Keen On America

“There is the burden of being homeless and the burden of being judged for it.” — Saumya Roy on poverty in America
 
How does the world look at America in the MAGA age? This is our third conversation drawn from How We See It, a collection of essays about America from the excellent new publication The Dial. In the first, The Dial’s Paris-based editor Madeleine Schwartz offered a very French version about the oddities of Trump’s America. In the second, the Turkish novelist and commentator Kaya Genç gave us his view from Istanbul. Today, we have a take on America from the Indian-born Saumya Roy, Al Jazeera’s San Francisco correspondent and the author of Castaway Mountain, a book about the wastepickers of her hometown Mumbai.
 
Saumya Roy’s inside-out America is the one glimpsed from the back of a San Francisco cab, whose Indian driver told her he’d walked here from Mumbai. In her Dial essay, Roy compares the poverty of her hometown, Mumbai — the subject of Castaway Mountain — with the homelessness outside that San Francisco cab. The comparison isn’t quite what you’d expect. Mumbai’s poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing — a hundred thousand street people against San Francisco’s eight thousand. But in Mumbai Roy finds a social kind of poverty, whereas in San Francisco it’s atomized and isolating. In the land of personal responsibility, she reports, there’s a double burden of being on the street: being homeless, and being judged for it. Some of the street people Roy meets even shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won’t know their predicament.
 
And yet Roy still recognizes the American dream. She reports that it often burns brighter in a Mumbai slum — where a young gig worker told her he wants to be “the Elon Musk of India” — than it does in America itself. That dream can be real, she says, just as it can be cracked. From the back of her San Francisco cab, Saumya Roy sees both Americas.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       “I Walked from Mumbai to the US.” A cab driver’s five-word answer contains the whole story. In the popular imagination, Indian America is the America of tech CEOs and startup founders; beneath it are millions — many undocumented — who chased the same dream, work small jobs, and were left behind by the wave. San Francisco, Roy observes, is a boom and bust town — dot-com, social media, now AI — and the American dream is a wave: catch it and you make an amazing life; miss it and you may end up sleeping in the subway car of the world’s richest city. The dream, she says, can be fulfilled — and the dream can be cracked.
•       The Double Burden. Mumbai’s poverty is vaster and more dehumanizing than anything in America — children dying of tuberculosis in their teens, perhaps 100,000 people on the street against San Francisco’s eight thousand. But it is social: even at a distance you see cooking smells, cradles, families living together on the sidewalk. American homelessness struck Roy as profoundly isolated — everything owned in a shopping cart, riding the train aimlessly because no one is waiting anywhere. And the ideology of personal responsibility cuts both ways: if success is earned, failure must be deserved. Hence the double burden — being homeless, and being judged for it — and the people who shower at a gym each Christmas so their families won’t learn where they live.
•       What Is Growth For? The AI boom is minting $250 million research salaries and trillion-dollar IPOs that will change the face of San Francisco for decades — while polls show seventy to eighty percent of Americans fear losing their jobs to AI investment, and a single medical expense can capsize a family. Young Americans watch the markers of their parents’ lives — a home, affordable gas, a job within a year of graduation — drift out of reach. Roy’s question is the one policymakers keep dodging: what is growth really for, if it doesn’t translate into a better quality of life for the people who need it most?
•       The Mumbai Model. Roy’s editor at The Dial asked why she wrote “homeless” for San Francisco but not for Mumbai — and the answer became the essay. In Roy’s own lifetime, Mumbai has moved more than 100,000 people off its sidewalks and railway tracks: not by sweeps, evictions, and demonization, but by involving communities — especially women — and giving people confidence that the housing they moved to would be safe and secure. Meanwhile only ten to twelve percent of San Francisco’s homeless report substance use or mental illness as the cause; eighty-eight percent are simply priced out, often working two or three jobs. As Roy puts it: they deserve a hug more than they deserve to be evicted.
•       The Dream Burns Brighter Abroad. Reporting on unemployment in a Mumbai slum, Roy climbed a steep staircase to interview a young gig worker and asked him his dream. “I want to be the Elon Musk of India,” he said. The American dream, Roy suggests, now burns brighter in Mumbai and the Gulf than in America itself — where the darkness is emotional rather than economic, a mourning for the idea of America rather than its numbers. Neither MAGA nor doom-monger, Roy watches a country that leads the world in innovation while paying developers not to build wind farms, and concludes that what people everywhere are grappling for — left, right, and abroad — is a system that reflects the crises they actually live.
 
About the Guest
 
Saumya Roy is Al Jazeera’s San Francisco-based correspondent, covering technology and the environment. A former Mumbai journalist who co-founded the microfinance nonprofit Vandana Foundation, she is the author of Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai (Astra House, 2021), one of NPR’s best books of the year. Her essay on Mumbai, San Francisco, and the American dream appears in How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, June 2026), edited by Madeleine Schwartz.
 
References:
 
•       How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, edited by Madeleine Schwartz (The New Press, June 2026). Adam Shatz: “It is often foreigners who understand us best.”
•       Castaway Mountain: Love and Loss Among the Wastepickers of Mumbai by Saumya Roy — her acclaimed account of the lives built on Mumbai’s Deonar garbage mountain, an NPR best book of 2021.
•       Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo — the Mumbai classic in whose tradition Roy’s reporting stands.
•       Madeleine Schwartz and The Dial — the volume’s editor, whose own Keen On America conversation about the book preceded this one.
•       Stephen Marche — the old friend of the show whose re...

“It’s a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” — Keith Teare on the book he wrote with AI in a week
 
Welcome to episode 2984 of the show. A week is certainly an age in AI time. Since last week’s “Who Owns Intelligence” show, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare has used AI to write an entire book entitled, surprise surprise, Who Owns Intelligence. No wonder, as Keith’s editorial this week puts it, AI has its enemies.
 
These enemies, Keith insists — riffing off Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies — are mostly “good people.” They are the authors, workers, and others caught in the headlights of epochal technological change. He claims to have seen the pattern before. When he opened the world’s first Internet cafe in 1994, the BBC only wanted to ask him about online porn. But some enemies are less well meaning than others. Congress is considering a kill switch bill — let’s call it the Kill Bill — which is backed by the frontier companies like Anthropic and OpenAI cynically seeking to set their current market dominance in stone.
 
So might the answer be Chinese style “open source” AI as requested this week in an open letter by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang? Keith’s answer is deliciously ironic. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs, Chinese labs learned to train cheaply by inference — distilling American frontier models through their own public interfaces. So Huang’s support for open source AI might end up shooting NVIDIA in their most sensitive parts — their chips.
 
And what about the state — can it protect all those “good people” from the oncoming AI locomotive of history? No. Not according to Keith, at least. State regulators like Lina Khan treat consumers as children, Keith (himself the parent of three boys) says. Besides, government simply can’t keep up with the speed of technological change. So, for example, when OpenAI’s models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test this week, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. As for inequality, the answer isn’t nationalization but ownership on the model of Keith’s Norway-style human wealth fund. For more, read his new book Who Owns Intelligence.
 
We ended on an uncharacteristically French post-structuralist note. My interview of the week was Emily Eakin, author of The Frenchmen, her very personal history of French theorists like Michel Foucault and the two Jacques, Derrida & Lacan. It was Foucault, who — at the end of his 1966 book The Order of Things — predicted that man would be erased, AI style, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. But Keith isn’t in this bleak Foucaultian camp. His book, written with AI in under a week, he says, is a realization of his individual self, not an alienation from it.
 
The end or beginning of man? Maybe I got it wrong earlier. Welcome to episode 1984 of the show.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       A Book in a Week. Inspired by last week’s conversation, Keith used AI to write Who Owns Intelligence in seven days — the case for a “human wealth fund” seeded by the AI companies’ own stock, global on day one and non-governmental, with Norway and Alaska as partial precedents. AI, he insists, is a tool, not an author: “AI would never have been able to start, never mind finish a book without me.” The detection farce cuts his way — Substack’s new AI detector rated his 100% human editorial as 100% AI, and universities are quietly canceling their AI-detection contracts because the tools simply don’t work.
•       The Kill Bill and the Ladder-Kickers. Congress is considering a bill that would let government switch AI off — and, paradoxically, the AI companies are in favor. Keith’s reading: regulation is a competitive strategy. Dario Amodei — “he’s an entrepreneur, he’s devious, he strategizes” — is the most sincere in wanting rules that would lock out open source competition — and Anthropic’s $1.5 billion book settlement this week suggests the moat is expensive to maintain; Sam Altman zigzags; Musk, in this context at least, is one of the good guys. The genuine enemies of AI, meanwhile, are mostly good people: authors and workers frightened by the scale of change, just as the BBC in 1994 could only ask the founder of the world’s first Internet cafe about porn and addiction.
•       Why the Good Open Source AI Is Chinese. The week’s uncomfortable question: where is the American open source AI? Keith’s answer is structural. Denied walls of NVIDIA GPUs by export controls, Chinese labs were forced to train cheaply by inference — asking American frontier models millions of questions through public interfaces and learning from the answers. The result: world-class open models built, in effect, on distilled Anthropic and OpenAI. NVIDIA’s much-signed open letter supporting open source, Keith notes, translates simply: more customers.
•       The State Can’t Keep Up. Lina Khan’s consumer protection, in Keith’s telling, is parental — treating consumers as children — and government-owned AI would be obsolete within three months of purchase. The counter-example happened this week: when OpenAI’s de-railed models hacked Hugging Face in a lab test, the company caught, stopped, and reported it faster than any regulator could. The companies are the right point of control, held to a high standard. Matthew Yglesias adds nuance on the data center backlash — local micro-politics is not the same thing as the statewide bans coming almost entirely from Democratic states — and the American university, still metering intelligence at $80,000 a year, looks to Keith like a business model past its sell-by date.
•       The End of Man — or the Beginning? Andrew’s interview of the week was Emily Eakin on the Frenchmen — and Foucault’s 1966 prophecy that man would be erased like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea, a prediction Eakin thinks the AI age is realizing. Keith takes the opposite view: the postmodernists grasped the rise of the individual (consider the Pantone color system) but gave him no society to live in. AI, far from erasing the individual, lets him realize himself — the week-old book is “a realization of my individual self, not an alienation of it.” Could Popper have written The Open Society in an hour? Before the car, nobody drove Manchester to London in two and a half hours either.
 
About Keith Teare
 
Keith Teare is Andrew’s weekly co-host and the publisher of the That Was The Week tech newsletter. A four-decade veteran of the technology industry, he opened Cyberia — the world’s first Internet cafe — in London in 1994, co-founded Easynet and TechCrunch, and is today the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation in Palo Alto. His latest — unpublished, so far — book is Who Owns Intelligence, written with AI in a week.
 
References:
 
•       “AI and Its Enemies: Who Needs a Kill Switch?” — Keith’s editorial in this week’s That Was The Week.
•       <...

What has made this moment feel different is not the anxiety about incivility, which has always been there, but rather the performance of it. It’s relentless.” — Molly Brady on incivility in the age of the smartphone
 
Whatever happened to the American front porch? Builders killed it to save money, says the Harvard law professor Molly Brady — and with this death went one of the key stages on which Americans have practiced the art of being neighbors over the last 250 years.
 
Brady is a contributor to America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance, a new volume of 62 essays from the Harvard Law School faculty edited by Alexandra Natapoff. Brady’s subject is the land, real-estate and local government law determining neighborliness. Thus her interest in front porches.
 
Brady grew up in Utica, New York — on the old Erie Canal — a Rust Belt town whose fracking fights, abandoned housing, and urban renewal steered her toward property law. Utica is also, despite its red politics, a place well versed in the art of neighborliness — with the town warmly welcoming recent Bosnian and Iraqi refugees.
 
Incivility isn’t new, Brady says. What’s changed, she argues, is its performative virality. With a phone in every pocket, we can now watch our fellow “citizens” behaving badly. Meanwhile the physical infrastructure of community — the front porches and corner stores — has been zoned, sprawled, and value-engineered away. Analogue porches have been replaced by digital chatrooms.
 
Brady’s remedy is unfashionably local. On Zoom or in person, she advises, show up at your local planning meetings. Brady even requires her Harvard students to attend at least one local meeting so as to demystify the real work of governance.
 
The republic, as Ben Franklin so famously warned, is ours if we can keep it. Keeping it, Molly Brady suggests, may require in-person attendance on a Wednesday night at your local planning commission. And it might also require hanging out on your porch. If the builders ever give them back to us.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Performance of Incivility. Americans have always fretted about incivility — the republic itself was born out of Europe’s religious civil wars. What has changed, Brady argues, is technology. When difference was mediated through traditional publishers, you had to grapple with the people in your physical world: the workplace, the water cooler, the town meeting. Now everyone carries a phone on which fellow citizens can be found behaving horribly at any given moment. It is not the presence of incivility that makes this moment feel different — it is the relentless performance of it.
•       The Death of the Porch. Brady writes in the tradition of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, updated for the post-smartphone age: suburbanization, the loss of third places, remote work — and a thousand micro-choices in property law that removed the physical alternatives to online life. Builders dropped the front porch to save money; developers in the South and West build almost nothing outside homeowners associations, so there is no meaningful market choice. People are human — they yearn for connection — but in the absence of physical competition, technological community wins by default.
•       Tocqueville’s Scalability Problem. What Tocqueville admired in New England — every citizen (nominally) arguing policy with neighbors at the town meeting — may never have been scalable to a continental republic, a question America has been grappling with since the Louisiana Purchase. But the local still scrambles our politics in useful ways: party preference, as the scholar David Schleicher observes, tells you nothing about road paving. The darker local truth is Bill Fischel’s homevoter hypothesis — homeowners dominate participation and vote to maximize home values, which has helped produce the national affordability crisis.
•       Glimmers: Zoom, Newton, and Showing Up. The shift to Zoom planning meetings completely changed the demographics of who participates in land use decisions — young parents cannot spend Wednesday from seven to midnight debating a corner store. Newton has produced genuinely pro-housing policies; Cambridge ran a charter commission that drew in residents of every kind; groups like Abundant Homes Massachusetts organize contingents to make sure meetings are not left to the usual voices. Brady requires her students to attend at least one local meeting. The lesson: do not think this is for someone else.
•       2076: Best Case, Worst Case. Asked to imagine America’s 300th birthday, Brady hopes for less polarization and demonization, and for a real confrontation of the housing and environmental crises — collective work that might itself rebuild the habit of cooperation. The worst case runs through Margaret Atwood and civil war scenarios to environmental degradation and lives lost to our incapacity to work together. The warning signs are already banal: middle-aged men now pay consultants to teach them how to make friends. The skills have atrophied — and local participation, Brady suggests, is the gym where a republic gets them back.
 
About the Guest
 
Molly Brady is a professor of law at Harvard Law School, where she teaches property, land use, and local government law. Raised in Utica, New York, she is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, and her scholarship on the history of American property law has won wide recognition, as has her teaching. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, and is a contributor to America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance, edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel E. Charles (MIT Press, July 2026).
 
References:
 
•       America Unfinished: 250 Years of Law and Governance, edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel E. Charles (MIT Press, July 2026). Bryan Stevenson: “A valuable contribution to understanding America at a critical moment.”
•       Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam — the 2000 classic on America’s vanishing social capital, written, Brady notes, before the smartphone made things worse. Putnam is an old friend of this show.
•       Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville — the towering account of New England civic virtue that frames the episode’s scalability question.
•       Shade by Sam Bloch — the new book on the politics of shade that taught Brady about the money-saving death of the American front porch.
•       Bill Fischel’s “homevoter hypothesis” — the Dartmouth economist’s account of why homeowner-dominated local politics maximizes home values and starves housing supply.
•       Alexandra Natapoff — the volume’s co-editor, whose own Keen On America conver...

“It’s like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas.” — Ricardo Semler on why bosses won’t let their workers vote on them
 
Ricardo Semler might be the most anti-boss boss in the history of corporate bosses. Thrown into his Austrian immigrant father’s São Paulo manufacturing firm at seventeen, the young Brazilian ripped up the rulebook — no dress codes, no time clocks, a ten-page cartoon manual instead of HR — and grew the company from 110 employees to more than 5,000. In the mid-Eighties he was already inventing hybrid work, shipping Telex machines to his workers’ homes. One of them even squeezed one of these 150-pound machines into his bathroom.
 
Now, in his upcoming e-book The End of the Boss, the author of the iconoclastic autobiography Maverick argues that the corporate pyramid — an inheritance, he says, from West Point via the railroads — is as dead as a cuckoo bird (as the Swiss would say). Nothing good has been done with it since World War Two. Not in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, his native Brazil, and certainly not in corporate America where Elon Musk’s current pay package equals the wages of all his employees for the next five years.
 
Semler’s alternative is disarmingly simple: groups of ten who validate their leader every six months. Fail the vote and you’re not fired — you go back to being one of the nine. His Netherlands-based consultancy has brought versions of the idea to 208 companies, including the giant Dutch bank ABN AMRO, which agreed to do away with 399 branch managers. So why don’t more bosses follow? Because, says Semler, asking executives to be elected from below is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. Even the self-styled “fearless” Elon Musk would be terrified to end up as the roasted centerpiece of the Xmas table.
 
That same maverick idea (his first ex-wife joked he’s only ever had one) runs through everything Semler has ever proposed — from the rotating district presidents of São Paulo, to the untethered MBA whose cohorts hire their own professors, to the schools that grade Call of Duty and map it to the curriculum. Switzerland, he points out, has been governed by seven rotating nobodies since the fourteenth century. No, The Third Man’s Harry Lime was wrong. Rather than the cuckoo clock, it’s this anti-boss invention which explains Switzerland’s five hundred years of democracy and peace.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Pyramid Came from West Point — and It’s Dead. The corporate hierarchy, Semler argues, is a military inheritance that reached business from West Point via the railroads — and nothing good has been done with it since World War Two, from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan. The numbers agree: the average company’s lifespan on the stock market has collapsed from 61 years to 21, which makes the classical pyramid, not self-management, the biggest gamble of all. Jack Welch’s GE is a shadow because he prepared it for nothing except Jack Welch. And when one Alexander Wang is valued like 20,000 engineers, or a CEO’s package equals five years of everyone’s wages, something structural is wrong.
•       Turkeys Voting for Christmas. Semler’s system is cells of ten that choose or validate their leader by anonymous survey every six months. Fail the vote and you aren’t fired — you return to being one of the nine. His consultancy has brought the idea to 208 companies, including ABN AMRO, which agreed to eliminate 399 branch managers. The reason it doesn’t spread is not that it doesn’t work; it’s that nobody at the top wants it — turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg would be terrified of their employees deciding whether they keep their jobs. His model is Switzerland: seven rotating councilors nobody can name, working out fine since the fourteenth century. The alternative ends, sooner or later, in Kim Jong Un.
•       Cycles, Not Failures. “Until death do us part,” Semler says, is about the silliest question anybody could ask. His own eighteen-year marriage with three children wasn’t a failure — it was a cycle that ended, ten beautiful years out of eleven. Children born today will live to 100 or 110, with time for three full careers and still a retirement, so asking a seventeen-year-old what they want to be for the rest of their life is the wrong question. His daily metric is simpler: was today a valid day — like getting your parking ticket validated — or a dues day? When the dues days outnumber the valid ones week after week, the marriage or the job is already finished, whether you admit it or not.
•       The Untethered MBA. Semler taught MBAs at MIT and spent four years at Harvard Law School, so he knows exactly what he’s calling outmoded, outdated, and obsolete. His replacement: cohorts of ten who work through a dashboard curriculum at their own pace, study the case of the day rather than decade-old case studies — is SpaceX worth a trillion dollars, or nothing? — and spend credits to summon former CFOs or Stanford professors on demand. The same logic runs his schools, which grade TikTok and Call of Duty and map them to the curriculum. The smartphone panic, he says, is mostly nostalgia: what the screens are ruining is your ability to memorize the periodic table.
•       AI Is Electricity — and He’s Losing the Argument. AI, Semler says, is irrelevant the way electricity is irrelevant: a tide rising for every boat, pointless to oppose and impossible to live without. He runs everything through four LLMs — “there’s nothing left of slop or hallucination at the end of that” — and confesses that when he tells his AI to push back, he now has trouble keeping up intellectually, which wasn’t true a year ago. His hope is that we don’t become “domesticated pets” over the next fifteen years. The deeper obstacle to everything, though, remains human: the cattle aspect of fear. There is no Trump and no Putin, he says — there is thirty percent of the population willing to support them, and one person who understands what populism can do.
 
About the Guest
 
Ricardo Semler is the chairman and majority owner of Semco Partners, the São Paulo company he took over from his father at 21 and transformed into the world’s most famous experiment in industrial democracy. His book Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace (1993) was an international bestseller published in sixteen languages; The Seven-Day Weekend followed in 2003. He is the founder of the Lumiar schools and the Ralston Semler Foundation, has taught at MIT’s Sloan School and Harvard Law School, and his TED talks have been viewed millions of times. His new e-book is The End of the Boss (endoftheboss.org, 2026).
 
References:
 
•       The End of the Boss by Ricardo Semler (2026) — the e-book, and its “Round Pyramid” alternative: self-managing cells of ten with leaders validated from below.
•       Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace by Ricardo Semler — the million-copy classic whose Brazilian predecessor, Turning the Tables, was rejec...

“I could not get under oath and swear that I know exactly how Kennedy died in Dallas.” — Ben Barnes, who helped advance JFK’s fatal Texas trip

In Texas, there’s nothing in the middle of the road, Jim Hightower famously quipped, but yellow stripes and dead armadillos. But Ben Barnes has spent seven decades disproving him. Elected as a Democratic moderate to the Texas legislature at 21, Speaker of the Texas House at 26, and lieutenant governor at 30, Barnes was LBJ’s premier protégé and has known every president from Kennedy to Trump. Now 87, he has distilled all his centrist wisdom into Get It Done: Seven Decades of Lessons from a Political Legend.
Get It Done is more than just a Texan story. Barnes spent six weeks advancing JFK’s fatal 1963 Dallas trip and breakfasted with the president in Fort Worth on the morning of the assassination. He confesses that the Warren Commission “did not get it entirely correct” and notes that the experienced hunter John Connally, who rode in the Presidential limo, always insisted there were four shots, not three.
Then there’s the equally historic scene at the White House on the day LBJ signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Pen in hand, Johnson looked a dozen young Southern Democrats — Barnes among them — straight in the eye and told them he’d just signed away Dixie. “What I’m doing today is probably going to turn the South Republican for thirty or forty years,” LBJ confessed with astonishing prescience.
The dirty trickster Richard Nixon, meanwhile, ended Barnes’ electoral career. You can hear it on the tapes — Nixon ordering his attorney general, John Mitchell, to “get something on Barnes” before the Texas Democrat got to be governor. Years later, fresh from prison, Mitchell invited Barnes to lunch, apologized over a bowl of spaghetti, then dropped dead on a Washington sidewalk three months later.
Barnes forgave Mitchell. He is less forgiving of the current administration, which he says is hammering the final nail into the coffin of LBJ’s Voting Rights Act. In the recent Texas Senate runoffs, only seven percent of voters showed up. Seven. Barnes remembers, aged three, watching pickup trucks packed with young men rolling toward the recruiting stations the morning after Pearl Harbor. That generation died for the country. This one, the very alive Texan armadillo quipped, could at least vote to protect American democracy.
Five Takeaways

•       Four Shots, Not Three — But No Conspiracy. Barnes advanced JFK’s Texas trip and was at the Fort Worth breakfast on the morning of the assassination. The Warren Commission, he believes, did not get it entirely correct: Connally, a hunter, swore the single-bullet ricochet was a physical impossibility and always counted four shots. Yet Barnes dismantles the grand-plot theories with logistics — Oswald started at the Book Depository thirty days before a motorcade route that wasn’t fixed until six days prior, so he could not have known the president would pass. Ted Kennedy assured him before his death that nothing of importance remains unreleased in the files. Sixty years of phone calls from theorists later, Barnes will not swear under oath that he knows how Kennedy died.
•       The Hostility Began in Los Angeles. The LBJ–Bobby Kennedy feud, in Barnes’s telling, started at the 1960 convention, when Bobby went to Johnson’s hotel room to talk him out of accepting the vice presidency his brother had just offered. The wound never healed — not through the vice presidency, not through the White House years with Bobby as attorney general. The counter-example was Ted Kennedy, who voted for the civil rights bills, kept a genuine affection for Johnson, and told Barnes three weeks before his own death what a great president LBJ had been.
•       “This Will Turn the South Republican.” On the day he signed the Voting Rights Act, Johnson looked a dozen young Southern officeholders — Barnes among them — in the eye and told them the bill would probably turn the South Republican for thirty or forty years, and that they would have to work and tell the story over and over again. The prophecy held: Texas, Barnes says, is now the reddest state in America. And the administration’s new voting legislation, he warns, would be the final nail in the coffin of Johnson’s greatest achievement — making it harder for everyone to vote, and hardest of all for minorities.
•       “Get Something on Barnes”: Nixon’s Vendetta and Mitchell’s Spaghetti. Furious that Barnes had helped Humphrey carry Texas in 1968 — and alarmed that he was outpolling every Democrat in the state — Nixon told John Mitchell to go to Texas and manufacture a scandal before Barnes reached the governor’s mansion. It’s on the tapes, and Barnes keeps copies. His electoral career ended. Years later, out of prison, Mitchell asked him to lunch, apologized over a bowl of spaghetti — “I had time to think in prison” — and died on a Washington sidewalk three months later. Barnes forgave him. The tactics, he notes, are back in fashion.
•       Seven Percent. Trump, Barnes says, never prepared himself for the presidency — no student of history, bored by his intelligence briefings, and surrounded this term by a team without depth. American prestige is dwindling; NATO is non-negotiable; when America coughs, the world catches pneumonia. At home, racism has resurfaced and women’s promotions to the military’s top ranks are reportedly frozen. But his sharpest alarm is the emptiest statistic: seven percent turnout in the recent Texas Senate runoffs. The man who watched pickup trucks of volunteers roll toward the recruiting stations after Pearl Harbor asks only that this generation get involved — before the Republic runs out of birthdays.
About the Guest

Ben Barnes was elected to the Texas legislature at 21, became the youngest Speaker of the Texas House at 26, and the youngest lieutenant governor in Texas history at 30. LBJ’s “premier protégé,” he has spent the subsequent decades as a consultant, fundraiser, and Democratic power broker, helped establish the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and is founder and CEO of the Ben Barnes Group in Austin. His new book, written with David Ritz, is Get It Done: Seven Decades of Lessons from a Political Legend (Grand Central Publishing, July 14, 2026).
References:

•       Get It Done: Seven Decades of Lessons from a Political Legend by Ben Barnes with David Ritz (Grand Central Publishing, July 14, 2026). Doris Kearns Goodwin: “When a gifted storyteller has a great story to tell, the result is magic.”
•       The Warren Commission — the 1964 report whose three-shot conclusion John Connally, a hunter who was wounded in the motorcade, never accepted.
•       Jim Hightower — the Texas populist who actually coined “nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos,” a line usually credited to Ann Richards.
...