Keen On America

“My whole life has been coming up with ideas myself, and now AI can do that better than me.” — Bill Gross

INTRO

Bill Gross has been Mr Ideas Man since 1996 when he founded Idealab in Pasadena and started the hand production of startups. Today, he launches Idealab AI where the hand production of startup ideas is replaced by the algorithm. He fed seventeen million documents — news stories, expired patents, SEC filings, complaints on Reddit — through a thirty-thousand-token prompt built around the thirty-one methods he has used all his life, and out popped 1.2 million business ideas. The first batch cost a thousand dollars in tokens and produced thirty-two thousand ideas in an hour. He is giving all of them away.
“Holy shit, my life is over,” he thought.
Then he decided it was a superpower instead. Mr Ideas Man had come up with his greatest (and final?) idea.
His showcase algorithm-produced idea is a five-dollar-a-month app that locks in today’s gas price by hedging the pooled subscriptions on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Bill’s own system scored it 8.9 out of 10 against 32,000 rivals.
The business model inverts the usual one. Entrepreneurs pay nothing. Corporates with large R&D budgets and fat patent portfolios license the platform to mine their own IP, and they fund the giveaway. Universities are next. Bill is talking to one that would pay students fifty thousand dollars to come and build a company, rather than charging them fifty thousand to study one. As Chris Marquis argued in yesterday’s New York Times, business school as we once imagined it is over.
So where does the hope machine come in? I asked Bill whether the MAGA crowd might object to an American giving away his best ideas to the rest of the world. He was unmoved. Idealab AI is defiantly global from day one, and he is most excited about its power in Africa, the Middle East and South America, where young people and ideas are abundant.
“Bill, this is a hope machine,” thus exclaimed Ahmed El Alfi, the founder of the Flat6Labs accelerator in Cairo, having come to Pasadena to get a sneak preview.
I asked Bill what the machine can’t do. “Judgment,” he said. Which means mentors, advisors and investors matter more now, not less. But what about questions from interviewers? Hmmm. Holy shit, my life is over. Maybe Uncle Bill can build me a question machine.

FURTHER READING

•   Idealab AI launched on the day of recording. Bill gave the address on air as idealab.ai and his own email as bill@idealab.ai. The thirty-year parent company is at idealab.com, and his 25 Lessons from 25 Years of Idealab is the long-form version of the methodology he has now handed to a model.
•   Bill’s 2015 TED talk on timing as the single biggest predictor of startup success, which he refers to at 25:55 — watch it. He says the new platform now does this analysis automatically.
•   On the IP argument at 17:58: ProRata.ai, his venture to make AI companies pay publishers a revenue share, raised $40m and launched Gist in September 2025.
•   Matthew Botvinick of Anthropic, whom AK raises at 08:39, on the risk AI poses to democracy — listen to that episode, and his book AI and Political Freedom (Princeton, 2026).
•   Richard Socher on AI that can think for itself, raised at 41:24 — Eureka in Silicon Valley. His book is The Eureka Machine (PublicAffairs, 2026).
•   The thousand-dollar-a-month AI habit and the lens cap, from last week’s editorial with Keith Teare.
•   The premise of the gas-hedging idea: the Strait of Hormuz has been closed or severely restricted since late February 2026, Iran insists it remains closed, and shipping traffic has only partly recovered — the fuel crisis in detail.
•   Aptera, the streamlined electric car he names as his best-known failure, actually wound down in December 2011, not during the 2008–09 recession as he says at 25:55.
•   “Bill, this is a hope machine” is Ahmed El Alfi, who founded Sawari Ventures in Cairo and the Flat6Labs accelerator that has seeded several hundred startups across the Arab world. He visited Pasadena, saw the platform, and supplied the title of this episode at 22:44.
•   On the universities at 19:29: Christopher Marquis, a previous guest on this show, published “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down” in the New York Times the day before this conversation was recorded. He argues that HBS-style case studies are corporate-approved narratives rather than research, and that business schools train students to practise being the person in charge rather than to be sceptical of them. He was last on in November 2025 — Strategic Hibernation.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. Why this only works now, and did not a year ago. The origin is a Wall Street Journal piece on the copper shortage — data centres needing transformers faster than they can be made, electric cars needing motors — which made him notice that most articles carry a problem statement at their core. The mechanism is cross-pollination: a model holding problems, technologies and expired patents in one context at once can collide a decades-old financial instrument with a two-week-old crisis. He is emphatic that this is new. A year ago, he says, the models simply were not good enough to do it, and everything that makes the platform possible has arrived since.
2. Nobody tested the best idea the machine made. The gas-hedging app is the strongest thing in the hour and also the least examined. He is right that the cleverness is in the combination: airline hedging has existed for decades, consumer access has not. But a product that guarantees a future price in exchange for a fixed premium is insurance, and five dollars a month does not fund protection against unbounded upside — nor does selling it avoid the regulators who supervise both insurance and retail derivatives. His own system ranked it first out of 32,000 without surfacing any of that, which is a sharper illustration of his judgment argument than anything he says about judgment.
3. He insists he has no moat, and appears to mean it. Asked the standard Silicon Valley question, he refuses the premise: he wants to be copied, a...

Two straight days of murder in America. Yesterday we were in Ozark, Alabama with Matt Kessler investigating the gruesome murder of two young women. Today’s guest has spent four decades investigating homicidal crimes and continues to have the time of his life. Harold Schechter has written more than thirty true crime books, his latest being Murder by the Numbers, an account of 199 chilling tales of true crime.
When it comes to crime, I asked the Queens, NY–based Schechter, is America special? On the murder rate, yes. He was just in Iceland, where he asked a retired homicide detective whether the country had ever had a serial killer. Oh yes, the man said. Around 1325. Some Viking. The difference is firearms, Schechter argues, and a frontier that closed within living memory.
But, he says, the appetite for murder isn’t uniquely American. Martin Dumollard was guillotined in a French village in 1862 before a crowd three times the size of the town. During the Terror, tradesmen sold guillotine earrings to the women and toy guillotines to the children, who took them home and decapitated squirrels.
Schechter is unimpressed by our current media panic over violent videos. He reminds us that Jesse Pomeroy, the Boston Boy Fiend, was blamed on dime novels. The Great Train Robbery was blamed for juvenile crime. Then radio, then television, then Psycho, then American Psycho, then The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, after which there was no detectable surge in chainsaw massacres. Manson took his cue from the White Album, Lennon’s killer from Holden Caulfield, Hinckley from Taxi Driver. And if one book has inspired more killers than any other, he says, it is the Bible.
What about gender — are all serial killers male? Schechter’s argument is that we count female serial killers differently. They poison their victims, often enjoying the deaths in real time. And they tend to kill family and children rather than strangers. Women like watching too. The audience for a trial about a mother who killed her children is usually overwhelmingly female, he notes.
So what about gentle Harold Schechter? Could he kill, I asked. Or is he the kind of guy who only likes to watch?

FURTHER READING

•   Harold Schechter, Murder by the Numbers: 199 Chilling Tales of True Crime (Workman, 6 October 2026).
•   Matt Kessler on the murders of JB Beasley and Tracie Hawlett, the episode AK opens on: listen or watch.
•   The failed execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee on 30 September 2026, which AK raises at 39:07 — what happened. Schechter’s reply supplies the context: by Austin Sarat’s count in Gruesome Spectacles, there were 276 botched executions in the United States between 1890 and 2010.
•   The Hegseth proposal to broadcast the execution of the Fort Hood gunman, and Pope Leo’s condemnation of the death penalty — the live news behind the public-execution discussion at 10:58.
•   Schechter’s Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment makes the dime-novel argument at length, and Deviant, Deranged and Fiend are the Ed Gein, Albert Fish and Jesse Pomeroy books he mentions.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. He splits the question in two, and gives opposite answers. Is America exceptional in its murder rate? Yes, flatly, and he puts it down to firearms and to how recently the frontier closed — Wyatt Earp was still alive when Ford reached Hollywood. Is America exceptional in its appetite for murder stories? No, and he is firm about that too. Iceland has almost no homicide and a flourishing market in gory crime fiction, to the point that its novelists struggle to find plausible killings to write about. The guns are American. The fascination is human.
2. The taste for watching people die is not a modern decline. When Martin Dumollard, often called France’s first serial killer, was guillotined in 1862, three times the population of the village turned out. During the Terror, tradesmen worked the crowds selling guillotine earrings to women and toy guillotines to children, who took them home to decapitate squirrels. Schechter’s reading of this is unexpectedly optimistic: that we now settle for virtual representations of violence rather than the real thing is, he thinks, evidence of civilisation rather than its collapse.
3. True crime has always sold titillation as moral instruction. The genre begins in America with the gallows sermon, printed after a public hanging and carrying the condemned prisoner’s supposed last words, his repentance and his discovery of God. It also carried, invariably, a very detailed account of what he had done. Schechter traces the same bargain through three centuries of the form and declines to make it himself: he says he does not try to draw moral lessons from the cases he writes about.
4. No new medium has ever been shown to raise the murder rate. Dime novels were blamed for Jesse Pomeroy, the Boston Boy Fiend. Newspapers blamed juvenile crime on The Great Train Robbery. Then radio, television, Psycho, American Psycho — and no wave of chainsaw massacres followed The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. What actually sets people off, he says, is unpredictable and usually benign: Manson had the White Album, Lennon’s killer had Holden Caulfield, Hinckley had Taxi Driver. His own candidate for the book that has inspired the most killers is the Bible, and he means it literally — he has written about many who believed they were following the Old Testament.
5. Female serial killers were never rare, only counted differently. Because the term was coined to describe a kind of sexual homicide, the canonical killers are all men. Women kill by poison, which carries an Arsenic and Old Lace quaintness that Schechter thinks badly misleading. Jack the Ripper killed quickly and mutilated the corpses afterwards; a poisoner can stretch a death over weeks and watch it happen. Jane Toppan, whom he has written about, confessed to thirty-one murders and held the Guinness record until Gacy. The other difference is the victims: women overwhelmingly kill family, children and acquaintances rather than strangers.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Harold Schechter is Professor Emeritus at Queens College, CUNY, where he taught American literature, myth and folklore for more than forty years. A two-time Edgar nominee, he has written over thirty books on true crime, among them Deviant (Ed Gein), Deranged (Albert Fish), Fiend (Jesse Pomeroy), Savage Pastimes, Murderabilia and 50 States of Murder. He lives in Queens, New York. Murder by the Numbers is published by Workman.

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Ah, the American South. So romantic. A few days ago we were in Clayton, Georgia, hearing about the dissident Lillian Smith, whose house was burned down for telling the truth about Jim Crow. Today we go south-west into Alabama, to Ozark, in the Wiregrass, the boondocks of the boondocks — a region named for a scrub that grows where nothing else will. Except for murder.
The Wiregrass, as the Birmingham, Alabama–based journalist Matt Kessler explains, has poor soil, no cotton, almost no plantations, and therefore, none of the southern decorum either. He has spent nine years there researching The Wiregrass, a new true-crime investigation into a case nobody has satisfactorily explained.
On 31 July 1999, JB Beasley turned seventeen. She and her friend Tracie Hawlett set out from the Alabama town of Dothan (peanut capital of the world) to go party-hopping in the Wiregrass. Searching for a field party with a keg, the two young women got lost. They stopped at a closed filling station in Ozark to use the payphone, and someone gave them directions that didn’t sound suspicious.
“Right out of the lot, left at the McDonald’s.”
The surveillance tape shows them leaving in the right direction. Their car was found by the roadside the next morning. At two in the afternoon somebody finally opened the trunk. Both girls were inside, shot in the head. Southern gothic murders most foul.
So what happened? The bodies sat in that trunk for five hours in a steaming Alabama summer, before an officer from out of town had the smart idea to open it. Trained officers then searched the car without gloves. A lead investigator tried to tow it back to Dothan, which would have destroyed the crime scene. Years later the car was quietly released and resold, with no paperwork stating who authorised it. A man named Johnny Barrentine confessed and was let go when the DNA did not match. And when Kessler rang the Ozark police for the file, he was told that everything before 2000 had been “accidentally” destroyed. Oops.
Twenty years on, a genetic genealogy search matched semen from the scene to Coley McCraney, a married preacher with no criminal record. He was convicted on four counts of capital murder in 2023 and is now serving life without parole. McCraney admitted to the sex, but denied the killing. The DNA is the only material evidence since nobody found a weapon. Kessler believes in his innocence, and suspects the police are implicated, though the officer he calls a person of interest will stay unnamed until you buy the book. Ah, the South.

FURTHER READING

•   Matt Kessler, The Wiregrass: A Tale of Murder and Retribution in the Deep South (Grand Central, 6 October 2026). Kirkus calls it “a meticulous, urgent account of a case officially closed, but far from settled.”
•   The official record, against which his account should be read: the Alabama Attorney General’s statement on McCraney’s sentencing in June 2023, following conviction on four counts of capital murder.
•   In September 2024 the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction. The defence had argued that Rena Crumb should have been allowed to testify that an Ozark officer, not McCraney, killed the girls — the same account Kessler describes here. Crumb subsequently recanted, and the judge ruled her evidence hearsay. The case is now before the Alabama Supreme Court.
•   Keri Leigh Merritt on Lillian Smith and the Georgia side of the same story, the episode AK opens on: listen or watch.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The reporting is far stronger than the theory it is marshalled behind. The most valuable hour of this conversation is the texture, and it is first-hand: a Klansman soliciting donations on the town square in the eighties like the Salvation Army; black families teaching their children to carry what they called driving around money for the inevitable bogus stop; locals pressing handguns and window-shattering hammers on a reporter they thought was in danger for asking questions. None of this requires anyone to accept his conclusion. It establishes something narrower and more damning, which is that this was not a department capable of investigating anything.
2. The investigation failed at almost every point where it could fail. The bodies lay in a closed trunk for five hours in high summer before an officer from Dothan, there on his own initiative, opened it — several whistleblowers told Kessler that any experienced investigator would have known what he was smelling. Local officers then searched the vehicle without gloves. One tried to tow it to another jurisdiction. The heat destroyed the evidence so thoroughly that no time of death could be established. Some years later the car itself was released and sold, and no document records who authorised that. Kessler says he cannot tell whether this is incompetence or concealment, which is the honest answer.
3. A pattern of police sexual coercion runs underneath the case. A Police Explorers programme at the local high school, nominally training juniors and seniors for the job, was shut down by an incoming deputy chief because officers had been sleeping with the students. A school administrator told Kessler of pupils arriving in his office in tears after officers traded bogus speeding tickets for sexual favours. During the reporting, the police chief and a supervisor were forced out over coercing the wives of officers on parole. AK’s question is the sharp one: whether two girls from the bigger town simply refused to play along.
4. The conviction rests on DNA and almost nothing else. A genetic genealogy search of the kind that caught the Golden State Killer led police to Coley McCraney, who gave a sample voluntarily and was arrested for double murder and rape. There is no weapon and no other material evidence. Put on the stand by his own lawyer against his wishes, he placed himself in the girls’ car and could not satisfactorily account for the evening seventeen years earlier. Kessler accepts the DNA is his and argues the encounter was consensual, which is where his real intellectual claim sits: that DNA at a scene is accepted prima facie as guilt without anyone asking what it actually shows.
5. He accuses the police, and is candid that he cannot finish the sentence. Asked directly what happened, he says he believes a local officer was involved, names one as a person of interest, and then declines to identify him on air — you will have to read the book. He is scrupulous about the rival theory, having found nothing in a quarter of a million files to support the rumour that the girls stumbled onto a drug flight. Listeners should know what the hour does not mention: Rena Crumb, whose secondhand account of a drunken confession is central here, later recanted, and the appeals court that upheld the conviction in 2024 ruled her evidence hearsay....

On 16 October 1962, exactly sixty-four years ago, photos of Soviet missiles on Cuba were shown to President Kennedy and the world faced nuclear Armageddon. The definitive account of that thirteen-day crisis, One Minute to Midnight, was written by today’s guest, the presidential crisis historian Michael Dobbs. He has now written about a crisis that few remember, but which he calls the climactic crisis of the Cold War.
It happened in 1983. In September of that year, the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner with 269 people aboard, among them the most anti-communist member of the United States Congress. A few weeks later a Soviet early-warning computer reported that America had launched its missiles, and a colonel named Petrov, alone in a bunker at one in the morning, decided on his own authority that the machine was lying. In November NATO ran a nuclear release exercise called Able Archer, which Moscow took for the real thing.
The difference between 1962 and 1983, Dobbs says, was twenty years of technology. Kennedy had thirteen days. Reagan, by his own estimate in his memoirs, would have had six minutes. Thus the title of his new book, The Six Minute War, subtitled Reagan, Russia and the Race to Automate Armageddon.
As the incoming Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, Dobbs had a front seat on the crisis. He arrived in Moscow just after the airliner came down, and his best material is anecdotal. He saw Russians bussed to a state-organised protest outside the American embassy, chanting on cue while jealously eyeing the Buicks and Cadillacs parked on the street. In a Moscow cinema showing Three Days of the Condor as anti-American propaganda, he watched the audience gasp — not at the dastardly CIA, but at the lavish contents of Robert Redford’s fridge.
Fast forward to today, and we get to the most worrying part of Dobbs’ analysis. The presidential crisis historian reckons we are now in a more dangerous period than at any point he can remember. We have more weapons, less warning, with our split-second decisions dependent on machines whose reasoning is increasingly hard for us humans to understand. Call the compounding annual risk one per cent. Multiply it across thirty years and the arithmetic isn’t reassuring. We might now be just a few seconds to midnight.

FURTHER READING

•   Michael Dobbs, The Six Minute War: Reagan, Russia, and the Race to Automate Armageddon (Simon & Schuster)
•   His Cuban Missile Crisis book, One Minute to Midnight (2008) — the thirteen days against which he measures the six minutes. Down with Big Brother and Six Months in 1945 complete his Cold War trilogy.
•   The National Security Archive’s declassified sourcebook on Able Archer 83 — the NATO exercise the Kremlin read as cover for a first strike.
•   Eliot Cohen made the companion argument on this show: that the nuclear danger now sits with Pakistan and North Korea rather than Moscow and Washington. Listen or watch.
•   Harold James’s essay “Late Soviet America”, the gerontocracy parallel AK raises at 25:26 — among his Project Syndicate columns.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. The headline is about now, not 1983. The historian who wrote the definitive account of the Cuban Missile Crisis says we are in a more dangerous period today than at any point in his memory of the Cold War, as a child or later as a reporter. His reasoning is that the warheads have proliferated, the warning times have been compressed, and the decisions are moving to computers whose workings we cannot inspect. The Cold War at least had a rough nuclear balance between two systems that understood each other. He is more frightened for his grandchildren than he was at the tensest moments he lived through.
2. What changed between 1962 and 1983 was twenty years of technology. Kennedy and Khrushchev had thirteen days to argue their way out of Cuba, which now looks almost leisurely. By 1983 bombers had given way to missiles and computers had entered the early-warning chain, and Reagan wrote in his memoirs that he might have six minutes to decide whether a blip on a screen was the end of the world. That line is where the book’s title comes from. Dobbs is candid that there was no six-minute war: the compression of time is the subject, not an event.
3. A Soviet colonel is the reason this is a book about automation. At one in the morning in the autumn of 1983, Soviet satellites and computers reported an American missile launch, and Colonel Petrov had to decide whether to pass it up the chain as real. He had written some of the algorithms himself and knew they could be wrong, and he reasoned that nobody opens a surprise attack with five missiles rather than two hundred. So he called it a false alarm on his own authority. Dobbs’s point is not that Petrov was a hero but that somebody else in that chair might have answered differently.
4. Reagan was the most anti-nuclear president since the bomb was invented. This is the claim least appreciated at the time and the one Dobbs presses hardest. The man denouncing the evil empire was also reading the Bible for prophecies of Armageddon and was genuinely tormented by the possibility of nuclear war, which is why he later stunned his own advisers at Reykjavik by proposing to abolish nuclear weapons outright. Asked which Reagan to believe, Dobbs refuses to choose: both were real, the militant anti-communist and the pragmatist who found someone he could deal with in Gorbachev.
5. Nobody starts a nuclear war on purpose, which is the frightening part. In both 1962 and 1983 the danger was never a deliberate first strike but an accident that escalates past the point where anyone can stop it — a stray airliner, a faulty algorithm, an exercise misread as cover. Andropov told the former ambassador Averell Harriman exactly that in the Kremlin, and Dobbs thinks it remains true with Pakistan, North Korea and now AI added to the mix. His prescription sounds modest and is not: elect sensible leaders, keep talking to the other side, and practise the empathy that let Kennedy ask what the world looked like from Khrushchev’s chair.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Michael Dobbs is a presidential crisis historian and a former foreign correspondent and Moscow bureau chief for the Washington Post, where he launched the paper’s Fact Checker column in 2007. He reported from Moscow through the 1983 war scare and was there in August 1991 when Boris Yeltsin climbed onto a tank. His Cold War trilogy comprises Down with Big Brother, One Minute to Midnight and Six Months in 1945; he is also the author of King Richard, The Unwanted, Saboteurs and a ...

Last month Adam Kirsch was on the show arguing that our current obsession with UFOs represents a new kind of religion. Today’s guest, the international relations expert Alexander Wendt, argues that today’s UFO obsession is the least of our problems. In his new book, The Last Humans (out today), Wendt’s worst-case scenario is that the UFOs are already here — and have been for some time.
While the Pentagon has conceded only that the objects are real and that it cannot identify them, Wendt extrapolates further. A recognition of the presence of UFOs would bring, he warns, both a crisis of global security and the demise of the traditional state system. Worst of all, he fears, would be a descent into a Hobbesian-style war-against-all.
Wendt is less worried about the invasion of the earth by little green men. If they had wanted to attack, he says, they would have done it when we fought with sticks rather than nukes. Instead, he worries about the social contract we have with the state. We obey the laws of the state because they keep us safe. Spacecraft that the Pentagon cannot identify, in airspace the Pentagon can’t defend, would leave that contract in tatters. What follows is not war with aliens but Hobbes’s great fear of a return to his dreaded state of nature.
So, as Wendt notes, “the threat of UFOs is not them. It’s actually us.” Rather than a new religion, they represent an old nightmare. Beam me up, Thomas Hobbes.

FURTHER READING

•   Alexander Wendt, The Last Humans: UFOs, Global Security, and the Threat to State Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, out 15 October 2026)
•   Adam Kirsch on We Want to Believe — the case that this is a religion, not a security problem: listen or watch

•   Wendt’s 1992 article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It”, the piece that launched constructivism, and his Social Theory of International Politics — both listed at his Mershon Center page

•   The June 2021 Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — the report that, on Wendt’s account, changed the game

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

1. His thesis is that the danger is on our side of the encounter. He separates the craft from the question of who is flying them, and says the Defense Department has settled the first — after seventy-five years of denial it changed its mind, which he finds significant. On the second he is agnostic but unworried about attack: anything capable of getting here could have destroyed us long ago, when we were far weaker. The threat he describes is political. Our civilisation is organised around the assumption that we are alone, and the discovery that we are not would expose a state that cannot identify these objects, cannot stop them entering its airspace, and cannot protect anyone from them. That is the emperor with no clothes, and what it threatens is allegiance.
2. What he actually fears is Hobbes, not invasion. Once the news is out, people will disagree about what to do — shoot them down, worship them, ignore them — and there is no way to settle the argument, because nobody can get inside the craft to find out who is right. Disagreement with no arbiter is the oldest problem in political philosophy and the one Hobbes built the state to solve. His worst case is not conquest from outside but an implosion from within, which is why he thinks disclosure handled too quickly and too casually would itself be dangerous.
3. The title has three meanings, and the third is the interesting one. We could be the last humans physically, if they exterminate us. We could be the last biologically, if the hybridisation programme described by alien abduction experiencers is real. Or we could be the last in what he calls an experiential sense — the last people who will ever know what it was like to believe we were alone in the universe. He thinks the third is much the most realistic, calls it sad and potentially uplifting at once, and notes that in all three cases the anthropocentric world we have built does not survive.
4. It is bad news for America and possibly less bad for China. A country accustomed to sitting on top of the international system has the furthest to fall, and every scenario he sketches makes the United States smaller: against a superior intelligence the gap between the strongest state and the rest stops mattering. On China he is openly speculating, but the thought is that a more collectivist culture has more cohesion and loyalty to draw on in a shock like this, where an individualistic one has people going every which way. His guess is that Washington and Beijing would try to cooperate, and that the real question is whether either can keep a grip on its own population.
5. The UFOs are the occasion; the argument is about constructivism. The most fluent stretch of the hour has nothing to do with aliens. Wendt explains why idealism became a slur in international relations after Munich, how realism and then liberalism replaced it, and where his own school came from — sociologists rather than economists, George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman rather than rational choice. His 1992 article “Anarchy Is What States Make of It” argued that the international system has no single logic and that everything depends on what actors do with it. That is the claim this book applies to the strangest case available.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Alexander Wendt is Mershon Professor of International Security and Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University, and a founder of the constructivist school of international relations. He is the author of Social Theory of International Politics and of the 1992 article "Anarchy Is What States Make of It". In the 2017 TRIP survey his peers named him the most influential scholar in international relations of the previous twenty years. He shared the 2023 Skytte Prize in Political Science and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2025. The Last Humans is published by Oxford University Press.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.