Keen On America

So was November 5 a moral catastrophe signaling the death knell of American liberalism or just another election in the turbulent history of American democracy. According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch, the Trump-Harris election was both. On the one hand, Rauch argues, wearing his unashamedly liberal cap, November 5 was a moral catastrophe for the future of American democracy. But, on the other, slapping on his Brookings analyst’s cap, Rauch celebrates November 5 as an ordinary election. I suspect the double capped Rauch is onto a singular thing here. There is a feeling of catastrophic ordinariness about America right now. It’s that moment before a crash when everything slows down and you know something dramatic is about to happen. Enjoy the (horror) show, Rauch seems to be saying. America is about to become very unordinary. Transcript:“When I say a moral catastrophe, it means that people like me, we don't know what to do.” -Jonathan RauchAK: Hello, everybody. I'm just back from a little bit of an East Coast jaunt. I drove around rural Virginia a couple of days ago, and I saw this sign, for people who are just listening, there's a "Trump/Vance 2024" flag, and then underneath someone has put "winner." And that is clear. There's no doubt the Trump and Vance in 2024 are the clear winners in every sense. From the point of view of liberals, it's very concerning. Francis Fukuyama, who might be described as the pope of American liberalism, believes that the Trump win marks a decisive rejection of liberalism. So it's a historic change. And my guest today on the show, an old friend of of show, Jonathan Rauch, I think agrees. He's described the November election as "Tuesday's moral catastrophe." In spite of that moral catastrophe, John Rauch is still around. Just back from the south of France. It's a hard place to go, John. What do you mean by a moral catastrophe? I mean, those are strong words.JONATHAN RAUCH: I mean in a specific sense. We don't write our own headlines, of course. And that one is a little blunt. What I meant by that is that for the last eight years, people like me, including me, have done everything in our power to persuade the American electorate that Donald Trump was an unacceptable candidate from the point of view of morality and character and basic decency and observation of the fundamental norms on which our country and constitution rely. And this election, 2024, was a complete, I think, repudiation of that view. It was an ordinary election. The good news is that it was an ordinary election. We did—AK: And you wrote a piece for Brookings. You're a fellow of Brookings—JONATHAN RAUCH: Yeah, that's right.AK: —On this ordinary election. So on the one hand, it was ordinary. On the other hand, it was extraordinary. It was a moral catastrophe.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, it was. Yeah, that's right. The good news is that it was an ordinary election. It was a rerun of 2016. It was an anti-incumbent election. It was close. It was undisputed. We've seen all that before. The bad news, for someone like me who's been saying for eight years is this this guy is not someone who should be anywhere near the White House, is that it was an ordinary election. The voters looked at everything that he's done and everything that people like me said. And they shrugged and they said, well, you know what? You're either wrong or we're not interested. They treated him as you would another candidate. And so from that point of view, this is a, I think, a decisive rejection of what folks like me have been saying. And we have to change.AK: John, I know you don't have any kids. I've got kids. And I think rule number one of parenting—and I'm certainly not the person to lecture anyone on good or bad, or certainly good parenting—rule number one of parenting always seemed to me, was if you tell a kid enough times that they can't do something, in the end, they will. And I don't mean to trivialize your argument, but what you just said to me sounded like—and correct me if I'm wrong, that the John Rauchs of the world, fellows at Brookings, authors of bestselling books like Constitution of Knowledge, for eight years, you warn the American people that the guy on the ballot, Donald Trump, was a bad deal, that he was a bad man, that he was unethical, all the rest of it. For eight years, you told them, you made it clear, and they have disobeyed you. And this is a crisis. In terms of that narrative, were you, you collectively I mean, you can't speak on behalf of your Brookings class, but weren’t you are asking for trouble by making it so clear that you disapproved of this particular candidate?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, it certainly appears that way today, doesn't it? On the other hand, one cannot deny what you said. Clearly, all the things that people like me have have said, and many, many other people, the editorial boards of many newspapers, and Frank Fukuyama, a brilliant man and wonderful scholar. They've been rejected, and so they've just clearly failed. So you're undoubtedly right. The question is, should we have just shut up this whole time? Should we not have pointed out, for example, that this is someone who led an effort to overthrow the United States government, that this is someone who lied by actual account, average of 20 times a day while he was in office? You can't really not point these things out in a liberal democracy, can you? So when I say a moral catastrophe, it means that people like me, we don't know what to do.AK: Are you saying then in a sense that it's a moral catastrophe not for America, but to quote you, for people like John Rauch, that your ideas, that you grew up with it you clearly believe in, you're one of the upholders ethically, philosophically of liberal ideals. Is this a catastrophe for yourself?JONATHAN RAUCH: That is exactly what I'm saying. You just said it better.AK: Well, you said it well, John, a moral catastrophe for yourself. And does that suggest that, really, you're beginning to question your own ideas, that more than half of America, maybe 51, 52 percent of the people who voted suggested that you were wrong?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, I'm not a populist, and in fact, as an atheistic homosexual Jew, I'm very used to being part of an unpopular minority and thinking that I was right regardless. And I don't think I can or want to change fundamentally in my view. For example, the founders, the U.S. Constitution, the benefits of small liberalism. I don't mean left wing progressivism. I'm center right myself, but I mean the ideals of the American founding and the Enlightenment. I still think that there's actually—Fukuyama was right in what he said in the early 90s. There's no real alternative to those things if what you want is peace, prosperity, freedom, and knowledge. But where I think I have to go back to square one is trying to figure out how to make that case. People like me, you know, I assumed that we were the majority, that we spoke for mainstream America, and that that Trump was a fringe candidate who had somehow managed to commandeer the commanding heights of politics. And I think someone like you is quicker to understand, no, that it's actually the other way around. A large number of the people, and now clearly a majority of the people, are on his side. And that means that we, people like me, again, liberals of the world need to recalibrate and understand we're no longer the mainstream. We're now the dissident faction. It's a very different world than we thought we lived in.AK: Although, in a way, it's a return to some. And you and I spent some time together this summer at the Liberalism for the 21st Century Conference. It was actually put on, I think, by the same people who published your "Tuesday’s Moral Catastrophe," the UnPopulist. But I wonder, in your piece, you talk about something called "the moral minority." I mean, isn't that the foundations of classical liberalism? Isn't that what John Stuart Mill, perhaps the most influential of all 19th century liberals, focused in on liberalism? What's wrong with being in the moral minority? Is there something...insecure about wanting to be in the moral majority, John?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, again, Andrew, I think you're exactly right. And the problem is that I forgot that. We had such—liberals, you know, again, I always use the word liberal in this conversation. I hope you're—AK: Yeah, with a small L. We're not talking about left-wing democrats.JONATHAN RAUCH: With a small L. Madison and Jefferson and Burke and Locke and Tocqueville and all of that. The founding ideas of liberal democracy. So we had an easy ride for many years. We assumed that we were the good guys. We were certainly right when the opponents were of fascism and communism. And then in the 90s it appeared that the world had simply come around, and that America was on a straight path to to just preserving this model forever. And what we've seen now is that that's not true. What we've seen is a lot of people feel left behind. Now, we knew a lot of people were being left behind. And at the think tank where I work, Brookings, for decades now, we have been hatching ideas every day about how to help those people, you know, retraining, trade adjustment assessment, apprenticeship programs, better forms of welfare. It's all we do all day, is try to help those who are left behind. Nonetheless, it's just as you say, I think we got complacent. I think now it's now obvious we are complacent. What else can you say after an election like this?AK: And yet you talk about this moral minority. Earlier you defined yourself as an atheist, a homosexual, a Jew—probably a secular Jew. And when I think of John Rauch, I would think is much more comfortable in a—I mean, he is a minority guy. I mean, that's your mentality. So what's changed? So, your political party—with a small P—your liberals, they're in the minority. So what?JONATHAN RAUCH: So I thought that...I was certainly in a minority in my lack of belief in God, and in being a member of a minority religion, and especially growing up gay in a world where that made you a pariah. But all of those things we saw remarkable progress. In the world I grew up in, of course, homosexuality was illegal. You couldn't serve in the military. Marriage was a ridiculous idea. Atheists were the most unpopular people in the country. Polls found that, you know, Gallup results would show that atheists were unelectable to public office. And we'd just come out of the shadow of the Holocaust. And my father, who is, we're talking about the 1950s in Phoenix, Arizona. He moved to Phoenix because as a Jew, he couldn't get a job on the East Coast, because he wasn't in the top half of his law school class. And we saw immense improvements—AK: I'm sorry to jump in here, John, and I'm not trivializing this, but if he had been in the top half, would he have got a job as a Jew?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, what he told me is that because he wasn't in the top half, he couldn't. And he had to move to Phoenix to get a job. So more than that, I can't tell you, but—AK: But that's going back to parenting. It was probably smart. You'd never be even close to being the bottom half of anything.JONATHAN RAUCH: But, you know, when he moved to Phoenix in the 50s, and when I grew up in the 60s, Jews could not join the Phoenix Country Club. So the story that I heard is the story of liberalism—again, small L-liberalism—coming through for people like me. And I thought, that's the nature of our country, where we are fundamentally, at the end of the day—we may make wrong decisions in the short term—but we are about advancing rights according to liberal doctrine. And so I now feel an outsider in the one category where I always felt an insider.AK: I think you probably seek—you would never acknowledge it publicly—but I don't think that unhappy about it.JONATHAN RAUCH: About which?AK: About being an outsider.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, that's interesting. I am unhappy about the decision that my country has taken in a direction that I think is very, very bad for all kinds of reasons, which we can discuss. I am very unhappy that so many people would support a person whose candidacy and character I think are indefensible. I am certainly unhappy about that. And I'm unhappy about thinking that my country is a different kind of place than I thought. All of those things make me very unhappy. The broader way in which you're maybe right, and I've have never had to think about it quite this way, is: it was unhealthy for liberals to become complacent, to become insiders, to not listen, to not notice. And it may be good for us—in fact, it may be necessary for us to start from scratch, which is kind of where I think we are. AK: I wonder, John, whether one of the problems—and I'm as much of a liberal as you, although I'm naturally I'm always uncomfortable if I'm in the majority, by definition, if I'm in the majority, then I'll change my mind to go into the minority—I wonder whether one of the problems—Fukuyama's an old friend of yours, certainly the high priest, the pope of American liberalism. Of course, much misunderstood in terms of his end-of-history narrative. But he did have a—and you talked about it earlier—a kind of teleology, and he perhaps still does, the idea of history progressing towards something better. It's Martin Luther King's moral arc of the universe. Might that be one of the problems with American liberalism? That we've accepted this Fukuyama/MLK-style teleological narrative, that the world is always becoming a better place?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, I don't know that I'd put the Fukuyama thesis quite that way. It wasn't that the world's always becoming a better place, but it was a view of the moral directionality of liberalism, that is, over time, if you have liberal forms of government and economics and epistemology—that is, science, the way you go about finding knowledge—that you will over time tend to increase peace, freedom, prosperity, and knowledge. So they were saying that, and I still think that's true, Andrew. I still think that the people proposing various alternatives to liberalism, Christian nationalism, or various forms of state enterprise, or Chinese-style communism, or postmodernism or wokeism. I think those are bad ideas, and I think they won't work. I think they'll make people less free and less knowledgeable, and there will be more conflict. And so I think Frank Fukuyama was fundamentally actually right. There's really only one system in the 200,000 years of the human species which has surmounted our tribal instincts and allowed us to knit together into a global community, which has over time, increased prosperity, knowledge, diminished war and poverty. So I don't challenge that premise. Where I think you're right, and what I think we were too complacent about, is we kind of assumed that that would be on autopilot and that the people who are left behind, for example, or who are unhappy with demographic change, or the way the country was changing, that they could just be kind of dismissed, you know, that they would be happy because GDP is is growing. And that turns out, of course, to be wrong.AK:  You talk about—I don't remember if you said 20,000 or 2000 years—but is the one system over—JONATHAN RAUCH: Two hundred thousand.AK: A hundred, wow, it's even more, 100,000. I'll use that as the title for the interview, John. One system over 100,000 years that—JONATHAN RAUCH: Two hundred thousand.AK: Two hundred? We'll put it up.JONATHAN RAUCH: Three hundred, depending when you date the—AK: Yeah, maybe a million. Well, certainly a lot of years since we've overcome tribalism. But some people might respond—including some people who think of themselves as liberals. Yascha Mounk comes to mind—that the idea of overcoming tribalism is itself a kind of unrealistic, almost utopian, ideology, that we are, by definition, tribal. In fact, we've had a number of shows on the value of tribalism. There's a guy at Columbia whose book in defense of corporate and social tribalism is actually shortlisted for the F.T. Book of the Year. So are you suggesting that—in your view, at least, you use this word tribalism, it's your word, Jon, rather than mine—are you suggesting that it's fundamentally incompatible with liberalism, that for a liberal system to work, we can't think tribally? In racial, cultural, I don't know, in every sense, linguistic terms?JONATHAN RAUCH: No, I'm saying, in a way, the opposite. The great liberal theorists going back to John Locke, but especially my favorite of them, my hero, James Madison, understood that what could be called tribalism, or what can also be called partizanship of a certain type, and what Madison called faction, that this is a fundamental driver of the human species, and that you're not going to make it go away, and that the flaw of most of these other systems, you know, monarchy and autocracy and theocracy, is that they tried to stamp out the identities of individuals and of groups and tribes and simply impose one on everybody. You know, we're all now going to be the tribe of Catholics, for example. And a certain type of Catholic. You're going to stamp out all the heresies. Liberalism's innovation is to say, no. That stamping out human nature—we will always be tribal and partizan and factional. So you want to build a society where people in their factions and in their tribes can nonetheless get along through negotiation and compromise and persuasion. And then you set up mechanisms and constitutions that try to get them to do that. And then you teach norms that get them to support those things. And that's all extremely difficult. But the core of liberalism is understanding that the factions are always there, and managing them is always hard. And guess what? The things that we thought were working haven't been working so well.AK:  Yeah. So John, you're collapsing tribalism and Madison's notion of faction.JONATHAN RAUCH: Am I wrong?AK: Well, I've never thought of them quite in the same way. I mean, people are...didn't Madison mean by faction people's self-interest? So, business owners or exporters or importers or people whose interests happened to coincide? That's what faction is. Tribalism is something that we...we tend to be born in to tribes. And isn't that the problem that liberals have with tribalism? That it can't be overcome? I mean, you know, the classic one is, is race. You're born white or black. You can't choose what you're born and how you can't repaint yourself. So there is a difference between, I mean, in my sense, between tribalism and faction.JONATHAN RAUCH: I would I would dispute that actually. I think Madison—my interpretation of Madison is, right? Which is that these are all just forms of groupieness. You know, you've seen these experiments. There are tons of them. But you take students and you divide them randomly into two groups and you put one of them in red jerseys and the other in green jerseys and you tell them they're different groups. And then you put them through experiments like how altruistic they are, and they almost instantly bond into groups based on entirely random categories with people they've never known before. And so you can be born into one of those things. Of course, I actually am not convinced race is something you're born into. I think it's socially constructed to a large extent. But setting that aside, I think all of these things just come down to the natural tendency of humans to form groups and to form loyalties in those groups and then have insiders and outsiders—partizanship, which used to be pretty fungible, we saw bipartisanship all the time, has now become tribal, just in the sense that people put their identities into it. They define it as an identity. And, you know, the color jersey you wear can define your identity, and certainly your identity as a farmer can define it. So however you call it, you know, I think we're talking about the same basic phenomenon, which is what do you do about our tendency to groupieness and to—I guess I hate this term, but I'll use it—"othering," saying, the world is people like us, and people like them, and we're people like us, and we're against people like them.AK: John, Tuesday's moral catastrophe—and it was a couple of Tuesdays ago—is it a unique catastrophe? And there was an interesting piece in this weekend's Financial Times by Mark Mazower, excellent Columbia University historian, and why he said, he was suggesting that Trump's victory will change America. That goes without saying. Europe is going to respond very differently. He doesn't believe it's fascist, but he said something very interesting in the piece. He said, the U.S. is the only nation in the world currently governed by a document drawn up in the age of the Enlightenment. Of course, perhaps the most influential figure in that is your hero, Madison. Does this make what's happening in America, this rejection, in your eyes, at least, of liberalism so particularly important? Is it the final nail in the coffin of the Enlightenment, John?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, it's certainly not the final nail. This is an ongoing story. And for just the reasons we've discussed, I have hope that I and my friends and the people who are with us at the conference that you mentioned in July will be shaken out of our complacency and find ways both to solve, or help solve the kinds of problems that liberalism has, and also find better ways to explain it and its enormous advantages. I can tell you that I think Chinese communism, for example, is is not the solution. I do think it's important to note that what's happening now is not just in America. It's global. We've seen—this year has been, according to the people who look at such things—this year has been a record year for anti-incumbency all around the world. In fact, as far back as—AK: I mean, as you say in your Brookings piece, a very ordinary election, inflation historically always made it very hard for incumbents to keep their power in an election.“The question is, should we have just shut up this whole time? Should we not have pointed out, for example, that this is someone who led an effort to overthrow the United States government, that this is someone who lied by actual account, average of 20 times a day while he was in office? You can't really not point these things out in a liberal democracy, can you? So when I say a moral catastrophe, it means that people like me, we don't know what to do.” -JRJONATHAN RAUCH: Well, that's right. But everywhere you look, Japan, we had a serious upset. Germany's government has collapsed. Macron's government has collapsed. Everywhere you look, you see voters who are unhappy with the status quo and grabbing vehicles to oppose it. And sometimes those vehicles are far right-wing parties in Europe, which have been fringe or nonexistent until now. And America is part of that trend. And one of the things that folks like me need to try to figure out is why are people so damn unhappy?AK: Well, you know that, you don't need...I mean, you just need to look at the inflation numbers, the poverty numbers, the inequality numbers, the addiction numbers, the death of despair numbers. That's not hard for a guy like you to understand, is it, John?JONATHAN RAUCH: A lot of those numbers are better. A lot of the—AK: But that does still make it...I mean, they haven't gone away.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well sure, there are always problems, I'm not denying, and I'm not saying something silly. But the American economy was objectively much better than people gave it credit for. People were telling pollsters that the United States economy today is as bad as it was in the Great Depression of the 1930s. And I can tell you that's just not the case. And...increasingly people attribute what's happening not just to objective factors like economic growth and inflation, though of course those are there, I wouldn't deny it, but to anomie, to things like loneliness, to the lack of connection. David Brooks has a very big article in The Atlantic on the many ways—you alluded to some of them—that people are finding their lives coming up short and a lot of them have to do with intangible factors like do they have friends, do they feel secure if they're in trouble? Do they have someone to call? Do they feel that they live in an environment which is safe? And those things...we at Brookings pay attention to the numbers, right? These intangibles are harder to cope. AK: I wonder, it'd be really interesting, I don't know if everyone's done the research on this, John, whether your point about the age of anxiety and loneliness, David Brooks has written about it, all sorts of other people, it's one of the dominant intellectual strains of our age. But I wonder whether anyone's done any research of whether...a sense of loneliness is more dominant in the minds of Harris voters versus Trump voters. My guess, and it's just a guess, is that the Trump voter is less likely to be lonely than the Harris voter, because they're less urban, less bound up in all the enemy of post-post digital capitalism.JONATHAN RAUCH: I know those numbers exist. I don't know what they show. A couple related trends, which I do know a little bit, is that indicators go in different directions. Progressives, people on the left with college degrees and all that, who are very progressive, are more neurotic and less happy than conservatives. And that stands to reason, since they seem to spend their days telling themselves that we will never have progress on race and that we live in a terrible and unjust society of settler colonialism. So there's that. On the other hand, we have a scholar at Brookings who studies happiness and hope. Happiness not in the sense of mood, you know, how cheerful I am, but life satisfaction, how good do I think my life is? And the ethnic group in America—the socioeconomic group, I should say—that is least hopeful is working class whites. And it turns out college educated whites are also low on the hope scale. And the most hopeful people in America are African-Americans.AK: Well they've been—I know this from families—they've been through so much hell historically that whatever they do now doesn't compare with what's happened in the past. Yeah that's a—JONATHAN RAUCH: Bingo. Yes. That's exactly what Carol thinks. I mean, we don't know we don't have a—AK: Who is the person at Brookings who does this?JONATHAN RAUCH: Carol Graham. She terrific. She's studying hope, actually. But that's right. The trajectory for African-Americans is much like my trajectory as a gay American, which is you've seen this remarkable progress. And that gives you hope, the trajectory for whites, especially working-class whites who really are having a bad time economically, they're looking back at a world in which they had more stock.AK: Yeah, but...I take your point on that, but my point was not on that. It was about loneliness as opposed to unhappiness. But maybe we can get her on the show. I'm guessing John, I'm the last cheerful progressive, am I?JONATHAN RAUCH: Are you cheerful, Andrew?AK: I'm very cheerful. I'm sort of...I always think Americans are miserable optimists, and I'm a cheerful pessimist. So whatever happens now makes me more cheerful. When the news is good always makes me nervous and miserable. You've talked, John, and we're going to reverse this, actually, next week you're going to interview me because you're one of the people I most respect, I'm interested in getting your take on what I think. You'll help me figure that out. You keep on mentioning complacency. You and I were at this Liberalism for the 21st Century, and I think I told you at the time, I thought it was very complacent, very elitist. It sort of reflected the problem rather than the solution. One thing that I have to admit, I disagreed with you in your moral catastrophe piece was the idea that Harris, and I'm quoting you here, ran an exemplary campaign. I mean, okay, everybody knows she got thrown in the deep end and all the rest of it. You don't need me to tell you that. But I think it was anything but exemplary. It was complacent. She had no, in my view, at least, no sense of why she wanted to be president. She rested on the Biden assumption that the economy was good and that there was no real reason to fundamentally change that. So what was, in your view, exemplary about the Harris campaign? She didn't manifest any kind of confidence. She wasn't even willing to go on the Joe Rogan Show because apparently some of her staff were uncomfortable with that. What do you admire about the Harris campaign?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, as I think you agree, she was cast into extremely challenging circles.AK: Yeah, I've said that. I acknowledged that. But—JONATHAN RAUCH: You acknowledged that. And when I say exemplary, I don't mean against a standard in which she could start from scratch, go through an entire primary campaign, develop policy proposals. And most importantly—and this really is important—not be an incumbent. She was an incumbent. She tried not to sound like she wasn't an incumbent, you know, turn the page and all of that, but the voters are not dumb. And they said, well, you are the sitting vice president of the United States. And they refused to separate her from Joe Biden, whose popularity was extremely low, low 40s, high 30s. That's a massive headwind. And those are conditions she can't change. The conditions that she could change begin with handling Biden extremely well. There were no leaks from the Harris operation trying to nudge Biden out, and that actually helped get him out. Then she was able to corral the delegates she needed in 36 hours. That seemed like a very heavy lift. People—AK: I think that reflects very poorly, actually, on the Democratic Party, that they were pushed into this.JONATHAN RAUCH: No, well, they got the delegates. Now, part of that is because the Democrats didn't have time to go through a proper primary process. And people who thought that they could somehow do an abbreviated version of that in three weeks were just on drugs. There was no way that was going to happen. She raised a stupendous amount of money. She had an extremely good team with essentially zero internal money.AK: The money was worthless. She had no idea that she was spending it. I mean, she raised ridiculous amounts of money that were just wasted.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, I mean, I don't know. She'll probably wind up within a percentage point of Trump in the popular vote and the places—AK: Are you claiming victory, then, a moral victory, John?JONATHAN RAUCH: No, no, no. I'm saying that the places where she spent money, which are the seven swing states, the evidence that people who study this thing are saying, is that all of those places were much closer than the places that she didn't spend money. And part of that is because she was able to focus resources. But, you know, to continue, she crushed her opponent in a debate. So when I say exemplary, I mean, I think she did as good a job as you can expect someone to do in that situation. She still lost, because the country wanted a change and they understood the status quo.AK: I mean...she took no risks. She was unwilling. There was no reason...she's not in Biden's pocket. There was no reason why she couldn't have crushed Biden. When she was asked—the famous moment, to me, the whole campaign was finished when, I think it was on one of the morning shows, someone said, "Well, how would you be different from Biden?" And there was this long "um," and then she had no idea. The fact that—she'd clearly been thinking about this for years, I mean, it was obvious what might happen. But she had no idea of how she was different. I mean, what most troubles me about Harris, and this perhaps goes to the complacency of the liberal establishment, and you're not really part of that establishment, although you know it better than I do, is that complacency, their idea that actually things are pretty good, and that Biden did a good job, and the economy was good and it's not Trump, and if you just reminded people that the economy was improving and you're not Donald Trump and you're a small liberal, then you're going to win. To me, it was anything but exemplary.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, we'll agree to disagree, but I will agree with you that that was a terrible answer. It was a bad moment.AK: But it's more than just a bad answer. The truth is—JONATHAN RAUCH: Here's where we disagree, which is: like it or not, she's the incumbent. And it is not credible for an incumbent, it just never has been, for a vice president to say, "the administration that just happened wasn't me." Because it was her. So that moment was a bad moment and she could and should have done better. But I think the screw up was that the Biden administration ignored immigration and inflation for too long. And in hindsight, that's pretty clear. But that that was baked in, right? That's the world she inherited. So I guess we could go round and round on that, you know, if they'd had a full primary process and Biden had gotten out and you had had someone who was not in government, like Josh Shapiro, or maybe Gavin Newsom, you know, all these people have their flaws. You know Gavin Newsom a lot better than I do.AK: And Newsom's been on the show. I think he's a bit too smirk.JONATHAN RAUCH: Yeah, he might be. But then I think he would have had time to develop those things. But I think what we did have is a test in this election. She ran as an avatar of the Biden administration because she was, you just can't run away from that. She's sitting vice president. And she ran into an electorate which said, you know what? We think Biden is a failed president and that makes you a failed vice president. And we don't want to fail another term of that. We want something else. That's Donald Trump. And where people like me fell on our faces is that we tried to tell them, well, Donald Trump is unacceptable. So go with the failed presidency. Go with the failed administration. And they're not willing to do that.“Liberals of the world need to recalibrate and understand we're no longer the mainstream. We're now the dissident faction. It's a very different world than we thought we lived in.” -JRAK: Right. And you write about in your excellent piece, "The Moral Catastrophe," you quote along elections determining norms, which is certainly the case in this last election. I mean, briefly, going back to Harris, what about...does the fact that she seemed to be running by committee, she's like an American car or something designed by committee, completely unwilling, I mean, she's the reverse of Trump, completely unwilling to take risks, completely unwilling to do or say anything that might offend anyone or create any kind of controversy. Is that just a problem with Harris and her camp, or is this a problem, John, with small-L liberals in America today, this unwillingness to challenge, to tell the truth? I mean, coming back to Biden, there seems to be, in my view, at least, a kind of conspiracy amongst mainstream media not to tell the truth about Biden over the last 2 or 3 years, that he was clearly...not fit to be president, that he was too old, that he'd lost something that made him barely presidential. And yet the press never focused on this. So why is our—and I'm part of your class—why is our class so unwilling to take risks.JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, there's two things there. One is about the coverage of Biden, and that's a separate conversation. And I have a minority view on that.AK: Do you agree or disagree with me?JONATHAN RAUCH: I disagree. I think that the reason that the Biden's condition wasn't broadly reported is that the administration hid, it and they clobbered you if you tried to write on it, and when The Wall Street Journal finally was able to get a story in about it April, they could only get one person to go on the record about Biden's condition. And that was former Speaker McCarthy, who is not an unbiased source. Biden held essentially no press conferences. He shut that down. He withheld himself from the press. I think he's Parkinsonian. They have good days and they have bad days. Doesn't mean Parkinson's disease, by the way. There are lots of things that can cause the things you see of him, kind of the slurred speech and the slack-jawed look and the stumbling gait. But he was hiding that. And he was abetted in hiding it by people who should not have done that.AK: But it's the whole administration. It's all these—JONATHAN RAUCH: But that's a side question. Your big question—yeah, I shouldn't have gone down that rabbit hole, because who knows? But your big point is, are liberals refusing to take risks and tell the truth? I don't know about liberals because it's a very big group. And my friends at the Cato Institute, for example, who are classical liberal libertarians, say all kinds of things that are very risky, like privatize all the schools. I do think, though, that that's the case about Democrats, and that they should, for example, have separated Biden and Harris, and other people should have separated themselves from the academic left, you know, the genderqueer people and the critical race theory, social justice, critical, everything people, they should have separated themselves from those people and they should have been willing to say that a woman is an adult human female, and that they've been afraid to do that because that part of the coalition can be so noisy. And in fact, when things are this close in the country, when you're having one 50/50 election after another, you're afraid of losing part of your base. But there, yeah, I agree with you. Democrats need to learn a page from Republicans who have been nothing if not risk takers. “Increasingly people attribute what's happening not just to objective factors like economic growth and inflation, though of course those are there, I wouldn't deny it, but to anomie, to things like loneliness, to the lack of connection.” -JRAK: That the party then needs its Sister Souljah movement. You've been very generous with your time, John, and we're going to continue this conversation. Still a lot to talk about. Back in. Back in August 2022, a couple of years ago, it seems a long time ago now, you wrote for The Atlantic: Trump's second term would look like this. And you talked about the extinction of American democracy. Where are you? I mean, you're obviously worried this these are difficult times, to put it euphemistically from your point of view. How fearful are you about this second term? I mean, we're speaking after the appointment of certain cabinet ministers, appointments for the attorney general, RFK Junior. I mean, there's a there's a whole episode to talk about here, but...when you look back to August 2022, so a couple of years ago, more than two years ago, when you talked about the Trump second term, are you more or less pessimistic about the fate of American democracy?JONATHAN RAUCH: Well, you are right that that would be a great opening point for a separate episode, because there's so much to discuss there, and I am so interested in your view of that, which has been very different from mine, and perhaps, I hope, will prove correct. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'm about a nine. The things that I said in August of 2022 that they would do, they are doing, and they can do, and we know what they are, because they've either told us what they are or they've actually tried to do them in Trump's first term. And we will see them unfold. And if I'm correct about the sixth out of six of them, the one thing that he did not do in his first term, then that's the end of liberal democracy in America as we've known it. And what that sixth thing is, is the open violation of court orders, making Supreme Court orders, rulings, optional. I fully expect that they will do that. Now, I hope I'm wrong about that. But if that happens, in addition to the other five things that we predicted and that we know they want to do and that they're now setting about doing, yeah, I think we live in a fundamentally different kind of regime. It's not, of course, China, but it's in the direction of Hungary...and yeah, so I'm pretty much hair on fire. I'd like to be wrong, though. I'd like you to be right. And as you know, I give your view great weight. I view you as kind of a canary in the mineshaft of people who said, you know, I'm too hysterical. AK: I like being called the canary in the mineshaft. Jonathan Rauch, we will continue this conversation. We're going to switch hats. It's going to be my hair on fire the next time around. John's going to come back on the show and talk to me.JONATHAN RAUCH: You have a lot more hair to set on fire.AK: Yeah, well, for the moment. But we will continue this conversation. John, It's always an honor and a lot of fun to have you on the show. You are certainly the most the most human of liberals, I would say. Warts and all, you don't deny any aspect of the liberal condition. So it's always an honor to have you on the show, which is, I think, the essence of liberalism, in contrast to some of the utopianism of other ideologies. So we will—JONATHAN RAUCH: Andrew Keen meets out his compliments with parsimony. So I take that as a as a good one.AK: Good John, well, honor. And I hope you survive the next week, because I want you back on the show and you're going to interview me. So we'll talk again in the not-too-distant future. John Rauch, keep well, keep worrying. We need you to worry. If you worry, then makes it easier for the rest of us. Thank you so much.Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the governance studies program at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award. His books include The Constitution of Knowledge, The Happiness Curve, and Gay Marriage. He lives in northern Virginia.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

“There is one winner regarding the most significant story this week,” Keith Teare writes in his That Was The Week technology newsletter. But, as he explains, there are, in fact, two winners: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneurs trusted by Trump to reform and shrink the federal government. So how seriously might we take Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)? Should we welcome this attempt to reform (ie: cut) the Federal government. And is Musk’s SpaceX really a positive model for streamlining the state bureaucracy. Keith, as always, is hopeful; Andrew, as always, is skeptical. But, like it or not, DOGE is going to be one of the more intriguing and impactful experiments of the incoming administration.Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In association with our friends at Digital-Life-Design (DLD), Europe’s iconic annual tech conference which next January celebrates its twentieth anniversary, we are starting a series of conversations with DLD speakers looking back over the last twenty years. First up is Silicon Valley entrepreneur, speaker and author John Hagel, who talked, quite openly, about his lifelong fear of fear and how he’s cured himself of this affliction over the last two decades.John Hagel III has more than 40 years’ experience as a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur. After recently retiring as a partner from Deloitte, McGraw Hill published in May 2021 his latest book, The Journey Beyond Fear, that addresses the psychology of change and he is developing a series of programs to help people navigate through change at many levels. John has founded a new company, Beyond Our Edge, LLC, that works with companies and people who are seeking to anticipate the future and achieve much greater impact. While at Deloitte, John was the founder and chairman of the Silicon Valley-based Deloitte Center for the Edge, focusing on identifying emerging business opportunities that are not yet on the CEO’s agenda. Before joining Deloitte, John was an independent consultant and writer and prior to that was a principal at McKinsey & Company and a leader of their Strategy Practice as well as the founder of their E-Commerce Practice. John has served as senior vice president of strategy at Atari, Inc., and is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups. John is also a faculty member at Singularity University where he gives frequent talks on the mounting performance pressure created by digital technology and promising approaches to help traditional companies make the transition from a linear to an exponential world. He is also on the Board of Trustees at the Santa Fe Institute, an organization that conducts leading edge research on complex adaptive systems. He has also led a number of initiatives regarding business transformation with the World Economic Forum. John is the author of The Power of Pull, published by Basic Books in April 2010. He is also the author of a series of best-selling business books, Net Gain, Net Worth, Out of the Box, and The Only Sustainable Edge. He is widely published and quoted in major business publications including The Economist, Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, as well as general media like the New York Times, NBC and BBC. He has won two awards from Harvard Business Review for best articles in that publication and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by a variety of publications and institutions, including the World Economic Forum and Business Week. John has his own website at www.johnhagel.com, and for many years wrote personal blogs at www.edgeperspectives.typepad.com as well as contributing postings on the Harvard Business Review, Fortune and Techonomy websites. He is active in social media and can be followed on Twitter at @jhagel and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhagel/ John holds a BA from Wesleyan University, a B.Phil. from Oxford University, and a JD and MBA from Harvard University. John Hagel has spent over 40 years in Silicon Valley and has experience as a management consultant, entrepreneur, speaker and author. He is driven by a desire to help individuals and institutions around the world to increase their impact in a rapidly changing world. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. TRANSCRIPTKEEN: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. We're going to do things a little differently today. We're starting a new series on KEEN ON in association with my dear friends at the DLD conference. It's an annual conference held each year in Munich. My view? Certainly the best tech conference in Europe, if not in the world. And in January 2025, they're celebrating their 20th anniversary. And in association with DLD, we're talking to some of their most notable speakers about their experiences over the last 20 years. We're beginning with an old friend of mine, John Hagel, a very distinguished author, futurist. His last book was called The Journey Beyond Fear, and John spoke at DLD '16 about narratives and business. And I began our DLD KEEN ON conversation with John Hagel by asking him to cast his mind back to January 2005.HAGEL: In January 2005, I was working as an independent consultant in Silicon Valley. I'd been there for 25 years already. I was fascinated with the degree to which digital technology was exponentially improving, and I was being aggressively recruited, at the time, by a large consulting firm, Deloitte, that wanted me to join. I was a bit resistant. I turned them down four times because I didn't want to go work for another large consulting firm. I'd been a partner with McKinsey before that, but ultimately they prevailed. They persuaded me that they would help me create a new research center that would be autonomous, even though it was part of Deloitte and it was really focused on trying to understand the long-term trends that are reshaping the global economy and what the implications are for people. And that was my passion, and I'm very grateful that I was able to pursue that.KEEN: What was the global economy, John, like in 2005?HAGEL: It was definitely becoming more and more connected. It was going through fundamental change even at that stage. I've come to call it "the big shift," but basically, some long-term trends that were playing out were creating mounting performance pressure on all of us. One form of pressure was intensifying competition on a global scale. Companies were competing with companies from around the world. Workers were competing with workers from around the world. So there was a lot of intensifying competition. The pace of change was accelerating. Things you thought you could count on were no longer there. And then, as if that weren't enough, all the connectivity we were creating...a small event in a faraway place in the world quickly cascades into an extreme, disruptive event. So it creates a lot of performance pressure on all people. And we were just in the early stages of that. I think we're actually still in the early stages of "the big shift." A lot more to come.KEEN: What was it, John, about "the big shift?" It was your term, is still, I think, one of the best terms to describe the first quarter of the 21st century. What both most worried and excited you about "the big shift" in 2005? Back then, not today.HAGEL: Well, at the time, I was starting to realize that fundamental change was going to be required in all companies, all organizations, governments, universities. And I was worried that that would be a challenge, that not many people really embrace that kind of change, and so how do you get people to make that transition? But on the other side, I was excited about the fact that the changes that we were seeing—I love paradox. And one of the paradoxes of the big shift is, I mentioned the mounting performance pressure as one of the trends and the big shift. Another trend was exponentially expanding opportunity. We can create far more value with far less resource, far more quickly, given all the connectivity that's been created. So the excitement was that if we understood the changes that were happening and were willing to make the changes, we could create value that would have never been imagined before.KEEN: Back in 2005, John, what were the lessons of the past that we were trying to correct? History obviously always changes. Today, in 2025, we seem to be wanting to learn from, perhaps, 2005. But what were we reacting against in 2005?HAGEL: Well, frankly, I think we're still reacting against it. But in 2005, the way I describe it is all new large institutions around the world, not just companies, but again, governments and universities and foundations, all the large organizations around the world were built on a model that I call scalable efficiency. The key to success is becoming more and more efficient and scale. Do things faster and cheaper. And hard to argue, because for over a century that model of scalable efficiency gave us all the global, large institutions we know around the world today. So, a huge success with that model. The challenge is that in a rapidly changing world, scalable efficiency becomes more and more inefficient. We're not able to respond to the changes that are going on. We're just focused on doing what we've always done faster and cheaper. So I think that's an interesting dilemma that we were confronting in 2005 and frankly still confronting.KEEN: Were there organizations in particular back in 2005 that captured what you call this paradox of the great shift?HAGEL: Yes. I think that one of the things that I was focused on—I wrote a number of books in the past 20 years, three books. And one of them was called The Only Sustainable Edge. And it was a notion that in a world of more rapid change, we need to focus on what I call scalable learning. And learning not in the form of sharing existing knowledge, not in the form of training programs, but learning in the form of creating new knowledge as we confront entirely new situations and figure out how to create value in those situations, and do that throughout the organization, not just in the research department or the product development group, but every department needs to be focused on scalable learning. And part of that, it's how do you reach out and connect with broader networks of third parties, rather than just try to do it all yourself inside your organization? And in that context, I was looking at companies in a very large part of the developing world, China, for example. There were companies that were pursuing really innovative approaches to scalable learning in global networks, where they were connecting in global networks and focusing on driving innovation and learning throughout the network. So that really inspired me with the notion that this is not only possible but necessary.KEEN: John, one of the words that I always associate with your name is is "the edge." You popularized it, you were part of a group that focused on researching the impact of edge technologies in organizations. Why is this word "the edge" so important to making sense of the last 20 years?HAGEL: Well, I actually founded the Center for the Edge, and it took me a while to get Deloitte to approve the title because they said, wait a minute, you're either the center or you're the edge. How can you be both? And again, I love paradox, but in the context of the question about what do we mean by edge, it was the belief that if you're looking for change that's coming into the world, start by looking at edges. It could be geographic edges, developing economies. It could be demographic edges, younger generations coming into the workforce or into the marketplace. It could be edges across disciplines and academic world, many different kinds of edges. But it's venture out into those edges and look for emerging things that have the potential to scale and become really significant as change agents. And I think that that's what drove us to really do our research, was to find those edges and learn from the edge.KEEN: What did you believe in, John, in 2005, or is that an inappropriate question?HAGEL: What did I believe in? Well, I believe that again, digital technology is a key catalyst, changing the world. As was mentioned, I've been in Silicon Valley for many decades, but I've also, while I've been based here in Silicon Valley, I've been working with large organizations around the world, so I've got a global perspective as well as focusing on the digital technology and how it's driving change. But I think it was a notion that, again, we are seeing some significant change that's happening. But I think that one of the things that I came to realize over time, because I was so focused on these opportunities and things that were emerging around the world and the need for change and the need for transformation. And I was encountering significant resistance from leaders of organizations and from people within the organization. When I talked about the need for change and transformation. And the thing that I learned, and has become a real focus for my work now, is rather than just focusing on strategy and business, focus on emotions. Focus on the emotions that are shaping our choices and actions. And one of the things I came to realize was that in a world of rapid change, the emotion of fear becomes more and more prevalent. And fear? Well, it's understandable. I think there are reasons for fear in a rapidly changing world. It's also very limiting. It holds you back. You become much more risk averse. You erode trust in other people. You don't want to look out into the future. You just want to focus on today. You need to find ways to move beyond the fear and cultivate other emotions that will help you to have much more impact that's meaningful to you and others. And that's become a real focus for me, is how do we make that journey beyond the fear? It was my most recent book is The Journey Beyond Fear, because I've come to believe that psychology and emotions are really the key that's going to determine how we move forward.KEEN: That was very personable, John. And I know that you've had a lot of experience of fear in your own personal life as well as in a professional context. Do you think one of the narratives, perhaps the central story for you over the last 20 years, has been overcoming fear?HAGEL: Yes. Well, I think that it certainly was a period of change for me and helped me to really reflect on how much the emotion of fear had been driving my life. But at the same time, I began to see that there were things that had really excited me throughout my life. And while they were quite different, you know, my first book was in 1976, and it was on alternative energy technologies. A little bit early, but throughout my life I had been excited about certain things, like alternative energy technologies, and when I stepped back and reflected, well, was I just shifting all over the place to different things, or was there a common element in all of these? I began to realize that what really excited me, and where my passion was, was in looking into the future and seeing emerging opportunities and helping to make people aware of those opportunities and ultimately motivate them to address those opportunities. And that was my passion and really helped me to overcome my fear, even though there's still fear there, it's never fully eliminated. But it's what really kept me going and keeps me going today.KEEN: Your 20-year narrative, John seems to have been pretty successful. You've learned a lot. You've published a lot. You succeeded in many ways. But that personal narrative, is that reflected in the world itself? It seems in some ways, certainly according to the pessimists who seem to be dominant these days in our zeitgeist, the world is taking a step back. If John Hagel took a step forward between 2005 and 2025, the world has taken a step back. Is that fair?HAGEL: No, I think it's very fair. I think that if I had to generalize, and obviously generalizations need some qualification, but generalizing, I would say that over the past 20 years, the emotion of fear has become more and more prevalent around the world. At the highest levels of organizations, lowest levels out in the communities. And again, while I think it's understandable, I think it's a very limiting emotion, and it's creating more and more challenge for us in terms of: how do we really embrace the change that's going to be required and capture the opportunities that are available to us? So I think that it's become a real focus for me and again, was the motivation for me to write the book The Journey Beyond Fear. I'm wanting to help people, first of all, acknowledge the fear, because I think many people don't even want to admit that they're afraid. And we live in cultures where if you say you're afraid, you're a weakling. But acknowledge the fear, recognize its limits, and find ways to move forward beyond it. And that's what I'm focused on now.KEEN: Is that fear, John, has it been most clearly manifested over the last 20 years in politics, particularly in the growth of liberal populism, which, in many people's views, you may or may not agree with it, is the way in which politicians take advantage of the culture of fear?HAGEL: It's complicated. I think there are factors that are helping to intensify the fear. A bit controversial or provocative. But I actually, in the United States, I believe both sides of our political spectrum are equally guilty in the sense that they have both focused on what I call "threat-based narratives," the enemies coming together. So, we're all going to die. We need to mobilize now and resist, or we're going to die. The enemy differs depending on which side you're on, but it's all about the threat. The enemy feeds the fear. And you look at our news media and challenge people to say, Tell me, when was the last time you heard a good news story? It's all about the latest catastrophe. Somewhere in the world where people have died and more are going to die. And so I think that there are factors that are feeding the fear, unfortunately, and making it an even more challenging emotion to overcome.KEEN: John, you spoke at DLD in 2016, and the focus of your talk was on storytelling, on the narrative of fear, on telling a good story. Is that the key to addressing so much of the fear in the world today, is telling a different story?HAGEL: Well, I have to be careful because I use words with different meanings than most people do. When I when I say narrative, most people say, you're talking about stories. Yeah, we know about stories. No, I believe there's an important distinction between stories and narratives. So for me, stories are self-contained. They have a beginning, a middle and an end to them. The end, the stories over. And the story is about me, the storyteller, or it's about some other people, real or imagined. It's not about you. In contrast, for me, a narrative is open ended. There's some big threat or opportunity out in the future. Not clear whether it's going to be achieved or not. And the resolution of the narrative hinges on you. It's a call to action to say, your choices, your actions are going to help determine how this narrative plays out. And again, I believe we've become increasingly dominated around the world by threat-based narratives. When we look into the future, there are huge threats, big challenges. Who's focused on the really big opportunities, inspiring opportunities, that could bring us all together? And what amazing things we could accomplish. So, I have become a strong believer that what I call opportunity-based narratives can become a powerful catalyst to help us move beyond the fear and start to cultivate an emotion that I call the passion of the explorer, that will help people to really have much more impact in a rapidly changing world.KEEN: In thinking about this alternative narrative, I'm thinking about it perhaps in architectural terms. Might we imagine this to be storytelling from the edge, or at least an architecture, a narrative architecture, which is built around the edge rather than some imaginary center?HAGEL: Well, again, I want to make the distinction between stories and narratives. I'm talking about narratives.KEEN: Right. Your idea of a narrative is more profound. It's deeper than the way most of us think about narratives. I take your point.HAGEL: Yes, I want to be explicit about that because—and not to dismiss the power of stories, I think stories can be very useful as well. But in making The Journey Beyond Fear—one of the things I should mention is, I've studied, throughout history, movements for social change in different parts of the world, different periods of history. And one of the things that I think is interesting is, the most successful movements for social change around the world throughout history, have been driven by what I describe as an opportunity-based narrative. The leaders were focused on a really inspiring opportunity that could bring people together and excite them. Just one small example that many people here in the U.S., at least, are familiar with is Martin Luther King's speech in Washington, D.C., "I Have a Dream." Amazing things we could accomplish. And yes, there are obstacles and barriers, absolutely. But the focus was on the opportunity of coming together and achieving amazing things.KEEN: John, you and I have talked about this before. Perhaps the most influential modern philosopher is Thomas Hobbes, 17th-century author of Leviathan. He made fear, and I think in many ways his theory of the world was built around his life, he was a very fearful man, and he didn't think fear was a bad thing. He actually thought it was a good thing for humans to recognize the value of fear. I don't want to revisit Hobbes. I know you're not a political philosopher, but at the same time, is there value to fear? Does it have any value at all, or your view, do we really need to simply overcome it and move beyond it?HAGEL: No. No. I am not in any way suggesting we will eliminate it. I believe fear is something that's intrinsic. And an example I give—and this ties to another emotion I mentioned briefly, passion of the explorer. I've come to believe that if we're really going to achieve significant impact in a rapidly changing world, we need to cultivate a very specific form of passion, the passion of the explorer. And I've studied this in many different domains, but one interesting domain is extreme sports. I've spent a lot of time with big wave surfers. Interesting thing, if you talk to a big wave surfer as they're paddling out to ride the next big wave, they're afraid. They know that people have not only fallen off their board, but have died riding those waves. So they're afraid, and they're using the fear to focus on what are the risks, how can I manage the risks? But they are paddling with Excitement. To get out, to ride that wave. They're not letting the fear dominate them. And so I think that's the interesting dynamic and relationship that needs to be established, to use the fear to focus on the risks. But don't let it stop you from making significant change.KEEN: You've clearly learned a great deal over the last 20 years, John. Do you have any regrets, though? Have you made mistakes? Are there things you wish you'd done that you haven't?HAGEL: You know, I think that it's complicated. I do believe that the big mistake in the early days was really focusing so much on the opportunities that were being, created and not recognizing the role of emotions in preventing us from addressing those opportunities. And so it's led to a significant shift in my life and my thinking and my work around...and I'm not ignoring the opportunities, I'm continuing to explore the opportunities. But at the same time, I'm really focused on how we address the obstacles and barriers that are preventing us from getting to those opportunities. And that's where I'm spending more and more of my time.KEEN: When we think back to 2005, most of the same big tech companies were around. Amazon, Google, Microsoft. Facebook was just beginning. There was a very positive, broadly, outlook on tech those days. Today, in 2025, things have changed dramatically. Is that fair, do you think?HAGEL: Well, again, it's complicated. I think that this is one of the areas where fear is really demonstrating itself, anything large and big. One of the big issues that I see, it's not just tech, by the way, I mean, there are surveys around the world that...our trust in large institutions around the world is eroding at a very rapid rate. And when I say this to people that they nod their heads. They've all seen the surveys. Very few people that I know of have asked the question, why? What's driving that erosion of trust? And I believe I've come to believe, based on the research I've done, that a big factor is fear, the emotion of fear, which leads to erosion of trust. And so we need to really understand, why are we so fearful and what can we do to address it? And I don't want to dismiss, I think there are issues, too, in terms of, and I'll just mention quickly, in technology, one of the big issues with the large tech companies is they tend to be supported by advertising models and commission-based models, where they're being paid by the advertiser and the vendors, and the user of the technology, you're the product. And so I think more and more people are beginning to realize that a tech company's primary loyalty is not to you as the user, it's to the people who are paying all the bills. So, I think there are reasons for erosion of trust. But I do think that we need to recognize that fear is a significant factor as well.KEEN: Have you changed your own view of the potential of technology over the last 20 years? You've been in Silicon Valley for a long time, John. You're one of the most distinguished, respected people. You're not a billionaire type, so you're not just a drum beater. But at the same time, you're a man who's not just naturally negative and skeptical. Do you think you're more or less optimistic and positive about the impact of tech, particularly big tech, on the world today in 2025 than you were in 2005?HAGEL: Good question. I think that I'm by nature an optimist, so I'm always looking at opportunities in the future. And I think that technology can still produce amazing new opportunities. One of the interesting things to me—it's not getting as much attention as I think it should is the role of technology innovation in biology and health and wellness. Helping us to live longer, healthier, better lives. And I think we're just in the earliest stages of that technology being developed. But rather than technology being outside us, technology is increasingly going to be inside us and helping us to lead much fuller lives. And so I'm very optimistic about that. And I do believe that the world is changing at a rapid rate, and I'm a believer that we're going to see major new technology companies emerge. And a lot of the current technology leaders will be disrupted and cast to the side. So, more change to come.KEEN: Are there individuals over the last 20 years who have, in your mind, captured the spirit of the age? When one thinks of Elon Musk, for example, he seems to be someone immune from fear. For better or worse—he's not always the most popular man in the world, certainly the richest man in the world. But are there men—and they tend to be men, perhaps women—over the last 20 years, who, for you, have captured all the best and, perhaps some of the worst, of world history in this first quarter of the 21st century?HAGEL: Wow. Well, in that context, I want to answer the question I get from a lot of people since I've been in Silicon Valley for so long is: how do you explain the continued success of Silicon Valley for so many decades? And most people, when confronted with that question, will say, well, it's the venture capitalists, it's the universities, it's the infrastructure. No, I believe that the success of Silicon Valley is being driven by an opportunity-base narrative, which is fundamentally—we have exponentially expanding digital technology that can enable us to change the world for the better. But it's not going to happen automatically. You need to come to Silicon Valley. Will you come? It's the reason why the majority of successful entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley—most people don't know this—the majority of successful entrepreneurs were not born in the United States, much less in Silicon Valley. They were drawn here from all over the world. And it's because they were driven by, again, a very specific passion that I call the passion of the explorer. And that's where they're excited about new territory and are excited about venturing out on the edges, excited about finding ways to have more and more impact that's meaningful to people. And I think that's really been a continuing driver of success in the Valley. KEEN: John, you live in the North Bay, just north of San Francisco, over the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. This part of the world was discovered by one of the great explorers in world history, Francis Drake. And there's a wonderful bay not too far from where you live called the Drake Bay. I've walked around there. Is this concept that you introduced called the "explorer," is it a feature of Western civilization? Is Sir Francis Drake, or was Sir Francis Drake, an early example of this?HAGEL: You know, I wouldn't say Western civilization. I would say of humanity in general. I mean, again, I think that one of the things that I continually hear from people is fear is what helped us stay alive and made us human. And my response to that is, well, if we were completely driven by fear, we would still be living in the jungle, hiding from the tigers and the lions. What happened? We had a desire to explore and to see new things and to try new things. And it led to the emergence of agriculture civilizations around the world. And it was a process of exploration, but it really motivated a number of people so that they would move out and make progress. And I think we're just still exploring.KEEN: I mentioned, John, you talked about DLD in 2016. I know you're a big fan of the event, Europe's top innovation—I wouldn't call it a summit, it's a gathering of influencers like yourself. Over this last 20 years, the American economy has, for better or worse, marched ahead, and Europe has become increasingly stagnant. The German economy, the EU's economy, the United Kingdom's economy...In your view, is an important development over the last 20 years...has Europe—broadly, I know you can't talk about all individuals—but has Europe lost the inspiration of exploring that you're such a believer in?HAGEL: You know, I'm not sure I would generalize about Europe as a region in that regard. I think there are interesting parts of Europe that are doing some very interesting and innovative things. And so I think the challenge is that, again, we live in a world, a global economy, where competition is intensifying on a global scale. And Europe in general has failed to really respond effectively to that and maintain ways of of creating more and more value in that kind of world. So again, I'm an optimist, and I'm hopeful that people will see that potential. But right now, what I'm seeing in Europe and the rest of the world is the emotion of fear holding people back and saying, no, no, let's just hold on to what we have and find ways to make it through. And unfortunately, I think that's the wrong the wrong response.KEEN: I know it's easy to return to 2005, and it's impossible in practice. But had you gone back to John Hagel in 2005, do you think you'd be surprised by the power of the American innovation economy and the relative weakness of the European one?HAGEL: That's a good question. I'm not sure. I wasn't really forecasting particular geographies as areas that would grow and areas that wouldn't grow. I did see, again, an expanding global economy wherein there is increasing competition from other parts of the world, non-European, non-U.S., and so the challenge was how do we respond to that? And that's the issue that we're facing.KEEN: That's the issue indeed, we are facing, John. You and I are talking in November of 2024 in anticipation of the DLD 20-year anniversary of their event in January 2025. Where are we in late 2024 in the world? How would you summarize our situation?HAGEL: Well, again, I think it's a paradox. I think at one level, the situation is very unfortunate in the sense that the emotion of fear is dominating every country in the world. I don't see any countries where it's really the excitement and passion that's driving people. But on the other side, I also see the technology and trends in the world are creating more and more opportunity to to create value at exponential levels. And so I'm, again, an optimist and I'm hopeful that we can find ways to move beyond the fear and see the opportunities and pursue them and create the value that's there to be created.KEEN: I didn't see that fear, certainly in Silicon Valley, John, with the billions of dollars now going into the AI economy, to the booming biotech sector and the other technology sectors that you've talked about. Is there fear, in Silicon Valley, do you see it?HAGEL: Well, again, I think Silicon Valley stands out because many, if not all, the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were drawn here by passion and excitement to create more and more value. And yes, they have fear. If you talk to them, they're afraid the startup could collapse next month. Their customers could go away. But they're driven by that excitement of having that kind of impact. And I think that's what explains the continued success of Silicon Valley. But it stands out as one of those few areas where passion, and specifically, again, the passion of the explorer—and I haven't gone into detailed definition of what I mean by that, but it's based on research—that passion of the explorer that will help people to move beyond the fear and achieve impact that's much more meaningful to them.KEEN: John if we'd been talking in 2005, I don't suppose you, or most analysts of the Future of the Edge, whatever you want to describe it, would have brought up AI as being central. Today, of course, it's all anyone talks about in late 2024, early 2025. If you put your futurist on, and you've mentioned biotech...there are other technologies which have the potential to take off, quantum, for example. What technology do you think is most underrated in terms of imagining the next 20 years?HAGEL: Well, again, I would probably go to biotech as the area that is not getting as much attention as it should, because I believe it has the potential. There is an expression in Silicon Valley, "the longevity escape velocity." It's this notion that with this technology, we will be able, ultimately, to basically live forever. We won't have to worry about dying. And not just living forever, but being healthy and more vibrant and flourishing more than we've ever flourished in the past. And I think that's being underestimated as a potential driver of significant change in our lives and in our society.KEEN: Some people will hear that, John, and be very fearful of that. And lots of novels and stories and music have been made suggesting that if we live forever, life will become a nightmare. We'll be bored by everything and everyone. Should we, in any way, be fearful of that world you're describing?HAGEL: And again, you know, sure, if we're going to live our lives in fear for an eternity, yes, we should be afraid of living our lives in fear. But I believe as human beings, we all have within us the potential for that passion that I described, the passion of the explorer, which is never ending. No matter how much impact you achieve, if you're pursuing that passion, you're driven to have even more impact. What can I do to have even more impact? And excited about it and fulfilled by it. This is nourishing. I think people who have this passion will want to live forever. They will be excited to live forever. And we all have the potential to find that passion within us. By the way, I would just say we I get a lot of pushback. Yes, John, come on. Some of us are capable of this passion, but most of us just want to be told what to do and have the security of an income. My response is, let's go to a playground and look at children 5 or 6 years old. Show me one that doesn't have that kind of excitement about exploring and coming together and trying new things, seeing the things. We all had it as children. What happened to us? We went to school and we were taught by the teacher, "Just listen to the teacher. Memorize what the teacher has to say and show on the exam. So you've memorized it." I've studied the US public school system. It was explicitly designed to prepare us for work environments where the key was just to read the manual, follow the manual, do what's assigned. Passion is suspect, passionate people ask too many questions. Passionate people deviate from the script, they take too many risks. Why would you want passionate people? Just get people who will do their job. And so I think, back to your question about AI, again, I think there is obviously a lot of fear about AI. And one of the reasons for the fear is when I talk to executives, senior executives, about AI, I get two questions. First, how quickly can I automate with AI? And secondly, how many jobs can I eliminate with AI? It's all about scalable efficiency, faster and cheaper. I believe the role of AI is to help us become human again. To take away all of that work, the routine tasks, highly standardized, routine tasks that most of us do on a daily basis, and free us up to actually explore and find ways to create new value and have impact that's meaningful to us. That's exciting.KEEN: If you're right, John, if the next 20 years are ones where there is a profound biotech revolution—and we may not live forever, but certainly will live longer and longer lives—what do we need to address? Seems to me as if one area would be inequality, given that already in America, the difference between how long people live in on the coasts, in California or New York, are quite different from the hinterland. Does this concern you, if indeed you're right? What are the the biggest threats and challenges in a world where longevity is the central reality?HAGEL: Now, again, you talk about threats and challenges. I would talk about opportunities. The opportunities are to help everyone achieve more, to help them all find their passion, help them all find ways to earn income from their passion and achieve more impact that's meaningful to them and to others. And yes, there are issues like inequality, climate change, all the rest, limited resources in the world. But I believe with technology and innovation, we can overcome all those obstacles and achieve amazing results for everyone.KEEN: Finally, John, you're naturally an optimist. So, for me to ask you to put on your rose-tinted glasses might be slightly inappropriate, but if you were to think most positively about the future, in 20 years’ time in 2045, if DLD celebrates its 40th anniversary, what kind of world could this be? Imagine the best kind of world. Would it be like a giant kindergarten? Like people are running around and excited all the time before the teachers got their hands on it?HAGEL: You know, my belief is that if we can really unleash this passion and excitement about driving change and creating more value, that we can create a world where every living thing flourishes. Not just human beings, not just animals, plants, every living being flourishing in ways that would have been unimaginable 20 years earlier, because we're all creating an environment that helps us to flourish. And to me, that's what's really the potential and exciting.KEEN: Do you think the next 20 years will bring more change than the previous 20 years?HAGEL: It's going to bring a lot of change. I suspect it's going to be even more change, because we're talking about exponential change and change exponentially increases over time.KEEN: Well, John Hagel, who spoke at DLD in 2016, a great friend of the conference, a real honor, John, and a pleasure. And I hope we will meet again in 2045 to see whether or not you were right. Thank you so much.HAGEL: Excellent. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

The endless culture wars rage on. In his new book, The War Against the Past, the sociologist Frank Furedi believes that unless what he calls “the West” fights for its history, the “grievance entrepreneurs” will take over and undermine all our hard won intellectual freedoms. It’s the convention conservative argument, of course, but what’s interesting about Furedi is that he used to be a revolutionary communist. So I wonder if Furedi’s rightward shift is the standard intellectual fate of old leftists. Alternatively, perhaps, the woke crowd has become so corrosive that even former communists like Furedi are now manning the barricades in defense of western civilization.Frank Furedi is a sociologist and social commentator. He is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Since the late 1990s, Frank has been widely cited about his views on why Western societies find it so difficult to engage with risk and uncertainty. He has published widely about controversies relating to issues such as health, parenting children, food and new technology. His book Invitation To Terror; Expanding the Empire of the Unknown (2007) explores the way in which the threat of terrorism has become amplified through the ascendancy of precautionary thinking. It develops the arguments contained in two previous books, Culture of Fear (2002) and Paranoid Parenting (2001). Both of these works investigate the interaction between risk consciousness and perceptions of fear, trust relations and social capital in contemporary society.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

As the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle was one of first people to recognize the collapse of neoliberalism. But today, the real question is not about the death of neoliberalism, but what comes after it. And, of course, when I sat down with Gerstle, I began by asking him what the Trump victory tells us about what comes after neoliberalism.Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Gerstle received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of more than ten books.  He is currently the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, where he is working on a new book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century.  He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Named as one of the "100 most pivoted men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's most pivotal broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the pivotal author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two cats, both called Pivot.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. TRANSCRIPT“It's important to recognize that the neoliberal triumph carried within it not just the triumph of capitalism, but the triumph of freedom. And I think the that image of the wall coming down captures both. It's people wanting to claim their freedom, but it also paves the way for an unregulated form of capitalism to spread to every corner of the world.” -Gary GerstleAK: Hello everybody. As we try to make sense of the aftermath of the US election this week, there was an interesting headline today in the Financial Times. Donald Trump apparently has asked, and I'm quoting the F.T. here, the arch-protectionist Robert Lighthizer, to run U.S. trade policy. You never know with Trump, he may change his mind tomorrow. But nonetheless, it suggests, and it's not a great surprise, that protectionism will define the Trump, presidency or certainly the second Trump presidency. And it speaks of the structural shift in the nature of politics and economics in the United States, particularly given this Trump victory. One man who got this, I think before anyone else, is the Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle. He's been on the show a couple of times before. He's the author of a wonderful book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. It's a profound book. It's had an enormous impact on everybody. And I'm thrilled and honored that Gary is back on the show. This is the third time he's been on the show. Gary, is that important news? Have we formally come to the end now of the neoliberal order? GARY GERSTLE: I think we have, although there's an element of neoliberalism which may revive in the Trump administration. But if we think of a political order as ordering political life so that all participants in that order have to accept its ideological principles, we have moved out of that order. I think we've been out of it for some time. The critical election in this case was 2016, and the critical move that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders made in 2016, the two most dynamic presidential candidates in that year, was to break with the orthodoxy of free markets, the orthodoxy of globalization, the orthodoxy of a world without borders where everything was free to move and the market was supreme. And the only role of government in the state was to ensure as full access to markets as was possible in the belief that if governments got out of the way of a private capitalist economy, this would spur the greatest growth for the greatest number of people everywhere in the world. This was governing orthodoxy, really from the time of Reagan until 2016. Trump broke it. Sanders broke it. Very significant in this regard that when Biden came into office, he moderated some of the Trump tariffs but kept the tariffs on China substantially in place. So there's been continuity for some time, and now we're going to see an intensification of the protectionist regime. Protectionism used to be a dirty word in American politics. If you uttered that word, you were excluded from serious political discourse. There will be other terms that are used, fair trade, not just because protectionism has a negative connotation to it, but we are living in an era where governments assert the right to shape markets as they wish to in the interests of their nation. So, yes, we are living in a different era, although it must be said, and we may get into a discussion of this at some point, there are sectors of the Trump coalition that want to intensify deregulation in the domestic market, that want to rollback government. And so I expect in the new Trump administration, there is going to be tussles between the protectionists on the one hand and those who want to, at least domestically, restore free trade. And by that I mean the free operation of private capital without government regulation. That's an issue that bears watching.AK: Is that a contradiction though, Gary? Can one, in this post-neoliberal order, can governments be hostile to regulation, a la Elon Musk and his association with Trump, and also be in favor of tariffs? I mean, do the two—can the to go together, and is that the outline of this foggy new order coming into place in the second quarter of the 21st century?GARY GERSTLE: They can go together in the sense that they have historically in the past gone together in the United States. In the late 19th century, the US had very high tariffs against foreign goods. And domestically, it was trying to create as free a domestic market as possible. What was known as the period of laissez-faire domestically went along with a commitment to high tariffs and protection of American laissez-faire against what we might call global laissez-faire. So it has been tried. It did work at that time. But I think the Republican party and the constituencies behind Donald Trump are divided on this question. As you noted, Elon Musk represents one pole of this. He certainly wants protection against Chinese imports of electric cars and is probably going to get that because of all the assistance he gave Trump in this election. But domestically, he wants no government interfering with his right to conduct his capitalist enterprises as he sees fit. So that's going to be one wing. But there's another wing of the Republican Party under Trump that is much more serious about industrial policy that says we cannot leave the market to its own devices. It produces too many human casualties. It produces too many regions of America left behind, and that we must use the government to help those people left behind. We must structure free enterprise industry in a way that helps the ordinary working-class man. And I use the word “man” deliberately in this context. Interestingly, JD Vance, the vice president, embodies both these tendencies, sees, on the one hand, a creature of venture capital, Silicon Valley, close to the Musks and Peter Thiels of the world. On the other hand, he has talked explicitly, as in his vice-presidential acceptance speech, about putting Main Street over Wall Street. And if he's serious about putting Main Street over Wall Street, that's going to involve a lot of government intervention to displace the privileged position that finance and venture capital now has in the American economy.AK: Gary, you're a historian, one of the best around, you're deeply versed in the past, you bring up Vance. He presents himself as being original, even has a beard. But I wonder whether his—I don't know what you would call it—a Catholic or Christian socialism, or at least a concern with the working class. Is it in any way new, for you, historically? I mean, it certainly exists in Europe, and there must be analogies also in American history with him.GARY GERSTLE: Well, if he is a convert to Catholicism, I don't know how well-versed he is in the papal doctrines of years past. Or decades. Or even centuries passed. But there was a serious movement within the Catholic Church in the late 19th and early 20th century to humanize capitalism, to declare that free market capitalism produced too many human casualties. Too many ordinary Catholic workers and workers who are not Catholic were hurt by unemployment, poverty, being thrown out of work in the troughs of business cycles, having no social welfare to fall back on, as a result of injury or misfortune in life. And so there was a profound movement within Catholic churches, in the United States, and in Europe and other parts of the world as well, to humanize capitalism. Whether this very once important Catholic tradition is an active influence on Vance, I don't know, because he's a recent convert to Catholicism, and I don't know how deeply has imbibed its history or its doctrine. But there is a rich tradition there. And it's possible that this is one of the sources that he is drawing on to shape his contemporary politics.AK: We were talking before we ran live, Gary, I said to you, and I think you agreed, that this use of the word "fascism" to describe Trump isn't always particularly helpful. It reflects a general hysteria amongst progressives. But I wonder in this context, given the way in which European Catholicism flirted, sometimes quite openly, with fascism, whether the F-word actually makes a little more sense. Because after all, fascism, after the First World War, was a movement in the name of the people, which was very critical of the capitalism of that age and of the international market. So, when we use the word fascism now, could it have some value in that context as a kind of a socioeconomic critique of capitalism?GARY GERSTLE: You mean fascism offering a socioeconomic critique of U.S. capitalism?AK: Yes. For better or worse.GARY GERSTLE: I'm reluctant to deploy the term fascism, since I think most people who enter the conversation or who hear that word in the United States don't really know what it means, and that's partly the consequence of historians debating its meaning as long as they have, and also suggesting that fascism takes different forms at different times and in different places. I prefer the term authoritarianism. I think that tendency is clearly there and one can connect that to certain traditions within the church. The United States once had a intense anti-Catholic political tradition. It was unimaginable in the 19th century. AK: Yeah, it drove the KKK. I mean, that was the Klan hated the Catholics probably more than they hated the Jews.GARY GERSTLE: It drove the Klan. And the notion in the 19th century—I'm not remembering now whether there are 5 or 6 Catholics who sit on the Supreme Court—but the notion in the 19th century that 5 or 6 Catholics would be the chief custodians and interpreters of America's most sacred doctrine and document the Constitution was simply unthinkable. It could never have happened. There was a Catholic seat. As for a long time, there was a Jewish seat on the Supreme Court, but understood that this would be carefully cordoned off and limited and that, when push came to shove, Protestants had to be in charge of interpreting America's most sacred doctrine. And the charge against Catholics was that they were not democratic, that they vested ultimate power in God and through an honest messenger on Earth, who was the pope. John F. Kennedy, in 1960, became the first Catholic president of the United States. Biden is only the second. Vance is the first Catholic vice president. Before in the campaign that Kennedy was running in 1960, he had to go in front of thousands of Protestant ministers who had gathered in Houston so he could persuade them that if he became president, he would not be handing America over to the pope, who was seen as an authoritarian figure. So for a long time, Catholicism was seen as a carrier of authoritarianism, of a kind of executive power that should not be limited by a human or secular force. And this promoted, in the United States, intense anti-Catholic feeling, which took the country probably 200 years to conquer. Conquered it was, so the issue of so many Catholics on the Supreme Court is not an issue. Biden's Catholicism is not an issue. Vance's Catholicism is not an issue. But Vance himself has said, talking about his conversion, that of his granny—I forget the term he uses to describe his granny—were alive today, she would not be able to accept his conversion because she was so deeply Protestant, so evangelical, so—AK: A classic West Virginian evangelical. So for me, the other contradiction here is that Vance is unashamedly nationalist, unashamedly critical of globalization. And yet, by embracing Catholicism, which is the most international of face, I don't quite understand what that suggests about him, or Catholicism, or even history, that that these odd things happen.GARY GERSTLE: Well, one thing one can say in history is that odd things happen and odd couples get together. I don't know myself how fully Vance understands his Catholicism. I believe Peter Thiel led him to this. Vance is still a young man and has gone through a lot of conversions for a young man. He was—AK: Well, he's a conversion expert. That's the narrative of his life, isn't it?GARY GERSTLE: Yes. Yes. And he began as being a severe anti-Trumper, almost a Never-Trumper. Then he converted to Trumpism. Then he converted from Protestant to Catholicism. So a lot of major changes in his life. So, the question you just posed is a fascinating one. Does he understand that the church is a catholic church, meaning small c catholic in this case, that it's open to everyone in the world? Does he really understand that? But I would extend my puzzle about religion beyond Catholicism to ask, for all the evangelical supporters of Trump: where is Jesus's message of peace and love? Where did that go? So there are puzzles about the shape of Christian religion in America. And there's no doubt that for its most devout supporters in the United States that has taken a very hard nationalist turn. And this is true among Protestants, and it is true among many Catholics. And so, I think the question that you posed may be one that no one has really confronted Vance with.“What we have to think about in regard to Trump is, will they take on projects that will threaten the constitutional foundation of the United States in order to achieve their aims? What does Musk represent, and what does part of Trump represent? It represents unbounded executive power, unconstrained by Congress, to promote conditions of maximum freedom. And the freedom they have in mind is not necessarily your personal freedom or mine.” -Gary GerstleAK: And I would extend that, Gary. I think that the most persistent and credible critics of Trump also come from the religious community. Peter Wehner, for example, former—I don't know if you're familiar with his work. He writes a lot for the Times and The Atlantic. Very religious man, is horrified—worked in the Bush and the Reagan administrations. Let's go back to—I was looking at the cover of the book, and obviously authors don't pick the covers of their books—GARY GERSTLE: I did. I picked this.AK: Okay. Well, when you look at the—GARY GERSTLE: This is this is not the original cover.AK: Right, so, the book I'm looking at, and for people just listening, I'm going to describe. The dominant picture is of the Berlin Wall being knocked down in the evening of November 1989. It's odd, Gary, isn't it, that...for the rise and fall of the neoliberal order, which is an economic order in a free market era, you should have chosen the image of a political event, which, of course, Fukuyama so famously described as the end of history. And I guess, for you as an economic historian who is also deeply interested and aware of politics, is the challenge and opportunity to always try to disentangle the economics and politics of all this? Or are they so entangled that they're actually impossible to disentangle, to separate?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I think sometimes you need to disentangle them, sometimes they move in different directions, and sometimes they move in the same direction. I think to understand the triumph of the neoliberal order, we have to see that politics and economics move in tandem with each other. What makes possible the neoliberal triumph of the 90s is the fall of communism between 1989 and 1991. And no picture embodies that better than the taking down of the Berlin Wall. And that connotes a message of freedom and escape from Soviet and communist tyranny. But the other message there is that tearing down of those walls opens the world to capitalist penetration to a degree that had not been available to the capitalist world since prior to World War One, prior to the war, and most importantly, to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And where communists came to power everywhere, they either completely excluded or sharply curtailed the ability of capitalist business to operate within their borders. Their message was expropriate private property, which meant expropriate all corporate property. Give it over to the state, let the state manage it in the interest of the proletariat. This was an extraordinary dream that turned into an awful tyrannical outcome. But it animated the world, as few other ideas did in the 20th century, and proposed a very, very serious challenge to capitalist prerogative, to capitalist industry, to free markets. And so the collapse of communism, which is both the collapse of a state—a communist state, the Soviet Union—but perhaps more importantly, the collapse of the belief that any governments could structure the private economy in ways that would be beneficial to humankind. It's what opened the way in the 1990s to the neoliberal triumph. And it's important to recognize that the neoliberal triumph carried within it not just the triumph of capitalism, but the triumph of freedom. And I think the that image of the wall coming down captures both. It's people wanting to claim their freedom, but it also paves the way for an unregulated form of capitalism to spread to every corner of the world. And in the long term—we're in the mid-term—that was going to create inequalities, vulnerabilities to the global financial and economic systems, that were going to bring the global economy down and set off a radically different form of politics than the world had seen for some time. And we're still living through that radically different form of politics set off by the financial crash of 2008/2009, which, in my way of thinking, was a product of untrammeled capitalism conquering the world in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's and communism's collapse.AK: Yeah, and that's the other thing, isn't it, Garry? I mean, it goes without saying that the bringing down of the war fundamentally changed the old Soviet economy, the East European economies, Poland, Hungary, eastern part of Germany. But what no one—I think very, very few people imagined in '89 was that perhaps the biggest consequence of this capitalist penetration wasn't in Warsaw or Moscow or the eastern part of Berlin, but back in West Virginia with guys like JD Vance. How did the bringing down of the wall change America, or at least the American economy? I've never really quite understood that.GARY GERSTLE: Through the mass exporting of manufacturing to other countries that—AK: Wasn't that before? Wasn't that also taking place before '89, or did it happen particularly in the '90s?GARY GERSTLE: It began before 1989. It began during the Great Recession of the 1970s, where the first districts of manufacturing in the U.S., places like Buffalo, New York steelmaking center, began to get hollowed out. But it dramatically intensified in the 1990s, and this had to do with China permitting itself to be a part of this global free market. And China was opened to capitalist penetration from the United States and Europe. And what you saw in that decade was a massive shift of manufacturing to China, a shift that even intensified in the first decade of the 21st century with the admission of China in 2001 to the World Trade Organization. So China was a big factor. Also, the passage of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, which rendered the northern half of the Western Hemisphere one common market, like the European Common Market. So, enormous flight of jobs to places like Mexico. And the labor costs in places like China and Mexico, and then East Asia already leaving Japan for Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, parts of the South Asian subcontinent. The flight of jobs there became so massive, and the labor costs there were so cheap, that American industry couldn't compete. And what you begin to see is the hollowing out of American industry, American manufacturing, and whole districts of America just beginning to rot. And no new industries or no new economies taking the place of the industries and the jobs that had left. And this America was being ignored, largely in the 1990s and first decade of the 21st century, in part because the ideology of neoliberalism said, we understand that this global free market is going to increase inequality in the world, it's going to increase the distance between rich and poor, but the distance between rich and poor is okay because all boats will rise. All people will benefit. This is not just an American story, this is also the story of other parts of the North Atlantic economy. Britain certainly, Germany was a partial exception, France, other places, and this was the ideology...growth would benefit everyone, and this was not the case. It was a fallacy. But the ideology was so strong that it held together until the financial crash of 2008/2009. After that crash, it became impossible to make the point that all boats were rising under the neoliberal regime. And this is when the forgotten Americans and the forgotten Brits of the northern part of the of Great Britain. This is when they began to make their voices heard. This is when they began to strike a very different note in politics. And this is where Donald Trump had his beginnings with these forgotten, angry people who felt ignored, left behind, and were suffering greatly, because by the early decades of the 21st century, it wasn't just jobs that were gone, but it was healthy marital life, divorce rates rising, rampant drug use. Two Cambridge economists wrote a book called Depths of Despair.AK: Yeah, that book comes up in almost every conversation. I once went down to Princeton to interview Angus Deaton. Like your book, it's become a classic. So let's fast forward, Gary, to the last election. I know you're writing a book now about politics in our time of authoritarianism, and you're scratching your head and asking whether the election last week was a normal or an apocryphal one, one that's just different or historical. And I wonder, in that sense, correct me if I'm wrong, there seems to have been two elections simultaneously. On the one hand, it was very normal, from the Democrats' point of view, who treated America as if it was normal. Harris behaves as if she was just another Democratic candidate. And, of course, Trump, who didn't. My interpretation, maybe it's a bit unfair, is that it's the progressives. It's certainly the coastal elites who have become, implicitly at least, the defenders of the old neoliberal order. For them, it kind of works. It's not ideal, but it works and they can't imagine anything else. And it's the conservatives who have attacked it, the so-called conservatives. Is there any truth to that in the last election?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I think the Democrats are certainly seen by vast sectors of the population as being the defenders of an old order, of established institutions controlling the media, although I think that's less and less true because the legacy media has less and less influence and shows like yours, podcasting and rogue Fox Television and all kinds of other outlets, are increasingly influential. But yes, the Democrats are seen as a party of the establishment. They are seen as the party of the educated elite. And one of the factors that determines who votes for who now is now deeply educational in the sense of, what is your level of educational achievement? If you are college educated, you're much more likely to vote Democratic, regardless of your income. And if you're high school educated or less, you're much more likely to vote Republican. I don't think it's fair to say that the Democrats are the last protectors of the neoliberal order, because Biden broke with the neoliberal order in major, consequential ways. If the defining characteristic of the neoliberal order is to free the market from constraints and to use the state only to free up market forces—this was true, to a large extent, of Obama and of Clinton—Biden broke with that, and he did it in alliance with Bernie Sanders, set of task forces they set up in 2020 to design a new administration. And his major pieces of legislation, reshoring CHIPS manufacture, the biggest investment in clean energy in the country's history. $1 trillion infrastructure bill, the biggest infrastructure project since the interstate highway system of the '50s, and arguably since Roosevelt's fabled New Deal. These are all about industrial policy. These are all about the government using its power and resources to direct industry in a certain way so that it will increase general happiness, general welfare, general employment. So this represents a profound change from what had come before. And in that way, the Biden administration can't be seen as the last defenders.“The question is, will they be able to get further than past generations of Republicans have by their willingness to break things? And will they go so far as to break the Constitution in the pursuit of these aims?”AK: And let me jump in here, Gary, there's another really important question. There was a very interesting piece, I'm sure you saw it, by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker about Bidenomics and its achievements. You talked about the New Deal, the massive amount of investments—it was post COVID, they took advantage of the historical crisis. Trillions of dollars have been invested in new technologies. Is Bidenomics new in any way? Or is it basically just a return to the economics, or the political economy, of FDR?GARY GERSTLE: Well, it certainly draws inspiration from FDR, because at the core of the New Deal was the conviction that you could use government to direct industry to positive uses that would benefit not just the corporations, but the population as a whole. But there was nothing like the Green Energy Project in the New Deal. The New Deal, except for hydroelectric projects, was primarily about prospering on a cheap fossil fuel economy. The New Deal also was very comfortable with accepting prevailing gender and race conceptions of the proper place of women and African Americans in American life in a way that is unacceptable to Bidenomics. So there are redirections under Bidenomics in ways that modify the New Deal inspiration. But at its core, Bidenomics is modeled on the New Deal conviction that you need a strong federal government to point industry in the right direction. And so in that sense, there's a fundamental similarity in those two progressive projects. And I think people in the Biden administration have been quite conscious about that. Now, the particular challenges are different. The world economy is different. The climate crisis is upon us. So, it is going to take different forms, have different outcomes. But the inspiration clearly comes from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal.AK: Well, let's go over to the other side and Trump. You scratching your head and figuring out whether this is unusual. And of course, it's the second time he's won an election. This time around, he seems to be overtly hostile to the state. He's associated with Musk, who's promised to essentially decimate the state. In historical terms, Gary, is there anything unusual about this? I mean, certainly the opponents of FDR were also very hostile to this emergent American state. As a historian, do you see this as something new, the pleasure in essentially blowing the state up, or at least the promise of blowing the state up?GARY GERSTLE: That impulse is not new. There have been members of the Republican party who have been talking this language since the New Deal arrived in America in the 1930s and '40s during the '50s and '60s and early '70s, they were marginal in American politics. And then with the neoliberal order coming into being in the '70s and with Reagan as president, their voice has gained enormous traction. One of Reagan's key advisors in the 1980s and 1990s, one of his favorite lines was, “I want to shrink the size of the federal government until we can drown it in the bathtub.” It's a wonderful image and metaphor, and captures the intensity with which conservative Republicans have wanted to eliminate the strong centralized state. But they have not been able to do it to a degree that makes that have satisfied them. It turns out that Americans, for all their possible ideological opposition to big government like big parts of it, like Social Security, like Medicare, like a strong military establishment that's gonna protect the country, like clean air, clean water. So it's proved much more difficult for this edifice to be taken down than the Reaganites had imagined it would be. So, the advocates have become more radical because of decades of frustration. And what we have to think about in regard to Trump is, will they take on projects that will threaten the constitutional foundation of the United States in order to achieve their aims? What does Musk represent, and what does part of Trump represent? It represents unbounded executive power, unconstrained by Congress, to promote conditions of maximum freedom. And the freedom they have in mind is not necessarily your personal freedom or mine, as the abortion issue signifies. What they have in mind is corporate freedom. The freedom of Elon Musk's companies to do whatever they want to do. The freedom of the social media companies to do whatever they want to do. The question is, will they be able to get further than past generations of Republicans have by their willingness to break things? And will they go so far as to break the Constitution in the pursuit of these aims? Peter Thiel has said, very forthrightly, that democracy no longer works as a system, and that America has to consider other systems in order to have the kind of prosperity and freedom it wants. And one thing that bears watching with this new Trump administration is how many supporters the Peter Thiel's and the Elon Musk's are going to have to be free to tear down the edifice and the institutions of the federal government and pursuit of a goal of a reconfigured, and what I would call rogue, laissez-faire. This is something to watch.AK: But Gary, I take your point. I mean, Thiel's been, on the West Coast, always been a convenient punchbag for the left for years now, I punched him many times myself. I wanted to. But all this seems to be just the wet dream of neoliberals. So you have Musk and Thiel doing away with government. Huge corporations, no laws. This is the neoliberal wet dream, isn't it?GARY GERSTLE: Well, partly it is. But neoliberalism always depended on a structure of law enforced by government that was necessary to allow free markets to operate in a truly free and transparent manner. In other words, you needed elements of a strong government to perfect markets, that markets were not perfect if they were left to their own devices. And one of the dangers of the Elon Musk phase of the Trump administration is that this edifice of law on which corporations and capitalism thrives will be damaged in the pursuit of a radical libertarianism. Now, there may very well be a sense that cooler heads prevail in the Trump administration, and that this scenario will not come to fruition. But one certainly has to be aware that this is one of the possible outcomes of a Trump administration. I should also say that there's another very important constituency in the Republican party that wants to continue, not dismantle, what Biden has done with industrial policies. This is the other half of JD Vance's brain. This is Tom Cotton. This is Marco Rubio, this is Josh Hawley, senator from Missouri. And they want to actively use the government to regulate industry in the public interest. And there's a very interesting intellectual convergence going on between left of center and right of center intellectuals and policymakers who are converging on the importance of having an industrial policy, because if Elon Musk is given his way, how is the abandoned heartland going to come back?AK: It's cheering me up, Gary, because what you're suggesting is that this is a fairly normal moment. You've got different wings of the Republican Party. You've got the Cottons and the Rubios, who were certainly not revolutionary. Why should we believe that this is a special moment then?GARY GERSTLE: January 6th, 2021. That's the reason. Trump remains the only president in American history to authorize an attack on the very seat of American democracy. That being: Congress sitting in the Capitol. And once he authorized the attack, he waited for three hours hoping that his attackers and his mob would conquer this building and compel the legislators inside to do—AK: And I take your perspective. I'm the last person to defend that. But we're talking about 2024 and not 2021. He won the election fairly. No one's debating that. So, why is 2024 a special election?GARY GERSTLE: Well, here's the key. Well, maybe it's a special election in two ways. It may signify the reconfiguration of a genuinely populist Republican party around the needs of ordinary working-class Americans. And we should say, in this regard, that Trump has brought into his coalition significant numbers of Latinos, young blacks. It has the beginning of a look of a multiracial coalition that the Democrats once had, but now appear to be losing. So it may be an epochal moment in that regard. The other way in which it may be an epochal moment is: what if Trump does not get his way in his term in office for something he really wants? Will he accept that he is bound by the Constitution, that he is bound by the courts? Or will he once again say, when he really wants something, no constitution, no law, will stand in my way? That's how January 6th, 2021, still matters. I'm not saying he's going to do that, but I think we have to understand that that is a possibility, especially since he has shown no remorse for the outcome of the last election. If I read into your comments, I hear you saying: he won this time. He doesn't have to worry about losing. But Trump is always worried about losing. And he is a man who doesn't really know the Constitution, and the parts that he knows and understands he doesn't especially like, because his dream, along with Elon Musk's dream, and this is one reason why I think they are melding so tightly, at the apex of American government should be unbounded executive power. This is not how the country was set up. And as Congress and as the courts begin to push back, will he accept those limits, that there must be bounds on executive power? Or will he try and break through them? I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's something that we have to be concerned about.AK: I wonder, again, wearing your historical cap you're always doing, the more you talk, the more Trump and Trump's Republican party is Nixonian. This obsession with not being responsible for the law. The broadening of the Republican party. Certainly the Republican party under Nixon was less singularly white than it became later. Isn't, in some ways, Trump just a return to Nixon? And secondly, you're talking about the law and Trump ransacking the law. But on the other hand, everything he always does is always backed up by the law. So, he has a love hate relationship with the law himself. He could never have accomplished anything he's done without hiring all these expensive lawyers. I don't know if you saw the movie this year, The Apprentice, which is built on his relationship with what's with Roy Cohn, of course, who schooled him in American politics, who was McCarthy's lawyer. So, again, I'm not trying to defend Trump, but my point is: what's different here?GARY GERSTLE: Well, a key difference from Nixon is that when push came to shove, Nixon submitted to the rule of law, and Trump did not. Nixon did not unleash his people on Congress when a group of senators came to him and said you're going to be impeached if you stay in office, you should resign. He resigned. So the '70s was a moment of enormous assertion of the power of Congress, and assertion of the power and authority of the Constitution. That is not the story of Donald Trump. The story of Donald Trump is the story of the Constitution being pushed to the side. If you ask, is there anything new about Americans and politicians trying to manipulate the law in their favor? There's nothing new about that. And Trump, having made his fortune in New York real estate, knows there's no such thing as perfect markets, knows that judges can be bought and corrupted. And so, he has very little regard for the authority of courts. Everything's a transaction. Everything can be bought and sold. So, he understands that, and he has used the law to his advantage when he can. But let me bring you back to his first inauguration speech. There was no mention of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in what he had to say that day. I think we'd be hard pressed to find another inaugural speech that makes no reference to the sacred documents having to do with the founding of the American Republic. And so I think in that way, he is something new and represents, potentially, a different kind of threat. I'm not saying that's going to happen, but it's certainly possible. And let me add one other element that we have to consider, because I'm suggesting that he has a fondness for forms of authoritarian rule, and we have to recognize that hard rights are on the march everywhere in the world right now. The social democratic government of Germany has just fallen. Britain may soon be alone in terms of having a left-center party in control and upholding the values of liberal democracy. The world is in a grip of an authoritarian surge. That is not an American phenomenon. It is an international phenomenon. It is not a phenomenon I understand well enough, but if we're to understand the kind of strongman tendencies that Trump is exhibiting, the appeal of the strongman tendencies to so many Americans, we have to understand the international context in which this is occurring. And these movements in these different countries are fully aware of each other. They draw strength from each other's victories, and they get despairing from each other's defeats. So this is an international movement and an international project, and it's important, in that regard, to set Trump in that historical context.AK: Final question, Gary, there's so much here, we'll have to get you back on the show again in the new year. There's certainly, as you suggested, a great deal of vitality to conservatives, to the Cottons, the JD Vances, the Steve Bannons of the world. But what about on the left? We talked earlier, you sort of pushed back a little bit on the idea that the progressive elites aren't defenders of the neoliberal order, but you kind of acknowledged there may be a little bit of truth in that. In response to this new conservatism, which, as you suggested, is in some ways quite old, what can and should progressives do, rather than just falling back on Bidenomics and reliance on a new deal—which isn't going to happen now given that they had the opportunity in the COVID crisis to spend lots of money, which didn't have any impact on this election, for better or worse. Is there a need to re-architect the progressive politics in our new age, the age of AI, a high-tech age? Or do we simply allow the Bernie Sanders of the world to fall back on 20th-century progressive ideas?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I'm not sure where AI is taking us. AI may be taking us out of democracy altogether. I think one of—AK: You're not giving it any chance, if that's the case.“What if Trump does not get his way in his term in office for something he really wants? Will he accept that he is bound by the Constitution, that he is bound by the courts? Or will he once again say, when he really wants something, no constitution, no law, will stand in my way?”GARY GERSTLE: Well, there are different versions of AI that will be coming. But the state of the world right now suggests that democracy is on the defensive, and authoritarianism is is on the march. Those who predict the death of democracy have been wrong in the past. So I'm not predicting it here, but we have to understand that there are elements of life, technology, power in in private hands today, that make democracy much harder to do effectively. And so, this is a period of reflection that groups who care about democracy at all points on the political spectrum have to be thinking very seriously about. As for the here and now, and politicians don't think in terms of 10 or 20 years—or you have to be a leader in China, where you can think in terms of 10 or 20-year projects, because you never have to face any election and being tossed out of office—but in the here and now, I think what Democrats have to be very aware of, that the party that they thought they were is the party that the Republican Party has become, or is becoming: a multiracial, working-class party. And if the Democrats are to flourish—and in that regard, it's very significant—AK: It's astonishing, really.GARY GERSTLE: It is astonishing. And it's important to to note that Trump is the first Republican nominee for president since George W. Bush in 2004 to get a majority of votes. And the only person to do it before him in the last 30 years was his father, George H.W. Bush, in 1988. Kamala Harris came within 200,000 votes of becoming president of the United States. That's not well enough understood yet. But if 200,000 votes had changed in three states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, she would be the president elect of the United States. However, she would have been the president elect while losing the popular vote. And one has to go very far back in history to find the Democrats being the beneficiaries of the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. And I think the fact that they lost the popular vote for only the third time in the last 50 years, maybe? I mean, when they elected someone...has to suggest that they have to do some serious thinking about how to reclaim this. Now, Bernie Sanders is coming out and saying, they should have gotten me on the public stage rather than Liz Cheney, that going after suburban Republican women was the wrong route. You should have stuck with me. We had a left/center alliance that worked in 2020. We could have done it again. But that's not my reading of the situation. My reading of the situation is that Bernie-style politics is distinctly less popular in 2024 than it was in 2020. The Democrats have to figure that out, and they have to figure out what they have to do in order to reclaim majorities in American life. And in order to do that, I think their economic programs are actually on the right track, in that respect, under the Biden administration. I think they probably have to rethink some of their cultural policies. There were three issues in this election. The economy was number one. The immigration issue was number two. And then, the trans issue was number three. The Republicans ran an estimated 30,000 ads declaring that the Democratic party was going to take your children away by turning them from boys to girls or girls to boys. The Democratic party has to do some hard thinking about how to have a progressive policy on immigration and how to have a progressive policy on issues of trans matters without losing a majority of the American people, who clearly are, at this moment, not with them on those important issues.AK: It's an astonishing moment, Gary. And I'm not sure whether it's a revolutionary moment or just surreal.GARY GERSTLE: Well, you've been pressing me, on a number of occasions, as to whether this is just the normal course of American politics, and if we look in that direction, the place to look for normality is...incumbents always do badly in high-inflationary times. And Ford and Carter lost in the 1970s. Every incumbent during COVID and during the inflationary period in Europe seems to have lost a recent election. The most normal course of politics is to say, this is an exceptional moment having to do with the enormity of COVID and what was required to shut down the economy, saved people, and then getting started up again, and we will see something more normal, the Democrats will be back to what they normally do, in 2028. That's a possibility. I think the more plausible possibility is that we are in the midst of some pretty profound electoral realignment that is giving rise to a different kind of political order. And the Democrats have to figure out if that political order is going to be under their direction, what they have to do to pull that off. AK: And maybe rather than the neoliberal order, we're talking about, what, a neo-authoritarian order? Is that—GARY GERSTLE: Well, the Trump forces are maybe neo-authoritarian, but we don't have a name for it. Pete Buttigieg—AK: Well, that's why we got you on the show, Gary. Don't you have a name for it?GARY GERSTLE: No. You know—AK: We're relying on you. I hope it's going to be in your next book.GARY GERSTLE: Well, I have till January 20th, 2025, to come up with the name. Pete Buttigieg called it the Big Deal rather than the New Deal. I don't think that cuts it. And there's some other pundits who are arguing about building from the middle out. That doesn't cut it.AK: That sounds terrible. That sounds like—GARY GERSTLE: This is part of Biden's—AK: Designing political parties by committee. It's like an American car.GARY GERSTLE: This is part of Biden's problem. You can't name, effectively, in a positive way, what he's done. One thing that's going to happen—and this may be a sign that things will continue from Biden to Trump, in terms of industrial policy. Do you have any doubt that Trump is going to plaster his name on every computer chips plant, every battery factory? Trump brought this to you, he's got to be there for every opening. He's not going to miss a beat. He'll see this as a grand publicity tour. I think there's a good chance he will take credit for what Biden has started, and that's going to upset a lot of us. But it may also signify that he may be loath to abandon many of these industrial policies that Biden has put in place, especially since the Biden administration was very clever in putting most of these plants, and chip plants, and battery plants, in deep red Republican districts.AK: Well, Gary, I know you're not particularly cheerful. I don't suppose most of our audience are, but you actually cheered me up. I think things are a little bit more normal than some people think. But we will get you back on the show after January—what did you say—January 25th, when you'll have a word to describe the New World Order?GARY GERSTLE: Well, I said after January 20th, 2025, you can expect me to have a name. I probably should—AK: Gary, now, we'll have you back on the show. If you don't have a name, I'm going to report you to Trump.GARY GERSTLE: You'll have to bury me.AK: Yeah. Okay. Well, we're not burying you. We need you, Gary Gerstle, author of Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, a man who makes sense of our present with historical perspective. Gary, as always, a pleasure. Keep well and keep safe. And we'll talk again in the not-too-distant future. Thank you so much.GERSTLE: Thank you. A pleasure talking with you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Gary Shapiro is my Pivot Guy. As the longtime CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, the organization that puts on Las Vegas’ annual CES, Gary knows a thing or two about pivoting. And now he’s put his pivoting wisdom into a pivotal new book, Pivot or Die: How Leaders Thrive When Everything Changes, a guide about how to pivot successfully. As Gary explained to me, he breaks pivoting down into four kinds of pivots: the startup pivot, the forced pivot, the failure pivot and the success pivot. A pivotal conversation about a pivotally important subject.Gary Shapiro is CEO of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA)® which represents over 1300 consumer technology companies and owns and produces CES® — the Global Stage for Innovation. As head of CTA for more than three decades, he has ushered the consumer technology industry through major periods of technological upheaval and transformation. Shapiro is also the New York Times bestselling author of Ninja Future: Secrets to Success in the New World of Innovation (HarperCollins, 2019), Ninja Innovation: The Ten Killer Strategies of the World’s Most Successful Businesses (HarperCollins, 2013), and The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream (Beaufort, 2011). Through these books and through television appearances, and as a columnist whose more than 1200 opinion pieces have appeared in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post, Shapiro has helped direct policymakers and business leaders on the importance of innovation in the U.S. economy.Named as one of the "100 most pivoted men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's most pivotal broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the pivotal author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two cats, both called Pivot. Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

It’s the race that will change the world. In Supremacy, one of the FT’s six short-listed best business book of the year, Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson tells the story of what she sees as the key battle of our digital age between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind. Altman and Hassabis, Olson argues, are fighting to dominate our new AI world and this war, she suggests, is as much one of personal style as of corporate power. It’s a refreshingly original take on an AI story which tends to be reported with either annoyingly utopian glee or equally childish dystopian fear. And Olson’s narrative on our brave new AI world is a particularly interesting take on the future of Alphabet, DeepMind’s parent corporation, which, she suggests, might, in the not too distant future, have Demis Hassabis as its CEO. “There's a very human story behind the development of AI.” -Parmy OlsonTRANSCRIPT:AK: Hello, everybody. A few weeks ago, about three weeks ago, the Nobel Prizes were awarded. And it was the year for AI and physics. John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey Hinton being known as the godfather of AI. Hinton had worked for Google for a while, and then in chemistry, the prize went to three scientists, including Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google DeepMind. Hassabis is a remarkable fellow on many different levels. One person who, I think, follows Hassabis with a great deal of care and interest is my guest today, Parmy Olson. She's a London-based Bloomberg opinion columnist and the author of a very intriguing new book, Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race That Will Change the World. Parmy is joining us from the Bloomberg office in London. Parmy, would it be fair to call this new book, which has actually been shortlisted for the F.T. Business Book of the Year Award, one of the six books on the shortlist, is it fair to call this book a kind of parallel narrative of Demis Hassabis at DeepMind and of course, Sam Altman at OpenAI? Is that the narrative of your book?PARMY OLSON: That's a big part of it. I wanted to tell the story of the AI boom and some of the possible risks that could come from AI, particularly around the control of AI, by talking about the humans behind it. So, I think there's a very human story behind the development of AI. And so, that's why I structured the first half of the book as a tale about the careers and lives and accomplishments, and failures as well, of Demis Hassabis and Sam Altman, including their rivalry.AK: Yeah, it's interesting and kind of ironic given that AI's about smart machines. Some people fear that it might turn us humans into footnotes, some people have suggested that AI is our last invention. And Hassabis has always been presented as the good face, the nice guy, obviously a genius, but at the same time quite reasonable. Whereas, of course, Altman is a much more controversial figure. It's not quite Elon Musk, but he's certainly closer to being like Musk than Hassabis. Is that a fair generalization, or do you reveal that Hassabis is actually a rather more complicated figure than his public persona suggests?PARMY OLSON: Yes, we could say that. I mean, first of all, I would say that publicly, in terms of how both men position themselves and come across, I think Hassabis comes across as a nice guy and someone who is very scientifically minded and very focused on pushing ahead scientific frontiers and discovery, whereas Sam is much more of a business person. You could see him more as a capitalist, someone who really wants to grow his power and influence. Demis is a little bit more driven by prestige. He has wanted, for years, to win a Nobel Prize. That was very much a—AK: Who doesn't, Parmy? We all want Nobel prizes, except most of us, we're not going to be considered, I think, by the committee.PARMY OLSON: Sure, but which CEOs actually sit down with their engineers and say "this is how we're going to measure success, is going to be winning 2 or 3 Nobel Prizes over the next ten years"? It was an actual concrete metric for success within his company. So, prestige was very important to him. I think in both cases, though, both men—and this was a thing I really wanted to get across with the book—is that both men had these very big humanitarian ideals around building powerful AI. Demis would talk about using it to—when they eventually build AGI, which is artificial general intelligence, or AI that surpasses our brains, and it can solve all sorts of problems that we can't solve, for example, curing cancer or solving climate change. He would often talk about that in interviews, and Sam wanted to do the same thing, but for a slightly different reason. He wanted to bring abundance to humanity and elevate the wealth of everyone and just improve everyone's well-being and lives. But what ended up happening over the years, of course, is on their journeys to trying to build AGI, the economics of that endeavor were such that they had to align themselves with larger tech companies. And those those objectives, as humanitarian goals, ultimately faded into the background. And they both, whether you see one is more Machiavellian than the other, I don't think really either of them had that kind of intent, but both ended up helping to enrich and extend the power and wealth of the world's largest tech companies, the world's largest de facto companies.AK: And those, of course, are Google and OpenAI.PARMY OLSON: And Microsoft.AK: It's interesting that you focus, initially, on the ethics in terms of comparing Hassabis and Altman. The reviews of the book, Parmy, of course, have been very good. As I suggested, you are on the shortlist for the F.T. Book of the Year. But a couple of reviewers, The LA Times, suggested that you didn't address—you yourself as the author—didn't address the ethical questions associated with a AI, and The Wall Street Journal reviewer concurred. Is that, I won't say a fair criticism, but do you think that that was part of your job, or given that you were focusing on two remarkable individuals, Hassabis and Altman, with very clear ethical goals, for better or worse (some people might suggest that some of those ethics aren't for real), that it wasn't your job as an author to get involved in making judgments on yourself? PARMY OLSON: Oh, but I completely disagree with that analysis, because—and I mean, I would say that as the author, of course, pushed back against those reviews—but in the middle of the book—AK: The reviews were good. It was just that one—PARMY OLSON: Oh, sure. Yeah. Okay. But the there's a whole section in the middle of the book which talks about the ethics of AI, and AI research, and why academic research into AI is not looking into the ethics of and measuring the success of AI in terms of well-being for humans, fairness, justice, those sorts of things being measured by capability and power and growth, because the academic field that researches artificial intelligence is completely funded by big tech. And that has been increasingly the case over the last ten years. And a few years ago, there were some researchers at Google who warned about the ethical problems that were inherent in the design of these large language models, like the ones that underpin ChatGPT, and Anthropic's Claude, and all these other ones that are coming to the fore now. And unfortunately, that whole effort became quite controversial. The researchers were fired. It was a quite a messy situation. They did get the word out, though—which I think I think was very important—that people started to pay more attention to the problems, for example, around bias in some of these language models, and the training data that's used to actually create these models. Also, the last 25% of the book is almost like a polemic by me against some of the ethical downfalls of the designs of these systems. So I do go into it quite a bit. I almost worried when I was writing the book that I was pushing a little bit too hard. So it's it's funny people are interpreting it in different ways. Some people have said, well, you you're quite kind to the founders. And I think that's because I, again, don't see them as having malintent. I think they were caught up in a system where the force of gravity around big tech companies is so strong that what they were trying to build just got sucked into that, and their ideals, and their efforts around governance—which we can talk about more—just really fell apart. And they ended up just kind of becoming de facto product arms of these companies. And the ethical considerations really, just like the humanitarian ideals, really just got pushed to the wayside.AK: Parmy, it's interesting you mention that Google researcher who got fired. Her name is Margaret Mitchell. She was actually on the show, and she talked a little bit about being a female in all this. I mean, obviously, Demis Hassabis is male, as is Sam Altman. They both are very well-educated men. They're not from the ruling class, of course. Hassabis is from a working-class family in England, but he graduated with a double first from Oxford.PARMY OLSON: Cambridge.AK: Altman dropped out, in classic fashion, from Stanford after a couple of years. Is the fact that they're men in a business where men tend to dominate—we all know the fate of Marissa Mayer, and perhaps even Sheryl Sandberg—does that tell us that, in some ways, whilst Hassabis and Altman are very different kinds of men, they might have more in common than divides them?PARMY OLSON: Because they're both men?AK: Yeah, well, they're both men. Classic men in tech, highly intelligent, for example, they're adjusted. Hassabis sat down with his DeepMind people and said, well, one of the things we need to do over the next ten years is win three Nobel Prizes. That's a very...not just a male thing to do, but a very...I mean, he's from the UK, but it's a very Silicon Valley kind of thing.PARMY OLSON: I think there's actually more that sets them apart. They're just so different in terms of their approach, even to building companies. You know, Demis, as we were talking about with the Nobel Prizes, was very focused on prestige. And that's kind of how he set up DeepMind as well. It was quite hierarchical. And people who worked at the company who were scientists or researchers who had PhDs were like the rockstars within the company. And they were the ones that got face time with Demis, whereas other people who didn't have that status did not have that kind of access. And you look at somewhere like OpenAI I under Sam Altman, it was a much more flat kind of organization. Doors were open. If you wanted to talk to Sam, you could. He would interview new recruits himself, often for hours at a time. He spent something like a third of his time on recruitment. That was a big part of just how he spent his day to craft together the most effective potential workforce. And OpenAI wasn't made up of research scientists with PhDs. It was engineers and hackers and former startup founders from the Y Combinator accelerator. So it was a very different kind of culture, quite, almost freewheeling. And and I think that reflected the personalities and the approach of both men.AK: Let's remind ourselves, Parmy, because not everyone knows this about the history of DeepMind. It was founded by Hassabis and...who was his co-founder? Suleyman...PARMY OLSON: Yeah, Mustafa Suleyman, and—AK: He's been on the show, he was on the shortlist last year for the F.T. Book of the Year. He had a book out on AI, which I'm sure you're very familiar with.PARMY OLSON: I've read it, yes. It's very good.AK: I think they may have met at Oxford. When did they found DeepMind? Tell us about the story. Everyone knows about OpenAI, particularly given what happened last summer. But I think less people are familiar with the story of DeepMind.PARMY OLSON: So it was the two of them and also Shane Legg, who was a research scientist who was one of the early proponents of artificial general intelligence. This was 2010. When we talk about AGI now, it's kind of become a mainstream discussion point. But in 2010, 14 years ago, it was a fringe theory. And if you were a scientist, you were liable to be laughed out of the room if you talked about it. And so, Shane and Demis knew each other from University College London, where they had both been doing PhDs. And Demis knew Mustafa as a childhood friend, like the two of—AK: Yeah, they're London boys, aren't they?PARMY OLSON: London Boys. And Mustafa, known as Moose, was actually friends with Demis's brother, and he and his brother and Demis, they actually played poker together, like serious professional poker. And at one point they went to Las Vegas and took part in a poker tournament. And they had this whole kind of like game plan, and had their tactics, and that was just something they had done in their 20s. And then, basically, when Demis was at UCL, Mustafa was interested in coming over and possibly studying there. And Demis said, well, why don't you come along, join us in some of these lunch lectures that we do. And then the three of them ended up just kind of coalescing together and having lunch together in this restaurant called Carluccio's, just around the corner from the university. Shane told me, they—AK: I just want to remind everyone, if anyone wants to write a novel about this, that if you go into UCL, the first person you see is a dead person, is Jeremy Bentham and the spirit of Bentham's Utilitarianism and his way of framing the world is perhaps the dominant one today. So, there's a lot of fictional qualities to this narrative, I mean, although you've done enough.PARMY OLSON: Well, someone really can go right in and write the novel if they want. I did not know that. That's a cool little aside there.AK: He's hard to miss, he's right in the middle when you walk into UCL.PARMY OLSON: Oh, boy. Okay. So it sets the tone.AK: He's not alive of course. Physically. His spirit is still there.PARMY OLSON: The three of them felt that they couldn't really talk about AGI on the premises of UCL, or this is what Shane Legg told me anyway. So they met in Carluccio's, where they just had a little bit more space and they were—AK: Is it, kind of, trashy Italian—PARMY OLSON: Ish. You have to go there. Don't knock it till you've tried it.AK: Well it's not exactly the Ritz, is it?PARMY OLSON: No, it's not. But they were...I don't know how much money they had at the time, but they were talking about potentially doing a company. And they you know, Demis and Shane talked about trying to, you know...the wildest, most galactically ambitious idea you can think of. Let's build AGI, the most powerful AI mankind has ever seen. How are they going to do it? They couldn't do it within a university setting, because they wouldn't get the funding they needed. They needed big computers to run the training systems. They needed to build these algorithms. Demis knew that from the beginning. He realized they had to start a company. And Mustafa, having had some experience working with starting companies in the past, he had already co-founded another company, the three of them worked together and started DeepMind, and they were very secretive to begin with. And they also really struggled to raise money in the UK. Andrew if you've spoken to tech people in the UK, you just don't have the same scale in funding and crazy visionary thinking that you get in Silicon Valley.AK: And these were just north London kids. Nobody had heard of Demis Hassabis.PARMY OLSON: With the crazy idea. Yeah, exactly. With a crazy idea.AK: Solomon has a checkered reputation now. When Google acquired DeepMind, he went over there, and then got fired for his behavior. Was Demis the genius and Mustafa the street hustler? What was their relationship like at DeepMind?PARMY OLSON: So, I think both of them were quite charismatic figures within the company. Shane was a little bit more in the background. Demis certainly was the brain. But Mustafa was like, I've heard him described as the Pied Piper. So he would interview people from academia, civil servants, to join DeepMind. And people have told me that within 20 minutes of speaking to Mustafa, they had to join DeepMind, because they absolutely believed that this was a company that was going to change the world, that was going to build Artificial General Intelligence. They were already getting way ahead within just a few years of starting. They were starting to attract some of the top scientists in deep learning.AK: I want to get to the Google acquisition in a second, but did they know Geoffrey Hinton? Geoffrey Hinton, of course, is British and ended up in Canada as a researcher. But did they have meetings with Hinton?PARMY OLSON: I don't know. Yes, I believe they did. Gosh, I'll have to go back and look over my notes, but I think when they actually did the Google acquisition, that Hinton was part of the entourage that came over to London to talk to them.AK: Wow. That's part of the movie. So. So what did they build? What year did they get acquired by Google?PARMY OLSON: 2015. And the reason for that was: they were struggling to keep their engineers from getting poached. So by that time, big tech companies like Facebook and Google and Microsoft were realizing, hey, deep learning is a thing. This suite was kind of a backwater in AI, and suddenly there were some milestones that were achieved and it was like, we need to hire the best—AK: And this was before Hinson's LLMs became huge, right? This was pre LLM?PARMY OLSON: Very much pre large language models.AK: So AI was still potential rather than, sort of, actuality.PARMY OLSON: Yes, but some tests had shown that deep learning was very good for vision recognition. So, recognizing that a cat was a cat. And so, when Facebook, Google, Microsoft wanted to hire the top deep learning scientists, turned out they were all working for DeepMind because Demis and Mustafa had done such a good job of hiring the world's best deep learning scientists. And they were offering two, three times the salary of what DeepMind could pay. And so Demis reached this realization like, we're going to have to take some money from a large tech player, or even be acquired, if we're going to reach AGI. And Facebook initially put 800 million dollars on the table, but DeepMind rejected it, because they wanted to have an ethics board where there would be some independent members of the board who would have legal control of AGI when they eventually built it. And Mark Zuckerberg, spoiler alert, said definitely not to that, walked away, and then Google came along, offered 650 million, and they agreed on that, because Google also agreed to have this ethics board, which, by the way, never actually happened.AK: It's a fascinating story, Parmy, on a lot of levels. Firstly, DeepMind's focus on scientific genius is very Google-like, isn't it? I assume that Demis in particular has quite a lot in common with Larry and Sergey as a personality type. Would that be fair?PARMY OLSON: Very much so. In fact, Demis and Larry had a very special bond, and that remained very important to DeepMind's position within Google for years. Larry allowed Demis and DeepMind to have quite a lot of independence, because Larry just trusted what Demis was doing. His father was a computer scientist involved in artificial intelligence, and Larry was deeply interested in artificial intelligence himself. He believed in mind uploading and very much believed in artificial general intelligence, this kind of potential utopia with with AI. So he was very much on board with what Demis was trying to do. The problem was, of course, as you know, Larry eventually stepped down as CEO of Google. And over time, that link that that Demis had to the top person at Google just became...he lost that.AK: So what's your reading of the Suleyman story, I mean, it was a little bit of a scandal at the time. Now he's at Microsoft. He's the AI supremo there. Why did he get thrown out of Google, in your view?PARMY OLSON: I've reported on that. I did a very long investigative story at The Wall Street Journal, and I think I broke the story on that. So essentially what happened was, there were allegations of bullying within DeepMind. DeepMind hired an independent investigator, a.k.a. a lawyer, to come in and see what was going on. And Mustafa was removed from his management position within DeepMind. He went on leave for a little while and then was welcomed to Google in Mountain View with open arms and took a vice presidential position within the company. But he didn't have—AK: Just to be clear, DeepMind had been acquired by Google.PARMY OLSON: Correct.AK: So, DeepMind was part of the Google, or Apple, or the Alphabet...network, a corporate network. Mustafa Suleyman was, what, the president at DeepMind. He got pushed out of DeepMind because of bullying, and he went to Google. Wasn't that a bit odd?PARMY OLSON: Odd in what way? I mean, it's odd in the sense that Google kind of—AK: Why would they hire a guy who's already accused of bullying?PARMY OLSON: Well yes, if that's what you mean, then 100%. And Google has this reputation and a history of giving a hero's welcome to executives who have not behaved very well. The top leader of Android was accused of harassment. There was a very big payout. You know, it's not the best look for Google. “I think the management team [at Google] have realized that this is the age they're living in, where companies like Perplexity AI are coming up with real, viable competition.” -Parmy OlsonAK: They appreciate the naughty boys more than other big tech companies. I always assume that are a lot of these kind of characters, particularly in Silicon Valley.PARMY OLSON: I mean, here's what I think. I think that's a moral failing of Google. And I think that it's, simply put, it's kind of the bro culture of Silicon Valley, that these people are able to get away with that kind of behavior.AK: Although the bros don't run...I mean, Google is less of a bro company, certainly, than Uber, and perhaps in some ways, Amazon or Facebook. Anyway—PARMY OLSON: Depends on how you define that.AK: What about the relationship between Demis and Mustafa? Did they fall out?PARMY OLSON: It's hard to tell now. I think they're still in touch. There was a really interesting article, I think in The New York Times by Cade Metz, where Demis made some comment—this is literally just in the last few months—and he said something like, "Mustafa is sort of where he is today in large part because of me." I'm completely paraphrasing that. But it was kind of a passive...Well, the reason I bring it up is because I've been to a few DeepMind events and AI events here in London, and that keeps coming up. People keep saying, did you read that comment that he made to The New York Times? So it does feel a little bit tense between the two. And no surprise. Demis is running AI for Google. And Mustafa is a big honcho for AI for Microsoft, and, of course, they're going head to head.AK: Right, and of course, Microsoft's use of OpenAI is incredibly complicated and controversial.PARMY OLSON: That's right.AK: So, before we get to the emergence of OpenAI, for these first few years, did Google essentially leave DeepMind alone and allow them to do all their research, hire these brilliant scientists and just pursue AGI, this big vision of machines that will have a kind of consciousness? Is that fair?PARMY OLSON: Yeah. 100% they left DeepMind to go alone. I don't know if their intention was for DeepMind to create technology that had consciousness, but certainly to create powerful AI.AK: Well, that AGI is, isn't it?PARMY OLSON: There's different definitions. Consciousness had always been part of the definition. Well, I'll just answer your question, then we can go to that. But for a long time, DeepMind operated very independently, and it actually spent years, at one point, trying to break away from Google, because remember, I said that Google agreed to DeepMind having the ethics board. Well, a couple of years after the acquisition, if you recall, Google turned into a conglomerate called Alphabet. And as part of that restructuring, various bets within the alphabet umbrella were able to spin out like Verily, the Life Sciences group, and Waymo, and organizations like that. And the DeepMind founders were told, you can also spin out, and you can become your own autonomous bet. And so the founders spent years talking to lawyers, drafting legal documents, to become a new type of company. They were going to be called a "general interest corporation." They actually took their entire staff on a plane up to Scotland for a retreat, where they announced this to the staff and said, we're going to be a separate organization. And the reason they were doing this was because they wanted to protect their future AGI from the control of a single corporation, a.k.a. Google. Their new organization was going to have a board. It was going to be staffed with very high ranking former political figures. They were reaching out to people like Al Gore and Barack Obama to be on this board. And they proposed all this to Google. And Google said, yes. Google even—and this is what I found through my reporting for the book—Google signed a term sheet where they agreed to fund this new organization, DeepMind, to the tune of 15 billion dollars over ten years as a kind of endowment. And so, the founders ran with this. They waited for it to happen. We're going to protect AGI. The staff loved it. And then during Covid, Google told Demis, the Google executives, actually, we're not going to let you spin out. We're going to draw you in even tighter.AK: Who at Google told him?PARMY OLSON: I actually don't know which particular exec—I assume it was Sundar, but Demis, at one point in April, I think of 2020 or 2021, had a meeting with the entire staff of DeepMind and just told them that the negotiations, which had been going on for years to spin out, were coming to an end and it was not going to happen. And I can tell you that the vast majority of people within DeepMind at the time were very, very disappointed.AK: I can imagine. And then, there's a remarkable symmetry to the narrative here. You can't make this stuff up, Parmy, which you haven't, of course. Meanwhile, OpenAI, similar sorts of issues were brewing. Is that fair? I mean, Altman's involvement with the company, Musk, of course, was one of the co-founders, as so many other people in Silicon Valley. It was founded as a nonprofit with similar idealistic concerns and goals. Is that fair?PARMY OLSON: Absolutely. It was just being approached from a different direction right? So, they started off as a nonprofit. Elon Musk co-founded it with Altman, in part because he was also concerned about Google having sole control of AGI. Musk was one of the early funders of DeepMind, and so he'd made a little bit of money when DeepMind sold to Google. But he knew what kind of research that DeepMind was doing. He felt they were very much on the cutting edge and they were getting close, and he felt we need to start an organization that isn't beholden to anyone financially, that isn't going to be opaque and closed, but it's going to be transparent. That's going to be cooperative and work with organizations, because when AGI comes, when we eventually build it, we can't have one single company controlling it, because then that would not benefit humanity. That would only benefit that one company.“I don't see them as having malintent. I think they were caught up in a system where the force of gravity around big tech companies is so strong that what they were trying to build just got sucked into that, and their ideals, and their efforts around governance…really fell apart.” -Parmy OlsonAK: And then tell me if I'm wrong. But there's so many ironies here. So, large language model technology was pioneered by Hinton, of course, who won who won the physics prize this year, and a team in Toronto. While they were at Google, Hinton somehow convinced Google to buy his researchers. But then Google didn't develop the large language model technology. And that got developed almost as a hunch by OpenAI. Is that a fair summary of this bizarre narrative?PARMY OLSON: Very much. And I would say actually Hinton didn't have as big a role in language models. He was more deep learning. It was another team of scientists within Google who worked on language models. In particular, they came up with this architecture called "the Transformer." So that's the T in chat GPT. And there was a group of them who wrote this paper, and it became—AK: That was in Toronto, wasn't it?PARMY OLSON: This was actually in Google's headquarters. They were all working in Google's headquarters in Mountain View. And they wrote this paper, and they released it. And OpenAI took that finding and built their own build on top of the Transformer and built their own versions of language models that eventually became ChatGPT. That's a that's a big oversimplification of a lot of work over several years. But that's essentially what happened. And part of the reason—AK: It's an astonishing irony, Parmy, that the idea of the Transformer was developed by Google scientists, Google researchers, but it was the people at OpenAI who were willing to invest in the idea. They had a hunch it could work, whereas Google essentially passed on it. It's almost like a VC who missed the investment in Google or Facebook or Amazon or something.PARMY OLSON: 100%. And I've spoken to people who were at OpenAI when they were building this, and they've told me when they were building the early versions of ChatGPT, they were so worried, like really, truly scared that Google was just about to release the exact same thing, because they were thinking, well, Google's—because the culture within the field of AI is just to release new innovations, like when you come up with a new architecture like the Transformer, you put it out into the world. And that's why other people, like the folks at OpenAI, could play with it. One person told me it was like, we're playing with Google's toys, and they're not doing anything. So they were shocked when they were releasing their own—AK: They were playing with Google's toys.PARMY OLSON: Yeah, they were shocked when they could put out their own versions and they were just waiting for Google to come out with the same thing. And it never did. And actually, there were language models being developed within Google, including by the guy who ended up starting character AI, which is a which was a very big AI chop up company. And they just wouldn't release it. And a big part of it is the innovator's dilemma, right? So Google knew, I think some part of them knew, if they put a big powerful chat bot out onto the internet, well, people might just use that instead of Google search. So why would they release something like that? And there was also a lot of concern about chat bots being online and saying toxic, crazy, unpredictable things, which could really hurt the company's reputation. So that was a big reason also why they didn't release it.AK: So meanwhile, while all this is going on, OpenAI does ChatGPT, which changes the world. What was the response within Google, and particularly for Demis? He must have been, in a way, furious that OpenAI had jumped on this technology, which, in some ways, the Google people had been pioneering. How did the DeepMind people allow Google to ignore the Transformer and the work that Hinton's people were doing? Or is that just a separate division, sort of parallel worlds?PARMY OLSON: Well, I think at DeepMind there wasn't as much interest in language models, and that was actually a little bit of a source of tension between Mustafa and Demis. Mustafa was very interested in the potential of large language models. This was even a couple of years before ChatGPT came out, but Demis was very interested in games and training AI through chess, or Starcraft, or Go, which is of course—AK: Which was their big breakthrough, on Go, wasn't it?PARMY OLSON: It was their very big breakthrough, very big PR moment for them as well. It was kind of like their version of IBM Watson beating Garry Kasparov and the chess champions. Now, they were beating someone who was able to, you know, master an even more complex game, which was Go. And that got them a lot of really positive press attention a few years ago. But it wasn't quite the same kind of public breakthrough. Again, this was something that appealed more to higher level scientists, whereas ChatGPT, remember we were talking about kind of the differences in approach, Sam Altman was more product-oriented. Demis is more about sort of prestige and science was with ChatGPT. This was something the entire public could play with. It was just a web page anybody could access. But that approach to AI was not something that Demis was as interested in. He wanted to try and build AGI by approaching in lots of different ways, whereas OpenAI and Sam, they saw the potential with language models as their one route. They wanted to just pick that one thing and just stick obsessively with it. And that's what they got.AK: Yeah, very focused, which is the startup way. Meanwhile, Hassabis has come around to recognizing this, he gave an interview last month to Axios suggesting that he now sees a watershed moment for AI. And Google has reorganized itself, its Gemini app team, Gemini being, in a sense, I guess their version of ChatGPT, now is managed by the DeepMind Group. So is Hassabis become, through perhaps some clever politics, has he become Mr. AI at Google?PARMY OLSON: He absolutely is. In fact, there's every possibility he could become the next CEO of Google. That is what I've heard from former executives of DeepMind and Google.AK: Wow. Who are his rivals at Google? Who are the other people who you think could take over from the current CEO?PARMY OLSON: I mean, maybe someone like Ruth Porat, who is sort of in the CFO role.AK: The former CFO, who now has a stupid role there.PARMY OLSON: I don't know who else could, really—AK: I mean, there's a German, I can't remember his last name, called Philip, who runs that business side, who I think is quite powerful.PARMY OLSON: Yeah, well, Jeff Dean was the person who could have ended up doing what Demis is doing now. But Demis sort of took that role instead. And we could talk about why that is. But I think ultimately, he is the most one of the most powerful people in Google right now. He's running their AI efforts in Silicon Valley and in London. So he absolutely is Mr. AI Guy. I think the big question is whether he would want to uproot his family and move to Silicon Valley if he ever wanted to take that even further. And, you know, take that top position, which might be something, you know, shareholders, activist investors might want to push for because—AK: What kind of lifestyle does have? Altman has a notoriously weird Silicon Valley, one, doesn't seem to move anywhere, doesn't seem to care about money. Does Hassabis enjoy the cash that he's got? I mean, he's a very rich man.PARMY OLSON: I think they all enjoy the cash. Have you seen the video of Sam Altman in his sports car, driving around San Francisco?AK: What kind of life? He's in London. Where does Hassabis live?PARMY OLSON: I don't know specifically where he lives. I presume it's somewhere near north London. But he does live in London with his family.AK: He's probably got the whole of the Caledonian Road, where I used to live. The real narrative of Andrew O'Hagan was on the show, His Caledonian Road. I've got a few more questions, this is such interesting stuff from Parmy. You mentioned the innovator's dilemma at Google, and that this new AI and these large language models, the Transformer would eat up their search dominance. Is there acknowledgment now, do you think, within Google that that innovator's dilemma is something they have to address and that they have to somehow embrace AI, and even AGI, even if it in some ways undermines the traditional notions of search?PARMY OLSON: Yeah, I think in a way they're kind of standing at an abyss and they have to just jump in. It's all very much an unpredictable. Google has always been a company that does not do a lot of radical change, which feels weird to say because you think, "Google. Tech company, cutting edge, AI. Surely, they..." But actually, just look at the Google home page. It has barely changed in a decade. There's really not a lot of big changes that Google ever makes to its core products, because it derives 80% of all its revenue from advertising. And so, messing around with that formula is a potential recipe for a disaster. But I think you're right. I think the management team have realized that this is the age they're living in, where companies like Perplexity AI are coming up with real, viable competition. This is a chat bot that a lot of people are using instead of Google search because it's just giving you a singular answer, and a very comprehensive answer. Whereas you look something up on Google, whether it's something related to a transaction or advice, and, I don't know how often you use Google, but you know, there's a ton of ads.AK: But of course, OpenAI also came out last week with its own version of search. And again, history is, in so many ways, repeating itself. Now, OpenAI is what Google once was to Microsoft. Meanwhile, Suleyman is at Microsoft. So many ironies. I know you got to run, finally Parmy—and we'll have to get you back on the show because it's so much more to talk about here—you probably heard there was an election in the US this week.PARMY OLSON: Hah. Oh, really?AK: A certain Donald Trump now is running the show. His supposed right hand man and left hand man is a certain Elon Musk who put his fortune on the line. He was one of the co-founders of OpenAI. Lots of questions now about what Trump will do with AI. One piece by Scott Rosenberg in Axios suggests that young AI just got a ticket to run wild. Given your narrative in supremacy, is this moment historically now the opportunity for both Hassabis and Sam Altman to really profoundly change the world? They won't have to deal with Lena Khan in DC or any other kind of regulation?PARMY OLSON: I actually have kind of a contrarian view to the one you just described from Axios, and a few other people have said, "Oh, Trump's in power, light touch regulation. Elon Musk isn't whispering in his ear. He's got an AI company. Obviously, things are going to be fast and loose for AI companies." I actually am not entirely sure that's how it's going to play out. And again, it's just because of all that I've read and research on Elon Musk. He is a guy who can put ideology before his own business interests, and he has done that before. And this guy truly is worried about AI as an existential risk. This has been years in the making for him. He broke up his friendship with Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, over an argument about the risks of AI destroying human civilization. He's publicly stated that. And it is absolutely a reason why he co-founded OpenAI because he was worried about Google controlling AGI. So I think this means that if Trump comes into power—Trump didn't even talk about AI on the campaign trail. He mentioned it a couple of times. But didn't really talk about it.AK: He's more into crypto, I think.PARMY OLSON: I think he just doesn't really care that much about AI. I don't think it really interests him, which leaves the door open for someone else to steer. And I think that person could well be Elon, because he cares about it so much. I don't think it would be JD Vance, because JD is more on the whole "big tech little tech" thing. I think Musk is really the AI guy in the administration, and I think he would push for safety measures. And the current executive order that Biden put in place on AI, Trump has said he'll get rid of it. Sure, he might do that, but he'll put something very similar in its place that will still push companies to check their AI models for safety. But they will also be told, you don't have to have filters in place on toxic content. So, because Trump and both Musk are so anti-censorship, anti-woke censorship. So I think we're going to have chat bots in the next couple of years that say a lot of wild things.AK: Yeah, well, you've said some very sensible things, Parmy. Your book, Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT, and the Race that will Change the World is on the shortlist of the F.T. Books of the year. That will be announced, I think, in London on December 9th. If you win, are you going to share the proceeds with Hassabis and Altman?PARMY OLSON: Or maybe I should put it into the race to build AGI because that's for the sake of humanity, right? That would be the charitable thing to do.AK: Right, well, Parmy, Olson, really honored to have you on the show. Fascinating subject. So much more to talk about. We'll get you back on the show in the not-too-distant future. Thank you so much.PARMY OLSON: Thank you.Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology regulation, artificial intelligence, and social media. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is the author of We Are Anonymous and a recipient of the Palo Alto Networks Cyber Security Cannon Award. Olson has been writing about artificial intelligence systems and the money behind them for seven years. Her reporting on Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp and the subsequent fallout resulted in two Forbes cover stories and two honourable mentions in the SABEW business journalism awards. At the Wall Street Journal she investigated companies that exaggerated their AI capabilities and was the first to report on a secret effort at Google’s top AI lab to spin out from the company in order to control the artificial super intelligence it created.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Might November 5 mark a new dawn for both Silicon Valley and America? Palo Alto based serial entrepreneur Keith Teare is ambivalent. In his That Was The Week tech newsletter for this week, Keith confesses that while he voted for Harris, he recognizes that the Trump victory probably benefits him economically. It’s almost as if Keith is embarrassed to admit this - which may be true more broadly about the rest of us in Silicon Valley. As Keith and I discuss this week, November 5 brings much of what has been simmering over the last decade to a boil - particularly the role of AI in reshaping both the Valley and American society. It’s certainly going to an interesting four years. This episode also comes with some afterthoughts from Rob Hodgkinson, Keith’s co-founder at SignalRank, who wrote a provocatively celebratory piece this week about American exceptionalism. Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.Rob Hodgkinson is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of SignalRank. He previously worked at Pixel United as an Advisor. Rob Hodgkinson attended the University of Cambridge.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

The election is over and, is spite of Trump’s clear victory, America remains as divided as ever. So how to put the country together again? Juliana Tafur, the director of the Bridging Differences Program at UC Berkeley, has been giving this existential question much thought. What all Americans need, Tafur tells me, is the compassion, empathy and humility to understand the other side. But, as I asked her, isn’t that just shorthand for a progressive bridge building project in which the left defines the language of a reunited America?Juliana Tafur, the director of the Bridging Differences Program at UC Berkeley Her work focuses on strengthening social connections across lines of race, religion, culture, politics, and more, to foster a culture of understanding and belonging in the United States and beyond. Through partnerships, multimedia content, speaking engagements, and workshops, Juliana is committed to ensuring that bridge-building skills and resources reach people and inspire meaningful change. With experience as a social entrepreneur, workshop creator, Emmy-nominated senior producer, and award-winning documentary filmmaker, she has been working to foster human connection across complex societal divides for more than a decade. A TEDx speaker, she has led and facilitated speaking engagements and training sessions on bridging differences at more than 30 higher education institutions and organizations. Juliana is also a 2021–2022 Obama Foundation Scholar at Columbia University—a mid-career fellowship that recognized and deepened her work in the bridge-building field, expanding her research on intergroup relations, political polarization, and conflict transformation. She is an honors graduate of Northwestern University, where she earned dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Journalism and History.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.TRANSCRIPTKEEN: Hello, everybody. The easy bit's over! The election's finished, now the real challenge is bringing America back together. We always hear these terms from politicians and activists, but in practice, of course, it's a very challenging thing to do. My guest today on the show, Juliana Tafur, though, is somebody who's given a great deal of thought to bringing America back together, bridging differences. She is the inaugural director of the Bridging Differences Program at UC Berkeley. She's also very much involved in the Denver Foundation. She's based in Boulder, Colorado, and she's joining us today. Juliana, is that fair? Was the election the easy bit? Now, the challenge is putting Humpty Dumpty back together again?TAFUR: 100%. I love the Humpty Dumpty. Yes, we are broken. How do we come back together and mend those pieces while still acknowledging the brokenness, right? Yeah. With that analogy, there's a beautiful Japanese technique that aims to cover the fractures, but to cover the fractures with a strand of gold so that we're not pretending like the fractures aren't there, but we are making something better as a result of the recognition of those fractures.KEEN: Juliana, we've done a lot of shows about this sort of thing. In fact, I've worked with the Braver Angels group. I'm sure you're familiar with them. I have been to a couple of their conferences. There are more and more of these groups trying to bring Americans back together. Might one suggest that there is now a broader movement in America to bring Americans of different--particularly different political persuasions back together? You're doing it, braver angels are doing it. Many of the thousands of activists and hundreds of groups.TAFUR: Yeah. There is so many of us across the country that work tirelessly day in and day out, around elections and before and after elections to make sure we come together. And yes, Braver Angels is just one of them. I could certainly give you a list that you could attach to the show notes, because a lot of us are doing this work and it's good for people to know that we're out there and that this is possible. But sometimes it takes seeing it in action and understanding how to do it to really trust that you can do it, too.KEEN: Yeah, we've had lots of people on the show. I know you're familiar with the work of Eboo Patel. You've worked with him his book couple of years ago. We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy is another example of this kind of work. Tell me what you do at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. What are you doing that's different or unusual or unique in terms of bringing Americans back together?TAFUR: Yeah, well, at the Greater Good Science Center, we study the psychology, sociology and neuroscience of well-being, or what we'd like to call the science of a meaningful life. And we break the science to the practice. So we take the science of how to have a meaningful life or how to bridge differences, and we translate it in a way that is accessible to people to apply in their own lives or to practitioners to help others apply the science. And in the bridging differences programs specifically, we do this through a series of videos, multimedia pieces that we publish in our magazine, Greater Good. We have a famous podcast called The Science of Happiness. We began in earnest in 2018, I would say, gathering what the science said about how to bring people together across differences. And when we talk about the science, we talk about skills, science-based skills, from compassionate listening to finding shared identities, etc., that have been tested in labs, and we translate them in a way that people understand how some of these skills applied, how they worked in labs, and how they can then work also in kind of real-life scenarios and situations. So we have a bridging differences playbook that has 14 science-based skills for bridging differences. We have an edX course that's free and available for everyone to take that also disseminates some of the science-based skills.KEEN: Tell me a little bit more about yourself. You've been involved in this space for a while. You're also a filmmaker, so you're very much committed on lots of fronts to this. How did you find yourself? Is this a reflection of your own upbringing, your own experience in the United States?TAFUR: Absolutely, yes. What you had up first was the page from the Obama Scholars Program. So a few years ago, 21, 22, I was an Obama scholar at Columbia University--KEEN: And you were the founder, at least at that point, of something called Story Powerhouse. I'm guessing you're still the founder, although you've moved on in a sense.TAFUR: Correct. Yeah. And Story Powerhouse was at the company Listen Courageously, which was a workshop series that I took around to universities and organizations and corporations talking about the power of empathic listening. And I got to that through film that I produced and directed that brought Americans together on opposite ends of the spectrum across the easy topics of abortion, guns and immigration. And the inspiration for this film came after the 2016 election. I felt a big need back then to try to bridge the divide that I was seeing and feeling, very explicitly, for the very first time in our country. And as a Colombian-American, I was beginning to talk to folks in my circles, and I was feeling this this real sense of othering that I had never, ever experienced and wondering and questioning what was my place and that of so many others like me in our country. And that led to to Listen, to this film that brought three sets of participants across these really tough topics together to explore if they could see each other as people and connect on a human level despite their differences. And I had no idea what the outcome would be. I had documented their conversations across a period of time. And I was truly moved by what I saw. I saw that those who were able to connect at a deep, human level were those who were able to listen. So then, that led me to study and explore and understand the power of listening and understood that it was a field. It's an arts, but it's also a science and connected with practitioners, but also researchers in the field of listening. And one thing led to the other, right? As a practitioner and filmmaker in the field of bridging differences, I found myself going back to intergroup relations and conflict transformation and other subjects too, to really understand why. Why was it that my film participants had come together, and how could I then equip others to continue doing the same? Less from a "we know this is possible" and more from a kind of research-grounded way.KEEN: Juliana, some people might be listening to this and...whilst on the one hand being, in a way, impressed they might be scratching their head, maybe listening to you, you use the E-word all the time empathetic, which is quite a kind of ideological character these days. You talk about othering, you're funded by, or you were funded by, the Obama Foundation. Now you head up a greater good institute at UC Berkeley, People's Republic of Berkeley, which is a place I know all too well, I used to live there for many years. Some people might be listening to this and thinking if you scratch the surface of what Juliana's saying, is she suggesting that this is the progressive version of the greater good? And as long as you're in our camp and you use her words like "empathy" and "othering" and love the Obamas and spend time at UC Berkeley, it's fine. But when you start perhaps putting red caps on and talking about America becoming great again or not being particularly sympathetic to immigrants, then you're outside your world. How would you respond to that? Is that a fair criticism or am I wrong, or would one be wrong?TAFUR: Well, obviously, people's criticisms are their criticisms, and that's absolutely okay. And there is no right or wrong. I just want to say--KEEN: Well, there is right and wrong, Juliana, isn't there? There's some things are certainly more right than wrong and some things are more wrong and right.TAFUR: Yes, but we don't judge that. I think, you know, people are right to believe what they believe, vote for who they vote, and be who they are. And we start bridging from the place of: I see you, and I hear you, and I might not understand you, but that's okay. I still don't dehumanize you. And that's the spirit of bridging differences. And yes, I don't hide where I stand. Politically, I am more progressive. And I have been an Obama scholar. And I work at Berkeley. So all of that is who I am. And from that place, I bridge. I bridge from the place of this is who I am, where I stand. I still love you and I still want to get to know you. And I still want to see you. And I just want to say, given that I'm Colombian American and I lived in Miami for the last ten years, I just recently moved to Boulder, Colorado, to lead a statewide initiative here in the state of Colorado called Belonging Colorado to make Colorado a place where everyone feels like they belong. Thank you for popping it up.KEEN: Called Belonging Colorado.TAFUR: Yeah, in Florida, I mean, I've had friends and neighbors who don't think like I do, who don't see the world like I do. And I've appreciated that. And I have not excluded them from our circles, from trying deeply to learn and understand what is it that they believe, what they believe. So I intentionally have made way to understand our country and and to try to tap into, honestly, what at the end of the day, are people's fears of what we need. And I approach them from that place. When you approach others from a place of "we are all walking with our fears in our foreheads," we begin to connect with your fear, my fear. But it's all fear and it's okay.KEEN: You used the term "humanizing differences," Juliana. Some people, again, might be listening and thinking to themselves, well, the guy who just won the election, more Americans voted for him than the other candidate. It's quite a decisive election. He doesn't seem to be in the business of "humanizing differences." In fact, many of the people he doesn't like, he seems, some people believe, I tend to be sympathetic there, he's dehumanizing them. So. So what do we do in an America, where the next president is, or appears to be, very often in the business of dehumanization?TAFUR: Hopefully we take back the narrative.KEEN: What does that mean, "take back the narrative"? He's been elected. It's his narrative.TAFUR: It is his narrative. But as people I don't believe that everyone who voted for him is voting for the dehumanization. I am holding firm to the belief that people are good, and that people have voted for other things and not for that. And I want people who voted for him to still see that we need to humanize each other despite our differences. And I believe that they do. I do not believe people are buying into that narrative and rhetoric. At least not everyone. Some may. But I think when we take back the narrative, we take back the narrative of: yes, right now there's a winning camp and a losing camp, and that's okay. And I would hope that those in the winning camp also want to see across differences and are reaching out to humanize those who are not in the winning camp. And, you know, that is now that is four years. But our country perseveres and continues and we are interdependent and need each other. Absolutely need each other. More than this rhetoric, more than the divisive politics. Politics is just one aspect of who we are.KEEN: There are others. I mean, you acknowledge that you're a progressive. There are other progressives who are preparing to resist the new--what they see as a regime, some people even think that the new president is a fascist. What would you say to resistors, people who don't believe that it's possible to, as you would put it, reshape the narrative or seize the narrative, that that the next president is in the business of dehumanizing many people, particularly people out of America and many people in America. And it's just pointless and that they're going to fight him, they're going to fight him in the courts, and maybe even on the streets.TAFUR: I don't think that's the way. I don't stand for that. And I'm also trying to bring those people along. I think the only way out of hate, sincerely, and I know it sounds cliche, but it's through love. I don't believe in resistance in that way. I am for peace and I will continue to promote peace. And I know that that is hard for people in the far left to also swallow. And I know it takes time and I know not everyone is there right now, especially right now. And not everyone will be there ever. And that's okay, too. We understand that bridging is not the right thing for every person in every situation. We know that a lot of people who feel that their identity is in danger or that they're being disrespected might not be called to bridge differences. And that is also okay. I don't think this is work that you do by demand. And and we know that it's not without risks. We know that it involves exposing vulnerability. And we also know that sometimes bridging work takes small shifts over time. What we like to call small to large, or big, bridges. Sometimes you don't start with the biggest bridge possible bridging across the biggest divide. So we know that it's work that requires the right mindsets and skills and attitudes, and that takes time.KEEN: You've used the word bridge a lot, bridging as a noun, as an adjective. I seem to remember Bill Clinton was very much in the, at least the etymological bridge building business. He would always talk about it. Are examples of American politicians in the past who have successfully built bridges? I mean, Clinton wanted to, of course, he had his own controversial personal narrative that didn't help. But when you look back into the American past, who are the bridging presidents? FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Lincoln?TAFUR: Yeah, those, and I would say, you know, yes, I may I'm totally biased because I am funded, have been funded, by the Obama Foundation. But sincerely, President Obama has taken bridging and pluralism, as he called it, as the work that he is doing, that he is centering on after his presidency, and he runs these democracy summits that happen once a year. And and it is a message that he deeply believes in and is trying to share with others.KEEN: Yeah, I mean, doesn't everyone bridge on their own terms? Obama campaigned aggressively for Harris. And in fact, a lot of people believe that Trump never would have got involved in politics had Obama not given him such a violent roasting at one of the White House correspondence evenings a few years ago. So isn't Obama an example of someone who bridges when they feel like it and when they don't, they accuse other people of not bridging?TAFUR: Yeah, I mean, honestly, I prefer not to get into politics. I do bridging differences work because I am equipping folks with the skills to be able to do this work. And I believe in humans. So so this is really not about politics for me. It never was. It never will be. I happen to be an Obama scholar, but I'd really rather not comment on what politicians are or not doing.KEEN: And I take your point, Juliana. But politics and the founders knew this, the politics in and out of America, is a dirty business. We pursue our own interests. Madison called them the pursuit of faction. That's why we have divisions, that's why we have branches of government which are designed to negate each other. Just as Madison so famously said, so profoundly said, "If men were angels (and he did say, man, he didn't say women as well, of course), if men were angels, there'd be no need for government." And I wonder whether...and again, I don't want a group for your movements or your thinking into one, but I wonder whether this kind of ambivalence, hostility, maybe even contempt for politics is problematic. When I think of someone like Michelle Obama, I have to admit I'm very, very disappointed that she didn't choose to enter into politics. She seems to be political when she feels like it. But not to participate in politics, she was probably the only person in America could have beaten Trump. Again, I don't want to turn this into a conversation about either Obama's. But my question to you is about acknowledging the dirtiness of politics, which reflects the dirtiness of the human condition, the fact that we all are, for better or worse, self-interested. Do you accept that Madisonian version of human nature?TAFUR: I honestly think there is a better future for us when we tap into what we can be and not what we are. And I know it's hard for many to do right now. And it's hard when what we see as reality is what politicians do. And I do see some examples of politics where people are coming together that I'd like to highlight, including Governor Spencer Cox. And he's led a national campaign called Disagree Better. And he's come on ads with Governor Jared Polis from--KEEN: Colorado, yeah?TAFUR: Colorado. And Governor Cox is out of Utah, Republican. Jared Polis is a Democrat from Colorado. And I think we need more of that. We need more examples of that, politicians coming together and showing how they are coming together so that we believe that it's also possible. So I'd like to  hang on to those examples in the political realm. But again, I'm in the business of what we individuals can do at the interpersonal level to begin to cultivate the right skills and mindsets, to be able to come together and at the inter group level with others.KEEN: There's been a lot of conversation, debate after this election, Juliana, like many elections, about why and how people should vote. Should they vote out of self-interest or for the the greater good? Lots of comments about many of the people vote voting for Trump seem to be voting against their own interests, particularly the new American working class. Whereas the coastal elites in voting for Harris seem also in an odd way to be voting against their own--certainly economic--interests by voting for her, in your view, to get to this bridge and this ability to be empathetic and converse with others, do we need to overcome our own self-interest, particularly our own economic self-interest?TAFUR: I don't think you need to overcome your own economic self-interests to bridge. Not at all. Because when we bridge differences, we are not asking honestly people to leave aside any of what they value. It centers on this recognition of, yes, common humanity, which I know is very abstract to a lot of people. But it is not about persuasion and it does not require you compromising your beliefs or values. It just requires the ability for you to recognize that anyone, anyone can teach you something, which is a term called intellectual humility. So, no, not to bridge. I mean, you may be putting your self-interest aside, or some of your self-interests, aside when you're voting for certain candidates. But to bridge, we are just coming together to see each other and to be with each other.KEEN: You talk about intellectual humility. That word again, humility is another fashionable word that goes with empathy. Is there, do you think, a religious context to this? Do you think some of these movements, maybe yours, maybe even yourself, it grew out of a religious tradition. A Christian tradition? Humility, empathy, love, understanding. These are words that are traditionally used in religion.TAFUR: Yes, they are. I will say that we have not necessarily emphasized or called attention to these character virtues and moral virtues in our work. We do talk about them a lot and we will probably emphasize them a bit more moving forward, given interest that we have in doing so, because we do think that when you talk about civil, moral character virtues like respect and curiosity and courage, you are meeting different types of people at different places. And at the end of the day, this is about becoming better people.KEEN: Say that again: this is about becoming better people. So, it's a moral movement. You're suggesting people need to pull their their moral socks up if we're going to put Humpty Dumpty, to extend this rather childish metaphor, if we're if we're to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, we need to pull our moral socks up. Is that fair?TAFUR: Yeah. I mean, we believe that cultivating these virtues is not just about overcoming current societal divides, but about nurturing a deep commitment to, for a lack of a better word, the greater good. This is what this is about.KEEN: I don't know how many jobs you have, Juliana. I'm lucky enough that I don't have multiple jobs, but some people, again, might be watching this and saying this is all very well. Maybe in some biblical fantasy land, we can all put ourselves out and be better people. But most people are really busy. Many, particularly, working class people who perhaps voted for Trumo, they're working 2 or 3 jobs. They're busy. They struggle to pay their rent, feed their families. Does this require to be part of your bridging movement? Does it require, shall we say, moral...concentration? Or could you do it...occasionally?TAFUR: Absolutely. You can do it occasionally. You can do it in the weekend. You can do it with neighbors. You could do it at a school board meeting. You could do it in neighborhood meetings. You could do it wherever you are. You could do it at work. You could do it with colleagues. You could do it with your kids. It does not require more than anything that you are already doing. It's just about how you approach those who are in your circles and in your life.KEEN: What's the most difficult thing? You do this a lot. You run bridging programs. You run a school, essentially, designed to help people bridge. What does the movement most struggle with? When you see people who are open to the idea and say, you're right, I need to be able to talk responsibly with humility and empathy to people who I don't agree with on the other political side, culturally, racially, and all the rest of it. What do people most struggle with, what don't they expect? What would you warn people about who are trying to get into a movement like this?TAFUR: We are very clear that if the other person is dehumanizing you, and if you feel at risk or threatened by this dehumanization, that you should probably be careful in engaging. So that's where we draw the line.KEEN: Yeah, but then you're shifting the responsibility to somebody else. I mean, obviously, if they're dehumanizing you, you wouldn't want to talk to them. But what's hard about changing oneself, that's possible, that doesn't involve the other?TAFUR: I think this just requires the commitment to want to do it and then the right skills. To engage with it in a way that you see works, that feels good, and that invites you to continue trying it out. And all it takes is the willingness to say, "I'm exhausted by this. This is affecting me personally." Because we do know that our divides are consuming us. They're affecting our health, our well-being. We also know our divides are affecting our families and our closest circles. We know that our divides affect our children in schools. So there are many, many reasons for wanting to bridge, for saying, "this is enough. I am exhausted." And if you are, you are not alone. Three. Out of four Americans are. 75% of Americans in the most conservative estimates say they are exhausted by the division.KEEN: Exhausted by just this endless controversy of people not being able to talk to one another?TAFUR: Yeah. Research tells us that three out of four Americans see political hostility and divisiveness as a serious problem and want to live in a less polarized country. So we are just trying to meet that exhausted majority where they are. Because we do know that people value diverse perspectives. Again, research points to this, and a desire to shift the political discourse. So we're telling them: we hear you. We see you. Yes, this division hurts us. Let's do something about it. Do you need some skills? We got you.KEEN: Juliana, I asked you about other examples from American history. What about models from the rest of the world in these kinds of conversations? You often hear about the the reconciliation, the truth and reconciliation movement and Mandela, South Africa. Are there models overseas, which Americans can learn from? Americans often aren't very good at learning from other countries, particularly in Africa. But is the South African model a good one, do you think?TAFUR: Yes. I mean, clearly, they were able to come together across incredible fracture and division, and they were able to persevere and collaborate across differences. There is also the model in Ireland that we can point to. There is division that is hurting countries across the world right now. And I know ,I come from a country that is deeply divided, Colombia. And Colombians have also succeeded in bridging the great divide. But there's been strides, through peace treaties and others, to come together despite differences. So we can certainly learn from other countries that have been deeply divided and in deep conflict and have come together. We are not in a place in the US where our conflict has turned violent, thankfully, at least not openly. We are seeing signs of violence, but we are not in the midst of a war (although it seems like a moral war in many regards.) And and I do want to point to the hope that countries who have been in deeper fractures about how this is possible and and hopefully also show us that we must do something before the fracture goes wider and deeper. And where reconciliation seems harder to do.KEEN: Juliana, you mentioned Ireland. One of the things that comes to mind in the Irish model is the role of citizen assemblies in bringing people together to talk about very difficult issues. You brought up abortion, guns and immigration, in the U.S., the three most divisive issues, probably abortion, was and maybe still remains the most divisive in Roman Catholic Ireland. But the Citizens' Assembly movement in Ireland addressed the issue of abortion, and that was the way for the Irish parliament to actually develop some some quite interesting new legislation on abortion. Are you sympathetic to rethinking institutions, political institutions, political organizations like the Citizens' Assembly? Is this something that you've thought about, researched, is it part of a greater good future?TAFUR: Yeah, I mean, I do think we need to re-imagine. I do think we need to take good examples, including citizens' assemblies and in understand what's going to work for all of us. We know what we're doing now is not working for all of us. What does it take? How can we bring folks together to the conversation in a way that is bringing us all together? So, I do think bringing a diverse group of citizens to engage in structured dialogue, learn from experts, and also deliberate over complex topics could be the way. Maybe that's what we need. Maybe we do need more public participation in the democratic process in a way that ultimately ends up shaping legislation. And it does align with our bridging differences program, right? And and what we promote in in bringing people in and fostering inclusivity. So how can we bring different backgrounds together in structured discussions so that we can move beyond these partisan divides? Because we do understand that some of these issues do provoke, I would say, a really strong emotional response and and also carry significant social implications for folks.KEEN: Juliana Tafur, you've you've done very well with, my rather obnoxious question. So let's end with an opportunity for you to talk about, quite literally, where we go from here. You have some articles on your website, on the Bridging Differences website about where do we go from here, after the election. Perhaps you might touch on 3 or 4 bullets--concrete things of where we go from here in in early November 2024 that can bridge America, that can bring us back together. What would you suggest that's doable, viable, can be achieved in the next few months?TAFUR: It's great that you point to that article. I was obviously part of a group of us at the Greater Good Science Center that was very keen on publishing this the day after the election to--KEEN: And now you're on--I couldn't resist this one, Juliana, now you're on KEEN ON. I'm sorry for that rather silly joke, but anyway. Go on.TAFUR: Yep, yep, yep. Well, let me just, like, run through a bit of what some of the experts and researchers who we invited to be a part of this article with what they said.KEEN: And that included Eboo Patel, who, as I said, has been on the show. So you put together a very interesting group of people to write this thing.TAFUR: Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, so Eboo is saying keep doing what matters to you and the world, and he's trying to get us away from this catastrophe mindset, and he wants to remind us that what you are doing is sacred and it makes a difference. And even if the world is going to end, he says, the wisdom of the sages says to keep doing your meaningful work, because that work is part of the saving grace of humanity. So that was beautiful. Scott Shigeoka, who's a bridging differences fellow at the Greater Good Science Center, is inviting us to practice curiosity as an act of love. And for Scott, he says that we must practice curiosity if we want to transform our fear and hate. And he's reminding us that curiosity is a trait that we are all born with, and it's the desire to understand others more deeply. Again, this does not mean agreeing with views that clash with your own, but challenging the assumptions that you have about people who hold those views. So a lot about interrupting prejudice. Jeremy Smith, who's our editor at The Greater Good, he's inviting us to work to promote your values in community. I'll go high level on some of these. Get to know other humans, right? Get out of our silos as much as we can and connecting across our differences. Dr. Linda Traub, who is a close collaborator of ours, is inviting us to be good neighbors, even, and especially, to those who are different. So those are just a few. Choose nuance, not outrage. So I do invite folks to go through this article and and hopefully a few of the golden nuggets of inspiration do stay with you, do motivate you, to do something. It's been hard for many of us to understand what is it that we can do right now if bridging even is the calling of the moment when so many are struggling to understand what this means about our country, what this means about the next four years. But I understand others are not and are celebrating. Regardless of where you are, I think in a few weeks when you feel up for it, I think the calling of our times is to come together and to understand, again, our interdependence. We must break this cycle of othering us versus them. That does that does not exist. Those are constructs that that we have created. But we are better and we are more. And we are one. And sorry if this sounds cliche to some, but that's what I got for you.KEEN: That's interesting. And finally, Juliana, you mentioned one of your colleagues talked about what they would do if the world was to end tomorrow, what they would do this evening. It certainly reflects on you. I know if I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would go to Kentucky Fried Chicken. But that probably speaks of my own unsuitability for your movement. What would you do if you knew the world was ending tomorrow?TAFUR: I would speak to you, Andrew.KEEN: Oh my god, we can go together to the Kentucky Fried Chicken. Well, Juliana, it's been a real honor to have you on the show. Very interesting conversation, we're going to get you back on because this--one thing we can say for sure is this issue is not going away in 2024, 2025, 2026. Keep up the good work, Juliana, and we'll talk again in the not too distant future. Thank you so much.TAFUR: Thank you, Andrew. Thank you.For those impressed with what Julianna Tafur is doing and would like to participate, here are a couple of ideas:* Ready to turn division into connection? The Greater Good Science Center’s 7-Day Campaign for Connection Challenge offers practical, research-based skills to ease stress and create understanding. Reserve your spot: http://tinyurl.com/7DayChallenge24* Feeling the weight of division this election season? You're not alone! Join the @Greater Good Science Center’s 7-Day Campaign for Connection Challenge, to help you navigate these polarized times with science-backed skills. Reserve your place: http://tinyurl.com/7DayChallenge24Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

If there’s a disease that captures the toxic spirit of our times, it’s what the therapist, Vanessa Resier, in her new book, calls Narcissistic Abuse. Even the language of this disease - Gaslighting. Love bombing. Hoovering. Triangulating - has become part of the dictionary of life in the 2020’s. Narcissism and narcissists seem to be everywhere these days. In fact, as Resier told me (see full transcript below), all domestic abuse - from outright violence to subtle manipulation - is a form of narcissistic abuse. But if that’s true, I asked her, then what, exactly, isn’t narcissism?Vanessa M. Reiser is a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), licensed in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Florida. She is a psychotherapist and the founder of Tell a Therapist, LLC as well as the founder of the nonprofit, Tell a Therapist, INC. Vanessa holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from SUNY Empire State college and a Master of Social Work (MSM) from the University of Southern California. Vanessa specializes in narcissistic personality disorder, and her practice focuses on treating victims and survivors of cults, narcissists, domestic violence, and narcissistic abuse. Her insights are both personal and professional, giving her a unique lens into this insidious form of domestic abuse. Vanessa is a long-distance runner and two-time Ironman who is best known for running the state of New York (285 miles in 11 days) in a wedding dress to raise awareness for narcissistic abuse.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Long-time viewers and listeners to the show know that I have a particular interest in words. Certain words acquire fashion, and I'm always curious why. One word that seems to be particularly popular these days, gets thrown around a lot, both clinically and out of the psychotherapist's office, is the word “narcissist.” There's a new book out this week. It's called Narcissistic Abuse. It's by my guest, Vanessa M. Reiser. She is a clinical social worker, a psychotherapist based in central New Jersey. And she's joining us. Vanessa, congratulations on the new book. This word narcissist. You're all too familiar with it, of course, everyone throws it around. Do you think it's particularly fashionable these days, or is that my imagination?Vanessa Reiser: I think it is definitely a word that is misunderstood. So, to your point, I think people use it in a way or in a regard that is not totally accurate. So, somebody who has narcissistic personality disorder. Has a list of characteristics that are very specific, very hazardous. It's not just somebody who is into taking selfies, or that we might think the word is in reference to. So, there are pretty serious characteristics that they possess. If somebody has a pathological disorder.Keen: Or let me rephrase the question: do you think there are more narcissists around now in the 2020s than there were historically, or are always the same amount? Of course, the word was invented by the Greeks. Its etymology comes out of Greek mythology: the God of Narcissus. So are we particularly prone, our culture or our individuality. To two to the problems of narcissism?Reiser: I think that it's always been around. I think there are more people, but I do think that we are now developing the vernacular for the characteristics. And I do think that because we have social media, people are more inclined to discuss it. So, in some ways it's a good thing, because we are now talking about it more, and some of the toxic behaviors. But I think is also an uptick because people are more individualistic, they are potentially more vain, more narcissistic. In their approach to their marketing themselves, everybody is out there flitting about, trying to make themselves an entity of sorts. And so, we're seeing a lot of people that are seemingly narcissistic, but that is not the same as somebody who has a pervasive pathological disorder, somebody who is lacking empathy, somebody who potentially has overlaps with sociopathy and looks to hurt people. We see this in certain pop culture scenarios, like we're seeing it with the P Diddy stuff here. There's a lot of talk now about cults, which my book is about also. So, these are people that are dangerous in some regard. These are people who are interested in meeting their own needs at the expense of others. And so it is somewhat misused, the word.Keen: Aren't we all want a bit like that? Aren't we all a bit self-interested? The subtitle of your book is A Therapist's Guide to Identifying, Escaping and Healing from Toxic and Manipulative People. Aren't all people, Vanessa, aren't they all manipulative? Aren't we all seeking what we want? This word toxic...it's another one of these words that's become fashionable, it seems to be used in all sorts of generic ways. Aren't we all, in our own way, toxic too?Reiser: I think there is a level of ego that we all possess, so we are feeding our egos, we are trying to manage that up against others in society, etc. Very Freudian. But this idea that somebody would be particularly manipulative, somebody who's lying, controlling, uses isolation. And again, the book is aimed to fuse the concepts of narcissistic abuse and cult abuse. So, cult leaders are all narcissists, sociopaths or psychopaths, and the way that they operate is in line with what we see in domestic violence scenarios in a one-on-one interpersonal relationship. And those are the tactics. They are very much about mind control. So this is positive reinforcers, negative reinforcers, silent treatment. So the level of manipulation is different than, let's say, if you're having a bad day and you need a Snickers bar and you might just act like a jerk. That is not a pervasive behavior. This is more maniacal, to sort of oversimplify it.Keen: I can't resist our promise not to bring up Trump too much in this conversation, Vanessa. But this is the week, of course, that he got elected, or reelected, to office. And often people use the word narcissist in association with him. You talked about its influence on popular culture. Does it also play a role in politics? You talked about cult leaders, aren't all political leaders in their own way, cult leaders?Reiser: No, because, again, you have to have a pathological disorder. It's not to say that there aren't an abundance of--there are. There are a ton of CEOs and c-suites of, you know, poets, priests and politicians are generally able to kiss babies and potentially stab you in the back. They can be really dangerous. I wouldn't say they all are. I would say it is more prevalent in certain career paths for sure. We see this in the military. We see this in police officers. We see this in surgery rooms. So, there are certain jobs--see, I think 1 in 4 CEOs is a psychopath directly, which is very interesting.Keen: But what do you make of that? Does that suggest that everyone is a psychopath, or does that suggest that certain kinds of jobs like CEO or perhaps presidents lend themselves to psychopaths and narcissists?Reiser: I think the way that they climb the ladder without empathy, sort of lying...Jeffrey Epstein was a good example of this because he was a liar. His entire resume was a fraud. So they know how to work the system, climb to the top, convince others to do their bidding, hide, find loopholes. They're pretty slippery and sneaky. And as I mentioned, the level of manipulation is just a master level. And so this is why cult leaders in political arenas and otherwise, in the one-on-one relationship, they are able to get people to fall in line, right? Manson never killed anyone. It was his minions that did so. So, they are able to use mind control in a way that most people don't think they could fall victim to. But I think that's the beauty of the conversations we're starting to have around this, because we're bumping into these people in our work environments. We're now having a discussion about what they look like, how they behave. It's very hard to process when you go through something like this. I think most of us think that people are sharing similar perspectives and logical ideas. And when you go through this portal, you understand that not everyone is thinking the way you are. And I think it's brilliant that we're starting to talk about it, actually. I think the word is overused, but I also believe that there are far more dangerous people out there than maybe we ever realized.Keen: Vanessa, you talked about Mayor Charles Manson, mass murderer Jeffrey Epstein, a serial sexual criminal. You also talk about CEOs. Surely there's a difference between the two, though. Are there, shall we say, criminal narcissists and then people who have done well, who have an element of narcissism in their personalities?Reiser: Absolutely. I think there are unfortunately often overlaps between narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder or sociopathy. So, the way I would characterize the difference would be what you are saying, which a is very, very big difference and yet somewhat nuanced, in my opinion, is the idea of no empathy. The narcissist might step over the dead body, the sociopath put the dead body there. So, it feels like it's a huge difference and a very small difference at the same time. Why? Because without empathy, I think our society really doesn't go on. I think empathy, is in the very first place, something that occurs when the primary caregiver realizes the baby's crying. Let's take care of the baby, the baby needs something. And this sort of innate experience is why we go on as a species. Without it, we are doomed. And so, this idea of no empathy already feels very wonky to me, and I think we need to open up a dialogue about that. But you're quite right. There is a difference between somebody who steps over the dead body and somebody who puts the dead body there.Keen: Yeah, there's a very big difference. You use the E-word, empathy. It's another of these, what I think of at least, as cult words. It gets thrown around as if it's a good thing. You talked about the the species nature of empathy, that we wouldn't survive without it. I'm not an expert on evolution or Darwin's theories, but I wonder what evolutionists would say about this, that our species is a competitive one and we all compete with one another. Is empathy, then, self-interest, and does that, in a sense, undermine the idea of empathy, given that it's supposed to be about being empathetic? But if it enables us to survive and prosper, then maybe it's not quite as empathetic as we would like to think.Reiser: I think probably there's a balance there, and the imbalance is what we're seeing. I think we need to cultivate more empathy. I think we need to be kinder to one another. I feel like it's gotten a little dark, and people are maybe acting out of fear a lot more than I've ever seen. And so, I think we have lost a good amount of that. I think we see it in times of tragedy, like in New York, on 9/11, you were able to see humankind in its best light. And we saw quite a bit of it with Covid when the first responders were being highly empathetic and volunteering their time and risking their lives to look out for others. So I think it's still there, but I think that we might be trending away from it. And that scares me. So, I think it is important. Empathy, to me, is ground zero for everything. I think it's important. I understand what you're saying, but I think there's a balance that we might be getting too polarized around.Keen: Are you suggesting that if you don't have empathy, you are by definition a narcissist?Reiser: No, I think that there are certain people that don't have as strong of empathy. Maybe they understand empathy. But I think if you couple that with this recipe of other characteristics like manipulation, like lying, controlling, isolating, abusing through addiction, smearing, withholding, there's, you know, something like 20 characteristics that most of them will possess a good amount. So, it's not an exact science. But no, I think no empathy, though, is one of the things that I think lends people to behave the way that they do if they're going to be abusive. So, it is a term that I think may highlight a good amount of what narcissists jumping off point is, which is they don't care, so they're going to do anything that they can to get what they want.Keen: You mentioned Manson, Jeffrey Epstein, of course, a historic sexual criminal, both male and very male in their own way. You've talked about empathy in some detail, Vanessa, both on the show and in the book. Is there a gendered quality to this too? Do Women make, and of course, there are female narcissists, but is a female narcissist different from a male narcissist, or are all narcissists, whether they're made of female, essentially the same?Reiser: There are some slight differences. By and large, the female narcissist will oftentimes exploit their children and use their children for supply. Not that the male narcissist won't do that, but a good oversimplification to identify the female narcissist is oftentimes the “pageant mom." Their children are an extension of them and they're sort of braggadocious about, you know, “my child is a doctor." The other thing that they they can do is--Keen: Sounds like a lot of mothers, Vanessa. They're proud of their kids if they're adults, I think, or a psychotherapist...Reiser: I think proud is very different from somebody who behind the scenes in the home, they're valuing that child based only on what they can get from the child. So they get supply from the neighbors who are excited to see the daughter, or the people at the cheerleading competition. It's very superficial and shallow. Behind the scenes, they can be particularly abusive and severely so. So, these children could develop eating disorders, could be self-injuring. And a lot of this is about the mask that they wear in public versus who they are behind the scenes.Keen: But on a lot of shows, Vanessa, on social media and anxiety, as you know, as a therapist and as a writer, this is a huge issue these days: is there a connection between our age of anxiety and the prevalence of narcissistic abuse? Are some of the most important reasons why there's so much anxiety, particularly amongst young people, a consequence of the rise of narcissistic abuse?Reiser: I'm not sure. It's an interesting question. I tend to lean more into the camp of nature, less nurture. So, my belief is based not on a ton of data, because there is not a lot of data on NPD because narcissists are not going into studies and saying, “Hey, I'm a narcissist, please study me," or “I'm willing to be studied." They are generally mandated. So, you know, there's not a lot of data to pull from. So, we're kind of theorizing, but I tend to lean more into the camp of something where intergenerational trauma may play a role, or genetic or biological predisposition. So, I'm not sure. There are certain people who have different opinions on this. Some people think this is something that happens in childhood, and it's a trauma. I tend to think it's something that potentially could be genetic.Keen: Vanessa, is there a danger here? You're a clinical social worker, a psychotherapist, you have your own private practice. So I'm not suggesting, of course, you're self-interested and you're trying to build a clientele here. But aren't you, not you, but isn't this whole movement, or discourse, medicalizing the complexity of the human condition? So all parents are, in their own way, manipulative. They will perhaps use their children sometimes to self-promote. Everybody wants to control one kind of relationship, or rather, everyone has their own interest. What's the danger, in your work and in the work of others, of medicalizing the business of being human? And I mean that not in an economic sense, but in all the messiness of what it means to be human and in our relations with others.Reiser: Yeah, I definitely do not see it that way. I think when my clients come to me, they are very confused about what has happened to them. And so the word being a clinical word, narcissistic personality disorder (or clinical words, narcissistic personality disorder) can feel very validating because it would be like going to the hospital and the doctor says, “you're sick." “Well, what do I have?" “You're just sick." And so my clients, very specifically, because I work only in the domestic violence realm, really are feeling validated around the language. So the language, you opened up this conversation today talking about words, these words like gaslighting, and the level of confusion that's gone on with--Keen: --and lovebombing and hoovering and triangulating, all these words that you bring up in your book.Reiser: They're very important for people to understand what they've endured. And so, I actually quite like the medical term, because it gives an answer to those that have gone through something that is particularly difficult to process and certainly very hard to describe.Keen: You talked about abuse and a lot of your clients, you talk about violence, or as most of the narcissistic abuse verbal?Reiser: All domestic violence is narcissistic abuse, all domestic violence is narcissistic abuse. Every single one of my clients who has been physically assaulted, or has an acute trauma through physical abuse, tells me that the psychological abuse is far worse. It's a brain injury of sorts when somebody lies to you repeatedly and skews your perception. I feel like the brain is kind of a fact-finding machine, and it looks for data, and it's constantly working to make those connections. And so, when that becomes fractured, people really decompensate. They do not do well. They fall apart. They fail. Most realms of their entire life can just fall apart. And so, it's a pretty serious thing, this psychological brain injury, if you will.Keen: Yeah, I take your point. I'm certainly not trying to minimalize domestic abuse. But just to repeat, you said all domestic abuse is narcissistic abuse. Is that what you're saying? So the husband who comes home after some drinks in the bar and beats his wife up. Is that narcissistic abuse or is that just that an angry drunk man?Reiser: I would have to sort of assess further, but it very well could be, and more than likely it would be. Now, does that mean he has narcissistic personality disorder? No, but that behavior itself is narcissistic.Keen: But aren't you, again, making it such a big word that any kind of bad behavior...it becomes narcissism. So it's really everything.Reiser: Certainly the high level bad behaviors that you're referencing, yes.Keen: So domestic abuse, anything behind domestic abuse: smacking someone around, beating up your child, beating up your wife, beating up your husband, it's always narcissism?Reiser: Yes.Keen: So, okay, so we have this thing called narcissistic abuse. You're a therapist. People don't come to you to, as you suggested, to have this thing argued over. They come for help, and they come to identify it and escape it. How do you deal with it? Let's begin with children and their narcissistic mother. What's your advice? How to get out of a narcissistic relationship?Reiser: That one is particularly challenging, because when you leave an intimate relationship, oftentimes you can just go back to the person you were prior, go find that person. When you are the child of a narcissist, it is challenging because, as I mentioned earlier, you become an extension of that parent. And so, your identity has not been developed, you have to figure out who you even are. What are your likes? What are your interests? What is autonomy like for you? And so, it's a big hill to climb. You're generally filtering thoughts through "what would my toxic parent want or what would they not want?" Which ultimately gives them control over every single thought you're having. And so that is a really, really hard thing to overcome. And then I suppose what we would do, probably, would be work on low contact or harm reduction to the extent that they feel comfortable, unless they're willing to remove them from their lives. Narcissists can be dangerous, in a way. So, these are people who might manipulate your love relationship, or the relationship you have with your own children, or your career. They can infiltrate everything around you. So depending upon the severity--it would be a case-by-case basis--but generally, with a parental unit, I would say probably trying to get to a point where you would see them maybe during holidays, or whatever you're comfortable doing, and then you don't really want to share too much with them, because they tend to exploit the information that you share with them.Keen: How reformable then, Vanessa, are narcissists? You're suggesting that they can't be reformed, that they have this condition and that you shouldn't trust them with information? They're always trying to take advantage of you.Reiser: Not a lot of data on the narcissist changing. It is a rigid pathological disorder. So, the neurotypical brain can move. Trauma victims can repair and develop new pathways in the brain. This is different. It's rigid. So, I don't see a ton of movement. I think that the best-case scenario is to get away from them.Keen: But have you had patients who've come into your office and said, “I'm a narcissist or I fear I'm a narcissist. Nobody wants to talk to me. My parents, my kids, my friends, my children, my relatives won't speak to me. I need to become less of a narcissist." Is that a condition that you sometimes come across?Reiser: Yes. And we would work towards developing empathy to the extent that they can. We would work towards developing emotional connections with other people. We would work towards understanding boundaries, working on accountability, communication style, attachment style. This is generally something that is best handled in an in-patient scenario. So it could look like a sex addiction treatment center, something like this, where they are really diving in. So the work that I'm doing is the best that I can with anybody who comes to me, as you mentioned. But it's something that would be best handled with extensive therapy.Keen: So you're a therapist and you're in the business of identifying and escaping and healing from toxic and manipulative people. But what about medicine? I talked about medicalizing the condition. I'm slightly curious about that, perhaps even slightly skeptical. But are there drugs for narcissists or for people who have been abused by narcissists?Reiser: In a word, no. There are tons of things therapeutically that have been coming out. We're seeing people who are trying certain psychedelics for post-traumatic stress disorder. So in the case of the victim, I know Bessel van der Kolk talks about MDMA and other options for treating trauma specifically that is very experimental and goes up against big pharma. So he has a lot of push back. But there's different treatments and things that people are trying, but there isn't really anything per se that treats trauma. In the pharma world, everything is to treat anxiety and depression, and sometimes that can work. So again, we're going to practice harm reduction. And the same could be said for the narcissist in terms of treatment. Pharmacologically, we would probably do something like the SSRIs, but there's no data that I can provide that says that that works. It's just something that I've heard people try to probably work on the anxiety of it. But there's no there's no drug that I know of that's going to remedy trauma or NPD.Keen: So you're ambivalent on psychedelics. We've done a number of shows. It's becoming increasingly fashionable or popular.Reiser: I'm not ambivalent.Keen: You're against or for? You don't think it works, basically?Reiser: No, I think I think it I think it could be tremendous. I don't know enough about it, but I'm kind of hopeful that it would work.Keen: But isn't that kind of, some people might say, Brave New World? It's an escape? We live in a psychedelic universe, we leave the world and we go to another?Reiser: I don't know. If we are microdosing, it's possible that we could quell the trauma responses to the extent that we may be able to then focus on developing different neural pathways and changing the way that the brain is thinking and some of the cognition that's negative that's floating around in there. So I'm hopeful that those things would help. I understand what you're saying, though.Keen: In an America which, Vanessa, is very divided, a lack of, perhaps, your word, empathy, politically, on either side, an election that reflects and perhaps compounds the divisions...do you think that America needs to become more, shall we say, therapeutic? Is is that the only way to bring Americans back together? I'm not suggesting that all politicians are narcissists, although, as I said, a lot of people have argued, including, I think his own niece, that Donald Trump is a classic example of a narcissist. But does America need counseling, shall we say? Is America itself collectively suffering from narcissistic abuse?Reiser: Well, that is a good question. Just gave me the chills. Yes, but also therapeutic practices that we can all do, I do this in my own life, is just...I really think it's important for people to express themselves. I notice in my clientele, when they are just sharing, they're connecting the dots really on their own, they aren't processing things, and I think it's important to express yourself. So even if you're journaling--so it doesn't have to be this, like, you're in therapy, so something is wrong with you, and let's fix you, and this is this is my advice, and all this. No. I do think that you need to have a safe place to express yourself. So, even just good friends, some way to kind of get it off your chest if it's through, you know, anything that you enjoy doing, like, running as I do, or the written word, or kickboxing, or some way to get things off your chest, I think, will help you to feel empowered, will help you to process some of the things that you're witnessing that could be upsetting.Keen: Yeah there's a long tradition of narcissism in literature, many writers have written books about narcissism, and some people believe many of the greatest writers are themselves narcissists. You talk about, Vanessa, finally, a safe place to do this. We touched on social media earlier. You're on Instagram, you're on TikTok, like most of us. Is social media in your view, a safe place, or is it the problem, or is it both?Reiser: Oh, great timing on that one. I would say it is something that could be both, for sure. It has tremendous benefits. There's communities that have developed through something as simple as a hashtag. So, there's so much good and then there's so much horror. I mean, that's just the way I see it.Keen: Well, finally, I have to ask you this, Vanessa. Since I get some free therapy from you, sometimes my kids accuse me of being a narcissist. I think it's sometimes when they don't like what I say. Have I displayed any manifestations of narcissism in this conversation? Do I need therapy myself?Reiser: No. You know, I don't know you well enough. You were certainly a gentleman. And it would be very, very hard for me to decipher something like that unless I got to know you behind the scenes. And I'm sure the same could be said about me.Keen: Well, next time my kids accuse me of being a narcissist, I will tell them, “Go and talk to Vanessa." Well, congratulations, Vanessa, on the new book, it's an important subject, and you treated in a very down to earth, coherent way. The new book is Narcissistic Abuse--sorry--Narcissistic Abuse: A Therapist Guide to Identifying, Escaping and Healing from Toxic and Manipulative People. It's on audiobook, it's read by Vanessa, and it's also out in traditional text. Congratulations, Vanessa. Subject isn't going away, we'll get you back in the not-too-distant future to talk more narcissism. Thank you so much.Reiser: Thank you so much. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe