Let’s Ban Billionaires: Noam Cohen on the Know-It-Alls 2.0

00:00:01 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody.

00:00:02 Andrew Keen: It is Monday, 03/23/2026. Ten years is a long time in world history. Back in December 2017, we did a show. My show was on Literary Hub, Lit Hub. It was titled "Is It Too Late to Save the Internet from Itself?" with, at the time, a New York Times writer and expert on the internet called Noam Cohen. Noam had a new book out at the time. It was called The Know-It-Alls. And as I noted in my introduction to my conversation with Noam back then, things were changing. Writers like Noam Cohen, Jonathan Taplin, Franklin Foer were all turning on the internet. Well, ten years later, everybody seems to have turned on the internet. Noam Cohen has a new introduction to The Know-It-Alls, which is out right now. So, Noam, congratulations on the new introduction. You were right all along back in 2017, weren't you?

00:01:07 Noam Cohen: I forgot we weren't too late, though. Right? We're just in time, and we solved it all. So it's fine.

00:01:14 Andrew Keen: For me. That is — no. I'm afraid that's not making me laugh. That's the blackest of humors. But of course—

00:01:22 Noam Cohen: —that's why I'm trying to make a joke of it also.

00:01:25 Andrew Keen: How's the last ten years been for you? Have you had a good time? What have you been doing?

00:01:29 Noam Cohen: Oh, I had a good time? I mean, it's been a tough time in media, I would say. Things — you know — fewer outlets. I guess it's kind of the Cassandra thing. Right? Are you proud to be among the early ones seeing this problem? And the headline "too late to save the internet" — maybe it really was too late. That's kind of my conclusion from re-looking at the book: they'd kind of gotten a grip on so much power. But about me personally — I have a family, that's gone well. I've been able to write some pieces that I'm excited about, but I tend to be kind of despairing, right, like many of us. And to think that — I wouldn't call it survivor's guilt, but to have seen this problem and to think that maybe you and I and others didn't convey it clearly enough. I don't think there was a sense that this was a crisis. I think when I wrote it — when we had that conversation — it was obvious what was happening and power was getting consolidated. But if you look at the difference — in this new introduction the book has a chart about how much the wealth has changed. So when you talk about someone like Zuckerberg going from $50 billion to $250 billion, it's hard to put that in perspective, but it does create the sense — the way Elon Musk does as well — that they're almost like the size of countries. So it's like we had a chance to not nip it in the bud — because it was already flowering at that point — but to really act quicker, and we didn't as a society. And now I feel hope only in the sense that I think we can never go back to where it was. Either we're going to keep going worse — and it sounds like maybe you're really pessimistic about it, Andrew — but it also means we could just rethink everything. And that would mean that maybe we nationalize these digital products.

00:03:11 Andrew Keen: I mean, I'm thinking a lot about—

00:03:12 Noam Cohen: —cigarette companies, and how do we rein in cigarettes? We tax them heavily. We use that money to educate people about the dangers of cigarettes. I mean, there are paths to getting this right. And it's sad to think that it has to get so bad before people wake up, but that is often darkest before the dawn. Am I winning you over, Andrew, or am I coming off as a Pollyanna?

00:03:34 Andrew Keen: You talk about the Cassandra thing. I have to tell you, my wife is called Cassandra.

00:03:39 Noam Cohen: Oh.

00:03:39 Andrew Keen: So I have to be careful what we talk about when we talk about Cassandra things. No. You've talked a little bit about the broader contours of the digital economy — more and more wealth, more and more power to what you originally called back in 2017 the Know-It-Alls. You also suggested that you yourself personally are a casualty of what's happened in media over the last ten years. Last time we talked, I think you were still with The New York Times. What's happened to you?

00:04:12 Noam Cohen: No, I wasn't at the New York Times at that point. But no, you're absolutely right. I don't mean to dodge that point. What's happened to media is really scary. Right? And that's part of the consolidation — there aren't really these independent outlets anymore. Everything's become kind of consolidated, and there are fewer and fewer of them. So for me, it's been hard. I have a family. I have a wife who has a good living. It can almost feel like being a hobbyist, what I'm doing. I've had some pieces I'm really proud of. I wrote something for Wired about a woman who had a campaign about keeping Wikipedia going — fighting off Nazis.

00:04:49 Andrew Keen: That was back in January 2024.

00:04:52 Noam Cohen: Sure, like that. And I have an interesting piece about looking at the Harvard campus when Facebook was first introduced, kind of doing an oral history about that. But yeah, I am definitely a casualty of a different media world where everyone has their own brand, and that's not really the way I was raised. It's hard to promote yourself like that. I've been trying to make videos to talk about ideas. I think that's a better way to get across to people if you don't have established magazines and institutions that are trusted. So yeah — I'm definitely a casualty of that.

00:05:25 Noam Cohen: I do think something's going to have to fix itself there too. I do think people need news. They need sources they can trust. I guess I'm just trying to view it as — we're all on the down curve and something has to get restored. I mean, I'll give you an example, Andrew. I was talking to someone I share a workspace with, a coder type, and he said that basically AI is helpful in coding — it kind of does the work of an intern. You know, it's not good; you can't rely on it, but it gets things moving. And if that's the case, you kind of wonder how there are ever going to be interns. You can't only have people be senior. Young people emerge and have to be trained. So I don't know how that's stable. We are a society. We're going to have to feed people, have jobs for people. I just think we're going to have to reckon with that. Otherwise we're really heading toward something dystopian — we're going to be people living in guarded camps, shifting around.

00:06:22 Andrew Keen: A few years ago, we had Margaret Atwood on this show, of course—

00:06:25 Noam Cohen: Oh, wow.

00:06:25 Andrew Keen: —who wrote The Handmaid's Tale about that dystopia. I remember asking her — she told me she wrote it about America, and she noted it wasn't really dystopian in the sense that she already saw it happening. Of course, now it seems more and more of a reality. You studied history, Noam, as an undergraduate. Where were you at college?

00:06:46 Noam Cohen: I went to Harvard, and I studied American history. I wrote my thesis about — I guess I was always looking at how people are convinced of things. I wrote it about a guy I kind of described as Paul Sachs: the interpreter of modern art for rich people. I was very curious — how do you get the Rockefellers and other people in the twenties and thirties to like modern art when it was fundamentally made by people who were radicals and hated wealth inequality? And there was a guy who kind of held their hand and explained, "Oh no, this is really good. Here's what they're doing. Here's what they're questioning. Look at the use of this technique." So I wrote a biography of a guy who was sort of the middleman for rich people to like modern art. I've always been curious about how the powerful live their lives. I was listening to Naomi Klein on a different podcast. She was talking about this episode — maybe you saw it on Twitter — where Joyce Carol Oates was asking Elon Musk how come he never seems to be happy. How come he's always tweeting?

00:07:51 Andrew Keen: I heard that. Yeah. It was quite revealing.

00:07:53 Noam Cohen: So I think I've always wondered: you get this wealth and power, what is it for? And what does it mean to have someone tell you that you like this art — as opposed to liking it instinctively? And what does it mean to be estranged from the people who make art that you're championing, who have such different values than you? So that was what my history project was about.

00:08:11 Andrew Keen: And was there a little bit of a conveyor belt between the history department at Harvard and The New York Times? I wouldn't say a conveyor belt, but I'm sure you knew others at Harvard who ended up at The Times.

00:08:28 Noam Cohen: I do. I mean, I went to school roughly with the current editor, Joe Kahn. I guess he might not have been a history major. But yeah.

00:08:35 Andrew Keen: If you were doing it all over again — I know it's easy for me to say — what would you change about your own narrative?

00:08:44 Noam Cohen: Interesting. I mean, I wonder — I don't think I have an entrepreneurial personality, but I did leave the Times earlier to work on a site called Inside.com, which had many Harvard people too. It was an early attempt to do internet-based digital news. It did not succeed. It had a lot of funding, but it wasn't really digitally native. I always kind of contrast it with Josh Marshall, who really built things very gradually and organically.

00:09:17 Andrew Keen: What was that? Talking Points Memo?

00:09:20 Noam Cohen: Talking Points Memo, which is still thriving today. Mine was called Inside.com. So I do think I always saw the potential of digital news and digital outreach. I was really an optimist early on. Maybe that's something — it's funny to look back on. Could I have been more invested in the digital future in a way that made it better? I tried a little bit. I love Wikipedia. I write about it all the time. I'd say it's my real area of expertise as a journalist and what I've really made my biggest mark doing.

00:09:51 Noam Cohen: I consider myself to be a real early person writing about Wikipedia for the New York Times and in general, and sort of seeing the potential of that — even as I see how it did undercut the idea of professional writers. I mean, Jaron Lanier always thought that Wikipedia was this malicious idea and very dangerous, and saw it as undercutting the idea of professional writers. But I thought it was an amazing attempt to harness collaboration and make something incredible with all these people working together. So I don't know what I would have done differently. I think probably it's something I talk to my therapist a lot about — whether I should be more bold, whether I was too passive, whether I took too easy a road. I feel like fate sent me there, because writing a book is something I always wanted to do, and that feels really great. And I feel very honored that my publisher thought this book was worth revisiting.

00:10:50 Noam Cohen: Yeah. I always wanted to be engaged. When you ask would I have wanted to be a historian of things not related to current times — I don't think so. I always felt — that's why I wanted journalism. I always wanted history that was related to what's going on today. Maybe trying something more adventurous early on could have been smart, but I do like the idea that I always wanted to look at what the world is like today and what history can teach us.

00:11:20 Noam Cohen: And if you look at what my book does — what I like about it — it was trying to look at the history of computer science at Stanford to explain who these people are. Why are they running us into the ground? I understand capitalism. I think that's a key distinction: there are a lot of critics of what's going on who see it purely as capitalism. I saw it as hackers and unique stories and unique histories of America that explain why these people are the way they are.

00:11:45 Noam Cohen: And I was kind of blindsided — Sam Altman wasn't in the original book. And then to find out that Sam Altman fits the exact same pattern of these Know-It-Alls — he was a young hacker, went to Stanford, dropped out to do a startup. He thinks people are machines and machines are people. I couldn't even have dreamed him up more perfectly as an example of what—

00:12:06 Andrew Keen: Although some people might say — and I want to come to this later — but some people might also say that Dario Amodei, who is now standing up to Trump and doing all the things you wanted the tech people to do back in 2017, he's also an example of a hacker. So maybe there is some promise. More broadly — you were on Twitter. Now it's called X. You left it, I think, back in 2023, 2024 when Musk acquired it. Now you're on Bluesky. What's happened to the history of media? You were again somebody who was hopeful about social media. Have you been deeply disappointed with the social media narrative over the last ten years?

00:12:52 Noam Cohen: Yeah. I mean — wow. It's hard to parcel these things out. And this is kind of what that trial going on in California is about.

00:12:59 Andrew Keen: Which trial?

00:13:01 Noam Cohen: I meant the trial about social media manipulation — the civil suit. The—

00:13:08 Andrew Keen: The trial where a woman is suggesting that her life was ruined because she became addicted to Facebook and YouTube. I don't think the decision has yet been passed down by the court. I think it's coming out next week.

00:13:21 Noam Cohen: It might be a jury trial. But I only bring it up to say — we have a system that I don't think was right. I'm less of a free speech absolutist than others. Some people think that the whole notion of safe harbor — allowing companies not to be responsible for what's posted on their sites — is good and led to all this growth in social networks.

00:13:46 Noam Cohen: But what was unique about that suit was that they were saying it wasn't the content — it was the way the platforms were designed to hook you, with infinite scrolling and notifications and things like that. So that's separating two things out. Could social media, without an evil, manipulative, capitalistic manager, have been good or bad? I mean, it's obviously got incredibly good things about it. We're really having to distinguish between: could social media have existed without these evil Know-It-Alls who are manipulating it? I mean, I don't know that digitally connecting people is bad inherently.

00:14:30 Noam Cohen: I do know that having people driven by profit and power doing it is obviously bad. So the first step would be to remove the manipulation and the power-hungry from it and see what social media becomes. Again, the same thing with Wikipedia. Was it really a destabilization of the idea of the expert — and in that sense really a bad thing? I don't think so, but I could see why, looking at what we're in now, Wikipedia could have been the front line of disputing the idea that we should have gatekeepers and experts who answer what a thing is, rather than a community of people trying their best.

00:15:06 Noam Cohen: I still always go for the community, but it's a really big question — whether social media is inherently bad. I mean, is that what you're asking?

00:15:16 Andrew Keen: And you sound like a defiant optimist. One other question on the last ten years that perhaps we didn't expect. One of the last pieces you wrote for The New York Times was about the impact of the Epstein scandal back in 2019 on MIT Media Lab. You've written extensively on it. You wrote about Joi Ito's resignation — he was one of the early casualties of the Epstein scandal. What do you make of it in broad historical terms, particularly in the context of the fact that Epstein seemed very eager to get in with Silicon Valley insiders like Joi Ito?

00:16:06 Noam Cohen: Yeah. I mean, Joi Ito and then Reid Hoffman would be the other key conduit for all this. And there's that photo — I won't say it's famous — of a dinner Epstein had in Silicon Valley where Reid Hoffman was there and Mark Zuckerberg, and he had contacts with Peter Thiel. I actually did a little video on Instagram about this, because I wanted to make clear that Jeffrey Epstein was a natural fit: the misogyny of Jeffrey Epstein really fit what is a Silicon Valley mode where women were excluded. Eugenics is a major part of my book.

00:16:44 Noam Cohen: The argument I'm making — I was trying to find connections that people hadn't seen. Right? The idea was that Stanford had this transformation from being a real backwater school to being the Harvard of the West, through the figure of Fred Terman, who was the provost and who really brought VC investment into Stanford's research, starting with Hewlett-Packard. And the thing was, his father was Lewis Terman, who brought the IQ test to America — often called the Stanford IQ test. He brought it from France. And it was all about finding the gifted children, identifying them and harnessing them. It was a real eugenics vision. Stanford has a eugenics history: the idea that the brightest should be encouraged and the rest neglected.

00:17:37 Noam Cohen: And it's all of a piece. So Jeffrey—

00:17:40 Andrew Keen: Hold on, Noam. What do you mean by that? That Stanford has — I mean, isn't that true of universities generally? Harvard as well — that they bring in the smart kids and are less interested in the ones that don't—

00:17:52 Noam Cohen: No, no. I'm only saying that Terman actually did studies and created this whole concept of the gifted child. And he actually did a study trying to prove that gifted children were happier. It's one thing to say — first off, I know Harvard doesn't only admit the smartest people, I was there — but the point is: it's one thing to believe in admitting people who do well on tests, and another to say society should be run by people like that. Bring it back to Epstein: Epstein was fascinated — and Trump too — by the idea of the smartest people breeding.

00:18:36 Noam Cohen: The idea that intelligence can even be measured, Andrew — these are not—

00:18:40 Andrew Keen: If Trump was that concerned with eugenics, I'm not sure he would have found such dumb wives, would he?

00:18:46 Noam Cohen: Interesting question. I mean, he might think his own genes are so powerful that it overcomes that. He's obsessed about his uncle, who was an MIT professor — I think he was a physicist. So he believes he's got great stock. He constantly talks about genes, and he's constantly invoking "low IQ" — which is a very weird thing. IQ is a radical concept; the idea of using IQ to decide how the world allocates resources to people is, I would say, a very extreme eugenics view, and he seems very casual about it.

00:19:18 Andrew Keen: No, no, no. You keep throwing around this term eugenics. We've done a number of shows on eugenics and eugenicists of one kind or another. Some people have made the connection between the origins of eugenicism in nineteenth-century America, then it being taken up by the Nazis and brought back to the United States. Do you see any connection? And how does Stanford fit into this narrative?

00:19:41 Noam Cohen: So I'm trying to say that Stanford fits in because it had this important research that was really predicated on finding gifted people and rewarding them. In the book I point out the irony that, literally, in the Bay Area, two young people who didn't fit the category of gifted — who were actually tested by Stanford — went on to win Nobel Prizes.

00:20:05 Andrew Keen: Who were they?

00:20:08 Noam Cohen: One is Shockley. I think one is Alvarez. But Shockley — William Shockley—

00:20:12 Andrew Keen: Well, he was about as crazy and disturbed and disturbing as anyone—

00:20:17 Noam Cohen: I'm just saying, on their own terms, he ought to have passed their test to be one of — you know — a thousand young kids in the area in the gifted program, and he wasn't. And I think Alvarez, another Nobel Prize winner, was also in that cohort. I'm only saying it's obviously going to be inherently biased how you judge who the best people are. And what Epstein — you will agree, in all those emails — was fascinated by was evolutionary biology and the concept of men dominating over women. That's part of what I'd call eugenics — call it biological-based misogyny if you prefer. But there's a reason why Epstein didn't raise any red flags with them. He was a very similar—

00:21:07 Andrew Keen: He was a natural fit. You mentioned Epstein's association with Joi Ito — Joichi. And you wrote about that resignation and his broader association with that world — misogynistic, not particularly welcoming to women?

00:21:30 Noam Cohen: I'm saying they are not put off by behavior that ought to be a red flag. And if you look at what Joi Ito was doing — it was very manipulative. What do you call having no principles? He was doing whatever he could to get money.

00:21:50 Noam Cohen: I think when you're willing to sell your credibility — yeah. That's what was going on at MIT. If you're interested in the MIT story: how I got to that was there was a project at MIT called Open Ag — the idea of having these "food computers" that just made no sense. I couldn't understand how MIT could have a lab, the MIT Media Lab, with a project that was so obviously not valid and was run by a non-scientist. And Joi Ito himself hadn't graduated from college.

00:22:19 Noam Cohen: I don't know if that's elitist of me to say. But it just seemed very strange — this institute at MIT that didn't have scientific rigor. So Epstein — if you look at those emails and what was going on there — was very interested in Bitcoin. I don't want to throw every big buzzword out there, but the MIT Media Lab needed money to acquire the programmers behind Bitcoin. That's what they did. They created an apartment there for them. And Epstein — if you look at what he was interested in — was really interested in the people who were behind Bitcoin and how the software operated. He wanted to have an insight into how it would work, and he had this idea of digital currency that would work with Sharia law. He saw an investment opportunity there, but I think he also just wanted to cozy up to scientists, and scientists wanted money.

00:23:11 Noam Cohen: So when you read that stuff, it's just so transactional and strange — they're giving their credibility, their value in society, to Epstein in exchange for money. It's a kind of pathetic experiment. When you think of Silicon Valley — so much money, looking for access to what Epstein can offer — it's all very transactional and very dispiriting.

00:23:36 Andrew Keen: It's dirty. In other words, I think what you're saying is that the subtitle of the book — "The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball" — you could probably include Jeffrey Epstein in this. So let's get to the new intro. I know it was triggered in part by Trump's reelection — Trump 2.0, as some people are calling it. There's that famous photograph of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Google, and of course Elon Musk, all at Trump's inauguration. Some people might say: these are business people. They get invited to the inauguration of a president whether it's Biden or Obama or Bush or Clinton. They would have shown up. Why is this photo and this moment so important to you, and why did it trigger a new introduction to the book?

00:24:35 Noam Cohen: Yeah. I mean — again — if I use the Cassandra term, looking at people who — actually, I was going to throw Cassandra out the window. I was toying with another idea—

00:24:44 Andrew Keen: You can't throw Cassandra out the window. She's my wife.

00:24:47 Noam Cohen: Mater. Mater. I was toying with "premature anti-technologist." Right? Riffing on the premature antifascists — this idea that certain people were considered too left-wing and communist if they were against the fascists before the US government entered World War Two.

00:25:03 Noam Cohen: So it was kind of a slur: you were a little too early to realize that Hitler was bad. You're supposed to know Hitler was bad right now. This is when Hitler was bad — likewise Franco. Likewise, I think you could call us premature anti-technologists. We should now know it's bad, but back then, you weren't supposed to. But to me — what I wrote at the time, and it's why I really have a kind of crusade about this — is that I could see the alliance between Trump and Silicon Valley even in 2016. And it isn't so — I mean, you're asking: obviously, they're business people. Obviously, Tim Cook is going to flatter Trump and give him some medal—

00:25:43 Andrew Keen: And Tim Cook was there. And of course a lot of people have wondered — but Tim Cook of all people would show up to this thing.

00:25:49 Noam Cohen: But again, he would say — he was actually interviewed and said, "I don't have politics. I'm just talking about policy." But to me, what was notable is that this is really what they wanted: Trump. He's a perfect vessel for them. He doesn't believe in regulation, doesn't believe in democracy. He shoots from the hip and believes the best should lead, including him. When I heard him say "only I can solve it" — okay, that's Trump saying it, but that's the same thing Elon Musk says or Mark Zuckerberg says.

00:26:15 Noam Cohen: They're all unique founders who believe only they can solve it. They have so much in common.

00:26:20 Andrew Keen: They're all Know-It-Alls, in other words.

00:26:22 Noam Cohen: Yeah. Absolutely. Zuckerberg—

00:26:25 Andrew Keen: Musk. And we do include some of the others. I mean, you noted Tim Cook — he doesn't seem that much of a Know-It-All. Or Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, or even Jeff Bezos. So they're Know-It-Alls too?

00:26:38 Noam Cohen: I think Bezos is interesting. Bezos is not a hacker, and I think — you'd say that Bezos is slightly different as you see him transition to enjoying his wealth. I don't think you'd say the same thing Joyce Carol Oates said to Elon — like, "Why did you get all this money? You seem miserable all the time." Jeff Bezos seems like he's having the time of his life. He's remarried. He's going to Paris fashion shows.

00:27:00 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I mean, he looks like he's transformed himself.

00:27:02 Noam Cohen: He's definitely swimming in the deep end.

00:27:04 Andrew Keen: Into a Hollywood muscle man.

00:27:06 Noam Cohen: Yeah. Exactly. And that's what floats your boat.

00:27:09 Andrew Keen: And he has a wife to reflect that.

00:27:12 Noam Cohen: Sure. And I think that at least is a familiar story of wanting to make money. And you look at the history of Bezos — he isn't a hacker. He isn't someone who lost himself in machines. He was literally a financial analyst who said, "We're going to sell lots of things on the internet. I want to be the middleman who gets the cut of all that. I'll start with books." It's a natural fit — the best way to start, because with books, you didn't have to have a whole warehouse. It's a familiar model: someone places an order for books, I'll go get them for you. And then little by little he just became incredibly wealthy and allowed it to pursue his dreams. And that's the traditional — hardly an ideal story of a predatory capitalist. But it's not the Know-It-Alls. It's not someone who literally lived in a little machine.

00:28:04 Noam Cohen: I think the idea of the closed world of a computer was so flattering, it made so much sense to these people. As one of the people I quote in the book, Joseph Weizenbaum, points out — in that world, you can make up down and down up. You control gravity. When you make a video game—

00:28:17 Andrew Keen: You're god. But on the other hand — can't you be a good Know-It-All? When I mentioned Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, he's taken on Trump and some of the people you note in your photograph. Is there such a thing as a good Know-It-All, or is that a contradiction in terms?

00:28:34 Noam Cohen: It's a contradiction in terms. I mean, I guess what I would say is — I think that's fine for them to be the engineering department. It's when you take what you've learned from engineering and want to apply it to the world that I have a problem. So I don't really want Dario — and you can argue how much of a radical or rebel he really is in that world. From what I would say: this technology ought to be nationalized. To the extent that there's one person or a small group of people who want to control AI, that is inherently the Know-It-All quality.

00:29:08 Noam Cohen: Unless he's willing to say, "I'm out" — or, once we have a better government, to cede this control. That's what's going to have to happen. So yeah, I do think it's a contradiction in terms to have a good Know-It-All, because fundamentally it's them against us. It really is. I hate to be so black-and-white, Manichean about it, but that's the idea. They have power that's really a social power.

00:29:29 Noam Cohen: Look — my perspective on AI, and I wrote about it earlier—

00:29:33 Andrew Keen: And I want to come to AI because it's interesting. Back in 2017, this was before ChatGPT. I mean, OpenAI existed, but it was a small company that no one really talked about. I asked you: looking back at the history of artificial intelligence, what does it tell you about the story of the internet? And you had an interesting response on Stanford and certain characters there. So perhaps you might remind us of what you thought in 2017, and also talk about how surprised — or not — you've been by our current obsession with AI.

00:30:09 Noam Cohen: Right. So one of the main characters in the book is John McCarthy, the guy who coined the term "artificial intelligence." He's an interesting character because he was a so-called red diaper baby — a radical who over time became more and more conservative — and a brilliant mathematician who became one of the first computer scientists. That was his job, and he was at MIT with Marvin Minsky, who interestingly had a connection to Jeffrey Epstein — but we'll put that aside. One of the most innovative theorists about AI had a very close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. But John McCarthy did not. What I was fascinated by, in both of them, is that they genuinely believed AI was going to work.

00:30:56 Noam Cohen: They genuinely thought — he would say it literally: "Imagine if we had someone who was three times as smart as Einstein. What would they tell us about the universe?" Put your head around that. The idea of three times as smart as Einstein is a bizarre concept. But okay — he would talk about that stuff all the time, and he had a genuine belief that we could learn things from it. It's not about money. It's about actually understanding the world. But when it didn't work, he really just kind of gave up on that vision and saw it as very, very hard to achieve — this idea of what they call artificial general intelligence, a machine smarter than a person, whatever that means.

00:31:34 Noam Cohen: The example that was kind of classic — I'm sure you know, Andrew — was chess. Right? Chess became the model for that. Everyone I know who's good at chess is so smart — how could a computer do chess? The computer eventually beats a human at chess — it then beats Garry Kasparov. And what did it mean? It meant nothing. It meant that they were calculating fast. It had nothing to do with insight. And it was that recognition that chess isn't even really a surrogate for intelligence. What is intelligence? Something that's human. So all of this kind of blew their minds, and they retreated. In some sense you could see the story as a loss of idealism or innocence: machines are not going to save us. That was — I hope that was roughly the point I was getting at.

00:32:17 Noam Cohen: So what we're seeing now with AI is not that. To me, the first thing is: AI is a theft of knowledge. That's how this works. I can't believe we as a society allowed this. I pitched a story a couple of years ago. As it was happening, I had a friend who was at a publishing house and told him: "Go to ChatGPT and look up a poem, and it's entirely printed there. Did you even know that, or do you care?" Like, copyright is meaningless. They hoovered up all of civilization.

00:32:48 Noam Cohen: Why were they allowed to do that? We have a government, and it does not care, does not protect what people created. I don't know how to explain it, Andrew. This is like a theft of our civilization.

00:33:01 Noam Cohen: So what they do with it — okay, we can talk about the huge environmental cost — but fundamentally it is a bad project. What was interesting to me is that the other thing you saw about the McCarthy-Minsky approach was that they genuinely thought they were creating little smarter people. They were going to be like children. They were going to study children. I remember McCarthy — it's in the book — he was so frustrated: "How can a four-year-old tie their shoelaces and a robot can't?" Like, what does that even mean? So they were just frustrated. And I think you would see that also in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is very influenced by Minsky — where they turn off HAL because he's become evil, and he goes back in time and starts singing "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do." He's going back to being a child. It's this myth that they were creating a new being. What the ChatGPT kind of AI — or Claude — is doing is just hoovering up all of our knowledge and replicating it. It's just so different.

00:34:06 Noam Cohen: It's not like a new being. It's just — I don't know — a takeover.

00:34:11 Andrew Keen: It certainly brings new meaning and context to your title, The Know-It-Alls. It seems even more true today.

00:34:17 Noam Cohen: It does.

00:34:18 Andrew Keen: In our conversation ten years ago, Noam, we talked about how to fix things. You talked about small-scale internet, local internet. We often heard that kind of thing. Is that still relevant? Have you given up now — in these ten years, as these companies have become larger and larger, more and more powerful, and the government, as you've noted, has stepped back to allow these people to do whatever they like? Have you given up on trying to reform the internet? Have we lost it?

00:34:48 Noam Cohen: No. I mean, again — you're pointing out that I'm maybe congenitally optimistic. I look at the election of Mamdani. What I'm trying to say is there are certain trends that are really good. You're out in California — I look from Brooklyn with admiration at what California is trying to do, if it succeeds. The billionaire's wealth tax. That is a hugely good thing, because it's not just taking taxes to support noble goals like health care — it's actually trying to reduce wealth inequality, which in and of itself is good. I'm just not a believer that more growth, if it's so unequal, is good. It's distorting, as we've learned. Musk has too much wealth, and we need to claw that back. So that's one really good thing.

00:35:31 Noam Cohen: And you look at what's going on in Australia — banning social media phone use for kids under 16 — another huge thing. The one thing I see as positive — and maybe I'm wrong — is that I don't think the Democratic Party can nominate someone who is Silicon Valley-friendly or neutral. And to be clear, Kamala Harris was that. Her brother-in-law had these ties to Uber. She was not going to shake up Silicon Valley — and that's what's so absurd, that these people—

00:36:03 Andrew Keen: He's very senior at Uber.

00:36:05 Noam Cohen: Yeah. Exactly. So she was not going to shake up Silicon Valley. And that is — you can't have a system where it's "give everything to Silicon Valley" on the Republican side, and "we can work with these billionaires, nudge them in the right direction" on the Democratic side. It needs to be two parties where one says "we need to claw this stuff back" and the other says "we're going to let them run the world" — and have it out.

00:36:29 Noam Cohen: And so I think this next election is going to be so vital. You look at Mamdani in New York — he ran against the wealthy, had so much against him, but it didn't matter. He had the people on his side. So I don't know. What do you think of what's going on in California? Does that give you hope or not?

00:36:48 Andrew Keen: Oh, finally. No. You'll have to interview me on this, but this is a Know-It-Alls conversation. From what you're saying, there is no reform apart from nationalizing the internet. Is that what you're arguing now — something that maybe you didn't put in The Know-It-Alls back in 2016, 2017 when you wrote and published it? Is that how you've changed your mind? That the only way the internet and digital society can be reformed is by nationalizing not just the technology but these companies — these massive trillion-, multi-trillion-dollar companies that now dominate our lives? Do we need nationalization?

00:37:35 Noam Cohen: I do think things like AI and social media are utilities, and they do need to be nationalized. And you're probably right, Andrew, in saying that this has become clearer. Maybe I've had my class consciousness raised more. I do think it's interesting — obviously the other model would be to break them up, have more competition. And I was listening to Ezra Klein — another esteemed podcaster — who had a conversation about this, and he was saying, "I've got to be honest: I worry about breaking them up because their goals are so evil. Who wants more competition between Snapchat and Instagram over how to proceed?" And I heard that and thought — wow. You're basically saying these companies are inherently doing bad things. Our only hope is to have them be senescent monopolies that are just happy doing a mediocre job and not coming up with innovative ways of manipulating us. That's kind of an acknowledgment that they really shouldn't exist.

00:38:33 Noam Cohen: And so, yeah — could regulation work? Could breaking them up work? I don't know. I do think fundamentally we need a major reorientation. And what are we going to do with people worth a trillion dollars? How is that stable? It doesn't make any sense. So yes — there shouldn't be billionaires. Call me a communist or a nationalist. I guess I didn't link it in the original book because the inequality hadn't reached such extremes. Elon Musk was not a major figure in our minds. There were stories about it even then, but he wasn't this thing to rival a government.

00:39:15 Noam Cohen: So that has changed. And as — what was it — John Maynard Keynes or someone said: when the facts change, my opinions change. What do you do? The facts have gotten much more dire. We have much more need for solutions that are—

00:39:32 Andrew Keen: Well, there we have it. The Know-It-Alls—

00:39:35 Noam Cohen: —Two Point Oh.

00:39:35 Andrew Keen: Two Point Oh. It's out again. A wonderfully interesting conversation. More — I think I wouldn't say pessimistic, perhaps more realistic — from Noam Cohen. He's seen the last ten years. He doesn't like it. Maybe we'll entitle this show: "Noam: There Shouldn't Be Billionaires." Thank you so much.

00:39:58 Noam Cohen: I'll take it. Thank you, Andrew. It's great talking. Always great questions. Appreciate it.