Keen On America
News & Politics
About
Nobody asks sharper or more impertinent questions than Andrew Keen. In KEEN ON, Andrew cross-examines the world’s smartest people on politics, economics, history, the environment, and tech. If you want to make sense of our complex world, check out the daily questions and the answers on KEEN ON. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best-known technology and politics broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running show How To Fix Democracy and the author of four critically acclaimed books about the future, including the international bestselling CULT OF THE AMATEUR. Keen On is free to listen to and will remain so. If you want to stay up-to-date on new episodes and support the show, please subscribe to Andrew Keen’s Substack. Paid subscribers will soon be able to access exclusive content from our new series Keen On America – keenon.substack.com
Episodes
- Don’t Use the F-Word: David Ost on Why the Red Pill, Not Fascism, Demystifies the Far Right
“Fascism is the term that is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary political discussions. We can talk about right-wing populism — but the type of politics they share with classic fascism is what I call red pill politics.” — David Ost Plea…
- Don't Retire, Rewire: Michael Clinton's Longevity Nation
“Retirement is a false construct created a hundred years ago by the government. It was basically created when Social Security was born. Prior to that, people worked until they died — because they didn’t live as long.” — Michael Clinton At…
- How to Watch the World Cup Like a Genius: Nick Greene on Why the Best Team Doesn’t Always Win
“Soccer matches are poorly designed experiments — you don’t necessarily find out which team was better. But any soccer fan will tell you that. Oftentimes, the better team does not win.” — Nick Greene, via a NASA scientist On June 11, the W…
- Can Keith Teare Convince Jonathan Rauch That AI Is Benign? That Was the Week, Special Edition
“The dangers are human, not AI. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what the AI does itself. In fact, even the idea that there is such a thing as the AI in itself is a mistake.” — Keith Teare I’m in Korea this week. So rathe…
- Athens vs Sparta: Adrian Goldsworthy on the Rivalry That Made the West
In this episode, classical scholar Adrian Goldsworthy explores the rivalry between Athens and Sparta, as detailed in his book. He draws parallels between ancient geopolitical issues, such as alliance structures and supply chain vulnerabili…
- Sometimes Fixed Sometimes Fickle: Audun Dahl on Why Our Moral Judgements Are Always in Flux
Psychologist Audun Dahl explains that human morality is neither fixed nor fickle, but exists in a state of flux. He identifies two types of moral change: situational and historical, and notes that moral concern emerges intrinsically in chi…
- From SEAL Sniper to Puddle Jumper: Brandon Webb on How to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids
Brandon Webb discusses his transition from Navy SEAL sniper instructor to fatherhood, applying principles of performance psychology to raise confident and joyful children. His book, "Puddle Jumpers," outlines a parenting philosophy of high…
- The Sweatshop of the Meritocracy: Dylan Gottlieb on How the Yuppies Conquered America
In "The Sweatshop of the Meritocracy," Dylan Gottlieb explores the social history of the "Yuppie" and argues that this professional class, which came of age in the Reagan years, fundamentally reshaped the American economy, cities, and poli…
- Where Are the Firefighters? Jonathan Vigliotti on How Los Angeles Was Left to Burn
The Palisades Fire in Los Angeles started on January 7, 2025, with no firefighters initially present and no organized evacuation, leading residents to combat the flames themselves. This event mirrors the earlier Camp Fire in Paradise, Cali…
- What Would You Do With the Last 19 Minutes of Your Life? Vincent Yu on an Apocalypse that Fizzled
“They’re all me. Every single one. I see them almost as if they’re inoculated on various petri dishes, and the petri dishes are all put into this pressure-cooker situation — that of a missile alert.” — Vincent Yu So what would you do with…
- A Nation of Strangers: Ece Temelkuran on Rebuilding Home in a Homeless World
“We’re losing home on so many different levels. Physically. Politically. Morally. And after AI, spiritually — because language, our spiritual home, is taken away from us. We now have to share it with an unhuman entity.” — Ece Temelkuran Do…
- That Sounds Incredibly Boring: Keith Teare's Vision of our Jobless AI Future
“You can’t be confident about human decision-making. You can be confident on the potential of technology. Humans are quite capable of making both wrong and bad decisions.” — Keith Teare Is a jobless AI future really something to celebrate?…
- Hong Kong Burning: Simon Elegant on the 2019 Protests
“It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I think perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” — Simon Elegant on being ‘eliminated’ by the Washington Post Hong…
- Is London Really Falling? Bethanne Patrick on Patrick Radden Keefe, Freya India and the Collapse of Book Reviewing
“If criticism isn’t going to be written by one human mind, what else is it for? Criticism done by AI means nothing.” — Bethanne Patrick Is London really falling? Perhaps. This week on Keen On America , everything seems to be falling. There…
- Never Trust a Handsome Soldier: Becky Holmes on the Past, Present and Future of Fraud
“Fraud makes up between 40 and 50 percent of all crime in the UK. Police resource dedicated to fraud: 1 percent. No country is giving fraud the attention it deserves.” — Becky Holmes Was Shakespeare a fraud? Possibly, says Becky Holmes , t…
- The Mysterious Mr Murdaugh: James Lasdun on Why a Father Annihilated His Son
“Justice may have been served, but the human element of the story didn’t seem to add up.” — James Lasdun In March 2023, Alex Murdaugh — wealthy scion of a South Carolina prosecutorial dynasty — was found guilty of murdering his wife Maggie…
- Why History Keeps Happening: Patrick Wyman on Human Failure and Success in Building Civilizations,
“Every single person that we meet was both the endpoint of thousands of years that brought them there, and the midpoint of some other process, and was the beginning of something else entirely. Think of yourselves as the middle and the begi…
- How Politicians Broke Our World: Ian Shapiro on Raising Ourselves Up After the Fall
“The current crisis was far from inevitable. Politicians made consistently bad choices. In doing so, they fostered a crisis of confidence in political institutions, empowered anti-system candidates, and produced a new Cold War as dangerous…
- Why the Future of Europe Is Wales: Glyn Morgan on the Rise and Fall of American Europe
“Post-war Europe is essentially an American protectorate. Europeans don’t like to admit that. They only came to realize just how dependent they were on the United States in 2025, when Trump basically leveraged US security and forced Europe…
- Make Hungary (and America) Boring Again: Marc Loustau on Why Orbán Lost and How to Defeat Trump
“Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone actually threatened his plan, he just couldn’t imagine it. And that person got more than 55%…
- Do We Really Want a No-Hands Job From Silicon Valley? Who Holds the Power in the Age of AGI
“Anyone that’s properly using AI now knows that you tell it what you want, it gives you a plan, carries out the work, and you judge and tweak. You’re not a passive victim — you’re an active user with outcomes in mind.” — Keith Teare Do we…
- May Day, May Day: Jason Pack on the Unhappy War in Iran We All Want to Ignore
“Trump has no strategy and no endgame. No amount of success in tactics will win. No military campaign has ever been won solely from the air.” — Jason Pack Happy May Day! Today’s papers are leading with stories about Obamacare, a Gaza floti…
- God Looks After Fools, Drunks and the United States: John Steele Gordon on How Information Technology United America
“Nobody has ever made money selling America short. We’re an extraordinary country.” — John Steele Gordon To honor America’s semiquincentennial birthday, the Wall Street Journal has been celebrating the most impactful American inventions of…
- We Know You Can Pay a Million: Anja Shortland Illuminates the Dark Screen of Ransomware
“It’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses are the ransom. The damage to the car is fifty to seventy-five billion dollars a year.” — Anja Shortland Cybercrime is booming. Ransomware attacks — where criminal gan…
- The Deadliest of Plagues? Gary Slutkin on Violence as Our Most Contagious Disease
“Violence has been misdiagnosed. And there’s a misdiagnosis that has caused us to not be able to control it as we could.” — Dr. Gary Slutkin Human violence appears ubiquitous. In Iran. In Gaza. In Ukraine. In Sudan. In American cities and…
- How Iraq Turned Some American Soldiers into Monsters: Helen Benedict on the Unintended Consequences of War
America is once again at war. Helen Benedict is one of our most distinguished writers on the moral consequences of war. Her new novel, The Soldier’s House , is set in the aftermath of the Iraq war. But it could, equally, be about the after…
- The Too Many Führers Problem: Steven J. Ross on the History of American Neo-Nazism
“All these groups from 1945 on said: we can resist any hate group in America, even the Ku Klux Klan, as long as we take them on one at a time. But our great fear is if these right-wing groups figure out a way to communicate with one anothe…
- The Truth Is Paywalled and the Lies Are Free: Brewster Kahle on the Internet of Forgetting
“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free.” — Current Affairs editor, quoted by Brewster Kahle The internet, we were promised, would remember everything. Rather than memory, however, it is now most distinguished by its digital forgetf…
- Are White Men Really Smarter Than Everybody Else? Steve Phillips on Who Actually Runs America
“White men are 29 percent of the population but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all money managed by money managers. Is that because they’re smarter? Or is it because there is…
- Adulting: The Week That AI Finally Grew Up
“Sam Altman’s best case scenario is that abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but it also exacerbates inequality. That was his favorite outcome.” — Keith Teare This week’s editorial from Keith Teare , publisher of the Tha…
- A Terrible, Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South
“The burdens of slavery did crush some people. They elicited outright armed rebellion from others. And between those two extremes, there’s all manner of response. But black culture was what most historians say it was: rich, semiautonomous…
- Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong: Peter Wehner on Trump's Unholy War
“They weren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side.” — Peter Wehner on Hegseth and Trump According to Peter Wehner , something has gone terribly wrong in America. And that something…
- The Revolutionary Center: Adrian Wooldridge on the Lost Genius of Liberalism
“Liberalism was founded in the middle of the eighteenth century as a revolutionary philosophy — a philosophy that tried to subvert the old world. That set of beliefs has continued to be radical and revolutionary. When liberalism fell into…
- How to Be a Dissident: Gal Beckerman on Why Pessimism Is the Most Important Human Quality
“Pessimism is not fatalism. Fatalism is the belief that things will always necessarily be worse. Pessimism is the belief that things will probably get worse. Within that ‘probably,’ it opens up space for action.” — Gal Beckerman In the fir…
- The Eleventh Commandment: Jamie Metzl and GPT-5 Write a New Moral Code for Humanity
“These technologies are morally agnostic. They could be the best things ever and the worst things ever, and the determinant is us.” — Jamie Metzl Two summers ago, Jamie Metzl gave a talk on AI and spirituality at the Chautauqua Institution…
- Friending the Machine: Victoria Hetherington on How to Fall in Love with Your Bot
“I felt sad after every interview. Because it’s not real. These AI are able to elicit a very convincing illusion of empathy — even love. But it’s fake. And these people are alone.” — Victoria Hetherington One night in 2023, the developers…
- Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous
“Let’s just say it out loud,” Keith Teare , publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, says. “AI is not dangerous.” Not all of you will agree. I’m certainly not so sure. But the gruff Yorkshireman is convinced that AI can only benefit…
- Read Fifty Books a Year: Deborah Kenny on Nurturing a Well-Educated Child
“A mark of an intelligent person is humility. If you have the right amount of humility, then you’re seeking out knowledge from others rather than thinking you’re going to invent something new. It’s really about executing well on ideas.” —…
- Cold Feet over the Cold War: Daniel Bessner on Why Cold War Liberalism Was Unamerican
“If God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or for liberal democracy? That actually happened. Now you would be considered an idiot or a fool to do that.”…
- From One Mad King to Another: Don Watson's Shortest History of the United States
“Politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds.” — Henry Adams, quoted by Don Watson America is celebrating its 250th anniversary this July. In The Shortest History of the United States , Australian writer Don Watson has squeezed thes…
- Agency, Agency, Agency: Sophie Haigney on the Three Things All the Worst People Want
“I find it very odd that agency is being promoted for its own sake rather than being connected to any kind of value system. Because without those things, agency looks pretty scary. Dictators are quite high agency.” — Sophie Haigney On Apri…
- How Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump Explain the World: Franklin Foer on Arsenal, the MAGA World Cup and an Unlikely Theory of Globalization
“Globalization has revived tribalism. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left predicted, it has made them stronger. Far from the triumph of capitalism that the right predicted, it has entrenched corruption.” — Franklin Foer How d…
- Biden’s Blue Authoritarianism: Stuart Schrader on How America’s Police Seized Power From Below
“You don’t have enough money to pay all the bills? Well, cut the budget for parks and rec, cut the budget for libraries, cut the budget for fixing potholes — but don’t touch the police budget.” — Stuart Schrader Fifty years ago, America’s…
- Forget Iran: Eyck Freymann on Taiwan, China, and Why America Keeps Hitting the Snooze Button,
“We keep getting wake-up calls and snoozing the alarm. Now is the time to actually get out of bed and confront this problem before it is too late.” — Eyck Freymann Forget Iran for a moment. The Hormuz crisis is a template for the bigger cr…
- Can I Say It? Jacob Mchangama on Our Global Crisis of Free Speech
“Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama The Jyllands-Posten editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade under round-the…
- Slippery Sam, Devious Dario, Honest Hassabis: Blowing Up Silicon Valley’s Cult of Personality
“The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith Teare Last night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion. I live a cou…
- The Failure of Ultra-Stability: Robert Pearl on Why American Healthcare is Quietly Rationing Us to Death
“It’s ultra stable. Health care doesn’t move. If you biopsied American health care in 2010 and again in 2026, no one could figure out which slide was which.” — Robert Pearl, MD Bad news. The patient, I’m afraid, is ultra-stable. Robert Pea…
- Between Pride and Shame: Beverly Gage Gets in her Subaru & drives Across 250 Years of American History
“You can face your history and still love your country. This is my attempt at doing that.” — Beverly Gage When the Yale Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage finished her almost nine-hundred-page biography of J. Edgar Hoover, she n…
- The Many Faces of AI: Sebastian Mallaby on Demis Hassabis and the Quest to Read God’s Mind
“Doing science is like reading the mind of God.” — Demis Hassabis, quoted in The Infinity Machine This week’s New Yorker uncomplimentary profile of OpenAI’s CEO is entitled “The Many Faces of Sam Altman.” But not all AI leaders are quite a…
- More Embarrassing Than Sex: Alex Mayyasi on Why Money Talk Makes Us So Nervous
“There are parts of the business and finance world that are invested in making these things seem intimidating and scary. We really enjoy making things more approachable.” — Alex Mayyasi What’s the last taboo? The thing that we are totally…