Keen On Democracy

“As early as 1805, you had orators getting up there — barely twenty years after American independence was recognised by Great Britain — saying: the Republic is over. We've had it. So there is a tradition of calling it the end times.” — Nathan Perl-Rosenthal It's less than three weeks until America's big birthday bash. But what exactly will be celebrated this 250th Independence Day? In The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776, the historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal read some 2,500 July 4 orations delivered in the hundred years after independence. And what he found is that most Americans didn't believe that the revolution was really over. Orators often unfavourably compared the American Revolution to the French, Spanish American, and European revolutions of 1830 and 1848. They argued bitterly about slavery. As late as the 1870s, leading orators were insisting that the revolution was unfinished because the truths of the Declaration of Independence had not yet been fully worked out. Fast forward to 2026 and Perl-Rosenthal suggests a return to the kind of sustained public dialogue that the oratorical tradition once represented. So put down your smartphones on July 4 and tell the world where America currently is and where it should go. The act of oration, Perl-Rosenthal suggests, is not just a civic act, but essential to the country's long revolutionary tradition. So happy birthday America. And many many more. Five Takeaways •       100,000 Orations: The Archive Nobody Knew About: In the first century after independence, an estimated 100,000 July 4 orations were delivered across the United States — roughly a thousand towns and villages, each holding an annual address for a hundred years. Of those, 2,500 survive in published form as pamphlets, now collected in a digital database at fourthofjulyorations.org. These are not peripheral documents. They were delivered by the most prominent public figures of their day — lawyers, clergymen, politicians — before large audiences. They are among the richest sources we have for what ordinary Americans actually thought about their revolution and their republic. •       The Revolution Was Ongoing: Most Orators Believed This Well Into the 1870s: The single most striking finding of Perl-Rosenthal's research: most orators, deep into the nineteenth century, did not regard the revolution as a completed historical event. They saw themselves not as commemorating it but as participating in it. As late as the 1870s, leading orators were insisting the revolution remained unfinished. One orator in Boston in 1870, in a debate about immigration policy and Chinese exclusion, argued that the revolution could not be over because the inalienable rights proclaimed in the Declaration had not yet been universally extended. The parallel to the immigration debates of 2026 is, Perl-Rosenthal suggests, striking. •       The Orations Were Critical, Not Triumphalist: Perl-Rosenthal went into the archive expecting, as he puts it, “rah America.” He found something quite different. Many orators compared the American Revolution unfavourably to other revolutions: to the French in the 1790s, to Spanish American revolutions in the 1810s and 1820s, to the European revolutions of 1830 and 1848. The comparisons often did not flatter America. Wealthy Bostonians giving the prestigious Boston oration — one of the oldest and most prominent in the country — would argue explicitly that the founders had failed to deal with slavery. The critical tradition was mainstream, not marginal. •       1876 as the Turning Point: When the Tradition Died: The July 4 oration tradition effectively ended after 1876. That year, Congress for the first time asked towns and cities to deliver historical rather than political orations — accounts of local history rather than arguments about the present. A tenfold increase in orations was followed by a rapid collapse of the tradition. The shift was significant: from argument to commemoration, from an ongoing political conversation to a museum piece. The practice of serious sustained public political dialogue — an hour or more, in public, about the state of the republic — has not recovered. •       A Low, Dishonest Period: What the Tradition Offers Now: Mark Lilla's blurb: “a low, dishonest period in our history. This surprisingly timely book reminds us of our responsibilities.” Perl-Rosenthal is not catastrophist about the current moment — he notes that orators were calling it the end times as early as 1805. But he is clear about what is missing: a forum for sustained public argument about where America is and where it should go. The smartphone generation, he acknowledges, is unlikely to sit through an hour-long oration. That, he suggests, is precisely the problem. About the Guest Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a professor of history, French and Italian, and law at the University of Southern California. He has been a fellow at Harvard and Cambridge. He is the author of The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776 (Basic Books, June 2, 2026), Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Belknap/Harvard), and The Age of Revolutions. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in Los Angeles and Cambridge, Massachusetts. References: •       The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776 by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal (Basic Books, June 2, 2026). •       fourthofjulyorations.org — the digital database of 2,500 published July 4 orations referenced throughout. •       Eric Foner — Perl-Rosenthal's dissertation adviser at Columbia, referenced as still giving July 4 orations in his Connecticut town. •       Mark Lilla — referenced for his blurb: “a low, dishonest period in our history. This surprisingly timely book reminds us of our responsibilities.” About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. Website

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” Oscar Wilde wrote in his 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan. This week, Elon Musk managed — not for the first time — to be simultaneously in the stars and the gutter. SpaceX's IPO valued his rocket company at $2 trillion — making Musk, officially, a trillionaire, the richest person in the world by a very large margin. The space Musk — the defiant genius who bet everything on a reusable rocket and the promise of a cosmic monopoly — is astonishing. The Wall Street Journal called the IPO a Goldilocks debut with Musk starring as the three bears. But there is another Musk — the one in the gutter, promoting white nationalist violence from his platform on X. This week Musk not only stoked the anti-immigrant riots in Belfast but reiterated his support for the English white supremacist gangster Tommy Robinson. So is this another Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella? Keith Teare, publisher of That Was the Week, certainly thinks so. While Keith is in awe of Musk's entrepreneurial genius at SpaceX, he seems to excuse Musk's support for Tommy Robinson's paramilitarism. “I'm not even sure I like him,” Keith confesses in his musings on “civilisation.” Nor do the rest of us. But I wonder if this good/bad Elon narrative is too convenient. There is an uncomfortable symbiosis between Musk's journey to SpaceX and to white nationalist violence. For all the utopian cornucopia of space, our earthly reality is one of scarce land and fear of immigrants — Trump, Tommy Robinson, and this weekend's Swiss referendum on capping its population at 10 million. For all the Muskian promise of cosmic abundance, today's Muskian politics is paranoid and exclusionary. So maybe it's not just Elon. Everyone these days is simultaneously in the gutter and looking up at the stars. Five Takeaways •       SpaceX: From El Segundo Warehouse to $2 Trillion Juggernaut: SpaceX is 25 years old. It started in a warehouse near Los Angeles, in an area with a concentration of rocket scientists. Musk bet almost all of his Tesla gains on the idea of a reusable rocket — and nearly lost everything. Then a rocket worked. Since then: iterative improvement, the rockets getting bigger and more reliable, a virtual global monopoly on delivering payloads to space, Starlink (satellite internet that actually works at gigabit speeds), and NASA subcontracting its launches. Now: $2 trillion at IPO, Musk a trillionaire. Wall-to-wall applause from the startup world. Wall-to-wall pylon on social media. Both simultaneously true. •       The Grimace vs the Applause: Andrew vs Keith's Media Diet: Keith says most commentators are grimacing at the valuation and Musk's net worth. Andrew says the serious press — the Wall Street Journal, even the New York Times — is largely applauding. The exchange reveals the media bifurcation: mainstream outlets cover the achievement; social media — X, Facebook, LinkedIn — is wall-to-wall outrage about a trillionaire in a world of growing inequality. Keith's verdict on Musk: he doesn't care whether people like him. Neither, in Keith's view, should we. You judge him not on likability but on criteria: civilization or net worth. Different criteria, different judgment. •       California and Europe: The Failure of Government: Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post: California is a case study in failed government. Andrew had Jonathan Weber on the show this week — City on the Edge, the historic dysfunctionality of San Francisco city government. Fukuyama is trying to be optimistic about Europe's liberal future. Keith's counter: Fukuyama ignores the structural problem — top-heavy EU bureaucracy that overrides countries, producing dislike of the EU in every European nation, even France, which built it. Populism, Keith argues, is not the disease. It's the symptom. The disease is twenty years of bad policy. •       Bernie Sanders Finally Had an Insight: The Sovereign Wealth Fund: Sanders has proposed a sovereign wealth fund owning 50% of all high-growth AI companies, giving every citizen ownership shares. Keith, who last week said 50% wasn't enough, this week credits it as the first genuine insight Sanders has had. The kicker: David Sacks — arch right-winger, former PayPal Mafia, Andreessen Horowitz — agreed on his podcast and said it should be 75%. Keith's observation: when David Sacks and Bernie Sanders can agree on the direction, left-right labels stop helping. The question is just how to make capitalism's gains flow to everyone. •       Planning Beats Complaint: Keith's editorial closer. The choice is not between liking Musk and hating Musk, not between celebrating SpaceX and resenting its valuation. The choice is between complaining and planning. John O'Farrell, former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, resigned and wrote an op-ed in the New York Times: “We can't let my former venture capital colleagues buy off democracy.” Gary Tan organised an Asian-American reaction against San Francisco's school board and won. Citizens who act beat citizens who complain. That's the week's lesson. That's Keith's lesson. Andrew is away next week. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       Fareed Zakaria, “How California Became a Case Study in Failed Government,” Washington Post — referenced in the conversation. •       John O'Farrell, “We Can't Let My Former Venture Capital Colleagues Buy Off Democracy,” New York Times — referenced in the conversation. •       Francis Fukuyama on the liberal vision of Europe — referenced in the conversation. •       Episode 2938: Jonathan Weber on City on the Edge — referenced at the opening. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: SpaceX IPO, ...

“Power trumps money fundamentally. And I think we've seen the extent to which these companies are very subservient to the US government. Because the US government can break them in an instant.” — Jack Watling on whether Anthropic and OpenAI can become geopolitical players In Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, an ageing Texas sheriff finds himself outmatched by a killer operating by a logic the old rules can't contain. It's the story of a man shaped by one world, and then trying to operate in an entirely different system. That's also the situation facing many statesmen today who are having to operate in an international system where the old rules no longer apply. The British military strategist Jack Watling argues in his new book Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World that we have moved from a monopolar world to one of intensely multipolar competition where adversaries can subvert all the premises of another state's strategy. These disruptive rules of the 21st century multipolar international system aren't entirely new. There are, for example, eerie similarities with the chaotically multipolar system that led to the First World War. But they are new to the leaders who have to apply them. So, for example, they are having to deal with Vladimir Putin who is locked into an eighth-century Orthodox Holy Russian Empire fantasy. Or with the impulsive and disruptive Donald Trump whose only goal, it sometimes seems, is to subvert all the rules of the old world. These are Jack Watling's new rules of power in a divided world. New statecraft for old men. Or maybe old statecraft for new men. Five Takeaways •       The Rules Are New to the Leaders, Not the World: Watling's thesis: many of the principles in his book are old, as a historian he knows that. But they are new to the current crop of political leaders because they were formed in a monopolar world where America had primacy, crises were resolved, and the status quo was restored. We are now in a period of intense interstate competition where changes are permanent — the interventions that are being made fundamentally shift the trend. That does require a new way of thinking. The tragedy is that the leaders who most need to think in new ways — Putin and Trump in particular — are the least capable of it. •       Putin vs Trump: Two Different Kinds of Fallibility: Putin has locked himself into a rubric of looking at the world through the lens of the Orthodox Holy Russian Empire — a framework that doesn't align with how anyone else reads the map. He's not a pragmatic dealmaker; when you get him to the table, as Trump found in Alaska, he starts referring back to the eighth century. Trump is very different: much less cautious, much more impulsive, skilled at making the conversation happen on his terms by disrupting everything around him. The problem with impulsive rather than deliberate is that he has no clear idea of where he wants to get to. Both fallible. Neither predictable. •       The WWI Parallel: Over By Christmas: Watling's most sobering analogy: when we look at 1914, nobody thought it would become what it became. The assumption was over by Christmas. It grew out of any capacity to control it. Today, the rules between the great powers don't reflect where power actually sits. The capacity for a conflagration — Taiwan being the obvious tipping point — to suddenly trigger a series of escalations around the world is very real. We have to be cognisant that risk is latent in the system. The outcome we most wish to avoid is also the most mutually calamitous one. That's not a guarantee it won't happen. •       Power Trumps Money — Even Trumpian Power Trumps Trumpian Money: Andrew asks whether Anthropic and OpenAI could become geopolitical players — more powerful than middle powers like Brazil or Japan. Watling's answer: no. Russian oligarchs made this mistake in the 1990s. They thought that because they had huge amounts of money and controlled valuable resources they could play geopolitically. They were very quickly subsumed by the state. These tech companies are very subservient to the US government, which can break them in an instant. The pun lands perfectly: even Trumpian power trumps Trumpian money. •       How Smaller States Build Leverage: Stay Off the Menu: One of the book's central arguments: how do smaller states shape world events when dwarfed by superpowers? Watling's answer: leverage is not just military. It is economic, informational, reputational. The UK spends billions on aircraft carriers it struggles to support at sea — a good illustration of how a state can mistake the form of power for its substance. Smaller states that build genuine leverage — through control of chokepoints, indispensable relationships, asymmetric capabilities — can stay off the menu even in a world dominated by great powers. That requires statecraft. Not just military spending. About the Guest Jack Watling is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London. He works closely with the British, Ukrainian, and American military and advises governments on security and strategy. He was formerly a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World (Pan Macmillan, 2026) and The Arms of the Future: Technology and Close Combat in the Twenty-First Century. Originally a journalist, he has contributed to Reuters, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian. References: •       Statecraft: The New Rules of Power in a Divided World by Jack Watling (Pan Macmillan, 2026). •       Episode 2935: Michael Mandelbaum on The American Way of Foreign Policy — referenced in the conversation. •       RUSI (Royal United Services Institute), Whitehall, London — Watling's institutional base. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Podcasts

“That's not the America that I believed in and that I chose to merge my fate with.” — David Frum on Trump's predatory foreign policy What does it mean to be an American? It's a slippery question — especially for those of us born outside the United States. Take, for example, David Frum, the Toronto-born writer and Presidential speechwriter who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil” in 2002. Back then, it included Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Today, one wonders if Frum, who has written two powerful jeremiads about Donald Trump, would include what he calls this "fascoid" in this exclusive club. Frum still lives part of the year on Loyalist Parkway in Ontario — a road honouring British troops fleeing the American Revolution. From his deck, what remains of the Canadian in Frum gazes across Lake Ontario at the American shore. The lights on the other side of the lake, he admits, are more glittering. But unlike Nick Carraway in his favourite American novel The Great Gatsby, David Frum isn't seduced by all that glitters. Carraway, Frum says, is an unreliable narrator impressed by the gangster glamour of Jay Gatsby. But Gatsby, like Donald Trump, Frum reminds us, is a criminal. And Gatsby, perhaps also like Trump, is at least part of the answer of what it means to be an American. Five Takeaways •       Loyalist Parkway: Canada as the Product of the American Revolution: Frum spends part of the year on Loyalist Parkway in Ontario — a road named for the refugees who fled the American Revolution northward and settled across Lake Ontario. Canada, in his telling, is the product of what he calls the American civil war that nobody calls that: the revolution of 1776. It was, for the Loyalists, a shattering loss. From his house, he looks across the lake at the American shore. There is something brighter there, more glittering, more charged. That particular Canadian vantage point — attracted to and slightly outside of America — is where Frum and Zakaria both live. •       Predatory America: Trump vs the American Tradition: America is currently at war with Iran. Trump's stated aim, in Frum's analysis, is purely predatory — to take Iran's oil, enrich the United States by impoverishing Iranians, plunder like a bandit. He compares this to Trump's Venezuela policy. Frum's verdict: that is a president against the American tradition. George W. Bush — whatever the failures of the Iraq war — went to Iraq to overthrow a dictatorship and bring a better future. He went in the name of American ideals. Trump invokes no ideals. He just wants the oil. •       The Axis of Evil Defence: Andrew raises the uncomfortable parallel: Frum coined “axis of evil,” worked for Bush, helped set the fuse for the wars that led, arguably, to the current moment. Frum's defence is structural. The Iraq war of 2003 was the continuation of a conflict that began when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. Bill Clinton nearly returned to war with Iraq in 1994 and struck it in 1998, for the same reason: Iraq's violation of the 1991 armistice. Bush was following that path. He went to war in the name of ideals. He didn't go to steal Iraq's oil. That is the American tradition, even in failure. •       Nick Carraway Is an Unreliable Narrator: The conversation's most surprising section: Frum on The Great Gatsby. Nick Carraway, Frum argues, is not a reliable guide to Gatsby's moral complexity. He is a narrator seduced by gangster glamour — who constructs moral explanations for an attraction he knows he shouldn't feel. The tell: Nick is horrified by the glamour one night, then thrilled the next morning to fly in Gatsby's private seaplane. Gatsby is a criminal. And Gatsby is, for Fitzgerald, a symbol of America: a self-invented person with a fabricated backstory, living on bootlegging and organised crime, staring across the water at a green light he can never reach. •       Looking Across the Lake: The Canadian Analyst of American Life: Frum's closing meditation: there is something about knowing America from the inside, but there is also something valuable about the critical distance of the outsider. He looks across Lake Ontario at the American shore from which the Loyalists fled — the shore they looked back at because there was something magical on the other side. Fareed Zakaria looks across the Atlantic from India. Both naturalized citizens brought to America by an idea of what it was. Both rethinking that idea now. Frum's plan for July 4: sitting on his deck in Ontario, looking across the water, wishing well to American democracy. About the Guest David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the host of The David Frum Show. He was a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush in 2001–2002. He is the author of Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic (HarperCollins, 2018) and Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy (HarperCollins, 2020). He lives in Washington, D.C. and Wellington, Ontario. He is working on a memoir. References: •       The David Frum Show — Frum's show at The Atlantic, where his interview with Fareed Zakaria is referenced at the opening. •       The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — the central text of the conversation's second half. •       Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic by David Frum (HarperCollins, 2018). •       Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy by David Frum (HarperCollins, 2020). •       Loyalist Parkway, Ontario — the road where Frum lives part of the year, named for the refugees from the American Revolution. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“The same creative and political forces that gave rise to [San Francisco's] boom nearly engineered its collapse.” — Jonathan Weber In Hitchcock's Vertigo, the quintessential San Francisco movie, the villain points to an old painting of the city and tells Jimmy Stewart that San Francisco has changed. The real city has been lost, he says. Somebody has stolen San Francisco's soul. The veteran tech journalist Jonathan Weber is the latest writer to search for that soul. In City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco, Weber bemoans the disappearance of the real San Francisco — the city not just of the Beats and the Counterculture but also of ordinary teachers and policemen. We've had thirty years of boom, bust, and Big Tech. The ordinary folks of San Francisco have been replaced by a new class of tech bros. In 1992, just 2% of San Franciscans worked in tech. By 2019 it was 35%. As a longtime San Franciscan, Weber had a front-row seat on the dot-com mania, the rise of social media, Uber and Airbnb, the pandemic's great emptying of downtown, and now the AI boom driven by the San Francisco-based Anthropic and OpenAI. In City on the Edge, Weber argues that the same creative and political forces that gave rise to the boom — the counterculture's anarchic spirit, the city's love affair with eccentricity, the tech industry's utopian self-belief — also engineered its near-collapse. Digital vertigo, so to speak. Once again somebody has stolen San Francisco's soul. Five Takeaways •       From 2% to 35%: The Numbers Behind the Transformation: In 1992, just 2% of San Francisco workers were in tech. By 2019 it was 35%. The book traces how this happened: a city economically troubled in the early 1990s, still reeling from AIDS and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, with its manufacturing base gone and its corporate headquarters thinning out. Into this vacuum came a group of free-thinking technologists immersed in the city's creative counterculture. They invented the contemporary internet. What followed was one of the most rapid urban transformations in American history. •       The Cacophony Society and the Founding of Burning Man: Before the tech boom, San Francisco in the early 1990s had a remarkable underground culture. Weber writes about the Cacophony Society — the group of anarchic free spirits who effectively founded the Burning Man festival. The Cacophony Society emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s through various evolutions — Situationist pranks, urban exploration, radical creativity. Burning Man began as their annual trip to the Black Rock Desert. The spirit of that founding: go somewhere, build something, be someone different, leave no trace. That spirit was the soul of the city too. •       The City of Nostalgia: Always Believing Yesterday Was Better: Weber takes his Vertigo reference seriously. San Francisco is structurally a city of nostalgia — people arrive with a fixed idea of what the city is, and it inevitably becomes something different. The gap between the idea and the reality generates permanent mourning. This is not unique to San Francisco — Trump has built a presidency on the idea that things were better in the 1950s — but it is intensified here by the height of the hopes people bring. The city means something bigger than itself. That is both its greatest asset and its permanent wound. •       The AI Boom and the Coming IPO Earthquake: The current AI boom is, in Weber's reading, likely to be the largest yet. OpenAI and Anthropic are both based in the city. When those IPOs happen, San Francisco real estate — already rising 25–50% in some neighbourhoods, Andrew notes — will go, in Weber's words, “really, really crazy again.” Hundreds of thousands of millionaires will be created overnight. The city is gradually becoming uniformly wealthy. Some of the old tensions may be less intense for that reason. But Weber does not think the cycles are over. The current boom will bust, as all booms do. What comes next is the question. •       Burning Man, the Internet, and the Future of Cities: Weber ends the book at Burning Man. His closing observation: when the internet arrived on the playa, Burning Man lost the sense that it was a separate world — a place where you could be a different person, because nothing from your regular life could reach you. Now everyone has a phone. The privacy is gone. The sense of separation is gone. For cities: part of the power of cities is that they bring people together, and good things arise from that friction. But if technology no longer requires you to be in the same place, cities become less essential. What is the future of the city in the age of technology? Weber doesn't have a tidy answer. Neither does anyone else. About the Guest Jonathan Weber is a veteran technology journalist and the author of City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco (Atria Books, June 9, 2026). He was the founding editor-in-chief of The Industry Standard, former editor-in-chief of the San Francisco Standard, and covered the technology industry for the Los Angeles Times. He lives in San Francisco. References: •       City on the Edge: Technology, Politics, and the Fight for the Soul of San Francisco by Jonathan Weber (Atria Books, June 9, 2026). •       David Talbot, Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love — referenced in the conversation; Weber's recommended companion read on 1970s San Francisco. •       Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance — referenced in the closing exchange. •       Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem — the opening epigraph to Weber's book, referenced in the conversation. •       Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo (1958) — Andrew's reference; the film's own meditation on San Francisco as a city of nostalgia. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstack

“I never knew, and I was a bright kid. I didn't know who the mayor of New York was, but I could tell you the names of all the mafia guys on the corner.” — Vincent Coppola So we finally found a Coppola for the show. No, not Francis Ford. But somebody just as cool and even more authentic. The longtime Newsweek reporter Vincent Coppola grew up in Brooklyn three subway stops from Manhattan, but never went there until he was a teenager, nor even visited Central Park until his twenties. Coppola's version of Brooklyn, a teeming Italian ghetto squeezed between the banks of the polluted Gowanus Canal, no longer exists. Except in his exquisitely rendered new memoir, Gowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood, which has the most delicious story about an Easter pie recipe you'll ever read. The Brooklyn of Vinnie's childhood was intact, insular, cut off from everywhere more than three stops away. It had its own government — the Mafia; its own religion — the Catholic Church; its own poisoned geography — the Gowanus Canal. A world inside a world. He didn't know who the mayor of New York was, but he knew the name of every wise guy on every street corner. To a kid, Gowanus was a magical place. The grown Vinnie (now called Vincent), having crossed his own Rubicon to attend Columbia journalism school, describes it as a “toxic snow globe.” Brooklyn über alles. Or, more authentically, al primo posto. Especially now, when only a real Coppola can resurrect it. Five Takeaways •       A Toxic Snow Globe: Cut Off Three Stops from Manhattan: Coppola grew up in an Italian enclave on the Gowanus Canal — a waterway that was, unbeknownst to its residents, one of the most polluted in America. The community was so insular that Coppola — a bright, bookish kid — never went to Manhattan until he was a teenager, never visited Central Park until he was in his twenties, though he was three subway stops away. He knew the names of all the Mafia guys on the corner. He did not know who the mayor of New York was. A toxic snow globe: its own rules, its own government, its own religion. Intact and entirely cut off from the rest of the world. •       The Mafia as Shadow Government: The Mafia was not background colour in Coppola's childhood. It was the actual government. Police from the 78th Precinct pulled up to the social club on Sundays; officers walked in and walked out with brown paper bags full of cash. Squad cars ferried a hitman — the bodyguard of Carmine Persico — as if they were taxis. This corrupted any childlike innocence about institutions. The stereotype of the nice policeman, the honest cop, the beloved priest: none of them applied. Because they were poor, nobody cared. Nobody cared about the canal being polluted until real estate people came in. •       The Predatory Priest and the Code of Silence: A local priest molested altar boys for decades, including Coppola's best friend. Nobody in the community knew. Coppola's observation: if the Mafia had known, they would have killed that man. It would have been that simple. Two oppressive codes of silence — the Mafia's omertà and the Church's own silence — operated in parallel. One protected criminals who were also community pillars. The other protected a predator. The community was too poor, too preoccupied, too isolated to see what was happening in front of their eyes. •       The Easter Pie Recipe: A Story About Secrets and Mothers: One of the great set pieces of the book. Coppola was obsessed throughout his life with a specific Easter pastry — pizza di grano, a grain pie — that the old neighbourhood women made and would not share the recipe for. He worked for Newsweek, had access to chefs everywhere, could not reproduce it. At his mother's funeral, an old neighbour pressed a piece of paper into his hand. Weeks later he found it in his jacket pocket and opened it. Not cash — the recipe. Written in Italian. Beginning: “under a full moon.” It was a hundred years old. He wasn't going to be baking under full moons. •       The Ghost Town: A Million-Dollar Desert: Coppola returned to Gowanus three weeks before the interview, invited to speak at a public library. His neighbourhood was blooming with skyscrapers and condominiums. And it was dead silent. When he grew up, the streets were teeming — children playing hopscotch, women gossiping on chairs outside, music, grilling on the corner, betting. He came back to a million-dollar ghost town. It broke his heart. The people he grew up with had been driven out — priced out of the place where they belonged. That is the elegy the book is writing. He hopes he preserved the best of that world. About the Guest Vincent Coppola is a journalist and the author of six books. A former reporter at Newsweek, he has written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Men's Journal, and Atlanta magazine. He is a 1977 honours graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His essay on his mother's battle with cancer won the William Allen White Gold Medal. He is the author of Gowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood (Henry Holt, June 9, 2026). He lives in Savannah, Georgia. References: •       Gowanus Crossing: A Brooklyn Boyhood by Vincent Coppola (Henry Holt, June 9, 2026). •       Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes — the publisher's comparison: “Frank McCourt's gimlet eye with the exuberant menace of a Scorsese movie.” •       Carmine Persico — the mafioso boss referenced in the conversation; his bodyguard is a character in the book. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: the Brooklyn of Whole Foods vs the Brooklyn of the Gowanus Canal (01:20) - An Italian village plucked from the south of Italy and dropped in Brooklyn (02:04) - Vince, did you ever really leave? (02:27) - Stage four cancer: the trigger for the memoir (03:11) - The Gowanus C...

“The hyperreal is the real. The surreal is the real in The United States. We've reached that point. The absurd is the real. And so that's what I was trying to capture in the book.” — Ben Fountain Our absurdist-in-chief wants a $250 banknote with his face on it. But the satirist Ben Fountain gives the President something even more valuable. In his new novel Rasputin Swims the Potomac, Fountain delivers something quite priceless: a book that Trump deserves. In Fountain's novel, a sitting president, running for a third term, enlists a world champion professional wrestler, Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, to help secure his re-election. Born Patrick Walsh Strickland in Buffalo, New York, Rasputin served in special forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, spent six years in a monastery, became fluent in Russian, and claims to be a real Russian monk. Evangelicals start defecting to Rasputin. A pandemic of “weeping sickness” sweeps the nation. It's almost as unbelievable as a sitting President wanting a $250 banknote glowing with his orange face. Fountain's parallels with late Tsarist Russia are hard to miss — the chasmic wealth inequality, the impossible get-rich schemes, the quack religions, the gilded decadence, the dying social classes, the mad politicians. It's scary stuff. Fountain says that we should even be careful taking his summer novel to the beach. Rather than Jaws-dropping, Rasputin Swims the Potomac, he warns, might bite us back. Maybe we should put Ben Fountain's face on that $250 bill. Five Takeaways •       The Hyperreal Is the Real: America Has Beaten Its Satirists: When Fountain sat down to write the book in early 2023, he was thinking about the blurring of the line between reality and fantasy in American life. Trump, throughout his career, has blurred that line to masterful effect. Fountain's question: what would be the next step on that continuum? His answer: professional wrestling — famously fake, scripted, and yet real, happening in real flesh and blood. Suppose a wrestler ran for president as his wrestling persona, with the fake baked in and everyone knowing it's fake. Suppose the country buys it. Because the hyperreal is the real. The surreal is the real. America has already reached that point. •       Why Wrestling, Not Politics: Jesse Ventura — “Jesse the Body” — ran for governor of Minnesota and won. But he ran as Jesse Ventura himself. Fountain's innovation: a wrestler who runs as his or her wrestling persona, with the character fully intact. Rasputin — born Patrick Walsh Strickland in Buffalo, special forces veteran, six years in a Russian monastery, world champion wrestler in Japan, legally changed name — never breaks character. He is the historical Rasputin, back from the dead, a holy man of the Russian Orthodox Church. Evangelicals start defecting to him because he's speaking their language. The fake is the real. •       Late Tsarist Russia and Contemporary America: Striking Parallels: Fountain read three or four biographies of the historical Rasputin. The deeper he got, the more striking the parallels. Late Tsarist Russia: extreme wealth inequality, get-rich schemes everywhere in St Petersburg and Moscow, quack religions and spiritualists plying their trade, extreme decadence among the upper classes. A social structure that could not be maintained. People's emotional responses to chaos. Fountain: not just in material terms but in terms of how people were feeling, the parallels to the United States are really striking. Gogol, not Baudrillard, is his natural ancestor. •       The Satirist as Realist: Andrew raises Baudrillard and hyper-realism. Fountain's response: he is a realist down to his bones. Whatever he does, it has to be anchored in some fundamental sense in the real world, as he understands it. American life has become such that the surreal is the real, the comical is the real, the absurd is the real. He didn't set out to write satire. He set out to write the story as genuinely and authentically as he could. The question of genre came afterwards, asked by other people. He is just a realist. It's just that American reality is Rasputin swimming the Potomac. •       Living in the Belly of the Beast: Dallas and North Carolina: Fountain lived in Dallas, Texas for forty-one years — what he calls the most American city of all, better and worse. In Dallas, the free market and capitalism are so much a part of daily consciousness that there's very little awareness that there might be different ways of living. Fountain: it's very conservative and very conservative. For someone to the left of Gandhi, his assumptions are always being challenged. He has to think about how he's thinking about things. That productive discomfort — not Brooklyn, not Los Angeles — is where this book comes from. About the Guest Ben Fountain is the author of Rasputin Swims the Potomac (Flatiron Books, June 9, 2026), Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist), Beautiful Country Burn Again, and Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (PEN/Hemingway Award). He is the recipient of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, and a Whiting Writers Award. He lives in New Bern, North Carolina. References: •       Rasputin Swims the Potomac by Ben Fountain (Flatiron Books, June 9, 2026). Named a Best Book of Summer by the LA Times, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Boston Globe, Newsday, and New York Post. •       Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (2012) — the predecessor referenced throughout. •       Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution by Ben Fountain (2018) — his 2016 election nonfiction, referenced in the conversation. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (...

“The United States has conducted an unusually ideological foreign policy, an unusually economic foreign policy, and an unusually democratic foreign policy. These three features have been present from the eighteenth century to the present.” — Michael Mandelbaum Is there an “American way” of foreign policy? Does that make the now almost 250 year-old republic unique? Michael Mandelbaum, author of The American Way of Foreign Policy: Ideology, Economics, Democracy, says yes and no. America is exceptional. But that exceptionalism is unexceptional. Mandelbaum says that American foreign policy over the last 250 years has been unusually ideological, economic, and democratic. Foreign policy realists say great powers all behave the same way. Mandelbaum, as an idealist, says: not America. Uniquely in world history, he says, America has pursued its principles overseas without prioritising its political, economic, or military self-interest. And yet The American Way of Foreign Policy isn't triumphalist. Mandelbaum opposed NATO expansion in the 1990s. He was in the anti-Vietnam marches as a Harvard student in the Sixties. Nor is he partial to demonstrations of overt nationalism. His July 4 plans, for example, are to watch baseball. As a lucky man in a fortunate Republic, what better way to celebrate 250 years of independence than to enjoy its national pastime? Five Takeaways •       Three Distinctive Features: Ideological, Economic, Democratic: Mandelbaum's thesis: American foreign policy has differed from the foreign policies of other countries in three enduring ways. First, ideological: political ideas and the effort to spread them have been more important to America than to other powers. Second, economic: America has used economic instruments to achieve political goals — trade, aid, sanctions — rather than the imperial model of using political power for economic gain. Third, democratic: American public opinion has always had greater influence over foreign policy than in other countries. For almost all other countries, for most of their histories, foreign policy was the preserve of a small elite. That was never true of the United States. •       Idealist and Realist: Both Apply: Andrew invokes Kenneth Waltz and the realist tradition, which argues that great powers always behave the same way regardless of their self-image. Mandelbaum's response: realism fits American foreign policy up to a point. America has fought twelve significant wars and has not been oblivious to military power. But it has also conducted idealist foreign policies that cannot be explained by realism — policies driven by its liberal political ideas rather than its material interests. The distinctive feature of American foreign policy is not that it ignores realism, but that it goes beyond realism in ways that other great powers have not. •       NATO Expansion: Mandelbaum's One Big Regret: In the 1990s, Mandelbaum was opposed to the expansion of NATO, alongside George Kennan — one of the architects of Cold War containment. His fear: it would do a lot to alienate Russia. He acknowledges that he cannot blame NATO expansion explicitly for the Russian attack on Ukraine. But he notes that the fear was reasonable and that, as he puts it, alas, it has come to pass. He does not think that the Russian attack was inevitable or that NATO caused it. But he does think the warning was worth issuing and that it deserved more serious consideration than it received. •       Vietnam and the Antiwar Movement: Was It Counterproductive? As a graduate student at Harvard under Stanley Hoffmann, Mandelbaum was opposed to Vietnam and took part in marches. He has since revised his views — not on whether Vietnam was a mistake (it was) but on whether the antiwar movement had any positive effect on the course of policy. His conclusion: it probably didn't, and may have been perverse. Nixon used the antiwar movement as a foil. The war ended because most Americans decided it was costing too much in American lives — not because the goals were wrong. That was the democratic aspect of American foreign policy in action. •       Israel, Gaza, and the American Way: Andrew suggests that Israel has been able to push America around, and that this is “un-American.” Mandelbaum pushes back firmly. America supports Israel for two reasons: strategic advantage (Israel as a bulwark against threats to American interests in the Middle East) and shared values (Israel is the only country in the region that shares American political values). When interests diverged — the 1980s anti-aircraft arms sale, Obama's Iran deal — America went its own way. The reverse is also true: America doesn't have the capacity to push Israel around in Gaza, because for Israel these are matters of national survival. About the Guest Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He previously taught at Harvard, Columbia, and the US Naval Academy, and was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a BA from Yale, an MA from King's College Cambridge, and a PhD from Harvard. He is the author or co-author of thirteen books, including The American Way of Foreign Policy: Ideology, Economics, Democracy (Oxford University Press, April 2026) and The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower. He lives in the Washington DC suburbs. References: •       The American Way of Foreign Policy: Ideology, Economics, Democracy by Michael Mandelbaum (Oxford University Press, April 2026). •       The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower by Michael Mandelbaum — referenced in the conversation. •       Kenneth Waltz and the realist school of international relations — referenced at the opening. •       Ernst Haas and the idealist school — referenced at the opening; Andrew's teachers at Berkeley. •       George Kennan — referenced as Mandelbaum's fellow opponent of NATO expansion in the 1990s. •       Stanley Hoffmann — Mandelbaum's Harvard PhD supervisor, referenced at the close. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly ...

“Objects in museums have to come from somewhere. The stories of how they came to be in those collections often involve laws being broken, unethical behaviour, and extreme violence.” — Matthew Campbell Imagine a gay Jeffrey Epstein who set up shop in Thailand. Only rather than peddling young girls, he traded in bodybuilders and priceless antiquities. That's the story of the British émigré Douglas Latchford, the subject of Matthew Campbell's new book The Man Who Stole the Gods. It's the true story of a man who was born in the last days of the British Raj, made his fortune in Bangkok, became the world's leading dealer of Khmer antiquities, and was indicted for criminal conspiracy in 2019. Campbell's tale is simultaneously a crime story, a history of Cambodia, and a parable about the relationship between Western wealth and the world's cultural heritage. The Khmer Empire, which dominated Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, produced one of the finest civilisations of the medieval world. Angkor in the twelfth century had 750,000 people — making it ten times the size of London. After the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, every Khmer site in Cambodia was systematically looted. The pieces went to the Metropolitan Museum, to Christie's, to private American collectors. Latchford was the central conduit. The Jeffrey Epstein enabler. Like Epstein, Latchford got away with it for years. Unlike Epstein, he died a free man, even chalking up a 2020 New York Times obituary as a Khmer antiquities expert. Five Takeaways •       Douglas Latchford: The British Jeffrey Epstein of Asian Art: Born in the last days of the British Raj, educated in the UK, Latchford made his fortune in Bangkok and became the world's leading dealer of Southeast Asian antiquities — selling pieces for millions of dollars to the Metropolitan Museum, Christie's, and wealthy American collectors. He presented himself as an expert and connoisseur. He gave to universities and lent to exhibitions. He received a glowing obituary in the New York Times in August 2020. The dark side: he was, Campbell shows, the central organiser of a decades-long criminal conspiracy to loot Cambodia's cultural heritage. He was indicted in 2019 but died before he could be extradited. •       The Khmer Empire: 750,000 People When London Had 40,000: The Khmer Empire dominated Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, ruling directly or indirectly over what is now Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and parts of Malaysia. Its capital, Angkor, had 750,000 people in the twelfth century — when London had 40,000 at the absolute outside. The Khmer built extraordinary temple cities — Angkor Wat is only the most famous — and produced remarkable stone and bronze sculpture. Every single Khmer site in Cambodia was systematically looted. The pieces all went somewhere. A great many came to the West. •       The Vietnam War, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Conditions for Genocide: The Vietnam War is central to Campbell's story. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran partly through Cambodia, making Cambodia of great interest to Nixon and Kissinger. Beginning in 1968, large-scale American bombing of Cambodia — ostensibly aimed at destroying a supposed communist headquarters that, Campbell notes, never actually existed — helped destabilise the country and created the conditions in which the Khmer Rouge could emerge. The Khmer Rouge ideology: Pol Pot believed civilisation needed not to be reformed but erased. A blank slate. Rebuild from zero. •       The Museum World's Complicity: The Sackler Parallel: The Metropolitan Museum of Art features prominently in Campbell's account. Objects in museums have to come from somewhere — the works in the Met did not originate in New York. How they came to be in those collections often involved laws being broken, unethical behaviour, and extreme violence. Campbell draws a parallel with Patrick Radden Keefe's account of the Sacklers: the more investigative journalists look at the wealthy donors and private collectors associated with major cultural institutions, the more troubling the stories that emerge. The museum world has a serious provenance problem. •       The Happy Ending: Repatriation and the National Museum in Phnom Penh: Latchford was indicted in 2019 for criminal conspiracy. He died in 2020, in a monastery in Northern Thailand, before he could be extradited. He never went to trial. But the recovery effort — a remarkable collaboration between Cambodia and the US Department of Justice — tracked down hundreds of stolen objects through meticulous detective work. The pieces have been returned to Cambodia. The National Museum in Phnom Penh now has so many repatriated objects that it is running out of room and may need to build a new wing. As Campbell says: that's a good problem to have. About the Guest Matthew Campbell is an award-winning investigative journalist at Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, June 2, 2026) and co-author, with Kit Chellel, of Dead in the Water (a Book of the Year in The Economist, Financial Times, and The Times; called a ‘masterpiece' by the New York Times). A 2025 Jonathan Logan Family Foundation Fellow at New America, Campbell has reported from more than 25 countries. He lives in Singapore. References: •       The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy by Matthew Campbell (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, June 2, 2026). •       Dead in the Water by Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel (2022) — the preceding book, referenced at the opening. •       Patrick Radden Keefe, Empire of Pain — referenced as a parallel account of museum world complicity. •       The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York — a central institution in the Latchford network. •       Cambodia's National Museum, Phnom Penh — the destination of the repatriated objects. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the...

“AI represents successful capitalism. What we have alongside that is unsuccessful government. Government has no plan — left or right.” — Keith Teare It's the 82nd anniversary of D-Day. On June 6, 1944, there was an unambiguous end game — the defeat of Nazi Germany. But today, end games are more controversial, especially in terms of harnessing the AI revolution to benefit everyone. For Keith Teare, publisher of That Was the Week, the AI end game requires an “Institute of the Future.” Everyone from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to Elon Musk and Sam Altman should hammer out a plan to harness AI for the benefit of society. Keith offers the internet governance organisation ICANN as a model for this institute. It will shape the future for all of our benefit, he promises. So a D-Day for AI? I'm sceptical of this type of Brave New World-style technocracy. Firstly, Sanders, Warren, Musk and Altman agree on very little. And Musk and Altman hate each other. I'm also dubious that AI will or can benefit everyone. As Keith notes, some professions — teachers, for example — will be decimated by AI. Where I agree with Keith, however, is that we need a new politics for this new age. Political parties, rather than institutes, of the future. Innovation rather than ICANN. Five Takeaways •       The Anthropic IPO Slip — and Why SpaceX Now Looks Small: Anthropic accidentally filed for its IPO this week — what the New York Times described as a slip. The terms of SpaceX's unconventional $75 billion IPO were also revealed. Keith's observation: SpaceX now looks small by comparison. He tried to buy SpaceX shares this week through his brokerage and expects to get none — the demand will be way bigger than the supply, and the price will go up from the offering. San Francisco real estate is already feeling the Cerebras effect: 800 employees are now millionaires. The three big IPOs — Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX — will compound that on a much larger scale. •       Successful Capitalism, Unsuccessful Government: Keith's framework for the week: AI is capitalism working. Resources are directed to money-making opportunities via the profit motive, which coincides with innovation and, at least in the short term, creates lots of jobs. That is successful capitalism. Alongside it: unsuccessful government. The Trump administration went from hands-off to requiring all AI models to be submitted for a 30-day assessment before launch — in the same week. No plan. No endgame. Everyone has an opinion. Nobody states what outcome they want. •       Keith's PhD: Why Capitalism Is Never Static: Andrew challenges Keith's authority to pronounce on these matters. Keith reveals: he has a PhD from the University of Kent in Canterbury — on why capitalism is never static, and why new entrants always eclipse what went before. Andrew: that was the 1970s, Keith. Does a fifty-year-old PhD give you authority? Keith: it's a useless criticism. You could say that to anyone about anything. The exchange is revealing: the argument is not about credentials but about frameworks. And Keith's framework — capitalism as dynamic, government as static — has at least the virtue of consistency. •       Credit to Bernie and Warren: At Least They're Having the Conversation: Andrew expects Keith to trash Bernie Sanders (50% government ownership of AI companies) and Elizabeth Warren (high taxation of AI profits). Keith surprises him: at least they're having the conversation. His criticism is not that they're wrong to want wealth distribution but that their framing — tax, centralise, spend — is unattractive to most people and captured by the interests of the old economy: teachers' unions, trade unions, legacy coalitions that can't think freely about a future without teachers as they currently exist. •       An ICANN for AI: Keith's One Concrete Prescription: Andrew pushes Keith for one concrete thing politicians should do this year. Keith's answer: create an Institute for the Future. Bring Musk, Altman, Amodei, Sanders, Warren, and everyone else to the table with a clear mandate — define the future you want, agree actual outcomes, seek governmental authority to implement them. His model: ICANN, the global internet governance body, which disagrees constantly and still makes decisions. Andrew's verdict: Keith wants to create an ICANN for society. Interesting idea. History's jury is out. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. He holds a PhD from the University of Kent. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       Noah Smith, “We Need Liberal Nationalism to Come Back” — referenced in the conversation. •       The Economist, “American Capitalism Has Taken an Apocalyptic Turn” — referenced in the conversation. •       Ben Thompson on Google becoming a capital company; John Battelle on Google reinventing itself from search to data infrastructure — both referenced. •       ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, Keith's model for AI governance. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: D-Day, June 6, and the Anthropic IPO slip (02:26) - What is the endgame? AI is no longer just a tech story (03:46) - Successful capitalism, unsuccessful government (04:49) - Atomisation and the absence of proper conversation (05:33) - Andrew challenges Keith's authority (06:42) - Keith's PhD: capitalism is never static (07:13) - Bernie Sanders: 50% ownership of AI companies (07:30) - At least they're having the conversation (07:55) - The old economy framing: tax, centralise, spend (08:25) - What gives Keith the authority? (09:00) - Jack Clark and the call to slow down (10:00) - The Trump administration at war with itself (15:00) - Andrew Yang and universal capital distribution (20:00) - ...

“He didn't just say it, he meant it, he felt it — and the combination of the power guy, the ruthless power guy, and the profound idealist was fascinating, and also hard for him.” — Evan Thomas on Bobby Kennedy Who was the greatest riddle in 20th century American political life? Judging from the ever-expanding library of Bobby biographies, Robert Francis Kennedy ranks very high on that list. Indeed, according to Evan Thomas, one of RFK's most acclaimed biographers, this third Kennedy son is, indeed, the most sphinx-like riddle in 20th century America. In his classic 2000 biography, Robert Kennedy: His Life, Thomas unravels the good and the bad Bobby. But, rather than presenting parallel narratives, his portrait treats the Machiavellian and the idealist as the same riddle. Raised by his father to exercise raw power, RFK discovered that mid-century America wasn't living up to its own ideals. The contradiction of the ruthless Kennedy machine politician and the profound idealist was what continues to make him so intriguing to Americans of every political stripe. Bobby concurred with Churchill's dictum that courage is the greatest virtue because, without it, you can't have the other virtues. So he lived a life of ridiculous physical and moral courage — taking insane risks that would terrify ordinary mortals. And, of course, his most insanely courageous act was his last — running for President in 1968 knowing that he was likely to be assassinated. Where have you gone, Bobby Kennedy? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Five Takeaways •       The Central Paradox: Power Guy and Idealist in the Same Man: Bobby Kennedy was raised by his father to be the henchman of the Kennedy machine — doing the dirty stuff in Boston politics to keep Jack floating free and grand. He was pretty ruthless about it. At the same time, in mid-century America, he discovered that the country was not living up to its own constitution, and he wanted to make things right, and genuinely felt it. The combination of the machine politician and the profound idealist was what made him so endlessly fascinating. It also made him hard for himself: a man permanently at war with his own nature. •       Courage: The Only Word That Mattered: No word was more important to Bobby Kennedy than courage. Churchill: it's the greatest virtue, because without it you can't have the others. Kennedy believed in physical courage, emotional courage, mental courage. He was a runty little kid at the wrong end of the dinner table — Jack and Joe and Kick at the golden end with the father, Bobby with the nuns and the mum. He got kicked out of prep school for cheating. He was not the athlete, not the golden one. Real courage comes from suffering. It took courage just to overcome being the loser. That was the source. •       Making Up for Missing the War: Physical and Moral Courage: Bobby missed World War Two, basically. He got in at the very end and ended up scraping the deck of a destroyer in the Caribbean, far from combat. His brother Jack is a war hero on steroids — PT boat cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, rescues his men, written about in The New Yorker and Reader's Digest. Joe volunteers for a secret dangerous mission to replicate Jack's glory and dies. Pretty high bar of courage. Bobby spends the rest of his life making up for it — swimming the Colorado River, climbing Mount Kennedy in the Yukon, jumping overboard off the coast of Maine to save Jack's jacket. Sometimes stunts. But increasingly, moral courage — which is the greater thing. •       The Mob, Joe Kennedy, and the Beehive: When Bobby starts poking around in the mob as a Senate aide, J. Edgar Hoover is only too happy to point out: keep going here, you know where it's going to end up. With Joe Kennedy. Bobby's investigation of Giancana and Frank Sinatra starts grazing against his own father. Thomas's reading: whether conscious or unconscious, there is an element of rebellion. Bobby, appointed henchman, doing the dirty stuff for pop, resenting it, starts poking the beehive that might expose him. It never fully landed. But it started. And Hoover used it to blackmail the Kennedys. •       The Ripple of Hope, and RFK Jr. as Tragedy: Bobby's trip to South Africa — apartheid everywhere, the freedom movement barely existing, everybody in prison. His speech: every time somebody does something brave or heroic, it causes a ripple, and that gives you hope. A young Margaret Marshall, later Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, was in the audience. He gave us hope where there was none. That is the ghost Andrew went looking for at Hickory Hill and didn't find. The contrast with RFK Jr. is, for Thomas, simply sad. Poignant. His own family has disavowed him. Caroline Kennedy made a broadcast accusing him of crimes. The idea of Robert Kennedy Jr. is tragic. About the Guest Evan Thomas is an American writer and historian. He was Washington bureau chief of Newsweek for ten years and a writer and editor there for thirty-three years. He is the author of ten books, including Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon & Schuster, 2000), Being Nixon, Road to Surrender, and, with Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men. He has taught at Harvard and Princeton. His biography of Churchill is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in December 2026. References: •       Robert Kennedy: His Life by Evan Thomas (Simon & Schuster, 2000). •       The Wise Men by Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 1986) — referenced in the closing. •       Robert Coles — Bobby Kennedy's psychologist friend, referenced in the conversation. •       Hickory Hill, McLean, Virginia — the Kennedy family home Andrew visited on this trip to Washington DC. •       Bobby Kennedy's “Ripple of Hope” speech, University of Cape Town, South Africa, June 6, 1966. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTube

“That kind of put soccer on my radar as a sport. I saw how deeply it meant to people, in a way I didn't appreciate prior to that. And then I was in London when the World Cup began, and I saw the opening match — Argentina and Cameroon, with Cameroon winning in an upset. Just the whole spectacle of it gave me an appreciation for the game.” — Brian Bunk, on Ireland, Italia '90, and the moment everything changed Not long now. Only seven days until the World Cup begins. Just enough time to read Brian D. Bunk's new The Shortest History of Soccer: From Ancient Kicking Games to the World's Most Popular Sport. History isn't Bunk with Brian. He looks a bit like Elton John, which is appropriate given that old Rocket Man was chairman of Watford and bankrolled the tiny English club to almost winning the league. Pop stars like Ed Sheeran (Ipswich) and Robert Plant (Wolves) love football, Bunk notes. Probably because it reminds them of where they came from. Bunk's thesis is that soccer's global dominance is not accidental. Born in the industrial communities of nineteenth-century England, the game gave workers a new identity, new evidence of their collective power, proof they'll never walk alone. That same logic explains why middle-aged men all over America religiously gather at their local bars to watch English teams with strange names like Ipswich Town and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Such is religion in our globalised post-industrial age. “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that,” the great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly quipped. That's the shortest of short histories of football. What the working-class Shankly meant was that it gives us social meaning — which is, indeed, more historically significant than the life or death of a single individual. Or even God. Football saves our souls, Brian Bunk concurs with Bill Shankly. Enjoy the World Cup. Five Takeaways •       Soccer Was Born in Industrial Communities for a Reason: The game emerged in industrial Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century not by accident but because industrialisation had shattered traditional community life. Mass migration to cities, technological disruption, the loss of familiar rhythms — all created a need for new kinds of identity and belonging. Soccer filled that need. It gave factory workers a team to follow, a ground to gather at, a shared identity that transcended ethnic and class lines. Bunk's argument: this community function is baked into the game itself, which is why it has replicated across every culture it has touched. •       Why Americans Love the Premier League: Bunk identifies the 1990s as the pivotal decade for American soccer. The 1994 World Cup on home soil. The women's World Cup. The formation of MLS. The arrival of the FIFA video game. The Premier League broadcasting deals with ESPN and Fox. All of these combined and snowballed. Add to that the NFL owners investing in English clubs, the celebrity ownership wave (Ryan Reynolds, Elton John), and the cultural footprint of shows like Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham. The result: a generation of Americans for whom following the Premier League is a primary source of community. •       Maradona: All the Contradictions of Football in One Man: Asked which historical match he would most want to attend, Bunk chooses Mexico City, June 1986: Argentina vs England. Not for the Hand of God goal — which was cheating — but for the second goal, the one where Maradona picked up the ball in his own half, went past five English players, and scored what is generally considered the greatest goal in the history of the game. Bryon Butler's BBC radio commentary: “turning like a little eel.” Andrew's verdict: if any single figure captures all the genius, joy, turbulence, and tragedy of football, it is Maradona. •       The World Cup Returns to North America: In seven days, the 2026 FIFA World Cup begins in the United States, Canada, and Mexico — the first time the tournament has returned to North America since the USA hosted in 1994. The timing of Bunk's book is deliberate. Soccer is more popular in America than at any point in history, and the home World Cup is the event that could push it into the first tier of American sports culture. The Premier League, MLS, women's soccer, and now the World Cup: the game's US footprint is larger than it has ever been. •       Andrew's Game: Tottenham vs Benfica, April 1962: Andrew's own fantasy match, offered unprompted at the end: the first leg of the 1962 European Cup semi-final between Tottenham Hotspur and Benfica at the Est00e1dio da Luz in Lisbon on March 20, 1962, with Eusebio and Jimmy Greaves on the same pitch. Spurs lost 320131 on the night, went out 420132 on aggregate. Two clear penalties not given. Andrew's conclusion: had Spurs won that match, the history of European football — and possibly his own life — would have been different. He notes that he has a son, and that he should have called him Jimmy. About the Guest Brian D. Bunk is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches courses on world history, modern Europe, and the global history of soccer. He is the author of The Shortest History of Soccer: From Ancient Kicking Games to the World's Most Popular Sport (The Experiment, June 2026), Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2025), and From Football to Soccer: The Early History of the Beautiful Game in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2021). He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. References: •       The Shortest History of Soccer by Brian D. Bunk (The Experiment, June 2026). •       Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States by Brian D. Bunk (University of Illinois Press, 2025). •       Argentina vs England, FIFA World Cup quarter-final, Azteca Stadium, Mexico City, June 22, 1986 — the Hand of God game, referenced as Bunk's fantasy match. •       Tottenham Hotspur vs Benfica, European Cup semi-final, Estádio da Luz, Lisbon, April 1962 — Andrew's fantasy match. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On A...

“Get the f*** out of your house and join an organisation. Groups are how we make movements. They're how we make political and social change. They're how we transform. Nobody does anything of value alone.” — Yotam Marom If you're feeling politically powerless, you're not alone. Yotam Marom — full-time organiser, facilitator and veteran of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter — has spent his adult life on the front lines of progressive movements. His new book, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond the Politics of Powerlessness, explains why progressive movements keep losing — and what to do about it. Marom's diagnosis is that the left has developed a “politics of powerlessness” — an attachment to purity, insularity, and performing resistance rather than building power. In contrast, the right understands that people's pain is real, and channelling it into something organised is the only route to political change. The liberal model of showing up every few years, voting, and then going home is insufficient. And the left too often sabotages itself by dodging conflict and choosing righteousness over action. His prescription is to “get the f*** out of your house” and join an organisation. Groups are how societies change and where people find meaning, purpose, and connection. So go on the streets. Turn up the volume. Your days will be louder and more meaningful. Five Takeaways •       The Politics of Powerlessness: Why the Left Keeps Losing: Progressive and left movements have repeatedly put enormous numbers of people into the streets — and repeatedly failed to convert that energy into durable political power. Marom's explanation: a politics of powerlessness has taken hold. It prizes purity over winning, insularity over coalition, righteousness over effectiveness. It avoids conflict because conflict feels dangerous. It avoids leadership because leadership feels hierarchical. The result is movements that are morally serious and politically weak. The right, by contrast, is very good at taking pain and converting it into organised power. •       The Right Channels Pain. The Left Needs to Do the Same: Trump's most effective political move, in Marom's analysis: he tells people that they're being screwed — and he's right about that. Then he continues to screw them. But the left cannot simply counter this with policy arguments. The people who voted for Trump are not wrong that the system has failed them. Income inequality is growing. Politicians don't listen. There is no leverage. Marom's argument: the left needs its own version of this — speaking directly to people's pain and offering a genuine path to power. Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani know how to do this. They're not the only ones. •       Liberal Democracy Is Necessary but Insufficient: Voting, electoral participation, civic engagement — these are important and necessary parts of a healthy democratic society. But they are not sufficient to make big political change. The right understands this and has been exploiting it for a decade: the failure of the liberal establishment to deliver for ordinary people is the fuel for right-wing populism. Marom's answer is not to abandon liberal democracy but to supplement it with the kind of mass social movement that has historically produced the big political changes: the labour movement, the civil rights movement, the suffragette movement. •       Conflict and Leadership Are Good, Actually: Two of the left's most self-destructive habits, in Marom's experience as a facilitator: avoiding conflict and avoiding leadership. Groups that learn to face conflict with dignity and care come out with better strategies. Leaders who accept the responsibility of leadership — who are willing to be visible, to take risks, to be wrong in public — give movements something to coalesce around. The fetishisation of horizontalism and the terror of hierarchy have kept many progressive organisations small, fractured, and ineffective. Leadership is not domination. It is responsibility. •       Get the F*** Out of Your House: Marom's prescription for individuals who feel powerless: join an organisation. Not a party, not a mailing list — an actual organisation where people gather, disagree, decide things together, and act collectively. It doesn't have to be a national political organisation. It can be a union, a community organisation, a neighbourhood group, a mutual aid network. The point is the group. Groups are where political change happens. They are also where people find meaning, purpose, and connection. Nobody does anything of value alone. Not political change, and not a good life. About the Guest Yotam Marom is a full-time organiser and facilitator based in Brooklyn, New York. He has been active in movements since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, played leadership roles at Occupy Wall Street, and co-founded IfNotNow and the Wildfire Project. He is the author of For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond the Politics of Powerlessness (The New Press, June 2, 2026). He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children. References: •       For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond the Politics of Powerlessness by Yotam Marom (The New Press, June 2, 2026). •       Episode 2919: David Masciotra on A Country of Strangers — referenced at the opening. •       Episode 2903: Ece Temelkuran on Nation of Strangers — referenced at the opening. •       Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848–1849 — referenced in the closing exchange. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:  

“Be optimistic about the boom, but don't buy the stock.” — Liaquat Ahamed on the AI bubble Yesterday, Alexander Starritt argued that the 2008 financial crash ruined the lives of his generation. But compared with the great crash of 1873, 2008 looks like a tremor. The Pulitzer Prize-winning economic historian Liaquat Ahamed has a new book out today, 1873, which presents this 19th century economic crash as the first truly global financial crisis. In 1870, three globalising infrastructure projects were completed in quick succession: the US transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Trans-India railroad linking Bombay to Calcutta. Into this newly integrated global economy, the Franco-Prussian War injected a trillion-dollar-equivalent indemnity that the Rothschilds helped France raise — and the resulting dramatic capital flows produced three simultaneous bubbles in Berlin, Vienna, and New York. A French journalist named Jules Verne worked out that for the first time, you could circumnavigate the globe in less than eighty days. Around the world in one global economic crisis. The lesson for posterity, Ahamed warns, is that the authorities made a catastrophic error by doubling down on the gold standard, producing decades of deflation that triggered an anti-semitic and anti-globalist populism, and ultimately led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. So what does that tell us about today's AI boom, which is about to be rocketed by three trillion-dollar IPOs? Be optimistic about the boom, the wise Ahamed says. But don't buy the stock. Five Takeaways •       Jules Verne and the First Global Economy: In 1870, three iconic infrastructure projects were completed: the US transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Trans-India railroad linking Bombay to Calcutta. A French newspaper noted that for the first time, a traveller could circle the globe in less than eighty days. Jules Verne read the article and found his next novel. The point for Ahamed: this moment marked the creation of a genuinely integrated global economy for the first time in history. And with global integration came the first global financial crisis. The boom of the 1850s and 1860s was not irrational. It reflected real economic growth. The crash came from what happened next. •       The Trillion-Dollar Indemnity and Three Simultaneous Bubbles: Under the peace treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War, France was required to pay Germany an indemnity worth the equivalent of $1.2 trillion in today's money. With the help of the Rothschilds, France raised this sum in six months. The resulting capital injection caused the Berlin and Vienna equity markets to rise 200–300 percent. Simultaneously, European capital fleeing the war flowed into US railroad construction, inflating that bubble further. A third bubble formed in foreign borrowing on the London capital markets, as money chased yield in countries that should never have been given credit. Three bubbles, one crash. •       The Wrong Lesson from 1873: Gold Standard Orthodoxy: When the crash came, the authorities made a catastrophic error: they concluded that the gold standard had worked because the 1850s and 1860s boom had happened under it. They failed to see that the crash itself was partly produced by the gold standard's rigidities. The resulting decade of deflation crushed farmers, debtors, and ordinary people across Europe and America, fuelling anti-globalist populism. The same orthodoxy — applied by Montagu Norman and others in the 1920s — helped cause the Great Depression. We always fight the last war. •       The Rothschilds: Scapegoated Despite Being Innocent: The Rothschilds were at the centre of the 1873 boom as the world's leading bond underwriters. Presciently, they kept a low profile during the most speculative phase of the bubble. When the crash came, they were viciously scapegoated — part of the wave of antisemitism that swept Europe in the wake of the depression. Ahamed's irony: the Rothschilds were blamed for a crisis they had been cautious enough to partially avoid. The story of 1873 is, among other things, a story of how financial panic turns into political persecution. •       The AI Boom: Be Optimistic, Don't Buy the Stock: Andrew's final question: should we buy Anthropic and OpenAI when they go public? Ahamed's answer, via the lesson of every bubble from 1873 to 1929 to the dot-com era: bull markets are usually driven by real fundamentals — until the last phase, when they become untethered. The 1920s were rational until 1927; the dot-com era was rational until 1997. The dilemma: the last irrational phase may still produce 40 percent gains. Ahamed's advice: be optimistic about the AI boom. It reflects real productivity growth. But don't buy the stock. About the Guest Liaquat Ahamed is a financial historian and investment manager. He graduated with degrees in economics from Cambridge and Harvard, worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and had a twenty-five-year career as a professional investment manager based in London and New York before turning to writing. He is the author of 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World (Penguin Press, June 2, 2026) and Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Gold Medal, and the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year). He lives in Washington, D.C. References: •       1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press, June 2, 2026). •       Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press, 2009) — the Pulitzer Prize-winning predecessor, referenced throughout. •       Episode 2928: Alexander Starritt on Drayton and Mackenzie — directly referenced at the opening; the 2008 companion. •       James Surowiecki, “Why Stocks Keep Going Up,” The Atlantic — referenced in the final exchange. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstack

“To explain the lives of people living in this moment, to look at the historical forces that are shaping all of us, you have to look at business and technology. In our period, what is it that's shaping us? I would suggest it's the long fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and the technology revolution that's been happening in California.” — Alexander Starritt How to write a novel about our times? For Alexander Starritt, it means juxtaposing friendship and ambition alongside the grand historical forces of the age. Just as George Eliot did in Middlemarch. Whereas for Eliot, those forces were the 1832 Reform Acts and the industrial revolution, Starritt's forces are the 2008 financial crisis and the digital revolution. His novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, follows two ambitious Gen X'ers through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The 2008 crash, Starritt says, ruined the lives of many of his generation. Rather than being in a Gramscian interregnum, our brave new 21st century world is already visible. But in contrast with many progressive critics of our neo-liberalism age, Starritt isn't apocalyptic about the future. Think of Drayton and Mackenzie as Middlemarch and McKinsey. Revolutions will come and go, but, for Alexander Starritt, friendship and ambition are unchanging. Five Takeaways •       The First Novel on the FT Business Book List in 15 Years: The Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year longlist typically features books on China, AI, and tech giants. In 2025, for the first time in fifteen years, it included a novel. Starritt's reading of why: there's a gap. The literary and cultural worlds have become so estranged from the business world that very few writers are even attempting to write seriously about the forces that actually shape people's lives. That gap, he says, says as much about the cultural moment as any quality the book itself might have. •       George Eliot's Method: Historical Forces as the Engine of Fiction: When George Eliot wrote Middlemarch, the historical forces she was dramatising were the Reform Acts and the industrial revolution. Starritt's equivalent: the 2008 financial crisis and the California tech revolution. His method is Eliot's — use a closely observed relationship (in his case, a male friendship rather than a marriage) as the engine through which the reader experiences history. The friendship gives the historical canvas an emotional charge. The historical canvas gives the friendship its full weight. Neither works without the other. •       Male Friendship: The Most Important Relationship Nobody Writes About: We've all read too many books and seen too many films about romantic and sexual relationships. Starritt's observation: there is another type of relationship — friendship — that is incredibly important to almost all of us, and that gets almost no literary attention. Drayton and Mackenzie is his attempt to take it seriously. The friendship between James (straight-lined, disciplined, brilliant) and Roland (impulsive, self-sabotaging, charming) evolves from incomprehension to something described by the Financial Times as “unbreakable” — and the reviewer admitted that by the end, their vision wasn't the clearest. •       The Post-Liberal World Is Already Here: Everyone quotes Gramsci's interregnum — the old world is dying, the new one hasn't been born yet. Starritt's counter: the new world has already been born. You can see it everywhere across the Western world. British jobs for British workers. Reshoring manufacturing. Keeping out undesirable foreigners. There is, he notes, quite a lot of consensus about these things, even if the discourse around them is contested. The post-liberal world is already here. The question is not whether it will arrive but what we do with it. •       European Optimism: The Separation From America May Be for Europe's Own Good: Starritt's closing optimism, which he acknowledges may not be welcome news for American listeners: the painful separation from America that America is forcing upon Europe is probably, in the long run, for Europe's own good. Rather than relying on the White House, Europeans can take responsibility for themselves. David Runciman's idea: democracy needs to be renewed every generation. The external pressure of China, Russia, and an America that no longer wants to help may be the forcing function that produces that renewal. Maybe we can get some agency back. About the Guest Alexander Starritt is a Scottish novelist and entrepreneur. He was born in 1985 and is the author of Drayton and Mackenzie (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2, 2026), We Germans (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize), and The Beast (a 2017 Spectator book of the year). He was a founding team member of the policy platform Apolitical. He lives in London. References: •       Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2, 2026). •       George Eliot, Middlemarch — Starritt's primary literary model, referenced explicitly. •       Adrian Wooldridge, “Bring Back the Big Business Novel,” Bloomberg — the piece referenced at the opening. •       David Runciman — referenced for his argument about democratic renewal. •       Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — the Financial Times comparison. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: the FT Business Book longlist and the first novel in 15 years (02:03) - The gap in culture: literary and business worlds estranged (02:50) - Adrian Wooldridge: bring back the big business no...

“When you're in a world that is careening out of control, where we've broken through seven of the nine safe dimensions of safe operating space that scientists have discovered, it's unrealistic in my view to focus on those little things and think that will lead to a real better outcome. What's realistic is backcasting.” — Jeremy Lent There Is An Alternative. That is the central argument of Jeremy Lent's new book, Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All. Margaret Thatcher's historically materialist TINA — THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE — was both the most seductive and disempowering message the neoliberal establishment ever produced. As long as everyone believes in the inevitability of free market capitalism, nothing will ever really change. Anti-agency is the name of agency. We just push for slightly higher carbon taxes and slightly fewer fossil fuel subsidies and give it the euphemism of “progress.” For Lent, however, this is environmental capitulation. Jeremy Lent imagines a genuinely sustainable world — one where humans have a long-term relationship with the living Earth. From that vantage point, the steps that look realistic to the incrementalists seem timid or counterproductive. He reminds us that we've broken through seven of the nine safe operating dimensions that scientists have identified for a stable Earth system. No, incrementalism isn't realism. Rather than progress, it's a trance-like slide into the apocalypse. Rather than state control or free markets, the alternative Lent introduces in Ecocivilization is the commons — Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom's third way in which humans self-organise in the collaborative ways of the natural world. It is already happening, he says, in places as far apart as Cleveland, Ohio and Jackson, Mississippi. Maggie was wrong, the Anglo-American Lent insists. TINA is bunk. THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE. Five Takeaways •       The Consensus Trance: Why Nobody Is Freaking Out: Everyone knows who's in and who's out in Washington today. Everyone knows their team's sports score. Almost nobody is aware of some of the bigger existential questions facing all of us. Lent's explanation: we have media owned by billionaires who don't benefit from people freaking out. The entire system is designed to lull people into what he calls a “consensus trance.” We broke through seven of the nine safe operating dimensions that scientists have identified for a stable Earth system. In normal times that would be front-page news every day. Instead: the news cycle moves on. •       Backcasting vs Incrementalism: The Two Realisms: There are two ways to use the word “realistic.” Realistic given the forces of destruction and oppression all around us right now: push for slightly higher taxes on the uber-wealthy, slightly fewer fossil fuel subsidies. Realistic given what a genuinely sustainable world would actually look like: start from the destination and work backwards. The first kind of realism may be taking us in the wrong direction. Lent's argument: when you're in a world careening out of control, the timid steps of incremental realism are not realistic. Backcasting is. •       The Commons: Ostrom's Third Way: The political debate of the last hundred years has been between state control and free markets. Both have failed. Lent's alternative, via Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom: the commons. Not the state owning things. Not markets extracting profit. Humans self-organising together in the way they evolved to do — collaboratively, cooperatively, with attention to the common good. Ostrom showed, empirically, that commons governance works. The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi: these are working prototypes of what Lent means. •       TINA Is the Most Disempowering Message Ever Produced: Margaret Thatcher's “there is no alternative” — shortened to TINA — is, for Lent, the central ideological achievement of neoliberalism. As long as everyone believes there is no alternative, people will just try to improve the situation that little bit and nothing will change fundamentally. Ecocivilization is Lent's counter-argument: there is an alternative. The first step is to believe it. Once you believe it, the second step is to figure out what the practical steps are to get there. The book is those practical steps. •       The Authoritarian Moment: Why People Vote for Strongmen: People drawn to authoritarian strongmen feel in their gut that the system is designed to screw them. They're right about that. They're wrong about the solution — the strongmen are offering greater inequality dressed as populism. Lent's prescription: what AOC, Bernie Sanders, Mamdani represent is the alternative — the courage to actually stand for human dignity. When things swing to one extreme, they tend to swing back. We could be surprised at the speed of change. It's already happening in local communities — islands of coherence in a sea of chaos — and it can happen at the mainstream level too. About the Guest Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker described by George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age.” He is the founder of the Deep Transformation Network and the nonprofit Liology Institute. He is the author of Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All (Melville House, May 26, 2026), The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning, and The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe. He lives in Berkeley, California. References: •       Ecocivilization: Making a World That Works for All by Jeremy Lent (Melville House, May 26, 2026). •       Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons — the Nobel Prize-winning work on commons governance referenced throughout. •       Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics — referenced in the conversation as a related framework. •       Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level — the study showing higher well-being in more equal societies, referenced by Lent. •       The Evergreen Cooperatives, Cleveland, Ohio — referenced as a working prototype of commons governance. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. Website

“I don't look to companies to be moral guides. I want them to be good companies. When you invest in the stock market, you want them to be growing fast and making profit. That's it. There's nothing more to it.” — Keith Teare If it's Saturday, it must be our weekly tech show. Before we went live, That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare told me it wasn't a big news week. He was wrong, of course (as he often is). The really BIG news this week, which Keith conveniently missed, is that Anthropic overtook OpenAI as the world's most valuable AI startup. Dario Amodei's AI startup raised $65 billion this week, putting its valuation at $900 billion, way ahead of OpenAI's last round at $730 billion. Keith says, without any proof, that they've cooked their numbers. Which makes this week's news even tastier. The more interesting story, for Keith at least, is Sam Altman's latest pivot: that humans need stakes in the AI platforms whose wealth they help create. Rather than Patagonia-style moral corporations (which Keith says would make him “throw up”), it should be the responsibility of the state or government to make capitalism more moral. But even slippery Sam got outpivoted this week by Anthropic, who sent a co-founder to Rome to do a deal with the Pope. Leo XIV's new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” is Anthropic's papal pivot. It's the smart model for value investing in the AI age. Five Takeaways •       Anthropic Tops OpenAI — But the Numbers May Be Wrong: Anthropic raised $65 billion this week at a $900 billion valuation, overtaking OpenAI's last round at $730 billion. The VCs backing it — Green Oaks, Sequoia, Altimeter, Dragoneer — are credible. Andrew's argument: they've seen the books. Keith's counter: the VCs are playing a different game. They expect two to three times their money at IPO and they'll probably get it — not because the revenue numbers are solid, but because the only way is up right now. The real test: the S-1, which requires audited accounts. Keith's prediction: the revenue numbers will look different when the SEC sees them. •       Dario's Credibility Problem — But Claude 4.8 Is Fantastic: Keith has consistently characterised Dario Amodei as “slightly juvenile” and has long been sceptical of Anthropic's public positioning. This week he cites Om Malik and the All In podcast in support of the revenue numbers critique. But he is careful to separate the man from the product: Claude 4.8, released two days ago, is “fantastic.” At SignalRank, Keith's firm, Claude rebuilt an entire agent valuation workflow in an hour that would have taken days manually. Andrew's observation: Andrew is now Anthropic's newest fan. He has replaced Spurs with Anthropic as his team. •       Altman's Pivot: From UBI to Ownership: Sam Altman has shifted his public narrative on AI and labour. Previously: UBI — universal basic income — as the answer to mass unemployment. Now: ownership. Humans need to own stakes in the AI platforms whose wealth they help generate. Not welfare. Not redistribution. Ownership. Keith's verdict: it's an interesting and significant move. More interesting than Amodei's continued fearmongering about AI devastation. Andrew notes that Altman seems to have genuinely grown up in the last two months. His tone is markedly different. •       Patagonia Capitalism Would Make Keith Throw Up: The week's interview of the week: Eric Ries on Incorruptible, arguing that great companies stay great by choosing a higher moral purpose — the Patagonia model. Keith's response: it would make him throw up. He doesn't want companies to be moral guides. He wants them to be profit machines. Moral guidance is the job of politics. And politics, he acknowledges, is massively disappointing. He does agree with Ries on one thing: Sundar Pichai, as an individual, should care about the future. But Google's job is to make money. That's it. •       Where Does Moral Guidance Come From? The Populists: Andrew's closing question: if not corporations, not politicians, not the pope — where does moral guidance come from? Keith's reluctant answer: the populists. Because the people care. They care about the future. And in the absence of politicians they can trust, they go elsewhere. Keith sees this as inevitable rather than desirable. Populism is the unintended consequence of political failure. The people filling the gap that broken institutions left. It's not a solution. It's a symptom. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       Om Malik, “The Copy and the Guru” — the post on Anthropic's revenue numbers referenced in the conversation. •       All In Podcast — referenced for the Anthropic S-1 revenue discussion. •       Episode 2921: Eric Ries on Incorruptible — the interview of the week discussed in the show. •       Episode 2915: Keith Teare on capitalism and AI — the preceding TWTW, referenced at the opening. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: ten days since the last TWTW (01:01) - The big news: Anthropic tops OpenAI at $900 billion (01:53) - Keith's reaction: both true and BS (02:22) - OpenAI is further ahead on IPO filing (03:15) - Om Malik and the revenue numbers: what does misleading mean? (03:41) - The All In podcast and Dario's credibility (04:21) - Anthropic's $65 billion raise: the VCs' game (04:42) - But Claude 4.8 is fantastic: the SignalRank story (06:16) - Dario vs Sam: who's more grown up? (07:00) - Altman's pivot: from UBI to ownership (08:00) - Keith admits he was wrong about OpenAI's dominance (09:47) - What did Keith get wrong? (10:36) - Corporate vs consumer AI dominance (15:00) - Agentic AI: the big theme in Keith's newsletter (20:00) - The pope: Leo XIV and AI (25:00) - Moral cap...

“The thirteen colonies that became the United States were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. We need to think about why some colonies rebelled and others did not.” — Sarah Pearsall Earlier today, the historian Dominic Erdozain came on the show to argue that American patriotism has the same exceptionalist Puritan roots as British imperialism. But not all historians of the American revolution would agree. Take, for example, Sarah Pearsall, author of Freedom Round the Globe, who turns 1776 inside out to present the American rebellion as a kind of world revolution. 1776 as 1917. American patriotism as an explosion of borderless humanity. Pearsall argues that 1776 was as globally significant in its revolutionary promise as 1789, 1848 or 1917. She reminds us that there were at least 26, possibly as many as 32 British colonies in existence in 1775 — in the Caribbean, in Canada, in East and West Florida. And the radical ideas that drove the Declaration of Independence — security, happiness, respect — were being asserted simultaneously all over the world. So in Edinburgh debating clubs, Caribbean sugar plantations and West African castles, the American revolution was welcomed as a global revolution. Universal rather than exceptional. The Tea Party as the Storming of the Winter Palace. Five Takeaways •       32 British Colonies, Not 13: The Forgotten Empire: People talk about the thirteen colonies as if they were all the British colonies in North America. They weren't. There were at least 26, possibly as many as 32, depending on how you count groups of islands. British colonies in the Caribbean. In Canada. In East and West Florida. Each had its own relationship to the British Empire, its own internal tensions, its own calculations about the costs and benefits of rebellion. The question Pearsall asks — why did some rebel and others not? — is the question that opens up the global story. •       The Caribbean Undermines the Slavery Thesis: There is a popular argument that the American Revolution was primarily fought to preserve slavery — that the colonists feared British abolition and revolted to protect the institution. Pearsall's counter: if this were the main driver, the Caribbean colonies would have been the first to join. They were far more dependent on slavery than the mainland colonies. They did not join. The relationship between slavery and the revolution is genuinely complicated — not simple in either direction. The Caribbean story is the evidence that demands a more nuanced account. •       From St Kitts to Kolkata: The Declaration's Global Keywords: Pearsall's organising device: she takes thirteen key words from the Declaration of Independence and finds the spark of each in a far-flung location. Security in the Six Nations cornfields of upstate New York, where it meant something very different to the Haudenosaunee than to the Philadelphia delegates. Happiness in the debating clubs of Edinburgh, where women were demanding it alongside men for the first time. Respect in the streets of Kolkata. This device lets her write about the globe without losing the Declaration as her anchor. •       Americans Were Already Thinking Globally in 1776: One of Pearsall's more surprising findings: Americans in 1776 were far more aware of global events than we tend to assume. They were reading about events in India. The Boston Tea Party is unintelligible without knowing that tea was an Asian commodity and that the East India Company was simultaneously extracting profit from Asia and from the American colonies. Colonists compared themselves explicitly to Indians under the Company's thumb. They saw the connections. The isolation of American history as a subject of study is a modern academic choice, not an eighteenth-century reality. •       Read the Declaration, Not the Constitution: Pearsall's July 4 Prescription: Andrew asks Pearsall what she'll be doing on July 4 and suggests people should read the Constitution. Pearsall gently corrects him: the Declaration of Independence. Two very different documents from very different moments. The Declaration, published on July 4, 1776, is short, bold, and reaches toward universal ideals. The Constitution, ratified in 1788, is a compromise document about how to govern. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, Pearsall's prescription: read the Declaration. The IndyCar races and the UFC match at the White House can wait. About the Guest Sarah Pearsall is a prize-winning historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution (Knopf/Penguin Random House, May 2026). She previously taught at the University of Cambridge, where she was a colleague of Christopher Clark. She grew up in the United States and lives in Baltimore, Maryland. References: •       Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution by Sarah M. S. Pearsall (Knopf/Penguin Random House, May 2026). •       Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848–1849 — referenced in the conversation; Pearsall's former Cambridge colleague and friend. •       Episode 2924: Dominic Erdozain on To Love a Country — the morning's companion episode, directly referenced. •       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — the week's America 250 series. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Erdozain this morning, Pearsall this afternoon (01:57) - A meta vantage point: turning the revolution inside out

“We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” — Randolph Bourne, via Dominic Erdozain Should Americans be proud of their country? The Anglo-American historian Dominic Erdozain thinks not. His new book, To Love a Country, argues that there's a problem with American patriotism. Americans shouldn't love their country, Erdozain says. It's not a good place. His argument is that American patriotism has the same Puritan root as British imperialism. The idea of a chosen people, a city on the hill, a nation with a special mission is a kind of moral virus. He says it infected America in the great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has provided moral cover for slavery, military aggression abroad, and the denial of rights at home. So what America needs, he argues, is a new set of foundational myths laid out by progressives like Jane Addams, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Martin Luther King Jr. This would establish a new kind of American patriotism which is forward-looking and internationalist rather than nativist or exceptionalist. Erdozain even gives Gandhi a shoutout as a model of American patriotism, although one wonders what the Indian pacifist would have made of this. So what will the Atlanta-based Erdozain be doing on July 4? Hiding under his bed, perhaps, rather than enjoying the hotdogs and fireworks. In hiding from hundreds of millions of patriotic Americans. Five Takeaways •       The Puritan Root of American Exceptionalism: The idea of America as a chosen people, a city on a hill with a special mission to the world, was not invented in America. It was inherited from English Puritanism. As it spread through the first and second great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — what some scholars call the New Englandization of America — it became the canopy under which very different kinds of people sheltered. You didn't have to be a Puritan in any theological sense. You just had to accept the premise that America was righteously exceptional. And once you accepted that, a great deal of scrutiny became unavailable. •       Nationalism Is Immune to Failure: One of Erdozain's sharpest observations, via historian Lindsey O'Rourke's work on American interventionism: nationalism can absorb any amount of failure. The defeat in Vietnam, the disaster of Iraq, the failure of Afghanistan — a certain kind of nationalism insulates itself from the lessons these events might teach. It's always someone else's fault. It's always a particular administration's failure, never the national premise. This makes exceptionalism uniquely resistant to the ordinary mechanism of democratic accountability. •       Randolph Bourne and the Patriotism of the Future: Erdozain's most original historical recovery: Randolph Bourne, a radical journalist writing during the First World War, who argued that nativism and nationalism were European imports, backward-looking and derivative. Bourne's phrase: “we must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” A patriotism faithful to the diversity of modern America — its bustling pluralism, its immigrant energy — cannot be built by looking backward to the founders. It must be built by looking forward to the founders we have not yet had. •       Alternative Founders: Addams, Douglass, Garrison, King: Erdozain proposes replacing — or at least supplementing — the canonical founders with a different cast. Jane Addams, who said the question is not what can we teach the bewildered immigrant but what can we learn from them. Frederick Douglass, who held America to account for its foundational promises. William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. Martin Luther King Jr., who went to India to learn about nonviolence from Gandhi. These are the people, Erdozain argues, who offer a patriotism adequate to the diversity and complexity of twenty-first century America. •       JFK's Strategy of Peace: The Possibility of Reinvention: Erdozain ends the book with Kennedy's strategy of peace speech at American University in June 1963 — two months before his assassination. By then, Kennedy had come to believe that the impetus for war was coming from within his own country, from his own military and CIA, not from the Soviets. His speech — conceding nothing to communism as an ideology, but immensely generous about the Russian people and about Khrushchev as a leader — is Erdozain's model for what reinvention looks like. The Bay of Pigs taught him something. By the end, he was talking about Vietnam as not America's fight. Lessons can be learned, even in office, even at the last moment. About the Guest Dominic Erdozain is a historian and writer, graduate of Oxford and Cambridge, and visiting professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author of To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America (Crown, June 2, 2026) and One Nation Under Guns. He grew up in Preston, Lancashire, supports Liverpool FC, and lives in Atlanta, Georgia. References: •       To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America by Dominic Erdozain (Crown, June 2, 2026). •       Randolph Bourne — radical journalist and critic of American nationalism during the First World War. His phrase “our American cultural tradition lies in the future” is the book's central provocation. •       Jane Addams — co-founder of Hull House, Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Referenced as an alternative founder. •       JFK's Strategy of Peace speech, American University, June 10, 1963 — the closing argument of the book. •       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — directly referenced at the opening. •       Episode 2923: Joe Cunningham on Life of the Party — directly referenced at the opening. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTube

 “I deliver it with the credibility of having won a district that Trump carried by 13 points. Not only how to speak to these voters, but how to win them back.” — Joe Cunningham Yesterday's guest was Alexandra Natapoff, co-editor of America Unfinished — a collection of essays by illustrious Harvard Law School professors grading the march toward justice in the United States over the last 250 years. America got about a C+ from this progressive clique. “Could do better” their report cards suggested. Today's guest is a very different kind of Democrat. Joe Cunningham is a lawyer and personal injury attorney in Charleston, South Carolina, a one-term US representative, and the author of Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America's Trust and How They Can Win It Back. Cunningham got his law degree at Northern Kentucky University's Salmon P. Chase College of Law. Harvard, he jokes, was his safety school. In contrast with Harvard Law professors, Cunningham's credibility is hard to dress up. He was the first Democrat to win South Carolina's 1st Congressional District in over forty years, in a seat Trump carried by 13 points. He was also the first Democrat in elected office to publicly warn against Biden seeking re-election. His diagnosis of what went wrong is that the Democratic Party abandoned kitchen-table economic issues in favour of culture wars, dismissed legitimate voter concerns as bigotry, and told people what they should care about rather than listening to what they actually cared about. The party, he argues, replaced empathy with arrogance. It's as if it's been colonized by morally prickly Harvard Law professors. Professor Cunningham gives the Dems a D+. Could do significantly better. Five Takeaways •       Winning Trump +13: The Credibility Argument: Cunningham's case for why his diagnosis should be taken seriously is not his ideology but his record. He won South Carolina's 1st Congressional District in 2018 — a heavily gerrymandered seat that Trump had carried by 13 points — making him the first Democrat to hold it in over forty years. He was also the first elected Democrat to publicly warn against Biden seeking re-election. His prescriptions don't come from a think tank or an op-ed page. They come from a man who has actually won where Democrats can't win, and lost where Democrats keep losing. •       The Party Replaced Empathy with Arrogance: Cunningham's central diagnosis: the Democratic Party stopped listening and started lecturing. It told people what they should care about — immigration wasn't an issue in West Virginia because West Virginia is far from the border. It told people the economy was fine when they couldn't afford their bills. It dismissed legitimate concerns about crime, immigration, and cultural change as bigotry rather than trying to understand them. The result: voters who felt condescended to left. The party that was founded on speaking for ordinary people no longer speaks their language. •       Big Publishing's Progressive Insularity: The book didn't get picked up by a major publisher. Cunningham was told, more or less directly, that a book this critical of the Democratic Party — of Biden, of Harris, of the party's leadership — was too much. He published it himself, through South Battery Press, named for a street in Charleston. Andrew's observation: isn't this itself evidence of what the book argues? If progressive culture controls big media and big publishing, those institutions will inevitably filter out self-criticism and reinforce the insularity that caused the problem in the first place. •       The Geriatric Oligarchy and the Technology Frontier: Cunningham uses the phrase “geriatric oligarchy” — the same phenomenon Andrew has been calling a gerontocracy — to describe Congress's inability to grapple with technology, AI, and social media. The vast majority of members of Congress cannot understand the problems that are emerging: social media preying on children, identity theft, artificially inflated prices, the environmental impact of data centres. The party needs new leaders who understand these issues. The answer to data centres is not a blanket ban — it's community-level decisions and proper regulation. •       The Party Needs Bloodletting, Not Just Rebrand: Cunningham's sharpest prescription for the Democratic Party: a coming-to-Jesus moment or genuine accountability for what led to 2024. After the debate, Democratic officials stood outside the White House claiming Biden was fine. His staff said he'd go to bed earlier, wake up later, and shorten his workday — as if this would reassure Americans. Cunningham's verdict: lessons will be repeated until they're learned. The party needs a Newsom-level confrontation — real winners and real losers — not the bloodless triangulation it currently offers. Only then can it earn back trust. About the Guest Joe Cunningham is a personal injury attorney and former US Representative from South Carolina's 1st Congressional District, the first Democrat to win that seat in nearly forty years. An attorney and ocean engineer by training, he was the Democratic nominee for Governor of South Carolina in 2022. He is the author of Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America's Trust and How They Can Win It Back (South Battery Press, May 20, 2026). He lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife Ashley and their children. References: •       Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America's Trust and How They Can Win It Back by Joe Cunningham (South Battery Press, May 20, 2026). Available at lifeofthepartybook.com. •       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — the preceding episode referenced at the opening; the Harvard Law contrast. •       Episode 2912: Michael Clinton on Longevity Nation — the gerontocracy argument directly referenced. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Natapoff's Harvard Law vs Cunningham's Charlesto...

“As long as democracy is a collective endeavour of all the people who belong to it, in some sense it can never be finished — because we are constantly bequeathing to the next generation the opportunity and the freedom to have these conversations over and over again.” — Alexandra Natapoff It's less than six weeks until America's 250th birthday. The official America 250 store is selling T-shirts while Harvard Law School is doing something slightly less commercial. 62 HLS professors have written 1,000-word essays, assembled into a single volume to be published on July 4. Entitled America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance, it's co-edited by Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law professor who spent years as a federal public defender in Baltimore. The title, of course, is borrowed from the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died in the Civil War. So is America unfinished or is it just getting started? For Natapoff and other Harvard Law School professors like this year's Pulitzer Prize-winning Jill Lepore, the answer is suitably complex. Yes and no and maybe. Everything all at once. The essays focus on 250 years of both justice and injustice in America. Perhaps the only thing all authors agree on is the central role of capitalism in the history of the United States. Follow the money, Natapoff suggests. Those dollars will transport the reader to the heart of the American story. That said, America Unfinished will certainly cost you less than a three-year Harvard Law degree. And if you wait six months, the book will be available at no cost online. So follow the money. It will take you to some unexpectedly free places. Five Takeaways •       The Gettysburg Address as the Title's Source: The book does not merely allude to Lincoln's famous speech — it reproduces it at the front, so readers can go back to the original. In the Address, Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died at Gettysburg — the work of building a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Natapoff and Charles chose this frame because it captures both the challenge and the hope: democracy is unfinished in the sense that it demands active work from every generation. It is not a gift that has been fully delivered. It is a task being handed on. •       America and Democracy Are Not the Same Thing: Andrew's challenge — you use the words interchangeably — earns a concession. Natapoff's work in criminal justice has led her to argue repeatedly that the American criminal system fails many tests of democracy: it is exclusive, inegalitarian, overly coercive, inconsistent with democratic principles. So ‘America' and ‘democracy' are not synonyms in the book. Many of the 62 essays disagree about the state of various pieces of governance. The book's inquiry is whether it is fair to call any particular piece of American legal governance a democracy — which both editors consider a compliment, and not a certainty. •       A Federal Public Defender in Baltimore: The Biography Behind the Scholarship: Before she became a law professor, Natapoff was a federal public defender in Baltimore's federal courts. Her job was to be adverse to the federal government all day every day, defending some of the most vulnerable and dispossessed people in the city against the massive resources and power of the federal apparatus. Those years shaped everything: her subsequent twenty years of scholarship on criminal courts, plea bargaining, misdemeanors, and race and inequality; her book Punishment Without Crime; and her contribution to America Unfinished. In her reading, the experience of her clients — people facing off against the federal government — is now more widely shared than it used to be. •       It's the Money, Not the Lawyers: Dan Wang's recent book Breakneck contrasts China, run by engineers, and America, run by lawyers. Natapoff's counter, via the book's economic governance essays: it's much more complicated than that. Six very different scholars who disagree about almost everything converge on a perhaps surprising answer: it's the money. Financial interests, corporate interests, the ownership class — in one way or another, they've been running America. The lawyers helped. They were part of the management scheme. But they weren't making the decisions. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. •       Molly Brady's Essay: Property Law and the Destruction of Community: Asked to pick her favourite essay without starting a fight with 61 colleagues, Natapoff flags the very last one: Professor Maureen “Molly” Brady on property law. Brady argues that property law has permitted suburban sprawl and the destruction of physical community — the kind of infrastructure that makes analog life (libraries, neighbours, public space) possible — while being profligate in its support for social media and the dispersed, thinner version of community. She exhorts us to remember how law has contributed positively to communities we are proud of, and to stand up for that vision. For Natapoff, it captures both the critical nature of this moment and why lawyering still holds out some important promise. About the Guest Alexandra Natapoff is the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, and a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School. She began her legal career as a federal public defender in Baltimore. She is the author of Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books) and Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice (NYU Press). She is co-editor, with Guy-Uriel Charles, of America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance (MIT Press, July 4, 2026). References: •       America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance, co-edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles (MIT Press, July 4, 2026). Open access from January 2027. •       Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books, 2018). •       Dan Wang, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future — referenced in the interview as the “America run by lawyers” contrast. •       Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (1863) — reproduced at the front of the book; the source of the title. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since ...

“I took it for granted that we were trying to make the world a better place. But I think in retrospect that was naïve. What kind of change? For whom? We kind of forgot to specify what the purpose of all this disruption was.” — Eric Ries In 2011, Eric Ries published The Lean Startup, a book that reflected the optimistic zeitgeist about disruptive Silicon Valley companies. Fifteen years later, in Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, Ries reflects today's totally different zeitgeist about the value of companies inside and outside Silicon Valley. Back in 2011, everybody loved tech. Ries, creator of the Lean Startup method and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, admits he was naïve in his positive view of disruptive corporations. In Incorruptible, Ries argues that corporate corruption is structural, rather than a problem of bad actors. As organisations grow (ie: become more disruptive), the systems that govern them — ownership, incentives, charters, accountability — quietly reshape behaviour. Success itself becomes a form of financial gravity, diverting companies away from their original purpose. Ries proposes that we design organisations to be incorruptible from the beginning. It's the Patagonia model. When the outdoor clothing company almost went bankrupt in the 1990s, their bank agreed to restructure their loans if they would suspend their charitable donations for a couple of years. No deal, the CEO said. The bank blinked and Patagonia remained Patagonia. Now, Ries argues, every corporation should try to emulate Patagonia and become the incorruptible corporation. We must all join Eric Ries in getting beyond the lean startup. Five Takeaways •       Corporate Corruption Is Structural, Not Ethical: For decades, we've explained corporate failures as problems of bad actors, moral weakness, or isolated scandals. Ries' argument: that story doesn't match reality. Again and again, companies founded with strong ideals drift toward short-term thinking, extractive behaviour, and mission abandonment — often despite the best intentions of people inside them. The failure is structural. As organisations grow, the systems that govern them — ownership structures, incentives, charters — quietly reshape behaviour. Success becomes financial gravity, bending companies away from their purpose. •       The Patagonia Model: Organisational Strength, Not Moral Righteousness: When Patagonia nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s due to outsourcing to poor-quality foreign factories, their lead lender agreed to restructure the loans on one condition: suspend charitable donations during the restructuring. Reasonable request — any other company would have said yes. Patagonia said no. The bank blinked. Ries' reading: this is not moral righteousness. It is organisational strength. The ability to resist external pressure and stay true to a core principle. That is what makes a company not just good but great. Also: Black Wednesday, the day of their layoffs, is still referred to by name inside the company. •       The Wrong Distinction: For-Profit vs Non-Profit: Ries argues that the distinction between for-profit and non-profit is fundamentally a tax code distinction that has come to define how we think about organisations in ways that are misleading and harmful. He proposes a reframe: if profit means the maximisation of human flourishing, then the Smithsonian is very for-profit and Philip Morris is very non-profit. This reframe changes what we should demand of governance, of accountability, of what organisations are for. It is simultaneously an economic and a political argument. •       Civic Infrastructure: The Political Dimension: Ries' book ends with a chapter on what he calls civic infrastructure — the kinds of organisations that set the rules of the road for others. He argues that the principles of incorruptible design apply not just to companies but to the institutions of governance. The darkness of the current political moment is, for him, partly a failure of organisational design. When this darkness passes, he argues, the generation that follows will have to rebuild civic infrastructure in the way the generation that survived the Depression built the institutions that governed the second half of the twentieth century. •       The Anakin/Padamé Problem: Ries' Mea Culpa: Ries opens with a reference to the famous internet meme — Anakin says he's going to change the world, and Padamé asks: for the better? He grins mischievously. Ries used to find it funny. Then it stopped being funny. When he wrote The Lean Startup, he assumed the purpose of disruption was to make the world a better place. He took it for granted. He now thinks that was naïve. The lesson: you have to specify the purpose. What kind of change? For whom? That is the question that Incorruptible is trying to answer. About the Guest Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, The Leader's Guide, and The Startup Way. As a founder, he has put his ideas into practice with the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), Answer.AI, Virgil, and IMVU. He is the author of Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great (Authors Equity/Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. References: •       Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries (Authors Equity, May 26, 2026). •       The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (Crown Business, 2011). •       The Startup Way by Eric Ries (Currency, 2017). •       More information and bonus materials at incorruptible.co. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSp...

“There is a pretty powerful strain in America today in which men feel some need to be violent and domineering to sort of prove their masculinity. And there's sort of less intense but still prevalent strains that infect many other types of men.” — Jasper Craven Today is Memorial Day — America's annual celebration of its warriors and military ethic. But for Jasper Craven, author of God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, it should be a day of muted self-reflection rather than bellicose celebration. Especially in May 2026 with America involved in another ludicrous overseas war. Craven's argument is that from George Washington onwards, America has fused military manliness with a self-destructive masculine identity. Thus young men are trained at top military academies like West Point to be unthinkingly domineering and violent. But for Craven, America — a continent surrounded by oceans to the east and west and by friendly neighbours to the north and south — has no need for the unreflective militarism fetishised by its military academies and culture. So what has West Point wrought? A nation of Pete Hegseths, Jasper Craven implies. Happy (ie: peaceful) Memorial Day everyone. Five Takeaways •       Military Manliness and American Identity: From Washington to Hegseth: From the Founding Fathers — most of whom were Revolutionary War veterans — America has explicitly fused military manliness with core masculine identity. Boys who want to define themselves as Americans have felt a need to be strong, to serve, to defend. The archetype has only been beefed up over time: through the steroid era and into the world of Navy SEALs and special operators. The result is a culture where men feel the need to be violent and domineering to prove their masculinity, from carrying AK-47s to protests to becoming ICE agents. The problem: the archetype has no relationship to actual national security needs. •       West Point and the Civil War: A Fuse, Not a Remedy: West Point was created to produce a well-schooled officer class. What Craven argues: when you allocate massive resources to building a military, you will feel the consequences. Before the Civil War, West Point was segregated into northern and southern companies — which exacerbated tensions rather than building union. When war broke out, many West Point officers defected to the Confederacy, including Robert E. Lee, who had been superintendent. West Point officers on opposite sides then killed each other in their thousands. Many lawmakers called for West Point to be abolished. They were not heeded. •       Race, Integration, and the Military's Complex Legacy: Craven acknowledges the military's partial role in racial integration: Truman's executive order in 1948 desegregated the armed forces, which was a genuine milestone ahead of civilian institutions. But he is careful about what this means. Integration at the institutional level did not eliminate racism within the culture. And the same military that desegregated also produced the culture of violence, dehumanisation of the other, and misogyny and homophobia that Craven chronicles throughout the book. Partial credit is still only partial credit. •       January 6th and the Politicisation of the Officer Class: In Trump's first term, General Mattis and General Kelly and others demonstrated real courage in reining in Trump's worst impulses. By the end of that term, they had all been replaced by loyalists. During the transition to Biden, Trump's military cronies at the Pentagon went dark. January 6th was largely carried out by military veterans. More than 100 senior retired military officers penned an op-ed supporting what Trump had done. In Trump's second term, the politicisation of the officer class has only accelerated. The non-political professional officer class is now divided. •       ROTC, Not West Point: Craven's Prescription: Craven's preferred model: ROTC — military training supplemental to traditional liberal arts education. Survey data shows ROTC officers, because of exposure to Plato, Shakespeare, and the rest, are more well-rounded and better thinkers than West Point graduates. At West Point, it is essentially all STEM. Craven's prescription: introduce the humanities, expose cadets to civilians, break the silos. Ideally, West Point could become a national university that includes military programmes alongside the training of doctors and aid workers. The military-civilian divide is as much the military's creation as the civilian's. About the Guest Jasper Craven is a freelance reporter covering the military and veterans' issues. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, Politico, The Baffler, and the New Republic. He is the author of God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood (Atria/One Signal Publishers, May 19, 2026) and the co-author, with Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early, of Our Veterans. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. References: •       God Forgives, Brothers Don't: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood by Jasper Craven (Atria/One Signal Publishers, May 19, 2026). •       Sebastian Junger, Tribe — referenced in the publishers' framing as a companion text. •       Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning — referenced as a companion text. •       Episode 2907: Brandon Webb on Puddle Jumpers — the companion episode referenced at the opening; the pro-military counterpart to Craven's critique. •       Episode 2909: Adrian Goldsworthy on Athens vs Sparta — also referenced at the opening. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Podcasts

“We've learned how to tolerate acts of violence, acts of widespread death, disease — that other developed nations simply don't tolerate. And that tolerance manifesting in myriad political failures — all of which go back to our refusal to maturely deal with mortality and issues of grief.” — David Masciotra Earlier this week, we talked to Ece Temelkuran about her book Nation of Strangers, a manifesto about strangers finding one another. But for the cultural critic David Masciotra, strangerdom is the problem rather than the solution. Contemporary America, he argues in his new essay A Country of Strangers, has become a place of death, despair and indifference. Masciotra takes his cue from Albert Camus' 1942 novella The Stranger. Camus' Meursault — the narrator of The Stranger — is a man completely detached from meaning. He attends his own mother's funeral without feeling anything. He murders an Arab man on a beach without motive. He faces his execution with a shrug. Masciotra's argument is that the United States has become Meursault writ large. America's failure is existential rather than political. It is a failure to mourn — a sustained refusal to engage with death, grief, and the weight of history that produces a society of strangers who cannot connect with one another across race, class, or geography. So is Masciotra right? Are we all Meursault now? What can Albert Camus teach us about America? Five Takeaways •       Meursault and America: The Same Detachment: Camus' The Stranger is narrated by Meursault — a man who attends his mother's memorial without feeling, murders an Arab man on a beach without motive, and faces execution with indifference. The novel, Camus said, was his attempt to detail “man's confrontation with absurdity in its nakedness.” Masciotra's argument: this is America now. A country that has adopted Meursault's emotional posture toward mass death. Columbine stopped the nation in 1999. Mass shootings now barely register. That is not political failure. It is existential failure. •       A Failure to Mourn: Masciotra's central thesis: America's deepest problem is its refusal to mourn. Not guilt — he is careful to distinguish mourning from guilt. You can have a national memory that reckons with both what you celebrate and what you grieve. If the Founding Fathers are worth preserving in active memory, so are the people they enslaved. Never properly dealing with the Civil War allowed the resurgence of white supremacist movements. Never properly mourning mass shootings allows them to accelerate. The failure to grieve is not sentimental. It is political. •       Is Meursault Autistic? The Spectrum Reading: Some contemporary critics read Meursault as someone on the autism spectrum — a man whose emotional detachment reflects neurodivergence rather than moral failure. Masciotra is skeptical. His reading: Camus' portrait is one of moral refusal, not neurological condition. The distinction matters for the American parallel: if America's indifference is a structural feature rather than a disease, the remedy is not therapy but political and cultural change. You can't medicate a country into empathy. •       The Colonial Murder and the Racial Hierarchy: Meursault murders an Arab man in French Algeria and feels nothing. Some critics fault Camus for not making colonialism more explicit. Masciotra defends Camus: Meursault doesn't care about anything, including his own mother's death. His indifference to his Arab victim's humanity is the point, not an evasion. The parallel to America: the hierarchy of victims, where Black Americans have historically ranked lower in the eyes of law and institution. David Shipler's 1997 book A Country of Strangers documented the same failure of Black and white Americans to actually talk to one another. •       You Are the First Close White Friends I've Had: Masciotra's friend Alana — a highly educated, cultured Black woman who lived in Chicago — once told him and his wife: “You are the first close white friends I've had.” They said the same back. This, Masciotra argues, is the country of strangers in daily life. Not the horror stories of overt racism. The quieter failure of self-imposed segregation that persists in a society that preaches diversity but, judging from its own behaviour, doesn't really want it. About the Guest David Masciotra is a cultural critic and the author of six books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy, I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters, and Mellencamp: American Troubadour. He has written for the Progressive, the New Republic, Liberties, and many other publications about politics, literature, and music. His Substack is Absurdia Now. References: •       A Country of Strangers: Death, Despair and Indifference in the US by David Masciotra, CounterPunch, May 1, 2026. •       Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942). Camus' novella, the primary text of the conversation. •       Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel — referenced in the conversation. •       François Ozon, The Stranger (2024 film) — the adaptation that prompted the essay. •       David Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (1997) — referenced in the conversation. •       Episode 2903: Ece Temelkuran on Nation of Strangers — the companion episode referenced at the opening. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Temelkuran's nation of strangers and Masciotra's country of strangers (01...

“If you write something you think is really fanciful today, tomorrow's news headlines might be telling the exact same story. That's the challenge of writing realism today — when everything feels so sci-fi and so dystopic.” — Fred Lunzer Boy meets girl meets AI therapist. That is the premise of Sike, the debut novel by Fred Lunzer. Adrian is a rap ghostwriter who has never met any of the rappers he writes for. After a relationship collapse, he signs up for Sike — a Facebook-style AI psychotherapy app that tracks your every move and emotion via smart glasses and guides you toward mental contentment. He meets Maquie, a venture capitalist and Sike refusnik. You can imagine the rest. Sike is a self-consciously “realist” love story set in a world where AI therapy is ubiquitous. Lunzer wanted to write AI fiction that is realistic rather than dystopian or utopian. He started it speculatively. By the time he'd finished, ChatGPT had launched and what he'd once fancifully imagined had become reality. It's the futuristic writer's permanent predicament. Make the future believable before it becomes so familiar that we barely notice it. Turn science fiction into social realism. Five Takeaways •       AI Fiction Without Dystopia: The Gap Lunzer Is Filling: Almost all AI fiction is either utopian or dystopian. James Bond loves gadgets. Most literary fiction treats technology as vaguely grubby and pushes it into genre. Lunzer's ambition: find the realism. Write about a world where AI is already everywhere, the initial fears are already past, and we've reached the same ambivalent relationship with it that we have with our smartphones. We don't know what model we have. We barely think about it. That's where the interesting questions live. •       Reality Caught Up Before He Finished: Lunzer wrote Sike speculatively. By the time he finished, ChatGPT had launched. William Gibson's observation: the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. His corollary: if you write something fanciful today, it's tomorrow's news story. Lunzer's solution to this perpetual problem is to stop writing near-future speculation and instead set the story in a world where the technology is already past its introduction — where the hype is over and the real reckoning begins. •       Realism Is the Hardest Genre Right Now: Andrew's observation: the best AI fiction is realist. Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun treats unimaginable things as taken for granted. That's the technique. Lunzer agrees — and notes that realism is particularly hard to write now because everything already feels surreal. Trump, AI, the state of the world: if you'd described any of it thirty years ago, people would have called it fiction. The challenge of the realist novelist in 2026 is to find the quiet normality inside the chaos. •       Non-Polarising AI Fiction: Lunzer deliberately avoided writing a book that slams Meta, or that is obviously pro- or anti-AI. He calls it non-polarised. In Sike, some characters love the AI therapy app, some refuse to use it. No one is obviously right. The book's thesis — insofar as it has one — is that the interesting questions about AI are not the ones about whether it's good or bad, but the ones that arise once you've stopped arguing about that and started living with it. •       The Economics of Writing: Trenches, Not Glamour: Lunzer has a day job — AI researcher at Sony. Sike was his first published novel, not his first written. Before it: a travel narrative about the Japanese restaurant industry that went nowhere, and a novel about a global pandemic finished in early 2020 and overtaken by COVID before any publisher would touch it. His verdict on the publishing world: not glamorous. A lot of books. A lot of writers. Not much money except for a few. He got an advance. Most debut novelists don't earn it back. The lesson he draws from Norman Mailer: writing a good novel is like learning to play the piano well. It just takes time. About the Guest Fred Lunzer is an AI researcher at Sony and the author of Sike: A Novel (Celadon Books, 2024; paperback 2026). He was born in London and lives in West Sussex, England. References: •       Sike: A Novel by Fred Lunzer (Celadon Books, 2024; paperback 2026). •       Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun — the key comparison text referenced in the interview. •       William Gibson — two quotes referenced: “The future is already here, just unevenly distributed”; and the observation about reality catching up with fiction. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“Vaccine hesitancy in the U.S. should be understood as religious expression — not as the product of scientific misinformation. These debates have been proxies for existential concerns about justice and morality.” — Kira Ganga Kieffer Are anti-vaxxers simply bizarre anti-science crazies egged on by conspiracists like RFK Jr? For Kira Ganga Kieffer, author of Unvaccinated Under God, what she calls “vaccine hesitancy” in America is actually a more complicated and prescient affair. The prevailing narrative — that vaccine-hesitant people lack scientific facts or serve their own individual agendas — misunderstands what's actually happening. Kieffer's argument is that vaccine hesitancy is best understood as a kind of religiosity. Not in the narrow context of church doctrine, but in the broader sense of meaning-making, moral reasoning, and an intensely individualist relationship with the body that is deeply rooted in American evangelical and alternative-spiritual tradition. This hesitancy, Kieffer shows, is not new. It has been present since the smallpox vaccine in the eighteenth century. What recurs across very different eras and very different communities is a set of metaphysical rather than scientific concerns expressed in the language of wellness, purity, and bodily sovereignty. The most interesting political implication of Kieffer's argument is that the same hyperindividualistic anti-modern instinct behind vaccine hesitancy also drives the wellness movement, the rejection of AI, and the political coalition that coalesced around RFK Jr. She sees this as a broad and growing constituency that neither party has fully understood nor spoken to. Rather than crazies, today's anti-vaxxers might offer a window onto tomorrow's American politics. Five Takeaways •       Vaccine Hesitancy Is Moral Meaning-Making, Not Ignorance: The dominant public health framing: vaccine-hesitant people lack scientific knowledge. Kieffer's reframe: they are engaged in profound moral reasoning about the body, purity, parental responsibility, and the relationship between the individual and the state. The parent who fears the MMR vaccine is not asking a scientific question. They are asking: if I consent to this intervention and my child is harmed, am I responsible? That is a theological question — about guilt, intention, and moral agency — dressed in the language of health. •       Evangelical Hyperindividualism Is the Root: Kieffer's structural argument: American evangelical Christianity is, at its core, an individualist proposition. You are saved by your personal choices. This translates directly into the wellness culture's logic of bodily salvation: you are saved from illness, aging, and death by your personal choices about diet, supplements, and vaccines. The individual body becomes the site of spiritual as well as physical salvation. This hyperindividualism is very American — and very old. It predates the wellness movement and will outlast it. •       Vaccine Hesitancy Has Been Present Since the Eighteenth Century: Kieffer's most important historical corrective: vaccine hesitancy did not begin with COVID, with MMR, or with the anti-vaccine movement of the 1990s. It has been present since the smallpox inoculations of colonial Massachusetts. What recurs across very different eras is not the same people or the same science — it's the same core concerns: bodily purity, parental moral responsibility, and distrust of external authority over the body. Each generation clothes these concerns in the available language. Today it is wellness. Earlier it was religious freedom. •       RFK Jr.: Evangelical Crusader or Wellness Influencer? RFK Jr. shares many characteristics of the evangelical crusader — a sense of special mission, a narrative of persecution, a world divided into the awakened and the deceived. But Kieffer is careful not to put words in his mouth. What she observes: in his crusade for wellness and his critique of organised medicine, he channels the same instincts she traces throughout the book. His coalition is now showing signs of disillusionment — followers who believed he was a true believer are finding that political power complicates purity. They are looking for someone else. •       The Anti-Modern Instinct Will Shape American Politics: The same hyperindividualist, anti-modern instinct that drives vaccine hesitancy also drives the rejection of AI, the wellness movement's critique of pharmaceutical medicine, and the political formations that coalesced around RFK Jr. Kieffer sees a broad and growing constituency that packages distrust of modernity in spiritual terms: what is essentially good is nature, humanity, the unmediated body. Neither party has fully understood or spoken to this constituency. As skepticism about AI and hypertechnology grows, Kieffer expects it to become more politically significant, not less. About the Guest Kira Ganga Kieffer is a scholar of American religions, history, culture, and politics. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Boston University and is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Fairfield University. She is the author of Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America (Princeton University Press, May 19, 2026). She lives in Westport, Connecticut. References: •       Unvaccinated Under God: Religion and Vaccine Hesitancy in Modern America by Kira Ganga Kieffer (Princeton University Press, May 19, 2026). •       Matthew Avery Sutton, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity — referenced in the opening; the preceding KOA episode on American religion. •       Episode 2913: David Ost on Red Pill Politics — the companion episode on the anti-modern political impulse that Kieffer's book helps explain. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify

“The rules-based system just hasn't worked. China's system is so opaque that you can't see the subsidies. And when you've got China not interested in new rules and the US not interested in a referee, you've got two of the world's biggest actors who aren't on board.” — Soumaya Keynes It would have been nice to get John Maynard Keynes on the show to get his critique of Trump's trade war. But in the long run, we're all dead — even old Maynard. So instead, we found his great-great-niece, Soumaya Keynes — Financial Times columnist and co-author of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy. Having already appeared on Jon Stewart this week, Soumaya has a bit of Keynesian star quality about her. But she's also a first-rate economist. Her thesis is that the old rules-based trading system that her great-great-uncle helped design after World War II is gone. And it ain't coming back. China's subsidies are so opaque that rules can't be written to constrain them, let alone enforced. The US is no longer willing to submit to a referee. Without the two biggest players, no rules-based system is meaningful. So — now what? Keynes says we must think like a trade warrior. Donald Trump should leverage the tools available — but use them strategically. Trump's error in his second term was not being tough on China while being too tough on everyone else, especially allies like Canada and Mexico. Soumaya Keynes' most contemporary idea might be her most Keynesian one. John Maynard Keynes proposed penalties for countries running large trade surpluses as well as those running deficits — recognising that global imbalances are a two-sided problem. That idea didn't make it into the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement. Eighty years later, in equally anxious economic times, his optimistic great-great-niece is reviving it. Five Takeaways •       Can Trade Wars Be Won? Yes, Sometimes: The conventional wisdom: no one wins a trade war. Keynes and Bown agree — in theory. In practice, countries in a weaker position cave. History has examples: France in the late nineteenth century told its trading partners they were renegotiating treaties, and the smaller partners complied. Trump's tariffs in his first term produced concessions. The problem is not that trade wars can't be won. It's that the smaller power's only defence — coordinating with other smaller powers — is extremely hard to sustain. There's always an incentive to cut a deal first. •       China Is the Doper on the Sports Field: Keynes's sharpest analogy: the global trading system is like a sports game that needs rules to ensure a level playing field. China's subsidies — cheap credit, corporate handouts, opaque support for state-linked companies — are the equivalent of performance-enhancing drugs. The problem is that unlike doping in sport, China's subsidies are invisible. You can write a rule saying China won't give these handouts. But you can't verify compliance. And without enforcement, rules are meaningless. The WTO has not solved this. Nothing has solved this. •       Trump Was Right About China, Wrong About Everything Else: Keynes is careful here. She credits Robert Lighthizer in Trump's first term with identifying China as the real problem and building a focused strategy. In the second term, Trump put tariffs on everyone simultaneously — which dissipated leverage, alienated the coalition of allies needed to pressure Beijing, and mixed up the problem of China's subsidies with grievances against Canada, Mexico, and the EU. If you were genuinely tough on China, you wouldn't have put tariffs on everyone. You would have been more targeted. •       The Rules-Based System Is Gone and Isn't Coming Back: Why can't we return to the system Keynes's great-great-uncle helped build? Two reasons. China's subsidies are too opaque to write enforceable rules against. And the US has lost confidence in any international referee — a long and complex story, but the result is that America won't submit to neutral adjudication. Without the two biggest players, no rules-based system is meaningful. Yearning for the old approach is not an option. A new strategy is needed — and that's what the book is about. •       AI and the Next Trade War: Services: AI is central to the US-China conflict already — chip restrictions, military advantage, economic supremacy. But Keynes's less-noticed observation: AI could fundamentally reshape international services trade. The UK, for example, is a massive services exporter — finance, legal, consulting, accounting. If AI eliminates demand for those services, the UK faces a new current account crisis, new trade tensions, a new wave of economic conflict. Nobody knows how this plays out. Which is why, she suggests, the tools in the book will remain relevant for longer than the current tariff cycle. About the Guests Soumaya Keynes is an economics columnist at the Financial Times and host of The Economics Show with Soumaya Keynes. Before joining the FT she spent eight years at The Economist. She co-founded the Trade Talks podcast with Chad Bown during Trump's first term. Chad P. Bown is the Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and former Chief Economist at the US State Department under President Biden. Together they are the authors of How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy (Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). References: •       How to Win a Trade War: An Optimistic Guide to an Anxious Global Economy by Soumaya Keynes and Chad P. Bown (Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). •       Soumaya Keynes on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, May 19, 2026 — referenced in the interview. •       Episode 2892: Jason Pack on the Iran war — the companion episode on America's strategic distractions from the China problem. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouT...

“The end of labor means the end of paid slavery. And the opening up of freedom — that is to say, choice of how to spend your time. The only question, a big question, is how do you eat?” — Keith Teare Does capitalism have a future in our AI age? For Musk, Silicon Valley's baddest bad entrepreneur, the answer might surprise. Musk seems to think that in the long run, money and wealth will disappear in an age of abundant intelligence. Which, presumably, will include hundreds of billions of his own dollars. Although given Musk's determination to sue and take money from OpenAI, some might be slightly sceptical of his real faith in a post-money cornucopia. It's not just Musk and That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare who are reimagining capitalism in our AI age. The former World Bank chief economist, Branko Milanovic, drawing on Karl Marx and Adam Smith in equal measure, argues that if AI eliminates the labor component of production, things will become free — thereby creating the conditions for the destruction of capitalism. Keith agrees — and goes further than Milanovic. The end of paid labor, he insists, borrowing also from Marx, is not a catastrophe. It's the end of what he calls “paid slavery” and the opening of genuine freedom. I'm not so sure. If nobody has to work, we'll all become bad artists. The cult of the amateur. The future is of bad entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and even worse artists. Hyper-capitalism in our age of AI. Five Takeaways •       The Musk-OpenAI Trial: A Big Yawn That Cost Millions: An Oakland jury rejected Elon Musk's claim against OpenAI in under two hours — not because OpenAI didn't do what Musk alleged, but because the statute of limitations had expired. Someone should have caught this before two weeks of trial. Musk has vowed to appeal, but it's hard to see how you get around a statute of limitations. Keith's verdict: sideshow, big yawn, ego contest. The lawyers won. The real question — who owns OpenAI after it converts to for-profit — was never going to be answered here. •       Sam Altman's Credibility Problem: The New York Times took five takeaways from the trial, one of which was that Sam Altman has a credibility problem. Keith's response: not new information. What the trial did reveal is the depth of mutual animosity between Musk and Altman — two people who, despite everything, share more beliefs about where AI is going than almost anyone else in the world. Keith on who he'd back in a Stalin vs Hitler choice: Stalin, 100 times out of 100. Which is not to say he's enthusiastic about either. •       Krugman on Europe: Right Analysis, Wrong Conclusion: Paul Krugman, touring Europe, argues that GDP per capita understates European quality of life. A third of US income buys more than a third of US lifestyle in Europe — healthcare, education, travel, housing are all significantly cheaper. Keith agrees with the analysis. His counter: Europe's structural hostility to innovation means it can maintain its lifestyle but not grow it. The social democratic model is sustainable until it isn't. It needs to unlock innovation or it will slowly fall behind. Hard to do when you're spending your time writing regulations. •       Milanovic's AI Thesis: When Things Are Free: Branko Milanovic — Marxist and neoclassical economist — argues that if AI eliminates the labor component of production, value in the classical Adam Smith/Ricardo/Marx sense disappears, and things approach free. Keith agrees and goes further: this isn't just Marxist logic, it's classical economics. The organic composition of capital. If variable capital — mostly labor — tends toward zero, costs tend toward zero, prices tend toward zero, and the distinction between capitalism and its opposite dissolves. Musk says the same thing. Agree or disagree, it's the most interesting economic argument of our time. •       The End of Paid Labor Is the End of Paid Slavery: Keith's most provocative position. The end of paid labor is not something to fear. It is freedom — the opening up of genuine choice about how to spend your time. What remains are human-to-human activities: care work, travel companionship, live music, the masseur. These will be in demand. They just won't constitute most of what 8 billion people do. The question of how the previously employed population participates in society — eats, lives, has purpose — is real and large. Keith's position: it's not an inconceivable problem. Andrew's counter: if nobody has to work, we'll all become bad artists. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       Branko Milanovic, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism from a Marxist and Neoclassical Point of View,” Substack. •       Paul Krugman, “Is Europe in Economic Decline?” The New York Times / Substack. •       Episode 2910: Keith Teare and Jonathan Rauch on AI — the preceding special edition, directly referenced. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters:  

“Maps are communicating vast quantities of new knowledge that was only estimated. They convey this imaginative energy — an imaginative energy that maps today have lost, because today maps are so functional, so utilitarian.” — Peter Keating In the sixteenth century, Spanish cartographers represented California as an island. They weren't being careless. Nor were they drawing New Yorker covers. These 16th century cartographers were, instead, mapping the limits of both what they knew and what they imagined. Cartography is as much an art as a science and maps always mirror how we see the world. Thus Peter Keating's beautifully illustrated new book, Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World. Assembling nearly 100 of history's most consequential political maps, Keating's thesis is that maps are not neutral. They are arguments. Every map centers something — a religion, an empire, a people — and pushes something else to the margins. The story of cartography, then, is the story of power. Five Takeaways •       California Was an Island: The Power of Imagined Geography: In the sixteenth century, Spanish cartographers drew California as a large island off the coast of America. They weren't being careless — they were mapping the edge of what was known and imaginable. Before any map can draw a border, Keating argues, it has to decide what is real. The T-and-O medieval maps placed Jerusalem at the center of the world, with the biblically admitted lands of Europe, Africa, and Asia radiating outward. Only slowly, and with great difficulty, did the Western cartographic tradition absorb the fact that there was a whole continent between their imagination and the Pacific. •       The Oldest Tension in Cartography: Sacred vs Scientific: Keating identifies two traditions in constant tension throughout Western history. The cosmographical tradition: center what you know and believe, place your gods and sacred lands at the middle of the world, and mix fantasy with inquiry. The scientific tradition: starting with Ptolemy in ancient Greece and independently in ancient China, create maps that generals and kings could actually use to expand territory, find resources, and identify enemies. With Rome's Christianisation, the cosmographical tradition dominated for nearly a thousand years. The Ptolemaic scientific tradition only re-emerged with the Renaissance and exploration. •       Poland: The Most Erased Country in Cartographic History: Keating's answer to his own question — which country has been wiped off maps most often yet survived? Poland. It disappeared from maps at least three times, divided and partitioned by more geographically fortunate powers — Habsburgs, Russians, Nazis — whose cultural and military might seemed overwhelming. And yet Poland survived every erasure in the hearts of its people. A 1956 map of Poland as a carnation, published by the communist government as a May Day celebration, reads — Keating argues — as subversive under the surface: a nation asserting its existence against the regime that claimed to represent it. •       Lincoln's Favorite Map: The Slave Density Survey: The most powerful map in the book: the 1861 Coast Survey, a non-ideological government project that shaded American counties by the density of enslaved populations. Lincoln studied it obsessively. He reasoned that where enslaved people were densest, Union troops could arrive as liberators and find support. Where they were rare — in predominantly white areas of the South — he could pursue accommodation and peace. The map shaped the Emancipation Proclamation's geography. And because enslaved populations had settled where the delta soils were richest, the map also explains the cultural and political geography of the American South today. •       The Two-Color Election Map Is Making Democracy Worse: Every two years, Americans are shown the same red-and-blue electoral map. Keating's verdict: it is a bad projection, a winner-take-all distortion, and a representation of the Electoral College's biases rather than actual political sentiment. Research shows that two-color maps increase cynicism, cause people to underestimate the number of fellow-partisans in other states, and erode faith in politics. In a democracy, maps should reflect actual political support. The United States is overdue for population-based electoral maps. About the Guest Peter Keating is a narrative journalist whose work has appeared in GQ, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and Politico. He was a longtime columnist and founding member of the Investigative Unit at ESPN, where he was part of teams that won three National Magazine Awards. He is the author of Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World (Black Dog & Leventhal, May 12, 2026) and Dingers! A Short History of the Long Ball. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey. References: •       Power Lines: Maps That Shaped the Way We See the World by Peter Keating (Black Dog & Leventhal, May 12, 2026). •       Saul Steinberg's “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” The New Yorker, 1976 — the famous New Yorker cover discussed in the interview. •       Episode 2908: Audun Dahl on moral judgements — the parallel episode on how framing shapes perception. •       Episode 2909: Adrian Goldsworthy on Athens and Sparta — referenced in the conversation. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - California as an island: sixteenth-century Spanish maps (02:14) - What imagined maps teach us: the limits of knowledge (04:30) - The New Yorker cover of 1976: New York's view of the world (05:22) - Two traditions in tension: cosmographical vs scientific (08:13) - Geo...

“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 Please don't use the F-word. At least to describe the politics of Trump, Orbán, Meloni, Netanyahu, Modi, Farage et al. Rather than fascism, the best way to demystify far-right populism is via the movie The Matrix through its idea of “red pill” politics. David Ost's new book, Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today's Far Right, argues that to grasp the threat we need to stop stepping out of the Third Reich and into The Matrix. The red pill, borrowed from the 1999 dystopian classic, has been appropriated by the far right as a metaphor for seeing through the liberal hegemony they claim distorts reality. Popping a red pill himself, Ost argues that while today's far right shares the essential DNA of classical fascism, it nonetheless operates in a world in which outright dictatorship isn't viable. Mussolini, Ost warns, didn't become totalitarian until four years after taking power. Fascism, then, is a process. It takes time. Even dystopias require patience. The book is also a manifesto for left counter-politics. Yes, Law and Justice in Poland and Orbán in Hungary have both been voted out, Ost acknowledges. But in Poland, he warns, the Tusk government won power in 2023 and then governed timidly, afraid of alienating the center, failing its own base on abortion and LGBT rights, and then losing the presidential election. So the lesson from Eastern Europe is that economic left populism, not liberal caution, is the best antidote to red pill politics. Mamdani not Starmer. Otherwise the F-word will once again become a reality. Five Takeaways •       The F-Word Has Become Meaningless: Every application of “fascism” to Trump, Orbán, or Meloni is immediately met with the counter: “Are we killing you? Are we throwing you in jail?” And seemingly the matter is put to rest. Ost's argument: the f-word has become a conversation-stopper rather than a conversation-starter. It lets the far right off the hook by setting the bar at Nazi-level violence. The actual threat — the delegitimisation of institutions, the treatment of opponents as traitors, the erosion of democratic norms — is already underway, without the gas chambers that the f-word implies. •       Opponents vs Traitors: The Defining Distinction: In a democracy, you have opponents. You disagree with them, you campaign against them, you try to vote them out. In far-right politics, you have traitors. People who disagree with you are not legitimate participants in a political contest — they are enemies of the nation, people who do not belong, people who are working against the interests of the real people. This distinction — not violence, not the gas chambers, but the redefinition of legitimate opposition as treachery — is Ost's clearest marker of the transition from normal democratic politics to something else. •       Mussolini's Four Years: How Long Before Dictatorship? When Mussolini first came to power, there were still elections. He tried to rig the game — to gerrymander, to use contemporary parlance — and institutionalise his authority. He only turned to outright dictatorship after four years in power. That was a different time. But the pattern — of coming to power through elections and then slowly making it impossible to be removed through elections — is not unique to Italy. Ost argues we may currently be in the equivalent of Mussolini's first four years in several countries simultaneously. •       What Eastern Europe Teaches America: The Tusk Warning: Law and Justice in Poland governed for eight years and was voted out in 2023. The lesson should be hopeful. But the coalition that replaced it, led by Donald Tusk, governed timidly — afraid of doing anything that might alienate the center, failing to deliver on abortion rights and domestic partnerships, and then lost the presidential election. Ost's verdict: a Biden mistake. When the center-left or left comes to power, it must be consequentially left populist — not just different from the right in tone and temperament, but materially different in what it does for regular people. Caution is its own kind of failure. •       Mamdani as Real-World Exhibit A: Ost was writing the book when Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdani campaigned explicitly to speak to voters who had voted for Trump — asking why they were moving in that direction and arguing that a universalist left could speak to their material concerns without abandoning minorities. For Ost, this is the model: economic populism that is genuinely redistributionist, that speaks to small cities and rural areas, that is tough on the issues rather than cautious about public opinion. A left that actually stands for something. About the Guest David Ost is an emeritus professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the author of Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today's Far Right (The New Press, May 19, 2026), The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, and other books. He has written for a wide range of scholarly and popular publications, has done research in Polish factories, and once drove a NYC taxi. He lives in Ithaca, New York. References: •       Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today's Far Right by David Ost (The New Press, May 19, 2026). •       Jonathan Rauch, “Yes, It's Fascism,” The Atlantic — the piece Andrew references at the opening, and the episode we produced around it. •       Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works — cited as the book Ost's is in conversation with. •       Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die — Levitsky blurbs the book. •       Episode 2894: Marc Loustau on making Hungary boring again — the companion episode on Orbán's defeat, referenced directly. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTube

“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 the ripe young age of 70, Michael Clinton hiked nine days to Everest Base Camp and ran the Tenzing-Hillary Marathon down. Now 72, he is president of his own longevity consultancy, a columnist for Esquire and Men's Health, a private pilot, part-owner of a vineyard in Argentina, and the author of Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026). Rather than about living forever, Longevity Nation dares us to redefine what the second half of our lives can look like. And Clinton wants us to reinvent society accordingly. A hundred years ago, he reminds us, only seven million Americans were over 65. Today there are 62 million, which will quickly grow to 80 million. The whole world is aging, and its institutions are not keeping up. Retirement, Michael Clinton explains, is a false construct invented a century ago by industrial age governments. Rewire, the septuagenarian marathoner says. Don't retire. Five Takeaways •       This Is What 72 Looks Like Today: Clinton's opening provocation: at 70, he hiked to Everest Base Camp and ran the marathon down. He's visited 125 countries, run marathons on all seven continents, holds two master's degrees, and is a private pilot. His point is not to brag. It is that the cultural image of what 70 or 80 looks like has not caught up with the reality of what a subset of 70 and 80-year-olds — and, increasingly, a growing proportion of 70 and 80-year-olds — actually look like and are capable of. When he was 40, 72 seemed ancient. Now he is 72. It doesn't. •       GLP-1: Hotel California or Longevity's First Democratised Drug? The sharpest exchange in the interview. Andrew's framing: GLP-1 is Hotel California — you can check in but not check out. Stop taking it and the weight and inflammation return. Clinton's response: yes, that seems to be the story right now, and nobody knows the long-term play. But GLP-1 is coming to Medicare this summer, price cut in half, and it may become the first truly democratised longevity drug — reducing obesity, inflammation, and cardiovascular risk across the income spectrum, not just for the wealthy. Exciting and uncertain in equal measure. •       Retirement Is a False Construct: Social Security was created at a moment when most Americans died before collecting it. Life expectancy was 62. The retirement age was 65. The construct was built for a world that no longer exists. Clinton's prescription: don't retire. Rewire. You don't have to do the same thing, but do something. Stay engaged. Stay purposeful. If you're 65 and live another thirty years, the retirement construct — move to Florida, play golf, wait — is not merely insufficient. It is actively harmful to cognitive and physical health. •       Longevity Nation vs Gerontocracy: Andrew raises the counter-argument: is longevity nation actually gerontocracy? Trump, Biden, Trump. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Nancy Pelosi. A class of elderly people who won't step aside, hoarding power and preventing generational renewal. Clinton's response: he is opposed to formal retirement ages for anyone. His answer to the political hoarding of power is not age limits but engagement — people need purpose, and purpose should be redirected, not cut off. Andrew's unspoken counter: this is easy to say when you're not the one being blocked by an eighty-year-old senator. •       Who Do You Want Around Your Deathbed? Clinton's most personal observation, via the book he co-authored: as you think about living longer, ask yourself — who are the five people you would want around your deathbed? And are you maintaining those relationships? The grandson of a funeral director, Clinton has a different relationship with death than most. His prescription: the longer you live, the more important it becomes to keep your closest relationships strong. Longevity without community is not longevity. It is just duration. About the Guest Michael Clinton is the former president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines, founder of Roar Forward, and the author of Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026) and Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It's Too Late). He is a columnist for Men's Health and Esquire, a private pilot, a marathon runner on all seven continents, and a part-owner of a vineyard in Argentina. He lives in New York City and Water Mill, Long Island. References: •       Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives by Michael Clinton (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026). •       Stanford Center on Longevity, New Map of Life — cited by Clinton as one of the major research frameworks behind the book. •       Samuel Moyn, Gerontocratic Nation — the Yale professor's forthcoming counter-argument, referenced by Andrew. •       Cara Swisher, Cara Swisher Wants to Live Forever — the CNN series referenced at the opening as the sceptical counterpart to Clinton's optimism. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Cara Swisher wants to live forever (01:33) - How old are you, Michael? 72 and proud (01:57) - The Everest Base Camp hike at 70 (02:17) - Is the longevity boom a coastal elite phenomenon? (03:15) - A hundred years ago: seven million over-65s; today, 62 million (03:46) - The cultural shift:...

“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 World Cup comes to North America. Fifty-six years ago, I watched the searing injustice of Johann Cruyff's Holland getting robbed in the 1974 final by Germany. Today I talk with someone who explains how this kind of injustice is built into the game's DNA. Nick Greene — long-suffering Newcastle United fan and author of How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius — has a new book, How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius, which tells us what architects, stuntwomen, paleoanthropologists and computer scientists tell us about the beautiful game. What they tell us is that the game isn't fair. One NASA scientist tells Greene that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” because the low-scoring nature of the game means results don't reliably identify the better team. Thus the dark fate of the free-scoring, brilliantly inventive Hungarians in 1954 and the Dutch in 1974. So if you want to watch the World Cup like a genius, don't expect the best team to win the tournament. Which may explain why Greene suspects that England — where the pain of World Cup injustice is a national fetish — will win in 2026. On penalties probably. Arsenal style. After 120 minutes of goalless football. Five Takeaways •       Soccer Is a Poorly Designed Experiment: A NASA scientist published a peer-reviewed paper concluding that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” — the low number of goals means results don't reliably identify the better team. Greene's observation: any soccer fan could have told him that, and saved the journal space. But this is also what makes the game what it is. Unlike basketball's seven-game playoff series — which gives the best team enough chances to emerge on top — a single World Cup match, in a single-elimination tournament, means one error can have outsized consequences. The imperfect and the human are inseparable. •       Justice Has Nothing to Do With It: The 1974 Dutch vs 2004 Greece: Andrew's most painful memory: the 1974 World Cup final, where the magnificent Dutch side led by Cruyff was beaten by the Germans. The Dutch didn't win, but they are remembered as one of the greatest teams in history. The 2004 Greek side, which won Euro 2004 by parking the bus and grinding nil-nil victories, actually won — and are remembered as a fluke. The lesson Greene draws: the shared understanding built into soccer watching is that winning is only one metric, and often not the most important one. It is an imperfect and profoundly human enterprise. •       How to Appreciate Defense: The cliché American complaint about soccer is the low scoring. Greene's response: this is partly a failure to appreciate defense, which in soccer can look like the absence of good offense. He discusses Italy's history of outstanding defensive play — the Catenaccio system, Paolo Maldini, Beckenbauer — and the intelligence required to prevent goals. Andrew's contribution: his wife, who watches American football, taught him that defense is where the sophistication lives. The same is true of soccer. The genius watcher watches the defenders. •       VAR: Too Much, Going in the Right Direction: Greene's measured verdict on VAR — video assistant refereeing. His worst case: when it ruins a goal celebration. The player scores, the crowd erupts, the flag goes up, three minutes of review, okay everyone start celebrating again. That destroys the cathartic moment that makes soccer's rare goals so electrifying. His prediction: VAR will evolve toward the coach's challenge model used in American football and basketball — a limited number of challenges per half, preserving the flow of the game while correcting the worst errors. It's relatively young. It'll be futted and fidgeted with. •       Don't Bet On It. Watch the Game: Greene's best advice for American newcomers to soccer. Not about tactics, not about history. Betting on soccer is a mug's game — partly because results don't reliably reflect the better team (the NASA paper again), and partly because talking about your bets is the least interesting conversation you can have about sport. His prediction for the tournament: England. Reasoning: Harry Kane is playing. Andrew's reaction: Kane is a Spurs man, so reluctant endorsement. But please, Nick. Don't. About the Guest Nick Greene is a contributing writer at Slate and the author of How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius: What Architects, Stuntwomen, Paleoanthropologists, and Computer Scientists Reveal About the World's Game (Abrams Press, May 12, 2026) and How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius (Abrams Press, 2021). His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a Newcastle United fan and lives in Berkeley, California. References: •       How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius by Nick Greene (Abrams Press, May 12, 2026). •       Simon Kuper, Going to the Match — referenced in the introduction as a recent KOA episode on nine consecutive World Cups. •       Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World — referenced as the prior KOA World Cup episode. •       David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer — blurbed the book; relevant to the 1974 Dutch discussion. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“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 rather than doing a traditional one-on-one That Was the Week tech summary, Keith Teare and I are trying something different. We invited Jonathan Rauch — Brookings Institution senior fellow, serial author and one of the most rigorous minds in Washington — onto the show to discuss AI. Rauch had a simple mission. He wanted to find out why Keith Teare is just about the only person in the universe who believes that AI is benign. Jon had five buckets of doom to dump on Keith: labour market disruption, political upheaval, mental health and cognition, malicious actors, and the biggest daddy of all — AI developing consciousness, setting its own agenda, and killing everyone (even Keith). But Keith maintained his Yorkshire stoicism under intense scrutiny from the analogue Rauch machine. AI is a word-counting machine, he explained. Large language models train on words, not experience. They split words into a probabilistic graph of correlations. When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, word by word. In that sense, he says, AI is no cleverer than a calculator. The idea that it has awareness, consciousness, or a plan is mythological. What's dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what AI does itself. The dangers, he says, are human. Jon wasn't entirely reassured (his Brookings brand is scepticism, after all). What worries him most is that humans will handle these technologies irresponsibly. On that, he and Keith agree. The short-term labour disruption will be significant. White-collar service provision — legal, accounting, junior consulting — is already going. Jobs will go too. Work, Keith insists, will not. But nobody in politics is having the conversation about what comes next. Not JD. Not AOC. Only Keith and Jon. Five Takeaways •       AI Is a Word-Counting Machine: Keith's Core Argument: Large language models train on words and only words. They split those words into a probabilistic graph — how close is word A to word B? When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, producing output word by word. There is no awareness. There is no consciousness. There is no plan. The idea that such a system could develop its own agenda is mythological. It's no cleverer than a calculator. It's just a very big, very fast calculator. Rauch's counter: the brain is also just dumb neurons. We get emergence from dumb neurons. Keith's reply: what the AI can do is constrained by what humans allow it to do. The agency is human. •       Doomerism as Business Model: Before engaging with any specific AI doom argument, Keith signals a prior: whenever there is ambiguity in a major technological change, a business model emerges to monetize doubt. It was true of nuclear power. It was true of climate change. It is true of AI. This doesn't mean the fears are groundless — they wouldn't sell if they weren't reasonable. But it means they should be approached with prior scepticism. The doom argument works precisely because AI genuinely contains possible negative outcomes. The business model packages and amplifies those possibilities beyond their actual probability. •       The Guardrails Are Human: Keith's metaphor: AI sits in a prison where humans decide what the doors are. If you give it access to email, it can email. If you don't, it can't. It cannot take actions it has not been permitted to take. The word “guardrails” is commonly used, and it's apt: the constraints on what AI can do are entirely under human control. The word output is the statistical engine — that's not controllable. But its ability to act on words is highly constrained. The danger is not what AI does. It is what humans choose to allow AI to do. •       Jobs vs Work: The Labour Disruption Argument: Rauch's young friends in junior consulting are watching their jobs go in real time. Keith distinguishes between jobs — paid labour — and work, which is closer to effort and creative agency. Jobs can go. Work, he argues, will not — humans will always be reinterpreting the future they want and working to make it happen. But the short-term disruption will be significant: white-collar service provision (legal, accounting, consulting), teaching, driving. The wealth creation AI enables could supplement the end of paid labour. But no one in government is having that conversation. •       Rauch's Verdict: Clarified, Not Reassured: After fifty minutes with Keith Teare, Jonathan Rauch reaches a considered position: his worst fear — that AI becomes an autonomous engine of anti-human malfeasance — is unlikely to happen unless humans make it happen. His residual concern: that humans will not handle these technologies as maturely as one could wish. He's not optimistic about political systems that are already too rigid, too partisan, and too dysfunctional to adjust as they did to the industrialization of the late nineteenth century. On that, he and Keith agree. Nobody knows. Not Keith. Not Andrew. And, despite his brilliance, not Jonathan Rauch. About the Guests Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch. Jonathan Rauch is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, The Happiness Curve, Kindly Inquisitors, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, and many other books. He is based in Washington, D.C. References: •       That Was the Week by Keith Teare. •       The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch. •       Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — the AI doom book referenced in the conversation. •       Sam Harris and Tristan Harris podcast on AI risk — referenced by Rauch as the catalyst for his questions. •       Episode 2902: Keith Teare on his jobless AI future vision — the preceding TWTW episode directly referenced. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. 

“History is really interesting because it's about people. And people are interesting. So there are plenty of different ways of doing this, and I think there's room for everybody.” — Adrian Goldsworthy The greatest rivalry in antiquity is also uncomfortably relevant to us today. In Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece, the classical scholar Adrian Goldsworthy covers the long fifth century BC, from the Persian Wars that forced Athens and Sparta into alliance, through the Peloponnesian War that set them against each other. The parallels of the rivalry between Sparta and Athens are uncannily relevant today. Goldsworthy traces the NATO-like structure of the Athenian alliance, with its familiar complaint that the allies weren't paying enough. He notes that Athens, which outgrew its ability to grow its own food, had to secure its grain supply from the Black Sea — in the same way as closing the Straits of Hormuz has disrupted modern supply chains. And he observes that the Spartans won the Peloponnesian War by getting Persian money — while the Athenians were doing exactly the same thing. Persia, he notes, is always lurking in the background. There would be no “west” without it. Five Takeaways •       Athens and Sparta: Two Experiments, One Greek Longing: Both city states were driven by the same competitive Greek impulse — the desire to excel, to be the best. But they ran radically different experiments in how to achieve it. Athens: radical democracy, open society, maritime empire, philosophy, drama. Sparta: apartheid military state, in which a tiny Spartan elite was freed from all labour by a vast population of helots, so that they could devote their entire lives to being warriors and citizens. Two models for a polity that still structure political argument today. •       Thucydides: Essential but Embittered: The History of the Peloponnesian War is the essential source — and the problematic one. Thucydides was an Athenian general who failed to save a city from a Spartan-led force and went into exile as a result. He is analytical and apparently balanced in ways that seem modern. But he cannot hide his biases: the demagogue Cleon gets speeches written for him that make him look like a self-interested buffoon. And his silences are as revealing as his words — large events, including an Athenian disaster in Egypt, are mentioned only vaguely. He tells us what he wants to tell. •       The NATO Parallel: They Weren't Paying Enough: The Delian League — the Athenian alliance that emerged after the Persian Wars — has a structural similarity to NATO that Goldsworthy notes carefully. Athens, like the United States, is the dominant naval power that has mobilised for a great threat and then chosen not to demobilise. The allies, like European NATO members in successive administrations' complaints, weren't willing to send ships or men. They'd just send a bit of cash. The Athenian fleet ends up overwhelmingly Athenian. As the threat recedes, the other states increasingly resent the protection they're receiving from it. •       Persia Is Always There: The Spartans won the Peloponnesian War by securing subsidies from the Persian Empire. The Athenians were doing the same thing. The irony: both sides of the Greek world's greatest internal conflict ended up funded by the barbarian power they had united to defeat a generation earlier. Goldsworthy draws the modern parallel delicately: America is now fighting a war in Iran, once known as Persia. Europe chose not to join. The question of who Persia is in any given age is always live. Persia, he says, is always there. It always has been. •       Athens as a Theme Park: The Roman Legacy: In the Roman period, Athens and Sparta became what Goldsworthy calls “university cities or, in Sparta's case, a theme park.” Sparta, having lost any real military or political power, invented a public performance of its old customs — a tourist attraction for Roman visitors who wanted to see the old ways enacted. Athens was a university town for the Roman elite, whose children went there as we might go to Oxford. What we think we know about classical Greece is partly filtered through this late antique nostalgia — a celebration of how great we used to be. About the Guest Adrian Goldsworthy is a historian, novelist, and YouTuber with a DPhil from Oxford. He is the author of Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece (Basic Books, May 12, 2026), Caesar: Life of a Colossus, Augustus: First Emperor of Rome, How Rome Fell, Philip and Alexander, Rome and Persia, and many other books. He lives in Penarth, South Wales. References: •       Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece by Adrian Goldsworthy (Basic Books, May 12, 2026). •       Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War — the essential and problematic source, discussed at length. •       Episode 2897: Patrick Wyman on Lost Worlds — directly referenced in the interview as a contrasting style of history. •       Episode 2892: Jason Pack on the Iran war — the companion episode on the modern Persian conflict, referenced in the interview. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“We need to develop better theories of why the other side believes what they do. Having an accurate theory includes recognizing if somebody is a psychopath — but also recognizing that psychopaths are rarer than we think.” — Audun Dahl If you're not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no head. While this sounds like an annoying cliché (especially to people under forty), it does recognize that our moral views change. But, as the Cornell psychologist Audun Dahl argues in his new book Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing, the most interesting question is why our moral principles always seem in flux. Why people who say cheating is wrong cheat. Why people who say violence is wrong turn a blind moral eye to their own insurrections. Dahl is a psychologist, not a moralist. He is not interested in what we should believe, but in what we think we believe. His central finding is that human morality is neither fixed nor fickle. People change their moral views when they believe they have good reasons to — reasons they can, indeed, articulate. The problem isn't hypocrisy per se. It's that we struggle to understand why the other side believes what it does. In morally polarised societies like contemporary America, we over-attribute psychopathy to political opponents. Most Republicans and most Democrats do have genuine moral commitments. But they are just different principles, applied to parallel moral hierarchies. Rather than morality perhaps, we need more empathy. Don't judge. Understand. Five Takeaways •       Two Kinds of Moral Change: Dahl identifies two forms of moral change that should trouble us. Situational moral change: people espouse one principle and act against it in a specific situation — the person who says cheating is wrong and cheats on an exam, the January 6th rioter who says violence is wrong. Historical moral change: the same principles coexisting with practices that contradict them — Thomas Jefferson proclaiming inalienable rights while enslaving hundreds. Both are not simply hypocrisy: they reflect the genuine messiness of moral life, where competing principles create constant conflict. •       Morality Emerges in the First Three Years of Life: Dahl's most striking empirical finding: by around age three, virtually all children develop an intrinsic concern with how we ought to treat other sentient beings. It is not taught as an external rule. It emerges. A three-year-old will say: it's wrong to harm others, you shouldn't steal. No other animal acquires this. It is a uniquely human characteristic. The question is not whether people have moral commitments — almost everyone does. The question is how those commitments interact with other concerns, pressures, and competing principles. •       We Over-Attribute Psychopathy to the Other Side: One of the most robustly documented findings in political psychology: Republicans and Democrats don't merely think the other side is wrong. They think the other side is evil — likely to condone things they would never condone. Research shows both sides significantly over-estimate the other's extremism and moral depravity. Dahl's prescription: develop better theories of why the other side believes what it does. An accurate theory includes recognising genuine psychopaths and bad actors when they exist. It also includes recognising that they are rarer than we think. •       Jefferson, Epstein, and the Exceptions: Two historical anchors. Jefferson: the author of the Declaration of Independence's inalienable rights, who enslaved hundreds. The question is not whether he was a hypocrite — he clearly was — but how someone could hold both positions simultaneously. The answer Dahl finds most compelling: conflicting moral principles applied with different weights in different contexts, not the absence of moral concern. Epstein: the opposite case, a man who concealed an absence of moral concern behind a veneer of respectability. The lesson: some people genuinely lack it, but they are exceptions. •       Elbow Room: The Hilary Mantel Closer: Dahl's two wishes for a more moral world. First: that we understand why the other side disagrees. Second: that we have more “elbow room” — the phrase from Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy — to make decisions based on what we actually think is right rather than what we need to do to survive. Machiavelli and Cromwell operated in a world where survival left almost no room for principled action. If that is becoming our world again, the prospects for moral progress are bleak. Dahl is cautiously hopeful. The creative, restless energy of each new generation — willing to say this is unjust, this is unfair — is what abolished slavery. It is what drives moral change still. About the Guest Audun Dahl is Associate Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He is the author of Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing (Harvard University Press, April 2026). He grew up in Norway and is based in Ithaca, New York. References: •       Between Fixed and Fickle: Why Our Moral Views Keep Changing by Audun Dahl (Harvard University Press, April 2026). •       Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall trilogy — cited by Dahl as capturing the “elbow room” problem of moral action under survival pressure. •       Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning — referenced in the same context as Mantel. •       Episode 2906: Dylan Gottlieb on Yuppies — the companion episode on how professional class morality was shaped by competing incentives. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - The Churchill/Adams quote: liberal at 20, conservative at 40 (02:08) - Dahl's Norwegian grandpa and the disputed attribution (02:30) - Two kinds of troubling moral change: situational and historical (03:10) - Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and his enslaved peopl...

“Being a father is probably one of the toughest and most rewarding jobs I've ever had. A lot of the principles I used to teach snipers apply to kids: dealing with negativity, replacing negative self-talk, learning that well-meaning adults can say terrible things — and you don't have to take that on as baggage.” — Brandon Webb Brandon Webb defines himself as an author, entrepreneur, Navy SEAL sniper, and father. But not in that order. The first three he leveraged into a series of bestselling books about the art of sniping. The fourth — the art of being a loving father — he dodged and ducked for years. But fatherhood might be Webb's real calling. People regularly pulled him aside after meeting his grown children to ask him about his “secret” for being an effective dad. His kids were making eye contact, they were asking good questions rather than staring at their phones. Most astonishingly, they seemed happy. Webb's new book, Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids, reveals his secret of parenting. It applies the positive performance psychology Webb learned as a Navy SEAL sniper instructor — how to redirect negative self-talk, how to deal with well-meaning adults who say damaging things, how to build mental toughness without destroying connection — to the work of raising children. It outlines his parenting philosophy of both high expectations and high support. Think of Puddle Jumpers as simultaneously the manual for tiger and the bunny parenting. Brandon Webb's ultimate calling in life is as a parent. Father, author, entrepreneur and Navy SEAL sniper. In that order. Five Takeaways •       The Sniper Instructor as Parenting Coach: Webb was running the Navy SEAL sniper program at 27 years old. The psychology they taught there — positive self-talk, replacing negative internal narratives, dealing with adversity without being broken by it — is what he applied to parenting. The connection is not as strange as it sounds: both sniping and parenting require performing under pressure, dealing with failure without catastrophising, and building confidence that is genuine rather than brittle. The difference is that the stakes in parenting last a lifetime. •       High Expectations, High Support: Webb's alternative to the false choice between permissive parenting and authoritarian discipline. Permissive parenting replaces preparation with protection. Authoritarian discipline breaks connection. Puddle Jumper Parenting holds both simultaneously: clear expectations and emotional safety. Kids need to know what's required of them. They also need to know they won't be abandoned when they fail. Webb's word for children raised this way: puddle jumpers — kids who leap into life's messy moments with full-hearted abandon, not because they're fearless but because they trust themselves to recover. •       The Credit Card Lesson: Don't Bail Them Out: Webb's son Jackson managed a self-storage facility through college and ended up with a $25,000 ownership payout as a sophomore at St Andrews. He spent it like a drunken sailor on shore leave, got a credit card, ran up $12,000 in debt at predatory interest rates, and called his father for help. Webb's response: you remember that conversation we had? Figure it out. He let his son suffer. Jackson's girlfriend hated Webb for two years. At the end, Jackson paid off the debt with a new business and told his father it was one of the best lessons he'd ever been taught. It would have been easy to bail him out. The suffering was the lesson. •       Purpose and the War Veteran: Viktor Frankl's Lesson: How does a combat veteran come home intact? Webb's answer: purpose. His Afghanistan deployment had clear moral logic — the propaganda posters in the caves, the training camps, the towers. That clarity carried him through. Iraq was different. Soldiers who went to Iraq with no understanding of why they were there — and whose friends in 2010 were saying we have no idea what we're doing here — came home broken. Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning: purpose is the thing that makes endurance possible. Without it, violence that cannot be assigned rational meaning produces serious mental illness. •       Teach Kids About Money: The American Economy Preys on Them: Webb has strong opinions: America's economy is largely fuelled by consumer debt. Credit card companies prey on college students because they know the parents will bail them out. Kids need to understand the system before the system takes advantage of them. His prescription: teach them age-appropriate financial literacy early. The Acorns Early app gamifies financial learning for children. The deal he struck with all his kids in college: I pay for school, you have a roof and food, but if you want to socialise, get a job. The lesson is not just about money. It's about agency. About the Guest Brandon Webb is a combat-decorated Navy SEAL sniper, multiple New York Times bestselling author, Harvard Business School alumnus, and father of three. He is the author of Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids (Authors Equity/Simon & Schuster, May 12, 2026), The Red Circle, The Killing School, and The Making of a Navy SEAL. He divides his time between Portugal and New York City. References: •       Puddle Jumpers: Simple and Proven Ways to Raise Confident and Joyful Kids by Brandon Webb (Authors Equity/Simon & Schuster, May 12, 2026). •       Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning — Webb cites it as one of his favourite books, and the source of his thinking on purpose and combat trauma. •       Episode 2888: Helen Benedict on The Soldier's House — directly referenced in the interview; Webb's purpose-in-war argument is the complement to Benedict's moral injury argument. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Podcasts

“As recently as the mid-seventies, under 5% of Ivy Leaguers are headed to Wall Street. It's actually not that attractive. But as Wall Street's deregulated, it changes the incentive structure — it makes it much more profitable and demands this huge labor force.” — Dylan Gottlieb They stalked the sidewalks of Manhattan in button-down shirts embroidered with the names of investment banks. They jogged. They drank Beaujolais Nouveau. They gentrified neighborhoods. They were the Yuppies — and with the Boston-based Dylan Gottlieb, they've found their young urban professional biographer. In Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York, Gottlieb offers both a social history of financialization and a collective biography of the professional class that came of age in the Reagan years. Rather than a passing 1980s stereotype, Gottlieb argues that the Yuppie is a phenomenon that remade the American economy, city, and political class. As recently as the mid-1970s, under 5 percent of Ivy League graduates went to Wall Street. A decade of deregulation later, banks were recruiting a third of graduating classes from top universities. The sweatshop of the meritocracy was born. Most of us are still sweating. Five Takeaways •       From Yippie to Yuppie: The Word's Origins: Yuppie resonates with Yippie — the iconographic late-sixties radicals of the New Left, for whom Jerry Rubin was the signifier. The word first appeared in a Chicago alt-weekly in the late 1970s to describe highly educated young people trickling into gentrifying North Side neighbourhoods. It didn't achieve full cultural dominance until 1984, when it became the frame for supporters of Gary Hart's presidential campaign — a prototypical Yuppie candidate who stormed the Democratic primary and represented a new professional vanguard within the party. The word named something that was already happening. It didn't create it. •       The Incentive Structure Changed: Under 5% to One Third: As recently as the mid-1970s, under 5 percent of Ivy League graduates went to Wall Street. It was seen as the preserve of WASPy children who used family connections to get a bank job. By the mid-1980s, banks were recruiting roughly a third of graduating classes at top universities. What happened: deregulation made finance enormously more profitable; finance demanded a large educated labour force to do the work of putting finance at the centre of the American economy; and the most talented students — those who might have become poets or public servants — followed the money. At mid-century, the most prestigious option for a Princeton graduate was middle management at a Fortune 500 company. By 1985, it was Wall Street. •       Democratization and Distinction: The Double Movement: Gottlieb's central thesis is a double movement. The Yuppie era brought genuine diversification to America's elite: Jewish lawyers could now make partner at firms previously closed to them; women entered investment banks in numbers that would have been inconceivable in 1965; Black and Asian Americans got at least a foot in the door. This was new, and it mattered. Simultaneously, that newly diversified elite pulled further away from the rest of America, extracting profits from companies being financialized and rents from communities being gentrified. Democratization and distinction in constant tension. The elite became more diverse and more remote at the same time. •       The Pyramid to Cylinder Shift: AI is about to do to the Yuppie what the Yuppie did to everybody else. Gottlieb spoke recently to an HR representative at an investment bank — name and bank withheld — who said the firm was moving from a pyramid structure to a cylinder structure for employment. The wide base of entry-level workers that finance has depended on since the 1980s will shrink dramatically. Only the best and brightest will be selected; the rest will be automated. Gottlieb wrote about the era of the large pyramid — the exploited many at the bottom who hoped to reach the top. What happens to the professional class when that pyramid disappears? •       Are the Yuppies Becoming Socialists? A long-running trend: the pressures of the sweatshop of the meritocracy have embittered many members of the professional class. Academics work in conditions demonstrably worse than they were forty years ago. Doctors are evaluated on metrics that resemble those of factory workers. Journalists are precarious. The housing market in the cities where professionals cluster has made the cost of replicating their social status for their children prohibitive. And into this comes AI, threatening the entry-level pipeline. Gottlieb's question: will the investment bankers see their plight as similar to the Amazon warehouse worker's? Or will the edifice of meritocratic myth-making — the deep conviction that you're special — hold them back from that solidarity? About the Guest Dylan Gottlieb is Assistant Professor of History at Bentley University and co-host of the Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism podcast. He is the author of Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York (Harvard University Press, May 12, 2026), winner of the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. He has written for the Washington Post, Gotham, the Journal of American History, and Public Seminar. References: •       Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York by Dylan Gottlieb (Harvard University Press, May 12, 2026). •       Noam Scheiber, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of a College-Educated Working Class — the companion book, referenced in the interview as directly relevant to Gottlieb's thesis. •       Barbara Ehrenreich — referenced by Gottlieb as the first to identify the downwardly mobile tranche of the professional class. •       Episode 2895: Glyn Morgan on the rise and fall of American Europe — the companion episode on how the professional class shaped American foreign policy. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeAp...

“All the warnings were there. It was almost a carbon copy — the same warnings that were ignored before Paradise, ignored again before the Palisades. And nobody was held accountable.” — Jonathan Vigliotti On January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire ignited in Los Angeles. Over the first few hours of the fire, the second-largest city in America had no firefighters on the front lines and no coordinated evacuation. Residents fought the flames with garden hoses. “Where are the firefighters?” somebody, running from the fire, screamed into a live television shot. Where, indeed, were Los Angeles firefighters? Jonathan Vigliotti — CBS national correspondent, Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award winner — was there from the beginning. His new book, Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles, is the searing firsthand account of the tragic failure of the Los Angeles authorities to respond to the fire. The story Vigliotti tells is not new. In some ways, it is a carbon copy of the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise in Northern California. First as tragedy then as farce: inadequate evacuation routes, uncleared fuel loads, officials who failed to act were repeated almost exactly in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. More than eighty people died in Paradise and more than thirty in the LA fires. The economic damage in LA will likely make it the costliest natural disaster in US history. And when the LA mayor and the Californian governor appeared in the first press conference after the fires broke out, Vigliotti reports, all Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom were talking about was the 2028 Olympics. The political reckoning has not happened, Vigliotti warns. Bass is still mayor and Newsom is a Presidential frontrunner for 2028. California's current governor's race is dominated by homelessness and crime. Wildfire — the existential threat to the state, the one where more than $2 billion in taxpayer money was pumped into agencies over several years with more than half a billion unaccounted for — is barely mentioned. The fires will be back, Vigliotti warns. Maybe this year for the World Cup, maybe in 2028 for the Olympics. So where are the firefighters? Five Takeaways •       Where Are the Firefighters? The Central Question: Vigliotti was on scene from the first moments of the Palisades Fire. What struck him was not the scale of the flames — he'd seen wildfires before — but the absence of any official response. No firefighters at ground zero. No coordinated evacuation. The traffic gridlock that formed within an hour of ignition blocked fire trucks from getting through. Residents fought embers with garden hoses. A man running from the hillside screamed into Vigliotti's live shot: “Where are the firefighters?” That question became the question of the disaster — and the book. •       A Carbon Copy of Paradise: The 2018 Camp Fire destroyed the Northern California town of Paradise. More than eighty people died. Before it happened: weeks and months of warnings about inadequate evacuation routes, uncleared fuel loads, and officials who failed to act. The same warnings, in almost identical form, were issued for Pacific Palisades and Altadena before January 7, 2025. They were ignored in the same way. The LA fires killed more than thirty people and will likely be the costliest natural disaster in US history. Nobody has been held accountable. Nobody has been fired. •       The Olympics Come First: Vigliotti's most damning reporting: in the first press conference after the Palisades Fire broke out, Mayor Karen Bass and Governor Gavin Newsom were already talking about the 2028 Olympic Games and Los Angeles's ability to rebuild in time. The fires were still burning. The framing was already: how do we make this a story of resilience and recovery? Vigliotti's counter: the story is not resilience. It is accountability. The question is not whether Los Angeles can rebuild. It is whether it can avoid the same disaster happening again. •       $2 Billion, Half a Billion Unaccounted For: California's taxes are already among the highest in the country. More than $2 billion in taxpayer money was pumped into homeless-related agencies over several years. More than half a billion was unaccounted for. And the agencies responsible for wildfire prevention and emergency management are chronically underfunded. Vigliotti's argument: it is not that Californians need to pay more taxes. It is that the taxes they pay need to go to the right agencies. The budget for fighting climate change and protecting communities from fire is dwarfed by the budget for crime. Fire kills more people. •       The Political Reckoning That Hasn't Happened: California's governor's race, in the wake of the deadliest and costliest fire season in recent memory, is dominated by homelessness and crime. Wildfire — the existential threat to the state — is barely mentioned. Nobody in the political class, Vigliotti reports, has come to him asking for advice or analysis. He is not holding his breath. His warning: this summer, and every summer, the fire will come back. The conditions that created the Palisades disaster have not been remedied. Los Angeles is not ready. About the Guest Jonathan Vigliotti is a CBS News national correspondent and Emmy and Edward R. Murrow Award winner. He is the author of Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles (Atria/One Signal, May 12, 2026) and Before It's Gone: Stories from the Front Lines of Climate Change in Small-Town America. He is based in Los Angeles. References: •       Torched: How a City Was Left to Burn and the Olympic Rush to Rebuild Los Angeles by Jonathan Vigliotti (Atria/One Signal, May 12, 2026). •       Lizzie Johnson, Paradise: One Town's Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire — the companion book on the 2018 Camp Fire, referenced in the interview. •       Watch Duty — the wildfire monitoring app Vigliotti mentions as standard equipment for California residents. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstack

 “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 the last 19 minutes of your life? That's the question Vincent Yu plays with in Seek Immediate Shelter. Triggered (so to speak) by a 2018 Hawaii missile alert of an apocalypse that fizzled, Yu's novel is about a false alarm that sent Asian-American residents of a small Massachusetts town into 19 minutes of existential panic. Seek Immediate Shelter really starts after the fictional all-clear. Because now everyone has revealed their cards. The real games begin. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. Seek Immediate Shelter is really a novel about third acts, not second. The first act is normal life. The second is the nineteen minutes of terror. The third — the one that really matters — is the reckoning: the mother who used the alert as an excuse to cruelly insult her daughter; the man who hit the gas and sped away from his family; the woman who confessed her unrequited love. So all clear does not mean all right. The missile alert strips away all the lies of daily life. What's left is a truth as explosive as any missile. Five Takeaways •       The Third Act, Not the Second: F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives — and Yu's novel is a direct argument against that claim. But the book's real focus is the third act: not the nineteen minutes of terror (the second), but the aftermath. The mother who used the alert as permission to say something cruel. The man who sped away from his wife and child. The woman who confessed her love. These are the decisions people made when they thought it was the end. Now they have to live with them. All clear does not mean all right. •       The Petri Dish Method: Yu has a background in biology and no formal training in fiction. He approaches writing scientifically: characters as specimens on petri dishes, a missile alert as the experimental conditions. The pressure-cooker situation strips away the social armour and reveals the character beneath. His goal was not cruelty but pressure — there's a difference. He feels profound empathy for every character. When asked if any are based on real people: they're all me. Every single one. •       Asian American Silence and the Langston Hughes Principle: Yu originally wrote the characters without race. But honesty required him to make them Asian American — citing Langston Hughes's argument that a Black poet cannot write outside of race even if he wants to. Asian American fiction has long focused on immigrant trauma and the difficult parent-child relationship. Yu wants to push beyond that: third- and fourth-generation stories, people who are simply American. The missile alert forces the silence of striving and quiet excellence to break. What's underneath is the novel's real subject. •       Can AI Write This Kind of Novel? Yu has never used AI for his writing and — he admits — hasn't been curious enough to try. His verdict: AI is nowhere close to writing a novel like this. Some genres, with more uniform rubrics, are more vulnerable. But the distinctive cadences of AI writing are currently easy to detect. He is, however, optimistic: the proliferation of AI-generated plots may make readers more discerning, better at recognizing tropes, more hungry for genuinely fresh storytelling. AI might, paradoxically, sharpen the audience for literary fiction. •       The Cuban Missile Crisis, Trump, and COVID as Crucibles: Andrew's provocation: was the Cuban Missile Crisis actually good for America? Did it force a national reckoning? And might Trump and COVID do the same? Yu is reluctant to apply this logic to countries — he deals in characters. But at the individual level: yes. A crucible that forces you to confront what you most cannot bear to part with, what truly matters, can be clarifying. The novel's premise is that the missile alert was such a crucible. The broader lesson may be that we are all living through one. About the Guest Vincent Yu is a fiction writer and sales manager at W. W. Norton/Liveright. He is the winner of the 2021 Ashley Bourne Prize for fiction from Ploughshares and the author of Seek Immediate Shelter (Flatiron Books, May 5, 2026). His short fiction has been published in Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, Ninth Letter, Able Muse, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. References: •       Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu (Flatiron Books, May 5, 2026). •       The 2018 Hawaii missile alert — the real-life false alarm that inspired the novel. •       Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) — the essay Yu cites on writing within race. •       Episode 2898: James Lasdun on The Family Man — the companion episode on fiction's capacity to go where journalism cannot. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“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 you feel homeless — physically, politically, morally or spiritually? That's the question posed by Ece Temelkuran's new book Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century. Shortlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Nonfiction, the narrative is structured as a series of letters from one homeless stranger to another. Temelkuran left Turkey in 2016, after threats to her life made staying untenable. After seven years of exile — in Beirut, Tunis, Oxford, Paris, Zagreb, and now Berlin — she has written both her own and our story in today's globalized, populist age. She's been called everything from a 21st century Hannah Arendt to a “ruthless Cassandra.” And yet she retains faith in the future — as a defiant stance, a can-do-no-other attitude against rootlessness and loneliness. The wisdom of survival, Ece Temelkuran argues, lies with refugees, exiles and migrants like herself. This nation of strangers are rebuilding home in our homeless world. Five Takeaways •       Four Kinds of Homelessness: Temelkuran identifies four simultaneous crises of home. Physical homelessness: refugees, migrants, the displaced. Political homelessness: people who no longer recognize their countries, who feel unrepresented by any party, who cannot feel that they belong where they are. Moral homelessness: people who see the cruelty of our times and find no institution — state, court, international organization — capable of stopping it. And spiritual homelessness: the loss of language as our innermost home, now shared with AI. Four levels of being unhoused at once. That is the human condition of 2026. •       Minneapolis as a Nation of Strangers: The week the book was published in the US, Minneapolis happened — ordinary people forming human chains to resist ICE agents. Temelkuran's reading: that was a Nation of Strangers in action. People who had never met, people from different communities who owed each other nothing in the old sense, holding on to each other because they recognized a shared condition. Not an ideology, not a party, not a leader — just strangers building a home together in real time. That, she says, is what the book is about. •       Digital Refugees: When Elon Musk bought Twitter, millions of people fled to Mastodon, Bluesky, and other platforms — behaving, Temelkuran observes, exactly like refugees. Looking back at the old home while building a new one. Checking both simultaneously. She asks: why did no one think to occupy Twitter? To say: this is ours, not yours? Her conclusion: our political imagination has become extraordinarily limited. We accept displacement, digital or physical, as inevitable. We do not think to resist it by occupying the space rather than fleeing. •       Gaza and the Move-On Ideology: Gaza was the ultimate test of how much humanity can swallow. Temelkuran draws an arc from Colin Powell's tube in the UN Security Council in 2003 — when a global anti-war movement was brushed aside — to today. Each time people mobilize and are ignored, they lose a little more faith in themselves, in politics, in institutions. What devastated Temelkuran most was not the bombing but Jared Kushner at Davos presenting his PowerPoint for a seaside resort in Gaza. That, she says, is what neoliberal morality looks like. Move on. That is the lowest of the low. •       The Pioneers of History: Refugees as the Advance Guard: Temelkuran resisted writing her own story for years — she came from a leftist family where talking about yourself was suspect, and she feared being seen as a victim. What changed: she realized her story intersected with the story of the masses. The wisdom of survival — how to remake home from scratch, how to survive with dignity, how to rebuild identity after losing everything — belongs to refugees, exiles, and migrants. These are the pioneers of history. Soon everyone will need what they know. That is why their stories matter now. About the Guest Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish writer, political thinker, and public speaker. She is the author of Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century (Simon & Schuster, May 2026), shortlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Nonfiction; How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism; and Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World. She was born in Turkey and is based in Berlin. References: •       Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the Twenty-First Century by Ece Temelkuran (Simon & Schuster, May 2026). •       How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism by Ece Temelkuran — the book that made her reputation in the West. •       Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World by Ece Temelkuran — the second book, between How to Lose a Country and Nation of Strangers. •       Episode 2894: Marc Loustau on why Orbán lost and how to defeat Trump — the companion episode on defeating fascism from within the system. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Is Ece still retaining faith in the future? (01:47) - Faith as a stance: like Martin Luther, here I stand (02:30) - How to Lose a Country and what comes next (02:57) - Minneapolis as a Nation of Strangers (04:00) - Four kinds of homelessness: physical, political, moral, spiritual (04:35) - AI and the loss of language as spiritual home (05:10) - Why this book now — and why it's the most personal

“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? That Was the Week publisher Keith Teare certainly thinks so. His editorial “Civilization: What Is Worth Doing” this week imagines a future in which nobody has to work unless they choose to, basic necessities are no longer scarce, leisure time is abundant, and governance fades to near-invisibility. I'm not so sure. As I told Keith, “That sounds incredibly boring. I don't want to live in that kind of society.” The conversation this week has been civilizational. A few days ago, the podcaster Patrick Wyman came on the show to argue that history is mostly unintentional and unexpected. But Keith says civilization is broadly linear and tends, if not toward justice, toward progress. Wyman says civilizations are plural and never inevitable. “Why History Keeps Happening” is how Wyman put it. The end and the beginning of history are, thus, delusional. We are, then, always in the middle of history. That's the wisdom missing from all the ridiculous hysteria about AI. It's just one chapter in our history. The promise that AI will create mass abundance is as somnolent as the fear it will wipe out our civilization. Pass the Soma. Five Takeaways •       Civilization: Singular or Plural? Wyman's argument: civilizations are plural, nonlinear, full of failure and unintended consequence. Keith's counter: civilization — singular — is the long arc of human progress collectively, broadly linear over two hundred years. Both are right at different scales. Andrew's instinct: we're in a nonlinear moment masquerading as progress. Keith's: we're at a fork in the road. That much they agree on. The more interesting question is who controls which direction the fork takes. •       Paul Ehrlich and the Limits of Forecasting: Norman Lewis's cautionary tale: Paul Ehrlich predicted in the 1970s that population growth would exhaust the Earth's resources within a generation. He was famously, totally wrong. Andrew's application: most people are probably wrong about AI right now — both the doomers and the optimists. The future is not the thing you think you're heading toward. The Wyman principle: history keeps happening in directions nobody predicted. •       The Pyramid of Change: Keith's model for how history gets made. Agents of change form a pyramid. At the top: a small number of people who have a much larger influence on what happens than everyone at the base. Most people receive change rather than make it. Those who step outside the norms and make things happen — those are the ones who make history. The question of our moment: who is at the top of the pyramid? And do they share your values? Or anyone else's? •       AI Panic in the Media: Reflecting, Not Forming: Nirit Weiss-Blatt's research into ten studies on AI coverage: the media is overwhelmingly negative. Keith's reading: media reflects opinion rather than forming it. Negativity around AI is a reasonable reaction to not knowing. When you don't know, you can believe anything, and most of the available influence is negative. If AI delivers real benefits, opinion will change, and media will follow. Andrew's reading: the cause is genuine uncertainty, not media panic. •       Keith's Utopia: “That Sounds Incredibly Boring”: Keith's vision: everyone eats, everyone is warm, nobody has to work unless they choose to, leisure time is abundant, paid labour replaced by a society that provides for all, governance shrinking toward irrelevance as satisfaction rises. Andrew's verdict: “that sounds incredibly boring. I don't want to live in that kind of society.” The Germans, Keith notes, will still be putting their towels out at dawn to claim the beach. Some scarcities will always remain. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew's regular TWTW co-host. References: •       That Was the Week: “Civilization: What Is Worth Doing” by Keith Teare. •       Norman Lewis, “The Future Is Not Scarce,” Nervous. •       Nirit Weiss-Blatt, “What 10 Studies Revealed About AI Panic in the Media.” •       Ezra Klein, “Why the AI Job Apocalypse Probably Won't Happen,” The New York Times. •       Episode 2897: Patrick Wyman on Lost Worlds — the companion episode on civilization's unintended consequences, directly referenced in this conversation. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: 

“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 Kong in 2019. A dismembered body is found in a landfill. A disgraced police superintendent is called back from internal exile to solve it. The city around him is burning. Rather than a John Woo movie, this is the setting for a Simon Elegant thriller. Born in Hong Kong, former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, most recently the Washington Post's man in China until Jeff Bezos “eliminated” him three months ago — Elegant has written the definitive Hong Kong novel. First and foremost, City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong is a crime thriller. Superintendent Killian Tong — half-Chinese, half-Irish, loved by no one in his department — investigates a murder while his sister is noisily demonstrating on the other side of the barricades. But the book doubles as a compressed history of Hong Kong: from Palmerston's “barren rock” in the 1840s — seized from China after the opium wars — through the ninety-nine-year lease, the handover in 1997, and the slow strangulation of the “one country, two systems” promise. Elegant is neither a hardline China hawk nor an apologist for Beijing. Yes, he credits the British with a relatively enlightened administration — from its public housing to the uncorrupt civil service that inspired the Singapore model. But he is also clear about what happened after 1997. Hong Kong people assumed Beijing would honour the Thatcher-Deng terms, and then discovered, to their horror, that they had no rights. It was a silent coup rather than a gaudy takeover of power. And so the 2019 protests — when a million people went onto the streets — are not just a backdrop to City on Fire but also the real-life stage on which Hong Kong burnt. Five Takeaways •       Enlightened Colonialism — With Caveats: Was Hong Kong an example of enlightened British colonialism? Elegant says: relatively, yes. The administration was light-handed. The public housing was so good that Singapore copied it. The civil service was — after 1972, when they had to create the ICAC following a police corruption scandal — genuinely clean. Milton Friedman praised the free-market model. But it was also racialized: the upper levels were almost entirely white Anglo, and the Chinese were largely excluded from administrative power. Governor Jock MacLehose changed this. Enlightened colonialism, Elegant concludes, is not a contradiction in terms — but it is relative. Compared to the Belgian Congo, Hong Kong was paradise. •       One Country, Two Systems: A Promise Broken: The terms negotiated by Thatcher and Deng in the 1980s guaranteed Hong Kong's autonomy until 2047. Hong Kong people assumed these terms were real and would be adhered to. They were not. The first attempt to pass a national security law came in 2004. There were mass protests in 2014. In 2019, a million people — in a city of six million — were on the streets. Beijing's choice was not between crushing them or not. It was between blood in the streets and a silent coup. They chose the silent coup. The national security law of 2020 was the final instrument. There is no longer any meaningful “one country, two systems.” •       The Policeman as Moral Complexity: Elegant's decision to make his protagonist a policeman — rather than a protester — is the novel's central artistic choice. Superintendent Killian Tong is not a villain. He is a man caught between institutions he has served his whole life and a conscience that knows what's happening is wrong. His younger sister is on the other side of the barricades. The murder investigation forces him to confront not just the crime but the system that made it possible. Elegant wanted to write about moral complexity, not propaganda — and the only way to do that was to give the story to the person most implicated in the system. •       Bezos ‘Eliminated' the Washington Post's Foreign Staff: Simon Elegant's final paycheck from the Washington Post used the word “eliminated.” He was one of 35-40 foreign correspondents let go in a single exercise — one of the biggest foreign staffs at any American newspaper. No one, he says, can explain what the thinking was, or if there was any. Every person he meets in Washington has cancelled their subscription. The Post still has excellent national security reporters, but in terms of foreign coverage it is, Elegant says, “doomed.” His conclusion: “perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper, it made sense.” •       Hemingway's Iceberg, Applied: What did writing fiction teach Simon Elegant after a career in journalism? The iceberg principle, which Hemingway described: seven-eighths of a book — the knowledge, the research, the reported detail — should sit below the waterline. Only the tippy-top should be visible. The weight of the knowledge gives the visible surface its authority. The book started at 128,000 words — every reported detail jammed in. By the third or fourth round of cuts with the editor's blade, it was 75,000. The lesson: don't jam in your entire notebook. Fiction goes more directly into the heart. It bypasses the brain and seeks a different truth. About the Guest Simon Elegant is a journalist and novelist born in Hong Kong. He was Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine and most recently China bureau chief for the Washington Post. He is the author of City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong (Pegasus Crime, May 5, 2026), A Floating Life (Ecco/HarperCollins), and A Chinese Wedding (Piatkus). He is based in Kuala Lumpur. References: •       City on Fire: A Novel of Hong Kong by Simon Elegant (Pegasus Crime, May 5, 2026). •       Episode 2870: Eyck Freymann on Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China — the companion episode on Taiwan and the growing China crisis. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Pod...

“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 are young men falling from riverside apartments. Girlhood is falling to the commodification of appearance. Book reviewing is falling to AI. Mary Todd Lincoln fell through history as a shrill and inconvenient widow. And just three days ago, Yale historian Ian Shapiro argued that democracy itself has fallen — from the euphoric heights of 1989 to today's nadir of illiberal populism. One person who never falls is our unfailingly literate friend Bethanne Patrick — book critic at the Los Angeles Times, founder of #FridayReads, and the best-read lady in America. And her May list of recommended reads is full of books about falling. Take, for example, the New York Times bestselling London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe — a true crime whodunnit about Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old who reinvented himself as the son of a Kazakh oligarch and fell to his death from a Thames-side luxury apartment. Then there's Girls by Freya India on Gen Z and the commodification of girlhood; Make Believe by Mac Barnett, the Children's Laureate, on storytelling as an art of raising kids; I Am Not a Robot by Joanna Stern on AI as useful tool, not a civilizational menace; and An Inconvenient Widow by Lois Romano which rehabilitates the already fallen Mary Todd Lincoln. And then there's the fall of book reviewing itself. Where have all the critics gone? New York Times book critic Dwight Garner wrote its obituary this week. But Bethanne Patrick hasn't fallen. And, last I checked, London is still standing. Five Takeaways •       London Falling: The Oligarchs Were the Problem: Patrick Radden Keefe's new New York Times bestseller is about Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old London boy who reinvented himself as the son of a Kazakh oligarch and fell to his death from a Thames-side luxury apartment. Bethanne's reading: the most interesting element is not the Brettler family's grief — sympathetic as they are — but the portrait of a London transformed by money from overseas. Twenty years ago, the worry was economic immigrants. The people who really changed London were the oligarchs. Andrew is sceptical of the neoliberalism-as-villain thesis. Janan Ganesh: London has always been defined by capitalism. •       Girls: The Commodification of Girlhood:  by Freya India (born 1999) argues that Gen Z girls have always been girls — but technology has made the existing anxieties about appearance, body, and social status thousands of times worse. Face-tuning, influencers, targeted advertising, social media bullying. Bethanne's daughter — summa cum laude in economics — relaxes by watching reality shows about the commodification of female appearance. The book's parallel with London Falling: both are about young people who cannot escape the mirror of other people's wealth and image. •       Make Believe: Art for Children, Not Just Books: Mac Barnett, current Children's Laureate of the Library of Congress, argues in Make Believe that children don't just need books — they need art. Great literature, beauty, truth. The book echoes Robert Coles' The Call of Stories and pushes back against the passive consumption of screens. Bethanne's connection to London Falling: Zac Brettler was a brilliant storyteller. He might have been a writer or filmmaker. But stories have to move you toward caring about other people. They're not just about taking in — they're about give and take. •       I Am Not a Robot: AI as Tool, Not Menace: Joanna Stern, the Wall Street Journal's consumer tech columnist, spent a year using AI for almost everything. The book is a stunt memoir in the tradition of “my year of doing this” — but also genuinely useful. Her verdict: AI is a tool. It's not good or bad. She wrote every sentence herself but used AI for spell-checking, research, and editing. Meanwhile: the Authors Guild raised close to $900,000 at their annual gala, with David Baldacci giving an impassioned speech about AI and intellectual property. The Chicago Tribune published AI-generated summer reading recommendations that included a Louise Erdrich novel she never wrote. •       Where Have All the Book Reviewers Gone? A Dwight Garner piece in the New York Times cites a 1981 Donald Barthelme story predicting machines doing reviews. Now it's happening: the New York Times recently discovered a freelance reviewer had been using AI for several reviews. Google Gemini now summarises reviews before you see them. Bethanne Patrick, book critic at the Los Angeles Times, is one of a tiny handful of full-time book critics left. Her verdict: criticism done by a non-human entity misses the point. The point of criticism is judgment. Judgment requires a human mind. About the Guest Bethanne Patrick is a book critic at the Los Angeles Times, founder of #FridayReads, host of the Missing Pages podcast, and the author of Life B: Overcoming Double Depression (Counterpoint, 2023). She is also known as @TheBookMaven on social media. Books Discussed: •       London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday, April 7, 2026). •       Girls by Freya India (2026). •       Make Believe by Mac Barnett (2026). •       I Am Not a Robot: My Year Using AI to Do Almost Everything by Joanna Stern (2026). •       An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln by Lois Romano (Simon & Schuster, 2026). About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-Ame...

“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, the Stratford-upon-Avon-based writer and the lady behind the X account @deathtospinach. She should know. Best known as the author of Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You, a cult hit among the romance fraud crowd, Holmes' latest book is The Future of Fraud. It's a short, sharp, witty history and anatomy of fraud, from the first recorded case in ancient Greece to today's AI-enabled deepfakes and romance scams. Holmes' most alarming statistic is that fraud accounts for between 40 and 50 percent of all crime in the United Kingdom, while only 1% of police resources are dedicated to investigating it. No wonder so few fraudsters are ever prosecuted. Holmes wants more Sherlocks. She wants fraud awareness on every school curriculum. And she wants our language to change. No, you didn't “fall for” a scam. Your money was stolen from you. As if you were mugged on the street or your home was broken into. The internet was bad enough for fraud. But AI, she warns, offers online criminals even more opportunity. It's not just Keanu Reeves who isn't in love with you. Never trust a handsome soldier, she says. Especially a virtual one. Five Takeaways •       The First Recorded Fraud: 300 BC, Greece: A Greek merchant took out an insurance policy on his boat, borrowed money, and planned to sink it and collect the proceeds. It didn't go according to plan. But the basic structure — a false representation designed to extract money or goods from another party — has not changed in 2,300 years. Every fraud since, from the South Sea Bubble to Bernie Madoff to AI-enabled romance scams, is a variation on the same theme: getting something from someone by not telling the truth. •       AI Has Erased All the Red Flags: Holmes used to advise romance fraud victims and potential victims: if he won't do a video call, that's suspicious. If the voice sounds wrong, that's suspicious. If he can't meet in person, that's suspicious. AI has rendered all of these warnings useless. You can now have a fully convincing video call, voice message, and real-time conversation with someone who doesn't exist. Deepfakes mean you can't even trust what your eyes tell you. The “red flags” that protected fraud victims for thirty years are gone. •       40 to 50 Percent of Crime, 1 Percent of Resource: In the United Kingdom, fraud accounts for between 40 and 50 percent of all recorded crime. Police resources dedicated to investigating fraud: 1 percent. Holmes cites a comparable US statistic: in one state, there were millions of people and ten police officers dedicated to cybercrime — and not one of them did it as their primary job. No country, Holmes argues, is giving fraud the attention it deserves. The gap between the scale of the problem and the resources devoted to it is not a funding issue. It is a political choice. •       You Didn't Lose Your Money. It Was Taken from You: Holmes has a crusade about language. The phrase “fell for a scam” implies the victim's credulity caused the loss. “Lost their money” implies carelessness. Both are wrong: in fraud, money is taken by a deliberate criminal act. Holmes wants the language changed because language shapes understanding, and understanding shapes policy. If fraud victims are seen as complicit in their own victimhood, society finds it easier to underfund investigation and under-prosecute offenders. Reclaiming the language is not symbolic. It is strategic. •       Fraud Awareness Should Be on Every School Curriculum: Holmes's most concrete prescription. Every person on the planet will encounter fraud at some point. Teaching children to recognise it should be as basic as teaching them to cross the road safely. It should be age-appropriate: fraud awareness around gaming sites and online chat when children first go online; around bank accounts and credit cards when they turn eighteen; around investment fraud at university level. The alternative — leaving it to parents, who are often themselves uneducated about fraud — is not good enough. The next generation of fraudsters is already on the gaming headsets. About the Guest Becky Holmes is the creator of the X account @deathtospinach, a fraud prevention speaker and writer, and the author of The Future of Fraud (Melville House, April 2026) and Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud. She lives in Stratford-upon-Avon. References: •       The Future of Fraud by Becky Holmes (Melville House, April 2026). •       Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud by Becky Holmes (Unbound, 2024). •       Episode 2890: Anja Shortland on Dark Screens — ransomware as the companion episode on the booming business of cybercrime. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: Was Shakespeare a fraud? (01:35) - Everyone has been into fraud at some point in history (01:44) - What is fraud? A working definition (02:41) - Anja Shortland and the British women and fraud connection (03:16) - How Becky got into fraud: handsome soldiers on Twitter during lockdown (03:32) - @deathtospinach: the origin of the handle (04:53) - Where does romance fraud end and marketing oneself begin? (05:27) - Motive is the line: wanting money from a relationship (06:09) - Fraud for sex and power: a different kind of romance fraud (06:50) - The spinach debate: raw vs. cooked (...

“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 and his son Paul at their family estate. With its opioid addiction, fatal boat crash, staged suicide, and a cousin called Eddie, the case could have been invented for our true crime age. And who better to tell the story of the mysterious Mr Murdaugh than the literary crime writer James Lasdun whose 2023 New Yorker piece about the trial became the magazine's most-read story of the year. Lasdun's new book, The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh, tries to answer the one question the trial never answered. Why would a father annihilate his son? The prosecution claimed that Alex killed Maggie and Paul to distract from a web of financial crimes about to be exposed. While this is theoretically possible, Lasdun acknowledges, it is totally implausible psychologically. Coming from a family of prosecutors, Murdaugh would have known he would be the prime suspect. And this family annihilator, as the prosecutor described him, murdered not just his wife, but his boy. Who would annihilate their beloved child to muddy a prosaic embezzlement? The Southern gothic case isn't over. The court clerk who managed the Murdaugh trial resigned in disgrace after it emerged she had interfered with the jury — fabricating a Facebook post to remove a juror who was bending toward acquittal. Murdaugh has appealed to the South Carolina Supreme Court. A retrial isn't inconceivable. But even if the murder conviction is overturned, Murdaugh faces forty years inside for his financial crimes. So he's never going free. But James Lasdun's core question remains unanswered. Why? “Justice may have been served,” Lasdun concludes, “but the human element of the story didn't seem to add up.” Mr Murdaugh remains a mystery, perhaps even to himself. Five Takeaways •       The Family Annihilator: A Psychological Category: The term “family annihilator” — first used at the Murdaugh trial — is not a well-developed criminological category. There isn't much psychology behind it. What Lasdun found in his research: most family annihilators are men who kill their families when they believe everything is about to be taken from them — not out of hatred, but out of a grotesque form of ownership. The family is theirs. If their world is ending, the family ends with it. This pattern, Lasdun argues, begins to illuminate what happened at Moselle. Not excusing it. Illuminating it. •       The Thirteen Minutes of Mystery: The murders took place in a thirteen-minute window at the kennel at Moselle. In thirteen minutes, Alex was supposed to have shot his wife with a shotgun and his son with a rifle, staged the scene, called 911, and composed himself sufficiently to appear on a video call immediately afterward showing no signs of distress. Lasdun's question: was he capable of that? The prosecution said yes, and the jury agreed. Lasdun is not saying they were wrong. He is saying that the how and why of those thirteen minutes remain genuinely mysterious — and that the mystery is part of what makes the case important. •       Cousin Eddie and the Staged Shooting: Three months after the murders, Alex arranged a meeting on a rural road with his cousin Eddie — a distant relative — and emerged with an entry and exit wound at the back of his head. Alex claimed he had asked Eddie to shoot him dead so that his surviving son Buster could collect his $10 million life insurance. Eddie denies this account entirely. The police concluded quickly that the “shooter” was not a stranger seeking vengeance for the boat crash, as Alex had initially claimed. Lasdun's reading: Alex was trying to reinforce the vendetta narrative that would implicate Anthony and Connor Cook, the young men who had been on the boat when Mallory Beach was killed. •       The Court Clerk and the Removed Juror: One juror was leaning toward acquittal in the final hours of deliberation. That juror was removed from the jury on the last day of the trial, after the clerk of court produced evidence that the juror had been indiscreet about the case on Facebook. It subsequently emerged that the clerk had fabricated the Facebook post. She resigned in disgrace. The Murdaugh appeal is partly based on this interference. The South Carolina Supreme Court has taken it seriously. A retrial is not inconceivable. The legal situation is still live. •       Murdaugh as an American Story: Lasdun's book, like Capote's In Cold Blood, is not ultimately about a crime. It is about a society. The Murdaughs were prosecutors — the family that put people in prison, that sent people to death row. The corruption that enabled Alex's embezzlement was not unusual in Hampton County; it was systemic. The opioids that fuelled his addiction were everywhere. The insularity and entitlement of the Lowcountry ruling class created the conditions in which Alex Murdaugh could operate for twenty years without exposure. The murders are a symptom. The disease is American. About the Guest James Lasdun is a poet, novelist, memoirist, and staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh (W. W. Norton, May 5, 2026), Afternoon of a Faun, Give Me Everything You Have, and many other works. He was born in London and lives in Brooklyn, New York. References: •       The Family Man: Blood and Betrayal in the House of Murdaugh by James Lasdun (W. W. Norton, May 5, 2026). •       James Lasdun's two New Yorker pieces on the Murdaugh case — the magazine's most-read stories of the year. •       Truman Capote, In Cold Blood — the comparison Lasdun's reviewers have drawn and that the interview raises explicitly. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple Podcasts

“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 beginning, not just the end.” — Patrick Wyman History, we are often told, is a simple story of progress — from caves and villages to cities; from forests and farms to factories; from chieftains and kings to democracies. But, for Patrick Wyman, host of the enormously popular Tides of History and Fall of Rome podcasts, that's far too linear a narrative. In his new book, Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World, Wyman argues that rather than a teleological inevitability, civilization is a chaotic ten thousand year story of improvisation, experiment, failure, and unintended consequence. It is never ending. We are always in the middle of it. Dramatic advances in archaeological technology triggered Wyman's argument in Lost Worlds. Ancient DNA, isotope analysis, LiDAR, cutting-edge excavation are all opening up what Wyman calls “a golden age for popular historians.” We can now trace the lives of individuals in ways that were inconceivable just a generation ago. Wyman's star is Ötzi the Iceman — a man murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps, whose gut contents, DNA, last meal, and likely killers we now know. Rather than a symbol of prehistoric life, Ötzi the Iceman reveals why history keeps happening. Five Takeaways •       The Prelapsarian Fallacy: Hunter-Gatherers Weren't Paradise: The romantic idea — popular in the last decade as people read Graeber and Wengrow or Yuval Noah Harari — is that hunter-gatherers had it better. Farming made us smaller, sicker, more crowded, more unequal. Wyman's counter: yes, on some metrics early farmers were less healthy than foragers. But farming also supported enormously larger populations. It expanded the possibilities of human life in ways that foraging never could. Looking back at the past and calling it paradise says more about the critique of the present than about the actual realities of past lives. •       Civilization Was Not Inevitable: We have a story about how we got from foragers to cities: people settled, started farming, produced surplus, developed specialisation, built states. But Wyman's new archaeology shows that this story is wrong at every step. Farming didn't always replace foraging. Villages didn't automatically spark agriculture. Cities didn't necessitate rigid hierarchies. For every society that moved from one stage to the next, there are others that moved in different directions, collapsed, hybridised, or simply chose something else. The line of progress is a retrospective fiction. •       Ötzi the Iceman: A Man With a Story: Wyman's most vivid example of what the new archaeology makes possible: Ötzi, a man murdered 5,300 years ago in the Alps, whose mummified body was found in 1991. From isotope analysis of his teeth, we know where he grew up. From his gut contents, we know what he ate in his last meal — venison and ibex. From his DNA, we know his ancestry. From the arrow in his back, we know how he died. We don't know his name, but we know enough to recognise him as fully human. That is what the new tools give us: not symbols of a lost world, but individual people with individual stories. •       The Fall of Rome Was Not a Tragedy: Wyman spent fifteen years of his life thinking about the fall of the Roman Empire and hosting a podcast about it. Writing this book changed how he sees it. He used to view it as a tragedy — something lost. Now he views it as a natural part of the rhythms that pulse through human societies over long periods of time. The remarkable thing about Rome is not that it fell. All empires fall. All societies eventually reach the limits of their technologies, their environments, their ways of organising life. The remarkable thing is that it lasted as long as it did. Six hundred years. That's the story. •       Think of Yourself as the Middle, Not the End: Wyman's message for the AI apocalypticists — and for everyone else who believes they're living at the final chapter of human history. Every person at every point in the past believed the same thing. The Neolithic farmers Wyman studies. The Bronze Age city-dwellers. The Romans. Every one of them was both an endpoint and a beginning. The AI revolution may transform the world. But it will not end it. Stop thinking in terms of next quarter. Start thinking of yourself as part of something much, much bigger — that will extend long after your name has been forgotten. About the Guest Patrick Wyman is the host of the Tides of History, Fall of Rome, and Past Lives podcasts, and the author of Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World (Harper, May 5, 2026) and The Verge: Renaissance, Reformation, and Forty Years That Shook the World. He has a PhD in History from USC and lives in Phoenix, Arizona. References: •       Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World by Patrick Wyman (Harper, May 5, 2026). •       Tides of History podcast by Patrick Wyman — currently covering the Iron Age. •       Fall of Rome podcast by Patrick Wyman. •       Episode 2891: John Steele Gordon on information technology and American unity — the companion piece on how technology changes history at the deep level. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: from the Ice Age to the Bronze Age...

“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 as the last.” — Ian Shapiro The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was a moment of extraordinary euphoria. Fukuyama even described it as the end of history. But what seems to have really fallen in November '89 was the vitality of democracy. Almost forty years later, we have Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and, perhaps most worrying of all, Keir Starmer. Callous and inept politicians are breaking our democratic world. Our job is to put it back together. That's the thesis of a new book by Ian Shapiro — Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale. In After the Fall, Shapiro argues that it's politicians who have created today's crisis of democracy. His pivotal moment is 2008 rather than 1989. The global financial crisis was the inflection point — the moment at which the corruption of the neoliberal order became self-evident, when elites bailed out the banks and we see the birth of left and right wing illiberal populism. The roots go back before 2008. Clinton's greatest failure, Shapiro argues, was not NAFTA or welfare reform. It was Russia. Yeltsin wanted to join NATO. Even Putin, in his early years in power, acknowledged that Russia considered itself European. George Kennan, Brent Scowcroft and Richard Nixon warned that expanding NATO eastward would create a new enemy. Clinton ignored them all. So history repeated itself in the form of Versailles rather than the Marshall Plan. So how to raise ourselves up after this fall? What road to take? Maps, Shapiro suggests, aren't always helpful. The New Deal had no GPS algorithm. FDR invented it on the fly. What democratic governments need now, he insists, is massive investment in physical, technological, and labor market infrastructure. Charismatic leaders matter. But the ideas matter more. We need politicians who take risks. Otherwise we'll be saddled with Keir Starmer and our current crisis of extraordinary dysphoria. Five Takeaways •       2008, Not 1989, Was the Inflection Point: The fall of the Wall in 1989 produced euphoria. The real break came nineteen years later. The 2008 financial crisis exposed the neoliberal model, undermined the supremacy of the US-led world system, and — crucially — left behind a large population that would subsequently be mobilizable by political entrepreneurs. Elites bailed out the banks and returned to business as usual. They didn't realize that business as usual was over. From 2008 you can draw a straight line to 2016, to Brexit, to Trump, to every anti-system surge that followed. •       We Repeated the Mistake of Versailles: After World War II, the Marshall Plan invested in the defeated powers — Germany, Japan — and folded them into the new security and economic architecture. After World War I, Versailles punished Germany, and Keynes predicted the results. After the Cold War, the victorious West chose Versailles over Marshall. Yeltsin wanted to join NATO and the EU. Even early Putin said Russia considered itself European. Kennan, Scowcroft, Nixon all warned that expanding NATO eastward would create a new enemy. Clinton ignored them. We created the enemy we warned ourselves about. •       Politicians Broke the World — Not Capitalism, Not Culture: Shapiro's subtitle is precise. The crisis of democracy was not caused by inevitable economic forces or cultural shifts. It was caused by specific bad decisions by specific politicians at specific moments of choice. Clinton on NATO expansion. Bush on the Iraq War and the refusal to build a genuine rules-based international order after 9/11. Obama on the financial crisis response. These were decisions, not fates. They could have been made differently. Which means the current situation is not irreversible — and that future decisions can be made better. •       Starmer as Exhibit A: Having Power Without Ideas: Shapiro's prescription for what democratic governments need: a policy agenda. His cautionary tale: Keir Starmer. Starmer came into office with a massive parliamentary majority — he could have passed legislation that attracted 50 or 60 backbench no votes and still won. He had nothing to pass. Tiny step left, tiny step right, reverse, repeat. His comparison: Trump's main policies came out of Project 2025 — put together not by Trump himself but by people who created the ramp he ran on. Without a ramp, even a charismatic leader stumbles. Without ideas, power is squandered. •       The New Deal Had No Blueprint: FDR Made It Up: The lesson for what comes next. The New Deal — the last great democratic reconstruction — was not designed in advance. Roosevelt made it up as he went along, trying things, abandoning what didn't work, building a coalition of extraordinarily unlikely bedfellows. What democratic governments need now, Shapiro argues, is massive infrastructure investment: physical infrastructure, tech infrastructure, labor market infrastructure. The CHIPS Act model. Incentivize business to retrain the workforce for the tech revolution and the green transition. Chancellor Merz in Germany has just borrowed half a trillion euros for this. Without it, there will be another Trump. And another. And another. About the Guest Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy — How Politicians Broke Our World (Basic Books, May 5, 2026), Uncommon Sense, The Wolf at the Door (with Michael Graetz), and many other books. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. References: •       After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy — How Politicians Broke Our World by Ian Shapiro (Basic Books, May 5, 2026). •       Episode 2881: Adrian Wooldridge on The Revolutionary Center — the companion episode on the crisis of liberalism that Shapiro's book diagnoses. •       Episode 2895: Glyn Morgan on The Rise and Fall of American Europe — the international dimension of Shapiro's argument about the post-Cold War missed opportunities. •       Episode 2880: Gal Beckerman on How to Be a Dissident — on the tradition of resistance that Shapiro's “roads not taken” argument implicitly invokes. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than th...

“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 into a very disadvantageous trade deal.” — Glyn Morgan Post Second World War Europe was always an American project. At least according to The Rise and Fall of American Europe by Glyn Morgan, the Director of the Moynihan Center of European Studies at Syracuse University and a proud Welshman. All that post-war civilizational jazz — the Marshall Plan, NATO, the EU — weren't really European achievements. Instead, they were American-designed ideas and institutions that proud Europeans boasted they had built themselves. For Morgan, post-war Europe was, in fact, little more than a US protectorate. Gaul colonized by Rome. Wales as a backwater of Great Britain. Europeans only discovered this unpalatable truth in 2025, when Trump leveraged their security dependence to force a ruinous trade deal. JD Vance made the official press announcement at the Munich Security Conference. Today's crisis of NATO is its obit. The original architects of American Europe were deeply Europeanized Americans — Bill Bullitt, who loved France; George Kennan, who spoke better German than most Germans; Ivy League Libs who cherished Europe as a café-rich sibling of New York City. That imaginary continent lasted eighty years. Morgan defines its MAGA replacement as “civilizational America.” It's a United States that sees itself as a distinct civilization with distinct interests, willing to transact with Russia and China and leave an increasingly marginalized Europe to fend for itself. Wales is the future of Europe, Morgan says. The Welsh lost the Darwinian struggle for world power very early — conquered, then absorbed and shrunken into a rainy museum for English romantics. Sheep, rugby and singing ex-miners. That's the fate of 21st century Europe. Bon Voyage. And don't forget your umbrella. Five Takeaways •       American Europe Was a US Protectorate: The story Europeans like to tell is that they built post-war Europe themselves — the Marshall Plan, the Treaty of Paris, the Treaty of Rome, the EU. Morgan's counter: the construction of post-war Europe was theorized by Americans and pushed through by American pressure. Europeans resisted and begrudgingly went along. NATO provided the security. The EU organized the trade. Democratic nation states were the units. Enlargement was the engine. Europeans got comfortable inside this structure and convinced themselves they were in charge. Trump's arrival in 2025 revealed the truth they had been avoiding for eighty years. •       The Architects: Bullitt, Kennan, and the Europeanized Americans: The Roosevelt Democrats who built American Europe were deeply European in origin and values. Bill Bullitt loved France. George Kennan spoke better German than most Germans. They were steeped in the idea that America and Europe were one civilization. They wanted to rescue Europe both from the Europeans themselves and from the Soviet threat they were among the first to identify clearly. Bullitt and Kennan broke with Roosevelt over the Soviets — Roosevelt thought a deal could be struck; they said no. A strong democratic Europe as a bulwark against Soviet communism was the founding logic of the whole enterprise. •       Trump and Vance: The Return of Isolationism: American isolationism — powerful in the 1930s, defeated by Pearl Harbor, marginalized through the Cold War — has returned. It returned in JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2025, and in Trump's leveraging of European security dependence to force a disadvantageous trade deal. Morgan's framing: what has emerged is “civilizational America” — a United States that sees itself not as the guarantor of European democracy but as a distinct civilization with distinct interests, willing to transact with Russia and China and leave Europe to manage its own affairs. •       Putin and Trump Are Playing the Same Playbook: Putin seeks a Europe of nation states — not the integrated EU — where he can deal transactionally, playing different European states against each other. Europeans were slow to realize that's what they were facing. Then they faced the same thing from Trump. The beneficiary of the collapse of American Europe, Morgan argues, is China: investing in Eastern Europe, doing trade deals across the continent, acquiring economic leverage while Russia and America compete for security dominance. A Chinese Europe in fifty years is not inconceivable. •       No Solution: Look to Wales: Europe faces an impossible dilemma. Rebuild the military and lose the welfare state. Or preserve the welfare state and rely on security that may no longer be provided. De Gaulle's line: it is a fundamental error to think that to every problem there is a solution. At some moments there is no solution. We await a Bismarck; we have mediocre politicians who can only stop things from getting worse. The bleak future: a pleasant museum, highly dependent on American tech, visited by Chinese and American tourists. Morgan is from Wales. Wales lost the struggle for world power very early. He can see what's coming. About the Guest Glyn Morgan is Director of the Moynihan Center of European Studies at Syracuse University and the author of The Rise and Fall of American Europe (Polity, August 2026) and The Idea of a European Superstate. References: •       The Rise and Fall of American Europe by Glyn Morgan (Polity, August 2026). •       Episode 2875: Daniel Bessner on Cold War Liberalism — the companion episode on the Cold War liberal tradition that built American Europe. •       Episode 2887: Steven J. Ross on The Secret War Against Hate — referenced in the interview; the American neo-Nazi tradition that ran alongside American Europe. •       Episode 2881: Adrian Wooldridge on The Revolutionary Center — the crisis of liberalism that American Europe's collapse is accelerating. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual intervi...

“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% — a two-thirds-plus majority. Orbán shot himself in the foot.” — Marc Loustau On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the populist who invented the illiberal playbook — got booted out of office by the Hungarian electorate. His defeat, says Marc Loustau, Harvard PhD and fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, represents a playbook for defeating illiberalism. Orbán had rigged the electoral system so dramatically — giving the winner 1.5 votes for every vote the loser got — that when Péter Magyar got more than 55 percent of the vote, Orbán's own system destroyed him. The gods must have their fun — Hungarian poetic justice. Orbán's cronies, Loustau reports, are fleeing to Dubai with their hot rod car collections and ill-gotten gains from sixteen years in power. But the mid- and upper-tier bureaucrats, Loustau warns, are still in office. Not having any other skills, they're going to be difficult to dislodge. Making Hungary a functional democracy again won't happen overnight. The goal of Péter Magyar's government, Loustau says, is to “make Hungary boring again.” That should be the lesson for the anti-Trumpists in his native America, Loustau says. Build the broadest possible coalition, never kick anyone out of it, and refuse to be drawn onto the deadly culture-war terrain. When Orbán banned the Budapest Pride parade to force Péter Magyar to take a stand on LGBTQ issues, Magyar flew to a Greek island. It was, Loustau says, the smartest move of the campaign. Make America boring again. The anti-Hollywood playbook for defeating illiberalism. Are you watching Gavin & Kamala? Five Takeaways •       Poetic Justice: Orbán's System Destroyed Him: Orbán rigged Hungary's electoral system to massively benefit the winner: if you get more than 55 percent of the vote, you get roughly 70 percent of parliamentary seats, and effectively 1.5 votes for every vote your opponent receives. He did this because he never imagined anyone could get above 50 percent against him. When Péter Magyar did — comfortably — Orbán's own system gave Magyar a supermajority. Loustau's verdict: it is rare that there is genuine poetic justice in life. This is one of those moments. •       The Cronies Are Heading for Dubai: Sixteen years of a two-thirds majority in parliament allowed Orbán to pack every institution in Hungary with loyalists — friends, family, friends of friends — from top to bottom. In the end, this became part of his undoing: when you bleed out talent and fill institutions with cronies, you end up with an inept government. The most visible Orbán figures are now heading to Dubai with their hot rod car collections. But the mid-level “authoritarian cadre circles” burrowed into every institution will be much harder to remove. It will take years to restore functional public services. •       Make Hungary Boring Again: The incoming government's agenda, in Loustau's formulation, is to make Hungary boring again. No more brinkmanship between Russia, Brussels, and Washington. No more geopolitical risk-taking. Hungary belongs in the EU, and if the EU likes anything, it is stultifying bureaucracy. That, paradoxically, may be the best thing for ordinary Hungarians. It does not signal the end of the far-right threat globally. So long as Putin is alive, Loustau argues, we must remain vigilant. •       Magyar Goes to Greece: The Culture War Lesson: One of Orbán's favourite tactics was to force opposition politicians to take a stand on LGBTQ issues. He banned the Budapest Pride parade specifically to create a trap for Magyar — either come out against the ban and look soft on “family values,” or attend the parade and look radical. Magyar's response: he went on holiday to Greece. He wasn't even in the country. Loustau calls it one of the slyest moves of the campaign. The lesson for Trump's opponents: never engage on the terrain your opponent has chosen. •       Can Disaffected Trumpians Defeat Trumpism? Magyar came from within Orbán's government and broke with him at a moment of genuine moral crisis — a scandal involving pardons for those who covered up sexual abuse at state-run orphanages. That moral authority gave him a platform. Loustau's honest assessment: disaffected Trumpians who had any dealings with Trump are radioactive, perhaps permanently. But the broader lesson holds: when government inaction harms the innocent and powerless, someone who stands up and says “enough is enough” can build a majority. Magyar didn't win on policy. He won on decency. About the Guest Marc Loustau is a Harvard PhD, Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest, and author of the At the Edges Substack. He writes on Central and Eastern European politics, religion, and society. References: •       At the Edges by Marc Loustau — his Substack on Central and Eastern European politics. •       Episode 2880: Gal Beckerman on How to Be a Dissident — the companion episode on the theory of resistance that Magyar's campaign enacted. •       Episode 2881: Adrian Wooldridge on The Revolutionary Center — on the crisis of liberalism that Orbán exploited and Magyar may have reversed. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - How significant was the Hungarian election in historical terms? (01:30) - Orbán's authoritarianism: model for the world, now defeated (02:56) - Was the left paranoid? How did Orbán actually lose? (03:50) - Poetic justice: Orbán rigged the system and it destroyed him (05:46) - Corruption uncovered: the regime unraveling (06:38) - Sixteen years of cronyism: what remains? (07:51) - Authoritarian cadre circles: how long to dislodge them? (08:24) - The cronies heading for Dubai with their hot rod collections (10:38) - Romania, Ceauşescu, and celebrat...

“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 really want a no-hands job from Silicon Valley? That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare — who thinks all tech innovation results in human progress — thinks we do. No hands, no problem, Keith says. But I'm not sure. Especially given the powers-that-be giving us that no-hands job. Keith welcomes the end of what he calls the “typed” and “touched” computing era — keyboards, mice, touchscreens, and all the manifold ways we have used our hands to interact with computers since the 1980s. That's the outcome, he predicts, of the race to AGI. So far so good. But what happens if our no-hands AI future is controlled by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook? This week these four behemoths committed 00 billion to AI infrastructure investment in 2026 alone — 2 percent of all US GDP. These companies are racing to build (and own) the foundational mechanics of AGI. That's always how it's been, Keith says, embracing our no-hands future. I'm less open-armed. What happens if we want our hands to fend off AGI? No, I'm not so keen on a no-hands job from Silicon Valley. Especially one couched in the altruism of human progress. Five Takeaways •       The End of the Hand-Driven Computing Era: Andrej Karpathy's observation at Sequoia's AI Ascent: he no longer uses his hands to do his work. He speaks to the computer; the computer acts; he judges and refines. The keyboard, the mouse, the touchscreen — all the hand-driven interfaces that have defined computing since the 1980s are entering their twilight. Karpathy calls it “software 3.0”. Keith, two years ago, wrote an editorial called “eyes, hands, ears, and mouth” about the inclusion of other human attributes beyond hands. That prediction has arrived. •       $700 Billion: The CapEx Explosion: A post by @Signal framed the week's numbers: $700 billion in AI infrastructure spending in 2026, equivalent to 2 percent of all US GDP. This kind of spending, the post observes, usually happens via governments or wars. This time, it's four private companies — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta — racing to build the foundational mechanics of AGI. Meta was punished by Wall Street for overspending; Google was rewarded because its numbers were strong enough to justify it. The same bet, two different verdicts, depending on your quarterly earnings. •       Was the Internet Privately Built? The ARPANET Argument: Keith's claim: innovation waves have always been privately financed. The railways, the telephone, the electricity grid, the commercial internet. Andrew's counter: ARPANET was a massive government investment that created the protocols on which the internet runs. Keith's response: ARPANET was a university bulletin board that created the precedent, not the infrastructure. Andrew's response: that's not exactly what ARPANET was. They agree that government research matters. They disagree on how much credit it deserves for what became the commercial internet. •       The Revenge of the Idea Guy: Sam Altman's line of the week. In the past, an idea person came up with a concept and then needed expensive engineers to build it. Many ideas never saw the light of day because the engineering cost was prohibitive. Now, anyone can speak an idea into existence. AI builds the plan, executes the work, and you judge and refine. That changes the economics of creativity, advertising, software development, and anything else that used to require specialist execution. The specialist is not dead — but specialists will increasingly use AI to scale themselves, rather than being hired one at a time. •       Should Kids Use AI in Schools? A New Yorker piece asks what it would take to get AI out of schools. Keith's view: the premise misunderstands how AI works now. The fear is passive students asking chatbots for answers and having their brains atrophy. The reality is that proper AI use requires active judgment at every step — telling it what you want, refining the plan, evaluating the output. If schools understand that, they embrace AI. If they don't, they produce graduates unequipped for a world in which the idea guy with AI tools now has the power the engineering team used to have. Andrew's prediction: the kids whose parents ban AI will eventually sue them. About the Guest Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter — a daily curation of the most important stories at the intersection of technology, business, and culture. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and a long-time interlocutor on Keen On America. References: •       That Was the Week newsletter by Keith Teare — this week's editorial: “Hand Job?” •       Andrej Karpathy at Sequoia Capital AI Ascent 2026 — the Karpathy interview on Software 3.0 and the end of typed input. •       @Signal, “$700 billion on AI infrastructure” — the post that framed the CapEx question. •       Jessica Winter, “What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?” The New Yorker, 2026. •       Episode 2891: John Steele Gordon on how information technology knitted America together — the ARPANET backstory that feeds directly into this week's argument. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackYouTubeApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:31) - Keith leads with “Hand Job?” — explaining the headline (03:27) - Karpathy at Sequoia: the end of typed and touched input (04:30) - CapEx: the real story of the week (05:35) - $700 billion — 2% of US GDP on AI infrastructure (06:38) - Was the commercial internet privately built? (07:35) - ARPANET: pathetic bulletin board or foundational infrastructure? (09:08) - Keith and Andrew agree to disagree on government's role (11:00) - Big Tech earnings: Google up, Meta down, and why (17:00) - OpenAI's strategy: the long game