Keen On Democracy

“I want someone who has regrets. I want someone who's learned the hard way. I want someone who understands that life is made of those messy compromises.” — Joel Christensen on the Odysseus he hopes to see in Matt Damon Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is out — the controversial movie of the year, much of the controversy raging before anyone had seen a frame. So, before either of us had seen the epic, I talked to the CUNY classicist Joel Christensen, author of the timely Why Odysseus? Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero. What, I asked Christensen, did he most dread about Hollywood's treatment of his beloved Odyssey? His answer: a hero too noble to be interesting. The Odysseus of the epic is a survivor, a scoundrel, an antihero — the master sergeant who does what needs to be done, from engineering the Trojan Horse to making sure Hector's infant son doesn't survive it. Christensen's worry about Matt Damon came down to one word: too likeable. What he wanted instead was a man with regrets — De Niro in Raging Bull rather than anybody noble. So did Christensen get the Odysseus he wanted? Below is his review, written after seeing the film when it came out. Postscript: Joel Christensen's Verdict on the Film Nolan's Odyssey is not Homer's Odyssey. This should be clear to anyone. Nolan faced an almost impossible task well: ancient audiences knew the story already. Modern audiences do not, so he created a ring structure with the beginning union of Penelope and Odysseus anticipating the reunion at the end, also introducing plot elements like the dog Argos and the pin by which Penelope will recognize Odysseus. The film is not Homer. Homer's power is poetry; the film's is image. Some of the images are striking: the scene when Circe turns his men into animals is the most arresting in the whole movie, showing everything that can be done with visceral imagery and a slight adaptation (Circe here is a survivor of sexual assault). The changes made to the plot such as omitting the Phaeacians, Nestor, Laertes, the bed and more are not as jarring as some of the general decisions. Calling “Zeus' Law” “do unto others…” makes an understandable translation to a Christian context, but it is somewhat nonsensical for Homer. Depicting a mutilated Helen is a strange decision that I am struggling with. What the movie gets right is making humans responsible for their own suffering. In a novel take on Odysseus as a traumatized warrior, the hero spends seven years with Calypso eating Lotus to forget the loss of his men. Damon, too likeable, regrets the trick of the Trojan Horse after witnessing the slaughter during the sack of Troy. We find out as well that the “sea people” from history, bringing an end to the “civilization” are actually the Greeks returning from the Trojan War and suffering for the transgressions they committed there. Is this ending an echo of Zeus' plan to end the race of heroes in the Trojan War? Is it an allegory for our civilizational collapse in the future thanks to technology, environmental catastrophe, and fascism? Any potential social critique dissipates with the movie's end. The traumatized veteran turns out to be merciful and kills only some of the suitors, showing many mercy. Then, guilty of violating “Zeus' Law”, Odysseus happily goes into exile with Penelope, leaving Telemachus to be king. There's no way to make Homer's Odyssey into a film and convey all its ambiguity and depth. That would be an unfair expectation. Nolan's film is a compelling spectacle and it makes me wonder more about how it reflects who we are as an audience. Do we need the hero to be ultimately good, even if he messed up? Are we so simple that we need to hear about Zeus' Law and the Sea People so repetitively? I fear that in this age where fiction and fact are so hard to disentangle, that we long for narratives that are just simpler. We don't get the Odyssey we want; we get the one we deserve. Five Takeaways •       A Complicated Man: The Translation Problem. Every word of Homer carries echoes no English can hold, and the fights over Nolan's dialogue replay the fights over translation. Emily Wilson detonated a controversy by rendering polytropos — poly, many; tropos, turn — as “a complicated man,” alluding at once to Odysseus's travels and the many forms of his character; Daniel Mendelsohn's “man of roundabout ways” does the work too, if you can stop thinking about rotaries. Even the objection to Tom Holland's Telemachus saying “dad” collapses on inspection: Telemachus uses the colloquial form in Homer. And the “authentic” dialect purists want was an artificial amalgam that no ancient Greek ever spoke. •       The Culture Wars Come for Homer. Nobody remembers a brouhaha over Wolfgang Petersen's Troy — a pretty bad movie, Christensen notes — but Nolan's Odyssey generates more controversy than a scholar can track daily. Lupita Nyong'o's Helen is attacked as inauthentic by one side and as cultural appropriation by the other; since 2015, classicists have watched the Western tradition weaponized by the alt-right while their own field argues about who owns it. Christensen's advice channels the epic itself: between Scylla and Charybdis, take Scylla. You'll lose six men. The alternative is losing the ship — and if the story doesn't persuade in three hours, nobody will remember the armor anyway. •       The Valence of Violence. Modern audiences are more accustomed to represented violence than any in history — you don't need Natural Born Killers when Twitter serves unverifiable clips from Gaza and Iran. The question Christensen brings to the film is what the violence is for. Uberto Pasolini's The Return gave Ralph Fiennes's Odysseus a steady, untroubled thump of arrows; the epic's own slaughter of the suitors, read closely, approaches Tarantino-adjacent parody. And the hardest tests are the atrocities the adaptations always cut: the mutilation of the goatherd Melanthius, and Telemachus hanging the enslaved women. Does the violence glorify the hero — or show what even the best of us are capable of? •       Keep Penelope Ambiguous. The great interpretive question of the Odyssey is when Penelope knows the beggar is her husband — the suitors, dead in the underworld, are convinced she was in on it all along. The epic grants her remarkable intelligence and agency, then reins it in: Agamemnon's ghost praises her by way of insulting all women, and she vanishes from the text. Christensen's advice to Nolan wouldn't be Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, which centers the women's voices; it would be more screen time and total ambiguity — no access to her mind, a wife who matches her husband in wits and may even have outwitted him. Though based on Nolan's arc, he doubts we'll get a woman at the center. •       Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero. Christensen's worry about Matt Damon was simple: too likable. Odysseus is the master sergeant — the one who takes the hard orders, tricks Achilles into the war, engineers the Horse, and makes sure Hector's infant son doesn't survive to rebuild Troy. The ancient hero is neither good nor ...

In 1776 — that same year America declared its independence — Adam Smith published the equally revolutionary The Wealth of Nations, his founding explanation of national economic value. Two hundred and fifty years later, Tim O'Reilly argues in the free-market Economist that Elon Musk and his fellow tech barons are building a monarchical form of capitalism that the proto-democratic Smith would have hated. Musk, O'Reilly reports, believes that SpaceX will become “worth more than the rest of Earth”. The merchants are becoming princes, O'Reilly warns. And the rest of us are becoming peasants. Such is the road to serfdom in our AI age. So who should own the AI in our bewildering age of multi-trillion dollar start-ups like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI? Or as That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare asks in his latest editorial, who should own the “intelligence” of our AI age? Keith uses a bottling plant as a metaphor to describe our dilemma. Since no single entity can own this intelligence — the sum total of our common experience — charging us for it would be like seizing the Earth's water supply and selling it back to us, Coca-Cola style, in plastic bottles. Except that the Hayekian Keith approves of the bottling process. Private companies, rather than governments, he argues, are most suited to doing this. For Keith, this dilemma is also an opportunity to redistribute the ownership of intelligence. He argues for a “Human Wealth Fund” into which every consequential AI company should put a slice of its equity. In the manner of Norway's sovereign wealth fund, this fund would be distributed to all citizens. Rather than Denmark, now we should become like Norway, a tiny homogenous nation with a cultural distaste for Muskian individual wealth. Not very realistic, I fear. On top of that, it's hard to imagine our tech princes collaborating on anything. Musk and Altman aren't on speaking terms while Altman and Amodei, who also loathe each other, are focused on their IPOs. Meanwhile, the Trump administration, which presumably would coordinate this fund, is pitching a $100,000-a-month fast feed of the president's posts. Keith's question, “who owns the intelligence”, is the right one. But the answer won't come from trickle-down funds set-up by our tech princes. Such supposed munificence is about as likely as America becoming Norway. Read the fine print of any “Human Wealth Fund” set up by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. As we should know all too well by now, when a “revolutionary” Silicon Valley gives stuff away, it turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. Free plastic bottles of intelligence, anyone? Five Takeaways •       Intelligence, Not AI. The week's framing shift: the word AI is too small, because AI is merely the tool for harvesting and delivering the thing itself — intelligence, the sum total of our common human experience. Keith argues the renaming is not semantic but political: the moment intelligence sits at the center of the discussion, everyone's opinion has to be shaped by what it actually is, and the idea that any single entity could own it starts to look as bizarre as owning the world's water supply. Andrew's rejoinder: they're still just words — though he concedes intelligence is the better one. •       Bottled Intelligence Is Good — The Question Is Who Benefits. Keith refuses the critic's role: bottling intelligence, like Google's bottling of the world's words into search, is a good thing, because only massively capitalized private companies can innovate at that scale — and between private entities and governments as owners of intelligence, he'll take the companies every time. What's wrong is the distribution of the benefits. Even insiders are complaining: Alex Karp is publicly angry at OpenAI and Anthropic's pricing, while China's Kimi K3 — released the day of recording and, Keith claims, better than Claude Fable — signals that very good models are about to get very cheap. •       Capitalism Adam Smith Would Hate. Tim O'Reilly argues in The Economist that Musk and his type are building a capitalism Smith would despise — founders as monarchs, a point Henry Farrell reinforces with a slide from Peter Thiel's startup class placing the king of a monarchy and the founder of a startup side by side. Keith's response is characteristically unsentimental: Smith would have hated everything since the Federal Reserve, and the founder-king structure — Larry and Sergey's voting shares, Zuckerberg's special rights, corporations bigger than countries with user bases bigger than China — is simply the stage of capitalism we're at. The question is whether there's a path from here to somewhere better. •       The Human Wealth Fund. Keith's path comes in two versions: government-down, a sovereign wealth fund holding AI equity for every citizen; or company-up, the AI companies voluntarily endowing a global fund — and it only takes one to move first, because everyone else would have to react. His proxy is Norway, where every citizen benefits from ownership — not payouts, ownership — in the oil fund; AI revenues, unlike Norwegian oil, could eventually drive most of a doubled global GDP. His critique of the Brynjolfsson economists' much-signed statement is that “must act now” is vacuous: he'd have added a point four naming the actual mechanism. •       The Bet. Andrew's counter-case: Musk and Altman loathe each other, the mob hates AI so thoroughly that no pro-AI politician can survive, the states from Newsom's California to Florida are embracing nothing, New York just enacted the first data center moratorium, and the founders — eyes on their IPOs — are in the pockets of the banks. Hence the wager: 5% of the Teare Wealth Fund says no Human Wealth Fund this year, and none in the twenties. Keith declined the bet, on principle: he's an advocate, and only through advocacy does public opinion change. As Andrew put it: keep fighting the good fight — maybe one of the crazy ideas will stick. About the Guest Keith Teare is the founder and editor of the That Was The Week tech newsletter, and Andrew's weekly co-host. A British-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, he was a co-founder of TechCrunch and runs the Palo Alto–based venture firm SignalRank. He and Andrew have been arguing about technology — productively — every week for years. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith's newsletter; this week's editorial argues that the word AI is too small, and that the central question of the age is who owns intelligence. •       Tim O'Reilly in The Economist — on Elon Musk building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate, quoting Musk's claim that SpaceX will become worth more than the rest of the Earth. •       Henry Farrell — the big tech critic's companion piece, featuring the slide from Peter Thiel's startup class that plac...

“We have a Justice Department which is now 100% the political pawn of the president,” warns Brookings senior fellow Jonathan Rauch. “He points, and they shoot.” Point and shoot. Like an old Kodak camera. Not exactly assuring words, you might think, from a man who begins our conversation looking back at the first six months of 2026 by announcing that he's significantly less alarmed than he was a year ago. Yes, Rauch acknowledges, Trump's approval ratings have sunk, the courts have pushed back, Elon Musk's DOGE rampage has petered out. And yet the pointing and the shooting goes on. Rauch, who only months ago diagnosed eighteen “distinct and unmistakable signs” of an American fascism in a much touted Atlantic piece, now admits he may never crack the Trumpian code. Every time you nail it to the wall, he says, it morphs, creeps or sails away. Like an Iranian gunboat in Hormuz. Slippery stuff for the liberal Brookings analyst. Fascism one month, McKinley-style imperialism the next, then Gilded Age plutocracy — although without those ontologically undeniable Carnegie libraries. Meanwhile, America's 250th birthday party fizzled into what Rauch calls a “damp squib,” its reflecting pool turning an opaque green rather than a clarifying blue. A muddy madness in DC. Still, amidst all the opacity, Rauch remains a defiantly optimistic liberal. In contrast with yesterday's guest, the reality hallucinating Turi Munthe, Rauch believes not only that there is an ontological reality, but that it's good. Frank Fukuyama was right, Rauch insists. Liberalism is not only the only political system that creates wealth, produces knowledge and settles disputes, but also establishes an undeniable reality. Liberals just need to relearn how to clearly tell its story. Perhaps. Though storytelling is certainly simpler when nobody is waving a gun at you. Five Takeaways •       Less Alarmed, Still Scared. Rauch opens with the good news: he is significantly less alarmed than he was a year ago, when the administration was running rampage, putting agencies out of business and demanding Greenland. Approval ratings have dropped, so Trump has less political space; the courts have pushed back, so he has less judicial space; Stephen Miller has vanished from view. And then comes the caveat that gives the episode its title: the Justice Department is now 100% the political pawn of the president — he points, and they shoot — and Trump has shown that as his ratings fall, he becomes more willing, not less, to use those tools. •       I May Never Crack the Code. Only months ago, Rauch diagnosed eighteen distinct and unmistakable signs of a modern American reinvention of fascism in The Atlantic. He doesn't regret the essay — but he has gone back to being confused. The Trump phenomenon is slippery: every time you nail it to the wall, it morphs, creeps or slides away. Fascism one month, McKinley-style imperialism in Venezuela the next, an Iran war with no rationale at all. Trump is such an improviser, and so disorganized, that Rauch concedes there is an element of randomness he may never decode — though he accepts Andrew's suggestion that attention is now the coin of the political realm. •       Not the Gilded Age — No Carnegie Libraries. The new inequality, Rauch argues, is different in kind: a class of people almost superhuman in the wealth they control, and strangely narcissistic and nihilistic toward the broader society. The Gilded Age tycoons did some bad things, but they also built — Carnegie's libraries, Mellon's National Gallery, Rockefeller's University of Chicago, Stanford's university. This group builds rockets and sounds, in the case of Marc Andreessen, like a parody of an Ayn Rand novel — or, as Andrew corrects him, not a parody at all: they simply repeat what they've read. Even so, Rauch is not sorry to see politics reacting to a world where Musk can casually drop $300 million into a presidential race. •       The Gloves-Off Court and the Accelerating Presidency. The Supreme Court term brought the clearest statement yet of the conservative agenda: Humphrey's Executor overturned after eighty years, making it far easier for presidents to fire agency heads at will; what remained of the Voting Rights Act effectively gutted; birthright citizenship surviving by a shockingly narrow margin. The imperial presidency is not new, Rauch notes — what's new is the speed. A president can now simply refuse to run a congressionally mandated agency, and the Senate, forty quietly nixed nominations notwithstanding, remains lacking in spine. The Todd Blanche nomination, he says, is the next test of whether any line exists at all. •       Fukuyama Was Right — and Liberals Should Say So. Rauch sees a moral vacuum and, for the first time, a craving to fill it: the pope's AI encyclical, multi-faith clergy bearing witness in Minnesota, the Episcopalians and Latter-day Saints finding their voices. His prescription for the second half of 2026 is a liberal one, in the nineteenth-century sense — science, markets, constitutions, rule of law. Fukuyama, widely misunderstood, was right: there is only one system that produces knowledge, peace, freedom, and wealth on a global scale, and it's ours. It needs fixing — he cheers the bipartisan housing bill Trump refused to sign — but liberals must relearn how to tell that story, and how to brag. About the Guest Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of nine books, including The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (2021), Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale, 2025), and Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. A recipient of the National Magazine Award, he serves on the boards of Heterodox Academy and Civic Life, and is a longtime friend of the show. References: •       Rauch's Atlantic essay identifying eighteen “distinct and unmistakable signs” of a modern American reinvention of fascism — the piece he stands by, even as he admits the phenomenon keeps morphing. •       His recent essays for The UnPopulist on why liberal societies need grand stories about themselves, and why liberals must relearn how to brag about liberalism. •       Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner in The New York Times — the earlier argument, which Rauch says still holds, that the Republican Party is more dangerous to the constitution and the rule of law than the Democratic Party. •       Tim O'Reilly in The Economist — on Elon Musk building a form of capitalism that Adam Smith would hate. •       Francis Fukuyama — whose widely misunderstood The End of History thesis Rauch defends: there is only one system that creates wealth, produces knowledge, and settles political disputes on a global scal...

“If you can only explain the arguments of the other side because they're mad or dangerous or dumb, the problem is with you.” — Turi Munthe On yesterday's show, the psychiatrist Sally Satel described how Americans imagine their own mental condition differently, depending on their politics and age. Which is a nice segue for today's conversation with the Anglo-French journalist turned media entrepreneur Turi Munthe. It's not just in our mental health self-evaluation, Munthe argues, that we hallucinate reality. Indeed, the French born Munthe often sounds like one of his post-structuralist compatriots in his defiantly slippery notion of ontological reality. In Why We Think What We Think: The Unexpected Origins of Our Deepest Beliefs, Munthe argues that our deepest convictions turn out to be shaped by genetics, brain shape and sometimes even by the agricultural legacy of our distant ancestors. Left and right thinkers, Munthe argues, are different political phenotypes — each hallucinating their own version of reality. Total relativism, then — the full French post-structuralist monty? Not quite. Here's where Munthe's Englishness kicks in. Following the Anglo-Russian philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Munthe insists pluralism and relativism are different. So Turi Munthe doesn't just think what he thinks because of his English or French origins. Borrowing from the cognitive scientists Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, Munthe defines thinking as a “contact sport”. So, for example, believing that the 2020 election was stolen is what Munthe calls a social commitment, because humans would rather be wrong together than right alone. Speaking of convenient segues, Munthe's thoughts on thinking set the scene for next Tuesday's conversation with Emily Eakin, author of The Frenchmen. It's her history of seductive post-structuralists like Foucault, Derrida and Lacan who corrupted a whole generation of literary American Ivy Leaguers (including Eakin) into hallucinating reality. Five Takeaways •       Pluralism Is Not Relativism. Munthe opens with Isaiah Berlin's distinction: registering the sincerity and value of opinions across the political, religious, and ethical spectrum does not relativize truth. That Charles Windsor is King of the United Kingdom is a statement of fact; whether you're a monarchist or a republican is where opinion begins. The book confines itself to the second category — beliefs, values, and opinions that cannot be factually proven — and asks what the nonrational influences on them actually are. The answer is humbling: genetics account for perhaps half of political persuasion, and the rest is shaped by everything from brain anatomy to the agriculture of our ancestors. •       Different Political Phenotypes. At the margins, left and right differ neurologically: right-leaners are on average more readily startled by loud noises and more attentive to threat, while left-leaners carry a slightly larger anterior cingulate cortex — the brain region where we process ambiguity and split hairs. That anatomy, Munthe argues, explains the ideological capture of academia and media better than any conspiracy: hair-splitters go where the hair-splitting is, and a conservative 22-year-old doesn't volunteer for a newsroom where 80% of colleagues think differently. We are, in his phrase, different political phenotypes, each hallucinating a different version of reality. •       Thinking as a Contact Sport. Drawing on Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier's research, Munthe argues that reason didn't evolve for solitary contemplation — Rodin's Thinker is the wrong image — but for argument: to convince you to hunt the buffalo with me, I need reasons that look objective to you too. The evidence is everywhere, from the most impactful academic papers being written by pairs and groups to the creative density of small university towns. The implication is political: the people we disagree with are not obstacles to good thinking but the condition of it — the loyal opposition that helps us get out of ourselves. •       Wrong Together Rather Than Right Alone. Munthe's reading of January 6 and the stolen-election faith is social rather than psychiatric: an enormous number of our beliefs matter more for what they do than for what they say, and professing them is a commitment to a group. From an evolutionary perspective, believing what your village believes — even about the god who is a giant rock at the end of the field — is intelligent, because the ostracized lose the protection of the group. The terrifying data point is the marriage test: in the 1950s, around 4% of families would have objected to a child marrying across party lines; today it approaches 45%. That is affective polarization, and it can pull societies apart. •       The Problem Is With You. Munthe spent his twenties unable to fathom American gun rights — supporters had to be bought, dumb, or morally corrupt — until he did the work and found a tradition he now calls beautiful and heroic, whether or not he shares it. His rule of thumb: if you can only explain the other side's arguments as madness, danger, or stupidity, the problem is with you. This is not centrism — there was no middle ground on slavery or the Holocaust — but a defense of the clash itself: societies need the left to fix inequality and the right to defend the village, and we think best when the two are, in his words, continually bashed against each other. About the Guest Turi Munthe is a journalist and policy analyst turned media entrepreneur. He founded Demotix, which became the largest network of photojournalists in the world before its sale to Corbis in 2012, and Parlia, an encyclopedia of opinion. He has written for The Economist, The Guardian, the TLS, The Nation, and The Spectator, has sat on the boards of Index on Censorship, openDemocracy, and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and is a board member of the Italian media group GEDI, publisher of La Repubblica and La Stampa. He studied Arabic and History at Oxford. Why We Think What We Think: The Unexpected Origins of Our Deepest Beliefs (Penguin/Hutchinson Heinemann) is out now in the UK, with US publication early next year. References: •       Why We Think What We Think: The Unexpected Origins of Our Deepest Beliefs by Turi Munthe (Penguin/Hutchinson Heinemann, 2026). Timothy Garton Ash: “Thinking is a contact sport.” •       Isaiah Berlin — the Anglo-Russian philosopher whose insistence that pluralism and relativism are not the same thing frames the whole book. •       Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier...

“You can do as many brain scans as you want, but you'll never be able to distinguish an impulse that wasn't resisted from one that's irresistible.” — Sally Satel on why social media addiction can't be proven in court When Meta and YouTube lost the so-called landmark social media addiction trial back in March, there was jubilation inside and outside the courtroom. Finally, Big Tech seemed a bit less big. Justice, it seemed, had finally been done. Or maybe not. (Full disclosure: my wife is head of litigation at Google, so I might be a bit biased). But today's guest, the psychiatrist Sally Satel, doesn't have a dog (or husband) in the fight, and she's a skeptic of the trial's outcome. A senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the medical director of a Washington methadone clinic, Satel argues that the concept of addiction — her clinical specialty — was distorted in the trial to serve a $1.4 trillion litigation pipeline. The plaintiffs' theory reifies addiction as behavior beyond control. If that were true, Satel argues, none of her patients would ever get better. Satel comes at this as a doctor rather than a moralist. Clinically, she acknowledges, social media addiction exists — excessive use, loss of control, continued harm — and the treatments are the same behavioral strategies she uses at her clinic. But legally, where causation is everything, the plaintiff argument collapses. No brain scan can ever distinguish an impulse that wasn't resisted from one that's irresistible. The mechanism of harm is unprovable — a ludicrously brittle foundation, Satel argues, for a trillion dollars of lawsuits against social media companies. So when is “addiction” really addiction? Satel's upcoming book Not a Disease: Rethinking Addiction in the Heart of America's Overdose Crisis, which will be out in early 2027, addresses this awkward truth. And we'll certainly have her back on the show to discuss. Five Takeaways •       The $1.4 Trillion Distortion of Addiction. The March bellwether verdict awarded “Kaley” $6 million from Meta and YouTube, but the real story is the litigation pipeline behind it — four states suing Meta in a single day, with total claims reaching $1.4 trillion. Satel's objection is professional: the lawsuits invoke brain science at the most superficial level and reify addiction as behavior beyond control. If addiction truly extinguished self-control, her methadone patients would never get better — and they do. Kaley herself had fragilities that long predated the platforms, one therapist testified social media barely came up in her sessions, and her stated career plan is to become an influencer. •       Clinically Real, Legally Incoherent. Satel's central distinction: in a clinic, social media addiction is a recognizable condition — excessive use, loss of control, continued harm — treatable with the same strategies she uses for drugs, from identifying idiosyncratic cues to self-binding tactics like grayscale screens and switched-off notifications. In a courtroom, where causation is everything, the concept falls apart. No brain scan can distinguish an impulse that wasn't resisted from one that's irresistible; the technology simply doesn't exist. The mechanism of harm at the center of the litigation is not just unproven but unprovable. •       Demoralization Is Not Depression. At her methadone clinic, nine patients out of ten arrive reciting diagnoses — bipolar, PTSD, depression — that closer examination reveals they don't have. What's medicated as depression is often demoralization: the entirely understandable response to crumbling public housing and an abusive partner. Younger people now diagnose themselves by internet, because a diagnosis has become valorized — a built-in excuse, a victim category, less expected of you. Gratifying in the short run, Satel argues, and developmentally retarding in the long run: less engagement with risk, with challenge, with the world. •       The Therapeutic Culture Meets Woke Therapy. Sixty years after Philip Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic, the medicalization of ordinary sadness is complete — grief becomes a prescription, and resources drain away from the seriously ill. The newer turn is political: counselor training now teaches that the therapist knows what's wrong before the patient speaks — oppression — and a congressional investigation is examining antisemitism within the American Psychological Association. Satel's emblematic story: a young man fired by his therapist for gently suggesting his rabbi's sermon had become too politicized. You don't fire a patient, she notes. The therapist's moral commitments bled into the room. •       The Good News About Fentanyl. Fentanyl deaths are falling significantly — not because fewer people use, but because far fewer die. Narcan is flooding the streets, nailed up in boxes on telephone poles and handed out free at clinics; the Chinese supply has tightened and Mexican distribution has been disrupted; and, as in every drug epidemic, the upcoming generation is opting out — the same dynamic the rappers documented during crack. The morbid factor is real too: many long-term users have died. Satel's book Not a Disease — rethinking addiction from the front lines of the overdose crisis — arrives in early 2027. About the Guest Sally Satel is a psychiatrist, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the medical director of a methadone clinic in Washington, DC. She is the author or co-author of PC, M.D., One Nation Under Therapy, and Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, and her essays appear in Persuasion and The Free Press. Her new book, Not a Disease: Rethinking Addiction in the Heart of America's Overdose Crisis (MIT Press), is out in early 2027. References: •       Not a Disease: Rethinking Addiction in the Heart of America's Overdose Crisis by Sally Satel (MIT Press, early 2027) — drawn from her years on the front lines of the overdose crisis. •       Satel's recent Persuasion essay arguing that social media addiction is more complicated than the litigation suggests, and her Free Press pieces on social media addiction and on why fentanyl deaths are falling. •       One Nation Under Therapy and Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience — Satel's earlier assaults on the therapeutic culture and superficial brain science. •       The Age of Diagnosis by Suzanne O'Sullivan — the book behind the episode's framing question: which comes first, the diagnosis or the anxiety? •       Philip Rieff — whose The Triumph of the Thera...

The Israeli art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon is as real as George Smiley or Hercule Poirot. He even has his own Wikipedia page. The CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel describes herself on X as a friend of Gabriel Allon before she gets around to mentioning her husband, the best-selling thriller writer Daniel Silva who, of course, is the creator of Allon. As with all successful literary inventions, of course, Silva is as much Allon as Allon is Silva. Silva-Allon. Amongst the most lucrative partnerships in contemporary fiction. Unsurprisingly, Silva still hasn't managed to kill off Allon. Twenty-six books into the series, the retired Mossad legend turned Venice art restorer is the truest fake spy in the business — a character so real that Silva, who seems to revel in his insularity, has to lock himself away from imagining how readers receive him. Or perhaps he's locking himself away from Allon. In Ransom, out today, a billionaire real estate baron asks Allon to find his vanished wife, the dazzling socialite Alice Winter — who has, of course, a darker life. Behind Silva's latest summer best-seller looms Russia's shadow war on Europe. That's the post-cold war cold war politics of Ransom. Unit 29155, the GRU's sabotage specialists, are hitting pipelines and flying drones over Copenhagen, an MI6 officer describes the Russians as feral animals, and Ransom's climax unfolds at an emergency Downing Street summit with Zelensky without the United States in the room. It's a terrifying narrative as real as Gabriel Allon. Five Takeaways •       An Art Restorer Who Used to Be a Spy. Gabriel Allon was invented for one book — a 1999 novel inspired by the Camp David peace process, written like a demon in a cottage near Land's End — and was never meant to continue. Twenty-six books later, Silva has flipped the character's formula: once an operative whose cover was art restoration, Allon is now an art restorer who used to be a spy, formally retired and living in Venice. As for his age, Silva freezes time the way Christie froze Poirot: Allon is aging in reverse, quite intentionally, and Silva will write him for as long as people want to read him. •       Russia's Shadow War on Europe. The serious spine of Ransom is the campaign of sabotage and subversion that Russia is waging against all of Western Europe — the GRU's Unit 29155 hitting pipelines, running hacking operations, and flying the drones that shut down Copenhagen Airport and pushed Denmark toward its highest state of alert. One MI6 officer tells Silva the Russians are acting like feral animals, and the worse the battlefield goes, the more aggressive the sabotage becomes. Silva has been here before: Moscow Rules put him ahead of the curve on Putin in 2008, and Allon's personal war with Putinism enters its latest round. •       Writing an Israeli Hero After October 7. Allon is the old Israeli liberal establishment made flesh — secular, social-democratic, the Ashkenazi security elite whose surviving members now oppose the conduct of the war. Silva, an avowed two-stater, saw the change coming years before October 7: quoting his friend Richard Haass, this is not your parents' or grandparents' Israel. Allon, he insists, would never serve in a cabinet alongside far-right extremists like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich — and they wouldn't have him. What happened on October 7 was barbaric, Silva says, but this war has gone on far too long. •       The Super Rich, With a Judgmental Eye. It's fun to write about the rich — the jets, the expensive toys, the glamour of Venice, Knightsbridge, and Ibiza — but Silva does it for a specific reason: to draw the contrast between how they live and how the rest of us live. A new global super elite is checking out from everyone else, he argues — unwilling to pay taxes, to educate the young, or to care for the sick — so Ransom balances the socialite's world against an encampment of homeless seasonal workers on Ibiza. Britain itself gets the same treatment: austerity, seven prime ministers in a decade, and shires where nobody is doing very well. •       Pencils on the Floor. Silva calls himself a literary novelist masquerading as a thriller writer, and his working methods match the self-description: he lies on the floor and writes with pencils, keeping technology as far from the work as possible. AI appears in Ransom only because the plot demanded it — a proof-of-life photograph that has to be checked for deepfakery, in a world where even presidents fake pictures. The thought of asking AI to write for him prompts a simple question: what would be the point? A book a year since 1997, and book 27 began the day after this one was finished. About the Guest Daniel Silva is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-six Gabriel Allon novels, including The Kill Artist, Moscow Rules, Portrait of an Unknown Woman, A Death in Cornwall, and An Inside Job. His books are published in more than thirty countries. He lives in Florida with his wife, CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel — who describes herself on X as a friend of Gabriel Allon before mentioning her husband. His new novel is Ransom (HarperCollins, July 14, 2026). References: •       Ransom by Daniel Silva (HarperCollins, July 14, 2026) — book 26 of the Gabriel Allon series. James Patterson: “Silva can really write, the bastard.” •       Moscow Rules (2008) — the novel Silva is proudest of, which put him ahead of the curve on Putin and began Allon's personal war with the Russian secret services. •       The Kill Artist (2001) — Allon's first appearance, inspired by the Camp David peace process and written in a rented cottage near Land's End. •       Unit 29155 — the real GRU sabotage unit behind the pipeline attacks, hacking operations, and drone incursions that drive the novel's plot, including the 2025 shutdown of Copenhagen Airport. •       John le Carré — whose George Smiley, Silva concedes, needs no advice from Gabriel Allon, though the two would have got on had they met on Bywater Street. •       Richard Haass — the foreign policy analyst and friend of Silva's whose line frames the Israel discussion: this is not your parents' or your grandparents' Israel any longer. 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 3,000 episodes since the show launched on...

The leftist cultural critic David Masciotra isn't happy with the state of America in the first half of 2026. His dislike of the MAGA crowd goes without saying. But his anger at the state of progressive politics is more noteworthy. So far, he says, 2026 has been — to borrow from Antonio Gramsci — a time for monsters both on the left and right. With its “Epstein class” vocabulary, knee-jerk Luddism and AIPAC litmus tests, the left, Masciotra argues, is mimicking MAGA in its paranoid bigotry. The year's most disturbing story so far is Graham Platner, the erstwhile Maine Senate candidate who, Masciotra suggests, is either an idiot or a Nazi. Equally disturbing were the “progressives” who blindly defended Platner until the most recent rape accusations. So how to slay these monsters on the left? What's missing, Masciotra argues, is the kind of positively benevolent Jacksonian (Jesse) vision which seizes the moral high ground of American politics. We are still waiting for the next Bill Clinton, Obama, or even Bernie able to imagine a new dawn for the left in America. Maybe we'll see the early shoots of a more optimistic progressivism in the second half of the year. In the manner of a football (soccer) match, let's hope 2026 turns out to be a year of two halves. Five Takeaways •       The Old Gods Return. Masciotra's answer to the what-time-is-it question is that 2026 has seen the old gods stumble back onto the landscape: nationalism, male chauvinism, paranoia and conspiracism. Borrowing from Zygmunt Bauman, he argues that we have moved from a solid age to a liquid one, in which nothing feels stable — and instability inculcates a nostalgia that is usually irrational and ill-informed. People are reaching for the resurrection of manufacturing, the male-headed nuclear family, even a return to religion, with young Americans reportedly turning to Catholicism. Quality of life is objectively better than in our grandparents' era, and yet we live in an age of doom-scrolling and pessimism. •       The Epstein Class and the Left's New Litmus Tests. The criticism of Israeli conduct after October 7 has morphed, for many on the left, into an all-encompassing paranoia in which AIPAC, Zionists, and “the Epstein class” control everything. Graham Platner coupled those terms constantly in his stump speeches — antisemitic conspiracy-mongering 101, in Masciotra's phrase — and declaring Israel genocidal has become a litmus test in Democratic primaries from Maine to Denver to California. Masciotra, who saw Jesse Jackson spend decades atoning for Hymietown, calls this the most important story of 2026 to monitor: the collapse of parts of the progressive left into bigotry, misogyny tolerance, and purity tests. •       Luxury Beliefs and Streamer Politics. Voter turnout used to be organized bottom-up — black churches, the NAACP, Jackson's Rainbow PUSH Coalition — around the issues of actual neighborhoods. Now streamers like Hasan Piker mobilize thousands of calls into districts they know nothing about, amplifying what Masciotra calls luxury beliefs: positions whose consequences never touch the people who hold them, from making every race about Israel to defunding police in neighborhoods the believers don't live in. Whether it's Piker on the left or Nick Fuentes on the right, national streamers will always champion luxury beliefs, because they lack the knowledge to champion local ones. •       Working-Class Drag Doesn't Work. Platner looked like he had just changed a tire and talked like a pro wrestler cutting a promo on Susan Collins — and the polls showed Collins beating him even before he dropped out over credible accusations of rape and domestic violence. White working-class voters, Masciotra argues, are not looking for someone in the right costume with the right gravelly voice; they have real beliefs, and they respond to people who speak directly to their concerns rather than in the nomenclature of consultant firms. Nobody in Maine piecing together a living as a farmer or a home-health aide has AIPAC first and foremost on their mind. •       Waiting for the Benevolent Vision. What the half-year lacks, from Washington to Westminster, is what Jesse Jackson had even for his critics: a benevolent vision. Masciotra finds it today in Bryan Stevenson and the civil rights tradition he calls the moral center of American politics, and in Senator Raphael Warnock, who preaches from King's old church. His policy candidate for the next Clinton-or-Obama moment is a self-employment manifesto — politics for the millions piecing together gig work who appear in nobody's rhetoric, not the manufacturing nostalgia of the right nor the union nostalgia of the left. And on AI, he sees an opening: oppose the secretly-dealt data centers, as presidential hopeful J.B. Pritzker has, but harness the technology for the precariat rather than the moguls. About the Guest David Masciotra is a cultural critic, journalist, and lecturer. He is the author of six books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy (Melville House, 2024) and I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (Bloomsbury, 2020), drawn from his many years working alongside the late Reverend Jackson. His writing appears in UnHerd, The New Republic, Washington Monthly, The Progressive, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and he teaches literature and political science in Indiana. He is a longtime friend of the show. References: •       Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy by David Masciotra (Melville House, 2024). Booklist, starred review: “Insight and a fresh perspective on the culture wars.” •       I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters (Bloomsbury, 2020) — Masciotra's biography of the Reverend, discussed here for Jackson's decades of recompense after the 1984 Hymietown remark. •       Zygmunt Bauman — the Polish sociologist of liquid modernity, quoted in Exurbia Now, whose move from solidity to liquidity frames the episode's diagnosis of nostalgia. •       Antonio Gramsci — the Prison Notebooks passage on the interregnum, in both its translations: morbid symptoms and monsters. •       Masciotra's recent UnHerd essays — on why Democrats gave Graham Platner a free pass, on the party's luxury belief agenda, and on Stephen Colbert as the emblem of detached establishment liberalism. •       Bryan Stevenson — founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and the legacy sites memorializing slavery and lynching; the subject of Masciotra's forthcoming piece and, in his view, the closest thing 2026 has to a benevolent vision. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brin...

Will 2026 be one of those grand historical years that change the world — like 1917, 1789 or 1968? Not according to Keith Teare, publisher of That Was The Week newsletter and co-host of our weekly tech roundup. For Keith, the best historical analogy is 1905, the year of the first abortive Russian revolution. The year that didn't change the world. Keith's latest tech newsletter asks “What Time Is It?” His answer is that we have “multiple clocks” — micro and macro, short, medium, and long term to make sense of our current AI moment. This week, for example, OpenAI and Anthropic both shipped work-focused products, and most of the world hasn't noticed. Thus his allusion to 1905. We are on the brink of massive change. But nothing is going to change. Not quite yet. Until everything does. Five Takeaways •       It's 1905 in the AI Economy. Keith's answer to the what-time-is-it question is the failed Russian revolution — the moment when the variables of transformation were all in motion but nothing was yet visible, and which took seventy years to fully play out. AI's radical change is real, he argues, but it is being experienced by a small number of people and is not yet generalized through the economy. The evidence of the week: OpenAI and Anthropic both shipped work-focused products — and most of the world shrugged. •       The Socialist Temptation of Slippery Sam. The Wall Street Journal frames Altman's offer of 5% of OpenAI to Washington as socialism creeping into Silicon Valley. Keith — who hated the word even when he was a communist — says the term has been Americanized into meaninglessness: it now just means the capitalist state doing more. What Altman is actually proposing is capitalism's end game — a sovereign wealth fund holding equity in the companies everybody wants to fund, so that private wealth creation reaches the point where everyone can imagine benefiting from it. The precise opposite of British Leyland. •       The Multiple Clocks. Keith's framework sorts the week's flood of AI news into micro and macro issues running on short, medium, and long-term timelines. At the micro-short corner sits deployment friction: Microsoft and Amazon spending billions on forward-deployed engineers, and Apple suing OpenAI. In the middle, work adapts — the human as the driver of AI rather than AI imposed on humans. At the top sits Arvind Narayanan's idea of AI as a “normal technology,” which deflates hysteria without deflating importance: electricity was a normal technology too, and it still changed everything — just slower than its loudest advocates expected. •       Abundance and Its Discontents. Matt Yglesias argues that saving capitalism requires radical land use reform, which reignites the show's longest-running argument. Keith's case: the Elizabeth Line and the congestion zone have redefined London, multiplying its effective land fifty-fold, and a house twenty minutes from the center can be had for a couple of hundred thousand pounds. Andrew's case: prices haven't fallen, London is more expensive than ever, and free is doing a lot of work as “a tendency, not an achievement.” The quarrel is adjourned until next week, with Keith cheerfully moonlighting as a real estate agent. •       Two Americas — and the Small Stuff. Ivan Krastev tells Yascha Mounk that American exceptionalism ran roughly from 1850 to Vietnam and has been replaced by defensive preservation — MAGA as a reaction to decline rather than a vision. Noah Smith's version: America can't build a passenger train, yet its AI industry is upending the world. And against John Battelle's worry that digital life has lost the plot, Keith offers the week's best rejoinder to Ian Bogost's small stuff: go back in history, and no one had time for small things. What we are living through is creeping abundance. The week closes with farewells — to Psion founder David Potter, a week after Om Malik. About the Guest Keith Teare is the founder and editor of the That Was The Week tech newsletter, and Andrew's weekly co-host. A British-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor, he was a co-founder of TechCrunch and runs the Palo Alto–based venture firm SignalRank. He and Andrew have been arguing about technology — productively — every week for years. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith's newsletter; this week's edition asks what time it is in the AI economy and lays out the multiple clocks framework. •       The Wall Street Journal piece on the socialist temptation of Sam Altman, and Altman's proposal that the US government hold 5% of OpenAI. •       Arvind Narayanan — the Princeton computer scientist whose framing of AI as a “normal technology” anchors the civilizational clock. •       Matt Yglesias — whose piece argues that saving capitalism requires radical land use reform. •       Ivan Krastev — the Bulgarian political theorist, interviewed in Yascha Mounk's Persuasion on why America has lost faith in itself. •       Noah Smith and Paul Krugman — on the American age and the perennial Europe-versus-US economic comparison, respectively. •       John Battelle — the Web 2.0 pioneer asking whether we've lost the plot, quoting Ian Bogost in Wired. •       The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost (Simon & Schuster) — the interview of the week on Keen On America. •       The New Geography of Innovation by Mehran Gul (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster) — also on this week's show, on America, China, and everyone else. •       David Potter — the founder of Psion, builder of the first handheld computer and later a governor of the Bank of England, who died this week and is Keith's post of the week. 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 3,000 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 Substack YouTube

“Someone said, oh, you look like Steve Bannon, and I love you for that… No, I just shaved my hair and lost some pounds.” — Kaya Genç on Trumpism's global fanbase The NATO circus rumbled into the Turkish capital of Ankara this week resembling more of a gun show than an alliance summit. Ringmaster Donald J. Trump promised Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the F-35s and lifted the very sanctions that Trump himself had imposed. Erdogan handed out pistols to the assembled leaders — with poor old Keir Starmer (no Winston Churchill) leaving his at the airport. And observing all these clowns from Istanbul was the Turkish novelist and essayist Kaya Genç. As a contributor to the anthology How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, Genç is a keen America watcher. He first set foot in the United States in January 2017, stumbling into New York City's protests against Trump 1.0's Muslim-ban. What seemed temporary — Trump as a bizarre historical aberration — looked to Erdogan-literate Kaya Genç like an operating manual for 21st century populist authoritarianism. Turkey, Genç argues, has spent a century Americanizing itself. First with the 20th century Marshall Plan, the highways, the Hilton hotels, and finally an American-style executive presidency operating on the politics of referendum. Now, he says, the whole world — from Turkey to France and Britain — is living with the consequences of 21st century Americanization. Like a more functional NATO, right-wing populists operate like an international alliance. Erdogan, Trump, Meloni, Le Pen and Farage are like a club in which projecting strength at summits buys impunity at home. And this club has a house style. Turkish right-wing columnists, Genç reports, deploy Michael Corleone on their X banners — exactly David Thomson's warning earlier this week about Hollywood's glorification of on-screen violence. So, in a way, America observers like Kaya Genç got a sneak preview of Trump's America in movies like The Godfather. First as cinema, then as life. From both Turkey and Russia with love. Five Takeaways •       NATO: The Club of the Mighty. The night before the summit, activists were rounded up in Ankara — LGBTQ rights defenders, labor unionists, journalists — as threats to NATO security. In Turkish civil society, Genç explains, NATO doesn't represent the liberal world order; it represents the mighty, and has since the writers of the 1960s. The summit itself was a military passion show: jets overhead, revolvers gifted among the attendees, and a host country whose ruling politicians no longer hide that arms exports — including the drones Ukraine used so effectively — are now the mission of the Turkish economy. •       Trump: A Star Among Right-Wing Voters Everywhere. In India, a chubbier, longer-haired Genç was once told: you look like Steve Bannon, and I love you for that. The Turkish media savaged Biden but forgives Trump everything — Netanyahu is the villain of the Turkish press, while Trump speaks the language. Not Turkish (though he tried a phrase): the language of the presidential system. The Turkish right's America has always been selective — yes to the death penalty and gun ownership, no to labor rights, free expression, and the trans movement — an instinct as old as the poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy's advice to copy Germany's industriousness and leave out the decadence. •       Living the Consequences of Americanization. Turkey began its republic in the 1920s on the European model — parliament, proportional voices for an ethnically diverse country. After the Marshall Plan, it re-forged itself on the American one: highways, Hilton hotels, burger joints, and eventually an American-style executive presidency, approved by referendum over the objections of people like Genç. That's why Trump 1.0 read so differently in the two countries: in New York it looked like an exception to be fought off; in Ankara it looked like how American politics works — and something to imitate. •       Populists Learn Like Large Language Models. Did Erdogan create the model, or is Trump teaching Erdogan? Neither, says Genç: it's a dialogue — right-wing populism learning from itself the way AI learns from language models. The AKP ran a Gramscian culture war through the institutions; Meloni, Le Pen, and Farage apply the cosmetic soft brush that makes fascist-rooted politics presentable. Join the club, project strength at the summit, and whatever you do domestically stops mattering. Putin, notably, is not in the curriculum: Turkey is returning its S-400s to get the F-35s, and Russia is becoming a footnote. •       The Hologram and the Pushback. Ekrem Imamoglu — the Istanbul mayor Genç profiles in The Dial as the hologram candidate — won the city with socialist municipalism, and the skeptics who warned it would alienate the pious were simply wrong. Soft liberalism, the faith Genç himself held since the nineties, is disappearing; the pushback is finding its heroes in dead poets — Rosa Luxemburg, and Sevgi Soysal, whose novel Walking is out in English from New York Review Books. From Istanbul to Middle America, Mamdani to AOC, Genç's advice to the left is the same: don't fragment — conquer the big parties. About the Guest Kaya Genç is a novelist and essayist from Istanbul. He is the author of Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey and The Lion and the Nightingale, and his writing appears in The Dial, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Index on Censorship, and Jewish Quarterly. He is a contributor to How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, June 2026), edited by The Dial's Madeleine Schwartz. References: •       How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, edited by Madeleine Schwartz (The New Press, June 2026). Publishers Weekly: “A much-needed reality check.” •       Madeleine Schwartz — founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial, editor of the anthology, and a recent guest on the show. •       Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey — Genç's account of Turkey's political generation, published just after the 2016 coup attempt. •       Ece Temelkuran — the Turkish writer and recent guest whose How to Lose a Country globalized the Turkish case as a warning to democracies everywhere. •       Sevgi Soysal — the Turkish novelist who died at 40, whose Walking — a portrait of Ankara slowly killing itself for profit — is out in English from New York Review Books, reviewed by Genç. •       David Thomson — the film critic and recent guest whose argument that Trumpism grew from Hollywood's lov...

“A place that doesn't have great philosophers will not have great technologists either.” — Mehran Gul on Europe's inexplicable underperformance The digital revolution, we were promised, would mean the end of geography. From Beijing to Birmingham to Berlin to Barcelona, anyone could invent anything anywhere, and so the geography of innovation would no longer matter. But that's not the way it has worked out. At least according to the Geneva-based innovation geographer Mehran Gul. Gul's acclaimed The New Geography of Innovation is a travelogue of innovation. But what he finds on his journey around the world in search of innovation is the end of the end of geography. Yes, Gul reports, there's innovation in Beijing and in Birmingham (USA) — but not in Birmingham (England), Berlin or Barcelona. All the important invention is in China and the US. There simply isn't much radical stuff going on anywhere else. Gul began his journey expecting to find ten or twelve countries able to innovate competitively with the United States and China. But what he discovered is either niche players or, in the case of South Korea, Israel, and India, just an extension of the US-centric system. Europe — as renters rather than owners of American technology — comes off worst. When PayPal went public, it minted 160 millionaires who went on to help build SpaceX, Tesla, LinkedIn and Palantir; when Skype exited at about the same value, it minted 11. And if you put London aside, the rest of the UK is now poorer per capita than Mississippi. And the AI boom has only compounded all this, with half of last year's key research papers coming from China, 40% from America, and just 4% from Europe. So really the new geography of innovation is the old geography. Only with China replacing Europe as the only serious competitor to American innovation. Oh lord, oh lord. As a Mississippi bluesman might summarize Europe's predicament. Five Takeaways •       Golden Shares: The Two Systems Are Converging. OpenAI offering Washington a 5% stake, the US government owning Intel — these are Chinese moves, and Gul argues the two models are becoming more alike than either admits. But he pushes back on the lazy version of the China story: its tech sector rose despite the state, not because of it. Jack Ma exiled to Japan, Didi hit with a billion in fines, entire sectors decapitated overnight in 2021 under the banner of common prosperity. In a country with no independent media and no opposition parties, the only rival to centralized power is the tech sector — and the party knows it. •       Two Countries — and Everyone Else. Gul started writing expecting to find ten or twelve countries punching at America's level; the honest answer turned out to be two. Only China has broad-based competence across technologies and a genuinely competitive relationship with the US. The middle powers — South Korea, Israel, India — are extensions of the American system, not rivals to it. That finding surprised the author as much as anyone: it's not the book he set out to write. •       Europe: Renters, Not Owners. After the Fable 5 and Mythos bans, Europe woke up to being a renter of American technology — foundation models, NVIDIA GPUs, all of it. Its best companies keep leaving: DeepMind to Google, Arm to a New York listing, Hugging Face from Paris to Manhattan — while Volvo, Supercell, and KUKA sold to China. Gul's diagnosis is institutional, not cultural: European employees own half as much of their startups as American ones, so there is no European PayPal mafia. His fixes: a European Nasdaq to replace 41 competing capital markets, and pension funds unleashed into venture capital. •       The Question Nobody Is Asking. Since 1990, America's share of global GDP has held at 25% while China's multiplied tenfold — the loser is Europe. The top ten American tech companies are worth $27 trillion, more than the GDP of every country on earth except America itself. Tech is not one industry among many; it is the foundation of all of them — the new cars came from Tesla, not GM. Gul's message to the skeptical Spaniard enjoying long lunches: the last sixty years of American platform dominance skewed power across the Atlantic, and the next sixty will add China to the bill. •       The Rest of the Map: Anti Case Studies. Japan tops the freedom indexes, has the technical schools, and still never escaped the keiretsu — disproving Matt Ridley's claim that innovation is simply the child of freedom. Taiwan's relevance comes down to one company and Morris Chang's missed promotion at Texas Instruments. Singapore is an inspiration, not a model — a one-party city-state that invoices NVIDIA's chips and banks ASEAN's venture capital. India underperforms while Indians excel — 56 notable American foundation models last year, 35 Chinese, barely one Indian. And Switzerland reminds us innovation isn't only venture-backed: a train network running on renewables since the 1960s. About the Guest Mehran Gul writes about technology and business. He is the winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize, from which The New Geography of Innovation grew. He attended Yale as a Fulbright Scholar, Fox International Fellow, and Teaching Fellow, has been a Lead for the Digital Transformation of Industries at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, and served as an expert on entrepreneurship and industrial policy at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization in Vienna. Born in Pakistan, he lives in Switzerland. The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), a Financial Times Book of the Year, is his first book, out in paperback this month in the US and UK. References: •       The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies by Mehran Gul (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster). The Wall Street Journal: “An ambitious tour of technological innovation.” •       Sebastian Mallaby — author of The Power Law, which argues China's tech rise owes more to American-style risk capital arriving in Shanghai and Shenzhen than to the state; recently on the show discussing his biography of Demis Hassabis. •       Kai-Fu Lee — author of AI Superpowers, cited by Gul as the classic account of tech written through a Chinese lens. •       Matt Ridley — author of How Innovation Works, whose thesis that innovation is “the child of freedom and the parent of prosperity” Gul tests against the anti case study of Japan. •       Andrew Keen — author of How t...

“I crack the tab open, and I feel the cold metal… I hear the tink and give of the aluminum. And maybe when I'm done, I crush it into a small patty.” — Ian Bogost on the everyday enchantment of a Diet Coke can Don't sweat the small stuff is one of the most persistent (and annoying) mantras of the self-help industry. But the counter-intuitive Atlantic columnist Ian Bogost advises the opposite. In his new book, The Small Stuff, Bogost suggests that gratification lies in our appreciation of small stuff like the crinkle of empty Diet Coke cans and the foldability of plane tickets. Max Weber argued that disenchantment was the defining quality of modernity, but in The Small Stuff, Bogost maps a way back to it. What we need to get away from, he says, is “optimization” — metrics, feedback loops, money as a proxy for a place in heaven. Rather than the cult of delayed gratification, pick up that empty coke can and revel in its architectural glory. Or lick a tree. That's how to be enchanted in postmodernity. Five Takeaways •       Sweat the Small Stuff. Bogost inverts three decades of self-help orthodoxy: the small stuff is precisely what we should be sweating. The crack of a Diet Coke tab, the cold metal warming in your hand, the can crushed into a patty before the recycling bin — these sensory encounters are not where deep purpose lives, and Bogost never claims they are. But they recur every day, sometimes several times a day, and accepting them as meaningful rather than as noise to get through delivers what he calls a surprising payload of engagement and enchantment. For some it's Diet Coke; for others, woodworking, gardening, or the gear shift of a manual transmission. •       Dematerialization: How We Lost the World. The book's central diagnosis is what Bogost calls dematerialization — the slow disconnection from the physical world driven by convenience technologies. The QR code that replaced the concert ticket you might have pinned to a bulletin board. The automatic faucet you wave at awkwardly in the public restroom — which never works, and doesn't even save water; it just makes buildings easier to manage. The process is decades old, hardly limited to computers, and it stripped the texture from everyday life so gradually that nobody noticed what was being given up. •       It's Sensory, Not Physical — and Not Anti-Tech. This is not a go-touch-grass book. Bogost insists the small stuff is sensory rather than physical, and that smartphones are compelling precisely because they are delightful — the smooth glass that demands to be touched, the thunderstorm animation in the weather app. Everything is technology, including the clothes on your body and the language in your mouth. He gave his twelve-year-old a smartwatch rather than banning screens, because parenting means living in the same world as your kids — and kids must live a contemporary life to become the adults who invent the next one. •       We Already Got Rid of God — So Meaning Had to Move. Pressed on Weber and the Protestant ethic, Bogost argues that secularization emptied out the place where meaning used to live — good works justified by an infinite time in heaven — and replaced it with happiness, purpose, and wealth as proxies. The result is a hyper-optimized, future-oriented culture in which everything worth doing is worth doing for some later payoff. Bogost admits he struggles with this himself: the health wearable he wears while writing a book against quantification. What he loves about his morning walk isn't the step count. It's the twigs crunching underfoot. •       The Quietism Charge — and the AI Twist. Isn't this stoicism for the age of Trump, the same charge leveled at Heidegger's silence before the Nazis? Bogost anticipates the critique: we are and must be both political creatures and creatures who live moment to moment in our bodies — he asks no one to abandon the fight, only to stop missing the life underneath it. And the timing is no accident. As AI takes over the big stuff, Bogost suspects it may push us back into the sensory world — he consults ChatGPT about fixing his range thermostat, then goes and fixes it with his hands. About the Guest Ian Bogost is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of eleven books, including The Small Stuff and Play Anything. He is the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches computer science and engineering, film and media studies, and art and design. He is also an award-winning game designer whose work is held in collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He is the author of The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026). References: •       The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life by Ian Bogost (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026). The New Yorker: “Bogost's joy is infectious.” •       Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (2016) — Bogost's earlier book, the subject of his June 2020 appearance on the show. •       Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing (2012) — Bogost's “straight up philosophy book” where he first explored the idea of wonder. •       Max Weber — the German sociologist who identified disenchantment as the defining quality of modernity, and whose The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism frames the discussion of delayed gratification and the afterlife. •       Matthew Crawford — mutual friend of host and guest, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head, earlier explorers of the same terrain. •       Martin Heidegger — the philosopher whose ideas of thrownness and being-in-the-world haunt the book, though his name never appears in it, and whose Nazi-era quietism frames the political critique. 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 3,000 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 Substack 

“America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” — the message Tad Devine and Ben Tulchin developed for Bernie Sanders, which tested highest in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2015 How the Democrats Screwed Bernie. It could have been coined by Donald Trump. That was Tad Devine's first objection when his editor floated it. But as Devine, Bernie Sanders' chief strategist on his 2016 Presidential campaign, worked on the book about the 2016 campaign, he realised it most accurately expressed how he felt about what actually happened. And so the new tell-all — the inside account of the historic Sanders campaign — is, indeed, entitled How the Democrats Screwed Bernie. Devine was never an outsider. He worked on Al Gore's 2000 and John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaigns. He first met Bernie Sanders in 1996, when Peter DeFazio — the Oregon congressman for whom Devine and his partner Mike Donilon had just run a near-miraculous campaign — suggested they meet. Sanders had almost lost his House seat in 1994. Devine's campaign won it back by 26 points. Ten years later, Devine ran Sanders' successful Senate campaign against a free-spending billionaire. They won by 30 points. Devine schooled Bernie in the insider-politics of the Democratic party. But he didn't transform him into an insider. Bernie was and is always Bernie. The consummate outsider. So how, exactly, did the Dems screw Bernie? According to Devine, it was a coordinated campaign by the Clinton Machine, the DNC, and a network of Super PACs to stop a wildly popular outsider through dark money, dirty tricks, and deliberately structured primary rules. The unHillary candidate who, Devine argues, may well have been the people's choice — and could have beaten Donald Trump in November 2016. But Bernie's real legacy, Devine insists, is not what was done to him. It's his campaign message. “America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” That outsider language — which Devine developed with pollster Ben Tulchin — captures how America is screwing itself. The consummate insider Trump stole Bernie's language. And if the Democrats want to screw the MAGA crowd in 2028, they need to seize back this outsider message. Five Takeaways •       The Title That Sounded Like Trump: Devine's first reaction when his Simon & Schuster editor proposed the title: I don't want to be anything like Trump. But as he worked through the process of writing the book, he came to see that the title most accurately expressed how he felt about what happened in 2016. The Democratic establishment — the Clinton Machine, the DNC, the network of Super PACs and media allies — used dark money, dirty tricks, opposition research, and deliberately structured primary rules to stop a wildly popular outsider candidate. A candidate who, the book argues, may well have been the people's choice and may well have defeated Donald Trump. •       How Devine Met Bernie: 1996, Peter DeFazio, and 26 Points: Devine was already a Democratic establishment figure when Peter DeFazio — a progressive Oregon congressman — introduced him to Sanders in early 1996. Sanders had almost lost his House seat in 1994; Devine's firm came in a month before the 1996 election and reversed the trajectory. Sanders won by 26 points. Ten years later, Devine ran Sanders' Senate campaign against a billionaire who spent the equivalent of $350 million in California, and they won by 30 points. A bond of trust formed between the establishment consultant and the independent socialist, though it was a relationship in which the label-defying aspect went both ways: Bernie, you're a United States senator, Devine told him. That is the establishment. •       The Rigged Economy Message: What Bernie Actually Contributed: The most important moment in the 2016 campaign was not a debate or a rally. It was a polling session in 2015 in which Devine and pollster Ben Tulchin combined two separate arguments — a rigged economy and a corrupt system of campaign finance — into a single sentence: “America has a rigged economy held in place by a corrupt system of campaign finance.” It tested as the highest message in Iowa and New Hampshire. That, Devine argues, is Bernie's real legacy: the identification of the structural problem. Until that problem is fixed — until the campaign finance system that rigs the economy is reformed — the economy will continue to crush the middle class and make it impossible for people to afford groceries, gas, and healthcare. •       The Real Populist vs the Phony One: Trump saw the same diagnosis Bernie had identified and grabbed it — infusing it with his xenophobia, racism, pathological lying, and contempt for democratic norms. The populist message was the same; the bundle around it was entirely different. Bernie represents a belief that government has a role in serving people. Trump represents a belief that government should serve rich people and punish everyone else, wrapped in the language of the working class. That, Devine argues, is the distinction that matters for 2028. The fight is not between left and right. It is between the real and the phony. •       AOC, Ro Khanna, and the 2028 Democratic Race: Bernie won't run in 2028. But Devine is certain that one or more Bernie-style candidates will. AOC and Ro Khanna are the most obvious — both have toured with Bernie, both share his core principles, both are committed to Medicare for All. But Devine adds: at this point in the calendar going into 2006, Barack Obama was a state senator from Illinois. The candidate who actually wins the 2028 nomination may not yet be on the radar. What is on the radar: a Democratic base that is desperate for new leadership and a new direction. And a president, Trump, who Devine believes is capable of doing anything to hold power, including worse than January 6. The only way to stop him is to beat him in elections. About the Guest Tad Devine is a Democratic political strategist with over thirty years of campaign experience. He served as chief strategist for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign and as a senior adviser in Al Gore's 2000 and John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaigns. He has held academic positions at Boston University, the Harvard Kennedy School, and George Washington University. He is the author of How the Democrats Screwed Bernie (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026). References: •       How the Democrats Screwed Bernie by Tad Devine (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026). Publishers Weekly: “An enraging account… a keen cautionary tale.” •       Mike Donilon — Devine's former partner; later became Joe Biden's top strategist in the White House.

“For all the paperwork of democracy — government by and for the people — we have become a citizenry of spectators who simply want to be entertained. And we are accustomed to the realization that we can't do anything about what's on the screen.” — David Thomson Has the prolific film critic David Thomson fallen out of love with the movies? That's the question I began my conversation with Thomson, arguably the greatest living writer on film. My question was triggered by his revisionist movie history (out today), A Sudden Flicker of Light, which, while still glorifying film, nonetheless recognizes the damage that the medium has done to us. No, he hasn't fallen out of love with the movies, Thomson responded. But he did acknowledge a new kind of wariness about his beloved medium — a suspicion of auteur worship, that tradition which concentrates on the great artistry of individual directors like Welles, Hitchcock, and Scorsese while ignoring what the motion picture medium as a whole has done to society. “What has God wrought?” Samuel Morse asked about the telegraph. David Thomson is asking the same question about the consequence of movies. Cinema, particularly Hollywood, Thomson argues, has spent a century disempowering audiences. Sitting in the dark, gazing at the screen, people have lost their agency. This passivity, Thomson argues, has invaded our political life, transforming us from citizens into spectators. No, Mr Smith hasn't gone to Washington. Instead, America has become a theater of gawkers addicted to screen entertainment, unable to discriminate between a sudden flicker of light and reality. Thus the degeneration of America into a violent Coppola movie. Thus The Joker who has crawled out of primeval darkness and now monopolizes all our screens. You could make a movie about it. Call it “Being There” or “Network.” Or perhaps “The Truman Show.” Five Takeaways •       Cinema Has Trained Us to Be Spectators — and That Has Destroyed Our Agency: Thomson's central argument: sitting in the dark watching a bright light in front of them, audiences learned that the thing on the screen is not their responsibility. People are not really hurt on screen, no matter their bodies are torn apart. They are not really happy, no matter what they say in the film. And whatever happens, the audience remains a spectator. Extrapolate that out into a broader world and you have a society in which, for all the paperwork of democracy and government by and for the people, people have become a citizenry of spectators who simply want to be entertained. America, Thomson believes, is in that state. •       Every Cut Is Violent — and Every Cut Is a Marriage: Thomson's most original observation is the smallest: the cut. A cut is where the stream of imagery you are watching goes from one shot to another. It is a separation — but it is also a marriage. Every cut says: join them up. The way we measure the effectiveness of directors from D.W. Griffith onward is that they found ways to put shots together so that film had sequence and order, like the order of sentences in writing. And every cut has an element of violence in it, because you are seeing one thing and then, bang, you are watching something quite different. We have never taught our children what a cut is — even though they have spent far more of their lives watching moving imagery than reading. That neglect, Thomson argues, is consequential. •       The Culture of Manhood and the Systematic Neglect of Women: Thomson's most politically charged observation: the culture of manhood and the serious neglect of women was going on in virtually every film he saw until at least the 1980s, and you could argue well beyond that. That is, he says, a kind of tacit advertising — a way of saying, look, this is really a very good way for how the world should be. It is something that has become harder and harder for him to endure as an idea. And he thinks that the war in Iran would not have been as likely if America had had enough women running the country — because women feel and think together in concert in different ways, with more room for compassion, sentiment, and plain rationality. •       Cinema Is Deeply Educational — and We Have Ignored That: Thomson's answer to Andrew's challenge: what does any of this have to do with movies? Everything. You cannot have a mass medium without the mass being affected, without the ways in which they think being shaped. The movies have given us examples of how to live that have been intensely persuasive. They are deeply educational. And yet we have permitted them, and like every technology humans have ever invented, we have let the technology take control of us rather than the other way around. Children spend far more time watching moving imagery than reading — and yet we do not teach them what a cut is, what a camera angle means, how the medium constructs its reality. That neglect has been, Thomson believes, catastrophic. •       Citizen Kane Is the Definitive American Film — Not The Godfather: Andrew's final question: what is the definitive movie about America? Not The Godfather, Thomson says, because the Godfather films cannot overcome their attraction to authority. There is a reverence for dark power in the Godfather films. Whereas in Citizen Kane, there is all through the film a terrible ruefulness about what happens to people who seek power. Welles absolutely understood and was intensely critical of the personality that needed power and authority — and he was afraid of it. For that reason, it is still for Thomson the definitive American film. Thomson has been known to doze off watching it, because he knows it too well. On July 4, he plans to watch something different. Ideally, The Odyssey. About the Guest David Thomson is the author of more than twenty books on film, including A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026), The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (six editions, 1975–2014), Orson Welles, The Big Screen, Have You Seen…?, and biographies of David O. Selznick, Marlon Brando, and Nicole Kidman. Michael Ondaatje has called him “the best writer on film in our time.” He lives in San Francisco, where he is Andrew Keen's neighbour. References: •       A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies by David Thomson (Simon & Schuster, July 7, 2026). •       Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) — Thomson's definitive American film; discussed extensively in the conversation. •       The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) — referenced as ...

“White Americans considered themselves chosen by God to possess the continent and lord it over others — and they saw Native people as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction.” — David J. Silverman Was the colonization of North America a genocidal project? That is the delicate question David J. Silverman confronts in his powerful new book, The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States. Yes, Silverman concludes, there was an American genocide. But with a crucial distinction. Rather than a top-down government-organised “Final Solution,” the fate of Native Americans was what Silverman calls a “structural genocide.” It reflected a complete indifference to Native American life, grounded in a religious and racial ideology that gave white Americans the right to possess the continent and viewed Native Americans as indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction. The Spanish colonization of Latin America, Silverman notes, intended to subjugate the Native population and keep them as tributaries. The English, and their American successors, in contrast, intended to replace them. It's the same structural genocide that occurred in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. For all Silverman's dark take, there is good news. He argues that this structural genocide came to an end in the late 1960s. In an extraordinary and underappreciated transformation, Native American activists convinced a broad majority of Americans that tribes as tribes should be a permanent part of the United States. White supremacy, Silverman concludes, has been a feature of North American history since its colonization. But so has pluralism. American genocide vs American pluralism. Is history once again repeating itself in Trump's America? Five Takeaways •       Structural Genocide: Society-Wide Indifference, Not Just Government Policy: Silverman's central concept: structural genocide. Not the top-down, government-directed campaign to exterminate a people — though there were moments of exactly that across the centuries, when the government decided certain groups of Native people should be exterminated for resisting American rule. What he's describing is a society-wide and culture-wide indifference to Native American life, grounded in a racial ideology in which white Americans considered themselves chosen by God to possess the continent and Native Americans indelibly savage and fated by God to extinction. That ideology, combined with the imperative to seize Native American land, led white Americans from the seventeenth century through the twentieth to destroy Native American life through dozens of different forms. •       Anglo vs Spanish Colonialism: Replacement vs Subjugation: The Spanish in Latin America and the Caribbean were violent and horrific — but their purpose was to subjugate the Native population and have them subservient, not to replace them. Once the Spanish had defeated Native people, they took their foot off the gas and kept the surviving population as tributaries. The English colonies, and their American successors, intended to replace Native people — to displace them from the land and install new settler societies of men, women, and children. That pattern is also visible in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. It is not unique to the United States, but it is particular to English-origin settler colonialism. •       White Americans as “Chosen”: The Theological Foundation of Racial Ideology: Silverman's most striking argument is the theological one. White Americans did not merely believe they were racially superior — they believed they were chosen by God to possess the North American continent and lord it over others, and that Native people were equally fated by God to extinction in the name of white Christian civilisation. Native people countered with their own theology: the Great Spirit had created Indians and Whites separately and intended America to belong to Indians alone. This was not just a political dispute. It was a cosmic one. The racial ideology of white election — the sense of being chosen — is, Silverman argues, inseparable from the structural genocide that followed. •       The Good News: Structural Genocide Came to an End in the Late 1960s: An extraordinary and largely unacknowledged transformation. Native American activists and their non-Native allies convinced a broad American majority — Democrats and Republicans — that Native tribes as tribes, not just individuals, should be a permanent part of the United States, and that the treaties signed by the republic should be honoured as the supreme law of the land. For most of American history, the government's programme was to exterminate Native people physically or as cultural, social, and political units. That is no longer the case. Native Americans are rising: in numbers, in well-being, in political power. Light years to go. But it is a stunning transformation. •       Honoring Treaties Is Not Reparations — It Is the Constitution: On the question of Native land rights and casino rights, Silverman is precise: what you are seeing is not special privileges granted out of white guilt. It is the United States honouring the treaties it signed with Native tribes in the nineteenth century — treaties that under the United States Constitution are the supreme law of the land. The United States has not honoured those treaties for most of its history. It has begun to do so since the 1960s. This is not reparations. It is the republic living up to its word and its constitutional duties. The distinction matters, and Silverman draws it carefully. About the Guest David J. Silverman is Professor of History at George Washington University. He is the author of The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States (Bloomsbury, February 10, 2026), This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving (Bloomsbury, 2019; winner of multiple awards), Thundersticks, Ninigret, Red Brethren, and Faith and Boundaries. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, National Geographic, and The Daily Beast. He is based in Washington DC. References: •       The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans and the Making of Race in the United States by David J. Silverman (Bloomsbury, February 10, 2026). •       Konstanty Gebert (Warsaw, Episode 2952) — referenced at the opening for his discussion of the definition of genocide. •       Isabel Wilkerson, Caste — referenced in the closing section on racial hierarchy as caste. About Keen On America 

“The pinnacle of capitalism is still flawed. Any idea that it's perfect — this idea of the perfect union — is deeply flawed as a concept and always has been.” — Keith Teare With July 4 finally done, we can look forward to the next American revolution. Just as AI is revolutionizing the economy, so too are radical ideas about harnessing this disruption for the benefit of all Americans. One idea that is acquiring more and more currency in and out of Silicon Valley is what we might call universal basic capitalism. Six months ago, nobody knew what “universal basic capital” even meant. Now everyone is talking about it. What if the answer to inequality, AI disruption, and the slow hollowing out of the American economy isn't a return to socialism — but a new, more distributive kind of capitalism? As That Was The Week's Keith Teare argues in our weekly tech roundup, universal basic capitalism offers the best way to simultaneously empower all Americans without turning them into the welfare “queens” so disparaged by neo-liberals. Economists agree that AI is going to eliminate vast numbers of jobs, probably within the decade, certainly in time for America's 300th anniversary. One fix is the democratic socialist strategy of tax and spend through the state. Universal basic capitalism, in contrast, takes the wealth generated by AI companies, puts it into a sovereign wealth fund, and distributes the dividends directly to citizens. Rather than an ever-more-bloated bureaucracy redistributing wealth, the state miraculously shrinks. It's a neat idea. Instead of welfare queens, we get shareholding kings. But is this really the next American revolution? Or just the trickle-down economics of the DOGE crowd for an AI age of mass unemployment? Five Takeaways •       America the Beautiful — and Its Profound Flaws: Keith's 250th editorial acknowledges America's extraordinary achievements: the growth in wealth, living standards, and democratic governance over two and a half centuries. The fact that Donald Trump won the presidency, Keith notes, is itself evidence that the people still rule — most intellectuals didn't want him, but the people voted for him. At the same time: capitalism at its best still has huge swathes of poor people who can barely eat. The perfect union is deeply flawed as a concept and always has been. America has probably peaked in world terms. The next 250 years are not a foregone conclusion. •       1,200 New Millionaires a Day: The American Prosperity Machine: The stat of the week: the United States added 1,200 new millionaires a day last year, bringing its total to nearly 24 million. China has just over 5 million; Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea, Australia, France, and the UK are all under 3 million. The math: US GDP per capita is around $85,000 a year; China's is around $20,000-something. In California in particular, where house prices routinely exceed $1 million and there are 50–60 million residents, the numbers are doing a lot of work disguising a highly skewed distribution concentrated in coastal cities. •       Universal Basic Capital vs Democratic Socialism: The State Shrinks: Keith draws a sharp distinction between UBC — the sovereign wealth fund model — and democratic socialism as practised by Mamdani, Sanders, and AOC. In the socialist tradition, you seize the state through elections and use taxes and spending for good ends. Under UBC, the sovereign wealth fund becomes the distribution mechanism and the state shrinks to an administrative function: roads, health, education, defence. The actual AI companies don't become the state. The state becomes a shareholder in the fund. Money flows to citizens; the state shrinks. It's an interesting inversion. •       The AI Jobs Debate: Short-Term Boom, Long-Term Automation: Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford is at the centre of a debate this week. One body of evidence says companies using AI are hiring faster than companies that don't — Amazon and Microsoft both announced plans to put thousands of engineers on the front line helping customers implement AI. But Brynjolfsson's longer view says automation will accelerate: the things you need a front-end engineer for today will be done by agents tomorrow. Keith agrees with the long view: declining employment over five to fifteen years, which doesn't have to be a bad thing if universal basic capital is in place. Look at Musk's robot plans. It is definitely declining employment. •       Om Malik: The Liberal Humanist Who Prefigured Substack: Om Malik died this week at 59 — the tech journalist and venture capitalist who founded GigaOm and co-hosted the Crunchies with Mike Arrington. Keith knew him from Iceland, from photography, from the whole era of early tech blogging. His assessment: Om was a liberal with a capital L and a humanist, often writing critically about the extremes of capitalism and favourably about remedies. He became a capitalist to be independent, and that independence gave him freedom. Without GigaOm and TechCrunch, there would be no Substack. The line runs from the New York Times to GigaOm to TechCrunch to Substack to That Was The Week. Thank you, Om. 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 — the newsletter on which this episode is based. •       Erik Brynjolfsson (Stanford) — referenced for his argument that AI will accelerate long-term job automation, despite short-term hiring booms. •       Jennifer Harris, “The Generational Force Hollowing Out the Economy,” The New York Times — referenced in the closing discussion. •       Om Malik — founder of GigaOm; venture capitalist at True Ventures; died July 4, 2026, aged 59. •       MG Siegler — referenced for his obituary of Om Malik. 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 3,000 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: 

“What is happening today in America is part of a global political turn — and what's odd is how little the American people seem to realize it.” — Madeleine Schwartz So we've finally arrived. America is 250 today. But where, exactly, have we come? How should we think about the United States of America on July 4, 2026? Rather than peering inwards, Madeleine Schwartz — the Paris-based founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial — reverses the lens. Her anthology, How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press), gathers twelve essays from writers in India, Canada, South Africa, Ukraine, Palestine, Taiwan, Turkey, Cuba, Egypt, Argentina, Italy, and Ireland. The result might be the most honest birthday message that America will receive today. What these writers all observe is the same extraordinary ambivalence about the United States. They describe a country that defines itself as the democratic purveyor of justice, while operating as a vast imperial and economic power that shapes the lives of the rest of the world. What's odd — and Schwartz uses that word carefully — is how few Americans seem to realise this is how the world sees them. “The question of America is vast. It is unrelenting and unanswerable and will not be silenced,” the Gaza poet Muhammad al-Zaqzouq notes in his essay. Happy birthday, odd America. You might not know it, but the rest of the world is watching. And they won't forget what they've seen. Five Takeaways •       The World's Ambivalence: Purveyor of Hope, Imperial Power: Schwartz's central finding from twelve countries of essays: the world does not simply hate or love America. It holds a profound ambivalence — between the country that presents itself as the beacon of hope and democracy, and the country that is a vast imperial and economic power that shapes the lives of billions who have no vote in its elections. This ambivalence is, she argues, almost impossible to fully understand from inside the United States, where the assumption of benign intent is so deep. The essays collectively diagnose what the US's retreat from that self-image means for the world's ability to find alternative frameworks. •       Turkey and America: Erdoğan and Trump Have Learned From Each Other: Kaya Genç's essay from Turkey is one of the collection's most original: the Turkish right has long admired the vast powers of the American presidency as a model to follow, even as that same right has been characterised by American commentators as anti-American or Islamist. The admiration was never for American values — for free speech or civil liberties — but for the structural power of the presidency. Trump, meanwhile, has learned from Erdoğan's playbook of media control, legal intimidation, and institutional capture. The learning has gone in both directions. What is happening in America, Genç argues, is not exceptional — it is part of a global turn. •       Taiwan: Self-Defence Classes and Going It Alone: Michelle Kuo's essay from Taiwan describes a country that has fundamentally revised its relationship with the United States. For decades, many Taiwanese believed that by adhering to certain principles — upholding liberal values, supporting LGBTQ rights, maintaining civil liberties — they would gain American favour and the protection that came with it. That thinking is now gone. People in Taiwan are taking self-defence classes, preparing for a possible Chinese invasion without the expectation of outside help. And the values they uphold — civil liberties, LGBTQ rights — are upheld now because they actually want them, not to please Washington. •       The Dial: 90 Countries, One Third in Translation, Based in Paris: Schwartz founded The Dial four years ago in response to a sense that American media was turning catastrophically inward, unable to understand its own moment without comparison to what was happening elsewhere. The magazine publishes work from some 90 countries, about a third of it in translation, and aims to bring voices from outside the Anglophone foreign correspondent establishment. Several pieces from the book were reprinted in The Guardian. The anthology grew from a special issue published during the 2024 election, asking writers from around the world to look at the United States — a reversal of the magazine's usual direction. Schwartz will be talking about the book in Paris on July 4, not eating hot dogs. •       The Question of America: The Gaza Poet's Unanswerable Verdict: Muhammad al-Zaqzouq is a Gazan poet and father of three who has spent years trying to reach the United States, only to find that under Trump's America, asylum is no longer a possibility. His essay traces a lifetime of ambivalence — America as site of exclusion and segregation, America as specter of another possible life, America as the dream that institutions offer and that the firm hand of diplomacy snatches away. Schwartz reads the closing lines in the interview: “The question of America is vast. It is unrelenting and unanswerable and will not be silenced.” Of all the voices in the anthology, it is the one that stays. About the Guest Madeleine Schwartz is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial, an online magazine of culture, politics, and ideas with a focus on local writing from around the world. She is the editor of How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, June 9, 2026). Her writing appears in The London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. She teaches journalism at Sciences Po in Paris, where she is based. References: •       How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump edited by Madeleine Schwartz / The Dial (The New Press, June 9, 2026). Essays from India, Canada, South Africa, Ukraine, Palestine, Taiwan, Turkey, Cuba, Egypt, Argentina, Italy, and Ireland. •       The Dial — Schwartz's magazine of international writing, based in Paris. •       Kaya Genç (Turkey), Michelle Kuo (Taiwan), Muhammad al-Zaqzouq (Gaza), Eve Fairbanks (South Africa) — among the essayists referenced in this conversation. •       Adam Shatz, blurb: “To read this rich, subtle, and moving anthology is to be reminded that it is often foreigners who understand us best.” 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 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is t...

Tomorrow, America will celebrate its birth. But the decisive moment, even the real birth of modern America, argues Alexander Mikaberidze in his new book The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, may not have been 1776 at all. It was 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase. The year Thomas Jefferson bought the future from Napoleon Bonaparte. This was the moment the young American republic doubled its size in a single transaction, absorbed the heart of a continent and set itself on the path to becoming a global superpower. The numbers associated with the Louisiana Purchase are staggering. 828,000 square miles. Thirteen states. Fifteen million dollars — four cents an acre, so the mythology tells us. But Mikaberidze reminds us that the deal Jefferson signed did not actually grant the United States the land. Instead, it merely authorised the republic to negotiate the acquisition of land still owned by Native Americans. So it became the founding event of the US-Indian Treaty System that produced over 200 Native American cessions between 1804 and 1970, and cost the Republic billions of dollars. The Louisiana Purchase was America's grand Faustian bargain. It was a deal that not only enabled America's eventual rise as a 20th century superpower, but also the expansion of slavery, the destruction of Native peoples, and the 19th century imperial reach of the Monroe Doctrine. So forget 1776 and save the fireworks to remember 1803. And celebrate with croissants rather than hot dogs. Without Napoleon Bonaparte's generosity, the United States might be just another regional power like France. Five Takeaways •       The Louisiana Purchase: Arguably the Decisive Moment in American History: Mikaberidze's opening argument: if you had to pick the single most important moment in American history, 1803 has a stronger claim than 1776. Independence established the republic. The Louisiana Purchase made it a continental power. 828,000 square miles. Thirteen states. The heart of the continent. Securing the Mississippi for American commerce. Laying the groundwork for the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, and America's eventual emergence as a global superpower. The revolution created the nation. The purchase created its destiny. •       Four Cents an Acre? The Real Price Was Billions: The famous number: $15 million, or four cents an acre. The less famous fact: the agreement Jefferson signed did not grant the United States the land. It merely authorised the republic to negotiate the acquisition of the land, which was still owned by Native Americans. The Louisiana Purchase was the founding event of the US-Indian Treaty System — which produced over 200 Native American cessions between 1804 and 1970, and cost the United States not $15 million but billions of dollars. What appeared to be the greatest real estate deal in history was actually an authorisation to conduct the most expensive series of land negotiations in history. •       The Grand Faustian Bargain: Slavery, Native Peoples, and the Monroe Doctrine: Andrew's formulation — the Grand Faustian Bargain, the deal with the devil — is one Mikaberidze accepts. The purchase did three things simultaneously: it made America a continental power and a future superpower; it enabled the expansion of slavery into the vast new territory (the Missouri crisis of 1820 was a direct consequence); and it set in motion the dispossession of Native peoples at a scale and speed that would otherwise have been impossible. The Monroe Doctrine — America's declaration that the Western Hemisphere was its sphere of influence — would not have been conceivable without the continental reach the purchase provided. •       Napoleon's Bad Weather: The Contingency That Made America: The counterfactual at the heart of Mikaberidze's book: in October 1802, Napoleon had 4,000 veteran French troops ready to sail for New Orleans. The bad weather delayed them. Then it was too late — war with Britain was coming, and Napoleon decided to sell. If those troops had arrived, Mikaberidze argues, France might have retained effective control of southern Louisiana, cultivated alliances with Native nations (as it historically had), and used those alliances to constrain American expansion inland. Without the Louisiana hinterland, the American republic might have been a prosperous but regionally limited power, strong in New England and the Northeast but denied the continental reach that made it a superpower. •       Croissants in Kansas, Tacos in Oklahoma: The Counterfactual Continents: Andrew's closing question: what would July 4 look like in Kansas and Oklahoma if the purchase hadn't happened? Mikaberidze's answer: French Louisiana, Spanish Texas, and Native-controlled hinterlands are all in play. The people of Kansas might indeed be celebrating with croissants rather than hot dogs. Mikaberidze adds: or tacos. Almost certainly more tacos and moles, given the Spanish and ultimately Mexican influence that would have prevailed across most of the continent. The American empire of liberty, in this alternative timeline, stops somewhere in the middle of what is now Missouri. About the Guest Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of History and the Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University-Shreveport. He is the author of The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America (Oxford University Press, July 3, 2026) and more than two dozen other books, including Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace (Oxford, 2022) and The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Oxford, 2020), both winners of the Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award and the Gilder-Lehrman Military History Prize. He was born in Georgia (the Caucasus) and has lived in Shreveport, Louisiana for twenty-six years. References: •       The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America by Alexander Mikaberidze (Oxford University Press, July 3, 2026). Part of the Pivotal Moments in American History series. •       Craig Fuhrman, The Vast Enterprise — referenced by Mikaberidze as a new reassessment of Lewis and Clark's expedition. •       Jedediah Morse (1789) — the geographer who wrote of “American Empire” with a western boundary at the Pacific, referenced in the Monroe Doctrine 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 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolif...

“There's a kind of exhaustion and resentment — maybe sometimes feeling a little foolish about still feeling attached to some idea of this country that seems like it's maybe not holding that strong or that healthy anymore.” — Christopher Hooks Happy fucking birthday, America. No, not my tasteless language. These words adorn the cover of the July 2026 issue of the 175-year-old Harper's, America's oldest monthly publication. From one alter kocker to another. It's no fun getting old. The Harper's piece, written by the Texas-based journalist Christopher Hooks, is a funereal essay about his travels around an exhausted America. It began as a reported account of America250 — the bipartisan commission set up in 2015–2016, at the end of the Obama era, to organise the semiquincentennial celebrations. Bipartisan? Internal bureaucratic dysfunction. Disagreements about purpose. Trumpian lawsuits. NDAs. Blah, blah, blah. Hooks found it demoralising. The landscape of Washington DC, he writes mournfully, is didactic and insistent. Some alter kocker is always trying to teach you something. But some people do, indeed, have something to teach us. Hooks' piece ends with Thaddeus Stevens — the club-footed, cranky, ugly radical Republican congressman who was born a few years after the Constitution was ratified. Stevens spent most of his long life believing in perfect racial and ethnic equality, helped frame the 14th Amendment as a second founding father, and died deeply disappointed. And, of course, that disappointment would only be compounded if he could see what Christopher Hooks saw in his recent trip around the contemporary United States. Dear America — happy fucking birthday. Love, uncle Thaddeus. Five Takeaways •       Happy Fucking Birthday: The Title, the Feeling, and the Cover of Harper's: Hooks' editor at Harper's came up with the title. Hooks is glad they did. It matches the feeling: exhaustion, resentment, and a kind of embarrassment at still feeling attached to an idea of America that seems like it's not holding together. His father — a Republican for most of his life until 2016 — wakes up every morning and has to deal with the fact that America is maybe not the thing he thought it was. He feels humiliated. His son does too. Nobody likes to be fooled. And part of the unique indignity of the Trump era is the delight Trump and his people take in rubbing the noses of liberals in the abuse of American symbols. •       The America250 Commission: Dysfunction, Lawsuits, and a Startup Fund: America250 was a bipartisan commission set up at the end of the Obama era to organise the semiquincentennial celebrations. By the time Hooks arrived at their press briefing, they had survived internal dysfunction, disagreements about purpose, lawsuits, and NDAs. Trump's people had been brought in; fighting followed. Their proudest achievement: a venture capital seed fund to help American college students start companies, as a way of repairing the lack of patriotism polling says younger Americans feel. It felt to Hooks like it came from a past political moment — discredited and distant. He came out of the briefing dispirited. •       The History of Semiquincentennials: 1876 Had Juice, 1976 Had Amnesia: Milestone commemorations have usually been emotionally complicated. 1926 was a disaster. 1976 — at the end of Vietnam and after Watergate — surprised many by producing an unexpected wave of patriotic sentiment that washed away, at least for a day, the gnawing doubts. That amnesia helped make possible both Jimmy Carter and the Reagan revolution. But the moment of maximum danger had passed by then. The one commemoration that had genuine juice, in Hooks' view, was 1876 — the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, a world's fair that was a genuine moment of national energy. The 250th is not that. •       Thaddeus Stevens: The Honest Version of America's Story: Hooks ends his piece with Thaddeus Stevens — the radical Republican congressman, club-footed, cranky, and widely described as ugly by his contemporaries. Born a few years after the Constitution was ratified. Believed in perfect racial and ethnic equality when almost no one else did. Helped frame the 14th Amendment as a second founding father of American democracy. Died deeply disappointed. His story, Hooks suggests, is the most honest version of how to be attached to America: feeling profound anger about the country as it is, working for something better, not living to see it, and laying the groundwork for what comes after. •       Not Going to a Sanctioned Celebration Zone: Hooks will spend July 4 in New York, having a few beers with friends. Probably not going to a sanctioned celebration zone. Not setting off fireworks. His father will be in Texas, doing roughly the same. Both men share what Hooks calls a feeling of humiliation — a sense that they were fooled about what America was, and that the process of reckoning with that is long and ongoing. The Gilded Age was also pretty bleak, Hooks notes, and in time it was replaced by the progressive era and the New Deal. American history swings in big pendulum arcs. He wants to have hope. Some days it's easier than others. About the Guest Christopher Hooks is a journalist who writes about Texas politics for Texas Monthly and national politics for Harper's Magazine, The New Republic, and others. He divides his time between Austin, Texas and Brooklyn, New York. His piece “Happy Fucking Birthday: An Exhausted America Turns Two Hundred and Fifty,” is the cover story of the July 2026 issue of Harper's Magazine. References: •       “Happy Fucking Birthday: An Exhausted America Turns Two Hundred and Fifty” by Christopher Hooks, Harper's Magazine, July 2026. •       Ben Fountain, Rasputin Swims the Potomac — referenced at the opening; recent KOA guest. •       Peter Wehner, “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump,” The Atlantic, June 14, 2026 — referenced; recent KOA guest. •       Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) — radical Republican congressman, abolitionist, framer of the 14th Amendment. •       America250 — the federal commission organising the US semiquincentennial celebrations. 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 ...

“The second law of thermodynamics is not to be negotiated with.” — Thomas S. Mullaney The second law of thermodynamics is non-negotiable. The universe will end. Every human being dies. Everything decays and every record disintegrates. So why record history? Why bother remembering? These are the questions that the Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney addresses in his intriguing new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information. How We Disappear is triggered by grief. Mullaney's father — a man he never fully understood, an exile in an estranged household — died unexpectedly in 2017. Sitting in his father's office surrounded by the “paperwork of death,” Mullaney's training as a historian crystallised into an all-too-personal project of disappearance. It's a book about what Mullaney calls “intransitive disappearance” — not the spectacular, cataclysmic kind of traditional historiography (wars, book burnings, genocide) but the everyday, uneventful ways things fall apart. Like Thomas Mullaney's dad. Existence as obsolescence, erosion, sinescence and the slow drift of the unremarkable into nothing. History, in Mullaney's account, is a Sisyphean fight against this nothingness. We tell stories to survive and maintain the polite appearance of coherence. If you actually tried to reconstruct experience — the thing-in-itself — you would need an infinite library of trillion-page books. Existence, for Mullaney, is a swirl of stimuli and daydream. History tries to domesticate this Borgesian swirl. So does consciousness itself. That's why, as Mullaney memorably puts it, “historians do the dirty work of necromancers.” Which is to say they try to negotiate with the second law of thermodynamics. Five Takeaways •       Intransitive Disappearance: The Everyday Way Things Fall Apart: Mullaney's central concept: intransitive disappearance. Not the spectacular, cataclysmic kind — book burnings, genocide, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria — but the everyday, drifty, uneventful ways things disintegrate. Obsolescence. Erosion. Sinescence. The unremarkable drift of the unremarkable into nothing. He became obsessed with these forms of disappearance — a pack rat across every discipline he could think of — for twenty-five years. His father's unexpected death in 2017, sitting in his father's office amid the paperwork of death, crystallised what had been inchoate into a book. •       History as Domesticated Experience: The Trillion-Page Book: If you tried to actually reconstruct experience — the actual thing, unfiltered — you would need a trillion-page book that would make Naked Lunch look like a kindergarten primer. You'd have to say how many hairs were on his head; whether he favoured his left foot over his right; the scent of his aftershave. Experience, unfiltered, is an n-dimensional vortex of stimuli and daydream. Anytime you read a work of history, you are reading experience that has been domesticated into narrative — with turning points, main characters, thematic arguments. Historians know this. Every practising historian knows that the ideal of reconstructing human experience can never be reached. •       The Vocal Defence of History: Why Do It If You Know It's Impossible? Mullaney's answer to the subversive question: history is just the professional counterpart of what every human being does every second of their existence. You, right now, telling yourself the story of your experience, are already well into postproduction. Your experience of being a person in a chair talking to another person on a couch — that is already domesticated. Human beings need to tell stories to live, to maintain continuity, to maintain coherence. Historians do the same thing under certain rules and protocols. The futility of history is the futility of consciousness itself. Neither is a reason not to try. •       The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is Not to Be Negotiated With: The universe will end. Every human being dies. Everything we create decays. Every record disintegrates. Mullaney is unsparing about this. He is also, in his strange way, cheerful about it: we don't need to last forever to have meant something. The meaning is not in the permanence. It is in the making. He would like the Silicon Valley immortality seekers — Kurzweil, the others, all those negotiating with thermodynamics from Palo Alto — to read the book, to face the facts, and then to find the alternative: rejoining physical reality and finding very deep meaning in that. •       AI Bots of Deceased Parents: Stop: Andrew raises the obvious question: what would Mullaney say to the people in Palo Alto building AI bots of your deceased mother and father, so they can exist forever for your children and grandchildren? Mullaney's answer is one word: stop. Human beings do not have the wetware — the biological critical apparatus — to maintain distance from a deep fake of their deceased parent. It short-circuits us. It bypasses our limitations. He cannot fathom, outside of very specific, closely monitored therapeutic settings, an argument in which this is a good idea. Paul Postman's phrase: we are amusing ourselves to death. And there is very little critical reflection coming out of the neighbourhoods where this stuff is being made. About the Guest Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the former Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress. He is the author of How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W. W. Norton, June 23, 2026) and four previous books on Chinese history and technology, including The Chinese Typewriter: A History (winner of multiple awards). He lives in Palo Alto, California. References: •       How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information by Thomas S. Mullaney (W. W. Norton, June 23, 2026). •       Jorge Luis Borges — referenced; the infinite library, the map that equals the terrain. •       Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death — referenced in the closing discussion on AI and human limitations. •       Kara Swisher — referenced for her CNN series on Silicon Valley immortality seekers. •       Ray Kurzweil — referenced as an exemplar of tech-utopian immortality thinking. 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 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. 

“If I perish, I perish.” — the chant Katie Gaddini heard from Esther's Army at the National Mall, weeks before the 2024 election Back in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, Margaret Atwood came on the show to talk about The Handmaid's Tale — her warning of how trad wives, to borrow a contemporary phrase, could be exploited by an evangelical patriarchy. Five years later, the Stanford fellow Katie Gaddini offers a strikingly different vision. Her new book, Esther's Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right (out today), is the product of nine years of research and over 100 interviews with conservative Christian women across 28 states. These women, this army of Esthers, are not handmaidens, Gaddini concludes. “They are very much in charge. They are politically engaged. They, in many cases, hold political positions of power.” Gaddini grew up as an evangelical — her father a pastor, with four more pastors in her extended family. She voted for George Bush “naturally,” before discovering she could be a Christian and not a Republican. But she is less a rebel against her upbringing as much as a sociologist with a Cambridge doctorate. She was living in London when Trump won the 2016 nomination and wondered how it was that Christian women were planning to vote for this most imperfect of men? Nine years and 100 interviews later, the answer turns out to be more complicated than the standard liberal media exploitation tale about handmaids. The book's title comes from the women themselves. At a 250,000-person rally on the National Mall weeks before the 2024 election, Gaddini saw women wearing gold-plated Esther necklaces, chanting “If I perish, I perish” from the Book of Esther. Gaddini interprets this as a striking theological shift — away from the forgiveness of the New Testament toward the Manichaean Old Testament narrative of violence, destruction, and an imperfect male figure designed by God to redeem the rest of us. Donald Trump, in this telling, is King David. Or Jehu. Margaret Atwood better watch out. This Army of Esthers are warriors, not handmaidens, and they are preparing for an apocalyptical war. If you perish, you perish. Another Old Testament-style pandemic. Five Takeaways •       Not Handmaids: Trad Wives Are a Tiny, Overhyped Fringe: Gaddini went into nine years of research expecting to find Atwood-style oppression. Instead: only one of her hundred-plus interviewees follows a trad wife on social media. Trad wives are overpopulated in media attention but represent a much smaller political force than coverage suggests. The women Gaddini actually studied span homeschool moms involved in local politics to Heritage Foundation lawyers to women working at the top echelons of power in Washington DC. They are diehard MAGA supporters and politically engaged — the opposite of passive. •       The Hidden History: Women Built the Conservative Movement Since the 1970s: Gaddini's archival research into the Reagan administration found women — never household names — who drafted legislation that still shapes policy today, including the squashing of federal child care. Phyllis Schlafly was not an aberration but part of coordinated networks of women who strategised together at national conventions, even as Schlafly took the spotlight while others worked behind the scenes. Books about the Christian right's formation in the 1980s have largely written women out of the story. Gaddini is writing them back in. •       Conservative Feminism: A More Complicated Relationship Than Expected: Gaddini expected uniform hostility to feminism, the classic Schlafly-era position. Instead she found a more nuanced split: some women reject feminism as toxic; others embrace a self-styled “conservative feminism,” remapping their politics onto a new understanding of women's empowerment. They reframe issues the left claims as women's issues — reproductive rights, birth control — as harmful to women, and argue that capitalism itself benefits women by letting families thrive on a single strong salary. A repackaging of feminist language for a conservative, highly gendered worldview. •       If I Perish, I Perish: The Old Testament Shift and the Esther Necklaces: At a 250,000-person rally on the National Mall weeks before the 2024 election, Gaddini saw international attendees — women from South Korea, Brazil, nuns from Nantucket — wearing gold Esther necklaces and chanting the book of Esther's key line. The theological shift she's tracking: away from the New Testament and Jesus, toward Old Testament violence, destruction, and imperfect male figures redeemed for God's purposes — the allegories comparing Trump to King David or Jehu. These women see themselves as warriors, not handmaidens. There is, in their minds, an absolute war going on. •       The Fracture Lines: Iran, MAHA, and the Jesus Selfie: Gaddini's research captures real fault lines opening in 2026: the Iran strikes alienated Trump voters who wanted America out of foreign wars; MAHA women — anti-vax homeschool moms alongside liberal Bay Area “crunchy” mothers, an unlikely ideological alliance forged through RFK Jr.'s endorsement — are furious about pesticide regulation rollbacks; and Trump's social media image styled as Jesus (he said it was meant to be a doctor) did not land well even with his base. Nobody Gaddini interviewed thinks Trump is a good Christian. They believe his policies align with their vision of America. That, for them, is what matters. About the Guest Katie Gaddini is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, Associate Professor of Sociology at the Social Research Institute, University College London, and a UKRI Research Fellow at Stanford and UCL (2022–2026). She is the author of Esther's Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right (W.W. Norton, June 30, 2026) and The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women Are Leaving the Church. Her writing has appeared in TIME, The Huffington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Hill. She hosts the Podium and the Pulpit podcast and Substack. References: •       Esther's Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right by Katie Gaddini (W.W. Norton, June 30, 2026). •       Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale — referenced at the opening; Atwood previously appeared on KOA. •       Phyllis Schlafly — the 1970s conservative organiser; previously covered on KOA. •       Delano Squires, The Vanishing Black Family — referenced; Heritage Foundation fellow, recent KOA guest. •       Arlie Russell Hochschild, Stolen Pride — referenced as a sociological influence and fellow Bay Area scholar; ...

“My brothers always think: what would Jesus do? And they do that. I think: what would dad do? And I do the opposite.” — Jamison Firestone What do you do if your dad was a multimillionaire conman, crack addict, and owner of New York's most expensive brothel? If you're Jamison Firestone, you transform yourself into his antithesis. You go to law school. You go to post-Soviet Russia and establish the country's first independent foreign law firm. You employ Sergei Magnitsky and befriend Alexei Navalny. You transform yourself into one of Vladimir Putin's most vocal foreign critics. It's quite a story. His memoir, Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin's Russia (HarperCollins, June 4, 2026), is both a Russian and American confession. As an old friend of the show, Peter Pomerantsev, says: “This book is NUTS! — in the best possible way.” Yes, Rule of Lies is nuts. But it's also the best kind of contemporary history. Firestone arrived in Russia in 1991, at the very moment the KGB hardliners rolled tanks into the streets and kidnapped Gorbachev. He watched, within days, as the Russian people confronted the tanks. He saw Yeltsin emerge as the hero, the Soviet Union dissolve, and the promise of a free-market democracy consumed by mafia groups, corrupt officials, and the structural lawlessness of the transition. In 1993, Yeltsin shelled his own congress. In 1999, on New Year's Eve, he got on television, wished everyone a happy new year, and resigned — handing the country to Vladimir Putin in exchange for a pardon. That, says Firestone, is how we got to Putinism's kleptocratic rule of lies. Firestone's Russian memoir is also the Magnitsky story. He employed an accountant called Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered the largest tax theft in Russian history, was arrested on fabricated charges, and died in pre-trial detention — probably murdered by the same corrupt officials he had exposed. The Magnitsky Act, the Magnitsky sanctions, the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign — all of it connects back to Jamison Firestone. And, in a way, back to his dad, Richard, the New York City crook who schooled his rebellious son in the value of obeying the law and telling the truth. Five Takeaways •       The Criminal Father Who Taught Him Everything He Needed for Russia: Firestone's father was a brilliant, charming man who turned out, when Firestone was 15, to be a multimillionaire fraudster defrauding investors and the IRS. Indicted, his father went a little crazy: became a crack addict, bought New York's most expensive brothel, started hanging out with loan sharks and contract killers. Firestone spent his late high school years learning to talk to contract killers — respectfully, to make them laugh, to say no and not get killed. That skill, he says, turned out to be exactly what he needed in Russia in the 1990s, when everyone was mafia. His father taught him crime doesn't pay. He believed it. •       Arriving in Russia at the Moment of the Coup: Firestone arrived in Russia in 1991, at the very end of the Gorbachev era, during the opening of the Soviet Union. Within days, KGB hardliners rolled tanks into the streets, kidnapped Gorbachev, and declared the reforms over. Then — the extraordinary thing — the Russian people stood up. The tanks backed down. Gorbachev was released. But the hero of the day was Yeltsin, not Gorbachev. The Soviet Union dissolved within months. What followed was a chaotic, disorderly transition in which democracy got lost: everyone, including Firestone and the US government, was so concentrated on the business opportunities that no one noticed the democratic backsliding until it was too late. •       Yeltsin Shelling His Congress, and Putin's New Year's Eve Deal: Two moments stand out in Firestone's account of Russia's democratic failure. First: in 1993, Yeltsin resolved a standoff with his own congress by shelling it — the equivalent, Firestone says, now that January 6 has happened, of not unimaginable. Everyone — the US government, Firestone himself — saw it as a triumph for the free market. They didn't recognise how undemocratic it was. Second: on New Year's Eve 1999, Yeltsin got on national television, wished everyone a happy new year, and resigned — handing the country to Vladimir Putin in exchange for a pardon. “That's how we got Putin,” Firestone says. For a pardon. •       Sergei Magnitsky: The Tax Fraud, the Murder, and the Act: Firestone employed Sergei Magnitsky as a tax adviser and auditor. Magnitsky uncovered what was then the largest tax theft in Russian history — committed by the same government officials who had raided and seized a Browder-connected fund. Magnitsky reported it to the authorities. He was arrested on fabricated charges, denied medical treatment in pre-trial detention, and died — murdered, in Firestone's view, by the officials he had exposed. The Magnitsky Act, which sanctions human rights abusers, grew from that death. The Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, which Firestone co-founded with Bill Browder, has extended it worldwide. •       Russia's Precarity and Why Ukraine Must Not Fall: Firestone's current work is dedicated to seizing Russian state assets for the benefit of Ukraine. His strategic assessment: Russia has burnt through its $600 billion reserve fund under sanctions — it took four years, but it's done. Russia now owes hundreds of billions of dollars. Putin cannot force a mass mobilisation without becoming deeply unpopular, and even the huge financial incentives he's offering for enlistment are no longer working. The regime is precarious. But Firestone's long-term hopes for Russia do not change his short-term argument: if Russia is not stopped in Ukraine, the West will be fighting it when it takes a chunk of Europe that used to be part of the Soviet Union. About the Guest Jamison Firestone established Russia's first independent foreign law firm, where he worked for eighteen years. He is the author of Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin's Russia (HarperCollins, June 4, 2026). He is co-founder (with Sir William Browder) of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, which created the Magnitsky human rights and anti-corruption sanctions regimes. He also ran the Navalny 35 campaign promoting the sanctioning of corrupt oligarchs and officials identified by Alexei Navalny. He currently works on seizing Russian state assets for the benefit of Ukraine. He lives in London. References: •       Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin...

“His descent is in a sense our descent.” — Peter Wehner on Trump at 80 Donald Trump turned 80 two weeks ago. But Peter Wehner's timely Atlantic piece, “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump,” isn't much of a birthday present. Wehner even suggests that for all Trump's madness, mayhem and malevolence, the orange octogenarian eludes Shakespearean tragedy. So no historic hall of infamy for Donald. He's too sad for that. Trump is a man, Wehner says, of borderless corruption — malicious, totally corrupt, without any visible redeeming qualities. But he isn't King Lear. Trump lacks Lear's complexity, Wehner says. Lear was a figure with whom you could have some empathy. Trump is not. He is, as Wehner notes, “a flatter figure in that sense” — but that doesn't make him any less dangerous. For the DC-based Wehner, what makes Trump more dangerous, as an octogenarian, is his decomposition. The signs are everywhere: the disinhibition intensifying, the impulsivity more easily triggered, the volatility producing a foreign policy that no ally can track or trust. His descent, Wehner warns, might be our descent. Peak Trump. The apotheosis of a pathetically malevolent madman. Just in time for the semiquincentennial, which Wehner will “celebrate” at Monticello. Five Takeaways •       Trump at 80: The Apotheosis and the Decomposition: Wehner's Atlantic piece, written to mark Trump's 80th birthday, argues that what we are seeing is not just the decline of an old man but a visible decomposition in his mental and physical capacities that is making him more, not less, dangerous. The disinhibition is more intense. The impulsivity is more easily triggered. The volatility is producing a foreign policy that no ally can track or trust. Trump 2.0 is more dangerous than Trump 1.0 — and Trump 1.0 was not a walk in the park. The question is not whether this ends well. The question is how badly it ends. •       Not King Lear: A Man of Borderless Corruption: Wehner uses a King Lear allusion in his Atlantic essay but hesitates to lean on it. Lear was a complicated figure — someone you could have empathy with, who saw things at the end he hadn't seen earlier. Trump is not like that. He is, as best Wehner can tell, a man of borderless corruption, malicious from head to toe, with no visible redeeming qualities — a flatter figure in the Shakespearean sense. That flatness makes the Lear parallel partial. But it does not diminish the danger. His descent is in a sense our descent. •       European Mystification: When It Happens Twice, That Breaks Trust: Andrew has just returned from Europe, where every prominent journalist and historian he met was mystified by Trump. Wehner agrees: Trump is sui generis, unlike any leader the post-war world has produced. What he says is particularly disturbing is the second election. If it had happened once, Europe could have told itself it was a parenthesis. When it happens twice, that breaks trust. Even if the next president is sane and rational, there is no guarantee the following one will be. That uncertainty, Wehner says, is a real inflection point in the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. •       The Crack-Up of MAGA World: The cult-like grip Trump had on the Republican Party and the MAGA base is no longer there. His approval among Republicans has dropped from the nineties to the seventies — still high, but significant. And the fissures in MAGA world are, in Wehner's word, extraordinary: Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly and Candace Owens have broken from the movement or turned on its leadership. Marjorie Taylor Greene too. The crack-up has begun. Whether it is fast enough or decisive enough to matter remains to be seen. But the movement that once seemed invincible is showing its first serious cracks. •       Monticello for the 250th: Welcoming New Immigrants: Wehner and his wife are considering spending July 4 at Monticello — Thomas Jefferson's house in Charlottesville, Virginia — where a friend has invited them to an event welcoming new American citizens and immigrants. It is, he says, going to be a birthday that is not untainted by sadness even as there will also be hope of what can still happen. Six days from the 250th, Andrew asks what Jefferson would think of Trump. Wehner: probably not terribly favourable. Probably true of most of the founders. About the Guest Peter Wehner is a Contributing Editor at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He served as a senior policy adviser in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. His Atlantic piece “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump” was published June 14, 2026. References: •       Peter Wehner, “The Apotheosis of Donald Trump,” The Atlantic, June 14, 2026 — the piece that occasions this conversation. •       Episode 2945: Samuel Moyn on Gerontocracy in America — referenced at the opening. •       Monticello, Charlottesville, Virginia — Thomas Jefferson's home; venue for the July 4 immigrant-welcoming event Wehner mentions. 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 3,000 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: Trump at 80 and the apotheosis (02:07) - Visible decomposition: more dangerous than Trump 1.0 (02:54) - Something to celebrate or be concerned about? (03:21) - The disinhibition intensifies; impulsivity more easily triggered (04:18) - Is there a Shakespearean arc? (04:54) - King Lear allusion: hesitation; Trump is a flatter figure (05:30) - Man of borderless corruption; his descent is our descent (06:40) - European mystification: just back from Poland (07:18) - Trump is sui generis (08:10) - When it happens twice, that breaks trust (10:22) - Not everyone elected Trump: the Republican question (11:16) - The crack-up of MAGA world (12:19) - Marjorie Taylor Gre...

“The frontier AI companies invited the government into the room. Now the government is beginning to behave as if it owns the door, the guest list, the schedule, and the product roadmap.” — Keith Teare Last week, I was away in Europe. So Keith Teare ran our That Was The Week show solo — with a chillingly authentic Andrew Keen bot. So realistic, in fact, that the fake version sounds (to me, at least) more interesting than the real one. The bad news is that I'm back. The good news is it's been an interesting week in tech. That was the week in which the US Commerce Department told both OpenAI and Anthropic that they now need government approval for whom they can sell their frontier AI models. This is supposedly “voluntary” — for now, at least. Keith's TWTW editorial argues that Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have spent over a year crying wolf about the dangers of their own technology, supposedly deliberately seeking government involvement as a regulatory moat against competitors. And now the government has walked through the door that Sam and Dario left ajar. Now, Keith argues, the US government is behaving as if it owns not just the door and the guest list, but the entire product roadmap. “Payback's a bitch,” Keith bristles in his editorial. The other major news this week is the rumour (via David Sacks) that OpenAI has offered the US government a 50% stake in a sovereign wealth fund. If true, this would change everything — not just in Silicon Valley, but in the political debate about public ownership of our AI economy. It's not just tech insiders like Sacks and Altman who are on board the sovereign wealth fund express, but also Bernie Sanders and other leftist critics of Big Tech. So maybe payback, at least when it comes to public investment in AI, isn't always such a bitch. Five Takeaways •       The Fake Andrew Keen: An Hour of Work on a Local Nvidia Card: Keith ran last week's show solo with an AI-generated Andrew Keen: trained on a few episodes of the show, animated from a YouTube still, scripted from Keith's newsletter. No third-party service. Just a local PC with an Nvidia GPU, about an hour of work, three attempts. Andrew, listening back, second-guessed whether he was actually there. The result was “pretty bad compared to our normal actual live shows,” Keith says. But also: really good. The question hanging over this episode and every future one: which Andrew are you listening to? •       Payback's a Bitch: How AI Companies Created Their Own Regulatory Trap: The US Commerce Department has told OpenAI and Anthropic they need government permission for who gets to use their latest models. Voluntary, for now. Keith's diagnosis: AI leadership spent more than a year crying wolf about existential risk — not because they believed it, but because government regulation creates a moat against competitors. Now the government has taken them at their word. Dario and Sam Altman wanted to be wrapped in government clothing. They are. The government now owns the door. They asked for this. They got it. •       American and Chinese State Capitalism: Converging Models: Andrew raises the macro argument: what we're watching is the convergence of American and Chinese models of capitalism toward a more state-centric model. China has always been explicit about state control. America has prided itself on free enterprise — even when the internet, atomic technology, and now AI were all substantially government-funded or government-shaped. Keith agrees at this level: all governments seek to control things they frame as dangerous. The difference is the framing. The direction of travel is the same. •       OpenAI's Rumoured 50% Stake Offer to the Government: Keith has heard — from sources including David Sacks, who should know — that OpenAI has offered the US government a very large stake, potentially 50%, in a sovereign wealth fund that would then distribute dividends to citizens. Sacks is not only unsurprised but in favour: he thinks 50% is too small. Andrew's question: why would OpenAI give away 50% of the company? Keith's answer: because it's the price of the regulatory moat. The government as partner rather than the government as regulator. A company that once aspired to “open” AI is now offering the state a controlling interest in its future. •       Paul Kennedy and America's Inevitable Decline: Keith has Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers on his shelf. His conclusion from it: it is historically impossible for America to retain its first-place status. No country ever has. Newly capitalised countries produce things more cheaply; China, India, and large parts of Asia are where most future growth will be. Does the AI boom change this? Keith's honest answer: no. It may slow the decline. It will not reverse it. America will, like an older gentleman on a rocking chair outside the house, accept its fate. Europe won't even be in the rocking chair. 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 — the newsletter on which this episode is based. •       Azeem Azhar, The Exponential View — his report quantifying the AI economy at roughly $175 billion, referenced in the closing section. •       Alex Lazarow, 99%Tech — referenced for his piece on the emergence of an AI trust layer, the “Lloyds of AI.” •       Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers — on Keith's shelf; referenced in the America-China decline section. •       David Sacks — referenced as the source for the OpenAI sovereign wealth fund rumour. 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 3,000 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: (00:38) - Introduction: the fake Andrew Keen from last week (01:14) - Keith explains how he did it: local Nvidia card, one hour, three attempts (02:11) - The big story: Commerce Department tells OpenAI and Anthropic they need permission ...

“You cannot expect a society to open its doors if there is no way to close them. You cannot expect a society to open its gates if there is no gate to open.” — Justin Gest It's a counterintuitive and deliberately provocative argument. Rather than bolstering open societies, migration actually benefits authoritarianism. And it's the argument that Justin Gest makes in his new book, Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy. Drawing on data from 149 countries, Gest shows that global migration has been inadvertently strengthening authoritarianism by stealing liberal democrats from the places that need them most. When liberals emigrate from authoritarian countries, Gest argues, they take their democratic values with them. As a consequence, fewer people dare to vote against the autocrat, fewer people protest, fewer people cling to liberal norms. The argument turns the normal discourse about migration on its head. Immigration is usually framed as a question about the countries experiencing migration. But Gest reframes it from the perspective of the countries losing people. So, for example, when Hungary's young liberal professionals move to Berlin or London, Orbán's job got easier. Or when Venezuela's middle class emigrated to Miami, Maduro's grip tightened. And, of course, when people leave America, it benefits Trump. That's the real bite in his polemic. Be patriotic, Justin Gest is telling American liberals. Stay home. Don't go down the democratic drain. Five Takeaways •       The Democratic Drain: Migration Is Strengthening Authoritarianism: Gest's central argument: when people emigrate from authoritarian countries, they are disproportionately people who hold liberal democratic values — people who would vote against the autocrat, protest in the streets, or organise civil society. He calls them “demmigrants.” When they leave, they leave behind a population that is, on average, more sympathetic to authoritarian governance. The result: Orbán's Hungary is easier to govern after Hungary's young liberals move to Berlin; Maduro's Venezuela tightens its grip as the middle class departs for Miami. Across 149 countries, the correlation is striking. •       White Working Class as Protest Voters, Not Authoritarians: Gest, whose earlier book The New Minority anticipated the Trump and Brexit era, pushes back on the characterisation of working-class voters as simply authoritarian. Many are protest voters: they want to see the system shaken, they see populists as the only candidates willing to speak truth about the system's failures, and they are willing to tolerate short-run damage to democratic institutions in the hope of building something better from the ashes. Immigration is the sine qua non of far-right populism: when immigrants are framed as an existential threat, voters make transactional short-run compromises to democratic integrity. They are not irrational. They are strategic. •       The Left Must Embrace Nationalism to Win the Immigration Argument: Gest's most provocative political prescription: the left has ceded nationalism to the right as if there is no nationalist case for immigration, no nationalist case for climate policy, no nationalist case for progressive values. This is, he says, inexcusable. The national interest served by carefully selected immigration is plain: immigrants make countries younger, fill labour shortages, innovate, create jobs. If the left can frame the immigration debate in terms of the national interest rather than moral obligation, the debate changes. He wrote a piece for the Washington Post on this in March 2022. •       Can You Be an Enlightened Anti-Immigrationist? The Internationalist Paradox: Andrew raises a sharp question: if democratic drain is real, then an internationalist who cares about democracy globally might logically oppose emigration from authoritarian countries, since it strengthens those authoritarian governments. Gest's response: possible, but foolish. You don't stop the drain by damming the river. You stop it by growing the democratic movement — by demonstrating the vitality and virtues of democracy and the perils of authoritarianism — so that there are more democrats to spare even after emigration. •       Three Fault Lines for the 21st Century: Gest maps three overlapping fault lines that will define the 21st century's politics. First: democrats vs authoritarians (the Wieliński argument, which Gest confirms and extends). Second: winners vs losers of globalisation (which often determines the first). Third — and Gest's own addition: those who understand their nation in civic terms vs those who understand it in ethno-religious terms. The civic imagination: a country grounded in ideas, institutions, interdependency, and a devotion to co-evolution together. The ethno-religious imagination: a country derived from static, unchanging ancestral roots. Whichever fault line you look at, he says, you end up at the same place. About the Guest Justin Gest is Professor and Director of the Public Policy Program at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government. He is the author of Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge University Press, May 2026), Majority Minority: Racialized Divisions in the New American Order (2022), The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (2016), and four other books. A founding editor of the Oxford University Press series “Oxford Studies in Migration and Citizenship,” he has published commentary in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. References: •       Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy by Justin Gest (Cambridge University Press, May 2026). •       Justin Gest, “How the Left Can Embrace Nationalism While Maintaining Its Values,” Washington Post, March 2022 — referenced in the conversation. •       Episode 2951: Bartosz Wieliński on “We No Longer Dream of the United States” — referenced at the opening. •       Central European University, Budapest — where Gest is teaching this week. 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 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America...

“Narrative remains a pretty unbeatable delivery device for information.” — Patrick Radden Keefe Has London really fallen? That's the question Patrick Radden Keefe — staff writer at The New Yorker and bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing — addressed in his new book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. One thing for sure is that Keefe himself hasn't fallen. He's been surprised by the book's success. “I thought the antibodies would get up because I'm an interloper,” the American confesses about writing about Britain. Antibodies or not, the book has been a #1 bestseller in both the UK and US. And we can look forward to an A24 and Brightstar TV adaptation soon. On London, the story is murkier. London Falling begins on November 29, 2019, when nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler falls to his death from a luxury apartment above the Thames. Every parent's ultimate nightmare. As it happens, I've known Zac's dad, Matthew, for many years. But what appeared to be a tragic accident or a suicide turned out to be something far more sinister — a story of double lives, dirty money, a dishonest businessman named Akbar Shamji, and a terrifyingly violent gangster known as Indian Dave. Lurking behind the Brettler death is what Keefe presents as the greatest deceit of all — London's cruel descent into what he sees as the moneyed miasma of post-Thatcherite neo-liberalism. London is, in Keefe's compelling narrative, the most invisible of cities — where power lies with criminals like Indian Dave, where the police are at best bystanders, and where a teenage fantasist from a comfortable middle-class family can become fatally entangled in a fallen world he barely understood. Five Takeaways •       Zac Brettler: The Double Life That Led to His Death: Zac Brettler was nineteen years old. He fell — or was pushed, or was forced to jump — from a luxury apartment balcony above the Thames on November 29, 2019. He had been living a double life: to London's criminal underworld, he was Zac Ismailov, the son of a Russian oligarch, heir to a great fortune. He had even fabricated bank statements showing a personal account holding $1 million. Under this guise, he became entangled with Akbar Shamji, a slippery businessman, and a man known as Indian Dave, a violent extortionist. Keefe's reporting suggests Zac jumped to escape from one of these men. Scotland Yard's passivity in investigating the case is, in Keefe's word, bizarre. •       London as a Twenty-Four-Hour Laundromat for Dirty Money: Keefe's portrait of London is the book's macro argument: a global city that has been hollowed out by decades of financial deregulation, whose financial sector is stacked with professional facilitators eager to help protect or conceal a dubious fortune, where posh mansions and private nightclubs serve as the visible surface of a hidden economy of criminal money. Zac Brettler was not rich. He was a boy from a comfortably off family who became fixated on the glitzy, mercenary, aspirational culture embodied by foreign billionaires who had bought mansions and football clubs in his city. London, in Keefe's telling, did this to him. •       The Brettlers' Consent: A Long Haul With the Family: Keefe had written 15,000 words for The New Yorker when he knew there was a book. He went to Matthew and Rochelle Brettler and their surviving son Joe and told them: I will only do this with your blessing. They read the finished piece, talked amongst themselves, and came back with a yes. Keefe's method: he is an open book; he invites sources to read his previous work. It took him an LSE graduate who became one of the most trusted journalists in the world to persuade a devastated family to trust him with their son's story. They made the right decision. •       Narrative as Delivery Device: Keefe's Method: Keefe on why he writes the way he writes: everyone has a phone in their pocket making claims on their attention. Narrative — true stories about real people, told with enough seductive propulsive energy — remains the most powerful way to convey information, to make someone who would not otherwise read nonfiction want to keep turning pages. He is looking, always, for inherently dramatic stories. London Falling is that: a whodunit, a parental love story, a portrait of a corrupted city, and a thriller, all in one book. The New York Times described the whole book as one of the best of 2026 so far. •       The Television Adaptation: A24, Brightstar, and the Lessons of Say Nothing: A24 and Brightstar are producing the television adaptation of London Falling. Five production companies had to audition for the Brettlers over Zoom. The family is involved. Keefe knows from Say Nothing — which took five years from book to screen and won awards as an FX series — that this cannot go on autopilot. The aim: something sophisticated, sensitive, and just to the family's story. The first word on the Mill Hill School website is “integrity.” Whether that word will survive contact with a television adaptation remains to be seen. About the Guest Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth (Doubleday, April 7, 2026; #1 New York Times bestseller), Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize), Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (National Book Critics Circle Award; named one of the twenty best books of the 21st century by the New York Times), Rogues, and Chatter. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award, and the Orwell Prize. He served as executive producer on the award-winning FX series Say Nothing and is the creator and host of the podcast Wind of Change. References: •       London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe (Doubleday, April 7, 2026). •       Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe — referenced at the opening. •       Say Nothing (FX series, executive produced by Keefe) — referenced in the closing section. •       Andrew O'Hagan, Caledonian Road — referenced as covering similar London territory in fiction. •       A24 and Brightstar — the production companies making the London Falling television adaptatio...

“The United States and America are not the same thing. The United States is a government, an administration. America is an idea — and that idea is still there, even when the government is not.” — Konstanty Gebert What is the best thing about America? At least when viewed from Warsaw. For Konstanty Gebert — Polish-Jewish journalist, Solidarity activist, co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza, and one of his country's most celebrated public intellectuals — the answer is the interlibrary loan system. The ability to order any book from any library in the United States and have it delivered to your local branch within days, for free. To Gebert, it represents something irreducibly American: access to knowledge as a public good. What the internet once was. What America once represented to freedom-loving Poles like Gebert. And the worst? Yalta. Gebert's narrative is damning. In February 1945, FDR and Churchill caved into Stalin's demands and agreed to Soviet colonisation of Eastern Europe in exchange for Russia's entry into the Pacific War. Poland was once again bartered by the great powers. “We were sold,” Gebert describes a perfidy that resulted in a forty-year Soviet occupation of Poland. Between the interlibrary loan and Yalta lies a more complex Polish-American history: Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points enabling an independent Poland; Herbert Hoover feeding a starving Europe after WW1; Reagan's support for Solidarity. Now, however, Konstanty Gebert warns, Trump's America isn't just failing Poland, but all of Europe in its disdain for freedom, especially in Ukraine. That's the view from Warsaw. And it's closer to Yalta than the interlibrary loan system. Five Takeaways •       The Interlibrary Loan System: The Peak of American Civilisation: Gebert's opening answer to Andrew's question about what the United States means to him: the interlibrary loan system. The ability to order any book from any library in the country and have it delivered to your local branch within days, for free. It represents something specific about the American idea: that access to knowledge is a public good, that no individual library can hold everything, and that the solution is to share rather than compete. It is, he says, the most civilised thing any country has ever done. He is not entirely joking. •       The United States and America Are Not the Same Thing: Gebert's structural distinction: the United States is a government, a foreign policy, a set of institutions that can be well or badly run. America is an idea — a myth of liberty, opportunity, and democratic self-governance — that has shaped the world's imagination since 1776. When the United States fails, as it has under Trump, that is serious and damaging. But it does not destroy America. The idea persists independently of what any administration does to it. Poland's relationship is with America, not just the United States. That is what survived Yalta. That is what survived Trump's first term. He is less sure it will survive the second. •       Wilson Square, Hoover, and Yalta: America's Polish History: The arc of American-Polish relations is extraordinary. Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points gave Poland its independence after 123 years of partition — which is why Wilson Square in Warsaw exists. Herbert Hoover fed Europe after the First World War — a gesture of generosity that Poles still remember. But at Yalta in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt traded Eastern Europe to Stalin in exchange for Soviet entry into the Pacific War — or so the Polish reading goes. “We were sold,” Gebert says flatly. Reagan's support for Solidarity rehabilitated the American image. Trump's presidency has damaged it again. The cycle is long but the memory is longer. •       Solidarity and America: Personal History: Gebert was a Solidarity activist and underground journalist — writing under the pseudonym Dawid Warszawski — during the 1980s. The movement was sustained, in part, by American moral and material support: the Reagan administration, the CIA, Western unions, the Catholic Church in America. For Gebert's generation, America meant: someone in the world cares about us. Someone knows what is happening in Warsaw. We are not alone. That is the emotional core of the Poland-America relationship. Trump's abandonment of Ukraine — not just Ukraine but the principle that democracies defend each other — tears at that core. •       Gaza, Genocide, and the Precision of Language: The conversation's most unexpected and bravest section. Gebert — as a prominent Polish Jew, Solidarity activist, and scholar of comparative genocide — refuses the word “genocide” for Gaza, and explains why. The legal and historical definition, established at Srebrenica and Nuremberg, requires evidence of systematic intent to destroy a people as such. What is happening in Gaza is, he says, horrifying, criminal, and a moral catastrophe for Israel. But the precision of the word “genocide” is what gives it its power to prevent future atrocities. Diluting it into a synonym for mass killing weakens the concept at the moment we most need it. The Nazis' General Plan Ost would have turned to Slavs next. That is the context in which the word was forged. About the Guest Konstanty Gebert (also known as Dawid Warszawski) is a journalist, author, and Jewish activist, and one of Poland's most celebrated public intellectuals. He was a democratic opposition activist in the 1970s, an underground journalist during martial law in the 1980s, a co-founder of Gazeta Wyborcza in 1989, a war correspondent in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and co-founder of Midrasz, Poland's leading Jewish intellectual monthly. He is an Associate Fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations and has taught at Hebrew University, UC Berkeley, and Grinnell College. He is the author of more than a dozen books in Polish, covering Poland's Round Table negotiations of 1989, the Yugoslav wars, Israeli history, comparative genocide, and commentaries on the Torah. References: •       Wilson Square, Warsaw — named for President Woodrow Wilson, whose 14 Points included Polish independence; renamed Paris Commune Square under communism, restored in 1989. •       Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points (1918) — Point 13 called for an independent Poland with access to the sea. •       Herbert Hoover's post-WWI European relief programme — referenced as an act of American generosity Poles still remember. •       The Yalta Conference (1945) — where Roosevelt and Churchill agreed to Soviet influence over Eastern Europe, which Poles describe as a betrayal. •       Srebrenica — referenced as the legal touchstone for the definition of genocide in international law. •       Andrew Keen's forthcoming book: Where Have You Gone, Bobby Kennedy? My Search for a Lost America — the conversation is part of Andrew's European research trip for the book. About Keen On America Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer a...

“People in my generation worshipped the United States during communism. Everybody wanted to flee to the US. It was the land of the dream. And now we confront a different type of country, different type of politics — and we don't dream of the US anymore.” — Bartosz Wieliński I'm just back from Warsaw where I spent an afternoon at the offices of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's liberal newspaper of record. I talked with Bartosz Wieliński, the newspaper's Deputy Editor and one of the country's most respected journalists. The message from Warsaw is dire — at least for America. Wieliński told me that his generation grew up worshipping the United States. But they no longer do. The Americans, he says, have lost not only their credibility and their values, but their minds. Invoking Timothy Snyder, Wieliński describes this as the “suicide of a superpower.” Trump didn't have to start a trade war. He didn't have to bomb Iran without strategic objectives. He didn't have to destroy US aid programmes that were the most cost-effective democracy-promotion tool in the world. He didn't have to cripple NATO or sacrifice Ukraine. He chose to do all of it. Wake up, America! That's Bartosz Wieliński's stark message from Warsaw. Don't lose Europe. Trump will be gone sooner or later. Make sure he hasn't burned every bridge with Europe before he exits. Five Takeaways •       We No Longer Dream of the United States: Wieliński's generation grew up under communism worshipping America — the land of the dream, the place everyone wanted to reach. Now they confront a different country with a different politics. The Americans, he says, didn't lose anything. The Poles didn't lose their innocence. The Americans lost their credibility, their values, and their minds by electing Donald Trump. If anyone lost anything, it was Americans. Not Poles. •       The Suicide of a Superpower: Wieliński invokes Timothy Snyder's phrase to describe what Trump is doing. The US started a war with Iran without having any strategic objectives. Nobody heard Trump say what his objective was. America had friends, influence, and soft power — US aid was the most cost-effective democracy-promotion tool in the world. It is being deliberately destroyed. NATO was the best investment America ever made: the only time Article Five was invoked was by Europeans, to defend America, after September 11. Crippling NATO means losing Europe, and there is no way back. •       The Dark Enlightenment and Silicon Valley: Wieliński identifies a specific group behind Trump's project: very rich and powerful people connected to big tech who believe they can reshape politics through platforms, influence behaviour through technology, and create a new technological order — reversing political development back to before the Enlightenment. They call it the dark enlightenment. Europe, he says, rejects it. Europe will defend its societies against that influence. •       The New Division: Democrats vs Anti-Democrats: The key political division everywhere Wieliński looks is no longer between left and right. It is between supporters of democracy and its enemies. In Germany: the AfD at 30%, while the mainstream parties have collapsed from a combined 70% to a combined 35%. In France: the horseshoe theory — far left and far right meeting at the ends of the arc, both willing to work together to dismantle democracy. In Poland: a colourful coalition from right to left defending democracy against PiS. The same coalition will be needed everywhere. •       Wake Up: Don't Lose Europe: Wieliński's message to Americans: wake up. You still have friends in Europe. Europeans still want to believe in America as the land of promise and freedom. But don't destroy what you spent so many decades building. Trump will be gone sooner or later. Make sure he hasn't burned every bridge with Europe before he exits. If those bridges are destroyed, they will be very hard to rebuild. About the Guest Bartosz Wieliński is Deputy Editor in Chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading liberal daily newspaper. He was formerly the paper's Berlin correspondent. Gazeta Wyborcza was founded in 1989, the year of Poland's first free elections. References: •       Gazeta Wyborcza — Poland's liberal newspaper of record, founded 1989. •       Timothy Snyder — referenced for “suicide of a superpower.” Previously appeared on KOA. •       The horseshoe theory — the idea that the extreme left and extreme right, at the ends of the political horseshoe, are closer to each other than either is to the centre. 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 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. WebsiteSubstackApple PodcastsSpotify Chapters: (00:30) - Introduction: Warsaw, Gazeta Wyborcza, and lost illusions (01:25) - We no longer dream of the United States (02:17) - The Americans lost their credibility, not the Poles (02:41) - Message to Trump voters: you did it wrong (03:51) - Timothy Snyder: the suicide of a superpower (05:00) - The Iran war: no strategic objectives (06:00) - US aid: the most cost-effective democracy tool ever destroyed (07:00) - NATO: Article Five was invoked by Europeans, for America (08:10) - Silicon Valley and the dark enlightenment (09:14) - Trump's policy as an opportunity for Europe (27:26) - The new division: democrats vs anti-democrats (27:52) - Germany: the AfD at 30% (31:15) - The horseshoe theory (33:45) - Wake up, America: don't lose Europe

“If your opening position is: your views are beyond the pale, you are deplorable, there is no space for you in democracy — then how on earth do we expect anything other than revolutionary conservatism as a response?” — Maciej Kisilowski For Americans concerned about the fragility of their democracy, Poland offers some reassuring news. Having experienced its own illiberal blip, democracy in Poland now seems amongst the healthiest in Eastern Europe. So what does a democracy only created in 1989 teach America as the old republic braces for its surreal semiquincentennial celebration? The Vienna-based constitutional scholar Maciej Kisilowski is the author of Let's Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design. In this bestselling 2025 book, Kisilowski argues that Poland is a map of where other Western democracies could go. If they choose to. Poland elected its first illiberal conservative government in 2005. Hungary followed in 2010. Both explicitly served as models for Donald Trump — relatively tamed in his first term, unshackled in his second. Like the United States, Poland is a relatively rich country with per capita GDP growing an astonishing 650% in a single generation. So, Kisilowski argues, the conventional argument that Poland embraced illiberalism in response to economic hardship is mostly wrong. Instead, what triggered illiberalism in Poland was culture, particularly the compressed, accelerated challenge to traditional identity — national, male, religious — that EU accession triggered in Central Europe. Kisilowski, who teaches at Central European University, might have entitled his book Let's Agree to Disagree. Poland's solution to this cultural crisis of identity is what Kisilowski calls “subsidiarity” — genuine decentralisation that allows both conservative communities to remain traditional and liberal cities to become progressive, all within a common democratic framework. He warns both the left and the right that if you tell people their views are somehow foreign, it's entirely rational for them to want to smash their “foreign” democracy. This is the Polish model of a viable 21st century democracy. Ironically, it's a Madisonian warning about the dangers of faction. The “deplorable” gambit always backfires. Péter Magyar's remarkable victory in Hungary — a staunch conservative ending Orbán's 16-year mafia-style illiberal chapter — offers the Hungarian model of Kisilowski's argument. So this July 4, worried Americans might read Let's Agree on Poland. Or reread James Madison. Five Takeaways •       Central Europe as the Leading Indicator: Poland and Hungary Before Trump: Poland elected its first revolutionary conservative government in 2005 — sixteen years before the January 6 insurrection. Hungary followed in 2010. Both were explicitly cited as models by the architects of Trump's political project. Kisilowski's argument: what happened in Central Europe is not a regional anomaly but a leading indicator of what happens when open society's challenge to traditional identity is concentrated and rapid rather than gradual. The walls of liberal democratic institutions were weaker in Warsaw and Budapest. They will not hold indefinitely in Washington or London either. •       It's Not the Economy, Stupid: The Case Against Materialist Explanations: Poland and Hungary are economic opposites. Hungary was the “happiest barrack” of the Soviet bloc but fared poorly after 1989. Poland was among the poorer countries of the bloc and grew 650% in per capita GDP in one generation, with a Gini coefficient below France's. Same revolutionary conservative politics. Opposite economic trajectories. Kisilowski's conclusion: the materialist explanation — people turn right because of economic hardship — is flatly wrong. The driver is identity: the compressed, accelerated challenge to national, male, and religious identity imposed by EU accession conditionality in a decade. •       The Deplorable Problem: Why Exclusion Rationally Produces Authoritarianism: Kisilowski's most politically pointed argument: if your opening position to conservatives is that their views are beyond the pale, they are deplorable, there is no space for them in democracy — then it is entirely rational for them to break democracy. Not irrational. Not manipulated. Rational. If there is no space for me inside the system, I must break the system. That is what revolutionary conservatism is: a rational response to liberal exclusion. The solution is not to validate the views. The solution is to demonstrate that there is a place for those people and their communities within a democratic framework. That is the Madisonian insight. •       Subsidiarity as the Solution: Conservative Communities, Liberal Cities, Common Framework: Kisilowski's constitutional proposal, worked out with co-authors from the full ideological spectrum, is subsidiarity: genuine decentralization that allows conservative rural communities to be conservative and liberal cities to be liberal, within a common democratic framework. Budapest, in Magyar's Hungary, should get strong autonomy to pursue the more liberal policies its electorate wants. Warsaw and Kraków should be able to differ. The European Union is, in this reading, the model: different countries, different cultures, one framework. The alternative is winner-takes-all, which always produces a revolutionary reaction from the losers. •       Peter Magyar and Hungary: Proof of Concept for the Compromise Strategy: Magyar's extraordinary victory in Hungary — winning a constitutional majority against a 16-year right-wing regime rightly called a mafia state, in elections skewed heavily toward the government — is, in Kisilowski's reading, direct evidence that the compromise strategy works. Magyar is a staunch conservative and former member of the Orbán government. He won because he demonstrated to far-right voters that there was a place for them and their views within democratic Europe. The 2 million liberal Budapest voters who voted for him did so not because they like his conservatism but because he was unquestionably preferable to Orbán. Kisilowski made sure Magyar got the book. About the Guest Maciej Kisilowski is Associate Professor of Law and Strategy at Central European University (CEU) in Vienna. He is co-editor (with Anna Wojciuk) of Let's Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design (Oxford University Press, 2025). He is a Europe's Futures Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School. He writes frequently for Project Syndicate, Politico, and The EU Observer. References: •       Let's Agree on Poland: A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design by Maciej Kisilowski and Anna Wojciuk (Oxford University Press, 202...

“The Gross National Product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” — Robert F. Kennedy, University of Kansas, March 18, 1968 It is June 5, 1968. An eleven-year-old English boy is watching the assassination of Bobby Kennedy on his black and white television. That little boy is Tim Jackson — now one of Britain's most influential critics of capitalism. He had no idea then that RFK would change his life. It happened years later, when Jackson discovered a speech Kennedy gave in Kansas in the spring of 1968. It was a speech that changed the way Tim Jackson thought about economics. The March 1968 speech, one of the first of RFK's presidential campaign, was delivered at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, University of Kansas. It opened with a joke at the expense of rival Kansas State University. Then Bobby turned deadly serious. For the first time (at least for a Presidential candidate), he attacked the very idea of the Gross National Product itself. RFK argued that GDP quantifies all the worst stuff including air pollution, cigarette advertising and jails. But it doesn't measure the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It quantifies everything except that which makes life worthwhile. Then fetishizes the data. Worse than wrong, Bobby Kennedy suggested, GDP makes data evil. For Jackson, who has spent his career mulling over the idea of economic growth, RFK's Phog Allen Fieldhouse speech came as a revelation. Indeed much of his later thinking, including his 2021 award-winning book Post Growth: Life After Capitalism, is indebted to this March 1968 speech. Almost sixty years later, in our ever-more-quantifiable age of data-centres, it's a speech that appears uncannily prescient. Both Tim Jackson and Bobby Kennedy are right to remind us that there is an alternative to quantifying progress. There is, indeed, life after GDP. And it can't be measured. Five Takeaways •       An 11-Year-Old Watching the Assassination on His Birthday: Tim Jackson was born on June 4. On the night of June 4–5, 1968, after the California primary, RFK was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Jackson — watching on a black and white television in the UK — remembers thinking: oh no, not again. His aunt had just sailed for America from Southampton. Is this the country she is going to? Two high-profile assassinations. Violence as a condition of American political life. He had no idea then that RFK would become important to him professionally two or three decades later. •       The Kansas Speech: GDP Measures Everything Except What Makes Life Worthwhile: The speech RFK gave at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, University of Kansas, March 1968 — one of the first of his presidential campaign — opened with a joke at the expense of rival Kansas State University and became one of the most prescient political speeches of the 20th century. Kennedy attacked GDP directly: it counts air pollution, cigarette advertising, and the jails for the people who break the law. It does not count the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. •       The Two Wrong Turns of Post-War Capitalism: Jackson's account: fossil fuels made mass production possible; the Great Depression revealed the danger of overproduction; the post-war solution was to persuade people that having more stuff is what matters. Two big mistakes were embedded in that solution. First: material consumption is not all we are — we have social, relational, spiritual needs that GDP ignores. Second: more production does more environmental damage. Both wrong turns are what Kennedy was already diagnosing in Kansas in 1968. Both are what we are now living with in extremis. •       The Trillionaire and the 2 Billion: The interview is recorded the day after the world's first trillionaire arrived on the scene. Jackson's response: this is an obscene amount of money for one person to have, while 2 billion people lack access to clean water and electricity. The same structural observation could be made about the 1850s: monarchs parading luxury while the people around them starved. The trillionaire is not a new phenomenon. He is the latest expression of an economic system that was always building toward this endpoint. •       They Created a Desert and Called It Peace: In the Kansas speech, RFK quoted Tacitus on Rome: “they created a desert and called it peace.” Jackson applies it directly to today's America: what is it to be a citizen of the affluent West only on the back of a flattened Gaza, a distant war, the creation of violence to preserve a failing hegemonic empire? Bobby was saying: we have values around social justice. We have a fragile planet. These are what matter. Bernie Sanders said the same things. AOC picked up the mantle. The message is unchanged. It is still Kansas, 1968. About the Guest Tim Jackson is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). He is the author of Post Growth: Life After Capitalism (Polity Press, 2021; winner of the 2022 Eric Zencey Prize for Economics) and Prosperity Without Growth (2009/2017; Financial Times book of the year). He is also an award-winning BBC radio dramatist. He lives in Guildford, Surrey. References: •       Post Growth: Life After Capitalism by Tim Jackson (Polity Press, 2021). •       RFK's University of Kansas speech, March 18, 1968 — delivered at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, Lawrence, Kansas. •       Tacitus, Agricola — “they created a desert and called it peace,” quoted by RFK in the Kansas speech. •       Kerry Kennedy, Ripples of Hope — referenced in the conversation. •       Andrew Keen's forthcoming book: Where Have You Gone, Bobby Kennedy? My Search for a Lost America — the RFK book this conversation feeds directly into. 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 3,000 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

“Just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. The agent is the unacknowledged legislator of the literary field.” — Laura McGrath We think of publishers and editors as the ultimate tastemakers. As those godlike gatekeepers controlling what we read. But if you're looking for literary gods, Laura McGrath argues, then you need to look at literary agents rather than publishers or editors. Her ten-year project, Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction, is the first serious scholarly account of the literary agent's astonishingly powerful role in shaping what America reads. Except, of course, the Middlemen are actually Middlewomen — since 80% of literary agents are women. The numbers are striking. Just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. McGrath interviewed 75 of them over ten years. Shelley called poets the unacknowledged legislators of the world. McGrath's agents are the unacknowledged legislators of the literary field. They shaped postmodernism (Candida Donadio and Pynchon, Heller, Gaddis). They launched the debut novel as a literary form. They made the short story collection viable. And 25 of them control more than half of the prizes. So will AI replace the agent? In operations, perhaps, McGrath acknowledges — the slush pile is overwhelming and smart machine assistance is welcome. But in creative work — in the business of writing, editing, translation, cover design, and above all taste — she thinks not. No algorithm will ever learn the Catch-22 of publishing — separating the Thomas Pynchon or Joseph Heller from all the dross. And no bot (male or female) is ever going to host a three-martini lunch in Manhattan. Five Takeaways •       The Literary Agent as the New Gatekeeper: Replacing the Publisher: In the early 20th century, publishing was shaped by the taste of individual publishers: Bennett Cerf at Random House, Alfred and Blanche Knopf at their imprint, Max Perkins at Scribner's. Those days are over. Publishers are now conglomerates where individual editors may have excellent taste but no single figure shapes the house. Into that vacuum has come the literary agent — who now operates, McGrath argues, exactly as the great publishers once did: as the primary tastemaker, the person whose aesthetic and commercial judgment shapes what America reads. •       25 Agents, Half the Prizes, 80% Women: The Numbers: McGrath's most striking statistical finding: just 25 literary agents represent more than half of all prizewinning novelists in the 21st century. Twenty-five people. The field is 80% women — hence the tongue-in-cheek title — and 73% white. Agents tend, McGrath found, to represent authors who resemble themselves. One answer to the question “why is contemporary literary fiction so white?” is: because agents are. And agents, because they work on contingency fees rather than salaries, face severe financial pressures that concentrate power at the top of the profession. •       The Unacknowledged Legislators: Agents Shaped American Literary History: McGrath's book is full of literary history rewritten from the agent's perspective. Sterling Lord persisted past dozens of rejections to place On the Road for Kerouac. Candida Donadio — Pynchon's, Heller's, Gaddis's, and early Philip Roth's agent — championed maximalist, experimental writers whom no one was interested in, and built the social network of editor relationships that made postmodernism possible. The debut novel as a cultural form, the persistence of the short story collection despite poor sales, the rise of the New York novel — all are, in McGrath's account, partly agent-made. •       Can White Male Writers Not Get Published? No: Andrew raises the complaint he hears from white male writers: that they can no longer get published because of diversity initiatives. McGrath's answer is flat. No. She thinks it's silly. The number of books published each week is staggering. Being able to see some success on the part of writers of colour does not diminish the work white men are doing. The complaint, she notes, circulates every ten years, typically after a boom in support for writers of colour. We are in another round of this cycle. There will be another one in a decade. •       Will AI Replace the Literary Agent? In Operations, Maybe. In Taste, No: Andrew's closing question: will AI replace the middlemen? McGrath draws the distinction she heard at the US Book Show: AI in operations (slush pile management, contract tracking), yes, possibly. AI in creative work — writing, editing, translation, cover design, and above all taste — she hopes not. An algorithm is built on priors. It narrows the window of possibility endlessly, replicating itself. That is not what a good literary agent does. A good literary agent is looking for books that surprise, frustrate, and thrill. No algorithm has learned to take an author out for a three-martini lunch. About the Guest Laura McGrath is an assistant professor of English at Temple University and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow. She was formerly the associate director of the Literary Lab at Stanford University. She is the author of Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction (Princeton University Press, April 28, 2026). She writes the textCrunch Substack on literary and publishing culture. References: •       Middlemen: Literary Agents and the Making of American Fiction by Laura McGrath (Princeton University Press, April 28, 2026). •       Earlier on KOA: Gayle Feldman on Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built — the companion episode referenced at the opening. •       Sterling Lord (agent for Kerouac), Candida Donadio (Pynchon, Heller, Gaddis, Roth), Andrew Wylie — agents profiled in the book. •       Andrew Keen, Cult of the Amateur (2007) — referenced as Andrew's own defence of gatekeepers. 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 3,000 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

“AI companies are taking advantage of our natural tendency to ascribe an inner life to our interlocutors. They profit when you think the chatbot cares.” — Kate O'Neill If we don't like someone, we call them a fascist. And if we like them, we say they are a humanist. The F and H words. Both meaningless in our sloppy, bot-infested age. But maybe I'm just a cranky anti-humanist. Even anti-human — whatever that means. Or maybe I'm being harsh (moi?). Humanism certainly is all the rage in our AI age. Corporate consultant Kate O'Neill likes the word so much that she has built her brand around it. The self-styled “Tech Humanist” is the author of Tech Humanist, the host of the Tech Humanist Show, and a frequent speaker on the TED circuit. So how to use the H word without sounding like Claude or ChatGPT? O'Neill argues that what makes us human is our quest for meaning. The M word. That's what distinguishes us from the bots. But as Kazuo Ishiguro warns in Klara and the Sun, we are fast arriving at a point when the bots are better than us at extracting meaning from the world. So did Kate O'Neill pass the Keen Test (reverse of Turing)? Did the Tech Humanist say anything that would have eluded Claude? Or have we already arrived at Ishiguro's bleak terminus where the bots are more skilled at infusing the H word with meaning than we are? Five Takeaways •       What Is Tech Humanism? Aligning Business and Human Outcomes: O'Neill's definition: technology shapes human experiences at scale, and it does so almost always in service of a business objective that is accelerating its advance. The purpose of tech humanism is to find the business objectives that need to be met and align them with human outcomes that are rewarding and fulfilling for people. This means using technology to amplify the alignment between business and human outcomes — rather than simply making the business more successful. It is, she acknowledges, not the habit of most business leaders. But it is a habit that can be developed. •       You Sound Like a Bot: Andrew's Challenge: Andrew's opening challenge: O'Neill sounds exactly like a well-prompted language model. She uses the h word (humanism) and the m word (meaning). What is she saying that Claude couldn't say? O'Neill's answer: meaning is not a word but a phenomenon. It is what emerges from the combination of embodied sensory experience and language — the way humans encode meaningful experiences with language in their brains. As far as we know, this is a uniquely human capability. Machines process information statistically. Humans process it meaningfully. That distinction is, she argues, precisely the gap that matters. •       AI Companies Profit When You Think the Chatbot Cares: O'Neill's sharpest observation: we are constituted to look for inner life in the things we interact with. We give nicknames to our cars and talk to our toasters. At this early stage of interacting with large language models, it is entirely natural to assume there is a consciousness on the other side. The problem: AI companies are actively taking advantage of that natural tendency. They profit from it. The more people believe the chatbot genuinely understands them, the more they use it. That manipulation is real and it is working. Developing critical thinking about AI interactions is, O'Neill argues, now a form of self-defence. •       The Intersection of Meaning and Scale: O'Neill's key contribution to the tech humanism conversation: the problem with technology is not technology itself but the scale at which it operates. A single interaction with a biased algorithm is annoying. A billion such interactions, aggregated and accelerated by a business objective, reshapes society. The tech humanist's job is to ensure that when we deploy technology at scale, the outcomes remain aligned with human meaning rather than with the extraction of human attention. This, she says, is both a business problem and a civilisational one. The two are, in her view, inseparable. •       A Message to 2126: What We Valued About Ourselves: Andrew asks O'Neill: it is 2126. Humans and machines are indistinguishable. What do you say to whoever is listening? O'Neill's answer: hello from the past. What we valued about ourselves was our ability to understand each other — intellectually, emotionally, sympathetically, empathetically. We could come into our interactions by holding space for what the other person feels and cares about. And we could, even when we disagreed, create more shared understanding by virtue of having the conversation. That is a beautiful thing, she says, whether we are distinctly human and distinctly machine or increasingly a blend of both. About the Guest Kate O'Neill is founder and CEO of KO Insights and is widely known as “the Tech Humanist.” She was one of the first 100 employees at Netflix and has held roles at Toshiba and founded the analytics firm [meta]marketer. She is named to the Thinkers50 global ranking of top management thinkers. She is the author of What Matters Next: A Leader's Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That's Moving Too Fast (Wiley, January 2025), Tech Humanist (2018), A Future So Bright (2021), and Pixels and Place (2016). She advises Google, IBM, Microsoft, the United Nations, Harvard, and Yale. She hosts The Tech Humanist Show on YouTube. References: •       What Matters Next: A Leader's Guide to Making Human-Friendly Tech Decisions in a World That's Moving Too Fast by Kate O'Neill (Wiley, January 2025). •       Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021) — the novel discussed in the conversation's closing section. •       Victoria Hetherington, The Friend Machine — referenced by Andrew in the conversation on AI companionship. 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 3,000 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 considered it elder abuse. She put him through the paces, not only before the debate, but after. She should have gotten him out of there immediately.” — Sally Quinn on Jill Biden and the debate Today's guest is amongst America's most verbal octogenarians. No, not you-know-who. Sally Quinn is the illustrious Washington DC hostess, writer and commentator. The almost 85-year-old does improv comedy every Sunday, ballroom dancing every week and Zen Buddhist meditation every Monday night. Her novel, Silent Retreat, is now out in paperback. And she's working on her memoir, tentatively entitled Never Invite Sally Quinn. Certainly Jill Biden won't be inviting Sally Quinn any time soon to one of her tête-à-têtes. Quinn's account of what went wrong with the Biden presidency is sharply personal. Her late husband, legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, had dementia. She watched his cognitive decline from inside, and the parallels with what she observed in Biden were, she tells me, too close for comfort. Jill Biden's decision to keep Joe running after the debate, when she privately suspected he'd suffered a stroke, was, in Quinn's word, “elder abuse.” Silent Retreat, set at a monastery in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, is about the sexiness of silence. A prize-winning reporter and the venerable Archbishop of Dublin fall in love in enforced silence. Anything but elder abuse. But autobiographical? Probably not. As Ben Bradlee used to tease her over breakfast, it's always been hard for not-silent-Sally to keep her mouth shut. Five Takeaways •       The Army Brat Who Became Washington's Most Powerful Hostess: Quinn grew up as an army brat, moving from posting to posting with her military father. She arrived in Washington after college, did a stint as social secretary to the Algerian ambassador, and was then hired by Ben Bradlee to write for the Washington Post's new Style section — the first style section in the history of American journalism. She and Bradlee eventually married. Their home in Georgetown became the hub of Washington's social and political life for decades. She describes herself not as a powerhouse but as someone who “really lucked out.” An army brat who knew how to work a room. •       Gerontocracy Is Real — But People Who Keep Going Are Different: Quinn agrees with Samuel Moyn that American gerontocracy is a genuine problem: people who lose their cognitive sharpness should not be running organizations or countries, and the tragedy is that no one can know in advance who will lose it and who won't. But she draws a distinction: the problem is not old people, it's old people who have stopped growing. She surrounds herself with younger people, particularly younger journalists, because of their energy, idealism, and optimism. She is still working full time. The issue is not age. It's vitality. •       Biden and Jill: Elder Abuse: Quinn's account of the Biden presidency is the most personal Andrew has heard. Her husband Ben Bradlee had dementia. She knows the signs. She watched Biden lose it, got a knot in her stomach every time he spoke publicly. The debate was her worst nightmare. Everyone in the White House knew what was happening and wasn't telling the truth. And Jill Biden — who now admits she thought he had had a stroke after the debate — raised his arm in a victory salute the next day and took him off to campaign in North Carolina. Quinn's verdict: “I considered it elder abuse.” •       Silent Retreat: A New Yorker Writer and an Archbishop Fall in Love in Enforced Silence: The novel grew from Quinn's own annual visits to a Trappist monastery in Virginia's Berryville. She is a woman who once failed to stay quiet for three days — or so her husband thought — and who found to her surprise that she loved it. The novel: a prize-winning reporter whose marriage is falling apart, and an Archbishop of Dublin whose faith is in crisis, check into the same monastery for a silent retreat. They can't speak to each other. They speak to the monk instead. The novel is told through those confessions. Kirkus: “an unholy brew of lust and faith.” Airmail: “a bodice ripper with a fillip of Roman Catholic ritual.” •       Improv, Ballroom Dancing, Zen Buddhism, and Dinner by Candlelight: Quinn's account of how she stays alive at 84 is the most energetic thing in this conversation. Improv comedy every Sunday for two and a half hours — performances after the class, with people half her age. Ballroom dancing every week. Zen Buddhist meditation every Monday night for two hours. Working out every day. Writing her Washington memoir. And hosting small dinner parties — six or eight people, candlelight, good food, a lot of wine — as a form of community-building in what she calls the toxic environment of today's Washington. The memoir's title: Never Invite Sally Quinn. Andrew has already secured an invitation to the next dinner party. About the Guest Sally Quinn is a longtime Washington Post journalist, columnist, television commentator, Washington insider, and one of Washington's legendary social hostesses. She is the author of Silent Retreat (Simon & Schuster), Finding Magic, The Party, Happy Endings, Regrets Only, and We're Going to Make You a Star. She was the founder and moderator of On Faith, the Washington Post's religion website. She lives in Georgetown, Washington DC. References: •       Silent Retreat by Sally Quinn (Simon & Schuster). In paperback. •       Episode 2945: Samuel Moyn on Gerontocracy in America — referenced at the opening. •       Ben Bradlee — Quinn's late husband, executive editor of the Washington Post during Watergate, referenced throughout. 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 3,000 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:...

“Age is the modality in which class is lived in America today.” — Samuel Moyn Yesterday we had 91-year-old Mordecai Kurz on the show. Tomorrow, it will be 84-year-old Sally Quinn. But today's guest, the Yale legal historian Samuel Moyn, has a bit of a problem with old people. His new book, Gerontocracy in America, argues that the old folks are hoarding power and wealth in America. For Moyn, Dylan's Sixties anthem of “Forever Young” has soured into today's reality of “Forever Old.” In some ways, it's hard to argue with Moyn's thesis. Donald Trump is the oldest elected US president in history. Congress has been ageing for decades — and several Democratic members died in the run-up to the One Big Beautiful Bill vote, thereby facilitating its passage. The progressive heroine Ruth Bader Ginsburg stayed on the Supreme Court through a pancreatic cancer diagnosis and died in office, handing the right a supermajority and the end of abortion rights. Clarence Thomas, the RBG of nutcase conservatism, is on track to become the longest-serving Supreme Court justice in US history. And then there's that alte kaker Joe Biden, former dodder-in-chief, the only pol who gives Trump a youthful glow. Even Bob Dylan — who I saw in all his morbid brilliance in Berkeley last week (“but me, I'm still on the road”) — just celebrated his 85th birthday. Forever old, America. Happy 250th. Five Takeaways •       What Is Gerontocracy? Not a Problem With Old People: Moyn is careful to distinguish gerontocracy from old people. He is in his mid-fifties and can't attack old people generally. His target is the system: the structural overrepresentation of old people in power, and the structural disadvantaging of the young that results. Old people can be great. Some are, some aren't — just like everyone else. The problem is that when we defer to old people automatically — as a system rather than as a judgement about individuals — we replicate their mistakes alongside their wisdom. And cognitive decline is real, as Biden proved. “Age is the modality in which class is lived in America today,” Moyn writes, riffing on Stuart Hall's formulation about race. •       The Congress, the Courts, and the Deaths That Passed the Bill: Trump is the oldest elected US president in history — and if JD Vance were to succeed him, Vance would be the youngest president since Teddy Roosevelt. But Moyn's focus goes beyond the presidency. Congress has aged dramatically: the average senator and representative are significantly older than at any point in US history, and there is now only one member of Congress in their thirties. Several Democratic members of the House died in the months before the One Big Beautiful Bill vote, facilitating its passage. The gerontocracy is quite literally voting itself into power through death. •       The RBG Problem: Selfishness and the Supreme Court: Moyn's account of Ruth Bader Ginsburg is unsparing. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest — and allegedly survived it. She had become a progressive icon, “Notorious RBG.” But she chose to stay on the court rather than retire under Obama, and she died in office in 2020, allowing Trump to appoint Amy Coney Barrett and hand the right a supermajority that ended abortion rights. Moyn's verdict: she was selfish. He is also careful to note that the system should not depend on individual virtue — there will always be selfish people. The system must be reformed so that selfish choices are no longer possible. •       The Framers Designed Gerontocracy Into the Constitution: One of Moyn's most striking historical arguments: the framers deliberately empowered old people. The age minimums for federal office (35 for the presidency, 30 for the Senate) excluded 70% of the population at the time. The Senate was named after the Roman senatus — literally “old men” — and the concept went back to the Spartan council of elders. Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers that federal judges should serve until they were “dodering” because the alternative was too much popular power. The gerontocracy is not an accident. It was designed. •       The Solutions: Vote at Six, Retire at Sixty, Tax the Family Home: Moyn's solutions are deliberately radical. On voting: lower the age, as David Runciman advocates to six, and reduce the number of elections because evidence shows the more elections, the greater the elder dominance. On political office: age limits, youth cohorts. On the courts: mandatory retirement — this requires creative interpretation of the constitution rather than amendment. On the economy: higher taxes on inherited wealth and housing assets — an incremental tax for staying in a large house you no longer need. On the title of the paperback: Andrew suggests “Forever Old.” Moyn will credit him if it's chosen. About the Guest Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. He is the author of Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 16, 2026), Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, and The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. He is co-host of the Digging a Hole podcast and a frequent contributor to The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. References: •       Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — and What to Do About It by Samuel Moyn (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 16, 2026). •       Samuel Moyn, “The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis,” Harper's Magazine, May 2026 — the excerpt from the book referenced at the opening. •       David Runciman — referenced for his advocacy of lowering the voting age to six. •       Stuart Hall — referenced for the formulation that class is lived through race, which Moyn repurposes for age. 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 3,000 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

“Between 1980 and 2019, the billionaires gained $25 trillion. By today it's probably $35 trillion. The question is who will pay for reform? You go where the money is.” — Mordecai Kurz Keynes observed that in the long run, we are all dead. The nonagenarian Stanford economist Mordecai Kurz agrees. Which is why he has no patience for the tech utopians' promise of abundance for all of us in the long run. And his new book, Private Power and Democracy's Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy, is amongst the most urgent cases yet made for a fundamental reform of American capitalism. Kurz compares our billionaire-infested times with the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, which eventually ended with sharp progressive reform. We are now in a second Gilded Age, he argues. Between 1980 and 2019, the top billionaires gained $25 trillion. By today, he estimates it's $35 trillion. Meanwhile, workers without college education gained essentially nothing in income between 1980 and 2010. The result is both Trumpism and the world's first trillionaire. Kurz lays out a three-fronted reform strategy. First, reduce market power through patent and antitrust reform. Second, redistribute the gains from technology through a 65% top marginal income tax rate and a 45% corporate rate. Third, guarantee the livelihood of every worker displaced by policy-supported technological change with retraining, full wage support, tuition, healthcare, and even relocation. Wouldn't the billionaires simply leave? The spirited Kurz, who has taught economics at Stanford for sixty years, isn't worried. “Others will come instead of them,” he says. And in response to Sam Altman's argument that AI will free humanity from labour, Mordecai Kurz retorts with Keynes's remark about death in the long run. And this particular long run, he says, could be many millennia. Five Takeaways •       The Second Gilded Age: Same Dynamic, Different Technology: Kurz's central historical argument: the first Gilded Age — 1864 to 1914 — produced extreme inequality, rising economic monopolists who became centres of political power, and democratic decline. It ended with progressive reform. The second Gilded Age, beginning in 1980, follows the same logic: technology used as a weapon of market power, market power converting into political power, political power undermining democratic institutions. The difference is scale and speed. Between 1980 and 2019, the top billionaires accumulated $25 trillion. By 2026, Kurz estimates $35 trillion. The reform that ended the first Gilded Age took fifty years. He is not sure we have that long. •       The Three-Pronged Reform: Market Power, Distribution, Livelihoods: Kurz's proposed reform has three components. First: reduce market power through patent reform, antitrust reform, and reform of acquisition law — the legal structures that allow technology firms to entrench monopoly positions. Second: redistribute the gains from technology through a 65% top marginal income tax rate, a compulsory minimum 15% tax on incomes above $400,000, and a 45% corporate tax rate. Third: guarantee the livelihood of every worker displaced by policy-supported technological change — retraining, full wage support, tuition for children, healthcare, and relocation assistance. •       The 1980 Mistake: Where It All Went Wrong: Kurz is precise about the origin of the problem: 1980. The turn to unregulated free-market capitalism under Reagan, combined with the information technology revolution, created what he calls a techno-winner-takes-all economy. Workers without college education gained essentially nothing in income between 1980 and 2010. Millions lost their jobs to automation and import competition and received no government support. Kurz's diagnosis of Trumpism: it fed on the despair of those abandoned workers. This is not a cultural or demographic explanation. It is a structural economic one. •       Would the Billionaires Leave? Let Them: Andrew raises the obvious objection: if you tax them at 65%, won't the Elon Musks and Larry Pages and Sam Altmans simply leave? Kurz's response is blunt: he doesn't think they would, because the system called America — its universities, infrastructure, market, human capital, and institutional environment — is what made their billions possible. Their billions are not the product of their individual genius alone. But if they do leave, he says, others will come instead. He adds that he would prefer coordinated taxation across all Western advanced economies, not the US alone. •       In the Long Run, We Are All Dead: The Keynesian Punchline on Tech Utopianism: Andrew asks about Elon Musk's claim that money will eventually disappear and technology will free humanity from labour — the Keynesian/Marxist long-run abundance argument. Kurz paraphrases Keynes' most famous line: “In the long run, we are all dead.” And then he adds: the long run could be a very long time. He is ninety years old, has taught at Stanford since 1961, and from his office window he can see the $1 billion mansions in the hills above Palo Alto and the workers below who cannot afford to live there. He is, he says, not prepared to wait for Musk's utopia. About the Guest Mordecai Kurz is the Joan Kenney Professor of Economics Emeritus at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1961. He is the author of Private Power and Democracy's Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy (MIT Press, May 19, 2026) and The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age (Columbia University Press, 2023). He was born in Tel Aviv and received his doctorate from MIT. References: •       Private Power and Democracy's Decline: How to Make Capitalism Support Democracy by Mordecai Kurz (MIT Press, May 19, 2026). •       The Market Power of Technology: Understanding the Second Gilded Age by Mordecai Kurz (Columbia University Press, 2023) — the preceding volume, referenced throughout. •       Thomas Piketty — blurbed the book: “A great book, a must-read.” Also referenced in the conversation. •       Dani Rodrik and Gabriel Zucman — referenced as fellow economists in Kurz's camp. •       Marc Andreessen — referenced for his counter-argument that high taxation destroys innovation. 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 3,000 episodes s...

“Second wave feminism taught women that femininity was weak, masculinity was toxic, marriage was oppressive, the home was a prison, and children are a burden.” — Delano Squires Sixty years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan published The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, which was immediately attacked by the left as victim-blaming and by the right as an admission of state responsibility. In 1965, 25% of black children were born to unmarried parents. Today the figure is 70%. So is the black American family vanishing? Delano Squires — director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing at the Heritage Foundation — certainly thinks so. In his controversial new book, The Vanishing Black Family, Squires argues that “welfare” and “feminism” have made black marriage optional and children vulnerable. Squires identifies what he calls the “sinister six” forces that have dismantled the black family: slavery's legacy, the welfare state, second wave feminism, popular culture, the failure of the black church, and the indifference of black progressive leadership. Perhaps his most controversial claim is that the second wave feminism of Betty Friedan did specific damage in black communities by weakening the social norms that survived slavery and Jim Crow. His prescription is a Heritage Foundation-style free market revolution led by black institutions rather than by Daniel Patrick Moynihan's federal government. The church, HBCUs and black media should all embrace education, work, marriage and family. Give her a ring before she gives you a baby, Squires advises young black men. But leave Betty Friedan literature off the wedding gift list. Five Takeaways •       From 25% to 70%: The Statistics Behind the Book: In 1965, when Moynihan wrote his report, 25% of black children were born to unmarried parents — a figure Moynihan regarded as a national crisis requiring urgent political response. The national average was 7%. Today, 70% of black children are born to unmarried parents. The national average has risen to 40%. Squires' argument: the gap has widened, the scale has changed, and the Moynihan consensus — that this is a serious problem requiring serious attention — has been largely abandoned by black progressive leadership. Only 33% of black adults are married, compared to 48% of Hispanics, 57% of whites, and 63% of Asians. •       The Second Wave Feminism Argument: Squires' Most Contested Claim: Squires devotes an entire chapter to second wave feminism and its specific damage in black communities. His top-line claim: that second wave feminism — from Betty Friedan's characterisation of the suburban home as a “comfortable concentration camp”, to Gloria Steinem's description of married women as “hostesses” — taught women that femininity was weak, masculinity was toxic, marriage was oppressive, the home was a prison, and children a burden. He is careful to distinguish this from the franchise and access to credit. He argues this ideological framework did particular damage in communities where family structures had already been weakened by slavery and segregation. •       The Success Sequence: Finish School, Get a Job, Get Married, Then Have Children: Squires' prescribed alternative to the cultural norms he critiques: the “success sequence,” a term drawn from social science research. If you finish high school, get a job, get married, and then have children — in that order — your chances of living in poverty are in the single digits, approximately 3%. His slogan: give her a ring before she gives you a baby. He advocates for government awareness campaigns in cities like Baltimore, Memphis, and Detroit, but argues that 90% of the required change has to happen in the culture, led by black institutions: the black church, HBCUs, and black media. •       Black Leadership's Failure: Far More Invested in the White House Than the Black Family: Squires' sharpest political observation: black progressive leaders today are, in his view, far more invested in retaking the White House than rebuilding the black family. He argues that the institutions of black civil society — the church, the HBCU, the cultural and media establishment — have collectively failed to make family formation a priority, and that this failure is traceable to an ideological commitment to progressive politics that makes marriage advocacy feel retrograde. He does not spare conservatives: the government policies of the right have often failed black families too. •       Advice to Ambitious Black Women: The Cornerstone vs the Capstone Marriage: Andrew asks what Squires would say to a highly ambitious young black woman. His answer: he would give it “in a fatherly tone.” Women, he argues, naturally seek partners who match or exceed their social status — a Bloomberg analysis of married couples by occupation confirmed this. The higher a woman's earnings, the smaller her pool of eligible partners. His recommendation: prioritise marriage earlier rather than later. The median age of first marriage in 1980 was 24 for men and 22 for women; today it is 31 and 29. He distinguishes between the “cornerstone marriage” — where two people build together from a young age — and the “capstone marriage,” where people wait until all individual goals are achieved, often leaving the biological clock behind. About the Guest Delano Squires is the director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing at the Heritage Foundation, where he studies the impact of marriage and family structure on social outcomes. He worked for fifteen years in local government in Washington, D.C. before joining Heritage. He is the author of The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable (Sentinel/Penguin Random House, June 16, 2026). His writing has appeared in the New York Post, Newsweek, National Review, and Compact. References: •       The Vanishing Black Family: How Welfare and Feminism Made Marriage Optional and Children Vulnerable by Delano Squires (Sentinel/Penguin Random House, June 16, 2026). •       Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965) — the foundational text Squires explicitly updates. •       Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963) — referenced extensively in Squires' chapter on second wave feminism. 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 dail...

“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...