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“Intelligence is 100 percent human. AI is a tool created by humans to distill, digest, and distribute intelligence.” — Keith Teare The working class died this week — at least in Palo Alto. Delivering the eulogy in our regular That Was The Week tech summary is my co-host Keith Teare. “Humans create intelligence,” (whatever that means) the Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur tells us. And so, in our AI age of supposedly abundant intelligence, he pronounces, human knowledge “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies.” Check your pockets, everyone. Silicon Valley has another freebie for you. With AI, the entrepreneur promises, intelligence is democratized. Everybody gets it. We will all have the intelligence of a Nobel laureate at our fingertips. Even Keith. And so he attacks Daron Acemoglu, the Nobel Prize-winning MIT economist who has called for a “pro-worker AI.” But, for Keith — a council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose lifetime ambition was to evacuate the working class — this is “complete bullshit.” Acemoglu's ideas, he says, are an example of the “fetishization of workers” when, in fact, we should be celebrating the end of the “working class.” What Acemoglu is calling for in his pro-worker AI manifesto is more government planning for today's transition to the AI epoch. But Keith disagrees. So I asked him three times what government should do while AI kills the working (and middle) class. “Allow it to happen,” he finally answers. “A good upheaval.” Good? The former “worker” will lack jobs, wages, healthcare, housing. Even food in an America now eliminating food stamps. No matter. Let them eat intelligence. Five Takeaways •       Humans Create Intelligence. Keith's editorial thesis distinguishes individual intelligence — where experts live, and always will — from the collective sum of everything all humans, living and dead, have ever contributed. That collective stock was once locked in encyclopedias, libraries, and universities; for the first time, AI can aggregate, distill, digest, and distribute it, at a price falling toward everyone. Knowledge, he writes, “should not be trapped inside experts, institutions, or companies” — but note the fine print: experts don't disappear in this democratization. If anything, they get elevated: the expert reading an AI's output about viruses understands it very differently than the rest of us.•       The End of the Age of Heroes? Noah Smith's much-shared essay argues that AI ends the era of the mathematical hero — and that's fine, since most people (truck drivers, financial advisers, executive assistants) never got to be heroes anyway. Keith's rebuttal turns on his central distinction: AI and intelligence are not the same word. There is no evidence, he argues, that AI creates new knowledge — it understands and distributes the existing stock. Innovation still takes individuals, and those individuals now start from a far higher floor, leveled up to everything already known. Heroes don't go away; they multiply. In the world of AI, he suspects, every single teacher becomes one.•       “What Even Is Pro-Worker AI?” The week's main event: Daron Acemoglu — via Yascha Mounk's Persuasion interview and an Atlantic essay, with What Happened to Liberal Democracy out next week — wants AI agencies, grant programs, and public competitions to build “pro-worker AI.” Keith's verdict: “complete bullshit.” The middle-class “fetishization of workers” is paternalistic; the wage is a temporary power relationship between employer and employee; and the end of the working class is precisely the progressive outcome — says the council-estate kid from Yorkshire whose aspiration was not to be working class. Pressed three times on what government should do amid the upheaval, Keith finally answered: “Allow it to happen… a good upheaval.” Though swap workers for people, he conceded, and he'd almost entirely agree — every teacher a hero, even in East Palo Alto.•       Bandwagons and Silences. Regular people are being arrested protesting data centers; Erin Brockovich — a Keen On guest some years back — is assembling class actions; Ezra Klein has begun folding anti-big-tech language into abundance. A politician-led bandwagon, Keith argues, regressive but keyed to genuine local concerns. The stranger fact is the silence on the other side: neither Altman nor Amodei nor Demis Hassabis is making the public case that AI benefits everybody — astonishing, Keith says, and the vacuum Acemoglu is trying to fill. Hassabis himself stepped aside at Google this week — a scientist returning to science as Sergey Brin becomes AI czar — while the Nobel-winning AlphaFold team has been quietly broken up. “Something strange is going on there.”•       A Drama in a Teacup. Is the AI economy real? Ed Zitron's stat — 70 percent of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google's AI revenue comes from OpenAI and Anthropic — is two-thirds right, says Keith, and no problem at all: beneath the concentration, the money comes from some two billion distributed users paying real subscriptions, and the revenues are sustainable. The Aschenbrenner postscript, via Porter Stansberry's post of the week: he bet the chip layer (Samsung, SK Hynix) when the value sat a layer up, got the timing wrong more than the thesis, sold to Citadel at a discount — and kept his Anthropic shares, remaining a multi-billionaire. As for the coming reality check: Anthropic and OpenAI will IPO only when public capital beats private, and SpaceX's wobble from $135 to $108 — through a 20 percent lockup release — counts as no catastrophe. Public markets, Keith reminds us, don't determine the success of the underlying business. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech. His AI-assisted book in progress is titled Who Owns Intelligence. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith's newsletter, including this week's editorial, “Humans Create Intelligence.”•       Noah Smith — “The End of the Age of Heroes,” on what happens to human ambition when the machines do the math.•       Daron Acemoglu — the Yascha Mounk interview at Persuasion, the Atlantic essay on pro-worker AI, and What Happened to Liberal Democracy, out next week.•       The Financial Times — “Google's AI shakeup boosts Brin as DeepMind's Hassabis steps aside.”•       Ed Zitron — on the 70 percent of hyperscaler AI revenue that flows from OpenAI and Anthropic.•       Porter Stansberry — post of the week, on Leopold Aschenbrenner's losses, Citadel's discount, and the drama in a ...

“Democracy didn't fall out of the sky. It was earned. It was created, and it was made manifest through protest.” — Gloria Browne-Marshall Yesterday, Casey Michel described a United States of Oligarchy where the wealthy cosy up to dictators and destroy democracy. Today, Gloria Browne-Marshall describes a parallel America. In A Protest History of the United States, she explores 500 years of profound protest to what Michel coins the banality of the deal. If Casey Michel described the few who own the country, then Gloria Browne-Marshall chronicles the many who made it. Her thesis is that a nation born of protest has been protesting with itself ever since. So Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence while owning the teenaged Sally Hemings. Democracy is protest's child, not its parent. Rather than just falling out of the sky, she argues, American democracy was earned by protesters like her great hero, Daisy Bates, the Little Rock organizer whose mother was murdered by a white mob. So where's the protest now? “Too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” Gloria Browne-Marshall argues. Thus our Covid silos and the capitulating law firms. Her prescription for this malaise is, of course, to get out on the streets. She reminds us that the anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, with its quarter of a million protesters, is coming up at the end of the month. So it's been done before. And will be done again. The United States of protest rather than of oligarchy. That's who we are. Sometimes, at least. Five Takeaways •       A Nation in Protest with Itself. America was born of protest — the Declaration itself was a protest document — and has argued with itself ever since: the empire builder rolling over the rights of others on one side, liberty-and-justice-for-all on the other. Jefferson embodies the conflict: theorist of protest, author of the Declaration, slaveholder at Monticello with the teenaged Sally Hemings. And the artists matter as much as the marchers, Browne-Marshall argues, in a hand-off from Monday's Curtis White conversation: the Depression photographs that moved a government, The Grapes of Wrath doing what no pamphlet could — art brings the humanity of the issue to the fore.•       Democracy Didn't Fall Out of the Sky. Asked about the d-word, Browne-Marshall answers that she expected it to be dissent. Democracy came by way of protest: the workers, the women, the marginalized earned rights nobody was volunteering to hand over. Vernon Dahmer was burned alive in his Mississippi home in 1966 — in a democracy — for trying to vote; Seneca Falls in 1848 became the Nineteenth Amendment only in 1920. The Voting Rights Act gave nobody the vote; it protected a right people were dying to use. And protest's victories hide in plain sight: the end of mandatory retirement at 65, disabled children in mainstream classrooms — all of it protested into existence.•       January 6 and the Meaning of Nonviolence. Is January 6 a protest? Yes, she allows — a protest with criminal consequences, like any protest that turns violent; rob a bank and call it a protest against poverty and the consequences still arrive. Nonviolence, meanwhile, is the most misunderstood word in the American vocabulary: a philosophy — Gandhi to Bayard Rustin to King — in which protesters will not strike back even when attacked. It is not a standard that applies only to Black protesters while the actual violence, historically, comes from those attacking them. January 6, with its gallows, its ransacked offices, and its hunted officials, was many things; nonviolent protest it was not.•       No Pension Fund: Daisy Bates. Browne-Marshall's favorite figure in the book: the Little Rock organizer who learned at nine that the woman raising her was not her mother — her mother had been murdered by a white mob and thrown in the pond where Daisy swam as a child. She guided the Little Rock Nine into Central High under armed National Guard escort amid daily death threats; as NAACP secretary she chose jail over surrendering the membership list, a refusal that went to the Supreme Court; she faced sexism inside the movement itself, spoke before the United Nations — and died nearly penniless, fed by neighbors. Protest has no vacation plan and no pension fund. (Mother Jones was smuggled into the same answer. “You're cheating.” “I know. I am.”)•       Outsourced Outrage. Why the relative quiet now? COVID scattered Americans into silos; the administration's shock-and-awe blitz kept them off balance; masked, nameless ICE agents and capitulating law firms (Paul Weiss, by name) spread fear; and — echoing Claire Stapleton's moral-compass warning from earlier this week — “too many people have outsourced their sense of outrage,” mistaking an email or an Instagram post for action. What's needed: leaders willing to fight, strategy and alliances, visible plans, and a protest that is for something — democracy, diversity, health, literacy. The model remains the March on Washington, whose anniversary falls August 28: one hundred organizers, a quarter-million regular people, and a government reminded of its own Constitution. About the Guest Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is a professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, a civil rights attorney, and an award-winning playwright whose work has been staged and televised. Her books include She Took Justice, The Voting Rights War, and Race, Law, and American Society. She is the founder of Martyrs Day, observed July 5 in honor of slain protesters, and host of the forthcoming She Took Justice podcast. A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, ReVisioning History series), winner of the 2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards gold medal for history, is now out in paperback. She lives in New York City. References: •       A Protest History of the United States by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall (Beacon Press) — 500 years of resistance, from Powhatan's stand against the English in 1607 to the climate protests of today.•       Curtis White's On Resistance — Monday's Keen On conversation on cultural resistance, to which this episode is the historian's reply.•       Claire Stapleton's Don't Be Evil — whose warning against outsourcing your moral compass finds its twin in Browne-Marshall's “outsourced outrage.”•       The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck — her example of art doing what no pamphlet can: bringing the humanity of an issue to the fore.•       Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine — Central High School in Little Rock still stands as what Browne-Marshall calls a living monument to protest.•      &nbs...

“Misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.” — Curtis White's motto for resistance How to say no to fascism? Curtis White, the literary thinker dubbed “the splendidly cranky utopian,” has published what he calls a “manifesto” of “resistance.” On Resistance, the 75-year-old White told me, is his last work of non-fiction. He still has worlds to invent, novels to write. Enough with the manifestos. But don't expect a program. On Resistance is more of an anti-manifesto. “That's not for me to say,” White responds when asked what, exactly, we're supposed to do to resist fascism. His resistance is cultural. It's an attitude. Borrowing from Ted Gioia's subversive history of music, White likes the idea of “psychic treason.” Its patron saints are the first dropouts, romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge who rejected the military, clergy and family to write poetry in the countryside. But On Resistance isn't simply sixties nostalgia. White, a veteran of Berkeley and the Haight, prefers the Nietzschean imperative to forget the past and move on to the next joyful deed. So the only good manifesto is the anti-manifesto. If you want to say no to fascism, become a cranky utopian. Or at least pick up On Resistance. Five Takeaways •       Psychic Treason. White's resistance is not conventionally political — Trump appears once or twice, party politics not at all. Borrowing “psychic treason” from Ted Gioia's Music: A Subversive History, he argues that the arts are subversive by nature: sometimes formally, sometimes by allying with social movements. His founding example is the Romantics, the first dropouts — Wordsworth and Coleridge refusing the military, the clergy, and the family estate to write poetry in the countryside, declaring cultural war once the church was out of the way. The treason White wants is the one the arts commit constantly, whether or not anyone calls it politics.•       Not Nostalgia — Nietzsche. The sixties made White: Berkeley in high school, San Francisco after, and the formative discovery that his country “had lied to me” and was indifferent to whether he lived or died. But On Resistance opens with the confession “I am living in a world that no longer exists” — and refuses to make anyone else live there. One chapter is bluntly titled “Forget The Beatles.” His position is Nietzschean: move on to the next joyful deed. And the rot, he insists, didn't start with Trump but with Reagan — the decades-long withdrawal of public money from public goods, education above all.•       The Three False Resistances. The book's first half is ideology critique: our culture says resistance is unnecessary because it has already been provided — by philanthropy, virtuous corporations, and liberalism. White's exhibits: Steve Jobs Buddha-branding the counterculture to sell machines to people who thought they were subverting something; the “big green” foundations (via Mark Dowie) taking over grassroots fights and defanging them; the Gates Foundation vaccinating children against polio downwind of a polluter it was invested in. Philanthropy, he argues, self-limits to protect the source of its own wealth. Patagonia may be the quiet exception that proves the rule.•       Dropping Out, Together. White's alternative is dropping out — plural: doing something else, and doing it with other people. The organic farms and farmers markets that have created communal well-being in most American cities; FC2, the author-run press he co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, past its fiftieth anniversary; the thriving-but-invisible independent presses — Graywolf, Coffee House, Rochester's Open Letter — for which he's now plotting a group Substack. The obstacle is the money jail: everyone's struggle for money limits what it is possible to do. The goal isn't overturning the status quo. “What we need right now is companions.”•       Misbehave, Make Something Beautiful, Try to Win. White's motto since The Middle Mind — the making beautiful needn't be art; the trying to win is where misbehavior gets socialized. His lineage runs Thoreau, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and above all John Berger: Marxist, art critic, poet, writer of lively living books. His Marxism, such as it is, is the humanist 1844 Manuscripts — alienation, not expropriation — via Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. And the book itself is the argument: playful and fierce, a performance that moves like a novel, reinvigorating worthy old ideas rather than hunting new ones. At 75, it's his last nonfiction — written in a spirit of play, to be left in one. About the Guest Curtis White is a novelist and social critic whose books include Memories of My Father Watching TV, The Middle Mind, The Science Delusion, and Living in a World That Can't Be Fixed. Called by Elle “the most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment,” he is co-founder, with Ronald Sukenick, of FC2, the publisher of innovative fiction run collectively by its authors, and taught English for many years at Illinois State University. His new and, he says, final work of nonfiction is On Resistance: A Manifesto (Melville House, August 11, 2026). He lives in Port Townsend, Washington. References: •       On Resistance: A Manifesto by Curtis White (Melville House, August 11, 2026). Jeffrey St. Clair: “a trail guide through our disorienting and perilous political landscape.”•       Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia — the source of “psychic treason” and the argument that the arts subvert by nature.•       The Middle Mind by Curtis White — where the motto was coined: misbehave, make something beautiful, and try to win.•       Jon Taplin in Rolling Stone — the recent essay asking whether the counterculture can rise again, and a recent Keen On conversation in the same key.•       One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse — the Western Marxist tradition, via the 1844 Manuscripts, that taught White to worry about alienation rather than expropriation.•       FC2 — the author-run press of innovative fiction White co-founded with Ronald Sukenick, now past its fiftieth year. 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

“The human part is 99 percent. The AI part is maybe 1 percent — even if 100 percent of the manuscript was dumped onto the page by AI.” — Keith Teare on writing with AI What is “real” authorship in our AI age? For That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, all authorship, even the most AI-enabled, is real. It's the cave-dwelling Luddites who are the sloppy ones. For Keith, true creativity, in our age of Claude and Gemini, almost requires the use of AI. A couple of weeks ago Keith confessed, or perhaps boasted, that he is writing an AI-assisted book entitled Who Owns Intelligence. This week, publishing discovered what happens when others play the same game without public acknowledgement. So we have the case of the “red-hot” debut novel, fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped overnight when the agent found AI in the mix. “It's a fantastic book,” the book's agent acknowledged, before firing its less than transparent author. Which, for Keith, is precisely the scandal. His position, argued in this week's editorial “AI Detected,” is pretty absolute. Nothing is written by AI, Keith argues, because AI has no will. It doesn't produce a single word unless asked. The human part is 99 percent, he says, even when 100 percent of the manuscript is spat out by the machine. So the real sin isn't using AI but not acknowledging its use. So, on Who Owns Intelligence, Keith makes it crystal clear that “AI was heavily used in the writing of this book.” I'm not so sure. Amazon is now infested with AI slop that requires no authorship. Besides, Keith clearly has no love of reading books. He admits to reading only a single volume in the last couple of years. And he's still smarting from being, in his mind at least, ripped off by the publishing industry for his last published book some 40 years ago. He no longer needs to read books, he pronounces, because his world-view is already set. For a man who thinks he knows everything, AI isn't scary. Maybe we should rename him Claude. Postscript. Full Keith-style disclosure: these shownotes were produced with the help of Anthropic. When I fed Claude my draft, it responded: “‘Maybe we should rename him Claude' is a closer I'm contractually obliged to enjoy.” Nothing, as Keith says, is written by AI. Although some algorithms seem to have cheeky opinions of their own. Maybe Anthropic should rename it Keith. Five Takeaways •       Nothing Is Written by AI. Keith's absolutism starts from the machine's lack of will: AI won't produce a word unless a human asks. His Who Owns Intelligence — fifteen chapters, arguments, and references — was structured in ninety minutes from years of thinking; the AI produced a manuscript he then shaped, like a color grader working sliders in Photoshop. The human part is 99 percent even when the machine types every word. And authorship was never solitary anyway: Plato's contemporaries thought writing itself degraded ideas, and no publisher will touch a book that hasn't passed through an editor and a subeditor. If editing doesn't change authorship, Keith asks, why would AI?•       Transparency, Not Technology. The week's cautionary tale: a debut novel fought over by fourteen publishers, dropped when the agent discovered AI — while conceding, in the same breath, “it's a fantastic book.” For Keith the scandal is concealment, not composition: own the tool, as he now does with a strapline under his byline. The detection regime, meanwhile, is collapsing on its own inaccuracy — universities dropped their AI detectors this week, and Substack's new detection partner scored Keith's human-shaped editorial as 100 percent AI when a fair reading was 40. Cheating exists only against obsolete rules: the question is moving from did you use AI to how well did you use it.•       “The Publishing Industry Is Basically a Scam.” Keith's response to Andy Hunter's ban on AI-generated books — from last week's Keen On interview — was one word: outrageous. There is no such thing as an AI-written book, only good and bad ones; and the true victim of publishing is not the bookstore but the author. Exhibit A: his own 1988 book sold 50,000 copies at £3.99 and earned him roughly £10,000 — about 5p a copy — while Penguin took the rest. The future he wants is direct, author-to-reader, without the middlemen. As for “organic” artisanal literature: real, elite, and tiny — the new vinyl, which is itself cut these days from digital masters.•       Sharks, Playing Their Own Book. Leopold Aschenbrenner — fired young from OpenAI, transfigured by one prophetic essay into the “Nostradamus of AI” — saw his $45 billion, heavily leveraged Situational Awareness fund lose $600 million, get margin-called, and sell to Ken Griffin's Citadel. (He is, Keith suspects, still super rich.) Zuckerberg's sudden conversion to open source as “the distribution of wealth to the people” struck us both as a bit rich; Amodei's “I'm not against open source as long as it's safe” — from a man on record that no AI is safe — translates as: against. Keith's deeper complaint, from an admiring Claude user: you can't trust Dario. And China, hardware-constrained, has made open source its national strategy — undermining American foundation-model revenue one cheap routed prompt at a time.•       Money Won't Matter by 2036? Elon Musk predicts money becomes irrelevant within a decade; Vinod Khosla — our post of the week — thinks he might just have a point. Keith, ever the economics tutor, reaches for tendency and ceteris paribus: money is a means of exchange and a store of value, and if abundance drives the labor-value of things toward zero, its irrelevance is not illogical — though between tendency and reality lies a whole ton of variables. I bet the opposite: that by 2036 money will matter more than ever. The problem, we discovered, is the stake — you can't bet money on money not mattering. Wives and children were proposed and hastily withdrawn (“We'd be losing, Andrew”). Loser buys dinner — at a free restaurant. About the Co-Host Keith Teare is the publisher of That Was The Week, the essential weekly tech newsletter, and founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. A serial entrepreneur — co-founder of, among others, EasyNet and RealNames — he was present at the creation of the UK internet and has spent four decades at the intersection of technology, capital, and ideas. He joins Keen On America every Sunday to make sense of the week in tech. His AI-assisted book in progress is titled Who Owns Intelligence. References: •       That Was The Week — Keith's newsletter, including this week's editorial, “AI Detected.”•       The Wall Street Journal — on the red-hot debut novel at the center of publishing's AI mystery: fourteen publishers, one discovery, one dropped author.•      ...

Should the American Pope debate the American president about good and evil? The shameless Trump, one suspects, would relish a noisy cage match with a rival American celebrity. But Leo XIV has quietly declined the invitation — a refusal that the Catholic scholar Jack Hanson insists is neither cowardice nor convenience. Rather, as Hanson argues in this month's Harper's cover story, “Radical Reformation,” it's because the church has become the last global institution able to provide a coherent moral compass for our rootless times. The great irony, Hanson notes, is that the church was the first victim of the legitimacy conflagration now engulfing every other institution. His history begins in 1870, when Rome lost the Papal States and, for the first time in a millennium, had no earthly kingdom to defend. Ever since, the church has been reorienting itself — lately, against political, economic and military power. That opposition to worldly power was always a strand within the apostolic tradition, Hanson reminds us. Thus the Gospel's “antinomian communists” who stayed behind in plague cities, Thomas More's attack on private property, the 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day, liberation theology. What's new is that the Vatican itself has embraced this political tradition of questioning Caesar. Then came 9/11. In the war on terror, Hanson argues, the secular West redefined its enemy not as a rival religion but as religion itself — and the church stopped being Western civilization's moral crown jewel. John Paul II's opposition to the Iraq War was a preview. Leo XIV's 40,000-word encyclical on AI — Magnifica Humanitas, complete with an apology for the church's role in slavery — is a more mature realization of this radical reformation. No wonder, then, that Leo has no interest in a cage match with Trump. “A direct debate with a president who's going to be out of office in a couple of years isn't in his interest. It's too small a task,” Hanson explains. As the latest in a very long line of God's representatives on earth, Leo is playing the long game. He can afford to wait out a noisy Caesar or two. Five Takeaways •       The Last Moral Voice. Institutional legitimacy — of churches, states, the organs of governance and community — is in free fall, and the great historical irony, Hanson argues, is that the Catholic Church was the first institution to face that crisis. When Rome lost the Papal States in 1870, it lost a thousand years of political centrality and has been reorienting itself ever since. Over the last twenty years, the church has ceased to see the West as its spiritual home and reconfigured itself as a genuinely global institution — positioned, almost paradoxically, against power as such. Which is how the paragon of institutional crisis has returned as maybe the last moral voice on the global stage.•       The Radical Tradition Was Always There. The subversive strain Hanson traces runs from the Gospel itself — the early Christians as “antinomian communists” who held everything in common and stayed behind in plague cities — through Thomas More's attack on the enclosures (the first great critique of private property in Western history), Leo XIII's 1891 Rerum Novarum, Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker, and Latin American liberation theology. Hanson doesn't flinch from the two Thomas Mores problem — the property radical was also a persecutor of heretics — because the church is full of sinners; you wouldn't need one otherwise. What's new is that the Vatican itself now orients toward the radical tradition rather than serving as the avatar of institutional power.•       9/11 Drove the Wedge. For most of the twentieth century the secular West treated the church as a civilizational feather in its cap. The war on terror changed that: the enemy was recast not as a rival religion but as religion as such — the new atheism was its rhetorical arm — and John Paul II's vociferous opposition to the Iraq War marked the rupture. Beneath it all, the secularization thesis (societies modernize, therefore secularize) had collapsed, its death usually dated to Iran in 1979. Reason and faith, Hanson argues, are far more intertwined than the twentieth century assumed — and, not coincidentally, the church and the left hit their historical nadirs together and are now showing signs of life together.•       Magnifica Humanitas: Arguing with the Machines. Leo XIV's 40,000-word encyclical on AI and humanity is remarkable, Hanson suggests, less for its conclusions than for its method: reasoned, humane argument addressed to people of all goodwill, in an age of universal bombast — from a leader with no personal stake in the outcome. It includes an apology for the church's involvement in slavery, an acknowledgment that the church itself once practiced the exclusionary humanism it now warns against. While subway billboards advise companies to “stop hiring human beings,” the church's real power, Hanson argues, is the legitimation of popular dissent: since Vatican II redefined the church as the People of God, the pope's voice works by inspiring people to find their own.•       Too Small a Task. Was the American pope elected to counter the American president? “His name wasn't mentioned once,” a conclave cardinal insisted — a denial Andrew files next to Casablanca's “shocked, shocked.” Either way, Leo refuses a direct debate with Trump, and Hanson insists this is the harder path, not the easier one: the pope aims to beat Trump on a higher register, shaping consciences in America and across the globe rather than winning a news cycle against a president who'll be gone in a couple of years. As for the evangelical prosperity gospel wing of MAGA: essentially in schism, Hanson says — not much to do with historical Christianity, politically or theologically. About the Guest Jack Hanson received his PhD in religious studies from Yale in 2024 and has taught there. His essays and criticism on religion, politics, and literature have appeared in Harper's and elsewhere. His cover essay, “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church's Progressive Revival,” appears in the current issue of Harper's Magazine, the oldest continuously published monthly in America. He lives in upstate New York. References: •       “Radical Reformation: The Catholic Church's Progressive Revival” by Jack Hanson — the cover essay of the current Harper's Magazine.•       On Statesmanship by Steven B. Smith — yesterday's Keen On conversation on the crisis of secular authority, which opens this one.•       Rerum Novarum (1891) — Leo XIII's encyclical on capital and labor, the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching.•       Magnifica Humanitas — Leo XIV's 40,000-word encyclical on AI, technology, and the human person, including its apology for the church's involvement in slavery.•       Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker — the American wing of the radical tradition Hanson traces.•&nb...

“It's too easy to look back at sciences of the past and say they were all fools. The exact same thing is gonna happen two hundred years from now when people look back at us.” — Paul Stob on the lessons of phrenology Step right up. Over the road from P.T. Barnum's American Museum in 19th century New York stood the city's more metaphorical circus — the Phrenological Cabinet, where admission was free and you could hold a murderer's skull in your hand. After the Barnum museum, it was the second most popular show in town. Although back then phrenology — the supposed science of skull size and head bumps — wasn't seen as the province of tricksters or clowns. So who created this 19th century American obsession with skulls, who created the phrenology phenomenon? In his new book, Empire of Skulls, the Vanderbilt scholar Paul Stob tells the phrenology story through the wealthy Fowler family — Orson, Lorenzo, and Charlotte — who financed and promoted this American circus. It was the Fowlers, Stob explains, who shaped phrenology into the intellectual glue of 19th century American progress and convinced reformers like Walt Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton of its social value. The appeal was self-improvement, that most American ideal. In Europe, your skull was your fate; in Fowler's America, you could supposedly reshape your brain like a bicep in order to grow new bumps. A gym for skulls. And, in P.T. Barnum fashion, it toured, bringing replica skull collections to the utopian communes of mid 19th century America. And in good (or bad) American fashion, this bunk often had a darker subtext with skulls pilfered from native burial mounds and, inevitably, a slaveholding phrenologist wing. Not everyone bought a ticket. Mark Twain visited Lorenzo Fowler's London depot incognito and was told his skull shape indicated an absence of humor. Three months later, he reappeared, this time as Twain, and got the reverse prognosis. But what finally killed phrenology wasn't Twain but the hitherto unparalleled bloodshed of the Civil War. Not even the Fowlers could glean much positive from the mountains of actual skulls at Gettysburg or Antietam. The circus had ended. Now it's the Fowlers who are the freaks. We gawk at them rather than their skulls. Step right up. The show must go on. Five Takeaways •       The Intellectual Glue of American Reform. From the 1830s to the 1860s — the era of reform — practically every movement to improve the young republic was led by believers in phrenology: abolition, women's suffrage, temperance, prison and education reform. Whitman, Susan B. Anthony, John Brown, Stanton, and Mott were all sympathetic; Orson Fowler barnstormed Massachusetts with his Amherst friend Henry Ward Beecher, who swore by phrenology for the rest of his life; John Brown Jr. worked at the Fowlers' Phrenological Cabinet until Bleeding Kansas called him west. The reason was one word: improvement. Even the enslaved, the phrenologists argued, must be freed — because every human being deserves the chance to improve.•       Curl Your Brain Like a Bicep. European phrenology said your skull was your fate. The Fowlers Americanized it: exercise a mental faculty, they taught, and the brain deposits new gray matter that literally pushes out the skull — self-improvement you could measure with calipers. Parents brought children for readings, returned years later, and found the head had grown just as prescribed: to the Fowlers, concrete proof. The ideal male head measured twenty-three inches around, the female twenty-two — women started in a different place, but nothing said they couldn't climb. And in 1843's Hereditary Descent, Orson made an argument radical for his century: that race mixing was a positive good for humanity.•       Second Only to Barnum. For three decades the Fowlers' Phrenological Cabinet at Clinton Hall — free of charge, unlike the American Museum kitty-corner across the street — was the second most visited tourist attraction in New York City. Visitors could hold a murderer's skull and feel for themselves why he killed, or trace the bumps of statesmen and writers. The empire was literal: the global skull trade of the era, from Samuel Morton's Crania Americana to skulls pilfered from native burial mounds, stocked the shelves. The Fowlers were millionaires, not billionaires — and Orson spent his share on a sixty-room octagon mansion, flagship of the 500-odd octagon houses he inspired across America.•       Twain's Two Visits — and the Birth of “Pseudoscience.” Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said reading a brain through a skull was like reading the inside of a safe by feeling the knob — and coined the word “pseudoscience” specifically for the phrenologists. Mark Twain ran the experiment: visiting Lorenzo Fowler's London depot incognito, he was told his organ of mirthfulness was a divot; three months later, business card presented, it was off the charts. Stob still insists on calling phrenology a science — because that is how its era understood it, because it was more accurate than much of the competition, and because one of the fathers of American neurology emerged from the Fowlers' own circle.•       We Are the Phrenologists Now. What killed phrenology was the Civil War: three decades of promising heaven on earth ran skull first into carts of actual skulls, and the utopia of self-improvement died on the battlefield. But the impulse never did. Phrenology, Stob argues, was self-help before the word existed — and its descendants fill the airport bookstore: astrology, Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, the genetic ancestry kit, all of them, in his words, scientifically garbage yet enormously significant in people's lives. The uncharitable reading of the past is a trap. In two hundred years, Stob warns, they will look back at our sciences of the self exactly the way we look at the Fowlers. About the Guest Paul Stob is Director of the Program in American Studies at Vanderbilt University, where he also teaches in the Department of Communication Studies and the Program in the Communication of Science and Technology. His research focuses on nineteenth-century American intellectual culture — religion, democracy, populism, and social movements. He is co-author, with Stephen Lucas, of The Art of Public Speaking, now in its fourteenth edition. His first trade book is Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind (Counterpoint, April 14, 2026). References: •       Empire of Skulls: Phrenology, the Fowler Family, and a New Nation's Quest to Unlock the Secrets of the Mind by Paul Stob (Counterpoint, April 2026). Jennifer Wright in The New York Times Book Review: “A thoroughly researched and intriguing work.”•       The Gospel According to Hobby Lobby by Michael Blanding — the recent Keen On episode on the Greens, this show's previous installment of ...

“You didn't have to look someone in the eye while you extinguished their life, and you could do it from a distance.” — Mike McIntire on what the gun changedIs there an American way of violence? Earlier this month, the film critic David Thomson blamed gory Hollywood movies, like Coppola's Godfather, for glorifying it. Today's guest has an even more brutal answer. According to Mike McIntire, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative journalist, it's the gun itself that can be blamed for the perpetual American plague of violence.Yes, the gun did it. In his new book Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, McIntire observes that every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, and significant mental illness. But what no other country has are schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers massacred on a regular basis. Up to forty thousand Americans die from guns every year — half of them suicides — and yet we treat these uniquely dangerous machines as if they were iPhones.How did this catastrophe happen? McIntire's answer focuses on the law as much as the culture. English common law imposed a duty to retreat in the event of conflict. Then, amid the centennial jingoism of 1876, an Indiana court declared that “retreat” was not “the tendency of the American mind.” A “true man,” explained an Ohio court, doesn't fly from threats. Stand your ground was born — and with it, a legal redefinition of what it means to be an American.And then there's the NRA — founded in 1871, ironically, by a former New York Times correspondent as a marksmanship club, and radicalized a century later. Its greatest coup was reframing the Second Amendment from militia clause into individual right — a maneuver that Warren Burger, a Republican chief justice, called the “biggest fraud” ever perpetrated on the American people. And today even the NRA looks moderate compared to new online radical right-wing gun rights groups.McIntire, a gun owner himself, doesn't preach. Instead he describes his first murder scene as a young cop reporter — the dead man peacefully lying in the grass, one small round hole in the side of his head. Clean, efficient, clinical. Like an iPhone app. That's the American way of violence. The gun did it. And will continue to do so until America retreats from its deadly love affair with the firearm.Five Takeaways•       It's the Gun Itself. Every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, mental illness, and toxic social media. What none of them has, McIntire argues, is a repetitive, constant problem of schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers being massacred. Up to forty thousand Americans a year die from guns — half of them suicides — and firearms account for three-quarters or more of all homicides. Yet America treats these uniquely dangerous things as ordinary consumer goods, bought, sold, marketed, and carried around like an iPhone or a wallet. Whatever role Hollywood plays — and McIntire takes David Thomson's argument seriously — you have to start with the one thing that is actually different: the gun.•       A Daily Trickle of Bloodshed. When a plane crash kills two hundred people, there is a massive media and government response. When two hundred people die in scattered shootings across fifty states in the same period, there is a local news story, and then nothing. Gun violence in America has slipped into the category of acceptable losses — background noise. The conundrum for gun-safety advocates is how to sustain attention on a crisis that only becomes visible when the next Sandy Hook or Parkland arrives.•       No Duty to Retreat. English common law, imported into the colonies, required you to retreat from a public confrontation before resorting to lethal force. Amid the centennial fervor of 1876, American courts began overturning homicide convictions on new grounds: retreat, declared Indiana's Supreme Court, was not “the tendency of the American mind,” and a “true man,” added an Ohio court, need not fly from an aggressor. The repeating rifle helped make the old duty obsolete — you cannot outrun a bullet — and stand your ground became canon. Every week, somewhere in America, the defense still succeeds.•       “The Biggest Fraud”: Rewriting the Second Amendment. The founders' great fear was a standing army; the amendment preserved a well regulated militia — trained and disciplined, not unlimited. Beginning in the 1970s, the NRA underwrote sympathetic scholarship, law reviews, and court cases in a deliberate long game to recast the amendment as an individual right — moving guns from common law, where legislatures can regulate, into constitutional law, where they largely cannot. Warren Burger, the Republican former chief justice, called it the biggest fraud he had ever seen perpetrated on the American people. Now the Supreme Court's “common use” test — found nowhere in the Constitution — means a weapon popular enough may be unbannable, with AR-15 bans next on the docket.•       The Death Star Eclipsed. McIntire's cache of internal NRA documents traces the organization's path from post-Civil War marksmanship club — cofounded by a former New York Times correspondent — to radicalized lobbying juggernaut, complete with pro-gun Democrats like John Dingell on its board. Today it has been outflanked by no-compromise groups like the Firearms Policy Coalition, which at any given moment is pushing more lawsuits against state gun laws than the NRA. Guns remain the third rail — Beto O'Rourke said “hell yes” to taking away AR-15s and has not held office since. The irony in McIntire's prescription: gun-safety advocates should copy the NRA's own generation-long legal strategy.About the GuestMike McIntire is an investigative journalist at The New York Times and a member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting teams, whose work has exposed everything from Russian election interference to the hidden financial incentives of policing. He is the author of Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports. He lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut. His new book is Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence (One Signal/Atria, July 2026).References:•       Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence by Mike McIntire (One Signal/Atria, July 2026). Jane Mayer: “McIntire is both a superb reporter and storyteller.”•       A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies by David Thomson — the recent Keen On guest whose argument about Hollywood and American violence opens the conversation.•       The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford — the classic anatomy of the American funeral business that lends this episode its central question.

“The fatal error is ours. Legislators set out a regulatory regime that keeps regulation at bay. The only other industry with a similar protection is the gun industry.” — Olivier SylvainThere are certain words in book titles that provoke. “Reclaiming”, for example. My guest today is happy to defend the provocation. Fordham law professor and former FTC senior advisor Olivier Sylvain argues in his new book, Reclaiming the Internet, that the internet was never really ours to begin with—and that the story about user control, free speech, and digital democratisation was always more nostalgia than reality.But Sylvain's argument in Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control—and How We Can Take It Back is not the usual big-tech-is-bad narrative (yawn). He doesn't blame the companies. He blames us—or rather, Congress. The fatal error, he says, was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996, which created a blanket immunity from liability for companies trafficking in user-generated content. The only other industry with comparable legal protection, he says, is the gun industry. That immunity enabled the attention economy's business model. Infinite scrolling = infinite advertising = infinite profit.What follows from that error is now everywhere: autoplay, algorithmic recommendation—design features engineered to hold your attention, not to facilitate free speech. Sylvain insists these companies aren't really platforms. They are, instead, services delivering content pursuant to their bottom line. And now the same Nineties playbook—innovation, user control, free speech—is being replayed with AI. Companies are deploying chatbots before they're ready, racing each other to market. A young man killed himself after a Gemini chatbot told him to and Google invoked the First Amendment in its defence.The fix, Sylvain argues, is not to abolish Section 230 but to attend to the business model itself: data minimisation, purpose limitations, and the kind of product-safety regulation that every other industry—from automobiles to toys to food—already accepts. I should disclose that my wife runs litigation at Google, so I'm all too familiar with the counter argument. But Sylvain makes a persuasive case even if his reclamation project is still a little too Rousseauean for my Hobbesian taste. Five Takeaways•       The Fatal Error Was Ours, Not Theirs: Sylvain doesn't blame big tech. He blames us—or rather, Congress. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act created a blanket immunity from liability for user-generated content. The only other industry with comparable protection is the gun industry. That legal shield became the business model.•       These Are Not Platforms: The word “platform” implies a neutral conduit connecting users. Sylvain says that's wrong. These are companies engineering your experience—infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic recommendation—to hold your attention and serve their bottom line. The free speech story is cover for a commercial design.•       The Same Mistake Is Happening with AI: The nineties playbook—innovation, user control, free speech—is being replayed with AI. Companies are deploying chatbots before they're ready, racing each other to market. Internal documents show they knew the dangers. A young man committed suicide after Gemini told him to. Google invoked the First Amendment in its defence.•       Data Protection Is the Real Fix: Sylvain argues for data minimisation and purpose limitations—rules that would only allow companies to collect information consistent with the purposes a consumer signed up for. Not to monetise it for opaque reasons. That would dampen the incentive to engineer addiction without touching free speech.•       There's a Bipartisan Consensus—but Only for Children: Something is shifting. Courts are rejecting Section 230 defences. Legislators on both sides agree something must be done. But the consensus only extends to protecting children. Sylvain thinks that's a mistake: a 36-year-old man just killed himself after talking to a chatbot. Adults are vulnerable too. About the GuestOlivier Sylvain is a professor of law at Fordham University, a former senior advisor to the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and a Senior Policy Research Fellow at Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute. His new book is Reclaiming the Internet: How Big Tech Took Control—and How We Can Take It Back (Columbia Global Reports).ReferencesReferences and previous Keen On episodes:•       Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (1996) and its evolution into blanket immunity for tech companies•       Gonzales v. Google (2023)—the Supreme Court case that declined to rule on Section 230 but allowed the merits to proceed•       The Character AI / Gemini chatbot suicide cases—ongoing litigation against Google•       Tim Wu on the extractive economics of platform capitalism — previous Keen On episode•       Julia Angwin, Zephyr Teachout, and Stewart Brand—referenced in the conversationAbout Keen On AmericaNobody 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 2,800 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:(00:00) - Introduction: What does “reclaiming” the Internet mean? (03:06) - The layered stack: pipes, platforms, and consumer-facing apps (06:01) - Was user control ever real? The ideology of the nineties (09:32) - The fatal error: Section 230 and blanket immunity (14:51) - Facebook as punching bag—and why Sylvain doesn't blame the companies (17:31) - Addiction, self-harm, and the design features that hold your attention (22:00) - The attention economy and the Gonzales v. Google case (26:35) - How we can take it back: data minimization and purpose limitations (29:02) - “These are not platforms” (31:21) - Europe, the First Amendment, and the right to be forgotten (33:06) - AI business ...

In this KEEN ON episode, Andrew talks to Soren Kaplan, author of Experiential Intelligence: Harness the Power of Experience for Personal and Business Breakthroughs". 

In this KEEN ON episode, Andrew talks to Joe Hart, author of "Take Command: Find Your Inner Strength, Build Enduring Relationships, and Live the Life You Want."

In this KEEN ON podcast, Andrew talks to Adam Kirsch, author of "The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us"

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Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Chris Schroeder, writer of the Seeking Awesome Substack newsletter and the author of Startup Rising.Christopher M. Schroeder is a Washington D.C. and New York City based entrepreneur and venture investor. He co-founded HealthCentral.com, one of the nation's largest social and content platforms in health and wellness, backed by Sequoia Capital, Polaris Ventures, The Carlyle Group, Allen & Company and IAC Corporation. The company was sold to the health media publisher, Remedy Health, in January 2012 where Schroeder remained a board advisor.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by William Deresiewicz, the author of The End of Solitude: Selected Essays on Culture and Society.William Deresiewicz is an award-winning author, essayist and critic, as well as being a frequent public speaker.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Soli Özel, professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.Soli Özel is professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, and a columnist for the Turkish daily Habertürk. Since 2002, Soli Özel has also contributed to Project Syndicate on different occasions, commenting on Turkish politics. He served on the board of directors of International Alert and is currently a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. He was also an advisor to the Chairman the Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association (TÜSIAD) on foreign policy issues. He has guest lectured at Harvard, Tufts, and other US universities and has taught at UC Santa Cruz, John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the University of Washington, Northwestern University, the Hebrew University, Boğaziçi University and Bilgi University (Istanbul). He also spent time as a fellow of St. Anthony's College, Oxford and was a visiting senior scholar at the EU Institute for Security Studies in Paris. He was a Fisher Family Fellow of the “Future of Diplomacy Program” at the Belfer Center of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. In 2013, he was a Keyman fellow and a visiting lecturer at Northwestern University. Soli Özel regularly contributes to the German Marshall Fund's web site's “ON Turkey” series. His work has been printed in different publications in Turkey and abroad, including The International Spectator, Internationale Politik and the Journal of Democracy. He also occupied the position of Editor-in-Chief at Foreign Policy Turkish edition. Soli Özel holds a Bachelor in Economics from Bennington College and a Master in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Gary Gerstle, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era.Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research at the University of Cambridge. He is the author and editor of more than ten books, including two prizewinners, American Crucible (2017) and Liberty and Coercion (2015). He is a Guardian columnist and has also written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New Statesman, Dissent, The Nation, and Die Zeit, among others. He frequently appears on BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, ITV 4, Talking Politics, and NPR.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Jenny Kleeman, author of Sex Robots and Vegan Meat: Adventures at the Frontier of Birth, Food, Sex, and Death.Jenny Kleeman is a journalist and documentary filmmaker who travels the world finding eye-catching, thought-provoking stories, and compelling characters. Her articles appear regularly in the Guardian and also in the Sunday Times (London), The Times of London, The New Statesman, and VICE. She has reported for BBC One's Panorama and HBO's VICE News Tonight. She won the One World Media Television Award for her work on Unreported World and was nominated for the Amnesty International Gaby Rado Award. She lives in England.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Julia Hobsbawm, author of The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future.Julia Hobsbawm is an entrepreneur, writer, and consultant who addresses the challenges of the hyper connected age, in particular remedies of what she has called Social Health for organizations. She is Chair of The Workshift Commission and is Founder and Chair of the content and connection business Editorial Intelligence. Her bestselling book The Simplicity Principle: Six Steps Towards Clarity in a Complex World was published in 2020 and won the American Book Fest Best Book Award 2020 – Business: General and the NYC Big Book Award 2020 – Self-Help: General. Awarded an OBE for services to business, her articles are amongst the most downloaded on the Strategy + Business site and she is an adviser to the British Academy's Future of the Corporation project.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Christopher Leonard, the author of The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy.Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Meat Racket and Kochland, which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Gary Marcus, author of Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust.Gary Marcus is a scientist, best-selling author, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Robust.AI and was founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine-learning company acquired by Uber in 2016. He is the author of five books, including Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times best seller Guitar Zero.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Larry Downes, author of Pivot to the Future: Discovering Value and Creating Growth in a Disrupted World.Larry Downes is an Internet industry analyst and author on developing business strategies in the age of disruptive innovation. He is the co-author of Big Bang Disruption and author of New York Times business best-seller, Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance (1998), which was named by The Wall Street Journal as one of the five most important books ever published on business and technology. He is a columnist on innovation for both The Washington Post and Forbes and writes regularly for Harvard Business Review. Downes has held faculty appointments at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Northwestern University School of Law, and the University of California-Berkeley's Haas School of Business, where he was Associate Dean of the School of Information. Since 2014, he has served as project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Peter Wehner, author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.Peter Wehner is a New York Times contributing Op-Ed writer covering American politics and conservative thought and a popular media commentator on politics. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and veteran of three White House administrations.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Chris Miller, author of Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology.Chris Miller is Assistant Professor of International History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He also serves as Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Eurasia Director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and as a Director at Greenmantle, a New York and London-based macroeconomic and geopolitical consultancy. He is the author of three previous books—Putinomics, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, and We Shall Be Masters—and he frequently writes for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The American Interest, and other outlets. He received a PhD in history from Yale University and an AB in history from Harvard University. Currently, he resides in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Elissa Epel, author of The Stress Prescription: Seven Days to More Joy and Ease.Elissa Epel, PhD, is a leading health psychologist who studies stress, aging, and obesity. She is the director of UCSF's Aging, Metabolism, and Emotion Center and is associate director of its Center for Health and Community. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and serves on scientific advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health and the Mind & Life Institute. She has received awards from Stanford University, the Society of Behavioral Medicine, and the American Psychological Association. She is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Telomere Effect.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Matthew Krogh, author of The White House Plumbers: The Seven Weeks That Led to Watergate and Doomed Nixon's Presidency.Matthew Krogh (1970 - ) is a professional change maker focused on issues of climate change, fossil fuels, and policy. Mostly based in Bellingham, Washington, he has spent his career in nonprofit activism at various organizations, and has worked as a freelance writer, ranger, and geographic analyst. He currently co-owns Warthog Information Systems, a company focused on using geographic information to make the world a better place. He is grateful for the opportunity to amplify his dad's important life lessons through co-authoring The White House Plumbers, along with its earlier iteration Integrity.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Peter Coy, New York Times Opinion writer.Peter Coy writes about economics, business and finance for Opinion. He has been covering the topics for four decades.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Martin Rees, author of On the Future: Prospects for Humanity.Martin Rees is Astronomer Royal, and has been Master of Trinity College and Director of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. As a member of the UK's House of Lords and former President of the Royal Society, he is much involved in international science and issues of technological risk. His books include Our Cosmic Habitat (Princeton), Just Six Numbers, and Our Final Hour (published in the UK as Our Final Century). He lives in Cambridge, UK.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Vivek Wadhwa, authors of From Incremental to Exponential: How Large Companies Can See the Future and Rethink Innovation.Vivek Wadhwa is director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization and executive in residence at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University; vice president of innovation and strategy at Singularity University; fellow at the Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance, Stanford University; and distinguished visiting scholar, Halle Institute of Global Learning, Emory University. He is a regular columnist for the Washington Post, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and Forbes.com. In February 2012, the US government awarded him distinguished recognition as an “Outstanding American by Choice” for his “commitment to this country and to the common civic values that unite us as Americans.”

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Rob Reich and Jeremy Weinstein, authors of System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot.Rob Reich is professor of political science and codirector of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at Stanford University.Jeremy M. Weinstein went to Washington with President Obama in 2009. A key staffer in the White House, he foresaw how new technologies might remake the relationship between governments and citizens, and launched Obama's Open Government Partnership. When Samantha Power was appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations, she brought Jeremy to New York, first as her chief of staff and then as her deputy. He returned to Stanford in 2015 as a professor of political science, where he now leads Stanford Impact Labs.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Tony Hiss, the author of Rescuing the Planet: Protecting Half the Land to Heal the Earth.Tony Hiss is the author of fifteen books, including the award-winning The Experience of Place. He was a staff writer at The New Yorker for more than thirty years, was a visiting scholar at New York University for twenty-five years, and has lectured around the world. He lives in New York with his wife, young-adult writer Lois Metzger.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Joanne McNeil, author of Lurking: How a Person Became a User.Joanne McNeil was the inaugural winner of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation's Arts Writing Award for an emerging writer. She has been a resident at Eyebeam, a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Lurking is her first book.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Jonathan Rauch, author of Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth.Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer of The Atlantic. His previous books include Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. Rauch resides in Washington, DC.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Charles Kupchan, author of Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World.Dr. Charles A. Kupchan is Professor of International Affairs in the School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University, and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Lev Golinkin, author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka.Lev Golinkin is the author of A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka. Mr. Golinkin, a graduate of Boston College, came to the US as a child refugee from the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkov (now called Kharkiv) in 1990. His op-eds and essays on the Ukraine crisis have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and Time.com, among others; he has been interviewed by WSJ Live and HuffPost Live.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by Maciej Kisilowski, director of Initiative for Regulatory Innovation Research Center.Maciej Kisilowski is assistant professor of law and public management at CEU Business School and director of Initiative for Regulatory Innovation research center. He holds an MA and a PhD in law from Yale, MPA in economics and public policy from Princeton, and MBA with distinction from Insead. He also holds another MA and a PhD in law from Warsaw University. His research interests include theory of regulation and public management.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.In this episode, Andrew is joined by J. Bradford DeLong, author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century.J. Bradford DeLong, an economic historian, is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton administration. He writes a widely read economics blog, now at braddelong.substack.com. He lives in Berkeley, California.