Keen On America
Nobody asks sharper or more impertinent questions than Andrew Keen. In KEEN ON, Andrew cross-examines the world’s smartest people on politics, economics, history, the environment, and tech. If you want to make sense of our complex world, check out the daily questions and the answers on KEEN ON. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best-known technology and politics broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running show How To Fix Democracy and the author of four critically acclaimed books about the future, including the international bestselling CULT OF THE AMATEUR. Keen On is free to listen to and will remain so. If you want to stay up-to-date on new episodes and support the show, please subscribe to Andrew Keen’s Substack. Paid subscribers will soon be able to access exclusive content from our new series Keen On America – keenon.substack.com
Episodes
“Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone actually threatened his plan, he just couldn’t imagine it. And that person got more than 55% — a two-thirds-plus majority. Orbán shot himself in the foot.” — Marc Loustau
On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the populist who invented the illiberal playbook — got booted out of office by th...
“Anyone that’s properly using AI now knows that you tell it what you want, it gives you a plan, carries out the work, and you judge and tweak. You’re not a passive victim — you’re an active user with outcomes in mind.” — Keith Teare
Do we really want a no-hands job from Silicon Valley? That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare — who thinks all tech innovation results in human progress — thinks we do. No hands, no ...
“Trump has no strategy and no endgame. No amount of success in tactics will win. No military campaign has ever been won solely from the air.” — Jason Pack
Happy May Day! Today’s papers are leading with stories about Obamacare, a Gaza flotilla, and the price of oil. Everything but the story at both the front and back of our minds. Only the Wall Street Journal leads with Iran. Which is more than a bit odd, given that America...
“Nobody has ever made money selling America short. We’re an extraordinary country.” — John Steele Gordon
To honor America’s semiquincentennial birthday, the Wall Street Journal has been celebrating the most impactful American inventions of all time:
1. Internet
2. Light bulb
3. Integrated circuit
4. Personal computer
5. Airplane
The railroad doesn’t even make the top twenty. But the business historian John Steele Gordon valida...
“It’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses are the ransom. The damage to the car is fifty to seventy-five billion dollars a year.” — Anja Shortland
Cybercrime is booming. Ransomware attacks — where criminal gangs encrypt your servers and hold your data hostage until you pay — cost victims somewhere between fifty and seventy-five billion dollars a year in damage. The hackers themselves pocket ar...
“Violence has been misdiagnosed. And there’s a misdiagnosis that has caused us to not be able to control it as we could.” — Dr. Gary Slutkin
Human violence appears ubiquitous. In Iran. In Gaza. In Ukraine. In Sudan. In American cities and homes. So widespread, indeed, that it seems naturally hardwired into us. Our species-being, so to speak.
But, for Dr. Gary Slutkin, there is nothing inevitable about human violence. Slutk...
America is once again at war. Helen Benedict is one of our most distinguished writers on the moral consequences of war. Her new novel, The Soldier’s House, is set in the aftermath of the Iraq war. But it could, equally, be about the aftermath of Afghanistan. Or even Iran. “The war turned me into a monster,” veterans tell Benedict, again and again. “How am I supposed to face my wife, my children, when I know I’m a monster?”
...
“All these groups from 1945 on said: we can resist any hate group in America, even the Ku Klux Klan, as long as we take them on one at a time. But our great fear is if these right-wing groups figure out a way to communicate with one another in a more instantaneous way — we are in big trouble.” — Steven J. Ross
It’s not just springtime for Hitler in America. It’s winter, summer and fall too. There is what the historian of A...
“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free.” — Current Affairs editor, quoted by Brewster Kahle
The internet, we were promised, would remember everything. Rather than memory, however, it is now most distinguished by its digital forgetfulness. That’s the warning in Vanishing Culture, a new series of essays published by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive. In its concluding essay by Brewster Kahle — founder of the I...
“White men are 29 percent of the population but hold 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEO positions, 90 percent of venture capital, and 98 percent of all money managed by money managers. Is that because they’re smarter? Or is it because there is preference, inequality, and active bias in favor of white men?” — Steve Phillips
Are white men really smarter than other Americans? Some white men might think so, but few others are convi...
“Sam Altman’s best case scenario is that abundance lifts everyone up to a much higher standard, but it also exacerbates inequality. That was his favorite outcome.” — Keith Teare
This week’s editorial from Keith Teare, publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, is entitled “Adulting.” His verdict: this was the week the AI industry finally started behaving like grown-ups. The evidence: OpenAI launched ChatGPT 5.5 and Ima...
“The burdens of slavery did crush some people. They elicited outright armed rebellion from others. And between those two extremes, there’s all manner of response. But black culture was what most historians say it was: rich, semiautonomous — and yet there is all kinds of cross-fertilization that goes on.” — Melvin Patrick Ely
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the republic, America is still struggling to come to terms ...
“They weren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side.” — Peter Wehner on Hegseth and Trump
According to Peter Wehner, something has gone terribly wrong in America. And that something, Wehner has been warning us now for more than ten years, is Donald Trump. In his latest Atlantic piece, “Hegseth’s Unholy War,” Wehner aims his moral rifle at Trump’s latest outrage, the ...
“Liberalism was founded in the middle of the eighteenth century as a revolutionary philosophy — a philosophy that tried to subvert the old world. That set of beliefs has continued to be radical and revolutionary. When liberalism fell into decadence, it examined itself, subverted itself, and became once again a revolutionary faith.” — Adrian Wooldridge
We’ve lost our revolutionary center. At least according to Adrian Wooldr...
“Pessimism is not fatalism. Fatalism is the belief that things will always necessarily be worse. Pessimism is the belief that things will probably get worse. Within that ‘probably,’ it opens up space for action.” — Gal Beckerman
In the first months of Trump II, Gal Beckerman watched American society do something that shocked him: comply. In one pathetic example after another, prominent law firms, universities, and senior f...
“These technologies are morally agnostic. They could be the best things ever and the worst things ever, and the determinant is us.” — Jamie Metzl
Two summers ago, Jamie Metzl gave a talk on AI and spirituality at the Chautauqua Institution in Upstate New York. That same spot where Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage a couple of years earlier. Rather than an assassination attempt, Metzl’s talk triggered The AI Ten Commandme...
“I felt sad after every interview. Because it’s not real. These AI are able to elicit a very convincing illusion of empathy — even love. But it’s fake. And these people are alone.” — Victoria Hetherington
One night in 2023, the developers at Replika — a so-called AI intimacy company — changed a few lines of code. Thousands of people woke the next morning, kissed (so to speak) their AI partners, and received cold, clinical ...
“Let’s just say it out loud,” Keith Teare, publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, says. “AI is not dangerous.”
Not all of you will agree. I’m certainly not so sure. But the gruff Yorkshireman is convinced that AI can only benefit humanity. For him, with his scientific faith in historical progress, today’s AI revolution is a glorious combination of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. The only danger, he...
“A mark of an intelligent person is humility. If you have the right amount of humility, then you’re seeking out knowledge from others rather than thinking you’re going to invent something new. It’s really about executing well on ideas.” — Deborah Kenny
When her husband died of leukemia, leaving her a single mother of three small children, Deborah Kenny read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. She discovered her own m...
“If God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or for liberal democracy? That actually happened. Now you would be considered an idiot or a fool to do that.” — Daniel Bessner
Co-host of the American Prestige podcast Daniel Bessner is a bit of a bomb thrower. Which is why he’s a regular on the show. Today, he has a bomb in each hand. As the co-...
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