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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

society & culture news commentary

All Episodes

44:00

Crowning Our Engineer Kings: Jensen Huang for President?

Keen On America ·

2026/10/11

Jensen Huang biographer Stephen Witt argued in a New York Times op-ed this week that the leather-jacketed Nvidia CEO is the most powerful engineer on Earth. It’s not hard to prove. Just look at who (sans leather jacket) was sitting right next to you-know-who at last week’s AI White House lunch.America is run by lawyers, we were told by the China expert Dan Wang, and China by engineers. But nobody seems to have told either Trump or Huang. In his embrace of Huang’s supposed wisdom on

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41:18

Karuna Karuna: Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi on...

Keen On America ·

2026/10/10

It’s always fun to have Nobel Prize winners on the show. Recently, we’ve hosted the journalist-dissident Maria Ressa, the economist Simon Johnson and the gloomy godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton. Today it’s the Delhi-based Kailash Satyarthi, who won the 2014 Peace Prize for his fight against child exploitation.He is now trying to globalize the ideal of compassion. But for Satyarthi, compassion doesn’t mean kindness, empathy, mercy, or even pity. In his new book Karuna (a Sanskrit word that

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67:39

A World We Share: Roger Berkowitz on Hannah Arendt...

Keen On America ·

2026/10/09

“A human being is worth more than his opinions”, Hannah Arendt wrote to her Zionist friend Gershom Scholem in 1946, after he read her critical essay on Zionism and accused her of betraying the Jewish people. So how to value a human being? What, according to Arendt, are we worth? According to the Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz, our value lies in the power of friendship. That’s what he calls, in his new book, A World We Share. It’s what makes us human.Berkowitz, who runs the Hannah Arendt

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61:52

AI and Political Freedom: Anthropic's Matthew...

Keen On America ·

2026/10/08

Matthew Botvinick works at Anthropic, where he leads the Anthropic Institute’s research on AI and the rule of law. His new book, AI and Political Freedom, focuses on AI’s risk to democracy and how we should respond to it. It’s important to note that for this Princeton University Press book, Botvinick doesn’t represent Anthropic. That said, the fact that he just happens to be a senior policy guy at Dario’s trillion dollar startup makes both Matt and his book particularly intriguing.He

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41:03

The President and the Oligarch: Greg Steinmetz on...

Keen On America ·

2026/10/07

The retired money manager Greg Steinmetz has now written three books about very rich men. The first, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, was about the sixteenth-century Augsburg banker Jacob Fugger. The second, American Rascal, was about the nineteenth-century robber baron Jay Gould. The third, The President and the Oligarch, came out this week, and this time the rich man has a president as a co-star. It’s a book about the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Andrew W. Mellon.Mellon

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42:56

Do We All Really Need a Digital Chief of Staff? Grok...

Keen On America ·

2026/10/06

Everyone, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare breathlessly announced this week, is about to be offered an AI personal assistant. Or, to put it in Silicon-Valley-speak, a digital chief of staff. OpenAI unveiled Dot at its developer day. Meta already has Muse, Musk has Grok Bot, and a British start-up called Instinct raised a billion dollars at a ten billion dollar valuation while adding group chat, so that an entire team can share this same digital master of the universe. My instinct is

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46:38

The Future of Truth: How AI Reshaped Steven...

Keen On America ·

2026/10/05

“A book about truth needs to be truthful.” — Steven Rosenbaum In April, the New York City based tech impresario Steven Rosenbaum came on the show to discuss The Future of Truth, his then new book about artificial intelligence. He warned that AI is a spectacularly good liar and that we should be concerned about the future of truth. A few weeks later, The New York Times reported that the book contained untrue quotations — among them one (mis)attributed to the notable tech journalist Kara

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41:32

Everything Is Everything: Steven E. Jones on Tom...

Keen On America ·

2026/10/04

“When Dylan was booed, at the festivals or on tour, even over in England — some of that was Tom Wilson’s fault.” — Steven E. Jones Five years ago, the Los Angeles based Ron Brownstein came on the show to argue that 1974 was the greatest year in American cultural history. Steven E. Jones has a rival candidate. His new book, Everything Is Everything, makes the case for 1966. In contrast with Brownstein, Jones builds his argument not around a Hollywood star but around a record producer most

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47:14

How to Survive Authoritarianism: Dan Storyev on a...

Keen On America ·

2026/10/03

“The United States is speed running into a more authoritarian model that the Russians have been living in for quite some time now.” — Dan Storyev How to survive authoritarianism in the United States? Maybe we can learn from the Russians. At least according to the Russian-American Dan Storyev, co-author (with Maria Kuznetsova) of How to Survive Authoritarianism, a phrasebook which provides a hundred Russian words for the nasty political things Americans can see but can’t yet name. Storyev’s

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31:57

An Inconvenient Woman: Keri Leigh Merritt on Lillian...

Keen On America ·

2026/10/02

“She is absolutely a Cassandra. She is unafraid to tell the stark naked truth, no matter how ugly it is.” — Keri Leigh Merritt In April, Gal Beckerman came on the show to identify the ten qualities of being a dissident. They included pessimism, humour and recklessness. But he left one out: inconvenience. Dissidents are profoundly inconvenient people — to the government, to society, sometimes even to themselves. Take, for example, Lillian Smith, author of the bestselling (and banned) 1944

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57:26

Biography of a Dangerous Idea: Andrew Curran on How...

Keen On America ·

2026/10/01

“The Enlightenment may have produced race, but it also produced what we might call anti-racism.” — Andrew Curran Most of us imagine the eighteenth century Enlightenment positively. As the victory of reason, science and individual rights over superstition and intolerance. But Andrew Curran, who has spent his career interpreting the Enlightenment, has a more nuanced view. Indeed, his new book, Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson, suggests

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57:47

Artificial Intimacy: Sherry Turkle on Who We Become...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/30

“The original sin of generative AI is having chatbots speak in the first person.” — Sherry Turkle Fifteen years ago, at the height of the social media boom, the MIT technology scholar Sherry Turkle came on the show to warn that we were now “alone together.” She was, of course, chillingly prescient. A decade and a half later, she warns in her new book Artificial Intimacy that if social media came for our attention, AI is now gunning for our human capacity for attachment. Who — or, more

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51:17

London Station: David McCloskey on the CIA, MI6 & the...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/29

“What if we fell out with the Brits? What if the agency and the Brits started spying on each other again?” — David McCloskeyWhat if the Americans and the British started spying on each other again? That’s the premise of London Station, David McCloskey’s fifth novel, out today. It isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Before the Second World War those perfidious Brits did spy on America, breaking American ciphers and running influence campaigns in New York to drag the United States into the

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48:00

The Age of Cures: Barry Werth on How Big Pharma Once...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/28

“Kennedy and Trump are taking a wrecking ball to probably the most important thing we have done consistently better than the rest of the world over the last eighty years, and I don’t get it.” — Barry Werth Last week on the show, the San Francisco based AI mogul and Eureka Machine author Richard Socher promised a scientific renaissance in which AI will cure everything. Socher’s eureka moment, however, may have already occurred. Not with AI, but with big pharma. At least according to Barry

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47:46

A Fabulous Debt: Robin Wigglesworth on How Bonds...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/27

Amidst all the talk of an AI bubble, bonds are back in the news. The world’s two leading business newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, both feature stories this weekend warning about bond ructions and surging yields. While these warnings might only interfere with the sleep of bond geeks, they are a good reminder of the centrality of the bond market to our prosperity. For all their financial geekiness, Robin Wigglesworth knows that bonds matter. He edits Alphaville,

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49:40

And Now For Something Completely Similar: Untangling...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/26

Lenin supposedly said there are decades where nothing happens, and weeks where decades happen. This wasn’t one of those weeks. It might have looked like a historic week. The AI circus rolled into the UN with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei addressing the Security Council on the peril facing “humanity as a whole.” Britain and Australia weighed in with middling diplomatic or regulatory AI initiatives of their own. Trump renamed AI as superintelligence. But none of this changed anything. The UN

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49:43

Trump Has Finally Lost the Plot: Jonathan Rauch &...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/25

“His intent is getting worse, but his capacity is diminishing. The next two years will be some kind of mad race to figure out which of these two things will prevail.” — Jonathan Rauch As the nights get shorter, we are drifting into the autumn of the patriarch. That, at least, is the view of two old friends of the show, Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner, who argued in The New York Times that Trump has finally lost the plot. So will this really go down as the fall that Trump failed? Rauch and

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43:53

Proudly-Jewish & Never-Boring: Alan Dershowitz on His...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/24

“A good divorce is better than a bad marriage, and this is a good divorce.” — Alan Dershowitz The American lawyer Alan Dershowitz says he’s been voting Democrat since John F. Kennedy. He even defended Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton and Alan Cranston in court. But, at 88 years old, Dershowitz has now left — or, as he puts it, been forced out of the Dems, in the same way Ronald Reagan was sixty years ago. His new book Why I Quit the Dems and So Should You is both a history of his souring relations

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49:02

Eureka in Silicon Valley! Richard Socher on Why AI...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/24

“There’s no realistic scenario where AI wipes out all of humanity. It’s like a mix of sci-fi.” — Richard Socher Eighteen months ago, when he last came on the show, the German-born but San Francisco-based AI whizz kid Richard Socher was running You.com. He’s now also the co-founder of Recursive, a $4 billion start-up with fewer than thirty employees, focused on self-improving superintelligence that automates the scientific method. As if that isn’t enough, he has a new book out this week, The

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55:30

Our Own Worst Enemies: Robert Pape on America’s Age...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/22

“Democracies don’t die silently, sleepwalking. Democracies die by going through periods of pretty serious political violence.” — Robert Pape Forget all the long-term civil war scenarios of everyone from Kurt Andersen to Stephen Marche. Today’s guest Robert Pape has spent the last thirty years at the University of Chicago studying political violence, and his warning is about the next six weeks rather than the next ten years. In his new book, Our Own Worst Enemies, Pape argues that tens of

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