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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

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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37:58

Patrimonial Capitalism: Peter Hall on Trump, Orbán &...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/22

“I think patrimonialism is exactly the right phrase to describe the way in which the current administration is governing.” — Peter Hall Neoliberalism is dead. So what comes next? Peter Hall, a Harvard political economist for the last four decades, says the capitalist locomotive left the neoliberal station years ago. His new book, Governing Growth, names the next stop: the “knowledge economy,” the digital, globalized capitalism of the 21st century. The knowledge economy made San Francisco,

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45:52

The Pursuit of Unhappiness: George Loewenstein on Why...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/21

“I think our genetic makeup makes us miserable. We evolved to be miserable.” — George Loewenstein Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yeah, yeah. We’ve all heard that one before. When Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he remixed Locke’s “life, liberty and estate,” replacing the idea of property with happiness. As we know from last week’s conversation with the historian Joshua Specht, America’s age-old love affair with real estate has been perpetually

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37:10

Are the Doomers Now Doomed? A Bad Week for the AI...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/20

Last week we were panicking about a supposedly imminent AI apocalypse. Seven days later, Keith Teare argues, government oversight is about as far away as it could possibly be. That’s because Musk, Altman and Amodei agreed to police themselves and test each other’s models. The doomers, says the publisher of That Was The Week, have lost not just this week’s battle but probably the whole war. So who will then write the AI rules? The people building the models, Keith says — as with California’s

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54:52

Mortgaging the American Dream: Joshua Specht on the...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/19

My hometown of San Francisco has the unholy problem of a mansion shortage and mass homelessness. AI money is driving house prices to record highs, our mayor has declared a rent emergency, while in New York City housing affordability has become so acute as to become a rare bipartisan concern. This unreality of the real-estate market has heated up both local and national politics. But as Joshua Specht argues in his new book, Property Values, a history that runs from the rent wars of the 1840s

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51:25

It's Happening Here: Rosan Smits on Fascism in...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/18

“Today’s fascists don’t look at all like those from the past. What is similar is how they act. You’ll recognize the fascist by what they do.” — Rosan Smits Fascism is a reality in both America and Europe. At least according to Rosan Smits, the Dutch political scientist whose This Is Fascism: A Wake-Up Call to Resist is already a bestseller in Europe. Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here in 1935 as a warning about the possibility of fascism in Great Depression America. Not only does

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55:44

Eight Profiles in Cowardice: Jacob Weisberg on Bezos,...

Keen On America ·

2026/09/17

“Since Trump’s second election we’ve been in a wave of cowardice, where people have decided — partly by observing what others like them are doing — that there’s no viability to standing up on principle.” — Jacob Weisberg Michelle Goldberg devoted her Monday New York Times column to two new books shaming the elites who caved to Trump. Both of them have appeared on the show this week: Susan Neiman’s Call It Evil on Monday, and now Jacob Weisberg’s Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of

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