Keen On America

Andrew Keen
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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

  1. How the Democrats Screwed Bernie: Tad Devine on the 2016 Campaign, the Rigged Economy, and What’s at Stake in 2028

    1 day ago ·  Video

    How the Democrats Screwed Bernie: Tad Devine on the 2016 Campaign, the Rigged Economy, and What’s at Stake in 2028

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

    46 min
  2. A Sudden Flicker of Light: Has David Thomson Fallen Out of Love With the Movies?

    1 day ago ·  Video

    A Sudden Flicker of Light: Has David Thomson Fallen Out of Love With the Movies?

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

    57 min
  3. Was the Colonization of North America a Genocidal Project? David Silverman on the Tragic Fate of Native Americans

    3 days ago ·  Video

    Was the Colonization of North America a Genocidal Project? David Silverman on the Tragic Fate of Native Americans

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

    43 min
  4. Universal Basic Capitalism: The Next American Revolution Or More Trickle Down Economics?

    3 days ago ·  Video

    Universal Basic Capitalism: The Next American Revolution Or More Trickle Down Economics?

    “The pinnacle of capitalism is still flawed. Any idea that it’s perfect — this idea of the perfect union — is deeply flawed as a concept and always has been.” — Keith Teare   With July 4 finally done, we can look forward to the next American revolution. Just as AI is revolutionizing the economy, so too are radical ideas about harnessing this disruption for the benefit of all Americans. One idea that is acquiring more and more currency in and out of Silicon Valley is what we might call universal basic capitalism.   Six months ago, nobody knew what “universal basic capital” even meant. Now everyone is talking about it. What if the answer to inequality, AI disruption, and the slow hollowing out of the American economy isn’t a return to socialism — but a new, more distributive kind of capitalism? As That Was The Week’s Keith Teare argues in our weekly tech roundup, universal basic capitalism offers the best way to simultaneously empower all Americans without turning them into the welfare “queens” so disparaged by neo-liberals.   Economists agree that AI is going to eliminate vast numbers of jobs, probably within the decade, certainly in time for America’s 300th anniversary. One fix is the democratic socialist strategy of tax and spend through the state. Universal basic capitalism, in contrast, takes the wealth generated by AI companies, puts it into a sovereign wealth fund, and distributes the dividends directly to citizens. Rather than an ever-more-bloated bureaucracy redistributing wealth, the state miraculously shrinks.   It’s a neat idea. Instead of welfare queens, we get shareholding kings. But is this really the next American revolution? Or just the trickle-down economics of the DOGE crowd for an AI age of mass unemployment?   Five Takeaways   •       America the Beautiful — and Its Profound Flaws: Keith’s 250th editorial acknowledges America’s extraordinary achievements: the growth in wealth, living standards, and democratic governance over two and a half centuries. The fact that Donald Trump won the presidency, Keith notes, is itself evidence that the people still rule — most intellectuals didn’t want him, but the people voted for him. At the same time: capitalism at its best still has huge swathes of poor people who can barely eat. The perfect union is deeply flawed as a concept and always has been. America has probably peaked in world terms. The next 250 years are not a foregone conclusion.   •       1,200 New Millionaires a Day: The American Prosperity Machine: The stat of the week: the United States added 1,200 new millionaires a day last year, bringing its total to nearly 24 million. China has just over 5 million; Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea, Australia, France, and the UK are all under 3 million. The math: US GDP per capita is around $85,000 a year; China’s is around $20,000-something. In California in particular, where house prices routinely exceed $1 million and there are 50–60 million residents, the numbers are doing a lot of work disguising a highly skewed distribution concentrated in coastal cities.   •       Universal Basic Capital vs Democratic Socialism: The State Shrinks: Keith draws a sharp distinction between UBC — the sovereign wealth fund model — and democratic socialism as practised by Mamdani, Sanders, and AOC. In the socialist tradition, you seize the state through elections and use taxes and spending for good ends. Under UBC, the sovereign wealth fund becomes the distribution mechanism and the state shrinks to an administrative function: roads, health, education, defence. The actual AI companies don’t become the state. The state becomes a shareholder in the fund. Money flows to citizens; the state shrinks. It’s an interesting inversion.   •       The AI Jobs Debate: Short-Term Boom, Long-Term Automation: Erik Brynjolfsson of Stanford is at the centre of a debate this week. One body of evidence says companies using AI are hiring faster than companies that don’t — Amazon and Microsoft both announced plans to put thousands of engineers on the front line helping customers implement AI. But Brynjolfsson’s longer view says automation will accelerate: the things you need a front-end engineer for today will be done by agents tomorrow. Keith agrees with the long view: declining employment over five to fifteen years, which doesn’t have to be a bad thing if universal basic capital is in place. Look at Musk’s robot plans. It is definitely declining employment.   •       Om Malik: The Liberal Humanist Who Prefigured Substack: Om Malik died this week at 59 — the tech journalist and venture capitalist who founded GigaOm and co-hosted the Crunchies with Mike Arrington. Keith knew him from Iceland, from photography, from the whole era of early tech blogging. His assessment: Om was a liberal with a capital L and a humanist, often writing critically about the extremes of capitalism and favourably about remedies. He became a capitalist to be independent, and that independence gave him freedom. Without GigaOm and TechCrunch, there would be no Substack. The line runs from the New York Times to GigaOm to TechCrunch to Substack to That Was The Week. Thank you, Om.   About the Guest   Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was The Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and Andrew’s regular TWTW co-host.   References:   •       That Was The Week by Keith Teare — the newsletter on which this episode is based.   •       Erik Brynjolfsson (Stanford) — referenced for his argument that AI will accelerate long-term job automation, despite short-term hiring booms.   •       Jennifer Harris, “The Generational Force Hollowing Out the Economy,” The New York Times — referenced in the closing discussion.   •       Om Malik — founder of GigaOm; venture capitalist at True Ventures; died July 4, 2026, aged 59.   •       MG Siegler — referenced for his obituary of Om Malik.   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.   Website Substack YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify   Chapters:

    38 min
  5. The United States of Oddity: Madeleine Schwartz on How the World Sees America at 250

    5 days ago ·  Video

    The United States of Oddity: Madeleine Schwartz on How the World Sees America at 250

    “What is happening today in America is part of a global political turn — and what’s odd is how little the American people seem to realize it.” — Madeleine Schwartz   So we’ve finally arrived. America is 250 today. But where, exactly, have we come? How should we think about the United States of America on July 4, 2026?   Rather than peering inwards, Madeleine Schwartz — the Paris-based founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial — reverses the lens. Her anthology, How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press), gathers twelve essays from writers in India, Canada, South Africa, Ukraine, Palestine, Taiwan, Turkey, Cuba, Egypt, Argentina, Italy, and Ireland. The result might be the most honest birthday message that America will receive today.   What these writers all observe is the same extraordinary ambivalence about the United States. They describe a country that defines itself as the democratic purveyor of justice, while operating as a vast imperial and economic power that shapes the lives of the rest of the world. What’s odd — and Schwartz uses that word carefully — is how few Americans seem to realise this is how the world sees them.   “The question of America is vast. It is unrelenting and unanswerable and will not be silenced,” the Gaza poet Muhammad al-Zaqzouq notes in his essay. Happy birthday, odd America. You might not know it, but the rest of the world is watching. And they won’t forget what they’ve seen.   Five Takeaways   •       The World’s Ambivalence: Purveyor of Hope, Imperial Power: Schwartz’s central finding from twelve countries of essays: the world does not simply hate or love America. It holds a profound ambivalence — between the country that presents itself as the beacon of hope and democracy, and the country that is a vast imperial and economic power that shapes the lives of billions who have no vote in its elections. This ambivalence is, she argues, almost impossible to fully understand from inside the United States, where the assumption of benign intent is so deep. The essays collectively diagnose what the US’s retreat from that self-image means for the world’s ability to find alternative frameworks.   •       Turkey and America: Erdoğan and Trump Have Learned From Each Other: Kaya Genç’s essay from Turkey is one of the collection’s most original: the Turkish right has long admired the vast powers of the American presidency as a model to follow, even as that same right has been characterised by American commentators as anti-American or Islamist. The admiration was never for American values — for free speech or civil liberties — but for the structural power of the presidency. Trump, meanwhile, has learned from Erdoğan’s playbook of media control, legal intimidation, and institutional capture. The learning has gone in both directions. What is happening in America, Genç argues, is not exceptional — it is part of a global turn.   •       Taiwan: Self-Defence Classes and Going It Alone: Michelle Kuo’s essay from Taiwan describes a country that has fundamentally revised its relationship with the United States. For decades, many Taiwanese believed that by adhering to certain principles — upholding liberal values, supporting LGBTQ rights, maintaining civil liberties — they would gain American favour and the protection that came with it. That thinking is now gone. People in Taiwan are taking self-defence classes, preparing for a possible Chinese invasion without the expectation of outside help. And the values they uphold — civil liberties, LGBTQ rights — are upheld now because they actually want them, not to please Washington.   •       The Dial: 90 Countries, One Third in Translation, Based in Paris: Schwartz founded The Dial four years ago in response to a sense that American media was turning catastrophically inward, unable to understand its own moment without comparison to what was happening elsewhere. The magazine publishes work from some 90 countries, about a third of it in translation, and aims to bring voices from outside the Anglophone foreign correspondent establishment. Several pieces from the book were reprinted in The Guardian. The anthology grew from a special issue published during the 2024 election, asking writers from around the world to look at the United States — a reversal of the magazine’s usual direction. Schwartz will be talking about the book in Paris on July 4, not eating hot dogs.   •       The Question of America: The Gaza Poet’s Unanswerable Verdict: Muhammad al-Zaqzouq is a Gazan poet and father of three who has spent years trying to reach the United States, only to find that under Trump’s America, asylum is no longer a possibility. His essay traces a lifetime of ambivalence — America as site of exclusion and segregation, America as specter of another possible life, America as the dream that institutions offer and that the firm hand of diplomacy snatches away. Schwartz reads the closing lines in the interview: “The question of America is vast. It is unrelenting and unanswerable and will not be silenced.” Of all the voices in the anthology, it is the one that stays.   About the Guest   Madeleine Schwartz is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Dial, an online magazine of culture, politics, and ideas with a focus on local writing from around the world. She is the editor of How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump (The New Press, June 9, 2026). Her writing appears in The London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. She teaches journalism at Sciences Po in Paris, where she is based.   References:   •       How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump edited by Madeleine Schwartz / The Dial (The New Press, June 9, 2026). Essays from India, Canada, South Africa, Ukraine, Palestine, Taiwan, Turkey, Cuba, Egypt, Argentina, Italy, and Ireland.   •       The Dial — Schwartz’s magazine of international writing, based in Paris.   •       Kaya Genç (Turkey), Michelle Kuo (Taiwan), Muhammad al-Zaqzouq (Gaza), Eve Fairbanks (South Africa) — among the essayists referenced in this conversation.   •       Adam Shatz, blurb: “To read this rich, subtle, and moving anthology is to be reminded that it is often foreigners who understand us best.”   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is t...

    35 min
  6. America's Grand Faustian Bargain: Alexander Mikaberidze on How the Louisiana Purchase Made the United States

    5 days ago ·  Video

    America's Grand Faustian Bargain: Alexander Mikaberidze on How the Louisiana Purchase Made the United States

    Tomorrow, America will celebrate its birth. But the decisive moment, even the real birth of modern America, argues Alexander Mikaberidze in his new book The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America, may not have been 1776 at all. It was 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase. The year Thomas Jefferson bought the future from Napoleon Bonaparte. This was the moment the young American republic doubled its size in a single transaction, absorbed the heart of a continent and set itself on the path to becoming a global superpower.   The numbers associated with the Louisiana Purchase are staggering. 828,000 square miles. Thirteen states. Fifteen million dollars — four cents an acre, so the mythology tells us. But Mikaberidze reminds us that the deal Jefferson signed did not actually grant the United States the land. Instead, it merely authorised the republic to negotiate the acquisition of land still owned by Native Americans. So it became the founding event of the US-Indian Treaty System that produced over 200 Native American cessions between 1804 and 1970, and cost the Republic billions of dollars.   The Louisiana Purchase was America’s grand Faustian bargain. It was a deal that not only enabled America’s eventual rise as a 20th century superpower, but also the expansion of slavery, the destruction of Native peoples, and the 19th century imperial reach of the Monroe Doctrine. So forget 1776 and save the fireworks to remember 1803. And celebrate with croissants rather than hot dogs. Without Napoleon Bonaparte’s generosity, the United States might be just another regional power like France.   Five Takeaways   •       The Louisiana Purchase: Arguably the Decisive Moment in American History: Mikaberidze’s opening argument: if you had to pick the single most important moment in American history, 1803 has a stronger claim than 1776. Independence established the republic. The Louisiana Purchase made it a continental power. 828,000 square miles. Thirteen states. The heart of the continent. Securing the Mississippi for American commerce. Laying the groundwork for the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, and America’s eventual emergence as a global superpower. The revolution created the nation. The purchase created its destiny.   •       Four Cents an Acre? The Real Price Was Billions: The famous number: $15 million, or four cents an acre. The less famous fact: the agreement Jefferson signed did not grant the United States the land. It merely authorised the republic to negotiate the acquisition of the land, which was still owned by Native Americans. The Louisiana Purchase was the founding event of the US-Indian Treaty System — which produced over 200 Native American cessions between 1804 and 1970, and cost the United States not $15 million but billions of dollars. What appeared to be the greatest real estate deal in history was actually an authorisation to conduct the most expensive series of land negotiations in history.   •       The Grand Faustian Bargain: Slavery, Native Peoples, and the Monroe Doctrine: Andrew’s formulation — the Grand Faustian Bargain, the deal with the devil — is one Mikaberidze accepts. The purchase did three things simultaneously: it made America a continental power and a future superpower; it enabled the expansion of slavery into the vast new territory (the Missouri crisis of 1820 was a direct consequence); and it set in motion the dispossession of Native peoples at a scale and speed that would otherwise have been impossible. The Monroe Doctrine — America’s declaration that the Western Hemisphere was its sphere of influence — would not have been conceivable without the continental reach the purchase provided.   •       Napoleon’s Bad Weather: The Contingency That Made America: The counterfactual at the heart of Mikaberidze’s book: in October 1802, Napoleon had 4,000 veteran French troops ready to sail for New Orleans. The bad weather delayed them. Then it was too late — war with Britain was coming, and Napoleon decided to sell. If those troops had arrived, Mikaberidze argues, France might have retained effective control of southern Louisiana, cultivated alliances with Native nations (as it historically had), and used those alliances to constrain American expansion inland. Without the Louisiana hinterland, the American republic might have been a prosperous but regionally limited power, strong in New England and the Northeast but denied the continental reach that made it a superpower.   •       Croissants in Kansas, Tacos in Oklahoma: The Counterfactual Continents: Andrew’s closing question: what would July 4 look like in Kansas and Oklahoma if the purchase hadn’t happened? Mikaberidze’s answer: French Louisiana, Spanish Texas, and Native-controlled hinterlands are all in play. The people of Kansas might indeed be celebrating with croissants rather than hot dogs. Mikaberidze adds: or tacos. Almost certainly more tacos and moles, given the Spanish and ultimately Mexican influence that would have prevailed across most of the continent. The American empire of liberty, in this alternative timeline, stops somewhere in the middle of what is now Missouri.   About the Guest   Alexander Mikaberidze is Professor of History and the Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University-Shreveport. He is the author of The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America (Oxford University Press, July 3, 2026) and more than two dozen other books, including Kutuzov: A Life in War and Peace (Oxford, 2022) and The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Oxford, 2020), both winners of the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award and the Gilder-Lehrman Military History Prize. He was born in Georgia (the Caucasus) and has lived in Shreveport, Louisiana for twenty-six years.   References:   •       The Louisiana Purchase: The Grand Bargain and the Making of America by Alexander Mikaberidze (Oxford University Press, July 3, 2026). Part of the Pivotal Moments in American History series.   •       Craig Fuhrman, The Vast Enterprise — referenced by Mikaberidze as a new reassessment of Lewis and Clark’s expedition.   •       Jedediah Morse (1789) — the geographer who wrote of “American Empire” with a western boundary at the Pacific, referenced in the Monroe Doctrine discussion.   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolif...

    50 min
  7. Dear America — Happy Fucking Birthday: Christopher Hooks on an Exhausted United States at 250

    6 days ago ·  Video

    Dear America — Happy Fucking Birthday: Christopher Hooks on an Exhausted United States at 250

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

    33 min
  8. How We Disappear: Thomas Mullaney’s All-Too-Personal History of Information

    1 Jul ·  Video

    How We Disappear: Thomas Mullaney’s All-Too-Personal History of Information

    “The second law of thermodynamics is not to be negotiated with.” — Thomas S. Mullaney   The second law of thermodynamics is non-negotiable. The universe will end. Every human being dies. Everything decays and every record disintegrates. So why record history? Why bother remembering? These are the questions that the Stanford historian Thomas S. Mullaney addresses in his intriguing new book, How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information.   How We Disappear is triggered by grief. Mullaney’s father — a man he never fully understood, an exile in an estranged household — died unexpectedly in 2017. Sitting in his father’s office surrounded by the “paperwork of death,” Mullaney’s training as a historian crystallised into an all-too-personal project of disappearance. It’s a book about what Mullaney calls “intransitive disappearance” — not the spectacular, cataclysmic kind of traditional historiography (wars, book burnings, genocide) but the everyday, uneventful ways things fall apart. Like Thomas Mullaney’s dad. Existence as obsolescence, erosion, sinescence and the slow drift of the unremarkable into nothing.   History, in Mullaney’s account, is a Sisyphean fight against this nothingness. We tell stories to survive and maintain the polite appearance of coherence. If you actually tried to reconstruct experience — the thing-in-itself — you would need an infinite library of trillion-page books. Existence, for Mullaney, is a swirl of stimuli and daydream. History tries to domesticate this Borgesian swirl. So does consciousness itself. That’s why, as Mullaney memorably puts it, “historians do the dirty work of necromancers.” Which is to say they try to negotiate with the second law of thermodynamics.   Five Takeaways   •       Intransitive Disappearance: The Everyday Way Things Fall Apart: Mullaney’s central concept: intransitive disappearance. Not the spectacular, cataclysmic kind — book burnings, genocide, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria — but the everyday, drifty, uneventful ways things disintegrate. Obsolescence. Erosion. Sinescence. The unremarkable drift of the unremarkable into nothing. He became obsessed with these forms of disappearance — a pack rat across every discipline he could think of — for twenty-five years. His father’s unexpected death in 2017, sitting in his father’s office amid the paperwork of death, crystallised what had been inchoate into a book.   •       History as Domesticated Experience: The Trillion-Page Book: If you tried to actually reconstruct experience — the actual thing, unfiltered — you would need a trillion-page book that would make Naked Lunch look like a kindergarten primer. You’d have to say how many hairs were on his head; whether he favoured his left foot over his right; the scent of his aftershave. Experience, unfiltered, is an n-dimensional vortex of stimuli and daydream. Anytime you read a work of history, you are reading experience that has been domesticated into narrative — with turning points, main characters, thematic arguments. Historians know this. Every practising historian knows that the ideal of reconstructing human experience can never be reached.   •       The Vocal Defence of History: Why Do It If You Know It’s Impossible? Mullaney’s answer to the subversive question: history is just the professional counterpart of what every human being does every second of their existence. You, right now, telling yourself the story of your experience, are already well into postproduction. Your experience of being a person in a chair talking to another person on a couch — that is already domesticated. Human beings need to tell stories to live, to maintain continuity, to maintain coherence. Historians do the same thing under certain rules and protocols. The futility of history is the futility of consciousness itself. Neither is a reason not to try.   •       The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is Not to Be Negotiated With: The universe will end. Every human being dies. Everything we create decays. Every record disintegrates. Mullaney is unsparing about this. He is also, in his strange way, cheerful about it: we don’t need to last forever to have meant something. The meaning is not in the permanence. It is in the making. He would like the Silicon Valley immortality seekers — Kurzweil, the others, all those negotiating with thermodynamics from Palo Alto — to read the book, to face the facts, and then to find the alternative: rejoining physical reality and finding very deep meaning in that.   •       AI Bots of Deceased Parents: Stop: Andrew raises the obvious question: what would Mullaney say to the people in Palo Alto building AI bots of your deceased mother and father, so they can exist forever for your children and grandchildren? Mullaney’s answer is one word: stop. Human beings do not have the wetware — the biological critical apparatus — to maintain distance from a deep fake of their deceased parent. It short-circuits us. It bypasses our limitations. He cannot fathom, outside of very specific, closely monitored therapeutic settings, an argument in which this is a good idea. Paul Postman’s phrase: we are amusing ourselves to death. And there is very little critical reflection coming out of the neighbourhoods where this stuff is being made.   About the Guest   Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the former Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress. He is the author of How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information (W. W. Norton, June 23, 2026) and four previous books on Chinese history and technology, including The Chinese Typewriter: A History (winner of multiple awards). He lives in Palo Alto, California.   References:   •       How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information by Thomas S. Mullaney (W. W. Norton, June 23, 2026).   •       Jorge Luis Borges — referenced; the infinite library, the map that equals the terrain.   •       Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death — referenced in the closing discussion on AI and human limitations.   •       Kara Swisher — referenced for her CNN series on Silicon Valley immortality seekers.   •       Ray Kurzweil — referenced as an exemplar of tech-utopian immortality thinking.   About Keen On America   Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

    43 min
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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

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    Andrew Keen
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
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    © 2026 Andrew Keen
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