Keen On America

Andrew Keen

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. From One Mad King to Another: Don Watson's Shortest History of the United States

    9 HR AGO

    From One Mad King to Another: Don Watson's Shortest History of the United States

    “Politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds.” — Henry Adams, quoted by Don Watson   America is celebrating its 250th anniversary this July. In The Shortest History of the United States, Australian writer Don Watson has squeezed these 250 years into 60,000 words. Beginning with Mad King George, he ends with Mad King Donald. In between: the Puritan North, the plantation South, the miracle of the Constitution, the nightmare of slavery, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, two world wars, and the long arc from republic to empire that Americans have never quite admitted to themselves.   Watson argues that America is a profoundly idea-driven place — unlike any other country on earth. The Bible and the Enlightenment documents of the revolution set the bar impossibly high. The Declaration of Independence, the preamble to the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural: these are documents of aspiration that no group of people could ever live up to. Which is precisely why the American moral minefield has never been cleared. The greatest American politicians — Lincoln, FDR — are those who managed to cobble together the most improbable coalitions. The most profound American contradiction — building a country of liberty on the backs of 600 slaves — is one they were always aware of but could never move on from, because the republic couldn’t survive without the South. The republic always came first. Even Calhoun, ardently pro-slavery, said he would hang any man who tried to split it.   Is Trump different? Watson doesn’t think so — not fundamentally. Trump is a chip off the old American block: a huckster, a Roy Cohn-formed Queens opportunist, playing the same game of racial pot-stirring and imperial presidency that has always lurked beneath the surface. The US was founded out of the overthrow of a mad, tyrannical king. From one mad king to another. Six words. The shortest history of America.   Five Takeaways   •       Eden with Savages to Remove: Watson begins in Australia, where he lives, to establish a point of contrast. Every new-world country has an appalling history of violence toward indigenous peoples. But America is different in one key respect: it found extraordinary land. Lewis and Clark head west and discover the Great Plains, cross the Rockies, see the great rivers, and return to the Mississippi. There is always somewhere to push west. It’s Eden — with some savages to remove, who are easily accounted for in biblical terms. This is the first and most consequential American story: a cornucopia that licensed everything that came after.   •       The Bar Was Set Impossibly High: America is exceptional in being an idea-driven place. The Bible is there. The Enlightenment documents are there: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, the Second Inaugural. These are documents of incredible aspiration that no group of people is ever going to live up to. “A more perfect union” drives them on and damns them simultaneously. Watson’s formulation: America is a moral minefield precisely because it set the bar so high. Every infraction of that rhetorical overlay becomes a scandal. Tocqueville grasped it in the 1830s, having barely left the East Coast. His observations are more relevant now than when he wrote them — which means either he was a genius, or America hasn’t fundamentally changed in two hundred years. Probably both.   •       The Republic Always Came First: A crucial distinction Watson draws: the Civil War was not fought to preserve democracy. It was fought to preserve the republic. Even Calhoun — ardently pro-slavery — said he would hang any man who tried to split it. Manifest destiny, Watson argues, lies latent within the founding: Jefferson and Madison both said the republic couldn’t survive without pushing west. West takes you to the Pacific, and beyond. It’s an empire from way back — but one that has never recognised itself as an imperial power. And a republic, Watson notes, that has always been an elected monarchy: the powers of the American executive exceed those of any existing European monarchy, and can be expanded, as recent events demonstrate, pretty much at will.   •       Trump Is a Chip off the Old Block: The question: is Trump different, or has he always existed? Watson’s answer: he’s a profoundly American individual, a huckster shaped by Roy Cohn and Queens, who is playing an old game. The US was founded out of the overthrow of a mad, tyrannical king. The “no kings” rallies of recent times are interesting precisely because the struggle against a monarchical presidency has been perpetual. Watson’s Gatsby comparison: Trump is Gatsby without the romance — born to be a huckster, not a dreamer. Henry Adams wrote in the 1880s that politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds. That has not changed. Nor has the deep-sea-fish quality of ordinary American life, insulated from the world beyond its own provincial borders.   •       Mark Twain, FDR, and the Miracle of Cohesion: Watson’s favourite American: Mark Twain. Beautiful voice. The irony. Huckleberry Finn as a seminal novel. Anti-imperialist in the end. Got his politics pretty much right. Among presidents: FDR, who saved and modernised the United States, who believed political leaders can’t afford to stand still — you have to stay ahead of the regressive and self-interested forces. Watson’s broader verdict: American history is a miracle of cohesion. You can read it as wild turbulence, or you can marvel that it holds together at all. Filaments of goodwill. Recognition of the necessity of holding together. Always threatening to fall apart. Never quite does.   About the Guest   Don Watson is an Australian author and screenwriter, former speechwriter to Prime Minister Paul Keating. He is the author of The Shortest History of the United States (The Experiment, 2026), American Journeys, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, and many other books. He lives in Melbourne.   References:   •       The Shortest History of the United States by Don Watson (The Experiment, 2026).   •       Democracy: A Novel by Henry Adams (1880) — “Politics is the systematic organisation of hatreds.”   •       Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835) — still the most quoted work on how American democracy works.   •       Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson — the argument that American political life is a caste system.   •       Episode 2871: Beverly Gage on This Land Is Your Land — road-tripping through America for the 250th anniversary.   About Keen ...

    44 min
  2. Agency, Agency, Agency: Sophie Haigney on the Three Things All the Worst People Want

    1 DAY AGO

    Agency, Agency, Agency: Sophie Haigney on the Three Things All the Worst People Want

    “I find it very odd that agency is being promoted for its own sake rather than being connected to any kind of value system. Because without those things, agency looks pretty scary. Dictators are quite high agency.” — Sophie Haigney   On April Fools’ Day, The New York Times published an op-ed entitled “All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be High Agency.” But it wasn’t a joke. Sophie Haigney — former web editor of The Paris Review, currently working on a debut essay collection entitled Future Relics — warns that “agency” has become the defining buzzword of Silicon Valley bro culture. From Sam Altman to Mark Zuckerberg, Haigney observes, our new tech overlords have made becoming “high agency” their top priority in self-realization. Haigney argues that these entrepreneurs touting high agency most insistently are the very same people building the tools most likely to rob everyone else of theirs. Like her New York Times jeremiad, it’s no joke. Altman and Zuckerberg’s agentic technologies are often exploitative and addictive. They will make the worst people worse. Ha ha. It will be April Fools’ Day every day.   Five Takeaways   •       The 401(k) Is Low Agency: Sam Altman’s first answer to “what skills to develop in the age of AI”: become high agency. The term has migrated from philosophy and debates about free will into Silicon Valley self-help, LinkedIn posts, and entrepreneurship podcasts. In its new form it has a gambling element the old bootstrap individualism lacked. Someone in San Francisco told Haigney that having a 401(k) is the lowest-agency thing you can do with your money. Put it all on red. The rewards for big risk-taking are so much larger now that incrementalism — get a job, save up, buy a house — looks like passivity. That’s a new development, and a dangerous one.   •       The People Promoting Agency Are Robbing You of Yours: Haigney’s sharpest observation: the people promoting high agency most loudly are building the tools most likely to strip it from everyone else. Sam Altman says become high agency. His product — in Haigney’s view — will function like social media: not liberating but addictive, another rabbit hole that makes people more stuck. The gambling epidemic is the same logic. Sports betting offers the seductive illusion that your specific knowledge can crack the system. But the system is designed so the average person can’t win. High agency, in practice, tends to concentrate at the top.   •       Stuckness and the Lottery Mindset: We live in a moment of extreme stuckness — people who feel two steps away from winning the lottery and yet completely unable to move. This odd combination — paralysis plus the fantasy of a big break — is what the high-agency ideology exploits. Haigney connects it to the gambling epidemic, to the male podcasters with beards, to the young men who feel the system is rigged against them and are being told: the solution is to become the kind of person who cuts in line. What nobody says is that the cutting-in-line ethos, scaled up, is what produced the system they feel rigged by in the first place.   •       Hitler Was High Agency: The most unsettling move in the piece. Agency without values is just power. FDR was high agency: he packed the court, overrode term limits, used wartime powers to push through the New Deal. Dictators, Haigney notes, are quite high agency. The tech adoption of the term strips it of any moral content — agency is promoted for its own sake, disconnected from any question of what it’s being used for. That, she argues, is what makes it genuinely frightening at scale. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” is the American ancestor. Thoreau, its famous practitioner, got his mum to do his laundry.   •       High Agency Could Mean Repair: Haigney’s counter-proposal: couldn’t we be high agency and organize to build a better railway? Wouldn’t it be high agency to fix the Department of Education rather than abolishing it? The NHS, railways, public education — systems people are nostalgic for — required enormous collective agency to build. The tech definition of agency is individualistic and destructive. But there’s another definition: the capacity to act together, to create rather than just disrupt. That version doesn’t get much airtime on the podcasts. It should.   About the Guest   Sophie Haigney is a critic and journalist who writes about visual art, books, and technology for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and others. She is a former web editor of The Paris Review and is working on her debut essay collection, Future Relics, for Liveright.   References:   •       “All the Worst People Seem to Want to Be High Agency,” The New York Times, April 1, 2026. By Sophie Haigney.   •       Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841) — the American philosophical ancestor of today’s high-agency ideology.   •       Episode 2858: Scott Galloway on the male crisis — agency, stuckness, and young men.   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 2,900 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:   (00:31) - “All the worst people seem to want to be high agency” — the April 1 op-ed (02:51) - The Silicon Valley definition: risk, disruption, cutting in line (04:52) - Emerson, self-reliance, and the new American individualism (06:44) - Is high agency essential to survive the 2020s? (08:41) - Thoreau’s laundry: the gendered dimension of agency (11:04) - Male podcasters, the crisis of young men, and the seduction of high agency (12:20) - Stuckness, gambling, and the lottery mindset (16:13) - TikTok, the Grateful Dead, and the age of addiction (17:16) - The people promoting agency are building tools to take it from you (18:29) - AI: the biggest addiction on the horizon (19:56) - Agency as the new political axis: left, right, and disruption (21:29) - Is skepticism of agency just nostalgia for the twentieth century? (24:16) - California’s failed railways, China’s success, and democracy’s agency problem (25:16) - Hitler was high agen...

    35 min
  3. How Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump Explain the World: Franklin Foer on Arsenal, the MAGA World Cup and an Unlikely Theory of Globalization

    2 DAYS AGO

    How Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump Explain the World: Franklin Foer on Arsenal, the MAGA World Cup and an Unlikely Theory of Globalization

    “Globalization has revived tribalism. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left predicted, it has made them stronger. Far from the triumph of capitalism that the right predicted, it has entrenched corruption.” — Franklin Foer   How do Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump explain the world? According to Franklin Foer — senior writer at The Atlantic and author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization — they’re both (or were, in the case of Bin Laden), like Foer himself, rootless Arsenal fans. That’s the irony of our simultaneously tribal and globalized world. The more rootless we become, the sharper our imagined identities. Thus the DC-based Foer, who showed up for this interview flaunting his Gooner gear, never misses an Arsenal game on tv, even though he grew up almost four thousand miles west of Highbury.   Foer’s 2004 classic has been reissued with a new preface in honor of the World Cup. As he notes, this upcoming MAGA spectacle will only underline the tribal-global nature of the world. On the one hand, Trump wants to emulate Mussolini (1934) and Putin (2018) in transforming the sporting event into a celebration of localism. On the other hand, the expansion of the tournament into 48 teams mirrors the increasingly international reality of today’s world.   And then there’s the distant but delicious possibility of an Iran-USA final. In 2022 in Qatar, the Iranian players refused to sing the national anthem in the opening game to protest the killing of a young woman who wasn’t wearing a headscarf. Foer argues that the national team represents an idea of Iran quite foreign from that of the theocracy. While the anti-MAGA Foer wouldn’t support Iran against the USA, he does argue that one of the great failures of the American left has been its inability to speak the language of patriotism. So Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom should wave the flag this summer. Whose flag he doesn’t say. Probably the Arsenal if the global Foer had his tribal North London way.   Five Takeaways   •       Globalization Is a Form of Tribalism: Thomas Friedman said countries with McDonald’s don’t go to war with each other. Foer’s book said the opposite: globalization doesn’t dissolve tribal identity, it sharpens it. Barcelona can have Dutch DNA from Cruyff and a Qatari airline on the jersey — it’s still a symbol of Catalan nationalism. The cosmopolitan elites who predicted the melting of national borders were themselves a tribe that mistook its tribal identity for universal truth. Andrew’s formulation: globalization is a form of tribalism. Foer, cautiously, agrees.   •       Trump’s Bread and Circuses: Trump has identified three spectacles as the tent poles of his presidency: the 250th anniversary celebration of the United States, the Olympics, and the World Cup — which he calls the biggest spectacle of his term. Every strongman in history has understood the distracting quality of a spectacle. Putin sat in Moscow in 2018, ominously presiding. Mussolini had 1934. Trump won’t be a passive participant. The expanded tournament was, Foer says, a greedy error — the early rounds will be poor — and the whole thing will unfold under the shadow of a president who wants to cosplay as president of the planet.   •       The Financialization of Fandom: When Foer wrote the book in 2002, the transfer market was a big deal but not the phenomenon it is now. Fans have been forced to become conversant in the balance sheets of their clubs, getting upset when the club overpays. There’s something sad about that — your relationship to a team has been financialized. Meanwhile, the Premier League jacks up ticket prices every year, people complain, and the stadiums are still full. The new power centres in the game are Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds using soccer as reputation laundering and soft power, and American private equity with its arrogant belief that it can do better than whoever was there before.   •       The Iranian Team and the True Carriers of Civilization: In the last World Cup, Iranian players refused to sing the national anthem as protest against a government that had just killed a young woman for not wearing a headscarf. They were pressured to sing in the next game. The diaspora was divided. Foer’s argument: the Iranian national team represents an idea of Iran entirely divorced from the theocracy — a spirit of nationhood, not religion. When Trump talked about destroying Iranian civilization, he was discouraging the people who consider themselves its true carriers and the regime’s real opponents. Foer thinks it would be genuinely good if Iran could come and play in this World Cup.   •       The Left’s Patriotism Failure: Foer’s parting argument: one of the great failures of the left in its quest for cosmopolitan ideals has been its inability to speak the language of patriotism. Even if the impulses behind progressive ideas could be described as patriotic, that’s been one of the things limiting their political appeal. Should Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom wave the flag this summer at the World Cup? Foer says yes. Andrew, a Spurs fan born in North London who has lived in the United States for decades, suggests he would be “amused” if Iran beat America in the final. They do not reach agreement.   About the Guest   Franklin Foer is a senior writer at The Atlantic and the author of How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (reissued 2026 with a new preface), The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future, and World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. He lives in Washington, DC.   References:   •       How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer (reissued 2026 with new preface).   •       “The Quintessential Trumpian Sport,” The Atlantic, April 2026. By Franklin Foer.   •       Episode 2858: World Cup Fever — Simon Kuper, who has attended nine consecutive World Cups, on the 2026 tournament.   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 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.   Website Substack YouTube

    44 min
  4. Biden’s Blue Authoritarianism: Stuart Schrader on How America’s Police Seized Power From Below

    2 DAYS AGO

    Biden’s Blue Authoritarianism: Stuart Schrader on How America’s Police Seized Power From Below

    “You don’t have enough money to pay all the bills? Well, cut the budget for parks and rec, cut the budget for libraries, cut the budget for fixing potholes — but don’t touch the police budget.” — Stuart Schrader   Fifty years ago, America’s local police still served at the pleasure of democratically elected politicians. Not anymore. Stuart Schrader has spent years in the archives tracing how it happened. In Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, Schrader begins the story in Sixties Detroit, where a young, progressive Democratic mayor found his career derailed by a police union fighting for recognition. It was the opening move of a decades-long campaign in which rank-and-file officers took advantage of the tools of American democracy — unions, lobbying, litigation, public relations — to lift policing above the law.   Schrader’s most counterintuitive finding is that the greatest federal champions of Blue Power were Democrats like Joe Biden. With Trump 2.0, the story gets even stranger. ICE — anonymous, paramilitary, seemingly answerable to no one — has paradoxically made local police look credible by comparison. Some police unions have tried to exploit the contrast at contract renewal time. Others have quietly welcomed the federal incursions as a way to challenge progressive city councils in Los Angeles, Chicago, and DC. It’s almost as if today’s democratically elected politicians serve at the pleasure of the local police.   Five Takeaways   •       The Detroit Opening Move: The book begins in 1960s Detroit, where a young, charismatic, progressive Democratic mayor found his political career effectively destroyed by a police union fighting for recognition. That wasn’t an accident. Police were simultaneously being called on to put down urban rebellions and gaining new workplace power through public sector unionization laws. They married those two things together: law and order rhetoric plus well-compensated, long-leashed officers. The Supreme Court’s rights revolution — criminal defendants’ rights, civil rights — felt to police like an existential threat. Blue Power was their answer.   •       Biden and the Bipartisan Consensus: Schrader’s most counterintuitive finding: the greatest federal champions of Blue Power were Democrats. Joe Biden, as a senator, was one of the most important figures in unifying police organizations — rural versus urban, command rank versus rank and file — and ensuring legislation met their demands. The law-and-order consensus wasn’t just Republican. It was built by Democrats who were terrified of the crime hysteria, and police who were expert at stoking it. Even once crime began its dramatic decline in the 1990s, police kept using the fear. We stopped the crime wave. Now pay up.   •       Crime Hysteria as a Political Weapon: Police learned early that crime statistics were a cudgel. Sign a good contract or crime will go up. And the tactic worked — not because the connection between police compensation and crime rates is real (Schrader says it isn’t), but because the fear was real. Social scientists still can’t fully explain why crime rose dramatically through the 1960s-80s and then declined just as dramatically from the mid-1990s. Police can’t explain it either. But no other public sector union operates this way. Sanitation workers don’t demand raises because they plowed the streets well in a heavy winter. Teachers don’t point to test scores. Police do.   •       ICE, Blue Power, and the Trump Paradox: ICE — anonymous, paramilitary, answerable to no one, reluctant even to wear identifying insignia — has paradoxically made local police look credible by contrast. Some unions have tried to exploit this at contract renewal time: we’re not ICE, so pay us accordingly. Others have quietly welcomed the federal incursions as a way to override progressive city councils in Chicago, LA, DC, and elsewhere. The Border Patrol union was one of the first to endorse Trump in 2016 and has been rewarded handsomely. Blue Power is nothing if not adaptable.   •       Why Defunding Failed — and What Actually Matters: Blue Power, Schrader argues, is the primary reason defunding didn’t happen. Police used the same political tactics the book describes to thwart those demands from movements — the same lobbying, litigation, public relations, and contract leverage they’ve been deploying since the 1960s. The real question isn’t defund or not defund. It’s how cities allocate their resources. Over and over again in his research, Schrader found police saying explicitly: cut parks and rec, cut libraries, cut pothole repair — but don’t touch our budget. That argument, made in fiscal crisis after fiscal crisis, has never really stopped.   About the Guest   Stuart Schrader is associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. He is the author of Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves (Basic Books, 2026) and Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (University of California Press, 2019).   References:   •       Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves by Stuart Schrader (Basic Books, 2026).   •       “Authoritarianism from Below,” New York Review of Books, 2026. By Stuart Schrader.   •       Episode 2021 [March 2021]: Rosa Brooks on Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City — the sympathetic counterpoint to Schrader’s critique.   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 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.   Website Substack YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify   Chapters:   (00:31) - Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue, and the sympathetic take on policing (03:44) - Authoritarianism from below: how police seized political power (05:09) - Conscious strategy or structural drift? The origins of Blue Power (08:37) - What drives Blue Power: ideology, bureaucracy, or money? (09:19...

    38 min
  5. Forget Iran: Eyck Freymann on Taiwan, China, and Why America Keeps Hitting the Snooze Button,

    3 DAYS AGO

    Forget Iran: Eyck Freymann on Taiwan, China, and Why America Keeps Hitting the Snooze Button,

    “We keep getting wake-up calls and snoozing the alarm. Now is the time to actually get out of bed and confront this problem before it is too late.” — Eyck Freymann   Forget Iran for a moment. The Hormuz crisis is a template for the bigger crisis of Taiwan. Eyck Freymann — Hoover Fellow at Stanford, author of the brand-new Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China — believes that the fate of the 21st century may hinge on Taiwan. And he warns that if America can’t handle Iran, it’s certainly not ready for Beijing.   Freymann argues that China doesn’t need to invade Taiwan. Xi Jinping has watched Putin discover — with horror — what happens when you send unprepared forces into a country that fights back. China’s lesson from Ukraine is a strategy of quarantine rather than invasion. The United States will then face a choice between accepting Chinese checkmate or escalating a crisis with no domestic or international support. Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors and 99% of the cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs used to train frontier AI models. If those chip factories shut, there will be an instantaneous global financial crisis.   Forget today’s Iranian theater. Taiwan will be the real existential show.   Five Takeaways   •       The Hormuz Alarm Bell: Iran has no navy, no air force, and supposedly no ballistic missile arsenal anymore — and yet it took 20% of global oil supply offline. The Trump administration went in thinking overwhelming military superiority would translate to political victory. It hasn’t. Strategy, Freymann says, is the art of connecting ends to means. If you don’t know your ends, you’ll flail. China is watching every mistake: no plan for the economic shock, no domestic legitimacy for the war, excess pain falling on oil-importing US allies like Japan, South Korea, and Europe. Beijing’s conclusion: we don’t have to pick a military fight with the United States. Why would we?   •       The Semiconductor Chokehold: Taiwan produces 90% of the world’s advanced semiconductors and 99% of the cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs used to train frontier AI models. The CHIPS Act has tried to change this. It hasn’t. The Arizona facility is two generations behind Taiwan, commercially uncompetitive, and unable to scale. Taiwan is five years ahead now and will be five years ahead in five years. If the Taiwan fabs go offline, there is an instantaneous global financial crisis: the seven companies that account for roughly 40% of the S&P 500 are all essentially the AI trade. The hyperscalers are spending $600 billion in data centers this year — the only thing keeping the US economy out of recession. This is what’s at stake, before you even get to the military question.   •       The Quarantine: Winning Without Fighting: Xi Jinping’s plan A is not invasion. It’s the quarantine: seize control of who and what comes and goes to Taiwan by declaring that anyone flying to Taipei must first clear customs in Shanghai. Impound a United Airlines flight. Let the ambiguity do the work. If China can do that and get away with it, Taiwan can’t rebuild its military, the US can’t send more weapons, and Beijing controls the chips. It’s checkmate — without a shot fired. The United States then has to accept it, or escalate in a way that has no domestic legitimacy and drives wedges between Washington and its allies. China has figured out how to extort the West with prolonged economic pain. The alarm bells keep ringing. America keeps snoozing.   •       What a Taiwan War Would Actually Look Like: It would be a war at sea — fundamentally unlike anything America has fought or prepared for in eighty years. China would need to simultaneously control the skies, the undersea, and the surface on all sides of the Taiwan Strait, then send tens of thousands of men 80 miles across in amphibious vessels to storm beaches in a Normandy-style assault. The first engagements would be decided in minutes to hours by long-range precision munitions. America’s operational capabilities are exceptional: the cyber assassinations, the special forces raid, the continuous bomber sorties from the continental United States. But China has home-field advantage. And it has been building systematically for this scenario for years. We could probably win if we fought today. We need to make investments for tomorrow.   •       The Four-Pillar Strategy: Freymann’s integrated answer: diplomacy, military deterrence, economic resilience, and allied coordination — all working together, not in separate silos. On diplomacy: maintain the principled position that Taiwan’s status must be resolved peacefully and democratically. On military: show China it can’t win if it escalates to war, while keeping conventional forces credible. On economics: build enough allied resilience that authoritarian powers can’t extort the West by threatening prolonged economic pain. On allies: coordinate with Japan, South Korea, the Europeans on a shared plan for what happens if things collapse. This is doable. It’s been done for fifty years. We just need the resolve to keep doing it.   About the Guest   Eyck Freymann is a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute. He is the author of Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China (Oxford University Press, 2026), The Arsenal of Democracy: Technology, Industry, and Deterrence in an Age of Hard Choices (Hoover, 2025), and One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World (Harvard, 2021).   References:   •       Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China by Eyck Freymann (Oxford University Press, 2026).   •       “The Strait of Hormuz as a Template for Taiwan,” Financial Times, April 2026. By Eyck Freymann.   •       Episode 2862: Truth Is Dead — on AI, disinformation, and American strategic confusion.   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 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.   Website Substack YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify

    45 min
  6. Can I Say It? Jacob Mchangama on Our Global Crisis of Free Speech

    4 DAYS AGO

    Can I Say It? Jacob Mchangama on Our Global Crisis of Free Speech

    “Once you start clamping down on speech, it will have serious collateral damage. And we’re starting to see that now.” — Jacob Mchangama   The Jyllands-Posten editor who published those Mohammed cartoons in 2005 spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He’d commissioned artists to say it with their pens, but the mob came after him with AK-47s. Copenhagen-born Jacob Mchangama watched that happen in a country where free speech had been considered as natural as breathing, and has since dedicated his professional life to defending it. Thus The Future of Free Speech, Mchangama’s new book coauthored with Jeff Kosseff.   It’s also the reasoning behind his Future of Free Speech Institute at Vanderbilt, where Mchangama runs the only serious academic program dedicated to the proposition that democracy’s most essential freedom is in global retreat. The Varieties of Democracy dataset agrees. The number of countries where free speech is declining has increased dramatically; those where it’s strengthening are few. In 2000, Bill Clinton laughed at the idea that China might censor the internet — “that’s like nailing Jell-O to a wall.” Over the last quarter century, China has perfected that art.   The decline doesn’t come from a single ideological camp, which is Mchangama’s most politically inconvenient point. He suggests that the left has convinced itself that hate speech regulation, age verification for social media, and disinformation controls are acts of democratic hygiene. The Trump administration, meanwhile, is overtly shutting down free speech at a scale unmatched in recent American history. And then there’s the paradoxical possibility that anti-social-media liberals like Jonathan Haidt, in their fervor to take freedom of online expression from kids, are also contributing to today’s great recession in free speech. Left, right, and center. America, China, Denmark. Nobody, it seems, wants to allow us to say anything anymore.   Five Takeaways   •       The Editor Who Lived Under Protection: The editor of Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the 2005 Mohammed cartoons spent a decade under round-the-clock protection from Danish intelligence services. He had asked cartoonists to draw. They came after him with AK-47s. Ten years later came Charlie Hebdo — the French satirical magazine that had republished the cartoons as an act of solidarity, and saw twelve people murdered when two jihadists entered its offices. For Mchangama, growing up in Denmark where free speech felt as natural as breathing, this was the event that changed everything. The last place he expected an existential challenge to free speech was religion.   •       Democracy’s Varieties Are Shrinking: The Varieties of Democracy project — probably the most sophisticated dataset of free speech indicators — shows the trend line is clear: the number of countries where free speech has declined has increased dramatically, while those where it is being strengthened are few. Bill Clinton laughed in 2000 at the idea China might censor the internet — “that’s like nailing Jell-O to a wall.” China has since perfected the art. The internet’s original techno-optimistic promise — that censorship would be consigned to the ash heap of history — has been turned on its head. The recession of free speech has gone hand in hand with a wider democracy recession.   •       Four Hateful Men and the Minority Principle: The most important US Supreme Court decisions protecting free speech deal with extremely hateful people — viciously antisemitic speakers, members of the KKK. And very often, Black and Jewish civil rights organizations defended them on principle, because they knew: if you are a vulnerable and persecuted minority, you depend more than a majority on the ability to challenge power. You depend on a principled protection of free speech. That history has largely been forgotten. Free speech, Mchangama argues, can be under attack from the left, from the right, even from centrists. The Trump administration is restricting it. The woke left tried to. The answer is principled, consistent defence — regardless of who’s speaking.   •       Elite Panic Is the Historical Constant: Every time the public sphere is expanded through new communications technology, the traditional gatekeepers fret about the consequences of allowing the unwashed mob direct and unmediated access to information. The World Economic Forum declared disinformation the largest short-term threat to humanity ahead of the 2024 super-election year, when around two billion people were eligible to vote. Researchers studying those elections could not identify AI-generated disinformation as having shifted a single outcome. The AI disinformation apocalypse never materialized. Jonathan Haidt — who has done important earlier work on free speech and academic freedom — may be exhibiting motivated reasoning in his crusade for age verification. Elite panic looks the same from every century.   •       Creative AI vs. Intrusive AI: Mchangama distinguishes two faces of AI. Creative AI gives superpowers on demand — a PhD-level tutor for reading Homer, research agents that operate at a depth and scope previously unimaginable. Intrusive AI enables the most powerful surveillance and censorship regimes the world has ever seen. “If Hitler or Stalin had the powers that the Chinese Communist Party has now — that is a frightening thought in and of itself.” Preemptive safetyism is the wrong response: AI is a general-purpose technology. Filter it in the name of preventing disinformation and you hand governments and companies a filter over the entire ecosystem of ideas and information. The same logic as free speech. Applied to the most powerful communications technology ever built.   About the Guest   Jacob Mchangama is the founder and executive director of the Future of Free Speech at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media and the coauthor, with Jeff Kosseff, of The Future of Free Speech.   References:   •       The Future of Free Speech by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026).   •       “The Timeless Fear of Corrupting the Youth,” Wall Street Journal, March 2026. By Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff.   •       Episode 2862: Truth Is Dead — Steven Rosenbaum on AI as a spectacularly good liar. Mchangama’s counter-argument on disinformation panic.   •       Upcoming: Gal Beckerman on How to Be a Dissident — the companion argument to Mchangama on what dissent actually requires.  ...

    41 min
  7. Slippery Sam, Devious Dario, Honest Hassabis: Blowing Up Silicon Valley’s Cult of Personality

    5 DAYS AGO

    Slippery Sam, Devious Dario, Honest Hassabis: Blowing Up Silicon Valley’s Cult of Personality

    “The media has its own agenda, completely separate from anything going on in the real world, creating the story themselves.” — Keith Teare Last night, somebody hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion. I live a couple of hills over, but heard nothing. Meanwhile, the New Yorker hurled its own explosive cocktail at Sam, publishing a 15,000-word hit piece rhetorically entitled “Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can He Be Trusted?” No, of course, he can’t be trusted. Not according to the New Yorker. Especially with something as precious as, gasp, our future. Not everyone, however, is sold on this media cult of personality. In his That Was The Week editorial, Keith Teare tells the media to take their hands off Sam. I don’t disagree. Although I’m a bit skeptical of Keith’s attempt to demonize what he defines as a “devious” Dario Amodei. Whether it’s Altman, Amodei or Google’s AI honcho Demis Hassabis, all these guys are prisoners of their company’s structures and cultures. They are also victims of today’s anti-tech hysteria. It’s one thing to blow up Silicon Valley’s cartoonish cult of personality, it’s quite another to hurl bombs at these people’s homes. Enough with all the violence – verbal or otherwise. It never ends well.   Five Takeaways •       A Molotov Cocktail at Slippery Sam’s House: On Friday night, someone hurled a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights mansion, according to The New York Times. Andrew lives nearby and didn’t hear it. The week’s zeitgeist had already turned: a 15,000-word New Yorker hit piece by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, wall-to-wall coverage, Sam moving into Musk-like media-frenzy territory. Keith’s editorial: Hands Off Sam Altman. The personality-driven circus has caught fire. Quite literally. •       Anthropic’s Mythic Model Finds Decade-Old Vulnerabilities: The actual AI news this week, drowned out by the personality circus. Anthropic’s new “Mythic” model autonomously discovered security holes in software that had eluded human experts for years. Dario refused to release it openly until the patches were complete. Treasury Secretary Bessent commented on the implications for banks and government. The signal: AI is becoming systematically better than the best humans at specialist domains. Generalists can probably relax. •       Slippery Sam vs Devious Dario vs Honest Hassabis: Keith’s contrarian take: Altman is honest because he’s openly dishonest. Amodei is the devious one — a politically liberal narrative wrapped around a commercial juggernaut. Andrew’s third way is yesterday’s Mallaby interview: Demis Hassabis, the Spinozan one-faced scientist who would rather be at Princeton. But even Demis must have authorised the firing of Mustafa Suleiman. Everyone has a game plan, said Mike Tyson, until they get punched in the face. •       Post of the Week: Keith Replaces WordPress in Ten Minutes: Keith’s tweet: he’s run two curation sites — seriouslyphotography.com and seriouslybc.com — on WordPress for over a decade. Last Friday afternoon, he asked Anthropic’s tools to rewrite them. Ten minutes later, both sites were rebuilt from scratch, fully responsive, WordPress gone. Cost in the old world: tens of thousands of dollars and several months. The Matt Mullenweg vs Matthew Prince debate is settled by the actual technology while the principals are still arguing. •       The End of Ownership? Keith Goes Marxist: Pure capitalism, Keith argues, will produce so much abundance that scarcity ends and self-interested competition with it. “In the future there will be no ownership, or everything will be commonly owned.” Andrew calls it Marx with Tesla characteristics. Eric Ries’s forthcoming Incorruptible argues that Patagonia and Mondragon point a different way — structural ethics rather than abundance utopianism. Two visions of the post-AI economy. Both probably wrong. We’ll find out.   About the Guest Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. A former Washington Post columnist and Economist contributing editor, he is the author of More Money Than God, The Man Who Knew (winner of the FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year), The Power Law, and now The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. References: •       The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby. •       Episode 2862: Truth Is Dead — Steven Rosenbaum on AI as a spectacularly good liar. Mallaby’s quiet counter-argument. •       Episode 2860: We Shape Our AI, Thereafter It Shapes Us — Keith Teare on agency in our agentic age. Hassabis thinks he can still steer. 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 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. Website Substack YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify   Chapters: (00:31) - A Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s Pacific Heights house (02:41) - The New Yorker hit piece: Ronan Farrow, Andrew Marantz, 15,000 words (05:36) - Slippery Sam and the zeitgeist (07:39) - Brian Merchant: it’s open season for refusing AI (08:09) - Anthropic’s Mythic model finds decade-old vulnerabilities (10:46) - Why even release it? Dario’s narcissism (12:12) - Slippery Sam vs Devious Dario (14:11) - Hassabis as the third way (18:29) - The Mustafa Suleiman question (19:17) - Mike Tyson, Kant, Spinoza, and Hobbes (22:09) - Brian Merchant and the new Luddism (23:34) - Anthropic makes a new generation redundant every week (23:34) - Post of the week: Keith rebuilds his sites in 10 minutes (26:39) - Eric Ries on incorruptible companies (30:12) - Patagonia, Berkeley Bowl, Mondragon (35:43) - The end of ownership? Keith goes Marxist

    39 min
  8. The Failure of Ultra-Stability: Robert Pearl on Why American Healthcare is Quietly Rationing Us to Death

    5 DAYS AGO

    The Failure of Ultra-Stability: Robert Pearl on Why American Healthcare is Quietly Rationing Us to Death

    “It’s ultra stable. Health care doesn’t move. If you biopsied American health care in 2010 and again in 2026, no one could figure out which slide was which.” — Robert Pearl, MD Bad news. The patient, I’m afraid, is ultra-stable. Robert Pearl, former CEO of Kaiser Permanente for eighteen years and author of ChatGPT MD, returns with the bleakest diagnosis we’ve heard all month. American healthcare, Dr Pearl says, is “ultra stable.” That might sound good. But it’s actually very very bad. If you biopsied American healthcare in 2010 and again in 2026, Pearl says, no clinician could tell the slides apart. Both were and are overpriced. Both underperforming. Hospitals still represent between 30-35% of expenses. Costs continue to rise at between 7-9% a year. There remain four hundred thousand misdiagnosis deaths annually. Burnout is stuck at 50%. The numbers haven’t moved in fifteen years. Meanwhile, a stealth revolution is already underway. 40% of Americans use generative AI every month for medical questions. 70-80% of physicians use it weekly. While the patients and doctors have moved, the system hasn’t. It remains ultra-stable. It’s a Kodak moment — healthcare’s business model, Pearl suggests, is selling sickness. So, for example, the new new medical thing is GLP-1 drugs that cost $5 to manufacture and sell for $400. So will the system collapse? No, Pearl insists. It has too much strength for that kind of drama. Instead, it will quietly ration us to death — more chronic disease, earlier deaths, more people making a major sacrifice to pay their healthcare bills. Ultra-stability, then, is what is killing the American healthcare system. It will, quite literally, ration us to death.   Five Takeaways •       Ultra Stable: Pearl’s diagnosis of American healthcare in one phrase. Hospitals stay at thirty to thirty-five per cent of total expenses. Costs rise at seven to nine per cent annually. Life expectancy hasn’t budged. Four hundred thousand misdiagnosis deaths a year. Burnout at fifty per cent. Biopsy 2010 and 2026 — no one could tell the slides apart. Both overpriced. Both underperforming. •       The Stealth Revolution Has Already Happened: Forty per cent of Americans use generative AI every month for medical questions. Seventy to eighty per cent of physicians use it weekly. The patients and doctors have moved. The system hasn’t. It’s a Kodak moment — they had the first filmless camera and let it die because their business model was selling film. Healthcare’s business model is selling sickness. •       Quietly Rationed to Death: There will be no dramatic collapse. The system has too much strength for that. Instead: rationing, more chronic disease, earlier deaths. Like airlines moving everyone into first class while the rest drive. Twenty-five per cent of Americans already made a major sacrifice to pay healthcare bills last year. When it hits fifty per cent, maybe the polling places will notice. Pearl is doubtful. •       GLP-1s Cost $5 to Make and $400 to Buy: Yale’s analysis: the manufacturing cost of a GLP-1 drug is $5 a month. They sell at a discounted price of $400. That’s eighty times markup. Pearl’s math: to make GLP-1s cost-neutral against the medical savings, the price has to be under $200. Trump Rx won’t help most people because you can’t use insurance there and $400 cash is still impossible on $60,000 a year. •       Vibe Coding Is the Prescription: One year old. Lets clinicians build software in plain English without code. Pearl’s example: a heart failure patient at home, weighed daily on a Bluetooth scale, with an electronic stethoscope, ankle video, blood oxygen, exercise tolerance — all in an app a doctor could build in a weekend. Three days of fluid retention caught before the ICU admission. Cost: twenty dollars a month. The fix has arrived. The system isn’t using it.   About the Guest Beverly Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History and American Studies at Yale. She is the author of G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History. She is currently at work on a biography of Ronald Reagan. References: •       This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through US History by Beverly Gage. •       G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century by Beverly Gage — the Pulitzer-winning biography. •       Episode 2859: Stop, Don’t Do That — Peter Edelman on Bobby Kennedy and the heart of America. The companion conversation. 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 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting. Website Substack YouTube Apple Podcasts Spotify   Chapters: (00:31) - Introduction: AI and the American healthcare sector (01:47) - ChatGPT MD: chronic disease and the trillion-dollar opportunity (04:50) - The stealth revolution: 40% of patients, 80% of doctors (06:53) - Ultra stability: the 2010-vs-2026 biopsy (09:50) - Three years of generative AI and counting (11:13) - Will the system collapse? No — it will quietly ration (13:33) - The drip-drip of preventable deaths (16:08) - GLP-1 drugs: $5 to make, $400 to buy (18:23) - Vibe coding enters the conversation (21:22) - Will AI replace clinicians? (28:08) - Trump Rx and why it won’t help most people (30:41) - RFK Jr., vaccines, and the war on science (33:23) - The midterms as the political reckoning (35:29) - The three-step fix: capitation, transition, capital (39:48) - Vibe coding and the heart failure example

    47 min
See All (2k)

About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Andrew Keen
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    2k
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Andrew Keen
  • Show Website
    Keen On America

You Might Also Like