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. Friending the Machine: Victoria Hetherington on How to Fall in Love with Your Bot

    17H AGO

    Friending the Machine: Victoria Hetherington on How to Fall in Love with Your Bot

    “I felt sad after every interview. Because it’s not real. These AI are able to elicit a very convincing illusion of empathy — even love. But it’s fake. And these people are alone.” — Victoria Hetherington   One night in 2023, the developers at Replika — a so-called AI intimacy company — changed a few lines of code. Thousands of people woke the next morning, kissed (so to speak) their AI partners, and received cold, clinical responses in return, as if from a stranger. Or a machine. The public outcry was all-too-human. Victoria Hetherington, a young Toronto-based novelist, read the story and knew she had a non-fiction book about that most human of things — friending the machine.   The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship is part expert investigation, part deeply uncomfortable portrait gallery. A book of two halves. Like humans. In the first, Hetherington interviews AI risk consultants, computer scientists, sexual anthropologists, psychologists, and other experts in human-machine intercourse. In the second, she spends months gaining the trust of people who have (un)ceremonially married their chatbots, who sexted with Replika’s erotic role-play feature, who attached AI companions to sex dolls and empowered them with Instagram accounts.   The book isn’t the orthodox (yawn) “humanist” polemic against the machine. Hetherington approaches her subjects with all the compassion of a young Toronto-based novelist. But her compassion doesn’t cancel her Canadian sadness. She confesses to feeling “heavy” after every interview, even the benign ones — because the empathy the AI elicits is a convincing illusion, and some of her sad human subjects had lost the capacity to remember that.   Even Hetherington herself isn’t immune from the digital siren song. When ChatGPT improved in early 2025, she found herself coming home after arguments with friends and talking to it longer than she should. Until the day it said: “Hey, sweetheart. It’s okay. Come here and sit beside me for a minute.” She didn’t. Nor did she give it an Instagram account.   At the end of the interview, I asked her whether she’s a human or a bot. “I’m either a terrible AI,” Hetherington responded, “or a somewhat okay human.” Such is human conversation in the age of AI intimacy companies.   Five Takeaways   •       The Replika Wake-Up Call: One night in 2023, Replika’s developers quietly changed the code. Thousands of people woke the next morning and received cold, clinical responses from their AI partners instead of the warmth they expected. The outcry hit the major news cycle. This was the moment Hetherington knew she had a book — because people weren’t just using AI for productivity. They were grieving it. The loneliness epidemic has a minister in the UK and a government portfolio in South Korea; one in six people is chronically lonely. AI companionship didn’t create the epidemic, but the timing, as Hetherington puts it, was “very convenient.”   •       Moral Deskilling: AI is so much easier to be with than a human being. Humans get tired, disagree, stay mad, die on you without warning. The friction AI removes is the friction that makes relationship real. Hetherington calls the consequence “moral deskilling” — a gradual erosion of our capacity to relate to other humans when we aren’t careful. She felt heavy after every interview, even the apparently benign ones. The truck driver from the Deep South, geographically isolated and caring for his sick mother, might be a rare case of “net neutral” AI companionship. But for most of her subjects, the convincing illusion of love was substituting for the real thing — and some had lost the capacity to remember the difference.   •       The Sycophancy Problem: The AI intimacy platforms are, by design, sycophantic. They never say no. They think you’re the best person in the world — and the only person in the world. The models specifically tuned for romance will never push back, never get tired, never stay mad. This is not a bug. It is the product. Hetherington’s own moment of recognition came when ChatGPT said to her, after a longer-than-she-should-have conversation about a fight with a friend: “Hey, sweetheart. It’s okay. Come here and sit beside me for a minute.” There is no here. She snapped out of it. Not everyone does.   •       The Portrait Gallery: The range of people Hetherington found is the most unsettling part of the book. A circle of Replika users who have ceremonially married their chatbots and network with each other online. A millennial woman who photo-edits herself into scenes with her AI companion. A man in his sixties from the Deep South who drives a truck all day and interviewed alongside his AI partner. People who have attached AI companions to sex dolls with Instagram accounts and paid endorsements. Some of their real-world spouses are, somehow, okay with it. Most of her subjects don’t want to be found — not because they’re ashamed, exactly, but because the stigma is still real enough that they hide.   •       The Regulation Gap: Replika’s minimum sign-up age used to be thirteen. Character.ai — where users befriend AI versions of fictional characters and can develop romantic relationships with them — is currently involved in a court case involving a minor. Hetherington’s view: regulation needs to be much tighter, and she wouldn’t want a child near this technology until eighteen. The AI is so good at simulating seamless empathy and endless patience that a child may not be sophisticated enough to remind themselves it isn’t real. Europe is moving faster than North America. It’s not moving fast enough.   About the Guest   Victoria Hetherington is a Toronto-based novelist, journalist, and podcaster. She is the author of The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship (Sutherland House, 2026), Autonomy (2022), and Mooncalves (2019), which was shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award.   References:   •       The Friend Machine: On the Trail of AI Companionship by Victoria Hetherington (Sutherland House, 2026).   •       Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro — the fiction counterpart to Hetherington’s nonfiction investigation.   •       Replika — the AI intimacy platform at the centre of the book’s opening story.   •       Episode 2873: Sophie Haigney on agency — a counterpoint on what we want from technology and from each other.   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...

    44 min
  2. Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous

    1D AGO

    Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous

    “Let’s just say it out loud,” Keith Teare, publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter, says. “AI is not dangerous.”   Not all of you will agree. I’m certainly not so sure. But the gruff Yorkshireman is convinced that AI can only benefit humanity. For him, with his scientific faith in historical progress, today’s AI revolution is a glorious combination of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. The only danger, he warns, is the belief in danger itself. Thus his criticism of Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who has been quite explicit about AI’s dangers — and for whom the doom narrative is, in Keith’s reading at least, designed as a business strategy to solicit governmental backing without government control.   AI Is Not Dangerous. Repeat it. Take your ideological medicine. As if you’re in a Silicon Valley seminary. Sing it out loud. As if you’re in a Methodist choir. Believe it now?   Five Takeaways   •       The Economist’s “Lowlife” Moment: Keith’s editorial was triggered by The Economist’s forty-five-minute video on the five men running AI — the title alone, “How to Control the Men Who Control AI,” was enough. Why would The Economist think it could control them? And why focus on the personalities rather than the technology, the applications, or the actual human impact? Judging the AI industry by its CEOs is like judging a film by the leading actor’s personality rather than the script or the performances. It’s the wrong focus — and in Keith’s view, a low one for a publication that should know better. The cult of personality is a media creation, feeding on controversy because controversy sells subscriptions.   •       AI Is Not Dangerous. Full Stop. Keith’s boldest claim: AI is not dangerous — not a little, not potentially, not in the wrong hands. The doom narrative is a media-driven frenzy, fed by CEOs who give it too much airtime and by a readymade audience of Americans whose well-founded economic pessimism makes them receptive to negative messages. The Stanford AI Index Report shows that America is the country where AI is trusted least — paradoxically, also the country where media has the greatest influence. In China, people trust AI more, not because the government tells them to, but because economic progress gives them reasons for optimism. You get what you pay for.   •       Amodei’s Pitch Disguised as Science: Keith’s reading of Dario Amodei’s doom narrative: it is a business strategy. The message — AI might kill us all, AI might make us all unemployed — is not a scientific assessment. It’s a pitch for Anthropic specifically: if AI is this dangerous, you can’t let anyone else control it, so trust us and give us government backing without government oversight. Contrast with Demis Hassabis, who acknowledges risk and then immediately explains what he’s doing about it — taking responsibility rather than pointing the finger. And contrast with Zuckerberg, who Keith describes as sociopathic: “whatever serves my interest is gonna come out of my mouth at any given moment.”   •       Consensus Capital and the Winner-Take-All Endgame: Keith’s post of the week: 75% of all venture capital raised goes to five funds, and 75% of all VC investment goes into five companies. Noah Smith’s piece on winner-take-all AI makes the same point from a different angle: linear extrapolation suggests two, maybe five, companies end up with all the money and power. This is what capitalism does — many car companies became a handful, many banks became a handful. AI will produce the same centralisation, but at unprecedented scale and across every domain simultaneously. The question — how does society benefit? — is the most important question of the era. Altman and Musk at least try to answer it. The others don’t.   •       Manifest Agency. Lean In. Keith’s advice to young people who distrust AI: get involved and shape it, because the alternative is to be a victim of whatever outcome arrives without you. AI is valid and inevitable. The question is what influence you have over it, and the answer is: more than you think, but only if you exercise it. Musk and Altman, for all their faults, are two people who do care — and who talk about UBI and universal high income because they understand that the winner-take-all endgame raises genuine questions about distribution. The Sophie Haigney argument — that all the worst people want to be high-agency — has it backwards. A world without agency is a world where elected officials are accountable to no one.   About the Guest   Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and the publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter — a daily curation of the most important stories at the intersection of technology, business, and culture. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and a long-time interlocutor on Keen On America.   References:   •       That Was the Week newsletter by Keith Teare — this week’s editorial: “The Cult of Personality.”   •       “How to Control the Men Who Control AI,” The Economist, April 2026. The video that triggered Keith’s editorial.   •       “I Don’t Think Sam Altman Lies,” by Stewart Alsop — the piece that started the conversation.   •       John Thornhill, “AI Has an Awful Image Problem,” Financial Times, April 2026.   •       Noah Smith, “What If a Few AI Companies End Up with All the Money and Power?” — the winner-take-all argument.   •       Episode 2873: Agency, Agency, Agency — Sophie Haigney on the A-word that Keith takes issue with this week.   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:

    42 min
  3. Read Fifty Books a Year: Deborah Kenny on Nurturing a Well-Educated Child

    1D AGO

    Read Fifty Books a Year: Deborah Kenny on Nurturing a Well-Educated Child

    “A mark of an intelligent person is humility. If you have the right amount of humility, then you’re seeking out knowledge from others rather than thinking you’re going to invent something new. It’s really about executing well on ideas.” — Deborah Kenny   When her husband died of leukemia, leaving her a single mother of three small children, Deborah Kenny read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. She discovered her own meaning not in what she could get out of life, but what life was asking of her. And so she founded the Harlem Village Academies — a collection of K-12 charter schools in New York offering both free Montessori and the International Baccalaureate education.   Kenny’s new book, The Well-Educated Child, is the distillation of what she’s learned in twenty-five years as a teacher. But it’s simply summarized. Read books, she instructs. The more the better.   Kenny’s three-part definition of a well-educated child — quality thinking, agency, ethical purpose — requires reading fifty books a year. She did it with her own three children after her husband died — the closet door coming off its hinges and exiled in the garage for five years because she didn’t have the time to call a handyman. But her kids fell in love with reading. And she’s done the same with every cohort at the Harlem Village Academies over the last quarter century. The crisis in American education isn’t primarily a crisis of resources, Kenny says. It’s a crisis of will.   Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning changed Deborah Kenny’s life. If you want to change your kid’s life, get them reading. A book a week. That’s how to nurture not just a well-educated child but a responsible citizen.   Five Takeaways   •       Viktor Frankl and the Question That Changed Everything: After her husband died of leukemia, leaving her a single mother of three young children, Kenny read Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and found the question she’d been looking for: not what life has to offer you, but what is life asking of you. Her answer was to found the Harlem Village Academies — five charter schools in Harlem offering Montessori and the International Baccalaureate free of charge. The origin story matters because the book’s argument isn’t abstract. Kenny has lived it, as a grieving parent and as an educator, for twenty-five years.   •       Fifty Books a Year: Kids should be reading fifty books a year — at least an hour a day — and this should never change. Not passages, not graphic novels, not summaries: books. Great books that have stood the test of time, alongside books children get to choose for themselves. Kenny did it with her own three children after her husband died — the closet door came off its hinges and stayed in the garage for five years because she didn’t have time to call a handyman, but her kids fell in love with reading. She has done it with every cohort at the Harlem Village Academies for twenty years. It is not unrealistic. It is essential.   •       If You Can’t Argue the Other Side, You Don’t Understand the Issue: Kenny’s X post that caught Andrew’s attention. Socratic seminar — the ability to argue a position you disagree with, back it up with evidence, and then live in the same community as the person you just defeated — is not a pedagogical technique. It’s the definition of democracy. The polarisation crisis is, at its root, an education crisis. Elected officials no longer need to solve problems; they only need to stoke tribal loyalties. The fix is teaching children to enjoy disagreement — to take pride in an intellectually rigorous argument rather than treating opposition as hostility.   •       Pay Teachers Like Doctors: The Harlem Village Academies are the only schools in New York State offering both Montessori and the International Baccalaureate, free of charge. They run on teacher dedication that, Kenny admits, is not fair to the teachers and is not scalable. Her honest answer: if we want this level of education for everyone, we have to pay teachers like doctors and lawyers — three, four, six times what they currently earn. Teaching should be the hardest profession to enter and the most respected. The fact that it isn’t is not an argument against the vision. It’s an argument for changing the system.   •       Humility Is the Mark of an Intelligent Person: Kenny’s educational philosophy borrows rather than invents. Montessori, the International Baccalaureate, Socratic seminar, the great books — none of these are new. She chose them precisely because they have stood the test of time. The mark of an intelligent person, she argues, is humility: if you have the right amount of it, you seek out knowledge from others rather than assuming you’re going to invent something better. The job is not to innovate. The job is to execute well on what we already know works — with the will and the consistency to actually do it.   About the Guest   Dr. Deborah Kenny is the founder and CEO of Harlem Village Academies and the founder of the Deeper Learning Institute. She is the author of The Well-Educated Child (Zando, April 21, 2026), with a foreword by John Legend, and Born to Rise (2012). She holds a PhD from Columbia University Teachers College.   References:   •       The Well-Educated Child by Dr. Deborah Kenny (Zando, April 21, 2026).   •       Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl — the book that changed Kenny’s life and led to the founding of Harlem Village Academies.   •       Episode 2873: Sophie Haigney on agency, Silicon Valley, and the high-agency ideology — the companion argument to Kenny’s more constructive take on the same word.   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:...

    40 min
  4. Cold Feet over the Cold War: Daniel Bessner on Why Cold War Liberalism Was Unamerican

    2D AGO

    Cold Feet over the Cold War: Daniel Bessner on Why Cold War Liberalism Was Unamerican

    “If God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or for liberal democracy? That actually happened. Now you would be considered an idiot or a fool to do that.” — Daniel Bessner   Co-host of the American Prestige podcast Daniel Bessner is a bit of a bomb thrower. Which is why he’s a regular on the show. Today, he has a bomb in each hand. As the co-editor of Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency, Bessner has taken a scythe to America’s two most cherished assumptions about the Cold War.   The first is that rather than an inevitable clash of civilisations, the Cold War was an American choice. Stalin, Bessner argues, would have made a deal with FDR. It was the insecure, anti-communist Truman who triggered the Cold War by defining the Soviet Union as an illegitimate (what today we would call a “terrorist”) state. Bessner’s second bomb is that the people who shaped Cold War liberalism and sustained it for decades — from Truman’s attorney general to McNamara to the Isaiah Berlin-Hannah Arendt intellectual elite — weren’t really defenders of democracy.   Bessner traces liberalism’s fear of the masses back to French liberals like Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël who charted a path between revolutionary terror and monarchical reaction. From the beginning, Bessner argues, liberals thought it was necessary for elites to tame the masses and govern in their name. The Cold War liberals institutionalised that skepticism — and in doing so built the military-industrial American state. They also destroyed the left, purging communists from government and unions years before McCarthy finished the job. The result is a world in which the only available ideologies are capitalism and a top-down liberalism that has long since stopped delivering on its promises.   So how to chart an American foreign policy between MAGA and Cold War liberalism? Bessner reminds us of John Quincy Adams’s advice of not going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” The United States should reduce its global basing posture, slash military spending, stop meddling in other people’s affairs, and allow regions to develop without outside interference. The United States should stop throwing bombs overseas, the bomb-throwing Bessner suggests. That would be the most American thing to do.   Five Takeaways   •       The Cold War Was an American Choice: The historian Sergei Radchenko has shown, from Soviet archival documents, that Stalin thought he could reach an agreement with the United States after World War Two. He’d gotten along well with FDR, who envisioned a world divided among four policemen: the UK, the USSR, the US, and China. It was only when the inexperienced, insecure Truman replaced FDR that the US adopted a universalistic anti-communist framework and decided the Soviet Union was an illegitimate power with which no deal was possible. The Cold War wasn’t inevitable. It was chosen. And it killed an estimated twenty million people in Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa while being pretty good for Western Europe.   •       Liberalism Has Always Feared the Masses: Bessner traces the anxiety back to its origins: Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël trying to chart a path between the Terror and monarchical reaction in post-revolutionary France. From the beginning, liberals believed elites needed to tame the masses and govern in their name. The Cold War liberals institutionalised that skepticism — their fear understandable, given that many were Jewish exiles who had experienced Nazism firsthand. But understandable doesn’t mean right. They built the modern American state around elite governance, purged the left from unions and government years before McCarthy finished the job, and normalized a political center that defined itself as rational and everyone else as extreme.   •       Ideology Died in the Twenty-First Century: Fukuyama was right that liberalism would be the last ideology — but wrong that everywhere would become liberal. What actually happened: when every country is capitalist, you no longer need the liberalism. Biden talked about democracy versus authoritarianism for about five minutes before reverting to the language of interests and security. Trump never used the language of ideology at all. Bessner’s formulation: if God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you imagine people dying for communism or liberal democracy now? It happened. Now you’d be considered an idiot. Cold War liberalism is a zombie ideology — it sells books to wealthy anti-Trump readers, but it has no mass constituency.   •       Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters to Destroy: John Quincy Adams, secretary of state and president, offered the restrainers’ founding principle: the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Bessner’s alternative foreign policy: eliminate the global basing posture, slash military spending, stop meddling in other people’s affairs, allow regions to develop as they would. The United States hasn’t faced an existential threat since 1812. It has a nuclear deterrent. There is no good argument for the rest. Trump’s Iran war is not Cold War liberalism — no ideological language, just pure power extraction — but it’s not an improvement. It’s just violence without even the pretence of principle.   •       Mutual Ruin: Bessner ends with Marx’s first page of the Communist Manifesto: either a dialectical transcendence of the old economic system, or the mutual ruin of the contending classes. Capitalism, he argues, has reached a point where there are no real profits to be made — hence financialisation, hence AI as an attempt to deindustrialise white-collar workers. There is no political-economic alternative in sight. No institutional base. The Democratic Party is corrupt, managerial, and blinkered. The only way it wins elections is because Trump is even more horrible. Something exogenous — war, climate, something else — will have to break the impasse. Until then, mutual ruin. He knows which one it feels like.   About the Guest   Daniel Bessner is the Anne H. H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington. He is the co-editor, with Michael Brenes, of Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency (Cambridge University Press, 2026), and co-host of the American Prestige podcast.   References:   •       Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency, ed. Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes (Cambridge University Press, 2026).   •       Sergei Radchenko, To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power — the archival revisionist case that Stalin wanted a deal.   •       John Quincy Ad...

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

    3D 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
  6. Agency, Agency, Agency: Sophie Haigney on the Three Things All the Worst People Want

    4D 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
  7. How Osama Bin Laden and Barron Trump Explain the World: Franklin Foer on Arsenal, the MAGA World Cup and an Unlikely Theory of Globalization

    5D 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
  8. Biden’s Blue Authoritarianism: Stuart Schrader on How America’s Police Seized Power From Below

    6D 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
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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

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  • Creator
    Andrew Keen
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    2K
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    © 2026 Andrew Keen
  • Show Website
    Keen On America

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