Keen On America

“Washington and Hamilton were governed by Willing.” — John Adams, 1813 Thomas Willing voted against the Declaration of Independence. He was the wealthiest man in Philadelphia, the largest merchant trader in North America, an Anglican slave trader printing money. So he saw little reason to declare independence from Britain. Especially since the renegades — the poor Scots-Irish Presbyterians floodin...

“I don’t know if any rational person ever became a billionaire running a disruptive company.” — Keith Teare Is capitalism by permission of democracy, or is democracy by permission of capitalism? That’s the question Keith Teare and I have been circling for a while on our weekly tech roundup, and this week it triggered a full-blown discussion of our 21st century economic and political fate. Earlier...

“We do not exist without nature — unless Silicon Valley figures something out in their bunkers.” — Natalie Kyriacou Forget the Middle East for a moment. Or rather, don’t — because today’s petroleum war is an environmental catastrophe, perhaps even an ecocide. Militaries are the largest source of emissions on the planet. Trump uses Iran’s oil fields as a bargaining chip while assassinating its lead...

“Nobody’s reality is more or less real.” — Kevin Ashton It’s the chicken and egg question. What came first: stories or language? For Kevin Ashton , the answer is stories. In his new book, The Story of Stories , Ashton argues that rather than inventing stories with language, we invented language to tell stories. Stories, for Ashton, predate language. They are what makes us human. 300,000 years ago,...

“I don’t like the idea of losing out to a machine because I feel like I’m losing a part of myself in the process.” — Nelson Dellis, six-time USA Memory Champion Most of us can’t remember our spouse’s phone number. We barely know our own. We haven’t read a physical map in years. Some of us don’t even know what a map is. Such is the impoverishment of mental life in our digital age. Nelson Dellis , u...

“If we don’t fight, then what are we doing?” — Jeff Boyd How do you write fiction about contemporary America when reality itself is stranger than fiction? A country in which “alternative facts” is policy rather than satire. Where “truth” has been nationalized. Jeff Boyd , an acclaimed young American novelist, sees fiction as refuge. For both writer and reader, it gets us inside the heads of people...

“Had another nation done this, we would regard this as an act of war.” — Arthur Levine, President of Brandeis University Forget Iran for a moment. I asked Brandeis President Arthur Levine whether the Trump administration has gone to war with the American university. He paused diplomatically. “Going to war is a very restrictive term,” he answered. Then added: “Had another nation done this, we would...

“You would not want to be me.” — Elon Musk Yesterday I argued that Dario Amodei is the most interesting man in America because he’s doing something nobody else has the balls to do: acting like a human being in public. Elon Musk is the opposite. He has the balls — nobody would deny that — but what’s missing is the human-being. Or perhaps Elon is all-too-human, which explains why so many of us — inc...

“Whether you like Amodei or not, at least he’s a leader.” — Andrew Keen Dario Amodei is the most interesting man in America right now. Not because he runs a $500 billion company or because he’s suing the Trump administration or because Anthropic’s Claude topped the iPhone charts. But because he’s doing something nobody else in Silicon Valley has the balls to do: he’s acting like a human being in p...

“I can point to things. But is that a systemic explanation? I think there the answer is a little less clear. I mean, surely people need love and all of that, but then there’s this risk of just devolving into platitude.” — David Sussillo David Sussillo is a big time neural reverse engineer. The Stanford brain scientist worked at Google Brain with Geoffrey Hinton, and now is at Meta Reality Labs. Wh...

“They all did it. They’re all guilty.” — Amy Littlefield Who killed Roe? Amy Littlefield , the abortion access correspondent at The Nation and big time Agatha Christie fan, has written a true crime book about it. Literally. Killers of Roe treats the death of the constitutional right to abortion as a murder mystery in the Poirot or Miss Marple tradition, complete with suspects, motives, and a foren...

“It’s about blood. I cover a lot of bloodshed in the book, but I also talk about a different kind of blood: blood that ties, blood that binds families across time and distance.” — Jazmine Ulloa Kristi Noem is gone. Under her tenure, 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 — double the previous year’s toll. But Jazmine Ulloa , the New York Times’ national immigration reporter, doesn’t think much will...

“This is not the beginning of a new right-wing revanche fascist era; this is the end of something. But the problem is we can’t get to the new world because the new world is too filled with problems.” — Jonathan Taplin Trump fantasizes about himself as a king. But he’s actually just an interregnum, at least according to Jon Taplin — author of Move Fast and Break Things , Hollywood insider, and old...

“Fidel Castro told his aides, ‘We’re going to fill his arms with shit.’ That is an example of weaponised migration. What we’re experiencing now is on a thermonuclear scale.” — Peter Schweizer Is best selling writer Peter Schweizer a conspiracy theorist? He doesn’t think so. His new book, The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon , argues that Mexico, Ch...

“I have always said that they are the same person. And the drama of this story is that one ends up dead in the darkest prison in America, and the other in the White House.” — Michael Wolff A few days ago we had Jason Pack on the show suggesting that the Anglo-American media elite had a degree of complicity in the Epstein scandal. Michael Wolff disagrees. The media weren’t complicit, he says. They...

“The fatal error is ours. Legislators set out a regulatory regime that keeps regulation at bay. The only other industry with a similar protection is the gun industry.” — Olivier Sylvain There are certain words in book titles that provoke. “Reclaiming”, for example. My guest today is happy to defend the provocation. Fordham law professor and former FTC senior advisor Olivier Sylvain argues in his n...

“They’re both naughty boys in the playground, leveraging the absence of clarity to their own advantage. Neither one of them is an authoritative leader of opinion with the interests of everyone at heart.” — Keith Teare What a difference a week makes. Last Saturday, Keith Teare was arguing that Anthropic was wrong to push back against the US government’s use of AI in warfare. This week his editorial...

“All my life, I’ve absolutely opposed all terrorism by anyone under any circumstances. I define terrorism as the deliberate killing of noncombatants.” — Daniel Ellsberg, October 2001 Last week we had Tom Wells on the show talking about Henry Kissinger’s moral indifference to the loss of innocent lives in the Vietnam war. Henry Kissinger, of course, was no fan of the Pentagon Papers— the leaked doc...

“I don’t think we’re sleepwalking, because people have striven to be as thoughtful as possible. In some ways, they’ve been too thoughtful. We’re paralysed, in fact, by our risk awareness.” — Christopher Clark It’s 1830 in East Prussia. The city of Königsberg still bathed in the amber glow of the late Enlightenment—at least in the minds of people who’d never been there. But that glow, it goes witho...

“We should all be able to look at the numbers and agree that this is not sustainable and that whatever we’ve been doing is not working. Democrats have had their chance, and Republicans have had their chance, and it’s only gotten worse.” — Halle Tecco Warren Buffett called America’s healthcare costs “a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.” That tapeworm now devours nearly a fifth of the nation’...

“If we let things continue in the direction that they are taking now, I think it is more likely than not that we will end up in some kind of Great Power war within the foreseeable future.” — Arne Westad This conversation was recorded before the invasion of Iran, which makes what you are about to hear even more chilling. In his new book, The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History,...

“When you use humor to degrade people, you can get away with it—but you’re also doing something that’s completely devastating.” — Rhae Lynn Barnes Donald Trump’s recent retweet of Barack and Michelle Obama depicted as apes was dismissed by his supporters as “just a joke”—another example, they claimed, of liberals lacking a sense of humor. But Princeton historian Rhae Lynn Barnes argues that this k...

“If you disestablish Christianity, then Christian leaders need to make Christianity a consumer product. They need to give the American people something they want.” — Matthew Avery Sutton Over the years, Keen On has done many shows on the relationship between the United States and organized religion. Daniel Williams argued that smart people still believe in God. Jim Wallis warned that a false white...

“We keep telling you there’s an eviction crisis, so organize with us. Feel free to come into our meetings. Feel free to learn about the lives of people who have been here for a long time.” — Manissa Maharawal Yesterday we spoke with anthropologist Ida Susser about France’s Yellow Vests—provincial truck drivers, nurses, and teachers who drove hours to Paris, furious about decades of disinvestment i...

"He's blundered here. He's trying to set policy for the government on the use of AI through a sales contract." — Keith Teare on Dario Amodei There's only one story this week: Dario Amodei's refusal to let the Department of War use Anthropic's best technology for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Silicon Valley rallied behind him. The New York Times covered it. Sam Altman pub...