Keen On
2,128 episodes - English - Latest episode: 1 day ago - ★★★★ - 72 ratingsNobody 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.
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Episodes
Episode 2065: Craig Whitlock explains how an overweight Malaysian contractor known as Fat Leonard bribed, bilked and seduced the U.S. Navy
May 16, 2024 12:58 - 41 minutes - 38.2 MBIt’s a mind blowing story. In Fat Leonard, the Washington Post’s prize winning investigative journalist Craig Whitlock tells of a Malaysian contractor called Leonard Glenn Francis who successfully seduced up to a thousand US naval officers with prostitutes, fancy dinners and expensive gifts. The most astonishing thing of all, he explains, is that many Naval officers seems to have known exactly what Fat Leonard was up to. So what, I asked Whitlock, does this tell us about the state not just o...
Episode 2064: Chris Gavaler explains how How Stars Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Marvel determine how we view reality
May 15, 2024 15:29 - 41 minutes - 37.9 MBEver wondered why the never-endingTrump show seems simultaneously like a reality show remake and sequel? According to Chris Gavaler, the self styled Patron Saint of Superheroes, it’s because our view of reality itself has been shaped by all those “sequels, remakes, retcons and rejects” endlessly spewing out of Hollywood. Our addiction to the Stars Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings and Marvel franchises has “revised" our reality,” Gavaler, the co-author of the new REVISING OUR REALITY, s...
Episode 2063: Rabbi Shai Held on why Judaism is really all about Love
May 14, 2024 16:55 - 39 minutes - 36.2 MBGiven the situation in Gaza, some might interpret a new book entitled Judaism Is About Love to be either satirical or slightly chutzpahdik. But its author, Rabbi Shai Held, President & Dean of New York City’s Hadar Institute, is all too serious in his argument that the idea of love lies at the historic heart of traditional Jewish life. It’s an intriguing, if idealistic, interpretation. Christianity, he suggests, appropriated this idea, thereby creating what he considers the anti-semitic trop...
Episode 2062: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Ali Velshi
May 13, 2024 16:31 - 39 minutes - 36.5 MBLast week’s KEEN ON America interview featured a conversation with R. Derek Black, the son of a KKK Grand Wizard, whose all-too-American life has been defined by radical personal reinvention and second chances. In contrast, Ali Velshi, host of MSNBC's "The Last Word", not only chose to come to America from Canada, but also chose to become an American citizen. For Velshi, a self-styled libertarian who confesses to holding five passports, the act of being America suggests the kind of small act...
Episode 2061: Rafil Kroll-Zaidi on Branson, Missouri, the most American town you've never heard of
May 12, 2024 16:26 - 41 minutes - 38.3 MBWhat is the most American town in the USA? Las Vegas comes to mind, of course. And Memphis, with its uniquely American church of Graceland. Or one of Springsteen’s forgotten beach towns in New Jersey. Imagine rolling Vegas and Memphis and one of those sad NJ boardwalk places into a small Missouri town that you’ve never heard of. That’s Branson, Missouri, the 12,,638 person self-styled “city” in the Ozarks that is the annual host to millions of mostly white American visitors. a guide to Bra...
Episode 2060: Ferdia Lennon on the tragicomedy of the Peloponnesian War
May 11, 2024 16:41 - 39 minutes - 36.5 MBI’m just back from five glorious days in Syracuse, the ancient Mediterranean city in the south western corner of Sicily. And to extend my trip, at least virtually, I spoke to the young Irish novelist, Ferdia Lennon, author of the very unusual and much acclaimed Glorious Exploits, a tragicomic novel set in the Syracuse of the Peloponnesian War. We talked the Syracuse of antiquity, of course, but also Lennon discussed the long process of writing Glorious Exploits and gave valuable advice to ot...
Episode 2059: Keith Teare on why critics of the iPad Crush advertisement are "haters of the future"
May 10, 2024 16:33 - 35 minutes - 32.5 MBApple’s Crush advertisement for their new range of iPads got so crushed by its critics that Apple apologized and announced the commercial wouldn’t go on tv. But according to Keith Teare, author of the That Was The Week tech newsletter, the massive reaction to this ad reflects a troubling cultural hysteria which, he believes, is driven by “snowflakes” on social networks like Threads. And the truth, at least according to Keith, is that critics of new creative devices like the iPad are actual...
Episode 2058: Timothy Morton searches for a Christian Ecology that will get us out of our Planetary Hell
May 09, 2024 14:17 - 35 minutes - 32.4 MBTimothy Morton, who teaches English at Rice, has become a bit of a rock star interpreter of our hellishly hot planetary times. And his eclectic work has even gotten the stamp of approval of real rock stars - like Laurie Anderson & Björk as well as the Big Lebowski himself, Jeff Bridges. So it was really fun to have him on KEEN ON to talk about HELL: In Search of a Christian Ecology, his new theological guide to how to live in catastrophic times. “This is hell, but not the end of the world,” ...
Episode 2057: KEEN ON America featuring R. Derek Black
May 08, 2024 14:11 - 54 minutes - 49.5 MBHow seriously should we take the white nationalist threat in the United States? Very seriously, at least according to R. Derek Black, a young man who knows a thing or two about the US white nationalist movement. The son of a Grand Wizard of the KKK and a close family friend of David Duke, Black believes that white nationalism is no longer a fringe feature of the Trumpist Republican party. And it’s this fear of the mainstreaming of overt racism that triggered Black’s new book, The Klansman’s ...
Episode 2056: Kyle Paoletta exposes the 2024 Republican Primaries as "Farce"
May 07, 2024 15:50 - 42 minutes - 39.1 MBMarx’s 19th century remark that history repeats itself twice, first as tragedy and then as farce, helps us makes sense of the seemingly surreal politics of the contemporary Republican Party. As Kyle Paoletta notes in his insightful Harpers essay “The Race For Second Place”, the 2024 Republican primaries have been a complete “farce” (the tragedy, of course, being the 2016 primaries). Everything about this year’s Iowa Causus and the New Hampshire primary, Paoletta reported from Des Moines and ...
Episode 2055: Michael Ignatieff on a history of his privileges
May 06, 2024 17:05 - 44 minutes - 40.4 MBPete Townsend said it best. “Hope I die before I get old” he wrote in The Who’s anthemic 1965 hit, “My Generation”. But what Townsend really meant in a lyric that best captured the rebellious Boomer spirit of the Sixties, he later acknowledged, was “hope I die before I get very rich”. Townsend, as it happens, is still alive and, like many other members of his generation, very very rich. In fact, the accumulated wealth of Townsend’s generation is now estimated by the New York Times to be ove...
Episode 2054: Keith Teare follows the money of the online creative economy
May 05, 2024 21:37 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBThe more that changes in the digital world, the more that stays the same. For all the disruption of AI, two trends appear totally unchanging. Firstly, it’s the big players - Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple - that appear to be most benefitting from the AI revolution. Secondly, creative individuals continue to struggle to make money in the online economy. That, at least, is the view of That Was The Week’s Keith Teare who, in spite of his general optimism about our digital future, argues in...
Episode 2053: Vince Houghton on how the Cold War transformed Miami into America's most Covert City
May 04, 2024 08:50 - 41 minutes - 38.1 MBWe don’t often image Miami as a city of Cold War subterfuge akin to Berlin or Vienna. But according to Vince Houghton, co-author of COVERT CITY, Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War as Washington DC or Moscow. The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War, he argues. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. On reflection, it make sense. With its pop...
Episode 2052: Bryan Caplan on the economic and philosophical case for the radical deregulation of the housing industry
May 03, 2024 16:48 - 37 minutes - 34.7 MBWe’ve done several shows on the housing crisis in America, mostly from a progressive perspective in which the solution to the shortage of homes is presented in terms of government investment. The libertarian economist, Bryan Caplan, however, comes at the problem from a more conservative angle. The co-author of the new graphic novel, BUILD, BABY, BUILD, Caplan argues that the housing industry needs to be radically deregularized. This right-wing libertarian approach to the science and ethics ...
Episode 2051: Mohamed Amer Meziane offers an ecological and racial history of seculization
May 02, 2024 16:16 - 37 minutes - 34.4 MBOne of Bethanne Patrick’s recommended books for April was Mohamed Amer Meziane’s The States of the Earth. It sounded intriguing, if not entirely coherent, and so I invited Meziane on the show. Even now, I’m not sure I exactly get Meziane’s point. He seems to be saying that secularization is not only behind western racial colonialism but also the destruction of the land. It’s a provocative thesis, nonetheless, and Meziane, who teaches at Brown University, makes it with a flourish of rich his...
Episode 250: Andrew J Scott on why we should care about old people
May 01, 2024 21:13 - 38 minutes - 35.4 MBIn today’s stultified American gerontocracy, not everyone is convinced that we should care about old people. After all, aging baby boomers still control most of the wealth and power in an increasingly divided & inegalitarian country. But, in contrast with many of today’s age warriors, Andrew J Scott cares about the old. In fact, the 58 year-old British business school academic has built a career on fetishizing long life. His latest book is entitled The Longevity Imperative in which he expla...
Episode 2049: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Samyr Laine
May 01, 2024 11:03 - 51 minutes - 47 MBSamyr Laine might be a model for how to become a Haitian-American in the 21st century. Son of Haitian emigrants, Laine was a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard, competed at the London 2012 Olympics as a Haitian triple jumper, and is now an entrepreneur and investor in sports and entertainment. It’s quite a remarkable story and will speaks, to some, of the continued existence of the American Dream. Although Laine himself might question this optimistic interpretation of his narrative, sugg...
Episode 2048: Tobias Buck on the Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century
April 30, 2024 08:56 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MBGiven the industry of Holocaust remembering, do we really need another book about the Nazis and their industrial death camps? Yes, according to Tobias Buck, author of the much acclaimed A Final Verdict: the Holocaust on Trial in the 21st Century. As the half-German managing editor of the Financial Times, Buck brings a subtlety to the discussion of the Holocaust which is sometimes missing from other commentators. The problem with many Holocaust books is that they routinize this singular histo...
Episode 2047: Elisa New on Poetry in America
April 29, 2024 19:06 - 39 minutes - 36.3 MBThe Harvard academic Elisa New is host of the much acclaimed PBS series POETRY IN AMERICA. Now in Season Four, the show has featured conversations about American poetry with Joe Biden, Herbie Hancock, Gloria Estefan, Shaquille O’Neal, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. While America isn’t normally considered a poetic nation, New’s show has brought poetry into the homes of millions of Americans. So when I caught up with New, I asked her whether there was such a thing as an American poem and what it is...
Episode 2046: David Faris on why American kids are all left these days
April 28, 2024 21:08 - 36 minutes - 33.5 MBIn November of this year, two particularly out of touch eighty-year old men will contest the US Presidential election. America, in other words, has an age problem. According to David Faris, author of THE KIDS ARE ALL LEFT, the country might be on the brink of a generational war between young and old. But there’s nothing apocalyptic about this imminent conflict, Faris believes. The majority of American kids, he argues, are politically on the left and their progressive activism will unite rat...
Episode 2045: Lisa Kaltenegger on the inevitability of the existence of non-human life somewhere in the Universe
April 27, 2024 10:32 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MBAs founding director of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute and author of the new ALIEN EARTHS: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos, Lisa Kaltenegger is one of the world’s most respected cosmologists. She believes that, with our revolutionary new cosmological technologies, we are likely to “discover” non-human life somewhere in the cosmos. What’s particularly astonishing about these kinds of conversations is how they no longer astonish us. Fifty years ago, the idea of discovering non-human li...
Episode 2044: Warning! This KEEN ON conversation with Alex Edmans may contain lies
April 26, 2024 21:10 - 31 minutes - 29.1 MBIn a “post-truth” world, who should we trust? According to Alex Edmans, one of the UK’s hottest business school professors, you should trust him enough to read his new book, May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit Our Biases - And What We Can Do About It. You should also trust me enough to listen to and/or watch this conversation with Edmans, but not enough to believe everything that I say. For example, describing Alex as one of the UK’s “hottest” business school profes...
Episode 2043: Adam Kuper explains why our museums reveal much more about ourselves than about other people's cultures
April 25, 2024 23:18 - 33 minutes - 30.2 MBMuseums, the distinguished anthropologist Adam Kuper argues in his new book Museums of Other People, are actually mirrors of ourselves. Rather than revealing curiosities about cultures of antiquity, they are actually living documents of power - particularly western, colonial power. Does this mean we affluent westerners should all feel horribly guilty ever time we go to the British Museum or the Peabody? Perhaps. But Kuper brings these old museums back to life by reminding us of their contem...
Episode 2042: Robert Pearl MD explains how AI can regenerate the American medical system
April 24, 2024 12:14 - 41 minutes - 38.3 MBThere are few people more adept at navigating America’s labyrinthine medical system than Robert Pearl. Yale medical degree, Stanford University professor, best-selling author, former CEO of the Californian insurance network Kaiser Permanente, Pearl has explored this byzantine confusion of private enterprise monopoly and government supported bureaucracy from almost every angle. And now Dr Pearl has a way of curing its profound dysfunctionality and shoving the archaic system into the 21st cent...
Episode 2041: Dr. Judy Ho on how we can stop f*****g ourselves up
April 23, 2024 18:16 - 35 minutes - 32.2 MBDr Judy Ho has a new book entitled The New Rules of Attachment: How to Heal Your Relationships, Reparent Your Inner Child, and Secure Your Life Vision. It’s one of those books which explain to us, in our therapeutic age of intense anxiety, how to stop f*****g ourselves up. Yeah, I know. These kinds of books, by “clinical and forensic neuropsychologists” like the telegenic Judy Ho, can be intensely annoying. But, as an proven expert in f*****g up one’s life, I rather liked Dr Judy’s arguments...
Episode 2040: Matt Hern on the revolutionary potential of suburbia
April 22, 2024 13:14 - 38 minutes - 34.9 MBThe suburbs haven’t got a great press recently on KEEN ON. First there was Benjamin Herold, author of Disillusioned, who found the dead body of the American Dream in the American suburb. And then David Masciotra, author of Exurbia Now, discovered political lethargy and reaction in the outer suburbs of American “exurbia”. Matt Hern, however, disagrees, finding in the suburbs the very political energy and engagement that he believes have been lost from the gentrified inner cities of London, Va...
Episode 2039: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Mark Danner
April 21, 2024 15:57 - 1 hour - 61.2 MBIn his early opposition to the Iraq war and other overseas misadventures in Bosnia, Haiti and El Salvador, Mark Danner is one of the most respected observers of American foreign policy. So it was a real honor to sit down with him and talk about his life both as an American and as a critic of America’s increasingly frayed relations with the rest of the world. Given his peripatetic life as a correspondent of overseas conflict, there’s a Homeric quality to Mark Danner, both as a man and as a wr...
Episode 2038: Daniel Bessner on how the existential crisis of Hollywood's film & tv writers is the canary in the coal mine for the rest of America's professional elites
April 20, 2024 16:25 - 37 minutes - 34.2 MBHarper’s has a great cover story this month entitled “The Life and Death of Hollywood” by the intellectual historian, podcast and general muckraker Daniel Bessner. Film & tv writers face an existential threat, Bessner told me, from a Hollywood now controlled by four financialized mega-companies operated by MBA touting execs. But is this really new, I asked him, or is today’s dismal story just another rerun of the standard anti-capitalist narrative of creatives getting screwed by the money m...
Episode 2037: Elliot Ackerman on the danger of mercenaries and the value of national service
April 19, 2024 18:16 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MBElliot Ackerman has an intriguing essay in this issue of Liberties Quarterly on the use and abuse of mercenaries throughout history. Linking the history of the British in India, the US in Afghanistan and Russia in contemporary Ukraine, he ask what it means when mercenaries replace regular soldiers to fight supposedly “national” wars? It’s not usually good news, he suggests, arguing that for America to remain both a militarily and morally great power in the 21st century, it should consider re...
Episode 2036: Stephen Marche, author of "The Next Civil War", on Alex Garland's new movie "Civil War"
April 18, 2024 17:22 - 32 minutes - 29.6 MBI have to admit I absolutely HATED Alex Garland’s new movie Civil War. I found it annoyingly trite, self-evidently packaged for an ahistorical cinematic audience addicted to the amnesia of mindless violence. That’s fine, of course, for most Hollywood productions, but not for a supposedly serious movie about the American future by a highly talented filmmaker. However, my Canadian friend, Stephen Marche, author of the much acclaimed The Next Civil War, clearly disagrees with my own (elitist) ...
Episode 2035: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Christopher Schroeder
April 17, 2024 15:52 - 50 minutes - 46 MBPart of the purpose of our new KEEN ON AMERICA series is to (re)discover what it means to be an American. Many of the wisest observers of American life - from De Tocqueville in the 19th Century to Max Weber and Alistair Cooke in the 20th - saw the uniqueness of the American character in its can-do quality, in its hunger to fix the fixable. Christopher Schroeder is an archetype of this type of practical wisdom. As a media executive, tech investor, political insider, start-up entrepreneur and...
Episode 2034: Dale Maharidge tells American liberals to look in the mirror to understand the Doom Loop now engulfing their country
April 16, 2024 18:20 - 33 minutes - 30.5 MBLike yesterday’s KEEN ON guest, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Dale Maharidge believes that liberals are “equally to blame” for what he calls, in his new collection of essays, America’s Doom Loop. Maharidge, whose Pulitzer prize winning writing about the gutting of the industrial midwest, inspired Springsteen’s iconic 1995 song “Youngstown”, barely recognizes the America of the 2020s. It was a different reality in 1980, he says, arguing that Americans of both left and right have written off the center ...
Episode 2033: Batya Ungar-Sargon on how American elites have betrayed the country's working men and women
April 15, 2024 17:02 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBBehind all the partisan hysteria, a dramatic political realignment is taking place in America. As SECOND CLASS author Batya Ungar-Sargon told me, the Democrats have become the party of a mostly coastal global knowledge elite and the Republicans the party of the old (most white) working class. This new elite, Ungar-Sargon argues, have broken its contract with the working people by pursuing internationalist policies that hurt most working Americans. There’s obviously some Trumpian hyperbole he...
Episode 2032: Natalie Foster on how the arc of the 21st century American moral universe is bending toward justice
April 14, 2024 18:13 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MBFinally some good news for progressive Americans. According to Natalie Foster, whose new book The Guarantee is out on April 23, Americans are about to get the economy they deserve. In The Guarantee, Foster gets inside the what she describes as “the fight” for our economic future and discovers the seeds of an American post neo-liberalism. This “New New Deal” began, she says, in the depths of the Great Recession of 2008, and matured during the COVID years when the government took financial re...
Episode 2031: New books from Salman Rushdie, Erik Larsen, Amor Towles, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Patric Gagne & Leif Enger
April 13, 2024 19:32 - 31 minutes - 28.9 MBI do enjoy our regular new books show with Bethanne Patrick, the astonishingly widely read book critic of Los Angeles Times. For April, she recommends freshly published books by Salman Rushdie, Erik Larsen, Amor Towles, Mohamed Amer Meziane, Patric Gagne & Leif Enger. Of these, she picks Leif Enger’s new novel, I Cheerfully Refuse, as the best book for April. But I’m so intrigued by Mohamed Amer Meziane’s The States of the Earth, that I’ve already booked him to appear on the show. I’d also l...
Episode 2030: KEEN OF AMERICA featuring Sara Paretsky
April 12, 2024 16:47 - 32 minutes - 29.9 MBSo what does it mean to be an American? Previous guests on KEEN ON AMERICA like Arlie Russell Hochschild and Thelton Henderson told me that they learnt to be an American during the civil rights unrest of the Sixties. Sara Paretsky, the creator of the incomparable female Chicago detective V.I. Warshawski, might agree. As Paretsky told me, learning what it meant to be American was shaped by her experience in the civil rights struggles in Chicago during the Sixties. And the issue of racial inju...
Episode 2029: How to House America?
April 11, 2024 16:34 - 33 minutes - 30.9 MBHow to deal the American crisis of homelessness? Late last year, Kevin Adler, the San Francisco based homeless activist and author of When We Walk By, came on the show to argue that we should all personally interact with the unhoused. Alexander Gorlin, an award winning architect, and Victoria Newhouse, an architectural historian, look at the problem in a more traditionally top-down manner. Co-editors of the new Housing the Nation: Social Equity, Architecture and the Future of Affordable Hou...
Episode 2028: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Thelton Henderson
April 10, 2024 14:58 - 55 minutes - 50.7 MBFew Americans of any color or creed have had a legal career as historically rich or significant as Thelton Henderson. One of the earliest African-American graduates of Boult law school at UC Berkeley, Henderson was the first black attorney for the civil rights division of the US Department of Justice, going down to Mississippi in 1963 where he become familiar with MLK and many other civil rights leaders. He later became a Federal judge where he pioneered historic legal decisions regarding ra...
Episode 2027: Marc Hauser on giving children second chances to overcome trauma and lead happy lives
April 09, 2024 15:01 - 38 minutes - 35.7 MBEveryone deserves a second chance. The former Harvard professor of psychology Marc D Hauser has had a controversial academic career, having been investigated in a high profile case in 2010 by Harvard for supposedly falsifying research data. But Hauser, who quit Harvard in 2011, remains prolific and has a new book out this week, Vulnerable Minds, focused - perhaps not uncoincidentally, given Hauser’s own history - on giving children second chances to overcome trauma and thus lead happy lives...
Episode 2026: Dr Damon Tweedy on today's struggle to center psychiatry and mental healthcare into the mainstream of the medical community
April 08, 2024 23:19 - 38 minutes - 35 MBAccording to Dr Damon Tweedy there a connection between the historic struggle for civil rights and today’s struggle for more mainstream mental healthcare. In 2016, Tweedy wrote Black Man in a White Coat, his bestselling reflections on race and medicine. And now the Duke University based doctor is back with Facing the Unseen, a book making the case for what he calls “centering” mental health in medicine. In both his new book and this conversation, Dr Tweedy argues for a more comprehensive and...
Episode 2025: On the eve of the eclipse, Christopher Cokinos illuminates the sun and moon's history and their future
April 07, 2024 20:31 - 32 minutes - 29.7 MBToday, on the eve of the total lunar eclipse of the sun, the media is full of practical guides about how to tilt our heads at this once-in-a-lifetime celestial event. But what about the metaphysical questions about the eclipse? What should it mean to us humans, both in terms of our existence on earth and to our planet’s uncertain future? According to cosmological poet Christopher Cokinos, author of the new STILL AS BRIGHT: An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow, the e...
Episode 2024: Sheryl Kaskowitz on how FDR and his New Deal team saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time
April 06, 2024 23:59 - 38 minutes - 34.8 MBIn this KEEN ON show, the music historian Sheryl Kaskowitz, author of A CHANCE TO HARMONIZE, narrates how FDR and his team of New Dealers saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time. And she explains that there would have been on popular American folk music - no Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez or Bob Dylan - without FDR's Hidden Music Unit and its radical ambition to reinvent American communities in the depths of the 1930s. Sheryl Kaskowitz is a writer, editor, ...
Episode 2023: How the AI "bubble" isn't really a bubble and why Keith Teare might be emigrating to China
April 05, 2024 21:27 - 41 minutes - 37.9 MBIs there such a thing as an economic bubble? Not according to That Was The Week author Keith Teare who argues that all bubbles reflect innovation and promise (even if you lose your shirt by investing in tulips or dotcoms). While Keith still doesn’t seem to have met a bubble he wouldn’t invest in, his argument probably does make sense for the current “AI bubble” which many skeptics today are writing off as just more irrationally exuberant techno-babble. For all his critique of techno-pessimis...
Episode 2022: Henk de Berg on the many similarities tying Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler
April 04, 2024 17:08 - 41 minutes - 38.3 MBIs Trump really like Hitler? Last month, we did a show with the Hitler scholar, Peter Range, who argued that the Adolf Hitler of 1924 had much in common with the Donald Trump of 2024. And now we are back on the Trump-Hitler comparison train with Henk de Berg, author of the new Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying. What ties Trump and Hitler together, de Berg argues, is their ability to fabricate reality (ie: lie). Both men, de Berg explains, are masterful performers on a political ...
Episode 2021: Norman Ohler on Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age
April 03, 2024 17:11 - 41 minutes - 38.1 MBIn TRIPPED, his intriguing new history of drugs and postwar America, the German writer Norman Ohler makes LSD both a symbol and a metaphor for the history of the Cold War. Linking Nazi Germany, the CIA with what he calls “the dawn” of the psychedelic age, Ohler presents LSD — the revolutionary psychedelic drug invented by the Swiss pharma giant Sandoz which the Nazi tested as a “truth serum” in Dachau — as a weapon used by the American military-industrial complex to fight the Soviets. As wit...
Episode 2020: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Arlie Russell Hochschild
April 02, 2024 18:38 - 1 hour - 65.8 MBHow to put America back together? Few people have thought more about this Humpty Dumpty style challenge than Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the 2016 classic Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. So when I sat down with Hochschild for my new KEEN ON AMERICA series, we began by talking about what it means to her to be American and whether she’s ever felt like a stranger in her own land. Born in 1940, my sense is that Hochschild has spent much of her life g...
Episode 2019: Ismar Volic explains how mathematics can save American democracy from the Trump/Biden gerontocratic duopoly
April 01, 2024 22:53 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MBLike all immigrants who fled to the U.S. to escape civil war, Ismar Volic has a deep personal appreciation for American democracy. And Volic - a Bosnian refugee from the Yugoslavian civil war who is now director of the Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College - fears that American democracy has now slipped into existential crisis and might only be fixable with the help of math. Thus Volic’s new book, Making Democracy Count, which explains how mathematics can not only impr...
Episode 2018: Becca Rothfeld's celebration of mess, appetite and sexual desire
April 01, 2024 03:18 - 39 minutes - 35.8 MBBecca Rothfeld’s much heralded new collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, challenges the American Puritan values of self-control and abstinence. Why have one meal when you can three, she asks, praising the New York City diner who orders and eats several plates of the same pasta dish. On the one hand, Rothfeld’s embrace of mess is a polemic against Marie Kondo and her fetishization of tidiness and order; on the other, it’s a challenge to the stuffiness of an America...
Episode 2017: David Masciotra finds the pathologies of American Totalitarianism in Exurbia
March 31, 2024 18:53 - 39 minutes - 36 MBAccording to David Masciotra, the real battleground for the future of American democracy lies in that no-man’s land between suburban and rural America - what he calls the “exurb”. It’s here, Masciotra argues in his new book EXURBIA NOW, that we can find the pathologies of a 21st century American totalitarianism. The America that Masciotra finds in these outer suburbs is the antithesis of Tocqueville’s small town America - a fragmented, alienating place without public space or communal inter...
Episode 2016: Stefan Simchowitz on why he may be the most loathed man in the contemporary art world
March 31, 2024 00:36 - 41 minutes - 38.1 MBThe Daily Mail called him the “Sith Lord” of the art world, the New York Times annointed him as the art world’s Patron Satan”, while the Wall Street Journal described him as the dealer the art world “loves to hate”. Californian voters aren’t too keen on him either, with only 0.24% voting for him in January as the Republican candidate for Diane Feinstein’s Senate seat. Yes, we’re talking about Stefan Simchowitz, the notoriously disruptive Los Angeles based entrepreneur who has built an enorm...