Keen On America

So what’s exceptional about America? According to the writer, film producer and scholar Jonathan Taplin, American exceptionalism lies its uniquely global cultural influence. For Taplin - the tour manager for Bob Dylan & producer of Martin Scorcese’s masterpiece Mean Streets - this reflects what he calls America’s right-brain power which dominated the world in the second half of the 20th century. Today, however, he says, left-brained tech magnates like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are all powerful and, as a consequence, are triggering an existential crisis of creativity in America. In this age of the algorithm, Taplin worries, the US will be just another unimaginative player in the global race to control the digital economy. Jonathan Taplin is a writer, film producer and scholar. He is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and was a Professor at the USC Annenberg School from 2003-2016 in the field of international communication management and digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Mean Streets, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival five times. In 1984 Taplin acted as the investment advisor to the Bass Brothers in their successful attempt to save Walt Disney Studios from a corporate raid. This experience brought him to Merrill Lynch, where he served as vice president of media mergers and acquisitions. In this role, he helped re-engineer the media landscape on transactions such as the leveraged buyout of Viacom. Taplin was a founder of Intertainer and has served as its Chairman and CEO since June 1996. Intertainer was the pioneer video-on-demand company for both cable and broadband Internet markets. Taplin holds two patents for video on demand technologies. Professor Taplin has provided consulting services on Broadband technology to the President of Portugal and the Parliament of the Spanish state of Catalonia and the Government of Singapore. Mr. Taplin graduated from Princeton University. He is a member of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and sits on the Author’s Guild Council and the Board of the American Music Association. Mr. Taplin was appointed to the California Broadband Task Force and the City of Los Angles Technology and Innovation Council. He was named one of the 50 most social media savvy professors in America by Online College and one of the 100 American Digerati by Deloitte’s Edge Institute.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Much of the critical writing about authoritarianism warns that contemporary populism threatens democracy. But as Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein argue in their interesting new book, The Assault on the State, this global attack on legalistic government by wannabe dictators like Putin, Erdogan and Modi endangers not just democracy but also much of what we take for granted about the convenience of modern life. It’s a return to what they call the “patrimonialism” of The Godfather - a chillingly dysfunctional future in which to get a road fixed or a school built, we have to kiss the ring of a Don Corleone or a Donald Trump. Weird, eh?Stephen E. Hanson is the Lettie Pate Evans Professor in the Department of Government at William & Mary.  At William & Mary, he served as the Vice Provost for Academic and International Affairs from 2011 to 2022. Hanson received his B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard University (1985) and his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley (1991). He served from 2011–2021 as the Director of the Wendy and Emery Reves Center for International Studies, while also serving as Vice Provost for International Affairs at William & Mary. In 2016, William & Mary received the Senator Paul Simon Award for Campus Internationalization from NAFSA: Association of International Educators. Hanson served from 2009–2011 as the Vice Provost for Global Affairs, and from 2000–2008 as the Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European, and Central Asian Studies at the Jackson School of International Studies, at the University of Washington, Seattle. Hanson is the author of Post-Imperial Democracies: Ideology and Party Formation in Third Republic France, Weimar Germany, and Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), which received the 1998 Wayne S. Vucinich book award from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. He is the co-author (with Richard Anderson Jr., M. Steven Fish, and Philip Roeder) of Postcommunism and the Theory of Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2001).Jeffrey Kopstein is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Irvine. In his research, Professor Kopstein focuses on interethnic violence, voting patterns of minority groups, antisemitism, and anti-liberal tendencies in civil society, paying special attention to cases within European and Russian Jewish history. These interests are central topics in his latest books, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2018) and Politics, Memory, Violence: The New Social Science of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2023).Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

In the 1970’s, J. Doyne Farmer built the first wearable computer which he used to predict the game of roulette. While this didn’t make him particularly popular in casinos, it did mark the beginning of a glittering scientific career in complexity and systems theory, as well as in theoretical physics and biology. And, along the way, Farmer founded a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006 as well as working for a while as an Oppenheimer Fellow at Los Alamos Labs. So when a guy as smart as Farmer - who now teaches both at Oxford and at the Santa Fe Institute — turns his big brain to economics, we should take note. In his new book, Making Sense of Chaos, Farmer explains how we can get to a “better economics for a better world” through what he calls complex economics. As a fusion of big data analysis and behavioral economics, Farmer is navigating a third economic way between the scylla of traditional free market economics and the charybdis of de-growth economics. Seriously smart stuff from one the world’s brainiest men. J. Doyne Farmer is Director of the Complexity Economics programme at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School, Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems Science at the Smith School for Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and Chief Scientist at Macrocosm. His current research is in economics, including agent-based modeling, financial instability and technological progress. He was a founder of Prediction Company, a quantitative automated trading firm that was sold to UBS in 2006. His past research includes complex systems, dynamical systems theory, time series analysis and theoretical biology. During the 1980s he was an Oppenheimer Fellow and the founder of the Complex Systems Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. While a graduate student in the 1970s he built the first wearable digital computer, which was successfully used to predict the game of roulette.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

According to the historian Matthew Warshauer, there was no giant conspiracy on 9/11. The real story about September 11, 2001, he argues in his provocative new book Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation, is its impact on Gen Z who he believes should be renamed the 9/11 Generation. 9/11 and its disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he argues, have created a lost generation of young Americans without faith in the country’s institutions or elected officials. They’ve been “cast out of the Disneyland” of a unipolar world, he warns, and their cynicism and distrust is only compounding the seemingly never-ending political, economic and cultural crises of the United States over the last quarter century. Rather than the internet and social media, he believes, 9/11 is the root cause of America’s current age of anxiety. Matt Warshauer is a professor of history at Central Connecticut State University, his under-graduate alma mater, where he learned that passionate, devoted professors can change lives. Originally bored and uninterested in school, he bounced around the country with his family, attending three different high schools in four years – from California to Illinois and then ultimately to Connecticut. He didn’t even want to attend college, but compromised with his parents by going to Norwalk Community College for a few semesters and then transferring to Central.  Even upon his initial arrival at Central Connecticut State University (CCSU), Warshauer’s focus was not particularly academic. He studied marketing, but majored in partying. It wasn’t until he met professors like Norton Mezvinsky (History) and Barry Leeds (English) that Warshauer’s mind was turned on. He has been fascinated with American culture ever since and, basically, trying to figure out how the United States got to where it is today. One of his key interests is the paradox – a core dispute about the meaning of the nation – that has always existed in American society and which is so apparent today with the election of Donald Trump and the extreme divisions that cut to the core of who we are as a people.  Warshauer’s study of “the paradox” first focused on early American political and constitutional history, particularly from the nation’s founding to the Civil War. Books and articles on Andrew Jackson, slavery, and the political divisions that led to the Civil War were the result. Most recently, Warshauer has turned his focus on 9/11 and memory. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Earlier this year, the prolific American political journalist Sasha Issenberg came on the show to offer a playbook for winning elections in our disinformation age. And, on a recent trip to Los Angeles, I sat down with Issenberg in his Venice home to talk more broadly about the American political system for our KEEN ON AMERICA series. In particular, he addressed perhaps the most pressing issue of all about the future of American politics - how we might build more trust and transparency in both media and the system itself. Sasha Issenberg is the author of five books including THE VICTORY LAB, which upon its 2012 release Politico called “Moneyball for politics,” and the follow-up THE LIE DETECTIVES, published in March 2024 by Columbia Global Reports. His other books have covered topics ranging from the global sushi business to medical tourism and the same-sex marriage debate. He covered the 2008 election as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, 2012 for Slate, 2016 for Bloomberg Politics and Businessweek, and 2020 for The Recount. He is the American political correspondent for Monocle, and has written for New York, The New York Times Magazine, and George, where he served as a contributing editor. He teaches in the political science department at UCLA.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Many are called, but few are chosen. In her late twenties, Deesha Dyer was still in community college. By the age of 31, however, she had become Michelle Obama’s social secretary in the White House. So how did this self-styled undiplomatic young woman become a member of the most exclusive club in the world? And what does her authentically irreverent attitude which she says, in her new memoir, creates the “best kind of trouble”, tell us about how to succeed in 21st century America?Deesha Dyer is an award-winning strategist, on-the-ground community organizer, and executive operations expert. She served as the White House social secretary during the Obama administration and is currently the founder and CEO of social impact agency, Hook & Fasten. She curated and instructed a study course called Imposter to Impact at the Harvard Kennedy School. Deesha’s entertaining and engaging style of storytelling allows her to inspire audiences around the world. She co-founded and operates organization, beGirl.world Global Scholars, which tackles the racial disparity in study abroad. Deesha was named Marie Claire’s new guard of women changing the world, the Root’s most influential African-Americans and profiled in Women Who Run the White House by Essence. She’s been featured in Vogue, Travelnoire, and The Washington Post and written for Oprah Daily, Glamour and Lonely Planet. Deesha was recently awarded the Women of Excellence Award by the city of Washington, DC. and lives in Maryland. Deesha can be found on Instagram!Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

What’s it like to discover a Klansman in one’s own family? A few weeks ago, R. Derek Black, the son of a KKK Grand Wizard and an intimate family friend of David Duke, came on the show to confess the exceptional nature of his own family history. But for Edward Ball, the author of Life of a Klansman, the story of his great great grandfather, perhaps the most disturbing element of having a family history of white supremacy is its unexceptional quality. As Ball - best known as the author of the award winning Slaves in the Family - explains, around half of Americans could, if they wish, write a similar memoir. So Ball’s Klansman could easily be your Klansman too. “Whiteness and its tribal nature,” Ball warns, “are normal, everywhere, and seem as permanent as the sunrise.” Edward Ball is the author of several nonfiction books, including The Inventor and the Tycoon, about the birth of moving pictures in California, and Slaves in the Family, an account of his family’s history as slaveholders in South Carolina, which received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has taught at Yale University and has been awarded fellowships by the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. He is also the recipient of a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

We’ve been on a food & farming run this week. First, we talked with America’s “lunatic farmer,” Joel Salatin, about how regenerative agriculture can regenerate the United States. And we followed that up with the food blogger and writer Nicola Twilley who explained about how refrigeration has transformed not only our food, and our planet, but also ourselves. Our guest today, Andrea Freeman, makes food policy central to the politics of America from its foundations to today. Her provocative new book, Ruin Their Crops On the Ground is intended as a kind of Fast Food Nation for the Black Lives Matter era. From the genocidal Trail of Tears to the anything but “free” school lunches in America today, Freeman argues that food has been always used by American corporate and political interests as a weapon of conquest and control.Andrea Freeman, a pioneer in the field of food politics, is a professor at Southwestern Law School. A Fulbright scholar and author of Skimmed: Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice, Freeman has published and appeared in the Washington Post, Salon, The Takeaway, Here & Now, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Black Agenda Report, and more. She lives in Los Angeles.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

While Kamala Harris has announced that she wants to become the first Silicon Valley President, Donald Trump is speaking today at Bitcoin2024 in Nashville in a self-serving attempt to make Bitcoin Great Again. So where should Silicon Valley be putting its (ample) money in 2024? According to That Was The Week’s Keith Teare, tech is divided between pro Harris classical liberals like Reid Hoffman and pro Trump free market libertarians like Mark Andreessen. But the election, Teare warns, will really be all about America coming to terms with its own limitations - a reactionary idea that will find few supporters in forward thinking Silicon Valley. So, whoever wins the 2024 election, he suggests, the losers are likely to be innovative start-up entrepreneurs like Teare himself.Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

A couple of days ago, America’s most controversial regenerative farmer, Joel Salatin, came on the show to explain how industrialized farming is killing our soil, our bodies and our souls. Today, the Los Angeles based food writer and podcaster Nicola Twilley offers a more nuanced account of the impact of industrialization on our food, our planet and ourselves. In her excellent new book, Frostbite, Twilley explains how industrialized refrigeration technology has revolutionized every aspect of the food cycle - from farm to table. Acknowledging its self-evident benefits (year round bananas, tomatoes & ice cream), Twilley also warns of the dark side of the refrigeration revolution, particularly its environmental impact which, she argues, is the central cause of global warming. Modify our refrigerated food economy, Twilley says, and the planet will cool down. Chilling.Nicola Twilley* is author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (Penguin Press, June 2024), and co-host of the award-winning Gastropod podcast, which looks at food through the lens of history and science, and which is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater. Her first book, Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, was co-authored with Geoff Manaugh and was named one of the best books of 2021 by Time Magazine, NPR, the Guardian, and the Financial Times. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and the author of Edible Geography. She lives in Los Angeles.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe