Episodes

“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 — including myself — loathe him. Charles Steel , a London investor, doesn’t loathe Elon. In fact, he’s se...

“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 public. He has principles, he states them, and he accepts the consequences. That’s leadership. It sho...

“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. What distinguishes Sussillo, however, is not his Silicon Valley good luck, but the bad luck of his ori...

“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 forensic reconstruction of the 50-year crime scene. The suspects have Christie-style names: the Racist (J...

“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 change. Noem wasn’t really the point, she insists. The MAGA spectacle rolls on. Stephen Miller’s vi...

“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 friend. In a “terrifying” new piece in Rolling Stone , Taplin draws an unusual historical parallel: ...

“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, China, and the Muslim Brotherhood are using mass migration as a strategic tool to undermine the United...

“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 were just dumb. They found the story unseemly, were uncomfortable with it, and avoided it out of dis...

“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 new book, Reclaiming the Internet, that the internet was never really ours to begin with—and that the...

“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 is entitled “ No Good Guys .” He’s used AI to put images of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Pete Hegs...

“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 documents that showed the American government was lying about Vietnam, thereby changing public opinion ...

“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 without saying, is illusionary. The greatest of all Königsberg citizens, the illustrious 18th century phi...

“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’s GDP—and the patient, as always, is on the table. Today we dedicate the show to the most perennial ...

“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, Yale historian Arne Westad warns that the structural parallels between our multipolar 2020s and the...

“When you use humor to degrade people, you can get away with it—but you’re also doing something that’s completely devastating.” — Rae 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 Rae Lynn Barnes argues that this kind of “humor” is anything but innocent. It draws on a centuries-long white supremacist tradition of d...

“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 gospel is threatening America. But we’ve never quite done a show on Christianity as “the thing in i...

“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 in their economy. So does America have its own Yellow Vests? You might find them in (of all places) t...

"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 publicly supported him—while quietly cutting his own deal with the administration. But Keith Teare thin...

"You can't wear a yellow vest on a demonstration anymore because you get arrested as soon as the police see you." — Ida Susser In November 2018, something strange happened in France. People from the urban periphery—truck drivers, nurses, teachers, plumbers—drove seven or eight hours to Paris wearing yellow safety vests. They weren't students. They weren't union members. They weren't organized by any political party. They were furious about a diesel tax, but really about something deeper: decades...

"He lied more than I thought he did—and I thought he lied a lot." — Tom Wells on Henry Kissinger In our Epstein age, everyone seems to have access to everyone else's dirtiest secrets. But half a century ago, in the Watergate era, it was harder to get one's hands on the secret files, phone calls and other private data. But historian Tom Wells has done exactly that with the private phone calls of Henry Kissinger. Wells' new book, The Kissinger Tapes , is based on transcripts of Kissinger's secretl...

"They are fundamentally bound at the hip, because the Trump age is a conspiratorial age and a backlash against global wealth inequality... Epstein facilitated the rise of Trump." — Jason Pack Late last year, Disorder podcast host Jason Pack came on the show and predicted that Mark Carney would be the "orderer" of 2025 and Jeffrey Epstein would be 2026's "disorderer-in-chief". Pack was uncannily right. Although, as he admits, such prescience gives him no pleasure. Pack is no conspiracist. He thou...

"The House hasn't reorganized committee jurisdictions since the early 70s—before the internet existed." — Maya Kornberg America is stuck stuck stuck stuck. Almost exactly a year ago, I interviewed the Atlantic's Yoni Applebaum about Stuck , his influential critique of the housing crisis. Now we have another Stuck —this one by Maya Kornberg , a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. Only her subtitle is about Congress, not housing: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congre...

"We didn't have to grow up with that." — Ross Greene, on school shootings One of the most persistent worries these days is that our kids aren't okay. With most of the blame, of course, now being placed on the ubiquity of social media. But psychologist Ross W. Greene , author of the bestselling Lost at School , has a new book out today called The Kids Who Aren't Okay which doesn't place all the blame on social media. Indeed he argues that if we focus only on the internet, we'll fail to understand...

"I wake up at 3 AM, check my phone to see what fresh hell has come out, and it's usually two words: 'Trump threatens.'" — Peter Bale We're reversing the lens today. Rather than examining America from the inside, we're peering at it from the outside in—from New Zealand, at the bottom of the world. Peter Bale is a longtime media executive who's had senior positions at CNN, Reuters, and News Corp. He's now back in his native New Zealand, waking up at 3 AM to check his phone. The news, he says, is u...