Why Are We So Miserable? Mikko Ketovuori Surfs on the Waves of History to Explain Social Mood Swings

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It is Wednesday, September 9, 2026. And as always, it seems these days, the news is bad. The New York Times report that Iran is preparing to escalate the war with The United States. Wall Street Journal reports on oil hitting $100 for the first time for a couple of months. Meanwhile, all sorts of other monstrous floods happening around the world. The BBC reports on the rise of the far-right party, the AfD, in Germany, and the Washington Post, in anticipation of the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 on Friday, reports that cancer's toll on 9/11 survivors is accelerating twenty five years later. It seems, as always, that the news is bad. We live in miserable times most people take for granted, but I'm not sure that's the view of my guest today. Mikko Ketovuori is, a Finnish academic and writer and the author of an intriguing new book, Waves of Change: A Study of Social Mood. Mikko wrote the introduction to the Finnish version of The Internet Is Not the Answer, one of my books from a few years ago. So I thought it'd be an interesting opportunity for him to lay out his theory of history. He's talking to us from Turku, the old capital of Finland. Mikko, why these days does everyone assume that the news is bad, that the world seems to be coming to an end?

00:02:20 Mikko Ketovuori: Mhmm. Well, you know, from my point of view, news is just an utter sociometer [as spoken]. It means that it reflects the time. It's not necessary that, we pick up the best news if the social mood is negative. For example, in the nineteen eighties, the social mood was so bright that perhaps when you compare these different decades, you may notice that the news were much better at that time.

00:02:59 Andrew Keen: I know you wrote a book a couple of, years ago laying out your theory of history. How does it work? I mean, your new book is full of references to all the great philosophers of historians of the past, from Hegel to Marx, but what's your version? What are you saying that hasn't been said before about how to interpret history?

00:03:25 Mikko Ketovuori: Well, social mood drives the events is the basic core claim of socionomics.

00:03:33 Andrew Keen: Right. And this book that you came out with a couple of week a couple of years ago is called Socionomics: How Social Mood Shapes Society. So you've got this theory, Mikko, of social mood. What does that mean?

00:03:48 Mikko Ketovuori: It means social mood is the collectively shared, largely unconscious feeling that fluctuates behind the daily life all the time. And that normally, we think that the events affect our feelings, but it's the other way around. So the social mood gives us the frame, the context in which we make our own interpretations what is going on in the world right now.

00:04:23 Andrew Keen: So mood, which as you say is borrowed from your socionomics, what does that mean? I mean, where do we get that from? Where does it originate?

00:04:34 Mikko Ketovuori: Well, it's a combination of two words, sociology and economics. And the father of this idea is Robert Prechter from Gainesville, Georgia. And he was a Wall Street guru in the nineteen seventies. And he has a Elliott Wave International that is the largest market prediction company in the world. And they have been in the field, like, forty years. And I've been working, like, twenty years with them, and I studied all the Prechter writings and some other writings as well. And I put it in one book, very short book. So it's not totally my idea.

00:05:21 Andrew Keen: Well— [unclear]. It doesn't really matter where it originates from. But so okay. Let's— let's talk about 2026. As I said at the beginning, I mean, newspapers are always always full of bad news even in the best of times. But why, Mikko, is everybody so miserable these days? You could make a compelling case that we're on the verge of a remarkable technological revolution with AI. We've only got another year and a half, two years of Donald Trump. Global warming is a bad thing, but it nonetheless, certainly, I'm guessing, cheers up places like Finland in the winter. Why are we so miserable these days?

00:06:08 Mikko Ketovuori: Well, eventually, the first thing I have to say is that social mood is negative at the moment. But, it's a kind of invitation, to people not to just reflect the outside— world, but they should be looking for more really asking themselves that what is going inside of me? And perhaps starting use their own mind, if you like, saying this. If you are going to have a group of miserable people around you and you are just searching the Internet for those news. I'm sure you are feeling miserable.

00:07:04 Andrew Keen: So you're saying it's a kind of false consciousness. And when you meet people these days, you say, how are you? And they always say, well, given how terrible things are, I'm okay. They're thinking, in America, at least, everyone seems still obsessed with Trump. They're thinking of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Do people have a reason then to be miserable these days in rational terms, in terms of your theory of socionomics? Are we living in bad times, Mikko?

00:07:38 Mikko Ketovuori: No. I think there has been more at times in history. Actually, we are doing pretty well. You can have access to all the arts, all the books. You may communicate around the globe with the people. You can travel. We have plenty of food. What else do we need? Maybe good relations with your family, perhaps, and your friends.

00:08:06 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We also live in an age of anxiety. Your book is quite historical. I know you spent quite a lot of time looking at the swinging sixties, in The UK and in the rise, of the Beatles as the symbol of optimism and prosperity in the nineteen sixties. But, of course, the nineteen fifties in The UK and in the world were rather depressing. What does the example of the swinging sixties and the Beatles teach us about, apparent misery in the late twenty twenties?

00:08:42 Mikko Ketovuori: Well, there's a reason for why I write about Beatles, and that's it is exactly that Robert Prechter founded his theory on studying the Beatles and the Dow Jones average. And he what he found was that there was a really core correlation between those things. And what I did in Finland, I studied, the charts of Nokia, our mobile phone company, And made the reference point to 2006 and then the 2009 pop music that was listened in Finland. And I found the same thing that Prechter had found from Beatles before. And, well, we made a journal article for Cambridge's Popular Music about that thing. And, really, there's a music reflects the moods of the society almost with the certainty that, you could actually predict what is going to happen if you have your—

00:09:58 Andrew Keen: So let's go let's look at The Beatles, and you've given it a lot of thought. You've written about it. You spent some time in London for the book. Did The Beatles create the sixties, or were the sixties did the sixties enable The Beatles? I mean, it's, of course, a chicken and egg with the always the chicken and egg question in history. What created what? If Lennon and McCartney had been born ten years earlier, I assume we wouldn't be talking these days about the Beatles.

00:10:32 Mikko Ketovuori: Exactly. Exactly. You may practice a lot. You may have a you are very talented, but, actually, the time, decides whether you succeed or not.

00:10:51 Andrew Keen: So everyone so coming back to the swinging sixties, a lot of people have written about this. Britain and the world, or at least the Western world, was ready to throw off the misery of the postwar economics and culture. Are we in a similar time now, Mikko, where people are becoming more and more unhappy, shall we say, with unhappiness? That they're sick of all this misery?

00:11:20 Mikko Ketovuori: Yeah. But it's calling for change. That if you are miserable and you don't know how what is wrong, you have to adjust very good questions on your life and see what might be new waves that come. And I really hope that, some we could see the change of the wave at this point. Because this is—

00:11:55 Andrew Keen: I think— in every— in your camp [unclear]. We've done many shows with all sorts of people about the sixties and why, what we're missing today in terms of the vitalization or revitalization of culture through music? Is it gonna come through music? History doesn't always repeat itself, does it, Mikko? So if we are to have a new era of optimism, it's not as if we're gonna get the next Beatles. No one expected music in the sixties to revolutionize society. So where's it gonna come from? Is it gonna come from technology, from AI, from nature? Where are we gonna get this new optimism?

00:12:40 Mikko Ketovuori: Well, the really the answer is that optimism come comes first, and then we see the different kind of fruits, with this that brings. And, certainly, if it's that you see the world as open ending, you don't really you cannot say what is exactly that comes from all that. There's a kind of artistic process of seeing the future and making experiments and then you got something. And afterwards, you might say, hey, These artists, these writers, these politicians, they got what it takes to capture the essence of the era.

00:13:30 Andrew Keen: So where are we gonna find that? I know in the book you write about everything from, the great American movie director and actor Orson Welles, the Canadian media theorist McLuhan, events in Scandinavia like the Estonian singing revolution. Is this gonna be led politically through movies? I mean, AI most of all comes to mind. There's a lot of pessimism about it, but it's a remarkable new technology.

00:13:59 Mikko Ketovuori: Yeah. I love it because—

00:14:02 Andrew Keen: Did you use it for this book, Waves of Change?

00:14:06 Mikko Ketovuori: Yeah. For of asking questions and that. But most of the stories are actually I have traveled a lot, and they are as I'm writing about Highgate Cemetery, I was standing there and looking for the grave of Marx and realized that, okay, Spencer is next to him. So that father of capitalism and father of socialism are staring each others. And I don't I made a story about that. What if after that all the tourists have went away and night comes, what kind of discussion they might have they have

00:14:48 Andrew Keen: Oh, Spencer and, yeah. My I agree with you. Cemeteries are very creative places. I was just in Italy, and I spent some time in some small cemeteries. They're they're very reflective places, certainly, if you're alive, I guess, in terms of reminding yourself also of the value of life. So you went to Highgate Cemetery, actually, just up the road from where I went to school in England.

00:15:09 Mikko Ketovuori: Oh.

00:15:10 Andrew Keen: You spent some time at the grave of Marx, which, as you say, is a big tourist attraction, and then, of course, of Herbert Spencer, the Social Darwinist of the nineteenth century. But also another fellow, perhaps less well known, Alexander Litvinenko, is buried in, Highgate Cemetery. So we have a triangle of Marx, Spencer, and Litvinenko. What does that teach us about history and mood, Mikko?

00:15:43 Mikko Ketovuori: Yeah. That there are some things that really don't change, but they eventually come cyclically back. And I was very touched by, the work of Luke Harding. He has—

00:16:03 Andrew Keen: The BBC— yeah.

00:16:04 Mikko Ketovuori: Yeah. Yeah.

00:16:05 Andrew Keen: BBC man in Russia. [ed.: Luke Harding was the Guardian's Moscow correspondent, not the BBC's]

00:16:07 Mikko Ketovuori: Yeah. And, well, it's just so crazy, the poison they used to kill the man.

00:16:15 Andrew Keen: Litvinenko, of course, was a Russian dissident, I guess, who, a defector who was poisoned by Putin's people.

00:16:27 Mikko Ketovuori: Yeah. A bit cost, like, £50 million or something like that just to wipe out one man. So somebody hated him very much.

00:16:38 Andrew Keen: Well, you, as a Finn, of course, have a particular sensibility or sensitivity to the Russians. What can the what is the Finnish experience? I know you write extensively about Finland in this new book, everything from the education boom in Finland, to your own life. What is your Finnish experience? What is the Finnish experience? Teachers, are people as miserable in Finland as they are in The United States or The UK?

00:17:07 Mikko Ketovuori: Well, it's amazing how the discussion goes the same lines. We have the so called far right or far left, and they're using this exactly the same arguments that is used in United States. And that's crazy because we are not Americans. We have our own context and our own history. And sometimes it really seems that people have opinions about the things that do they really have those opinions of the old, or are they just taking them somewhere from media, perhaps? And what about the education? I was a teacher educator, like, thirty years.

00:17:58 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Everyone idealizes the Finnish education system. So every time we have a conversation about education in The US, which, of course, is always in crisis, we will say, why can't we be we, the Americans, why can't we be more like the Finnish? Why can't we learn from Finland's prioritization and investment in teaching and schools and universities? Is that fair? Would if we were we Americans, Mikko, if we were in Finland, would be would we be more optimistic about education and schooling?

00:18:28 Mikko Ketovuori: No. In fact, the PISA results came just a day before yesterday, and then Finland has really gone down. So what I would like to suggest you to do is to look to Estonia. They have much, much better results. And, well, I was once lecturing in Columbia University Teachers College, and I write a chapter of that experience. And I really noticed that there's a cyclicality also how we see the education. And I'm sure we are going to we have to correct some things at the moment. There's a huge discussion going on other how poor we are doing right now.

00:19:18 Andrew Keen: Mikko, do we have— the a-word always comes up in these conversations. Do we have agency when it comes to our mood in, you wrote a book, Socionomics, about how we collectively think as a society, and this new book focuses on, social mood, waves of change. Can we determine it, or is it somehow and, you know, it comes back, I guess, to Marx and his theory of agency in history. Can we control it? I mean, if everyone sat down this morning and said, we're not gonna be miserable anymore. We're gonna think we're gonna be more cheerful. We, we're gonna focus on things that are good in the world. Would that change everything?

00:19:59 Mikko Ketovuori: No. A sailor doesn't control the sea, but understanding the waves matters enormously, how to navigate the tides of history. That's why I really think in smaller way, everyone can affect their own lives. But social mood, it's much, much bigger thing. And, unfortunately, we cannot control that.

00:20:29 Andrew Keen: What does history teach us? I know you write about all sorts of intriguing historical figures, everything from the very controversial Richard Wagner, who was very popular with the Nazis, to the mad Ludwig the second of Bavaria. What does the nineteenth century teach us about social mood? And the rise, of course, of Nazism. Some people think history is repeating itself. Every day, we seem to have a discussion about how Trump or the radical right in Europe is like the Nazis, like Mussolini. You in Finland, of course, had your own rather apocalyptic experience in the nineteen thirties with the Soviet Union.

00:21:10 Mikko Ketovuori: The fact is that Hitler and Stalin were comrades by the Ribbentrop pact. And that's why Finland fought that winter war against Russians, and, we gained, we kept our independence just by fighting back. And then, okay, they came Operation Barbarossa and the cards were once again mixed. And we were kind of allies with Germany against Stalin. And no one really usually don't know that after 1944, Finland was against Germans as well. So we kicked them out from Lapland. So there's a very strong rooted idea in Finnish population that, we are independent. We try to come, of course, with our neighbor in some terms to together. But if they do what they do at the moment, then, well, that's their problem.

00:22:35 Andrew Keen: Does liberty make us happy, though? I mean, some people might argue conservatives have sometimes argued that too much liberty is problematic, and perhaps one of the reasons why there's so much pessimism culturally, socially, individually these days is people have too much freedom.

00:22:56 Mikko Ketovuori: Yeah. That that's of course, as a father and grandfather, I can understand that you have to have a certain limits in your life. But, the authenticity comes from that when people are getting realizing that they are the ones who are in charge of that.

00:23:22 Andrew Keen: You make some interesting cultural comparisons. You compare and contrast Disney and Orson Welles. What is the role of cultural figures like Disney and Welles in cheering people up or not cheering them up? I mean, Disney is still a very powerful company. In spite of all the misery in America, people still watch a lot of Disney productions, which tend to be more optimistic. Orson Welles, of course, was a rather dark character both in his life and his works, as in Kane in particular. What are the role of cultural figures? Can you have an optimistic society and have cultural producers like Welles churning out stuff that's dark, dismal?

00:24:08 Mikko Ketovuori: Well, in movie in industry, the Walt Disney productions, for example, there's a study on that. When there's more optimistic times, they do very well. But, but if the mood goes down by, like, in America 1975, the movies were very, very dark, like Taxi Driver and the movie about the shark.

00:24:40 Andrew Keen: Yeah. We, we got an upcoming show, with Mark Binelli. He's just written a book about, a biography of Scorsese. So we spend quite a lot of time talking about Mean Streets and Taxi Driver.

00:24:54 Mikko Ketovuori: Yeah. So it really depends on the audience and how the audience is making the choices and how they are feeling. So if you yeah.

00:25:06 Andrew Keen: How does this all connect with the stock market? Yesterday, we did a show with a London Business School professor, Alex Edmans, on market madness. He has a new book out, The Madness of Markets: Why Smart Investors Make Crazy Decisions and How to Exploit Them. He talks about guys like Newton who lost their minds literally in the crazy exuberance of the booms of the eighteenth century. We had the tulip craze. We've got the dot-com boom and now maybe the AI boom. How does your book and your theories relate to the stock market?

00:25:47 Mikko Ketovuori: I actually write one of my essays about tulip crisis. And or and I look at the history of this same thing. Well, you know, Robert Prechter has made his whole life his income from predicting the stock market as a main sociometer of how society feels. And I can understand that in the context of United States that is probably the most capitalized society ever been. So there's a straight connection to that. But, of course, we have like, in Moscow, we have the stock market as well, and Elliott Wave International actually predicted, exactly the date when the Crimea war started. It's just based on the wave analysis of Moscow stock exchange. It has a direct connection, the social mood.

00:26:54 Andrew Keen: So explain, Mikko, finally. In America, two things seem to be happening simultaneously. On the one hand, there's this massive stock market boom, an exuberance of investment, as you say, the most capitalized society probably in the history of the world. Billions, tens, hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into this new technology, AI. More and more people using it and maybe abusing it, but supposedly also bringing meaning and order to their lives. And on the other hand, we have all this pessimism about data centers and Silicon Valley and, these new AI superpowers like OpenAI and Anthropic. What does that tell us? How would you explain the current weird move in The United States in waves of change? On the one hand, economic exuberance and remarkable historic technological innovation. On the other hand, misery, pessimism, increasingly apocalyptic. In fact, earlier this week, we did a show with Adam Kirsch about UFOs. His new book, We Want to Believe, explains our obsession with UFOs with this cultural pessimism and suspicion, conspiracy of the state. So how do these two things go together, and what is real? Is it— what, pessimism or optimism?

00:28:24 Mikko Ketovuori: Neither. I would like to say that was funny when you mentioned the UFOs because that was exactly what was doing just before the Second World War. So— yeah.

00:28:38 Andrew Keen: His War of the Worlds radio broadcast, of course, was believed, and there was hysteria in New York.

00:28:44 Mikko Ketovuori: Yeah. New York. So tech technology is enormously important, of course. But I could make a distinction between, amplification and origination. A technology can accelerate and give form, to a social mood without necessarily creating that mood. So, you have been writing about Internet. And then and I remember before the financial crisis of two thousand eight, how there was a very, very positive books about how the Internet is going to change things. And then after the mood came down, and now we are really, really pessimistic about technology. But after all, we, the people, are those who use it. So it comes down how we feel, how we are going to use it in bad or perhaps the good.

00:29:55 Andrew Keen: Well, we will see. Fascinating moment in history. I'm not quite sure whether we're on the brink of disaster or its opposite. Mikko Ketovuori's new book is coming out next month. Waves of Change: A Study of Social Mood tries to address this in a meta sense. It goes from everything from the Beatles and the swinging sixties to Herbert Spencer and Karl Marx sitting next to each other in Highgate Cemetery. Congratulations, Mikko, on the new book. And thank you so much for a fascinating conversation about why we're cheerful and why we are miserable.

00:30:36 Mikko Ketovuori: It was a pleasure. Thank you.