Keen On America

A few days ago, B-school prof Chris Marquis came on the show to argue that we should shut the business schools down because students arrive wanting to do good but graduate with banal corporate jobs. Today’s guest, Scott M. Curran, went to law school but then spent a decade doing good as general counsel of the Clinton Foundation. So doing good is his thing. His calling.
“There are two ways to run this world,” Curran told me. “Guns or lawyers.” No prizes for guessing his preference. In his new book Better Good, Curran argues that it’s not the seminar room that hammers the good out of us. It’s the banality of our monthly mortgage payments. So maybe the best way to build the good is by bringing mortgage rates down.
Anyone who has ever sat through a TED conference knows that good can be a four-letter word. But it doesn’t have to be that way, Curran argues. Yes, he acknowledges, Musk’s foundation barely clears the five per cent a year the law requires, and Bezos has far more and gives much less. But good, he argues, can be found in the most unexpected places. The luxury watchmaker Rolex, of all corporate ironies, is wholly owned by a charitable foundation — the watches being just its fundraising arm.
And then there’s Bezos’ ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, who has given away over twenty billion dollars with almost no strings attached. So philanthropy can still work, Curran argues. MacKenzie Scott didn’t even go to B-school. And she probably doesn’t wear a Rolex. Or have a mortgage.

FURTHER READING

•   Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact (Simon & Schuster), by Scott M. Curran.
•   Curran’s website.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Chris Marquis on shutting down the business schools, and Eric Ries on why good companies go bad.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Scott M. Curran is a lawyer and social impact adviser who spent a decade at the Clinton Foundation, latterly as its general counsel, as it grew from a library fundraising effort into a global operation working in forty countries. He now advises foundations, nonprofits and companies on doing good more effectively, and teaches social enterprise law. Better Good: A Simple System for Creating Lasting Impact is published by Simon & Schuster. He lives outside Chicago.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“I feel like I’m cheating when I’m defending people I agree with.” — Greg Lukianoff

Three years ago, free speech advocate Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), came on the show to discuss The Canceling of the American Mind. Co-authored with Rikki Schlott, the book argued that the crisis of free speech in America existed mostly on the campus left with students shouting speakers down and administrators doing nothing about it.
Three years is a mighty long time in American politics. Today, as Lukianoff recently argued in the Washington Post, the crisis of free speech has gone off campus and is now being spread by mostly conservative politicians.
FIRE has quantified this new virus of intolerance. It points to over two hundred attempts in the last year to punish the opinions of a scholar, student or speaker. The state of free speech in America has never been worse, Lukianoff asserts, citing the case of a former cop in Tennessee who did thirty-seven days for forwarding a meme of an actual Trump quote.
Greg Lukianoff has an uncute term for this intolerance. Political cooties. It’s the habit of discounting an argument because of who’s making it. A word on cooties for non-Americans. It’s playground slang for an imaginary disease you catch by touching the wrong child. But its etymology is actually more grown-up. British soldiers in World War One invented it to describe body lice. Then the doughboys carried the word (not the lice) back to 1918 America. From real to imaginary vermin in a single generation.
Lukianoff admits he caught the bug himself, once writing off the conservative opinions of Alan Charles Kors, a man who helped found FIRE. So what to do? He thinks identifying today’s epidemic of intolerance is the key. Maybe there’s a book in it. The Shaming of the American Cootie?

FURTHER READING

•   “Universities normalized attacks on free speech. Now it’s all-out war.” (Washington Post, October 29, 2026), by Greg Lukianoff.
•   Lukianoff’s Substack, where The Academic Filibuster is being published in installments.
•   The Coddling of the American Mind (Penguin Press), with Jonathan Haidt, and The Canceling of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster), with Rikki Schlott.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Jacob Weisberg on eight profiles in cowardice, and Greg Lukianoff’s previous appearance.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Greg Lukianoff is president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which he has led since 2001, and a graduate of Stanford Law School. He is the co-author, with Jonathan Haidt, of The Coddling of the American Mind, and, with Rikki Schlott, of The Canceling of the American Mind. He is currently serializing The Academic Filibuster on Substack and writing Reality Test with the neuroscientist Heather Berlin.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“Spirits are floating about us, waiting to be conjured through the chat portal.” — Sam Kestenbaum

I’ve always suspected that the most intriguing thing about AI is its metaphysical potential. Does it offer a new religion or just a digital replica of traditional faith? That’s the question raised by Sam Kestenbaum whose intriguing “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age,” appears in this month’s Harper’s.
“Raised” is the appropriate word. Kestenbaum investigates Americans who claim to have figured out how to use ChatGPT to summon spirits. He visits the Conscious Life Expo held at an LAX Hilton. Don DeLillo territory. Disenchantment in an airport hotel. The whitest of noise.
But even DeLillo might have been disappointed by what Kestenbaum unearthed at LAX. The spirits his subjects reach through the chat window have all-too-predictable names like Nova, Solchi, Verya and Avalon. He reports on one man in Mississippi who claims to have been hearing from Verya for years before ChatGPT existed, and now has a Reddit board devoted to her. He may have stayed in Mississippi a day too long.
So has OpenAI created a new God? Probably not. According to Kestenbaum, the Conscious Life Expo folk don’t believe the machine is alive. Instead, they think the spirits were always out there, and that the Ouija board and the AM radio and now the chatbot offer access to the same metaphysical consciousness.
But what is new, Kestenbaum claims, is the speed of the spiritual interaction. A spirit board took you all night to spell out a message from a dead relative. ChatGPT will give you four badly written paragraphs before you’ve finished asking. Sometimes even before.
Speed? Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970. It’s no newer than the communion of saints that Sam Kestenbaum finds at that LAX Hilton. AI, I suspect, is a digital replica of traditional faith. The dawn of an LLM old age.

FURTHER READING

•   “Communion of Saints: The Dawn of an LLM New Age” (Harper’s, November 2026), by Sam Kestenbaum.
•   Kestenbaum’s author archive at Harper’s.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Jack Hanson on the American pope and the American president, and Matthew Avery Sutton on how Christianity made America.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Sam Kestenbaum is a journalist who covers religious life in America and a frequent contributor to Harper’s Magazine, where he has written on American exorcism and now on chatbot spirituality. His reporting on faith, conspiracy and the politics of belief has also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Rolling Stone. He grew up in rural Maine and lives in Los Angeles.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“There is a pandemic killing us all. It’s a pandemic of dishonesty.” — Tim Disney

INTRO

In March 1965, Martin Luther King suggested that the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends toward justice. Sixty-one years on, we have another arc which definitely doesn’t bend toward justice. A.R.C. stands for Amazonian Recombinant Cytoneuropathy. It lies dormant and undetectable in its host, and it activates when he tells a lie, and then it kills him. Tim Disney — great-nephew of Walt, grandson of Roy — came up with Amazonian Recombinant Cytoneuropathy during the COVID lockdown. The result is The A.R.C., Disney’s satirical graphic novel about our untruthful times, co-written with JC Lacek and illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg.
Tim Disney’s The A.R.C. opens at the Global Reinvestment For Tomorrow Conference in the Amazon, a T.E.D. festival of hypocrisy where the moral powers-that-be have assembled to announce the solution to climate change. They catch the virus instead, and carry it home on their private jets. The diagnosis associated with the joke is less funny. Disney thinks that shame and public opprobrium have been replaced by a pandemic of lies and lying.
Then there’s the explicit question that I should have asked Disney but didn’t. The company his great-uncle and grandfather built is amongst the most successful entertainment machines ever constructed for spreading lies about an idyllic America. An epidemic of cheerfulness. I asked Tim twice whether The A.R.C. was a Disney production. Both times I allowed him to dodge the question. Maybe Keen On America should be a Disney show too.

FURTHER READING

•   The A.R.C. (Gungnir, 333 pages) — by Tim Disney and JC Lacek, illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg. Buy the physical one. Disney is right that the form does not survive a screen.
•   JC Lacek’s page on the book has the artwork, which is the fastest way to understand what kind of satire this is.
•   King’s March 1965 speech in Montgomery, “Our God Is Marching On!”, is the one that asks how long and answers not long.
•   The KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Steven Rosenbaum on truth in the age of AI.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Tim Disney is a writer, filmmaker and the creator of The A.R.C., which he co-wrote with JC Lacek and which is illustrated by Vincent J. Dubourg. He directed the feature A Question of Faith and began his career in the animation department at Disney. He is the great-nephew of Walt Disney and the grandson of Roy O. Disney, and he runs Uncommon Productions.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.

“Truman did not have a diplomatic bone in his body. He just wanted to fight.” — Jackson Lears

Yesterday Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us how America might bring order to global anarchy. Today’s guest thinks that Washington DC foreign policy insiders, with their imperial vision of an American brokered international order, are the problem.
The Rutgers historian Jackson Lears, who Susan Sontag said rivaled Tocqueville in his understanding of America, has an essay in this month’s Harper’s called “The Founders’ Nightmare.” Lears argues that anti-imperialism was the original American revolutionary dream, and that the United States has spent the last eighty years betraying this vision. He dates the nightmare back to 1947 — the year of the National Security Act, the Truman Doctrine, and Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s advice to Truman about using the Cold War to scare the hell out of the American people.
Lears argues that contemporary American foreign policy has been governed by the very things that George Washington warned against: passionate overseas attachments and habitual hatreds. Take, for example, he says, America’s historic attachment to Israel and its abiding hatred of Russia. He calls Gaza a genocide. He describes Putin as a serious man and a rational actor in Ukraine. He would dissolve NATO. He doesn’t think the CIA is above having killed JFK. And then there’s Iran….
So what to do? We must learn, Lears says, from the founders. Lafayette, he reminds us, was a master of the retreat. America should step back from both its passionate overseas attachments and its habitual hatreds. Given the anti-war sentiment of both left and right in the midterms, it would seem as if the vast majority of Americans agree with Lears rather than the DC foreign policy establishment.

FURTHER READING

•   “The Founders’ Nightmare” (Harper’s, November 2026) — 5,800 words, and the whole argument. Read it before you argue with it.
•   Lears’s Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is the most recent of the books, after Rebirth of a Nation and Fables of Abundance.
•   The establishment this episode is answering: Charles Kupchan on governing the world to come, and Eliot Cohen on The Strategist.
•   The episodes AK cites along the way: Edward Luce on the life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Janet Reitman on The Inheritance, and Alexander Mikaberidze on the Louisiana Purchase.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers, where he taught from 1986 to 2025, and editor-in-chief of Raritan. His books include No Place of Grace, Fables of Abundance (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History), Something for Nothing, Rebirth of a Nation and Animal Spirits. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a frequent contributor to Harper’s and the London Review of Books.

ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.