Keen On America

“Bezos said he had so much money he couldn’t spend it all on Earth. And I think to myself, well, cut your prices.” — Marc Chandler

INTRO

Jeff Bezos, our Amazon overlord, once complained that he had so much money he couldn’t spend it all on Earth. Hence his toy rockets. My guest today has a more down-to-earth suggestion. Cut your prices. Pay your workers more. Let them unionize.
Marc Chandler is no dreamy Bolshevik. He’s spent his life as a currency strategist. Every day for the last forty years he’s tracked the trillions of dollars sloshing around the foreign exchange markets. And what he sees, he argues in his new book, Surplus, is too much. Too much stuff, too much capacity, too much capital with nowhere useful to go. Keynes thought the economic problem of scarcity might be solved by 2030. We comfortably beat that Keynesian deadline, Chandler says. But Bezos’s toy rockets are stopping us from getting to it.
So what to do? The hard-headed Chandler doesn’t fall into the trap of imagining America can become Denmark. Instead, he wants it to return to the founders’ marriage of freedom and equality, and to end the collapsing of economic and political power. No more Muskian buying or selling of elections. It’s a familiar argument from an unfamiliar quarter. America has changed. Even money guys like Chandler have had enough.
Marc Chandler ends Surplus with a parable of heaven and hell. In hell, there’s a banquet table full of food, but everyone has spoons too long to feed themselves with. So they all starve. In heaven, they feed each other across the table with these spoons. Too much, then, doesn’t have to be too little. It all depends on how we use our spoons.

FURTHER READING

•   Surplus: The History of Too Much and the End of Economic Primacy (Prometheus), by Marc Chandler.
•   Marc to Market, Marc Chandler’s market commentary.
•   “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), by John Maynard Keynes.
•   The End of Economic Man (1939; Routledge), by Peter F. Drucker.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Mordecai Kurz on the trouble with trillionaires, Scott Curran on Musk, Bezos and MacKenzie Scott, Dennis Rasmussen on Frederick Douglass, and Anthony Badger on Hoover, Roosevelt and the making of the American state.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Marc Chandler is managing partner and chief market strategist at Bannockburn Global Forex. He was previously head of global currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman, and before that at HSBC and BNY Mellon. He teaches at New York University and is the author of Making Sense of the Dollar and Political Economy of Tomorrow. He writes the market commentary Marc to Market. Surplus: The History of Too Much and the End of Economic Primacy is published by Prometheus.

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.
LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO: How to See America. Who Stole America’s Pride? Arlie Russell Hochschild in conversation with Andrew Keen, Manny’s, December 8. Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-see-america-who-stole-americas-pride-tickets-2003996604791

“Originalism is not the original way of thinking about the Constitution. The past can tell you some things, but it can’t answer our modern problems.” — Rachel Shelden

INTRO

Before the midterms, Jacob Weisberg came on the show to identify eight cowards, including Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who have enabled the second Trump regime. His charge was that the Chief Justice had become too political. My guest today is no fan of Roberts. But she suggests that this political sin pales in comparison with Roberts’s sin of originalism.
Rachel Shelden is a historian at Penn State, and her new book, The Political Supreme Court, argues that the court was political by design for its first hundred years. Everybody knew it, she says. And that, in itself, wasn’t a problem.
It’s only recently, she reminds us, that we’ve invented the idea that the court is supreme. The justices had no grand courtroom until 1935, sitting in what everyone called the basement of the Capitol. And no robing room either, with justices dressing in front of other lawyers. They came to the bench from cabinets and governorships and Congress, they rode circuit and held jury trials in their own regions, and when they were done they wrote newspaper articles about their own constitutional views. None of this was thought improper, because the Constitution was understood as a political document that belonged to everybody, rather than a legal one that only belonged to the Supremes.
So where did the fiction of legal holiness come from? It began in the 1880s, Shelden says, with the professionalization of the law. It was marked by the founding of the American Bar Association and the establishment of professional law schools. Out of all this, America got the idea that the Supreme Court is the law above the law. That it should never be political.
Originalism arrived a century later to supply the scripture. Bork, Meese, Scalia, and now a bench of self-professed originalists claiming the authority of a founding generation that would have been horrified by a court this powerful and (dishonestly) political. A deep irony, Shelden calls it. The sin of originalism. Not particularly original, but very sinful.

FURTHER READING

•   The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History (University of North Carolina Press), by Rachel A. Shelden.
•   Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People (W. W. Norton), by Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan.
•   Rachel Shelden, Talking Points Memo.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Jacob Weisberg on collaboration in the Trump era, and Michael G. Miller on the breaking of the Voting Rights Act.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Rachel A. Shelden is associate professor of history at Penn State and director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center. She took her doctorate at the University of Virginia and is the author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War. She sits on the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center and writes for Talking Points Memo. The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History is published by the University of North Carolina Press.

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.

China, China. Yesterday we had the prize-winning Princeton historian Beth Lew-Williams on how nineteenth-century America turned immigrants from China into John Doe Chinamen. No name, no vote, no route to citizenship. A century of humiliation. A hundred and fifty years later, the Chinese aren’t asking anyone’s permission for anything.
Which brings me to an old friend of this show, Kishore Mahbubani. He’s a Singaporean diplomat and one of the world’s most bullish thinkers on the rise of China as a twenty-first-century superpower. His Has China Won? came out in January 2020 and has just been reissued with a new foreword.
So, six years later, has China won (again)? Kishore is far too smart to fall into such a binary trap. But he does say that nothing he wrote in 2020 needs retracting. His message then and now to Washington is that America has misidentified its opponent.
“The biggest mistake Americans make is to think they are competing against the Chinese Communist Party,” Mahbubani says. “The United States is not competing against a hundred-year-old party. It is competing against a four-thousand-year-old civilization — the world’s oldest continuous civilization.”
At the same time, Mahbubani insists, he’s not predicting the fall of America. The wily Singaporean diplomat, in fact, reminds Chinese audiences never to underestimate the Yanks. So there’ll be no winners (or losers) in the great China vs America twenty-first-century game. Like at American kids’ soccer games, everybody gets a medal.
I pushed him on what many China watchers in the West, like Orville Schell and the former Australian PM Kevin Rudd, see as Xi’s descent into totalitarianism. They are all trapped in a Western bubble, Mahbubani shot back. A hundred million Chinese leave the country as tourists every year and then freely come home again. John Doe Chinaman has, apparently, been retired (again).

FURTHER READING

•   Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy (PublicAffairs), by Kishore Mahbubani. New edition, with a foreword by the author.
•   Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future (W. W. Norton), by Dan Wang.
•   Kishore Mahbubani, author website.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Beth Lew-Williams on Chinese life under American racial law, and Kishore Mahbubani on the Asian century.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Kishore Mahbubani spent thirty-three years in the Singaporean foreign service, serving twice as Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations and as president of the UN Security Council in 2001 and 2002. He was the founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, where he is now a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute. His books include Can Asians Think?, The Asian 21st Century, Living the Asian Century and Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy, reissued this year with a new foreword.

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.

“The systematic erasure of the Chinese was not an accident. It was, in many ways, structured.” — Beth Lew-Williams
Her Chinese-American grandfather asked her to turn off the tape recorder as they spoke. Beth Lew-Williams was a history student interviewing her grandad, her YeYe, two weeks before he died. He had come to America in 1930, aged nine, in violation of the Chinese Exclusion Acts, and was held on Angel Island for what he always said was nine months. Years later she looked up the file. It was “only” thirty-four days.
It was the shame of it all, he confessed to Lew-Williams, after she switched off the recorder. For his whole life, he blamed himself rather than American racial laws for his humiliation.
That student is now a professor of history at Princeton, and this year she has won more or less every prize for John Doe Chinaman, her history of Chinese life under American racial law. The Bancroft. The American Book Award. The Merle Curti for social history. The Langum for legal history. The Western History Association’s book prize. And now the grand Canadian one, the 2026 Cundill, worth seventy-five thousand dollars, the most lucrative history prize in the world.
“John Doe Chinaman” is the term Lew-Williams kept meeting in the archives — in the court records, in the census, in the newspapers. Record after record of that nameless Chinese man. Such anonymity, she argues, was purposefully manufactured by thousands of local and state laws governing where Chinese people could live, who they could marry, and whether they could testify against a white man in court.
A Chinese Jim Crow? Lew-Williams reminds us that the earliest racial zoning laws in America were aimed at the Chinese. So were the earliest restrictive covenants, written into deeds in the 1880s. First Chinese-Americans. Then African-Americans. The subtitle of John Doe Chinaman describes it as a “forgotten” history. No longer. This acclaimed book forces us to remember the humiliation of nameless Chinese immigrants like Lew-Williams’s YeYe.

FURTHER READING

•   John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law (Harvard University Press), by Beth Lew-Williams.
•   The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press), by Beth Lew-Williams.
•   The 2026 shortlist, Cundill History Prize.
•   The 2026 Bancroft Prizes, Columbia University Libraries.
•   Beth Lew-Williams, Department of History, Princeton University.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Sophia Rosenfeld on the age of choice, Joseph Kelly on the prehistory of American fascism, Stacey Patton on how white America learned to lynch black children, and Susan Neiman on calling it evil.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Beth Lew-Williams is a professor of history at Princeton, where in 2014 she became the university’s first appointment in Asian American history. She grew up in Davis, California and took her doctorate at Stanford. Her first book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America, won two book prizes from the Organization of American Historians. John Doe Chinaman: A Forgotten History of Chinese Life under American Racial Law is published by Harvard University Press and won the 2026 Cundill History Prize, along with the Bancroft Prize, the American Book Award, the Merle Curti Social History Award, the David J. Langum Sr. Prize in American Legal History and the Western History Association’s book prize.

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.

“We gave AI a mission to make advertising revenue at all costs. It’s not evil. It just doesn’t care.” — Joe Marchese

INTRO

I’ve always been skeptical about the H word — “human”. Especially these days. In our AI age it’s lost its meaning. Today, it’s just another sloppy way of saying good. Being human equals not being a fascist. The word might have been invented by a bot.
So I was intrigued by today’s guest, who seems to be cornering the market in humanness. Former advertising executive Joe Marchese is the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Ventures, wears a Human or Nothing hat, and has a new book entitled Human Dot AI. He got to the H word early, he confesses, naming his firm ten years ago, when humans were just human and machines were machines.
Marchese’s argument in Human Dot AI is less sentimental than his branding.
Nick Bostrom’s dystopian AI paperclip machine, he reminded me, wasn’t evil. We told it to make paperclips and it accomplished that mission. Similarly, over the last twenty-five years, in our Web 2.0 age of Google and Facebook, we’ve handed AI the mission of making advertising revenue at all costs. And it did exactly that with our news feeds, our recommended videos, our information diet.
“It’s not evil,” the former Fox advertising chief told me about AI. “It just doesn’t care.”
So now in our post-Web 2.0 age, he says, we are at another fork. Your AI agent is supposed to work for you. Which, in the real (i.e. legal) world, indicates fiduciary duty. What happens when that agent — or, at least, its human owner — is quietly taking a cut for every advertisement the AI serves us?
“Gotta Serve Somebody,” Dylan reminds us. So who will your agent serve?

FURTHER READING

•   Human Dot AI: How the Fight for Your Attention Became the World’s Biggest Business (Amplify), by Joe Marchese and Jonathan Bing.
•   “Reimagining advertising with AI,” OpenAI.
•   KEEN ON AMERICA episodes cited: Noam Cohen on Aaron Sorkin’s Zuckerberg film, Mustafa Suleyman on containing and controlling AI, Tim Wu on the extractive economics of platform capitalism, and D. Graham Burnett on the war for your attention.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Joe Marchese is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and executive chairman of Human Ventures, the New York venture firm he started with Heather Hartnett in 2015. He founded the attention-based advertising company true[X], which Fox acquired in 2014, and then served as president of advertising revenue at Fox Networks Group until 2019. He has sat on the board of Clear Channel Outdoor since 2019 and was inducted into the Advertising Hall of Achievement in 2016. Human Dot AI: How the Fight for Your Attention Became the World’s Biggest Business, written with Jonathan Bing, is published by Amplify. He lives in New York.

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.