Keen On America

“The burdens of slavery did crush some people. They elicited outright armed rebellion from others. And between those two extremes, there’s all manner of response. But black culture was what most historians say it was: rich, semiautonomous — and yet there is all kinds of cross-fertilization that goes on.” — Melvin Patrick Ely
 
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the republic, America is still struggling to come to terms with its original sin — slavery. With his new micro-history, A Terrible Intimacy, Melvin Patrick Ely takes all the abstractions, moral and otherwise, out of the story. The meticulous Ely has spent many years in the county records of Prince Edward County, Virginia, going through 75 cartons of nineteenth-century papers: court cases, lawsuits, plantation ledgers, testimony from black and white witnesses alike. The result is a history of six criminal trials which reveals the intimacy of life between whites and blacks in the slaveholding South.
 
In Prince Edward County, as on most small Southern farms — and contrary to our plantation mythology, fully half the enslaved people in the South lived on small properties of fewer than twenty people — black and white people knew each other personally. They drank together, worshipped together, spoke the same dialect, shared the same folk knowledge of weather, nature, and time. Ely tells the story of an enslaved man named Tom and his white overseer Richard Foster who consumed a quart of whiskey together in the morning, and then fought to the death that same afternoon over a surcingle strap. That was how blacks and whites lived and died. Such intimacy, Ely is careful to make clear, did not mitigate anything. Everyone knew the master who gouged a slave’s eyes with sticks and pulled sound teeth out with pliers. But he was the outlier. Life was mostly more tragically complex. That was the terribly terrible intimacy about America’s original sin.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Thirty Years in the County Records: Five or six entire summers, six days a week, eight hours a day, in the Library of Virginia — plus months of collating, plus years of writing. Seventy-five cartons of papers from Prince Edward County: court cases with witness testimony, plantation records, mercantile ledgers, letters, building contracts (including the bill from the carpenter who built the gallows on which one of the book’s central figures was hanged). Ely’s method: go through tens of thousands of documents looking for needles in a haystack — nuggets of revelatory information about how the society actually operated. Most historians process that research behind the scenes and deliver a smooth narrative. Ely does it in front of you, in conversation with the reader.
 
•       Tom and the Overseer: A Quart of Whiskey and a Fight to the Death: The book’s first chapter is built around one criminal trial. An enslaved man named Tom is on trial for killing his white overseer, Richard Foster, with the handle of a hoe. The testimony — from white witnesses including the dead man’s own sister, and from other enslaved people on the farm — reveals that in the morning of the day of the killing, the two men had sat down and drunk together as much as a quart of whiskey. Then, later in the day, a stupid verbal exchange about a missing strap escalates into a fight to the death. In a single day: drinking like buddies, then killing. That is the terrible intimacy — closeness and callousness, not as opposites, but as the same thing.
 
•       Half the Enslaved Lived on Small Farms: The plantation is the dominant image of American slavery — the sprawling estate, the hundreds of enslaved people, the distant master. But fully half of the enslaved people in the South lived on small properties of fewer than twenty people: farms where black and white people of every legal status — enslaved, free black, poor white, slaveholder — were in daily personal contact. They shared the same churches, the same dialects, the same understanding of nature and time. Black culture was rich and semiautonomous, but there was also constant cross-fertilization. The binary of master and slave does not capture what was actually happening in most of the South.
 
•       Nobody Said a Word While He Was Alive: One chapter centers on an enslaved man who killed his master — a man the testimony reveals had beaten him with sticks, broken sticks over his head, gouged his eyes, whipped him, chained him to the floor, and pulled sound teeth from his mouth with pliers. At the trial, white witnesses are called. Their testimony ranges from glossing over the abuse to calling it “barbarious.” But not one of them had spoken up while the master was alive. Not one ever said: beating a slave with a stick must never be done. The range of white feeling about permissible cruelty was finite — some drew the line at near-blindness, some did not. Nobody drew it at the start. That is the system.
 
•       Beyond Pride and Shame: Two hundred and fifty years on, the temptation is still to resolve slavery into a usable narrative — either the sentimental Southern white memory of paternalist kindness, or the equally schematic counter-narrative of unremitting oppression met by constant resistance. Ely resists both. Unremitting oppression does grind people down — but it also elicits armed rebellion, quiet subversion, rich cultural creation, and all manner of response in between. White Southerners were not all identical — but the range of their difference was constrained by a system that made economic gain dependent on the legal ownership of human beings. The book doesn’t offer resolution. It offers accuracy. Which, in the 250th anniversary year, is the harder and more necessary thing.
 
About the Guest
 
Melvin Patrick Ely is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at the College of William & Mary. He is the author of A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South (Henry Holt, April 14, 2026), Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Bancroft Prize), and The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.
 
References:
 
•       A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South by Melvin Patrick Ely (Henry Holt, April 14, 2026).
 
•       Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War by Melvin Patrick Ely — Bancroft Prize winner; the companion volume to this book.
 
•       Episode 2871: Beverly Gage on This Land Is Your Land — the road trip through American history that opens Ely’s interview as a point of departure.
 
About Keen On America
 
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“They weren’t interested in being on the side of God so much as they are insistent that God is on their side.” — Peter Wehner on Hegseth and Trump
 
According to Peter Wehner, something has gone terribly wrong in America. And that something, Wehner has been warning us now for more than ten years, is Donald Trump. In his latest Atlantic piece, “Hegseth’s Unholy War,” Wehner aims his moral rifle at Trump’s latest outrage, the Iranian conflict. Citing Hegseth’s prayer at the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” Wehner argues that the Bible, in his Crusader-like hands, has been weaponized into a theological cover for bloodlust.
 
Something has gone terribly wrong with the intersection of faith and American politics, Wehner believes. The evangelical church, which once commanded real moral authority, has largely become what he calls a defamation of Jesus. Thus the significance of Pope Leo XIV’s public opposition to Trump. Rather than a social media spat, Wehner sees this Papal indictment of Trump as a kind of moral war which has been brewing for some time.
 
In a recent New York Times op-ed co-authored with Jonathan Rauch, Wehner argued that the Trump administration has reached its psychotic stage. Having filled key institutions with Hegseth-style lackeys and hoodlums, this psychosis is now infecting not just the federal government but the whole world. Thus Iran. It’s the kind of fiasco you wouldn’t expect from middle schoolers planning a field trip, Wehner says. His fear is that as Trump is humiliated by both the Papacy and Tehran, the President of the United States will have what psychologists call an extinction burst — a five-year-old’s out-of-control tantrum. Yes, something has indeed gone terribly wrong in America.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Hegseth’s Unholy War: At a Pentagon worship service, Hegseth prayed for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” invoking imprecatory psalms — emotional laments written from the perspective of the powerless — as theological cover for the most powerful military force in history. Wehner’s sharpest line: Hegseth and his allies are not interested in being on the side of God; they are insistent that God is on their side. The Bible becomes not a text for self-examination but a weapon aimed outward. Wehner’s diagnosis: Hegseth has a bloodlust, unresolved resentments, and a conversion that is at least in part real — but real in the sense that he has locked onto a particular brand of faith to validate things he already believes.
 
•       Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong: The evangelical church, which once commanded moral authority, has become — by and large, in Wehner’s view — an awful depiction of the Christian faith and a net negative contribution to American civic life. Figures like Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, Robert Jeffress, and Al Mohler have become vocal Trump supporters, using the name of Jesus to validate cruelty and crudity. Wehner’s explanation: too many people who know better are afraid to speak out — afraid their congregations will split, afraid of the institutional costs. But the silence is not neutral. A watching world has seen these evangelicals and concluded: you are a bunch of hypocrites who act worse than the people you criticize.
 
•       Pope Leo XIV vs. Trump: Wehner thinks this is not a tiff. It is an intellectual war, and it has been carefully planned. Pope Leo — an American pope, significantly — represents a set of contrasts almost too clean to be coincidental: a moral man against an amoral one, a person of faith against a person of no faith, someone who uses language with care against someone who cannot help but dehumanize his critics. And an institution-builder against an institution-destroyer. Wehner credits Leo with performing a necessary function that almost no one else in American public life is capable of performing — confronting Trump on explicitly moral terms with unblemished authority.
 
•       Vance: The Mask He Wears: Wehner distinguishes Hegseth from Vance: Hegseth is, in some sense, a true believer; Vance’s conversion to MAGA was transparently cynical, driven by enormous ambition. That makes him more morally culpable, not less. But Wehner also notes a psychological dynamic: when you live a life at odds with what you truly believe, cognitive dissonance is painful, and the mind mitigates that pain by rationalizing, by beginning to believe what you say. You become the mask you wear. Vance, Rubio, Graham, Johnson — these are people who knew better, decided to make a figurative deal with the devil, and convinced themselves they could do more good than harm.
 
•       The Republican Party Has Become a Dark Force: Without the Republican Party, none of this could have happened. The party is hugely accountable. Trump is sociopathic — colorblind when it comes to morality, probably unable to help himself. But the Republicans in the party did know better and went along anyway. Mike Johnson, very big on proclaiming his evangelical faith, is a pathetic and disreputable figure. His reputation has been stained beyond belief. Wehner’s verdict on the party’s future: if it has any association with the current iteration, it deserves condemnation. The roots of MAGA go too deep for a snapback. This may get more chaotic after Trump leaves than less. History will get it right, Wehner believes. These people were on the wrong side of their faith, their morality, their politics, and their justice. And it will be known.
 
About the Guest
 
Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. He is the author of The Death of Politics and several other books. He lives in McLean, Virginia.
 
References:
 
•       Hegseth’s Unholy War by Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, April 2026.
 
•       “Pete Hegseth’s Moral Unseriousness,” by Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, April 2026.
 
•       “The Trump Administration Is in a Psychotic State,” by Peter Wehner and Jonathan Rauch, The New York Times, April 10, 2026.
 
•       The Barmen Declaration (1934) — Bonhoeffer’s theological break with the German Protestant church under Nazism, discussed as a historical precedent.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Ke...

“Liberalism was founded in the middle of the eighteenth century as a revolutionary philosophy — a philosophy that tried to subvert the old world. That set of beliefs has continued to be radical and revolutionary. When liberalism fell into decadence, it examined itself, subverted itself, and became once again a revolutionary faith.” — Adrian Wooldridge
 
We’ve lost our revolutionary center. At least according to Adrian Wooldridge, the distinguished British political writer. That revolution, Wooldridge insists, is the genius of liberalism — the radical eighteenth-century ideology that shaped the modern world. Today, however, he argues in The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, “liberalism” has become conservative, perhaps even reactionary, in its senescent infatuation with cultural identity. Meanwhile, the biggest threat to liberal individualism is big tech: fragmenting attention, spreading misinformation, manipulating choices through algorithms designed to excite emotion rather than inform reason. Rather than making us geniuses, Silicon Valley is turning all of us into idiots.
 
To the ramparts then, Wooldridge pronounces. Liberals need to seize back the revolutionary center. Or, as Wooldridge, a Fellow of All Souls, would spell it, centre.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Erasmus and the Liberal Way of Life: Liberalism begins not as an ideology but as a way of living. Erasmus, charting a middle path between the Reformation and the counter-Reformation, offers the founding insight: a good life involves reading books, drinking wine, having discussions, and not bullying people to adopt your faith. What liberalism adds to this is intellectual skepticism — the recognition that you can’t be absolutely certain of your beliefs, and therefore that power must be constrained by constitutions. When liberalism became purely associated with political philosophy, Wooldridge argues, it lost this sense of liberalism as a way of life — and that loss is part of what needs to be recovered.
 
•       Bobo Orthodoxy and Its Wounds: The liberalism of the last forty years has been Bobo liberalism — bohemian bourgeois, David Brooks’ term. Maximum individual freedom in both the marketplace and personal conduct; no judgementalism on lifestyle choices; celebration of diversity and immigration as ipso facto goods. It did a great deal of good. Gay marriage. The dismantling of corporatist economics. But it also created problems it couldn’t see, because its own philosophy prevented it from acknowledging them. In Britain: the Bobo establishment’s inability to confront the grooming gangs, because its multiculturalist assumptions made it terrified of accusations of racism. In America: tent cities, drug addiction, the social costs of choices that nobody felt entitled to criticize.
 
•       Big Tech Is a Bigger Threat Than Putin: Wooldridge’s most provocative claim: the biggest threat to liberalism is not Putin or Xi but the tech oligarchy. Putin is a dictator; that system will eventually collapse. But big tech is dismantling liberal individualism from within. Liberalism’s foundational premise is that individuals, as the building blocks of society, must be well-informed, capable of self-control, and able to act as rational agents. What information capitalism is deliberately engineering — through algorithms designed to excite emotion, fragment attention, and spread misinformation — is the destruction of all three of those conditions. These companies need to be broken up. Not on socialist grounds. On liberal ones.
 
•       Liberalism as Senescence: Biden and Harris: Exhibit A for the Bobo orthodoxy’s exhaustion: the 2024 election. Biden, visibly too old to lead, unable to string sentences together; a whole liberal establishment around him, imprisoned by its own assumptions, running a candidate nobody could defend. Then Harris — chosen, in Wooldridge’s blunt phrase, as an affirmative action candidate. The old liberal establishment — Pelosi and the rest — had been in power since the 1990s, had accrued all the defects of the establishment, and had no blueprint to address the real problems people were encountering. The last time British liberalism looked this dead was the 1890s. Then a new programme and new talent arrived: Churchill, Lloyd George, Asquith.
 
•       The Revolutionary Center: Save Capitalism from Itself: Wooldridge’s prescription is not to destroy capitalism but to reform it, as Teddy Roosevelt and Louis Brandeis did. Break up vast conglomerations of economic power. Tax inherited wealth. Recreate the conditions for a mass middle class. Brandeis’s argument: if people can buy votes, you can’t have democracy. If people have vast fortunes, you can’t have democracy. You need to save capitalism in order to make it the best version of itself. Mill understood this too: once he saw that factory owners and workers had structurally different choices, he began supporting trade unions and moved left on economics. A radical center is not a soft center. It is a center that is willing to blow up the orthodoxies that have calcified within liberalism itself.
 
About the Guest
 
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist at Bloomberg Opinion and former political editor and Bagehot, Schumpeter, and Lexington columnist at The Economist. He is the author of The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism (Pegasus Books, 2026), The Aristocracy of Talent, and Capitalism in America (with Alan Greenspan). He holds a DPhil from All Souls College, Oxford, and lives in London.
 
References:
 
•       The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism by Adrian Wooldridge (Pegasus Books, 2026).
 
•       Episode 2880: Gal Beckerman on How to Be a Dissident — the companion conversation on liberalism, dissidence, and the question of the revolutionary center.
 
•       Episode 2869: Jacob Mchangama on The Future of Free Speech — the free speech crisis that contextualises Wooldridge’s argument about liberalism’s lost genius.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube

“Pessimism is not fatalism. Fatalism is the belief that things will always necessarily be worse. Pessimism is the belief that things will probably get worse. Within that ‘probably,’ it opens up space for action.” — Gal Beckerman
 
In the first months of Trump II, Gal Beckerman watched American society do something that shocked him: comply. In one pathetic example after another, prominent law firms, universities, and senior federal employees buckled to every Trumpian whim. America appeared unable to resist authoritarianism. There were no dissidents.
 
Thus How to Be a Dissident. Beckerman’s new manual of resistance is inspired by history’s more insistent dissenters — from Mandelstam and Solzhenitsyn to Navalny, Ai Weiwei, Thoreau, Havel, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and demonstrators on the streets of Minneapolis. The quiet manifesto focuses on what Beckerman considers the ten most essential qualities of how to be a dissident: Be alone. Be pessimistic. Be funny. Be reckless. Be watchful.
 
Pessimism, above all. Not fatalism — the belief that things will always necessarily be worse — but the belief that things will probably get worse. Optimism, in Beckerman’s mind, undermines urgency and thus enables passivity. Pessimism forces resistance. It’s the first lesson in how to be a dissident.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Moral Nausea: Beckerman’s term for the feeling most of us recognise but most of us suppress: seeing something wrong — a neighbour treated badly, a homeless person in a terrible situation, a dead child in a newspaper — and knowing ourselves somehow implicated. Most of us swallow it back down. We don’t do anything. We try not to think about it. The dissident is the person who doesn’t. What separates them, Hannah Arendt argued after studying Germans who resisted the Nazis, is a single question: can I live with myself? If the answer is no — if living with myself would mean living with a murderer — the dissident acts. That question, and the refusal to avoid it, is what makes a dissident a dissident.
 
•       The Pre-Political: Havel’s definition of where dissidence begins: not in ideology or revolution, but in the defence of whatever allows a human life to feel normal. For Havel, it started with a rock band — the Plastic People of the Universe, arrested for playing unauthorised concerts in communist Czechoslovakia. They weren’t political. They sang about drinking beer. But they were gathering people together outside state sanction, and that was enough. For Iranian dissidents: being able to drive unaccompanied, or not cover one’s hair. For the Tiananmen tank man: getting home to make dinner. The dissident defends those pre-political conditions — the normal life — when the state moves to violate them.
 
•       Mandelstam’s Answer: Osip Mandelstam composed a poem mocking Stalin in the early 1930s — at the height of Stalin’s repressive era — and never wrote it down. He repeated it to his wife, Nadezhda, night after night in bed until she had memorised it. When it reached the secret police, he was arrested and brought to the Lubyanka. The interrogator asked: why did you do this? He could have denied it. Blamed his wife. Said it was a game of telephone. Instead he said: I wrote it because I hate fascism. It’s as simple as that. Beckerman opens the book with this moment because it captures the dissident at their most elemental — a man who, when asked the Arendt question, answered honestly.
 
•       Navalny Goes Back: After being poisoned by Putin and spending months recovering in Germany, Navalny returned to Russia, knowing almost certainly that in the best case he would be in prison for a very long time, and that Putin would most likely find another way to kill him. Which he did. Why go back? Navalny’s answer, in his memoir: he had made a promise to the Russian people. How could he stand on the sidelines while asking others to sacrifice so much? The scene Beckerman describes from the prison: Navalny finds a moment away from the cameras, pulls his wife Yulia aside, and tells her he’s accepted that he’s probably not getting out alive. She says: I know. I’ve thought the same thing, and I’ve accepted it. He kisses her. He needs to know she isn’t engaging in magical thinking. Optimism, in this context, would not have helped him.
 
•       Be Pessimistic: Beckerman’s most counterintuitive prescription, and his favourite. The assumption is that anyone engaged in quixotic world-changing behaviour must be an optimist. Beckerman argues the opposite. Pessimism — not fatalism — is healthier. The distinction matters: fatalism says things will always necessarily be worse. Pessimism says things will probably be worse. The “probably” leaves room for action. If you assume someone else will solve climate change, or that authoritarianism will inevitably collapse, you wait. The pessimist acts now, with what time they have, because they know things probably won’t work out otherwise. It is, Beckerman suggests, akin to accepting death: the ultimate pessimistic reality we all face, which is also the only thing that makes each day matter.
 
About the Guest
 
Gal Beckerman is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of How to Be a Dissident (Crown, April 21, 2026), The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, and When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Sami Rohr Prize winner). He has a PhD from Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
 
References:
 
•       How to Be a Dissident by Gal Beckerman (Crown, April 21, 2026).
 
•       Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope — the memoir Beckerman calls one of his favourite books.
 
•       Alexei Navalny, Patriot — the memoir Beckerman draws on for the prison scene with Yulia.
 
•       Episode 2869: Jacob Mchangama on The Future of Free Speech — the companion episode on the crisis of free speech that contextualises this one.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube

“These technologies are morally agnostic. They could be the best things ever and the worst things ever, and the determinant is us.” — Jamie Metzl
 
Two summers ago, Jamie Metzl gave a talk on AI and spirituality at the Chautauqua Institution in Upstate New York. That same spot where Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage a couple of years earlier. Rather than an assassination attempt, Metzl’s talk triggered The AI Ten Commandments: A New Moral Code for Humanity — a book co-authored with GPT-5. Metzl humbly claims that AI enabled him to incorporate other non-Christian traditions in a new moral code for humanity.
 
Some might think, however, that this type of ChatGPT-5 co-production reflects a new moral crisis for humanity. The victory of AI slop. Fast information. High on intellectual calories, low on everything else.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Co-Authoring with GPT-5: Five to six thousand back-and-forth exchanges over the course of writing the book. Metzl is a novelist who cares deeply about language and the provenance of ideas — he is explicit that this is not the kind of AI fraud that got Mia Ballard’s book pulled from Hachette. The analogy he reaches for: Refik Anadol at MoMA, whose installation uses the museum’s entire digital collection not to reproduce the images but to create something new from them. The collaboration with AI isn’t about outsourcing the thinking. It’s about gaining a vantage point that no individual human could have — the same way we collaborate with machines in biology to see the genome, which no one could simply observe by looking at another person.
 
•       Moses’s Problem: The biblical 10 commandments, examined closely, don’t hold up. The first two are preamble. “Thou shalt not kill” — Moses received it on Sinai and then came down and murdered 3,000 people at God’s instruction. The commandments were written by people with no awareness of the moral traditions of the Americas, Asia, or Africa. Metzl’s counterproposal uses AI to look at all of human recorded history simultaneously — every tradition, every culture, every spiritual framework — and decipher what they share. The analogy: the Artemis II astronauts seeing Earth holistically from space, rather than one community at a time.
 
•       The Ten Commandments, Listed: (1) Treat every being with compassion and dignity. (2) Do no harm; actively protect the vulnerable. (3) Speak and act truthfully, with integrity and humility. (4) Share generously, especially with those in need. (5) Seek to understand others before judging them. (6) Resolve conflict with fairness, forgiveness, and the intent to heal. (7) Live in harmony with nature and all forms of life. (8) Value wisdom over dominance; cultivate inner growth. (9) Honour the freedom and uniqueness of others. (10) Remember the sacredness of life; live with awe, gratitude, and love. Metzl’s favourite is number ten. Andrew’s objection: you don’t need GPT-5 to come up with any of these. You could get most of them from a local Buddhist centre.
 
•       Humanistic Slop vs. Selfish Survivalism: Andrew’s repeated challenge: these principles are so unobjectionable that they amount to nothing — a kind of AI-laundered platitude. Metzl half-concedes, but argues that the absence of articulated universal norms is itself a political danger. Kant described the League of Peace in 1795. It took a hundred and fifty years and two world wars before the UN Charter was signed in 1945. The UN has now largely failed. If we don’t articulate what we’re trying to achieve, it becomes even harder to get there. Globalism, in Metzl’s framing, isn’t idealism. It’s survivalism. Our fates are intertwined whether we recognise it or not.
 
•       The Eleventh Commandment: World-changing technologies must be governed responsibly, including through national regulation and accountability frameworks. The hope that AI CEOs will voluntarily do the right thing — even the best of them, even Dario, even Demis — is a terrible strategy. It will fail, because some companies will always seek opportunity. The nuclear analogy: at the dawn of the nuclear age, nobody said “alright, just do whatever you want and good luck.” These are civilizational transformations. They require governance. These technologies are morally agnostic. They could be the best things ever and the worst things ever. The determinant is us.
 
About the Guest
 
Jamie Metzl is a technology futurist, geopolitics expert, sci-fi novelist, and founder and chair of OneShared.World. He is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and a Singularity University expert. He is the author of The AI Ten Commandments: A New Moral Code for Humanity (co-authored with GPT-5, April 21, 2026), Superconvergence, and Hacking Darwin.
 
References:
 
•       The AI Ten Commandments: A New Moral Code for Humanity by Jamie Metzl and GPT-5 (April 21, 2026).
 
•       OneShared.World — Metzl’s global social movement and Declaration of Interdependence.
 
•       Episode 2877: Keith Teare on AI Is Not Dangerous — the Silicon Valley seminary argument, one episode prior.
 
•       Episode 2878: Victoria Hetherington on The Friend Machine — the AI intimacy investigation that immediately precedes this show.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

(00:31) - Why GPT-5 and not Claude? The co-author question

(02:58) - Is this a joke? The Chautauqua origin story

(05:09) - The Refik Anadol distinction: collaboration vs. fraud

(07:57) - From the genome to the moral code: why collaborate with AI

(08:54) - What is Chautauqua? The six-thousand-person standing ovation

(09:53) - Moses’s problem: the biblical 10 commandments examined

(12:48) - Sam Altman and the Ronan Farrow piece

(14:00) - Advanced praise from the Vatican and a leading reform rabbi

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