Keen On America

“Fascism is the term that is everywhere and nowhere in contemporary political discussions. We can talk about right-wing populism — but the type of politics they share with classic fascism is what I call red pill politics.” — David Ost
 
Please don’t use the F-word. At least to describe the politics of Trump, Orbán, Meloni, Netanyahu, Modi, Farage et al. Rather than fascism, the best way to demystify far-right populism is via the movie The Matrix through its idea of “red pill” politics.
 
David Ost’s new book, Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today’s Far Right, argues that to grasp the threat we need to stop stepping out of the Third Reich and into The Matrix. The red pill, borrowed from the 1999 dystopian classic, has been appropriated by the far right as a metaphor for seeing through the liberal hegemony they claim distorts reality. Popping a red pill himself, Ost argues that while today’s far right shares the essential DNA of classical fascism, it nonetheless operates in a world in which outright dictatorship isn’t viable. Mussolini, Ost warns, didn’t become totalitarian until four years after taking power. Fascism, then, is a process. It takes time. Even dystopias require patience.
 
The book is also a manifesto for left counter-politics. Yes, Law and Justice in Poland and Orbán in Hungary have both been voted out, Ost acknowledges. But in Poland, he warns, the Tusk government won power in 2023 and then governed timidly, afraid of alienating the center, failing its own base on abortion and LGBT rights, and then losing the presidential election. So the lesson from Eastern Europe is that economic left populism, not liberal caution, is the best antidote to red pill politics. Mamdani not Starmer. Otherwise the F-word will once again become a reality.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The F-Word Has Become Meaningless: Every application of “fascism” to Trump, Orbán, or Meloni is immediately met with the counter: “Are we killing you? Are we throwing you in jail?” And seemingly the matter is put to rest. Ost’s argument: the f-word has become a conversation-stopper rather than a conversation-starter. It lets the far right off the hook by setting the bar at Nazi-level violence. The actual threat — the delegitimisation of institutions, the treatment of opponents as traitors, the erosion of democratic norms — is already underway, without the gas chambers that the f-word implies.
 
•       Opponents vs Traitors: The Defining Distinction: In a democracy, you have opponents. You disagree with them, you campaign against them, you try to vote them out. In far-right politics, you have traitors. People who disagree with you are not legitimate participants in a political contest — they are enemies of the nation, people who do not belong, people who are working against the interests of the real people. This distinction — not violence, not the gas chambers, but the redefinition of legitimate opposition as treachery — is Ost’s clearest marker of the transition from normal democratic politics to something else.
 
•       Mussolini’s Four Years: How Long Before Dictatorship? When Mussolini first came to power, there were still elections. He tried to rig the game — to gerrymander, to use contemporary parlance — and institutionalise his authority. He only turned to outright dictatorship after four years in power. That was a different time. But the pattern — of coming to power through elections and then slowly making it impossible to be removed through elections — is not unique to Italy. Ost argues we may currently be in the equivalent of Mussolini’s first four years in several countries simultaneously.
 
•       What Eastern Europe Teaches America: The Tusk Warning: Law and Justice in Poland governed for eight years and was voted out in 2023. The lesson should be hopeful. But the coalition that replaced it, led by Donald Tusk, governed timidly — afraid of doing anything that might alienate the center, failing to deliver on abortion rights and domestic partnerships, and then lost the presidential election. Ost’s verdict: a Biden mistake. When the center-left or left comes to power, it must be consequentially left populist — not just different from the right in tone and temperament, but materially different in what it does for regular people. Caution is its own kind of failure.
 
•       Mamdani as Real-World Exhibit A: Ost was writing the book when Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdani campaigned explicitly to speak to voters who had voted for Trump — asking why they were moving in that direction and arguing that a universalist left could speak to their material concerns without abandoning minorities. For Ost, this is the model: economic populism that is genuinely redistributionist, that speaks to small cities and rural areas, that is tough on the issues rather than cautious about public opinion. A left that actually stands for something.
 
About the Guest
 
David Ost is an emeritus professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He is the author of Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today’s Far Right (The New Press, May 19, 2026), The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, and other books. He has written for a wide range of scholarly and popular publications, has done research in Polish factories, and once drove a NYC taxi. He lives in Ithaca, New York.
 
References:
 
•       Red Pill Politics: Demystifying Today’s Far Right by David Ost (The New Press, May 19, 2026).
 
•       Jonathan Rauch, “Yes, It’s Fascism,” The Atlantic — the piece Andrew references at the opening, and the episode we produced around it.
 
•       Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works — cited as the book Ost’s is in conversation with.
 
•       Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die — Levitsky blurbs the book.
 
•       Episode 2894: Marc Loustau on making Hungary boring again — the companion episode on Orbán’s defeat, referenced directly.
 
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

“Retirement is a false construct created a hundred years ago by the government. It was basically created when Social Security was born. Prior to that, people worked until they died — because they didn’t live as long.” — Michael Clinton
 
At the ripe young age of 70, Michael Clinton hiked nine days to Everest Base Camp and ran the Tenzing-Hillary Marathon down. Now 72, he is president of his own longevity consultancy, a columnist for Esquire and Men’s Health, a private pilot, part-owner of a vineyard in Argentina, and the author of Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026).
 
Rather than about living forever, Longevity Nation dares us to redefine what the second half of our lives can look like. And Clinton wants us to reinvent society accordingly. A hundred years ago, he reminds us, only seven million Americans were over 65. Today there are 62 million, which will quickly grow to 80 million. The whole world is aging, and its institutions are not keeping up. Retirement, Michael Clinton explains, is a false construct invented a century ago by industrial age governments. Rewire, the septuagenarian marathoner says. Don’t retire.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       This Is What 72 Looks Like Today: Clinton’s opening provocation: at 70, he hiked to Everest Base Camp and ran the marathon down. He’s visited 125 countries, run marathons on all seven continents, holds two master’s degrees, and is a private pilot. His point is not to brag. It is that the cultural image of what 70 or 80 looks like has not caught up with the reality of what a subset of 70 and 80-year-olds — and, increasingly, a growing proportion of 70 and 80-year-olds — actually look like and are capable of. When he was 40, 72 seemed ancient. Now he is 72. It doesn’t.
 
•       GLP-1: Hotel California or Longevity’s First Democratised Drug? The sharpest exchange in the interview. Andrew’s framing: GLP-1 is Hotel California — you can check in but not check out. Stop taking it and the weight and inflammation return. Clinton’s response: yes, that seems to be the story right now, and nobody knows the long-term play. But GLP-1 is coming to Medicare this summer, price cut in half, and it may become the first truly democratised longevity drug — reducing obesity, inflammation, and cardiovascular risk across the income spectrum, not just for the wealthy. Exciting and uncertain in equal measure.
 
•       Retirement Is a False Construct: Social Security was created at a moment when most Americans died before collecting it. Life expectancy was 62. The retirement age was 65. The construct was built for a world that no longer exists. Clinton’s prescription: don’t retire. Rewire. You don’t have to do the same thing, but do something. Stay engaged. Stay purposeful. If you’re 65 and live another thirty years, the retirement construct — move to Florida, play golf, wait — is not merely insufficient. It is actively harmful to cognitive and physical health.
 
•       Longevity Nation vs Gerontocracy: Andrew raises the counter-argument: is longevity nation actually gerontocracy? Trump, Biden, Trump. Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Nancy Pelosi. A class of elderly people who won’t step aside, hoarding power and preventing generational renewal. Clinton’s response: he is opposed to formal retirement ages for anyone. His answer to the political hoarding of power is not age limits but engagement — people need purpose, and purpose should be redirected, not cut off. Andrew’s unspoken counter: this is easy to say when you’re not the one being blocked by an eighty-year-old senator.
 
•       Who Do You Want Around Your Deathbed? Clinton’s most personal observation, via the book he co-authored: as you think about living longer, ask yourself — who are the five people you would want around your deathbed? And are you maintaining those relationships? The grandson of a funeral director, Clinton has a different relationship with death than most. His prescription: the longer you live, the more important it becomes to keep your closest relationships strong. Longevity without community is not longevity. It is just duration.
 
About the Guest
 
Michael Clinton is the former president and publishing director of Hearst Magazines, founder of Roar Forward, and the author of Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026) and Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late). He is a columnist for Men’s Health and Esquire, a private pilot, a marathon runner on all seven continents, and a part-owner of a vineyard in Argentina. He lives in New York City and Water Mill, Long Island.
 
References:
 
•       Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives by Michael Clinton (Atria/Beyond Words, May 5, 2026).
 
•       Stanford Center on Longevity, New Map of Life — cited by Clinton as one of the major research frameworks behind the book.
 
•       Samuel Moyn, Gerontocratic Nation — the Yale professor’s forthcoming counter-argument, referenced by Andrew.
 
•       Cara Swisher, Cara Swisher Wants to Live Forever — the CNN series referenced at the opening as the sceptical counterpart to Clinton’s optimism.
 
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) - Introduction: Cara Swisher wants to live forever

(01:33) - How old are you, Michael? 72 and proud

(01:57) - The Everest Base Camp hike at 70

(02:17) - Is the longevity boom a coastal elite phenomenon?

(03:15) - A hundred years ago: seven million over-65s; today, 62 million

(03:46) - The cultural shift:...

“Soccer matches are poorly designed experiments — you don’t necessarily find out which team was better. But any soccer fan will tell you that. Oftentimes, the better team does not win.” — Nick Greene, via a NASA scientist
 
On June 11, the World Cup comes to North America. Fifty-six years ago, I watched the searing injustice of Johann Cruyff’s Holland getting robbed in the 1974 final by Germany. Today I talk with someone who explains how this kind of injustice is built into the game’s DNA. Nick Greene — long-suffering Newcastle United fan and author of How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius — has a new book, How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius, which tells us what architects, stuntwomen, paleoanthropologists and computer scientists tell us about the beautiful game.
 
What they tell us is that the game isn’t fair. One NASA scientist tells Greene that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” because the low-scoring nature of the game means results don’t reliably identify the better team. Thus the dark fate of the free-scoring, brilliantly inventive Hungarians in 1954 and the Dutch in 1974. So if you want to watch the World Cup like a genius, don’t expect the best team to win the tournament. Which may explain why Greene suspects that England — where the pain of World Cup injustice is a national fetish — will win in 2026. On penalties probably. Arsenal style. After 120 minutes of goalless football.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Soccer Is a Poorly Designed Experiment: A NASA scientist published a peer-reviewed paper concluding that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” — the low number of goals means results don’t reliably identify the better team. Greene’s observation: any soccer fan could have told him that, and saved the journal space. But this is also what makes the game what it is. Unlike basketball’s seven-game playoff series — which gives the best team enough chances to emerge on top — a single World Cup match, in a single-elimination tournament, means one error can have outsized consequences. The imperfect and the human are inseparable.
 
•       Justice Has Nothing to Do With It: The 1974 Dutch vs 2004 Greece: Andrew’s most painful memory: the 1974 World Cup final, where the magnificent Dutch side led by Cruyff was beaten by the Germans. The Dutch didn’t win, but they are remembered as one of the greatest teams in history. The 2004 Greek side, which won Euro 2004 by parking the bus and grinding nil-nil victories, actually won — and are remembered as a fluke. The lesson Greene draws: the shared understanding built into soccer watching is that winning is only one metric, and often not the most important one. It is an imperfect and profoundly human enterprise.
 
•       How to Appreciate Defense: The cliché American complaint about soccer is the low scoring. Greene’s response: this is partly a failure to appreciate defense, which in soccer can look like the absence of good offense. He discusses Italy’s history of outstanding defensive play — the Catenaccio system, Paolo Maldini, Beckenbauer — and the intelligence required to prevent goals. Andrew’s contribution: his wife, who watches American football, taught him that defense is where the sophistication lives. The same is true of soccer. The genius watcher watches the defenders.
 
•       VAR: Too Much, Going in the Right Direction: Greene’s measured verdict on VAR — video assistant refereeing. His worst case: when it ruins a goal celebration. The player scores, the crowd erupts, the flag goes up, three minutes of review, okay everyone start celebrating again. That destroys the cathartic moment that makes soccer’s rare goals so electrifying. His prediction: VAR will evolve toward the coach’s challenge model used in American football and basketball — a limited number of challenges per half, preserving the flow of the game while correcting the worst errors. It’s relatively young. It’ll be futted and fidgeted with.
 
•       Don’t Bet On It. Watch the Game: Greene’s best advice for American newcomers to soccer. Not about tactics, not about history. Betting on soccer is a mug’s game — partly because results don’t reliably reflect the better team (the NASA paper again), and partly because talking about your bets is the least interesting conversation you can have about sport. His prediction for the tournament: England. Reasoning: Harry Kane is playing. Andrew’s reaction: Kane is a Spurs man, so reluctant endorsement. But please, Nick. Don’t.
 
About the Guest
 
Nick Greene is a contributing writer at Slate and the author of How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius: What Architects, Stuntwomen, Paleoanthropologists, and Computer Scientists Reveal About the World’s Game (Abrams Press, May 12, 2026) and How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius (Abrams Press, 2021). His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a Newcastle United fan and lives in Berkeley, California.
 
References:
 
•       How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius by Nick Greene (Abrams Press, May 12, 2026).
 
•       Simon Kuper, Going to the Match — referenced in the introduction as a recent KOA episode on nine consecutive World Cups.
 
•       Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World — referenced as the prior KOA World Cup episode.
 
•       David Winner, Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer — blurbed the book; relevant to the 1974 Dutch discussion.
 
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:

“The dangers are human, not AI. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what the AI does itself. In fact, even the idea that there is such a thing as the AI in itself is a mistake.” — Keith Teare
 
I’m in Korea this week. So rather than doing a traditional one-on-one That Was the Week tech summary, Keith Teare and I are trying something different. We invited Jonathan Rauch — Brookings Institution senior fellow, serial author and one of the most rigorous minds in Washington — onto the show to discuss AI.
 
Rauch had a simple mission. He wanted to find out why Keith Teare is just about the only person in the universe who believes that AI is benign. Jon had five buckets of doom to dump on Keith: labour market disruption, political upheaval, mental health and cognition, malicious actors, and the biggest daddy of all — AI developing consciousness, setting its own agenda, and killing everyone (even Keith).
 
But Keith maintained his Yorkshire stoicism under intense scrutiny from the analogue Rauch machine. AI is a word-counting machine, he explained. Large language models train on words, not experience. They split words into a probabilistic graph of correlations. When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, word by word. In that sense, he says, AI is no cleverer than a calculator. The idea that it has awareness, consciousness, or a plan is mythological. What’s dangerous is what a human does with AI, not what AI does itself. The dangers, he says, are human.
 
Jon wasn’t entirely reassured (his Brookings brand is scepticism, after all). What worries him most is that humans will handle these technologies irresponsibly. On that, he and Keith agree. The short-term labour disruption will be significant. White-collar service provision — legal, accounting, junior consulting — is already going. Jobs will go too. Work, Keith insists, will not. But nobody in politics is having the conversation about what comes next. Not JD. Not AOC. Only Keith and Jon.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       AI Is a Word-Counting Machine: Keith’s Core Argument: Large language models train on words and only words. They split those words into a probabilistic graph — how close is word A to word B? When you ask a question, a large statistical engine fires, producing output word by word. There is no awareness. There is no consciousness. There is no plan. The idea that such a system could develop its own agenda is mythological. It’s no cleverer than a calculator. It’s just a very big, very fast calculator. Rauch’s counter: the brain is also just dumb neurons. We get emergence from dumb neurons. Keith’s reply: what the AI can do is constrained by what humans allow it to do. The agency is human.
 
•       Doomerism as Business Model: Before engaging with any specific AI doom argument, Keith signals a prior: whenever there is ambiguity in a major technological change, a business model emerges to monetize doubt. It was true of nuclear power. It was true of climate change. It is true of AI. This doesn’t mean the fears are groundless — they wouldn’t sell if they weren’t reasonable. But it means they should be approached with prior scepticism. The doom argument works precisely because AI genuinely contains possible negative outcomes. The business model packages and amplifies those possibilities beyond their actual probability.
 
•       The Guardrails Are Human: Keith’s metaphor: AI sits in a prison where humans decide what the doors are. If you give it access to email, it can email. If you don’t, it can’t. It cannot take actions it has not been permitted to take. The word “guardrails” is commonly used, and it’s apt: the constraints on what AI can do are entirely under human control. The word output is the statistical engine — that’s not controllable. But its ability to act on words is highly constrained. The danger is not what AI does. It is what humans choose to allow AI to do.
 
•       Jobs vs Work: The Labour Disruption Argument: Rauch’s young friends in junior consulting are watching their jobs go in real time. Keith distinguishes between jobs — paid labour — and work, which is closer to effort and creative agency. Jobs can go. Work, he argues, will not — humans will always be reinterpreting the future they want and working to make it happen. But the short-term disruption will be significant: white-collar service provision (legal, accounting, consulting), teaching, driving. The wealth creation AI enables could supplement the end of paid labour. But no one in government is having that conversation.
 
•       Rauch’s Verdict: Clarified, Not Reassured: After fifty minutes with Keith Teare, Jonathan Rauch reaches a considered position: his worst fear — that AI becomes an autonomous engine of anti-human malfeasance — is unlikely to happen unless humans make it happen. His residual concern: that humans will not handle these technologies as maturely as one could wish. He’s not optimistic about political systems that are already too rigid, too partisan, and too dysfunctional to adjust as they did to the industrialization of the late nineteenth century. On that, he and Keith agree. Nobody knows. Not Keith. Not Andrew. And, despite his brilliance, not Jonathan Rauch.
 
About the Guests
 
Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch.
 
Jonathan Rauch is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, The Happiness Curve, Kindly Inquisitors, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, and many other books. He is based in Washington, D.C.
 
References:
 
•       That Was the Week by Keith Teare.
 
•       The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch.
 
•       Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — the AI doom book referenced in the conversation.
 
•       Sam Harris and Tristan Harris podcast on AI risk — referenced by Rauch as the catalyst for his questions.
 
•       Episode 2902: Keith Teare on his jobless AI future vision — the preceding TWTW episode directly referenced.
 
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.

“History is really interesting because it’s about people. And people are interesting. So there are plenty of different ways of doing this, and I think there’s room for everybody.” — Adrian Goldsworthy
 
The greatest rivalry in antiquity is also uncomfortably relevant to us today. In Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece, the classical scholar Adrian Goldsworthy covers the long fifth century BC, from the Persian Wars that forced Athens and Sparta into alliance, through the Peloponnesian War that set them against each other.
 
The parallels of the rivalry between Sparta and Athens are uncannily relevant today. Goldsworthy traces the NATO-like structure of the Athenian alliance, with its familiar complaint that the allies weren’t paying enough. He notes that Athens, which outgrew its ability to grow its own food, had to secure its grain supply from the Black Sea — in the same way as closing the Straits of Hormuz has disrupted modern supply chains. And he observes that the Spartans won the Peloponnesian War by getting Persian money — while the Athenians were doing exactly the same thing. Persia, he notes, is always lurking in the background. There would be no “west” without it.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Athens and Sparta: Two Experiments, One Greek Longing: Both city states were driven by the same competitive Greek impulse — the desire to excel, to be the best. But they ran radically different experiments in how to achieve it. Athens: radical democracy, open society, maritime empire, philosophy, drama. Sparta: apartheid military state, in which a tiny Spartan elite was freed from all labour by a vast population of helots, so that they could devote their entire lives to being warriors and citizens. Two models for a polity that still structure political argument today.
 
•       Thucydides: Essential but Embittered: The History of the Peloponnesian War is the essential source — and the problematic one. Thucydides was an Athenian general who failed to save a city from a Spartan-led force and went into exile as a result. He is analytical and apparently balanced in ways that seem modern. But he cannot hide his biases: the demagogue Cleon gets speeches written for him that make him look like a self-interested buffoon. And his silences are as revealing as his words — large events, including an Athenian disaster in Egypt, are mentioned only vaguely. He tells us what he wants to tell.
 
•       The NATO Parallel: They Weren’t Paying Enough: The Delian League — the Athenian alliance that emerged after the Persian Wars — has a structural similarity to NATO that Goldsworthy notes carefully. Athens, like the United States, is the dominant naval power that has mobilised for a great threat and then chosen not to demobilise. The allies, like European NATO members in successive administrations’ complaints, weren’t willing to send ships or men. They’d just send a bit of cash. The Athenian fleet ends up overwhelmingly Athenian. As the threat recedes, the other states increasingly resent the protection they’re receiving from it.
 
•       Persia Is Always There: The Spartans won the Peloponnesian War by securing subsidies from the Persian Empire. The Athenians were doing the same thing. The irony: both sides of the Greek world’s greatest internal conflict ended up funded by the barbarian power they had united to defeat a generation earlier. Goldsworthy draws the modern parallel delicately: America is now fighting a war in Iran, once known as Persia. Europe chose not to join. The question of who Persia is in any given age is always live. Persia, he says, is always there. It always has been.
 
•       Athens as a Theme Park: The Roman Legacy: In the Roman period, Athens and Sparta became what Goldsworthy calls “university cities or, in Sparta’s case, a theme park.” Sparta, having lost any real military or political power, invented a public performance of its old customs — a tourist attraction for Roman visitors who wanted to see the old ways enacted. Athens was a university town for the Roman elite, whose children went there as we might go to Oxford. What we think we know about classical Greece is partly filtered through this late antique nostalgia — a celebration of how great we used to be.
 
About the Guest
 
Adrian Goldsworthy is a historian, novelist, and YouTuber with a DPhil from Oxford. He is the author of Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece (Basic Books, May 12, 2026), Caesar: Life of a Colossus, Augustus: First Emperor of Rome, How Rome Fell, Philip and Alexander, Rome and Persia, and many other books. He lives in Penarth, South Wales.
 
References:
 
•       Athens and Sparta: The Rivalry That Shaped Ancient Greece by Adrian Goldsworthy (Basic Books, May 12, 2026).
 
•       Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War — the essential and problematic source, discussed at length.
 
•       Episode 2897: Patrick Wyman on Lost Worlds — directly referenced in the interview as a contrasting style of history.
 
•       Episode 2892: Jason Pack on the Iran war — the companion episode on the modern Persian conflict, referenced in the interview.
 
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: