Radio Live - Podcasts - Keen On America - Finally Some Good News: Why We Might All Be Altruistic Creatures

Finally Some Good News: Why We Might All Be Altruistic Creatures

Author: Andrew Keen May 13, 2022 Duration: 34:07

Podcast episode

Keen On America

Keen On America is a sharp, fast-moving podcast hosted by author and commentator Andrew Keen. Known for asking impertinent questions, Keen cross-examines some of the world’s most thoughtful voices on politics, economics, history, culture, the environment, and technology. Each episode digs beneath headlines and hype to uncover what is really shaping America today and how those forces connect to global change. Listeners can expect challenging conversations rather than easy talking points, as Keen presses guests to explain not just what is happening, but why it matters and what might come next. Whether you are trying to make sense of polarized politics, rapid technological disruption, or shifting social norms, this show offers a bracing, critical lens. Tune in and listen episodes of Keen On America to hear Andrew Keen interrogate the ideas and assumptions that define contemporary American life.

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now.

In this episode, Andrew is joined by Stephanie D. Preston, co-author of The Altruistic Urge: Why We’re Driven to Help Others.

Stephanie D. Preston is professor of psychology and director of the Ecological Neuroscience Lab at the University of Michigan. She is coeditor of The Interdisciplinary Science of Consumption (2014).

More episodes

Episode 2029: How to House America?

11.04.2024 Duration: 33:44

How to deal the American crisis of homelessness? Late last year, Kevin Adler, the San Francisco based homeless activist and author of When We Walk By, came on the show to argue that we should all personally interact with…

Episode page

Episode 2028: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Thelton Henderson

10.04.2024 Duration: 55:20

Few Americans of any color or creed have had a legal career as historically rich or significant as Thelton Henderson. One of the earliest African-American graduates of Boult law school at UC Berkeley, Henderson was the f…

Episode page

Episode 2027: Marc Hauser on giving children second chances to overcome trauma and lead happy lives

09.04.2024 Duration: 38:57

Everyone deserves a second chance. The former Harvard professor of psychology Marc D Hauser has had a controversial academic career, having been investigated in a high profile case in 2010 by Harvard for supposedly falsi…

Episode page

Episode 2026: Dr Damon Tweedy on today's struggle to center psychiatry and mental healthcare into the mainstream of the medical community

09.04.2024 Duration: 38:14

According to Dr Damon Tweedy there a connection between the historic struggle for civil rights and today’s struggle for more mainstream mental healthcare. In 2016, Tweedy wrote Black Man in a White Coat, his bestselling…

Episode page

Episode 2025: On the eve of the eclipse, Christopher Cokinos illuminates the sun and moon's history and their future

07.04.2024 Duration: 32:26

Today, on the eve of the total lunar eclipse of the sun, the media is full of practical guides about how to tilt our heads at this once-in-a-lifetime celestial event. But what about the metaphysical questions about the e…

Episode page

Episode 2024: Sheryl Kaskowitz on how FDR and his New Deal team saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time

07.04.2024 Duration: 38:00

In this KEEN ON show, the music historian Sheryl Kaskowitz, author of A CHANCE TO HARMONIZE, narrates how FDR and his team of New Dealers saved America from the Great Depression - one folk song at a time. And she explain…

Episode page

Episode 2023: How the AI "bubble" isn't really a bubble and why Keith Teare might be emigrating to China

06.04.2024 Duration: 41:24

Is there such a thing as an economic bubble? Not according to That Was The Week author Keith Teare who argues that all bubbles reflect innovation and promise (even if you lose your shirt by investing in tulips or dotcoms…

Episode page

Episode 2022: Henk de Berg on the many similarities tying Donald Trump with Adolf Hitler

04.04.2024 Duration: 41:52

Is Trump really like Hitler? Last month, we did a show with the Hitler scholar, Peter Range, who argued that the Adolf Hitler of 1924 had much in common with the Donald Trump of 2024. And now we are back on the Trump-Hit…

Episode page

Episode 2021: Norman Ohler on Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age

03.04.2024 Duration: 41:36

In TRIPPED, his intriguing new history of drugs and postwar America, the German writer Norman Ohler makes LSD both a symbol and a metaphor for the history of the Cold War. Linking Nazi Germany, the CIA with what he calls…

Episode page

Episode 2020: KEEN ON AMERICA featuring Arlie Russell Hochschild

02.04.2024 Duration: 1:11:55

How to put America back together? Few people have thought more about this Humpty Dumpty style challenge than Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of the 2016 classic Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the Ame…

Episode page

Episode 2019: Ismar Volic explains how mathematics can save American democracy from the Trump/Biden gerontocratic duopoly

02.04.2024 Duration: 36:50

Like all immigrants who fled to the U.S. to escape civil war, Ismar Volic has a deep personal appreciation for American democracy. And Volic - a Bosnian refugee from the Yugoslavian civil war who is now director of the I…

Episode page

Episode 2018: Becca Rothfeld's celebration of mess, appetite and sexual desire

01.04.2024 Duration: 39:05

Becca Rothfeld’s much heralded new collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, challenges the American Puritan values of self-control and abstinence. Why have one meal when you can three, she asks,…

Episode page

Episode 2017: David Masciotra finds the pathologies of American Totalitarianism in Exurbia

31.03.2024 Duration: 39:20

According to David Masciotra, the real battleground for the future of American democracy lies in that no-man’s land between suburban and rural America - what he calls the “exurb”. It’s here, Masciotra argues in his new b…

Episode page

Episode 2016: Stefan Simchowitz on why he may be the most loathed man in the contemporary art world

31.03.2024 Duration: 41:34

The Daily Mail called him the “Sith Lord” of the art world, the New York Times annointed him as the art world’s Patron Satan”, while the Wall Street Journal described him as the dealer the art world “loves to hate”. Cali…

Episode page

Episode 2015: Is Apple about to pull out of the European Union and did Sam Bankman-Fried really deserve his 25 year jail sentence?

30.03.2024 Duration: 41:24

Is it really conceivable that Apple will withdraw its products and services from the entire European Union? What might sound absurd is actually conceivable, That Was the Week’s Keith Teare says, because of what he sees a…

Episode page