Radio Live - Podcasts - Keen On America - John A. List: Why Quitting Good Ideas Is Often a Winning Strategy

John A. List: Why Quitting Good Ideas Is Often a Winning Strategy

Author: Andrew Keen May 4, 2022 Duration: 35:45

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 John A. List, author of The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale.

John A. List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. He has served on the Council of Economic Advisers and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Kenneth Galbraith Award. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, NPR, Slate, NBC, Bloomberg, and The Washington Post. List has authored over 250 peer-reviewed journal articles, several academic books, and, with Uri Gneezy, the international bestseller The Why Axis.

More episodes

Nobel Laureate Peter Agre: Why Scientists Must succeed Where Politicians Fail

02.11.2025 Duration: 27:37

A Nobel laureate on why we should sometimes trust scientists, and not politicians, to fix the futurePeter Agre won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003, but he’s not interested in playing God. Or even know-it-all. “When…

Episode page

Why Our Fear of Technology Is Nothing New—And Why That Should Give Us Hope: From Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT

01.11.2025 Duration: 38:42

Why our panic about AI is nothing new—and why history suggests we have far more creative agency over our technological future than either Silicon Valley’s determinists or the neo-Luddites would have you believe.Who isn’t…

Episode page

Not Even God Can Judge Tupac Shakur: How a White Suburban Sportswriter Found the Humanity and Tragedy Behind Hip-Hop’s Most Misunderstood Star

31.10.2025 Duration: 36:58

WHY LISTEN? Because Jeff Pearlman strips away the myth to reveal the real Tupac Shakur—a brilliant, wounded, and fiercely human artist whose story still speaks to America’s struggles with family, race, trauma, and truth.…

Episode page

Fighting to Tell the Truth: Why every Film about War is an Anti-War Film

30.10.2025 Duration: 39:48

After almost two decades in limbo, Michael Pack’s once-rejected Iraq War film finds its moment — a reminder that even the most supposedly “patriotic” war stories reveal the tragic cost of battle.Seventeen years after PBS…

Episode page

Between the River and the Sea: American Jews and the Soiling of the Zionist Dream

29.10.2025 Duration: 53:54

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether we can still talk about Israel, but whether we can afford not to. Silence, Daniel Sokatch warns, is complicity — and in both America and Israel, there’s already too much of it.Four…

Episode page

The Vinci Code: How AI is Turning Everyone into James Bond

28.10.2025 Duration: 47:05

As AI radically democratizes the world, we’re all about to become James Bond — or so says longtime spook watcher (and player) Anthony Vinci. In his new book, The Fourth Intelligence Revolution,, Vinci argues that we must…

Episode page

Huawei vs Ericsson: How Huawei Turned Sweden's "Neutral" Tech Advantage Into a Cold War Liability

27.10.2025 Duration: 41:17

Huawei matters, not just because it’s the world’s largest telecommunications company, but because it reveals so much about contemporary Chinese economics and politics. In House of Huawei, just shortlisted for the FT busi…

Episode page

How Smart is the MAGA Intelligentsia? The Professors, Philosophers, and Trolls who Transformed Rage into a Winning Political Ideology

26.10.2025 Duration: 43:26

So how smart is the MAGA intelligentsia? According to Laura K. Field — a longtime observer of the American right and author of Furious Minds — the making of the new right has less to do with original intelligence than wi…

Episode page

This Is Not a Browser—Did René Magritte Really Predict the End of the Web Age?

26.10.2025 Duration: 40:34

The Belgian surrealist René Magritte was a smart artist, but could the 20th century futurist really have predicted the end of the Worldwide Web age? Not exactly, of course. But according to That Was The Week publisher, K…

Episode page

The Panic of the Intellectuals: From Ezra Pound to the Trumpagies of Today

25.10.2025 Duration: 48:24

American intellectuals always seem to believe they are living through the end times. From the fascist poet Ezra Pound in the 1930s to the historian of fascism Timothy Snyder today, they flee America in despair. In Seeker…

Episode page

How to Choke Your Enemy: Why America Turned the World Economy into its Weapon of Global Domination

24.10.2025 Duration: 51:29

How should America choke enemies like Iran, Russia and China? Not on the battlefield—according to Edward Fishman, that’s yesterday’s game. Today, Fishman argues in Chokepoint, America has turned the world economy into it…

Episode page

All Religions Are Absurd Because We Are Absurd: How the Internet is Creating the First New Form of Religious Community in 250,000 Years

23.10.2025 Duration: 55:25

Twenty years ago, the religious scholar Reza Aslan wrote his first book, There is No god but God, about the origins, evolution and future of Islam. It was a huge hit which lead to many other bestselling books on Islam an…

Episode page

Why the Real Road to Serfdom Runs Through Silicon Valley: Tim Wu on the Extractive Economics of Platform Capitalism

22.10.2025 Duration: 39:44

Last time the anti-monopoly crusader Tim Wu appeared on the show, he was warning broadly about the road to serfdom. But in his new book, The Age of Extraction, Wu gets much more specific. The real road to serfdom, he war…

Episode page

Are We Still Fighting the Hundred Years War? Why Joan of Arc, Agincourt, and the Black Death Aren't Quite Dead

22.10.2025 Duration: 44:40

A couple of years ago, I asked the great military historian Richard Overy if World War Two had ended yet. Overy answered inconclusively, suggesting that wars were never really over. And such depressing wisdom is shared b…

Episode page

From Cancelled Students to Coddled Autocrats: The Crisis of Free Speech in America

21.10.2025 Duration: 34:19

Two years ago, free speech champion Greg Lukianoff came on the show to express his concerns about conservative students getting cancelled on college campuses. Today, he’s terrified of the President of the United States.…

Episode page