Episodes

This is the last and amongst the liveliest of my interviews at Munich’s DLD Conference this year. An old friend who has appeared on KEEN ON several times before, Andrew McAfee is a MIT professor who co-wrote the 2014 classic ...

Most of the breathless talk in snowy Munich at this year’s DLD conference , of course, was about the generative AI revolution. But amongst all the hype and glitz about our brave new AI future, Richard Socher stands out. Born...

If anyone should be anointed “aunt” or “court jEsther” of the tech industry, it’s long time journalist, investor and philanthropist Esther Dyson . When I caught up with Dyson at DLD, she reflected on her 40+ year career in te...

With Trump’s inauguration today, are we really about experience a new “golden age” in America? No. Not at least according to the best selling writer Robert D. Kaplan , author of Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis ( out n...

Amidst all the doom and gloom of the current zeitgeist, Harvard University literature professor & DLD 2025 speaker Martin Puchner remains cautiously optimistic about our high tech future. Reflecting on cultural and technologi...

In this week’s That Was The Week round up of tech news, Andrew and Keith Teare discuss the need for progressives to become what Keith calls “yes people” on technology. At the moment, he argues, their reactionary “no” on tech ...

The Stanford Business School professor Michal Kosinski has spent his career warning about the corrosive impact of technology, and particularly social media, on democratic institutions and individual freedom. The Polish born a...

Few people have a better perch to observe technological change than Kenneth Cukier , deputy executive editor at The Economist and co-author of the best-selling book Big Data . I caught up with Cukier at DLD this year to get h...

One person I didn’t expect to see at DLD is the feted Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran . Not exactly a regular on the tech circuit, Temelkuran is best known as a critic of the Erdogan regime and author of the influential 2019 bo...

We are back in Munich at the DLD Conference , Europe’s foremost tech gathering. DLD is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and, to mark this occasion, we spoke to some of the leading DLD’ers about the tumultuous last t...

Published on the eve of you-know-who’s second inauguration, Kurt Gray ’s new book Outraged focuses on why Americans are so divided and how they might find common ground despite their political differences. Gray argues that bo...

A new book by the acclaimed neuroscientist Lisa Genova is always a big event. Genova, best known for her best-selling 2007 novel, Still Alice , has a new novel out this week, More or Less Maddy , which follows a 20-year-old ...

The world is shutting its borders to immigrants. Yesterday , we featured a conversation with Laurie Trautman who dates the Covid crisis of 2020 as the tragic moment when the entire world closed its doors to immigrants. But ev...

From MAGA and the UK’s Reform Party to the German AfD, aggressively nationalist borders controls are back in political fashion. According to Laurie Trautman , an expert on immigration at Western Washington University, we can ...

Nicholas Carr has been amongst the most persistently prescient observers of the digital revolution over the last quarter century. Take, for example, his 2012 essay "The Arc of Innovation Bends Towards Decadence," which, in m...

Is there really a data-driven science that enables us to predict and change human behavior? Mind Masters author and Columbia Business School professor Sandra Matz certainly is a believer. But I wonder whether Matz’s observati...

Everything old is new again in international politics. According to Jill Kastner , co-author of A Measure Short of War: A Brief History of Great Power Subversion , today's international tensions over Ukraine, Taiwan and Green...

What’s wrong with the U.S. economy? Not much according to Wall Street. But according to Adam Chandler , author of 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life , there’s a fundamental contradiction at th...

This is a good one. Former mobster Louis Ferrante discusses the second volume of his history of the American mafia, Borgata: Clash of Titans , covering the critical period between 1960 and 1985 when the mob was at its height ...

Addiction specialist and former meth addict Dr. Adi Jaffe challenges everything we take for granted about addiction and recovery. Opening our KEEN ON conversation with his own dramatic story of a SWAT team arrest that turned ...

Paula Whyman 's journey from bug-obsessed city kid to mountaintop conservationist is an inspiring environmental tale. Now the owner of a 200-acre Virginia mountaintop, she's traded her childhood fascination with cicadas for a...

It’s not just the MAGA crowd who are concerned with government waste and inefficiency. In a convincing Wall Street Journal op-ed, best-selling tech author Larry Downes questions the need for a thousand Social Security offices...

Remember that time in 1977 when Jesse Jackson debated KKK grand wizard David Duke on national tv? As David Masciotra reminds us , it was one of those now forgotten moments from the recent past that can help bring some clarity...

Avid reader, global investor and German Marshall Fund chair Chris Schroeder , who devoured around 150 books in 2024, engages in a spirited New Year discussion about literacy, geopolitics, and the power of deep reading. Despit...