Episodes

A few months ago, I interviewed David Leonhardt , author of Ours Was the Shining Future, about the death of the American dream which, he argued, can be dated from on 5 June 1968 when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. And it’s ...

On the week that the price of Bitcoin rose above $100,000 and Trump appointed David Sacks as his “AI and Crypto Czar”, has Silicon Valley finally succeeded in conquering Washington DC? In today’s That Was The Week summary of ...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Mozilla co-founder and Internet Hall of Famer, Mitchell Baker, one of the great champions of an open web. Today’s guest, the prolific writer and journalist Jeff Jarvis , is another l...

Few people deserve their place in the Internet Hall of Fame than Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker . Since co-founding the Mozilla Project in the late Nineties, Baker has been one of the most consistent and articulate champio...

Few people are better at demystifying the byzantine complexities of the American healthcare system than the former CEO of Kaiser Permanente, Robert Pearl , MD. So what does Pearl make of Trump’s nomination of RFK Jr for Secre...

If Silicon Valley has an official matriarch, it might be the Palo Alto based educator and writer Esther Wojcicki. Popularly known as the “Godmother of Silicon Valley”, Wojcicki is the mother of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojci...

Steve Blank is one of Silicon Valley’s most persistent hackers. As the pioneer of the Lean Startup movement, Blank has changed how startups are built, how entrepreneurship is taught, how science is commercialized, and how com...

If there’s a Marshall McLuhan for our digital age, then it might be the much published media theorist Douglas Rushoff . One of the founding evangelists of the digital revolution, Rushkoff then became one of the earliest criti...

As the presenter of the How to Fix Democracy show, which will be going into its seventh series next year, Andrew Keen has given much thought to the health of American democracy. In this KEEN ON episode, Jonathan Rauch , the B...

Few innovators have had a better front row seat on the internet revolution than Idealab chairman Bill Gross . Having founded Idealab in 1996, Gross has been a participant in every wave of digital innovation - from Web 1 and 2...

This week’s tech news is all about Elon Musk and Vivak Ramaswamy’s DOGE ambitions to supposedly reinvent the Federal government. But as That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and Andrew discuss this week, the problem with th...

If the 20th century was the American Century then, for Kishore Mahbubani, the controversial Singaporean writer and diplomat, the 21st century is the Asian Century. In his new memoir, Living the Asian Century, Mahbubani - Sing...

To conclude our trilogy of interviews with prominent tech journalists to celebrate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the DLD Conference , today’s interview is with David Kirkpatrick , author of The Facebook Effect and fou...

As a longtime journalist and the co-founder of Transparency International , myboldb friend Frank Vogl has always the nose for a good story. So it was particularly interesting to get Frank’s take on the incoming Trump administ...

Last week, we featured an interview with John Markoff, the legendary New York Times Silicon Valley correspondent. If Markoff has an East Coast equivalent, it’s Steven Levy , the former Newsweek technology correspondent and au...

In this KEEN ON Andrew Keen special, guest host David Masciotra interviews Andrew about his controversial book Cult of the Amateur . While David generously describes it as prescient, Andrew focuses more on what the 2007 book...

Every digital tech revolution over the last forty years has promised decentralization but each one only seems to have recentralized power. So will the AI revolution be different? Can AI be the tipping point for fundamentally ...

How to beat Trump? In his new book, Turf War , the architect Steven Robinson shows us how it can be done. In the late 1980s, a band of New York civic groups set out to stop Donald Trump from building his self-styled “masterpi...

Former New York Times reporter John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for almost a half century. In December 1993 the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wrote one of the earliest articles about the World Wide Web, ...

Few Americans have been as consistently critical of Donald Trump’s morality than the New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner . How to prevent the worst happening , Wehner thus wrote, in his final Atlantic column be...

It’s hard to know if F.H. Buckley is keen on Donald Trump. On the one hand, Buckley and his wife wrote a number of speeches for Trump in his 2016 campaign; on the other, Buckley publicly wrote Donald Trump off in 2022, arguin...

So how can The Dude and The Boss save America? According to the cultural critic, David Masciotra , Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski and Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen, represent the antithesis of Donald Trumps’s illiberal authoritar...

So was November 5 a moral catastrophe signaling the death knell of American liberalism or just another election in the turbulent history of American democracy. According to the Brookings scholar Jonathan Rauch , the Trump-Har...

“There is one winner regarding the most significant story this week,” Keith Teare writes in his That Was The Week technology newsletter. But, as he explains, there are, in fact, two winners: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the...