Episodes

In association with our friends at Digital-Life-Design (DLD), Europe’s iconic annual tech conference which next January celebrates its twentieth anniversary, we are starting a series of conversations with DLD speakers looking...

The endless culture wars rage on. In his new book, The War Against the Past , the sociologist Frank Furedi believes that unless what he calls “the West” fights for its history, the “grievance entrepreneurs” will take over and...

As the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order , the Cambridge University historian Gary Gerstle was one of first people to recognize the collapse of neoliberalism. But today, the real question is not about the de...

Gary Shapiro is my Pivot Guy. As the longtime CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, the organization that puts on Las Vegas’ annual CES, Gary knows a thing or two about pivoting. And now he’s put his pivoting wisdom int...

It’s the race that will change the world. In Supremacy , one of the FT’s six short-listed best business book of the year, Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson tells the story of what she sees as the key battle of our digital age b...

Might November 5 mark a new dawn for both Silicon Valley and America? Palo Alto based serial entrepreneur Keith Teare is ambivalent. In his That Was The Week tech newsletter for this week, Keith confesses that while he voted ...

The election is over and, is spite of Trump’s clear victory, America remains as divided as ever. So how to put the country together again? Juliana Tafur , the director of the Bridging Differences Program at UC Berkeley , has ...

If there’s a disease that captures the toxic spirit of our times, it’s what the therapist, Vanessa Resier , in her new book, calls Narcissistic Abuse . Even the language of this disease - Gaslighting. Love bombing. Hoovering....

War is never pretty, but its privatized high tech future dominated by companies like Palintir and SpaceX is particularly chilling. In Unit X , their FT shortlisted best business book of the year, Raj M. Shah and Christopher K...

I did this interview with John Driscoll , co-author of Pay the People! Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America , earlier this week, assuming that Harris would lose the election. And let’s be clear: she did los...

Lauren Oyler’s “Revenge Plot”, a literary diary of her trip to this year’s Republican convention in Milwaukee, is the cover story of this month’s Harper’s . So when I talked today with the Berlin based writer , we discussed b...

The good news is that the interminable 2024 election is almost done. The bad news is that the 2028 Presidential campaign - sure to be described as the most important e lection in American history - will begin later this week....

This was the week of Techcrunch Disrupt , one of San Francisco’s biggest technology events of the year. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare attended Disrupt this year and, as he explained in our weekly round up of tech ne...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with the British pro-market Conservative, Jon Moynihan, who is unambiguously in favor of economic growth. But Daniel Susskind , author of Growth: A History and a Reckoning , is less of an...

Not everyone believes in the promise of economic growth. We’ve done KEEN ON shows in the past with “degrowth” advocates like Tim Jackson and Jason Hickle who argue that we need to get beyond the false promise of ever expandin...

Maybe Halloween is a bit early this year. As Jason Pack , the host of the excellent Disorder podcast notes, a Trump victory on Tuesday would be a horror show. And while he’s much more optimistic than me about a Harris victory...

Can one age with grace and wisdom? Yes, according to Andrew J. Scott , author of the Longevity Imperative, one of the six books on the Financial Times ’ illustrious short list for best business books of the year . For Scott, ...

Last week, the Los Angeles Times book critic, Bethanne Patrick, came on the show to talk about the best new non-fiction books for the Fall. Today she is back to talk new novels by great fictional writers like Allan Hollinghur...

There are few more passionate bibliophiles than those who have dedicated their lives to the publishing business. Take, for example, Stephen Riggio , the former CEO of Barnes & Noble who, as he confessed to me, has been hooked...

There are few men politically or intellectually smarter than President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary Robert McNamara . So how did LBJ and McNamara screw up America’s involvement in Vietnam so tragically? According ...

As the longtime collaborator of the 2024 Nobel laureates John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, Terrence Sejnowski is one of America’s most distinguished AI scientists. In his new book, ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Lang...

Not only is the AI revolution really happening, but its Large Language Model technology is becoming an independent actor in the world. Rather than the dark conclusion of a techno-pessimist, this is actually the view of one of...

From the introduction of North Korean troops into the war in Ukraine to a budding friendship with Elon Musk, Putin continues to make strange headlines. The real question is whether Putin actually knows what he’s doing or if h...

The Politifact founder, Duke University professor and Pulitzer Prize winning writer Bill Adair certainly isn’t the first person to raise the alarm about the problem of lying in American politics. But what’s really interesting...