Episodes

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...

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...