Episodes

Yesterday, we featured a conversation between Andrew and That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare looking back at the major tech events of 2024. Today, Andrew and Keith look forward to the upcoming year for big tech...

So how will future historians think about 2024? In tech terms, 2024 will probably be remembered as the year when AI began to become ubiquitous. Although, as Keith Teare and Andrew discuss in this special 2024 edition of THAT ...

As Elon Musk continues to plot, with Trumpian glee, against the American Federal government, it is important to remind ourselves of the essential value of this state bureaucracy. As the founding president and CEO of the Washi...

The supposed “science” of eugenics is one of the most dangerous myths of the modern age. As Erik Peterson, author of The Shortest History of Eugenics explains, it not only was used by Nazi thugs to justify the Final Solution,...

There is a counter intuitive school of thought - represented by Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen - which suggests that America, for all its technological innovation, remains trapped by long term economic stagnatio...

The iconic DLD conference will be holding its twentieth annual event in Munich next month. Founded in January 2005, DLD has hosted many of the world’s leading tech thinkers and entrepreneurs from both Europe and the United St...

Yesterday, we ran Bethanne Patrick’s five best novels of 2024. Today, we feature her top non-fiction of the year including new books about reality television, Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife and Handel's Messiah. ‘Tis the seaso...

Pity the novelist. In a year which brought us the unbelievable non-fiction of a second Trump victory and the establishment of Luigi Mangione as an American folk hero, what can novelists do to stretch our imagination? But acco...

For all the hysteria about misinformation and disinformation, maybe we prefer ignorance. That’s the intriguing thesis of the illustrious Columbia University intellectual historian, Mark Lilla, in his new book, Ignorance is Bl...

It’s been coming a while. But now it’s official. Keith Teare has declared his love for Elon Musk. In this week’s THAT WAS THE WEEK newsletter, suitably entitled “ I’m With Musk ”, Keith argues that without Musk “I have no ide...

On May 24, 2022, a 18 year-old walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and shot to death 19 students and 2 teachers. In Uvalde’s Darkest Hour , the owner of the local Uvalde Leader-News , Craig Garnett tries to ma...

While many of us fear a future in which all our online interactions are with algorithms, the young Florida based programming prodigy, Michael Sayman , actually looks forward to this brave new world. In fact, earlier this year...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with Jonathan Taplin about the dearth of high quality contemporary music and movies. The music writer, David Rowell , agrees with Taplin, but goes one step further, suggesting that we no ...

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...