Episodes

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 is handing MAGA conservatives and their Silicon Valley backers a free pass to win the debate about the future. While Keith and Andrew aren’t always on the same page about the need to regulate Big Tech, they are in complete agreement that progressives - both inside and outsid...

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 academic gained notoriety for his research at Cambridge University on how social media data could predict intimate personal traits. His work became particularly relevant during the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016, leading to significant legal consequences for Facebook, in...

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 his take on the last twenty years of technology disruption. He began by remembering how, in 2005, tech giants like Google and Facebook were viewed simply as successful startups, not as the foundational platforms they would become. Cukier explores the emergence of Big Data, wh...

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 book How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. In our conversation at DLD, Temelkuran argued that the world is experiencing a profound transformation comparable to the Industrial Revolution, where neoliberalism is eroding both democracy and basic human...

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 twenty years. First up is the Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger , author of The World After Capital , who - in spite of all the problems of the last two decades - remains defiantly optimistic about the future. He emphasizes the need to move beyond "industrial age th...

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 both sides of the political spectrum are driven by a desire to protect themselves, their families, and their vision of America from perceived threats. He suggests that humans evolved not just as predators but as prey, making us naturally attuned to threats and vulnerability. T...

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 aspiring stand-up comedian who is diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The protagonist, Maddy, grows up in affluent suburban Connecticut with a father who disappeared when she was young, leaving mysterious boats stranded on their front lawn – a hint at his own undiagnosed bipola...

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 even in the internationalist EU, border policy is tightening. According to Washington Post ’s Isaac Stanley-Becker , author of the new book Europe Without Borders: A History , borders have emerged as a critical geopolitical flashpoint within the EU. Against this backdrop, Stan...

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 date much of this back to 2020 and the Covid-19 tragedy. The co-author of When the World Closed its Doors , Trautman sees the global Covid crisis as the unintentional trigger for much of what is being taken for granted around the world now in terms of limiting or even elimin...

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 many ways, foresaw our current technological and social predicament. Carr's thesis was that technological innovation increasingly moves toward fulfilling self-indulgent desires rather than addressing fundamental human needs, following a pattern similar to Maslow's hierarchy o...

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 observations about psychological targeting and data analysis through large language models represent anything fundamentally new or original. I’m also not convinced of her glib take on mental health applications. In contrast with Matz, I fear that AI-driven mental health monitoring co...

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 Greenland mark a return to historical normalcy after a brief period of global American unipolarity. Kastner explains that subversion—defined as hostile or unwanted action on a rival's territory—has been a constant tool of statecraft throughout history. She presents subversion as...

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 the heart of American capitalism. While the U.S. leads in AI investment ($50 billion of $56 billion globally in 2020) and Wall Street performance, Chandler notes, there's significant labor unrest at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. He argues that while the American economy...

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 of power. The era began with the Kennedys' rise to power, where Joe Kennedy paradoxically used mob connections to help JFK win the 1960 election, particularly in Illinois and West Virginia. However, Robert Kennedy's aggressive pursuit of organized crime as Attorney General c...

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 his young life around, Jaffe goes on to deliver some startling insights: nearly half of all Americans are hooked on something, whether it's drugs, porn, social media, or the latest "miracle" weight loss medications. The author of Unhooked: How to Free Yourself from Addiction...

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 an ambitious ecological restoration project. Her new book Bad Naturalist chronicles this transformation. Despite the self-deprecating title, Whyman is dead serious about her mission. She's working to restore native plants and wildlife to her Virginia mountaintop, fighting inv...

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 around the country. Downes argues that the federal government's resistance to digital transformation has resulted in staggeringly low user satisfaction rates - just 12% for federal government services. Despite more than 85% of federal workers being based outside Washington,...

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 to today’s American politics. In particular, Masciotra argues, the 1977 debate underlines the idiocy of Kamala Harris’ refusal to go on Joe Rogan show. As Masciotra explains, this primetime tv debate in which Jackson crushes Duke shows why progressives like Harris should al...

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. Despite hand-wringing about America's reading decline, Schroeder remains optimistic about young entrepreneurs' intellectual curiosity, particularly in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Discussing his favorite 2024 reads, including Annie Jacobsen's chilling nuclea...

While most of us can at least hope for a happy new year in 2025, the same can’t be true for the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank. That, at least, is the view of Michael Scott-Baumann , author of The Shortest History of Israel and Palestine . Given the ineffectiveness of the United Nations and the unwillingness of the United States to rethink its alliance with Israel, Scott-Baumann suggests, nothing is likely to change this year. So while there will be lots of talk of an Abraham Accords 2.0...

Marshall Poe runs the New Books Network , a podcasting platform incorporating over 25,000 individual podcasts from thousands of podcasters and many millions of downloads. 2024, he acknowledges, was a bad year for podcasting because Apple changed their metrics so that the audience numbers for most podcasts fell precipitously overnight. And 2025, he suggests, probably isn’g going to be much better with winner-take-all podcasters like Joe Rogan hogging most of the audience and profits. How could th...

Gary Marcus is amongst the world’s leading skeptics on the AI revolution. So it’s worth taking note when Marcus admits that “of course we are getting to AGI eventually”. No, he says, artificial general intelligence (AGI) won’t take place in 2027 or perhaps even 2050. But it will happen, he confidently predicts, by 2100. So that only underlines Marcus’ argument, made in his acclaimed 2024 book Taming Silicon Valley , of the desperate need to regulate AI before it regulates us. And it also context...

Is it entirely coincidental that some of the leading figures in the MAGA movement - including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and David Sacks - all grew up in Apartheid South Africa? Not according to Simon Kuper who raised the alarm about “Musk, Thiel and the shadow of apartheid South Africa” in a bracing September Financial Times column . But this is a reactionary shadow, Kuper warns, not just haunting the United States but most of the world. Kuper’s faith in globalization, he acknowledges, seems to be ...

Our job is to make Trump fail. That, at least, is the view of the writer Joseph O’Neill , whose essays in the New York Review of Books offer not just a powerful critique of Trump but also of the contemporary Democratic party which he describes as a “cancerous thing”. There’s a desperate need, O’Neill believes, for the Democrats to reinvent themselves as an populist alternative to Trumpism. And that means, he says, addressing the problem of angry young men who, he says, have become “cannon fodd...