Episodes

We are focusing on the impact of AI this week with interviews featuring Shannon Vallor, Matt Beane and Madhumita Murgia. First up Beane , who teaches Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara and has a new book out about how to save human ability in an age of intelligent machines. The book is called The Skill Code , but as Matt Beane explains, it’s really about a human code that will allow us to maintain our value in an age of intelligent machines. Matt has also been kind enough to provide KEEN ...

Little has changed in America more dramatically over the last half century than the retail fashion industry. There was a time, Julie Satow tells us the mid 20th century, when the high fashion department stores on New York City’s Fifth Avenue were not only glamorous, but were actually run by women. This is the story of her new book, When Women Ran Fifth Avenue , a wistful, yet sociologically penetrating view of of the golden age of American department stores. What does the death of the high-end f...

There are those who believe that fighting for democracy is more important than defending the rather nebulous concept of “liberalism”. And then there are those, like the political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre, who, in their eponymous new book, see liberalism as a way of life which makes us both better and happier people. For Lefebvre, liberalism is the ideology of our times, as ubiquitous as religion once was. Rather than apologizing for the L word, Lefebvre argues, we should celebrate the way ...

It’s an odd world. Many of our most pressing political problems, particularly global warming, are long term, and yet we are still confined to the here-and-now of national politics to determine policy. This is the issue that Thomas Hale, an Oxford Professor of Public Policy, addresses in his interesting new book, LONG PROBLEMS: Climate Change and the Challenge of Governing across Time . For the self-styled “transnationalist” Hale, long problems like climate change are best addressed not just by...

Are we on the brink of technological “super intelligence”, machines that will be able to think and reason with infinitely more power than humans? According to Leopold Aschenbrenner , the author of Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, a technological roadmap for the next ten years, super intelligence will inevitably arrive by 2027. Much of Silicon Valley agrees with Aschenbrenner, a young German futurist who looks as if he just walked out of a Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice . “You can see the ...

Peter S. Goodman , The New York Times’ Global Economics correspondent, is one of America’s most innovative and outspoken journalists. He was on KEEN ON a couple of years ago talking about how the billionaire class - aka: Davos Man - has devoured the world. And now Goodman is back on the show to talk about his latest book, How the World Ran Out of Everything - what he describes as a “cosmically bewildering” journey inside the broken global supply chain. So how, I asked him, are omnivorous Davos M...

Bethanne Patrick , the world’s best read woman and KEEN ON’s official literary maven, has six recommended new books to read this June. Three non-fiction works and three novels, they extend from books all about women, to the dangers of jelly fish to a gay Hungarian in the Lavender Scare Hollywood of the Fifties. So something for everyone and Bethanne even suggests whether each book should be read on the porch or the porch. No excuses. Y’all have something to read in June. Bethanne Patrick maintai...

Back in August 2021, we did a show featuring the British psychologist Lucy Jones , about how nature maintains our sanity. Jones’ thesis is born out in the astonishing story of Banning Lyon , who was institutionalized in a Texan psychiatric hospital as a teenager and freed by his discovery of the outdoors. Lyon’s new memoir The Chair and the Valley is excellent - as, I hope, is this interview. In contrast with many other contemporary writers on trauma and healing, Banning tells his story in the ...

It’s becoming more and more self-evident that the Nineties matter . John Ganz’s important new book, When the Clock Broke , focuses on how, in the early 1990’s, the seemingly crackpot ideas of what at the time appeared to be con men like David Duke and Pat Buchanan, infiltrated what remained Ronald Reagan’s optimistic, globalist Republican party. The seeds of Trumpian reactionary populism, Ganz believes, were sown by characters like Duke, Buchanan and the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard who...

In episode 2065 , we discussed the Malaysian contractor, Leonard Glenn Francis (aka: Fat Leonard) about the biggest recent scandal in the US navy. But, as Guy Lawson, author of Hot Dog Money explains in this episode, Louis Martin “Marty” Blazer gives Fat Leonard a good run for his money (so to speak) in Blazer’s participation and later expose of the profoundly corrupt nature of American college sports. The US college sports “economy”, Lawson explains, is a huge deception - from the lie of amateu...

As America braces itself for the upcoming Presidential election, a growing army of coastal commentators are agonizing over the health of the country’s democracy. In contrast with many of these desk bound pundits, the Bloomberg editorial director Frank Barry bought an RV and drove from New York City to San Francisco on the backroads of old Lincoln Highway. His new book, Back Roads and Better Angels , is an account of this journey into the heart of American democracy and, as Barry told me when I v...

In the wake of a “ major Summit ” on Ukraine which neither the Russians nor the Chinese attended, the war remains as murky and inconclusive as ever. And it’s this murkiness and inconclusiveness that the San Francisco based writer Sasha Vasiljuk explores in her new novel, Y our Presence is Mandatory. But Vasiljuk’s semi-autobiographical, semi-fictional canvas focuses on more than just Putin’s invasions of Ukraine. It’s a sweeping panorama of the last seventy-five years of Ukrainian history - alth...

Big Tech is getting even bigger. This was the week that NVIDIA joined Microsoft and Apple as a three trillion dollar company. And it’s also the week that, according to That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare, in which OpenAI’s deals with Microsoft and Apple might have locked up the AI economy. CHECKMATE! Keith thus entitles this week’s newsletter, suggesting a Big Tech economy in which an isolated Google will be pitted against the OpenAI-Microsoft-Apple axis. I ‘m less convinced. Sure, these dea...

The Euros start today and Copa America next week. So expect a slew of garbage about soccer/football as the “beautiful game” or, even more ludicrously, the “people’s game”. But as Joseph O’Neill shows in his timely new novel, Godwin , today’s trillion dollar football industry is a mirror of our globalized, neo-colonial economy. Think of Godwin as a chirpy Heart of Darkness for our celebrity age of Messi, Ronaldo and Mbappe. And O’Neill, an Turkish-Irish Manchester United fan based in Brooklyn, h...

How to write a history of labor in the United States for young people? According to the award-winning author J. Albert Mann , a history of labor written for children shouldn’t be childish. Indeed, her new book, Shift Happens: The History of Labor in the United States , is anything but childish in its very grown-up focus on exploitation and injustice. And given that our young adults are on the frontlines of an AI revolution that is already radically transforming the value of labor, shift is happe...

In episode 2082, James Kirchick suggested that being Jewish and being a Zionist should be of all of one thing. Shane Burley reverses this. The co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Antisemitism , the Portland based, religiously orthodox Burley suggests that being Jewish might actually mean questioning not just Netanyahu, but the very intellectual foundations of the Zionist project. This division between nationalist and internationalist Jews isn’t new, of course. But in a wor...

One fashionable English language word I’d like to blow up is “weaponization”. Another is “victimhood”. So I couldn’t resist talking the London School of Eonomics professor Lilie Chouliaraki about Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood , her new book attempting to right how we abuse these two maligned words. Feeling wronged, Chouliaraki explains, is really all about establishing power. No wonder, then, Trump’s obsession with being victimized and his ludicrous sensitivity about being wronged . L...

Sixteen months feels like sixteen centuries in the history of digital technology. Last year, the NYU data scientist Meredith Broussard came on episode 1360 to explain how technology is reinforcing inequality and what we can do about it. Today, seventeen hundred episodes later, Broussard explained to me when she came back on KEEN ON, both nothing and everything has changed. AI is dramatically disrupting the world, she notes, and yet it also continues to spread stupidity and compound inequality. P...

The Nineties are back in fashion. Last week on KEEN ON, Terry Anderson explained why the Nineties still matter . Next week, we are featuring a conversation with John Ganz, the author of When the Calock Broke , his interpretation of how America “cracked up” in the early Nineties. Today we feature a conversation with D.W. Gibson, author of the oral history of Seattle’s World Trade Organization protests, One Week to Change the World . As Gibson explains, the June 1999 WTO protests bridge the end o...

We are having a Stanford self-improvement sort of weekend. Yesterday, KEEN ON featured a conversation with two Stanford profs on how to acquire a venture capital mindset. Today, Jeremy Utley, the director of education at Stanford’s Institute of Design, teaches us how to facilitate our own epiphanies. In his new co-authored book, IdeaFlow: The Only Business Metric that Matters , Utley - who boasts of having been “facilitating epiphanies for over 20 years ” - promises to teach us how to radically ...

Venture capitalists aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. For leftists, they are Trump supporting vultures, feasting on the rotting carcass of neo-liberalism. But for Alex Dang and Ilya Strebulaev, co-authors of THE VENTURE MINDSET , the top venture capitalists offer a lesson to all of us in how to make smarter bets and achieve extraordinary growth in both our businesses and our lives. Dang and Strebulaev who - surprise, surprise, both teach at Stanford - may have a point. There’s nothing cuddly about V...

That Was The Week author and Silicon Valley based entrepreneur Keith Teare isn’t a great fan of either Trump or Biden. But as he notes in this week’s newsletter , while Joe Biden is no dream candidate, Donald Trump is a “big no no” nightmare. But not everyone in Silicon Valley shares Keith’s distaste for Trump. Sequoia Capital partner, Doug Leone, for example, tweeted this week that he would be voting for Donald Trump in November. And other tech investors like former PayPal COO David Sachs are e...

The KEEN ON America series is supposed to feature conversations with prominent Americans about the post, present and future of their almost 250 year-old Republic. And while Nick Bryant was born in the UK and now lives in Australia, I think he nonetheless qualifies as an honorary American. The BBC’s America correspondent during the Bush and Clinton presidencies, Bryant has been compared with the iconic 20th century British journalist Alistair Cooke for his ability to make sense of the United Stat...

“The past is never dead”, William Faulkner quipped, “it’s not even past.” Angry white men, a disruptive internet, political gridlock in DC, right-wing terrorism, lying Presidents…. Yes, the 2020’s began in the 1990’s with Ruby Ridge, Newt Gingrich, the Oklahoma bombing, Bill and Monica, Russ Limbaugh, and the dotcom madness. Indeed, according to Terry H. Anderson’s intriguing new book WHY THE NINETIES STILL MATTER , we can trace most *contemporary American dysfunctionality back to that fateful f...