A few months ago, I interviewed David Leonhardt (https://lithub.com/david-leonhardt-on-the-decline-of-the-american-dream/) , 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 that infamous date that I begun my…
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 (https://www.thatwastheweek.com/) summary of tech news, Keith Teare and Andrew review what appears to…
Yesterday, we featured a conversation (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2265-internet-hall-of-famer) with Mozilla co-founder and Internet Hall of Famer, Mitchell Baker, (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2265-internet-hall-of-famer) one of the great champions of an open web. Today’s guest, the prolific writer and journalist Jeff Jarvis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Jarvis) , is another leading defender of the internet. In his new book, The Web…
Few people deserve their place in the Internet Hall of Fame than Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker (https://www.internethalloffame.org/official-biography-mitchell-baker/) . Since co-founding the Mozilla Project in the late Nineties, Baker (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker) has been one of the most consistent and articulate champions of an open internet. So looking back over the last quarter…
Few people are better at demystifying the byzantine complexities of the American healthcare system than the former CEO of Kaiser Permanente, Robert Pearl (https://robertpearlmd.com/) , MD. So what does Pearl make of Trump’s nomination of RFK Jr for Secretary of Health and Human Services? Is this a thinly veiled excuse…
If Silicon Valley has an official matriarch, it might be the Palo Alto based educator and writer Esther Wojcicki. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Wojcicki) Popularly known as the “Godmother of Silicon Valley”, Wojcicki is the mother of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, 23andMe founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki and anthropologist and professor Janet Wojcicki.…
Steve Blank (https://steveblank.com/about/) 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 companies and the government innovate. And now, as a Stanford professor, he’s focused on…
If there’s a Marshall McLuhan for our digital age, then it might be the much published media theorist Douglas Rushoff (https://rushkoff.com/about/) . One of the founding evangelists of the digital revolution, Rushkoff then became one of the earliest critics of its increasingly market-driven and monopolistic forces. But now, as the…
As the presenter of the How to Fix Democracy (https://www.howtofixdemocracy.org/) 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 (https://www.brookings.edu/people/jonathan-rauch/) , the Brookings Institute senior fellow, turns the tables…
Few innovators have had a better front row seat on the internet revolution than Idealab (https://www.idealab.com/) chairman Bill Gross (https://www.idealab.com/bio/management/bill_gross.php) . Having founded Idealab in 1996, Gross has been a participant in every wave of digital innovation - from Web 1 and 2.0 to Web 3 and today’s AI revolution.…
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 (https://www.thatwastheweek.com/) publisher Keith Teare and Andrew discuss this week, the problem with this DOGE plan is that it appears much more interested in blowing…
If the 20th century was the American Century then, for Kishore Mahbubani, the controversial Singaporean writer and diplomat, the 21st century is the Asian Century. In his new memoir, Living the Asian Century, (https://www.amazon.com/Living-Asian-Century-Undiplomatic-Memoir/dp/1541703049) Mahbubani - Singapore’s longtime permanent representative at the United Nations - offers what he calls an…
To conclude our trilogy of interviews with prominent tech journalists to celebrate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the DLD Conference (https://www.dld-conference.com/) , today’s interview is with David Kirkpatrick (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kirkpatrick_(author)) , author of The Facebook Effect (https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Facebook-Effect/David-Kirkpatrick/9781439102121) and founder of Techonomy Media (https://worth.com/techonomy/) . In contrast with Steven Levy (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2254-steven-levy-on-what) and…
As a longtime journalist and the co-founder of Transparency International (https://www.transparency.org/en) , myboldb friend Frank Vogl (https://www.frankvogl.com/about) has always the nose for a good story. So it was particularly interesting to get Frank’s take on the incoming Trump administration, especially since he just wrote an interesting piece (https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-11-15/trump-harris-and-musk-how-money-did-and-didnt-affect-the-election) about how…
Last week, we featured an interview (https://keenon.substack.com/p/episode-2250-john-markoff-compares) with John Markoff, the legendary New York Times Silicon Valley correspondent. If Markoff has an East Coast equivalent, it’s Steven Levy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Levy) , the former Newsweek technology correspondent and author of best-selling books about hacking, crypto, Google and Facebook. Levy is now Wired’s…
