Keen On
2,195 episodes - English - Latest episode: 4 days ago - ★★★★ - 72 ratingsNobody asks sharper or more impertinent questions than Andrew Keen. In KEEN ON, Andrew cross-examines the world’s smartest people on politics, economics, history, the environment, and tech. If you want to make sense of our complex world, check out the daily questions and the answers on KEEN ON.
Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best-known technology and politics broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running show How To Fix Democracy and the author of four critically acclaimed books about the future, including the international bestselling CULT OF THE AMATEUR.
Keen On is free to listen to and will remain so. If you want to stay up-to-date on new episodes and support the show please subscribe to Andrew Keen’s Substack. Paid subscribers will soon be able to access exclusive content from our new series Keen On America.
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Episodes
episode 2032: Elle Reeve on how the darkest corners of the internet have poisoned society and captured American politics
July 17, 2024 14:14 - 43 minutes - 39.5 MBIn the wake of the failed Trump assassination attempt by what seems to be a conventionally lonely and bullied young man, more and more Americans are asking what has gone wrong. According to CNN correspondent Elle Reeve, online Americans - particularly lonely, alienated young men on networks like Discord and 4Chan - have swallowed the Black Pill of QAnon style conspiracy theories, neo-nazi racism & antisemitism, and a fascist celebration of male violence. Reeves interviews many of these onli...
Episode 2031: Laurent Dubreuil's creative answer to whether AI can think creatively
July 16, 2024 15:17 - 48 minutes - 44.1 MBTrust a French literary theorist to think creatively about whether AI can think creatively. Laurent Dubreuil is a professor of French literature at Cornell and the author of the intriguing Harper’s piece, Metal Machine Music, which asks both if AI and we humans can think creatively. Using ChatGPT, Dubreuil ran a test at Cornell asking a bot and humans to compete poems written in English and then invited people to guess which were authored by AI and which by humans. The results of this creat...
Episode 2030: Renee DiResta on our Invisible Rulers Who Turn Lies into Reality
July 15, 2024 15:25 - 40 minutes - 37 MBI’m just back from the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference in DC which featured a lively discussion about digital misinformation between KEEN ON regular Jonathan Rauch and Renee DiResta, the author of Invisible Rulers. As the former manager of the Stanford Internet Observatory, DiResta has been on the front lines of the disinformation wars and understands the chillingly close relationship between making something trend on social media and making it appear “true”. Her work focuses on ...
Episode 2029: Niobe Way on America's Crisis of Masculinity
July 14, 2024 15:52 - 48 minutes - 44.2 MBDoes America have problem with its boys and men? Yes, says author of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves, a previous guest on KEEN ON. Today’s guest, Niobe Way, a NYU professor of developmental psychology, give a more nuanced answer. The author of the Rebels With a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves and our Culture, Way argues that the crisis is one of a culture of “masculinity”. It’s our stereotyped “boy” culture which particularly troubles Way. What boys and men want, she argues, are close frien...
Episode 2028: Peter Hessler on what life is really like in Xi's China
July 13, 2024 15:05 - 47 minutes - 43.1 MBFew Americans know contemporary China better than Peter Hessler. The author of four prize winning books about life in China as well as the former China correspondent of the New Yorker, Hessler originally came to China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996 and has been writing about the day-to-day life of the country ever since. In contrast with the geopolitical crowd with their bellicose nonsense about the totalitarian evils of Xi’s China, Hessler, whose twin daughters were educated in a local ...
Episode 2027: Andrew O'Hagan goes up the Caledonian Road in search of Truth, Justice and a Man in Blue
July 12, 2024 10:15 - 1 hour - 60.2 MBWhat a treat. LA Times book critic Bethanne Patrick and I got the opportunity to talk today with the great Andrew O’Hagan, author of Caledonian Road, his new blockbuster novel about the state of contemporary Britain. It’s a fabulous read and O’Hagan was no less fab, generously dedicating an hour to our questions. As O’Hagan explained, for all his horror at the Dickensian squalor of contemporary Britain, Caledonian Road remains his most defiantly optimistic novel, particularly in its brillian...
Episode 2026: Daniel Silva on why the Criminal Rich Collect the Masterpieces of Van Gogh, Vermeer and Picasso
July 11, 2024 12:43 - 36 minutes - 33.2 MBSpy novelists often make excellent moralists and the American writer Daniel Silva, author of the Gabriel Allon series of best-selling thrillers, is a particularly sharp critic of contemporary morals. His new Allon thriller, A Death in Cornwall, focuses on money laundering, murder and mayhem in the art world. The novel is set in the contemporary United Kingdom of the (once) ruling Tory party where international criminals use expensive art to feed their vanity and launder their ill gotten cash...
Episode 2025: Mike Maples on how to Break Patterns and Invent the Future
July 10, 2024 13:22 - 59 minutes - 54.6 MBEarlier this week, I visited the offices of Floodgate Partners in Menlo Park to talk with its co-founding partner Mike Maples. As an early investor in Twitter, Twitch.tv and many other successful start-ups, Maples is one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capitalists. He is, to borrow the title of his new book, an investor in “Pattern Breakers” - entrepreneurs whose radical innovations challenge preexisting conventions and, quite literally, change the future. But, as he explained, wh...
Episode 2024: Jeremy Kahn's Survival Guide for our AI Future
July 09, 2024 17:03 - 43 minutes - 40 MBIn episode 2022, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and I violently disagreed about the current AI boom. Keith, the eternal techno-optimist, thinks AI is about to radically change everything; as the perennial techno-pessimist, I argued that much of the current Wall St AI insanity is a 21st version of 17th century Dutch tulip mania. But if we were to split the baby and come up with a more carefully reasoned & reasonable analysis of the current AI boom, we would probably morph into Jeremy...
Episode 2023: Mara Kardas-Nelson Reveals the Seductive Promise of Microfinance
July 08, 2024 17:24 - 41 minutes - 38.4 MBThe seductive promise of microfinance might have conveniently died in the Western media, but Muhammad Yunis’ alluring economic idea has actually wreaked unintentional havoc around the world. Mara Kardas-Nelson’s important new book, We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky, reveals the damage done by microfinance loans in developing world countries like Sierra Leone and Bangladesh because their predatory interest rates. As too often with supposedly democratizing “innovations” like microfinance or c...
Episode 2022: Is the AI Tech Boom of the 2020s a Repeat of the Wall Street Mania of the Roaring 1920s?
July 07, 2024 17:59 - 38 minutes - 35.5 MBLast week, That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and I discussed whether Silicon Valley has an AI Bubble Problem. And we return to the same subject today, comparing today’s AI driven Wall Street techno-mania with the automotive centric Wall Street madness of the roaring 1920s. As usual, Keith is the optimistic, arguing that stock market booms are always founded on some new technological reality. And, as always, I’m the pessimist, fearing that the current Big Tech AI driven Wall Street boom...
Episode 2021: PR exec Phil Elwood confesses to building a "counter-narrative" for some of the worst humans on the planet
July 06, 2024 14:19 - 34 minutes - 31.4 MBMemoirs are usually morally uplifting reads with happy endings. But Phil Elwood’s new memoir, All the Worst Humans, is a confession of how Elwood, as a top DC based PR operative, created what he calls a “counter-narrative” for Assad, Gaddafi and the Qataris. Elwood isn’t proud about any of this. As he confessed to me, he still sleeps poorly and often wakes up at 3.00 am regretting the morally poor choices he’s made in his life. The sad thing is that there are still many other highly paid PR ...
Episode 2020: Simon Reynolds on reasons to be cheerful about the AI cultural revolution
July 05, 2024 17:16 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBIn 2011, Simon Reynolds is one of the world’s most prolific music journalists, came on KEEN ON to explain why the Internet has been bad for both musical artists and fans. Back then it took a brave man like Reynolds to argue against the supposedly cornucopian cultural potential of the Web 2 revolution. Today, in contrast, most mainstream cultural critics see the internet, and particularly the AI revolution, as a catastrophe for artists and fans. And yet Reynolds, often the cultural zigger wh...
Episode 2019: Diane McLain Smith offers a way to reunite America
July 04, 2024 23:27 - 38 minutes - 35.4 MBOur second July 4 interview features Diane McLain Smith, author of Remaking the Space Between Us: How Citizens Can Work Together to Build a Better Future For All. The problem with America, McLain Smith believes, is that “we the people have become the problem” with our endlessly divisive tribalism. But just as we are the problem, we can also be the solution if we join her citizen network and work together to remake the space between us. McLain Smith’s background is as a business consultant an...
Episode 2018: Former Prosecutor Debbie Hines on Black Lives, White Justice and her Quest for Reform
July 04, 2024 14:10 - 49 minutes - 45 MBAs the former Assistant Attorney General for Maryland, one would expect Debbie Hines to be a strong supporter of the American criminal justice system. But the Baltimore based veteran trial lawyer is unambiguously critical in her new memoir, GET OFF MY NECK, of what she sees as the structural racism of a “conveyer belt” American legal system which sends so many African-American people to jail. Hines’ critique should make particularly resonant viewing on July 4, the day that Americans celebra...
Episode 2017: Celeste Marcus Exposes the Generational Crisis of American Liberalism
July 03, 2024 18:38 - 35 minutes - 32.7 MBLast week’s horror show debate woke up a lot of progressive Americans. For Celeste Marcus, managing editor of Liberties Quarterly, Biden’s dismal performance was akin to the shock of the January 6th insurrection. In contrast with Jan 6, however, Marcus is calling for a political insurrection amongst progressives that will trigger a generational shift in power. Both American democracy and liberalism are in generational crisis, Marcus argues in her latest online Liberties piece, Our Liberalism...
Episode 2016: Daniel Porterfield defends the personal and civic value of a college education
July 02, 2024 22:38 - 40 minutes - 37.5 MBOver the last couple of years we’ve had multiple guests questioning the economic and moral value of a college education. But Daniel R. Porterfield, the Aspen Institute CEO and former President of Franklin and Marshall College, strongly disagrees. In his new book, MINDSET MATTERS, Porterfield argues that in our age of rapid technological change, the college experience is particularly valuable, especially to young people from less privileged backgrounds. At a time when it’s become fashionable ...
Episode 2015: Dmitri Alperovitch on how America can beat China in the Second Cold War
July 02, 2024 14:58 - 35 minutes - 32.9 MBAmongst the most bizarro thing about last week’s truly bizarre Presidential debate was how much Biden and Trump were in violent agreement on China. Trump certainly has won the ideological battle about the supposedly existential China threat and the two decrepit old men both celebrate American embroilment in a second Cold War. This is great news , of course, for the America’s sprawling military industrial complex with its unquenchable thirst for rearmament and military engagement overseas. I’...
Episode 2014: M. Steven Fish on why Trump's dominance-style politics will win in November (didn't anyone tell the Democrats?)
July 01, 2024 15:25 - 40 minutes - 36.7 MBIn the wake of Biden’s pathetically dismal performance last week, it’s worth remembering that some progressive thinkers have been warning for months about this catastrophe. Back in May, the New York Times ran an op-ed by UC Berkeley political science professor M. Steven Fish entitled “Trump Knows Dominance Wins, Someone Tell Democrats”. Even though The Times functions as the Pravda of the Democratic Party, obviously nobody did tell the Dems, which explains why the dominantly dishonest Trump ...
Episode 2013: Does Silicon Valley have an AI Bubble Problem? Duh....
June 30, 2024 23:43 - 34 minutes - 31.2 MBDoes Silicon Valley have an AI bubble problem? That Was the Week’s Keith Teare, usually the most bullish of tech bulls, acknowledges that Silicon Valley has an overvaluation issue with AI startups. But I wonder if the problem with AI goes deeper than the frothiness of its startup valuations. What, if anything, is AI search good for? asks a Vox piece that Keith links to this week. That could be rephrased. What, if anything, is AI good for? might be a better question amidst the ridiculous valu...
Episode 2012: The Woman Who Mistook A Stranger For Her Husband
June 30, 2024 15:50 - 36 minutes - 33.5 MBImagine accosting a stranger in a grocery store because you mistook him to be your husband? That was the fate of the Washington Post science reporter, Sadie Dingfelder, who suffers from the bizarre condition of faceblindness. She explores this condition in DO I KNOW YOU?, her own journey into the strange science of sight, memory, and imagination. Dingfelder’s embrace of her own neurodiversity is both intriguing and delightful. This is a strongly recommended interview, one of my favorite of ...
Episode 2011: Tracy O'Neill's Return to South Korea to Discover her Birth Mother
June 29, 2024 19:29 - 37 minutes - 34.5 MBIf you liked Davy Chou’s excellent 2022 movie, Return to Seoul, then Tracy O’Neill’s new memoir, Woman of Interest, might be for you. Both movie and book are about an a female adoptee’s return to South Korea in search of their mysterious birth mother. Chou’s movie features a heartbreakingly lost Ji-Min Park wandering through life in the West and finally stumbling emptily onto the foggy truth of her Korean origins. O’Neill’s non-fictional quest for her mother, in contrast, contains more agenc...
Episode 2010: John Ganz on his German Jewish ghosts of resistance and exile
June 28, 2024 12:40 - 20 minutes - 18.4 MBThe New York City based writer John Ganz appeared on episode 2099 talking about how American cracked up in the Nineties with the rise of neo-Nazis like David Duke. When it comes to national crack-ups, however, nothing much competes with Nazi Germany in the Thirties - and Ganz, as a grandson of German Jewish refugees from Nazism, recently travelled to Cologne to search for his family’s bookstore. This trip, which Ganz describes in a Harper’s piece, The Dead Admonish, is anything but catharti...
Episode 2109: Madhumita Murgia on why we are living in the dark shadow of AI
June 27, 2024 11:24 - 35 minutes - 32.2 MBWhatever one thinks of the creative potential of AI, it’s definitely been great for metaphor makers. Yesterday, we had Shannon Vallor explaining why AI is a mirror of our social and political values. Today, Madhumita Murgia, the Financial Times’ Artificial Intelligence editor and author of CODE DEPENDENT, suggests that we are all living in the shadow of the economic perils and inequities AI. The metaphors of shadows and mirrors return us, of course, to Plato’s cave and Socrates’ invention of...
Episode 2108: Shannon Vallor on how to Reclaim our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
June 26, 2024 15:43 - 46 minutes - 42.3 MBAccording to Shannon Vallor, a self-styled AI “ethicist”, artificial intelligence is a mirror. When we interact with the latest algorithms from OpenAI or Anthropic, she says, we are actually observing our social and political values, prejudices and ideals. This all-too-human quality of AI makes it less of an existential threat to humanity and more of a reflection both of society’s flaws and a promise of its self-improvement. AI, like our own reflection in the mirror, is both everything and n...
Episode 2107: Matt Beane on How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines
June 25, 2024 14:46 - 37 minutes - 34.2 MBWe 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 K...
Episode 2106: Julie Satow remembers a time when Women ran Fifth Avenue
June 24, 2024 15:21 - 36 minutes - 33.4 MBLittle 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-e...
Episode 2105: Alexandre Lefebvre explains why Liberalism is a Way of Life
June 23, 2024 14:17 - 47 minutes - 43.9 MBThere 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 ...
Episode 2104: Thomas Hale on how to be a Transnationalist in an age of Nation-States
June 22, 2024 17:39 - 33 minutes - 30.5 MBIt’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 j...
Episode 2103: Keith Teare explains why Silicon Valley is celebrating like it's 2027
June 21, 2024 23:57 - 34 minutes - 31.7 MBAre 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 th...
Episode 2102: Peter S. Goodman on How the World Ran Out of Everything
June 21, 2024 16:16 - 41 minutes - 38.3 MBPeter 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 Davo...
Episode 2101: Bethanne Patrick's six new books to reach on the porch or beach this June
June 20, 2024 15:38 - 35 minutes - 32.2 MBBethanne 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 ma...
Episode 2100: Banning Lyon's remarkable memoir of trauma, healing and the outdoors
June 19, 2024 16:19 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MBBack 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 t...
Episode 2099: John Ganz on how America cracked up in the early 1990s
June 18, 2024 18:12 - 31 minutes - 29 MBIt’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 w...
Episode 2098: Guy Lawson gets us inside the biggest scandal in the history of college sports
June 17, 2024 14:53 - 35 minutes - 32.1 MBIn 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 am...
Episode 2097: Keen On America featuring Francis S. Barry
June 17, 2024 04:29 - 27 minutes - 25.2 MBAs 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 ...
Episode 2096: Sasha Vasilyuk uncovers Ukraine secretive history by digging into the Soviet past
June 16, 2024 15:08 - 39 minutes - 35.9 MBIn 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, Your 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 - al...
Episode 2095: Keith Teare on why the AI game in Silicon Valley might already be all over
June 15, 2024 20:29 - 35 minutes - 32.5 MBBig 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...
Episode 2094: Joseph O'Neill on football as the ugly game of neo-colonial exploitation
June 14, 2024 20:35 - 51 minutes - 46.9 MBThe 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...
Episode 2093: J. Albert Mann offers a Young Person's Guide to the History of American Labor
June 14, 2024 11:26 - 40 minutes - 37.3 MBHow 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 ha...
Episode 2092: Shane Burley on why Anti Zionism isn't Antisemitism
June 13, 2024 11:55 - 46 minutes - 42.2 MBIn 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 ...
Episode 2091: Lilie Chouliaraki on the Weaponization of Victimhood
June 12, 2024 19:16 - 38 minutes - 35.1 MBOne 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...
Episode 2090: Meredith Broussard on the digital "revolution" of artificial unintelligence and inequality
June 11, 2024 13:41 - 37 minutes - 34.7 MBSixteen 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 inequalit...
Episode 2089: D.W. Gibson celebrates the 25th Anniversary of Seattle's 1999 World Trade Organization protests
June 10, 2024 15:44 - 44 minutes - 40.4 MBThe 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...
Episode 2088: Jeremy Utley on how to facilitate epiphanies
June 09, 2024 21:45 - 41 minutes - 37.8 MBWe 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 radicall...
Episode 2087: Alex Dang and Ilya Strebulaev on How to Think Like a Venture Capitalist
June 08, 2024 18:35 - 46 minutes - 42.7 MBVenture 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 abo...
Episode 2086: Keith Teare on Silicon Valley's Trump-Biden dilemma
June 07, 2024 12:07 - 30 minutes - 27.6 MBThat 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 ar...
Episode 2085: KEEN ON America featuring Nick Bryant
June 06, 2024 19:42 - 43 minutes - 40.2 MBThe 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 ...
Episode 2084: Terry H. Anderson on why the 1990's still matter so much
June 05, 2024 12:18 - 46 minutes - 42.5 MB“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 fatef...
Episode 2083: Andrew Lipstein on the $15 Trillion 401(k) Doomsday that might trigger a global economic catastrophe
June 04, 2024 17:06 - 36 minutes - 33.6 MBWhat goes up, comes down. As the Dow continues to hover at 40,000, something is inevitably going to burst the Wall Street’s current irrational exuberance. According to Andrew Lipstein, the biggest danger to today’s stock market boom is the $15 trillion in global passive investing funds managed by companies like Vanguard. In this month’s Harpers cover story, WHAT GOES UP, the Brooklyn based Lipstein talks to leading Cassandras warning us of the apocalyptic dangers of passive investing. Lipste...