Keen On America

It’s the race that will change the world. In Supremacy , one of the FT’s six short-listed best business book of the year, Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson tells the story of what she sees as the key battle of our digital age between Sam Altman’s OpenAI and Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind. Altman and Hassabis, Olson argues, are fighting to dominate our new AI world and this war, she suggests, is as much on...

Might November 5 mark a new dawn for both Silicon Valley and America? Palo Alto based serial entrepreneur Keith Teare is ambivalent. In his That Was The Week tech newsletter for this week, Keith confesses that while he voted for Harris, he recognizes that the Trump victory probably benefits him economically. It’s almost as if Keith is embarrassed to admit this - which may be true more broadly abou...

The election is over and, is spite of Trump’s clear victory, America remains as divided as ever. So how to put the country together again? Juliana Tafur , the director of the Bridging Differences Program at UC Berkeley , has been giving this existential question much thought. What all Americans need, Tafur tells me, is the compassion, empathy and humility to understand the other side. But, as I as...

If there’s a disease that captures the toxic spirit of our times, it’s what the therapist, Vanessa Resier , in her new book, calls Narcissistic Abuse . Even the language of this disease - Gaslighting. Love bombing. Hoovering. Triangulating - has become part of the dictionary of life in the 2020’s. Narcissism and narcissists seem to be everywhere these days. In fact, as Resier told me (see full tra...

War is never pretty, but its privatized high tech future dominated by companies like Palintir and SpaceX is particularly chilling. In Unit X , their FT shortlisted best business book of the year, Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff ’s explain how the Pentagon and Silicon Valley are transforming the future of war with the creation of a new kind of military-digital complex. As Shah and Kirchhoff e...

I did this interview with John Driscoll , co-author of Pay the People! Why Fair Pay is Good for Business and Great for America , earlier this week, assuming that Harris would lose the election. And let’s be clear: she did lose an election that should have been eminently winnable. Driscoll spelt it out clearly in a powerful The Hill article last week about how raising the minimum wage is the key to...

Lauren Oyler’s “Revenge Plot”, a literary diary of her trip to this year’s Republican convention in Milwaukee, is the cover story of this month’s Harper’s . So when I talked today with the Berlin based writer , we discussed both the revengefulness of the Republican party and what she calls the “risk aversion” of the Democrats. While Oyler cares a lot about the outcome of today’s election, she is w...

The good news is that the interminable 2024 election is almost done. The bad news is that the 2028 Presidential campaign - sure to be described as the most important e lection in American history - will begin later this week. The best-selling writer Paul Greenberg is already imagining this election. “It is 2028 and a certain president wants a third term,” is the premise of Greenberg’s new satire,...

This was the week of Techcrunch Disrupt , one of San Francisco’s biggest technology events of the year. That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare attended Disrupt this year and, as he explained in our weekly round up of tech news, the event - which was attended by over 10,000 people - only confirmed to him that we are living in profoundly disruptive technology times. And yet, as Keith and I discuss,...

Yesterday, we featured a conversation with the British pro-market Conservative, Jon Moynihan, who is unambiguously in favor of economic growth. But Daniel Susskind , author of Growth: A History and a Reckoning , is less of an ideological warrior on behalf of unrestrained economic growth. In Growth , which is deservedly included on the Financial Times ’ short list of best business books for 2024, S...

Not everyone believes in the promise of economic growth. We’ve done KEEN ON shows in the past with “degrowth” advocates like Tim Jackson and Jason Hickle who argue that we need to get beyond the false promise of ever expanding wealth. Our guest today, however, is anything but a sceptic of capitalist economics. Jon Moynihan is a Conservative member of the House of Lords, a vocal supporter of BREXIT...

Maybe Halloween is a bit early this year. As Jason Pack , the host of the excellent Disorder podcast notes, a Trump victory on Tuesday would be a horror show. And while he’s much more optimistic than me about a Harris victory, Pack nonetheless views Trump as Exhibit A in his arguments about the global disorder now threatening peace and stability around the world. My own view is that America - alwa...

Can one age with grace and wisdom? Yes, according to Andrew J. Scott , author of the Longevity Imperative, one of the six books on the Financial Times ’ illustrious short list for best business books of the year . For Scott, aging in the 21st century requires a sharp shift in both personal and public policy attitudes to “old age”. No, we can’t live forever, he reminds us, but we do need to make th...

Last week, the Los Angeles Times book critic, Bethanne Patrick, came on the show to talk about the best new non-fiction books for the Fall. Today she is back to talk new novels by great fictional writers like Allan Hollinghurst, Rachel Kushner and Paula Hawkins. For those of you for whom American reality is currently too depressing, Patrick’s list of great new literature will be of particular sola...

There are few more passionate bibliophiles than those who have dedicated their lives to the publishing business. Take, for example, Stephen Riggio , the former CEO of Barnes & Noble who, as he confessed to me, has been hooked on books his whole life. Riggio’s latest book project is as the translator of Silician Avengers , the greatest Italian novel that you’ve probably never heard of. Written...

There are few men politically or intellectually smarter than President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary Robert McNamara . So how did LBJ and McNamara screw up America’s involvement in Vietnam so tragically? According to Peter Osnos , the author of LBJ and McNamara: The Vietnam Partnership Destined to Fail , it might have been because the two men were, in their own quite different ways, too...

As the longtime collaborator of the 2024 Nobel laureates John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, Terrence Sejnowski is one of America’s most distinguished AI scientists. In his new book, ChatGPT and the Future of AI: The Deep Language Revolution , Sejnowski addresses some of the central technical and philosophical issues of today’s large language model AI revolution. And in this wide-ranging conversati...

Not only is the AI revolution really happening, but its Large Language Model technology is becoming an independent actor in the world. Rather than the dark conclusion of a techno-pessimist, this is actually the view of one of the leading AI platforms. For this week’s episode of That Was The Week , we ran Keith Teare’s editorial summarizing this week’s tech news through Google’s Notebook LM. Rather...

From the introduction of North Korean troops into the war in Ukraine to a budding friendship with Elon Musk, Putin continues to make strange headlines. The real question is whether Putin actually knows what he’s doing or if he, as a wannabe 21st century Russian Tsar, is subject to the same seemingly inevitable historical forces as the Tsars of yesteryear. As both a seasoned Putin watcher and the a...

The Politifact founder, Duke University professor and Pulitzer Prize winning writer Bill Adair certainly isn’t the first person to raise the alarm about the problem of lying in American politics. But what’s really interesting about his new book, Beyond the Big Lie , is that Adair also has innovative solutions to fixing what he calls an “epidemic of political lying.” One idea, he explained to me, i...

In February 2011, I had the maven of mavens, Seth Godin , on the show to discuss the end of the industrial age. “So why are you so popular?” I asked the best-selling author, entrepreneur and teacher. “I notice things,” he explained. Luckily for all of us, nearly fourteen years later, Godin is still noticing things, especially the obvious stuff that most of us miss. The problem, as he notes in his...

New books about the impact of AI on the human condition are two a penny. But it’s rare to have an AI book by such a prominent author as Robert Skidelsky , a member of the British House of Lords and the author of the iconic three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes. In his new book Mindless , Skidelsky presents a sweeping history of our relationship with machines as way of explaining how we sli...

There are some seriously heavyweight new non-fiction books this Fall including memoirs by Al Pacino and Ketanji Brown Jackson, as well as an intriguing new historical analysis of the recently departed Queen Elizabeth and that inevitable pre-election Bob Woodward tome on the misbehavior of you-know-who. But for our resident book maven, Bethanne Patrick , the most intriguing non-fiction release of t...

Last October, we featured a conversation with Kian Vesteinsson, co-author of Freedom House ’s 2023 FREEDOM ON THE NET report, about the repressive power of artificial intelligence. A year later, Freedom House’s 2 024 FREEDOM ON THE NET report is entitled “The Struggle for Trust Online”. And as Allie Funk, one of its co-authors, explains, it’s a very mixed report on the state of online trust. In so...

The conventional way of thinking about digital technology revolutions is akin to thinking about how to build a house. First we build the foundation, then we add the frame and finally the cosmetic furnishing. In tech, this is known as the “stack” - and traditionally, each chapter in the narrative involves different companies and technologies. So in the case of the Internet boom, for example, first...