Keen On

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 in which it saturates every area of public and private life, shapes our psychological and spiritual outlooks, and underpins our moral and aesthetic values.Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sydney. He teaches and researchs in political theory, the history of political thought, modern and contemporary French philosophy, and human rights. He grew up in Vancouver, Canada, studied in the United States (PhD, The Johns Hopkins University, Humanities Center 2007), and now calls Syd

 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 international organizations like the United Nations, but also by new local political initiatives like citizen assemblies. He may well be right. But Hale’s long-term transnationalism is a hard political sell in our short-term nationalist age of Trump, Modi and Le Pen. Thomas Hale is a professor in public policy at the University of Oxford Blavatnik School of Government. Hale’s research explores how we can manage transnational problems effectively and fairly. He seeks to explain how political institutions evolve–or not–

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 future first in San Francisco”, Aschenbrenner explains. THAT WAS THE WEEK’s Keith Teare sees a similar future. However, I live in San Francisco and, rather than super intelligence, what I see here is excessive wealth, massive homelessness and the super stupidity of a liberal ruling class.Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the Univ

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 Man and today’s fractured global supply chain connected? Are they both examples of an an uncontrolled, globalized economic system empowered by free trade agreements like NAFTA?Peter S. Goodman is the Global Economics Correspondent for the New York Times. He was previously the NYT’s European economics correspondent, based in London, and the national economics correspondent, based in New York, where he played a leading role in the paper’s award-winning coverage of the Great Recession, including a series that was a Pulitzer

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 maintains a storied place in the publishing industry as a critic and as @TheBookMaven on Twitter, where she created the popular #FridayReads and regularly comments on books and literary ideas to over 200,000 followers. Her work appears frequently in the Los Angeles Times as well as in The Washington Post, NPR Books, and Literary Hub. She sits on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. She is the host of the Missing Pages podcast.Named as one of the "100 most con

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 kind of unsentimental, down-to-earth manner that will be inspiring to both environmentalists and psychologists. Banning Lyon is backpacking guide, instructor, and public speaker. He currently lives in Martinez, CA, with his wife and daughter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books abo

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 confessed, in a 1991 speech, to wanting to break the clock of social democracy. That clock is now smashed as is much else that was taken for granted in the early 1990’s about American politics.John Ganz writes the widely acclaimed Unpopular Front newsletter for Substack. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Artforum, the New Statesman, and other publications.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to pr

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 amateurism to the way in which television sports revenue has transformed many academic colleges into media companies. As Lawson notes, you couldn’t make up the story of Marty Blazer. And the biggest scandal of all is that the lie of amateur college sports continues to generate massive wealth to American universities and media companies. Guy Lawson is an investigative reporter who has looked closely at crime over the course of his career — and notes that the predatory ecosystem around NCAA sports is essentially an organized cr

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 visited him at the Bloomberg offices in New York City, this trip has made him cautiously optimistic about the health of American democracy.Frank Barry is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and member of the editorial board covering national affairs. He is the author of Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey Into the Heart of American Democracy.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the h

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, 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 - although there’s nothing particularly sweeping or panoramic about the awkward secrets that Vasiljuk digs up in this most most morally murky of geographies.Sasha Vasilyuk is a journalist and author of the debut novel Your Presence is Mandatory (Bloomsbury) about a Ukrainian Jewish WWII soldier and his family who reckon with his lifelong secrecy. The novel will also come out in Italy, France, Germany, Finland and Brazil in Fall 2024. Sasha grew up between Ukraine and Russia before immigrating to the U.S. at the age of 13. She h

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 deals look good on paper, but my sense is that the real AI game has barely begun and there will be many many unexpected twists and turns before any multi trillion dollar tech company can declare checkmate in the great game of owning the emerging AI economy. Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. Teare studied at the University of Kent and is the author

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, has the necessary globetrotting credentials to chart the rottenness of our beautiful game. One-nil to neo-liberalism. Own goal. Joseph O’Neill is the author of the novels The Dog, Netherland (which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Breezes, and This Is the Life. He has also written a family history, Blood-Dark Track. He lives in New York City and teaches at Bard College.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best k

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 happening big time in our increasingly automated 21st century.J. Albert Mann is a disability activist, an award-winning poet, and the author of eight published novels for children. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults, and is the Partner Liaison for the WNDB Internship Grant Committee. Her first work of nonfiction for teens—SHIFT HAPPENS: THE HISTORY OF LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES—was published June 4, 2024 with HarperCollins Children’s.Named as one of the "100 most connecte

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 world where both antisemites and philosemites equate hatred of Israel with hatred of Jews, it’s an important reminder that anti Zionism has a long heritage in the radical Jewish community.Shane Burley is a writer and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse (AK Press, 2021) and Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (AK Press, 2017), and the editor of the forthcoming anthology ¡No pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in

 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. Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as the department’s Doctoral Program Director. She is the author of several books, including The Spectatorship of Suffering and The Ironic Spectator, Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian CommunicationNamed as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addi

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. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.Data journalist Meredith Broussard is an associate professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University, research director at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Technology, and the author of several books, including “More Than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias in Tech” and “Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World.”Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's b

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 of the 20th with the beginning of the 21st century. On the one hand, they are a fitting conclusion to what now appears to be the illusion of Nineties prosperity and stability, on the other, the Seattle protests are an early example of a populist response to economic globalization which climaxed in the Occupy movement a decade later. DW Gibson is most recently the author of One Week To Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO Protests. His previous books include the awarding-winning The Edge Becomes the Center: An

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 innovate in the style of disruptive masters like Bezos or Jobs. Trust an evangelical Stanford prof to be in the business of transforming commercial innovation into religion. Not everyone, I suspect, will be quite as keen as Jeremy Utley in becoming personal assembly lines of their own creativity. Jeremy Utley is the Co-Founder of Stanford's Masters of Creativity at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He was formerly the Director of Executive Education at the Stanford d.school, where his blend of on-your-f

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 VCs, but if you want to survive in our entrepreneurial age, it might be smart to mimic the venture mindset.Alex Dang is a technology executive and digital strategy advisor with two decades of experience at companies like McKinsey, EY, and Amazon. As a Partner at McKinsey, he helped clients to design and build new digital businesses and develop innovation capabilities. As Amazon product leader he launched numerous new services and solutions for millions of customers across ecommerce, supply chain, and AI. He graduated fro

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 even holding San Francisco fundraisers for Trump. So would a Trump or Biden White House be better for Silicon Valley? Or is possible that in their mutual opposition to Chinese tech and their shared ambivalence about technological innovation that the two alter kockers aren’t quite as different as their supporters imagine?Keith Teare is the founder and CEO of SignalRank Corporation. Previously, he was executive chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd., a U.K.-based global investment company focused on startups at all