Keen On

A hundred episodes ago, we had the author of Second Class, Batya Ungar-Sargon, on the show to talk specifically about how America’s elites have betrayed the country’s working men and women. So when I bumped into her at the recent Braver Angels convention in Wisconsin, we talked more broadly about her identity as an American and how she would like America to reinvent itself in the 21st century. What I admire about Ungar-Sargon is that she is hard to politically categorize, especially in her non Trumpian critique of America’s technocratic elites. Batya Ungar-Sargon is an American journalist and author. Ungar-Sargon is the opinion editor of Newsweek[and the former opinion editor of The Forward. She is the author of two books, the most recent of which is Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, which discusses the challenges faced by the American working class and the gap between them and the elite class.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amon

In the wake of Biden’s resignation and the coronation of Kamala Harris, it’s likely that this year’s election will be particularly divisive and vitriolic. We will hear endless hysteria about the election being the most important in American history, blah blah blah. But while I certainly don’t believe that American democracy is under existential threat, there clearly is a problem with the ugliness of political discourse. So what to do about it? Anne Snyder, editor-in-chief of Comment magazine and author of The Fabric of Character, has given a great deal of thought to strengthening what she calls “the middle ring” of morally formative institutions. And I caught up with Snyder at the recent Braver Angels convention in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to discuss how to work on a moral renewal of the United States. More easily said that done, of course, but Snyder’s voice is important in a country increasingly bereft of morally formative institutions.Anne Snyder is the editor-in-chief of Comment magazine and oversees our partn

As CEO of the AI start-up DoNotPay, Joshua Browder is one of Silicon Valley’s rising young entrepreneurs. Born in the UK and educated at Stanford, Browder is from a remarkable family of American innovators and activists. His great grandfather, Earl Browder, was head of the US Communist Party. His grandfather, Felix Browder, was one of America’s most brilliant mathematicians. And his father, Bill Browder, is an American investor, activist and high profile critic of Vladimir Putin. Given this unique lineage, I began my conversation with Josh Browder by asking him what being American meant to him.Joshua Browder is the CEO and Founder of DoNotPay.com, the world's first robot lawyer. DoNotPay has automated over 200 consumer rights processes for consumers, including cancelling subscriptions, lowering bills and obtaining refunds, among many others. To date, the company has won over 2m cases for its customers. Browder has been named as one of the “35 Innovators Under 35” by MIT Technology Review and one of the top le

Lauded by KEEN ON favorites like Dave Eggers & Dale Maharidge, J. Malcolm Garcia might be the Studs Terkel of contemporary American literature. Having worked as a social worker with San Francisco’s homeless community for 14 years, he then became an acclaimed journalist and winner of the Studs Terkel prize for writing about the American working classes. And now Garcia is publishing his first fiction, Out of the Rain, a novel about the people in a San Francisco homeless shelter. Garcia brings the wisdom of an experienced social worker and the eye of an prize winning writer to a problem which is the shame of wealthy American cities like San Francisco. J. Malcolm Garcia was born in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, IL. He attended Ripon College from 1975 to 1977. He transferred to Coe College in the fall of 1977 and graduated from Coe in May 1979. He wrote for The Coe Cosmos newspaper and was active in college theater. As a social worker, Garcia worked with homeless people in San Francisco’s Tenderloin distric

I was at the Liberalism for the 21st Century conference last week in DC where I bumped into an old friend and KEEN ON regular Jonathan Rauch. A Brookings Fellow and prolific author, Rauch is amongst America’s most thoughtful commentators on the contemporary crisis of liberalism and the rising popularity of “post-liberalism”. So, in the wake of Trump’s choice of JD Vance, a politician who has openly embraced the “post-liberal” moniker, I caught up with Rauch to get his take on a liberalism for the 21st century. Does John Stuart Mill’s classic 19th century theory of individual rights need to be reinvented for our networked age, I asked. And does the West need a revitalized international liberal consensus to confront not just China, but rogue states like Iran, North Korea and Russia.JONATHAN RAUCH, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is the author of eight books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and recipient of the 2

For all the “progress” in civil rights front over the last couple of generations, the wealth gap between white and black Americans hasn’t changed much. As Ebony Reed, co-author of best selling new book, Fifteen Cents on the Dollar, whites on average have 85% more wealth than blacks, a shockingly inegalitarian fact about a supposedly color blind democracy. Reed’s book is subtitled How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap and, as she hints, until American citizens address these dramatic economic inequalities between whites and blacks, the country will remained mired in its shameful history of injustice and discrimination.Ebony Reed is a seasoned journalist, editorial leader, and news strategist. She has extensive knowledge and experience in local, regional, and national journalism, business operations, communications, and diversity-related projects. Ebony joined The Marshall Project in January 2022 as its first-ever Chief Strategy Officer, leading strategy across the organization, managing communications,

In 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 online nihilists and argues that they have become prisoners of bullying gangsters like Richard Spencer, the openly neo-nazi activist. What Reeve reports about the 2020s is the next chapter in John Ganz’s argument about how the Clocks Broke in 1990’s America with the mainstreaming of neo-nazis like David Duke. Reeve’s story is particularly chilling because, for all her conversations with these young men, she doesn’t seem to have found an antidote to the Black Pill.Elle Reeve is a CNN correspondent whose work has won numerous

Trust 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 creative literary experiment were surprising, particularly in terms of the common assumption that we humans are more creative than machines.Laurent Dubreuil is Professor of French, Francophone and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. In his research, Laurent Dubreuil aims to explore the powers of literary and artistic thinking at the interface of social thought, the humanities and the sciences. Dubreuil's scholarship is broadly comparative and makes use of his reading knowledge in some ten languages. Professor Dubreuil

I’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 those supposedly invisible people, our new ontological masters, who, she believes, turn lies into reality. Given that the 2024 election will be determined by which candidates’ version of reality is more ontologically convincing to the American electorate, DiResta’s well-informed perspective is an essential guide to how liberalism can not only survive but also flourish in the 21st century. Renée DiResta was the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a cross-disciplinary program of research, teachin

Does 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 friendships and meaningful family relationships. But America’s “toxic” culture, with its focus on the supposedly masculine values of status and achievement, Way says, isn’t allowing its boys to be boys and its men to become real men.Niobe Way is Professor of Developmental Psychology at NYU, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH; pach.org), creative advisor of agapi, and the Principal Investigator on the Listening Project. She was the President of the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA)

Few 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 state-run elementary school, has spent the last quarter century talking with ordinary Chinese people about ordinary things. In his latest book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, Hessler offers intimate narrative about two generations of students in China’s heartland. In an America unthinkingly preoccupied with the “China threat”, Hessler provides an accurate window onto real life in this much misunderstood country. Peter Hessler is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 200

What 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 brilliantly uplifting ending. And it’s his most personally generous novel too. Caledonian Road took 10 years to finish and he acknowledges pouring the experience of his own life as a glamorous north London literati into its quasi-autobiographical narrative. Enjoy. Andrew O’Hagan, a Scottish novelist and essayist, is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a three-time nominee for the Booker Prize, the editor-at-large of the London Review of Books, and a contributor to The New Yorker. He lives in London.Bethanne P

Spy 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. This conversation with Silva is part one of our focus this week on the fetid underbelly of the international art scene. Tomorrow, we’ll feature a conversation with the Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan, author of Caledonian Road, about the moral corruption of not just the UK’s politics and its cultural economy, but also of art critics themselves. Daniel Silva is the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Unlikely Spy, The Mark of the Assassin, The Marching Season, The Kill Artist, The English Assassin, T

Earlier 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, while pattern breakers might sometimes have to be disagreeable, that doesn’t justify what he calls the “jerks “who all-too-often do a disservice to the business of building the future. Mike Maples is a co-founding Partner at Floodgate.  He has been on the Forbes Midas List eight times in the last decade and was also named a “Rising Star” by FORTUNE and profiled by Harvard Business School for his lifetime contributions to entrepreneurship. Before becoming a full-time investor, Mike was involved as a founder and operating exec

In 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 Kahn, the AI editor of Fortune. Kahn’s new book, Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future, is a extremely nuanced and well researched analysis of current & future realities of the AI revolution. And Kahn himself, in contrast with Keith or I, is neither an ideological techno-optimist or pessimist and, in my conversation with him, offers about as fair & balanced an interpretation of AI as you can get in our surreally manichaean times.Jeremy Kahn is Fortune's AI Editor, spearheading the publica

The 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 cryptocurrency, Kardas-Nelson reminds us, it’s poor people, particularly women, who ultimately get saddled with the techno-utopian bill. Mara Kardas-Nelson is an independent journalist focusing on international development and inequality. Her award-winning work has been supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation, Investigative Editors and Reporters, the Richard J. Margolis Award and others and has appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian, on NPR, and elsewhere. Mara has also spent years working

Last 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 will end in a similar kind of economic catastrophe to the Great Crash. 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 of “The Easy Net Book” and “Under Siege.” He writes regularly for TechCrunch and publishes the “That Was The Week” newsletter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine,

Memoirs 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 execs doing the dirty narrative work for dictators, tycoons and corrupt politicians. Let’s hope they pick up All the Worst Humans at the airport on their next trip to Saudi Arabia or Russia.Phil Elwood is a public relations operative. He was born in New York City, grew up in Idaho, and moved to Washington, DC at age twenty to intern for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He completed his undergraduate degree from Georgetown University, and his graduate studies at the London School of Economics before starting his career at a

In 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 when everyone else zags, has cheered up. In a new collection of essays, Futuromania, his first book in eight years, Reynolds is cautiously optimistic about electronic dreams, desiring machines, and tomorrow's AI revolution. AI isn’t going to destroy culture, Reynolds reassures us. It might even lead to a new renaissance of creativity, akin to punk or even the glory years of Sixties popular music. Simon Reynolds is the author of Energy Flash: A Journey through Rave Music and Dance Culture, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock, T

Our 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 and there’s an annoyingly apolitical utilitarianism to her “thought leadership”. But in an America riven by angry factionalism, I guess even a power-point solution is better than nothing. Diana M. Smith is a renowned thought leader who has led change efforts for 35 years in some of America's most iconic businesses and cutting-edge nonprofits. Her Leading Through Relationships (LTR) approach has been used around the world to covert debilitating intergroup conflict into a constructive force for change. Her newest book is Remak