Keen On

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

The 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 States. Bryant has a new book about America out this week, THE FOREVER WAR, in which writes about the Republic’s “unending conflict with itself”. And so does Bryant think that America can ever come together, or is its 21st century fate to be always on the verge of civil war?During a career spanning almost thirty years, Nick Bryant came to be regarded as one of the BBC’s finest foreign correspondents. He has been posted in Washington, South Asia, Australia and New York, where he covered the Trump years. His writing has appe

“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 fateful final decade of the 20th century. Terry H. Anderson is Professor of History and Cornerstone Faculty Fellow at Texas A&M University, a Vietnam veteran, and has taught in Malaysia and Japan. He has received Fulbright awards to China, Indonesia, and was the Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College, Dublin. He is the author of numerous articles on the 1960s and the Vietnam War, co-author of A Flying Tiger's Diary, and author of The Sixties; United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War,

What 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. Lipstein is the author of two wickedly entertaining novels and the writer brings a sparkling surrealism to the normally horribly boring business of identifying the next economic crash.Andrew Lipstein is a writer based in Brooklyn. His debut novel Last Resort was published in 2022 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. His second novel The Vegan was published in July 2023, also by FSG and W&N. His third novel Something Rotten will be published in January 2025.Named as one of the "10

James Kirchick’s New York Times op-ed, “A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing”, has elicited much controversy. I have to admit that I’m not entirely convinced by Kirchick’s thesis, particularly on his position that a Jew these days has no choice but to be a Zionist, but it’s a provocative argument. While meritocracy has “been good for the Jews”, he explains, our new “woke” politics, especially surrounding Israel, has transformed Jews into “the new whites”. So Jewish writers are now being silenced by a censorious publishing industry if they express even the slightest ambivalence about Gaza. Is this the new McCarthyism or just another storm in the literati teacup?James Kirchick is a journalist and the New York Times-bestselling author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington and The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. A writer at large for Air Mail and a contributing writer for Tablet, he has reported from over 40 countries and his writing has appeared in many public

On yesterday’s show, Keith Teare mourned the scarcity of utopian thinking in Silicon Valley. But maybe Keith was looking on the wrong coast. Robert Wolcott, who teaches at the University of Chicago and is the chair of the World Innovation Network, recognizes the value of utopian idealism in his co-authored new book, Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-in-Time Transform Business, Society and Life. As he told me, the just-in-time tech revolution of generative AI, 3D printing, lab-grown meats, renewable energy, and virtual reality is going to change everything. But what Wolcott can’t predict, he confesses, is whether all this radically disruptive new tech will lead us to utopia or to dystopia. Robert C. Wolcott is Adjunct Professor of Innovation at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, and Adjunct Professor of Executive Education at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. From 2010 – 2019, he served as Clinical Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Kellogg. Wol

If you want to insult somebody in Silicon Valley, call them a “utopian”. It suggests a fantastical mind unable or unwilling to come to terms with reality. Utopians, it is assumed by self styled “realists”, are children. They’ve failed to grow up. But according to That Was The Week tech newsletter Keith Teare, the problem with today’s Silicon Valley is the scarcity rather than abundance of utopian thinking. Borrowing from an essay entitled Whither Utopia by the British technologist Rohit Krishnan, Teare argues that we need a new generation of Robert Owen style utopians for our age of AI, technological visionaries with the audacity to think big and dig deep to confront our most persistent problems. 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 wri

Heroism might be out of fashion, but that hasn’t deterred Jeremy S. Adams from offering what he calls Lessons in Liberty from the lives of ten extraordinary Americans. His list (yes to RBG, but no to JFK, FDR or MLK) will inevitably be controversial, but most of us don’t doubt that Americans need civic inspiration from their most distinguished citizens. And Adams, a much celebrated high school teacher in California’s Central Valley for the last quarter century, has the right combination of erudition, enthusiasm and patriotism to rekindle American innovation and moral excellence.Jeremy S. Adams was the Daughters of the American Revolution 2014 California Teacher of the Year and a finalist for the Carlston Family Foundation Outstanding Teachers of America Award. He is a social studies teacher at Bakersfield High School and was a longtime political science lecturer at California State University, Bakersfield.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best kno