Keen On America

EPISODE 1642: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Scott Creney, co-author of THE STORY OF THE B-52s, about one of the most subversive and iconic American pop music historyScott Creney is author of the work of creative nonfiction Dear Al-Qaeda: Letters to the World’s Most Notorious Terror Organization (Black Ocean). They have written about music, books, and film for Clash Music, The Fanzine, Collapse Board, and Ablaze!, among others, and contributed six entries to 101 Albums You Should Die Before You Hear. Scott was also the bass player for the Athens band Tunabunny.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 about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1641: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Michael Wooldridge, author of A BRIEF HISTORY OF AI, about the vast quantities of online data, especially social media content, that have trained ChatGPT to mimic human languageMichael John Wooldridge (born 26 August 1966) is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford. His main research interests is in multi-agent systems, and in particular, in the computational theory aspects of rational action in systems composed of multiple self-interested agents.His work is characterised by the use of techniques from computational logic, game theory, and social choice theoryNamed 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 about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1640: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to the New York Times and Atlantic columnist Peter Wehner about why the 2024 election may present America with its greatest moral moment since the Civil WarPeter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum.His books include The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era, which he co-wrote with Michael J. Gerson, and Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism. He was formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Wehner is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and his work also appears in publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and National Affairs.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 about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1639: In this KEEN ON episode, Andrew talks to the prolific futurist and tech critic, Douglas Rushkoff, about the false promises of social media and our need to engage with what he calls "reality reality"Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He serves as a  research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He is a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen.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 about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1638: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Tobias Rose-Stockwell, author of OUTRAGE MACHINE, about the checkered history of social mediaTobias Rose-Stockwell is a writer, designer, technologist and media researcher whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, WIRED, NPR, the BBC, and on CNN. He is the author of the upcoming book Outrage Machine, which forcefully unpacks social media's influence on news, discourse and democracy. His research has been cited in the adoption of major interventions to reduce toxicity and polarization within tech platforms. He previously ran humanitarian projects in Southeast Asia focused on civil-war reconstruction efforts. He spent six years in Cambodia rebuilding communities overcome by violent conflict, work for which he was honored with an award from the 14th Dalai Lama. He lives in New York City.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 about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1637: In this regular weekly show with THAT WAS THE WEEK newsletter author Keith Teare, Keith describes a near apocalypse for Silicon Valley billion dollar valued start-ups ("unicorns") and the impact of this meltdown on the broader innovation economyKeith Teare is a Founder and CEO at SignalRank Corporation. Previously he was Executive Chairman at Accelerated Digital Ventures Ltd - A UK based global investment company focused on startups at all stages. He was also previously founder at the Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the original incubator for TechCrunch and since 2011has invested, accelerated or incubated many Silicon valley startups including InFarm, Miles, Quixey; M.dot (sold to GoDaddy); chat.center; Loop Surveys; DownTown and Sunshine. Teare has a track record as a serial entrepreneur with big ideas and has achieved significant returns for investors.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 about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1636: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Brooke Kroeger, author of UNDAUNTED, about how fearless women like Ida Wells, Martha Gellhorn and Joan Didion changed American journalismBrooke Kroeger is a journalist, professor emerita at NYU, and the author of six books, the latest of which is Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism, published by A.A. Knopf in May 2023. It explores how women have fared in American journalism’s most competitive and highly valued bastions, the ones men have dominated in the 180 years since mass media began. Her earlier books are Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (1994, an NPR Best Books of the Year); Fannie: The Talent for Success of Writer Fannie Hurst (1998, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Books of the Year); Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are (2003, a Post-Dispatch Best Books of the Year); Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (2012, finalist, Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award of the American Journalism Historians Association), and The Suffragents: How Women Used Men to Get the Vote (Gold Medal in US History in the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards and a finalist for the 2018 Sally and Morris Lasky Prize of the Center for Political History.)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 about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1634: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Aryeh Lightstone, author of LET MY PEOPLE KNOW, about what he believes was the "incredible story of Middle East peace" reflected by the 2020 deal between Israel and Bahrain and the United Arab EmiratesARYEH LIGHTSTONE served as the Senior Advisor to U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman from 2017 to 2021. He played a critical role in advancing bilateral U.S.-Israel relations with a focus on 5G implementation, infrastructure expansion, and economic development. Further, he was instrumental in facilitating the opening of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem as well as its successful merger with the Jerusalem Consulate. Also, he was on the Peace to Prosperity team, led the inaugural Abraham Accord Business Summit, directed the Abraham Fund, and was the point person in the Middle East for the actualization of the Abraham Accords. Prior to joining the State Department in 2017, Lightstone worked as an educator, rabbi, management professional, entrepreneur, and issue advocate. He is a Denver native and now splits his time between Israel and Colorado with his wife and four very adorable children.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 about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1634: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Bethanne Patrick, prolific on social media as @TheBookMaven, about her memories of Twitter's glory years and what she calls the "dopamine hangover" after 2012Bethanne 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 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 about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

EPISODE 1633: In this KEEN ON show, Andrew talks to Luke Nichter, author of THE YEAR THAT BROKE POLITICS, about 1968, the last year American politics got broken by economic, political and cultural upheavalLuke Nichter holds the H. Cavanaugh Endowed Chair in Presidential Studies at Chapman University. His area of specialty is the Cold War, the modern presidency, and U.S. political and diplomatic history, with a focus on the "long 1960s" from John F. Kennedy through Watergate. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan's Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Rothermere American Institute, and a Hansard Research Scholar at the London School of Economics. He is a New York Times bestselling author or editor of eight books, including, most recently, The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 (Yale University Press). It is the first rigorously researched historical account of the most controversial election in modern U.S. history to have cooperation from all four major sides – Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace. Luke interviewed approximately 85 family members and former staffers, in addition to extensive archival research and access to new evidence that dramatically changes our understanding of the election. This work was awarded a nNational Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Luke's last book was The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War (Yale University Press). It was the first full biography of Lodge – whose public career spanned from the 1930s to the 1970s – based on extensive multilingual archival research. This work was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Grant. He is also the author of Richard Nixon and Europe: The Reshaping of the Postwar Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press), which was based on multilingual archival research in six countries, and is now at work on a book tentatively titled LBJ: The White House Years of Lyndon Johnson. He is a noted expert on the secret White House recordings of Franklin D. Roosevelt through Richard Nixon, and wrote an authoritative history of their taping systems commissioned by the White House Historical Association.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 about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.