Keen On America

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 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.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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, The Confessor, A Death in Vienna, Prince of Fire, The Messenger, The Secret Servant, Moscow Rules, The Defector, The Rembrandt Affair, Portrait of a Spy, The Fallen Angel, The English Girl, The Heist, and The English Spy. His books are published in more than thirty countries and are bestsellers around the world. He serves on the United States Holocaust Memorial Council and lives in Florida with his wife, CNN special correspondent Jamie Gangel, and their two children, Lily and Nicholas.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.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 executive at back-to-back startup IPOs, including Tivoli Systems (IPO TIVS, acquired by IBM) and Motive (IPO MOTV, acquired by Alcatel-Lucent.) Some of Mike’s investments include Twitter, Twitch.tv, Clover Health, Okta, Outreach, ngmoco, Chegg, Bazaarvoice, and Demandforce. Mike is known for coining the term “Thunder Lizards,” which is a metaphor derived from Godzilla that describes the tiny number of truly exceptional companies that are wildly disruptive capitalist mutations. Mike likes to think of himself as a hunter of the “atomic eggs” that beget these companies. Mike is the host of the Starting Greatness podcast, which shares startup lessons from the super performers.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.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 publication's coverage of artificial intelligence. He is the author of Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Superpowered Future (Simon & Schuster, July 2024), and he is the lead author of Fortune's Eye on AI newsletter. Before rejoining Fortune in 2019, he spent eight years at Bloomberg as a technology reporter and a senior writer for Bloomberg Markets magazine. His writing has also appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, The Boston Globe, and Portfolio. From 2007 to 2011, he reported from New Delhi, India. Prior to moving to India, he was the managing editor of the New Republic. He began his career at Fortune in New York, where he worked from 1997 to 2004. He holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics. He is currently based in London. Follow all of Jeremy's stories here.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.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 in global health. Originally from the U.S., she has also lived in Canada, South Africa and Sierra Leone.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.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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, 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.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 small PR firm. Over the last two decades, Elwood has worked for some of the top – and bottom – PR firms in Washington. He lives in DC.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.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellions and Rock and Roll (co-written with Joy Press), Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978 – 1984, and, most recently, Bring the Noise: Twenty Years of Hip Hop and Hip Rock.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.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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 Remaking the Space Between Us: How Citizens Can Work Together to Build a Better Future for All. Follow Remaking the Space on Substack.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.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

As the former Assistant Attorney General for Maryland, one would expect Debbie Hines to be a strong supporter of the American criminal justice system. But the Baltimore based veteran trial lawyer is unambiguously critical in her new memoir, GET OFF MY NECK, of what she sees as the structural racism of a “conveyer belt” American legal system which sends so many African-American people to jail. Hines’ critique should make particularly resonant viewing on July 4, the day that Americans celebrate their “freedom”. Happy Independence Day everyone!Former Baltimore prosecutor, Assistant Attorney General for the State of Maryland, and trial attorney Debbie Hines is an advocate for racial equity in the criminal justice system. She maintains a private law practice focused on civil and criminal litigation in Washington, DC. A leading voice in the discourse of criminal justice and race, Hines is often called on by media networks for legal commentary.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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe