That Was the Week in Tech: Why Substack Is a Bust, How Apple Can't Do AI, and Why China Is Thrashing the U.S. in Clean Tech Innovation

Not everyone, especially mainstream Democrats, are going to agree with Jessica Pishko on this one. In Liberties, she argues that it was the Democrats who “built Trump’s army”. It was Joe Biden, she claims, who built up t…

There’s a story today about how a VR headset can make us more empathetic toward nature. But according to the Pacific Northwest based author and biologist Thor Hanson, no digital technology can ever replicate nature. Inst…

Here are the 4 KEEN ON AMERICA take-aways in our conversation about the dysfunctional American immigration system with Felipe Torres Medina1) Background & Immigration Journey* Felipe Torres Medina is a comic writer for "…

We are back to AI (actually it never left us). In this THAT WAS THE WEEK tech show, Keith and Andrew talk about how AI is now enabling anyone - even non-coders - to code. "I was able to do something without having the sk…

So what’s the most revolutionary invention in the history of the American Republic? The internet, maybe? Or the electric bulb or the motor car? Perhaps. But according to the Harvard historian Joyce Chaplin, it might be t…

Award-winning reporter Kevin Fagan is one of San Francisco’s great treasures. In his much acclaimed new book, The Lost and Found, Fagan tells his his two-decade experience reporting about homelessness in San Francisco. H…

What do Fareed Zakaria, Nikki Haley, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Vinod Khosla and Kamala Harris all have in common? They are all, of course, highly successful Americans of Indian descent. Accor…

America, to borrow a word from last week’s guest Yoni Appelbaum, is “stuck”. And so the American Dream, for most stuck Americans, is dead. Our guest today, the social entrepreneur Nicholas Lalla, agrees with Appelbaum. T…

What one word describes how Donald Trump thinks about the world? According to both the Atlantic writer Jonathan Rauch and UC Irvine professor Jeffrey Kopstein, that word is “patrimonialism” - a rather stodgy sociological…

The international war reporter John Lechner is a brave man. For his new book Death Is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare, he spent time in both Russia and the Central African Republic re…

In today’s THAT WAS THE WEEK tech newsletter, Keith Teare asks what “civilization” is good for. Triggered by David Brooks’ “We Can Achieve Great Things” NYTimes piece, Keith’s editorial this week focuses on how we can “e…

In the long run, Keynes famously quipped, we are all dead. But Swedish entrepreneur Kristian Ronn reverses Keynes to argue that in the short term we, as a species, might also be death. In his new book Darwinian Trap, Ron…

Should lawyers, home alarm fitters, hairdressers and plumbers all have to get a license to do their business? And what about dog walkers and surgeons? It’s an absurd question, of course, but as Rebecca Haw Allensworth re…

Who wants to change their life? Who want to transform their relationships and increase their influence? If that’s you, then Stanford based psychologist Caroline Fleck might be your therapist. In her new book, VALIDATION,…

According to the Atlantic’s Yoni Applebaum, America is STUCK - literally and otherwise. In his new book Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity. Appelbaum argues that America…