Keen On Andrew Keen

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 "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.






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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 publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.



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.









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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. Wolcott won Teacher of the Year from Kellogg’s EMBA program in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. He’s co-founder and chair of The World Innovation Network (TWIN), a global community of nearly 4,000 innovation and growth leaders from over 30 countries and across sectors (business, government, the arts, academia, defense). TWIN gathers 400 delegates for TWIN Global each year in Chicago to explore the future, in addition to smaller gatherings and online sessions. The objective is to build trusted relationships across sectors. Wolcott is an angel investor in over 20 companies including crowd funding leader Indiegogo, tech-enabled coaching and culture development platform Abroad.io, student loan innovator Lumni, digital education leader Kiddom, transaction security technology firm Magic Cube, digital mental health platform Silver Cloud Health and ClearCare Online (acquired by Battery Ventures), international art show, EXPO Chicago and MommyDaddyMe.com, a Hong Kong-based online capability development platform for children and their families across Asia. Wolcott holds a BA, European and Chinese History; and an MS and Ph.D., Industrial Engineering & Management Science, Northwestern University. Wolcott is a board member of Clareo, a foresight and growth strategy consultancy serving global corporations, and Abroad.io, a tech-enabled human transformation platform. Wolcott serves on advisory boards for H-Farm, the leading technology ecosystem in Italy, and the Open Innovation Lab of Norway. He serves on the board of Cure Blindness (Himalayan Cataract Project), a global non-profit that has restored sight to nearly one million people in Asia, Africa and Latin America. He is a regular contributor for Forbes on the impact of technology on business, society and humanity. His book, Grow From Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation (McGraw-Hill, 2010) has been published in Chinese and Japanese. Wolcott’s work appears in MIT Sloan Management Review, strategy+business, The Harvard Business Review (online), The Wall Street Journal, Advertising Age, Business Week, The Financial Times (European Edition), The New York Times and numerous overseas publications.



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.

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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 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.

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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 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.





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We live in a erotically dissonant and carnally confused age. One the one hand, young people are having a lot less sex these days; on the other, they are listening intently to the music of erotically dissonant artists like Billy Eilish and Taylor Swift. I first came across the ideas of “erotic dissonance” and “carnal confusion” in “The New Sound of Sexual Frustration”, an intriguing Atlantic piece by their prolific culture critic Spencer Kornhaber “I've listened to Billie Eilish's "Blue" 400 times already”, the obsessive Kornhaber confesses. So what did the author of ON DIVAS learn about the carnal confusion of today’s youth? Is the music of Eilish and Swift just another explosion of youthful sexual frustration? Or is our age of anxiety creating something quite new - a culture of anxiety in which sex is always in our heads but not in our beds.



Spencer Kornhaber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers music and popular culture. Prior to joining The Atlantic as an editor in 2011, he wrote for Spin, The A.V. Club, and OC Weekly. In 2019, he won the Excellence in Column Writing Award from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists.




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