Keen On Andrew Keen

Another week in tech, another splashy AI scandal. This one involves OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the voice of Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson. Dear Sam, Keith Teare’s That Was The Week newsletter begins, as the SignalRank CEO tries to give the OpenAI CEO advice about how to minimize these sorts of scandals in the future. But I wonder if the Johansson-Altman spat is a very early example of the multi-fronted war that is about to erupt between the creative and tech economies. All Scarlett Johansson has is her face, her voice and her acting skills. If companies like OpenAI can replicate all these, then what becomes not just of Johansson but all the stars of the future? Keith Teare, however, isn’t too worried. He believes that AI offer a radical democratization of creative production tools. In the age of Sam Altman’s OpenAI, we will all have the technological tools to become Scarlett Johansson. Dear Keith - I hope you’re right.


Keith 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 the founder at the Palo Alto incubator, Archimedes Labs. Archimedes was the original incubator for TechCrunch and since 2011 has invested, accelerated or incubated many Silicon Valley startups including Around (sold to Miro), Millicast (Sold to Dolby), 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.




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The debate about the supposed “colonial” foundations of Israel goes on and on. But I wonder whether Jehuda Reinharz’s definitive new biography of Chaim Weizmann might help clarify the unintentional colonial foundations of the Zionist project. Reinharz explains that Weizmann made his name as a brilliant chemist in the UK, where he leveraged his equally glittering social networking skills into the publication of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. As Reinharz told me, it was Weizmann’s ability to appear like a British aristocrat that enabled him to successfully schmooze imperial Brits like Lloyd-George, Balfour, Astor and Mark Sykes (of Sykes-Picot fame). So even if his Zionist dream wasn’t formally designed as a colonial project, the fact that Chaim Weizmann had to dress up like British colonialist to get his way might have unintentionally resulted in Israel becoming a spooky replica of a European colony. To remix Marx, great men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please.



Jehuda Reinharz was a long-time professor at Brandeis University, serving as Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies; Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry; founder of the Jacob and Libby Goodman Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel; Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs; and University President. In January 2011, Dr. Reinharz assumed the presidency of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation. Dr. Reinharz is the author or co-author of more than one hundred articles and thirty-one books in various languages and the recipient of eight honorary doctorates. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He earned his master’s degree in medieval Jewish history from Harvard and his doctorate in modern Jewish history from Brandeis University.



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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The digital revolution has few more persistent critics than John (Rick) MacArthur, the legendarily outspoken publisher of Harper’s Magazine. His skepticism about Silicon Valley, he confesses, came at the turn of the century when he overheard the gibberish sales talk from a rabble of start-up entrepreneurs in a San Francisco restaurant. In the quarter century since, MacArthur hasn’t been shy to argue that the internet is killing not just our culture and economy, but also our democracy. His latest crusade is what he considers to be the disturbing impact of screens on our cognitive skills . Kids learn better on paper, he insists. Which may be why Harpers - in contrast with the Atlantic and the New Yorker - is first and foremost a print rather than an online magazine.




John R. (Rick) MacArthur is president and publisher of Harper's Magazine and an award-winning journalist and author. Under his leadership, the magazine has received nineteen National Magazine Awards, the industry's highest recognition. He writes monthly columns for The Providence Journal and, in French, for Montreal's Le Devoir newspaper. His critically acclaimed first book, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, won the Illinois ACLU's 1992 Harry Kalven Freedom of Expression award and was a New York Times notable book. His second book, The Selling of "Free Trade": NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy, was published in 2000. He has also written You Can't Be President, published in 2008 and reissued in 2012 as The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. L'Illusion Obama was published in 2012 in France and Canada. Mr. MacArthur grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, and graduated in 1978 from Columbia University with a B.A. in history. He lives with his wife and two daughters 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.

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Bobi Conn’s life is an American story. Growing up in a desolate Kentucky holler, her father a drug addicted outlaw who abused her mother, Conn has reinvented herself as a successful writer and mother. But for all Conn’s unflinching honesty about her brutal upbringing, she remains proudly America - both in her love of the Kentucky land and her unwillingness to demonize rural America. Her American spirit, inherited from generations of poor folk scratching out a living on the land, is a defiant optimism and offers hope that America can once again reinvent itself in the 21st century.



Bobi Conn was born in Morehead, Kentucky, and raised in a nearby holler, where she developed a deep connection with the land and her Appalachian roots. She obtained her bachelor’s degree at Berea College, the first school in the American South to integrate racially and to teach men and women in the same classrooms. After struggling as a single mother, she worked multiple part-time jobs at once to support her son and to attend graduate school, where she earned a master’s degree in English with an emphasis in creative writing. In addition to writing, Bobi loves playing pool, cooking, being in the woods, attempting to grow a garden, and spending time with her incredible 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.

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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Is it time to start worrying about the Germans again? Perhaps, at least according to Jacob Kushner, the author of LOOK AWAY: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, a book about an eleven year terror campaign by the National Socialist Underground (NSU). Kushner is ambivalent about the broad appeal in Germany of the NSU’s murderous violence against immgrants, but he does suggest that this recent chapter in German history suggests that the country isn’t quite the peaceful haven of toleration that some previous KEEN ON guests, like Peter Gumbel, believe it to be.



Jacob Kushner is an international correspondent who writes magazine and other longform stories from Africa, Germany, and the Caribbean. He reports on migration and human rights, foreign aid and investment, terrorism and violent extremism, science and global health, climate change and wildlife, and press freedom.  His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Economist, National Geographic, The Nation, VQR, The Atavist, WIRED, Foreign Policy, and VICE. He has photographed for National Geographic and field-produced for VICE on HBO, and PBS NewsHour. He is the author of China’s Congo Plan, which was favorably reviewed in The New York Review of Books.His new book, Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants, is published in May 2024. He teaches International Reporting and Migration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 



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

Jordan Elgrably, the Morrocan-French editor of the Markaz Review, wants us to read complex stories about the Middle East and North Africa that our simplistic newspaper headlines mostly ignore. In his new anthology, Stories from the Center of the World, Elgrably includes short stories from writers as diverse as Leila Aboulela, Amany Kamal Eldinn and Hanif Kureishi that reflect the rich mosaic of life in the region. Elgrably’s anthology offers a refreshing alternative to the standard apocalyptic slant of most conversations in Western media about the Middle East and North Africa.



Jordan Elgrably is the Editor in Chief of The Markaz Review. For many years he worked in Los Angeles where he was a social entrepreneur, producer & the founding director of the former Levantine Cultural Center (est. 2001), renamed The Markaz, Arts Center for the Greater Middle East. The Markaz closed on May 31, 2020 (as reported in the Los Angeles Times) but returned in September 2020 as The Markaz Review. A former curator of public programs, Jordan is of Moroccan and French heritage. He has been passionately committed to strengthening Arab/Muslim/Christian and Jewish relations for many years. In addition to The Markaz he cofounded the New Association of Sephardi/Mizrahi Artists & Writers International in 1996 and Open Tent Middle East Coalition in 1999. He was a producer for the Dalai Lama’s World Festival of Sacred Music in 1999, 2002 and 2005. As well, he has launched several original initiatives, among them Arabs, Blacks & Jews: The Art of Resistance (2005-2010); Sultans of Satire: Middle East Comic Relief (2005-2017); Beirut-Los Angeles.org—an effort to help victims of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war (2006); CelebratePalestine.org (2013-2014); New Voices in Middle Eastern Cinema (2010-2015), with funding from the Golden Globes/Hollywood Foreign Press Association; and Gaza Surf Relief (2007). Jordan attended the American University of Paris (formerly ACP) and was based for a number of years in Paris and Madrid, where he worked as a journalist and associate producer for TF1. His essays, articles and stories have appeared in many anthologies and periodicals. In 2008, the L.A. Weekly featured Jordan Elgrably in its People of the Year issue and he received the Local Hero Award from the Foundation for World Arts and Culture; in 2011 and 2014, he was an Annenberg Alchemy Fellow; in 2013 and 2015 he was nominated for the James Irvine Leadership Award. In 2014 he received an American Express Award and in 2015, the Rachel Corrie Conscience and Courage Award from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In 2016 he was a Ariane de Rothschild Foundation Fellow. Jordan divides his time between Los Angeles and Montpellier.



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