Episodes

Charles Armstrong is a social entrepreneur based in London. He founded The Trampery in 2009 to develop new kinds of workspace for startups and creative communities. Since opening the first co-working space in London’s Shoreditch innovation district The Trampery has opened ten further sites in London including specialist facilities for fashion, digital arts, travel and retail. Charles is a Fellow of the School for Social Entrepreneurs, the world’s first business school for social entrepreneurship...

Robert H. Frank is the H. J. Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management. He has been an Economic View columnist for the New York Times for more than a decade. His many books include The Winner-Take-All Society, The Economic Naturalist, and Success and Luck (Princeton). He lives in Ithaca, New York.

In 2020, particularly in the Democratic primary, we have this great debate about capitalism. Some people say capitalism work. Some people say it doesn't. Lots of the candidates are suggesting that we need to go beyond capitalism. In the midst of that debate, one of the world's leading economists, Branko Milanovic, who's a distinguished academic and ex-World Bank chief economist, suggests that there's nothing beyond capitalism. The entire world works off the same system, whether it's Denmark or t...

Angus Deaton, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in economics, is the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at Princeton University and Presidential Professor of Economics at the University of Southern California. His books include The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality (Princeton). They live in Princeton, New Jersey.

Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, chief executive, and author. She was born in Texas, raised in Holland, and educated at Cambridge University. She worked for the BBC and developed interactive multimedia products with Peter Lynch, Tom Peters, Standard & Poors, and The Learning Company. She has served as Chief Executive Officer for InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation, and iCAST Corporation. The author of Beyond Measure, Willful Blindness, and A Bigger Prize, among others, she blogs f...

Michael S. Malone covered the technology beat for the San Jose Mercury News in the 1980s and remains one of world's best-known technology-business journalists. He is the author or coauthor of nearly thirty books, including The Virtual Corporation with William Davidow. He is currently dean's executive professor at Santa Clara University. Today’s episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Go to Betterhelp.com/KeenOn to get 10% off your first month with discount code KEENON.

Steven Levy is Wired’s editor at large. The Washington Post has called him “America’s premier technology journalist.” His previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written seven previous books and his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology...

Lucy Parker is a partner of the Brunswick Group, one of the world’s leading corporate communications firms, whose clients include Burberry, Facebook, Microsoft, Tesco, Thomson Reuters and Visa. Lucy began her working life as a BBC documentary maker, making programmes about social issues. This led her to take her film-making skills into the business arena, helping companies – from breweries in Russia to copper mines in Chile – to tell their. She led the Talent and Enterprise Taskforce under Gordo...

Over the last two hundred years, nothing has divided us more than our free-market economic system. Is it the source of every social injustice, from exploitation to alienation to inequality, or is it essential to our freedom and democracy? This debate is as relevant today in 2020 as it was in 1920 or 1820. Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumbl...

Over the last two hundred years, nothing has divided us more than our free-market economic system. Is it the source of every social injustice, from exploitation to alienation to inequality, or is it essential to our freedom and democracy? This debate is as relevant today in 2020 as it was in 1920 or 1820. From the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee's compelling argument—masterfully researched and brilliantly articulated—that we have at last learned h...

Bhaskar Sunkara is an American political writer. He is the founding editor and publisher of Jacobin and publisher of Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy and Tribune.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is editor in chief of Reason, the magazine of “free minds and free markets.” Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Slate, and numerous other publications. She is a frequent commentator on radio and television networks such as National Public Radio, CNBC, C-SPAN, Fox Business, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. She is a Future Tense Fellow at New America.

Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, New York City.

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA, a psychedelic biography of the 9/11 bomber Mohamed Atta, was an unexplained bestseller in parts of Canada. His first novel, I Hate the Internet, was a bestseller everywhere, doing especially well in Serbia. His second novel, The Future Won't Be Long, wasn't a bestseller anywhere, but was published in the United States by a company that printed propaganda for Nazi Germany. So there's always hope.

David Edgerton is Hans Rausing Professor of the history of science and technology and professor of modern British history at King's College London. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth Century History.

Ian Bassin served as Associate White House Counsel from 2009-2011. In addition to counseling the President and senior White House staff on administrative and constitutional law, his responsibilities included ensuring that White House and executive branch officials complied with the laws, rules and norms that protect the fundamentally democratic nature of our government. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal and President of the American Constit...

Yancey Strickler is a writer and entrepreneur. He is the cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter and author of This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World, coming October 29 through Viking Press.

This week, Tiffany Shlain sits down with Andrew Keen to discuss her new book, 24/6. In 24/6, Tiffany Shlain explores how turning off screens one day a week can work wonders on your brain, body, and soul. Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and founder of The Webby Awards. Tiffany’s films and work have received over eighty awards and distinctions including being selected for the Albert Einstein Foundation’s Genius: 10...

In this episode of Keen On, Andrew talks to Scott Galloway, the bestselling author of The Four and Algebra of Happiness and New York University business professor, about what's gone wrong in the digital economy, why breaking up the largest tech companies will be beneficial for everyone except its CEOs, and why Silicon Valley isn't more aggressively supportive of change.

In this episode of Keen On, Andrew talks to Richard Stengel, author of Information Wars: How We Lost the Global Battle Against Disinformation and What We Can Do About It, about his experience as the Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs for the U.S. Government, the information war in Russia, and the illusion of choice.

In this episode of Keen On, Andrew talks to journalist Maria Ressa, about the weaponization of social media, the loss of democracy as we know it, and how we can save our future.

In this episode of Keen On, Andrew talks to Carl Benedikt Frey, the co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment at the University of Oxford and author of The Technology Trap, about the similarities between the 19th century and today, what the future holds for high-skilled jobs in the age of automation, and how governments can embrace the future of technology.

In this episode of Keen On, Andrew talks to Jeffrey A. Winters, the political scientist and author of Oligarchy, about the convergence of oligarchy and democracy, the complex phenomenon of Donald Trump, and the transformation of European countries becoming minority white. Jeffrey A. Winters is an American political scientist at Northwestern University, specializing in the study of oligarchy. He has written extensively on Indonesia and on oligarchy in the United States. His 2011 book Oligarchy w...

In this episode of Keen On, Andrew talks to Toomas Hendrik Ilves, former President of Estonia, about how the invention of the World Wide Web forever changed democracy, Russian influence in the digital age, and how doing away with anonymity gives citizens more power.