"I'm much more likely to protest when I feel responsible—when violence is being done in my name." — Bruce Robbins

As always, the media is full of stories about political protest. A Columbia University Gaza protester held by ICE claims to have been chained to her bed after a seizure. Our friends at FIRE are addressing the right to demonstrate against ICE in a house of worship. Obama is arguing that ICE demonstrators should have the right to demonstrate on the streets of Minneapolis. The US government, meanwhile, cheers protesters on the Iranian streets while cracking down on protesters at home. Today's guest isn't shy at pointing out that contradiction.

Bruce Robbins is a professor at Columbia—ground zero for the Gaza encampments of 2024—and his new book Who's Allowed to Protest? argues against those who protest the protesters. Conservatives like David Brooks, Musa al-Gharbi, and others have dismissed campus demonstrators as "spoiled rich kids at elite schools" who are "just doing this to feel morally superior." Robbins points out that the same argument was used against Vietnam protesters in the 60s, against Greta Thunberg's climate activism, and against anyone whose cause appears in any way utopian. This reactionary critique never changes: they're privileged, they're not starving, so ignore their hypocritical whining.

What drives people to protest? Robbins says it's a sense of moral responsibility. He confesses that he's much more likely to get off his couch when violence is done in his name—particularly as a Jew or an American. And he makes an interesting broader argument: that the conservative attack on student "elites" dangerously conflates educated elites with moneyed elites. The firefighters in LA were an elite team, he reminds us. Scientists are elites. We need expertise, Columbia's Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities says. The question is who controls this expert knowledge and who pays for it.

I think Bruce Robbins has a point here. But some American student protesters, especially the Gaza crowd, do make themselves vulnerable to critics like Brooks and al-Gharbi. As I suggested to Robbins, if these smart kids at Columbia want to protest, then they should be smart about it. Especially by recognizing the moral complexities of the Palestine-Israel issue and by being able to convincingly explain why they chose to protest this injustice over everything else.

About the Guest

Bruce Robbins is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is the author of Atrocity: A Literary History and numerous other books. His new book is Who's Allowed to Protest? (2026). He succeeded Edward Said in the Old Dominion chair.

References

People mentioned:

●      David Brooks wrote about "America Needing a Mass Movement"—though apparently not an anti-Israel one. Robbins finds his dismissal of protesters hypocritical.

●      Musa al-Gharbi is the author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, which Robbins takes issue with.

●      Edward Said held the Old Dominion chair before Robbins and was a visible Palestinian presence at Columbia. His office was trashed multiple times and he received death threats.

●      Mahmoud Khalil was a Columbia student arrested in his apartment lobby in front of his pregnant wife, jailed for 104 days, released by court order, and is now facing re-arrest.

●      Bari Weiss, now head of CBS News, tried to get Palestinian professors fired when she was a Columbia undergraduate, sponsored by the David Project.

●      Greta Thunberg faces the same "spoiled rich kids" critique that Gaza protesters face. Robbins sees the same silencing tactic applied to any protest that seems "disinterested."

●      Greg Lukianoff and FIRE are mentioned as free speech absolutists.

Events mentioned:

●      Columbia 1968 preceded May 1968 in Paris. Apparently the Paris students asked Columbia students for advice on what to do after occupying a building.

●      The Columbia encampments of April 2024 made the university ground zero for Gaza protest in America.

●      Robbins was found guilty by Columbia for taking students to visit the encampment during his class on representations of atrocity.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

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Chapters:

• (00:00) - Introduction: Headlines full of protest

"We are still dealing with a system which tolerates rampant abuse of accused people." — Emily Galvin Almanza

Back in April 2024, we interviewed Thelton Henderson, one of the first African American federal judges in America. What disturbed me about our conversation was that even though Henderson grew up in the late Jim Crow era, he didn't seem to think that America is a profoundly more just place now than it was back then. Today's guest clerked for Judge Henderson, and her new book suggests he's right.

Emily Galvin Almanza is a public defender turned activist, and The Price of Mercy is her data-driven indictment of a criminal justice system that, as she puts it, "tolerates rampant abuse of accused people, tolerates the blatantly racist application of the law, and tolerates a total lack of transparency." According to Almanza, the numbers are damning: 80% of cases are misdemeanors. 80% of people prosecuted are poor enough to need a public defender. 70% of people in jail haven't been convicted—they just can't afford bail. California's gang database was 99% people of color, she says, and famously included literal babies listed as having "admitted their gang affiliation."

And here's both the good and bad news: crime is actually down. If you're under 50, she notes, you're living through the safest period of your lifetime. The solutions aren't mysterious either—housing reduces arrest rates by 80%, after-school programs cut youth violent crime in half. That's all good news for us. But it remains bad for those being unjustifiably prosecuted. We just lack the political will to implement what works. And as Galvin Almanza points out, this isn't a federal issue: 87% of prisoners are in jail on state charges. Change happens at the local level—DAs, sheriffs, state legislatures. The fixes, she says, are realizable. We just need the collective political will. That's the price of mercy in America today.

About the Guest

Emily Galvin Almanza is Executive Director of Partners for Justice and teaches at Stanford Law School. A former public defender, she clerked for Judge Thelton Henderson. Her new book is The Price of Mercy: Unfair Trials, a Violent System, and a Public Defender's Search for Justice in America (2026).

References

People mentioned:

●      Thelton Henderson was one of the first African American federal judges in America, a civil rights pioneer for whom Galvin Almanza clerked.

●      Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, blurbed the book. Galvin Almanza agrees "without hesitation" that we're living in a new Jim Crow system.

●      Alec Karakatsanis coined the term "copaganda" for media narratives that undermine smarter criminal justice solutions.

●      Clara Shortridge Foltz was a 19th-century lawyer who coined the phrase "free and equal justice" and pioneered the public defender system.

●      Andrew Ferguson of GW University appeared on the show recently with a book warning about surveillance.

Key statistics from the book:

●      80% of cases in the system are misdemeanors—trespassing, driving without a license, fare evasion.

●      80% of people prosecuted are poor enough to be assigned a public defender.

●      70% of people in jail haven't been convicted—they're awaiting trial and can't afford bail.

●      87% of prisoners are there on state charges, not federal—making this a local issue.

●      Every year of incarceration shaves two years off a person's expected lifespan.

●      Being incarcerated cuts a person's expected lifetime earnings in half.

●      Giving an unhoused person housing reduces their chances of future arrest by 80%.

●      After-school programs can reduce youth involvement in violent crime by 50%.

Concepts discussed:

●      Cash bail is a $2 billion per year industry in America. Most civilized countries don't allow you to buy your freedom back from the government.

●      "Failure to protect" laws criminalize women who are present while an abusive partner also abuses their child—charging victims as perpetrators.

●      Self-defense laws were "designed with two men fighting in an alley in mind"—making them nearly useless for abused women who fight back.

●      Gang databases in California were 99% people of color and included babies listed as having "admitted their gang affiliation."

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:00) - Introduction: Thelton Henderson

"Two years from now, all white-collar jobs may be gone." — Dario Amodei (via Keith Teare)

Keith Teare leads this week's tech roundup with a video he made on Google's Veo: one glass half-full of water, another half-full of spiders. It's a metaphor for the AI moment. The water represents the tools released in the past two weeks—Anthropic's Claude 4.6, OpenAI's CodeX 5.3—which Keith calls "beyond belief." The spiders represent the fear, which he acknowledges is not irrational. But maybe spiders are the wrong metaphor. Maybe we're the frogs being slowly boiled, not noticing the temperature rise until it's too late.

The trigger was Matt Schumer's viral essay "Something Big is Happening," which got 50 million views by telling engineers to become AI experts immediately or become irrelevant. Keith tested the thesis: he built venturebets.io, a prediction market, in a single day. He automated That Was The Week so completely that his weekly workflow dropped from six hours to under one. But then Dario Amodei and Satya Nadella both said the quiet part loud: in two years, there may be no white-collar jobs left. Keith's response? The glass doesn't contain jobs—it contains the future of life. And he'd rather have time to make videos of spiders crawling out of glasses than spend six hours curating links. The rest of us may not have the luxury of choosing.

About the Guest

Keith Teare is a serial entrepreneur and investor, founder of SignalRank, and author of the newsletter That Was The Week. He co-hosts the weekly tech roundup on Keen On America.

References

Essays discussed:

●      Matt Schumer's "Something Big is Happening" went viral with 50 million views, arguing that engineers must become AI experts immediately or face obsolescence.

●      Noah Smith published two essays: "The Fall of the Nerds" and "You Are No Longer the Smartest Type of Thing on Earth," arguing that humanity's destiny is now mostly out of our own hands.

●      Josh Tyrangiel wrote "America Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs" in The Atlantic.

●      The Financial Times published "Anthropic's Breakout Moment" on the company's enterprise momentum.

Tools and companies mentioned:

●      Claude 4.6 from Anthropic and CodeX 5.3 from OpenAI represent a "step change" in agentic AI—you give tasks, not prompts, and sub-agents complete them autonomously.

●      Google Veo is Google's video generation tool, which Keith used to create the glass-half-full-of-spiders metaphor.

●      Polymarket and Kalshi are prediction markets that Keith's new venturebets.io aims to match in quality.

People mentioned:

●      Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, predicted that white-collar jobs may be gone in two years.

●      Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, echoed Amodei's prediction about the end of white-collar work.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:00) - The glass half-full of spiders

"She's a ten to me and that's the part that matters." — Paul Eastwick

If it's Valentine's Day, we must be talking about love. Paul Eastwick studies attraction and relationships at UC Davis, and his new book Bonded by Evolution takes aim at the "old science" that treated romance like a competitive market where everyone gets assigned a number. The incels, of course, ran with that research to compound their paranoia about the other sex. Eastwick says they got it wrong—and so, with the exception of Paul Eastwick, did most academics.

When two people look at the same photograph and make a hot-or-not judgment, Eastwick explains, they only agree about 65% of the time. After they've known the person for months, agreement drops to barely better than a coin flip. So there isn't any universal hierarchy of desirability. What's real is that some people will think you're an 8 and others will think you're a 3—and that quirky disagreement explains most of what happens in the science of attraction. The problem is that dating apps make everything feel like they're in a market, thereby filtering out the "slow burn" people who need time to grow on you. Eastwick's advice, therefore, is forget swiping, reboot your social networks, throw candle lit dinner parties where nobody knows each other. It's more democratic, it takes longer, and it actually works. Happy V day everyone.

About the Guest

Paul Eastwick is Professor of Psychology at UC Davis, where he studies attraction and close relationships. He is the author of Bonded by Evolution: The New Science of Love and Connection (2026) and co-host of the podcast Love Factually with Eli Finkel.

References

Concepts discussed:

●      The mating market hypothesis treats attraction like an economic exchange where people are assigned desirability values and seek partners at their "level"—an idea Eastwick argues is far more limited than academics have assumed.

●      Limerence is the academic term for the intense, obsessive early stage of romantic attraction—what we might call infatuation or passion.

●      The Dunbar number (~150) represents the cognitive limit on stable social relationships—roughly the size of hunter-gatherer groups where our mating psychology evolved.

●      Pair bonding emerged in human evolution about two million years ago as brain size increased and children required longer periods of intensive parental investment.

●      Attachment theory describes the deep bonds that form when we trust someone to have our back, celebrate our successes, and support us through difficulty.

Evolution and mating:

●      Human males became smaller relative to females and lost their sharp canines as women selected for men who were safe around babies—"the evolved male is the good caregiver and good dad."

●      Unlike gorillas with their harem-style mating, humans shifted toward pair bonding because helpless infants with expanding brains needed investment from both parents.

●      Polyamory research shows that people can form genuine attachment bonds with multiple partners—trust, wellbeing, and attachment levels match or exceed monogamous couples.

Also mentioned:

●      Eli Finkel is Eastwick's co-host on the Love Factually podcast and author of The All-or-Nothing Marriage.

●      When Harry Met Sally (1989) depicts "one of the most beautiful friendships on screen," according to Eastwick, and holds up well on the friends-to-lovers pathway.

●      Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996) was the subject of a recent Love Factually episode—"that MTV style of filmmaking" with Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio.

●      The incel and manosphere communities have taken 1990s attraction research and "run with it in some strange and unjustified ways."

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:00) - Introduction

"How can you not be a populist in this day and age?" — Hélène Landemore

In February 2020, The New Yorker profiled a Yale professor making the case for citizen rule. Six years later, that political scientist, Hélène Landemore, has a new book entitled Politics Without Politicians arguing that politics should be "an amateur sport instead of an expert's job" and that randomly selected citizen assemblies should replace representative democracy. Landemore calls it "jury duty on steroids."

Landemore draws on her experience observing France's Citizens' Conventions on both climate and end-of-life issues to now direct Connecticut's first state-level citizen assembly. We discuss why the Greeks used lotteries instead of elections, what G.K. Chesterton meant by imagining democracy as a "jolly hostess," and why she has sympathy for the anti-Federalists who lost the argument about the best form of American government to Madison. When I ask if she's comfortable being called a populist, she doesn't flinch: "If the choice is between populist and elitist, I don't know how you can not be a populist." From the Damon Wells'58 Professor of Political Science at Yale, this might sound a tad suicidal. At least professionally. But Landemore's jolly argument for a politics without politicians is the type of message that will win elections in our populist age.

About the Guest

Hélène Landemore is the Damon Wells'58 Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is the author of Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule (2026) and Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (2020).

References

Thinkers discussed:

●      G.K. Chesterton was the British essayist who defined democracy as an "attempt, like that of a jolly hostess, to bring the shy people out"—a vision Landemore finds more inspiring than technical definitions about elite selection.

●      James Madison and the Federalists designed a republic meant to filter popular passions through elected representatives; Landemore has sympathy for their anti-Federalist opponents who wanted legislatures that looked like "a mini-portrait of the people."

●      Alexis de Tocqueville warned about the dangers of trusting ordinary people—a caution Landemore pushes back against, arguing that voters respond to the limited choices they're given.

●      Max Weber wrote "Politics as a Vocation" (1919), arguing that politics requires a special calling; Landemore questions whether it should be a profession at all.

●      Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his concept of the general will has been blamed for totalitarian impulses; Landemore rejects the comparison, insisting her vision preserves liberal constitutional frameworks.

●      Joseph Schumpeter defined democracy as "a method for elite selection"—precisely the technocratic framing Landemore wants to overturn.

Citizen assembly experiments mentioned:

●      The Irish Citizens' Assembly on abortion (2016-2017) is often cited as proof that randomly selected citizens can deliberate on divisive issues and reach workable conclusions.

●      The French Citizens' Convention on End-of-Life (2022-2023) found common ground between pro- and anti-euthanasia factions by focusing on palliative care—a case Landemore observed firsthand.

●      The French Citizens' Convention for Climate (2019-2020) brought 150 randomly selected citizens together to propose climate policy; participants were paid 84-95 Euros per day.

●      The Connecticut citizen assembly on local public services, planned for summer 2026, will be the first state-level citizen assembly in the United States. Landemore is directing its design.

Also mentioned:

●      Zephyr Teachout is the left-wing populist who called Landemore a "reluctant populist."

●      Oliver Hart (Harvard) and Luigi Zingales (Chicago) are economists working with Landemore to apply the citizen assembly model to corporate governance reform.

●      The Council of 500 was the Athenian deliberative body whose members were selected by lottery, with a rotating chair appointed daily.

●      John Stuart Mill is the liberal theorist whose emphasis on minority rights raises the question of whether Landemore's majoritarianism is illiberal. She says no.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

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Chapters:

• (00:00) - Chapter 1

"I will say that QAnon was right and I was wrong." — Pepper Culpepper

From Bannon and Trump to Summers, Gates, Blavatnik and Chomsky, the Epstein scandal has revealed elites of all ideological stripes behaving shamefully together. The Oxford political scientist Pepper Culpepper argues this is exactly the kind of corporate scandal that can save democracy—not despite its ugliness, but because of it. His new co-authored book, Billionaire Backlash, shows how scandals activate "latent opinion," bringing long-simmering public concerns to the surface and triggering society-wide demand for regulation. We discuss why Cambridge Analytica led to California privacy law, how Samsung's bribery scandal sparked Korea's Candlelight Protests, and why China's authoritarian approach to corporate malfeasance actually undermines trust.

Culpepper, himself the Blavatnik Professor of Government at Oxford's Blavatnik School, acknowledges an uncomfortable truth. "I would say that QAnon was right," he admits, "and I was wrong." The specifics might have been fantasy, but the underlying suspicion about elite corruption was justified. And policy entrepreneurs—obsessive individuals who channel public outrage into actual legislation—matter more than we think. For Culpepper, billionaire backlash isn't a threat to democracy—it might actually be what saves it.

About the Guest

Pepper Culpepper is Vice Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. He is the co-author, with Taeku Lee of Harvard, of Billionaire Backlash: The Age of Corporate Scandal and How It Could Save Democracy (2026).

References

Scandals discussed:

●      The Epstein scandal revealed that elites across politics, finance, and academia were connected to Jeffrey Epstein's network of abuse—vindicating populist suspicions that "the system is broken."

●      Cambridge Analytica (2018) exposed how Facebook leaked data on 90 million users, leading to the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act in the EU, and California's privacy regulations.

●      The Samsung bribery scandal in South Korea led to the Candlelight Protests and President Park Geun-hye's resignation, demonstrating how corporate scandals can strengthen civil society.

●      The 2008 Chinese milk scandal killed six infants due to melamine contamination; the government's cover-up during the Beijing Olympics destroyed public trust in domestic food safety.

●      Volkswagen's Dieselgate scandal showed how companies cheat on regulations, bringing latent concerns about corporate behavior to the surface.

Policy entrepreneurs mentioned:

●      Carl Levin was a US Senator from Michigan who shepherded the Goldman Sachs hearings and contributed to the Dodd-Frank Act.

●      Margrethe Vestager served as EU Competition Commissioner and pushed for the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.

●      Max Schrems is an Austrian privacy activist who, as a student, discovered Facebook retained his deleted messages and eventually brought down the US-EU data transfer agreement.

●      Alastair Mactaggart is a California property developer who pushed through the state's privacy regulations when federal action proved impossible.

●      Zhao Lianhai was a Chinese activist who tried to organize parents after the 2008 milk scandal; the government arrested and imprisoned him.

Concepts discussed:

●      Latent opinion refers to concerns people hold in the back of their minds that aren't front-of-mind until a scandal brings them to the surface.

●      The Thermidor reference is to the French Revolutionary period when the radical Jacobins were overthrown—Culpepper suggests a controlled version might benefit democracy.

●      The muckrakers were Progressive Era journalists whose exposés led to reforms like the Food and Drug Administration.

Also mentioned:

●      Michael Sandel is a Harvard political philosopher known for arguing that "there shouldn't be a price on everything."

●      Patrick Radden Keefe wrote Empire of Pain, the definitive account of the Sackler family and the opioid epidemic.

●      Lee Jae-yong is the heir apparent to Samsung, implicated in the bribery scandal.

●      Parasite, Squid Game, and No Other Choice are Korean cultural works that critique the country's relationship with its conglomerates.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:00) -

"You either need to call it fascism or you need to invent a new word with more or less the same meaning." — Jonathan Rauch

Jonathan Rauch's viral Atlantic essay has reignited the debate over what to call the Trump administration. Having previously settled on "semi-fascist," Rauch now argues that Trump ticks all 18 boxes on his checklist of fascist characteristics — from the glorification of violence and territorial ambitions to Carl Schmitt's philosophy of "enemies, not adversaries." We spar over whether the term obscures more than it reveals: Is this really fascism, or just authoritarianism with American characteristics? The conversation sharpens around Minneapolis, where citizens were shot face down, and the government initially denied it happened. You don't do that to win votes, Rauch argues — you do it because you believe that's how the social contract should work. He predicts Trump will fail to turn America into a fascist country but warns that institutions like the newly expanded ICE will outlast this administration.

About the Guest

Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of nine books, including The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (2021), Cross Purposes: Christianity's Broken Bargain with Democracy (2025), and Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought (1993). He received the 2005 National Magazine Award.

References

Thinkers discussed:

·      Carl Schmitt was a Nazi political theorist whose "friend-enemy distinction" argued that politics is fundamentally about identifying and crushing enemies, not managing disagreements with adversaries.

·      George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language" that "the word 'fascism' has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies something not desirable."

·      Hannah Arendt was a German-American political theorist and refugee from Nazi Germany whose book The Origins of Totalitarianism examined both Nazism and Stalinism, preferring "totalitarianism" to "fascism" as the more encompassing term.

Historical figures:

·      Benito Mussolini invented the term "fascism" (from the Latin fasces, a bundle of rods symbolizing collective strength) and ruled Italy as dictator from 1922 to 1943.

·      Francisco Franco ruled Spain from 1939 to 1975. Whether he was truly a fascist or merely an authoritarian remains debated; he never got along well with Hitler and outlasted the fascist era by three decades.

·      Viktor Orbán is the prime minister of Hungary whose systematic capture of media, courts, and civil society has become known as the "Orbán playbook" — a template Rauch argues the Trump administration is following.

Contemporary figures mentioned:

·      Stephen Miller is a senior advisor to Trump who declared that "force is the iron law of the world" and told progressives "you are nothing" at a memorial service where the widow of the deceased had just offered Christian forgiveness to an assassin.

·      Russell Vought is the director of the Office of Management and Budget, identified by Rauch as one of the younger ideologues building Trumpism into something more like a coherent ideology.

·      Chris Rufo is a conservative activist and culture war strategist who has employed what Rauch calls "revolutionary language" in his campaigns against universities and public institutions.

Essays and books mentioned:

·      "Politics and the English Language" (1946) is Orwell's essay arguing that the corruption of language enables the corruption of politics, and that vague or meaningless words like "fascism" make clear thinking impossible.

·      The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is Hannah Arendt's study of Nazism and Stalinism as parallel forms of total domination, examining how mass movements, propaganda, and terror enable regimes to control entire societies.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:00) -

"The black market exists only because we decided that this form of trade should be illegal." — Scott Eden

In October 2019, tech executive Tushar Atre was abducted from his oceanfront home in Santa Cruz and found murdered on his own property in the redwoods — shot execution-style, hands bound. He had spent barely three years in the cannabis business. Scott Eden's new book traces how a charismatic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, seeking to "disrupt" the newly legal weed industry, found himself entangled with an array of colorful and dangerous characters — hippie do-gooders, black-market operators, and stone-cold killers. We discuss the permeable divide between legal and illegal cannabis, why the industry has been an economic disaster for most founders, and whether America's half-pregnant approach to legalization created the conditions for Tushar's death. A California story about ambition, love, and the darker edges of the American dream.

About the Guest

Scott Eden is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work has appeared in ESPN The Magazine, GQ, Wired, Inc., and The Atavist. His story "The Prosecution of Thabo Sefolosha" won a 2017 New York Press Club Award and a National Association of Black Journalists award for investigative reporting. He is the author of Touchdown Jesus (Simon & Schuster, 2005) and the new A Killing in Cannabis.

References:

People discussed:

• Tushar Atre — tech executive and cannabis entrepreneur; murdered October 1, 2019
• Rachael Lynch — cannabis grower from the Emerald Triangle; Atre's business partner and lover
• Ken Kesey — author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; Merry Pranksters; La Honda cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains
• Sean Parker — Napster founder, early Facebook investor; bankrolled Proposition 64
• Travis Kalanick — Uber founder; comparison to Atre's brash, edge-seeking style
• Tony Hsieh — Zappos founder; tragic death; Silicon Valley hipster executive archetype

Places:

• Pleasure Point, Santa Cruz — oceanfront neighborhood; famous surf break; Atre's home
• Emerald Triangle — Humboldt, Mendocino, Trinity counties; America's cannabis heartland

Legal and historical:

• Proposition 64 (2016) — California ballot initiative legalizing recreational cannabis
• Proposition 215 (1996) — earlier medical marijuana law; the "215 era"

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States—hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Chapters:

• (00:13) - America's war on drugs

"We all love Thomas Paine. We just wish we liked him." — Jonathan Turley

Jonathan Turley's new book asks a deceptively simple question: why did the American Revolution become the longest-running successful democracy while the French Revolution devoured itself? The answer, he argues, lies in Madison's "auxiliary precautions" — constitutional safeguards designed not to eliminate rage but to channel it. Turley draws a direct line from Robespierre to today's calls to pack the Supreme Court and abolish the Senate, warning that removing those precautions invites the same mobocracy that sent the Jacobins to the guillotine. But the real provocation comes in the book's second half: with AI and robotics threatening mass unemployment, America may soon face a "kept population" — citizens subsidized by the state who lose their vital relationship to productivity and self-governance. We discuss Thomas Paine (brilliant about humanity, clueless about humans), why rage itself isn't the enemy, and whether the republic built to handle the 18th century can survive the 21st.

About the Guest

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University Law School. A legal analyst for CBS, NBC, BBC, and Fox News over three decades, he is the author of The Indispensable Right (a bestseller) and the new Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.

Chapters:

00:01:14 The uniqueness of the American Revolution
Two revolutions, two outcomes; Thomas Paine and James Madison as the twin geniuses

00:03:53 Paine vs. Madison on democracy
Paine wanted direct democracy; it nearly got him guillotined in France

00:05:54 Robespierre's transformation
The ACLU lawyer who came to believe "terror is virtue"

00:09:01 Thomas Paine: the penman of the revolution
From complete failure to revolutionary genius in two years

00:11:46 Slavery and the revolution's contradictions
Why people preferred Jefferson to Paine

00:15:43 Franklin's greatest achievement
Seeing something in "that heap of human wreckage"

00:18:07 What was unique about American rage
Not the rage itself, but the system designed to handle it

00:25:08 The "New Jacobins"
Calls to pack the Supreme Court and abolish the Senate

00:26:40 Rage on both sides
"Your rage is righteous, their rage is dangerous"

00:30:47 AI and the "kept population"
Mass unemployment and the citizen's relationship to the state

00:39:26 "Gynan" jobs
Homocentric industries like psychiatry and education that AI can't replace

00:45:00 Why the American Republic is still the best model
Decentralization over EU-style centralization

References

Figures discussed:

• Thomas Paine — arrived in America "barely alive," became the penman of the revolution in two years
• James Madison — designed the "auxiliary precautions" that prevented American democracy from devouring itself
• Benjamin Franklin — paid for Paine's passage to America, saw genius in "that heap of human wreckage"
• Maximilien Robespierre — began as an advocate for due process, ended declaring "terror is virtue"
• Jean-Paul Marat — radical journalist, killed by Corday in his bathtub (he bathed constantly due to a skin disease)
• Charlotte Corday — Republican who assassinated Marat; Robespierre and Danton watched her execution
• Georges Danton — joined the moderate Girondin wing; executed by the revolution he helped create

Art:

• The Death of Marat (1793) — Jacques-Louis David's painting of Marat's assassination; David was himself a Jacobin

Historical events:

• The Battle of Fort Wilson (1779) — Philadelphia mob attacked founder James Wilson's home; several killed
• The Reign of Terror (1793–94) — nearly all Jacobin leaders guillotined, including Danton and Robespierre

Books mentioned:

• The Wealth of Nations (1776) — Adam Smith; embraced by the founders as "the perfect companion to their political theory"
• The Federalist Papers (1787–88) — Hamilton, Madison, and Jay

About Keen On America
Nobody asks more impertinent questions than the Anglo-American writer, filmmaker and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen. In Keen On America , Andrew brings his sharp Transatlantic wit to the forces reshaping the United States — hosting daily interviews with leading thinkers and writers about American history, politics, technology, culture, and business. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

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"It may not be Mister Right YouTube, but it is Mister Right Now." — Erika Dilday

On Super Bowl Sunday — with America celebrating its 250th anniversary — Erika Dilday joins to discuss the power of documentary film to cut through algorithmic noise and show us who we really are. As executive producer of POV, the longest-running documentary program on American television (now entering its 39th season), Dilday has spent her career championing first-person storytelling that platforms won't surface. She's also co-directing an upcoming series with Ken Burns, Emancipation to Exodus, exploring the period from the Civil War to the Great Migration. We discuss why algorithms limit discovery, whether AI can replicate human nuance, and what she learned from screening films at San Quentin.

About the Guest

Erika Dilday is the Executive Producer of POV, America's longest-running documentary series, now in its 39th season on PBS. She is co-directing Emancipation to Exodus with Ken Burns, a documentary series about the period from the end of the Civil War to the Great Migration, scheduled for PBS in 2027. Her father was the first Black television station manager in the United States.

Chapters:

00:00:01 Opening
Super Bowl Sunday, America's 250th, and Erika's prediction ("all Patriots all the way")

00:02:28 Emancipation to Exodus
Her collaboration with Ken Burns on the period from Civil War to Great Migration (PBS, 2027)

00:05:09 Her father's legacy
The first Black TV station manager in the United States; "Those who want change don't have the luxury of being comfortable"

00:06:23 Documentary as truth and art
What distinguishes film from news; Hoop Dreams and the power of immersive storytelling

00:08:21 POV's mission
39 seasons, Tongues Untied, and stories that wouldn't be told elsewhere

00:11:27 PBS and the culture wars
Pressures on public broadcasting, the need for alternative distribution

00:15:47 YouTube: Mister Right Now
Not the ideal platform, but the only one for democratic distribution

00:17:38 San Quentin Film Festival
Incarcerated audiences engaging deeply with documentary

00:20:06 Media consolidation
Time Warner, Netflix, Paramount; indie platforms like Mubi and Ovid

00:21:49 Algorithms and discovery
Platforms suggest what they think you want, not what might stretch your thinking

00:24:47 AI vs. human nuance
"It can be imitated, but it's not going to be replicated"

00:27:26 Oscar picks
The Perfect Neighbor (2025) (Netflix) and Cutting Through Rocks (2025) (the sleeper)

References:

• POV
• Hoop Dreams (1994) — documentary about two Chicago high school students dreaming of NBA careers
• Tongues Untied (1989) — Marlon Riggs' documentary on Black gay identity in America (POV Season 4)
• Salesman (1968) — Maysles Brothers documentary following door-to-door Bible salesmen
• The Perfect Neighbor (2025) — Geeta Gandbhir's documentary about a killing in Florida, told through body cam footage (Netflix)
• Cutting Through Rocks (2025) — Sara Khaki and Mohammad Reza Eyni's documentary about a female elected official and motorcycle rider in Iran
• San Quentin Film Festival — the first film festival ever held inside a U.S. prison, celebrating incarcerated and formerly incarcerated filmmakers
• Independent platforms mentioned: Mubi, Ovid, Jolt

About Keen On America

Keen On America is a daily podcast hosted by Andrew Keen, the Anglo-American writer and Silicon Valley insider. Every day, Andrew brings his uniquely transatlantic and eclectic eye to the forces reshaping the United States — interviewing leading thinkers and writers about American politics, technology, culture, and democracy. With nearly 2,800 episodes, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in podcasting history.

Website: KeenOn.TV

Substack: keenon.substack.com

YouTube: youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

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