"150 universities have adopted neutrality policies just since October 7th. I'm on the losing end of this trend." — Brian Soucek

Universities keep claiming what they see as the moral high ground of neutrality. But Brian Soucek, who holds the MLK chair at UC Davis School of Law, believes that's a dangerous myth. In his new book, The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education, Soucek argues in favor of the biased university. His argument is that even (or, perhaps, particularly) when universities stay quiet, they're actually taking sides through their policies, their hiring, their building names, their actions. Silence isn't neutral. It's ideological.

This fetish with neutrality is gaining in popularity, Soucek warns. Since October 7th, an estimated 150 universities have adopted neutrality pledges—pushed by well-funded efforts from the Goldwater Institute and others. Every pledge has a vague moral carve-out: universities will still speak when their "mission is at stake." But everyone has a mission and they are all different. That's the whole point. Soucek claims the moral high ground of pluralism. That's why he wants Boston College to be different from Yale, UC Davis different from University of Austin. The flattening of higher education into some imagined neutral sameness is what terrifies this classical liberal.

The real crisis, Soucek insists, isn't self-censoring students or woke professors. It's the external threat of federal funding cuts, hostile state legislatures, a Trump administration that has declared DEI illegal without exactly making it so. Universities are staying quiet because, as one UC president put it, "We don't want to be the tallest nail." But Harvard's faculty spoke out through the AAUP, and it changed the conversation. For Soucek, silence isn't safety. It's surrender. Eventually everyone will become the tallest nail. And will be flattened by a hammer-wielding ideological foe.

On the promise or threat of AI, Soucek is blunt: the idea of objective algorithms deciding what statues to take down or what books to read sounds to him "completely dystopian." We'd lose something essential if we stopped allowing communities to make these contested decisions differently, he says. For Soucek, that's not a bug of an otherwise unbiased university. It's the feature of any credible institute of higher learning.

Five Takeaways

●      Neutrality Is a Myth: Universities claim neutrality but act in non-neutral ways—through policies, hiring, building names. Silence is a choice, not an absence of choice.

●      150 Universities Signed Neutrality Pledges Since October 7th: Well-funded efforts from the Goldwater Institute are pushing this flattening of higher education. Soucek sees himself on the losing end.

●      The External Threats Are the Real Crisis: Not self-censoring students. Federal funding cuts are existential. Universities are staying quiet so as not to be "the tallest nail."

●      Pluralism, Not Homogeneity: Different universities should have different missions. That's why University of Austin is fine. New College Florida—where changes were imposed from above—is a disaster.

●      AI Objectivity Is Dystopian: Letting algorithms decide which statues to take down or which books to read? We'd lose something essential. Contested decisions should stay contested.

About the Guest

Brian Soucek is Professor of Law and holds the Martin Luther King Jr. Chair at UC Davis School of Law. He is the author of The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education. He earned his JD from Yale Law School and his undergraduate degree from Boston College.

References

Concepts mentioned:

●      The Kalven Report was a 1967 University of Chicago faculty report on institutional neutrality. It's been revived by organizations pushing neutrality pledges.

●      The Goldwater Institute has funded efforts to get university boards to adopt neutrality policies modeled on the Kalven Report.

●      Heterodox Academy is a campus speech advocacy organization that estimated 150 universities adopted neutrality policies since October 7th.

●      FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) conducts surveys on campus self-censorship that Soucek references.

Universities mentioned:

●      University of Austin is a new university founded by tech figures with a consciously different mission. Soucek supports its existence as an example of pluralism.

●      New College Florida was transformed by Governor DeSantis and Chris Rufo. Soucek calls it a disaster—changes imposed from above, not through shared governance.

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: The myth of neutrality

"72% of Americans say they hate big corporations—including Republicans." — Charles Derber

It's not just the right that's reacting against liberal democracy. Some progressives are also embracing populism. Charles Derber, longtime professor of sociology at Boston College, has a new book called Fighting Oligarchy: How Positive Populism Can Reclaim America. Rather than a dirty word, he argues, populism is an inevitable political response to the brutality of today's economy. We're in a disguised depression, he fears. Sixty percent of Americans say they feel one paycheck away from oblivion.

72% of Americans say they hate big corporations, Derber reminds us. Not just Democrats—Republicans too. Such hostility to large capitalist enterprises thus represents a kind of political supermajority. And Derber, a man of the left, sees this as fertile ground for what he calls positive populism. It's a politics that connects economic grievance to democratic renewal, the way the 1890s Populists did, the way the New Deal did, the way Martin Luther King did when he insisted you couldn't fight for civil rights without fighting against war and capitalism.

But can positive populism coexist with American capitalism? Derber says no. American capitalism is too oligarchic, too individualistic, too hostile to collective identity. It's not compatible with positive populism and thus, in Derber's mind at least, not compatible with survival. But that doesn't involve a Soviet-style elimination of the free market. It means something more like Northern European social democracy: strong unions, universal healthcare, a government that actually intervenes on behalf of ordinary people.

The trap, Derber warns, is nostalgia for the pre-Trump era. Going back to the supposedly "consensus" years of Bush, Obama and Clinton is a circuitous way of getting to another Trump. Today's street demonstrators—from Minneapolis to Los Angeles to New York City—understand this. According to Derber, demonstrations against ICE and MAGA are associating the immigration crackdowns with corporate oligarchy, and authoritarian political power with the economic power of big capitalism.

And so positive populism will prevail. At least according to Charles Derber. Fight the oligarchy!

Five Takeaways

●      We're in a Disguised Depression: Sixty percent of Americans say they feel one paycheck away from disaster. This isn't radical rhetoric—it's mainstream public opinion.

●      Hatred of Corporations Is Bipartisan: 72-73% of Americans—including Republicans—say they hate big corporations. Derber sees this as fertile ground for positive populism.

●      Positive Populism Has Precedents: The 1890s Populists united white and Black workers. The New Deal gave ordinary people a stake. MLK linked civil rights to economics. These are the models.

●      Going Back to Pre-Trump Is a Trap: If Democrats return to Bush-Obama-Clinton centrism, they'll get another Trump. The resistance understands this. The establishment doesn't.

●      American Capitalism Is Incompatible: Positive populism can't coexist with American-style oligarchic capitalism. It needs transformation—not elimination of markets, but European-style social democracy.

About the Guest

Charles Derber is a professor of sociology at Boston College and author of more than twenty books, including Fighting Oligarchy: How Positive Populism Can Reclaim America and Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relationships, and the Quest for Democracy. He is an old friend of Keen on America.

References

People mentioned:

●      Pepper Culpepper is an Oxford political scientist whose book Billionaire Backlash argues that backlash against billionaires could strengthen democracy.

●      Hélène Landemore is a Yale political scientist whose book Politics without Politicians makes the case for direct democracy.

●      William Jennings Bryan ran for President four times on a populist platform but, Derber argues, sold out the movement's anti-corporate thrust.

●      Martin Luther King Jr. argued that civil rights couldn't be separated from economic justice and opposition to war—a form of positive populism.

●      Bernie Sanders and AOC are examples of positive populists within the Democratic Party today.

Historical references:

●      The 1890s Populist Movement united farmers and workers against the first Gilded Age oligarchy. Lawrence Goodwyn called it "the democratic moment."

●      The New Deal represented a form of positive populism with significant government intervention in markets and encouragement of union organizing.

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:

"American culture likes martyrs, not marchers." — David Masciotra, quoting Jesse Jackson

A couple of days ago, a great American died. Jesse Jackson was 84. He was somebody. Even Donald Trump acknowledged the passing of "a good man"—which, as my guest today notes, Jackson probably wouldn't have appreciated. David Masciotra is the author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters, one of the most readable biographies of the African-American leader. Having spent six years covering him and more than 100 hours in conversation, he called Jackson a friend.

Masciotra borrows from Jackson on Americans preferring martyrs to marchers. It's easy to celebrate him now that he's gone. But when Jesse was being Jesse—battling economic apartheid, registering millions of voters, building a Rainbow Coalition—he had many critics and enemies, including some of those hypocrites now praising him.

Jackson's legacy is vast. After King's death, he focused on economic justice, securing thousands of jobs for Black workers and entrepreneurs. He ran for President twice, nearly winning the 1988 nomination. He pushed for proportional delegate allocation—without which Obama would never have won in 2008. He debated David Duke and, in Masciotra's words, "reduced him to a sputtering mess." He was the first presidential candidate to fully support gay rights. He slept beside gay men dying of AIDS in hospices. He marched with Latino immigrants from California into Mexico.

But perhaps most relevant today: Jackson showed how to build a coalition that transcended racial politics without ignoring race. "If we leave the racial battleground to find economic common ground," MLK's spiritual successor insisted, "we can reach for moral higher ground." That's the populist strategy Masciotra believes the Democrats need now—a vision, he fears, trapped between the identitarian politics of its left and the milquetoast neoliberalism of its right flank.

Five Takeaways

●      Martyrs, Not Marchers: American culture celebrates civil rights leaders after they're dead. When Jackson was hard at it, he had enemies—including some now praising him.

●      Jackson Made Obama Possible: Jackson pushed for proportional delegate allocation. Without it, Obama—who won small states—would never have beaten Clinton in 2008.

●      Jackson Debated David Duke: And reduced him to a sputtering mess. Duke's response: "Jackson's intelligence isn't typical of Blacks." Jackson believed refusing debate only empowers enemies.

●      Race and Class Are Linked: Jackson showed you can't substitute race for class or use race to erase class. Leave the racial battleground for economic common ground.

●      Visionaries Win the Marathon: Jackson often lost the sprint but won the marathon. His Rainbow Coalition vision is what Democrats need now—and keep fumbling.

About the Guest

David Masciotra is a cultural critic, journalist, and author of I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters. He spent six years covering Jackson and more than 100 hours in conversation with him. He is an old friend of Keen on America.

References

People mentioned:

●      Martin Luther King Jr. was Jackson's mentor. Jackson was an aide to King and was with him on the balcony the day he was assassinated.

●      David Duke, former KKK leader, debated Jackson in 1988. Jackson wiped the floor with him.

●      W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington represent a historic dichotomy in Black political thought. Jackson occupied space between positions.

●      Rosa Parks was eulogized by Jackson, who noted that she succeeded simply because "she was available."

●      Robert Kennedy shared Jackson's universal vision of coalition-building across racial lines.

Organizations mentioned:

●      Operation PUSH was Jackson's organization focused on economic justice for Black Americans.

●      The Rainbow Coalition was Jackson's political movement seeking to unite Americans across race and class.

Further reading:

●      Masciotra's UnHerd piece: "Jesse Jackson Transcended America's Racial Politics"

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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Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

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Chapters:

• (00:00) - Introduction: A great man died

"It truly is becoming a desert right now for book publicists." — Bethanne Patrick

A couple of weeks ago, there was an "absolute bloodbath" at The Washington Post with hundreds of workers laid off and the book section totally gutted. Ron Charles, the beloved fiction editor, is gone. So is Becca Rothfeld, who described it in The New Yorker as "The Death of Book World." Today I'm talking to Keen on America's resident book expert, Bethanne Patrick of the LA Times, about what this latest bloodbath means not just for readers and writers, but also for the future of literary culture.

The news is pretty grim. Patrick points out that we used to have a general public reading newspapers and general interest magazines like Time & Newsweek for guidance about what to read. Now we've splintered into much narrower reading groups, each told to care only about what they already care about. The New York Times might be thriving, but its dominance isn't healthy. No writer wants to hear, "The Times didn't pick up your book, so there won't be a review at all." Meanwhile, mass-market paperbacks are dying and while Patrick is unsentimental about their physical quality, she nonetheless bemoans the demise of a mainstream reading culture.

There is, however, some good literary news. Spotify has struck a deal with Bookshop.org to sell physical books—enabling us to click a link while listening to a podcast and then buy the book, with proceeds supporting independent bookstores. And audiobooks are booming. Patrick defends them vigorously, citing research that shows listening to them stimulates the same part of the brain as the act of reading. When her husband discovered audiobooks, Patrick reports, he started reading longer books and, perhaps not uncoincidentally, more women novelists.

And then, last but certainly not least, there's AI. ElevenLabs is doubling down on AI-generated audiobooks—cheaper, faster, and increasingly hard to distinguish from human narrators. Patrick is conflicted. She narrated Life B, her own memoir, and loved it. But the middle market is disappearing from audiobooks too: soon we'll have winner-take-all celebrity narrators at the top, crappy AI bots at the bottom, and nothing in between. It's the enshittification of books. Jeff Bezos is presumably fine with all of this. Someone's taking care of the bottom line somewhere—maybe his delightful new wife's plastic surgeon.

About the Guest

Bethanne Patrick is the book critic of the LA Times and author of the memoir Life B: Overcoming Double Consciousness. She has written for The Washington Post, NPR, and numerous other publications. She is Keen on America's resident book expert.

References

People mentioned:

●      Ron Charles was the fiction books editor at The Washington Post. Patrick counts him as a dear friend. He has since started his own Substack.

●      Becca Rothfeld wrote "The Death of Book World" for The New Yorker and is author of All Things Are Too Small. She was also laid off from the Post.

●      Colleen Hoover is the self-published author of It Ends with Us. Patrick notes she's "doing just fine without mass-market paperbacks."

●      Maria Adelmann is the author of The Adjunct, which Patrick is currently reading and recommends.

Publications and companies mentioned:

●      The Washington Post gutted its book coverage in what Patrick calls "a big blow for the literary world."

●      Bookshop.org is partnering with Spotify to sell physical books, with proceeds benefiting independent bookstores.

●      ElevenLabs is an AI company doubling down on AI-generated audiobooks with various tiers of service.

●      Libby is the app where many young readers now discover audiobooks through their libraries.

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: The Washington Post bloodbath

"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.

Website

Substack

YouTube

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

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

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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

Spotify

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) -