Keen On America

"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

(00:36) - Happy Valentine's Day

(01:42) - The pressure of Valentine's Day

(02:34) - Old science vs. new science

(03:02) - The incel corner of the internet

(04:05) - We've lost the art of socializing

(05:06) - Love as a market

(06:52) - What happens after swiping

(08:03) - Slow burn people

(09:07) - Twos, fives, and tens

(10:31) - The hot-or-not experiment

(11:33) - Is there something un-American about this?

(13:13) - The Dunbar number and hunter-gatherers

(14:10) - Did love exist before modernity?

(15:07) - Passion and limerence

(16:39) - Looking for yourself or the other?

(18:15) - Machine learning can't predict compatibility

(19:43) - Why we pair bond: helpless babies

(21:30) - Men got gentler and lost their canines

(22:52) - What polyamory tells us

(24:36) - Gen Z and the delay of first sex

(26:48) - Paul's love life

(27:44) - She's a ten to me

(28:01) - Romcoms and Love Factually

(31:08) - Advice: reboot your social networks

"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

(00:00) - Six years from New Yorker profile to book

(01:14) - Politics as amateur sport

(02:08) - What the Greeks got right

(04:03) - Citizen assemblies: jury duty on steroids

(06:21) - The Yale professor who speaks for ordinary people

(07:11) - Rousseau and the age of innocence

(08:41) - The gerontocracy problem

(09:33) - Do we need a communitarian impulse?

(11:30) - Experts on tap, not on top

(15:15) - The reluctant populist

(17:01) - Can we trust ordinary people?

(19:11) - How it works at scale

(23:14) - Why professional politicians are failing

(26:15) - Max Weber and politics as vocation

(29:08) - Leaders who emerge organically

(30:04) - Rejecting Madison and the Federalists

(32:26) - Finding common intere...

"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) -

(00:22) - The Epstein opportunity

(01:21) - Elite overreach exposed

(03:12) - Scandals without partisan charge

(05:04) - The Vice Dean's credibility problem

(06:21) - Latent opinion explained

(09:39) - Is there anything wrong with being a billionaire?

(11:47) - American vs. European scandals

(14:48) - Saving democracy vs. saving capitalism

(17:05) - Corporate scandals and economic vitality

(18:33) - Policy entrepreneurs: Carl Levin and Margrethe Vestager

(19:54...

"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) -

(00:13) - The viral essay

(02:10) - Why Rauch changed his mind

(03:41) - Fascism vs. authoritarianism

(05:54) - Carl Schmitt and "enemies not adversaries"

(06:14) - Orwell on the word "fascism"

(09:12) - Can old people be fascists?

(11:51) - Blood and soil nationalism

(14:14) - Minneapolis

(17:51) - Kristallnacht comparisons

(20:07) - The postmodern right

(26:34) - Following the money

(32:05) - ICE as paramilitary force

"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

(02:03) - The victim: Tushar Atre

(05:27) - Prop 64 and the gold rush

(08:15) - The counterculture connection

(11:13) - The permeable divide

(14:43) - Tech bros living on the edge

(17:10) - Steve Jobs, Burning Man, and weed money

(18:07) - The murder

(20:06) - Rachael Lynch

(22:39) - Economic collapse

(25:31) - Half-pregnant prohibition

(31:45) - The paranoia problem