Eric Liu | How to Live Like a Citizen: Rebuilding Democracy from the Ground Up

What does it mean to be a citizen, not simply in a legal sense, but as an active member of the community? Andrew Keen speaks with Eric Liu, CEO of Citizen University and author of Live Like a Citizen, about what citizenship requires in an era of polarization and declining trust in democratic institutions.

Liu argues that resilient democracy depends not only on politics and institutions, but on the everyday habits, relationships, and choices of citizens themselves. He outlines eight essential practices: seeing, listening, feeling, joining, fighting, changing, imagining, and committing. They discuss the corrosive effects of social media, the importance of local communities and civic participation, the relationship between economic inequality and democracy, and why rebuilding democratic culture starts from the ground up.

At the heart of the conversation is a simple idea: democracy is not something we inherit and take for granted. We practice it and have to keep practicing it together.