Keen On America

“He didn’t just say it, he meant it, he felt it — and the combination of the power guy, the ruthless power guy, and the profound idealist was fascinating, and also hard for him.” — Evan Thomas on Bobby Kennedy
 
Who was the greatest riddle in 20th century American political life? Judging from the ever-expanding library of Bobby biographies, Robert Francis Kennedy ranks very high on that list. Indeed, according to Evan Thomas, one of RFK’s most acclaimed biographers, this third Kennedy son is, indeed, the most sphinx-like riddle in 20th century America.
 
In his classic 2000 biography, Robert Kennedy: His Life, Thomas unravels the good and the bad Bobby. But, rather than presenting parallel narratives, his portrait treats the Machiavellian and the idealist as the same riddle. Raised by his father to exercise raw power, RFK discovered that mid-century America wasn’t living up to its own ideals. The contradiction of the ruthless Kennedy machine politician and the profound idealist was what continues to make him so intriguing to Americans of every political stripe.
 
Bobby concurred with Churchill’s dictum that courage is the greatest virtue because, without it, you can’t have the other virtues. So he lived a life of ridiculous physical and moral courage — taking insane risks that would terrify ordinary mortals. And, of course, his most insanely courageous act was his last — running for President in 1968 knowing that he was likely to be assassinated. Where have you gone, Bobby Kennedy? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Central Paradox: Power Guy and Idealist in the Same Man: Bobby Kennedy was raised by his father to be the henchman of the Kennedy machine — doing the dirty stuff in Boston politics to keep Jack floating free and grand. He was pretty ruthless about it. At the same time, in mid-century America, he discovered that the country was not living up to its own constitution, and he wanted to make things right, and genuinely felt it. The combination of the machine politician and the profound idealist was what made him so endlessly fascinating. It also made him hard for himself: a man permanently at war with his own nature.
 
•       Courage: The Only Word That Mattered: No word was more important to Bobby Kennedy than courage. Churchill: it’s the greatest virtue, because without it you can’t have the others. Kennedy believed in physical courage, emotional courage, mental courage. He was a runty little kid at the wrong end of the dinner table — Jack and Joe and Kick at the golden end with the father, Bobby with the nuns and the mum. He got kicked out of prep school for cheating. He was not the athlete, not the golden one. Real courage comes from suffering. It took courage just to overcome being the loser. That was the source.
 
•       Making Up for Missing the War: Physical and Moral Courage: Bobby missed World War Two, basically. He got in at the very end and ended up scraping the deck of a destroyer in the Caribbean, far from combat. His brother Jack is a war hero on steroids — PT boat cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, rescues his men, written about in The New Yorker and Reader’s Digest. Joe volunteers for a secret dangerous mission to replicate Jack’s glory and dies. Pretty high bar of courage. Bobby spends the rest of his life making up for it — swimming the Colorado River, climbing Mount Kennedy in the Yukon, jumping overboard off the coast of Maine to save Jack’s jacket. Sometimes stunts. But increasingly, moral courage — which is the greater thing.
 
•       The Mob, Joe Kennedy, and the Beehive: When Bobby starts poking around in the mob as a Senate aide, J. Edgar Hoover is only too happy to point out: keep going here, you know where it’s going to end up. With Joe Kennedy. Bobby’s investigation of Giancana and Frank Sinatra starts grazing against his own father. Thomas’s reading: whether conscious or unconscious, there is an element of rebellion. Bobby, appointed henchman, doing the dirty stuff for pop, resenting it, starts poking the beehive that might expose him. It never fully landed. But it started. And Hoover used it to blackmail the Kennedys.
 
•       The Ripple of Hope, and RFK Jr. as Tragedy: Bobby’s trip to South Africa — apartheid everywhere, the freedom movement barely existing, everybody in prison. His speech: every time somebody does something brave or heroic, it causes a ripple, and that gives you hope. A young Margaret Marshall, later Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, was in the audience. He gave us hope where there was none. That is the ghost Andrew went looking for at Hickory Hill and didn’t find. The contrast with RFK Jr. is, for Thomas, simply sad. Poignant. His own family has disavowed him. Caroline Kennedy made a broadcast accusing him of crimes. The idea of Robert Kennedy Jr. is tragic.
 
About the Guest
 
Evan Thomas is an American writer and historian. He was Washington bureau chief of Newsweek for ten years and a writer and editor there for thirty-three years. He is the author of ten books, including Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon & Schuster, 2000), Being Nixon, Road to Surrender, and, with Walter Isaacson, The Wise Men. He has taught at Harvard and Princeton. His biography of Churchill is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in December 2026.
 
References:
 
•       Robert Kennedy: His Life by Evan Thomas (Simon & Schuster, 2000).
 
•       The Wise Men by Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 1986) — referenced in the closing.
 
•       Robert Coles — Bobby Kennedy’s psychologist friend, referenced in the conversation.
 
•       Hickory Hill, McLean, Virginia — the Kennedy family home Andrew visited on this trip to Washington DC.
 
•       Bobby Kennedy’s “Ripple of Hope” speech, University of Cape Town, South Africa, June 6, 1966.
 
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 2,900 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

“That kind of put soccer on my radar as a sport. I saw how deeply it meant to people, in a way I didn’t appreciate prior to that. And then I was in London when the World Cup began, and I saw the opening match — Argentina and Cameroon, with Cameroon winning in an upset. Just the whole spectacle of it gave me an appreciation for the game.” — Brian Bunk, on Ireland, Italia ’90, and the moment everything changed
 
Not long now. Only seven days until the World Cup begins. Just enough time to read Brian D. Bunk’s new The Shortest History of Soccer: From Ancient Kicking Games to the World’s Most Popular Sport. History isn’t Bunk with Brian. He looks a bit like Elton John, which is appropriate given that old Rocket Man was chairman of Watford and bankrolled the tiny English club to almost winning the league. Pop stars like Ed Sheeran (Ipswich) and Robert Plant (Wolves) love football, Bunk notes. Probably because it reminds them of where they came from.
 
Bunk’s thesis is that soccer’s global dominance is not accidental. Born in the industrial communities of nineteenth-century England, the game gave workers a new identity, new evidence of their collective power, proof they’ll never walk alone. That same logic explains why middle-aged men all over America religiously gather at their local bars to watch English teams with strange names like Ipswich Town and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Such is religion in our globalised post-industrial age.
 
“Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don’t like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that,” the great Liverpool manager Bill Shankly quipped. That’s the shortest of short histories of football. What the working-class Shankly meant was that it gives us social meaning — which is, indeed, more historically significant than the life or death of a single individual. Or even God. Football saves our souls, Brian Bunk concurs with Bill Shankly. Enjoy the World Cup.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Soccer Was Born in Industrial Communities for a Reason: The game emerged in industrial Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century not by accident but because industrialisation had shattered traditional community life. Mass migration to cities, technological disruption, the loss of familiar rhythms — all created a need for new kinds of identity and belonging. Soccer filled that need. It gave factory workers a team to follow, a ground to gather at, a shared identity that transcended ethnic and class lines. Bunk’s argument: this community function is baked into the game itself, which is why it has replicated across every culture it has touched.
 
•       Why Americans Love the Premier League: Bunk identifies the 1990s as the pivotal decade for American soccer. The 1994 World Cup on home soil. The women’s World Cup. The formation of MLS. The arrival of the FIFA video game. The Premier League broadcasting deals with ESPN and Fox. All of these combined and snowballed. Add to that the NFL owners investing in English clubs, the celebrity ownership wave (Ryan Reynolds, Elton John), and the cultural footprint of shows like Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham. The result: a generation of Americans for whom following the Premier League is a primary source of community.
 
•       Maradona: All the Contradictions of Football in One Man: Asked which historical match he would most want to attend, Bunk chooses Mexico City, June 1986: Argentina vs England. Not for the Hand of God goal — which was cheating — but for the second goal, the one where Maradona picked up the ball in his own half, went past five English players, and scored what is generally considered the greatest goal in the history of the game. Bryon Butler’s BBC radio commentary: “turning like a little eel.” Andrew’s verdict: if any single figure captures all the genius, joy, turbulence, and tragedy of football, it is Maradona.
 
•       The World Cup Returns to North America: In seven days, the 2026 FIFA World Cup begins in the United States, Canada, and Mexico — the first time the tournament has returned to North America since the USA hosted in 1994. The timing of Bunk’s book is deliberate. Soccer is more popular in America than at any point in history, and the home World Cup is the event that could push it into the first tier of American sports culture. The Premier League, MLS, women’s soccer, and now the World Cup: the game’s US footprint is larger than it has ever been.
 
•       Andrew’s Game: Tottenham vs Benfica, April 1962: Andrew’s own fantasy match, offered unprompted at the end: the first leg of the 1962 European Cup semi-final between Tottenham Hotspur and Benfica at the Est00e1dio da Luz in Lisbon on March 20, 1962, with Eusebio and Jimmy Greaves on the same pitch. Spurs lost 320131 on the night, went out 420132 on aggregate. Two clear penalties not given. Andrew’s conclusion: had Spurs won that match, the history of European football — and possibly his own life — would have been different. He notes that he has a son, and that he should have called him Jimmy.
 
About the Guest
 
Brian D. Bunk is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches courses on world history, modern Europe, and the global history of soccer. He is the author of The Shortest History of Soccer: From Ancient Kicking Games to the World’s Most Popular Sport (The Experiment, June 2026), Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2025), and From Football to Soccer: The Early History of the Beautiful Game in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2021). He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
 
References:
 
•       The Shortest History of Soccer by Brian D. Bunk (The Experiment, June 2026).
 
•       Beyond the Field: How Soccer Built Community in the United States by Brian D. Bunk (University of Illinois Press, 2025).
 
•       Argentina vs England, FIFA World Cup quarter-final, Azteca Stadium, Mexico City, June 22, 1986 — the Hand of God game, referenced as Bunk’s fantasy match.
 
•       Tottenham Hotspur vs Benfica, European Cup semi-final, Estádio da Luz, Lisbon, April 1962 — Andrew’s fantasy match.
 
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 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On A...

“Get the f*** out of your house and join an organisation. Groups are how we make movements. They’re how we make political and social change. They’re how we transform. Nobody does anything of value alone.” — Yotam Marom
 
If you’re feeling politically powerless, you’re not alone. Yotam Marom — full-time organiser, facilitator and veteran of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter — has spent his adult life on the front lines of progressive movements. His new book, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond the Politics of Powerlessness, explains why progressive movements keep losing — and what to do about it.
 
Marom’s diagnosis is that the left has developed a “politics of powerlessness” — an attachment to purity, insularity, and performing resistance rather than building power. In contrast, the right understands that people’s pain is real, and channelling it into something organised is the only route to political change. The liberal model of showing up every few years, voting, and then going home is insufficient. And the left too often sabotages itself by dodging conflict and choosing righteousness over action.
 
His prescription is to “get the f*** out of your house” and join an organisation. Groups are how societies change and where people find meaning, purpose, and connection. So go on the streets. Turn up the volume. Your days will be louder and more meaningful.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Politics of Powerlessness: Why the Left Keeps Losing: Progressive and left movements have repeatedly put enormous numbers of people into the streets — and repeatedly failed to convert that energy into durable political power. Marom’s explanation: a politics of powerlessness has taken hold. It prizes purity over winning, insularity over coalition, righteousness over effectiveness. It avoids conflict because conflict feels dangerous. It avoids leadership because leadership feels hierarchical. The result is movements that are morally serious and politically weak. The right, by contrast, is very good at taking pain and converting it into organised power.
 
•       The Right Channels Pain. The Left Needs to Do the Same: Trump’s most effective political move, in Marom’s analysis: he tells people that they’re being screwed — and he’s right about that. Then he continues to screw them. But the left cannot simply counter this with policy arguments. The people who voted for Trump are not wrong that the system has failed them. Income inequality is growing. Politicians don’t listen. There is no leverage. Marom’s argument: the left needs its own version of this — speaking directly to people’s pain and offering a genuine path to power. Bernie, AOC, and Mamdani know how to do this. They’re not the only ones.
 
•       Liberal Democracy Is Necessary but Insufficient: Voting, electoral participation, civic engagement — these are important and necessary parts of a healthy democratic society. But they are not sufficient to make big political change. The right understands this and has been exploiting it for a decade: the failure of the liberal establishment to deliver for ordinary people is the fuel for right-wing populism. Marom’s answer is not to abandon liberal democracy but to supplement it with the kind of mass social movement that has historically produced the big political changes: the labour movement, the civil rights movement, the suffragette movement.
 
•       Conflict and Leadership Are Good, Actually: Two of the left’s most self-destructive habits, in Marom’s experience as a facilitator: avoiding conflict and avoiding leadership. Groups that learn to face conflict with dignity and care come out with better strategies. Leaders who accept the responsibility of leadership — who are willing to be visible, to take risks, to be wrong in public — give movements something to coalesce around. The fetishisation of horizontalism and the terror of hierarchy have kept many progressive organisations small, fractured, and ineffective. Leadership is not domination. It is responsibility.
 
•       Get the F*** Out of Your House: Marom’s prescription for individuals who feel powerless: join an organisation. Not a party, not a mailing list — an actual organisation where people gather, disagree, decide things together, and act collectively. It doesn’t have to be a national political organisation. It can be a union, a community organisation, a neighbourhood group, a mutual aid network. The point is the group. Groups are where political change happens. They are also where people find meaning, purpose, and connection. Nobody does anything of value alone. Not political change, and not a good life.
 
About the Guest
 
Yotam Marom is a full-time organiser and facilitator based in Brooklyn, New York. He has been active in movements since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, played leadership roles at Occupy Wall Street, and co-founded IfNotNow and the Wildfire Project. He is the author of For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond the Politics of Powerlessness (The New Press, June 2, 2026). He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children.
 
References:
 
•       For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond the Politics of Powerlessness by Yotam Marom (The New Press, June 2, 2026).
 
•       Episode 2919: David Masciotra on A Country of Strangers — referenced at the opening.
 
•       Episode 2903: Ece Temelkuran on Nation of Strangers — referenced at the opening.
 
•       Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848–1849 — referenced in the closing exchange.
 
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 2,900 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:

“Be optimistic about the boom, but don’t buy the stock.” — Liaquat Ahamed on the AI bubble
 
Yesterday, Alexander Starritt argued that the 2008 financial crash ruined the lives of his generation. But compared with the great crash of 1873, 2008 looks like a tremor. The Pulitzer Prize-winning economic historian Liaquat Ahamed has a new book out today, 1873, which presents this 19th century economic crash as the first truly global financial crisis.
 
In 1870, three globalising infrastructure projects were completed in quick succession: the US transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Trans-India railroad linking Bombay to Calcutta. Into this newly integrated global economy, the Franco-Prussian War injected a trillion-dollar-equivalent indemnity that the Rothschilds helped France raise — and the resulting dramatic capital flows produced three simultaneous bubbles in Berlin, Vienna, and New York. A French journalist named Jules Verne worked out that for the first time, you could circumnavigate the globe in less than eighty days. Around the world in one global economic crisis.
 
The lesson for posterity, Ahamed warns, is that the authorities made a catastrophic error by doubling down on the gold standard, producing decades of deflation that triggered an anti-semitic and anti-globalist populism, and ultimately led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. So what does that tell us about today’s AI boom, which is about to be rocketed by three trillion-dollar IPOs? Be optimistic about the boom, the wise Ahamed says. But don’t buy the stock.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Jules Verne and the First Global Economy: In 1870, three iconic infrastructure projects were completed: the US transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, and the Trans-India railroad linking Bombay to Calcutta. A French newspaper noted that for the first time, a traveller could circle the globe in less than eighty days. Jules Verne read the article and found his next novel. The point for Ahamed: this moment marked the creation of a genuinely integrated global economy for the first time in history. And with global integration came the first global financial crisis. The boom of the 1850s and 1860s was not irrational. It reflected real economic growth. The crash came from what happened next.
 
•       The Trillion-Dollar Indemnity and Three Simultaneous Bubbles: Under the peace treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War, France was required to pay Germany an indemnity worth the equivalent of $1.2 trillion in today’s money. With the help of the Rothschilds, France raised this sum in six months. The resulting capital injection caused the Berlin and Vienna equity markets to rise 200–300 percent. Simultaneously, European capital fleeing the war flowed into US railroad construction, inflating that bubble further. A third bubble formed in foreign borrowing on the London capital markets, as money chased yield in countries that should never have been given credit. Three bubbles, one crash.
 
•       The Wrong Lesson from 1873: Gold Standard Orthodoxy: When the crash came, the authorities made a catastrophic error: they concluded that the gold standard had worked because the 1850s and 1860s boom had happened under it. They failed to see that the crash itself was partly produced by the gold standard’s rigidities. The resulting decade of deflation crushed farmers, debtors, and ordinary people across Europe and America, fuelling anti-globalist populism. The same orthodoxy — applied by Montagu Norman and others in the 1920s — helped cause the Great Depression. We always fight the last war.
 
•       The Rothschilds: Scapegoated Despite Being Innocent: The Rothschilds were at the centre of the 1873 boom as the world’s leading bond underwriters. Presciently, they kept a low profile during the most speculative phase of the bubble. When the crash came, they were viciously scapegoated — part of the wave of antisemitism that swept Europe in the wake of the depression. Ahamed’s irony: the Rothschilds were blamed for a crisis they had been cautious enough to partially avoid. The story of 1873 is, among other things, a story of how financial panic turns into political persecution.
 
•       The AI Boom: Be Optimistic, Don’t Buy the Stock: Andrew’s final question: should we buy Anthropic and OpenAI when they go public? Ahamed’s answer, via the lesson of every bubble from 1873 to 1929 to the dot-com era: bull markets are usually driven by real fundamentals — until the last phase, when they become untethered. The 1920s were rational until 1927; the dot-com era was rational until 1997. The dilemma: the last irrational phase may still produce 40 percent gains. Ahamed’s advice: be optimistic about the AI boom. It reflects real productivity growth. But don’t buy the stock.
 
About the Guest
 
Liaquat Ahamed is a financial historian and investment manager. He graduated with degrees in economics from Cambridge and Harvard, worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and had a twenty-five-year career as a professional investment manager based in London and New York before turning to writing. He is the author of 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World (Penguin Press, June 2, 2026) and Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize, the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Gold Medal, and the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year). He lives in Washington, D.C.
 
References:
 
•       1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press, June 2, 2026).
 
•       Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (Penguin Press, 2009) — the Pulitzer Prize-winning predecessor, referenced throughout.
 
•       Episode 2928: Alexander Starritt on Drayton and Mackenzie — directly referenced at the opening; the 2008 companion.
 
•       James Surowiecki, “Why Stocks Keep Going Up,” The Atlantic — referenced in the final exchange.
 
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 2,900 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

“To explain the lives of people living in this moment, to look at the historical forces that are shaping all of us, you have to look at business and technology. In our period, what is it that’s shaping us? I would suggest it’s the long fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and the technology revolution that’s been happening in California.” — Alexander Starritt
 
How to write a novel about our times? For Alexander Starritt, it means juxtaposing friendship and ambition alongside the grand historical forces of the age. Just as George Eliot did in Middlemarch. Whereas for Eliot, those forces were the 1832 Reform Acts and the industrial revolution, Starritt’s forces are the 2008 financial crisis and the digital revolution.
 
His novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, follows two ambitious Gen X’ers through the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The 2008 crash, Starritt says, ruined the lives of many of his generation. Rather than being in a Gramscian interregnum, our brave new 21st century world is already visible. But in contrast with many progressive critics of our neo-liberalism age, Starritt isn’t apocalyptic about the future. Think of Drayton and Mackenzie as Middlemarch and McKinsey. Revolutions will come and go, but, for Alexander Starritt, friendship and ambition are unchanging.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The First Novel on the FT Business Book List in 15 Years: The Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year longlist typically features books on China, AI, and tech giants. In 2025, for the first time in fifteen years, it included a novel. Starritt’s reading of why: there’s a gap. The literary and cultural worlds have become so estranged from the business world that very few writers are even attempting to write seriously about the forces that actually shape people’s lives. That gap, he says, says as much about the cultural moment as any quality the book itself might have.
 
•       George Eliot’s Method: Historical Forces as the Engine of Fiction: When George Eliot wrote Middlemarch, the historical forces she was dramatising were the Reform Acts and the industrial revolution. Starritt’s equivalent: the 2008 financial crisis and the California tech revolution. His method is Eliot’s — use a closely observed relationship (in his case, a male friendship rather than a marriage) as the engine through which the reader experiences history. The friendship gives the historical canvas an emotional charge. The historical canvas gives the friendship its full weight. Neither works without the other.
 
•       Male Friendship: The Most Important Relationship Nobody Writes About: We’ve all read too many books and seen too many films about romantic and sexual relationships. Starritt’s observation: there is another type of relationship — friendship — that is incredibly important to almost all of us, and that gets almost no literary attention. Drayton and Mackenzie is his attempt to take it seriously. The friendship between James (straight-lined, disciplined, brilliant) and Roland (impulsive, self-sabotaging, charming) evolves from incomprehension to something described by the Financial Times as “unbreakable” — and the reviewer admitted that by the end, their vision wasn’t the clearest.
 
•       The Post-Liberal World Is Already Here: Everyone quotes Gramsci’s interregnum — the old world is dying, the new one hasn’t been born yet. Starritt’s counter: the new world has already been born. You can see it everywhere across the Western world. British jobs for British workers. Reshoring manufacturing. Keeping out undesirable foreigners. There is, he notes, quite a lot of consensus about these things, even if the discourse around them is contested. The post-liberal world is already here. The question is not whether it will arrive but what we do with it.
 
•       European Optimism: The Separation From America May Be for Europe’s Own Good: Starritt’s closing optimism, which he acknowledges may not be welcome news for American listeners: the painful separation from America that America is forcing upon Europe is probably, in the long run, for Europe’s own good. Rather than relying on the White House, Europeans can take responsibility for themselves. David Runciman’s idea: democracy needs to be renewed every generation. The external pressure of China, Russia, and an America that no longer wants to help may be the forcing function that produces that renewal. Maybe we can get some agency back.
 
About the Guest
 
Alexander Starritt is a Scottish novelist and entrepreneur. He was born in 1985 and is the author of Drayton and Mackenzie (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2, 2026), We Germans (winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize), and The Beast (a 2017 Spectator book of the year). He was a founding team member of the policy platform Apolitical. He lives in London.
 
References:
 
•       Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt (Atlantic Monthly Press, June 2, 2026).
 
•       George Eliot, Middlemarch — Starritt’s primary literary model, referenced explicitly.
 
•       Adrian Wooldridge, “Bring Back the Big Business Novel,” Bloomberg — the piece referenced at the opening.
 
•       David Runciman — referenced for his argument about democratic renewal.
 
•       Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay — the Financial Times comparison.
 
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 2,900 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:
 

(00:31) - Introduction: the FT Business Book longlist and the first novel in 15 years

(02:03) - The gap in culture: literary and business worlds estranged

(02:50) - Adrian Wooldridge: bring back the big business no...