Drayton and Mackenzie: Alexander Starritt on How the 2008 Crash Ruined Everything

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Longtime viewers and listeners to the show know that I'm a big fan of the Financial Times best business books of the year. Last year, I was struck by the fact that included on the list amongst books on China and AI, of course, and, all sorts of companies like, Google and Facebook, there was a novel. First time, I think, they've had a book on the long list, a novel on the long list of the FT book of the year for many years. It was an all it was a novel called or it is a novel called Drayton and Mackenzie, by a writer called Alexander Starritt. Alex, is, also a management consultant, startup entrepreneur. And the book is out this week in The United States, and I'm thrilled that Alexander Starritt is joining us from London. Alex, congratulations on the success of the book. Did very well in The UK. It's out this week in The US. Were you surprised that it appeared on the shortlist of, the FT amongst books? Many of these books, in fact, we've covered books like Karen Hao's Empire of AI, Steven Witt's The Thinking Machine about NVIDIA, Dan Wang's, Breakneck about America and Chinese rivalry. Were you, were you expecting to be on the long list of the FT book of the year?

00:02:03 Alexander Starritt: No. I wasn't. I saw I mean, I knew that my publishers have put me forward for it. And, but it felt like very much a long shot that the FT would pick up on it. And I think the fact that they did says as much about a gap for that sort of book than it does about any qualities that the book itself might have. Yeah. But, you know, there's you know, the reason that there's been I think it's 15 years since they've had a novel on that list. And the big part of it, I think, is that the kind of literary world or the kind of cultural world and our business world are so estranged from one another at the moment and have become so over the past few decades. There's not you know, there are very few people writing about this kind of stuff at all.

00:02:50 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And, another old friend of the show, Adrian Wooldridge, who loved the book, wrote a piece for Bloomberg. He's a columnist there. Bring back the big business novel. Were you writing this as a business novel? Did you wanna, emulate people like Tom Wolfe?

00:03:08 Alexander Starritt: No. I mean, I have to I have to admit, I've never read that Tom Wolfe book.

00:03:12 Andrew Keen: Are you, Adam?

00:03:13 Alexander Starritt: No. I mean, I will. I promise I will.

00:03:16 Andrew Keen: I don't care.

00:03:18 Alexander Starritt: Yeah. I'm promising it to myself. no. I didn't think of it as a business book. I thought of it as a book about the search for meaning in life and trying to understand why people's lives turn out the way they do. And I thought that to explain the lives of people living in this moment, to look at the sort of historical forces that are shaping all of us, you have to look at business and technology. You know, if when George Eliot wrote Middlemarch in it, you know, the historical forces that she was talking about were the reform acts, democratization, and the industrial revolution. You know, in our periods, 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.

00:04:17 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I think that's in some ways, maybe you'll correct me if I'm wrong, reflected in your own life. You this is your third novel. Your first two, The Beast and We Germans, were very well reviewed, and they sold presumably quite well. Thirty, fifty years ago, you'd be a famous young novelist. These days, though, you have to make a living as a publisher. You were a start up entrepreneur. So what were once writers have become entrepreneurs. Is that fair? I'm not suggesting that, you what you've done as a writer is incredibly hard, and yet it's, it's probably not particularly lucrative.

00:05:02 Alexander Starritt: I know. I mean, there's certainly some truth to that. The I mean, I sometimes read interviews with writers, the kind of generation above me, and they talk about living in London and getting by on writing a monthly review for the Times literary supplement, which now I think will pay you about £100. So, yeah, the material circumstances of writing have changed a lot. And it's also true that the novel is not as central in our culture as it was even in, say, the eighties. And so, yeah, people have got to have jobs.

00:05:40 Andrew Keen: People have got to have jobs. What's your job, Alex? Your day job.

00:05:45 Alexander Starritt: So my day job at the moment is so about eight years ago, a couple of others and I set up a company which does a weekly briefing on international politics and economics mainly for big corporates and some investment funds and government agencies. And the thing I enjoy about it is it's a very different it's a kind of opposite way of looking at the world to fiction writing. You know, it's all about impersonal analysis of what's happening. I think of it as a kind of political economy briefing.

00:06:20 Andrew Keen: Your book, Drayton and Mackenzie, is about a relationship, two men, an unlikely friendship, a plan that could change the world. Sunday Post called it an epic masterpiece encompassing some of the most pivotal points of our century. Is it a novel about male friendship, or is it a novel about contemporary history or both? Or are those so intertwined that they're impossible to separate?

00:06:48 Alexander Starritt: It's a novel about both those things. The thing that drew me to the novel I mean, I've been a bit surprised by this aspect of the reaction in a way. And I think this is quite typical for novelists who have these sort of superstructures in their novel. You know, I was drawn to this by the kind of historical forces element of it. And on a kind of almost literary technical level, I thought I wanna have this sort of relationship between two men as the kind of engine for it because the book needs an engine. And I also thought we've all read too many books and seen too many films about the relationships, you know, sexual relationships, romantic relationships. And there's other type of relationships, in fact, incredibly important to all of us, which is friendship. And it doesn't get as much of a look in. And so I just thought it'd be more interesting to write about that.

00:07:46 Andrew Keen: You're a start up entrepreneur. You, you were involved with, you were on the founding team of the policy platform Apolitical, which in 2018 was listed as one of the world's most innovative companies. That's usually a kiss of death. I've been in the start up world, so it doesn't seem and maybe correct me if I'm wrong. It doesn't lend itself to close friendships between men and men or men and women often because you're not supposed to go to bed with your colleagues. You get into trouble for that in America. But, also, there's a great deal of rivalry. Do you think in your own experience as a start up entrepreneur that it brings out friendship? We, of course, live in an age supposedly of anxiety, of loneliness, where we're increasingly incapable of creating friendships, of talking to one another.

00:08:43 Alexander Starritt: Well, that's an interesting question. My own experience is, you know, that policy platform, it was set up by two women, which is a bit of a different vibe anyway. And I think the kind of companies that I'm talking about and that company were very mission driven. You know, it wasn't just about make getting ourselves rich, which we did not. It, and I think in those sorts of companies, there's much more scope for people to become friends because you all have you have this kind of collective sense of purpose, which really binds people together. I mean, as cynic would say that mission driven companies exploit that sense of purpose to hire people for less money than they should be paid and get more out of people than you should be able to get out of them. But I think it does give people that feeling.

00:09:40 Andrew Keen: We live in unusual times. Some people would call them surreal times. Next week, I have an interview with the very successful American surrealist, Ben Fountain. He has a new book out, Rasputin swims the Potomac, the Potomac, a satire of our Trump page in which he calls reality hyperreality or surrealism. You're much more of a realist writer. You're writing about The UK rather than The US, which is probably more realistic, less surrealistic, or hyperreal. But you think that your tools of realism as a writer, you write about them not you use them obviously, in, in Drayton and Mackenzie, but also in your first two books, the beast and We Germans. Is it sufficient, or are they sufficient to make sense of our bizarre world, the world of Trump and Putin and every other bizarre thing that's happening these days?

00:10:43 Alexander Starritt: I think so. And I would argue, in fact, that bizarreness mostly applies to, you know, the discourse. Most you know, even more so the online discourse than it does to people's actual lives. You know, the stuff that Trump comes out with is bizarre often, but I should be careful. I'm coming to The US soon. But Yeah.

00:11:06 Andrew Keen: You won't let in, Alex. Alex, or you'll get back

00:11:09 Alexander Starritt: to from the record.

00:11:11 Andrew Keen: Not by, ICE agent. But

00:11:14 Alexander Starritt: I think when you look at what's actually happening in people's lives, it's, you know, it's explicable by all the things that people use to explain lives a hundred and fifty years ago. You know, it's economic change, technological change, you know, precariousness in the workplace. It's all you know, I don't think actually the time we're living in, even though it is a sort of time of flux and things are changing rapidly, I think it's a mistake. And I see lots of people who believe this to think that everything has become so sort of frothy and fervid and mixed up that, you know, it can't really be understood anymore. And to those people, I kind of think, like, get off Twitter and just, like, go and meet some real people, and that feeling will fade away.

00:12:06 Andrew Keen: So, social media isn't central. Your book, Drayton and Mackenzie, is not a critique of social media like so much else these days?

00:12:15 Alexander Starritt: No. I mean, I loved pre Musk era Twitter. I thought it was amazing, and I used it a lot of my work. I thought it was the world's premier English language news source at that time. So I don't I don't have a sort of, like, you know, reflexive antipathy towards it, but I do also note that I've got rid of all of mine apart from Twitter, which I still have to use for work and will get rid of it when I can just because it does roil your brain.

00:12:48 Andrew Keen: Speaking of Elon Musk, your book has been extremely well reviewed, but the one slightly negative review I read, which is always the most interesting and I can hear you chuckling. I'm sure you enjoyed it too. There was a negative review in the new, in the new Statesman, England's left wing weekly suggesting that you cast big tech leaders as Olympian. Do you tend to? Does the book idealize the Musks and the Altmans and the Bezoses of the world, or is that unfair in terms of the book?

00:13:21 Alexander Starritt: It's not totally unfair. I do think, you know, I need to run out to an explanation here, but, you know, part of what this whole book is about is actually the limitations of an egocentric approach to life. You know, one of the characters is someone who's incredibly ambitious and kind of, you know, would like to be Elon Musk on one level.

00:13:48 Andrew Keen: Wouldn't we all, Alex?

00:13:49 Alexander Starritt: Wouldn't we all. And part of what the book is about is how arid and ultimately unsatisfying your life is if it's only about winning, if

00:14:00 Andrew Keen: if

00:14:01 Alexander Starritt: you only want the gold stars. And so one of the things that happens in the novel is that he encounters Elon Musk who has been doing very comparable things to what he's been doing except obviously that is much more success in this much more successful way and that's quite confronting for him. I mean, what I would also say about Elon Musk personally is like, you know, regardless of his politics or the things he says, it's you know, there's a good argument to be made that nobody in the world has done more for decarbonization. No other individual has done more for it than Elon Musk for the simple reason that he made EVs and their associated technologies a real commercial proposition. And he frightened all the other car companies or most of them into getting involved in it as well. And that is huge, and that will always be true.

00:15:01 Andrew Keen: So how maybe this comes back to my point about hyper realism or surrealism or the bizarre nature of our world. How do you explain that? I mean, he is, as you suggest, in some ways, a great man of history by pioneering EV, by leading Tesla, reshaping up the future of vehicles. But at the same time, he's astonishingly obnoxious. He seems to me, at least, to be a racist, nostalgic for apartheid South Africa, many other things. He's clearly autistic on many different levels. How do you make sense of that? Are the characters in your Drayton and Mackenzie, do they have, Musk's complexity or his bizarre qualities of, on the one hand, being a remarkable man of history and, on the other hand, an annoyingly obnoxious pain in the neck?

00:15:51 Alexander Starritt: Well, I would say you put your finger right on it. I think a person like Musk would respond very well to that sort of even fiction, you know, the fully rounded complex character. And the way that Musk is written by in a lot of our journalism is, of course, you know, very two dimensional and, you know, one side or the other. And, yeah, I do think that things like fiction, particularly realist fiction with its emphasis on character and sort of I contain multitudes reality of human beings is very well suited to describing that sort of person and understanding him. You know, and obviously, there are lots you know this already, but, you know, Henry Ford is maybe a good analogy. These kind of people have always been there. And the separation between your abilities in one field, you know, let's say, in the field of technology and your opinions about other things, you know, Henry Ford's opinions, of course, he was a notorious extreme and anti semite. You know, those things can coexist in one person.

00:17:12 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And of course, perhaps the man who did most to make Ford immortal was Huxley in brave new world that created Fordism. Sort of. Yeah. Your book is another very positive review described it as a punchy satire where Dickens meets The Big Short. But coming back to Musk, we did a show, a few months ago with another London based journalist who'd written a book about the inner world of Elon Musk. Your book is about the outer worlds of a couple of entrepreneurs. What although, of course, it also is intimate in its own Dickensian way. What does the inner world of somebody like Musk look like? Is it too bizarre for even a not any kind of novelist, whether they're a surrealist or a realist like yourself, to actually describe?

00:18:08 Alexander Starritt: Well, I mean, I, you know, I don't know Elon Musk. I

00:18:12 Andrew Keen: But you can imagine you're a novelist. Yeah.

00:18:15 Alexander Starritt: My speculation would be that I mean, the thing I see one of the things I see in him is a characteristic common to all kinds of engineers and technologists, which is, you know, a kind of profound interest basically in how things work and systems and what the effects of systems are. And in his politics, I think you see and this, I would say, is very common to engineers as well. You see the application of that mindset to something where it doesn't really make sense. You know, a lot of Silicon Valley people's political ideas are often you know, I don't wanna be I don't wanna be harsh, but, like

00:19:00 Andrew Keen: I do want you to be harsh. You're allowed to be harsh on this show.

00:19:03 Alexander Starritt: Right. You know, I mean, they're kind of sophomoric a lot of the time. They don't really understand the complexities of what's happening. And that's because they see it all in terms of these kind of simplified, decentralized systems when, of course, that's not the way politics works or not the way history works or human societies do. And, yeah, I would I think that's that underpins a lot of his political pronouncements, I would imagine.

00:19:32 Andrew Keen: Your book is not really about Musk. It's about, I wouldn't say, failed entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs who aspire to become Musk. And I'm astonished with how unpopular these successful entrepreneurs have become. I mean, every show I do seems everyone's facing, oh, we gotta get rid of the billionaires. Oh, they're ruining the world. You wrote a book, a few years ago called We Germans, a novel about remembering the Nazis, the shame of being associated with the Nazis, and Mhmm. As a grandson. Do you think one day in a hundred years, people will be writing not we Germans, but we entrepreneurs, sort of confessional novels or autobiographies about being associated with these destructive individuals? In other words and this is obviously a slightly absurd question.

00:20:20 Alexander Starritt: No. No. No.

00:20:22 Andrew Keen: Is there an equivalent in a way between the Nazis and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs these days?

00:20:28 Alexander Starritt: I mean, don't forget my first book was set in a tabloid newspaper.

00:20:33 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The beast.

00:20:34 Alexander Starritt: Yeah. I think it's a really interesting question. And I think, obviously, part of it depends on what happens over the next ten or twenty years with AI. You know, if we do all lose our jobs and everyone's living in penury apart from people who are invested in AI companies, then yeah. And I may I do think in a way, perhaps the great novel of the twenty-first century in America might be a sort of updated retelling of Frankenstein. You know, the kind of excitement and ingenuity and technical skill and giving life to this thing. And then, oops, it's out of control. It's destroying things and killing people.

00:21:21 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And it's interesting. You mentioned Frankenstein, fountain referred to that in, in his, in, in my conversation with him about his new normal.

00:21:30 Alexander Starritt: That's interesting. I mean, the and on your, on your question, I think personally, yeah, I'm always I'm always drawn to, like, I would say, I'm always interested in what I think the consensus is not seeing. Because on every subject, you get this polarization and this kind of this group think that self radicalizes. So now you have this deep antipathy to business and to Silicon Valley, like you said, in among lots of people. And there are good reasons for that. Of course, there are. We all know what they are. I don't need to rehash them, but there are, like, obvious things that those people are missing, you know, in, you know, in the book, for instance, one of the characters is having this kind of conversation and he says, you know, where do people think airplanes come from or the Internet or penicillin? Like, basically, everything that we have in our modern world is made by companies. And you might not like that, but it is the case. And therefore, it gives us all a stake in, essentially, in capitalism functioning well. And there is this, I think, this kind of lazy and ignorant idea, which is encapsulated in the phrase late stage capitalism The this whole system is decadent and corrupt and coming to an end. And in fact, I think when you look at it outside of the kind of group think, there's no sign whatsoever that it's coming to an end. There is a late stage that any of this is gonna fall apart anytime soon. And so I would suggest that people should, you know, should think more about how to make it function in a way in which we will benefit from. Right. You know, there are obviously all these advantages to all the things coming out of Silicon Valley and we'll want them, you know, that's why they're so successful. And this kind of wholesale rejection of like they're all, you know, they're all tech bros, I think it's just foolish, honestly. I think it's little different from the Lancashire weavers getting cross about the spinning Jenny or whatever it was.

00:23:58 Andrew Keen: They got a bit more than cross. I mean, certainly in Europe. The we've done lots of shows on the Luddites.

00:24:03 Alexander Starritt: Yeah. And yeah. Sorry. Yeah. I think that was all I was gonna say.

00:24:11 Andrew Keen: You, you know, you mentioned, AI and of course your book is features a couple of aspiring management consultants. Is that great apocalypse coming with AI? There was a recent piece in the FT about how AI threatens the giants of consulting, the McKinseys of the world. Your book is inhabited by a couple of aspiring McKinsey types. I know you yourself live in that world too. Is this something that, is when historians look back at the 2020s, is this gonna be the most memorable theme of our age about how technology did away with the old ruling class, the kind of characters who exist in your novel?

00:24:59 Alexander Starritt: Well, I don't think it's gonna do away with the old ruling class tour. I mean, I think it will make the old ruling class stronger. What it will do is what I really think is gonna happen is that it will be like previous waves of automation, the industrial revolution. I mean, even just I think it should be seen as part of a continuity with all of the, you know, all of this software that's come out of California since the early eighties. I mean, look for instance at think of secretaries, typists, clerks, all these jobs that existed in huge numbers in our lifetime and they're all basically gone. They don't really exist anymore. And for those people losing those jobs, yes, that was bad. But it's not as if our society collapsed. The question rather is and I do believe that whatever happens with AI, we will adapt and new types of jobs will be invented. And overall, it will lead to kind of greater human prosperity. The question really is how big is the shock? How fast is the shock? And the bigger and faster the shock is, the harder it will be for us to metabolize it in a way which doesn't ruin lots of people's lives. Because, you know, I know you're interested in the industrial revolution. If you look at how long it took for that to be metabolized, you know, for some people that was their whole life fundamentally. So, yeah, I it could be very bad, but I think it's just a question of, like, how fast and how big the shock is. Yeah. I think the only thing

00:26:44 Andrew Keen: we can say, Alex, for sure is in fifty years or a hundred years, people will still be talking about late stage capitalism.

00:26:50 Alexander Starritt: Yeah.

00:26:51 Andrew Keen: We can bear on that one. You're, you wrote an interesting piece for the times, last year. Stop mocking us millennials. The 2008 crash ruined our lives. You appropriated the millennials to speak about what you went through in 2008, the great crash and all the rest of it, which in your view at least or, you know, maybe compares to 1929 or 1873. What happened to you in, in 2008, and how does that appear in the novel?

00:27:26 Alexander Starritt: Yeah. I should say, actually, funny enough, those headlines, those times headlines, I believe are now written or at least drafted by AI. So stop the buzz. Yeah. You can stop. Multimillionaireals, pure rage baits, obviously.

00:27:42 Andrew Keen: We can't even blame editors anymore. We have to blame AI.

00:27:47 Alexander Starritt: So in 2008, I personally graduated from university and soon afterwards lost my first job. I got made redundant from my first job that autumn. But I think You're

00:28:00 Andrew Keen: going to get a psychological rupture. It sounds very painful.

00:28:05 Alexander Starritt: I do think that's true. And my argument would be this, that from, let's say, 1990 until 2008, the Western world lived, particularly Europe, lived in this period of stability, prosperity. The Cold War was won. The whole world basically had adopted capitalism. Even the Chinese and the Russians were kind of opening up to the West.

00:28:33 Andrew Keen: Even the Chinese and the Russians, Alex.

00:28:35 Alexander Starritt: Well, the Chinese are run by a committed communist party. But even they were opening up to the West and to kind of state directed capitalism. And many people at the time believed, of course, that China would be so, changed by this experience that it would become politically closer to the West as well. Of course, that didn't happen, but that's what people thought. I remember I think it must have been about 2006. I don't know if it was big in America. We had this popular campaign in Britain called Make Poverty History. People would wear these white plastic armbands. And

00:29:13 Andrew Keen: And what's interesting with regard to it in, you Yeah. Footballers, Stephen Fry was involved, all sorts of prominent people.

00:29:21 Alexander Starritt: Yeah. And what was what's interesting about it is that at the time, I think what that indicates is that we felt so affluent. We felt that things were just always continuously improving. That at some point, we could eradicate poverty. Like that, I mean, millions of people thought that. And now, of course, nobody thinks that. And I would say that, you know, I studied history at university. It was all about turning points. I would say the turning point was the 2008 financial crisis. And you can see that, for instance, in the kind of macroeconomic data about things like globalization, international trade, international flows of capital, all that kind of stuff. It was all, you know, everything was getting more international, more globalized until 2008 and then it went bang. And, you know, some examples, the last free trade agreement that The US signed with a new country was in 2007 with

00:30:18 Andrew Keen: such And in your piece, you have a graph about how GDP per head has flatlined since 2010.

00:30:26 Alexander Starritt: Yep. Exactly. And it was the beginning of this, you know, this kind of historical pendulum shift from away from, like, open borders, evermore tolerance, evermore individualism, back towards protectionism, British jobs for British war workers, which was you'll remember this scandalous slogan from Gordon Brown in 2009. You know, now British jobs for British workers is a political philosophy that's basically standard across the Western world. And at the time, it was considered so outrageous that people said it was illegal for the prime minister to say it. So yeah. I mean, in America, of course, the financial crisis brought about the birth of the Tea Party. You know, it brought that kind of populist right wing sentiment into the mainstream of the Republican Party. And that was the sort of, I would say, the precursor to MAGA. So I think in lots of ways, you can see that 2008 was this turning point, you know, a wave basically from, like, greater openness and individualism towards protectionism, tariff barriers, nationalism, antipathy to outsiders, all of it. I think that's where it started.

00:31:47 Andrew Keen: Do you think one of the reasons why your generation is still so shell shocked, you'd you know, maybe the AI talks about it ruining your lives. It certainly shaped your lives 2008. But as you said, it was a hinge moment. You live both before and after. So the beforehand was the world of Drayton and Mackenzie, the aspiring management consultants who got their first class, not all both of them, but one of them got their first class degrees where I assume the world was their oyster where they could do anything they liked, and they'd be successful and wealthy and travel around the world and go and work them for McKinsey or become start up entrepreneurs. And then after 2008, everything changed. So the world became a foreign place. Fukuyama famously talked about the end of history. But what's interesting for your generation is you live both at the end and the beginning of history.

00:32:44 Alexander Starritt: Yes. That's exactly right. If we'd been you know, I was born in 1985. Someone ten years older than me were to remember the Cold War and the Soviet Union, all the rest of it. I don't really. And, I mean, actually, because I'm my mom was German, the fall of the Berlin Wall was this huge event in our household, one that I barely understood, of course. And

00:33:10 Andrew Keen: Well, you're only four years old.

00:33:11 Alexander Starritt: Yeah. I was only four years old. And when I was about I must have been about six. We were staying with my grandparents in the South Of Germany. And in the middle of the night, we're woken up by this, like, horrific mechanical screeching. And my grandmother ran in and said because she recognized the sound, said, panzer. I, being a child and mixed up and half asleep, thought panthers, but, of course, panzer means tanks.

00:33:38 Andrew Keen: Mhmm.

00:33:39 Alexander Starritt: We went out onto the balcony, and it was the one of the or some part of the American border force, which had patrolled the inner German border, kind of leaving that and going back to its base in Heidelberg. So the real final end of the division of Germany and the Cold War. So I did see that bit of it. But, yeah, you're right. We people my sort of age, born in the eighties, grew up in what we thought was and what Francis Fukuyama suggested might be the way things were always gonna be. And now looking back on it, that was the exception. You know, that period, 1990 to 2008, that was the anomaly. That was the period.

00:34:26 Andrew Keen: Yeah. You've written, as I said, about history, we Germans, and this book, this new book is contemporary history. Should we blame can we blame history, Alex, for this? I mean, there's a generational guilt in your generation. The millennials often blame my generation, the boomers, for all this. Or can we blame history? Is history appropriate or easy to blame? I mean, that's a kind of German idea, blame history.

00:34:55 Alexander Starritt: I think we could lay a lot of blame on the idea of progress, which is obviously very important to lots of German political thinkers like Karl Marx.

00:35:08 Andrew Keen: And Hegel of course who invented the

00:35:11 Alexander Starritt: exhibition

00:35:11 Andrew Keen: of historiography. Exactly.

00:35:15 Alexander Starritt: And yeah. And, of course, progress doesn't really exist, I would suggest, in a kind of in the sense of human societies. It's a sort of Christian idea brought over into study of history. And lots of people think it's true because they look at technology, which is the one place where progress does exist and it's cumulative. And they assume that the same thing must be happening in our societies. You look at, for instance, at books like Steven Pinker's, it's called the Better Angels of Our Nature, which basically suggests that we used to be, you know, in ancient Roman times, horrific, cruel, violent barbarians. And over the course of the last two thousand years, we've learned to be gentle, civilized, and kind to each other, which I think is, with all due respect to Steven Pinker, complete bollocks. And we just happen to live recently in this period of relative peace. And the idea of progress is what's so confounding to people because they can't understand why it's not working. Henry Kissinger in his PhD thesis has this very interesting idea. He talks about the peace that ended the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the Congress of Vienna. And his theory is essentially that peace was too good. That the world the Europe it created was too stable, too prosperous, And that by nearly a hundred years later in 1914 when the First World War broke out, Europeans had forgotten what the real nature of warfare was. They were used to only kind of limited campaigns, foreign adventures, you win, you lose, whatever. It doesn't make that big a difference. And they'd forgotten that war can actually be existential, which is one reason he suggests why so many Europeans were so enthusiastic about the outbreak of the First World War. And I think something similar has happened less in America, certainly in Europe since 1945 in Western Europe, that we've lived under the American umbrella so completely that we've, and I would say until the last few years, forgotten that progress isn't real, that war still exists, that the world can be a kind of hubs in place. You know, particularly, you know, Germany is at the center of that and growing up partly in German culture, I was I can see that lots of people in Germany in the post war generations were brought up, including me, to believe that war simply belong to the past. That this kind of, like, violence, it wasn't it wasn't that it was wrong. It was that we'd, as a civilization, had evolved beyond it, you know, in the same way that we don't use horses anymore in the way we used to. And there's when Russia invaded Ukraine, you could see among a lot of these German commentators a kind of psychological rupture where they just can't could not bring these two ideas into connection with each other. One of which is war belongs to the past and the other is you're not allowed to invade Ukraine. And the only response to that problem, which is, you know, build weapons and give them to Ukrainians, is one that they simply cannot accept. So, yes, I think we can blame a lot on our ideas of history.

00:38:51 Andrew Keen: You mentioned the p word a couple of times, pro not peace. You mentioned Kissinger's thesis on peace, but progress. Your book, as I said, has been described as an epic masterpiece, at least by the Sunday Post, which is a bit woolly. If it's a book about one thing, a treatise, maybe not in Kissinger's PhD thesis style, but more in a fictional sense. Is it about the promise, the hope, and the illusion of progress?

00:39:24 Alexander Starritt: I would say it's a book about two things at the same time. One of those things is that historical hinge moment and the way our lives been shaped by what's all what's all been happening for the last twenty years. And the other thing it's about is searching for meaning within that flux. You know, one of the things that marks out millennials, you know, you can see it in all the management consultant surveys, and Gen Z is the same.

00:39:55 Andrew Keen: The ones that have left, the ones that haven't been replaced by AI.

00:39:58 Alexander Starritt: The ones that haven't been AI'd yet. You know, they're all saying or they all look for a sense of purpose in their work. You know, my, my working title for this novel was On Purpose because that's why I see all around me. You know, it's a kind of human response to things be to the world around you changing unmanageably fast that you start looking for meaning. And you see all these, yeah, you see all these people with a sense of vocation about one thing or another. And, obviously, what where some people find that meaning is in technological progress, particularly as it pertains to climate. You know, there's a lot of people who've made decarbonization, kind of who derive a sense of purpose from that very important work that we're doing.

00:40:55 Andrew Keen: Yeah. On purpose is an alternative, as you say, an alternative title. Marx famously said we make our own histories, but not quite in the way we think we do. It is another way of describing On Purpose, talking about agency and these men and all of us, your generation, my generation, we're all looking for agency, and, of course, it's particularly relevant and ironic in an age of AI where we're supposedly replacing our own agency with smart machines. Yeah. I smart machines.

00:41:28 Alexander Starritt: Yeah. I really think that's true. I yeah. I think that there are kind of two aspects to it. One is that, you know, pre 2008, the thing that we and people like me were all told growing up in schools and universities was, you know, what you're supposed to be doing with your life is fulfill your purpose. You know, there was no concept of duty service these terms even like signing off and cringe you know. Nobody you know, for my grandparents generation it was war, national service, wear a uniform, all that stuff. Whereas for my generation, there was no concept that society would ask anything of you. It was just self realization, self fulfillment, the search for to like jump as high as you can jump fundamentally. And I think since 2008, we have seen this shift back towards the collective in lots of different ways. You know, for people on the right, the nation, the need to kind of define the nation against outsiders and for people on the left that need to like save the world from all the things that are going on. So I do yeah. I think that's part of it. And sorry I've forgotten the question now. How embarrassing.

00:42:50 Andrew Keen: Well, final question, Alex. You've been very generous with your time. I have a upcoming show in the next couple of days with the economic historian, Liaquat Ahamed. His book 1873 is out this week. He's also the author of Lords of Finance, which won the Pulitzer Prize about the great crash of the night of the late twenties. I wonder if we look back at history, we in fifty years, we I joked, maybe it's not very funny that people still be using the term late stage capitalism. But when we look back, maybe if we're in the February or fifties or nineties, we'll look back at this moment, the moment that you claimed that ruined your lives, the 2008 crash. And, actually, it's not that big a deal when you compare it to the great crash of 1873, the first great global crash, or certainly to the twenties. Do you really think that we're living in historic historically interesting times, or are we on the brink of something? I know David Runciman once, he had an interesting podcast about an age in which we always expect to wake up to some massive news. We always think we're on the verge of something historic. Do you think that, 2008 is a tremor, and that what your friends, Drayton and Mackenzie, lived through, in the first part of the twenty-first century isn't really the earthquake?

00:44:26 Alexander Starritt: I don't I do think it's the earthquake. I mean, I should say it was the AI who wrote it ruined our lives. I don't think it ruined

00:44:34 Andrew Keen: the AI. Okay. So what do you mean?

00:44:36 Alexander Starritt: Answer the question. Okay. If you

00:44:38 Andrew Keen: were doing the title for that piece, what would you have called it?

00:44:41 Alexander Starritt: I'd have called it something really boring, which nobody would have read. But I do I mean, the reason I think it's the earthquake and not the tremor is I mean, in some on some level, you're right. Like, these this is kind of what I was saying about there not being any progress. Human societies go through these phases all the time, and we're now going through this phase, which is more kind of nationalistic. And, you know, it was not the first time. Whether you know, if it turns into World War Three, then it will then it will suddenly be the earthquake. But I don't know. In terms of what Runciman's saying about we always think that, you know, the new world is about to be revealed. I would say the new world already has been revealed. You know, this is everyone quotes this that Gramsci quote.

00:45:29 Andrew Keen: Yeah. The interregnum, quote.

00:45:32 Alexander Starritt: Yeah. You know, what the old world's died, the new one hasn't been born yet, something like that. But I actually think the new world politically is very obvious to see it already exists. You know, you have all over the Western world, you see the same tendencies which are towards British jobs for British workers, you know, re reshoring American manufacturing. You know, basically, there's quite a lot of consensus on that in America. Keeping out illegal immigrants. Troublemakers like you, Alex. Troublemakers like me coming in, taking your jobs and your women. You know, there's quite a lot of consensus about

00:46:21 Andrew Keen: about our women. I don't know about

00:46:22 Alexander Starritt: our job. You know, there are all these things that are so, contested in our public discourse. I think, actually, you can see where the new consensus already exists. You know, it's protection for our own companies. Is it keep undesirable foreigners like British writers out of the country. And I'm not saying that I agree with any of those things. I'm just saying you can see it happening. I don't I think the kind of post liberal world is already here.

00:46:55 Andrew Keen: Well, let's end on a positive note. You end on a positive note. You that essay, at least, you say that we've given a once in a generation opportunity to change the world, which is in some ways a feature of Drayton and Mackenzie. Where should we be optimistic in, in late May, June 2026, Alex?

00:47:22 Alexander Starritt: Well, I mean, I see a great source for a great cause for European optimism, which is maybe not very good news for your listeners, which is essentially

00:47:32 Andrew Keen: have European listeners too. Don't worry.

00:47:35 Alexander Starritt: Which is basically the even though we're painful and costly, the kind of separation from America that America is forcing upon us is probably for our own good, I think. You know, rather than relying on the White House and essentially having to do what the White House says in many countries like Britain, we can take responsibility for ourselves, make our own decisions, run things the way we want to run them. And I think, you know, Runciman actually in one of his books has this idea that democracy has to be renewed every now and then.

00:48:14 Andrew Keen: Yeah. He wants kids to vote, which actually I think is a rather good idea since grown ups don't seem to do a very good job of it.

00:48:20 Alexander Starritt: Yeah. I mean, there are all kinds of ways you could I mean, personally, I think as nuts, but there, you know, there are lots of ways you could renew it, and you probably need to use them all, like, one every twenty five years. One and one way that you could renew European democracy, I think, now is by essentially throwing a lot in with each other to say, you know, China is a big economic rival to us. The Russians are have invaded Eastern Europe. The Americans don't wanna help us anymore and call us names the whole time. Maybe the moment for Europeans to look after themselves has finally arrived. I mean, Europe was the sort of, you know, it was the place where world orders were created basically from the industrial revolution to the present day. And the and at the and we've been since 1945 living in this period of sorts of ahistorical, I don't know, sort of suspension where we don't really have any agency over anything. Maybe we can get some agency back.

00:49:28 Andrew Keen: Maybe we can get some agency back. You certainly can get some agency back by reading, Alexander Starritt's epic masterpiece, Drayton and Mackenzie. It's been out in The UK for a while and done very well, won all sorts of awards, was on the Financial Times, best business book, long list. Now it's out in The United States. Alex, real honor to talk to you. Best of luck. I'm sure you're working on a new book.

00:49:52 Alexander Starritt: Thank you, Andrew. Yeah. I am. I am. Something very different, a kind of adventure story.

00:49:59 Andrew Keen: Well, we'll have to get you back on the show when your adventure story comes out, but, that was an adventurous conversation. Thank you so

00:50:06 Alexander Starritt: much. Thank you, Andrew.