Keen On America

“The thirteen colonies that became the United States were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. We need to think about why some colonies rebelled and others did not.” — Sarah Pearsall
 
Earlier today, the historian Dominic Erdozain came on the show to argue that American patriotism has the same exceptionalist Puritan roots as British imperialism. But not all historians of the American revolution would agree. Take, for example, Sarah Pearsall, author of Freedom Round the Globe, who turns 1776 inside out to present the American rebellion as a kind of world revolution. 1776 as 1917. American patriotism as an explosion of borderless humanity.
 
Pearsall argues that 1776 was as globally significant in its revolutionary promise as 1789, 1848 or 1917. She reminds us that there were at least 26, possibly as many as 32 British colonies in existence in 1775 — in the Caribbean, in Canada, in East and West Florida. And the radical ideas that drove the Declaration of Independence — security, happiness, respect — were being asserted simultaneously all over the world. So in Edinburgh debating clubs, Caribbean sugar plantations and West African castles, the American revolution was welcomed as a global revolution. Universal rather than exceptional. The Tea Party as the Storming of the Winter Palace.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       32 British Colonies, Not 13: The Forgotten Empire: People talk about the thirteen colonies as if they were all the British colonies in North America. They weren’t. There were at least 26, possibly as many as 32, depending on how you count groups of islands. British colonies in the Caribbean. In Canada. In East and West Florida. Each had its own relationship to the British Empire, its own internal tensions, its own calculations about the costs and benefits of rebellion. The question Pearsall asks — why did some rebel and others not? — is the question that opens up the global story.
 
•       The Caribbean Undermines the Slavery Thesis: There is a popular argument that the American Revolution was primarily fought to preserve slavery — that the colonists feared British abolition and revolted to protect the institution. Pearsall’s counter: if this were the main driver, the Caribbean colonies would have been the first to join. They were far more dependent on slavery than the mainland colonies. They did not join. The relationship between slavery and the revolution is genuinely complicated — not simple in either direction. The Caribbean story is the evidence that demands a more nuanced account.
 
•       From St Kitts to Kolkata: The Declaration’s Global Keywords: Pearsall’s organising device: she takes thirteen key words from the Declaration of Independence and finds the spark of each in a far-flung location. Security in the Six Nations cornfields of upstate New York, where it meant something very different to the Haudenosaunee than to the Philadelphia delegates. Happiness in the debating clubs of Edinburgh, where women were demanding it alongside men for the first time. Respect in the streets of Kolkata. This device lets her write about the globe without losing the Declaration as her anchor.
 
•       Americans Were Already Thinking Globally in 1776: One of Pearsall’s more surprising findings: Americans in 1776 were far more aware of global events than we tend to assume. They were reading about events in India. The Boston Tea Party is unintelligible without knowing that tea was an Asian commodity and that the East India Company was simultaneously extracting profit from Asia and from the American colonies. Colonists compared themselves explicitly to Indians under the Company’s thumb. They saw the connections. The isolation of American history as a subject of study is a modern academic choice, not an eighteenth-century reality.
 
•       Read the Declaration, Not the Constitution: Pearsall’s July 4 Prescription: Andrew asks Pearsall what she’ll be doing on July 4 and suggests people should read the Constitution. Pearsall gently corrects him: the Declaration of Independence. Two very different documents from very different moments. The Declaration, published on July 4, 1776, is short, bold, and reaches toward universal ideals. The Constitution, ratified in 1788, is a compromise document about how to govern. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, Pearsall’s prescription: read the Declaration. The IndyCar races and the UFC match at the White House can wait.
 
About the Guest
 
Sarah Pearsall is a prize-winning historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution (Knopf/Penguin Random House, May 2026). She previously taught at the University of Cambridge, where she was a colleague of Christopher Clark. She grew up in the United States and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
 
References:
 
•       Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution by Sarah M. S. Pearsall (Knopf/Penguin Random House, May 2026).
 
•       Christopher Clark, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848–1849 — referenced in the conversation; Pearsall’s former Cambridge colleague and friend.
 
•       Episode 2924: Dominic Erdozain on To Love a Country — the morning’s companion episode, directly referenced.
 
•       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — the week’s America 250 series.
 
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.
 
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(00:31) - Introduction: Erdozain this morning, Pearsall this afternoon

(01:57) - A meta vantage point: turning the revolution inside out

“We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” — Randolph Bourne, via Dominic Erdozain
 
Should Americans be proud of their country? The Anglo-American historian Dominic Erdozain thinks not. His new book, To Love a Country, argues that there’s a problem with American patriotism. Americans shouldn’t love their country, Erdozain says. It’s not a good place.
 
His argument is that American patriotism has the same Puritan root as British imperialism. The idea of a chosen people, a city on the hill, a nation with a special mission is a kind of moral virus. He says it infected America in the great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has provided moral cover for slavery, military aggression abroad, and the denial of rights at home.
 
So what America needs, he argues, is a new set of foundational myths laid out by progressives like Jane Addams, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Martin Luther King Jr. This would establish a new kind of American patriotism which is forward-looking and internationalist rather than nativist or exceptionalist. Erdozain even gives Gandhi a shoutout as a model of American patriotism, although one wonders what the Indian pacifist would have made of this.
 
So what will the Atlanta-based Erdozain be doing on July 4? Hiding under his bed, perhaps, rather than enjoying the hotdogs and fireworks. In hiding from hundreds of millions of patriotic Americans.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Puritan Root of American Exceptionalism: The idea of America as a chosen people, a city on a hill with a special mission to the world, was not invented in America. It was inherited from English Puritanism. As it spread through the first and second great awakenings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — what some scholars call the New Englandization of America — it became the canopy under which very different kinds of people sheltered. You didn’t have to be a Puritan in any theological sense. You just had to accept the premise that America was righteously exceptional. And once you accepted that, a great deal of scrutiny became unavailable.
 
•       Nationalism Is Immune to Failure: One of Erdozain’s sharpest observations, via historian Lindsey O’Rourke’s work on American interventionism: nationalism can absorb any amount of failure. The defeat in Vietnam, the disaster of Iraq, the failure of Afghanistan — a certain kind of nationalism insulates itself from the lessons these events might teach. It’s always someone else’s fault. It’s always a particular administration’s failure, never the national premise. This makes exceptionalism uniquely resistant to the ordinary mechanism of democratic accountability.
 
•       Randolph Bourne and the Patriotism of the Future: Erdozain’s most original historical recovery: Randolph Bourne, a radical journalist writing during the First World War, who argued that nativism and nationalism were European imports, backward-looking and derivative. Bourne’s phrase: “we must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future.” A patriotism faithful to the diversity of modern America — its bustling pluralism, its immigrant energy — cannot be built by looking backward to the founders. It must be built by looking forward to the founders we have not yet had.
 
•       Alternative Founders: Addams, Douglass, Garrison, King: Erdozain proposes replacing — or at least supplementing — the canonical founders with a different cast. Jane Addams, who said the question is not what can we teach the bewildered immigrant but what can we learn from them. Frederick Douglass, who held America to account for its foundational promises. William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. Martin Luther King Jr., who went to India to learn about nonviolence from Gandhi. These are the people, Erdozain argues, who offer a patriotism adequate to the diversity and complexity of twenty-first century America.
 
•       JFK’s Strategy of Peace: The Possibility of Reinvention: Erdozain ends the book with Kennedy’s strategy of peace speech at American University in June 1963 — two months before his assassination. By then, Kennedy had come to believe that the impetus for war was coming from within his own country, from his own military and CIA, not from the Soviets. His speech — conceding nothing to communism as an ideology, but immensely generous about the Russian people and about Khrushchev as a leader — is Erdozain’s model for what reinvention looks like. The Bay of Pigs taught him something. By the end, he was talking about Vietnam as not America’s fight. Lessons can be learned, even in office, even at the last moment.
 
About the Guest
 
Dominic Erdozain is a historian and writer, graduate of Oxford and Cambridge, and visiting professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author of To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America (Crown, June 2, 2026) and One Nation Under Guns. He grew up in Preston, Lancashire, supports Liverpool FC, and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
 
References:
 
•       To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America by Dominic Erdozain (Crown, June 2, 2026).
 
•       Randolph Bourne — radical journalist and critic of American nationalism during the First World War. His phrase “our American cultural tradition lies in the future” is the book’s central provocation.
 
•       Jane Addams — co-founder of Hull House, Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Referenced as an alternative founder.
 
•       JFK’s Strategy of Peace speech, American University, June 10, 1963 — the closing argument of the book.
 
•       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — directly referenced at the opening.
 
•       Episode 2923: Joe Cunningham on Life of the Party — directly referenced at the opening.
 
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.
 
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“I deliver it with the credibility of having won a district that Trump carried by 13 points. Not only how to speak to these voters, but how to win them back.” — Joe Cunningham
 
Yesterday’s guest was Alexandra Natapoff, co-editor of America Unfinished — a collection of essays by illustrious Harvard Law School professors grading the march toward justice in the United States over the last 250 years. America got about a C+ from this progressive clique. “Could do better” their report cards suggested.
 
Today’s guest is a very different kind of Democrat. Joe Cunningham is a lawyer and personal injury attorney in Charleston, South Carolina, a one-term US representative, and the author of Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America’s Trust and How They Can Win It Back. Cunningham got his law degree at Northern Kentucky University’s Salmon P. Chase College of Law. Harvard, he jokes, was his safety school.
 
In contrast with Harvard Law professors, Cunningham’s credibility is hard to dress up. He was the first Democrat to win South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District in over forty years, in a seat Trump carried by 13 points. He was also the first Democrat in elected office to publicly warn against Biden seeking re-election. His diagnosis of what went wrong is that the Democratic Party abandoned kitchen-table economic issues in favour of culture wars, dismissed legitimate voter concerns as bigotry, and told people what they should care about rather than listening to what they actually cared about. The party, he argues, replaced empathy with arrogance. It’s as if it’s been colonized by morally prickly Harvard Law professors. Professor Cunningham gives the Dems a D+. Could do significantly better.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Winning Trump +13: The Credibility Argument: Cunningham’s case for why his diagnosis should be taken seriously is not his ideology but his record. He won South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District in 2018 — a heavily gerrymandered seat that Trump had carried by 13 points — making him the first Democrat to hold it in over forty years. He was also the first elected Democrat to publicly warn against Biden seeking re-election. His prescriptions don’t come from a think tank or an op-ed page. They come from a man who has actually won where Democrats can’t win, and lost where Democrats keep losing.
 
•       The Party Replaced Empathy with Arrogance: Cunningham’s central diagnosis: the Democratic Party stopped listening and started lecturing. It told people what they should care about — immigration wasn’t an issue in West Virginia because West Virginia is far from the border. It told people the economy was fine when they couldn’t afford their bills. It dismissed legitimate concerns about crime, immigration, and cultural change as bigotry rather than trying to understand them. The result: voters who felt condescended to left. The party that was founded on speaking for ordinary people no longer speaks their language.
 
•       Big Publishing’s Progressive Insularity: The book didn’t get picked up by a major publisher. Cunningham was told, more or less directly, that a book this critical of the Democratic Party — of Biden, of Harris, of the party’s leadership — was too much. He published it himself, through South Battery Press, named for a street in Charleston. Andrew’s observation: isn’t this itself evidence of what the book argues? If progressive culture controls big media and big publishing, those institutions will inevitably filter out self-criticism and reinforce the insularity that caused the problem in the first place.
 
•       The Geriatric Oligarchy and the Technology Frontier: Cunningham uses the phrase “geriatric oligarchy” — the same phenomenon Andrew has been calling a gerontocracy — to describe Congress’s inability to grapple with technology, AI, and social media. The vast majority of members of Congress cannot understand the problems that are emerging: social media preying on children, identity theft, artificially inflated prices, the environmental impact of data centres. The party needs new leaders who understand these issues. The answer to data centres is not a blanket ban — it’s community-level decisions and proper regulation.
 
•       The Party Needs Bloodletting, Not Just Rebrand: Cunningham’s sharpest prescription for the Democratic Party: a coming-to-Jesus moment or genuine accountability for what led to 2024. After the debate, Democratic officials stood outside the White House claiming Biden was fine. His staff said he’d go to bed earlier, wake up later, and shorten his workday — as if this would reassure Americans. Cunningham’s verdict: lessons will be repeated until they’re learned. The party needs a Newsom-level confrontation — real winners and real losers — not the bloodless triangulation it currently offers. Only then can it earn back trust.
 
About the Guest
 
Joe Cunningham is a personal injury attorney and former US Representative from South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, the first Democrat to win that seat in nearly forty years. An attorney and ocean engineer by training, he was the Democratic nominee for Governor of South Carolina in 2022. He is the author of Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America’s Trust and How They Can Win It Back (South Battery Press, May 20, 2026). He lives in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife Ashley and their children.
 
References:
 
•       Life of the Party: How Democrats Lost America’s Trust and How They Can Win It Back by Joe Cunningham (South Battery Press, May 20, 2026). Available at lifeofthepartybook.com.
 
•       Episode 2922: Alexandra Natapoff on America Unfinished — the preceding episode referenced at the opening; the Harvard Law contrast.
 
•       Episode 2912: Michael Clinton on Longevity Nation — the gerontocracy argument directly referenced.
 
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: Natapoff’s Harvard Law vs Cunningham’s Charlesto...

“As long as democracy is a collective endeavour of all the people who belong to it, in some sense it can never be finished — because we are constantly bequeathing to the next generation the opportunity and the freedom to have these conversations over and over again.” — Alexandra Natapoff
 
It’s less than six weeks until America’s 250th birthday. The official America 250 store is selling T-shirts while Harvard Law School is doing something slightly less commercial. 62 HLS professors have written 1,000-word essays, assembled into a single volume to be published on July 4. Entitled America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance, it’s co-edited by Alexandra Natapoff, a Harvard Law professor who spent years as a federal public defender in Baltimore. The title, of course, is borrowed from the Gettysburg Address, where Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died in the Civil War.
 
So is America unfinished or is it just getting started? For Natapoff and other Harvard Law School professors like this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Jill Lepore, the answer is suitably complex. Yes and no and maybe. Everything all at once. The essays focus on 250 years of both justice and injustice in America. Perhaps the only thing all authors agree on is the central role of capitalism in the history of the United States. Follow the money, Natapoff suggests. Those dollars will transport the reader to the heart of the American story.
 
That said, America Unfinished will certainly cost you less than a three-year Harvard Law degree. And if you wait six months, the book will be available at no cost online. So follow the money. It will take you to some unexpectedly free places.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The Gettysburg Address as the Title’s Source: The book does not merely allude to Lincoln’s famous speech — it reproduces it at the front, so readers can go back to the original. In the Address, Lincoln charged the living with completing “the unfinished work” of those who died at Gettysburg — the work of building a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Natapoff and Charles chose this frame because it captures both the challenge and the hope: democracy is unfinished in the sense that it demands active work from every generation. It is not a gift that has been fully delivered. It is a task being handed on.
 
•       America and Democracy Are Not the Same Thing: Andrew’s challenge — you use the words interchangeably — earns a concession. Natapoff’s work in criminal justice has led her to argue repeatedly that the American criminal system fails many tests of democracy: it is exclusive, inegalitarian, overly coercive, inconsistent with democratic principles. So ‘America’ and ‘democracy’ are not synonyms in the book. Many of the 62 essays disagree about the state of various pieces of governance. The book’s inquiry is whether it is fair to call any particular piece of American legal governance a democracy — which both editors consider a compliment, and not a certainty.
 
•       A Federal Public Defender in Baltimore: The Biography Behind the Scholarship: Before she became a law professor, Natapoff was a federal public defender in Baltimore’s federal courts. Her job was to be adverse to the federal government all day every day, defending some of the most vulnerable and dispossessed people in the city against the massive resources and power of the federal apparatus. Those years shaped everything: her subsequent twenty years of scholarship on criminal courts, plea bargaining, misdemeanors, and race and inequality; her book Punishment Without Crime; and her contribution to America Unfinished. In her reading, the experience of her clients — people facing off against the federal government — is now more widely shared than it used to be.
 
•       It’s the Money, Not the Lawyers: Dan Wang’s recent book Breakneck contrasts China, run by engineers, and America, run by lawyers. Natapoff’s counter, via the book’s economic governance essays: it’s much more complicated than that. Six very different scholars who disagree about almost everything converge on a perhaps surprising answer: it’s the money. Financial interests, corporate interests, the ownership class — in one way or another, they’ve been running America. The lawyers helped. They were part of the management scheme. But they weren’t making the decisions. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
 
•       Molly Brady’s Essay: Property Law and the Destruction of Community: Asked to pick her favourite essay without starting a fight with 61 colleagues, Natapoff flags the very last one: Professor Maureen “Molly” Brady on property law. Brady argues that property law has permitted suburban sprawl and the destruction of physical community — the kind of infrastructure that makes analog life (libraries, neighbours, public space) possible — while being profligate in its support for social media and the dispersed, thinner version of community. She exhorts us to remember how law has contributed positively to communities we are proud of, and to stand up for that vision. For Natapoff, it captures both the critical nature of this moment and why lawyering still holds out some important promise.
 
About the Guest
 
Alexandra Natapoff is the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, and a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School. She began her legal career as a federal public defender in Baltimore. She is the author of Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books) and Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice (NYU Press). She is co-editor, with Guy-Uriel Charles, of America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance (MIT Press, July 4, 2026).
 
References:
 
•       America Unfinished: Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Law and Governance, co-edited by Alexandra Natapoff and Guy-Uriel Charles (MIT Press, July 4, 2026). Open access from January 2027.
 
•       Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal (Basic Books, 2018).
 
•       Dan Wang, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future — referenced in the interview as the “America run by lawyers” contrast.
 
•       Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863) — reproduced at the front of the book; the source of the title.
 
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 ...

“I took it for granted that we were trying to make the world a better place. But I think in retrospect that was naïve. What kind of change? For whom? We kind of forgot to specify what the purpose of all this disruption was.” — Eric Ries
 
In 2011, Eric Ries published The Lean Startup, a book that reflected the optimistic zeitgeist about disruptive Silicon Valley companies. Fifteen years later, in Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, Ries reflects today’s totally different zeitgeist about the value of companies inside and outside Silicon Valley.
 
Back in 2011, everybody loved tech. Ries, creator of the Lean Startup method and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, admits he was naïve in his positive view of disruptive corporations. In Incorruptible, Ries argues that corporate corruption is structural, rather than a problem of bad actors. As organisations grow (ie: become more disruptive), the systems that govern them — ownership, incentives, charters, accountability — quietly reshape behaviour. Success itself becomes a form of financial gravity, diverting companies away from their original purpose.
 
Ries proposes that we design organisations to be incorruptible from the beginning. It’s the Patagonia model. When the outdoor clothing company almost went bankrupt in the 1990s, their bank agreed to restructure their loans if they would suspend their charitable donations for a couple of years. No deal, the CEO said. The bank blinked and Patagonia remained Patagonia. Now, Ries argues, every corporation should try to emulate Patagonia and become the incorruptible corporation. We must all join Eric Ries in getting beyond the lean startup.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Corporate Corruption Is Structural, Not Ethical: For decades, we’ve explained corporate failures as problems of bad actors, moral weakness, or isolated scandals. Ries’ argument: that story doesn’t match reality. Again and again, companies founded with strong ideals drift toward short-term thinking, extractive behaviour, and mission abandonment — often despite the best intentions of people inside them. The failure is structural. As organisations grow, the systems that govern them — ownership structures, incentives, charters — quietly reshape behaviour. Success becomes financial gravity, bending companies away from their purpose.
 
•       The Patagonia Model: Organisational Strength, Not Moral Righteousness: When Patagonia nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s due to outsourcing to poor-quality foreign factories, their lead lender agreed to restructure the loans on one condition: suspend charitable donations during the restructuring. Reasonable request — any other company would have said yes. Patagonia said no. The bank blinked. Ries’ reading: this is not moral righteousness. It is organisational strength. The ability to resist external pressure and stay true to a core principle. That is what makes a company not just good but great. Also: Black Wednesday, the day of their layoffs, is still referred to by name inside the company.
 
•       The Wrong Distinction: For-Profit vs Non-Profit: Ries argues that the distinction between for-profit and non-profit is fundamentally a tax code distinction that has come to define how we think about organisations in ways that are misleading and harmful. He proposes a reframe: if profit means the maximisation of human flourishing, then the Smithsonian is very for-profit and Philip Morris is very non-profit. This reframe changes what we should demand of governance, of accountability, of what organisations are for. It is simultaneously an economic and a political argument.
 
•       Civic Infrastructure: The Political Dimension: Ries’ book ends with a chapter on what he calls civic infrastructure — the kinds of organisations that set the rules of the road for others. He argues that the principles of incorruptible design apply not just to companies but to the institutions of governance. The darkness of the current political moment is, for him, partly a failure of organisational design. When this darkness passes, he argues, the generation that follows will have to rebuild civic infrastructure in the way the generation that survived the Depression built the institutions that governed the second half of the twentieth century.
 
•       The Anakin/Padamé Problem: Ries’ Mea Culpa: Ries opens with a reference to the famous internet meme — Anakin says he’s going to change the world, and Padamé asks: for the better? He grins mischievously. Ries used to find it funny. Then it stopped being funny. When he wrote The Lean Startup, he assumed the purpose of disruption was to make the world a better place. He took it for granted. He now thinks that was naïve. The lesson: you have to specify the purpose. What kind of change? For whom? That is the question that Incorruptible is trying to answer.
 
About the Guest
 
Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, The Leader’s Guide, and The Startup Way. As a founder, he has put his ideas into practice with the Long-Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), Answer.AI, Virgil, and IMVU. He is the author of Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great (Authors Equity/Simon & Schuster, May 26, 2026). He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
 
References:
 
•       Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great by Eric Ries (Authors Equity, May 26, 2026).
 
•       The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (Crown Business, 2011).
 
•       The Startup Way by Eric Ries (Currency, 2017).
 
•       More information and bonus materials at incorruptible.co.
 
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
Sp...