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Across five full decades, Melanie has contributed to almost every British news institution, from beginning her career as a writer for The Guardian and the New Statesmen, to winning the Orwell Prize for her work at The Observer, to becoming a regular panellist on The Moral Maze and Question Time.

Today, Melanie’s work can be found in the likes of The Times, The Telegraph, the Jewish News Syndicate, and The Jewish Chronicle.

Why did we invite her on?

The last twelve months have seen Trump haemorrhage his coalition. Between the baffling handling of the Epstein scandal and the questionable wars with Iran, he’s lost the libertarians, the paleocons, and the disenfranchised liberals that accounted for his votership in 2024. Even some of his most ardent proponents - Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, etc. - have withdrawn support, the pair having recently gone as far as to leave the Republican Party.

For a time, it seemed his only defenders left were, outside of the ride-or-die ‘MAGA Republicans’, the pro-Israel right. In the wake of the prospective deal between the warring nations, he may have lost them too.

With the likes of Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin publicly scolding the President for ‘kowtowing’ to Iran, Trump is enduring a fresh wave of criticism from his last line of defence. At the least, he’s been accused of fumbling a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to quash a long-time rival once and for all. At most, he’s been labelled a traitor.

What’s the truth? Is he, as the deal’s advocates claim, finally putting America first, even if only far too late? Or is he surrendering the world’s greatest superpower to one of the most evil regimes of modern times?

We have our view, we want to have it challenged and Melanie is the perfect candidate for the task.

What did we learn?

Whether this MOA holds remains to be seen, but America and Iran find themselves as close to peace as they’ve been in months. Trump’s 40-odd claims of victory aside, it now looks like a possibility.

If you can call it “victory”, that is. To almost everyone, this looks like defeat.

”Trump goes to war with Iran and enjoys tremendous successes. But much to obvious his horror, the Iranian regime, having taken this great punishment … they didn’t [surrender]. Trump wanted a war done in weeks.”

So, what happened? If Trump was enjoying such ‘tremendous success’, why is he throwing in the towel?

To Melanie, Trump is responding to the worst actors in his party, giving in to the most shallow demands of his base. They don’t want war, so Trump’s not pursuing it. What it leaves us with is an incoherent narrative.

”From what I’ve been reading, the Israeli government went to Trump and told him that the only way to change the regime was to take the existing one out. The only way to do that was a war that would last a year. Trump [refused], so Israel adapted to what America wanted … Later, Iran has America by the throat. What do you do? Well, if you’re Trump, you say ‘We’ve won! Let’s now negotiate the terms of their surrender!’ None of it makes sense. If they’ve surrendered, it’s not a deal. If they’ve surrendered, what is there to negotiate? It was all total rubbish.”

Facing mid-term defeat, evacuating support and an economic hit at home, Trump found himself in an inexcusable, irreconcilable position. The America First President launched a war thousands of miles away and Americans are paying the price. How does he squirm free from that?

”He had to find a scapegoat, and that scapegoat is Israel.”

The last few weeks have seen various reports published of a souring relationship between the US and Israel. Most of it was, allegedly, going on behind closed doors. Now, that rift appears to be going public, with the likes of VP J.D. Vance warning Israel not to jeopardise the negotiations.

To Melanie, as the global perception of the Jewish state worsens, it becomes easier to ascribe one’s failings to them. Trump is merely taking advantage of that truth.

”In my view, this is wicked stuff. It contributes to this idea held by an unpleasant number of British people that Israel is somehow the aggressor in the region. They just don’t know what’s going on. He’s using the Israelis to explain why Iran isn’t cooperating. [If it weren’t for the Israelis], they’d all be friends. This is ludicrous, and tremendously dangerous.”

What is Melanie prescribing? Should Trump not negotiate for fear of emboldening a few keffiyah-draped protestors in London?

Melanie is not merely against this deal; she’s against any deal. Full stop. End of story. In her mind, negotiation itself is a form of surrender. The Iranian regime can and will endure much more pain for its mission than the West, and so will always win. There is nothing America or Israel can offer them that will veer them off course.

”The Iranian regime will never resile from its aim; firstly, to destroy the state of Israel, as a precursor to destroy America. The longer [the regime] goes on, the worse the eventual war will be for all of us.”

We disagree.

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Tomorrow, he is coming on the show to give a breakdown of what the West actually is, it’s history, values and why he thinks its worth preserving.

Comment your questions for James below.

Gold is back in the headlines.

Central banks are adding to their reserves.
Governments are printing more of their currency.
Debt keeps climbing.

But rising gold prices alone don’t explain what’s really happening.

The team at Monetary Metals just released their 2026 Gold Outlook Report, and it digs into the deeper forces driving the gold market right now.

Inside the report you’ll learn:

• Why gold may still be in a long-term bull market

• What rising debt and unstable monetary policy means for gold

• Why recent market volatility could signal bigger shifts ahead

It’s a clear, data-driven look at where gold is today, and where it may go next.

If you care about gold, this is worth your time.

🏆 Read the Monetary Metals 2026 Gold Outlook Report

Tomorrow, he is joining Francis and Konstantin on Triggernometry to discuss human happiness, how to find purpose in life and his new book - The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, Build the Life You Want (co-authored with Oprah Winfrey), and From Strength to Strength.

Comment your questions for Arthur below.

Most of us put real effort into our work, our families, and our finances. But when it comes to our health, we are mostly guessing.

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Price-wise, this is a straightforward decision. Superpower used to cost $499. Right now it is $199, while other testing services charge $500 to $1,000 or more for similar or often inferior information. And with code TRIGGER at checkout, you get an additional $20 off.

Head to Superpower.com and use code TRIGGER at checkout for $20 off your membership. After you sign up, they will ask how you heard about them. Make sure to mention Triggernometry.

Your blueprint, activated. Visit Superpower.com and use code TRIGGER at checkout.

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Tomorrow, he is returning to the show to discuss the story and history of the Odyssey, Homer, ancient Greece and what Hollywood gets wrong.

Comment your questions for David below.

Francis has been taking Qualia Creatine+.

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Tomorrow, he is coming on Triggernometry to discuss net zero, energy efficiency, fossil fuels, and his thoughts on the best energy policy for the future.

Comment your questions for Scott below.

The Triggernometry merch store is built on Shopify.

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Joanna Moncrief is, at once, one of the most radical and conservative thinkers in the field of psychiatry.

She is a Professor of Critical and Social Psychiatry at UCL and, in 1999, she co-founded the Critical Psychiatry Network - an advocacy group of psychiatrists seeking reform of the current treatment of mental illness. Her books - The Myth of the Chemical Cure and The Bitterest Pills - have since become foundational texts of the movement.

Her latest, Chemically Balanced: The Building and Unbuilding Of the Serotonin Myth, was released last year.

Why did we invite her on?

In 2022, she (along with fellow psychiatrist Dr Mark Horowitz) undertook her most significant project to date, seeking to answer what is arguably the most consequential, pervasive psychological problem of our time: where does ‘depression’ come from? Does it even ‘come from’ anywhere?

For decades, the consensus read that depression was merely a “chemical imbalance” - an insufficiency of serotonin. With the right diet of drugs, it could be remedied. Joanna and Mark’s umbrella review, drawing upon a wealth of research, found that there was no such relationship. In their words, "there is no convincing evidence that depression is associated with, or caused by, lower serotonin concentrations or activity".

So, what does that mean? Can depression be treated? Is it even real?

History is littered with explanations for mental illness that we now, in enlightened times, find baffling. Demonic possession, Saturn’s influence, an imbalance of the humours, too much black bile - all easily dealt with via exorcism, inhaling pleasant smells, or having a hole bored in your skull.

These beliefs are, thankfully, at no risk of making a comeback. Trouble is, that’s no guarantee that we don’t have misguided beliefs of our own. Beliefs that, through the infrastructure of the billion-limbed pharma industry, have become so entrenched, so endorsed for profit, that they may prove difficult to disentangle. If Joanna’s claim is correct, millions have been lied to.

As soon as we read Chemically Imbalanced, we knew she would make for a perfect guest.

What did we learn?

”We treat depression like cancer; we think we can treat everyone the same way. And that’s what we do. We give them antidepressants, cognitive behavioural therapy. These might work, but I think we should see it differently.”

Some may read into Joanna’s words a contempt for modern psychiatry. This would be false. Rather, she’s suspicious of the practice’s one-size-fits-all approach - treating the symptoms rather than the underlying problems. In Chemically Imbalanced, she strives to take the totality of research and derive the solution from that. It turns out, there is much more contradiction than we’ve been led to believe.

For decades, the average person has been fed the line that depression can be reduced to a lack of the right chemicals in one’s brain. A disharmony of the glands. If they can be righted, the symptoms will go away and hey presto, no more depression.

Some studies support this hypothesis. Some. The truth is much more complicated.

”There are thousands of studies. Some of them find a link between serotonin and depression, that it’s a bit lower in people who have it. Some find that there is no relationship, some even find that serotonin is higher in people with depression. So, taken all together, overall, there is no consistent evidence of an abnormality either way.”

While it may feel like an unchallenged, axiomatic truth now, Joanna is keen to stress this wasn’t always the case. That we all now believe it is no accident - it was the deliberate, and expensive, work of a billion-dollar industry that got us to this point.

”The idea that depression was caused an abnormality of the brain or a chemical imbalance has been around for a long time, but it wasn’t widely accepted among the general public. In the ‘90s, the pharmaceutical industry launched campaigns to spread this idea. They did it to sell more drugs.”

And it worked. For all the campaigning that’s been done to raise awareness of mental health troubles, millions of people are quietly dependent on these drugs. Someone you know has likely revealed to you that they take them. Dozens you know have not.

”8.7 million in England take SSRIs. That works out at 15-17% of the adult population. It’s absolutely staggering.”

For just shy of 9 million people to be using something, it must work in some way. These receipients have to be getting something out of it, otherwise why would they bother? Why wouldn’t they go back to their medical professional and report that the drugs had had no effect?

Joanna corrects us: they are having an effect. It’s not disputed that antidepressants can alter one’s mood. The query is why, and at what cost.

”The mainstream view is that these drugs are targeted some kind of underlying abnormality. Drugs that enter the brain are going to change our normal feeling states. Think of alcohol; you can be feeling very depressed, have a shed load of alcohol and feel better. It’s not solving anything except in the moment. Most antidepressants have an emotionally numbing effect. People on them often can’t cry, or feel overjoyed. They might not feel as intensely sad as they once did, but whether that effect is beneficial is questionable.”

There is one thing that serotonin is credibly connected to. Unfortunately, though phonetically similar, it’s not happiness.

”There has been research into what serotonin levels [actually] effect. The only thing where there seems to be a meaningful correlation is sexual function, and it’s bad for it. The more serotonin you have, the less likely you are to want sex, or for your sexual organs to work properly.”

Depression, however unpleasant, may not be a bad thing. In the same way that the suffering one feels when they burn their hand on the stove isn’t ‘bad’. It’s your body’s way of conveying crucial information. One can look at someone who has recently been made redundant, or undergone a painful breakup, or received other terrible news, and the ensuing depression is no surprise. In fact, it’s probably a good thing they have that response - it demonstrates a sensitivity to their circumstances. Proves that they’re tuned into their own life.

In cases like that, depression might be, on some level, desirable. If nothing else, it inspires the patient to act. But what about cases where depression is not so easily explained? Where, on the face of it, the patient’s life is one of prosperity, security and pleasure?

This kind is often called ‘clinical depression’ - a condition more serious, less coherent than merely ‘being depressed’. One that requires medical intervention.
Even among those who are sceptical of medications, ‘clinical depression’ is frequently given a carve-out, treated as an exception to the rule.

Now, we find ourselves asking: does it even exist?

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Tomorrow, she is returning to the show to discuss the state of British politics, the recent resignation announcement from Sir Keir Starmer and the Middle East.

Comment your questions below.

We get asked this all the time: which VPN do we use at Triggernometry?

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If staying private online matters to you, this is worth a look.

Read more

Like him or loathe him, there’s only one David Starkey.

After decades of exemplary work as a historian and a lecturer at Cambridge, David truly entered the public conscience during his time contributing to the BBC Radio 4 debate programme The Moral Maze, a tenure that earned him the title of the “rudest man in Britain” from the Daily Mail. Sinc then, he has become something of an unorthodox national treasure, inviting scorn and applause in comparable measure.

Today, David runs his own YouTube channel, David Starkey Talks, where you can find him discussing British history, contemporary politics, and academic freedom.

Why did we invite him on?

Our country is undergoing a seismic political shift. As populism continues to rise, the two core parties crumble in public esteem. Who will harness the movement and take office next remains to be seen. By tomorrow, we might have some idea.

At the time of writing, the citizens of Makerfield are selecting their new MP. A constituency in Greater Manchester, one might be forgiven for not recognising the gravity of the result. But what comes of it may prove to be hugely consequential for Britain’s future.

David is one of our favourite recurring guests. He’s made four appearances on our show, and each has been more entertaining than the last. We always look forward to having him back, but recent developments in British politics made it essential.

Labour. Reform. Restore. Who does David back? Who does he think will win? Depending on who Makerfield choose, what’s in store for the United Kingdom?

This is your place to find out.

What did we talk about?

Before we get into the fine detail, we ought to get a bird’s eye view, and identify what vantage point we’re looking at the future from. David describes himself as a conservative. Still, he’s had no shortage of criticisms for the party and its leadership. Later in the interview, David informs us - in no uncertain terms - that, given the chance, he would shoot Theresa May.

“I remain a nominal member of the Conservative Party, but I am friendly with everybody on the right.”

Though he is ‘friendly’, David never bites his tongue. He has cutting things to say about everyone from the new darlings to the old guard. A figure in ascent today is Rupert Lowe. Once a key character in Reform UK, he now attacks his former party from the right, making himself one of the most controversial politicians in Britain today. What does David think?

”Rupert is the bizarrest of things. He’s presenting himself as the ultimate outsider, aligned with all these young men online. Charlie Downes, Conor Tomlinson, all the young toughies on the right, the ‘Lowe-mosexuals’. But he’s a farmer! He shoots pheasants, yet he presents himself as an extraordinary outsider. These are increasingly ridiculous postures!”

Rupert’s rise is, at least in part, a response to Conservative failure. Big C, that is.

After enjoying 14 years in charge, the Tories are a shambles. With each passing election, they lose power and, in turn, relevancy. The once-unshakeable institution has pinned its hopes on its latest leader - Kemi Badenoch. Despite the party’s downward spiral, Kemi seems to be one of its more popular MPs. Does she give David hope?

”She’s very impressive, but until there’s a full-scale mea culpa, until the Conservatives admit what went wrong, they don’t have a chance. I can only imagine the reason she hasn’t is that she fears half the party will join the Lib Dems. She suggests that the reason the Conservatives failed is because she wasn’t in charge, but really, it’s because they followed the wrong policies as established by the Labour party.”

Throw Reform into the mix and what we see is a divided right. Conservatives who are conservative in name only, rebel upstarts Reform drafting in its members from the failed party that inspired its founding in the first place, and Restore, a radical outpost of cryptic identitarianism.

To David, that’s an accurate reading. But one that misses the bigger picture.

”There are two forces moving in two completely different directions. On the level of personalities, these are increasingly radical positions. It’s Hobbesian - a war of all against all. Restore is yapping at the heels of Reform and Reform continue to denounce the Tories. You’d think they weren’t fighting Andy Burnham; they’re just fighting each other.”

On the surface, the right is fractured and irreparable. As the leaders scramble for dominance, they resort to sniping one another, calling into question their right-wing credentials, desperate for the voting public to see their rival as the real loon.

Yet, quietly, on the level that matters, the right is coming back together.

”On the level of policy, everybody is moving towards each other. This, for me, is the important thing. My view is that there has to be a reunion of the right, and the only basis for it is policy. All three parties of the right realise that they’re not dealing with something fractured. They’re dealing with a single central issue: the system has failed.”

When the system fails, opportunity emerges. Opportunity for radicals. Pundits, politicians and organisers who vow to raze the ground and start again. We’re saying it on both sides. Just as Restore promises to reconfigure Britain into the image of yesterday, the Greens have ambitions of rebuilding society from scratch. To David, it’s no surprise - doing nothing is no safer than starting again.

”If you look at the alternative - the nation continuing down the route it’s going - it is a catastrophe. A vicious downward cycle. There is no way you can break it without fundamental changes.”

What are the fundamental changes? What is so wrong with Britain that it needs to be altered on that granular level?

”The British state has stopped working. It has an autoimmune disease. The machine is eating itself. The system has failed.”

Coming from David Starkey, it’s a chilling recognition. A man who has always exhibited immense national pride, as well as a derision for revolutionary thinking, now has no choice but to call it for what it is - a failure of the institutions.

But if that’s the case, and if radical solutions are needed, what makes him think the right is so much more credible to handle it than the left? If we have to start again, why not start again in their vision?

Because the left doesn’t even know it’s happening.

”The right is slowly beginning to recognise that, so there is some hope. The left is blind to this. What on earth is ‘Burnhamism?’ It’s just re-heated Reevesism, which is just a reheating of Bidenomics. We have Bidenomics without the bucks.”

Again, looking at the prediction markets on the day of the by-election, Burnham has pulled ahead as the favourite. Reform’s Robert Kenyon and Restore’s Rebecca Shepherd have taken a hit, and Labour’s candidate looks set to leave with victory.
If he does, he might take Keir Starmer’s job from him. Should that happen, a Labour victory in 2029 is not out of the question.

If that happens, if the status quo remains the status quo, what does that mean? How serious is the problem?

Read more

Tomorrow, Sir Bill joins us in the studio to discuss his battle with Russian oligarchs, the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign, Vladimir Putin, and his personal story.

We get asked this all the time: which VPN do we use at Triggernometry?

The answer is CyberGhost VPN.

CyberGhost is not some fringe tool. It has 38 million users and over 20,000 five-star reviews on Trustpilot.

That is rare for any tech product, let alone a VPN.

Right now, you can get CyberGhost for around two dollars a month, with four months free, a 45-day money-back guarantee, and 24/7 support. That is full protection for your browsing data and access to blocked content for the price of a coffee. Completely risk-free.

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If staying private online matters to you, this is worth a look.

Read more

Tomorrow, he will be returning to the show to discuss the Reform and Restore parties; their rivalry and whether there is the potential to join forces. Konstantin, Francis and Dr Starkey will also be discussing wider British politics.

Comment your questions below.

Gold is back in the headlines.

Central banks are adding to their reserves.
Governments are printing more of their currency.
Debt keeps climbing.

But rising gold prices alone don’t explain what’s really happening.

The team at Monetary Metals just released their 2026 Gold Outlook Report, and it digs into the deeper forces driving the gold market right now.

Inside the report you’ll learn:

• Why gold may still be in a long-term bull market

• What rising debt and unstable monetary policy means for gold

• Why recent market volatility could signal bigger shifts ahead

It’s a clear, data-driven look at where gold is today, and where it may go next.

If you care about gold, this is worth your time.

🏆 Read the Monetary Metals 2026 Gold Outlook Report

Tomorrow, he is returning to Triggernometry to give a fascinating breakdown of the British Empire from start to finish. He will go through it’s origins, kings and queens, explorers, the Royal Navy, expansion, industry, colonies, slave trade, wars, collapse and finally, legacy.

Comment your questions for Dan below.

Francis has been taking Qualia Creatine+.

Here’s what he has to say about it:

“I resisted creatine for years. I assumed it was for people who spend three hours a day in the gym and refer to themselves in the third person.

Turns out I was wrong.

The research on creatine has moved well beyond the gym.

Your body makes it naturally and uses it as fuel, not just for your muscles, but for your brain, your energy levels, your mood, your memory.

The problem: from your 40s onwards, your body produces less and less of it and recovery is slower. You get that afternoon fog and the sense that you’re running on slightly less than you used to”

Most creatine supplements don’t actually solve this. The formula matters, specifically whether it gets into your cells and activates once it’s there. Qualia Creatine+ uses two clinically studied forms of creatine, combined with electrolytes and sea salt, designed to solve the whole problem.

Go to qualialife.com/TRIG for 50% off, and use code TRIG15 for an extra 15% on top of that.

Ed Husain is one of the world’s most revered experts on the topic of Islamism. Not only because he’s read more on the subject than almost any other, but because he’s seen it for himself.

At age 16, Ed - raised in Britain by moderate parents - became passionately involved in Islamist fundamentalism, even going as far as to join Hizb ut-Tahrir. 5 years later, he disavowed it, and dedicated his life to educating the world about the reality of the extremist mindset.

In 2008, Ed, alongside activist and radio presenter Maajid Nawaz, founded the Quilliam Foundation, a British think tank with stated goals of combating Islamism in the Western world.

Elsewhere, Ed is a professor at Georgetown University’s School Of Foreign Service, Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). As a writer, he has been published in the Spectator, the Telegraph, the New York Times, and has been short-listed for the George Orwell Prize.

Why did we invite him on?

Ed’s story is fascinating, but if it weren’t for his remarkable insights, he wouldn’t be such a tremendous guest. Just shy of two years ago, Ed joined us for an interview and predicted, with alarming accuracy, Israel’s attacks on Iran.

How did he get it so right?

We wanted to know, so we invited him back. It turns out the story is much more complex than we initially believed.

This time, Ed is here to guide us through the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, how it infiltrated major Western instutions, and what we can expect in the future.

What did we learn?

Before we can even begin exploring the subject at hand, we need to know how. The phrase “Muslim Brotherhood” is thrown around so liberally, sometimes to mean an organised force and other times to describe Muslims as a bloc. Where does the truth lie?

The Muslim Brotherhood, officially speaking, is a Sunni organisation. Ed, however, thinks this framing is, conveniently for them, ineffective.

”The best way to approach the Brotherhood is to see it as an ideology. Just shutting down their bank accounts is putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. You have to confront it as a battle of ideas … This isn’t a case of finding a postcode and banning the organisation from there. It’s a wider movement. It creates a mood music.”

And what is that ‘mood music?’ What is the Brotherhood, where does it come from, and what do they want?

”The Muslim Brotherhood was founded [in 1928] by an Egyptian schoolteacher [Hassan al-Banna] … He primarily took issue with three things. Firstly, he opposed the abolishment of the caliphate in Turkey in 1924. He wanted a Muslim-led empire that confronted the West and the Soviet Union. Second, he disliked American evanglicals preaching in Egypt, a Muslim majority country, and felt it was a strike against the Muslim manhood. The third thing that really offended him was seeing Egyptian men and women dancing, drinking alcohol, becoming Westernised.”

From there, Ed guides us through the unusual birth and unlikely ascent of this peculiar organisation. And unlikely is the operative word; as Ed describes, the Brotherhood’s aims and demands run contrary to the vast majority of Muslims. In fact, their central desire is the core divide through the heart of the Islamic world.

”The fundamental divider is between those who believed in nation-states and those who believe in the Caliphate. [The latter] want the Middle East to be under the control of a single, central Islamic theocracy.”

It’s hard to see a meaningful difference. After all, aren’t most countries under the rule of single central government? Wouldn’t it make sense that they, in Muslim countries, they were Islamically informed anyway?

”The hallmarks are that it must have one leader, and it must have not borders, but ‘frontiers’. Frontiers are not fixed; they are amorphous and can be expanded. … It’s not just a state - it’s an expansionist state, like the Soviet Union or the Ottoman Empire.”

Expanding into where? Is it merely focused on the countries that were historically Islamic, or the rest of the world too?

”The first priority is to reconquer Spain, Siciliy, India, parts of China - areas that were once Muslim. But you don’t stop there. You keep expanding to bring the whole world under the control of the theocracy.”

Fundamentally, the Muslim Brotherhood is an imperialist enterprise. Islam is not a private belief, or even a national ideology - it’s a global faith, and one that must be instigated by force if necessary. The great irony is that the least Islamic countries are least equipped to resist it; many Muslim majority countries do a better job of containing the spread of the Brotherhood than the West.

”It’s the ordinary Muslims who oppose them. There are two billion Muslims, vs. what I would generously estimate is five million members of the Brotherhood … However, an organised minority can control a disorganised majority. And that’s what this is - a highly organised minority.”

Ed explains how the Brotherhood are able to operate in plain sight. Their tactics adapt to the lay of the land. In the West, they align themselves with left-wing political groups, creating the oft-discussed “red-green alliance”. It’s a perfect example of horseshoe theory; operatives who would be considered far-right in countries to the right of the British status quo, holding hands with our most far-left agitators.

But it’s not exclusively a union of fringe activists; our government is in on it too. The Labour government does less to tackle the troubling behaviour of Islamists in Britain than the leaders in Bahrain and the UAE do. It naturally leads one to ask: why?

Why would a supposedly secular-if-not-Christian country welcome in extremists from a different faith? Why would they allow these extremists to recruit new members and rall ysupport for their cause? What’s in it for them?

Here, Ed claims something extraordinary.

Read more

On Monday, James will be joining Francis and Konstantin in the studio to discuss Adolf Hitler; who he was, his rise to power, why he is known as the most evil man in history and how he has, in effect, replaced the devil as the epicentre of evil.

Comment your questions below.

We get asked this all the time: which VPN do we use at Triggernometry?

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CyberGhost is not some fringe tool. It has 38 million users and over 20,000 five-star reviews on Trustpilot.

That is rare for any tech product, let alone a VPN.

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At a time where many of his peers prefer to sit in air-conditioned offices and prospect on the world, Sebastian Junger is unafraid to see it himself. For that, he is one of America’s bravest journalists.

He came to prominence in 1997 with the release of his creative-nonfiction masterwork The Perfect Storm, a genre-reviving book that was later adapted into a major motion picture. Later, he embedded himself in dangerous and remote military outposts across Afghanistan to report on the war, recounting his decade at the heart of the conflict in 2010’s War.

That same year, Sebastian co-directed his first documentary - the Grand Jury Prize-winning and Oscar-nominated Restropo, following it up with the likes of The Last Patrol, Hell On Earth and Against All Enemies.

His latest book - 2024’s In My Time Of Dying - details Sebastian’s near-death experience, as well as his ensuing reckoning with the prospect of an afterlife.

What did we learn?

”Our neurological wiring is from the Stone Age. We have not changed at all in 20,000 years. We are wired for living in groups of up to 100, hunting, building shelter, and being totally interdependent. We need to be useful to one another. That’s where we get our meaning. Modern society hasn’t changed that.”

A common thread through Sebastian’s repertoire is an interest in group strength. Teams of people, pooling their skills and resources, to overcome an unprecedented challenge.

These cases make for fascinating stories, but the phenomenon is not unique. Humans do it everyday. At least, we used to. Today, in atomised modernity, individualism runs rampant. Our needs are met with an ease that our distant ancestors - or even recent ones - could not fathom. We no longer turn to our neighbours for help. It sounds liberating. As Sebastian explains, it is not. Rather, it makes us depressed.

”Nobody commits suicide in Afghanistan. Some do when they come back, but one theory is that it’s the loss of community. It’s not the trauma … When you’re there, with people you’d die for and people who would die for you, even if you don’t like each other, that’s immense security. We have nothing like that here.”

Without wanting to brush over the obvious downsides of being stranded in a warzone, it’s clear that there’s something to the experience that bonds people. Why is that?

Evolutionary psychology, as a field, typically relates human thinking to the same incentives that drive all animal behaviour - ones of survival. This, Sebastian suggests, is where we differ most from animals. The way human beings react to that kind of stress is not merely an evolutionary quirk; it’s one that no other animal shares. We avoid it at our peril.

”We are the only species that will die to protect a same-sex peer. Not a child, not a mate, not a parent - another young man will give his life to protect another young man. We’re the only ones who do that, and that’s what makes us human. You owe your survival to the group and, therefore, you have a duty to them. That’s the essence of being human.”

Contrasting his experiences in desert foxholes with the exponential fractioning of modern life, Sebastian sees a huge discrepancy between what we think is good for us and what is actually good for us. Quite often, the material solutions to our problems have a spiritual side effect.

”A study found that the average American home has doubled in size in my lifetime, and there’s a correlation between people living in larger spaces and becoming depressed. It’s the tragedy of affluence; it has allowed us to live far apart from one another, and that’s made us depressed. The consequences, particularly for children, are terrifying.”

With the way things are going, it’s a strain to imagine the circumstances improving. In fact, they might get much, much worse, very, very soon.

AI is, for several reasons, a cause of grave concern. One such reason is what it will mean for the role of humans. If all of our needs and demands can be met by unthinking machines, faster than any team of people could manage, what will become of us then?

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