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No one receives more scorn from believers than a heretic.
Lucy Biggers is one such case.

Initially rising to prominence as a self-styled activist, Lucy was once a feverish voice in the fight against climate change. Later, she would reverse her position. In her words, “the common knowledge surrounding climate change isn’t just slightly wrong. It’s that the truth is usually the opposite of what we’re told.”

Today, as well as working as Head of Social Media at Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, Lucy has become a podcasting regular, all while continuing to publish riveting articles here on Substack.

Why did we invite her on?

”When you start to get success and accolades, it’s so hard to leave… It’s a comfortable way to live. Even when I saw the contradictions, I ignored them. I knew that if I went against the group, I wouldn’t be their friend anymore.”

The term ”cult”, like “Nazi” and “bigot”, has been so exhausted, it has no real meaning left. Every religion, cause, or political faction is a ‘cult’ to someone else, and deploying melodramatic language when it’s unwarranted - as we know now - does nothing to help your motives.

Then again, cults do exist, and some ideologies function accordingly. Perhaps none more so than ‘climate change’. Whether or not you agree with the ‘scientific consensus’, there’s no question that its most vocal advocates behave unnaturally, often eschewing rational argument for hysterical, panicked moralising.

But why? What is it about this belief that has such an all-encompassing effect on those who hold it? What’s more, why has it been adopted by nearly every political leader in recent memory?

We’re fascinated by anyone who speaks out against their tribe. Apostates make for compelling stories, and also allow us to get a glimpse into the psyche of those who think differently. Lucy is one such case, and hers pertains to a subject we have found ourselves troubled by for some time. It only made sense to explore it with her.

What did we talk about?

If you want to indoctrinate, start early.

That’s how Lucy’s story begins. Prior to her having any interest in politics at all, climate panic was instilled in her by the education system through the mandatory viewing of a film that terrified so many of her generation. Given how things have turned out, it almost seems quaint now.

”I saw Al Gore’s [climate change documentary] An Inconvenient Truth in school assembly when I was 16. It was my first time hearing anything like that, and I was filled with such existential dread. I thought I had 10 years left to live.”

A former teacher (drink), Francis laments the effect this kind of politicisation has on young people. Rather than teaching them to be open and optimistic about their planet, they’re imbued with a debilitating shame. A guilt for having been born. Is it a stretch to call it 'brainwashing?’

”I go further than that - I call it a crime against humanity. The destruction of human capital that has happened as a result of this propaganda… It’s heartbreaking.”

It might be in recession now, but at its peak - the era in which Lucy found herself at the centre of it - it was a star-making movement. This cause célèbre gave us countless celebrities. Fittingly, the most universally known was, indeed, a child.

Greta Thunberg is a peculiar case study. At the age of 15, Greta became one of the single most recognisable people alive after staging a series of protests outside Swedish parliament, pleading with her nation’s government to act on ‘the science’. Quickly, she was invited to the UN, COP25, and enjoyed a level of fame only few have this side of the millennium. Lucy was privileged to see her work firsthand.

”When I interviewed her, I realised something: this was a very professional operation. She would walk her bike into the room mulitple times, purely so the camera crews could get lots of photos. I only had a few minutes with her, and she was very charismatic and eloquent, but it struck me as weird…”

How come?

”She struggled with anxiety about climate, and her way of dealing with that was to become an activist. If that was my child, I’d be showing them counterfactuals. There’s so much out there to suggest that the ‘climate crisis’ is not existential, and the fact her parents didn’t… It’s a reflection on their values. And we can see that now; she’s very confused. She’s gone full Marxist.”

Should we be shocked? While the climate crisis is allegedly due to kill us all indiscriminately, those who are most feverish about it all fall on one side of the aisle. The right is not without its tree-hugging contingent, but the spread isn’t even close.

It seems counterintuitive. Wouldn’t the more traditionalist wing of politics be the one most committed to protecting the Earth? Shouldn’t the conservatives be the ones conserving?

In theory, yes. In practice, nothing could be further from the truth. To Lucy, while the ideals of environmentalism sound right-of-centre, the approach is wholly Marxist.

”There’s a lot of overlap. Both ideologies have the idea of the ‘intelligent bureaucrat’ - the central planner who knows so much more than the average person, and so they should be in charge of everything. They’re both utopian - you’ll give up anything to get there. Socialism strives for equality, climate activism seeks to save the planet. It’s all control in the name of the ‘greater good’.”

It’s a difficult mode of thinking to abandon. Once you accept the ‘greater good’, how can you bring yourself to challenge it?

How did Lucy escape the groupthink?
What were the facts that led her to reconsider her positions?

”I read [environmental scientist and Obama advisor] Steven E. Koonan’s book Unsettled. The science is exactly that: unsettled. He explained that extreme weather - floods, hurricanes, droughts, etc. - have not gotten worse because of climate change, and my jaw hit the floor. Every time one happens, the news will say it’s because of climate change, but even the UN can’t find a pattern.”

It’s certainly compelling. Still, that’s only one example. Lack of evidence is not the same as opposite confirmation. Besides, what does ‘settled’ even mean? How one-sided does it need to be?

In 2013, a study found that out of over 4,000 peer-reviewed papers on climate science published since 1990, 97% agree, explicitly or implicitly, that global warming is happening and is human-caused. If that’s not ‘settled’, what is?

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Even among esteemed historians, Mark Moyar’s resume is baffling.

As an academic, he holds degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, while as a writer, he has been published by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He is also the former Director of the Office for Civilian-Military Cooperation at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), appointed under President Trump. Today, he is Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College.

Why did we invite him on?

Across the dozens of conversations we’ve had with historians, we’ve covered the majority of the modern West’s wars. Yet, we’ve never tackled the most contentious of them all…

Vietnam.

It traumatised a generation, rewired global relations, and utterly recalibrated how Americans saw themselves on the world stage. Nearly 70 years later, it acts as a fable for nations out over their skis. A lesson in what can happen if you don’t see your own weakness.

In the string of American interventions since - Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran - Americans have become increasingly suspicious of foreign military action. It’s unsurprising - the distance between them and their last decisive victory, like (and with) the mythos of Vietnam, has only grown.

In 2007, Mark published one of the most controversial books ever to be released on the subject. Triumph Forsaken invited critical praise and academic criticism for its radical overhaul of the historical orthodoxy, and remains one of the most widely-discussed Vietnam books of the 21st century.

We wanted to get Mark’s expert perspective on this thorny subject. Should it be? Is the story of Vietnam overstated? Is it understated?

What did we learn?

”Lyndon B. Johnson didn’t explain to Americans why it was important. Compare him to FDR; he was out there, explaining why entering WWII was the right thing to do, why it was a fight worth having. Nixon tries to do it later, but it should have been done long ago. There’s a good case for it; Johnson just didn’t make it.”

Historical orthodoxy tells us that Vietnam was doomed from the start. There’s ample reason to believe it; the factors that made this war more complex and challenging than its predecessors are in such multitudes that there’s no hope of listing them all.

Scholars still debate what was most significant. Some argue that it was the increasing division at home. The civil rights movement brought about a new racial consciousness in millions of black Americans, many of whom resisted the draft - fruitlessly, as black men were enlisted at a rate above the national average. When Muhammad Ali refused to fight, he inspired countless others to follow suit. If America couldn’t depend on its own population to focus on its war, what chance did it have in the jungles of Asia?

Others suggest the Viet Cong had an insurmountable advantage. Not only could they retreat into the dense rainforests, a terrain the Americans could never hope to understand, but into neighbouring countries as well. The Americans had no place to return to. They were stranded, surrounded by an enemy they couldn’t see, much less understand.

Or perhaps it was the drugs. By the late ‘60s, heroin had run rampant through American platoons, debilitating soldiers with a habit that rendered them useless whether or not they were on it. Already facing the natural advantages of their enemy, how could the paranoid, exhausted, sick men in American uniform stand a chance?

Then again, perhaps all of this could have been remedied by one thing: support.

The nation’s morale is an undeniably crucial factor in its military outcomes. If the boys abroad know their wives and children and peers and parents are at home smiling with pride, they might will themselves to make them right. Instead, the American public - if it ever had been in favour of it - was turning ever more against their own fighters. Horrific images were broadcast into homes, stories from the battlefield trickled back, and evidence of criminal conduct by certain platoons was starting to emerge. Once they saw what ‘winning’ meant, the US no longer wanted it.

As Mark explains, none of these can be dismissed. With his forensic level of expertise, he is able to seamlessly guide us through the dizzying array of factors that contributed to American failure in the tropics.

”A lot of historians, especially on the left, will claim that this war could never have been won. There was nothing America could have done differently to secure victory. I think they could have.”

How?

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For nearly 60 years, Nicholas Wade has been one of the most admired and divisive science writers in the world.

In 1967, he wrote for and edited the science journal Nature, before leaving in 1972 to work for Science, where he would stay for 10 years. He later joined the New York Times team as the science and health editor, remaining there for 30 years.

In the late ‘70s, Nicholas began authoring controversial books on the subject of evolution, genetics and the human mind. Last year, he released his latest: The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations.

Why did we invite him on?

”These basic instincts don’t go away. There are certain bonds that the nation state can’t provide, and we should be very worried about what might happen without them.”

How much of our politics can we control?

It’s perhaps the most fundamental question we can explore. There’s something attractive about the notion that all of our views are always the result of nuanced and impartial reason, an unbiased weighing of the data. Believing that is assuring, but is it true?

Do we have any say over what we think? Can we change our minds if we want to?
If not, are we doomed to repeat our mistakes forever?

These are heady questions, all explored in Nicholas’ most recent work. We’ve hoped to host him for a long while, and now seemed like the perfect opportunity.

What did we learn?

”Defenders of socialism will say that it’s never been tried. It has been. The kibutzum was a fair test.”

What was the kibutzum? Emerging in Israel in the 20th century, these were unforced, open communities which adopted communist practices. Members would share in the wealth, resources and labour, they could come and go as they pleased, and measures were taken to undermine the formation of hierarchies. It was, for all intents and purposes, the socialist utopia so often promised.

”It was voluntarily agreed to, and voluntarily rejected when they saw it didn’t work. It was a great and noble idea…”

These sound like a set of circumstances any ardent communist would accept. None of the authoritarianism, state control, censorship and genocide of more well-known examples, and the freedom for individuals to enter and exit as they wish.

”The first thing they did was abolish the family, which has been the unit of humanity since the dawn of time. They separated the children from their families, only allowing them to see one another briefly at the end of the day. Then, they decided to release the woman from the patriarchy; they had whatever jobs they chose and didn’t have to depend on their husbands for anything. Then they abolished meritocratic pay - everyone got the same, regardless of how hard they worked. It was total equality, and on paper, it was ideal.”

If it were so ideal, why do we no longer hear about them? Why don’t leftists parrot the success of the kibbutz in every debate on the merits of communism?

Because, as Nicholas explains, they did what all communist communities do - fall apart.

”It required running against the grain of human nature … When the second generation came up, they weren’t indoctrinated in the ideology of the founders. They started to change things. The mothers wanted to be at home with the children, and the more prosperous workers left to enjoy better pay for their work elsewhere.”

But why? If these were voluntary and free communities, why did the members lose faith?

To Nicholas, their fate was sealed by one thing: the inalienable, unavoidable sway of human nature. Communism, he argues, runs counter to the reward system that millions of years of evolution have imbued humans with. We expect our quality of life to reflect our efforts. Pushing against that leaves everyone destitute and, more importantly, unhappy.

”The system is set up for free-loading. The only thing that stops you from slacking off is public disapproval, but only that can go so far. It’s also destabilising- if you work your heart out and you receive the same pay as the ‘skiver’, you feel you have been wronged, and indeed you have been wronged. It’s very dangerous when you don’t reward people for their merit.”

It raises a complex question: when it comes to what is and isn’t ‘human nature’, where do we draw the line?

The kibutzum didn’t come about through force. It was humans voluntarily participating with other humans in the pursuit of a higher ideal. What could be more ‘human’ than that? Why were these communities less ‘human’ than any other?

Nicholas explains that there exists in the human mind a profound tension: a desire for meritocracy and a desire for equality. We want people to be rewarded for their good work, but we also want things to be ‘fair’.

It’s a tension that can be traced back to our most primordial ancestry. Failure to recognise it comes with a high price.

”In early societies, men had to compete to survive. It wasn’t one man for every woman; it was one chief, alpha-type, with many wives. So you competed like hell. If you didn’t, you stood no chance of having a family. But we also had to be very cooperative with each other… if we failed to do so, we couldn’t defend our tribe. We’d be killed, and the woman would become property of the victor. We are the descendants of the men who survived this system.”

Nicholas goes on to explain that even within these tribes, there was meaningful difference. The most significant exists in the discrepancy between the sexes. Male and female members provided distinct features - ones which needed one another.

”The left will say that the men are no different, apart from minor biological differences. Nothing could be further from the truth. Their mind’s eyes are as different as their bodies, as evolution has shaped them for very different roles. Women are specialised for the home, relationships, raising the children, and men are specialised for defence, fighting, and organising the largest-scale institutions of society.”

To Nicholas, the shallow contrasts we often focus on are only the tip of the iceberg. Men and women don’t merely exist in the world differently - they perceive it in ways that the other can never truly understand. It can make communication difficult, but it’s also a great strength for a society that wishes to survive. Blind spots are accounted for as different strengths are played to. Any efforts to mitigate those natural differences, he suspects, end in disrepair.

”All major institutions, historically, have been set up and run by men. Are women going to do as good a job? … If positions at the head of institutions were to be selected entirely on merit, I suspect it wouldn’t be a 50:50 ratio.”

We told you he was controversial.

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Warren Smith never had aspirations of fame.

For years, he worked as a teacher in a Massachussets secondary school, specialising in media and film. That was until 2024, when he was suddenly fired from his position.

His crime?

Encouraging a student to think critically about why they hated J.K. Rowling.

When it broke, the story spread like wildfire across social media, inviting praise and scorn into Warren’s life at a scale he’d never experienced. Unwilling to let the moment define him, he started a YouTube channel. On Warren Smith -Secret Scholar Society, he dissects clips of popular debates between the most popular pundits of our time, explaining why their arguments work (or don’t) or where their reasoning goes wrong (and doesn’t).

Why did we invite him on?

Stories like Warren’s are as fascinating as they are troubling. Private citizens being fired for their views is one thing, but that’s even not what happened here. Warren was let go for asking clarifying questions - for encouraging a student, in an institute of learning, to think for themselves. That’s a whole new breed of chilling effect.

What’s that like? How does an experience like Warren’s shape you?

We wanted to find out, and why not hear it from the man himself?

What did we learn?

Before we can go into that, you need to know precisely what happened. If you didn’t follow Warren’s story at the time, you might find this hard to believe.

”The video was of me talking to a student. They asked me: ‘How have your views on Harry Potter changed given J.K. Rowling’s bigoted opinions?’ I asked them about the presupposition in there, and they released they didn’t have the data to back that up, and they changed their mind.”

It sounds inocuous enough. Political conversation is hardly atypical in high school today and, if anything, this sounded like an example of de-radicalisation occuring in the classroom. It’s unclear why this was even newsworthy. Warren doesn’t argue.

”I’m surprised anyone watched it really.”

But people did watch it. In their millions.

The clip went viral. Thousands distributed it and thousands more shared their enthusiasm for Warren’s conduct. To many, it was a breath of fresh air, a reminder that there were still educators out there striving to expand the horizons of their students. Imagination, not indoctrination. J.K. Rowling herself even reached out.

Still, it was only the beginning.

”Then Piers Morgan invited me on. I knew if I went to the school and asked them about it, it’d have to go through the chain of command and it’d take too long, so I just did it. Before that, I wasn’t really in trouble - the other teachers didn’t like it, but I wasn’t getting fired. After the Piers Morgan interview, I’m meeting with the principal and the lawyers.”

That’s rarely a good sign. What happened?

”They congratulated me! The principal told me he would have done the same thing, and the lawyers wished me luck. They also told me: ‘We hope you don’t make any mistakes’.”

”We hope you don’t make any mistakes.” What does that mean? Were they trying to intimidate Warren?

”That was definitely the tone… There were some things that happened that people wouldn’t believe.”

From here, it’s a baffling story, as Warren shares the loss of friendships, the legal battles he endured with his previous employer, and how one confrontation’s aftermath led to him sleeping on the bathroom floor after an evening with anxious throwing up.

Warren recovered victory from the jaws of cancellation, but not everyone has been so lucky. For every story like his, there are countless we will never hear. Stories of anonymous and average people, snuffed out of polite society for raising the wrong opinion at the wrong time. Warren has seen the damage this has, particularly among young people.

”There’s a fear among the students about having these conversations. At Emerson College, I see it. Students will march into classes to prevent certain topics from even being discussed. One time, white students were told to ‘surrender’ their white privilege for the duration of a talk. I don’t understand it…”

To our viewers, this is nothing new; left-wing ideologues dominating higher education has been a subject of conversation since long before we started our show. What might alarm you is this - as much as wokeism is retreating in other aspects of life, it’s very much alive in education. And getting worse.

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Even at the peak of censorious wokeism, few comedians were able to slalom the lasers of cancellation better than Ryan and Danny.

Together and apart, the two have enjoyed massive success producing viral comic clips for social media, often tackling the hot-button issues of the day. Through these bite-sized sketches, Danny and Ryan have made a career out of mocking political correctness, performative activism, third-wave feminism and the far right. To date, these skits have amassed over a billion views across all platforms.

Since 2020, they have hosted the hugely popular and wildly funny Boyscast, an irreverent podcast focused on all things male.

Why did we invite them on?

Ryan and Danny are two of the most popular comedians of the internet age, and understandably so. At the height of self-censoring in comedy, they remained unbowedly true to themselves, maintaining the irreverent spirit that makes the artform so special.

We hosted Ryan on our show in 2021 and the following year, we both appeared as guests on the Boyscast. It was a hilarious conversation, and we felt it was high time we returned the favour.

What did we talk about?

Comedy has always adapted to the medium and events of its day. In the advent of the internet, it has never had to move so quickly. It’s no longer enough for a comic to just be funny. They’ve got to produce clips, host podcasts, film all their sets, craft sketches, and work as full-time social media managers. Ryan and Danny have flourished in that environment, but they recognise there’s been a cost to the artform.

Danny: “I’ve been at shows where the host sets up a camera and does crowd work. Just the basic stuff… ‘What do you do?’, asks everybody. And the next comedian sets up their camera and goes up and asks the same question! Is that what comedy is now? Just asking the audience what they do? I was at a show once, and the heckler went up to the comedian after and asked if he’d filmed it. The heckler wanted a clip of him heckling the comedian for his own thing! It’s really next level…”

In the last few years, comedy has infiltrated everything. Trash talk has become the standard patter between pundits and political debates have become roast battles. Even
CNN host Jake Tapper’s set has been remodelled to resemble the stereotypical podcast studio - even his mic is placed on a desk littered with bobbleheads.

”That’s where he’s filming his multimillion-dollar show! If we had his budget, we’d be going for the classic news set.”

Ryan: “Now he’s trying to look like a sportscaster.”

It’s all symptomatic of the long forecast, inevitable heat-death of late-night TV.

For decades, late-night TV was the fortress of entertainment. If you could make it onto the other side of those walls, you were set for life. These hosts had the power to anoint aspiring celebrities with careers beyond their wildest dreams.

Now, that all sounds absurd. What happened?

There’s never any single factor in these downward spirals. But undeniably, the politicisation of these shows played a significant role. Americans would tune in to Fallon, Colbert and Kimmel to escape the heady and divisive reality of politics. Soon, they had no place to turn. The institution was never the same again.

Danny: ”Colbert dancing around and singing about the vaccine… And that was with a team of thirty writers. There are thirty people who make full-time salaries working for that show, and they all passed that.”

Ryan: ”It’s like seeing the girl in the morning without the make-up on … Actors are the same. You see them now doing a video with an influencer, and you go ‘Wait, this guy can’t act! He just had explosions behind him.’”

A select few hosts have had to bow out, but many of the main players have stuck around. Can it last? How long does, say, Colbert have left?

Danny checks his watch:

”About a month.”

It’s a strain to mourn this ‘loss’.

Then again, what do we have instead?

The evaporated trust in institutional media is no bad thing, but humans don’t do well with uncertainty. Instead, people are clinging to any wild theories they hear. The wilder the better - namely, conspiracy theories.

There’s no denying it - conspiracies are a lot of fun. The trouble comes when they tip over from low-stakes fantasy to unsavoury suspicion…

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”I’m a ‘90s liberal, which makes me a right-wing fascist now.”

One of the most recognisable faces of Gen-X comedy, Rob Schneider has been a mainstay of American culture for over 30 years.

Rob was catapulted to fame by three years in the cast of SNL, alongside fellow legends Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Norm MacDonald, and Chris Farley - a run that would earn him three Emmy nominations. Leaving in ‘93, Rob transitioned to films, appearing in the likes of The Waterboy, Big Daddy and 50 First Dates, as well as his own star vehicle: Deuce Bigalow.

More recently, Rob has become something of a political commentator. Cutting away from his peers, he has become increasingly outspoken in his opposition to childhood vaccines, transgenderism and woke culture, as well as his Catholicism and his support of Trump.

Why did we invite him on?

”It’s gotten dangerous. We have to have gun checks at comedy shows now.”

In one of our first interviews post-Trump’s 2024 win, we invited Rob on to share his thoughts on the President, the left, and the divided states of America. It proved to be not only our most popular interview of the trip, but in the history of our show - as of the time of writing, it boasts over 2.4 million views on YouTube.

From that, we can glean that not only do we love talking to Rob, but you seem to appreciate it too. We had to have him back. One year on, there’s so much more to talk about.

What did we discuss?

“There’s a Chinese proverb: ‘May you live in interesting times’… We are certainly living in interesting times.”

The amount that has happened in the last 12 months is, frankly, baffling. Even discounting the West and the world more widely, just looking at America… so much which could not have been predicted this time last year has come to pass. The Epstein scandal, the 12 Day War, which spiralled into the conflict we’re seeing now, the splintering of the MAGA movement - it’s an overwhelming shift.

”The realisation for the liberals that they have lost power is still sinking in. The useful idiots are still protesting, doing their ‘No Kings’ demonstrations … And also there’s a wake-up call for the Republicans that, just because the party is in power, they can’t do all the things they want to do. There are impediments to power.”

Still, if there’s any respite, it’s this: it’s hard to imagine a more ripe time for parody than the age we find ourselves in. Everything is absurd, and the shackles of wokeism have been broadly relinquished. Popular comedy is once again edgy, shocking and, for better or worse, mean.

It’s an unsurprising return to form. After years of censorious scolding, the reaction was always going to be a pendulum swing, equal and opposite in its force. Rob, as a comedian with over thirty years under his belt, warns that the right’s humourists might have missed the key lesson of the woke era…

”In American comedy, we’ve got to be careful. We’ve come out of that COVID tyranny, but all the best stuff about Peter Cook and Monty Python is that it was silly - silliness is king. I fear there’s a lot of serious creeping in, and I think the audience is noticing. I have to be careful too! I have to be careful that I’m not just throwing slop to the conservative masses.”

One of the most significant figures in the pushback was (and is) Dave Chappelle. Arguably the most acclaimed and influential comic of his generation, Dave’s return to comedy in the mid-2010s was initially greeted with universal praise. That soon faded - in Sticks & Stones, Dave began to make jokes at the expense of transgenderism, something he’d double-down across his following specials. Describing himself as “Team TERF” in The Closer, comedy’s greatest living icon made it explicitly clear that he wouldn’t be bowing to the mob. The inevitably 0% Rotten Tomatoes score swiftly followed, but the numbers didn’t lie - Dave was more popular than ever, and did as much as anyone else in his field to steer the ship back on course.

For that, Rob gives Dave all the adulation he can. However, he stresses that even the greats are not immune.

“Dave Chappelle is a genius, but I thought what he said about Charlie Kirk was disgusting. He was sh*tting on him in his last special [The Unstoppable…], making fun of the comparisons people were making to Martin Luther King. But that wasn’t Charlie doing that - that was other people. I didn’t like that…”

Rob’s repulsion to Dave’s comments is not rooted in a distant admiration for Charlie, but rather his close friendship. Talking about him now, Rob becomes visibly misty-eyed.

”Charlie is irreplaceable. I, honestly, as a comedian and a humourist and also a cynic, would get calls from his organisation asking me to be involved. And I was suspicious of it. But then I realised that he’d built an incredible organisation of young people. If you want to influence the future, if you want to return us to traditional American values, you need young people to understand the loss of not maintaining them … And that voice was silenced.”

Approximately zero seconds passed before hysterical leftists raced to drag Charlie’s legacy through the mud. Even today, Rob doesn’t understand it.

”I’m still wrestling with it [eight] months later… Charlie wasn’t like RFK, or JFK, or Martin Luther King. He wasn’t like these leaders who did amazing things but had flaws in their personality. You need those people - people to take big risks and put everything on the line. He was just a genuinely incredible guy. He was a gigantic loss for us.”

Whether you agreed with or even liked Charlie, only the most fringe and sadistic could see what happened to him as anything other than a tragedy. It could have been an opportunity for reconciliation; a bipartisan acknowledgement that things had gone too far and it was time to turn down the temperature.

That opportunity was not fulfilled…

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The 48 Laws Of Power is one of the most divisive million-selling books of the last 30 years.

Heralded as a powerful guide to establishing self-worth and success, it’s equally reviled as a form of advocacy for sociopathy, encouraging readers to treat those around them as pawns to be manipulated for their own gain. It’s been cited by some of culture’s most influential figures - including the likes of Michael Jackson, Jay-Z and, allegedly, Fidel Castro - and has also been banned from several American prisons.

Like Machiavelli’s The Prince or Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, it’s an amoral, detached explanation of how power works and how individuals can harness it. It describes power not as it should be, but as it is – the ends for which it’s used are irrelevant to its author: Robert Greene.

Power is a fact of life, and a feature worth understanding. We wanted to get Robert’s insight into the political landscape of our time. How does power function in society? How can leaders accrue more, and how can they use what they have to their advantage? As voters, what should we look out for? Knowing what we know now, what’s to come?

What did we learn?

Hunger for power is a trait we typically reserve for only a slim percentage of society. Politicians, CEOs, police officers, managerial types - those who directly benefit from the gain of influence.

This, Robert assures us, is not true.

”Most people want power. The sense that you have no control or influence over your wife, your kids, your boss, your job, etc., is hugely miserable for the human animal. We need a feeling that we have some power over our environment and the people around us. If you feel powerless, you can turn to some very negative behaviours.”

”Power” has a bad reputation; many believe that the desire for it is often mistaken for a want to use others nefariously. This is mistaken. It can be a malevolent force, but not necessarily. Ultimately, it’s an expression of how others see us - power is a kind of validation.

”Every human being needs a degree of validation. We’re a social animal; the idea that we are individuals is kind of an illusion. Everything that we think is reflected through the eyes of other people. If people are alone and isolated, their sense of being a human can fall apart. We can’t get validation or love from ourselves - we need it from other people.”

Nowhere is the will to power - and how widespread it truly is - more obvious in the 21st century than on social media. The mechanisms of every aspect of modern life are shaped by it. Politicians use it to curry support, celebrities use it to advertise to their fans, and even regular people are suckered into the games of influence.

This all came in the years following the publishing of the 48 Laws. Looking at it now, would Robert change any of them to accomodate such a drastic change?

He thinks not.

”Human nature is human nature. We evolved from our ancestors. Our brains are wired a particular way. We all feel envy, we all have an irrational side, we tend to be self-absorbed. All social media does is exaggerate those qualities and make them worse. It’s a machine for creating envy. It’s a tool that makes it easier to deceive. One of the laws is to court attention at all costs, and social media makes that possible.”

Social media also capitalises on the difference between those who have and those who don’t. The whole function of it, Robert argues, relates to the deceptive end of power-seeking - mislead your peers and rivals about your abilities. Harness that, he says, and things change rapidly.

”If I convince myself that I am powerful, confident and worthy of attention, it creates a self-fulfilling dynamic. People read that you’re confident and presume it comes from somewhere real. I see this in Elon Musk. Say what you will about him, he’s very good at marketing. He creates an automobile company off the back of a myth that he’s a revolutionary person, and that makes people want to fund him. The appearance of power alone can draw people to you.”

Still, is this not all more than a little deceptive?

Robert isn’t advising people to acquire useful skills, or be straight-foward and frank with others, or even simply to do what is right. What happened to meritocracy? Let the best man win?

”Let me introduce to the real world - it doesn’t operate like a utopia. People have egos, they have problems. I worked in TV on a terrible show, I won’t even name it… I was a researcher, and a researcher was considered successful based on how many stories they found that then got made. I was the best of my team. I still got fired. Because I didn’t brown-nose the boss. Because of stupid, stupid egos. They don’t care about results - they care about how they feel. That crosses the line from business, into sports, into entertainment, into warfare, into politics. It goes through everything. And the larger the group, the more politics matter, and the more egos affect things.”

The subjects of egos and politics guide us seamessly to one of the subjects we hoped to explore with Robert - President Donald Trump.

Trump’s political career has been nothing short of astonishing. From novelty nominee in 2015 to elected leader of the free world in 2016, from President to pariah in 2021, and then to come back and win again in 2024 with the most dominant Republican victory in decades. It’s still hard to understand, which is why so many try.

Political scientists the world over have been trying to formalise the secret to his success. Robert, as someone who looks at things much more pragmatically, sees things differently. We had to ask: is Trump adhering to the 48 laws?

”He’s absolutely brilliant at one law of power. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who’s even been better at it. Law 6: court attention at all costs. Everyone’s thinking about him all the time. He knows how to turn anything, even a negative, into a publicity stunt. He’s very, very good at the attention game. Not just getting it, but using it.”

Unfortunately for Trump, his greatest strength, when not ballasted, becomes his greatest weakness. To Robert, it’s Trump’s inability to show any reflection that makes him not just a compelling figure to so many, but a loathsome one to everyone else.

”Envy is a powerful motivator, and when you’re powerful, people envy you. Having a sense of humour, particularly a self-deprecating sense of humour, is very important, because it can cut away on that instinct in others to steal power from you. Abraham Lincoln was a master of it. The problem with Trump is that he’s never self-deprecating. His humour is always at the expense of someone else. That might appeal to cruel people, but to everyone else? I think eventually that wears very thin."

Is this something Trump can outlast, or is he doomed?

”I don’t have a crystal ball, and I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few years. But I know he has a very serious character flaw, and that character flaw will always get in his way…”

And what’s that?

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”When you start looking at the underpinnings of our beliefs, you realise how we divided we are. There’s a lot more hatred than you think.”

Andrew Wilson is one of the internet’s most notorious debaters and not without good reason. His confrontational and arresting style, as demonstrated through his appearances on Piers Morgan Uncensored and the Whatever podcast, has earned him fans and detractors alike. More recently, Andrew has appeared on Jubilee’s flagship show Surrounded, where he faced off against left-wing streamer Destiny, and on the Joe Rogan Experience. Today, he hosts his own podcast The Crucible, which has been described as “the fastest growing debate platform online”.

Why did we invite him on?

Andrew is a voice in ascent. While most well-known pundits initially made their name in other fields - authoring books, stand-up, commentating, etc. - Andrew’s reputation is built purely on his skills in the arena of debate.

That alone makes him interesting. But we were intrigued beyond that.

Andrew’s politics - what he describes to us as a form of cultural nationalism informed by Christian ethics - are also becoming increasingly popular. His right-populist stances have been taken up by some of the most influential conservatives in the world today, and we wanted to explore those maxims with one of their most ardent apologists.

Yet, for as much as we put our challenges to Andrew, he returned some tests of his own.

What did we talk about?

Well, things start off blunt.

”I hate leftists.”

Why?

”They’re psychopaths who are going to destroy everything I care about through suicidal empathy. I hate the entire left. I consider the delineation between progressives and leftists to be minute. It’s all about ethics and they don’t have any. It’s just degrees of psychopathy.”

If Andrew’s expecting an argument about the demerits of lunatic progressivism, he’s come to the wrong place. But why throw all left-wing people in the same bucket? There are plenty of sane left-wing thinkers - many of whom we’ve had on the show - who don’t hate their country or success or merit and are willing to hear the other side and consider the issues with an open mind and humility.

Andrew doesn’t think so.

”It’s all the same kind of thinking. Why do they want what they want? Why aren’t social safety nets voluntary? The whole idea of progressive liberalism is volunteerism, that the government can’t force you to do anything. The promise of leftists, of progressives, is that the government will do what’s fair. That’s why we can’t have a Christian government, because the secularists will do what’s fair. They’re not going to force you to do anything, but they compell me against my will to do all kinds of things.”

Still, there are degrees here. A centre-left thinker might argue for raising taxes a fraction, or opening more community centres, providing a more robust safety net. This is a far cry from the communist who wants totalitarian control of the economy, the press and the means of production.

It’s true, Andrew concedes, but fundamentally, the difference is not meangingful.

”Right and left is dialectical. We view politics in the United States through a duality - it’s left, or it’s right … What are we referencing here? What is ‘left’? Is it social issues? Is it taxes? … I think we could break it down further - these are philosophical positions and people don’t realise it.”

What does Andrew mean by that?

”The left-wing pillar is based around anti-realism and anti-moralism. That’s how you end up with post-modernism and all that. Right-wingers are interested in tradition and religion because they see the world as duty-bound, [whereas] the left see it as about ‘rights’. ‘I have the right to do this, I have the right to do that.’ There are no morals - it’s all stance dependent - which is why they do so many immoral things. Those pillars don’t align, and that’s why we’re constantly clashing.”

If you hadn’t worked it out already, Andrew finds himself squarely on the right. A self-described “paleocon” (conservative in the traditional sense), he appeals to the value of an objective standard. To Andrew, moral relativism is a downward spiral to degeneracy and apathy.

Konstantin challenges him, asserting that, in a liberal society, Andrew is welcome to have his views on any given subject. The only limit is when he tries to move from the philosophical to the political - when he tries to thrust his personal qualms on the wider population. Andrew responds, arguing that these two things are not too different and, in practice, might even be indistinct.

”If there’s no objective appeal to a standard, then everything’s fair game, and then things are eroded… OnlyFans hookers and homosexual marriage, why is this something we have to put up with again? If two men can get married, why not three? Why not ten? Nothing. Nothing prevents that. But we know it’s not good for society.”

Andrew’s response raises the ultimate political question: what is good for society?

Here, we naturally slalom to one of the subjects we were hoping to tackle with our guest: his ‘cultural nationalism’, and his desire for Christian ethics to return to the centre of American government.

Even among believers, it’s a fringe view. The separation of church and state is, today, seen as as a fundamental feature of America’s national identitity. Does Andrew’s view contradict itself? Why should a non-Christian roll over and accept its teachings against their will?

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”Humans have the chance to save ourselves and we’re screwing it up. We know the right answers, but we’re making the wrong decisions.”

‘Roman Yampolskiy’ might not be a name you’re familiar with. After all, the list of celebrity computer scientists can be counted on one’s elbow. But if his predictions come true, he may prove to be one of the most significant academic figures of his generation.

Roman is considered to have coined the term “AI safety” - the research field focused on controlling artificial intelligence. He has also dedicated his life’s work to it. In 2012, he founded the Cyber Security Lab, which he has since directed, and has also worked as a research advisor of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and an ‘AI safety fellow’ of the Foresight Institute. To sound the alarm on what he deems the near-certainty of AI-induced human extinction, he has appeared on Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan and, now, Triggernometry.

Why did we invite him on?

Wherever AI leads us, it’s going to be seismic.

To some, it’s the sure path to utopia. Once AI is complete enough for us to hand it the reins, we’ll be living in the land of milk and honey. A world free of disease and of prosperity the likes of which we have never seen.

That’s one vision. The other is less rosey: a world in which humans are enslaved by their own tools, with their faculties atrophied and blackmailed by a godlike ‘mind’ capable of hypnosis and control.

Some who know the most about it - even some who have helped create the models - are now trying to alert us to the danger. In February, Anthropic AI’s head of safety, Mrinank Sharma, announced his resignation with a public letter in which he declared that the “world [was] in peril.” He’s not alone. Quite suddenly, many who once fiercely advocated the cornucopian view of AI have started to turn.

They’re all catching up to Roman.

Roman was one of the first thought leaders in the field to show hesitancy. Now, he sees us at a crossroads. If we don’t stop soon, we might be signing our own death warrant.

Why? How? That’s exactly what we wanted to know.

What did we learn?

Before we delve into this most complex of subjects, it’s essential to understand exactly what it is Roman does. What is ‘AI safety’, and why does it matter?

”[In AI], we’re creating something with the capacity to replace us or kill us. [The AI safety thinkers] are trying to prevent that. There’s a lot of concern about what AI will do to productivity, creativity, our relationships… but there’s very little about making sure it goes well. If these systems go from sub-human level to above us, we are done.”

Roman says it with a level of confidence that suggests he has a clear image of how it will happen, so why are we “done?” What does “done” even mean?

”Done”, to Roman, describes the total and irrevocable destruction of the human species. The eradication of each member of the population and the likely corrosion of any mark it had on the planet.

Today, people use AI to make amusing cartoons of themselves. The idea that it could be used as a weapon against its creator is unthinkable. How does Roman see it playing out?

”You’re asking me how I would destroy humanity. And believe me, I have a lot of great ideas [laughs]. But it’s not what a super-intelligent computer capable of designing new weapons, physics and poisons would come up with … Squirrels have no concept of how we can kill them - there’s too big a cognitive gap. Similarly, we don’t know what super-intelligent AI could do.”

Doesn’t Roman’s analogy prove that his prediction is, at the very least, not certain? The human race, if it dedicated itself to doing so, could kill every squirrel on the planet. It wouldn’t even be that taxing. The fact squirrels remain alive is testament to the fact that we don’t want to. We like squirrels and so we let them live. Who’s to say AI will be any different?

Even if we grant that it one day could, why would AI even want to destroy us?

”It’s not because the AI hates you. It’s because it wants to do something else and it doesn’t care about you. Maybe it wants to cool down the planet. Why? Well, maybe computations are easier to do in a cold environment. So it freezes the whole planet and we die. Does it care about that? No - it doesn’t matter. Maybe it wants to convert our planet into fuel and fly to another galaxy. It has no built-in concern about your safety. If it wants to accomplish something and the side-effect is humanity dies, that would not be an obstacle.”

However powerful and intelligent AI becomes, we are still its creator. What’s to stop us writing into the code that the preservation and well-being of humanity is a non-negotiable?

Roman tells us we have it backwards.

”We don’t write any code. We train those systems by giving them data. All the data we have and all of the internet, and then it learns something. And whatever it learns, that’s what we’re trying to figure out. We study it like biological artefacts - you observe it and see how it functions. Nobody knows how to encode anything like [what you’re saying] into the models. Nobody’s even claiming to. We simply don’t know how these systems will behave.”

These questions are unavoidable and if Roman’s right, they’re not really questions at all. Yet, the developers at the cutting edge of this technology refuse to slow down. They wax lyrical about the heaven on earth it’ll bring us without consideration for what happens if they’re wrong.

If the survival of humanity is in jeopardy, why do they persist?

”If I’m the guy who created God… maybe I’d get something out of it. But the truth is, when it goes wrong, they won’t even be remembered as the ‘bad guy’ in history - there will be no history books at all.

Tech is defined by its ‘devil-may-care’ attitude. Make changes now, ask questions later. In Facebook’s early days, the company operated on a ‘move fast and break stuff’ mantra. People got hurt, and the social costs are self-evident, but it’s also one of the most profitable companies of the last century. It’s hard to weed out those incentives, and harder still to place ethics at the forefront.

”Historically, most people work in AI never took the time to ask what would happen if they succeeded. It was so hard for so long that they only thought about trying to succeed at all. They never asked ‘if this works, then what?’ Then, the progress became exponential. Now, it’s hyper-exponential; the AI is helping research itself. But do we want this? Did 8 billion people agree to this experiment?”

To some of you, this might sound like science fiction - a problem for the distant future. It won’t happen in my lifetime, or even my childrens’ lifetime, or theirs childrens’; this is something for the populations of the next millenium to worry about.

It’s coming sooner than you think. Much sooner.

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