Peter Hitchens is one of Britain’s most beloved conservatives. In his career, he has contributed to the likes of The Spectator, the American Conservative, The Guardian, and the New Statesmen. Today, he writes primarily for the Mail On Sunday, while continuing to publish best-selling books.

Why did we invite him on?

”I’m in my mid-70s. I have little to gain in life, and not much longer to live; if it were possible for me to do something, I would. But people are drawn to more seductive voices, and I can’t offer seduction - it would be dishonest.”

Across the eight years we’ve been doing our show, Peter has firmly established himself as one of our favourite recurring guests. His firewood-dry wit and expert and unorthodox analysis always make for a brilliant conversation, and we thought it was high time we had him back.

Last time he joined us, we discussed the then-upcoming 2024 election. Peter shared a view that divided our listeners, and two years on, with so much having changed, we wanted to see if he stood by it. Beyond that, we also wanted to explore what he sees in our nation’s future, both the immediate and the distant. What came of it was typically fascinating.

What did we talk about?

”Last time I was on your show, I said that a vote for Reform was a vote for Labour, and that seems to me to have been proven true … How anyone thought putting a Labour government in office would solve the social, political, and economic conditions of the country, I just don’t know.”

With that last election now 24 months behind us, it’s hard to say with any certainty that Britain is in a better place. Those eight seasons have been characterised by riots, upheaval, division and decay. But with Starmer now bowing out, does Peter feel any more hopeful than he did before?

”The country is obviously finished. It’s just a question of how and when this will be apparent to everybody.”

To Peter, the theatrics of politics are just that - theatrics. The Conservatives are not conservative, Reform can’t reform, the Greens are too green, and Labour doesn’t work. As wide a gulf as there seems to be between these parties, they are all fundamentally operating on the same delusion. Unless radical change is implemented, it’s all just lawn-mowing at the foot of Krakatoa.

”Everything we do is based on an overestimation of how rich we are, and if the currency shrinks, you can’t keep up that pretence anymore - the government spending will [have to] shrink. We have also trashed the talent pool of this country; we have people at the elite level who are unable to think properly. We have a transport system that doesn’t work and is falling to pieces. We have a criminal justice system that might as well have been abducted by aliens … These all contribute to a feeling that nothing works. It’s as though someone has cursed us.”

So far, Peter has given us very little reason to feel optimistic. What he describes isn’t a country in decline but a declined country that can’t see itself. Britain has run off the cliff, but it hasn’t looked down. Is there anything we can do to change course?

”We need someone to tell the people that things have to change, and they will be difficult. There will be fewer of the things we have gotten used to, and that’s a hard thing to accept - it doesn’t tend to win elections.”

Peter explains that if we don’t face things now, we’ll be forced to later, when they’ll be much, much worse. He warns of cycles of hyperinflation and poverty, “the likes of which we never thought we’d see”. With poverty comes division. Under such circumstances, political extremism is inevitable. In a sense, it’s already here.

”You’re already seeing that. People are willing to listen now to people they ought not to listen to.”

Who is Peter talking about here?

”[Sighs] You can guess. It’s not even worth raising the names. There are people now on the edges of politics who are becoming very influential, and they’re very worrying. I don’t want to help them now by naming them.”

History, it’s been said, comes in cycles. The collapse is as predictable as the rise, and the rise is as inevitable as the collapse. If the country is “finished”, it isn’t really; something will come in the wake of it. Perhaps something better. That rejuvenation may fall outside a 10-year-plan, but, as Konstantin asserts, if things turn bad enough, a revival is sure to come. There is only so much the average person will put up with. So far, they’ve allowed themselves to be squeezed, but we’re already seeing their teeth.

Nations that suffered much worse fates have recovered. Former communist states, former military dictatorships… even those who participated in the Second World War. Is that something to comfort in?

”That’s rather Marxist of you.”

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Everybody has an opinion on Nigel Farage.

To some, he’s the heir apparent to Enoch Powell, the face of English bigotry. To others, he’s a lovable rogue, the parliamentary phoenix of right-wing politics - an unsmotherable force that, despite everything that comes his way, shapes and defines the movement in his image.

He’s Britain’s most divisive politician of the 21st century and arguably the most influential to never hold the top office.

That might soon change.

Today, according to recent polls by IPSOS, YouGov, and Freshwater Strategy, Reform UK is the most popular political party in the country, and the favourite to win the next general election.

Why did we invite him on?

Nigel is never far from controversy. The scorn he faces is often commensurate with the adulation he enjoys. As Reform continues to enjoy a surge in public support, the predictable tide of scrutiny comes his way. It’s a pattern as old as his career in politics.

The last month, however, has proven to be one of his most testing yet. Between scandal and tragedy, Farage and his party have been put through the wringer. We wanted to get a sense of what things are like in the eye of the storm. Is this another test in the long and storied history of a divisive firebrand, or are we looking at the end of one’s public life?

What did we learn?

Our conversation comes mere days in the wake of Ann Widdecombe’s shocking murder. A well-known conservative voice and Reform Party spokesperson, Nigel had a close relationship with Ann; though we initially planned to focus on the by-election, it would be wrong to not start the discussion there. Nigel asserts that the two events are not so disparate.

”They’re directly linked. The full-scale attack on Reform, which has really gone into gear since May 7th. Why May 7th? Massive set of elections across the UK. We wipe out the Conservatives in East Anglia… unbelievable. We take out Labour in Northern England, the Midlands, we make big breakthroughs in Scotland and Wales. Ever since that moment, the attacks on the party have been unrelenting. [They say] we are extremists, a threat to Britain, more dangerous than Putin, and we’re all criminals. This is the narrative that’s going out unendingly.”

Nigel’s used to scrutiny; over four decades in political life, he’s faced his share of barbs and jabs. He even welcomes it. This, he believes, is different; the political tension we’re seeing, the will for violence, is unlike anything he’s witnessed in his lifetime.

”I’ve been in this game a long time. I’m used to the rough and tumble of politics. In a way, that’s what democracy is … But when stuff going out in national newspapers that is simply untrue, or exaggerated beyond belief… If you demonise people, like in Ann’s case, because they don’t believe in gay marriage, or have strict views on abortion, or they believe in strict immigration control… If you dehumanise them, is it surprising that it engenders a form of hate?”

And hate, to Nigel, contrary to what initial official reports suggested, is what this is.

”It was obvious to me from the first moment that this was politically motivated and premeditated. It was an assassination, directly downstream from the anti-Reform campaign waged by the House of Commons and the mainstream media every week.”

Things are at a crossroads; they can go one of two ways. This either results in a normalising of sociopolitically inspired acts of terror or a realisation that we’ve already let things go too far. With, as Konstantin notes, Gen-Z up to 7 times more in favour of political violence than previous generations, they don’t look promising.

”[The left] so believe in their righteous virtue that they feel allowed [to say anything they want]. I cannot think of a single conservative commentator who would ever say anything approaching that about the death of a senior public figure. If Jeremy Corbyn died, I’d say ‘I don’t agree with him, but he believed in what he believed in, and he fought for it for decades.’ That’s the difference here.”

It’s no shock to Nigel; he’s been at the sharp end of this cultural shift for years. Recently, The Times revealed that the party leader receives up to 300 death threats a month. How serious are they?

”Oh, it’s serious. It’s been serious, in my case, since 2013, but nobody cared … We requested protection, but we were told the threats ‘did not meet the threshold’. ‘Did not meet the threshold.’ And yet, Lucy Connolly, who puts out an intemperate tweet and removes it four hours later, goes to Britain. Two-tier policing, two-tier justice, two-tier attitudes. Hopefully, after the horrific and deeply upsetting murder of Ann, something will come of it. Maybe the police will start to take threats seriously, regardless of which end of the political spectrum they’re on.”

This brings us neatly to the other key subject we planned to explore. On July 7th, Nigel announced his resignation from his post as the MP of Clacton. Not to disappear from public life, but to trigger a by-election in his constituency. The news came after weeks of increasing criticism from rival parties and major media outlets, generally pertaining to a controversial “gift” - £5 million from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne - and in a valley of Reform’s popularity. Why did he call it?

”I called this by-election before Ann’s murder, but I ordered it [to combat] that daily assault. Being slandered in the media every single day, without any way to come back from it, had left the party in a state of paralysis. I want the people of Clacton to be my judge. If you think I’m a crook, get rid of me. If you don’t, and if you think the mainstream media are out of touch, then vote for me on August 13th.”

It’s an understandable position, but if Nigel is going to accuse the mainstream media of lying and exaggerating, he has to demonstrate why they’re wrong. Here, he’s unflinching in his defence.

“Have I broken the law? No. Have I broken tax law? No. Have I fiddled my expenses? No. Have I used public money? No. I’ve claimed nothing on expenses; I don’t need to. What is my crime? What is my sin? The rules of procedure, for parliamentary standards, which are only there to regulate your public life - not your private life - say that any political donations that you receive have to be declared.”

There are two key questions the voting public has here. The first pertains to the origin of the money. Who is Christopher Harborne? Is this some kind of pseudo-grant? A bribe?

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Alastair Campbell is one of the most influential, discussed, and divisive figures in modern British politics.

Rising to prominence in the ‘80s as Political Editor for the Daily Mirror, before moving to Today in the ‘90s, Alastair left journalism to become press secretary to the then-newly-elected opposition leader, Tony Blair. When Labour secured an electoral victory in 1997, Alastair also became Blair’s speechwriter and chief strategist. Ingratiating himself as a key figure in the New Labour movement, he would oversee two more re-election campaigns.

Since leaving his post under Blair, Alastair has kept busy, continuing to act as a freelance political advisor for various European governments, as well as editing The New World and interviewing for GQ. In 2022, Alastair partnered with Rory Stewart to launch The Rest Is Politics, which - at the time of writing - ranks as the single most popular podcast in Britain.

Why did we invite him on?

It’s always easier to criticise and prospect from the sidelines. To thrust utopianism on the real world without ever facing the consequences. It’s another thing entirely to make calls on the world stage.

We are fascinated by outspoken characters, especially those who have seen the machine from the inside. Alastair is one such case.

We wanted to explore Alastair’s assessment of Britain in 2026. The state of our politics, the fate of its people, and the marriage of the two as captured in the rise of populism.

We got that, and we got more.

What did we talk about?

‘Elites’, whether that be billionaires or academic authorities or career politicians, have never been less popular. For the first time in recent memory, credentials are a mark against you - the public wants one of their own. If you’re a hopeful political actor and want to pull people in on the left or right, you have no choice but to adopt the populist view. Whether Alastair likes it or not, the age of populism has arrived.

He doesn’t like it. Why not?

”It depends how you define it … For me, populism is about exploiting problems and not solving them. It’s not about meeting challenges together; it’s about driving people apart. That’s my take, and that’s why I don’t like it.”

Woven into Alastair’s definition is a key recognition: there are indeed problems. Some argue that they alone are sufficient explanations for the rise of populism. Alastair disagrees.

”There are some very effective political operators who have worked out that their route to power is populism as I define it. Trump in America, Farage here, we know who they are. One of the things I find so comical about the populist right is that they’re very nationalist, but they fight it on a global level. It’s such a con that they’ve tricked people into thinking they’re on the side of the people. They’re globalists fighting against globalism.”

Framed like that, it’s unclear how it caught on. If democracy is the sum wisdom of a population, why does Alastair think they keep falling for hucksters?

”There’s a sense that democratic politics wasn’t producing leaders that people felt were their leaders. I think Tony probably was the last one here. I didn’t like Thatcher, but when she was Prime Minister, I didn’t think ‘It’s ridiculous that she’s the Prime Minister’. I think that all the time now.”

Konstantin suggests that these criticisms ignore the real problems. They condemn the results of the problems more than the problems themselves For example, Farage came to prominence on a wave of anti-immigration sentiment which has percolated more and more over the last decade or so. Is his popularity his own fault, or a comment on how betrayed the British public feels about his chief issue?

Or take the case of the grooming gangs. If it had been tackled properly in the first place, would the “con-artists” Alastair talks about have been able to “exploit” it?

”I don’t know. Some of the anger is justified, but a lot of it isn’t.”

Konstantin lays out his view: 50,000 illegal immigrants should not be coming into the United Kingdom every calendar year. Is that a fair position?

”Depending on the wider context, it might not be.”

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What is happiness?

For as much as we dedicate our lives to it, the answer is unclear. It is elusive by nature; look directly at it, and it ceases to be.

It’s a problem that Arthur C. Books has dedicated his career to solving.

Returning to academia in the late ‘90s after a career in classical music, Arthur has explored the subject of contentment at several of America’s most prestigious higher-education centres, including Harvard Business School - where he continues to lecture today. Since the turn of the millennium, he has authored and co-authored a dozen books - including 2023’s Build The Life You Want, sharing credit with Oprah Winfrey. His latest - The Meaning Of Your Life: Finding Purpose In An Age of Emptiness - was published earlier this year.

Why did we invite him on?

However you define ‘happy’, one thing is inarguable: most people are not it. Much has been made of the 21st century’s “crisis of meaning” - a post-industrial condition whereby ordinary people, separated from the pursuit of their base needs and simultaneously locked out of adventure, are left scrambling for purpose.

That crisis manifests in ugly ways. Violence, sectarianism, and suicide, to name just a few. If human beings could find meaning in escaping it, perhaps the problem would solve itself.

But how?

That’s what we wanted to know, and Arthur seemed like precisely the person to ask.

What did we learn?

Before we can explore what happiness, it’s wise to identify what it isn’t. To Arthur, people often mistake it for lower-value goods. Some view it as nothing more than ‘pleasure’. This, he argues, is the root of all misunderstanding.

”Happiness is not a pursuit of pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure does not lead to happiness; it leads to rehab.”

Perhaps happiness isn’t the presence of something good, but the absence of something bad. Life is defined by suffering - grief, fear, stress, death - and maybe what we call ‘happiness’ is best understood as a temporary escape from these pressures. Is that closer to the truth?

Still no.

”Negative emotions and experiences are behind your survival. And yet, people don’t want them. That’s the conflict - they want something they know they can’t have. Happiness isn’t the absence of negative emotion … it’s a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Those are the macronutrients. Don’t pursue ‘happiness’, pursue those three things, and happiness will find you.”

”Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.” It’s a helpful framework, but are these terms any more easily defined than ‘happiness’. To test his hypothesis, we ask Arthur to break them down one by one.

”Enjoyment is the engagement of pleasurable things under the right circumstances … If you’re in Vegas at 4 in the morning, pulling the [slot machine arm] again and again, we’ll need to talk. But if you’re sat at the blackjack table, prudently gambling with money you can afford to lose, and surrounded by your best friends? That’s enjoyment.”

That’s straightforward enough, and difficult to argue with. Noble sacrifice might be admirable, but without any pleasure at all, it’s hard to call that ‘happiness’. What about satisfaction?

”Satisfaction is very paradoxical - it’s the enjoyment of an achievement reached through struggle. Only homo sapiens want pain; if you don’t have to give something up to achieve something else, you’ll get no sweetness from it. If a student cheats on an exam, they’ll get no satisfaction from their A. But this is where it gets weird…”

Here, Arthur explains something we all know, but rarely recognise. Have you ever noticed that the elation you feel after the attainment of a long-fought goal never sticks around? Have you wondered why? It’s because hardwired into the human brain is an evolutionary trap that keeps us from achieving long-term satisfaction but protects us from knowing that we won’t achieve it.

”There’s something called ‘the arrival fallacy’. It’s the idea that, because it was fun to make progress towards something challenging, the goal will be bliss. It never is. When people win an Olympic gold model, they fall into a clinical depression. Your emotions don’t work to put you in a permanently good mood, and we know that, but Mother Nature wants you fooled again and again and again so we stay in the hunt.”

With ‘enjoyment’ and ‘satisfaction’ now clearly defined, we can move on to the most challenging of the triumvirate - meaning. Everyone knows what enjoyment feels like, and the same is true for satisfaction. There will be a large number of people out there who have no personal experience of ‘meaning’ as it’s often described. So, how can we identify it?

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Establishing himself through a career of acclaimed books and programmes for TV and radio, rendering the tangled tales of history for an audience of millions, James Holland is one of Britain’s eminent popular historians. Today, he also co-chairs the Chalke Valley History Festival and co-hosts - with comedian Al Murray - the brilliant podcast, We Have Ways Of Making You Talk.

Why did we invite him on?

After Tucker Carlson’s highly contentious interview with amateur historian Darryl Cooper, we invited James on our show for the first time. Long-time admirers of his work, we felt he was the perfect candidate to explore the eminating myths of World War II revisionism. He was an exceptional guest, masterfully separating the fact from the fiction, and we knew instantly that we’d have him back again.

We also knew we wanted to go deep. Deep into the murky, disturbing world of the 20th century’s greatest monster: Hitler.

A telling of the dictator’s life has been missing from our historical catalogue. It’s such an immense subject, one so sensitive and densely woven, we couldn’t help but approach it with caution. Once it was covered, that was it. We had to get it right.

We had faith in James, and were thrilled when he accepted our offer to host him once more. The interview was scheduled to run for 90 minutes. By the time we wrapped filming, we’d gone for three hours.

What did we learn?

Typically, we would take the time here to share some of the highlights and insights from the interview.

In this case, that feels wholly inadequate. This is one of the longest, most detailed, and comprehensive conversations in the history of the channel. Dicing it up would defeat the point. Rather, we feel you should enjoy it in full. Believe us - you’ll want to.

Over the course of our three-hour exploration of the life of the last century’s great tyrant, we left no stone unturned. We talked about…

- Hitler’s distinct lack of charisma in his youth, and how his heroism in the First World War sets about a rebirth of character.
- How the momentum post-war spite shaped his political outlook, carried him to party leadership, and guided him to finding his voice.
- His 1000-year vision of Germany and how long-termism shaped the Nazi project.
- Whether the Nazis were a right- or left-wing party, or if it even matters.
- Their iconography and its subliminal messaging.
- The psychology of imperialism and initial expectations.
- The miscalculations in battle.
- His final throes of desperation…
- … and humiliating demise.

and ask what is arguably the most explosive question of all… Is there any feasible moral understanding of Hitler?

And yet, that’s still not all. These kinds of interviews come along only once in a while, and we can’t wait to share this one with you. The whole thing comes to Substack tonight before going out on YouTube and X tomorrow - 7PM UK / 2PM ET. Don’t miss it.

Bill’s story is one of the most fascinating we’ve ever heard.

A Brit born and raised in America to a Communist family, Bill moved to Russia as a young man and a ferocious capitalist.

”When I grew my hair long, that didn’t upset my family. When I followed the [jam band] Grateful Dead around the country, that didn’t upset my family. When I put on a suit and tie, that p*ssed them off good and proper.”

Specialising in Russian markets, Bill is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management and investment advisor to the Hermitage Fund which, in 1997, ranked as the best-performing investment fund in the world.

In 2005, in retaliation to his challenging of several large Russian corporations, Bill was refused entry to the country, deported to the UK, and declared a national threat.
Two years later, the firm’s Moscow offices were raided, and the man Bill assigned to investigate the raid’s cause - Sergei Magnitsky - was arrested, held without trial, before falling ill (a result of his mistreatment) and ultimately dying in custody.

After Magnitsky's death, Browder became devoted to political activism, lobbying for Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act, a law to punish Russian human rights violators. In 2012, it was signed into law by President Obama.

Bill has remained a steadfast enemy of the Kremlin ever since.

Why did we invite him on?

Bill’s unique experience with Russia has gifted him a unique insight. He’s seen the best and the worst the country can offer an individual, and hence possesses an intimate, unorthodox understanding of its quirks, curios, and dangerous components.

That extends to his assessment of their war with Ukraine.

To most in the West, Putin’s intentions are clear - to revive Russia’s dimmed glory by knocking back what he sees as European encroachment. It’s his attempt to assert himself as a once-in-a-century political figure, a Peter The Great-style figure for the 21st century.

Bill disagrees: Putin’s war in Ukraine is not a man-of-history story; it’s a cover-up.

Of what?

That’s what we wanted to find out.

What did we learn?

”When Putin came into power, he wasn’t a monster. He was a technocrat cracking down on the oligarchs. I was one of the people supporting him! When he got [former wealthiest man in Russia] Khodorkovsky, I thought ‘One down, twenty-one to go.’”

It’s remarkable to hear, given everything that would soon happen to him and his associates, how warmly Bill once felt about the Russian dictator. Initially, he seemed like the remedy for Russian corruption. It’s almost funny to think of that now.

Putin’s supposed crack-down on oligarchs turned out to be, unsurprisingly, self-serving. The only way they’d be allowed to continue to operate in Russia would be if they gifted 50% of their earnings to the President. Not the Presidential account, not the Kremlin - Putin himself.

This was the beginning of the autocrat’s shady efforts to enrich himself through his office.

”He stole too much. He’s been a crook since the beginning. Nobody goes into public service to serve the public. If you’re a traffic cop, it’s to extract bribes. If you want to be a building surveyor, you do it to extract bribes. The bribes just get bigger. Putin stole an exorbitant amount of money. More than you can imagine.”

Try us.

”Over the course of 22 years, up to the start of the war, Putin and a thousand other people stole over a trillion dollars from the Russian people. Money that should have been spent on roads and schools and electricity was instead spent on private jets and houses in the South of France.”

Eventually, everything comes to light. It’s only a matter of time before these crimes are exposed and, when they are, the people will want his head. This, Bill asserts, is the real motivation for the Ukraine War.

”He stole so much money that he’s afraid of his own people. The best way to have your own people not be mad at you is to invent someone else for them to be mad at. It’s Machiavelli 101: create a foreign enemy and start a war.”

The prospect of a million men storming the Kremlin might sound a little far-fetched. But is it?

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Dan Jones has quickly established himself as one of Britain’s favourite and most prolific young historians.

Since 2009, he has published 14 books, including 2012’s The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England, and in 2022, he released his first work of fiction, Essex Dogs, the first of a trilogy. In TV, he boasts the creation of several documentary series for Channel 5. He has also written for The Times, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The New Statesman and GQ, and continues to write columns for the London Evening Standard.

Why did we invite him on?

We have a wish list of historical stories that we want to cover on our show, and while we’ve done a good job so far of ticking them off, one has sat waiting for years.

The Hundred Years’ War.

Despite being the longest military conflict in European history, its key events, main players, and consequences are firmly the domain of history nerds. The general public seems to know very little about it. We include ourselves in that.

We’ve wanted to have Dan back for some time, and this just so happens to be one of his areas of expertise. As far as guest and subject go, it’s a match made in heaven.

What did we learn?

Let’s start with the most important question: is the Hundred Years’ War why we hate the French?

”It’s certainly one of the ways that that relationship is shaped. You see it now, even in sporting events. If England were to play France in this World Cup, you can guarantee there would be a montage package ahead of it that would somehow reference the Hundred Years’ War, something about the plucky English taking on the French nobility and winning. Is it why we hate the French? I’m not sure it’s the reason, but it’s part of the story.”

Going back seven centuries, we encounter an England largely different from our own. France likewise. These are less recognisable as ‘nations’ as we now understand them, and more as “personal fiefdoms held together by monarchs.” Monarchs who held competing claims over one another’s kingdoms. It is that tension that, ultimately, starts the war.

”The war starts over a very specific incident. For decades, there had been squabbles between the kings of England and France, particularly over Gascony [an English-controlled territory in southwest France]. In 1328, there is a succession crisis over the French crown, and the young king of England - Edward III - got in his head that a way to solve it would be to claim to be the king of France himself. He decides that that would be his excuse for an expansive war, and also something he can use as a bargaining chip. Just under a decade later, he makes that claim officially.”

From 1337 onwards, kings of England perpetually made their claim to be king of France, and repeatedly found themselves going to war to enforce it. But already, what a diversion from the status quo. It invites the question: how radical was Edward III? What is his reputation in the annals of history?

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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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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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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?

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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.

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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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The financial world is one of the most puzzling, murky, and troubling of them all. Through that mire, Patrick has emerged as one of its most clear-speaking figures.

Beginning his finance career in 1997, Patrick has worked with Victor Niederhoffer (George Soros' former partner) and has been a portfolio manager at RBS, Millennium and Nomura. Today, however, he is best known for his wildly popular work on YouTube, where he breaks down ongoing financial developments in digestible terms, establishing himself as one of the most reliable predictors in the game. At the time of writing, it boasts over 1.2 million subscribers.

Why did we invite him on?

We’ve been fans of Patrick for some time, long admiring his uncanny ability to summarise and make entertaining the complex and the seismic. Hoping to have him on for some time, unfortunately, an interview forecasting financial trouble ahead has only become more timely and appropriate.

Still, at a time of ever-increasing economic anxiety, all we can do is know more. That’s what Patrick is for.

What did we learn?

Britain’s economy once was the envy of the world. A haven of trade, information-sharing and valuable resources, there was seemingly no end to our capabilities. Somewhere along the line, things changed. There’s an increasing feeling that we’re no longer a wealthy country, but a poor country attached to London. Outside of for the privileged few, life seems to only be getting worse. Increasing numbers of citizens on benefits, restrictions on those who do work, and a hiked-up cost-of-living that affects anyone without the means to ignore it.

Why are things so bad here? Is it just our imagination, or are the circumstances uniquely terrible?

”Everything bad that’s happened in the last 30 years has hit Britain worse. We were hit the hardest by the global financial crisis, the gas price hike after the Russian-Ukraine war… Everyone wants to say it’s politics or lazy people, but it’s not.”

The factors, Patrick explains, are multitude, but most present and perhaps most significantly is our inflation. The skyrocketing price of, well, everything is often dismissed as a natural reaction to interest rates. But looking around, the squeeze is much tighter than that alone can account for. What happened?

”Inflation exploded due to lockdowns. The global economy shut down in March 2020 and governments around the world had a choice - let everything tank (and there’s a free market argument for that) or, at this is what they did, leap over that huge hole in the economy. Bankrolling companies, stimulus checks… it’s all really expensive, and now there’s massive inflation. We have to pay the bill for what happened; you can’t ignore the fact that everyone got paid for two years when there was no economic activity.”

If this discomfort is the inevitable cost of paying of said bill, perhaps we can swallow that. But are we paying it?

”[Laughs] It’s on the credit card. That’s why I laugh when people get excited about the government cutting taxes. The tax only really happens when the government spends the money; we’ll either pay with it by being taxed today or we’re gonna pay in the future.”

”Pay in the future”, to an addict, is always the more appealing option, and a natural, predictable consequence of party politics. After all, why take the blame for decades of mishandling when you can contribute to it and let someone else take an even bigger hit later?

Exaggerated by the last decade of constant upheaval, short-termism is the thinking of the day in British parliament, and, as Patrick elucidates, the prime mover of these baffling policies.

”The only real incentives governments have is to kick the can down the road and hope someone else gets the blame for it. That doesn’t help the citizens of the country, and it’s even worse for the youngest citizens.”

Young people increasingly feel that the game is rigged against them, and it’s no surprise. Nowhere is it more radically apparent than the housing crisis. Long ago, the ladder was yanked up.

“It’s strange… you have sellers saying ‘My million pound house is now only worth 900,000!’ but then the buyers are responding ‘Yeah, but 900 is still too much!’ … [It could be fixed] but it’s so politically unpopular. If house prices in major cities went down to what they were in the late 1990s, there would be war in the streets. But the truth is, if they don’t… there will be war in the street!”

And there is no sign of things changing. In recent months, the youth vote has swung violently in favour of the Green Party - long-time joke, current election hopeful. Less shocking is the party’s policy agenda: doubling down. To fund their hugely expansive social programmes, party leader Zack Polanski has pledged to raise he national debt from 2.9 trillion to 5.2 trillion. Before we even get the chance to ask whether that’s a sensible solution, Patrick is shaking his head.

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Sir Antony Beevor is one of Britain’s most revered and widely-read historians.

For over four decades, he has been publishing works of staggering depth, including the genre-defining Stalingrad (1998), the polarising Berlin (‘02) and 2012’s 900-page sprawl The Second World War. To date, his total sales amount to nearly ten million copies.

His latest tome, Rasputin: And The Downfall of the Romanovs, was released in March.

Why did we invite him on?

As long-time fans of Sir Antony’s work, perhaps this was no surprise, but earlier this year we read Rasputin and loved it. Across its near-400 pages, Beevor charts a path through Rasputin’s entire life, weaving its narrative with that of Tsar Nicholas II, the Tsar who abdicated during the Russian Revolution. It’s one of the most information-dense history books we’ve enjoyed in recent times, and we each knew it was time to have him back.

We wanted to discuss the life of Rasputin, but primarily, we wanted to use it as a backdrop for the wider subject of Russia itself, particularly the mindset of its people.

Russia has a distinct national character, one that persists despite the radically changing circumstances its people have enjoyed and endured. Its unique disposition is shared by citizens 5000 miles apart, in the Siberian tundra as well as on the Southwestern Caspian coasts.

But why? What is it about this country that is so unusual?

What did we learn?

To set the stage for our conversation, Beevor pulls a quote from 1866 poem by the Russian diplomat and poet Fyodor Tyutchev: “Russian can not be known by the mind [alone].”

”There’s a lot of truth in that. All these contrasting elements… In the case of Rasputin, we see deep spiritualitity mixed in with lasciviousness… or corruption mixed in with incredible generosity. All of these coming together in the same person… [he captured] the Russian soul. There is no [such thing as] national DNA, but there is a certain self-image in all countries that they try to live up to. A certain reputation, a certain tradition.”

And what is that reputation?

The Russian tradition is a complex one and, as Antony outlines, one of paradox. One feature commonly associated with the Russo mindset is callousness. Unfeeling, unsentimental, self-regulating to a hellish extent. Where does that come from?

Beevor asserts there’s a relationship between the attitude of Russians to life and their approach to war.

”There’s been a considerable debate among historians as to where the Russian method of warfare originated. Some say it goes back to the Mongol invasion of the 13th invasion … [They] believed that fire, sword, laying waste and mass rape were natural elements of warfare. And these became central elements in the Russian understanding of war: conspicuous cruelty.”

For the vast majority of history, ‘conspicuous cruelty’ was not unique to Russia. It was the norm internationally. Enemies were not there to be stopped, but vanquished. When the West moved on, Russia did not.

”[For most of history], Europe was just as bad! One thinks of the horrors of the wars of religion and they’re just as cruel as anything Russia had done up to then. The difference came with the Enlightenment. There was then a codification of war - not necessarily more civilised, but more rule-based.”

This is a peculiar history. One hard to map onto our own. The Mongols, through their successor state known as the Golden Horde, ruled Russia for over two centuries, from 1240 to 1480. That’s over two centuries subjugated by what Konstantin likens to “the ISIS of their time.”

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“Silicon Valley’s favourite podcaster.”

It’s a hell of a title, currently held by Dwarkesh Patel.

Specialising in interviewing influential, divisive figures from science, technology, politics and history, Dwarkesh Podcast has become one of the most acclaimed shows of the decade. Through it, Dwarkesh established himself as a leading commentator on the subject of AI, even earning a spot in Time’s list last year as one of the 100 most influential people in the field.

Last year, he, alongside co-author Gavin Leech, published his first book - The Scaling Era: The Oral History of A.I, 2019 - 2025.

Why did we invite him on?

On this topic, we’ve had conversations with figures who hold all manner of views. Evangelicals who herald its arrival as some kind of second coming, doomsday thinkers who see us rolling out the red carpet for our own demise, and everyone in between.

Dwarkesh has spent as much time exploring the topic in public as anyone of his discipline, so we were curious to see what he’s made of the arguments so far. Has he become more or less optimistic over time? How does he see this paradigm-shift development playing out for us?

What did we learn?

”Among Silicon Valley types, I’m seen as a sceptic. They think the singularity [AI systems that can do anything humans can] will happen yesterday, I think it’ll take 5-10 years … The models are not amazing at discovery. They don’t ask good questions. Humans are great at idiosyncracies - exploring weird angles that nobody else is thinking about. AI is basically an average…

But even I’ve had to admit the progress has been fast.”

This is a subject where the messenger’s role matters acutely. Hearing about the brilliance and reach of AI from someone who manufactures it - and therefore stands to capitalise on others believing in it - is one thing, but from a sceptic? That’s something else entirely.

But even AI’s critics agree with Dwarkesh - we are hurtling towards unprecedented change and, once we pass a certain threshold, there’s no going back. What happens then, nobody can know for sure.

Dwarkesh has spoken to virtually every eminent figure in this world. What is it they want?

”Maybe 40% of the population is doing work that a computer could do. Take an AI, put it on Zoom, give it a Gmail account, and it could do their job. AI companies want to be able to do all of that work, and they think they can get there in a year.”

Is that a reasonable aspiration? Or, more importantly, a desirable one?

When you look at the the handywork of AI as it exists today, that might sound absurd. Take a read of any writing - articles, books, papers, whatever you choose - that has been found (or even accused) of being written, even in part, by a language model.

You can always tell. Addled with cliché, riddled with mistakes, and lacking in invention. An AI might be able to write a perfunctory manual, but it can’t produce truly great work.

However, that’s only true today. Tomorrow is another story. The rate of improvement these models are undergoing is exponential, and the threshold is screeching into view.

”It’s reaching a point where it’s more useful to hire AI. For me to get what the AI does, but from people, I’d have to hire several analysts. It could cost me seven figures a year.”

Expecting corporations to ignore those kind of incentives is a big ask. But if they can already save millions a year by firing their analysts, why haven’t they?

The truth is, these models are not yet reliable. Before our America trip, Francis asked Grok to suggest guests who hadn’t been on the show before and would be a good fit. Its first answer? Douglas Murray, who - we don’t need to tell you - has indeed been on before.

If a human has to fact-check the AI’s work anyway, of what use is the AI? Doesn’t the need for people in that role itself undermine the supposed ‘power’ of this technology?

”AI, like people, has thought patterns - it’ll spin off and get confused. Grok will have scanned the Internet and seen ‘Douglas Murray’ and ‘Triggernometry’ next to each other, and [rightly] believed there was some kind of relationship there. It’ll get better at that.”

Last month, Dr Roman Yampolskiy - the forefather of ‘AI safety’ - warned us that we as a species are massively underestimated the risks associated with AI, specifically AGI. He believes, with 99% certainty, the advent of AGI will result in the extinction of the human race.

That may be so. But do we also underestimate the potential benefits?

Konstantin relays a story of a recent trip to the dentist. His was already using AI to measure gum recession, scan for decay, approximate the-

”Let’s just replace the dentist!”, Dwakresh reacts, “Why should I stand in line for three hours just to be told ‘You’re fine, go home?’ If I have the doctor on my phone, and I can talk to it, and can get the check-up there and then, I’ve saved a lot of time and a lot of money.”

Dwarkesh recommends that if someone is nervous about looking forward, they should look backward instead. What they conclude about the past might tell them how to feel about the future.

”There is no amount of money you could pay me to go back and live in the year 1000. There’s no way of me having the same quality of life there - the goods simply do not exist, no matter how much money I have.”

The ‘architects of AI’ have been inescapable, appearing on every podcast and chat show to communicate the marvellousness of their technology. Yet, on every occasion, they seem to say something that makes the public bristle. If this is going to a thrilling world of unprecedent prosperity, why have they been so bad at communicating that?

As Dwarkesh explains, they don’t know. Not because they haven’t thought about it, but because they can’t know. The change that’s about to happen is so pervasive and profound, even those leading it are behind the curve.

”If you were alive in the 14th century, surrounded by people dying of the Black Death, it would just seem normal to you. You wouldn’t see it as something that needs to be ‘solved’. We’re in a similar position now. We’re like the last people before the Industrial Revolution. ‘What are the benefits of the Industrial Revolution?’ We can’t really know until it happens.”

Even comparing this to the Industrial Revolution feels insufficient. Contrasting what happened post-industrialisation and what may be possible in the wake of AGI, factories and power plants seem quaint.

We’ve already explored the disappearance of ‘knowledge work’ and the challenges associated with physical work, but what about the most human pursuit of all?

Art.

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For years, Kelsi was one of many silent heroes with unknown stories - one of the nameless faceless who serve to protect their nation. In 2009, at just 19, she was deployed to Afghanistan, facing the worst of the war, and returning with PTSD.

Tormented by her affliction, Kelsi’s therapist suggested turning to art. Incorporating her trauma into her newfound escape, she started making jewellery from spent shell casings. She would later turn this new hobby into a successful enterprise: eyewear and jewellery brand Brass & Unity.

2023 saw the release of her wildly popular autobiography of the same name, detailing the horrors of Afghanistan and the mental fortitude she summoned to see it through. Since then, she has sat down for long-form interviews with Jordan Peterson, Lex Fridman, and, indeed, TRIGGERnometry. Today, she hosts the Brass & Unity Podcast, where she welcomes a plethora of public figures to share their stories of “leadership, resilience, and personal growth.”

Why did we invite her on?

We’ve had Kelsi on twice before. The first time, in March 2024, she shared the frank realities of life on the frontline and the PTSD you take home. It was a heartbreaking interview that remains a favourite of ours to this day.

Last year, she joined us for a staggering conversation on another subject close to her heart: MAiD - Canada’s ‘assisted dying’ initiative. It quickly went viral; today, it sits at over a million views.

It’s no wonder. The revelations Kelsi brought to our table left us utterly dumbfounded. We knew MAiD was a controversial enterprise, but we had no clue quite how bad things had gotten. As the idea gets bandied around more and more internationally, it only becomes more prescient.

16 months later, we wanted to know - has anything changed? Have things improved since we last spoke?

Yes, and no.

What did we learn?

”The definition of a serial killer is someone who has killed two or more people in separate events. We have doctors in this country who have killed over a thousand.”

Before we get into any of it, Kelsi insists we reframe the discussion. By calling it ‘MAiD’ or ‘assisted dying’, we are, knowingly or unknowingly, covering for it. Hiding how perverse and disturbing the practices actually are.

’Orwellian’ is a word that gets thrown around with wild abandon, often where it doesn’t apply. Thus, it’s lost its punch. That doesn’t mean it’s never appropriate. In this case, no other word applies.

One of George Carlin’s most incendiary routines covers this precise phenomenon. In just a few minutes, he charts the evolution of how “shell shock” became “battle fatigue”, and then became “post-traumatic stress disorder.” A dehumanising, disconnected form of speech that obscures the seriousness of what it’s meant to describe.

’MAiD’ is no different - This is a softening of language to launder something much, much more insidious.

”We need to change the way we talk about this. When you soften language, you disguise what it is. When you say ‘MAiD’, it sounds fluffy and peaceful. It isn’t - this is a eugenics program.”

”Eugenics.” It’s as loaded a term as you’ll find, and one of the most serious accusations that can be levied against a state.

The word recalls Nazi science and compulsory sterilisation. Is Kelsie at risk of being hyperbolic? If not, it invites the question: why?

Let’s grant Kelsie’s assertion that this is a eugenics campaign. Why would Canada want that? Why would a country murder its own citizens, even if they are a burden?

”Maybe it doesn’t meet the UN definition of eugenics, but what does it actually mean for a society? You get rid of all the difficult eaters, the mentally disabled, the vulnerable, the people who are a burden on the system. When you cost the government a lot of money, when you’re not a perfectly well-rounded person, you get offered MAiD.”

Say what you will about Canada, it’s still a developed country. One firmly in the ‘First World’. Even if they are offering these services, surely it’s done under the advisement of qualified, sensible practitioners. A bureaucracy of trained and ethical doctors who will only pass the most desperate cases… Right?

”[When you go for MAiD], you have two ‘assessors’ - I call them ‘crazy psychopaths’, because that’s what they are - and they check whether you are psychologically stable enough to decide to end your life. They bill you $300; $50 for every 15 minutes. If they agree, you go to the doctor who’s going to poison you to death. They can charge up to $500. They call it a ‘procedure’, but I can’t call it that. It’s medical murder. They’re making $800 for every person they can legally kill. You think that’s not an incentive? You’re out of your mind. Money matters.”

And once it’s all ‘agreed’, what happens then? How is the ‘assisted dying’ handled?

”They give you a cocktail of drugs and say, ‘Drink this.’ What do we know about those drugs? We know it’s nearly identical to the recipe for the lethal injection. Meanwhile, capital punishment is illegal. The government wants its people to have that as an option, but we can’t give it to people who rape children? That’s a problem.”

It’s tempting - comforting, even - to tell ourselves that these cases are rare.
Even as Kelsi asks, ”What about the girl with anorexia who was MAiD-ed? What about the patient who died 137 hours after being poisoned?”

It’s easy to condemn any policy on the evidence of its worst applications. Even the most ardent euthanasia advocates would struggle to defend such examples. So, what about the opposite?

Let’s imagine - as we easily can - an elderly patient who has suffered from a debilitating stroke. They have lost all independence, any capacity to communicate, and it’s never coming back. They spend their waking hours in a state of abject, undulling, panicked agony.

What does keeping them alive serve? Isn’t, in that example, the induction of a painless death the best thing for their well-being? What about their dignity?

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Dr David Butterfield has one of the most enviable academic resumes one can imagine.

His journey began as a student at the University of Cambridge, where he would remain for two decades as a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics. During this time, he was also a Fellow of Christ’s College and Queens College, working as a Director Of Studies at the latter. Today, he is the Provost of Ralston College, as well as a Professor of Latin, a private college in Georgia dedicated "freedom of thought and speech". Elsewhere, David is also literary editor for The Critic, senior fellow at the Pharos Foundation, and the editor-in-chief of classics journal Antigone.

Why did we invite him on?

We met David in Greece on a Ralston-associated tour. There, we had an absolutely electrifying conversation about the nation’s ancient history, as well as the Roman Empire, and how these two epochs laid the groundwork for modern society as we see it. We bombarded him with questions and queries for hours, and could have carried on for hours more.

We decided to do exactly that. This time, however, we’re sharing it with you.

What did we talk about?

This is one of the most all-encompassing subjects we could ever hope to explore on our show. The story of Greece is one of politics, science, philosophy, art, language, and ethics. Before we go any further, we need to answer the most fundamental of all questions: what is civilisation?

”It’s a controversial question, but I think unduly … The best we can do is point to certain things that are needed for a civilisation and see how far that takes us. A group of people need to have stability. Geographical stability, an agricultural and economic base that allows them to be rooted in one place. They also need political and social stability - a fixed law code, an established hierarchy, a military to defend them from encroachments. But there’s also more than that…”

What David says next is the most profound of his insights on this question. All these other attributes, while necessary, are insufficient for what we might call a ‘civilisation’. The crucial detail is immaterial - it’s something that exists only in the minds of the members.

”Civilisations have self-awareness. A shared consciousness of the civilisation of that group of people. That requires a willingness to commemorate and memorialise those who came before them. Something that carries across time and space.”

This guides us beautifully to the topic we wanted to explore - Ancient Greece, and how it acted as a cradle for Western civilisation.

’Western civilisation’ is, nowadays, a controversial term. We use it all the time, but certain academics, journalists and public thinkers bristle at its notions. They suspect those who use it have some underhanded, nefarious reason for doing so. Is it a dog whistle? Does it even mean anything?

To David, these questions are absurd.

”If you read modern books, modern op-eds, criticising the term ‘Western civilisation’, the arguments are childish counter-claims. ‘How can it be ‘the West’ if some of the countries in it are in the East?’, ‘How can it be truly Western if some countries in the West don’t have these features?’ This is not meaningful to understanding the world we’re in. Fundamentally, the West would look nothing like it does - and there’s no way we would be having this conversation - without the intertwined the Greco-Roman intellectual and artistic traditions, and the thread of Christianity. That’s indisputable fact.”

So what is the Greco-Roman tradition? How is it different to what other people believed at the time, or even still today?

David is quick to stress that, despite the contraction, these two empires were not equally influential.

”Rome is extremely important, and also not important.”

How so?

”Most of the Greek ideas that matter, that survive and are catalysed in Western society, they are refined by Roman conquest of Greece. Without the Romans, it’s an open question of what the fate of the Greeks and the West would have been. But if we had a weighing scale with the intellectual contributions of the Greeks on one end, and those of the Romans on the other, the scale would break in favour of the Greeks.”

Put simply, the Greeks gave shape to modernity. In our age of industry, mechanics, automation and convenience, we remain students of a society built with marble and stone. Logic tells us that, because we observe progress in our lifetimes, one could theoretically trace that back and find a coherent lineage to the dawn of man. A line that can be drawn to the earliest known societies.

This, David suggests, is a falsehood. Ancient Greece wasn’t a continuation of anything, but a self-actualising shift in human thought.

”We presume that people have always been asking the big questions. That’s not the case. There are intellectual turns that happen in Greece, in centuries B.C., that as far as we can tell are entirely new [to them].”

To illustrate his point, David tells the story of Thales Of Miletus, a pro-Socratic philosopher and one of the ‘Seven Sages’ - a founding figure of his time. To many historians and anthropologists, this single figure is something of a forefather for science itself.

”He begins to ask scientific questions, cosmological questions, questions that break from seeing the world as a result of divine command. He is able to use astronomical knowledge and mathematical ability to predict a solar eclipse. That day is, in some circles, seen as the day science ‘began’. Not because a calculation of that kind could be made, but it showed there were rational principles underpinning these cosmic events that hitherto had been seen as divine.”

The basic principles of research, of attempts made to understand our university, were born here. It’s hard to think of a more profound change in the human psyche than that. The very notion that we can track it is itself baffling.

Yet, this only accounts for half of the story, and arguably less than that. Just as influential as the advent of science is the Greeks’ modernising of artistic expression - the birth of ‘art’ as we know it.

”There is no genre of artistic production which isn’t live and thriving in Classical Greece. They didn’t inherit that from other parts of the world - they invented them. Tragedy, drama, comedy… It’s unparalleled, both in its innovation and its enduring legacy.”

Still, these unthinkable leaps may be overshadowed by Greece’s political contribution…

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Often cited as the founding mind in his field, David Buss is one of the most influential researchers alive today. For over 40 years, David has worked at the bleeding edge of evolutionary psychology, seeking answers to the most complex and disturbing human quirks. His award-winning work, which amounts to over 200 articles and several acclaimed books, explores the phenoms of jealousy, attraction, mating rituals, social status, cheating, stalking, and homicide.

Why did we invite him on?

“Love is an evolved emotion. I was told in school that it was a Western invention, something created by European poets. That’s not true; it was evolved specifically for long-term committed romantic relationships.”

We’ve hoped to have David on for some time, and we’ve also had designs for an episode covering the reasons relationships start and end. What attracts us to one another? What are the most universally liked features? Why do we cheat? Why do we fall in love? How do we fall out of it?

These dynamies shape our world, and getting to grips with them can help us avoid a lot of pain and confusion. If you want to learn more, there are few people more equipped to teach you than David.

What did we learn?

”If you want to test a potential partner, go on a vacation together. Go somewhere neither of you know. Different culture, different language, different food, different customs. Do they get thrown out of whack? Are they resilient? Can they adapt well? You’ll see how that person reacts to novel information, and that’ll tell you how they’ll react to things you can’t predict here and now.”

Evolutionary psychology is a divisive area of study. Depending on who you ask, it’s either the most rational, level-headed approach to tackling the impossible problem of consciousness, or a deterministic, reductive pseudoscience.

Whatever you make of it, it’s worth understanding. Even if its critics are right and it’s only appropriate to use when studying our most fundamental instincts, those make up more of our thinking than we’d like to imagine.

As David explains, once we see human beings as animals, they become easier to study. Ironically, it also helps mark out where we are distinct from our fellow mammals.

"Humans are unique in their mating system in several pivotal respects. One is ‘concealed ovulation’. A second is the evolution of long-term pair-bonds. No other primate species forms long-term committed relationships. We have the attachment system, the emotional love. That’s why, although women have the obligatory investment in child-rearing, most men do a tremendous amount above the bare minimum.”

This is one of the most bizarre curiosities of human evolution. Thinking purely rationally, the most optimal strategy for any man is to impregnate as many partners as possible and never stop moving. So why don’t they? Why do the vast majority opt for a committed, settled relationship with a single partner?

“Women have maternal certainty. No mother, in the act of giving birth, has ever wondered, ‘Gee, I wonder if this kid is mine.’ Men cannot have that. Ancestrally speaking, it could always be another man’s child. This creates a fundamental problem.”

And what’s that?

”In order for heavy male parental investment to evolve, men had to evolve adaptations to increase the probability that the kid is their own. If they didn’t, they could invest decades in the defence and provisioning of a rival’s offspring.”

Human beings have social and physical adaptations wired to detect traits in a prospective partner, and they differ between the sexes. Women, David explains, have a more holistic approach - tone of voice, demeanour, even smell. Men are much more visual and, for lack of a better term, shallow. The tools afforded them don’t make for useful readings. What do men do instead?

”The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. I studied murders, so ‘body count’ means something very different to me. Now, it means how many people you’ve had sex with. If a woman has had sex with a large number of partners prior to commitment, there’s a higher probability that she’s going to be having sex after you’ve committed.”

This goes some way to explaining why, across societies, a premium has been put on female virginity in a way that isn’t mirrored for men, and why a shared attribute of the major faiths is a stressing of fidelity. Konstantin asks: is this evolutionary phenom why societies all over the world, with all sorts of different pressures and circumstances, have developed means of controlling female sexuality?

Yes and no.

”It’s mostly the families that do this. They call it the ‘daughter-guarding hypothesis’; parents put more effort into restricting their daughter’s sexual activity than the songs. The modest clothes, setting curfews… It ranges from that, to things like genital mutilation. The families are very concerned with their daughter’s sexual reputation, so it’s actually the women within the family inflicting these wounds on their daughters because it increases their mate-value.”

Even under ideal, ancestral circumstances, these adaptations create enough complications. They misfire, we misjudge, and things end in mistakes. Or worse, outright sadism.

Today, these heuristics, which have served us for millions of years, are ill-equiped for the climate. They served us well when life was simpler. As it is, they’re ripe for hijacking.

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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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