1984 Today!

“Privacy is not about something to hide. Privacy is about controlling access to yourself.” Bruce Schneier has spent decades thinking about digital security and the hidden systems that shape modern life, and he pulls no punches in his assessment: Surveillance is the default condition of digital life because politicians lack the will to limit corporate power in a data economy that rewards the ongoin...

“There is no belief in a democratic process in Iran right now.” In this episode, I speak with Fariba Nawa, the Afghan-American investigative journalist, podcaster, and chief editor of OnSpec Podcast, about the Islamic Republic of Iran’s global campaign to threaten, kidnap, and kill dissidents living abroad. Fariba shares how her own life as a refugee has informed her work, and discusses the proces...

In this episode, I speak with Nasrin Parvaz, the Iranian civil rights activist, author, and artist, about her life before, during, and after the Islamic Revolution, her arrest in 1982, and the eight years she spent in Iran’s infamous prison system, including the Joint Committee Interrogation Centre and Evin Prison. Nasrin describes the rapid transformation of Iran after 1979, the policing of women...

Tech justice lawyer and UCLA lecturer Melodi Dinçer joins me in this episode to explore the rise of AI‑induced delusional disorders and her litigation work at Tech Justice Law, where she represents the human beings who have become collateral damage in Big Tech’s pursuit of the Singularity. Melodi argues that, far from just being an economic engine of productivity, Silicon Valley is engaged in quas...

“If you don’t have legitimacy, then you need 1984.”​ Professor David Betz of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies argues that a perfect storm of social, economic and political grievances has made civil war “inevitable” in some Western nations. He suggests that the West’s deepest crisis is not foreign enemies but the collapse of legitimacy, trust and social cohesion at home. Moving fro...

“We are tearing a hole in the universe and AI is sticking its head out, and we still don’t really understand how.” In this episode, the philosopher, engineer, and AI ethicist Nell Watson joins me to explore how rapidly advancing AI is reshaping our inner lives, our work, and our political reality. Nell explains why the real alignment challenge isn’t just future AGI, but today’s agentic AI systems...

“Authoritarianism today is cleverer; it doesn’t only rule by fear.” From manipulated statistics to collapsing trust in experts and institutions, what happens when people simply stop believing what they’re told? Amid multicultural tensions and identity politics, do efforts to “protect democracy” risk hollowing out its liberal core? Are our systems bending, breaking, or being quietly re‑engineered?...

Hide your mince pies! Our first-ever Christmas Special is about when Christmas was outlawed in England. I’m joined by historian Dr. Fiona McCall to explore one of England’s weirdest experiments in governance: the Interregnum. Between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, England abolished kingship, dismantled the Church hierarchy, censored culture, banned...

Michael W. Green is the Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager for Simplify Asset Management. Previously in his nearly thirty-year career in finance, he managed macro strategies at Thiel Macro, the investment firm that manages the personal capital of Peter Thiel, and founded Ice Farm Capital, a macro hedge fund seeded by Soros Fund Management. In a recent series of essays on his Substack, beginnin...

Robert Joseph Greene is a Canadian author of gay romance fiction, including The Gay Icon Classics of the World , a globe-trotting collection of love stories set in various historical eras including Egypt, Persia, and Tsarist Russia. The latter story, The Blue Door, was taken up by activists in their protests against Putin’s prohibition of “ homosexual propaganda ”, making Robert “ the face of gay...

John R. Carlos wants you to think about what it means to be human. In 2020, after forty-two years as a Royal Australian Air Force Wing Commander, he retired and turned his hand to writing. He has just published Cryonic Dreams: Awakening , the first novel in a science fiction trilogy set in 2169 that explores humanity’s attempts to preserve meaning and agency in the face of tyranny, advanced techno...

Daniele Bolelli is an Italian historian, professor, and author who also hosts the podcasts History On Fire and The Drunken Taoist. He grew up during the Years of Lead, a fraught pair of decades from the 1960s into the 1980s when extreme political violence was common in the Land of Caesar. The story of the Years of Lead is rich in conspiracy fuel, involving Licio Gelli’s P2 Masonic lodge, NATO’s Op...

Graham Linehan is a five-time BAFTA-winning comedian and writer who created Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd. He also wrote for The Fast Show, Harry Enfield & Chums, Brass Eye, The Day Today, and Blue Jam, all near-legendary British comedies. Over the past decade, Graham’s life underwent a total transformation. After making his views on gender identity public, his work in the UK dried up,...

Feminists have a saying—we can’t fight sexism if we can’t say what sex is. And that is precisely where we are as a society today—we can’t say what sex is. Kara Dansky is the author of The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls , and she writes The TERF Report on Substack. She is the former Pres...

In her book The Privacy Pirates: How Your Privacy Is Being Stolen and What You Can Do About It , Dr Leslie Gruis describes the current situation in stark terms: “If privacy were a patient, it would be in the intensive care unit. It’s not dead, but it is life-threateningly ill.” Dr Gruis worked at the National Security Agency for thirty years, and her last two assignments were at US Cyber Command a...

On September 13, central London was taken over by competing gatherings. One, organised by Tommy Robinson, was billed as a free speech festival and national pride event called Unite The Kingdom. The other, March Against Fascism, was put together as a protest against the Robinson rally, with participation from Stand Up To Racism, backed by a coalition of Britain’s unions. The Metropolitan Police est...

Michael Box and Patrick Hague are creative partners in EchoEterna Productions and have worked together for almost 20 years as musicians, writers, and filmmakers. They join me to talk about their feature film project SpeakEasy, set “in the near future, where creative freedom is monitored by an oppressive authority class.” As a lover of cinema, dystopian fiction, and punk rock, it was a special plea...

Free speech dies, comedy dies. It’s that simple. From 1952 to 2018, MAD Magazine published over five hundred regular editions as well as specials and books. In that time, it defined and shaped political satire and social commentary for generations of readers, becoming a cornerstone of American culture without ever taking itself seriously, a true achievement. Gazing gap-toothed from MAD’s cover was...

Frank Sanazi is a unique comedy character, a tongue-in-cheek mashup of Adolf Hitler and Frank Sinatra described by his creator, the British singer and comedian Pete Cunningham, as “a satirical blitzkrieg blending dark humour, swing music and politically incorrect cabaret”. The newspaper The Scotsman has called him “brilliantly stupid, fantastically wrong and ridiculously funny”. The comedy blog Ch...

It’s trite to point out that the internet is an increasingly weird and difficult space to explore. AI-generated ‘slop’ muddies search results and even ends up in published scientific papers. Bots roam social media freely, making it nearly impossible to know whether interactions are organic or automated. Your voice and face can be cloned and reproduced by AI, making security breaches and fraud much...

BeLikeWater (a.k.a. Lisa) is a Superforecaster® with Good Judgment Inc. , the forecasting project co-created by Professor Philip Tetlock (the co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction ), and a forecaster with Sentinel Global Risks Watch and the Swift Centre in the UK. In a recent interview with Polymarket about her successful forecast of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nucl...

There is sadly a lot to worry about when it comes to the rights to privacy and free speech. Digital ID, central bank digital currency, facial recognition, online censorship, spying on bank accounts - you name it, the British government has a plan, none of them very promising for individual freedom. Big Brother Watch are one of the UK’s leading civil liberties campaign organisations, and their Advo...

Hamit Coskun (pronounced Josh -kun) is a fifty year-old asylum seeker from Turkey living in the city of Derby in northern England on a support allowance of £48 per week. His grasp of the English language is assessed at the A1 (Beginner) level, so he uses Google Translate to protest on social media about the erosion of secularism and rise of Islamist sympathies in his home country. In February 2025...

In 2023, Professor Garret Merriam ran an experiment that caught 40 out of 96 of his students cheating on the final exam in his ethics class at CSU Sacramento. He had decided to “poison the well” to see who among them might use a well-known study resource website to review the answers before the test, so he inserted obviously false answers that anyone paying attention in class would know to be inco...

Ever since I read Travellers in the Third Reich , a Sunday Times best-seller by Julia Boyd, I’ve been recommending it to anyone who will listen. Her carefully researched narrative is constructed from the diaries, letters, and correspondence of people who visited Germany between the ends of the First and Second World Wars. From Quakers to Boy Scouts, classical music lovers to dedicated fans of Hitl...