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#065 - Neema Parvini - How Out Of Control Western Elites Brought A Civilisation To Its Knees · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Dr.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Nima Parvini.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Nima is the author of eight books, including The Prophets of Doom, The Populist Delusion, The Defenders of Liberty, and Shakespeare's Moral Compass.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: He has also written dozens of chapters and articles in scholarly publications and the media.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Nima is also the director of Academic Agency, which he set up to focus on core academic skills and knowledge areas, which can help students and learners of all ages to achieve both academic excellence and improve communication and research skills in the workplace.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Nima and I think out loud about what the cyclical and linear views of history are, how civilizations rise and fall, what elite theory means and what it means for social change, the felt decline in modern Britain, what Trump's US vibe shift really is, and whether the United Kingdom will experience a vibe shift of its own, why he thinks the West faces insurmountable problems, why countries and civilizations can only be young once, why we should avoid creating and consuming slop and listening to cringe lords in content creation, and how Nima's worldview began to shift after voting remain in the United Kingdom's Brexit vote in 2016 and much, much more.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: I really enjoyed the opportunity to speak with Nima.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: I discovered his work at some point through 2024, and then I promptly began to inhale his books.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Two of them, in particular, The Prophets of Doom and The Populist Delusion, I can highly recommend, and we speak about those in this show.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: In my opinion, Nima is a very unique thinker, and I'm sure you'll agree.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me, John.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Nima, I learned of you I think uh quite soon after me rejoining Twitter, after probably a decade having not been on it, and I rejoined it for the purposes of promoting thinking class.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Very quickly, the algorithm put you in front of me.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the people who started to listen to my podcast initially were suggesting, oh, you you must speak to to Nima Parvini, you'll you'll have a lot to talk about.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that was because I had initially been concerned with exploring the people, values, culture that make a civilization and those that unmake it, but specifically what uh what elites have to do with all of this and why they matter.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you have written extensively about elite theory.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: You've written a great book on the populist delusion, which I recently read, but the first book I read of yours, The Prophets of Doom, was this analytical um take on uh some of the big figures in uh political philosophy and history and their view of history and what it means when civilizations are coming to an end.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I'm really looking forward to getting into all these topics because I ended up geeking out on your stuff quite a lot.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's great to have you here.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh perhaps perhaps we can begin with unpacking, um, at least from a historical perspective, the different views of history.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: I know I know you have in your book, Prophets of Tomb said that typically there has been a linear view of history, um, but there are also cyclical views of history.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And perhaps we can begin with what each of these are and what a salient example to bring each of those to life would be.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, uh cyclical history uh is really the idea that civilizations rise and fall and go through something like the the seasonal cycles.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if you want to use Spengler's model, which is which is probably the one most people will be at least, you know, even if they haven't read Spengler, they'll have through osmosis come across it at some point in their life where you get uh you know uh where uh bursting forth, you get uh civilization in spring, then there's a summer, a high noon, an autumnal phase, and then the winter uh you know, in the uh and then at some point there'll be a collapse and the whole cycle starts again.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: Much like every every year we go through the seasonal cycles.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that's one way of looking at history, uh, which uh we can talk about in a in a in a moment.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: Then there's the linear view of history, which also comes in different forms.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: Most people are probably the most familiar with the Whiggish or progressive view of history, where we are going forward in a straight line, marching onwards and upwards, uh, you know, uh getting more sophisticated all the time, um and uh you know becoming socially, morally superior uh from our primitive past.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: That is that has been the dominant way of viewing history for most of our lives, um, where you know the past is seen as in some way being barbaric and backwards, and we're getting more and more civilized all the time.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that is a kind of progressive linear history.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: But as I talk about in that in the book, there is uh an older linear history that comes out of uh Abrahamic religion.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh all of the Abrahamic religions have some form of linear history where very simply the world starts, God creates the world, um, and then certain things have to happen in a certain order.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: So uh in the uh story of the Bible, for example, uh, you know, there's uh prophecy foretold, you know, Messiah will come, he does come, um, and then uh after his coming, various other things have to happen before the second coming, an Armageddon, and then the world will end.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so you could that's a very that is a linear history.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh the progressive linear history, as I talk about in the book, is uh kind of a bastardization or uh re-articulation or a uh perversions, I might say, of uh that old uh story that was told that was certainly for a period in the medieval era actually declinist in nature, where you go get various uh you know, 12th and 13th century monks uh talking about how you know there's the city of God and the city of man, uh and the city of man basically just gets worse and worse and worse until the city of God comes, right?
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then uh I mean uh it it's kind of uh beyond anything I think most most of your listeners will be interested in, but once you get uh various Protestant sects, you then get um how can I put it uh more esoteric forms of this, I guess, where you know there's this thousand years um you know between the uh the second the reign of God on earth before the Armageddon.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um and again, depending on who you ask, we're there, we're not there, it's coming, uh, you know, the second coming means that God is literally here, versus oh, it actually means that man is ruling in God's name and all this sort of thing.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um but all of these uh kind of interdenominational theological arguments, um you know, once you get through all of those arguments that took place, weirdly, something like the liberal progressive version of history comes out the other end of it.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh yeah, I mean, I'm I'm never on my most comfortable ground discussing theology, because frankly, I don't really care I don't really care about it as a topic.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um but uh you can see how the declinist uh a declinist linear version of history can be inverted if you actually think that um we're preparing for you know this kind of great time of the Messiah, etc.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so yeah, and I mean these narratives actually have in lots of strange ways come back into mainstream uh mainstream politics, uh due to the conflict in the Middle East, where if you actually listen to some of the evangelicals in America talk, or even some of the things that Benjamin Netanyahu have said, I mean we're back in the realm of you know, biblical uh prophecy or you know, uh you know, the various uh Judaic versions of that, uh third temples and so on.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um so these are, you know, from a completely neutral stance, live forces in the world today that are still at large.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um I tend towards the uh view that empires rise and fall, and that if anybody doesn't think that my question is always, well, so you think the American Empire, which is the one that we're living under now, that's just gonna exist indefinitely for the next thousand years, two thousand years.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, at some point it will fall, right?
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: So uh and some something else will come and take its place.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: Just as the Roman Empire fell and the Ottoman Empire fell, and the various Persian Empires have fallen and the British Empire fell, so too will this happen to the American Empire uh sooner or later.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's let's zoom in on Britain a little bit here because you you mentioned the the fall of the British Empire.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think uh lots of people could probably subscribe to the notion of the cyclical view of history that ultimately we're currently in that tail end of the fallout from having become uh a civilization that was um uh very confident in itself, it had conviction that the things that produced, whether you're looking at various parts of the English-Scottish uh contributions to the canon and scientific endeavour.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then when we look at everything that's happened post-decolonisation, post-second world war, and where Britain is at now, I think people could say, yes, it feels like a country that could potentially be out of ideas, it's it's running on fumes, and I know you've written that countries, civilizations are only young once, uh, as you just talk through that seasonal cycle.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh do you think that the liberal progressive view of history, which I remember growing up with, I mean, I'd say up until the point, and I don't know whether it was an age thing or maturity thing, but I certainly do remember thinking very, very um starkly that we had clearly moved on from the past, that the we were clearly so much better, and that we were going to continue getting so much better.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think I ended up with a bit of a view like Ed Wet has, which is he's a techno-optimist but a cultural pessimist.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that we are getting to a point where people do feel as though that progressive worldview of history is falling away, that that people perhaps accept or recognise that we are in the in the winter of a civilization?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose probably more importantly, do you believe that that we are?
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean what one of the things that interests me is that uh when you show people images of the 1950s of this country, or indeed in America, where you've got clean streets, or you've got these uh old uh communities with village greens, and they look impot they look impossibly idealized, to the point where you even have some leftists who deny it or claim it's constructed or in some way.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, this is just video footage that was taken of the 1950s, okay?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean, and and then you go to your typical high street today with its uh endless vape shops and uh, you know, people uh various people are from various different backgrounds milling about on the corner and uh everybody looking at their mobile phone.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: And does it feel like that's progress?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, does anybody really believe that things are better better off now than they were back then?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it was kind of e I think it was easier to sell this progressive vision of history if people felt that things were getting better, okay?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Or if people felt that their lives are bet were better than their parents' lives.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but of course, anybody I think from millennials on down, millennials and uh the uh the zoomers, possibly even some of the younger Gen Xers as well, um well, that's just not been true.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: We I mean I I was born in uh the early 80s, and I felt that I've lived my entire life under the shadow of the boomers, of their cultural achievements, of their kind of cultural ground zero in the 1960s.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, I was a teenager in the 90s, and the 90s was already a kind of homage to the 60s.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Remember the um Blur and Oasis and uh, you know, but it was all nostalgia.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was all looking back, it was all like, oh, the Beatles again, or if you look at the Blur, it was the Kinks again.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_01: But if you go back to the Beatles and the Kinks, even they were already nostalgic.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: Already trying to like, I mean, yes, there was the the 60s cultural revolution, but there's also a sense of loss.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, anybody listens to Sergeant Pepper or Kinks are the village green preservation society, there's a sense of they knew that they were living through something that was being lost.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, now in the 60s there was cause to be optimistic about that, and possibly there would the die the last dying fumes of that were in the 1990s when we grew up.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now in 2025, um what Blair was selling, and when, you know, when I was 18, uh, of this kind of optimistic vision of technology getting better and life getting better for everybody, is a much more difficult sell, I think, when people can't get on the housing ladder, when people um can't get jobs, when people or they can't get it's not that they can't get jobs, it's that they can't get the kind of uh professional class jobs that they feel that they're entitled to.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um the uh and and uh one of the bad legacies of Blair is what they call elite overproduction, that is the dragooning of millions of people into university who frankly shouldn't really be in university.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then they've done degrees that don't really lead naturally to a job.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then those ones who do do jobs, you know, they they do their degree in uh, you know, they could be English literature or history or you know, they could be studying the classics or something.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: But what do they what they actually end up doing is working for some massive multinational corporation uh, you know, on a on a middling salary, doing marketing or internal communications or something, um, which you know, I mean it's it's kind of um it's like well, okay, this is the progress, this is what we've like this is this is the promised land.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and obviously, I mean, it's not just uh men, of course, but millions of women too have been sold this dream.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's like okay, it's it's framed as liberation, it's framed as progress.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, a very simple question to ask would be well, you know, there's something called the female happiness paradox.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, uh there's vast literature on this.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: As uh emancipation of women into the workplace has progressed, uh you know, their happiness as uh registered in various surveys and empirical studies has progressively declined, their mental health has progressively got worse, uh anxiety uh is through the roof, uh suicide rates have increased.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh women are denied starting a family when they're young and now are forced to start families in their late fur uh 30s or even early forties, and at some point they sit down and they think I was sold this liberal dream.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I spent most of my formative years chained to a desk writing emails for Microsoft.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: Was it all that?
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Was it better than the life that my grandparents had?
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe, maybe not.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: But the fact that the fact it's even being questioned shows that it's not um it's not obvious.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas I feel like in the 90s, when we when we were teenagers, maybe, it felt more obvious that it was kind of going onwards and upwards to most people.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now I now I think pessim people are more pessimistic about that whole vision.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: And um another problem is that our elites, the elite class, are so it's almost like a sunk cost, they're so far in on this that they have no answers whatsoever to any of these questions at all, except for more of it.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Ki Kia Starmer ran on a platform of growth, growth, growth.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: I saw Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, uh write an article the other day saying, Oh, look, there's cause for celebration because um Britain has added five million people to the population.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, okay, that may make sense if GDP is your only concern.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Not that those five million people have necessarily uh led to economic growth, by the way.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: I I saw another study showing that they've cost the country 35 billion people, uh 35 billion pounds, but that's another story.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: The point is is that okay, right now we're gonna have a population of 70 million people, 75 million people, 80 million people.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: Again, that might be good for Microsoft, but is it better for the standard of living?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Is it better for your your happiness, for your life, for the country you want to lead?
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I mean, I I'm much more, you know, you mentioned tech optimism or Anglo-Futurism or something.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm much more of a mind of like, well, wouldn't it actually be better if you just have the population?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: Wouldn't be good for growth, it wouldn't be good for Microsoft, but it might be good for the prospect of you buying a house or living a fulfilling life or being part of a community.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: But these questions are put out of doors by our elites who just aren't concerned about that because their bottom line all everywhere in always is economic.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Agreed.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's that that population question is an interesting one.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I am grappling with this myself, and and recently, uh, as I was questioning whether economic growth or countries' um economic security, stability, vibrancy comes from an ever-grown population.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: I had found myself reading works of anthropology by Professor Alan Farlane, who's Professor Emeritus at Cambridge, and he's done lots of work on the English.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, he's lived all over, he's lived in Nepal and Japan and China, and he realized as he left the the British Isles that uh there was something very unique about the place he'd come from, and that led him down the path of doing lots of lots of research as to what made the people of this country culturally different.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: And you can find quite a lot of examples in that where he is talking about how the apart from that very fecund period of the Industrial Revolution where there were lots of children being born, is that typically compared to most other countries, those with um you know peasant societies, uh, the English in particular, and then then the Celtic fringe never actually went for the big family, and most populations were kept in check.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: It grew very, very modestly.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I you mentioned earlier on the the video footage of times gone by, which show just how pristine and um and and safe, I suppose, these uh this society was in this country not that long ago.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what's quite interesting is we can also look at the most productive periods culturally, economically in this country's history, and it was not with a massive population.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um It shows that you can actually get more from less in some ways without getting too economic about it, because I think it is ridiculous how our uh media elites always go with that line as though they're chasing the GP, as though that's the only thing that matters, and and and uh as as though you can't see things with your own eyes, that things clearly aren't working that well.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I said this to Connor Tomlinson and Harrison Pitt the other day.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: I went on the program, I know you've been on that that show, and um I said, because I grew up in a small market town in Northumberland, I like you had experienced, you felt like you things were still just about right, they were on the onwards and upwards.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um that was a very that was a very secure town I could run around outside.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: It was uh a place that I uh didn't have to worry about big big predators, as it were.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose as I left school early, didn't go to university, I didn't get that that whole shaping of the liberal progressive worldview, but I picked up on it from the media, from the people, my my peers when they went off there.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized when I went off to cities, oh, this is just what cities are like.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they're just a bit chaotic.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: There is just the prospect of violence and drugs and and gangs and all of those things.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then it started to dawn on me that it wasn't always like that in cities either.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, there have been periods, and of course, there has always been the problems of crime and social issues, but it is off the scale now in comparison to before.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: And it's almost like no matter what you do, you can't get anyone who is of the view that things really are just progressing.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: If everyone else would just get on board, there's no there's no evidence, there's no data you can put in front of anyone to show that things aren't as good as they think they are.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know when that myopia ever ever changes.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and in fact, you you wrote, and this is probably a good point to get to some of the things you've written in the populist delusion.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: You wrote, I think, in that page one, that all social change at all times and in all places have been topped down and driven by elites rather than the people.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: And those movements which have the appearance of being organic and bottom-up protests, for example, the 1960 civil rights movement in the USA or Russian Revolution of 1917, were in fact tightly organized and funded by elites.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so I guess uh what I've got to ask you here, Nima, is um I've heard Vivek Ramaswamy say the guys with the gold make the rules, that was in a woke ink book.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we now have seen a big vibe shift, a counter-elite come into uh power in the US with Trump Mask, Vance, RFK.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if if ideology follows power, um, if we've got the unipolar world coming back for at least a few moment where they're saying you guys have really screwed things up and things are bad, this is the way you fix it.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that the problems we've just been highlighting here, where people just don't see the problems and aren't willing to do anything about them because they don't want to see them, do you think that that changes?
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Are we downstream of that, or is it not as simple as that?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean I I'm I I'm a little bit less optimistic about uh quote unquote vibe shit that than a lot of people are, because if I if you just take a step back and have a look at well, what are the forces at play here, what are the interests of power?
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um I have maintained that um the the woke, whatever whatever woke was, was was a failed ideology.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was I mean it fundamentally is bad from the point of view of uh being a political technology that works in the interests of power, right?
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: Why is it bad?
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, a ruling ideology should bring people together, it should get people to buy into the systems, it should and and woke didn't it divided people, turned people against the system, it um, you know, uh made enemies of people who should have been fight part of the system, you know, managerial class or intellectuals who were fired for petty political reasons, for example, um, you know, who then, you know, ha are motivated to work against quote unquote woke.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it was clear that this was a problem that the the system needed to correct.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's not that surprising to me that you've got people like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramashwamy, uh and and various other the so-called tech bros who let's not forget they were there in the 90s, they were there in the 2000s.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the the the the the DEI stuff and the woke stuff was actually becoming an operational problem.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was also uh becoming a problem for uh military recruitment, which I mean, of course, you can't have an Imperium, you can't have an empire uh where the army is being hollowed out and weakened by uh a pernicious and toxic ideology.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: So at least two years ago, I wrote an article called Putting the Work Away, and I I uh where I said, look, uh one way or the other, the system is going to pull back on this stuff, because the bottom line is militar military recruitment is half of where it should be.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you can't have a system where almost a third of the population are checked out.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if you look at from the point of view of power, by power I just mean the American system as a whole.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if you fast, if you go back three years and think about how many people had doubts about the 2020 election, about democracy as a whole, about uh any other institutions, about Hollywood, about you name it, they they had checked out, they were against it, they you know, they didn't like it.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh all it's really taken is Trump winning, uh, or being allowed to win, some might want to put it that way, and a couple of weeks of executive orders, and now we're so back, now everybody's back in, now everybody's looking forward to the movies coming out again, and you know, America's back, baby, and all this.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um and, you know, it's as simple as I mean, you don't really need a deep understanding of elite theory to see that actually the system is kind of self-corrected and Trump was probably I mean, what I said was if they do this, Trump will probably buy the American system plus 30 to 50 years, something like that.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I do I genuinely believe Trump comes as the saviour to the system, not as the overthrow of the system.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now it may look revolutionary because the system has a lot of rotten it.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I do believe that various um uh arms of the organism had either become rotten or gone rogue.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the Democrat, the Democrat Party in America, uh, I think had got to levels of corruption that are intolerable for any system.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so one way or the other it needed to self-correct.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but now that it's doing so, I think a lot of people who three years ago would have quite happily said that they don't really believe in democracy or uh whatnot are probably back on the reservation.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um so in a sense, while it's uh, you know, from the point of view of stability and order, it's good that Trump has won.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: But from the overall point of view of um, you know, if you want this structure to fall, Trump has done the opposite.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: He saved it.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh at least for the time being.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's there's I do think we're the the US Empire is in its late phase.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in fact, I put out a video very recently that people can go and check out, uh, talking about how tariffs are a sign of an empire on the downward swing.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at the British Empire in the 1930s, they also started putting up tariffs.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: The 1930s were actually the height of the British Empire in terms of total area controlled.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, in you know, in the space of 20, 30 years, the British Empire was gone.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh, by the death of Churchill, gone in 1965.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it can happen that quickly, but nobody in 1930 say, would have believed you if you'd said, oh well, in 30 years' time, all of this will be gone.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but the fact they'd move from laissez-faire to or free trade as a doctrine to tariffs and trade wars um is something that uh happens in the late empire.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh mainly because free trade is best understood as a control mechanism for power, it's a kind of soft control mechanism, uh, which America has done or had done pretty well from World War II up until now.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: That structure's falling apart, and if if Trump represents anything, it is the at the end of that period of American uh of American kind of real dominance in the world.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: Very interesting anal analysis that uh I haven't heard uh anyone anyone come up with that as a Trump's transition, but it sounds sounds logical based on what you're saying.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: And and turning it back to the the United Kingdom where where we live, we've uh we've got uh a Labour government deeply unpopular.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I think they're living up to the the meme that people are were putting out uh as the the Tories were closing out their 14 years of wasted power here, where they said something like the only difference between the Tories and Labor is uh Labour ruins things even faster than the Tories do.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think we're seeing that.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think people can feel it.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I know some people don't necessarily want to, and I don't make this a partisan thing.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: I I dislike both both parties um a lot myself.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: But uh people people are speculating.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Is this is this the end then?
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh do we see now we've got reform hitting the top of the polls?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: Are we seeing us on the poem straight to the vibe shift?
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: We're always a few years behind the Americans.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, before I ask the question and see what you think of this, Nima, within your work on the populist delusion, you may point that elite minorities rule and cannot be controlled by the majority, even by democratic means, which you're basically saying ultimately the elite will do what they want and do things within their own interests.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, however, you did caveat that, and I can't remember which thinker it was, it might have been Mosca, it might have been uh someone else, but you said that no ruling classes, as a quote, can survive without an effective political formula, and the ruled mass remain the hummus out of which grow leading groups.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: So my question to you is do we do we see, with the likes of Farage uh and Rupert and Lee Anderson, and if I'm thinking about new media voices like Matt Goodwin, they they they are this ruled mass, which uh that the hummus of which we're going to see grow leading groups, or do you think do you think not headed really toward uh a similar British flavoured version of the American vibe shift?
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: My tendency would uh be to say that those people that you just mentioned are already part of the elite, broadly defined, already.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: That they do not uh they are not actually part of the quote unquote mass in in that in that sense.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um but um the system our system or the system one of the strengths of the system of democracy, if you want, is that it can it can kind of um it can kind of shift in what it does by putting unpopular things on one party or the other party.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now if you think that, oh well, maybe the system needs to do all sorts of things, like Blair's digital ID, for example, is gonna come in whether we like it or not.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna come in in America.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: The tech bros will do their digit their version of it over there.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh how do I know?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: Larry Ellison, the number one funder of Blair, gave a speech on the day of Trump's inauguration and was sitting there with uh Elon Musk, and Ellison is uh uh you know the number two uh owner of Tesla stock as well.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh right.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: So um, you know, they want this, they want that to happen.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: Your uh you know, tech futurist guys are maybe on board with it as well.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: It kind of makes sense that you'd build this uh, you know, everything everything's much more online now, everything's much more digital.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, the the governmental architecture has to cut catch up to that, and digital ID is a is a good one-stop shop, and it will you'll be able to sell it to people under things like um, you know, if how to control illegal immigration, for example.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, you're not gonna get far if you haven't got a digital ID, etc.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: So it'll be I reckon people will come around to that idea.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: Point is though, a lot of the things this Labour government are doing are very unpopular, okay?
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's um it's possible that Starmer, you know, he's gonna be in there for a couple of years doing all sorts of things, hated, hated, hated.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you then get the people back on side?
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, once he's done all that stuff, you can just switch it.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: You can just, it's like I talk about pro wrestling a lot.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, oh, people are getting fed up of the heel of the villain champion.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I remember uh Triple H, the Reign of Terror, they called it.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_01: How do you get the people back?
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's bring in a beloved babyface, put the belt on the rock or whatever.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not saying it's like it's not quite as kind of orchestrated as that.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but certainly if you can sell the idea of a vibe of a quote unquote vibe shift, it's easier for people then to buy back in to the whole project and to the idea of the government and the parliament and so on, because now the uh you know the rulers are kind of aping what the people want a bit more.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this is the nature of populism.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um I uh I mean some people may know I campaigned for the Tory Party to be destroyed, something called zero seats.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: I I really uh I thought I said I it will be good for everybody if um Labour gets 650 seats.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um because uh it would then show, you know, it would put, it would make the system accountable for itself and show everybody, you know, what happens when just you know have the single party there.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um unfortunately, uh we didn't quite achieve the zero seats, so the Tories still got over 100 and odd.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and now of course we've got reform.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I d I mean I don't really want to make predictions anymore, but if I had to get, I mean, just looking at the raw electoral mathematics, it doesn't take a genius to look at the current polls and be like, well, hold on a second.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: Reform are on 25, 26, 27, Tories are on 20 odd, and Labour are down on 20 odd as well.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: You just combine the reform and the Tory vote, and that's 40 odd.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it would just make sense to merge the two parties to the end of the line.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: Now, nobody's talking about that at the moment, because we're not close to an election, but as we get closer to an election in 2029, um something like, I don't know, the reform Tory party, you stick Nigel's face on it rather than Kemi Badenok's face.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: And whether and again, like like in America, we're so back, we're so back.
• 38:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you've got to understand this analysis, it's not what I want to see, and I'm not being kind of like necessarily pessimistic.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just saying, like, these are the things that are more likely to happen for the stability of the system.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it is better for a system to have moral unity between the elites and the people.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, if you don't have that, it threatens the social fabric, and you get, you know, you you're then accelerating towards the breakdown of the system.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: So ultimately, what uh if that happens, if that quote unquote vibe shift happens in this country, and we get Prime Minister Nigel Farage with Rupert Lowe next to him, and maybe someone like uh Matt Goodwin, you know, as an advisor or something, um the concerns of the people, people will feel like they're quote unquote being heard, okay?
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um but of course, as long as it is in the hands of people who are already part of the system, then you can take you can kind of take the the rougher edges off of it.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: You can moderate it, you can moderate what you know the quote unquote people want down a little bit to something that may be more acceptable to power.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because at the at the end of the day, every every anyone who's ruling this country, or anybody who's ruling America, is not going to be able to go to um too far in the direction of intolerance.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um because the fact is you've got different populations, different ethnicities, they're here.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: So so so again, from a purely pragmatic perspective, you have to manage that.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: And if you have, I don't know, an explicitly racial doctrine entering the discourse, that's no good from the point of view of power because that leads to the breakup, that leads to breakup and division, just like woke did.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_01: So you know, uh as long and somebody like Nigel Farage, he will make sure that is kind of kept out, right?
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it will be more managed.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is that, and again, this is where we get back to our cyclical history and back to what has happened in the past the the more liberal, tolerant, universalist doctrines that every empire through necessity has to adopt ultimately are the things that lead to its eventual breakdown.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's almost never the case that um the leader or the lead or the people in power are gonna willingly take actions that I don't know, cut the empire in half or you know, lead to its deliberate breakup or something like that.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um they're gonna do the things that are gonna try to keep it going.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, but often that means trying to do more of the same thing that's failed already.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so in a roundabout way, yes, you could get your vibe shift, yes, you could get Prime Minister Farage.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: But Farage is not in the long run, Farage is not gonna do any of the things that um many people would like to see.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: He's gonna do things that are gonna try to keep the the show on the road, um, which could be doomed to failure.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe we'll find out he's like a kind of political genius who can, you know, th thread the eye of a needle, but that remains to be seen.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: I I as a realist um suspect that some of the problems that have developed in the West are insurmountable through the continu like if we continue um you know in a broadly speaking liberal frame, which is what you know both Trump and Farage are part of, um you're not gonna get the solutions that people want ultimately, for good or for ill.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: What are the insurmountable problems as you see them?
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um well how can I put this uh delicately?
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um I mean the the the fact is is that between World War II and now the the leaders of the West have embarked on a really quite radical political experiment that has never been tried before at any at any other time to my to my knowledge.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um that experiment is the importation of millions upon millions of people uh that aren't native to various different lands, whether it's France, Britain, America, uh and then expecting them in the space of one or two generations to just get on because they've got this view that people are interchangeable units, right?
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: People people are fungible.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't really matter if you have um, you know, Birmingham populated by uh indigenous Brits or people who were born elsewhere.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh now that may work as liberal theory, but uh it does not work in reality.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody knows that um if you change I mean it's it's it's just common sense.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: You ch if you change the population of a town to be, you know, the popul uh populated with people who were born two thousand miles away, that town it that those two thousand people aren't magically going to turn, you know, into the into the people who came before them.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: They're going to turn that town.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Into being more like the place that they're they're from.
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it's just that's obvious that that happens.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and if that happens enough, and it that that happens in an unchecked way, then the things that brought us here, and again, we go back to cyclical history, every empire falls when it forgets about the things that brought them there.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: What brought us here.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: And many, and and unfortunately for most empires, the thing that brings them there are things that are, you know, seen to be uncivilized by the uh once people are quote unquote enlightened, right?
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is the um, you know, it's the difference between Homer and uh Socrates and Plato, or it's the difference between, you know, it's like the belief um, you know, the British Empire was not brought about by um Adam Smith comparative advantage and you know utilitarianism.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't, it was brought about like every empire was brought about through conquest, through, you know, uh particularist doctrines.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um but like I said, every empire goes through this, even the Mongol Empire.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: Genghis Khan, you know, nobody thinks of Genghis Khan as a liberal, right?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: But the gang but the Mongol Empire, fact is, was tolerant.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um it uh exercised free trade, free trade network.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um I even saw an article, you can search this in Google if you want, comparing Genghis Khan or the Mongols to Tony Blair.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because many of the many of the actual decisions the Mongols ended up doing when they were in power actually start to look a bit liberal because every empire has to deal with the problem of managing multi-ethnic populations.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: Trouble is, you fast forward a couple of hundred years, and that original spirit of Genghis Khan is gone.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: The spark that led you there has gone.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: And once it's completely gone, then the empire dissolves.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: And there's nothing like, and you could you could argue that this is what happened even with the British Empire.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you you compare the mindset of the um Victorian explorer.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I've just sure that there are man-eating gorillas in Africa.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: Come on, let's get come on, pack your bags, we're going.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_01: Can you can you imagine anybody?
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I remember when they were talking about, you know, oh, are we able to build the Millennium Dome?
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's gonna cost a lot of money.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they can't fix Hammersmith Bridge now.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: There is a living monument.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: We can't now today we cannot fix Hammersmith Bridge.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: But back in back in that era, they were like, yep, we'll get this up in six months, a year, or however long it took.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: So you you can see that spirit, the spark has gone.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: And once that spark is gone, you're not you can try to recapture it by bringing in fresh blood, right?
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a writer called uh Brooks Adams, wrote a book called The Law of Civilization and Decay, who says, Look, look, once that spark is gone, people you can keep on bringing in foreign populations, you know, uh fertile young men, you know, uh who've got spirit, who've got like a bit of go in them, can try to like import that energy, but you're still it's like a patch, it's like it's on life support, right?
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: So this so this vision of um Fraser Nelson, who is celebrating this, you know, plus five million people, Fraser Nelson, like who are those five million people?
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't think it's too politically incorrect, John, to say those five million people aren't five million Isambard Kingdom Brunels or uh Dr.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_01: Livingston's or whatever.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_01: They're five they're five million people from the third world, let's face it.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and this is another thing that I'm very pessimistic about.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: There's this um, depending on who you follow, you'll see talk of elite human capital.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard that phrase?
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_01: People like Richard Hanania, they talk about elite human capital.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean, did elite, I mean, elite human capital, if you look again, if you look at the uh achievements of quote-unquote Western civilization, I talked about the Victorians, okay.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, were the Victorians drawing on a massive pool of university-educated people from around the world?
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: Or was that pool actually very small?
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Arnold Toymbe talks about a creative minority, okay?
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: That the the number of people who really change the world are actually just a handful of geniuses, a handful of people who somehow, like I mentioned Brunel, I mean you can you can name your own famous, uh, famous innovators from from the past.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: It has almost never come from, oh, I know, let's bring over two million, two million people from uh, you know, the subcontinent, because that's going to it just doesn't work like that.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: You can't engineer it in that way.
• 49:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know any examples of where that's really been tried and tested.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I I do think that the entire thinking is wrong-headed.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and without getting too metaphysical, uh, this is what some people might call the reign of quantity.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_01: The idea you just throw enough stuff at it, and quant you know, through the law of averages, the reign of quantity will win out.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um whereas, in fact, every empire, every great power has a phase where it is qualitative and produces men and women, if you want, of of distinction, of differentiation, of of excellence.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then over time that gives way to a more quantitative, empirical, scientific, if you want, way of thinking.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: But that drains out the great the great spirit that gets you there.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and uh yeah, I mean that's why I'm less uh I I have less hope for uh these methods that people have of rejuvenating what happens, if that makes any sense.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: It does, it does.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I suppose it totally ties in with your work that ultimately we are in that period of civilizational decline, and at some point there will be the birth of something new, and we we don't know what that is yet.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's some of the interesting points you made there about uh how specifically the British Empire was built and the mindset of the people, whether it was the explorers or the creative minority, but even even the people that were your everyday Joes and Janes, as it were, that were called to settle parts of Canada, uh, will be a bit of land and away you go.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but you need to be able to work hard, you need to be able to uh be working with your hands all day out in the elements.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is an unforgiving environment.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so much of what was created of settler uh areas of whether Canada or the US were people who were who had to seriously put some put some graft in.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if I think about my generation, our generation, we we don't we don't have that in us, and and I know you have talked about this, and others like NS Lions have talked about this, uh the lions and foxes theory, where you have the lions who embody that uh go-getting uh fearless attitude, uh want to explore, willing to do the hard things to keep things going, so know when to uh act with vengeance in order to get justice, uh, and know when to be tolerant.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh you have the foxes, the bureaucrats who, as you mentioned, it's you know, the empire was not built on people sitting doing Adam Smith comparative theories and then going off and doing it based on that.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was a totally r reversed role.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I uh uh as someone who's found myself surrounded by the bureaucracy, um, and interestingly, you can find passages from some of the governors or and our MPs back in the Victorian era who, with the rise of bureaucracy following the French Revolution, would talk about it being a very un-British thing.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: We do not want to go anywhere near that.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_00: That is not what Britain does.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose the empire was still uh absolutely in its uh prime at that point.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's much more we could go on, but there are two questions I'd like to ask you this side of the paywall, Nima.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I suppose the first one is actually as someone who is uh also in that part of the internet where we um have conversations and put them out there, is you always want to make sure that what you put out there is of quality, it's been thoughtful, and you're not just at least this is the way I see it, and I know you see it, you're not just trying to go along with the whims of the world and just draw people in with click by you know outrage bait or uh whatever else it is that you want to call it.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: But I know you in particular have become quite vocal about slop and what's being referred to as slop on on the internet.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you have uh you've been talking about how some high-profile media personalities are cringe lords, and I want to be able to avoid one becoming a cringe lord and two creating anything constituting slop.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_00: So perhaps you can unpack uh how what a cringe lord is and what slop is, and how how we as content creators inverted commas can avoid that.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um well, I mean, it's just whatever the latest thing is.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one of one of the great tragedies of uh Twitter, in my view, is that everybody's memory is like two days long.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: Things that happened a week ago or two weeks ago feel like ancient history very quickly, and people just move on suddenly and forget about what's happened.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: So there's like a constant amnesia, um, which gets people in the like people are in just a heightened emotional state all the time, where you know, uh you know, something like following Trump becomes an emotional roller coaster.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, uh there's even a meme about it.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's over, we're so back, it's over, we're so back, and all this sort of all this sort of thing.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the truth is, of course, most of this stuff is just happening within your own personal head, Kenan.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's like it's like a fictional, it's like a fictional symbolic universe where really less is happening than than it appears, or um not every single little thing that happens has this kind of world-changing significance.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yet if you go on, I mean, one of my favorite things to do is to go down my YouTube subscriptions or you know, my Twitter feed and see how many times people claims like this changes everything.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh if I if I counted the amount of things that have changed everything in the past 10 years, uh it would be sort of like hundreds, thousands of things.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: So everybody's looking for the great world-changing moment all the time.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and everybody talks about it until the next thing comes along, and everybody's talking about that.
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, one of the things I always want to do is to try to get out of the mental headspace of being part of that, because it it is very much like being on a roller coaster, and you can only see the roller coaster once you're off the roller coaster.
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_01: You have to take off the seatbar, get off the ride, and you can kind of watch it, and then you can what you then those people who you may follow at the moment, or you can just see them as passengers on that ride rather than um and uh I mean the reason I say that is because I'm trying to provide value-free analysis.
• 56:09
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to understand what is happening.
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not doing politics, I'm not working for a political party, I'm not working for Donald Trump or anybody else, or the Tory Party or the Labour Party.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_01: Many many people, in my view, in this space now, uh, this wasn't always the case, but it definitely is now, are actually working for various interests.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they may be funded, they may just be part of a uh of a kind of uh ecosystem.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um so their in their incentives are to keep you on that, to keep you on that roller coaster.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you know, they're gonna do what they're gonna do.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: I can't change that.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: All I can do is point out what is happening, and um I mean, why?
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I don't have any if if you go on my channel, the only thing I promise is to try to keep you sane in an increasingly insane world, right?
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: That's the uh that's the only thing I can offer.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um because we are living through quite extraordinary times, and uh uh keeping yourself sane is probably the number one thing you can do.
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, whether we ever land or not, I don't know.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_01: But here we are.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's definitely a noble, a noble goal and something we should probably strive for considering just how uh much of a tomboler it feels like you're in being turned around if you step into the vortex of Twitter or other other media outlets that aren't uh on the social media feed.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: And uh yeah, I I've had a few people say that to me in the last couple of weeks as they've learned about the podcast, is they appreciate that it's at least engaging in a calm, thoughtful discussion where people can unpack their ideas instead of constantly being steered toward something which is going to generate a whole bunch of clicks.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_00: So, oh, tell me about this and where it turns into conflict.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that there isn't ever space for that, there can be, but it can't be the whole thing.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think uh people like you certainly, and hopefully at some point, people like me uh will see the benefits of that as people perhaps start to tire of the constant cortisol levels going up and they go, Do you know what?
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I just want to go to some uh something a little bit more uh pedestrian with regards to the the pace, but it's gonna give me some thoughtful stuff to chew on instead of just jacking at my amygdala or whatever other hormonal systems that are at play.
• 58:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Nima, final question this side of the play.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_00: Well, ask all of my guests this.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: What have you changed your mind on during the course of your life and what was it that made you think differently?
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh, uh pretty much everything.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I would say that um in the uh 2000s, uh I was kind of just uh, you know, a lot of my political views were just defect, you know.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh famously I voted for Tony Blair, of course, uh in 2001, I think it was.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um and um I had no reason really to question the general kind of waters that we were swimming in.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh what what really I mean it obviously I've always read widely and I've always, you know, had uh kind of unique view on things in a way.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: I was I was quite into um uh Marxist thinker called Louis Altazair, who wrote a lot about ideology.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know, a lot of my uh early academic work was actually trying to challenge some of those Marxist um uh critiques of liberalism.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I and my initial response was actually to want to defend liberalism.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: Which I w which is where I think a lot of people start because you you want to defend what you know, right?
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_01: Things like individualism and you know, uh I was born in Thatcher's Britain, so I was pretty much pro-capitalist, you know, uh McDonald's and Coca-Cola and all the rest of it.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I I grew up watching He-Man, you know.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was like born, I was born, I had Thatcher running through my veins.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, a true, like true child of Thatcher's Blair's Britain.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you know, most of my education or self-education has been unlearning.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: Almost everything I've learned.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: And uh that that process never really never really ends, uh, I think.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: The one thing the one thing I would say was the hysterical reaction to Brexit.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I voted remain.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you know, I thought I did it in good conscience and fairly and so on.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: But when the media and the political class and you know, friends of mine and the hysterical reaction to that and the you know watching people who you may have I mean, the person who comes to my mind was AC Gray.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he just lost his mind.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and he wasn't the only one.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: There were there were dozens of people who it was like um it was like their their brains had been caved in.
• 1:01:13
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, what did there's something weird is happening here?
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then of course Trump came around the corner, and um it it it it led me down a path really to be like, well, I really want to understand what is happening here.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um so that uh that was the kind of political uh breaking point, which I think came for a lot of people.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the other big thing I really changed my mind on, uh, which I will always mention uh was a book by uh Jonathan Haidt called The Righteous Mind.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: Came out in uh 2012.
• 1:01:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and another book called Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: Uh these two books single-handedly, uh you could say they ruin they ruin my life in some ways, because once once I read them, I couldn't.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's like seeing a magic trick that you can't ever put back again.
• 1:02:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it completely changed how I saw almost everything.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because you like to think that reason and evidence and things like this are how how what governs us, what makes people tick.
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: Those two books turned that completely on its head.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they in fact it was Jonathan Heights who, in a way, got me into all of this.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I got in touch with him, and uh if you pick up my book, uh Shakespeare's Moral Compass, he's on the back of it.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he he got me involved with uh Quillette and um the Heterojox uh Academy.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, and it kind of got me down on the path where I was already kind of thinking differently uh from a lot of other people.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then Brexit and Trump came along, and I was like, I could I could recognize that we weren't seeing the rational brain at work, we were seeing cognitive dissonance, we were seeing confirmation bias, we were seeing um, you know, the analysis I was seeing in the media did not marry up to what was actually happening.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then of course the extraordinary lies that were told about Trump and so on.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been a big Trump guy, to be honest, but I can see when lies are told, you know.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I've got a very low tolerance for BS.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I was being asked to to lie.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was being asked to BS, and I don't like that.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh similarly with the woke stuff, you know, I'm not gonna uh talk of you respect your pronouns or well, you know, I will, because I'm a nice guy, I'm polite, so I will I will actually respect pronouns, but um, you know, the back of my mind I'm thinking, like, this is what's going on here?
• 1:03:46
  SPEAKER_01: I have to pretend this man is a woman now, or um and uh so it, you know, so it goes down.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_01: So a low tolerance for BS uh wedded to all those things probably uh changed my mind on almost all of my liberal priors.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a been a journey.
• 1:04:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, uh one I can totally empathize with sounds very similar though.
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yours resulted in some really cool meetings, people like Jonathan Height, but I remember that book being a big turning point for me.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_00: But Brexit, I had ex almost exactly the same experience, vote remain for the same reasons as you put forward.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_00: And initially, with that reaction, I thought kind of half went along with it, and it just felt really weird.
• 1:04:29
  SPEAKER_00: And then I realized that whatever was going on was just terribly crazy, and that sent me down a very similar intellectual route to you, and now find myself questioning all of this.
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and uh anyway, I it's been very interesting to be able to speak to someone who's had similar experiences because yes, you find yourself sitting outside of it as an observer more and more instead of getting wrapped up with it, not suggesting I'm some kind of sage or guru.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_00: I still get sucked into things.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, before before we jump into subscriber questions, I know you have a wonderful channel on YouTube called Academic Agent.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, where else can people find you, Nima, and what are you working on that we might expect to see soon?
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I I I've just I've just had a course come out called Foundations of Shakespeare, which people can do on uh Academic Agency, which I if you go to my YouTube channel, uh you'll find it quickly because I I'm always going on about it.
• 1:05:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, you can take Foundations of Shakespeare.
• 1:05:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um that's something I've just finished.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in theory, I'm working on a book called The Boomer Truth Regime.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_01: But um I am, I mean, just to be perfectly honest, wary about writ finishing that book in current circumstances with Starmer as the uh as the Prime Minister.
• 1:05:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Starmer, I find them a little bit scary because I I there's an authoritarian streak there that I I worry that if pushed the wrong way, uh things could get bad, really bad for us uh before they get better.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_01: So um I am uh you know not gonna finish that book while he's in power certainly um but I did that I do have an extract of that uh which is gonna be published in the magazine Chronicles uh where I have a monthly column now as well so if uh that's an American conservative publication um so you can read me there as well I've got a substack called the Forbidden Text which you can read um I don't I'm not like somebody who writes every single week or some people like to have two or three essays a week.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_01: I only ever write an essay when I feel like I've got something really worth saying.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_01: But uh yeah quite a lot of people subscribe to that uh substack as well an essay is more durable often than a video right so I mean Twitter is the world of pure slop, right?
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's like a hurricane, a raw sewage pipe, it's an everything that's like pure ephemera.
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: YouTube has got a little bit more durability but once the video is dropped out of people's front pages or whatnot it's kind of gone.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: A Substack I find has got a little bit more of a kind of uh you know it's it's it's because it's written it's there it's kind of more durable and then the ultimate form of it is a book of course which is you know in this day and age almost like building a statue or something so um yeah you can follow me in any of those places.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well I'd highly recommend it it's uh an entertaining ride certainly an informative one and uh I look forward to being with truth regime once Labor are out of power.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: I can see your reticence there.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_00: Nima it's been an absolute pleasure now's a time where we will go to subscriber questions for Substack subscribers who are paid.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if anyone wants to be able to hear what Nima has to say then head over to thinking class on Substack and you can hear his answers to two more questions.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_00: Nima it has been an absolute pleasure and uh these are the type of conversations I wish I could have every day and not just around PowerPoint documents, Excel spreadsheets, maybe one day uh wish you all the best with all of the work you're doing I hope we get to speak again in future and thanks so much for coming on the show.
• 1:08:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure everyone really enjoyed the conversation.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: Cheers thanks a lot to keep up to date with all that I am doing please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at ThinkingClass and follow me on X at thinking classes.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_00: Here I seek to explore the ideas, values and culture that made our civilization, those that are unmaking it, and how leaders at our public and private institutions should respond.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_00: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail dot com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey