Latest / Thinking Class / #082 - Philip Pilkington - A Post-Mortem: The Death Of Liberalism (& The Rise Of A New World Order)

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#082 - Philip Pilkington - A Post-Mortem: The Death Of Liberalism (& The Rise Of A New World Order) · Thinking Class

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking with Philip Pilkington.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: Philip is a macro economist and investment professional with nearly a decade of experience working in global financial markets.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: He is the author of a book on economic theory, The Reformation in Economics, and runs the Macro Cosm Substack.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: Philip regularly writes for a variety of outlets, including Unheard, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The New York Post, Money Week, First Things, American Affairs, The Critic, and Post Liberal Order.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: He is also the co-host of the popular geopolitics podcast Multipolarity, and he has a significant following on X at Philip Pilk.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: Today we are discussing his new book, The Collapse of Global Liberalism and the Emergent Post Liberal World Order, which is out now in the United Kingdom.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Philip and I think out loud about why global liberalism as ruling ideology has collapsed globally, why modern liberalism might have been a phenomenon of the baby boomers, the contradictions in American democracy, why many of the social issues we see today are due to what Philip calls hyperliberalism, why humans resist being seen as economic widgets alone, and why the distance between liberal philosophers and those deemed far right are smaller than you think, why it is that liberals and not nationalists are warmongers, how the Russia-Ukraine war demonstrates the impotence of the standard bearers of global liberalism in the West, why the great man theory is true and much, much more.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: As ever, Philip doesn't mince his words, and he delivers a searing analysis of the situation that we see today, both internationally and within domestic politics in the West.
1:43
SPEAKER_00: In my first conversation with Philip last year, it proved to be hugely prescient for what we're seeing today.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: We spoke of the economic ruination being experienced by European nations, including the United Kingdom, the impotence and lack thereof an industrial strategy, and how this was self-inflicted, and we can see the effects of that playing out now.
2:05
SPEAKER_00: You can check that episode out in the show notes.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: And make sure to like, subscribe, follow the show on YouTube, your podcast platform of choice and Substack, where paid subscribers get the opportunity to contribute questions to a special QA that only they you will get access to.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: Let's grow Thinking Class together.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: Philip Hilkington, welcome back to Thinking Class.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for having me on again, John.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: Philip, last time we spoke, we talked about how European countries face economic ruination of their own making.
2:47
SPEAKER_00: It's something which you've spent a lot of time thinking about as a macroeconomist.
2:52
SPEAKER_00: And since then, you've turned your attention to the wider international picture, specifically a changing world order.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: And you've written a book called The Collapse of Global Liberalism and the Emerging Post-Libal World Order.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: Let's begin with that.
3:09
SPEAKER_00: So we we've swum in the waters of liberalism, I suppose, for many decades, liberal democracy as well, is a term which we've become accustomed to.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: It's something that we uh are told we ought to defend.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: And I suppose if you swum in those waters all of your life, it's difficult to see that the water may well have changed.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: And what would you say to those people who believe that the waters remain unchanged, that the liberal world order has not fallen?
3:35
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure if there's very many left at this stage.
3:38
SPEAKER_01: I think the dividing line now in the public debate is between people who kind of are broadly accepting of the changes that are taking place.
3:47
SPEAKER_01: They're very obvious now.
3:48
SPEAKER_01: Um, I I was joking with someone the other day that um I wrote the book a bit late, actually.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's actually the perfect timing.
3:55
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
3:55
SPEAKER_01: I'm not a marketer or whatever, but if you wanted to be Nostradamus, uh it would have been good to publish a year ago rather than today.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: I I think it's become very obvious that there are huge changes taking place, and these changes are anti-liberal in a sense, at just about every level, changes in the global world order, changes in domestic politics, etc.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: etc.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: And when I do read the liberal publications, which are I do less actually by the day, they're they're becoming a lot less relevant, even kind of big name publications like the Financial Times and so on are becoming harder to read, let's just put it that way.
4:30
SPEAKER_01: And I I see them kind of uh accepting the premise in a sense, but lamenting it.
4:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, although there's kind of interesting developments taking place even around the lamentation.
4:41
SPEAKER_01: Uh, some people are kind of uh broadly kind of trying to figure out how they fit into the whole thing and everything like that.
4:48
SPEAKER_01: But I think broadly speaking, the the previous defenders of the liberal world order are basically recognizing that there is some sort of a change taking place and that a decline of liberalism is setting in, at least in the short term.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they hope to revive it in the longer term, although I don't even really see any talk of that.
5:07
SPEAKER_01: And they're kind of just um just saying that that uh that that it's a negative development.
5:13
SPEAKER_01: I I mean there's a million different reasons for this, but I I think the headline one, because US politics still dominates in the West, uh, I don't think that's going to be the case uh 10 years from now, but um it still does.
5:26
SPEAKER_01: I think that the um the main development that's led to this to this accepting of reality in a sense was probably the Biden administration because Trump won got in, it was thought to be an anomaly.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: Now it came on the back of Brexit and a few other developments, but you know, people convince themselves this is an anomaly, and then we just get the get the evil orange dictator out and get like normality back in, apparently.
5:54
SPEAKER_01: And they got it, they had a shot at that with Biden, and like I'm like, I'm sorry, I don't want to be partisan political, but Biden was a freak show, and everyone saw it was a freak show, and no one no one really defends the Biden administration.
6:07
SPEAKER_01: And then when they tried to run an alternative candidate after basically engaging in a self-coup d'etat, let's be frank, um, that candidate was another disaster.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: And I think at that point, um my sense from talking to more liberal friends of mine who are you know more thoughtful maybe than the average, is that um I think they began to realize that the that the liberal bench was actually very shallow.
6:33
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it became increasingly clear that liberalism may have actually been a phenomenon of the baby boomers, in a sense.
6:40
SPEAKER_01: Um, there wasn't actually that much talent in the in the United States political system, for example, to reach down and pull up new liberal talent onto the bench.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: They ended up with Kamala Harris, which was a disastrous presidential candidate, let's be honest.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: And even the even the person who's who's kind of next up in line for the throne, well, up until the riots recently, Gavin Newsome, um, he's a he's a he's a family dynasty guy, right?
7:07
SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't think, I mean, I I don't want to be vulgar about it, but I don't think Gavin Newsom has any particular principles.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: He's from the Pelosi clan in California.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: They sort of, it's a bit of a one-party state there, um, let's be honest.
7:20
SPEAKER_01: And um, and so Gavin Newsome may or may not be a talented politician.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: I I I think people are gonna have their own opinions about that, but um he's not really uh uh uh if you put Gavin Newsom up on stage, you wouldn't say, well, here's a here's an ideological upholder of the liberal world order.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: You'd say, here's a very pragmatic political operator from a kind of one-party system in in California that we're gonna just run probably on pretty much any ticket we can we can think will appeal to the voter, uh, just to get something over the hedge that won't uh the uh um the the the line that won't be Trump.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: So I think all these kind of forces have coalesced.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: We haven't even talked about the global picture, which plays a lot into this too, the lack of defeat of Russia and the war, the the continued rise of China in the face of pretty much everything.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: Um uh but all these things are coming together now so that your average kind of uh I think liberal defender of the liberal world order, uh, even up to the time when we previously had the podcast, which was only a year ago or less, um, they've kind of um they've kind of crumpled, I think, to be honest.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: That's my sense.
8:32
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we should certainly look at the rise of China, the rise of BRICS a little bit later on, and indeed the Russia and Ukraine war without giving too much of your your book away.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: Uh, but perhaps we talk about the the long tale of how we got to the liberal world order, which I suppose began uh a long time ago.
8:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh we it began with um John Locke, uh, and we we can talk a little bit about that.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: But uh Alexander Dokovie on his uh trip to America, where he wrote his very long book, Democracy in America, started to talk about the amazing uh nature of the democracy there and the way that people just rubbed shoulders and went along and it was a liberal world.
9:17
SPEAKER_00: But he also talked about the issues that he was starting to spot in that in the way that people lived.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: So I'm gonna read a passage out to you from that and get your reaction to it.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: I think that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: I am trying myself to choose an expression which will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it, but in vain.
9:45
SPEAKER_00: I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: Above the race of men stands an immense and tutelary power which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild.
10:15
SPEAKER_00: It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare man for manhood, but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood.
10:26
SPEAKER_00: It is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: How uh deprescient do you think that is for the picture of which we've just painted of the recent liberal world order?
10:44
SPEAKER_01: De Togueville spotted the underlying contradiction in America.
10:48
SPEAKER_01: He was a great admirer of America.
10:50
SPEAKER_01: Um, in a sense, I guess I am too.
10:52
SPEAKER_01: I used to live there for a while.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: I I see the the positives of America, which you don't actually really see unless you live there.
10:59
SPEAKER_01: Um, but they're in increasing trouble and have been for a very long time.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: Um but de Tocqueville saw one of the one of the underlying problems of of the American Republic in a sense, which was um the uh perhaps too extreme egalitarianism at the root of its uh at the root of its claims, um, which is probably the problem with liberalism too.
11:22
SPEAKER_01: And you want to be kind of cautious about how you phrase this, because when you say when you say that egalitarianism can create issues, you say, well, what do you mean?
11:32
SPEAKER_01: Do you not want people to have equality in front of the a judge, for example?
11:36
SPEAKER_01: Um, well, no, that's not actually uh as I pointed out in the book, that's not actually a liberal equality, for example.
11:42
SPEAKER_01: The equality, equality of the law goes uh um uh back pre-liberal, and you'll find it in other societies that have never embraced liberalism either.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: Um, of course, there are gradations to that.
11:53
SPEAKER_01: Uh, a slave in ancient Rome doesn't have the same equality before the law as a Roman citizen.
11:58
SPEAKER_01: But if you're a Roman citizen, for example, you have basic equality before the law.
12:02
SPEAKER_01: Now it's great that that's expanded and we don't have slavery.
12:05
SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's fine, but that's not a liberal development either.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: That's a development from Christianity, um, the the abolition of slavery and the universalization of the legal relationships.
12:16
SPEAKER_01: It goes through various stages and so on.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, so you want to be careful about how you phrase this, but the problem I think that de Toqueville noted in the in America, the uh the more extreme egalitarianism, which he also uh I'm sure saw in France, uh post-revolutionary France, is that there's a big difference between uh reasonable egalitarianism, you might call it, which might include equality in front of the law, might it might even scale up to democracy.
12:43
SPEAKER_01: Democracy and liberalism are not the same things.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: Democracy existed in ancient Greece, there were no liberals in ancient Greece.
12:50
SPEAKER_01: Um uh uh uh you want to separate that from the notion that everyone is just equivalent, uh, that every everyone is interchangeable and the same.
12:59
SPEAKER_01: Uh uh you know, uh the idea that everybody, everybody uh is just a homogenous piece of you know material in the in the social machine.
13:10
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's that's where liberalism definitely tends toward.
13:14
SPEAKER_01: Um people might say that's not liberalism, that's communism.
13:17
SPEAKER_01: That's kind of liberalism too, actually.
13:19
SPEAKER_01: Um you can overlay uh uh a capitalist framework onto the basic notion of uh you know homogeneous people, um, and you can allow for some sort of like Darwinian process to set in there, sure.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: And then you don't have communism, you have something else.
13:36
SPEAKER_01: But at the end of the day, the ideas, but the the idea of kind of uh uh homogeneous social blob uh uh is much the distance between com Marxism and liberalism is actually much smaller than people imagine.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: It's it's the only the only real defense that a liberal can can give to not have complete uh uh homogenization as you might try and have in a in a socialist or a communist society, is to say, well, we'll allow capitalist competition to continue on.
14:06
SPEAKER_01: But at a basic level, liberalism definitely sees it seeks to extinguish what it sees as arbitrary hierarchies in society.
14:15
SPEAKER_01: And those can go from everything from you know the the uh episcopate, the church, and so on.
14:21
SPEAKER_01: These were the classical uh uh targets of the liberals, um the Lockeans, the the uh the Puritans, the Roundheads, and the English Civil War, which is the first real liberal development on my reading.
14:32
SPEAKER_01: Um, but also, you know, uh at a certain point you start questioning like, well, why do we have any hierarchy?
14:38
SPEAKER_01: Why do we have um hierarchies of parents over children?
14:41
SPEAKER_01: Why do we have hierarchies embedded in our notion of gender, for example?
14:45
SPEAKER_01: Um, so it it it it liberalism to my mind is kind of a bit of a it's a bit of a social asset in a sense that that tends to try and undo undo bonds.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's basically what de Tocqueville saw in in the United States.
14:59
SPEAKER_01: He saw an awful lot of promise in getting rid of some of the more dysfunctional hierarchies that were that were in place in Europe.
15:07
SPEAKER_01: That's that's debatable actually, but de Tocqueville definitely took the side that there was um that some of the arbitrary hierarchies, as he might have put it, in Europe were dysfunctional at the time.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: And he saw a great deal of um uh more movement injected into the system in the United States.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, he saw these um very radical egalitarian ideas creeping in, and he began, I think he began to notice that it could end up in a sort of a dissolution of the social fabric itself.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: And of course, that's exactly what's happened in the United States today.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: Uh no matter the problems that we face in Europe, and we face enormous problems in Europe, some of which we can go into, the um the dissolution of social bonds has gone much, much further in the United States than it has in Europe.
15:51
SPEAKER_01: And that's why we often see that the the politics over there is so extreme, uh, even relative to some of the issues that we have in Europe.
15:59
SPEAKER_01: It feels like Europe can, uh even though it's has much it has worse, in a sense, economic problems than the United States at the moment, it has a it's going to have a much more difficult time finding its feet in the new world order.
16:12
SPEAKER_01: Um there are many, many problems that Europe has, but you definitely get a palpable sense that the that the social order is a little bit more stable in Europe than it than it is in the United States, and that's been true for probably 10 or 15 years.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think that is probably due to the due to the um uh uh continued developments that De Tokville saw saw the beginning of, which was this tendency to start to view people as kind of um uh widgets that could just be replaced uh in and out in a society.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, I mean that's pretty much what's what's happened there.
16:47
SPEAKER_01: And we've imported a lot of that into Europe too.
16:49
SPEAKER_01: Let's let's let's be honest.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we should certainly come back to to that that that undifferentiated human matter uh idea, the constant interchangeability, and and how people uh perhaps responding to that.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: But lingering a little bit longer on liberalism's origins and how and its impact on other nations as it's gone international, because I know you look at this picture quite heavily in your book, and just generally as a as a commentator, is as you as you've spawned, you've you've mentioned liberalism spawned from from England.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: It was an outgrowth of Cromwellianism revolution, and it was a reflection of the religious hostilities that had been experienced in the country, and then other aspects of liberalism as they grew in other parts of Europe, like Immanuel Kant, who effectively lived in the easternmost seat of power in Prussia, this wonderful cosmopolitan city.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: He lived alone, as you point out, he loved order, and he believed that the universe tended toward a perfection that was within cosmopolitanism, that that was that was the destiny of humanity.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: And these ideas all went international.
17:57
SPEAKER_00: What do you think the practical impacts have been on some nations, whether it's birth rates, for example, just to set you off, uh, that have shown some examples of this the social fabric being dissolved, as you've you've put it?
18:12
SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe you go back one step before uh describing some of the uh issues that that liberalism has has raised.
18:21
SPEAKER_01: I don't think we've seen um very hardcore or purified liberalism uh until quite recently.
18:29
SPEAKER_01: I think this is kind of the key to understand that um proponents of liberalism up until recently have made the assumption that we've basically been living in liberal societies since the Enlightenment.
18:42
SPEAKER_01: Um and by making that assumption, you can say, well, isn't liberalism great because society's better today than it was in 1750, right?
18:51
SPEAKER_01: Um and of course, these are always poisoned uh debates anyway, because you're you're basically lumping everything in together and you're saying every development in scientific progress from 1750 must be kept in the same camp as every political development from 1750.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: Of course, those those are completely separate issues.
19:12
SPEAKER_01: There's there's uh despite the illusions uh that people will put forward, there's very little link between developments in chemistry in the 18th century and developments in political ideologies in the 18th century.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: Of course, these things bounce off each other and so on, but there's there's no inherent link between these two things.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, as we're starting to see uh scientific progress increasingly shift to China, we'll increasingly see this.
19:37
SPEAKER_01: You'll have a completely non-liberal society.
19:39
SPEAKER_01: I was in Beijing two weeks ago, it's a completely non-liberal society, um, engaging in scientific developments that are going to start in some areas outpacing the West.
19:50
SPEAKER_01: It's just the reality.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: It's already started, and it will be taking place in a non-liberal society, and we'll see that there's no inherent link between material progress and liberalism.
19:58
SPEAKER_01: That was an illusion created by various uh uh political forces at any given historical moment.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: But the my point would even be broader that we simply did not live in predominantly liberal societies until quite recently.
20:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, what we ended up living in is societies that embedded some aspects of liberal ideology within them.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: So I like to take there's two really easy examples here.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: We'll just go for one, I suppose, is Britain in the 19th century, right?
20:27
SPEAKER_01: Britain in the 19th century is generally regarded today in the historiography, the liberal historiography of today.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: You might call it Whig historiography, some people call it, in reference to the liberal faction, the Whigs in Britain.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: Um, and and what they what this historiography tells us is that in the 19th century, Britain became the first kind of moderate liberal society.
20:51
SPEAKER_01: Um and I'm not sure what really the evidence for this is.
20:56
SPEAKER_01: Um Britain in the 19th century is not uh particularly democratic, first of all.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: Not that liberalism and democracy have uh are are equivalent, they're not, but often the liberal proponents uh make that so.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, Britain in the 19th century is predominantly an aristocratic society.
21:16
SPEAKER_01: Um uh liberal reformers begin to change that at the end of the 19th century, the reform acts, the attacks on the aristocracy and the landed gentry, and so on.
21:24
SPEAKER_01: But through most of the 19th century, through most of the Industrial Revolution, Britain is not in any way a liberal society.
21:31
SPEAKER_01: And more than the political structure itself, um, the way people live their lives day to day have has almost nothing to do with liberalism.
21:40
SPEAKER_01: The the average person described in a Charles Dickens novel is not a liberal in any sense.
21:46
SPEAKER_01: They're they're basically Christian people.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: Um now, are they as believing in 1870 England as they were in 1170 England?
21:56
SPEAKER_01: No.
21:56
SPEAKER_01: The the the developments in the church doctrines like And so on had gone a long way by then.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: And there was a form of what you might call liberal Christianity, although perhaps that's a contradiction in terms, embedded in the society at that point.
22:10
SPEAKER_01: But the fact of the matter is that the it was a very hierarchical society in a lot of ways.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: In a lot of ways that people live day to day.
22:18
SPEAKER_01: The liberalism that was there at the time was very limited.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: And it was basically limited to economic relationships.
22:25
SPEAKER_01: And even those were only being really experimented with at the time, you might think of repeal of the coin laws or you know the pre the pre-factory act kind of laissez-faire, anything goes approach to the development of industry in Britain and so on.
22:44
SPEAKER_01: Again, we won't make moral judgments on these things, we won't say if they're good or bad, but there was an awful lot of experimentation with laissez-faire economic policy in the 19th century.
22:55
SPEAKER_01: That does not equate to having a liberal society.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: And so I think when we you could say the same for post-war United States, between 1945 and call it whenever you want, 1990, I suppose.
23:11
SPEAKER_01: American liberals today, or especially conservative liberals, will tell you that that was kind of a golden point of liberalism.
23:19
SPEAKER_01: It showed how functional the system was, et cetera, et cetera.
23:22
SPEAKER_01: And look, that society did become more extremely liberal over time.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's true.
23:28
SPEAKER_01: But at the golden age, in the mid-1950s, mid-1960s, your average person, again, is very similar to the person I'm describing in 1870 Britain.
23:38
SPEAKER_01: They basically live uh broadly Christian lives, whether they're believers or not.
23:43
SPEAKER_01: That's basically where their morality comes from.
23:45
SPEAKER_01: That's basically how they view uh their immediate social relations.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: That's how they justify their relatively large family sizes, their relatively stable family structures.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: Divorce is a rarity, just to point out one aspect that's very different from today.
24:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, and so we only really get to um the beginning of uh what I'd consider actual liberal societies after the end of the Cold War.
24:12
SPEAKER_01: And and I call this in the book the the rise of hyperliberalism.
24:15
SPEAKER_01: This is the point at which we really do start to experiment with the liberal ideas that have been there for a very long time.
24:22
SPEAKER_01: You could find them in John Stuart Mill, William Godwin, and Britain, you'll find them in uh various American radical writers in the 1920s.
24:29
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it was at this point where where the the egalitarian impulse, the the kind of um homogenizing impulse begins to kick in, probably in the 1990s.
24:42
SPEAKER_01: And I'd say by the mid-2010s, we reached a point of liberalism uh that that we'd never seen before, that were in that were implicit in the writings of John Locke, even if he shot if he would have shied away from them.
24:57
SPEAKER_01: They were definitely explicit by the time, for example, of John Stuart Mill writing about social relationships and so on.
25:04
SPEAKER_01: But they only become a mass, oh, and I should say they are very present among the elite baby boomers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but not disseminated to the broader society.
25:16
SPEAKER_01: Those principles become effectively democratized and very broadly uh uh disseminated by, I'd say, the mid-2010s, by the Obama period, effectively.
25:27
SPEAKER_01: And that was that was when we really started to see a liberal society develop, or we began to experiment with a liberal society.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: Now, has it been successful?
25:36
SPEAKER_01: I'd say it's been an absolute catastrophe, not only on any social measure you want to take, but look how long it's lasted.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: If I'm correct that we basically reached peak liberalism in the second Obama administration, how long did it last?
25:53
SPEAKER_01: The reaction was immediate.
25:54
SPEAKER_01: Like we you and I watched this in real time, and it felt like maybe it felt like it was longer than it was, but come on, we're in 2025 now.
26:03
SPEAKER_01: We can take a bit of a retrospective.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: The Obama administration gave rise to an immediate reaction.
26:09
SPEAKER_01: The next electoral cycle, it was rejected.
26:12
SPEAKER_01: So I think we're starting to see that when you actually try and apply the liberal program at every level in society and create the type of society that liberals have long wanted, it doesn't work because it's not a functional ideology.
26:29
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26:35
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26:43
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26:46
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26:59
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27:02
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, thanks for sharing, thanks for showing your support.
27:05
SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: It is fascinating to realize how quickly it's unraveled because I was born late 80s, 1987, and so grew up thinking that this was indeed the world, and it was unquestionably so, and that this was obviously the assumptions by which to live by, they were unquestionable.
27:29
SPEAKER_00: And I myself have seen those things unravel within me, but largely because I've seen them unravel around me.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: And I think what's quite interesting is that what what you've just outlined there being that you had this idea of the distilled liberalism you talked about really solidify within uh within the end of by the end of the cold war, is the the the famous philosopher Francis Fukuyama, who came up with the end of history, who believed that the international state system by this point had succeeded in abolishing the possibility of war.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: Even he saw the problems that liberalism and liberal democracy would present to the common person.
28:17
SPEAKER_00: And so uh I I I'll read out a short passage of his from the the section of his book, which is referred to as the last man, uh, which is something that is often overseen, and then talk about how much there is overlap between him and people who are considered extreme right by our uh our regime, by our our government bodies.
28:40
SPEAKER_00: So Fukiyama wrote that human beings will rebel at this thought of being the last men.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: That is, they will rebel at the idea of being undifferentiated, of a universal and homogeneous state, each the same as the other, no matter where on the globe one goes.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: They will want to be citizens rather than bourgeois, finding the life of masterless slavery, the life of rational consumption, in the end, boring.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: They will want to have ideals by which to live and die, even if the largest ideals have been substantively realized here on earth, and they will want to risk their lives, even if the international state system has succeeded in abolishing the possibility of war.
29:14
SPEAKER_00: This is the contradiction that liberal democracy is not yet solved.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: And what's interesting is the language that undifferentiated, universal, homogenous.
29:22
SPEAKER_00: This is this is language that Renault Camus, the man who is not allowed into Britain, the French philosopher who came up with the sociological concept of replacism that sits at the core of Great Replacement and then turned into the Great Replacement Theory, is uh is seen as a danger to Britain.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: But what's interesting is one of the godfathers, I suppose, of modern liberalism, seeing it having one out against everything else, even spots that is a suppression of the spirit of man that liberalism does.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: And so I suppose my question to you, Philip, is I think it's called thuma thumos, Plato calls it thumos, this restless spirit of seeking recognition in every age that it's just irrepressible within man.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: Are we seeing through whether it's Trump, whether it's Brexit, whether it's uh the the roiling culturals, is this an expression of the thumos of people no longer wanting to be kept down by liberalism, or is that making it far too romantic and poetic?
30:23
SPEAKER_01: I think it is that.
30:24
SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh the Fukiyama passage that you read is is really interesting for like a million different reasons.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: It's very honest, and uh, hats off to Fukiyama for being honest, because some of them aren't honest.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: But I think even he's glossing over it.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: This obsession of this baby boomer generation with the Second World War, which they didn't live through, by the way, it was their parents that lived through it, and their parents did not adopt these ideas, actually, to the same extent that they did.
30:51
SPEAKER_01: The baby boomers live in a myth created by themselves, basically, um, and some of the more radical people in their parents' generation.
30:59
SPEAKER_01: That's effectively what happened there.
31:01
SPEAKER_01: But they they they're so unrealistic about this because look at what Fukiama has said.
31:08
SPEAKER_01: He's recognized something that's true, that people don't want to be the last man, that people don't aren't gonna accept this um homogenization, this rationalization.
31:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, but he associates the rejection of that with some sort of martial spirit, with some sort of like warlike desire, some sort of uh specter of scary nationalism, you might put it, right?
31:31
SPEAKER_01: But actually, no, it's mostly like much more simple things that people get mad about.
31:36
SPEAKER_01: Like they get mad about the fact that their lives aren't great because they haven't been uh they they've been told that they don't need to have families or that they don't need like strong social ties.
31:47
SPEAKER_01: They get mad that like immigration gets too high because their neighborhood starts look to look too different too quickly.
31:54
SPEAKER_01: Um, they get mad because they're not allowed like their national heritage or something like that.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: So the the baby boomer liberals like conflated these two things that don't actually have that much to do with each other, which is kind of more extreme forms of nationalism that can end up with conflict and war internationally, and just very simple, kind of normal living principles that most societies require, like not most, all societies require at any point in time, things that are very just immediately obvious to people.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: Just to give one example um that I gave on a podcast last week, I just really like it, is um uh there's a current there was a thing uh going around Twitter recently about people in the United States uh uh complaining about the high costs of campgrounds.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: So uh in America, campgrounds are actually extremely popular.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: Of course, they are in Britain too, but they're they're even more popular in America, probably because the weather's slightly better.
32:52
SPEAKER_01: Um, and people love going in their RVs to campgrounds and just like grilling, as the Americans say, or whatever.
32:58
SPEAKER_01: And people began to realize like, why are the campground costs as high as hotel costs?
33:06
SPEAKER_01: Makes no sense economically, if you think about it, because on the campground, you're not, you don't have to pay, uh, you don't have to pay for the cleaner, you don't ex, etc.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, so like the cost of the hotel, think about it for two minutes, should be lower than the cost of a campground.
33:19
SPEAKER_01: You're providing your own uh home in a sense in the campground and you're doing your own work.
33:24
SPEAKER_01: Well, the reason is because private equity companies have gone in, they've snapped up the campgrounds, and they're trying to see how much um they can squeeze out of them, right?
33:32
SPEAKER_01: You you you corner the campground market and then you raise the price and you see how much uh consumers are willing to tolerate.
33:39
SPEAKER_01: And you make the case that that's okay to do, although you don't have to when you buy them and you extract right, you don't have to make the case to anybody.
33:46
SPEAKER_01: But if you do, you just say, like, well, it's what the market's willing to bear, and um, and that's how a free market system works, et cetera, et cetera.
33:54
SPEAKER_01: You can debate whether that's true or not.
33:56
SPEAKER_01: We get over the debate of our own monopoly and so on.
34:00
SPEAKER_01: But the the underlying point there is that those abstract principles of the market are going in and wrecking the campground sector, right?
34:09
SPEAKER_01: That's that's exactly what is going on there.
34:12
SPEAKER_01: That's not that's not rabid nationalism, Francis Fukiyama.
34:16
SPEAKER_01: That's like people saying, I want my campground back, and I want to be able to go and park my RV and pay a quarter the price that I'd pay for a three-star hotel or a four-star hotel.
34:27
SPEAKER_01: And that's what I want because that's what I like to do when I'm not working.
34:32
SPEAKER_01: And so there's been this complete misconception of the baby boomer generation and the kind of I call them the kind of Gen X clone generation.
34:41
SPEAKER_01: I don't mean that by every Gen Xer.
34:43
SPEAKER_01: There are some like more sensible Gen Xers, but the ones that have been promoted in liberal institutions have been the thoughtless uh clone Gen Xers who just kind of sucked up to the boomers effectively.
34:55
SPEAKER_01: And and um, there are some in our generation too, but we're we're there are less of them, let's just put it that way.
35:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, those people uh will not recognize that.
35:04
SPEAKER_01: They just won't recognize the fact that liberalism actually steamrolls over normal social relationships.
35:11
SPEAKER_01: And yes, the reaction to it could become quite quite violent.
35:14
SPEAKER_01: Are we seeing that currently?
35:16
SPEAKER_01: No, I think I think the the fears that people are are raising are are overblown.
35:22
SPEAKER_01: Actually, I see the the liberals becoming much more warlike rather than the nationalists.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: The liberals are the ones that want a war, literally, in Europe, like uh to scale up to a full-scale war.
35:32
SPEAKER_01: It's the liberals that are pushing for this.
35:35
SPEAKER_01: Um uh the question on Chinese conflict in the United States is more is more uh nuanced, but um, but you know, I don't see any reason that the liberals are the peacenics anymore.
35:46
SPEAKER_01: They seem to be the ones that want war.
35:48
SPEAKER_01: Some sort of weird globalist war as well, by the way, not um not a uh not a war of nation against nations, um, which in itself kind of undermines the premise, doesn't it?
35:59
SPEAKER_01: Because I thought you needed to be, if you wanted to create World War III and have nuclear exchange, the liberals would have said, well, that's what happens if you go down the route of dangerous nationalistic ideas.
36:09
SPEAKER_01: It's like, well, we're getting pushed to the we got pushed to the brick of World War III at Russia for the exact opposite ideas, for the non-nation ideas.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: So none of it makes any sense, really.
36:21
SPEAKER_01: It's all just rubbish and it's all just born out of this, um born out of this boomer mythology that was created after after the Second World War.
36:30
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's applied to everything, um, anything and everything.
36:34
SPEAKER_01: But it's breaking down now.
36:35
SPEAKER_01: Um, there's absolutely no doubt about that.
36:38
SPEAKER_01: Um, and and I think people are coming to realize like, no, being concerned with normal, uh natural law-based, as I'd call them, uh, social relationships, is not equivalent of you know, uh joining the National Socialist Party in 1927.
36:55
SPEAKER_01: It's just not.
36:56
SPEAKER_00: You you raised the the Russian Ukraine war and the uh well, the European leaders in increasing involvement in it, whether it be financial and offering military material and the like.
37:11
SPEAKER_00: Let's delve into that a little bit more because you contend in your book that Russia, Ukraine, this demonstrates the collapse of global mic uh sorry, global liberalism in microcosm.
37:23
SPEAKER_01: How is this so um I mean all these histories history is always easier to read after it's taken place.
37:31
SPEAKER_01: There's an old Hegel quote, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and what it means is that you can't really you can't really tell the end of a um historical period until after it's already happened.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: And at that point, it becomes much easier to to rationalize everything.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: And when you live through moments of great historical change, which we've either been blessed or cursed with, we'll see.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: Um you start to really you realize this.
37:56
SPEAKER_01: You realize that um, you know, Hegel was living through the times of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and so on, and you start to realize this.
38:03
SPEAKER_01: You you the way that you experience history, I'm sure you experience it the same, the listeners experience the same.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: It's this like flood of events happening mainly on Twitter these days.
38:12
SPEAKER_01: Um and it's almost hard to keep up.
38:15
SPEAKER_01: And then when you kind of start looking back a year or two later, it all comes into focus and you go, Whoa, these are like really, really, really big changes.
38:23
SPEAKER_01: Um, but at the time, they kind of just feel like uh I don't know, you feel a bit punch-drunk or something watching the whole thing.
38:30
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of nuts, actually.
38:32
SPEAKER_01: But um, in the case of the war in Ukraine, this is definitely one of those instances.
38:37
SPEAKER_01: Um, when the war uh started in February 2022, the whole thing was a bit of a blur.
38:44
SPEAKER_01: Um, I think I came to the views a little bit quicker than other people that this was a fundamental uh tipping point in the global world order.
38:54
SPEAKER_01: But you know, even recognizing that abstractly, it was still kind of hard to follow, you know, what that actually meant.
39:01
SPEAKER_01: But now we're we're three, three and a half years on almost.
39:06
SPEAKER_01: The outcome of the war is now very clear.
39:08
SPEAKER_01: Um, a lot of the geopolitical developments that it set off are now solidified, they're they're they're they're permanent in a sense or semi-permanent.
39:18
SPEAKER_01: And what it ultimately reigns in is probably the collapse of the liberal world order in multiple ways.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: Look, the liberal world order would have collapsed eventually because it was just not a sustainable system.
39:29
SPEAKER_01: The ideology, as I've said, is just not a sustainable ideology.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: But the Ukraine war knocked it off its perch um very quickly for multiple reasons.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: The geopolitical changes that it brought in, the alliance between Russia and um and China is one, the BRICS, the the rising importance of the BRICS alliance, and so on.
39:50
SPEAKER_01: But also it's kind of just destroyed the European liberal leadership class.
39:56
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I don't even have to go into detail about what that means.
39:59
SPEAKER_01: Just look around in Europe.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: The liberal elite are still embedded in Europe, they're not embedded in the United States anymore.
40:06
SPEAKER_01: I think they are actually in the process of being politically liquidated in the United States.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: Um, that's a whole different phenomenon.
40:13
SPEAKER_01: And where that's going is very interesting because it's becoming increasingly unstable as far as I can tell.
40:19
SPEAKER_01: But it is happening in the United States.
40:21
SPEAKER_01: In Europe, in the positions of power, and by the way, this is only because of the structure of the European Union.
40:27
SPEAKER_01: If this was a national-based system still in Europe, the liberals would not be currently in power.
40:32
SPEAKER_01: But they've they've they've um they've created a system of trenches, political trenches, might call them in Brussels, and they remain, they remain in power.
40:40
SPEAKER_01: But look at them.
40:41
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's it really is Hitler in the bunker at this stage, isn't it?
40:44
SPEAKER_01: I mean, ranting away, looking at maps, like they there is absolutely no way out for them in any of their schemes.
40:53
SPEAKER_01: And what are they 100% focused on?
40:55
SPEAKER_01: The war.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: The war, a failed, uh a collapsing war, a collapsing front line in Ukraine, which in theory shouldn't mean that much to European leaders, but they've they've focused themselves on it, they've focused their energy.
41:07
SPEAKER_01: And as all these changes are taking place in their in society, in their key ally in the United States, they're hunkering down, they're in the bunker, they're looking at their maps, they're they're hoping for a Wunderwaffa, wonder weapon to come along and save them in the war.
41:22
SPEAKER_01: And they've also convinced themselves that if they could just win the war in Ukraine, that everything will be fine.
41:26
SPEAKER_01: Like, how does that work?
41:28
SPEAKER_01: Like, it makes no sense.
41:29
SPEAKER_01: Even if they could turn around the war in Ukraine, whatever that would mean, it wouldn't make any difference to the political problems that they've created domestically.
41:36
SPEAKER_01: It wouldn't make any difference to what's happening in the United States.
41:40
SPEAKER_01: So I I think the the Ukraine war was not a necessary condition to destroy global liberalism or to destroy the liberal elite in Europe or in the United States.
41:51
SPEAKER_01: But historians will read it that way because it just obviously is the final thing that knocked them off the perch.
41:58
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you might think of this like um uh without the French Revolution, would the Enchant regime have survived in France, the absolute monarchy?
42:06
SPEAKER_01: No, it probably would have transitioned to some sort of a constitutional monarchy, right?
42:10
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe the monarchy would have collapsed altogether.
42:13
SPEAKER_01: But um that's kind of the point that the that there's a historical process there that in the case of France, pre-revolutionary France, the enchant regime was probably just not long left for this world.
42:26
SPEAKER_01: And something comes along, something gets sparked off, destroys that previous uh political and social relationship, and that's that's how history is written.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: So even if it's not a necessary the Ukraine war wasn't required to collapse global liberalism, something would have collapsed it, but it turns out that it was a war, and wars tend to do that in a very jarring way, as we're as we're beginning to realize now.
42:52
SPEAKER_00: As you're talking there, uh reading between the lines, it it made me realize how people think that the historical process is almost random, but they forget about the will of people within those moments.
43:08
SPEAKER_00: And I've been reading quite a lot of Thomas Carlisle recently, who was the person who effectively originated the great men of history idea, saying that history is the biography of great men.
43:19
SPEAKER_00: Is there are times in which none appear, even though there is dry kindling lying all over the floor waiting to be lit, but then sometimes the lightning of a great man or a great person or a set of great men come along and it takes you away, and then the historical process just goes away.
43:36
SPEAKER_00: He talks about Norse paganism with Odin, he talks about Jesus Muhammad, but he talked about the French Revolution, you know, Robespierre and uh and his band of men brought that into being.
43:47
SPEAKER_00: And then we live with the consequences all these years later.
43:51
SPEAKER_00: So it's it's fascinating.
43:52
SPEAKER_00: Um the the the widening geopolitical lens, then, is one of the penultimate questions for Philip, is you you've Mentioned BRICS.
44:01
SPEAKER_00: When people were studying BRICS probably 10, 20 years ago, they would say that BRICS was just this random conglomeration of nations thrown together that weren't quite part of the Western international system.
44:14
SPEAKER_00: Is it a pointless term or has it become something substantial?
44:18
SPEAKER_00: And what does the future look like?
44:20
SPEAKER_01: So I I've been kind of doing BRICS commentary since the war in Ukraine, uh especially since the Russian-Chinese economic conglomeration, call it what you will.
44:32
SPEAKER_01: And I've always been at the same attitude.
44:34
SPEAKER_01: Whether BRICS becomes something, you know, something resembling the G7 or something like that, it doesn't really matter that much.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: It's the spirit of the idea that matters.
44:46
SPEAKER_01: It's the spirit of the and the spirit of the idea is quite simply that um the world has been effectively on the Western development model since I mean go back as far as you want, definitely since the 19th century, since what the Chinese would have called the uh the century of humiliation.
45:03
SPEAKER_01: Um but even before that, um the the the main the main drivers of uh global development, economic and political development were Western in the in the ages of conquest, the age of sale, um, all that kind of thing.
45:18
SPEAKER_01: Some of it was trade, some of it was invasion, some of it was uh taking over land masses that were sparsely populated or not populated at all.
45:27
SPEAKER_01: And it was all a Western Western phenomenon in a sense.
45:32
SPEAKER_01: And um I think that is coming to an end.
45:34
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean that the West doesn't have a role to play in the world.
45:37
SPEAKER_01: It does.
45:38
SPEAKER_01: It absolutely does.
45:39
SPEAKER_01: It's not going away.
45:40
SPEAKER_01: And the ideas that the West has spread are going to have a permanent influence on the world.
45:45
SPEAKER_01: You can't understand contemporary China, for example, without Marxism.
45:49
SPEAKER_01: Um Marxism, I think, is losing its hold on China, and I don't think it's a communist country anymore.
45:55
SPEAKER_01: But it it you can't understand modern China without understanding the influence of those ideas, you see what I mean?
46:01
SPEAKER_01: So the um, and as with Russia, you can't understand the development of modern Russia without understanding the Marxist-communist period, even if they're trying to get away from that.
46:12
SPEAKER_01: Um, so the the the issue with the BRICS isn't so much, to my mind, whether it'll become a G7 arrival or anything like that.
46:21
SPEAKER_01: For the record, I think there is a pretty good chance it will become that um if they can if they can continue to develop along the lines they are creating alternative um international systems like the BRICS Bank and so on.
46:33
SPEAKER_01: I think there's every reason it could become that.
46:36
SPEAKER_01: But that actually matters less than the than the spirit of the whole thing.
46:40
SPEAKER_01: And the spirit of the whole thing is basically saying, okay, the world's been developing along Western lines, which have increasingly become liberal lines as the West has liberalized.
46:52
SPEAKER_01: Um, and we don't want that anymore.
46:54
SPEAKER_01: We we want some sort of a non-Western uh path.
46:58
SPEAKER_01: Doesn't mean that there has to be a Cold War or anything like that.
47:00
SPEAKER_01: It's just like we're gonna have our own, you know, organization here or we're gonna have our own ideas about how we're gonna develop, and we'll see where like there's there's confluence of interests and so on.
47:12
SPEAKER_01: But ultimately, when it comes to liberalism, uh because the Western countries have become so liberal in their late phase, the BRICS is effectively an anti-liberal organization.
47:23
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's what it is.
47:24
SPEAKER_01: It's not set up to be that.
47:26
SPEAKER_01: It's not like they got together, the BRICS guys got together and said, Don't you just hate liberalism?
47:31
SPEAKER_01: Let's like create an anti-liberal block.
47:34
SPEAKER_01: But in effect, look at the countries in that block, and they're not liberal countries for the most part.
47:40
SPEAKER_01: I mean, maybe the most liberal are South Africa and Brazil.
47:43
SPEAKER_01: Of course, it's been expanded now, so it's not even BRICS anymore, and you have like Middle Eastern powers and so on.
47:50
SPEAKER_01: And you know, uh if you like assigned population weights to the BRICS members, and then you estimated how much of that their population were liberal, you know, truly liberal, like we're living in in Western liberal societies, it's probably like 1%, right?
48:08
SPEAKER_01: I mean, so you've got a huge population bloc there that are not living liberal lives and do not believe in liberal principles, and their leadership are not liberals for the very for the most part.
48:19
SPEAKER_01: You can make exceptional cases, maybe Lula and Brazil is a liberal.
48:22
SPEAKER_01: That's an open debate.
48:24
SPEAKER_01: But for the most part, those blocs are being led, or not even blocks, those formations are being led by non-liberal countries like China mainly, but Russia as well, India, not a liberal country at all, democratic, but not liberal.
48:38
SPEAKER_01: So um, so I think that's the way to read that.
48:40
SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of driven me crazy when I've been commenting about it that people are like, no, BRICS will never create an investment bank.
48:47
SPEAKER_01: It's like it doesn't matter if it creates an investment, it has an investment bank, but you know, it'll never succeed, it'll never compete with the World Bank.
48:53
SPEAKER_01: I think I don't care.
48:54
SPEAKER_01: Like what maybe it will, maybe it won't.
48:56
SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting thing, it's worth tracking, it's worth considering.
48:58
SPEAKER_01: But the overall shift is what's actually interesting.
49:02
SPEAKER_01: Like, people need to start thinking a lot, a lot bigger picture if they want to grasp what's going on.
49:07
SPEAKER_00: Well, Philip, and you that whatever threw what I th whatever I threw at you with questions today, you'd come back with a considered response as you always do.
49:16
SPEAKER_00: And the there's always gold in there for people to go sifting through.
49:20
SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much for coming back on the show.
49:23
SPEAKER_00: It's been a great pleasure.
49:24
SPEAKER_00: And I deeply enjoyed your book, and I recommend everyone goes out to read it.
49:28
SPEAKER_00: If they haven't yet read the runes or they wish to see you bring together what we've witnessed over the last few years in praise summary, uh I think you did yourself down saying it might be a little bit late.
49:41
SPEAKER_00: I'm still not too sure everyone has connected to the dots, uh, particularly amongst our governing uh classes, or at least they're they're not wishing to face reality yet.
49:51
SPEAKER_00: So I'd I'd recommend everyone goes and reads it.
49:54
SPEAKER_00: Before I let you go, Philip, perhaps you could tell the listeners where they can find you and when they can expect your book to be out, depending on where they are in the world.
50:03
SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks for having me on again, John.
50:05
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you can find me on Twitter at Philip Pilk, P-H-I-L-I-P-P-I-L-K.
50:12
SPEAKER_01: I think most of my stuff's posted on there.
50:14
SPEAKER_01: Um, the book is out now in Britain, paperback and hardback.
50:18
SPEAKER_01: Um, no ebook out because that comes with the American release, which I think is at the end of August or the beginning of September.
50:26
SPEAKER_01: So if you're in Britain, I'd say just get a paper cop a paperback uh copy.
50:30
SPEAKER_01: And if you're in America, um shake your fist at the publishing industry, which hasn't adapted to certain changes in the global marketplace.
50:41
SPEAKER_00: Very diplomatically put.
50:47
SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much, John.
50:51
SPEAKER_00: 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.
51:01
SPEAKER_00: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
51:07
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.
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51:26
SPEAKER_00: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.