Latest / Thinking Class / #032 - Doug Stokes - Why We Must Understand What It Means To 'Decolonise' Something

Transcript

#032 - Doug Stokes - Why We Must Understand What It Means To 'Decolonise' Something · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Doug Stokes.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Doug is the professor of international relations at Exeter University and acts as the director for its Strategy and Security Institute.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Doug was a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for over a decade and is currently the Thomas Telford Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy and the senior advisor to the Legartum Institute's sovereignty unit.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: Doug writes regularly for major news outlets, including the Times, The Telegraph, The Spectator, and the Daily Mail, and enjoys doing the odd podcast with interesting people.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: They are definitely his words from his bio and not mine, but I'm going to take that as an endorsement.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: In this episode, Doug and I talk about what decolonization theory is, what its implications are, and how it may be used against its proponents in future, why healthy process of academic exchange matters and what it gives to society, the underlying motivations of those who act in the name of liberation, the changing face of international relations and what kind of an era we're moving into, why hard power matters if we are to continue living comfortable lives in the West, the youth quake in Africa and its implications, how much of Britain's wealth was really derived from slavery, who the African protagonists were in the slave trade, why the culture war is really a class war at root, the horrors Doug saw in Bosnia during its civil war in the 90s, the implications of globalization and multiculturalism for Britain, the geopolitics of net zero, and much more.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_01: It was a real delight to talk to Doug, who's someone that I have come to admire since I learned of him last year.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Doug is someone who grew up in the East End of London and is from a long line of cockneys and has seen the impact personally of globalization and high immigration with his own eyes.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: There were some really touching moments in the conversation, and it's one that I will remember.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Doug has carved out a stellar career and has seen more than most of us would ever wish to in the course of his life, and I really appreciate his courage and clarity in analysing fashionable ideas and their impact on the rest of us.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: Before we dive in, you'd be really helping me out if you click subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to or watching the show on, because the more subscribers we have, the more guests we can attract, and the faster Thinking Class grows.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Doug Stokes, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: My pleasure.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it is definitely my pleasure.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: I first came to learn of you after you made a bit of a splash on the trigonometry podcast, which I thought was probably one of the most clinically delivered um summaries of an academic concept in decolonization and all of the things that that um means uh to Western society as it as it sweeps um, I suppose, our academic life, our public and private institutions as uh a kind of a rule of the day, as it were.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: And um, you're the professor of international relations at the University of Exeter, so you know what um these ideological spasms can do as they cross borders and um move through the years.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: But you've also been writing and thinking quite a little bit, quite a bit about net zero, its impacts, its risks, its trade-offs.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it'd be good to talk about all of those things today.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll begin with decolonization because I know that your book against decolonization uh lays this out nicely as to why we should be concerned about it.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: Might not be what we think it is, if it feels good.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: So let's start there briefly.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: Doug, what is decolonization?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: What does it mean?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Decolonisation uh refers to there's different there's two different two broadly speed of two two different things.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Decolonization refers to, in the historical sense, the the dissolution of the European empires, in particular, French and British empires, and the emerging state formation in the global south amongst formerly colonized states.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, from Vietnam, the dissolution of French imperialism in Vietnam, and then the war, and then the Europeans went in to Africa, to Asia, etc.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got a political decolonizing process, which is one thing.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: I don't recover that in the book.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, I I understand decolonizing.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: I look at the ideology in the discourse in particular in the modern day, and obviously we're long, we're sort of way past the process of decolonization in a formal political sense.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I don't take any position on that in the book, although, you know, I think I don't take any position on that in the book.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, but it but so what I cover in the book is I the contemporary ideology of decolonization, and what it essentially argues is is that um Western civilization and in particular, and also the institutions within Western civilization, in particular the Anglophone uh institutions in the African world, are fundamentally imbued with a kind of colonial and racist uh and kind of in the patriarchal and sexist.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, it's kind of all the sort of shibbolets of the left, essentially.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so these institutions are characterized by this ideologically, and it's so it makes a number of claims.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: The first major claim it makes is that um uh decolonizing ideology imposes its will upon the world.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't see that it kind of rejects the Western concept of truth and objectivity in science.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So the process of academic in the university, for example, the process of academic exchange and is not about the uncovering of truth and you know, a kind of synthesis of different types of arguments and which one works best, which is never perfect, by the way, but then you kind of you move beyond that, etc.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about that.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, it adopts a post-modernist position of truth, which essentially says there is no self-stream as truth.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, the regime is discourse, is epistemes, and it kind of draws on a Nietzschean conception of truth, where sort of truth is is about a will to power almost within within these epistemes, the discourse themselves and impose themselves upon the world.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than knowledge being about uncovering what the world is, an ontological claim is an epistemological claim, i.e., there are different knowledge regimes which impose themselves, as interesting as truth, as interesting as the real world.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you see the world like that, all truth and social and social life becomes uh sort of based around the imposition and power imposition of different regimes of truth.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and so the claim from the decolonizing ideology is that the West has the Western imperialism wasn't just about full colonial geopolitical colonization, territorial acquisition.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was also about the imposition of a way of understanding the world.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And although that that may have ended formerly with the dissolution of the European empires, that can continue to have a legacy and very profound legacy effect today.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: So it draws from thinkers like Edward Saeed and Jacques Derrida.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about sort of post-colonialism, and so Derrida and Saeed, who was a disciple of Derrida and Foucault, says that Western philosophy is fundamentally predicated around a binary system.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so you've got in this binary system, you've got good versus evil, men versus you know women, black versus white, or these kind of civilized, uncivilized.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so within these binaries, there's a power hierarchy, it's sort of colonized and colonized.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so the principal mechanism, political process of contestation on the part of decolonizers, and which is very strongly with Tom Arsenal, the anti-Israel protests, etc., is this process of political contestation of truth and Western ways of being, Western ways of knowledge.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And that that's that's the political.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you can overturn this, destroy it, if you can deconstruct it, then you'll ultimately liberate humanity from this Western colonial scientific rationalist mindset, and then truth will be flown up in up in the air, and ultimately the human will become the act of becoming, you know, you'll become your true self, or or you'll be uh liberated from regimes of truth and this kind of thing.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you and so fundamentally at the heart of this is a rejection of science, rational adjudication of truth claims, uh, and in particular kind of ontological primacy, i.e., the the world as point of knowledge is to understand the world as it is, and instead it it it centers uh what what we call social constructivism, i.e., the world is socially constructed by these ideologies and discourses.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: So and so so again, the the political moment in this is by understanding the contingent and relative nature of truth and knowledge, and by understanding that you deconstruct it, and a new liberation world will come out of this, where we will all sort of sit around the campfires, I guess, in in Gaza Strip or you know, Brighton or wherever you want to be, and we'll all sort of be a liberated humankind.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: So essentially, I I'll shut up in a minute, but you kind of so the end so so you know, once once you realize that that it's all contingent and it's in imposition, then you free yourself from the from the shackles of Western uh scientific knowledge, and then religion will fade away, colonialism will fade away, institutions will fade away, and I guess we'll just become this kind of unified morass of humanity with no nations and states.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: I guess it's like the John Menon moment, you know, imagine, you know, that kind of thing.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: That that that's a kind of way of seeing it.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: That that's what they claim.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: The the power element saying at the heart of that, I suppose that becomes the biggest worry if people see uh the world as being only about power relations, it gives a bit of a clue as to how those advancing the agenda will act when they're in power.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, I know you use him as an example in your book, Franz Fanon, and talk about how influential he was to decolonization.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I came across a quote of his which um just goes to show that the liberation isn't necessarily for everyone.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the quote goes the enslavement, in its strictest sense, of the native population is the prime necessity.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: For this, its systems of reference have to be broken.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: Expropriation, spoliation, raids, objective murder are matched by the sacking of cultural patterns, or at least condition such sacking.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: The social panorama is destructured, values are flaunted, crushed, and emptied.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that is quite, isn't it?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: Chilling quote.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know who's going up against the wall for those who are disagreeing.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but but what gets me about that, and then you see it very strongly now amongst uh kind of, I guess, radical chic posers running around, you know, protesting doing XYZ.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's is and and you know that what what you saw this in on October the 7th, following October the 7th, and it's kind of and essentially this is what decolonization looks like.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: So well, if you want to go that way, then so you so what you're saying basically is you want to kill people, you want to murder people because you designate them as the as the ultimate oppressors.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what's to stop these people saying, well, tell you what, if you're gonna come for me, I'm gonna come for you, I'll kill you first.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's where it wants to take it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: So what so if you if these protesters now on campuses and goodness says well on the streets, they're basically saying, you know, we want to kill you, or you know, these are justified acts of liberation, and I don't buy, and I don't buy your historical narratives, by the way, then then it's game one, right?
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's game one.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: If you're saying you're something you want to deconstruct the West and Western civilization is fundamentally beyond the tail.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and so so where where is that going to take politics in the West?
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And this is this is especially so when we can come onto this if you want, right?
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: A big part of what I do, I do it in the book as well, but it's a big part, forms a large chunk of my thinking.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I think a lot of this stuff that you see is really uh it rests on a on an institutional and a kind of geopolitical dispensation that you saw during the Cold War with the victory over communism, but then in particular post-Cold War period, where you had the unipolar American moment, right?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: You had the emergence of American unipolarity and globalization.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it so and and that in many senses, Americans, America's military power settled many of the big issues the states and civilizations faced.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of created a kind of, no matter how much you may wish to critique it, broadly speaking, a globally independent global economy, underpinned by American strategic superintendents.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: So essentially, if you want iPads or you want food on the table or whatever, America's, for example, that its Navy releases global waterways and stops piracy, keeps the global international system able, right?
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of stuff people don't realize in terms of what America's strategic superintendence has done.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Has it always been amazing?
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely not.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: If it's sometimes imperialist, absolutely, yeah, of course it is.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: But broadly speaking, the post-war liberal international order that rests upon America's unipolarity and military superintendents has solved many of the many of the collective action problems that bedevil international relations and human civilizations, right?
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: So what we see now is it's very indulgent and it and it's kind of it it it it it seems to think that the world, absent for a start, it's casting the West as these colonial things, right?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Again, this is kind of fantasy.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Not only are there been numerous empires throughout history, but we've got the rise of China now, we've got China running all over Africa and and other parts of the world, the Belt and Road Initiative, we've got um America uh Russia's aggression in Ukraine.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that history has stopped, you know, the end of history thesis has stopped.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: So, and it's stopped and it's sort of set in amber with the Western imperial system.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Not only is historically myopic and fundamentally Eurocentric, which is a deep irony given the critiques that they wish to make about Eurocentrism, which is fundamentally completely Eurocentric, completely narcissistic, by the way.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: But it rests fundamentally on an international dispensation that is predicated on America's uh collect solving of collective action, global collective action problems, right?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in a more multipolar system, which I would argue we're very much now entering into, the the that international dispensation, that that's that settlement is becoming much, much uh weaker.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so then what you're gonna get, you see it now, debates about NATO, for example, America, which is sort of backpassed more down to the Europeans in terms of the security arrangements in the European geopolitical space.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: So what you're gonna basically see is a lot of the dining out on American power that we've had.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: States will now have to start taking very, very big decisions in terms of defense, their own security in their neighborhoods.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: You're seeing, for example, Sweden or Finland have joined NATO.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: NATO will become much more of an American-like uh security order in the European space.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of this stuff that we see on campuses, and all of this kind of jibber-jabber that we see, is fundamentally based on an international system that is now in deep flux and the structural conditions that allow uh this dalliance, and I think it's a dalliance, the rise of you know other civilizational states and projects that are far more self-confidence than the confident than the West.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's a dalliance.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that we're kind of anyway, it's a long way of sort of saying I think we're the international system is in deep flux.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: So this stuff is more redolent of a kind of uh the new left of the 60s and 70s that's now run through universities and they've been spatting and producing hundreds of thousands of these graduates.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: But that world has changed, that world has fundamentally changed.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: We're entering into a very different international dispensation now.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: People have often said that the reason why we see so much of this indulgence and decadence perhaps is because we've had the military backing.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think I heard Connor Tomlinson the other day when I was speaking to him before we started recording, say that you can't have the peace and stability of the Shire in Middle Earth without the men of Gondor.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that's actually a really nice metaphor.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: And ultimately, the reason why we can all go off and do all the things that we want to do and indulge ourselves is because we have or have had lots of hard power in the past.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um do you envisage, you're an academia, do you envisage that as things start to become more uncertain and it becomes more clear who our enemies are?
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, there are going to be sections of people who just align with the enemies because they are programmed to want to see the West collapse.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: But do you expect that there could be a turnaround where you see people cohere more around where it is they're from and their nation state and where they reside?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Or do you think it's uh uh a bit of a lost cause for so many because they're so committed to watching whatever this is that we live under fall apart?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a complicated question.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think that human political agency is sometimes behind where the structural conditions are.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: So where we are now in terms of political agency is be is somewhat behind what I think is already baked into the international system.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: And what I think is baked into the international system is more great power competition, but the potential, God forbid, but the potential for great power war.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh and and I think that the the big issues that we face in the West from demographic decline, mass migration of people who come from failed states, bad governance states, blah blah blah, uh will put a massive strain on Western politics.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing it already, you know, in Europe, we're seeing the rise of pop so-called populist parties.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think I the way I interpret it, I kind of like John Gray's take on it, you know, who I think is a very interesting and sophisticated thinker, says that populism is used in a pejorative sense, but it's kind of essentially it's referring to the the kind of the reaction against a lot of the negative externalities of globalization.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you know, open borders and and and uh open borders, what that does to the social contract, what it does to the welfare state, what that does to the capacity ordinary people to earn their living, that the strain it puts on local services, the strain that puts on earning capacity.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the people that champion a lot of those kind of more globalizing narratives, you know, it's the classic luxury beliefs uh idea, often don't experience the the outcomes of these of these the very policies they advocate for.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: But so I think so.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: My take on it would be I think that we are going to enter into a more an era of greater geopolitical compet uh competition.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: I think the West faces demographic decline, but so does other major powers as well.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: So China, if you talk about China, for example, I'm much less sanguine about the the the longevity of Chinese power, by the way.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think China faces massive problems going forward.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, much bigger than ours in many ways.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, a lot bigger than ours.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think the biggest the big thing for the UK will be how it charts its its kind of international relations in the context of a dialing down of America's strategic superintendents in the security sense.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: And also what we're seeing now in the post-Brexit world is is the emergence of kind of uh integrated uh economic blocks.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: So the Europe, the EU now, you know, greater integration in some sense.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that greater comp that that the dialing out of American strategic superintendents will necessarily lend itself to greater EU harmony and greater EU coming together.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Problem with the EU is many problems with the EU, but one of the things is is it's it's its capacity to act collectively is often overdetermined by the national interest of its powerful states.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: The EU is ultimately, forget all this nonsense about it's kind of like uh stuff like Kumbaya Club, and you know, that's just nonsense.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone knows anything about the EU, apart apart from you know, the kind of knows that itself it's ultimately it solves the very the national interest of its constituent states.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Some states get loads of money from it, the Germans get a kind of constitutionalization of its power and economic bloc, the French get the grandstand and contain German power to some extent.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's partly why we left the EU.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was because you know it's an island power.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: A lot, a lot of that, a lot of the if you're physically locating the geographic landmass of Europe, your your the geopolitical, your geopolitics look very different.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you if you're France, you're gonna have to worry about Germany.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: So the EU constitutionalizes German power.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you're Poland, you see what I mean?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: So it it the EU, in terms of its constitutionalization, in effect solves a lot of that.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I think what's interesting for the Brits is in the context of the kind of deglobalizing, onshoring, friendshoring world that we're seeing, and the emergence of global trade blocks within the global economy, more sinocentric, more American centric, that would lend itself to these.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: To these kind of very powerful states or collection of states, the EU and the US.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: So where does that leave the UK?
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: If part of the Brexit thing was about free trade, but we're seeing greater protectionism, which we are, the Inflation Reduction Act in the US, much greater protectionism in the EU.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: We've sort of entered the the post-Brexit thing is entering into what we hoped would be a globalizing world of free trade, but increasingly it's more of a protectionist world.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, so so that so it's kind of like that there are different currents.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: But to go back to your question, what I think we'll see is I think what's what what what is baked in into the future.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely what's baked in, in my humble opinion, is America will dial out more from a European security, definitely.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you'll have to European states will have to take a lot more responsibility for their own security, and that's in the context of the non-resolution of the Ukraine crisis.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: So I think you'll get that.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think that you will have these increasingly sort of protectionist blocks.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: You'll also have mass migration movements away, especially from Africa.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Africa, I think by 2050, is going to have you know, I think it's gonna be I think like 60% of in sub-Saharan Africa under the age of 25.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: They've got what's what some what's some of these great book called Youth Quake, but I can't remember the author's name, called a youth quake.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got the the demographics in in Europe, is we're we're getting older and not many people, young people, Africa's much younger, and you're gonna get so you're gonna get a lot of migration.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that will put a very interesting stone on politics.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you're seeing the early signs of that now, especially in amongst the European states, the kind of populist rising up against that, where national sovereignty, a different type of social contract, and a different type of politics will begin to emerge to address what are ultimately structural problems within within within politics, and haven't been addressed by the Tories, by the way.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: As far as I can tell, they've got the completely all of the wrong answers.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: It will just double down everything that's just that's going wrong, I think.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so we'll see where it all goes.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm pretty sure you might be right on that one, which is uh which is depressing.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and let's see, let's see how it turns out.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it turns turns around.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose there are some people living in hope that it will leave space to actually have some kind of a party that emerges that generally takes into account the the everyday concerns of most people across the the spectrum.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um you talked a lot about how we rely upon the superintendents of the US.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: And before the US were the world's leading superpower, it was, of course, Britain.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: And uh people have often said the only reason why Britain was ever a superpower and ever became wealthy was because it benefited from slavery, and that was why.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to know whether that's fact or fiction, Doug.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, so if you think about that, if if slavery was the principal variable for wealth, yeah, one of the richest societies in the world right now would be Nigeria.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you have some of the largest uh black slaving kingdoms, the Kingdom of Dahomey, Sapota, Calipha, in what's in modern-day Nigeria, millions and millions of black slaves, it's intra-African slavery.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, same with Portugal.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's like Portuguese, I think, in the transatlantic slave trade ran about two-thirds more in terms of the numbers of slaves taken and put into the colony of Brazil in particular.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: So if slavery per se was the principal driver, the principal variable in terms of wealth, then one would expect to see other societies that are practiced slave on a much relatively speaking GDP per capita basis, a much, much higher level than the Brits did.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: They should be, by their very nature, incredibly wealthy.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: So there's lots of arguments.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: The principle, I think, the kind of like the what's called the Great Divergence.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's a massive academic literature on this.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: One of the principal, in terms of the academic literature, it tends to say one of the principal drivers of British wealth and the early advent, you know, that kind of led up to the Industrial Revolution was the Black Death.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: So essentially what you had is about a sort of, I think it was a third or even a half of the population of the UK, and I think it was the 1400s, I think it was, died.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: So what so what you that then you had is that you had massive feudal land estates and had to essentially incentivize workers to work and then pay them a lot more.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: So you had a much higher GDP per capita basis.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: So people had more to suppose green car, I mean, this kind of so that's that was partly it.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: But obviously, the the most important thing was the industrial revolution, the first, you know, the first country to have the industrial revolution.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so that really generated loads and loads of wealth.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of slavery, I think obviously there were uh, if you look at it, um uh there were aristocrats and members of the elite, the elite, economic elite, and political elite that benefited enormously on a personal level from slavery.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um Edward Carlston is the most famous example in Bristol, his that statue was thrown on the River Avon, etc.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_00: So there are obviously individuals who families benefited enormously from the disgusting trade in in slaves.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: But in terms of the Britain as a whole, on an aggregate basis, it's just I just don't think it's it's it's simply not sustainable.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you look at the I think in the book I I can't remember the exact figures, but in in 17 something, I can't remember which which year it was, towards the end of the sort of the 1700s, it was I think 1792, but I'm not I can't remember exactly, but it's like the the the principal year when there was most transatlantic slavery taking place from the Brits, in terms of what the the the naval capacity of dedicated the transshipment of slaves was about 3% of the entire um uh kind of shipping uh that was owned by the Brits.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: So were were there some individuals who made enormous amounts of money?
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: But then even then we you factor into the fact that you're talking about we want a democracy, tiny elites were controlling this disgusting trade, and then as as and as I'm sure you were aware, they were compensated by the British Exchequer.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_00: So 40% of I think national GDP was given over to pay the slave owners off to accelerate the ending of slavery.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Then post that the Royal Navy was then dedicated, a large chunk of the Royal Navy was dedicated to ending slavery.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, in terms of slavery, for a start, there was huge inter-African black slaves, slaving states, Kingdom of Lahome, Sakota, Calvert, etc., Zanzibia, the biggest slaver in human history is a guy called Tipu Tip.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: He had about 10,000 slaves on the Zanzibia, uh Zanzibar uh plantations, in Afro Mani.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_00: But so it's more about this idea that essentially white people are collectively guilty for the transatlantic slave trade, which I think is an absolutely disgusting assertion.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's completely, not only is it completely untrue, you look at the conditions of social life at the time of the ending of slavery, let alone you know the hundreds of years before, you know, when it first got going, think about average age and mortality is about 35.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, mass slums, mass disease, white slaves were sent away as well.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the indentured indentured labour, white slaves were sent away as well, the conflicts were sent to Australia.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that all white people, all white Brits, uh benefit from slavery, or this country's benefit from slavery, it's just simply not sustainable.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, there's so many um oversights, I suppose, in that slavery discussion.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: You you touched there on the um the cost to the British taxpayer, not only for paying off the the wealthy who were losing out on key streams of their revenue, but that Royal Navy um uh uh what's the right way of framing it?
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: That Royal Navy um effort to stamp out slavery that you talked about, that was something like 2% of Britain's GDP every year for 65 years to police the world's oceans, and not even the British Empire, it's just everyone who might be contravening it.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, to think about the compensation to the slave to the slave, and people now use that as as an example of why we're collectively guilty.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's the complete other way around.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, you had very, very, very strong uh politically, political and economic elite interests concentrated in parliament.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_00: We were not a democracy, by the way.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: An aristocratic kind of uh uh elites who essentially resisted the abolition of slavery.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it was it was a way of the British government paying these people off to accelerate the ending of slavery.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea that so so and absent that, you basically have given them money to end the disgusting trade in human souls.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: So you thought you so it's compensation, but compensation designed to end it as quickly as possible.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and that was 40% of GDP.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine what would have been done with that money.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: If we were, if we I mean, this is back then we weren't weren't as morally advanced, quote unquote, as we are now.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine 40% of GDP.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: GDP in this country is about right, it's like uh today, isn't it?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of trillion.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's three trillion, I think.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Three trillion.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, relatively speaking, and this is in the context of mass uh infant mortality, uh mass urban slums, desperate poverty, people living like 10 people in a room in in east end of London where my family comes from.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine what would have been done with that money.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that money, undemocratically, by the way, was used to pay off to end the transatlantic slavery.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine what had been done.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: We could have done with that money if we put that in, for example, the London slums or the Glasgow slums or the slums of up north.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: You see what I mean?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: So and yeah.
• 32:34
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• 32:40
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• 32:48
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• 33:04
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• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: Enjoy the rest of the show, classmate.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's a good good example of what it could have been done to help out the common person and their conditions.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose even the example that you highlighted also undermines the concept of white privilege, which uh ultimately, you know, Douglas Murray has also spoken about at all, is whilst he was privately educated, his whole family are from a long line of people who once occupied the highlands, who were then obviously cleared out and they worked the land.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't have privilege.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: I got here because people worked with whatever they had and moved along with the conditions.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: And clearly those people in the east end of London, or the people down the pits later on in the northeast of England where I'm from, you know, that's that's not that's not privilege.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's just this but this is why this is a cultural war.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is why I think that I said cultural war like Michael Lingu, I think it's fantastic.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: He talks about the culture war as a class war, and I completely buy that.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why so you think about this narrative.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, the woke left, the progressive left now, across institutions, the BBC and the Channel 4, they push this absolute crazy narrative of collective white guilt.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_00: So so, but the reality is white people, this country is a is a northern European.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: I hate to break it to people, but it's a northern European country, and prior to seven years ago, it was about 99.9% white.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: So white people, as the left designate them as collectively guilty, right?
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: So what so what you've effectively got is you've got uh massive urban slums, okay, uh huge amounts of money used to end the transatlantic slave trade.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Then post-war, various, again, the same economic elites that benefit from slavery usually that are in the government, okay, now start pushing mass immigration policies.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Where do those immigrants tend to end up?
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_00: They end up in um in working class communities.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm from Hackney, North London.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_00: I was an ethnic minority in my class as a young kid.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_00: Went to uh inner city schools, right?
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: Ethnic minority.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was a very diverse uh upbringing.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: And it was great, and it was also absolutely awful.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: But but the influx of mass amounts of immigration back in the day, let alone now it's gone really on steroids, did cause all kinds of dislocations.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and you know, as natural, if you live in a small rural community, I used to listen to a small rural community, you get like five people moving in there, and they're like, who are these people?
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: And it takes a process of integration, let alone in a desperately poor working class community that's been established there has been bombed in the war, massive bombing.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: Prior to that, we're living in absolute slums, still can't live in slums, still desperately poor, and and the the immigration inflow as a result of economic and political elites saying, Oh, we want to bring immigrants in now, go into these desperately poor communities, and the strain that puts on local services and schools, and I hate to say it, but the destruction of pre-established communities.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now what happened to whoever goes in there?
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: You took a lot of, you're from White North, we just said, right?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: You took a lot of northerners, whole, or I don't know where you're from, but I say whole, you put them in the in in in London.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not even racially coded.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's people that aren't, you know, different different types of ways of being, different types of communities come together.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: And it does, it leads to a kind of fusion at some point, one hopes, and a positive fusion of that, one hopes, but it it's very dislocating, especially in the context of already desperately poor communities.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: So that's why I think the stuff's a class war.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: You've got uh educated elites, public institutions, the BBC essentially are pushing what is a collective uh a discourse and an ideology of collective racial guilt on the part of white people, right?
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_00: When the people that have actually borne the brunt and invariably got on with uh immigration, mass immigration are poor, white, the very poor white working class communities.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the genuine anti-racism is.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Not sat in a seminar with some highly paid consultant coming in from California, had all the time going on about white privilege and white vigility.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: These the organic multi-racial communities I grew up in in Hackney, you know, where my my grandmother was an old uh cockney matriarch, right?
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: She was born in uh Hackney Wick in in East London, completely white, you know.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: No, I know the BBC finds some black trumpeter from about a couple hundred years ago and says it's all that's utter nonsense, right?
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, so completely white, very poor East End Cockney, white working class communities.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when she died at her funeral were people from all over the world, loads of Jamaicans.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: I grew up I basically I'm from Hackney, right?
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of like my cultural background, believe it or not, it's kind of white working class cockney and a kind of Jamaican fusionism.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like it's very much like a sort of like uh, and it's not a race thing, it's kind of an inner city thing, a ghetto thing.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of as the older I get, I kind of look back at it, I was there for 25 years, I kind of see, I kind of feel it more and more.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a it's a fusion thing.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_00: So just so many, so it's kind of uh it's a very, very funny discourse.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: You get this upper middle class speeching elites, telling white, very white working class people that beyond the power, that their political concerns are just unreconstructed racists.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_00: They have to accept all the the liberal uh uh hegemonic nonsense that's pushed on them all the time.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the progressive catechisms that we see are are are are essentially it's a political faith-based system.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: And if you don't accept that, you're a heretic and you're morally beyond the pale needs to be cancelled or cleansed or you know dealt with in some way.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, it's a bit of a rant there, but you know, yeah.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: Very well put together, Rand Doug.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: Don't worry about it.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh collecting a few dots from some of the points that you've made so far.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: So we've talked you talked a little bit about decolonization and how the process of political decolonization, i.e., end of the colonial powers, happened a long time ago.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: And now you've got this big ideological thing, which is let's expunge anything that might be connected to um this part of the world, I suppose, the Anglophone West, uh, because it's it is um it's racist, it keeps people in their box, and we need to overthrow it if we're all going to be liberated.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you said there's a risk here that by employing these tactics, that should the pendulum swing, that it may swing back and someone's gonna employ those tactics.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: And as you were sharing your story there about growing up in a place that was um previously uh the ethnic, an ethnic majority of um white British and probably white Irish, um the you then saw it all change, and so did your granny, saw it all change.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose I've noticed that there are some thinkers on the right who've recently been writing about how, well, if we're talking about colonization, then we're gonna make the argument that mass immigration is a form of it.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so I wonder if if the p pendulum does ever swing, but actually those people who are currently employing decolonization as the battering ram against the current political, well, it's not even the status quo, is it?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: Let's be honest.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's a kind of bogeyman.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um then that looks like it might already be swinging to come back their way.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: It seems to be part of the the the um the talking points, I suppose, of the emerging right, which is, oh no, if we're talking about colonization, well, countries that are recipients of mass immigration, they're being colonized, and they're throwing around all the percentages of ratios between um white Britons, for example, and everyone else in London, and now that's now at something like 36%.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was just under 50% in 2011, it was 25% higher than that 20 years before or something.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so do you think that is a is a is a um yeah, what does that represent?
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: Is that a is that a risk?
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: Does it is uh is there a risk that this gets a bit nasty?
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: I think potentially, uh I don't know.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I see a lot of stuff now on on that it's on the edges of that stuff that I think is uh almost racist.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of I do feel I find that very problematic.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think that um I cannot completely understand the frustration post-Brexit in terms of Brexit was about ultimately rebalancing the political economy of this country to um you know mass immigration, no matter which way you swing it, has if you look at the state, and that's pretty clear, has lowered the wages of ordinary white working class people, basically.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: We do have now a very skewed political economy.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_00: Again, one of the frustrations you've got with the Tories, I think it's like eight and a half million people now are economically inactive on some kind of benefit of some kind, whilst we're importing huge amounts of parts of the world.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I think that is clearly not a sustainable model.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't I'm not an expert on immigration, by the way, but I think to myself, uh uh you do have a lot of people coming in, and obviously it places an incredible strain on social services.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it's it's it's a tough one.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think that uh you have to ultimately rebalance the economy.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: If you have objective needs within the economy, uh then who's gonna do the jobs?
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: So if if Brits I think if you if you had a much lower immigration system to to go hand in hand with that, you'd have to have a massive welfare reform package as well.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that that's that's the simple truth of it.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's um a lot of businesses are bringing in people from immigration in low school immigration to do the jobs that unfortunately a lot of Brits wouldn't do, won't do.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_00: And also, I should also say, I mean, a lot of this narrative around immigration, the vast majority of immigrants, in my experience at least, and this is me growing up in Hackney, one of the most multiracial places in the world, right?
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, there was tough moments.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, there was a lot of crime and a lot of stuff like that, right?
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: But the vast majority that I've experienced has been, you know, people when they're here, they you know, they they they often try to integrate.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: I see a lot of stuff now, especially on X, and I find it a bit beyond the tail.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't sit well with me.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't sit well with me.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there is uh Um and I wouldn't want any kind of like castigation of communities, wholesale castigation of communities.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think I just think that that that that's a recipe recipe for disaster.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't mean that you know we feel frustration or you kind of feel that you want some degree of cultural continuity.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_00: I get I get all those things.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_00: But the mass castigation of people, or I think if it went in that way, no nobody wins there.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody wins there.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because then what you have is you have people completely against each other.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that that is just a recipe of disaster.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_00: I went to I was in Bosnia just after the war, and when I was settled, but where I went, it was still very hot.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and still in Hackney too, but you know, especially in Bosnia, with Bosnia was a fairly integrated multi, you know, multi-ethnic or multi-sort of religious community, and it didn't take that much to really push it over the edge.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, we're talking about often the model that you saw in Bosnia was you'd get a couple of hundred death squads, people, guys, would go into villages, kill people, and drive them out, and then then the army would follow them in.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen what that looks like.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: I've stood at mass graves where hundreds of bodies are being dug up.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen that in the flesh.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_00: Walking down where I lived, basically the last place I lived in Bosnia was overlooking a massive death camp.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was an industrial camp.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: They'll kill people en masse and throw them in the river.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_00: You'd walk everywhere you go, there'd be mortar rounds and bullet holes everywhere.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: Often head height, they'd line people up.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I've seen what where that goes, and it's not pretty, it's not nice.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that I think that we, you know, sometimes you've got to take a little step back here and try to reboot it.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it's frustrating.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, the Tories are really lost.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think people are so angry with the Tory Party, and you're gonna see it in this election.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason people are so angry with the Tory Party is because the Brexit vote was about sovereignty, rightfully so.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was about national sovereignty in the face of an unelected uh EU superstate, right?
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's a very powerful message, and it's a very true one, too.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: But it's also that immigration was about ultimately having a moment to breathe and to resettle and to sort of to sort of work out who we are and to you know re-rebalance the political economy.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: And what the Tories did, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, what the Tories did is they basically put two middle fingers up to the British people and they put this stuff on steroids.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: So people are very, very angry about this.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is why when Labour gets in, they're gonna, I think they're gonna draw, they're gonna go make people are so the Labour are gonna win because centre right people are not gonna vote.
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: So then so they're not gonna get, they're not gonna people aren't voting for Labour, they're just not voting for the Tories.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if Labour goes down that path of woke nonsense, race equality acts, and mass immigration, or just fudging the figures a little bit more and all the other progressive nonsense that you see, the absolute twaddle that you see, right?
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're gonna get a massive reaction.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there's gonna be a massive there's gonna be a reaction, but my where I come from is I'd say you really gotta try and keep your heart pure in this in some senses.
• 47:20
  SPEAKER_00: I know it sounds a bit crumbayari, right?
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: But having seen what I've seen and how it can flip, and that hatred can you know, you've got to try and maintain your humanity, otherwise the anger and can boil you up and it'll push you in a very bad and dark, dark place, and that's not good for anybody.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I totally agree.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_01: And Helen Pluck Rose, who's a hide-in-the-wool liberal, has been on this podcast, and she made the case that look, if everyone's arguing liberal liberalism is dead, then we should try to maintain some semblance of what's good about it, and the point you just made there, which is try to extend the same courtesy you'd ext expect to be extended back, because once you start racing to the bottom, everyone goes there.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you you talked a little bit about um how the Tories missed the opportunity to figure out who it is that we are and um to run on that basis.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose lots of people who are interested in politics would say, right, since the Blair years, we've been running this policy of multiculturalism, so subvert the national core of whatever it is we are and celebrate the cultures of everything else.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's led to obviously the ideals of diversity and all of those things.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: And um, I suppose those people, there are lots of people who think that multiculturalism is not a good model, and they cut across the political spectrum.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, Helen Pluck Rose is one of them.
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: We've got Paul Embry who's well and truly on the left, we've got Frank Faradi, Ed West on the right, Matt Goodwin centre right, Ion Hersey Ali liberal.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, lots of people think look, it's okay to celebrate your own cultural achievements because then that gives people something to integrate into.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_01: It shows you have confidence in your own culture and civilization.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not to say that you have to diminish and downplay everything that makes a person a person who's not from here, but it can't be only about that, otherwise, you'll never get cohesion.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess my question, Doug, is is it okay for a nation like Britain to champion its own cultural achievements?
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: And do we expect that might start turning around?
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: Clearly, not with a Labour government.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you've heard this before.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, uh there was a very interesting book on multicultural written by Patrick West, who I think may be the brother of Ed West, who does a very interesting suspect, which I really like.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but that's that's an interesting, it's a very short book.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was a Cipitas pamphlet, actually.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very interesting book.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: I kind of I read that.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_00: I I so when you talk about multicultural, we're not talking about multi-racial, there's a difference between multi-racialism and multiculturalism, right?
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: So multi-racialism is a multi-you know, you have multiple ethnicities living within a country.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's one thing.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure 99% of Brits would be completely fine with that.
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's very tolerant nation.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: But multiculturalism, essentially, the model of multiculturalism isn't about multi-racism.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: What it basically says, and it kind of draws in many ways the philosophy of social constructivism, and it says essentially you have uh multiple cultures, all of which have equal purchases of their own inner truths, right?
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: And they can all live side by side.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so and so so essentially, what so you you know you can have these different cultures and they can live siloed ultimately within a kind of broader national, national uh society or broader state, right?
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: And and and they're all equally valid.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: But so the problem with that is essentially um if you have a host nation, a dominant nation, the majority nation, Britain, what you're basically saying is these minority cultures have as much validity and a purchase as your own culture.
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_00: And and if their values may be antithetical to yours or their norms are different to yours, basically it's racist or beyond the power to have any negative judgment on that.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think and I think that's what people really are reacting against.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is a recipe for complete breakdown of social cohesion and national pride and national culture.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's that's what we've got on steroids.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, in this country, um multi- the multicultural model seems to be not saying the ideal necessary, but in practice, seems to be that you have multiple cultures, all of which have equal claims to truth and to knowledge, and we just have to all rub along with it.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and and and and essentially, when a compromise has to be made in some way to accommodate one of those truth claims, invariably the majority culture has to accommodate around the needs and the wants, desires, and the or the worldview of the of the minority culture.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or and that's how very much how it feels, right?
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that and I think that is very, very, very problematic.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: And and so you this is a very different model in France, where you basically you have French the French culture and you assimilate to that.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I think I think that the balance, the multicultural model that we've got in this country has gone way too far down the minoritarian line, right?
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: And and what's really done massive damage to that, a lot of people could live with that, they're not very happy about it, but they can live with it.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: But what's done massive damage to that is in particular is that in the last five or six years, you have elite cultural institutions like the BBC that are that delight in that, delight in essentially pushing, you know.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_00: You can't say anything about this.
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is of equal worth or this is the equal value to you, and you can't say anything about this kind of utter like not misrepresentation of your culture, because if you do, you're you're you're a racist.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_00: This could the third point on that is I think that this is another problem.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_00: The left have been pushing the charge of fascism and racism so hard and pumping the gas on that for so long, it's kind of lost all its meaning.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, everything essentially if if any any judgment that you may have if it's uh on a non on a minority culture, right?
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it it you cannot have any negative judgment.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_00: You can't have any uh position on immigration that's negative.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_00: You can't basically connect your own lived experience, your own lived experience in any negative sense, because to do that essentially means that you're a racist.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: In this liberal script, this kind of hyper-liberal globalization script that the left is is living in, right, is itself an articulation of a kind of bordered or bounded racist worldview.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: You're saying that the there is a world.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_00: And yet when you when you apply this sort of this this this this thing to non-Western cultures, massive celebration of national sovereignty, massive celebration of flags, the the the cultural ways of being, the lived experience of these non-Western people, to the extent that you have a kind of ethno uh celebration of ethnonation.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_00: Is isn't that what the Palestinian issue is about?
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_00: Is it's got to some extent?
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: So so do you see what I mean?
• 54:35
  SPEAKER_00: So so so it's again the battle standards which itself rests on on a historical narrative about the egregious nature of Western civilization that most Brits, most people don't buy.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: And but so so you've got this kind of false narrative of history being pushed to guilt trip people into this uh accepting this hegemonic aggressivism that we've got in our institutions.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, the final point I say is the fourth final point I say is this that has really pumped the gas hard, and I think you will see a very negative reaction against it.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: You are seeing it already, you're seeing it massively on Europe now, but I think you will definitely see it here.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh I think that uh that that stuff has done uh really great damage.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh really great damage.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean all the nonsense posed George Floyd, the BLM nonsense, George Floyd, sound like you know, it's just ridiculous, anyway.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you've talked about so many things that we could keep picking up the threads on, but I'm very mindful that we're probably not too far from the end zone.
• 55:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so I would like to talk about uh another thing that people are skeptical about, and net zero seems to be one of those things, and yet it it seems to be accepted on um on good faith that it's the road to environmental salvation, and because of that, uh public and private uh bodies and actors have started to reorient their focus economically, strategically, toward bringing around a net zero world, whatever that may look like.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think it's been fully articulated yet, other than renewable energies are part of it and reducing carbon emissions.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: You have written about the various risks and trade-offs that sit beneath this that aren't commonly spoken about and might be actually roadblocks to people, or not people, countries actually achieving these goals.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: So what are those unintended, unseen consequences that aren't being grappled with very well at the moment, Doug?
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the the main one, I mean, I'm not a I'm not a geo, I'm not a sort of uh an environmental scientist, so I just put that out there, right?
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I I'm fully on board with the idea that uh humans contribute to forms of climate change.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: That seems incontrovertible and settled in that sense.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: But but as far as I understand, I think the debate is mainly around the amount that human activity contributes to climate change relative to solar solar flares, the El Nino, there's other factors that one has to sort of factor into this process.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing I sort of would would say is that I think that inherent with a lot of the net zero stuff, and also the the broader environmental critique is ultimately a critique of industrialization and capitalism.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you look if one has to just look at any graph in terms of positive outcomes for humanity, I think that you know the vast majority of humanity humanity's existence has been sort of nasty brutally short, you know, dead by the age of 30, disease, want, squalor, war, tribalism, you name it.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not been essentially every day was pretty much calibrated around trying to cram as many calories down your goblet as you possibly could.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's only in the last 150 or 100 years or so, especially post-industrialization, the technological innovation that we see, an industrialization has taken off that we can enjoy the kind of life, lifestyles on a much broader basis that we have now.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that goes hand in hand with uh energy.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: You literally can chart another the uh fossil fuels and industrialization and quality of human life go like that.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: So obviously, energy is fundamentally uh primary to sustaining uh any kind of quality of life.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_00: And uh as far as I understand, the current alternative energy sources to fossil fuels uh just cannot do that on a mass scale in terms of wind and solar.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: One hopes I'm sure it will develop more and more and more.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: But so but so the the the there are those kind of more generalized statements out there, but in terms of like specifically what I've some of the research I've done, I did a paper on this recently, I'm doing some more research on it now, and that is the net zero energy transition ultimately has at its heart um new technologies, so solar, EVs, uh uh rare earth magnets and stuff like this.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_00: And those in turn are very heavily reliant upon what are called rare earth elements, REEs.
• 59:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so, and the reason there's about 17 of these things, but the reason they're so um important is because they have all kinds of magnetic properties and heat resistant properties, etc.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_00: And these really sit at the heart of the key technology in that in the net zero transition.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, these are quite ubiquitous in terms of the environment, rare earths, but the processing of these things is incredibly costly, often very environmentally damaging, and requires huge amounts of industrial input to get these different types of rare earths, light rare earths and heavy rare earths.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: So there's some of the stuff I've been doing on this is looking at the ways in which China, if we buy the idea that we're entering we we do have an era of great power competition, which we do, you know, there's a kind of US-centered international system or a more China Sino-centric international system.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if we buy the idea in particular that China, which has become very strong economically, also has regionally uh hegemonic ambitions, which it clearly does, especially in relation to Taiwan, and therefore we we may have the potential for conflict there.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third element of this rare earth, the fact that China has pretty much got a very massive monopoly of rare earths.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, the third element of that is that uh China in the past has used the export of these minerals, these rare earths, to punish states.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so, for example, there was uh an incident with a Japanese trawler and a Chinese naval ship came into conflict in 2010 and China cut off the export of these rare earths.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: So the main research and stuff that I've been publishing and writing about and thinking about for some time is the fact that our net zero transition is making us very heavily dependent on these rare earth elements.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_00: And as we transition deeper into net zero industrial economies and rely upon these different types of technologies, new technologies, non-fossil fuel type technologies, electric cars, etc., we're going to need more and more of these things.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the main supplier of these rare earths, and we don't have any alternative right now, is China.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we have a very interesting situation.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_00: If we think about the 20th century, the centrality of states like Saudi Arabia or OPEC states or the Gulf states in terms of their export of oil, they were strategically dependent on America ultimately to keep them safe, both internally and externally.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: China is not, doesn't have that strategic dependence on America.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: So we so we have a net zero transition.
• 1:02:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh these technologies that are at the heart of that, that all of all of which need these rare earths are primarily processed by China.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just in terms of electric vehicles and wind turbines and stuff like that, it's also very high-tech military kit.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: So the S-35s the Americans have relies upon huge amounts of these rare earths, all most of which come from China.
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: In 2022, the continent had to sign a waiver uh to allow the ex to allow Chinese rare earths to keep coming into America and had no alternative to put them to F-35s.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, in the event of a war or greater trade protectionism vis-a-vis China, what would it what we ultimately have is that the European net zero transition, the new industrial economies are dependent upon a massive China monopoly on this these crucial rare earth elements.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: Again, you don't see much analysis of this, you don't see much thinking about this, but this is a massive uh national security, but also an industrial uh problem that we face.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: The geopolitics always overlooked, and what I find interesting when people unpack these is that you start to find out that what are builders' conspiracy theories when people start to mention when net zero became the thing, that this seems like Chinese propaganda and it benefits the Chinese, is they're very dismissed, dismissed very quickly as reactionary and perhaps conspiratorial.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing is, is it when you start to hear about it, it becomes much harder not to think that actually there has been some kind of hijacking of economic thought.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and I say this having had someone on the show who he's Norwegian, used to be in the forces, and um is now part of an organization that sources rare earth metals.
• 1:04:22
  SPEAKER_01: And specifically, they're trying to find they've found rare earth metals that are on the seabeds and they are around volcanic fishes and they are apparently quite easy to mine.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_01: You use technology, you thus don't need all of the um sub-Saharan African labor to be pulling things out of the ground and heavy, dirty, polluting work.
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he's found lots of pushback from European politicians and industry bodies, even though he says, look, Norway is ready, we can start pulling this stuff out of the ground.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: We just need you to help us at an EU level.
• 1:04:57
  SPEAKER_01: And he's found a lot of resistance to that.
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's almost as though people are just committed to this idea of having these really complex global supply chains.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it makes you wonder, you know, whether that pendulum swings away from that.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've seen upon the rise of the recent Dutch coalition government, um, at least kind of nominally headed up by Hirtfielders, um, come out on day one, scrap all the energy transition targets that had previously been set around renewable energies and said, look, this stuff isn't going to fix it, we're gonna move to nuclear, we'll build build four nuclear plants.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: Is is that the way for Britain, the Anglophone countries, the other countries that have become too dependent on foreign rivals, or or does that also fall under the same uh issues as we'd need to source from foreign rivals?
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I see that um again, I'm not an expert on the lobbyist technology technology.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: I followed some of it and I followed um in terms of energy, but it strikes me that ultimately, if you want to your your economy.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the quality of life that you enjoy is fundamentally related to energy.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can't get around that, right?
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, the wind, the wind turbines don't produce energy when the wind's not blowing, the solar doesn't produce energy when the sun's not shining, we don't have the storage capacity for that.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: So then we have to rely upon fossil fuels, ultimately, as the backups, the intermittent backups, when when these clean technologies don't work.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now, um, and so it strikes me that nuclear or small and particularly small modular reactors would be the obvious way to go if we wish to mitigate climate change to the extent that fossil fuels and human activity around fossil fuels is responsible for upping the CO2 content in the atmosphere.
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to keep the lights on, we need to keep hospitals going, we need to keep food on the shelves, etc.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: Then one presumes we need a very big, large store of supply of energy, and and and uh nuclear power will strike me as the obvious choice for that.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_00: But unfortunately, it suffers from this kind of Chernobyl discourse.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and nowhere more do you really see that in Germany.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_00: If you really want to look look to a country that is has made such bad mistakes, then Germany really is it.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: Germany is basically the economic hegemon and the political hegemon within the EU.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_00: So where Germany goes, the EU goes, okay.
• 1:07:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh categorically, whenever there's a crisis in the EU, you're not getting on the flu phone to Spain or to you know to Portugal, you get on the phone to to Merkel in particular, but you know, Germany, right?
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: So what Germany's done is decommissioned his nuclear power stations, okay.
• 1:07:49
  SPEAKER_00: Got massively into bed, Merkel got massively into bed with Putin to rely upon uh Putin to supply energy to I mean that that itself was absolutely crazy.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_00: Decommissioned its nuclear so where is it now?
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, Germany is going into a massive demographic decline as well, okay.
• 1:08:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's had to import huge amounts of immigrants into the German economy, number one, it's decommissioned a load of its nuclear power, its industry can't get the energy it needs.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_00: So what so what are they doing?
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_00: They've reopened and burning now lignite coal, which is some of the dirtiest coal you could possibly burn because they they need the energy.
• 1:08:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so Germany, so it it that that really represents if if that's where the net zero is going to take you, to decommission clean sources of energy and put uh a knife to your own throat in terms of your your industrial capacity, and all the and all the attendant effects, negative effects that will have your population, your employment, etc.
• 1:08:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then to scrabble around and say, oh my goodness, we've made we've made we're in a terrible tight pickle here, especially with Putin, and then to basically reopen the most dirtiest lignite coal burning power stations, as it as is the global south.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Modi tweeted the other day, we've opened yet another lignite coal station, you know, they're proud of this stuff.
• 1:09:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, so so the net net zero, it has it sounds, you know, one hour clean, yeah, that's fine.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_00: But if you want the if you want industrial civilization to maintain itself, you need huge amounts of energy.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_00: So importing French nuclear energy from France, or you know, or energy from abroad, which is what we're doing, or LNG from Qatar and from the US, etc., that's what we're doing.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we we we need more energy, we need nuclear.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think we definitely need small modular reactors.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_00: The fact again that we haven't done that, we're not doing that, we're not looking at that, and we're relying upon uh these untried quite dodgy technologies that sun down shine, wind down blah, you ain't gonna get energy.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_00: That for me is again symptomatic of the fake the strategic failure of our political parts.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think I've kept you long enough, but before you go, Doug, uh, because I could definitely keep peppering you questions about all of this stuff.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I've started to trial a question out with guests, which is what have you changed your mind upon in your life or recently, and what was it that you changed your mind?
• 1:10:28
  SPEAKER_01: What made you think differently?
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know what?
• 1:10:30
  SPEAKER_00: I change my mind all the time, right?
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_00: I change my mind a lot.
• 1:10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and I like changing my mind, or I like being wrong.
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because what you know, you know, you like you know people get very dogmatic.
• 1:10:41
  SPEAKER_00: I like being wrong.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I I uh the way I tend to operate is I I try to make the argument for net zero and then and then read and try and make the counterargument for net zero and see where it falls.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I I so I'm I'm in a constant process of doing that, and I like being wrong.
• 1:10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh because when I'm wrong, or I look it means I'm learning something new, I'm gonna be pushed out of my intellectual comfort zone.
• 1:11:04
  SPEAKER_00: And and you see what I mean?
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm kind of and I'm I'm growing, I'm growing.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_01: That is a breath of fresh air.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think people generally own up to um intellectual modesty, it's usually hubris all the way down.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Doug, you mentioned before we started recording that you were you had some new book ideas.
• 1:11:23
  SPEAKER_01: I know they're they're just germinating at the moment, but what can listeners, watchers expect to see from you, and where can they find you, more importantly?
• 1:11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm on Twitter.
• 1:11:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's the only social media I use, and at prof Dws.
• 1:11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've got my I've got a little website, uh it's uh wwbogstokes.net, or you can get the link from Twitter too.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I've got all I do a lot of media, I do a lot of think tank pieces, I do a lot of academic work.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_00: If you're interested in listening to the gabbing on and jibber-jabbering on other podcasts, you can go there, you can find all the links you need on that.
• 1:11:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, so the new book essentially is an early exploratory stage here, but it's looking at the Cold War, but using the Cold War to talk about the present day, and essentially the argument is how the West lost the Cold War.
• 1:12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if you see the Cold War in geophysical terms, we won the Cold War into communism.
• 1:12:15
  SPEAKER_00: If you see the Cold War, and it's what I'm trying to develop here, is it's a metaphysical struggle between authoritarianism and freedom.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I want to use that as a kind of mini springboard to talk about the present day, and in particular the rise of supranationalism, neo-technocratic overlords, essentially, and what that does to the social contract in the in particular in the West, but how that links to identity politics and the rise of supranational uh technocrats and the the kind of political reactions that you're gonna see again against that.
• 1:12:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it's pretty much a book that's going to talk about everything everything, and and then we've just been speaking about you know, technocracy, supranationalism, popular democracy, reactions in globalization, the changing international, international system, the the decline of American power and the rise of a more multi-polar international system, and what all this what all this says and how this would affect the the the the this country, but also Europe, European politics and the world order as a whole.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big project, but I'm kind of like, but that that's that's that's what I think what I'm gonna do.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm gonna claim this as a preview premiere and so that you can find on thinking class.
• 1:13:29
  SPEAKER_01: But uh, but no, I I genuinely I look forward to speaking about that in the future when it's ready to come out, and I'll be I'll be following you keenly seeing what you're you're tweeting about, writing about, publishing about.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_01: It'd be great to have you back on, Doug.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_01: But today it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:13:42
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks for joining me.
• 1:13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much, and thanks to your listeners.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed it.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_00: And any time, John, just just just any time you want, just let me know.
• 1:13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Great.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to it.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_01: Take care.
• 1:13:52
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, buddy.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Cheers.
• 1:13:58
  SPEAKER_01: To keep up to date with all that I am doing, please subscribe to the Thinking Class YouTube channel at Thinking Class and follow me on X at Thinking Classes.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thinking Class seeks to understand the civilizational issues we face and why what our leaders do in response matters.
• 1:14:14
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Engage with me on YouTube or X or write to me at thinkingclasspod at gmail.com to tell me who you want me to speak to and what topics are important to you.
• 1:14:33
  SPEAKER_01: I look forward to seeing you there and for joining me on this journey.