1984 Today!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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