Jamie Bartlett - Radicals

Full transcript: Jamie Bartlett on London Real

4:38 I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jamie Bartlett, the journalist, author and television presenter whose last book, The Dart Neck Inside the Digital Underworld, introduced us to the disturbing corners of the encrypted web. Here you became friends with trolls, hackers, drug dealers, pornographers, political extremists, crypto anarchists, and vigilantes. Your new book, Radicals, takes us into the minds of the people who dare to be different. The innovators, disruptors, idealists, and extremists whose secretive and influential movements include techno futurists questing for immortality, far right groups looking to close borders, militant environmentalists, autonomous cooperatives, and psychedelic pioneers, much like us. Jamie, welcome to London Real.

5:25 Great to be here. Great to be here. It’s great to have you back. The last show you were here. I just remember being absolutely captivated with the stories that you told me about the digital underworld. And what I love about it is, first of all, you’re a storyteller, you know, and great storytellers don’t exist anymore. So a lot of us know about these movements and these types of people, but you have a great way of humanizing it. And I think it teaches people and maybe gets some empathy and some understanding the way that a blog article or this or that wouldn’t do it.

6:00 Well, without this being a love-in, I mean, you give me the time to explain those stories. So that’s why it’s so great to be here, because these things do take time to understand. You know, too often you get these little snapshots of people and their ideas, 20 seconds in the media or on the television. But to really get to grips with ideas, political ideas, you’ve got to put the time in. You’ve got to really listen. You’ve got to really think about it.

6:25 And that’s the thing. I mean, I wanted to with this book, I wanted to write a book about politics that wasn’t boring. So many books about this, what turns people off politics. It’s so boring. But there are some amazing people out there trying different things about how we live. And the amazingly fun and exciting times you can have with those people, if you put the time in, it’s incredible. So that’s what I wanted to do, a story about politics rather than a dull, philosophical piece about politics. Yeah. And what I found with your first book, or your second book, I guess, the last book, is that the people that I had a two-dimensional conception of, whether it was the webcam girls or the guy that goes to the far right demonstrations, saying horrible racial slurs of people, were actually these humans. And they weren’t exactly who you thought they were. And sometimes they didn’t even like the movement they belonged to.

7:14 And after you told me the story, or the webcam girls, or something, you’re like, wait a second. That could be me in a different reality. And it was just a great way of understanding them without judging them. Has it changed your views in any way? When you see people on the net that are annoying you, or you see these personalities that are saying things, you’re getting frustrated with them, or you’re reading stories about the bad guys on the internet.

7:38 I hope what it’s done is made people just stop for a second and think, wait a minute, there’s a person behind the screen. And I bet they’re not how I imagine them to be. I bet they’re different. I bet they’ve got a story. I bet there’s something about their lives.

7:52 There’s something that I should maybe not judge them immediately. Try to imagine that they’re humans with their own issues or their own hopes and their own fears. And that’s the internet sometimes gets in the way of that. And every time you actually meet with people in person, speak with them, you get a totally different view on things. Yeah, same with me. So I am lucky enough to get people in my flesh right here to talk to them.

8:19 And the biggest example I think was Ken Livingston. I mean, I try to be objective. I’m in the goddamn media business, and yet I think Red Ken’s coming over, right? But he rolls up, he takes the tube, he comes in, he sits down, and for an hour he tells me how he got the Olympics to London, about how he did all these things. At the end of the day, I found a guy who really cares about London and about the people, and he’s doing his best to do his job. So yeah, I mean, I get reminded all the time of humanism, but the internet is not what you said. It actually does the opposite of that. The internet gives us short little sound bites. It makes it makes it divisive. It makes us hate. It makes us panic. It makes us react. Most of the internet just does that, unfortunately. It can, can’t it? And that is maybe why some of our politics at the moment is feeling really divisive, really quite corrosive, really angry, really partisan.

9:11 You know, apparently the American Congress is more divided than it’s ever been. And partly that is because that’s the way the internet pushes us apart. The antidote to that is going to be face to face. It’s going to be getting out there on the streets, meeting people, spending time with them. That is the answer to some of the problems of our divided politics.

9:31 How we do that, I’m not quite sure, but I’m convinced that when you’re in face to face with people, talking about political ideas, talking about things that you disagree with, you get so much more out of it when you see them in real life. Yeah, I totally agree with that. And when I’ve seen the last couple of attacks here in the UK, first in Manchester, and the next one on the bridge you just crossed, right? London Bridge, to get over here. Sore all the flowers up there, and it’s really close to where I work.

9:57 Wow. You know, when I see that, and probably because I’m in the media business and I get to talk to people in the flesh every week, my first reaction is, we need to reach out to these people that did these bad things. And we need to try to have some dialogue and find out why there’s this hate that causes this thing to happen. But when I say that, everyone’s like, what are you talking about? We got to get them, we got to kill them, we got to do insecurity, we got to blah, blah, blah. I’m curious from everything you learned and see, and you live in London, when you see an attack like that happen, and then you see the news media coverage, and then kind of the fallout, what is your read and reaction on that whole thing? Because it’s not just the incident itself, it’s not just the people that died, it’s all of the stuff that comes with it.

10:41 It’s such a big question, that one, Brian. I mean, it’s your first reaction, obviously, as a Londoner is you’re angry and you’re upset, and you’re frustrated, and you just, and there’s this sort of quite strange social media reaction now that everyone takes part in, where it starts off with lots of immediate speculation. Who’s done it? Where are they? Is there more? What’s happening? And it’s frantic, and you’re addicted to it, and it’s a horrible thing, but terrible things happening, especially terrorism, excites people, and they spend a lot of time online, addicted to it, tweeting about it, trying to get shares and mentions and retweets from this awful tragedy, and that’s part of the game at the moment, is that, you know, everything is about shares and content, and even with a terrorist attack, there are people that are playing the same game, and I’m part of that too. You know, and it’s horror, I feel terrible about it sometimes, but I’m thinking, oh, writing articles about this, and you know, what’s the angle? And so sometimes, being in that media bubble, you have a very strange look at this thing, you almost lose your humanity, because you’re seeing it through the lens of your own profession.

11:54 And I’ve found it very, very difficult sometimes to actually deal with these issues, you know? Yeah, I was with a major PR company here in London, and before the attacks, and he said, Brian, I was in one of these newsrooms, and they said, like, this is after Westminster Bridge happened, and he said, they try to see how long they can kind of extend the tension, can they go four hours, can they go two days, can they do three days, so they introduce new stuff, and just try to keep this aggro going, because the ratings go up. Yeah, yeah, and we’re all part of it, you know? We’re all in some ways responsible for that, because we are all clicking and watching and viewing and addicted to what’s like outrage, and horror and terror has an addictive quality about it, I’m afraid.

12:40 But then the aftermath, I mean, the kind of, the thing that really worries me is that the aftermath of terrible things like this is ever more government control over radical extreme ideas. You know, the first and most natural thing is to say, why didn’t we prevent it? Why didn’t we stop it? We need to prevent these things from happening, we need to prevent the ideas from having airtime, we need to prevent the people from communicating, we need to have greater surveillance controls. The sort of default reaction is always more control over things, and especially in ideas, it’s always that we need to somehow prevent the radical ideology from having the opportunity to spread somehow. I don’t think that’s the right approach.

13:27 I think in the end, it’s better to have ideas out there, people to talk about it, people to be open about what they think about things. The worry is, I mean, the government has an anti-extremism program called Prevent. Yeah, tell me about that. Well, the idea is that it tries to stop people supporting terrorism, and it sort of undermines the support for extremist ideology. And it started off a decade ago or so, really targeted on stopping by Islamists using violence.

14:01 It was a really narrowly targeted program after 2001. The idea was that there are some radical Islamists who might consider using violence in pursuit of their aims, and we could try and persuade them not to use violence. We’re not going to change their ideas, but tell them that those may have convinced them, persuade them, almost force them to accept that violence isn’t the answer. And over the last 10 years, that has just spread. It’s got bigger and bigger and bigger. And now it’s sort of about any idea that’s not in its support of Britishness, or is against British values, or is against democracy, is considered to be in some ways a little bit dangerous. And we need to maybe report that to the authorities, and then people have an intervention so that they’re not going to be sort of infected with these radical ideas.

14:49 And it starts off with Islamism, and it gets bigger and bigger, then starts including far right groups, then far left groups, and then before you know it, anything outside the little tiny narrow window of acceptable political views is going to be deemed extreme. And then liberal democracies and the idea to think differently is going to be too dangerous. People will be afraid of it. And that is what I worry about the long term effect of terrorist attacks is, is that it closes down the kind of opportunity for people to think differently. Because even ideas we disagree with, they don’t get beaten by being silenced. Yeah, it sounds like a bad science fiction novel, what you’re describing. Oh, it’s kind of living through a bad science fiction novel, aren’t we? Yeah. And so this plan is really, they go down deep and they just try to nip it at the butt, these radical ideas. Yeah, exactly. Which is really quite ridiculous.

15:39 You think we should air them and talk about them and try to have some type of discussion around that as opposed to extinguish. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, they, you know, a lot of it is the culture that it creates, you know. To me, the biggest danger in society is self-censorship.

15:58 It terrifies me. It’s not that people are going to be sent to prison for saying the wrong thing, it’s that nobody dares speak out. Nobody dares speak the truth. Nobody dares say what they really believe. Because even if the government says we’re not, you know, we’re not going to arrest you for saying radical things, but you might have to have an intervention where we’ll talk to you about those ideas. That’s enough to stop people feeling like their ideas should be talked about. A true liberal encourages disagreement, encourages dissent. You know, a true liberal seeks out the devil’s advocate and wants them on the stage saying their piece because it forces everybody to think for themselves. It forces you to determine what you care about. Anything that stops that, that undermines that, that makes people feel nervous about speaking, that worries me a lot. And I think, unfortunately, that could be the direction that we’re heading in. The crazy thing about this attack on the bridge, and I read an article about it, and it was in the New York Times, I think it said that after 9-11, and I was there for that, they were saying we’re worried about the next attack, which will be a dirty bomb. Someone’s going to get some atomic device and blow it up and radioactive material is going to go everywhere, and that’s how they’re going to hurt us. And they observed that the latest attack was done with a rental car and four kitchen knives

17:23 Or whatever type of knives. And it got similar effect because it freaked everybody out. And then, like what you said, now the government’s kind of oppressed and make the population more anxious right on the back of it. So they got a win there, right? And in a way, we kind of helped them get that win. Yes, exactly. And the truth of the matter is when it comes to terrorist attacks, it is remarkably easy to spread fear and panic. I mean, like you say, you can rent a car, take some kitchen knives, and the minute that is a terrorist attack, it’s front page news the world over. And there’s debates about whether the government needs more surveillance powers and all the rest of it. It is so easy. I mean, in some ways, I’m always surprised there’s not more of it.

18:12 You know, in a strange way, the fact that some of the recent terrorist attacks, the Manchester bomb not including that, but that many of the recent attacks have been relatively simple, not sophisticated at all, is a mark of success of the intelligence agencies, because they’ve stopped them doing a lot of these really, really spectacular things. And so now terrorists are sort of reduced to these very, very rudimentary attacks. But the problem is the effect is the same on the public. And if not more with digital media magnifying it and the kickback, it sometimes can be worse. So yeah, and I agree with you. I mean, these were still lone wolf attacks, obviously not really planned or funded by, in my opinion, any major organization, more of a grassroots effort. So that’s a sign. But still, they’re having the same amount of terror.

19:01 You know, just like we saw when they hijacked planes in the 70s, you’re on international television station with some guy holding a gun to the pilot’s head. It freaks everybody out for the first time. So yeah, you know, we talked about it’s spectacular. It’s a media show for the terrorists as well. They know this, they understand that their content is viral. And I know it’s weird to use those words. I mean, we’re in short, so sort of advertising terminology, but that’s what it is. It’s viral content. And they know that. And some of them go to some effort to make sure that it is shared widely. And you’ve seen the ISIS is sort of propaganda wing kicks into action. The minute anything happens, they are spreading these videos around, they’re spreading rumors around, they’re sharing the videos around, they’re claiming responsibility for it, because they want to ramp up the media impact of their work. And they say themselves that the media jihad is as important as the physical one, because it’s a battle of ideas for them. The attackers on London Bridge had fake explosive devices taped to them. And they were, you know, of the opinion that might have been to keep the police away at the time, but it might have been so those videos and selfie pictures would go more viral. Think about it. Is it crazy?

20:14 Think about this. These guys are often Western, young, westernized guys. They’ve often been born here or at least spent a considerable amount of their lives in Western countries in their 20s. Is it really that strange that they’re thinking about viral videos? No, they’ve grown up with this stuff. The problem is the people working for our intelligence agencies and our governments, they haven’t grown up with this stuff. This is kind of new to them. This is weird to terrorists in their 20s. This is absolutely natural. Nothing is more obvious than trying to make your video go viral. Yeah, we talked about terrorism last time you were here, but you know, two years ago, over two years ago, what do you see besides some of the things you said about how they are embracing the web? I mean, obviously, ISIS is very good on social media, right? They kind of know what they’re doing. They’re doing some of the things that we talked about here. Is there anything else you’re seeing or where do you think we might even be a few years from now? Can you see the tools that they’ll be using? Because again, it’s all about their reaction. It’s not really about the body count. It’s just about the terror reaction. And the worst part is that the media companies are complicit in some way, as in they are making money on the back of this too. So it’s this weird relationship that they have. It’s almost the Manchurian candidate relationship where the

21:31 Corporate Western media companies are doing better when the radical Islamic groups attack. That’s weird. It is weird, but it’s not only about radical Islamist groups. I mean, they also fell in love with Donald Trump. They know the sorts of stories that people love clicking on and they will provide it.

21:55 And that is also understandable because they are commercial companies that want to get revenue. So there’s nothing strange about that, but it does create, I think, a dynamic that all of us feel slightly uncomfortable with. But I’m not sure there’s much we can actually do about it. Yeah, I think Trump and ISIS both equally are skilled in manipulating the media for their own ends, which is shock and awe. Give them something to report. They know it’ll be consumed by us and it will go viral on the back. Trump is probably the first genuinely social media president. People said Barack Obama, but that was because he did some clever advertising on Facebook. I think the candidate that understood social media better than anyone was Donald Trump.

22:38 And people say, oh, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s ridiculous. No, I think he’s a genius on social media. Everyone in the 90s imagined that there are politicians in a digital world would be like professors. They’d be really informed and they’d be really smart and they’d be kind and they’d be knowledgeable and they’d be decent people and all the rest of it.

22:59 What they didn’t counter on was the fact that social media is making us more emotional. I don’t think it’s making us more analytical. And as a result, it’s that it’s those politicians that can really grip your emotions. Outrageous, exciting, simplistic, whatever. They’re the ones that are going to win on social media. People like Donald Trump, but also people like ISIS. And the things that I noticed with this group, I mean, it’s inevitable to me that they are going to keep picking up on whatever latest technologies out there.

23:32 We’ve learned now there are no slouches when it comes to tech. They know what they’re doing. So what does that mean? In the next 12 months, I’m convinced they will start using ransomware like we saw with that attack on the NHS. Right. Can you explain that to people that don’t understand it? So we had ransomware as a type of software that you can buy on the dark net actually for very cheaply. Maybe you should edit that out so people don’t want to buy that. But it’s stuff that you can that you that it’s malware that you can infect someone’s computer in it and encrypts the hard drive of the computer, which renders it practically unusable.

24:07 And you have to pay a ransom in Bitcoin to get it decrypted to get all of your stuff back, whether it’s your family photos or your important work files. And if you don’t pay the ransom, they throw away the key and your stuff’s lost forever. This is potentially a very, very good way of making money for people, because anyone from anywhere in the world can do it from their basement. Right. And they printed a bunch of money on this latest attack that hit the NHS and hit a few other organizations in a big way. But they made a lot of money off the individuals right that had to get it wasn’t that expensive. $300. $300. But that adds up.

24:45 If you can infect a million computers, and only a percentage, you know, one or two percent of them pay $300 each. That’s a lot of money. And in addition to the money, huge amounts of disruption, we saw what happened with the NHS, there were operations being cancelled waiting list extended. This is this could, you know, this is our networked systems are incredibly fragile in some respects, because we’re so reliant on them. And I think it’s inevitable that groups like ISIS are going to turn to things like computer hacking, and ransomware in the next two or three years, and we’re going to have this kind of weird hybrid of techniques that we’ve associated with hackers being used by terrorist groups. Interesting for their funding or for other reasons?

25:32 It’s going to be both. Okay. Any they will be working out any way they can, how to exploit the technology that’s out there for their own good. And that’s going to include things like hacking into a wired house, a house that’s in an internet of things, where people have their fridges and their, and their irons and their televisions and everything else connected to the net lock you in, they will they will work ways out. And there will be a media story saying ISIS has hacked in to people’s fridges, done x y and z, infected computers with ransomware. And that will be the big story in the next. Yeah, turn out the pilot light, turn the gas on kill you from abroad.

26:14 Exactly. And imagine we talk about terror, we talk about people being worried, the idea that the fridge in your house or your cooker could be accessed by terrorists to do harm to you. I mean, we’re talking about getting right into your home. So that’s I don’t like to, I don’t like to reject these depressing things, but we got to be ready for it. We know that these people are they’re incredible innovators. They’re always looking for ways to exploit the system.

26:42 And the other thing I see, ISIS, terrorist groups and extremist groups go in waves, things become fashionable, and they go out of fashion again. And I’m not convinced that radical Islamist terrorism is going to be around forever. I think we’re going to see, given what’s going on at the moment, and given the challenges that society faces, I think we’re going to see a lot of different types of radical and extremist movements out there. Yeah. We can’t even imagine maybe that are going to start getting bigger and bigger.

27:10 Okay. All right. We’ve already seen this incident in the States where some guy, like an anti Trump guy shot a congressman and there’s this whole movement. So yeah, we always associate it with these other people, but of course it could come from, you know, people in our own country. Absolutely. And we’re talking about politics at the moment becoming very polarized and people getting more and more angry and radicalized frustrated. And the more that happens, the more there’s a sort of group of people from within which some might decide to take it that extra step, like this guy, who’s apparently a Bernie Sanders supporter. And, but I think that there’s going to be things like me. I believe that in the next 10 years, we’re going to see a serious upswing in potentially violent or definitely militant environmentalism. People will determine that the environmental problems that we face are so bad, so severe, and the costs are so great civilization that violence is the only answer to try to deal with that. That’s industrial sabotage. These, these are going to be the movements of the future. We always think that the problems we face now or the radical movements we face now are going to be the ones that we’ll always be worried about.

28:24 But in the seventies, it was left wing terror. Things change quickly. And the threats of today will not be the same threats as tomorrow. What did you see when it came to, you know, militant environmentalists, which most people probably won’t even know what you’re talking about. And it’s interesting you said that because we just had a moving conversation in Hempstead Heath with a guy named Dennis McKenna, and it was the same day that Trump took us out of the Paris Accord.

28:48 And he’s a big into plant intelligence. And he’s like, Brian, we got 50 years before this is irreversible with way we’re killing the planet. And we need the plants for our own intelligence to get us back on track. You know, you could see some of his supporters saying, time to get militant. Right. And these are the kind of things you’re talking about.

29:05 Exactly what I’m talking about. So exactly what I’m talking about. Greenpeace used to do little boats in front of other big boats, but you’re talking next level. I’m talking next level. I mean, that’s the Greenpeace are going to still be doing their stuff.

29:16 They’re kind of that will be civil disobedience. That will be what you might consider to be legitimate types of nonviolent activism that will be disruptive. And I’m sure there’s going to be a lot more industrial sabotage. So there’ll be people messing around with the grid, with power lines, doing anything really to keep fossil fuels in the ground. I mean, in my book, I spent a lot of time with direct action environmentalists who we went down, we went and shut down a mine, you know, training yourself to machinery, stopping the diggers from digging the coal out of the ground, because their argument is Greenpeace and the like have had 20 years to try and do something and nothing’s changing.

29:55 We’re still digging up. We’re still destroying the earth and we don’t have time left. And I think there’s going to be a growing number of people who are just going to conclude that all this talk, even the Paris climate deal that we agreed, all the nice little things that we’re doing to improve sustainability and, you know, green energy and it’s improved, it’s not enough. And at some point, groups of people are going to say, we are going to have to actually start doing things outside the law, whatever that’s going to take. I mean, to them, it will be a question of morals, they’ll say the ends justify the means.

30:35 And we are there’s a there’s a group called, you may have heard of them, they were the Earth Liberation Front, they were called and they’re people that say essentially, we we there, I mean, they are an outlawed group in several countries. And I think in the US, they’re actually a prescribed terrorist group, because they think that in the end, people are responsible for destroying this planet. And if you have to commit acts of violence against those people, then you have to do it. And actually democracy, much as we love it, might not be the right and best approach to dealing with something like climate change doesn’t work. It’s not going to work to save the planet. And they’ll decide that actually, whatever it takes is going to be worth the cost. There’s a group already and they’re called the it’s called the deep.

31:28 Oh, I’ve forgotten the term. I’ve forgotten the exact word for it now. Deep green movement, I think it’s called. Okay. And there’s a book about this. And it really is I mean, it advocates industrial espionage, in some cases, even violence against people, save the Earth. And as things get worse, as the water levels rise, and the temperature goes up, and crops start failing, and millions of people start moving across the globe, searching for food and water, more and more people, I think, are going to conclude that they’re going to have to hit the streets and do something about it. It’s interesting, because it was always the classic opposition of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Martin Luther King was turn the other cheek, let’s do the marches. Let’s look at what Jesus did and Malcolm X is classic line by any means necessary. It’s my job to get it done. And I was talking with Douglas Rushkoff recently, and we’re talking about this obsession with growth and these companies are just making all these decisions based on profit and growth. And it’s like, well, where’s going to be the point where us as humans, we say, this has gone too far. And maybe it’s going to be one of these militant operations that just says, hey, wake up. But that’s scary. So you’re it is scary.

32:35 But honestly, I think that I think this is going to be in the next 10 years, this is going to be the thing that we will be talking about in the same way that we talk about Islamist now, we’ll be talking saying, what are we supposed to do with these environmentalists? What are we going to do about them? Do we work with them? Should we talk to them? Some people will say, but they got a point. And other people say, but violence is never legitimate. We’ll be having the same discussions, but it will be a different set of ideas behind it. You know, what’s interesting about that is that I’m not religious. I’m not Muslim. And so I would probably never be around someone that might be a Muslim extremist, but I could easily be in the same walks of life with an environmental extremist. And they could walk through and say, you know, I know this guy, and he just blew up this grid. And I’d be like, well, it’s not cool to blow shit up. But you know, I just left a hundred pounds on that desk. And if it goes missing and it goes to him, then it’s better than Trump doing his nonsense. So he starts to get a little gray.

33:28 There’s going to be a lot of gray area in this because there’s going to be a lot of people that agree totally with the aims, but not agree with the methods. And those people are going to be torn and they’re not going to be sure what to do. And there’s going to be a lot of people. And the police will probably try to infiltrate some of the environmentalist movements that are peaceful to try to spot if there are maybe some violent ones within it. The same thing that we had with the IRA, you know, the idea that the IRA had to move within communities of people that may not have been the men of violence, but supported them and helped them. And the police are going to have to think, well, we’ve got the same thing with these violent environmentalists and we need to look at the nonviolent environmentalists, try and potentially work with them or infiltrate those groups. It’s going to be the same stuff. I don’t have an answer for this. This is going to be a really difficult question for people to grapple with, actually. And I think there’s got like, particularly democracy, where the democracy is actually not going to work for this problem. And what do we do about that? These are big issues, man.

34:30 These are really big issues and they’re coming and they’re coming fast. Right. So your job is to get us to talk about this stuff now, to start a dialogue, to start listening before it gets to this point where it’s too late. Exactly. Okay. And I love it. Before we jump into some of these other fascinating issues, and you always find some of the most interesting, right? What’s that craziest? Radical.

34:51 Sometimes it’s the crazy people that have all the best ideas. You know that. I do know that. The people that you speak to. Yeah. Oh yeah. The people I speak to. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

34:59 All the best, weirdest, most exciting ideas for change. They come from people that everybody else says is crazy. Only crazy people often are brave enough to think outside the way that we do things. Well, you know, six years ago London Real started with these long-form conversations that people said we were crazy to stick them on YouTube because no one wants to listen to you for an hour. And our tagline was putting the BBC out of business. And that was a joke because you can’t put them out of business because they’ll just attach you. Exactly. Well, they are, but that’s another story. And so, you know, some thought that was a little radical, but I’d like to think we’re making some change here by engaging people. But a quote from your book, George Bernard Shaw, very beginning. You said, the reasonable man adapts himself to the world.

35:44 The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw, why did you put that in the beginning of this book? Well, it summed it up. It summed it up. It was, and it actually came at the end after all the book had been written. And I’m thinking with my editor, what kind of, how do we try and encapsulate this? And usually there’s some brilliant older writer from times past who says it better than you ever could. And it was simply, it’s really quite logical actually, when you think about it. Most of us are, we play by the rules. We play the game as it’s supposed to be played. We are somehow part of the system and we don’t really ever think too much about it. Therefore, we are never the ones, the mainstream, the ordinaries. We’re never the ones that change things. We’re always the ones that keep the thing going. Any big change comes from people who reject the system and come up with something different, something new, outsiders, people who refuse to accept the way that it is and want to change it. And by definition, they are people that all us ordinaries will think are crazy.

37:03 So progress has to depend on crazy people, has to depend on the outsiders. Otherwise, everything atrophies, because we all just think the same. That is the great power of these people in this book. And anywhere else in the world, the people that dare to be different, they in the end are the ones that are going to change the world. So we should nurture them and listen to them.

37:23 We should listen to them. Sometimes they are, sometimes I couldn’t tell you how much I disagree with some of the people in this book. But even the ones that I disagree with, even the people that I think are completely wrong, their great value is to force me to think for myself. You know, the great problem in modern liberal democracies is that there is a narrower and narrower set of ideas that everybody has to sign up to and agree with. And we’re like, we’re complacent about it all. We don’t even think, we don’t even dare to think of anything outside the things that we’re used to. We’re not active citizens anymore. We don’t question the basics of how we live. All of this, all of this outside, how the world works, we just accept it all. Radicals, even the ones you disagree with, force you to think for yourself. What do you care about? What matters to you? They stimulate your mind.

38:23 They make you come up with ideas. Society without radicals pushing at fringes with their crazy ideas would just atrophy. We’d all just forever be thinking the same thoughts. We need the stimulation where even if we disagree with those people, they stimulate us. And that is, when I think about the challenges society faces coming down the line, we need an active group of citizens who are brave, who are thoughtful, who are engaged, and radicals makes you do that.

38:53 I had a teacher, a school teacher once say something to me, and I was raising kids at the time, and he said, Brian, behavior is feedback. And I was like, what the hell are you talking about? And he said, you know, your 10-year-old might say something, but the way they act is feedback on how they feel about you. And so you could say that about these radicals. You could say that about this terror incident on London Bridge. It happened for a reason. Now, you might not agree, and it’s horrific and blah, blah, blah, but it means that someone’s disaffected enough to do this thing.

39:23 Someone’s not feeling good. Someone’s feeling marginalized. The discussion wasn’t made. So yeah, I think you need to take note of that message and all these other radicals’ ideas and messages because it’s a sign that someone’s feeling this way, right? And there’s thought patterns out there, and maybe we need to engage. We’ve got to try to listen. We’ve got to try to understand. We’ve got to try to think about it seriously. I mean, just to dismiss everything out of hand. This is not to defend people that go around killing each other at all, but there’s a big difference between trying to understand it and apologizing for it or being sympathetic to it. It’s incumbent on us to understand it seriously. And just to say, there are a bunch of nutters that actually saves us the bother of thinking about it seriously.

40:06 So we can do better than that. And the other thing about groups like ISIS, this is a very uncomfortable thing to say, but there is a value even in them existing for liberal democracies because they force you, you see how they live. You see the barbaric nature of what they do in Syria and Iraq, and it forces you to take a side. It forces you to become politicized. It makes you realize the value, the amazing thing that liberal democracy actually is.

40:39 We’re so complacent about democracy. Democracy doesn’t mean anything to us anymore. It’s lost its vitality. People don’t trust it. Majority of people born in the 1980s don’t even think it’s essential to live in a democracy anymore. Liberalism needs and democracy needs to be under threat. I know that’s a horrible thing to say. It needs to be threatened because threats to something you cherish makes you value it, makes you appreciate it. So even the worst groups have potentially something very valuable for a liberal democracy, which is it forces us to think.

41:13 We’ve got to listen to what these people are saying. We’ve got to try to understand what’s motivating them, not because it means that we agree with them, but we need to understand them if we’re going to solve the problem, but also it politicizes us. I care a lot more about liberal democracy now, ever since I’ve seen what ISIS do than I did before they existed. Politicize me, you know, and that’s important. You’re a radical.

41:41 I’m actually thinking I’m a conservative. Seriously, seriously, I actually, like, I approach these groups with a really, really high degree of skepticism. And I’m always thinking, like, it’s natural in me. You know, I think I’m too old to be, I’m too old to be a liberal and radical now. I’m a conservative, but I see the value of radicalism for the health of our society.

42:05 And what worries me is that we have so little of it, so little of it now. People don’t dare to be different. And that’s the death of democracy and liberalism. Tell us about you first, before I want to hear about some of these other stories. What the hell is a nice guy like you from London doing in all this craziness? Did you ever think this was going to happen, that you’d be going into these groups, you know, with the last book and with this stuff? How’d you get into this gig?

42:34 It’s just, I never thought of it. I come from a really ordinary background. My parents aren’t academic people. Family’s not really university types. I was, I actually, when I was 18, I thought I was going to work in a supermarket. I was working in a supermarket, and I was going to go on the management training scheme and work in a supermarket.

42:53 That was my career. And I don’t know what happened. I just thought, I want to try and do something different. I want to get out there and see the world. I want to try and make something of myself. And I know this is really boring. I’m not a particularly intelligent person, but I work really hard. I think I outwork everybody. Maybe you, not including you, but I outwork nearly everybody else. I’m a really hard worker. And you can get so far, what do they say about persistence, perseverance? There’d been my watchwords. I just work as hard as I can to do as much as I can. And it’s got me so many things that I never expected. And I try to, I think coming from quite an ordinary background, I think it’s really helped me to get into the mindset of people. I think I can sort of see where people come from, frustrated people, people like where I came from, there really wasn’t much going on. There wasn’t much opportunity.

43:50 People didn’t have great aspirations for their lives. And I think that somehow has helped me to be able to get in with groups, to understand where groups are coming from, to understand frustration, you know, because I’ve also felt it a bit myself. So I hope that what that’s allowed me to do is to be a bit more natural with people and quite open with people and they sort of trust me to let them into their worlds. Well, building a rapport is so important for you with these people. And it’s everything. It’s everything. Without that, you have nothing.

44:21 Because they’re really trusting you with a lot of their inner secrets. Yeah. And it’s a great, it’s kind of a great burden, you know, because people really trust you when you’re working with them, you’re writing about them and you end up building up a rapport with them and you kind of like them because they’ve trusted you, but you also have to hold the line. You also have to be skeptical about the claims they make because your first duty is also to tell the truth, to tell people what, how you really understood their movements and their ideas. And so I’m so grateful that people trust me and take me in, but at the same time, I’m sure some of the people in that book won’t be happy with what I’ve said about them. Because I’ve got to try to be honest. All I ever promise people is I will be objective. I’ll be honest. I’m not here to screw you over. I’m not here to stiff you or get a scoop, but I will be honest. But it doesn’t mean you’re going to like it. Now, most people think they’re misunderstood. Most people think that journalists are unfair on them. So they believe that if you’re objective, that’s better than most journalism and they let you in. Okay. Very nice. All right. I want to jump back into some of these groups in here, but one definitely caught my attention, which was the psychedelic people. Because if I really am honest and look back, I wasn’t always wearing the three piece suit in the beautiful studio. We based the early part of the show on our ayahuasca experience.

45:40 Serious. Yeah. And we’ve been very open about psychedelics from the beginning. And to be honest with you, Jamie, I’ve had over 400 conversations with some of the most incredible minds in the world. And a lot of times the psychedelics come up. A lot of people, high performance people, a lot of people that are very learned, very aware, very conscious have had experiences with psychedelics. They just can’t talk about it because they’re in the closet, radicals again.

46:06 And we wouldn’t either if I was publicly funded or if I happened to work for the BBC, like other people in this room, they probably wouldn’t tolerate this. But since we’re independent, we can talk about it. But this show was really formed on an ayahuasca experience. I went on to talk about psilocybin experiences and my episode about DMT before and after just hit a million views last week, our single most watched episode. I know, crazy. And at the time, I’ll go even further, Jamie, just to get real with you. I had a daughter in a private school and she had said the word ayahuasca in the school and the nurse had called and they were contacting child services. And this might sound like a high quality problem in London, and I guess it is. But it was like they were actually calling us out as parents, getting child services involved. It was potentially going to be a problem. And I was taping the show on DMT and I had to make this call whether I was going to publish it or not.

46:56 And of course, being me, I said, fuck it. Publishing me dams. And I published it. Right. And this was, you know, and so we did it and it’s been part of our fabric ever since.

47:06 And I don’t think it’s a coincidence in our search for truth and humanity that we happened to bump into psychedelics. We talked about it a little bit last time with the Silk Road, which how you went into that. But it’s weird or not weird to me that this is a chapter in your book and one of seven or eight groups that you talk about. So tell me what you learned. Psychedelics is the big secret. People don’t want to talk about it. I couldn’t believe it when I got into this subject, how important it was historically for early humans. I mean, we’re not talking, we’re talking about humans having taken psychedelics for tens of thousands of years.

47:44 And in the last 30, not taking it anymore. It’s quite unnatural for us not to be taking some form of psychedelics. And I, it’s people don’t want to talk about it in public, but you get them onto the subject in private and you see the power that these drugs actually have. I was one of those people that didn’t really understand psychedelics. I just associated it with Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, the 1960s and Timothy Leary. And I think I had just, I’d just taken that lazy narrative in myself. Yeah. That’s just another drug.

48:22 It’s just another drug and it’s a really dangerous drug actually. And I think the word acid has done so much damage to psychedelics. That and magic in front of the word mushrooms. That’s because I sound like a joke. Exactly. And it’s, and it’s, you know, if it had been, if it had been talked about and sold slightly differently as a sort of spiritual drug and medical aid, rather than a recreational drug that you take at parties, which is the worst time possible to take psychedelics. It might’ve had quite a different history. Now my view is that in the next five years, I think of all the movements I write about in the book, in the next five years, psychedelics is going to grow more than any other one.

49:04 I think it is going to become as important in popular culture as it was in the late sixties. That’s how big I think the movement is underground. And it’s going to take not very much for it suddenly to rise above ground and people to start talking about it seriously. You’ve seen them, you’ve seen the scientific research on psychedelics, the things that it can do for anxiety, depression, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder. And there are, the power of these drugs is immense. The, the, I mean, I’m telling you, you know what I’m talking about. The number of people who look at us, look around you, look around outside tonight here in London, there’ll be thousands of miserable people getting smashed off their faces partly because they’re searching for something and they want to experience something where they want to change their consciousness and there’s something inside them they’re not happy about or they’re frustrated about or whatever. Millions of us are walking around carrying this weight, anxiety, depression, nerves. Psychedelics, if we could work out how to harness their power, if we could have some way that people could take them safely in the right environment, the magic that could do for our nation’s mental health, it’s, it’s, the potential is unbelievable.

50:23 And I was such a skeptic, I really was. And I, like I said, I’m a conservative. I go into these groups with skepticism. I come out still being worried that what’s going to happen is it will become so popular and the late sixties will repeat themselves. People will start taking them at parties and the results for some people will be catastrophic. If we can control that, but come up with ways that people can take them safely, it really could be quite remarkable.

50:49 Yeah, it’s interesting to hear you come to that conclusion from a completely different perspective. I’d never taken psychedelics before, but for that book, basically everyone told me, if you write a chapter and don’t take psychedelics yourself, no one’s going to take seriously. You have to take them. And I really didn’t want to, man. I don’t like taking, I don’t like losing control. Look, but in the end I was like, I’ve got to take them to try it. What did you take?

51:12 And what did you learn? Well, magic mushrooms. How much? Um, it was, oh my God, it’s 20 milligrams. Is that the right dose? It probably would have been enough for a three or four hour trip. Okay. Probably two grams of dried or maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Basically I’d been with this group, the psychedelic society who do these organized trips in the Netherlands where they take groups of 20 or 30 people and you take psychedelics all together and have a really like powerful experience with each other. And I went with them, but I stayed sober.

51:45 I watched them. I interviewed them, tried to understand where they were coming from. And then after that, the universal consensus was don’t be a chicken shit, take them, write about it. So I took the same dose as they took and then wrote about it. And you know, like there were a few hairy moments, but then I walked outside into these woods and I am really, I’m a restless person.

52:11 Now I’m like sitting down here for this long already, I’m getting restless. I always, I’m on the move constantly and I stood there and I looked out at the tree. I know what I sound like because when people were saying this to me, I thought they sounded mad, but I stood there and looked at these trees and they were just sort of gently moving. And I stood there for about three hours with my mouth literally hanging open, just staring. And I didn’t, there was, I just, I couldn’t move from the spot. I had to stand and nothing else in the world mattered apart from seeing these trees move. And it like cleared my mind out, you know? And if people could experience that safely, if they could, if we could work out how people could experience that safely, it’s an amazing thing. Yeah, I visualise the time in the future, 20, 30 years from now, where as opposed to, you know, grandma going to Spain for a two-day weekend, she would go to the spa, you know, up in, you know, the north somewhere out in Oxfordshire. And as opposed to having her sauna and her massage, she would go to the the psilocybin of the ayahuasca area and it would be a beautiful room, a great set, plants, quiet environment, low light, maybe a bed. And she would have her ceremony and she would come back from this vacation with a new ideas and a new mindset, kind of the way that vacations were engineered in the past, where you would go get some new

53:33 Information, see a different culture, maybe be a little uncomfortable for a while, but come back with this knowledge in a great controlled environment where it’s not illegal and why should it be. That’s what the psychedelic society put on. They put on these kind of monthly trips where that’s exactly what you can go and do. You’ve got to travel all the way to the Netherlands to do it. Some people go to South America and do it with ayahuasca retreats. But that’s exactly the kind of model that I could imagine in 20 or 30 years time, maybe even less time. I would hope so.

54:05 But you know that that could be remarkably powerful and that’s different from taking it at a party. I don’t want 15 and 16 year olds taking LSD at parties. That is a nightmare. But granny going to this amazing retreat or anyone, it doesn’t need to be people with mental health problems. All of us can carry weight with us. All of us can sometimes do with a different take on things. And that could be so powerful. It’s not going to work for everybody, but it’s definitely going to work for some people. Yeah. In Peru, they call it a plant medicine and a plant teacher. So again, language is everything in this world. And when you put this word drug on it, it goes into the war on drugs. And then it goes into a socioeconomic policy that the US is champion of. And that’s what happened in the late 60s. It was a counterculture movement, anti-war movement, anti-government movement. At the same time, a synthetic form of a psychedelic host, LSD was created. And that got out of control and it was quickly demonized as something that was associated with the anti-government movement. And it was used with all of their media to just made illegal and now made a horrible bad thing and all the propaganda to go with it. And we’re still, we still have a hangover from that. We do, we do. And the general view on psychedelics, the one that I had before writing this book is a good example of that. It’s just the assumption that these things are ridiculous and stupid and dangerous and that there’s nothing else beyond that.

55:31 That was my take. And that was very mistaken. And that’s the power of these ideas. It’s those ones on the outside that teaching people like me something. Now, I think there were worries in the 1960s about people’s wellbeing and health because people were taking it irresponsibly.

55:49 So psychedelics, like I said, I think are coming back just like they were in the late 60s. They’re going to be as big as they were in the late 60s. And I mean, if you look at the local, sorry, if you look at the recent global drug survey, they’re the fastest growing drugs that people are taking. And actually the dark net, I think is one of the reasons for that because you can suddenly get quite powerful psychedelics relatively easily, or at least compared to how hard it was five years ago. So they’re coming back in a big way. The scientific research is helping push it forward. The key thing is going to be not to make the same mistake as the late 60s, where it just turned into this recreational drug of choice for everybody. People start taking it irresponsibly. The government crashes down on it. And then it’s all of the benefits of psychedelics are lost for 30 years. We can’t make that mistake. Yeah. Or was that the mistake? Or is that just the narrative that you’re regurgitating that the government gave you back then?

56:42 You know, I mean, sure. There were cases of people taking too much LSD. The problem with LSD is it’s synthetic. So you actually take micrograms of that stuff. It’s very easy to overdose. It’s hard to do that with a plant medicine because you physically can’t consume that much. It’s an organic. You can’t overdose on mushrooms. I don’t think you have to beat your own body weight. Yeah. I don’t even think there is a death dose there. But if you want to take more than 10 grams, you know, good luck to you. Here’s the scary thing. Here’s the thing that people don’t like talking about when it comes to psychedelics. There is some research that shows people that take psychedelics do become more left wing. What’s that? What does that mean for us?

57:19 Well, you know, look, I could tell you all sorts of things about, you know, the psychedelic stuff, but it really gets you in touch with your humanity, with what’s important on this earth. And it rarely involves money, ego, and all these other kind of isolation wins that we are programmed to want. And I’m not saying those are conservative based, but it wouldn’t surprise me that it would just make you a bit more open minded. I wouldn’t necessarily say though, that it would push you politically one way or the other. Open minded, exactly. In fact, that’s exactly the right word because there’s those personality types, five big personality domains that people are measured on. It’s called the ocean scale. And openness is one of them. And people who take psychedelics tend to report increases in their openness score, more open to new experiences, to trying new things, to being in touch with the environment. And those things are generally associated with being left wing. Okay. So maybe it’s a fascinating area, actually.

58:17 It seems like I am one of the radicals in the book, because we talk a lot about this on the show. I’ve had Professor David Nutt in here. I’ve had a lot of the people that work on this, Rick Doblin from MAPS in the United States. Yes. And in Dr. Carhartt Harris, I mean, this continually comes up here. Dennis McKenna was here two weeks ago for this walk, and he’s the brother of Terrence McKenna. So the difference is I’m not an advocate. I’m not a psychedelics person. I’m someone that looks at this politically. I’m someone that’s saying, what value is this?

58:47 There’s a neutral outsider trying to understand these new movements. And even me, I was dazzled by the potential as a social level of something like psychedelics. Yeah, that’s really interesting. And of course, the last book you wrote when you talked about the Silk Road was actually a place where, in the dark net, you could actually purchase these psychedelics. And they were funny enough, one of the safest places you could, because they were peer-reviewed, just like Amazon.

59:11 And I may or may not have purchased psychedelic mushrooms on the Silk Road. Before or after speaking to me? Yeah, that time before? Yeah, well, did you? I may or may not have before or after. So in other words, I did.

59:24 And yeah, what a great place to do it, because there were people who cared about them, who sold them with integrity, with peer review, and again, amazing thing that the dark web gave us. And similar to the conclusions you came when you went and researched that. So it’s a shame that, because of the war on drugs, it’s considered a drug. It gets demonized because politicians make it convenient, and it gets locked in with the cocaine and the heroines of the world.

59:48 But in fact, there are some real medicinal things to it. So we have a mental health crisis. People forget that. Yeah. People are miserable. People feel isolated, atomized. Millions of people think there’s no purpose in life, especially with the end of organized religion, the crutch that people had to lean on, especially as they got closer to death, they were worried about what was to come.

1:00:10 We’re ignoring all of that stuff. It’s as if it’s not happening. It’s happening everywhere. And here is something that offers a way out of some of those problems. And we’d be stupid not to seriously look into it, not to seriously consider it. And that’s it. Again, radicals.

1:00:28 You might not agree with all of it, but they always have an idea that the rest of us, that deserve the rest of us to pay serious attention to. Great chapter. Really love that. Talk to me about crypto anarchists. I’ve had Andreas Antonopoulos on here twice, who is, he won’t want me saying this, but he is the Bitcoin guru.

1:00:47 He talks a lot about that currency. And the last time he was on here, you would probably find that episode really interesting. He came on to talk about cryptocurrency, but what we really talked about was humanity. And the fact that when our money, which is our buying habits, which is our consumption, isn’t monitored or controlled by a government, which is the way it is in a non-crypto currency, how all of a sudden we have our freedoms back. We have our, really, our humanity back. And it was really interesting to hear what he said. But I’m curious what you saw when it comes to, again, that’s what’s great about you. You kind of come in with this kind of objective view of what’s going on here. What can we learn from these people?

1:01:24 What can you tell us? I think that the winds are behind the radical libertarian, the technological changes that are coming that are already happening are going to help groups like the crypto anarchists. People are thinking that the radical right, the populist right, is on the march. I think the next 20 years, we’re going to see that they don’t have the answers to the problems of the future. And groups like crypto anarchists.

1:01:48 What is a crypto anarchist? Well, a crypto anarchist is essentially a libertarian, that was a great question, essentially a kind of libertarian in spirit, people that care so much about individual liberty and freedom and protection from the state and who believe that technology and especially encryption, mathematics and physics, is the key to human freedom. So having powerful encrypted communications so we can talk to each other without the government monitoring us, will allow us to, for example, create communities around the world that aren’t based on nation states, but rather are based on common interests that governments can’t really control.

1:02:28 Without them being able to monitor our communications, they can’t really control us. Using crypto currencies like Bitcoin, they can’t really tax us. And if governments can’t control the money supply, well, governments can’t really function, can they? And the idea that the crypto anarchists have is that we can use things like Bitcoin to create money supplies that are a system of currency that’s peer to peer, decentralized, not controlled by a government. And that is going to mean that governments as we know them won’t exist for long, or they won’t exist forever, because they won’t be able to raise taxes in the same way. They won’t be able to manipulate the money supply for their own political interests.

1:03:10 And people will be able to do a lot more peer to peer transactions with each other and create these communities of interest with each other. And who knows, maybe even create nations of their own where everything is done digitally. And to me, well, I think obviously some of it’s a little bit optimistic. Right? Yeah, is this reality? Some of it’s optimistic. I think the winds of change are blowing against the nation’s state as we know it. I don’t, everyone, every system of government that we’ve had before in the past, empires and, you know, religious empires, the Roman Empire, city states, the different things that were feudal systems, the different ways we’ve tried to live together, everyone at the time thought they were inevitable and thought they were inevitably a way of life that would last forever. And I think that’s a very important and then sooner or later they disappear. And what’s to say that why should the nation state this thing with borders and central governments and forced taxation and representative democracies with two parties that trade power? Why do we think those things are going to be around forever?

1:04:20 Why do we think those things would outlast history where every other system failed? I don’t think they will. And crypto anarchists say the answer is going to be to create new ways of governing ourselves that’s peer-to-peer and decentralized where we use technology to create our own little systems. Again, slightly optimistic, but I can’t see in the next 20 years, I see much more uptake of things like cryptocurrencies. I see it much harder for governments to continue to tax us. I see it’s much harder for governments to control their borders.

1:04:56 And I can see people’s confidence in nation states being chipped away at slowly. And I don’t know what follows, but at least crypto anarchists are coming up with something, something for us to think about. I mean, it’s inevitable that Bitcoin, versions of Bitcoin will be made by governments. Governments, the UK government will create its own cryptocurrency and it will be an official cryptocurrency and a lot of people will use that. So they will try to keep up.

1:05:25 That’s inevitable. Yeah, which in most people’s minds defeats the point of cryptocurrency. Which defeats the, I mean, it makes it very efficient. It makes it very smooth. It makes it elegant and very fast. But for the people that see Bitcoin as a tool of liberation and freedom, then it kind of defeats the point if the government, if a centralized government is using it.

1:05:46 So Andreas, his mother lives in Greece, and so she was actually liquidating her savings into Bitcoin. And she’s now probably a millionaire. Well, yeah, I mean, well that because Bitcoin went up of us, she was also managed to literally keep her savings from just going to zero. And also people in Argentina are embracing it too. When they just in America is I think probably the continent where it’s being picked up the quickest because they don’t trust the local currencies.

1:06:12 And when Brazil tries to introduce capital controls, businesses think, well, hang on a minute. I mean, I need to ship money overseas. I need to get money in. I don’t want to pay lots to do that. And why should the government tell me that I can and can’t do that? And so they’re going to Bitcoin because you can do it very quickly and easily. Yeah. If you go to Brazil, you’ll quickly learn that the Brazilian AI, you can’t take it out of the country. You can’t exchange before you get in the country. The government controls that currency. So and you’re like, well, why? And then wait a second. That means as a business person or even a tourist or anything, you can’t literally get your money out if you need to. You know what? This is, this to me is the great value of Bitcoin that I learned. Why? It suddenly makes you think, well, why do central banks control the money supply? Why can’t we have our own system of currency between us? Why? That’s what things like Bitcoin force you to do. Radicals. Yeah. The radicals, they make you say, yeah, go down a minute. Why do we have nation states with these borders? And before you, and it’s only the radicals that ask those big questions. And again, like, and that stimulates me that stimulates other people to think, yeah, you know what? This is nation states are simply commonly agreed myths. We all sign up to them, but they’re manmade things, which means they can

1:07:35 Come and they can go. And you’re right about the reason so many people are using Bitcoin and the values going up is because so many people see the great benefits to it. I went over to Prague to meet some of these crypto anarchists and I get to the airport in Prague and I get some, well, I bring some sterling over with me. Then I pay to get it changed into Karuna, the check currency, which with a massive slice for the company that runs that exchange, then I get to this crypto anarchist place and they don’t accept Karuna. They only accept Bitcoin. And I’m like, Oh man, you should have just wish I’d have known beforehand. Cause I got Bitcoin already. So I can then just go from London to Prague, don’t need to change one thing and use my money there as well. And I’m like, why am I paying these extortion exchange rates when all I want to do is exchange some assets from me to this guy? Yeah, not to mention, yeah. Why can’t we do that? Not to mention, you can do it with a Bitcoin wallet in a matter of microseconds. You don’t need a bank. It’s also not monitored, which people will say, well, I’m not doing anything illegal. What do I care if my bank monitors it overtakes a charge? Well, yeah, wait till you get a call in 20 years. And then they want to make it their business. So just having the privacy to make that transaction as well, which you wouldn’t have in a G seven currency through a bank. There’s real value in

1:08:53 That privacy and we’ll value that someday in the future when you don’t have your privacy anymore. I’ve changed my view on, on this question of privacy since we’ve, um, you say privacy, I say privacy since, uh, since speaking to you last, actually, I’ve become much more persuaded by the future proofing argument about privacy that actually, and it may be it’s the turbulence for the last couple of years, that the reason you build these systems and defend them and defend privacy and encryption for the individual is because you don’t know in 10 or 15 years whether you’ll need them. But the minute you lose them, they don’t come back.

1:09:33 So you have to defend them for the future, not just for the now. And now it’s okay to say, well, I trust the government. I trust this. I’m okay with it. I’m sure nothing bad’s going to happen.

1:09:43 That’s all fine. But seed your privacy and your liberty now. And in 10 years time, who knows where we’re going to be. And then once it’s gone, it’s not coming back. So that is, to me, has become in my mind, probably the most powerful argument and especially when writing about radicals. And I know how much some of these groups depend on things like encryption and privacy to do their activism. And if that all goes, a lot of the groups in this book can’t function anymore either. And where are all the new ideas going to come from? Yeah, I mean, I’ve had countless talks here about privacy. The Tor browser was introduced to me. Annie Michon, former MI6 agent, always sends me encrypted emails all the time. And she’s constantly encouraging me to get on that. And at first your reaction is, I have nothing to hide, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But as you listen more and more to them, you realize that when did Noah build the Ark before the rain? And it shows you that what they can do is say 15 years from now, they can go back and cherry pick any information they might want to use and potentially use it against you. And who knows where the tides will have changed. Maybe in five years from now, psychedelics will become so illegal that anybody ever using a Silkrow transaction will be jailed. And guess what? I’ve just admitted to it on air and now it’s public. And so who knows what these kinds of things happen.

1:11:05 You and me both. Right. Or better yet, someone might knock on their door and say, Brian, we’d like you to stop broadcasting. If you don’t, we’re going to put this information out. Your family’s going to be prosecuted. Your daughter’s going to this, this, and this.

1:11:15 So just close it down quietly and you’ll never even know. So just then you can take privacy to the nth degree. So it’s so important and it’s interesting to hear you change your mind on it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it was doing this work with the radicals, realizing that so many of them depended on that and realizing that actually the freedom and liberty and privacy go hand in hand, because often only when you believe yourself to be free, can you really be honest and can you really like when I was, for example, when I was in Croatia and some other countries that I’ve been to where I’ve suddenly realized I really don’t trust the government in this place.

1:11:52 And I want to start. I want to, I want to do my journalism. I want act. I want to speak to activists about the things they’re thinking and the ideas that they have. And without some form of secure communication, I wouldn’t dare speak to them. And then all that, all those ideas, all that stimulation, all the possibilities, which I think we need in society disappears because we self censor because we’re so afraid the government wouldn’t even need to silence us.

1:12:20 We’d silence ourselves because it’d be so terrified. Yeah, that’s the danger. That’s why I’ve changed my mind. That’s what Rupert Murdoch does. And we’ve had, you know, a guy in here talking about that. And he said, basically, that’s what Rupert Murdoch does. You’re so scared of what he could potentially do to you that even the journalists themselves censor themselves and they will not say things that they believe Rupert will not like. So he has this aura of fear around him. And you could argue politicians and police officers and all that stuff where they’ll just think, maybe I won’t push it with his media empire and I won’t mess with him.

1:12:52 So that’s another extreme example of getting self censorship because of a threat of privacy and exposure. And I’m not saying that we don’t need the intelligence agencies. I’m not saying we don’t need police to be able to have some forms of surveillance sometimes. The key thing, though, is just like how important it is to defend as a default the right for citizens to have encryption, Bitcoin, privacy enhancing tools. Governments have to work around those when they need to do some type of surveillance work. They should be able to do that. And you know, because there are bad guys out there that need to be stopped and the criminal justice system needs to work. But they have to do that working around this pretty strong defense of the right to privacy that all of us have. Yeah, not crash through it.

1:13:41 Yeah, through the justice system, etc. It’s nice when I hear companies like Apple and WhatsApp and all these people defending their encryptions. And I don’t know if it’s lip service to keep us as consumers happy. I frankly don’t care. But as long as they will try to uphold my rights above governments, and it doesn’t always happen. And we always hear of a few tech companies that kind of bowed. Beware of any bit. I mean, a lot of the encryption people will say beware of the big centralized companies, too, because they’re getting even more data than the governments are about you. And who knows what they might do in the future. So a lot of it again is like, yeah, it’s the reason Tor and Bitcoin are so powerful is because you’re not giving it into another company to defend your privacy. You are taking it yourself. I think that’s even more important because even the big companies, you know, we don’t know everything that they do either. Yeah, that probably be more dangerous than the governments. At this rate, what was I going to say? Tell me about radical love. Because I have this fixed version of my monogamous world that I live in. And it seems like you found a few other different kind of radicals here.

1:14:44 Yes, I did. Yes, I had to always put a little spice on it, don’t you, Jamie? I was just thinking the webcam girls and you always put a little spice. There’s always some kind of sexual angle in my books, isn’t it? I don’t know what’s going on. But you know, maybe why? Because sex is one of those things that everyone thinks about. But then, you know, people don’t write about it or talk about it in public. But it’s such an it’s such a central part of what motivates people to do things.

1:15:09 Yeah, there’s that quote by I forgot who it was. But they said, everything is about sex. And then he said, and sex is about power. But you know, he said all of our behavior, you know, is really about sex somehow. I think it’s I think it’s much more of a driving force of behavior than a lot of people dare to admit. It should be interwoven into so many of our books, our nonfiction books, explaining the world, our books about politics, about history, about society, about society should always have some sex in it, because it’s such an important thing, right?

1:15:47 What’d you learn? Well, there’s groups out there that take this so literally that they have created a whole philosophy based on this. So I went out to a free love commune in Portugal. It’s been around for 25, 30 years out there run by about 120, 130 Germans mostly that live there together. And it’s a polyamorous commune. So people aren’t in monogamous relationships, people have as many sexual partners as they want within the group. And they get together at the end of every day in a big circle, and they talk about it, and they’re open and honest with each other. And the idea is that this is the key for humans to live peacefully together. Because sexual jealousy, sexual tension, sexual desire that’s unexpressed, they believe, is the key to all the other problems in the world, to the violence, to the jealousy, to the rivalries. And they think they’ve come up with this kind of model, this unbelievable openness and transparency that allows them to overcome those weaknesses and actually live in harmony with each other and with the earth. Here’s the amazing thing about this commune. It’s called Temera. They are, most communes collapse after a few years. You hear these stories of people going out into the forest and they say, we’re going to live off grid, and we’re going to share everything. And they always collapse.

1:17:09 It’s because the leader usually goes to aggro and… It’s nearly always two things happen. It’s babies, all the women. There’s a leader that gets too powerful, and there’s some kind of sexual misconduct, or there’s financial troubles and someone’s pilfering money, or a group of idealists turn up and they become free riders and everyone argues about you not pulling your weight and the whole thing collapses. Nearly every commune fails for one of those three reasons.

1:17:35 Or the FBI comes in and shoots up the place. In very extreme circumstances, yes. And that’s partly because communes elicit quite a lot of distrust because people think there’s this weird group doing weird things and they can sometimes be quite closed. I’m not, God, I’m not for a minute saying that what happened in Waco is understandable at all. But the reason they can elicit a lot of distrust from outsiders is because people are going, what the hell are these guys doing?

1:18:02 Now, Temera has overcome all of those things. It hasn’t collapsed. In fact, it’s thriving. It’s flourished. And 25, 30 years later, they’re carrying on. They’re all delighted to be there.

1:18:17 I didn’t see people that were frustrated, angry, or unhappy. And they have become remarkably water sustainable. They create their own energy, their own food, and they’ve turned what was a, what was a really a dust bowl into this amazing nature reserve almost where wildlife’s coming back, this amazing, incredible trees and forestry that they’ve built. This is an incredible place. And according to them, the key to all of it is free love. That’s what holds it together.

1:18:53 And what do you think? And what are the dynamics of free love? What are the rules? How did they get it right when maybe other people haven’t got it right? And again, there’s large parts of California that are trying this as well and have been for a long time.

1:19:07 Yeah. And I mean, the thing is that there’s a lot more communes out there now than there were. There’s a, there’s been a huge increase in the number of what they call intentional communities, people that come together like this to live off and off grid, partly because they’re frustrated at how the world is and they want to try something different. And partly, and I felt it when I was there, I don’t understand how anything works, man. If there was some kind of catastrophic meltdown and I had to suddenly produce my own energy, catch my own food, I wouldn’t last five minutes because I don’t know the basics of how humans live.

1:19:41 I rely on other people to sort everything out for me. And I think somewhere deep down, that’s really unsettling, but not over there on Tamara. And the other thing is none of them was staring at their phones all the time, addicted to their smartphones because they’re thinking, I got to go out there and, you know, plow the fields or some kind of physical manual labor that gets me back in touch with the earth. Why have they, why do they steal? They say that it works because of openness, total honesty. They say without that honesty, without this kind of very, very carefully thought through way of always telling the truth to each other, the whole thing collapses. So they spend a lot of time working on that. There are jealousies, there are frustrations, you know, people have sex with one person and then another, and it causes a bit of a rivalry. Of course that happens, but they always get together in a big group and try and hash it out. They never force anyone to stay. Everyone stays of their own accord.

1:20:41 So there’s no coercion or anything like that. I think the key thing though, they’d like to get bigger. Here’s the problem. They’d like to grow. They’d like to set up loads of these because they actually think that they can set up these communes, identical versions of these communes all over the world. And it’s so spiritual. And they think that they’ll be able to connect to some kind of energy that will sort of tilt the earth’s energy onto a peaceful setting.

1:21:06 They have a very new age philosophy that actually there’s a level of consciousness that you can attain that can somehow affect everyone’s decisions. And that’s the point at which I kind of step off. And I’m like, I’m not sure. I’m not sure about this. Doesn’t every radical group feel that way?

1:21:20 From the psychedelic community to the crypto community to the meditation community, they all feel that if we get big enough, it’ll have what they used to call the Maharaja Effect. If 1% of people do it, it’ll chill everyone out with a new consciousness and a new kind of a relaxer. Yeah, but I think that I… You don’t buy it. I don’t quite buy it there because I don’t see the root. All I see is a hope. All I see is this kind of new age theory that there’s a level of consciousness that we don’t understand, but that if enough of us tune into it, we’ll be able to switch the earth’s consciousness.

1:21:52 To me, it’s a level beyond which I’m willing to go. My skepticism doesn’t allow me to to get beyond that, but I think they have a lot to teach us about honesty, to do with sexuality, about how you can live sustainably with the earth. We can learn lessons from these people. It doesn’t mean that I agree that we could all live in a free commune, but that’s the great value of certain types of radical groups is they offer this little example of life that you peer into, take a look at and think, shit, we could learn something from those guys.

1:22:26 But the key thing is they want to keep growing. There’s this problem though. They’re about 120 big, and for years they’ve been trying to grow bigger and they never can. And I thought, why is that? Why can they not get above 120?

1:22:41 And I think the reason is that… I did some research into this and it turns out there’s a long established theory about this number, 120. It’s called Dunbar’s number. You come across that? I was just thinking of it. I thought it was 150, but yeah.

1:22:54 Well, maybe it’s between 120 and 150. Humans cannot deal with more than 150 other humans without having to create hierarchies and structures, because our brains aren’t big enough to be able to negotiate all the different relationships. Yeah, we can’t just keep them. We can’t keep track of all these different individuals in our brains. Exactly. And this academic, Robin Dunbar said, this is why a lot of these communes, about 150 or 120, they split off into two.

1:23:23 Because we can’t get bigger than that and maintain a kind of informal, structureless community. Or intimacy. Or intimacy, exactly. Which you need for the communication to sustain. Exactly. So I think they are stuck at 120. Because that level of intimacy, that level of understanding, the level of we’re all in this together and part of a commune where we can have a big forum where we all talk to each other, that works at 120. It doesn’t work at 500.

1:23:52 So it’s not scalable. It’s not scalable. Because it wasn’t meant to be. So leave it alone. Stop trying to scale it. That’s what they should be told. I mean, I like the fact they’re trying, but then they believe they can get bigger. And that’s the other thing about radicals. They want to convert everybody to their way. They can sometimes be a bit dogmatic. Right. They can sometimes be a bit.

1:24:10 Closed to other ideas. Right. So they stick to their own thinking about something and they’re not open to other people’s ideas. That can be true. And that is the, I suppose, the dilemma of a radical. It’s that their single-mindedness, their narrow-mindedness sometimes, is what gives them the energy and the belief to change things and make the rest of us listen. But it can make them close to other ways of thinking. And if you become too dogmatic and too convinced of your own ways, that can also become quite dangerous because you can start coercing people. Radicals are our hope for the future. You know, they offer us this amazing opportunity for how the world might be. But some of them are quite dangerous and some of them can lead us into some pretty dark places too. But in my view, democracy and liberalism itself is unstable. It’s a dangerous system by its very nature. So I think we have to accept that.

1:25:05 Are you going polyamorous? Not right now. I don’t think my ego could handle it because the idea is that they want to smash down the ego. Well, right. That’ll do it. It’s like a psychedelic.

1:25:17 It is a little bit. Maybe a lot of these radical groups are about that. Smashing down the ego. Maybe. There is a bit of that, yeah. Although most groups, the irony is that a lot of these quite successful groups need an egotistical leader.

1:25:30 Mm. And that’s one of the reasons that most of the groups that I followed, there is an ego somewhere involved. Okay. Hence the movement might not exist unless there was. Okay. Well, if they got an Englishman talking about sex, then they have a wind.

1:25:45 Right? So that’s really good. Yeah, but not on your show, I’m afraid. I don’t think it’s so difficult. Maybe not. Maybe not. Talk to me about the human factor because in your previous book, and maybe this book too, you find that all these movements exist and they’re interesting and there’s radical ideas, but there’s also this element of being included, the social aspect of this gathering. Maybe it comes down to the Dunbar number where we need to be around 120 people.

1:26:10 And when it gets bigger than that, it doesn’t feel right. We need to be in a tribe. Right. A lot of these different movements, they, I was so lucky to spend time with, you know, one week it will be a group of radical anti-Islam campaigners. Then it will be a psychedelics group. Then the crypto anarchists, then the transhumanists and every single group, I saw similarities at the really basic human level. The need to be part of a group, the thrill of being involved with an outsider movement, changing the world, the enjoyment that comes with being people that are like you, having a shared subculture of which you’re apart.

1:26:46 The same reason I used to be a, an indie music fan and had my indie hair and all my friends had indie hair and we’d go to indie clubs. We were part of a tribe and it was those bits of it, the human elements of it that often kept the group together, you know, and they are as important as the ideas. So for example, I spent a year traipsing around Europe with anti-Islam campaigners, with Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defence League. And people don’t understand the appeal of these groups and they think they’re just a bunch of angry racists.

1:27:21 And there are some angry racists in there, don’t get me wrong. But once when you’re inside the group and you’re part of it, you see a very different side of it. It’s exciting, it’s thrilling, it’s fun. You’re part of a team, the world’s against you, but you stick together, you get this very tight bond. I was traveling across Europe doing demonstrations with these guys, right, and we were getting bottles thrown at us from anti-fascists. We were being, they were charging us with the police trying to block them out of the way. We were being chased in taxis. We had police guards at our hotels because we were being followed around by anti-fascists that were threatening to kill us. And I’m telling you, that’s more exciting than sitting around on a Saturday on your own, in the part of the country where maybe there aren’t that many brilliant jobs around and nothing much is going on. And you have this community of people of which you suddenly feel apart. That is so powerful. And people forget that about these groups, you know, like it’s fun and exciting to be part of them. And I know that from having been in them for so long, following them around. And if you don’t understand that, and you don’t see that human side to it, you completely misunderstand what the group’s about. Right. But then is it just about the inclusion? And what can we conclude from that, that these people are normal just like us, that we could be one of them, or that not everybody in these radical movements really believes all the

1:28:50 Radicalness in there? I think that, yeah, I think that’s, I think a lot of it’s going to come down to a recognition that if there are other ways that people can feel like they’re part of something and feel like they belong to a movement, there are ways to divert them. There are ways for them to express that need in other ways. You know, there’s no coincidence that a lot of the radical right groups came directly out of football hooligan fans. And their love of going overseas with England and watching England play, because it was a big piss up with a load of mates.

1:29:26 And you know, some of that then comes down to if you’re if you’re being really tactical about it, with the police, for example, when the police really overly aggressively police them, and really like, beat the shit out of them or chase them around that only serves to harden their view, to make them more angry to make them believe that the world’s against them. And they will get more recruits because those recruits will see that there’s this group of people being attacked by the police. I don’t think the English Defence League, this group that was set up in 2009, by Tommy Robinson, would have even existed. Had it not been for the way that the first two or three demonstrations were policed. If they’d have been softer, nicer, more respectful, I think the whole movement might have been nipped in the bud. And it’s the same thing with the anti-fascist groups that go out there to fight with them. And the anti-fascist groups just call them a bunch of racists and a bunch of hate filled fascists, and try and fight them, throw bottles at them. And all that serves to do is make them angrier, make them more hardened, make them more determined. And it doesn’t actually deal with the problem what the anti-fascist are trying to do, which is to stop them. In fact, it fuels them all. And there is this strange symbiotic relationship between the radical right and the anti-fascist that I’m not like, I’m not even 100% convinced that either side would like the other side to disappear. Because they kind

1:30:51 Of need each other to fight each other. And I know of examples where they actually have been in communication with each other to tell the other side where they’re going to be so they can have a punch up. They love it when the anti-fascist turn up and the anti-fascist love it when the right, the radical right turn up. A bit like Liverpool and Everton football fans, they love to hate each other, but they kind of need each other. And unfortunately, what that does is it doesn’t actually deal with the problem. It doesn’t actually make the groups go away.

1:31:21 It just keeps the whole thing rolling over. I don’t know whether I have answers to the problem. I don’t have answers or solutions to how you deal with these issues. But I think that the first step is figure out where they’re coming from, understand what’s motivating them. And it’s not what people think. Communicate with them, listen to them. And it’s maybe you’re not even listening to their opinion on the issue. Maybe you’re just hearing the pain they’re going through or what’s happening in their life and then treat them with respect from a policing standpoint. And listen to, I think, I think above all else, I’d like, and the whole argument of the book is all the different radicals out there, treat them with a bit of respect.

1:31:56 You disagree with them strongly. You profoundly disagree with them. Listen to them, though. Treat them with some respect. Don’t just scream them down. Don’t just shut them up by calling them or racist or fascists or in other cases, you know, maniacs or lunatics. Treat them with a bit of respect. And I think if we had done that a bit more with some of the radical right groups out there, actually listen to them. We’re talking sometimes here about some of the poorest people in society, some of the white working class who’ve got who’ve left school at 16, had very few chances in life, get sneered at and mocked by people who are far more fortunate than them.

1:32:36 They go out on the streets to express themselves politically. We may not like it. We may find it offensive. But if we’re liberals and if we’re Democrats, we should at least welcome the fact that these people are on the streets saying what they care about. And we owe it to them and to democracy and to liberty to listen to them with a little bit of respect. Disagree with them.

1:33:00 Say they’re wrong. Say you think that they’re mistaken, but at least treat them with a little bit more respect than we do. That’s an amazing message. And I’m so glad you came here to tell us that. It will be a, you know what, that will really offend some people just to say that. Yeah, I know. Which is crazy because we’re talking about being liberal and trying to understand, listen to ideas. Everyone says, I love radical ideas. Yeah. Only, but only when I agree with them, you have to defend the people that you disagree with. Otherwise the whole thing’s meaningless. Yeah. Yeah. You’re getting me thinking about that. I’m shouting at you like you’re disagreeing with me. No, I love it, but I am. It animates me because it infuriates me.

1:33:39 Because as humans, we’re always thinking the same thing. Like, yeah, they’re radical, but if it’s an idea I like, then I will listen to it. And you know, here I am talking about radical ideas like psychedelics. And yet when, you know, something else I don’t like, I don’t want to hear, I don’t want to engage in. And whether that means a terror incident on London Bridge from a Muslim extremists, I’m of course putting them into the terrorist zone.

1:34:01 Whereas probably by what you’re saying, I should go in and listen to them. Why did they do this? Why were they feeling this way? What made them do this crazy thing? I was thinking about it. It was four dudes on a Saturday night and they went in to do this where they were certainly going to die. That’s motivation. You might not agree with it, but it’s important enough to probably sit down and say, what made you go to this extreme?

1:34:21 Let me listen to you. Let’s see if we can figure this out. Maybe a little bit more. And you’re right. A lot of people aren’t going to like that.

1:34:27 Well, they’re not going to like that. I mean, they’re definitely not going to like it with ISIS because I mean, there are some groups with whom you will struggle to do that. There are some groups who will not talk to you, who will not listen to you, who cannot be reasoned with. And I think, send you in. Well, I don’t know. And I wonder whether I want to, I mean, I thought about it, but I think you have. Yeah. But I realized that if I went in there, they just kidnapped me and killed me. But there’s no, because there are some groups that you cannot really reason with easily. They might be one of them. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand them. I think we still got to understand them. But the key thing I think is this.

1:35:07 The society which says, you know what, those radical right wing guys that we don’t like, but we are going to listen to them. We’re going to let them speak. We’re going to treat them with respect. That’s the society in which the psychedelics movement also gets the chance to speak. Because that’s the society which welcomes new ideas. And the society which says, oh, those radical right wingers, we need to silence them, we need to sneer at them.

1:35:35 That’s the society where all the different ideas that you care about constantly get talked away and ignored and silenced. Liberals are really bad at understanding that point. They want to sometimes only listen to the radicals they agree with without realizing you’ve got to defend every radical movement. You’ve got to defend the notion of radical thinking because sooner or later, it will be your radical idea that they’ll come and shut down next. You know, I know, I know. Tell me a bit more about you. This is a beautiful book, the beautiful book cover. It’s read, like I said, before we started. I mean, you can send this to your mom and say, mom, I made it. How does Jamie become Jamie? Was there something you talked about outworking the competition? Was there something you changed about your life five years ago where you said, if I start thinking this way, if I start waking up this way, if I start making myself right every day this way, where you said I become more successful?

1:36:31 Dude, you have some really, really inspirational people on this show and they have amazing stories. But there’s space for quite mundane people like me, too. You know, the people that I don’t have a magical moment. I don’t have a special story, you know, a revelation or an epiphany. I don’t get up at three o’clock every morning and I don’t do those. I’m just someone that works really hard, an ordinary person that works hard and believes that you can with like perseverance and persistence, you can make something of yourself. And I have knocked back. Things don’t always go well for me. I don’t, you know, not everything falls in my lap. I don’t even own a house in London. I can’t afford it. But I work so hard. I’m so motivated to, basically, I’m a bit of a workaholic. And people don’t like to admit that success sometimes does come down to you being a workaholic. And unfortunately, some of your other things in life do suffer a result of that.

1:37:31 But you focus on a goal and I kind of become obsessed. I’m highly competitive. I’m one of those people that’s like really friendly and nice to people. But then deep down, I’m like, gotta beat them. Gotta beat that guy. I’m like, I want to be better than him. Oh, lovely to meet you.

1:37:46 No, no, good luck. Good luck. I’m gonna beat that guy. So I’m one of those people that’s highly competitive on the inside, but tries to hide it. I’ve given it away now, but never mind.

1:37:56 Well, that’s why you create such great work. That’s it. That’s it. Competitive and workaholic. There’s like this boring story, man, but for a lot of people who don’t have these remarkable gifts, that’s what it takes. Yeah. Well, I mean, you didn’t sit around and opine from your flat in Stoke Newington. You went out to the Paul L’Oréamorous people and whatever you did, there’s none of my business. You took the psychedelic mushrooms, you hung out with the transhumanists. You know, you did all that stuff and that’s a whole lot of hard work and it shows up in the stories you write because they’re so real. I think that’s why I love your books and I love your stories because you’re telling me these real stories of these individuals that are unique and flawed and courageous and all that stuff. And it really brings home these points. And thank you for saying that about hard work, which is not popular in this country, especially as an American. I get told that that’s just the same old American line, hard work. And by the way, I don’t necessarily think Americans work hard. They just always talk about how hard they work.

1:38:48 Right. But there’s something to be said for that. And I appreciate you saying that because it’s not a popular thing. It’s not, is it? No, it’s not. Especially not in this town. We don’t talk about it and it’s almost like a dirty word. Yeah, it is. Workaholic. But I’m sorry, I’ve turned workaholism into a positive. I’d rather be addicted to working than addicted to booze because I produce something. So we find our addictions. The key thing is finding an addiction that’s productive. You know, and to me, I find it in work and I enjoy beating people at stuff. Maybe it’s because I’ve got a brother that’s a very similar age to me. And we just used to fight and we used to play against it and we just used to desperately want to beat each other at everything. And we’ve both turned in. He’s a personal trainer. You know, we’ve both turned into these unbelievably competitive people, him of the body and me of the mind.

1:39:38 I love it. I’m about to have my second son and the brothers are going to be a year apart. So I can only imagine maybe those guys are going to be so successful. Yes. I was going to have a beautiful book like this. They’re going to send me in the 35 years. What’s the next book? I mean, I’m obviously encouraging you to go underground and undercover into ISIS. You know, if you get killed, well, but you might make a great book. But what’s next? Because you must be getting ideas or how do you come up with the next idea? And then also tell me about a little bit about your BBC documentary as well. But first, the book. Well, I’m working on it at the moment. I’m trying to think about it. I’m trying to work out what my role is, like what helpful role do I play in society? And picking up on the theme of radicals have been kind of toying with this idea of writing a book about truths that cannot be publicly stated. What are the things that people say in private? Things that people believe? Difficult truths people say and believe themselves, but that no one dares say publicly. What are they? They exist. Oh, yeah. Why can’t we speak?

1:40:44 Why can’t we say what we think in public? What we say in private? And is there is there a reason for that? And is there self censoring? Exactly. Can I play I believe so strongly. I’m so what I get so worried about self censorship for some reason. And maybe it’s because I feel it. I have ideas sometimes and I want to tweet them out or post them and I’m just terrified. I’ll offend and I might people I’ll get fired or I’ll have complaints about me. And I think, God, but if everyone’s doing this, then people aren’t. We’re not being honest about what people really think. And there’s real dangers to that. So I’m thinking, is there a case for me to play the kind of sacrificial role and putting myself out there to say some really uncomfortable things? And because the the benefit of radicalism, I think, in a way is, is that people go out there and say those unspeakable truths, those awkward, difficult ideas, and maybe they get shot, shot, shot down or shut down. But they create a little bit of window of space for other people to follow them and say something that they believe. You know, like Tim Farron recently, the liberal democrat leader who said we should legalize marijuana. And everyone said, Oh, crazy, it’s ridiculous. It’s a ridiculous, it’s never going to work. The next guy that comes along and says that people won’t say that because Farron took the hit. There’s a role for those radicals. And I’m wondering whether I write about people, I write about their stories,

1:42:09 I tell their stories, but I’m often I have this easy position of being neutral and saying, I’m just telling the story. I never put my own view out. Maybe I should. There’s a lot of stake in the world at the moment. Maybe I should the next book I need to be a bit braver, put my nail my own colors to the mast, say what I really think about stuff.

1:42:28 You know, and what was it? Was it Winston Churchill? I mean, I’m always quitting Winston Churchill, but he said, you’ve never offended anyone in your life. That means you’ve never done anything worthwhile. You’ve got a kind of sometimes upset people to help the world evolve. And so maybe my next book is going to be something a little bit more controversial, a little bit more about my own views. We’ll see. Good. I like that. And I think it’s important to go out there and take the hit. And it’s not like I do that every week here at London Real, but we’ve done stuff in the past, like the DMT episodes and all this stuff where you just kind of throw it out there. And I think part of my job every week here is to try to offend half of my audience and to put something like I like that you’re talking about defending these skinhead guys that go out and slant all these racist things. And while I like the fact you’re saying, well, maybe we should listen to them. And that’s going to offend a lot of people. But if it allows them to consider this idea of understanding radicals, then it’s done a good job. So you have to do this. Like offending people has somehow become like this cardinal sin.

1:43:31 You’re right. Not illegal. But offending is it’s okay to be offended. And it’s sometimes quite important to be offended. Yeah. Like you need to have thick skin in a liberal society.

1:43:42 You need to deal with being offended. And there is a benefit sometimes to being offended forces you to think, yeah, I can’t bear the idea that we’re heading towards a society where no one ever dares offend anybody else. That would be the most lifeless place, the most uninteresting, tepid society we could possibly imagine. And I’ll tell you something, we’re never going to survive long if that’s where we’re heading. Yeah, you’re so right. No radicals around. They say back to that psychedelic experience, they say there’s no such thing as a bad trip. Like when you have something happen, you’re just learning at a rate that you’re not accustomed to. And so that’s what I say about the psychedelics. And same when you get offended. At first you’re like, ah, ah, and then you react and think about it. And why did I feel that way? Why? And then you grow. So I agree. Yeah, you want to live in a place where you’re being challenged and offended by ideas and by behaviors that make you reevaluate things. So let’s hope that continues. When you think of the word success, who comes to mind?

1:45:06 What’s been the reaction to this book? And tell me more about these two BBC documentaries that there’s a camera in the studio filming right now. So if you’re watching this, there it is over there. Yeah, it’s going to be part of that. So what been reaction so far to the book? I know it’s early on.

1:45:21 And how did these documentaries come about? Why did you do them? And I’m trying to put this company out of business. You try to put the BBC out. And it’s not helping when you know you’re helping them. BBC does some good stuff too. Right. Come on. Come on. How’s the book going so far?

1:45:38 Well, I think it’s too early to know. Like for the Darknet, for example, it took two or three years for it to, I think, really bed in. And the Darknet became like required reading for people interested in the internet now. It’s amazing. I get people talking, coming up to me all the time, talking about it. It took a long time for that to happen. So I think it’s far too early to say, because my aim is that actually in three, five, seven, 10 years, people are going to keep looking back at this book and being like, holy shit. He called that. He said that was going to happen.

1:46:09 He was talking about these groups. So my measure of success for that is that it gets people being a little bit more open to radical ideas, being willing to listen. And that isn’t going to, I’m not going to know that yet. It’s only been out four weeks. I’m going to know that in a year or five years even. I mean, so we’ll see. We’ll see. Although the Guardian said that Martin, if it had been written by Martin Amos, Martin Amos would have made the characters come to life better. Well, no fucking shit. It’s Martin Amos. Of course he would have done. Come on, give me a chance. So just say that because you’re at the Telegraph. Yeah, exactly. It’s just jealousy and bitterness. So we’ll see with the book. I’ll know better in a couple of years.

1:46:52 Okay, good. Let me tell you about the documentary. When is this when I can’t say too much, though, because they’re not coming out for another month. I know, but I can tell you that it’s a documentary series about it’s about technology and how technology is changing the world. Was is this an exciting thing to be part of a documentary? So exciting. I mean, they’re filming you, you know, in all these different continents, following you around, doing things. It’s hard work. It’s exciting. Is it a different message than what’s in the book?

1:47:19 Or is it just more personalized? What do you expect it to be? It’s a documentary about technology and how technology is changing the world and the effect it’s having on people and industries and governments. It’s really kind of far reach, really far reaching. It’s I’ve never been so exhausted. I didn’t know how tiring television was sitting around writing a book, you know, you’re chilling out, you’re having a coffee. It’s all nice and easy. It’s hard work.

1:47:45 It says the word about like, yeah, no, but I mean, you’re working at your own pace. But let me tell you when you’re you’re like filming 14 hours a day without breaks and you’re always on tenterhooks and you suddenly I mean, I’ve never worked so hard in my life. And it’s such a different medium television. Like if I turn up to a scene with my notepad and you know, I’ve got my leisure. I get to capture things and I get to remember it afterwards. If you don’t get that shot on the camera when it happens, it didn’t happen. It literally didn’t happen. No one’s ever going to know. It’s so the stakes are so much higher on television and that makes you so much more nervous all the time. I’ve never been so stressed. I’ve never but it’s really exciting man, because you have a good day when you’re filming the end of the day that beer that are you just feeling so good because you got it in the can as they say. Yeah, and it’s a great feeling.

1:48:40 So I’m really excited about it. That’s good. Wait till somebody else edits your video and just is laid on the cutting room floor and you’ll be like, what about that moment? I couldn’t you put that in and I’ll be like, well, this wasn’t interesting. Yeah. The footage of you in the train, uh, watching the scene go by was better, but no, look, I think it’s amazing.

1:48:58 You’re doing it. I think when you change the medium, we also change the message. You change the audience. This experience will probably change the way you write and document and journalize hopefully for the better. Um, but these days to get into certain people’s heads, they need to see it on video. I agree. So, and you’re so right. I think I’ve learned so much already about it. It’s going to change my writing. It’s going to change how I do things. Uh, and like for me, it’s so important to keep throwing yourself into new challenges. So when I had this opportunity and I realized how difficult it would be and how much work it would be for a while, I thought, Oh, I’m not going to do it. It’s too much. You know, I thought that is the worst attitude you could take. If I’m scared by this and I’m nervous about it, surely that’s I’ve got to evolve. That’s what I’ve got to throw myself into the thing that makes me nervous and worried. Otherwise I’m just going to tread water on my whole life. As we say in London Real academy, go to where the fear is. That’s exactly where to go. Always. That’s what I did. I, that was literally my thought process was if I’m afraid of this, that’s where I’ve got to go. Okay. Well, good. I can’t wait to see this come out.

1:50:07 And once the, uh, the BBC slices and dices it and bastardizes your vision and message, I encourage you to take the knowledge that you’ve gotten from these documentary filmmakers that are working with you and to produce your own videos in the future. And that way for the next five, 10 years, you’re producing these regular snippets of what you see. And when you do that, after you’ve learned all this IP from them, that’s when I think you’re really coming to your own and you start producing a lot, large quantities of amazing content from you documenting these adventures. So I’m pushing you to go into video production. That’s another fear factor for me. Yeah. And that’s what you got to do. Yeah. Um, what would be, we’d be surprised to learn about Jamie something you do in the off hours that we would just be like, I would have never thought he did that. I’m addicted to like weightlifting. I love weightlifting and the, I know I don’t look like it, but if I took my top off, you would be, I’m not going to do it, but I love it. I love it. I like, if I don’t go at least twice a week, I get really anxious.

1:51:07 And so I have to do like, I’m really quite good at squats. I’m addicted to doing so. I hate squats, but I can’t leave the gym without doing squats. And I love that feeling when your muscles are killing you the next day. Nothing is better than walking around aching. And so the gym, I’m there for like two and a half hours each time. I just, I don’t know what it is about it. And I, and I meet so many people that they say, do you lift? Like that’s the thing, isn’t it? Do you lift?

1:51:33 It’s, it’s the, do you even lift bro? That’s the internet. Do you even lift? It’s so addictive though, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s once you’re into it, it’s weird. And no one would ever think it looking at me that I like, I love lifting weights. I wouldn’t think that now.

1:51:46 Let’s get you lifting every day is what I’m thinking. No. Yeah. I like to know, but I know what you mean when you first start lifting, first of all, I experienced with lifting when I first started lifting, I didn’t realize it was a skillset. I just thought it was just move the bar and move the bar. Technique. Yeah. Technique is everything. And then the learning curve and learning how to get the most out of yourself and learn to be focused.

1:52:06 Then the soreness at first people are like, Oh my muscles hurt. It’s like, that’s not pain. That’s something different. That’s actually a reminder to you that you had done some serious work and then you get addicted to being sore. And then when you’re not sore, you’re like, what the hell am I doing? I did work hard enough. Exactly. I know.

1:52:22 What have I been doing? Nothing. So you get into it. And it’s so true. And legs are great because it’s the bigger the muscle group, the bigger the pain and the endorphin rush.

1:52:30 So after a great leg session, you know, I used to time all my first dates for Wednesday evening. It’s a true story because I do leg day on Wednesday and I would get to the date and I was the coolest guy in the room because I had just gone all out in the gym, I got the shower and I’m coming in and I got this. That feeling when you, I can’t explain it enough. That feeling when you walk out of the gym, having known you pushed your limits, it’s just, and then you walk, I don’t know, like even just walking around the streets, you just feel like you’re a bit taller, a bit like you got a bit more in your stride and you feel like you can take, take it on. And that helps, that kind of helps in all your other things that you do as well.

1:53:09 I recommend it so highly. I never thought I would. I always love playing football. I never thought I’d get into weights. I never understood people that did, but now I see it.

1:53:19 I really do. You know what I just thought of? Our most popular guest of all time on London Real is Dorian Yates, the six time Mr. Olympia, who basically had the greatest developed physique in the world from 1992 to 1997. Something that would freak people out when they would see it.

1:53:35 You know what he was? A radical. And at the time, nobody was lifting weights. Nobody would go to the gym. No one would do any of that stuff, but Dorian did. And sooner or later, some people noticed him like, wait a second, interesting. What he does, that looks interesting.

1:53:48 Let me try that. Let me do that. Oh, you can lift weights and get better sports performance. Oh, wait a second. And that’s the idea that came from the radical. Now you’re doing it.

1:53:57 Anyways. Interesting. Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s just, it’s just, um, one bit of it with, with lifting is, uh, is, is how it clears your mind out. You know, I don’t think people realize it’s a bit hypnotic. Uh, and that, that clears your mind out. And when I’m struggling with writing and I was getting writer’s block and things aren’t coming out, get down the gym, empty my mind, work at workout, not thinking. And something comes in. You need, we need in this life to be able to clear out our minds. And that’s what some of the psychedelic stuff is about too. And weightlifting does that so beautifully. So it helped me write that book. That’s very interesting. And I’m not surprised. It gets you out of looking at your phone and your push notifications and your media back into your body and your humanity and your reason for being here, which is like an Alex do as well. At my gym, there’s really bad connection to 4g and I’m so grateful. Be there with the workout. Yeah. Be present. Yeah. Um, Jamie, I always ask a few people, uh, the people here at the end, a few questions I’m going to ask you if you can make a phone call to the 20 year old Jamie apartment and give that young man a bit of advice was on his way to a successful career in the supermarket, I believe. Uh, or maybe that was later. Um, 18. Uh, what would you tell him? Do you remember last time I was here, you asked me that and I said, I wouldn’t tell him anything. Okay. Right. I think I would tell him

1:55:23 Something though. And I think I would tell him, don’t be afraid of upsetting people and offending people. Don’t, don’t, don’t worry about doing things that other people might really disagree with. And that’s a really hard message when you’re 20 because you’re obsessed with what other people think about you and the older I get, the less I care about what other people, people that I care about. Yeah. And my peers and my, but like, I know that I will offend some people doing some of this stuff. That’s okay. And I would love to be able to say to that 20 year old, not too much. I don’t, I think it’s important to learn as you get older, to learn on the journey. Um, but just if you don’t just 10%, just, just be willing to be a bit more offensive, a little bit more outspoken, a little bit braver, that kind of multiplies.

1:56:21 So it’s so by the time you’re 35, every year you’ve been 10% a bit more. By the time you’re 35, you’re going to be a way more interesting person. That’s great advice. Second part of that question, best advice you ever received could be about journalism, reporting, film and video. I don’t know what your parents said or whatever a mentor. I’m curious if there’s something on writing because a lot of people are curious about that, but it doesn’t have to be.

1:56:49 I mean, I’ve got a very, very, I mean, I mean, I’ve got a very boring one, which was someone told me you got to write a book. They said, you’re the next step for you. This was six years ago. The next step for you is write a book because your career is not going to progress unless you do something like that. And it was in a hotel in like Dubai or somewhere weird. And that just, some reason that just was the right thing at the right time. You know, sometimes it doesn’t, people probably said that to me a year before and it didn’t work and they would have said it a year later and it didn’t work. It’s something at that moment when certain bits of advice just lodge in your head and that one did write a book and it just kind of echoed around in my mind for a very long time. I mean, the other thing that with writing that I’ve been advised and now I always use is you got to see it as a craft. Think of it a bit like being a carpenter.

1:57:41 Like you don’t just, people think you can just turn up and just be an amazing writer, but it’s not. It’s also like carpentry. Like you’ve got to learn tricks of the trade. You’ve got to study it. You’ve got to be serious about it, you know, and then you learn how to improve. So you can always improve and there don’t, you can always learn something and it is a craft writing. So you might have great natural talent, but you can always learn from other people.

1:58:09 And there was someone else that, they didn’t give me this advice, but I took it from them who actually, funnily enough, it was someone who was the former director of GCHQ, the government’s spying agency called David Obend. And what I noticed about him is he was one of the most successful people in government. I mean, he became the director of GCHQ, the unbelievably clever guy, PhD in mathematics. And me, about seven or eight years ago, me and a colleague wrote a paper with him about social media and intelligence work. This guy knew more than me and my other 25 year old mate.

1:58:51 Could tell you like, what could we teach him? Nothing. He’d been the head of GCHQ. And yet he would sit there and listen to our arguments seriously, respectfully. He’d ask really basic questions that I would be embarrassed to ask because I think I look stupid, but he would just ask them.

1:59:10 And he’d really like respect us and listen to us. And I was like, man, if someone like him who’s been at the top of his game, so successful, he’s willing to listen to a pair of people in their 20s, arguing with him about intelligence work, his profession, I can learn from that. He made me realize you can always learn from someone else coming in and giving you advice. You shouldn’t be arrogant about it. You shouldn’t think, oh, I know better than you.

1:59:38 I’m not going to listen to you. You don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s too young. You don’t have, and that too many people do that. He didn’t. And I was like, oh man, you can always learn from someone. I just got to listen to them.

1:59:47 It’s a really good observation. Last part to that 20 year old that’s watching us right now, the one that maybe belongs to one of these radical groups. It could be in China, South America, Argentina, Greece, who knows Russia, America, and they want to, they want to do something to change the world. They want to go ahead and give us some learnings or make a difference. What advice do you give to them? Firstly, you have to take risks.

2:00:16 You have to be willing to make sacrifices and sometimes put yourself on the line. And that’s what we saw. That’s what we saw in Egypt with the uprisings. People have to go out there and put themselves on the line. And it’s a lot of hard work. People don’t realize everyone in that book, they work so hard. Their personal lives take a hit for it. They spend hours and hours and hours in their own time organizing things. And a lot of it’s really boring and mundane organizing demonstrations and events. So you have to do a lot of work and take some risks.

2:00:52 And the second thing is think about the timeframe. Things rarely change over the course of six months or a year. But if you start thinking 20 years how things might change, you can make a difference. I had a guy named Master Mantek Chia in here. And I didn’t even know much about him when I booked him. And he’s kind of into qi. And he’s been teaching kind of these Chinese thought processes and about energy and organs and sexual stuff and all these things. And so he sat down and he dropped some crazy science on me for like two and a half hours. And at the end he said, Brian, he said a movement or a business, he said, it’s like a child.

2:01:33 He said when it’s five years old, you can barely say all the words. When he’s 10 years old, still maturing, you know, 15, 20 years old. He said that’s when it starts becoming something. And he said, and yet people think that these movements and businesses are going to have overnight. He said you have to earn this trust. It’s so true. But people think in time frames when they’re getting involved in political activism of six months and they get disheartened.

2:01:58 When things haven’t changed after six months. No, you’ve got to think 10 years. What’s that great? There’s a great Chinese proverb of like the best time to plant an oak tree is 100 years ago. The second best time is now. You know, and that’s the thing, you’ve got to start somewhere, but you’ve got to realize that it’s going to take you a long time to do it. But if you keep that in mind, you can really make a difference.

2:02:21 Yeah, I go to Barcelona like once a year, and I go to see La Sagrada Familia, this church that is still under construction from a guy that started building it in like 1914 in the middle of a field with sheep running around. And you look at the whole structure now and you see this old black and white pictures of him building like one facade. And you realize that he realized that at the tops, he would have two facades done. And there was this whole grand plan. And he always said, my benefactor isn’t in a rush, which was God. And so he had this 120 year plan that was going to outlive him and he didn’t care. And it always when I come back, I always think about London Real and I’m just thinking, I got that hundred year plan, like I say, is the legacy.

2:03:05 And also it’s a vision like that, that keeps you even honest, because that can’t be about your ego, can it really can’t be about you letting people see what you did. It has to be bigger than even you. And then maybe it’s pure in that way, because it’s an idea that you want to see flourish. So I always try to come back to that and like, what am I trying to do here? To be honest, Jamie, I’m trying to teach people the art of listening is what I’m trying to do, which I believe is a little bit of what you’re trying to do with this book, as in people have just plugged in now for two hours for you. They’ve gotten inside Jamie’s head and they might not agree with what you’re saying here. And they definitely don’t agree with every radical in this book, but I believe now, maybe for the first time ever, they’re willing to consider some of the ideas. Whereas that piece of news on CNN or BBC or whatever, or that blog would have made them say, Oh, I don’t like that person. They’re a wrong religion. They wear funny clothes and they do that. Now, maybe they’ve considered that point of view. And I think that gets us to the next level of humanity by doing that. So that’s my 50, a hundred year vision here. I meant to promote that through listening and through understanding, um, and hopefully offending as well, which, uh, you’re, uh, I hope you continue to offend us, which is why when I got that email from you a couple of weeks back

2:04:23 And you’re like, Brian, here’s my new, my new book. I just said, you got to come back on the show because I haven’t seen you in two or three years, but I consider you a good friend and a friend of the show. Cause I like your vibe and your energy because I see, could see from that first time we spent together that you care about more than selling books. You care about more than your own fame, even though you insert yourself into these stories. You don’t give me that yucky Louis Thoreau tip that I get from him and God bless him, but I believe it’s all about him.

2:04:51 And I don’t think it’s about you and these things. And John is someone in between, but I do like John and I’ve had John on before. And I think John actually ultimately does a great job of exposing the people that he talks about. So, uh, I just want to thank you Jamie for the hard work you do by, by producing stuff like this that isn’t popular. You could sell more books with different themes. You could sensationalize this stuff and sell a lot more books. I know you could, but you choose not to. So respect to you, sir. Um, keep working, keep grinding, keep making these video series. Cause we need them. And I can’t wait for your next book and the documentary and all that stuff. Well, thank you so much for having me and for the time, the time that you give us on this show to explore these things. Cause I think it makes all the difference, you know, like a 10 minute interview, you never get into the subjects seriously. It’s the same, it’s exactly the same problem as when you read a little blog or an article about a group, or you read a whole book about them and think about them and see them. And so this is like, this is the chance that I get as well to, to talk it out. Cause some of the things I’ve said on this, on this episode with you, like I haven’t said them before. They’re in there somewhere. They’re ideas that are floating around, but I’ve never actually kind of said them. They can’t come out of my mouth.

2:06:02 And so it’s great experience. Just have that time to allow the ideas to develop a little bit. So I’m looking forward already to being back on air in another three years time with the next thing. Yeah, let’s do it. And it’s funny just by talking about these ideas will help you crystallize certain ones in your head. And it’ll also help you think, you know, I thought I wanted to explore that, but once I talked about it on London Real Brian, I thought actually I’ll wait another six years. That’s the next next book. And so yeah, I’m a big fan of talking this stuff out because I think you get that stuff in your head. So thanks for being here. Thanks for being part of the long form. Uh, as we say in London Real, it’s about the journey. I wish you well on yours, be safe, but not too safe. Take some risks and keep offending people. Thank you. Thanks for having me.