1984 Today!

Hide your mince pies! Our first-ever Christmas Special is about when Christmas was outlawed in England.I’m joined by historian Dr. Fiona McCall to explore one of England’s weirdest experiments in governance: the Interregnum.Between the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, England abolished kingship, dismantled the Church hierarchy, censored culture, banned Christmas, and attempted to remake society along rigid moral and religious lines. What began as a revolutionary push toward a “better” society quickly revealed the all-too-familiar contours of a dystopia: surveillance, neighbour reporting on neighbour, draconian laws governing private life, and the violent policing of belief.Drawing on first-hand accounts from people who were there, Dr. McCall brings the 17th century to life, showing how ordinary people navigated civil war, censorship, puritanical rule, and the terrifying collapse of the line between sin and crime.Our conversation found unsettling parallels between England’s past and present regimes in their attempts to legislate morality, a stark reminder of how fragile social freedoms can be.You can find Dr. McCall’s books on Amazon: Church and People in Interregnum Britain and Baal’s Priests: The Loyalist Clergy and the English RevolutionSubscribe for free at 1984today.substack.comVisit us at 1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Michael W. Green is the Chief Strategist and Portfolio Manager for Simplify Asset Management. Previously in his nearly thirty-year career in finance, he managed macro strategies at Thiel Macro, the investment firm that manages the personal capital of Peter Thiel, and founded Ice Farm Capital, a macro hedge fund seeded by Soros Fund Management.In a recent series of essays on his Substack, beginning with My Life Is A Lie, Michael unpacked the dystopian impact of wealth inequality and the accompanying loss of civic trust in the United States. Part of that work included examining the origin of the poverty line as a metric for measuring relative wealth. He came to some stunning conclusions: * The poverty line in the US has been grossly underestimated by generations of economists and politicians;* An American family of four on an income of less than $140,000 per year is in a precarious position once other factors are accounted for;* Around 65% of Americans live in “the Valley Of Death”, an economic trough between around $40k to $100k in which additional income is negatively balanced out by the progressive withdrawal of means-tested support, leading to no real increase in material wealth.The response to his examination of the subject has been a viral outpouring of posts, comments, and think-pieces declaring him to be either an apologist for profligate wastrels incapable of living within their means or an overdue explainer of the underlying dynamics causing widespread inequality and dissatisfaction in The World’s Wealthiest Country™.As CBS News reported in January 2025, 59% of Americans say they “don't have enough savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 emergency expense.” According to the Gini Index, the United States sits somewhere between Turkmenistan and Uganda in terms of inequality.In this conversation, Michael explains his motives and methodology, and expands on the reinforcing factors contributing to the current crisis of trust and cohesion in the United States.You can subscribe to Michael’s Substack, Yes I Give A Fig, or follow him on X.Subscribe for free to our SubstackVisit our websiteFollow us on X and InstagramListen and rate us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Robert Joseph Greene is a Canadian author of gay romance fiction, including The Gay Icon Classics of the World, a globe-trotting collection of love stories set in various historical eras including Egypt, Persia, and Tsarist Russia.The latter story, The Blue Door, was taken up by activists in their protests against Putin’s prohibition of “homosexual propaganda”, making Robert “the face of gay propaganda in the Russian media”.In Germany, Robert’s publisher had its books removed by a bookseller owned by the Catholic Church because they didn’t match the company’s “traditional values”, despite heterosexual erotica being stocked without issue.In his research, Robert also found examples of historical figures and writers who have had their references to homosexuality removed or elided by later translators and historians, sending their true feelings, preferences, and worldview squarely down the Memory Hole.In this conversation, Robert talks about his experiences of being censored and even subjected to a Russian arrest warrant, the hidden histories he uncovered in his research, his long-running support for human rights, and the philosophical ideas he explores and contests in his work.Who knew that Polybius’s concept of anacyclosis predated Strauss and Howe’s generational theory by over two thousand years?La plus ça change…Don’t miss an episode, follow us on Apple PodcastsSubscribe for free on SubstackFollow on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

John R. Carlos wants you to think about what it means to be human. In 2020, after forty-two years as a Royal Australian Air Force Wing Commander, he retired and turned his hand to writing. He has just published Cryonic Dreams: Awakening, the first novel in a science fiction trilogy set in 2169 that explores humanity’s attempts to preserve meaning and agency in the face of tyranny, advanced technology, artificial intelligence, space colonisation, and the all-too-terrestrial struggles for wealth, power, and resources.With a story set over a hundred and forty years in the future, John needed to envision in great detail how its world would function. He also had to understand how the dystopia he imagined had come into being organically, as a result of what is happening around us now. To do that he adopted a systems approach, mapping out dystopian trends to chart their trajectories and outcomes, a task that led him to have serious concerns about where civilisation is headed.In this episode, he shares his creative process, his concerns about current socio-political trends, and his wish for humanity as it slouches towards a technologically intrusive, possibly totalitarian future.You can find Cryonic Dreams: Awakening wherever books are sold and visit his website to explore the lore of the world he is creating.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Daniele Bolelli is an Italian historian, professor, and author who also hosts the podcasts History On Fire and The Drunken Taoist. He grew up during the Years of Lead, a fraught pair of decades from the 1960s into the 1980s when extreme political violence was common in the Land of Caesar. The story of the Years of Lead is rich in conspiracy fuel, involving Licio Gelli’s P2 Masonic lodge, NATO’s Operation Gladio, false flag attacks staged by the ‘right’ to discredit the ‘left’, political assassinations, running street battles, and a reductive “red or black” cultural discourse that still echoes in that sun-kissed Mediterranean nation today.As a professor in California, Daniele sees parallels between Italy back then and what is happening in the United States today. Across the political spectrum, violence is increasingly a feature of American society.A recent Politico poll found that 55% of Americans expect political violence to increase, with 50% of respondents saying they found it ‘very likely’ or ‘somewhat likely’ that “a political candidate gets assassinated in the next 5 years”.There is also a generation gap when it comes to political violence, with “[m]ore than one in three Americans under the age of 45” agreeing that violence is justified versus only 7% of those over the age of 65.In short, Daniele is onto something. Younger generations have a higher tolerance for and a higher expectation of political violence, while the partisanship of America’s two-party system has become supercharged, leading to wild pendulum swings in fear and discontent depending on who is in the White House.When that is thrown into the mix with “the paranoid style in American politics”, the plate tectonics of economic inequality and catabolic collapse, historic racial wounds, elite nest-feathering, kakistocracy, and interference by foreign actors eager to see America tear itself apart, the result is a dynamic and highly flammable brew.In this conversation, Daniele and I explore his experience of the Years of Lead, the similarities he sees in the American situation, the nihilism and myopia of cheering on divisive political violence, the decline of personal connection in the digital age, and the ways he stays motivated and positive.For more, you can read Daniele’s description of the Years of Lead on his Substack, listen to the History On Fire episode about that period, follow him on X, and visit his website.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Graham Linehan is a five-time BAFTA-winning comedian and writer who created Father Ted, Black Books, and The IT Crowd. He also wrote for The Fast Show, Harry Enfield & Chums, Brass Eye, The Day Today, and Blue Jam, all near-legendary British comedies.Over the past decade, Graham’s life underwent a total transformation. After making his views on gender identity public, his work in the UK dried up, colleagues and friends either stepped away from him or openly denounced him, his marriage ended, and he moved to the United States. From being a pillar of Britain’s creative community, he became a pariah, unemployed and, in the eyes of many within the arts sector, unemployable.He has described himself as “the most hated man on the internet” and he has been accused, like the Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, of sullying his body of work beloved by fans with an unnecessary, unhealthy, unhelpful focus on gender identity.In September 2025, on returning to the UK for a trial related to an altercation with a gender identity activist, Graham was arrested at Heathrow Airport by armed police for three posts on X, formerly Twitter. The stress of the experience led to his hospitalisation; he wrote about it all on his Substack.He joins me in this episode for a free-flowing conversation about how and why he became vocal on the issue of gender identity, the possible roots of his objections, how speech restrictions have affected him, and why limits to free speech sound a death knell for comedy.For more, you can follow Graham on X and subscribe to his Substack, The Glinner Update.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow 1984 Today! on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Feminists have a saying—we can’t fight sexism if we can’t say what sex is. And that is precisely where we are as a society today—we can’t say what sex is.Kara Dansky is the author of The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, and she writes The TERF Report on Substack.She is the former President of the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International, which seeks to promote the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, and she also served on the board of the Women’s Liberation Front from 2016 to 2020. A lifelong Democrat and former ACLU lawyer, Kara writes in The Abolition of Sex that the discourse around gender identity presents “a unique challenge for feminists because while we support nonconformity with traditional sex-based stereotypes, we strongly object to the complete obliteration of biological sex.”Her view, as argued in her book, is that “sex is being abolished as a legal, social and physical category of human beings”, that “the ‘gender identity industry’…is a key component of that effort”, and that this is “detrimental to everyone, but especially to women and girls (i.e., human females).”In this episode, Kara talks through some examples of what she considers to be the movement to abolish biological sex, details the sources of funding for the gender identity industry, and shares her experiences at the ACLU and on the political left as they changed tack in a way that she felt abandoned her principles.She sets out her reasoning with patience, good humour, and passion. Regardless of your feelings about gender identity, Kara is worth listening to, whether you agree with her or not.You can follow Kara on X, read her on Substack, or visit her website.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In her book The Privacy Pirates: How Your Privacy Is Being Stolen and What You Can Do About It, Dr Leslie Gruis describes the current situation in stark terms: “If privacy were a patient, it would be in the intensive care unit. It’s not dead, but it is life-threateningly ill.”Dr Gruis worked at the National Security Agency for thirty years, and her last two assignments were at US Cyber Command and the National Intelligence Council. She was the first president of the NSA’s Women in Mathematics Society, and is a prominent advocate of STEM education for girls.She joins me in this episode for a conversation about how she started working in intelligence, why she is so concerned about the state of privacy in the United States, the fascinating history of privacy and transparency in American law, and the ongoing tug of war between private technology companies and government.You can visit her website to find out more about her work, and for links to her books.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

On September 13, central London was taken over by competing gatherings. One, organised by Tommy Robinson, was billed as a free speech festival and national pride event called Unite The Kingdom. The other, March Against Fascism, was put together as a protest against the Robinson rally, with participation from Stand Up To Racism, backed by a coalition of Britain’s unions.The Metropolitan Police estimate that 150,000 people attended Unite The Kingdom, with 5,000 taking part in the March Against Fascism. The police had planned for the two marches to be kept separate, but due to circumstances unknown at the time of writing, protesters ended up face to face, with unfortunate and predictable consequences. 1984 Today was there to speak with the participants of both events and ask about their reasons for attending. What emerged was a troubling picture of a country in which people of all political affiliations have lost faith, where the incumbent government is disliked equally on both sides of the police cordon, where communication across ideological boundaries is felt by many to be almost impossible.What seemed to be agreed upon by nearly everyone we spoke with is that “the State is broken”, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is a focal point of discontent, and belief in the possibility of meaningful change is in short supply.I left with the distinct impression that if only the people who were kind and open enough to speak with me could have the opportunity to speak to one another in the same way, some of the suspicion, division, and animus might be dispelled.Here’s hoping…1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow us on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Michael Box and Patrick Hague are creative partners in EchoEterna Productions and have worked together for almost 20 years as musicians, writers, and filmmakers. They join me to talk about their feature film project SpeakEasy, set “in the near future, where creative freedom is monitored by an oppressive authority class.”As a lover of cinema, dystopian fiction, and punk rock, it was a special pleasure to take a ride through their imaginations and explore the world-building they engaged in to realise a believable dystopian world for their protagonists, a band called The Riot Police. We also got into their impressions and experiences of present-day America, where living conditions could be encouraging the rise and acceptance of “an oppressive authority class”.You can listen to a sample track by The Riot Police on Bandcamp, and buy it to support the fundraising for the film.To help get a sense of the tone they had in mind, I asked Patrick and Michael to each name a punk rock song that gives a flavour of their dystopian world. Michael chose Rise Above by Black Flag, and Patrick chose Full Disclosure by Fugazi.If you want to find out more about the film, you can follow them on Instagram or visit their website.1984today.substack.com1984.todayFollow 1984 Today! on X and Instagram This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Free speech dies, comedy dies. It’s that simple.From 1952 to 2018, MAD Magazine published over five hundred regular editions as well as specials and books. In that time, it defined and shaped political satire and social commentary for generations of readers, becoming a cornerstone of American culture without ever taking itself seriously, a true achievement.Gazing gap-toothed from MAD’s cover was almost always the grinning face of Alfred E. Neuman, whose catchphrase became embedded in American culture: “What, Me Worry?”The “steady stream of pointed political satire and pure silliness” that MAD delivered to its fans was created by “The Usual Gang of Idiots”, the affectionate term for the writers and cartoonists who populated its office in New York City.As early as 1959, “The Usual Gang of Idiots” were the subject of a minor diplomatic incident in which a British newspaper attempted to prevent the “highly undesirable” importation of MAD into the UK in a sniffy letter to the US Embassy because of a humorous depiction of the Royal Family. “[E]very possible attempt should be made to stop this appearing in America no less than in Britain,” wrote Lee Howard, the editor of the Sunday Pictorial. The Department of State wisely advised the embassy in London that “making an issue out of the incident would likely add more grist to the mill”.From its inception, MAD was at the front of the endlessly evolving and shifting arguments and legal wrangling over censorship, humour, and taste, questions that remain pressing, urgent, and at the centre of what it means to preserve a free society.Now-former senior editor Joe Raiola worked at MAD “[f]or an embarrassing 33 years”, describing it as “the only place in America where if you mature, you get fired.” In that time, he was credited on over 100 articles and found Joan of Arc in a seafood bisque.As well as “making funny noises in the hallway” at MAD, in 1993 Joe created and began touring a one-man show called The Joy of Censorship, which he has since performed in 44 states.Describing himself as “a floundering comedian, comedy writer, speaker and producer”, Joe joins me in this episode to talk about his time at America’s greatest satirical magazine, the absolute necessity of free speech, and the ever-present danger of censorship to comedy and liberty.It was great fun speaking with him. I hope you enjoy it.You can experience more of the joy of Joe at joeraiola.com or by joining him on October 5 for “an evening of smart stupidity” at City Winery in New York City.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: 1984TodayPodInstagram: 1984Today This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Frank Sanazi is a unique comedy character, a tongue-in-cheek mashup of Adolf Hitler and Frank Sinatra described by his creator, the British singer and comedian Pete Cunningham, as “a satirical blitzkrieg blending dark humour, swing music and politically incorrect cabaret”.The newspaper The Scotsman has called him “brilliantly stupid, fantastically wrong and ridiculously funny”. The comedy blog Chortle considers him “a pleasure uber alles”.As well as doing solo shows, Frank also leads The Iraq Pack, a gang of crossover crooners including Dean Stalin, Saddami Davis Jr., Osama Bin Crosby, his daughter Nancy Sanazi, and, of course, Diva Braun. Frank has performed internationally, from Austria to Israel, and regularly features at Glastonbury and Bestival in the UK.His act is a wild freewheeling thumb in the eye to the seriousness with which history’s lunatics and despots have been traditionally accorded, and it cannily highlights something often overlooked about Hitler: He was a performer.“There’s no doubt about it,” the legendary comedian Mel Brooks told Der Spiegel in 2006. “Hitler worked in the same branch as we do: he created illusions.”In the same interview, Brooks summed up why mocking the 20th century’s most infamous boogeyman was not only permissible, but necessary: “[B]y using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths.”In this episode, Frank Sanazi joins me to talk about how he conceived and honed his character, how standup comedy has changed over the years he’s been working, and why satire and ridicule are essential tools against tyranny.You can buy Frank’s albums Mein Way on a Steinway and Songs for Swinging Leaders here. Tickets for his one-hour show at the Edinburgh Fringe (August 1 through 23) are available here. You can also visit his website.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPodInsta: @1984Today This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

It’s trite to point out that the internet is an increasingly weird and difficult space to explore. AI-generated ‘slop’ muddies search results and even ends up in published scientific papers. Bots roam social media freely, making it nearly impossible to know whether interactions are organic or automated. Your voice and face can be cloned and reproduced by AI, making security breaches and fraud much more likely.The response from tech and government is to push for heightened identity verification and so-called “proof of humanity”, with one example being Sam Altman’s WorldCoin project and its iris-scanning Orb.It didn’t used to be like this. Signing a legal agreement running into the thousands of pages in order to buy a pair of jeans is not normal. A business demanding that you install their app on your phone so it can track your location, spending habits, and browser data is not normal. Being forced into a surveillance dragnet to prove you aren’t a bot is definitely not normal.Is there a way that technology can protect our civil liberties instead of eroding them?Can we re-establish privacy as a default setting in the hands of the public or are we past the point of no return?To examine these questions and more, I spoke with Shady El Damaty, co-founder of the Holonym Foundation, whose mission is the establishment and protection of “natural digital rights for privacy, security, and data ownership”. One of their projects, Human.Tech, is developing “human-centric technology that fosters freedom, resilience, and opportunity in a connected, borderless digital world.”Through applied cryptography, they believe they can provide the tools for “digital personhood” in a way that gives the individual control over what data is shared, how, and when.In 2009, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google at the time, told CNBC that “if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”In 2006, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “[p]rivacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.”The tech sector has broadly been on Team Schmidt for a generation. It’s time to hear from Team Schneier before it’s too late.You can visit human.tech to find out more about Holonym’s work.1984today.substack.com1984.todayInstagram: @1984TodayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

BeLikeWater (a.k.a. Lisa) is a Superforecaster® with Good Judgment Inc., the forecasting project co-created by Professor Philip Tetlock (the co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction), and a forecaster with Sentinel Global Risks Watch and the Swift Centre in the UK.In a recent interview with Polymarket about her successful forecast of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear capability, she made a bold call: The probability of Ayatollah Khamenei being out as Supreme Leader of Iran by the end of 2025 is “somewhere around 85%”, and “70-75%” for him to be out by the end of July.At the time of writing, Polymarket has the probability of the former at 35%, making her outlook an outlier, if not downright contrarian.To come to this and many other forecasts using the accountable framework encouraged by Good Judgment Inc., she applies a rigorous, repeatedly-updated process and works with a diverse team of colleagues to interpret, digest, and parse a wealth of information from which a prediction with clear parameters and adjustable probability can be distilled.In our conversation, she shares the details of her methods, her often-surprising thoughts on what might happen in 2025 (and beyond), and insights into the dystopian trends she sees developing or culminating in the near future.Speaking with her was as enlightening and reassuring as it was concerning. I hope you enjoy it.You can find Lisa on X and Substack, and you can read Sentinel’s reports and research here.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPodInstagram: @1984Today This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

There is sadly a lot to worry about when it comes to the rights to privacy and free speech.Digital ID, central bank digital currency, facial recognition, online censorship, spying on bank accounts - you name it, the British government has a plan, none of them very promising for individual freedom.Big Brother Watch are one of the UK’s leading civil liberties campaign organisations, and their Advocacy Manager Matthew Feeney joins me for a conversation about the challenges facing the citizens of Britain in 2025.Are we past the point of no return when it comes to the philosophical idea that a citizen in a liberal democracy is innocent until proven guilty, free to interact and transact without government oversight or interference, and entitled to the right to be let alone? Or is there still a chance to reclaim and redraw the boundary of individual liberty, to reassert that our freedoms are not granted by government at their discretion, but natural and not to be limited without due process and valid probable cause?Besides the largely unregulated roll-out of facial recognition across the UK, high on the list of looming horrors is the apparently unflushable idea of a mandatory national ID card, now rebranded for the digital age as ‘Britcard’. First tried during World War II and repealed by Churchill in 1952, it was subsequently floated by Tony Blair’s Labour government but shot down due to popular resistance. Since then it has risen over and over, unbidden and unwanted, refusing to go round the U-bend into the sewer of terrible ideas. Now it’s back, again with the support of Tony Blair in his capacity as the reviled-but-somehow-taken-seriously elder statesman of British politics, and after the current government “ruled out” the introduction of digital ID in July 2024. Big Brother Watch have a petition to reject Digital ID in the UK that you can view and sign here.“We’re a democracy that’s been around for a long time…we were dealt a good hand,” Matthew told me at one point. “I hope we don’t squander it in the near future.”As my dear departed grandfather used to say, “let’s not and say we did.”You can visit the Big Brother Watch website here or follow them on X.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Hamit Coskun (pronounced Josh-kun) is a fifty year-old asylum seeker from Turkey living in the city of Derby in northern England on a support allowance of £48 per week. His grasp of the English language is assessed at the A1 (Beginner) level, so he uses Google Translate to protest on social media about the erosion of secularism and rise of Islamist sympathies in his home country.In February 2025, he burnt a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London and was attacked by two men, one of whom had a knife. He was then arrested and charged with a religiously aggravated public order offence of which, on 3 June, he was convicted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.His case marks a potential inflection point in British policing and justice. According to the prosecutor, the barrister defending him, and the judge, no single element of his behaviour was a criminal offence. However, the violent reaction to what he did, and the fact that he did it in a public place and used “the f-word” led the Crown Prosecution Service to charge him with public disorder, and ultimately secure a conviction.I attended the entire trial and wrote it up as a long-form piece called Hamit in Wonderland. As requested/suggested by subscribers to the 1984 Today Substack, this episode is a reading of that report on the trial.You might also be interested in listening to my conversation with Hatun Tash, about getting stabbed in Hyde Park for Jesus, or reading Witness for the Persecution, the story of the Berlin ‘thought crime’ trials of the American satirist CJ Hopkins.We’ll resume our usual format of long-form conversations about dystopian trends in society in our next episode.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In 2023, Professor Garret Merriam ran an experiment that caught 40 out of 96 of his students cheating on the final exam in his ethics class at CSU Sacramento. He had decided to “poison the well” to see who among them might use a well-known study resource website to review the answers before the test, so he inserted obviously false answers that anyone paying attention in class would know to be incorrect. The process of analysing the results was “exceptionally stressful”, taking up time that he “would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.”Since then, Garret has been sounding the alarm about the prevalence of AI use and cheating at American universities, alongside writers and teachers like Ted Gioia and Troy Jollimore.Tales of woe continue to emerge from academia. Teachers are fed up of running faster and faster to stay still, spending increasing time and energy fighting the intrusion of AI-enabled cheating, playing the role of an enforcer to the detriment of delivering an education to their students.New York Magazine recently published a piece by James Walsh called Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College which, despite the clickbait title doing a disservice to the many students who are trying to learn, gives a thorough picture of the parlous state of pedagogy in the age of AI. As one source tells Walsh in the article: “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”Is this the typical bellyaching of an older generation as youth discover new technologies and ways of behaving? Or is there a real problem in higher education?Garret joins me in this episode for a wide-ranging discussion on the impact that AI has had on his experience as a teacher, how he tries to balance enforcement and prevention with his responsibilities as an educator, as well as the practical and philosophical implications for society if machine learning supplants human learning.In the humanities especially, we face a pressing and vital question: Who do we become as a culture when our understanding of ourselves is shaped not by individual study and reflection but the acceptance and use of what machines say we are?You can follow Garret on X or explore his YouTube channel, Sisyphus Redeemed.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Ever since I read Travellers in the Third Reich, a Sunday Times best-seller by Julia Boyd, I’ve been recommending it to anyone who will listen. Her carefully researched narrative is constructed from the diaries, letters, and correspondence of people who visited Germany between the ends of the First and Second World Wars. From Quakers to Boy Scouts, classical music lovers to dedicated fans of Hitler, she finds and brings together a wonderfully broad range of personal contemporaneous accounts of what it was like to visit, work in, study in, and travel through a Germany struggling to redefine and reclaim itself in the interwar period.It’s an illuminating, moving, troubling picture of how we humans are prone to seeing what we want to see, discounting present dangers on the basis of our assumptions and prejudices, and failing to face the reality of what is going on around us.Julia followed that book with another, A Village in the Third Reich, the focus of which is the citizens and residents of the Bavarian mountain village of Obertsdorf. The experiences of foresters, priests, farmers, nuns, innkeepers, Nazi officials, village councillors, mountaineers, socialists, slave labourers, schoolchildren, tourists and aristocrats are woven together along with the accounts of the Jews who survived to give a picture of life under Nazism like no other.Her detailed research and compassionate writing won her the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for Travellers in the Third Reich, and A Village in the Third Reich was named a Waterstones Paperback of the Year and a New Statesman Book of the Year in 2022. The Oldie dubbed her “a leading historian of human responses in political extremis.”Julia joins me in this episode to talk about her experiences researching and writing the books, what the intimate correspondence of people from another time taught her about our shared humanity, and how a human being can transcend the pressures and prejudices of their era to live decently while surrounded by horrors.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

Berlin’s CyBrothel is “the world’s first AI brothel”, according to its founder and Episode 130 guest Philipp Fussenegger, offering visitors an alternative to human prostitution in the form of silicone sex dolls. Some of the dolls are humanoid, some are aliens or vampires, but almost all of them can, with the visitor’s consent, interact by listening, talking back, and ‘seeing’ (with the help of CCTV). It isn’t AI making whoopee with the discerning doll diddler, though — connected remotely in real-time is a human “Voice Queen” named Leni von Mayn.In our conversation, Leni shares her personal voyage of sexual discovery with good humour, candour, and a refreshing willingness to open up. An unexpected job offer during the pandemic set her on a path from a bot brothel in Berlin to a beach in Bali, living her best life as a “sexplorer” and mindful sexuality coach. She gives her thoughts and feelings about the impact of technology on our sex lives, the importance of presence and attention in intimacy, and even throws in some tantric pointers.The idea of romping with a silicone doll that talks back while a human woman watches on CCTV and talks dirty might strike some of us as off-putting, complex, awkward, even synthetic, but is “artificial sexuality” really an alienating factor for modern humans, or just another new way for people to engage with themselves and their desires?As Woody Allen said: “Love is the answer. But while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.”You can follow Leni von Mayn on Instagram and X, or find her on OnlyFans.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com

In 2014, an NHS junior doctor named Chris Day made “protected disclosures” to the hospital trust he worked for in south east London. He raised issues of understaffing (doctor/patient ratios were 1:18, more than double the national standard of 1:8) and reported two specific cases in which poor care led to avoidable patient deaths.The hospital trust took swift action, thanked him for bringing it to their attention, and wrote him a glowing recommendation.Just kidding.What could have been a ‘teachable moment’, or at least a routine incident of whistleblowing, instead set Chris on a collision course with Britain’s National Health Service, the then-national training provider Health Education England (HEE), and the justice system itself. In his words:One night in January 2014 I became a whistleblower. I did this without realising it and since then I have been very nearly swallowed up by an NHS made legal gap or ‘lacuna’ in whistleblowing law.Writing in 2016, Benedict Cooper explained the “lacuna” for the New Statesman:The fulcrum of the case is a gap – or “lacuna”, to get into the legalese – in the laws protecting junior doctors when they blow the whistle. A gap which exists because of an ambiguity as to who is ultimately responsible for their career, and which Day’s case has revealed. The status quo is that HEE isn’t fully bound by S43K whistleblowing laws because it is a training provider not an employer, while NHS trusts, which take junior doctors on as temporary employees contract-by-contract, don’t have to afford the same rights to them as they would more permanent staff . The background – and how this fits into the junior doctors contract dispute – is all here.Day and his legal team are arguing that this ambiguity is leaving junior doctors in a no-man’s land; that while doctors are duty bound to report concerns, they’re not protected against harsh treatment when they do; that HEE, as de facto employers of junior doctors, should step up and take responsibility for them.Chris found himself unable to work for the NHS as a junior doctor, characterised as “angry” and “emotional”, and embroiled in a fight to prove that he was an employee of the organisation he worked for in order to benefit from whistleblower protection.As Chris went from hearing to hearing, he found the lengths his former employers were willing to go to to discredit him and save face increasingly extreme:* In one episode, “one of the trust’s directors “deliberately” deleted up to 90,000 emails midway through a tribunal hearing in July 2022.” * The outcome of one hearing was a ruling that effectively stripped 54,000 junior doctors in the UK of whistleblower protection, later overturned on appeal. * The law firm defending HEE turned out not to have “disclosed key contracts it had been paid public money to draft for its client”, contracts that could have resolved the “fulcrum of the case” and prevented what ex-shadow health minister Justin Madders described as “a lengthy and wholly unnecessary legal battle where HEE was effectively seeking to remove around 54,000 doctors out of whistleblowing protections by claiming that they were not their employer.”As Tommy Greene wrote for Byline Times in 2023:This lack of disclosure allowed the agency to argue it could not be considered the legal employer of junior doctors – a position that Court of Appeal judges overturned in 2017. The contracts were eventually obtained through FOI requests in 2019.Believe it or not, Chris’s case is still ongoing, and, after more than ten years, the British Medical Association has now announced it is backing him up “as part of plans to improve its support for whistleblowers.”How much has the perennially cash-strapped NHS spent fighting Chris in court? According to Tommy Greene (writing in 2023):As of 2018, more than £700,000 had been spent by NHS bodies defending the case brought by Day. Overall costs are currently thought to stand at around £1 million.Chris joins me for a deep dive into his journey from junior doctor to “lightning rod”, and opens up about how he’s found the strength to keep going despite the numerous reversals along the way.You can visit Chris’s website, follow him on X or LinkedIn, or follow his case on CrowdJustice.1984today.substack.com1984.todayX: @1984TodayPod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1984today.substack.com