Red Scare - Can't Get You Out of My Head w/ Adam Curtis *UNLOCKED*

Episode Date: February 27, 2021

We're unlocking our Adam Curtis interview. Description below. New episode coming soon! *** Filmmaker Adam Curtis chats with ladies about his new docuseries Can't Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World

That was about half a second out, but you're from show to be fine. We're back. We have a very special guest today that we're very excited to have with us. Filmmaker, journalist, documentarian, the director of his new six-part series, Can't Get You Out of My Head, an emotional history of the modern world, Mr. Adam Curtis. Welcome, Adam. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

I'm glad Dasha did the intro because I was going to flub that. Your work has been called Dazzling and Coherent, which is much nicer than most of what has been said about us, so I feel like we're off to a good start. Well, I guess I wanted, my first question is I wanted to ask you about this idea, this notion of emotional history and the way in which your film, at least in the first part, seems to be primarily about, or most of the protagonists are women. If history, as you've said, is sort of what the ruling class tells us reality is, conventional thought would sort of follow that women have been excluded from producing history or participating

in this narrativizing of reality, but as you show in your film, lots of women have had profound influence, even if they've been relegated to sort of an emotional realm, like Jeng Quing, Mao Zedong's wife, who the film is in the large part about, sort of weaponized the drama of the revolution to become incredibly powerful. And so my question is, do you think that there's a relationship between emotionality and femininity, and then what was your approach or interest in telling an emotional history? No, I don't think there's a relationship between emotionality and femininity. What I think is, and why I call it that, is that we are living in an age in which we are

encouraged and we believe that our feelings are the prime thing we should pay attention to. I mean, it's what, to be honest, to use a fancy word, it's the ideology of our time, that if what you feel inside you is not only the most important thing, it's probably the most truthful thing. That's the ideology of our age, as opposed to previous ages, where what you were told to do was the most important thing to do. It's this idea that truth comes from within inside you.

I mean, it's called individualism, but it's about feelings. And what I wanted to do was to tell the story of how we got to now, in an age in which feelings have become very powerful, very dominant. And it seemed to me that if you're going to do that, you've got to tell what goes on inside people's heads as much as what goes on outside their heads in the society, if you're doing that. And how power gets mixed up with those feelings inside people's heads, because it seems to be like, for example, Zhang Qing.

Zhang Qing was one of the early individualists. She was an actor in the movie studios in Shanghai in the 1930s. She was scorned, put down, hated by most of the studio bosses. She went off to, and she was angry because she was an ambitious person. She went off to join the Communist Revolution. She became Mao's mistress. The other revolutionaries, all men, put her down, scorned her, hated her and tried to stop her, and she wasn't having it.

And when they tried to make her join a unit, all communists have units, because that's what gives you collective power, she came out with this phrase, which I think sort of sums up our age. She just said, no, I am a unit of one. And I think, to be honest, that's what we all are these days. We are units of one, which is glorious and wonderful because we feel we're autonomous and can do what we want. But it also, at times when things go bad, makes things a bit lonely and a bit difficult.

And I was just exploring, I suppose, the rise of the unit of one and the feelings that go with it. Yeah. I mean, to be honest with you, when I first heard the title of the film, I thought that like, it would, I almost thought it would dovetail with like something that we've talked about on the podcast, which is how emotions, especially like the concept of empathy is now used to like sheepdog, political discourse and divide people into good and bad teams. In the paranoid way that someone like Richard Hofstadter described, which I think you've

actually cited him. So he talks about the camps, the warring camps of like good people and then their enemies who are like unreasonable and unappeasable. But of all the figures you touched on, I think Jiang Cheng was like the most compelling and consuming, but the most interesting to me was this guy, BF Skinner, who was the most unassuming, the behavioral psychologist, who talks about individualism as kind of a blip on the radar of history. And he predicted a world beyond freedom and dignity.

Those are your words, I'm assuming, not his. No, those were his. No, that's for you. They were his. He wrote a book called Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which people hated because it came out in, I think the early 1970s, when the rise, I mean, you're quite right. We live in an age when you are either judged to have the good feelings or bad feelings. I mean, in the Victorian era in the 19th century, you were judged to be morally good or morally

bad. These days, you're judged to have the correct feelings or the incorrect feelings. And underlying that is this idea that it all comes from inside you. So if you've got the bad feelings, there's something wrong inside you. One of the things I try and show in these films is the forgotten idea, which says the very opposite. It's not everything, but a lot of your feelings, it says, don't come from inside you. They come from outside.

So if you're feeling anxious and uncertain, it may not be your fault, as most of the psychologists now tell you. It may be the fact that you are living in an anxious and uncertain society and you're just feeling the reflection of that. But these days, you are made to feel that it's your fault, which means that no one ever questions the system that you're living in. They question you and they say, I mean, this is, I do a bit about positive psychology in the last film, which says, no, if you are feeling bad, we can help you and adjust you

to fit into the system, which means that you actually have a psychology these days, which hardly ever questions the system it is adjusting you to, which I think is a very limited, narrow view of the world. Yeah. I mean, to that point, I guess my question is, is individualism over? Are we headed toward a new era, a new age of collectivism, which sort of clings to the trappings of individualism, but parts with any kind of remnants of collaboration or cooperation? Well, because I'm a good journalist, I don't say what I think.

At the end of the film, I outline what I think of the possible three futures you have. Because I think you've now got to a turning point in individualism. One of them is BF Skinner's idea. Skinner said, look, what you had before in the past was kings and queens and emperors and they told you what to do. Then you had individualism in which everyone was free and it was all about feelings. But that is just a temporary moment in history, he said, until science catches up with you, manages to accumulate enough data on your observed behavior that it can offer you the

right rewards for doing the right behavior. That's very much what you now see happening in China, where you get rewards for doing all the right things based on the data they gather from you. That's one option. The other option, I would say, is the late American model, let's call it that, which I think really emerged over the last four years, which in a way is the very opposite. Instead of ignoring people's feelings, you amplify them to a hysterical level, which I think is what you've been through over the last four years in America, of total hysteria

both on the left and the right, which actually, if you look at it, nothing actually changed in your society during those four years, none of what Donald Trump said he was going to do happened, none of what the left said they were going to do happened. They just lived in a hysterical mode, but actually it was as frozen a society as the Chinese society, if you see what I mean, because the structure of power remained totally untouched, inequalities carried on being exactly the same as they were, and that was it. So what I would argue is you've got two models for the future. One is a hysterical model, which is also about stasis and state of staticness, and the other

is you just ignore people's feelings and you monitor them like the BF Skinner world, or there is a third world, which is we genuinely start thinking dynamically again about history and try and imagine other kinds of societies that have never existed, which I think is an exciting idea, but it's a forgotten idea, but I think it'll come back, but that's my personal view. Well, I thought that your films were very exciting and inspiring and actually very optimistic in that regard, and I especially liked what you said, and you said it in an interview as well, that we are enchanted with this idea that the tech platforms have all this control

and surveillance over us because they have access to our data, but we believe that the data is valuable because that's what the algorithms and the machines themselves have told us is valuable, but actually we're capable, as you say, of extraordinary nonlinear things. Yes, all that data does is it observes what you did yesterday, compares the pattern of your behaviour to the pattern of other people's behaviour and suggests the same thing tomorrow to you, so in a way you're just haunted by your own limited, the data of your own behaviour. Part of the power of modern tech and the tech corporations is this idea that they have this unique ability to see the truth about you that you don't have.

I don't think that's true, I think increasingly there's evidence that especially from psychological experiments that show that it's very difficult to manipulate people, we're much stronger than we are encouraged in this doom-laden moment to think, I mean, admittedly we're going through a very dark period, but part of that is this idea that we are weak and irrational and have to be managed, which is the dominant ideology, I think that may not be true, personally, I just think that actually I was a part of this, I was researching the history of the national security agencies since 2001, this is relevant, because they started doing in 2001 pretty much exactly what Google does, they just monitor the data

in order to see if they could predict a terrorist attack in this case. In 19 years, the national security, and they admitted to the agency and they admit this themselves, despite reading trillions and trillions and trillions of bits of data have never managed to find a terrorist because of it ever, that this idea that the magicalness of data will lead you to some other truth, that human beings are too limited to understand, maybe just the myth of our time, the myth of this strange tech world that has taken innocent to this limited simplified view of the world and stops us seeing the real world outside, and maybe it's about time we sort of broke on out and saw the real world for

its complexity. Yeah, and you can, I mean, I think the scary thing about it is that there are these enormous like vast caches, troves of data that are, people are afraid that they're kind of predictive in some way, but really the scary thing is that they I think actually mold our behaviors toward the end of the film, you know, you talk about how the proliferation of things like artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, like predictive modeling. Thanks to the proliferation of those things, people actually began acting more like computers and analyzing random sets of data and then detecting patterns within them.

And I think the tendency is to view history in terms of progress or alternately in terms of decline as we're prone to do now, but what if things are just becoming different and people are simply, you know, becoming less human? Is there some kind of truth to that? What do you mean what's human? Well, let more influenced by, I mean, more cyborg and to use a word I personally hate, more influenced by machine learning and stuff like that. Well, I think that's, I mean, a lot of people write a lot of books about how robots and

machines are going to take over. I would argue that actually the opposite is happening is that the feedback loops that you and I get involved in online tend to simplify our behavior and in a sense, turn us into somewhat simplified robots. I don't think it'll last. I don't just don't think it can because its weakness is that it has no story to tell us about the future, that system of power. All it can do is it can read the patterns of your behavior, compare that to the patterns

of other people's behavior that it could see like that you are like, and then suggest you that you do pretty much what those people did as well. That's a static world. And the one thing everyone knows about history is that history is not static, that, you know, history roars on outside this little bubble we're in at the moment, and I don't think you can do that. I don't think you can run a society like that. I think it's a myth.

But I think it's a myth that's grown up because we have lost confidence, and the reason we've lost confidence is because our politicians and those who are in the opposition have given up telling us stories about what this is all for, different kinds of societies we could have, and have turned into managers. I mean, personally, I think it's a funny moment between the collapse of one set of ideologies and some new big story that we haven't got the faintest idea what it is that's probably coming towards us, and it's coming from somewhere we have no idea where it's, you know, where it's rooted in.

And we're just in this funny moment in the eye of the storm when we're just swimming in trillions and trillions of bits of stuff that make no sense. And in the face of that, we've given it power to the machines to try and make a limited sense of it, because that's all we have at the moment. What we're waiting for is something, a story that actually makes much grander sense at all, because it will connect with how now feels. Have you noticed how very little art at the moment is actually trying to explain to people how now feels?

It's always retro, it's always going back, or it's trying to tell stories from the past that are real. It's not actually trying to capture that sort of strange, incoherent feeling of now. It's very little around. Well, yeah, it's nostalgic. Yeah, it's nostalgic. The contemporary condition, I think, yeah, it's characterized by a lack of confidence, but also, as you say, a lack of imagination, and sort of like a...

And nostalgia. You're completely right. Nostalgia is... Did you know nostalgia in the 19th century was seen as a disease, a psychological problem? No, I didn't, but I think we should reclassify it as such. Yeah, it is. Have you noticed how everyone just reworks the past? I mean, including me, I mean, I just slapped together old bits of footage and repurposed

them, banned sample stuff all the time, Google constantly reads the past and gives it back to you. We're haunted all the time, we're a haunted culture, we really are. Yeah, I mean, I think we're haunted, but we're also, I think, very sort of disenchantment, and the only enchantment that we have in our collective unconscious is, yeah, like you said, this idea of the sort of monopoly and the deep power of tech platforms, and then also sort of the proliferation of conspiracy theories are this kind of enchanted story that people tell themselves about what's happening and it's...

And they do it because the stories they're told by those in power are so boring or non-existent. Exactly. At least conspiracy theories have a sort of magical dreamlike quality to them. Right, and I feel like it almost, it doesn't matter necessarily to conspiracy theorists whether or not, say, like Nancy Pelosi or Mark Zuckerberg actually are reptiles or lizards because the way that they behave and the influence that they have is reptilian. Yeah, but also I went and just did a bit, when I stumbled upon that giant conspiracy theory that most of the stars like Britney Spears and Beyonce are actually being mind-controlled

by a combination of the CIA, the Illuminati, and Walt Disney, I went and researched it a bit. The people who believe it, I'm not sure really believe it in a rational sense. They know that it's probably untrue, but they think it's just so magnificently wonderful and strange because it takes them away from a world in which those in charge either tell them the most boring stories or have no stories to tell them. I mean, Jeff Bezos doesn't tell you a story, does he? No, he doesn't.

Mark Zuckerberg doesn't tell you a story. Sergey Brin doesn't tell you a story. And Elon Musk is trying to sort of, I don't know, imitate an old bad Superman film. He's just, they're not telling you stories about the future. And that's their weak point. That's the case here. Yeah, I think the kind of flip side of nostalgia is that, you know, I think cultural nostalgia comes about from like productive economic stagnation.

And you know, I always think like I'm not, not an elitist, like I'm not against elites in principle, but it's just that our elites suck and they're boring and they don't tell good stories. But the other issues, like how do you begin to revive a grand narrative or a grand myth? I mean, if you try to do it along nationalistic lines, that's fascism, right? And that's a no-go. Well, I mean, that's the big question. Does it lead?

I mean, I think these are questions that are going to emerge very soon unless the left comes up with some stories of its own. I mean, nationalism is a very, I mean, I saw it in my country with Brexit, it's a very powerful story and it grabs people. The real question is, is can you have nationalism which doesn't inextricably lead to a kind of ethno-racism or to a fascism? I don't know. No one's, no one's ever told me.

I mean, we're terrified of it because the last time it was tried, it led to horror. Both, you know. And in a way, you could argue that's why we tried to live in a world without big stories and we're now paying the price for that because the left has sort of got itself frozen. It's terrified of embracing nationalism, but it's too frightened to try and imagine something new and therefore what it just tries to do is tinker with the little bits. But you know, the voting pattern in your election of last year shows that, you know, still millions and millions of people are angry and want to vote, want to press that button that says

fuck off. Despite the fact that Donald Trump did absolutely nothing of what he promised and despite the fact that he handled the pandemic so atrociously, they still want to vote for him. That's real power. It's not going to go away. Well, I think the vast majority of people are not as invested, maybe in stability as the managerial technocratic classes, because things have gotten so bad for them. Yeah.

I mean, I just think that if stability is all you've got to offer as your ideology and no story, you're in quite a weak place given that history is a dynamic force and the people outside your stable world don't really care whether things are stable or not and are quite happy to let it rip because they've got nothing to lose. But returning to, I guess, individualism and politics being sort of ill-equipped to deal with individualism and attempting to imagine a world where people can be individuals but also live and act sort of collectively in service of some greater idea or moral principle or whatever does feel a bit not impossible, but very difficult.

Well, there is an argument that says that, I mean, there are different kinds of ideas of freedom. I always think that the civil rights movement is a very interesting historical moment because it actually, it was the last time that young activists, both black and white, went down to the South of America for years because it took years. They went through incredible danger. Many got beaten up. Many, some were killed.

We still don't know their names. They gave themselves up to something. I mean, we know some of the leaders, but the majority of people, we don't know them, but they gave themselves up to something really good. Then came individualism. People don't do that. I mean, I remember the march against the Iraq invasion in my country. Its slogan was, not in my name.

I don't care whether it's in your name or not. I just don't want the war. You know what I mean? It had this narcissistic sort of shroud over it and I just thought that was the moment at which you think, how can collectivism really work when you're really dealing with millions and millions of little squealing piglets who want to express themselves. That's the real problem is radicalism always has to express itself these days and maybe real radicalism is not about expressing yourself.

It's giving yourself up to something that you believe in and maybe that will come back. I don't know. I actually have a question for you about radicalism. Your films do contain this tension between the two main classes of social actors that you seem drawn to as the New Yorker journalist pointed out who you did an interview with, the radicals and the managers. I think most people just assume that you fall on the side of the radicals just like they sort of assume that your politics are left wing, but you can detect a hint of skip.

I'm not going to make you identify or account for yourself, but you can detect kind of like a hint of skepticism and how you deal with someone like Tupac Shakur for example and the parallel that immediately came to mind for me was Patty Smith who you touched on in your previous film and who played a similar role I think in her generation that he did in his. You were much nicer to Tupac than you were to Patty and I think for good reason, but are you sympathetic with radicals and is radicalism kind of fake news, especially in this day and age?

I keep thinking of people like Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem and the Weather Underground. There's countless examples of these people who have been institutionalized and the same with movements like BLM. Were they co-opted or were they never that radical to begin with? I'm emotionally sympathetic to radicalism because I like the idea of a progressive. That's really all my politics are. I'm typical of my time. I don't have a consistent set of politics and I suspect people who do.

But I'm progressive so I try and understand what went wrong with radicalism. The reason I really made these films is I was astonished that over the last four years both in my country and in your country those who would portray themselves as radical did nothing to try and respond to the enormous forces that Trump election and the Brexit vote revealed. Instead what they did is they retreated into a hysterical paranoia about the fact that Vladimir Putin had really manipulated the election or into a sort of just a deep depression where there were only responses to the idea that there's nothing we can do.

They've refused to face the elephant in the room which is that actually millions and millions of people were very angry and I know there were lots of other people who voted for Donald Trump who weren't like that but they just refused to look at that elephant and they still are refusing to do it and retreated into a hysteria and into a series of conspiracy theories both on the right and the left to be honest. And therefore what I think is that radicalism has run out of road at the moment. This way of explaining the world doesn't make sense and you can see that because it had nothing to offer.

If I was a left winger, if I was leading a radical party in America in 2018 I'd be going out to people, which I think Bernie Sanders did to an extent and saying to the people who voted for Trump, look you were right to vote that but he's conning you. He's not doing anything. He's failing completely. He's totally corrupt. He promised to remove corruption in Washington. He's done nothing.

He promised to bring the factories back. He's done nothing. He promised to end the wars where your sons and daughters are getting killed. He's done nothing and he promised to build a wall. He hasn't built it. I would have gone out again and again and again at and saying no, you were right but he conned you. We can do it better together.

None of them did that. None of them. Everyone retreated into conspiracy theories. Just as much as the QAnon lot retreated into their conspiracy theory to explain why Donald Trump wasn't doing anything. I mean I think that's the real function of QAnon because it explained why he wasn't doing anything of what he was doing because he was being stopped by a cabal of paedophiles in Washington.

Everyone retreated into this unreal world and refused to face it. Therefore radicalism in my skeptical journalistic brain stopped being radical and I really made these films to try and examine why that happened, what the roots of that failure were because I think it's sad. I just think it's terribly sad the last four years. I mean I'm true in my country as well. You had this energy that came up with first of all with the Occupy movement, then burst out with Brexit and Trump and remember a lot of the people who voted for Trump voted for

Obama. You know suddenly they went from being good people to stupid people in the eyes of the Liberals. And this is extraordinary energy that was there wanting change and those who portrayed themselves, who saw themselves as wanting change, didn't actually go and do anything about it. And that's terribly sad. I mean you know it's just, it's a retreat and I think what I'm trying to do is examine

the roots of that retreat rather than saying oh you're stupid radicals, just saying well this is why it happened and part of it is in a way a failure of I suppose the modernism that dominated our world which said no you can reinvent world out of nothing. You can ignore the past. No you can't ignore the past. Those people who voted for Trump and those people who voted for Brexit have deep emotional things like nationalism in their heads and if you want them to vote for you you've got to go and engage with that because that's really powerful.

You can't just do it through, I was going to say policy wonks, but can I just say one thing about, I really think that BLM is good because BLM is the first movement that I've seen come up, radical movement that says no it's a structural problem, it's about power built into the society and if you want to change things you've got to change the power structure. It's not just about making people be nicer to each other, it's inbuilt into the power structure and it goes way back into the past and we've got to acknowledge that and it's really interesting that it takes a group that are outside the system to come black people,

to come smashing in and bring that into the mainstream. I think it's great because it actually is acknowledging the thing that isn't talked about in the age of the individual which is power and I have a bit of Stokely Carmichael making a speech at the end of the second film which I think is great where he just says you know when you see a white boy, you don't just see a white boy, behind him you see the army, the navy, the police force, the politicians, the law system, when you see a black guy there's nothing behind him and that's it, how you feel, how you behave is as much where you are in the power structure and in the class structure as how you feel inside yourself

and that's a really amazing step forward I think for radical politics because the radicalism of the last 40 years has been totally based on the idea of I just express my radical feelings, it comes from within me and it didn't get anywhere, you know Tupac Shakur wanted to use culture to try and radicalise people and it failed and he got really bitter and that again was terribly sad because I thought he was good. Yeah, I mean me too, he was like a touchstone of my youth, I think the argument, the most obvious argument against something like BLM is that it's kind of mystifying, misdiagnosing the problem by focusing on racial politics over economic inequality which is I think

a fair point and I think your point is fair too but I think it's opening up that crack that will lead to that wider thing because it takes people from outside the system to do it. I didn't see any of that from the white radicals who opposed Trump, I saw nothing of that, they retreated into theories about Vladimir Putin, which any good Russian journalist will tell you is fantasy. I mean even that very good journalist on the New Yorker called Masha Gassin thinks it's ridiculous, she made a great quote, she said Americans have got to realise that Russians

didn't elect Donald Trump, Americans elected Donald Trump and they still haven't got their head round that. Yeah, and it's funny that there's so much kind of defence mechanism around recognising this kind of very basic factual reality. Yes, it's a refusal, it's shocked people, just like Brexit in this country, shocked people and it goes back, I mean it's really deepened, I think it goes to the fourth line of paternalistic liberalism which is that from the 1940s onwards the white liberals saw themselves as having a benign paternalistic caring attitude to the white working class, that's what the American

corporation that grew up in the 1950s was all based upon, it was a benign paternalism and then in 2016 the white working class in my country and your country turned around and bit those people and they were so shocked they just couldn't comprehend it and also they couldn't comprehend it because in their eyes the white working class were voting against their own self-interest, which that's because the idea of self-interest has gone incredibly deep into you and my society in the last 30 years, the idea that people could do things not out of their own self-interest is seen as like alien, why would they vote against their own self-interest?

I heard there's a lot in the reaction to Brexit here. Right, and the cognitive dissonance on the part of the liberals that our country could be so flawed instead gets grafted onto Russia-gate style conspiracies. Yeah, I just thought it was a sad retreat by the liberals from actually engaging in something that was really significant and also energetic. The energy behind the Trump thing was extraordinary and the left could have got hold of it. I still think, what did you think of Bernie Sanders, did you like him? I was a Bernie supporter in both election cycles, I thought he was the only contemporary

politician we had who actually seemed like he stood for something, but in the end I ended up feeling sort of swindled by the Democrats. I think yet, and Bernie's virtue was that he was so plain-spoken and no frills and he actually, at least in his first campaign in 2016, refused to do the whole kind of telling my story thing, which was refreshing, and he did bill himself, like one of the central themes of your films is how politicians have defaulted from their role as representatives of the people to kind of becoming the perception managers of reality on behalf of powerful finance and tech interests, and Bernie, very much early on, billed himself as a representative

of the people, of the constituency, so it was very, I think, depressing to see him basically whip up support for the Democratic establishment and default to theories like Russiagate, because I mean, you're right, he could have said, well, the animus behind Trump's election is warranted incorrect, but he's not, you know, going whole hog, and here's why I can do it instead of also hysterically starting to scream about Russiagate and Vladimir Putin. And to give him credit, as far as I know, in 2016, 2017, he did go and do that, Bernie Sanders. He went and talked to Trump supporters, and I thought that was really good, and he seemed

to be the only one who did it. I just thought it was really, and also, in that 2016 election, many of the things he said was pretty much the same as what Trump was saying. I mean, it's very, very interesting. It's a forgotten moment. I think Bernie Sanders might have won, personally, that election. Yeah, but it feels like, I mean, the last four years very much, the last four or five years do feel like a missed opportunity.

And I mean, you can also see, I think, the white working class and the black working class are sort of aligned not only in their economic interests, but in the condescending attitude that affluent white liberals take to them, this benign paternalism that you talk about, because they're always groping around for revolutionary subjects, whether it's among white working class or black, urban poor, or women, they're always trying to find this revolutionary class, I think, like Joan Didion said that. Yeah, but they run out of steam, those liberals. I mean, they've got to get it back.

They've just got to. I mean, that's one of the reasons I tried to make these films is just to explain why have you got to this static state where you've just run out of an alternative? I mean, Joe Biden really surprised me the other day when he made a speech which said that he thought the war in Yemen should be stopped and America should stop selling arms through the Saudis in that war. And I thought, that's really good, do you know, it's the first time in four years I've actually heard someone talk about the real world outside Twitter, social media.

And yes, it's a horrific war and my country and your country is backing it and they should stop it. And I thought, that's really good. But I think one of the things that this last film brings to light is how like, because we've invented this world for ourselves that's overtaken by kind of paranoid ideation conspiracy theory. I don't know what to believe when a guy like Joe Biden says something like that and you automatically begin to doubt him and think that he's doing it out of personal self-interest,

which is what he's done most of his life. I know, I know, and it eats away at the soul, you know, money, money corrupts, but distrust eats the soul. And that's the problem is that you've got the two, you've got money corruption and distrust. And I just wanted to show where that distrust comes from and how disempowering it is. And one of the things I put at the end of the films is it's really interesting that in the last four or five years, a number of psychologists have tried to repeat the major experiments or some of the major experiments that prove that you can manipulate people

without them realizing it. They call it priming, we call it nudging, that idea that you can do it through sending them signals that they don't understand, practically none of the major experiments could be repeated. And the psychology has got a real problem at the moment, but what I take from that is that actually we may be far stronger as human beings than we think. And actually, although you can keep us in a state of hysteria online by bombarding us with memes and all things like that, what you can't do is actually change the way we think and feel underneath.

We're quite strong people, and I really like that idea. And I want a politician that comes back and says that to us and actually says, no, you got to trust me. You got to trust me because otherwise you're going to be in this forever. You're going to be in this unreal, panicky, suspicious, distrustful world. And I think people are so exhausted at the moment by this, that level of distrust and suspicion that they might go for that. They might.

Yeah, I would agree with you that it's reaching a kind of extremely heightened fatigue, definitely. And you say in your last film that the evidence for priming is basically non-existent and that if you tell people that they're being manipulated, they're going to feel manipulated and it's going to heighten the paranoia, which is going to exhaust them. That's the problem. I mean, to be fair, it's not all the experiments to show priming. But a number of the major ones, they haven't been able to replicate. But it is true if reports come out that say psychologists working with Facebook have shown

that they can unconsciously make you feel depressed by feeding these things into your news feeds, whether it's true or not, it just simply adds to the power of Facebook. Even though actually you're dissing Facebook and saying, oh, Facebook is bad, what you're really doing is feeding the power of Facebook because they are perceived to have this ability to manipulate you. What if they don't? What if actually all they can do is keep you engaged online because the rest of your world is so shitty that actually that's the world you live in.

But it can't actually change the way you think and feel that actually Facebook is far weaker than we think. Google might be far weaker than we think. Isn't that quite a liberating idea? It really is. And you draw, sorry, you draw sort of a parallel in your films to the sort of spy narratives of the mid-century and the Cold War that spies were thought to be these like incredibly sexy, powerful agents, but in fact they were just sort of pretty banal, weak, bureaucratic

actors. Yes, who used secrecy to pretend that they had power. I think this is more true in my country than yours. It was at that moment that the British Empire was falling apart and what the spies managed to do was sort of psychologically recreate for an elite class that idea of power because they gave out the idea that somehow there were levels of secrecy and levels of knowledge that you as the individual would never be able to find out. I always thought John Le Carré in his strange way, although he portrayed them as sad figures,

was a great PR man for them because there was always a hidden secret beyond the hidden secret, whereas I don't know if you've ever met any spies, as a journalist I've met quite a few spies, they're completely useless, they know nothing, they really know nothing. Did they see the end of the Cold War? No, none of them saw it coming, none of them predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. Were there any weapons of mass destruction? No, but they spent all their time telling us though there was, and did you notice in order to try and rescue their reputation, they spent the last four years telling us

that Donald Trump was peed on in a bed in Moscow by two prostitutes, why should I believe that if they didn't predict the end of the Cold War? Well I can't intuitively or psychologically buy it because he strikes me as a huge germaphobe and hypochondriac, I tell him he would let any strangers pee on him, but no, I mean you're right, and now there's, I think there's kind of like this sexy narrative in, I mean it's a very fragmented and broken narrative about the deep state in the United States, and I liked what you said in this New Yorker interview that you normally find conspiracy theories pretty boring.

Yeah, they're boring. But they are, yeah, and I think that they're kind of narcissistically flattering because they take away from the sad fact that the reality is just as awful but much more mundane, it's like thunderingly, crushingly mundane. Yeah, if as a result of the end of the Cold War you gave up on dramatic politics and went for politics of management, the truth is all the institutions that are supposed to govern you are really banal, the people who run it are very dull, the think tank people are so dull and they all lack imagination, all of them, because what they are is they believe

that money is the measure of everything, they're utilitarians really by nature, they're just dull and actually they spend all their time trying to mythify everything and suspicion is part of that, yes? We think Mark Zuckerberg is really powerful, maybe he's not, maybe he's just nothing, and there was a fascinating thing, I couldn't put it in the films because it was too complicated, but an economist working for eBay began to get suspicious about Google and he persuaded the marketing department of eBay to stop advertising on Google for a third of the North American continent for three months.

The marketing department of eBay just went, you can't do this, it'll be a disaster, but he insisted on it, they got the boss to let him do it, nothing happened, they didn't advertise on Google for three months, the sales remained exactly the same, they tried it again for another three months, nothing happened, and a number of other people are beginning to suspect that this magical idea that Google have promoted, that they somehow can target someone and adjust how they behave, may not be true either, it may all be, as a result of a series of catastrophes that hit in 2001, we have become these frightened individuals who then believe those myths of supreme magical powers, and it may all not

be true, and we may be the magical people because we have the ability to change the world if we became more confident, that's really what I'm trying to say in the films. Right, well I mean taking responsibility is frightening. Exactly, I think for many people as disempowering as these belief systems are, they're also sort of maybe a relief of some kind, to feel disempowered. Do you think so? I think for a lot of people, yeah, that's why these myths are so pervasive. The myths of disempowerment, it explains why they can't do anything, yes?

Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that they say, yeah, the reason that I'm sort of ineffective and politically impotent is because these tech platforms, these bureaucracies, these governments are sort of all powerful. Yes, and there's nothing we can do. I mean that is the feeling of our time, that inevitability isn't there, that whatever happens is just going to happen, and there's nothing you can do about it. But I quote that activist called David Graber, who I really like, at the front and the end of the films, who he just says, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that we made

this world, and that means we can make it differently as well. Yeah, and you say that we do it so we can change it. Yeah, I mean, which is a very ultimately individualistic concept, but keep in mind also, the left one, a major kind of symbolic coup, because in the 80s and 90s you had this kind of thatcherite Reaganite bootstrapping ethos that I think has been very intellectualized, very well explained, very well documented as something kind of corrosive to collective politics and collective interests, and rightfully so, but because the kind of contempt for individual responsibility is so high, I think that also de-incentivizes people from imagining how

they themselves could possibly sacrifice or imagine a world outside of their immediate consumer needs. Well, that's up to someone to come up with it. I mean, the big problem is, is that individualism is never going to go away. You can't put it back in the box, now it's out. It's a thing. Personally, I think if you could take the internet back from the venture capitalists who got hold of it in 2000 and have skewed it into this very narrow way, I always rather

like some of the early tech utopianism there, because the internet does allow you to behave and feel that you are an individual expressing yourself, yet also does allow collective power. It just does. And it may have just gone down a strange little route for the last 20 years as a result of the catastrophes we've been through. But on the other hand, I just think it's about imagination. Yes, you're right. People do feel frightened to move out of that cocoon there in a moment, which is consumerism

and is a sense that there is an inevitability around that there's nothing they can do about it. So they might as well just hide. But really, what did you think of, sorry, really, I just think that sometimes you can inspire people. I just do. I don't know. History shows you that.

I mean, people get, what did you, I mean, people get frightened by saying, Oh, look, the last time we tried to do something big, it led to horror. I wish they mean fascism. You know, if your big stories are dangerous, because they, they run away with you, big attempts to change the world, run away with you. Yes, that's true in the case of fascism, and it was true in the case of state communism in Russia. But I mean, the country you're living in at the moment, America, that was born out of

a big story. And for all its faults, it's an extraordinary achievement. The welfare state that I live in was born out of a big story. The very idea of voting that you can challenge people in power was born out of an extraordinary they're extraordinary attempts. We have done extraordinary things to change the world. And I'm not being nostalgic and I'm not being super optimistic. What I'm saying is what David Graber said in that thing that I quote, is we made this

world so we can actually make it different if we want. It didn't just happen. It didn't just happen, which is the feeling now that this world just happened. No, it didn't. We did it, which is really what I'm trying to show you in these films. Yeah, you say we and those in power created it together, which I think is, is very inspiring. Well, I think it's true, I really do. I wanted to ask what you what you thought of the the GameStop sort of the people collectively

inflating the price of this memafied stock. Personally, I thought GameStop in a way was a snapshot of the weirdness of our time. I mean, it started off as a sort of story of the little people against the bad hedge funds. And that ran for quite a while. Then the conspiracy theorists turned up that said, no, actually, the people who are betting on Robin Hood and other of those platforms are actually being used by other hedge funds to destroy the other hedge funds.

Then the evidence came out that Robin Hood itself, which was founded by two people who came out of the Occupy movement, was also making his money, allegedly, by selling the people's data on who actually bet on their site, and that's how they made their money. At which point, then the Marxists left came in and said, it's terrible because actually, even though they're taking on the hedge funds, they just want to bet on the market, which is very bad. At which point, I just give up. And I just think it's, it's what we call dogs in a box.

They're just all fighting each other and biting each other. And it's summed up the online world for me. And really, I've got this, I've got this lurking feeling in the back of my journalistic brain is that it all happens in your head and it's all online. And it is the funny truth of the last four years is that all that sound and fury that we've been through in my country, in your country, Brexit and Trump, it all happened in our heads. It didn't actually happen in the real world outside.

Nothing changed in the real world outside. It was like, it was like a sort of those, you know, those slow motion science fiction worlds, whereas inside our heads, there was this fury going on. And I'm wondering whether we're going to look back at this 20 years and say it was this strange moment, probably started by the catastrophe of 9-11, that we retreated into this sort of strange link between us and online and felt that that was the world. But in fact, actually, what we'd do, what would have happened is we'd all got locked into a pantomime theater together, where we got locked into these strange feedback loops

of people like Donald Trump, all shouting at each other, outside, we just didn't see what was happening. And I'm suspecting that people are going to suddenly turn and say, really? Is that? And they're going to turn against the online world and just go, it's mundane. It's just boring. It can't manipulate us. It just can't.

They're going to log off. Yeah. Let's go outside, you know, and let's find out what we're going to get. I hope so. Yeah, but I mean, I think the GameStop thing is really interesting because it basically illustrates what the George Floyd protests illustrated with the storming of capital, of the capital building illustrated, what's something like the Epstein scandal illustrators that you have a series of these mediated shocks that are consuming in the moment, but

then are swiftly forgotten. Nobody remembers them. And they do exist, even if they have kind of real world origins, they exist primarily online and in people's minds. And that's very dangerous because, like, you know, how do you self-adject from that? And the brutal argument, which is what I was saying earlier on about compared to China, you either have a Chinese system where you ignore people's feelings or you have a system which inflates people's feelings to a continual state of extreme anxiety, which is what you're

talking about. It's waves of hysteria and that that's what we're living with. And it stops us seeing that actually nothing is changing, nothing. The structure of power is the same. And it's not a conspiracy. It's something we've all found. Because what's really interesting, I think I'd try and point out in the movie, the last movie, is that it's everyone benefited from this hysteria, except if you were at the bottom

of the heap, that Donald Trump benefited from it because it explained why he wasn't doing anything. The New York Times benefited from it because it just got the masses and masses of clicks. Otherwise, they might have had real serious financial problems. The liberals benefited from it because it managed to, they avoided having to face up to the fact they didn't have an explanation of how to counter Trump's attractiveness. And the spies benefited from it because it made them look grand again when in fact they're completely useless.

And Vladimir Putin benefited from it because it made him seem strong at the very moment when people like Alexei Navalny were rising up, which was beginning to channel opposition against him, which you'll see again and again. So all these people who were trying desperately to cling on to power, but who had run out of a story to tell themselves and other people, found in this hysteria a wonderful way of holding on to power in this desiccated, dried up way. And I just think it may be near its end, personally, but that may be being optimistic. I want to ask you a Russia question because it makes total sense that you would be interested

in guys like Vladislav Serkov or Edward Limonov, who's a protagonist in this latest film. I was shocked to see that you mentioned the ballerina Maya Plesetskaya and also the bard Arkady Severny, who were like touchstones of my youth. I'm just shocked. I really? Yeah. Dusted them off out of some archive. But are you kind of a Russia buff or are you just like a cultural omnivore and do you

put any stock in this comparison that people are throwing around now of the USSR at the time of its collapse and the United States in the present day? It seems to me that everything feels kind of Russian now. And I don't think it's because of any concerted Russian collusion, but because America has entered the era of being a low trust society, which Russia and China kind of pioneered. I mean, the brutal argument is that America is where Russia was in 1987 because what happened in Russia is that they desperately tried to make the economy work in the early to mid 80s.

And you could argue that America did the same thing with the financialization of its economy. I mean, the really fascinating thing about the most powerful corporations in America at the moment is that they are all just making vast amounts of money and not actually change. They're not making anything. Google doesn't make anything. You know, it just they're just sitting on vast cash piles and that really what you've got is a baroque version of financialized capitalism, which in 2008 collapsed. And ever since then, it's been flatlining and you've been pumping in what's called quantitative

easing, a phrase that no one understands, but actually is a way of just propping up these corporations. You could argue that you're at the same point with in 2008 that the Soviet Union was in mid 80s, that you're desperately trying to prop up a system that was rational once upon a time. The Soviet plan was rational in 1954. It became absurd. You could argue that that financialized capitalism became absurd in 2008.

I mean, they're talking about negative interest rates, they're going to pay you to borrow money. Well, that's that's like one of those Russian novels, you know, where everything has gone absurd. Yeah. When people who have enormous boats and houses in the Hamptons come to you and say, we want to give you money to borrow money. Yeah, and you're just like, that's weird, right?

Yeah. So there is no argument that maybe maybe it is like that. There is another argument that says that's not going to be the issue. The issue becomes then, you know, when you have an economy that's purely speculative and nonproductive, how do you tether any kind of grand myth or grand narrative to a reality because the underlying reality is, you know, non-existence and there's no gold in that safe anymore. Yeah, I think that's a really good point.

I mean, that really is it. If you let the money out of control, it eats away at reality. It really does. And it sort of benefits from that slipping slipperiness of reality, like GameStop, which will be forgotten in two weeks time. Of course. Yeah. But because, okay, the other, what's the word, brutal economic argument is that the hysteria

not only allows those who are losing power to desperately hold on to power when they be Trump or the liberals or Putin, it also allows finance to constantly speculate on the hysteria. That's true. It feeds off it. And the social media companies feed off it too. But it's a static world. It doesn't got a story to tell you.

And I think it's very, I think it's much weaker than you think, much weaker. And just as people didn't believe, I mean, in hypernormalization, I chose that phrase written by this very, very good historian who said that really what made it so strange in the Soviet Union in the 80s is everyone knew that it wasn't working. But because no one could think of an alternative, they treated it as normal. And it was hypernormal. And the same sort of thing is true now. I mean, it's not like the Soviet Union.

This isn't the, you know, America and my country are not the Soviet Union, but they've reached a point of absurdity when they have to do things like pay you to borrow money. And maybe just maybe that actually we are in our own hypernormal state, accepting what we know as absurd as normal. It's a bit like the people who believe in conspiracy theories. They know that they are conspiracy theories, but they go along with them because actually in a funny way, they make more sense of the world than it feels more true. Yes.

Well, I think I think that you say, go on. Every story that you say, sorry, go ahead. What I was going to say is every age has its own emotional reality. It's what feel, it's how people feel at a time. Do you see what I mean? And the people who embrace the conspiracy theories, it's sort of more how it feels. It feels more real than being told by, I don't know, I'm not going to be nasty. I'm going to be nasty, but you can be nasty.

No, no. This is a safe space. I think the, the historian you say is this guy, Alexi Yurchuk, who came up with the term hypernormalization. He also came up with this term stob that I've written and talked about a lot, which is a late Soviet parody style that is kind of extreme over identification with your position. And you could almost argue that what happened in the, in the United States was Donald Trump was like the premier proponent of American stob in the sense that it was unclear.

He was his own best parody. It was unclear whether he was mocking himself or whether he was dead serious, which is why, you know, a lot of critics said like, okay, well, SNL isn't funny anymore because you have Alec Baldwin coming on every Saturday mocking Trump in a way that he does better. And it seems like we are past, I mean, that, that's another issue. We're at this point of like kind of terminal irony where everybody is like over identified with a position. And that to me seems like a psychoanalytic problem because we're suffering from too much

kind of self-awareness. Is it possible to go back from that? No, well, I don't think it is. Actually, I do think one of the great things of our time is the self-consciousness of, of the individualism has ended up with it. I mean, the original idea of individualism is that you would be liberated from being told what to do by patrician elites and you would be your own empowered and confident person.

That's ended up not just with millions of people feeling anxious and uncertain, but they're all very self-conscious. I think one of the defining things of our age is that everyone sort of feels, no, everyone acts as though they're being watched, do you know what I mean? That it's, it's very much their own performance, they're very self-conscious. I think I've never managed to find a way of expressing it in films because it's so inchoate. It's a sort of thing that lurks underneath everyone's behavior, but you notice it in

bars and pubs in the evening. People, people are self-conscious and it's self-consciousness is this thing that you're being watched when you're not, but it's, and it's very damaging. And I think that is related to that irony that you're talking about. It eats the soul. It really does. And yeah, you've got to break out of that irony. I mean, there is no argument that irony might be one of the real defense mechanisms against

the future because it's part of the nothing can be trusted thing. And I'm not arguing for deep horrible total sincerity, I'm arguing for a skepticism about irony as much as a skepticism about those who say, trust me, do you see what I mean? Yeah. I mean, a confident intelligence about it rather than just giving into it, that's all. That was quite incoherent. No, no, no, I think, I think self-consciousness is interesting in what you do in your film very well.

I perceived a kind of like, there's something Hegelian about the way that the structures of consciousness mirror and replicate structures of society. And as we become increasingly sort of individualized and then maybe now self-conscious of our individualism, new sort of forms will emerge inside and outside. Yeah. I think I was trying to grope towards that idea that maybe when individualism ends up as being totally self-conscious, it's not really individualism any longer, it's something else.

And we don't quite know what it is, but it will have to morph into something because people just get so exhausted by that. There's a real sense of exhaustion about that and I don't mean just because of the pandemic. I mean, just in social terms, that if you are always having to feel you're being watched, that's exhausting. It really is. And maybe it will morph into something else. I don't know.

We can't even comprehend yet. Yeah. No, I mean, it's exciting and exhausting by the same token, which reminds me, this is not a question, but it reminded me of the thing like John Berger said that men watch and women watch themselves being watched, but now it seems like everybody is acting like a woman. In a misogynistic way, but everybody's become, you know, kind of embodied this feminine consciousness. It is.

I mean, I remember that piece, it's in his film, one of John Berger's films he's talking about. In my, these films I've done, I talk about the rise of Valium in the late 60s, early 70s, which many of the feminist movement at that time said more women, it was predominantly being taken by women, and it was because they were realizing that the life they were being promised as a homemaker in the suburbs wasn't true. Now, that was true, but I remember talking to a guy who knew Arthur Sackler, who promoted Valium, and he told me something very interesting about Sackler.

He said that Sackler thought the feminists were wrong. He wasn't challenging their argument. He said that the women, because they were isolated in their suburban homes, were understanding the problems of the individual ahead of the men. They got there first, he said, that the houses in the suburbs were like the laboratories of the future, where you would be on your own with your own anxieties, and you would become distrustful. And that's, the women just were taking the Valium to deal with that.

And as Sackler pointed out to this guy I was talking to, more and more men were beginning to take it as well. So it's not really a feminine, it's not a femininity thing. It's the fact that the women of that era and that social class that got into the suburbs found the reality of the downside of individualism before anyone else. Right, they were like the early adopters. They were the head of the curve. Yeah, I think you say they were free, but they were alone.

Yes, exactly. And the aloneness is the weakness of it all. And if you're self-conscious and alone, that's very strange, because you have the sense that you're being watched, but you know there's no one watching you. So really, and this goes back to your thing about how you knew you may emerge, you're sort of aware that you're watching yourself. It's what a lot of, you know, it's a lot of, what a lot of people say about the obsession with dieting is that people actually aren't dieting because they're dieting for themselves.

They look at themselves in the mirror all the time. So it's a constant, you're in constant feedback loops with yourself. And that's quite debilitating. I mean, of course you're dieting because you want to look good for the world, but really the person who's judging it all the time is you watching yourself in the mirror and constantly trying to adjust yourself. And that's quite strange. That women were merely just kind of like the first guinea pigs for this sort of thing because

they were like historically, I mean, as Berger Berger means that they were like the original kind of artistic muses through a variety of historical economic factors, whatever. But yeah, that's definitely true that like, I think that's one of the scariest things that you kind of encounter in your day to day interactions with yourself is that you are now kind of programmed to think, to kind of anticipate the way that you will appear to yourself. To yourself. Exactly.

Yeah. And that's a really strange relationship to have that no one, no novelist as far as I can see has got their head around that. Yeah. I mean, it's antisocial and probably autistic and not very healthy. No, no. But it might be the baroque end of individualism and we're getting to where it starts to not trying to eat itself, it just sort of starts to watch itself.

It's really fascinating. I have a question about you make this point about Tupac to backtrack a little bit where you say that he sort of channeled or sublimated his revolutionary politics into culture, popular culture, and that that was kind of like a ultimately an impotent activity that reinforced existing power structures. Do you think that there is a meaningful way to sort of enact progressive ideology through culture? I don't know.

I mean, there's part of me that's very suspicious of culture because it actually doesn't done anything that it promised to do. It's like, well, you know, culture really stopped the Iraq war, didn't it? You know, radical culture. In the era of radical culture, which you can really date from the late 1980s through to now, by any empirical judgment, it's failed because inequalities have gone up massively. The inequalities of power have not been changed. It's made a lot of noise, but actually hasn't managed to change anything.

I don't know. What's good about culture is that it manages to express how people are feeling. It gets there for, I think music does that a lot. I think Tupac did that. You know, I don't attack him for his music at all. I just think he found that it was quite a sealed off world when he got there. But it does express how people feel. I mean, I do think a lot of the good music of our time expresses that strange mixture

of a sort of machine-like trappedness, but at the same time a romantic yearning for something beyond all this in an incoherent way that is way ahead of any politics. And I think it's good like that. It somehow expresses the mood of now, the feeling of now. It's good at that. It really is good at that. Yeah, I think music can be almost futuristic in that regard. Yes.

And also, did you see a series of films that the BBC did called I May Destroy You done by a woman called Michaela Cole? I haven't. You should watch it. That's really good. This was kind of the movie about, it was like a sexual assault kind of movie that was on the air. That's how it starts.

That was the narrative, yeah. But it goes, you can't predict where it's going to go. It's really good. Okay. It captures the mood of now. What art and culture is really good is about capturing the mood of now. I don't think it really is very good at changing the world. It captures now and that then inspires people to go off and try and make sense of that.

But it's really good at the getting the now, that's what it's good at. It's sort of reactive. The second part of my question, which you sort of have just answered, but is about your own work, which has become, I think, increasingly popular. And this film, I think, is one of, is your most successful, maybe, and that it's the most kind of accessible and generous. Yeah, it's more generous, that's true. And it's, it feels, your work feels like it's becoming more individualized or individuated

even to use, like, Jungian terminology, in that it's very distinct and it has like a singular style and you're almost, in our culture and our milieu, at least, you're almost like a cool, like, DJ of, like, concepts in music and footage. So my question is, I guess, how do you see your role as an artist, a very individualized one in society? I see myself as a journalist who's realized that you can make, you can steal from art and bolt that bits of art onto journalism and make it much more emotionally involving. That's what I do.

I don't, I don't think I'm an artist. I haven't got that, that capacity in me. But what I can do is I can see bits in art that you can take and literally fuse together with political journalism to give it a feeling that most political journalism never has, because to be brutal, most political journalists aren't interested in music, they're just not. And I worked out quite early on, and I've done it much, you're right, I've done it more with this one, is that you can create all kinds of moods with music and with images and noise and voice that create a platform or a world into which you can take people

and then begin to tell them things that otherwise would be seen as rather dry and rather boring. And I think I've done that probably more in this one. Yeah, it's like, I mean, my aim with this was to try and make a thing like a 19th century Russian novel, to be honest. They wish you had lots and lots of characters that come and go, and sometimes not all of it is germane to that, the mainstream of the plot, it just has a feeling of life. So I suddenly put in a bit that one of the women who actually had written a novel that inspired lots of young Russians to go and take part in the revolution, a woman called

Ethel Bull, Ethel Voynich, had also inherited a thing called the Voynich Manuscript, which is a manuscript that no one has yet managed to decipher. It doesn't appear in the rest of the movies, I just thought it was a great fact, let's put it in. Well, I think you, I also noticed, sorry, you did a great job of illustrating by example, what you describe, which is, you know, presenting us with a lot of data that we could draw connections and recognize patterns in. This film is interesting because it feels very much like a synthesis of many of your

previous films, like you have like threads of hyper normalization century of the self, even the Mayfair set, which is my personal favorite. But by the same token, it also feels like a kind of primer, like I almost feel like you could go backwards from this one and access all of your other work. I hope that's not insulting. No, no, it's not. I mean, I, I, I wanted to make this more emotional. I mean, actually, funnily enough, the Mayfair set was also quite emotional because it was

about these four men and, and, and even though what they did was pretty weird grotesque, I sort of wanted to sympathize with their rise and fall because then you sort of understand what they're doing. Which is what novels do novels that the problem with a lot of journalism now is that it has to divide people into what to put it bluntly are goodies and baddies. And you know, from your own experience, that's not what people are like, you know, if you yourself, you could be bad and you could be good and really good novels are about acknowledging that people can be all kinds of stuff because that's real.

And I just have this in this one more than I've done in the past, tried to bring that forward in some of the characters I've done. Yeah, it's like acknowledging moral ambiguity, which Russians do better than, than Americans know. Sorry, you were going to ask. I have a Mayfair set question, but you had one. No, go ahead. Well, can I just say that I have tried to make this more ambiguous.

I like that idea and, and, and give up trying to just tell you it all the time and just let you pull back at certain points and let you, the person watching go into the world and just think about it a bit. What do you think about Jiang Qing? What do you think about these ambiguous characters? And then I say what I think, but less than I have in the past. Well, yeah, and they're, they're horrifying, but they're also inspiring. Extraordinary.

Sir James Goldsmith, one of the early corporate raiders that you profile in the Mayfair set, I became really obsessed with him because he's a horrifying, formidable character. He's also incredibly charismatic. There's a great Charlie Rose interview with him. He became a vocal opponent of globalization, especially Gatt and NAFTA. And in essence, he turned against the very kind of system. He helped pioneer and make a reality because it was no longer serving him. Though, of course, he added kind of a moral justification to it.

He even put a lot of money and resources behind challenging Gatt through a referendum. And one of the kind of stupid theories that I had was that Brexit is actually kind of a delayed referendum on Gatt. Is that insane? Absolutely. No, no, Goldsmith, Goldsmith, Goldsmith gave you Brexit, really. He, he set up, I mean, Goldsmith, I, I, in those films, I portray him as a tragic figure at the end because you're right.

He unleashed the power of the financialized market, a financialization, and it destroyed him because the pension funds who he activated as this grant force just got rid of him because they disapproved of him. And the story of our time is that the nice, sorry, nice pension funds destroyed the man that actually made them powerful because they disapproved of him. He was too vulgar and he revealed too many truths about how the market really works. It's kind of a trumpy entail. Towards the end of his life, he set up this thing called the referendum party.

You know, he was one of the early people to turn against the idea of Europe. For these very reasons, he saw it as part of a globalization. And yes, the roots of Brexit go back to him. So in fact, one of the pro-Brexiteer ministers, a woman called Preeti Patel, who is now the Home Secretary, was one of his early candidates, I think, in his party. I think. So we have to say a legend, but I think she was. So yeah, no, you're completely right.

He's, Goldsmith is a fascinating historical character. He runs, he runs through my country like this. See you. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, because I, I'm a chick and I'm interested in gossip, I, you know, went down and realized that his daughter, Jemima, was married to Imran Khan. I'm kind of an Anglophile. So this was like a fun research project for me.

Yeah. And then, and then went out with Russell Brand and now I think, and now I think he's in love with, I know her, so I have to be nice. He's, is in love with Peter Morgan, who writes the Queen, the Crown. Oh, interesting. Tell her we love her too. So the complexity of English culture keeps on intertwining with itself. But the other question I have is, is that like a lot of these guys that you introduce

like Goldsmith, well, to the general public who may not know about them, an Anglo phone public in the case of like someone like Limon of Horst Mahler, who was, you know, a leftist extremist in Germany and actually ended up as a neo-Nazi, so he kind of ended up where his father began. Yes. Well, a lot of these guys end up very publicly and vocally rejecting the ideologies that they once promoted. What do you think is up with that beyond, you know, is it just self-interest?

No, I think it's a generation who come out of that modernism of our time, which somehow thinks you can reinvent the world and just cut the past off. You just can just do it and you can reinvent. Right. Well, Horst Mahler is fascinating because he's part of that generation who come out of, whose parents come out of the Second World War, they realise that the Nazis are still among them, the children do, and set out to try and get rid of it. What they don't see is that that experience has scarred their own minds as well.

And I do think that one of the things I'm trying to say in these films is that the past haunts all our societies. I know you're sceptical of Black Lives Matter, but I think what Black Lives Matter did, which is in a funny way what Brexit did in my country, it reminds you that you're haunted by the past. In my case, the empire, in your case, the racism, you could call it an internal empire. It's that past still preys upon you. And until the left and the liberals acknowledge that, they're going to always have problems

because it's inside their heads as well. I mean, what was fascinating in my country when the Brexit vote happened was not so much the reaction of the think tanks who went, oh, I didn't see that coming. It was of the benign paternalistic liberals. They were so shocked that their country that they still thought of as grand and somehow special could come to this. They were hurt because they somehow thought that England was a special country, and although they would never think of themselves as being part of the empire, or in fact, they would

be anti the empire, they still had that sense of specialness and entitlement inside their heads. I remember seeing so many other people, I know, and people a bit older, going, how could it have come to this that our country did this? They voted like this. It was like talking to people who still thought they were special because they had an empire. Even though in their rational brains, they would never support the empire. It goes deep.

The past goes like class distinctions go very deep in society, in America as well. The past is always there, and the left has always been terrified of the past, partly because of fascism and communism. They thought they could try and wipe all that and get rid of it and start all over again, but also because they're terrified of nationalism, terrified of it, and maybe for good reason. It hamstrungs, it traps them. In the UK, you make the case that the guilt over what England had done to China in imperialism sort of morphed from guilt into this kind of collective paranoia and fear.

I think in the United States, we do have this legacy of slavery that we haven't really reckoned with and almost refused to. What I was tracing in that film, sorry to jump in, is just that what we're talking about was the liberals in the 19th century started off feeling very guilty about how they wrecked a society by forcing people onto them, but then they got frightened. That fear and that guilt is very, very powerful, very deep, and I suspect, but I don't know America well enough, it's also true of the liberals in America, is there's a really big complex thing, which as a psychoanalyst would say, to unpack, and I don't think it's

done it yet, because, and this goes back to modernism, modernism was an attempt to live without history. It really was. That's why they built buildings that have no historical antecedents. It was an attempt to escape from history. And I think what I'm really saying is that you can't, and a lot of it, that really screwed up a lot of the progressive movement, because it was suffused with guilt and suffused with a sort of angst that was going to be revenge.

We still have it. Have you noticed how Vladimir Putin is no longer the big enemy, it's Xi Jinping. He's the next one. There's going to be, what was called the yellow peril in the late 19th and early 20th century is reemerging, and a lot of it is driven by that same fear of what we did to China. You know, they're now going to take their revenge. I mean, I think this is also totally economically motivated, because the relationship of the American elites toward China is beginning to change, you know, someone else put it,

they are no longer our primary partner. They are now a competitor on the global kind of map. But I mean, I think Dasha put it well on one of our podcasts that like all politics is like sexual pathology. And this kind of echoed Hofstadter's point that basically paranoia is projection, right? A lot of these liberals who see kind of a vast conspiracy in Putin or Trump were projecting their own kind of like wish fulfillment, their own fantasies in a way. And actually, you know, it ended up happening that they accused the Trump administration

of a lot of the kind of crimes and misdemeanors that they themselves would be guilty of eventually. Well, it didn't go unnoticed in England, Britain, that a lot of what was being, a lot of what people got upset with Trump for doing, which saying the election has been stolen, was pretty much what they had done for four years before him. They said the election had been stolen, that there's a sort of they got, I don't know, they got locked together. That's the real problem is that the left ran out of ideas and got locked into a feedback loop of anger with Trump.

And I just think that debilitated them and it's led to a lot of suspicion. And the next wave of suspicion, Putin is gone, he's not talked about, I noticed these days, it's going to be Xi Jinping. And I suspect you're going to get a new Cold War mood with China. That's not to say that China is a nice and good society, but I still think it's going to debilitate the liberals and the left, they're going to get caught up in that, rather than actually trying to pull back and see, yes, it is a complex economic thing that's emerging and that maybe China is far more fragile than you think, it's another society that's run

out of ideas. I mean, the generation in charge in China, by which Xi Jinping is one, where the children of the of the Cultural Revolution, they were called the princelings, and they did some really horrible things, those people, and they just want to keep it all shut down. And part of the sort of big surveillance society in China, people like me would argue, is a way of avoiding having to face their own past, what they went back to. So just as much as I would argue that here, the liberals and the left have not really come to terms with their past failures, that's also true of that generation are now in power

in China. They just don't want to examine the price they paid for this extraordinary economic transformation they've done, and there is a lot more dissatisfaction underneath the surface of society in China than we think in the West. But what we're about to do, I suspect, is start another simplified version of, oh, China's the new Cold War, and it's threatening us, which is not going to do the service, either country much service, I think, but I don't know, maybe Biden will turn out to be much better than we think.

Maybe he'll be wonderful. He was very good on the war in Yemen. I'm sorry to keep on making that point, but that was really good. No, that's surprising, and it's well-welcome news. My government has to go out of the courage to say that at all. It's still supplying arms to the Saudis to bomb the people in Yemen, and it's good that America's not doing that. Well, see, I'm such a paranoiac now, again, I'll believe it when I see it, you know, and

I have no way of proving it, so. I'm more of an optimist. Yeah, well, that's certainly, yeah, I rewatched hypernormalization last summer when it was like a very rigid sort of lockdown, and the George Floyd protests had started happening, and I was listening to a lot of, like, Yonka and Igor Letov and, like, smoking cigarettes in my apartment and just sort of lamenting how my parents had left the Soviet Union for me to end up, like, in a bread line, feeling very, very doomed, and this, your new film really left me with, like, a sense of kind of optimism and imaginative generative.

Just to back to your question about what I like about Russia, what I like about Russia is that it's always had, I mean, it can manifest itself in a bad way, but Russia has always had this feeling that, although it's part of Europe, it's somehow separate and can see the world in a different way, and I like that very much. The trouble is, it comes out in horrible nationalistic ways in this way called Eurasianism, the guy called Alexander Dugan, and it comes out actually in Navalny, Navalny's quite a strong nationalist himself. Yeah, well, that was the kind of, like, the bitter pill that American liberals had to

swallow, that he said a bunch of really bad things about Caucasians, especially Muslims. Exactly. So maybe he's not as great as you think he is, but he is brave, you know, so it's complicated. But I like that idea that Russia has always been suspicious of the narrowness and the utility, in a way, the economic view that the West has always had. There's something else in Russia, and I've always really liked it. I can't explain what it is, it's just an ability to pull back from the rest of the powerhouse of capitalism in the 19th century and say, no, there's more to this than that.

Well, they're less precious about their individualism. I mean, they really, like I've said this on the pod before, but you know, if black lives don't matter in America, no lives matter in Russia, and that's both horrifying and liberating. And I think, you know, the racist, like my feeling about it is, our racism is completely, you know, proliferates every fiber of society, but it's also a lot more casual and a lot more casual. More or less. Yeah.

And people are less precious about racism in a way that I think is crippling and paralyzing here because people internalize it too much, make too much out of it. Not that it's not a horrible thing that has ruined many a life, but I'm talking about kind of the day to day, like microaggressions and oppressions that people perceive. Well, I think that that has to do with slavery. Yeah. Like, we had our own haul system of slavery, this like karmic kind of debt that can never really be paid that in Russia is just much more vast and.

Russia's much more vast and older and America has had a much more intense. The slavery was really weird and intense. Yeah. It damaged the society as well. And also the one of the things I point out in the first film, which I think Richard Hofstadter says is that the white settlers who came to the North America saw themselves as escaping the bad culture, the corrupt old world, but they bought with them suspicion that they bought them with them because they were always worried that they might have brought them that that

old world corruption with them. So in a way, what I think people like Hofstadter were arguing is that that distrust was built into America right from the very start because it saw itself as exceptional. It was always aware of that it that that exceptionalism might be under attack and that brought paranoia right from the start. I'm not sure that's true about Russia. I don't think it has that it's too big and old to have that sort of feeling that it doesn't have the fragility that that paranoia brings with it, which you find in America, right?

It's less experimental. The village paranoia. I don't know. Um, well, do you have, I have, I have maybe like a couple of last questions. Yeah. Okay. A few of you have time. So I think part of the reason that your films are so kind of anticipated and beloved, I'd

like to believe is that people still have kind of a muscle memory for edifying intellectually ambitious programming, kind of like you get in the heyday of like the BBC and the PBS. And it seems like this virtually doesn't exist anymore. Like you're kind of, you know, I'm not trying to gas you up, but you're kind of in a league of your own in this sense. And it also seems like the death of grand cultural narratives has gone hand in hand with a decline in the quality of cultural production in general. And you see this across the board and, you know, in art and music and literature and

certainly documentary is no exception. You know, most documentary now has basically slid into like the true crime genre. It's super like meta-referential, that sort of thing. Do you think there's any hope for the genre? I think, I think you praised me too much. I think what I spotted, partly because I like music, but also partly because I started working in what could be best described as trash television. I mean, my first jobs were to go and film talking dogs and things like that, which I

really enjoyed. I had great fun doing it. Is that you, I think every age when, I think every age has a moment when it's journalism becomes boring and it dies and out of that comes a new kind of journalism that connects with people because it connects as much emotionally. And I worked out quite early on in my career that people, that people were moving towards music and talking to each other about films and they were being silly and that jokes were dying and what was replacing them was deadpan silly humor.

And all I did was simply take high-end pretentious rubbish and bolt it together with trash popular music, stuff I got from music and spotted an art to just try and make it not entertaining but just you connect with it and I had fun doing it. And I think that's all I did. I'm not part of a great big serious narrative tradition. I just decided to take political journalism and bolt it together with things that I liked which are fundamentally music and emotional and being emotional and being silly. I mean, often I'm silly.

I don't make jokes. I'm just silly in the films. And I put in a shot of an animal looking at you or something like that that just makes me. People dancing. Yeah, people dancing and just silliness. It's just silly. And I just found people like that because I think they got a sense of where I was coming

from. Well, I think it made them feel less anxious about dealing with kind of like intellectually demanding ideas. I'm going to praise you a little more but I have an ulterior motive so it's not purely honest. But I think what appeals to me about your films is that they take, you know, a rather dark view of human nature and human progress but at the same time you never fall into the trap of being like moralizing or pedantic or overly cynical.

You know, in other words, you're not, you don't strike me as a miserable prick, which is very important. A sea of journalists who are. But what do you enjoy? What personally appeals to you about like this moment or, you know, in culture? Yeah. This moment. Yeah.

Because I think that even though it's really dark at the moment, people are beginning to realize that things aren't fixed and things aren't inevitable. I also think that, sorry, I'm becoming boring now. But I just think that maybe, just maybe things are going to open up. That's what I think. Can I just go back to what you just said? The other thing I'm very conscious of not doing is ever using academic terms in any of my films.

I will never use the word, I can't even say it, the N word that is neoliberalism. I can't. I just can't because for two reasons, A, I don't believe it exists. I think the kind of thing we've got at the moment isn't really capitalism, but that's another argument. But also because I have noticed with a lot of inverted commerce, serious journalism, when people use terms like that, the audience or the reader goes, oh, yes, that's the N word.

It's like the Mona Lisa. When you're shown the Mona Lisa, you go, oh, that's the Mona Lisa. You don't actually look at it at all. So when they use the N word, they mean, oh, yes, he's one of those people who talks about neoliberalism. You're not actually listening to what that person is saying at all, at which point it's all, whatever you're saying, is completely gone because I know what that person is going to say.

So what I try and do is tell stories in which I literally let the ideas come out of the stories and never use a term that people will feel is, it's not even a cliche, it's just, oh, yeah, that's that term that people use when they're doing that. I'm very, very careful about that because I just think it's, it's not just lazy. It makes people not listen to you. Yeah. Do you consider yourself a populist in that regard? No.

No. I'm a journalist. I just think, I just have a great faith in journalists because I think it's part of mass democracy. It's a part of, it's part of telling people, oh, have you thought about looking at the world this way? I mean, that's what the BBC asked me to do is just pull back like a helicopter and say, have you thought about looking at the world this way?

So, you know, because now right and left have dissolved together, there's a very narrow consensus in our society. And I just think very rigid and it's just good to pull back and say, have you thought about it looking at that way and don't use the bad academic words? Well done. That was literally my, my final question was the N word question. I was going to ask why you never use that word, even though it's like the big elephant in the room.

Um, okay. One last question. Well, since you mentioned mass democracy, do you think mass democracy is possible in an age of mass media? That's the kind of eternal contradiction. Yeah. I do. I think the question no one has quite answered is whether mass democracy is, is possible

in the age of hyperindividualism because as I try and show in these films, it was born out of mass democracy, individualism, but then it starts to eat away at it. And what you get are these strange figures who, who are powerful because they're individually very powerful, but also corrode collectivism. And what we're waiting to see is whether the politicians of the future can somehow find a way of combining that very powerful force of individualism with a new collectivism. If they can, then mass democracy is going to flourish in a way that we can't possibly imagine and it will be fantastic.

If they don't, then I might, we might be heading towards a BF Skinner world where you just simply observe, get the gather the data and give them the treats to make them do what you want. It's one of the two. I don't know which, I hope it's the former. Same. Yeah. Right, the BF Skinner world where we kind of have these atomized hysterical hallucinations

that don't actually have any bearing on reality. No, it's a world, it's a world in which what BF Skinner said was in a way sort of religious. He said that human beings are not liberated when they are controlled by their feelings. Human beings are actually imprisoned by their feelings because if, if what guides you is all that stuff that goes on in your head minute by minute, then actually you're a terrible prisoner of those strange weird shit that goes on inside your head. And what he was trying to evoke is that old idea of freedom, which goes back to religion, which simply says in whose service is perfect freedom, what he means is God, but what they

will reinvent is a kind of God that will be able to see and understand you through the data more than you understand yourself. That's their theory. And that, to be honest, is the reinvention of God because that was the, that's the idea of God that he understands you better than you understand yourself. Personally, I think it's a terrible idea because actually what you're going to get is, you know, you're going to live in China. What I hope is that really individualism is just beginning and that we're through a series

of catastrophes starting with 9-11. It's been skewed into this narrow, distrustful form, but we can escape from it. But that requires a politics that somehow manages to accept that individualism, but find a way of pulling it together and making you feel you're part of something that will go on beyond your own existence. I mean, the person I really like is a, I think he's Brazilian. He's a writer called Roberto Unger and he is, he's really trying to tackle with this thing. He believes what David Graber believes is that we made this world so we can do it again.

And he says, how do we get that individualism to work in a collective way at the same time without denying it's individualism, it's individualistic-ness. And I think that's the key thing of our time. But quite frankly, worrying about whether Putin gave you Donald Trump is a blockage against thinking about those things. It's the, that's the problem. It's the distrust and the self-conscious distrust that the liberals have at the moment. Well, and it's also, you know, to pivot off of BF Skinner, it's not only kind of an abdication

of freedom, but it's also very deeply undignified. Yes. That's another way of putting it. Very good. Which is possibly more print anyway. Well, thank you so much. Pleasure. For coming on our show.

It was a pleasure to have you. Thank you for inviting me. We will see you in hell. That's our sign off. Okay. I thought he froze. It was just perfect.