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|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on this people. | ||
| Here's not got a free shot on all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you're trying to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA Media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
| stephen k band friday 16th of january anno domini 2026 Harnwell here at the helm at Steve Bannon's war room. | ||
| It's been a tough week for the British Conservative Party, called the oldest political party in the world. | ||
| They've had two serious defections this week. | ||
| We're going to talk now with Joseph Robertson. | ||
| Joseph, welcome back on to the show. | ||
| Let's talk about Robert Jenrick's resignation first, even though I guess he is slightly less in status as a shadow justice secretary. | ||
| But I think that's the one that's taken more as a stab in the back. | ||
| Kemi Badenock, I think, I don't know how she's going to be able to make the proposition to the British public that she's a Conservative Prime Minister in waiting if someone like Robert Jenrick basically defects to reform, which is what he's done today. | ||
| Before you go into this, let's just have a quick view of what he said right now. | ||
| I challenge anyone to argue other than that Britain is completely broken. | ||
| Those that came before us built a great country. | ||
| The greatest country in the world. | ||
| But we are set to lose it. | ||
| We will, for certain, if this government gets re-elected. | ||
| I can't kid myself anymore. | ||
| The party hasn't changed and it won't. | ||
| The bulk of the party don't get it. | ||
| They don't have the stomach for the radical change that Britain needs. | ||
| In opposition, it's easy to paper over these cracks, but the divisions, the delusions are still there. | ||
| And if we don't get the next government right, Britain will likely slip beyond the point of repair. | ||
| Everything is on this. | ||
| Everything is on this decision. | ||
| So Joseph Robertson, that was Robert Jenrick, up until yesterday, until he was sacked actually, by Kemi Badenuk. | ||
| He was the shadow justice secretary, shadow chancellor, shadow Lord Chancellor. | ||
| I have reservations about reform at this point in time taking on Tory defectors. | ||
| But I get the political point that this is illustrating. | ||
| This is Nigel Faroesh illustrating to the country that the Tory leadership, Tory leader, Kemi Badenuk, has lost the confidence of her most senior parliamentarians, her most senior shadowed cabinet colleagues. | ||
| And therefore, it's going to be difficult for her to say, I'm ready to be prime minister if those who work closest with her have lost confidence. | ||
| Temple, it wasn't a surprise. | ||
| We knew this yesterday. | ||
| As I say, Kemi Badnuck sacked him, anticipating with her irrefutable proof that he was about to defect. | ||
| So the news wasn't today totally shocking, but give me your first reaction to it, please. | ||
| Well, thanks, Ambion, again, Ben. | ||
| I think, you know, politics in Britain tends to go, as we've seen in sort of 100-year or 50-year cycles. | ||
| There have been previous movements that have risen up or displaced the major parties from time to time, but they don't either achieve getting into power, or when they do, as we saw with the replacement of the Liberal Party, you know, the branching out between Whigs and Tories. | ||
| When that happens, which happened last 100 years ago, parties tend to disappear, sometimes into a third or fourth position. | ||
| And we've only really got one or two examples of it in our history, nothing quite on this scale. | ||
| I tend to lean towards jubilance at this news, not necessarily because, as you've outlined, you know, you don't want reform to seem like Tory Party 2.0. | ||
| That's certainly not why I joined reform, why many others did so in the past. | ||
| But I think what we do need to recognise is that you can't really spoil history without the word Tory. | ||
| And unfortunately, until the Unit Party is broken properly, and by that I mean the absolute demolition of the so-called right-wing Conservative Party, which actually has been more to the left of Blair for the last 15 years, you can't really achieve any progress. | ||
| I think Jenrik said it very well that there's no appetite for the type of radical change that is needed in this country, in that party anymore. | ||
| And so anything that hastens that demise, I think, is important. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's a good reading of this. | ||
| So let's now just zoom back ever so slightly. | ||
| I mentioned this week's been tough for Kemi Badanuk. | ||
| Robert Jenrick wasn't her only defection. | ||
| Earlier on in the week, Nadine Zahawi, who was the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, for an American audience, as basically the Treasury Secretary, Finance Minister, considered to be one of the three great offices of state. | ||
| And he's only there for like a couple of months. | ||
| I think he did slightly longer as Chancellor, as Liz Trust did as Prime Minister. | ||
| But still, again, it's an emotional blow to the credibility of the Tory Party to lose a former Chancellor to a party that's nipping at your heels. | ||
| Just give what's your reading of Zahawi, by the way, Joseph? | ||
| So, I mean, Nadim, I think the first point to make is that he's unelected and will remain so unless he happens to go through party process and reform and become an elected official, which would mean that it'd have to be acceptable to the membership as well as other things, other tasks that will require from every candidate before they run. | ||
| So that's the first point to make. | ||
| I think for me, he has done exceptionally well in business and in other areas outside of politics. | ||
| I know he carries political baggage. | ||
| I certainly didn't agree with the way he handled, for instance, passports during COVID for vaccines, that kind of thing. | ||
| There's a lot of disgruntled noises from some factions, particularly libertarian factions, who feel that he was unfair to those. | ||
| However, what I would say is that he correctly sided with Liz Truss when she came into power. | ||
| He understands economics very well. | ||
| And that overall you can't ignore someone like that when you look at their business acumen. | ||
| And I would also say, really, you know, looking at the GOP, those positions that maybe were on the fringes of the manga movement are not popular. | ||
| Many of those people have come into the fold over the years as the movement develops. | ||
| I think that's something you've got to learn and understand as you mature as a political movement. | ||
| And so reform is trying to do the same. | ||
| It's a huge blow to Kemi because behind the scenes, I mean, he works with the, or used to work with a lot of Tory donors. | ||
| He has, like I said, an immense business acumen. | ||
| So I think both of these defections are going to hit her very hard. | ||
| And I would say both of them are net positives for reform, whatever people may think of the individuals. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| To some extent, it's a little bit, I get, you know, trying to be dispassionate about this, trying to read this objectively. | ||
| I understand why reform took them both, because at this point, it's basically any stick with which to beat the Tories. | ||
| Now, it's been like a couple of decades since I was a member of the Tory party, but I would like, you know, I certainly don't support them. | ||
| This has been a long time since I voted for them. | ||
| But I would like to try to be objective about my reading of their situation. | ||
| I don't know where they go now because it's clear that Kemi Badenuk isn't doing, she's not up to the job. | ||
| I think that's clear. | ||
| And yet Robert Jennick was probably the only person who had perhaps the credibility with the voters who are peeling off towards reform to have tried to be an alternative. | ||
| He was in fact a leadership, her leadership rival. | ||
| He lost the last, it was last year, right? | ||
| He lost to her when they both went, challenged one another for the leadership of the Tory party. | ||
| Just try, if you wouldn't mind, try to be along with me here. | ||
| Try out, because we're both supporting reform. | ||
| Try to help me be objective in this and dispassionate, looking at it from the Tory Party's view. | ||
| Where do they go from now when their one possible alternative to the failing Kemi Badenuk has jumped ship? | ||
| Who do they go to who could possibly because I don't see anybody and I'd like to know what your reading of this is. | ||
| What do they do now when their one credible alternative has thrown his cards down on the table and said, right, that's it, fold, I'm out. | ||
| So I think that while their situation is dire, they do have one or two cards left on the table. | ||
| So there are people like Katie Lamb coming through. | ||
| I am, you know, the jury's out on whether or not she is as good as she says she is. | ||
| Obviously, she has, you know, some associations with people in the Tory party that I consider to be on the left, despite what she says being more to the right of the party. | ||
| But they do have some younger MPs. | ||
| I think what will happen is if we see, let's say, a Katie Lamb or, you know, indeed a Swella Braverman, etc., defecting to reform in the next few days or weeks, then that will truly be the end because that will be all of your options off the table for anybody with any talent in the party to come through. | ||
| And that will basically be the litmus test. | ||
| As long as they sort of have this switcheroo going on between James Klebley and Kemi Baynot, both establishment candidates, both essentially run by the same vested interests that control the rest of the Tory Party, there is not much hope, quite frankly. | ||
| And there's one thing I've got to say, which is that there's no youth movement in the Tory Party. | ||
| It's a big problem for them right now, as well as having no donors. | ||
| But the youth I always look towards more as an indicator of where they're going to go. | ||
| I saw one quite large conservative influencer who is still in the Conservative Party and still in her 20s saying on Twitter the other day that she just hates the fact that she's going to have to eventually follow Robert Jenner because that's what she always said she would do. | ||
| But she's not yet ready to make that jump. | ||
| And I said, well, supporting the Tory Party right now is rather like supporting your local football team. | ||
| But in reality, they've moved stadium and they now play 3,000 miles away. | ||
| And I think that's basically what most of them are facing. | ||
| It's this attachment to the brand without being able to actually be part of it. | ||
| Yes, it's basically pure self-identification. | ||
| I'm going to come back to you in about 90 seconds on that theme, especially about what the youth are doing, Generation Z is doing right now. | ||
| I'm going to ask you about recent polling as well. | ||
| And I'm also going to ask you about who you have your eye on specifically for potential next defections. | ||
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| Back now to pick up the conversation with Joseph Robertson. | ||
| Joseph, tell them let's start at the back then and then work forward. | ||
| Who's your eye on, do you think, for potential future defections from the Tory Party to reform? | ||
|
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Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it could be any of them at this stage. | |
| I'll be quite frank. | ||
| I mean, you know, there are some, of course, that simply won't be allowed into the party because of their past baggage or their political inclinations. | ||
| And that's, you know, like I said, reform, whatever people may throw at it, is very much out to destroy the Tory Party, not simply let it abscond and enter. | ||
| Nigel was completely aware of what can be pulled as it was in 2019 when you had essentially Tories infiltrating the Brexit Party and then tearing it down from the inside. | ||
| He will not let that happen again. | ||
| I'm quite confident. | ||
| And I think, you know, what we need to look at now is perhaps who would be most aligned with the Tory MPs who have already joined reform in Danny Krueger and Robert Jenrik. | ||
| And if you look backwards, you know, I'm going to list some names. | ||
| I don't necessarily think all of these will jump shit, but I think the ones that would be most aligned would be people like Aston McVeigh, Suella Braverman, to an extent, younger MPs like Jack Rankin, obviously I mentioned Katie Lamb. | ||
| And then you also have to look at some of the old Storarts and wonder whether or not they're thinking about it. | ||
| So Sir John Hayes would be another who is both Sweller's former mentor and also formerly one of the safest seats in the country as far as the Tories are concerned. | ||
| You know, there are others that I could think of, but I would imagine that those are some of the names that are on the lips of many people right now. | ||
| You know, it's really a case of what do you want out of your political career at this point. | ||
| I think for younger MPs like Jack Rankin and Katie, the fact is they don't have as much baggage as maybe some of these other names are mentioning. | ||
| So if they jump ship, they could authentically be included in the reform movement in perhaps a way that some of these other older heads can't. | ||
| So I would be looking for some of the younger ones who perhaps see a future in politics for the next 10, 15 years, and then maybe some like Sweller who naturally align with reform's message. | ||
| I'm going to ask about the youth vote in just a moment. | ||
| But, you know, drawing out from what you're saying, you make a very important point for reform leadership right now that some of these Tories aren't jumping ship for ideological reasons or even because they think Nigel Farage is going to make a better prime minister than Kemi Bagnock. | ||
| They're jumping ship because they want to continue their political careers and they see no viability of them doing that if they're kicked out of parliament at the next election. | ||
| It's a pure opportunism thing. | ||
| And some of these guys are going to go over, you can very much sort of use the descriptor of raps leaving a sinking ship. | ||
| But, you know, Nigel Farage is an old hand. | ||
| You know, he's not going to, he'll have the discernment to sort that out. | ||
| He's going to actually add something to his movement and who's just coming on board for opportunism. | ||
| Tell me, because you mentioned just now the youth element of the vote and you mentioned it before. | ||
| What's going on in Generation Z, as the Americans like to say? | ||
| Well, it's splitting into what I would consider to be a slightly more extreme left and right divide. | ||
| I think it would be foolish to say that, you know, reform is dominating with the youth because that's not true. | ||
| There is still a very, very strong contingent of left-wing voters, particularly at university age, but they are going further to the left. | ||
| They're not satisfied with the Labour Party. | ||
| And quite frankly, if I was on the left, neither would I be, because the Labour Party has drifted too far towards commercial interests to be of interest to genuine Marxists, whilst also remaining Marxist enough to not be of interest to old school Labour voters. | ||
| So it's perfectly positioned itself to be the land of never. | ||
| And so younger voters are turning more to parties like the Greens, perhaps in some cases like the Leb Dems, and then of course Nigel. | ||
| But there is a big gender disparity still in that age group. | ||
| So young men are more likely to vote right leaning towards Nigel and young women tend to vote more to the left. | ||
| So that's kind of where we see the biggest gap is in the gender divide. | ||
| Where do I think that generation will go? | ||
| Well, I think there is two trends that I look at which surprise me. | ||
| I think even in the more left-leaning voter pools, there's more emphasis on relationship and community building. | ||
| Whether or not that translates to solving our natal crisis is yet to be seen. | ||
| I don't think that will be the case, but there is at least a sense that there's a lack of community. | ||
| And there's also something else quite interesting, which is less partying going on, less alcohol consumption in younger generations that we can see. | ||
| Of course, drug usage is still prevalent, but there does seem to be a kind of growing trend that people are taking life more seriously at a younger age again. | ||
| And so I think that will probably lead to a more conservative flourishing maybe in the next five years or so as those younger people do settle down and have families. | ||
| So I think the stats are pretty positive. | ||
| The only big issue for me is whether or not we can try and outgrow this natal crisis that we have in the West. | ||
| Something that we cover on our Wednesday show, we're going to have to get you on our Wednesday show at some point, Joseph. | ||
| Something that we talk about basically every week amongst Generation Z is the uptick in between 18 to 24-year-old men embracing Christianity. | ||
| There is something like it. | ||
| We covered the statistics just a couple of days ago. | ||
| I think it's nearly twice as much. | ||
| It's about 24% now of young guys in that age bracket say they go to church at least once a month. | ||
| And that's literally twice the equivalent percentage amongst the equivalent aged females. | ||
| Something's going on and that's going to have an influence at some point on politics as well. | ||
| You know, one of the things that the war room is pretty focused on is the, say, the blue-collar worker movement aspect. | ||
| Certainly in the United States, I think Steve Bannon's been pushing very heavily over the last 15 years, but also in the UK. | ||
| Boris Johnson, despite his faults, did quite well to take over some of those Labour constituencies, historic Labour constituencies. | ||
| Of course, he didn't know what to do with them. | ||
| And it sort of emerged that the levelling up electoral gambit didn't really have much policy behind it. | ||
| And of course, Keir Starmer took those seats back. | ||
| But what hope do you see for presumably not the future, the Tory Party, but a future reform government going in and taking definitively those traditionally Labour voting constituencies and actually delivering on an agenda for the regular working guy? | ||
| Well, you've hit a nerve with me because I, for the viewers who probably won't know this, I was the director of a think tank between sort of 2020 and 2024, I guess, probably just 2023 really, but it was sort of filtering out at that point, which was set up back end of 2019 to focus on two things. | ||
| The work of Sir Roger Scruton, who may be familiar to some people, you know, sort of the last conservative philosopher who died in 2019 in the UK. | ||
| And then also the secondary purpose was to look at conservatism in the Red Wall and how the 2019 win under Boris Johnson would translate to those areas and what we needed to do to get the country flourishing again. | ||
| We did a lot of policy work specifically on this, you know, those blue-collar workers translating into Tory voters because they wanted to unlock prosperity. | ||
| And we found a few things. | ||
| They're still very socially conservative. | ||
| They want to build families. | ||
| They want to build businesses, very often very entrepreneurial. | ||
| And they are not at all modern Labour voters. | ||
| And so those people were very disappointed by the Tory party for obvious reasons, you know, taxes, mass migration, this slavish, wedded mentality to net zero. | ||
| All of these things helped crush the Red Wall rather than raise it up, a lack of commitment to infrastructure, proper leveling up like transport, etc. | ||
| So those people kind of went into the ether. | ||
| I don't think a lot of them really voted Labour. | ||
| A lot did vote reform already in the last general election, but a lot just stayed at home. | ||
| And Nigel's promises of opening up steel industries, getting fracking and going again, coal, all these key industries, which, by the way, if you're into AI or tech, we desperately need because we're going to be so energy intensive trying to grow out those sectors. | ||
| It's a pipe dream to suggest otherwise. | ||
| That's what will unlock growth in the Red Wall. | ||
| And I think voters are already quietly turning out. | ||
| You know, you've just seen 29 councils apply across the country not to have elections again this year at local level. | ||
| This is something the Labour government is supporting and encouraging and, in my opinion, inducing to try and prevent reform-winning councils off them all over the place. | ||
| And the Tories are happily complying because the same will happen with their fewer councils that they hold. | ||
| But this is the big question. | ||
| How much will the Red Wall come out to vote? | ||
| I personally think that they will pour out for Nigel in the next election. | ||
| And I think we will end up having an even higher vote share than is predicted by the pollsters. | ||
| Okay, let me build on that because we've got like 90 seconds left and ask you this, because we haven't really spoken about the Labour Party vis-a-vis the Tory defections. | ||
| How do you think the Labour Party should be looking at this doing the hemorrhaging of the Tory presence in the House of Commons right now? | ||
| Panic, patience, or popcorn? | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| I mean, they're Fabians, so patience will always be their virtue. | ||
| But I think in the front bench, there will be some panic because this signifies a unifying effect against them. | ||
| They only think in two ways. | ||
| They think in 100-year plans, and that's going back to my Fabian analysis. | ||
| But then they also think in two, three, four years, the very short term at the other end of the spectrum. | ||
| They will be panicking in a political sense because the problem is as reform unifies and gains more and more authority, they can level less and less this idea that they don't have experience in the party. | ||
| And that will be their panic at the moment. | ||
| There's also rumours of a Labour defection coming soon, I think next week. | ||
| So that will add to their fears because don't forget, a lot of the elected representatives in the Labour Party, particularly in the Red Wall, may not like the trend of socialism going on, may be more socially conservative and may not feel like it's their home anymore. | ||
| Just give me 30 seconds before we close this about Kirstarma's attempt to suspend the local government elections of, I think, around 70 or so local councils across the country. | ||
| What does that indicate to you? | ||
| Communism. | ||
| And they're winning scared, right? | ||
| They're absolutely communism. | ||
| I'm not joking, but I think at this point we have to question whether or not we are under communist rule. | ||
| I've said it quite openly, but it's not just about that. | ||
| It's about free speech, the crackdown on X, etc. | ||
| Just to give you one very quick statistic, Snapchat in this country accounts for 53-54% of child sex crimes, not X. | ||
| So, you know, you can see where it's going. | ||
| 10 seconds, Joseph. | ||
| It's always a pleasure for you to come on the show and share your very detailed insights in UK politics. | ||
| 10 seconds, social media. | ||
| Where do people go to keep up with you? | ||
| JR Types across X and Substack and Joseph Robertson UK on Instagram. | ||
| If you want to follow me there, it'd be great to connect with some of you afterwards. | ||
| Joseph, thanks very much indeed. | ||
| We'll catch up with you again soon. | ||
| God bless you now. | ||
|
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| Welcome back. | ||
| Well, sometimes on the show we have scientists, sometimes historians, sometimes analysts, sometimes journalists. | ||
| But we like to expand the range of people we bring on. | ||
| And we've asked Dr. Nicholas Wright, the neuroscientist, to come back and give his insights into politics and how certain political dispositions, social dispositions, cultural dispositions are actually hardwired into the human brain. | ||
| And you know, when I saw that Dr. Wright had made the thesis, looking at the protests going on in Iran right now, that you can actually have a neuroscientific analysis of why people are in a democracy movement are of all things calling out for the return to monarchy. | ||
| I was immediately interested to know more. | ||
| So Dr. Wright, thanks for coming back on to the show. | ||
| Tell us then, in your own words, your thesis on this, because I think it's absolutely fascinating. | ||
| Yeah, Ben, thanks so much for having me on. | ||
| So I think the first thing to say is that all human societies are hierarchical. | ||
| There is always a hierarchy. | ||
| And by a social hierarchy, I mean that can obviously come from many different traits that people might have. | ||
| It might be sort of physical strength. | ||
| It might be something to do with the religious, you know, where you are in a caste system, for example, or whatever it might be. | ||
| But there will always be some form of social hierarchy. | ||
| There will always be leaders and there will always be followers. | ||
| And that is baked into how our brains work. | ||
| And so our brains have very specific areas that see exactly where we are in these social hierarchies. | ||
| Now, in terms of the leaders and followers, we know that some people actually, in fact, quite a lot of people, do not want to assume responsibility for others. | ||
| They don't want to take on a leadership position. | ||
| And we can see where this happens in the brain. | ||
| And actually, what we can see is that when people are given the opportunity to just shoulder responsibility for others, often they are averse to it. | ||
| And when we scan their brains and then we can see where people are more likely to be averse to shouldering responsibility for others, we can then actually then correlate that to real-world tests of their leadership. | ||
| So for example, there was a great study done in Switzerland and they were able to scan people's brains and then look to see where they had reached in the military ranks within the Swiss military. | ||
| And so for all those reasons, there will always be leaders and there will always be followers. | ||
| And what we often want is a specific individual leader that we will follow. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why monarchy in particular has been one of the most historically successful and pervasive forms of leadership structure that we've had in human societies. | ||
| Okay, so much there to unpack. | ||
| So much there to unpack. | ||
| Start. | ||
| Um, I don't believe in evolution. | ||
| I think I mentioned that the last time we had you on the show, but I'm quite happy to use it as an intellectual construct because it makes a certain amount of sense. | ||
| So, the even if tell me if I have understood the thesis correct, um, and it's a very, you know, amongst scientists, what you've expounded there is a very popular and accepted idea that because of the constraints of evolution and the nature of limited resources, was it Darwin who called the struggle for existence? | ||
| Um, so there's only a certain amount of food or what have you, um, and therefore animals need to fight over it, and those who are best fitted and suited pass on their genes. | ||
| And because of that, and because of the mating process and all the rest of it, and the selection of these genes, sort of inside all animals' brains, you know, and this goes, I think, down to lobsters, there is this hierarchical inbuilt. | ||
| Is it in the hippocampus? | ||
| I don't remember where in their brain, but there's a measure of where you are in the hierarchy, right? | ||
| In your communal hierarchy, in your social hierarchy, and that sort of where that placement in the hierarchy dictates basically how you confront and respond to all of life. | ||
| So, it's there at the neurological level in the brain, inbuilt, included, including into into human beings. | ||
| And the more social the animal, the more it lives in society, the more keenly aware it is of this hierarchical nature. | ||
| Now, if I've understood the thesis correctly, and what you're saying is that also that reality which humans have because of evolution, I just say it doesn't, this is this is based, this doesn't have to be based on evolution. | ||
| So, you know, my studies scan people's brains, and you could say those brains have evolved, or you could say those brains were designed intelligently, or wherever you want to go. | ||
| So, it's not, it's not centered on evolution, just to just to be clear. | ||
| No, thanks, yep, thanks for that corrections. | ||
| Great. | ||
| Um, because it basically makes your analysis even more universal. | ||
| But the idea is, then, because of these very real measurements in human brain structure that can be made, you can then project outwards onto politics. | ||
| Because you said the last time you came on the show a couple of months ago that the way the brain is constructed can actually lead human beings into the state of warfare. | ||
| You drew the direct parallel from the neurological structure, architecture of the brain into warfare. | ||
| And your thesis now is exactly the same: you're looking at the human brain and you're sort of projecting that to how we comport ourselves on the political level. | ||
| So, tell me, so if I've got that synthesis correct, tell me more then, please, about how that neuro-architectural structure would lead to people calling for a king. | ||
| I know you were just sort of saying it a moment ago, but I wanted to get that out for the audience. | ||
| Say that again about how in this moment that is the result. | ||
| So, I think that what people always want is a leader, right? | ||
| There will always be a leader, and that leadership. | ||
| So, where does human leadership come? | ||
| There will always be leaders, and there will always be followers. | ||
| So, where does human leadership come from? | ||
| And there are really two main sources of power and human leadership. | ||
| So, the first thing is the sort of maybe more animalistic side, which is dominance, right? | ||
| Or this could be to do with the fact that you have power through guns or whatever it would be, but there's dominance. | ||
| So dominance can often give you power and that can be contributed to you having a leadership position within society, a status, and other people will follow you. | ||
| But then in humans, because we are really remarkable animals and we teach each other and we learn and we're extremely clever animals, extremely social animals. | ||
| And so another source of power for us that leaders can have is through prestige. | ||
| Right, so prestige is when you're doing things when you have qualities that will be thought admirable by others. | ||
| And so people can have prestige. | ||
| So I, for example, when I was a doctor working in the hospital, there were other doctors who were more senior than me and they had a huge amount of prestige. | ||
| And so I valued their opinion. | ||
| I followed them because they had a huge amount of prestige. | ||
| And we see others who have prestige in societies. | ||
| So for example, religious leaders will often have a large amount of prestige within society. | ||
| And that prestige is another source of power. | ||
| And so one of the traditional sources of prestige in very many societies is monarchy. | ||
| And so if you look, for example, today, of the G7 countries, that's the sort of the biggest rich world economies, three of the seven G7 countries are monarchies. | ||
| If you look at countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, they're monarchies. | ||
| If you look at many of the most successful countries in the Middle East, they are monarchies. | ||
| Oman, Jordan have been much more stable than others. | ||
| And if you're in Iran, for example, you're looking at UAE, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, they have been much more successful. | ||
| And one of the reasons for that is that they have a much more stable society because they have this clear leadership at the top. | ||
| Now, that doesn't necessarily mean the leader is going to be benign. | ||
| It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be democratic. | ||
| But we as humans will often try and coordinate around such individual human leaders. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why, particularly if there is a traditional monarchy that you can go to, that people will often coordinate around that as a source of leadership. | ||
| It gives Reza Pahlavi, who is the Shah living in the US now, has been since 1979, it gives him an extra leg up in Iranian politics because other people will coordinate around him as a leader. | ||
| I'm going to ask you, this is a fascinating thesis. | ||
| I'm going to ask you after this short shout out to one of our sponsors. | ||
| You've mentioned how the structure of the brain might lead to a desire for monarchy. | ||
| I'm going to ask you how compatible democracy is with your analysis as a neuroscientist of the brain. | ||
| But that will be 90 seconds. | ||
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| So Dr. Wright, I get the idea how a desire for a king, and it sort of comes out of neuroscience, of the study out of the composition of the brain. | ||
| And if I might just interject, if I might just interject, because you mentioned where that sort of hierarchical sense of falling in comes out of, say, physical strength or of social prestige and what have you in leadership. | ||
| I'd like to say that my somewhat idiosyncratic theological view on this is that the desire for power, the desire to dominate one's fellow man, arises out of original sin. | ||
| But I'm perfectly happy to argue here on the brain level. | ||
| Tell me then about democracy, because throughout human history, as you were indicating, throughout recorded human history, there's pretty much always only ever been a king that's led, governed over, ruled over his, normally, subjects. | ||
| Democracy is a rather more rare bird. | ||
| How compatible is democracy with your study of the human brain? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, so what I'd say is the brain is like an orchestra, right? | ||
| There's not one single system in the brain that explains everything. | ||
| We have many different systems and they're all important for how we act in society, how we make decisions about things like who we support politically or whether we go to war, for example. | ||
| Now, yes, these social systems are very important that look at social hierarchies and they create the space, a space at the top of our social hierarchies for a leader or a leadership, something that will be at the top of our hierarchy. | ||
| But what could that be? | ||
| It's not only going to be monarchy. | ||
| Clearly, it could also be, for example, in the United States, 250-odd years ago, you had a war, a war of independence, and the point of that was to get rid of the monarch, right? | ||
| And then we have other parts of the brain that can think up clever ideas and put those systems, those institutions, as things that we then will have at the top of our hierarchy or that can create spaces that can help us fill the top of that hierarchy. | ||
| And how we choose those people then wouldn't be through the intuitive and ancient system of the family unit or family inheritance, which is the most common, always the most basic fundamental unit of social organization in humans. | ||
| But then you could, for example, have the US Constitution, which had votes, and then they selected a leader who then ruled for a defined period of time. | ||
| And I think this also indicates that these rules are not only, for example, if you're looking at the American Constitution, not only about how things are written down, but they're also about the human beings and how they decide to act. | ||
| So they set the social parameters. | ||
| So George Washington famously chose to step down, right? | ||
| He could basically have become a king. | ||
| A lot of people would argue. | ||
| But he chose to step down. | ||
| And by setting that precedent, you know, the family fathers of the United States were really quite remarkable guys. | ||
| And he set that precedent. | ||
| That helped set the unwritten rules by which the United States, along with the written rules, now has a system, a democratic system, in which it can have a leadership position filled. | ||
| And in a country like Britain, for example, or the Netherlands, you have a hybrid system. | ||
| And we often have hybrid systems too. | ||
| And our brains live with this kind of hybridity all the time. | ||
| I seem to remember that when back during the first president, there was a debate on how Americans should address their president. | ||
| And George Washington basically ended the conversation by saying, Mr. President, is more than sufficient. | ||
| But there was actually a movement to suggest that the correct form of address ought to be His Majesty the President. | ||
| And you can imagine how America might have worked out differently had that faction succeeded. | ||
| Now, you mentioned, obviously, that we're now sort of accelerating towards America's 250th anniversary. | ||
| And I think it's fair to say that revolutions that succeeded, that have succeeded, probably did succeed because they were very quick about re-establishing the hierarchical structure whose leadership the revolution had replaced. | ||
| From a neuroscience perspective, do you think humans are just badly hardwired in the brain in order to have a social structure that isn't heavily dependent on political leadership? | ||
| I don't think we can have any kind of large-scale social structure where there won't be leadership. | ||
| There won't be hierarchy and there won't be leadership. | ||
| And partly that's because there will always be followers, right? | ||
| And there will always be leaders and there will always be followers. | ||
| And that's because the followers' brains like to follow and the leaders' brains like to lead. | ||
| And that's, you know, that makes up the structure of our society. | ||
| That's part of it. | ||
| Then there's a second point, which is sometimes you need leaders, right? | ||
| So if you have a military, you can't have everybody having a good old discussion about what they should be doing. | ||
| Sometimes you need a decisive leader. | ||
| And that's why I think if you look at the Roman Republic, there were periods where they would have decisive leadership, right? | ||
| They would essentially give a decisive leader far more power so that they could make the, and the same thing in them, democracy, where they, so they could then make the types of decisions that were needed urgently, right? | ||
| So for those two sets of reasons, one, we basically, as humans, like to live in hierarchical societies, whether that's something that people are comfortable with agreeing with or not. | ||
| And secondly, there are just so many examples where having a more hierarchical society, certainly in part, can make you more effective. | ||
| So that's bad news for libertarians then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I think that if you just scatter people around, I mean, it is basically, I don't think it's going to work for a wide variety of reasons because you would scatter people around, but then people will assort into leaders. | ||
| You look at somebody, I don't know if you probably saw just last fall, I think, and you had Donald Trump gathered around the titans of the US tech, you know, the US tech industry in the White House. | ||
| And you saw them sitting at this big table. | ||
| And it was, I mean, you didn't, you know, a deaf person or, you know, a monkey could probably have worked out who is the big leader and who were all the subordinate people in that, you know, around that around that table. | ||
| That's just the way people organize. | ||
| And that comes through two things, as I said. | ||
| You get that political power through dominance. | ||
| You know, yes, they had a lot of money, those tech leaders, but the guy who has the dominance, you know, the security operations on is Donald Trump. | ||
| And then secondly, he is a very effective politician. | ||
| He is very good at politics. | ||
| That's been amply demonstrated, certainly now, you know, winning your second term. | ||
| And that gives him an enormous amount of prestige as well, politically. | ||
| Okay, look, if you've got 30 seconds, if you can do it in 30 seconds, fine. | ||
| If you can't, we'll have to bring you back on again. | ||
| You mentioned earlier the typical leadership profiles being established, I think, on physical strength and your word prestige. | ||
| Are there any other characteristics that historically are essential from a neurological perspective in political leadership? | ||
| 20 seconds, if you can. | ||
| I'm going to be super quick. | ||
| So I was talking about why we have leaders and followers, but there's a separate thing is what makes you a good leader. | ||
| What makes you a good leader is having accurate self-confidence. | ||
| You're not too overconfident. | ||
| You're not too underconfident. | ||
| You need to have a model of what you want to achieve in the world and you need to be a good communicator. | ||
| And those three things are the three things you need to be a more effective leader. | ||
| Someone like Dwight Eisenhower, for example. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So Dr. Wright, where do people go to keep up with your research and your sort of quite fascinating various theses? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So on X, Nicholas D. Wright, my book, Warhead, How the Brain Shapes War and War Shapes the Brain. | ||
| And I'm on places like Time Magazine and other, you know, other outlets. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Dr. Nicholas Wright, thanks very much. | ||
| I had wanted also in this show to discuss with you Venezuela and your also fascinating thesis on Trump's unpredictability as a strategic tool from the neurological perspective. | ||
| Have to get you back on again another time to dig down on that one. | ||
| That's the end of the show, folks. | ||
| Have a great weekend. | ||
| My thanks to Will and his crap team in Denver from Real America's Voice, our producer, Cameron Wallace, and of course, Victorio Santi Franco, who put this show together. |