Michael Box and Patrick Hague are creative partners in EchoEterna Productions and have worked together for almost 20 years as musicians, writers, and filmmakers. They join me to talk about their feature film project SpeakEasy, set “in the near future, where creative freedom is monitored by an oppressive authority class.”

As a lover of cinema, dystopian fiction, and punk rock, it was a special pleasure to take a ride through their imaginations and explore the world-building they engaged in to realise a believable dystopian world for their protagonists, a band called The Riot Police. We also got into their impressions and experiences of present-day America, where living conditions could be encouraging the rise and acceptance of “an oppressive authority class”.

You can listen to a sample track by The Riot Police on Bandcamp, and buy it to support the fundraising for the film.

To help get a sense of the tone they had in mind, I asked Patrick and Michael to each name a punk rock song that gives a flavour of their dystopian world. Michael chose Rise Above by Black Flag, and Patrick chose Full Disclosure by Fugazi.

If you want to find out more about the film, you can follow them on Instagram or visit their website.

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Free speech dies, comedy dies. It’s that simple.

From 1952 to 2018, MAD Magazine published over five hundred regular editions as well as specials and books. In that time, it defined and shaped political satire and social commentary for generations of readers, becoming a cornerstone of American culture without ever taking itself seriously, a true achievement.

Gazing gap-toothed from MAD’s cover was almost always the grinning face of Alfred E. Neuman, whose catchphrase became embedded in American culture: “What, Me Worry?”

The “steady stream of pointed political satire and pure silliness” that MAD delivered to its fans was created by “The Usual Gang of Idiots”, the affectionate term for the writers and cartoonists who populated its office in New York City.

As early as 1959, “The Usual Gang of Idiots” were the subject of a minor diplomatic incident in which a British newspaper attempted to prevent the “highly undesirable” importation of MAD into the UK in a sniffy letter to the US Embassy because of a humorous depiction of the Royal Family.

“[E]very possible attempt should be made to stop this appearing in America no less than in Britain,” wrote Lee Howard, the editor of the Sunday Pictorial. The Department of State wisely advised the embassy in London that “making an issue out of the incident would likely add more grist to the mill”.

From its inception, MAD was at the front of the endlessly evolving and shifting arguments and legal wrangling over censorship, humour, and taste, questions that remain pressing, urgent, and at the centre of what it means to preserve a free society.

Now-former senior editor Joe Raiola worked at MAD “[f]or an embarrassing 33 years”, describing it as “the only place in America where if you mature, you get fired.” In that time, he was credited on over 100 articles and found Joan of Arc in a seafood bisque.

As well as “making funny noises in the hallway” at MAD, in 1993 Joe created and began touring a one-man show called The Joy of Censorship, which he has since performed in 44 states.

Describing himself as “a floundering comedian, comedy writer, speaker and producer”, Joe joins me in this episode to talk about his time at America’s greatest satirical magazine, the absolute necessity of free speech, and the ever-present danger of censorship to comedy and liberty.

It was great fun speaking with him. I hope you enjoy it.

You can experience more of the joy of Joe at joeraiola.com or by joining him on October 5 for “an evening of smart stupidity” at City Winery in New York City.

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Frank Sanazi is a unique comedy character, a tongue-in-cheek mashup of Adolf Hitler and Frank Sinatra described by his creator, the British singer and comedian Pete Cunningham, as “a satirical blitzkrieg blending dark humour, swing music and politically incorrect cabaret”.

The newspaper The Scotsman has called him “brilliantly stupid, fantastically wrong and ridiculously funny”. The comedy blog Chortle considers him “a pleasure uber alles”.

As well as doing solo shows, Frank also leads The Iraq Pack, a gang of crossover crooners including Dean Stalin, Saddami Davis Jr., Osama Bin Crosby, his daughter Nancy Sanazi, and, of course, Diva Braun. Frank has performed internationally, from Austria to Israel, and regularly features at Glastonbury and Bestival in the UK.

His act is a wild freewheeling thumb in the eye to the seriousness with which history’s lunatics and despots have been traditionally accorded, and it cannily highlights something often overlooked about Hitler: He was a performer.

“There’s no doubt about it,” the legendary comedian Mel Brooks told Der Spiegel in 2006. “Hitler worked in the same branch as we do: he created illusions.”

In the same interview, Brooks summed up why mocking the 20th century’s most infamous boogeyman was not only permissible, but necessary: “[B]y using the medium of comedy, we can try to rob Hitler of his posthumous power and myths.”

In this episode, Frank Sanazi joins me to talk about how he conceived and honed his character, how standup comedy has changed over the years he’s been working, and why satire and ridicule are essential tools against tyranny.

You can buy Frank’s albums Mein Way on a Steinway and Songs for Swinging Leaders here. Tickets for his one-hour show at the Edinburgh Fringe (August 1 through 23) are available here. You can also visit his website.

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It’s trite to point out that the internet is an increasingly weird and difficult space to explore. AI-generated ‘slop’ muddies search results and even ends up in published scientific papers. Bots roam social media freely, making it nearly impossible to know whether interactions are organic or automated. Your voice and face can be cloned and reproduced by AI, making security breaches and fraud much more likely.

The response from tech and government is to push for heightened identity verification and so-called “proof of humanity”, with one example being Sam Altman’s WorldCoin project and its iris-scanning Orb.

It didn’t used to be like this. Signing a legal agreement running into the thousands of pages in order to buy a pair of jeans is not normal. A business demanding that you install their app on your phone so it can track your location, spending habits, and browser data is not normal. Being forced into a surveillance dragnet to prove you aren’t a bot is definitely not normal.

Is there a way that technology can protect our civil liberties instead of eroding them?

Can we re-establish privacy as a default setting in the hands of the public or are we past the point of no return?

To examine these questions and more, I spoke with Shady El Damaty, co-founder of the Holonym Foundation, whose mission is the establishment and protection of “natural digital rights for privacy, security, and data ownership”.

One of their projects, Human.Tech, is developing “human-centric technology that fosters freedom, resilience, and opportunity in a connected, borderless digital world.”

Through applied cryptography, they believe they can provide the tools for “digital personhood” in a way that gives the individual control over what data is shared, how, and when.

In 2009, Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google at the time, told CNBC that “if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”

In 2006, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “[p]rivacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.”

The tech sector has broadly been on Team Schmidt for a generation. It’s time to hear from Team Schneier before it’s too late.

You can visit human.tech to find out more about Holonym’s work.

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BeLikeWater (a.k.a. Lisa) is a Superforecaster® with Good Judgment Inc., the forecasting project co-created by Professor Philip Tetlock (the co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction), and a forecaster with Sentinel Global Risks Watch and the Swift Centre in the UK.

In a recent interview with Polymarket about her successful forecast of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear capability, she made a bold call: The probability of Ayatollah Khamenei being out as Supreme Leader of Iran by the end of 2025 is “somewhere around 85%”, and “70-75%” for him to be out by the end of July.

At the time of writing, Polymarket has the probability of the former at 35%, making her outlook an outlier, if not downright contrarian.

To come to this and many other forecasts using the accountable framework encouraged by Good Judgment Inc., she applies a rigorous, repeatedly-updated process and works with a diverse team of colleagues to interpret, digest, and parse a wealth of information from which a prediction with clear parameters and adjustable probability can be distilled.

In our conversation, she shares the details of her methods, her often-surprising thoughts on what might happen in 2025 (and beyond), and insights into the dystopian trends she sees developing or culminating in the near future.

Speaking with her was as enlightening and reassuring as it was concerning. I hope you enjoy it.

You can find Lisa on X and Substack, and you can read Sentinel’s reports and research here.

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There is sadly a lot to worry about when it comes to the rights to privacy and free speech.

Digital ID, central bank digital currency, facial recognition, online censorship, spying on bank accounts - you name it, the British government has a plan, none of them very promising for individual freedom.

Big Brother Watch are one of the UK’s leading civil liberties campaign organisations, and their Advocacy Manager Matthew Feeney joins me for a conversation about the challenges facing the citizens of Britain in 2025.

Are we past the point of no return when it comes to the philosophical idea that a citizen in a liberal democracy is innocent until proven guilty, free to interact and transact without government oversight or interference, and entitled to the right to be let alone?

Or is there still a chance to reclaim and redraw the boundary of individual liberty, to reassert that our freedoms are not granted by government at their discretion, but natural and not to be limited without due process and valid probable cause?

Besides the largely unregulated roll-out of facial recognition across the UK, high on the list of looming horrors is the apparently unflushable idea of a mandatory national ID card, now rebranded for the digital age as ‘Britcard’. First tried during World War II and repealed by Churchill in 1952, it was subsequently floated by Tony Blair’s Labour government but shot down due to popular resistance. Since then it has risen over and over, unbidden and unwanted, refusing to go round the U-bend into the sewer of terrible ideas. Now it’s back, again with the support of Tony Blair in his capacity as the reviled-but-somehow-taken-seriously elder statesman of British politics, and after the current government “ruled out” the introduction of digital ID in July 2024. Big Brother Watch have a petition to reject Digital ID in the UK that you can view and sign here.

“We’re a democracy that’s been around for a long time…we were dealt a good hand,” Matthew told me at one point. “I hope we don’t squander it in the near future.”

As my dear departed grandfather used to say, “let’s not and say we did.”

You can visit the Big Brother Watch website here or follow them on X.

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Hamit Coskun (pronounced Josh-kun) is a fifty year-old asylum seeker from Turkey living in the city of Derby in northern England on a support allowance of £48 per week. His grasp of the English language is assessed at the A1 (Beginner) level, so he uses Google Translate to protest on social media about the erosion of secularism and rise of Islamist sympathies in his home country.

In February 2025, he burnt a copy of the Koran outside the Turkish consulate in London and was attacked by two men, one of whom had a knife. He was then arrested and charged with a religiously aggravated public order offence of which, on 3 June, he was convicted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.

His case marks a potential inflection point in British policing and justice.

According to the prosecutor, the barrister defending him, and the judge, no single element of his behaviour was a criminal offence. However, the violent reaction to what he did, and the fact that he did it in a public place and used “the f-word” led the Crown Prosecution Service to charge him with public disorder, and ultimately secure a conviction.

I attended the entire trial and wrote it up as a long-form piece called Hamit in Wonderland. As requested/suggested by subscribers to the 1984 Today Substack, this episode is a reading of that report on the trial.

You might also be interested in listening to my conversation with Hatun Tash, about getting stabbed in Hyde Park for Jesus, or reading Witness for the Persecution, the story of the Berlin ‘thought crime’ trials of the American satirist CJ Hopkins.

We’ll resume our usual format of long-form conversations about dystopian trends in society in our next episode.

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In 2023, Professor Garret Merriam ran an experiment that caught 40 out of 96 of his students cheating on the final exam in his ethics class at CSU Sacramento. He had decided to “poison the well” to see who among them might use a well-known study resource website to review the answers before the test, so he inserted obviously false answers that anyone paying attention in class would know to be incorrect. The process of analysing the results was “exceptionally stressful”, taking up time that he “would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.”

Since then, Garret has been sounding the alarm about the prevalence of AI use and cheating at American universities, alongside writers and teachers like Ted Gioia and Troy Jollimore.

Tales of woe continue to emerge from academia. Teachers are fed up of running faster and faster to stay still, spending increasing time and energy fighting the intrusion of AI-enabled cheating, playing the role of an enforcer to the detriment of delivering an education to their students.

New York Magazine recently published a piece by James Walsh called Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College which, despite the clickbait title doing a disservice to the many students who are trying to learn, gives a thorough picture of the parlous state of pedagogy in the age of AI. As one source tells Walsh in the article: “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”

Is this the typical bellyaching of an older generation as youth discover new technologies and ways of behaving? Or is there a real problem in higher education?

Garret joins me in this episode for a wide-ranging discussion on the impact that AI has had on his experience as a teacher, how he tries to balance enforcement and prevention with his responsibilities as an educator, as well as the practical and philosophical implications for society if machine learning supplants human learning.

In the humanities especially, we face a pressing and vital question: Who do we become as a culture when our understanding of ourselves is shaped not by individual study and reflection but the acceptance and use of what machines say we are?

You can follow Garret on X or explore his YouTube channel, Sisyphus Redeemed.

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Ever since I read Travellers in the Third Reich, a Sunday Times best-seller by Julia Boyd, I’ve been recommending it to anyone who will listen.

Her carefully researched narrative is constructed from the diaries, letters, and correspondence of people who visited Germany between the ends of the First and Second World Wars. From Quakers to Boy Scouts, classical music lovers to dedicated fans of Hitler, she finds and brings together a wonderfully broad range of personal contemporaneous accounts of what it was like to visit, work in, study in, and travel through a Germany struggling to redefine and reclaim itself in the interwar period.

It’s an illuminating, moving, troubling picture of how we humans are prone to seeing what we want to see, discounting present dangers on the basis of our assumptions and prejudices, and failing to face the reality of what is going on around us.

Julia followed that book with another, A Village in the Third Reich, the focus of which is the citizens and residents of the Bavarian mountain village of Obertsdorf. The experiences of foresters, priests, farmers, nuns, innkeepers, Nazi officials, village councillors, mountaineers, socialists, slave labourers, schoolchildren, tourists and aristocrats are woven together along with the accounts of the Jews who survived to give a picture of life under Nazism like no other.

Her detailed research and compassionate writing won her the 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for Travellers in the Third Reich, and A Village in the Third Reich was named a Waterstones Paperback of the Year and a New Statesman Book of the Year in 2022. The Oldie dubbed her “a leading historian of human responses in political extremis.”

Julia joins me in this episode to talk about her experiences researching and writing the books, what the intimate correspondence of people from another time taught her about our shared humanity, and how a human being can transcend the pressures and prejudices of their era to live decently while surrounded by horrors.

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Berlin’s CyBrothel is “the world’s first AI brothel”, according to its founder and Episode 130 guest Philipp Fussenegger, offering visitors an alternative to human prostitution in the form of silicone sex dolls.

Some of the dolls are humanoid, some are aliens or vampires, but almost all of them can, with the visitor’s consent, interact by listening, talking back, and ‘seeing’ (with the help of CCTV). It isn’t AI making whoopee with the discerning doll diddler, though — connected remotely in real-time is a human “Voice Queen” named Leni von Mayn.

In our conversation, Leni shares her personal voyage of sexual discovery with good humour, candour, and a refreshing willingness to open up. An unexpected job offer during the pandemic set her on a path from a bot brothel in Berlin to a beach in Bali, living her best life as a “sexplorer” and mindful sexuality coach. She gives her thoughts and feelings about the impact of technology on our sex lives, the importance of presence and attention in intimacy, and even throws in some tantric pointers.

The idea of romping with a silicone doll that talks back while a human woman watches on CCTV and talks dirty might strike some of us as off-putting, complex, awkward, even synthetic, but is “artificial sexuality” really an alienating factor for modern humans, or just another new way for people to engage with themselves and their desires?

As Woody Allen said:

“Love is the answer. But while you're waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.”

You can follow Leni von Mayn on Instagram and X, or find her on OnlyFans.

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