1984 Today!

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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In 2014, an NHS junior doctor named Chris Day made “protected disclosures” to the hospital trust he worked for in south east London. He raised issues of understaffing (doctor/patient ratios were 1:18, more than double the national standard of 1:8) and reported two specific cases in which poor care led to avoidable patient deaths.

The hospital trust took swift action, thanked him for bringing it to their attention, and wrote him a glowing recommendation.

Just kidding.

What could have been a ‘teachable moment’, or at least a routine incident of whistleblowing, instead set Chris on a collision course with Britain’s National Health Service, the then-national training provider Health Education England (HEE), and the justice system itself.

In his words:

One night in January 2014 I became a whistleblower. I did this without realising it and since then I have been very nearly swallowed up by an NHS made legal gap or ‘lacuna’ in whistleblowing law.

Writing in 2016, Benedict Cooper explained the “lacuna” for the New Statesman:

The fulcrum of the case is a gap – or “lacuna”, to get into the legalese – in the laws protecting junior doctors when they blow the whistle. A gap which exists because of an ambiguity as to who is ultimately responsible for their career, and which Day’s case has revealed. The status quo is that HEE isn’t fully bound by S43K whistleblowing laws because it is a training provider not an employer, while NHS trusts, which take junior doctors on as temporary employees contract-by-contract, don’t have to afford the same rights to them as they would more permanent staff . The background – and how this fits into the junior doctors contract dispute – is all here.

Day and his legal team are arguing that this ambiguity is leaving junior doctors in a no-man’s land; that while doctors are duty bound to report concerns, they’re not protected against harsh treatment when they do; that HEE, as de facto employers of junior doctors, should step up and take responsibility for them.

Chris found himself unable to work for the NHS as a junior doctor, characterised as “angry” and “emotional”, and embroiled in a fight to prove that he was an employee of the organisation he worked for in order to benefit from whistleblower protection.

As Chris went from hearing to hearing, he found the lengths his former employers were willing to go to to discredit him and save face increasingly extreme:

* In one episode, “one of the trust’s directors “deliberately” deleted up to 90,000 emails midway through a tribunal hearing in July 2022.”

* The outcome of one hearing was a ruling that effectively stripped 54,000 junior doctors in the UK of whistleblower protection, later overturned on appeal.

* The law firm defending HEE turned out not to have “disclosed key contracts it had been paid public money to draft for its client”, contracts that could have resolved the “fulcrum of the case” and prevented what ex-shadow health minister Justin Madders described as “a lengthy and wholly unnecessary legal battle where HEE was effectively seeking to remove around 54,000 doctors out of whistleblowing protections by claiming that they were not their employer.”

As Tommy Greene wrote for Byline Times in 2023:

This lack of disclosure allowed the agency to argue it could not be considered the legal employer of junior doctors – a position that Court of Appeal judges overturned in 2017. The contracts were eventually obtained through FOI requests in 2019.

Believe it or not, Chris’s case is still ongoing, and, after more than ten years, the British Medical Association has now announced it is backing him up “as part of plans to improve its support for whistleblowers.”

How much has the perennially cash-strapped NHS spent fighting Chris in court? According to Tommy Greene (writing in 2023):

As of 2018, more than £700,000 had been spent by NHS bodies defending the case brought by Day. Overall costs are currently thought to stand at around £1 million.

Chris joins me for a deep dive into his journey from junior doctor to “lightning rod”, and opens up about how he’s found the strength to keep going despite the numerous reversals along the way.

You can visit Chris’s website, follow him on X or LinkedIn, or follow his case on CrowdJustice.

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Are the nations of ‘the West’, especially the United States, in a new Cold War with Russia and China?

What does the world look like now that nations favouring authoritarian governance and repression of civil liberties have become major influential global powers?

How can states and individual citizens navigate the new reality in which we find ourselves?

According to the March 2025 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, “Russia, China, Iran and North Korea—individually and collectively—are challenging U.S. interests in the world by attacking or threatening others in their regions, with both asymmetric and conventional hard power tactics, and promoting alternative systems to compete with the United States, primarily in trade, finance, and security.”

Is this a global hegemony bemoaning the rise of a new multipolar order, or are we hearing an early warning signal of a potentially far-reaching 21st century power struggle?

To get into all this and more, I’m joined by Velina Tchakarova, a geopolitical strategist and strategic foresight expert.

Velina runs a consultancy called For A Conscious Experience (FACE), serves on the board of the European Alpbach Forum and the Advisory Board of a French think tank called Eastern Circles, is a visiting fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, and was previously the Director of the Austrian Institute for European and Security Policy in Vienna.

In our wide-ranging conversation, she describes what she calls ‘Cold War 2.0’, a new oppositional relationship between the United States and Europe on one side and the alliance she calls the DragonBear, made up of Russia and China, on the other.

As summed up in the U.S. intelligence community’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, Cold War 2.0 is an undeclared conflict in which the DragonBear and its allies “seek to challenge the United States and other countries through deliberate campaigns to gain an advantage, while also trying to avoid direct war.”

One doesn’t need to be an apologist for the excesses and vagaries of American power projection to see how an alliance of authoritarian regimes keen on securing their own interests and projecting their own values internationally can have a chilling effect on the rights and quality of life of individuals everywhere.

You can find Velina on X for up-to-the-minute clear-eyed commentary, or read her blog posts on FACE’s website.

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In January 2025, Elon Musk started posting on X about a long-festering blot on the copybook of British justice, the decades-long organised mass rape of children across the cities of northern England by ‘grooming gangs’.

In places like Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, and Oldham, years of horrific abuse had gone barely acknowledged by authorities, with intermittent, insufficient, and inconsistent prosecution. The majority of the victims were girls between the ages of 11 and 16.

After Musk’s social media posts, the scandal became international news, with the media often seeming more upset that Musk was criticising the British government than about the years of mass rape, human trafficking, torture, and murder that the alliterative sanitised phrase “grooming gangs” glosses over.

An inquiry led by Professor Alexis Jay, commissioned in 2013 by Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council and published the following year, gave a “conservative estimate…that approximately 1400 children were sexually exploited over the full Inquiry period, from 1997 to 2013,” and that “[t]his abuse is not confined to the past but continues to this day.” The report was, in a word, damning:

Over the first twelve years covered by this Inquiry, the collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant. From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham.

Jay subsequently oversaw a full report, published in 2022, that called rampant child abuse an “epidemic that left thousands of victims in its poisonous wake,” in which institutions “prioritised their reputations above the welfare of those they were duty bound to protect.”

In the report’s foreword, Jay wrote: “I urge the UK government, the Welsh Government and all other relevant institutions to implement promptly the Inquiry’s recommendations which are designed to protect children from sexual abuse in the future.” The report made detailed recommendations to the Home Office and called for swift action to prevent the failures of the past from continuing into the future.

In January 2025, when Musk’s social media activity drew fresh attention to the issue, it was twenty-seven months after the 2022 report and Professor Jay had been “frustrated” by the lack of action from government.

Whistleblowers, community activists, and citizen journalists like Raja Miah had been working to get the story proper scrutiny for years, but Musk’s involvement, while bringing attention, drove the characterisation of ‘grooming gangs’ as a far-right talking point, summed up as follows by Sky News in their coverage at the time:

Condemnation of rape and grooming gangs isn't far-right in itself: the entire British public shares exactly the same position. But there's evidence that Musk's introduction to the topic is a result of right-wing and far-right accounts on X.

At issue was a sore spot at the centre of the sordid sinuous saga: The majority of the victims in places like Rochdale and Rotherham had been white, and the majority of the perpetrators had been from the Asian, usually Pakistani, community. One inquiry into the failures that prevented or delayed justice mentioned a “nervousness about race”. Britain’s success story as a multicultural society was seen as being endangered by the ethnicity of the criminals and their victims.

On one side, a reasonable fear of opportunistic elements seizing on the role of minorities in horrific crimes to drum up violence and social unrest. On the other side, the very real experience of being frozen out of the justice system and abandoned by institutions and the government because admitting and facing the problem head on would concede something that could be misused by those elements.

Raja Miah joins me in this episode to give a detailed insight into the genesis of the scandal, the communities that were affected, and the successive governments that looked the other way.

Raja is a second generation Bangladeshi Muslim who received an MBE in 2004 for his community service. He is also a self-described rabble-rouser who proudly points out that the Labour Party considers him “a dangerous man”. He says that he has “a bounty on his head from both gangsters and Islamists who he has exposed for their open links to Labour Party politicians.”

You can watch his regular transmissions on his Recusant Nine YouTube channel, follow him on X, or visit his website at Red Wall & The Rabble.

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In recent months, Britain, like Europe, has seen farmers take to the streets in their thousands to protest against changes in the law that they say will make their jobs harder, undermine food security, and possibly even close them down.

Britain has proposed a change to inheritance tax that would affect 25% of the country’s farms and could result in many farms being parcelled off or even sold entirely. The EU has a clear plan to “restore” 20% of its land and sea, albeit subject to an “emergency brake” that would place reductions on hold at the national level “under exceptional circumstances if they severely reduce the land needed for sufficient food production for EU consumption”.

Are these necessary steps to protect the environment, or the final nail in the coffin for national food security? Could it be both? Helen Freeman joins me to get into these questions, and more.

Helen works for Farms Not Factories, an NGO campaigning to end factory farming in the UK. She is also a farmer with a high welfare free range herd of Saddleback pigs. You can find her writing on Substack and follow her on Instagram.

In our conversation we make reference to her article The Price of Protest, about the 10 February 2025 farmer protest in London.

I hope you enjoy it.

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