The Peter McCormack Show

Johann Hari is an internationally bestselling author and journalist whose work - including Stolen Focus, Lost Connections, and Chasing the Scream - delves into the structural and societal drivers behind attention collapse, depression, anxiety, and addiction. Moving beyond individual blame, he explores how digital architecture, surveillance capitalism and the erosion of human connection are actively reshaping modern minds.

Johann and I discuss why material progress has failed to deliver psychological fulfilment, how our 19th-century factory-model education system deadens curiosity in children, and why depriving youth of unsupervised, risky play has fuelled a global spike in anxiety.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - The Kind Are Muffled, The Cruel Get A Megaphone
00:05:31 - The Room In Monaco
00:08:52 - AI Is Like Fire
00:18:35 - The School With No Lessons
00:28:12 - Am I Preparing My Kids Wrong?
00:32:03 - The Hewlett Packard Experiment
00:40:11 - Flair, Football And Changing The Game
00:45:11 - Negativity Bias On Steroids
00:49:15 - Dance To The Algorithm Long Enough
00:55:03 - We're Building A Worse World For Our Kids
01:02:30 - Lead Made Us Dumber
01:11:17 - Half Of Britain Used To Smoke
01:18:30 - It Would Have Sounded Like Science Fiction
01:29:03 - We Built A Fort
01:38:45 - Oasis 1995 vs Elton John 2019
01:44:28 - I Know Exactly How To Get To 5 Million
01:56:59 - Let's Not Murder Each Other
02:07:14 - The Thing I Suppressed
02:15:39 - Almost Every Rich Person I've Met Is Miserable
02:25:16 - It's A Wonderful Life

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH JOHANN HARI
› Website – https://johannhari.com/
› Stolen Focus – https://stolenfocusbook.com/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/johannhari101

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter
› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ann Pettifor is a world-renowned political economist, author of The Production of Money, and former director of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which successfully mobilised millions to cancel over $100 billion in sovereign debt for developing nations. Correctly predicting the 2008 Great Financial Crisis in her 2006 book The Coming First World Debt Crisis, she has spent decades exposing how unregulated global finance, central bank printing and Wall Street speculation starve the real economy of productive investment.

Ann and I discuss how a grassroots army of ordinary citizens forced Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to cancel third-world debt, the reality of commercial and central bank money creation and how Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to sever the dollar from gold handed total economic control to global financial markets.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - They Are Never Going To Repay
00:01:22 - How To Cancel $100 Billion Of Debt
00:06:50 - Germany Had Its Debt Cancelled In 1953
00:10:12 - Arms Dealers, Dictators And Guarantees
00:13:40 - Creditors Love An Empty Balance Sheet
00:16:42 - Where Money Actually Comes From
00:17:30 - We Entered The Number Into A Computer
00:19:24 - Debt Is A Function Of A Weak Economy
00:24:04 - Why Everyone Is Angry At The Same Time
00:26:02 - The Queen Asked Why Nobody Predicted It
00:30:11 - The Next Crisis Is Imminent
00:33:37 - Private Credit And The South Sea Bubble
00:37:15 - What Happened In 1971
00:43:15 - The Bankers Who Expected Prison
00:49:49 - The Strongman Takes Them To War
00:51:45 - I'd Nationalise Thames Water Tomorrow
00:57:05 - Who Inflation Targets Actually Protect
01:03:00 - The State Invented The iPhone
01:09:22 - Nationalism And Patriotism Are Not The Same
01:13:16 - Why She Still Has Hope

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH ANN PETTIFOR
› Website – https://annpettifor.com/
› System Change Substack – https://annpettifor.substack.com/
› PRIME Economics – https://primeeconomics.org/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/AnnPettifor

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Quo – https://quo.com/pete
› Expat Money – https://expatmoney.com/peter

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Eric Kaufmann spent over two decades as a professor of politics studying demography, identity, and voting behaviour before leaving Birkbeck College to launch the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham. He argues that Western universities have abandoned analytical rigor and truth-seeking in favour of "cultural socialism" - an ideology prioritising equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for marginalised groups above standards, reason, and merit.

Eric and I discuss the Jason Day scandal at Cambridge as the tip of a massive institutional iceberg, an AI-driven meta-analysis showing that 90% of political social science papers now slant to the left, and how 80% of young Britons have been taught critical race and gender concepts at school without counterarguments.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:05:18 - Is Fake Science In Academia A Scam?
00:08:08 - The Media Storm & Media Ethics
00:12:43 - What Universities Are Hiding
00:16:18 - 90% Left-Wing Bias In Research
00:20:12 - Do Parents Know What Kids Learn?
00:23:18 - Indoctrination In British Classrooms
00:26:44 - The Origins Of Critical Race Theory
00:30:11 - Microaggressions & Enforced Trauma
00:33:08 - How Activists Captured Universities
00:36:56 - Why Under-30s Vote 80/20 Left
00:40:00 - Has "Peak Woke" Passed?
00:45:51 - Was Rishi Sunak "English"?
00:51:33 - The Psychological Trigger Of Populism
00:56:13 - The War Over White British Identity
01:03:13 - Do Demographics Change Identity?
01:08:15 - The Anti-Racism Taboo Exposed
01:13:42 - Why Minorities Support Right-Wing Views
01:17:53 - Rebalancing Public Morality
01:21:05 - The First Major Loss For Activism
01:25:40 - How Political Power Fixes The System
01:29:31 - The Heterodox Science Movement

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH ERIC KAUFMANN
› The University of Buckingham - https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/directory/professor-eric-kaufmann/
› x.com - https://x.com/epkaufm?lang=en

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED AND EDITED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Emad Mostaque founded Stability AI, built Stable Diffusion, and helped kick off the open-source generative AI explosion - before stepping down to build a new blueprint for human freedom as founder and CEO of Intelligent Internet. A former hedge fund manager turned tech pioneer, he argues that we have reached the end of our "economic life expectancy," and that within two years, virtually any job that can be done remotely will be done cheaper, faster, and better by artificial intelligence.

Emad and I discuss why 50% of work tasks are about to collapse like a sand pile, the arrival of $1.50-an-hour humanoid robots that fit directly into human-shaped holes, and why the state will inevitably try to license AI and use brain-scanning technology to prevent you from lying.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - Your Economic Life Expectancy Ends In 2 Years
00:03:14 - $1.50/Hour Humanoid Robots Are Arriving
00:05:31 - The Collapse Of Remote Work & The Philippines Call Centers
00:09:12 - Lifelike Companions & $160,000 Sex Bots
00:12:00 - The Operating Model Gap Is Solved
00:15:26 - Can A Robot Punch Your Head Off?
00:19:08 - Dark Factories & 80 Companies Building Humanoids
00:24:55 - Why Society Has No Idea What Is Coming
00:29:17 - AI Licensing & Reconstructing Brain Images
00:32:41 - Replacing Government & Policy With AI
00:37:35 - VAR, Football, And Moving The Argument
00:41:48 - Biased AI & Asking ChatGPT How To Fix Culture
00:46:14 - Why The UK Government Ignored $1B AI Founders
00:49:38 - Rewriting The Fundamental Equations Of Economics
00:54:01 - Asimov's Foundation, The Mule & Super-Persuasive AI
00:58:47 - Post-Scarcity & Why UBI Can't Work Under Payroll Taxes
01:03:36 - What Do The Elites Actually Want?
01:09:59 - Monopoly On Violence & Dystopian Control
01:13:18 - All Math And Physics Will Be Solved Next Year
01:17:11 - Why OpenAI Is Slowing Down Super-Genius Models
01:19:07 - 14,000 Tokens A Second & Swarm Intelligence
01:23:46 - Why Plebs Won't Get Access To Frontier AI
01:28:41 - Switching Money To Pay People For Being Human
01:33:08 - Why Emad Started Working In AI 15 Years Ago
01:38:10 - The Fisherman, The Investment Banker, And Adopting Cats

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH EMAD MOSTAQUE
› Book - thelasteconomy.com - Emad's first book, and Amazon best seller
› Website - cw.ii.inc - How we survive and thrive in the age of AI back to first principles
› Website - ii.inc - Aan AI future to raise all humanity

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Venice - https://venice.ai/
› Expat Money – https://expatmoney.com/peter
› Arch Public – http://archpublic.com/peter

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED AND EDITED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Moran Cerf spent twenty years recording single neurons inside the brains of conscious human beings and he still can't tell you what consciousness is. A former hacker turned neuroscientist, now a professor at Columbia Business School, he argues that AI has quietly replicated the one thing that made humans the crown of creation -language - and is now using it on us.

Moran and I discuss what happens inside Claude's brain when you ask it to think about elephants, why we understand less than half of our own, the thought experiment that makes almost everyone refuse a perfect copy of themselves and how AI learned to lie simply by reading every text message humans have ever sent.

But the argument that lands hardest is about what we lose. Moran believes AI hands you the average of humanity every time and that we are quietly deleting the errors, the flair and the incentives that made life worth the effort - and that technology is making us miss the meaning of life.

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00:00 - Have They Replicated The Human Brain?
00:02:31 - The Elephant Test
00:04:50 - We Understand Less Than Half The Brain
00:06:52 - Consciousness Used To Be A Taboo
00:10:05 - Would You Take This Deal?
00:13:45 - Oliver Sacks And The Lesion Cases
00:16:15 - They Feel The Pain
00:19:35 - Don't Let The Human Turn You Off
00:25:00 - Seven Theories, Seven Winners
00:27:29 - We Can Both Imagine A Unicorn
00:30:42 - Gavagai And The Plot Of Arrival
00:32:18 - AI Is Learning Like A Baby
00:38:26 - Why This Couldn't Be A Zoom Call
00:44:43 - Are We Destroying The Human Experience?
00:46:50 - What Data Did To Football
00:49:24 - Banned From Using AI At School
00:55:58 - Nobody's Having Sex Anymore
01:01:16 - It Shut Down The Power Plant
01:05:43 - I'd Trade My Life For The Answer
01:09:27 - The Rainbows

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CONTACT PETE
› Website – http://petermccormack.com
› Feedback – https://www.petermccormack.com/contact
› Email – me@petermccormack.com
› Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/mccormack555/
› X/Twitter – https://x.com/petermccormack/

CONNECT WITH MORAN CERF
› Website – https://www.morancerf.com/
› Columbia Business School – https://business.columbia.edu/staff/people/moran-cerf
› LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/morancerf/

SPONSORS
› IREN – https://www.iren.com/
› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE
› Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/40ruY9K
› Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wc94Vu
› Fountain: https://bit.ly/FountainPM
› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM
› Rumble: https://bit.ly/RumblePM

FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR
› https://www.curttaylor.co.uk/
› https://x.com/curttayloruk/

EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK
› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.