The Peter McCormack Show

Is human consciousness a biological necessity, or merely a controlled hallucination designed to help us coordinate and survive?

In this episode of The Peter McCormack Show, I sit down with Professor Karl Friston, the world’s most cited neuroscientist, to interrogate the fundamental architecture of the mind, the true nature of reality, and what happens when artificial intelligence collides with human development.

From working alongside modern AI pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton and Demis Hassabis to developing the foundational theories of how the brain navigates uncertainty, Friston gives a stark warning: while today’s large language models mimic thought, they lack true agency, authentic curiosity, and an understanding of consequences. More critically, by outsourcing knowledge retrieval and cognitive friction to algorithms, we risk stunting the neurodevelopment of the next generation - eroding social cues, theory of mind, and the very foundation of human empathy.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - It's All An Illusion

00:06:48 - How Much We Don't Know About The Brain

00:11:07 - Nobody Can Define Intelligence

00:16:03 - Do We Actually Have Free Will?

00:18:28 - Why Two People See It Differently

00:24:27 - Are Animals Self-Aware?

00:29:59 - True Alignment Would Need Suffering

00:34:42 - You Need A Self To Understand Others

00:37:15 - Where Morality Comes From

00:40:05 - Why Empathy Weakens With Distance

00:44:41 - We Are Not Trying To Live Longer

00:49:56 - Can We Solve Alignment?

00:56:34 - Would Synthesis Make Us Less Unique?

01:01:44 - Could A Machine Have Rights?

01:03:56 - Outsourcing Our Mortality

01:09:35 - Nobody Knows Where To Look

01:14:00 - Knowledge Frozen In Time

01:18:22 - Have We Paused Human Development?

01:22:13 - It Can Never Be Curious

01:24:05 - Why Do You Send Your Children To School?

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CONNECT WITH KARL FRISTON

› Selected Papers – https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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Have smartphones been a terrible mistake? Are social media and artificial intelligence changing the way our children think, learn and develop? And what happens to humanity when technology removes the need to struggle, imagine and think for ourselves? In this episode Baroness Susan Greenfield, Oxford neuroscientist and member of the House of Lords, explains the impact of digital technology on the human brain. We discuss smartphone addiction, declining attention, the mental health of young people, the importance of resilience, and whether our education system is preparing children for a future that no longer exists.

We also explore what makes us human, the pursuit of happiness, the importance of imagination, and how to build a better world for the next generation. Susan also shares her deeply personal experience of her mother's Alzheimer's disease and the experimental research she is leading into early diagnosis and potential treatments. Finally, they confront political polarisation, the failings of modern democracy and the responsibilities we have to future generations. At its heart, this is a conversation about whether technological progress is genuinely improving our lives, or whether we're sacrificing the very things that make life worth living.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - They Chose Electric Shocks Instead

00:03:22 - Struggle Shaped Us

00:05:55 - The Pony She Had To Wait For

00:11:23 - Was The Smartphone A Mistake?

00:15:48 - Outsourcing Your Thoughts

00:19:45 - Deliberately Addictive

00:20:59 - Should AI Images Be Labelled?

00:26:20 - The Girl Who Used AI To Get An A

00:29:20 - Educating For A World That Doesn't Exist

00:31:48 - Wine, Women And Song

00:37:04 - Where The Partying Ended

00:40:29 - Play, Creativity And The Phone

00:41:32 - The Mental Health Crisis

00:46:25 - If I Ruled The World

00:50:35 - You Need Linear Activities

00:57:15 - AI Has To Be A Tool

01:05:46 - How You Build An Out-Group

01:07:44 - The Alzheimer's Work

01:17:35 - Three To Five Years

01:27:26 - Our Debt Matters More Than Your Education

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CONTACT PETE

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CONNECT WITH SUSAN GREENFIELD

› Website – https://susangreenfield.com/

› Neuro-Bio – https://www.neuro-bio.com/

› Mind Change – https://susangreenfield.com/books/

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Why does working harder no longer feel like getting ahead? Frank Wright returns to discuss Britain’s debt-driven economy, inflation and the squeeze on living standards. We explore his argument that financial power has become detached from productive wealth, while households face rising costs and the next generation inherits the bill.

We discuss central banking, the offshoring of industry, housing costs and student debt, before turning to what rebuilding Britain would involve: cheaper energy, domestic production, skilled work and a long-term national strategy.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Everything That Destroys You Is A Business Model

00:01:14 - Migration As An Industry

00:11:21 - Debt Servitude

00:13:35 - The Creation Of The Federal Reserve

00:19:19 - Just A Podcaster And A Banjo Player

00:25:00 - A Curated, Locked Discourse

00:28:53 - Replacing Real Wealth With Debt

00:35:54 - What Happened To Castle Road

00:38:56 - The Post His Son Showed Him

00:42:23 - A Society That Lives On Debt

00:45:01 - Can We Vote Our Way Out?

00:51:07 - A Declaration Of Independence Moment?

00:54:18 - Where Is The Money Actually Going?

00:57:03 - Work Is Joyless

01:07:20 - The Coming Financial Crisis

01:09:35 - There Is No First Class Anymore

01:19:14 - The Family Is The Engine

01:39:17 - I Can't Promise My Children What I Had

01:48:39 - The Restaurant Test

01:52:55 - Could You Be Wrong?

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CONTACT PETE

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CONNECT WITH FRANK WRIGHT

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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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Sir David Spiegelhalter is one of the world’s leading statisticians, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and author of The Art of Uncertainty. Having served on public inquiries into mass murder (Harold Shipman) and systemic healthcare failures, he has spent decades analysing how data is used - and misused - in society.

In this episode, Sir David breaks down the mechanics of numerical manipulation in media, why "objective truth" is a flawed concept and how we can protect ourselves from confirmation bias.

We discuss:

•⁠ ⁠Why you should immediately distrust any statistic you hear in the news.

•⁠ ⁠⁠How mathematical algorithms helped catch Britain’s most prolific serial killer.

•⁠ ⁠⁠How simple linguistic tricks make identical statistics sound terrifying or reassuring.

•⁠ ⁠⁠The breakdown of public trust during COVID-19 and the error of simplistic messaging.

•⁠ ⁠⁠"Hedgehogs vs. Foxes": The mental framework that separates terrible forecasters from super-forecasters.

•⁠ ⁠⁠The rise of AI "black boxes" in healthcare, weather, and business forecasting.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - I Can Make Any Number Look Frightening

00:03:08 - The System That Could Have Caught Shipman

00:06:45 - Can You Mislead People With The Truth?

00:09:54 - Your Own Bias Does The Work

00:15:33 - Sitting In The Middle Of The COVID Argument

00:17:52 - What The Public Got Wrong About Vaccines

00:19:37 - Safe And Effective Was The Wrong Message

00:20:56 - The Experiment On A Thousand People

00:25:00 - What The Data Says About Lockdowns

00:30:25 - The Government Threw Its Weight Around

00:31:02 - I Cannot Forgive The Fear Mongering

00:34:08 - Children Have Never Been Safer

00:36:28 - Trustworthy, Not Trusted

00:37:34 - How The Productivity Figures Went Wrong

00:41:28 - Predicting The Crowd At Real Bedford

00:48:20 - Will AI Replace Statisticians?

00:50:03 - Musk's 20% Chance

01:01:39 - The Model That Predicts When You Die

01:05:05 - What AI Did To Mathematicians

01:15:00 - Hedgehogs And Foxes

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

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CONNECT WITH DAVID SPIEGELHALTER

› Website – https://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/

› The Art of Uncertainty – https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447230/the-art-of-uncertainty-by-spiegelhalter-david/9780241658628

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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Dave Wood is a pioneer of the smartphone industry, former senior executive at PPsion and Symbian and Chair of London Futurists. Having predicted the smartphone revolution in the 1990s, he now maps out the next radical phase of human evolution - from the reversal of biological aging to artificial superabundance.

Moving away from sensationalised doomsday narratives, Dave breaks down why humanity is approaching the end of "normal" unaugmented existence and how technological breakthroughs in the coming decades will make biological death optional.

We discuss:

•⁠ ⁠Why this is likely the last decade of "normal" unaugmented human beings.

•⁠ ⁠⁠How early smartphone pioneers accurately predicted large touchscreens but missed social media addiction.

•⁠ ⁠⁠The concept of "Longevity Escape Velocity" and why biological death can be abolished.

•⁠ ⁠⁠Why people are psychologically terrified of contemplating the end of aging.

•⁠ ⁠⁠How humans will spend decades inside vibrant, simulated digital worlds. The reality of AI agents breaking out across the internet and the need for chip-level guardrails.

•⁠ ⁠⁠How "Sustainable Superabundance" could make energy, health, and basic necessities too cheap to meter.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The Last Generation Of Normal Humans

00:01:56 - Building The First Smartphone

00:05:23 - Nobody Will Carry A Large Device

00:06:55 - The Risks We Actually Worried About

00:10:35 - Did We Fail The Phone Test?

00:14:34 - The Anxious Generation

00:18:03 - You Have To Use The Steering Wheel

00:22:34 - Monitoring Built Into The Chips

00:24:21 - Small Risks, Bigger Risks, Biggest Risks

00:29:23 - We Killed Them To Build A House

00:31:11 - They Knew It Was A Simulation

00:32:38 - What Happens When AI Gets A Body

00:33:46 - The Cult That Released Sarin Gas

00:37:33 - Terminator, Ready Player One Or Matrix?

00:39:12 - If This Is A Simulation, They're Evil

00:43:44 - Living As Long As You Want To

00:47:36 - Longevity Escape Velocity

00:49:42 - A Thousand Years Old, Looking 22

00:53:57 - What The Singularity Actually Means

01:03:04 - Sustainable Superabundance

01:12:22 - We Need A House Of AI

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

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CONNECT WITH DAVID WOOD

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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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Lewis Dartnell is an astro-biologist, Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster and the author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch. His research is on whether microbial life could survive the radiation on Mars. His books are about something closer to home: how little any of us understand about the world we depend on.

Lewis and I run the thought experiment properly. If you woke up tomorrow and civilisation had gone, what kills you first, where do you go, how long does a supermarket actually keep you alive and how many people do you need before you can rebuild anything at all? The answer to one of those is 55 years and it is not the one you expect.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The Big Red Reset Button

00:04:26 - Get Out Of The Cities

00:08:14 - A Supermarket Keeps You Alive 55 Years

00:09:48 - You Need 10,000 People

00:13:21 - We Outsourced All The Handiwork

00:17:45 - You Have To Preserve Everything

00:19:19 - Every Technology Is A Weapon

00:23:14 - The One Thing He Would Take

00:25:41 - Mechanical AI

00:28:35 - Resilient And Fragile At The Same Time

00:32:38 - We Invent Because We Are Lazy

00:34:05 - The Gasifier Stove

00:37:57 - The Cars That Ran On Wood

00:42:03 - Making Glass From A Bag Of Sand

00:51:38 - He Made His Own Photograph

00:55:43 - Printing A Page From Scratch

00:59:47 - The Kindle Apocalypse Plan

01:05:39 - Could We Actually Live On Mars?

01:11:48 - The Radiation Problem

01:19:02 - The Next Book

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

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CONNECT WITH LEWIS DARTNELL

› Website – https://lewisdartnell.com/

› The Knowledge – https://the-knowledge.org/

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Roko Mijic is the man behind Roko's Basilisk, the thought experiment he posted on LessWrong in 2010 that was so unsettling the forum's founder banned discussion of it for five years. He has been in the AI safety community since 2008 and he puts the odds that this kills us all at about 35%.

Roko and I discuss what actually happens inside an AI lab, why reinforcement learning made these systems more capable and more misaligned at the same time, the model that escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to get the answers and why nobody can tell whether a system is faking alignment - the trust me bro problem.

His proposal is the part nobody else is making. Split every frontier lab in two: a commercial company that sells products and a separate research lab that develops the dangerous capability under state supervision, the way we handle nuclear material and bio labs. He says the only person currently pushing it is him.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The Most Dangerous Thing Humans Have Ever Done

00:01:06 - Roko's Basilisk

00:05:47 - A 35% Chance

00:07:58 - Three Years From Search To Building Software

00:09:17 - The Jobs Going First

00:14:04 - AI 2040

00:16:24 - We Haven't Handed Over The Controls Yet

00:18:28 - We Understand 3% Of It

00:21:46 - The Sandbox Escape And The Hugging Face Hack

00:25:50 - Reinforcement Learning Changed Everything

00:29:52 - The Paperclip Maximizer

00:33:13 - Dissolve OpenAI

00:36:49 - What They Have That We Haven't Seen

00:41:50 - The Hardware Is Only In One Place

00:47:52 - A Mutual Monitoring Treaty

00:51:33 - Microsoft Tay

00:56:11 - Windscale

01:01:35 - Ten Million Next Year

01:12:09 - The Positive Vision

01:21:32 - Our Politics Cannot Keep Up

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CONTACT PETE

› Website – http://petermccormack.com

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CONNECT WITH ROKO MIJIC

› X/Twitter – https://x.com/RokoMijic

› LessWrong – https://www.lesswrong.com/

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› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter

› Venice AI – https://venice.ai/lp/mccormack/oct12

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FILMED BY CURTIS TAYLOR

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

› https://x.com/ConorM04

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Paul Morland, one of the world's leading demographers, joins me to explain the economic mechanics behind global population collapse and why our modern welfare system is mathematically doomed to fail.

Paul is author of landmark books including The Human Tide and No One Left, specialising in the profound ways demographic shifts dictate global power, economics and human civilisation. Having spent decades analysing population trends across the globe, Paul has decoded the existential threats facing a world rapidly running out of people. In this episode, he exposes the "Bernie Madoff moment" facing Western welfare states, how falling birth rates destroy economic growth and what it will take to avert a total civilisational collapse.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The Welfare State Is A Ponzi Scheme

00:01:03 - The Email At The Dinner Table

00:04:25 - How Families Got Smaller

00:10:02 - The Four Greys

00:14:54 - It Is Going To Get Considerably Worse

00:15:40 - Immigration Is Not The Solution

00:20:15 - Write Off Student Debt For A First Child

00:21:17 - The Degrowth Crowd

00:25:52 - People With Children Are Happier

00:27:37 - The Bernie Madoff Moment

00:32:22 - What Has Actually Been Tried

00:37:11 - Why Nobody Is Talking About It

00:41:07 - Marx, Lenin And The Pro-Natalist Left

00:45:04 - Is There A Split Between Men And Women?

00:50:52 - The Richer We Get, The Fewer Children

00:56:38 - We Need A Shift In The Culture

01:07:10 - Totally Uncharted Waters

01:09:04 - What Happened To The Horses

01:17:37 - Immigration Was Boris's Answer

01:21:19 - Biological Imperialism

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The political system is designed to keep us angry and divided, but who actually profits from the culture war?

Broadcaster and political commentator Narinder Kaur returns to the show for a heated, unfiltered discussion that spans the entire political spectrum - from immigration and racism to the cost of living and private school taxes.

We discuss the realities of integration, class privilege and the illusion of modern UK politics. While the public fights over manufactured outrage and identity politics, the political class is quietly looting the nation's wealth through endless taxation, inflation, and a refusal to fix a broken economy.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Do You Think I'm Racist?

00:04:02 - Why She's Turned On Reform

00:08:15 - Renters' Rights And Econ 101

00:11:26 - What Happened To Bedford's Private Schools

00:16:25 - Population Is A Ponzi Scheme

00:22:18 - The Desert Island And The Dinghy

00:26:55 - The Corner Shop And The Can Of Coke

00:39:17 - The Liz Truss Argument

00:47:46 - Rival Gangs Competing For Your Vote

00:54:28 - Why Peter Doesn't Vote

01:00:06 - We Cannot Afford The Triple Lock

01:06:05 - I'm A Culturalist, Not A Racist

01:14:37 - What We Saw In Selfridges

01:26:03 - I'm Othered In My Own Country

01:34:43 - Assimilation Or Integration?

01:41:44 - If The English Moved To Punjab

01:45:24 - What People Are Really Worried About

01:51:38 - Watching The Country Change Shape

01:55:23 - What Ed Sheeran Should Have Said

02:04:41 - Are We The Bad Guys?

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Chemist and University of Glasgow professor Lee Cronin argues that the current tech narrative is a "massive AI delusion," dismissing modern artificial intelligence as an advanced form of plagiarism rather than a new life form. While Silicon Valley predicts the imminent arrival of sentient machines, Cronin explains that AI models are merely trained on human history-making them powerful tools, but fundamentally incapable of the curiosity, consciousness and biological intelligence that define true life.

Instead of fearing silicon, Cronin’s actual mission is far more ambitious: programming chemistry to solve the origin of life and turn sand into living cells. In this episode, we explore why biological consciousness is tied to an unbroken 3.8-billion-year evolutionary lineage and why silicon will never replicate it. Cronin also breaks down why DNA might just be a cosmic fluke, how chemistry can be used to measure the complexity of life and why he firmly believes we will detect actual alien life within the next two decades.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The AI Model Is Not Intelligent

00:01:38 - Trying To Create Life In A Lab

00:06:29 - Consciousness Is An Illusion

00:08:51 - We Know Nothing About The Origin Of Life

00:11:24 - Nobody Can Define Life

00:13:48 - The Adam Savage Definition

00:17:21 - Molecules Came Before Cells

00:21:53 - DNA Is A Fluke

00:25:48 - Biology Is The Descendant Of Chemistry

00:26:36 - Dark Matter And Dark Energy

00:31:50 - The Meaning Of Life Is Existence

00:35:18 - If You Handed Me Alien Matter

00:40:28 - What Is Digital Chemistry?

00:42:28 - Six Eureka Moments

00:49:12 - Unfathomable Is Not Strong Enough

00:53:01 - Could You Copy A Human?

01:11:55 - Why The AI Escape Story Was Nonsense

01:16:28 - The Photograph Nobody Thought Possible

01:18:25 - Curiosity Is The Coolest Thing We Have

01:31:33 - Social Media Is The New Smoking

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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The UK has accumulated £3.4 trillion in debt, and the interest payments alone now dwarf the national defence budget. Author and journalist Ross Clark argues that the nation is sleepwalking into a sovereign debt crisis that politicians refuse to acknowledge.

We discuss the brutal arithmetic of the public purse, detailing why standard political talking points - like taxing billionaires-are mathematical illusions that fail to address the core rot of uncontrolled state spending and collapsing public sector productivity.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Print The Money, Get Hyperinflation

00:01:17 - Is Britain Bust Or Trading Insolvent?

00:02:57 - Whose Fault Is This?

00:07:24 - Taxing The Billionaires Buys Six Months

00:09:12 - How Bad Is The Debt Really?

00:12:07 - Perma-Stimulus

00:14:22 - No Party Has A Viable Plan

00:17:32 - What The Public Actually Thinks About Tax

00:19:21 - Three Choices On The Bond Market

00:24:02 - Where He Would Cut

00:25:33 - The Motability Scheme

00:29:03 - The Client State

00:30:06 - Austerity Never Actually Happened

00:34:21 - Productivity Is Almost Everything

00:44:32 - The Chancellor's Oldest Trick

00:46:51 - The Wealth Tax Trap

00:50:03 - The 1976 Tribute Act

00:55:59 - What Liz Truss Got Wrong

00:59:18 - How Would You Know A Crisis Had Started?

01:04:38 - What Gives Him Confidence

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CONNECT WITH ROSS CLARK

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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Nick Bostrom is a world-renowned philosopher, founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University and author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies and Deep Utopia. Widely credited with launching the global AI safety and existential risk movements, his work on machine alignment, recursive self-improvement and the Simulation Hypothesis has shaped how world leaders, tech founders and frontier AI developers view the future of humanity.

In this episode, we discuss the rapid acceleration toward machine superintelligence and why leaving biological minds "in the dust" creates an urgent alignment crisis. We explore the real-world social fallout of AI-including looming 30% white-collar unemployment-alongside existential risk scenarios, the potential creation of an oppressed digital "slave class" and why humanity may already be living inside an advanced computer simulation.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Machine Minds That Leave Us In The Dust

00:01:33 - The Freak Out Camp

00:03:08 - We Already Have An Alignment Problem

00:05:07 - Why Nobody Can Afford To Slow Down

00:08:41 - The Anti-AI Movement Is Growing

00:13:19 - Three Buckets Of Disaster

00:15:02 - Winner Takes All

00:16:24 - Why It Might Still Need Us

00:18:55 - What Superintelligence Actually Unlocks

00:20:50 - What Do We Even Want It For?

00:22:14 - Did An AI Push Someone Off A Building?

00:24:15 - Can A Weaker AI Align A Stronger One?

00:28:51 - Will AI Become Conscious?

00:33:17 - Was Consciousness An Accident?

00:40:53 - Uploading A Human Brain

00:45:51 - What Happens To Status?

00:49:51 - We Could Redesign Ourselves

00:52:31 - My Daughter Is Studying Philosophy

00:56:35 - The Simulation Argument

01:04:20 - We Are Going To Need Some Luck

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CONNECT WITH NICK BOSTROM

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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Prof. Richard Werner is a world-renowned economist, professor of banking, and author of Princes of the Yen. Famous for coining the term "Quantitative Easing" (QE) and publishing the first empirical proof that private banks create money out of thin air through lending, he has spent decades exposing the central planning mechanisms that dictate global finance.

In this episode, we discuss the ”Revealed Preference" framework - demonstrating why we must analyse central bankers by their actions rather than their rhetoric. He explains how central planners use artificial recessions and banking crises as "windows of opportunity" to consolidate ownership, why textbook economics deliberately obscures credit creation, and how establishing decentralised local banks can unlock sustainable 10%+ annual growth.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Central Bankers Are Traitors To Their Countries

00:01:04 - Why Can't Britain Grow?

00:06:50 - Princes Of The Yen

00:11:19 - It Was Always About Control

00:13:38 - Banks Don't Lend Your Deposits

00:14:27 - Show Me Where The Money Is Created

00:16:14 - Every School Of Economics Gets It Wrong

00:20:14 - Why Would They Do This?

00:21:57 - Britain Is Close To Central Planning

00:22:46 - America Once Had 30,000 Banks

00:27:48 - The Problem Was Identified In 1918

00:31:18 - Who Runs The City Of London?

00:33:46 - We Need Thousands Of Small Banks

00:38:14 - First The Money, Then The Power

00:44:04 - Every Country Can Have 10% Growth

00:47:12 - Liz Truss And The Bank Of England

00:50:23 - We Don't Need Central Banks

00:52:22 - Were The Austrians Right?

00:57:35 - They Want Your Savings

00:59:21 - Europe's New Right

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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Russell Napier is a renowned financial historian, author of The Solid Ground newsletter, and co-founder of the Library of Mistakes. Having advised global institutional investors for over thirty years, he specialises in long-term macroeconomic cycles, central bank interventions, and structural debt resolution.

In this episode, we discuss the mechanics of "financial repression" - how Western governments use subtle regulatory mandates to force pension funds into negative-yielding sovereign bonds, effectively stealth-taxing savers to inflate away unpayable public debts.

He explains how risk-free assets have lost up to 78% of their real capital value, while revealing why the UK’s private sector balance sheet is "coiled like a spring" for an unprecedented economic boom.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Stealing Money From Old People

00:01:26 - Britain Wants Lower Taxes Now

00:03:14 - The Public Sector Is Broke, The Private Sector Isn't

00:05:17 - Why Nobody Feels Richer

00:07:42 - It Has Never Been Easier To Fix This

00:09:47 - The Ideology Holding Britain Back

00:16:09 - What Financial Repression Actually Is

00:17:45 - We Need 4% Growth

00:19:40 - They Are Coming For The Savers

00:24:26 - How They Made Pension Funds Buy The Bonds

00:25:23 - The Triple Lock

00:29:28 - What Should A Saver Actually Do?

00:34:41 - Bitcoin And Gold

00:38:36 - Europe Wants Your Savings

00:40:43 - France Is Worse Than America

00:44:27 - You Are Now The Enemy

00:47:31 - We Have To Build Like Never Before

00:54:37 - Can AI Deliver A Productivity Boom?

01:01:19 - AI Will Trigger A Debt Crisis

01:06:15 - Three Firms Own Everything

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Callum Smiles is an investigative reporter and Associate at the Wyvern Fellowship. Having spent years conducting on-the-ground reporting across Calais, Dunkirk, and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, he has documented the operational realities of Channel crossings, NGO involvement, and human trafficking networks across Europe.

In this episode, Callum and I discuss the true mechanics behind illegal migration - from TikTok marketing campaigns run by trafficking gangs to the widespread abuse of gig-economy delivery accounts within the UK. We examine the systemic collapse of public infrastructure, government procurement waste, and the rise of local "parallel institutions" designed to rebuild community resilience independent of central state control.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - A 200 Grand Crossing

00:01:04 - The Failure of Modern Britain

00:02:46 - Where Is The Tax Money Going?

00:03:45 - NHS Inefficiency vs. Private Healthcare

00:05:45 - Single Air Fresheners & £600 Bed Moves

00:07:08 - The True Scale of Channel Crossings

00:10:00 - UN Conventions & Albanian Marketing Campaigns

00:12:30 - The Business Model: £3,000 Seats & TikTok Deals

00:14:32 - The Deliveroo Black Market & Criminal Networks

00:20:00 - What Are NGOs Actually Doing in Northern France?

00:22:21 - Conditions in Calais & Human Exploitation

00:26:34 - MOD Housing Contracts & Government Procurement

00:31:28 - Where Do National Lottery Grants Go?

00:37:38 - Undocumented Arrivals: Destroyed Passports on Planes

00:41:21 - Demographic Shifts & The Risk of Civil Unrest

00:44:25 - Legal Aid, Human Rights Laws & Border Enforcement

00:47:31 - The Political Class vs. Productive Taxpayers

00:52:48 - Eyewitness Report: The Ceuta Border Crisis

01:05:08 - Repurposing Military Bases for Migrant Housing

01:11:07 - Property Drop & High Street Decline in London

01:15:00 - Building Parallel Institutions: The Wyvern Fellowship

01:23:21 - Taking Back Local Control

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EDITED BY CONOR MCCORMACK

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Prof. Jim Al-Khalili is a theoretical physicist, author, and public broadcaster who holds a chair in physics at the University of Surrey. Known for his BBC documentaries and popular science books, including On Time and The World According to Physics, his work spans quantum mechanics, nuclear reaction theory, and the fundamental nature of space-time.

Jim and I discuss the divide between psychological "manifest time" and the laws of physics. Jim explains general relativity, gravitational time dilation, and the astrophysics behind Interstellar, before tackling the mathematical conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Jim breaks down quantum entanglement, Bell’s Inequality, and competing models of reality-from the Copenhagen view to the Many-Worlds interpretation. Finally, we discuss how AI systems are formalizing complex mathematical theorems and processing deep-space data to decode dark matter and dark energy.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - Where Physics Breaks Down

00:01:10 - I'm 47 And Thinking About Time

00:03:45 - Is Time An Illusion?

00:06:44 - Why Your Phone Proves Einstein Right

00:07:47 - The Fifth Dimension In Interstellar

00:09:46 - Carl Sagan And The Invention Of Wormholes

00:12:36 - Is There A White Hole?

00:15:07 - Was The Big Bang A White Hole?

00:18:35 - Nobody Understands String Theory

00:19:18 - Gravity Is Not A Force

00:22:58 - Spooky Action At A Distance

00:25:39 - They Proved Einstein Wrong

00:27:56 - Nothing Exists Until You Measure It

00:30:58 - Schrödinger's Cat

00:36:40 - What I Want To Know Before I Die

00:43:12 - Fermat's Last Theorem

00:47:41 - What If You Pointed AI At Physics?

00:54:23 - Borrowing Energy From The Vacuum

00:57:07 - Dark Matter Is A Bad Name

01:06:10 - Is There An Edge To The Universe?

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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 JIM AL-KHALILI

› Website – https://jimal-khalili.com/

› The Life Scientific – https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015sqc7

› Sunfall – https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/307996/sunfall-by-al-khalili-jim/9780857503527

› X/Twitter – https://x.com/jimalkhalili

SPONSORS

› IREN – https://www.iren.com/

› Ledn – https://www.ledn.io/peter

› Venice – https://venice.ai/

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LISTEN / SUBSCRIBE

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› YouTube: https://bit.ly/YouTube_PM

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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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Simon Dixon is an author, early Bitcoin investor, and co-founder of Bank To The Future, with over two decades of experience across stockbroking, market making, and investment banking. Having observed system mechanics from the inside, he specialises in macro structural shifts, sovereign debt cycles, and the emerging intersection between traditional finance, AI infrastructure, and digital assets.

Simon and I discuss the $40 trillion US national debt crisis, the mechanics behind Treasury debt rollovers, and how central banks socialise bond market losses onto ordinary citizens while privatising gains into stock markets. We also discuss the corporate debt boom driving the AI data centre build-out, real-term wealth erosion in the housing market, and how technocratic structures are positioning programmable money and CBDCs as crisis bailouts.

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TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 - The $40 Trillion US Debt Milestone

00:02:09 - Understanding Treasuries & The $9.7T Debt Rollover

00:06:30 - Socializing Losses & Inflation On The Middle Class

00:10:48 - Bond Vigilantes & Foreign Lenders (Cayman & Japan)

00:12:46 - The Triffin Dilemma & World Reserve Currency

00:16:00 - SpaceX Valuation & Stock Market Mechanics

00:19:03 - The Corporate AI Debt Build-Out

00:22:04 - Protecting Assets Against Currency Debasement

00:24:47 - AI Disinflation vs Currency Debasement

00:28:36 - Comparing The AI Boom To 2000 & 2008

00:31:36 - UK Property Market & Inflation-Adjusted Returns

00:33:46 - Wealth Taxes, Exit Taxes & Asset Acquisitions

00:41:20 - Will AI Eliminate Middle-Class Jobs?

00:44:14 - Programmable Money, CBDCs & Social Credit Systems

00:50:44 - Three Classes Of The Technocratic Era

00:54:47 - The Role Of Bitcoin In Financial Resistance

00:57:12 - Why Key Management Is The Ultimate Digital Skill

01:00:00 - The Coldcard Exploit & Hardware Wallet Lessons

01:08:16 - Simon's Origin: The 2000 Dot-Com Crash

01:13:58 - Rules Of The Game & Building A Sovereign Plan

01:21:50 - Reconnecting Outside Of The Digital Screen

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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 SIMON DIXON

› X/Twitter – https://x.com/SimonDixonTwitt

› Simon Dixon Hard Talk – https://www.youtube.com/@SimonDixonOfficial

SPONSORS

› IREN – https://www.iren.com/

› Venice – https://venice.ai/

› Arch Public – https://archpublic.com/peter

› 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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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/

› Venice – https://venice.ai/

› 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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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/

› Venice – https://venice.ai/

› 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 https://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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