Show Notes
Dr Nick Bryant (BBC Washington correspondent, author) has spent most of his career covering the events that many of us see as spelling the decline of the US, a once-great nation – the school shootings, Trump presidency, Roe v Wade, storming of the Capitol, George Floyd, conspiracy theories and…all the rest. But in his new book The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself Nick argues that the hate, divisiveness, racism and murmurings of civil war are part of the fabric of the country – “America is just doing America”.
Nick has been a foreign correspondent for three decades, writing for the BBC, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and more. A copy of his previous book, When America Stopped Being Great sat on Joe Biden’s Oval Office bookshelf. This chat sets out to give context to the issues swirling in the lead-up to the November election. We cover Gaza, RFK Jnr, Project 25, guns, media both side-ism and the fascinating history of American Exceptionalism.
SHOW NOTES Get your copy of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself I reference a post I wrote on Project 25. You can read it here. This 7am podcast about Project 25 is useful. And check out the Jim Jeffries clip on gun control. It’s brilliant. You can get started with reading my next book here.
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Indy Johar (founder of Dark Matter Labs, systems designer) closes this 12-part series on the life-enhancing “what comes next” that we need (and want) to be creating. Indy is one of the world’s most original voices on redesigning societies and he has a radical thesis that brings together most of the themes we’ve discussed so far. He calls it “civilisational optionality”. Our job is not to save civilisation or to know what comes next…. It’s to preserve or expand the capacity for life (that is, humanity and the living world) to adapt to whatever comes next.
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