Meeting People
Amul Pandya converses with independent, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Creativity is an act of rebellion. Whether they are entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, investors, chefs, or corporate antagonists, Amul's guests all share a common disposition of not just pushing boundaries but re-drawing landscapes.
Meeting People
#22 James Baxter-Derrington: The Bitcoin debate, legacy media, AI and prosperity in the Arts
James Baxter-Derrington is a writer, journalist, cricket fan and Investment Editor at The Telegraph. Our discussion began with his notorious article arguing that Bitcoin is worthless before evolving into a broader conversation on Value. We also talked about the role of legacy media in the face of online platforms, podcasts and citizen journalism. I asked James how to get Britain and the West out if its current malaise and on topic after topic his thoughtful responses made this one of my favourite conversations to date.
You can find James's articles at the Telegraph here or on X as @jamesbaxterd.
Hello and welcome to Meeting People with me, Amul Pandya. Meeting People is a podcast where I have long conversations with the rebellious, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Thank you for sparing the time and it's great to have you on the show. Thanks very much for having me. Yeah, pleasure, I thought we'd start in the place. That seems most obvious looking at your work. You wrote an article, I think back in December, for the Telegraph about Bitcoin. I know you don't write the title to these things, but the title was Don't Get Too Excited. Bitcoin is Still Worthless, which you know, um, you know, I know you weren't doing just for provocative reasons. It's probably lots very well thought through, but the reaction has been kind of very, very entertaining at the very least, and I've got my views on bitcoin, uh, which I try not to be too, uh, ideological or evangelical on, but it'd be great to. Just before we talk about the reaction to the piece, let's talk about the piece itself. What made you think that? How long have you thought about it?
James Baxter-Derrington:What's the thesis of the piece itself? It's interesting when it comes to Bitcoin and actually sitting and collating your own thoughts on it, because it's a very emotional topic for everyone involved, it's not something. Despite all the conversations, the technical and the philosophical and the world-changing function that it may or may not provide, you're either with it or you're against it. There's not much of that middle ground, and I've known of Bitcoin since 2010,. Really very early, and that came via a friend who was obsessed with the Internet and knew it via Silk Road and those kind of means, representative of some of the stranger elements of society lately and the fact that, in a lack of control, a lack of stake in society, people turn to conspiracy theories. In one way, they turn to things like bitcoin, they turn to collective action. Whatever it is, it's a reaction to something and bitcoin was born as a reaction in 2008 and it in its institutional adoption and it's you know spreading to bbc and kind of big media actually writing about it was a reaction to 2020.
James Baxter-Derrington:I know the conversations were there in 2016, but it was off the back of the pandemic that people started talking about it and once it moved beyond a way to buy drugs online, people had to understand why it could keep going up forever. When it started going up forever they're post-rationalizing, I'd say so it just kept going, you know. It went from not even a penny to 10 or 16 000, was 2018, 2016, kind of peak, and then it went back down to two and then 2020 and 2022 and every single time it is that post-rationalization of why it hit those levels and I was just trying to understand my own thoughts on it. I certainly respond to it emotionally.
James Baxter-Derrington:When I began with my knowledge of it, you know, 15 years ago, at this point, it was a very silly thing. That was internet money that you could use purely to do illegal things with. And then I started to get annoyed with the evangelical nature by five years ago and I just wanted to settle down and understand my own thoughts on the topic. And while the headline is, of course, something worth clicking on and provocative in that nature, I do think when you argue something as nice as it is to sit in this kind of context and talk for a very long time and have a rational conversation and agree that there's not necessarily the answer when you come to writing opinion, you do have to have a strong stance, and my stance, the more you follow it to its logical conclusion, is that of it being worthless, right?
Amul Pandya:so just talk us through that step, step by step chain of thought to get you to that conclusion. Well, what are the steps in your hand that make you think, um, this thing is worthless or has no value? Um, beyond scarcity, I, I guess I mean scarcity is a terrible reason for something to have value, and tulip bulbs are a good example of that, but it does carry value. Your use of the word emotional is actually a really interesting one, because I try to think about. You know what is value? You know what? What does it mean when something has value from an ex, from an economic perspective? Obviously, putting spiritual moral relationship to one side for now, um, and I find the austrian school quite interesting at this like so, you know, value is subjective, it's in your mind, rather than it's not this sort of objective. You know, if all human beings stopped existing, would gold have any value? Or would a factory that no longer has people in it have any value?
Amul Pandya:No, it's all up here and what I find interesting from someone who I went down the kind of bitcoin rabbit hole and in the covid period and I got very excited about it and thought this is a really good way of kind of dealing with, um, you know, excesses of the monetary system, of fiscal spending.
Amul Pandya:I've kind of moved away from that a little bit now, but why I think it's got value is because there's people who think it has value and the longer they think it has value, these evangelicals and above the evangelicals, you've got the adjacents, who are kind of they'll go to church on Christmas and Easter, but then you've got the ones who quite like a carol service once every three years and then they will always be there. Giving this thing value is how I've kind of settled my thinking on Bitcoin or crypto. Is that there's enough of a constituency that will believe in this even if the dollar value is zero. So I'd just be on that. I'd be interested in how you kind of thought, thought through the kind of a how do you ascribe value to something and then why, therefore, is through that framework, does bitcoin mean zero?
James Baxter-Derrington:I think you know value is the interesting word on that. When the piece first came to mind and pitched it and it was the idea that we could run with I began just researching why people do believe it has value. You know what, what the point of Bitcoin actually is. You know most of them, but you wanted to get to the nub of the argument in that way and in the process, the essay as such shifted from being about Bitcoin to my understanding of value. That's how it really um concluded uh, as a piece. So, while the headline was quite nice to say bitcoin, and it's a good way into it, that bitcoin is a lens through which to understand precisely and you mentioned the austrian school, something I came across in the process of looking at bitcoin and looking at value and quoted a couple of the professors of it in the piece as well and I think the simple answer to value one there isn't a simple one but two is counterintuitive. Simply because someone's willing to pay for something I don't believe means it has value. I know you know you this very basic kind of economic theory, and as soon as you say something like that, people jump into the comments to say, well, clearly you don't understand anything. Yeah, obviously, if someone pays for something, it has value. Obviously supply and demand, so on and so forth. But what inherent value is there in something that eventually can kind of collapse? You know, you mentioned tulip bulbs. It's the classic example, but still at the very heart of tulip bulbs you can grow a tulip, and that's quite nice. You can still hold on to your beanie babies, and that's lovely. Whether or not they're worth fighting over in divorce court, like that famous image, um, and you then start exploring the use cases of bitcoin and the reasons they argue it has value, and they all disintegrate relatively quickly.
James Baxter-Derrington:In terms of bitcoin as a currency, cryptocurrency, that's a it's a nice term, but one. No one really uses it to buy anything. It was begun as a method to, you know, deal in legal trade remains quite heftily in that space, but I don't think that's a good argument for why it shouldn't have value. Obviously that that does and you can use it for, you know, not illicit purposes too, but in terms of a currency, it's magnitudes less successful than what we actually have. Bitcoin can process something like 10 transactions a second due to its inherent blockchain, and that benefit visa does something like 46 000 transactions a second, so it doesn't work as a currency. It's incredibly clunky. You don't know how much you're paying, yeah, and you pay for the privilege of it.
James Baxter-Derrington:I think another element that I found interesting is discovering how effective financial and banking systems actually are in the world today, when you try and start them again and when you look at what ascribes value, when you look at how currencies actually function, when you look at what it requires for me to buy a coffee or to give you a fiver, and how easy that is with fiat currency in the way that we've developed it versus bitcoin, suddenly that five that I'm trying to pay you is three pound fifty, not only because of fluctuating value, but because I'm paying everyone for the cost, whereas visa, mastercard and every bank is free, really at the point of access. So that's an interesting part of it, and then another one that people always like to jump on to be seen as less well, not even mercantile, but less just sort of obsessed with money, and the rising value they can have is oh well, and I think it's quite an insulting use case really. Is a Syrian refugee mother at the border needs to be able to transfer money or pay it to somebody. Her bank account has been locked out but she can still access Bitcoin to pay it. One, I'm not certain her phone's necessarily working at that moment in time.
James Baxter-Derrington:Two, you know there are so many reasons why that's not a useful argument either, on kind of a moral and know, just on that sort of level. But also, do you really think your currency, which you believe is worth hundreds of billions, possibly trillions of dollars, is backed up entirely by refugee crises and the money that they need to transfer to to be able to access what they need in those kind of situations? So that's not a great answer for it either. And then, okay, it's a store of value. It's going to replace fiat currency, and you might as well get in at the ground floor, wouldn't you have loved to bought every single dollar before?
James Baxter-Derrington:We all agreed that the greenback was the reserve currency? Certainly yes, but if you're arguing it's going to replace everything, then the decentralized nature of it immediately disappears, and that's supposed to be a very big positive of it. It's a reaction against the elites and against the society that exists as it does right now, and we can reclaim it. And I understand where that reaction has come from, and it's in the vein of so many other reactions. But you know, a lot of knocking down a factory doesn't really fix what's actually happening there yeah and it's not an answer to it.
James Baxter-Derrington:And then they turn to the institutional acceptance of it. On this same note of what BlackRock has it and these companies all have it, and that means it's going to work. Everyone views it's the future. But one again, it doesn't really go with your power to the people, kind of thing. And two, they don't make money from the Bitcoin. They make money from selling it to you and you being able to buy it out of them and the actually the evangelists don't actually like the institutional adoption point at all.
Amul Pandya:It's uh, it's very much. They see it as the suits they call them the suits um coming in and and sort of kind of spoiling it or besmirching this sacred thing. Um, I hear you and I hear your point that just because something has value in someone's mind doesn't therefore mean it has value and you know there are all sorts of people who talk about rory sutherland before we kicked off.
Amul Pandya:You know who would have thought that a drink like red bull would have had value. You know it's more expensive, it tastes worse and it's uh, more unhealthy for you than a coca-cola. All of a sudden, it has a value in people's minds that's different to other soft drinks and that's not how a rational person would have devised a soft drink. You know or who would have thought. But you know what my haircut really needs is for me to have my ears set on fire and my shoulders squeezed, and that's the kind of the turkish, you know, free experience that people, people are getting now that we and um, and, and so you're making a bet, basically, as to whether this value at the moment that people ascribe to this is ephemeral or sustaining effectively. And you're saying it's ephemeral. To me, I just feel like there has to be, in a digital age, some form of peer to peer. Maybe it's not Bitcoin, it's not Bitcoin, but there has to be a way or there will be demand from enough people to give something value for a method of transferring money or transferring value from me to you without it going via a central institution, because that's kind of the way the world's going Uber, netflix before you.
Amul Pandya:I've got a car. I can't get maximum value out of it. I'm studying, god. Wouldn't it be helpful if I could do two hours in the weekend or two hours in the evening outside studying to ferry people around town? But I can't do that because there's this centralized gatekeeper called the medallion holders or the bank cabs. You know where you've got to do the knowledge and all of a sudden, now I can, you know, rent out my car to Airbnb, all these things. I think this kind of peer. Do you think about the kind of peer-to-peer element? Yeah, we don't have to talk about crypto, but just generally the silly, the internet enabling us to circumvent cake eaters, it is a very interesting part of it.
James Baxter-Derrington:But, equally, uber has a centralized body that connects me with you. Airbnb has a centralized body that connects me with you. All of these sorts of things still rely on a central institution to process all of these transactions. Even bitcoin, at its heart, still has the blockchain. It's a different example and that one is separate from them.
James Baxter-Derrington:But what's the problem with our transactions going through a central financial body as opposed to not as opposed to, but with the exception of a, an emotional reaction against things, that the perception of things going wrong in society, or an emotional reaction against some philosophical belief that you now have that you can't trust anyone and therefore the only person I can trust is myself and whoever I'm connecting with and whoever I'm connecting with. We have a perfectly easy system of transferring wealth and processing payments across the internet. It works very well. It's free for peers to use, so I just don't see that we need that. I understand that for a lot of people, that's desirable and that's probably why it will sustain itself for such a long period of time. But, in terms of overthrowing fiat currency, even everyone that speaks to about bitcoin tells you how much it's worth in dollar. They don't tell you how much. You know. I've got one bitcoin. They say my one bitcoin is worth 120 grand.
Amul Pandya:Yeah, and the evangelists will know my one bitcoin is worth one bitcoin. Yeah, and the evangelists will know, my one bitcoin is worth one bitcoin yeah, that's what they will try.
James Baxter-Derrington:They'll try and say it, but what your? How many was? It is near 10 bitcoin. That bought in two papa john pizzas in 2014. Those 10 bitcoin are not worth 10 bitcoin today. You can seek out those snappy phrases and you can logic your way through to any answer, but at the heart of it it's just it's false.
Amul Pandya:So the heart well, let's say the heart of it is that you don't think the system is broken, or if it is broken, this isn't it.
James Baxter-Derrington:Yeah.
Amul Pandya:Or do you think it's broken?
James Baxter-Derrington:I don't think the system of payments is broken. I don't think my access to a bank account and the ease with which I can initiate bank transfer to you and you can have that money in yours before we've even noticed it's happened is broken. I think that works better than it ever has. I think from the consumer perspective of daily spending, the financial system works incredibly well, like I can, you know, send a text to someone you know, the babysitter or whatever.
James Baxter-Derrington:Twist 20 quid oh yeah, it's phenomenal and I think the issue is that it's tied to the lending system.
Amul Pandya:That's where the payment system is great, but it freezes, because the people who are managing the payment system are the ones who are lending money out and they're the ones that get into trouble. And then the moral hazard comes in, because the government's got to step in so that we can all get paid Absolutely.
James Baxter-Derrington:And I understand again where this reaction has come from, and it's not only a reasonable one, but a rational one. 2008 is what birthed Bitcoin. And then we see as Mario Draghi did anything it takes kind of thing. We did the same again, and then we saw spiraling inflation and, off the back of 2008, where people lost their homes through no real fault of their own. Perhaps they shouldn't have taken 110% mortgage, but equally, people were very much pressured into that by institutions they trusted, and these institutions had a payment system that enabled them to offer that Exactly. So I understand where the reaction of Bitcoin has come from and I don't think we can ever really overstate how close to almost end times 2008 actually was.
James Baxter-Derrington:I don't think it's discussed often enough, I think because we've moved past it. No one really went to prison, no one was really held responsible. Rbs didn't collapse because people did what was necessary. We've been able to kind of sustain that system. But how long can we sustain that system? The UK debt ratio is going to hit 105%. I think the IMF or OECD was saying recently Japan's at about 230. And just because it's worked what? 200 years of capitalism? Maybe just because it's worked for that long does not suggest it's going to work forever. So I understand the reaction of Bitcoin and it sparks a serious conversation that we need to have, but I don't think it's the answer.
Amul Pandya:Yeah, yeah, like fiat, has enabled us to pay for our mistakes, using future generations' effectively and as the future generations staring down, probably not having a state pension.
Amul Pandya:It does hurt sometimes, yeah um, and I think that's maybe the issue. Maybe maybe how the hurt is felt is as important as the magnitude of the hurt, because if it comes every 10, 20 years versus frustration and pain every day, you're never going to get that widespread adoption because people will go back to their normal lives. So that could be. It's an upside and a downside could be it. Yeah, it's an upside and a downside, but I, there is I, I hear you that there is a kind of annoying apocalyptic um nature to the argument. The anti-elite side. I it resonates with me, but because I have my own problems with experts, but it's, it's just it's useful to flesh it out with with someone is who has kind of thought it through properly versus kind of maybe the let's talk about the reaction to it, but let's, yeah, because that's been quite fun.
Amul Pandya:Um, you know someone put a video, very thought through video. You know they several hours must I don't know if you've seen it, I may have done. Yeah, possibly. Um, where they kind of started off with you know the telegraph's subscription numbers over the last 40 years kind of going down versus bitcoin's share price or something like that, and then we're talking what were you expecting? That response?
James Baxter-Derrington:Yeah, you have to expect that it will happen, and so long as it stays out of the personal, it's absolutely fine. I think, unfortunately, that, but several other articles I've written as well. As soon as you disagree with someone, it's something that they believe is core to them. Their immediate response in terms of lashing out is very aggressive, very personal digging through your internet profile as best as they can find it to try and find holes in it. Saying, well, he's done this at one point, he's done that, he lives here.
Amul Pandya:This kind of stuff yeah, you would think that would I mean I've been killed.
James Baxter-Derrington:Oh, that that person would think that they're kind of oxbridge and they live in hampstead and yeah and obviously with me I have the the virtue of my name as well, which means people get to assume whatever they want about me. Um, I'm simultaneously too poor to understand money and too rich to understand money. No one can quite, because no one knows where the name actually comes from. No one can pin down what they believe of me, and it puts a very useful um argument in their hands of whatever they want it to be. I'm either legacy money and I'm clearly landowning and I've got all these estates off the basis of a double-barrelled surname, or I've got a very gauche name and he clearly doesn't know what he's talking about and he's reaching above his station, of which neither is the case of it. It's simply mum and dad put the name together.
Amul Pandya:Yeah.
James Baxter-Derrington:That's all it is.
Amul Pandya:Well, I'm really enjoying this smoking room and being in this room with this hand.
James Baxter-Derrington:It's beautiful. You've got to love the velvet, given the chance.
Amul Pandya:No, we're all guilty of that, and the internet has exacerbated this. When you look to answer difficult questions with easy, when you substitute difficult questions with easy, well, you substitute difficult questions with easy ones and, um, all sides of the political spectrum are very guilty of this. You know, like you know you're a vaccine denier, or you're a climate denier, or you know an anti-vaxxer, or whatever. You know these, um, and we're kind of. I think it's partly because we're geared for entertainment rather than solving problems. And I guess that takes us to the next thing. You obviously are one of the criticisms of legacy media. This guy is so legacy media. How do you view the landscape of getting ideas out there or thinking them through and finding answers, and then that, resulting in whether it's policy change or change, is traditional media? I wouldn't say legacy media. Traditional media fit for purpose versus new media.
James Baxter-Derrington:Absolutely, and I think the combination of the both is what makes the world such an exciting place today to be able to research anything and to find every opinion that you want. Find every opinion that agrees or disagrees with you. You know unbelievable amounts of knowledge. So 20 years, even 10 years ago, the ease with which people can actually put stuff out there is phenomenal. But I believe that traditional media is absolutely at I wouldn't say necessarily crisis, but certainly approaching it, and it's trying to understand what it needs to do. That's more simply seen through the lens of, say, television and the production of TV shows and films. And you know your Netflix versus your Channel 4. And how do these coexist with each other? That's an easier lens to kind of discuss that.
James Baxter-Derrington:But in terms of traditional media, it's always anyone who has a strong opinion is the one who's going to go into the comments to write it, whether they agree or they disagree, 90% is the disagree that will go to that effort. So every voice you hear loudly talking about traditional media, 90% of them are only there to proclaim its death. The 10% who are evangelical in its favour are quiet and held up as people who can't really see the wood for the trees. And then you've got the vast vast majority of us. In the middle are people who continue to read it, who continue to watch it, who continue, um, to respect what comes with it, and I think what is often forgotten is that most people do still value the reputation that traditional media affords. It does give you a baseline of what to expect. Someone who works for the bbc, the telegraph, the guardian has proven to be able to find themselves in that job, that they're capable of research, they're capable of writing, that they're worth listening to. In that way it's kind of costly singling isn't it?
Amul Pandya:I've been through, I've done my hard yards at the local rag and I've, you know, gone to university or whatever it is, and britain content every day that has a length and has to be, has been checked, and I've been doing this for 10, 20 years, and so there's a value to be ascribed to that kind of cost of access that you've gone through.
James Baxter-Derrington:Absolutely, and while on the other side of that you've got Substack, which I think we should talk about. I think it's a phenomenally interesting space and I've subscribed to dozens of them. At this point, one thing that is vastly underestimated by people who look at journalism from the outside is the fact it's a job. People often believe it's soapbox, it's grandstanding. It's people who've got some sort of access into the space where they're given a platform. They get to say whatever they want. But everyone near enough who is in that space has worked very, very hard to get and, as you say, they've done the hard graft along the way.
James Baxter-Derrington:And when I first joined professional journalism, my news editor at the time, uh, remains an excellent journalist to this day, but taught me something that sticks with me, which is simply to treat journalism as the vocation that it is. It is a trade. It is something you learn how to do, like plumbing or plastering. It's not the highfalutin thing that a lot of people come into, and you have to shed that attitude quite quickly, otherwise you won't survive in it. But unfortunately it's something that doesn't get witnessed from the outside of. You've got 15 minutes to turn this into the right kind of copy. You've got to put this as news. We're interested in this. What's happening here? Who do you go and call? What conversations do you have along the way? Anyone can write an essay, an opinion piece I'm glad they do, and that's what Substack I think is fantastic for. But in terms of journalism it's just a job. It's a dogged determination to want to get there.
Amul Pandya:But my worry is, they may be your exception rather than the norm, and over time, and partly because it's become so fiercely competitive and over time, and partly because it's become so fiercely competitive and partly because um of competition from new forms of media, but it feels I can feel people kind of screaming, you know, into their, into their car radio wherever is, into their airports when they're listening to this game or hasn't legacy traditional media kind of failed because of the hurling of opinions as a kind of and this has been demonstrated by you know. You know the elections, the, the failure of polling, the failure of the like, you know treating the lag, lab leak theory as something that's a kind of racist, um, the, the failure of the lab, you know, treating the lab leak theory as something that's a kind of racist, the lack of accountability, for you know, someone like Zelensky, for example, you know we don't need to go down that rabbit hole but because it's so competitive, you don't speak up and go out of the kind of mainstream narrative and because you, you, you all heard someone says, someone influential, the kind of, some editor of whatever, will say this and therefore the opinion, because they shout that out loud, the opinions of all the other journalists kind of congregate around that, when the real answer maybe is over here or let's give you another. You know you said earlier like I've got to take a view of Bitcoin, right, but maybe the answer is a bit of this and a bit of that, yeah, and if you've got a 15-minute slot or five-minute slot going on to BBC or Sky News or CNN, you can't give an idea. You're more likely to get that slot if you go. Anyone who thinks this is an idiot, anyone who thinks this is an idiot, anyone who thinks that is, and there's a lot of people who believe that.
Amul Pandya:You know, not enough people have got that value of questioning things, changing their opinions over time, getting better at it, treating it as a vocation and going. Well, what I think today may be different from what it is now. It's become tribal. I identify myself as a Clintonite or a MAGA. Yeah, I'm going to. You know that's. It's going to take a lot for me to not be that.
James Baxter-Derrington:Absolutely, but I think that's been the case forever. I don't think that's the fault of legacy media. I don't think that's the solution of new media either. Think that's the solution of new media either the tribalism and wanting easy answers rather than challenging your own thoughts and doing a lot of work and coming to the conclusion that actually it's somewhere in this gray. You know, 99 of everything is somewhere in that gray zone. Um, you know, don't trust any. It's something that I very strongly believe. Don't trust anybody that knows anything for certain.
James Baxter-Derrington:Yeah and yes, within the context of a 500 word opinion piece, you want someone's opinion. That's, that's the job of that. But equally, there is room for, and frequently published, the 3 000 word, 5 000 word essay that goes into legacy media as such, saying well, maybe, but all of that is actually out there. And the people who are so certain that it's not and that new media is the only solution to it. And actually people haven't investigated this idea and they haven't done that Most of the time. Where have you heard those ideas? You don't want to admit it, but most of the time they are there in legacy media. The BBC is writing about it, the Telegraph is writing about it. So is the Guardian, and that tribalism, that certainty of thought, is nowhere near as defined as people like to believe it is. It is their own certainty that kind of blinds you to it Describing tribalism where maybe it's a mystery there Precisely, and we've all been guilty of it and we all will be forever more.
James Baxter-Derrington:Let's say, 10 years ago at university, I can't say that the Telegraph was something that I read or thought was worth reading necessarily.
James Baxter-Derrington:And then, the older that you get with it, the more that you understand.
James Baxter-Derrington:No one's ever been worse off from knowing more about the world and hearing another opinion.
James Baxter-Derrington:And then, instead of ignoring everything that you thought disagreed with what you believed and therefore had to be wrong, you read more and more of it and you understand that it's fantastic to have this breadth of opinion, whether or not I agree with it, and that tribalism is nowhere near as set within these titles as people believe it is. If you actually go on the Telegraph and see how much content disagrees with what was written the day before the opinion writers in there, the long-form journalists, the news writers the Telegraph itself is an entire microcosm of opinion. You will find so many writers disagreeing with other writers in there, but from the outside of people who say, well, it's right-wing, that that's not me, I think that's wrong you'll miss all of the nuance. And the same goes the other way people who disregard the guardian because it's full of silly lefties who don't know what they're talking about when it comes to money, ignore how much great journalism is there as well, and it's broad and combative within these titles.
Amul Pandya:What do you say to the movement? I don't know if you've come across it, maybe because you're so in your role, but that kind of all media is basically it's entertainment, preying on your fears or amygdala. You're kind of, if it bleeds, it leads, and actually we're all better off checking out from the news if something's really important you're going to find out, like someone's going to tell you, like if there's a meteor going to strike us or a pandemic you're going to. But actually day to day you're better off not reading a newspaper or checking on me new or legacy and think about ideas and principles. Read books, you know, go back to your adam smith or your darwin or your car marks, whatever it is, rather than spending that same time, you know, finding out. You know robert jenryk sent this or you know kirsten has done that. I is. It's bad for your mental health I think that's sorry just to finish, because it's so overwhelmingly negative, because that's what makes more money. It's bad for your mental health to basically be so overloaded with such negativity every day.
James Baxter-Derrington:So I've considered this for a while before joining journalism and throughout my whole time in it as well, and it's a very, very curious concept, and the best solution that I've managed to come to is you either consume all of the news or none of the news. I don't think there's a healthy middle ground. I think if you're sat in the middle of it every single day, watching the news at 10, reading just the notifications that pop up on your phone, you are going to feel miserable and I do think it will be damaging to your mental health. So I think you either commit to engaging or you don't. If you don't, obviously there's a very easy reason as to why that's better for your health in that kind of way.
James Baxter-Derrington:But if you do commit to engaging with it and you read as much as you can, as often as you can, and you read it from the telegraph and the ft and the guardian, you get the spread of it as best you can and you do it for a sustained period of time, suddenly things are less scary because you have the context of it all. Yeah, you start to understand. Let's say, the Bank of England. Let's say you only started paying attention to it when rates hit 4.5% or 5.2%, wherever they got to, and inflation's at 11.2% and you're kind of terrified of that, but you've had no understanding of the three years that led up to it and that you could see this coming and you could understand that this has caused, that has caused this, has caused the other. I understand how we've got here and therefore I understand how we can get out of it as well.
James Baxter-Derrington:when you see any major conflict, any big political situation, it's not to detract from the seriousness and the concern of these events, but if you have the context of them, you don't feel so defeated by them, and I think more of us should read all of the news yeah I don't think checking out is the right answer, but in terms of your health, you've got two options and I think the more of us that engage with as much of the news as possible, the less we will be minded towards conspiracy theories as well, because I've been fascinated by those for a long time, powerless, who lack context. It's very easy for a scary world to be explained by something that you know and no one else does, that is insidious and dark and malign and satanic. To explain why everything is against you and why the world is so difficult, rather than life is very messy, life is very hard and it's a very grey space.
Amul Pandya:It also doesn't really give enough credence to incompetence, like the ability for 20 people to keep something secret that has world-reaching consequences, is basically impossible.
James Baxter-Derrington:Yeah, absolutely. There's only so many people they could kill to kind of keep the Exactly. You know, how often have you heard gossip, gossip, is someone letting go of a secret, kind of thing?
Amul Pandya:Don't take one part.
James Baxter-Derrington:Yeah, you know, and then you're saying exactly the same thing to someone the next day.
Amul Pandya:You don't see new media as a threat. Sorry, just to kind of circle back. No, there's, obviously, if you, if you wind the clock back, the classic, the example people give is you know, the, the printing press, disintermediated or removed some sort of gatekeeper access to knowledge information, because you had to be where all the books were and the people, all the books were at universities or churches, so you had to be in the church or university and universities over and and all of a sudden you've got access to information without having to travel to it. It can come to you. And there was.
Amul Pandya:You know, you had two experiments running in parallel. You've got europe and you've got the ottoman empire. The ultimate empire went no, no, this is too dangerous, this is going to cause havoc. And for probably about 200 years they were probably going yeah, we did the right thing. Look at this carnage that's unfolding because all of a sudden people can have access to information and they're all killing each other and going around having considerable kind of yeah, it was a very tough place. If you had a 200-year time frame, which is a long one, you could argue that the disincentivization or the dissemination of knowledge was a big mistake. But then over time, you know, from it came ideas and knowledge and technology and um, and we're having that, we're having a repeat of that experiment now, where basically anyone can say anything with a bit of technology.
Amul Pandya:You have this podcast as an example of that um, and they don't have to think about it, they don't even have to reveal themselves, there's no cost. As we said, to journal like, like the journalistic profession, has that kind of barrier to entry, which is has its upsides and its downsides. Um, I'm optimistic. I think over time we'll work that out like we did back back then. Um, what advice would you have to new media? I don't know if you're familiar with the joe rogan, joe Rogan, douglas Murray podcast. That happened recently, where Douglas Murray went on to the podcast to say look, you've had guests on that are saying things. Like you know, churchill was actually the villain in World War II, which is, you know, it may be true, it's quite the claim. You've got to now back that up by going up against an expert and talking about it and they're like well, we're not experts, we're just, you know, we're just. So how does a consumer and the content producer navigate the lack of barrier to entry?
James Baxter-Derrington:it's a really interesting part of it, you know, I I do think, just returning to the, the printing press arguably the most revolutionary technology of the past you know, two, three, four thousand years, more so than the industrial revolution as well um, because not only did it allow access to knowledge, but it also removed those very high barriers to entry if you needed someone to write your book out. You can now have many more people producing those kind of works, many more ideas proliferate, and that's fantastic. And in terms of the new media today, I've certainly and I think what's interesting there is your reference to it of joe roan and his unwillingness to really hold to account some of these claims that appear on his podcast, versus how I engage in new media, which tends to be very well-researched sub-stacks of people writing long-form essays, having done wealths of research and are very well-qualified to talk about what they're talking of, of research, and are very well qualified to talk about what they're talking of, and the fact that both of those things exist but can absolutely exist in bubbles of each other. That, even though the joe rogan podcast is, I think, probably still the most successful thing on my long way on spotify and millions upon millions of people listen to it. I still go through my life meeting most people who don't. You know. It might be hundreds of millions of people who do it, but in a world of seven or eight billion it's still not actually that large um.
James Baxter-Derrington:So it's curious as to how you organize those barriers to entry, which I don't think erecting them one is a good idea, two would even begin to work. So then, unfortunately, you're left with the individual having to really come up with their own guidelines for what they're wanting to listen to and what they're willing and able to. And I think, beyond recommendation, that's probably the easiest and safest. Starting point is someone that you trust and believe understands things quite well recommending something to you, and then that person recommends a further thing to you, and half the sub stacks I read were recommended from the very first one I kind of signed up to the algorithm.
James Baxter-Derrington:Yeah, yeah, kind of thing. Well, even that, it's not the algorithm, it's the sub stack. Writers themselves will send you something saying I found this newsletter, I like it, which is even better because there's a person who you find interesting offering something further there. It has to be broadening your appeal rather than kind of deepening it. I think that's an important part that the individual has to do. You have to be interested in everything I research. That's a difficulty that applies in every single sphere of life. Everything that was once academic truth changes, everything that scientific truth changes. You know, I don't really think humoral science exists in the same way anymore. Bloodletting is not going to fix what ails you kind of thing. So forever. What is?
Amul Pandya:all eugenics, you know. I think that's the big example of how the scientific method can be, you know, tortured into suiting absolutely.
James Baxter-Derrington:And I think truth is a very difficult concept and when it comes to just to sort of round off the joe rogan kind of point, um, the best way to really shield yourself from this kind of stuff is, unfortunately, to hold yourself to account. And if something makes you emotional, that's probably the time to sit and check yourself as to whether you've actually got the right response to it there. If you're immediately furious or angry or upset or you're immediately thrilled that someone has said it, are they simply challenging or agreeing with what you believe, or have they said something that's worth kind of listening to? And church was actually the villain, let's all say sorry to hitler kind of stuff understandably makes you very emotional and I would disagree with those things. But you have to understand why you disagree with them and sit back with it.
Amul Pandya:But I do think that the simplest answer to shielding yourself from that kind of new media lack of barrier to entry is to engage with your own emotions yeah, because everything is a lot of information flows and exercise of confirmation biases you've alluded to, and one form of media that's not got a business model wrapped around it is WhatsApp, for example.
Amul Pandya:People will forward and forward and forward and that's a dissemination of, you know, a meme or a video, and people can look at this idea or, god, look at this. So and so is destroyed, so and so, um. I, where I feel, um, the incumbents or the traditional crowd, has sort of, you know, needs to get better, is this perspective that, because of this new media thing and because people don't have the time pad width, or they don't have the emotional intelligence, or they, you know, or maybe they, I know, many of them think, oh, most people are just too stupid, or whatever it is, we need to kind of a shield them or b tell them things like trust the science, like if ever there was a more stupid phrase and trust the science I'd like to be told on because, as you've alluded to, you know eugenics was a science.
Amul Pandya:Once you know, I feel it's it's. The burden on being skeptical is a big one, and most people don't have the time. It's a luxury burden yeah we don't.
Amul Pandya:Most people can barely pick up their kids after school and feed them versus trying to figure out whether the lab leak theory versus the kind of exactly and is is is the right one. So the I wish in some way that the kind of media was less commercial, and that's a very socialist thing for me to say that's all but like, and that's why I think kind of. I'm optimistic about new media, because there's people doing it just for the love of it. You know, I, for all his faults, joe radin, was doing this well before he made any money and he'll be. If no, if everyone stopped listening to it, he would still be doing it. Um, and I just, yeah, I, I, the expert class, or the expert problem is one where I think traditional media, if it's going to have a future, will have to be better at you know, better at sort of taking on.
James Baxter-Derrington:Yeah, I think for as many people who take legacy media and say the Telegraph said this is a sign that they've researched, they know what they're talking about, there's 10 that will say the opposite to it. That issue of new media, of how can you believe what they say? Have they done their research properly? Do they know what they're talking about? Has existed forever. You know, the internet may have exacerbated some of these problems and suddenly in two days everything can be over for you in that kind of way or the, the kind of whatever theory can spread incessantly. But misinformation, disinformation straight up, lies have existed forever and people get caught up with them forever. And I don't think it's. You know, new media needs to be conscious of it, but it's also not its job to fix. Legacy media never quite grappled with it. Pre-media never understood it.
James Baxter-Derrington:So many events in history have happened because someone misunderstood something or someone actively twisted something in their favor. This has been there forever and, as we were saying there, the difficulty with truth is that it can change as well, especially with anything to do with human experience. Truth is a subjective matter. You know we were talking just before this. No one writes history books as lists of what happened, because that's incredibly boring. But even if they did, that's not an objective truth. The subjectivity lies in why have you said that goes in the list and that doesn't go in the list? Very, very quickly everything becomes subjective. So we need to kind of we've had to grapple with this forever. We need to, you know, fight it on a new front in that kind of way. But the internet hasn't invented people falling for conspiracy theories I mean that.
Amul Pandya:one example comes to mind. I remember there's a debate, um, after brexit, between two journalists one was at the ft, I think the other one was at the telegraph, and the telegraph journalist or it may not have been the telegraph, it was um, you keep reporting things negatively despite Brexit or because of Brexit, this has happened. And the the FT journalist said well, I'm only, I'm only reporting what I see, we're only doing, we're only giving an objective, you know, assessment of it. And what was frustrating was the day before I'd walked past the FT office and they had two flags outside the office. Well, this was post-Brexit, one was an FT flag with the logo and the other was a European Union flag, and maybe I was reading too much into it, but that was an active choice not to put the Union Jack or st george or whatever it might be there. And that journalist, I felt, was not conscious of the fact that they were underweighting news or facts that disagreed with their thesis and overweighting facts and um, where do I go with that?
Amul Pandya:yeah any thoughts on that?
James Baxter-Derrington:um, yeah, it is interesting. People like to be right and they like to prove with arguments that they're right, with arguments with evidence, with things that you choose to use and things that you choose to ignore. Obviously, um, and one that I get particularly frustrated with because especially it tends to be those who are against legacy media or those who don't care about the arts is, logically, this my argument is logical and therefore it's right. Elon Musk uses logic and that kind of thing, and that is the scientific truth. That's what logic is, but I mean, there's plenty of people throughout history that have mocked it for what it is, and I do believe that logic is a useful mathematical technique and is a very fun game to play with your arguments, but it doesn't prescribe truth in its nature, especially as every logical statement begins with if the burden.
Amul Pandya:I always say this in every episode now, but the the explanatory load on the scientific method is too, too great. Absolutely, it's a coax to may help us understand the world when there's so much going on in the metaphysical realm or the spirit, whatever you say, that that is less good using. Do you? Are you familiar with the term? The medium is the method, the message, sorry, the medium is the message they're aware of, if not so desperately yeah so, like you know, it's not the information, it's how it's delivered that will shape the way you perceive the world.
Amul Pandya:So, um, an article of 500 words will force you to write it in a certain way, or a tiktok video will force you to prevent this, present the same inflation, the same way, which would make it be perceived very differently. And so what's interesting in the moment is we're having the first conflict, or kind of major conflict, in a sort of real social media age, and this is where I've, to the disappointment of many people, I'm sure, just kind of checked out of the israel gaza conflict, because I don't have the ability to understand what's truth and what's not. There's so many videos, I've seen so many news articles that five days later turn out to be wrong or disinformation. So how do we now, in this day kind of let's take that conflict how do you figure out what to think, what to believe and what to therefore opine on?
James Baxter-Derrington:It's a difficult one, one. I'm in no place to opine on it, so I'm not going to. You have to come to your own conclusions with these sorts of things, and exactly as you're saying now that it's the first conflict in the social media age and it's been pumped to us in a way that's never happened before, I remember 14 or 15 studying history at gcse and hearing exactly the same thing about the vietnam war, and that was the first war that was delivered to people's television rooms and they couldn't look away. But obviously now we've had 60 years of conflict on our televisions and you just kind of settled with it, and in the same way that we're going to settle with, you know, conflict in the social media age as well.
James Baxter-Derrington:Humans are incomparably adaptable, sometimes to their detriment, that we can take horrific information and sit with it, especially since the advent of moving pictures and radio. Those two things have brought, have brought the, the realities of life into such stark view that we forget what they are. You know there are several philosophers in the 20th century writing about. We've completely forgotten violence because we see it all of the time, and it eventually became these arguments of being desensitized to violence, and it wound up the Senate talking about mortal combat in the mid-90s and these kinds of things. But that kind of you know, rendered violence is very different to what you're able to see on your phone Right now if you wanted to.
James Baxter-Derrington:I mean, there's a whole Reddit subreddit called Watch People Die and you can just do that with no real weight of understanding of what's actually going on there. And I think, precisely because the question is, what can you opine on regarding that conflict, rather than kind of what's at the heart of it, what actually is happening and the level of human suffering is how. We've discussed it forever and it's not kind of new in that way, but sometimes worth thinking about. And you know you don't always have to have an answer to these things either. Whichever conflict you're talking about Vietnam or Russia, ukraine or Israel, gaza I'm thrilled that I'm not in the room where I have to make those decisions. I get to look at everything, try and swallow it as a human being and take what we can from it, and that's a privileged position for us to be in really, really, rather than actually having to negotiate as foreign secretary.
Amul Pandya:What, what you do with that well, or a reporter at the sale of bbc ins well, can you? Is the bbc anachronism? Can you have objective?
James Baxter-Derrington:balanced. I think the bbc remains one of the most phenomenal public goods that the UK has produced, absolutely. And I think that's precisely proven by the fact that everyone on the left wing will tell you the BBC is biased to the right and everyone on the right wing will tell suggests it's doing something right on that level of objectivity and I think, to do it for the genuine public good. Much as channel four is a public service broadcaster, even if it's commercially operated, without something like the bbc and what it offers in the world service and what it offers in bbc4 on a kind of more twee level, the promotion of and access to knowledge for its own sake, is a phenomenal thing on all levels from its journalism, whether or not it has faults it absolutely does.
James Baxter-Derrington:There is not a title in the legacy media and, of course, new media that doesn't have issues within its journalism how it conducts it, how it deals with objectivity and how it rationalizes its subjectivity they're all at fault in some way. No one's getting it right. But on that objective level, if everyone hates you, you're probably doing something, all right. Everyone hates you, you're probably doing something, all right. Um, but from that journalism that it allows access to the arts and science and sport and everything like this. It's in a real critical moment of how it survives, and I really hope it does.
James Baxter-Derrington:Obviously it has to rationalize the license fee and how it's going to figure out funding. I still think that's probably a good system, but everyone's argument against it most of them do stand up. You either agree or you disagree with the license fee on a philosophical level. It's based entirely on what you believe, and I don't think either argument's wrong. Necessarily, necessarily. But there isn't an institution in the world that is capable of doing what the bbc does and there won't be one again if it disappears either yeah, I mean you.
Amul Pandya:Taking the license fee away may well be a very good thing for the bbc in terms of taking that stigma off it and enabling it to kind of figure out how, at best, without that, you know, enforced support, I think you'll probably be, mind me, we don't need to get too heated about it. I would suspect that you're being too generous and your average BBC reporter, journalist, researcher is of a very, very narrow background perspective, of that sort of trendy. I'm doing exactly what I'm guilty of and I know I'm guilty of. But you know, university educators, kind of dilettantes, skin in the game, um type person who likes to um, who believes they've got opinions that kind of are better than other people's opinions, and they tend to be of they're not left-wing but they're metropolitan sort of centrist perspective and I think they've carried too much weight. But I'm happy to be wrong, which is, I guess.
James Baxter-Derrington:I do think that it remains a London centric organisation and therefore it over represents for that, and I do think that all media, all professions are absolutely packed with people who know they're right and are very smug about that fact, whatever they write about.
Amul Pandya:But that's fine If you build a business model around it and you know sustain yourself yeah and you know a lot of traditional media is really struggling. But um goes back to your point about the license fee. You do that but don't make me pay for it, if that makes sense.
Amul Pandya:You know you feel, and I'll dip into the bits I want to and not yeah, um and I hope it finds its way out to that, because you know I do want a bit of att out to that, Because you know I do want a bit of Attenborough and a bit of you know the ashes or whatever it is, but maybe I don't want another view on Trump from what I know. I'm going to get first, without the new odds. How did you get into writing? How did you know you wanted to be a writer? Were you kind of born with a pen in your hand? Were you doing it from a very early age?
James Baxter-Derrington:I have always enjoyed it. I remember I would have been about eight or nine the first time I attempted to plagiarize Harry Potter as an example of giving writing a go and being very upset when it got shot down and then being explained that Diagonal Alley is not different enough. You know Harry Weaver? Yeah, precisely so. From very early doors I've always enjoyed writing because it made sense to me. I've always liked knowing things for the sake of knowing them. I love any form of trivia, pub quiz through to university challenge, all that, that kind of thing. I think writing is one of those few pursuits which allow you to know things and do things purely for the sake of them, and I think that's one of the greatest things about people is the pursuit of something for its own end. You know art for art's sake, that kind of thing. And throughout secondary school, um, which was grammar for me? Um, it was not eaten.
James Baxter-Derrington:No bitcoin hate precisely, nor the, nor the sort of yeah, god knows what else people assume of it. Um, no, but you know, non-fee paying school or anything like that. It certainly wasn't shared a room with my brothers growing up six person, a three-bed house, kind of thing, you know. Um, throughout school, writing was the bit that made sense to me. I could make words work. I struggled with science and maths. Um, I got there, you know, I got a's in them and that kind of thing as well, but that was a slog to make happen, whereas history and english, where you could understand something and then explain it or craft an argument or try and explicate, is wonderful. For me that just makes sense.
James Baxter-Derrington:The amount of people who say to me they struggled with exams over coursework. They preferred coursework because you could sit down and work at it and make it happen, whereas for me I much preferred the exam because you're going with a set amount of knowledge and you just go and make it happen in that kind of way, the, the pressure of just doing it. And I was considering I mean, I've considered various careers over time and done many of them, but family sort of cousins pressure had been. You know, go into law, you'll enjoy that. You like words, you like talking? Go and do a law degree, you'll have fun. It helps that most of them are lawyers as well.
James Baxter-Derrington:No-transcript. More than that, it forces you to understand what you think you know and it forces you to want to understand more and it forces you to rationalize your thoughts, because you can think about something forever, but when you put it on paper you kind of have to know what you're doing yeah, paul graham, I don't know if you're familiar with his essays, but he kind of he described he's got an upgrade essay called why I write and in it he says you think you understand something.
Amul Pandya:then you try and write about it and you realize you don't understand it at. It's a phenomenal autodidactic tool to sort of process what's going on in your head and I sort of envy your ability to do that and have to do it to kind of meet a deadline, to churn something out, to have something. But I try to artificially put deadlines on myself to kind of put things out, and then I sort of oscillate between open-ended explorations versus a finished product that is consistent, because the downside of the finished product is you don't get the kind of the 15 years that you need to flesh out whether the marxist labor theory of value is, you know, more applicable, applicable to the Austrian school of subjective value or whatever it is. But at the same time you've got to produce and ship content ship product.
James Baxter-Derrington:For me, deadlines are the only way I've ever managed to do anything. I didn't write one essay at uni that didn't finish at four in the morning the day it was due. I didn't write one essay at uni that didn't finish at four in the morning the day it was due. This job has really worked so well for me because you have the room for both. You have the immediate deadlines, the 15 minutes You've got. This is due tomorrow. This has to be done.
Amul Pandya:And you have the ability for the months and months. You know you're creative writing, so why do you do it? You must enjoy it intrinsically for its own sake.
James Baxter-Derrington:Absolutely, or you know your creative writing, so why do you do? You must enjoy it intrinsically for its own, absolutely. And I do kind of enforce other guidelines on myself, though, which is I write with a friend, and if you don't turn up to write with them, they're sat miserable, annoyed at you kind of thing, and it's the only way that I can get myself doing it. I love self-imposed deadlines.
Amul Pandya:It's just, but it's like you know it's like I can always change those after five pints in the pub, you're not gonna have the sixth exactly, and the sixth is delicious as well.
James Baxter-Derrington:So, but yeah, it's that creative writing side of things I have really struggled to do on the individual level. I've been doing more of it lately, but that's very, very hard to pin down. So, yeah, having something to hold you to account, whether it's a friend, whether it's a deadline, whatever it is is vastly important, and I think, within journalism as well, and university and all these essays, as much as you could spend 15 years, maybe 16 would be better, and I, much as any other writer, absolutely loathe business speak in that kind of way. But there is one very frustrating kind of phrase that I do hold to, and I've annoyed myself every time I say but perfect is the enemy of good, you just need to do it sometimes and actually having it at the end of it, you wind up proud of it rather than what could have been never happened.
Amul Pandya:And are you surprised that certain pieces resonate this? You think, oh, this thing will really do well versus this thing. I'll get it out all of a sudden that second one becomes the one that really lands versus one that you're.
James Baxter-Derrington:You know you kind of is that happened a lot to you absolutely and you get frustrated that the real value and the, the great work and the stuff people should read seven people really enjoyed and the stuff that kind of goes out and oh you know this will do well or I just need to get something out here winds up being the best read thing of you know the entire Telegraph kind of.
Amul Pandya:Thing.
James Baxter-Derrington:And some things just get at people's emotions and you can't always predict what those are going to be, and those are, of course, the ones that people really engage with, generally with a lot of anger, and you've just got to take those as they come. But I love to be in a position where to take those as they come, but I love to be in a position where some of my work resonates in that way.
Amul Pandya:But I also have the freedom to write on very niche topics that I find interesting, that some others might how do you manage the input side of things, like everyone likes talking about the writing process and the output, but how do you process? Now we've got access to information, as much information as we'd like, and it's almost the tyranny of disclosure how do you? It's what information? The method, the medium is the message. How do you process that information? How do you ignore the bits that are not relevant and then, before you start shaping it up and turning it into a finished piece?
James Baxter-Derrington:I think you come into it quite open. For me, there's two main ways of getting to a piece. One is the bit that I love, which is you read anything and everything all of the time and eventually, six months down the line, that thought might be relevant to something else that happened and eventually, six months down the line, that thought might be relevant to something else that happened. I remember when deep seek ai came out at the beginning of the year and by absolute chance, I'd not been doing any research or looking into it. I happened to watch an old bbc science show from the 80s where alan sugar was talking about his new Amstrad computers and the very next day DeepSeek happened and I had a very good lens and framework to discuss it.
Amul Pandya:Just explain DeepSeek what happened specifically, absolutely so.
James Baxter-Derrington:DeepSeek was the very cheaply built supposedly challenger to ChatGPT. It was an AI model that came out, the large language model that came out and was able to do, to all intents and purposes, what chat gpt did for a pen, you know, one percent of the cost that it made that open, ai had to spend on it and their argument was yeah, we didn't do this from scratch, but we've done incredibly cheaply and here it is for you to use. So that mirrored again by chance of me being bored one night and just flicking through the archives, all this money pouring into artificial intelligence.
Amul Pandya:The market or people thought maybe we don't need it we don't need that money anymore.
James Baxter-Derrington:Anyone can do it, the access is there. And the comparison to Alan Sugar was all these very, very expensive computers. Um, the institutions could afford, but certainly the home computer didn't exist in the same way. And he said I'm not going to invent a new one, I'll buy your old stuff and turn that into something that I can sell cheaply to everyone. And that mass access changed completely. And yeah, those thoughts all sparked from reading everything.
Amul Pandya:So your field of information has to be broad it has to be and you're not, because I'm guilty of kind of maybe narrowing things down too much to subjective. You know assessments of quality. I'm only going to readwin or adam smith or whatever, and that's where I'm gonna think help me. But, um, do you find talking to people helps as well? Because I've one thing that's, um, I'm gonna age you and lump you in with my. Our generation, indeed, is guilty of, I think, is we. We're pretty terrible kind of picking up the phone and talking to people or going out and meeting people and you know, hence the name of the podcast. But like that ability to sort of you know sit in a cafe and then sort of you know someone's reading a book. Next you go, how do you think it has the book, what do you think? And all of a sudden you get an insight and like do you find that valuable or do you need to just get in and focus?
James Baxter-Derrington:No, massively so. Again, you don't know where any of the ideas are coming from and, as I sort of previously said, no one's worse off from knowing more about the world. Whether it's an OECD report that's obviously very related to my job, or whether it's some scientific discovery or something on the philosophy of suicide, all of this is relevant to building your worldview. And when you boil it down to something as narrow as investing which equally you know, it's this really tiny bottleneck back into everything. Everything matters, because money touches everything.
James Baxter-Derrington:Um, the more you understand, the more you can come to those theories, the more that someone can say well, what does this company do? You look at it and go well, actually, I have heard of that before, I know how this relates to that and therefore we can talk about it the better. And this job affords it's always worth reflecting on being very, very kind of excited about. One of the big benefits of this job is that basically, anyone will talk to you. If you need access to information, if you want something explained, you can generally call whoever wrote that book to explain it to you, which is a phenomenal level of access which you get very excited about in year one and then after two or three it becomes much, as we were saying. You adapt to it.
Amul Pandya:Because you've got inbound from people who want to have said they've had a meeting with so-and-so the telegraph, whatever it is.
James Baxter-Derrington:To have said they've had a meeting with so-and-so at the Telegraph, whatever it is, but to be able to sit down with the CEO of a company you're curious about and they will just give you that time of day. Or to want to understand one theory better that you read and you emailed them and give them a call and have a chat with you. But just as valuable to all of that is the conversation you have with anyone and everyone, and I've been lucky throughout my life. Well, at one point I just kind of decided that I was going to be someone who was not shy anymore. So at 16 I decided I wasn't going to be shy anymore 15 years and 364 days.
Amul Pandya:You were very shy yeah it was a it's a bit like confidence, isn't it you? It's, it's. It's a thing you project or manifest, and then it happens versus yeah, something that you wait for that never comes you know, my my dad was a very big inspiration of that.
James Baxter-Derrington:He was the sort of person that anyone could and would want to talk to. He can make anyone feel comfortable in any environment. If there are 100 people in a room and it was overwhelming, he'd make you feel like the center of the world, kind of thing. So, and then my granddad not his father, actually, my mum's was a similar figure. So I saw that and I realized that I wanted that. Instead of being someone who would need that kind of comfort, I wanted to be able to offer it. So I just decided one day that, okay, that's what we're going to do now. So I did. And then you do so many jobs. You know I've worked on fun fairs, I've worked in suiting, I've worked in kitchens, and that builds your ability to talk to people. It's interesting.
Amul Pandya:We talked to matt about this. Actually we have this sort of openness. Part of confidence, I guess, is openness to showing vulnerability. And an example I I generally, if I'm walking past someone and we cross eyes, I'll smile like, and most of the time I'll get a smile, but I don't, I just don't. Or.
Amul Pandya:But there are times was someone looking, why the hell that guy smile at me? What idiot? Or like, if I'm in a waiting room and there's two of us, I just I will want to chat, I just want to strike up a conversation and not you're opening yourself up to that person who very often is like why is this guy what? He's just getting away from me? I don't want to. That could be, they could be having a bad day, but actually for a lot of people it's just they just don't have that. They don't want to open up to you. Yeah, and your ability. It must come with the trade. I guess Is it tricky when you're in a room full of people like you? Do people kind of try and out-confidence each other or out-open each other?
James Baxter-Derrington:I think people who are bad at confidence try to out-confidence each other or out-open each other. I think people who are bad at confidence try and out-confidence each other.
James Baxter-Derrington:Right yeah, if you're just confident, you're happy to. Yeah, and the joy of it is the fact that you have those people to talk to, not that you prove you're the best one to talk to. You know, the joy of speaking to other people is what they say to you rather than what you're. You know what you're going to say. You've said it a hundred times. It's what someone else might bring to that kind of conversation. That's so wonderful and it comes with the territory of the job.
James Baxter-Derrington:But I also know so many very successful journalists who aren't necessarily conversationalists in that way. They know how to ask the question. They might be a little awkward in the room but they're very good at writing. They're very good at finding the the kind of heart of the matter and getting what they need in that way. But sitting down and going to the pub's not for them. So as much as you have a archetypal journalist, there's probably about 10 different archetypes and then 100 different actual versions within that too. And you know, I'm glad to hear you sort of going out and having those conversations with anyone who sat next to you, because I would say maybe a decade ago I'd be annoyed if someone started talking to me in the pub. Yeah, you know, you sit there.
James Baxter-Derrington:Sometimes get annoyed if someone tries to talk to us, yeah, but actually then you're like, oh, no, okay this is what I would do, and you have wonderful conversations and you find incredible things about people and I've put that to the test to the extreme, kind of by accident.
James Baxter-Derrington:It wasn't the reason I did this, but I've started a kind of annual pilgrimage as such, which is a not the pilgrimage isn't the same every time that I just go walking by myself for two weeks, something like that, and in that time I always stay in a pub in the evening, um, to sort of walking 15, 20 miles a day.
James Baxter-Derrington:You go to the pub in the evening, settle down, sit in there and you've got yourself your book, your phone, if you're really not in the mood for it that day, and you just talk to people and you can have some incredible experiences that way. You can sit there for a night. Certainly no one talks to you, no one wants to, and it's a miserable experience. Well, you got your book worst case Exactly. But in other cases I've been there where a family welcomed me in for dinner that night and I had dinner with all of them and sat drinking till 3 am and had incredible conversations as a result of it. And had incredible conversations as a result of it and as twee as it is. If you open yourself up to the world, it's full of the most wonderful people.
Amul Pandya:And they're almost that shyness is them waiting for something they always need that brought out of them? We touched on AI and we've touched on writing, so we're going to have to do the necessary thing of putting those two together, I'm afraid, because, as we mentioned, that writing a huge positive of it is. As an autodidactic tool, it helps you process your thoughts. Um, however, can you that used to have a commercial attachment to it that you could earn a living out of as well? So that is that. Do you worry that? You know, whilst you may still be a writer and process your thoughts and enjoy it and produce things that people may or may not read, but the actual kind of commercial element of it may be arbitraged away by the fact that I can, at a click of a finger or a tap of a few keys, produce something that's credible ish.
James Baxter-Derrington:Yeah, um, I understand the fear, I understand the concern, and there certainly will be entire industries that are very much threatened by this, and some part of that will be chunks of journalism too. But I think there's a couple of factors why I'm not scared of it. One is the obvious it can't do anything new. All it can do is, you know, rationalize everything that's been there before and churn something out. It can't go and have those conversations, it can't go and get those. You can't go and get those. You know scoops horrible term but you know it can't actually write the news.
Amul Pandya:Yeah, it can't shape the algorithm, it is the algorithm exactly.
James Baxter-Derrington:You know it. It can't go out and get any new information. All it can ever do is process what's been there before, and there's a huge amount of value in that, and a lot of journalism is those relationships as we were discussing, and people don't want a relationship with an AI. You know someone might say, well, the AI could call them up and get the information and write it. No, one's telling that to the AI, though. You have those conversations over a coffee. You have those conversations because you've built a good relationship with someone that you understand, you enjoy speaking with, and they say, oh, have you thought about this? And you've got this idea.
James Baxter-Derrington:Trust is an enormous part of this job, as it is most. I think trust is very underrated in basically every career. We all know it's part of it, but we never value it in the way that we do other kind of skills. So there's that element of it. There's also the element that you know it can't really toy you with new ideas in that way. Um, it will never write like you. It can write in the style of someone, but it'll never actually write like you. And, yes, it's sounding more and more human by the day. I still think you can smell it a mile off year or two. That's probably not going to be the case. It will be kind of um, you know you won't be able to pick it out in that that same way, but yeah, so the the voice of it's different. But I think the third part is something I've inherently believed and only been able to find words for off the back of someone's substack. Interestingly, a guy called Ted Joyer, I think, is how his surname is pronounced G-I-O-I-A, and he is a professor of jazz.
James Baxter-Derrington:In kind of new romantic movement, which the original one was a massive reaction against industrialization, featured people like the, the kind of futility of luddites, but also a lot of trade unions were eventually born out of that in that kind of way too. But more than that, the arts changed, and off the back of the industrial revolution, off the back of the scientific method, off the back of the enlightenment and people knowing they were right, we figured out A plus B equals C. This is how the world is going to work from now on. People got fed up of losing the human touch and he argues that we're getting towards a new romantic movement where things are smelling like they did in 1800. There is a lot of frustration.
James Baxter-Derrington:People are very angry about AI. There's a lot of great stuff that it can do. I believe that you know the large language models are useful in about AI. There's a lot of great stuff that it can do. I believe that the large language models are useful in specific contexts. They can fill out that spreadsheet wonderfully for you.
James Baxter-Derrington:But in terms of the general AI, one don't believe and two don't want, but there is a real groundswell against it. It's not going to stop it happening. We had the industrial revolution and I love trains they're fantastic. But that's not to say that we're going to continue to decenter the human experience of it all. And I think writing will be a large part of that and people will want proof. It's written by someone. People want proof. The art has been made by someone, the music has been made by someone and I think, whereas now it's still kind of getting hidden and spotify's got a big problem with it, apparently fake music of ai generated and we will develop some system that proves it was made by a person and that will that will bring its own value yeah, I think that's a pretty, um, pretty thorough assessment that resonates probably.
Amul Pandya:No, no pushback there. Um, do you think it can help as a technology beyond the helping fill out that spreadsheet? And actually we don't have to talk about ai can be one part of your answer. But let's say some. Take something like health care or government services. Um, we know that on defense the applications are kind of scary and we can see that. You know where a human flies, a drone. It has that latency problem because of the human making the decision at some point. You know America's going to and China's going to take the humans away and let the AI have the drones thrashing out with each other and then they will kind of be reprogrammed and then. So that's a scary side of things.
Amul Pandya:But we are in a funk at the moment. Right, the there's enough out there about the west being finished or the britain being that's it. We're kind of done. Now it's we've had our moment and it's all about, you know, nice holidays and avocado toast. At best and at worst it's sort of malaise and stagnation and immigration away from the UK to places where there are more receptive to ideas and risk-taking, to ideas and risk-taking. How do we in James Patterson's world get out of? Are we in a funk and how do we get out of it if we are?
James Baxter-Derrington:I think it's apparent that we are, whether or not the economic data backs that up, which obviously it does.
Amul Pandya:The paradox is sorry, is that it's never been so good. Exactly, probably never been a better time to start a business 30 years ago, in the 70s. You know, do you really want to be trying to do? You know something then versus now. You know absolutely and it's yes.
James Baxter-Derrington:So the data obviously backs up the funk. But equally, I don't think you can have a conversation with one person in the uk right now who would say that we're in anything but a funk. Everyone would agree. There is a massive sense of malaise. There is no idea that things are going to get better. We had that one brief moment of the summer, with labor getting in, and there was a sense of whatever your view on that election of change, something was going to be different. And instead, within a week, we were still being told actually, it's worse than you think it is, lads, and it's going to get worse still. And, by the way, here's a very confusing budget that's going to tweak around the edges because we were too scared of losing to, you know, not make very boldges, not to raise any kind of taxes, and how are we going to fix spending and all these sorts of things. And I think what could inspire a better attitude for all of us in the country is the sense that things work. But not only is there the sense that the grand theories are against you, there is a real sense that the country just doesn't work.
James Baxter-Derrington:I've heard so many people speak of the social contract being broken, the idea of paying taxes and going to work and working hard for the good of yourself and the good of the country, is that, well, you can get on a train that's not delayed, you can get a GP appointment, you can get your kids to school, you can afford to keep having your career, and I don't think you could point to one thing in the country that seems to be working? I mean water is that? We thought we cracked that. Yeah, we thought we maybe figured that out at some point, um, and instead the absolute misery of the experiment of privatizing water, um, is coming to a rapid conclusion. I think I don't know exactly what it looks like, but it's certainly not macquarie saving the day. Um, so if we think that you know the, the elite, the establishment, the shadowy, whatever even though it's not, it's just people being incompetent are pumping raw sewage into the rivers and the beaches that you can't swim on anymore, you can't even get a train to find out that you can't swim in margate or whatever's going on, um, the answer has to be really focusing on the little tiny bits. Yeah, and I think everyone's fed up with hearing the conversations of how ai is going to fix everything when we can't even run a train. That was invented? What 200, 250 years ago? Um, and that is.
James Baxter-Derrington:It's just so devastating to wanting to get up and do something, and a very large part of the blame obviously has to go to the government of the 2010s wasting an entire decade of essentially free money yeah, that was never borrowed. Instead, we went through austerity, which directly led to deaths and now is leading to stagnation, because we never invested in all those great infrastructure projects and why we're in a place where we're envious of the french and the germans and the spanish and the railways that they have there and the sense that, oh, I can afford to have a kid because I'll be able to put them to child care or nursery without it bankrupting me. The fact that we have a state in our tax system right now where people don't want to earn a hundred grand because you lose access to that child care and you have a nominal, even if two of you are 99 999 pounds, you still got access to it exactly, whereas one hundred, which is an incredibly foolish thing, um, and on top of that, vastly overlooked because it's just millennials complaining about things.
James Baxter-Derrington:The student loan system has been an appalling, appallingly designed system.
James Baxter-Derrington:That, once again, you know.
James Baxter-Derrington:It doesn't discourage people earning more money, because obviously every pound more is still a pound more, even if you only get 37 pence of it or whatever.
James Baxter-Derrington:But for all the people telling you to stop paying for netflix and have your avocado toast, who went to university for free, it feels quite unfair to hear that coming back when the system is designed. I only discovered this recently that the more you earn, the interest rate that you pay on your student debt increases, not just the amount, obviously on a percentage basis, but if you earn over 40, 50, 60, I can't remember where the lines are but if you do well, as university is supposed to be that kind of professionalization in a way, and that's the argument anyway that you earn more from doing it. If you do what they encourage you to do and earn more, your interest rate goes up from 4% to 7% to 9%. Just the rate of that goes up. So suddenly your nominal tax rate as somebody who went to university after Blair or from Blair onwards, you're punished for it in that kind of way, and that's an incredibly unfair system.
Amul Pandya:You touched on something which you wrote about, I believe, where I think it was in 2010,. Nick Clegg said why bother with nuclear reactors that will only come online in 2022? Why should we think about this now?
James Baxter-Derrington:They'd be really nice right now, wouldn't they?
Amul Pandya:But it feels. Even this is where my I 100% agree with you on the small stuff and I want to get back to that. But let's zoom out. I still feel that this is a kind of uh, an ideas problem and a cultural problem, those two together. Because on the one hand, we just we're not a serious country if we don't think we need to produce lots of energy to keep costs low for our manufacturing, our exporting, our households. We would rather pay more electricity costs to feel good about ourselves and then import it from the balance when it's not working, from Norway or Russia or whatever it is, and I think that is driven partly by we've lost.
Amul Pandya:Europe was at its most successful when it was at its most paranoid, because when your existence is in threat, you innovate. Or if you don't have access to things, you innovate. And DeepSe seek is a great example of that, where this company you know the chinese biotech industry, is another example. Where they don't have access to capital they don't have access to, they've been shut out from the world. So all of us have to make do with less and europe has effectively been told or decided well, you don't need to worry about your safety, someone else will do that you don't decided.
Amul Pandya:Well, you don't need to worry about your safety, someone else will do that. You don't worry after. You don't have to worry about building things because someone else will do that for you, much cheaper, um. So what you need to really worry about is eliminating all downside from your life, and we'll do that through welfare and kind of, and we'll for those of us who don't have to worry about the downside or we'll focus on is feeling as good about ourselves as we can as possible. So we'll have these harebrained, expensive schemes to generate stuff and stop any building of anything, whether it's a nuclear power plant or a house for someone to live it and so that's the and.
Amul Pandya:So then when I hear people tweak, thinking about, well, we need to tweak the tax system to be a bit more this or a bit less that. Well, the problem with being an ideas person or trying to become an ideas person is you go, well, actually the tax system is 100 broken and we're over taxing people who produce stuff and earn stuff and we're not taxing the people who are doing something for nothing. There's this guy, henry George, who's kind of figured this out 200 years ago. But on the flip side, you take somewhere like India. They figure out actually get a driving license it takes a day. You've got to pass your exam to actually prove that you can drive. Or to get your Wi-Fi connection, to get your passport, all those small things. You go to a train station, the Wi-Fi works, the trains are now running on time in India because they know if they get the small things right.
Amul Pandya:And this is why what Robert Jenrick's stunt that he did very recently about going to the tube station and calling out fair dodgers was easy to laugh at. It was so very partridge, it's so very. Look at this. You know little minded person, you know this isn't the big thing, but it points to that kind of broken window approach to you know, if the window is broken then it's going to attract criminality because people think, well, this neighborhood doesn't care about stuff, so we're going to start doing things here. So it's almost like we need a reassessment of the ideas and we need to do the small stuff. That's a very long rant for you to riff off or not at all your thoughts on both sides, on the small bits or the big bits yeah, absolutely, and I think.
James Baxter-Derrington:I mean I recently had a terrible um experience trying to get wi-fi in a new flat. It took six weeks to eventually decide that open reach wasn't going to work and I just had to go with someone else. Every week they'd call up and say oh no, we'll sort something. It was with them, yeah, talk, talk, or something like that. Um, no plus net, um, and every week they'd call and say we've got an update for you next week.
James Baxter-Derrington:Sorry yeah you'd call up and say, no, the update's next week, the update's next week. There's not an engineer, open reach, who can do this right now and at some point. Your job is simply to provide internet to someone and we can't do that. Look, was there not internet at this flat beforehand? How was this working, um, which is so frustrating?
James Baxter-Derrington:And then kind of turning to Jenrick, and you know, rightfully, compared to the, the kind of Partridge thing. But the point he's making is is a fair one, and I've certainly been very frustrated when I see fair dodgers are even more annoying when they push past you in the barriers as well, because then, you know, I mean the kind of actually being shoved doesn't happen very often, so that's not much fun. But it comes back to that conversation of trust. And if you have no trust in the system at its heart, if you feel that social contract is broken, well, you, you don't need to hold up your end of the bargain anymore, you don't need to um, avoid criminality or pay for things, because one? Um the benefits that you're supposed to get out being part of that society aren't there anymore. You can't get that gp appointment, so on and so forth, so there's little care for doing it out of the goodness of your heart.
James Baxter-Derrington:And then we have the secondary issue whereby everyone would agree that bike theft, mobile phone theft in london is basically legal. I'm so many friends have had phones nicked or bikes nicked, have had the air tags on them or defy my phone and they've gone to the police and said it's there, can you go and get it? And they're like no, sorry lads, it's just not gonna happen.
Amul Pandya:Um, so if there's no, then people see so and so being locked up for a tweet, even if it's in poor taste or you know, and then you think, hang on.
James Baxter-Derrington:There's, that's where the conspiratorial yeah, and obviously I mean you could do another 20 hours talking about the prison system in this country and the fact that it still is just based on a victorian punitive system rather than anything looking like reformation, um, which has to really be the point of it. Otherwise, why let people out in the first place, if you're going to? If someone comes out of prison after serving their time, as to say for two years for something they did in a kind of moment of heat when they were 18 and for the rest of their life have branded an ex-con rather than someone who has served their time and therefore just a citizen again, what's the point of? You know, you feel the social contract's broken there completely. You've done what you were supposed to do, you held up your end of the bargain and you're told that you can't work anywhere anymore. What's left? But to kind of go back into criminality. And it's exciting to have someone like timpson in as the prison's minister. That's a really exciting prospect to see what he could possibly do there.
James Baxter-Derrington:Um, but you know, I was watching simon reeve's new documentary on scandinavia recently because he's just a nice presence and is very good at showing you the fun lovely and then immediately kind of juxtaposing it with the, the difficult questions, and he deals a lot with immigration and defense and that kind of thing in the series. But his real takeaway was a large part of what makes Scandinavia famously however true it may be in some ways, but famously a happy place to live is its trust of each other and its government very cultural, which you can't do as policy not at all, like in the fiscal framework no, and it's very.
James Baxter-Derrington:You know, it's one of those things that takes a lifetime to build and is lost immediately, kind of thing, whatever the phrase is. And you see that now, like how do we even begin to rebuild that trust that the government might do the right thing and that our taxes are going to something that's useful and that people do have our best interest at heart and if you work hard you can live a life of dignity? Where does that kind of come from again?
Amul Pandya:yes, I mean I, a friend of mine, works at hmrc and um, we're talking about stamp duty and the iniquities of stamp duty and kind of his. You know it was flippant but it was, you know, instructive. You know that's a great tax raiser though. You know it's just so hard to avoid. It's so easy for you if your mindset is I need to. You know what's yours is mine and I'll let you know what what I deem worthy of you keeping.
Amul Pandya:And you know you've talked about the cash ISA allowance and stuff like that, which I don't necessarily disagree with. I'm not a fan. Going back to the idea thing, I'm not a fan of tax breaks or incentives. Just let people have their own money. But then you're removing purpose for this government machine and a media machine that likes to talk about, well, this tax break's better than that tax break. Um, so just that's where the ideas part comes back in. And just you know, do we think it's just to tax people's income or do we think it's just to tax people's capital, the risks that they've taken? Um, can we figure out a system that you keep what you earn but give back what you don't, what you don't produce?
James Baxter-Derrington:um absolutely enough form that um, definitely, and you know, when income tax was first introduced it was very much made clear it would only be for this war and we'll carry on afterwards and we'll give it back and and then we're done. And, much like Stamp Duty, it was found to be quite a good fundraiser and if people adapt to it as we've said, we're very good at that then you can keep doing it. And Stamp Duty is one of those that I don't think anyone philosophically agrees with on the left or the right. Really no one likes that tax, but it raises, it's a great fundraiser, whereas there's other ones that you can argue on, kind of those levels.
James Baxter-Derrington:But I think, obviously, as you're alluding to, there's something that I've only come across lately and you mentioned his name earlier was henry george and this concept of taxing unearned rather than earned, and it's a very curious notion.
James Baxter-Derrington:Um, that I feel answers quite a lot of the the questions that people struggle with with capitalism and struggle with with socialism as well.
James Baxter-Derrington:It sits nicely in the, the kind of middle of it and you know, only recently come to do quite a bit of reading on it and, in brief, as I understand it please correct me is the idea of where he had the concept of the single tax, whether that lasts to today or still needs to be complemented with some small other taxes, but the idea that everyone should keep what they've earned by labor, by capital, by ingenuity, but no one should be able to benefit from the unearned, which is simply the land that no person has created he ever could, and is inherently given to us by nature of being on the earth. And he had a, an idea of land rent which would simply apply to the, the land, the space, the location, what's on it minerals, water, so on and so forth. We'd figure out that rate and anything you put on top of it property factories, anything else that was yours to do with this, you wanted well, let's, you know, it is probably the issue of our time.
Amul Pandya:You know the fact that if you want to live near where the action is, you're basically priced out of it by virtue of where the people who own property where the action is keep the benefits of that action. So you know, flat sharing in London is going to cost you considerably more than flat sharing in Glasgow, and the difference between those two costs goes to the pockets of landowners. Both end up earning the same money. So not the landowners, the us as the consumers, or the taxpayers and I did think the Labour government did have some, you know, have some, you know, promising thoughts on this. But let's, let's see. But it's, it's, it's the one thing that's preventing, preventing us from kind of actually being able to. You know, uh, you know, and it's all done that the nursery fees, everything kind of has a.
Amul Pandya:Has a link, um, but I, I, I, you know, I your small things. I'm glad you said it because it really resonates. I remember John Majors. He used to have this cone hotline where people would be. If they saw a stray cone on a motorway, he'd be able to phone up the cone hotline and tell them look, I was on the A111 or whatever and there was a cone on Junction 4. And people just thought what is this? But it was just, you could do lots of those small things and together you can kind of rebuild trust.
Amul Pandya:As you know, I like to kind of wrap these things up with a closing question. I ask all guests, which I call the long bet You've got a 10-year time horizon to make a prediction of something that you would like to happen or think will happen. And you know, nick clegg, for example, in 2010, said you know why bother about energy production in 2022? Who cares? I'm putting words in his mouth to the extent, but it can, um, which you correctly picked up on on something you wrote recently. So it'll come by fast 2035. So be curious to get your take on either one or two something you'd like to happen or something you think will happen in the next 10 years.
James Baxter-Derrington:I think 10 years is such an interesting period because it's phenomenally short and phenomenally long. Exactly, you know, nick Clegg said it was far too long to talk about this fusion, the nuclear reactors, and the Green Party has also said the same thing for a long time too. But equally, if you think about what five years ago looked like, let's say, five and a half and five days a week in the office was simply what happened. Work from home didn't exist and the world was, you know, completely, completely changed.
Amul Pandya:And just to add to, that like if we went, if the government took its spending back to five years ago, we wouldn't have a deficit. It's kind of that. Um, that's and that's not the dark ages. We're not asking people to go back to, kind of you know, the night watchman state. Here we're getting asking to go back to the 20, 20, 20, 20, 19 times. So that shows you how quickly things can change and yeah so sorry, absolutely no.
James Baxter-Derrington:Um, I think I'll. I'll take the offer of both and with something I think and something I hope, and I think we'll go on the negative side for that, we will see a situation where governments very seriously have to actually deal with their debt crisis. Now we've ignored it since 2008 because we had to. We had to make 2008 happen. We had to get through the eurozone crisis. We had to get through brexit. We had to get through the Eurozone crisis. We had to get through Brexit. We had to get through the pandemic. But eventually the debt crisis will be something we have to get through.
James Baxter-Derrington:We're approaching 100%. America's doing the same. We're not going to clamp down on spending. You can't really add to the tax burden. We're already massively overtaxed, kind of every step along the way. I think there's other interesting taxes to think about, but we're going to have to actually deal with that At some point. People are going to stop lending. I don't know that it will be total economic collapse. I don't believe that, but it will be a complete rewriting of the post-world war ii regime. We've seen that in so many ways. Culturally, we've seen it, but the beginnings of it financially, with the, the tariff threats, I think, is the best we can call those, but nothing lasts forever and I think the debt crisis is is the next upcoming thing um, that will very expensive, very painful and very hard to explain to people why it's their fault, because it's not.
Amul Pandya:Yeah, at some point your credit card interest payments will be bigger than your rent, your fuel, your food bill, and that's what's happening to the government. Fuel, your food bill, and that's what's happening to the government.
James Baxter-Derrington:We already have those horrible phrases like cost of living on the personal level, and, yeah, the government's going to have to figure that one out. And then on the, what I'd like to happen is this new romantic movement and the return to the ideals of the human and interaction with the arts and an overthrowing of the logical, the stem, all of that, which are very important and I hope they keep going, but they're not the be all and end all, and to live a life worth living, you have to be engaged with the arts.
Amul Pandya:Yeah well, I would like that. I completely agree with you. And this be engaged with the arts? Yeah well, I would like that. I I completely agree with you.
Amul Pandya:And this came up with a in a recent episode with isabel hamley, where she's she's um former archbishop canterbury's chaplain and she said this reductivism, where we extract everything away from something to leave it, leave it to only its scientific logical core, has left a big gap of meaning. And maybe yoga and meditation isn't going to cut it. And there is this preliminary data to show that there's a Gen Z z revival in church attendance which is shocking everyone at the moment. And this coming from someone who's a sort of metaphysically uncertain I'm unsure agnostic.
Amul Pandya:You know, I'm not quite sure what to believe, but I think stripping away, kind of nietzsche's predictions about the stripping away of religion have manifest themselves because there is an emptiness and art, the arts were a reflection of that in many ways. So maybe you could go go one step above the art. Art is a kind of an output of what you believe and what, what, you, what, what, and the scientific method is not enough to give you good art and therefore have something to kind of interact in the world with. So what that looks like I don't know, but I hope you're right that there's something bridges the gap that is out there that enables us to kind of think beyond the world in very hyper-naive rationalism.
James Baxter-Derrington:So where can people find you? I'd say I'm on twitter. I still have it, but, um, you know, message me there. Uh, linkedin too, but I would say that the best place is is go to the telegraph.
Amul Pandya:My email address is on my profile and I'd love to have a chat great and I think what this conversation has done, um, is giving me some confidence that there is a future for traditional media, uh, or if there's enough james's out there in amongst what is probably, by definition, a sea of mediocrity, um, then there's a chance that this thing will come through and hopefully you know the people like you kind of pushing that it's got a decent chance, because I know I can feel many people listening will be like you didn't go at him hard enough about bitcoin.
Amul Pandya:You know why didn't you bring this up? And that's not the point of this. The point of this is to kind of flesh out how you think and what you put you. You know, and maybe you, when you come back on and three, four years on, whatever it is, uh, to see how that long bet is going. You may have changed your mind on many things, and sure I will, but in the meantime, really grateful, uh, you give me a lot of confidence that there's good journalism still out there to be done and uh, thank you you're very kind.
Amul Pandya:Thank you very much this has been meeting people. I've been your host. Hello, pandia. This is a podcast produced by Max Cooper with music composed by Loverman.