I'm doing pretty well. So it's been a long time. You and I had we had a very good conversation

on your show a couple of years ago and we had planned to meet on this side of the pond and then

Covid hit and interrupted our plans to meet. So we're going to do this remotely, which is the new

face to face. Sounds good to me. So how have things been? Things have been good. Well, personally,

things are fine. Politically, things are completely and utterly screwed up. You know, the thing that I

found most surprising and shocking and disappointing about the current moment or the past few months

is the fact that the Covid crisis has exacerbated all the trends and ideologies that people like

you and I are worried about. And I thought it might have the opposite effect. I thought a genuine

threat to health or, you know, serious problem facing societies might galvanise people to focus

on things that are actually important like health, the economy, ensuring that everyone has a good

life and make them forget all the nonsense and crap that they've been spouting for the previous

five to 10 to 20 years. But it's had the opposite effect. All that stuff seems to have intensified

over the past few months, which I think is very disconcerting. Well, I think it's part of a more

general pattern. I think we've seen many events that could have galvanised us, but that there's

something in our system that causes these opportunities to be missed automatically and for us to

descend further into madness, which is a pattern we need to notice. But we certainly saw it with

9-11. We saw it with Katrina over here in the US. Certainly with Covid, the possibility existed,

but was quickly lost. And so anyway, we seem to be, as you point out, just hurtling faster in

the same direction and the disaster that will arise is completely predictable, if not with precision,

certainly with a certain degree of accuracy. So what do you make of it? Why do these potentially

galvanising phenomena result in further derangement? I think people

struggle to make sense of dangerous things at the moment. I mean, you mentioned 9-11. That's a

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