Sometimes you've just got to take a step back and ask yourself, what's going on?

With Trump in the White House and Elon Musk everywhere else, great power politics are back.

I'm joined by Professor Will Davies, author of the happiness industry

and nervous states, to ask whether we've exited neoliberalism and entered into a new era of

something else. We talk about Adam Too's, Peter Thiel, and why Rachel Reeves hates

newts so much. I hope you enjoy the

conversation as much as I did. Well, Davies, thank you so much for joining us on downstream.

It's a pleasure to be here. I'm such a big fan of your writing and I've been wanting to get you on

for like a big state of the nation interview, but then things kept happening. And my first question is, do you think that we, in the West, at least, are in the middle of

a historic vibe shift?

I mean, whether that's the right frame, I'm not entirely sure.

I think it's useful.

I don't think it's a useless concept, the vibe shift.

And in some ways, it's partly about what I was trying to get at in my book, Nervous States, which was about, which came out in 2018, and was about partly about the displacement of facts, as in representations of reality that are relatively static, stable, and can be kind of moved around from,

you know, academic journal to newspaper to public sphere and remain intact. And they're a bit like sort of photographs of the world. They don't, they don't constantly change. From that to a kind of

data-based understanding of knowledge where things are kind of in constant flux and you've

constantly got some sense of a vibe and you've got some sense of sentiment analysis, what are the

markets saying, what's trending on Twitter, this sort of thing. So I think that that shift in

the fact that we are now sort of more vibe based, I do totally buy. In terms of a sort of more

of, I guess, what Marxists and other political

economists have understood as crisis, which is more about a kind of paradigm shift than a

vibe shift from one hegemonic way of running the world to a new hegemonic way of running the world. There's been a lot

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