Gahey, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. Today, a delightful and scintillating and inspiring and disconcerting and thought-provoking and discombobulating and many other multicellabic words in romp with one of the most celebrated philosophers in the

English-speaking world. A. C. Grayling is a British philosopher who has written more than

30 books on everything from the nature of consciousness to the history of freedom to what it means

to live well. Now, he is warning about the fragility of liberal democracy, the possibility

that we might slide into what has been the norm for humankind throughout most of history,

in most places, a chaotic and uncertain world in which the powerful do what they want. But he also

has a message of hope, and he has some solutions.

On a speaking tour of Australia, he was kind enough to swing by the Uncomfortable Conversation

Studio and sit down with me to discuss the crisis of meaning in the West, the rise of authoritarianism

around the world, and what remains of the self when the machines get too smart.

I hope you enjoy as much as I did, the one the only philosopher extraordinaire, A.C. Grayling.

It's an amazing time to talk to someone like you because you've done so much work about war and peace and the justifications for war.

And I don't feel there's been a moment in my life where I've been more uncertain about what exactly the rules of the game are when it comes to... Oh my God.

War. What do you make of living in this world at this moment?

It's terribly disappointing. You know, I think probably everybody at any point in history has

thought they've lived in bad times. But I think we live in particularly bad times now,

because we've got a whole, you know, kind of superstorm.

We've got climate.

We've got AI.

We've got Trump.

We've got the rise of authoritarianism largely to do with Trump because he's empowering people

to think that it's okay to act that way and be that way.

...