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Hello and welcome to the Red Box podcast. I'm Carol Walker in this week for Matt

Chawley. Coming up on the podcast today, a fascinating interview with Sir Howard Davis.

He's an economist, former head of the CBI, now chairman of Nat West Group,

and he's written a book about former British Chancellor's and how they responded to various crises.

Well that's coming up in just a moment, but first let's hear from some of our favourite

columnists this morning, freelance broadcaster Angela Epstein and Hugo Riftkind.

Yes, it is time to talk to our two favourite columnists and today we've got the journalist and

broadcaster Angela Epstein. Hello Angela. Hello, good morning Carol. Great to have you with us.

And joining me here in the studio is the times columnist and times radio presenter Hugo Riftkind.

Good morning Hugo. Good morning. Really good to have you with us. And as we were talking about,

well bad news, good news, let's start with your column this morning Hugo. He's on, it's bad,

it's not the end of the world. This is apocalypse fatigue. Yes, I was sort of struck by the way

that our approach to the world post-COVID are generally people, you know, I don't think it's just me.

Our approach to the world post-COVID is to we're constantly wasting for looming disaster and not

just small disaster, huge disaster. We feel a bit like we had a luckier skate with COVID. It could

have been the end of the world. It wasn't quite. So we're now on the lookout to see what the end of

the world is. And my point in this column is it's probably not coming. There are a lot of bad things

going on. I'm not downplaying the bad things going on. The cost of living crisis is terrible.

You know, the global food crisis is terrible. But it's not a Stephen King novel. You know,

...