That phrase — third line of defense — comes from the world of banking and corporate risk management, and it is worth explaining before making the case for why FIFA should adopt it, because the term does a lot of quiet work. In the standard model used across regulated financial institutions, the first line is the business itself: the people originating deals, taking risks, making money. The second line is risk management and compliance, sitting closer to leadership but structurally separate from the business, tasked with challenging decisions before they become irreversible. The third line is internal audit, and it is the only one of the three whose entire reason for existing is independence from management — it reports not to the executives running the organization, but to a board or an audit committee with the authority and the will to act on what it finds, including the power to escalate uncomfortable truths that no one asked to hear. A functioning third line does not exist to make an organization look compliant. It exists to catch the CEO before the CEO catches the front page.

FIFA has never had anything resembling this, and its current structure explains why the FFE crisis was allowed to metastasize as far as it did before anyone with real independence could intervene. On paper, FIFA’s governance includes a Governance, Audit and Compliance Committee along with judicial bodies such as the Ethics and Disciplinary Committees, all formally described as independent. In practice, the independence is structurally hollow, because the FIFA Council — the body headed by the president — retains the power to propose, appoint, and in effect remove the very people meant to oversee it. This is not a new observation or a partisan one. It is close to the entire plot of FIFA’s last major governance crisis a decade ago, when the organization’s own independent audit and compliance chairman resigned after the Council clawed back the authority to hire and fire the people meant to supervise it, arguing openly that the change undermined the reforms he had been brought in to enforce. FIFA had, in other words, built something that looked like a third line, staffed it with credible people, and then quietly ensured that the line reported to the very management it was supposed to be independent from. A watchdog on a leash held by the person it is watching is not a watchdog. It is a mascot.

Compare this to how the largest banks operating in the United States are required, not merely encouraged, to structure themselves. Following the 2008 financial crisis, US banking regulators — the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency chief among them — did not simply ask large banks to be more careful. They wrote enforceable heightened standards requiring that risk management be structurally separated from revenue-generating business lines, that a chief risk officer have direct, unfiltered access to the board, and that internal audit maintain genuine independence from the management whose decisions it reviews, with the explicit expectation that findings reach the board even when — especially when — management would prefer they didn’t. This is not a suggestion buried in a best-practices memo that banks can quietly ignore. It is a supervisory expectation with teeth, backed by an examination regime that can and does result in consent orders, forced leadership changes, and in extreme cases the kind of regulatory intervention that ends careers. A major American bank that let its CEO unilaterally develop a multibillion-dollar restructuring of its core business, in secret, without the risk function or the board finding out until it leaked, would not be writing an apology letter to its members. It would be facing its primary regulator within the week, and quite possibly losing people at the top by the end of the month.

FIFA has no equivalent regulator, and this is the crux of the problem, because when you strip away the vocabulary of committees and charters, no external body exists with the authority to compel FIFA to structure its oversight function this way, and no comparable law does the work that US banking regulation does for American financial institutions. FIFA is registered as an association under Swiss civil law, headquartered in Zurich largely because Switzerland has historically offered a light regulatory touch to the international federations that base themselves there — not just FIFA, but around sixty other sport governing bodies including the International Olympic Committee. Switzerland’s answer to FIFA’s long history of scandal has been narrow and criminal in nature rather than structural: the so-called Lex FIFA reforms, passed in the wake of the 2015 corruption arrests, made bribery within Swiss-based sports federations a criminal offense prosecutable without a complaint, and designated the leaders of such organizations as politically exposed persons subject to enhanced money-laundering scrutiny. These were genuine, meaningful reforms, and they closed real gaps. But they punish corruption after it happens. They do nothing to require that an organization build the internal architecture — independent risk challenge, an audit function insulated from the people it audits, a board with real power to act on bad news before it becomes a criminal matter — that might have stopped the FFE proposal from ever leaving the building in the first place. When a Swiss lawmaker previously proposed a dedicated law governing the internal structure of billion-franc sports federations, the government rejected it outright, arguing that the general law of associations already “functions well” and that federations were better overseen by their own general assemblies than by the state. The 2026 crisis is, in a fairly direct sense, the rebuttal to that argument.

It is worth taking seriously why Switzerland has been so reluctant to go further, because the reluctance is not simply regulatory laziness. Swiss lawmakers who have pushed back against tighter federation-specific law have pointed out, not unreasonably, that federations like FIFA have genuine mobility — unlike a bank, which cannot simply relocate its balance sheet to escape a regulator, FIFA could in theory move its headquarters to a more permissive jurisdiction if Switzerland made the cost of staying too high, taking billions in economic activity and prestige with it. This is the same argument used against tightening financial regulation everywhere, that capital and institutions will flee to whichever jurisdiction demands the least of them, and it is not wrong so much as it is beside the point, because it describes exactly why waiting for Switzerland to impose this structure by law is a bad strategy for anyone who actually wants it to happen. A state that fears losing an institution will always regulate that institution more gently than the institution’s own stakeholders should want it regulated. Which is precisely why the fix here cannot be outsourced to Bern. It has to be self-imposed.

This is the part of the argument that FIFA’s defenders will resist hardest, because self-imposition sounds like exactly the kind of promise FIFA has made and quietly abandoned before — the Independent Governance Committee of 2011, the reforms of 2016, the endless procession of task forces and working groups that produce reports, generate headlines, and change remarkably little about who actually holds power when a decision needs to be made fast and quietly. The skepticism is earned. But the skepticism is also an argument for precision rather than an argument for giving up, because the specific failure mode FIFA keeps repeating is not a lack of committees — it has committees in abundance — it is the absence of one committee whose members FIFA’s own president and Council cannot appoint, cannot remove, and cannot route around when the findings are inconvenient. A genuine third line requires structural firewalls, not additional layers of paperwork: an internal audit function with a budget the Council cannot starve, a reporting line that runs to an audit committee chaired by someone with no financial or professional dependency on FIFA leadership, whistleblower protections with real enforcement behind them, and — critically — a mandate that includes strategic and commercial decisions of the size and shape of FIFA Forward Enterprise, not merely financial statement accuracy. Most third lines of defense in banking would have had visibility into a proposal of that scale months before it reached a signing table, because reviewing exactly this category of major strategic risk is the job. FIFA’s oversight bodies, by virtually every account of how FFE unfolded, learned about it roughly the same way the public did: late, and by leak.

The uncomfortable truth FIFA has to sit with is that self-regulation of this kind is not actually the soft option it sounds like. It is harder than waiting for Switzerland to act, because it requires FIFA’s leadership to voluntarily create a body with the power to embarrass, overrule, or expose that same leadership, and to fund and staff it well enough that the power is real rather than decorative. Every incentive facing a FIFA president points away from doing this, which is exactly why every FIFA president since the office existed in its modern form has stopped short of doing it, preferring instead the appearance of independence that the current Governance, Audit and Compliance structure provides, an appearance robust enough to survive a routine year and fragile enough to collapse the moment a proposal like FFE tests it. The 2026 crisis was not a failure of individual judgment so much as a failure that individual judgment was ever allowed to matter this much in the first place — a functioning third line does not rely on a COO having the courage to call out his own organization publicly after the fact, because it stops the problem before there is anything to call out.

FIFA has, in the aftermath of FFE, an opening it rarely gets: a crisis bad enough, visible enough, and directly traceable enough to a specific governance failure that the case for real reform can be made in plain, structural terms rather than the usual language of renewed commitment and enhanced dialogue. Switzerland is unlikely to force the issue, for reasons that are politically understandable even if they are not admirable, and every past FIFA reform effort suggests that voluntary change tends to fade once the news cycle moves on to the next World Cup. But the organization now has a fresh, undeniable example of exactly what it costs to operate without a genuine third line: a lost year of credibility, a boycotting confederation, a head of state publicly withdrawing confidence, and a presidential election in 2027 shadowed by a crisis that a properly empowered, properly independent internal audit function should have flagged before a single headline was written. FIFA does not need another committee with the word independent in its title. It needs one that actually is.

That horror is precisely the problem. Sharenting survives not because it is defensible but because it is invisible, wrapped in the language of pride and connection so thoroughly that almost no one pauses to ask the only question that actually matters: does the child benefit from this, or does everyone else? A parent posting a first-day-of-school photo to grandparents in another state is not the target of this argument, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The target is something larger and more insidious — an entire economy and culture that has grown up around turning children into content, in which parents functionally become their kids’ first employer, their first brand manager, and in some cases their first exploiter, years before that child can spell the word privacy, let alone understand what it means to lose it.

Start with the plainest version of the problem, which is money. Family vlogging and “kidfluencer” content is now a genuine industry, generating sponsorship deals, ad revenue, and brand partnerships that can run into millions of dollars annually for the most successful channels. The children at the center of these channels are, in every meaningful sense, the product. They are the reason brands pay. They are the reason audiences return. And yet in most jurisdictions, unlike a child actor on a television set, they have no guaranteed right to any of that money, no mandated trust fund, no union protecting their working hours, and no one legally required to ask whether they even want to be filmed that day. A child star on a network sitcom is protected by decades of labor law hammered out specifically because the entertainment industry has a long and ugly history of exploiting minors. A child whose entire existence is a YouTube channel run by their own parents has almost none of those protections, because the law has not caught up to the idea that a parent, of all people, could be the one doing the exploiting.

This is not a hypothetical concern dreamed up by people who dislike the internet. It is already playing out in painfully public ways, with adult children of family vlogging channels speaking out about being filmed during punishments, having meltdowns broadcast for views, being denied privacy in their own bedrooms because a camera crew — their own family — needed content, and discovering as adults that thousands of hours of their most vulnerable childhood moments are permanently online, monetized on their behalf without their consent and often without them seeing a cent of the profit. These are not isolated horror stories. They are the predictable outcome of a system with no guardrails, run by people whose incentive to post is measured in real time by an algorithm that rewards exactly the content most likely to be uncomfortable: tears, tantrums, punishments, humiliations, “relatable” chaos. The algorithm does not care about the child. It cares about watch time. And the parent, whether they admit it to themselves or not, is being trained by that algorithm just as surely as any influencer chasing brand deals.

The most common defense of sharenting is that it comes from pride, not exploitation — that parents post because they are proud of their kids, because grandparents live far away, because documenting childhood is simply what people do now in the same way baby books and photo albums existed before. This defense deserves to be taken seriously, because it is sincere. Most parents posting photos of their children are not cynically building a content pipeline; they are doing what feels like the modern equivalent of showing off a school photo to relatives. The trouble is that intention and impact are two different things, and an entire generation of children is now growing up as the first cohort in human history whose complete childhoods exist as a permanent, searchable, screenshot-able public record before they were old enough to have any say in it.

A photo album stayed on a shelf. It was shown to people who came into your living room. A child’s presence on the internet is a different category of object entirely — it can be scraped, reposted, used to train facial recognition systems, pulled into disturbing corners of the internet that no parent wants to think about, and it stays there essentially forever, resistant to deletion, indifferent to the fact that the person in the photo grew up and might have wanted a say in whether that photo existed at all. Love is not a defense against a category error. A parent can love their child completely and still be making a decision on that child’s behalf that the child, as an adult, may never have consented to and may have every reason to resent. The fact that the decision felt good to make does not mean it was the parent’s decision to make in the first place.

Strip away the sentimentality and the entire debate collapses into a single unresolved tension: children cannot consent, and parents are making a permanent, public, often monetized decision on their behalf that cannot be undone. This is not true of most parenting decisions, which is precisely why sharenting deserves more scrutiny than it gets rather than less. Deciding what school a child attends, what values they’re raised with, what food they eat — these are private, reversible, correctable decisions that unfold inside a family and can be adjusted as the child grows and starts expressing preferences of their own. Posting a child’s face, name, location, personality, and vulnerable moments to a public or semi-public platform is none of those things. It is instantaneous, largely irreversible, and made entirely without the input of the one person who will have to live with the consequences.

Consider what it would mean for any other category of decision this permanent and this exposing to be made unilaterally by a parent on a child’s behalf. We do not let parents make binding financial contracts in a child’s name that the child cannot later challenge. We do not let parents consent to medical procedures with irreversible cosmetic consequences purely for aesthetic preference. We recognize, in nearly every other domain, that some decisions are simply too permanent and too consequential to be made for another human being without their say. Yet when it comes to a child’s entire digital identity — searchable by future classmates, employers, romantic partners, and strangers with bad intentions — we have somehow decided this is a matter of parental discretion no different from choosing a haircut.

Perhaps the most damning evidence against sharenting is not theoretical at all; it is the growing number of now-adult children of these online families speaking publicly about how it felt to grow up as content. They describe a specific and consistent kind of harm: the sense of having been surveilled rather than parented, of having their most difficult emotional moments turned into performance, of meeting strangers in public who knew intimate details about their childhood bedwetting or first heartbreak because it had been posted for an audience of millions. They describe an erosion of the basic boundary between private self and public persona that most people are allowed to construct gradually, on their own terms, as they mature — a boundary that sharenting simply does not permit, because the record is already out there before the child is old enough to decide what they might have wanted kept private.

None of this requires villainizing every parent who has ever posted a photo of their kid. It requires being honest that there is a spectrum, and that a meaningful portion of the sharenting economy sits at the exploitative end of that spectrum, protected mainly by the fact that no one wants to accuse a parent of harming their own child, even when the evidence is sitting in a monetized YouTube channel with the child’s face on the thumbnail. Discomfort with naming the problem is not the same as the problem not existing.

None of this argument requires banning family photos or treating every proud parent as a predator. It requires building the same kind of structural protections around child content creation that already exist, imperfectly but meaningfully, around child acting: mandated financial protections that guarantee a portion of any income generated by a child’s likeness goes into a trust the child controls at adulthood, meaningful limits on the kind of content that can legally be monetized involving a minor, a legal “right to be forgotten” that lets an adult child request the removal of content posted about them as a minor regardless of a parent’s wishes, and above all, a cultural shift away from treating a child’s most vulnerable, humiliating, or private moments as acceptable content simply because a parent holds the camera.

The internet has made an entire generation’s childhood permanent, public, and in some cases profitable for someone other than themselves, and it did so before anyone bothered to ask whether that generation would have agreed to the arrangement. That is not a minor cultural quirk. It is a genuine ethical failure hiding behind the most sympathetic possible messenger: a parent who insists they were only doing it out of love. Love has never been a reliable safeguard against harm when the person doing the loving also holds all the power and the person being loved has no way to object. The kids growing up as content right now will be the ones left to explain, someday, why none of the adults around them thought to ask if this was okay first.

As I reflect on what I want this space to become over the coming year, I’d love to hear your feedback. Which topics have you found most valuable or thought-provoking? Just as importantly, are there areas you feel have added less to the conversation?

Thank you again for being part of this journey. I look forward to continuing to build this space with your support.

Take care, and speak soon.

None of this is meant as a personal criticism. It’s simply what I see after listening for years. Human beings change. 15 years and more than two thousand five hundred conversations will change anyone. Rogan himself often says that people weren’t designed to repeat the same routine every day for decades. Maybe podcasting is no different. Maybe this is simply what happens when someone spends more than 15 years talking for a living. Curiosity slowly gives way to confidence. Confidence hardens into certainty. Before long, the interviewer becomes just as invested in his own ideas as those of the people he’s interviewing.

It might sound odd considering the show bears his name, but I never listened because I wanted to hear Joe Rogan’s opinions. I listened because I wanted to hear the people sitting opposite him. Rogan’s greatest strength wasn’t his knowledge; it was his curiosity. He stood in for the audience. He wasn’t afraid to ask obvious questions or admit he didn’t understand something. He gave his guests room to explain their world, and the conversation belonged to them. That no longer feels like the show I’m listening to because these days it often feels as though guests are stepping into Joe Rogan’s world rather than inviting him into theirs.

He’s become more than the host. His own views now occupy much more of the conversation and, while that’s his right, it changes the dynamic. I never came to The Joe Rogan Experience for Joe Rogan’s ideas. I came for his guests.

When I looked back over the recent guest list, I wanted to see whether this feeling was simply nostalgia. It wasn’t. The guests themselves are still impressive. Annie Jacobsen. Nick Bostrom. Marc Andreessen. Tim Robbins. Taylor Sheridan. Aravind Srinivas. These aren’t lightweight guests, and the common criticism that Rogan now only talks to comedians simply isn’t true. I believed that (and wrote about it) myself until I sat down and categorised the last fifty guests. While comedians remain the single biggest category, they are nowhere near as dominant as I had assumed. . The range of professions is still broad. What has changed is where Rogan’s curiosity now seems to lead him.

More and more, he appears drawn towards people who challenge accepted thinking. Dean Radin. David Paulides. Timothy Alberino. Cassie Coppersmith. Diana Pasulka. Zach Bush. Chase Hughes. They all come from different backgrounds, yet many of their conversations share the same underlying message: the experts have missed something, institutions can’t be trusted, accepted history is incomplete, or the mainstream narrative is fundamentally wrong.

I’m not saying these people are wrong. Minority opinions sometimes turn out to be correct. We’d never have scientific progress if they didn’t. But they’re called minority opinions for a reason. Most of them never replace the mainstream view because the evidence simply isn’t there.

What concerns me isn’t that Rogan gives these people a platform. That’s always been one of the show’s strengths. It’s that he seems far less interested in talking to people who completely disagree with them. Years ago, if Rogan explored a controversial idea, there was always the chance that a guest with a very different perspective would appear a few weeks later. I don’t see much of that now.

This isn’t really about balance. Rogan has never pretended to be an impartial broadcaster. It’s about curiosity. Early Rogan gave me the impression he was asking, “What am I missing?” Now it feels more like he’s asking, “Who else thinks the establishment has got it wrong?” Those questions sound similar, but they’re worlds apart because one opens the conversation while the other narrows it.

I also think Rogan has become increasingly attracted to outliers. Give him ten experts who broadly agree on something and one person who completely rejects it, and his attention almost always gravitates towards the outlier. Sometimes that’s exactly where breakthroughs begin. Most of the time it isn’t. Yet the outlier is almost always the more interesting story, and I think Rogan has gradually become captivated by that instinct.

The absence of traditional experts has become impossible for me to ignore. Where are the Brian Coxs? Where are the mainstream archaeologists when ancient civilisations are being discussed? Where are the leading epidemiologists when medicine dominates the conversation? Where are the historians whose work underpins the accepted understanding of the subjects being debated? Not because I expect them to be right about everything, but because they deserve to be in the room.

Cassie Coppersmith became a good example of this. My issue isn’t with her personally. It’s the way the conversation unfolded. Claims were made confidently, speculation often blurred into fact, and there was very little attempt to separate evidence from possibility. Rogan seemed completely absorbed by the discussion, but almost none of the obvious questions were asked. Years ago, I could imagine him following that episode with someone who would challenge those ideas. Today, that follow-up rarely arrives.

The result is that listeners can easily come away believing a field is deeply divided when, in reality, the overwhelming majority of specialists may hold a very different view. Rogan doesn’t need to tell people what to think. His guest selection does much of that work on its own.

I don’t think this happened overnight. In fact, I think Rogan has always been fascinated by outsiders. That’s part of what made the show so compelling. The difference is that he once seemed far more open to changing his mind. Today, he strikes me as much more certain of how the world works. His curiosity hasn’t disappeared, but it has become more selective. He appears drawn to ideas that reinforce the framework he already has rather than ideas that genuinely threaten it.

I also think his interviewing has changed. There are more monologues than there used to be. He interrupts more. He often returns to familiar stories and familiar opinions regardless of who is sitting opposite him. At times he seems less engaged with the person across the table because he already knows where he wants the conversation to go. For me, that’s the biggest loss because I never expected Joe Rogan to be an expert. I expected him to be curious. Those aren’t the same thing.

If that’s what’s happened, I don’t think it’s a scandal. I think it’s a natural ending, and it leaves me with a much bigger question: who comes next?

Who is building the next genuinely curious podcast? Who is prepared to invite both mainstream experts and unconventional thinkers into the same room? Who is willing to ask difficult questions without already knowing which answers they want to hear? I honestly don’t know, and maybe that’s why I still look at every new Joe Rogan guest announcement. Part of me is still hoping to find the podcast I fell in love with all those years ago. More often than not, I end up moving on to something else, and for me that’s the clearest sign that something has changed.

Ridicule has always been one of society’s most efficient defence mechanisms. It protects us from wasting time on countless implausible claims, but it can also discourage curiosity before curiosity has had the opportunity to do its work. Throughout history there have been ideas that deserved ridicule, ideas that deserved acceptance and ideas that simply deserved investigation. The difficulty, of course, lies in distinguishing between them. Continental drift was dismissed for decades because it seemed absurd that entire continents could move. Meteorites were once considered impossible because respectable scientists could not accept that rocks fell from the sky. The suggestion that invisible organisms caused disease encountered fierce resistance despite mounting observations. None of these examples demonstrate that today’s controversial subjects will eventually be vindicated, nor should they. They simply remind us that social consensus and objective reality have never been identical. Ridicule is useful for maintaining cultural norms. It has proved considerably less reliable as a method of discovering the truth.

For most of the twentieth century, unidentified flying objects occupied precisely that uncomfortable space where serious inquiry became almost impossible. Genuine anomalies became intertwined with elaborate conspiracy theories until the distinction between them almost disappeared. Extraordinary claims were presented with extraordinary confidence despite little supporting evidence, while sceptics increasingly concluded that the entire subject deserved dismissal. The result was an intellectual vacuum. Rational investigators avoided it because association alone threatened their credibility, while those who remained often became progressively more certain of conclusions extending far beyond what the available evidence justified. Somewhere between those extremes, the possibility of simply admitting that some observations remained unexplained almost disappeared from public conversation.

Yet over the past decade something has shifted. Military pilots have publicly discussed encounters they cannot explain. Governments have acknowledged that certain incidents remain unidentified. Congressional hearings have examined the subject without provoking the universal ridicule they almost certainly would have received twenty years earlier. Scientists who previously regarded the topic as professionally untouchable have begun arguing that unidentified phenomena deserve systematic investigation rather than automatic dismissal. None of these developments establish the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence. They do not prove that unknown craft are traversing our skies. What they do establish is something subtler but still important. The people most qualified to assess certain categories of evidence increasingly appear willing to admit that not every observation fits comfortably within existing explanations. That alone represents a remarkable cultural change.

I sometimes wonder whether we have misunderstood what scepticism is supposed to accomplish. Genuine scepticism is not the habit of rejecting unfamiliar ideas. It is the discipline of withholding judgement until sufficient evidence becomes available while remaining willing to revise one’s conclusions as new information emerges. Dismissal operates differently. It reaches a conclusion before the investigation begins. One seeks better evidence. The other seeks reasons not to examine it. Those may appear similar from a distance, but they represent entirely different approaches to knowledge. If science has any defining characteristic, it is surely the willingness to remain intellectually uncomfortable for longer than our instincts would prefer.

Many people quite reasonably point out that “unidentified” does not mean “alien.” I agree entirely. An unidentified object is simply something that has not yet been identified. It may eventually prove to have an entirely ordinary explanation. Human perception is unreliable. Cameras distort reality. Atmospheric conditions create convincing illusions. Instrumentation fails. Memory changes over time. Every one of these possibilities deserves careful consideration before any extraordinary conclusion is entertained. The history of science contains countless examples of mysteries that eventually yielded perfectly mundane explanations. It would therefore be irrational to leap from uncertainty to certainty simply because the unknown is inherently fascinating.

What interests me far more is why the conversation so often stops there. Explaining that unidentified does not mean extraterrestrial is perfectly reasonable. Concluding that unidentified therefore deserves no further investigation is something entirely different. Scientific progress has never depended upon pretending anomalies do not exist. Quite the opposite. Anomalies are often where discovery begins. Most eventually dissolve under closer examination. A small number change our understanding of the world entirely. The challenge has always been determining which is which, and that determination requires investigation rather than instinct.

For years I regarded the subject in precisely those terms. I considered extraterrestrial intelligence almost certainly to exist somewhere in the universe while simultaneously believing there was no compelling reason to think it had anything to do with humanity. Those positions felt entirely compatible. The universe appeared unimaginably vast, making intelligent life elsewhere statistically plausible, while the distances involved seemed so immense that meaningful contact appeared extraordinarily unlikely. Had you asked me where I stood a decade ago, I would have described myself as curious but unconvinced.

That position began to change, although not because of any single dramatic event. There was no revelation, no document, no witness whose testimony suddenly overturned everything I thought I knew. Instead, my thinking evolved gradually as several independent lines of reasoning slowly converged. The cultural conversation changed. Governments became more willing to acknowledge unresolved incidents. Military personnel with distinguished careers described experiences they had previously avoided discussing publicly. Scientists who once ignored the topic began arguing that it warranted careful study. None of these developments proved anything extraordinary, yet collectively they altered something fundamental. They shifted the question from whether every report could immediately be explained to whether it remained intellectually responsible to assume they all eventually would be.

Around the same time, I experienced something that complicated my own thinking. On multiple occasions, while looking out across the Atlantic coast of western Europe, I observed groups of bright objects at considerable altitude behaving in ways I could not readily explain. I am deliberately cautious in describing those experiences because I do not regard them as evidence for anyone else. They are observations, nothing more. Cameras rarely capture such moments as our eyes perceive them. Distance becomes almost impossible to judge against an empty sky. Apparent motion can be deceptive. Human beings are remarkably poor at estimating scale under unfamiliar conditions. Every one of those limitations deserves acknowledgement before drawing conclusions, and I continue to consider them today.

What changed was not that I suddenly believed I knew what I had seen. Quite the opposite. What changed was my confidence that I already understood enough to dismiss similar observations made by others. Before those experiences, unidentified aerial phenomena belonged to the abstract world of newspaper articles and internet debates. Afterwards, they became an unanswered question occupying a very different place in my own thinking. I stopped asking whether every report could be explained and began asking whether I had been too eager to assume that they could.

There is a subtle but important distinction between saying, “I know what I saw,” and saying, “I no longer know enough to dismiss what others claim to have seen.” The first statement ends a conversation. The second begins one. Mine has remained open ever since.

The more I reflected upon that uncertainty, the more I realised that the larger question had remarkably little to do with unidentified aerial phenomena at all. Long before considering government reports, military testimony or personal observations, we are confronted by a much simpler question. What should we actually expect the universe to look like if we approach it without assuming humanity occupies a privileged position within it?

Our own galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars. Modern astronomy suggests that planets are not rare exceptions but ordinary features of stellar systems. Beyond the Milky Way lie hundreds of billions, and perhaps trillions, of additional galaxies stretching across the observable universe. Around countless stars, chemistry unfolds according to the same physical laws that produced life here. We still do not know how frequently biology emerges, how often intelligence follows or how commonly technological civilisations develop. Those remain open scientific questions. Yet unless one of those transitions proves almost impossibly unlikely, the sheer scale of the cosmos strongly suggests that intelligence has arisen elsewhere many times.

Notice what this argument does not require. It does not require belief in UFOs. It does not depend upon classified documents, government whistleblowers or extraordinary eyewitness accounts. It follows simply from the size of the universe and the assumption that Earth is not uniquely exempt from the same processes operating everywhere else. Indeed, I increasingly find the opposite proposition more difficult to accept. The idea that among perhaps trillions of galaxies, our species alone represents the universe’s only intelligent observers strikes me as requiring a far more extraordinary chain of coincidences than the existence of other civilisations.

This, I suspect, is where many conversations become confused. People often assume that acknowledging the overwhelming probability of extraterrestrial intelligence automatically commits someone to believing that extraterrestrials have visited Earth. It does not. Those are entirely separate propositions requiring entirely different standards of evidence. I remain convinced that confusing those questions has damaged serious discussion for decades. The first arises naturally from astronomy. The second belongs to an entirely different category of inquiry.

Where my own thinking began to evolve further was in considering timescales rather than distances. Human civilisation, as we typically define it, occupies only a few thousand years. Modern science spans perhaps four centuries. Spaceflight occupies little more than half a century. Against the age of the universe, these are effectively invisible moments. If intelligent life has emerged elsewhere even a tiny fraction of the time, then some civilisations may be millions, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years older than ours. At that point, we are no longer discussing technology slightly beyond our own. We are attempting to imagine capabilities separated from us by spans of time so immense that comparison itself may become almost meaningless.

Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Whether or not that observation is literally correct, it contains an important warning. Human imagination is shaped by human experience. We instinctively project our present understanding into the future, yet history repeatedly demonstrates how poor we are at anticipating genuinely transformative advances. A smartphone would have appeared supernatural to someone living two centuries ago. Artificial intelligence capable of writing software, analysing scientific literature or holding conversations would have seemed equally implausible only a generation ago. If we struggle to imagine the world two hundred years ahead, what confidence should we have in imagining a civilisation millions of years older than our own?

If my thinking had stopped there, I would probably still describe myself as unconvinced. The existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe tells us remarkably little about whether it has ever interacted with humanity. It is one thing to believe we are almost certainly not alone. It is another to suggest that another intelligence may already have crossed paths with us. That remains an extraordinary proposition, and it should remain one. The standard of evidence ought to reflect the magnitude of the claim. I have no interest in lowering that standard because doing so ultimately harms the very conversation I believe deserves serious attention.

At the same time, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with another form of certainty. It is the certainty that because we cannot yet explain something publicly, we already know enough to conclude there is nothing there worth examining. That strikes me as an oddly unscientific position. Science has never progressed by insisting reality conform to our existing expectations. It has progressed by allowing reality to challenge them. Every major advance in our understanding has required the humility to admit that the universe was under no obligation to resemble the picture we had constructed of it. Every time we have assumed we had reached the limits of knowledge, nature has quietly reminded us that our confidence exceeded our understanding.

One criticism appears again and again whenever this subject is discussed. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I agree completely. In fact, I think the phrase has become so familiar that we often overlook what it actually demands. It does not say extraordinary claims should never be investigated. It does not say anomalies should be ignored until someone arrives carrying indisputable proof. It simply reminds us that confidence should be proportional to evidence. That is not an argument against investigation. It is an argument for conducting investigation well. The mistake, in my view, is assuming that because extraordinary evidence has not yet entered the public domain, extraordinary possibilities can already be dismissed with complete confidence. Those are not equivalent conclusions, because the absence of publicly available evidence is not itself evidence that no extraordinary explanation exists. It simply means the question remains unresolved.

The same applies to what is commonly known as the Fermi Paradox. If intelligent civilisations are likely to exist, where is everybody? It is one of the most fascinating questions in modern science precisely because nobody knows the answer. Perhaps technological civilisations destroy themselves before developing meaningful interstellar capabilities. Perhaps intelligent life is astonishingly rare despite the size of the universe. Perhaps the distances involved make physical exploration impractical. Perhaps advanced societies lose interest in expansion altogether. Perhaps we are searching for signatures that only make sense from the perspective of a civilisation at our own stage of development. The list of possibilities is remarkably long, and every proposed solution serves mainly to illustrate how little we truly know. What has always struck me as curious is the tendency to treat the paradox itself as evidence against extraterrestrial intelligence. It is not evidence against anything. It is simply the recognition that our current understanding remains incomplete.

The longer I have reflected on these questions, the more I have realised that popular culture has probably shaped our expectations far more than science has. We instinctively imagine another civilisation arriving in spacecraft that resemble sophisticated versions of our own. We assume communication would occur through methods we recognise. We imagine exploration because exploration is what humans do. Yet every one of those assumptions is profoundly anthropocentric. They reflect our own technological stage rather than any universal principle. If another intelligence exists and has had millions of years to develop beyond us, then the likelihood that its methods would resemble ours may be remarkably small. The mistake is not believing such a civilisation would appear strange. The mistake is believing we already know what that strangeness should look like.

My own conclusion has therefore become more cautious in one sense and considerably more speculative in another. I am less certain than ever about specific explanations. I do not know whether some unidentified phenomena represent advanced technology, misunderstood natural processes, classified human projects or something else entirely. I cannot honestly claim to know. What I have become increasingly convinced of is that our existing framework may simply be too narrow. I find it entirely plausible that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. I also find it increasingly difficult to dismiss the possibility that some form of non-human intelligence may already be known to us in ways we do not yet fully understand. That is not a conclusion I expect anyone else to accept simply because I have reached it. It is the conclusion I have arrived at after years of watching the conversation evolve, reflecting upon my own experiences and asking myself whether my scepticism had quietly become something closer to habit than inquiry.

Whether that conclusion ultimately proves correct is, in many respects, less interesting than what it would mean if it did. We often talk about the discovery of another intelligence as though it would simply be another scientific breakthrough, comparable to finding a new particle or detecting life beneath the ice of a distant moon. I suspect it would be something entirely different. It would alter not only what we know but the framework through which we understand ourselves. Some discoveries expand knowledge. Others redefine the observer. This would almost certainly belong to the second category.

For thousands of years humanity has constructed its understanding of itself around an assumption so deeply embedded that we rarely notice it. We have always regarded ourselves as exceptional. Religions place humanity at the centre of creation. Philosophers have debated what distinguishes us from every other living thing. Our legal systems, moral frameworks and political institutions all assume that human intelligence occupies a category entirely of its own. Even science, despite dismantling many older certainties, has largely left that assumption intact. We learned that Earth was not the centre of the Solar System. Later we discovered that the Solar System itself occupies no privileged position within the galaxy, and that our galaxy is merely one among incomprehensible numbers scattered throughout the observable universe. Each discovery reduced our geographical importance without fundamentally altering our belief that humanity remained intellectually unique. We accepted that we occupied no special place in space while quietly continuing to assume we occupied a special place in existence.

Imagine, for a moment, that this assumption also proves temporary. Imagine discovering that intelligence is not a singular event in cosmic history but one expression of a process that has unfolded repeatedly across the universe. Imagine learning that some of those intelligences began their own histories millions of years before our earliest ancestors walked upright. Such a discovery would not diminish humanity any more than the existence of ancient civilisations diminishes modern achievements. Shakespeare would still have written Shakespeare. Newton would still have described gravity. Einstein would still have transformed physics. The Apollo missions would remain among the greatest accomplishments in human history. None of our achievements would disappear. What would change is the context in which we understand them. Humanity would no longer appear as the sole author of intelligence in the known universe but as one chapter in a much larger story.

History suggests that these moments of humility are often accompanied by remarkable intellectual growth. Copernicus did not simply rearrange planets; he transformed humanity’s relationship with the cosmos. Darwin did not merely explain biological evolution; he fundamentally altered our understanding of ourselves. Neither discovery made humanity less remarkable. They simply revealed that our previous picture of reality had been incomplete. Every major scientific revolution has expanded our knowledge while simultaneously reducing our confidence that we occupied a uniquely privileged position within existence. If another intelligence exists, then history suggests we should expect precisely the same pattern to continue. We may eventually look back on human exceptionalism in much the same way we now look back on geocentrism: not as foolish, but as an understandable conclusion drawn from limited information.

It is striking that humanity finds itself contemplating these questions at precisely the same moment it is attempting to create intelligence of its own. Artificial intelligence is forcing philosophers, neuroscientists and engineers to revisit questions that remained largely abstract for centuries. What is intelligence? What is consciousness? Can reasoning exist without subjective experience? At what point does sophisticated computation become something deserving of moral consideration? These are no longer questions confined to philosophy departments. Increasingly they shape technological development itself, and every improvement in AI reminds us that qualities we once regarded as uniquely human are proving more difficult to define than we imagined.

Whether artificial intelligence eventually becomes conscious is, in one sense, almost beside the point. It has already forced us to confront an uncomfortable possibility. Intelligence may be far less uniquely human than we once believed. If we are beginning to share aspects of cognition with machines of our own creation while simultaneously considering the possibility of intelligence elsewhere in the universe, then humanity may be entering an era in which the defining question is no longer whether we are intelligent, but what intelligence actually is. We may discover that the most profound scientific question of the twenty-first century is not whether other minds exist, but how many different forms a mind can take.

The same observation applies to religion, although perhaps not in the way many people assume. It is often argued that confirmation of another intelligence would destroy religious belief. I find that prediction surprisingly unconvincing. Religious traditions have survived heliocentrism, evolution, cosmology and quantum mechanics because they attempt to answer questions science was never designed to address. Purpose, morality and meaning do not disappear because our map of the universe becomes more accurate. They simply become more difficult, more nuanced and, perhaps, more interesting. Another intelligence would undoubtedly challenge many theological assumptions, but challenge has never been the same thing as destruction. History suggests that belief systems evolve. They rarely vanish overnight. If anything, another intelligence would expand the questions religion seeks to answer rather than eliminate them.

If there is one conclusion I have become increasingly confident about, it concerns neither extraterrestrials nor unidentified aerial phenomena. It concerns secrecy. If governments possess compelling evidence relating to genuinely unexplained phenomena, then continued secrecy becomes increasingly difficult to justify indefinitely. During the Cold War there were understandable reasons to protect technologies, intelligence capabilities and methods of observation. Those concerns have not disappeared, and I do not pretend that every classified programme should suddenly become public. National security remains a legitimate responsibility of governments. Yet there is an important distinction between protecting methods and permanently withholding knowledge. Some discoveries belong to nations. Others belong to civilisation.

The structure of DNA did not belong to Britain. Relativity did not belong to Germany. Evolution did not belong to England. Once discoveries reach a certain level of significance, they cease to be national achievements and become part of humanity’s collective understanding. If compelling evidence exists that fundamentally reshapes our understanding of intelligence or our place within the universe, then eventually that evidence should become available to the world’s scientific community. Physicists, astronomers, engineers, materials scientists, biologists, historians, philosophers and increasingly AI researchers would all bring different perspectives to the same evidence. Humanity has consistently solved its greatest mysteries by expanding the number of minds working on a problem rather than restricting them. If the question concerns humanity’s place in the universe, then humanity itself should ultimately be allowed to participate in answering it.

Perhaps I am wrong. I have tried to keep that possibility in view throughout writing this essay, and I hope I continue to do so. Every conclusion should remain vulnerable to better evidence. If ordinary explanations eventually account for every unresolved observation, then I will gladly accept them. Reality has no obligation to conform to my expectations, and one of the greatest strengths of science is its willingness to abandon attractive ideas when better explanations emerge.

What I have become equally sceptical of, however, is certainty in the opposite direction. The certainty that there is nothing left to discover. The certainty that every anomaly already has an ordinary explanation. The certainty that humanity has reached the limits of what nature is capable of producing. History offers remarkably little encouragement for that kind of confidence. Every generation inherits assumptions that feel permanent until they suddenly are not. Every scientific revolution begins with questions that respectable people once considered settled. The universe has repeatedly turned out to be larger, older, stranger and more imaginative than humanity expected. We have spent centuries discovering that we occupy a smaller place in reality than we once believed, yet every one of those discoveries has expanded rather than diminished what it means to be human. Humility has never been the enemy of progress. More often than not, it has been its beginning.

I cannot say with certainty that another intelligence has visited Earth. I cannot demonstrate that some unidentified phenomena represent anything beyond the limits of our present understanding. Those remain open questions, and they should remain open until the evidence warrants stronger conclusions. What I can say is that I no longer believe the most interesting question is whether every unexplained observation can eventually be explained away. The more interesting question is whether our assumptions about ourselves have quietly become the greatest obstacle to recognising something genuinely new.

Perhaps centuries from now our descendants will look back on this period and conclude that we worried unnecessarily about shadows that turned out to be entirely ordinary. That would be a satisfying scientific outcome because ordinary explanations are still explanations. Or perhaps they will wonder why a civilisation capable of mapping the cosmic microwave background, detecting planets around distant stars and building increasingly intelligent machines spent so long treating one of the oldest questions in human history as something unworthy of serious conversation. Either possibility seems preferable to refusing to ask the question at all, because if the history of science has taught us anything, it is that the universe has always been under no obligation to satisfy humanity’s expectations. The question is not whether reality will surprise us again. It is whether, when it does, we will possess enough humility to recognise that the next great discovery may not simply change what we know, but change who we believe ourselves to be.

Not gone on strike. Not staged a protest outside company headquarters. They had simply resigned. Tens of millions of people deciding, on the same day, that they would no longer participate in a system they believed distributed the rewards of their labour unfairly. They would not be demanding higher wages or better benefits. Their demand would be much simpler: rethink how the profits generated by our collective work are shared.

At first glance, the idea sounds absurd. Organising something on this scale would be practically impossible and would rank among the largest acts of collective coordination in human history. Yet that is one reason why it makes for such an interesting thought experiment. It forces us to ask questions about power, ownership and dependency. Are our current economic arrangements genuinely the fairest ones available, or have they simply become accepted because they have existed for so long?

The immediate consequences would be immense. Stock markets would likely fall sharply. Supply chains would begin to seize up. Supermarkets would struggle to replenish their shelves. Banks, technology companies, pharmaceutical firms, airlines, manufacturers and logistics providers would all confront the same uncomfortable reality. Capital without labour achieves very little. Every company, regardless of how sophisticated its technology becomes, still depends on people deciding to turn up for work.

This is something that often gets overlooked when we discuss capitalism. We spend a great deal of time talking about investment, entrepreneurship and risk, all of which deserve recognition. Starting a company is difficult. Building one into a successful global enterprise is harder still. Founders frequently sacrifice years of income while assuming enormous personal and financial risks. Investors commit capital knowing they may lose everything.

Labour, however, assumes a different kind of risk. Employees may not invest financial capital, but they invest their time, their health, their relationships and often decades of their lives. Most people cannot diversify that investment in the way investors diversify a portfolio. Losing a job is not simply a financial setback. For many people it threatens their mortgage, their family and their future. That is a very different kind of exposure, but exposure nonetheless.

Perhaps that is why debates about profit distribution never really disappear. They are not simply arguments about money. They are arguments about value. How much of a company’s success belongs to the people who conceived it? How much belongs to those who financed it? How much belongs to the people who spend years building, maintaining and improving it? There is no universally accepted answer, which is why the discussion never really goes away.

If millions of people resigned simultaneously, governments would intervene almost immediately. Critical industries would have to be prioritised. Negotiations between governments, employers and worker representatives would begin almost overnight. Politicians who usually champion free markets might suddenly find themselves calling for intervention, while others would argue corporations had finally been forced to confront a problem they had ignored for decades.

Whether any of this would actually produce lasting change is far less obvious. Faced with losing their workforce, many companies might rethink compensation. Employee ownership schemes could become more common. Profit-sharing arrangements might move from being an exception to becoming an expectation. Executive compensation would likely come under renewed scrutiny. Boards might conclude that pay packages hundreds of times greater than those of ordinary employees are becoming increasingly difficult to justify.

It is equally possible that very little would change. Companies could accelerate automation. Governments could weaken labour protections in the name of economic stability. Public sympathy might evaporate once shortages began affecting everyday life. History suggests that people often support protest movements until those protests begin inconveniencing them personally.

There is also a deeper question that rarely receives enough attention. What exactly counts as a fair distribution of profit? Should every employee receive an equal share regardless of responsibility or contribution? Almost nobody argues that they should. Should profits instead reflect individual contribution? That sounds reasonable until someone attempts to measure contribution objectively. Is the engineer who designs a product more valuable than the technician who manufactures it? Is the salesperson who wins the client more valuable than the support representative who keeps that client for years? Modern organisations are so interconnected that separating individual contributions quickly becomes an impossible exercise.

Founders present a similar challenge. Many create businesses from nothing, assuming years of uncertainty before the first employee is ever hired. It seems reasonable that they should benefit disproportionately if the company succeeds. At the same time, companies rarely become global successes because of one person alone. Thousands of employees spend years turning a founder’s vision into an operational reality. Without them, the vision remains exactly that.

The thought experiment also exposes something else. Most people do not actually want corporations to fail. We depend on them. They provide employment, develop medicines, build infrastructure, create technologies, transport goods and produce many of the products we rely upon every day. Even many critics of corporate power benefit enormously from the conveniences those corporations create. The issue is rarely the existence of corporations themselves. It is whether the rewards generated by collective effort reflect that effort in a way people recognise as fair.

Fairness is also deeply subjective. Ask an employee who has spent twenty years helping build a company and they may wonder why a CEO earns hundreds of times more than they do. Ask the founder who mortgaged their house before the company had a single customer and they may wonder why those risks should not be rewarded disproportionately. Neither perspective is obviously irrational, which perhaps explains why arguments over wealth distribution never seem to disappear. The question becomes even more interesting if we assume labour’s leverage may not last forever.

There is, however, another dimension to this discussion that is difficult to ignore. For most of modern history, labour has possessed one form of leverage that capital could never fully replace: people. Companies could relocate factories, outsource work and invest in better machinery, but they still required millions of employees to keep operating. Artificial intelligence may be about to change that equation in ways we have barely begun to appreciate.

How that change unfolds is unlikely to be uniform. A warehouse operative, a software engineer, a lawyer, a nurse and a graphic designer are unlikely to experience AI in the same way or on the same timeline. Some jobs may disappear entirely. Others may become significantly more productive, while many will simply evolve into something different. History suggests that new technologies often create opportunities as well as eliminate them. The concern is not that every employee becomes obsolete, but that the balance of power gradually shifts. If companies can achieve the same output with fewer people, then labour inevitably loses some of the leverage it once possessed.

Over the next decade, AI is likely to eliminate, augment or reshape millions of jobs across almost every industry. Nobody knows the exact scale, the timeline or even which professions will be most affected. Whatever the numbers eventually prove to be, few serious observers now dispute the direction of travel. If that proves to be true, then the bargaining power employees have collectively enjoyed for generations may already be beginning to erode. A coordinated resignation today would likely bring many corporations to a standstill. The same protest ten years from now may not carry anything like the same influence if a significant proportion of that workforce has already been replaced by software, robotics or autonomous systems.

Suddenly the thought experiment is no longer just about profit sharing. It becomes a question of timing. If employees believe the current balance between labour and capital is unsustainable, then the opportunity to influence that balance may not exist indefinitely. Ironically, the very technology that promises extraordinary gains in productivity may also reduce labour’s ability to negotiate how those gains are ultimately distributed.

None of this is really an argument against corporations, or even against AI. AI has the potential to improve healthcare, accelerate scientific discovery, transform education and increase productivity on a scale that is difficult to overstate. Businesses should absolutely embrace those opportunities, just as society has embraced every transformative technology that came before. The challenge is ensuring that the benefits are distributed in ways that strengthen society rather than concentrating an ever larger share of wealth and influence into fewer hands. If AI allows companies to generate dramatically greater profits with dramatically fewer employees, then questions about ownership, profit sharing and economic participation become even more important than they are today.

Which brings us back to where this thought experiment began. If everyone walked away tomorrow, corporations would suffer, economies would suffer and ordinary people would suffer. Some reforms might emerge from the crisis, while others might never materialise. The protest could become one of the most significant demonstrations of collective labour power in history, or it could simply accelerate automation and weaken labour’s long-term position even further. Either outcome forces us to confront the same uncomfortable question. Have we reached our current economic arrangement because it represents the fairest balance between labour and capital, or simply because we’ve become accustomed to it? If AI changes that balance over the next decade, this may not simply be an interesting thought experiment. It may represent the last point in history at which labour possessed enough collective leverage to renegotiate its relationship with capital.

Of course, I have written previously about how I use AI in my writing, but I want to provide some additional context here. Everything I write goes through an LLM before I publish it. I have a set of prompts that I use to ensure my essays meet my own baseline standards for good writing. Those prompts are not there to generate my ideas, opinions, or arguments. They are there to challenge weak phrasing, improve clarity, identify repetition, and highlight places where my reasoning could be expressed more effectively. I use an LLM because I do not have a team of writers or editors to rely on before publication. I am the final editor, of course, and every single sentence I publish is one that I stand behind as my own. If the model suggests something that changes my intended meaning, I reject it. If it makes a sentence clearer while preserving my intent, I often accept it. That seems no different in principle from accepting edits from a trusted human editor.

Some of my published essays have changed very little following an LLM review; others have changed quite a lot, and many fall somewhere in between. It depends entirely on the piece, how much time I had available when writing it, and whether I feel the argument is already communicating what I intended. The LLM has enabled me to publish essays at a cadence that meets my subscribers’ expectations while ensuring a minimum standard of quality. It has also helped me become a better writer by repeatedly exposing habits that I probably would not have noticed on my own. Have I hit the mark with every piece of writing? Of course not, nor do I hold myself to that standard. I have published essays that I would rewrite today, and I suspect I always will. That is simply part of writing in public. With a busy “normal” job and young children, I do this as a side project, writing about whatever interests—or triggers—me from day to day. AI has made that process more sustainable, but it has not replaced the thinking, the reading, the research, or the responsibility that comes with putting my name on every published piece.

What interests me more, though, is the reaction some people have to my essays. The criticism generally falls into one of two camps. Either the essay is dismissed as "AI slop," or I am told I have not provided enough examples. The latter is sometimes a fair criticism, although not every essay requires an exhaustive catalogue of examples to make its point. What is striking, however, is how often these criticisms become the discussion, rather than the substance of the essay itself. Some readers do point to passages they believe read as though they were written by AI. Others simply invoke the label and move on. Either way, the conversation too often ends there, with far less attention paid to whether the arguments themselves are coherent, accurate, or worth engaging with.

While these are clearly lazy comments, I find it interesting to consider whether these individuals are genuinely so triggered by the possibility that they might be reading something written—or simply reviewed—by AI that it overrides everything else. There seems to be an assumption that once AI enters the process in any capacity, the work somehow ceases to be worthy of consideration. That strikes me as an odd position to take, particularly when we routinely accept tools that improve our work in almost every other domain. We do not dismiss a photograph because it was edited. We do not dismiss software because it was built with better development tools. We generally judge the output, not the existence of the tools behind it.

Does the fact that something is written by AI immediately mean it should be dismissed? More importantly, does the possibility that AI was involved relieve us of the responsibility to think about what we are reading? If “AI slop” becomes nothing more than a reflexive response, then it risks becoming an excuse not to engage with ideas at all. Perhaps the more important question is not whether AI helped produce a piece of writing, but whether the arguments within it stand up to scrutiny. If they do, then they deserve to be answered. If they do not, then they deserve to be criticised. Either way, the discussion should begin with the ideas themselves, not end with a label.

That was once again on full display during Portugal’s defeat to Spain. Chris Sutton happened to be one of the more obvious examples, but he is far from alone. He represents a much broader problem within modern football media, where Ronaldo has become less of a player to analyse and more of a character in a story that many pundits have been telling for years. The details changebut the conclusion does not.

The strange thing is that this narrative often survives even when it collides with the football taking place in front of everyone. Against Croatia, for example, there was criticism surrounding Roberto Martínez’s decision to withdraw Ronaldo, accompanied by commentary that suggested Gonçalo Ramos had replaced him and immediately improved Portugal. Except that is not what happened. Ramos had already been introduced earlier and was playing alongside Ronaldo before Martínez eventually removed his captain. The tactical adjustment was driven by Portugal losing control of midfield, not by some dramatic realisation that Ronaldo had been holding the team back. It was obvious to anyone watching the game with an open mind rather than searching for another chapter in an already familiar script.

The defeat against Spain last night followed exactly the same pattern. Portugal’s biggest problem was not the man wearing number seven. It was the football they played. Under Roberto Martínez, Portugal too often build attacks at walking pace. Possession is recycled endlessly across the defensive line. Midfielders receive the ball facing their own goal. By the time the ball finally reaches the final third, the opposition has already organised itself behind the ball. It is slow, predictable and remarkably easy to defend against. That tactical reality affects every striker. It affected Cristiano Ronaldo. It would affect Ramos, and it has. It would affect Mbappe. It would affect Haaland. Centre-forwards cannot score chances that are never created.

That is not to say Martínez should never substitute Ronaldo. Of course he should. Ronaldo is no longer twenty-eight. No serious football supporter believes otherwise. There will be matches where fresh legs are needed. There will be games where Portugal require greater mobility or pressing intensity. Those are perfectly legitimate football debates. The problem arises when every substitution involving Ronaldo is treated as proof of a conclusion that existed long before the teams even walked onto the pitch.

The irony is that Ronaldo continues to be judged against standards that no other footballer in history has been expected to meet. He is the highest goalscorer the men’s international game has ever seen. He has scored well over 130 international goals. He has carried Portugal through multiple tournaments, won the country’s first major international trophy, added another in the UEFA Nations League, and continued scoring decisive goals long after most elite outfield players have retired or accepted supporting roles. Even under Martínez, a manager whose tactical approach often leaves his centre-forward isolated for long periods, Ronaldo’s goalscoring record has remained comparable with many of the world’s leading international strikers. Yet every match seems to begin with the assumption that he is the problem that needs solving.

What makes this particularly frustrating is the complete absence of balance. Ronaldo is hardly beyond criticism. He has always possessed a sizeable ego. At times it has undoubtedly worked against him. There have been performances where he should have been substituted earlier. There have been matches where Portugal would have benefited from greater mobility in attack. Those are reasonable football conversations. What is not reasonable is pretending that one of the greatest footballers ever to play the game has suddenly become the explanation for every tactical weakness Portugal possess while the manager, the system and the players around him receive comparatively little scrutiny.

There is also something oddly dismissive about the way Ronaldo’s longevity is discussed. Rather than appreciating what is arguably one of the greatest examples of sustained excellence in sporting history, many commentators seem irritated that he is still competing at the highest level. They no longer compare him with other players of his age because there are virtually none. Instead, they compare a forty-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo with the twenty-eight-year-old version of Cristiano Ronaldo. It is an impossible standard that would make every athlete in history appear to have failed.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Ronaldo Derangement Syndrome is what it says about modern football analysis. Good analysis begins with curiosity. It asks why a team struggled to progress the ball. It examines tactical structure, spacing, pressing triggers, midfield balance and the quality of chance creation. Poor analysis starts with a personality and works backwards. Portugal lose, therefore Ronaldo must be the explanation. Portugal play slowly, therefore Ronaldo must be restricting them. Portugal fail to dominate possession, therefore Ronaldo’s presence must somehow account for it. Once analysis reaches that point, it stops being analysis altogether. It becomes confirmation bias dressed up as expertise.

Cristiano Ronaldo will retire soon enough. Time eventually defeats every footballer. When that day comes, football should celebrate one of the most extraordinary careers the game has ever witnessed rather than congratulate itself for having spent years trying to prove he had already become irrelevant. Until then, perhaps it is time for some pundits to spend a little less energy defending a narrative they settled on years ago and a little more time watching the football that is actually unfolding in front of them.

Nobody wants to be the bank that moved too slowly. Nobody wants to be the insurer that failed to innovate. Nobody wants to be the executive remembered for saying, “Let’s wait.” Every Board wants an AI strategy. Every executive committee wants AI use cases. Every technology function wants to demonstrate progress. Every consultant has a transformation roadmap. Every vendor has a solution that promises to change everything. That fear of being left behind may turn out to be far more dangerous than artificial intelligence itself.

I find it remarkable that almost every discussion revolves around the same questions. How quickly can we deploy AI? Which processes can we automate? How much productivity can we unlock? How many hours can we save? Those are perfectly reasonable questions, but they are not the questions keeping me awake. The question I keep coming back to is much simpler. Which AI use case currently being rolled out inside financial services will become the industry’s first genuinely catastrophic mistake?

I am not talking about machines becoming conscious or taking over financial markets. I am talking about something much more familiar. Organisations have always failed because intelligent people gradually stopped asking difficult questions. I see no reason to believe artificial intelligence will change that. If anything, I suspect it will accelerate it.

Financial services has spent decades trying to strengthen governance after one crisis followed another. More regulation was introduced. Risk functions expanded. Compliance teams grew. Internal Audit became more sophisticated. Boards demanded more assurance. The objective was never simply to create more controls. It was to ensure somebody, somewhere inside the organisation, remained willing to challenge assumptions that everybody else had quietly accepted. Challenge has always been the industry’s safety valve but I am no longer convinced we value it as much as we claim.

Artificial intelligence is already drafting Board papers, preparing presentations, summarising regulatory obligations, assisting investigations, analysing risks, producing management information and helping auditors document their work. Every individual use case appears sensible. Many of them undoubtedly are. The danger is not contained within any single implementation. It lies in the cumulative effect of hundreds of sensible decisions that slowly change how an organisation thinks without anybody consciously deciding that this is what they wanted.

Nobody worries the first time an analyst accepts an AI summary instead of reading the source material. Nobody worries when a manager signs off a report because it looks comprehensive. Nobody worries when an auditor accepts reasoning that appears sound because the document is well written. None of those decisions is dramatic. Collectively they begin changing something much more important than efficiency. They begin changing how judgement is exercised inside the organisation and here is what worries me most - performative competence.

Artificial intelligence is exceptionally good at producing work that looks impressive. Board papers will become more polished. Risk reports will become more comprehensive. Audit reports will become more coherent. Executive briefings will become clearer. Presentations will become almost impossible to distinguish from those produced by highly experienced professionals. If anything, that should worry us.

There is a dangerous assumption beginning to take hold that polished output is evidence of better thinking. It is not. Sometimes it is simply evidence that a machine has become exceptionally good at producing the appearance of competence. Those are very different things. An organisation can reach the point where every document looks outstanding while the quality of the underlying judgement quietly deteriorates. Most people have worked inside organisations long enough to know that impressive presentations and impressive thinking are not always the same thing.

Imagine a Board meeting five years from now. Management presents an AI-generated paper. Risk presents an AI-assisted challenge. Internal Audit presents an AI-assisted assurance report. External Audit has relied on AI throughout parts of its review. The regulator supervising the firm increasingly uses AI to prioritise supervisory work. Every document in the room is polished. Every participant believes there is human oversight. The uncomfortable question is whether anyone in that room has done enough original thinking to recognise the flaw that every AI system happened to miss.

The issue becomes even more serious when one considers how professional judgement is developed in the first place. Nobody becomes an outstanding Chief Risk Officer, Chief Auditor, regulator or compliance professional by reviewing other people’s work. They become experts because they spent years wrestling with complexity themselves. They followed lines of enquiry that went nowhere. They misunderstood problems before eventually understanding them. They read thousands of pages that turned out to be irrelevant. They occasionally found something important precisely because they refused to stop digging when everyone else had moved on. That is how judgement develops. It is slow, inefficient and often frustrating. I keep wondering what happens when that apprenticeship begins disappearing.

If artificial intelligence drafts the first report, performs the first analysis, identifies the relevant regulation, proposes the control improvements and even suggests the audit findings, what exactly are junior professionals learning? Reviewing AI-generated work is not the same thing as producing original analysis. Spotting an obvious mistake is not the same thing as constructing a sound argument from first principles. We should not assume tomorrow’s senior leaders will possess the same judgement as today’s if we quietly remove the work that developed that judgement in the first place.

Much of the language surrounding AI adoption focuses on augmentation. We are repeatedly told AI will augment human capability rather than replace it. Perhaps it will. Large organisations, however, have a long history of turning productivity gains into cost savings. Every hour saved creates pressure to do more with fewer people. Every successful pilot encourages wider deployment. Every efficiency becomes the new baseline. Augmentation has a habit of becoming substitution, not because anybody intended it, but because organisations rarely ignore opportunities to become leaner. Here is an important question - Who is slowing this down?

Boards have every incentive to accelerate adoption because investors expect innovation. Executive teams have every incentive because markets reward transformation. Technology functions have every incentive because implementation demonstrates progress. Business units have every incentive because productivity targets become easier to achieve. Consultants and technology vendors have obvious commercial reasons to encourage faster adoption.

The traditional answer would have been Risk, Compliance, Internal Audit and, ultimately, regulators. Yet even those functions are enthusiastically adopting artificial intelligence themselves. Internal Audit is using AI to improve planning, testing and reporting. Risk functions are exploring AI-enabled monitoring. Compliance teams are embracing AI-assisted regulatory analysis. Regulators are investing heavily in supervisory technology. None of that is wrong in itself, but it creates a subtle shift that deserves much closer attention. The independent challengers are beginning to rely on the same technology as the organisations they are supposed to challenge.

Governance has never been about producing the fastest answer. It has always been about ensuring somebody remains independent enough to ask whether the answer is actually right. If every function begins relying on the same tools, the same assumptions and increasingly the same outputs, we should at least pause long enough to ask whether we are weakening one of the very principles that made financial services more resilient after previous crises.

Institutions rarely fail because intelligent people suddenly become stupid. They fail because intelligent people gradually stop exercising the judgement that made the institution resilient in the first place. That process rarely announces itself. It hides behind efficiency, productivity and good intentions. Looking back, every individual decision appears perfectly reasonable. Looking forward, the cumulative effect is much harder to see.

When the first major AI failure eventually arrives, I suspect the headlines will blame artificial intelligence. There will be calls for stronger regulation, tighter controls and better oversight of the technology. I think that diagnosis will miss the deeper problem. The technology will simply expose a weakness that had been developing for years. Organisations will have become faster, more productive and more polished while quietly allowing independent human judgement to become less important than it once was.

Artificial intelligence may become one of the most valuable technologies financial services has ever adopted. That is precisely why we need to start asking much harder questions than we are asking today. If we continue treating AI primarily as a productivity tool instead of an organisational transformation, the first major AI scandal will not expose a failure of the technology. It will expose a generation of institutions that gradually forgot why independent human judgement mattered in the first place.

Harris spoke about his fury at Trump, about those who helped return him to power and about the need for people to acknowledge the role they played in creating America’s current political mess. Fine. Personal responsibility matters. Public intellectuals have every right to ask difficult questions of their audiences. The obvious question is why Harris never seems prepared to ask the same question of himself.

For years he occupied the moral high ground during COVID with breathtaking confidence. He didn’t merely argue his case. He delivered verdicts. People who questioned institutional decisions, challenged official narratives or expressed discomfort with the extraordinary expansion of political and social power were too often dismissed as irrational, reckless or intellectually unserious. Harris wasn’t simply participating in the debate. He behaved as though the debate itself had already been settled and his role was merely to explain why everyone else had failed to keep up.

Now, years later, he demands that other people acknowledge the consequences of their judgement while displaying almost no interest in examining his own.

The irony is almost impossible to miss. The man who built his reputation urging people to question dogma gradually became one of its most confident defenders. The public intellectual who once warned about certainty became one of its loudest practitioners and the champion of intellectual honesty now seems strangely uninterested in applying that principle when the spotlight points in his own direction.

Nobody is suggesting Harris caused the collapse of trust in American institutions by himself. That would be absurd. He was, however, one of the most influential voices encouraging extraordinary confidence in those institutions during one of the most divisive periods in modern public life. If Trump voters are expected to examine the consequences of their political judgement, surely Harris can spare a moment to consider whether his own certainty contributed, however modestly, to the climate of distrust he now spends so much time lamenting.

What has become increasingly striking about Harris is not that he is sometimes wrong. Every serious thinker is wrong. It is that he has become remarkably poor at recognising the possibility. Somewhere along the way, intellectual confidence hardened into moral certainty, and moral certainty hardened into something far less attractive: the quiet conviction that self-criticism is for other people.

That may be the greatest irony of Harris’s career. He spent years warning audiences about tribalism, ideological capture and the dangers of certainty. Then he slowly became convinced that he alone had somehow escaped those very human tendencies. Once you arrive at that conclusion, genuine self-reflection becomes almost impossible because the first assumption is always that the problem lies somewhere else.

Harris still speaks the language of reason, but reason without self-scepticism eventually becomes something much less admirable. It becomes self-righteousness wearing the costume of rationality, and it is difficult to think of a more revealing example than a man demanding accountability from millions of strangers while appearing almost entirely uninterested in examining his own contribution to the world he now condemns.

My problem with Tyson is not that I have become less interested in science. Quite the opposite. I remain endlessly fascinated by astronomy, physics and cosmology. If anything, I am more interested in these subjects today than I was ten years ago. The problem is that I increasingly find Tyson himself difficult to listen to. I often start interviews, podcast appearances or episodes of StarTalk hoping to learn something new and end up switching them off because he cannot seem to resist inserting himself between the audience and the science.

Over the years a pattern emerged that became increasingly difficult to ignore. Tyson rarely sounds like someone sharing a fascination with the universe. He increasingly sounds like someone performing expertise. There is a difference. One invites curiosity. The other demands recognition. Conversations that should be about discovery somehow become demonstrations of how much Neil deGrasse Tyson knows. Questions become opportunities for correction. Disagreements become lectures. Entire discussions can be derailed by his apparent need to establish intellectual superiority before allowing the conversation to continue.

None of this would matter very much if Tyson were simply another scientist. The reason it matters is because he occupies a role that few people are capable of filling. Society desperately needs effective science communicators. Most people are never going to read academic journals or spend their evenings studying astrophysics textbooks. They rely on people like Tyson to act as translators between specialised knowledge and the public. The tragedy is that Tyson possesses all the raw ingredients required to be exceptional at this task. He is knowledgeable, articulate and genuinely passionate about science. Yet he increasingly undermines his own effectiveness through a style of communication that often feels condescending, self-important and strangely insecure.

The irony is that Tyson is frequently compared to Carl Sagan. Sagan possessed an obvious intellect, yet people rarely remember him for demonstrating how intelligent he was. They remember the wonder. They remember the humility. They remember the sense that he was standing alongside the audience, looking out at the cosmos together. Tyson often appears to occupy a different position entirely. He is not standing beside the audience. He is standing above them, explaining why they should be impressed by his understanding of what they are seeing.

This tendency has become increasingly apparent as Tyson’s public profile has expanded beyond science communication into something resembling full-time celebrity. At some point it became difficult to distinguish where the scientist ended and where the brand began. Tyson comments on politics, culture, education, social issues, public controversies and virtually any topic capable of generating attention. That is not unusual in modern media. Public figures are constantly encouraged to expand their range, broaden their audience and remain visible. The incentives are obvious. The more visible you are, the more opportunities become available. The more opportunities become available, the more valuable visibility becomes. This is where Tyson’s recent engagement with aliens becomes interesting.

For years Tyson’s attitude toward much of the UFO community bordered on outright dismissal. His message was remarkably consistent. Show me the evidence. Show me the spacecraft. Show me the alien. Show me something more substantial than blurry videos, personal testimony and speculation. Until then, there was no serious conversation to be had. Whether one agreed with his tone or not, the position itself was perfectly understandable. Scientific scepticism is not a weakness. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence. The problem is that very little has fundamentally changed.

Despite Congressional hearings, military footage, documentaries, media attention and endless online debate, the public still lacks compelling evidence that extraterrestrials are visiting Earth. The conversation has become louder. The evidence has not become dramatically stronger. The basic sceptical position Tyson spent years defending remains entirely available to him. Which makes his decision to publish a book about communicating with aliens feel remarkably strange.

The issue is not that someone wrote a book about first contact. Science fiction writers, scientists and philosophers have explored such questions for decades. The issue is that Tyson spent years signalling that much of this territory was not worthy of serious attention and now appears eager to participate in it himself. That creates an obvious question. If the evidence has not materially changed, what exactly has changed? The cynical answer is attention.

The possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe has always captured the public imagination in a way few scientific subjects can match. The topic generates clicks, interviews, podcast appearances, book sales and public interest. It sits at the intersection of science, mystery and entertainment. It is difficult to imagine a more commercially attractive subject for a public intellectual seeking relevance. Whether that explanation is correct is almost beside the point. The fact that it feels plausible is itself revealing.

Tyson increasingly suffers from a credibility problem that did not exist a decade ago. The allegations and controversies that surrounded him damaged his public image. His growing tendency toward arrogance has alienated many listeners who once admired him. His expansion into subjects far beyond astrophysics has diluted the authority that originally made him compelling. Each development on its own might have been manageable. Together they have altered how people interpret his behaviour. Ten years ago many people would have assumed Tyson was acting out of intellectual curiosity. Today many people assume he is acting out of self-interest.

The deeper issue extends beyond Tyson himself. Modern media increasingly transforms experts into brands. Scientists become personalities. Communicators become influencers. Expertise becomes intertwined with visibility. Remaining relevant becomes part of the job description. Once that process begins, the incentives start pulling in directions that have very little to do with science and public attention becomes a resource that must be maintained. Topics are selected not only because they are important but because they are engaging and visibility starts rewarding itself.

The danger is not corruption in the traditional sense. The danger is gradual adaptation. A person can remain intelligent, sincere and technically knowledgeable while slowly drifting toward whatever attracts the largest audience. Nobody needs to make a conscious decision for that process to occur. The incentives do most of the work on their own.

Perhaps that is what frustrates me most about Tyson. There is still an audience desperately hungry for what made him compelling in the first place. There are countless people who genuinely want to understand the universe better. They want someone capable of explaining black holes, dark matter, planetary formation and cosmology without turning every discussion into a performance of personal brilliance. They want the science. They want the curiosity. They want the sense of wonder. Increasingly, Tyson seems more interested in maintaining the brand than serving that audience.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe the alien communication book is simply an innocent thought experiment. Maybe there is no contradiction between years of public scepticism and a sudden interest in preparing humanity for first contact. Maybe this is exactly the same Neil deGrasse Tyson who inspired so many people a decade ago.

What I see instead is a talented science communicator who gradually became a celebrity, and a celebrity who increasingly appears willing to follow public attention wherever it leads. That transformation may be good for book sales, podcast downloads and media visibility. I am less convinced it is good for science communication. The unfortunate reality is that every time Tyson chooses the performance over the substance, another person who genuinely wants to learn about science reaches for the stop button.

I do not belong to the camp that argues none of this achieved anything. It clearly did. The governance architecture surrounding large corporations and financial institutions is stronger than it was thirty years ago. My concern is different. I am not convinced that stronger structures automatically create stronger challenge. I am also not convinced that the institutions designed to provide that challenge ever became as independent or as influential as we like to imagine. Before they had fully matured, they began evolving in a different direction. They were expected to become more collaborative, more commercial and more closely aligned with the businesses they oversee. None of those developments sounds unreasonable in isolation. Taken together, however, they raise an uncomfortable question. What happens when the institutions designed to provide independent challenge slowly become institutions expected to support management objectives?

The debate currently taking place around Strategic Advisory inside Internal Audit illustrates the wider issue. I have no objection to the principle. A modern audit function should understand the business and should understand where strategic risks are developing. A function that simply arrives after the event to document control failures will always struggle to remain relevant. The difficulty is that the industry still has not settled on what Strategic Advisory actually means or how it should operate in practice. Traditional assurance creates accountability. Formal findings attract management attention. Audit Committees ask questions. Progress is monitored. Advisory work often operates differently. Management receives the review, thanks the audit team for the quality of its thinking and decides what deserves further action. If the recommendations are expensive, disruptive or politically inconvenient, they can become optional in a way that formal findings rarely are.

I do not think this is really an Internal Audit story. I think it reflects a broader shift across corporate life. Organisations increasingly want business partners. Risk functions are expected to facilitate. Compliance functions are expected to enable. Internal Audit functions are expected to advise. The language has evolved alongside the expectations. Findings become observations. Observations become themes. Themes become insights. There are situations where this is entirely appropriate, but there are also situations where language becomes a mechanism for softening independent challenge. A significant problem can survive for a remarkably long time if everyone agrees to describe it carefully enough.

Most senior executives would reject the suggestion that they are hostile to governance, and many of them would be completely genuine. Large organisations spend enormous amounts of time discussing ethics, culture and accountability. Town halls are full of messages about speaking up and doing the right thing. Internal Audit, Risk and Compliance are publicly praised as important parts of a healthy organisation. I have met many senior leaders who sincerely believe these things.

The modern corporation has become highly sophisticated at articulating the values of good governance. The harder question is whether those values remain equally strong when independent challenge threatens delivery targets, budgets or executive reputations. Large organisations are not simply systems of governance. They are also systems of careers. Executives are expected to deliver financial performance, complete strategic programmes and satisfy shareholders. A significant audit finding can delay a transformation, increase costs and attract unwanted scrutiny from the Board. It is entirely possible for an executive to believe deeply in the value of Internal Audit while simultaneously becoming intensely frustrated when one of their own businesses receives a Needs Improvement report. Public support for challenge and private irritation with its consequences are not contradictions. They are often features of the same incentive structure.

The pressure that follows is rarely explicit. Modern organisations do not usually operate through blunt instructions. Very few executives would tell an auditor to suppress a finding or alter a report. The pressure is more subtle and, in many ways, more effective. Questions begin to emerge about whether the auditors really understood the business. A Head of Audit may be viewed as technically strong but not sufficiently commercial. An experienced auditor may develop a reputation for creating unnecessary challenge. A Risk Officer may be described as someone who struggles with stakeholder management. These labels are powerful because they are difficult to disprove. Nobody wants to become known as difficult. Nobody wants to be the person who cannot build relationships. Careers are built on influence and trust as much as technical competence, and people understand that without anybody needing to say it out loud.

I sometimes wonder whether the industry underestimates how much human behaviour shapes governance outcomes. We prefer to think of governance as a technical discipline because technical problems have technical solutions. We can write a new framework, introduce a new committee or implement a new reporting process. Human incentives are harder to deal with. An auditor knows that continually exercising independent challenge may affect future opportunities. A control function knows that poor relationships with management can make its work more difficult. A senior executive knows that adverse reports will attract Board attention. None of this requires bad people or bad intentions. It simply requires people to understand how organisations work.

The appointment of senior gatekeepers deserves far more scrutiny than it receives. Corporate governance frameworks rightly emphasise the functional independence of the Head of Internal Audit, but independence on an organisational chart is not necessarily the same thing as independence in practice. The individual will spend far more time dealing with executive management than with the Audit Committee. In many organisations executive management also has significant influence over the appointment process itself. I am not suggesting executive management should be excluded from governance discussions or appointments. They are responsible for running the organisation and their views matter. The question is whether the institutions created to provide independent challenge possess sufficient authority to remain independent when their judgement diverges from management’s interests.

Every organisation wants someone who can build relationships, communicate effectively and understand the business. Those are valuable qualities, but they should not outweigh a candidate’s willingness to provide independent challenge when it is needed. A candidate who is collaborative and pragmatic may be preferred over a candidate who is more willing to exercise independent challenge when circumstances require it. The people making those judgements are often the very people the function exists to challenge.

I have gradually come to the view that executive management should have far less influence over these appointments than it currently enjoys. If Internal Audit exists primarily to provide independent assurance to the Board and the Audit Committee, then perhaps those bodies should carry the overwhelming weight in selecting its leader. The argument against that position is always the same. The Head of Audit must work closely with management and therefore management must have confidence in the individual. There is truth in that, but there is another question that receives less attention. Should the people being independently assessed have significant influence over the appointment of the person carrying out that assessment?

Large organisations have also become remarkably sophisticated at managing challenge itself. They know how regulators think because they deal with them constantly. They know how auditors think because they have spent decades responding to findings. They know how Boards think because they prepare the information those Boards receive. They know how to negotiate language, challenge ratings and explain why an issue that appears significant is actually temporary, isolated or already under control. None of this requires deception. It reflects experience and organisational maturity. The practical effect, however, is that management often understands the gatekeepers better than the gatekeepers understand management.

The relationship between management and Boards is another area where public perception and practical reality can differ considerably. There is a comforting image of Boards receiving an unfiltered account of the organisation they oversee and making decisions on the basis of complete information. Practitioners know that reality is much more complicated. Board papers are drafted and reviewed long before directors see them. Senior management discusses what should be escalated immediately, what requires more work and what can wait until a later meeting. Legal teams, Government Relations functions and other senior stakeholders all have legitimate interests in how information is framed. Management exists to manage, and information is one of the things it manages. By the time a difficult issue reaches the Board, it has often passed through several layers of interpretation and judgement.

That process increases the importance of independent gatekeepers who are capable of presenting a different perspective when necessary. The standard answer is that Internal Audit, Risk, Compliance, External Audit and regulators provide that safeguard. My concern is that these institutions are themselves under pressure. Internal Audit depends upon management cooperation and organisational support. Risk and Compliance functions operate inside the businesses they oversee. Modern regulation necessarily relies on governance systems operating effectively inside firms. No regulator can independently observe every decision, transaction or behavioural dynamic inside a complex multinational organisation. External supervision ultimately depends upon the quality and independence of the internal gatekeepers. External Audit operates within a defined scope that was never intended to become a substitute for every other line of defence. Boards depend heavily on the quality of information flowing from all of these sources. The result is an ecosystem where every gatekeeper relies, to some extent, on another gatekeeper.

The Three Lines model remains a sensible framework, but frameworks do not remove human incentives. The model assumes that each line possesses sufficient independence and authority to challenge the others. It assumes that difficult conversations will occur when necessary and that organisations value those conversations even when they are inconvenient. I am beginning to wonder whether modern corporate life increasingly rewards the opposite behaviour. Partnership, collaboration and influence are valuable qualities, but they are not the same thing as independence. If every line is encouraged to become a business partner, there is a risk that nobody feels entirely responsible for being the sceptic.

Another issue that deserves more attention is the gap between complexity and capability. Large organisations rely heavily on relatively junior professionals to perform detailed work across Internal Audit, Risk and Compliance. Many are intelligent and hardworking, but experience still matters. Understanding where the real risk sits is different from completing a testing programme. Recognising that several individually modest weaknesses combine to create a serious governance problem usually comes from years of exposure to similar situations. Senior people often possess that judgement but have less time to devote to detailed analysis because they are occupied with committees, stakeholder management and administrative responsibilities. The pace of organisational and technological change is increasing faster than many control environments were originally designed to accommodate.

Perhaps none of these issues is enough to create the next major corporate failure on its own. Strategic Advisory is not the problem. Collaborative executives are not the problem. Curated Board reporting is not the problem. Junior teams are not the problem. Regulators with finite resources are not the problem. External Audit operating within a defined mandate is not the problem. Heads of Audit building relationships with management are not the problem. Ambitious executives protecting delivery deadlines are not the problem. Organisations becoming highly skilled at managing challenge are not the problem.

The concern is that these things do not exist independently of one another. They reinforce each other. They create an environment where difficult conversations become easier to postpone, where formal findings become advisory insights, where Boards receive carefully managed versions of reality and where independent functions are quietly encouraged to be constructive rather than disruptive. They create a culture where the label of being difficult becomes a career risk and where maintaining relationships can gradually become more important than sustaining effective challenge.

I do not believe the next major corporate failure will emerge because organisations stopped investing in governance. I think it is more likely to emerge from organisations that appear exceptionally well governed. There will be dashboards, committee structures, assurance maps, strategic advisory reviews, regulatory engagement and carefully documented management actions. There will be evidence that everyone took risk management seriously. The larger question will be whether anybody possessed enough authority, independence and institutional backing to force action when the important issues finally appeared.

Future inquiries will almost certainly discover that warning signs existed. Reports will have been written. Concerns will have been raised. Meetings will have been held. Management actions will have been agreed. Regulators will have engaged. Boards will have been informed, at least to some degree. The more difficult question may be why the institutions designed to make powerful organisations uncomfortable no longer possessed enough influence to insist that something had to change.

The lesson I take from Enron and the crises that followed is not that governance frameworks are unimportant. Enron was not simply a failure of one company. It was an ecosystem failure involving governance, external assurance, market incentives and regulatory oversight. Major corporate collapses rarely belong to a single institution. Organisations eventually learn how to govern the governance itself. They learn how to manage expectations, sequence information and shape difficult conversations. Those capabilities become more sophisticated every year. I am far less certain that the gatekeepers are evolving at the same pace.

The debate around Strategic Advisory is therefore only a small part of a much larger story. The real issue may be that we have spent decades strengthening governance structures while quietly weakening the people expected to operate them. If independent functions are increasingly selected, rewarded and promoted for their ability to build relationships, avoid unnecessary disruption and support management objectives, there is a risk that the qualities which justified their existence begin to erode. The ultimate authority of independent control functions does not come from organisational charts. It comes from whether Boards and regulators are willing to support those functions when their conclusions become politically inconvenient. I am not arguing that another Enron is inevitable. I am asking whether we are slowly creating an environment where effective challenge becomes accommodation, where governance becomes performance and where the next major corporate collapse grows inside an organisation that looked exceptionally well controlled right up until the moment it failed.

I think there is more intellectual honesty in stating a position this plainly than in hiding behind endless qualifications. I also think many of Harris’s critics fail to engage with the strongest version of his argument. Hamas would commit a genuine genocide against Israelis if it possessed the means to do so. It deliberately embeds itself among civilians. It has repeatedly placed ideological and military objectives above the welfare of ordinary Palestinians. Any state confronting an enemy organised around those principles is going to face choices that would not exist under normal conditions.

I have no difficulty accepting those points. I also have no interest in pretending that if I had been living in Israel on October 7th I would have responded with philosophical calm. I suspect I would have wanted security. I suspect I would have wanted decisive action. I suspect I would have supported policies that appear much easier to criticise from thousands of miles away.

The disagreement I have with Harris is not over whether Hamas is evil. It is over what happens after that judgment has been made.

One sentence in his essay seems to carry the entire structure of his argument. He writes that none of Israel’s failings, however grave, alter his sense that the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast. I believe he means exactly what he says. I also think this sentence deserves more attention than it has received because it explains why so many debates about Israel seem to go nowhere.

Once the ethical asymmetry has been established, individual events begin to lose much of their independent force. Civilian deaths are acknowledged but they do not substantially alter the larger picture. The actions of settlers are acknowledged but they do not substantially alter the larger picture. Political extremism inside Israel is acknowledged but it does not substantially alter the larger picture. Each event is absorbed into a framework that has already decided which side occupies the moral high ground.

That framework may be correct. My concern is not that Harris has reached the wrong conclusion. My concern is that I no longer know what kind of event could significantly disturb the conclusion itself.

This is not the same as asking for a casualty threshold or demanding that someone identify a magic number beyond which military action becomes unjustified. War does not work that way. Serious moral decisions are not made by balancing columns in a spreadsheet. They involve context, objectives, intelligence, and alternatives that outsiders rarely understand completely.

But if there is no number, there still has to be some principle that limits the framework itself. Otherwise the same justification can simply expand to accommodate whatever follows. Military necessity explains one action and then another and then another, until it becomes difficult to distinguish between a principle that guides events and a principle that merely adapts to them.

I have spent enough time writing about Sam Harris to know what many of his supporters would say at this point. They would argue that his position remains open to evidence. They would point to the final section of his essay where he tells readers not to place him on a pedestal and encourages them to continue bringing arguments and facts that might prove him wrong. I take that invitation seriously and I have no reason to doubt his sincerity.

The difficulty, as I see it, is that a framework can remain open to new facts while becoming increasingly resistant to new moral weight. Facts continue to arrive, but their ability to change the overall picture gradually diminishes because the larger judgment has already become so dominant.

The question of radicalisation illustrates the problem. Harris has argued for many years that militant Islam is rooted in ideas that have to be taken seriously. I think he is right about that. Religious beliefs matter. Ideology matters. Some people genuinely organise their lives around visions of martyrdom and holy war.

At the same time, violence changes people. Families who lose children are changed by it. Communities that experience repeated destruction are changed by it. Individuals who would never have considered extremist movements can become susceptible to them after personal catastrophe. This does not excuse terrorism and it does not reduce the moral responsibility of those who commit it. It simply recognises that ideology is not the only force shaping human behaviour.

If that observation is true, then military action can suppress one form of extremism while helping to create conditions for another. A strategy that appears necessary in the short term can carry costs that emerge much later. Those costs may not outweigh the immediate threat, but they remain part of the moral and strategic calculation.

Harris would probably argue that many of his critics underestimate the independent force of ideology. I think there is truth in that criticism. I also wonder whether his own framework risks underestimating the force of accumulated trauma and the political consequences that follow from it.

The interesting part of his latest essay is not that he refuses to debate critics of Israel. Public intellectuals are free to choose which conversations they think are worth having. The more interesting question is whether some moral frameworks eventually become so stable that they stop being tested by the events they are supposed to explain.

I do not think Sam Harris is dishonest. I do not think he lacks compassion. I do not think he is indifferent to the suffering of innocent people. I think he has built a moral framework around a distinction that he believes is fundamental: the difference between a society trying to preserve life and a movement that celebrates death. That distinction may be one of the most important features of the conflict.

I am simply not convinced that it can carry as much weight as Harris now asks it to carry. A moral framework should help us interpret events, but it should also remain vulnerable to them. If every new tragedy simply reinforces a conclusion that was already fixed in advance, then the framework gradually stops functioning as a guide and starts functioning as an identity.

Perhaps I am wrong about that. It would not be the first time. But after reading Harris’s latest essay I found myself asking a question that I do not think applies only to him.

What kind of evidence should force a serious person to reconsider the moral architecture through which they understand a war?

That seems like a worthwhile question because the alternative is not certainty. The alternative is the quiet assumption that the answer was known before the next event even happened.

This is not a new phenomenon. People have always speculated about motives. Politicians lie. Journalists chase attention. Public figures protect their interests. Human beings are perfectly capable of disguising self-interest as principle. The difference is that motive now often arrives before engagement. Rather than being something inferred after examining an argument, it has become the lens through which the argument is viewed from the outset.

The result is that many discussions never reach the substance of the disagreement. The conversation shifts almost immediately toward incentives, status, tribal loyalties, hidden agendas and personal psychology. Once a satisfactory explanation has been found for why somebody holds a belief, there is often remarkably little curiosity about whether the belief itself might be true. A diagnosis has taken the place of an argument.

What makes this habit attractive is that it feels like skepticism. Looking behind the curtain has become a mark of sophistication. It is easier to explain a person’s motives than it is to engage with their reasoning, and it often feels more intelligent too. Anyone can discuss an argument. It takes a certain kind of social fluency to discuss the incentives behind it. The problem is that motive analysis can quickly become a substitute for critical thinking rather than an aid to it.

The growing tendency to dismiss writing as AI-generated follows the same pattern. Whether a piece of writing was produced by a human or a machine is sometimes an interesting question. What is striking is how often the question overwhelms every other consideration. Instead of asking whether an argument is coherent, persuasive or correct, people begin debating authorship. The text itself recedes into the background. A discussion that begins with ideas ends with forensic speculation.

None of this means people should stop questioning motives. There are grifters, opportunists and bad-faith actors in every field of public life. The problem is not that people consider these possibilities. The problem is that they increasingly stop there. Once a person has been explained, many feel no need to engage with what they have said.

Benefit of the doubt was never about politeness. It was a practical requirement for disagreement. It meant temporarily accepting that another person might actually believe what they are saying, even if they are mistaken. Without that assumption, persuasion becomes impossible. Every argument turns into a dispute about character, incentives and hidden motives. Nobody changes their mind because nobody is listening for reasons anymore. They are listening for explanations.

The Richard Dawkins Award was supposedly created to honour people defending secularism, rationality, science, and free inquiry. Twenty years ago that probably sounded rebellious and culturally disruptive. Back then the New Atheists positioned themselves as outsiders attacking religious dogma, irrationality, tribal thinking, and institutional conformity. Harris built his reputation partly by presenting himself as somebody willing to follow reason wherever it led regardless of social consequences. That version of Sam Harris at least felt dangerous to existing institutions and moral orthodoxies.

The problem is that Sam Harris is no longer an outsider in any meaningful sense at all. He increasingly sounds like the exhausted head of institutional liberal rationalism permanently trapped in reaction mode against Rogan, Musk, Trump, populism, conspiracy culture, podcast culture, and whatever new internet subculture currently threatens elite professional-managerial sensibilities online. Large parts of his public output now revolve around warning people about misinformation, irrationality, dangerous conversations, authoritarianism, bad incentives, internet populism, and the collapse of institutional trust. The man who once sold himself as a fearless critic of orthodoxy increasingly sounds like somebody desperately trying to defend a collapsing establishment consensus from cultural forces he no longer understands emotionally.

That is what makes the award feel so hollow and self-congratulatory. The New Atheists once marketed themselves as critics of institutional thinking and tribal certainty. Now they increasingly behave like their own little secular priesthood endlessly reassuring each other that they are still the rational adults in the room while the chaotic internet masses descend into madness outside. The whole atmosphere around it feels less like intellectual courage and more like a retirement dinner for people who still believe they are dangerous rebels because they criticised religion during the Bush administration.

What makes Harris especially frustrating is that he still frames himself psychologically as though he exists outside tribalism altogether. He continues presenting himself as somebody uniquely committed to reason while showing increasingly obvious emotional fixation around figures like Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, podcast culture, and internet populism generally. At this point entire sections of his public identity seem organised around reacting to people he supposedly considers intellectually unserious or socially dangerous. Rogan lives in his head constantly despite Harris clearly believing he stands intellectually above him. Musk clearly irritates him deeply because Musk now occupies cultural territory Harris probably assumed rationalist intellectuals themselves would continue dominating. Trump meanwhile remains the great organising villain holding enormous sections of Harris’s worldview emotionally together years after everyone already understands what Trump is.

At some point you have to ask whether Harris is still following reason wherever it leads or simply orbiting the same outrage-feedback-loop economy he claims to critique. The uncomfortable irony is that Harris increasingly depends on the existence of these figures culturally almost as much as they depend on critics like him. Rogan, Musk, Trump, conspiracies, misinformation, populism, and internet irrationality now function as recurring antagonists sustaining the entire emotional structure of his podcast and public positioning. He sounds less like somebody transcending tribal thinking and more like somebody trapped inside a permanent psychological war against the internet itself.

The funniest part is that Harris would instantly recognise these patterns if they appeared inside religion or politics. He built an entire career criticising self-reinforcing belief systems, ideological capture, tribal identity, moral certainty, and institutional groupthink. Yet modern secular rationalism increasingly operates through many of the exact same social dynamics. There are approved authorities, approved fears, approved enemies, approved moral frameworks, and approved public performances of rationality. The language changed. Human psychology largely did not.

That is why the Richard Dawkins Award increasingly feels less like recognition for intellectual bravery and more like an establishment participation trophy for people who still imagine themselves as anti-establishment. Watching Richard Dawkins hand Sam Harris an award in 2026 does not feel culturally disruptive anymore. It feels like two aging aristocrats of secular liberalism reassuring each other that they are still bravely defending civilisation while the rest of the internet quietly stopped caring about their old intellectual hierarchy years ago.

The deeper problem for Harris is that the internet evolved while he psychologically remained attached to an older model of public intellectual authority. The New Atheists emerged during a period when rationalism, science, secularism, and institutional credibility still carried enormous cultural prestige online. That world no longer exists in the same form. Today the internet rewards attention, identity, tribal belonging, spectacle, emotional energy, and personality far more aggressively than careful rational analysis. Harris clearly despises much of that transformation while simultaneously being unable to stop reacting to it constantly. That tension increasingly defines him more than his actual ideas do.

Watching Sam Harris receive the Richard Dawkins Award in 2026 did not feel like watching a dangerous thinker being recognised for courageous inquiry. It felt like watching the establishment congratulate itself for still believing it represents rebellion.

Every post now follows the same strange rhythm that has become instantly recognisable across the platform. Somebody is always “humbled,” “thrilled,” “grateful,” or “excited to announce” something that clearly exhausted them emotionally in real life. Executives who quietly spent six months restructuring teams, freezing promotions, and stretching existing staff further suddenly appear online discussing empathy, authenticity, wellbeing, and leadership purpose as though they are spiritual mentors rather than middle-aged spreadsheet managers protecting quarterly targets. The language itself has become so artificial that large parts of LinkedIn now genuinely read like AI talking to AI while actual human beings slowly disappear underneath the performance.

What makes the platform especially fascinating is that almost everyone privately recognises how fake it has become while continuing to participate in the performance publicly anyway. Professionals constantly mock LinkedIn in private WhatsApp groups, office conversations, and dinner discussions while posting the exact same polished nonsense themselves the next morning. That contradiction reveals something important about modern corporate culture because professional survival increasingly depends not only on competence but on the ability to perform emotionally acceptable corporate identity continuously in public. Many people already understand the game perfectly well. They simply no longer believe they can safely opt out of it.

The rise of AI has intensified this atmosphere dramatically because corporate language was already halfway machine-generated long before ChatGPT arrived. Endless posts about leadership, resilience, transformation, growth mindsets, innovation, and productivity now blend together into one giant stream of emotionally sterilised optimism. Every executive suddenly sounds like a motivational speaker trapped inside a software update announcement while middle managers repost leadership clichés they clearly do not believe themselves. Entire personalities increasingly appear constructed from corporate therapy language designed to signal ambition, emotional maturity, technological enthusiasm, and ideological safety simultaneously.

What makes this even darker is that many people posting this content are probably not consciously fake at all. Most are simply adapting rationally to the incentives surrounding them because LinkedIn increasingly functions less like a networking platform and more like a permanent public performance review. Your employability, professionalism, emotional stability, ideological safety, and corporate compatibility are constantly being assessed by invisible audiences including recruiters, executives, former colleagues, clients, competitors, and future employers. Under those conditions authentic expression starts becoming genuinely dangerous because professional identity slowly merges with public identity completely.

That is why the platform increasingly rewards the safest possible forms of personality. Corporate positivity performs well because it signals compliance and emotional reliability. Controlled vulnerability performs well because it creates carefully managed relatability without threatening the broader professional performance underneath. AI evangelism performs well because organisations desperately want employees who appear enthusiastic about automation rather than privately terrified of becoming obsolete. Even criticism on LinkedIn usually arrives wrapped carefully inside soft leadership language designed to avoid offending the corporate machine itself.

The result is a platform where millions of professionals slowly flatten their personalities into professionally acceptable templates over time. You start noticing that many people now speak almost entirely through management language even outside work itself because career identity has consumed ordinary identity so thoroughly. Everything becomes “value creation,” “growth,” “impact,” “alignment,” “mindset,” or “opportunity” regardless of whether anyone involved actually talks that way naturally in real life. People no longer sound like human beings with distinct personalities. They sound like internal communications departments wearing human skin while trying desperately to remain employable in a shrinking corporate economy.

I realised how extreme this had become when LinkedIn eventually removed my account because I wanted to remain anonymous on the platform. They demanded identification to continue participating. This exposed what LinkedIn increasingly is underneath all the networking rhetoric. The platform does not merely want professional interaction between individuals. It wants verified economic identity tied directly to your real-world employability, reputation, relationships, opinions, and corporate legitimacy. Your public professional self increasingly becomes inseparable from your actual identity inside systems designed to reward visibility, conformity, and permanent self-presentation.

That is partly why LinkedIn now feels more psychologically exhausting than almost any other social platform online. Twitter/X at least allows visible conflict, irrationality, humour, ego, and flashes of genuine personality even when the environment itself becomes toxic. Reddit allows anonymity and occasional honesty because people are not forced constantly to perform employability publicly in front of professional networks. LinkedIn increasingly feels like a giant corporate roleplay environment where millions of anxious professionals perform emotionally optimised versions of themselves while suppressing fear, resentment, insecurity, exhaustion, ambition, and competition underneath polished language about collaboration and growth.

Meanwhile everyone collectively pretends this entire atmosphere is completely normal and healthy. Professionals now publicly narrate their careers as though they are brands rather than human beings trying to survive economically inside unstable systems. Layoffs become “new opportunities,” burnout becomes “growth,” and emotional exhaustion becomes “resilience” because ordinary human language increasingly sounds too risky inside corporate environments obsessed with positivity and adaptability. The platform has essentially become a live demonstration of what happens when identity itself gets absorbed almost entirely into market incentives and corporate performance culture.

I honestly think many professionals can feel this happening psychologically even while continuing to participate in it every day. The problem is that stepping outside the performance increasingly carries real professional risk because careers, opportunities, income, and status now depend heavily on remaining visible and acceptable inside these systems. That creates a strange collective self-awareness where millions of people privately recognise the absurdity of LinkedIn while continuing to feed the machine publicly because the economic consequences of disengagement feel increasingly real.

LinkedIn did not create fake corporate culture from nothing. It simply exposed how much of modern professional life already depended on performance, image management, emotional suppression, and strategic self-presentation long before social media arrived.

That is what makes listening to him so exhausting over long periods of time. You constantly feel as though there is a genuinely valuable ten-minute conversation trapped somewhere inside a sprawling two or three-hour performance dominated by self-mythologising language, endless framing devices, and intellectual throat-clearing. Weinstein often speaks as though he is carrying the burden of truths and insights too profound, dangerous, or sophisticated for normal institutions to process properly. Even when parts of his analysis are reasonable, the theatrical delivery increasingly overshadows the substance underneath it.

One of the recurring frustrations with Weinstein is the way he positions himself rhetorically within conversations. He rarely presents ideas simply and directly. Instead, everything becomes wrapped in layers of implication suggesting that he exists slightly above the intellectual systems surrounding him while simultaneously being unfairly excluded from them. In older Rogan appearances this tendency already existed, but over time it has become increasingly difficult to separate genuine insight from personal mythology.

A good example comes from one of his earlier Rogan conversations where he says:

“If you’re rich and you’re smart and you’re connected, if you’re part of some secret program and you’re watching this, please reach out to the Joe Rogan Experience or Eric Weinstein to turn the ship around.”

This captures the problem perfectly. On one level, Weinstein is discussing institutional decline and hidden power structures, which can be legitimate topics. But the phrasing itself sounds almost comically self-important, as though he occupies some uniquely critical intellectual position in the fate of civilisation. It is this constant tendency toward grandiosity that makes many listeners eventually recoil even when they agree with parts of his underlying critique.

The same dynamic appeared again when Weinstein discussed his appearances on shows like American Alchemy and implied that elements within government circles had quietly reached out to him afterward. The way he frames these stories increasingly sounds less like somebody carefully describing events and more like somebody subtly building mythology around himself in real time. Throughout the Rogan conversation there is this recurring implication that elite insiders, hidden programs, intelligence-connected figures, or powerful institutional actors continuously recognise unusual depth and importance in Weinstein that broader society somehow fails to appreciate properly. Even when parts of the underlying discussion are interesting, the atmosphere becomes exhausting because every topic slowly bends back toward Eric Weinstein’s own exceptionalism. That is ultimately the issue with him. He often sounds less like a man communicating ideas clearly and more like somebody narrating the legend of himself while the conversation is still happening.

The frustrating part is that Weinstein is often directionally correct about certain things. He has spoken intelligently about institutional stagnation, elite incentives, scientific gatekeeping, media dysfunction, and cultural fragmentation long before these topics became mainstream conversation online. He is capable of genuine intellectual honesty at times and occasionally raises questions many others avoid. That is why people continue listening to him despite the growing frustration he creates.

The problem is that he increasingly seems unable to resist framing himself as a central misunderstood figure within every discussion. Conversations gradually stop being about the underlying issue itself and start becoming about Eric Weinstein’s relationship to the issue, Eric Weinstein’s exclusion from institutions, Eric Weinstein’s warnings, Eric Weinstein’s frameworks, or Eric Weinstein’s sense that he has been uniquely ignored by systems too broken to recognise his importance properly. Even when the broader point has merit, the narcissistic framing slowly contaminates the credibility of the argument.

This is where podcast culture becomes part of the problem as well. Long-form conversations allow personalities like Weinstein to operate almost entirely through atmosphere, cadence, and perceived intellectual depth rather than concise clarity. Rogan rarely interrupts guests aggressively or forces them to simplify their ideas under pressure, which often works brilliantly with certain guests but becomes disastrous with personalities prone to self-indulgence. Instead of sharpening arguments, the format often rewards sprawling verbal performance and conceptual inflation.

That inflation becomes particularly noticeable because Weinstein often speaks as though every observation carries civilisation-level significance. A relatively straightforward point about institutional incentives or scientific politics becomes wrapped in language suggesting hidden revolutions, suppressed paradigms, elite blindness, or existential cultural collapse. Over time the listener begins noticing the gap between the actual insight being communicated and the dramatic framing surrounding it. The ratio slowly starts drifting too far toward performance.

What makes this especially frustrating is that there genuinely is an intelligent and worthwhile thinker somewhere underneath all the rhetorical excess. If Weinstein communicated more directly, spoke with greater humility, and resisted the temptation to constantly elevate his own role within every discussion, he would probably be taken far more seriously by a much broader audience. Instead, many listeners eventually arrive at the same emotional conclusion. They stop focusing on the genuinely interesting parts because the constant self-mythologising becomes too distracting to ignore.

This is why reactions to Weinstein often become strangely polarised. Some listeners hear a misunderstood intellectual visionary courageously challenging broken systems. Others hear an intelligent man trapped inside his own grandiosity who desperately wants to be recognised as historically significant. The uncomfortable reality is that both interpretations probably contain elements of truth simultaneously. That is precisely what makes him such a compelling but ultimately frustrating figure to listen to.

The deeper issue, however, extends beyond Weinstein himself. Modern podcast culture increasingly rewards personalities rather than precision. Guests who speak confidently, frame themselves dramatically, and create the impression of hidden depth often outperform people who communicate clearly and cautiously. Long-form podcasts create environments where charisma, narrative framing, and conversational dominance can easily blur together with genuine expertise. Over time audiences begin confusing verbal complexity with intellectual profundity.

That may be the real reason Weinstein divides people so sharply. Many listeners instinctively sense that there is genuine intelligence present while simultaneously feeling manipulated by the theatrical framing surrounding it. You leave the conversation thinking he probably said several important and intellectually honest things, yet somehow the overwhelming emotional residue is still irritation. That is a difficult achievement in itself.

At some point the question stops being whether Eric Weinstein is smart because clearly he is. The more interesting question becomes whether he is capable of communicating insight without constantly inflating his own importance in the process. Increasingly, I am not sure he can.

What struck me almost immediately during the debate was how badly prepared some of the alternative-history figures looked once confronted directly by somebody who knew the subject in detail and was willing to push back aggressively. One of the guests had apparently never even been to Egypt despite speaking confidently about the civilisation and its mysteries to large online audiences. Others relied heavily on implication, atmosphere, and broad claims that sounded compelling inside friendly podcast environments but quickly weakened once basic factual questions were applied consistently. The contrast became difficult to ignore because the confidence many of these personalities project online often creates the impression they possess overwhelming evidence that mainstream archaeology simply refuses to confront honestly.

The uncomfortable reality is that several of the arguments began collapsing under surprisingly basic scrutiny once the conversation moved outside the emotionally supportive atmosphere of podcast culture. Claims that sound incredibly persuasive when delivered confidently over three hours to sympathetic hosts suddenly looked vague, speculative, or poorly evidenced when somebody knowledgeable interrupted the flow and demanded specificity. Watching that happen forced me to confront something slightly uncomfortable about myself because I realised how easily I had absorbed parts of this broader atmosphere over time without fully recognising it.

To be clear, I still think Graham Hancock raises interesting questions and I do not place him in the same category as every personality orbiting alternative-history media. I have written previously in partial support of Hancock because I think there are legitimate reasons to remain open-minded about aspects of ancient civilisations, lost history, and the possibility that mainstream institutions can become overly rigid or dismissive. History is full of examples where accepted narratives later changed significantly after new evidence emerged. Remaining intellectually open-minded is not the problem. The deeper issue is what long-form podcast culture does psychologically to the way people evaluate truth, expertise, and confidence over time.

After enough exposure to the same personalities, the same narratives, and the same conversational atmospheres, familiarity itself starts becoming evidence emotionally. You hear the same ideas repeated confidently across multiple podcasts while guests validate one another continuously and hosts nod along sympathetically because confrontation often damages the relaxed conversational atmosphere these shows depend on. Entire ecosystems slowly form where certain assumptions stop feeling controversial internally because everyone surrounding the conversation already shares the same emotional orientation toward the topic. Once that happens, listeners begin confusing repetition and social reinforcement with actual validation.

That creates a dangerous illusion of intellectual rigor because long-form conversations naturally feel serious even when the underlying arguments remain weak or speculative. Listeners begin mistaking conversational fluency for expertise and confidence for evidence because the atmosphere itself encourages emotional trust rather than disciplined skepticism. This becomes especially persuasive when the host is socially skilled and emotionally likable because disagreement starts feeling psychologically unpleasant rather than intellectually necessary. Inside these environments, alternative explanations accumulate constantly while very little receives serious adversarial scrutiny from people who genuinely understand the field deeply.

Watching the Hawass debate made me realise how rarely many of these personalities face genuine resistance from knowledgeable critics in real time. Friendly podcast environments create conversational momentum that often allows weak claims to pass unchallenged because nobody wants to interrupt the flow aggressively or appear closed-minded in front of audiences trained to value openness above precision. Once somebody enters the conversation who is willing to challenge assumptions directly, however, the atmosphere changes immediately and many ideas suddenly appear far less stable than they did previously.

The more I thought about it afterward, the more I realised this pattern extends far beyond ancient Egypt or alternative history communities specifically. The exact same psychological mechanism now exists across enormous parts of internet culture including politics, wellness, AI discourse, UFO communities, self-improvement media, and even public intellectual spaces. People increasingly build entire worldviews through repeated exposure to personalities rather than through direct engagement with evidence, expertise, or adversarial scrutiny. Podcast ecosystems create tribes where listeners gradually start trusting certain figures emotionally because they spend hundreds of hours listening to them speak casually and confidently in relaxed conversational settings.

That emotional familiarity changes the way audiences process information whether they realise it or not. After listening to somebody for years, the host or recurring guest stops feeling like a stranger and starts feeling psychologically trustworthy almost independently of whether their expertise genuinely justifies that level of authority. Once that emotional attachment forms, criticism no longer feels like disagreement over evidence alone. It starts feeling personal because audiences unconsciously identify with the ecosystem and the personalities inside it. Defending the idea becomes psychologically tied to defending the people and communities they emotionally trust.

I have fallen into this trap myself more than once, which is partly why the Hawass debate stayed with me afterward. The danger is not simply that podcasters or alternative-history figures are dishonest because many of them are clearly intelligent, curious, and often acting in good faith. The deeper problem is that repeated conversational exposure creates a false sense of certainty around ideas that may never have been properly stress-tested in the first place. Listeners gradually begin mistaking social reinforcement for validation and narrative coherence for truth because familiarity itself lowers skepticism over time.

This same pattern increasingly surrounds figures like Sam Harris, wellness influencers, political commentators, AI personalities, and countless other online intellectual ecosystems. Audiences slowly stop evaluating individual arguments carefully and instead begin trusting or distrusting entire personalities wholesale depending on tribal alignment and emotional familiarity. Once that happens, people are no longer thinking critically about specific claims. They are following individuals and communities emotionally while convincing themselves they are independently evaluating evidence.

That is what ultimately made the Piers Morgan debate feel important to me beyond the specifics of Egyptology itself. Watching supposedly revolutionary thinkers struggle under relatively straightforward questioning exposed how fragile many internet-driven intellectual ecosystems can become once they leave friendly conversational environments and encounter sustained scrutiny. It also forced me to confront how easily intelligent people, myself included, can drift into forms of passive intellectual tribalism without fully recognising it happening in real time.

The modern internet rewards familiarity and confidence far more effectively than careful uncertainty because confidence spreads emotionally while caution rarely does. Podcasts intensify this dynamic enormously because they simulate intimacy exceptionally well and encourage audiences to build emotional trust with personalities they have never actually met. Over time that emotional trust can become strong enough that audiences stop distinguishing clearly between enjoying somebody’s personality and accepting the truth of their ideas.

That may be one of the defining intellectual problems of the modern podcast era. Millions of people now consume information primarily through personalities they already trust emotionally rather than through structures designed to challenge assumptions rigorously and systematically. Once that shift occurs, confidence, familiarity, and repetition slowly start replacing the much harder work of genuine critical thinking.

I understand that feeling because I live inside it myself. I have spent more than twenty years inside global financial services and none of this was especially planned from the beginning. Like many people, I simply kept moving toward the next opportunity because it felt sensible at the time. Work hard, progress steadily, become more valuable, increase income, and build security. At each stage the decisions appeared rational individually, but careers are rarely shaped through one dramatic life-changing moment. They are built gradually through hundreds of smaller decisions that only reveal their cumulative consequences much later when your life has become financially and psychologically dependent on continuing down the same path.

Eventually you wake up in your forties inside a life that is extremely difficult to step away from. That is the part people rarely discuss honestly, especially successful professionals. Once you have children, mortgages, school fees, aging parents, financial commitments, and other people depending on your stability, the psychological relationship with work changes completely. Your career stops being primarily about ambition or fulfilment and becomes tied instead to responsibility, risk management, and fear of instability. You are no longer making decisions only for yourself because other people’s futures become attached to your ability to continue functioning inside systems you may privately dislike more and more each year.

At the same time, the corporate world itself has become increasingly hollow in ways that are difficult to articulate clearly unless you have spent years inside large organisations. The language remains strangely upbeat and performative despite the atmosphere underneath it changing significantly. Leadership discussions revolve endlessly around growth, transformation, innovation, development, wellbeing, and purpose while HR departments organise fireside chats where executives explain how to “navigate your career journey” as though broad upward mobility still genuinely exists for large numbers of people. Beneath all of this corporate theatre, however, many organisations now feel emotionally dead in a way that becomes impossible to ignore once you have seen enough internal restructures, endless efficiency programmes, and leadership messaging detached from operational reality.

Remote work intensified this feeling enormously for me over time. At first it seemed liberating because there was no commuting, more flexibility, more time with family, and fewer pointless office rituals draining energy each day. But eventually work started becoming a permanent digital fog where every day blended into the next with endless Teams calls, endless presentations, endless corporate messaging, and endless discussions about strategy, optimisation, transformation, and productivity. The physical separation between life and work slowly disappeared until it felt as though the corporate machine had followed everyone directly into their homes and simply stayed there permanently.

What makes this psychologically exhausting is not hard work itself because most people at senior levels are perfectly capable of handling pressure and responsibility. The deeper exhaustion comes from the growing sense that much of modern corporate life now revolves around maintaining systems and narratives that fewer and fewer people genuinely believe in anymore. Employees are told constantly to “upskill,” “increase visibility,” “drive their careers,” and “embrace change” while organisations quietly reduce opportunities, compress structures, and stretch existing teams further each year. The language of growth continues while the actual environment increasingly revolves around cost discipline, operational efficiency, and protecting shareholder expectations above almost everything else.

I now sit in leadership discussions where senior leaders openly praise leaner structures and expanded remits as though permanently doing more work with fewer people represents some form of organisational enlightenment. Entire layers of management remain frozen while ambitious employees underneath continue absorbing additional responsibility with very little genuine movement upward available to them. Everyone continues performing optimism publicly because acknowledging the reality directly would destabilise morale, but privately many people already understand what is happening. The traditional corporate ladder still exists visually inside organisations, but more and more of the rungs have quietly disappeared.

That realisation creates a strange emotional tension for people like me because there is no simple villain in the story. I do not hate capitalism, ambition, or financial success. I understand why corporations optimise relentlessly because markets reward efficiency and punish weakness brutally. I also understand that many people would gladly trade places with someone in my position given the financial security attached to senior corporate roles. That awareness often creates guilt around dissatisfaction because it feels ungrateful to complain while living a materially comfortable life compared to much of the world.

Yet psychological entrapment can exist alongside material success. In some ways it becomes harder to discuss precisely because the external markers of success remain intact. People assume senior professionals with good salaries and stable families must feel fulfilled because modern society treats financial achievement as evidence that the system worked properly for you. What often goes unspoken is how many successful people privately feel trapped inside lives they drifted into gradually rather than consciously choosing with full awareness of the long-term trade-offs involved.

I increasingly suspect millions of professionals now exist inside this psychological state without discussing it openly. Many wake each morning already emotionally fatigued before opening their laptops because the work itself no longer feels connected to anything meaningful beyond maintaining financial stability and protecting the structure of their existing lives. They continue functioning competently because responsibility leaves little alternative, but internally the sense of identification with the corporate world weakens more every year. The ambition that once drove them slowly transforms into maintenance, preservation, and quiet endurance.

AI only sharpens this atmosphere further because everyone can sense where large corporations are heading even if leadership avoids discussing it directly. Employees are encouraged constantly to automate workflows, improve efficiency, increase productivity, and reduce manual effort while simultaneously being reassured that exciting opportunities still exist for adaptable people willing to evolve. The contradiction underneath these conversations is obvious. Organisations are structurally moving toward needing fewer people while publicly continuing to perform the language of development, opportunity, and long-term growth.

Perhaps the strangest part of all this is how rarely people speak honestly about it in professional environments. Most corporate communication now feels carefully sanitised to remove genuine emotional reality from the workplace entirely. Leaders discuss resilience, transformation, wellbeing, and purpose in language so polished and abstract that it barely resembles the actual psychological experience of modern professional life anymore. Meanwhile employees perform engagement because mortgages still need paying, children still need supporting, and stepping away from highly paid careers becomes increasingly risky once your entire life structure depends on maintaining financial continuity.

That is the trap many successful professionals quietly find themselves inside. They climbed the ladder successfully only to discover they never really stopped long enough to ask whether they actually wanted the life waiting at the top of it. By the time the question becomes unavoidable, leaving often feels far more dangerous than continuing. So people keep going, keep presenting professionally on calls, keep discussing strategy and transformation, and keep performing belief in systems they increasingly experience as emotionally empty.

The uncomfortable truth is that modern corporate life often does not collapse dramatically. It simply becomes spiritually thinner year after year while remaining materially functional enough to continue indefinitely. That may be why so many highly successful people now seem quietly restless beneath the surface. They are not failing inside the system. In many cases they succeeded exactly as they were supposed to. The problem is that success itself increasingly feels like a trap very few people know how to leave behind safely once they have built an entire life around it.

That assumption has weakened dramatically over the past several years, and recent events have accelerated the feeling further. Over the past few weeks alone the United States has moved deeper into confrontation with Iran while simultaneously threatening allies with tariffs, escalating rhetoric around China again, and pressuring Europe publicly in ways that would have once been considered strategically reckless. Europe itself increasingly resembles a continent slowly realising that dependence on American political stability may now represent a vulnerability rather than a guarantee of security. At the same time, global corporations continue restructuring around AI and relentless efficiency pressure while publicly pretending the future remains stable, manageable, and full of opportunity for employees willing to remain adaptable.

What makes the current atmosphere so strange is not simply instability itself because instability has always existed underneath the surface of history. The deeper shift is psychological. More and more people are beginning to suspect that many of the institutions governing modern life are no longer operating from coherent long-term strategy at all. Instead they increasingly appear reactive, improvisational, and emotionally driven by short-term incentives that change almost week to week depending on markets, media cycles, political pressure, or public outrage online.

Everything now feels accelerated beyond the ability of institutions to process events coherently. Governments react to social media narratives in real time while corporations reorganise themselves constantly around quarterly earnings pressure and shareholder expectations. AI companies openly acknowledge they are racing toward technologies capable of radically reshaping labour markets while simultaneously admitting they do not fully understand the downstream implications themselves. Military escalations unfold while public explanations remain vague, contradictory, and emotionally charged. Entire populations now absorb geopolitics through podcasts, clips, influencers, memes, and algorithmically amplified outrage rather than through serious institutional analysis.

The internet has intensified this feeling enormously because every major event is now converted into content almost immediately. War footage spreads alongside jokes, conspiracy theories, AI-generated misinformation, and influencer commentary before people have time to establish even the most basic understanding of what actually occurred. Political crises become entertainment cycles. Economic anxiety becomes motivational content on LinkedIn. Public distrust itself has become monetised through entire online ecosystems built around permanent suspicion and emotional stimulation. Under these conditions, it becomes increasingly difficult for populations to distinguish between serious leadership, performative leadership, and pure spectacle.

This change is visible across almost every major institution once you stop filtering reality through official language and public relations messaging. CEOs increasingly speak like influencers managing personal brands rather than long-term corporate stewards. Politicians communicate through emotional performance and constant media confrontation rather than coherent strategic vision. Podcasters with enormous audiences increasingly behave like geopolitical analysts while millions of listeners absorb their interpretations with very little skepticism. Tech founders discuss civilisation-level disruption with the emotional tone of people launching lifestyle products or software updates. Everyone projects certainty publicly while simultaneously giving the impression they are improvising in real time underneath the performance.

The old system at least projected seriousness, whether deserved or not. Institutions once operated with a slower and more disciplined tone that created the impression of restraint, caution, and strategic patience. Today everything feels emotionally overheated while simultaneously intellectually exhausted. Governments threaten allies publicly in ways that would once have been handled privately through diplomatic channels. Corporations speak endlessly about purpose, innovation, and people while internally restructuring themselves around cost discipline and workforce compression. Financial systems remain permanently dependent on intervention while still pretending markets operate freely and naturally underneath. The entire structure increasingly resembles something being held together through momentum and public performance rather than genuine confidence.

After spending more than two decades inside global financial services, I increasingly notice this same atmosphere inside large corporations themselves. Leadership discussions still use the language of long-term growth, development, innovation, and transformation, but internally many organisations now operate through extremely short-term logic driven primarily by cost containment and quarterly performance pressure. Senior leaders speak constantly about adaptability and opportunity while simultaneously stretching existing teams further, freezing layers of progression beneath them, and quietly restructuring organisations around permanent efficiency expectations. The gap between the language corporations use publicly and the incentives driving decisions internally has become increasingly difficult to ignore once you have spent enough time inside these systems.

The same dynamic now exists politically and culturally at a much broader scale. Institutions no longer appear capable of slowing events down long enough to think carefully before reacting. Every system is trapped inside acceleration loops driven by technology, financial incentives, media pressure, political instability, and public outrage. AI development accelerates because companies fear competitors gaining an advantage. Governments escalate rhetoric because weakness is punished instantly online. Media organisations amplify emotional conflict because attention itself has become the primary economic resource underneath the modern internet.

One of the most unsettling aspects of this shift is that many people can sense it instinctively even if they struggle to articulate it clearly. Something about modern society no longer feels governed in the way previous decades did. The systems still function on the surface. Flights still leave on time. Markets still open each morning. Governments still hold press conferences and corporations still publish long-term strategies filled with reassuring language about stability and growth. Yet underneath all of this there is an increasingly difficult feeling to shake that many institutions are no longer being guided carefully by serious people operating from stable frameworks.

That feeling no longer sounds paranoid in the way it once might have. Increasingly it feels like a rational interpretation of how modern institutions now behave publicly. Trust collapses when people sense inconsistency, improvisation, emotional volatility, and short-term thinking inside systems that once projected discipline and strategic clarity. The language of competence still exists everywhere, but the emotional signal underneath it has changed dramatically. More and more people now sense they are living inside systems that continue performing stability publicly while quietly struggling to maintain coherence underneath.

The deeper problem is not simply political polarisation, technological disruption, or media fragmentation individually. It is that modern civilisation increasingly feels unable to think slowly enough to govern itself properly. Everything is immediate, emotionally amplified, and accelerated through networks designed to reward reaction rather than reflection. Under those conditions, even intelligent institutions begin behaving reactively because the surrounding environment punishes patience, restraint, and uncertainty while rewarding speed, outrage, confidence, and performance.

That may ultimately become the defining problem of this era. Modern societies still possess extraordinary technological capability, wealth, intelligence, and organisational complexity. What increasingly appears to be weakening is the psychological capacity for long-term strategic thinking itself. More and more institutions now look like systems trying to maintain legitimacy and operational stability while being pulled constantly by forces they no longer fully control. The structures still stand and the performance still continues, but underneath it all there is a growing sense that nobody is really steering anymore.