What If Everything is Wrong

S1E19 The Signal - The Beginning

So what do we do? Not what should governments do, not what should the institutions do, not what should some new leader do. What do we do, you and me, the ordinary decent majority who never asked for…

S1E17 The Messengers

The same message keeps coming back. Different language, different century, different continent. Zoroaster in Persia. Akhenaten in Egypt. Buddha in India. Socrates in Greece. Jesus in Judea. Rumi in…

S1E15 Consumerism

This one's about to get uncomfortable. In every other chapter of this book we've been innocent bystanders, looking at institutions doing things that were out of our hands. Not this one. This is the…

S1E16 Religion

Where did it come from? And how did it get from one civilisation to another? The answer leads to a religion almost nobody in the West has heard of, a buried library in the Egyptian desert, and a…

S1E14 China

I can't talk about every country, there's too much to say. But I have to talk about China. The good and the bad. Britain forced opium on it at gunpoint. Japan committed unspeakable atrocities in…

S1E13 Science

Science is my weakest subject. Then quantum physics caught my attention and I couldn't make head nor tail of it, so I kept digging. What I found is so mind-blowing it ties into everything else in…

S1E12 Media

From Gutenberg's printing press to TikTok, every new form of media has followed the same arc. It frees people, then it gets captured, then it gets monetised. This is the story of how the loudest,…

S1E11 Drugs

The story of how the substances that humans have used for healing and understanding for thousands of years got criminalised, who benefited from that, and what's quietly being rediscovered now that…

S1E8 Energy, Agriculture & Global Warming

The story of how energy and food got captured by the same handful of interests, from Tesla's free electricity tower being shut down by JP Morgan, through the carving up of the Middle East for oil, to…

S1E10 Welfare & Pensions

A 59-year-old former soldier with diabetes, found dead in a flat with six tea bags, an out-of-date tin of sardines, and a pile of freshly printed CVs. An unsent letter that said "please judge me…

S1E9 National Debt

Every country on earth is in debt. The total is over a hundred trillion dollars. Nobody can clearly say who it's owed to. This is the shortest chapter in the book because once you see the shape of…

S1E5 Education

S4E6 Healthcare

A mum diagnosed with cancer at forty-six, an NHS that didn't ask for a penny, and a question that wouldn't go away. How did we build the most civilised healthcare system in the world, and who has…

S1E7 Justice System

At twenty I stood in a courtroom facing up to ten years. Someone in the system saw something worth saving and gave me a chance. Not everyone gets one. This is the story of how justice works, who it…

S1E4 Finance

S1E3 America

Founded on the idea that all people are equal, written by a man who owned six hundred of them. The story of how the most ambitious experiment in human freedom was captured before the ink was dry

S1E2 The Straight & Narrow

Four bank accounts, twelve thousand pounds of cheque guarantees, and a teenager who chose the wrong option. This is the story of how it all went sideways, how it nearly went much worse, and the…

S1E1 The Feeling

Where it all began. A Jehovah's Witness childhood, a feeling that wouldn't go away, and the long road from knowing something was wrong to finally asking why