Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity | Paul Kingsnorth

23:47Demetri Kofinas:Can you elaborate a bit further on this passage, Paul? Specifically, what do you mean by this current time being apocalyptic? What is being revealed? and how was the machine responsible? Well, firstly, just to build on what I said just now, I suppose, the COVID pandemic, which you started off by talking about, whatever you think of vaccines or viruses or whatever, has radically accelerated our immersion in the digital world. I don't think anyone had even heard of a Zoom call before 2020. I haven't. I certainly hadn't. And most of the world is now spending a good deal of its time on them. We have been rushed very, very fast, even just over the last decade, into a world in which it's virtually impossible to live without a smartphone.

24:29It's virtually impossible to live without being online a good amount of the time. And that was not the case, as I say, even a decade ago. So society becomes digitized. And of course, the more digitized society becomes, the more everybody is connected to everybody else, the easier it is to monitor and control and manipulate situations and manipulate cultures. the culture war that's going on in in the united states and in britain and in much of the rest of the western world at the moment would not be happening at least in the same way to the same degree without social media without algorithms without the internet as a whole that's not to say that the issues wouldn't be there and people wouldn't be concerned about them but there's absolutely no way that we would have been whipped up into these kind of fanatical opposing camps without algorithmic social media pumping into your feed, whatever is going to make you angry and whatever is going to make you post again.

25:22And that, again, has accelerated very, very fast just over the last five years. There are so many grown adults out there acting like angry 15-year-olds on the internet because they've allowed themselves to be manipulated by these algorithms. We have seen this huge division of society. We have seen a kind of social breakdown because culture and politics can't keep up with what's going on. And we have seen, as I said, a world in which it's almost impossible for us to exist without the internet now, even if we want to. And that's completely unprecedented. We've never had a situation like that. So when I say it's apocalyptic, I mean that in the literal sense of the word, because the literal sense of the word apocalypse is revelation.

26:06In other words, something is unveiled. We tend to talk about apocalypse as a collapse or a disaster, and it might be that. But an apocalypse is a revelation. It's when you unveil something. It's when you remove the sheet and look at what's below it. So we're seeing unveiled something about machine society, something about technology, something about what we've allowed the digital world to do to us, and particularly how we have been very, very easily and very quickly enslaved by it. I mean, we're living in a world now that Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World would not have been remotely surprised about because it's a world he predicted quite effectively.

26:39And so did many other of those 20th century science fiction writers. But we've allowed ourselves to be coerced and corralled and manipulated. And we're now kind of trapped literally in a web or a net. And we don't really know how to get out of it again. But certainly from a Christian perspective, we're allowing our passions to be inflamed to such a degree that we're lashing out at whoever we can see the enemy is. And I think if there's an enemy, the enemy is the machine because it's this giant digital network that we're all caught in that's making us behave like this. Yeah.

27:12Demetri Kofinas:I mean, the use of the word paranoia, anger, confusion, broken promises, established systems coming up, this overbearing bureaucracy. I mean, all this resonates and can certainly resonate with many of our listeners. And I think this is what so many people are reacting to in the US today. And I think there's also a sense of surreality that you've picked up on and written about that I think we also see all around us. And I want to quote a passage from your book where you give voice to this. You write, quote, all across the culture now, there is an inverse relationship between reality and its perception, between nature and simulation, between map and territory.

27:46Demetri Kofinas:As a result, it increasingly feels like nothing is true and nothing is real. And yet we can't quite see what is actually wrong. This feels so true to me. And I'm curious to ask you, first of all, why? Why do you think it's so hard for people to understand what's wrong? What is it about this technology or this technological moment and how it affects our minds that is so different from the core technologies of the industrial revolution, where yes, people had to contend with drastic changes in how they perceive time and space with the introduction of the locomotive and telegraphy and the ability to illuminate spaces at all hours of the day.

28:28Demetri Kofinas:But I'm not aware of people losing their minds on this scale, which is what it feels like is happening today. And I'm curious to ask you, how do you make sense of this? How do you understand the seeming discrepancy at scale from previous technological revolutions to what we're experiencing today? Yeah, really interesting question. I mean, the first question you ask is, why can't we understand what's going on? Why can't we get a grip on it? And I think the answer to that is that everything's just so enormous that it's almost impossible to understand. Because I think the human mind is not actually capable of dealing with the things that it's having thrown at it at the moment.

29:06The sheer amount of information, the sheer amount of propaganda, as I say, the manipulative power of the algorithm, of advertising. It's not news that children are addicted to their smartphones. It's not news that adults are addicted to their smartphones. And that's because those things are designed to addict you. I mean, there's a huge amount of research on this. We know this is the fact. We know about so-called limbic capitalism, which is designed to give you a dopamine hit every time you see something. So we've allowed ourselves to be literally drugged by this form of technology, But we've also got a world which is now so complex, as you say, so bureaucratic, so many layers of bureaucracy, so many layers of government, so many layers of corporate power, so many layers between us and what we actually want to do.

29:49I mean, I don't know if you've had this experience. I imagine a lot of your readers have. You buy something, the thing you have bought doesn't work. You phone up the manufacturer and you get passed around a thousand different call centers in different countries and different people. And it's almost impossible to talk to a human being directly and find out what's actually going on. So it's almost as if every area of our lives is so bound up in so many layers of complexity that we can't see what the actual problem is. And that is hugely magnified by the digital age. It's interesting to talk about early technologies and industrialization, because if you look at some of the narratives, I mean, say you read William Blake, the great English mystic who's living in London during the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, when London's a much smaller place and the part of London he lives in is almost a village on the outskirts.

30:36He's writing in great depth about how this machine is coming to consume everybody. and yet he's still walking on the common. He's still living in a family and a community and the basic things of life are still there. There's a part of the book in which I try to define what a traditional society is made up of to try and work out what's gone wrong. This formula that I come up with is what I call the four Ps, which are people, place, prayer, and the past. In other words, you have a community around you that you belong to and you understand, that's people. You have a place, which is the place you live in, the place you know, it gives you a connection to nature.

31:15Even if it's in a town or a city, it's a community you understand. Then you have prayer, which is your religion, which is probably shared by the people you are around, although not necessarily. And then you have the past, which is your sense of history, your sense of where you came from. Now, I would say that this society we're living in now pretty much digs up and scatters all of those things. And so it makes us rootless and alienated from almost everything we can see around us. I mean, this is again, not a new claim. Marx was talking about alienation in the 1840s. It's a common theme. But even though we could look back and we could say, well, the giant industrial cities of the 19th century alienated people in a huge way from their landscape and from the communities they came from, they certainly did.

31:55That's accelerated again a thousandfold with the digital world. And I think it all comes back to the screen again, all the time, because we spend so much time on the screen now, we are literally not in the real world. Even in an industrial city in 1850, you're walking down the street, you're surrounded by human beings, they're talking to each other, they have not got their heads in their phones. There is not a thousand layers of bureaucracy for you to go through to get anything done. There are not a hundred different laws which prevent you from doing this, that or the other. You're not scared about what you can say.

32:21There isn't this kind of insane feeling that a digital algorithm is corralling you into thinking a certain thing and you're not even sure where that came from. You're not obliged to have opinions about something that's going on on the other side of the world that you saw on a screen today. I mean, how many horrors do we have projected into our head about what's going on everywhere from Gaza to, you name your horror zone? I'm not trying to downplay those things at all, but we feel completely helpless in the face of them. We don't even really understand them. We're required to have an opinion about them.

32:50Everyone's shouting about them. I think it's just kind of mentally overwhelming. And we're just not equipped as human beings to deal with what's happening.

32:59Demetri Kofinas:Yeah, that's also a great point because we have been, I think this was especially true in the pandemic period. We needed to have an opinion. It wasn't okay. It wasn't enough just to not have a view and just sort of observe and try and understand. You had to be on the quote, right side of history. Even if you didn't really understand what that meant, or even if the thing and transgenderism is a great example of that, because this came... Again, this is something that I just knew a little bit about from movies, like The Crying Game and Boys Don't Cry. I didn't know much about it. My understanding of transgenderism was that it was something that was a thing that happens to a few people.

33:38Demetri Kofinas:It's tragic because the people that experience it feel like they're trapped in the wrong body and all I could feel was sympathy for people like that. But I never had a much stronger view or opinion understanding of it. But suddenly I felt that I had to have a view and I had to be on the right side. And if I wasn't, and we could see this from other examples of people, if you weren't on the right side, you could be attacked by the mob and canceled and lose your job. And that's another thing that's unique about the time we live in today. There's a kind of mob justice roaming around. Yeah, precisely.

34:05And I've experienced that myself for trying to talk about some of these things. And so of many, many other people who are saying things which 10 or 15 years ago would have been regarded as completely normal, middle of the road. Transgenderism is the perfect example. Is a trans woman a woman? I would bet that most people don't even know what that question means even now, let alone what they think about it or what any of this is. I mean, who actually really does have an opinion about this other than the one they're told they ought to have by the internet? But because it sifts us into tribes, as you say, we need to signal that we're on the good side and the right side of history.

34:38We have to join the tribe that is saying the thing that we all know we have to say. And so most people either say the thing they know they have to say, or they just keep their head down, whether it's on that issue or any other. And then of course, people who disagree, they all get cancelled and then they get angry and then that turns into a kind of a fight back. And there's a craziness in the air, which comes precisely from that pushing, firstly, this pushing of an extremist narrative on people that they don't even understand in the first place. And that narrative usually comes from a cultural elite that does not represent anybody and isn't representative of them.

35:10So the narrative is pushed, then we all know we have to get onto the right side and then the culture war kicks off. And it's, as I say, It's manifested a thousand times through digital tech. Now, again, I think this is a question that Jonathan Haidt, the psychologist, has asked. Would transgenderism as it is now exist in the same way without the smartphone? Would this idea that you can identify as something else and then become that thing, which young teenagers, especially teenage girls, are very vulnerable to, would that have gone into anybody's head without them having a phone in their pocket that's pushing all this stuff into their timelines?

35:41I very much doubt it. I think that if it wasn't for that, transgenderism would have remained what it was in the way that you're talking about it. It would have remained a thing that happens to a few people, and most of us don't know about it, and we need to treat those people well. But it doesn't really impinge on people's consciousness. It doesn't become this huge, divisive political issue that everybody has to have an opinion about. I don't think much of that would have happened without these technologies. And so it's almost as if they're not designed to divide us. They're certainly doing a very good job of it.

36:08Demetri Kofinas:You know, Ian also has this interesting insight about transgenderism where he applies his framework to it, which is that we've always lived in a world where people were fluid in gender and sexuality and all sorts of things. Some men were more or less feminine. Some women were more or less masculine. But what Ian said, which I found so interesting, he said this years ago, was that in a world dominated by the left brain, again, this is his framework and I'm using it more metaphorically than I am specifically, whether it's the left or right brain. But in this world, people need labels. They need to put you in a box.

36:42Demetri Kofinas:They need discreteness. They need to be able to say this X, Y, Z. And so this, in his mind, is a symptom of this kind of way of looking at the world. And it explains why there are so many genders and so many identities, and everyone needs to have a specific identity. And increasingly, we become identities of one. We become a world where each individual has to be so unique in a labeled form, even if we can't actually see who they are in reality, even if we've lost that ability to be in the moment. Yeah. And I think in a curious way, society used to be a lot more diverse and a lot more tolerant than it is now, even in the age of diversity and tolerance.

37:20Because diversity is the watchword for everything, and we're all supposed to be very supportive of it. And government schemes and private sector schemes exist to promote it and all the rest of it. But as you say, it's promoted in this extremely narrow way where people have to choose an identity box and ticket, whether it's racial, or whether it's gender, or whether it's sexuality. We're all supposed to have these identities so that we can be placed on a kind of pyramid of oppression and the rest of it. And it's just not how normal people think. People do not think like that. We do have identities, and they're usually a bit complicated and mixed.

37:49And most people probably in a healthy society, and this is one of the points I make in the book, don't really think about it very much. I think identity and And having to define yourself in this particular way is only something that happens in a society that's already quite broken. I live in the west of Ireland and my neighbors are in their 80s and they've lived in Ireland all their lives. They're ordinary rural Irish people, traditional Catholic people. Do they have an identity? Well, if I were to ask them that question, they wouldn't know what I was talking about. It would make no sense to them.

38:16I mean, in a sense, they do. They're Irish, they're Catholic, they're, you know, whatever. But they're not thinking like that. They're just living their lives in a kind of normal human scale place.

38:24Demetri Kofinas:And they don't need you to get it right. They don't need me to get it right. They don't care. It's completely irrelevant. I'm not interested, and neither are they. And in a normal human society, including in Western society up until fairly recently, that was the case as well. But now, as you say, it's become not only a very rationalized, almost very nerdy way of dividing people up into little boxes, but it's also become, in the age of the culture war, this thing that everybody has to choose a side on. So you've got to choose your identity, and then you've got to be against this identity and the rest of it.

38:54And again, I would bet that the great majority of people have no interest in this stuff and would like it all to go away. But again, it would not exist without the digital world that we find ourselves stuck in.

39:06Demetri Kofinas:So we haven't spoken much about culture, but culture is a big part of the book. And in fact, at one point you write that our culture is not in danger of dying. It is already dead and we are in denial. Why do you believe that our culture is dead? And maybe before you even answer that question, how do we even think about or define what a culture is? Yeah, well, that's a good question. And that's kind of the question that opens the book in a way. And that statement is sort of deliberately hyperbolic. There's a few slightly hyperbolic statements in the book, but they exist to make a point. It depends what you mean, doesn't it?

39:36So again, if I were to talk about my elderly neighbors here in Ireland, everything they've grown up with has completely disappeared from the Catholic church to the small community that they lived in around here to the very small scale world in which people weren't even using cars when they were young. So in that sense, culture has radically changed. That always happens. But there's something bigger going on as well, I think. And if we were to go back to those four Ps, people place prayer and the past, and we were to say, well, how is the culture that we live in doing in terms of those things being alive and well?

40:07Now, I suppose the answer to that will differ depending on where you are. If I look at the country I come from, which is England, I would say that in almost all of those cases, those things are severely eroded. So not everywhere, obviously, it's different from place to place. But broadly speaking, we've been very, very much uprooted psychologically, often geographically, economically, culturally. It's very, very hard for anyone to find any footing that will last very long at all, whether it's having a job for life or even living in the same place, or if you do live in the same place, not seeing that place so radically transformed that you don't recognize it.

40:43This is kind of the story of modernity. The death of religion is another big one. You may have grown up like my elderly neighbors in a country that was very, very Christian, which is now pretty much sort of secular progressive and very much aggressively so. So again, a huge change. And I think that that's the measure of it. That's the measure of the culture. If we were to say, I mean, that statement you quote there is, I think, is written in the context of talking about this culture war, because everyone's fighting about the culture, right? So all the progressives on the left want to change the culture because they think it's racist and sexist and colonialist.

41:16And lots of conservatives on the right want to defend whatever they think their culture is against the woke left, and they want to go back to whenever they think it was good. But if I look at both sides, I think they're both scrabbling over something that's already gone.

41:29Demetri Kofinas:You describe it in the book as two bald men fighting over a cone. Yeah. I mean, it pretty much is that. I mean, if you want to be a conservative, and I've got a lot of sympathy for people who are conservative, because I would call myself small c conservative in some ways anyway, in instinct anyway. Wanting to conserve the good things about your culture is, you know, that's good. You need to have that to keep your culture alive. But what are you conserving? What is there that already hasn't actually been ripped up? And again, if you're a progressive, what exactly are you progressing towards? What exactly are you fighting?

41:56There's no ground on which I think we can stand at the moment where we could look back, say you were on the right, it's not feasible to say, well, if only we could get rid of all these woke people from the institutions, our culture would be working again. I don't think it would be working again. I think economically, culturally, in terms of the digital world, in terms of the machine and the rise of AI, which is just around the corner, there is no old fashioned culture which you can stand on now and say, well, we've got it back again. Because it's like modernity has eaten itself. The project we've been on for the last 300 years or so, scientific rationalism, liberalism in a political sense, individualism, the death of religion, all of those things have actually undermined what makes a real culture.

42:37That's how it seems to me. And so the culture war, which is very loud and destructive, is almost not exactly a distraction, but it's missing the point. And again, this is another point I tried to make in the book. I think you only get a culture war when you don't have a culture. I think if you're in a healthy culture, you don't need to do this. So we're only screaming like this because the culture's already so broken. In my view, you have to go back to the roots and start building something else rather than trying to retain what has already gone.

43:05Demetri Kofinas:That raises an interesting question because this isn't the first culture war we've had. So how long has our culture been dead in your view? How long have we been without a culture or has a different culture replaced it and we're not aware of? Yeah, sure. I mean, in a sense, I suppose you could say that's always happening. I mean, the Reformation is a culture war in the 16th century in Europe. It's a huge culture war that changes an enormous number of things. There are culture wars in Victorian England. If a culture war is people battling over what a culture is and what culture should dominate, then it's a very normal thing.

43:33What I try to talk about in the book is what we call the West. If we want to talk about the West, which everyone's doing today, we'd have to say, well, what is the West? There is no reason to talk about the West at all, unless you're talking about the heritage of the Christian church in the West, which originally would have been the Roman church. That's why we talk about the West. The territory we call the West is the inheritor of a thing we used to call Christendom, which was the territory of the Roman Christian church. So that's what the West is. It's a society or a group of societies of people very loosely tied together by an interpretation of the Christian story.

44:08Now, whether or not you like that story or believe in that story, I think it's difficult to argue against that. And I think that in the West today, and this may be less true in America than it is in Europe, actually, but certainly the Christian story is fading very, very fast. I mean, where I come from, it's pretty much gone completely. And where I live now, it's going very fast as well. People don't believe it on a scale that's very, very large, but more to the point, societies don't base their laws or their structures or their worldviews around the Christian story or an interpretation of that story.

44:39So what we had is we had a thing called Christendom until maybe till the Reformation. Then we had a thing called the West, which was kind of enlightenment, liberalism, scientific revolution, individualism, all of them, though, based on the Christian values that still existed in society. The values of liberalism were primarily Christian values. And now we've got to the point where I think that liberalism is collapsing as well. The values that it was built on are gone. And so we don't have any shared values. We don't, I mean, even when I was born or certainly when my parents were born in my country, you could look around and say, well, what are the shared values?

45:11It was still broadly speaking, a Christian country had a certain sense of itself. Whether that was good or bad, it was there and it's not there anymore. We're broken up into these sort of digital warring tribes. And so there's no way I think you can look around and say that you have a culture that ties you together. Now, that doesn't mean there aren't cultures at local level. It doesn't mean there isn't a lot that's going on that's nourishing and good. But I don't think you could say that the West is a thing. And I think increasingly, I don't think you can even say that the nations of the West have anything that really ties them together.

45:39Demetri Kofinas:In the book, you talk about how we've become slaves to the power of money and worshipers of the self. This is something I totally agree with. I've seen it. It's something that I've spoken about with other guests on this podcast. I was born in a culture of money. I was born in 1981, the year that Ronald Reagan was elected president. But the extent to which money has come front and center in people's lives, especially in the lives of young people, is something that I just didn't experience. It could not relate to when I was younger. And it feels like it's happened in parallel with this kind of society-wide regression, where adults are acting more like children.

46:19Demetri Kofinas:And this is something that you also talk about in your book, where you quote Robert Bly, who said that we've forgotten how to produce adults. Are these some of the most obvious examples of symptoms of a dying or dead culture that you think we exhibit in Western society? And how important is it to be able to identify them? And is there a good way of thinking about where they fit in the context of the framework that you put forward earlier? Well, again, lots of this is in the book, but what I would try and say, if we were to go back to those four Ps again, people place prayer in the past, if that's a sort of very crude, but maybe useful way of defining what are the pillars of a culture, then what I come up with in the book as an attempt to describe the thing that's replaced it, it's what I call the four S's, which are sex, science, the self, and the screen.

47:09So in other words, you have, if we take those in a slightly different order, we have science, which replaces prayer. Science is supposed to be the tool that we use to give us meaning, to explain what the world is. But it's inadequate to that task, because although it's very good at doing what it does, what it does is actually very narrow. It's much more narrow than a lot of its public proponents suggest that it is. Science is a way of finding out how things work. And it's very good at that. And it's given us lots of tools and medicines and all the rest of it that we either like or we don't like, but it's a huge success story in that sense.

47:39But it can't tell us anything about what life is, what the meaning of life is, where life comes from, whether there's a bigger story to it. It can't do any of those things. It's not designed to do them. So we have science there. Then we have the self, which as you've just discussed, is pretty much the essence of the culture now, there is very little selflessness left. Effectively, the morality that we live in is a kind of extremist liberalism where we effectively say people should be allowed to do anything they want as long as it's not harming anyone else, which of course is a very difficult thing to define.

48:10So we put ourselves primarily first. And that ties up with what you were saying about money there, I think, because this is consumerism. It's kind of capitalism gone absolutely wild. And again, you're right, I feel the same. When I was young, when I was a boy, say, the level to which we are manipulated by advertising, to which we are sold things, to which people spend money and are obsessed with money and will buy absolutely everything from, I don't know, from Botox to new cars every two years. It's just a craziness. It's an absolute craziness. I'm in my early 50s now. Not that old, but I'm not young.

48:44I've seen that accelerate unbelievably just over the last couple of decades. It's a society now which is absolutely soaked in the self and soaked in consumerism. So you have science, you have the self, you have sex, which again, the kind of sexual liberation is an enormous story. The sexual mores have changed so much since the 1960s. It's impossible for people of my generation probably to imagine what they would have been like before when, say, my parents were -

49:08Demetri Kofinas:I mean, I feel like we went through a phase where you could be, I don't know if you could be canceled, but you could be publicly shamed for not properly labeling people that live in polyamorous relationships or people that spend their time on OnlyFans making money selling images of their bodies. If you called that prostitution and not sex work, you could be labeled the person who is on the wrong side of the issue. Well, you're slut shaming, which is an incredible phrase that I think the notion, I can't imagine what my grandparents would think if I tried to explain to them what slut shaming was.

49:43Because of course it's fine. It's fine to do absolutely anything you want now and there's to be no judgment about it at all. And that's such a radical change. And then finally have the screen, which we've talked about at length already, this kind of new device, which is supposed to be your portal to reality, which actually takes you out of it. So I would say that those four S's are my attempt to explain what's replaced the culture that we lived in before. And the culture we lived in before, however imperfect it was, and it's important to say this is not a kind of pain to how everything was terrific at a certain period in the past.

50:11Every culture, every time period has plenty of problems that it brings with it. But I don't think we've ever lived in a time, and this is something Ian McGilchrist says as well quite forcefully, where we have been so completely disconnected from reality in every respect, from our history, from what the natural world is, from each other, from communities. And young people can feel that. That's why there's such a high level of depression and anxiety amongst young people, because they know this. Even if they can't intellectualize it, they can feel that they're growing up in this kind of weird vortex of unreality where the things that humans actually need, human culture and community and connection to nature and all these real things, which are actually very simple, are very, very difficult to come by.

50:50Yeah.

50:51Demetri Kofinas:I mean, I'm going to move to the second round, Paul, but I would say I certainly feel that there's been a collapse of, I don't know what the word is. I mean, it's bred nihilism, but there's a collapse in people's sense of meaning. What is the purpose? What is the point? I mean, we've seen this in, And I've talked about it in the form of financial nihilism in financial markets. We've seen it in the way that people conceptualize the role of the United States internationally, where we've broken so many of the rules that we claim to uphold. And I feel like there is this kind of collapse. And in that process, I think also in this, our conversation today so far has touched on this, there's a kind of nostalgia that comes up.

51:28Demetri Kofinas:And I love this part in the book where you essentially say that when we're being nostalgic, people will often say, well, or when we think about the past, we talk about the past, people will say, well, you're just being nostalgic. And they'll kind of like... But I think that's a way of dismissing something really important because the roots of nostalgia are nostos, which is a reference to homecoming, and algos, which is a description of sorrow or grief. The word describes a longing for home, for the return. And I often think of the past in those terms of it being a place that feels like home. And today it feels almost like a dream.

52:06Demetri Kofinas:So I'd like to talk a little bit more about that. And also, how do we ask the question of how do we live in this world? What is the correct response for us? If let's say large scale solutions don't work here, what do we do in our own lives in order to live in this world that we've talked about today? For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Paul, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers.

52:42Demetri Kofinas:All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Paul, stick around. We're going to move the rest of our conversation onto the premium feed. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou.

53:20Demetri Kofinas:For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.