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Podcast Summary: Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat
Episode Title
The Mainstream Media: Former Editor Reveals Truths About Journalism, Bias, And The News Industry
Episode Overview In this episode of Slo Mo, host Mo Gawdat speaks with Andy Coulson, a former newspaper editor and communications director for the UK government. The conversation explores Coulson's experiences in the media industry, including his rise in journalism, involvement in the UK phone hacking scandal, and the complexities of managing media bias and truth in reporting.
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Key Themes and Discussions
Introduction
- Host's Reflection: Mo mentions the need to slow down his podcast commitments and introduces a mini-series focusing on uncovering truths about the media.
- Guest Introduction: Andy Coulson's background includes being the editor of the *News of the World* and serving as Director of Communications for Prime Minister David Cameron.
Media Ethics and Responsibilities
- Coulson's Early Career:
- Started as a showbiz journalist motivated by breaking stories.
- Describes himself as a skilled dealmaker, balancing the interests of celebrities and the media.
- The Concept of Truth:
- Discussion on how journalists make choices about what to publish and what to omit.
- The complexities of presenting 'truth' in journalism and the pressures from commercial interests.
The Duality of Journalism
- Morality in Reporting: Coulson emphasizes the challenge of ethical decision-making and acknowledges the mistakes he made.
- Judgement in Journalism:
- Coulson argues that both media and individuals cannot be classified as purely good or bad; there is nuance in their actions.
Bias in Media
- Personal Experiences with Media Bias:
- The conversation touches on Coulson’s perception of how media bias operates, including ideological motivations and lobbying influences.
- Cultural Context:
- Gawdat shares a personal perspective from Egypt, where media narratives are heavily controlled by the government.
The Role of Social Media
- Risks of Unregulated Content:
- Coulson expresses concern over the unfiltered nature of content on social media, emphasizing the need for credible human oversight.
- Comparison with Traditional Media:
- Despite imperfections, Coulson believes traditional media has a responsibility and a structure that social media lacks.
Crisis and Resilience
- Coulson's Journey: Discusses his personal crisis stemming from the phone hacking scandal and subsequent imprisonment.
- Lessons Learned:
- The importance of self-acceptance and focusing on what one can control.
- Emphasizes humor as a crucial coping mechanism during dark times.
Conclusion
- Reflection on Relationships:
- Coulson credits his wife and friends for their unwavering support during his difficult times.
- Final Thoughts:
- Gawdat summarizes the episode by urging listeners to question narratives, seek reasonable discussions, and cherish personal connections.
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Key Takeaways
- Journalism is Complex: The media landscape is influenced by many factors, including ethical dilemmas, commercial interests, and individual biases.
- Critical Thinking is Essential: Listeners are encouraged to critically evaluate the information they consume and question mainstream narratives.
- Resilience and Control: Personal crises can lead to growth; focusing on what one can control is vital for recovery.
- Value of Relationships: Meaningful connections provide support and stability amid turmoil.
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Closing Thoughts This episode highlights the intricate relationship between media, ethics, and personal accountability. It encourages a deeper understanding of journalism's impact on society while promoting resilience in the face of adversity. Mo Gawdat invites listeners to reflect on their own lives and the narratives they accept, advocating for a more thoughtful and engaged approach to information consumption.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01I am so glad you could join us. I'm your host, Mo Gaudet This podcast is nothing more than a conversation between two good friends sharing inspiring life stories and perhaps some nuggets of wisdom along the way This is your invitation to slow down with us Welcome to Slow Mo
0:34Welcome back. This is one of my very final episodes before I go to vacation. I told you in my previous episode that we are going to wind slow-mo down a little bit of time because I have other important priorities. I feel that in the time I have available to me with the ambitions I have, I need to be a little more focused. And as much as I love this thing, there are things that deliver more impact for the next year. my closing mini-series is a passion of mine during 2024 which is really to find the truth to understand the reality of the world around us and what to believe and what not to this mini-series hopefully will be five episodes that we call It's Not What They Told You and there is no one that can help us understand the core of how the media works at least how the media was designed to work if you want than my guest today.
1:34Andy Colson is very well known in the British society for some very interesting stories and some very, very, very serious contributions. He was the editor of the News of the World between 2003-2007. He was the head of communication, director of communication for the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, between 2007 and 2011. And he now runs his own consultancy firm around crisis management and is the host of a podcast that I personally like called Crisis, What Crisis? Andy's story hit the headlines, if you want, because his organization back in News of the World hacked phones to get to a story which may have been important to the public.
2:20But then eventually, many, many years later, the blame fell on Andy, if you want. and he had to pay for it. He served a period in jail and turned from a journalist that really did whatever he could to get the story to a, I don't know, a stoic teacher, if you want, in a way that basically helps people realize how to deal with such a crisis. Andy, thank you very much for the start. Thanks for having me. I want to talk about it all, honestly. I don't know if time will allow, But since I wanted to meet you and I've been following your conversations and work for a while, I wanted to learn from you firsthand sort of what motivates an editor, a reporter, a journalist.
3:09Why does the media do what it does? And in an interesting way, why is it that I no longer believe any of what they say? I'm not sure I can provide an answer to the second question. Let's see where we go. On the first question, it's, you know, it's born out of, as most things are, you know, as an individual editor, you know, who you are and what your motivation is, what your past is, perhaps where you come from. And so perhaps in explaining the kind of editor that I or the kind of journalist I was, that was informed by my upbringing. I was a Sun reader. I grew up in a household of Sun readers. I loved the Sun showbiz column.
3:49And so I became a showbiz journalist. You know, I wasn't a political journalist at the start of my career. I was a showbiz journalist. And so what I was motivated by was breaking stories and being involved in and being a part of, you know, showbiz, frankly. You know, and my skill as I then developed as a journalist and ended up at The Sun actually really was as a dealmaker. That was what was my main motive. I was a dealmaker. My skill as a young journalist, you know, making my career on the Sun, was the ability to work with very famous people, produce a piece of content that would keep everybody happy.
4:25Keep my editor happy. Keep the reader happy. Keep the reader happy. Keep the topic happy. And keep the celebrity and their, you know, agents and PRs and whatever around them, machine around them happy. That's what I was quite good at. And my timing was good because it was a period of time when the business of show business was really beginning to motor. It's always been there, of course. You know, we talk about Posh and Becks in this country. You know, Taylor and Burton were the Posh and Becks of the 60s, 70s. So it wasn't entirely new, but it was suddenly being powered in a different way. And so groups like the Spice Girls and Take That Here were really commercial enterprises.
5:06And I got the joke of that particular universe better, perhaps, than a number of other journalists operating at the time. And so I was able to get very close to those kind of operations and the individuals involved. So that actually was my reputation as a young journalist. That was my motivation as well as a young journalist. But underlying all that, I was a trained journalist. I did go through my apprenticeship, my indentures. you know the principles of what it is to be a journalist were set for me in my mind you know and that is about accuracy that is about making sure that what you're publishing is accurate and that you operate as a professional journalist now as i'm sure we'll get on somewhere along the line you know obviously i can say that i lost sight of that as an editor because i did and as you mentioned in the intro paid a price the one thing i would say if you don't mind about your very generous intro for which thank you is that I would do anything to get a story bit because I don't think I would and didn't do anything to get a story I think that there were plenty of moments and of course it's so difficult to evidence because how do you evidence something that you didn't publish it's quite a difficult thing to demonstrate but believe me there was a lot I didn't publish and I'm not asking for a round of applause at that moment by the way but it's just the reality of the job is that you are making judgments about what works and what doesn't work, what's right and what's wrong.
6:32And I'm not saying I got it right. I think it's a fair amount of evidence that I got it wrong on a number of occasions, but I got it right as well. And I think when you're analyzing, I think this is true of the media and I think it's true of my own individual experience. The temptation is that you've got to put it all in one box, right? It's good or it's bad right newspapers are good or they're bad the media is good or it's bad me as an individual i'm good or i'm bad and obviously i've gone through a long period of my life where the classification was very much you know bad yeah yeah yeah and i'm not that i've made loads of mistakes i've failed everyone does right miserably but it's not me entirely and i am i think more than my mistakes and i think also the media is more than its mistakes and we've got to be careful about what we mean by the media as well but maybe we'll get into that well i want to get into this but i think what you're saying is really quite eye-opening because the idea is in an engineer's mind if you want if you want to put the definition of the truth in an algorithm it would be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth but that's impossible for a journalist to bring right because in mathematics the whole truth is all of the locations of all particles in the universe at the same time right so it's impossible to contain on one page or on an article or on a now in the new media in a one minute reel, right?
7:52But you say that you make choices to leave things out. So there are things that you don't publish. There are things that you publish, but they have to be some sort of a deal that allows you to sort of break more news in the future without being marked as the enemy or whatever. What would be the motivation that gets you to say this is enough of the truth? Or, you know, this bit I don't want to include in this article or so difficult this conversation in a way because it can only really be explained and evidenced by a specific that's as ever once you get to a particular example that is also quite a dangerous thing to do it is a very dangerous yeah that in itself can distort yeah let's use a hypothetical example so in a world where i'd grown up doing those deals right let's look at some david and victoria beckham for example i had a relationship with the spice girls i had at one point I almost had a business relationship with Victoria Beckham after she left the Spice Girl.
8:49She's a very skilled, very commercial, very ambitious woman and was in those early days as well. We were actually looking, the company that I was working for, setting up a business with her a little bit later. But before then, when she gets engaged to David, they decide they're going to get engaged and I get a phone call from them to say that this is going to happen. It hasn't happened yet, but it is going to happen and we'd like you to be a part of it. She's got an interesting proposition. Of course. We'd like you to come along to the hotel. We'd like you to, you can take a picture of the ring.
9:19We'll give you some quotes. You'll get your own pictures, but then we're going to step outside of the hotel and then we're going to announce our engagement to the world. This is actually, Mo, the last piece of journalism that I did as a reporter before I then became an executive. And we paid them a pretty significant amount of money for that. Oh, wow. Right. So in that circumstance, when I've grown up in that world of deal-making, this is not excuse making. This is just the explanation of how it worked. That when I then get a story that perhaps they're less inclined to see published, and there were stories, including later in my career with the Beckhams in particular, where they absolutely didn't want to see those stories.
9:59I did not make a decision, I'm not going to run those stories because there's no deal to be done. I'm going to run that story if it's true. And it needs to be true. And that's the major consideration. And then you've also got to ask yourself as a human being, and as an editor is just the right thing to do. That is also obviously an interesting area to discuss because that changes. I'd be a hopeless editor now because I'm changed. Now that doesn't mean, of course, you get changed by what happens to you in life and that's the purpose of being a human being, I think. And I'm a different person. I'll be a hopeless editor.
10:36So what was the quality that made you a good editor? The hunger to break a story? I think I enjoyed breaking stories. I enjoyed the environment. You know, people now, I think, look back at tabloid newspapers at that time and just think it was some kind of, you know, evil death star. It wasn't. I was there. It wasn't. Loads of mistakes, right? Plenty of mistakes, plenty of misjudgments, too much arrogance, too much belief of the world. Something called editoritis, I think, Mo, right? It's a little known condition. I definitely suffered from editoritis, right? And the primary symptom of editoritis is that you think the world revolves around you.
11:12or whatever it is you're doing, actually. Let's say yourself. And I definitely suffered from that. So too much of that, for sure. But there was also a bagload of fun. There was a bagload of camaraderie. There was a lot of adrenaline rushing through. But I'll tell you what else there was. There was good work, right? And campaigning journalism. Some of the proudest moments I've had have been around some properly meaningful campaigns, getting policy change driven through in this country. The ability to be able to kind of convene proper change in this country, tabloid newspapers have played a big part in that.
11:45And also at the other end, politics, where later I've moved and spent a lot of time, I think still popular newspapers play a very important part in the political landscape, right? In terms of prodding a politician, keeping them, you know, honest as much as you can, poking fun occasionally. I don't know if you're aware of, you know, the Liz Truss and the Lettice here, right, where the Daily Star newspaper, not famed for its political coverage, actually in that joke delivered something, in my view, very significant and reflective, by the way, of where the public were on Liz Truss, a short-lived prime minister.
12:25who almost brought down the country. It's a proper mix. So I want to go into the political side of this because I think this is really where our world is breaking down a little bit as we speak. But it seems quite interesting for me. I mean, I normally try to somewhat understand so far so that our listeners, who are probably like me, not experts in the topic. I have to say, you know, I grew up in Egypt. So we had two news outlets on TV, to news outlets in print. On TV, for example, we had Channel 1, which said exactly what the government told it to say verbatim, and Channel 2, which basically said exactly what Channel 1 said.
13:05And you could see like a tiny face shift between them. Channel 1 would say it, and then Channel 2 would say it. But they'd say it slightly differently in a more fun way so that we believe, they both agree it's the truth, right? Reality is, as I look back at my childhood in a country that was highly censored in terms of telling stories, I had never had access to the truth. But believe it or not, I knew that I didn't have access to the truth. That was very different in my Western upbringing. So one of the things I celebrated as I started to be exposed to the West as a student and then as a professional businessman and so on is like, hey, I can get to learn things here.
13:45Like I'm being told stuff. As I look back now, I'm being told filters. stuff. You know, I'm being told, as you rightly said, part of the stuff that helps the newspapers, you know, the editor has to make choices to make sure that the business is successful, even if they're not motivated by any malicious objective or personalized agendas or corruption or whatever, they still have to run a business. And so they may choose to do certain things and report other things and so on and so forth. Within accuracy, that's still not the whole truth. And I I think that to me became very eye-opening. Believe it or not, I had a tiny, tiny, tiny part of my career.
14:26Most people don't know that. Why am I saying this? I worked in British American Tobacco. And for a year and a few months, at the time, I had just finished my MBA. And my MBA was about how computer systems are becoming a consumer commodity. Believe it or not, at the time, they were not. At the time, most computers were mini computers and mainframes and so on. and the personal computer was still on the rise. And so I decided maybe I should have a career in consumer goods and understand. And British American Tobacco convinced me that smoking is an adult choice. And as an adult choice, they said, adults also can buy Porsches and Porsches are fast cars and that gives them joy, but it's dangerous.
15:11But it's an adult choice, okay? And so I believed in that, I even rallied behind it. And I quickly rose in my career in those 16 months or whatever. And we had a person in the team that was called the CORA director, which was corporate and regulatory affairs or something like that. And basically he had, I don't know if we're allowed to say that, you know, he had quite a few influences over journalists, over editors, over government officials and decision makers. He had quite a large budget and there were quite a few Range Rovers purchased in our budget. And I was like, what is all of this? Where is this coming from?
15:51And he basically said, well, you know, if you need to write an article in the top newspaper tomorrow that basically says that smoking is good for you, that's what this budget is about. That's shocking for me because most... And that was editorial. That wasn't even advertorial. 100%. That was like a new discovery by a scientist somewhere in Portugal that, you know, smoking is the best thing for your health. That shakes your confidence in everything. And I think it shakes your confidence mostly in the journalist and the government official and the people behind this. So how does it really work? I mean, well, again, I can only speak from my own experience.
16:31And to follow that path, you know, my entire newspaper career. So this is not something that shifted later in my career. Being part of News International as it was then, the idea of what you just described, which is corruption, right? There was no doubt that that was totally, no, unacceptable. Not in your organization, but it was present in the media in general. In other organizations. Other organizations. I can't speak, in the UK I'm talking about here, I can't speak to that. The idea, though, of, you know, because then you take one step back from that and you go to lobbying. You know, there's been lobbying in this country, obviously, for many years.
17:17I still think lobbying is a scandal that hasn't quite reached its end for what it's worth. There's certainly lobbying. You know, I now work as a consultant. I actually don't lobby. That's not what we do at all. I don't do public affairs. I'm not interested in any of that. But that's a profession for sure. You know, I think, again, several, several steps back from what you've described. the idea of those kind of deals being done, I would say that there was a culture of absolute pushback against that. But remember, I was a reporter at this stage, certainly as an editor, not for a second, the arguments that I would have between commercial and editorial, I would spend a large part of my working day, particularly as we got closer to publication on a Saturday, arguing with the commercial end of the newspaper who wanted to drive revenue for the product saying, no, this space is for my editorial genius.
18:08Thank you very much. You're not going to ruin it with your adverts. And so the push and pull and the integrity, if you like, of the editorial space and how we chose to put that to work was built in. You know, that was built in. And you know, the interesting thing is I didn't get a day of training to be an editor. I was trained as a journalist on my local newspaper. And then I went up to the Sun thereafter. I never had a day of training. You are developing your own operating system and your own value system and your own editorial judgment on the go. So again, I can only speak from personal experience, the idea of anything close to that.
18:43I think I'm pretty safe in saying for British newspapers, that's just not what it's about at all. But if it's not for monetary gains, is it not possible that it's for ideological gains? Like if a reporter believes in one side or the other or leans a little bit to one side or the other? Well, news is a human business. Correct. So any human business is going to have some bias one way or the other, to be utterly, completely, totally. Look at the BBC, which is built to be unbiased. It's a very difficult thing to do, right? Listen, I'm a net fan of the BBC. I think it's an organization with problems, and it's an organization that's done things wrong.
19:23But I think its mission is a positive one, and it aims to be unbiased. It aims to deliver news in a way that is unfiltered. But it's never going to succeed fully. How can it? It's so interesting that you say that because growing up, the BBC World Service was actually perceived by the world as the unbiased news source. Right. Especially if you grow up in a place where you have channel one and channel two. Right. But oh, my God, it is so biased to a Western agenda, if you don't mind me saying. like by nature maybe by information by what they have access to maybe by policy i mean it's still a british organization but if you don't mind me saying the bbc would never report anything positive about the truth of the conflict between nato and russia that absolutely drove the russian ukrainian conflict since i've been working as a consultant i've had an even clearer view that It gets much closer to what you've just described than what I had previously.
20:27I'm not saying that it is an unbiased organization that produces unbiased news. I think it's aim. And I think it's a positive aim. I've also lost days of my life arguing with people at the BBC about the political bias within this country. Within the country, of course. That's part of my job. When I worked for David Cameron was when I saw the 6 o 'clock news and I thought, that's fundamentally unfair. They've completely bypassed us. You know, we're in opposition at that point. It's very difficult to get heard when you're in opposition. so I'd end up having you know a conversation with the editor of the 10 o 'clock news saying look we there needs to be some balance here yeah but at least there was a conversation at least there was a routine and what I don't believe I'm about to compare the news of the world with the BBC which they won't appreciate at all is that both are human businesses correct with individuals making judgments with a you know aiming for with a particular purpose in mind and I just as I don't believe the news of the world was a death star in the way that i've described it i don't think the bbc is either at all and bbc is having a very tough time at the moment you know it's getting it's getting a lot of criticism from a lot of different angles yeah and has made mistakes but is the idea of the bbc fatally flawed i don't think it is i can't quite believe mo that i'm sat on a podcast defending the bbc i don't know why you're doing that we can we can edit you back in I mean, trashing them if you want.
21:49No problem at all. I mean, isn't that what media is all about? No, but it is an interesting side. I mean, again, my objective with this final miniseries, if you want, is not to actually divide at all or make people distrust anyone. I'm trying to get the world to see somehow that as a human organization, as a human journalist, as the limits of access to knowledge, as the need for certain deals exist, you're not always going to get the truth, the whole truth. and nothing but the truth. You're not, but again, what are we defining here? How are we defining media? Because what I'm much more concerned about is social media.
22:25I'm just concerned about the unregulated content that is pouring into our children's brains on an hourly basis through these mini computers that we carry in our pockets that has no human filter, really, right? It is just driven by something that you know considerably more about than I do, an algorithmic purpose. That has no judgment applied to it. Now, would I rather have, you know, a bunch of people in a room with imperfect values even, or an imperfect worldview, or an imperfect kind of standard of professionalism, at least some kind of grip on this content? Or do we just keep funneling it out in the way that we are at the moment into impressionable minds?
23:14I'd quite like the former rather than the latter. Yeah, I sadly don't think it's... And a lot of that unregulated kind of stuff that's being churned out, it falls into the new definition of media. 100%. It is the big majority of media. I think the most worrying of all of them, believe it or not, is that it's not either or. There are parts of that world that are run by highly professional, highly capable people who understand journalism, who know how to write the headline. They really know how to use the tool. Of course. Yeah, for distribution. Yeah, there is a darker and even darker side to it, for sure.
23:50Yeah. I feel like I'm defending. I feel that too. Not just the BBC. But I know. Journalism. And I don't, you know, it's really important, all of this, because I know what sits in the background of this. For me and my personal experience of the jobs that I've done, please, you know, explanation, not excuse, right? It's so important, I think, when you're having a conversation like this. I like that. I like that. Explanation is not an excuse. So what happens inside a government communications director position? Now the objective is clear. You are supposed to keep this government popular. You're supposed to keep this government out of trouble.
24:26And you're supposed to get the government reelected. If this was a business, this is your objective. It was for me because I was a special advisor. So my job was across both, if you like. And obviously the civil services role, they shouldn't be thinking about the next election. But of course, human beings. you know people are all kind of working together towards one aim um when i arrived in government having done a few years in opposition i found myself in a relatively unique position because of course it was a coalition government you know we'd got over the line into number 10 but we were in coalition with the lib dems yeah and so the team of people that i'd been in opposition against along with labor of course i was working i was working with my number two was the guy who was running the Lib Dem comms operation during the election campaign, Johnny Oates, who's now in the House of Lords, and Lena Peach, who now works for Nick Clegg Facebook.
25:18Great people. And we had a press conference. It all came in sharp focus for me. We had a press conference here that's quite well known in the UK in the Rose Garden, glorious sunny day, Nick Clegg and David Cameron together. It's kind of like a civil partnership. It was just the perfect day. Journalists sat in chairs. Everything went well. They were finishing each other's sentences. It was kind of, this is a new beginning. This thing is going to be fantastic. It couldn't have gone any better. And as they left to go back into Downing Street, the two teams of advisors went into different corners of the garden and started briefing against each other.
25:56No way. And I'm stood back from this as now the guy in charge of the entire sort of comms operation. And I thought, well, this is untenable. And so I took everyone back into my office and said, look, guys, we're in government now and we've got to work together. And there are going to be moments when you can take your own path and make your own case, and that's during conference season. Otherwise, we're working for the government here. This is a single purpose, right? We make sure this government stays on track. And by the way, this is going to be a difficult task. This is a coalition government.
26:26This is not easy. And to everyone's great credit, we pulled that off for quite a while. And, you know, I hesitate to say it, Mo, but I think it was a golden period of British politics. Yeah, you have to say that. Somewhat of an overstatement. But no, it was great. It worked really well. So it's fascinating. So I had a slightly different purpose, perhaps, than it was slightly less tribal, slightly less kind of party led because of that coalition. But then by definition, that means that, again, there is a strategy. There are so many opinions. There are so many views. There is so many angles to the truth.
26:59And then the government has to present a coherent part of this, which doesn't include everything, doesn't exclude everything. And basically, again, in my definition, it's just a very well polished version. Hasn't been particularly well polished for about a decade, is what I would say. That's, you know, that's when you get it even worse. Yeah, well, this is where the aim of government and the reality of government kind of, you know, start to become disjointed. Yeah. And why has that happened? I joke about the coalition being a relatively calm period of politics. I think it was. I'm hoping, by the way, we're now going into, in this country, a relatively calm period of politics.
27:38Feels like we might. Good luck. Good luck with that. But in terms of the management of government, do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. The sort of machinery inside. I think this government's got a whole stack of problems coming down the track. But it feels like the temperature is being slightly lowered after 10 years of chaos and of politics in this country becoming increasingly extreme. And why is that? I think there's a bunch of different reasons. You know, inequality, a bit of kind of incumbency. Tories have been there for too long. The longer you stay in power, generally the less popular you become.
28:14I think that immigration, you know, which is seen as a subject only in sort of right-left terms, I think actually it's a lot more complicated and nuanced than that. But I think it's a subject that raises temperatures. And when you have that coupled with inequality, which raises temperatures, then that attracts a certain type of politician. And the politicians who thrive in that kind of environment are politicians who like to operate on the edge, not politicians that operate in the center. And they become politicians who raise the temperature. And, of course, the media plays a part in that as well.
28:48They want the temperature. Of course, because the media, because there's a... Everyone reads then, everyone listens. What happens, right? The anger and the fury and the heat just slowly increases. And so what you then create is an environment that's very difficult to attract and grow a quality of leadership that, in my view, we need, right? Which is a sensible, able, and not a gold-plated narcissist. That's all I want. I don't think we need much more than that. And the environment that we've had over the last 10 years, obviously not just in this country, hasn't lent itself to that kind of leadership.
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29:28And I think that's the kind of mess that's been created. And trying, therefore, as someone in my job, to find a calm way through that in terms of the communication and the storytelling and the narrative is obviously become all but impossible. Because most of the time, most of the political conversation around this country has been on the edges. And I think this is probably, if you ask me, to list the top 10 of challenges the world is facing. It's that heat. It's the idea that you'd tend to believe, or at least the headline story is that the media is interested in conflict, in arguments, that social media thrives on negative comments and the rudeness and the arguments and so on and so forth.
30:11but also that the government themselves as you rightly said they will attract the kind of leader that thrives in this environment so that will motivate more of this environment i think you know listen once to donald trump and you easily can see in the debates that he's just trying to take the debate to a place that is very heated and very accusative this is a comfort zone for him did it did it this week with the debates exactly cats and dogs that's what he's trying to do Exactly. And so accordingly, this kind of environment that draws in more divide, more separation, more anger, more rudeness, more fights really in the public, magnified by social media or the modern media, if you want, is leading us to a place that is very, very, very challenging for a lot of people.
30:57There is almost an overwhelm with information. There is a lot of misinformation, as you rightly said, because none of those comments is true. And at the same time, it's just it completely hides the truth. Yeah. And there's a lack of reasonableness. Yeah. That's the other thing that I've come to be more and more attracted to personally and professionally. You're such a bad editor. Honestly, I'd be a shocking editor. I would. Because as an editor, you know, and I don't want to chuck all editors under the bus here. This is just my perspective on it. But as an editor, you do tend to live in one of two places, right?
31:32It's amazing. Yeah. It's outrageous. Yeah. Not a lot of room in there. Nobody would read a headline that says it's nice. Particularly as a tabloid editor, right? As I've got older and as a result of the experiences I've had, I much prefer to spend my time on that sort of spectrum that swings in between. And unreasonableness, it's a better way to live your life. I think it is also strategically undervalued. Reasonableness is, I think, very valuable. And also in the political context, I think what we need a bit of is the sort of removal of the isms. And we need the simple idea, if you're sat in a room with a prime minister, to be able to say to him, it's not about you.
32:18That conversation doesn't seem to have happened, certainly in politics in this country. you very kindly referenced stoicism earlier in terms of the way that i now see the world so you'll know this because i know that you are also a fan of the stoics very big stoicism created by xeno of citium and when it was first born it was called xenoism when they were you know when he was sitting around with his advisors his special advisors someone and they're struggling for a brand for this thing, someone who's obviously very good at managing up, you know, said to Zeno, you should call it Zenoism. And they did to start with.
32:57And then not far down the road, Zeno decided this is completely wrong. Yeah. Right? It can't be Zenoism. And that's how Stoicism was born, as you know, off the Stoa, the colonnade in Athens. And he didn't want it to be about him. It was bigger than him. Yeah. My God, we need a bit of that in our lives right now. And, you know, there is a tendency, media, but actually much wider than media, that when we see something, a movement, some kind of purpose gathering, there's got to have that ism on the end of it. It's got to be attached to the individual. The individuals I am attracted to now are people who rise above that.
33:38It's not about me and who are reasonable. You know, reasonable is one side of it. I want to come back to this, but I think the isms as well. is probably one of the biggest shocks in my understanding of the world. So, you know, part of this miniseries, I repeatedly say I am a recovering capitalist in reform, right? I have believed in capitalism for a big chunk of my life. And I still actually believe it or not, believe in the method of, you know, if we actually apply a free market approach to many objectives, such as my one billion happy mission, there is efficiencies in that. But the truth is, none of what we're told about capitalism is true.
34:20It's not a free market. It is a cartel, if you really think about it. And so is democracy. It's not actually representative at all. I mean, if you don't mind me saying, I don't have the right to speak about the UK, but neither the UK nor the US, the big democracy advocates have had democracy for a very long time. These are not elected leaders in many ways. They are somehow to start with elected parties, if you want. And it's a very big topic if we want to talk about it. But I get surprised when people tell me, oh, we're a democratic society. No, you're being told you're a democratic society. You're being sold the idea of democracy.
34:58You're being sold the value of capitalism. but you're not actually living this. And so those slogans that keep being thrown at us, for example, the US is killing millions around the world in the name of freedom. We're out there to liberate them. And the fact that the US society doesn't get to see any other than that because of the way the media works and so on, this is truly where I think the show business of it all starts to begin. Am I exaggerating this? I don't think you're exaggerating it. I think the debate around this, though, if we're to shift opinions, is that black and white thing again.
35:40And I believe, because I'm a journalist by trade and I work with words, as you do, that the words we use are so important. And I think if we're going to shift this and if we're going to get people to look at this in a different way, we've got to try and resist the temptation from going to 0 to 60, right? capitalism we thought was good it's not it's bad the truth is capitalism is flawed and in many ways democracy is flawed yeah pretty significantly and when that in fact that is something else that's playing out around the world right now actually our model is imperfect let's put it that way but in trying to move people to that understanding of the flaws and the difficulties and the limitations and some of the darker stuff too well i think we've got to take slightly gently gentler steps towards it, because otherwise what we're going to end up with is being in one camp or the other.
36:31And then we're on the edges, and then you've got extremism, and then there's no environment for reasonableness. The way through this for me, and this could sound hopelessly naive, is reasonableness. We've got to have discussions, and we've got to be able to get it out in the air. And we've got to get it out in the air much earlier than we are at the moment. These kind of conversations need to be happening in schools, right? This has got to be, and I think they, I'm sure they are in some form. But that needs to be celebrated a bit more and encouraged a bit more. At the moment, what we're doing with these things, particularly with societal agendas, is that everyone's angry.
37:06Everyone's driving themselves into a corner of the Rose Garden and a clunky connection. But you get my point, right? And where's that going to take us? I love this, Andy. I mean, I have to say I fully support that idea. I really believe that if you say this is bad, so I'm going to go to the opposite of it, the opposite of it is going to be bad as well, right? It's basically somewhere a reasonable medium is probably what we're looking for. What do you think would be the way for that reasonable medium to rise? Like, you know, again, as a person who is informed by the external world about the external events.
37:44Yeah, you'll have a better idea than Mimo as a master of scale. how you scale this idea of reasonableness. But my little podcast is my little reasonable arrow into the world. That's an interesting way. This is why I love podcasting, because I get to have a conversation like we're having now, which I think is reasonable. And the people that I've had on my podcast, who have all been through crises, far in excess of anything that I've experienced, we sit and we pick apart their story in a very reasonable way. I had one guest on who I was in prison with. And we discussed how we both dealt with that.
38:21Other people have found themselves in crisis through no fault of their own whatsoever. It was just something out of the blue sky. And those conversations, I think, are valuable. And how you scale that idea, how you scale the idea of reasonableness and try and encourage people into that gray space, into that understanding that we're all flawed. We will all make mistakes. and that talking about failure, and I talk about my failure, happily would be an overstatement, but I think it's important that I do because I believe in the value of failure. And if you're prepared to sit and listen to someone who properly mucked it up in the way that I did, well, then maybe that's going to be helpful in some way, shape or form.
39:01I love how you speak about this. But I'm not looking for a round. The important thing is, and this is one of the difficulties of it, is that when you do it, people are, oh, he's looking for a round of applause or it's, oh, he's building a platform. I'm not building a platform and I'm not looking for a round of applause. I'm just trying to have a reasonable conversation and tell you how I feel about what I went through. Because I think that might be, and it's for others to judge, but it might be useful. I couldn't agree more, believe it or not. This year, one of the big themes of scale for me is to go back to barter economies.
39:31It's, you know, the idea of capitalism as a promise, democracy as a promise, is really to give the power to the people. So, you know, it's not just the royalty and the landlords that have all the wealth. Capitalism was sort of promising everyone who does the work can actually get the wealth as well or some of it, right? You know, democracy was saying everyone who participates can have an opinion, can have a view that determines their life at the very core level, if you want. And I think what ended up happening is that those systems, specifically capitalism, if you ask me, started moving everything to the bigger scales and the bigger scales and the bigger scales.
40:04A small grocery shop is not good enough. You need to have a chain of supermarkets that then become a group around the world and so on. And that concentration of power still gives free market benefits, but they give it to very few while all of the others are just becoming cogs in the machine and feeling very lost if you think about it. And so if you take media, it probably followed the same approach. It followed the idea of media at the beginning was one guy telling his neighbor and then it became massive conglomerates. And now we're going back to that idea of, no, no, hold on. There could be a million of us podcasters that are communicating in ways that are not as big as the sun or the guardian or whatever.
40:47But then the responsibility, I think, falls on the listener. You know, the listener needs to start to cleanse their palate and let in only reasonable conversations. And I think it's probably a call for everyone to say, if it doesn't sound reasonable to you, if it's on the fringes, if it's polarized, then it's probably not the truth you're looking for. But it's connected to so many other things as well, isn't it? It really is. It's connected to just the kind of impact of, again, these mini computers on people's minds to be able to kind of even steer them towards a position where they see the value of reasonableness.
41:29when all they've digested is the immediate, not even necessarily negative. And that's another thing as well, right? The other danger here is that you could put social media, right, into a box that's just wholly negative. I've had guests on my pod who said that social media saved their lives. I had a woman called Paisley Mahmood who went through the horrific set of circumstances. Building a community on Instagram is what saved her life, right, without any shadow of a doubt. And so there's so much positive that can come with these technologies. So we've got to be careful not to put all that in the wrong box as well.
42:01Yeah, half of the knowledge I have in my older years come from YouTube. As much as people think I'm a bookworm, and I am, I read quite extensively, but definitely I get a lot more knowledge from highly targeted searches on YouTube than I get from books now. I want to talk about the podcast specifically, Crisis Word Crisis. And I don't know if I want to visit the story of how you ended up where you ended up. prison is not an easy place to be. I think you did quite a few amazing interviews and I ask our listeners to go and listen to some of them about your experience and how you describe it and how you sort of keep it to yourself.
42:41You say, I've made mistakes. You never mentioned that others made mistakes. You never mentioned that the other mistakes affected your path. You just simply say, I made mistakes. I ended up in a place I didn't want to be. I dealt with it. And I think that's fabulous in your approach and i really encourage people to listen to that that's partly because i think there's very little we've been talking about trying to find the truth yes i think is a truth there is nothing more useless either emotionally yeah strategically tactically than a self-appointed victim and that's that's a guiding light for me yeah i think the truth however is that our world today, again, not to see the negative side of it, but there are so many reasons for people to feel that they're in crisis.
43:31There's so much powerlessness that makes people appoint themselves as victims. So I don't want to generalize, but I want to start from a personal experience. The transformation you went through in those years creates a person that is not reasonable from a point of view of being forced to be. It's a person that is trying to be reasonable because he has seen both sides. He has seen sort of almost the ultimate power working for the prime minister of the country, feeling the rush of the ability to inform an entire nation, if you want, all the way to a person that's in a prison cell, unable to even say, but that's not my prison.
44:15You know, this is very high security. This is not what I need to be in. Can I be categorized so that I can move to a prison that fits my needs? That complete hopelessness, if you want, powerlessness. I find in your story is probably the ultimate teacher. So how do you think our world today, which really is a world of a lot of powerlessness, us. What have you learned that can help us navigate what's happening in our world today? Well, from a personal point of view, from an individual point of view, I went from sitting on Marine One, Barack Obama's helicopter, with Barack Obama sat on one side and David Cameron sat on the other, to sitting on a plastic mattress in a cell in the space of 24 months.
45:09and it was sitting on that plastic mattress that because I didn't cope very well at all in the first year of my difficulties I was unraveling pretty quickly everything in my life was just sort of falling apart all the things I cared about the things I'd built my responsibilities it all you know when it goes wrong it goes wrong really quickly yeah and I really struggled with it for the first year and I can date actually the moment when I when I kind of got a grip and it was sat on that blue plastic mattress that was May the 30th 2012 I was in a police cell in Scotland and it's the second time I've been arrested I've been driven up that day from London six and a half hours in the van police motorbike outriders as I went over the border into Scotland and I'm sat there in that cell and I sat on the on the mattress opposite me was one-way glass it It was like a cell for terrorists.
46:05And I just thought this is completely absurd. I have now lost control of my life. I've totally lost control of my life. And I, in that moment, was also able to say to myself, you know, you're breathing. It's going in, it's going out. This is a room. It's a horrible room, but it's just a room. and although you've lost complete control of your life, I now have total control of how I'm going to react to all this and how I feel about it. Wow. And I laid down on the mattress and that started the process for me. Just breathe in, breathe out, get through this day. This is before I've been interviewed and then move on to the next room and who knows what rooms you'll end up in.
46:52As it turns out, I ended up in an even worse room with a door slamming shut for a period of time. But even when I was in prison, I was still able to say to myself, look, just breathe in, breathe out. This is just a place. And actually prison, you know, desperately depressing environment. Cold, stark, miserable. But I tell you what, I'm full of emotion. And for a journalist, fascinating. Fascinating. Fascinating, right? Walking around a yard. It's like gold. Walking around a yard. Talking to every walk of life. walking around a prison yard, anti-clockwise, as every prisoner does in the world, interestingly, with a bunch of lads who are going to be serving sentences considerably longer than mine, and talking to them about how are you going to approach this, how are you going to cope with this, was fascinating.
47:42I would rather not have had that experience, obviously, because it wasn't just about me. It was also the impact. While I'm walking around that yard, my wife's at home with our sons wondering what on earth is going to happen next. I would not wish it on anybody, but I was able to say to myself Andy you've got control of how you feel about all this so keep control of that and that has been again along with dodging the bitterness bullet and the self-appointed victim bit which is related you know those have been the sort of guiding lights for me and I think it's the guiding light for anyone who's in crisis right that's the first thing you got to try and do is accept what's happening to you as being real and then work out what it is you've got control of and what you don't have control of and focus on that.
48:24And as you've correctly alighted on Mo, and I know that you're interested in this subject as well, there's nothing new about this. The Stoics worked this out a couple of thousand years ago. So they are the ultimate crisis managers in my view, and not much has changed. It's all about control. So when we zoom out of my story and think about it from a bigger picture point of view, that is what needs, in my view, to be taught. I think that is an important lesson to learn. Again, I go back to education. I go back to our schools. It doesn't have to be framed as stoicism. It doesn't need a label. It doesn't need to be because of stoics.
48:58For example, you put stoicism in Google, right? And you'll see a whole load of stuff aligning stoicism with toxic masculinity. Yeah. Utter nonsense. We've got to be super careful about what box we decide even to put stoicism in. But the idea, simple lesson, to build resilience. It starts with understanding what you have control of and what you don't have control of. That is a lesson that you can't teach early enough, in my view. This is an intense amount of wisdom in a very short few sentences, as a matter of fact. You're being very kind. No, no, no, no, hold on. The copyright, unfortunately, doesn't sit with me.
49:34It's a couple of thousand years old. It's out of copyright, funnily enough. You'll be amazed. So I disagree with you on that. I have to say, and I don't say this with vanity at all, that after I wrote Soul for Happy, and I was speaking about it publicly quite often, that people would walk to me after I finished my talk and say, that's stoicism, right? And I would go like, yeah, yeah. And I smiled. I didn't know what stoicism is. And then I started to read about stoicism as a result of people telling me that what I'm talking about sounds like stoicism. And I think what you went through seems to be exactly the same.
50:10You figured this out yourself, which probably means it's human nature and then you realize that this has been educated and taught for 2000 years yeah i found it as a result of what happened for sure this is another positive you know there's a lot of difficult content out there that is sending us in the wrong direction if we've been discussed there's also a lot of amazing content and i found some fantastic stuff and i'm gonna throw a compliment back at you including your book which i read and some of the podcast content that you've produced and the other work that you've done. And you're not alone.
50:45There is a real movement of people out there who are exploring what it is to be resilient, what it is to be a human being in this bonkers age of ours. There's a lot of good stuff out there and I've leant on it pretty heavily. But I have felt, oh, wow, why didn't I find this before? What? It's quite interesting. How has that not crossed my path previously? The truth is my mind wasn't open to it. Because you were focused and running in another direction, I think. I never shared this before, but I do a 40 days silent retreat every year. This year I managed to only do around 32 and halfway through I also had to spend a bit of time with my wonderful wife.
51:25Because 40 days of silence is good for a single man, but not good for a married man. I will say that openly. But anyway, this year was probably my most difficult silent retreat ever. ever like i i went through massive emotional peaks and troughs i i lost my sister my brother and my mom was two months apart yeah this year and i love them all and i think they're incredible beings that are definitely in a wonderful place but i think the realization of the slippage of time just hit me so hard okay and you know my my wonderful friend alex sat in front of me afterwards. And I was sort of talking to her about the idea of how everything's so fleeting and life is so short and so on.
52:16And she said in a very interesting way, it's not about when we die. It's about how much more time do you have for what you set yourself out to achieve, okay? Because in her words, you may live to be 80, but you're not gonna be able to travel the world like you travel now when you're 70. Okay. And, you know, you may live to be 75, but you're not going to be writing books as sophisticated and complex in their analysis as you're doing right now when you're 75. And so you might as well start asking yourself if you have, let's say, three books to write, and if you have four objectives that are big enough to have impact left for you to achieve, which ones will those be?
53:01I could almost picture myself sitting on that plastic blue thing that you were sitting on because that was a moment of realization of like, okay, you know what? You now need to understand that the fleeting time is not within your control. It's painful that the loss that comes through life is not within your control, but what is within your control, right? And this is why I say this is an intense amount of wisdom that you shared in literally two sentences. is stop being the victim, look at the reality, take as much as it may pain you to be in that reality, realize that you're alive, you're taking another breath in and another breath out, start thinking about what you can control.
53:46If you ask me about the world we're going in with geopolitical crisis, with economic crisis, with massive confusion around misinformation and disinformation and so much, it's difficult. It's difficult for a lot of people and we are fortunate compared to most. I think the answer is exactly the same. Realize that you're breathing in, breathing out, stop being the victim, acknowledge the truth, think about what you can control. Isn't that it? There's one other, on the face of it, slightly more superficial thing that I'd add. And that is the fundamental sort of strategic power of a sense of humor.
54:22I love that. Which has got me through some dark days, I can tell you. The irony of life. The irony of life, trying to keep a grip on the joke of the universe. When I was in Belmarsh, it was my second night in prison, and it's the first time that I'm taken to the servery to get my food, and it is like a scene in a terrible film, right? You're lined up, I'm in this ridiculous purple tracksuit that you get when you're in prison. I'm standing on a prison landing in a high-security prison, not knowing who's in front of me or who's behind me, and I'm taken down to the servery, and it's kind of like a piece of overcooked chicken.
54:58and you get your peas and then at the end of it, there's a prisoner stood behind the server and he's in charge of the potatoes. And he looks at me and he says, oh, it's you. And I'm like, oh, God, here we go. He says, you're the news of the world guy, aren't you? Oh, wow. And I think, oh, God, what's going to happen here? And then he, big smile, he says, I love that paper. Have another potato. No way. And so a cold, overcooked Belmarsh potato, literally the first positive that I'd had as a result of being the editor of the biggest selling Sunday newspaper in the world for about seven years. And I couldn't help but find that very funny.
55:43Yeah. You know, you've got to be careful about laughing about these things, I suppose. But I found it funny. And I tell you, it helped me in the walk back to the cell and the door was slammed. and I'm in that cell for the next 23 hours or whatever it was. It got me through, right? It's just such an important thing. And so when I look for opportunities to laugh, I try and grab them. I love this. And, of course, there's a whole chemical thing about that and we all know what the value of humor is. But to actually try and seek those moments out, I've done that. They're all around you, honestly. They're all around you.
56:22I have to admit to you, I haven't figured it out, but I've been really deeply thinking about this. And actually watching one of your interviews, I don't remember, with Jane something. Jane Moore. Yeah, Jane Moore. He's a good friend. Listening to it, not watching it. It just hit me really, really hard because you speak so beautifully about your relationship with your wife, Eleanor, and with your kids. during that time. You speak eventually about how some people really rose to the position of being really good friends while others disappeared. And that bit got me to really reflect deeply about what actually matters.
57:00Because believe it or not, in prison, a potato and a favorable guy, a supportive guy. Big moment. Is a massive treasure, right? It's quite interesting, really. And I've been thinking deeply about that during my retreat, the idea of what actually matters. Okay. And within what matters, what is actually within my control. So it's quite interesting that being ex-chief business officer of Google X, speaking about artificial intelligence at the time that we're speaking, you know, that we're going through now, makes me reasonably popular for corporates to do talks and so on. And so there is money coming in and, you know, I'm reasonably comfortable anyway because my t-shirts are not very expensive and so on.
57:47But the idea is there is so much that you can get sucked into in that world, being positioned as the expert of AI, which I really don't understand. I mean, I actually get some of my teachers really positioning me as an expert on the topic. I have no idea why. And so much blessing. But at the same time, it doesn't matter, truly, honestly and truly. So where have you got to on that? I think what matters is to have someone you love and to have your needs met. And in a very interesting way, I say that because when I was listening to you with Jane, somehow, I know this sounds ridiculous, so please don't punch me, but having your wife and feeling safe in prison, I somehow told myself after my last retreat, I was like, yeah, he had the whole world.
58:36Interesting. Yeah. That's exactly right. Yeah, he had the whole world. And my sons. Your sons, yeah. That's what I need. And I can tell you that was, because you'll know this, I haven't just made professional mistakes in my life. I've made some personal mistakes. Oh, having to be awesome. So that was imperiled, right? And the fact that Eloise stood by me, the fact that we stayed together, the fact that on the night that I arrive in prison I get news that actually what's going to happen is I'm going to come out of that prison and I'm going to go straight into another trial in Scotland, which is what happened, potentially with even worse consequences.
59:08is most people know where the door is not everybody most people know where the door is when they go into prison i knew where the door was it was straight into another trial and i speak to my wife and she's her words to me were it's a long life darling you'll be fine we're gonna be fine just an amazing woman she's an amazing woman and she's considerably more evolved than me asking her to marry me i'm i'm i'm very lucky as well by the way i'm incredibly lucky asking her to marry me was the greatest decision I ever made. And her saying yes was the greatest piece of luck that I ever had. So, you know, that was everything.
59:43It's incredible. Along with as well, that was the single most important thing. But also, you know, you touched on it earlier. When you find yourself in those circumstances, you know, I was cancelled would be the word that we would use now. But I was properly toxic, right, for a number of years. Unemployable, completely out of it. And in prison, of course, it just only sort of exacerbates that. and it becomes therefore a real audit on your life. You know, and my situation was also a scandal, you know, and scandal is an interesting thing because that twists relationships, it twists individuals, it twists history, it twists all sorts of things out of shape.
1:00:19And so all of that was kind of bent and broken for a while. And so you look at what you have and you certainly find out, the old cliche, cliche is for a good reason, who your friends are. And, you know, there were some people who sort of slightly fell by the wayside. That's for them. Important thing is not to be bitter or angry about that. But honestly, Mo, there's a group of people who owed me nothing, nothing, and who ran into the gunfire for me and who have absolutely sustained me and helped me and supported me to get through. Eloise is without doubt the most important, along with our three sons but I'm a very very lucky man I think it's remarkable that you can say that with what you've gone through I'm lucky I'm lucky that it all happened to me I'm a better man for it I would never say I'm so glad it all happened that would be ridiculous I wouldn't wish it on anybody but am I a better person for it without a shadow of a doubt am I a better husband yes am I a better father yes am i a better friend yes i am for sure a better advisor as a result of it because i want to be in a room with someone who's going through difficult things which is what i do professionally without any shadow of a doubt so you were waiting for your sentence on july 4th 2014 yeah yeah i was in prison exactly 10 years ago that was the day where i came back after burying my son oh goodness me so Ali left July 2nd we buried him July 2nd but you can imagine listening to your story I was like oh interesting that's interesting what I want to say my first and foremost is I'm sorry for your loss I would never go back and say you know I'm glad it happened but exactly like you it happened but my circumstances are nothing in comparison oh you'll be amazed I buried the love of my life my real teacher if you want you buried your old self that day no no I'm afraid I'm going to have to argue with you.
1:02:21You know, I had a broken reputation. That's what I had. And that is nothing in comparison. So I am nothing but admiring of the work that you've done in your son's memory. It's nothing but remarkable. I think we should end on this. Did you see me trying to make this podcast about news and media? Yeah, but I can't. This is not what slow-mo is about anyway. I am so grateful. And if you'd let me, I'd like to call us friends. I'd definitely like us to stay in touch. Privilege. What an incredible human being. What a wonderful story. Thank you, mate. Thank you for having me. Thanks for the conversation.
1:03:07And for all of you listening, I promise I wanted to give you a that's not what they tell you episode. I think there is a bit of that in our conversation. Please, please, please realize, I think, what Andy taught us at the beginning, that journalists are humans. Politicians are machines that have objectives and targets, and sometimes deals need to be made. Social media is completely uninformed. And so I think my objective of this entire miniseries is to tell you debate, question. When they tell you democracy is amazing, nod and say, is it really? and is what I'm living a democracy at all? If they tell you capitalism is freedom, question that.
1:03:50Whose freedom? Maybe it is, but not yours. And I think the idea that we can get to the truth if we're a little more reasonable, I love that part, that we can actually be a bit more reasonable. We don't have to be on the extreme fringes of everything. Having said that, it seems to me that life eventually boils down to what you need and love and connection. And if you have those, breathe in and breathe out, identify what you can control and start working on it. I cannot thank you enough until my last five episodes to give me the opportunity to speak to such amazing, amazing human beings with amazing stories and so much wisdom.
1:04:35It's all because of you. And I'm very, very grateful for your time and that you're listening to this. As I always tell you, I love you all for listening. and I will see you next time.
From the publisher
In the second episode in our miniseries 'It's Not What They Told You,' Mo is joined by former newspaper editor and communications director for the UK government, Andy Coulson.He rose to prominence as the editor of the News of the World, one of Britain's top tabloids, before transitioning into politics, where he served as Director of Communications for Prime Minister David Cameron. Coulson’s career took a sharp turn when he was involved in the UK phone hacking scandal, which led to his convict...
