‘Maybe the tsunami of digitalism will bring us back to being more human again,’ Yonatan Dor, creative force behind the astonishing Dor Brothers AI videos, tells me. ‘We're humans, and we connect to humans, and we connect to human art. So maybe you'll have incredible AI actors – but already we have incredible AI chess players and still we prefer watching Magnus Carlson playing, even though we know AI will beat him a thousand out of a thousand times.’

27 year-old Dor, who is Israeli, came to using AI video technology almost by accident in early 2022 after trying to make 3D music videos. In recent weeks his wildly dystopian and comedic creations – which typically portray world leaders and tech overlords as degenerate criminals or highlight the idiocies of modern culture – have repeatedly lit up the internet. Joe Rogan has hailed the work as ‘incredible’ and Lex Friedman while in conversation with Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said the films push the boundaries of what’s socially acceptable, existing at the very ‘edge of the Overton Window.’

Dor acknowledges he is working at the frontier of a new form of media, but claims to be mindful of the responsibility to use the technology for good. He says his videos showcase what is now possible ‘in a very obviously satirical way, but also in a very realistic and convincing way,’ in order that society can become accustomed to AI videos. This is better, he suggests, than ‘letting somebody else maliciously make a president appear to say something that causes a nuclear war.’

It won’t be long, Dor says, before screen actors are a thing of the past. He points out AI tools are being developed with such exponential rapidity – ‘wizardry’ – that within five years the tech will be able easily to train on existing footage of actors and then adapt it to any role. Directing AI talent, he believes, will be as simple as typing the prompt: ‘I want you to be this actor, but in this role, with this emotion, with this vibe, with this mindset.’ He says: ‘It will then act extremely well with that personality, but with it’s own twist on that actor's mindset and emotion.’

What about the implications for pornography? Already, society has had a foretaste of what is coming. The obscene artificial images of the singer Taylor Swift that appeared online in 2024 caused global outcry. Dor acknowledges AI and porn are natural bedfellows – ‘it wouldn't surprise me that porn is something that pushes the technology forward’ – but he seems more concerned by the manner in which the technology will soon be able to satiate all human desires, not merely the erotic.

He talks about the creation of AI ‘brain heroin machines’ and says: ‘It's the scariest aspect, because we're talking about satisfying a person's need entirely, which is beyond porn and romance. It's also entertainment… That's the biggest fear. We know AI is going to a place where it will perfectly entertain and indulge us in every need we have. How do we avoid a future where we just sit and plug into that thing and stay inside of it 24/7?’

Dor says he switches off the YouTube function that would enable him to monetise his videos, many of which are watched by tens of millions of people. The decision, which he estimates costs him a half a million euros annually, is largely artistic: ‘We want to bring back that mentality of making something cool, making something with spirit, making something with a personality – and not always chasing money.’

More pragmatically, he adds he’s less likely to be sued for creating satirical content if he’s not profiting from it. Instead, he makes an income by using the AI tech to create advertising for brands or to make pop videos for the likes of Snoop Dogg.

Dor’s scepticism of corporations extends to politics. He says he actively disengages from political conversations on the basis he does not find them interesting. Rather, he says he is fascinated by the manner in which human beings increasingly believe we have separated ourselves from the less civilised aspects of our nature. This is the theme he claims he is primarily exploring in his films. ‘People used to believe in mystical owls that whispered divine words into our ears, but we completely depressed it and became very clinical and hygienic with our thoughts. It's nice to remind people we’re still very primal and instinctive and tribal,’ he says.

Even though he is clearly having so much fun with it, like the rest of us Dor sounds both excited and frightened by the sudden and growing enormity of artificial intelligence. He speaks enthusiastically about the effect it will have on the film-making industry by enabling artists to take risks and circumvent executives who are concerned only with safe-guarding return on investment: ‘I think there's a coming golden age of cinema, because so many individual creators with fantastic ideas will be empowered and will be able to make high quality cinema again without executives saying what they can and can't do.’

He adds AI ultimately is only a tool and using it well to make stories come to life will always require talent. ‘The same directors who were good before will remain good, with it or without it,’ he says.

An optimist by nature, Dor admits he frets about the manner in which nations – most obviously America and China – are competing for AI superiority within an environment lacking adequate regulation. He says: ‘I think about AI as a different species that is a million times more intelligent… One of the most important things we should look out for is the people developing it. We don't want a situation where people are racing to the top and by doing so destroying everything behind them.’

He believes the need for an international United Nations-style regulatory body for AI is more pressing even than it is for nuclear weapons. ‘We know nuclear is dangerous, and we know that if somebody pulls a trigger we’re doomed – but we know that we have the control of pulling the trigger. With AI, we don't really know that, and that makes it an even bigger threat,’ he says.

Dor says in just a day or two he can make a highly sophisticated and slick AI film that will be watched by millions of people. Unsurprisingly, he is deeply conscious of the power of the new technology. He says he is a spiritual person: ‘I believe there's something beyond the human. I think the humility that comes from that thought process is really important, because once you don't have a God, maybe you start thinking you are one, and that's where problems arise.’

Is your best pal a convicted paedophile? No? Oh, don’t be like that. If His Excellency The Right Honourable The Lord Peter Mandelson, His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to the United States of America no less, can be best buddies with a known kiddy-fiddler, then so can you. There’s no shame, not anymore.

It’s easy, isn’t it, sometimes to wonder if the people who rule us actively hate us, or at least hold the most profound contempt for our petty worldview and our bourgeois sense of decency. Certainly, the Jeffrey Epstein saga – in which information about what exactly the rich and powerful got up to on the dead financier’s Little Saint James private island, or in any of his myriad ultra-luxurious properties – is ceaselessly promised and then withheld, makes this contempt seem obvious.

In May, Sky News asked Lord Mandelson if it was true he’d stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in June 2009, after the financier had in 2008 been given a weirdly lenient thirteen-month work-release sentence - rather than the maximum 45 year jail sentence - for the crime of raping girls as young as 14.

His lordship replied flatly that he refused to answer any questions about Epstein. ‘I wish I’d never met him in the first place,’ was all he would say on the subject.

Now, however, he has changed his tune, on Wednesday admitting to The Sun: ‘I regret very, very deeply indeed carrying on that association with him for far longer than I should have done… I fell and accepted assurances that he had given me about his indictment, his original criminal case in Florida. Like many people, I took at face value what he said.’

Oh dear.

Is it likely his lordship would have made this admission had a 2003 book made for Epstein to celebrate his 50^thbirthday - containing notes from illustrious friends - not this week been released thanks to the efforts of Congressional Democratic House Oversight Committee?

In the book we see all too clearly the adoration and praise Mandelson lavished on Epstein when the child molester was alive. ‘Wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!’ Mandelson gushed. He even illustrated his note with a photo of himself wearing only a bathrobe in conversation with Epstein, who is fully dressed.

‘Happy birthday, Jeffrey. We love you!!’ his note concludes.

There is so much about the Epstein scandal that stinks to high heaven, no matter how grimly President Trump – who once described Epstein as ‘a terrific guy’ and ‘a lot of fun to be with’ – tells us the whole thing is a hoax.

To recap: are we really expected to believe Epstein topped himself in a maximum security jail at the precise moment his guards had fallen asleep and the security cameras on his cell door were apparently on the blink? And just before he went on trial to answer questions about what he and his influential buddies had been doing? It seems awfully convenient.

Then there’s the question of how Epstein, a failed school teacher, became so obscenely rich. From whom, or where, was the money coming? Also, why did modelling agent and frequent Epstein companion Jean-Luc Brunel, who like Epstein stood accused of raping and trafficking children, also apparently commit suicide while in prison in Paris in 2022 – also by hanging?

Add to that the recent transfer of Esptein’s close companion Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security prison, apparently in contravention of Federal Bureau of Prisons regulations relating to the confinement of convicted sex offenders. The transfer was made just days after she had told Department of Justice officials she had never seen President Trump doing anything nefarious with Epstein. ‘They’re offering her something to keep her mouth shut,’ DOJ Acting Deputy Chief Joseph Schnitt told an undercover reporter shortly afterward.

It's worth pointing out that Maxwell’s testimony at her 2021 trial for crimes including human trafficking was considered sufficiently ‘sensational and impure’ by judge Alison J Nathan that to this day it is withheld from public consumption. Oh well.

The belief many people hold - too many, surely, to any longer be dismissed as the fanciful imaginings of conspiracy theorists – is that charismatic Epstein was running an industrial-scale honey trap operation on behalf of a foreign or domestic intelligence agency for the purpose of secretly filming highly influential people indulging whatever their particular perversion was in order later to exert control over them through the time-honoured means of blackmail.

‘Thinking of voting against sending more arms to eg Israel, senator? Fine, then presumably you also won’t mind your wife and constituents seeing this footage of you ecstatic in a gimp outfit/having acrobatic sex with an underage girl…” is the gist. It doesn’t take much imagination to see why shadowy intelligence agencies might like to operate in this way. It’s relatively cheap, for one thing, and presumably highly effective.

The alternative - and the version of events we are now asked by the likes of FBI director Kash Patel to believe - is that Epstein was simply both history’s wealthiest and most prolific paedophile – indeed, that he, and he alone, molested ‘over one thousand young women’, according to the official FBI report – but that when he wasn’t indulging in this depravity he liked nothing more than to throw really swell parties for the rich and famous.

Which do you think is more likely?

Whatever the reality, it seems increasingly likely we will never be told. Ultimately, perhaps that’s all the answer we need. You’ll remember Prince Andrew stayed with Epstein in Manhattan in December, 2010. If it was good enough for royalty, then surely it was good enough for a mere lord. As I say, there’s no shame anymore.

The official rationale for closing the FBI investigation into Jeffrey Epstein stinks and President Trump must know it - even if he can manage to feign incredulity that anyone should still want to talk about the disgraced financier.

‘‘Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,’ he responded testily on Tuesday to a reporter’s question at a cabinet meeting about whether Epstein had ever been an intelligence agency asset.

‘Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time? I mean I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein.’

Crucially, Trump didn’t deny Epstein was a spook, and neither did Attorney General Pam Bondi to whom he passed the question. “I have no knowledge about that. We can get back to you about that,” she obfuscated.

What an insane place the Epstein saga has now arrived at, a place in which - according to the official statement released late on Monday - we are now required by the FBI and the Department of Justice to believe Epstein did not traffic ‘over one thousand’ young women to powerful men as part of an industrial-scale honey trap blackmail operation, but rather that he molested them himself, in private.

As for all the entertaining he did on his Little Saint James island, or at his various multimillion dollar properties – where guests included Bill Gates, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew – hell, he must have just really loved parties.

Stating that there seems obviously to be a high level, deep state cover-up taking place on all things Epstein-related can no longer be dismissed simply as a nut-job conspiracy theory, no matter how much those involved might like to. Why not? Well, because so many of the people now asking us to believe the unbelievable not so long ago themselves called bullshit.

In 2023, current head of the FBI Kash Patel was asked by podcast host Glenn Beck who he believed had possession of Epstein’s black book of clients.

He said: “FBI. That’s under direct control of the director of the FBI… This is another government gangster operation. All these local law enforcement communities get funding from the DOJ and FBI for local programs. If you don’t cooperate, you’re not getting your million dollars for this, and that’s a lot of money to these local districts. That’s how they play the game. That’s why you don’t have the black book.”

In 2021, Vice President JD Vance responded to allegations Epstein’s close associate Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers had made a deal with the DOJ to ensure her black book of contacts would never see the light of day, by stating: “What possible interest would the US government have in keeping Epstein’s clients secret?... If you’re a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case you should be ashamed of yourself. What purpose do you even serve?”

Exactly.

There is so much about the Epstein case that is deeply suspect. To pick a few questions at random: what exactly was contained in Ghislaine Maxwell’s testimony at her 2021 trial for crimes including human trafficking that was considered sufficiently ‘sensational and impure’ by judge Alison J Nathan that to this day it is withheld from public consumption?

What did former US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alex Acosta mean when he said ‘I was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and to leave it alone’ when explaining the 2008 plea deal over which he presided that saw Epstein receive a thirteen-month work release deal rather than a maximum 45-year jail sentence for the crime of raping girls as young as 14?

Also, was the $158 million dollars paid to Epstein between 2012 and 2017 by Apollo Global Management Services CEO Leon Black really only for ‘estate planning, tax and philanthropic advice,’ as claimed? It seems a tremendous amount. Interestingly, Black was twice on the receiving end of lawsuits alleging he raped young women at properties owned by Epstein. He has denied all accusations.

Then, of course, there is all the other strange stuff: the cameras filming the door to the cell in which Epstein supposedly committed suicide being on the blink. The guards responsible for supervising him being asleep. Epstein’s friend the modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel - who like him supposedly committed suicide in a Paris jail while awaiting trial for human trafficking - being pictured on Little Saint James island wearing a cap bearing the words ‘Israel Army’.

Could it be that Trump, who before winning re-election said he would have ‘no problem’ with releasing the Epstein files, has been forced to make some very difficult decisions to protect the involvement of the American state, or of America’s allies, in whatever Epstein was up to? There are also people who claim he is trying to protect himself. It is no secret he used to party with Epstein. The Democrats on Tuesday demanded all DOJ Epstein documents mentioning Trump be released.

What seems certain is that Trump at a stroke has placed himself at odds with the podcast bros – and their massive audiences – that he and Vance went to such lengths to embrace ahead of the election. Hundreds of hours have been spent over the years by the likes of Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, Lex Fridman and Theo Vonn discussing Epstein.

This, for example, is Rogan’s recent take on Epstein: ‘It was an intelligence operation. Whoever was running it - whether it was the Mossad or the CIA, or whether it was a combination of both - it was an intelligence operation. They were bringing in people and compromising them, and then when they compromised them, they would use whatever they had on them to influence their opinions and the way they expressed their opinions.’

It seems extraordinary that Trump’s usually so reliably excellent political instincts, particularly when it comes to his base, would be so off. What is really going on? Unless answers are swiftly forthcoming, there is no danger discussion of Epstein will cease any time soon. It will be tremendously damaging for Trump.

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Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, he committed his sex crimes in private and no one who associated with him – much less visited his properties, including his Little Saint James private island – need be investigated or charged. That’s the FBI’s latest version of events, announced on Monday, after an apparently lengthy review of the dead financier’s belongings.

‘This systematic review revealed no incriminating "client list." There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,’ the FBI statement said.

It added ‘Epstein harmed over one thousand victims’ – presumably when not busy hosting the likes of Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, Les Wexner or President Donald Trump at lavish social events that must if nothing else have been immensely time consuming to organise.

But how to square the FBI assertion no client list exists with US Attorney General Pam Bondi’s statement in February that a list of Epstein clients ‘is sitting on my desk now to review’? She also told reporters ‘there are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn.’

Perhaps we’ll never know. What we do know for certain is that Epstein’s close associate Ghislaine Maxwell now resides in jail in Florida, having been sentenced to 20 years for crimes including trafficking. Are we expected to believe this Oxford-educated, society-heiress was trafficking underage victims solely for use by Epstein? If nothing else, the volume seems extraordinary.

Is it really more implausible to believe – as many do – that both Epstein and Maxwell, whose father was widely suspected of being a senior Mossad agent, were employed by a foreign or domestic intelligence agency to obtain kompromat on powerful and influential people, for the purpose of blackmail? Honeytrap operations – recording people having illicit sex – are after all one of the oldest secret service tricks.

Intriguingly, the first time Maxwell was pictured in public after Epstein’s death, at an In-N-Out Burger, she was conspicuously reading Ted Gup’s The Book of Honor: The Secret Lives and Deaths of CIA Operatives. According to its own blurb, the meticulously researched book affords ‘a surprising glimpse at the real lives of secret agents, and an unprecedented history of the most compelling - and controversial - department of the US government’.

It is easy to understand why there has been such widespread bewilderment at the FBI’s statement. Too much of the Epstein case seems utterly improbable. In 2019, Epstein supposedly committed suicide. Never mind that he was on suicide watch in a New York maximum security jail – his guards, apparently, were asleep. The cameras filming the door to his cell happened not to be working. And why has it taken the FBI so long to release this statement?

How exactly, too, did this failed school teacher afford his incredible lifestyle, including ownership of a $50 million Manhattan townhouse, a $20 million Palm Beach estate and a $20 million New Mexico ranch – not to mention the Caribbean islands – where he entertained his friends? Why in 2008 was he given a sweetheart thirteen-month work-release deal rather than a maximum 45 year jail sentence for the crime of raping girls as young as 14? And why did modelling agent and frequent Epstein companion Jean-Luc Brunel, who like Epstein stood accused of raping and trafficking children, also apparently commit suicide while in prison in Paris in 2022, also by hanging? It’s all very odd.

If only we could approach for comment Epstein’s most high profile accuser, Virginia Giuffre, who alleged consistently that she was trafficked by Epstein to his friends, including Prince Andrew. Sadly – or perhaps conveniently – she died, apparently by suicide, only last April. We also can’t ask Ruslana Korshunova, the young model who visited Epstein’s island twice before falling to her death from a ninth floor Manhattan balcony in 2008.

Anyway, I digress. ‘After a thorough investigation, FBI investigators concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019,’ the FBI statement reads. And let that be an end to it.

The problem with the future is it is very obviously no longer being created by cool people. Instead, it belongs to autistic nerds who want nothing more than to be a computer.

Cool people invent things like surfboards, Ray-Bans and Triumph Spitfires. Nerds make profoundly uncool things like cars that drive themselves and the absurd Limitless Pendant device that I have been attempting to wear.

Let me start this review by stating I hope the Pendant – yours for $199 – fails very hard. It is an awful and life-negating device that subjugates any human stupid enough to place one around their neck to an AI processing unit. It’s all too easy to imagine a not too distant future in which each of us is compelled by authoritarian governments to put one on in order that social credit scores can be apportioned based on activity behind closed doors. It’s a terrible thought.

The Pendant records everything you say, and everything anyone near you says. That’s it. It then feeds the captured data into AI and sends you a summary of your daily performance. I first put mine on last Friday ahead of an evening during which my nine year old daughter would go to a school disco and my football-obsessed seven year old son would be allowed to stay up past his bedtime to watch a match.

While I had it on, I also confessed to my wife that in the afternoon I had lost control of myself after eating half a chocolate brownie and consumed three Twix, one after the other. I told her the effect was to make me feel both catatonic and deranged.

This is what the Pendant had to say: ‘Your day was a wonderful mix of family time, sports, school events and meaningful conversations. There was a lot of laughter, some bedtime wrangling, and a sense of pride in your children’s activities and confidence. The evening ended with a bit of reflection and planning for the days ahead.’

I asked it how I could ‘be better’.

‘You mentioned feeling ‘hit by such a wave of tiredness’ – the three Twix – and ‘being so done with this’. Don’t forget to take care of yourself!’ it replied. Other bromides included the suggestion to incorporate a ‘gratitude moment’ into the kids’ bedtime routine and to try ‘a new family activity, a creative project or a shared learning experience (like cooking a new recipe or exploring a new park).’

So far, so anodyne.

The following day I wore it to our neighbours’ house during a mid-afternoon family visit and then to the shops while I searched for a fancy dress outfit for a Rivals-themed party in the evening. The Pendant gave a bland ‘friendly summary’ of these events. When I asked it for an ‘unfriendly summary’, this is what it said:

‘You spent the morning arguing with a child about socks, then hustled everyone out the door for yet another round of football. The sock drama was only matched by the chaos of trying to find water bottles and footballs. Football was played, but mostly it was a lot of talk about who’s better, who scores first and who cheats. You had a random chat with a dog walker about how many dogs they walk and how many steps they do a day. Riveting stuff. The rest of the morning was spent obsessing over football fixtures, arguing about which games were on, and making a big deal about going to the shop for milk because the kids drank it all. Lunch was a noisy affair with more bickering. The afternoon was dominated by a frantic search for 80s party costumes. You bought wigs and a fake moustache in a panic, then spent way too long in a vintage shop trying on hats that cost more than a small car. Back home, you fussed over which wig to wear, debated the merits of various party themes and generally overthought the whole thing. You herded the family to your neighbours, which was as chaotic as ever – lots of yelling about shoes, doors and who’s knocking. Once there, you all talked about how tired you were. The kids ran wild, you talked about TV shows you don’t really watch. Hide-and-seek was played, but mostly it was just an excuse for the adults to sit around and complain. The FA Cup final was the main event. You tried to watch the game while also lighting a barbecue and fixing a tap. The evening ended with more football, more family squabbles and vague plans for tomorrow that will probably change anyway.’

Who needs this? Not me. I took it off and am yet to put it back on. Clearly, this is not the response those behind the product expect. Limitless co-founder and CEO Dan Siroker has spoken recently about how he expects very soon that ‘millions, if not billions,’ of people will wear listening devices like the Pendant and make their lives into searchable documents. The company, launched last year, recently raised $33 million, and the sinister-seeming tech overlord Sam Altman sits on its board.

Tech nerds have taken recently to talking in public – without discernible embarrassment – about the idea that what we think of as life is actually a simulation, by which they mean we are all living in some kind of computer game. Elon Musk, for example, has said ‘we are most likely in a simulation’ and it has become increasingly common to hear these people denounce anyone of whom they disapprove as trivial ‘non-player characters’. This is very much the reality into which the Pendant fits – a device that makes you feel as if you are living within a mainframe and not in the kingdom of nature.

‘Our vision is to free the human mind from its biological limitations’ reads the blurb that comes with the device, without specifying what those limitations – emotions? forgetfulness? individuality? – actually are. Perhaps the answer to the complexity of the human condition is go through life recording every encounter we have, the better to analyse it later, but it’s hard to see how this approach could facilitate the things that matter most, and that ultimately make life worth living – things like friendship and romance and trust.

Don’t wear the Limitless Pendant. It’s deeply uncool.

This article was originally published in the Spectator

Francis Ngannou believes he was drugged to ensure he was defeated by Anthony Joshua when the pair fought in March, 2024.

‘I was set up,’ the former UFC champion tells me matter-of-factly. ‘This is not the thing that people like you to say in public. But I just don’t care. I say what I think. I think this wasn’t fair at all. Nothing here was fair’.

Ngannou claims he first noticed funny business occurring in the week of the fight, when he says he was repeatedly told by joint promoters Matchroom Boxing and Queensberry Promotions to arrive at promotional events hours before they actually began.

‘This was stressful and tiring,’ he says. ‘This was just the beginning of the week. I didn’t know how deep the situation was’.

On fight night itself, he explains, he was informed he would be picked up from his hotel at 10:30pm and transported to the Kingdom Arena, where the fight would take place between midnight and 1am, just as he had been told it would two months previously.

He says: ‘We get in the arena at 10:45pm, and I remember this producer came and told us: “We are having a little delay on the broadcast. So you’re going to be fighting around 1:45am.”’

Ngannou says he was frustrated, not least because his training had been predicated on fighting at midnight, but nevertheless waited in his locker room. ‘I was getting tired. Sitting there, drinking, waiting.’ He adds he started to feel extremely sleepy, despite trying to warm up vigorously. ‘Everything was off. I was in the locker room, warming up, sweating, sitting down, falling asleep while sweating’.

At 1:30am, he says he watched on a television screen as Anthony Joshua arrived at the venue. ‘That’s when we started to be like, ok, something is off. He can’t be coming now if he was getting ready to fight at 1am or 1:45am, as they’d previously said’. As it was, Ngannou points out the walk to the ring didn’t start until 3:30am, and the fight didn’t commence until close to 4am.

After being knocked to the ground in the first round, Ngannou was brutally punched unconscious by Joshua in the second. He says from the start of the contest he felt so strange that he believes – although he has no proof – he was drugged with something in the water in his locker room.

He says from the first bell he was not able to see well, nor to measure distance. He explains he was amazed he was knocked down in the first round as the punch hadn’t felt hard, and had caught his own glove before making contact with his face.

‘The first knockdown, I get surprised, because I was on the ground. I was like, what the fuck is this? I mean I felt the punch, but honestly it’s not what really got me down.’ He adds he has taken much harder punches over the course of his career and never been knocked down.

When his coaches were talking to him between rounds, he says ‘their voices started sounding far away. I just heard them from a very far distance. I’m looking at them and seeing them close, but their voices are coming from miles away’.

He says he doesn’t remember the second round at all.

If he could rewind time, would he drink the water in the locker room again? His answer is unequivocal: ‘Absolutely not… Not only I will not drink the water, I might not even buy the water in the city’. He says he now thinks drinking the water was an error caused by his lack of boxing experience.

‘The water was there. They put the water there. I know, big mistake. I see a lot of boxers that say: “Oh no, we don't drink water from the locker room. We bring our own water”. [They’re] not even fighters at the top level. They were like: “No, we don't drink it, bro.”

Why does he think the boxers he spoke to don’t drink the water provided in a locker room before a fight? Ngannou says: ‘Because they are suspicious, because something can happen. The reason they don't drink water is the exact same reason why I shouldn't be drinking that water. When you're in the locker room for over four hours, and there is somebody over there to collect urine, it's obvious that you're going to drink water over and over and over, you know? Or maybe at some point you start a warm up, because you think you're going to fight at 1:45am. Yeah, you're sweaty. You drink water. You take a sip every single time… We were just exposed, like amateurs. I didn't know the degree of how nasty boxing can be’.

Ngannou says it wasn’t until three days after the fight that it occurred to him it was ‘obvious’ he had been the victim of foul play, and that he now partially blames himself for being too naïve.

Ngannou’s bout against Joshua was only his second professional boxing match. His first, four months previously, was an astonishing contest against reigning heavyweight champion Tyson Fury that Ngannou had appeared to win comfortably – although the judges controversially awarded victory to Fury.

Ngannou says: ‘The first fight, the Tyson Fury fight, I think I offended a lot of people, and they wanted to restore that… I think what they were saying at the time, even before the fight, was that it was the Anthony Joshua versus Tyson Fury fight that they wanted to set up. So me winning the fight [against Joshua] would spoil that fight… What was at stake was so big. That's why sometimes I'm like, ok, this is also my fault. I should have understood what was at stake…

‘I did a lot of damage with the Tyson Fury fight, business-wise. They wouldn't let that continue… Let's not be stupid. You don't come from MMA, and you have no organisation behind you, and then you come and meet this structured organisation that everybody is sitting inside, and then you just destroy like that. It’s a money machine for many people. They've been around, they eat from that. You cannot just come and disrupt the system like that… If they had known that this fight could go this way, it would have never happened’.

For a man who believes he has been cheated on such a grand scale, Ngannou seems remarkably lacking in bitterness. He says if he fights at the elite level of boxing again, he will get involved in every detail. ‘We're going to put everything right,’ he says. ‘The fight time, for example. The pick-up time… We both would arrive at the same time everywhere. Period. If I'm going to wait three hours because there is a delay of operation, then, yes, we both arrive three hours ahead. It's ok. Don't play me and make me arrive three hours early and somebody else only one hour…

‘Maybe I look very stupid. Maybe when I people look at me, they're just like: “oh, this stupid guy. He knows nothing, right?”’

He points out, however, that so far he has got everything he wants, and that he intends to carry on doing so. ‘I’m not stupid’, he says. His track record shows he’s a quick learner. Perhaps it’s time the world stopped underestimating Francis Ngannou.

Matchroom Boxing and Queensberry Promotions were approached for comment. At the time of publication, neither had responded.

‘I’ve been researching comedy,’ CNN’s Elle Reeve announces grimly at the start of her hour-long interview with comedian Tim Dillon, released this week more than a month after it was recorded. What follows is an extended whine about the manner in which legacy broadcast media in America has ceded its status as the gatekeeper of the American cultural narrative to podcasters.

Is it the most satisfying piece of television I’ve ever watched? Possibly, yes.

The irony – and it’s almost too perfect to articulate – is that had Dillon not demanded, while appearing recently on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, that CNN release the interview in full rather than packaged into a tightly edited segment to fit a specific narrative, it probably would never have seen the light of day.

The viewer quickly becomes aware that Reeve – who has the unfortunate habit of speaking with her eyes closed, as if she cannot bear to look at Dillon – is still far from over the bewildering failure of the American people to seize the God-given opportunity they recently had to elect Kamala Harris as president.

She wonders if this catastrophe was not the fault of a gang of Rogan-led podcasters who have become the new establishment.

To his credit, Dillon responds to her question in good faith: ‘To hang this defeat on a few podcasters and to say they were the problem, I just don’t buy the narrative. I don’t think I’m the new establishment. If you weigh a few comedians with podcasts versus all of the people who supported Kamala Harris… multi-billionaires, huge media institutions, a whole political party apparatus, I just don’t think most people are going to buy that. It seems a great way to excuse running an unpopular candidate on a platform the American people weren’t sold on.’

Dillon says that the use of the word ‘establishment’ implies an ‘institutional component’ that has been enjoyed by ‘legacy media, the government, intelligence communities and Hollywood. I think all of those power factions have worked together for a very, very long time. To say a few comedians with podcasts is equal to that seems crazy.’

Reeve’s biggest gripe is apparently the manner in which high-profile podcasters are increasingly able, at will, to converse with political figures – people who until recently would have communicated with the masses only via the filter of professionally skeptical journalists. She points out that, ahead of the 2024 election, Dillon had Steve Bannon on his show and also J.D. Vance. Her implication is that, as a non-journalist, he was well out of his depth on both occasions.

She says: ‘Figures like Steve Bannon and J.D. Vance, or whoever you might have on in the political world, they spin, they confuse, they try to conceal what they really think. One of the hardest parts of my job is sitting across from someone and having a great conversation with them, and then having to have the question in my mind “but are they lying to me?”….

‘I’m kind of having an epiphany in this interview: it is possible the journalistic fixation with the whole podcast thing is, like, you guys are taking our jobs but not doing the shitty part, which is the uncomfortable thing in the room that sucks. Which is, like, “are you bad?”’

Could it be that the masses – in the United States and throughout the West – have grown heartily sick of this form of combative, gotcha journalism, in which the subject of any interview is treated always with maximum suspicion and yelled down at every opportunity? Certainly, this was the style of journalism that accompanied the first Trump presidency – and against which the backlash now seems so massive.

The success today of podcasters such as Rogan or Dillon, or even Theo Von, is predicated to a large extent on their willingness to respect the intelligence and ability of their audiences to make informed judgments sufficiently to let their guests speak at length without constantly attempting to catch them out or make them look foolish. It’s a simple formula: speak to people the way normal people speak to one another. Even Piers Morgan has started doing it on his fast-growing Uncensored show.

‘Did you find Vance authentic?’ Reeve asks Dillon.

‘I found him to be a politician. I’ve never found a politician to be anything other than a politician. Have you ever met a realtor? Do you find a realtor to be authentic, or do you have to buy a house?’ he replies. He later adds: ‘My job is not to save the country, my job is to have an interesting or entertaining show.’

It seems telling that CNN sent Reeve to interview Dillon. She made her name hunting Nazis in Charlottesville. But pigeonholing him as a paid-up member of the right is totally wrongheaded, as anyone who listens to his show regularly could attest. Dillon’s politics are not easily pinned down. Certainly, his sympathies are consistently with the little guy who is being screwed by transnational corporations or the government. This is the source of so much of his comedy: the multi-layered and universal agonies of modern life for normal people.

Watching Reeve’s interview, it is easy to see how through her questions she deliberately casts a wide net, seemingly comfortable in the knowledge that anything contentious or controversial in the responses will be amplified in the editing process. She pushes Dillon, for example, on the fascist-style salutes Elon Musk and Bannon supposedly made, the Machiavellian manner in which Rogan apparently controls American comics, and what she perceives to be the modern cancellation of left-wing comedians.

To this last point, Dillon cites the vast and ongoing success of left-leaning comedians Chelsea Handler, John Mulaney, Sarah Silverman and Bill Burr. When he mentions Louis CK, she instinctively makes a throat-slitting sign to imply cancellation. He continues: ‘Is Trevor Noah not popular? He does arenas. He’s one of the most popular comedians in the country… Where’s Amy Schumer? I don’t know. Maybe she’s in her $15 million townhouse in Brooklyn. I think she’ll be OK.’

Reeve finishes by likening Dillon, who is homosexual, to a ‘gay Rush Limbaugh’ and asks if his intention is to drive opinion. He doesn’t rise to it, instead pointing out Limbaugh was very good at what he did. ‘I try to make a show that’s interesting and entertaining and that’s worth someone’s time. As long as you’re listening to me, I don’t care if you agree with me or not. I think Limbaugh cared.’ That’s a point that Elle Reeve can’t seem to grasp.

This piece was originally published on Spectator World

How will AI destroy humanity? Will it simply go house to house in robot form slaughtering us where it finds us, or will it instead discover that a property of our livers or spleens is the most cost-effective form of lubrication for one of its less important robotic joints, and harvest us for that property, as we now harvest chickens, in battery farms?

It’s a fun thought experiment, no?

Perhaps it will find us diverting, in the same way we find the base animals with whom we share the planet diverting – my children’s hamster, for example, that for their entertainment in the evenings I allow to gambol in our sitting room inside a little plastic ball – and on that basis let us live out our days in relative peace.

Equally possible, I suppose, is that it will quite reasonably deduce humans can be made to work incredibly hard for nothing more than the avoidance of terrific pain – in a way that machines simply won’t be made to work – and so consign us to labour camps where we’ll toil until we drop. At this stage, all options must be considered to be on the table.

By the sound of it, we’ll find out soon enough. Elon Musk – our species’ leading AI pioneer and very possibly its cleverest individual – has lately taken to using high profile speaking opportunities to make absolutely terrifying prognostications about humanity’s increasingly short-term prospects.

Asked this week in a televised interview by Senator Ted Cruz how likely the prospect is of humanity being annihilated by killer robots, Musk replied: ‘twenty percent likely, maybe ten percent… in five to ten years.’

Was he joking? Sadly not. Last October, Musk told the assembled corporate overlords at the Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference in Riyadh – or Davos in the Desert, as it has come to be known – that there is a good chance humanity is right now conspiring in the creation of an AI-defined future that will be truly dystopian. ‘There’s some chance, which could be ten to twenty percent, that it goes bad. The chance is not zero,’ he said.

More recently, he told podcast king Joe Rogan: ‘I always thought AI was going to be way smarter than humans and an existential risk, and that’s turning out to be true… I think we are trending toward having something that is smarter than any human - smarter than the smartest human - by next year, or a couple of years. There is a level beyond that, which is smarter than all humans combined, which is frankly around 2029 or 2030.’

What a staggering statement: the unleashing in just the next five years of an intelligence so seismic – deepening at an exponentially rapid rate – as to be beyond human comprehension. ‘It’s getting ten times better per year,’ Musk said dispassionately at the FII conference. ‘Four years from now, that would mean 10,000 times better. Maybe 100,000.’ Oh, goody. ‘I think by 2040, probably there are more humanoid robots than there are people… there’ll be at least ten billion,’ he added.

Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom – or at least that’s not how Musk wants us to think of what’s coming rapidly down the track. ‘You could look at it like the glass is 80 to 90 percent full. Meaning 80 percent likely we will have extreme prosperity for all,’ he told Cruz.

Yes, an enormous number of people will very soon be made redundant, on the basis AI will do their jobs much faster and better, but according to Musk: ‘goods and services will become close to free, so it is not as though people will be wanting in terms of goods and services… you will have tens of billions of robots. They will make you anything, or provide you any service you want, for next to nothing. It is not that people will have a lower standard of living, they will have a much higher standard of living.’

Hmm. How exactly has that worked out for the indigenous populations of, say, Australia or the United States, displaced as they were rapidly by Whitey with his far superior education and technological capability? Not brilliantly, you’d have to say, on balance.

If the robots don’t mercilessly kill us, what will we do all day when they have replaced us at our workstations? Will we collectively – all nine billion of us – take up diverting hobbies, for example, baking and crafting, or will we en masse hit the bottle? ‘The challenge will be fulfilment. How do you derive fulfilment in life?’ Musk mused to Cruz. It’s a good question.

A better – and more obvious – one would have been to ask Musk how he can possibly apportion levels of probability to how the AI revolution plays out for mankind. If one AI – by the end of the decade! – will be more intelligent than all humanity combined, then obviously none of us, not even Musk, will be able to second guess it, now or ever. Very evidently, people will be as influential as apes are currently, or woodlice, to the direction of the future. Our species, and all of our collective achievements, will count for close to zero.

But we had a good run. Humans have been around for about 300,000 years, and we’ve been planetary top dog, in terms of brains, for at least 50,000 of them. Now, either a one-in-five chance we are very soon doomed – likely in ways we can’t now imagine – or else shortly none of us will ever again have to lift a finger thanks to armies of robots that are both cleverer than us by factors impossible for our relatively tiny minds to comprehend, yet happy on our behalf to do all the heavy lifting. What could possibly go wrong?

Personally – and not that it will matter when very soon the robot comes knocking – I’m with Tucker Carlson, who last summer said: ‘I don’t know why we aren’t having any of these conversations…. If we agree that the outcome is bad, specifically that it is bad for people… then we should strangle AI in its crib right now and blow up the data centres…. If it’s going to become a threat to people and humanity and life, then we have a moral obligation to murder it immediately.’

Quite.

This article was originally published in the Spectator

I’ve long liked to think that if I was a really big girl I would transition to compete in the men’s boxing heavyweight championship. Why not, ladies? Tyson Fury earns about £100 million every time he laces up his gloves. Why not get a slice of that pie?

After all, for an extremely weird decade or so we’ve been enjoined to believe there are no physical advantages, at least not in terms of strength, speed or stamina, to being born male over female. It’s the foundational myth upon which all sorts of madness – hulking great former blokes taking on women at sports including rugby, swimming, cycling and football – has been predicated.

If biological men can dominate women’s sport, then why not the other way around? Why don’t biological women ever switch codes, so to speak, to beat the fellas on the their own turf?

It looks like we might now never know. The UN in October issued a report on violence against women and girls in sport that appears intended to put a stop to the bending of gender rules in sport for good. Reading it is like waking up from a particularly wild dream in which everyone seemed to have gone insane. Finally, someone – the UN Special Rapporteur Reem Alsalem, in this case – is talking perfect sense.

Alsalem doesn’t hold back. She points out that since trans women – she calls them by the old fashioned term ‘males’ – have been allowed to compete with biological women in sport, ‘over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports’.

She makes clear, too, that everything we’ve been told about medications to suppress testosterone in trans women, thereby ensuring they have no athletic advantages over biological women, is, err, bollocks.

She says: ‘Male athletes have specific attributes considered advantageous in certain sports, such as strength and testosterone levels that are higher than those of the average range for females, even before puberty… Pharmaceutical testosterone suppression for genetically male athletes – irrespective of how they identify – will not eliminate the set of comparative performance advantages they have already acquired.’ Quite.

It goes without saying the ridiculous debate about whether men should be allowed to compete against women in any sport, let alone contact sports, has had serious repercussions for actual women. Alsalem says: ‘When female-only sports spaces are opened to males, as documented in disciplines such as in volleyball, basketball and soccer… injuries have included knocked-out teeth, concussions resulting in neural impairment, broken legs and skull fractures.’

She cites, too, a study published in Sports Medicine that found: ‘Even in non-elite sport, “the least powerful man produced more power than the most powerful woman” and states that, where men and women have roughly the same levels of fitness, males’ average punching power has been measured as 162 per cent greater than females.’

None of this can possibly come as news to anyone who has walked about in the world with their eyes open.

The way the entire trans issue has been weaponised in recent years by those on the front lines of the culture wars strikes most people, I think, as extremely bizarre. ‘What is a woman?’ has become a staple question of any media interview with a politician, and all of us increasingly – particularly during Pride month, when even captured corporations get in on the fun – are stridently impelled to agree that trans women are indeed women.

Personally, I’ve come suspect it’s all just a diabolically clever and deliberate means of making the West question itself constantly, eventually causing it to suffer a nervous breakdown. Looking around, you’d have to say as a plan it’s working quite well.

Anyway, I digress. Alsalem’s report makes one particularly exciting proposal, one that surely would be a ratings smash: ‘the creation of open [sports] categories for those persons who do not wish to compete in the category of their biological sex.’ A trans-only category. Why has it taken until now for someone to suggest this? Who doesn’t want to know who is the fastest transgender person in the world, or the strongest, or the most capable of jumping very high?

One hopes after this report, the allowing of men to compete with women in physical contests, let alone to share changing rooms, will be a strange thought experiment we will tell future generations about, while shaking our heads in bewilderment. ‘Males must not compete in the female categories of sport,’ the report says.

And let that be an end to it.

This article was originally published in the Spectator

I felt the same excitement watching Jordan Peterson’s interview with Elon Musk I would experience for a World Cup final. At last, the chance to decide once and for all who is the planet’s cleverest man.

From the off, it was clear both men understood what was at stake but that each would handle the pressure differently. ‘It’s ridiculously exciting to be here’, Peterson began preppily, looking undeniably fresh and ready to go in a trademark loud blazer. ‘I’ve been preparing to talk to you for a long time.’

Even at this early stage of pleasantries, however, mind games had begun. Musk had said something before the cameras started rolling that had rattled Peterson.

‘You said something that caught me right away… you said you were up until four in the morning?’ The professor looked amazed. ‘More like five in the morning’, Musk replied slowly, in case anyone watching was unsure just how lightly he took the prospect of the coming intellectual joust.

Quickly we were away and into the big stuff: AI and what it means for humanity. Both men made clear they were cleverer than the bots. ‘Chat GPT lies a lot, so you have to keep an eye on it,’ Peterson said dismissively. ‘Hurr, hurr, hurr,’ laughed Musk.

The first serious foray arrived cleverly disguised. ‘I’ve got an idea to run past you, you tell me what you think,’ Peterson said with the air of a man wondering if taking the family to France this summer might be preferable to Italy. Then: ‘there’s a golden thread of conversation that constitutes the basis for humanity’s education, let’s say, that’s run across centuries. In principle that concentrates on ideas that have been winnowed probably through a quasi-evolutionary process across large spans of time…’ On it went, a question deepening like Larkin’s coastal shelf while Peterson waggled and waved his fingers in the air as if playing jazz with invisible ideas. Eventually we arrived at the business end: ‘What’s the difference between the Western canon and the latest woke nonsense?’ 

Before Musk could answer, Peterson had told him not only was Grok – Musk’s own version of AI – ‘woke’, but also that it couldn’t understand images. Have some of that. ‘It does understand images,’ Musk claimed defensively, only inviting a new attack from Peterson about how humans ‘triangulate psychologically’.

Sensing perhaps the 12 Rules for Life author was opening an early lead, Musk now began rolling off examples of the world-changing projects for which he is responsible. Teslas were not cars, he said, rather ‘autonomous robots on four wheels, they just look like cars.’ Although Grok was currently ‘an order of magnitude weaker than Chat GPT’, by December it would be the best AI available to humanity.

‘What the hell do you think you’re building with these AI systems? What is this?’ Peterson asked, sitting forward in his seat and lowering his brow.

Musk seized the opportunity, replying massively. ‘I think what all the AI companies are aiming to build is digital superintelligence. So intelligence that is far smarter than any human. Ultimately, an intelligence that is far smarter than all humans combined. Now one can say: is this a wise thing to do? Isn’t this dangerous? Unfortunately, whether you think this or not, it is being done,’ he said.

He followed this statement quickly with the assertion he had the choice either ‘to be a spectator or a participant.’

‘That’s life, man,’ Peterson now croaked, nodding appreciatively. Out of nowhere, bonding was happening – a meeting of equals. Hunched over my iPad, I wondered if I might well up.

The sting had temporarily departed the contest, but what followed was instead a fantastically enjoyable insight into what it is like to be incredibly clever.

‘When I was 11 or 12 years old, I had an existential crisis, because there didn’t seem to be any meaning in the world. No meaning to life. So I actually read all the religious texts… I obviously read the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, a bit on the Hindu side… then I started getting into the philosophy books. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche… None of them seemed to have answers that resonated,’ Musk said. 

Responding ‘entropy is the boss battle’ to a follow up point Peterson made about the Sermon on the Mount, Musk added it was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with its assertion mankind is asking the wrong questions of the universe, that had got him out of his funk. Grok 3, presumably, Peterson pointed out, will be his way of asking it the right questions. ‘Is that a religion? I don’t know. Maybe it is. I call it the religion of curiosity,’ Musk said, pushing out his chin and sounding for a moment like David Brent.

After a few return zingers from Peterson – ‘Marx’s favourite quote from Goethe was a statement by Mephistopheles…’, ‘If you eradicate death it seems to me at some fundamental level you also eradicate reality itself’, and ‘if you apprehended a 10,000 year span of consciousness with no sleep, I don’t know what the hell you’d be if that was who you were, but you wouldn’t be human’ – suddenly the competition once again flared and we arrived at the most exciting part of the conversation.

‘Do you think that any of the machinery you’ve interacted with is showing anything that might be equated to consciousness?’ Peterson asked lightly, a question that caused Musk to pause for a worrying amount of time. Eventually he responded ominously with a question of his own: ‘Is everything conscious or is nothing conscious?’

A few moments later, after a brief discussion about stars exploding and Jacob’s Ladder, Musk elaborated: ‘The universe, at least according to physics, started off as hydrogen... 13.8 billion years later on this planet we have what we call consciousness. That means consciousness had to arise from hydrogen. So just leave hydrogen out in the sun long enough and it starts talking to itself… Maybe everything’s conscious in some way. Maybe it’s just degrees of consciousness, or concentrations of consciousness.’

It was a decisive blow from which Peterson couldn’t really recover. He attempted a kind of spinning return by repackaging what Musk had just said in a metaphysical context, but not convincingly. ‘I didn’t study science precisely,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t as interested in the transformations of the material world. I am probably more people oriented than thing oriented, temperamentally.’

That sounds about right: the foremost social and systematic thinkers of our time declaring a score draw. I hugely look forward to the return fixture.

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Who before it happened would have predicted that immediately after being shot the planet’s foremost sybarite President Donald J Trump would have the mettle even as the blood gushed down his neck to raise a defiant fist in the air and to invoke those watching to ‘fight, fight, fight’?

It was a culturally transcendent moment: a rebel yell conforming to the heroic ideals of Hollywood issued in a time of grave personal danger by the very man America’s powerful liberal elite - Tinseltown’s most influential personalities included - seeks to crush.

Would George Clooney have acted similarly? Would Robert De Niro or Mark Ruffalo? Perhaps. Certainly, these leading men who have been so vocal in their denunciations of Trump – ‘I’d like to punch him in the face’, De Niro once said – have each made many millions pretending to be heroic types impervious to fear. Fake tough guys, in other words.

But now we have proof that when it matters Trump, whose entire political credo is predicated on being the antihero’s antihero – ‘they’re after you. I’m in the way’, goes his famous message to America’s beleaguered working class – possesses the steely grit Hollywood, and indeed all Western culture, celebrates.

His critics have long argued Trump is out only for himself: that he is a manipulative billionaire huckster able to wear the concerns of the little guy as they relate to globalism, immigration and national decline in order to hold the world’s highest office solely for the satiation of personal vanity.

But that ‘fight, fight, fight’ gives lie to this accusation, with its implication that the political movement of which he is figurehead is not just something in which he believes deeply, but also a struggle for which even the ultimate sacrifice is worth paying.

Of course, like all the best political oratory, it was an open-ended statement and therefore subject to interpretation. Who was the former president saying should be fought? America’s enemies? The corporate overlords? All those who pose a threat to freedom? Perhaps his concern was closer to home: he was exhorting the crowd to fight the person unseen who had just shot him in the ear.

Whatever. The fact is Trump showed that thing so important to any would-be Commander in Chief: grace under fire. Should America choose him as its next president, then his would be the responsibility of asking uniformed men and women when the time came to put themselves in harm’s way, and to show courage while doing so.

It’s hardly a stretch to imagine those same men and women will have watched how Trump responded to being shot and found much to admire in his apparently immediate concern not for himself but for those who look to him for leadership.

Like him or loathe him, Trump’s defiance in the face of an assassination attempt was unarguably brave. That’s not a bad quality to exhibit when attempting for a second time to become leader of America, the land of the brave.  

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September, 2023

Is it more remarkable that Romanian two-time Grand Slam tennis champion Simona Halep took performance enhancing drugs, or that she was caught? I ask only because the sport’s authorities seem to catch vanishingly few dopers, which surely means either they’re very bad at it, or elite players rarely cheat to win enormous sums of money.  

Certainly, it’s easy to be cynical about tennis. When in 2017 I interviewed legendary doping chemist Angel ‘Memo’ Hernandez – who during the nineties and 2000s was the world’s leading illicit sports chemist, providing undetectable super-stimulants to a wide range of household name athletes – he burst out laughing when I asked about doping in tennis.  

‘Tennis was paradise for a long time. No testing involved. No testing. They were in paradise, enjoying their stuff, loving their stuff. No testing at all. Now I believe they have started testing, but it is still a joke,’ he said.  

Halep on Monday was banned for four years after a urine sample she gave at last year’s US Open was found to contain Roxadustat, an anti-anaemia drug that just happens to stimulate production of the red blood cells so vital for physical endurance. Halep denies knowingly taking the drug.

Her case carried echoes of that of five-time Grand Slam winner Maria Sharapova, who in 2016 was the last high profile tennis player to be sanctioned for doping when she was popped at the Australian Open for taking Meldonium, a drug newly added to the WADA anti-doping list, used to treat ischaemia by enabling increased blood flow – and with it improving aerobic capability.  

It is surprisingly difficult to find an exact figure for how many top-level tennis players have been caught taking performance enhancing drugs – as opposed to recreational drugs ultimately harmful to performance, such as cocaine – since the Open era began in 1968. According to Wikipedia, it’s less than 80, which is a tiny fraction of the thousands of players who have competed in Grand Slam events during that time.   

Halep, Sharapova and Marin Cilic (who received a four month ban in 2013 for ingesting the stimulant Nikethamide) aside – those who have been caught have hardly been a roll-call of the sport’s greatest luminaries. They include Wayne Odesnik, Mariano Puerta and Barbora Strýcová. No, me neither.  

But the feeling persists that tennis, and the media that covers it, doesn’t help itself when it comes to the wider perception that all might not be as it seems at the sport’s highest levels.   

When the greatest ever player Novak Djokovic was caught on camera appearing to inhale a gas from an opaque water bottle during his Wimbledon victory over Tim van Rijthoven in 2022, he simply told reporters at a subsequent press conference that the bottle had contained a ‘magic potion’ and added that it enhanced his performance. ‘It helps’, he said. No one asked him to elaborate any further. 

A few days later, after winning tennis’ most prestigious tournament, he once again refused in front of journalists to explain what the so-called magic potion contained and instead talked vaguely about one day marketing it. He even told a reporter that if he tried the potion he too ‘might win Wimbledon’. Everyone laughed and no one asked him to elaborate any further. He still hasn’t said what was in the bottle, and no reporter has asked him about it in public since. 

While there is no suggestion, or indeed evidence, Djokovic has ever taken any form of illegal performance enhancing drug, his secrecy on the topic of what he ingested during the match with Rijthoven raises important questions. Most obviously: why the need for secrecy? And isn’t it ultimately bad for tennis?  

In 2016, former world number one Sir Andy Murray said:  

‘I have played against players and thought: “they won’t go away, or they don’t seem to be getting tired.” Have I ever been suspicious of someone? Yeah. You hear things.  

It’s harder to tell in our sport as people can make big improvements to a stroke or start serving better because they have made technical changes. If it’s purely physical and you’re watching someone playing six-hour matches over and over and showing no signs of being tired, you’d look at that.’  

Boris Becker, then Djokovic’s coach, was quick publicly to rebuke Murray for his comments. ‘We have random drug testing and unless it’s proven, they are 100 per cent innocent… I believe 100 per cent Andy is clean. Roger [Federer] is clean. Rafa [Nadal] is clean. Novak gets tested a lot. That can mean twice in a Grand Slam’, he said.  

A remarkable aspect of the evolution of modern men’s tennis is the increasing durability of the sport’s best players since the 1980s. To pluck a few great champions at random, Andre Agassi was 32 when he won his last Grand Slam, Pete Sampras 31, Jimmy Connors 31 and Becker 28. Nadal, Federer and Djokovic have all won Grand Slams aged 36.   

Perhaps one aspect of tennis that causes journalists covering it to be hesitant about asking questions that are anything other than fawning is the astonishing tribalism and aggression of many of the fans of the sport’s biggest stars.   

In November last year, I experienced this first-hand when I reposted on what was then Twitter, now X, video footage I had seen showing Djokovic’s team seemingly trying to hide a concoction they were making for him in the stands at the Paris Masters, commenting that it looked dodgy and asking if anyone could explain what was going on. What followed was a tsunami of online abuse, including not just threats of physical violence toward me, but also toward my family. Tennis, it turns out, isn’t as genteel as it looks.     

For what it’s worth, Djokovic is far from alone in receiving mysterious drinks from team members in the stands, transported via ball boys or girls, during matches, or even disappearing for strangely long toilet breaks during difficult moments in competition only to emerge sufficiently reinvigorated to seize victory. Many of his rivals do exactly the same sorts of thing.  

Earlier this month, there was online outrage over footage of Wimbledon champion Carlos Alcaraz, the game’s newest hot-shot, receiving an actual test-tube containing pills from his team mid-match against Britain’s Dan Evans at the US Open. This sort of thing didn’t used to happen.  

Halep, naturally, is appealing the decision against her. Good luck to her. I grow increasingly convinced no one any longer really cares who is doping and who is not in all top-level sport, much less tennis – how else to explain journalists’ apathy toward it – on the basis that so much of the evidence we see with our own eyes suggests virtually everyone must be at it.   

If that’s the case, then why hang poor Halep out to dry? It’s easier, surely, just to enjoy the spectacle and believe in the magic. 

This article was originally published by the Spectator

'The best way to reach me is to say your message into a sack, then roll the window down at 60 and throw it out. It will get to me', is how retired UFC prize fighter and self-styled bad guy Chael Sonnen responds to my initial request for his email address, made via X.

Feted as the sport's greatest ever trash-talker - he famously once claimed to have witnessed the feared Brazilian heavyweight Nogueira twins mistaking a bus for a horse after arriving in Las Vegas ('there was a bus that pulled up to a red light and little Nog tried to feed it a carrot, while big Nog was petting it') - Sonnen delighted during his fighting days in playing the villain to generate hype.

Today, thanks to his You're Welcome podcast and YouTube channel - both of which he uses to act as a tour guide to the ceaselessly and cartoonishly entertaining world of cage-fighting - Sonnen, who is 46, has a strong claim to being his sport's most influential voice. He's also the rarest of creatures: a former elite-level professional athlete prepared to talk about using performance enhancing drugs.

'I've taken everything on the off-chance it would work', Sonnen tells me when he eventually agrees to be interviewed. 'The only three things that work are testosterone, growth hormone and EPO. Everything else is garbage'.

A few minutes later, he will clarify: 'Performance enhancing drugs, so that you understand - I can tell by looking at you, you've never done them - but they will take you to a place that you can't get, no matter how much you lifted, or you did nutrition, or your parents had good DNA. They will take you to a whole other gear. They will take you to a place a human being can't get to'.

Sonnen, who holds a degree in the unlikely subject of sociology, is an astonishingly articulate man - he talks with the kind of speed and fluency that would have made him a brilliant evangelist, or huckster. On his podcast, to which this writer is a devotee, he rejoices in making what sounds like a straightforward proposition - namely, organising fights and getting people to watch - sound so incredibly complex you find yourself grateful he's taken the time to explain it all.

He was also an outstanding fighter, competing 49 times over the course of a 22-year professional career, which included three UFC world championship bouts. After the first - an agonising defeat in 2010 against Anderson Silva that he'd looked certain to win after holding his opponent down for four straight rounds and smashing him repeatedly very hard in the face, mainly with his elbows - he was suspended for anabolic steroid use. The California State Athletic Commission ruled he'd failed to disclose he was taking a testosterone supplement prescribed for the treatment of hypogonadism.

Sonnen explains: 'You've got to understand, I used testosterone because testosterone is king, there is no performance enhancer that God ever made that is more effective than testosterone. Testosterone was legal. Some commissions you had to have an exemption and some commissions you just had to disclose it. But I knew all of those rules and I followed them every time, including the times they popped me and said I was in violation. They were wrong. I was one hundred percent in compliance'.

He adds that at no point in his career did he ever try to hide from the authorities what he was taking. 'I had my own litmus test, which was: if I take it from a doctor, if it's allowed, then it's legal and it's okay. I'll take two. This is what I believed. I also didn't try to conceal it. I wrote down what I was taking. They would then test me and a lot of times not find it in my system'.

How to square that statement, though, with his admission in March that when he fought Jon Jones - considered by many to be the greatest mixed martial artist of all time - for the light heavyweight championship in 2013, he was doped to the gills, and that he believed his opponent was, too?

'We know our own. I could tell very easily,' Sonnen told MMA Hour podcast host Ariel Helwani. 'I had more juice than Tropicana and he pushed me around like a Mack Truck. As soon as we locked up with each other and he's pushing me backwards, before the big spinning elbow, I remember thinking "oh, I know your secret, because I got the same one"'.

Doesn't secrecy imply he knew what he was doing was against the rules?

Sonnen is adamant it doesn't. 'The commission was the New Jersey State Athletic Commission, which to this day has my file. I turned in that I was taking testosterone. Jon Jones had that same opportunity and did not turn that in. So that's the distinction I make. I don't care that he used testosterone'.

Throughout our interview, Sonnen, who is likeable and generous with his time, repeatedly makes clear he doesn't want to sound as if he is defending himself against accusations he cheated. 'I don't like any part where I'm using a defence. I've never been falsely accused. Everything they thought was in my system was, and I put it there intentionally'. Later, he adds: 'My way of breaking every rule every athletic commission ever set forth, and being the guy that goes on ESPN to talk about the other guys that break the rules, was to have no defence'.

He points out, too, how ludicrous anti-doping protocols could seem, and how easily gamed: 'The leading agency in the world is the Nevada State Athletic Commission. They approved me in less than an hour to take anabolic steroids, known as testosterone. They approved me. I can take it and my opponent can't. Very next up was Nick Diaz. They gave him a five-year ban for marijuana... which is a death sentence, for a street drug'.

Sonnen claims to be able to tell with 100 percent accuracy what performance enhancing drugs any athlete is taking merely by looking at them. 'Conor [McGregor] looks the part, he's got great DNA. He's clean. Kamaru Usman looks the part, he's got great DNA. He's clean,' he reports.

However, he says he is certain the most famous basketball player in the world is doping.

'He takes EPO. Statement. Not "I think he takes EPO"... I wouldn't know if he was anaemic or had other reasons to need a medication. I'm not trying to snitch on him. I am stating a fact: that body is not what you get from running up and down a court. You got testosterone supplements, you got growth hormone supplements and you have EPO.' For good measure, he adds two of Hollywood's most bankable action heroes are also doping, despite multiple public denials by both.

He says he knows of two gyms where high-level fighters are being doped without their knowledge by unscrupulous coaches, who are applying EPO, testosterone and human growth hormone topically, disguised in blameless-seeming creams or ointments.

'There's two gyms... I'm not going to name them, so don't even bother to ask me. This isn't kind of they're juiced up. One hundred percent of the athletes they have signed that have ever competed on TV are juiced up. One hundred percent. If you go into the gym, the girl that's working the front desk is juiced up. A 40 year-old mother of two is juiced up. You go "what is going on here?"

'You're looking at everybody in that gym and associated with it. Two different gyms. Everybody except the owner... and the head coach. You look at everyone in that gym, hundreds of members, high school kids. The owner and the head coach, at both gyms [are clean]. That's an incredible coincidence. That's an incredible coincidence that one could speculate is because wherever they're putting it, in the shampoo, in the soap, in the hand sanitiser or wherever it is, they know and they don't touch it.'

Suddenly, our time is up and Sonnen has to go. After 45 minutes in his company it's clear not only is he the opposite of the bad guy he claims he is, he's also - to use the term he reserves on his podcast only for the fight game's most wildly entertaining personalities - a treat.

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On Remembrance Day as it was getting dark, I pulled into Sainsbury's petrol station on the Lower Richmond Road in Putney, where I had been sent by my wife to find supper. As I parked, I noticed an elderly lady at one of the pumps sitting on an office chair behind a blue Nissan Micra, two traffic cones at her side as if to protect her from moving vehicles. She looked tiny on the forecourt among the brake lights and exhaust fumes and so I went over to ask if she was ok.

She was Irish, close to 90, and spoke as if we were well acquainted. She explained the till-worker who'd carried her shopping had closed the boot of her car and by doing so locked the vehicle. Inside were her keys and her small dog. She seemed cheerful, although the cold had given her pale skin an ethereal quality and there were dark rings around her brown eyes. Her name was Jenny. She didn't have a coat, only a cardigan over her dress, and she held up an old Nokia phone with a look of deep mistrust. The AA seemed to have changed its number, she said.

I told her I would help and suggested while I did she go inside where it was warm. She wouldn't be separated from her dog, she said. I called the police first, hoping they might break into the car, but when they said it wasn't a job for them, I called the AA. I found the number effortlessly, using my iPhone.

A frail pensioner, a small dog, the November night setting in - the man on the other end of the line agreed it sounded like an emergency. 'Someone will be with her in twenty minutes', he assured me. Surprised, I gave Jenny the happy news and left her with the supermarket manager who had come to see how she was getting on, returning home to put my young children through the bath. Forty minutes later, I came back to find her still sitting behind her car, now looking rather less cheerful. A dark haired woman was talking to her. She introduced herself as Babs and said Jenny was still refusing to move inside.

The AA had gone to the wrong Sainsbury's. There had been many missed calls to Jenny's phone. 'Nah mate, I've gone to the right one', the driver said when the operator in the call centre connected me to him. 'I've gone to the one I was told to go to.' He was at a Sainsbury's in Richmond. He said his shift had now finished, his tone unmistakeably final. 'You'll have to get them to put someone else on the job.'

It was now after 6pm and Jenny was very cold. She'd been sitting behind her car for close to two hours. 'I don't feel it', she kept saying as she shrugged off Babs' male companion's attempts to put an insulated high-vis jacket over her shoulders. We talked about her daughters - one in Saudi Arabia and the other in America - and her love for her days working as a nurse at St George's Hospital in Tooting. While speaking she was transported sufficiently that the jacket could be fastened around her without her noticing. I went home to fetch her a woolly hat. The AA said they would be with her in under an hour.

As the minutes passed, we tried to break into her car. The supermarket manager fetched a chisel and a flat piece of Perspex used for signage. We slid both down the side of the driver's window, the way they do in films, but without success. The hour came and went. Jenny became incontinent of faeces. Babs brought her handfuls of paper towels. A black van pulled up at the next pump and two Polish builders got out. Did either by any chance know how to get into a locked car? One shrugged but the light in the other man's eyes seemed momentarily to change. A wire coat-hanger was produced and fashioned into a hook, which, after the driver's door was prised sufficiently open, was lowered toward to the internal handle. But it couldn't quite be done. He went on trying for another hour. At the front of the car his colleague, Babs' companion and I offered him words of encouragement. At the back, Babs continued to help Jenny. Inside, the shivering little dog looked out at us.

At 8:15pm, the AA man arrived and in no time had the car open. We clapped. After a wait of nearly four hours, Jenny could go home. We all said goodbye to each other. 'You make sure you warm up before you drive,' I advised Jenny. 'I'm so sorry for the incident', she called after me as I walked away, her eyes wide with mortification.

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I recently underwent a surgical procedure that according to the female Scottish surgeon who performed it would cause either no discomfort at all or result in 'exceptional pain' for at least two weeks. No way to tell until I was on the operating table, apparently. She said this matter-of-factly, as if discussing bus routes, just as I was about to receive a general anaesthetic. As soon as I came to, I learned it was the latter.

In the following days, bedbound and near-delirious with pain and medication, I listened to hour after hour of Taylor Swift. I didn't want to hear anything else. I found her music, with its vast emotional depth and stunning lyrical dexterity, terrifically soothing.

Surely the music we turn to in distress, when we really need it, says more about our tastes and who we are than the songs we listen to when we're happy or indifferent. Lying there mewing and terrified of movement, my other favourite bands - The Smiths, The Libertines, The National, The Strokes - were no use at all. I needed Swift, and only Swift would do.

Until very recently, I'd been quite furtive about my Taylor Swift habit. I knew I was verging into superfan territory when Spotify sent me my listening statistics for 2022, which informed me I was in the top one percent of her global listeners. I was secretly quite proud of the achievement - there's a lot of Swifties in the world, after all. But I didn't make a thing of it, mainly because I feared I would be mocked. It was widely accepted, I thought, that Swift's music was for teenage girls, not men fast closing in on 50.

But lately I feel more prepared to be open about how I feel. I'm a Taylor Swift obsessive, and I don't care who knows it.

What's changed? Well, for one thing I've noticed I'm not alone among heterosexual men of my age. Chatting to a couple of school dads at my children’s sports day last month - as chance would have it on the same day Swift announced she would be touring the UK next year - all of us professed first to a desire to obtain tickets (for our wives and daughters, you understand), and then to the fact we were clandestine fans. 'She's relevant', one said knowingly, and we all frowned and nodded in unison.

The collaborations she's done since the pandemic with members of the unimpeachably cool band The National also don't hurt when it comes to expressing admiration for Swift in public when you're my age. If she's cool enough for lead singer Matt Berninger - a deeply cool 52 year-old - then the reality is she's probably cool enough for you, too.

But the main reason I now don't mind who knows I think Swift is the most important female musical artist of all time is the sheer weight of the evidence. Ignore the fact Shake It Off is unarguably the greatest pop song ever written or the astonishing range of her back catalogue, and look instead at the records she is breaking with her current box office-melting, 131-date Eras tour, which sees her playing back-to-back three-hour sets in sold out stadiums on five continents.

On the first day tickets went on sale in America alone, a record 2.6 million were shifted. By the time the tour concludes in August next year, it will have generated profits well in excess of $1.5 billion - far more than any other artist has ever achieved.

Yes, at face value Swift is just another big league pop star - a beautiful face who can hold a note and dance. But it's her electrifying skill as a writer that truly sets her apart and that creates such a powerful connection with so many people. As anyone who has listened properly to her lyrics will attest, she's a poet, and an important one at that. 'There's an ache in you, put there by the ache in me', she sings on tis the damn season, by my reckoning casually distilling in just twelve words the complex sentiment every love poem or love song ever written in the history of our species has been trying to communicate.

On You Are In Love she goes further, describing the indescribable sensation of being in love as well as anyone ever has: 'You can hear it in the silence. You can feel it on the way home. You can see it with the lights out', she sings.

There are moments of perfectly expressed human insight in virtually all Taylor Swift songs, but it's the ten minute version of All Too Well that's her crowning masterpiece. A deeply moving disquisition on spurned love addressed a decade after the event to the older lover who broke her heart as she turned 21, it builds to an impossibly sad conclusion. 'Just between us, did the love affair maim you too?' she sings hauntingly towards its end. This isn't just music for teeny-boppers.

I don't believe I'll stand a prayer of getting tickets to see her perform on my birthday at Wembley Stadium next June, because as soon as they go on sale next week hundreds of thousands of people will attempt to buy them and I'm not prepared to pay the thousand pounds that secondary ticket sites are apparently demanding.

Instead I'll wait for the live recording to appear on Netflix, which I'll enjoy painlessly on my sofa with a bottle of wine. On top of everything else, I've come to believe listening to Taylor Swift has medicinal qualities. I was promised a fortnight of agony by my surgeon, but in reality it lasted only a week. For that - and for everything else - thank you, Taylor.  

This article was originally published in the Spectator.

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Unless it can be proved in court that Russell Brand is a rapist or guilty of sexual assault then the media storm that engulfed him so suddenly after the Sunday Times and Channel 4's Dispatches programme published accusations against him made anonymously by four women will prove ultimately to be nothing more than publicity for his next project.

After all, there is precedent. In 2017, at the very zenith of the #metoo movement, comedian Louis CK admitted claims made by five women in the New York Times that he had inappropriately masturbated in front of them were true.

He said: 'These stories are true. At the time, I said to myself that what I did was okay because I never showed a woman my dick without asking first, which is also true. But what I learned later in life, too late, is that when you have power over another person, asking them to look at your dick isn’t a question. It’s a predicament for them. The power I had over these women is that they admired me. And I wielded that power irresponsibly'.

Immediately after this admission, CK was cancelled - an experience he later likened to going 'to hell and back', estimating it cost him $35 million. He was dropped by his management and by streaming giants including Netflix, HBO and Disney subsidiary FX Networks. Production of all projects he was working on was halted, and his voice was either replaced or scrubbed from animated films he had already made.

Nine months later, however, he was performing again, at first making low-key, impromptu appearances at comedy venues and then in 2019 announcing a world tour. Today, all is apparently forgiven. Netflix hosts three of his comedy specials - one of which, Louis CK - 2017, is for this writer's money the greatest stand-up performance of all time - and he makes frequent appearances on high profile podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience.

Last year, he was even awarded a Grammy for his comedy special Sincerely Louis CK, in which he joked about his sexual misconduct shame: 'I like jerking off, I don’t like being alone, that’s all I can tell you. I get lonely, it’s just sad. I like company. I like to share. I’m good at it, too. If you’re good at juggling, you wouldn’t do it alone in the dark. You’d gather folks and amaze them.'

Is it possible permanently to cancel top rank comedians? Unless they've demonstrably and egregiously broken the law - a la Bill Cosby - the answer is probably not. By definition they operate on the fuzzy edges of society's norms and strictures, and we pay them handsomely to challenge our modes of thinking in ways that make us laugh, both at ourselves and the world we have constructed for ourselves.

Importantly, they don't as a rule pretend to be exemplars of moral rectitude and we anyway understand instinctively that they are not. In the truest sense of the word, the best comedians are subversive - which is what makes them compelling and alluring. To be in their presence is thrilling, which is why they are able to fill huge venues like the 2000-seat Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre, where Brand performed even as the allegations against him were being made.

I have long recognised that Brand is a charismatic, in the sense that he is able to cast a spell over anyone watching or listening to him through the sheer force and magnetism of his personality alone. It's a remarkable gift, one that no doubt makes him powerfully sexually attractive to many women and also that has previously enabled him unashamedly to behave like a hypocrite without any meaningful backlash.

I used to watch his Trews (true news, geddit?) vlog on YouTube in 2015 in which he would weekly broadcast, often from the back of a chauffeured limousine in London, to bemoan privilege. He would make gnomic statements like: 'What is the function of capitalism, except for self-preservation? It's got no real ideals, like to change things and make things better, create new institutions. All it wants to do is protect itself, and the band of the privileged at the top." In the same year, I also watched the Michael Winterbottom-directed film The Emperor's New Clothes in which multimillionaire Brand travelled the streets of London's financial district berating bankers via a mega-phone for complicity in the creation of a financial system that allowed for the existence of inequality.

Eventually I lost interest, but I did notice that not long afterward he was dating society heiress Jemima Khan - nee Goldsmith - and palling up with capitalism's biggest advocate Professor Jordan Peterson, and also with the political commentator Tucker Carlson who is so loathed by the left. 

Anyway, this is to digress. The claims made against Brand - which he denies - are very grim, but unless it can be proved illegality, specifically rape or sexual assault, has taken place, then are they really all that shocking? Brand has never made any secret of his libertine attitude toward sex, and given the magnitude of his fame surely the great majority of women who found themselves in his orbit would have known this. The Sun famously awarded him the title Shagger of the Year in 2006, 2007 and 2008, and he boasted openly of sleeping with between 80 and 90 women a month.

It will be interesting to see how Brand's former wife, the singer Katy Perry, responds to the allegations. When the actor Jonny Depp sued his ex-wife Amber Heard last year over accusations of domestic violence she had made against him, the testimony - 'he never pushed me, kicked me or threw me down any stairs' - of former flame supermodel Kate Moss was viewed by many as decisive.

But even were Perry to come out and say that Brand is a deviant on a par with the Marquis de Sade, it probably wouldn't be enough - not without irrefutable proof of illegality by his current accusers - to see him cancelled for any longer than Louis CK was, which is as it should be. Everyone has a right to a fair hearing.

Either Brand will be tried and, if found guilty, rightly go to prison for sex crimes, or in eighteen months I predict he will have a huge hit Netflix comedy special about this sordid and depressing episode.

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May 2017

It's not easy to get hold of Ángel Hernández, the legendary Mexican chemist who for a decade provided illicit performance-enhancing drugs to numerous athletes, including, he claims, all eight 100 metres finalists at the Beijing Olympics. It took me just over a year of trying. The FBI also struggled.

The story goes that when they eventually caught up with him in 2005 he had been holed up in a hotel room in Texas, living under an assumed name for two years. Presented with numerous incriminating wire-tapped telephone conversations and bank statements as part of the investigation that eventually sent three-time Olympic gold medallist Marion Jones to prison, Hernández became a state witness in return for avoiding chokey.

Today, he says, he is clean, no longer juicing athletes but instead working in top-level boxing (‘It’s terribly dirty’), putting his deep knowledge of sports science to use as a conditioning expert. ‘I’ve been clean since I became a Federal witness and that is the only way for me until the day I die.’

Perhaps more than anyone else alive, Hernández — who was previously known as Ángel ‘Memo’ Heredia — understands the charade that top-level sport internationally has become and the inability of drug-testing programmes to prevent athletes from cheating in order to win enormous sums of money. He knows what athletes — ‘like the soccer players in London’ — are prepared to invest in order to ensure they are quicker and fitter than the other guy.

Are footballers really doping? ‘Yes, of course.’ He says drug testing in the game is nowhere near frequent or aggressive enough to prevent it. ‘Think about it; if you are a soccer player you can do a blood transfusion [to boost oxygen levels in the blood]. If there is no testing, like a biological passport, then you can get away with a blood transfusion. Get away with it easily. You can still get away with all the other tricks in the house, too. You can still get away with micro–dosing EPO [a red blood cell booster], micro–dosing IGF-1 [a muscle growth hormone].

‘The problem is that the testing has got better, but it has not got to the point where they can detect everything, as they say they can.’ He adds that drug-testing bodies are reluctant to admit publicly the limitations of their testing procedures for fear of losing funding. ‘They have to justify to the public how much money they make, saying they are working on detection methods, when in reality the detection methods they have are not 100 per cent reliable.’

Hernández says a major problem for testers is the ever-increasing number of drugs coming on to the market. ‘You have got to understand that as the pharmaceutical industry grows year by year, new drugs [with performance-enhancing qualities] come to the public or into the research environment. What happens is the testers don’t catch up until later on. There is always a gap. Some of the athletes are cheating now; they are taking advantage of an opportunity that lasts a year, maybe a year and a half, before the testing authorities have any idea what is happening. They are abusing those drugs.’

Drug-testing bodies are today supposed to hold athletes’ samples for a minimum of ten years so they can be retested in future, when new ones might have been developed. However, in reality that practice is not always observed. Hernández says that he knows of testing bodies that dispose of samples almost immediately.

‘If you don’t hold those samples for the ten-year rule, then there is nothing you can do. You can assume, but you have no proof,’ he says.

On the subject of drugs that are easily available over the counter in any pharmacy and that have performance-enhancing qualities, Hernández is fascinating, although he refuses to name the most potent ones for fear of facilitating cheating. He will say Viagra is a drug that can make a sprinter run faster, but that it’s not on the banned list of athlete medications. ‘If I was a sprinter, I would not take Viagra,’ he says. ‘You do not want to have a boner while you’re running a race.’

What about asthma inhalers? So often we see top-level endurance athletes sucking on inhalers, a sight at odds with most people’s childhood memories of asthmatic classmates’ loathing of aerobic exercise. Could it be the humble asthma inhaler holds performance-enhancing qualities?

‘I call it the “transporter”,’ he says. ‘It opens and expands not only your lung capacity but also your pulmonary capability, so it has improved capacity to move the blood cells…

‘In other words, if you were using EPO, or if you were using another substance like EPO, it would help you to boost endurance even more. It is like multiplying the effects by between three and five times.’

He points out some athletes are using the pumps legitimately because they have what he calls ‘induced asthma’ from training, but that others are cheating by conning doctors into giving them medical letters stating that they have the condition, letters that no anti-doping agency on the planet can argue with. ‘It’s like a green light for doping,’ he says.

Certainly, this is a version of events that tallies with the experience of elite American distance runner Lauren Fleshman, who in 2015 spoke publicly of the pressure she felt she was under to be diagnosed with asthma.

She claims that coach Alberto Salazar — head of the Nike Oregon Project — ‘set up an appointment in Portland, during allergy season, with a doctor who had seen many other runners. He had a specific protocol… you would go to the local track and run around it, work yourself up to having an asthma attack and then run down the street, up 12 flights of stairs to the office and they would be waiting to test you. So that is what I did and I failed the test.’

Once prescribed Advair, to be taken by inhaler, she claimed Salazar ‘encouraged me to push to be on the highest dose of it year round, which was something different than what the doctor said’. Salazar denies the allegations.

Did Hernández encourage the athletes he doped to use asthma pumps? ‘Of course,’ comes the reply. ‘All of my athletes were using pumps.’ I ask him if at the elite level it is possible for a clean athlete to beat an athlete who is doping. He says in boxing it would be very difficult, because the doped fighter would be able to throw heavy power punches from round one to 12 without tiring. How about in sprinting? He is emphatic. ‘As a sprinter you cannot, no. No.’

Hernández stresses that he is a world expert in human fitness and conditioning, now walking on the right side of the law. He expresses frustration that his past still clings to him, and that if a boxer he is training wins a fight, aspersions are immediately cast.

‘I’m being judged every time my athletes get a good performance, because of science and training. But the problem is not me. The problem is the system itself. It allows the athletes to have the tools and the abilities to cheat.’

I finish by asking if he would want his son to be an athlete. A note of resignation comes into his voice: ‘When I was young I was a national champion, a record holder for the discus, Central America champion, you name it. I was projected to become an Olympian. But then, after seeing so many things, that’s when I started understanding what the whole business is about. It changes your view. I want my son to be what he wants to be. An athlete, a pianist. But frankly, I don’t want him going into the Olympic world, or boxing. A scientist or a doctor, maybe. Sports are getting worse and worse.’

This article was originally published in the Spectator

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July, 2015

If I was an elite level athlete I think I'd take performance-enhancing drugs. I suspect most of them do. With the exception of the ones that get caught, they're not stupid.

If Mo Farah or Chris Froome, for example, are not taking the drugs they're accused of taking, they are being poorly advised. There is a great deal of money to be made from doping and relatively little downside, certainly compared to other forms of theft or organised crime.

Crucially, there isn't really a victim.

Instead, we are the stupid ones: the crowd that looks on credulously, that pays to watch, that is infinite in our capacity to be astonished and outraged when it becomes clear profoundly competitive people will do whatever it takes to win large amounts of money.

We are the stupid ones because we cleave obstinately to notions of the purity of sport that we picked up as children - playing games at school or in the park - before we really knew what cheating was.

It is natural that we hold we these ideals as dearly as we cherish the innocence of our own youth - how else to explain our willingness to make ourselves wilfully blind to the realities of professional sport?

This, of course, is why the outrage we experience when doping is discovered is so intense - we take it personally, an affront to the child within us. (Notice Lance Armstrong, sport's most illustrious doper, has been given the nickname Voldemort by the media - an evil character from a children's book.)

But our deliberate blindness - our reluctance to confront properly the obvious reality of widespread doping - perpetuates the cycle of cheating. It makes cheating at elite levels of competition easier, not harder.

In all sports - cycling, athletics, football, rugby, tennis, boxing, to name but a few - we see today physiques and sustained aerobic performances that clearly defy both logic and the evidence of recorded human evolution.

And yet, when we watch the Olympic hundred metres' final, or when we see the mountain stages of the Tour de France, or when we see how rugby players have doubled in size, speed and endurance, we are happy to suspend our disbelief and to bask instead in optimism about our species' abilities.

This is the sharp end of sport as entertainment - the magic that jerks us out of our seats and makes us go "ooh" and not "WTF?" We want to believe.

More and more, in broad daylight, athletes and cyclists, particularly, pass marks or smash times set by known dopers, and for the most part we stand and we cheer. And so the lucrative charade continues.

How relatively slow, for example, doper Ben Johnson's hundred metres' best of 9.79 seconds now seems (it's not even in the top thirty quickest times). Times set by Armstrong, too, in the prime of his doping career, for particularly gruelling mountain ascents, are also now being beaten by more than a minute.

But sportsmen and women are not natural cheats. Common sense says they don't want to dope and the vast majority wouldn't if they didn't know their rivals were doing it without detection or sanction. Only in May, the BBC's Panorama demonstrated how easy it is to pass a doping test after taking human growth hormone (EPO).

Athletes don't really have a choice, certainly not the choice the sanctimonious or the pious would have us believe. For how else can they compete?

What person in their right mind would turn their back on a glorious career of adulation, wealth and success - the fulfillment of the rarest of talents - to take a normal job, all for the sake of a few pills or injections, that everyone else is already taking?

It is human nature to cheat if you feel your opponent is cheating and not being caught (if you doubt this, play online Scrabble with your friends).

When we catch dopers - like Armstrong, like sprinter Justin Gatlin, like tennis player Wayne Odesnik - we should fight the urge to ostracise them completely.

Instead, we should try to sympathise with them a little - if for no reason other than that it would it be unconscionable to be put in the same position.

We should work with them and learn from them - we should harness their experience and knowledge, to make sure young sportspeople are not put under the same pressures in the future.

Because what is the purpose of sport, essentially? Is it not, at its most fundamental, to find out of what the human body is capable?

Then is it not possible that in our desire to be ever more amazed by humanity - to be amazed by ourselves - we make ourselves more complicit in elite level sports' cheating than we realise, or than we would like to admit?

It is easier, for sure, to be appalled by fallen champions than it is to try to empathise with them. But, by turning a blind eye, by believing the unbelievable, we are all a little to blame. We are cheating ourselves.

Only by accepting the realities of doping, as we would any other criminal activity, will we eradicate it.

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May, 2021

‘I look at my father and it’s like he’s been lobotomized, but maybe he’s figured something out,’ 36-year-old comedian Tim Dillon tells me. ‘I may find out it’s the only way to survive.’

Dillon is increasingly now recognized as heir-apparent to countercultural comedy greats Bill Hicks and George Carlin, but it wasn’t so long ago he was selling subprime mortgages and photocopiers, and working as a New York tour bus guide. A recovering addict (11 years clean), his life changed in 2019 when podcast king Joe Rogan spotted his defense of canceled comedian Louis CK on Facebook and invited him to be a guest on The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast whose global audience is measured in the hundreds of millions.

‘My entire career shifted at that moment, because of his generosity,’ Dillon says. ‘He gave me that platform and he kept having me on.’ Today, Dillon’s own podcast, The Tim Dillon Show, for which he says he doesn’t prepare — ‘it’s just me talking to my friend twice a week’ — generates more than $100,000 a month through Patreon subscriptions, and his audience is growing rapidly. Candace Owens and Jordan Peterson have made guest appearances. Unsurprisingly for a man who until recently was living hand-to-mouth, he is an ardent supporter of podcasts. He considers them relevant in a way mainstream media can no longer hope to be.

‘Donald Trump won an election in no small part because he was a wild, unpredictable figure. That should have taught the mainstream media that people are much less impressed by the stilted interviews you see on The Tonight Show, where people are talking for three minutes about a vacation they went on, and all the jokes are preplanned and it’s meant to feel spontaneous, but it feels the exact opposite — and everything is sandwiched between commercials for products you don’t use.’

The idea of moving into the mainstream — to host, say, a family-friendly chat show, à la Jimmy Kimmel or James Corden — fills him with horror. ‘I couldn’t think of a worse thing to do. What could be less interesting than an entire family consuming the same entertainment? How grotesque. How grotesque to make something that appeals to a nine-year old and someone who’s 75.’

Devotees of Dillon’s podcast could be forgiven for suspecting a transition to primetime would not last very long anyway. He rages (usually by making very specific allegations) against prominent members of political and social elites. He mercilessly mocks the likes of Meghan McCain or the lesbian couple (‘desert dykes’) who last year objected to the state in which he left their Joshua Tree Airbnb rental. It seems a miracle nobody has tried very hard to have him canceled, or sued him into oblivion.

‘Libel suits are very difficult to win,’ he says, unconvincingly. ‘As far as canceling me, there’s nothing to cancel, because I just entertain my fans. I’m not forcing myself down your throat; that’s why I don’t want to be on mainstream TV. If you put me on CBS and the audience flips out, or someone says “This guy’s offensive”, then CBS has got to decide if I represent their core values. I only have to entertain my fans, thanks to the technology we use.’

The worldview from which Dillon derives much of his comedy is apocalyptic: civilization on the brink, Rome burning while its medicated citizenry stares obliviously at smartphones and tunes in to The Bachelor.

‘We are living in a ridiculous society. It’s a society that’s absurd. I don’t know how it gets more absurd, but I’m sure it will. It seems to be peak insanity to me. In America we have people on the streets fighting each other. We have people in Viking helmets charging into the Capitol building. We had a woman who threatened her mother on Dr Phil who is now a bona-fide celebrity.

‘We have children on TikTok dancing in Los Angeles mansions, who are worth a bazillion dollars, being asked their opinions on important political issues. And people are listening to them and if they have a wrong opinion, they are canceling them. Adults are writing about the things 16-year-olds do, and trying to work out if they are good or bad. It’s a ridiculous society.

‘How long it goes on like this, I don’t know. But the seeds have been planted of a somewhat rapid disintegration, and I think you are witnessing it now.’

He points out that the rise of ultramodern phenomena like cryptocurrencies and nonfungible tokens only lends credence to this view:

‘This is where we are. We are all selling bullshit to each other. No one believes you can make it in any traditional sense any longer. People have lost faith not only in leaders, but they’ve lost faith in the entire system.

‘People are trying to go outside the system to earn money…it seems like a money grab. It seems at the end everyone is looting. Because everyone is just taking whatever is left. It doesn’t feel like there’s any long-term faith in the system to make peoples’ lives any better.’

Dillon doesn’t look far for the people he believes are responsible for the state of the planet. He puts the blame for almost everything on the boomers, a generation he describes as ‘the teenagers of the world’. Specifically, he takes issue with the advice — ‘follow your dreams’ and ‘do what you love’ — given to his generation by their parents:

‘These are maybe the worst things that have ever been told to anyone. They’re catchphrases. They’re things on the wall of a guidance counselor. They’re bumper-sticker slogans. They’re not anything that would in any way approach a rational course of action for most people’s lives.

‘We were never told what would happen if that didn’t work out. There was no “but”. We were never prepared for sacrifice, or the reality of what that means. It was just bad advice. It was bad because it was given by boomers who are deeply selfish people, the destroyers of the Earth.

‘They gave us very bad advice because they didn’t want to speak to us — they wanted to drop us off at soccer, they wanted to go and drink wine on the patio.’

Isn’t he himself, though — as the recent trajectory of his career attests — not living proof that ‘follow your dreams’ is excellent advice?

‘I’m 36 years old and have started to succeed in the last year of my life,’ he says. ‘The best years of my life were completely wasted. So, start the conversation there. Don’t say “Follow your dreams”. Say: “For how long are you prepared to be broke?” First question. “Are you prepared to be broke for the majority of your adult life?”’

Although he is now well on the way to becoming one himself, Dillon is deeply interested in wealthy people, who he believes are cut differently from everyone else. He quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line about the very rich being ‘soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful’.

He says: ‘It’s real money I’m interested in. I’m not interested in midrange stuff. I’m interested in blue-blood aristocracy — families that have been rich for hundreds of years. They’ve always interested me… the idea of dynasty is fascinating.’ He delights in Illuminati-style conspiracy theories, particularly ones relating to the sinister manner in which throughout history the super-rich — ‘people who operate outside the democratic process’ — have closed ranks to protect one another:

‘Someone’s protecting Prince Andrew,’ Dillon tells me. ‘I wouldn’t say it’s the Illuminati, but someone’s protecting Bill Clinton. I mean, anybody that had taken 20-plus flights on the plane of a human trafficker [Jeffrey Epstein] should be questioned, which I don’t believe he has been, by the FBI. Prince Andrew should be questioned, too.

‘If the rule of law is to mean anything, these people should be held to account for some very dubious behavior. Someone is protecting them, or someone is preventing that from happening. I don’t know who it is, but I don’t think it is an irrational or crazy belief that these people should be called to account for associating with someone who has destroyed the lives of countless women and children.’

Dillon does not — it goes without saying — believe Epstein committed suicide: ‘The guy was killed. I think it’s quite easy to keep someone alive. I think we’ve proven that. I think it’s very interesting that he was killed. I can’t for the life of me understand people who think that’s some kind of mere coincidence. I mean, this guy had some of the most damaging secrets on some of the most powerful people on Earth, and he ends up dying. To me, someone is preventing light being shed on this.’

Until he discovered cocaine and alcohol at 13 — ‘I decided I would learn more about life in crack houses than school’ — Dillon was categorized as a gifted child. At one point, he was buying his coke from the same dealer as one of his teachers.

An unsuccessful child actor (he once appeared on Sesame Street), he describes his time as an addict — ‘12 years, I put a good chunk of life into that’ — as a period of great sorrow and loneliness. To this day, however, he doesn’t regret stealing from his family to finance his habit: ‘If you met my family you would know how much these people deserve to be stolen from. It’s really one of the only things I’m not sorry about. When I did my inventory, I went to AA and the 12-Step Program, and they said “You’ve got to make amends to your family.” I did so begrudgingly.’

Today, Dillon is on course to become the leading comedic voice of his generation — a destiny he is apparently moving toward clear-eyed and unencumbered by the past. He’s aware, however, that his is an industry littered with sad stories.

‘It’s all a cautionary tale,’ he says. ‘You know what’s the best cautionary tale? The people that have succeeded and still have guns in their mouth. The cautionary tales never stop. In the beginning, it’s people that haven’t succeeded, that have been at the party too long. And then the cautionary tales become people who have succeeded beyond their wildest imagination.’

As for the future, Dillon says he is focused on growing his podcast audience and collaborating with likeminded people to generate laughter. ‘Funny is my first love,’ he says. ‘I don’t really care how I’m being funny. As long as people are laughing, I’ve figured it out.’

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition.

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The Tiger Who Came to Tea is a desperately bleak depiction of adultery and highly eroticised sexual mania seen through the eyes of a little girl called Sophie. Grotesque and depraved, it is a book that by rights should be kept in a locked cabinet but that instead at bedtime we murmur direct into the ears of society’s most vulnerable in the safest space imaginable, the nursery. Until I confiscated and set fire to it, it was my daughter’s favourite bedtime book. Now I’m terrified the damage I’ve done is irreparable.

The book begins with a scene of domestic order, the last Sophie will know. She is drinking tea and having cake with her adulterous mother. True, mummy’s cheeks are a little flushed, her skirt sits above her knee and she is not wearing her wedding ring, but there is no way merely from this tableau of innocence for the reader to discern what is to come.

“Suddenly there was a ring at the door”. Sophie watches as mummy struggles to remember whose turn it is this time to visit her. The milkman has already come, we are told, and the boy from the grocer doesn’t come today. It can’t be daddy — and now we start to establish what is going on here — because although he is not at home, he has keys. “We’d better open the door and see.”

It’s Sophie, of course, who opens the door. Standing behind it is a large, exotic man, grinning in anticipation at what is to come. In her trauma, Sophie will later recollect that this man was in fact a tiger, a characterisation with which author Judith Kerr is likely referencing his extreme beauty and power to terrify. He comes straight on in. “I’m very hungry,” he says darkly. And for the briefest time — no doubt for Sophie’s sake — the pretence of normality is affected. The ‘tiger’ sits at the family table with both Sophie and mummy, whose hands are clasped together in excitement.

It’s now that the filth really begins, graphically related through gossamer-thin metaphor. Sophie’s mummy offers the visitor something to ‘eat’ — in the accompanying image we see the tiger running his tongue over the proffered food (heartbreakingly, proffered by Sophie) — but it’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough. Tiger wants everything mummy’s got and more, and he wants it right now. Over the kitchen table he eats and he eats and he eats. All the sandwiches, all the buns, all the cake. He devours everything, “until there was nothing left.” Now mummy, still desperate to please, offers fluids to slake his thirst. But in no time at all, tiger has drunk mummy dry. “Tiger drank all the milk in the milk jug and all the tea in the teapot.” The illustration shows tiger tipping his head back and grinning ecstatically as he lets the golden liquid gush into his open mouth.

Events now take a turn for the worse. Tiger has consumed everything mummy has to give. “Then he looked around the kitchen to see what else he could find.” In the drawing we see that tiger’s eyes have become slitted and sly. His tail is very much erect and Sophie — mummy now nowhere to be seen — is hugging him. Tiger commences eating once again.

Hunched over, tongue extended, he slurps from a pot. Lying on top of the opened fridge, he paws hungrily at its contents, green and blood red vegetables lie fallen on the floor. Standing and smiling with his mouth closed in deep satisfaction, he ransacks a cupboard. Nothing is out of bounds, he takes everything he can find. Were the allegory not obvious enough already, Kerr now becomes unequivocal in her use of imagery. Tiger does something no man would ever do in another, absent man’s home. He drinks daddy’s beer. He drinks all daddy’s beer. Not since Remus jumped over Romulus’ wall has one male signalled his disrespect for another so totally in literature. The cuckolding of daddy is complete. Now tiger leaves.

Exhausted, mummy begins to try to repair the scene of domestic devastation left behind. “I don’t know what to do,” she says. She cannot even muster the energy to bathe her daughter. As daddy comes home, presumably from work, she is blaming her failing on a supposed lack of water. Sophie now has to watch as mummy, unable to hide the evidence, confesses. As daddy sits glum faced in an armchair, “mummy told him what had happened.”

What follows is a reckoning, of which Sophie in her innocence is oblivious. The family go out into the cold night. We see them in a cafe — a neutral space — mummy’s head bowed in shame, daddy wearing a melancholy smile. But he is supping a beer — that which was taken from him is returned — an indication perhaps that forgiveness is possible.

The next day Sophie and mummy “went shopping and they bought lots more lovely things to eat.” Has mummy mended her ways? “They also bought a very big tin of Tiger Food, in case the tiger should ever come to tea again.” In the book’s final scene, we see tiger, holding his instrument — a trumpet — to his lips, his back turned to us disdainfully, head cocked over his shoulder, eyeballing the reader. Tiger doesn’t care what we think of him.

We’ve been reading this book to small children since 1968. It’s sold a million copies. Can we really be surprised the world is the way it is? Angry millennial snowflakes, it’s not your fault: you were triggered before you were out of nappies.