Tell us, what's the genesis of that book? What are you hoping to accomplish with it? And what was your inspiration?

Yeah, the book is Borderline Genius, Borderline Insane, Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder and How Female Borderlines Have Shaped History.

And my inspiration for it was a paper about 30 years ago, which looked at the psychopathology of great men.

It was by a psychiatrist called Felix Post.

And what he found was that most of his sample, I think it was 291 great men, were subclinically psychopathological and often things like cluster B.

So depression, narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, but to a subclinical degree, seemed to be associated with very high achievement and with being an accepted genius, as it were, in various fields.

And it was very extreme in the arts.

And so a sub question would be, you know, are we wrongly seeing ourselves as individuals when really we are just a herd kind of species that has become atomized?

Mm-hmm

... actually wrote about not being clear who she was.

And, uh, her husband, uh, who by the way she left aft- she left like after about a day of marriage, um, ta- uh, talked, talked about how you never knew who, who you were going to, who, who she was going to be at any given time.

She was essentially different people depending on the, depending on the, her, her, her mood, completely different people.

So that, that, that was very, very interesting.

So I looked at that.

I looked at how neuroticism fueled it.

I don't know that.

we have such a victim way of looking at the borderline woman that is sometimes i feel packed on into this well they have they you know poor them they have such an unstable self well that is not really the the the why they are doing it they're they're doing it to enhance this bonding that they need in that moment

Yes, precisely.

Yes, exactly.

It's a highly manipulative, whether consciously or unconscious, thing to do.

So that's the first...

Anyway, that's the first...

These people were...

30% to 70%.

I wondered from your reading of Arday's book, what your analysis of his personality would be.

Well, again, class to beat.

But in particular, he is a narcissist with both grandiose and vulnerable traits.

So narcissistic personality disorder, possibly even borderline, but certainly narcissistic personality, you have all these kinds of negative feelings and you feel that you're rubbish and you feel that you're crap and whatever.

And so you deal with this by creating a narcissistic false self in which you are perfect and wonderful.

You try to attain narcissistic supply, i.e. the world telling you that you're perfect and wonderful by boasting, by bragging, by exaggerating, by lying or by manipulating other people, all this sort of thing.

And also you're highly entitled because narcissism is not just neuroticism.

Is this a very 2026 situation? Is this a very 21st century phenomenon? And how do we make sense of it?

Broadly speaking, what's your feeling on them?

Yeah, I just...

They've broken any kind of...

We like Princess Anne in the UK.

And we like Princess Anne because she's herself.

To use a Meghan Markle term, she's true to herself.

But she actually is true to herself.

What's your broadest feelings on Mr Putin, Ed?

Blair and Cameron or Thatcher and

Blair? Blair and Thatcher.

They were both in for a decade or more, and they both came in in an election, so they inherently had a mandate.

And then they made sort of radical change to the country and so on.

And so we think of ourselves as this idea that a prime minister doesn't have a mandate if they're not elected.

But historically, we're going back to the norm now, the norm, It was a weird period of relative peace and relative economic security under Mrs. Thatcher, under Major Blair and Brown.

It was this peculiar period that's unusual over the cycle of 100 years.

Do you think I'm overreacting or I've just got the wrong end of the stick on

And that is where you'd expect to be with your IQ?

Probably it would be one even.

Um, but, but, uh, really how many children I have is not relevant.

I could have, I could have zero children.

Um, the, the, the, the point, the point is the data.

What is the d- what is the data saying? And so it's, it's not just intelligence though.

I mean, intelligence is what we've talked about so far, but it's not just intelligence, it's other things.

Mm-hmm.

And he is only gonna disappoint.

It reminds me...

It, it of course is gonna disappoint.

It reminds me of the hysteria of COVID, where basically the government have lost control of the country.

They don't know what they're doing.

They don't understand what's going on.

And so they need to, the whole establishment needs to come together behind something to give hope, something to give a sense of order and structure, something to say, uh, that this is not chaos and we haven't lost control.

And [laughs] after my criticism of King Charles this week, I think it's quite nice actually to feel like we have a sane member of the royal family.

Yes, there are periods of time when you need the charismatic leader, but that person has to be held in tr- in, in, in train by the more, um, managerial, uh, uh, uh, bu- bureaucratic, uh, as Weber would put it, uh, John Major type.

And if they're not, if there's no one there to hold them back because they surround themselves by sycophants and-

Mm.

There's Parliament, there's the court, uh, the royal court, I mean.

Uh, there's the church court.

Uh, and they're vying for power.

Um, even if you go as recently as, you know, uh, '70s or whatever, you've got...

Yeah, there's the, the, the way you get power, a par- well, there's also trade unions.

Mm

... finding different ways to pass on their genes.

What is one way you can do so? The answer is you can super virtue signal so that you...

You know, you're middle class.

You're middle class.

You've gotta find a niche.

You super virtue signal, so you come across as unbelievably nice.

[laughs]

shouldn't have said that to you on the stairs.

No, it didn't matter.

I've had a whole lifetime of it.

Why do you walk like that? Why do you walk like that? It's fine.

But anyway.

That was me five minutes ago.

It wasn't really.

Well, that takes more.

disagreeableness.

Yeah, there's a disagreeableness to autism that is an accidental disagreeableness.

They don't mean to be disagreeable.

They're not nasty people.

They're just inherently disagreeable because they don't know what the social rules are.

They care more about other things as well.

They're obsessive about sort of structure and order and things making sense and that can make them disagreeable.

Do you imagine that I might be somewhere on some sort of spectrum? I don't know about that, but one of the things that we

woke left and the woke

right.

Both of them.

So the woke left are definitely like this.

And of course you can see there are people on the right or the far right or whatever you want to call it that are dogmatic.

So at the moment, there's this debate about, what is it to be English? You've had this debate on your show with Steve.

To be English means that you're white and you have English ancestors all the way back to the Saxon times.

Okay, so one of them dismissing...

I think that's

the thing.

I didn't know that.

He's never said that to me.

I can see, now you say it, well, not now you say it, I've thought it before.

If you're watching, Conor, look, we love you, mate, we love you.

Yes.

I

And other people might say, no, they're going to lead us astray because they're not able to think rationally or whatever.

Yes, I think there's some truth in that.

Which one? The latter.

So people have suggested that someone like Churchill had autistic traits.

And there's some intense sensitivity to certain materials, things like this.

And you could argue that the autistic traits themselves, in terms of a sort of pathway to this, mean that they question authority, mean that they don't care about offending people, mean that they can perhaps deal with the underlying problems psychologically, the fears or whatever, by adopting a persona of confidence, which allays their negative feelings and makes them feel good.

A bit like narcissism, really.

But I would think to myself, well, what would you, come on, what do you

What about you, autism spectrum?

I've not been diagnosed with autism, no.

But I can see that a lot of...

I mean, autism wasn't really part of common parlance until probably, what, the early 2000s? Sure.

And I remember meeting at university, I was 21 at the time, somebody that was rather more on the spectrum than the average chap.

And someone said to me, who was also a bit spergy himself, oh, this guy has what's called Asperger's.

I said, what's that? And he explained it to me.

Or good at most things.

That's a different

thing.

So there's that element to new ideas.

There's also low conscientiousness.

Conscientiousness is rule following, really.

And so if you don't follow the rules, well, there's a degree to which an autistic person doesn't even understand what the rules are because he has poor cognitive empathy.

He has a poor understanding of social rules and that sort of thing and working it out.

Do you imagine that I might be somewhere on some sort of spectrum? I don't know about that, but one of the things that we did

So I guess, first of all, probably the biggest thing, What's your thoughts and feelings about Iran and the blockade and Mr. Trump and Israel and everything that's going on? What's your, in the broadest sense, what's your thoughts and feelings on all that

stuff? It's funny you asked me about that because it's the one thing that I try to avoid thinking about.

I just think it's potentially so awful.

It reminds me, I've got that sort of foreboding that I had during COVID, when COVID started.

And I thought, hang on, this could get really, really bad.

And in fact, so bad that although in general, I tend to feel myself a bit of a contrarian, like speak out against what we're told to believe and what we're told we must believe and not think about.

This is so bad.

The idea that we spend so much on welfare... and and the NHS and relatively little on defense and yet our establishment the blob whatever you want to call it is is really quite hawkish quite a lot of the time spent sent send lots and lots of money and material and resources to Zelensky but yet don't seem to be able to want to or prepare to spend money relatively small amount in the scheme of things on our defense I don't know if you heard much of the show earlier but you know spending hundreds of billions on welfare in the NHS and can't muster like two and a half billion for spending despite being very very bellicose what's all your thoughts and feelings on that whole subject

This is genuinely the most perfect representation of leftism and immigration married together in the West.

It's a society where nothing serious...

We were talking just before we came on about outside loos and their importance.

And it's a society where nothing serious happens.

Yes.

Where there's nothing to put you in touch with death, nothing to make you actually struggle.

And then when you get into that situation, you get used to everything being done for you.

When I was a

Well, I agree, but go on.

But basically, well, how did I come to that conclusion? Well, first of all, I was researching the subject of intelligence.

And then from intelligence, I was researching personality psychology.

And then from there, it takes you down into the issue of selection and selection pressures changing over time.

And from then you start looking at the relationship between political viewpoints and markers of mutational load, markers of mutation.

I mean, that we were under harsh Darwinian selection until 1800, basically, and then you have mortality 50%.

It's now collapsed down to less than 1%.

symmetrical faces.

In

cells.

In cells, exactly.

But in general, the direction is going to be mutation will be associated with deviation from what we were selecting for, which is basically a sort of fitness factor, including in which is conservatism.

With the result that you would expect left-wing views, i.e. being individually oriented rather than group oriented, i.e. being left-wing... to be associated with a high mutational load.

And eventually the society would start to, they would reach a tipping point.

It's been argued that 20% is a tipping point in groups where it's seen that the new up and coming worldview is the in thing.

Am I right in saying what you're saying really is, by woke in this instance, is in any given society, people who unthinkingly go towards what is the mainstream idea or the popular idea of the moment – so with the Nazis, it would have been Nazism, for example, and right now it's this woke stuff – Those are the people who tend to have these genetic issues.