Thinking Class

John Gillam

Thinking Class is a weekly long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and civilisational forces shaping England, Britain, and the Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show brings together historians, philosophers, theologians, economists, and public intellectuals for conversations that go beyond the news cycle by examining the deep roots of the West's present predicament and asking what genuine recovery might require. Guests have included David Starkey, Lord Jonathan Sumption, Lord Nigel Biggar, Robert Tombs, Peter Hitchens, Lionel Shriver, Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Stock, Carl Trueman, and many others. If you value serious conversation about Britain, the West, and the forces shaping our future, then this is the show for you. New episodes every week.

  1. 15 hr ago

    #130 - Iain McGilchrist - The Industrialisation Of Man, The Loss Of Faith, And What The Western Mind Has Done To Itself

    Dr Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London, a former research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and since September 2025 the Chancellor of Ralston College. He lives on the Isle of Skye. He is the author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva Press, 2021). He writes at Channel McGilchrist and on Substack. Something has gone wrong with the Western mind. Not recently and not with any particular government or policy but rather at a deep structural level, over centuries. Iain McGilchrist has spent his career as a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and literary scholar trying to make sense of it. In this conversation we think out loud about:  The difference between the actions and thoughts produced by the left and right hemispheres of the brain The most visible symptoms of civilisational decay in Britain and the WestThe key inflection points in history that set the West on a road to ruin, having previously defined the path to greatnessWhat the Romantics were longing for in the industrial era — and why nostalgia is not a bad thing but necessaryWhy we need more new Romantics to show us how to live more fully human lives in the machine ageWhat the industrialisation of man has done to our soulsWhat the world we have built is doing to our minds and why mental health diagnoses are so prevalent amongst the youngThe mistake made by the West in becoming post-ChristianWhy Iain would rather die than sever his relationship with the faith — What Iain has not changed his mind onFind Dr McGilchrist's work: Channel McGilchristMcGilchrist SubstackThe Master and His EmissaryThe Matter with ThingsRalston CollegeRelated episodes: #126 Gary Gerstle — The Iran War Is Ending The Global Economy As We Know It#110 Renaud Camus — The Disaster: The Great Replacement, Elite Failure & The Crisis Of The West#042 Peter Hitchens - How Britain Witnessed A Moral And Cultural RevolutionThinking Class is a long-form interview podcast on the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam. ▶ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkingClass ✍️ Substack: https://thinkingclass.substack.com 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37vvzrlxpo8eORDoTDRtbH 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/thinking-class/id1717021615 🐦 X: https://x.com/thinkingclasses New episodes every Thursday at 3pm.

    1hr 28min

  2. 28 May

    #129 - William Clouston & Firas Modad - The Iran War Is Breaking The Global Economy And Britain Has No Plan

    William Clouston is the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the United Kingdom and a member of the advisory board for Restore Britain.  Firas Modad is an analyst and political economist focused on the Middle East and global geopolitics. He runs his own consultancy, Modad Geopolitics, helping companies and investors understand the commercial impact of political, economic, and security risks they face. Firas Modad is a host on Podcast of the LotusEaters. Britain built its economy on the assumption that global stability was permanent. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed for nearly three months. William Clouston and Firas on what is actually happening, how Britain ended up this exposed, what a sane government would do, and what the crisis reveals about a deeper civilisational loss of will. We think out loud about: - What the Strait closure actually means militarily and whether it will ever reopen - How Britain ended up with no strategic reserve, no energy self-sufficiency, and no industrial base  - Why successive governments stopped thinking like custodians of a nation - What a sane government would actually do on energy, manufacturing and borders - The ideological double whammy: free trade purism and net zero combined are lethal doe Britain  - How the financial sector was ideologically captured and failed to see the crisis coming - Whether the integrated global economy is finished and what will replace it  - How the faith crisis underpins the nation's morale crisis and why power stations alone will not fix it - What ordinary people should actually begin doing differently in their own lives in response Follow their work: - SDP Investment State Green Paper: https://www.sdp.org.uk - Firas Modad Geopolitics: https://modadgeopolitics.com - The Lotus Eaters: https://lotuseaters.com Related episodes: - #126 Gary Gerstle — The Iran War Is Ending The Global Economy: https://youtu.be/KbCyaKcj0E8?si=Hzc1TNvhkuK90Wa- - #109 William Clouston — Why British Politics Governs Against The National Interest: https://youtu.be/Rm2Qp-1qnJw?si=5W0MSjBKe0tyFj1k - #112 Firas Modad — Britain Is Losing Control At Home And Abroad: https://youtu.be/KMOwGx9ZtMI?si=MKl__0WCHBbdRnmu Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast on the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam. ▶ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkingClass ✍️ Substack: https://thinkingclass.substack.com 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37vvzrlxpo8eORDoTDRtbH 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/thinking-class/id1717021615 🐦 X: https://x.com/thinkingclasses New episodes every Thursday at 3pm.

    1hr 9min

  3. 21 May

    #128 - Lord Tony Sewell - Life At The Bottom In Broken Britain - The White Working Class, The Road Man Culture, And The Collapse Of England

    Lord Tony Sewell CBE is a British educational consultant, author, and life peer. Born in Brixton to Jamaican parents, he trained as a teacher and worked in some of London's most challenging schools, during which time he completed his PhD on black masculinities and schooling at the University of Nottingham. He helped transform education in Hackney as part of the team that established the Learning Trust and the iconic Mossbourne Academy, a flagship of the Academy movement. He is the founder and chair of Generating Genius, a charity that has helped hundreds of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds into STEM careers at top universities. In 2021 he chaired the government's Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, producing what became known as the Sewell Report. He was awarded a CBE for services to education in 2016 and elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Sewell of Sanderstead in 2022, where he sits as a member of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. His latest book is Black Success: The Surprising Truth, published by Swift Press. In this conversation, Lord Sewell and I think out loud about:  Why white working-class boys are still at the bottom How the numbers were deliberately fudged to hide the problem The three causes behind poor performance: poor schools in post-industrial areas, family breakdown, and no one championing their cause The self-loathing of middle-class white professionals and how their luxury beliefs that harm those below them Anti-white animus in the institutions and class warfare dressed up as progressivism The road man culture cutting across every ethnicity and what John saw on his road trip for his The Call Of England travelogueWhy Sewell thinks Netflix' Adolescence missed the point entirely A modern-day dissolution of the monasteries. Can the institutions can be trusted or do they need to be replaced?Individual agency and community-led regeneration and what the state cannot fix The collapse of Christianity as the root cause underneath all of itWhat Sewell changed his mind on and why he came back to ChristianityFind Lord Sewell's work:  Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities Centre for Social Justice — White Working Class Boys report: https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/newsroom/white-working-class-boys-still-at-the-bottom-of-the-class-says-race-report-chief Generating Genius: https://www.generatinggenius.org.ukAbout Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with thinkers, historians, and commentators grappling honestly with the condition of our civilisation. ▶ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkingClass ✍️ Substack: https://thinkingclass.substack.com 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37vvzrlxpo8eORDoTDRtbH 🐦 X: https://x.com/thinkingclasses New episodes every week.

    1hr 9min

  4. 14 May

    #127 - Jonathan Rose - Literacy Is At Record Lows But It Wasn't Always. What The British Working Class Built And How It Was Destroyed

    Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University in New Jersey. He edits the journal Book History and was founding president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. He is the author of several books including The Literary Churchill and The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. For the better part of two centuries, the British working class sustained one of the most remarkable intellectual traditions in any civilisation. Miners read Shakespeare. Engine-men debated Darwin. Workmen's institutes built libraries of tens of thousands of volumes. Literacy was not a middle-class gift — it was seized, organically, as a form of human dignity claimed on their own terms. Then we severed it.  In this conversation, we think out loud about:  What the autodidact tradition looked like at its height — what a working-class reader's intellectual life in 1880 or 1910 actually was Why they chose Shakespeare and Milton rather than what their betters told them to read — and what that tells us about the nature of the impulse How the educated classes responded by creating modernism — deliberately obscure, deliberately difficult — to keep the inheritance out of reach The mechanism by which reading formed people with a high internal locus of control — and whether the loss of that mechanism is what literacy decline is really documenting The Hitchens argument: whether the tradition was destroyed from above by curriculum changes, or voluntarily relinquished from within — and whether those two things can be separated The role of Methodism as the engine of working-class self-improvement — and what its near-collapse means for any prospect of recovery Whether the autodidact tradition is still alive, operating now through podcasts and the internet rather than workmen's institutes What recovery would actually require — and Jonathan Rose's own changed mind on whether the impulse is dying Find Jonathan Rose's work:  The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes — Yale University Press: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300098952/the-intellectual-life-of-the-british-working-classes/ The Literary Churchil: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300196535/the-literary-churchill/ Drew University faculty page: https://www.drew.edu About Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with thinkers, historians, and commentators grappling honestly with the condition of our civilisation. ▶ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkingClass ✍️ Substack: https://thinkingclass.substack.com 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37vvzrlxpo8eORDoTDRtbH 🐦 X: https://x.com/thinkingclasses New episodes every week.

    1hr 1min

  5. 8 May

    #126 - Gary Gerstle - The Iran War Is Ending The Global Economy As We Know It & What Comes Next

    Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and the author of The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order — one of the most clarifying accounts written of how a set of economic assumptions came to dominate Western politics, and how they are now collapsing. He is currently Kluge Chair of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress, working on his next book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century, forthcoming from Penguin Press. The neoliberal order is over — the set of ideas that captured both Reagan and Clinton, both Thatcher and Blair. Gary Gerstle on what that means for Britain, America, and the communities the order hollowed out — and whether what comes next is a swing of the pendulum or a rupture of a different kind. He ends the conversation by calling liberty a fragile flower. Draw your own conclusions. Find Gary Gerstle's work: The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: https://amzn.to/4u7wWIA9780197519646 Books: https://amzn.to/3Rp07bGAbout Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with thinkers, historians, and commentators grappling honestly with the condition of our civilisation. ▶ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ThinkingClass ✍️ Substack: https://thinkingclass.substack.com 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/37vvzrlxpo8eORDoTDRtbH 🐦 X: https://x.com/thinkingclasses New episodes every week.

    1hr 12min

  6. 1 May

    #125 - Theodore Dalrymple & Rob Henderson - The Ideas That Claimed To Help Britain & America's Poor And Made Everything Worse

    Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Dr. Anthony Daniels — physician, psychiatrist, and social diagnostician. He spent years working in the hospitals and prisons of Birmingham before his essays for City Journal established him as the foremost chronicler of what he called the culture of the British underclass. His writing has also appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, New Statesman, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, The New English Review, and The Wall Street Journal. Theodore has authored numerous books, his book Life at the Bottom is twenty-five years old this year, including Life at the Bottom, The Worldview That Makes the Underclass, Our Culture, What's Left of It, and Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality. Rob Henderson is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class — a national bestseller selected by The Economist as one of the best books of 2024. He is best known for coining the concept of luxury beliefs: ideas that confer status on the educated class while the costs are borne entirely by those at the bottom. He has written the foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of Life at the Bottom. In this conversation we think out loud about: What Life at the Bottom got right and what 25 years have added to itWhy the non-judgmentalism Dalrymple documented has spread from the clinic into the general cultureLuxury beliefs: the ideas that confer status on the educated class while the costs fall on everyone elseWhy the disability industry at elite universities is the latest expression of the same pathologyThe tattoo economy and what it reveals about cultural contagion moving upward through societyWhat honest hope looks like and what a serious individual-level response might actually requireFind Theodore Dalrymple's work: Life at the Bottom — 25th Anniversary EditionCity JournalThe Salisbury ReviewFind Rob Henderson's work: Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social ClassRob Henderson's Newsletter (Substack)City JournalAbout Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with historians, legal scholars, economists, theologians, and public intellectuals — concerned with long-term patterns over headlines and hot-takes. If you value serious conversations about Britain, the West, and the forces shaping our future, why not subscribe:  ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube 🎧 Follow on Spotify 📰 Read on Substack 🐦 Follow on X

    1hr 15min

  7. 24 Apr

    #124 - Michael Lind - Why Britain And America Keep Betraying Their Working Class

    Michael Lind is a political theorist, historian, and one of America's most rigorous independent analysts of class, democracy, and political economy. He is a Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, a co-founder of the New America think tank, and a visiting professor at the University of Austin. He has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and previously served as an assistant to the Director of the Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs at the US Department of State. His books include The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States, The Next American Nation, and among more than a dozen works of non-fiction, history, and political theory. His writing has appeared in UnHerd, Tablet, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, American Affairs, and The New York Times, among many others. This is the first episode in a four-part Thinking Class series on social class in Britain and the West. In this conversation, we think out loud about:  What the managerial class actually is and how it displaced the old bourgeoisie  Why Brexit and Trump were intra-capitalist conflicts, not working-class revolts How Britain's failure to properly industrialise shaped its class settlementWhy AI will automate the credential class before it automates the working class What the working class once had — and what was taken from it Whether anything can dislodge the managerial settlement in Britain or AmericaFollow Michael Lind Buy Michael Lind's books: https://amzn.to/4tkJFHBFollow Michael Lind's work at UnHerd: https://unherd.com/author/michael-lind/About Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with historians, legal scholars, economists, theologians, and public intellectuals — concerned with long-term patterns over headlines and hot-takes. If you value serious conversations about Britain, the West, and the forces shaping our future, why not subscribe:  ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube 🎧 Follow on Spotify 📰 Read on Substack 🐦 Follow on X

    1hr 28min

  8. 17 Apr

    #123 - Carl Trueman - The West Killed God. Then It Killed Man. Now Something Darker Is Coming.

    Dr. Carl R. Trueman is Professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania and currently a visiting Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His most recent books are The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Expressive Individualism, Cultural Amnesia, and the Road to Sexual Revolution, (with Bruce Gordon) The Oxford Handbook to Calvin and, and To Change All Worlds: Critical Theory from Marx to Marcuse (B and H). His writing has appeared in Deseret Journal, Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, American Mind, Claremont Review of Books and Public Discourse.  The question "what is a woman?" is only confusing, Carl Trueman argues, because the prior question — what does it mean to be a human being — has already been answered wrongly, or abandoned entirely. His new book The Desecration of Man traces how that happened: a long arc from Luther through Rousseau and Nietzsche, through the sexual revolution and the death of serious art, to transgenderism, artificial intelligence, and the hollowed-out Church of England hosting iftars in its cathedrals. This is the third time Trueman has joined Thinking Class, and in this conversation we think out loud about:  the Faustian bargain the West made with its own traditionwhy radical secularism is defenceless against Islam, and what a genuine recovery of human dignity would require — not at the macro-political level, but in a person's own life and community.Follow Carl Trueman Carl Trueman's new book The Desecration of Man is available from Amazon Books: https://amzn.to/3OkKwsLBuy Carl Trueman's books here: https://amzn.to/4cP0nJmFollow Carl at First Things: https://firstthings.com/Carl will be speaking at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London in June — details at: https://www.arc-conference.com/About Thinking Class: Thinking Class is a long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and moral forces shaping England, Britain, and the wider Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show features serious conversations with historians, legal scholars, economists, theologians, and public intellectuals — concerned with long-term patterns over headlines and hot-takes. If you value serious conversations about Britain, the West, and the forces shaping our future, why not subscribe:  ▶️ Subscribe on YouTube 🎧 Follow on Spotify 📰 Read on Substack 🐦 Follow on X

    58 min
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About

Thinking Class is a weekly long-form interview podcast exploring the cultural, historical, and civilisational forces shaping England, Britain, and the Western world. Hosted by John Gillam, the show brings together historians, philosophers, theologians, economists, and public intellectuals for conversations that go beyond the news cycle by examining the deep roots of the West's present predicament and asking what genuine recovery might require. Guests have included David Starkey, Lord Jonathan Sumption, Lord Nigel Biggar, Robert Tombs, Peter Hitchens, Lionel Shriver, Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Stock, Carl Trueman, and many others. If you value serious conversation about Britain, the West, and the forces shaping our future, then this is the show for you. New episodes every week.

Information

  • Creator
    John Gillam
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    129
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Thinking Class
  • Show Website
    Thinking Class

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