Novara Media

Latest Episodes:

Downstream: American Democracy Is Collapsing, and This Man Predicted It w/ Joseph Stiglitz Jun 16, 2025

Show notes

During the 2008 economic crisis, the Obama administration had an opportunity to enact widespread market reforms. Instead, they bailed out the banks and laid the groundwork for mass inequality and a political culture that has given us a second Trump administration.

This week’s guest was in the room where those crucial decisions were made, and argued that financial institutions should not be able to escape the consequences of their recklessness.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and author of ‘The Road To Freedom: Economics and The Good Society’.

He sat down with Aaron to discuss the collapse of American democracy, his relationship with Milton Friedman and whether China is actually a socialist country.

Novara FM: How to Redistribute the Globe w/ Jo Guldi Jun 13, 2025

Show notes

Assuming you’re not reading this on your yacht, then the most contentious thing in the world is right beneath you.

Since the dawn of agriculture, peasants, farmers, landlords, and states have vied for control of the land.

Jo Guldi is the author of the The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights.

She spoke to Eleanor Penny about the history of that struggle, and how the struggle over the most basic condition of life is evolving now.

Downstream: The IDF Killed My Entire Family, and the British Government Helped Them w/ Ahmed Alnaouq Jun 10, 2025

Show notes

Ahmed Alnaouq is a Palestinian journalist and author. In October 2023, while he was in the UK, an Israeli airstrike hit his home in central Gaza, killing 21 of his immediate family, including his father, two brothers, three sisters and their children.

He joins Ash Sarkar to talk about Israel’s dehumanisation of Palestinians, Britain’s continuing support of Israel, and what lessons can be drawn from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Alnaouq’s book, We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth, is published by Penguin.

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Novara FM: Palantir Technologies and the Age of Automated Genocide w/ Matt Mahmoudi Jun 05, 2025

Show notes

The genocide in Gaza has been the most automated in history.

Systems like ‘Lavender’ and ‘Where’s Daddy?’ reportedly speed up the process of tracking and targeting Palestinians.

The genocide’s brutality has been concealed behind the facade of technical neutrality.

So why are the companies working with the IDF also working with the NHS?

Eleanor Penny spoke to Matt Mahmoudi about the broken promises of big tech and war in the age of AI.

Downstream: Britain’s Most Powerful Multi-Millionaire Hippy w/ Dale Vince Jun 02, 2025

Show notes

Dale Vince is a former new age traveller and the inventor of a string of transformative technologies: the world’s first green energy company, the electric supercar, and the Electric Highway charging network. The last of these got him into in a David-versus-Goliath legal battle with Elon Musk – a battle that he won.

Since then, Vince has funded Just Stop Oil, become a major donor to the Labour Party, and bought Forest Green Rovers, the world’s first vegan football club. His next project? Creating an edible form of high protein-grass. He spoke to Aaron Bastani about his journey from new age traveller to multi-millionaire political player.

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ACFM Microdose: Superheroes Jun 02, 2025

Show notes

Following the recent Trip episode on Heroes, Keir and Jem return with a Microdose focusing on the masked, the winged and the mutated. Why are superheroes such a cultural mainstay? What psychological and political desires do they fulfil? Are they inherently reactionary? From Superman to Batman, Wonder Woman to 2000AD, it’s a weird left reading of superheroes and comic book culture.

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Novara FM: How Enoch Powell Explains British Politics’ Rivers of Shit w/ Kojo Koram May 29, 2025

Show notes

Keir Starmer stands accused of echoing Enoch Powell in his ‘Island of Strangers’ speech.

But who was this titanic figure in the history of British racism?

And how did he shape the far right’s existential struggle to understand Britain once it ceased to be a formal empire?

Eleanor Penny spoke to Kojo Koram about how to understand his influence in a renewed moment of national decline, and how his ideas poisoned the very political waters we swim in.

Novara FM: The New Party, Beyond London w/ Pamela Fitzpatrick, Jamie Driscoll and Shockat Adam May 27, 2025

Show notes

There will be a new party. And also, there already is one.

We put the strategies of Pamela Fitzpatrick, Jamie Driscoll and Shockat Adam head to head: do we need a new party? Should it be led by Jeremy Corbyn, or someone new? Or do we just need more independent MPs?

They debate Reform UK, attacks from the mainstream media, and what class politics means now.

You can listen to the previous episodes in this series in this podcast feed.

Downstream: How to Be a Morally Effective Person w/ Rutger Bregman May 26, 2025

Show notes

This week’s guest is best known for hijacking a panel at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, where he told a room full of billionaires to stop avoiding taxes. He now claims that this form of protest has been proven ineffective in the struggle for progress. The last 25 years have seen some of the biggest protests in history, yet we’ve seen wars erupt and inequality widen.

With his new book, ‘Moral Ambition’, Rutger Bregman lays out a history of how societal change actually happens, and how we can learn from the agentic groups of thoughtful individuals who improved our civilisation.

In conversation with Aaron Bastani he discusses the true origins of abolitionism, what the left gets wrong about Elon Musk and why we might actually see the end of history.

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Novara FM: What Communism Actually Is w/ Jasper Bernes May 22, 2025

Show notes

Communism is a classless, moneyless and stateless society. So far, so simple. And so far out of reach.

Or, we could define it differently, as “the real movement that abolishes the present state of things”. That’s how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described it in the German Ideology.

Jasper Bernes is the author of The Future of Revolution, a book that aims both to clarify our ideas and to reignite our determination to make a fundamentally new kind of society.

He spoke to Richard Hames about the red thread of history, from the Paris Commune to Black Lives Matter, and on into the communist future.