Turn Off the Fucking News
I stopped watching television news a long time ago and something extraordinary happened. The world continued to exist.
Governments didn't collapse because I wasn't watching them. Markets still opened. Businesses still traded. Ships continued arriving in ports. People went to work, money moved around the planet and nobody from the BBC came round to check whether I was sufficiently informed about whatever catastrophe they'd selected for me that evening.
More importantly, my life didn't become worse.
It became quieter.
Anton Kreil's ninth secret is that mainstream media is useless and you shouldn't consume it. On this one, Anton doesn't have to work very hard to convince me. He could probably have saved himself the explanation, gone to the pub and ordered a pint. I absolutely fucking deplore most mainstream media, and the BBC in particular has occupied a special place in my personal dustbin for years.
I find the BBC sanctimonious, politically slanted and frequently so convinced of its own moral importance that watching it feels less like receiving information and more like being lectured by a geography teacher who has somehow been appointed Archbishop of Everything. I know plenty of people disagree with me about its politics. Fine. That's the beauty of having an off button.
My solution is considerably simpler than arguing with the television.
I don't fucking watch it.
What particularly gets up my nose is the institutional arrogance. BBC Verify might be my favourite example. The BBC actually created a verification operation to help distinguish reliable information from bullshit. There is something magnificently BBC about looking at the entire internet and deciding that what civilisation really needs is the BBC standing at the front with a red pen checking everybody else's homework.
The fucking brass neck deserves its own postcode.
To me, it's like a burglar opening a neighbourhood security consultancy. Thanks very much. I'll certainly bear your expertise in mind.
The BBC's own history ought to encourage a little more humility. The Jimmy Savile scandal led to a major independent review examining serious failures around the BBC during the years he worked there. Decades later, Huw Edwards, once one of the most recognisable faces of BBC News, pleaded guilty to offences involving indecent images of children. These are different cases with different facts, and I'm not suggesting everybody at the BBC knew everything or was responsible for the crimes of individuals. My point is simpler. An institution with that sort of history might want to climb down from the fucking pulpit occasionally before appointing itself Britain's referee of truth.
Then there's The Guardian.
I can't stand it.
Reading some Guardian commentary feels like entering a church where I've somehow committed seventeen sins before I've taken my coat off. I've driven a car, eaten meat, taken a flight, operated a business and probably failed to consider the colonial implications of my garden furniture. Somewhere a columnist is reaching for the smelling salts.
I sometimes imagine opening The Guardian and seeing the headline, Why Your Kettle Is Problematic, And What Your Choice Of Tea Says About Britain's Imperial Past.
Underneath there'd be 1,800 words explaining why boiling water is an act of structural violence.
Then there's The Economist, which irritates me in a completely different way. The Guardian can sometimes feel like a sermon. The Economist can sometimes feel like speculation that's been sent to boarding school. Put something uncertain into an expensive typeface, give it a clever cover and suddenly everyone feels considerably more intelligent while reading predictions about what governments, markets and economies are going to do next.
Mr Market, unfortunately, doesn't subscribe.
He'll do whatever the fuck he wants.
But here's where I think Anton's ninth secret becomes much more interesting than simply saying the media is shit.
Because I don't think the biggest problem with mainstream news is necessarily that everything it reports is false. Plenty of it is factually correct. The bigger problem is that enormous quantities of it are completely fucking irrelevant to your life.
Something can be true and still be useless.
A minister has resigned.
Fine.
Two politicians have had an argument.
Wonderful.
Somebody said something offensive.
Call the army.
A journalist has written an opinion about another journalist's opinion regarding something a politician said about somebody else's opinion.
Fetch the fucking defibrillator.
None of this necessarily changes what I'm doing tomorrow morning.
This is where Anton makes a point I find far more powerful. Forget the daily noise for a moment and look at the size and direction of the global economy. We're living inside a world economy producing well over a hundred trillion dollars of goods and services each year, and despite wars, elections, political stupidity, market panics and everything else thrown at it, global output continues to grow over time.
That's the fucking playing field.
The exact GDP number will change with exchange rates, forecasts and how it's measured. That's not really the point. The point is the staggering scale of the machine.
Billions of people wake up every day and do things.
Factories manufacture.
Farmers produce.
Engineers build.
Companies hire.
Companies fire.
Capital moves.
People borrow.
People lend.
Ships cross oceans.
Software gets written.
Restaurants open.
Buildings go up.
Businesses fail and new ones replace them.
Somebody in Korea hires an engineer. Somebody in Singapore moves capital. Somebody in Brazil buys machinery. Somebody in America starts a company. Somebody in Vietnam opens a coffee shop.
The economic machine is so fucking enormous that trying to comprehend it through the evening news is like trying to understand the Atlantic Ocean by examining a wet sock.
And somewhere in that enormous global economy is your little patch of grass.
That's what matters.
You don't need the whole fucking field.
You need a piece.
This is the street fighter philosophy I take from Anton's argument. Stop standing on the pavement listening to commentators describe the fight. Get in the fucking ring and concentrate on what's in front of you.
The news encourages the opposite behaviour.
It teaches spectatorship.
There's always something happening somewhere and therefore always something new to worry about. Once one crisis stops generating enough attention, another arrives. BREAKING NEWS appears across the bottom of the screen with dramatic music and serious faces, as though Belgium has just exploded.
Twenty four hours later most of it has been thrown into the skip.
Then the next emergency arrives.
It's an industrial conveyor belt of urgency.
That's why I increasingly think mainstream media produces as much slop as social media. TikTok gives you slop wearing leggings. Mainstream media gives you slop wearing a tie.
At least TikTok doesn't pretend the dancing teenager beside the swimming pool is performing an essential democratic service.
Television news takes the same basic ingredients, novelty, emotion, fear, outrage and conflict, then puts them behind a polished desk. Instead of somebody pointing at captions, you get a correspondent standing outside Downing Street in the rain explaining that nobody knows what will happen next for eight fucking minutes.
Thank you, Jeremy.
Excellent work.
We'll check tomorrow and discover that you still don't know.
This is the trick mainstream media pulled magnificently. It convinced people that consuming news means being informed.
Those are not the same thing.
You can consume six hours of news every day and know enormous amounts about events over which you have absolutely no control while knowing almost nothing about the things that determine your own economic future.
You can know which minister is in trouble while not understanding your pension.
You can know the latest polling numbers while not understanding your mortgage.
You can know what happened to the FTSE today while having no idea what you actually own.
You can know what some BBC presenter thinks about the economy while possessing no fucking clue how your own company makes money.
That's not information.
That's intellectual wallpaper.
And the wallpaper is screaming at you.
The most valuable information I've received in my life has rarely arrived because a television presenter told me about it. It has come from books, people who know things I don't, conversations with people working inside markets and businesses, clients, staff, accountants, lawyers, competitors and my own experience of getting things right and getting things spectacularly fucking wrong.
That information has consequences.
It changes decisions.
That's my test now.
Does this information change anything I'm likely to do.
If not, why am I filling my head with it.
I'm not suggesting living in a cave. Obviously there are major events worth understanding. Wars matter. Elections matter. Interest rates matter. Tax changes matter. Regulation matters. If something materially affects my business, investments, family or life, I want to know about it.
But knowing something important happened is different from spending six hours watching people discuss it.
If a hurricane is heading towards my house, I need the weather forecast. I don't need three journalists sitting in a studio arguing about what the hurricane means for the Prime Minister.
That's the distinction.
Mainstream media is a parasite when it persuades you that attention itself is participation. You sit there consuming the problems of the entire planet while doing absolutely fuck all about your own.
And after two hours you're exhausted.
Of course you are.
You've just mentally carried Ukraine, China, Donald Trump, inflation, immigration, climate change, interest rates, Gaza, the NHS, house prices and a royal scandal around the living room while sitting in your underpants eating biscuits.
No wonder you need a fucking lie down.
Meanwhile the world economy carries on without asking your permission.
That's the part I love about Anton's argument.
The machine doesn't care about the commentary.
A pink haired Guardian columnist with a nose ring can write another furious article about whatever moral emergency has arrived before lunch. Fine. The container ships keep moving.
A BBC presenter can put on the solemn face and explain tonight's catastrophe. Fine. Tomorrow morning millions of businesses open again.
The Economist can publish another immaculate explanation of what the global economy is going to do. Fine. The global economy will decide for itself.
They're pigeons shouting at a container ship.
The ship keeps fucking moving.
And that's liberating because it puts responsibility back where it belongs.
With me.
I don't control the BBC.
I don't control governments.
I don't control elections.
I don't control wars.
I don't control interest rates.
I don't control what some journalist thinks about capitalism, Britain, inequality, immigration, business or whether my fucking kettle is problematic.
But I have considerable control over what I do with tomorrow.
That's enough.
There's a gigantic global economy outside the window. There are businesses to build, investments to understand, people to meet, things to learn and opportunities that don't give the slightest shit whether I've watched the ten o'clock news.
That's the environment in which I can change my life.
Not the studio.
Not the newspaper column.
Not the panel discussion.
Not BBC Verify.
The real fucking world.
So Anton's Secret Nine is probably one of the easiest for me.
Mainstream media is useless.
Don't consume it.
I'd add only one qualification.
If something genuinely matters, find out what happened. Read several sources. Find the original data where possible. Listen to people who understand the subject. Think about incentives. Decide whether it changes anything relevant to you.
Then get on with your fucking life.
The BBC will survive without you.
The Guardian will find somebody else's garden furniture to investigate.
The Economist will publish another forecast.
And somewhere outside, a hundred trillion dollar plus global economy will continue lumbering forwards like an enormous container ship while the media pigeons scream from the harbour wall.
I'm going to make coffee.
If Belgium explodes, somebody can WhatsApp me.