Of course, none of these things really are facts, just the half-arsed opinions of a self-appointed guru, who has managed to find a tribe of disaffected followers and fellow travellers who will lap this shit up. If we’re being honest, that doesn’t take long. The latter is in fact thrown into the end of each chapter as a way of summarising his “conclusions”: a way of imparting his “wisdom” to his acolytes. Like a fecally incontinent seagull, he sprays his book with phrases like, “no bullshit”, and “cold hard facts”. So we’ll start with broad strokes, the “mood music” as it were. Yes, there are motorcycles too, but we’ll get to that part soon enough. The pictures he shares of himself in his profile you can visualise if I just say the words “balding middle-aged man in midst of midlife crisis”. Except he exudes so much Dark Divorced Man Energy that we are in danger of possibly seeing the birth of a Supermassive Divorced Man at the centre of the galaxy. Possibly the most divorced man in the history of divorces, but he’s honestly, honestly, honestly not bitter. The first thing you need to know is that Richard Cooper is divorced. It’s hard to know where to start properly with what can only be called an egregious, self-pitying, whining slurry heap of a “book”. We also promised, seeing that he appears to be a Putin fan as well, that we’d also make sure that UNICEF got more out of the deal than he did.

If you don’t like spoilers, turn away now: yes. We decided we had to go all in and each buy a copy of his (self-published) book to read, to see if it was as awful as we suspected it might be. This is a man with a significant number of Twitter followers, and a YouTube channel, who appears to be so monumentally immersed in twattery that we had to find out if he could be as much of a mouth-breathing troglodyte as he first appeared. She saw a tweet by aman named Richard Cooper.

I was alerted to this book by a friend on Twitter. It’s written on the hoof, and as it continues it feels mostly like a bit of rage piece, so there will be typos.

No, this piece is really not what you think.ĭISCLAIMER: This is probably not going to be that coherent.

The unplugged alpha