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A heretical conversation with Andrew Gold
2.2k Plays6 months ago
Heresy is defined as opinion profoundly at odds with what is generally accepted. It has rarely been more dangerous to be a heretic, which is why it's rarely been more important to champion them.
There is no bigger heretic than Andrew Gold. Andrew is a journalist, author, and TV presenter who produces documentaries on bizarre and controversial subcultures.
He has battled an abusive exorcist, dueled with the Crazy Baby Lady, hunted UFOs, and spoken to a teen school captain, who also happened to be a pedophile. His podcast is appropriately titled, ‘heretics’.
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
Subscribe to Andrew's YouTube channel here.
Buy 'The Psychology of Secrets' here.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Fire at Will'
00:00:20
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will from The Spectator Australia, your safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. Heresy is defined as opinion profoundly at odds with what is generally accepted.
Heretical Opinions in Modern Society
00:00:36
Speaker
It was once used to describe beliefs that were at odds with the church. And herein lies a paradox.
00:00:42
Speaker
Western society has never been less religious, particularly in countries like the UK, Australia, and Canada. And yet, heretical opinions have never been more dangerous to hold. Well, at least since the days of being burnt at the stake. It's not the church that heretics need to be worried about. It's the establishment. More or less, all of our societal institutions have been captured by progressive, illiberal dogma.
00:01:11
Speaker
To question this orthodoxy can lead to a very 21st century equivalent of what the witches of Salem endured. Social media shaming, debanking, dismissal from your job, and general ostracization.
00:01:25
Speaker
That's precisely why heresy must be defended.
Guest Andrew Gold and His Work
00:01:28
Speaker
And there is no greater defender of it than my guest today, Andrew Gold. Andrew is a journalist, author, and TV presenter who produces documentaries on bizarre and controversial subcultures. He has battled an abusive exorcist, dueled with the crazy baby lady, hunted UFOs, and spoken to a teen school captain who also happened to be a pedophile.
00:01:52
Speaker
His podcast is appropriately titled heretics. Andrew, welcome to fire at will. Well, thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure to be here. Pleasure to have you on. What is a crazy baby lady?
Challenges with BBC and Controversial Documentaries
00:02:03
Speaker
That's actually a documentary that didn't end up making it. At first, I wasn't able to make documentaries at the BBC. They didn't really want me. I can get into the whole diversity issue around that, but also, I wasn't anybody. As anyone who knows, anyone who's tried to break into the industry, it's not easy. At the beginning, I took these ideas to the BBC,
00:02:23
Speaker
I had done some smaller things before, of course, for different channels and things, and they were like, look, you know, you're not really big enough. We don't know who you are. Your ideas sound good, but whatever. So I made like this Exorcist film that did
00:02:34
Speaker
So anyway, that did well. We ended up getting out to the BBC. So I thought, okay, is this a sustainable model or not? That I'll just go and make a documentary with a friend of mine who will hold the camera, will borrow stuff and work on a shoestring budget and make a crazy Louis Theroux kind of documentary where I go into a weird, crazy world. And so right after the exorcism film, I had been living in Argentina and they were in the middle of this whole abortion debate.
00:02:58
Speaker
And they've got this almost Trump-esque, or if you've seen the Westboro Baptist Church stuff that Louis Theroux did, very much like a Westboro person, pro-lifer called Mariana Rodriguez Barilla. And she was just larger than life. She's a crazy character who goes to interrupt people trying to terminate their pregnancies by throwing plastic, sort of plastic and rubbery fetuses at them. They're not real, of course.
00:03:23
Speaker
And she's screaming at them. And she became known in Argentina as the crazy baby lady. So I was just trying for months and months to get access to her and told her I would be neutral and all of these things. And I ended up going around with her. I went on the school run. I mean, the idea, the beautiful thing in the old Louis Theroux documentaries is even though he's mocking a lot of the right wing people in those documentaries, he was finding humanity in them at the same time.
00:03:45
Speaker
And not all of them, some of the characters are beyond redemption, but some of them, you almost love them while you hate their views.
Humanizing Controversial Figures
00:03:52
Speaker
And I find that really interesting. And I definitely started to fall in love in a documentary way with Mariana and her personality and her children and how she took us on the school runs and made us lunch and all those kinds of things. She was wonderful. And then we'd go around screaming at people trying to terminate their pregnancies. So that's who Mariana is, the crazy baby lady. By the end, I asked her,
00:04:16
Speaker
Questions that were a little bit too pressing ones that I probably wouldn't do now or I would in a different way I think you know I was a little bit less Engrained in the in the culture wars than I am now and I was a little bit more willing to vilify her Even though I tried to make her human and she took exception the point was that her father was a was part of and
00:04:35
Speaker
the dictatorship that disappeared, people's babies dropped them into the ocean, or sold them to rich families, those kinds of things. And I said to her, how is it right that you're the face of the pro-life side and at the same time you've got this family history and you support your father in what he was involved in?
00:04:54
Speaker
So again, I'd love to have that conversation with her now and actually listen to some of the things she had to say a little bit more openly, but I was young.
Identity and Beliefs in Society
00:05:01
Speaker
Anyway, long story short, no TV channel would take it. We got it into festivals and that was about it really.
00:05:08
Speaker
Increasingly rare quality in today's world, being able to separate the person from the beliefs that they hold. If you are a Trump supporter, then that is your identity and you must be loads for that reason. Or if you are pro-life, then that is, you know, you as a person. It feels like we're not particularly good anymore at being able to disagree with someone, but still appreciate their fundamental humanity.
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I'm thinking now, if I go back to those through documentaries, he often did the right. It was looking at the right wing, and I would like to make an equivalent looking at the woke left. The same sort of thing, because a lot of the stuff we see about the woke left is people going to these rallies and making a fool of them and having that kind of thing. I would like to sort of get ready with one of these guys who's going to put all the Palestinian wear around him or her,
00:05:59
Speaker
be in the room with them while they're making the flags and just sort of poke little questions and see if I can find some humanity in them. One of the issues though with it is I think Louis has even said this that one of the reasons he always did the right wing is because the right wing is a lot more fun and weird and extravagant and I don't usually like when people
00:06:16
Speaker
Point out differences between the far left and far right because I really do think that the same thing in so many respects but I think if there was one key differential it might be humor because the far left is utterly humorless whereas I think the far right even when they're going about doing horrible killings and whatever they might be doing seem to have humor and you can even see that you look at the far left guys in Venezuela
00:06:38
Speaker
in Cuba, wherever it was, these were just the Soviet Union, utterly humorless. And you look at Trump, I know some people might disagree if he's on the right, because he could have been either way. He just wanted to win, I think. But this is a guy who I've seen mixed with Seinfeld music and doing a real, genuine, traditional standup routine, a Seinfeld standup routine. So that's the problem with the left, I'd say. You've seen that, the scores. Yeah, it's great. It's great. Yeah.
00:07:01
Speaker
I agree. I think there is a distinction around humour and there's probably a distinction around an appetite for debate and discussion. I think in general, the elements of the right and even the far right are more comfortable debating their views. Whereas I think if you look at, say, the trans issue as an example, the far left proponents of trans ideology, it's part of the playbook not to engage in debate and discussion.
Pedophilia: Crime or Disorder?
00:07:27
Speaker
Let's just use that as a segue. I've got a list of heretical statements in front of me. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but I think they are all worthy of examination. I'm going to throw them to you and we'll use those as starters for discussion. Let's start with arguably the most taboo or heretical of areas, which is pedophilia, which you have looked at in your documentaries. Heretical statement one.
00:07:52
Speaker
Pedophilia should be treated as a psychological disorder, not as a crime. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely not as a crime. I saw Joe Rogan talking about this the other day and I think it was amazing to see
00:08:08
Speaker
that he hadn't fully grasped the concepts of what pedophilia is. And he was saying, I don't understand how anybody could have a conversation about it because these are people who have done these abhorrent things. And as soon as he says that, you go, hang on. You want to sort of shout into the Rogan podcast and go, no, no, no, hang on. This is the condition. This is not having done anything. And I think that is something that the public needs to be aware of.
00:08:32
Speaker
It is thought that the vast majority of pedophiles, if that's what we call them, because no one can decide on what the name is of somebody who doesn't offend. So non-offending pedophiles. These are people who have spent their lives with what might be a mental illness, psychological condition as that statement says. Who knows what? And they don't know. There is no real consensus on what forms as there isn't on what makes people gay or straight or whatever it is. Or if it's a sexuality, if it's just a mental illness, we don't know. The thing we do know is that
00:09:00
Speaker
A lot of children are abused and that is paramount because that ruins a life that ruins the life of these children is basically almost killing someone i don't mean to suggest that anyone who's been abused doesn't still go on to live a life but it's not the same life that they would have had had they not been abused in that moment it's a horrific thing to do to somebody and then we've got a decision to make it almost an effective altruism kind of way.
00:09:21
Speaker
We can either go, I feel that this is too emotional of a subject to engage in it, and I'm just going to shout things to look good, as Elon Musk might say, look good instead of doing good. It's the right-wing equivalent, maybe, where people would just go, ah, just kill them all. And then they think, OK, job done. Well, that doesn't make any difference to all the children who are getting abused by these people. Just kill them or just lock them up. Well, we can't find them all. They're hiding. And every time you do lock one up, another one is made or born or whatever it is. So I think we have to look at this in a really
00:09:50
Speaker
again effective altruism or very scientific way and go what is the best possible way to reduce the number of children being abused because that's all that matters that is it and it is thought according to this clinic in Germany that I visited called don't offend or kind tater verden don't become an offender the best way is to get these people in for therapy
00:10:11
Speaker
Now, if one of these people are non-offending pedophile, now, by the way, anyone listening, you don't have to like these guys. You can hate them. Whatever it is, I don't care. I'm not interested in that. And I just say that rather defensively because whenever I talk about it, people will just go, oh, so you think child abuse is fine? No, I couldn't be saying the opposite more loudly or clearly, but they think you get these people in
00:10:34
Speaker
disabuse them of their cognitive biases because we know that if you just, if you don't let them, okay, so in Australia, if you go to a doctor, it's one in a hundred men who have this condition. If they go to the, or mental illness, if they go to the doctor. Yeah. That would surprise all of the people.
00:10:51
Speaker
It's a lot of people. I mean, men. Women, it's thought to be significantly lower, but they do exist. And I've met one in the book, actually, in the Psychology of Secrets. So that was one whole chapter I dedicated to her, because I was just fascinated by this. But 1 in 100 men, that's larger than the army in most countries, 1 in 100. So it's a lot of people, and that's very dangerous for children.
00:11:10
Speaker
You go to a doctor in Australia and say that they're struggling with these kind of afflictions or whatever it might be. The doctor has to report them to authorities and who knows what happens next. The doctor will be put in prison if they don't report them. Same in America. In the UK, they're not put in prison, the doctors, but they are struck off. They lose their jobs for not reporting.
00:11:28
Speaker
In Germany, they don't have this mandatory reporting. So one of these guys can come in and actually get help. If you don't let people go and get help, they just retreat to the dark corners of the internet where they all talk to one another and they start telling one another, hey, it happened to me when I was a kid and I'm fine. It's like, well, obviously you're not. You're on the dark web right now talking to pedophiles, you know? But they will tell each other that they are. This is human nature. And they will say, oh, all those people who rejected us, screw them. We can just abuse as much as we want.
00:11:56
Speaker
And that's what's going to happen and the abuse rate is just going to go up. If they can go in, talk to doctors who say, hey, we understand. Here are some other people with your issue. We're going to work with you to make sure you never offend. That's a very difficult thing for most people to get on board with because we don't like the idea that a doctor is being nice or seeming to be nice to the pedophile who's never offended. However,
00:12:18
Speaker
all that matters here is that they stop abusing children and that's all I care about. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. It's the age-old question of harm minimisation versus retribution. I remember I did a debate at university and the topic, I don't think you see this at a university campus today, it shows how the times have changed, but the topic was that we should legalise cartoon representations of pedophilia
00:12:46
Speaker
And the debate there is basically, well, do you provide an outlet to that one in a hundred? And will that ultimately mean that less real kids will be abused if they have that outlet? Or alternatively, do you think that that will spark more people to get an interest in genuine pedophilic behavior? Replacement versus stepping stone. Tell me about that conversation that you had with that school captain.
00:13:10
Speaker
Oh yeah, well him. So he goes by Silas. That was his name. It's not his real name, obviously. And I don't even know where he's from. It's just I managed to get in touch with all these people through other people and through doctors and things like that. He is a prime example of the problem here.
00:13:26
Speaker
because he's young and happy and excited, which you don't expect to get. And a lot of these guys are sort of proud of themselves and they think that they can stop themselves from actually carrying out any abuse. But the more I spoke to him, he started telling me that he was very much involved with all sorts of school after school activities. He was always there looking after the younger kids. Always, always, always. And there does seem to be, and I'm just speaking anecdotally, not really as a doctor, you know, I don't, obviously I can't speak as a doctor, even if I wanted to, but he was,
00:13:56
Speaker
These guys always seem to have something more than just a sexual attraction. It's all-encompassing. It's an obsession. And it's almost like this, just from what I've seen, a sort of parental or a paternal love has gone wrong. Something's gotten weird here and they're starting to get a kick out of it. I don't know what exactly is happening in their minds. So they also do really want to protect those children. They want to look after them.
00:14:24
Speaker
at the same time, they want to do more than anything, the very thing that will ruin them beyond imagination. They want to do the worst possible thing to them. So this guy was a perfect example of that because he couldn't see it. And he even said to me at one point, Andrew, you don't understand, I have to be around them. If I'm made... Because I said, why don't you just not be in the after-school activities? Why don't you just walk home and not tempt yourself, not be an alcoholic behind the bar? And he said, if I'm
00:14:52
Speaker
If I'm near them, I know I won't offend." It was a cognitive bias. He was trying to tell himself that's what makes him feel comfortable. And I was trying to say, is that a threat? Are you saying if you were made to not be with them, that you would have to offend? And he was like, no, no, no. This guy needs to go into the therapy. He needs to understand, hey, mate, you need to not be around these children. This is the worst thing for you and for them. But yeah, that's him. There's not much I can do, unfortunately, about him.
00:15:16
Speaker
How do you reflect on the suggestion that by treating this as a psychological disorder, you implicitly say to these people that this is a condition, you don't have control over it, and therefore in some way you are enabling the behavior by saying that you don't really have free will over it?
00:15:37
Speaker
I would say you're saying to them, hopefully it's done well, and in a way that explains to them, look, the condition and the attraction is the psychological condition. Acting on it is the worst thing you can do. It's illegal. It's illicit. One of the problems that we have, I do actually agree with some of the more emotional people about this when they say they don't get locked up for a long enough time.
00:15:59
Speaker
especially the older I get, I'm feeling that more and more. If I had kids now and some adults, some disgusting adult started trying to do things like that to them and they go to prison for like a couple of years and there are people in there for like accounting problems and things like that that are in for longer. So that is a huge problem. That's something that needs to, I mean, at the end of the day, this is a democracy and maybe we do get emotional and you need level-headed people who say, okay, we're not going to lock everyone up for life, right? But there has to be something between life and
00:16:30
Speaker
It's got to be longer. Not that it would act as a deterrent necessarily, and maybe that is then just retribution, because those guys are going to get out and want the same thing. I mean, they get chemical castration a lot of the time, but that's not entirely effective, unfortunately.
00:16:42
Speaker
I actually saw a tweet the other day, a case in one of the Southern states of the US, Alabama, or one of those types of ones where a pedophile wasn't just chemically castrated, they were castrated. Physically. Yeah, which I didn't know was a thing. They don't mess around in the South. Yeah, that was done, I think, in Czech Republic as well. They used to do it there. There's a couple of countries where they would do that. And look, you know what?
00:17:09
Speaker
I don't want to, I'm just thinking out loud now because I hadn't really thought too much into this, but you know what people are saying, kill them, lock them up forever. Well, maybe that's the option. I really am feeling more aggressive about this, but if you do something to a child and you know you're not supposed to, obviously, maybe that's it. You get your, you get your knob cut off.
00:17:28
Speaker
Well, let's leave pedophiles for now. I think we've still got any listeners left. Go to a, a, well, perhaps slightly less heretical statement, but certainly one that is more prevalent in society.
Impact of Modern Feminism on Women
00:17:40
Speaker
Heretical statement two, modern feminism has done more harm than good to women. We've had this conversation with several people on this podcast around this issue. People like Constant and Kissen and John Anderson have, have views on this topic.
00:17:54
Speaker
Yeah, well, they're much smarter than me first. Certainly more erudite or erudite. See, I don't even know how to pronounce it. Erudite. Erudite. Erudite. Where would the accent be if it was Spanish? It would be on the first letter, erudite. It's unusual for an English word that typically it would be erudite if you think about it, where the emphasis would be in most words.
00:18:14
Speaker
I'm a linguist, not a feminist or whatever it might be. It's a really hard one because you know what it seems to me whenever I've been involved in those conversations? It really feels like we're talking about semantics so often. What is feminism to you and if feminism to you is
00:18:30
Speaker
equality for women and a pursuit of equality for women. And that sounds wonderful. And I've seen all sorts of stats recently suggesting that although support for feminism has gone dramatically down in recent years, support for the idea of equality of the sexes has stayed the same or gone up. So if you do see feminism simply as not a movement, but your own concept of, hey, to me, feminism is equality for women, then
00:18:59
Speaker
That's a great thing. Most people believe in it. Most people want that today. And it's also something that's unachievable. And I think that's one of the issues I'm sure we'll talk about this. And this is a lot this is at the center of a lot of what me and you talk about regularly is this pursuit of perfection or equity is
00:19:17
Speaker
not only unachievable, but dangerous because it becomes authoritarian. And it's really nice as an idea and a concept. But of course, women can't be equal to men because women spend nine months gestating. That is insane. It's an incredible thing that they do. They also have huge biological differences to men, different pursuits, different ideas, different ambitions.
00:19:38
Speaker
To try and understand which ambitions have been socially carved up and which are biological, it's an impossible concept. You can't ever even get close to it, so we don't know. But also, when that conversation arises, you cherry pick which biological differences are acceptable to talk about and which aren't. There are articles you'll read like,
00:20:00
Speaker
Female leaders did better during covered and then i'll talk about feminine traits like empathy to be able to back that up but if you look about say the gender pay gap and you say well one reason why there may be a gender pay gap is that men are on balance on average more assertive and therefore that helps in a salary conversation.
00:20:19
Speaker
That's a no-no because women can do everything that men can do. There is a degree of inconsistency in the way that we talk about this. That's spot on. I'm always paying attention to something called the Diamond Diversity Survey or whatever it is. Because it's all the DEI stuff in the UK, it's TV channels and who's on screen, who's off screen.
00:20:40
Speaker
And there's definitely a feeling that these people, the DEI diversity officers or whatever, they've got to keep their jobs. They have to find new things. And I understand that feeling. I'm a YouTuber. You're a podcaster. We've got to keep finding new things. And it's very stressful. What they're doing, I think, is bad, though, because it's creating friction in a society that doesn't need it and doesn't want that.
00:21:00
Speaker
But you look at these things, they're always trying to find something. So for years, I mean, 20 years ago, it was the idea that people on screen had to be exactly the right color and sex and this and that. And then they achieved that. They achieved that like 15 to 20 years ago. That's how long ago that was achieved. And now they've gone way past it.
00:21:17
Speaker
way past it. Minorities are significantly overrepresented. So what are they going to do, these DEI reporters? And they look for, what can we change next? So every single survey, they bring it out and it starts with can do better, of course, right? Otherwise you don't have a job and you go to like, it's now people off screen, but that started to become equal too. So now it's the people at the top off screen and that started to become equal too. So now they're looking at places where there aren't enough women, well, directors, right? There aren't many female directors on TV. However,
00:21:46
Speaker
The people above them with a higher job, a bigger status job, are the showrunners. Showrunners run the entire show and they hire the directors. So 70% of directors in the UK are male, but I think 80 or 90% of showrunners are female, the people who are employing the directors. But that's not where we have to do better, ladies and gentlemen. It's got to be all in the directors have to be more female. The other one is like stuff like lighting and cameras is mostly male.
00:22:12
Speaker
you know, makeup and those kinds of things are mostly female. Well, if we're going to get everything exactly right, we'll end up with the Bolsheviks or the Stasi. It's just no good. So, you know, somebody I spoke to recently, Ella Wieland, she was saying she prefers the term women's lib, women's lib, instead of feminism. Feminism obviously has those connotations of these people just sort of shouting at men, trying to demean men. And so we've moved on to another word. Ultimately, I think the idea is to get as close as possible to equality without implementing authoritarian measures.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah, and some people may not even be aware if you're not involved in the cultural stuff every day of the difference between equality and equity as terms, and you may use them in, in changeably, but they're very different. The simplest way of looking at it is, is equality is, is quality of opportunity and equity is, is quality of outcome or the same outcomes.
00:23:02
Speaker
and they're very, very different things. It's interesting, I was speaking to Gad Saad on this podcast not so long ago, and he was talking about the science, I should say, the studies that have been done on happiness and how that's changed over time between the sexes. Generally, what you can see in the studies of happiness since about the 50s, men's happiness has actually stayed about the same from the 50s through to today. Women's happiness has fallen off a cliff. Women are, you look at survey data,
00:23:30
Speaker
considerably less happy than they were, say, in the 50s and 60s. That's an interesting paradox because that's come as women's rights have become far more equal and at least legally are equal to men in Western countries today. What do you put it down for?
00:23:47
Speaker
Well, then you've got, you know, this was something I remember when I interviewed Julia Hart, who's an ex-Hasidic Jewish woman who did this, she did a Netflix series called My Unorthodox Life. And she's become like the Kardashian of people who have left cults and they're all Kardashian-y because it's the opposite. It's that individualistic American dream life as opposed to the Hasidic Jewish life. And so I put it to her that, you know, a lot of the Hasidic Jewish women, because I mean, it's even worse for women,
00:24:11
Speaker
there than for men, particularly much worse actually, say that they are happier. She said, look, a lot of them are and they can be, but what is more important is the opportunity to choose, to be able to have the right to choose. It's a really, really complex thing where a lot of people would prefer to be less happy and have more freedom. I know that sounds contradictory or like a paradox.
00:24:33
Speaker
So I guess in terms of putting what you said, what would we put that down to? Is it that having those kinds of liberties brings new kinds of problems? Or is it the case of what I think we're seeing with social contagion today? The more that you are told that you were oppressed, the more you start to feel like you are a victim. That's no good for anyone. I know in my own life, whenever something bad happened to me or small things, people started saying,
00:24:56
Speaker
you were right that what that person did, that wasn't right. That's definitely not made me feel better. That made me feel good. Maybe they did do a thing to me. And I think there is a lot of evidence for that as well in general. You tell people that they should feel upset and they will do. So it might be a mix of those two things. Too much liberty might be difficult to take on and reduce happiness in some respects. And also people telling you you're a victim, that's no good for anyone.
00:25:18
Speaker
I wholeheartedly agree with both of those points. And I would add a third, which is just the gap between expectation and reality. This for me is the happiness formula more generally is happiness really is about how close you can get that gap between what you expect out of life and what you actually have in life. And I think women have been sold a vision of being able to have absolutely everything, kids, family,
00:25:46
Speaker
uh, you know, the corporate job at the same time. And a lot of the time that is incredibly difficult to achieve. And when you've been sold that vision and you're not reaching that vision, that I think is another, another factor to throw into the mix. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I can hear people getting annoyed listening though, cause they're just saying, Oh, two men, they don't know shit. And people always say, Hey, there's things I think it's a bit idealistic. Um, I hear from some women's libbers as they are like to be called now.
00:26:11
Speaker
It's a little bit like the color thing with black people that used to be able to say colored, then it was black, and then it's gone back to of color. And women's libbers was the old thing. And then we went to feminism, and now we've gone back to women's lib. That's now the popular thing to say. And they'll be saying, look, there's more that governments can do. There are crashes for children. There are maternity packages, policies. There are all sorts of things that we can do to lighten the burden on women. And I think that's absolutely right. But ultimately, you know,
00:26:38
Speaker
We're always going to come up against certain difficulties that are biological and about different needs for men and women. Women have periods that last five days or whatever. How much might that have impacted on my life if I had to be in that constant pain for five days, every month, cramps, blood everywhere, embarrassment, social embarrassment, anxiety? We can do all we can to try and lessen that impact, but ultimately that's going to have an impact.
00:27:06
Speaker
It's shit, but I don't know what more to say except that it's just shitty. So yeah. Aoretical statement three is a question. I've actually had this on my list of interesting questions for some time, and I thought this would be a good podcast to throw it out. Apologies in advance at the risk of cancellation. If we were to find out tomorrow, conclusively and unambiguously, that one ethnicity was genetically dumber than other ethnicities.
Genetic Differences and Public Discourse
00:27:36
Speaker
should it still be communicated to the public? Oh, I think it has to be. I think it has to be because you just need transparency. Who are these elite keepers of information? What that would do to the world is, I mean, that's the worst thing ever. I interviewed a guy called Marvin Chun, Dr Marvin Chun, who looks into mind reading and they're amazing what they can do. And we're at a point now with- When you say mind reading, what do you mean?
00:28:03
Speaker
Well, fMRI scans into people's brains. You can put people in a scanner and you can know what they are thinking, what they're dreaming. There's this great thing he does on YouTube. There's people at a conference and he's talking on stage. It was done not necessarily by pictures, it was words popping up on the screen. There was a list of 10 words and the words were like house, garden, whatever. Then it got to
00:28:27
Speaker
man and then woman and then woman got bigger and bigger it was like this big word that was happening and the audience were laughing and gradually you made to understand that what's happening is you're inside somebody's dream that they've been reporting on someone's dream and they can see that a woman was getting involved in his dream and obviously turned a bit sexual so which is cool good good for that person they got lucky in the dream but amazing what we're able to do i mean,
00:28:49
Speaker
At the moment, the computers now can show what someone is looking at. They can actually show a rough picture of Steve Martin, if you're watching a Steve Martin film or something. It's remarkable. But at the moment, what we have, the fMRI can only check into the nearest set of 1000 neurons. But as we get better technology, they'll be able to locate individual neurons, and with AI, they'll be able to have a much better
00:29:16
Speaker
basically a dictionary of all the neurons in your brain and what each one firing off really means you're looking at or thinking about. So mind reading will be a thing and I'm sure it won't just be an fMRI scanner as people will be able to do it just with their phones, you'll be able to hack into people's minds and things. It's a really scary, scary thought.
00:29:33
Speaker
And that's the future. It might take hundreds of years. It might take 10 years. But what he said, there was something he said, what's great about that, and I didn't think this was great at all, but he said, what's great about that is we'll be able to scan people's brains to see who has a good brain. Because then if people who didn't get good education or whatever it might be, they can apply for a job and the job people can see, hey, this guy's got a great brain. He didn't get good exam results, but he's got such a great brain, we should hire him anyway.
00:29:57
Speaker
I just thought, firstly, there's something about the randomness of life that keeps things socially mobile. Once we've got a point where it's just these are the good brains, these are the bad brains, as would happen in your hypothetical with the races, that's the end of society. I don't know what we do. There's something about the plucky underdog.
00:30:18
Speaker
I think we like the idea that person A could be smarter, maybe did go to a better school, has a better brain, but person B has something plucky about them that can't be empirically measured in a brain and still gets the job. It's still open for all of us. The future is scary and I'm sure that might happen.
00:30:37
Speaker
I think I have read stuff about, I mean, I'm Jewish and I'm sure I've read that Jews, I might be, maybe it's just something that Jews tell ourselves, that Jews have more intelligence, they've certainly won more Nobel Prizes. I mean, it makes sense when we look at evolution, not that Jews are smarter, but that one race might be. I mean, we have all different kinds of physical, mental advantage and disadvantages that might happen. And I think it's the end of society as we know it. What do you think?
00:31:00
Speaker
I think that the search for truth has to be of paramount importance, even if it leads to uncomfortable outcomes. I think that has to be the primary purpose of all of us.
00:31:19
Speaker
And I put this in the context of, say, the actually a little clip I heard from Constance and Gisson recently around the impact that the new atheists have had on basically society today. And he drew a line from the new atheist to some of the woke stuff.
00:31:38
Speaker
The decline in organised religion has created a vacuum and that vacuum has been filled by even more troubling ideologies like woke ideologies. And what I was thinking as I was watching that was I think there's probably a case to be made that the rise of atheism has also seen a corresponding rise in some of this more troubling cultural stuff. But I don't think that is a reason not to say have conversations around atheism and not to try and come to answers on questions around religion.
00:32:07
Speaker
because the search for truth needs to be paramount. And I think that is a principle which is increasingly under attack in society today.
00:32:15
Speaker
There's that Bertrand Russell quote, when you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe or by what you think would have beneficial social effects if it were believed, but look only and solely at what are the facts. And that's one of my favorite snippets. You dumb well get that one outward forward.
00:32:40
Speaker
Yeah, well, I've sneaked it out. The thing is, I've got a teleprompter in front of me so I can see you in it. And I've got the notes in it. I'd love to have pretended I just had that in my head. But I've got it ready on notes, though, because it's one of my favorite quotes. And it speaks to the times we're in now. You want to say to all the sort of trans activists and all these things, like, yes, lovely idea. It would be great if it were true. You could just, you know, these are all fantastic. We're on your side with this.
00:33:04
Speaker
However, we know that it's a slippery slope. Things start to unravel very fast once you give up the idea of truth. I was with Konstantin recently at that New York dissident dialogues organized by Winston Marshall. And there was this brilliant climax where Richard Dawkins and Ian Hersialli, who for those who don't know, she had the fatwa at the same time as Salman Rushdie had to go into hiding. She was an ex-Muslim and she's recently become a Christian.
00:33:26
Speaker
And it was just phenomenal because it was a big mix in the audience of people who were sort of on both sides, some were religious like her, some were on Dawkins' side with the atheism. And she made a lot of those points as well. And Dawkins made the same point that you made of just like, well, say what? Say what if woke has come from this? Well, then they should teach rational thinking at school. That's what they should teach. That's the solution. It's about truth, and there's no truth here.
00:33:52
Speaker
And so, you know, and I sort of gave it a big round of applause and all that. And it was good fun. I think the challenge with Dawkins for me is he's almost too rational for his own good. Everything he says, it's very difficult rationally to have a problem with it, but he misses some of the softer messages and
00:34:10
Speaker
implications around what he says because he is the most rational mind you'll come across. Yeah, it's interesting. You open the door on the trans thing, so let's go to heretical statement number four. I actually think because this is a less heretical statement than it was three or four years ago because of the work of a lot of very brave people.
00:34:30
Speaker
in shifting the Overton window. But still, if you were to say this in Fortune 100 company in the US today, I think you'd still probably be in a bit of trouble. Men can't be women. It's hard to note like to what extent the Overton window has shifted and to what extent people like you and me and the listeners of this podcast have sort of gotten in our own little bubbles. And I can't
00:34:50
Speaker
I know you know this as well because of how I've heard you speaking. We can't understate quite how little most people in the public even follow any of this. How if I use the word woke, they won't even know what that is. A friend of mine who is a journalist and is involved very much in this thing, I mentioned DEI.
00:35:08
Speaker
the other day and she said, what's DEI? She didn't even know and she's in the space. So people were not. So I mean, to what extent are we just playing Dungeons and Dragons and sort of Pokemon and collecting our little, you know, and most people don't even care. It's not on their radar. It gives me the shits actually. Sometimes when I'm quite proud of myself for finding a particular guest who's big in this world, I'll then casually tell a few friends and they'll go, oh, that's great. Who's that? Ah, bit of a downer. You're right. I think we definitely do deceive ourselves some of the time.
00:35:38
Speaker
I've been going now four years and I'd say the most famous people I've had on are Richard Dawkins. Most people don't know who he is. They just don't. Most people do not know who Richard Dawkins is. That might sound shocking to most people listening, apart from the ones who are going, but I don't know who he is. But they don't have to. I mean, there are plenty of people I don't know who they are. And Robbie Williams. And Robbie Williams? No one in America seems to know who he is.
00:36:02
Speaker
No, nobody in the whole of America knows who Robbie Williams is, and young people often don't either. It's just been gutting, really, that everything I've worked towards, nobody knows who anyone I've talked to is. The best bet is probably Winston Marshall, because they won't know the name Winston Marshall, but they'll know Mumford and Sons, and that he was in it. They won't know the whole story, they won't know that he left, anything like that. I don't know.
00:36:25
Speaker
My book is about psychology, secrecy. It's true crime and psychology. And there's not much culture wars, but there is a lot about suppression of thought and authoritarianism and stuff like that. But I have said on YouTube and often publicly that obviously trans women are not women.
00:36:43
Speaker
And every book festival, every book shop that was going to have me as a guest to promote my book. And those things are still pretty important to promote your book. You know, book sales are low. I read the other day, the average book doesn't even sell 12 copies. The average book published these days. It's absurd.
00:36:59
Speaker
how low it is and we're used to big numbers because youtube you need hundreds of thousands just to make any money make things work but you just got to sell a new cell a couple of thousand you doing well. I'm being able to go to festivals and bookshops and things like that that makes a huge difference and i've been disinvited not from like ninety percent of them from.
00:37:19
Speaker
every single one of them, every single one, without conversation, without asking me what my beliefs really are, all of them. And I suppose as much as we're in a bubble maybe ourselves, people in bookshops and publishing, it's a sad one because they think they're doing good and they must think awful things of us. As I did when I was a kid and I heard about some horrible sounding politician and didn't really know what their arguments could be.
00:37:47
Speaker
And it's a strange one because if they were just openly debates, they'd see that we don't think that we're bad people, we just care about truth. And like you, I'm sure that I don't know, the more I got into this when I started, I was sort of tepidly saying, but they're not exactly, they're not really women, are they? And the more you get pushback for that, the more people get angry, the more they kick you out, the more you go, you know what, fuck this, it's a bloke in the dress. And ultimately,
00:38:13
Speaker
Although that's not maybe the nicest thing to say to somebody who might have a psychological condition or an illness or whatever it is, I think that's actually safer than telling them, yeah, mate, you're a woman. Fill your boots, you know? Yeah. On principle, I was supportive of, say, using preferred pronouns for a period of time. Me too. I spoke to Brendan O'Neill on this show and he changed my mind on this because he said, basically, you think you're being polite.
00:38:38
Speaker
What you're really doing is enabling an ideology which has so many downstream negative consequences and when i say this i don't say you know someone can't be transit don't care less what a consenting adult does to their own body but by normalizing the worst elements of this ideology through the use of pronouns. You are normalizing the conversion of children transition of children i should say.
00:39:04
Speaker
You are normalizing the women in men's jails. You're normalizing the women in men's sports. I think you're right. The tiptoeing around it by thinking you are being polite actually can have very dangerous consequences. And I think that's why you do need to have the guts to actually say the truth wherever the truth may lead. It's all effective altruism. There's a great book, but nobody's by it. For people who don't know the term, explain what effective altruism is.
00:39:29
Speaker
Yeah, I was just going to say, yeah, there's a great book. I only came across it recently, really. But don't get that book because you should get my book because you've only got a certain amount of money to get loads of books. But Jenny Kleeman, who I'm a big fan of, and she's been talked of as a cross between Margaret Atwood and Louis Theroux. She writes these books about robots in the future and vegan meats and those kinds of things. But she just had a book out about
00:39:51
Speaker
about the price of everyone's lives and things like that. So effective altruism, she explained to me the other day, it's what sort of the big philanthropists like Elon Musk or Bill Gates, they're involved in, whatever your thoughts are of them, the philosophy. Oh yeah.
00:40:08
Speaker
Yeah, but he was stealing money from people, wasn't he? Which is no good. I suppose that's effective altruism for him. He's being altruistic to himself very effectively until he ends up in prison. So it wasn't actually a very good idea. It wasn't very effective. But the idea is, as Jenny explained to me, there are people who say, a building's on fire. Do you save an eight-year-old child or do you save a Picasso? Well, the Picasso is worth enough money that it could help to save thousands of children in various situations. So effective altruism
00:40:38
Speaker
is saying, hey, turn off your emotions for a moment. Let's do what's best for the most people. It's very utilitarian. I think to actually do that, to actually save a Picasso rather than a child, you'd have to be a psychopath.
00:40:51
Speaker
Yeah. Well, to go, to go full in, like if you go full in on any, anything, you know, you've got to be a bit off to go full in on effective altruism. You probably do have to be a psychopath, but it explains why it is, it is very appealing to ultra intelligent, but potentially like kind of almost autistic, high achieving tech billionaires. That's right. I think exactly spot on. And, but it's also something that is, is a, is seen as a counter.
00:41:16
Speaker
to some of the woke culture, which is seen as just very visceral, emotional, not really well thought out. And I don't get this very often, but every now and then an old friend of mine will reach out and say, hey, I've seen you on Piers Morgan or, you know, well done. They'll often be polite, well done on this, well done on that. However, and I always know it's coming and it tends to be, it's always so far, it's always been, oh no, there was one guy, one guy and several women who've got in touch and they said very,
00:41:43
Speaker
almost a dig in a very sly way. It's almost pissed me off. I wish they'd just actually come out with it, but just very well done. I'll just say that, shame about having a go at the vulnerable people. There are vulnerable people here at stake, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm thinking at that point, am I going to Facebook message this old acquaintance of mine from 10 years ago explaining the values of effective altruism in this respect, which is, yes, you think you're helping,
00:42:08
Speaker
But I think I'm helping and I don't want to say you're wrong or I'm obviously I think you are wrong. We both have our points of view, but you're implying that I'm somehow morally less, less concerned about these people. And that is offensive. I resent that because I think what I'm doing is much better for them. I did, you know, my first documentary, the BBC, well, the only documentary now really was exorcism. The
00:42:30
Speaker
The parallels between exorcism and trans and gender are just startling. It's insane. You've got, particularly for the, I'm not talking about the AGP, sorry, people who've got an attraction to, right. I'm just for people if they're not fully into this whole thing. It seems that other than people who've got several nervous conditions and things, there seems to be a lot of older men who have or might have
00:42:54
Speaker
AGP which is auto gynophilia and attraction to the idea of being perceived as the other sex and we had that recently with this great question asked to Grayson Perry who's an artist in the UK who dresses as a woman and has worn like a strap on dildo to children's charities and things like that and he was asked.
00:43:10
Speaker
do you think that people get upset with what you're doing because they see what you're doing as sexual and they haven't consented to being part of your sexual act? And he said, yeah, it is that. So a lot of people will admit that it is a sexual thing. And I feel the same thing. I don't want to be part of someone's, you know, whatever they do in their own home that they're thinking about, I don't want to have to be there looking at their dildo. He's an extreme case, of course. And then 17 year old girls, 16 year old girls who want to convert to being boys, it tends to be that way around when they're younger.
00:43:37
Speaker
This is an age where these are adolescents. These are people who have no control over their lives. They feel like they're being looked at all the time. They're bodies. They're ashamed of their bodies. They often get things like anorexia, bulimia. It's just that age. And if you're in Argentina, where I was, and that's how you're feeling at that time, and I'm talking about not the modern part of Argentina, but if you're in an old fashioned part.
00:43:58
Speaker
somebody will say to you or to your parents, hey, have you considered exorcism here? This might be a case of demonic possession. And all very seriously, they will go down there, the exorcist will give them a, well, what do you think? What are your voices in your head like? And what's going on here and there? And they'll have the exorcism. And people in the West, including woke people, will laugh at that and go, God, how ridiculous, how old fashioned, how pathetic, how silly. And the people here,
00:44:24
Speaker
Exactly the same thing, they're out of control, they're having problems and someone will say, do you think you might be the wrong body here?
00:44:29
Speaker
So instead of a demon in exorcism, you've got a gendered soul. I've got the boy soul inside me. This needs to be taken out. There's something wrong with my body. These are such common fears and anxieties for children, particularly girls. It is frightening that doctors, that psychologists haven't cottoned onto this, haven't applied this across the board and said, these are kids with issues that they will grow out of. And if we do something to them now, it's going to scar them for life. And that's what's happening.
00:44:58
Speaker
And that's what my friends who reach out to me and say, you know, you look what you're doing to vulnerable people. That's what I would charge them with. Yeah, that's fascinating.
00:45:07
Speaker
analogy and it just points to the fact that this is, you know, I think Helen Joyce came out and said, this is entirely social contagion. She doesn't buy into any sort of medical explanation. I look at Hollywood actors and actresses and the percentage of those kids of Hollywood actors and actresses, which are now coming out as non-binary or whatever. It's statistically impossible. It goes to show that this is, that the contagion element is what's there.
00:45:34
Speaker
I want to go to a new heretical statement. I've lost track of my numbering system. Islam is incompatible with Western liberal democracy. These are great questions or statements. I can just throw them out there without necessarily earning them. That's the beauty of this. This one I actually will own, but go on.
00:45:57
Speaker
I'm an atheist, and I don't want to put off anyone who's not, because I'm very open to people who are religious.
Islam and Western Democracy
00:46:02
Speaker
But these are books full of things that, as far as I'm concerned, never happened. They have no historical basis. I find myself at Passover with my family.
00:46:11
Speaker
being the downer, explaining that I don't think there's actually any evidence that the Jews were in Egypt enslaved for that time, or that Moses lived to 800 years old. Things like this. In fact, these are things, if you look at them, that we know didn't happen. Some of it we don't know if it happened, and some of it we know it didn't happen. So the only reason I sort of pause there is because I feel reluctant to say that one book of
00:46:32
Speaker
What I consider to be unfactual storytelling is necessarily more harmful than another. There's a lot of really pretty awful stuff in the Bible, stoning gays and all sorts of things like that. The Jewish versions, I don't even know it that well, but I know there's some pretty bad stuff because I grew up around it and remember being just abhorred.
00:46:51
Speaker
by a lot of it. Dawkins said this recently, he said the issue with Islam is not necessarily the text, it's just the fact that the people who practice it are 700 years in the past. There seems to be a growing movement, you mentioned Constantine before, of people saying, listen, we need storytelling.
00:47:07
Speaker
Religions gone and this mad woke stuff has come to replace it. Obviously, I mean, the Soviet Union were atheists and they were like the most religious people you can get, but they were religious to other stories. It's all about stories. And you can argue that, hey, if we need to have stories, if we absolutely must as human beings, then Christianity right now and Judaism and several other religions that seem to have been modernized over the years, far better equipped than Islam, just because of the way that its adherents practice it.
00:47:35
Speaker
which is so long in the past. It's back with the Christians and the Crusades and all of those kinds of things, that kind of behaviour. Just because I don't want to give too much of a wishy-washy answer, I would say I'm one of my biggest concerns. One of the biggest concerns of pretty much everyone I know now is growing immigration
00:47:54
Speaker
from people who don't fit or don't want to fit and who want to come to a new place, because they don't like the place they're in, to make it shit again. Not to suggest that everywhere that people have been immigrating from is shit, but this happens as well on the other side. This happens with, I was speaking to people in the States recently who were saying, interesting, a lot of the woke people leaving San Francisco and moving to Austin, Texas and all these, they're becoming democratic States. And it's just like, look, can you not put two and two together here? Like you made San Francisco shit.
00:48:24
Speaker
Right? By all accounts, you can't even, it's just awful that, and you're moving to the most conservative place because you like how they have it, and you're going to try and make it back how you had it before. Like the hypocrisy, and then the whole time you're just going to resent all the people who are actually from that place and make them feel like shit. Well, the same thing's happening, and it's happening with Islam.
00:48:44
Speaker
I do resent the charge that it's racist. You keep hearing that, particularly in the UK. I mean, why wouldn't people be anti Hindu? Why wouldn't they be anti Sikh, anti Buddhist, anti Sephardic Jews if they had a problem with people's skin color? It doesn't make sense. You just look at it for one second, it doesn't make sense.
00:49:02
Speaker
So there is an issue, there's an issue around the way that people are practicing Islam, and I don't think it's compatible with the West. And I'm scared because I keep seeing, there are people who have taken positions of powers now. There was a guy the other day, I don't know if you saw in the North of England, who became a counselor. He's shouting Allah Akbar on his acceptance speech, running around screaming. And you go in, the people in England associate that phrase.
00:49:24
Speaker
with the 7-7 bombings of buses and trains here of New York as well, 9-11. That's what we associate. How can you represent us as a people when the vast majority of us are frightened to death of the thing you say in your acceptance speech? So yeah, but go on, what did you want to say?
00:49:39
Speaker
I agree. I'm moving to the UK in a month or so, and the rise of this religious sectarian politics in the UK I think is terrifying. And there is no doubt that politicians, and it's not just Islamic politicians, it's non-Islamic politicians, are galvanizing religious groups and getting them to vote as blocs.
00:50:03
Speaker
It's particularly dangerous in countries that don't have compulsory voting. I'm unsure on compulsory voting. Australia has compulsory voting and I think it actually is a bulwark against that sort of rise of sectarian politics because it's not as easy just to get a small, a powerful 20% minority and that can swing an election when you have to get the middle ground.
00:50:25
Speaker
I saw that footage of that councillor in Leeds and I was terrified. And there's no doubt as well, if you look at Sadiq Khan in London, he wasn't as overt obviously, but galvanising the growing Islamic population in London was a very important part of his re-election.
00:50:42
Speaker
There's this very, very weird union of Islamic voters and liberal progressives. The liberal progressives would disagree with a lot of the core tenets of Islamic ideology, I would have thought, particularly around, say, treatment of women. Yet, it's that
00:50:59
Speaker
weird union that is actually driving the election of people like Sadiq Khan in progressive areas. I'm very worried. I spoke to Matt Goodwin the other day. He talked about the stats that said that the number of people in the UK who are Islamic at the moment is, I think, around 5% or 6%. That's going to go up closer to 18%, 19%, 20%, I think by 2050.
00:51:20
Speaker
That is a monstrously big shift in the social demographics. I'm very worried for the UK as to where that leads. Well, especially when you consider, I mean, often I look at things from a very Jewish perspective, being Jewish, my wife is as well. She's from Argentina. There's not many Jews in the world, deceptively few. I'm sure some will say, oh, well then why are so many in power or whatever? But I think that's something you should
00:51:44
Speaker
you know, whatever, that's the whole different discussion actually. But the point is the population of British Jews, we make up 0.5% of the country. It means that when you're looking at this sort of disinformation going around, around sort of Israel, Palestine and things like that, around the whole country in the UK, there is not a city that doesn't have a significant population of Muslim people.
00:52:04
Speaker
who will be hearing, even well-intentioned Muslims, as there are many, of course, will be hearing very different stories, different facts, different figures that are not actually anywhere close to the truth. And everybody in the UK who's not, again, not as into the culture wars and all this stuff as you and I, as, yeah, as you and I, sorry, obsess over there. As you and I, as you and I. Yeah, as you and I, as you and I are obsessed. I'll allow it.
00:52:27
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. They will be hearing all of these things. You know, I get into the car on a taxi. I got on a taxi in New York. The guy, you know, he wasn't even Muslim. He's telling me, yeah, I've heard that they're eating babies in Palestine. The Jews are eating the babies. They're hearing all these things. The Jews, although many might see them as in positions of power and Jerry Seinfeld and all of these kinds of things, in reality, there are very, very few of us, particularly outside of northwest London in the UK.
00:52:50
Speaker
We have no influence over the common person. As that Muslim population rises, I think it's something like 70% of Muslims believe that Jews eat babies. There are loads of mad stats around the beliefs of Muslim people in the UK. That's really scary. And so it might seem over the top, but I do have these nightmares where what happened on October 7th happens in the UK, because why wouldn't it?
00:53:15
Speaker
Why wouldn't it? If it can happen over there, and they might say, oh, because the same stuff isn't happening with Israel, whatever, it could happen. We've had terrorist attacks. We've had coordinated ones. So why wouldn't they? And what do Jews do? They put a fucking mazuzah on the door. I wish that we would, you know, it's sad.
00:53:30
Speaker
I'm not religious anyway, so I don't need to have a mazuzah on my door. For anyone who doesn't know, that's a little thing on the side of the door Jewish people tend to have. It's got a little script inside it, some sort of religious thing. My family members have those, and I've said to them, if this uprising were to happen, maybe it's very unlikely, but in the next 10, 15, 20 years, one night where they go looking for those kinds of signs, I would take that down. There's two mosques very close to where I live. It's a very Muslim area where I live.
00:53:56
Speaker
And it's really, really scary. So I don't know what happens next. And what I would say about those people who are not Muslim, who are welcoming them, who are standing in the background smiling while the guy shouting Allah, but that's that Christopher Hitchens quote, the barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it's your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you. That was decades ago and so prescient. It's just, I don't know what to do about it. Yeah, 2008, I've shared that on Twitter a few times. It is scarily prescient.
00:54:26
Speaker
Your new book is wonderful. It is titled The Psychology of Secrets.
Andrew Gold's Book on Secrets
00:54:31
Speaker
Why were you interested in secrets as a concept to explore?
00:54:35
Speaker
I think part of me wanted to write something that wasn't just culture wars, although I wanted something that would reach people, some sort of theme that will reach people who are not on my side and sort of just remind them of some of the ways that secrets have been used to oppress people over the years. The kinds of methodologies used by the Stasi and the Bolsheviks and Scientology and Hasidic Judaism and extreme Islam and all of these kinds of things. So partly that was on my mind. Secondly, I had long been doing that whole kind of Louis Theroux shtick, even when
00:55:05
Speaker
documentaries weren't made in the end. So what do you do when you've got stories about an exorcist? You've got stories about the crazy baby lady and the female 25-year-old pedophile that I met in a small village in Germany. Loads of stories like that and you're going, what do they all have in common? Well, they were all keeping big secrets. I probably shouldn't expose the one of the exorcist. The 25-year-old female pedophile is obvious what hers was. And while I was thinking of that and trying to sort of meld that all together,
00:55:30
Speaker
I was getting more and more messages from viewers. I don't get so many now, but I was at that micro-influencer stage of 0 to 1,000 subscribers or whatever at the time. They say that that's the most valuable stage per subscriber. If you're Kim Kardashian, you've got
00:55:46
Speaker
subscriber base is the size of continents now, like 500 million people or whatever. Well, per person, like most of them don't even care, they're not involved. But an influencer with just a thousand, everyone's like, I know this guy, he's replying to me, so you've got this very close bond. And people were messaging me and they would start their messages with things like, hey, my first memory is my grandpa putting his hand down my pants. I'm like, okay, why are you telling me this?
00:56:11
Speaker
And the book starts on a murder or killing at least by a woman I know who I worked with for a bit. I worked in the same industry as her, a sort of journalisty kind of woman. I can't say who she is, but she encountered someone in an alleyway and she put her hands through this guy's eyes and it killed him. And she was telling me this and I'm going, why is she telling me this? So again, it was like, what was it about
00:56:36
Speaker
how I was behaving, how I was acting, I wanted to find out what qualities in us make people reveal stuff to us. So I sort of mixed a bunch of maybe true crime psychology stories with history, with the Stasi and all of that, with just this overarching thing of, you know, secrets. What are they? Why do we tell them? What happens to us when we keep them?
00:56:56
Speaker
It's a wonderful read. It's ideal as a holiday read. It's got that John Ronson very story, getting to a very human story, but then telling a deeper truth through that story.
Conclusion and Promotions
00:57:07
Speaker
I thought it was wonderful Andrew. Congratulations. Thank you. As a now published author. Needless to say for everyone who is listening that you have in my opinion, the second best Culture Wars podcast going around. So everyone sign up for heretics and looking forward to doing this again in person.
00:57:26
Speaker
in London. Thank you for coming on fire at will. Thanks for having me