Modern Wisdom - #355 - Andrew Gold - Exorcisms, Rockstar Priests & Dangerous Taboos

Episode Date: August 7, 2021

Andrew Gold is a documentary maker and podcaster. In the depths of the Buenos Aires suburbs is a priest who is warding off vampires, levitating followers and battling demons. Or maybe he's kidnapping schizophrenic patients from a local psychiatric ward. Andrew traipsed through Argentina to find out. Expect to learn what it's like to fear 5000 people are going to kill you in South America, how Andrew infiltrated an underground network in Germany, why the BBC's diversity quota might be protecting the top jobs, how brutal it is to work in Amazon's warehouse and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount & Free Shipping on awesome vegan meals at https://vibrantvegan.co.uk/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://puresportcbd.com/modernwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out Andrew's Podcast - https://www.andrewgoldpodcast.com/ Follow Andrew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people in podcast land? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Andrew Gold He's a documentary maker and a podcaster. In the depths of the Buenos Aires suburbs is a priest who is warning off vampires Levitating followers and battling demons or Maybe he's kidnapping schizophrenic patients from a local psychiatric ward. Andrew traips through Argentina to find out today psychiatric ward. Andrew traipsed through Argentina to find out. Today, expect to learn what it's like to fear 5,000 people are going to kill you in South America, how Andrew infiltrated an underground pedophile network in Germany, why the BBC's diversity quote might be protecting the top jobs, how brutal it is to work in Amazons warehouse, and much more. As Andrew says, he's this sort of gonzo style, side-eyed, Louis Theroux up and coming documentary maker with, I don't know how he finds these stories.

I was talking about prostitutes being forced to stand on ant hills somewhere and he went to go and meet a crazy baby lady who was campaigning for something to do with abortion, that literally is just existing at the absolute extreme taboos of everything, all stories everywhere on the planet, all the time. Before we get on to other news, if you didn't already know this Monday, the Modern Wisdom reading list is finally going live, a hundred books to read before you die, and's free and it took me ages so please appreciate it. It will be up this Monday and the pre-roll will tell you exactly where you can get it or you can follow me on Instagram at ChrisWillX and I will also tell you on there but now it's

time to learn about the world's most ultimate taboos with Andrew Gold. I'll give it a shot. Thanks, thanks for having me. How do you describe what you do for work? I am... so the quick way of describing it, I would say, is like a much less famous and less talented Louis Theroux. For those who don't know who Louis Theroux is or Louis Theroux in America, I like to document sort of weird and wonderful people and subcultures, quite strange, controversial people. Nothing is too controversial or everything's on the table. And trying to get to know why people think differently from why I do and from why we do, whether that's in video form, audio form, or writing. Didn't you manage the page three girls for the

Sun at one point? That is the best thing I've ever done. Yes, that was when I started out. So I was like 21 or 22. Who, I got in trouble for that recently, didn't I? Somebody was tweeting it. Oh yeah, somebody reviewed my podcast recently. They said, I've really enjoyed the first two and 10 episodes. Then I heard he worked at the sun, not for me,

and he just completely quit. And I thought, how can you enjoy, you know, hours of stuff? And then he found out I worked at a place, he didn't. Obviously he was from Liverpool and they've got a bit of a thing with the sun. Yes, it was my first job in journalism and I was working nights and you know, the stuff I was writing was just so tedious and it was all like, Rihanna poses without makeup. And I don't even know who any of these people were. I knew who

Rihanna was. And my, I was responsible at the end of the night for making sure the page three girl, who for those who don't know, that's the, they don't do it anymore. It was a woman on page three of the Sun newspaper who had her breasts out. And I had to make sure the 3D version of her went up on the iPad every night, which was, because I was having these calls at 4 or 5 in the morning with like customer support or whoever it is, somewhere in South Asia. Titty support. Titty support. I was just getting like, it's not working.

And I can't go home. Titty's the titties they aren't here. There are going to be a lot of people waking up in the morning who aren't going to be getting their titties. And you could turn her around with your finger, you could sort of twist her around. That is so fucking weird, man. Like that's the job that as a 14-year-old probably sounded amazing. Yeah. And then as a 21-year-old made you want to self-harm. That's how I imagine the trajectory goes. The idea was like that, yeah. Yeah, it made me want to

well, it made me want to get far away from there eventually. So what did you do next? Well, when I was there, yeah, I had a bit of a, I had been studying in France before that a couple of years. I've been getting really into languages, French, of course. And I was just thinking, I've got to, I've got to get out of this dreary of the sun place every night, you know, as well, you know, five in the morning, whatever. And I just thought, where's the place I can go that's the furthest away from any of this? And I wanted to learn a language. I thought, oh, I'll get something that's similar to French, you know. So Spanish was quite close. I thought, so where can I go? And I looked up Medellin in Colombia, because it's known as the City of Eternal Spring. So I thought it's like 25 degrees every day, blue skies, beautiful. So yeah, I went out there, I just got, I got a flight, I couldn't

afford it at the time really. I got the sun to give me like an article to do to write about the flower festival in Medellin and then I got an airline, I got in touch with all the airlines and I just just on the off chance, I thought I wonder if this will work. Emile Demore saying an airline, I got in touch with all the airlines and I just just on the off chance I thought I wonder if this will work. Emile Demore saying like look I've gone doing this flower festival and I can mention your airline or whatever and one of them gave me a free flight so I got out there and I wrote the piece and the sun never published it as far as I know and then I just quit my job while I was out there and just stayed out there. See you later on Titties. I'm not dealing with you anymore.

Yeah, well the Titties out in Medagin were a whole different thing because I think it's like the plastic surgery capital of the world. You kidding me. People fly out to Columbia to be robbed at gunpoint, get some drugs, and come back with a huge pair of knockers. Well, the Colombians listening to this or people of Colombian heritage will not thank us for saying this, but yes. It sounds like a good time to be fair. It sounds like a lot of people.

Yeah. Sorry, a lot of people loved it. Yeah, love it out there. Fairly fun place. What about this exorcist that you went to go in me? Hmm, so I'd been in, after a a year in Columbia and moved on to Argentina, which was a little bit more European. After a year in Columbia, it was just like,

I need something a bit more like home. They have a different dialect as well, and I wanted to get into that. The Argentine Spanish, it's cool. It's like Italian and they do all the hand signals. It's a che, j'ai, j'ai, j'ai, j'ai, t'ai, bassa. And yeah, I was there for like a year or two. I started making a few short documentaries about things like UFO hunting and what else?

In Fidelity. I got made fun of by Vigo Mortensen on a radio channel because he's quite big over there. He speaks Spanish. I went on live TV as well because I had to defend this in Fidelity video I was making because they were saying to me like, why are you assuming there's more infidelity in Argentina? So I ended up on live TV because of this Vigo Mortensen encounter I had in Argentina. Do you think using Argentine people of sleeping around? Is there a lot of swing occurs in Argentina or something?

Yeah, they were at the time. There were nights, the Thursday is known as like cheating night. It was just something I know. Is it like a national holiday or something? At least in Buenos Aires, and that's got sort of a big part of the population. I don't know much about outside of there, but they were, yeah, I, you know, I wasn't judging. I just thought it was quite funny and quirky, you know, you're looking for things to make a documentary, but I wasn't judging. I just thought it was quite funny and quirky. You know, you're looking for things to make a documentary, but I don't really care. But I ended up on a radio channel and there's a radio show there where people call up to have affairs. So they'll call up and say, hello, I want to have an affair with my friend's mum. So they'll call the mum on the show.

And I'll say like the idea is the concept is you have to say three normal things. So they would call like the friends mom and say three things. How are you? Good. Yeah, I don't know why you're calling me, what are you doing today? You are three things. And then you say, are you up for it or some Spanish equivalent? And they have to say yes or no? And then they hook up. What's the success rate of that? More than it should be, but I don't know exactly, but the ones I listen to most of them are saying yes, including like friends, mums and stuff. Interesting. All right, what about this exorcist? Yeah, right.

So I've been there for a few years, and I saw him just sort of on the TV quite a lot on the radio. This guy, there was something about his face. He had like an arrogance about him, you know. He was telling everybody things like, right,, right, next week's Halloween, so make sure you've got all your carats and this and that's a ward off vampires, stuff like that. I'm quite mainstream TV channels out there, and I found it really frustrating, I'm an atheist myself, but even if you're not an atheist, you don't usually believe in that kind of nonsense.

And people just took him out his word and he's, you know, professional presenters out there on TV, on the radio with him going, mm-hmm, oh, you know, tell us what else we can do, bad Ray Manuel, can we? It was nuts. So I got in touch with him and said, you know, I'd like to sort of follow you around for a few weeks, not in a creepy way. And he let me come and film him. I think even if you are religious, it might be even more insulting, like to have someone hijack faith. I don't know for certain, but I imagine that the line between dousing yourself in like olive oil to ward off werewolves or something and creating crosses out of carrots and the Christian faith. I imagine that there's probably a pretty big difference. I don't remember that from religious education in school so I think yeah, that's probably a bit of a piss take. All right, so you go see him and then what's he like? What where is he? He was in a impoverished suburbs of Buenos Aires. It's really once you get out of the city

It's really in some parts quite quite rough and quite scary out there. But also a lack of education, a lack of anybody that would tell the people out there that this guy was a fraud. So he was out there, he had thousands and thousands and thousands of followers, people who just turn up his church and just like start fainting and convulsing on the floor.

So I went to talk to him the first time and there were just people around my feet, like, you know, throthing at the mouth. And I was like, oh, hello, mate. And he was like, he had all the time in the world for me because he saw me as English and potentially selling this to the BBC. He loved that. He was very PR prepared, you know. He had, he played the music from the exorcist, the tubular bells theme tune, that was in his masses. He had posters of himself superimposed on the exorcist from the movie and other superhero movies around the church. So this was a guy who really liked the attention. So he loved that I was coming to interview him. He didn't at all expect that I might be quite critical and look into his relationship with the women who had schizophrenia that he was exercising.

So is that what was mostly happening? Was it people with mental health problems that are seeking a supernatural solution? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's all that was happening really, because unless you believe in the paranormal and stuff, it so happens that a lot of the myths and things that have been created around demons and exorcisms and all these kinds of things are very close to real mental health disorders, which is, I mean, that's how that happened.

That's how the idea of exorcism came to be because over the centuries, before modern medicine and modern views on mental health, people would be seen maybe shaking or having intrusive thoughts, whether it's OCD or schizophrenia. And that kind of thing, anorexia, bulimia as well, if you don't have science. I mean, imagine what an epileptic fit must look like if you don't know what that is. 100%. Exactly.

And, you know, what else you're going to say hundreds of years ago, other than, well, it must be God is not happy, there's a demon, what can we do? So he was actually taking young women mostly, the mostly young women, from a psychiatric ward nearby who was suffering with schizophrenia. And I went in spoke to the doctors there as part of this film for the BBC and they said it happens all the time. It's not just this guy. There are people coming. They get in these people's heads. Once they're 18 or 19, a lot of them are allowed to check themselves out and they do so and they go to the exorcist to be cured. The amazing thing is they do get better generally, but it's a temporary fix, but it's such a

jolt of energy and exorcism. It's the most remarkable thing I've ever seen and witnessed. Yeah, that's the complicated thing about exorcism. What's it like being in the room while someone's doing that? Scary as hell. Yeah, can you swear on this? I'm just going to say scary. Swear away. Scary as fuck. It was really scary and problematic in some ways as well because I had obviously grown up watching Louis Theroux

and I wanted to do this sort of sideways glance at it and I thought this would be funny. So I went in just with my director, David Hayes, who's a good friend of mine since we were young, and we just wanted to make this film together. And we thought it was going to be funny. So I decided I would take part in it. So the first exorcism, the exorcist handed me these bells, and he said, these bells ward off the devil. So I'm standing basically above this woman's head. She's lying on the floor before me, and I'm ringing these bells, hoping to ward off the devil or whatever.

And all I was thinking was, wow, this is really inappropriate, actually. This isn't funny. This is somebody with a horrible mental health, a breakdown she's having. And that's when I thought, right, from now on, any exorcist, if we film another exorcism, I'm not partaking. I need, what is it in this weird ritual? So what happens from there? Like roll the clock forward. So you spend some time with them, you start speaking to some of the, what are they? Patients, followers.

I've struggled knowing what to say as well. Yeah, I say patients, I suppose, but that implies there's some medical thing going on. Yeah, well, we've, we followed the first woman, was a woman called Natalia, who had some form of schizophrenia, I think, and then there was somebody called Candela, who's 17 years old, splitting her wrists, she had bulimia and a rexia. A lot of stuff that happens in adolescence,

that kind of peer pressure she had, and nobody to tell her that's common, so she assumed it was exorcism. After that, they have to look at themselves in some sort of holy mirror. And the fact that they're able to actually look in the mirror according to the exorcist means that they're cured. He always wins.

I asked him, do you ever not win? And he said, now we always be the devil. Is it all right, fair enough? And yeah, I suppose I was sort of making fun of him a bit still. I was asking him more and more outlandish ridiculous things like, you know, so their vampires coming here and he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, we've seen a lot of vampires. Sort of pushing to see at what point he might snap, you know, I enjoy doing that, I guess.

As time went on, we realized that his assistant was this woman called Paola, who was in her 20s or so. And she had been exercised by him. We didn't realise this at first. And it was his most famous exorcism. It's called the exorcism of Laura. She changed her name from Laura or Laura to Paola or Paula. And she had stayed by his side since her exorcism.

And now I've tracked down her, you know, doctor and everything. She had also had schizophrenia, she had been, spent her teenage years living in a psychiatric ward, and now it's just with this exorcist guy, and we didn't know what was happening with them exactly. All I knew is that they seemed to go upstairs, which is where the Padre or the father lived, and we got word from some of the clergy working at the church that they were a bit close and this and that.

And something very strange happened, which was that there was another journalist there at the church at the same time as maybe. He was very much a friend of the priests. He worked for the equivalent of the sun in Argentina. He's a loving reporter. Titty parade as well, was the Argentinian Titty parade. I think he might have been, well, at least all the paranormal silly stuff, you know, there must be Titty stuff happening in that in that newspaper as well. But he, I think was jealous that I was sort of, you know, stomping on his territory. And he, for whatever reason, told the Padre that I had been asking why he kisses this young woman, Paola, who he has exercised on the lips, which was something that I had thought might

be happening. I was suspecting it, but he never asked that. So I didn't know any of this. And I was getting ready to film this big mass or whatever at the church. And suddenly the assistant Paola, she said, Andrew, can you just come back here a second? So they take me back down this corridor and backstage, at the mass, meanwhile, there's tens of thousands of people, maybe more several thousand people,

waiting for the Exodus cut to come out. They're like getting themselves into a fervor. They're really, everyone's going crazy, the tubular bells, Exorcist music's playing. I go backstage, my director David is filming me behind and then they cut him off and they just say I just want to talk to Andrew. And David was sort of, you know, he didn't speak great Spanish and he's just trying to say, like, well, hang on, can't I? And they go, no, no, no, and they sort of manhandle him

out the way. They close the door and I'm scared at this point because we're out in the middle of nowhere, nobody really knows we're even filming there. This wasn't a typical thing where the BBC would commission it, it's impossible to get a commission. So we decided to film first just using like odd bits and pieces, equipment and stuff and then sell later. So nobody knew where we were, it was about midnight and my legs just turned to jelly, I thought where am I here? And he's in the room with five or six of his cronies, sort of big, big heavy set guys, some of them with one guy in particular who had a big staff like in Aladdin Jafar, you know. And he just comes up to me very like, he's obviously watched a lot of movies. And he goes, he goes up to me and goes like, why have you been telling people, right,

about my relationship with power? And I was just like, oh, no, well, I have asked about it a bit because just because you're so close and isn't that wonderful that you're so close now after what happened and she had, you know, and he was going, mm-hmm, and why have you mentioned mouth kisses? And I was like, I have not mentioned mouth kisses. And then someone, this journalist was in the room, he was going, yes, she did. I was like, I didn't, we can show you the audio. We had this back and forth for about an hour, which obviously we had to condense to a minute. But he lost his rag. And we didn't even, no, I didn't think about it because I was so scared.

I had my microphone on my, on my collar that was still recording. And he was screaming and going, you bastard, you took the fault clans. Now you're going to come and do this. You think you're walking in here? And I was just going, no, all bastard, you took the fault clans, now you're gonna come and do this, you think you're walking in here, and I was just going, all right, sorry. You go, you say sorry, sir, and I was like, I'm sorry, sir, and all this stuff, it's embarrassing, really.

Anyway, eventually we got out there, and that was not easy either. We had to sort of get away. We had to squeeze past thousands of people who we thought at any moment, if he tells them to, I'm just gonna kill us. We would just be another statistic out in the middle of nowhere. You know, it would be nothing to them. Squeeze past them, got out into the street where they're still thousands and thousands of these people all on the floor screaming crazy and his voice, I can hear

booming through a microphone. He's now come out, they've lost their minds. And he's going, the devil is in this church today. And he's trying to leave now and we're going, oh my God, oh my God, they were going to kill us. And at that point, we're running away, we're trying to get to where you're even going to get a taxi at like one in the morning now, middle of nowhere. And David says to me, mate, you're not going to be happy here. When you were leaving the church and I was filming you, I wasn't filming, it wasn't filming. And I was like, mate, you're not going to be happy here. When you were leaving the church and I was

filming you, I wasn't filming. It wasn't filming. And I was like, right, well, we're just going to go then. He's like, we can't, we can't not have you leaving the church. So we had to then squeeze past these thousands of people again, back into this like, then and film me walking out again, which was the scariest thing I've ever done. I've never forgiven David for that. No, I love him really. And yeah, we got away. And we were so scared, even on the way home, both of us just shaking. And it was only in the days that followed that we thought, you know, we recorded all of that. Like, this isn't just a normal film anymore. This is, you know, it was all on my, it was all on my, the microphone was on the whole time. So that's what made the film. We got quite fortunate really.

So yeah, it makes what makes it different, I think, the film, the last 10 minutes are pretty insane. So he held up a few thousand people's exorcisms to shout at you backstage, while he's got some snotty, so it sounds like the, like the weak kid that befriends the bullies in school, it's like, yay, he did. Yay, he did. He was he was so much like that. Yeah.

How bizarre? That's what you do this job, you know, you what you in the moment it's scary. We're three thousand Argentinian people in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. This is why we're here. Yeah, that's what life is. This is why we're here. Right. Yeah, that's what life is. Fuck man. All right, so how do you, the BBC picked it up, right?

Yeah. Well, how do you sell it to them? How do you say, I've got this guy who might be crossing the boundaries of what a parishioner should do, put it on your TV show. What I had mentioned to a couple of commissioners and things before doing it to see if they would commission it, you know, and they took a meeting with me and then they just didn't quite take it. It's very hard to sell ideas outside of the UK

or America may be able to push and especially foreign language stuff, which I think is a shame because when we do have foreign language stuff on TV documentaries and things, Stacy, Dewey, Louis Theroux, whatever, they're talking through translators and it's, there's a lot that's lost there. You couldn't have that kind of argument we had, for example. But they didn't want it, but it's so fine. Once it was done, I, yeah, I got back in touch with

all those people saying like, no, no, no, no, you've got to see this. Me and David spent months editing it, putting it together. And like in all industries or whatever, they just didn't reply. It took about two years of just going on LinkedIn every day, finding the names of different BBC, Channel 4, everyone, and guessing their email addresses. And I probably sent, there's that old thing about the Beatles, they got rejected five times or whatever, and Harry Potter was rejected five times before. And I just used, there's that old thing is near about the Beatles. They got rejected five times or whatever. And Harry Potter was rejected five times before. And I just used to look at those quotes and things and things.

I got rejected five times before breakfast this morning, every day for two years. And I was looking at the Vimeo, where we uploaded the video, just looking at the stats, nobody ever watched it. One or two did did the head of channel four did at one point at the time and then just said it was his he was worried that I looked too much like Louis Theroux which was the shame yeah but the BBC eventually somebody somewhere and some team I don't even know how replied after two years and said, oh, thanks for this, I'll give it a watch. So me and David were like, you know, two weeks just waiting, like, you

know, fingers crossed, please, please, please watch it. And we knew if he watches it, he'll take it. And that's, it wasn't arrogance, like we're such good documentary makers, a big part of documentary making, particularly the Gonzo style with presenters and things is luck. And if something mad happens when you're filming, you've got it. So it was just luck and we knew that nothing like this had been on TV before that was this crazy, just from the luck of the draw, from that crazy journalist saying those weird things that we're done that we hadn't. So yeah, they watched it and two weeks later, they said, we'll take it, et cetera. And they offered us an incredibly low amount of money,

which didn't even cover the legal fees that we then had to pay lawyers, because they asked you to get all these lawyers involved to check everything through. So we didn't make a penny from it. They took all the rights forever because they knew we were desperate to take it, to get it on the BBC.

And it's such a great calling card for us that it was worth it. But yeah, we got it out. And it was, it was, it was, it won some film festival awards first, and then it ended up in the BBC's best of the year list. So it was a great moment for us. Have you been invited back to the BBC since?

In the sort of, it was a funny one, yeah, I thought that they would be, and I don't mean as arrogantly, I just thought they would think like, oh wow, these two guys have just done this on their own, that's unusual, because usually it would give a budget of 50 grand or 100 grand or whatever, and they've done it for free. This is interesting, let's see what they've got. And there was just nothing, the film came out, and it was just like nothing at all. I then pushed a bit, and I was saying, hey, can we have a meeting? Can we talk? So I went to a

BBC 3 meeting. We have one guy who seemed to be sort of the head of the team and three younger women. I felt very much like they just, I felt that they hated me from the get-go. They were just looking at me with these eyes like, who the hell are you? What was wrong with you, huh? What do you think was wrong with you? Well, at the time I wasn't sure, but my experience since has led me to believe a big part

of it is being a white man, being middle class as well, looking and sounding a tiny bit like Louis Thoreau as well, especially BBC3, young people, it's supposed to be cool and edgy and young looking and I wasn't cool in that way. They just hate me. So I was just coming up with idea after idea like, hey, there's a bunch of vigilantes that make prostitute style and ant hills in Bolivia. And there are these pedophiles in Germany where the clinics don't report them to police. I had like 15 ideas like that, just really quirky bizarre stuff where I thought I speak the languages of these places, I can do this and everyone I said they were like

okay well how would you do that? I was like, well, I'd go, mm-hmm. So it was really a dampener after the excitement that came before it. I really thought it would lead to more stuff. And then I emailed, they just say, look, draw up a couple of pitches for us, for a series or whatever and get back to us and know, you know, with it in a week or whatever. So a week later, I did that.

I put a lot of work into it, sent it to the guy who was in charge of that team, who was the one who maybe had my corner. And he replied saying, I've actually moved to a different team. One of these women has been promoted. So I emailed her and yeah, just nothing, no interest at all. Some of the ideas I pitched, not just to her to other people,

they were saying like, well, why should you do that? You're not from that particular background. For example, gay conversion was one of them I wanted to do an Ecuador. It's a really interesting that I just quickly go. But in Ecuador, they banned gay conversion. They took the step to ban it because it was such a big thing. And the weird thing was it got much worse because it got pushed underground. So then instead of just priests and whatever doing it in therapists, it became, people would come in the middle of the night

and kidnap someone and you wouldn't see them again for five months, they were forced underground abused. So I thought that's a great idea. And they were like, Andrew, can we ask, are you gay? I was like, well, I don't know. No, no. Also not a pedophile or a prostitute though, so.

As far as you know, I'm neither of those things, no. But exactly, that was my point as well. So that was BBC3, and then I had meetings, endless, endless meetings for about six years with production company after production company. And every single one about half way through or three quarters of the way through, they would say, wow, these ideas are really exciting and would love to pitch them to BBC and Channel 4. The only thing is we would just need somebody from a minority ethnic background to be the on-screen presence and for you to be behind

the camera. You don't mind that, do you? And I was like, well, it is my story that I spent years looking into and getting all the contacts. I would like to quite, you know, be the journalist who interviews them. They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll just sort of, we'll do that, but we'll have a presenter from a minority on screen. And I was like, I'm not doing that. To this day, I've never said yes to that because it's just so ridiculous. But that's how it's gone. Why wouldn't you let someone from a minority group present the idea instead of you? Well, whoever it is, you know, they could have just said,

thanks for the idea, we're going to get Louis Theroux to present it. And I would have said, this is my story. I mean, it's a big thing for journalists. It's the same reason if it's a written story, you wouldn't then want somebody else's name to be at the top of it, you know. So, yeah, it's just that. What do you think is the reason, like, what's the justification behind this? Is it a potential that you're not the right man that you don't have to talents for it and they they're trying to palm it off in some other sort of way, or do you think that there's an agenda,

there's something more going on here? You've got to be open to everything, you know? And it's so hard to self-judge, isn't it? So I wouldn't want to say if I'm good or bad. It's hard, isn't it? It's hard to know. It's strange for me to hear that coming out from a meeting, like, to hear that said sort of sort of flagrantly feels a bit icky to me. Whether you want, no matter what your sort of goals are, if I was a mixed race presenter,

I wouldn't want to hear that the only reason that I'd got this job doing this interesting story was because of a diversity quota. Yeah, well, I've had people get in touch because they've heard me talk about this before on my podcast and people have gotten in touch saying, you know, I'm not even a presenter and I was emailed saying, like, you know, I've heard about this thing you're involved with, do you want to present this for TV? No way. So, yeah, so it does happen.

And yes, some people might think as well, well, yeah, maybe they just didn't think you were good enough. And that's fair enough. I mean, it's so subjective as well. But yeah, the thing was it was said, it wasn't even like 99% of meetings. It was every single meeting. This came up, it was the same reason.

It was a diversity thing. What do you think we should do about this situation? It's so complicated, isn't it? It's so complicated. The thing is right now, on TV in the last six years, the Diamond Diversity Survey, that's like the closest, that's like the most accurate survey that people use, all the TV channels use it. That shows that people from minority ethnic backgrounds are the most overrepresented group of people on screen in all British TV over the last six years. And when you tell people that they say, okay, but what about off screen and all that? And I say, well, that's not what we're talking about, though.

So it does sometimes feel like these TV channels are in a rush sometimes to push diversity on the screen while not paying attention to what's happening behind the screen. So it's just, so you think there might be a bit of a smoke screen almost? Yeah, until, although the thing is, when you look at the actual off screen stuff, the diversity, so we've got 13% of the UK is supposedly from a minority ethnic background.

22 or 23% of on screen TV people are also from that. So that's, it's almost double. Off screen behind camera, it's 12% or 12.3%. So it's not a big difference from that to 13%. And it depends on your political ideology as to whether you think that more needs to be done about that. And I would say that the belief is that higher up, it is a bit more white.

So the top directors and the top CEOs and stuff like that. And as you say, it could be a smokescreen, because I often hear this from the top BBC guys who are like these white guys, and I'm thinking like, well, you're where, if there isn't issue, that's where the issue is. It's you guys, it's not down at the bottom as presenters on TV.

So there could be perhaps protecting their jobs by doing that, but I mean, what if, what would you say if it turns out that the public respond better to a minority background presenter. If they are, I think the same way as ASOS recently have been very, at least on the men's side, have been very heavily using mixed race guys, a lot of them have had tattoos, they've got piercings. All that they're looking at is how many clothes does this model sell of this particular garment, they're able to attribute success a lot more tightly, right, because it's just clicks and conversions.

But I imagine there must be something similar there with the BBC. It might be the case that putting somebody from a minority background who's the presenter might result in high viewing figures or better retention or better reported happiness after watching the show or something. If that were the case, then we wouldn't need diversity officers and all this kind of thing because it was suggest there's no racism in the UK if the minority ethnic presenters perform so much better across the whole country. So they wouldn't need to be spending extortion amounts of money on new diversity officers

to up the diversity. This feels more artificial than what is best or not best for the show. And then on top of that, I would just think that the people who discover the stories, as long as they're okay at it, as long as they're pretty, you know, you don't have to be through, you don't have to be the most charismatic person ever, as long as you're pretty good at what you do, I think you should be able to present that story no matter who you are. And I think I do find it sad that we're looking so much at who every single person is, what they are. If you apply for a job at the BBC now, you don't just have to say what skin colour you are, what this ethnicity and stuff you now have to talk about your parents' jobs, you have to talk about your parents' university experiences, your sex, gender, orientation, all these things. I'm like, I can't, but why are you asking, you know, I also do get the other side to

an extent, but it's complicated, isn't it? It is, especially after a period where certain groups might have felt underrepresented. If you haven't had many gay presenters, let's be presenters, trans presenters on, there is a justification from the other side of the fence that says, well, we've been under represented for a long time. It's now time for us to have our time in front of the screen. I think it's what's really interesting is looking at how, if you were to distribute how much money you get to pay

across the entire BBC or ITV, the guys that are at the absolute top, you only need five of them to probably cover an entire couple of seasons worth of teams that run TV shows. And I would love to see the statistics around how many of these groups of people that are being brought in at the front end are actually then working their way up. Because that's very typical. I remember I grew up in Newcastle with the Jordy Show phenomenon and a lot of the show runners

because we would see them twice a year. They'd film every six months essentially. They'd come and do about a month and get a season out of it and do a month and get a season out of it and do a month and get a season out of it. So I would see this sort of iterative presentation of how TV works. So you'd see there would be just a crappy little runner, season one, then season two, maybe he's like an assistant runner or a researcher, then he may be a researcher, then he may

be an AP, then he may be a PD, then he may be an executive, then he may be a blah, blah, blah. And before I knew it, I then went on to Love Island and some of the people that were runners on season one of Jordy Shore had worked their way up to being some really sort of semi-important person. So it does feel like there's a bit of a lineage that goes on, but also there may be a glass ceiling that's been put in place. And if that's the case, if the case is that people are throwing diversity quotas around

in a way to hide their own jobs and keep their own jobs safe, the ones at the top of the tree, that feels a bit icky. Yeah, well there's definitely some of that. And as to whether they sort of, minorities now, I mean, there's no denying that back in the 90s, 80s, there were these problems, you know. So that's also why there won't be as many minorities

at the top now, because it does, as you say, it takes 20, 30, 40 years to get to the very top. So that is something, if that turns out to be the case, which would surprise me the way things are going, but then that's a problem and it's something we'd have to look at. Why is nobody letting people from minorities get to the top? I didn't know you were in Jordy Shore before Love Island. No, not on Jordy Shore. I was one of the... So I run events in Newcastle and they filmed in a lot of our nightclubs.

So we'd have every Saturday that come in, why are you in all over the police? And I used to pop it on in Argentina, like I'd be in a bar and it has somehow they'd have like Jordi shore on and I'd be telling all these are just really what they're exporting. British culture is that the best of what we have to offer is Jordi shore. Yeah, I was loving it. I was just like, they loved it. For some reason more than like Jersey shore, they would love in Jordi shore. So I was just, they couldn't understand a word of it, of course, but they had like subtitles

and that in Spanish, no. God, that must have been disgusting. All right, so you didn't use like an abortion lady as well. You're gonna do some stuff with her. Yeah, so straight after that film because I was getting all these nose about next stuff and I thought, well, screw it, I'm just gonna go and make a film.

I'd been in contact with this woman that was known out there as the crazy baby lady. And she was just this really, I'm really drawn to very eccentric, bizarre types. So I'm drawn to you, Chris. So yeah, it was something I wanted to do and she was just this woman who goes around protesting, people getting abortions, right? And I'm quite pro choice personally, but you're supposed to sort of keep that out of the documentary. And I went and sort of lived with her. And this is a thing from doing this kind of journalism. I'm sure you found the same thing talking to people from all different kinds of ideologies and backgrounds and things. You start to often, you quite like

the people you're with. So I went in thinking like this is gonna be this horrible, pro-life, angry conservative, religious, Catholic person who has different views about abortion and liberal things than I have. And I hung out with her, we went on the school run with her, picked up her six kids and she was very funny, witty, and we got on like so well and it was so nice, but ended up arguing because she again, she didn't like my line of questioning

and I pushed her a lot about some things and she hates me now and won't speak to me, which is really sad actually. But what it did was it helped me as a documentary maker to sort of realize, you know, when you go out to film people who really believe that there's a demon inside them or really aggressively believe about you know pro life or pro choice or whatever then you come home and people

are just saying things like can you believe people voted for Trump or can you believe a Brexit or whatever and I'm like well of course I can I've literally just been out with somebody who thinks the devil's inside them I mean to believe that's nowhere near as much of a push as voting for Brexit or Trump or something. So that was just a really fantastic experience for me to fully understand where the human mind can take us and how far it can go because I think it can heal diseases if you believe strongly enough in narratives we create in our minds. That blows my mind. That's incredible. And it also makes me think there's no point ever debating

anything because people's beliefs are so strong. Yeah, it's um there's a story from Johann Haris book Lost Connections about depression and in that he talks about this guy who had a special wooden wand thing like a big stick wrapped in a special type of metal that had electricity running through. This is in the 1800s, something like that. And he would promise people that he could fix them, that he could get rid of their arthritis or something. So it's not just mental stuff,

like physical problems as well, I think. You'd wave it over them. And these people would stand up and it turned out, they stripped it back. So they started doing a replica of that particular research and took away the electricity and then took away the metal from outside of the stick and then had untreated wood and then took the stick and then got rid of the stick. And the same effect just continued. So you write like the placebo effect, if you could bottle it, it would be a panacea because it fixes absolutely everything. And here's another cool story. So I learned that people that were catatonic during World War two, these psych ward patients, right, they hadn't moved for years, perhaps some of them were just completely out of it.

They hadn't moved for years, perhaps some of them were just completely out of it. When the bombs started landing and they desperately needed people to drive the ambulances, these men and women, I think it was mostly men, got up from catatonic states of years, years sometimes and went and drove ambulances, picking up survivors and drove fire trucks and stuff like that. So the change that you can have when there's a sufficient external stimulation and the right type as well, you have a purpose, you have a meaning now, this is something that, and it can bypass people that had been totally,

like comatose for five years. That's belief, and it is the most extraordinary thing. That's incredible. That is, and it's Darren Brown sort of does a lot of that stuff as well and shows why it's nothing to do with religion. It's all about belief and the power of it. But it's also why we all disagree on things so much. And people always say critical thinking.

You need to teach critical thinking. But there's a problem with that, which is that even the smartest people in the world who have amazing critical thinking, you need to teach critical thinking. But there's a problem with that, which is that even the smartest people in the world who have amazing critical thinking still totally disagree with one another. They're still led to different paths and some people really far astray. And a good example is it's like Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote

Sherlock Holmes. And I had David Robson on my podcast the other week, whose journalist who wrote the intelligence trap about how the smartest people in the world often their beliefs lead them one way and their intelligence sort of keeps them furred. They're able to explain anything because they're so smart. They can, you know, and Arthur Conan Doyle, he's supposed to be sort of the master of deduction and things like that because that's what Sherlock was.

He's incredibly smart. And he believed in fairies. And obviously it was a different time, but nobody believed in fairies then. And he ended up falling out with Houdini, the magician, because of his just kind of duel. Arthur Conan Doyle was friends with Houdini. Yeah, until they fell out. They fell out over that. And because while having these sort of arguments and things Arthur Conan Doyle said to Houdini listen, you know your mum's just died I'm gonna take you to my wife who's gonna help do a say-ons. We're gonna have a chat with your wife now

like with your mum. Sorry, and so he was like, oh, okay, right? So Houdini turns up and they do this say-ons and You know there's all this stuff coming out about Christianity and this and that. And after was Houdini said you know my mom was Jewish and the whole thing was you know and they fell out. I think they didn't talk again after that. But you know he believed in these fairies because there was a well-known a prank by these like 15-year-old girls who just did these cardboard cutouts of fairies and took a photo of it. They're very clearly fake. If you can see them on Google,

they're just absolutely fake. You can see like a pin in the stomach that's supposed to like hold it up on this wooden background or whatever. And he was just like, well, that's clearly the imbiblical code. So fairies can have children. Now this is the master of deduction.

And this is somebody who's fantastic at critical thinking, which is why, yeah, I just can't be bothered to argue with anyone anymore, because myself included, our beliefs will take us anywhere, no matter how good we are at critical thinking, it's not going to help us agree or even find truth or objective truth. So that's what the abortion crazy baby lady taught me. Are you ever scared that one day you're going to wake up and have just absorbed one of these mental views? Because I Arthur Conan Doyle, you think, yeah, totally rational guy, totally normal, then one day just fancy's waking up to believe in fairies. Tomorrow, me and you could wake up and have some, the exorcism thing, you know, or whatever

standing in anant hills, whatever it is that we got to do. I don't know, I don't want that to happen. I think I think what I'd be more worried about is that, and what is more likely is that you and I already have those beliefs and that certain people listening, probably not to your or my podcast, but, you know, we'll think that I don't think we'd wake up and suddenly have a different view. But our views, you're right, they do change, don't they? And I think that's a good thing. I think totally different stuff to what I thought when I was 18. I think you do as well.

I look through your reviews and your podcast and they're very different from the beginning towards the more modern and what recent ones were. Some people like, he's changed the people he's had on. It's like, well, you should change. You should develop. My business partner recreationally goes through the one star reviews and Apple Podcasts just for fun, because he likes to go through, he likes to go through and see people shit talking me, because he's a bastard. He's another thing, man. You know, like people, a lot of people, especially on the right,

they like to criticize the term lived experience, because what most people, what they propose, people that use the words lived experience mean, is un-falsifiable evidence that only exists inside of my head. But a lot of these beliefs, I don't think that the people that were getting exercised don't believe what happened to them. I think that the Padre, perhaps, was complicit and he is aware that he's probably not doing what he says that he's doing. But the people that were working with him, they believed it and the people that were being conned, they believed it and the people that were paying and donating money, they would

have believed it as well. You'd 10,000 people in the street don't come out for something that they don't believe in. Now, they weren't all there filming a gonzo-style documentary, suddenly. And it kind of makes me think, well, the limit of using the term lived experience is actually quite idiosyncratic, isn't it? Everyone's life is so different and so peculiar. And it does make it very,

I mean, it's a fucking miracle that anyone's able to speak to anyone and have a civil conversation ever. I think lived experience as well. I agree with you. And it's loaded as well. There's a, it's not only that sort of, I've experienced it, so I'm right, I win the argument. I've had lived experience and you can't say anything. It's also, if you do dare to say something, I'm going to get very emotional because an emotional thing happens to me. It's like the same with a lot of the PC and the woke stuff. A lot of it comes from really good places. And if you've got a friend or you meet someone and you're at lunch with them and they tell

you about a traumatic thing that happened to them and they went to an exorcist, well, it's probably polite to just let them think it, especially if it's helping them, you know? But there are times when we as a society, it's not enough to accept lived experience. We've all got lived experience, and all of our lived experiences is so different from one another.

If you go to a therapist, couples therapy and things like that, I know a lot about that as well, because in Argentina where I was living, I was there six years, it's the World Capital of Therapy. Everyone and their dog has a therapist, not really dogs. So every single person, you can get it like 10 quid to go or whatever. But one of the first things I'll tell like a couple is, look, you've got your lived experience, but you've got yours as well. And there's

the truth in between. So they will tell you the lived experience, but you've got yours as well, and there's the truth in between. So they will tell you the lived experience is not the truth. It's someone, someone's subjective experience, and you should respect it. It's good to respect that and go like, hey, that's your lived experience. It doesn't mean that's science. It doesn't mean that's true. And again, when you've had your job, which is interviewing all sorts of weird and wonderful people, how would you possibly know what's true from

everyone's lived experiences? So they're all different. What about you spoke to a guy that went undercover in an Amazon warehouse? What's it like working for Amazon? Horrific. Horrific. Yeah, that's James Bloodworth, who's a fairly lefty journalist, which I was happy to have on because I had quite a lot of writing or you know James Lindsay's and those kinds of Helen Plutcroes and sometimes you want to sort of redress the balance a bit and he although he's quite anti-woake I should say despite being very left and if for him it was

about the workers that's what being left wing was about, about labor, actual labor. And yeah, he was there six months, and it was horrible. He said he walked enough that his feet were bleeding by the end, he worked out that within a week, he could have walked from like Manchester to France or something, the amount they have to walk because they can't take toilet breaks and the place is so big because they have to cover a certain amount of ground every day.

If they don't, if they don't do things quick enough or fast enough, they get points. And once you get five points, you're fired. That's it. No questions asked. You get points for like, yeah, being in a toilet for spending more than 10 minutes having lunch, you get a point for answering back to someone. Is it in the UK? Yeah, he was at, I can't remember the name of, he went to this really industrial town somewhere in the Midlands where basically, there was not much going on and the Amazon. 50% of the people are employed by Amazon. Yeah, I think that's the kind of place.

And it was just miserable. A lot of Polish and Romanian immigrants and stuff, maybe half of them and then half sort of English working class people that he was working with. And they just lived in squallor, the amount they were being paid. And what really sort of boiled my blood hearing about that, it was that it's one thing to say, if some people get, you know, very captives minded, I am myself and it's one thing to say, if some people get, you know, very captives minded, I am myself, and it's one thing to say, look, well, that's the job that you're, you know, skilled for, and that's what you took, and you knew the conditions when you went in there. The problem is that from James Bloodworth's experience, they don't pay.

They don't pay on time, and they don't pay what they're supposed to pay, and what was agreed. So he said, he found himself time and time again, just spending hours knocking on the doors of his manager's going, I was supposed to get 120 quid this week. You've given me 17. And he said, like, the point is, when you're living in poverty like that, that's the difference between being able to eat and pay your bills and being homeless. And it's not on. And so it did make me angry. It did change how I thought about Amazon. And the irony, unfortunately, was that, you know, I ended the podcast saying, I, and if you want this book, you can find it on Amazon.co.uk.

What can you do? It's a problem of becoming too big to fail, isn't it? Like that. And I suppose, I mean, why do you think it is that the UK, a place that has fairly robust legal system and employment law. How can this is being permitted? So why isn't, should you only take one case and then you could roll that out across the entire country? It's just not on people's priority list at the moment and I guess the Tories aren't that interested in stopping Amazon from getting away with what they get away with.

I don't know if they're backhanded bits of money going to people in to people's pockets. I have no idea. On the left, they used to be much more bothered by that stuff, but recently, particularly in the Corbin era, they weren't talking about working class lives. They were talking about quite popular university politics, you know. It definitely did seem like that, that the original liberal sort of slant on politics was all to do with class, right? It was all to do with differences in wealth inequality between the classes in order to facilitate the labour to move up. And yeah, I mean, it's been a very long time since you've heard. It's a mad to think that you hear conservatives talking about those sorts of resurrects now, more

than you hear that from Labour. Yeah, more, I think, I don't know what the stats are, but not of working class people vote at Tory recently, didn't they? They've moved over. Yeah, I mean, Ashington, which is not far from me, Newcastle, that changed and then Hartley Pool, which was this sort of bastion that Labour had for ages. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I don't know, man, I feel like with Amazon, there has to be something complicit going on behind the scenes with regards to the government because I've seen

that we are not robots, Amazon Union. So they always have, you know, the little robot is like a cardboard box made out to be a robot. It's one of Amazon's mascots. And they've repurposed that. And I've seen these picket lines or whatever, workers unions. And then I saw a video the other day talking about it was a training for Amazon managers, for how to spot potential unionizing behavior. So if you see your employees using these sort of terms, if you hear them talking about this, if you notice groups of people that weren't previously friend, it's super, super scary and authoritarian.

Yeah, terrifying. And... You've seen no Mad Land, the movie. No, that was what won a ton of Oscars this year, wasn't it? What was that about? Yeah, it was about, I've got a name, Francis McDormand is being quite depressing and walking around the States, but she was on the poverty line and she was working at Amazon for a bit and it just looked fine.

It just looked totally fine. It was like, oh, Amazon, I'll just pop in and have a job and yeah, here you are chatting to people and just, you know, that's a big Hollywood production that's supposed to be very real and gritty. And they really, they really sort of Amazon doesn't come away from it looking badly. Didn't take the opportunity to perhaps show Amazon in the light that it really is. Yeah, well, I mean they probably got paid. Well, how much employment, investment, you know, business rates, tax rates, all of that sort of stuff is Amazon plugging through the UK. I imagine that it must take a lot of noise to counteract that much money to cause the government to take notice.

Yeah. Yeah, they're based in Dublin, I think. I think I'm, and that's hiding from tax in Dublin, yeah. Yeah, it was Google does it as well. It just seems like we squabble on Twitter about these little things. You know, JK Rowling this and like we were talking about before, though, what's the perfect rate of minorities to be on TV. And meanwhile, there's justice in sane stuff going on.

And a lot of us, again, if you're a capitalist, you don't mind. You go, look, I have no problem with rich people getting richer because that's the system that we have. It's not the best system, but it's not the worst either. However, that's fine as long as they're playing by the rule. Rich people get richer fairly, yeah, precisely. I had, uh, Yon Mi Park, the North Koreans refugee, I had her on the show recently. And, um, man, she's talking about levels of suffering that, hopefully, the vast majority of people on the planet are never even going to be able to be aware of. It's one of those things, it's so harrowing. And then she was saying that the Wiga Muslims in China, they were given what,

they were told was multi-vitamin shots, which is now reduced the fertility of that entire group by half. So, the fertility has gone down by 50%. Like, that's genocide. That's like legitimate genocide that's happening within the last two to three years. And yet, we're being caught up. Like the smartest minds on the planet are either debating about genders or getting people to click on ads Those are the only two things that they do at the moment or maybe there's a couple of accountants that are working out how to get more businesses in a Dublin

I don't know but yeah, it's um Well, there was a time when the smartest people believed in fairies, you know, so that's a story as well Arthur Conan, do you yeah? I don't know about that. Do you think how much do you think of the sort of current culture was and what we're seeing at the moment? How much of it is genuinely generated by the UK and the US? And how much do you think is planted stories by bad actors from nations like China and Russia? Have you thought about this? I thought about it a bit. I mean, I don't know enough about it to really comment, except to say, I read a great article in the Times the other day about suffering and how much we need to suffer.

And I guess if you were born in career, you can come away with a totally different way of thinking of like, thank God, I don't have that level of suffering. But the best, you know, the best areas of movies, of creativity, of art, when humans have created beautiful things, a lot of it comes from suffering. If you look at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the point is, I mean, we're always looking and we do it in our podcast as well. We're taking a drug that makes them happy, but there's no creativity, there's no literature, there's no beauty in the world. You need some suffering, obviously not on the levels of career, or something like that. And I think the smartest people in the world that you refer to, who are currently, yeah, talking about all these ridiculous things, they're trying to sanitize the world of like get rid of any level of being uncomfortable, of being bored, of being a bit sad sometimes. Obviously, people have very serious mental health

conditions that have to be taken seriously. But if we, yeah, for example, but sometimes it's like, well, you need to be a bit sad for now because you'll feel much better for it later. So I don't know how much is I mean, there must be some level of bad actors involved 100%. I also think it's a natural human impulse when everything is perfect, you know, not perfect. When everything is good compared to North Korea, compared to the entire, the entirety of history to look for problems to find like, oh, yes, but you should net why you depressed why you bored. And I thought that I would have agreed with that. If it hadn't been for the last year, I would have said in the absence of a real crisis

we create our own and in the presence of one we reset our values onto what really matters. But then you have probably the most globally traumatic thing to have happened ever to so many people. There's never been a single incident in all of to have happened ever to so many people. There's never been a single incident in all of human history that affected as many people as the last 12 months as the last 16 months. And yet, it seems to have further pushed us into discussions about stuff that doesn't matter. Part of me thinks with that, it's the information overload that there's so many sources of information thinks with that, it's the information overload, that there's so many sources of information at the moment

that working out what is in good faith, what's in bad faith, what do I dispense with, what do I need to retain, it's essentially impossible because for the first time in all of human history, we have a surplus of information. For all of our revolutionary history, we would have really looked for information because that was, we were like information forages.

We were looking for little nuggets of, how can I build a better fire? Where's a better cave? What's a better plant to eat? What's a better diet route to go home to avoid being eaten by a line, whatever. And now that same impulse to try and get more information still exists and we do not have the filtering mechanism

to be able to get rid of it. And the result has been tons of stress, a lot of difficulty and a lot of suffering over the last year. People dying, family members dying, restrictions on your livelihood, restrictions on the the economy, changes in your lifestyle, all of that sort of lack of social connection. But that hasn't pushed people towards thinking about a bigger picture, about giving themselves more perspective on what really matters. Have you got any sense about why that is?

Yeah, I think it's a different kind of tragedy. It's a very specific kind, the last year and a half, that a lot of us know people who have died and who have been gravely ill. A lot of us have been gravely ill, particularly older people. But for the majority of us, it's been a very depressing and sad time, but we've been sitting at home. Like comfortable, uncomfortableness. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's not the same as being called up to the front line in the world, well,

one or something, by any stretch of the imagination. Although that's not to negate the suffering of people who have lost loved ones, it's horrific, because that's, you know, there's not much worse that can happen than that. But if you're being called up, if all your loved ones are being called up to the front line and you're sort of saying, God, what are we going to do? You're probably not going to be thinking about critical race theory at that point. The point is we're all sat here at home just thinking, thinking, thinking for like a year, unless you did working out or whatever on your own. I don't do that, right? So I like, because I like team sports. It's the only way I can do exercise. I hate working out. I get to, you know, I can't do it. I wish I could. I couldn't play football for a year and a half or so.

I'm sitting there with energy. My girlfriend comes home because she was able to work in a hotel which keeps going during the pandemic, which is a bit scary. You know, she's coming home every day. We're hearing about this disease, who she met today and touched and been there or whatever. And I'm sitting there just stressed. And what am I doing? I'm reading fucking James Lindsay and critical race theory stuff, like everyone else in the world is. So I think it's a particular kind of tragedy

that's actually made us even more sort of insular and trying to find little problems and little things. It is the most millennial way to suffer, isn't it? That everyone's just had to ingest YouTube and Twitter and Netflix for a while. Yeah, I am, you're right, anybody that's still here, that's still listening to this has had that experience.

They've gone through a year of this, like luxurious suffering, kind of, I guess. Yeah. Really weird. It's so bizarre. What about you infiltrated a group of Peter files? That's been one of your more recent ones. What happened there? Speaking of so bizarre. Yeah. Well, you know, I was looking for controversial stuff and I got to Berlin. My girlfriend and I, we wanted to move back to Europe. She's Argentine.

And I've, I've wanted to go to Europe and learning. Another language German was my fifth one. I got excited about that. When I get to a new place, the first thing was like, what can I do that's really controversial, weird, and bizarre, and try and sell that somehow? It turned out that Berlin has the world's only sort of pitiful clinic that doesn't ever report them to authorities. So they can come in, a patient or whatever could come in and speak to the therapist and say, I did these terrible things yesterday. I'm worried I might do it again

and they will not be reported to anyone. And that's obviously very controversial because it means letting these guys go back onto the street to potentially offend again. But the other flip side of it, and the reason it's actually pretty popular in Germany among the locals is that it's seen as the only way to guarantee these people actually come out from the shadows and actually attend therapy because they know that no matter what they say, they're not going to be reported and

stuff and they can get help. So the idea was like, okay, I'm going to look into that and either write a book or a radio documentary or a video one. So I filmed was like, okay, I'm going to look into that and either write a book or a radio documentary or a video one. So I filmed some stuff, but I think it's going to be too difficult because no one wants to be on camera, of course. So I've written most of a book about that. And I've met all sorts of, you know, the patients and things. Recently, a 25 year old woman, for example, that fascinated me because female pedophiles are so rare,

and particularly ones who were taught to camera. So I took a train out to the middle of nowhere in Germany, some little village, and met this woman, and she's got a 27 year old boyfriend who is also a pedophile. Both of them are non-offenders. They both believe that it's... And everyone I've interviewed has said to me they're a non-offender. I don't not very interested in talking to someone who is an offender. How much do you believe there? 90% probably. This woman, I believe more because I just maybe because she's a young woman, it just didn't fit the narrative. And she was so angry when she spoke about other pedophiles

who had offended, and so was her boyfriend. And the idea is that they both have that view, and they want to raise a family together, which is a scary thought. What can you do? This is such a minefield. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Look, one percent of men are thought to be exclusive pedophiles.

Now, obviously, one percent doesn't sound very high, but in the world of seven billion, what's that? Seven hundred million is it in the UK? In most countries, it's, you, you have, you know, more male pedophiles than you have people in the army. It's a lot of people. Those are exclusive pedophiles, so it gets scarier. The more I looked into this, and I apologize to any listeners because I've become a little bit desensitized because I've been looking into this for two years, and I know this is quite scary stuff to even think about and talk about. But there have been some studies I've looked at, some surveys that have shown up to 20% of men

responded to saying they had some attraction to miners, or maybe even it was to children, I need to check that. But they are not exclusive. So most of those people, you don't have to worry about them, they will never offend in their lives, they know it's wrong and they just don't worry about it. That 1%, they can't form a physical attraction to adults, they just can't for whatever reason.

And that's scary because they might say, as you rightly point out how much you believe them, they might say like, I would never do that, but we're thinking, yeah, but what if you're drunk one day, what if you're feeling low? And this is the- People say they're not going to cheat on their partner. Exactly, that's the issue. And that is why we have such an issue. Because everybody asks me the first thing they say is like, how much do you trust them? And the reason we don't trust them is because we don't trust ourselves. And the vast, the 99% of us thank our lucky stars.

We don't have that attraction. And we'd like to think we wouldn't do that anyway. But, I'm not speaking about myself in particular, but we cheat. At an alarming rate, I don't know the actual rates for cheating, but everybody knows somebody who cheated at some point, most couples, there's some bits and pieces of cheating going on, so we don't trust ourselves, so it's very hard to trust the Peterfiles, and that is a problem for the non-offending community, and there is a big community of them. And they want to say, we're not like those people, we would never do it, but they can't say that without us going, we don't quite believe you make. So that's what they have to navigate. And that's the line I'm navigating while talking to these people.

It's such a challenging subject, and I've become really fascinated about the ethics of it. I've had a bunch of conversations over the last few years. I remember this girl I went to uni with, and her friend gave a talk at, and this must have been 2010 or something, so like a while ago. And he gave this talk basically saying, can you imagine how terrible it would be if you were born with an affliction that meant that you could only be attracted to people that are too young to have sex? And it always stuck with me. And I had this conversation with a neuroscientist, guy called Dr. Jack Lewis, being on the beat on the BBC. You should speak to him, you might

get you on. And he wrote a book about the science of sin and they put people of varying sexual preferences into FMRIs with arousal senses and they showed people that were non-peter files every different type of imagery that they could including above and below the age of consent, and registered what the response was mentally and in terms of a rousal response. And then they did the same to the people that had said that they were attracted to children. And the people that were attracted to children, they literally couldn't elicit any response

from them by showing them any type of adult porn. So the sentence that he said that stuck with me, I said, look, do we have any conscious control over the things that we're attracted to sexually? And his answer was no. There is no conscious control over that. And that makes for a really difficult ethical situation. Because you think, well, people didn't choose to be this way. because you think, well, people didn't choose to be this way. And only what, 70 years ago, was Alan Turing was medically castrated for being gay because that was seen as something that was unacceptable.

Now, there is a huge line between being gay. It's not only a difference in degree, it is a difference in kind, because you can't get consent and there's a whole manner of challenges to overcome there, It's not only a difference in degree, it is a difference in kind because you can't get consent and There's a whole manner of challenges to overcome there, but if you are part of a community that isn't That isn't actually doing anything physically wrong and you are afflicted with a problem that you didn't choose What what place is there in society for these people? Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head there and I think that's why I was

going to call this book, we need to talk about Max. Max, just, this guy called Max was the first guy I met from the program in Berlin and he wanted to meet me and he gave me an address. I turned up, I didn't realize before going, I cycled down there and it was a swimming pool, public swimming pool, which is a bit weird to meet a Peter Father. And once I got in there, I had to pay to go in and everything is all a bit weird.

He was with a little girl, like an 11 year old girl. And I said to him, like, what's going on here? And he was like, oh, I'm babysitting her for these other people, I know. I was like, but you're a Peter Father, What are you talking about? Then two other girls came along and they go, oh, hi, Max, can I have some money for the whatever? And he goes, I was like, who are that? And he's like, oh, I'm also babysitting them. He's going to a public swimming pool babysitting three girls who are his age of attraction. That's what he's into. So, and he's trying to tell me

about how he doesn't offend. never has done, he's a great guy, he completed the course, why can't he babysit kids. Now, that is awful. And I've said that to him as well. But the point is, I want to call the bit we need to talk about maths, because it's such a complicated issue, as you say. I don't know, nobody knows what the right thing to do is. The only thing we know is we do need to start talking about it, because the amount of people, amount of children who are abused is outrageous. There's no actual statistics because you don't know there's so much goes unreported, but it's a huge amount of children. The only way to really stop that apart from getting safer and safer schools and letting people

it will always go on. The only way to stop it is to stop the pedophiles themselves. Now what does that mean? You've got. Well, so you've got like different types the pedophiles themselves. Now, what does that mean? You've got, well, so you've got like different types of pedophiles, of course, right? So one type is actually not a pedophile at all. At the clinic, they get a lot of people with OCD who turn up and say they have pedophilia because they are obsessed and they have intrusive thoughts and they say, I'm scared, I'm going to touch my children and they run tests on them to check and they're like, you're

not a pedophile mate. and then they go home. They've just become obsessed with the fear that they might be a pedophile. That's really interesting. Yeah, it's called POCD, but a pedophile, and it's a really, really common one. And it makes sense, right? Imagine if you've got OCD and the type of OCD you have, because it's all different, it's intrusive thoughts, that's one of the most common ones. Now, if you were gonna have intrusive thoughts,

things that like the worst thing possible pops into your head, well, that would be it, right? And it's equally spread out among men and women with OCD, scared they're gonna hurt their children, that kind of thing. But anyway, that's one type of them. But of actual pedophiles, you've got, you've got ones who are basically crossovers with psychopaths and they're going to do whatever they do,

you can't stop them. You've got ones who will never have been no matter what because they've got their moral compass and their aware, critical thinking, all that stuff. In between, there's this murky line of people who are pedophiles. Again, it's, you know, it's a lot of people still and who will, with cognitive bias, convince themselves they're not hurting the children. These are empaths, empaths. These are not psychopaths. These are people who are good people normally, but they convince themselves. And we've talked about beliefs. You can take your mind anywhere if it suits you. So if somebody who's born with those beliefs, they will believe that. So if they turn up at Berlin's clinic or any clinic,

they get taught over and over about what it really does to a child, and it fucks up their life, it fucks up so many children's lives. In fact, that's it. You're basically killing someone if you abuse a child. They need to learn this. And there are three, the Berlin clinic talks about three risk factors for these people, right? They don't bother with the psychopaths. They don't need to bother with the ones who are never going to offend these ones who might offend. There are three risk factors. One is being drunk. They have to be careful about getting drunk because

obviously, you know, it frees up their inhibitions. The other is being around children. You'd be amazed how many of the ones I spoke to. they told me, oh, I would never offend, but like I've just got a new job as a teacher. And I'm like, what are you doing? Why are you being a teacher? This is one of the risk factors, you know that. And they've even told me I had one guy on my podcast who was the head boy of his school, 18 years old,

episode six of my podcast. I had to change his voice slightly. And he's sitting there telling me about how awful it is to abuse. You should never touch a child. But he's like, but I go to these like after school clubs and look after these kids because I need to be near them. And I said, what do you mean he said, well, if I'm near them, I know I won't abuse them. And if I'm away from them, it's harder. And I was like, this is twisted logic. The third risk factor is stigmatization. And that is that thing we're in a community. If you say to someone enough, you are evil, you are a monster, then they just sort of give up and they go, well, okay, I'm a monster then. If you say to someone instead, and this works for all types of criminals and people in prison or whatever, if you say to them, actually you're a valuable member of society.

We love you, we respect you. We think you're great and you're struggling with something difficult and we're gonna help you. That person is gonna do everything they can to not offend. So basically, we need to be able to talk about it more. That's the thing. I mean, outside the therapy that I went to see these pedophiles and to see this clinicians, it's graffiti, hang the pedophiles, hang the pedos in German. And it's just like,

if they see that, that's not helping and more children will be abused. I know right now that you have a huge following, people listening, just by percentage and statistics, there's going to be a percentage of people who don't want to hear this, who want to shut their minds off and go, oh God, how can you talk about such a thing? You must be defending it or what it. And it's like, no, we have to talk about it because otherwise children will continue being abused. And it could be any one of our children. We need to get these people into therapy. So that's all I know. I don't know where their place is in society. I don't know what we do with them because they definitely shouldn't be touching kids.

And you know, I couldn't be clear about that. But we do need to talk about it without that stigma and taboo of, you know, otherwise nothing's going to get done just like Amazon. It makes a lot of sense that if you stigmatize someone that after a while, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because if there's no, um, salvation in normal life, if you're not going to be, if there's no place for you in this world, then fine, I'll just retreat into my own. And this is where you get dark nets, chat rooms, and people doing all manner of weird nasty shit. Yeah, man, I mean, this whole area is, it's like the last taboo, the final truest taboo, I think. There is no more

uncomfortable conversation for people to have. And I understand, you know, you see the guys that I can't remember what it's called. It's like honey trapping, but it's for kids. Peter, if I'll hunt us? Yeah, the American one, that guy. There's a couple of famous ones on Facebook. They always turn up, the people think that they're going to go meet a young boy or a young girl and that turns out to be this huge burly guy with a beard and some of his mates looks like dog, the bounty hunter. Yeah.

And you see that and you think quite rightly, these people, they shouldn't be near kids, they should be off the streets. And then, I mean, you know, your previous readers, some of them from the sun, will be exactly the sort of ones that are the hang them in the streets. But if that rhetoric, if being so, using such a broad brush to paint an entire group of people that has subgroups within it, some of whom deserve compassion, some of whom require support and others of whom just need locking up. If you use the lock them up across them all and that then down the line causes more children to be harmed, you're actually creating the problem that you're trying

to stop. Yeah, there's a certain element. I'm careful when I say this because I don't mean everyone, but there is a tiny element of lady-dough protest too much. There's similarly, with homophobia, a lot of people who are so homophobic turned out to be gay, you do find there have been certain pedophile hunters who have turned out to be pedophiles themselves. Obviously not the majority of them, probably the minority, but that does and can happen. And also it's a case of like, well, I'm so against this thing, so I couldn't possibly be one. And we're like, we'd never said you were, mate.

Let's just talk about it. Well, isn't it some high percentage of killers returned to the crime scene? Mm-hmm. Some huge percentage of arsonists as well also returned to the crime scene. So I think that the police keep a log of people that turn up on the day. That's one of the reasons that they keep a log around the witness around the police line. They keep a log of the people that have arrived because a lot of the time or some of the time you're going to find the person that committed the crime that you're trying to seek there watching it. Yeah, sort of rubber necking, you know, checking it out. There's a huge

different, particularly, the difference, particularly in that community, the P2Var community, which is sort of delved into, you know, speaking to them and stuff's a huge difference, particularly in their community, the P2File community, which are sort of delved into, you know, speaking to them and stuff over the last couple of years, and they're online message boards and stuff in Germany. And they get very offended and sensitive about the difference between an offending and a nonoffending P2File.

Do they have to? Yeah, well, they say that an offending one is a P2File. And a nonoffending one is a pedophile. Some of them are proud. This woman, this 25-year woman, she said, this is my gender or my sexual orientation. I would never ever act on it, but this is who I am and I want to be able to express who I am. Yeah, it's so hard for us to get our heads round.

But one time I fell out with them all because when there was news about six months ago or a year ago of Madeline McCann's abductor potentially being this German guy in prison in Germany, there was this big news story and I thought obviously as a journalist I'm going to get the scoop on this, I've been in with these guys, so I messaged the message board I knew about and I said listen, does anyone know the pedophile being accused right now of taking Madeline McCann? And they, I left it for a couple of days, went back and checked. They're about 100 messages. They were livid, absolutely livid with me. And I thought, what have I done? What about you? As a, as a journalist, you don't want to lose your, you know, you've

worked so hard to get access to these people and trust with them. And I thought at first the problem might have been that I asked them, like because these are non-offenders, they're going, why would we know him? You know, why do you think we would know a person like that? I thought that would be the problem. The problem it turned out was that I referred to the potential abductor of Madeline McCann as a pedophile. And they were saying he is not a pedophile.

He's a pedochriminal. They were fucking, they were like, is not a p-d-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-e-re-re- Peter thousand the community, but it's a whole different world now and it's just so complex. It's a really difficult conversation to have. I mean, it's not the first time that I've brought it up on the show. And I think, every time that I think about it, it makes me, it's like such a cocktail of different emotions. Because there is disgust in there, there's a lot of Ick. And you think, why am I even, why do I even have to have this conversation? And then there's kind of a morbid fascination with it. The curiosity inside of me compels me to want to learn more about this and also to kind of tread the tightrope of acceptable and groundbreaking and sort of pushing new frontiers in terms of ethics and things like that.

I mean, I had a conversation not long ago with a guy called Sven Nyholm who is an ethics of robots, a robotic ethics professor and he was talking about the ethics of child sex robots. And if you take canteentism to its end degree, so if you talk about utilitarianism, is it fair, is it not? Is it, is there something sacred and representative inside of the robot itself? You know, even if you were able to reduce real world cases, is it, are you doing something that is unsacred by having this sort of mascot almost of a child. Man, there is, it's endlessly difficult. There was a story of a guy, I think he was Venezuelan, who he fancy this porn star or whatever.

And he got one of these DVDs from the street somewhere, in Venice and Kadakas, or I don't know where, and he was flying somewhere. I don't know the ins and outs, where was it? Like maybe to Puerto Rico, I'm going to say, all vice versa. And he got stopped at customs, and they said, what is this, you know, one of these little DVDs, and it's a woman who looks very young. And they put them in prison. And they said, this person's clearly very young. And at his trial hearing, the porn star flew to the country and turned up and said, I was over 18 at the time.

So he got off and got some remuneration for it, of course, and you know, what a horrible thing to have happened to him. However, the reason that he was in trouble is because her body had failed. I can't remember what the name of the test is right now, but there is a test that is done to determine whether something is probably child porn or not. And it's based on like measurements of the body. So her body. So her computer algorithm. Yeah, and her body was

according to the algorithm, that of a child, just because of nature that happens sometimes. So on the one hand, he got off rightly so because she was over 18 and able to give her consent. But what does that really mean? Because what he was doing was being attracted to a woman who looks like a child and that goes back to your point, is that then okay. The argument tends to be around that because it is illegal in most countries even to have like anime and cartoon porn of children. So the argument around that is on one side, you've got people saying it's good because it stops them actually offending real children.

And others say it's used as a stepping stone. Like people say about a woman. Yeah, wait a minute, go whatever, yeah. Exactly. And there's no consensus on that at the moment. Fuck man. Yeah, I mean, what's the essence of what you're trying to get out here?

Just because somebody is over 16 in the UK or over 18 on a video but look significantly younger than that. What where are you drawing the line here because if the outcome that the person is getting from this particular piece of work is illegal but somehow you've managed to create a situation in which the particulars of it are legal. Yeah, fuck man. Well, I mean, good luck, good luck finishing the book, too, because that's, that's a real, you've got a trooper of a, of a journalist to be able to go through that, I suppose. Have you found it uncomfortable? You know, like, how much is it affected you personally, learning about this sort of stuff? The first time when I went to meet Max, that was difficult. And I, maybe in a old-fashioned

man way, I don't cry, I don't, do you know what I mean? And that's just how you brought up, right? I cry at silly movies, maybe, but I don't quite in real life. And I met him and I hung around with him, I spoke for an hour, half an hour. Just, my head was swimming because you're just like, I can't believe he's turned up with three little girls when he's talking to a journalist. Like, what does he do when I'm not here? What does he do? I was just like, and I'm sat there in a swimming pool place, not in the pool, of course. But with loads of people, but with loads of

people around me, loads of children around me who have no idea who this guy is, is sort of this chubby looking, you know, normal looking guy wearing little speedos with a t-shirt over it, and it was just, you know, a bit cliché. And after speaking to him, I went across to the park, across the road, and I got an ice cream just because it was about 40 degrees, and I was like, I'm just going to get an ice cream. And I went and sat on a little log, and I just broke down. And I don't do that. It's just not me. I get emotional. Of course, I do. It's very, I did, you know, that feeling when it suddenly happens, you've lose control of like you're shaking. And I was just crying and shaking.

People were looking at me going past because it was so real. It was so real. And I was just crying and shaking people were looking at me going past because it was so real. It was so real. And I think, you know, after that you do become a little bit desensitized because you're working when it for so long. And that is what I was talking about, you know, when I said before that, you know, I got to perform an exorcism, I got to do these things. That's, I suppose, my adrenaline junkie.

For a journalist, a lot of the time, that's your adrenaline, that's your fuel. That was too much that particular day. But a lot of the situations I get myself into, when I'm walking around a park with a 25-year-old girl telling me she's a pedophile, she's actually attracted to babies. And I'm thinking, like, oh my god, oh god, but I'm also thinking, like, wow, this is so weird and bizarre right now. So yeah, it's a bit of everything. It's an interesting one because you have to manage your own emotions, but there's another layer on top that maybe people need to know about this and perhaps to get other people to find out about it, I need to go deeper into the rabbit hole. And yeah, it's strange, man.

I mean, it seems to me that the world, the investigative journalist, there aren't those celebrities of that industry anymore. You don't have, or I don't know many of them, I mean, who have I had on? John Lonson. Yeah, who was the guy that you used to work for the Guardian that did the stuff with not Edward Snowden with Julian Assange? Young guy. Anyway, I had him on the show. I can't remember his name. I've got his name.

Got that happens. You do so many shows in the end, then. Well, 350 years. You end up forgetting him., so he he he want to pull it to prize for one of his journalism pieces and he introduced Julian Assange Or maybe Edward Snowden to Wembley Arena on by video feed so he came out and James ball that's it James ball, So he came out and did this thing. But it really doesn't feel like sort of the investigative journalist world has any superstars.

Am I wrong there or is that kind of the way that it is at the moment? Well, there was so many as well now. I mean, it's easier to be a journalist. It in terms of like traveling, getting around the place in the 80s and 90s, especially like, for example, travel journalism. You could just get sent somewhere, you get given like three or four thousand pounds to write a little travel piece, everything's

paid for you, it's all beautiful and wonderful. Now, I'm competing as a journalist and I've got the, you know, the NCTJ is the journalism qualification, you need to work again, all of that stuff, but you're competing with like a billion bloggers, you're competing with a billion people on medium and all this stuff and the stuff that sells, the stuff that gets views on YouTube generally I'm, because I think you're an exception to this role because you have some controversial stuff and it does well. But we're encouraged to have very lame dull stuff because advertisers accept it more. Yeah, safe stuff.

And it's bland and that's part of what I was saying before, again, moving towards this brave new world where everyone's happy and safe. Nobody wants to talk about taboo stuff. One of the reasons I wanted to write about Peter Philly was also because I thought, right now, I'm towards the beginning of my journalism career. And I'm not going to be able to compete with John Ronson, who's a huge star. And as a few others, like Will Storl. And they go and do some of the show in a couple of a couple of ways.

I'm getting him on as well. Yeah, for his new book. Yeah. a few others like Will Storl and they go and do some of the show in a couple of a couple of ways. I'm getting him on as well. Yeah, for his new book. Yeah. Yeah, super good, really, really interesting book. I love that. I'm excited to get on. Yeah.

Haven't read it yet. I got it on PDF, but he's he's probably have you read his books then? Like before. No, no, no, no, this is the first I've been introduced to him. Oh, he's great. The Heretics was one of them. And again, the stuff that you and I, I think, are very interested in. And the listeners will be as well, the beliefs and how people go, and he hangs out with

these strange weird people. And you just think, I'm thinking, well, how am I going to compete with that? And I think the one thing there, and probably not going to touch, is Peter Philly. John Ronson doesn't need that controversy right now. What's the point? He did psychopaths. He's a huge star now. He doesn't need to do that. So, you have to take that risk, that kind of risk when you're hungry. Does

Louis Thru have to go and really do taboo stuff right now? He's got everything he needs. He can get stuff produced very easily. In the 90s, he was really, you know, hanging out with Nazis and stuff. Now he's sort of doing people with autism and things like that. It's a lot. Still very interesting. Yeah. yeah, it is. But does he need that anymore? So it's when you're young and hungry, I suppose. And, you know, yeah, I want to get that book out, but it's going to be, it's going to be very hard to find a public. If any publishers listening was brave enough to be interested, you know, get in touch. I had Hamilton Morrison, you know, the pharmacopie guy from Vice. Yeah, drugs.

I had him on and I think he did very much the same thing. I mean, his first piece that really broke him was flying out to South America somewhere and getting burned with the frog venom. He took Ritalin that day. Do you take Ritalin that day? I think it took Ritalin one other day and it kind of made a name for himself by mixing drugs, even though he understands the pharmacology of it down to some, he was blowing off all the people on the internet that were giving him shit saying, they don't understand that the Androgen receptor for this particular thing doesn't even bind to the same receptor that the,

whatever drug does. And I think he did the same as well, man. So I think, if this is what it takes to sort of make a name for yourself, ethically doing something that doesn't involve compromising journalistic integrity, but does talk about pushing the envelope of what people get exposed to, I think that's a way to do it. Man, Andrew Gold, ladies and gentlemen, people want to check out your podcast and other stuff that you do, where should they go? On the edge with Andrew Gold, it's on YouTube, it doesn't have much of a following for some reason, I think I've got more of a face for radio, but on audio, Spotify, Apple, all those places, that's where it's much more popular these days, but check out both if you want.

I'll send them the links in the show notes below, Andrew, thanks for today. Thank you.