UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

Freddie Sayers speaks to UnHerd’s Aris Roussinos, reporting from the frontline of the war in Ukraine.Read the article here: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Florence Read meets Silkie Carlo.There are six million security cameras in use in the UK, one for every 11 people, and the majority are Chinese surveillance systems. London, where UnHerd has its offices, is the most surveilled city outside of China, and has more cameras per person than Beijing. So it has to be asked, are we being watched?That is one claim made by a new report from Big Brother Watch on surveillance cameras made by Chinese companies. Silkie Carlo, one of the editors of the report, and the director of Big Brother Watch, joined Florence Read to investigate.Read the post article Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddie Sayers meets Ilya Shapiro.Ilya Shapiro was due to start his new job as senior lecturer and executive director of Georgetown's Law Centre for the Constitution. But this week, he quit. All because of a single Tweet.Freddie Sayers invited Shapiro to the studio to understand how censorship under the guise of 'diversity and inclusion' at Georgetown had played a part in his resignation.Read the Post article here: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddie Sayers sits down to discuss the pandemic response with Biologist, Bret Weinstein.Before the pandemic, evolutionary biologist and former Evergreen professor Bret Weinstein was lauded by both sides of the political divide for his insights into the crisis on American campuses. As a member of the so-called 'intellectual dark web', Weinstein was expanding his audience and being profiled by legacy media like the New York Times. Then the pandemic began and his heterodox perspective suddenly fell out of favour, even with many of his erstwhile allies.Advocating for alternative treatments for Covid, questioning the efficacy of the global vaccine programme and challenging narratives of the pandemic came at a cost. Without warning, the Dark Horse podcast was demonetised on YouTube and Weinstein was forced to split from the views of his former friends and supporters. So, how can we seek truth in such divided times? Freddie Sayers invited Bret into the UnHerd studio in London to try to understand what his views really are. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

UnHerd's Florence Read meets Elena Ledneva.Elena Ledneva, a woman living with her husband and young child in the UK, applied for a Master's course in hospitality at the University of West London. Elena had years of experience in running events, including welcoming international delegates to the Sochi Winter Olympics, so on paper, she would seem to be the ideal candidate. But last week she was rejected due to 'the situation in Ukraine'. Was she really rejected for being Russian? Elena joined Florence Read in the UnHerd studio to share her story.Read the Post article here: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddie Sayers meets David Heymann.Will monkeypox be the next pandemic after COVID? To try to find an answer, Freddie Sayers invited Professor David Heymann to the UnHerd studio. Currently based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Professor Heymann is one of the world’s most senior infectious disease epidemiologists. For 22 years he worked at the World Health Organisation in Geneva, as chief of the AIDS research programme and Assistant Director for Health Security. Before that he was in Africa for 13 years investigating the spread of monkeypox.Read the Post article here: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddie Sayers meets Pavel Podvig.Since the invasion of Ukraine, the outcome that nobody has wanted to contemplate is that of Russian nuclear escalation. Threats that “mirror moves” would be made by the Kremlin if NATO expanded, as we heard in last week’s interview with UN representative for Russia Dmitry Polyanskiy, suggest that a strike might not be out of the question. With Finland and Sweden seeking to join NATO, is nuclear war more likely now that it was three months ago? By trying to push Vladimir Putin to the brink, is the West actually increasing the chance of a nuclear incident? What actually is the sequence of events that would lead to nuclear conflict?To help us think through this difficult topic, UnHerd invited Dr. Pavel Podvig to the studio. Podvig is a senior researcher in the WMD programme at the Institute for Disarmament Research and a researcher with the programme on science and global security at Princeton University. He runs the world’s premier website dedicated to analysing Putin’s nuclear capability and edited the definitive encyclopedia of Russian nuclear forces. Dr. Podvig joined Freddie Sayers live from his office in Geneva.Read the Post article: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddie Sayers meets Michael Sandel.Do we deserve what we have? Are the elites any better than the rest of us? Do the right people get to run the world? One political philosopher who attempts to tackle these big questions is Professor Michael Sandel. A Harvard professor since the 1980s and world famous author of many bestselling books, including 'What Money Can't Buy', and most recently, 'The Tyranny of Merit', Sandel has made the case for overhauling Western neoliberalism. The alternative society Sandel suggests is more forgiving of failure and confers cultural status onto building community rather than capital. In a wide-ranging conversation with Freddie Sayers, Sandel explores how elite institutions from the Ivy League to Wall Street have given us the wrong idea about who deserves power. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddie Sayers meets Dmitriy Polyanskiy.First Deputy Representative of Russia to the UN Dmitry Polyanskiy joins Freddie Sayers to discuss the nuclear threat against NATO members and possible conclusions to the conflict in Ukraine.Read the Post article here: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Former computer programmer and political theorist Curtis Yarvin is considered by many to be a dangerous thinker. He has been named in the New York Times and Vanity Fair as a founding member of the burgeoning 'New Right' and caused a stir on Tucker Carlson. His theories of power seem to have made their way from the fringe blogosphere into the mainstream media. Now, people are trying to make sense of some of what Yarvin wants for the Western nations he criticises and where his thinking might go next.One particularly bold claim made by Yarvin is that America would be better run as a monarchy, rather than a democracy. To dig deeper into this esoteric political philosophy, Freddie Sayers invited Curtis Yarvin to the UnHerd studio. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.