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 pus...
May 20, 2022•26 min
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 soci...
May 16, 2022•45 min
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.
May 12, 2022•42 min
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 n...
May 08, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Freddie Sayers meets Professor Christine Stabell Benn. A new Danish study reveals disparities in all-cause mortality between mRNA and adenovirus vaccines. The results raise some difficult questions about the unexpected effects of the most popular COVID vaccines. Freddie Sayers speaks to the study's author Prof. Christine Stabell-Benn, from the University of Southern Denmark, to find out more. Read the full Post article here: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
May 03, 2022•35 min
Freddie Sayers discusses the backlash against Western values with Douglas Murray When Douglas Murray was writing his new book The War on the West, Putin had not yet launched an actual war on the edge of Europe. Now, two months after the invasion of Ukraine, has the battle of ideas he writes about been put into perspective? Freddie Sayers speaks to Douglas Murray about the factions of the Right who have been fooled by Putin’s ‘woke West’ propaganda and why the war in Ukraine is not the wake-up ca...
Apr 25, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Freddie Sayers meets Michael Tracey. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Western media has been overwhelmed with support for Zelensky's resistance and condemnation of Putin's invasion. Intervention from the US and Europe has now extended to supplying arms and sanctioning Russia. Some are demanding this support goes even further, suggesting 'no fly zones' or boots on the ground in Ukraine. Journalist, Substacker and Twitter provocateur Michael Tracey takes a very different view. Despite initia...
Apr 19, 2022•48 min
Freddie Sayers meets Sergej Sumlenny. As the war in Ukraine has become more entrenched, there has been much discussion of the small Eastern European states which might be annexed into the Russian Federation. One political scientist and journalist has taken a different view. Sergej Sumlenny is Russian-born, but lives in Berlin. On Twitter he predicted that rather than expanding, Russia was due to dramatically contract. Might he be right? In principle, Sumlenny argues, Russia's many ethnic states ...
Apr 11, 2022•32 min
The biggest city in China is in complete lockdown, with no end date in sight. Cases are rising and the 26 million residents of Shanghai are not permitted to leave their homes at all — not even to buy groceries or walk the dog. Footage has emerged of eerily deserted streets, but reliable information about what is really going on inside the strictest “Zero Covid” regime in the world is hard to come by, owing to the Chinese Communist Party’s control of the media. Now for the first time, UnHerd can ...
Apr 07, 2022•18 min
Commentators on the war in Ukraine seem to have come to a consensus: public figures have a moral responsibility not to challenge anything other than the Russian narrative. This rejection of balance in favour of propaganda poses a problem for political thinkers like Yanis Varoufakis, who has been accused of 'Westsplaining' and being a Putin apologist in the last week alone. To give this controversial conversation a chance, Varoufakis joined Freddie Sayers for a wide-ranging discussion about Weste...
Apr 05, 2022•39 min
Health Secretary Sajid Javid came into the UnHerd studio to talk to Freddie Sayers and look back at lessons learned from the Covid era. Read the full post here : Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Mar 31, 2022•28 min
Freddie Sayers meets Francis Fukuyama. Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist and public intellectual, most famous for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man which has helped to define how we understand contemporary history. His new book is called Liberalism and its Discontents. Freddie Sayers spoke to Dr. Fukuyama about the war in Ukraine, current trends in Western democracy, and how liberalism can better understand aspects of the human condition it has historically neglected. Rea...
Mar 24, 2022•42 min
Getting an accurate picture of who is winning the war in Ukraine has become increasingly difficult in the information age. Log onto Twitter and there are images of burnt out Russian tanks being towed away by Ukrainian farmers and hostage-style videos featuring Russians POWs expressing regret over the invasion; meanwhile, Western news outlets are littered with tales of doughty Ukrainian protesters sending the Russian enemy into retreat and Kyivans discovering a newfound unity in the face of war. ...
Mar 21, 2022•33 min
Freddie Sayers meets with Samo Burja. With Western powers increasingly united against Russia, we seem to be witnessing the end of the unipolar world. Financially, culturally and spiritually we have never been so bifurcated. Could this be the end of civilisation as we know it? To find a way through the big issues at stake, Freddie Sayers sat down with Samo Burja, a sociologist and the founder of Bismarck Analysis. Read the post article here Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informat...
Mar 17, 2022•36 min
When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine it was under the guise of ‘denazifying’ the country. But are there really any Nazis in Ukraine? Or is this just a story spun by the Kremlin? Aris Roussinos joins Freddie Sayers to unpick this contentious topic and seek some insight into Ukraine’s far-Right factions. Read the article here: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Mar 15, 2022•18 min
Freddie Sayers meets Marlene Laruelle. Aleksandr Dugin, the ultra-nationalist Russian philosopher and erstwhile organiser of the National Bolshevik Party, has been referred to as ‘Putin’s brain’. Professor Marlene Laruelle, the world’s leading expert on Dugin, says his influence is no longer direct. Dugin stated mission is to preserve the "Russian soul" and expand the Eurasian empire in defiance of the West. Today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and increasingly isolated global position feels like...
Mar 10, 2022•33 min
Freddie Sayers meets Leonid Ragozin. Leonid Ragozin was reporting in Siberia when Putin began to send troops to the Ukrainian border at Belarus. Despite the menacing signs, he was quick to voice his skepticism about Russia’s intentions to invade. But when tanks rolled into Ukraine over a week ago, Ragozin was left, like many, wondering: why had he got it so wrong? To try to answer this question Freddie Sayers met Ragozin to discuss Putin’s mysterious motivations and what the possible outcomes ar...
Mar 08, 2022•33 min
Freddie Sayers meets Justin Bronk. It has been a week since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and one of many unanswered questions is why Russia has yet to launch the vast majority of its combat aircraft, despite having an advantage over the comparatively small Ukrainian air force. Could Putin be holding back the full might of his army for tactical or political reasons? Or is this failure to launch a symptom of poor planning by the Kremlin? To seek out some technical expertise on this topic, Fredd...
Mar 02, 2022•18 min
Freddie Sayers meets Andreas Umland. This week we are being inundated with information about what is going on in Ukraine. And the challenge just to get above the noise and find out what exactly is going on and where it might go next. To dig into some of these questions, Freddie Sayers sat down with Dr. Andreas Umland, an analyst for the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European studies and expert in contemporary Russian and Ukrainian politics. Read the full article here: Hosted on Acast. See acast.c...
Mar 01, 2022•28 min
Flo Read meets Siva, Autumn, and Ann. Public schools in San Francisco sent their students home for 18 months during the COVID pandemic, the longest school closure in the country. While children were falling behind at home, the city’s elected school board was tasked with handling the re-opening. But, it seemed, they were too busy trying to pander to progressive demands to get children back in the classroom. A group of parents, angry with the extended shutdown and dithering meetings, launched a ca...
Feb 25, 2022•25 min
Freddie Sayers meets Konstantin Kisin. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, pundits from mainstream and alternative media platforms across the political spectrum have been left eating humble pie. Predictions of Russia’s next move as troops built up on the border have ranged from blaming hawkish Americans for hyping up a non-existent threat, to claims that Putin was using the standoff to make himself an international talking point. Now that it is clear that Putin is d...
Feb 24, 2022•32 min
Freddie Sayers meets Louis-Vincent Gave. Since the end of November 2021, Moderna's share price has been falling dramatically, from $368 to $147 at the time of writing. Why might this be? And what does it tell us about the vaccines more generally? Freddie Sayers sat down with Louis Gave, a financial analyst and co-founder of Gavekal, a financial services firm based in Hong Kong. Gave noted that the markets had been ahead of politicians and even epidemiologists on the Omicron variant in terms of i...
Feb 15, 2022•25 min
Freddie Sayers meets Glenn Loury. To get a handle on some of the race related news stories coming out of America, from Biden’s Supreme Court nomination to Joe Rogan’s cancellation, Freddie Sayers spoke to Glenn Loury, an economist and cultural critic. Loury was the first African American tenured professor of economics in the history of Harvard University and has set himself apart from his contemporaries by taking a sceptical view of the racialised rhetoric of American academia. In this wide-rang...
Feb 14, 2022•36 min
Featuring: Mary Harrington, Julie Bindel, Hadley Freeman and Sally Chatterton. It wasn’t long ago that feminism was a united movement resisting the patriarchal systems of old. Now, disputes between factions of feminists take up as much time as the fight for women’s liberation. To dig a little deeper into the points of schism and solidarity in fourth wave feminism, UnHerd invited activist and author Julie Bindel and columnists Hadley Freeman and Mary Harrington to an evening at the Art Workers’ G...
Feb 03, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Freddie Sayers meets Dr Camilla Holten-Møller, chair of the Expert Group for Mathematical Modelling at Denmark’s public health agency ‘Statens Serum Institut’. Holten-Møller was in charge of producing the models before Christmas that informed Danish policy, and her group’s updated advice in January led to the cancellation of all Danish Covid restrictions (even as case numbers continue to climb to all-time highs). She joins UnHerd to discuss Denmark's radical new policy, data modelling and why Om...
Jan 31, 2022•35 min
Freddie Sayers meets Kate Clanchy. Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher, and editor. She has been a qualified and practicing teacher since she was 22. Her writing includes three prize-winning collections of poetry, the Costa First Novel Prize-shortlisted Meeting the English, and the Orwell Prize-winning memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Last summer her work came under sustained criticism for its purportedly insensitive depictions of her students. Picador, her publisher until last w...
Jan 26, 2022•46 min
In a wide-ranging and forthright interview with Freddie Sayers, Professor Cyrille Cohen, head of Immunology at Bar Ilan University and a member of the advisory committee for vaccines for the Israeli Government said: - The Green Pass / vaccine passport concept was no longer relevant in the Omicron era and should be phased out (he expected it to be in short order in Israel) - He and his colleagues were surprised and disappointed that the vaccines did not prevent transmission, as they had originall...
Jan 18, 2022•31 min
Steve James is a critical care consultant at King’s College Hospital in London. When Health Secretary Sajid Javid visited last Friday, he asked the NHS staff about what they thought of the forthcoming mandates that will make Covid vaccination a condition of deployment for NHS staff. Dr James spoke out, saying why he was against the mandate and why he hadn’t taken the vaccine himself. It made headlines across the UK media, in particular coming from a Cambridge-educated NHS frontline doctor. Dr Ja...
Jan 12, 2022•37 min
UnHerd's contributors look back at a tumultuous year. The year began with riots in Capitol Hill in Washington and the removal of Donald Trump from social media; in March Meghan and Harry gave their interview to Oprah from a Los Angeles mansion, and in April Prince Phillip passed away; Western troops departed Afghanistan, leaving chaotic scenes in the capital Kabul; Maya Forstater was judged by the courts to be legally entitled to her gender critical viewpoints — and Kathleen Stock was forced out...
Dec 31, 2021•1 hr 22 min
As new data about the Omicron variant is interpreted (and perhaps predictably, misinterpreted) by experts worldwide, South Africa has become a coronavirus case-study under global surveillance. Last week, UnHerd spoke to Pieter Streicher about the data coming out of Gauteng, but we now wanted to look at the bigger picture in that country. To get a snapshot into the cultural and political reality on the ground, Freddie Sayers sat down with Brian Pottinger , former Editor of the South African Sunda...
Dec 22, 2021•26 min
