00:05:04.560They can hack entire nation's devices if they want to.
00:05:09.940We have the most totalitarian surveillance legislation of any democracy in the world in the UK and some of the most advanced capabilities.
00:05:20.060We've seen over the last few decades how you've had environmental activists, race equality campaigners, environmentalists being spied on by their own government and sometimes with very negative impacts.
00:05:35.880um that is a big chunk of the battle that we have to fight and i would like to see a bit more
00:05:43.340uh that to kind of register on the political spectrum a bit more um but meanwhile i would
00:05:49.180say to everyone use signal the class divide never gets discussed you know we talk about divisions
00:05:55.580in society we talk about you know ethnicity constantly are we being fair to this group of
00:06:03.100people, or that group of people, far too little discussion on social mobility. And actually,
00:06:12.480what I see is the more governments tax and redistribute, the lower levels of social mobility
00:06:19.520are. For social mobility, people need opportunity. They need that through education, which I've
00:06:24.660mentioned earlier, I think is one of the great challenges ahead of us. They need it in the
00:06:29.760workplace and working from home is not good for young people to get on and so yeah I do think1.00
00:06:37.680I do think that it's good to see actually some 2019 red ball Tory MPs who come from working0.95
00:06:43.720class backgrounds but I do think the class divide in this country is set in stone far more than it
00:06:49.380ever was the opportunities to break out of it aren't there you know world wars ironically
00:06:54.840gave people from humble backgrounds a chance to move up through the ladder.
00:07:00.380Grammar schools, for example, gave a lot of people from those backgrounds
00:07:04.080the chance to excel and go up the ladder.
00:07:06.900And I do ever so slightly feel that middle-class Britain has pulled the drawbridge up.
00:07:11.820So I have been a little bit thinking about this question of birth rate.
00:07:17.980Global birth rates declining in all developed nations.
00:07:21.300and Elon Musk has been talking about this recently so I do think we have been talking
00:07:26.320about it but prior to him and also someone like Matthew Iglesias in his book One Billion
00:07:32.720Americans talks about this which is just it seems to be close to a law of I don't know what you
00:07:43.340would call it developmental economics or what have you that as societies become wealthier and
00:07:50.200more educated people stop having enough children to replace their numbers
00:07:54.460naturally and you see it in pretty much everywhere on earth and the only places
00:08:01.880you don't see it are either societies that are that haven't become wealthy yet0.64
00:08:09.480or the highly religious the ultra ultra Orthodox Jews the the Amish men and
00:08:19.240Mennonites um you know the Amish in America have more than doubled their numbers in since the 90s0.69
00:08:26.340which is incredible right while the rest of America has receded below replacement level0.98
00:08:33.580and that's what happens when you don't use condoms mate it's what happens when you don't
00:08:38.400have entertainment mate what else are you gonna do yeah but it's interesting to think about the
00:08:45.280the long-term future of humanity right like if everyone what we want to happen is that poor
00:08:52.160countries stop being poor like poor countries we want that to happen so let's say that happens0.87
00:08:58.400and everywhere on earth now is replaced it was below replacement level except for the ultra1.00
00:09:04.920religious minorities that are doubling their numbers every 10 years what a great recipe for1.00
00:09:12.000future world it's interesting to think about what world that creates yeah i'm sure there1.00
00:09:17.720won't maybe a vision might no it'll be fine maybe it's not a big problem maybe it's such a slow
00:09:22.160moving emergency that the equilibrium will shift and you know it's kind of not something to worry
00:09:28.040about but but maybe i don't know maybe it changes the fundamental fabric of society if you have like0.98
00:10:06.320I think there is, along with this trans wave, and I'm not going to conflate the two because that's not remotely what I'm saying.0.76
00:10:15.320However, if I was a paedophile and I was watching with glee at the severance of family control and autonomy like in the schools in Birmingham and what our children, primary school aged children are being taught.0.53
00:10:27.420The fact that if you're a man, you can go away with the girl guides now and they don't have to tell your parents, the parents of the children.
00:10:33.120um and the sex sort of the way that we talk about sex in schools um and then pornography and the
00:10:41.100way that that's easily accessible for children and it all just it's really uncomfortable i feel
00:10:46.580like i'm wearing some sort of foil hat and should be on the david ike show instead of this very
00:10:50.420sensible and reasonable show but it does feel that there's some really uncomfortable things
00:10:55.900happening with the erosion of of boundaries this is something that people will not talk about
00:11:00.860That there is a methamphetamine epidemic among gay men that is killing large numbers of gay men.0.99
00:11:20.940Certainly the gay press barely talks about it.
00:11:24.320It's implicated in a whole bunch of things that you can see.
00:11:29.880For example, it's the real story of Matthew Shepard. Not that he was assaulted by two complete redneck strangers who hated gays, but he was assaulted by his own boyfriend who was on meth for five days. That makes much more sense of the situation than these other things.
00:11:47.880But the ability and the need to suppress this reality, because it's dirty laundry, because it's telling the truth about problems that we have, it's not helping gay men either.
00:11:58.180And I really would like to see this treated with the seriousness it deserves.
00:12:03.600Andrew, why is it happening? I've not heard about this at all. I don't know if you have, Frank.
00:12:06.940You have. Well, maybe you're more informed than I am. But why is it happening? Why is it specifically in the gay community?
00:12:14.720It's a good question because there are other communities, for example.
00:12:17.620In America, it's very much a sort of working class, white, rural epidemic as well.
00:12:25.440It's used in conjunction with sex.0.56
00:12:28.320It's apparently a fantastic sort of experience temporarily when you're on this thing.
00:12:35.520You feel great and powerful and all the rest of it, you have sex for days on end.
00:12:39.440um and people talk about that experience as super wonderful and they can't go back to having sex
00:12:47.860without it i eat i've just seen it destroy people friends and and and it goes on everyone
00:12:56.680acknowledges it privately it reminds me of the early days of aids in which people refused to
00:13:02.400actually acknowledge because they were scared that the facts of the matter would alienate people
00:13:07.100from gay people uh well we are alienating ourselves we are committing suicide in a way
00:13:13.960as a community and you can barely see a word written about it um and and i think again it's0.92
00:13:22.060partly the media's attempt well meant but cowardly not to air dirty laundry about minorities when in
00:13:31.100fact that dirty laundry needs to be aired in order to help minorities in order to have minorities
00:13:35.640help themselves um so for example denying that in america that the terrible toll of violence on
00:13:43.660black people is something that is a function of white supremacy when it is clearly a function of0.99
00:13:48.280of criminals killing them uh is an important thing to remember um infinitely more black americans0.99
00:13:58.240are killed by civilians than by cops and yet we barely mention the former and we obsess on the
00:14:04.600ladder and i'm not saying that killing by cops is something we should not be concerned about we
00:14:10.000should but the perspective is all skewed similarly in terms of where gay people are instead of
00:14:16.660talking about the hatred other people have for us which they generally don't except for a few
00:14:20.560nutters uh let's talk about how we can take care of ourselves what issues of self-esteem are still
00:14:29.120buried within us the things that makes it preferable to go on these drug benders than
00:14:35.400just get on with your life building a relationship or setting up a home or or getting a productive
00:14:39.900career going um it happens to be a very potent drug too which seems to hook people very quickly
00:14:47.260and be incredibly hard to recover from um it has taken a real toll it's still going on well there
00:14:55.060are lots of things. I would certainly have talked about the cannabis issue if we hadn't
00:14:59.320already done so. It isn't talked about anything like enough. And the correlation between cannabis
00:15:05.340use and mental health cannot be talked about enough because it's, and the correlation between
00:15:09.440cannabis use and crime can't be talked about enough because they are major problems. I'm
00:15:13.720pursuing a petition on this matter at the moment to try and get the government to inquire into the
00:15:18.360link to see if it is not just a correlation, but a genuine causal connection. But the other thing
00:15:23.700that always preoccupies me and has preoccupied me since my childhood, is the horrible way
00:15:30.400in which we allow the car to dominate our civilization.
00:15:35.200Have chosen to make it the dominant means of transport, and will not turn away from
00:19:34.440It's perfectly credible, in my view, to say not used as a cover.
00:19:37.620But it's like if we're paying for if we're trying to reduce the number of physical contacts where people can spread disease, doing things contactless sort of makes sense.
00:19:45.920Just as a counter argument, that would be one of the things. Right.
00:19:48.480The other thing you talk about, the the, you know, erasure of the working class, I get that completely.1.00
00:19:53.620But it's been already happening. It's pretty much if you listen to Andrew Yang, why Donald Trump got elected.0.90
00:19:58.160Right. Automation is taking over people's jobs. Is that really like people are using COVID nefariously or is it just like what's happening?
00:20:06.000It's not nefariously, but they're using it to speed up the process.
00:20:09.140So why would you open your branches if it costs you X amount to employ so many people
00:20:12.800when you can just have a machine that you put your check into and you save yourself a lot of money?
00:34:18.980It's probably all out there somewhere, but it's kind of, it's scattered everywhere.
00:34:23.920We should just, you know, this is a perfect example of what the state ought to be able to do very simply.
00:34:28.740I mean, you could, you know, someone at the DWP ought to be able to do that in kind of two days.
00:34:33.500Just gather all this stuff together, put it in one place, produce a little booklet for it or have it online and update it every year.
00:34:40.940And I think it would make the whole sort of feel, particularly now with so much uncertainty,
00:34:46.640it would create so much more visibility and transparency for people in this very unsure situation.
00:34:56.160Your capacity to be offended is not something that anyone need or should respect in you.
00:35:06.700Like, that's just not, it's not an argument, certainly not an argument, but it's not even a basis for respect. Like that, like table stakes for any ethical conversation is more than just your capacity to be offended. Right. And until you understand that, like you're just not, you can't play the game we need to play in order to ensure an open-ended circumstance of cooperation.
00:35:36.700i'm going to i'm going to introduce something now which you might find a little bit uncomfortable
00:35:40.860um in the book i wrote right about a time that i was nearly raped and i didn't really think
00:35:48.380anything about writing this because it it didn't traumatize me at the time and it doesn't traumatize
00:35:54.060me now um but the observer rang me up and so they they were doing an article on a tv series called
00:35:59.920i will destroy you and there's a male rape scene in that so they said can we do an interview with
00:36:04.940you about this so I spent about half an hour on the phone to them and the article wasn't about0.86
00:36:10.880that at all it was just about me which was a bit of a shock in a way um so I then did a phone in on
00:36:19.100it and LBC the following night for two hours and the number of men that phoned in say yeah this
00:36:25.640happened to me or either happened to me or nearly happened to me or my mate or whatever and I do
00:36:31.740think this is something that society doesn't really talk about we've got a lot we've had a
00:36:36.500lot of taboos in society and this is kind of one of the last ones I think 12,000 men were raped last
00:36:42.920year I think only about a thousand of the cases ever got to court I don't know how many actually
00:36:49.440were convicted the average how long do you think it takes for a man who has been a victim of a
00:36:58.220sexual assault whether it's by and often it's actually a straight male that is doing it um
00:37:05.280really yeah how long does it take for a man to tell anybody about it on average i'm gonna guess
00:37:12.300like 20 years 26 years yeah wow now you think of the mental health aspects of that where somebody
00:37:17.720is bottling up inside and i know several people that this has happened to it just in my sort of
00:37:24.200circle of contacts and i think well if i know sort of it's probably four or five what about
00:37:31.500the ones that i don't know and you think well this this is something that needs to be addressed
00:37:37.840and there's a charity called survivors uk which i've now kind of adopted and sort of if i give
00:37:43.860money to charity they get it because i think this is a really big issue that i mean people don't
00:37:49.700want to talk about for obvious reasons it's a very uncomfortable subject but it's also i mean
00:37:54.800there's also and again i've i've the day one of the national newspaper commissioned me then to
00:38:01.680write a long read feature on it which in the end they decided not to run which i was a bit annoyed
00:38:06.200about because i spent a lot of time writing it researching it so i've actually put it on my
00:38:09.840website now um and i i just think that it's something that people need to understand that
00:38:21.420it happens and it's not just men on men it's actually women on men as well bizarrely i mean
00:38:26.360okay it's slightly more difficult for a woman to rape a man but there is a lot of um i mean if we
00:38:31.520just think of the sort of me too things about sort of female employers groping female staff
00:38:37.400or making inappropriate comments to them.
00:38:40.140I remember back in the 1990s where I was,0.73
00:38:45.740I mean, a woman that I worked with just grabbed my crotch.
00:38:52.080Now imagine if I as a man did that to a woman.0.50
00:38:54.560No, that didn't traumatise me at all.0.90
00:38:56.000I just said, do you think that's appropriate?
00:38:59.360Mo Molan, when she was Northern Ireland secretary
00:41:49.720an eccentric thing that i'm just kind of bringing up to sound fresh but it has always touched me
00:41:56.960deeply that people end up ruining their bodies through no fault of their own because of the way
00:42:03.700food is in modern societies i wish that could be solved that is my honest answer to that
00:42:10.220oh boy um this is gonna be really heavy okay go yeah yeah abortion okay yeah
00:42:19.540I think that needs some more serious discussion. I think it's the biggest blight on society0.91
00:42:23.860And I think a real serious discussion and elevation of consciousness is needed around it
00:42:28.580So to make that more specific for us, I'm guessing given that you're religious you're probably against abortion
00:42:33.860Yeah, not from a religious basis, but I am against it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean you've got0.89
00:42:39.020Those are human lives and thousands are being taken every day and it's very much out of sight out of mind
00:42:43.660And it's certainly not a dinner table party conversation stuff that anyone wants to get into
00:42:49.140But the way I look at it is very similar to how I imagine the people who wanted to abolish slavery would have felt like hundreds of years ago.
00:42:59.660And you've got this thing that everybody accepts and it's been going on for thousands of years and people aren't questioning it.
00:43:06.060And it's deemed as a, you know, slavery was always deemed from the perspective of the slaveholders' rights.
00:43:12.220Right. We have a right to do this. We have a right to do this.
00:43:14.200abortion generally in the western world is very much framed as from pro-choice people of course
00:43:20.200as a women's rights issue right and very little very few people ever think about the baby fetus
00:43:28.140if you want to if you want to you know use the use the euphemism and it's all it's all it's
00:43:32.140completely framed in that regard not from pro-life people pro-life people are like um what about the
00:43:36.720baby that's being killed right but um I think that there I think that that whole conversation
00:43:44.180I don't know if society is yet mature enough to have that conversation but it's a conversation
00:43:48.140that I do think is is needed like it's something that troubles me it's something that troubles me
00:43:52.900every day genuinely it troubles me it troubles me a lot not because it directly impacts me but
00:44:00.240just knowing the rates of it you know and looking at the numbers I mean in some parts of the U.S.
00:44:05.180I mean, black babies in particular have a 50-50 chance of being aborted, okay?
00:44:10.460So over 50 million potential Americans have been killed since in the past, like, 40 years or something like that.
00:44:18.520I don't know the exact figures in the U.K., but considering how far we've come in a society in terms of just, like, consciousness and treating people decently and humanely and stuff like that,
00:44:29.780that one does trouble me to know that the most vulnerable members of the human species
00:44:34.600are not even considered in those things.
00:44:38.820And I know it's a very polarizing topic.
00:44:40.980It's something people get very heated on, understandably, on both sides.
00:44:46.500But yeah, in terms of a societal blind spot
00:44:49.320or something people just don't want to touch, don't want to talk about,
00:44:53.720I do think that it's, to me personally, it's something serious.
00:44:57.340See, I think the thing with that is that it's such a difficult issue because I don't think it's about maturity.
00:45:03.660I'm not sure that issue is ever going to get resolved.
00:45:05.720We're never going to find, like, a solution because it's kind of halfway and there's always going to have to be a compromise.
00:45:12.720And when you're talking about human lives, compromises don't really make sense.
00:45:15.860That's the problem. This is the problem.
00:56:01.760all of that these are the things that again using very unfashionable language elevators
00:56:08.580take us beyond ourselves but can also unite us with other people i run a think tank called the
00:56:16.540copenhagen consensus where we look at the world's big problems and how we can smartly fix them and
00:56:23.540and and what we never talk about are all these other issues we briefly mentioned in the interview
00:56:29.240The fact that people die from easily curable infectious diseases, that we don't have good education, that we have terrible health, that we have all these other problems.
00:56:38.080Remember, about 300,000 women die in childbirth every year, and 2.1 million kids die in their first month of life.
00:56:48.140And we know how to fix all of these problems, and often very, very cheaply.
00:56:52.760So my day job is actually trying to point out all these other great things that we can do at very low cost that could help humanity enormously.0.92
00:57:02.820And as you might have surmised, nobody cares a little bit in the third world, right?0.76
01:01:48.860How is this not front-page news every single day?
01:01:52.380It's just because it's not in the conversation.
01:01:55.000The thing that pisses me off, or not pisses me off, perhaps,
01:01:59.720well, it certainly occasionally pisses me off, but I can't quite work out,
01:02:03.720is why the issue of the Uyghurs in China,
01:02:07.420where it's the largest internment of human beings on the planet at the moment,
01:02:13.160It's between two and three million, or one and three million Uyghurs in camps in Xinjiang.
01:02:21.060And we've got all sorts of heinous, horrific stories of rape and organ harvesting
01:02:30.000and just the worst possible things you can imagine.
01:02:34.360And it seems to me to be one of the great atrocities happening right now.
01:02:38.060And there's certainly a lot of, there's been a decent amount of coverage across the board.
01:02:42.820And it is one of those issues, a bit like Hong Kong, which seems to, in this country, be bipartisan in that there's no one, it's not a divisive issue.
01:02:54.000Everyone's pretty much on the same page.
01:02:56.040I mean, there are extremes who are hesitant to criticize China, but I would say they're the extremes.0.92
01:03:01.560but the nevertheless and even though let's say the Uyghur issues in Hong Kong gets a fair amount
01:03:08.460of press coverage I don't think it captures the imagination of my contemporaries and peers and0.98
01:03:16.620perhaps this is because Uyghur culture is so alien this is another thing with1.00
01:03:23.320maybe one of the reasons why we got so the George Floyd captured the imagination all the way over
01:03:30.620here, and it's probably about the same similar distance to how far away the Xinjiang is from
01:03:34.940here, is because we're so marinated in American culture growing up that it feels like our
01:03:40.880culture. Whereas not only is Xinjiang a remote province of China, which is completely unimaginable,
01:03:50.220unfathomable to us, but China itself, even though it's the biggest country in the world,
01:03:55.740is, I don't think it's something we're educated on at all. Talk about being not educated1.00
01:04:00.520on communism earlier. We're not educated on China. I certainly wasn't. And it's really
01:04:05.300difficult because the language is very strange or like very different to ours. It's a difficult,
01:04:14.760complicated, long history. And so China, generally speaking, I think it's something we should1.00
01:04:20.520all be striving to understand better. But the Uyghur, that specific ongoing tragedy,
01:04:27.260I think needs more attention. And for any guests who are interested in learning more about the
01:04:33.680Uyghurs, I recommend following Rahima Mahmut, who is in Britain. She's a Uyghur who, she's also a
01:04:40.820singer and she does various performances. We've been working together, putting on cultural events
01:04:46.720together in the UK to try and enlighten or try and show us the other side about Uyghurs that isn't1.00
01:04:54.720just the horrible things that are happening to Uyghurs.1.00
01:05:48.900Because it's so commonplace that if we think about it as being committed by monsters who literally force a woman by holding a gun to her head, we only look at the most extreme cases that are very rare and we don't look at the rape culture in which we live.
01:06:04.580it's very commonplace ask pretty much any married woman of a particular age and ask if she has
01:06:11.380if she's had sex with her partner her male partner recently that she didn't want to have
01:06:18.320you don't call it rape to her or you'll get a very different answer and she will tell you yes
01:06:23.380she's been coerced into sex and that's pretty much every woman under the age of 30 that I
01:06:29.420speak to it's much more prevalent than we think and it really isn't the the masked marauder
01:06:37.560carrying a knife breaking into women's houses that happens but it's rare goodness um i feel
01:06:43.860like that we are not talking and should be talking more about the the spinal impacts of binding and
01:06:53.260and things about that nature i've been doing a few videos lately on that and it's like people
01:06:56.840talk about the bindings effects on breasts but i think that we need to talk about the spine as if
01:07:00.520it's like the foot and we need to recognize that if we're putting 13 year olds in binders
01:07:04.400they're going to end up with with deformations so we need to be very careful about that
01:07:09.240i think we should actually be talking more about like you know the toxicness of surrogacy within
01:07:17.300our society right now and i think this idea of the of of the fact of like you know having your
01:07:22.940own designing babies and kind of assuming that everybody has the right to have a child
01:07:26.280a bit random but it's not random it's just i really no no there's there was a show that i
01:07:31.140watched a few years ago which um had these like you know um like this family that was buying eggs
01:07:36.540from like white hot women and then going to india and just pumping their eggs and their sperm like0.99
01:07:41.080these these fetuses into um these poor these poor indian women and there are enough kids out there
01:07:47.160for us to adopt but this idea of the fact that we're all doing like surrogacy as though because0.57
01:07:52.540or this is a new way that technology has allowed us to have a family,
01:12:14.900but I recognize that we need something higher than us
01:12:18.860in order to keep us and our worst impulses in check.
01:12:22.640And I also think that whether it's a belief in God
01:12:26.120or maybe just some kind of maybe secular, I don't know,
01:12:32.840But there's something that comes with the place where you pray that is a community, something that binds you not only in a broader sense as a society, but also binds you to your nearby community that human beings absolutely need and without which we struggle and we wither away and our mental health is affected.
01:12:55.140And I'm a non-believer, but I see that.