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

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 #taboo #supernatural #journalism - 00:00 Intro 00:24 Andrew’s Work 04:43 Meeting an Exorcist 19:45 Pitching a Documentary to BBC 27:28 Problem with Diversity Quotas 36:10 Accepting Differing Opinions 43:05 The Power of Belief & Lived Experience 47:09 Undercover in Amazon 53:30 What Really Matters Today? 1:00:49 Infiltrating a Pedophile Network 1:19:15 The Ultimate Taboo 1:25:11 Superstar Journalists - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Where there are 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're all going to kill us.

• 0:20Chris Williamson?

  Andrew Gold, welcome to the show.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Thanks. Thanks for having me.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  How would you describe what you do for work?

• 0:26Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 0:59Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you manage the page three girls for the Sun at one point?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  That is the best thing I've ever done. Yes, that was when I started out. So I was like 21 or 22. Who got, I got in trouble for that recently, didn't I? Somebody was tweeting at, oh yeah, somebody reviewed my podcast recently. They said, I've really enjoyed the first 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.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it was my first job in journalism.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  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 didn'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.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  And I had to make sure the 3D version of her went up on the iPad every night, which was, which was complicated because I had, I was having these calls at four or five in the morning with like customer support or whoever it is somewhere in South Asia.

• 2:11Chris Williamson?

  Titty support.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  Titty support. And I was just going like, look, it's not working and I can't go home.

• 2:17Chris Williamson?

  The titties, they aren't here.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:26Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 2:28Chris Williamson?

  Fucking weird, man. Like, that's the job that as a 14-year-old probably sounded amazing. And then as a 21-year-old wanted, that made you want to self-harm. Like, that's how I imagine the trajectory goes.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  It was like that, yeah. Yeah, it made me wanna, well, it made me wanna get far away from there eventually.

• 2:47Chris Williamson?

  So what did you do next?

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Well, when I was there, um, yeah, I had a bit of a, I had been studying in France before that a couple of years. I'd been getting really into languages, um, French, of course. Um, and I was just thinking, I've got to, I've got to get out of this dreary, 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? Um, and I wanted to learn a language. I thought, oh, I'll get something that's, uh, uh, 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, uh, it's like 25 degrees every day, blue skies, beautiful. So, um, yeah, I went out there. I just got, I got a flight.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  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, uh, 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. Uh, emailed them all 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, uh, quit my job while I was out there and just stayed out there for a

• 4:07Chris Williamson?

  See you later on, titties. I'm not dealing with you anymore.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, the titties out in Medellin were a whole different, uh, thing because I think it's like the, the plastic surgery capital of the world.

• 4:17Chris Williamson?

  You're kidding me? People flying out to Colombia to be robbed at gunpoint, get some drugs and come back with a huge pair of knockers?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Well, the Colombians listening to this, or people of Colombian heritage, will not thank us for saying this, but yes.

• 4:32Chris Williamson?

  It sounds like a good time, to be fair.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  A lot of people, yeah, I'm sorry, a lot of people loved it, yeah, love it out there.

• 4:38Chris Williamson?

  A fairly fun place. What about this exorcist that you went to go and meet?

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Hmm, so I'd been in, after a year in Colombia, I moved down to Argentina, which was a little bit more European. After a year in Colombia, 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 is cool. It's like Italian and they do all the hand signals, che, che, que te pasa.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  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, infidelity. I got made fun of by Vigo Mortensen on the 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 infidelity video I was making because they were saying to me like, why, 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.

• 5:33Chris Williamson?

  So you're accusing Argentine people of sleeping around. Is there a lot of swinger clubs in Argentina or something?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, there were, there were at the time. And there were nights, Thursday is known as like cheating night. It was just something I noticed.

• 5:49Chris Williamson?

  Nationally, is this like a national holiday or something?

• 5:52Speaker 00

  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 don't really care. But I ended up on a, 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 they'll say like, the idea is the concept is you have to say three normal things. So they would call like the friend's mum and say, three things. How are you? Good. Yeah. I don't know why you're calling me. You know, what are you doing today? You ask three things and then you say, are you up for it?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Or some Spanish equivalent and they have to say yes or no, and then they hook up.

• 6:38Chris Williamson?

  What's the success rate of that?

• 6:41Speaker 00

  More than it should be, but I don't know exactly, but the ones I listened to, most of them are saying yes, including like friends' mums and stuff.

• 6:48Chris Williamson?

  Interesting. All right. What about this exorcist?

• 6:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. So I'd been there for a few years. And I saw him just sort of on the TV quite a lot, on the radio. This guy, and there was something about his face. He had like an arrogance about him, you know? He was telling everybody things like, right, you know, next week's Halloween, so make sure you've got all your carrots and your this and that to ward off vampires. Stuff like that on 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 at his word and these, you know, professional presenters out there on TV, on the radio with him going, mm hmm, mm hmm. Oh, you know, tell us what else we can do. Padre Emanuel, can we? He was nuts.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:45Chris Williamson?

  I think even if you are religious, it might be even more insulting, like to have someone hijack faith. Because I mean, I don't, 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, well, 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?

• 8:18Speaker 00

  He was, he was in the 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 he, but also a lack of education, a lack of anybody that would tell the people out there that this guy was a fraud.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  So he was out there, he had thousands and thousands and thousands of followers, people who just turn up at 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, frothing 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, on like The Exorcist from the movie and other superhero movies around the church.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  So this was a guy who, 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.

• 9:31Chris Williamson?

  So is that what was mostly happening? Was it people with mental health problems that are seeking a supernatural solution?

• 9:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I, I mean, I think that's, 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.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Anorexia, bulimia as well, if you don't have.

• 10:18Chris Williamson?

  Imagine what an epileptic fit must look like if you don't know what that is.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Hundred percent, exactly. And, and you know, what else are you 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, they were mostly young women, from a psychiatric ward nearby, who was suffering with schizophrenia. And I went and 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. And once they're eighteen or nineteen, 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, they do get better generally, but it's a temporary fix, but it's, it's such a jolt of

• 11:08Speaker 00

  energy and exorcism. It's just that it's the most remarkable thing I've ever seen and witnessed. So. Yeah, that's that's the complicated thing about exorcism.

• 11:17Chris Williamson?

  What's it like being in the room while someone's doing that?

• 11:20Speaker 00

  Scary as hell. Yeah. Can you swear on this? I was gonna say.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  Swear away.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Scary as fuck. Um, it was really scary and and problematic in some ways as well, uh, because I had, you know, obviously grown up watching Louis Theroux and I wanted to do this sort of, you know, sideways glance at it and it might, I thought this would be funny. Um, so I went in just with my director, David Hayes, who's, yeah, a good friend of mine since we were young and we just, we wanted to make this film together. And we we thought it was going to be funny. So I decided I would take part in it. So the first exorcism, uh, 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, um, hoping to, you know, ward off the devil or whatever.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  And all I was thinking was, wow, this is really inappropriate. Actually, this isn't funny. This is somebody with a horrible mental health, health, a breakdown she's having. Um, and that's when I thought, right, from now on, any exorcist, if we film another exorcism, I'm not partaking.

• 12:22Chris Williamson?

  I can be complicit in this.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  Weird ritual. So what happens from there? What, like, roll the clock forward? So you spend some time with them? You start speaking to some of the, what are they, patients? Followers?

• 12:35Speaker 00

  I I've I struggled knowing what to say as well. Yeah, I say patients, I suppose, but that implies there's some medical thing going on. Um, yeah, well, we we followed, um, the first woman was a woman called Natalia who had some form of schizophrenia, I think. And then there was somebody called Candela, who was seventeen years old, slitting her wrists. She had bulimia, anorexia, a lot of stuff that happens in adolescence, that that kind of, uh, peer pressure she had and and nobody to tell her that's common, you know, so she assumed it was exorcism. Um, 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, no, we always beat the devil. I said, all right, fair enough.

• 13:21Speaker 00

  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 there are 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 Paula, who was in her twenties or so. And she had been exorcised by him. We didn't realize 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 Paula 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.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  She'd been spent her teenage years living in a psychiatric ward. And now was 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 me, but he was very much a friend of the priests. And he worked for the equivalent of the sun in Argentina. So he was loving reports.

• 14:40Chris Williamson?

  Titty, titty parade as well. Was he Argentina in titty parade?

• 14:44Speaker 00

  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, 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, Paula, who he has exorcised on the lips, which was something that I had, I had thought might be happening. I was suspecting it, but I 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, Paula, she said, Andrew, can you

• 15:25Speaker 00

  just come back here a second? So they take me back down this corridor and backstage, you know, at the mass, meanwhile, there's tens of thousands of people, maybe more several thousand people, waiting for the exorcist 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 my director David is filming me behind and then they cut him off and they just said, I just wanna 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 manhandled him out of the way. They close the door. Um, and I'm scared at this point because we're out in the middle of nowhere. Nobody really knows we're even filming there.

• 16:08Speaker 00

  This wasn't a typical thing where the BBC would commission it. Um, it's impossible to get a commission. So we decided to film first. Um, 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, heavyset guys, some of them. With one guy in particular who had a big staff, like in Aladdin, Jafar, you know? Um, 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 Paula? And I was just like, oh, I was like, oh, no, well, I have asked about it a bit because just because you're so close.

• 16:51Speaker 00

  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 he's like, and then someone, this journalist was in the room, he's going, yes, he did. I was like, I didn't. We can show you the audio. We had this back and forth for about an hour. Um, which obviously we had to condense to a minute. But he lost his rag and we didn't even know, I didn't think about it because I was so scared. I had my microphone on my, on my collar that was still, uh, recording. And he was screaming and going, you bastard, you've, you took the Falklands. Now you're gonna come and do this? You think you're walking in here? And I was just going, no, all right, sorry. And he goes, you say, sorry, sir. And I was like, I'm sorry, sir. And all this stuff is embarrassing, really.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Anyway, you know, 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, are just gonna kill us. Um. We we would just be another statistic out in the middle of nowhere, you know, it would be nothing to them. Squeezed past them, got out into the street where there are 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're all going to kill us. And at that point, we're like, we're running away. We're trying to get to like, where are you even going to get a taxi at like, one in the morning now, middle

• 18:18Speaker 00

  of nowhere. And David says to me, mate, you're not going to be happy here. Um. 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 gonna go then. He's like, we, 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 den, and film me walking out again, which was the scariest thing I've ever done. I've never forgiven David for that. 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, you know, 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, uh, the microphone was on the

• 19:03Speaker 00

  whole time. So that's what made the film. We got quite fortunate, really. Um. So yeah, it's what makes it different, I think, the film. The last 10 minutes are pretty insane.

• 19:11Chris Williamson?

  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, yeah, you did. Yeah, you did.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  He was, he was so much like that, yeah.

• 19:29Chris Williamson?

  How bizarre.

• 19:33Speaker 00

  That's why you do this job, you know, you what you, in the moment, it's scary.

• 19:36Chris Williamson?

  We're threatened by 5,000 Argentinian people in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. This is why we're here.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what life is.

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, man. All right. So how do you, who, the BBC picked it up, right?

• 19:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:51Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 20:02Speaker 00

  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 maybe at a 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, Stacey Dooley, 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, so fine. Once it was done, I, yeah, I got back in touch with all those people saying like, no, no, no, you've got to see this. Me and David spent months editing it, putting it together. And like in, you know,

• 20:47Speaker 00

  all industries or whatever, you know, they just didn't reply. It took about two years of just going on LinkedIn every day, finding the names of different BBC, Channel Four, like everyone and guessing their email addresses. And just, I probably sent, you know, there's that old thing, isn't there about like the Beatles, they got rejected five times or whatever, and Harry Potter was rejected five times before, you know, got, and I just used to look at those sort of quotes and things and think, I got rejected five times before breakfast this morning, you know, every day for two years. And eventually, and I was looking at the Vimeo where we, where we uploaded the video, just looking at the stats, nobody ever watched it. Like, one or two did, the head of Channel Four did at one point at the time, and then just said it was,

• 21:30Speaker 00

  he was worried that I looked too much like Louis Theroux, which was a 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, oh, 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

• 22:10Speaker 00

  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'd done that we hadn't. Um. So yeah, they 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 get they ask 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 to take it uh to to get it on the BBC. And it's it's such a great calling card for us that it was worth it. Um. But yeah, we got it out and it was it it

• 22:50Speaker 00

  ends up it won some fist film festival awards first and then it ended up in the BBC's best of the year uh list. So it was a great uh moment for us.

• 23:00Chris Williamson?

  Have you been invited back to the BBC since?

• 23:03Speaker 00

  Uh, in the in the sort of, it was a funny one. Yeah, I thought that they would be, and I don't mean this arrogantly, I just I just thought they would think like, oh, wow, they've these two guys have just done this on their own. That's unusual because usually we'd give a budget of fifty grand or a hundred grand or whatever, and they've done it for free. This this is interesting. Let's see what they've got. Uh, 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, you know? So I went to a BBC Three meeting uh with one guy who seemed to be sort of the head of the team and three younger women. And I felt very much like they just, I felt that they hated me from

• 23:45Speaker 00

  the from the get go. They were just looking at me with these eyes like, who the hell are you?

• 23:50Chris Williamson?

  What was wrong with you? What do you think was wrong with you?

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Um, 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 Theroux as well. Uh, especially BBC Three, you know, young people, it's supposed to be cool and edgy and young looking, and I wasn't cool in that way. They just hated me. So I was just coming up with idea after idea like, hey, there's a bunch of vigilantes that make uh prostitutes stand on anthills in Bolivia. And uh there are these paedophiles in Germany where the the clinics don't report them to police. I had like fifteen ideas like that, just really quirky bizarre stuff where I thought I speak

• 24:34Speaker 00

  the languages of these places, um, I can do this. And everyone I said they were like, mm hmm, mm hmm. Okay, well, how would you do that? I'm just like, well, I'd go, mm hmm. So it it was really a dampener after the excitement that came before it. I really thought it would lead to more stuff. Um, and then I emailed, they they did say, look, draw up a couple of pitches for us, uh, for a series or whatever, and get back to us, 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, uh, 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,

• 25:15Speaker 00

  just nothing, no interest at all. Some of the, 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, uh, background. For example, gay conversion was one of the I wanted to do in Ecuador. Um, that it's a really interesting, I'll just quickly go, but in Ecuador, uh, they banned gay conversion. They they took the step to ban it because it was such a big thing. And the the weird thing was it got much worse because it got pushed underground. Um, so then instead of just, you know, priests and whatever doing it and therapists, it became, uh, you know, 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, mm hmm,

• 25:59Speaker 00

  Andrew, can we ask, are you gay? I was like, well, I don't know, no, no.

• 26:04Chris Williamson?

  Also not a paedophile or a prostitute though, so.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  As far as you know, I'm neither of those things. No, but it exactly, that was my point as well. So that was BBC Three. And then I had meetings, endless, endless meetings for about six years.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  With production company after production company and every single one about halfway 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 Four. 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. Well, 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.

• 27:03Chris Williamson?

  Why wouldn't you let someone from a minority group present the idea instead of you?

• 27:09Speaker 00

  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 that was just that.

• 27:27Chris Williamson?

  What do you think is the reason? Like, what's the justification behind this? Is there a potential that you're not the right man, that you don't have the talents for it, and 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?

• 27:42Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:58Chris Williamson?

  It's strange to hear, it's strange for me to hear that coming out from a meeting, like,

• 28:04Chris Williamson?

  to hear that said sort of so 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.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  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?

• 28:40Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  So, yeah, so it does, it does happen.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  And, and yes, I, 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, it's so subjective as well. But, but, but yeah, it's just the thing, the thing was, it was said, it wasn't even like 99% of meetings, it was every single meeting. This was, this came up, it was a, it was the same reason, it was a diversity thing.

• 29:07Chris Williamson?

  What do you think we should do about this sort of situation?

• 29:11Speaker 00

  It's so complicated, isn't it? It's so complicated. The thing is, right now, on TV,

• 29:20Speaker 00

  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, it's all for sure.

• 29:57Chris Williamson?

  I think it might be a bit of a smokescreen almost.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, until, although the thing is, when you look at the actual off-screen stuff, diverse, 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, you know, it depends on, 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.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  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 is an issue, that's where the issue is. It's you guys. It's not down at the bottom as, you know, presenters on TV.

• 30:55Chris Williamson?

  So they 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

• 31:40Chris Williamson?

  might result in higher viewing figures or better retention or better reported happiness after watching the show or something.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  If that were the case, then we wouldn't need diversity officers and all this kind of thing because it would suggest, well, 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 extortionate amounts of money on new diversity officers to up the diversity. This feels more artificial than what is best or not best for the for the show. And then on top of that, I would just, I would just think that, you know, 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 it's, I think, I do find it sad that we're looking so much at who every single person is, what they are.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  If you apply for a job at the BBC now, you don't just have to say what skin color 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. Well, I'm like, I can't, why are you asking, you know? I also do get the other side to an extent, but it's complicated, isn't it?

• 32:56Chris Williamson?

  Well, it is, especially after a period where certain groups might have felt underrepresented. If you haven't had many gay presenters, lesbian presenters, trans presenters on, there is a

• 33:09Chris Williamson?

  justification from the other side of the fence that says, well, we've been underrepresented for a long time. It's now time for us to have our time in front of the screen. I think what's really interesting is looking at how, if you were to distribute how much money gets paid 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

• 33:51Chris Williamson?

  I grew up in Newcastle with the Geordie Shore 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. So I would see this sort of iterative

• 34:11Chris Williamson?

  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 P, 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 Geordie 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

• 34:50Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  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, it 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, why is nobody letting people from minorities, you know, get to the top? I didn't know you on Geordie Shore before Love Island.

• 35:34Chris Williamson?

  No, not on Geordie 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, they'd come in, YI in all over the place.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  They used to pop it on in Argentina. I'd be in a bar and it somehow they'd have like Geordie Shore on and I'd be telling all these Argentinians.

• 35:53Chris Williamson?

  Is that really what they're exporting, British culture? Is that the best of what we have to offer is Geordie Shore?

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was loving it. I was just like, they loved it for some reason more than like Jersey Shore. They were loving Geordie Shore. So I was just, they couldn't understand a word of it, of course, but they had like subtitles and that in Spanish.

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  God, that must have been disgusting. All right. So you, didn't you look at an abortion lady as well? You go and do some stuff with her?

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, so straight after that film, because I was getting all these no's about next stuff. And I thought, well, screw it. I'm just going to 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

• 36:57Speaker 00

  and backgrounds and things. You start to often, you quite like the people you're with. So I went in thinking like, this is going to 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. Um, but ended up arguing because 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 uh really sad actually. But uh but but what it did was it helped me as a documentary maker to sort

• 37:39Speaker 00

  of realize, you know, when 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 um as voting for Brexit or Trump or something. So that was just a really fantastic experience for me to to to fully understand where the the human mind can take us and how far it can go. Because I think it can it can heal its it can heal diseases if you believe strongly enough in narratives we create in our minds. That blows my mind. That's incredible. And and it also

• 38:24Speaker 00

  makes me think there's no point ever debating anything because people's beliefs are so strong.

• 38:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's um, there's a story from Johann Hari's 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 it. It's in the 1800s, something like that. And he would promise people that he could fix them, that he could get rid of their like arthritis or something like something like not just mental stuff, like physical problems as well, I think. And you'd wave it over them. And these people would stand up and it turned out they stripped it back. So this they they started doing um a replica of that particular research and took away the electricity and

• 39:15Chris Williamson?

  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're right, 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 II, these psych ward patients, right, 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,

• 39:55Chris Williamson?

  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 know, 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.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  That's belief. And it's the most extraordinary thing. That's incredible, that isn't it? Derren 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 that's, that 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 like Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote Sherlock Holmes. And I had David Robson on my podcast the other week, who's a journalist who wrote The Intelligence Trap

• 41:07Speaker 00

  about how the smartest people in the world, often their beliefs lead them one way and their intelligence sort of keeps them further. They're able to explain anything because they're so smart, they can, you know, and Arthur Conan Doyle is 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 mad blues.

• 41:35Chris Williamson?

  Arthur Conan Doyle was friends with Houdini?

• 41:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. 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 going to take you to my wife, who's going to help do a séance. We're going to have a chat with your wife now, with your mum, sorry. And so he was like, okay, right. So Houdini turns up and they do this séance. And, you know, there's all this stuff coming out about Christianity and this and that. And afterwards, Houdini said, you know, my mum 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 prank by these like 15 year old girls who

• 42:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 42:37Speaker 00

  And he was just like, well, that's clearly the umbilical cord. 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.

• 43:04Chris Williamson?

  Are you ever scared that one day you're going to wake up and have just absorbed one of these mental views? Because Arthur Conan Doyle, you think, yeah, totally rational guy, totally normal. Then one day just fancies 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 anthills, whatever it is that we got to do. I don't know. I don't want I don't want that to happen.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  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, will 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 looked through your reviews and your on your podcast. And they're very different from the beginning towards the more modern recent ones, where some people like he's changed the people he's had on. And it's like, well, you should change.

• 44:03Chris Williamson?

  You know, my business partner. Recreationally goes through the one star reviews in 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. Here's another thing, man. You know, like people's, a lot of people, especially on the right, they like to criticize the term lived experience because what, what most people, what they propose, people that use the words lived experience mean is unfalsifiable evidence that only exists inside of my head.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:36Chris Williamson?

  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 have 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 subtly. And it kind of makes me think, well, the limit of using the term lived experience is actually quite

• 45:20Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  I think lived experience as well. I agree with you and it's loaded as well. There's, 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 happened 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 experience

• 46:17Speaker 00

  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's like ten quid to go or whatever. But therapists, one of the first things they'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 is not the truth. It's 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.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 47:09Chris Williamson?

  What about, you spoke to a guy that went undercover in an Amazon warehouse. What's it like working for Amazon?

• 47:15Speaker 00

  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 righty or, you know, James Lindsay's and those kinds of Helen Pluckrose. And sometimes you want to sort of redress the balance a bit. And he, although he's quite anti-woke, I should say, despite being very left. And for him, it was about the workers. That's what being left wing was about, about labour, actual labour. 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,

• 48:00Speaker 00

  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 the toilet, for spending more than 10 minutes having lunch. You get a point for, you know, answering back to someone.

• 48:24Chris Williamson?

  This is in the UK.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was at, um, I can't remember the name of, it was, he went to sort of this really industrial town somewhere in the Midlands, um, where basically, you know, there was not much going on and the Amazon.

• 48:39Chris Williamson?

  Fifty percent of the people are employed by Amazon.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  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 squalor, 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 you, if some people get, you know, very capitalist 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, from James Bloodworth's experience, um, 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 managers going,

• 49:26Speaker 00

  I was supposed to get a hundred and twenty quid this week, you've given me seventeen. How, and he said like, the point is when you're living in, 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, and so that it did make me angry. It did change how I thought about Amazon. And the irony unfortunately was that, you know, I ended, I ended the podcast saying, like, and if you want his book, uh, you can find it on amazon.co.uk. What can you do?

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  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, sure, you only take one case and then you could roll that out across the entire country?

• 50:14Speaker 00

  It's just not on people's, uh, priority list at the moment. And I guess, you know, the. The Tories aren't that interested in stopping Amazon from getting away with what they get away with. I don't know if they were backhanded, you know, bits of money going to people into people's pockets. I have no idea. And on the left, they used to be much more bothered by that stuff. But recently, particularly in the Corbyn era, they weren't talking about working class lives, really. They were talking about quite popular university politics, you know.

• 50:44Chris Williamson?

  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 mad to think that you hear Conservatives talking about that, those sort of rhetorics now, more than you hear that from Labour.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, more. I think, I don't know what the stats are, but a lot of working class people voted Tory recently, didn't they? They've moved over.

• 51:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, Ashington, which is not far from me, and Newcastle, that changed. And then Hartlepool, which was this sort of bastion that Labour had 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 the, is it We Are Not Robots, Amazon Union? So they always have, you know, the little robot, it's like a cardboard box made out to be a robot. It's one of Amazon's mascots. And then 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

• 52:02Chris Williamson?

  for Amazon managers for how to spot potential unionising behaviour. So it was 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 friends, it's super, super scary and authoritarian. Yeah, terrifying.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Have you seen Nomadland, the movie?

• 52:23Chris Williamson?

  No, that was what won a tonne of Oscars this year, wasn't it? What was that about?

• 52:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, it was about. I've got a name Frances McDormand 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, I'm at Amazon, I'll just pop in and have a job. And yeah, yeah, here you are chatting to people and just, you know. And 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 at all.

• 52:55Chris Williamson?

  Didn't take the opportunity to perhaps show Amazon in the light that it really is. Yeah, well, I mean.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  They probably got paid for it.

• 53:00Chris Williamson?

  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, a lot of noise to counteract that much money to cause the government to take notice.

• 53:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I, I, and, and they're, they're based in Dublin, I think. Is that, I think, I think I'm right.

• 53:24Chris Williamson?

  And that's hiding from tax in Dublin, yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, as Google does it as well. It just seems like we squabble on Twitter about these little things, you know, J K 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 just this insane 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, it's not the worst either. However, that's, that's fine as long as they're playing by the rules.

• 53:58Chris Williamson?

  Rich people getting richer fairly, yeah, yeah, precisely. Well, I had Yonmi Park, the North Korean refugee, I had her on the show recently. And 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 Uighur Muslims in China, they were given what they were told was multivitamin shots, which has now reduced the fertility of that entire group by half. So the fertility's gone down by 50%. Like, that's genocide. That's like legitimate genocide that's happening within the last two to three years.

• 54:38Chris Williamson?

  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 into Dublin. I don't know, but yeah, it's.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Well, there was a time when the smartest people believed in fairies, you know, so.

• 55:00Chris Williamson?

  That's true as well, Arthur Conan Doyle, yeah. I don't know, do you think, how much do you think of the sort of current culture wars 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?

• 55:23Speaker 00

  I've 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 Korea, 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 eras 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 talk about, we have people on to talk about how to be happier, right? Well, what does happy mean? If you're really, if you're really happy in Brave New World, everyone's happy because they're taking a drug that makes them happy.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  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 Korea or something like that. And I think the smartest people in the world that you refer to, who are currently, you know, yeah, talking about all these like 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.

• 56:34Chris Williamson?

  By an exorcist.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, 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 not, why are you depressed? Why are you bored? And I, I think that's.

• 57:06Chris Williamson?

  I would have thought that, I would have agreed with that if it hadn't been for Covid. 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 human history that's affected as many people as the last 12 months has, 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 at

• 57:48Chris Williamson?

  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 evolutionary history, we would have really looked for information because that was, we were like information foragers. 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 route to go home to avoid being eaten by a lion, 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.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  People dying, family members dying, restrictions on your livelihood, restrictions on the economy, changes in your lifestyle, all that sort of lack of social connection. But that hasn't pushed people toward thinking about a bigger picture, about giving themselves more perspective on what really matters. Have you got any sense about why that is?

• 58:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's a different kind of tragedy. It's a very specific kind, the last year and a half, that, you know, a lot of us know people who have died and who've 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.

• 59:07Chris Williamson?

  Like comfortable uncomfortableness.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, it's not the same as being called up to the frontline in World War 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. 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 frontline and you're sort of sitting there, 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

• 59:53Speaker 00

  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 near 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.

• 1:00:20Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, really weird.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  It's so bizarre. What about you infiltrated a group of paedophiles? That's been one of your more recent ones. What happened there?

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  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 fancied going to Europe and learning another language. German was my fifth one. I got all excited about that. And when I get to a new place, the first thing was like, what can I do that's really controversial and weird and bizarre and try and sell that, you know, somehow? And it turned out that Berlin has the the world's only sort of paedophile 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.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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 gonna be reported and stuff and they can get help. So the idea was like, okay, I'm gonna look into that and either write a book or a radio documentary or or or a video one. So I filmed some stuff, but I think it's gonna be too difficult because no one wants to be on camera, of course. Um, so I've written most of a book about that. Um, and I've met all sorts of, you know, the patients and things.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  Um, recently, a twenty five year old woman, for example. That fascinated me because female paedophiles are so rare. And particularly ones who will talk to camera. So I took a train out to the middle of nowhere in Germany, uh, some little village. I met this woman and she's got a twenty seven year old boyfriend who is also a paedophile. Both of them are non offenders. They they both believe that it's and everyone I've interviewed has said to me they are non offender. I haven't, I don't, not very, I'm not interested in talking to someone who is an offender.

• 1:02:51Chris Williamson?

  How much do you believe them?

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  Uh, ninety percent probably.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  This this woman, I I believe more because I I just maybe because she's a young woman. It just didn't, it just didn't fit the narrative. Um, and and she was so angry when she spoke about other paedophiles who had offended. Um, and so was her her boyfriend. And they, the idea is that they both have that view and they wanna raise a family together, which is a scary thought. But what can you do?

• 1:03:19Chris Williamson?

  This is a, this is such a minefield. Wow.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Look, one. One percent of men are thought to be exclusive paedophiles. 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 paedophiles than you have people in the army. You know, it's, it's a lot of people. And those are exclusive paedophiles. So it gets scarier. I mean, the more I looked into this, and I apologize, 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 twenty

• 1:04:06Speaker 00

  percent of men responded to saying they had some attraction to minors. Or maybe even it was to children, I need to, 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 one percent, 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, as you rightly point out, how much do you believe them? They might say like, oh, 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-

• 1:04:43Chris Williamson?

  People say they're not going to cheat on their partner.

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  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 ninety-nine percent of us, thank our lucky stars, we don't have that attraction, and would 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, I don't know the actual rates for cheating, but everybody knows somebody who cheated at some point, you know? 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 paedophiles. And that is a problem for the non-offending community, and there is a big community of them.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  And they want to say, you know, we're not like those people, we would never do it. But they can't say that without us going, oh, we don't quite believe you, mate. So that's the, you know, that's what they have to navigate. And that's, that's the line I'm navigating while talking to these people.

• 1:05:40Chris Williamson?

  It's such a challenging subject, man. I've become really fascinated about the ethics of it. I've had a bunch of conversations over the last few years. I remember there was this girl I went to uni with. And her friend gave a talk at you, 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, been on the BBC, you should speak to him, he might get you on.

• 1:06:20Chris Williamson?

  And he, he wrote a book about the science of sin and they, they put people of varying sexual preferences into FMRI's with arousal sensors. And they showed people that were non pedophiles, 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 arousal 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.

• 1:07:05Chris Williamson?

  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, that makes for a really difficult ethical situation because you think, well,

• 1:07:23Chris Williamson?

  people didn't choose to be this way. And

• 1:07:28Chris Williamson?

  only what 70 years ago, 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

• 1:07:47Chris Williamson?

  there's a whole manner of, of, of challenges to overcome there. But if you are part of a community that isn't.

• 1:07:56Chris Williamson?

  That isn't actually doing anything physically wrong and you are afflicted with a problem that you didn't choose.

• 1:08:04Chris Williamson?

  At what, what place is there in society for these people?

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  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 realise before going, I cycled down there and it was a swimming pool, public swimming pool, which is a bit weird to meet a paedophile there. And once I got in there to pay to go in and everything, it's all a bit weird. He was with a little girl, like an 11 year old girl. And I said to him like, what's, what's going on here? And he was like, oh, I'm babysitting her for these other people I know. And I was like, but you're a paedophile. 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?

• 1:08:52Speaker 00

  And he goes, I was like, who are they? 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, I said that to him as well. But the, the point is, I want to call it, but we need to talk about Max, 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

• 1:09:33Speaker 00

  of children. The only way to really stop that, apart from getting safer and safer schools and vetting people, it will always go on. The only way to stop it is to stop the paedophiles themselves.

• 1:09:43Chris Williamson?

  Now, what does that mean?

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  Well, so you've got like different types of paedophiles, of course, right? So one type is actually not a paedophile at all. At the clinic, they get a lot of people with OCD who turn up and say they have paedophilia because they're obsessed and they have intrusive thoughts and they say, I'm scared, I'm gonna touch my children. And they run tests on them to check and they're like, you're not a paedophile, mate. And then they go home.

• 1:10:07Chris Williamson?

  Though they've just become obsessed with the fear that they might be a paedophile.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Chris Williamson?

  That's really interesting.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's called P O C D, paedophile OCD. 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 types, is 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 paedophiles, you've got, you've got ones who are basically crossovers with psychopaths and they're gonna do whatever they do, you can't stop them. You've got ones who will never offend no matter what because they've got their moral compass and they're aware, critical thinking, all that stuff.

• 1:10:59Speaker 00

  In between, there's this murky line of people who are paedophiles. 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, 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, 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. If, that's it, you're basically killing someone if you, if you abuse a child.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  They need to learn this and there are three, the Berlin clinic talks about three um 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. Uh, 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, uh, 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, eighteen years old, episode six of my podcast. Um,

• 1:12:22Speaker 00

  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, uh, 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. Um, the third risk factor is stigmatization. And that is that thing where in a um, 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

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  to them, um, actually, you're a valuable member of society. We love you, we respect you, we think you're, you know, we think you're great and you're struggling with something difficult and we're going to help you. That person is going to 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 graffitied 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, 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

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  must be defending it or whatever. 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.

• 1:14:12Chris Williamson?

  It makes a lot of sense that if you stigmatize someone, that after a while, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Because if you, if there's no 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 net chatrooms and people doing all manner of weird nasty shit. Yeah, man. I mean, this, this whole area is, it's, it's like the last taboo, the, the final truest taboo, I think. There is no more uncomfortable conversation for people to have. And I understand, you know,

• 1:14:55Chris Williamson?

  you see the guys that, I can't remember what it's called. It's like honey trapping, but it's for, it's with kids.

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  Pedophile hunters.

• 1:15:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 00

  The American one, that guy.

• 1:15:07Chris Williamson?

  There's a couple of famous ones on Facebook. They always turn up that the people think that they're going to go meet a young boy or a young girl. And it turns out to be this huge burly guy with a beard and some of his mates looks like Dog the Bounty Hunter. And you, you see that and you think, yeah, 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.

• 1:15:36Chris Williamson?

  But if that, 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 the mall, and that then down the line causes more children to be harmed, you're actually creating the problem that you're trying to stop.

• 1:16:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a certain, there's a, there's a certain element, and I'm careful when I say this because I don't mean everyone, but there is a tiny element of lady doth protest too much, you know, there's similarly with homophobia, a lot of people who were so homophobic turned out to be gay, you do find there have been certain paedophile hunters who have turned out to be paedophiles themselves, obviously not, 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.

• 1:16:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, isn't it some high percentage of killers return to the crime scene?

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:16:38Chris Williamson?

  Some huge percentage of arsonists as well also return 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, they're watching it.

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, sort of rubbernecking and, you know, checking it out. It's, there's this huge difference, particularly, the difference particularly in their community, the paedophile community, which has sort of delved into, you know, speaking to them and stuff over the last couple of years and their, their online message boards and stuff in Germany. And they get very offended and sensitive about the difference between an offending and a non-offending paedophile.

• 1:17:18Chris Williamson?

  Do they have terms for it?

• 1:17:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, they say that an offending one is a pedo criminal and a non-offending one is a paedophile. Some of them are proud. This woman, this 25 year old woman, she said, this is my gender or my sexual orientation. I would never ever act on it, but I'm, I'm, this is who I am and I want to be able to express who I am. Yeah, it's, it's so hard for us to get our heads around. But one time I fell out with them all because when there was news about six months ago or a year ago of Madeleine 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

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  know the paedophile being accused right now of taking Madeleine McCann?

• 1:18:08Speaker 00

  Um, and I, I left it for a couple of days, went back and checked. There were about a hundred messages. They were livid, absolutely livid with me. And I thought, what have I done? What about, and 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. And 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 Madeleine McCann as a paedophile. And they were saying he is not a paedophile. He's a paedocriminal. They were fucking, they were like, even the German newspapers like Bild, which is the German version of the sun.

• 1:18:50Speaker 00

  Even they wouldn't do what you just did because Germans are a bit more sort of liberal and, you know, with, with paedophilia and stuff. And I was just like, oh, I'm, I'm really sorry, guys. You know, I ended up apologising to all these paedophiles in the community, but it's a whole different world, man, and it's just so complex.

• 1:19:06Chris Williamson?

  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,

• 1:19:13Chris Williamson?

  yeah, every time, every time that I think about it, it makes me, it's like such a cocktail of different emotions. Cause 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, 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, 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, robotic ethics professor. And he was talking about the ethics of child sex robots.

• 1:19:58Chris Williamson?

  And if you take Kantianism 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.

• 1:20:27Chris Williamson?

  It's endlessly difficult.

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  There was a story of, there was a guy, I think he was Venezuelan, who, he fancied this porn star or whatever, and he got one of these DVDs from, from like the street somewhere in Venice and Caracas, 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 gonna say, or 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, they put him in prison, and they said, this, this person's clearly very young. And at his trial hearing, the, 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

• 1:21:14Speaker 00

  for it, of course, and you know, what a horrible thing to have happened to him. However, the reason that they, 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.

• 1:21:32Chris Williamson?

  So this is like a computer algorithm?

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, and her body was, was according to the algorithm, that of a child, just because of, you know, 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, 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 some, 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 marijuana.

• 1:22:13Chris Williamson?

  Gateway Bridge or whatever, yeah.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  Exactly. So, and I, and there's no consensus on, on that at the moment.

• 1:22:20Chris Williamson?

  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 looks 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...

• 1:22:56Chris Williamson?

  You've got to be a trooper of a journalist to be able to go through that, I suppose. Have you found it uncomfortable? You know, like, how much has it affected you personally, learning about this sort of stuff?

• 1:23:05Speaker 00

  The first time when I went to meet Max, that was difficult. And I, maybe in an old fashioned man way, I don't cry, I don't, do you know what I mean? And that's just how you're brought up, right? I cry at silly movies, maybe, but I don't cry in real life. And I met him and I hung around with him, I suppose, 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 around me, loads of children around me, who have no idea who this guy is.

• 1:23:49Speaker 00

  He's 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, 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 forty degrees and I was like, I'm just gonna get an ice cream. And I went and sat on a little log and I just broke down. And I don't, I don't do that. It's just not me. I get emotional, of course I do. It's very, 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 think, you know, after that, you do become a little bit desensitized because you're working on it for so long.

• 1:24:36Speaker 00

  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 twenty-five-year-old girl, telling me she's a paedophile, she's actually attracted to babies. And I'm, I am 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, it's a bit of everything.

• 1:25:09Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:25:34Chris Williamson?

  There aren't those celebrities of, of that industry anymore. You know, you don't have, or I don't know many of them. I mean, who've I had?

• 1:25:45Speaker 00

  Jon Lonsom.

• 1:25:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Who was the guy that, um, that used to work for the Guardian that did the stuff with, not Edward Snowden, with Julian Assange?

• 1:25:55Speaker 00

  Hmm, not sure.

• 1:25:57Chris Williamson?

  Young guy. Anyway, I had him on the show. I can't remember his name. I've forgotten his name.

• 1:26:01Speaker 00

  God, that happens. You do so many shows in the end, don't you?

• 1:26:03Chris Williamson?

  350, yeah, and you, you end up forgetting him. Anyway, so he, he, he won a Pulitzer 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. Um, 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, is that kind of the way that it is at the moment?

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  Well, there are so many as well now. I mean, it's, it's easier to be a journalist in, in terms of like traveling, getting around the place in the eighties and nineties. If 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, the NCTJ is the journalism qualification you need, you need to work to get and 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 speaking, because I think you're an exception to this rule. Cause you have some controversial stuff and it, it does well. But we're encouraged to have very lame, dull stuff because advertisers accept it more.

• 1:27:19Chris Williamson?

  Safe.

• 1:27:20Speaker 00

  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. Um, one of the reasons I wanted to write about paedophilia 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 there's a few others like Will Storr, uh, and they go and do similar things.

• 1:27:43Chris Williamson?

  Will's coming on the show in a couple of, a couple of weeks.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

  Is he? I'm getting him on as well.

• 1:27:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for his new book.

• 1:27:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, super good. Really, really interesting book. I love that. I'm excited to get him on.

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  I haven't read it yet. I got it on PDF. Um, but he's, he's brilliant. Have you read his books then? Like before?

• 1:27:58Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no. This is the first I've been introduced to him.

• 1:28:01Speaker 00

  Oh, he's great. Heretics was one of them. Um, and again, the stuff that you and I, I think, are very interested in and, and you know, the listeners will be as well, with the beliefs and how people go and he hangs out with these strange, weird people. And you just think, I'm thinking like, well, how am I going to compete with that? And I think the one thing they're probably not going to touch is paedophilia. John Ronson doesn't need that controversy right now. What, 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 risks, that kind of risk when you're hungrier. Does Louis Theroux 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 nineties, he was really, you know, hanging out with Nazis and stuff. Now he's sort of doing people with autism and

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  things like that. It's a lot, still very interesting. Yeah, yeah, it, 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 is brave enough to, to be interested, you know, get in touch.

• 1:29:01Chris Williamson?

  I had Hamilton Morris on, you know, the pharmacopeia guy from Vice?

• 1:29:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:05Chris Williamson?

  Drugs guy. Uh, 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. And, uh, he, uh, he took Ritalin that, uh, did he take Ritalin that day? I think he took Ritalin one other day and he kind of made a name for himself by mixing drugs, even though he understands the pharmacology of it down to some, he, 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, the same receptor that the, whatever drug does. And, um, yeah, I think he did the same as well, man. So I think. If this is what it takes to to sort of make a name for yourself,

• 1:29:46Chris Williamson?

  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. But man, Andrew Gold, ladies and gentlemen. People want to check out your podcast and other stuff that you do, where should they go?

• 1:30:02Speaker 00

  On the Edge with Andrew Gold, it's on YouTube, 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's, Cast, all those places. That's where it's much more popular these days. But check out both if you want.

• 1:30:18Chris Williamson?

  I'll send them there. Links in the show notes below. Andrew, thanks for today.

• 1:30:22Speaker 00

  Thank you.