UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

After the resignation of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and with a leadership election looming, UnHerd convened some regular contributors for an emergency roundtable. Has the populist experiment run its course in the UK, or is it only just beginning? Joining Freddie Sayers to see beyond the Westminster speculation and get to grips with this historical moment were non-affiliated life peer of...

When the COVID-19 pandemic began and most of the world went into lockdown, Scandinavia bucked the status-quo by keeping their society almost completely open. At the time, there was a sense that Sweden, Denmark and Norway would pay a dire price for their decision. But looking back now, with all the data on Covid deaths at hand, it seems that their pandemic policy was a success. Why did rest of the...

Freddie Sayers meets Jesse Powell. Jesse Powell is the CEO of Kraken, one of the largest crypto currency exchanges in the world. He has been in the headlines this week for publishing a decidedly libertarian memo about his company's working culture that challenged any workers claiming offence on topics such as pronoun policies or racial diversity targets to find work elsewhere. Kraken's list of val...

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

Florence Read meets Silkie Carlo. There are six million security cameras in use in the UK, one for every 11 people, and the majority are Chinese surveillance systems. London, where UnHerd has its offices, is the most surveilled city outside of China, and has more cameras per person than Beijing. So it has to be asked, are we being watched? That is one claim made by a new report from Big Brother Wa...

Freddie Sayers meets Ilya Shapiro. Ilya Shapiro was due to start his new job as senior lecturer and executive director of Georgetown's Law Centre for the Constitution. But this week, he quit. All because of a single Tweet. Freddie Sayers invited Shapiro to the studio to understand how censorship under the guise of 'diversity and inclusion' at Georgetown had played a part in his resignation. Read t...

Freddie Sayers sits down to discuss the pandemic response with Biologist, Bret Weinstein. Before the pandemic, evolutionary biologist and former Evergreen professor Bret Weinstein was lauded by both sides of the political divide for his insights into the crisis on American campuses. As a member of the so-called 'intellectual dark web', Weinstein was expanding his audience and being profiled by leg...

UnHerd's Florence Read meets Elena Ledneva. Elena Ledneva, a woman living with her husband and young child in the UK, applied for a Master's course in hospitality at the University of West London. Elena had years of experience in running events, including welcoming international delegates to the Sochi Winter Olympics, so on paper, she would seem to be the ideal candidate. But last week she was rej...

Freddie Sayers meets David Heymann. Will monkeypox be the next pandemic after COVID? To try to find an answer, Freddie Sayers invited Professor David Heymann to the UnHerd studio. Currently based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Professor Heymann is one of the world’s most senior infectious disease epidemiologists. For 22 years he worked at the World Health Organisation in Ge...

Freddie Sayers meets Pavel Podvig. Since the invasion of Ukraine, the outcome that nobody has wanted to contemplate is that of Russian nuclear escalation. Threats that “mirror moves” would be made by the Kremlin if NATO expanded, as we heard in  last week’s interview with UN representative for Russia Dmitry Polyanskiy , suggest that a strike might not be out of the question. With Finland and...

Freddie Sayers meets Michael Sandel. Do we deserve what we have? Are the elites any better than the rest of us? Do the right people get to run the world? One political philosopher who attempts to tackle these big questions is Professor Michael Sandel. A Harvard professor since the 1980s and world famous author of many bestselling books, including 'What Money Can't Buy', and most recently, 'The Tyr...

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

Former computer programmer and political theorist Curtis Yarvin is considered by many to be a dangerous thinker. He has been named in the New York Times and Vanity Fair as a founding member of the burgeoning 'New Right' and  caused a stir on Tucker Carlson . His theories of power seem to have made their way from the fringe blogosphere into the mainstream media. Now, people are trying to make...

Freddie Sayers meets Professor Christine Stabell Benn. A new Danish study reveals disparities in all-cause mortality between mRNA and adenovirus vaccines. The results raise some difficult questions about the unexpected effects of the most popular COVID vaccines. Freddie Sayers speaks to the study's author Prof. Christine Stabell-Benn, from the University of Southern Denmark, to find out more. Read...

Freddie Sayers discusses the backlash against Western values with Douglas Murray When Douglas Murray was writing his new book The War on the West, Putin had not yet launched an actual war on the edge of Europe. Now, two months after the invasion of Ukraine, has the battle of ideas he writes about been put into perspective? Freddie Sayers speaks to Douglas Murray about the factions of the Right who...

Freddie Sayers meets Michael Tracey. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Western media has been overwhelmed with support for Zelensky's resistance and condemnation of Putin's invasion. Intervention from the US and Europe has now extended to supplying arms and sanctioning Russia. Some are demanding this support goes even further, suggesting 'no fly zones' or boots on the ground in Ukraine. Journ...

Freddie Sayers meets Sergej Sumlenny. As the war in Ukraine has become more entrenched, there has been much discussion of the small Eastern European states which might be annexed into the Russian Federation. One political scientist and journalist has taken a different view. Sergej Sumlenny is Russian-born, but lives in Berlin. On Twitter he predicted that rather than expanding, Russia was due to d...

The biggest city in China is in complete lockdown, with no end date in sight. Cases are rising and the 26 million residents of Shanghai are not permitted to leave their homes at all — not even to buy groceries or walk the dog. Footage has emerged of eerily deserted streets, but reliable information about what is really going on inside the strictest “Zero Covid” regime in the world is hard to come...

Commentators on the war in Ukraine seem to have come to a consensus: public figures have a moral responsibility not to challenge anything other than the Russian narrative. This rejection of balance in favour of propaganda poses a problem for political thinkers like Yanis Varoufakis, who has been accused of 'Westsplaining' and being a Putin apologist in the last week alone. To give this controversi...

Health Secretary Sajid Javid came into the UnHerd studio to talk to Freddie Sayers and look back at lessons learned from the Covid era. Read the full post here : Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddie Sayers meets Francis Fukuyama. Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist and public intellectual, most famous for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man which has helped to define how we understand contemporary history. His new book is called Liberalism and its Discontents. Freddie Sayers spoke to Dr. Fukuyama about the war in Ukraine, current trends in Western de...

Getting an accurate picture of who is winning the war in Ukraine has become increasingly difficult in the information age. Log onto Twitter and there are images of burnt out Russian tanks being towed away by Ukrainian farmers and hostage-style videos featuring Russians POWs expressing regret over the invasion; meanwhile, Western news outlets are littered with tales of doughty Ukrainian protesters...

Freddie Sayers meets with Samo Burja. With Western powers increasingly united against Russia, we seem to be witnessing the end of the unipolar world. Financially, culturally and spiritually we have never been so bifurcated. Could this be the end of civilisation as we know it? To find a way through the big issues at stake, Freddie Sayers sat down with Samo Burja, a sociologist and the founder of Bi...

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine it was under the guise of ‘denazifying’ the country. But are there really any Nazis in Ukraine? Or is this just a story spun by the Kremlin? Aris Roussinos joins Freddie Sayers to unpick this contentious topic and seek some insight into Ukraine’s far-Right factions. Read the article here: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Freddie Sayers meets Marlene Laruelle. Aleksandr Dugin, the ultra-nationalist Russian philosopher and erstwhile organiser of the National Bolshevik Party, has been referred to as ‘Putin’s brain’. Professor Marlene Laruelle, the world’s leading expert on Dugin, says his influence is no longer direct. Dugin stated mission is to preserve the "Russian soul" and expand the Eurasian empire in defiance o...