#142 – Andrew Gold – The Incentives Driving Radicalisation on Both Sides

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Peter McCormack Show – #142 – Andrew Gold – The Incentives Driving Radicalisation on Both Sides

Date: January 28, 2026
Host: Peter McCormack (“Pete”)
Guest: Andrew Gold

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the rising radicalisation on both the political left and right in Britain, the incentives that stoke these extremes, and the societal impacts of culture wars, immigration, economics, and the influence of digital algorithms. Andrew Gold, a journalist and podcaster known for examining cults and radical groups, joins Peter McCormack to dissect why society feels so divided, how media economics push creators into ideological corners, and whether the issues of culture and economics can be resolved. The conversation weaves together Andrew’s experience with cults, their joint perspective as content creators, and sober, often candid reflections on Britain’s shifting society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Radicalisation and the Loss of Social Trust

• Opening Reflection on UK Society
  • Andrew opens with a bleak assessment:

    "What I see when I open my door was a world I don't recognize anymore that doesn't recognize me. ... We used to have a higher trust society ... it's gone. And I'm not sure we can ever really get that back." (00:00, Andrew)

• Judging People by Ethnicity
  • Andrew cautions against ethnic judgments, warning that this path leads to societal breakdown:

    "I warn against this judgment of people based on ethnicity … that's not a smart way to handle this without breaking into war." (00:00, Andrew)

2. Algorithmic Incentives & Content Creation Bubbles

• Content Creator Dilemma
  • Both discuss how algorithms foster audience bubbles, nudging creators toward more extreme or repetitive content for views and revenue.
  • Andrew describes how his YouTube channel became pigeonholed into covering only Scientology because those videos performed best:

    “I became the Internet’s expert on Scientology … I stopped doing it at its peak … started again with Heretics two years ago.” (03:56, Andrew)

• Algorithm vs. Human Nature
  • Andrew reframes the conversation, saying:

    “When we talk about the algorithm, I think what we're really talking about is human nature … Human nature sort of pushes us into these bubbles …” (06:12, Andrew)

3. Purity Spirals, Cancel Culture, and Political Fractures

• Online Tribalism
  • Both note how any deviation from purist group lines gets met with hostility—whether from “woke” left or “fringe right” commentators.
  • Andrew gives the example of Meghan Markle conspiracies and the vitriol surrounding the trans debate:

    “There is then a group of people known as the Gender Critical Ultras … it's a kind of purity spiral ... you're not pure enough for them … that's inevitably going to happen with immigration, race, and these discussions.” (08:19, Andrew)

• Resulting Political Paralysis
  • Pete observes:

    "How do you have a cohesive society with so many fractured small groups ... and there's no compromise?" (10:35, Pete)

  • Andrew points to Overton Window shifts and the function of lightning-rod figures like Tommy Robinson.

4. Extreme Views and Their Limits

• Impracticality of Extreme Agendas
  • Pete critiques the far-right proposals discussed by Steve Laws:

    "...at a place where you have a police state, because you have to police ethnicity at the borders..." (18:58, Pete)

  • Andrew agrees these ideas quickly descend into authoritarianism and are unworkable:

    “Doctors looking at your medical records to judge who's fit to stay.” (19:02, Andrew)

5. The Role of Identity and Social Class

• Anywhere vs. Somewhere
  • Andrew references David Goodhart’s "anywhere" vs. "somewhere" dichotomy:

    “There are people who are just somewhere people ... impacted by mass immigration. ... the anywhere people ... tend to be the elites who ... are in charge of the world.” (27:00, Andrew)

• Alienation on Return to UK
  • Andrew discusses returning to the UK after years abroad and finding society more atomized, joke-policed, and “mental”—striking differences particularly evident to returnees. (28:37, Andrew)

6. Moral Fashion and Elite Signaling

• Changing Social Norms
  • Andrew traces “fashionable” morality through history, showing how changing linguistic and social taboos are driven by elite signaling:

    "You can trace swear words in terms of the fashion ... In recent times, it's become identity ... It's just a fashion, I think." (33:38, Andrew)

7. Diagnosing Britain’s Problems: Culture vs. Economics

• Andrew's View: Cultural fragmentation and the loss of national pride threaten social cohesion.

  • “We used to have a higher trust society ... And it's gone.” (46:18, Andrew)

  • He worries about immigrant communities not assimilating, leading to enclaves and diminished shared identity.
  • He also stresses not to judge individuals by ethnicity, warning that path leads to ethnic conflict.
• Pete's View: Economics—wage stagnation, inflation, government debt, asset bubbles—undermine society, with immigration partly a downstream symptom.

  • “I always come back to economics ... if we don’t fix the money and the economics, people are still going to be poorer and face a tougher future.” (67:34, Pete)

8. Feminism, Birth Rates, and Social Change

• Feminism’s Long-Term Effects
  • Both debate whether advances for women in education and career opportunities, combined with broader social changes (like Tinder), have had downstream effects on birth rates and family formation.
  • Andrew ponders:

    “The libertarian feminism ... might have caused a huge downfall in our society.” (78:39, Andrew)

9. AI, Technological Change, and Economic Futility

• AI Taking Jobs
  • Both reflect on how AI is automating away white-collar and creative jobs (e.g., marketing, travel writing), further pressuring the middle class and reshaping society’s structure.
• Debt-Based System vs. Technological Deflation
  • Pete highlights:

    "Technology is deflationary ... but because we live in a debt-based society, that doesn't happen ... money is inflationary." (68:30, Pete)

10. The Global Money Elite & Government Debt

• Elites Pulling the Strings
  • Pete discusses institutional economic power:

    “There’s about 150 people that run the world ... They control most of the important assets. They control the money flows.” (Citing Chamath Palihapitiya, 100:39)

  • They elaborate on how those near the source of new money (central banks, asset managers) disproportionately benefit, exacerbating inequality.
• Unmanageable Government Debt
  • The size of UK debt and its interest burden is discussed in foreboding terms.

11. “Would You Leave?”: Red Lines and Political Breakdown

• Emigration as a Last Resort
  • Andrew reflects on his own backup plans:

    "I would encourage anybody. If we're at a point where we're about to be completely murdered and our country is turning Islamic, get out before it happens.” (107:03, Andrew)

  • He refers to scholarly estimates that UK civil conflict is not inconceivable.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Content Bubble

  “If you show any doubt or in your own thinking, if you try to think in real time, if you try and change your views or anything like that, you're seen by some of these people as a grifter.” – Andrew (15:41)

• On Social Trust Lost

  “And what I see when I open my door in Bristol ... was a world I don't recognize anymore that doesn't recognize me. ... We used to have a higher trust society ... it's gone.” – Andrew (46:18)

• On Political Divisions

  “Every single party in every election is treating the other side like it’s an existential crisis ... if you don't vote for reform, Britain is done ... It was the same in America ... Government still wins. ... the money people still win, the banks still win.” – Pete (56:31)

• On Economic Inequality

  “If you've got enough assets, inflation is amazing. Like if you're sat there with 25 million in assets, you want this to carry on because when everything inflates, your assets inflate and you can leverage in their interest.” – Pete (73:00)

• On Libertarianism and the Role of the State

  “The state should just do three things. It should protect and defend life, liberty and property … Once it's redistribution, [the] morality is inversed and that's how you get culture wars.” – Pete (59:11)

• On Potential for Civil Conflict

  “If we are at a point where we have some kind of Islamic range uprising in this country … I think that is unlikely in the next 10 years, but not inconceivable.” – Andrew (107:31)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:00 – Opening reflections on the state of UK society and radicalisation.
• 03:55-05:32 – The trap of algorithm-driven content and personal integrity for creators.
• 08:19 – Purity spirals and being attacked by online tribes for not aligning with orthodoxy.
• 15:23 – Discussing blowback and good faith responses to controversial podcast interviews.
• 27:00 – "Anywhere vs. somewhere" people and mass immigration's impact.
• 33:38 – Social taboo as fashion and shifting language in identity politics.
• 46:18 – Culture, trust, and assimilation: Andrew’s diagnosis of social fragmentation.
• 67:34 – Pete’s argument: the UK’s fundamental rot is economic, not just cultural.
• 73:00-76:35 – How asset inflation, debt systems, and tax burden hollow out the middle class.
• 78:39 – Questioning libertarian feminism and its long-term effects.
• 86:39-87:37 – AI, work, and the future: what happens when jobs disappear?
• 100:39 – The Chamath Palihapitiya quote: “150 people run the world ... and they're all men.”
• 107:03 – On red lines: “If we're at a point where we're about to be completely murdered and our country is turning Islamic, get out before it happens.”
• 112:13 – How collective action toppled Scientology, and why famous people breaking silence could shift the culture war tides.

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Flow & Tone

The conversation is candid, sometimes bleak but often laced with dark humor and self-deprecation. Andrew provides the outsider’s cultural perspective, often using stories from his travels to illuminate British issues. Pete’s tone is relentless on economic critique, but both wrestle openly with their own biases, fears, and contradictions—making for an honest, thoughtful, and sometimes provocative listen.

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Conclusion

This episode offers a raw analysis of Britain’s cultural and economic malaise, arguing that radicalisation is fostered by both social and algorithmic incentives, and warning that neither “fixing” the culture nor the economy alone will repair the nation. Both Andrew and Pete root for tougher, more open dialogue—even as they recognize their own limitations and the daunting complexity facing modern Britain.

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Transcript

[Andrew]

If an alien came down, they would go, what the hell are they doing in that country right now? And what I see when I open my door was a world I don't recognize anymore that doesn't recognize me. And we used to have a higher trust society and that's so much to so many people. And it's gone. And I'm not sure we can ever really get that back. We're seeing people who have very extreme views all the time and it's very hard to remove ourselves from that and actually consider how unusual that is in real life. I warn against this judgment of people based on ethnicity for, you know, because I just don't think, I don't think that's smart. I don't think that's a good way to handle this without breaking into war. It's very hard though to debate someone who's looking you dead in the eye and basically saying. Well, not basically is saying you and your family out. But I think what's sad about that and the reason I have referred to a very fringe aspect of them as the woke. Right. It's the same as the woke left in that they don't seem to want to actually convince and change minds. In fact, they're looking to push you further away from them so that they can feel more pure in their cult. We've seen civil wars around the world. They're usually based on multi ethnic societies and the tensions between ethnicities. But yeah, I would encourage anybody. If we're at a point where we're about to be completely murdered and our country is turning Islamic, get out before it happens.

[Pete]

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[Andrew]

Hello. How's it going?

[Pete]

I'm good, how are you?

[Andrew]

Yeah, good.

[Pete]

I always like talking to someone who does this similar weird job to understand their experiences. And I was going to ask you, you started telling me this beforehand. How do you balance what you want to do with what you think is right to do for a show like this?

[Andrew]

It's really hard and I think it's a question that a lot of YouTubers are asking themselves. You are? I am. Every YouTuber I know asks themselves this because the way that YouTube works, I think a lot of people don't realize this is that I think if your video does well with a certain audience, YouTube shows your next video to that audience and so on. I used to be really interested in cults. That was what I first got into. So Scientology and Hasidic Jews and Mormons and so on, and people who had defected from those cults. But I found this was back when I had like zero subscribers. I found over time that the Scientology ones did better than if I talked about, say, yeah, the flds, the fundamentalist Latter Day Saints church. And so then you find yourself in a bit of a position where you're going, okay, well, I want to just do lots of diverse interviews, but I don't. I don't want to continue having no subscribers. And the Scientology stuff did well. So I would just do more Scientology stuff. And then you do more and more, and then you find yourself in a position where you've done Scientology every time for the last 50 videos. And if you. You get like 200,000 views for it, suddenly you have a career, you're able to do a job you love, but if you go back to doing Mormons, people are not as interested anymore, and you get 10,000 instead or 5,000 instead of 200. It's a huge difference. So that is really hard. I got to a point where I went, you know what? This is earning good revenue. And it was really easy to do. I did it at home. I talked about Scientology. I became the Internet's expert on Scientology. Somehow I was the biggest channel for Scientology related news in the world. I don't know how that happened, but it did. And so I stopped doing it at its peak. I went for a phase of maybe a few months of. I talked about the Royals and Meghan Markle. I was interested at first, genuinely interested. After a few months, I was like, I can't do this anymore. So that's when I quit that channel and started again with Heretics two years ago. That was the only way to do that.

[Pete]

A fresh channel.

[Andrew]

Yeah, completely fresh. Zero subscribers. Because I knew that putting out what I wanted to talk about, which was the culture wars at that time, would have died on my old channel, and it would have been a waste of time. And I would have found myself going, oh, man, I better go back to the Scientology videos. The only way was to cut it dead and start a new channel. But, yeah, you get to a point where, okay, it's been two years now. I've made I don't know how many, but let's say two or three Hundred videos. All of them have been about politics and the culture wars. And I think all of us like to think of ourselves as people who are interested in many different things. And so I might want to talk about football one week. I might want to talk about. I'm thinking of YouTube topics. Makeup. Probably not, but, you know, so some people say you do two videos for the audience that your audience likes and then one just for you. The problem with that is that that third one, if it does badly with your audience, is going to screw up the next ones. So I think it's really, really hard. I think you just have to make sure that you're always honest. Honest with your audience, honest with yourself, otherwise you're just going to go mad. What do you do? How do you do this?

[Pete]

We just make whatever we want to make.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

Which doesn't help us all the time because the range of performance on the shows is. Is quite wild. But I do, I do find, like, I get sucked into the. The games of the algorithms, but I compare it to smoking.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

Because, like, when you have a cigarette afterwards, I always feel terrible. I haven't had a cigarette in years, Bear in mind. But I used to always have a cigarette. Feel terrible. And I kind of feel terrible.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

But I also think about it quite philosophically about, are we. Part of the problem is the algorithm forcing us to either cover things we don't want to cover or forcing people to have opinions they wouldn't normally have.

[Andrew]

So your.

[Pete]

Your Steve Law's interview was really interesting when I watched it. And I went through a similar experience with Carl Benjamin, where I got annihilated in the comments. And I didn't want to change my views and my opinions, but I felt the algorithm was drawing me to do that. And I just, I don't know, been questioning a lot recently.

[Andrew]

It's a really hard one that. Because the algorithm. I mean, when we talk about the algorithm, I think what we're really talking about is human nature. I think some people talk about the algorithm as this kind of mystical thing. And really, it's just you've set up a business, you've set up sort of your, this is my channel, my TV channel, whatever it is. And a certain number of people like what you're talking about, they follow you. Those are the people then that YouTube will show your next video to, and they measure how well that video's gonna do and how much they're gonna push it based on how much the people who came to your business or your TV channel liked it. If they liked it or not. So human nature sort of pushes us into these bubbles as YouTubers the same way as it does to the audience. People watching right now, their own friendship groups and so on, so that we end up in where we are on Twitter. We're seeing people who have very extreme views all the time. And it's very hard to remove ourselves from that and actually consider how unusual that is in real life. Yeah, because in real life I am an absolute Nazi. I'm the most far right and I'm quite sure you are as well, person that most people have ever encountered. They won't speak to us, they will not have us on TV channels and so on. And yet Twitter, I'm a milquetoast, just pathetic. On the fence, always on the fence, which is what I'm told I am by people who are anonymous Twitter handles. And you go, well, hang on, we've put our faces out here. We're now unemployable by the mainstream because of doing that. And yet you guys are calling us cowards and on the fence and so on because we have views that are different from yours. There will always be purity spirals. I experienced this before. I experienced this just talking about Meghan Markle, right? I did videos about Meghan Markle and then some people come along and they say, you know, Meghan wasn't really pregnant, she faked it. It was all fake pregnancy bump. There's a million videos out there about this bump being fake. Oh, here's the moment she leant down and it was. You could hear something popped and it wasn't real and so on. And I just said, well, I'm not. I don't think that's probably. I think I agree with a lot of the criticism of Meghan Markle. I'm not convinced that she faked her pregnancy though. That just seems a bit far fetched for me.

[Pete]

You get slaughtered.

[Andrew]

Absolutely slaughtered. The trans stuff again. Many of us were saying this stuff about trans when it wasn't okay to say it. People forget that now. It feels milk toast whatever whatever. But two, three, four years ago when we were all saying like, hey, this, this thing that's taken over the world right now, it's a bit weird. It's a bit weird and it's completely wrong and insane and very cultish, that's what led me onto it. But there is then a group of people known as the Gender Critical Ultras. It's a kind of purity spiral. Many of them are well meaning, good people, but some of them, again, it's anonymous accounts and they take you down because you don't want to say, I hate that man in a dress. I wouldn't let that man in a dress go to a gen spec'd gender conference or something like that. And that's not all of them, of course, but some of them are like that. And so you're not pure enough for them in their purity spiral. And that's. Inevitably that was going to happen with immigration, race and these discussions that we have with. We are never going to be pure enough for those people. And they're very loud, they're very organized and who knows? The reality is we don't know how much they are a very small subculture online that we've gotten used to and most people would be appalled by or if they are actually making a dent in the culture right now. I don't think there's a very good way of knowing.

[Pete]

Yeah. And it makes making decisions really hard with this. Like we contemplate even nuking what we're doing now in that when you do an interview with somebody, you're bringing in a lot of their audience as well. And if you don't agree with them, you just get annihilated for not agreeing with them. But when we just make a show about what we want to talk about, the only people are watching the people actually like us, which is a lot smaller. But you get to be a bit more honest and you don't feel like a twat at the end of the day. And. And I worry like something like Steve Laws. I watched that and sure, there's a community of people who agree with Steve Laws and agree with. Agree with his view on the world and what should happen to the uk. I think if you think through it critically, all his ideas collapse. And when I was watching the interview, I was thinking, well, politics, you need a big tent, right? If you're gonna win an election, you need a big tent. And there's so many of these subgroups who want the world my way.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

These are my set of views. The world must be this way. How do you have a cohesive society with so many fractured small groups who will. Who've got like this determined view of how the world should be and there's no compromise. And so I think something like Steve Laws is there will never. He'll never be able to create enough or accumulate enough political power for what he wants happen into in the world to happen. And so what do we do with that?

[Andrew]

Well, he might say, I'm moving the Overton window So something Tommy Robinson might say as well. And again, a funny thing, because as much as I said earlier, you and I are considered like Nazis or whatever. I don't think we really are. But Tommy Robinson is. And he's the kind of person that just being friends with him is enough to get you alienated, pushed, excommunicated from your group. He is seen as some sort of Nazi. And it's so funny, funny to see that the Steve Laws is of this world. View him as a, again, this sort of, he said himself, this multicultural lover of Zionism and various minorities and so on. But Nigel Farage, for example, I don't think will associate himself with Tommy Reform won't. But Tommy serves a purpose to them, and I'm sure Tommy's aware of that as well by moving the Overton window about what's acceptable to speak about. So people might see what Steve has said and go like, oh, gosh, no. But the next time they hear Rupert Lowe speak, they might go, well, that seems a lot more reasonable. Or Carl Benjamin. That seems a lot more reasonable. I mean, I'm really happy I got to do that video. It's one of my favorite interviews I've ever done because I grew up on Louis Theroux. I grew up on everybody speaking to the extremes and as much as he is to the right of me. Anyone I said to you earlier, Jeremy Corbyn or Owen Jones, if I had a restaurant and they came in, they'd be welcome to a nice dinner. I'd sit and speak to them. I'd hope they have a good time.

[Pete]

Even James o', Brien.

[Andrew]

I don't think he'd be able to have a good time. I think he'd see me and just be immediately argumentative. Which Owen Jones as well is also the case. Owen Jones, I've had some interactions with recently, and I've actually found him really disappointing. And it's actually been. It's been sad because I knew who Owen Jones was, of course, for years, a strong leftist activist. And I thought he must have a little bit more to him and he'd be maybe a little bit less ad hominem and a little bit less bad faith. And he's come in and attacked me a few times on my tweets. And every time I've come back, I said, hello, Owen, nice to meet you. Here's what I think. What do you think about that? And every time he comes back with name calling. No, because you're this, because you're that. And I thought, wow, this guy is I think he's in his mid-40s now. He's been in the political arena now for decades. You would think he might have learned to have a little bit of. Well, as you said, a big tent. I think he's maybe the Steve Laws of the left, you might say. It was really disappointing. I hoped he might engage and we could have a conversation. Maybe he'd come on heretics, maybe we'd talk things through and go, oh, that's really interesting. This is why we disagree about this and that, but no interest at all.

[Pete]

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[Andrew]

I think that's fair enough to block you, though I'd rather he blocked me. He probably will after this. And because then at least it's like he doesn't want to engage with me. I think that's a bit pathetic, but fine. But if he's coming for you and just shouting slogans at you, I wouldn't mind.

[Pete]

I'm blocked by him. James o', Brien, Piers Morgan. Like most of them, I've got the.

[Andrew]

Full collection they didn't need to block because there's the notification trick, which I've learned recently. You just set your notifications. I guess they don't want you seeing their tweets. I don't really mind about anyone seeing my tweets. I have notifications. I can only see notifications about people who I follow, so I can choose. And it's changed my life. It was, you know, so much horrible hate, and now it's like I get two notifications a day.

[Pete]

How was that, Steve Lawson? Did you expect it to blow up?

[Andrew]

Like it a little bit? Yeah. I mean, okay, so I say that I. I enjoyed doing it. I'm happy I did it. When I was watching it back, there were moments, as there always are, with me, where I thought, oh, don't watch back, man. Yeah, I know.

[Pete]

But I never watch Eddie back.

[Andrew]

Had to watch watch it back because I died to help with the editing and all of that. So I had to, you know, and we don't take stuff out. And there were bits where I thought, this doesn't actually represent what I think, the way it might be taken. And I thought, I'm gonna get a lot of shit for this, but at the same time, it's not fair for me to take that out. And so we just went with it. But I think it. Yeah, there's a difficult one as well. I think on that side, there's no room for doubt. He has no doubt. I asked him, is there any room in your mind for doubt? No, to me, I said to him, that's a sign of an ideologue. I've seen that with cults time and time and time again. Do you have any doubt that Lord Xenu exists? I would ask a Scientologist. None. Zero. And I think if you show any doubt or in your own thinking, if you try to think in real time, if you try and change your views or anything like that, you're seen by some of these people as a grifter or so on. I think the reason that you and I have these big audiences is because most people do like this. They like that you're able to think in real time and maybe correct yourself and so on. But the loud vocal minority are, you know, the ones who comment vociferously. It's a lot. And it was a lot until I changed that notifications thing. I mean, it's also. It's such a strange way for them to go about it because those who actually engaged in good faith with me and said, listen, I like what you did. I don't agree with this idea that we should deport people who've been here in their families for hundreds of years. Of course not. However, have you considered what you said about this or that that gets you Thinking that really does. So I've definitely, I guess, how you felt after Carl Benjamin, after that conversation. There are points where I've looked at myself and gone, oh, you know what? Yeah, I suppose it is fair to say that there is an English ethnicity. I suppose they do feel like they're being replaced. And it was actually Carl, who speaks in a very sensible manner that did enable me to think that way. But I think what's sad about that and the reason I have referred to a very fringe aspect of them as the woke. Right. It's the same as the woke left in that they don't seem to want to actually convince and change minds. I'm talking about a fringe aspect. I'm not talking about Carl or Conor Tomlinson or any. I'm talking about a fringe aspect online who are very vocal and they just shout Jewish this. All right, Goldstein, Juju, juju, juju. They're not looking to change minds. In fact, they're looking to push you further away from them so that they can feel more pure in their cult.

[Pete]

What was quite interesting was even seeing Carl having to take a few spears at him from the Steve Laws crowd. And there's always going to be someone further to the right, more extreme, further to the right. And that's why I say you kind of need to think with a big ten, because otherwise you just. You go in this kind of like, doom loop of extremism, someone's got more extreme ideas. And I just don't think society will ever operate on that level. I think with Steve Laws, most of it, I. I just tried to think through what he was saying he wanted critically. Okay, so how do you accumulate enough power to get what you want? How do you execute it? How do you ensure it's maintained because you may lose power afterwards? And what is. What is the. What is the output? And I ended up at a place where you have a police state because you have to police ethnicity at the borders too.

[Andrew]

Doctors looking at your medical records to judge who's fit to stay.

[Pete]

Yeah. And a lot of your industry here will completely crash and crumble. So you're going to enter a kind of economic collapse. So the whole idea is just unworkable.

[Andrew]

That was. That's a more logical way to go at it. And if I could do it again, I would probably do it that way.

[Pete]

I wouldn't have done it live.

[Andrew]

This is.

[Pete]

This is me because I text you. This is me watching it, me and Connor debating it, thinking about it, rewinding it, like, seeing the arguments again, which you don't have the luxury of in the moment.

[Andrew]

That's the thing. And I've never been punishing of those who have said. There was that Sam Harris moment where he said something like, you know, he'd rather liars get in. It doesn't care about lying as long as it stops Trump getting in. I've misquoted that. But people were so unforgiving that Sam Harris is never allowed to even be spoken about again. And it's just mad because this is Sam speaking in the moment live. We're now used to that in podcasts, and we expect people to have these fully formulated ideas and to speak perfectly in the moment. Back in the day, everything was scripted. You know, you'd write these speeches, and that's how you would hear communication from political commentators. Now we expect these people in a debate. And I think the issue for me was. And I learned a lot. I mean, I'm used to arguing with the woke left. I grew up around the left and the woke left and the kind of elitist. I went to a posh school. I went to university. So I know them, so I can argue with them all day. And I know all of their points. I know their postmodernist, progressive points. I know the cultishness of it. I've not had debates with people on the right, and that was really interesting. But it's a learning experience. It's very hard, though, to debate someone who's looking you dead in the eye and basically saying. Well, not basically is saying you and your family out, see you later, and you've got to leave the. And it's, you know, we've been here hundreds of years. It's. It's. It's hard to keep your cool and go, okay, well, how would this happen logically? And that's. That's the thing.

[Pete]

So, yeah, and there's also a situation where you've opened the door for a conversation with Steve Laws, which has opened a door for other people who agree with him to talk. They're much more interested in that conversation than. Than people who maybe disagree with him. And that woke right point comes in because the woke left have this position whereby if you disagree with, they'll shout you down, scream at you, maybe kill you. And a similar thing is happening because you got even criticized for making the point work. Right. But you get shouted into silence, and there's like. They'll say things like, oh, Steve, you know, Steve is in the extreme one. Or weak men create bad times. They have all these different talking points to make you think, well, am I in the wrong?

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah.

[Pete]

Am I wrong?

[Andrew]

You do for a moment. But then when you turn those notifications off, then the people who do get in touch with you go, bloody hell, that guy was even stupider than I thought. I've had several, I mean, I won't name them, but people we know who are creators going. I mean, one in particular said I was actually relieved to watch how bad he was because I thought he might have had some good points, some good talking points on Twitter, but he didn't. So it's really hard. Again, that's what we're coming back to every time is to what extent is it a small minority who are vocal online? Yeah. And what does the real world think? If you showed that video, you took it around to the street and showed them? I think, you know, it doesn't. This is hard. This is complicated.

[Pete]

What did you study at university?

[Andrew]

English literature.

[Pete]

Okay, interesting. Where did you study?

[Andrew]

Leeds.

[Pete]

Okay. And then from that to cults to this.

[Andrew]

Yeah, that too. Via several countries. I mean, I was always really interested in cultures and languages and things like that. And so while I was at uni, I went to France. I don't know why. There was a. People from the French department had not got. There were spaces on their trip, Erasmus trip. So they asked the English department, does anyone want to go? And I was the first. I just happened to be checking my email, so I got back first. And so I was on this trip to Montpellier and it changed my life south of France for wow, what a year. And went out there and I was studying English over there. So it was the easiest year I've ever had because my class were all French people studying English. I already spoke it quite well, my English. So I was correcting the teacher. They were like Charles Dickens and I was like Charles, it's Charles. Easiest year you'll ever have. But I learned French. I never thought I would be able to learn another language. I thought that was only. I don't even know. I thought only foreigners could learn different languages. That set me on a path where after university I studied journalism for a few months. I did a course, six month course, where you have to learn shorthand and all those old fashioned things, politics, reporting and ethics. And after that I worked at the Sun. I was the guy responsible at night for making sure the page three girl was on the iPad and you could rotate her.

[Pete]

That's a tough job.

[Andrew]

It was tough at 21 doing that. It was a strange job though. And it was a night job, so it was like, 5am, I'm on the phone to India going like, guys, she's not twisting properly.

[Pete]

Do you know about this? Like in. When I was like, your age, the sun newspaper, you just would open, on page three there was a girl with a tits.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah.

[Pete]

Just. That was a normal thing, a pair of tits on page three of the newspaper.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Your generation doesn't know what is missing, let me tell you that.

[Pete]

They've got the Internet.

[Andrew]

No, no, they're mobile phones.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

But they don't get News and Briefs. That's what it was called. News and Briefs was the pun. And they would say there would be a little opinion that the pastry girl had about the politics. I think we should nuke Iran. And there she boobs out. News and briefs. So I did that for a bit. I got thoroughly depressed with it after, I suppose, a year. And we could say, don't buy the sun, right? We can say what?

[Pete]

Don't buy the sun.

[Andrew]

I don't care. I do, yeah. Liverpool, Scouse. Yeah. Yeah, I. You know, this 20, 30 years, you know, everyone's. They're all.

[Pete]

That's true.

[Andrew]

They're all shit. They've all got shit people everywhere. If you've got nothing else to read and there's a sun in front of you, I'm sorry, Liverpool, just fucking read it. Burn it after if you want.

[Pete]

Do you read any newspapers now?

[Andrew]

Daily Mail, Little bits every now and then. Mail online, what's happening to Andrew Garfield or something. Hugh Grant said hello to a postman or something.

[Pete]

I don't know how I lost 20 pounds in six weeks.

[Andrew]

Tomatoes will kill you. Yeah, I'll read a bit of that. No, no, I suppose not. It's mostly Twitter, then links to newspapers and things. But anyway, after that, after all the journalism stuff, after the sun, depressing. I went out to Colombia. I got. I had no money. I went to Medellin. I lived there a year and I decided I didn't have the money. I had nothing. I was. You know. And so I got the son to send me out there to cover the Medellin flower festival in Colombia. So I got a free flight with Air France, I think it was, sent me out there and I just. I resigned then. So I never went back to England, Just stayed out there and found a flat with some Colombians who didn't speak English and just lived out there for a year doing odd bits and pieces online, like working for articles and things like that so I could learn Spanish. After a year, I got so bored of Colombians, I Was gonna say Colombia and I changed it last second to Colombians there because it was just a different culture. They're lovely people, but it was just not my culture, so. And I was complaining to a Colombian friend of mine whose mum was like, listening and she eventually just went, andrew, if you don't like the country, just piss off and go to go to Argentina. That'll be more your thing.

[Pete]

Yeah. I went to Colombia for years because I went to Venezuela.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah.

[Pete]

The only way I could get into Venezuela was a flight from Colombia.

[Andrew]

There you go. It's all right. Colombia, it's lovely. But a year of it was too much. I did go to Buenos Aires and I stayed there for six years. Yep. And so picked. Learned the Spanish, the Argentine, Spanish, and then moved to. We moved to Germany after that for three years to learn German.

[Pete]

Do you speak four, five languages?

[Andrew]

Yes, five, including Portuguese, because I went to Brazil for six months and did a course there. But my Portuguese is not great now. I mean, you have to practice them all. So I always worry someone's going to burst in and go, okay, let's practice your languages then. I see. If you say you speak five, let's do them. But my French and Spanish are pretty fluent still.

[Pete]

That's pretty good experience, though, to do that and come back and then create a show. Haven't all experienced different cultures.

[Andrew]

It's a funny thing.

[Pete]

You sort of.

[Andrew]

You get to be. It's a hard one because I'm aware that anyone watching who is of the sort of Steve Laws, let's say, of their view, which I have come to respect more, not his politics, but the view of the English ethnicity and so on. There's that anywhere versus somewhere people. David Goodheart wrote, I love of that as an explanation that there are people who are just somewhere people who are of the place and they are the ones who are heavily impacted by mass immigration. They have a street of people where they never leave. They don't. I mean, they leave to go around or what? They might go on holiday, but this is their street. They might live in that house or in that area their whole lives and they see it change day by day from a place that was all people of the same culture, the same ethnicity, let's say the same religion, the same talking points to. You can't even understand anybody on your street. The somewhere people, sorry, the anywhere people, which is probably someone like me, maybe it's you as well, are people who are maybe university educated, who have ambitions about living abroad, going to different places. They could probably up and go easier and fit into another culture. And they tend to be the elites who tend to be in charge of the world. So I do get it from the perspective of someone who's here, seeing these guys lecture us. There's a noise that people can't hear on the microphone probably.

[Pete]

But that was the one downside of Soho is that the.

[Andrew]

The.

[Pete]

On a Friday night, if we do a late show on a Friday, you hear all the bicycles go past with the music.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah.

[Pete]

So we've had to try and put as much dampening for the sound.

[Andrew]

But there's some upsides of Soho. Hey, that nightlife.

[Pete]

I'm too old.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I know. I am too old. Not gay enough.

[Pete]

Definitely not gay enough.

[Andrew]

Yeah, so. So I get all of those points. And. And I think a big part of the reason I went to all these different countries and learned the different languages was like, I wanted to. I wanted to be able to come back to England with a perspective as an outsider in. In some respect. And so I came back to my country and saw, especially with the passing of time, some absolutely mental things. And I think it was easier for me to see. I know a lot of people who stayed also saw how mental this was. But to go away for. I think I was away for 13, 15 years and you come back and suddenly in this country, men can have vaginas, women can have penises. That was mental because I've been away in a country where, like Argentina, they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah, you know, don't be ridiculous. In Argent or offense offence culture, like people here, it was like the boiling frog. They saw it happen quite gradually. So I was able to completely go and then come back into this boiling pot and go, what the hell? No one's allowed to make any jokes. You saw that with the footballer Rodrigo Bentencourt a year or two ago. He's made a joke about Hyung Min's son looking like his cousins. Do you see that?

[Pete]

No, I didn't.

[Andrew]

It's his teammate, but he was off in, I think, Brazil. He's Uruguayan. Benson, Kerr, he was in the summer. Nothing to do with England. He's off there. Someone asked him about son and he said, oh, I saw him. Or maybe it was his cousin joke about, you know, East Asians looking the same. Right. It's not that funny and it's offensive. He got banned for nine games.

[Pete]

Well, we had it non league as well. So what's the team? What's the team with? Manager made the joke about the female linesman. Female ref, who's the guy who managed the team and owns the team. And they've had the most Dawkin. I'm pretty sure it's him. Mark White, I think. But I could be wrong, but I think it's him. He made a joke about there was a female ref and he said, I will help her park in the car park. An obvious shitty joke. He got multiple match banned for a joke.

[Andrew]

More than you get for breaking someone's leg. Yeah, probably.

[Pete]

Yeah. At a time when biological men were eligible to play in the women's game.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah.

[Pete]

As we were allowing that stupidity which was unfair to the girl players and presented risk to the girl players.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

A guy made a simple. Yeah, we can debate whether it's funny or not. I thought it was funny. I'm probably going to get a ban now as a chairman.

[Andrew]

I think with the offense culture, I think especially that joke and probably Benton Kerr's joke, I think. Look, you know, I get it. I get why people don't want those jokes to be happening. Maybe you could slap him on the wrist. Maybe you can say, hey, we're going to fine you. Maybe not. The non league guy, it's not, you know, he needs that bentonkur. You fine him a week's wages. Maybe he's even banned for one game to set a precedent. We don't want jokes about Asians looking the same. That's not what we want in our league. Even though you were abroad when you made the joke. But what is really frustrating about it is there is a. From a woke angle, it's a moral imperialism that we are setting, implement, implementing. We are going over and saying to Uruguayans who have a very different culture to ours, that's offensive. Even though you're in your country or you're in South America when you say it, we're so offended by it. We're going to ban you over here because of a thing you did that's very typically typical to do in Uruguay. Uruguayans have a very similar culture to Argentinians. It's the same kind of thing.

[Pete]

It's where the rich Argentinians go, right?

[Andrew]

Yeah, it is. Yeah. Punta del Este is the bit, but I've been there.

[Pete]

Hold on, where did I go? Medi. What's the capital?

[Andrew]

Montevideo.

[Pete]

Yeah, Montevideo. Yeah, I say Montevideo.

[Andrew]

Montevideo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a bit of a bland place, Right. Maybe you might go on something nice in there.

[Pete]

It's like Argentina's Monaco.

[Andrew]

Yeah, it is. It is that so. And the whole Uruguay is a bit of that.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

But he grew up Bensonco relatively impoverished and they, they speak out there. They call each other like chino, hey, Chino. Like Chinese, you know, hey, gordo, hey, fatty. Like they call each other those names and that. We have forgotten that offense. Culture was a huge part of bonding, that kind of joking with one another. That's how we bond, that's how we laugh despite the miseries. And I think you can even apply this to, not necessarily a somewhere versus anywhere kind of perspective, but there's definitely a kind of elitist looking down at people who just want to. Who don't have as much international elitist stuff going on in their lives, but can have a little bit of a laugh, a bit of a joke sometimes. Bit of Tommy Robinson stuff. Right. That's how he is. Tommy grew up in a very much. I mean, he's a hard one to place because he's, you know, I'd like to say he's a somewhere person, but he's constantly on holiday all over the place. You can't really pin him down as a somewhere person. But he grew up in a somewhere environment. He was very much in and of Luton. Luton. From Luton. That's his thing. And he grew up amid the boxing gyms, the football hooligans, those kinds of things. So having spent. I spent a week with him traveling around Israel, he is just. He's a lad and he jokes all the time.

[Pete]

But he's been judged by people, middle class people who live in Islington, who drink lattes.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Who don't need to have that kind of jokey thing. And I think what's happening more than just people being offended really is I think they're trying to say to others, you're old fashioned. And I've got the new fashion.

[Pete]

The new fashion, it's identity. They're expressing their identity by putting a moral blanket over society.

[Andrew]

But they're saying their identity is cooler than Tommy's. I think they're saying, I think it's cool.

[Pete]

I don't know if they're saying it's cooler. I think some, maybe. I think some are saying they're better people.

[Andrew]

Better people is definitely part of it. It's the piousness of it. But I think there's even more to it. I think it's fashion. So you can trace swear words in terms of the fashion. I mean, these are morals as well. They're morals. But if you stick to the morals, you're the fashionable one because you're the one who gets to go on all the TV Shows you're the one that all your friends go, clap, clap, clap. And you can trace swear words. I'm fascinated by this. John Matt Water talks about it in his book Nine Nasty Words from the Religious. So the worst thing you could say 150 years ago might have been hell or heck or any of those kinds of religious words. And then as we moved into what, the new moors of the day or the new fashions of the day, it became the body fuck shit and those kinds of words. And in more recent times, it's become identity. So it's just a fashion, I think. And you see that as well in like coloured. That was the word you were supposed to say. It was fashionable to say coloured. Look at these people. Oh, these coloured people. Because it felt like a tempered way of saying black. Black felt harsh. The K in it and the, you know, I'm not. Hey, I'm not black. You know, it's colored, that kind of thing. And then suddenly people started saying, coloured. What? I'm a colour, am I? What do you think? I'm black. We changed it so that changes in the universities where it's fashionable to hold certain views. And the kinds of people who don't hold the fashionable views are the Tommy Robinsons of this world, they're not fashionable. So what they did was they changed it to black. And over the years you'll have seen this, especially in the football world, they. Every now and then somebody would forget, you're not supposed to say colored. And what fun we all had by going, ah, what a dinosaur. We've caught him. He didn't know he was supposed to. He's not supposed to say colored anymore. That was finally. Finally got to the point where everyone knew, everyone in the whole world knew. You can't say coloured, right? That was done. They changed it back to of colour. So there's no escaping. There is some kind of.

[Pete]

Who gets to invent it? Where did he do you trace it? Where actually literally comes from, I think.

[Andrew]

It'S fashionable university people who get a kick out of being cooler or more in vogue than the Tommy Robinsons of this world. But gradually it filters down to them. It does filter down. So even in football now, you've got all the LGBT stuff everywhere, but it filters down to the working classes. And by the time they get it, like Burberry, the Poshos, the elites don't want it anymore and they change the rules of the game.

[Pete]

Have you read Eddie? Rene Girard?

[Andrew]

I've never read anything, mate. No, I haven't.

[Pete]

I think you would really enjoy Rene Girard. So he talks about that people's aspirations come from other people they look at, and they aspire to be like. So they end up copying them, but they then end up fighting them to compete with them. So it shifts. It can shift how people think, but it ends up becoming a fight. And that can become. In a workplace, that can become. Socially, it can become anywhere. And I think you. I think you'd enjoy.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I like that.

[Pete]

A bit of Rene Girard. I mean, I. What I'm really interested. I've taken a long time to get here, but what I'm really interested is obviously with your background in cults and they're making the show. When you look at the UK right now, what do you. How do you diagnose the. How do you diagnose where we're at? When you look? What do you think of our biggest problems? And.

[Andrew]

Yeah, well, I'm always. I'm moved socially. I'm a social creature. I was social when I went abroad. It was all about making friends and being part of a community wherever I was. And yet unmistakably English, culturally and nationally, and I love that. And you almost become more English when you go abroad because you show, this is who I am, but you also want to be polite to the local people. But what I'm trying to say is I know that you are initially a finance man, but where I personally am seeing the changes, you know, I see it socially. I see that I came in on the tube to London now, and I don't think I saw a white English. And by English, I mean just civically, someone, at least someone who speaks English with an English accent. I didn't see one. One. I don't think I saw one.

[Pete]

Where were you coming from?

[Andrew]

I don't want to say ish.

[Pete]

Okay, I know.

[Andrew]

Ish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean. I mean, on the tube, right? And look, that's a class issue as well, to an extent, a lot. It's like an immigration, and we've got a sort of underclass of people who have come in. And I get that that's. That's really hard to get away from, but that's mad. Where I lived in Bristol before, for streets and streets around where I was, I would say to my. I don't want to bring her into this, but my wife, you know, how long until we see somebody who's not in Muslim attire? So it's not about the person themselves. It's about the garb and what it's showing. It's showing I am different. I am not of you. I think, I just don't. I don't think that can continue.

[Pete]

But we are, we are a. Yes, but we are still a majority white British nation. How, how is it that this must be then contained to specific areas if you are getting on a tube.

[Andrew]

Cities.

[Pete]

Yeah, cities. And what. Why do you. So you think that's the biggest problem?

[Andrew]

Yeah, I think, you know, but, but this is a thing. It's really hard for me to be. I know I want to be more objective about this.

[Pete]

No, no, it's fine. It's just because you do the conversations with people and I do this conversation with people and I try and establish what I believe are the biggest problems. I always come back to economics. But at the same time I do think immigration is a problem, but I think it's downstream of economics and money.

[Andrew]

Yes, I mean, that's certainly true. I mean, what I was going to say is that, look, when I used to do Scientology, for me that was the biggest problem. You know, I was saying to people, have you not heard what's just happened with Danny Masterson from that 70s show? And he, he's gone to prison for. You know, most people don't even know what I'm talking about. But that was the world I was in. So right now I'm in this world that I've created myself, I suppose, with the YouTube channel, where culture and immigration is pivotal. Absolutely. Regarding economics being an issue, but it appears to me, and you'll know a lot more than me about this, so you tell me that one of the main issues we have is that we don't have an above replacement birth rate. And that's probably partly economical and partly cultural. There's no pride in this country. There's no incentive, either economic or cultural. You go to Israel. Israel is the one place in the west that seems to have, not just with the Haredi community, but the secular Jews, an above replacement level birth rate. There are many reasons for that. I think one of them is that they actually have real peril there. They're surrounded by countries who want to kill them. But you could argue that English people, however you define that, are also in peril right now. And they're not getting going with having kids to replace themselves. So I think there's more to it. I think there's a national pride that we need to start teaching in schools to help people be proud. Because so many people you hear go, well, we did the Empire stuff. I hate all that. I hate us. Why would I Bring kids into this world that needs to go because that's destroying us.

[Pete]

But you have to be asked to want to have a child and then afford to have a child.

[Andrew]

Yeah, but people had children before they could afford it. People used to have like 10 kids.

[Pete]

Sure, but it's, but it's very difficult now when there's different social pressures on kids. Connor made a really great point the other day when we were making a show. He said, dad, when you grew up, your peer group was essentially everyone you went to school with, that was who you were competing with. He said, I have to compete with the whole world because I have a mobile phone that tells me what the whole world is doing and I see what all their success is. I see a 21 year old who's streaming, he's got a Lamborghini, he's living in Dubai. And so Connor himself doesn't feel like he has to compete with that person. But generally.

[Andrew]

Victim complex.

[Pete]

Yeah, but generally speaking, it does exist that there's this, like, I meant to achieve all of this. Like when, when I was a kid, it was like, we're meant to go to school, go to uni and go and get a job and, you know, you'd eventually get a house. I think a lot of kids now, it's like you're meant to go and be. Become a millionaire like that.

[Andrew]

That's it.

[Pete]

Because that's what your peer group is doing. So I think there's that pressure. I also think hardcore pornography is, is a major problem. Yeah, I think that.

[Andrew]

Why did you point at your phone?

[Pete]

Well, because it's. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, my son's there, man.

[Andrew]

Come on.

[Pete]

Yeah, but I think that is a problem. I also think Tinder fuck things up.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

I got this thesis on Tinder. It flipped the Flip the Dating Game because I don't know how you met your, your wife. But my assumption is, like most of us before Tinder, you, you go up in a bar and you would talk.

[Andrew]

To a girl, get arrested for now.

[Pete]

Yeah. Well, you'd shit yourself, wouldn't you be.

[Andrew]

Like, to be fair, I did, I did. When I was 18, I did shit myself. Not, not literally. That's going to be taken out of growing up. Like, you meant to have that bit where you were shitting yourself and went up. Yeah, for the first time. I still struggled, though. I struggled.

[Pete]

Everyone, but everyone that the only way you met a girl got snog was going up at a party or in a bar and talking to a girl and you had so Much fear of rejection, right? But if she talked to us, oh my God, she's actually talking to me. This is amazing. And then maybe you get a phone number and you get a date and she gives you a snob, you know, oh, my God, this is amazing. And then, you know, if you're super fortunate, at some point she'd have sex with you. It's like, oh, my God, I'm having sex with a girl here. And then you would stay with her because otherwise you'd never know when that would happen again. And so you got to know a girl and you dated. We flipped it now so the women were in control because the men had to go and ask them out. I think Tinder flipped it because what we did is we gave, we took away the fear for men. You upload a photo and then you just swiped, keep swiping and eventually you get a match. It's like, oh, the fear bits gone. I know that person likes me because imagine in the days when you go to a bar, there was like a little screen above every girl and you knew for definite which girls would definitely talk to you. Well, you just go and talk to them.

[Andrew]

It would be unbelievable, though.

[Pete]

Yeah, but they screwed.

[Andrew]

I get your point. That's ruined everything from an individual point of view. Wow, what a great thing that would be to have.

[Pete]

But so, so you. These young lads are getting it screened for them. These are the girls that will talk to you. And now they're going out on a date and maybe they've got eight other matches there and so they don't have to. So we created these fuck boys, right, that don't have to worry about it and they don't have to. So. And then the flip for the girls is now, is there they've got a different worries, like, is he going to see me again? Am I just one of eight? And that's why I think there's so. Because I was. I got divorced in 34. So I dated, you know, for 34 to 40 and I dated a lot of. Not a lot, but I dated a few girls. I wasn't that bad, but I dated a few girls and there's a lot of girls who just want to have children. Like, I think this is a male led thing. I think there's a lot of girls who, women who really just want to have children. They've done the work thing. They realize it's not really fulfilling because I met a lot.

[Andrew]

But how old?

[Pete]

I mean, you know, mid to late 30s. Like last chance saloon.

[Andrew]

Yeah, but it's different thing.

[Pete]

But what I'm saying, it's last chance saloon. Like they, they. They haven't got time. So most dates you'd find you'd be asked within the first day, do you have more children? They're screening you to see if they're going to waste time.

[Andrew]

Of course, because. But they're in the last chance saloon. The problem is the women in their 20s who are trying to build careers. And so they should. Yeah.

[Pete]

But if they want to.

[Andrew]

If they want to. Not going to force them to build a career. I think that's the issue, unfortunately. And I remember watching.

[Pete]

But just back to my point is that we flipped it. We've taken the power away from women in the dating environment where they definitely should have been in charge, and then we've given it to men who are fucking idiots in the dating environment. Like, we can separate what men and women are good at and what they're not good at. I think the dating scene was best when women have the power and we can.

[Andrew]

To the extent women still have a power there, though, they have a power menace, as far as I can tell. And back when I was doing this before I was married and people can be going, hang on, how Wednesday? But I've been with my wife 12 years or so. But before that I just flick yes to most because I felt like I wasn't going to get a good ratio because it is. It is. Women are much more picky.

[Pete]

Yeah, of course.

[Andrew]

So that's. There's power in that.

[Pete]

You say that, but that means there's a lot more. A lot of women fighting over a few. A few men.

[Andrew]

There are. They actually want. Yes.

[Pete]

Have you seen that table where it's like based on attractiveness and all the women are pointing up to the top 30% of men, but they could still.

[Andrew]

Go out with someone who's in the bottom 70%. Whereas the men, most men only have like almost no one of the women who will date them.

[Pete]

I just.

[Andrew]

I think it's still power for women.

[Pete]

Oh, then there is. I just think they had all the power in dating before Tinder and that worked well. But look, it's complex and it's nuanced and you're right, we haven't got the replacement rate that we need. Sorry, we should go backwards. Sorry, we tangented there. So you think culture is the biggest problem. You think. And the immigration side of this.

[Andrew]

Well, others will say AI is the biggest problem, or the economy, as you might point out. So we've got many problems and they all interact with, of course. And they might even save one another. I've heard theories about the issue with the birth. Replacement levels might not be so important if AI is good enough, that we don't need a larger workforce, we don't need humors. Yeah. To support the older people. But it might also rid us of purpose. So there are issues. I always see it as kind of getting a football manager. You get a new manager in your team because your team has been too defensive. So you get Ange Postecoglou, who's going to attack all the time. And you don't know what the ramifications of that will be. And that's just 11 players. When you're dealing with the world, you don't know what bringing in AI as a new manager or the economy changing slightly this way or that way. What's going to happen? We thought feminism was this fantastic idea. I still like the idea. Of course, if I had daughters, I would want them to be able to do whatever they want. Has it led to us having a less happy group of women? As a lot of surveys seem to point towards so many going back to the previous point, I suppose so many women I know, pretty much almost every woman I know who was extremely academic, extremely ambitious has done their job. I'm now 36. They've gotten to about my age. They've had a kid or two, or sometimes before they had kids, they've gone, I don't really want this. Why have I been told I need to go and do all this? I'd quite like to be just a wife and a mother nowadays. So what I'm trying to say is there are so many different aspects to what might be destroying us. It does appear clear that people are not happy with the state of this country. That's why reform is so popular in the polls right now. It's why Zach Polanski is also quite popular in the polls. And what I see when I open my door in Bristol, where I was, was a world I don't recognize anymore that doesn't recognize me. And we used to have a higher trust society. And that's so much to so many people. And it's gone. And I'm not sure we can ever really get that back. Especially while we encourage people who come to the country not to settle in, not to assimilate. That is unbelievable that that happens. And that's another one of those things that if you're outside of the culture and then you come to England, having not been here, you come to Britain. So for me, that was the case. I was in Argentina. Argentine flags everywhere. Everyone is so proud to be Argentinian. You go there as an expat or an immigrant, you are expected to be part of what they do. To come back here for me, and then see the way we speak about our own history, our own culture, one of the best cultures ever that we have, that we had and the way it's spoken about and the way that people who come here are told to celebrate their own culture here rather than adapt to. That's. That is mad. That is one of those things that if an alien came down, they would go, what the hell are they doing in that country right now?

[Pete]

Do you think it can be fixed?

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. You know, it probably can't go back to what it was. I warn against this judgment of people based on ethnicity, you know, because I just don't think. I don't think that's smart. I don't think that's a good way to handle this without breaking into war. We've seen civil wars around the world. They're usually based on multi ethnic societies and the tensions between ethnicities. So I think if we start pushing ethnicity too much as an important factor, that's where we're going to end up. However, we have to stop denigrating our culture right now. And I think if you do that, and I don't know, I get criticism from the right when I say this, but. Katherine Burbal sings Michaela School It's 90% ethnic minority. I don't suggest that we have 90% ethnic minorities in this country because they wouldn't be minorities. It would just be different ethnicities and things. But at least she teaches those people who are already here. She's not going to deport them. I don't think she wants to, but she wouldn't. To assimilate and to be proud of this amazing, amazing culture. There's almost no culture in the world that's been as amazing as this one. From everything from our politics and history to our music to our films. The way this small island has affected the world. Our sense of humor are sarcasm to an extent. There are so many things that do make us English that I think people shy away from now.

[Pete]

But I hear people say about assimilate, we have to ensure people assimilate, but policy wise, how do you actually make that a thing? How do you make it happen?

[Andrew]

Well, you do. I mean, there was. There were some. There were. There were things you can do. I mean, it sounds so silly, but flags are important. That's the reason that the left is so flag happy all the time. You know, all the flags apart from one.

[Pete]

What, our flag.

[Andrew]

What, the British.

[Pete]

Exactly.

[Andrew]

Well, exactly the flag. The amount, number of times. I've been told, because I love the British flag, I love the English flag, and I get told by these guys, oh, you're a flag shagger. And they've got like eight different flags of, like, multi binaries. Some. Ukraine's always there, isn't it?

[Pete]

Yeah, Ukraine. Which, by the way, I am. I don't care. If you want a Ukraine flag, fine.

[Andrew]

But you should also have a. I'm bored of the Ukraine flag. I don't think they need a Ukraine. You can be pro Ukraine, you know.

[Pete]

Be pro Ukraine flag. I have three of mine. I have the Irish flag because I'm half Irish. Your flag saga. And the British flag. And a pirate flag.

[Andrew]

Yes, I like the pirate.

[Pete]

Yeah, that's our football team.

[Andrew]

That's. I know.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Yeah, that's cool. Obviously, flags are important. They mean something to people. There are an identity and people want their identity recognized. And for a huge number of people who feel like they're English, whether ethnically or culturally, to not be able to show that and to have the Gary Nevilles of this world. I like Gary Neville, but I think he made a huge mistake by going around criticizing people just for hoisting a flag. So you start with the flags.

[Pete]

Yeah, but Gary's part of the media lovelies. He has to say that.

[Andrew]

Yeah, well, that's an issue. But he needs to be a bit stronger.

[Pete]

Yeah, but he's not. He's weak.

[Andrew]

Yeah, well, that's it. I think you and I do push back against people when we don't agree, and then we get flak for it. But.

[Pete]

But you also get supported for as well. Yeah, I just think. Do you know what? I. I think I look at it all and I think, right, say we solve immigrations, we get down to kind of, I don't know, zero immigration, maybe deport some people who are, you know, here illegally and some criminals. I think what comes after that is a country that's still unhappy and still fighting.

[Andrew]

There are more problems. So, yeah, stopping immigration is the first step. And I don't even talk about that because it seems so obvious to me that's the first step. Obviously, stop the boats. But I think a bigger issue is the huge mass immigration that's legal right now. One of the hard parts about that is it sounds humane in many respects because you say to people, you can have your Family members come in, but people who come from Pakistan and India and those kinds of places have got such vast families that it's a bit of a loophole and it's just going to keep doubling and doubling. So we have to get a handle on that legally, it appears. That's what Suella Brahman speaks about. That's what the echr, and they've got to get a handle on the legal aspect. I'm not an expert in that stuff, but they've got to stop that at that point yet. There have to be huge cultural changes. There have to be changes to the education system. We need to teach Empire in a positive manner.

[Pete]

Yes.

[Andrew]

Talk about some of the horrible things they did. They did horrible things. But overall, this was quite a positive endeavor. We were, we, we ruled the world. Every country wanted to do that. And we, we did it with bad stuff as well. But those are the kinds of things that need to change. Look at 30, 40 years ago, black people in this country, they had names like John and Ian, and now they have names that tend to be African in ethnicity. Why does that happen? Because they are told over and over again by our media that they need to celebrate whatever culture came before. At the same time, the right is seeing a hypocrisy there because they're saying, well, hang on, you want to say you're as English as everybody else, but also that you get to have this other culture. And they say it of Jews as well with Israel. And I take their point. I think Jews just as much as black people, whoever else, I think we need to be a bit prouder of this country where we are, because there's a reason that we're all here and we love this country. So I think that is a cultural issue that needs to be pushed more in schools. And people might say, well, that's authoritarian to push narratives in schools. But I mean, any ideology they teach in schools is already being pushed. Right now, we are seeing an ideology being pushed.

[Pete]

But how would you even do that in schools? Didn't that poll come out recently? 7 in 10 teachers would vote left, either green or labor. How are you going to shift a education system that's been completely captured by left wing ideology?

[Andrew]

I think it's a really hard battle. I think you and I are responsible. We have responsibility because we have these big audiences. Trigonometry, Winston Marshall, just in case people wanted to make sure he got his full name there. But all of us, we've got these big audiences full of a lot of people who are actually a Lot of them are quite centrist. Some will even be a bit lefty. And they like listening to our show because we have reasonable voices, because we're not saying deport everybody who's not the same as us. We've got a reasonable way of speaking about these things and I think it is our duty to start convincing them. And I've been saying for a while that one of the ways to do this is through celebrities. There's a reason that brands pay so much money for celebrities to endorse their stuff. The same works for ideologies. The last 20 years, it's the celebrities that started pushing, particularly comedians on BBC, started pushing this mad left wing, postmodern agenda and it wasn't funny. It wasn't funny at all.

[Pete]

It wasn't funny.

[Andrew]

Well, the least funny people on earth. And unfortunately there's that woman, Rosie Jones. Is it also got cerebral palsy?

[Pete]

Yes. She's deciding what we can find funny anymore.

[Andrew]

Yeah, the. Yeah, dictator or the fuhrer of comedy.

[Pete]

I'd be honest, I actually saw one of her clips and she did actually make me laugh.

[Andrew]

I'm sure she's been funny sometimes and.

[Pete]

I'm sure I think she's got one joke.

[Andrew]

I imagine she's a really nice person as well. I don't think she's fully, you know, she's fallen for the same ideology as a lot of the rest of them. So I think it's incumbent upon us. I have celebrities. I'm sure you do. I'm sure the others do as well, who reach out anonymously, you know, and say, like, I actually really like your show.

[Pete]

Yeah, I agree with you.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And I say, do you want to come on and talk about that? No, but it's about changing things. And everybody on the right, I suppose, has a role to play in that. And I think it is happening. I mean, the trans stuff, nobody talks seriously about that anymore. Still, the NBC will. They're the last ones to fall. Yeah, of course. So we do change these things and then once the right gets a bit of a handle on the culture, there'll probably be a big civil war on the right, just as there was on the left and I don't know what happened. So perpetual war, I think, I think.

[Pete]

I think it's what happens to crisis after existential crisis.

[Andrew]

I think one side typically takes charge of a culture and once they've got that or put the politics or culture, if they've got a. Yeah, once they have that, some people want to continue becoming more extreme and the others going no, no. Now let's open up to both sides and let everyone in.

[Pete]

But I think it is getting more extreme. So. And this is what, this is what I worry about, because every single party in every election is treating the other side like it's an existential crisis. So reform at the moment, their message is, this is the last chance to save Britain. And so if you don't vote for reform, Britain is done. We are finished, we're cooked. And yet, whatever weird left wing alliance we get, whether it's Zach Polanski and Ed Dave or whatever, they're gonna say, this is an existential crisis. If you do not vote for us, we're gonna get the racists and the fascists of reforming and so someone will win.

[Andrew]

And the climate stuff.

[Pete]

Well, yeah, the climate as well. And it was the same in America. You know, you have to vote for Trump. If you don't, it's an existential crisis if Kamala wins and the next election will be the same. If you vote for Trump, look what he's done. He's been empire building. You have to vote for Gavin Newsom. It's an existential crisis. And what happens is it doesn't matter who you vote for. Steve Baker said this to me. It doesn't matter who you vote for. Government still wins. And the one thing that doesn't change is the debt doesn't get smaller. The debt gets bigger and bigger. Inflation keeps growing, we get wage compression, everything gets more expensive. Houses get further away from our kids, and the state gets to continually steal from us through our rights, through the bureaucracy that affects our businesses, and through the creation of money. So whatever happens, the money people still win, the banks still win. And I might sound conspiratorial with this myself, but there's a really good chamath video that came out today or yesterday where he said, do you know what chamath is? You know the all in podcast? All in the four guys, the four investors of America. So he's a multi billionaire. And he said. He just came out and said the truth, which is true. 150 people actually run the world. They're all men and they move the money around the world. It'll be your Larry Finks and your vanguards and who have got the money and they just decide what happens from country to country. All the politicians are puppets. Again, I sound conspiratorial, but it's true. And so what happens is we just roll this debt over around the world from place to place. We continue to drive inflation. All the assets inflate and the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And you can map this back for the last three, four decades in this country easily. And so this is my worry, is that as we watch these parties fight and argue and try and get you to buy their narrative in the background, the debt keeps growing, inflation keeps going up, everyone gets poorer. And I think we have to escape that.

[Andrew]

How do we do that?

[Pete]

Well, I mean, we all have to become libertarians. No, but there's. Have you ever read the Law by Bastiat?

[Andrew]

No.

[Pete]

So he said the state should just do three things. It should protect and defend life, liberty and property. They're the only three things it should do. The minute it goes into redistribution, it flips the kind of. There's like an. The morality is inversed because when it's defending life, liberty and property, it's defending you as the individual. Once it's redistributed you, it's now you can go into your pocket to look after its special interest groups. So morality becomes inversed and that's how you get culture wars. And I'm not saying we're going to go build a society based on what Bastiat said, but at the moment, all that's happening is constant theft. Inflation is constant theft.

[Andrew]

It does. It appears to be the case. Yeah.

[Pete]

All constant theft, all the time. And what happens is parties like the Labour Party, the poor are so poor they have to keep giving them more just so they can function in society, just so they can afford to put their basics of putting their heat on and feeding their family. And you get that wage compression between minimum wage and the lower middle class where there's almost no distinction between the two anymore. And if you look at any society that's crumbled under inflation or crumb. Yeah, I mean, Argentina is a great example. I mean, one of the things you must have noticed when you were living there, a lot of the young people left because they couldn't buy a home.

[Andrew]

Well, a frustrating side effect of that was they couldn't get into Britain. There were so many very, very smart people out in Buenos Aires. Doctors, lawyers and so on. Friends of mine who were desperate to live in London, I don't think they knew what London had become, unfortunately.

[Pete]

But I mean, I, I know when I went out to Buenos Aires, the people I spoke to, they said, you've got two jobs. As an Argentinian, your first job is your job, but 30% of your time you are a financial director.

[Andrew]

You are.

[Pete]

How do I move my money around to protect my purchasing Power. And I think Milei, for whatever criticisms people have of him, at least he is trying to record, restore some sense into the economics of that country.

[Andrew]

It's, there's, there's a culture as well. And this, again, this goes back. I, I don't want to keep pushing back to immigration and culture and things, but that's how my mind is wired. And I take your points in all of this. And inflation obviously is a problem. One of the half jokes that Argentinians always make is, gosh, if only the, the British had come instead of the Spanish and the Italians, you know, the British would be like Australia now. And I think there's actually a lot of truth in that. Now the reason it doesn't quite work is because I would say to these people, yeah, but it wouldn't be you because you're a descendant of those Spanish, so you'd be off somewhere else. But had the British come over, it might be different. And that's why it's so important. The kinds of cultures and people that move to a certain country. There's a reason that Argentina stands out as very different to the rest of South America just from looking at them. I mean, they're whiter, right, than the rest of South America. They are more European in their mannerisms. They're very Italian, whereas the rest of you wouldn't say Colombians are very Italian or Bolivians. And that's because 100 or so years ago, 120 years ago, loads of Italians moved to Argentina and they made for an Italian culture of pizza and the way they celebrate their football and their hand signals, they're very Italian. So it is direct evidence that, that if a large portion of people from a particular culture move to another place, it shifts it, it shifts it. And 125 years later, here we are with Argentina and next door in Paraguay, utterly, utterly different because different people came. Also how they interacted with the indigenous was different. In Argentina I think they killed them and in other countries they raped them. But I don't know which you prefer. If you're an indigenous person, it's no good. But this was some time ago. So to me that's direct evidence of, of what we already know. You know, if people move to this country, as we've had en masse from countries that are economically much worse off than us and have cultures that are very different to ours, especially with the way that they handle money and business, we are eventually going to look more like them. That's just reality, isn't it?

[Pete]

Well, I mean, it's actually happening.

[Andrew]

Yeah. So, yes, I take your point about the big. The people with them. I don't even know about those guys. And they're scary. But also, it stands to reason that we created this amazing economy at one point that ruled the world in many respects, off the back of a Protestant work ethic. Germany did similar. America did similar. You could even, you know, you can even look at the culture. I was having this chat with Ann Coulter. I think it was about Protestantism versus, say, Catholicism, and that's Mexico versus America. And the Catholic countries haven't done as well financially. So again, in Argentina, Catholic country, Italians and Spanish, I don't think they have been historically as good with money and business and things as we've been. And that is part of their culture now. Every single Argentine, they don't pay tax, most of them, because they don't trust the system. Every five years or so, they have this thing, I think it's called a blancimiento, like a whitening or something, where you are given the option to start paying tax again. And they won't put you in prison for previously not having done so, or they won't fine you for not having done so. They're given, like, a chance to get on the books. And some people take up that option, but others are like, well, you know.

[Pete]

I remember when I was in Argentina, they bring out the bill. They would offer you a discount if you paid in dollars. Cash.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Well, the dollars was a big thing. And they had this thing called the dollar. Blue?

[Pete]

Yeah, the blue dollar.

[Andrew]

Yeah. So when I first moved to Argentina, it was at a time when that was big. And so I used to go, I'd organize for this guy. They were usually taxi drivers who were almost kind of like mafiosos. And this guy would come pull up outside my flat once a month with a huge pile of bills or whatever. I would give him my dollars and he would give me the blue dollar rate, which was a better rate than you'll get elsewhere. What a strange economy. Just a whole madness. But again, it comes back to the culture. This is a very different culture to ours. We even see it in football. Look at the Argentinians. It's like cheat if you can just win, you know? But they also have a very protectionist culture. There's no apple, there's no Amazon, those kinds of things. And I used to get stopped frequently arriving at the airport, and they'd be checking my bags in case I brought something from the outside world. Well, how are they gonna compete with the Rest of the world. How are they gonna make their own Mercado Libre, which was their Amazon? It doesn't have anything to compete with and get better.

[Pete]

So when we were out there, I was taking money out of the cash machine.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

And, yeah, one of the guys was there, said, what you doing? You're like getting half the dollars.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

I was like, well, how to get money? You've got bitcoin, right? He said, yeah, it's like a money dealer guy came to the hotel. I transfer. I had to convert it into tether. Transfer him tether. And then he gave me the dollars. I still played a higher rate than the official rate, but much lower than the cash machine rate. But I. One of the guys I'd been staying with, we sent him some tea, some British tea that he wanted. We got to customs, they doubled the price.

[Andrew]

Wow.

[Pete]

The customs. For him to pick it up.

[Andrew]

Wow.

[Pete]

The whole. But Joe, I found was weird about Argentina because I knew about the inflation. I expected to see a lot of poverty in Buenos Aires, and I didn't, strangely. In the center, it's the outskirts.

[Andrew]

Yeah, the center as well, though. There's an area called Retiro, near the train station. That is. They have their slums there. They call them Bixas, spelled bitter Villas, Bichas. But the outskirts is where you get these big vichas. They have like numbers like Bisha number one, Vicha number 30, and so on. And that is. I've actually not been. But a friend of mine used to volunteer to help in those areas. And, you know, he said you would see people like missing limbs and it's that kind of poverty. And then you've got this very European modern center where people are walking about, you know, in suits and things. It's. It's grotesque, really, to see that kind of difference. Inequality, I suppose.

[Pete]

I was also told that when people get money, they would buy bricks and flooring and tiles because the currency was debasing so quickly. And then when they had enough, they would just build another room on their house or another floor.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's property. It's. You know, so they all buy property and you get these people who in the UK would be considered to be lower class, working class, or, you know, just above, just keeping themselves alive, really, who own properties and rent out the rooms. The small, tiny properties. I'm talking about tiny little flats, and rent out the rooms because it's the only way you've got to keep this money. Loads of others keep stashes of dollars or however they might get them in the, in their mattresses, like hidden in those kinds of things. Because the dollar won't appreciate at the same. Well, hopefully not at all.

[Pete]

Yeah. So I think where you're seeing the decay through the culture and immigration, I'm seeing the decay through the economics of the country. I think both are a problem. Yeah, both are a huge problem. But I think what I worry is people think solving immigration is some kind of like, I don't know, silver bullet for fixing the country. And I just think if we don't fix the money and the economics, you can do whatever you want with immigration. People are still going to be poorer and face a tougher future. People like Connor getting on the housing ladder or his friends. I think it's funny because you also mentioned the AI. I think about that a lot as well. So there's a really good book called the Price of Tomorrow written by a guy called Jeff Booth and he says technology is deflationary. So in that every time you go and buy a tv, that TV will be half the price in a year, two years. Right. Mobile phones, you know, when we first. I don't remember. You remember the first phones, it was phone and text, right?

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah.

[Pete]

But now you've got what, directions and any book you want. The entire history of human knowledge and it all exists on these phones. So technology itself is deflationary. And if technology is deflationary, then everything should be deflationary. We should be able to produce everything better and cheaper. But because we live in a debt based society, that doesn't happen. That's why you get inflation. And you cannot match a society that is built on technological deflation with inflationary currency because there's a mismatch. What really should be happening is if we're building everything better and faster and cheaper with technology, the money that we have should be appreciating in value. Our pounds should be buying more, but they're not.

[Andrew]

Because of debt.

[Pete]

Because of debt.

[Andrew]

It's an interesting. I mean, again, I speak to you as a layperson in finance and since YouTube, it's the first time that I've had sort of money. I need to speak to a financial advisor.

[Pete]

You know, put it all in Bitcoin.

[Andrew]

I'll put it all in Bitcoin then. I've got to do something. You know, you've got to do something. Because if it does just. It's a cost. Just keeping it still. Yes.

[Pete]

It's a melting ice cube.

[Andrew]

Yeah. So it's a strange one. But what is strange to Me and probably a lot of other laypeople. And most people watching your show in particular won't be laypeople, but there will be some. They probably feel the same as me. It's funny how much you're incentivized to have debt. Yes. Like, course, you need to have a credit card to do certain things. I never wanted to do that. I didn't want to work that way. I always felt like, no, no, I'm going to spend within my means. I'm never going to get into any kind of debt. And that meant that when I was on minimum wage, well, I had to just not eat as much as I wanted at that point. And, you know, I had to be really, really careful. And I got really good at that. And then I came to find 10 years later, like, oh, hang on, now I can't really get a mortgage because what I should have been doing is using a credit card to get stuff I can't afford. I mean, okay, you can say no, just get. Still get the stuff you can afford, but make sure it's on a credit card. It's not nice because you've got a month going. Oh, what if it doesn't go through? And then I haven't. You know, what if I forget to make it go through or the automatic transfer doesn't happen now forever, I'll be marked as someone who paid late. So you are pushed all the time to have these kinds of debt places and you get air miles and so on as well if you do that. And it just seems mad to me. I don't want to do that.

[Pete]

So on this podcast, you are definitely hearing me talk about bitcoin a lot. Well, why? We live in a really strange time with governments driving inflation with their reckless spending and endless money printing. There is a way out of this. There is a way to protect your money, and that is by stacking bitcoin. I've made loads of shows about bitcoin. You can go and research this, you can go and read the books, but the truth is, it is the hardest money ever created. If you are interested in protecting your financial future, it's time for you to get on the bitcoin train. I have. I've been stacking bitcoin personally and through my businesses since 2017. It's protected me, it's secured my family's future, and it also strengthens all of my businesses. So if you want to start stacking bitcoin, where do you do it? Well, for me, it's with Gemini. They're a Fully licensed, full reserve, exchange and custodian. So they give you a secure way for you to buy and own your bitcoin. There's no risks and no funny business. So if you're serious about stacking Bitcoin the right way, head over to gemini.com, which is g e m I n I dot com. I worry less about personal debt than government debt.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Pete]

Because it's, you know, it's a decision. What, I want to own a house, I want to borrow some money and I will pay. The thing is, most of us pay off the personal debt. Great. You get a mortgage, most of us pay that off over 30 years. You pay a high amount over that 30 year term, but you get to own something at the end of it. It's the government debt that I worry about because they don't pay it off. Yeah, we, I don't know if you know, but the UK government's debt pile now is about 3 trillion. But if you add in unfunded liabilities, pensions, et cetera, it's like, I don't know, was it 8 trillion or 12 trillion last time we looked? It's ridiculous number.

[Andrew]

Imagine how many nice tables like this you could get.

[Pete]

You get a lot. But, but the reason I worry about this and focus on this a lot is when you start to see the mechanics of it. So when, yeah, it's basics. But when the government cannot afford to pay what it wants, it goes and creates new money. But when that money is created, when it goes into the system, it just goes to the people near the money creator, the money spigot. And what they do is they then buy up all the assets.

[Andrew]

It goes to the first people to.

[Pete]

Receive, the banks, the asset managers. I mean we have zero percent interest rates. When the government's given away money for free to juice the economy, who's that money going to and what are they doing? They're buying equities, you know, they're buying property, they're buying gold, they're buying the assets.

[Andrew]

It's actually insane.

[Pete]

Yeah, but the prices of things start going up before your wages go up. And so all that happens is all the rich people get to hoover up all the assets. And so you get inflation, but you also get asset inflation. So if you've got enough assets, inflation is amazing. Like if you're sat there with 25 million in assets, you want this to carry on because when everything inflates, your assets inflate and you can leverage in their interest.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

Well, also think about it like this. Say you're sat there with 25 million of assets, you can borrow pounds against those assets and then you can buy more assets with those pounds you've borrowed. So you're buying an appreciating asset with a depreciating asset. And so all that does, it just makes the rich richer and the poor poor. And this is why we've got what we've got now with again wage compression and the inflation that means that people, you know, go to Sainsbury's, you used to get a trolley for 50 quid, now it's bag.

[Andrew]

At the same time though, there is another argument, I'm talking more about quality of life, that today's poorest in the UK are significantly better off in terms of daily comforts than 50 or 100 or 200. Certainly years ago the poorest were at one point literally dying of starvation. I'm also aware some people be screaming, well that's happening to people down my. And I'm sure it is happening to some people, but that's certainly a smaller percentage than others. Most people in the UK now have hot showers. Yes, right. Most people have iPhones. Most people that would have been inconceivable 100, 200 years ago. So I would say that yes, there is a huge problem, there's a huge disparity in wealth between the. And what you've just described is really scary. That's why I think the culture issue, it goes hand in hand.

[Pete]

But what was the cost of that to society? The cost to society was my dad bought his first house, a four bedroom detached house on the same salary that Connor's on now, the same equivalent. And my mum didn't work and they had three kids and I went to a private school and so did my brother and we had a holiday each year. Yeah, it's the same salary my son here is on.

[Andrew]

But there's. That's an argument, isn't it, about that can be an argument about feminism.

[Pete]

No, it's not about this isn't. But it could be. But sure, women should go to work, but what I'm saying is, is that should they? Well, it's object. They should have the choice. Just be honest. I'm honest to my daughter about this. I'm like if you want to have a career you should, but you just have to think about the life stages that you want to hit and what's going to become important to you at different stages. Just be aware of that. Yeah, but if you look at like Conor now for him, if he wants to buy a House. He can't get a four bedroom detached out. What can you get? You get a two bed flat.

[Andrew]

Yeah, one bed flat. And the worst part of bed fly.

[Pete]

One bed fat. And the worst part of Bedford, the same house that my dad would have actually. No, the worst house that we could find. Was it the worst? No. The cheapest four bed detached house in the same area that my dad bought is now 385,000 pound. So that's, it's a 10x and the same time wages have gone up 3x. It's not the reason that's a 10x and the wages have gone up 3x is because the government creates money. They give it to the rich people and the rich people take up the assets. It's just math. And if you continue to squeeze that, rather than having you have this weird kind of financial imbalance in society where you have so many super rich and everyone else is flattened, you don't want that. You need a good healthy middle class. And to me, I think if we don't fix that, that our, our country will literally collapse.

[Andrew]

It's quite scary.

[Pete]

Yeah, it is. Like I scream about this all the time and most of the shows are talking about culture and I think the culture stuff's important, but we are voting for parties who are making us poorer. We have to run harder and harder and we have to expect less. So that's that scenario. Now it's not even. Some people don't even have a choice. Like we force companies to give maternity and paternity, we force them to pay for it because how many people, if they want to have a kid can just go, yeah, I'm just gonna, my wife's just gonna get work.

[Andrew]

But again, this might be a feminist, I mean, and again, I don't know enough about finance.

[Pete]

Let's talk the feminism for now. Just say, does your wife work?

[Andrew]

Well with me now, she was a lawyer.

[Pete]

But if she just wanted to stop work and have children, could you just do that? Easily.

[Andrew]

We now could you now could, but yeah, a couple of years before this success. Absolutely. Not in a million years. No.

[Pete]

Yeah. So we're handing our children to be raised by the state, so used to be raised by them. My mum raised me, my son, my son, me, my brother and my sister. None of us went to a nursery. It just wasn't a thing. I don't know how many people don't by 1, 2 years old put their kids into a nursery. So because we've got to this point where to be able to afford the, to Afford to be able to afford to participate into society. So you can have your mobile phone, you can have the house you want, but you need two salaries.

[Andrew]

Is it not the case? And I genuinely am asking because I don't know that it used to be the case, as you say, that one person in the family, usually the dad, would be employed and that was enough for the family. And then once women started entering that as well. Explain to me, if this happened, did everything then sort of catch up to the point that, okay, because everyone's doing it, it's no longer effective? Whereas had women not entered the workforce in the same way, it might have stayed as okay for one parent households to be working.

[Pete]

It would have stayed that way because that's the way it was.

[Andrew]

Yeah. So by then having the second parent coming in, at first that was a great advantage, but then everyone started doing it and now we need to. So that's what I mean. And the reason I talk about this because I was having this debate with a friend of mine who was a big feminist and we had a really good faith sort of conversation. We're not shouting at each other or anything, but it's that Bertrand Russell phrase that I really like and I can never get it right. But he roughly says something like when analyzing society, go with what is actually true, not what you wish were true or would have beneficial consequences for society were it true. I think that's the issue with everything. I mean, trans, for example. It would be lovely if it was true that if you want, you can change into a woman, but unfortunately you can't. Maybe some of the things we've pushed for. Multiculturalism, what a lovely, wonderful thing. Everyone bring your culture and we'll all celebrate it and everyone's happy. Communism, lovely. What a lovely idea. Everybody just gets to hang around and do the same and everyone gets the same. Nobody's rich anymore. Lovely idea. All these things, when they're implemented are travesties. They absolutely screw us when we try to be too idealistic. So it's a really hard position for many of us, particularly libertarians, and I consider myself one as well, who say anyone should just do, you know, woman, man, individuals, whatever. We have to also face a reality. Maybe I don't know enough about this, but maybe we have to face a reality that by pushing something like that, this libertarian feminism, I suppose we might call it, and you know, everyone do, that might have caused a huge downfall in our society and made for a way where now you can't live without having both parents working.

[Pete]

Yeah, I mean look, you're making a fair point, okay? If I'm a libertarian, I don't care if. I don't care if women work. They should be asked to work.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Pete]

But I think of it slightly differently. I think in terms of, say, education. I would not put my kids through state education, okay? They went through private education. It wasn't that I would homeschool them because I don't want my children raised by the state when their job is to push an agenda which justifies having a state. It's like economics, the majority of. So when I did. Did you study economics? No, I did a level economics. They teach a version of economics called Keynesian economics. Well, Keynesian economics teaches you that the government can print enough money as long as they keep inflation under control. But inflation is theft. It's always an everywhere theft. It's constant theft. And so, you know, you talk about wanting to reform education. The way to reform education is get the state out of education. I mean, I don't believe the state should be anywhere in the education because their incentive is to teach you what. What is true for them.

[Andrew]

And the BBC.

[Pete]

And the BBC. I mean, the BBC should just be.

[Andrew]

Scrapped, but that's what's responsible for a lot of what's going on. But the difficulty for people like you and me is. And it's something I'm trying to confront at the moment, and I think that's why Carl Benjamin is sort of. I don't know what he would call himself, post liberal or he's gone beyond that. He's going, no, there's a problem with this is we're sitting here and we have these wonderful ideas that fit a particular ideology that you and I grew up with, which is fairness for all. Everybody sort of do your own thing, and all individuals. That might actually have been the cause of crumbling us.

[Pete]

Yeah, I don't think it is. I think the cause of crumbling us is the growth of the state, the size of the state.

[Andrew]

It could be several causes because.

[Pete]

I look at the size of the state, the surface area of the state is so huge now, they're in every part of our business. And what has actually got better under government in the last 30 years, have they improved the health service? Have they improved. They improved the police? As our defense got better, or is border control better or our roads better? There's like literally nothing that's improved yet. The state has got bigger and taken more. So if the state's got bigger and taken more and everything's got worse, I would say it's not working.

[Andrew]

Yeah, but you could argue in that sense that a lot of the politics, a lot of what the state is implementing is downstream of a culture. So that's why they're interlinked. The culture changes. People say, let's have. A lot of people are noticing as well. I know I'm gonna sound like an absolute misogynist on this, and I haven't really spoken about this stuff that often. I do want women to be able to do the same as men. I'm just wondering if the thing I want to happen has been a cause of a huge problem here.

[Pete]

Well, it could be a giant. The whole thing could be a giant myth. Did you see that thing this week about. The lady was talking about why you get screaming white liberal women? It was brilliant. She said, you know, biologically, men and women are. Are created to serve a certain kind of purpose. And historically, if you look at. We just go with animals. We don't even have to talk about humans. The. The female species births the child and rears it and looks after it and is the carer. Right. And. But it is the same with humans. Up until. I don't know, whatever it was, whenever we flipped with feminism, the woman's job was to have the. The child and to build the home and care and raise the children. Well, when women stop having children, but they still have that caring part of their kind of their soul, their emotional being. Well, who are they there to protect? What is every cause that exists out there? And so they're out there screaming and shouting and trying to. Because they have this innate nature, innate part of them that wants them to go and care and protect. So maybe if they were just having children, this wouldn't be happening.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Everything we say could be taken out.

[Pete]

We're gonna. We're gonna get hammered for this.

[Andrew]

No, but on a kind of manosphere podcast. Can you be normal?

[Pete]

Could you imagine the.

[Andrew]

The.

[Pete]

The. The racist feminist is gonna hate this show.

[Andrew]

The racist feminists? Yeah. What do you mean?

[Pete]

Well, because we've criticized Steve Laws and we've criticized.

[Andrew]

Oh, I see.

[Pete]

So racist firm is going to hate us.

[Andrew]

The racist. There will be some of those. It's an issue. I think it is an issue. And I think it's not just the screaming white liberal. It's also the way that the voting patterns happen, and it affects men as well, because a lot of men want to be in the good graces of those women. That's basically what men are on earth to do, is try and impress women. That's why I learned Guitar. When I was 16, it was literally the only reason you want to impress women. It never did. No woman was ever impressed. They didn't care because everyone was trying to do that guitar trick. I play guitar. We don't care. We're going to go off with Brad over there or something. But I think it's massively affected our politics and we've sort of moved into this kind of Jacinda, whatever her name is in New Zealand politics where. And that's again, I'm going back again. I'm obsessed. But it has led to a culture change that has been immense. And at the same time, the feminist, the other argument, the other side of that is like, hey, when men kind of were in charge of everything, you had enough wars, you know, you had enough people killing each other, you had enough poverty, you had enough of all these issues. So that would be the other side that they could say. But it is concerning. It is concerning that there is a much more kind of female look on voting patterns now. And I don't know what we do with that. I don't know how we re center this because it feels like it's going to be more and more open borders. It's going to be more and more. All the things that we're complaining about.

[Pete]

Will be if Zach Polanski becomes Prime minister, which by the way terrifies me that people actually think he is somebody that can lead a country.

[Andrew]

I know he's complete dope.

[Pete]

He doesn't understand economics either. He's a Marxist, he wants open borders and he would destroy this country. Look, I mean, look, I'm ranting from the side of the way I look at the world, but I look at the world through the money and at the moment I find it terrifying because at some point this debt has to be repaid back. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If you look at, I think under Rachel Reeves, our debt interest. Do you have you ever look even look at this, the debt interest. So the interest alone that we pay on our debt per year this year will be 110 billion. I think that's up from 98 billion or something last year. That's more than we spend on education, it's more than we spend on defense. I think it's like the third biggest bill we have as a country.

[Andrew]

I did see that. And that is absolutely mental. I'm reading that. I told you. I'm reading that Lionel Shriver book, the Mandibles.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Which is about this happening to the States and I think the whole world really and it's bloody scary. It's really scary.

[Pete]

But to service that debt and continue paying for the things I want to pay for, the debt then has to increase even more and the debt interest gets higher. And when the economy grows at a slower rate than the debt, you eventually get to the point where you either default as a country or I don't know what else.

[Andrew]

But it's obviously we're going to hit a really strange period because I think in 10, 20 years what is the future? Because almost everyone I know is now struggling with work because of AI. Yes.

[Pete]

Yeah, but that goes with if technology is deflationary and the currency was deflationary, like in an ideal world people have talked like Keynes, I think it was. Keynes wanted us to be working a 30 hour week and a 20 hour week. With technology being deflationary and making everything better, we should all be able to work less like as a choice.

[Andrew]

Yeah, but I don't know if it'd work that way because I feel like it would actually be just some people would have the 50 hour week and then other people would have zero hour weeks. I don't think it would work that everyone has a 20 hour week because there's not enough. We don't need everyone in that, in that future.

[Pete]

But yeah, but think about it like this. If technology has taken jobs away but everything's getting more expensive, why is that happening? If technology is improving life, but our pound doesn't go as far as it should, why is that?

[Andrew]

That's one point. And I get that everything you were saying before about that, that's related to inflation, the government's printing too much money. And I appreciate that point but I think as a separate point, the societies that we've built have only worked based on people having to work. Each individual at least at each household has had to work and give something to society that is needed in order to get something back. So we're talking not just about how each person can earn money, but how they can have purpose in life.

[Pete]

Purpose, Yeah.

[Andrew]

I just don't even know in 10, 20 years. I mean the job I did when I was in Argentina, most of the work I did I ended up working for a company that they wanted travel articles written and they were a travel age writing agency. And they would then send those to Expedia who would put them on their website, I don't even know where. And so I did that writing and they would send me like Sydney, they would say, Sydney, here's 10 places of interest. Cathedral so and so, so and I would do that without traveling. I would stay where I was, either in Buenos Aires or later in Berlin and just put things together that I found online. That's what they wanted me to do. There was no travel budget so I didn't actually go. But I was right anyway. I mean that was, I stopped doing that when I started this podcast. So five, six years ago. There's no way that job exists now because the ChatGPT can do that in five seconds or half a second. That's gone. It's amazing to see. I know people talk about it in the press or whatever, you see the news articles written about it. But that job I had has gone and that I'm so fortunate. That got me through living abroad for some years and I don't think that's been replaced by anything.

[Pete]

Yeah, and look, some jobs are going to go and they're not coming back. Marketing is being heavily. I know people who've got six figure jobs in marketing and they've lost their jobs and that job's not coming back.

[Andrew]

Yeah, and those people probably had big mortgages because they had a good salary. And that's a, that's. I mean if I had lost my job five years ago, I was on basically minimum wage anyway. I mean that's still shitty, but at least I didn't have these mortgages and those kinds of things going on.

[Pete]

But, but there are other ways that society can adjust to accommodate this. I mean 65 is the kind of general retirement age that people want. The only reason that ever goes up is because the state pension is a Ponzi. That's the only reason. Because the government literally cannot afford the state pension. And. But if we had a world where the currency appreciated rather than depreciated, you maybe would have people retiring earlier. Think like if, I mean when they.

[Andrew]

Die earlier as well.

[Pete]

So. But if, if, you know, if you're saving away for a pension, if you think of money as a proxy of time.

[Andrew]

Right.

[Pete]

So you work hard, you save money in some kind of way so you can retire at some point but if the money's been inflated, you have to work a bit harder than you would. Most people retire at 65. If you say could you retire at 60?

[Andrew]

They would.

[Pete]

My dad retired at 61, gave up 30% of his pension to go four years early. Okay, 30% of his pension.

[Andrew]

Is he still with us?

[Pete]

He's still with us. He's actually, he lives with us six months a year and yeah, he's great guy but my mum retired at the same time five Years later she had cancer and she died. And so that was sad, but sorry to hear that. Yeah, no, it's fine. But the point being is people, you know, I feel it now, 47, thinking I don't want to retire at 60, I want to retire 55, maybe even 50.

[Andrew]

Do you? Yeah, because a lot of people I speak to, it's the opposite. They're saying, gosh, what am I going to do? I'm talking. My dad's in his mid-70s. He's still sort of does a bit of work. He potters about, he tries to do a bit of this and that.

[Pete]

I won't do nothing. I'll maybe do this a couple of days a week, we'll make a show or something.

[Andrew]

You don't think this is work?

[Pete]

But. Yeah, but I think as dad is an aircraft engineer, he at 65 doesn't want to be doing that.

[Andrew]

I see.

[Pete]

And I just think you could lower the retirement age. People just go a bit earlier now that's optional, but that is a way that society can adjust. Or you could just have a four day week so there are more jobs out there or a three day week. But the problem is technology is deflationary, so it's taking jobs away. But money is inflationary, so it's taking jobs away that people can't afford to have. And the reason money's inflationary is because the entire structure, like it's structurally how it has to work is that the money is created by the government and given to the rich to take all the assets. It's not a conspiracy.

[Andrew]

Conspiracy.

[Pete]

It's just math. And the only way you can get away from this is by having a currency that isn't inflationary.

[Andrew]

Yeah. I mean it's hard.

[Pete]

By the way, there are people who explain this way better than me.

[Andrew]

I don't believe that for a second. This is going to be sort of finance expert explains to a monkey how to. Because I don't know enough about the economy. I do know that Milei, I loved at first the idea of. But a lot of Argentinians are now not at all happy with it. In the price of living has gone up so much.

[Pete]

Yeah. Where are the complaints there? Because you read different reports. Some people say like he got rid of price rent controls and rents have dropped, inflation has dropped.

[Andrew]

I'm hearing from friends of friends. So it's anecdotal. I'm giving you anecdotal stuff I'm not giving. Yeah. I don't know enough about it.

[Pete]

Is that not the. Is it The Peronista.

[Andrew]

Pair of the Peronistas.

[Pete]

Yeah, they just love. They love, like, Relaying the Rose in Buenos Aires.

[Andrew]

I was in Argentina back on holiday. I wasn't living there anymore when Milei got into power. And the day, the day before he was going to be voted in, when the votes were being collected and I was with, you know, family, friends of my wife and all of that. And as you can probably imagine, similar to when Trump got in, it was. It was like a dystopian horror film among them. And I. It's not my country, so it's not my place to be, you know, that's why I think so many people are bad guests in other countries and I'm a guest in that country when I'm there. So I don't sit there and say, like, hey, I'll tell you what's what, but I just go, okay, tell me why. Why is this going to be a problem? You know? And it was screaming and crying. Everyone was going to lose. And I think, to be fair, a few of my wife's friends did lose their jobs because they were state functionaries, you know, and. And he.

[Pete]

That's. But that's what I would do if I was.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

If I was Prime Minister of England, I would get rid of the majority of the state because the.

[Andrew]

Because then they've got to find work elsewhere and I don't know, you know, that's.

[Pete]

They've got to go into the productive parts of society because the state is unproductive. It survives off.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

Like, you work for the state. I work. We work six to seven months a year for the state. So if you. I always find it interesting if you look at how much you actually pay, like really in tax. Actually, you only start earning money in late September, early October.

[Andrew]

Wow. Starting from April.

[Pete]

So if you assume like a high, you know, higher. No, starting from January. So a high earner pays around 45, 50 tax on your income. But if you throw in VAT, alcohol duty, fuel duty, I don't know, stamp duty, you stopping all the taxes in. You start work in January and you start earning money end of September, start of October. And what do you get for that?

[Andrew]

Less and less, it appears.

[Pete]

And I bet you use less and less public services because they're so shit.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I suppose people could argue it's a way of sort of giving back to. Because there were times when I had to use more public services.

[Pete]

Sure. But I'm not saying we should have no public services now. I just think it's Got a big. There's a correlation between how much money has been created, how much debt we have, and then how high taxes are and how shit our services have got.

[Andrew]

Did you read about the bears in New Hampshire? No. So New Hampshire, they had a town that was able to go. They were able to do the libertarian experiment. They went fully libertarian, which I'm not against. I was interested in what happened then. I don't know how it works on a federal and a state and town level, but they didn't seem to have to pay taxes. Okay, I read this somewhere. I think it's a proper. It's been backed. It's a real.

[Pete]

New Hampshire is the most libertarian state.

[Andrew]

So. Yeah, and I think it was Carolyn Carlin Borisenko. I was having this debate with her. She's a. She's. She ran for. On a libertarian ticket or whatever. She was going for that. And they were doing all right at first, but then they realized that nobody was paying to ensure that bears wouldn't attack. And bears came and killed loads of them and ate their dogs. Yeah, you can't have that.

[Pete]

Well, there are always good arguments against it. And the ones like, for example, a fire service, if you had a private fire service, would people really pay for it? And I know Malays defunded the fire service in Argentina and they've just had some big fires up in the forest of Patagonia. Oh, yes, and now he's talked about foreign investors come and buy that land. So look, there are certain things like I'm not for libertarian. I accept there are certain things that are best socialized. The borders, I would socialize. The management of our borders, I would socialize a fire service. Certain parts. There's certain things. I'm not as extreme as other libertarians. What I would do though is just. I just would get away from the government being able to create as much money as I want because there was a thing like. Where was I reading it? Something like, we've injected 200 trillion of debt into the global economy and we've had like 40% growth for that period. Something ridiculous. I'll dig out the numbers for you. I'll send you the book. So, I mean, I usually interview somebody I'm just now lecturing.

[Andrew]

It's an interesting point. I think a lot of the crux of what we've been talking about is culture versus economics in terms of what is killing us ultimately both one another. And I think people who are not doing as well as they were 10, 20 years ago, things are harder economically would be Much happier or less unhappy if they could get out on their street and recognize people around them. If they didn't feel constantly that they were annoying people just by being alive as a white man, for example, if they were not constantly told that by the BBC and cultures like that, that stuff. I mean, status has a huge effect. It's one of the leading causes of suicide. If your stat suddenly drops, that can be economic. But white men, their status has dropped unbelievably quickly, like the last 20 years. It's, like, plummeted. We see the kids at school, white kids, perform much worse. So that side is cultural. And so there's a direct correlation between this cultural impact of white people. You are bad. And now what we're seeing, which is white kids now performing really badly at school, which will later affect their lives economically as well. So I think they're intertwined. And similarly, if you are worried about the culture and you don't recognize it and so on, but you're making a pretty penny, you're also going to be less unhappy. So I think both of those are huge aspects about people's happiness to do with the country and where we are right now.

[Pete]

Are you optimistic?

[Andrew]

No, I just think there's too. There are too many factors. I mean, we've discussed too big a job.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

It's just so much. And how do you. I'm never a believer, really, in the big guys pulling strings. I take your point about certain rich people. Maybe there is a case for that to be made. But I think also, to some extent, we're. You know, what is it? A train without a driver? It's too big. There's 70 million in this country or 60 million. It's just. That's one of the reasons we get things so wrong often. Covid, for example, you hear the numbers of people dying. Those numbers are really scary. Just like you and I speaking before about Twitter. Gosh, all these people are having a go at me. It's really scary because our brains cannot fathom 70 million in a country. You cannot even begin to think of that number. So when you see a thousand dying, you go bloody. But that many are being killed by cars every now and then.

[Pete]

Did you see that one? That first meet? I don't know. It's the first meeting. One of the first meetings that Keir Starmer hosted at Downing Street. It was with Larry Fink. Do you know Larry Fink is. So he runs. Why is it blackrock?

[Andrew]

Right, Right.

[Pete]

Okay, it's blackrock. I've. God knows how much can you have a look at blackrock's Aum. I mean they're the largest asset manager in the world. They get to decide where money goes. So I used to not believe in the guys pulling the strings. And it's not like a room of lizard people thinking 14 trillion, 14 trillion assets under management. So they want those assets to be productive. Okay, so where are those assets productive? Well, any place where there is high levels of debt that they get to have access to early on and to invest. He's also been recently talking about rebuilding Ukraine. Again, put their productive assets into Ukraine to rebuild it. So I don't think it's as evil as oh let's go and start a war there so we can rebuild it. But it's opportunity.

[Andrew]

There is people making business decisions.

[Pete]

Yeah. And I, I, so I actually do believe in these 150. Should we play that chamath video very quickly if you can. I do actually believe, but it's not like an evil cabal of lizard people. I just think it's the money goes where it can be made and it can be made where it can capture government.

[Andrew]

The issue with capitalism, I suppose, but this isn't capitalism.

[Pete]

You can't have capitalism under a fiat currency because capitalism requires a separation of money and state. Real capitalism. This is really interesting.

[Chamath]

There's about 150 people that run the world. Anybody who wants to go into politics, they're all fucking puppets, okay? There are 150 and they're all men that run the world, period, full stop. They control most of the important assets. They control the money flows. And these are not the tech entrepreneurs. Now they are going to get rolled over over the next five to 10 years by the people that are really underneath pulling the strings. And when you get behind the curtain and see how that world works, what you realize is it is unfairly set up for them and their progeny. First order of business is I want to break through and be at that table. That's the first order of business. And the way that I do that is by proving that I can do what they do as well as they do it and then do it better than how they do it because at the end of the day they are commercial animals. And they'll open the door out of curiosity and they'll let me stay because I, because I add value. And then once I'm there I can open the door for other people who can try to do the same thing.

[Andrew]

That's not going to happen once he's there.

[Pete]

Oh no, he will. He'll get there. He'll get there. So he's one of the mo. He's like, so he's worth about 5 billion. He's a Silicon Valley investor. And.

[Andrew]

The people who often want to then open the door for others suddenly don't often want to open the door as much.

[Pete]

Well, you open the doors for the right people. So he has to prove that he deserves a seat at the table and he understands how money flows work and that he's going to support that system. But it sounds like something that's really conspiratorial, like there's 150 guys that run the world. And like I say, it's not like lizard people. But it is the money, man. It is the people who control the money. The money flows. And why would investors put money in the UK at the moment? Okay, I don't know. I'm not the guy to answer it, but Larry Fink can get a meeting with the prime minister of any country like that, just like that. And he's going to give them a reason for that. BlackRock might put money in that country. They might say, I don't know, farming's important for us. We want to start owning farms. And then we might see an inheritance tax on farms that requires people, if they want to keep their farm, they're going to have to take out a loan now to be able to pay for that inheritance tax. And so once you start to see, you start to connect the dots. It is the outcome is evil. The structure is just the logic of money and the logic of money flows, but the outcome is evil. And ever since I've seen. It's taken me like eight years, 10 years to see it. Now when you see it, you see in everything. Every time you see blackrock somewhere you go, okay, that just makes sense because that's the way the money flows. And so that's why we're structurally set up to allow the asset managers get the debt that comes from the government when they create the money and then they can suck up all the assets. So, yeah, that's where I'm at.

[Andrew]

I know none of it's going to matter when we've got our own color fate here.

[Pete]

Yeah. All AI is the robots are killed.

[Andrew]

Us. Yeah.

[Pete]

So I bought a robot, by the way. Yeah. When do we get it?

[Andrew]

Hopefully never.

[Pete]

He doesn't want us to get it.

[Andrew]

What is it?

[Pete]

Some robot comes around the house, empties the dishwasher and stuff.

[Andrew]

Neo. Neo.

[Pete]

So Connor has PTSD because his favorite film as a kid was iRobot and he must have watched that film how many times?

[Andrew]

Too many.

[Pete]

But now, now he's like convinced if I get a robot in the house, it's going to kill us.

[Andrew]

But it's not as good as AI is it? Why did artificial intelligence that film?

[Pete]

You wouldn't have seen that, would you?

[Andrew]

Oh, if you like iRobot, it's like that, but 10 times better. It's got to watch artificial intelligence. Spielberg, someone. Where the little boy guy from the Sixth Sense. The kid?

[Pete]

Yeah, the kid.

[Andrew]

Have you seen the Sixth Sense? You're in. You've got a good night ahead of you. AI and the Sixth Sense.

[Pete]

He's going out with his boys in London. He's got a good night ahead of him.

[Andrew]

Listen, boys, sorry to let you know, but. So I let you down. I'm gonna have cancel. I'm gonna watch AI and the Sixth Sense. We're gonna do a Hayley Joel Osman double.

[Pete]

I think you should go down the money rabbit hole.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I mean, look, it's a scary, interesting world. It's a funny thing. I wonder sometimes if there's kind of a genetic thing. Everyone's slightly different. And there are some people I know get drunk easily. They like to have a bit of alcohol. Some people. That's me. Yeah, that's you. There you go. I just don't. I've been sober. Like, I don't even drink. It's boring to me. Some people can run marathons and I know they would say, oh, I train and blah, blah.

[Pete]

I know.

[Andrew]

You know, but I'm bored. If I run for five minutes, I'm bored. I'm so bored. So it's different kind of brains. And I think my brain, when it comes to money and economics, my brain can sometimes just shut down.

[Pete]

There are people I know to watch this and go, pete, you did a really shit job of explaining that there are better people than me.

[Andrew]

No, because you can speak to a layperson. I mean, explain it. I think they'll, they'll like that. And I think it's nice for people to hear that. Explain someone who's not a money person, because a lot of your audience will be. And it's been interesting for me, but. But yet going too far into that rabbit hole. My brain does, you know, and I'm enjoying that Lionel Shriver book, but I don't know if I'd read 10 in a row like that. Yeah. Because my brain would just go. Whereas I have family members who might be much more into or friends who are more into that. It just doesn't quite. Doesn't work with my head. My wife handles like my finances.

[Pete]

Final question.

[Andrew]

Would.

[Pete]

Would you leave? Is there a point you. Do you have a red line?

[Andrew]

You're asking me? No, no, no.

[Pete]

But you know what I mean.

[Andrew]

Leave, Andrew.

[Pete]

Yeah. Get the. Is it. Do you have a red line where you're like, I just can't stay here anymore?

[Andrew]

Because, I mean, I used to say yes, I wanted to get a. An Argentinian passport through my wife.

[Pete]

Okay. Oh, she's Argentinean. Yeah.

[Andrew]

So that I could.

[Pete]

She fiery.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Well, she would say no. Yeah. She would resoundly say no with passion. But yeah, I would. I love Argentina. I love. You know, it's used against me since I started saying that on social media, you know, oh, you can just F off to. You're Jew. You can f off to Argentina. But it's not because I'm Jewish. It's because I went out there and I met a woman there. Anyone else could do that as well if they so wanted. Most wouldn't want to. I think it's a good idea for anybody to get, if you can, through marriage or through some sort of ancestry, get a backup passport.

[Pete]

Or you can buy one.

[Andrew]

Or buy one. It can't hurt. Because if something bad would happen and then people say, oh, wouldn't you stay and fight? And it's like, well, yes, to a point. You know, if we are at a point where. And I think it could happen and I know it sounds. It sounds. But I think that we could get to a point where we have some kind of Islamic range uprising in this country where I think you only need sort of 15, 20, 25% of the country start getting more inroads into voting.

[Pete]

And politics becomes like Lebanon.

[Andrew]

Exactly. I think that can happen. Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan. I think that is unlikely in the next 10 years, but not inconceivable. And you've got to make that. When you have a family, you have a house, you've got a mortgage, you've got all these things, you have to think about that. And I'm now prominently known as a Jew. And if that were to happen and we were going to have some problems with people going around to houses and ransacking and murdering and those kinds of things, you'd be a target. Yeah, I'd be top of the list. There aren't. There aren't. If you, you know, in fact, I don't even want to go too far into that publicly and make that, you know, you don't want to make yourself a target. It's a scary thought. And if that were to happen, then you have to think about leaving. You have to think, where the hell can I get out to? The problem is what might happen in Britain if it happens here. And Professor David Betts spoke about this.

[Pete]

I really want to interview him.

[Andrew]

He's really good. He's really good. And he makes the point of civil war. I think he thinks it's an 18 and a half percent. He's worked out the exact percentage. I don't know how.

[Pete]

Six of the seven conditions have been met. Right.

[Andrew]

Something like that. An 18 and a half percent chance that in the next five years there'll be civil war. Now, he doesn't specifically label it as kind of Islamic versus he labels it as sectarian violence. Yes. And cities versus, you know, because it's the white fright, people are moving out into the countryside and cities versus countryside kind of thing. That's how he sees it. It's really scary. And he says that once that happens in one country, it tends to spread. So if we were to suddenly find ourselves in some kind of civil war, then immediately afterwards, perhaps Ireland might be. And then Sweden and Germany and Holland and France, which is already gone in many respects.

[Pete]

So we'll all have to go to Poland and Hungary.

[Andrew]

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, where do you go? You look at those places and you go, okay, yeah. Can you get into Poland and Hungary? Can you get to the States? Maybe Texas, you know, somewhere like that where they're, which is funny, they'll be the last people sort of protecting other kind of white people or something. Australia seems to be gone. Islam is now spreading into South America slowly. But we have family in Argentina, so it was harder than I thought to get that passport. You have to do a whole bunch of stuff. And I say all this as a kind of worst case scenario. I don't take it entirely seriously right now. So for now everything's fine. But yeah, I would encourage anybody. If we're at a point where we're about to be completely murdered and our country is turning Islamic, get out before it happens. I get frustrated because my words will be misinterpreted. They'll clip it everywhere and go. It's another subversive Jew who wants to just up and leave when the going gets tough. I'm saying stay and fight for your country. But if there's a point at which your family is about to be killed, I would hope that your ideology comes second. And your family, that's your children, your wife, your husband, your parents, that you Want to make them safe first.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And that's it.

[Pete]

Well, man, it was great to talk to you. I always like to talk with somebody does the similar job.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Pete]

See what I can learn from them.

[Andrew]

It's a lonely job.

[Pete]

It is. You've done a great job with heretics. Congratulations.

[Andrew]

Thank you very much.

[Pete]

Very, very cool. Actually, I haven't listened to the Robbie Williams one yet, and I really want to. I went to university in High Wycombe, and we used to have this thing called the May Ball, which is just like a black tie do for a thousand students. And it wasn't going well for Robbie Williams before he released Angels, and he was booked to play our Mabel. And he released Angels and blew up and still honored it. So I saw him play at a university.

[Andrew]

Wow.

[Pete]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Very cool.

[Pete]

So I do want to watch that.

[Andrew]

He was probably off his mind on drugs at the time. Probably. Yeah.

[Pete]

So was I.

[Andrew]

Probably. He's a lovely man. Really lovely man. And very different to most celebrities, I think the fact that he came on the show and doesn't give a shit when a lot of them are so worried about, you know, and that's the irony is they're all so worried, and if they do come on our shows.

[Pete]

It'S, well, more a break and cover.

[Andrew]

Matthew McConaughey, Jimmy Carr, like, nothing really happens to them. So Ricky Gervais, obviously. And you could argue, okay, those guys are so big, they can't be canceled. And it's the kind of middle ones that are worried, are there what happened to Rylan when he spoke about immigration?

[Pete]

Yeah, I've not heard of him since.

[Andrew]

So that's the worry, and I get it. But if they all broke cover at once. Yeah, that's how. That's how we all toppled Scientology. Scientology used to do their fair gaming, so they would. Which meant fair game, meant you can go after anybody who criticizes Scientology. So people were scared to speak out and say anything about the cult because they would come around your house. There were rumors, allegations that pets were murdered and killed. You murder a pet? Killed is murder. Only for humans. I don't know, Buck. Pets were killed and so on. Eventually, with the Internet and with south park, they played a pivotal role.

[Pete]

Incredible.

[Andrew]

And WikiLeaks as well. They all played this huge role. Everybody kind of came out at once to attack them, and they realized they looked silly going after everybody at once, and they just went, screw it, and they just went inwards. They stopped attacking everyone. They hardly ever speak publicly now, and their numbers are dwindling. So I, I, what I mean to say is there are a lot of kind of celebrities that if they all broke cover at once, we wouldn't have to listen to the really insufferable ones. I can't even think of some of their names, but bloody hell. Some of these people are lecturing us about various issues around the world.

[Pete]

Yeah, Hollywood actors.

[Andrew]

The moment you take any currency away from that, the moment you stop rewarding that Spanish actor who's in no country. Javier Badem.

[Pete]

Mark Ruffalo.

[Andrew]

Mark Ruffalo, Seth Rogen. He's come out with a few things.

[Pete]

But they're all going to get replaced by AI, so like, fuck off.

[Andrew]

I know. It's the one place where I'm just delighted. I feel sorry for the writers because the writers are really talented people, but the actors, you know, get another move on. Do musical theaters. That's talented work like Fair Play. But I don't need you in movies anymore, man.

[Pete]

Listen, congratulations.

[Andrew]

Keep doing your thing.

[Pete]

It's great to meet you and I wish you all the best. I've been listening to your show quite a bit more since the Steve Laws one and fuck the haters. Ignore the comments and do your thing.

[Andrew]

Thank you very much.

[Pete]

Thank you to everyone for listening. We'll see you soon.

[Andrew]

Ra.