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

Andrew Gold 0:00 ... where there are still thousands and thousands of these people all on the floor, screaming, crazy, and his voice I can hear booming through a microphone. He's now come out. They've lost their minds, and he's going, "The devil is in this church today, and he's trying to leave now." And we're going, "Oh my God, oh my God, they're all gonna kill us."

Chris Williamson 0:20 Andrew Gold, welcome to the show.

Andrew Gold 0:23 Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Chris Williamson 0:24 How would you describe what you do for work?

Andrew Gold 0:27 I am (sighs) ... so the quick way of describing it, I would say, is like a, a, a, a much less famous and less talented Louis Theroux. Uh, for those who don't know who Louis Theroux is, or, or Lewis Theroux in America, uh, I like to document sort of weird and wonderful people and subcultures, quite strange, controversial people, nothing, uh, is too controversial, everything's on the table, uh, and trying to get to know why people think differently from, from why I do and from why we do, whether that's in video form, audio form or, or writing.

Chris Williamson 0:59 Didn't you manage the Page 3 girls for The Sun at one point?

Andrew Gold 1:02 That is the best thing I've ever done, yes. That was when I started out, so I was like 21 or 22. Who got... I got in trouble for that recently, didn't I? Somebody was tweeting at s- (laughs) Oh yeah, somebody reviewed my podcast recently. They said, "I've really enjoyed the first tw- ten episodes. Then I heard he worked at The Sun. Not for me." And he'd just completely quit.

Chris Williamson 1:22 (laughs)

Andrew Gold 1:22 And I thought, "How can you enjoy, you know, hours of stuff?" And then he found out I worked at a place he didn't li- obviously he was from Liverpool, and they've got a bit of a thing with The Sun. Um, (laughs) yeah, so it was my first job in journalism, um, and it w- I was working nights and, you know, the stuff I was writing was just so tedious and it was all like, "Rihanna poses without makeup," and I didn't even know who any of these people were. I knew who Rihanna was. And my- I was responsible at the end of the night for making sure the Page 3 girl, who, for those who don't know, that's the- they don't do it anymore, it was a woman on Page 3 of The Sun newspaper who had her breasts out. Um, and I had to make sure the 3D version of her went up on the iPad every night, which was, which was complicated because I had to- I was having these calls at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning with, like, uh, customer support or whoever it is off- or somewhere in South Asia-

Chris Williamson 2:12 Titty support.

Andrew Gold 2:12 Uh, (laughs) titty support and I was just going like, "Look, the- it's not working and I can't go home for a bit."

Chris Williamson 2:18 "Sexy home facilities, they aren't here."

Andrew Gold 2:19 (laughs) "There are gonna be a lot of people waking up in the morning who aren't gonna be getting their titties." And you could turn her around with your, your finger, you could sort of twist her around.

Chris Williamson 2:26 That is so fucking weird, man.

Andrew Gold 2:29 (laughs) It's weird.

Chris Williamson 2:29 Like, that's the job that, as a 14-year-old, probably sounded amazing-

Andrew Gold 2:35 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 2:35 ... and then as a 21-year-old wanted to- made you want to self-harm. Like, that's-

Andrew Gold 2:39 (laughs) It did. It, yeah-

Chris Williamson 2:40 ... that's how I imagine the trajectory goes.

Andrew Gold 2:42 It did, was like that, yeah. Yeah, it made me wanna, well, it made me wanna get far away from there eventually.

Chris Williamson 2:47 So what did you do next?

Andrew Gold 2:49 Well, when I was there, um, (sighs) yeah, I had a bit of a... I had been studying in France before that a couple of years. I'd been getting really into languages, um, French of course, um, and I was just thinking, "I've gotta, I've gotta get out of this dreary The Sun place every night, you know, as we- you know, 5:00 in the morning, whatever." And I just thought, "Where's the place I can go that's the furthest away from any of this?" Um, and I wanted to learn a language so I thought, "Oh, well, I'll get something that's, uh, uh, similar to French, you know?" So Spanish was quite close, I thought, so where can I go? And I looked up Medellín in Colombia, because it's known as the City of Eternal Spring. So I thought, uh, it's like 25 degrees every day, blue skies, beautiful. So, um, yeah, I went out there. I just got- I got a f- flight, I couldn't afford it at the time, really. I got The Sun to give me, like, an article to do, to write about the flower festival in Medellín, and then I got, uh, an airline, I s- got in touch with all the airlines and I, I just, just on the off chance, I thought, "I wonder if this will work?" Uh, emailed them all saying like, "Look, I've gone, I'm doing this flower festival and I can mention your airline or whatever." And one of them gave me a free flight. So I got out there, and I wrote the piece and The Sun never published it, as far as I know, and then I just, uh, quit my job while I was out there and just stayed out there for a few months.

Chris Williamson 4:08 (laughs) See you later on, titties. I'm not dealing with you anymore.

Andrew Gold 4:12 (laughs) Yeah, well, the titties out in Medellín were a whole different, uh, thing, 'cause I think it's like the, the plastic surgery capital of the world.

Chris Williamson 4:18 You're kidding me.

Andrew Gold 4:19 (sighs) Yeah.

Chris Williamson 4:19 People flying out to Colombia to be robbed at gunpoint, get some drugs and come back with a huge pair of knockers?

Andrew Gold 4:27 Well, the Colombians listening to this or people of Colombian heritage will not thank us for saying this, but yes.

Chris Williamson 4:33 It sounds like a good time, to be fair.

Andrew Gold 4:35 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 4:35 Sounds like a fairly-

Andrew Gold 4:36 A lot of people... Yeah. I'm sorry, a lot of people loved it, yeah. Love it out there.

Chris Williamson 4:39 A fairly fun place. What about this exorcist that you went to go and meet?

Andrew Gold 4:43 Hmm, so I'd been in, um, after a year in Colombia I moved down to Argentina, which was, uh, a little bit more, uh, European. After a year in Colombia it was just like, "I need something a bit more like home." They have a different dialect as well and I wanted to get into that, uh, the Argentine Spanish. It's cool. It's like Italian and they do all the hand signals, the "Che, che, qué te pasa." Um, and yeah, I was there for, like, a year or two. I started making a few short documentaries about things like UFO hunting and, um, (sighs) what else? Infidelity. I got made fun of by Viggo Mortensen on the radio channel 'cause he's quite big over there. He speaks Spanish. Um, I went on live TV as well 'cause I, I had to defend this infidelity video I was making 'cause they were saying to me, like, "Why, why are you assuming there's more infidelity in Argentina?" So I ended up on live TV because of this Viggo Mortensen encounter I had in Argentina. Um, and-

Chris Williamson 5:34 So what you're doing, accusing Argentine people of sleeping around? Is there a lot of swinger clubs-

Andrew Gold 5:40 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 5:40 ... in Argentina or something?

Andrew Gold 5:42 Yeah, yeah. There, there were, there were at the time. Um, and there were nights, Thursday is known as, like, cheating night. It was just something I noticed and I thought-

Chris Williamson 5:50 Nationally? Is this like a national holiday or something?

Andrew Gold 5:52 At least in Buenos Aires, and that's got sort of a big part of the population. I don't know much about outside of there. But they were (sighs) ...... yeah, I, you know, I wasn't judging. I just thought it was quite funny and quirky. You know, you're looking for things to make a documentary about. I didn't really care. But I ended up on a, on a radio channel, and there's a radio show there, um, where people call up, uh, to have affairs. So they'll call up and say, "Hello. I want to have an affair with my friend's mum." So they'll call the mum on the show, and they'll say like y-... the idea is, the concept is you have to say three normal things. So they would call, like, the friend's mum and say three things. "How, how are you?" "Uh, good. Yeah, I don't know why you're calling me, but, you know." Um, "What are you doing today?" You ask three things. And then you say, "Are you up for it?" Or some Spanish equivalent. And they have to say yes or no, and then they hook up. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 6:39 What's the success rate of that?

Andrew Gold 6:40 (laughs) More than it should be, but I, I, I, I don't know exactly, but the ones I listen to, most of them are saying yes, including like friends' mums and stuff.

Chris Williamson 6:49 Interesting. All right, what about this exorcist?

Andrew Gold 6:51 Yeah. Right. So I'd been there for a few years, um, and I saw him just sort of on the TV quite a lot, on the radio, this guy, and there was something about his face. He had like an arrogance about him, you know. He was telling everybody things like, "Right, you know, next week's, um, Halloween, so make sure you've got all your, uh, carrots and your this and that to ward off vampires," stuff like that, on quite mainstream TV channels out there. And I found it really frustrating. I'm an atheist myself, but even if you're not an atheist, you don't usually believe in that kind of nonsense. And, uh, people just took him at his word, and these, you know, professional presenters out there on TV, on the radio with him going, "Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah, tell us what else we can do, Padre Manuel, can we..." It was nuts. So, I got in touch with him and said, you know, "I'd like to sort of, uh, follow you around for a few weeks," not in a creepy way. (laughs) Um, and, uh, he let me come and film him.

Chris Williamson 7:46 I think even if you are religious, it might be even more insulting, like to have someone hijack faith.

Andrew Gold 7:53 Hm.

Chris Williamson 7:53 Uh, 'cause, I mean, uh, I don't, I don't know for certain, but I imagine that the line between dousing yourself in, like, olive oil to ward off werewolves or something and, and creating s- crosses out of carrots and the Christian faith, I imagine that, that, well, there's probably a pretty big difference. I don't remember that from religious education in school, so I think, yeah, that's probably a bit of a piss take. All right, so you go see him, and then what's he like? What... Where is he?

Andrew Gold 8:18 (laughs) He was, he was in the impoverished suburbs of Buenos Aires. It's really... Once you get out of the city, it's really, in some parts, quite, quite rough and, uh, quite scary out there. Um, but he... but also a lack of education, a lack of anybody that would tell the people out there that this guy was a fraud. Um, so he was either... He had thousands and thousands and thousands of followers, people who just turn up at his church and just, like, start fainting and convulsing on the floor. So I went to talk to him the first time, and there were just people around my feet, like, you know, frothing at the mouth. And I was like, "Oh, hello, mate," and he was like... He had all the time in the world from me because he saw me as English and potentially selling this to the BBC. He loved that. He, he was very PR-, um, prepared, you know. He had... Um, he played the music from The Exorcist, the Tubular Bells theme tune, that was in his masses. Um, he had posters of himself superimposed on, on, like, The Exorcist from the movie and other superhero movies around the church. So this was a guy who, who really liked the attention, so he loved that I was coming to interview him. He didn't at all expect that I might be quite, um, critical and look into his relationship with, uh, the women who had schizophrenia that he was, um, exorcising.

Chris Williamson 9:32 So is that what was mostly happening? Was it people with mental health problems that are seeking a supernatural solution?

Andrew Gold 9:40 Yeah. Yeah. I, I mean, I think that's, that's all that was happening really, 'cause un- unless you believe in the paranormal and stuff. Um, it, it so happens that (sighs) a lot of the myths and things that have been created around demons and exorcisms and all these kinds of things, um, are very close to real mental health disorders, which is... I mean, that's how that happened. That's how the idea of exorcism came to be, because over the centuries, uh, before modern medicine and modern views on mental health, people would be seen maybe shaking or having intrusive thoughts, whether it's OCD or schizophrenia, um, and that kind of thing. Um, anorexia, bulimia as well. If you don't have science-

Chris Williamson 10:19 I mean, imagine what, imagine what an epileptic fit must look like if you don't know what that is.

Andrew Gold 10:24 100%. Exactly. And, and, uh, you know, what else are you gonna say hundreds of years ago, other than, "Well, it must be God is not happy. There's a demon. What can we do?" So (sighs) he was actually taking young women mostly, they were mostly young women, from a psychiatric ward nearby, um, who were suffering with schizophrenia. And I went and spoke to the doctors there, um, as part of this film for the BBC, and they said, "It, it happens all the time. It's not just this guy. There are people coming. They get in these people's heads. Uh, once they're 18 or 19, a lot of them are allowed to check themselves out, and they do so, and they go to the exorcist to be cured." The amazing thing is, they, they do get better generally, but it's a temporary fix. But it's, it's such a jolt of energy, an exorcism, it's just the... it's the most remarkable thing I've ever seen and witnessed. So, yeah, that's, that's the complicated thing about exorcism.

Chris Williamson 11:18 What's it like being in the room while someone's doing that?

Andrew Gold 11:21 Scary as hell. Yeah. Can you swear in this? I just gonna say it's scary as-

Chris Williamson 11:24 Swear away.

Andrew Gold 11:25 Scary as fuck. Um, (laughs) it was really scary and, and, uh, problematic in, in some ways as well, uh, because I had, you know, obviously grown up watching Louis Theroux, and I wanted to do this sort of, you know, sideways glance at it, and it might... I thought this would be funny. Um, so I went in just with my director, David Hayes, who's, you know, a good friend of mine since we were young, and we just thought we wanted to make this film together. And we were... we thought it was gonna be funny, so I decided I would take part in it. So the first exorcism, um, the exorcist handed me these bells, and he said, "These bells ward off the devil." So I'm standing basically above this woman's head. She's lying on the floor before me, and I'm ringing these bells, um, hoping to, you know, ward off the devil or whatever.... and all I was thinking was, "Wow, this is really inappropriate, actually. This isn't funny. This is somebody with a, a horrible mental health, health, uh, breakdown she's having." Um, and that's when I thought, "Right, from now on, any exorcists, if we film another exorcism, I'm not partaking and we can watch-"

Chris Williamson 12:24 You're not going to be complicit in this-

Andrew Gold 12:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:26 ... weird ritual. So what happens from there?

Andrew Gold 12:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 12:28 What, like, uh, roll the clock forward. So you spend some time with them, you start speaking to some of the, what are they, patients? Like, followers?

Andrew Gold 12:35 Hmm, I (laughs) I've, I struggled knowing what to say as well. Yeah, I say patients, I suppose, but that implies there's some medical thing going on. Um, yeah, well we've, we followed, um... The first woman was a woman called Natalia who had some form of schizophrenia, I think, and then there was somebody called Candela who was 17 years old slitting her wrists. She had bulimia, anorexia, a lot of stuff that happens in adolescence, that, that kind of, uh, peer pressure she had, and, and nobody to tell her that's common, you know, so she assumed it was exorcism. Um, after that, they have to look at themselves in some sort of holy mirror and the fact that they're able to actually look in the mirror, according to the exorcist, means that they're cured. He always wins. I asked him, "Do you ever not win?" And he said, "No, we always beat the devil." I said, "All right, fair enough." And, yeah, I suppose I was sort of making fun of him a bit still, um, I was asking him more and more outlandish, ridiculous things like, you know, "So there are vampires coming here?" And he's like, "Oh, yeah, yeah, we've seen a lot of vampires." Uh, sort of pushing to see at what point he might snap, you know, I, I, I enjoy doing that, I guess. As time went on, we realized that his assistant was this woman called Paola, who, um, was in her 20s or so, and she had been exorcised by him. We didn't realize this at first, and it was his most famous exorcism, it's called the Exorcism of Laura. She changed her name from Laura, or Laura, to Paola or Pola. Um, and she had stayed by his side since her exorcism, and now I've tracked down her, you know, doctor and everything, she had also had schizophrenia, she'd been, spent her teenage years, uh, living in a psychiatric ward, um, and now was just with this exorcist guy, and we didn't know what was happening with them exactly. Um, all I knew is that they seemed to go upstairs, which is where the padre or the father lived, um, and we got word from some of the clergy working at the church that they were a bit close, and this and that. And something very strange happened, which was that there was another journalist there at the church at the same time as me, but he was very much a friend of the, the priests, and he worked for the equivalent of The Sun, uh, in Argentina, so he's a loving reporter-

Chris Williamson 14:41 Was he on Titty, Titty Parade as well?

Andrew Gold 14:42 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 14:42 Was he Argentinean Titty Parade?

Andrew Gold 14:44 I think he might have been. Uh, uh, well, at least all the paranormal silly stuff, uh, you know, I... There must be titty stuff happening in that, in that newspaper as well. (laughs) Um, but he, he I think was jealous that I was sort of, you know, stomping on his territory. Um, and he, for whatever reason, told the padre that I had been asking why he kisses this young woman, Paola, who he has exorcised, on the lips, which was something that I had s- I had thought might be happening, I was suspecting it, but I never asked that. So I didn't know any of this, and I was getting ready to film this big mass or whatever at the church, and suddenly the, the assistant, Paola, she said, "Andrew, can you just come back here a second?" So they take me back down this corridor and backstage, you know, uh, at the mass, meanwhile, there's tens of thousands of people, maybe, well, several thousand people, uh, waiting for the exorcist co- to come out. They're like getting themselves into a fervor, they're really, everyone's going crazy, the, the, the Tubular Bells, Exorcist music's playing. I go backstage, my, my director David is filming me behind, and then they cut him off and they just say, "I just wanna talk to Andrew." And David was sort of, you know, he didn't speak great Spanish and he's just trying to say like, "Well, ha- hang on, can't I..." And they go, "No, no, no," and they sort of manhandle him out of the way. They s- just close the door, um, and I'm scared at this point 'cause we're out in the middle of nowhere, nobody really knows we're even filming there. This wasn't a typical thing where the BBC would commission it, um, it's impossible to get a commission, so we decided to film first, um, just using like odd bits and pieces, equipment and stuff, and then sell later. So nobody knew where we were, it was about midnight, and my legs just turned to jelly. I thought, "Where am I here?" And he's in the room with five or six of his cronies, sort of big, big heavyset guys some of them, with one guy in particular who had a big staff like an Aladdin Jafar, you know. Um, and he just comes up to me very, like he's obviously watched a lot of movies, and he goes, he goes up to me and he goes like, "Why have you been telling people, right, about my relationship with Paola?" And I was just like (gasps) and I was like, "Oh, no, well, I have asked about it a bit because, just 'cause you're so close and isn't that wonderful that you're so close now after what happened and she had to," you know, and he was going, "Mm-hmm. And why have you mentioned mouth kisses?" And I was like, "I have not mentioned mouth kisses." And he's, and then someone, this journalist was in the room, he's going, "Yes, you did." I was going, "I didn't, we can show you the audio." We had this back and forth for about an hour, um, which obviously we had to condense to a minute, but he lost his rag, and we didn't even know, I didn't think about it 'cause I was so scared. I had my microphone on my, on my collar that was still, uh, recording, and he was screaming and going, "You bastards, you've, you took the Falklands, now you're gonna come and do this. You think you're walking in here." And I was just going, "No, uh, sorry." And he goes, "You say sorry, sir!" And I was like, "I'm sorry, sir," and all this stuff, it's embarrassing really. Anyway, y- you know, eventually we got out there, and that was not easy either. We had to sort of get away, we had to squeeze past thousands of people who we thought at any moment if he tells them to are just gonna kill us. Um, we, we would just be another statistic out in the middle of nowhere, you know, it would be nothing to them. Squeezed past them, got out into the street where there are still thousands and thousands of these people all on the floor screaming, crazy, and his voice I can hear booming through a microphone, he's now come out, they've lost their minds, and he's going, "The devil is in this church today and he's trying to leave now." And we're going, "Oh my god, oh my god, they're all gonna kill us."... and at that point, we're like, we're running away, we're trying to get to, like, w- where are you even gonna get a taxi at, like, 1:00 in the morning now, middle of nowhere? And David says to me, "Mate, you're not gonna be happy here. Um, when you were leaving the church and I was filming you, I wasn't filming. It wasn't filming." And I was like, "Right, well, we're just gonna go, then." He's like, "We, we can't, we can't not have you leaving the church." So, we had to then squeeze past these thousands of people again, back into this, like, den, and film me walking out again, which was the scariest thing I've ever done. I've never forgiven David for that. No, I love him, really. And yeah, we got away, and, uh, we were so scared, even on the way home, both of us just shaking, and it was only, uh, you know, in the days that followed that we thought, "You know we recorded all of that." Like, this isn't just a normal film anymore. This is... You know, it was all on my, it was all on my, uh, the microphone was on the whole time. So, that's what made the film. We got quite fortunate, really, um, so yeah, it makes, what makes it different, I think, the film, the last 10 minutes are pretty insane.

Chris Williamson 19:12 So, he held up a few thousand people's exorcisms to shout at you backstage-

Andrew Gold 19:18 (laughs) Yep.

Chris Williamson 19:18 ... while he's got some snotty... So, it sounds like the, like the weak kid that befriends the bullies in school. It's like, "Yeah, you did. Yeah, you did."

Andrew Gold 19:27 He was, he was so much like that, yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:30 How bizarre.

Andrew Gold 19:32 (laughs) That's why you do this job, you know? You, what you... In the moment, it's scary and weird.

Chris Williamson 19:37 You're threatened by 5,000 Argentinian people in the (laughs) suburbs of Buenos Aires. This is why we're here.

Andrew Gold 19:42 Right? Yeah, that's what life is. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 19:45 Fuck, man. All right, so how do you... Who... You... The BBC picked it up, right?

Andrew Gold 19:50 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 19:51 How do you sell it to them? How do you say, "I've got this guy who might be crossing the boundaries of what a parishioner should do. Put it on your TV show"?

Andrew Gold 20:02 Hm, well, I had mentioned to a couple of commissioners and things before, doing it, to see if they would commission it, you know, and, uh, they took a meeting with me and then they just didn't quite take it. It's very hard to sell, uh, ideas outside of the UK, or America maybe at a push, um, and especially foreign language stuff, which I think is a shame 'cause when we do have foreign language stuff on TV, documentaries and things, Stacey Dooley, Louis Theroux, whatever, they're talking through translators, and it's, you know, there's a lot that's lost there. You couldn't have that kind of argument we had, for example. Um, but they didn't want it, so fine. Um, once it was done, I, yeah, I got back in touch with all those people saying like, "No, no, no, you, you've got to see this." Me and David spent months editing it, putting it together. And like in, you know, all industries or whatever, you know, they just didn't reply. Um, it took about two years of just going on LinkedIn every day, finding the names of different BBC, Channel 4, like everyone, and guessing their email addresses, and just, I probably sent... You know, there's an old thing, isn't there, about like the Beatles, they got rejected five times or whatever, and Harry Potter was rejected five times before, you know, it got... And I just used to look at those sort of quotes and things, and think, "I got rejected five times before breakfast this morning," you know, every day for two years, and eventu- and I was looking at the Vimeo where we, where we uploaded the video, just looking at the stats. Nobody ever watched it. Like, one or two did, the head of Channel 4 did at one point at the ti- at the time, and then just said it was his- he was worried that I looked too much like Louis Theroux, which was a shame, y- yeah. Um, but the BBC eventually, somebody, somewhere on some team, I don't even know how, replied after two years and said, "Oh, thanks for this, I'll give it a watch." So me and David were like, (gasps) you know, two weeks just waiting like, you know, fingers crossed, "Please, please, please watch it." And we knew if he watches it, he'll take it, and, and that's... It wasn't arrogance like we're such good documentary makers. A big part of documentary making, particularly the gonzo style with presenters and things, is luck, and if something mad happens when you're filming, you've got it. So it was just luck, and we knew that nothing like this had been on TV before that was this crazy, just from the luck of the draw, from that crazy journalist saying those weird things that we'd done that we hadn't. Um, so yeah, they, they watched it, and two weeks later they said, "We'll take it," et cetera. And they offered us an incredibly low amount of money, which didn't even cover the legal fees that we then had to pay lawyers 'cause they get- they ask you to get all these lawyers involved to check everything through. So we didn't make a penny from it. They took all the rights forever, because they knew we were desperate to, to take it, uh, to, to get it on the BBC, and it's, it's such a great calling card for us that it was worth it. Um, but yeah, we got it out, and it was, it, it ended up it won some fi- film festival awards first, and then it ended up in the BBC's Best of the Year, uh, list, so it was, it was a great, uh, moment for us.

Chris Williamson 23:01 Have you been invited back to the BBC since?

Andrew Gold 23:04 Uh, in the, in the sort of... (sighs) It was a funny one. Yeah, I thought that they would be, and I, I don't mean this arrogantly, I just, I just thought they would think like, "Oh wow, they've, these two guys have just done this on their own. That's unusual 'cause usually we'd give a budget of 50 grand or 100 grand or whatever, and they've done it for free. This, this is interesting. Let's see what they've got." Uh, and no- there was just nothing. The film came out and it was just like nothing at all. I then pushed a bit and I was saying, "Hey, can we have a meeting? Can we talk, you know?" So I went to a BBC Three meeting, uh, with one guy who seemed to be sort of the head of the team and three younger women, and I felt very much like they just, I felt like they hated me from the, from the get-go.

Chris Williamson 23:47 (laughs)

Andrew Gold 23:47 They were just looking at me with these eyes like, "Who the hell are you?" You know?

Chris Williamson 23:51 What was wrong with you? What do you think was wrong with you?

Andrew Gold 23:53 Um, (sighs) well, at the time I wasn't sure, but my experience since has led me to believe a big part of it is being a White man, being middle class as well, looking and sounding a tiny bit like Louis Theroux as well. Uh, especially BBC Three, you know, young people, it's supposed to be cool and edgy and young-looking, and I wasn't cool in that way.... they just hated me. So, I was just coming up with idea after idea like, "Hey, there's a bunch of vigilantes that make, uh, prostitutes stand on ant hills in Bolivia," and, uh, "There are these pedophiles in Germany where the, the, uh, clinics don't report them to police." L- I had, like, 15 ideas like that, just really quirky, bizarre stuff where I thought, "I speak the languages of these places. Um, I can do this." And everyone I said they were like, "Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. Well, how would you do that?" I was like, "Well, I'd go... Mm-hmm." So, it w- it was really a dampener after th- the excitement that came before it. I really thought it would lead to more stuff. Um, and then I emailed... They, they did say, "Look, draw up a couple of pitches for us, uh, for a series or whatever, and get back to us in a, you know, with a... in a week or whatever." So, a week later I did that. I put a lot of work into it, sent it to the guy, uh, who was in charge of that team, who was the one who maybe had my corner, and he replied saying, "Oh, I've actually moved to a different team. One of these women has been promoted." So, I emailed her and, yeah, just nothing, no interest at all. Some of the, some of the s- ideas I pitched, not just to her, to other people, they were saying like, "Well, why should you do that? You're not from that particular, uh, background." For example, gay conversion was one of them I wanted to do in Ecuador, um, that... It's a really interesting... I, I'll just quickly go, but in E- in Ecuador, uh, they banned gay conversion. They, they took the step to ban it because it was such a, a big thing. And the, the weird thing was it got much worse because it, it got pushed underground, um, so then instead of just, you know, priests and whatever doing it, and therapists, it became, uh, you know, people would come in the middle of the night and kidnap someone and you wouldn't see them again for five months. They were forced underground, abused. So, I thought, "That's a great idea." And they were like, "Mm-hmm. Andrew, can we ask, are you gay?" And I was like, "Well, I don't know. No, no."

Chris Williamson 26:04 Also not a pedophile or a prostitute though, so...

Andrew Gold 26:06 (laughs) As far as you know, I'm neither of those things. No. But (sighs) e- exactly. That was my point as well. So, that was BBC Three, and then I had meetings, endless, endless meetings for about six years with production company after production company, and every single one, about halfway through or three quarters of the way through, they would say, "Wow, these ideas are really exciting and we'd love to pitch them to BBC and Channel 4. The only thing is we would just need somebody from a minority ethnic background to be the onscreen presence, and for you to be behind the camera. You don't mind that, do you?" And I was like, "Well, it, it is my story that I spent years looking into and getting all the contacts. I would like to quite, you know, be the journalist who interviews them." They were like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. W- we'll just sort of... W- we'll do that, but we'll have a presenter from a minority on screen." And I was like, "Well, I'm not doing that." To this day, I've never said yes to that because it's just so ridiculous. But that's how it's gone.

Chris Williamson 27:03 Why wouldn't you let someone from a minority group present the idea instead of you?

Andrew Gold 27:09 Well, whoever it is. You know, they could have just said, "Uh, thanks for the idea. We're gonna get Louis Theroux to present it." Um, and I would have said, "This is my story." I mean, it's a big thing for journalists, and it's the same reason if it's a written story. Uh, you wouldn't then want somebody else's name to be at the top of it, you know? So, yeah, it was just that.

Chris Williamson 27:28 What do you think is the reason... Like, what's the justification behind this? Is there a potential that you're not the right man, that you don't have the talents for it, and they, th- they're trying to palm it off in some other sort of way? Or do you think that there's an agenda, there's something more going on here?

Andrew Gold 27:43 Um, you've got to be open to everything, you know? Um, and (sighs) it's, it's so hard to s- self-judge, isn't it? So, I wouldn't want to say if I'm good or bad. Uh, (sighs) it's, it's hard, isn't it? It's hard to know. Uh... (banging noise)

Chris Williamson 27:58 Well, it's strange to hear... It, it's strange for me to hear that coming out from a meeting. Like...

Andrew Gold 28:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 28:04 To hear that said sort of, so flagrantly feels a bit icky to me.

Andrew Gold 28:13 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 28:14 Um, whether you want... No matter what your sort of goals are, if I was a mixed race presenter, I wouldn't want to hear that the only reason that I'd got this job doing this interesting story was because of a diversity quota.

Andrew Gold 28:28 Yeah. Well, I've had people get in touch because they've heard me talk about this before on my podcast, uh, and people have gotten in touch saying, you know, "I'm not even a presenter and I was emailed saying like, 'You know, I've heard about this thing you're involved with. Do you want to present this for TV?'"

Chris Williamson 28:40 No way.

Andrew Gold 28:41 So, yeah. So it does, it does happen. Um, and, and yes, I und- some people might think as well, "Well, yeah, maybe they just didn't think you were good enough." And that's fair enough. I mean, it's, it's so subjective as well. Um, but, but, but yeah, it's just... The thing w- the thing was, it was said... It wasn't even like 99% of meetings. It was every single meeting this was... this came up. It was a di- it was the same reason. It was a diversity thing.

Chris Williamson 29:07 What do you think we should do about this sort of situation?

Andrew Gold 29:11 Hmm. (exhales) It's so complicated, isn't it? It's so complicated. The thing is right now, um, on TV, uh, in the last six years, the Diamond Diversity Survey, that's like the closest... that's like the most accurate survey that people use. All the TV channels use it. That shows that people from minority ethnic backgrounds are the most overrepresented, um, group of people on screen in all British TV over the last six years. Um, and when you tell people that they say, "Okay, but what about off screen?" and, and all that. And I say, "Well, that's not what we're talking about though." So it, it does sometimes feel like these TV channels are in a rush sometimes to push diversity on the screen while not paying attention to what's happening behind the screen. So it's just-

Chris Williamson 29:56 Oh, so you think it might be a bit of a smokescreen almost?

Andrew Gold 30:00 ... so for show. Yeah. Un- until... Although the thing is, when you look at the actual off screen staff, divers- the diversity is we've got 13% of the UK is, is supposedly from a minority ethnic background. Um, 22 or 23% of onscreen TV people are also from that. So that's... it's almost double. Off screen, behind camera, it's 12% or 12.3%. So, it's not a big difference from that to 13%. And, you know, it depends on, on your political ideology as to whether you think that more needs to be done about that.... and I would say that the belief is that higher up it is a bit more white, so the top directors and the top CEOs and stuff like that. And as you say, smoke, it could be a smokescreen because I often hear this from the top BBC guys who are, like, these white guys, and I'm thinking like, "Well, you're where, if there is an issue, that's where the issue is, it's you guys." It's not down at the bottom as, you know, presenters on TV.

Chris Williamson 30:55 So they could be perhaps protecting their jobs by doing that. But I mean, what if, what would you say if it turns out that the public respond better to a minority background presenter if they are, I think, the same way as, um, ASOS recently have been very, at least on the men's side, have been very heavily using mixed-race guys. A lot of them have had tattoos, they've got piercings. All that they're looking at is how many clothes does this model sell-

Andrew Gold 31:26 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 31:26 ... of this particular garment? They're able to attribute success a lot more tightly, right? Because it's just click, clicks and conversions. But I imagine there must be a s- something similar there with the BBC, i- it might be the case that putting somebody from a minority background who's the presenter might result in higher viewing figures or better retention or better reported happiness-

Andrew Gold 31:46 Hmm. Well-

Chris Williamson 31:46 ... after watching the show or something.

Andrew Gold 31:48 ... if that were the case, then w- we wouldn't need diversity officers and all this kind of thing, because it would suggest, well, there's no racism in the UK if the minority ethnic, uh, presenters perform so much better across the whole country. So they wouldn't need to be spending extortionate amounts of money on new diversity officers to up the diversity. This feels more artificial than, than what is best or not best for the, for the show. And then on top of that, I would just, I would just think that, you know, the people who discover the stories, as long as they're okay at it, as long as they're pretty, you know, you don't have to be thorough, you don't have to be the most charismatic person ever. As long as you're pretty good at what you do l- I think you should be able to present that story no matter who you are. Uh, and it's, I think I do find it sad that we're looking so much at who every single person is, what they are. If you apply for a job at the BBC now you don't just have to say what skin color you are, what, this ethnicity and stuff, you now have to talk about your parents' jobs, you have to talk about your parents' university experiences, um, your sex, gender, orientation, all these things where I'm like, "I can't bel- why are you asking..." You know. I also do get the other side's to an extent, but it, it, it... (sighs) it's, uh, it's complicated, isn't it?

Chris Williamson 32:57 Well, it is, especially after a period where certain groups might have felt underrepresented. If you haven't-

Andrew Gold 33:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 33:03 ... had many gay presenters, lesbian presenters, trans presenters on, there is a, uh, justification from the other side of the fence that says, "Well, we've been underrepresented for a long time."

Andrew Gold 33:16 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 33:16 "It's, it, it's now time for us to have our time in front of the screen." It's a, I think it's... What's really interesting is looking at how, if you were to distribute how much money gets paid across the entire BBC or ITV, the guys that are at the absolute top, you only need five of them to probably cover an entire couple of seasons worth of teams that run TV shows. And I would love to see the statistics around how many of these groups of people that are being brought in at the front end are actually then working their way up, because that's very typical. I remember, um, I grew up in Newcastle with the Geordie Shore phenomenon-

Andrew Gold 33:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 33:55 ... and a lot of the showrunners, because we would see them, uh, twice a year, they'd film every six months, essentially, they'd come and do about a month and get a season out of it, and do a month and get season out of it.

Andrew Gold 34:06 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 34:06 So I would see this, um, sort of iterative, uh, uh, presentation of how TV works. So you'd see there would be just a, like, crappy little runner Season 1, then Season 2 maybe he's like an assistant runner-

Andrew Gold 34:22 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 34:22 ... or a researcher, then he may be a researcher, then he may be an AP, then he may be a P, then he may be an executive, then he may be a blah, blah, blah. And before I knew it, I then went on to Love Island, and some of the people that were runners on Season 1 of Geordie Shore had worked their way up to being some really sort of semi-important person. So, it does feel like there's a bit of a lineage that goes on, but also there may be a glass ceiling that's been put in place. And if that's the case, if the case is that people are throwing diversity quotas around in a way to hide their own jobs and keep their own jobs safe-

Andrew Gold 34:56 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 34:56 ... the, the ones at the top of the tree, that feels a bit icky.

Andrew Gold 34:59 Yeah. Well, there's definitely some of that. Um, and, and as to whether they sort of, uh, min- minorities now, I mean, look, there's no denying that back in the '90s, '80s, uh, there were these problems, you know. So that's also why there won't be as many minorities at the top now, because it does, as you say, it takes 20, 30, 40 years to get to the very top. Um, so that is something... I- if that turns out to be the case, which would s- it would surprise me the way things are going, but, but then that's a problem, and it's something we'd have to look at, why, why is nobody letting, uh, people from minorities, you know, get to the top. I didn't know you were on Geordie Shore before Love Island.

Chris Williamson 35:34 No, not on Geordie Shore. I was one of the-

Andrew Gold 35:38 Oh.

Chris Williamson 35:38 So I run events in Newcastle, and they filmed in a lot of our nightclubs.

Andrew Gold 35:43 Oh, right, yeah.

Chris Williamson 35:43 So we'd have... Every Saturday they'd come in, Wye Eyeing all over the place. And, um-

Andrew Gold 35:47 They used to pop it on in Argentina. Like, I'd be in a bar and it has, somehow they'd have, like, Geordie Shore on, and I'd be telling all these Argentines, like... (laughs)

Chris Williamson 35:53 Oh God, is that really what they're exporting, British culture? Is that the, is that the, the best of what we have to offer is Geordie Shore?

Andrew Gold 35:58 Yeah. I was loving it. I was just like... They loved it, for some reason, more than like Jersey Shore. They were loving Geordie Shore. So I, I was just... They couldn't understand a word of it, of course, but they had like subtitles and that in Spanish, so.

Chris Williamson 36:09 God, that must have been

Chris Williamson 36:10 disgusting. All right, so you, didn't you look at an abortion lady as well? Didn't you go and do some stuff with her?

Andrew Gold 36:15 (laughs) Yeah. So straight after, um, (sighs) that film, because I was getting all these nos about next stuff, and I thought, "Well, screw it, I'm just going to go and make a film." I'd been in contact with this woman that was known out there as the crazy baby lady. And she was just this really... I'm, I'm really drawn to very eccentric, uh, bizarre types. So I'm, I'm drawn to you, Chris. So, um, (laughs) yeah, it was something I wanted to do, and she was just this woman who goes around protesting, um-... of, of, of people getting abortions, right? Uh, and I'm quite pro-choice personally, but you're supposed to sort of keep that out of the documentary. And I went and sort of lived with her. And (sighs) this, this is the thing from doing this kind of journalism, and I'm sure you found the same thing talking to people from all different kinds of, uh, ideologies and backgrounds and things, um, you start to... Often, you quite like the people you're with. So, I went in thinking like this is probably gonna be this horrible pro-life, angry, conservative, religious Catholic person who has different views about abortion and liberal things than I have. Um, and I hung out with her. We went on the school run with her, picked up her six kids, and she was very funny, witty, and we got on like so well, and it was so nice, um, but ended up arguing because again, she didn't like my line of questioning and I pushed her a lot about some things and she hates me now and won't speak to me, which is, uh, really sad actually. But, uh, but, but what it did was it helped me as a documentary maker to sort of realize, you know, when, when you go out to film people who really believe that there's a demon inside them or really aggressively believe about, you know, pro-life or pro-choice or whatever, then you come home and people are just saying things like, "Can you believe people voted for Trump?" Or, "Can you believe of Brexit?" Or whatever. And I'm like, "Well, of course I can. I've literally just been out with somebody who thinks the devil's inside them." I mean, to believe... That's nowhere near as much of a push, um, as voting for Brexit or Trump or something. So, that was just a really fantastic experience for me to, to, to fully understand where the, the human mind can take us and how far it can go 'cause I think it can, it can heal its... It can heal diseases if you believe strongly enough in narratives we create in our minds. That blows my mind. That's incredible. And, and it also makes me think there's no point ever debating anything because people's beliefs are so strong.

Chris Williamson 38:30 (laughs) Yeah, it's, um... There's a story from Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections, about depression, and in that he talks about this guy who had (laughs) a special wooden wand thing, like a big stick wrapped in a special type of metal that had electricity running through it. This is in the 1800s, something like that. And he would promise people that he could fix them, that he could get rid of their, like, arthritis or something, like something like not just mental stuff, like physical problems as well, I think. And he'd wave it over them and these people would stand up, and it turned out they stripped it back. So this, they, they started doing, um, uh, a replica of that particular research and took away the electricity and then took away the metal from outside of the stick and then had untreated wood and then took the stick, and then got rid of the stick. And the same effect just continued. So you're right, like the placebo effect, if you could bottle it-

Andrew Gold 39:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 39:27 ... it would be a panacea 'cause it fixes absolutely everything.

Andrew Gold 39:30 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 39:31 And here's another cool story. So I learned that people that were catatonic during World War II, these, um, psych, uh, ward patients, right? They hadn't moved for years, perhaps. Some of them were just completely out of it. When the bombs started landing and they desperately needed people to drive the ambulances, these m- men and women, I think it was mostly men, uh, got up from catatonic states of years, years sometimes-

Andrew Gold 40:00 Wow.

Chris Williamson 40:01 ... and went and drove ambulances picking up survivors-

Andrew Gold 40:03 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 40:03 ... and drove fire trucks and stuff like that. So, the change that you can have when there's a, a sufficient external stimulation and the right type as well, you know, you have a purpose, you have a meaning now, this is something that... And it can bypass people that had been totally like comatose for five years.

Andrew Gold 40:24 That's belief. And it, it's the most extra- extraordinary thing. That's, that's incredible. That, isn't it? Derren Brown sort of does a lot of that stuff as well, um, and shows why it's nothing to do with religion. It's all about belief and the power of it. But it, it, it's also why we all disagree on things so much. And people always say, uh, "Critical thinking. You need to teach critical thinking." But that's, that... There's a problem with that, which is that even the smartest people in the world who have amazing critical thinking still totally disagree with one another. They're s- they're still led to different paths, and some people really far astray. And a, a good example is, is like, um, Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote Sherlock Holmes, um... And I had... I had David Robson on my podcast the other week, who's a, a journalist who talk- who wrote The Intelligence Trap, about how the smartest people in the world (clears throat) , often their beliefs lead them one way and their intelligence sort of keeps them fur... They, they're, they're able to, um, explain anything 'cause they're so smart. They can, you know. And Arthur Conan Doyle, he's supposed to be sort of the master of deduction and things like that, 'cause that's what Sherlock was. He's incredibly smart, and he believed in fairies. Um, and, and obviously it was a different time, but nobody believed in fairies then. And he ended up falling out with Houdini, the magician, because of his just mad beliefs.

Chris Williamson 41:35 Arthur Conan Doyle was friends with Houdini?

Andrew Gold 41:39 Yeah. (laughs) Yeah, until they fell out. They fell out over that, and because, uh, while having these sort of arguments and things, Arthur Conan Doyle said to Houdini, "Listen, you know, your mum's just died. I'm gonna take you, uh, to my wife, who's gonna help do a seance. We're gonna have a chat with your wife now, uh, with your mum." Sorry. And so he was like, "Ugh, okay, right." So Houdini turns up and they do this seance and, you know, there's all this stuff coming out about Christianity and this and that. And afterwards, Houdini said, "You know, my mum was Jewish." And the whole thing was just... You know, and they fell out. I think, I think they didn't talk again after that. But, you know, he believed in these fairies because there was a well-known, um, uh, a, a prank by these like 15-year-old girls who just did these cardboard cutouts of fairies and took a photo of it. They're very clearly fake. If you... You can see them on Google. They're just absolutely fake. Uh, you can see like a pin in the stomach that's supposed to like hold it up on this wooden background or whatever. Um, and he was just like, "Well, that's clearly the umbilical cord. So fairies can have children." Now, this is the master of deduction, and this is somebody who's fantastic at critical thinking, which is why, yeah, I just can't be bothered to argue with anyone anymore because...... myself included, our beliefs will take us anywhere. No matter how good we are at critical thinking, uh, it's, it's not gonna help us agree or even find truth or object to truth. So, that's what the, um, abortion crazy baby lady taught me.

Chris Williamson 43:05 Are you ever scared that one day you're gonna wake up and have just absorbed one of these mental views? 'Cause, uh, Arthur Conan Doyle, you think, "Yeah, totally rational guy, totally normal," and then one day he just fancies waking up to believe in fairies. Like, tomorrow, me and you could wake up and have some... in s- with the exorcism thing, you know, or whatever, standing in anthills, whatever it is that we gotta do. I, I, I don't know. I don't want, I don't want that to happen.

Andrew Gold 43:30 (laughs) I think, I think what I'd be more worried about is that, uh, and what is more likely, is that you and I already have those beliefs, and that certain people listening, probably not to your or my podcast, but, you know, will, will think that. I, I don't think we'd wake up and suddenly have a different view, but our views, you're right, they do change, don't they? And I think that's a good thing. I think totally different stuff to what I thought when I was 18. I, I think you do as well. I looked through your reviews on your, on your podcast, and they're very different from the beginning towards the more modern o- recent ones, where some people are like, "He's changed the people he's had on." And it's like, "Well, you should change. You should develop them-"

Chris Williamson 44:04 You know my, you know my business partner recreationally goes through the one-star reviews in Apple Podcasts just for fun-

Andrew Gold 44:13 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 44:13 ... because he likes to go through, (laughs) he likes to go through and see people shit-talking me because he's a bastard. Here's another thing, man. You know like people's, a lot of people, especially on the right, they like to criticize the term lived experience-

Andrew Gold 44:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:25 ... because what, what most people, or what s- they, uh, propose people that use the words "lived experience" mean is unfalsifiable evidence that only exists inside of my head.

Andrew Gold 44:36 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 44:36 But a lot of these beliefs, I don't think that the people that were getting exorcised don't believe what happened to them. I think that the padre perhaps was complicit, and he is aware that he's probably not doing what he says that he's doing, but the people that were working with him, they believed it, and the people that were being conned, they believed it, and the people that were paying and donating money, they would have believed it as well. You know, 10,000 people in the street don't come out for something that they don't believe in. You know, they weren't all there filming a Gonzo-style documentary, certainly. And it kind- it kinda makes me think, well, the limit of using the term lived experience is actually quite idiosyncratic, isn't it? Ev- everyone's life is so different and so peculiar, and yet it does make it very... I mean, it's a fucking miracle that anyone's able to speak to anyone and have a civil conversation ever.

Andrew Gold 45:32 I think lived experience as well, I agree with you, and it's, it's loaded as well. There's, there's a... It's not only that sort of, uh, (clears throat) "I've experienced it, so I'm right. I win the argument. I've had lived experience and you can't say anything." It's also, "If you do dare to say something, I'm gonna get very emotional because an emotional thing happened to me." The... It's like the same with a lot of the PC and the woke stuff. A lot of it comes from really good places, and if you've got a friend or you meet someone and you're at lunch with them and they tell you about a traumatic thing that happened to them and they went to an exorcist, well, it's probably polite to just let them think it, especially if it's helping them, you know. But there are times when (clears throat) we as a society, it's, it's not enough to accept lived experience. We've all got lived experience, and all of our lived experience is so different from one another. If you go to a therapist, uh, couples' therapy and things like that, I know a lot about that as well because in Argentina where I was living, I was there six years, it's the world capital of therapy. Everyone and their dog has a therapist. Not really dogs. (clears throat) So, uh, every single person, you can get, it's like 10 quid to go or whatever. But therapists will... One of the first things they'll tell, like, a couple is, uh, "Look, you've got your lived experience, but you've got yours as well, and there's the truth in between." So, so they will tell you, "The lived experience is not the truth. It's someone, someone's subjective experience," and you should respect it. It's good to respect that and go like, "Hey, that's your lived experience." It doesn't mean that's science. It doesn't mean that's true. And again, when you've had your job, which is interviewing all sorts of weird and wonderful people, (laughs) how would you possibly know what's true from everyone's lived experiences? So, they're

Andrew Gold 47:09 all different.

Chris Williamson 47:10 What about, you, you spoke to a guy that went undercover in an Amazon warehouse. What's it like working for Amazon?

Andrew Gold 47:16 Horrific. Horrific. Yeah, that's James Bloodworth, who's, uh, a fairly, uh, lefty journalist, uh, s- which, which I was happy to have on, because I had quite a lot of righty or, you know, uh, James Lindseys and those kinds of, uh, Helen Pluckrose and the... uh, and sometimes you wanna sort of redress the balance a bit. Um, and he... although he's quite anti-woke, I should say, uh, despite being very left. And for him it was about the workers. That's what being left-wing was about, about labor, actual labor. Um, and (clears throat) yeah, he was there for six months, and it was horrible. He said he walked enough that his feet were bleeding by the end. He wa- you know, he worked out that within a week he could have walked from like Manchester to France or something, the amount they have to walk, because they can't take toilet breaks, um, a- and, and the place is so big because they have to cover a certain amount of ground every day. Uh, if they don't, if they don't do things quick enough or fast enough, they get points. And once you get five points, you're fired. That's it. No questions asked. You get points for like, yeah, being in the toilet, for spending more than 10 minutes having lunch. You get a point for, you know, answering back to someone.

Chris Williamson 48:25 This is in the UK?

Andrew Gold 48:26 Yeah. He was at, um... I can't remember the name of... It was... He went to sort of this really, uh, industrial town somewhere in the Midlands, um, where basically, you know, there was not much going on and the Amazon factory-

Chris Williamson 48:39 50% of the people are employed by Amazon.

Andrew Gold 48:42 Yeah. I think that's the kind of place. And it was just miserable. A lot of Polish and Romanian, uh, immigrants and stuff, maybe half of them, and then half sort of English working-class people that he was working with, and they just lived in squalor, the amount they were being paid. And what really sort of boiled my blood hearing about that...... it was that (sighs) it's one thing to say, if you want, if some people get, uh, you know, very capitalist minded, I, I am myself, and it's one thing to say, "Look, well, you, that's the job that you're p- you know, skilled for, and that's what you took, and you knew the conditions when you went in there." The problem is that from, from James Bloodworth's experience, um, they don't pay. They don't pay on time, and they don't pay what they're supposed to pay and what was agreed. So, he said he found himself time and time again just spending hours knocking on the doors of his manager going, "I was supposed to get 120 quid this week. You've given me 17. How..." And he said like, "The point is, when you're living in, in, in poverty like that, that's the difference between being able to eat and pay your bills and being homeless. And it's not on." And, and so, it did make me angry. It did change how I thought about Amazon. And the irony, unfortunately, was that, you know, I ended, I ended the podcast saying like, "And if you want his book, uh, you can find it on amazon.co.uk. What can you do?"

Chris Williamson 49:53 It's the problem with becoming too big to fail, isn't it? Like that. And I suppose, I mean, why do you think it is that the UK, a place that has fairly robust legal system and employment law, how come this is being permitted? So why isn't, shouldn't it only take one case and then you could roll that out across the entire country?

Andrew Gold 50:14 It's just not on people's, uh, priority list at the moment. And I guess, you know, the, the Tories aren't that interested in, um, stopping Amazon from getting away with what they get away with. I don't know if there are backhanded, you know, bits of money going to people, into people's pockets. I have no idea. And on the left, they used to be much more bothered by that stuff. Uh, but recently, particularly in the Corbyn era, they weren't talking about working class lives really, they were talking about quite popular, uh, university politics, you know.

Chris Williamson 50:45 It definitely did seem like that, that the original liberal s- sort of slant on politics was all to do with class, right? It was all to do with differences in wealth inequality between the classes in order to facilitate the labor to move up. And, uh, yeah, I mean, it's been a very long time since you've had... It's mad to think that you hear conservatives talking about that, th- those sort of rhetorics now more than you hear that from Labor.

Andrew Gold 51:15 Yeah, more, but I think, I don't, I don't know what the stats are, but a lot of working class people voted Tory recently, didn't, didn't they? They've moved over.

Chris Williamson 51:21 Yeah, I mean, Ashington, which is not far from me in Newcastle, that changed, and then Hartlepool, which was this sort of bastion that Labor had had for ages. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I don't know, man. I, I, I feel like with Amazon, there, there has to be something complicit going on behind the scenes in, with regards to the government, because I've seen the, is it We Are Not Robots? Amazon union?

Andrew Gold 51:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 51:46 So, they, uh, they always have, you know, the little robot, it's like a cardboard box made out to be a robot. It's one of Amazon's mascots.

Andrew Gold 51:51 I think so, yeah.

Chris Williamson 51:53 And they've, they've repurposed that, and I've seen these picket lines or whatever, workers unions, and then I saw a video the other day talking about, it was a training for Amazon managers for how to spot potential unionizing behavior.

Andrew Gold 52:08 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 52:08 So, it was if you see your-

Andrew Gold 52:09 Wow.

Chris Williamson 52:10 ... employees using these sort of terms.

Andrew Gold 52:13 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 52:13 If you hear them talking about this, if you notice groups of people that weren't previously friends, it's super, super scary and authoritarian.

Andrew Gold 52:20 That's scary.

Chris Williamson 52:20 Yeah. Terrifying.

Andrew Gold 52:22 Wow.

Chris Williamson 52:22 And, um-

Andrew Gold 52:22 Have you seen Nomadland, the movie?

Chris Williamson 52:24 No, that was what won a ton of-

Andrew Gold 52:26 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 52:26 ... Oscars this year, wasn't it? What was that about?

Andrew Gold 52:28 Yeah. That's, it was about, um, oh, I forgot her name, Frances McDormand being quite depressing and walking around the States, but she, um, was on the poverty line, and she was w- working at Amazon for a bit, and, uh, it just looked fine. (laughs) It just looked totally fine. It was like, "Oh, I'm at Amazon, I'll just pop in and have a job," and yeah, yeah, here you are chatting to people and just, you know. And that's a big Hollywood production that's supposed to be very real and gritty, and they really, they really sort of... Amazon doesn't come away from it looking badly at all.

Chris Williamson 52:55 Didn't take the opportunity to perhaps show Amazon in the light that it really is.

Andrew Gold 52:59 No.

Chris Williamson 52:59 Yeah, well, I mean-

Andrew Gold 53:00 They probably got paid, right?

Chris Williamson 53:01 Well, how much employment investment, you know, business rates, tax rates, all of that sort of stuff is Amazon plugging through the UK? I imagine that it must take a, a lot of noise to counteract that much money to cause the government to take notice.

Andrew Gold 53:19 Yeah. Yeah, I, I, it's... and, and they're, they're based in Dublin, I think. Is that... I think, I think I might, and that's-

Chris Williamson 53:25 Hiding from tax in Dublin, yeah.

Andrew Gold 53:26 Yeah. There's, Google does it as well. Um,

Andrew Gold 53:30 the, it just seems like we squabble on Twitter about these little things, uh, you know, JK Rowling this, and, uh, like we were talking about before, though, what's the perfect rate of, um, of minorities to be on TV? And meanwhile, there's just this insane stuff going on. And a lot of us, again, if you're a capitalist, you don't mind, you go, "Look, I have no problem with rich people getting richer because that's the system that we have." It's not the best system, but it's, it's not the worst either. However, that's, that's fine as long as they're playing by the rules and they're not-

Chris Williamson 53:58 Rich people getting richer fairly. Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Gold 54:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:00 Precisely. Well, I had, uh, Yeonmi Park, the North Korean-

Andrew Gold 54:05 Yes.

Chris Williamson 54:05 ... refugee, I had her on the show recently, and, um, man, she's talking about levels of suffering that hopefully the vast majority of people on the planet are never even going to be able to be aware of.

Andrew Gold 54:16 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 54:17 It's one of those things, it's so harrowing, and then she was saying that the Uighur Muslims in China, uh, they were given what w- they were told was multivitamin shots, which has now reduced the fertility of that entire group by half, so that the-

Andrew Gold 54:30 Jesus.

Chris Williamson 54:30 ... fertility has gone down by 50%. Like, that's genocide. That's like-

Andrew Gold 54:34 (sighs) .

Chris Williamson 54:34 ... legitimate genocide that's happening within the last two to three years, and yet we're being caught up... Like, the smartest minds on the planet are either debating about genders or getting people to click on ads.

Andrew Gold 54:48 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 54:48 Those are the only two things that they do at the moment.

Andrew Gold 54:51 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 54:51 Or maybe there's a couple of accountants that are working out how to get more businesses into Dublin, I don't know, but yeah, it's, um...

Andrew Gold 54:57 Well, there was a time when the smartest people believed in fairies, you know? So-

Chris Williamson 55:00 That's true as well.

Andrew Gold 55:01 ... just step up and laugh.

Chris Williamson 55:01 Arthur Conan Doyle, yeah. I don't know, man, but I-

Andrew Gold 55:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 55:04 ... do you think... How much do you think of the sort of current culture wars and what we're seeing at the moment, how much of it is, um, genuinely generated by the UK and the US, and how much do you think is planted stories by bad actors from nations like China and Russia? Have you thought about this?

Andrew Gold 55:22 Mm. I've thought about it a bit. I mean, I don't know enough about it to really comment, ex- except to say, I read a great, uh, article in The Times the other day about suffering and how much we need to suffer. And, uh, I guess if you were born in Korea, you can come away with a totally different way of thinking of like, "Thank God I don't have that level of suffering." Uh, but the best, uh, you know, the best eras of, of movies, of creativity, of art, when humans have created beautiful things, a lot of it comes from suffering. Um, if you look at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, the point is... I mean, we're always looking, and, and we do it in our podcast as well. We talk about, we have people on to talk about how to be happier, right? Well, what does happy mean? If you're re- if you're really happy, in Brave New World, everyone's happy because they're taking a drug that makes them happy, but there's no creativity, there's no literature, there's no beauty in the world. You need some suffering, obviously not on the levels of Korea or something like that. Um, and I think the smartest people in the, in the world that you refer to who are currently, you know, uh, yeah, talking about all these, like, ridiculous things, they're trying to sanitize the world of, like, get rid of any level of being uncomfortable, of being bored, of being a bit sad sometimes. Obviously, people have very serious mental health conditions that have to be taken seriously.

Chris Williamson 56:35 Bionics .

Andrew Gold 56:35 But if we... Yeah. Well, for example. But sometimes it's like, well, you need to be a bit sad for now, because you'll feel much better for it later. So, I don't know how much is... I mean, there must be some level of bad actors involved, 100%. I also think it's a natural human impulse when everything is perf- you know, not perfect, when everything is good compared to North Korea, compared to the, the entire, the entirety of history, to look for, um, problems, to find, like, "Oh, yes, but you should ne- why are you depressed? Why are you bored?" And, like, I'd almost have thought that-

Chris Williamson 57:08 Mm-hmm. I would have thought that. I would have agreed with that if it hadn't been for COVID.

Andrew Gold 57:11 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 57:11 If it hadn't been for the last year, I would have said, in the absence of a real crisis, we create our own, and in the presence of one, we reset our values onto what really matters. But then you have probably the most globally traumatic thing to have happened ever to so many people. There's never been a single-

Andrew Gold 57:27 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 57:27 ... incident in all of human history that's affected as many people as the last 12 months has, or the last 16 months. Um... And yet, it seems to have further pushed us into discussions about stuff that doesn't matter. I, I... Part of me thinks with that, it's the information overload, that there's so many sources of information at the moment that working out what is in good faith, what's in bad faith, what do I dispense with, what do I need to retain, it's essentially impossible, because for the first time in all of human history, we have a surplus of information. M- for all of our revolutionary history, we would have really looked for information because that was... We were like information foragers. We were looking-

Andrew Gold 58:08 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:08 ... for little nuggets of, "How can I build a better fire? Where's a better cave? What's a better plant to eat? What's a better d- route to go home to avoid being eaten by a lion?" Whatever. And now, that same impulse to try and get more information still exists, and we do not have the filtering mechanism to be able to get rid of it. And the result has been tons of stress, a lot of difficulty, and a lot of suffering over the last year. People dying, family members dying, restrictions on your-

Andrew Gold 58:33 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 58:33 ... livelihood, restrictions on the, the economy, changes in your lifestyle, all that sort of... Lack of social connection. But that hasn't pushed people toward thinking about a, a bigger picture, about giving themselves more perspective on what really matters. Have you got any sense about why that is?

Andrew Gold 58:51 Yeah, I think it's d- it's a different kind of tragedy. It's a very specific kind, the last year and a half that, you know... A l- a lot of us know people who have died and who've been gravely ill. A lot of us have been gravely ill, particularly older people. Uh, but for the majority of us, it's been a very depressing and sad time, but we've been sitting at home. Uh, so much-

Chris Williamson 59:07 Like comfortable uncomfortable-ness.

Andrew Gold 59:09 Yeah. Well, yeah, it's not the same as being called up to the front line, uh, in World War I or something, uh, by, by any stretch of the imagination. Although that, that's not to negate the suffering of people who have lost loved ones. It's, it's horrific. It's, that's, that's... You know, there's not much worse that can happen than that. But you d- if you're being called up, if your, if all your, your loved ones are being called up to the front line and you're sort of saying like, "God, what are we going to do?" you're probably not gonna be thinking about critical race theory at that point. The point is, we're, we're all sat here at home just thinking, thinking, thinking, for like a year, unless you did working out or whatever on your own. I don't do that, right? So I like... Because I, I like team sports, it's the only way I can do exercise. I hate working out. I get too, you know... I can't do it. I wish I could. Um, I couldn't play football for a year and a half or so. I'm sitting there with energy. My girlfriend comes home 'cause she was able to work in a, in a hotel which keeps going during the pandemic. Um, which is a bit scary. You know, she's coming home every day, we're hearing about this disease, who she met today and touched and been near or whatever. Um, and I'm sitting there just stressed. And what am I doing? I'm reading fucking James Lindsay and critical race theory stuff like everyone else in the world is. So I think it's a particular kind of tragedy that's actually made us even more sort of insular and trying to find little problems and little things.

Chris Williamson 1:00:20 It is the most millennial way to suffer, isn't it? That-

Andrew Gold 1:00:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:25 ... everyone's just had to ingest YouTube and Twitter and, and Netflix-

Andrew Gold 1:00:30 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:30 ... for a while. Yeah. I, um... You're right. A- anybody that's still here, that's still listening to this has had that experience. They've gone-

Andrew Gold 1:00:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:00:38 ... through a year of this, like, luxurious suffering, kind of, I guess.

Andrew Gold 1:00:45 Yeah. Yeah. Really weird.

Chris Williamson 1:00:48 It's so bizarre.

Chris Williamson 1:00:49 What about... You infiltrated a group of pedophiles. That's been one of your more-

Andrew Gold 1:00:52 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:00:52 ... recent ones. What happened there?

Andrew Gold 1:00:54 Speaking of so bizarre.

Chris Williamson 1:00:55 Yeah.

Andrew Gold 1:00:55 Yeah. Well, you know, I was looking for controversial stuff, and, uh, I got to Berlin. My girlfriend and I, we wanted to move back to Europe. She's Argentine. Uh, and I've, I fancied going to Europe and learning another language. German was my fifth one. I got all excited about that. Uh, and when I get to a new place, the first thing was like, "What can I do that's really controversial and weird and bizarre and, and try and sell that, you know, somehow?" Um, and it turned out that Berlin has the, uh, the world's only sort of pedophile clinic.... that doesn't ever report them to authorities. Uh, so they can come in, a patient or whatever could come in and speak to the therapist and say, "I did these terrible things yesterday. I'm worried I might do it again," and they will not be reported to anyone. Uh, and that's obviously very cont- controversial because it means letting these guys go back onto the street to potentially offend again. But the other flip side of it, and the reason it's actually pretty popular in Germany among, you know, the locals, is that it's seen as the only way to guarantee these people actually come out from the shadows and actually attend therapy, because they know that no matter what they say, they're not gonna be reported and stuff, and they can get help. So, the idea was like, "Okay, I'm gonna look into that and either write a book or a radio documentary or, or, or a video one." So, I filmed some stuff but I think it's gonna be too difficult because no one wants to be on camera, of course. Um, so I've written most of a book about that, um, and I've met all sorts of, you know, the patients and things. Um, recently, a 25-year-old woman, for example, that fascinated me because female, uh, pedophiles are so rare, um, particularly ones who will talk to camera. So, I took a train out to the middle of nowhere in Germany, uh, some little village, and met this woman, and she's got a 27-year-old boyfriend who is also a pedophile. Both of them are non-offenders. They, they both believe that it's... A- and everyone I've interviewed has said to me they're a non-offender. I haven't, I don't, I'm not very int- I'm not interested in talking to someone who is an offender. I don't want to-

Chris Williamson 1:02:52 How much do you believe them?

Andrew Gold 1:02:52 ... back there. Um, 90%, probably. Um, this, this woman I, I'm, I believe more because I, I just, maybe because she's a young woman, it just didn't, it just didn't fit the narrative. Um, and, and she was so angry when she spoke about other pedophiles who had offended, um, and so was her, her boyfriend. And they, the idea is that they both have that view and they want to raise a family together, which is a scary thought. But what can you do? I mean-

Chris Williamson 1:03:20 This is a (laughs) , this is such a minefield. Wow.

Andrew Gold 1:03:25 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Look, one, one percent of men are thought to be exclusive pedophiles. Now, obviously one percent doesn't sound very high, but in the world of seven billion, what's that, 700 million is it in the UK? In most countries, it's, you, you have, you know, more male pedophiles than you have people in the army. You know, it's, it's a lot of people. And those are exclusive pedophiles, so it gets scarier. I mean, the more I looked into this, and I apologize, apologize to any listeners because I, I've become a little bit desensitized because I've been looking into this for two years, and I know this is quite scary stuff to even think about and talk about. Um, but there have been some studies, I've looked at some surveys that have shown up to 20% of men responded to saying they had some attraction to minors, uh, or maybe even it was to children. I need to, need to check that. But they are not exclusive. Uh, so most of those people, you don't have to worry about them. They will never offend in their lives. They know it's wrong and they just don't worry about it. That one percent, they can't form a physical attraction to adults. They just can't, for whatever reason. And that's scary because they might say, as you s- as you rightly point out, "How much do you believe them?" They might say like, "Oh, I would never do that." But we're thinking, "Yeah, but what if you're drunk one day? What if you're feeling low?" And this is the-

Chris Williamson 1:04:44 People say they're not gonna cheat on their partner.

Andrew Gold 1:04:47 Exactly. That's the issue. And that is why we have such an issue, because everybody asks me, the first thing they say is like, "How much do you trust them?" And the reason we don't trust them is because we don't trust ourselves, and the vast, the 99% of us thank our lucky stars we don't have that attraction and would like to think we wouldn't do that anyway. But, and I'm not speaking about myself in particular, but we cheat at an alarming rate. I d- I don't know the actual rates for cheating, but everybody knows somebody who cheated at some point, you know? Most couples, there's some bits and pieces of cheating going on. So, we don't trust ourselves, so it's very hard to trust the pedophiles. And that is a problem for the non-offending community, and there is a big community of them. Um, and they want to say, you know, "We're not like those people. We would never do it." But they can't say that without us going, "Oh, we don't quite believe you, mate."

Chris Williamson 1:05:35 Yeah.

Andrew Gold 1:05:35 So that's the, you know, that's what they have to navigate. And that's, that's the line I'm navigating while talking to these people.

Chris Williamson 1:05:41 It's such a challenging subject, man. I've become really fascinated about the ethics of it. I've had a bunch of conversations over the last few years. I remember there was this girl I went to uni with, and, um, her friend gave a talk at U... And this must have been 2010 or something, so like a while ago. And, um, he gave this talk basically saying, "Can you imagine, um, how terrible it would be if you were born with an affliction that meant that you could only be attracted to people that are too young to have sex?"

Andrew Gold 1:06:13 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:13 And, uh, it always stuck with me. And I had this conversation with a neuroscientist, a guy called Dr. Jack Lewis, he's been on the-

Andrew Gold 1:06:19 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:06:19 ... been on the BBC. You should speak to him. He might get you on. And, um-

Andrew Gold 1:06:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:22 ... he, uh, he wrote a book about the science of sin, and they-

Andrew Gold 1:06:25 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:06:26 ... they put, uh, people of varying sexual preferences into FMRIs with arousal sensors, and they showed, uh, people that were, um, non-pedophiles every different type of imagery that they could, including, uh, above and below the age of consent, and registered what the response was mentally and in terms of, uh, arousal response. And then they did the same to the people that had said that they were attracted to children. And the people that were attracted to children, they literally couldn't elicit any response from them by showing them any type of adult porn. So-

Andrew Gold 1:07:06 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:07:07 ... the sentence that he said that stuck with me, i- I- I said, "Look, do we have any conscious control over the things that we're attracted to sexually?" And his answer was, "No, there is no conscious control over that." And that, that makes for a really difficult ethical situation, because you think, well, people didn't choose to be this way and...... only, what, 70 years ago that Alan Turing was medically castrated-

Andrew Gold 1:07:35 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:07:35 ... for being gay? Because-

Andrew Gold 1:07:36 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:36 ... that was seen as something that was unacceptable. Now, there is a huge line between being gay. It's not only a difference in degree, it is a difference in kind because you can't get consent, and there's a whole manner of-

Andrew Gold 1:07:48 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:07:49 ... of, of challenges to overcome there. But if you are part of a community that isn't, that isn't actually doing anything physically wrong, and you are afflicted with a problem that you didn't choose, uh, what, what place i- is there in society for these people?

Andrew Gold 1:08:09 Yeah. I think you've hit the nail on the head there and I think that's why I was gonna call this book, uh, We Need to Talk About Max. Um, Max, just a g- this guy called Max was the first guy I met from the, uh, program in Berlin, and, uh, he wanted to meet me and he gave me an address. I turned up, I didn't realize before going, I cycled down there, and it was a swimming pool, public swimming pool, uh, which is a bit weird to meet a pedophile there. And once I got in there, I had to pay to go in and everything, it's all a bit weird. He was with, um, a little girl, like, an 11-year-old girl. And I said to him, like, "What's, what's going on here?" And he was like, "Oh, I'm babysitting her for these other people I know." And I was like, "But you're a pedophile, what are you talking about?" Then two other girls came along, and they go like, "Oh, hi, Max, can I have some money for the..." whatever. And he goes... And I was like, "Who are they?" And he's like, "Oh, that, I'm also babysitting them." He's going to a public swimming pool babysitting three girls who are his age of attraction, that's what he's into. So, and he's trying to tell me about how he doesn't offend, never has done, he's a great guy, he completed the course, uh, why can't he babysit kids? Now that is awful, and I've said, I said that to him as well. But the, the point is, I want to call the book We Need to Talk About Max because it's such a complicated issue, as you say. I don't know, nobody knows what the right thing to do is. The only thing we know is we do need to start talking about it because the amount of people, amount of children who are abused is outrageous. I w- there's no actual statistics 'cause you don't know, there's so much goes unreported, but it's a huge amount of children. The only way to really stop that apart from getting safer and safer schools and vetting people, it will always go on. The only way to stop it is to stop the pedophiles themselves. Now, when you've got...

Chris Williamson 1:09:45 But what does that mean?

Andrew Gold 1:09:47 Well, so you've got, like, different types of pedophiles, of course, right? So one type is actually not a pedophile at all. At the clinic, you, they get a lot of people with OCD who turn up and say they have pedophilia because they are obsessed and they have intrusive thoughts and they say, "I, I'm scared I'm gonna touch my children." And they run tests on them to check and they're like, "You're not a pedophile, mate." And then they go home. So that...

Chris Williamson 1:10:08 So they've just become obsessed with the fear that they might be a pedophile?

Andrew Gold 1:10:12 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:10:13 That's really interesting.

Andrew Gold 1:10:15 Yeah. It's called POCD, um, pe- pedophile OCD, and it's a really, really common one. And, and it makes sense, right? Imagine if you've got OCD and the type of OCD you have, 'cause there's all different types, is intrusive thoughts, that's one of the most common ones. Now, if you were gonna have intrusive thoughts, things that, like, the worst thing possible pops into your head, well, that would be it, right? And it's equally spread out among men and women with OCD. Uh, scared they're gonna hurt their children, um, that kind of thing. But anyway, that's one type of them. But of actual pedophiles, you've got, you've got ones who are basically crossovers with psychopaths and they're gonna do whatever they do. You can't stop them. You've got ones who will never offend