heretics.

I asked self-confessed psychopath M.E. Thomas (Confessions of a Sociopath) to celebrate my 50th episode with me. Things get heated! Thanks to the episode's sponsor, the language-learning app Babbel. Sign up using my promo code of EDGE on http://babbel.co.uk/play. ME Thomas Links: Psychopathy Is YouTube videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbzIdxoEI7Y&ab_channel=PsychopathyIs Twitter: https://twitter.com/sociopathworld Confessions of a Sociopath: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307956644/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN Andrew Links: http://youtube.com/andrewgold1 http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok http://patreon.com/andrewgold http://andrewgoldpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Madeleine Black told her story in her book Unbroken, which is now also a podcast. At just 13, she was led drunk to a bedroom in a vacant flat in London by two American 17-year-olds, who raped her. Thanks to the episode's sponsor, the language-learning app Babbel. Sign up using my promo code of EDGE on http://babbel.co.uk/play. Madeleine Links: Unbroken Podcast: https://podfollow.com/1534721507 Unbroken Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unbroken-Journey-Shattered-Violence-Survival/dp/1786062763 https://twitter.com/madblack65 https://instagram.com/madblack65  Andrew Links: http://youtube.com/andrewgold1 http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok http://patreon.com/andrewgold http://andrewgoldpodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Naama Kates is an actress and musician best known for her work with extremists and incels. An incel is an involuntary celibate: men who feel they're physically or mentally too unattractive for women. While many of these men are depressed or lonely, when they come together through online communities, things can get toxic. Naama Links: Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/incel/id1469915971 https://twitter.com/naamakates Andrew Links: http://youtube.com/andrewgold1 http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok http://patreon.com/andrewgold http://andrewgoldpodcast.com Thanks to the episode's sponsor, the language-learning app Babbel. Sign up using my promo code of EDGE on http://babbel.co.uk/play. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, I’m talking to Telegraph journalist Cara McGoogan, the host and journalist behind acclaimed podcast Bed of Lies. [By the way, join me in an old 90's-style chat room Thursday 8pm GMT (it's free, and you don't have to sign up): https://discord.gg/RWH7fs6ygb]   The series follows the lives of several fairly innocuous and harmless Left-Wing activists in the 80s, 90s and 2000s who fell in love, married and, on occasion, had children with men they had met on the activist scene. They would then go together to marches and rallies against things like animal cruelty or climate change, and other typically socially Leftist causes. It later emerged that the men they had met were undercover police agents acting as spies. Imagine finding out that the love of your life, the father of your children and the person you trusted more than anyone else in the world – that’s all one person by the way, not three - had been living a lie. Cara Links: Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjmcgoogan Telegraph Page: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/authors/cara-mcgoogan/ Bed of Lies: https://podfollow.com/1537575625 Andrew Links: http://youtube.com/andrewgold1 http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok http://patreon.com/andrewgold http://andrewgoldpodcast.com   Cara talks to me about her investigation and how it got started, what it was like for these women to have the rug pulled out from under them, having to start again alone. We look at a few individual stories, and chat about the police officers and their motivations in ruining the lives of these women. They spent years pretending to support Left-Wing causes, but had actually been secretly laughing at their partners’ views for years and reporting back to the police. We look at the nature of secret-keeping and what that can do to a person, and hear about how some agents came down with PTSD.   We talk about literature a bit and the kind of books, like Russian literature, where there are so many names and nicknames and it’s hard to keep track of the characters. That happens at times in the podcast too - but Cara is very good at reminding us who is who - and the stories are enough to give us an overall sense of what happened to many different women over a number of years. More Cara facts – she is currently writing a coming of age love story about a couple torn apart by depression and addiction, set in the hedonistic world of music. She also has a new podcast about secrets and corruption set to come out later in the year. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, are you ready for part 2 of my super long interview with the glorious Sadia Hameed. If you haven’t yet heard part 1, it was just a couple of weeks ago, when Sadia told us about how social services in the UK actually helped her family to kidnap her when she was 15, and move her to Pakistan, where they starved and tortured her. They suspected her of sleeping with a white man. She later became a spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, although she is no longer involved with them, instead working with cases of domestic abuse. Join us free in the chat room on Thursday at 8pm UK time. You don't have to sign up or download anything - and can use a fake name if you want, to hurl abuse at me! ;) : https://discord.gg/RWH7fs6ygb Sadia Links https://twitter.com/sadia936 http://instagram.com/sadia936 Four Freedoms YouTube Andrew Links http://youtube.com/andrewgold1 http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok http://patreon.com/andrewgold http://andrewgoldpodcast.com   This second part is very different. She continues talking a little about her personal situation, and the men who demanded their feet be washed by their wives or sisters…and she speaks beautifully about her long-term partner Jack and a woman called Linda who wanted to adopt her as an adult. After the horrors of the previous episode, it’s a relief to be able to discuss the lights of her life.   We then go on to chat about a lot of different things. Having discovered who she is outside of her religious upbringing, Sadia has become worn out by some of the identity politics going on today, and speaks passionately about everything from feminism to trans movements…and she’s got some controversial opinions to share, including the notion that Pakistan has a high rate of trans because parents are so scared of having a gay child.   When she criticises some trans people, I hope it’s not lost on any listeners that she first makes an impassioned defence of the majority of trans people who have suffered incalculable harm and, as she says, need and deserve all our support. Only after making that point, does she go on to critique what she perceives to be a faction of people who use their attained victimhood attack and silence others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I’ve got one of the smartest and most interesting people I’ve ever met on the podcast in the form of Jesse Morton, a former jihadist who now counters violent extremism with his organisation Parallel Networks. Jesse has done some pretty terrible things – he was a Far-Left extremist who became the most prominent white American Jihadist and a recruiter for al-Qaeda. He was also responsible for threatening the South Park creators and forcing them at the last minute to censor their image of the Prophet. Jesse Links: https://twitter.com/_jessemorton https://twitter.com/lighttuponlight http://pnetworks.org/ Andrew Gold Links: http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok http://patreon.com/andrewgold http://andrewgold.me   I was going to put this out earlier, but thought it was a perfect follow-up to last week’s episode with David Robson on the The Intelligence Trap, because Jesse is an example of how an incredibly clever person can make huge mistakes. Of course, we are all part the sum of our experiences, and Jesse was abused by his mother as a child. Jesse talks about how a history of childhood trauma and a victim mentality can be a dangerous thing.  Jesse earlier spent time in prison and was in solitary confinement for a year, while reading up in the library on all sorts of fundamentalist material that strengthened his convictions.   He has such a long and rich story, so at times, I just wanted to sit back and listen, occasionally steering the conversation this way or that. He’s an intense and cerebral man, and talks with absolute honesty about what he did and why he did it.    Takes us into the life of a street preacher and a jihadi whose bomb designs were used by terrorists at the Boston Marathon. It may suit our ideology of good and bad to think of terrorists as either stupid or morally bankrupt, but Jesse talks about the far more nuanced and intricate traits and at play. Those who are highly intelligent but very unsuccessful, he says, try to tear down the world as it is, and rebuild it to suit their talents or purposes, a world where ‘everybody recognises my greatness’.   His work focuses on getting inside the minds of the top extremists, and denouncing violence to them. To understand everything about Jesse, we’ll start with his early life and family, before moving onto his beliefs and his work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Science writer David Robson talks about his book, The Intelligence Trap. It’s a brilliantly written and researched book about how the cleverest people in the world…are often the ones who make the biggest mistakes. Which is why I never make any errors! Join me on at 8pm GMT Thursday 18th March 2021 in a free chat room (no sign up etc needed!): https://discord.gg/RWH7fs6ygb David Robson Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-robson-5761791b twitter.com/d_a_robson Buy The Intelligence Trap https://davidrobson.me/ Andrew Gold Links: http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok http://patreon.com/andrewgold http://andrewgold.me I really learned a lot from the book. It seems that the more intelligent among us – if we define intelligence by IQ and proficiency in certain subjects – are so smart that they’re able to create convincing arguments as to why their beliefs must be correct. It's why some clever people are proponents of flat earth theory, astrology or just basic religious beliefs. David tells some fascinating stories about Einstein and Sherlock writer Arthur Conan Doyle, and talks about how we can focus more on things like wisdom and curiosity to prevent the intelligence trap.   We speak about how to argue with someone who has opposing views to us without getting heated or emotional. We look at examining our own cognitive biases, chat about the grisly end to the life of Socrates and think about the pictures of fairies with drawing pins in their navels that Arthur Conan Doyle mistook – using his famed powers of deduction – for belly buttons – showing fairies are born and give birth.    David studied maths at Cambridge University, and has written for the BBC, New Scientist, The Atlantic and many other top publications. His book has been acclaimed, and when I mentioned it on Twitter the other day, one of my favourite writers, Will Storr, tweeted his own admiration for it.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us at 7pm on Thursday March 11th 2021 here (it's free, and you don't have to sign up): https://discord.gg/RWH7fs6ygb Today, I’m speaking with Sadia Hameed, a former spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain who has a quite remarkable story to tell. She holds some strong and damning views, and has a knack for getting them across in a way that is both persuasive and, often, comical. Having grown up in England, Sadia was tricked in her teens into moving to Pakistan, where she was abused, starved and tortured, while her family out there tried to work out whether she had slept with a white man. Sadia Links https://twitter.com/sadia936 http://instagram.com/sadia936 Four Freedoms YouTube Andrew Links http://youtube.com/andrewgold1 http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok http://patreon.com/andrewgold http://andrewgoldpodcast.com Sadia isn’t just the sum of her experiences. She’s also outspoken on issues such as women’s rights and human rights, while, as you might expect, damning of religious extremism, with a particular focus on Islam. She can’t talk too much about the work she does, but it involves domestic abuse that is often hidden in religion’s guise of righteousness. She talks about what it was actually like to be so hungry that she thought she might die, and gives us an insight into the last few decades in the history of the UK’s south Asian immigration. It appears that what angers her more than anything is a recurring theme on this podcast - the refusal of social justice warriors to look in some of the most obvious places.  Like Yasmine Mohammed, who was on the podcast a few weeks ago, Sadia shakes with rage at so-called progressives who appear to move heaven and earth to help a young white girl in trouble; but who think it’s fine for a young brown girl to be tortured, raped and forced to marry. Most shockingly, she tells of a social services translator who actually warned her parents they should lock her up and send her away before she’s of age.   We got on so well in fact, that we ended up speaking for hours. So, I’ve done something I’ve never done on the show which is to split this into two parts, this being the first. And the bonus content for Patrons will be at the end of the second one, which will come out in a couple of weeks.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Come to my old-fashioned chatroom on Thursday at 8pm GMT (noon in California): https://discord.gg/RWH7fs6ygb. It's free and no need to sign up! Hello, and welcome to another episode of On the Edge with Andrew Gold. Today, I’m talking – well actually I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago – to comedian Andrew Doyle, who has just released his new book Free Speech. It’s a modern manifesto on why free speech is so important, and how even extremely offensive speech should be protected. Andrew Doyle Links: https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath https://www.amazon.co.uk/Free-Speech-Why-Matters/dp/034913538X Andrew Gold Links: http://patreon.com/andrewgold http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok It’s a really beautifully written essay, which draws on the history of free speech and how it is being eroded from all sides bit by bit. We’re all aware that history seems to go in cycles and you never know when you’re next going to be under some sort of authoritarian regime. According to Andrew, it rarely comes from the place you expect it, and he believes we’re very much at risk right now from the censors on the Left, although he is politically Left himself.  In his book and on the podcast, Andrew speaks of former essays, such as John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in 1859, and John Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica. Andrew was also a teacher and writers about all sorts of things, but you may know him as both the creator of fictional angry news reporter Jonathan Pie – although he is not the actor who plays him – and fictional twitter profile Titania McGrath. Titania is a fake creation who tweets to parody the beliefs and actions of critical race theorists or virtue signallers. Her Twitter bio reads: Activist. Healer. Radical intersectionalist poet. Nonwhite. Ecosexual. Pronouns: variable. Selfless and brave. Buy my books.   Today, we are going to talk mostly about Andrew and his book. On the day I spoke to him, he had just come under a barrage of abuse from his critics, because he had blocked some of them in anticipation of the book. They believed it was ironic for an author a book on free speech to block those who opposed the book – and Andrew countered that, if they believed that, they had a poor understanding of free speech. Part of free speech is not having to listen to someone.   We speak about the pressure of getting all that flack all the time on Twitter – people accusing him of absolutely every form of bigotry. I ask him what it’s like to be a gay man being accused so often of homophobia. And we talk freely about free speech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua Baker is simply one of the most impressive journalists out there working today. -- Join me on Discord Chat Room, free and you don't need to sign up, just follow this link at 8pm GMT on Thursday 25th Feb 2021: https://discord.gg/RWH7fs6ygb -- You may know him for his current podcast series with the BBC, I’m Not a Monster, or his related documentary Return from ISIS. The two follow his attempts to track down and understand Samantha, the woman who took her family to live with ISIS in Syria. If you’ve not yet listened to I’m Not a Monster, do give it a go, it’s incredible from the start. Listening to the first episode, I was walking in the snow in Berlin and it was -15C, and I stayed out longer in such extreme conditions, so I could reach the end of the first episode, that’s how riveting it is. Joshua Links I'm not a Monster Podcast: https://podfollow.com/1540251892 https://www.instagram.com/joshbakerfilm https://www.twitter.com/joshbakerfilm Andrew Links http://twitter.com/andrewgold_ok http://instagram.com/andrewgold_ok http://youtube.com/andrewgold1 http://patreon.com/andrewgold http://andrewgoldpodcast.com It begins by explaining minute by minute what it was like for Joshua to be attacked and bombed by ISIS, fracturing his back in an explosion that destroyed that left nothing of an entire street. Then, we hear audio footage of a young American boy being taught to assemble and use a suicide bomb. The kid explains how he would lure American soldiers by asking for help, before pulling the string. Now, I didn’t want to go into too much detail, because I want you to be able to listen to this full podcast without real spoilers, and to be able to then fully enjoy I’m Not a Monster afterwards. I was fascinated by Joshua from a journalistic point of view, because the one thing I always said was that I’ll do anything, and I’ve done stuff over the years in dangerous places – but I would never go near ISIS or anyone who might behead me. It’s just not worth the gain, so we talk a lot in this one about his experience literally being blown up by ISIS and surviving by the skin of his teeth – and then what it means to be doing this kind of journalism. That said, we do talk a bit towards end about the characters in the series, so I’ll give you a little run down without any spoilers, all stuff you know from the beginning of episode one. Sam is an American mother who took her kids to Syria, and wants to come back. She claims she was tricked into going there by her husband Moussa, but Joshua doesn’t entirely trust her, as her story doesn’t always check out. Joshua does track down a woman called Tsuad who was bought as a slave by Sam and Moussa during their time in Syria – and Tsuad speaks nicely about Sam, so I ask Joshua about that at the end. There is about nine minutes of bonus chat in this episode for patrons – get that on patreon.com/andrewgold. I’ll try to get Josh to come to my weekly Discord chat room event, they’ve been great so far – just find the link in the show notes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices