UnHerd with Freddie Sayers

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to John Burn-Murdoch, the chief data reporter for the Financial Times, as well as Hernan Moscoso-Boedo and Nathan Hudson from the University of Cincinnati, to investigate a controversial new study suggesting that the global proliferation of smartphones and social media since 2007 has drastically altered young people's behaviour, halved face-to-face socialisation, and accelerated a worldwide collapse in fertility rates that cannot simply be explained by the global financial crisis.

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks with journalist, author, and historian Adrian Wooldridge about the systemic leadership crisis facing the UK, exploring how the rapid decline of Keir Starmer's Labour government mirrors the previous Conservative downfall and reflects a broader decay of liberalism that necessitates a radical reinvigoration of the centrist tradition.

UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers talks with Odd Arne Westad – Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University – about his new book The Coming Storm, which argues that rather than entering a new Cold War, we are actually reliving the high-tension multipolarity of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a dangerous era where rapid technological shifts, the collapse of globalisation, and the friction between a rising China and a nervous United States mirror the exact structural conditions that caused the world to sleepwalk into the catastrophe of World War 1.

Freddie Sayers talks with UnHerd’s Aris Roussinos reporting from Hungary about the downfall of Viktor Orban’s long-standing administration at the hands of Peter Magyar, explaining that while the landslide victory for the Tisza party appears to be a win for the European establishment, it is actually a political shift that represents a rebranding of the Right rather than a return to liberalism and serves as a primary example of how the broader European continent continues to drift towards the Right.

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks with neuroscientist and philosopher Dr. Iain McGilchrist about the psychological and cultural crisis resulting from our modern reliance on the brain's analytical left hemisphere, a perspective that views the world as a collection of inanimate parts rather than a living whole, while making a compelling case for the rehabilitation of myth and religious tradition as essential pathways to a deeper, relational truth that can protect Western civilisation from the dehumanising effects of purely mechanistic thinking.

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers discusses the ongoing military campaign in Iran with former National Security Advisor John Bolton who delivers a blunt critique of the current administration by arguing that sporadic strikes are a strategic mistake and that the United States must instead commit to a total blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the ultimate goal of regime change to permanently neutralise the threat of a nuclear armed Tehran, while simultaneously delivering a scathing personal assessment of President Trump's impulsive decision-making process.