What's Left? With Jovan + Freddie

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Catherine Liu is literally the best. That’s all you need to know.

Slip into this portal of coherent dissent and slide on to the class politics bandwagon.

We take the scalpel to identity politics, liberal illiberalism and bioated bureaucracy.

What’s your universal principle? Ours is to i...

We're delighted to be joined by the Rt Hon Kanishka Narayan MP. In our first episode from Labour Conference 2026, we discuss the backlash to AI doomsday warnings, the fragility of the AI economy and how this tech will be used - to the benefit or detriment of workers. As listeners will know, we've approached AI with a healthy dose of scepticism. Technology is itself neutral but the politics emerges in its application. We have plenty examples in history of how industrial revolutions disempowered workers before inevitable backlash and revolution. Do we need to wait for things to get bad...

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Demographer Stephen J Shaw's research on global birthrates has become a cause célèbre of the radical right.

Since publishing his data on delaying parenthood as the cause for "unplanned childlessness", Stephen has been welcomed to the upper ec...

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Meet Schrödinger’s AI apocalypse - it is / isn’t happening. Cory Doctorow is the final boss of AI criticism. His sophisticated understanding of computer science paired with science fiction writing talents means he gets a good story about the future.

AI companies have been spending billions. Much of it has been in da...

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If you want a counter-counter-culture take based on FACTS and LOGIC, look no further than the Decoding the Gurus podcast. Who said there is nothing sexy about being sceptical about scepticism, defending institutional arguments or stress-testing scientific methodologies?

Matthew...

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Friend of the show, Matt Shea, returns for an update on the Andrew Tate case and a meaty analysis of Looksmaxxing CEO Clavicular.

Are young boys really looking up to these jokemen? Has the media misunderstood the manosphere as...

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Baroness Kidron completed Hollywood. She could be living the high life. Instead she's outchea trying to take down the latest Frankenstein of Capitalism: Big Tech.

Beeban is a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and has dedicated the latter stage of her career to keeping children safe online. It's...

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FIRST EVER RESTORE SUPPORTER IN THE HOT SEAT.

WHATS LEFT, WHATS RIGHT, WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

INFLATION, MONETARY POLICY, CRYPTO, IMMIGRATION, CULTURE, DEMOCRACY, DEPORTATIONS, BILLIONAIRES, TAXES, LIBERTARIANISM, ECONOMIC GROWTH... WE COVER IT ALL.

CONSIDERED PUTTING IT BEHIND A PAYWALL... NAHHHH. But please please please...

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This one is gonna set the cat amongst the pigeons.

In the spirit of openness and fair hearings, we've decided to bring Jack Roworth on the show.

Jack is a controversial online figure - a young man (the youngest to ever grace the stu at 19 years...

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Babe wake up, new PM just dropped!

Since we launched this podcast, politics has been lurching from crisis to crisis. Yet again, Britain has a new leader. Our 5th in 4 years, our 7th in a decade. It can’t go on like this, surely?!

This week we have a special episode with Paul Nowak, the General Secretary of the Trade Union Congress, the national umbrella organisation for trade unions in En...

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Are we more American than European? Has the UK's future been fatalistically forged? New Statesmen Editor and Brexit Historian Tom McTague offers an account of the real trade offs faced by the British establishment.

Too often, politics resorts to a conclusion of managed decline. A despondent shrug. Are we suffering...

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Another heatwave just dropped so we’re here with our first in-depth convo on the climate crisis, joined by one of the world’s biggest eco-influencers, Michael Mezz.

After studying economics at Stanford, Michael decided to hold onto his soul and become an activist to prevent ecological collapse. Remember folks, the magic circle law firm / big 3 consultancy isn't the only way...

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Green Industrialist and Labour Party mega-donor Dale Vince is beefing with Energy secretary Ed Miliband, as speculation around Andy Burnham's Chancellor nomination reaches fever pitch.

Vince, in typically bombastic style, intervened in the Times to argue that Labour should 'scrap Net Zero'. Yep, you read that right.

Is Britain's most divisive 'Eco Tycoon' reneging...

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Emily Lawford's viral New Statesman cover story 'Meet the Angry Young Women' created huge waves of online discourse, undulating from the radical TikTok Left to the extreme Right on Elon Musks's brainwashing algorithm.

Polling from Merlin Strategies found that Gen-Z women were feeling extremely pessimistic,about their future, young men and our politics. Why?

We thought...

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Can the Left forgive the Centre? Can the Centre forgive the Left?

This week we are joined by the UK's second biggest politics podcaster on where the Left is going wrong and how it must unite to win. Keeping out Reform will not be enough to fix the country. A...

In our latest video essay (optimised for YouTube), Freddie breaks down why the Labour Party refuses to engage meaningfully with Gary Stevenson - and why that all might be about to change...

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The Labour leadership crisis has gone nuclear with Health Secretary Wes Streeting resigning this afternoon, after a week of intense speculation of a coup following Labour's local elections drubbing.

We sat down with Phil Tinline, author of Ghosts of Iron Mountain and The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares, to dive deep into the chaos. Phil...

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Skit Comedian Tom Nestor and host of podcast All Right Idiots joins us for a chat on livestreamers, chronically online extremists and the upcoming local elections.

After calling out Freddie for his cold approach game with viral streamer Gymskin, the boys invited Tom on the podcast to discuss the best way to get non-political audiences caring about the issues of our time... <...

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Has political imagination died? Having made a name for herself as a leftist short-form content creator, Louisa Munch has quickly become Instagram’s favourite Critical Theorist. Expert in applying canonical political texts to the chaos we see unfolding today, Louisa joins us for a meandering discussion on higher education, leftist utopia and the how to challenge the insurgent populist right.

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Back again with the biggest quandaries afflicting the modern progressive movement as political canon events unfold at breakneck speed!

I don’t think I’ve ever felt more jaded by the perpetual shock and awe chain reaction of geopolitics. We’ve decided to create a little bit of...

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When Asim agreed to do this podcast, I messaged all my bros from school days immediately. Asim's character Chabuddy G, of 'People Just Do Nothing' fame, was one of the biggest cultural influences on those hazy days. In the playground, we used to spit Chabuddyisms over a bit of 2 touch, while deep...

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Ooooo yesss it's another WL x Novara crossover, as Ash Sarkar joins us in the studio! You know there's nothing we love more than a chaotic chat about political theory with a few gags mixed in – you are certainly entitled to question whether any of it is useful beyond a collective intellectual ego massage. We hope it is lol.

...

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YouTube OG, Josh Pieters, joins us for a deep cut into the ethics and cultural impact of YouTube and what has sustained his success through different eras of online culture. All of those questions stored up from spending hours and hours of our early teen years parasocially connecting with these slightly older teenagers, finally saw the light of day.

BONUS MINI-EPISODE!

After Labour's worst case scenario loss in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Freddie asks who still votes Labour and why?

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Joe Biden’s Tech Adviser (2020-2) Tim Wu joins us for a deep dive into the ‘Age of Extraction’. Wu is a Columbia Law Professor who writes regularly for the Financial Times, The New York Times and The Economist. He’s published an array of literature that focuses on big tech, monopolies and how the attention economy has restructured modern economic life.

In...

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Dr. Andrew Lownie has been vindicated. After putting his reputation on the line with his investigations into rogue members of the British Royal family, Lownie faced a barrage of criticism aimed at discrediting him. A well-respected academic historian, he trusted the veracity of his sources and stood by their claims with regards to the disgraced royal, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

...

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Steve Tsang is a political scientist, Director of the SOAS China Institute and the author of 'Xi Jingping's Political Thought'. On Tuesday 27th January, We sat down with Steve as Keir Starmer landed in Beijing for the first visit of a British Prime Minister in China since 2018.

With the Davos consensus of globalisation and free seamless trade becoming...

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‘This could be the end for Starmer’. Pundits, sub-editors and political rivals have been drawn to this phrase more than any other over the past 18 months. Evidentially, it seems a spurious claim. The Prime Minister has trudged on, by all accounts unfazed, despite the merry-go-round of self-immolation (call it a self-destructive fireworks display) that’s dogged his premiership. Labour’s top-scorer, much like the PM’s beloved Arsenal, has been own goals. And yet with a soviet-style majority, Starmer still will...

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Now this is cricket.

Horatio Gould, comedian + podcast virtuoso (and OG fan of What's Left), joins us in the studio with author James Bloodworth (Hired, Lost Boys) guest-hosting.

Post Davos, Western elites are checking their bank accounts and stock portfolios, considering the premium paid for their unerring...

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Hey What’s-Leftists, We’re back for season 2 and finally doing paid content so we can keep the lights on. So, if you’re a fan of the show and want early access to ad-free extended cuts and much more, THIS is the product for you.

We had planned to take some more time t...

Finale of SZN 1 w the donny herself, Grace Campbell ❤️!!!

This might be our funniest episode yet. Or maybe just the one where we all laughed the most.

Recently, I found out a listener had stopped engaging with the pod as he was finding the topics too depressing. I get it. Confronting our myriad crises has been hardly been reassuring. But I'm hoping that this ep could be the antidote that brings him back into the fold.

Why has there been no revi...

George Gilbert, the Gen-Z Farage fan recently kicked off Big Brother, joins us for a chat on cancel culture, young men and the radical right, with guest host Jordan Stephens!

As you know, What’s Left aims to stick its head above the culture wars. But we can’t avoid the magnetic pull from controversial personalities that keep the digital news cycle churning. We’re just as human as you.

Following our interview with the Oxford Union’s George Abaraonye, it appears we’ve found a new theme: int...

UK's biggest politics substacker, Sam Freedman, explains the deep rot at the heart of British politics. In this episode we address the big questions: why is Keir Starmer's Labour government failing and what would Reform do differently?

After winning a swathe of councils at the last local elections, Reform have struggled with the realities of governing. Indeed, a majority of Reform councils look set to raise council tax by the maximum after winning power by promising millions in cuts to spending.

Freedman argues that this is the...

Jonathan Hall, the Independent Reviewer of Terror Legislation, was in the room when the UK Govt decided it would proscribe Palestine Action as a terror group, alongside the likes of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Since then, we’ve seen anti-war activists, including pacifist priests and grandmothers (even both!) arrested for carrying placards, as the police enforce the letter of the law. A recent Guardian article revealed that the home office was advised that proscribing Palestine Action could make the organisation more popular. Over a thousand arrests later, it appears the advisors have been proved ri...

Miles Taylor, the Trump whistleblower, is now an enemy of the state.

Latest WL? dispatch comes from McGill University's conference on big tech's threat to democracy. We’ve stitched together four interviews with leading thinkers on whether the AI bubble will burst and how to confront mass manipulation in the digital age.

The first half is a deep cut with Miles Taylor, the author of the explosive NYT ‘anonymous’ op-ed, which revealed the chaos inside the first Trump administration. A vociferous critic of Trump and MAGA, Taylor is now experiencing the regime...

Aaron Bastani, co-bossman ⁨@NovaraMedia⁩ just burnished our leftie credentials!!!

Super gassed to share this episode with one of our absolute favourite political commentators. We filmed this on August 20th (2 months before release) so we didn't manage to get into the Your Party in-fighting / capitulation nor the rise of eco-populist Zack Polanski. Sorry about that.

But we still managed to get into the weeds on immigration, identity politics and why Aaron thinks the Labour Party is failing to win over the public!!! You're welcome.

EXCLUSIVE: Oxford Union President wants to make amends for insensitive Charlie Kirk comments.

In June, George Abaraonye rose to uni fame as the Oxford student who challenged Charlie Kirk about ‘toxic masculinity’. Just a few months later, his name and face was plastered all over digital and broadcast media as the Oxford Union President who ‘celebrated’ Charlie Kirk’s death.

What happened?

Moments after news broke that Kirk had been shot at one of his classic campus debate events, Abaraonye took to Instagr...

Will Ed Miliband take on Richard Tice in a Misfits Boxing Match for the future of Net-Zero? We’ve got the exclusive 🤣

It’s been an exhilarating 10 days of b2b conferences and a huge milestone for What’s Left as we interviewed ex-Labour leader, Energy Secretary of State Ed Miliband and Kamala Harris’ immigration tsar Frank Sharry!

In this episode we’ve got something a bit different for you – a buy one get one free. The first half is an interview with Miliband, where we discuss the challenges...

Bill Gates Advisor + LSE academic Hassan Damluji offers us a glimmer of hope to avoid international catastrophe!

Expert in global politics, climate change, pandemics and education reform, Hassan spent a decade at the Gates Foundation in charge of the Middle East, Pakistan and East Asia, closely advising Bill Gates and holding discussions with the likes of Saudi’s MBS, UAE’s President MBZ, Pakistan’s PM Nawaz Sharif and original GOAT investor Warren Buffet. Quite the line up.

Currently, he is a senior visiting fellow in International Relations at LSE and direct...

We are addicted to ragebait - Jameela Jamil dropped serious bars in the latest What’s Left? pod!

Short Form content is information crack. We’re hooked on it, even though doomscrolling leaves us feeling empty.

Your da’ gets sunday scaries now - isn’t that mad.

But what’s even more mental is hosting Jameela on the podcast discussing what the hell is left?! Thanks for coming Jam 🤝

A legend who has experienced the culture war f...