Bret speaks with Neil Oliver about the COVID conference in Bath and on their experiences throughout the pandemic.Neil Oliver is a British television presenter, archaeologist, and author. He is best known as the presenter of several documentary series on archaeology and history, including A History of Scotland, Vikings, and Coast. He is also an author of popular history books and historical fiction.Find Neil Oliver at:https://twitter.com/thecoastguyhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnVR-SdKxQeT...
Nothing came along that made me feel confident of setting aside my initial gut reaction.
On the contrary, all of the information that was coming from official sources was intensifying my feeling of threat.
And because it so quickly became a slanging match, we were suddenly in the playground being bullied by big boys and girls.
And I thought, this is so inappropriate.
This is an emergency facing the entire world and within minutes the best tool at their disposal has been calling people names.
If there's no credible A readily understood argument that can be made in a low, calm voice to explain to me why I ought to take a part.
If it's already at the point where they just have to say, if you don't do it, I'm going to hit you.
And if that doesn't work, I'm going to hit you harder.
I've never got beyond knowing that that's why something is wrong.
They don't have something that they can readily sell.
It's not something anyone would want to buy.
So they had to force it on people.
Because there's something hinky about it.
And I've never, once I realized that, once I felt that, I've never been persuaded otherwise.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast.
Splish Splash, we are podcasting from Bath, and I am here with Neil Oliver, and I could not be more delighted to be sitting in proximity to you, sir.
Welcome.
Thank you so much for making time for me.
It's beautiful here today.
It is beautiful here today, and I have to say there's something that I just, I'm not going to be able to really describe it, but I know from talking to you yesterday that you are experiencing something similar.
Many of us have been on a journey that we started on separately.
Something set us off, something alerted us that things were not right in the world.
And most people who had that experience didn't say anything, but some of us did.
And what came back was an incredible onslaught.
Now that was difficult to take, but what also happened is that we found each other and we discovered that there are Other people in the world, some of them quite remarkable and that, you know, we effectively joined forces.
So, I remember the moment that I first became aware of you.
You are a broadcaster on GBN News here in Britain and I remember Listening to what I think I have to describe as a soliloquy.
It was very unusual for television.
It was just a beautifully crafted, extremely insightful description of where we are in the most beautiful accent I've perhaps ever heard.
And I just thought, wow, how did I not know that this person existed?
Well, that's lovely to hear from you, Brett.
I'll take that with me.
It has been the most bizarre experience.
I've tried to come up with analogies for it.
I think I return often to the idea of it's as though we were all on a ship and the ship hit some sort of submerged obstacle and sank.
And we've all looked around at what's been left floating.
And so there's someone over there, and there's someone over there, and we've all kind of gradually swum together and linked arms amongst the floating wreckage.
And it's been the most unlikely gathering of people.
People that I'd never crossed paths with.
Many, many people that I didn't know existed.
But they've been made visible by this event and we have cleaved together.
So it has been simultaneously a very distressing, disorientating time, but also an amazingly renewing time.
The connections I've made in the last couple of years have affected me profoundly.
And while I wish that the great event had not happened, I think, I'll always be grateful for the fact that I've met the people that I've met on account of it.
So it's been a curse and a blessing at the same time.
I have the identical sense.
I still believe that we are in grave danger.
Maybe this is a brief pause, you know, as the weather gets better.
But There, I don't know what else would have put us all in contact.
And I think, you know, if I can Slightly hesitant about saying it but I think that the event by its very nature was an incredible revealer of character and the fact is lots of people with different sorts of defects failed the test and what that it was an intense kind of selective event that left therefore a lot of people who are
So diverse and unusual and maybe that's even a vulnerability in some ways, but lots of people who really bring to the table an extraordinary skill set.
And so even as I, you know, I walk around and I feel this kind of low level trepidation almost all the time because I know that there are things moving that, you know, our rights are being targeted and we can't even hear what's being said.
But there is also this gathering occurring and by virtue of the fact that we come from so many different backgrounds, it's just delightful to encounter all of these other folks.
It's the, you know, Warren Buffett I think said it in another context about, you know, he meant it financially, it's when the tide goes out that you see who's been swimming naked.
And I think the people I expected in the aftermath of this meteor strike, as it were, that I thought I knew who would stand up and speak on our behalf.
And I was thinking particularly, I suppose, about journalists, the silverbacks of the journalistic world.
I thought this would be their moment and they would come forward and they would say the things that need to be said and they would ask the questions that needed to be asked.
But they were spectacularly absent.
Yes.
And I found myself looking at her going, where is so-and-so?
Where is so-and-so?
Wouldn't you think that she would have an opinion, that she'd be saying something?
Nothing.
And in that, you know, when the pilot and the co-pilot and half the people on the plane have eaten the bad chicken and someone comes back in the disaster movie and says, well, someone's gonna have to sit in the pilot seat.
You thought, well, it's not gonna be me 'cause I'm gonna have one.
And then suddenly you are, you're up in the cockpit. - Right. - Thinking, I can't fly a plane.
What on earth am I doing here?
I mean, no one is more aware of my incongruous presence on GB News talking about the things I'm talking about and interviewing the people I'm interviewing.
No one is more surprised than me My wife looks at me across the breakfast table and says, how did this happen to you?
You know, you used to make cheerful little programs about archaeology.
And now you're talking to, you know, whoever, about these potentially apocalyptic events.
How has that happened?
And I just say, well, here we are.
This is what has happened.
And so then I look around at a room like yesterday, and you encounter people like Tess Lorre, you know, who was the organiser of the conference that we're here for, and Robert Malone and Adele Bigtree.
People have been sucked into this vortex.
Unwillingly, really.
And for want of the people that you would imagine would have been the characters who would articulate all our feelings, I don't know where they are to this day.
And a strange cast of characters have had to step on stage and put on ill-fitting costumes and just get on with it.
Yeah, I think Tess actually makes a particularly good, she's a particularly good exemplar of your point, because as you will know having talked to her off camera, where there's no one to observe, she is Exactly not who you would expect to be in this role, right?
That's right.
She's reticent, I would say.
Characterologically, it is inconsistent with her that she, you know, would be so avoidant of the limelight.
And you can tell That she had the same, she looked around, where are the people who are saying what needs to be said?
There was nobody.
She had the tools.
And so she effectively has to inhabit this entirely different role, this very public role.
And I mean, it's beautiful to watch and she shoulders that responsibility so marvelously.
And yet it's like, you can tell how strange this event must have been to have thrust her into the limelight.
There's a strange, another strangely analogous We've talked a lot in terms of COVID about repurposed medicines.
The whole ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine adventure.
People have been repurposed.
Tess Laurie was made to do something else, but she has been repurposed.
As it turns out, she's at least as good, if not better, at doing what needs to be done than perhaps a more Likely candidate.
Although she wouldn't have wanted it.
She's been conscripted into it and she turns out to be a really, really, really good soldier.
Yeah.
But she's been pulled in from, you know, a lab and now she's in the front line.
But it turns out she's really good at doing that.
And who knew?
Well, she's been repurposed.
She's been repurposed and I think it's a strength in a way.
And I'm particularly struck by You know, she did the two most important pieces of work to allow us to peer behind the curtain with respect to repurposed drugs, especially ivermectin.
And, you know, I hate to keep saying that word because it's, you know, such a flashpoint, but Uh, but she first did the meta-analysis that allows us to calmly evaluate the net evidence in a way that is actually quite conservative and to see how strong the signal is, right?
Now her meta-analysis Says one thing, and then the famous Hill meta-analysis says something else, right?
And so, that would leave most people to wonder, well, all right, maybe it's just not so clear, except that then the second piece of work was revealing why the Hill meta-analysis says what it does, which is, frankly, corruption and fraud, right?
She unearthed it, and she unearthed it in a way that It's just unambiguous.
Now, I don't know, most of the audience will probably, they might have seen the clip of her Zoom call with Andrew Hill where he effectively, not even effectively, he admits that he has been instructed to change the conclusion of the paper by unnamed authors.
And we know who they are.
They're powerful funders.
It's a charity actually.
But there's also a more highly produced version that includes that clip, that places it in context.
Have you seen it?
I haven't seen that.
It's utterly beautiful, right?
It really allows you to see what happened with Andrew Hill.
And then you have to ask yourself the question, All right, I've been told Ivermectin works, I've been told it doesn't work.
There's evidence both ways.
What are the chances that I would find the author of the work that says it is not useful has been pressured by powerful forces to change his conclusion if this was not a cover-up of the utility of these repurposed drugs?
What are the chances that that fraud would have happened if it really didn't work?
You wouldn't have needed a fraud.
No.
Right?
So, the fact that Tess has done that, that she has provided us both a sober, proper, mathematically rigorous analysis on the one hand, and provided us a corrective to see what the noise that is polluting this question, what its fundamental nature is, says, you what its fundamental nature is, says, you know, she's much more than a good soldier.
She She is really, um, A brilliant contributor to a very difficult puzzle.
It's the aggression, I think, that triggered me early on.
It was how rapidly That which might reasonably have been advice became coercive instruction, backed up by real slanderous, aggressive, vitriolic, shaming rhetoric.
And I thought, if the people who ought to have our best interests at heart in this, if they really are doing it for our good, they wouldn't need to force it.
If it's consensual and it comes from a place of love, it's a different animal than this.
I thought, why am I being shouted at already?
I haven't done anything wrong.
I'm just... I asked some questions early on.
My wife and I asked questions about vaccines.
All we did at the beginning was say, let's watch this.
Because this is all new stuff, let's just wait and see.
But waiting and see was swiftly taken away as an option.
It was like, it was like fish are cut bait now, and if you don't do the right thing, we're coming for you.
And the rapidity of that, how quickly it was like that, was what triggered the lizard tail in my amygdala or something.
And I thought for the first time in my life, I'm in danger here.
From people, and I know not whom, but I know I'm in danger.
And I wasn't quite sure what to do, fight or flight, but I knew I was, and it was the first time in my life my body had ever responded.
It was a real physiological response to danger.
Aged 53 or whatever age I was when all this started and I thought, I've never felt like this before and I just trusted it.
I thought, well I have to pay attention to that because that's coming from somewhere deep.
And I thought, this is not authentic.
There's something profoundly wrong here.
I don't know what it is, but because I've identified it physiologically, I have to pay attention.
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Yeah, I think it's very interesting to hear your report because, of course, I went through some parallel version.
before I even know who you were.
The What you were registering was that somebody was threatening you, right?
It isn't even just that there was this sudden requirement to declare a team.
It was that you were being alerted that if you didn't There were tools to bring you in line.
There'd be consequences if you didn't do the right thing.
Right.
And so that was unmistakable if you were in our spot.
And it's also perfectly characteristic of one of these battles.
This is by far the worst one I've ever seen, but I will say that the toolkit is pretty familiar.
And the, you know, here, let me just give you this example.
Heather and I got into this because we're biologists with a generalist toolkit.
We're evolutionary biologists, so we're in a position to talk a bit about viral evolution, about the interaction of a vaccine with the immune system, these kinds of issues.
And so, it just seemed like we had a global crisis and it made sense to try to piece together what we were reading and make it intuitive for people so they could follow what was going on.
And, you know, there were some painful lessons early on.
Things that we didn't understand and came to learn, but it was an invigorating process.
But I'm realizing now as evidence emerges that we didn't have, right?
It's easy to miss these things.
I don't even know if anybody's cataloging them.
That the whole thing was set up not to be understood, right?
So, for example, The idea of an mRNA vaccine, right?
You can tell me it's an mRNA and it's packaged in lipid nanoparticles and the lipid nanoparticles pull it into cells because the surface of the cell is made of lipid and chemically they will tend to affiliate, right?
I get that.
And I can intuit, okay, the mRNA gets into the cytoplasm and it's going to make protein and those proteins are going to do something and then I can know, okay, one of the things they're going to do, they all make spike protein, but spike protein has been modified so that it lodges in the cell surface so the immune system can see it.
That's pretty elegant, right?
You could imagine that working.
Here's what they didn't tell me.
They didn't tell me that they had modified the RNA too.
They modified the RNA in a way that makes it most unusual and prevents its breakdown.
Now I know why they did that, and it's a worthy experiment, but I wouldn't run it on a human.
You wouldn't want to inject a modified RNA into a person not knowing what happens when the body is faced with this thing and can't break it down.
Because what it means is that the spike protein is going to continue to be made.
Right?
Once you discover, oh, they screwed up, they picked the spike protein, and the spike protein actually turns out to be cytotoxic, something I've been accused of spreading misinformation over, but it's very clear if you look at the actual evidence.
But they've now created a template for it that won't go away in a natural form.
You know, how far in are we?
We're like, I don't know, 16 months in and we discover, oh, when we said RNA, did we forget to tell you that we modified one of the nucleotides?
You know, silly us.
And it's like, well, we're just flying blind.
You know, it's the craziest story where we have to wait to discover these things.
For me, what you just said is a perfect example for me.
While you're talking and explaining, I can hold on to the The understanding of the information that you're transmitting.
And then when you stop talking, it starts to go away from me again.
I can only hold on to it while it's actually happening.
So because I'm a non-scientist and I don't have that understanding that you have as an evolutionary biologist, I just had to go and gut Right, and I would have gone on gut until something better came along, but nothing came along that made me feel confident of setting aside my initial gut reaction.
On the contrary, all of the information that was coming from official sources was intensifying my feeling of threat.
Because it so quickly became a slanging match, we were suddenly in the playground being bullied by big boys and girls.
And I thought, this is so inappropriate.
This is an emergency facing the entire world and within minutes the best tool at their disposal has been calling people names.
If there's no credible a readily understood argument that can be made in a low calm voice to explain to me why I ought to take a part.
If it's already at the point where they just have to say, if you don't do it, I'm gonna hit you.
And if that doesn't work, I'm gonna hit you harder.
I've never got beyond knowing that that's why something is wrong.
They don't have something that they can readily sell.
It's not something anyone would want to buy.
So they had to force it on people, because there's something hinky about it.
Once I realised that, once I felt that, I've never been persuaded otherwise.
So it's not been scientific for me, because what I would have expected from scientists hasn't been there either, unless and until I started making contact with the people that we're talking about, like yourself, like Tess, and the people that were in that room yesterday, Robert Malone and all of these other people.
And I thought, oh my God, these are the clever people that understand this stuff, and they feel like me.
And not only do they feel like me, they can explain to me why I'm right to feel this way.
So, on that basis, it's become strangely easy to remain resistant, because I am persuaded that my course of action has been the only safe one.
And it is scientific.
That's the thing that I, you know, one of their tricks is they convinced you that that nagging suspicion of yours is something other than science.
When the fact is, from a complex systems perspective, with your own health on the line, being delivered something this novel, the right thing, the right scientific conclusion is I don't know if that's harmful, but I do know it's not safe.
Which is an important distinction.
It's a tough one for people because they hear that and you say, these vaccines are unsafe and what do you know that we don't?
And the answer is, I know that you haven't had them long enough to know what the long-term effects are.
That's why they're not safe.
I came up with this analogy that got me in trouble early on, but I know it's the right one, right?
If you walk into a room and there's a gun on the table and you pick it up and you put it to your head and you pull the trigger and it goes click, right?
Was that Was that safe?
No, it was not safe.
Were you harmed?
Maybe not.
Right?
Maybe you walked away, got away with it scot-free.
But the point is, you didn't know.
And because you didn't know, it is by definition unsafe.
Right?
So, there's that.
And then there's this other issue.
Like take the example of what they did to the availability of ivermectin, right?
Ivermectin became almost impossible in the US at least to get from a pharmacy, which meant that they were taking pharmacists and they were getting between those pharmacists and the doctors who were writing their prescription.
Which means that they were not confident of their ability to compel your doctor that it didn't work.
So if their point is it doesn't work and that's why you can't have it, Why are you strong-arming my pharmacist and my doctor, right?
You should be able to convince them they went to school for this, right?
And the point is, if you can't convince them, that's not really my problem, right?
You're telling me your argument isn't any good.
You're telling me in myriad ways, and the only inference I can have is that there's some reason you don't want me to have this that isn't about it not working, right?
That was the implication, I think.
One of the things that upset me quite early on was when it was explained to me that the Emergency Use Authorisation was contingent upon there being no other way to go.
That you could only get that emergency use authorisation for that kind of global rollout of something brand new and untested if it was the only option.
If the house is on fire, you just have to fight it with whatever you've got.
Even if it's not the ideal thing, you know, you fight it with whatever you've got, and that would justify you doing some pretty extreme things.
But in the case of COVID-19, there were alternatives.
And if they had acknowledged, and when someone explained to me, well, if they acknowledge that there's anything at all that's already available that will mitigate symptoms and all the rest of it, they can't get the emergency use authorization.
I thought, well, that's obvious then.
This is clearly the explanation for why Ivermectin became like trying to buy crack cocaine.
It was that unavailable and it was that taboo.
And I thought, once it was explained to me, well they can't allow that to be there because otherwise they can't roll out the vaccines.
Ivermectin, pretty much free.
Vaccines, very, very expensive and profitable.
You don't need to be any kind of scientist to join those two dots together and work out what's happening.
I always wondered, these people who believe that this story made sense, Let's suppose, just hypothetically, that you had a technology that might be worth hundreds of billions of dollars and what stands between you and those hundreds of billions of dollars is an out-of-patent drug that's so safe that you can give it under conditions of great uncertainty.
You don't even need to know that the patient actually has the disease.
It's safe enough to be cautious and give it to them and give it to their family because it has a prophylactic effect.
If a drug you can't make any money on that is produced all over the world, that has been given billions of times, actually worked, and that stands between you and hundreds of billions of dollars, what will that conversation sound like inside of Big Pharma?
Well, do we actually expect that somebody would say, well, you know, gentlemen, uh, I hate to break it to you, but we have this amazing, it's a market that could open up for us.
It's a huge new sector.
It could transform our industry, but there is this lovely molecule and it works so well that actually there's no reason to deploy it.
Do we, do we imagine that conversation happened?
I can't imagine what it would sound like.
So, We've all gone through this.
All the people that were in that room yesterday have all gone through that same process, more or less.
And I now feel completely flame-proof from any continued attempts to persuade me by the techniques that have been being in play.
The shouting at me, the name calling, the ridiculing and all the rest of it is now absolutely powerless to have any effect on me.
It no longer matters what gets shouted at me by those people, what they call me.
I have become somehow immune to it.
And so it's almost been cathartic.
I've got to the other side of something.
And being in that room yesterday and talking about the shared experience with all those other people, Yes, we've been through something.
This has been a wholly unexpected event that has affected millions of people.
And it's shoveled some people in one direction and it's moved some people in the other direction.
And having gone through that sorting process has been revelatory.
It's beautiful and important, but I'm going to argue there's a dimension of this that isn't captured.
I mean, I've got the same feeling, of course, and it's not the first time either because, of course, you'll remember that I came to public attention
At the pointy end of a crowd Demanding my resignation over my supposed racism and so I've been accused of vile things before and withstood it and gotten to the other side and the point is Everybody needs to have that experience because until you know that there is another side Then you will be controlled by what people might say about you.
The problem is That what people say about us Still matters a great deal, even if we are individually immune to it.
Yeah, granted.
And the thing that I'm most concerned about is that This is really about something.
We have to defeat the force that has captured all of our institutions and turned them to purposes that are not publicly spirited.
In order to do that, we need to reach a lot of people, and there is an attack that I have become cognizant of that I think is still very potent and the attack it's I think it's an extension of the fear uncertainty and doubt tactic
But if you deliver if you say right if somebody says look Brett Weinstein is obviously not a biologist in any meaningful sense What he says is so transparently simple-minded and counter to even the most basic understanding of this, that, or the other, right?
If you deliver that kind of slander and then somebody who doesn't know biology, right, or has a very narrow textbook view of it perhaps, listens and they think, Well, I don't really, I don't spot anything that's off about what he's saying.
That sounds credible enough.
What they've just done is ask the question, oh, am I a simpleton?
Do I not understand biology myself?
Cause I can't see through breath, right?
And so that trick does not cause people to think that they know that I or Tess or any of the other scientific experts who are speaking about this are not making sense.
What it causes them to do is say, I don't know what to make of this.
I can't call it, but I certainly don't want to stand up and say, actually, you know, tests make sense to me, and then be mocked for what I don't understand, so I'll just tune out.
And I think people are tuning out of the thing they most need to hear, because basically the opposition has a very powerful strategic weapon.
I do think so.
I know more and more people are quietly, at the moment, acknowledging that yes, indeed, something is wrong.
That is leaking.
That is now a leaky colander.
The truth is gushing out now.
Yes.
This has been such an existential event and experience, that it has come down.
I mean, people write me letters and they talk about light and dark, good and evil, right and wrong.
It's been distilled down to very basic stuff now.
And what I take reassurance from is that the truth will out.
I mean, it's a cliche.
Whether it happens today or tomorrow, or I couldn't put a time scale on it, but I know the truth will out because that's what the truth does.
It is perennial as the grass.
It will re-emerge from whatever is laid upon it.
To obfuscate, to obliterate, it will come back.
So I'm trusting that the truth will work in our favour eventually.
It's become that cut and dried for me.
It's become that simple.
Good and evil, right and wrong.
What's being done is wrong.
And wrong will not prevail.
Right will prevail.
I wish I shared your confidence.
I think in a prior era that might be right, but the novelty of our era makes me wonder about it.
And I believe part of what you're saying is certain.
And in fact, the truth has already emerged and there are many people who are never going back into the cave, right?
And we've simply seen it.
But the problem is, The thing that has captured all of our institutions, and I don't pretend to know what it is.
I can say something about its dimension based on how it behaves and what it's obviously capable of, but I don't know what it is and I don't know what it wants.
That thing has to be beaten.
It has to be defeated because it is a reckless monster, right?
It is obviously capable with the tools at its disposal of doing tremendous harm to humanity or worse.
So, it has to be defeated.
And so the point is the fact that the truth has emerged, that there are some of us who have detected important elements of it, and that we are now in conversation is good, but we need enough power to marshal the next argument.
And when I began looking at COVID, it started for me with the lab leak, right?
I did not actually expect us to win that argument, right?
I did expect that we would figure out Whether it had happened, and I believe we are essentially there, but I did not expect the public to become aware that the wet market or some other natural origin story just didn't fly.
And yet it did.
And at the point that that had happened, my thought was, well, the lab leak was a surprise win.
You've got... Except we won because it was true.
That's my... it couldn't... the truth, it merges.
It does.
That's why the public have accepted, broadly, that it was a lab leak.
Now, we don't yet know whether there was any intent or just accident, but that's its origin story.
It came out of that building, having been tampered with.
We know that.
And the fact that that has emerged and been accepted, I think, is a point on my scorecard.
It is.
It is.
The truth came out.
The truth came out and it actually stuck.
Right, they did not manage to muddle it enough that people don't get it.
Now they don't get the second part of it, right?
I feel like the lone voice saying, actually, it's not even true that The fact of it having emerged may be effectively settled, but downstream of that, it's just like it had emerged naturally.
The consequences of the protocols that it will have been run through to produce its capabilities are fundamentally important to the disease that it causes and to the way it spreads.
And therefore, We are entitled to know how it was created.
And if they will not tell us, we are entitled to put together a working group of the best minds and reverse engineer what must have been done so that we can understand what this thing is.
And I can't emphasize enough how much rests on the question of what the thing is, what they were trying to produce, where they were in the process, what protocols were used, what creatures was it run through in the serial passaging, what tissues was it run through?
These are critical questions from the point of view of knowing How to control it.
So, hopefully that level will emerge at some point, but I'm not confident it will.
But the other issues in the COVID debacle, right?
The question of repurposed drugs and early treatment and the question of vaccine safety and effectiveness.
Were it true that the truth came out and that the public came to understand it the way it understands lab leak, right?
Those three things together Then, once you've seen what happened there, tell you, ah, I can see the failure of every layer of our system.
I can see the failure of the journalists, I can see the role of the tech sector, I can see the failure of government, I can see the relationship between national governments and these international bodies, I can see the GAVI, the Trusted News Initiative, all of these elements of that failure would be made, would be laid bare.
And were we to get to that moment, then the really important thing would happen.
Then we'd have a party.
Well, that would be quite the day.
It would be quite the day.
Because that would be revelatory.
In every sense, in every understanding of the work, that would change the world.
Because like you, but for different reasons, I just know that there's something profoundly wrong across the board Institutions have been captured.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
I just know that.
If that becomes generally accepted and furthermore explained and exposed, then that would rearrange the building blocks of society itself.
And it's no surprise that that's why that's not going to happen today and it's not going to happen tomorrow.
It's so big.
I think part of my smouldering anxiety every minute of every day is because I'm aware that the necessary sequence of events is so profound.
It's a paradigm shift.
And it's not just a paradigm shift, it's going to expose something that has been going wrong presumably for a very, very long time.
And that's going to be very difficult for everyone, for both sides in the war.
No one is going to avoid being hurt by that revelation.
You know, you say it will be revelatory.
I think for those of us who are aware of it, it will be revelatory because we've already grappled, you know, and I think in your talk yesterday, you spoke about the grief process and what role it plays in the discovery here.
Those of us who have already Gone through it, right?
We'll be relieved that we can at least now finally talk about the topic, right?
Wrong at every level.
Captured across the board.
No functional institutions.
For everybody else, That is going to be a terrifying moment, and it has to be.
I don't want them terrified, but we have to get through the terrifying moment to get to the moment where we get to discuss what we're going to do about it, right?
And to me, this isn't about COVID, and it was never about COVID.
COVID reveals the problem.
What I've learned though, the reassurance I would offer people is that the Revelation, it's difficult, but it's survivable.
It's not that bad.
The greatest fear is fear itself.
We have become a society, for example, that is terrified of pain, physical pain, because we have so many means of dealing with preventing pain and aesthetics and painkillers and all the rest of it.
There's some justification for thinking you might get through your 3 score in 10 without ever having an ouchie, because pain relief is so sophisticated.
So people are terrified of pain.
The reality, you go back a couple of hundred years and people were having legs amputated by saw doctors, and they actually survived it.
It's arguably the case that it hurt them less because they just weren't as afraid of the pain.
The pain still hurts, but being terrified of the pain, It exacerbates the situation.
We've had 70 years since the last great global conflagration, and there's an illusion that you can go through your life without suffering.
But when you realize that, no, you can't, there will be suffering, and the suffering is survivable, that's a moment.
Oh, it's huge.
You think, well, the worst has happened, and I'm still here.
I thought it would make me cease to exist.
I thought it would be too much for me, but it's not.
The bit of the process that I've gone through, that's been the revelation for me.
I've thought, well, it's okay.
It's a rotten thing to understand, it's a rotten thing to go through, but it's survivable.
Here's the other side.
Well, it's better than that.
And I'm going to return us to what might be the most important topic here.
I have a lifelong fascination with Plato's cave.
I think the story is important.
I think it keeps returning to us in modernized forms.
You know, the matrix is clearly Plato's cave and the matrix might actually add an element that Plato needed and it's not there, right?
What happens to the person who leaves Plato's cave when he returns is Important for people to understand, right?
Those inside the cave don't want to know.
Those out here in modernity who make the discovery that you're talking about, I believe and I think you believe, will go through a terrifying grief process.
You and I both know it's finite because we've done it.
On the other side of that, not only is there the relief of having grappled with it and processed it and still being functional and alive and all of that, but there is A marvelous group of people who have gone through it too and effectively you join that group at the point that your eyes open and it's like the Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix.
So, I've been trying to figure out how to convey this to people and I came up with this.
See what you think.
It sucks to be in a foxhole, right?
It's no place any rational person wants to find themselves living.
But the company in the foxhole is incredible.
You will find the most remarkable people in this foxhole, and you will You're better off, you will feel better having the company of those people, their insight, their calm, right?
Their sense of humor than being stuck in whatever the bunker is where it's all lies and everybody's untrustworthy because they're terrified they're going to be slandered, that they're going to be accused of, you know, sitting down with the wrong person or whatever the accusations are.
It's the Captain Scott thing.
It's far better to die like this than in too much comfort at home.
You know, in Shackleton, you know, I'm big, you know, you're talking about Plato's cave and I'm going to my sort of true north is well, ironically, Shackleton's south.
And when, you know, when it's that when, because they were doing something that was so physically arduous and in many respects, they just wanted it to be over.
But it showed them something about themselves that they would not have achieved in any other way.
There is a great, there's a profound relief in knowing that it is worth suffering.
Suffering is its own reward.
I'm not, you know, you've got to be careful, you know, we're not, we're talking about things that are largely psychological rather than physical, but when you go through that sort of, I mean, I felt as if, I said yesterday, over the last couple of years, I realized that the world I thought I knew had died and I was grieving for it.
And I did grieve for it, but I came out of the other side of it.
All through the anger, the denial, the bargaining, the depression, I did come through it.
And you think before that process begins that you don't ever want to have that.
You don't ever want to go through it.
But it's better to have gone through it.
It's enriching.
And it's meant that the encounters that I was having yesterday with other people from all sorts of walks of life and people that I was only going to spend these two minutes with probably, probably the only two minutes I'm ever going to have with this person, and they were so intense and it was all fuelled by the fact that they had come to the same understanding in their own way and I was standing hugging Total strangers.
And you think this is worth it, which hasn't happened, but it's worth it.
Right.
No, it is worth it.
And I'm sure you're having the same experience that I am of people saying the most remarkable things to you.
They'll stop you on the street and, you know, they'll look you in the eyes.
They want you to understand what they're trying to say.
And they will say things like, you are keeping me sane.
All the time.
Right.
It's an extraordinary experience to go through that even once.
Yes.
If it happened to you once in your life, it would be meaningful.
Once in your life, it would be enough.
Yeah.
But when people are repeatedly saying that you've let it be known that you think something, and I realize that I think that too, and that means I'm not, even if I am mad, I'm not the only mad person.
There's at least two of us.
Right.
But then it ripples out.
When I say it's distilled down to fundamentals for me, the fact that I'm in contact with people from New Zealand, from the other side of the planet, And everywhere else in between.
From every continent I've had letters of communication from people who've gone to all sorts of effort to get a message to me to say, I think that as well.
And it means so much to me to know that someone else thinks what I think.
It's profound.
I've been made a different person.
On account of COVID-19.
I don't know what COVID-19 is.
I don't know what it's for.
I don't know who did it and why.
But it's a key that has unlocked something for me.
Yeah, it's beautiful and I will also say there's another dimension, I don't know if you will have seen it, but so there's sort of two categories of people in the dissident movement, right?
There are people who are recognizable, you and me for example, and then there are people who regard themselves as anonymous and frequently their first assumption is that they are unimportant.
Right, they will often introduce themselves and they will not mention their name and I will always say who are you right?
Because that's not the way to think about it.
You've just joined a small group of people and What what is this anonymity business, right?
but The number of absolutely extraordinary people in that anonymous group is amazing, right?
I've met some of the smartest people, the most capable people who show up just as a person in a crowd at first and then it becomes clear to you over a few interactions, oh, wait a minute, this is a very special person, right?
And anyway, some of these people have become close friends and allies in the sense that, you know, when that term used to have a real meaning, And that's delightful too, just it's like when I used to walk into a classroom the first time, you know, that I met my class at the beginning of the year.
I would look out at the sea of faces and I would think there are people in here that, you know, nine months from now I'm going to realize just the depth of what's going on in their minds and it will be a beautiful thing to know them.
But I don't know who they are yet, you know?
And it's that thing that just like a sea of human discovery is now available because this thing has forced very unique people together.
And anyway, it's a joy.
Do you think there's a precedent for this?
When you look back in history, or as a scientist, and you look at, I don't know, leaps of understanding, has there been anything like this before?
A great deceit, or a great conceit?
Has anything been done like this before, or has it simply not been possible before?
I want to answer that with I think it's a yes and no, okay?
I think there are a thousand precedents.
Every piece of this has happened somewhere with the exception of something highly technical.
But the sum total of what has happened here, I'm pretty sure is novel.
And, you know, I said at the beginning of COVID, I don't know if I said it into a camera, but I think I did.
This is the biggest thing that's ever happened.
And I meant that and I was, you know, I wasn't forgetting about world wars or anything like it, but there was something about this that it really truly was global, right?
It's even a world war.
There are places it doesn't touch, right?
This was a uniting, a potentially galvanizing moment across the entire globe.
And of course, something interrupted that galvanizing process, but The way in which whatever has happened on the far side of that has put us together, has created a global conversation.
It has burned out many of the tools that whatever that antagonistic force is, their best tools are evaporating on them, right?
They have called attention.
There are too many people aware of the tricks.
Um, and, you know, some people will hover at the edge and maybe they'll go back to imagining that the world is normal, but a lot of people won't.
So, I think the answer is no.
I think this is the net, the net outgrowth here is unprecedented.
It's interesting to me that what made a lot of it possible to, if this was, if, you know, if there was a cabal that decided to, this is the time to press the button, it was the internet that made it possible.
You know, for example, the whole working from home.
You know, everyone being able to retreat to their hutches and be isolated one from another.
Ordering food, ordering everything that you wanted.
You know, for a lot of people, it was possible for the first time.
And ironically or paradoxically, the seeds of their undoing are in the tool that made it possible.
Because the internet also made it possible for all of us.
To reach out to each other.
They were able to bring the internet to bear as part of how they were able to get us all organised in the way that they wanted us organised.
But the internet has also freed us.
There's a bug in the system that they weren't aware of, and it's their undoing.
They thought the internet is here, we can do it now, let's go.
But within the internet has been the seeds of their undoing.
That is the way in which we've been able to mine information, share information, circulate it around the globe, get it into each other's hands, and that'll be their undoing.
So I'll try to do it quickly, but I have a model for this.
There is a ratio of conspiracy that goes into whatever has happened.
And then there's emergent phenomena that aren't conspiratorial.
They're not conscious.
We don't know what the admixture is, right?
But it's some fragment, you know, is there a conspiracy involved here?
Well, you know, yeah, you've got big pharma and fiduciary responsibility, which is another way of saying that there's a conspiracy of people trying to do something in their interests, which are, which consider our interests unimportant.
So yeah, there's some conspiracy.
But here's the thing, the emergent part is effectively, we can call that, it's an evolved product, it's an adaptive product of evolution in the very real sense.
Now here's the important part.
To the extent that part of what we are up against is an emergent property and not a conscious group of people who think about how to outfox us, that thing will have a couple of characteristics.
One, it will be ferociously powerful.
Right?
But it will be stupid about anything it hasn't seen before.
Right?
The fact of it being a product of evolution tells you it will be good inside the zone that built it.
And it will be a moron when it runs up against things that it hasn't encountered.
Now, that is what you're talking about.
So, I keep on thinking about the Sheldon Cooper character in Big Bang Theory.
The big brain, you know, he's this… I haven't watched it.
The premise is that it's the four cleverest guys in California all live together, and they have their understanding of the world.
And Sheldon Cooper is a kind of autistic savant, and he's incredibly smart.
He's a genius level individual but he's continually outsmarted and undone by the woman who lives across the hall from him.
She's just a regular Jo, regular Jane, but she's got human empathies and street smarts and other characteristics that he simply cannot ever allow for because he's never felt them and they're his undoing every time.
So this it's like the world's being taken over by someone who lacks Something crucial.
There's a crucial absence and that is what's going to bring them down.
They're not allowing for humanity.
Humanity is an extraordinary event.
We've been here for 200, 300,000 years as Homo Sapiens and we've been here for millions of years as variations on the same theme.
And it's not by accident that we've lasted this long and we've got all sorts of innate characteristics.
The human animal, isn't it?
Everyone's excited about artificial intelligence and all the rest of it, but the flesh and blood and bone human animal is the most extraordinary thing that the universe has ever seen.
And you can't outwit it.
And something that lacks that empathic connection to humanity It's trying to run humanity and it doesn't fundamentally understand the animal that it's trying to control.
And that's why the animal will get away from it.
We will get away from them because they don't understand us and they don't really appreciate what we're capable of.
I quite agree with this, but I want to point out the bitter pill at the end of that beautiful argument.
The number of people who, when actually, when the chips are down, will look at this particular hill and say, you know what?
Yeah, I'll die on that one, which doesn't mean I'm looking to die on that hill, but it means I'm willing to if I have to.
The hill is that important, right?
The number of people who will do that is surprisingly high, and this is one of these characteristics about human beings that you're talking about.
It is not intuited by people who are monstrous because they wouldn't.
There's no hill they'll die on because they don't believe that deeply in things.
They're about something much more mundane.
So, that's good news for us because that means that there are a lot of people who, if we can reach them, will join us and will be courageous about it.
The problem is it's an arms race because even those of us who will look at a particular hill and say, you know what?
That one's important enough, right?
Even those of us who will do that.
There are things that frighten us, right?
This is why torture has returned to the West, right?
The West swore off torture.
It understood it to be fundamentally wrong, right?
It's actually written into the American Constitution that it is wrong.
But the West has returned to torture because it provides a tool.
If your If your toolkit is inadequate to control people because there are too many people who will die on that hill to prevent you from doing it, then you have to innovate.
Fate's worse than death, right?
And there are fates worse than death.
So, we are in an arms race, my friend, and the enemy has no decency.
So... No.
I wonder if they've got the... I wonder if they have the... I've thought this before, that the terrible things that were done, the horrible and unforgivable of the 20th century, was perpetrated and then committed by generations who had seen and done terrible things.
You know, the survivors of the First World War then became active in the Second World War and then you get into the second half of the 20th century in which all sorts of the gulags and all the rest of it, you know, the horrible was a progression but it was being done by people who had been to some extent brutalized or some generations that had been brutalized.
It takes quite a lot of doing to commit the horrible.
If you've lived in a world of essential peace.
I have my doubts that those who seem to be running the show now have the bottle to commit, to set themselves to the necessary wet work that you're describing.
That is a new thought to me and it's a beautiful one.
And it also rings a bit true.
I hope you're right.
I don't think they've got it in them because they are not.
They, like the rest of us in the West, have mostly grown up in a time of peace and they haven't seen and done that which had been seen and done by previous generations that unknowingly brutalised, either stood silent while other things were done or actively participated in them.
There aren't any people who are the product of that alive at the moment.
And I don't think they've got it in them to do what would have to be done when enough people... The last time the horrible was committed there were only one and a half to two billion people on the planet.
There's now eight!
That's a big lump of butchered meat if you decided that you were going to get stuck into it.
I don't think they've got it in them.
I think when push comes to shove they'll back off because they haven't got it in them.
Well, they won't back off, but I like your model here.
It rings true.
What I think we have seen already.
Is that just as your model predicts, they will be capable of the most spectacular indifference to human suffering, but that's different than what you're calling the wet work, right?
The willingness to demonize a drug that would help people who are dying alone in hospitals because their family is forbidden to enter, right?
The callousness of that is jaw-dropping.
But it's not the same thing as ushering somebody into a gas chamber.
No.
No, that is my point.
Oh, that's my hope.
Yeah.
No, I like it.
I'm going to be thinking about that for a good long time and comparing it to everything I know and that I see and trying to figure out, you know, how thick that ice is.
Because, A, if it's true, it actually tells us something about the beast that we're fighting that's useful, that's actually operationalizable.
And I hope you're right.
And frankly, I hope if they're listening, that they understand what's being discussed.
Because whether they know it or not, they're depending on us succeeding, right?
Their mechanism for governing this planet is absolutely reckless, and there is no way that the planet Can survive it, right?
They are not good at managing complex systems.
And that's one thing when you don't have extremely powerful tools.
And so your errors are limited in their scope, but the tools are getting more powerful, right?
This is not going to be a long ride if you don't get some very careful thinkers into those roles.
So, you know, to the extent that these people, these people who are behaving so monstrously, have children and grandchildren that they want to deliver a world to, They ought to wake up and figure out, you know, who it is that they would trust this place to because they can't do it.
Agreed.
So, there are a couple, I think when I started this conversation, I was so eager to talk to you about substance that I didn't say much about who you are and what you do and this is worth adding in here.
You, I know now that you trained as an archaeologist.
I know that, is it your first book, is The Wisdom of the Ancients?
No, that's not my first book.
I've lost count now.
Ten?
Ten.
Ten books out there with my name on them, yes.
Yes, all right.
Well, that's a lot of reading that I have to do, but all right.
So, and you have a current book, a new book?
I do, I do.
I have a book called The Story of the World in 100 Moments.
I try.
I'm a generalist.
You described yourself, you said an evolutionary biologist with a generalist.
I'm a generalist of another thought, of another sort.
I've always just loved the storytelling of history.
I'm not a historian.
I am an archaeologist, but it's the stories.
It's the tales of derring-do.
It's the aspiration.
It's the triumph and disaster of it.
I love the kind of round-the-camp fire.
recounting of great deeds.
And I try to emulate that in the sort of books that I write.
So they're light.
It's light history, I suppose.
I've produced a book called The Story of the World in 100 Moments.
It's not a textbook.
It's not supposed to teach people the history of the world.
It's maybe to encourage people to think about what they think are the most significant moments spread across the four or five thousand years of recorded history.
The things that Each one of us is an individual and a different set of lights come on for each of us.
If you looked up at the night sky and you hadn't understood the constellations as they've been perceived, we would all make our own patterns out of the night sky.
And so I'm suggesting that history is all the lights in the universe.
What patterns do you make?
What does your eye give you when you look up at that confusing spectacle of light?
And so some of it, you know, there are events in the story of the world in a hundred moments that are maybe things that people would expect and others are tiny moments that just resonate, that just resonate for me.
But it's always been about the storytelling for me.
I just enjoy.
Another fantasy that I had for the book, I had long thought, wouldn't it be great if as a party trick, you could stand up and in 10 minutes, tell the story of the world.
If you could distill all of it, Down into something meaningful that could be recited, memorised.
What a great trick that would be.
And so the book's partly a product of that.
I'm fascinated by the way in which certain stories have lasted for thousands of years.
Why?
You know, we've still got the Epic of Gilgamesh.
It's still with us.
We've still got the stories of the Old Testament.
They're still there.
And you think, well, they've come down to the present day because they are the distillation of wisdom.
And they've become shorter, they've been compressed out of the great heap of coal has been compressed diamonds.
And you have to ask yourself, why are we still telling ourselves some of these very old stories?
Well, in part, the answer is because they're true, or they have truth in them.
And I love that.
I love stories.
So I call this metaphorical truth.
And my definition is metaphorically true things are things that you are at advantage if you believe them as if they are true rather than recognize that they are not exactly true.
And I also say you cannot write a myth, right?
You can write a story and then evolution will either favor it, alter it, distill it and turn it into a durable myth or it won't.
But the point is you can't write it that way.
It's selection that does that, right?
It's the great stories that get refined in this way.
I must say though, there's a, you know, it's characteristic of you to be so modest about it.
But when you say, well, it's not a textbook, you know, it's light.
You're describing the craft of delivering this very potent thing in a way that it doesn't feel like medicine, right?
And so, I esteem this at the highest level.
This is what somebody who is truly good at conveying something deep will do, is they will deliver it in a way that you don't even realize you're transformed by it, right?
And so, anyway, I'm looking forward to reading this book.
I love the way that, as well, that I'm quietly obsessed with, for example, say the cave art from 30,000 years ago, Lascaux, Altamira, and so on, because there must be a storytelling in that as well.
The creation of those tableaux of animals, who knows?
They will serve many functions, but there must have been a storytelling aspect within it.
And that they still have the power to move us in our 21st century world.
I mean, I defy anyone to look at some of that cave art and not have the hackles rise.
Picasso said, after Altamira, all is decadence.
Acknowledging that something had been achieved then by those shadows, those lost people, that has never been bettered.
Not by Michelangelo, not by him, not by Leonardo.
There's something so potent.
And that those people, 30,000 years ago, in worlds unimaginably different from ours, in circumstances, living day to day in circumstances that we cannot conceive of, they still set aside time for that kind of creation.
They crawled into the darkness, deep underground, with little lamps in their hand, little animal fat and tallow lamps, and found these Contours on rock that suggested to them that there was something there that ought to be brought to the surface.
Like sculptors say that the thing is already in the rock and it just has to be released.
They were looking at the contours of the rock illuminated by shadowy light.
And then like, you know, like someone with a, you know, fly fishing, you know, they were trying to lure the bear or lure the bison to come further forward out of the rock.
And when they glimpsed it, they just put a line on it.
There's its shoulder.
There's the flank.
And that's enough.
We've done it.
And they will withdraw.
And they walked away and the darkness fell on it maybe forever.
That those people living those lives at that time set aside some of their... Every fire had to be kindled.
Every morsel of food had to be found or hunted.
And yet they were still making time to do these extraordinary things deep underground in the dark.
And we are still moved by them now because what they did was true and it mattered and we can feel it.
All right.
At the risk of being the scientist who can't help himself but to pull apart the flower, I want to take a look at what you've just described from a slightly different angle.
Imagine for a second that you have a compulsion.
If I know that ancestors made the effort that you've described, which is not a small effort, to leave these renderings on these cave walls, right?
I know they did it for a reason and that that reason has to be something other.
It has to improve their well-being, their fitness in some way.
And I think what it is, my hypothesis for this would be that these pictures transport information through time, vital information.
And I can imagine, let's, you know, if you have effectively hunter-gatherers who are nomadic, who are following creatures that are huntable, right?
That you would imagine that a population would ebb and flow into a valley and it might be generations between contacts with a particular location.
Right?
Imagine that your ancestors left you a treasure map in a cave so that when you arrived in this valley you had some idea what the passage of the seasons would bring.
Right?
What is this place?
Is it okay or is it not okay?
Right?
That kind of information.
Right?
And then this actually really is the same thing as what we call art, right?
Because what art does is it takes things that we need to know, and I don't necessarily mean that analytically, but things that we need to know.
You know, Guernica.
It can sit dormant on the wall and you can marvel at the, you know, the insight of Picasso and the strange mind that he had to be able to convey this thing with those odd shapes, right?
But then at some point, somebody starts dropping fucking bombs on somebody else and it's like, Guernica, got it, right?
That reminder from somebody who saw something, who figured out a way to transport it across time to you, even though they wouldn't be there to explain it, right?
That's a really important process, right?
Orwell is back, right?
That's important.
Now, here's the thing, though.
Let's go.
That cave, right?
One interpretation is that the message on that cave wall is no longer relevant because we are not hunter-gatherers and so the populations of huntable beasts are irrelevant to us.
Okay, true.
On the other hand, imagine that this creature distantly related to us, not so distantly, but distantly in our time scale, was telling us something about what we are and that it is again relevant, right?
Because we have come so far from that and yet, as you point out, it's the basic human characteristics that are still going to make the difference.
Yes, I do.
I agree with all of that.
I just marvel at our modern response to something that comes from another world.
It enables us to reach through 30,000 years and momentarily have a moment of connection with people that shuffled over the hill into the invisible eons ago.
The thing that they left behind still affects us.
We're still running Hunter software.
Although we live these sophisticated lives, we are at heart the animal that we've always been.
And a glance at the artwork of Lascaux reminds us that we are the same.
And we know we're the same because we look at those pictures created by them then, and we are moved by them.
Whatever they mean, whatever was the motivation for creating those works, it moves us.
And I think you're right, we definitely have.
I think part of what has been exploited, is being exploited this very moment by those who don't have our best interests at heart, to put it mildly, have lost connection with humanity.
They've lost that sense of awe.
We insulate ourselves from pain.
We insulate ourselves from dying and death.
We put it out of sight.
We don't involve ourselves with it.
We don't want to see it.
We don't want to smell it.
We don't want to be confronted by it.
And we are the less because of that.
There's a growing distance from the flesh and blood of humanity.
We must reclaim it.
We must remind ourselves of it.
And looking back, for example, at those ancient works, I think it's helpful and it's therapeutic because just to be reminded of what a wonder the human animal is must never be forgotten.
And part of what is being done now is being done by people who have forgotten.
How special we are.
This thirsting, lusting towards artificial intelligence and transhumanism and all the rest of it.
Hold on.
You know, before you do all that, let's remember just what we are, what we've been capable of, what we're still capable of.
And then we'll treat each other with more dignity and more decency.
There's a problem with our design, which is, it is built around a practical scope.
In other words, your perception and your cognition were built in an ancient environment in which there was no point in thinking beyond yourself past a certain threshold because there was something you could do about it.
And so, from the point of view of enhancing your fitness, keeping an eye on a couple of generations out was about the most that was worth doing.
And any effort you spent thinking about the distant future was wasted, for example, because you didn't have any power or influence over it.
That's not true anymore.
And in some sense, what I'm getting from your description is 30,000 years ago, creatures stood in a cave and invested in something that reaches us now and reaches us in an important way.
It's not trivial.
And A, imagine what you would have to do That anything that you left behind on Earth was meaningful to anyone 30,000 years in the future.
Almost impossible to imagine what you could do that would meet that challenge.
Also likely, there will be no one here in 30,000 years, right?
We'll be lucky to get through the next 200.
So, that should be alarming to us, right?
Relatives from 30,000 years ago did something that's meaningful to us today, and we can already see that our time horizon doesn't extend that far into the future.
Alarm bells should be going off, but we're not built to register them because we have this narrow scope about only a generation or two ahead.
And this ought to be Recalibrating that sense about what's important, because in some sense, think about all the people who will never be.
If we cease to exist in the next couple hundred years or thousand years, all the people who will never get to experience this who might otherwise have, what right is it of ours to deny that to them?
Aren't we obligated to deliver it?
Oh yes, and the Mervyn Peake line about to live at all is miracle enough.
I think we're... I've had a growing sense that we are lacking a sense of awe.
I think that's the best way I can describe it.
We're not awestruck by each other.
And we should be.
And we're almost embarrassed about it.
And we live in these pixelated, digitised worlds where we look at each other through screens, so there's literally a distance between us.
And it's becoming easier and easier to live like that.
You could live inside your house on your own and have everything delivered to your door and communicate with people, but you're not really communicating with people.
What I got from being in that conference hall yesterday was fundamental because it was being in a room with hundreds of fellow human beings.
And there's nothing quite like it.
When you say something on the stage, you know instantly if it's registered or if it's had any effect on even one person or on the collective.
It's an amazing feeling.
And if we forget how important, how energising and enriching it is just to be in a room with people, in the analogue and not the digital, We need to reclaim a sense of awe.
We do, and you know, this is actually one of the real perks of my line of work, because it does allow you to see, if you do it right, that the miracles are literally everywhere.
You and I, at this moment, are engaged In an utterly miraculous process, right?
I am literally vibrating air molecules in order to put a thought in your head and I can have reasonable confidence that if I do that well, you will actually have an idea that bears resemblance to the one that I meant to throw at you at this distance, right?
That's a miracle.
In the windowsill, there might be a house fly.
Have you ever looked at a housefly?
Even that housefly is a miracle, right?
You know, let alone a hummingbird or something even more marvelous.
They're everywhere and, you know, you're right, I like your focus.
And I agree with you that in that grand sea of miracles, human beings are the most remarkable product of the universe that we know.
It's the most remarkable one that we've seen.
All right.
Neil, would you like to wrap us up?
Because I think we are out of time.
Yeah, how do I do that?
Well, I don't know.
You tell us what we need to know, and then we will revisit this at some future point.
I wish that the last two years had not happened.
In the events that have unfolded, I wish it were different.
But here we are.
But I also value the experience beyond price.
And I'm aware that by saying this, it begins to sound ridiculous.
But it only doesn't sound ridiculous if you've gone through the process.
Having obviously been sleepwalking and being blissfully unaware for I don't know how long about the true texture of our reality and having been snapped into a sudden awareness
of it, having suddenly seen it all as though from a different perspective or a different bit of high ground, I feel I have added to the store of my wisdom something that is beyond price.
So while in so many ways I wish that this hadn't happened, it having happened has made me a better person.
That's really all I can say.
I would rather be the person that I am now than the person that I was before.
And the collateral benefit is it has brought me into contact with people like you and others that were in that room.
And I value that some accident, some unexpected sequence of events has brought me into contact with those people.
And so I'm glad that that's happened and I'm glad I think I'm beginning to understand what I now understand.
I agree.
It's been transcendent and I must say the The beauty of being able to sit with somebody that I will just confess I find utterly delightful and I know that that is a widely shared belief because I heard 25 people say it at this conference in separate contexts who weren't talking to each other.
