Putting COVID to the Smell Test: Neil Oliver on DarkHorse
Bret speaks with Neil Oliver on the subject of the fatigue and despondency stemming from ongoing global crises, the shift from production to consumption, and the complexities of the COVID pandemic, emphasizing the need for diverse perspectives and a deeper understanding of complex systems. Find Neil Oliver on X at: https://x.com/thecoastguy ***** Sponsors: VanMan: Tallow and honey balm, deodorant, and many other amazing animal based personal care products. Go to http://www.vanmanscompany....
The product that the Van Man company is best known for is tallow and honey balm, and it surpasses even very high expectations.
Vanman's tallow and honey balm works on everything from anti-aging to athlete's foot.
It's made with 100% grass-fed and finished beef tallow, raw honey, beeswax, olive oil, and essential oils, including sandalwood, frankincense, and neroli.
And they've got a version without the essential oils, if that's your preference.
And Vanman stepped it up even further by making bison tallow and honey balm.
It is out of this world, smooth and rich, decadent and healing.
It's got tallow from 100% grass-fed bison, Van Man also has a fantastic deodorant that contains magnesium, shea butter, and coconut charcoal.
Because it's Van Man, their lip balm has no seed oils, of course.
But check out the ingredients on other lip balms and you'll see just how rare that is.
They've got a tallow and honey soap, An all-natural insect repellent, a tooth powder containing both hydroxyapatite from beef bones and bentonite clay, and more.
They've just introduced travel sizes, too.
Get 10% off your first order when you go to vanmanscompany.com slash darkhorse and use the new code darkhorse10 at checkout.
The link is vanmanscompany.com forward slash darkhorse.
Try their amazing tallow products now.
You won't be sorry.
I'm not sure exactly how to dive in here.
You and I have not talked substantively in some time, and so that leaves a lot of room for us to have arrived at different conclusions.
Let me just ask you, where do you think we are relative to the crises that we have?
I think it's been deliberately attritional.
I think I feel a certain fatigue, a general exhaustion, not least because I think I can't.
I felt as if enough people might be drawing conclusions that were close enough that we might affect change.
I thought that there might be consequences for Things that had been done.
I thought lessons might have been learned.
I thought there might have been a commitment never to allow certain things to happen again.
But there has been an incessant barrage of crises.
The thing that was sold to us as a pandemic, then morphed into war in Europe, was then bloodied.
You know, in the most horrifying terms, by what happened in Israel and Gaza, and it's continuing to happen in Gaza, the horror there.
And people also, at the same time, because of things as banal in a sense as cost of living crises, inflation, increased taxation, people are finding it harder and harder just to keep their heads above water, far less to contemplate looking at the bigger picture, which I understand, because I feel it.
Myself.
But I feel a certain despondency, if not hopelessness, that wrongs that were committed in the past and for which there is now such ample evidence and no consequences.
And likewise, the bigger picture about, say, war in Ukraine is there for anyone that wants to spend a couple of minutes Getting a backstory on what continues to happen in Ukraine, and yet nothing changes.
Nothing changes, and I feel a certain kind of existential fatigue, I think, is my answer to your question.
Yeah, I feel that fatigue too, and I think I infer from your answer that you feel that the fatigue is intentional.
That the idea is to get us to tune out because it's just too exhausting to try to track the morphing crisis through all of its various incarnations.
Exactly that.
I think we're almost, I feel as if we're almost at a point, I've been describing it recently as just like living with organized crime.
I think this is literally accurate.
You know, I just feel that for people like me, I just thought we lived in a rules-based society, if not a rules-based world, and there were things that you oughtn't to do.
And if you did, if you transgressed, that from highest to lowest, richest to poorest, powerful to powerless, if you did certain things, there'd be consequences.
And now, evidently, all that's happening is that the drugs running, the human trafficking, They do what they like without consequences, and there are only consequences for people that stumble into the turf, that dare to sell drugs where they sell drugs, or traffic people where they traffic people.
It's not about right and wrong.
It's about whether you have the impunity that comes with power.
Yes, and this puts us in a very uncomfortable spot.
So let me just put a couple of concepts on the table that I'm juggling in this neighborhood.
One of them, you and I will have talked probably multiple times about what I call Goliath.
And you might remember that my definition for Goliath is, Goliath is the force that opposes all meaningful change.
It allows change.
But meaningful change is not allowed because if you are at the pinnacle of power, you have only to lose when things that are unpredictable are introduced.
So Goliath is effectively a force that prevents that meaningful change, which has terrifying implications.
But the predicament it puts us in is, I think you and I are both feeling that there is an amorphous something.
That manifests as crises as different as, you know, a war in Ukraine and a spreading infection and emergency procedures that are deployed ostensibly to control it.
Those two things are not alike in one regard.
But in another regard, to the extent that they feel like they are either Tools cut from whole cloth for Goliath's purpose, or events that are co-opted by Goliath, it amounts to the same thing.
It is the rules-based society that you and I thought that we lived in, a kind of illusion that is fed to our naive and hopeful parts in order to distract us from what is actually That's, I suppose, to some extent what I find most frightening.
Or, if not frightening, most discombobulating.
I would put it almost akin to, you know, if you'd been in a decades-long marriage that you had every reason to believe was You know, happy and mutual and all of the rest of it.
And then you were to find out that your spouse from before day one had been, you know, maintaining a second family and had been, you know, betraying you in every way imaginable.
So that you think, so none of this was ever real.
Because the depth of my discombobulation is such that not only do I think that we live I have no idea how long it's been going on.
It may have always been going on.
Into periods of time to be measured in centuries, if not millennia.
And so now I look out at what I took for reality and I think, was any of it ever real?
And now I'm 58 years old and I think, have I just been tricked?
And duped and been behaving like a hapless patsy for the whole of my life.
That's what I find particularly alarming.
You alluded to the Goliath thing.
You immediately make me think of, there's a poem by Ted Hughes called Hawk Roosting, which I can't remember much of it verbatim, but it's basically the ruminations of a hawk holding onto a branch with its talons and telling itself that, And it's in my power to keep things like this.
I am the apex predator.
And I will not be displaced.
Because after all, who's going to do it?
I suppose that's the way that I think of.
That would be my analogy for your Goliath.
That there's just power.
Power in the talents.
And it does what it does to perpetuate its status quo.
Well, I wonder...
I want to put a thought out there.
I'm not sure.
But I have the sense that the world that you and I thought we lived in is not entirely fictional.
But it's a layer.
We are effectively allowed to live in a layer that does have some of this rules-based nature, or at least it did.
And that, as you describe it, the crime from the point of view of the powerful something that lives above that strata is to compete with it in a zone that it has declared off-limits.
So I would use the analogy of currency.
You and I deal with something called money.
And that money is simultaneously an illusion and very real.
You can buy remarkable things with it.
You can place it in an investment and lose it all, and your capacity to do things in the world will be radically changed by the fate of your money.
So it is real in this sense.
But it is also the kind of thing that you cannot protect.
You can put it in a bank that will monitor the quantity of it that you have.
With precision.
And you can't prevent the central bankers from devaluing it.
So it is simultaneously real and protected, and there are certain things you can say about its value.
There are certain rules.
Economists study the rules that affect its value.
But there's a loophole where something about power renders it To them, monopoly money.
They have ways of effectively printing it that devalue the money that's locked behind a vault door in the reality we live in.
And so the point is it would be wrong to say money isn't real.
And it would be wrong to imagine that it is the object whose value is naturally defined by forces that we study scientifically.
It is both things.
It's both a fiction and a reality at the same time.
Thank you.
I would say that's a perfect analogy.
I think a lot about money, not for the obvious reason, because I don't have any and I want some.
I think about it as a useful analogy often, because You know, a currency is a circulating security, which is, for most of us, it's bits of paper, or at least a number on a statement on your phone or in hard copy.
And it works, or it worked traditionally because it was a security in as much as it was one step removed from something of actual value.
So notionally, you could redeem it in the form of gold or whatever.
Obviously, those days are long gone, but nonetheless, it's still a circulating security.
It's one step removed from something of value, from proof of work.
But the reason that it works so well as an analogy for what we're talking about is that it's fundamentally about confidence.
You and I have to accept that the $50 bill or the £100 note or whatever means the same thing.
We place the same value upon it.
And as long as we do that, then we can transact usefully and happily, and we can trust one another that when I give you this, you know what you've got in the form of that note.
And I think where I actually find optimism, actually, because I endeavour not, you know, I have a tendency more and more to be bleak, and I try not to be, and I try to find optimism.
I think that the Ponzi scheme of...
And likewise, I think that it's no bad thing if the Ponzi scheme of our reality is allowed to collapse as well.
Because what's real always was, always is, and always will be real.
All the things of value in the world and the proof of work and the And the gold and the crops and the skills and the knowledge are all still, everything that ever was on the planet is still here as this blue marble hurtles through infinity.
We've had an illusion placed over it.
And if that illusion is no longer something that we can trust, if that is a debased currency, If it's finally gone from being worth 100% to worth 1% and soon to be 0% of its cover price, then that might be no bad thing because you don't want to deal with a Ponzi scheme indefinitely.
I agree.
And it might be that the value of pulling the Band-Aid off is greater than the pain.
But I have a concern.
I think what you've said is logically true.
But past its sell-by date, in the sense that, let's say that we run your experiment in a town 300 years ago, where, let's say that the town exists in some sort of a nation that destroys its own currency through reckless policy or corruption.
Well, the townspeople who discover that the notes that they were using In exchange, are not, have gone from being a circulating security, as you put it, to a circulating insecurity, may at some point be better off just realizing, you know what, forget those things.
You know, I'm a blacksmith and I make these tools and you raise meat and you need these tools and we can go back to doing this in some way where there's no mystery about Now, run that scenario again with a modern American or British town chosen at random.
Well, it doesn't have all of the elements necessary for life.
It may grow nothing.
It may only grow things and not be able to manufacture the tools with which to do the growing.
And so the problem is, does a collapse become so catastrophic that even your point about it returning us to some kind of reason isn't allowed, it isn't possible for that to happen because the peril is so great in the getting from A to B?
it confronts us with or it Or it asks us to confront what I think we mean by evolution.
I do mean as organisms or so, and I'm not going to stray into your biological territory unwittingly, but evolution societally, we call it progress, but I do I think we have to confront what we've actually accepted and what we've done science and technology and
You know, we've all got the wisdom of the ages in our pockets.
And, you know, we have convenience and everything's a click away.
But in terms of progress, we're all stupid and without skills.
Most people don't know anything.
Unless they look it up.
And even at that, you have to know a certain amount to know what to look up.
And we don't have any skills.
I mean, nobody could fix a lawnmower, far less their car.
People can't make clothes to clothe their nakedness.
People can't hunt for food.
They can't grow.
You know, it becomes an interesting question.
I definitely think as well that we've passed the point where you used to be able to say, well, medicine has given us longer, healthier lives.
I think we've even passed the tipping point on that one.
I think we're living shorter lives, and we're certainly unhealthier, even if they're keeping us alive for 70 to 80, 90 years.
Even if we're living longer, though.
I think, cumulatively, for all of the aforementioned reasons, we are less alive than we used to be.
Yeah, I agree.
And we are degrading the quality of our lives through processes that are effectively automatic.
And that concerns me greatly.
That, for example, the enlightened perspective these days seems to be that the population gloom and doomers were wrong, which they were, and that actually there's no population problem at all, And that the more, the better.
And I hear that and I just think, this is...
Yes, the gloom and doomers were wrong.
However, the more people you pack on this, the example I use is Yosemite.
And the claim I will make is that Yosemite has shrunk by 50% in my lifetime.
Well, it hasn't shrunk at all.
But there are twice as many people on the planet, and there's only one Yosemite.
So, from the point of view of that Yosemite doing its role, it's twice as burdened.
And.
We are doing that across so many domains that there's no thought, you know, we've signed up for an economic system that effectively requires the population to grow because economic growth is.
It's assumed, which is part of why we're in such trouble when economic growth gives way and people's built-in expectations are violated.
They become violent and dangerous.
So the question is, surely there is a number, a population number, at which The effect on the planet is negative if it grows beyond that number.
I've never heard a good discussion of what that number might be.
Is it half of where we are?
Is it twice where we are?
It's not indefinitely growing.
That will certainly be devastating.
Isn't there, isn't the reality though that, I mean, I mean, you know, you're, you're the, you're the scientist and the biologist here, but aren't we confronting, um, population We are.
Fertility and or the number of children being born is in steep decline, not just in the West where you might expect it, given lifestyles and whatever, contraception and all of the rest of it, but in the East, in Asia, the populations in some instances are falling off.
Falling faster than a piano out of a window.
Sure.
So is population pressure really the burgeoning problem in the medium-term future?
Is it not the loss of populations that's going to present challenges?
There are exceptions to that.
There are places in Africa that are still growing like Topsy, but it is the Malthusian nightmares.
The population bomb, Ehrlich and all the rest of it, is it a realistic threat anyway at the moment?
The population bomb was wrong, but the sophistication that arises from recognizing this, you know what we need is more people.
Really?
Have you looked at the rate of consumption of the version of life that you're selling people?
Have you looked at the capacity of most people to raise healthy children?
So, my feeling is this is not a numeric parameter.
For one thing, I'm uncompelled that you can do the analysis on population.
If one person is consuming effectively the resources of 10 or 20 people, if they, let's say, live in the first world, then, you know...
Well, but it's not effectively crashing from the point of view of the parameter that in nature sets the population, the carrying capacity.
So, anyway, my feeling is I don't really want to have a conversation about population if we're not also talking about the future populations that will not have a place to exist if we liquidate the well-being of the planet.
What happens if we degrade the quality of life on planet Earth and we feed people a simulated hyper-pleasant substitute to keep them from noticing that they are living in squalor?
Right.
All of these things have to be discussed in one go.
But no, I don't think The normal thing is that populations are set in an unfortunate way by the resources that are available.
Populations turn resources into offspring.
We We, you know, you could make a strong argument that the apple on the tree of life, that that's a really good analogy for birth control and what it does to humans.
That it has, I'm very much in favor of birth control in terms of what it has accomplished, but it has also destroyed the fundamental logic of being a person.
And by doing so, it has created exactly the kind of chaos in which people do not understand that the future and getting into it is the entire point of the exercise.
People have become solipsistic, they've become narcissistic.
They have become confused about the centrality of children, the importance of raising them and raising them well, not just getting them to adulthood, but actually enabling them.
So anyway, I don't think it's a simple puzzle.
And I think we've been told it's a simple puzzle based on the economic consequences of population decline.
I mean, as a biologist, do you...
I mean, do species get dumber without it being apparent to the individuals?
You know, so many people, everyone out there thinks that, well, you know, in the first world, because you're doing the things you do, driving the cars you drive, operating the computer keyboards and the smartphones that you do, you're invited to think that there's a kind of a smartness implicit in that.
But of course, as all of us know, it's only when your car clunks and you drift to the hard shoulder that you're actually confronted with the reality of an internal combustion engine.
Up until that point, you've been living in a dream.
Likewise, when you get the spinning wheel of death on your screen, now you've got a computer.
And if the limit of your problem-solving is off and on again, we're dumb.
it's just simple things like I look at the books that were that were being read by how they were educated.
And it's streets ahead of us.
We are dumb.
Yeah.
We are dumb, and I would...
One is that we have very subtly been shifted from the role of producers to the role of consumers across every domain that matters.
So it used to be that people enjoyed sport.
This is an ancient thing we were But the idea that somebody who's into sport went from somebody who plays the sport to somebody who watches the sport and follows it on a screen, we have gone from producing sport to consuming it.
And yet it feels, oh, he's really into football, right?
That sounds like the same person.
People used to make music.
The number of people who now make music is very small.
What everybody else does is they consume music.
Music used to be universal.
Everybody in your tribe would gather and you would raise your voices together.
And the songs were living entities that went on and changed over time as the collective Version was updated through the production.
Now it's the same every time it comes through your headphones and you are the consumer of it.
That's a radical shift.
So my argument is this is everything.
It's even now sex.
People are now effectively
or they are, in fact, increasingly celibate, because the only thing that excites them is the extreme version of sex that's portrayed.
Being defaulted into a consumer modality relative to every normal human thing is a terribly pernicious trajectory.
In fact, I think it's fatal.
The second point I want to make is you point to the classroom and the apparently greater capacity of students in the past.
And I've noticed this too.
But I also think there's something wrong with the idea of school to begin with.
That school is...
And somewhere along the line, we got convinced that the place that you become smart is school.
And that's half the problem.
We don't know what to teach children in school because we don't know what world they're going to be living in.
So what we do is we kind of repeat the things that we were taught in the hope that, well, it got us this far.
Maybe it'll get them the same distance.
And it's bullshit.
The fact is, if you actually weren't a consumer in your life, if you were interacting with the world, it would be very hard to be stupid because stupid results in, you know, well, when you're a child, it results in, you know, scraped knees and things, and so you get wiser.
So, anyway, I just think we're so wildly off track on both those fronts that that's the top priority.
Education, as I understand it, means literally to lead out.
The concept is to draw from within what is inherently there, to bring forth the flower from the seed.
That's to educate, not just put a funnel down the goose's throat and pump it full of grain until its liver bursts.
I've been coming to the conclusion that what we're actually doing, and whether some malevolence has worked this out and is playing to it, Or whether it has just happened as the unhappiest confluence of coincidences.
But I think we're playing to our species' tendency towards amnesia.
You know, Henri Bergson said it's the function of the brain to enable us not to remember but to forget.
And the fine-tuning of our much-vaunted human consciousness.
It's exquisite.
It enables you to move forward into the future while remembering who you were when you went to sleep last night.
And you can also operate your consciousness like a cursor on a computer screen.
I can read a book, but at any moment I can pull myself away from the book and do something else because my consciousness is just so.
It's that kind of Goldilocks.
It's so right, the level of awareness that I have.
But the threat of that fine-tuning is that we forget.
We forget everything.
Even as someone interested in history and in archaeology, I've begun to question in a way that I never thought I would.
The version of historical events that I have taken for granted along with everything else for my 58 years and I've become much more open to alternative interpretations because I think, well, I'm not sure.
I wasn't there.
I've just been told.
I've just been told something.
So I wonder that there's a species-wide amnesia that's unnecessary for us.
Fantastic.
But because of the way things have gone, our species' tendency towards amnesia is becoming a kind of a cultural Alzheimer's.
We're losing everything.
We're not hitched to anything.
And we're just promised this perpetual tomorrow.
Upgrades, updates, new phone, next episode, next box set, next season.
And it's completely...
All right.
There is a lot there.
I think that's quite profound.
I want to emphasize the point you started with and then talk about where this has gone awry.
Because I do think the...
I've forgotten who you were quoting who said that the magic of the mind is...
Yes.
Now this is like Buckminster Fuller saying when he defined his term ephemeralization that the pattern is that we can do more and more with less and less until eventually we can do everything with nothing.
And the point is Buckminster Fuller was He, by overemphasizing the point to the point that we can all detect that it's perfectly impossible, what he said, you can't do absolutely everything with absolutely nothing, right?
He emphasizes the fact that mostly the pattern is the one in which we do more and more with less and less.
In this case, I 100% agree that most of what the mind does.
Is throw out data, and it's not just memory.
It throws out most of the perceptual data that would completely overwhelm you if you suddenly had access to temperature data across your entire surface area, right?
You'd go insane, right?
The ability to throw out most of the nonsense that your eyes are seeing in order to only focus on the few things that might have some relevance to the next instant of your life.
This is the key to how we function, throwing out almost everything and preserving only that which matters.
And in fact, the elegance, if we understand the system correctly, you throw out something unless it has been re-accessed in the immediate aftermath, which Tells you that might be important.
And then you get another longer period.
Has it been re-accessed in that period?
And so, you know, the difficulty remembering what you had for breakfast, because in general, unless something remarkable has happened, or you have the same thing every day, it hasn't been re-triggered.
There's no reason to remember.
That's an elegant system for forgetting, and it works marvelously.
But here's what I think is novel.
And you hint at it very strongly.
Something is taking advantage of our tendency to throw out data.
And it has built, you know, on the internet, we refer to memory holing of events because we feel viscerally that something is trying to take this event that today I know where to look it up.
And three weeks from now, I'll think, what was that?
Oh, yeah, there was something.
Can I go find it?
oh, I see no evidence of it, right?
So that does suggest anxiety.
But in many cases, something is taking advantage of our ability to move on, and it is parasitizing in order to get us to forget things.
Or it is revising what we thought about things so that we will come to see them in a different way and let them go.
Anyway, I wonder if any of that resonates.
I love a conversation like this, because I think there are many conversations like this that we're kind of being occulted and obstructed from seeing.
Because we're kept in this perpetual current affairs, cocaine, dopamine hit of new all the time, there's less and less opportunity, far less inclination to indulge, if that's the right word.
These kinds of thoughts.
But I think in unpicking it, you are forced to look back into the distant past, I think, which is ironic given that we've just identified the problem that we have remembered what we had for breakfast, far less anything further back.
But it's very, you know, people like the ancients were hitched to the past.
ancestor worship was what they did.
Because I think ancestor worship came out of an implicit understanding that they had to remember.
But what you're really doing is trying to keep things that for very good reasons you think you might need.
And this is why, famously, Socrates was against even writing, because he thought it's a trick.
People, if they can write things down, they'll think they know it, but they don't.
They just wrote it down.
They'll just forget it.
It's only what you've got, actually.
In your head.
That's knowledge.
And the ancients, they also felt very hitched to place.
Not just to the past, but to the place, the polis.
And their sense of themselves was rooted in where they were, surrounded by the familiar.
And that's why being exiled was a fate almost literally worse than death.
Because you were being put out beyond the pale and you were And people only remembered what exiles looked like so that if they reappeared, you could kill them.
Apart from that, they were gone.
but only if they resurfaced you would deal for them because they weren't allowed to be there.
And with the advent of, say, Christianity, 2,000 years ago, suddenly we were...
It doesn't matter where you are, God's there.
Your place doesn't matter.
Your family doesn't matter.
Your history doesn't matter because wherever you are, here, there, anywhere, God is just there.
And that was the beginning of just looking to the future.
The future will be better.
The future's heaven.
The future is an eternity with God.
So this process of unhitching us from the anchors.
That holds us in place is ancient.
It's been going on for a very, very long time.
thousands of years in some respects until you get up to And the idea of people being compelled to remember to forget.
Whatever it was, they're not supposed to remember anymore.
It's an insidious process like rising damp or rising flood water.
For the longest time, we only just held at bay.
But now, as you say, because I think of the possibility of a malevolence that's actually exploiting this tendency that we have, I think we're being turned into full-time forgetting machines.
It's all we do.
And we're being disconnected from place.
We're being made nowhere people.
Don't think about nations.
Don't think about patriotism.
Don't feel that you belong anywhere.
Because if you don't belong anywhere, you belong anywhere.
Which is really anathema, I think, to our species.
We do belong.
We want to belong somewhere and to a defined group of people.
And we're being told, no, none of that matters.
It's a very insidious process, and I think it's such a pitch now that I think it does invite the drawing of the conclusion that it's being pushed rather than just happening organically.
Well, you make a very interesting point about The difference between a familial, local orientation and an abstraction.
Maybe it does start with the idea of a god and the future and where will I be then, which is at some level an odd question.
But I think we have to recognize that something like a belief in That has tremendous benefits.
The degree to which we can be better versions of ourselves because of an abstraction like that is tremendous.
But as soon as you have that narrative that makes you Better, more effective, safer, all of the things that you might be that we would call better.
Once you have that, it is an irresistible target for capture.
That the idea that there is some story that will change your behavior means that if I can gain control over that story, I control you.
So the question really is, and I think in many of these cases, what we've got is an adaptation in the basic sense or an innovation in the technological sense that has tremendous benefits.
But we just don't control the downside.
The question is, what vulnerability have we just opened in ourselves by doing this?
You know, birth control allows women to participate.
In the extraordinary part of human progress, the scripting where we will go in the future, the setting our course, that is something that opens to women by virtue of the ability to choose when they produce children.
But the ability to choose when you produce children and the ability to decide not to produce children What creates the world of chaos that we now live in?
A world in which nobody knows what to do or what role, you know, what does it mean to be a human?
Is our children, you know, something that many people want?
Or is it bizarre that it's even a choice for most people?
So anyway, I want to continue to track the adaptations and innovations that had a Profound value without losing track of the fact that many of them, and maybe ultimately all of them, become more negative than positive by virtue of the fact that they get captured.
Sigh.
Thank you.
Do you think?
Another person that I met during the past few years and with whom I've maintained a relationship is Nick Hudson, who you know.
And Nick talks, amongst other things, about the arrogance of those that think that you can apply top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions.
It's a refusal, an inability, or just a disinclination to confront complexity.
Because it's easier in your arrogance to think, oh no, I can fix all that.
I just smooth everything out.
So when it comes to, say, the story, the narrative, I think, Is the problem that we're all being handed the same simplified story?
And what we're missing is that kind of broad spectrum diet of narratives.
You know, I'm contemplating writing another book at the moment and I'm contemplating giving space to ideas.
That explain the beginning.
Alternatives to the Big Bang.
Alternative explanations to how we got here.
Because I think it's better to have alternative narratives all at the same time.
That people can graze among.
And that there's more texture.
and more a brighter a broader palette of colours that can that can captivate people and inspire people and do you think part of the problem is that we're all just 8 billion people on the planet are in danger of just being told one simplistic story that doesn't satisfy anyone um
The way I live my life, I am in some sense synonymous With a model that I struggle to protect, to upgrade when possible, to fix when it shows an error.
I'm very concerned about altering it in pursuit of some capacity if I don't know what the downside of the alteration is.
So that may sound like a very strange way to live.
But if you imagine that I'm I'm very careful about it because, you know, for many different reasons.
But the point is, that model works when its effect on my Perceptions and behavior overlaps reality in an important way.
Now, that can be because my model is a model of reality.
That's an improvement.
The closer my model treads towards the way reality works, the better I can predict things.
But that's not the only way.
You can also...
or accurate in some sense.
So, the point that I would make about what you just said is I think a lot of people have the sense that they are tapped in to the model and that they, if everybody else is, all the better.
And really, they don't understand what a small fraction of what you might want to know that we actually do know.
And therefore, it is the best thing you can have is a diversity of high-quality models in your life that are not I think?
people who understand some other element of reality well enough to operate in that realm that by teaming up with them, they can get the benefit of whatever it is that you've figured out.
You get the benefit of what they've figured out.
And the idea that the models that we possess are going to be, you know, pumped at us almost indiscriminately through our screens or the Presented to us by some automaton at the front of a classroom, and that we will all walk away with the same enlightenment, and that that will enable us all similarly, I think you're right.
That's preposterous.
The anthropologist Wade Davis, of whose writings I am very fond, he's got a profound line that I've heard him say in TED Talks and in various Context, where he says, the model of reality into which you are born does not exist, not in any absolute sense.
You know, it's only a model.
And the other peoples in the world are not failed attempts at being you.
On the contrary, they are profound and important, irreplaceable answers to the question, what is it to be human and alive?
And I think that's where Nick Hudson's idea about embracing complexity comes in.
I think it's a dangerous, arrogant ignorance to dismiss the way other people perceive reality.
Because what do you gain?
What do you gain from just insisting that it's your way or the highway, except the loss of a light or a colour or a flavour?
You should travel in parallel with other people's interpretations of reality.
Because, as Wade Davis says, there is no absolute reality.
It's just the way you model it.
Well, okay.
I'm now in an awkward situation, and I think the right way to deal with it is straightforwardly.
I will be as careful as I can be.
I'm not giving anything to Nick Hudson.
On the idea that what we have to do is embrace complexity, and I'll come back to my own view on the role that complexity versus complicatedness plays in the story.
I was becoming friends with Nick Hudson, and I now think he's lost his mind or become so self-absorbed that he cannot be trusted.
he became vicious over a analytical disagreement about whether or not there was a pathogen circulating during COVID.
I don't know what to make of Nick.
Nick obviously has a high-quality mind, but I wonder about some of his other human characteristics and whether they are fully-fledged.
That said, What I've been saying about complexity is that we are suffering from the fact that a great many of the people who have power in our world, especially technologists, have become expert in the realm of highly complicated things.
And highly complicated things include computers, for example.
A computer, a modern computer, May not be fully understood by any person.
Maybe it is, but certainly most people, to the extent that they understand the functioning of what is happening in their computer, understand very little.
But it is all understandable at the level of its function.
There may be things in the materials that it's built out of that defy our understanding for the moment.
But it's a deterministic system, highly complicated.
But it is not complex.
Biology, society, economics, these are complex systems.
And the defining characteristic of a complex system is its unpredictability, which on the one hand sounds like it would be rational to throw up one's hands and Thank you.
You can operate in a complex system, but you have to use a different toolkit.
So I would point out a surfer is functioning well.
A good surfer is able to surf a complex system.
They don't do it by plotting out the route that they will surf.
Before they get out on the water, they do it instant to instant by perceiving where they are and what's happening and making a good guess as to how to exert force on the board, this, that, the other.
So we get into trouble when those who are expert in complicated systems look at complex systems and assume, oh, those are just more complicated systems.
And so let's get some experts in here and figure out how to do the thing we want to accomplish.
When in fact the modality that they need to use is one of navigation or prototyping.
You have to take your best stab at what will function in a complex system and then very carefully monitor what actually happened and correct your model based on it.
You can navigate from here to there based on such a mode.
But it is very different.
Than a complicated system where you can blueprint.
So, in any case, I do think that there is a profound distinction between these two realms, and that because, to most people, highly complicated systems and complex systems look the same, that we are again and again tripping over what happens when you let experts in a complicated system have dominion over a complex system.
What about what Nick has been saying draws you to conclude that he's lost his mind?
Is it not just that he has an alternative interpretation of what has happened to which you don't subscribe for reasons that you can articulate confidently, but that he has a different take that doesn't render him insane?
Oh, that would be fine.
And in fact, that's what I would have expected.
What I did not expect was an aggressive litmus test where only those who recognized that there was, in fact, no pathogen whatsoever, only those people could be trusted.
Yeah, if we had a difference of opinion over whether or not there was a circulating pathogen, that's the good stuff.
I want to have disagreements with intelligent people who are willing to defend their point, and then, if they discover they're wrong, to change their perspective and be honest that they've done so.
What I don't want is to be bullied by somebody who thinks that they are enlightened because they see me as foolish.
My feeling is, who appointed you, Nick?
My position on that circulating pathogen, ye or nay?
I don't know.
Because I can't analyze data.
nor do I have access to data even if I could analyze it statistically and all the rest of it, which I don't and can't.
But to me, the point at which I've arrived is that to me, it's what was done, not what the...
So it's not who made...
It's not...
Or what's the bullet made of?
Or where was it made?
It's that violence was used here.
That what was done in the name of COVID is what matters.
I've said to you before that Harrison, the Indiana Jones character in the Raiders of the Lost Ark is neither here nor there.
Because whether that character is in the story or not, His existence is neither here nor there.
He's just a colourful distraction for all concerned.
And likewise, whether there was anything, and I don't know if there was, but it doesn't matter.
It's a red herring to me, because they would have done the pandemic, so to speak, with or without it, because the intention was to take people's freedoms.
And mandate a dodgy product.
What they did.
I don't have any idea how you could believe what you just said.
And I have the feeling that you don't.
And let's find out.
That it doesn't matter.
And let me be very clear about what I believe.
Because why I would say it doesn't matter is because I, to this day, don't know anyone who died of COVID.
And I speak to nurses.
I just live in my community, and I speak to nurses in the run of things.
And they say that the hospital here was empty of COVID patients, and the only people who were dying were old people.
And the old people, many of them were being euthanized in locked wards.
You know, they weren't dying of COVID.
So, it seems like a lot of trouble to go to to release a pathogen that, as far as I can see, it didn't kill anyone.
Okay.
So, I will start with the premise that whether or not there was a novel circulating pathogen matters profoundly.
And then let me take up all of the challenges that you've just put on the table so you will see I have not lost my mind.
I don't know whether there was a circulating pathogen, but I see a tremendous amount of evidence that suggests that there was.
Was it SARS-CoV-2?
I don't know.
I'm not in a good position to know that because most of the evidence that I'm capable of evaluating directly comes in the form of Let's take an example.
The clinical experience of doctors faced with patients.
Another kind of evidence comes from experiences that I and my family had with pathogenic illness since 2019.
I do not believe that the novel circulating illness was especially deadly.
In fact, it wasn't deadly at all.
I believe we know that the majority of people...
Well, I believe that's a bit of a straw man.
I believe something circulated that had not circulated in humans before, and that it wasn't man-made, but that it was man-altered.
And I am not saying...
Let me be clear because those like Nick who believe that they have received the only important wisdom tend to caricature those of us on the other side of this argument who have a wide diversity of beliefs.
In my version of what happened, I've come to understand that COVID was not a So deadliness was not the measure of the seriousness of this disease.
I also...
So, those who are perceiving that this was entirely a psychological operation are assuming that because the PSYOP part of it I don't think it was a terribly deadly disease.
I don't think we had a pandemic.
I don't think we had an epidemiological emergency.
I believe these things were cooked up, and I believe that the behavior In the aftermath of the so-called pandemic tells us that these were not errors made out of an abundance of caution by well-intentioned people, although most in the system probably were well-intentioned people, that the people driving were another thing entirely.
So, are we agreed that I'm at least not crazy?
If I acknowledge that most of what took place during the pandemic was psychological in nature, that the harms came mostly from our medical and epidemiological responses, not from a pathogen, that I acknowledge that I can't be certain that there was a novel pathogen, but I'm proceeding from evidence that a novel pathogen circulated.
For example, people get sick with some flu-like illness and they discover that they've lost their sense of smell for weeks or months afterwards.
That's a novel phenomenon.
People have been losing their sense of taste and smell around infections of the respiratory tract since time immemorial.
Loss of taste and smell temporarily is not novel, is it?
Months.
I don't know.
I mean, you can lose your sense of taste and smell, isn't it?
Yeah, you can lose your sense of taste and smell.
I mean, I'd be very curious if there was some general pattern associated with flu-like illnesses where people were losing their sense of taste and smell for months.
Yes, your sense of taste and smell.
In answer to your question, no, I don't think any of that makes you insane or have lost your mind.
No, I don't think that.
Good.
So, I haven't lost my mind, and yet.
I think that the biological reality of a novel pathogen circulating, which I am not certain of, but believe strongly occurred, is profoundly important.
Okay?
This is the point I want to make to you.
Let's say that COVID, whatever it is, is a flu-like illness of Low potential to cause death.
Highly contagious.
And still circulating.
How many times have you had the flu in your life?
What I would call flu, I would say three, maybe four times across my lifetime.
Like most.
Yeah, I'm a couple years younger than you.
I would say three or four times is about right for how often I would say I've had the flu.
I've had something flu-like since 2019 at least that many times.
Okay, so in the space of five years, I've had something flu-like as many times as I had had the flu in my life up till that point.
Did you take the vaccine, so-called?
Are you kidding?
No way.
No, so just to clarify that, so I didn't think you had either, but I just, I didn't take any of the products either and I at some point in 2021
Now, when I was hedging around three or four, what I was ill with, I felt rotten, but flu's death warmed up.
I mean, when I've had flu, I've literally wanted to expire.
It was so dreadful.
What I had in the second half of 2021 was unpleasant, but I don't...
I'd had flu three times.
Push comes to shove.
I might categorise what I had in 2021 as flu, but I could also just say I just felt rotten.
And because of when it happened, in the circumstances, everyone assumed, and I assumed too at the time, that it was the thing called COVID.
But when I look back on it now, I didn't have any of the, There was nothing novel about it for me.
I just felt rotten at a time when everyone was being told, well, if you've got those kind of symptoms, then you've got COVID.
I don't know if I did or not, because I don't know what I was ill with.
I just had a rotten three or four days.
I took ivermectin and so on and so on, and I got over it within a week.
So I don't know what happened to me.
If it hadn't been for the so-called pandemic, Nonetheless, many of us have had multiple flu-like illnesses.
Let's say that they're a quarter as bad as flu.
Yeah, I've had nothing since.
I haven't had a cold since that event in 2021.
You're lucky.
I hope your luck holds out.
Yeah, I know.
I just, Mike, no, it plays to why you would be, I'm just suggesting that it plays to, if that's your physical experience over the last three, four years, it's the physical experience of many people, right?
If I look across my family, That's why I asked you about the jab thing, because the people I know that keep on getting ill are all multiply jabbed.
Well, you know, there's a lot of talk about this in...
And there is a belief which I have arrived at myself, which is the reduction in immunity of the vaccinated is creating effectively a petri dish in which viral experiments are getting a foothold.
And even those of us who aren't jabbed are vulnerable to some fraction of these.
Experiments that are circulating.
But nonetheless, we don't need to, let's just say, many of us have had some flu-like illness, often more than once since 2019.
Now, it is also, I believe, the case because we were not told about the circulating pathogen at first, which I believe You and I may have had a conversation about the time-traveling money printer, but the incentive of those who have information about a world-changing event like a pandemic, real or fictional, the incentive to use that information to profit is irresistible.
So the evidence suggests whatever was circulating was circulating in the fall of 2019, and we were not told about it till
And in any case, in the period since the dawning of whatever this was, many people have had a flu-like illness, some with novel symptoms, and there is, I believe, very high-quality evidence suggesting that this is the result of intentional manipulations.
Of a coronavirus involving Ralph Baric, involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Now, let's just say, forget whether you think that did or did not happen.
If it happened that a virus that had been modified by humans, modified in order to make it contagious between humans, has been circulating, In the human population since that event, the cost to humanity of bringing a pathogen across a species boundary from bats into people, a pathogen that as far as you and I know, we will never be rid of.
People will continue to get sick from it, even if it were only as bad as a cold.
The cost to humanity of having brought us a novel pathogen that would have not made it into humans, left to its own devices, Is astronomical.
And the necessity that we prevent those same crazy people from doing this again with other pathogens that are circulating in other species but are not able to get into and circulate between humans could not be more important.
Am I wrong about that?
No, but happily or unhappily there is that if.
If that happened.
You and I are both undecided about whether it happened.
No, no.
You told me that it didn't matter.
You told me that what was done in the name of COVID was all that mattered and that it didn't matter whether there was a pathogen.
And I'm saying what they did in the name of COVID mattered tremendously.
And whether there was a pathogen matters at least as much.
Both matter profoundly because, look, have you read Bobby Kennedy's book?
The Wuhan cover-up?
No.
Highly recommend it.
What it does is it documents a cryptic arms race in bioweapons that has gone on since World War II.
Anthony Fauci was the most highly paid federal employee in the U.S. because he was our chief weapons guy.
He was involved in what's called dual-use research.
Dual-use research is a loophole in American law that says although you're not allowed to make bioweapons, you are allowed to engage in bioweapons research if that research also has a medical value.
So they pretend they are studying disease while making weapons.
And here's what I think I came to understand from reading Bobby's book.
The weapons guys are frustrated.
They have a small list of weaponizable pathogens that they've already thoroughly explored.
Nothing wonderful from their perspective.
And they have an entire world of viruses and other pathogens circulating in other creatures that they would like to borrow from.
The problem is, it is evolutionarily very difficult for a virus to get from another animal into a human being and then to circulate within humans.
That is a big evolutionary jump.
And so what these maniacs are doing is they are shopping in nature for pathogens that might have some value in their weapons scheme, and then they are teaching them to infect and spread between people.
That's all they did.
They didn't do it because they're wizards who understand a tremendous amount about biology.
They let evolution do the work for them.
I've had a rule of thumb about I don't really think any of them will detonate nuclear weapons because it'll crack their windows along with everybody else's.
And I think they're self-preserving.
And likewise, The experience of the last four years surely showed that the prized possession MRNA platform was an absolute burst.
A bursted flush, as we say in the land of Robert Burns.
Useless at best and dangerous, profoundly dangerous at worst.
So they don't have any protection.
And if they're rubbing an arm trace amongst themselves, to follow your hypothesis, they're spending a lot more time and gaining a lot more ground making the dangerous thing, while they have no ability, self-demonstrated, to protect themselves from it.
Unless they're keeping some magic bullet back that we don't know about, and that would be one of those Rumsfeld unknown unknowns.
They're not going to leak something into the atmosphere of planet Earth that they themselves and their grandchildren are at risk from, are they?
For they would truly be insane.
This is where I don't understand the Nick Hudson perspective.
First of all, you're depending on their rationality now.
We'd really have to bring Nick in here to defend himself.
But, yes.
Why are we depending on their rationality?
I get your point about Nick.
Don't you think they're self-preserving?
No, because I believe in game theory.
And the problem here is that let's take a cryptic weapons maker in a lab somewhere trying to enhance some pathogen so that it can infect and spread between people.
And then the person who has decided not to participate in this research has the cost of being exposed to the weapons of their antagonists.
The cost of not having a weapon of their own.
So game theoretically, what happens is people make very dumb decisions because they are in no position to stop the world from producing these things, and they are in a position to build one of their own.
So that's the incentive, and it results in a completely irrational outcome.
Now, to your point about do they have a magic bullet, first of all, I believe they knew very well that things like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine were likely to be highly effective against the viruses that they were playing with.
Why?
Because they are highly effective against mRNA viruses across the board.
It would be very surprising if they didn't work for SARS-CoV-2.
So, did they take the jab?
I don't think so.
Did they have Drugs that were highly effective at controlling the bug that they were building?
Yes, I believe that they are likely to have had them and to have known it, and that they are such diabolical people that they would dare lie to us because they didn't want that knowledge circulating.
Why?
We can speculate.
You point to their mRNA platform, which is a cash cow, until you realize that it can't be deployed safely.
And in order to get it into emergency use authorization and then normalized across the population, there had to be no alternative.
And the fact is, tried and true drugs that are safe and effective would have been the end of their mRNA experiment.
So that is more or less what I do think happened.
But here's the other part of it.
One of the things we discovered late in the battles over COVID and COVID policy was that people who took two or more of the mRNA injections began to produce a special class of antibody, IgG4.
I don't know if we've talked about this before, but IgG4 is a class of antibody.
It is the kind of thing that an allergist tries to trigger in order to get An allergic reaction to some environmental influence like a pollen to reverse.
IgG4 is an attenuation signal, right?
And so the fact that somebody who's gotten two of these mRNA injections produces IgG4 in response to the spike protein means that at least we have a novel solution To an age-old problem in bioweapons.
It's exactly the one you point to.
Weapons manufacturer has to figure out how to build a weapon that the enemy will suffer from, that his own army will not.
The traditional way of approaching that is we'll come up with a really good vaccine that the enemy won't have.
We'll vaccinate our people and...
That doesn't work very well because, frankly, it's very hard to make a good, safe vaccine.
However, the production of IgG4 by multiple mRNA injections, specifically in response to spike protein, opens up the reverse play.
You can make a population vulnerable if you can get them to take the vaccine.
Right?
They become biologically vulnerable because their body produces this IgG4 mechanism.
Did they know that that was going to happen?
I have no idea.
But the fact that it was weapons makers who seemed to have brought this particular virus across a species boundary that it could not otherwise have jumped.
And that they seem to have been partnered with the production of a vaccine that produces not immunity but vulnerability is conspicuous.
So the thing that you're calling in that gameplay, the thing that you're calling and offering to people as a vaccine, and we've all learned to question what's exactly meant anymore by that word, it functions as a Trojan horse because you get people to take what they think is going to protect them.
When in fact, it's releasing into them all the little soldiers that are going to make them susceptible to the disease that's coming anyway.
Yes, and I worry, as I've been very hesitant to say this out loud, but I've discussed this elsewhere.
Problem is, if I understand the immunobiology here, the IgG4 antibody attenuation signal, is now coupled to the trigger, which is spike protein.
Biologically speaking, it is not terribly difficult to attach that spike protein to some other virus, at which point the introduction of that virus triggers IgG4 in Those who have been vaccinated.
So, I think we don't know enough about the weapons makers that we have been secretly funding.
This IgG4 attenuation effect, does it make the recipients of that product vulnerable, full stop, in a way that they wouldn't have been to the world of existing pathogens?
Is it a kind of a Swiss Army knife that opens them up to all pathogens, Would that be an interpretation of what you're saying?
It may be a slight over-interpretation.
Let me just say it carefully.
But it might make you more vulnerable.
It will make you more vulnerable to things that resemble that to which you were inoculated.
In this case, spike protein bearing coronaviruses.
Does it make you generally more vulnerable?
I don't know.
I believe the shots make you generally more vulnerable, that there is what we call immune dysregulation, which causes the immune system to be uncoordinated in responding to all threats.
So I believe we have both objects, and the question is, are they the same object?
Do we have a general increase in vulnerability as the result of the shots, and we have a specific increase of vulnerability in response to the production of IgG4?
Probably it's two effects that amount to the same thing, but it could be one effect, and I don't understand the IgG4 effect well enough to say how it produces vulnerability to things that are not spike-bearing.
The other point I think bears raising in this context is my inclination to be suspicious of new pathogen.
Is because it provides a get-out-of-jail-free card.
If people accept that there was a new sheriff in town called COVID, then the authorities that did what they did, up to and including taking everybody's money and chaining up the swings in the kids' play parks, Are able to say, well, you see, we really needed to do everything we could think of.
We really had to throw the kitchen sink at this mofo.
And you have to give us our due.
Yes, we did things that, looking back on it, might look excessive now.
But because there was a terrible thing out there, a real terrible thing, we had to do things that now look terrible in response.
And if we'd known then what we know now, we wouldn't have.
You know, we wouldn't have shut the swing parks, and we wouldn't have stolen all your money, but, you know, that's 20 /20 hindsight.
Whereas if there's nothing there, then they have no justification for what they did.
Well, I think you, I mean, I know you to be a very careful thinker, but I'll just say this.
I think you have to be careful to avoid concluding that there was no pathogen, because you think the question of The ability to address what happened is immaterial with respect to what actually happened.
And my point is, I don't want to let any of these people off the hook.
For one thing, although most of the people who went along with it were well-intentioned, The people who orchestrated it, I think we can clearly say were not.
And we can deduce that from their total indifference to the suffering and harm of those who did what they were told.
The vaccine injured, to me, are the linchpin of the entire story.
Because if this had been done out of an abundance of caution, And then people had gotten hurt.
Even if it was a small number, a reasonable, decent person would want to do everything in their power to take care of those who suffered trying to control the circulation of a virus.
Now, mind you, the vaccine that they deployed, or the so-called vaccine they deployed, stood no chance of controlling the spread of the virus.
This is a respiratory virus, an intermuscular injection.
The best that could have been hoped for out of such an inoculation was a reduction in symptoms, and they must have known that from the get-go.
So I think this was a pharma game at one level, that the idea was they wanted to deliver a shot that credibly had some benefit in the context of the
They could normalize it, and then they could rebuild every vaccine and many other so-called biologics on the mRNA platform and be unbelievably wealthy as a result.
Okay, that all happened, but to the extent that there is a weaponless dimension to this story, that, look, the strongest point that the folks in the no-novel pathogen camp have is that the gene jocks aren't nearly as powerful as they would have us believe.
They don't know nearly as much as they may think that they do, or that they certainly portray that they do to those of us on the outside.
They do not speak That said, the job that they accomplished here is not a biologically difficult one.
They took a virus that was barely capable of infecting people and not capable of jumping between them, and they used evolution to enhance those two characteristics.
That's not wizardry.
That's just toil.
So I'm not giving them credit for being incredibly clever and making viruses in a lab that then go on to terrorize the planet.
That's not what I think happened.
I think they took a small, tractable problem.
How do you get a virus that can barely infect people, which they knew that they had because they saw six infected miners in Yunnan province?
Miners who had been shoveling guano out of a bat cave, and as soon as they saw those six miners, three of whom died, they knew that they had a virus that had one of the two tricks it needed.
They had a virus that could infect people.
It didn't spread between them, but it could infect them.
So it's not that hard a job to take such a virus and teach it to infect people.
How do you do it?
You give it a gentle slope where the more it infects human-like tissue, the more it reproduces.
You let evolution do the work.
It's not cleverness.
Have you addressed this in open forum with Nick?
Have you had beyond exchanging whatever messages?
Have you sat down and talked about it?
No, because he went into full bully mode, where the point is anybody who didn't see the world the way he did was an idiot.
There was no basis for a conversation.
And I have made my position publicly clear.
He hasn't responded to it.
So my feeling is it's sad that he lacks the characteristics of decency or sufficient logical rigor to understand that his position is not perfect.
But unfortunately, that's where we find him.
Well, it's certainly not how I've found Nick.
It's not a stance he's ever taken with me at all.
I mean, at all, at all.
And because of how much I care for both of you, I'd like to see you both talk about it rather than...
I hear everything you've said, but I still think it's worth...
Because...
even if it's uncomfortable.
But yeah, I agree with that.
But something that I've learned, uh, And something that I have learned is that there are a great many people out there who have some of the characteristics necessary to do the hard work.
Maybe they have the courage to stare down power or they have the analytical power to discover hidden truths.
But very few people have all of the characteristics that you would need.
And the problem is that those vulnerabilities, the missing characteristics, result in the derailing of any effort that assembles these people based on the fact that they bring something useful to the room.
And I don't know why what I got back when, I mean, you've heard what I've had to say.
I'm not a zealot.
I'm open.
To the possibility that there was no circulating virus, but I'm not going to accept that there was no circulating virus simply based on the overreach of those who pretended the virus was more dangerous than it was in order to do all kinds of diabolical things.
So, you know, I don't see myself as unreasonable.
All cards on the table.
My wife, and there's no one closer to me than my wife, and no one more in tune with my point of view, points of view, Frudy would put her hand on the Bible and say that what happened to her, because she became unwell around later than me, a bit after me, and she would swear on a stack of Bibles that she's never had that before.
We don't agree.
We don't agree on that.
I say...
It was certainly nothing I hadn't had before.
Well, if it hadn't been for the furore around it all, the pandemic, blah, blah, blah, flashing lights everywhere, I would just have thought I had a bad week in the second half of 2021 and then got over it.
But Trudy says, no, no, I've never.
She still doesn't taste things the same way she used to.
There's things that she won't eat.
I mean, she doesn't like.
There's proprietary brands of wine.
Sauvignon Blanc, she says it tastes like onions.
And there are all sorts of things, much to her chagrin, but there are all sorts of things that she's noticed.
Where her taste has come back, she tastes things very differently than she used to.
She can't stand the smell of my coffee.
You know, she definitely, so within one marriage, and we agree on everything.
But she says, no, no, I'm not buying that.
I think I had something that didn't exist before.
So there you go.
Well, look, in my heart of hearts, I believe a couple of things.
One, I do believe there was a novel circulating pathogen.
I think it's more than likely it was SARS-CoV-2, but it could have been multiple pathogens.
There's also an argument to be made that there was a bird flu circulating, but nonetheless.
Novel circulating pathogen.
Novel symptoms in some people, some fraction of the time, but I believe a lot, you know, people do get flu-like illnesses and other illnesses and everything was put on the COVID side of the ledger during the so-called pandemic.
So the amount of COVID was certainly inflated.
And in my heart of hearts, I believe that the PSYOP we saw Was probably sufficient to do this even in the absence of a pathogen.
So I'm not arguing that the PSYOP was less strong than those who believe there was no novel pathogen.
And I'm open to their arguments.
What I'm not open to is the bullying.
I do feel genuinely, I haven't heard this from you in depth before, I'm very fascinated by your experience that you have had multiple, in fact, what's the word?
That's so very, very different from my experience.
And although Trudy says, no, no, I'd never had that before, that was something else, she hasn't had anything since either.
Apart from the fact that she felt it was different, like me, she's had little more than a common cold ever since.
Well, it would be interesting to know these things.
I will say, in my case, I discovered relatively late, like in the last 15 years, that I am allergic to wheat.
And I know I did a tremendous amount of damage to my lungs.
By being basically constantly inflamed over the course of all the years before that, where I didn't know I had a weed sensitivity and was eating it.
Bridget's been mindful of a weed sensitivity for exactly the same length.
Well, a little bit longer in her case, 20 years.
Interesting.
She's not got celiacs or anything as profound as that, but she does not.
Bloats and does not and feels uncomfortable and all sorts of unpleasant symptoms if she stumbles upon feet unknowingly.
It also, I suspect, the damage to one's respiratory structures probably increases the vulnerability.
So it may be that there's a difference.
The reason that I've had more of these than you have could be happenstance.
It could be some sort of feature of our previous environments.
Who knows?
Could be the circles we travel in.
Don't know.
But let's just agree that if we've got scientific labs enhancing the pathogenicity and virulence of wild pathogens,
For the purpose of utilizing them in people, that that's an intolerably dangerous behavior, and that it means that whether or not there was a novel circulating pathogen with such an origin story is profoundly important, irrespective of whether or not the PSYOP was independently capable of producing all of the effects that we saw in the pandemic.
In principle, I don't think anyone should be out there in labs cooking up more dangerous illnesses when we've got enough of those to be going along with.
Well, let's give Nick and his friends their due.
Their argument is not that nobody's, if I understand it correctly, their argument is not that nobody is trying to cook these things up.
It's that these people aren't nearly as good at the biology as they claim to be, which I agree with.
But again, It is akin to the transportation of mongoose into Hawaii, right?
Hawaii has a mongoose problem.
That's the result of technology.
It's not the result of anybody knowing enough to make a mongoose.
We couldn't make one cell of a mongoose.
But we can make an airplane or a ship that transports a mongoose and then suddenly you have a self-propagating mongoose problem in a place that didn't exist before.
That's what I'm arguing has happened here, is that a species boundary was jumped technologically, and that's not a hard job to do.
I think people just don't.
I think people are less inclined to fall out with me intellectually, because I don't think many people take me intellectually seriously.
I'm just a talking head, me.
I ain't got much game.
I don't know where you're getting any of that.
I think very highly of your, I don't even know what to say, that doesn't sound dismissive, but your analytic chops.
I think the world of you, which is part of why I think it's important to get this stuff right.
And right doesn't mean here's what happened, it means the evidence.
I just love, well, there's been several benefits actually to the last few years.
At a point in life where I suppose I had settled into thinking that I pretty much knew all the things I was ever going to know.
I'm not in academia.
I was just out there making the kind of TV that I was doing.
I was recycling stuff and repurposing stuff that I'd already done, really.
I was coming to a point where I was thinking I'm going to have to find something else to do because I've flogged this horse.
And then one of the great excitements has been in the last few years I've been confronted with having to run like hell to even begin to keep pace with what was happening across all sorts of things.
I don't know anything about virology or epidemiology, but because I was so affronted by what was happening in relation to the so-called pandemic, I was suddenly in Twitter spaces and reading.
Academic literature, and I was desperately trying to make headway through stuff that I simply would not have muscled up the effort to confront.
And then, of course, all sorts of things, philosophy and politics and societal concerns.
In the last four or five years, I've been through more of a learning experience than I ever did at university or indeed at school.
Because I was trying to find out something that to me seemed at some points to be a matter of life and death.
And my knowledge base and my awareness, at least of what so many other people are trying to understand, has grown exponentially.
I found myself in the room with, metaphorically speaking, minds that I just would not have been with.
You know, yours, Nick's, and scores of other people besides whose intelligence and expertise, you know, has been like an injection of, or it's been like breathing in oxygen for me.
Well, I mean, this is the key feature of human beings that distinguishes us from literally every other creature that's ever existed on this planet, is that we can plug our minds into each other almost literally.
If there was a cable, it would be more obvious.
But what it means to take minds that know different things and run different models and bring them into alignment, you know, we have a discussion, we come to understand some puzzle in common, and we parallel process it and then pool the insight.
That is an amazing, it is a miracle that it is even possible.
And, you know, I hear you saying, you know, endearing, self-deprecating things here.
But first, I want to point out, during the pandemic, the so-called pandemic, there was nobody who had the right expertise.
To understand what was going on, right?
At best, somebody might have been positioned to understand one or two of the domains in question.
But the virologists weren't vaccinologists.
The vaccinologists weren't epidemiologists.
None of these people were psychologists.
All of the elements that played out during that event.
It meant that the only thing that you could be in order to get a view of what was taking place was a generalist that was willing to do exactly what you described, which was to allow yourself to become educated about the relevant domains and then juggle the pieces until they made sense.
How do you know when it makes sense?
When it predicts things about the future.
I listened to you saying that and it reminds me of something that I felt at the time.
Like I said, I was hosting these Twitter spaces where I was so out of my depth for a lot of the time because people started to talk to one another within them and they were such specialists and I was hanging on to it like holding on to a rising balloon.
But I felt it was a bit like watching meerkats at the zoo.
You watch the colony of meerkats and there's nothing and then one by one heads start coming up out of the little holes.
Or you watch it on the television and you see the meerkats coming up and they're all just coming up and down out of little holes.
But over there's a designated watcher that's up a tree and they take it in turns and that one's got to watch everything and watch for predators.
That's what they're doing.
And it's a designated role that they have to take turns on.
They were all bobbing up and down.
All the little heads would come up, up and down, up and down, up and down.
But essentially, they were going back down again.
And you needed somebody with that overview, however good they were.
It was just, he needed someone that wasn't down a hole and was looking out more widely and who's, you know, who's, who's, who's, Panorama was not restricted in any way.
I agree, and I'm brought back to where this conversation started.
When a team practices, right?
We were talking about a football team, by which in this case, I mean soccer, if you're an American.
That team is developing a In other words, why would you go through the process of scrimmaging a hundred times when you know that the game that matters will not contain any of the moments that you practiced?
And the answer is you do it because you come to understand where What happens when that goes from an experience that,
let's say, almost every boy would have had just by virtue of growing up and playing on a certain number of teams to now the sport is something That every member of the team is watching the entire team on a screen.
You don't develop the sense of the strengths and weaknesses of the other people sitting on the other couches.
So at the point that you're actually called into something like, well, hey, we're being told that, you know, there's a pandemic.
What are we supposed to do about it?
You don't, you haven't developed your particular skill set and other people haven't come to understand you as having that skill set and therefore In other words, the way we play now does not give us the tools that you're talking about.
The meerkat that's watching all of the other meerkats in order to make sure that everybody remains safe by virtue of having the view from above, we don't learn it.
Yeah, and especially because the whole thing was overshadowed by something so malevolent, which was where people quite understandably stepped into that terrain thinking, God, there's something funny happening here.
What is it?
How can we come together to understand it?
But the very pursuit of understanding was being slapped down.
Don't you dare seek to understand this.
That was the last thing that the malevolent entity wanted, was that open-minded people would have a look at the situation and say, do you know what I really think we ought to do?
I don't know what you think, but I think we should do this.
All of that was whack-a-mole.
Just shut up.
We've already solved this in advance for you.
Just do what you're told.
So the very creative urge, the instinct to problem-solve was made anathema.
That was heretical.
Not only that.
I mean, I agree with that diagnosis exactly.
Anybody who showed an ability and an interest to sort out the evidence from first principles was targeted.
But think of how specifically terrible what was done to our medical professional.
Right?
Doctors used to be scientists.
They were faced with a patient.
And they had to deduce what it is the patient likely had.
And they had to figure out what the best course of action was likely to be.
And then they had to detect that it wasn't working and how to change course and what that implied about whether their original model was correct.
There's a mechanism for doing science on an individual patient.
And then doctors pool what they're seeing.
Imagine you've got three doctors in a town and they're all seeing people sick with the same thing.
Is it a toxin?
Is it a pathogen?
You know, they're pooling what they know and coming to do the job of medicine more effectively.
Well, in this case, one of the things that the PSYOP clearly involved was priming doctors for a This terrifying pathogen that never arrived, right?
The doctors were exposed to pandemic porn from China in advance, so they were all ready for this disease.
They were going to be heroes because many of them were going to die on the front lines of this battle against this terrifying pathogen that literally had people falling over dead in the streets of Wuhan, right?
Well, that disease didn't arrive, but the doctors, in the expectation that that disease was about to jump an ocean, were ready for it, right?
And they applied a kind of overkill medicine that killed a tremendous number of people who were then put on the COVID side of the ledger.
These people died of COVID.
No, they died of a respirator that you put them on.
Right.
They died of the protocols that you exposed them to.
They died of the way that you corralled them and isolated them.
So.
Thank you.
I guess the point is, a person who goes to medical school wanting to do medicine has a certain inclination to want to help people, to want to solve biological puzzles, and that had to be frustrated.
By a top-down, this is the way we treat this disease.
This is what this disease is going to look like when it arrives on your doorstep.
We're going to vaccinate the doctors and nurses first because this is the obviously right thing to do, and you're going to need to take it first because, frankly, you're going to be exposed more than anybody else.
All of these things synonymized this community and made it impossible for them to escape that.
And the few who did, the small number of doctors who stood up and said, hey, wait a minute.
Some of this doesn't add up.
Something's not right.
This disease isn't what we're being told.
These medications we're being told are useless actually aren't useless.
These other things that we're being told are the route out, are dangerous as hell.
Those doctors lost their licenses.
They were publicly demeaned as cranks.
It was a vicious process across all of civilization, but you can see it most clearly when you look at what was done in the context of medicine.
Very interesting to me, the thing with, I'll broaden it out and say, I don't know, physicians.
I had been raised almost...
The joke was that doctors have a God complex.
Did you get told, you know, they have this...
Because I was always...
I don't know many dogs.
Well, this idea, because they get educated to save lives, they develop this God complex, which I just took as part of the that, oh right, okay, doctors have a tendency towards a God conflict.
But it didn't really sit You know, all-seeing and all-knowing.
That they would submit to being told what to think and what to do.
That's not really what I would expect of an omniscient, omnipotent entity.
So I thought, they're not godlike at all.
They're actually, at an exaggerated extent, ready to just do what they're told.
And it made me think, I've read quite a lot about military blunders, great military blunders.
I can't remember the name of the author, God help me, but there's a very interesting hypothesis or thesis that soldiers who do best in the system are the ones who take orders unquestioningly.
They're the best soldiers because you're told all the time, well, if you do what you're told and everyone gets killed, you'll be able to say, well, I did what I was told.
Or if you don't do what you're told and everyone gets killed and you say, well, I just used my head.
Well, they'll shoot you for that.
That's insubordination.
And it means that when people end up at the top, because they're the very people who always need to be being told what to do by someone above them that they can ultimately blame because they told them to do it, when they find themselves as the brigadier general in command of the battle, they don't know what to do because they've never had to...
I can't blame anyone.
And so I wondered, you know, the reality of the kind of personality that becomes a doctor, rather than, on the contrary, God-complex, omniscient beings.
They actually seemed to demonstrate a tendency to groupthink on a hitherto unexpected scale.
Two things.
One.
As I began to investigate the vaccine mandates in the military and the number of people who were ejected for refusing to take them, it occurred to me that this, intentionally or not, was a very effective mechanism at creating a compliant force that would carry out immoral orders.
Exactly the kind of thing that we studied in the aftermath of World War II.
That if you get rid of all the people who say, hey, wait a minute, I'm not so sure about that shot.
I don't want it.
I have a religious objection.
You get rid of all of the people who stand up.
What you're left with is a force of people who did what they were told.
That that is a dangerous thing and it is something that those who wish to wield power and those who don't believe in the rules-based society that you and I started talking about at the beginning might want.
But here's the interesting thing.
Okay, so we see over in military space how you might create an order in which people do not think and that therefore you would expect that the people at the top of that order excel at not thinking.
Because they get to the top by playing that game.
But what happened in medicine, as I've pieced the story together, is back when you and I were kids, doctors lived in fear of malpractice lawsuits, at least in the U.S. They were in danger of losing everything because medicine is a dangerous game.
Even if you do the exactly right thing for your patient, it may kill them.
You can take the best gamble, give them the best shot they've got, and it may result in their death.
And doctors were being sued, and they were spending a tremendous amount of money on malpractice insurance because, of course, who wants to insure a doctor who could end up on the hook for millions of dollars for wrongful death or whatever?
So what happened is the system got reimagined around what's called the standard of care.
And the idea is the standard of care says what a doctor should do, given a patient with a certain set of symptoms.
And as you describe with the military situation, if the doctor follows the standard of care and the patient dies, no problem.
They did what the doctor is supposed to do in that circumstance.
And if they depart from it in an effort to protect their patient and the patient dies, they're in a world of So doctors have been trained now to follow the standard of care with a slavish devotion because that's their salvation.
And it has taken them from scientists who are faced with a life and death problem that might give a person a God complex because they have to think through what is it that's going to save this patient's life and has turned them into effectively glorified Pharmacists.
Pill dispensers, yeah.
Yeah, pill dispensers, which then played into the pandemic exactly as you would expect.
You know, a monolith of doctors, none of whom were raising the obvious objections that, you know, you and I were circulating amongst doctors making these points in the outside world who were being dismissed as cranks.
Yeah, the most harrowing, really, I keep citing this to people, I watched you talking to Robert Malone and Steve Kirsch across, it was about three hours plus, and it scared the living daylights out of me.
In a way, that was a pivot point for me.
I came out of that altered, having watched that.
You know, and it was, a lot of it was to do with the way that, between the three of you, I can't remember who was saying what, but people were describing what was happening to the ferrets.
You know, where the spike protein had tended to end up.
And it was in all the worst places, like ovaries and bone marrow and, you know, and then there was Steve Kirsch, you know, who was talking about, like, repurpose this and that.
And I knew going in that the three of you at that point were all vilified to some extent.
And I thought, oh my God, if these are the people that have been driven to the fringes and all but destroyed, we really, really, really are in trouble.
Because I've learned more in the last three hours listening to this lot than, you know, it was absolutely the moment for me.
And I thought, this is trouble.
The problem is not the pandemic.
The problem is not COVID.
The problem is if these three guys are being held up as devil-worshiping baby killers, we've got a real problem now.
Who's going to save us?
Well, here's the odd punchline of that story.
That episode, which YouTube immediately pulled down, struck the channel, and put us on a trajectory in which we were going to be thrown off the platform, resulted in our demonetization.
And the evidence suggests the capping of the number of subscribers on the channel, which immediately plateaued and has never recovered.
But the channel is still demonetized on YouTube.
Wow.
Even now.
Even now that we have in public begun to acknowledge that many of the things that were being said by these supposedly fringe voices turn out to be credible, there is no recovering.
Goliath is not going to acknowledge error.
And I mean, I don't, I don't mean to complain about this.
I'm a very lucky person and I'm I don't feel shortchanged by life in any way.
But there is something galling about the fact that clearly Goliath decided that if we were going to speak out of turn and talk about the hazards of the mRNA vaccines and talk about reproductive health, distribution of the spike protein in mouse models, all those things, we were going to do that.
That it was going to interrupt our capacity to earn a living.
And literally, YouTube eliminated more than half of our family income in one day by demonetizing our two channels, and they have never gone back and reinvestigated.
You know, as Jimmy Dore says, he says, you can get forgiveness for being wrong.
But you absolutely can't be forgiven for being right.
And I thought, that is where we are.
I mean, that's upside-down world right there, but there was never a truer word to speak.
You will be forgiven for being wrong, but being right, get out of town, don't come back.
Well, and it is resulting in another layer of tragedy that I think most people are just unaware of.
You had the mainstream that did terrible things during the pandemic and promoted a tremendous amount of fiction.
And you had a fringe.
Yes, some of the fringe people were crazy.
But all of the dissidents ended up driven to the fringe, right?
Where they became free to say what was true.
It was up to the public to figure out whether or not to listen.
But here's the problem.
In the middle, you have a huge number of people who didn't know what to think and dismissed the fringe.
They probably got their shots.
They probably worry about the fact that they got their shots.
And they are now in an uncomfortable spot.
They don't want to worry about The consequences of what they accepted.
And they really don't emotionally like having to acknowledge that the people that they agreed were crazy actually were making sense, right?
That's a very uncomfortable realization.
So you get a bunch of people in the middle engaged in a game that I call the middle ground scramble, where they are now going to scold.
The fringe, oh, those people, you know, yes, the pandemic didn't turn out to be what we thought, but those people on the fringe, they actually were crazy.
And then they scold the mainstream, you know, yes, we can all agree that out of an abundance of caution, you know, things were done that in retrospect, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They scold both sides and they ascend because the vast number of people who wants to acknowledge that something bad happened without Yes.
Yes.
The people who were the most Potent on the side of rightness.
You know, the attempt was to, well, to castrate them, really.
And if they couldn't do that, was certainly to keep them away from the breeding population.
You know, they must never be allowed to reproduce themselves.
And what you end up in that middle ground scramble are, you know, are the watered down, the least.
Whatever the antithesis of potent is.
Impotent, I suppose.
That's what you end up with, because they pose no threat to themselves, but by the mass of them, they pose a huge threat to everybody else because of that mental impotence.
Moral and mental impotence.
There's a process in con artistry, like a long con, where the mark begins to get wise that something is fishy.
And the process is called chilling out the mark, where the mark has to be given something, right?
Maybe you make a show of Taking one of the people who's part of the con and pretending to berate him or throw him out for being a bad apple who was up to something so that the mark again becomes comfortable that things are good and stops paying attention.
And effectively, the middle ground scramblers are the way that the diabolical people who did this to us escape without having to surrender any power.
What they do is they appoint these corruptible middle ground scramblers who will just be brought in on the next PSYOP.
I don't even want to say evolutionarily, but that's where I'm getting this from.
You either promote the people who got it right.
In which case, the system gets smarter.
Or you don't, in which case, it won't get any smarter.
That's the question.
You're one side of that line or the other.
Are you promoting the people who got it right?
Are you listening to Pierre Corey or not?
Are you listening to Robert Malone or not?
And if the system isn't going to listen to those people, then you are not moving past COVID the way many in public.
feel that they want to.
What you're doing is you are setting yourself up for the next round.
And I wish people understood that that's what they, were doing because if they knew that the force that did this to them isn't done with them they would be looking who can we who can we promote in order to prevent this from ever happening again yep Sigh.
All right.
Well, There were a whole many things that we were considering talking about, but perhaps we should leave them for a future episode?
You are due to come and talk on the aforementioned GB News at some point in the future.
Do you know when that is?
Well, I can probably nudge it to happening whenever you would best suit your schedule.
But in any event, we'll have more of the conversation.
I mean, we're so far from...
You know, it feels as if the great call-up and the great fall-in of 1916 and the carnage lies ahead, not behind.
I think all we've had so far is the Battle of Monds.
I meant to say this earlier and we got kind of sidetracked.
I feel the fatigue that you're talking about.
And I feel a kind of hopelessness when I try to imagine sorting it out well enough to return us to the rules-based society that you and I both thought we lived in.
But I also see another process.
The powers that be used to have a lock on the narrative because they owned all the channels and there weren't that many.
They now do something that I think is funny, where we think that somebody engaged in lying should be embarrassed is evident to the people to whom they are lying, right?
Because we would be embarrassed in that circumstance.
We don't understand that these psychopaths, they've been lying to us all along.
They're not embarrassed about it.
They don't like when we understand that they're lying.
But, you know, it's all, it doesn't keep them up at night.
And what that means is that now some of the lies that they tell are just.
These transparent revelations, right?
It's like, you know, they're involved in a con that requires them to get into a disguise and they forgot to put it on.
And it's like, but we can see that that's not who you are, right?
So take, for example, the story of President Biden's mental decrepitude.
His mental decrepitude was obvious to me and many others in 2019.
It was obvious as he was running for president the first time.
And we were demonized, of course, for saying so.
It was obvious.
All you had to do was look at a speech from Joe Biden in 2019 and compare it to one from, you know, 1990.
Two different people.
And the point is, okay, so that was a battle, and those of us who saw this decrepitude were dismissed as being political or conspiracy theorists or whatever it was.
And then in the aftermath of his leaving office, Goliath has recognized that everybody knows.
And so it now has to explain why the press marched in lockstep, pretending that And it's trying to pivot.
And so it now has like a propaganda campaign surrounding how, you know, how could the White House have lied to the press about the state of the president's mental faculties, right?
It just doesn't add up.
So anyway, my point is there is something heartening in watching the feebleness of the lies.
And the pivots.
This is now happening in front of us.
It's like we are standing where we can watch backstage and the actors who have been hired to fool us are all still under the misapprehension that we're sitting where it all looks very compelling.
I don't know if you take any solace in that.
The house lights are up.
Oh yeah, I do.
But it's kind of, it almost feels like, You think, what does it take?
Are we just finally arriving at that point where they just take off the masks and say, yeah, yeah, we know, but what are you going to do about it?
Because, you know, well, apart from your side of the Atlantic, they disarmed us all long ago.
What are we going to do?
At least you've got the Second Amendment.
We've got pea shooters and podcasts.
That's all we've got.
You've got AR-15s.
Yes, we do.
You joke, but I agree with this wholeheartedly.
I believe that there are really two things that matter given the state of battle.
One of them is the free exchange of ideas.
Free speech is too narrow a description, but the ability for us to tune out their channels and to have podcasts in which we hash this stuff out directly and nobody interferes with our ability.
You know, they've demonetized us, but we're still available.
That matters a great deal.
It does.
And the not being reduced to pea shooters also matters.
I do, I used to, this is one of the places where my, Perspective has radically shifted over my life.
I used to think the Second Amendment was the worst error that the founders made or one of the couple worst errors.
I now think it was extremely enlightened and was about exactly this question of tyranny.
Exactly this.
Yeah.
It's like Joe Rogan says, five years ago I thought vaccination was the greatest gift to mankind.
Now I don't even believe we went to the moon.
Yep.
Yep.
Man has a way with words.
He certainly does.
He's not the biggest for nothing.
Yeah, that's true.
All right.
Neil Oliver, it has been a pleasure as always.
Sorry for the tension.
I had no idea we were headed in that direction, but nonetheless.
You know, it's all in the free exchange of ideas.
Nick will stand up for himself because he surely does and surely will.
He certainly doesn't need a has-been TV archaeologist to fight his corner for.
Well, I just, you know, I'm all for...
You know, that's my predicament.
Those are the horns of the dilemma in which I find myself impaled.
I genuinely do.
Can we agree on this?
There is no reason for...
There's no need for acrimony.
God knows we've got enough trouble coming at us from the other side.
Analytical disagreements are all well and good.
Bullying and acrimony are not.
I'll give you that.
It's been a pleasure.
I'm looking forward to us picking up the conversation on GB News in the near future.
I do love you, Brett.
You've been a solace to me for four years now.
I first found you on Joe Rogan, as it happens.
That was where I first listened to all of you guys.
You know, those conversations I listened to before any of this.
It was even a glint in any of our eyes.
I still look back on fondly, and I'm still listening to you now.
Seems like a million years ago, and it really wasn't that long.
Now, it does raise a question, though, before I let you go.
You have this marvelous Scottish brogue.
Are there other brogues?
I don't believe there are.
I don't think there are.
Maybe Irish.
Do the Irish have a brogue?
I was puzzling over that very question.
I'm not even sure what a brogue is.
It's also being a shoe.
I'm not sure what a brogue is.
Yeah, I don't know either, but I know you've got one, and I'm not a jealous person, but I admire it, and if I had been cursed with such a thing, I would be proud of it.
Well, I find you very pleasant to listen to as well.
