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March 22, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:54:06

Jonathan Myles-Lea

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	I love Delling Poll, come and subscribe to the podcast baby.
	I love Delling Poll, unless another time subscribe with me.
	I love Delling Poll, come and subscribe to the podcast baby.
	Welcome to the Delling Poll with me, James Delling Poll.
	And you know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest.
	But this week, I mean how none more excited is my state.
	I've got Jonathan Marsley back by popular demand.
	Actually, has it been popular demand?
	I think so.
	People said that they'd enjoyed it so much they wanted to hear more from us.
	They liked the dynamic of us chatting together.
	I think they did.
	Actually, you know, I don't, as you know, I love all my children.
	But one of my favourite children, I have to say, was our first podcast together.
	Was it?
	Really?
	Oh listen, it was magical.
	Look, I think the thing is, I quite like the podcasts that transcend politics.
	Yeah, we covered a lot of ground, didn't we?
	I love the Roger Scruton podcast.
	I mean that was great and that was all about politics.
	But then I love the one with Sean Langan.
	Have you ever heard that one?
	I didn't see that one.
	About what it's like to be held by the Taliban under sentence of death.
	Oh golly.
	It's just a beautiful story.
	You're not going to get that from me.
	No, no.
	And then there was the Alan de Botton one, which again was more about Oh gosh, he's such a good speaker.
	Yeah, he's great.
	Well, I love Anna.
	I love Anna.
	Although he's not sort of as open to the spiritual or religious side, is he?
	I think he's more of a sort of earthbound, as it were.
	I'm going to talk more about the sort of mystical aspects.
	You're going to talk about crazy stuff.
	Who knows what's going to happen?
	You've taken your shoes off.
	I know, this is what you can do.
	These are quite nice socks too.
	On the way down to see you.
	I'm so glad I came.
	I was so excited.
	It was a bit spontaneous wasn't it?
	It was a bit spontaneous.
	You were going to come yesterday but I didn't feel too well.
	No you weren't well.
	We can talk about that.
	We can talk about your elf because that's quite important.
	I have my Oprah moment.
	Your Oprah moment.
	But on the way down I was listening to one of the most fascinating hours I've ever spent listening to a, well it wasn't even a podcast, he recorded himself talking.
	You know about this guy, Alan Watt.
	Yeah, Alan Watt.
	One man and his dog in a shack in Canada.
	It always seemed to be horrific.
	The weather was always terrible.
	He was always saying it's minus 10 or something like that.
	Oh, was he?
	Yeah, so I don't know how he ended up there.
	Scottish guy, isn't he?
	Yeah.
	They were like gold, those podcasts.
	It was on cuttingthroughthematrix.com.
	Website's still up.
	I was listening to one this morning.
	But it was from him I gained a lot of insight.
	He directed me towards people like Carol Quigley, the curator of the Library of the Council of Foreign Relations, all sorts of other people, Zbigniew Zbrynski, lots of writers that you sort of heard about but you need directing to.
	Well yeah, you see, I'm a newbie.
	I'm a bit like, you know, I've been coming to the club for a long time but I've only ever been in the sort of the main rooms.
	I didn't know about the back room.
	Welcome to the Irish.
	What goes on in the back room with the hoist and all the stuff like that.
	So these names like Carol Quigley and Alan Watt, some people are just going to be going, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've Yeah.
	Well, they'll shut down when they hear them because they think, oh, I've not heard about it on television, therefore it's not important.
	I don't need to know.
	The media would have filtered this for me.
	If it was important, I wouldn't have known.
	I would have known about it.
	I would have heard about the grand chessboard and these really important, quite weighty books that have been studied by people like Clinton and, you know, Zbigniew Brzezinski, for instance, whose daughter is a presenter on Fox, I think, in America.
	I don't think it's Fox, is it?
	She's a lefty, isn't she?
	She's got to be a lefty if she's... Yeah, oh yes.
	No, she won't be on Fox.
	No, she won't be on Fox.
	But yeah, Brzezinski, for those who don't know or need reminding, was the co-founder of the Trilateral Commission.
	Absolutely.
	Which is the organisation responsible ultimately for the Great Reset.
	For gender 2030, for everything that's going wrong in the world.
	It's heavily connected to the U.N., yeah.
	So, yeah, we've not been taken off the air yet by mentioning that.
	But, yeah, the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, those are subjects to research.
	And they're not mentioned on mainstream media, are they?
	I mean, even as think tanks, they're not referenced even en passant.
	They're things that you need to discover By turning off the mainstream news, training yourself not to absorb information in 10-second or 30-second soundbites, and to look behind the headlines, and to develop a sort of discernment.
	And for me, it's a spiritual discernment.
	When I'm watching a television broadcast, if it's presented in a studio and it's heavily choreographed and put together meticulously with lots of amazing sets, I don't feel anything from the man who's speaking or the presenter because they're reading it usually from autocue and there's a sort of deadness there.
	But when I watch you on a podcast you can see you're sort of fizzing up with this sort of excitement about discovering truth.
	You just reminded me.
	I don't think I've said this before.
	migrating to alternative media because they just can't watch standard mainstream broadcasting anymore.
	It just seems dead.
	It's like watching a cartoon, isn't it?
	And the way that the presenters are shown on screen, they don't look very real, especially in America.
	It was always a cliche, wasn't it, that television presenters looked sort of plastic.
	But that's happened with British TV as well.
	You just reminded me, and I don't think I've said this before, I may have done, that the last time I did, I engaged with mainstream TV, was the notorious Andrew Neil interview on was the notorious Andrew Neil interview on that late night programme, the kind of, you know, no one wears a tie, everyone's got their So I haven't watched TV for about 20 years.
	Okay so you wouldn't care it became a thing it was particularly a thing if you go on to if you go on to YouTube, you will find that it's one of the top items that comes up and the reason is that for lefties, Delingpole haters generally, it's the gotcha moment.
	Oh really?
	So he cornered you, what did he do?
	So I hadn't been on for a while and they said you know let's have you back and I said yeah what are we going to talk about and they said well you know Brexit is obviously the thing we want to talk about and how about you talk about how
	WTO rules is better than you know you just want to clean Brexit and even even on WTO terms and I thought yeah fine they said look we can we can write the script for you and I said yeah fine I'll just edit it and make it more me and fine and then I went and spent two hours in a warehouse in one of those places where you Paintballing.
	Oh yes.
	It was zombie paintballing.
	It could have been fun.
	Zombie paintballing.
	So I dressed up as a zombie.
	I didn't have a paintball gun and we were talking about... I can't remember what the connection between zombies and Brexit was but anyway I filmed my thing and I was... you're quite knackered when the programme goes out you know and you're sort of thinking well...
	I'm just going to say my piece and be amusing about it.
	I'm trying to get the connection between paintballing and Brexit.
	Never mind.
	We'll come to the point eventually.
	It was Andrew Neil.
	It was in a warehouse.
	It's a bit like one of those... Do you remember the two Ronnies sketch where Ronnie Corbett does the long... Yes, the spiel.
	The spiel.
	And eventually you get to the point hours later.
	Come on, get to the point now.
	So for whatever reason, actually I have my suspicions...
	Neil decided that particular night he wanted to destroy me rather than be my friend.
	Okay.
	So he grilled me about WTO rules and I had no fucking clue.
	And more than that I didn't really think it was my job to know because frankly who gives a toss?
	It was about, you know, I, it was, it was the format of the program was, was designed to, um, uh, it was about, it's, it's, as I said, it's about the undo your top button, you know, no one wears a tie.
	This is our late night, let, let our hair down for the discussion.
	Stretch back and be Michael Portillo.
	But Andrew decided that that particular evening he wanted to grill me on, anyway, I hadn't a clue and I remember as he started asking me these questions, this is where we come to the point, I remember thinking You know what I really want to say to you right now, Andrew?
	What I really want to say to you is, Andrew, why do you expect me to know this shit?
	I've just spent the afternoon dressed as a zombie providing the entertainment that makes this evening political discussion.
	I've got to see this YouTube clip.
	It gives it its particular slant, which is not daytime politics.
	It's evening politics.
	It's chill.
	What the hell are you doing?
	Why are you picking on me?
	If I'd done that it would have been brilliant.
	Yeah but you didn't so you held back from actually saying what you felt.
	It would have been, it would have called out the artifice of all these programs.
	And the artifice is what's wrong.
	It's the dishonesty.
	It's the way they want it.
	They play with this.
	They want it both ways.
	On the one hand they want it to be kind of Yeah, it's politics but we're having fun at the same time, aren't we folks?
	And at the same time, yes, but we're the BBC and we're grown up and this is very serious.
	And it didn't work.
	It never worked.
	There was always an uneasiness of tone.
	I should have called it out and the reason I didn't of course was because a one's kind of trained like a like a you know we're conditioned to how to behave on a set but also there was that that problem of Andrew Neil being the chairman of the spectator and therefore my employer at the same time so I couldn't really say Andrew this is just shit you know you why I'm not gonna play your game I couldn't have done it but I should have done.
	So when was that?
	What sort of year was that?
	That was like two years ago, I think.
	But you're famous for sort of saying exactly what you say.
	Yes, that's the other thing.
	That's why people love the podcast.
	You see, I wasn't on brand.
	Not only could I have saved my arse, I could have removed from posterity this gotcha moment used by the leftists, but also I could have enhanced my brand by being true to it.
	Yeah, by breaking the fourth wall or third wall.
	Exactly.
	But you've done something recently for me.
	You do so much for me Jonathan.
	Oh I do.
	Well I decided that we're so aligned on so many issues that we should just get married but sadly you're already taken.
	That would really boost our relationship.
	There's a thing I wanted to say to you.
	I'm really fucked off that you've got cancer.
	You're not happy as well, I imagine.
	I'm blissfully happy.
	I've never been happier.
	I've had the best five years of my life.
	Because it puts the context, it gives you a time limit.
	I've already discovered that I have supernatural DNA.
	I had kidney cancer in 2016, had a kidney removed, which is quite a big job to get to a kidney.
	I thought they'd go through the back, but they go through the front and they open up the whole front of you.
	So apparently, I won't go into those graphic details, but it was a big operation.
	But because I've always been a rugby player and I'm a vegetarian and a very positive, spirited person, within three months I was in Rome with a 22-year-old friend of mine, Polish friend, who's more exhausted by the sun than I was.
	I went into St Peter's Cathedral.
	I knew I wanted to touch the foot of St Peter, the big sort of sculpture of St Peter.
	Had you touched it before?
	No.
	I thought it might be a bit dirty, but I thought, you know, it's important.
	The miracle's more important than the hygiene.
	I thought a lot of people would have been kissing the foot.
	They'd have gone very shiny, as if you'd touched it.
	And I wasn't a Catholic at the time, though I am now.
	And so we went down the nave, beautiful shafts of sunlight coming through the dust.
	It's just the inside of St.
	Peter's is one of the most spectacular places in the world.
	Touched the foot of St.
	Peter and said, I really need a miracle, you know, because I wanted to live a few more years.
	I felt pretty good after three months.
	I was pretty thin.
	This was three months after your surgery?
	Yeah.
	So most people need a lot longer than that, really, because it was, yeah.
	But I sort of bounced back and I was swimming, I think, in two months.
	So I touched the foot of St.
	Peter, moved back into the centre of the nave where you could look at the Palatino at the end there, and I felt almost as though I was levitating.
	My whole body, you know those 70s lava lamps with the little bits of spring inside them?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	In the Italian sunlight.
	I felt like this was a bit like a Dr. Spock.
	Dr. Spock?
	Who's the one on... Mr. Spock.
	Mr. Spock on... The Vulcan on Star Trek.
	Star Trek, yeah.
	Very much like that.
	So, all through my body, but around my body, there's this swirling mass of silvery, sparkly... I'm not... It'd be crazy to make up something as crazy as this, but...
	And this warmth and a sort of light which permeated within my body, something I've never experienced before.
	Well, not before, but I have since.
	And I just had this sense, there was no voice or anything, I just said, you know, I'm giving you time, I'm giving you time.
	Within half an hour, I'd persuaded Daniel to go with me to the top of the dome, which is quite a walk, you know, for somebody who had been on crutches just a month before.
	So he agreed to it, not knowing how far it was.
	You have to climb around this very sweaty dome with millions of tourists, and it takes about 45 minutes to get right to the top, to the cupola.
	Well, I'd been up there every year for 20 years, I think.
	I'm obsessed by Rome, it's my favourite place on the planet.
	So we walked up, and it felt as though it was half the distance than it normally is.
	I thought, how can we be at the top already?
	I looked at Daniel, he was streaming in sweat.
	And he was, you know, it was a real ordeal for him, but I was still in this sort of nimbus of light.
	I was like, oh, this is incredible.
	Looked down on the whole of Rome, you look through this sort of great sort of vista that looks down to the, down the Tiber.
	Yeah.
	And I just had this sense that all will be well, all be well.
	A limit, but you know, I'm giving you time.
	That's what I felt.
	That's what I felt.
	It is definitely recording.
	Is that one recording?
	Yeah.
	Is it a red square on the back of that?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, that's good.
	Yeah, all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.
	Was that just a sensation or did those words actually come into...?
	Yeah, it was a kind of a voice.
	I've had other experiences later which were even more specific.
	Coming back to the present, just before Christmas, I was back in hospital.
	So unfortunately, you know, cancer always comes back.
	I didn't have any chemo or immunotherapy because the type of cancer I have is called collecting duct carcinoma.
	I only have the best sort of cancer, you see, the most aggressive, the most naughty.
	Exclusive, yeah.
	Yeah.
	You know, 1% most aggressive.
	So they gave me a few months.
	When I was in Rome, this is a weird thing, I was sitting at a restaurant called Piperno, which has the best fried artichokes in the world, I think.
	I went specifically just to eat fried artichokes in this place, Piperno, in a small courtyard.
	Sit down, and next to us at the table was an American family, and of course they're very voluble and they're very chatty.
	He said, oh my name's Chris, this is my wife, these are my children.
	I'm an oncologist from America.
	No.
	And I said, I just had a kidney out.
	He goes, who did the operation?
	I said it was Professor Noel Clark.
	Noel Clarke brings his phone out of his pocket, puts on the album, photo album, and there's a photograph of him sitting next to Noel Clarke at a conference somewhere in America.
	He said, we're the two top oncologists in the world, or some of them, and Professor Clarke's at Christie Hospital.
	And he said, oh, he did, he said, you were lucky to get him.
	He said, what was it?
	He said, oh, we think we call that a blini.
	He said, hmm, not good.
	And his wife said, Oh, you'll be fine.
	He said, no darling, we give people a few months with this.
	So it was like, it took the edge off the fried artichokes.
	Yes.
	But, you know, but they were still amazing.
	And a second order.
	So, you know, I was living in this sort of state of suspended animation where you feel as though this glass cloche has been put over you.
	The rest of the world is taking place outside the glass cloche.
	And you're in this sort of little weird bubble where you can still see everything taking place.
	You're not really connected to anybody.
	That was a phase, you know, this is the fascinating journey that you go through and it depends on your mindset.
	You can either approach it, you can approach it in all sorts of different ways.
	I've spoken to some people who've lived with people who've had cancer and they've just given up when they had the news and there's just been a long slow decline.
	Right.
	Well for me, my creativity and certainly my spiritual life has bloomed in the last five years and you know I want to tell some more about that.
	Anyway, going back to Chris.
	So he said, here he is.
	We didn't phone him, but we did in consultations later.
	Professor Clark said, I can't believe that you met each other.
	In Rome.
	And I've become very close friends with the family.
	They live in California.
	Margot is wife.
	We speak on Instagram all the time.
	How are you?
	The whole family are friends.
	They listen to the podcast between the two of us.
	And the thing that glues us together is a mutual sense of astonishment.
	How the hell is he still alive?
	Yes.
	So a year after the kidney was taken out, I had pancreatitis, which is, it's a bit like being shot in the stomach.
	I went to the gym, had a really lovely mushroom risotto, had a shower, and then you imagine somebody shooting you in the shower.
	That's basically what it feels like, pancreatitis.
	So it comes on very suddenly.
	You get the whole, you know, the whole works projectile vomit, screaming, whatever.
	So, rushed into hospital on morphine for, I think, 10 days.
	Wanted to calm down.
	Eventually, they decided to take out the, what you call, the gallbladder.
	So, I made a joke of the fact that it's an organ a year, you know.
	Anyway, two months after that, back to Rome, you know, because I'm obsessed by Italy.
	Yeah.
	And I recovered.
	And then I had sort of two or three years of absolutely amazing health, you know, working out, swimming.
	I was living up in the northwest of England because my mother wasn't very well.
	During that time I did more traveling than I've done for ages, mainly all around Italy, like a grand tour of Italy.
	And I presented all that on Instagram.
	So that led to these huge viewer figures.
	People love pretty pictures of attractive art and towns and cities in Italy.
	And it inspired other people to go and do the same trip.
	So I'd go to Pompeii, I'd go to Herculaneum.
	And photographed myself standing on the tiled floors that hadn't been stood on since, well they were discovered in the 18th century, but AD 79 they were covered up by the ash of Vesuvius.
	I was revealing to people, I felt it was like my purpose in life was to reveal these extraordinary things from our heritage by the act of pointing a finger.
	You can open up people's lives, you know, you can change their lives because it's very possible to spend your whole life, and we don't realize this, never seeing any great art or hearing the great stories of our past.
	You can be locked into quite a siloed system, can't you, through social media.
	The way that the algorithms work, you can choose only to be interested in sport or only in gaming or something like that.
	And your portal, your frequency of reference is very, very narrow.
	But when I did a lecture, the other thing that happened during that period, about three or four years ago, three years ago, was I was invited to do a lecture at Harvard Business School.
	The admissions officer, Lisa Hughes, said, you're a really good communicator.
	We love what you're doing on Instagram.
	Will you come and talk to us?
	And I said, about what?
	And she said, anything.
	So I thought, oh, this is amazing.
	To be able to have spoken in the place that, say, people like Jordan Peterson had spoken.
	And I knew that I was being invited in as a sort of wildcard, because we know what's going on in all the systems of academia.
	They're trying to distract people from the mystical experience, the direct experience of great art.
	And they're trying to use identity politics and all of this.
	So they were aware of that but they couldn't get any professors there to broach that sort of subject.
	I decided to call it the power of beauty and the inflection point.
	To give it a bit of a business side to it.
	I did a graph on the intro page to make it look a bit business-like.
	But really the point of it was the power of beauty.
	I'm darting around in subjects.
	Yeah, that's what we expect.
	We hope.
	You still look interested though with your orange microphone.
	The orange goes beautifully with that jacket.
	Is this the one that was darned by a cat by the way?
	This is the one made of Keeper's Tweed, which is the best because you can just... it like stands up on its own.
	Does it?
	And I remember a long time ago when I was kind of an aspirational country gent.
	Rather than, you know, you become the thing you want to be in a way, don't you, I think?
	Yeah.
	To a degree.
	And I remember seeing They were quite common back in the day.
	Well worn in.
	It takes a long time to wear these things.
	This is 15 years probably now.
	I remember coveting them and now I've got one of them.
	You'll never get rid of it even if the cat eats bits of it occasionally.
	It reminds me of the beautiful clothes in The Dig, the movie with Ralph Fiennes.
	I just was obsessed by the clothes.
	Period of clothes.
	A fashion.
	Particularly for men, I think.
	Less so for women.
	Well not so, the colours were quite earthy weren't they?
	We're going a little bit off topic aren't we?
	I like, you see that's the thing, I like earthy colours.
	I do, I think if everybody comes to Bath, when people come to Bath they should wear earth colours because it doesn't distract from the beautiful Georgian architecture.
	When I see people in cerise sort of jogging pants, I can't even get my camera out.
	But do you know what, I tell you what, when I see, when I see, we'll come back to your Harvard lecture though, I think you may have mentioned it.
	I did before, you never talk about Harvard too much.
	The thing that strikes me, having driven through Bath to get here to the car park, was just how unnatural and wrong it is that we live in a world where Bath is... I drove past this place which says something like the Board Game Cafe.
	and I thought what a lovely idea a cafe where you go to play board games where you say you interact with other people you're not using a screen it's about lovely interaction and humans being together as we're meant to and currently we've been denied all this but for no reason at all We could do virtual.
	I bought Peter Rabbit.
	It's a 150th anniversary pack with the little lead figures.
	Peter Rabbit, the Beatrix Potter game.
	It's really lovely.
	We've got one of those.
	Have you?
	Yeah.
	Well, let's do it.
	But is it fun or is it a bit like Ludo?
	It's amazing, shaking those dice.
	Yeah, but okay, apart from the iconic... No, it's basically Snakes and Ladders.
	You play it with very young children.
	That is rather what I thought, yeah.
	Or have a chat whilst you're doing it, you know.
	No, I'm more of a kind of settlers of Catan, I believe the Germans pronounce it as.
	You know the Germans make the best board games?
	Oh, I didn't know that.
	Yeah, they have a checkerboard.
	Yeah, and this has won the game of the year.
	Oh, well, you have to tell me about that.
	I like that.
	I think we should revise it.
	There's a German dentist.
	We're going way off topic now.
	Not that we ever had a topic.
	That's fine.
	Anyway, before we go any further, so Harvard, yeah.
	But I just want to know more about the cancer thing.
	So you got it in 2016.
	Yeah, yes, 2016.
	And so you've had this, because your experience is... I lost another close friend, Christopher Booker.
	You've not lost me yet.
	No, no, no, yeah.
	Christopher Booker.
	I remember you saying you wish you'd done in one last interview.
	One of the reasons that I came down here, I mean, I'm not like the angel of death.
	I haven't come to say, right, You're looking through the diary.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But I just thought, I know what happens to people with cancer and they're saying things like, yeah, yeah, I've just got to get this done and I'll see you in three weeks.
	And then three weeks time, they're not fit to see you.
	Well, I can tell you, you were going to come yesterday, weren't you?
	Yeah.
	I didn't think I was going to make it through the night.
	I had the district nurses out.
	We've got these, behind the books over there, we've got these emergency drugs, you know.
	So, the pain is extraordinary.
	Is it?
	I'm not in pain at all at the moment, but when tumours get to a certain size... Oh, I was just going to explain.
	So, remission and then it comes back.
	It always comes back.
	It came back in the lymph nodes and it moved into the liver and the pancreas.
	Starts pressing on things.
	So just before Christmas I was in hospital again.
	They had to put stents in.
	You have to be awake.
	It's quite a curious experience that, having a stent fitted while you're awake.
	But they give you these drugs.
	It makes it actually quite fun.
	I was talking about country houses during the operation.
	We had a really nice time.
	Morphine, basically.
	It's a relaxant or something.
	I'd had it once before when I had an operation on my thumb, so I knew it was going to be fine.
	You know what's going on, but you think, actually it's pretty cool, they know what they're doing.
	So I was getting on very well, you know, the staff were beautiful, and you could kind of see on them.
	I tried to not look on the monitor what was going on.
	They didn't realise I could see that.
	Anyway, so I was in there and I had a whole series of amazing things happen to me.
	So as soon as I came out of surgery to save my liver, I had pancreatitis again.
	So I was back on the ward and within two hours it felt like somebody had shot me.
	I went to the bathroom and it felt like somebody had shot me.
	So I was immediately in a CAT scan.
	So that's a pretty bad combination because I was totally yellow.
	I looked like Bart Simpson.
	If I'd dyed my hair blue, which you know I'd never do, I would have looked like Bart Simpson.
	And then I developed... He hasn't got... Bart hasn't got... He's got yellow hair.
	Marge has got blue hair.
	Marge.
	You look like Marge, which would have been worse.
	She would have looked like your microphone.
	Yeah.
	And then I got pneumonia, which is very bad, and I couldn't breathe.
	So at that point they said, do you want to see the chaplain?
	I said absolutely, what they like.
	And then I told a friend in California, my friend Enzo, who has an argument plug.
	He has a company called Heritage Liturgical.
	He builds churches and synagogues in California and commissions people to do the craftwork, the sculptures from Europe.
	He said that you've got to have a priest because he knows I've not been baptised.
	I was christened as a Methodist and he doesn't think that's good enough.
	You need to be in the proper church.
	So this was amazing.
	I thought this happened all the time in hospitals but apparently it caused quite a stir.
	I looked through the crack in the door and I was off my head on fentanyl.
	Yeah.
	You know that's a hundred times more powerful than morphine.
	It's the good stuff.
	Oh is it?
	And it was sort of pumped into me.
	Every time I pushed a button it was like fentanyl.
	And I saw pelicans at the end of the bed.
	And I had Robert Hughes, the Australian art critic, he was in the corner telling me about modernism in America and all that sort of thing.
	And I thought, the pelicans are back again.
	And through a crack in the door I saw this large figure, a bit like Father Christmas, gowning up in this sort of like green gown with this really jazzy sort of mask on.
	And he came into the room and I said to, I think James was with me, I said, Is that a priest in the hallway?
	And he said, like, it is.
	And I didn't know he was going to be driven all the way from Tetbury to Bath.
	He'd found, like, a traditional Catholic priest who came in.
	And he said, well, I'm going to baptise you.
	I'm going to give you your last rites.
	This is amazing.
	Last rites on fentanyl.
	So he stood by those little plastic tables and he said, we'll have to do this all quite carefully.
	It's hailing.
	It's hailing.
	That's exciting, isn't it?
	It is, it is.
	It's very atmospheric.
	So do you want to hear what he did?
	He said, I can baptise you if you're at least an Anglican.
	I said, well, I'm a Methodist.
	We can deal with it, we can deal with it.
	So he filled in the little blue plastic glass, the scratchy glass, put some water in there from the jug, picked up a little teaspoon, a little plastic teaspoon which was used to stir up my sort of movie coal, whatever it was, and he got out some holy water which had been blessed by the local bishop.
	Holy oil, sorry.
	And red in Latin.
	I propped myself up in the bed.
	I was shaking with pain.
	I was absolutely... I had a few hours left.
	This is just before Christmas.
	And when he blessed me and he put the water on my forehead, it was that same experience again, this nimbus of light.
	It was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had in my life.
	I didn't expect it to happen.
	I thought it would be a formula.
	It's just something you do, you know, when you're in a difficult situation.
	Yeah.
	But I had this incredible sense of peace and it's never left me.
	And it's not just peace.
	Well, I asked what it was.
	It's grace.
	It's grace.
	It's God's grace.
	It's difficult to talk about it without being emotional, but it flooded my whole body.
	And the thing is, I think it seeps out of my body too, to the people around me, and even to the people who hear the things that I have to say.
	And it comes out through the things that I write as well because I've been writing things through social media and through the podcast.
	I'll just turn up and I'll explain why I do it in this way.
	I don't script anything because after the priest had left, I looked at the water on the side and this voice said, Build the vessel and I will come.
	I know that sounds very theatrical, but it wasn't a vessel or a boat.
	It was sort of create a vessel, create something and my voice will come.
	And I knew what it was.
	I needed to set up something.
	On social media, which was more organized than Instagram.
	So within a few weeks, I'd created a website called Myles Lee TV and a YouTube channel called Myles Lee TV.
	Because I knew if there's some of the things I want to say a little bit out there, YouTube will just take us off, won't they?
	But if you've got your own website, that's the way of securing your content.
	So if somebody, you know, who's an alternative media producer says, oh I've been taking off YouTube, I just think why didn't you back it all up on your own website and get people subscribing and buying Marsley TV mugs, you know, and t-shirts?
	You need to get organised!
	So anyway, so build a vessel and the line will come.
	So within days Peter Whittle from New Culture Forum contacted me and said, Who I've always admired.
	I love the way that he went for the jugular with the Mayor of London about the Statues Commission.
	I thought, God, he's an icon.
	And I wrote to him, I said, we need statues of you on the fourth plinth.
	He didn't like that.
	Yeah.
	He's amazing.
	We've become such good friends.
	Yeah, he's a wonderful man.
	So he said, would you do an interview with me?
	Again, because my health is up and down, it took a while to organise it.
	But we did it, I did it from here, and he was in London.
	And what did we talk about?
	Pretty free-ranging subject.
	Oh, mainly the art world and identity politics, but it really connected with people.
	And it's had 43,000 views so far, which is as good as people who are far better known than me.
	I'm an obscure oil painter, but he has journalists and writers on.
	Gadsad.
	He's just about to interview Rod Dreher who wrote Live Not By Lies and The Benedict Option.
	You've got to read Live Not By Lies.
	I'm going to send you a copy of that.
	The Benedict Option?
	The Benedict Option, yes.
	Is that what I was talking about with Laura the other day?
	About How basically it's the ultimate black pill that we just, we form our little groups and we... Well yeah, his argument isn't that we actually remove ourselves from society but we acknowledge the fact that contemporary society now has become so corrupted and so sick that we have to preserve through gathering in groups either virtually or in the real world.
	And, you know, holding on to the culture, holding on to our cultural memory and what we've inherited.
	That's what Roger Scruton helped people to do in Eastern Europe by going there when it was very dangerous to do so, and gave them literature and Bibles and whatever, and encouraged them to keep their own culture alive.
	And he was given an award, wasn't he, recently by Polish president for taking action.
	So, yeah, we're veering off the subject again.
	Let me go back, yeah, but I don't mind if you don't.
	I've got, I can, I have got like a filing system in my head.
	Can we go back to Harvard?
	Yeah.
	So this, as I mentioned Jordan Peterson in this.
	Yeah.
	This was before, this was in the middle of 2019, I think.
	Yeah, I'm 19.
	So I've always been able to manifest things in my life through my consciousness.
	This is another backward step in the story but since I was very young I was aware of this archetypical world which existed all around us and interpenetrated the physical world and I was introduced to that through weird writers that I'd come across like Dion Fortune which was the pen name of Violet Firth who was originally with the Society of the Golden Dawn.
	She set up the Society of the Inner Light, I think, in Hampstead in the 40s.
	And I came across some books called Applied Magical Arts and Psychic Self-Defence, because I've always been afflicted by negative psychic attacks since I was a small child, because I'm very, very open to things like this.
	So I found books in the local library that would help me to find a way of dealing with it, protecting yourself through sort of magical means.
	How old were you?
	Oh, I was very precocious.
	I was reading and copying the illustrations in Grey's Anatomy when I was 10, and I was reading books like this when I was 13.
	I was reading Dostoyevsky when I was 13.
	How old were you when you had your first kind of psyche?
	I was at Malvern, because we were both at school at Malvern, although you were two years older than me.
	So we were in the same house when we numbered nine.
	I had a room which was in between, it was like a little connecting corridor between the boys' side of the house, which was dormitories, and the masters' side of the house, on the second floor, I think.
	And I was in bed one evening and I sensed a presence in the room.
	So I would have been 15.
	That's when you were given your own bed study as opposed to a dormitory.
	Yeah.
	And there was this incredible presence and I could smell it.
	It was like the smell of water on granite.
	That's all I can explain.
	It was something very ancient, very weird.
	And there was a presence in the room and I could sense something very close to my head.
	And I held the top of my duvet very tightly and it was being pulled to the bottom of the bed so strongly that my knuckles were sort of straining.
	And eventually I couldn't hold it any longer and the duvet shot to my feet.
	So all the duvet was stripped off my body and went down and ruffled up by my feet.
	And then a voice in my ear said, where is the snake?
	I mean, really bizarre.
	So I hadn't even been reading Jung or any of those writers at the time.
	Anyway, the next night, and I thought, what do I do?
	I mean, I was absolutely petrified because it was a physical thing that pulled it out.
	I couldn't have done that.
	And it was so creased.
	It was as though it had been compacted like in a vacuum.
	And the next night, the same thing happened with the same voice, the same words.
	Where is the snake?
	And it was literally inches from my right ear.
	And the third night it said the same thing but then there was an answer, the snake is in the grass.
	So again they're quite archetypical images, isn't it?
	The snake is a symbol of evil.
	Why was it happening to me there?
	Why?
	So the next night I couldn't find a full Bible but I found Mark's Gospel somewhere in the house, down the library.
	There was a little library, wasn't there, looked over the... That funny little library, yes.
	Funny one.
	Below where the smokers went.
	Exactly, yeah.
	So it always smells of smoke.
	I didn't think it had many books in it, did it?
	It had hardly any books!
	No!
	It wasn't really a library was it?
	No!
	We had two decent libraries in the school.
	Yeah, the Memorial Library.
	Let no one think that Morville was going to be illiterate.
	Oh no, it was amazing.
	Yeah, it was good.
	So I found a paperback copy of St Mark's Gospel.
	I thought, well that'd be protection.
	So the next night, it was always quarter to four because I had one of those LED lights.
	It was 3.45 when it happened.
	Every single night.
	So it happened again.
	I thought, before you get to tell me where the snake is this time, I'm going to say In the name of Jesus, go away.
	And it went immediately and I felt the energy dissipate.
	Something relaxed.
	Anyway, from that moment on, because I'd had this direct experience, I didn't enjoy going to chapel and doing hymns and listening to, although Keith was a great chaplain, that's not what really motivated me.
	It was this physical experience of spiritual energy, vivid experience, so tangible that it touched me and I could feel the breath on my ear.
	So then I suppose I told somebody at breakfast that this had happened.
	The word got out, probably Richard, who I was really good friends, your brother Richard, we were really good friends, he was a year older than me.
	And he was open to all that, being creative, and he'd go, that's really cool, that's amazing.
	And I said, well, I'm Christian.
	I was saved by Jesus, this thing was going to drag me into the grass.
	It was terrifying.
	So I don't know, how do we get on to that?
	Yeah, so Harvard.
	I realised after this that if I visualise things with intention and with emotion, it wouldn't materialise in the real world.
	So I decided to be an artist and people and situations just gravitated towards me.
	I didn't have to work for them, I didn't have to look for them.
	The right person would just appear and say, that would be the perfect person, they'd say, I'm here, somehow I have this feeling that you need this.
	And this happens right up to the present day, even to the extent that Ben, my assistant now, I needed an assistant to handle the correspondence I'm getting and all the other stuff, you know, the website, uploading images to the films to the website.
	And I woke up the next morning and he said, I'm Ben and I just felt God prompted me to contact you because you need some admin assistance.
	He said that?
	Yeah.
	Whoa.
	Yeah.
	It's... And he's perfect.
	And his wife is... She'd done a film course.
	And his wife's brother is a filmmaker in Guam, who's coming back to the UK.
	So he's editing all of these videos for me.
	He designs the icons for the YouTube channels.
	He handles all the... we've created a store page with these sort of mugs and whatever.
	He sets all that up for me.
	He answers a lot of my emails because I get literally hundreds and hundreds.
	He's amazed by how much correspondence I get.
	The things I say on Instagram, these little essays I write with the photographs.
	really speak to people.
	When I start writing them, it's as though a flow comes through.
	I'm not writing, I'm channeling it, certainly channeling it.
	Because I use words which are, I mean I've got a rich vocabulary, but I use words which animate the text.
	I use pangandrum or whatever.
	You know how Terry Wogan always had a very rich language and it was to draw you in.
	Yes, absolutely.
	So the power of the word, which is the logos, so that's the power of the logos.
	It's coming through you and it picks the perfect words, but it's using me as a vessel.
	By the way, did I take those brown pills or not?
	Yes, you did.
	I did, good.
	We should explain what the brown pills are.
	Yeah, well, will you explain what they are?
	Well, you're fine.
	You won't need to go to the loo or anything like that.
	But there is psilocybin.
	So it's the latest craze, or has been for a while, in Silicon Valley.
	It's called microdosing.
	So psilocybin is a chemical compound which is found in certain mushrooms.
	And if you take large doses of them, as I did at Morvan actually, I had an amazing tributary experience.
	I found them growing on the hills in Malvern.
	Oh, well done.
	Yeah, I'll tell you a little bit more about them in a moment.
	Then, obviously, it's LSD, close to LSD.
	It's called psilocybin, which has been used in ceremonies by native populations for thousands of years in order to break through into another realm, into the greater reality.
	If you've experienced it, You realize that the three-dimensional environment we're in is a very, very clogged, dense situation.
	And this is what I learned through studying the Kabbalah for, I think, ten years.
	So part of the teachings of the Society of the Inner Light were Pathworking.
	So I would every day draw the Tree of Life, the Qabbalistic Tree, and it's all about moving your consciousness up from Malkuth at the bottom, right up through Tipareth, which is the solar plexus, up to Kitha, which is spiritual consciousness, and then above.
	So it's a fantastic, it's a very abstract system which you have to have a lot of time to concentrate on I suppose.
	That's why I was lucky as an artist because I've been able to incorporate all of this study, this hermetic study into my life.
	In fact it is the centre of my life and the painting is the other thing I do but my hermetic studies and my consciousness, lifting my consciousness has been central to my, that's the great work they call it, As Above So Below.
	Right yeah um do you um I mean does it help that you've you already had this To be able to communicate with the spirit world, I mean you have this sort of special gift.
	Well yeah, there's a photograph we can perhaps show on screen which I took when I was at Malvern when I was I think 15 or 16 and it was a slow release analogue photograph on celluloid where I moved my head during the image and I was trying to convey the idea that I'm in this world but I'm also In another world.
	And it was inspired directly from seeing a documentary made by Melvin Bragg of Francis Bacon in 1986.
	Just before I went to Malvern.
	I think it was within two years.
	So I saw the documentary.
	It was the South Bank show.
	Hello, welcome to the South Bank show.
	Today we're interviewing Francis Bickard.
	And it started out being, oh Francis, look at this picture.
	Tell us a little bit about this.
	And they were using a slide projector.
	And you could see that Francis was getting a bit bored by this whole process.
	Oh, I don't like that one.
	Don't show that one.
	That sort of thing.
	They ended up with a bottle of wine each, I think, in a restaurant in Soho, getting quite tipsy.
	And that was pure television magic.
	And it made an impact.
	I must have been 14 or 15.
	I go to Malvern and I think, hmm, there's something magical about this guy.
	So I'm going to take a photograph, I had a sort of civil defence coat on, and put the tripod up, set it on a self-timer, and I just looked at the camera and then looked to the side like that.
	And it's created this iconic, it's so nice, I've made 1,500 postcards out of it recently, to give to my subscribers on Patreon.
	Are you like the Popes?
	The Pope.
	Oh, the Screaming Pope.
	Yeah, well I suppose it is blurred in that way.
	There's a photograph and I just saw it in a magazine yesterday.
	There's a picture of Francis Bacon, I think he's sitting in a boat or something, and it's blurred.
	I must have seen this picture as well.
	And it looks a bit, it's emulating the way he painted.
	So, you know, this blurred image.
	And I just love the fact that it's the face which we identified with the person.
	When we imagine someone, we imagine a clear view of the face, don't we?
	But it's blurred.
	It's here, but it's not here.
	And that's why I feel that, you know, when I walk outside in the Royal Crescent where we are now, I don't see the tourists and the cars.
	I see nannies in black lacquered, pushing black lacquered prams and you know, everything is kind of... The psychiatrography, the kind of overlays... Yes, it's all there.
	Because Richard, James, sorry, I'm thinking of your brother all the time.
	Do you like Dick?
	Yeah, I like Dick.
	And you know, Time is a sphere.
	This is another thing I've discovered since, well, I've known since I was probably 13 or 14.
	We don't live in a linear universe.
	We only perceive it in that way because we have to operate in a very specific frequency.
	We have to, otherwise we wouldn't be able to get up in the morning and make our breakfast.
	But the real reality, which you can experience through mystical states or through Shed loads of psilocybin or a DMT experience through ayahuasca ceremonies, things like that, breaks the boundary and it switches off the part of the brain which catalogues things.
	You know, the organising part of the brain, which for most people who experience is a terrifying experience.
	You know, if these ayahuasca ceremonies, it's a confrontation with the archetypical world, the greater reality.
	It's impossible to experience it without the real experience.
	It's like, what's the difference between talking about swimming and actually swimming?
	Or the taste without actually eating?
	If you've had the experience, it's totally natural for you to say, yes, I experienced reality.
	But if you hadn't, it would just be a concept.
	There's a wonderful book, which I heard about through Joe Rogan podcast.
	With the writer of the Immortality Key, and the foreword was written by Hancock, the guy who wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, Graham Hancock, who lives here in Bath.
	In order to get it published, I think he had to say, I've never had these experiences.
	By the way, I've never had ayahuasca, I've never had peyote, whatever.
	But the book is an analysis of the use of psychedelic compounds throughout history, especially in the Greek mystery schools, the Eleusinian mysteries.
	A book was written called The Road to Eleusis by, I think, Gordon Wasson in the 1970s.
	And it was all theoretical because they hadn't allowed anybody at that point to go into the museums and test the residues, the contents of these great big craters.
	They call them a mixing crater where they would mix either wine with some ergot, which is a sort of fungi which grows on wheat.
	So part of the mystery school practice was that you didn't just go in there and listen to lectures in order to find out about the greater reality, you had a physical confrontation You pass through a portal into reality and it was life-changing.
	All the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, they all went through this process.
	A lot of the writings on this were probably edited, heavily edited, throughout the Enlightenment period, you would imagine, the Victorian period.
	But there's enough there for us to know that there was a transformational, hallucinogenic experience that they had.
	Which a lot of people would just label as a drugs experience.
	It's not.
	It wasn't done for entertainment.
	It's actually an experience which is harrowing.
	It was done all over the world.
	Ireland and Ukraine, I'm sure they did things like that.
	I'm sure it wasn't a burial chamber.
	And it was like a rite of passage.
	So when you were, I would imagine, 18 or 21, something like that.
	But it does more than change the way you look at the world.
	It transforms your consciousness.
	And I think it's no coincidence that all of these previous civilizations were able to create culture and civilization in a way that we can only dream of.
	You know, we can basically put a few blocks of stone or concrete on top of each other and call it a dwelling or a public building.
	Or we can put a shark in a glass tank.
	Yeah, well, it's anti-art.
	And make a lot of money out of it.
	Yeah, but in that art, in Brit art and conceptual art, there's no portal to the divine, is there, as Jordan Peterson said in a lecture recently.
	He's done a series of lectures on the books of the Bible, and at one point he was just on stage, and I love these moments which are unscripted, where he just walked over to pick up a glass of water, I think, from the thing, and he said, artists and art, artists and art, well, They're kind of portals to the divine, aren't they?
	And this, very quietly at first, the sort of applause started in the audience and you felt your fingers start tingling because he's said something so profound and he's mentioned that in his latest book.
	What's it called?
	Twelve Moral Rules for Life.
	Beyond Order, I think it's called.
	It just arrived yesterday.
	I'm going to start reading it, but somebody sent me a squash.
	Do you know what?
	I was going to bring you one and I didn't.
	It was on pre-order for weeks.
	But yes, in that book, because a friend of mine called Chris who runs an Instagram page called Excavator Blog, who I'm going to interview very soon.
	He's a genius.
	He puts yellow highlighter over some of the pages and he sent me a link saying, there was a quote from this speech that he made, art and artists are a portal to divine and we've lost that sense of what art is because we think of it as a product, it's entertainment and we think of culture now as something we consume.
	And I tell you how frustrated I get when I open, the only app I have for a news site, mainstream is the Telegraph.
	So I look at the main things.
	There's something designed to make you feel angry on the front pages.
	And then I go to the culture section.
	And there's no culture there.
	It's all television.
	It's all... I'm sorry, I don't... I mean, people have different views.
	To me, culture comes from the word cult.
	It comes from a transformational experience.
	When I go to Rome and I look at a painting or a Giambologna sculpture, I'm physically transformed by it.
	It's something which stays with me.
	It's an experience which is so rich and profound and you want to relive it.
	You can relive it in your imagination.
	Television is something which is, this is what Francis Bacon said to me, he said it's ephemeral, get out of television.
	When I was working at Channel 4, we became friends by the way.
	I mention it again because this photograph that I took magnetised reality, it draws things to you.
	When you do things with intent and emotion, it's like a magnet.
	So I took this photograph of Malvern.
	I left Malvern two years later, three years later.
	I go to London.
	I think, what am I going to do?
	I want to do something exciting.
	I think about the documentary with Melvin Bragg.
	And I was walking through the streets of London.
	I thought, I need a job to supplement my income because I was on a university grant.
	We still had grants then.
	And I walked past Channel 4 television and I thought, I want to walk there.
	I want to work there.
	But I didn't have the courage to walk straight in, so I went to a pub first and had a pint.
	And then I went back into the reception, and there was an Indian girl on reception called Meena, I remember.
	And I said, have you got a job for me, Meena?
	And she looked at me kind of astonished, but it was the 80s, it was like 1988, 89.
	And those sorts of things happened.
	You didn't go through the applications portal and have to claim that you've been devoted to diversity and equality for the last 20 years.
	It's like, well, I'll make a phone call.
	So I went home.
	No, I went back to the halls of residence.
	I was living in one of those concrete blocks in Hampstead.
	It was at Westfield College, part of the University of London.
	And somebody knocked on the door, because we didn't have mobile phones, and there was a payphone in the hall.
	And this boy said, oh, there's a phone call from Channel 4 for you.
	So I picked, the phone was dangling, picked it up.
	She said, my name's Barbara Angel.
	Barbara Angel.
	She said, do you want to come and see me tomorrow?
	I said, I really do.
	So I met Barbara Angel and she said, well, what do you want to do?
	I said, I'd do anything for you.
	I've loved Channel 4.
	I was sitting in front of the television in 1982 when the Countdown, the first Countdown programme came on at five, I think it was five o'clock in the afternoon.
	It was the fourth channel.
	We had ITV, BBC Two, BBC One.
	1982, I'm sure it was.
	Channel 4 started up and I was so excited about it.
	I sat in front of the TV waiting for it to spring to life.
	So she knew I was interested in the company.
	I said, I'll do anything.
	I'll deliver wine to the boardroom, you know, anything.
	So she said, the next day she'd come back and she gave me a little device which clipped onto my jeans and anybody in the company could phone me and it would bring up the last four numbers of their telephone number and I was called a humper.
	She said, you are a humper.
	I think I told you that last time.
	Yeah, no, I just remembered those things that one had.
	Yeah, bleepers, weren't they?
	Pager devices.
	They were like rectangles.
	Yeah.
	Well, mine was.
	Mine vibrated.
	Yeah, that's right.
	And so you'd phone the number.
	It was like being Mr. Ben.
	You never know which environment you're going to be in next.
	And I think the second person who called me was Michael Grade, who was the DG of Channel 4 and was on the second floor and all the managers.
	And I think he just wanted to see who this guy was, because it was a small company then.
	It was based in Thore companies on Charlotte Street near Soho Square.
	The press office was in a separate building.
	So he said, oh, so hello Jonathan.
	So what's your story?
	I said, I'm studying history of art at university.
	He said, well, I've got some rather chipped coffee mugs here.
	Would you mind popping over to Tottenham Court Road and getting some new ones from heels for me?
	I said, I'll happily do that.
	So I came back with these lovely green gold rimmed coffee cups with saucers.
	And he said, good choice.
	And then he said, do you want to pick a sofa for me?
	So I went back to Eales.
	This is in my first week.
	I was choosing sofas and things like that.
	And I had this, it was called a TAN card.
	I could basically go in every department in the building, including the studios downstairs and the broadcast where the metal tapes were broadcasting to the country, the programs.
	It was, I would have paid to work there.
	I loved it.
	Within a month I'd met Richard Attenborough, the film director.
	Yeah, the talented one.
	The talented Attenborough.
	Dickie.
	Dickie Attenborough, yes.
	Are you about to diss him?
	No.
	No, no, no.
	I like Dickie Attenborough.
	So who's the guy who does the wildlife things?
	That's David.
	David's the dodgy one.
	Yeah.
	So Richard, Dickie Attenborough, and you know, so Michael Grade had these red, red braces.
	That was his thing.
	Do you remember that?
	Such an 80s thing.
	Yeah, well it was so 80s it was like...
	Red braces and he had a blue shirt with white collar.
	That's it, yes he did.
	Very charismatic, lovely guy.
	I mean it was amazing.
	And he's part of a dynasty, isn't he?
	The Grades, who go back to Lou Grade from UBC.
	So I was kind of in awe of him.
	I was always fascinated by broadcasting so I was a very early child, young child, early child.
	I was a late child actually, it was overdue.
	Anyway, so one day Michael took a bit of a liking to me because I was so enthusiastic and fascinated by all aspects of broadcasting.
	He said, oh we're going down to the studio, do you want to pop down?
	He said, so Dickie Attenborough was the chairman at the time and he would come in maybe once every two weeks just for some big meetings.
	We went down to this little studio, I didn't know we were getting onto this anyway, and it had two, they looked like Daleks, they were sort of I'm checking.
	Yeah, it's okay.
	Is mine still a red square on the back?
	Yeah.
	So we went down to shoot, just the three of us, and Dickie Attenborough said, have you ever used a studio camera before?
	They used to be these enormously heavy things with a big hand on the back.
	So you twist it one way and it would sort of, it would zoom in.
	Yeah.
	And he stood behind me.
	He said, you know, this is how to do it.
	So you basically drive it like a, like a vehicle with pedals and things like that.
	And he showed me how to use the... Dickie Attenborough.
	Dickie Attenborough showed me how to use a broadcast camera, yeah.
	A studio camera.
	He said, it's a bit like a motorbike.
	So on the right, if you twist it, you know, it zooms in.
	And it was amazing.
	So you see in the black, white modern monitor.
	So in this little studio, the only program we made was a thing called Right to Reply, which was originally presented by a woman called Linda Agron, who had this sort of great mop of sort of grey hair.
	And it was the equivalent of Points of View, if people in Britain remember that, on BBC.
	An opportunity for viewers of BBC television programs to talk to the producers or the directors when they had a gripe with the issue, with the program.
	And this was their equivalent, it was called Right to Reply.
	And I looked at the sofas on set and I thought...
	I'd quite like to do that one day.
	And I had the opportunity to present one episode.
	Linda Agram moved, somebody else took over.
	This came about because I had this TAN card that could go anywhere in the company.
	There was another guy called Jonathan who used to do the voiceovers there, from a little suite.
	So you'd see the Channel 4 logo come up and then you'd hear, and now on Channel 4, a striking adaptation of The Tempest by Derek Jarman.
	And I thought, I could do that.
	Yeah, and you could.
	So as luck would have it, three days after me imagining the guy being a little bit too ill one evening to actually come into work, they said, oh shit, does nobody do that?
	I said, I'll do it.
	I mean, this is a thing that would happen in the 80s.
	It would never happen now because it would all be stratified, wouldn't it?
	You'd have to be in a union.
	You'd have to be in an acting union to do this.
	Do you think that the 80s was the last... Oh, it's such fun.
	Because you and I know that the world is... has gone to shit.
	I mean, in ways that...
	It would be hard to describe without depressing anyone who was... We'll have to do a bit of blackpilling later.
	We'll do blackpilling.
	But so... Minds were more open.
	It was so creative because we're still living the analogue life.
	This is... I made a little video about this recently.
	The analogue life as opposed to the digital life.
	So things... We're scanning all my celluloid negatives at the moment.
	The mystery and magic of the light in those images is you can't compare it to digital photography if you're sensitive to it because it's all created through light.
	It's like records.
	Yes.
	Analogue sound is so much warmer than digital sound.
	It's created through vibration.
	So once CDs came along with their digital sound, that's it?
	I think so, yeah.
	So I haven't bought a record player, but I do want to do that.
	Yeah, that's why I try to do a lot.
	Well, all my painting is done by hand.
	You know, I use oil paints.
	Sometimes I grind my own oil paints.
	I draw with pencils.
	I never use CAD or anything like that.
	And I don't really use very, you know, specific measuring devices.
	I measure out gardens with my feet.
	So that's 12 inches.
	My feet are about 12 inches in shoes.
	And then that's my foot measurement.
	So it's all slightly on bong.
	It's handy having a foot that's a foot long.
	It's very useful.
	It is.
	If you're measuring a path, you don't need to get a tape.
	So a foot that's a foot long, what's the actual shoe size?
	It's 11, I think.
	Depends on the shoe, but it's always, when I'm buying them, I make sure they are 12 inches long so I can do my survey.
	So my clients, when they see I paint these pictures of country houses, they think it's fun.
	After lunch, I'll go out in the garden, they see me walking like a pigeon across the lawn.
	One, two, three, four, like this.
	In your clown shoes?
	Because I don't have an assistant when I'm doing that.
	Am I wired?
	In your clown shoes?
	Yeah.
	Well, I have these very nice... Well, if you're telling me you buy a size larger, No, no, it's not larger.
	No, they're right.
	I've got huge feet.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	I'm nearly six foot four.
	I'm looking at them now, they don't look enormous.
	It's the pattern.
	It's the pattern.
	It's the flowers.
	That is an illusion I'm creating.
	It breaks up the surface of the foot.
	I think so.
	Covering it in flowers.
	By the way, I think I can feel something from these, from the... Oh, the psilocybin.
	Yeah, so they're called microdosing.
	So, it's amazing.
	So the theory is that when monkeys came out of the canopies, because there was a change in the climate millions of years ago, they came down to the woodland basin and they started discovering mushrooms which were coprophilic.
	They grow on the shit of certain animals and they have high doses of psilocybin.
	When they ingested that into their systems on a regular basis, it transformed their consciousness so that they started developing tool-using skills.
	Right.
	And then there are other stages in evolution of human beings where the theory is the development of script and language was kicked off by human interaction through a symbiotic relationship with psychedelic plants.
	I think that's extraordinary.
	Some people say, oh, the Anunnaki came down and gave abilities to human beings.
	But it seems to be that this is a strange, flukish, weird thing.
	Because, of course, one thing that naturalists are correct about, it is a whole system.
	Geyer is a whole system.
	It's living.
	And we receive what we need from the natural world.
	We use synthetic medicines now, don't we, which are copies of the original drugs that were used.
	And evidence of that is that horses, if they have some sort of problem with their stomach, they'll go and they know which plants to eat.
	They gravitate towards certain plants to cure them.
	Horses are so clever and lovely.
	I don't know many horses, actually.
	You do.
	I know.
	I have relationships with horses and I love them.
	Do you?
	Yeah, I do.
	Like Catherine the Great.
	No, not like... You would have to sully the beauty of my relationship with horses.
	I've got to keep it spicy.
	So, anyway, obviously, I don't know who decided to use very small doses of this sort of micro-dosing, but I get them from Canada, these little capsules, and they've got very, very little in there.
	It must be like a fraction of one mushroom, perhaps.
	And it's mixed also with other mushrooms, like lion's mane, which has other health benefits.
	And you're supposed to just take one a day.
	I take three because I'm a big guy.
	Well I'm not a big guy, you made me take three.
	Oh yeah, you're gonna be flying.
	So I talked, but again I didn't really know what the effects of this would be, but I talked to my friend Eliana who's a photographer in Toronto.
	She's just photographed Jordan Peterson and his whole family, really beautiful images.
	That was amazing because we were talking about Peterson and she gets a phone call from Michaela saying, would you come photograph my family?
	You see that's that's this weird thing again.
	Yeah I could talk about that for hours.
	You remember Noel Edmonds?
	Oh yeah.
	When he was talking about when he went through the phase where he went public about sending out messages to the universe.
	Oh I didn't know about that.
	Yeah oh you know he does this and so it's it's a thing it's not just it's something that you just just you do I mean quite a few people I think I didn't know he did that.
	Yeah.
	Interesting.
	But he was mocked for it, of course.
	Well, he would be.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, so the microdosing, they use it in enhanced creativity.
	And I phoned Eliana one day, and she was in the car, and I said, I've had these kind of amazing experiences.
	I'll be in the car myself.
	And suddenly, I've got this whole, I need to start the recording on the phone, the audio recording.
	I'll pull to the side of the road and I come out with this whole, it's like a spiritual manifesto.
	And she said, I've had exactly the same thing.
	But what happens is there's no ifs or buts or errs.
	It comes out in an absolute stream of consciousness using all the correct phraseology, all the correct vocabulary.
	And when I go back, some of the words I've used seem a little bit obscure and I think, I'll look them up and they are absolutely perfectly tailored to the meaning of what it is that I've said.
	So my vocabulary is spontaneously expanded without actually having contact with that vocabulary in books or reading material.
	So that's, I think it's called the difference between inductive and deductive knowledge.
	Right.
	Something that comes through to you.
	And this is what a lot of the early philosophers were talking about, Plato was talking about.
	It's a connection to some sort of archetypical world.
	And that's why I keep mentioning Jung and Jordan Peterson, because his Maps of Meaning, which took ten years to write, the book he wrote before Twelve Rules for Life.
	We've talked about the fact that we're all fed, or if we're attuned, we're fed by this body of knowledge which is our inheritance, which we neglected to our detriment.
	And that's the thing that we need to sort of nest within.
	And it's the thing which, especially creative people, need to be in possession of.
	Because we're in the position to hand this on to the next generation, the people who come after us.
	Yeah, but the psilocybin, I suppose the people in Silicon Valley take it in order, not so they stay awake like ProPlus pills, but so that they can make connections and come up with ideas that they would never have thought of coming up with otherwise.
	I'm sorry to hear that Silicon Valley people take it.
	I know that, well that's the problem.
	They are the agents of darkness.
	Yes.
	I wanted to ask you about this.
	I mean, since I went Since I went down the rabbit hole and started realizing some of the shit that's really going on, I've become aware that lots of people of my party, of our party, are also in touch with God.
	And do you see what's going on in the world as a struggle between good and evil?
	Yeah, it's a spiritual battle.
	So we've got the external manifestation of it is a cultural war.
	It's very easy to persuade people that this is a culture war and it's a cultural revolution because you can see that because every time you switch on TV or social media It's a manipulated reality and it's agenda-driven and it's like being hit over the head with a hammer the whole time, isn't it?
	I can't listen to Radio 4 because it's all militant this or that.
	It's anti-male, it's anti-white and it's unrelenting.
	The next stage is to accept that this is a spiritual battle and it's a battle which has taken place throughout the whole of history and I think the only way of being able to really understand it is by moving into more of a spiritual environment yourself and then it just becomes Really obvious.
	So for me, I said I was baptised, that was sort of a random thing.
	I'd always thought, toyed with the idea of Catholicism, even though I don't like organised religion, I don't like organised anything because I think truth is far more organic than something that's organised.
	I don't like the idea of there being priests in between you and in a divine presence.
	So I don't go to church, I just, you know, I have more of a mystical approach.
	No, I think a lot of us having that experience, the number of people who've said to me, look, I believe in God, but the Church is not doing it.
	The Church has failed us, basically.
	I mean, you were lucky with your Catholic priest.
	I know that he came out to see me.
	But look at the Pope now.
	I mean, he's not the kind of guy you'd want to be in charge of your religion, is he?
	No, none of the Catholics I know are supportive.
	In fact, I guess if I was to say that the forces he represents are the forces of evil.
	Of course.
	Absolutely.
	Which is frightening.
	He's behind The Great Reset.
	I mean, he's fully on for The Great Reset, which I know you've touched on with some really important speakers.
	And yeah, he's an antipoet by the sounds of it.
	Yes.
	So, yeah, I mean, my friend who introduced me to the priest who came to see me, I mean, a lot of them focused on this Vatican II, which happened, I think, in the 1960s, where it was a modernisation of it.
	You can understand that people wanted to hear the word in their own language, but there were lots of changes that were made in Vatican II, which they see that as the big schism, where things really went downhill for the Catholic Church.
	So I appreciate the churches in an aesthetic way, but I find a lot of them quite morbid.
	I don't really want to look at pictures of flayed saints.
	I don't think that's very life-affirming.
	I was actually with somebody who was Hindu for a long time, and I loved Images of Ganesha and Krishna because they seem so joyful.
	They're all different colours, they throw powder around.
	For me, spirituality is about a game, a sort of playfulness, a creativity and that's the energy that fills me, not guilt.
	Control and, you know, that sort of strict ritual.
	But I do talk to Jesus.
	I think there is something extraordinarily powerful about the name Jesus because it's been used for so many, 2000 years.
	If you're in the presence of something which is deeply dark and sinister, If you bring this Christ awareness to you, it's almost like you've shone this sort of flashlight around the room and it highlights everything and you can hear this discernment I keep talking about.
	So for instance, if you watch Klaus Schwab, when he introduced the President Xi Jinping, the President of China, Yeah, President Xi Jinping.
	Yes, yeah.
	As the first speaker at the World Economic Forum meeting in January, I prepare myself before I watch these things.
	I say, I say, Jesus, show me, show me the truth of this situation.
	Or if I'm confused about somebody I've met, let them trip themselves up.
	You know, give me a little yellow, I would say, yellow highlighter moment.
	And something they say will suddenly will be written in text in front of me.
	It will say, ah, there you are.
	So I prime myself.
	So I watch this thing and this heavily scripted script.
	What I noticed was that the script that the President of China was giving was almost identical to the script that Klaus Schwab was presenting.
	And then Klaus Schwab takes over after and says, thank you, President of China.
	You mentioned four issues and you repeated them over again to hammer the point home and almost sort of tapped the President on the head.
	If you have a spiritual awareness, if you develop that, then these things shine out with such clarity that there's no denying them.
	Some friends of mine near Malvern invited me to go and visit them in the gap in between lockdown.
	They said, tell us about this Great Reset, whatever.
	And we sat at the breakfast table and I showed them this clip on YouTube on my phone and they watched it but I could still sense there was a slight distance because it was mediated by the screen and anything you see on a screen is...
	People's reaction to it is truth, but it's not living in some way.
	And what I really wanted them to see was what I could feel, which was this emanation, I felt, of pure evil, which is what The Great Reset represents.
	It's anti-human.
	It's about the ending of independent thought.
	I do believe that vaccines are all part of that.
	I think there's some sort of genetic manipulation that could be facilitated, perhaps at a later date, through vaccines.
	And so that's something else I've been trying to present through Instagram, weirdly, amongst all these pictures of beautiful, you know, sculptures.
	I'll just say, by the way, I am here also to bring awareness, to bring your awareness to the threat that the Great Reset represents.
	Because for me, that is the end of humanity.
	Well, yes.
	So, your understanding of good and evil.
	Is it a given that good will triumph?
	Well, there's always this battle going on, like cut to the chase.
	Please say yes, the good guys win.
	Well, I think we're in for a rocky ride.
	The thing is, the stories we tell ourselves, I mean this is what Christopher Booker was great on, you know, that there are seven basic plots and we make sense of our world through storytelling.
	That's the first act.
	Yeah, that's a good way of looking at it.
	These stories are a guide.
	They tell us how to behave and what to expect and they make sense of our world.
	Well up until the sort of the invention of the okay you could argue that the first antihero was maybe Milton's Satan but really it wasn't till the 60s that that whole nihilistic thing came in where The man with no name.
	The celebration of people that might hitherto have been considered not good people.
	Suddenly everything went negative.
	But up until then the stories we've told ourselves have always been about Heroes.
	People doing good and triumphing over evil.
	But were we deluding ourselves?
	No, those were repositories of wisdom that had been accumulated by the wisest people in society over many generations.
	It was an oral tradition.
	It was so important that they would remember them, as you remember Amnesty International.
	Well, Homer.
	Homer was recited long before it was...
	Yeah, so those were our identity, that's how we conceived of ourselves.
	Up until, I'd say, it was really active until the 20s and 30s.
	There was a big schism after the First World War as well, things started going awry then.
	What with the modernists?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I think Virginia Woolf's got a lot to answer for.
	I mean, I'd consign her to the dustbin of history.
	I impersonate her sometimes.
	Go on, do your Virginia Woolf impersonation.
	I was actually thinking of Vita Six for West.
	No, we'll go into the impersonations later.
	But yeah, it's when modernism unhitched itself, didn't it, from the great traditions.
	And then that's continued with the dissing of the canon, the Western canon of literature.
	I've been reading some great books by Harold Bloom about this recently.
	Now, I'm not totally in favour of having this calcified canon of Western literature, but it's a good place to start.
	It's a good place to begin.
	I think you should be.
	One of my previous podcast guests, whose name temporarily alludes to me, has written very, very well on the importance of the canon.
	Really?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Oh, it's absolutely brilliant.
	I used to have it By my by my loo because I just used to dip into it and it was I'll make sure you get a copy and in fact We're gonna have a break soon so that I can Cut the film thing into two halves, otherwise it would be impossible to... Let's do that now.
	Yeah, should we do that?
	Yeah.
	So, Jonathan, we had just had the most amazing thing there, didn't we?
	Because I was actually thinking, the three pill psilocybin might be okay for you, but I was feeling... I was slightly tripping out there.
	Not so that I'm out of control, but definitely I'm on another plane.
	Are you?
	Yeah.
	That's a bit novel.
	I thought you were looking a little entranced.
	Yes, I think entranced is exactly what it is.
	It's mutual.
	When you were doing this, when you were doing this with your finger, I was going, oh wow.
	Oh hell, what have I done?
	Anyway, the tea will be fine.
	We were talking about the Canon and you said to me before, this is extraordinary, you said to me about these sort of moments of synchronicity or whatever that you get when you start doing microdosing and we were talking about, I was correcting you on the Canon, that the Canon is not Whatever you said it was.
	You could see it as an ossified collection of ancient literature, but you need it.
	It's a reflection of... It's an accurate representation of what is good and what is bad.
	Absolutely.
	Anyway, the essay that I was thinking of was absolutely brilliant and I was trying to remember the name of the author of this essay, who's been on my podcast I think twice and he's a very clever chap and his book ought to be far better read than it is.
	And I was thinking, oh God, I'm going to have to... You couldn't remember his name, could you?
	I couldn't remember his name.
	I'm going to have to look on my phone, that means disconnecting it from the... Can we just, one second, I need to... I think we've established that probably three psilocybin pills is maybe too much for me, because I'm not your height.
	No, you're slightly more... You're 6'1"?
	I'm nearly 6'4".
	But I'm attuned to it, you see, so I've been having it regularly for a few months.
	This is your first experience.
	This is my first experience.
	So I have been slightly tripping out.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	You said when I was moving my fingers.
	When you were moving your finger, I was just going, wow.
	I thought you looked... I either thought you didn't really like what I was saying or you were just a bit tired.
	No.
	Or bored.
	No, no, no.
	It was neither of those things.
	You were kind of watching my finger a little bit.
	I was spaced out.
	But I remember when you were seeing the praises of microdosing a while back, you were saying you get these moments of extraordinary synchronicity.
	If you remember, we were talking before we had our tea break.
	You've got the Spode.
	I've got Florentine.
	Roderick Spode.
	Yeah, right.
	You've got Italian food.
	Before we had our tea break, we were talking about the canon.
	I could not remember the name of this guy.
	I couldn't remember the name of this guy.
	And I thought, oh, God, he's been on my podcast.
	So what I was going to do was...
	I don't know why I'm so averse to any form of rigmarole, but I just can't bear rigmarole.
	And the thought of going onto my phone, going to my Dellingpole World website, Oh, yeah, looking it up.
	Going through the names...
	I just my how you can use the cosmos my heart Universe will speak to you.
	So I was then coming into this filming room and...
	What did I see by your bed?
	The very book.
	The very book.
	Culture War by Alexander Adams.
	Which I was reading last night and the very thing that you were talking about I'd underlined.
	You'd underlined?
	Just before I went to sleep.
	And still you're making the wrong point or slightly the wrong point.
	Am I?
	You're talking about ossification and actually... No, it's just I need to have a more nuanced view on the canon because I've always been, you know, a proponent of the canon of Western liturgy.
	Yeah, we need this, we need this.
	But I'm aware that We need to be a little bit more flexible about it.
	Harold Bloom's 1994 book, The Western Canon, is very important, but I just think we need to be a little bit more flexible.
	It's something that he says there, isn't it, in his essay?
	It's a very good essay on the canon is all I'd say.
	So yeah, I just... - That's what academia needs to stick with, obviously.
	Otherwise we'll all go, Fruit Loop will all become, you know, be indoctrinated by work politics and nobody will be able to communicate with each other because they lost the ability to debate, they lost the ability to think because even when Margaret Thatcher was interviewed in the eighties, early nineties, and they said, you know, do you think classical education is important? and they said, you know, do you think classical education She said, oh yes, without a classical education You don't know how to be.
	It teaches you how to be and how to think.
	And then she mentioned some writers like Cicero, which is a good one to pick, a writer who was studied for 2,000 years up until about the 1920s.
	When you went to university, you didn't do all of this atomized study.
	You would basically study the letters of Cicero, the letters and the speeches of Cicero.
	And it would teach you the arts of rhetoric.
	And how to express yourself and how to think and then that was your basis, that was your bedrock and it was universal across the whole Western world and that's why there was such consistency in every aspect of culture.
	Within our lifetime, and I'm sure that this was the same for the generation born before us, but I think it's been particularly noticeable in our lifetime, is the the dumbing down that has taken place with it well i mean this bloom dealt with that in the closing of the american mind yes but it's extraordinary for example the The English teachers that I had at Malvern in the late 70s and early 80s.
	Can you remember their names?
	It might have been the same ones I had.
	Yes.
	I had Drack Mensforth.
	Douglas Mensforth.
	Can I just interject and tell me what he told me to do?
	He caught me in the corridor one day and he said, have you read Milton's Paradise Lost?
	And I said, no.
	And he was, what?
	He said, go back to your house and read one book a day for ten days.
	And then come back and tell me you've read it.
	And I did.
	And it was amazing.
	And I went back to tell him, he said, I was only joking.
	What was he?
	So Drach Mensforth took me for my Oxbridge class, you know, in the days when you sat an extra term for Oxbridge.
	Yeah.
	And it was extraordinary how much you crammed into that term.
	Was it AS level or something like that?
	It was, well it was just, you were not bound by the curriculum.
	Right, yeah.
	So I read the complete works of John Ford, for example.
	I read, um, uh, Henryson.
	Yeah, oh yeah, before Trojan Crusade.
	The Testament of Crusade.
	Yeah.
	Which you never, you never study normally.
	No.
	Normally.
	Now, I don't mean to diss Morvan as it is now, but there's no way that any child there is reading the Testament of Crusade by Henrison or studying Ford or... Probably not.
	It's an astonishing school with amazing facilities.
	They all went to Oxford and Cambridge in those days.
	Teachers just don't and haven't.
	And those that have, unfortunately, have not really had a very good education at Oxford or Cambridge.
	It's that anti-art.
	Cultural new criticism.
	Deconstructionism.
	So you don't read the texts in order to have superlative experiences.
	You learn about social constructs and it's interpreted in a different way.
	It takes all the joy out of it.
	So we were so lucky.
	We were probably right at the end of that period, weren't we?
	Because by the time I went to university, we were into, as I said, you know, Edward Said's Orientalism.
	It was all about deconstruction.
	There was no sense of joy in the way that the subject matter was presented.
	So I'm living this... Just a pause one second.
	Hello?
	All right.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Hello.
	Hello.
	Oh, thank you.
	Do you want to just push it?
	Push the door and leave it inside.
	Thank you.
	Sorry about this.
	Ben can edit this out.
	We'll just... I just love...
	He's so good.
	Okay, just briefly.
	Okay post modernists and the canon post modernists loathes the canon for its specific qualities and and its existence the canon accretes slowly and selectively it cannot be changed for political reasons and it cannot be legislated upon he's this book is every sentence is is brilliant, but um, yeah going back to the
	I'm living the problem at the moment through my offspring who are negotiating an English Literature course at a very good university.
	But they're trying to snatch the education that I had against a system which wants to steer them towards... There are lots of modules they could do which are bollocks modules.
	And there's a few modules there which are real and about old school, about reading actual works of literature by proper writers and stuff.
	A lot of it's kind of really off topic.
	They're in a better position than most.
	I mean, I dread to think what, well, we know what course they offer at Leeds now, I think.
	Leeds, they've got rid of Chaucer and they've got rid of... How can you study English and not do Milton, Chaucer, Shakespeare as your Yeah, I think the tutors don't understand it, they don't know how to teach it, and that's a way of them covering themselves.
	Somebody in an American high school recently boasted that they'd managed to get the Odyssey removed from the syllabus.
	But this is only the beginning, you know, people don't realise.
	I think people think that these social justice warriors and political activists are on the fringes, but they are the establishment now, aren't they?
	They're the ones calling the shots.
	So, that's why I think we need a call to action.
	I'm giving a presentation for the Conservative Policy Forum at the end of this month and they've said that the ideas that we come up with during this discussion will lead to concrete policy decisions.
	Education is the central part of it, isn't it really?
	Without that, it's a bedrock.
	Well, totally.
	Michael Gove.
	There was a very good essay, a demolition of Michael Gove in Conservative Woman, which is one of the very few Conservative websites, Conservative imprints in the UK now, although it's only online.
	But it did make the point that when Gove was Education Secretary, he got this.
	He understood that history cannot just teach the rise of the Nazis.
	And so he put, I think, the English Civil War on the curriculum, which is very chewy and complicated.
	But it's odd that the man who was capable of grasping this when he was Education Secretary is now, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, pushing forward what, to all intents and purposes, is the cultural Marxist agenda combining with the Great Reset.
	The destruction of our civilization, of our values, of everything, in the interests of this.
	And I'm not sure how...
	Isn't one of the curious things about the, sorry to go off on a tangent here, one of the curious things about the Great Reset and it's the Agenda 2030 and what's happening, technocracy, that... Yeah, technocracy is the key thing.
	Taking over the world by this narrow, narrow elite and treating the rest of us as... Useless eaters.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Most of the people, most of what you might call the useful idiots advancing this particular political development are not going to benefit.
	Their children aren't going to be in the special ivory tower with the panopticon and all the fruits of the, you know, probably ocelot spleens or whatever it is, whatever luxury it is.
	They're going to be down there with the rest of us cattle.
	So I don't get that.
	Why do Why are they buying into it?
	Yeah.
	Well it's either fear or bribery isn't it?
	I mean I think the president of Belarus was the only man to go public by saying that he'd been bribed was it 190 million dollars to wreck his economy by the IMF?
	Yes that's the extraordinary thing and yet how little traction has that story had?
	Well they defamed him in the media they had the organized public demonstrations against him.
	Yeah, they did.
	So I don't know whether that's something that's widely known or not but, you know, obviously we're both aware of it.
	I think it's probably something that's happened internationally.
	The new reality has been presented in the way that Schwab presents it.
	This is, the new normal is a totally different system.
	You know, there's no way, you can't option opt out of this.
	This is absolutely fixed in stone.
	So you either buy into it or You're out.
	And, you know, you've worked with a lot of politicians, and I have, and I do at the moment, and people in the House of Lords, and I love them, and they're wonderful people.
	But I think when you move into some position like that, it's a career, isn't it?
	And a lot of things become important, like, you know, which is the size of the iPad that I get, and which office am I getting?
	And all of those things that are related to your career and your future and your reputation become quite important.
	And your principles go?
	Well, I can't say.
	But I always use Margaret Thatcher as an example, somebody who didn't care.
	I think she thought, well, I don't mind being judged by anybody but God.
	That's how I think of it.
	And when I'm writing things and I'm being particularly strident, Friends say to me, what are they going to say?
	I really don't care.
	The only thing that I care about is my integrity.
	I welcome criticism.
	I love it.
	You know you're over target when you attract flack.
	That's what you've been feeling a bit recently.
	Going back to the chat we mentioned at the very beginning.
	Oh, Alan Watt.
	Alan Watt.
	So I spent an hour on the journey down, listening to him present it.
	Yeah, cutting through the matrix.
	But what he explained in this particular podcast is how long this has been going on.
	We go back at least to the era of Cecil Rhodes.
	Yeah.
	And that the.
	He talks about how in the 1920s, cocaine and jazz were used to to they essentially want to destroy the family unit.
	Yeah.
	They want to destroy... Shall we explain why that is?
	Because then there's more of a reliance on the state.
	Because the family unit is a primal building block, isn't it, for society.
	And you can see that happened in the 60s and another thing.
	And then again with Black Lives Matter on their website, their aims are the destruction of the nuclear family, the defunding of the police and and obliteration of capitalism.
	Yes.
	It's a running theme, yeah.
	And this is something that all totalitarian regimes have in common.
	Look at the Hitler Youth, look at the Young Pioneers and the Communists, look at the Red Guard.
	It's all about teaching young people to reject their families and embrace the state.
	So this is a common thing.
	Which Aldous Huxley explained very clearly in Brave New World about children being basically grown by the state rather than within a family unit.
	So Alan Watt talks about all this and he says that in the in the 20s they didn't quite go according to their plan because what they hadn't reckoned with is the massive increase in children and so you had all these orphanages, not orphanages, homes for children filling up and
	Then they tried it again in the 1960s, this time they had the birth control pill which made a huge difference.
	I've heard this stuff before and previously I've sort of thought, well this is so much woo, but now I'm aware that he was right.
	The television mimics your alpha waves and it just brainwashes you.
	It was Alan Watt who I heard say, I've been listening for about six years, and he said I've only met one person who worked in the CIA and he wouldn't tell me anything at all about his work.
	The only thing he would say is never watch television.
	Because it's not just the content, it's the physical, apparently they worked out the flicker rate would send you into this alpha state.
	So when you, I mean I found it when I did used to watch TV, you'd switch on something you did want to watch, three hours later you'd still be sitting there like this.
	Do you not watch TV now?
	Never.
	I have a television over there but it's not connected to any system.
	So I do watch films.
	I watch Amazon Prime and some Netflix things.
	I watch The Dig on Netflix but I'm very discriminating about it.
	So one of the things that Alan Watts says is that there's the plot that keeps you enticed and and you see the hero.
	Yeah and they use sort of themes.
	He says that once you, what you need to do is try and persuade yourself not to get involved in the plot and look at what's going on in the background.
	Yes, ancillary characters.
	So you watched, you watched The Dig.
	Yeah, which I loved.
	And you and I both noticed and actually Peter Hitchens to his credit called this one out.
	There's a scene, so A character played by Lily James has been shoehorned into this dig.
	I don't believe that she was even there in the original John Preston novel.
	Maybe wrong, but I don't think so.
	And she was married to a husband who was closeted Gay.
	And she ends up expressing herself with the presumably doomed RAF pilot.
	Oh yeah.
	Expressing herself.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Expressing herself.
	I love that.
	Very dainty for me.
	There's a scene where she turns up on the dig and there's the chap from the British Museum who is snobbish and sexist total misogynist misogynist yeah he makes a remark about how you need a woman because she's light enough to to scramble around on the dig and not just not not affect the archaeological excavations I mean they were really blatant kind of dumb yeah script at that point but
	As Hitchens pointed out, by this time, late 1930s, women archaeologists were well-established, well-respected.
	Nobody said, oh look, there's a dog walking on its hind legs.
	It was established that women could do archaeology too.
	So this is the imposition of now.
	This is the politically correct.
	So even in something gentle and allegedly historical like the dig, they cannot resist Making their political point and inserting it.
	Yeah, and that was weirdly that it was shown on Netflix and Netflix is definitely an agenda all the way through that.
	If you look at Bridgerton and even the remake of Dynasty, whatever, it's social programming.
	Isn't it?
	Bridgerton particularly.
	Yeah.
	And a lot of people watch historical dramas, particularly, and imagine that they're seeing a window on the past.
	Why wouldn't you?
	Why would you bother to dress people in historical costume, put them in historical situations, but then transform one aspect of it, which is the social?
	Psychological aspect of it.
	If you're going to modernise something, why not film it in New York?
	Why not do Bridgerton in New York?
	And then it would make total sense.
	Yeah.
	But I can't watch it.
	I mean, it was filmed in Bath so we were all excited.
	I saw the carriages going through the streets and you saw the lights and cameras.
	We were all very excited about it.
	And then I switched on the first episode, I got ten minutes in.
	And it wasn't because of the racial thing so much, it was just the manners and the way that people expressed themselves.
	It was modernised, but there was no grace in the way that people moved.
	It's revisionism, isn't it?
	It's what's going on with absolutely everything.
	And the memory hold, it's the things that you saw in 1984 where Winston Smith is, I think he's given capsules of information that he has to rewrite and then he puts them back up, these air shoots.
	But this is happening in real time now, so people are being shadow-banned, information's just disappearing, isn't it, every moment.
	So that's why I save my videos on this separate website.
	But I think as much as possible, I want people to... Can you just check if mine's got the red square on the camera?
	Yeah, it's still funny.
	So, yeah, it's very easy to make history disappear down the memory hole and that's what happened in Mao's cultural revolution, wasn't it?
	There were the four olds, you heard about this?
	The four olds, so they, you know, you weren't allowed to practice religion or read history books, so all of these things were being erased and that's what all communist systems do and that's I have no reservation in saying that this is a Marxist, Communist... It's a system that's been adopted by a corporatist, technocratic organisation, an international organisation.
	But they're using the model of China, aren't they?
	That's clearly what they love.
	Definitely.
	And you can see it happening in real time.
	It's very noticeable that our generation tends to find Bridgerton
	annoying for the reasons you've you've outlined but my kids generation they go things like dad why you you know what my son for example who is basically me intellectually and culturally except he's a he's the generation removed and he now finds it tiresome when I point this stuff out oh dad you know yeah yeah yeah
	Well, he probably knows what's going on, but what everyone wants is group acceptance.
	Right.
	So they're not using the critical faculty, they're just going with it.
	Exactly.
	That's a shame.
	The battle's been lost.
	And actually, this is what I wanted to talk to you about.
	The big one.
	Because It's black pill versus red pill.
	Yeah.
	Should we explain that?
	So blue pill is living in the reality we know.
	This comes from the Matrix film, doesn't it?
	Yeah.
	Where Neo is presented with a blue and a red pill.
	Do you want to go stick with the blue pill, stay in the world you know, or go down the rabbit hole and take the red pill and have a greater reality presented to yourself?
	But then there's this next stage which we We've discovered, which is the black pill, which is a little bit scary.
	It's where you really realise them, you understand the mechanisms of society and you start to realise that the political figures that we think are in control aren't actually in control.
	And the reforces so powerful, I mean this is what Alan Watt was talking about, the reforces, they've been planning this for so long that Whatever you and I say or do, it's not going to make any difference.
	That's the honest truth.
	Hitchens, in his own grumpy way, has taken this view.
	For me the black pill is in many ways a counsel of despair.
	It's like okay well then if there's no point then we might as well just top ourselves frankly.
	But I'll take this back into my own personal experience.
	So being given a terminal diagnosis, you know, you can choose to do two things.
	One is to give up and think everything's desperate or you can choose to imbue every single day With a certain magic and a focus, which is what I've done.
	And I can honestly say the last five years of my life have been sensational.
	And they get more and more exciting every day.
	When I wake up, I can be excited, for instance, in the way that the light is falling on the wall against that picture in the background.
	What's he called, the British painter from Yorkshire?
	Hockney.
	Hockney says, you know, he said something that I identified with.
	He said I can spend an hour looking at the way that the The shapes in the corner of the room joined together.
	I get excited by that.
	You know, it's those simple things.
	Aesthetic things can become very important.
	So for me, eating at the moment is almost a transcendental experience.
	The tastes that I experience.
	And that applies to... You hear people saying this who are in a similar situation.
	The appearance of the buds on the trees.
	It's not just pretty, it is sensational.
	It's, you know, it's blooming within your heart.
	But then I'm somebody who's always been quite happy to incorporate very dark aspects of existence into our lives.
	In the past we were far more Frequently acquainted with death.
	We'd see it more frequently in our communities.
	It wasn't spirited away.
	It's one of those subjects that people don't talk about anymore.
	But certainly the conversations I have with the Palliative Care team, we're in hysterics.
	We have a really good time.
	It's extraordinary.
	Because the way I feel about it, well, you might just have 20 minutes of discomfort and then, you know, who knows where you might be next?
	I'm quite intrigued to find out.
	Do you think that one does come back?
	Well, this is another story about reincarnation.
	When I was born, I remember being born, which is a bit odd, isn't it?
	But I remember seeing everything upside down.
	So the women's legs on the lino flooring in the Christiana Hartley Hospital in Southport, where I was born, were all upside down.
	I saw these reflections and apparently the image on your retina is upside down and your brain reverses it to the right way up.
	After a few days or something like that.
	So everything I saw was upside down.
	I remember seeing that sensation.
	And what else to remember?
	So I was very overdue.
	I was £10 one ounce.
	And I remember thinking, gosh, it's really cold and grey here.
	I don't like it.
	I want to be back with my other family in India.
	So half of me was still in this other realm, which was a small, a very small, like a shack basically, next to a river on the border of Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
	How do you know it was there?
	I can point it on a map, but I've never been.
	So I can smell, and still smell, what the earth smells like after monsoon rain.
	We used to sit on the floor and eat our vegetarian food off banana leaves.
	I had a pet monkey that sat on my shoulder.
	I died at the age of 10, lying on a truckle bed.
	I can even see the scratches on the blue wall next to my truckle bed where I was lying for weeks.
	I had a sister called Akka.
	I can feel the metal strips in the fabric on the sari which I was cradled in in her lap.
	And I remember asking my parents, where is Akka?
	Where is Akka?
	Where is my sister?
	And I think, what have we given birth to?
	And I was asking for a specific drink for years.
	I was born in 69.
	And I had this specific drink I loved.
	I wanted it.
	And I knew it was slightly orange.
	And it took about six or seven years.
	When I came across it, it was mango lassi.
	Oh, it's mango lassi.
	That's what I wanted.
	I tasted it.
	We went to some vegetarian restaurant in the Lake District.
	And I just picked some random drink.
	And that was the drink.
	It came back.
	But it's a very emotional thing.
	They're not just visual images.
	Then when I was in London I met a guy called Arul Mani and he was from South Africa but Indian and he was the guy who had the Ganesha statues and the Krishna and he would go around with them and bless all the windows and the doors and the fridge in the morning and I was very moved watching this and so he started playing some of Amma's bhajans, this sort of religious songs where they're swaying and singing these things.
	So Amma's Bhajans and then even the Indian National Anthem.
	There's a recording on on YouTube you can see where all these traditional sitar players and singers and when I listen to this recording and see the Indian National Anthem I am literally in seconds in floods of tears.
	My whole body is juddering, juddering with emotion.
	There's no explanation for this.
	I've never even been to India.
	If I do go it would be a very powerful experience.
	And it's expensive.
	So many things connect to India.
	So I speak to Indians and they'll say, have you ever seen any Bollywood movies?
	And I say, yeah, my favorite movie is Deer Dust with Aishwarya Rai and Shahrukh Khan, really.
	And Kabhi Gujji, Kabhi Ghan and Tal.
	And they say, we've never met Westerners that are as interested in, you know.
	I said, well, it's the dance sequences.
	You know, they're far more elaborate than American Hollywood movies.
	So that's, I'm, as I said, I'm always, I'm not living just in this particular frequency.
	I'm aware that there's all of this richness, flooding is all around.
	And yeah, so how do we get onto that?
	I can't remember.
	I'm just hoping that when I'm reincarnated, I don't live in Blackpool.
	That'd be a real come down because I'm hoping for somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere next time.
	Maybe Costa Rica?
	Peru?
	Yeah, but if you get reincarnated, the Great Reset will be further down the road.
	Oh, it won't be now.
	It won't be, you know.
	My last reincarnation was in the 1960s.
	It was quite short.
	I think it was about an 8 or 9 year gap between me dying as a 10 year old in India and then being reincarnated in Northern England.
	But, you know, it could be deep past.
	But I think you do, your higher self chooses.
	You have a consultation, I think, and you choose where you're going to reincarnate.
	But the other thing is, I've known about this reincarnation, it's called the tying up of strings.
	So I have a weird feeling this is the last one before you go into the light, whatever that means.
	I know it all sounds very hysterical.
	So you're the final avatar.
	So listen to what I have to say now.
	I'm not going to be around much longer.
	Listen, I was thinking about this.
	I was going to ask you this.
	I was possessed by quite a powerful urge.
	To come and see you?
	Yes.
	Did you send me that signal?
	Possibly.
	I mean, we're all interconnected, aren't we?
	It's like a big hologram.
	So, well, as I said earlier, you know, two nights ago, I was pretty keen to be hooked up to the morphine driver because I was in so much pain.
	It's the limit.
	It's worse than pancreatitis when the tumours, one of which is 10 centimetres in my chest, It's pressing on the nerves and everything.
	No painkiller can cut through that sort of pain.
	It's mortal agony.
	And I read a phrase, somebody sent to me on the internet actually, it was about offering up your suffering to God.
	And at that point, the only thing you can do, it's such an extraordinary, extreme experience, but it's also a spiritual experience.
	I'm sure it's not, I haven't had it as bad as you've had it, but when I had my palmar neembolism, The pain was so bad that all I wanted to do was assume a fetal position and for the earth to swallow me up.
	Yeah.
	It was just... pain of such... You want an exit, yeah.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	And you welcome death as a friend, as that Kathy Colvitt's image my mother used to show me as a child.
	You know, it's quite a dark image.
	That's bloody great, isn't it?
	What?
	Pain so great that death is more fun.
	Not exactly fun, but I think we have an unrealistic understanding of real life, don't we?
	We experience a rose because it's fleeting, it's ephemeral.
	Why should anything else which is living have, it can't be eternal, its beauty is in its ephemeral nature.
	I've always known that I would have a short, very busy life and I knew that from my teenage years.
	This the the thing that we didn't talk the last podcast.
	Oh, yeah Tell the story about so so we went into The came a point in the podcast.
	Yeah, they came a point in the podcast I remember well, I wanted to take it the conversation down to this kind of spiritual stuff.
	We talked about Your experiences with ayahuasca and about the strange thing where you could see people behind you.
	Oh yeah.
	And when I got home and checked the podcast, I found that it had been deleted.
	And you kind of on some level knew this.
	You'd controlled the... No, I affect electronics.
	Remember Yuri Geller, I don't know what... Yeah.
	My mother was holding a key one lunchtime when he was on Pebble Mill at one.
	She couldn't start the car because the key had bent in her hand.
	So, I mean, it is possible to affect the physical world through your consciousness.
	So... Yeah.
	I find it reassuring in a way that what you've been telling me, because I think that if this world were all there is, particularly now with the circumstances that we're living through, I think that one might feel a bit despairing.
	Yeah, but this is a massive transformation.
	Although we're seeing the Great Reset, obviously on a physical level is a terrifically dark thing, but we're going through a, you know, everything is shattering.
	It will take, it will take decades for the societies to be rebuilt after what's coming up.
	Because it's, you know, my intuition that it'll be a massive population cull, unfortunately.
	But as a result of that, things are reborn, aren't they?
	We have a renaissance, a renaissance of life.
	And these things happen to have to happen.
	Forests burn down and out of the ashes something new and beautiful is born.
	And that's a totally natural process.
	That happens with plants, fungi, every living form, that's what happens.
	But we can't deny the fact that there is going to be breakdown at some point.
	Oswald Spengler talks about that, about the decline of the West.
	That's a sort of a political sort of system.
	But in a spiritual way, we talk about the yugas, don't we, in the Eastern systems, you know, these great ages.
	We're approaching the end of one great age and the beginning of the next, but it's always a cataclysmic event.
	And I'm lucky I'm not going to be around to see all the nasty bits.
	I know, you lucky bastard, yeah.
	You're going to have to deal with it all.
	It's not often I say to people with terminal cancer, My how I envy you, but... You probably don't say that very often, though.
	No.
	It's going to be interesting.
	Yeah.
	But on some level, I've felt like, you know, I got the good deal.
	I get to, you know, I get to kind of, I'm going soon.
	Yeah.
	I wonder if we'll do, because I'm hoping you're going to come and see me at my place.
	Yes.
	I wonder if we'll do another podcast.
	Oh, yes, we've got to.
	Yeah.
	Oh, there's a few more in me yet.
	Oh, good.
	I mean, I have this incredible sense of energy.
	You can see my life force is so strong.
	Yeah.
	So, but it's amazing.
	I keep getting these extensions.
	I've been in the hospital so many times I think my friends are thinking I'm crying wolf.
	Oh, he's on his way out!
	And then suddenly there's photographs of me looking as fit as anything.
	You know, I don't look unwell at all, do I?
	No, you don't.
	And I feel amazing.
	It's just, you know, but within a few hours everything can change.
	So, you know, but I find it really exciting living on the edge.
	I think it's The oncologist at Bath Hospital said, you know, you're living on a knife edge.
	You could be back in here any moment with, you know, a life-threatening emergency situation.
	And I have.
	I've been back in.
	I know all the staff in the ambulance department.
	It's quite fun, by name.
	But there's something quite thrilling about living in that way.
	I'm not just saying it.
	It's quite fascinating.
	No.
	Enlightening.
	It's almost as though you sort of invited your cancer.
	I mean, it was part of the plan.
	I think you do make these contracts.
	It's weird, in a way, because I knew that I would have a shorter life, I'm 52, rather than a long, boring one.
	And the fact that I've catalogued everything, I've made a meticulous archive of everything I've done, photographically, I've always done that because I've led a very meaningful, conscious life.
	You know, I haven't just drifted.
	I've spoken to friends in London.
	I said, what have you done for the last 30 years?
	And they said, work.
	Well, I've traveled all over the place.
	I've lived in New York, Los Angeles, Brussels, Sussex, Wales, Bath, London for 20 years.
	I've been consciously packing in sensations and experiences and adventures.
	My life's been such an adventure.
	I'm writing an autobiography.
	I hope I'll be able to finish it.
	It's called Adventures in Paint, but it's wider than that.
	We've done a bloody good show.
	People will love this.
	No, it's been great.

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