I know I always say I'm very excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
Welcome to the Deling Pod with me, James Deling-Poll.
And I know I always say I'm very excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
This week's special guest is Laura Dodsworth, who is the author of the must-read book of the moment, I would say.
I was a bit freaked out.
Were you freaked out by this, Laura?
That when Lawrence Fox promoted it on Twitter today, he did this.
You know what that is, don't you?
I do.
I wouldn't say it freaked me out, but I noticed.
I think it was innocent.
I do not believe that Lawrence Fox is a Satan-worshipping Freemason.
Because apart from everything else, his dad is a God-fearing Christian, and I'm sure keeps Lawrence on the straight and narrow in that regard.
But you just don't know, do you?
No, I don't think he's a minion of the Illuminati.
The reason I know about this is that I was accused of it recently.
There's this really old picture of me holding a little camera.
It's a little bejeweled camera.
It's not a real one.
And I'm holding it over my eye.
And of course, I think I'm being terribly clever and charming and original as a photographer.
And it was a profile pic I used for ages.
Anyway, somebody saw it and then shared on Twitter.
That I was controlled opposition and a free mason and all this stuff.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
So I looked up and I gather that covering one eye is a symbol of being a mason or something?
Yeah.
And there's others.
I mean, when they do this kind of thing and...
I mean, Tolkien had it right.
The eye of Sauron, that single eye, all-seeing eye, is basically Satan or whatever.
And it's what these people worship.
They worship, you know, Luciferians.
They subscribe to all that.
Anyway, that's a complete digression.
And it wasn't why I had you on the podcast, although I do like to digress.
No, but that's good.
You know, there's a bit more of a digression here than I'm going to say.
I think it's interesting.
It's fascinating.
I don't know much about why the I is used by whichever cults or orders.
But I think the fact that, for instance, celebrities or Innocent, harmless officers and photographers get accused of replicating this symbol and being part of audits.
Is this true?
There's just something in us that is drawn to covering one eye.
Of course, we're drawn to anything that's to do with the eye.
Could be.
They're very useful, aren't they?
I quite agree.
In the same way that people... I'm constantly having to reassure people that Toby Young was not an habitué of Epstein Island, of Pedophile Island.
And it's not because I'm a dupe and Toby has used his kind of evil powers to blind me to the truth.
It's just I know that Jeffrey Epstein's Little Black Book had lots of names of people in it who weren't who, you know, he was a kind of collector of names in the dresses.
Not not everyone is implicated in the same way.
I'm quite sure that lots of people have subconsciously absorbed those those rock star photographs dating back.
I mean, I used to get Q magazine.
Do you ever get Q?
I mean, every male, I think, for a period used to get Q or ID or all those magazines in the days when people still bought bought star magazines.
And I'm sure that you would have absorbed so many celebrities doing doing this or doing the hand in the, you know, that one that Prince Charles does all the time.
Where he shoves his hand halfway inside his...
inside his coat.
What I can tell you as a photographer is people just don't know what to do with their hands.
They'll look for anything to do with their hands.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
They just try and hide a hand.
I would say that that one is actually a tell in Charles's case.
I'll tell you why.
There was no rational reason, unless you're trying to imitate Napoleon, which I don't think he is.
There was no rational reason why you would shove your hand into your coat like that, is there?
Do you think?
I don't know.
But you see, you've got me on an area that is not my expertise.
I don't know Masonic symbols.
I'm interested.
I might look it up, but I don't know at the moment.
Before we go on to the book, which I think is absolutely great, I just wanted... I sort of get the vibe that like 18 months ago, or two years ago, you and I would not have crossed paths in any way.
Because you're a photographer, is that right?
And a writer.
Let's say multi-talented.
I'm a creative.
You are.
But you write about things that I wouldn't read about, like vaginas.
Is that right?
Or something?
Or am I inventing that?
Outrageous.
I've also written about penises.
Have you?
I wouldn't write a book about penises either.
There's no pleasing some people, is there?
Laura, why did you choose a man with hairy legs?
Like that.
Why not, James?
Very nice and masculine and virile for the front cover of the book about manhood.
Interesting.
I think if I'd chosen a man with no body hair, then it wouldn't have looked very masculine.
Because after all, that's all you're going to see on the front cover.
No penis.
It is very interesting, isn't it?
And again, this is another digression, but since you've shown me that picture of a hairy leg with a sort of penis off camera, have you noticed The, well, the feminization of our culture.
I mean, I mean, there are so... Look, I'm not a particularly manly man, but I'm bloody Charles Atlas compared to the new generation with their stupid beards and their kind of kimchi diets and veganism, which has reduced them into these kind of pathetic, bloodless husks of what used to be men.
Have you noticed this?
I don't think it's something that just affects men.
I think there's a lot of confusion about gender and sexuality experimentation.
It's part of wider trends.
Of course, a man can't help the amount of hair he's born with or going to grow in his life in itself.
It's not an indicator of masculinity.
It would have been strange for me to choose a man, for the publisher and I, to choose a man who didn't have hair on his leg for the front cover, because for a book like that, for the front cover image, you're going for a body which represents the epitome.
of that biological sex.
I do feel like this is quite a strange introduction to the conversation.
I like it, but I wonder who might have tuned out by now.
They don't even know why I'm here, do they?
They might not, but I'm relying on the fact that people find my podcast... You see, the thing is, people say to me sometimes... I do.
People say... Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
People sometimes say to me... I do.
Well, I'm... I'm touched.
I'm touched, as Buxton says in the Blue Cat... Doodle and the Blue Cat.
I'm touched.
The... Sorry.
The thing is... The thing is...
I find that there's another thing I don't do as well in my podcast, and I really should bloody do it, because this is what Ivor Cummins told me, that I'm really, really shit at advertising for my Patreon and my Subscribestar.
He does it like three times, I think, in the course of his podcast.
And it's right.
I mean, if you want people to support you, you've got to remind them, please support my Patreon and Subscribestar, or go to my website, dellingpoleworld.com, where you can buy a special friend badge.
Yeah, I don't know.
Is that a Masonic symbol?
But I don't do it all the time.
But equally, what I don't do, which I know lots of podcasters do, they do the preamble.
They explain who the person is and why they're interesting.
I have to say, I'm just, I'm just thinking, as I listen to other people's podcasts, cut to the chase.
Just, just give us something, anything.
I'm not really interested.
Something fun.
Yeah.
Don't tell me who the person is.
Let me, let me, let me find out who the person is.
So anyway, the reason I was coming around to that preamble about, I just think,
One of the few good things to have come up out of this 18 months of hell, which are going to turn into 36 months of even worse hell, is that I've met some really great people who I never would have thought would have been interesting people have become my allies, like Naomi Wolf.
Who would have imagined that Naomi Wolf, Author of the beauty myth and, you know, kind of admitted voting for Biden.
Feminist.
I mean, you know, that in itself is toxic for me.
Because I think feminism is part of the problem.
The massive overreach.
I think that Covid is a facet of the problem just as feminism is.
Anyway, who would have thought that I would be thinking, yay Noam Chomsky, when previously I thought he was an absolute dick and responsible for so much of what is wrong in the world intellectually.
But I realize that he's right about the media, about Manufacturing consent.
I almost said it and then I held back in case I was saying the wrong words.
Manufacturing consent.
And you have been another great joy of discovering.
You've written this brilliant book called A State of Fear.
You probably, like me, have looked at the course of this pandemic, alleged pandemic, and you, like me, have recognized that the supposed cure has been a lot, lot, lot worse than the disease.
And you've chosen to focus on the way that this has been positioned in the public's mind as the greatest threat ever, you know, our World War II or worse, our Spanish flu.
And you've talked to various people involved in it.
So just tell me a bit about your process of discovery and all this.
Yeah, well, first of all, I agree about making new friends and allies.
It has been a real joy.
I think that this book for me has come out of a long, dark night of the soul.
I think for a lot of us, the last year has been Horrible.
It's been like living in a story, not a fun one, a truly hideous one.
I know there are some people whose lives improved and, you know, they might have enjoyed more family time or working from home and they maybe felt like their lives were less stressful.
But I think they breathe a very rarefied, privileged air.
For a lot of us, it's been a difficult year.
And one good thing to come out of that is a kind of a growth.
You know, who am I?
What do I stand for?
What's important?
What do I value in other people?
And I have felt a real shift, a shift in gear in terms of the people I like and want to develop relationships with.
It's a time to reassess the most important values.
And I think, you know, I don't want to be the same all my life.
I don't want to pretend that when I was 20, I knew everything and then stick there.
Or, you know, 46-year-old Laura knew it all.
Not at all.
I'm happy to constantly evolve.
And I think that there's been a lot of evolution in the last year.
I can truly say that I welcome that now we're through it, but it was horrible.
And I think the book comes out of that.
Okay, let's get back to hairy legs.
I can segue from the hairy legs of the man who'd covered before.
Because some people have said to me, why, you know, why have you, a photographer who's done projects about body image, written this book?
And actually my projects weren't about body image.
They might seem like that ostensibly, that's a kind of an easy, easy two-dimensional wrapper for them, but they're really not.
The photographs, which are really explicit and not salacious, are visual signposts through stories about politics of, the politics of power, shame, gender, sexuality, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a man.
And what I'm really interested in is just what makes us who we are.
So I think, you know, over the last year, a lot of people would say the story was an epidemic, a pandemic.
The story was COVID.
Yeah.
But it's not, that's not the story.
That's like a plot device.
The story is always us.
I'm interested in us.
And what motivated people to follow these brand new totalitarian brutal policies lockdown?
It can only be fear.
Fear, how else could we be persuaded to stay in our homes and not go out to work, not earn a living?
I mean, I was told I couldn't go out to work.
As a single mother with a family to feed, that's quite a shocking revelation.
Can't go and have relationships, can't see my elderly mother.
It's fear that put people into those pens.
Now, when you have an epidemic, people will be frightened.
Epidemics are frightening.
Most people have a natural inbuilt very understandable fear of illness and death.
It's hardwired into us.
It's important.
It's our evolutionary success.
But given that we'd be frightened in an epidemic, given that's an open door, I'm not sure the government even needed to do so much as open it and say, after you, but they knocked it down with a battering ram.
I'm very alert to language and I became alert to the language very, very soon.
For instance, I noticed that I think the first politician in the UK who said new normal, Dominic Raab, said it within one month of lockdown starting.
And I thought this was fascinating.
I thought, why would, why would we use a term like new normal when this is a so-called novel virus?
I say so-called because I don't, I'm not really too clear on the, on the science of it, but it's, it's a new virus.
It's an epidemic.
It will follow some kind of, and bell curve of some sort.
It will come, it will go.
How many people die?
I don't know.
But why would we segue into a new normal, into a new era?
Yes.
Rather than go back to old normal.
So there were lots of things that struck me at the beginning that were interesting linguistic markers.
And I felt frightened.
I don't think I'm ever really that drawn to explore, investigate and create around something unless it creates a point of Personal discomfort and tension for me.
I'm not interested in writing pretty poems or photographing landscapes.
I think I like, I'm drawn to the more difficult stuff.
And I felt fear myself.
I was not immune from it.
And so that's what I came up against and I wanted to explore.
And that's why I wrote a book about it.
I think that the big story of the last year is the weaponization of fear.
You read the title, but not the subtitle.
The subtitle is quite bold.
How the UK government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic.
That's my background.
Even with a segue from hairy legs.
You've described, I think, exactly what has happened.
I mean, I think the thing you don't answer in the book, and I think it's impossible to answer, it's obviously beyond the book's scope, is Who ultimately is making these decisions?
Because I don't believe they're coming from within the government or even within the various behavioral committees like SAGE.
I think it's at a much higher level than that, a supranational level, because you only have to look at this is happening across the world.
And I think equally, one's not sure, well, I think I probably am sure, but I don't think we've got space to discuss it here, what the game plan is and what the motivations are and so on.
But I think in terms of our country, you've captured perfectly that what seems to have happened is that the narrative has been controlled really from the start by behavioral manipulators, hasn't it?
I mean, the SAGE committee, and what are the other ones, the other committees that are advising the government on how to kind of control our behavior?
Well, one thing that was a really big surprise to me is just how much behavioural psychology there is within government.
So the Behavioural Insights Team, that is supposedly, it's operationally and legally separate to the government, but they're on a government contract for three years, taking until 2022.
for over three million pounds.
So they provide behavioral psychology consultation to the government.
Then the government also leans on advisory panels.
So SAGE and COBRA report into the government, but beneath SAGE is SCI-B.
That's the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behavior.
And that's made up of a range of behavioral scientists, psychologists, and other social scientists, Interestingly, nobody really with a very specific mental health expertise and no recovery specialists.
Funny that.
But also, yeah, as well as that, there's the Rapid Response Unit, which is a part of the Cabinet Office.
Then there's also the Counter Disinformation Cell, which is part of the, oh, the one with culture in it.
I'm going blank.
Oh yeah, culture and sport, whatever.
Yeah, they keep changing.
Culture and sport.
Yeah, yeah, they do, exactly.
There's also GCHQ.
There's the 77th Brigade, which is part of the Army.
So you have all these different units and cells, which are, you know, very populated with behavioural psychologists, and they're all working in different ways to counter misinformation.
Which could involve things like removing anti-vax information from the internet.
I'm using all their words before you put me up on it.
We don't really know too much about what they all do, because obviously when you try and find out, you hit a brick wall.
You're not supposed to know what people like that are doing in your best interests.
But there has been a lot of talk about pinning everything on Spy B in the media.
And that's because of this really extraordinary document that was released.
It was dated 22nd of March, and they produced a paper in response clearly to a question from government, which is how do we make people do this lockdown?
How do we make them follow the rules?
So it contained all this advice for how they were going to offer a behavioural psychology approach to making people follow lockdown.
And they said that people's sense of perceived personal threat had to be elevated.
Because some people were complacent because they understood the risk category for their age.
So basically, you know, some of us, for instance, me, who'd done the research, realised they wouldn't be at that much risk.
Sage and Spivey are worried about this and say, no, no, we need to get everybody more frightened.
And frightened as they did, that is what they did.
But Spivey is just an advisory panel.
They're not pulling strings of the government.
I mean, what's going on behind the scenes, we don't necessarily know.
The minutes are always quite clean.
You don't know what conversations are happening in a WhatsApp group or in a room where the meeting's not being minuted.
These minutes are fairly clean.
But they are this external group of people who are independent academics and professionals.
They are not the people who are in charge of pulling all the strings.
I'm more interested in what the Behavioural Insights team do, because they're very deeply embedded in the Cabinet Office, but they are operationally and legally separate.
It's very difficult from the outside to know exactly who is doing what.
You can't know which psychologist might have helped Boris Johnson with his speech, where he uses particularly martial language, which is to convey the severity, the war-like situation, and also encourage compliance in people, because war is a bitter pill to swallow and it's more likely to make the people obedient.
You don't know who is behind the use of cherry-picking data to produce somewhat misleading statistics.
You don't know really who's behind any particular advertisement.
But what I do know is there's lots of them.
There are behavioural scientists in 10 different government departments.
Yes.
Yeah.
This was one of the things that came across very strongly.
Was it David Cameron who introduced the Nudge unit?
Yes, he did.
And that's the colloquial term for the Behavioural Insights Team.
Yeah, because it strikes me that a lot of us make the mistake of looking back to the Cameron era.
Because Theresa May was so bad, and Boris Johnson has been so bad, some of us foolishly look on the Cameron era as a kind of, oh, I kind of miss Dave Cameron.
But actually, I think he was, in the same way that Tony Blair masked his malign intent through a kind of, with sort of fluffiness and you know, we're getting Peter Mandelson to tell everyone how comfortable he was about everyone getting filthy rich and so on and ensuring we've got... He advanced a very dodgy agenda under cover of reasonableness and I think David Cameron was the same.
I think There was his cozying up to China, him and George Osborne, massive sucking up to China, and there was this nudge unit, which is increasingly obvious.
It's very dodgy.
And who's the guy in charge of the nudge unit?
David Halpern.
Yeah.
He came across in your book and you're quite restrained.
I mean, you're writing for this for people very, very sensibly.
I mean, if I'd written the book, it would have been only for people like us, whereas you've written for a kind of more general audience.
So people aren't going to bore.
I want this big and general audience as possible because I really, really want the British people to understand what's happening.
Totally.
And I do have to be general about David Happen because I never got an interview with him.
And I think this is interesting.
I'm writing a book about the behavioral psychology approach to an epidemic.
And if not the head of the behavioral insights team, who is going to offer me some explanations, he clearly really didn't want an interview.
No.
But I did watch him answer questions for MPs.
I give the link to where that is in the end notes in the book.
And I found that truly fascinating.
And what came through for me was the same as I've got from reviews of his book, from his writing, from interviews he's done.
I think behavioural psychology is at heart just very paternalistic.
It's clever people.
Deciding what is best for not-so-clever people.
So I would like all the not-so-clever people of Britain to understand what the clever people think about this.
You know, we're constantly being nudged into what their idea of a model citizen is.
But I believe it's up to us to decide for ourselves what the model citizen is.
Now, if you have laws, if you have mandates, we can come right up against that and go, yes, I agree, I'll follow that rule.
No, I'm going to work to change this law.
You know what you're dealing with.
The way behavioral psychology works is to manipulate you at a subconscious level.
It's to help you make choices which are in your best interest, James, but without you knowing about it.
Now, they've actually called for there to be a consultation about the use of behavioral psychology because it was acknowledged that When we pay taxes as citizens to the government, it's for them to do certain jobs for us.
If they then do something that actually is about changing your personality, it also changes your relationship with the state.
And this is something, as a population, we should have a say in.
I think before, though, what they were doing seemed so...
Innocence, like making you pay your taxes online or on time.
Yes.
Or helping people to stop smoking.
Very few people had an argument with it.
Some people did.
And I look back and think it's really interesting.
You really got it then.
You really got it.
Like Claire Fox, who's the She's the founder of the Academy of Ideas, isn't she?
I forgot it the right way around.
The Academy of Ideas or the Institute of Ideas.
I'm not sure now.
Because of legal action or there's some sort of, yeah, codicil or something.
But she's now Lady Buckley in the House of Lords.
Now, she got it.
She crossed swords with them before.
But a lot of people didn't.
And it seems like it's great to kind of encourage youth not to engage in vandalism in city centres.
But what we've seen in the last year is where this could really go.
There's an analogy given in one of the papers on behavioural psychology that I talk about in my book, where they say that we might need help locking up the biscuit tins.
Yeah, we're a very, very fat nation.
Maybe we want help locking up our biscuit tins.
Well, you know, that sounds great.
Doesn't it help people lose weight?
I think it's quite bossy and paternalistic and I'd prefer an approach where they say this is an ideal diet, this is an ideal weight, we're giving you the information, now you decide what to do for yourself.
But they haven't locked up the biscuit tins this year, they locked us up.
Yes, you just almost sent me down another rabbit hole then, because of course underlying your question is Okay, so you've got behavioral insight teams nudging us into, gently steering us towards the correct behavior.
But what's very, very clear from your book in there, as regards COVID-19, if it even exists, I mean, it hasn't even been isolated, has it?
The virus has not been isolated.
So we don't know what it is exactly.
But that's by the by.
The SAGE Committee and the Behavioural Insights Committee took it as a given that the information they'd been presented on COVID was unquestionable.
COVID is a problem.
Therefore, how do we steer the British population into the correct behavior?
They never questioned, for example, the 500,000 deaths prediction, which was outrageously out by Neil Ferguson.
And this seems to be the case throughout.
Am I right?
Yeah.
I mean, it's not the job of SPY-B to question the ingested data.
They get given a model that is de facto, and then they have to come up with their bit as the behavioral psychology solution to make the population behave in the way they need to, to avert that scenario.
They do not question the data, but it's also not their job to question data.
I know that if I was in the room, because I think my default mode is to think for myself and question things, and I don't think that could be written out to me, I probably would have questioned it.
But you see, the other thing that's happened, I gather, over the year from talking to several people off the record, is that the dissenters over time have been nudged out of these advisory groups.
The wild cards are not welcome.
Yeah, nudged out.
Damn it!
And I hate that word now.
The word nudge is ruined for me.
Well, you see, that's interesting because one of them denies groupthink even exists.
And I thought that was fascinating.
I think I don't see how they avoid groupthink, to be honest.
And also, I did wonder what's the effect of them all doing this on Zoom calls?
You know, previously they'd have met in a room and there's a whole chemistry and, you know, adjusting for position and contributing to debate that would be different in an actual room than it would be over Zoom.
I'm not sure which is better or worse or what that means, but it would be different.
But yeah, they don't welcome the wild cards.
And the other thing from interviewing them, I can tell you this, they like us all being the same.
They're very keen on words like collectivism and solidarity.
And partly that reflects the fact that they're all quite left-leaning.
And there's no problem with left-leaning academics on the panels, but there's a real bias in academia towards the left.
If you had a bunch of right-wing libertarians in that room, they wouldn't be reaching for collectivism as the answer quite so often.
So, for instance, they like masks because they give us all a signal that we're all in it together.
They also give us a signal that we're in danger, we're walking billboards of fear.
But they would use words that really belie how they feel politically as well.
Much use of co-creation, solidarity.
I don't believe that groupthink would not be endemic in people who talk like that as well.
There was one moment that shocked you and shocked me too, when I read it, where you described an interview with one of the members of the panels who was banging on about how concerned he was about climate change.
And it's clear that in his head he'd made the link between lockdowns being virtuous because they're going to save the planet, And I was thinking, hang on a second, nowhere in your remit does it say that you should help think of ways of saving the planet.
This is not your area.
This is just your personal fixation, which you are, your baggage, which you are bringing into these meetings.
And this is helping to sway your position, which I thought was very worrying.
Well, this was a revelation for me, which in retrospect seems incredibly obvious, but I realised that they all bring their own personal beliefs and characters and political biases to the table.
And of course they would.
We all do it.
We're all human.
We would all have these frailties and bias.
There's no such thing as politically unbiased scientific advice.
Science is inherently political.
But it was a shock to me.
And I think it was a shock because it really strung my own raw nerve.
I don't want to see more lockdowns, but Ultimately, if as a nation and politically we accept that lockdowns work and they're useful and that people will do them, I don't really have any doubt that we'll see them again as some other iteration of them anyway.
We'll have muscle memory and the politicians will have muscle memory.
And I think if you accept that lockdown is an acceptable solution to save one life or to save however many lives from a virus, why would you not accept it for perhaps reducing CO2 emissions or If there's a run on the banks or if there are food shortages or a terror attack, I don't see why it wouldn't be a tool in the toolbox that we use again.
And when I say lockdown, I don't necessarily mean one particular version of it, perhaps a tier structure or something else, but something that's about restricting your movement and your freedoms, because it's for the greater good.
Yeah, he was really concerned about climate.
Well, we don't know if it is their remit or not, James.
We don't, we don't know.
I hope it's not.
I assume it's not.
Another thing I did know, I did notice, well, I don't know, I'm only speculating.
Have Spivey been tasked to think about climate?
I've got no idea.
Have other advisors been tasked to think about it?
I'm not sure.
We know about these minutes because there's been a call for transparency and for them to be published.
There has been quite a segue between COVID and climate.
I saw a message from Simon Stevens of the NHS last summer, autumn, talking about the NHS building back greener following COVID.
And I thought, hey, hang on, what's that about?
What's the connection?
And then after that I noticed a few other leaders in politics and public health around the world talking about how after Covid we should build back greener, as though there's a natural segue.
And there isn't really, they're two completely different things that would maybe have crossover in political solutions and maybe not, but there shouldn't be a natural segue, there's no logical sense for it.
I would say that when Clifford Stott, who's the spy, the advisor, said that to me, it really hit my own raw nerve of fear, that they think that lockdowns are good, not only because they've been a solution for COVID, but because they reduce CO2 emissions.
Yeah.
I think one of the things that comes across well in your book, and I think that this is why particularly normies should read this book.
I hope they do.
is that it becomes very... I think people have this default assumption, because why not, that the government is being advised by committees which have a cost-benefit analysis of the damage that's being done, weighing pros and cons, the cost of a
I don't know if you accept their case that there's this terrible virus and letting it rip through society versus the damage done by closing business.
Scientists seriously thinking about variants, which I don't believe in, by the way, at all.
And I think it becomes fairly obvious from your book that there are no such scientists on the committee.
I mean, even Neil Ferguson is not an epidemiologist.
He's a physicist by training.
He just happens to have spent a We've spent the last 10 or 20 years developing computer models, which actually have been falsified by real-world data every time.
It's been an absolute disaster.
But what's clear from your book is that these expert committees, they've already been told what to think.
You know, this is a problem.
You must make the public behave in a way.
And all they're doing is just finding different ways to manipulate us, to manipulate our psyche and make us do things that we otherwise might not do.
Is that fair?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, I don't think there should be an epidemiologist on SpyBeat because they are specifically the behavioural psychology group.
But yes, they don't question the data.
And over time, I get the sense from talking to people off the record, they have been recruited to be quite homogenous.
Which is a dangerous scenario for an advisory panel.
They should be more adversarial.
They should be challenging each other.
It shouldn't be as easy to reach consensus as I think it is on Spy B from having spoken to them.
I think that the best decisions would be made with probably a great deal more arguments.
I have stayed away from the science of the virus or the vaccine or anything in this book because it's really not my remit.
I have no idea about it.
And what became clear to me over the last year was that the actual empirical evidence Didn't seem to matter a great deal.
So I've almost lost a bit of interest in it.
And I tuned in to what was happening in terms of psychology and fear, because we're not still, our freedoms aren't still being restricted because of science, but because of cases or deaths or hospitalizations.
Look at where we are.
Deaths are below the average for this time of year.
And when you look at the numbers of people who've died with the Indian variant, I can't see why we've, I can't see how that could possibly be justified restrictions when we're supposed to be pretty much at herd immunity with vaccination and natural immunity.
We're coming into summer.
This isn't really about hard numbers.
It's about psychology.
People are still frightened.
And I think that actually, when you sometimes, when you see scientists, newsreaders and politicians talking on TV, I think the anxiety is palpable.
And there's different things that could be driving that.
That's the professional reputation.
That's the idea of deaths from COVID being laid at their feet.
Maybe they're really frightened of the virus.
Sometimes some of the people who've spoken out, they might have suffered death recently.
I think of the case of Edwina Currie recently.
She was very vociferous about how important vaccination and COVID passports were, and her partner had recently died.
So I actually had a great deal of sympathy for her, but you have to wonder sometimes how much people's personal circumstances might also be driving their own anxiety levels.
The thing is, we went into this campaign of fear without any plan for how we come out of it.
I think it was ethically dubious, at the very best, at the most benign interpretation, I think, to deliberately frighten people to make them follow the rules.
It isn't treating us like adults.
It's unkind.
It would never pass an ethics committee if this was an experiment in a lab.
But that aside, we went into it with no plan for how we'd get out.
The ONS have just released figures showing that 50% of clinically vulnerable people are still shielding, even though they've been told by the government they don't have to.
And that's actually, that's quite sad.
That's quite sad.
That's people who are basically shielding and staying indoors and not being out in the world and going about their lives because they're frightened more than they should be.
So one thing I did for the book was I interviewed people who have been very impacted by fear and There's a chap called Darren who was shielding.
He's clinically vulnerable.
And the first time he went out, which was after six weeks, he went to hospital.
He was petrified.
He didn't want to breathe in air that anyone else had breathed out.
So if somebody walked past him, he'd be holding his breath.
And he had to go to hospital for a cancer appointment.
And when he got home, he said he took all his clothes off at the door and he took off his shoes.
He threw his shoes away because he couldn't wash them.
And he got into a bath that was so hot, he was scalded over his whole body.
Oh dear.
And I spoke to somebody called Jane, who's in her 60s, and she woke up every morning for weeks with panic attacks.
And a chap called Austin in his 70s, he lives with his wife and his mother, who's in her 90s.
And he said he wasn't irrationally frightened.
And yet their washing machine had broken in the beginning of lockdown.
And all throughout lockdown, he hand-washed their sheets, towels, and clothes.
He didn't want to even accept the delivery of a washing machine in case there was COVID on the surface.
So people have been really impacted by the fear.
And there's lots of studies that link those elevated psychological stressful times and fear with reduced immune system and poor physical health.
So the idea that people were frightened like that was not even any plan for how to get them out.
It's incredibly sad.
So you talked to people about a cost-benefit analysis.
There's never been a quantifiable cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns.
And I suspect that's because the numbers simply won't stack up.
But sometimes you have to look beyond the numbers.
If we accept the premise that lockdowns have saved lives, how do we compare the life potentially saved by lockdown with the life lost because somebody didn't go to hospital because they needed medical care or because they jumped from a bridge?
And how do we weigh up the person who potentially didn't catch COVID because they stayed at home or worked from home with the teenager who started self-harming because they couldn't handle isolation and not going to school?
I don't know how you weigh all of that up.
And what worries me is I don't think anyone ever has fully weighed up.
We went into this campaign of fear and lockdown without anybody weighing it up.
Yes.
I think what makes me feel, makes me very cynical about the world and about the way things are reported.
I mean, I think that the media is completely bent in the service of bigger, of sinister forces, let's say, that it's not free.
It's not what we think it is.
But I was thinking, do you remember in the Before 2020, what were we told ad nauseum by Prince Harry and Prince William?
What was the thing that they kept banging on about?
It was about how there was a mental health crisis and we were encouraged to focus on mental health.
I'm not sure exactly what we were supposed to do, whether we were supposed to kind of buy antidepressants for our nearest down and out or whatever, or what they were actually encouraging us to do.
But they were sort of banging on about it ad nauseam.
And yet here we are in a country where the government, almost with the population's consent, because it's weird how everyone's got sort of Stockholm syndrome, haven't they?
They've kind of participated in this charade.
But for whatever reason, however culpable the public may be, the government is more culpable.
They have engendered what you call a state of fear.
They have created mental illness on a probably unprecedented scale.
It's so hard to know exactly why the media did it exactly the way it did.
I've got a whole chapter on it.
I think it's complex.
It's multifactorial.
First of all, fear does sell.
It certainly sells better than sex, apparently.
You know, as you were saying, if it bleeds, it leads.
If it scares, it airs.
And there was a remarkable video that was shared on social media where Somebody from CNN was caught talking about how it'd been really good for ratings.
Did you catch that, James?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and then it got polled, didn't it?
But it was an interesting insight into that.
And I interviewed somebody who works at a broadshoot who talked about how they are effectively remunerated for generating the most clicks on articles.
Yeah.
I don't think that's ultimately going to be very good for news reporting for very obvious reasons.
But also there's editor and proprietor bias at news outlets.
You have to wonder whether denotices have been waved from on high above people's heads in the media as well.
What do you mean?
D notices, that's where reporting is restricted because it's a matter of national security.
I see.
Right.
Yes, I understand now.
Yeah.
So people have been told not to.
Yeah, there does seem to be a very cosy relationship between the government and the media, and they've bought that They've bought their mouthpieces by... I think that in the first round they put something like 192 million and then the latest round is 300 million, I think, of advertising.
Which is... that buys a lot of propaganda, doesn't it?
Yeah, it's probably not a very healthy long-term situation for the government and Public Health England to be the biggest advertisers in the media.
That's obviously going to lead ultimately to some, not for any length of time, but certainly not for this length of time.
I collected some of my favourite headlines in the book because, my goodness, what a year for scary headlines!
And, you know, you have to kind of laugh.
Some of the things that we were supposed to be scared of in the last year, it's just hilarious.
Hang on, let me find a couple of my absolute top favourites.
Sorry about that.
God, I'm so sorry.
Do you know, I've heard your podcast before and people's phones ring and I think, God, that's disgraceful.
Why didn't they turn their phone off first?
Yeah.
And then it happened to me.
Okay.
Bad news for baldies as new U.S.
study finds they're 40% more likely at risk of coronavirus.
Health officials, yeah, bad luck, James.
Health officials recommend glory holes for safe sex during the pandemic.
Ice cream tests positive for coronavirus in China.
Dog owners face 78% higher risk of catching COVID-19.
Why your pets should be socially distancing.
I mean, it's insane.
I mean, the kind of things that you can be frightened of.
If you're a bit tall, if you're bald, if you've got a dog, you know, all these things that supposedly put you at more risk.
It's a maelstrom of fear.
I've noticed this, that we've got a dog, and dog owners, traditionally, when you go out on a walk, have you got a dog?
When you go out on a walk... I have got a dog, yeah.
Well, you know what it's like?
When you meet other dogs, you encourage your dog to socialise, and you give the other person's dog a pat on the... It's a bit like admiring somebody's child, isn't it?
People like their dog being appreciated because they love their dog very much.
And this has changed now, this changed in the last 12 months or so, where now you're never quite sure whether you're allowed to pet somebody else's dog because they could be among those people who've been scared into believing that if you touch their dog you might give it coronavirus and then it might infect them and kill their granny.
I mean that's how stupid it is.
Oh my goodness, I know.
I actually found the first several weeks of dog walks and running, because I do both, Really, really challenging.
First of all, everybody started going out for their daily exercise.
We were never restricted in England to an hour of exercise, but people had it in their head that because that's all they must go out and exercise for an hour.
So I'm lucky.
I've got lovely countryside to go into, but suddenly it was packed full of people, but packed full of people who were terrified.
And there was just something in the air that was completely different.
My dog went really strange.
She went really hypervigilant.
She went quite batshit actually, because I think she could smell the fear or something in the air.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
And people sort of jumped to the side of the path.
As I'd go past.
And there's something about that that almost hurt my soul a little bit.
I was thinking, you know, we're outside in a country lane.
You really, you're okay.
Honestly, you're okay.
We're just going to walk past each other.
But they were so frightened.
And they're people that don't normally go out.
I think the normal dog walkers and the normal runners were okay, actually.
Look, my goodness, if you have a dog, I mean, they eat horse poo and roll around in fox poo and they come back with ticks on them.
You know, you've got quite a high level of tolerance, unfortunately, for disgustingness of dogs.
There was a woman I came across who was really frightened that my dog was going to get her COVID.
She was obviously somebody who doesn't normally go out and for her exercise in the countryside.
And my dog was running towards her because we were crossing on a path and she stopped and kind of galloped backwards and she had her hands up in front of her going, keep it away from me, keep it away from me.
I said, it's okay.
She's not, she's just going to run past you.
But if you run backwards, waving your hand, she's going to think it's a game.
She's going to chase you.
Like you're doing totally the wrong thing.
And she said, it's, it's the law.
She's supposed to be on a lead because she could give people COVID.
And I was like, hang on, that is not the law.
There's no law that dogs have to be on the lead and she won't give you COVID.
And I just stopped running around waving her arms because then she gets my dog's attention and my dog's barking at her.
It was bizarre.
It was a very, very bizarre time.
And people kind of huffing and puffing and moving to the edge of the path and exhaling an irritation into a hedge because you're walking past them.
It was just weird.
I'm so glad that bit's over.
Oh, but it's going to get we haven't got to the next worst stage yet.
We'll talk about in a moment.
But but um, I imagine that the normies who who encounter your message will say to themselves, well, I'm not taken in by advertising.
I'm not easily propagandized.
I've got my common sense.
So just take us through the different... Tell us a bit about Edward Bernays, because I think he's a key figure in everything that's happened now.
He's the kind of Fonzette Origo of this kind of propaganda that we're being fed now, isn't he?
Yeah, I came across Edward Bernays when I watched the Century of the Self, Adam Curtis series.
It's really fascinating.
I really recommend it.
I know not everyone likes Adam Curtis, but it's such a great series.
I think he's great and I love his soundtracks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Edward Bernays was the nephew of Freud.
And so this was a time when people were really understanding the human psyche and our strengths and our frailties and how they could be manipulated.
Now, Edward Bernays is basically the godfather of propaganda, but he renamed it public relations.
Clever man, because propaganda required a bitter taste.
He's very involved in the Guatemalan coup.
I give that as an example in the book to help people understand how wide scale manipulation happens.
So he recommended that people's fear of cold war be not alleviated, but weaponized, be used.
Guatemala had a popularly elected leader and United Fruit Company didn't really like that.
They preferred having their own puppet dictator in the country.
It was better for profits.
And Edward Bernays set up a news agency which would put out stories that were threatening that the Russians were going to land on the beaches and really fanning the flames of fear in the Cold War.
And then he took some journalists there, and there just happened to be this terrible riot, and Guatemala looked really dangerous, and journalists report on that.
And he really coordinated between academics and politicians and journalists to elevate fear.
And a new dictator was installed in Guatemala.
He didn't really have much faith in people.
He thought that While democracy was a good thing, we couldn't really be entrusted with running it ourselves.
I've gone through quite a process... So democracy without the demos, basically.
Exactly.
You have got it.
That's a very good description.
Yeah.
I mean, I've gone through times writing this book where I've wondered how much we can be entrusted with ourselves, you know, myself.
I've wondered, because for me, it's been surprising how biddable we are as people.
And one of the SPY-B advisors I interviewed, he's called Gavin Morgan, he's an educational psychologist.
I'd asked him what he'd learned from the last year, and he said what he's learned is that we're more passive and biddable than he even thought.
And he doesn't mean that in a bad way.
It's a negative learning.
Everything in our society and education is kind of set up to teach us to be so biddable.
And I also wondered, do we deserve democracy?
I think I will always believe in it and I believe we should be entrusted with it.
But if you believe in democracy, I don't see how you can simultaneously believe in so much behavioral psychology embedded in government.
Because if you're being manipulated beneath the surface level of your consciousness into behaving a certain way, then you have given up on determining what the way is.
You've given up determining what being a model citizen is or what the greater good is.
You're letting somebody else guide you towards it, but in a sneaky way.
I think it's profoundly undermining to democracy.
And so this book took me on a massive learning journey.
I'd say it's part polemical, part revelator, it's part gonzo journalism because we're living in it and I'm learning about it to write the book.
I really have gone on a journey to understand how fear is weaponised and come face to face with my own fears and I might once have thought that some behavioural nudge to help people give up smoking was a good thing and I now feel extremely cautious about its use at all.
But specifically, obviously, the weaponization of fear.
Yes, I think I've increased my smoking in response to this.
Do you know what?
Everything I read in the newspapers, or rather don't read the newspapers anymore, everything the government tells me, I'll do the opposite now.
I think that's been my lesson from all this.
Just tell us the ways in which the government has manipulated us, all the different tricks they've used.
Yeah, sure.
OK, well, there's lots of different ways.
First of all, sometimes politicians have a go themselves, and it's pretty clumsy and catcandid when they do it.
So you'll hear a minister say something like, oh, you know, if you see people hugging, report them.
Well, you know, we can only lift the lock down if you follow the rules.
I don't believe that some spibey advisor was waiting in the wings and said, say this, because it's just too awful.
But they're having a go themselves at using behavioral psychology, and it's pretty dreadful.
But sometimes their wording is incredibly fine tuned.
If we go back to the 23rd of March, when Boris Johnson gave his speech to the nation, or Fright Night, as I like to call it, That speech was very carefully written.
Now, you studied English, didn't you, James?
Yeah.
And I did.
When you read the transcripts, it's very martial language.
It's very authoritarian.
And it's supposed to make us feel like we're fighting this great enemy.
But no politician can seriously believe that fighting a virus is the same as fighting a war.
It's a war you're not going to win.
80% of the human genome is now virus.
It's not like fighting an enemy nation.
But the thing about that sort of martial language is it rallies around obedience.
And, you know, you have to do your part for the war effort.
You're enlisted, or press gang, as it were.
So sometimes the speeches, you can see their involvement in speeches.
There's the advertising.
So some of the advertising has been just so shocking, like don't let a coffee cost lives.
Now that advert came out when buying a takeaway coffee and going for a walk with a friend.
Wow, what a privilege, what a treat, James.
That wasn't illegal.
And so why did he put out an ad saying, don't let a coffee cost lives?
It's a crazy premise.
And then there was the ads, look him in the eyes or look her in the eyes and tell him you always keep a safe distance, never bend the rules.
I felt this kind of whiplash of shock when I saw that.
Because what that is clearly designed to do is set up a blame game between people.
It's saying that all of the problems with COVID transmission can be laid at the feet of people who have not followed the rules.
And, you know, that completely ignores, say, the smoking gun of hospital-acquired infections or people who caught it in care homes.
And there haven't been any ads, quite rightly, blaming hospitals or doctors or nurses for that.
You know, people don't only acquire COVID because somebody didn't follow the rules.
Oh, I like those ads, though.
I'd love to see them.
No, we wouldn't.
Adds the point of the finger at the NHS.
This is an evil Stalinist organisation that has killed about 50% of the people who got Covid.
That would be good.
Nearly all the people working there are, you know, are doing a good job and believing they're doing a good job.
They can't help the fact the hospital's a bit like little cities and are not conducive to respiratory diseases and airborne viruses.
You know, we don't have the old fever hospitals of old.
But those ads, they were done in these very intense close-ups, very grainy, a bit like an upscale Blair Witch Project.
And around so much government messaging, you could see yellow and black chevrons.
And these are like disaster cordons.
Do not cross.
Danger.
Do not cross.
Makes you stop, you know, stop.
Pause.
Don't do anything.
Think about it.
It's dangerous out there.
It's also like a wasp, a wasp sting.
Big red fonts.
Use of fonts that are unfriendly.
The voices in the advertising were deep, stern, raspy men, warning you that this is very dangerous.
And then by the time you got to the summer, it's like a lady, go out and enjoy the summer, have a safe British summer.
And then you come back to the autumn, the winter, and it's the deep man's voice again.
I think one thing that was part of it was the Ofcom guidelines where broadcasters couldn't Produce content that was harmful, that might go against the official policy, because what that did was then stifle debate.
Science isn't fixed at one point in time and always set, it's constantly evolving and I think that the Ofcom guidance might have inhibited important scientific debate and also perspectives that would have alleviated people's fears.
Something which very much has behavioural psychology Yeah, I think the best apology approach is the use of social conformity and norms.
So the use of heroes and Covid-iots.
Yes.
You know, which team do you want to be on?
Do you want to be a Covid hero?
Stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives, follow the rules, wear your mask.
And being a hero in this sense means doing exactly what you're told.
Or there's being a Covid-iot or a granny killer.
Don't kill granny.
That's one of the other advertising slogans.
And, you know, that was turned on people who did such innocent things as even going to the pubs when they opened on July the 4th last summer.
You know, there was this avalanche of media articles basically pointing the finger at people who dared to go out and have a pint and enjoy themselves when pubs reopened.
So, you know, be on the right team.
It's using herd mentality.
And we're wired like this because it's much easier to make a decision if you're doing the same as other people.
It's like 8 out of 10 cats prefer whiskers.
Yes.
Are you going to be on the 8 out of 10 or the 2 out of 10?
Which cat food would you choose?
Easy, job's already, you know, decided for you.
You go for the one the group's done.
So there's been a lot of this social conformity and, you know, going alongside that there was a Conservative MP called Neil O'Brien who created a website called Covid Some kind of FAQ website, so COVID FAQ or something, and he created that with some other people and that produced lists, lists of journalists and scientists who had made mistakes, got it wrong, said dangerous things.
So it's very clear, you know, do you want to be some kind of outlier academic, albeit from Stanford University or Oxford University, do you want to be one of those outlier ones and end up on my list, or are you going to be the good ones?
Yes.
So there's a lot of othering.
And, you know, we can see that right now with the conversation about vaccines.
Look at the way the word refusenik has entered into the narrative.
Where did that come from?
I don't know, but it's just been plopped out there recently.
And that evokes Communists, Reds Under the Bed.
Who wants to be on that team?
Who wants to be Refused Nick?
And also, if you refuse things, you do sound awfully obstinate, don't you?
Yes, I think actually it was an odd use of the word, use the word Refused Nick, because actually, if you knew the origins of Refused Nick, you would realise that These were dissidents, particularly Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union, who were not allowed to leave the country, in most cases to go to Israel, which in a way actually is a
is negative to the cause of the government, because it is acknowledging what is true, that this government is acting like the Soviet Union, and it is treating dissidents like Jews were treated before Glasnost and perestroika.
So, I don't know.
But you're right, the word has appeared, and I wanted to ask you about this.
There was a horrible article by the associate editor of the Independent.
Did you see this one?
It was published yesterday.
He's called Sean O'Grady.
And he begins the piece, What shall we do about the anti-vaxxers?
A presumptuous question, I know.
And I was thinking, do you understand why this is far more than a presumptuous question?
All you need to do is to substitute the word Jews for anti-vaxxers.
What should we do about the Jews?
This is what's going on.
I mean, it could have been, but for the word anti-vaxxers, it could have been an article from Der Stürmer, frankly.
They are othering us.
They are setting us apart as a kind of a group to be maligned, well, scapegoated.
And you talk about scapegoating.
I do talk about scapegoating.
I think, you know, when people are concerning themselves with who's doing what, who's pulling the strings, is there a conspiracy theory behind it?
Is it all a cock-up?
What you have to realize is certain things just keep happening throughout history and one is scapegoating.
It's a very archetypal human practice.
And scapegoating is basically putting the sins of everybody onto one person and sending them out into the desert.
In a way, that's what Neil O'Brien did with his website.
It's scapegoating people.
I think, in a sense, there's a way in which most of us have been scapegoated, but instead of being cast out into a desert, we were confined in our homes instead.
We're carrying the sins, and the sin is that you are You are potentially infectious.
You are an agent of disease and a vector of transmission.
Geopolitical borders that need protecting have shrunk to the human body itself.
I don't want to go too much into that extended metaphor, but it's there in the book.
I think scapegoating is fascinating and it's never going to go anywhere.
What would be nice is if we could recognise it and deal with it more quickly.
And articles like the one you're mentioning aren't isolated.
I pulled out examples from other countries in the book.
There was one in Israel that referred to the Orthodox Jews as COVID insurgents and walking epidemiological time bombs.
And the language couldn't be more blunt.
What you just did is an interesting exercise.
If you substitute one word for another, how does it feel?
And it quite often doesn't feel good.
And this is the thing to be wary of.
Because that kind of dehumanizing language never really leads anywhere good.
And we shouldn't be blaming each other.
I mean, there's whole other ways you could position it.
You could say, well, people who don't look after their health, are they responsible for beds being clogged up in the NHS?
We wouldn't want to do that, would we?
I read somebody, I think it was an MP actually, wrote an article where he turned it around.
What if we said the obese couldn't enter shops or services without being weighed first?
In much the same way that there are proposals for people to show a Covid passport to show their Covid immunity.
It's an absolutely bonkers idea, yet one of those ideas does seem to be gathering steam.
Yes, I think so.
And I think also that this scapegoating of vaccine skeptics particularly has a long way to go.
I think we're going to go to some very dark places.
Because as you pointed out at the beginning, There's been no exit plan.
There are no behavioral psychologists schooled in skills of deprogramming people from fear.
It's not even part of the game plan.
We're talking at the moment about I met some young men staying at the hotel near where I live.
You know, the hotel's just sort of started taking guests again.
And I started talking to them about masks and stuff and instantly they brought up the Indian variant.
This idea that people just take on trust that there is this thing called the Indian variant, and that the Indian variant is a reason why we might not end the lockdown, and why the government is justified in doing so.
This is extraordinary, isn't it?
They can just present these pseudo-scientific factoids as if they were real, and no one stopped to think about this.
No one stopped to think, Matt Hancock, one of the MPs, was implying that they were doing it to protect the anti-vaxxers from themselves, that they were worried about our NHS being overwhelmed with anti-vaxxers who were succumbing to the Indian variant.
If you asked any anti-vaxxer or any vaccine skeptic, I think they'd all be very happy if push came to shove, never to use the NHS again, rather than be forced to take this vaccine.
And the arguments are all specious.
They're all dishonest.
Yeah, I mean, it doesn't really hold up because the thing is, if you have had the vaccine, you've had the protection it confers on you, You think?
So let's just well I'm going I'm going with that okay so let's say you go to a pub and you're standing at the bar now I've had my vaccine okay but you're standing next to me James and you haven't doesn't matter whether you have or not because I have yeah so I've had the protection it gives me.
You think?
So I don't I don't need to worry about whether I'm going with this line, but I don't need to worry about your immune status as long as I know what mine is.
And then this is about managing your own personal risk.
So this idea that we have to all be divulging our medical and immune status in order to access products and services is quite bizarre.
And when it's sold as getting us back to normal, again, this is another thing that, you know, the language just The language just gets my radar because I think, well, that's not normal.
It's never been normal to demonstrate your medical status, to go to a concert or to go into a shop or to go to the theater.
That's not normal.
That is not getting back to normal.
And a lot of the public health strategies bring about worrying about others and not yourself because the behavioral psychologist noticed that was more effective.
If you're being asked to worry about others, not yourself.
So because most of us, the vast majority of us, COVID isn't really a great threat for us.
If we were only worried about ourselves, we'd have just been able to carry on as normal, wouldn't we?
But you're being told to worry about others.
So my mask is to protect you.
It's not to protect me.
There's only very flyway evidence it does anything, but of course it's getting into your head that what you do is to protect others.
And your vaccine isn't just to protect you, which is the way it's supposed to work.
It's to protect everyone else.
that you've just explained something which has always puzzled me.
And it's a phenomenon I think I've called altruistic hypochondria, which is to say, whenever I've had conversations with people, young people wearing masks, for example, I'm saying, why are you wearing that muzzle?
Or when I've talked to them about any aspect of this, the need for lockdowns and so on.
Every single occasion.
It's never been about them.
It's always been about, oh, but you see, I've got this elderly so-and-so, or I've got this relative with this underlying health condition.
It's always, always they cite somebody else as the reason why they can't do it.
It's as though only they have feelings for their relatives, and people like you and me are just happy to let granny die, because those are the kind of people we are.
Whereas they, they care about their grandmother, they care about their sister who's got asthma or whatever.
Yeah, but now...
There's so much to pick up on there.
Well, first of all, the way the psychology works is that you can be... This is the whole Bernaysian way of looking at things.
People en masse, as a group, can be controlled by, as a group, tapping to their unexpressed fears and desires.
So the fear of death is huge.
That's a big one.
That's a very powerful motivator.
But if you say to people, we're going to ask you to pay like this because you're scared for yourself, you're scared of dying.
It's not very positive, is it?
If you wrap it up in, we're going to go for that fear, but we're going to tell you that what you're doing is protecting others.
It's suddenly so much more acceptable.
It's like a moral shield.
It's really virtuous.
So you stay home, really it's because you're scared, but it's to protect others.
But of course, people are good.
They really don't want to hurt others.
A lot of people really do feel like they've been behaving in a way which is socially responsible.
But I think, It's so unfair to strip that choice from people.
So my mother is in her 70s and she has very serious lung condition and she's had a heart attack before.
And I think that given that we don't know how long she has for the world, you know, maybe it's a couple of years or 10 years, but you know, who knows?
I don't want to speculate about that.
She might be listening to this as well.
Shouldn't it be up to her if she wants to see her daughter?
And likewise, and there was a point where we saw each other in the summer where we shouldn't have done, but she'd been quite poorly.
She had a suspected heart attack.
And I thought, this is crazy.
Why would I, why would I not see my mum?
What is life about?
What is life about?
And it's about love and family and doing what's what's morally right.
Of course, what we've determined is morally right has been all over the place this year, but my internal moral compass and what I value as a human said I should see my mum and my mum wanted to, so we saw each other, but I still had that fear, like, oh, what if I give her something?
Even you had that fear?
And yet it's no, yeah, yeah, I did.
Because like, what if I'm the one who's responsible for giving my mum a virus?
Yeah.
The funny thing is, James, I actually think I quite likely had COVID December 19, January 20.
And I was at my mom's house.
That's the thing.
I was very poorly for a few weeks.
I had to sleep sitting upright in bed for a while because my lungs were so sore and I couldn't breathe.
I'm never ill.
I've got, I've got the, uh, the resting heart rate and the blood pressure and the VO2 of a, an athletic 25 year old.
And so for me to be like that was odd.
So I think I might've had it.
And I was actually at my mom's when I was at my worst and therefore probably most infectious.
Yes.
I had a sort of similar thing where I had it in end of February, 2020.
And even though I'm quite dismissive now of people's, the way people have been manipulated into fear, I remember that in the run-up to my getting it, Because I spend a lot of time on social media and I'd seen the videos coming out of China.
Okay, there was the unconvincing one of the person dropping dead at the tube station or whatever.
But there was other stuff which seemed to be coming from independents.
It seemed like it wasn't propaganda.
It did seem for a time like this was a serious problem.
And I remember thinking, oh, I really don't want to get this.
I'm quite nervous.
And I went to stay in a hotel in London.
full of Chinese people.
You remember a lot of Chinese people traveling about at that time in the run-up to the to the COVID thing.
And you saw them on the tube.
And I remember sort of like trying to distance myself from them.
And I remember getting into a lift just after a load of Chinese people got out.
Or rather, I didn't get into the lift.
I sort of waited till they'd gone.
And then I didn't want to embarrass them.
And then I held my breath.
Went inside the lift and didn't breathe in again until I'd got out of the lift.
Anyway, that weekend I caught COVID by coincidence and I discovered that it's just like a cold.
I mean, unless you're unlucky, it's just like, it's no biggie.
But I can see why for those who haven't had it, it's been so bigged up in the media as this scary thing that you would be worried about getting it.
You would cover your hands in that stupid stuff that strips your skin off, and you would do all the things that I don't do at all now, not remotely, not ever.
In fact, I think I've probably stopped.
I wash my hands about half as much as I used to.
Again, as a gesture of defiance, I can't stand it anymore.
I really would be very happy, actually, if I caught, you know, some real disease, something other than this nonsense.
Yeah, I know.
I mean, I have to say, I've actually started washing my hands a little bit less, not as an act of defiance, but because I'm a bit worried about how much healthier pathogens and viruses we've been exposed to.
And I feel like I want my immune system to have some more challenges, because that is all part, you know, that's what we normally do.
We're normally out in the world and we're challenging our immune system.
So, yeah, I've been doing that as well.
Just, you know, I don't want to come the Autumn to be living in a sterile petri dish.
I don't think that's wise.
Do you not feel that the lockdowns and all these measures have become ends in themselves?
That they've long since parted company with the actual virus?
I mean, I think you hinted at this earlier on when you said you weren't very interested in the virus and the science side of things.
I think you're absolutely right.
It's got nothing to do with the virus.
This is all about government just like locking us down and punishing us and crushing our spirits because of something else.
I think we're lost.
We're really, really lost in a story.
There have been so many layers of manipulation now in the story.
So much nudging, so much use of fear that we are completely lost.
It's been an endless game of bait and switch.
The Overton window has moved so many times it's at the other end of the street.
We're not in the same building with the same window.
It's gone.
We latched down for three weeks to flatten the curve.
Yeah, I remember that.
I don't even know what to say.
We're somewhere so different.
We seem to have completely left things like personal responsibility in our pre-pandemic past.
Also the idea of informed consent.
The messaging around the vaccine is incredibly coercive.
Again, it's very heroes, you know, heroes and saints and refuse nicks.
So we seem to have left the ethical bedrock of informed consent in our pre-pandemic past.
Behavioural psychology isn't a genie that's out of the bottle.
It's like a multi-headed hydra and it doesn't matter how much you keep cutting its heads off, it's growing more and more heads.
They're recruiting all the time.
So many behavioural psychologists have been recruited in the NHS, Public Health England and the government over the last year.
And we're just nowhere like the same place we're in.
But I truly believe that we can all pick up a pen and start rewriting the story.
It's down to us.
What I want for the book is for it to wake people up to the fear messaging.
Because if you're frightened, if you feel anxious, it's harder to think clearly.
And when it's harder to think rationally and clearly, you're much more likely to be relying on government messaging.
Well, if you're relying on the government messaging at the moment, your fear levels are certainly not coming down.
And then you're more frightened, and then you're more reliant on the government messaging.
And it's this vicious circle of doom-mongering, You're in a self-perpetuating doom loop.
You need to break that spell.
Now, I don't just mean a magical spell.
You know, we use the word spell for spelling things.
It's about words.
I think the book is like an anti-nudge guide.
If you read this, I think it can wake you up.
So that's the first thing.
I think a lot of people in the media and in advisory circles and government are becoming a bit more vocal about this as well, that we need to help people climb down from fear.
Because recovery, if we're serious about recovery, it's not going on about variants because that's a story that can keep going forever.
There'll be hundreds of thousands of variants.
Recovery is children playing in the playgrounds.
It's people working in the office.
It's your sandwich shop back in business and not with a closed sign over it.
And it's most definitely not death dashboards.
We don't do these death dashboards for anything else.
And no vaccine passports either.
Otherwise... They won't get us back to normal.
We were told that when the most vulnerable were vaccinated, we'd cry freedom.
I think that by the time the over 50s and the most vulnerable were vaccinated, we were supposed to have eliminated the potential for 99% of deaths and 80 to 85% of hospitalisations.
Apologies if I'm a bit off, but I think those figures are right.
So at that point, we were told That the risk was hugely reduced.
The vaccine apparently works for the variants.
So why would you need a vaccine passport given that all the most vulnerable and the elderly have been offered the vaccine?
It's their choice if they've had it or not.
We should be able to get back to normal without needing a passport to enter an establishment or to go about our lives.
That's not normal.
That's not normal.
Demonstrating your medical status for products and services is not normal.
Yes, I agree.
But this is my final question, Chi, because I know you've got childcare jobs ahead of you.
Has the government been lying to us?
Hmm, so tricky.
The government is made up of different people.
It's not one homogenous blob.
It's different people.
Do different politicians lie?
I think we can say that they do.
Have they been lying?
Okay, so there was a presentation of statistics in November from Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance.
And I think at the time the forecast was that 4,000 people a day would Do you know, I'm so sorry, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but there was a shock and awe presentation.
And after that, they kind of had their knuckles wrapped by the National Statistics Authority, which didn't say, you've been lying, but did call for responsible presentation of statistics.
And Theresa May said in Parliament that it looked as though the government was picking Statistics to suit the policy, not the policy to suit the statistics.
They present worst case scenarios based on modeling.
We could call that scientific simulation, we could call it soothsaying, we could call it lying.
It depends where you want to draw the line there.
When they have told us that we should wear masks to protect people, that was based on no new evidence, no change in evidence whatsoever.
And there were two fact-checkers who went through my book.
My publisher's been very rigorous with me.
And the first, I think it's fair to say that the first fact-checker didn't like the book and the second one did.
And I do think, I do think the book will be polarizing.
Just going back to an earlier point earlier, you said that, you know, will it wake normies up?
Well, I actually think the book could hurt because nobody wants to think that they can be manipulated, let alone that they have been.
Anyway, the first fact-checker didn't like the book and She really took particular exception to what I said about the mask and she highlighted me to the government page on policy that encourages people to wear masks.
Well, that very page says there is no published research from randomized controlled trials on the role of masks or face coverings worn by the general population in the transmission of SARS-CoV-2.
Then it goes on to say the evidence to support their use is weak.
This is the government website.
Making accurate estimates of the degree of protection offered by face masks based on the available evidence is not possible at the moment.
May offer some limited protection in some contexts.
At best, I think we can call the evidence in favour of wearing homemade masks in the community to protect others flyweights, and that's generous.
And yet the policy changed from don't wear masks, you don't need them, and they did tell us we don't need them, to it's a law.
So they mandated clothing that we have to wear on our face based on no evidence.
I think that's getting quite close to... I'm not as comfortable about saying the word as you.
Well, it's getting a bit closer.
It's getting closer to it.
There's no evidence that they help, really.
Just tell us, one more question, because you've dealt with this in the book quite extensively.
What is the reason that you've worked out that they're making us wear masks?
Well, they've said it themselves.
I spoke to one MP who wanted to be anonymous.
He said he'd had it from Matt Hancock that masks were introduced because the economic bounce back wasn't good enough after the first lockdown.
And they thought it would encourage confidence to get people to return to the high street.
Matt Hancock did say that himself in the House of Commons too, that it would improve confidence.
Yeah.
And then they noticed that they perform a signal.
There's two things they do.
We behave differently when we wear them.
We keep a distance from other people because they turn you into a walking billboard for danger.
When you see people out there wearing masks, it's a constant reminder that there's an epidemic.
David Halpern, the head of the Payable Insights team, answered questions to MPs and I mean, for me, it was amazing.
None of them questioned the ethics of the use of behavioral psychology of fear at all.
In fact, I'd say they all went the other way.
But he was asked about masks and he referred to them being a signal.
And then he referred to them being underlying evidence.
So first of all, he put signal before underlying evidence.
And secondly, he prefaced evidence with underlying.
And I always think language Matters.
So masks are essentially a signal.
And I think at the moment they're keeping fear going and they're keeping the sense that we're in an epidemic going.
Actually, the prevalence is below epidemic levels.
We're not officially at epidemic levels of the virus.
I don't think that recovery is possible while people are wearing face masks.
First of all, we need human connection to conviviality.
That's just my that's my view.
We need to see people.
We need to rebuild connections, rebuild life.
But they also are this signal.
And until we drop the signal and these different rituals of fear, I don't see how we're going to get to recovery.
So if the government is serious that they want us to recover and for life to go back to normal, we do have to drop face masks.
At the very least, I'd like them to produce some evidence that's a reason for wearing them, which they haven't done so far.
I think they're going to have trouble finding it because there really isn't any.
Laura, thank you.
Thank you so much.
That's really interesting.
And I highly recommend your book.
Hang on.
A state of fear!
It's really good, it's really good.
And don't forget everyone, if you like this podcast, as I'm sure you did, and all my other stuff, don't forget to support me on Patreon and Subscribestar and on my website dellingpoleworld.com.
Buy a special friend badge, you know, help me out if you can.
And people should.
They should.
Thank you, Laura.
Freedom isn't free, is it?
Well, because your podcast is really good.
No, freedom's not free.
Free speech isn't free.
Podcasts aren't free.
I really enjoy your podcast.
It's been a real pleasure to be on it.
Thank you.
No, well, thank you.
You've been great.
And thank you for writing a great book, which I'm sure will help the cause enormously.
So, right, go and do your free thing.
Go and be free, Laura.
And don't wear a mask.
You're not going to wear a mask, are you?
I won't.
Good.
I'm not.
I'm taking a child to football in a field, so there'll be no mask anyway.
Yeah, but will the other... I gather that... Sorry, just now you mentioned this.
I really particularly dislike this character, Halpern.
He's clearly a very, very dangerous character.
Where is the bit where he talks about...
He's quoted as saying, in a positive way... There's an index at the back if you're struggling.
Oh, is there?
Where he says that he mainly relies on members of the public to do this policing process, to police one another.
So he relies on other members of the public to stigmatise those they see not wearing masks or those they discover not having taken the vaccines or whatever.
And I've noticed this a lot.
We've created this nation of snitches and complainers and disapprovers, and it's really made the country an unpleasant place to live in.
Because you're always being judged.
It's really depressing.
Yeah, I'm glad you picked up on that, actually.
That's something that really bothered me when he said that as well.
That's in the same select committee.
where he's questioned by MPs.
He's not the only one that said that, Dame Clare Sturdick of the Met Police, she also said that people should, that the police couldn't possibly enforce the mask mandate and should be relying on members of the British public to shame each other into complying.
Basically, we're being told to go out and behave like Stasi.
You know, also in some of these YB papers, you see the use of community champions, and it does have that ring of old communist block policing.
You know, where we report on people for doing wrong and praise people for being good social conformists.
It's really unpleasant.
I mean, when all this started, I wasn't sure how seriously exactly to take the epidemic.
And I said to my children, you do need to follow the rules.
But something that's really important, guys, is you have to be seen to follow the rules because people will start snitching on each other.
I knew it would happen.
What I didn't know was how our leaders would Encourage us to tell on each other with such gusto.
If you remember, there were hotlines set up for people to report to the police.
And actually, you'd think that when you're in a time of supposed disaster and epidemic, that they'd want to encourage community spirit and looking after each other.
And do you know what?
No, I think when we were left to our own devices, that's what was happening.
People were looking out for each other right at the beginning.
There was a genuine feeling of we are in this together.
There was, I remember that.
Yeah, but then there's this influence.
You've got to follow the rules.
Tell on people who don't follow the rules.
Yes.
People left to their own devices would have brought each other through it, I think.
I think you're right.
I think that people are basically good, but I think that the people in power, particularly on the level of the uber elite, they are psychopaths, and they want to destroy all that is good about our society and our civilization, and they've created all this shit.
This is all coming from on high.
It has got nothing to do with the virus, I'm afraid.
I want to say something else about people being good, actually, before we say goodbye, because I really do believe this.
So I've been on a really fascinating, but sometimes, frankly, disturbing journey with this book.
I read so much.
I mean, I've been like an undergraduate cramming.
I've read so many books and papers.
I've interviewed so many different types of people for it.
Scientists, psychologists, politicians, civil rights experts, lawyers, so many people.
And I think there was a time when I kind of lost my faith.
I thought, well, how have we gone along with being manipulated like this?
And how can there be people who do want to manipulate us?
I kind of lost my faith in people, but I really recovered it by the end.
Because ultimately, yes, we can be overly frightened.
And that makes us suggestible.
But you've got to remember that fear is built into us.
If I tried to finish the book with saying, don't be frightened anymore, that would be ludicrous.
We'll never not be frightened.
And we shouldn't not be frightened.
It's an important evolutionary response.
But I really believe in the goodness of people.
People ultimately don't want to be manipulated and they're not going to want to live like cowering, fearful shadows of their former selves.
You know, ultimately we lean towards all that's good about humanity, which is Being part of a flourishing society and family and relationships and love and conviviality and people want truth.
They don't, they certainly don't want to be manipulated.
So I'm in a place of a lot more faith at the end.
I really, I really do.
I do have a lot of faith.
Fear isn't sustainable.
And as it's fading away, people are waking up to the fact that it was overly amplified.
So fear is in this inverse relationship with the knowledge of its weaponization.
I don't know whether you've just, you're aware of this, but you've just made the case for the white pill.
But we can talk about that some other time.
But you know, you're on the way to taking the white pill.
I think that's what, that's, people are, people are discovering this.
It's amazing.
But we can talk about it some other time.
Anyway, thank you.
We should, definitely.
Oh, we should.
Oh yeah.
The white pill's interesting.
Yeah.
Good.
That was really good.
Thank you very much.
And good luck with the book.
Is it selling?
Thank you.
Thank you.
It's selling really well.
Great.
Well done.
Really well.
It's sold out.
First print run sold out on the first day it went on sale.
I know it really did.
I know.
Is it in bookshops?
It's selling so well.
It might be in some actual bookshops.
I don't know.
Apparently, somebody told me that they went into WH Smith's and asked for it, and they were told they wouldn't stock a book like that because it goes against the narrative, which just made me chuckle a little bit.
Perhaps if it was selling nowhere, that would have alarmed me, but It's sold out on the first day and that's actually amazing that it's sold out because weirdly it stopped appearing in Amazon searches for four days.
It was not hard to find.
You had to really persist to find my book for a few days.
It's on the second print run and now there's a third print run.
It's going really fast, which is very exciting.
And do you know something that's so nice?
So you'll know this as an author, writing a book is such hard work.
Well, I think it's hard.
You might find it easy.
There were bits that were really fun in the show when you write a book and you're like, yes, I rock.
I love this.
I've really explained it well.
And then you have other days where you think, I'm just terrible.
I'm hopeless.
What am I even doing?
No one will believe in it.
No one will buy it.
I'm useless.
I need to do something else.
You know, it's an excruciating process.
So to get to the end, and then I had people who sent me messages saying, I'm going to wait up till one minute past midnight so I can get the e-book and read it tonight.
It's just really amazing.
And I've had hundreds... No, no, they weren't my friends.
They're strangers.
Psycho strangers, right?
Okay.
No, I thought it was really nice.
Oh, I've had real psychos contact me.
They were nice.
I've had hundreds of emails and messages and tweets from people saying, you know, they'll say, I'm on page 69 and I love it so far.
I've read it and I'm buying it for four other people so that they understand they don't need to be frightened.
And so to feel that impact it's had, I don't want to gush too much, sorry, you've caught me in the first week so I might be in a kind of over-enthusiastic mode.
No, I'm really happy for you!
I feel so heartened and it's probably also where my level of faith in people's going, you know, it's going up more because they do want this message, they want to understand.
They want to understand the level of manipulation that happens, and they want to avoid it.
They don't want to fall prey to it again.
So I feel good at the moment.
It is selling.
People are enjoying it.
The first reviews are lovely.
Lots of five-star reviews on Amazon, and a third print run rolling off the presses.