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July 31, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:13:37
Dr. Hugh Willbourn
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Are you ready?
Yeah.
I've just thought about recording how you introduced me.
I'm kind of Mr. Unfamous, James.
I'm just a guy, an ordinary guy, who was so pissed off with the situation that I started my own blog.
And I've got a lot of background stuff.
That'll do.
Yeah.
That's good.
There was a... No, we'll keep this stuff in.
I like this.
There was a poltergeist opening your door there.
That's right.
That's a little...
Do you mind the poltergeist listening to us?
That's Milo.
No, I like what was that was that a small child?
It is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry, mate.
It's my story.
Oh, that's sweet.
Oh, how lovely.
Yeah.
OK.
Yeah.
Well, listen, we're going to keep that stuff in because we like we like a bit of a bit of Atmos or whatever it's called.
I get I tell you what, Hugh, I get so pissed off with other people's podcasts, particularly Americans.
They're really bad at this.
And they do this really, really shit banter for about five minutes before you cut to the chase.
And you think, hello, I'm waiting for the show to start.
Anyway, welcome to The Daring Pod with me, James Daring Pod.
I'm very excited about this week's special guest.
And I know I always say that, but I really am.
It's Dr. Hugh Wilburn.
Hugh is, well, you're a teacher at the moment, aren't you?
Well, you described what you were earlier on.
You're a writer.
You've got your PhDs in philosophy.
Philosophy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To psychotherapy.
Okay, and you're currently in The Narm, as my brother and I used to call it when we were growing up, watching Apocalypse Now and all those programs.
Actually, how is it there?
I mean, how is the lockdown fanaticism going on and the jabby jab fanaticism?
Well, I mean, all of last year, I was like, Being really, really snooty and superior to my friends back in UK, going like, you in your, you know, stuck in that fascistic democracy with all your rights taken away, you poor bastards, right?
And we were still having fun, going out to restaurants, dancing, you know, it's totally free.
The only thing we couldn't do was get in and out of the country.
They basically closed the borders.
But that doesn't work, as we all know.
So COVID has finally arrived, and we've got, I have to say, a pretty outrageous overreaction going on.
I'm in Saigon, which is down in the south of Vietnam, but all over Vietnam, whole cities are getting locked down.
And people are being tested.
If they test positive, they get either quarantined in place or taken off to some, actually to the school over the road for me as an example.
And they're just taken away from their families and they're quarantined for 14 days.
So it's a bit intense.
They've closed all the shops and closed even the, now we've got a 6 p.m.
to 6 a.m.
curfew.
Which obviously is brilliant.
It works just as well as the British one.
You know, this is the first virus that is time sensitive, like in the UK.
It's only dangerous after 10pm.
Well here, because we're closer to the equator, obviously it's dangerous from 6pm to 6am.
So that's why we have a curfew.
Yeah.
And do you have any suspicions as to why it is that Vietnam has turned from a kind of land of freedom like it was last year to a CCP style tyranny?
No, I say CCP style.
I should have said Canada style or Ireland style or New Zealand style or Victoria Australia style.
Why do you think this has happened?
To be honest, James, I don't know.
It's not clear.
I mean, it's not obvious why the government makes decisions here.
They just make decisions and you get told what to do.
I think they've been misled, basically, by the powers that are misleading the rest of the world.
I mean, where are the sensible places like Sweden, Florida, Texas, South Dakota?
And everywhere else has gone mad.
So, you know, Brazil, Belarus, Belarus.
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was wondering because you wrote a very good piece early on in the pandemic.
Was it published at Lockdown Skeptics?
There was one bit that Toby picked up on at Lockdown Skeptics, which was basically about how when people get involved in a cult and they believe something very, very strongly, and then they're absolutely disproved, this strange thing happens is a lot of them then double down.
Instead of going, oh, I'm wrong, they actually become incredibly evangelistic and they try and persuade everybody else that they're right.
And in order to kind of sustain their own self-image.
Yes.
I agree that what's happening in the world right now, it is like we're all trapped in this giant cult and it's an abusive cult at that, isn't it?
I mean, it's a kind of, it's probably a Jim Jones type cult.
I'm half expecting a senator to fly in to try and rescue some of us in an airplanes and for the senator and the escapees to be shot and everyone else to start drinking the Kool-Aid.
Yeah, I mean, actually the similarities are appalling, James.
I've done many things in my life, one of which I was a hypnotherapist, so I learned about hypnosis and I think that one of the best ways to describe what's happened is that people have been hypnotized by a certain worldview.
They're stuck inside it because You know, there are an enormous number of people who are deluded at the moment.
I mean, it's something like 80% of the world's population.
I mean, it's vast numbers.
It's not just bad people in government.
There are lots of good, kind, ordinary people who have become, if you like, possessed or deluded or hypnotized.
And they're not inherently bad.
Far from it.
They're inherently good.
But they've been caught by a problem that really arises.
It predates COVID.
It predates all this madness.
It's to do with the way that we think in modernity.
We prioritize abstract ideas and we undervalue genuine experience, people who've really learned from doing things.
We make, we mistake knowledge about things for knowledge of how to do things.
And unfortunately, almost all the people in positions of power are the people with knowledge about, with certificates, you know, who've, who, I don't know, they got themselves jobs as politicians or academics, but they have very little experience of doing a proper job of actually suffering when things go wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When did this start, this kind of shift in our culture, the way we view the world?
Well, there are many stages, if you like, James.
I could go back two and a half thousand years, or I can go back 150 years.
Which one do you want?
Or 600 years?
I want you to do both, because I think that's interesting.
Okay, so there is, Plato tells a little story in the Phaedrus, okay, and he says that Thoth, who was the basically the Egyptian version of Hermes, the god of invention and writing, he takes... He's got a, he's got a, he's an Ibis.
Sacred Ibis, isn't he?
I think he's got a kind of, is he an Ibis or is he kind of got the...
Anyway, I can't remember what he looks like.
He's a sacred ibis.
Okay.
So he goes to Famous, who's the king of Egypt, and he gives him this.
He says, look, I've got this fantastic gift for you and your people.
And he gives to Famous writing.
Okay.
And Famous looks at it and he goes, hmm.
He says, look, what you've just given me It's a receipt for recollection, but actually it will be no good for people's memory.
They'll forget things, they'll use these little squiggles on paper to remember things instead of their own proper resources.
And they'll get information, they'll get knowledge, without proper instruction.
So they will have the reputation for wisdom without the reality.
And because they have the reputation for wisdom without the reality, they will be a burden to society.
And I like read that like 20 years ago, 25 years ago.
I was like, oh my God.
Yes.
Now I'm sure you can- That is a wow thing.
I'm sure you can think of many people who are a burden to society all around you right now, James.
And they're people who have a lot of, like, data, don't they?
They have a lot of knowledge, but they have almost no understanding.
Yeah?
So what you're saying, Hugh, is that it all went wrong with literacy.
I am saying that.
Now, people used to get so angry with me because they'd go, you know, literacy is such a boon.
And I say, yes, it is.
Don't get me wrong.
The point is that The thing, it took me maybe a year or two to pick up on this, but what Famous said was without proper instruction, right?
So you think, okay, so before we had literacy, so in Famous's day, how did people learn things, right, before they had books?
And the answer is they learned by three things.
By apprenticeship, by experience, and by storytelling.
And that was it.
That was the only way people learned things, right?
And many of us are lucky.
Even to this day, even though we had a literate education, we've learned through those ways as well.
But they have not been valued in society.
Now think of maybe your own, however you came into journalism, the people you learned from, you will be able to pick out, Hey, I was really an apprentice.
Maybe it wasn't formal.
Maybe I didn't really, you know, sign on the dotted line for a seven year indenture or whatever, but you will, you can look back and you go, yeah, you know, I learned a lot from so-and-so and from so-and-so and so-and-so.
I think I sprung to earth fully formed.
OK, you're one of the few enlightened people, James, but the rest of us, we have to plot up, you know.
And so it's not that literacy is bad, but if we only have literacy, it's unbalanced.
So I talk about there are four pillars of education, like a table normally has four legs, one at each corner.
If you take three of them away, it's a really unbalanced table.
And that's our current situation.
Yeah.
What's the missing leg?
The three missing legs are apprenticeship experience and storytelling.
We've got literacy.
That is a wonky table.
It's a very wonky table.
OK, but it's not that everybody's lost them.
I mean, there are a lot of very competent people who've learned from their superiors or from from the people they've picked up from.
Apprenticeship.
I talked to civil engineers.
I've talked to pilots.
I've talked to naval officers.
And they all say to me, yeah, yeah.
Apprenticeship.
Super important.
Even though officially they've got certificates and training and degrees and goodness knows what, really important to learn from someone who knows how to do the job properly.
It's what they stripped out of medical education for surgeons with these ridiculous, you know, limitations of hours from the EU.
It was traditionally a really an apprenticeship based learning.
In the same way that nursing used to be about the acquisition of practical skills and you had your ward sisters and stuff who ran the wards like a sergeant major.
That makes total sense.
And also, in my own experience, my eldest boy wanted to become Well, he didn't know what he wanted to do, but he had a sort of vague idea that it'd be something to do with maybe interior design.
Anyway, he went to art college and learned the square root of F all.
But then he was taken under the wing of a brilliant interior designer called Russell Sage.
And Russell told him the things you don't get taught at art college, things like, How to negotiate with clients, how to decide what to charge, how to butter up clients, how to buy things from antique auctions and warehouses, how to spot antiques, all this stuff that you're never going to get.
So I'm totally with you on apprenticeships, but I've never heard that thing you mentioned before about Writing itself being the enemy.
And I see that totally.
Well, you have to remember that until about like 1400, writing was just a super geeky thing for rich people and monks, right?
So it wasn't a big problem.
Basically, everything was still run by apprenticeship and storytelling and experience.
But when we expanded the franchise for writing, like basically literacy, more and more literacy, you also had the Industrial Revolution.
And we got massive benefits from literacy.
Huge.
Everything around you.
Look around it.
The fundamental technology is literacy.
So it's good.
Don't get me wrong.
It's really, really good.
But like everything, it's got a shadow side.
And we have to acknowledge that.
That's the bit we have to remember.
And the shadow side is a little learning is a dangerous thing.
It's that.
It's also that there are three things that literacy tends to make us do.
It tends to make us imagine the truth is always fixed because you write something down.
And it's still there tomorrow.
So it's still true.
So the truth is fixed, right?
That's what you imagine.
It tends to make us overvalue abstractions.
We overvalue abstractions.
We think they're really important.
They're the real underlying truth.
Because we put things on... So give me an example of an abstraction.
Oh, the R number or the IFR or the CFR or something.
We take one of these, we say this is more important than the whole of your life, than your granny's funeral, anything like that, right?
This one number is more important than any other ailment that the NHS used to treat, okay?
Before it went mad.
Okay, I like that.
And then the third thing that writing does is it diminishes your emotional intelligence, your emotional understanding.
And that's simply the difference between reading a letter or reading a text and having a conversation.
Here you can tell what I care about because I get overexcited and you hear it in my voice.
Yes.
Right?
But if we write it down, it's much harder and you have to work harder to get the emotion.
It's nothing like as subtle or quick or rich as talking.
And generally, that's how you get the bureaucrat, you know, the person who basically doesn't have much emotional response.
They talk to you like they're dictating a letter, right?
And they're basically emotionally etiolated.
These are people who have very little emotional understanding at all.
It's never grown.
Yes.
Yeah, I'm liking this here.
I'm very glad that I've given you your head, because I wasn't sure which direction this was going to go in, but now I found your enthusiasms.
I mean, this is great.
Thank you.
So, what you say there actually, I think, describes, it's the best description actually, of something that all of us have intuitively noticed recently, which is that people who haven't been to university often have a lot more wisdom, common sense and understanding of the world than those who have been to university.
I did a podcast with somebody called Morgoth the other day.
He's far cleverer than I think any of my Oxbridge contemporaries.
You know, he's absolutely brilliant but he hasn't had his intelligence educated out of him.
Can I pause you one second?
I've just got to do some child management for one second.
Yeah, do that.
You can probably cope, James, but I get distracted, so I'm sorry.
No, he seems... I loved him.
He seems very sweet.
What's his name?
Milo.
He's wonderful.
He's very cute.
I got two, Milo and Felix, and they're both great.
Oh, yeah.
Nice names.
They're kind of why I'm talking to you, really, because, you know, if it was just for me to survive this shit, I could hide out somewhere.
But I really want to give them, like, just a tenth of the freedom that you and I had when they grow up.
That would be pretty important, I think.
Yeah, well, we can but hope.
So, so Hugh, okay, you've taken me back, what was the 1500 years version?
And then you said that there's 150 years, was that?
Do I remember right?
Yeah, so there's about 600 years is Gutenberg.
I'd say the Gutenberg press, that was the internet, if you like, of medieval times.
It turned Europe upside down.
You had ructions and feuds and wars.
It was 100 years of chaos in Europe, because it was the first time that ideas could be spread that quickly.
And then In the 19th century, more and more people actually learned to read and write.
The number of people who could read and write went over 50%.
So then and that that was the big that was when ideologies first got their first look in.
So Marx was writing in the 19th century and all that madness, you know, these these abstract ideas.
Now I can write it down.
This is the truth.
This is what's going to happen.
Very, very simplistic, but fancy theories which are kind of attractive, even, dare I say it, somewhat hypnotic.
Then the shit really hit the fan with the television, which is what you call secondary orality.
Right.
So it's a precursor of Twitter.
It's where every every possible idea is reduced to something small and conflictual and black and white and simplistic and very, very conflict, you know, it's all about drama and conflict and trauma.
It's not about thoughtfulness, deep understanding, contemplation, kindness and nuance, which are all the things we need.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
Have you ever come across Alan Watt?
Have you listened to any of his... The guy who became sort of Zen, the Zen man.
He was an American, right?
No, that's Alan Watts, I think.
Yeah.
No, Alan Watt.
He's Scottish.
But I think he spent his last years in Canada.
He was very much in agreement with you on the properties of TV.
And it's something I've become increasingly aware of, that it does seem to...
generate a kind of that sort of black and white, that sort of constant elevated state of emotion.
It's designed to unbalance you and unsettle you.
Absolutely.
Is that what we're talking about here?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, there was a brilliant guy called Jerry Mander.
He really is called Jerry Mander, who wrote this book back in the 70s.
It's called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
And he was actually one of the most successful advertising gurus in the West Coast of America, in California, and made a fortune selling Land Rover and, you know, Chivas Regal and stuff like that.
And he tried to do a bit of pro bono work, promoting an environmental charity, and it totally didn't work.
And he was like, I am advertising king.
I can make this work.
And he failed two or three times.
And he thought, well, why am I failing?
And he looked at television as a medium and he realized it's not great for promoting salt marshes.
It's good for conflict, for bright colors, for machines, for sharpness and simplicity.
But the machine itself, It just doesn't do subtlety.
I mean, it's an overwritten book, but it's quite fun.
And actually, everything he says about television is like doubly true of the Internet.
So, you know, the Internet comes.
Oh, it's fantastic, isn't it?
You and I can talk to each other in different parts of the world.
And yes, it is fantastic.
But it's got a downside.
Yeah.
And that's so obvious.
Yeah.
Well, go on, but tell me.
Oh, the downside of the internet.
It's just vast, isn't it?
So for a start, it creates polarization, right?
It amplifies the edge.
Like, why are all the, why is it, you know, why are people banging on about Twitter all the time?
It's the, remember when you were at primary school, there were like about 10, 20 kids who caused all the trouble.
They made all the noise in the corner of the playground.
You were being a nice kid.
Yeah.
And they were screaming and shouting.
Those are the kids who are all over Twitter, right?
There's a massive underrepresentation of ordinary, nice middle class or not even middle class, middle people, ordinary, ordinary people doing good, ordinary jobs, whether they're gardeners or guardsmen or grenadiers, right?
Like you don't go online to say, hey, I had quite a nice dinner with quite a nice friend and we kind of disagreed about a few things, but it was just nice to see him anyway.
They don't do that.
They sound quite dull, these people here.
I'm not sure I'd want to hear them, see them on Twitter.
Exactly, you don't!
Because Twitter doesn't want that, right?
No.
But politicians in particular think that Twitter is important.
Twitter is all the crazy kids from the corner of the playground.
The important people are people who don't want to scream and shout about themselves all the time, who are not mad and obsessed and crazed and possessed, right?
They don't even think they're that important.
They're just like, I just want to have a quiet life, you know?
Yeah, it's it's interesting.
I I get a lot of you know, I've got a telegram chat group now and I like to communicate with my audience when I can when I can remember when I've got the time.
I'm pretty I'm pretty sketchy but One thing I find is that there's quite a lot of them who keep suggesting as prospective podcast guests for me.
People that I have absolutely zero interest in talking to, because I have conversations and what they want is confrontation.
So they things like, oh, yeah, get Owen Jones on the on your podcast where he's a kind of, you know, sort of a teddy bear, teddy bear, Marxist character, or get somebody suggested I got Piers Morgan and I.
And this was in a stage where I actually listened to what people said to me and I actually went up to him at a party and asked him.
And he was horribly rude and dismissive.
And I was thinking, it's a bit like somebody daring you to go up to a girl that you really don't fancy.
You think he's a complete hound.
And you ask her out for a date and she rejects you and you think, well, I only did this for a bet.
You know, it's not like I really wanted to go out with you.
And that's how I felt about Piers Morgan.
But anyway, the point I'm making is that even people on our side of the argument who ought to be alive to what we're saying, they are still in this paradigm.
The BBC paradigm.
You look at every BBC interview, they are not designed to generate light.
They are there purely to generate heat through opposition and anger and tension and stuff.
That is the BBC model.
It's the model that so many people have come to accept.
And you're absolutely right.
It's not... Well, you don't learn stuff and you don't become a better person.
It's not... Yeah.
It's not enlightening at all.
It's basically, it's titillation, right?
And basically it's a meal of confection.
Porn.
Yeah, it's fear porn or whatever.
But a lot of this stuff is just little bits of teasing and anger and so forth that work to capture and keep your attention over and over again.
It's like feeding sweets to a kid.
And in the end, the kids is hyperactive and fat, right?
It's not a proper meal.
It's not a proper diet at all.
Right?
So if you get all your information from the TV, you're pretty screwed.
I mean, I used to for 10 to 12 years, I had a qualitative market research business.
And So I traveled the country and I literally talked to a representative sample of British, actually also across the world, but mostly in Britain, a representative sample of the population.
I got to know who really lives here, right?
And two things I discovered.
One is most people, and the vast majority of people, are kind, And they're well-intentioned, and they're willing to help.
They really are.
When I was a psychotherapist, I used to think everyone's a bit fucked up and their parents were nasty to them, right?
Then I go and meet a lot of really good, ordinary people.
I go, hey, you're nice, you're kind, you're thoughtful.
You're quite astute, actually.
You know, they see through things, right?
But they have two problems, which are very widespread.
They're not universal.
But they're widespread, okay?
And those two problems are people are misinformed and they are disempowered.
And you can do both of those things with a television.
You can do them even more with an internet, but that's exactly what a television does to you.
It disempowers you because you're not important.
The important people, the ones on telly, right?
You're just sitting on your couch somewhere in middle England, right?
And you're not a celebrity.
You're not famous.
Nobody even knows how to spell your name, right?
You're just no one.
The important people are on TV.
That disempowers you.
And also it makes you think that the important stuff's happening in that stupid box.
Really, the important stuff is happening in your house, in your street, in your town.
But the television says, no, no, it does not.
It's a flood somewhere in Germany or something is more important.
No, for you, it's not, mate.
It's not.
So you're misinformed and you're disempowered.
And you can tell you're misinformed, because if you ever listen to anything on the TV about your speciality, right, whatever it is, you play croquet, it's a program about croquet, you play darts, it's a program about darts, whatever, or you're into model engineering, I don't care, whatever the TV says will be, to a greater or less extent, wrong.
They'll miss something out, they'll misrepresent it, they'll get it wrong.
And you know that because you're the expert, right?
Now, think about it.
That's true for all of us.
Therefore, it's true for everything on telly.
It's always either a little bit or considerably wrong.
Because they don't care about the truth.
They care about, is it good telly?
I just got one more.
I want to go back to something that you said, the thing about people who don't go to university are generally wiser.
Well, when we did these groups, we'd go up and down the country, and pretty much every job would be somewhere up in the north of England, and we'd be talking to men and women, say, 45 to 60, C2D, which means kind of skilled and semi-skilled workers, right?
And halfway through the group, about 40 minutes in, some guy who hadn't said anything all day would chime up, he'd say two sentences, and he'd nail the project.
He would see through it, he'd see what's right, see what's wrong, he'd just go, boom, that's it.
We go, boom, job done!
Another guy in Durham or another guy in Newcastle has nailed it, you know?
Yeah, big shout to the people of Durham and Newcastle and the North East.
And Northern Ireland, always really good actually.
Northern Ireland, brilliant.
Really good, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely right.
But it's good to hear that there is a kind of psychological, or whatever, explanation for this stuff.
You know, the stuff that we sense, but we're not sure why it is the case.
I think the TV thing I find really frightening.
I would imagine that the way, for example, that the government has Throughout this alleged pandemic, which isn't a pandemic really, the way they've staged these press conferences where you've got the prime minister usually and then these men who are presented as experts.
One is the chief medical officer and one is the chief scientific officer, I think.
And they're standing on a podium and they've got these charts that they show you and they And I'm amazed at people's appetite for this.
It's like the National Lottery.
But they believe this tripe, which is broadcast into their homes.
They're so trusting.
Can you explain that a bit?
Why do people trust this stuff?
Well, partly because they don't know how to trust.
Right?
Mostly we're badly educated.
We're told we should trust our headmaster or we're told we should trust, you know, your teachers at school or trust the certification body or whatever.
This is a very bad principle.
The only possible real basis for trust is actually to trust yourself.
Because if I had to say that, oh, I ought to trust my headmaster, then one day somebody can say to me, yeah, but why do you trust your headmaster?
What are the criteria, right?
I trust that he's telling the truth, right?
Oh, well, somebody else told me.
Well, why do I trust him, right?
The only real basis for trust is to trust yourself, right?
Now, if you do that, and I certainly have this experience, you get it wrong, right?
I trust my judgment and I do something very stupid.
And then I learn from it, right?
And I do something else.
Maybe it's not quite so stupid, but it's stupid in a different way.
But little by little, I educate myself.
So, and this is the... I was going back to my point about learning from experience.
If I pay attention to my experience, I don't believe I already know the answer, but I trust myself and then I'm willing to acknowledge when I get it wrong.
Little by little, I get better at making choices.
I get better at knowing whom to trust.
But that's not part of our education system.
Mostly, people are told, you should trust Cernso, or, you know, he went to Oxford, or he went to Cambridge, therefore he's cleverer than you, therefore what he says is better than you.
Yeah.
Utter bollocks, right?
Utter bollocks, right?
Yes.
Can confirm.
Yeah.
So, it's a much deeper problem that, I mean, this bunch of charlatans, there's a wonderful quote From Carl Sagan in some way, he says that, you know, science, you have to be very skeptical as a scientist, right?
And if you're not properly skeptical, then you're going to be the victim of the next bumbling charlatan or rip-off artist who comes past.
Yeah, and you're not doing science.
You're not doing science, absolutely not.
No, but collectively, there's a very big misunderstanding of science, but collectively people are being ripped off by this bunch of charlatans who, you know, for whom Christmas, all their Christmases are coming at once, you know.
The average epidemiologist or public health servant has never had it so good.
Yes.
Yes, people are very impressed by labels, aren't they?
I mean, they like a word like epidemiologist or virologist.
And you'll see people saying stuff on Twitter like, I'd rather trust an epidemiologist than some random journalist.
And you're thinking, well, that's a classic rhetorical fallacy.
That's the appeal to authority.
It means nothing.
You're not saying anything useful.
Well, also you're saying something quite stupid because it is the nature of those institutions to promote orthodoxy.
So a really great example of that is climate change, right?
You know, how can you criticize climate change because you're not a scientist, right?
Well, if I was a climate change scientist, the only work I could do that I could get funding for would be finding out yet another reason why the world's going up in flames, right?
You can't get funding to challenge it.
So there are no contrarian climate scientists left.
I mean, there's half a dozen who managed to get tenure and a bit of money before the kind of orthodoxy took over.
But that's why so many of the people who are standing up against, you know, the mad orthodoxy of climate change or the mad orthodoxy of the pandemic are retired people.
Because so few people can, they've got mortgages, they've got kids, they can't afford to say the emperor's not wearing any clothes.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I was going to ask you, the more I've learned about the sort of development of modern education, which is probably started by Bismarck, wasn't it?
The sort of current thinking on education and you've got people like Dewey in the US, sort of creating this progressive education system.
And what you realize is that these so-called progressives have actually, you and I, probably when we were younger and more naive, would have imagined that the point of education was to teach you useful things about the world and help you to understand the world better.
But actually, isn't really what education does, and has done for decades, is to create kind of compliant citizens.
It's designed to kind of squash you and sort of make you all the same.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's almost too grand to suggest it was designed.
I think that it's the path of least resistance, isn't it?
That it's a whole lot easier, for example, to Agree what we should all learn and then teach that.
You don't have to think hard.
You don't have to meet the problems of the immediate circumstances.
You just set up a syllabus and say, OK, if you pass that syllabus, that makes you a lawyer or a doctor or whatever it is, or you've got a degree now.
And it's certainly oriented towards the crowd rather than the individual.
So the original, you know, the Latin meaning of education is educare, to lead out.
The idea is to lead out from you, your inner spirit, you know, what only James can do, the most wonderful part of you, which is your unique set of talents, and to nurture those.
Now, that's what a good version of education is.
And I think there are some good educators who do that.
But systemically, the bias is always going to be, particularly with more and more political Oh, but we need results, we need uniformity, we need to be able to tick boxes.
And hence, yes, I think the output is compliant citizens, but I think really it's just because somebody's wanted to make their life a little bit easier and not have to think hard.
Teaching's hard work, you know?
Yes.
No, I suppose what prompted that question is that you were saying earlier about how the only person we should we should trust is ourself.
And actually one of the things that we are encouraged to do by the education system is to, well, to trust To obey, certainly, what the teacher says, and to do what we're told.
Obviously, the brighter, sparkier kids rebel against that.
It's interesting, isn't it?
You know how, when you see old teachers, and I get the impression that the ones that they remember Because so many boys or girls have been through their classes.
The ones they remember are the sort of the sparky ones, the ones who didn't accept the yoke to quite the same degree.
But generally, I think our education system does turn out
What I'm trying to feel my way towards is an explanation, a sort of grand overarching theory as to how it is that 80% of the world's population has been brainwashed into thinking that something no worse than a bad flu is the greatest threat since bubonic plague and that we should destroy the world economy, kill jobs and force people to take compulsory experimental gene therapy.
It's shocking that so many people have accepted this stuff and we've been through various reasons and I was thinking maybe the education system is partly responsible for that, but maybe I'm wrong.
No, no, I think I think you're absolutely right.
jump back and say it's not that the only person we should trust is ourselves, but the first person we should trust is ourselves.
Because it's on the basis of my criteria that I've learned that I'm going to trust you.
But not because, you know, the headmaster told me to, but because I personally have decided to take that decision, that risk.
Yeah.
But yes, I think the, I mean, there's, Do you want a little anecdote about teachers?
Yeah, I love anecdotes.
Okay, so I went to St Andrews University a million years ago, and I spent almost all my time in the theatre, but I was also doing a degree, and I was very, very borderline when you have to move from first arts into your honours subject, sorry, second arts into your honours subject, right, so this kind of threshold you have to get over.
I was also working on the university magazine, right?
And they were doing a set of features about each of the departments.
And right at the last minute, somebody was taken ill.
So the article about the English department had to be rewritten.
So I just, like in 10 minutes, I wrote down a quick thing about basically what everybody thought about the English department.
And the editor said, yes, off you go, bang.
So it went to press.
And the English department went completely ballistic.
They thought I was the worst person in the world.
Basically, I pointed out that the recently retired professor had published twice in his academic career.
One was a paper called Shakespeare and the Sea, and the other was Maritime Metaphors in Shakespeare.
And I was kind of a little bit brutally rude, as students are.
But I basically said they're more or less supposed to be space.
But I'd applied to carry on doing English, and they absolutely refused to teach me.
So I ended up doing philosophy.
And I'm very glad, you know, but it was one of those really blessed accidents, right?
So there's the story.
They refused to teach me.
They all think I'm Satan.
About, I don't know, 10 years later, I'm on a train from London to Stevenage, which, and the train also goes on to Cambridge, right?
I get into the train and sitting opposite me is one of, pretty much the only English, member of the English department that I respected at the time, who was a genius young man who taught Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic.
And he'd left- So what's his name?
Oh crikey, what's his name?
Paul Bebeer.
Wonderful man.
Really wonderful man.
Somebody once said to him, why do we have to study Anglo-Saxon?
And off the top of his head, he gave this brilliant justification for a liberal arts education.
Genius man.
Anyway, we're on the train, and he remembered me, right?
And he said, yes, I remember all of that.
And just before he got off the train, he said, you were right, you know.
So he escaped and he had a great career at Cambridge.
I don't know if he's still there, but very, very bright man.
But yeah, so yeah, the thing is, every institution needs rebels, but they hate rebels.
OK, they they're all going to die.
But if they have a rebel to kick it up a bit, it'll keep them alive again.
But they hate that.
So it's a real a tussle, you know, in every institution.
They need like a dynamic chief exec or somebody come in, kick ass.
But they hate it, too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was quite interested earlier on to hear you use the word possessed to describe what's happened to a lot of people.
How seriously are you using that word?
It's pretty serious.
I mean, the The thing that you learn about hypnosis, so I studied hypnosis quite a lot, I used it a lot, right?
And one of the things you learn is that you learn about hypnosis, but at the same time you learn that everyday consciousness is nothing like as lucid, rational or controlled as people like to imagine.
People like to imagine they're making decisions, they're choosing things for themselves, they're in charge of their lives, they're moving towards their goals.
And they kind of think, when it all goes wrong, oh, that was an accident, or, oh, I just forgot about it for a moment, or, you know, I've changed my mind, or I don't care, or, you know, I mean, you just have to talk to people who want to lose weight for a while, and you realize, hey, this person is not capable of the kind of decision they want to make.
So really the reality is, most of the time, most of us are popping in and out of different sorts of trance.
And really, the more you are aware of that, the better your chances of becoming a little bit less deluded.
But it's a big old problem.
It's not easy being human.
One of the reasons people really like to be employed There are two big reasons.
One is money.
The other is somebody tells you what to do, right?
You just have to turn up and do it, whether or not you've got a hangover.
One of the nightmares of being self-employed is you have to tell yourself what to do.
It's like a billion times more difficult.
So we use external structures because it's a bit of a mess in here, and people can very easily just get their head caught inside an idea.
The longer they believe in it, the more embarrassing it is to say, oh my God, I've been wrong.
for 18 months or three years or however long it might be.
And especially if I've spasked up, I don't know, 200 billion pounds or something against the wall.
And then I have to go, actually, you know, I'm wrong.
It's almost impossible.
It takes a real leader to do that.
A really good leader is somebody who's able to say, shit guys, we've walked 10 miles in the wrong direction.
It's my fault, but I'm going to make us turn around and I promise you, I'll make it up to you.
But I fucked up and I apologize, right?
That would be so good.
Yeah, but we haven't got any other kind of leaders, you know, it's bullshit.
I want to describe something to you which has really shocked me recently, which is that, okay, so for most of my, well, all throughout school, all throughout university, and through the ensuing decades when I practiced journalism, There were certain ideas abroad which were pretty much a given.
No one was debating them because they were obviously true.
So one of them might be, and this of course has certainly applied since, say, Dr. Mengele's experiments in the Second World War in concentration camps, things like that, that we have a thing called bodily autonomy.
That the state has no right to inject you forcibly with experimental substances.
I mean, that's the sort of thing we balk at.
You know, you look at, there are movies like One Flew Over the Cooker's Nest, which signal our loathing for this kind of horribly Authoritarian stroke totalitarian behavior.
We associate this with with Mao's China and Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union.
And we imagine that we would never ever tolerate such a thing in our own culture for obvious reasons.
And yet in the space of 18 months, we've got to the stage where journalists and radio presenters.
There's a young man called Tom Harwood.
There's a radio presenter called James Whale.
And these people are really, really hot for the state coming to people's doors, banging on the doors and forcing them to take the death jab, regardless of what, you know, never mind if they've got T cell immunity, never mind if they've got moral objections, never mind, just jab them, jab the bastards.
And I would like to know how it is so many of us have become Nazis so quickly.
Is it in fact that civilization is at best skin deep?
Yeah, I mean, I was teaching a course the other day.
I was talking about Francis Bacon, you know, the guy who wrote a book in 1620 called Novum Organicum.
And he talks about, you know that one, the idols of the tribe and so forth, right?
And he talks about these problems.
So that's the beginning of the Enlightenment, let us say, you know, 17th century, early 17th century.
And right back then, he said, the human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, Either as being the received opinion, or as being agreeable to itself, draws all things else to support and agree with it.
So that's what we now call confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
Okay, so that's the fancy modern psychological words, but he nailed the same thing.
And also to my great joy, he also talked about wishful thinking, that the human understanding is no dry light but receives an infusion from the will.
Whence proceed sciences which may be called sciences as one would.
For a man, had rather were true, he more readily believes.
What he would rather was true, he more readily believes.
Wishful thinking.
And then, just one more I want to read you.
The human understanding is of its own nature prone to abstractions and gives a substance and reality to things which are fleeting.
So that's overvaluing abstraction, right?
So these lunatic fascists who want to knock on the door and inject you, believe wholeheartedly, 100%, that this vaccine is a good thing.
They don't pay any attention to adverse reactions or any damage that might be done.
They believe the truth is definable and absolute.
There's no nuance, there's no complication, there's no difficulty.
There's just good people and refuseniks like you and me, right?
And they feel threatened.
It's also kind of weird bullshit.
But because they're like the cultists, they have to try to be evangelical in order to support their own delusion.
If they stop trying to persuade you to get injected, and they just sit around and don't care about it for a while, they might think, what about that?
Friend of mine who can't walk properly anymore because they had the jab.
What about my friend who spent 10 days in bed because she'd had two jabs?
But she said, obviously, that, you know, she was glad she'd had the jabs because it would have been worse otherwise, right?
That's so true.
By the way, the only reason I was nodding sagely about Nova Morganum is that my kids are doing English.
And I never, I never read any Francis Bacon at university, but they now have these things called, I think it's the Norton Anthology, and they have Norton Anthologies of 18th century, 17th century, the Renaissance or whatever.
And they have the best bits of all the relevant writers, not just the obvious ones like Shakespeare, but also the kind of the thinkers of the day.
So I was reading those essays and I think he's extraordinary.
Did Francis Bacon, was he the knowledge is power?
Did he say that?
I don't know.
I mean, he was he was a politician as well.
He was the Duke of Verilam, you know, he wasn't so the other things all these guys were multitaskers, right?
So they physicists were also philosophers.
So Descartes writer wrote a paper on optics, you know, Newton spent a whole lot of time being an astronomer and an astrologer, by the way.
And so, yeah, these people that we put in little pigeon holes nowadays.
Oh, he was a physicist.
No, no, the guy was also an engineer and a philosopher and a linguist and a politician, you know, there was... Well, they were renaissance men.
They were indeed.
Indeed.
Yeah, no, I agree.
It'd be great if we could recapture that.
I mean, I still think that actually, If I were to devise the perfect education system, it would turn us all into Renaissance men.
So you wouldn't just learn Latin and probably Greek, but you'd also be able to shoot an arrow from horseback.
I don't know, play tennis, sail, ski.
These would all be equally important parts of the curriculum.
And yeah, you would learn philosophy.
Absolutely, I agree with you completely.
And I think one of the madnesses of, again, it comes from modern culture, is this insistence on you've got to be best at whatever it is you're doing.
That's a really stupid thing, right?
Because that's really expensive, and actually only one person is going to be best.
So you want to spend a whole lot of time trying to be best at tennis, and you're not, frankly, right?
You're not going to do it.
Much, much better is to be good enough at a lot of things.
Every kid should be able to play a musical instrument, should be able to cook, should be able to ride a horse, should be able to sail a boat, should be able to mend a shoe, you know, mend a shirt, sew a button on.
You know, this really matters, right?
And speak a foreign language and all that.
That's a proper education.
So yeah, don't try to be best unless you really, really want to.
You should not be encouraged to be the best.
You should be encouraged To have a rounded set of skills.
Yeah.
I've really enjoyed talking to you, Hugh.
Because actually, some of my podcasts recently have been really quite, quite bleak.
And it's nice occasionally to go into kind of more abstract things, but also into things which would have applied just as well in the world that existed before 2020 when everything changed.
It's nice to remember that there was a world where we could talk about ideas and ideal education systems and things.
But also, thank you very much for your analysis of how we all became susceptible to the group thing.
Actually, another question I wanted to ask you.
Go for it.
You say that 20%, I think that's probably optimistic, but let's just suppose you're right, that 20% aren't buying this shit.
What is it about, you know, why are we special?
What, what is it that, you know, cause I mean, I had the same education as a lot of the people pushing this, pushing these atrocities on us.
You know, I mean, I, my generation is responsible in the government, certainly for this, these terrible, terrible things that are being done, which I, which I think are evil, by the way, genuinely evil.
Yeah.
Why?
Why are some of us immune to this?
I mean, firstly, I think it's a Pareto thing.
Almost everything splits 80-20, right?
It's also, you can see it in the data, right?
79% of Brits wanted more vaccinations or something.
So why?
You're a bit of a maverick, you know, and you clearly trust yourself.
You don't go around saying, what can I say that's going to please people?
I mean, almost.
You go like, this is what I think, I don't care what you guys think, right?
So you, your fundamental thing is like, and I'm sure you've made mistakes, I've made a sheet of shed load, right?
So I trust it, I trust myself, got it wrong, but I've learned from that, right?
And so, and you, you're doing it your way, and with great panache, and thank you for inviting me on, it's been a real pleasure talking to you.
So my take on it is that You know, Francis Bacon kicked off the Enlightenment in 1620 and it ended in 2020.
OK, so that's the end of that.
Right.
It's just been all used up, beaten up, traduced, twisted, twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.
That's what it is.
And sadly, many people have been let down by the education system.
And that 80%, you know, maybe 10% of them are really arrogantly stupid, but most of them are simply misled.
And they're misled, because they didn't realize they couldn't be.
Nobody's ever said, you know, you're really wonderful.
And what you have to say is really worth thinking about and pursuing.
And really understanding deeper.
Everything you ever need to know, it's already out there.
All the knowledge is all there.
What we need is to understand better what we already know.
I can tell you a little story if we have time, but that's the key.
Yeah, tell me.
I like your stories.
Okay, so I used to teach hypnosis and hypnotherapy.
There's a very famous hypnotherapist called Milton H. Erickson.
And two students came to see him.
The girl was pregnant and they desperately wanted a termination.
And Erickson was talking to them for like three or four hours.
And they said, no, we want to be hypnotized so we can make the decision to have a termination because everything's going to go wrong if we have this kid.
Right.
And Erickson keeps talking, keeps talking.
And he can't kind of get them to shift their minds at all.
Right.
So he says, OK, OK, maybe I can help.
OK, maybe I'll help you.
What you have to do is come back and see me next week, and I can help you then.
But just one thing, between now and next week, you must not think of a name for the baby.
So I used to tell this story and as an illustration of what the stuff you couldn't get away with nowadays, like super manipulative, right?
Really putting in that indirect suggestion, you know, so they couldn't, you know, really, and I used to teach this, right?
And I would teach people, you know, this is Ericksonian indirect suggestion.
It's manipulative.
It's really, really kind of, you can't do it now.
And then one day I was teaching, I realized I only understood half of that.
Because actually, if those two kids had come back a week later and they hadn't thought of a name for a baby, they didn't need any help from Erickson.
Yeah.
In other words, if they didn't connect to the baby, they would have created the freedom for themselves to do what they want.
So it cut both ways.
So I saw one side of it, but I didn't see the other side.
And that took me like maybe two years, telling the same story, for me to realize there was another side to it.
You know, if they hadn't, they probably didn't need to come back the next week if they hadn't thought of a name for the baby.
Actually, what happened was they did think of a name.
She took a year out and it all ended happily ever after.
It wasn't a problem.
I was just thinking, actually, while you were saying that, Hugh, that it's your lot.
I mean the manipulators, the brain masseurs, whatever you want to call them.
Who was Freud's nephew, the guy who invented public relations?
Remind me.
Bernays, Louis de Bernays.
Edward Bernays.
Not Louis de Bernier.
He wrote a charming novel set in Greek gardens in the Second World War.
You're thinking of Edward Bernays, exactly.
That's right.
Just run through some of the techniques which have been used to manipulate and brainwash us.
Yeah, luckily, BBC is actually blocked here in Vietnam, which is a great blessing, I have to say.
So, I mean, hands, face, space, I mean, it's rhetoric, James.
Hypnosis is like rhetoric.
So, think back to your classical education.
All the tropes of rhetoric, all the devices, basically, that's influential language.
And The reason the government's been so good at it is not because the government is good, but they employ very well-paid advertising agencies.
I don't know who got the contract, but they're great.
They're the most successful part of this.
I mean, it's a nightmare, but they're good at it.
And it's some advertising agency, some, you know, guy with funny colored spectacles and his mate who draws pictures, and they've worked out, well, hey, we can sell lawnmowers, we can sell cars, we can sell concentration camps, why not?
Yeah, because we all think, don't we?
We all think, yeah, adverts are for other people.
I'm not going to get taken in by that, because I'm clever, because I can see it's an advert and, you know, I see right through it.
That's so not true.
You can be very clever, but you still have a heart.
I was very depressed once.
that we're all kind of, well, often 20%?
You can be very clever, but you still have a heart.
I was very depressed once.
I walked into a supermarket and I wanted to buy some beer.
And I picked up the own brand beer and I still felt depressed.
And this is going to show my age.
I picked up some Lowenbrau.
Now, when I was very, very small kid, Lowenbrau was advertised in cinemas with this big kind of boomy castle thing, right?
I picked up the Lowenbrau and I felt better.
Right?
That was the brand doing the job.
I thought, that's really weird, right?
So I put it down again, and then I picked up the own brand, exactly the same stuff, you know, Lager 5%, right?
And I didn't feel good, so I put it down, I picked up the Lone Brow, and like, oh, yes, I feel better.
I thought, well, that's cheap, you know, for whatever it was, 20 pence more, I get to feel great.
But normally you don't notice, but I was so, I was depressed that day, so I could feel the difference, right?
But that's happening all the time, all the time to all of us.
Yeah.
How do we get out of this?
I mean, okay, let me ask another way, because obviously that's too big a question.
How do people like you and me, and I think probably a lot of the listeners, how do we persuade the 80% that they've been sold a pup?
First of all, indirectly.
You've all discovered that arguing doesn't work, right?
You've all tried that.
All the people who are going to be convinced by arguments, they've already been convinced.
The ones who are left are not convinced by arguments.
So, talk to your friends, as friends, all the time.
You need your friends anyway.
We're going to need our friends in the next five to ten years a lot, right?
And when you're talking to somebody who has a different point of view from you, just tell a story.
Any old story, right?
A story about what happened to you, a story about your granny, a story about when you were on holiday three years ago.
Just tell stories, because people cannot disagree with stories.
They just go, oh!
And you might go a little bit close to the bone.
Sometimes I tell stories about times when I got something wrong, and then I realized I'd been an idiot, but it was all right, you know?
I just like that's just what we call an indirect suggestion.
You know, I do.
I got something wrong once.
I thought it was going to be really terrible.
It was a bit embarrassing, but then it turned out it was OK to admit I was wrong.
That's that's not a bad idea, actually.
Yeah, but I mean, I could tell people go for it about about.
I mean, I look back on my life, you know, you said you where you've probably been wrong about stuff.
And I was so I was so totally wrong about the Gulf War and about weapons of mass destruction and about the you know, I was all hot for war.
I was I was a neocon and I sort of bought all this absolute Absolutely bullshit.
You know, this sort of warmongering bullshit.
And I thought that David Kelly probably had hanged himself.
I don't believe any of that anymore.
Yeah.
You know, I and I think Blair is is, you know, not not without reason has he got those demon eyes um but yeah that's it so maybe that could be an example of a kind of way where you've had a kind of shift in understanding of the world absolutely would that work yeah i mean that's pretty bold i mean literally any old story is a good thing to do just share stories with people you know it's amazing how
How you sometimes tell a story and you don't realize, but it turned out to be just the right one.
You didn't know that.
That's happened to me many times as a therapist.
I just tell some random story.
Next week, my client comes in and says, I know why you told me that story.
It saved my life.
Yeah.
Actually, sorry, I keep meaning to wind up the podcast, but then you keep saying interesting things which spark off ideas in me.
And I was wondering what you think about kind of Sort of innate genius.
And I don't mean, you know, like, Shakespeare, say, you know, I'm not suggesting that you're Shakespeare, although we probably come pretty close.
But what I mean is, Am I right in thinking that our brains, our abilities, are way, way in advance of the way that they usually manifest themselves in our lives?
That we have access to this incredible stuff, and if we relied on it more, and if we trusted it more, we'd do more amazing things?
Pretty much, I think so.
Yeah, I mean, Jung called it the collective unconscious.
He also talked about the personal unconscious.
You know, we have a lot of...
Capacities that we rarely use and mostly because we're thinking too hard.
You know, if you're freewheeling a bit, it works better.
So, I mean, yeah, I used to do in pro theater and I would always be amazed afterwards.
Wow, that was pretty cool.
But I didn't really think I was doing it.
I was just kind of channeling the unconscious if you like.
By the way, can you hypnotize people on Zoom chats?
No.
I mean, even if I could, I wouldn't.
Sorry.
No, no, I'm not sure I was going to ask you to do it.
I'm just curious.
Do you need to be in the room with somebody or what?
What's the deal?
OK, well, the answer is personally, I wouldn't do it.
But, you know, if you want to know what does a hypnotized person look like?
OK, it's less easy now because people don't all watch the television together.
But the way you used to do it was go into the living room in the evening.
sit next to the television and look at all the people watching the TV, right?
And they've got this slack muscle tonus, right?
And their eyes are flickering back and forth.
They're kind of like staring.
And they've got a delayed startle response.
You say, Jamie, and they go, what?
It's like, boom.
So they are basically in a really not a very pleasant trance, but they're in a trance.
But it's, it's a, it's, it's not a particularly rewarding one, unfortunately.
Yeah.
But they're being fed messages, aren't they?
I mean, presumably, are they more susceptible to messages in that state?
Well, I mean, there's a lot of complicated research on it, but the answer is no.
People are basically highly suggestible.
Whether you hypnotize them or not doesn't make a lot of difference.
People are highly suggestible, right?
All the time, right?
Because actually, really being truly conscious and aware is pretty unusual.
There was a thing when I was at school, there was, you know how I have fads for doing things.
I mean, there was a fad where we used to sniff dry cleaning fluid.
And in fact, I don't know how many brain cells I killed doing that.
But there was also another for a couple of terms, there was this fad where we would put boys into trances, and we'd do it by... I was one of the chief hypnotists, actually.
I don't know why I was good at it, but I was.
I mean, I put several boys into trances, and we'd draw circles around their forehead, and somebody else, an assistant, would draw circles around their ankles, and somehow I'd send them to... What was I doing?
What was happening there?
Well, you were Bringing a focus of attention and controlling it, essentially.
So, I mean, that's how I got into hypnosis.
I accidentally hypnotized somebody.
I just told him to... I told him it was like a public school joke, you know, you're gonna get them to paint their face black, right?
But I gave him the spiel and he just went straight into trance, right?
Before he'd done the embarrassing thing, right?
So then I said, oh, forget it, right?
Which turns out to be a really stupid thing to say, right?
Because I said forget, which was a direct command, and it, which was a non-specific reference.
So basically that's it.
It's like format your hard disk, right?
Like about 20 seconds later, he was consciousness in the void.
Everything had gone.
It was just consciousness in the void, right?
And then he stopped looking hypnotized.
He started looking frightened because everything had gone away.
And I just, I didn't really know what had happened because I didn't think he was really in trance.
I thought he was double bluffing.
But luckily a friend of mine was there and she could see a man in distress when he was in front of her.
She gave him a cuddle.
She said, Hey, hey, hey, wake up.
You all right?
He was fine.
Right?
He was great.
I felt like a complete idiot.
Right?
And just to bring it back to our earlier discussion, James, that it, that's a non-specific reference, right?
That's a really key part of hypnotic language, right?
Abstraction is basically a non-specific reference.
So if I ask you to think about safety, you must keep safe.
That's an abstraction, okay?
And is this safe or is that safe?
I divide everything in the world into two packets, the safe packet and the unsafe packet.
And then whenever something comes along, I'm either gonna drop it into safe or unsafe, right?
So safe, vaccination, masks, all that crap, right?
Unsafe, all you dangerous, weird people with your own personal ideas and all that kind of stuff.
Now, the delusion is that those two categories are absolute and real.
But in fact, there is nothing that is completely safe.
And there is nothing that is completely unsafe.
But the abstract belief is, oh, yes, we can be safe.
It's bullshit.
Right?
That's where people have been trapped.
In the same way that it was quite a canny of George W. Bush to declare war on terror.
Because, like, that could be anything, couldn't it?
I mean, it's a dream scenario if you want to have wars on everything.
Yeah, terror.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, disaster.
I mean, a terrible thing to do, sadly.
But yeah, you're right.
Well, Hugh, I'm going to leave you to your life in Vietnam.
I do envy you being in that.
I'd love to go to Vietnam.
Come over sometimes.
After the madness, come and visit.
If we're ever allowed.
But I hope Felix and Milo have happy, fulfilled lives, and I hope that they get more than 10% of the freedoms that you and I have enjoyed.
Thank you.
It's been really great talking to you.
May I remind my lovely, dear, fantastic listeners that I really appreciate your support on Subscribestar and on Patreon and via my website dellingpoleworld.com.
You can buy your special friend badges and you can support me on PayPal and stuff.
And yeah, thank you.
Hugh, again, Hugh Wilburn.
Thank you very much.
It's been... I'm so glad I got... because we planned this ages ago, didn't we?
You emailed me and said, look, are you interested?
You weren't importuning me exactly.
You were just drawing my attention to your brilliance in a subtle way.
And I'm glad I finally got my act together and got you on.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Good fun.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Go and have a beer.
You need a beer now.
Absolutely, yes.
That's a good idea.
Thanks, mate.
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