Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Deling Pod, and I know I always sound excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
I've got Nick Hudson over from, well, actually in South Africa.
Nick, I'm really sorry I didn't meet you when you came over to London.
Our diaries did not align.
We tried.
We tried.
But next time.
Close enough, but just not quite.
What's that map behind you?
Is that your local bay?
Yeah, that's actually a topographical map of the Western Cape region, covering the whole Cape Fall mountain complex and the semi-desert area and the coast.
So yeah, one of my favourites.
I love maps.
Does that include Hunts Bay?
Yes, it does include Hunts Bay and you can see, if you look really closely, you can see the sharks.
I thought it looked familiar because, you know, I've been diving with great white sharks in Hunts Bay, in Shark Alley.
Wonderful, that riveting experience.
It was good.
So, there's loads I want to... I'm really excited to have got you, because you have been one of the heroes of the last two years.
But before we go on, just tell me, for people who haven't encountered you or Panda before, tell us about yourself and what your organisation does.
Sure.
Let's start with the organization.
Panda was set up in the very early days of the COVID crisis, when it became clear that these lockdowns were rippling around the planet, and we were concerned that developing countries might be foolish enough to follow suit.
And sure enough, as you know, the lockstep implementation of lockdowns Reached all around the planet.
And before we knew it, we were into not two, but three weeks to flatten the curve.
And then that was extended.
And we went into one of the longest lockdowns of any country in the world.
And our initial lockdown was extreme.
I think it holds the record for the greatest reduction in mobility was the initial South African lockdown.
We thought it was a very ill-advised policy story, and maybe I should tell you who we was.
At that stage, it was just a group of connections that somewhat fortuitously included an immunologist, an economist, a lawyer, an actuary.
So, we were getting a good multidisciplinary view of the whole story.
But when South Africa locked down, we became very worried, and we hastily put together a team to work on a paper called Quantifying the Years of Life Lost to Lockdown.
And that was a paper that made the simple point that there was an economy-mediated impact on public health that needed to be taken into account, and that nobody was performing any form of cost-benefit analysis.
And the reason we started there is there was almost an infatuation about lockdowns in the popular imagination.
People were begging for a lockdown.
It was being heavily promoted on social media and anybody who spoke out against the idea of locking down was greeted with howls of indignation and name-calling and cancel culture behavior.
That was one of the strangest things about the moment.
And that paper that we put out, quantifying the years of life lost to lockdown, got a lot of attention, both domestically and internationally.
And very quickly, the organization which we had by then dubbed PANDA, which was a portmanteau for pandemic state and analytics, was shot into a fair amount of profile, particularly here in South Africa.
And we began to attract the attention of other people who had similar thoughts that they maybe hadn't voiced.
The organization grew explosively by October, we had incorporated analysis of all aspects of the pandemic, not just the epidemiological ones, but you know, medical ones, and then We began also looking at some of the political drivers and we realized that by October that nothing that was being done in South Africa had anything to do with actual decision-making processes in South Africa.
It was all being forced upon us from outside the country and we realized that we needed to internationalize Panda.
Which we did very successfully.
We have representation all over the world and have stuck to our very multidisciplinary tradition.
So we don't only incorporate doctors and epidemiologists and virologists.
We like to see ecologists and economists and geologists even.
Anybody who brings a kind of a perspective and a breadth to these very complex and subtle problems that are embedded in the whole COVID crisis.
As for myself, I'm a bit of an accidental traveler in this adventure.
By day, I'm a private equity transactor.
I run a private equity fund here in South Africa.
I happen to be a prodigious reader and a person who's kind of interested in the world of ideas.
I've been a lifelong learner.
I'm a kind of very curious person and I engage in a lot of different fields.
And so I was kind of because of That background and also the happy circumstance of being completely independent from any other organizations.
You know, I'm kind of a stand on my own feet.
I don't depend on a corporation to pay me a salary or a university to give me tenure or a job or something like this.
That independence coupled with this almost reflexive curiosity and a network that reflects that was how I came to be chairman of Panda.
It was a bit of a Strange coming together of numerous strands through my life.
It's quite interesting, isn't it Nick, that the people who've come to the fore in the last two years are a really unlikely mix of people, the people who actually get what's going on.
I've often tried to work out what it is that we all have in common and I think, yeah, partly it's that thing about Having financial independence helps, or not being in a job where you have to knuckle under or get sacked, that definitely helps.
But also, beyond that, it's bizarre.
You've got everyone from Right Said Fred and Morrissey to, you know, an actuary in you in South Africa to sort of maverick ex-mainstream media hacks like me.
I'm doing Naomi Wolf later on this afternoon.
Naomi Wolf.
Oh, wow.
For most of my life, well, you know, as long as... You wouldn't have spoken to her?
I would have thought, who is this ghastly, ghastly feminazi, you know, sort of making me feel bad about being a man?
You know, I'm never going to talk to her.
And suddenly she's my, she's my pinup.
I mean, not, not literally, but I do admire her greatly.
People like John Pilger.
Do you know, do you remember John Pilger?
No.
The long-haired Australian journalist who I used to think was a kind of whining lefty, just troublemaker.
Yeah.
You know, why didn't he want more American troops in Vietnam?
Couldn't he see that Vietnam is a great thing and we were whopping Charlie's ass?
All this stuff.
Everything I believed in has been blown up in the last two years.
A lot of us are in that position.
I've performed a few internal experiments at Panda to try and work out what it is that people have in common, because I think it's quite instructive.
And there are actually a number of things that come up time and time again.
One of them that is astonishingly common is you find people who say that they swore off watching TV a decade ago or two decades ago, that they just realized that media was full of nonsense.
And so they stopped watching it as almost a personal discipline.
That's one.
The other observation I would make is that there's an incredible robustness demonstrated as a sort of thickness of skin.
So there are people who maybe value integrity over reputation and don't mind being called names in public, don't mind the odd smear article being written about them.
They're robust to that from a character perspective.
That's another very strong strain.
The independence, both financially and intellectually, is a striking feature.
But then there's also a kind of value system in operation.
A lot of what I would call old world values, as opposed to the utilitarian mumbo-jumbo that we're confronted with on a relentless basis in our current era.
That's true.
So many people have either become sort of believing Christians or at least uphold Christian moral values.
I find that a lot of us have that in common as well.
It's like we have a moral course. - Yes, Christian or indeed the value system upon which a great deal of Christianity was based, namely Stoicism.
You see a kind of, this whole idea of virtue ethics and the sort of, you know, classical, the seven classical Christian virtues, which are the four Stoic virtues with faith, hope and charity added on.
That's kind of what animates a lot of the people in our camp, as opposed to this kind of notion that the world can be run according to a spreadsheet that does various calculations aimed at maximizing the greater good, which will be defined in whatever bizarre fetch Gates or the WEF or some clowns at the World Bank want to use.
Yeah, it's, I mean, this is obviously been a problem throughout history, people who think that they know better than everyone else how to run the world and how to run the world in the interests of, as you say, the greater good, which always means the greater harm.
What I wanted to ask you to start off with is, I mean, I imagine your views must have shifted in the last two years.
You must have started out thinking, well, if only I get it out there, the message out there, if only I bombard the world with scientific facts and evidence demonstrating quite clearly that this is not a real pandemic, that it's been exaggerated, that The vaccines aren't the only solution.
In fact, they aren't even a solution.
There are many better, better, you know, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
They work and they don't need emergency legislation.
They don't they don't do you harm.
All this stuff.
I imagine because I went through this, by the way, with climate change.
I thought, if only you can get the information out there, people will suddenly wake up and they'll go, oh, right.
So climate change isn't a worrying thing.
And in the same way, people will go, oh, so it's not a pandemic.
Phew, I can relax.
But it hasn't been like that, has it?
You must have come to realise that it's much, much darker than that.
Yes, look, in many, many ways, I'm the boy who refuses to grow up, right?
And so this was an astonishing rude awakening for me in many ways.
What you're talking about, what's in common between those two nested narratives that you've referred to, COVID and climate change, is that they're propaganda stories.
And that's why they don't go away.
It's got nothing to do with reality.
There's no attempt in the whole circus to bring the narrative in correspondence with reality.
In fact, they depend on it not being so.
So, for me, there was this dawning realization that I was grappling with a set of problems, the likes of which I'd never engaged with before, and that I would have to do an awful lot of growing up, which is difficult for the boy who refuses to grow up.
Yeah, same.
But my curiosity serves me well, right?
To me, what happens then?
Oh, well, propaganda becomes a new item that I must put in the list of interesting problems that need to be solved.
And my curiosity just takes me straight into that, and I start looking at You know, finding the people who help me understand it.
I'm a huge admirer of subject matter experts.
I love them.
I engage with them.
I love talking to an expert.
So this whole trust the expert story, well, actually, yeah, I kind of really believe it.
I actually act out the real trust the expert story, which is, you know, to go and find curious people, people who engage with reality and who try and understand the world and solve its problems.
Create explanations.
I love engaging with people like that.
And that's what that's how Panda lives and breathes.
Yeah.
But I had to go into a whole lot of new face up to a whole new reality, which was that the world is not quite what it seems.
I'm with you on the expert thing, by the way, in as much as during my time fighting the climate wars, I noticed that the very cleverest scientists, the ones who really, really, really knew their stuff, were always totally on the climate change bunk, you know, that it's, that it's an exaggerated scare story, there's nothing to worry about.
So people like Will Happer, people, people, Judith Currie, Richard Lindzen, The really cleverest ones just know.
They see through the scam straight away.
And furthermore, they have an Olympian contempt, and quite justified Olympian contempt, for the kind of second-rate shills who push the climate agenda for grant money or because they're too thick to understand what's right.
That's right.
The hack subsist with grant funding.
Yeah.
Anyway, what I wanted to ask you to help me out here, Nick, I don't know whether this is even possible, but just suppose for a moment that I am one of those people.
Who thinks that everything's going to get better soon, that this was all a bit of a it was all a bit of a cock up.
You know, we didn't have the full information.
We didn't know enough about the disease at the time.
So we were acting on the precautionary principle.
But really, heads shouldn't roll.
There's nothing sinister about this.
I mean, imagine I'm called somebody like Toby.
Imagine my name's Toby.
How would you convince me, Toby, or Kunta Kinte, whatever you want to call me, how would you convince me that actually this is much, much more sinister than that?
Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right, Toby.
There's something that we need to look at here that goes a lot deeper than an epidemic.
I was asked the other day where I thought we were, if this was a, to use the analogy of a football match, you know, where we had halftime or close to the end of the second half or what, and I said, no, I think we've just picked up the ball and are running onto the field.
And why do I say that?
COVID isn't possible without a great deal of setup.
We needed, and I'm not talking about, you know, the idea of a Machiavellian plotter stroking his cat in a volcano crater, James Bond style.
What I mean by setup is there are multiple ingredients that needed to be in place in order for this hysteria to roll out in the way that it did.
And in order for these ridiculous and absurd policy measures, the COVID malarkey, To be propagated around the world.
You needed certain features of culture, which have been accruing over decades.
You needed Certain infiltrations of organizations from medical, the obvious candidates like medical faculties and public health organizations, but also maybe some of the less obvious ones like media and a whole host of non-governmental organizations, not-for-profit organizations and, you know, good old bureaucracies and governments to have been infiltrated.
You needed a philosophy Complete with very bad epistemology, very bad theory of knowledge, to have become current in a huge variety of places.
Without those things, there was no hope that such a ridiculous, and by the standards of the organization, the very organizations that promoted it,
An unacceptable set of policies, policies which violated the guidelines of the organizations that were promoting them, you know, in order for to have that become the religion of the time, the cult, the cult of the time.
It's a cult, not a religion.
You need it a lot in place and that stuff hasn't gone away.
It's still there and needs to be fought with the maximum effort and resources.
We are in a situation where the entire edifice of what I would call Western civilization is on the verge of collapsing.
It's no smaller.
The crisis is not smaller than what I've just expressed.
This is not simply about an epidemic where some bad decisions were made and everybody's going to lick their wounds and move on and say, well, we won't do that again.
No, that is not where we are.
There's every intention to do this again and more, whether it's in response to an epidemic or some other fabricated global crisis.
There is every intention of doing more, and those intentions are held by some of the most powerful people on the planet, the most well-resourced people on the planet.
Yes, absolutely.
Do you want to give me some examples of what you're talking about?
I mean, I totally agree that this was decades, if not centuries actually, but certainly decades in the planning and it could only have come together.
I mean, well, for example, it couldn't have happened 20 years ago because not everyone had sort of mobile phones, smart phones to look at their disaster porn on.
It couldn't have happened with a better educated populace.
I mean, I think that the dumbing down of the education system has played a key part in this, particularly people's inability now to think critically.
I mean, my parents' generation had a much better education, even people who went to state schools.
I mean, often they went to grammar schools and they had a better education than you get at private school these days.
It's so many different factors.
Yeah, the education one for me is really essential.
My favorite example of completely irrational things, which the man in the street seems to accept without a moment's thought, without a moment's consideration, is this whole story of identity, of identifying as.
As soon as you start the sentence, I identify as, A woman, whatever, you know, whatever the case may be.
You've made a mistake.
You've made a cognitive error.
You have asserted, by implication, that you have discovered a way to know what it is like to be something that you are not.
Now that's a problem in philosophy, a basic problem, an axiomatic problem in philosophy called the qualia problem.
And almost as an axiom that doesn't need to be proven, you know, it's an axiom, we can assert that it is not possible to know the qualia, the subjective experience of any other entity, any other human being.
So the moment you open your mouth and say, and start saying, I identify as, With the object in that sentence being something that you're not.
You have gone off into territory of great irrationality and yet, that kind of statement is completely acceptable in our modern world.
It represents like the starkest failing of critical thinking right there.
And to contradict such a person, to stand up and say, but hold on a second, How do you experience those qualia?
How do you experience what it is like to be something you most manifestly are not?
Is to commit some kind of heinous crime that can get you fired, that can get you cancelled, can get you suspended from social media, banned forever, to challenge that very assertion which is imminently challengeable.
Yes.
You require a collapse in cognitive capacity that can, in my mind, only be explained by a dumbing down process.
Yes, absolutely.
And you just made me think of another one.
The whole development of cancel culture.
Which and more broadly speaking censorship that you've talked about this a lot that none of the events of the last two years could happen without the truth being continually sabotaged by a censorship from big tech but also self-censorship this is this is I find this painful as somebody who spent 30 years as a as a mainstream media journalist that that newspapers Okay, so they've always been bent in some way.
I mean, even the Second World War, they were pumping out propaganda.
But sure, I know that When I started out in journalism, there was rivalry between the newspapers.
They did not all promote the same narrative.
Indeed, they took pride in getting things called scoops, and a scoop almost by definition is something else that the other newspapers aren't saying.
Now, throughout the so-called pandemic, there were legion scoops available to anyone with
Half an eye towards what was going on on the internet, you know, you could have done the story about Ivermectin working, or you could have looked at the actuarial figures, you could have looked at the ONS data, which clearly showed, I mean, this must have struck you, the ONS data clearly showing that 2020, the year of, you know, the plague year, the death
Age-adjusted death per capita was actually lower than every year from 2009 in the UK, 2009 going back to before the war.
They had higher death rates, but they didn't lock down and they didn't.
So, so, hey, what, what about that?
Yeah.
Anyway, so I'm rambling, but the point I'm making is the censorship was another key factor, was it not?
Absolutely.
And the absence of debate in the public square was essential to being able to roll out a false narrative.
It's not that they were worried that the man in the street might get confused if he heard people disagreeing with each other.
No.
When you are promoting a false narrative, debate is fatal.
You will never survive it.
So they needed to avoid engaging in debate at all costs, and they were successful for the most part.
I found it extremely difficult to get people to debate, and they will provide every flaky answer you've ever heard as to why they're not debating you.
But it's not as if they go on to debate someone else.
They simply don't debate.
And that's part and parcel of the narrative control and censorship story and was essential to the promotion of a false narrative.
And as you correctly point, you know, I mean, the narrative is false in every single element.
Just this, even the starting premise of, you know, a new deadly virus that emerged in Wuhan at the end of 2019.
That sentence that starts almost every scientific paper that's been written on COVID in the last two years, there must be, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of papers that start with that sentence.
Well, that sentence is false in at least four ways, you know.
It's not a novel virus.
And this was made clear by the International Committee on the Taxonomy of Viruses in February of 2020, where they wrote a paper saying that they disagreed with the World Health Organization's description of this as a novel virus, pointing out that it was an individuum of SARS-CoV-2, which an individuum is like you and I are to each other with respect to the human species, Homo sapiens.
So, you know, there is not a new virus.
Not in any reasonable definition of the term.
As you've pointed out, it's not a deadly virus within any reasonable definition of the term.
How do we know?
Well, take a look at Sweden, which didn't lock down over two years.
They have negligible excess mortality.
It's just, you can't have negligible excess mortality in a country that refused to do all the measures, or most of the measures, and then turn around and say there's a deadly virus that's spread around the globe.
And this whole question of the emergence in Wuhan, well, guess what?
After two years of ferreting around looking for the deadly bat or pangolin, they've come up with nothing.
People abound who will tell you that this was a bioweapon developed in a lab, but the more recent papers make it look far more likely to me that this is simply an instance of a continuing evolution of a very old Potentially pathogenic virus that's been with us for tens or hundreds of thousands of years or millions of years for all we know, you know, in one form or another.
That this is simply an evolution of nothing out of the ordinary.
So there you have that one little sentence that starts every paper that's false in four ways and it only needs to be false in one way for the entire narrative to collapse.
Just picking up on that particular detail, I'm inclined to agree with you that I think that the Wuhan lab leak story is itself a distraction planted.
I think it was part of the psyop designed to persuade everyone, look, this stuff is really serious because it's a bioweapon.
It was developed in the lab.
And people were suddenly starting using phrases like gain of function.
I agree it's sort of interesting but I noticed there's a lot happening with the climate change debate.
People were focusing on really abstruse technical scientific issues like feedback forcings and feedbacks and forcings and Actually, it was just a kind of an elephant trap designed to get people bogged down in a particular argument and take their eyes off the bigger picture, which with climate change and with coronaviruses, this is a fake.
This is a fake scare.
That's the only thing that matters.
Yeah, I mean, you've mentioned the early treatment story quite a lot.
But a point that I often make, and which gets up the noses of a few people on our side of the fence, is that you're never going to really convincingly demonstrate the efficacy of anything that addresses COVID as a disease in terms of its ability to prevent severe illness or death.
Whether we're talking ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine or any one of these jabs, you're never gonna get there because the disease isn't deadly enough.
The statistical sample size you'd need in a randomized controlled trial to show that this prevents death in people who are of normal age and reasonable health, because there are not enough deaths in the background.
I like to cite the statistic that for healthy under 70s, The infection fatality rate from COVID is less than 1 in 10,000.
So if you want to have a statistically relevant number of deaths in two arms of a randomized controlled trial, good luck!
You're going to need the mother of all studies.
It'll involve millions of people.
You're never going to get there.
So I'm sorry, but we're never going to have persuasive evidence on any of these stories in terms of ability to prevent illness and death.
And anybody who tells you that there is Strong or high quality evidence of efficacy with respect to either of those two clinical endpoints is talking nonsense.
And you've got to be very suspicious of them.
I don't.
Whether it's Pfizer or Bob.
I don't want to get bogged down on this point, but I've got to raise it.
What about Uttar Pradesh?
Population of over 200 million.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, well, you know, there's a problem is how much of that is because of a failure to panic?
The same organizations that are comfortable deploying ivermectin and not getting carried away with the narrative are probably also not doing this crazy dance of deliberately trying to maximize perceived threat in the population.
So there you go, you've got a confounding factor straight away.
Plus, combined with the young average age and low obesity in the population, this is a population that's not going to be hit very hard.
That's the crazy thing about all these measures being rolled out in Africa and India.
COVID is not a problem.
You could have 100% saturation infection with COVID and you would not have material deaths in Africa and India.
It's just as simple as that.
Certainly true.
But, you know, what this all points to, though, James, is the importance of beginning to grapple With the political agendas behind all of this, because propaganda doesn't emerge in a vacuum.
When we sit here saying these things are fake, these things are fake.
Well, yes, they are.
I agree with that.
There's an hysteria and there's an agenda and there's a political aspect to all of this.
And it's not sufficient.
For us to sit back and simply say, oh, yeah, well, it's that guy and that organization and that one over there.
There's real stuff that needs to be studied here.
And that's where Panda has turned its attention.
And we are now putting these questions of the socioeconomic and political aspects of the COVID phenomenon.
Under the spotlight and applying resources to studying them properly in a way which we believe is not being done in organizations elsewhere, because our universities are captured and our public health organizations are captured.
So they're not going to do an honest account, honest research into what happened here.
So where is it going to be done?
And so to that end, we've kind of spent the last couple of months reconfiguring Panda, changing the nature of the resources that we have, and putting together the project descriptions so that we can embark on a reasonable fundraising exercise to fund some permanently staffed projects, looking at these things properly, and really identifying the sources and mechanisms of this
Bizarre network of narrative control and projection and its related issues.
So I've got to ask you, before you tell me about what work Panda's doing now, but when was the point where you switched from this is A massive series of scientific errors and administrative cock-ups to, this is really sinister and horribly well organised and we should worry.
Yeah, it was very early on that I had a sense that there was a kind of securocrat Background, some sinister securocrat element to all of this.
And the one thing that I noticed was that there was plenty of propaganda apparently emerging from China, although as we've learned, it may not necessarily have actually been sourced in the CCP.
There was propaganda that the intelligence community was doing nothing to address.
That that was obviously obvious really early on.
And the silence of the in particular, the CIA, On the question of naked propaganda being pumped out was disturbing, because it meant to me that they were in on it.
Right.
And so I had that thought even before the lockdown story started being projected.
And that was the scary thought.
But I also had this unsettled feeling that, you know, a lot of the things that I've been concerned about, the drift towards relativism, this utilitarianism that had been emerging in philosophy, this kind of Sense of fragility, the safety culture, all of these things that have been niggling me for decades, really, were all coming together in one giant witch's brew.
So sinister was always there.
I think I, Probably became lent more and more towards the understanding that large elements of this had indeed been planned or prepared for.
Choose your poison.
And so I drifted more over time into that camp saying, okay, no, these guys were ready.
There were many aspects of this that were an object of intense scrutiny and planning and with the full knowledge that we would be dealing with something fake when they were making the plans.
So, yeah, there wasn't a single moment that I can realize where I remember when I switched.
There was, though, this early sense.
I remember seeing the Hungarian death data right in the beginning, and the Diamond Princess data, for example, when I looked at this and said, okay, that's it.
This thing is just being spectacularly overblown.
The people are being lied to.
This idea that everybody can get it and it can kill you, that was completely wrong and obviously wrong from the get-go.
It was not clear that those people in the Hungarian list, that any of them had actually died from the disease and not from the underlying comorbidities.
I mean, it was almost like a comedy, you know, if it hadn't been dealing with such a macabre subject, you would have laughed because you'd have these 96-year-old with six severe comorbidities, dies of COVID.
What?
You know?
No, no, he didn't, you know?
That kind of thing was obvious.
And so I guess those early, the Diamond Princess made it obvious, nobody under the age of 65 is severely ill, you know.
All of those things just made you realize that we were launching into a territory of hopeless, hopeless misinformation, promoted by governments, promoted by public health organizations.
That was before the real censorship was in place.
The censorship grew and grew over time.
Until now, we're in this position where you can say something that is completely supported by the science, has stood up in court, As you know, it is the closest you can come to a fact about the real world.
You can say that fact and be relentlessly banned and suspended and blown out of the water in media, smeared.
You will have the Info PsyOps people, who seem to have their epicenter in London, by the way, writing articles about you that are completely false, you know, all of that will happen to you.
And that just shows you the depths of this problem that we're dealing with.
Yeah, I'll tell you what, like you, I had no kind of epiphany, you know, no sort of saw line conversion moment, but there were breadcrumbs on the way.
One of the things that puzzled me very, very early on was, I don't know whether you had this in South Africa, probably not, but whenever one went to a petrol station,
There were these all-weather sort of plastic plastic banners urging you to support the NHS and celebrating our NHS heroes and this was very early on and and you even saw it on the on the sides of or on the on the backs of of sort of dustbin lorries and you know other sort of Council vehicles.
And at the same time, again, really early on, there were these signs saying, we don't want you to use cash, we want you to use card only, please.
And I was trying to work out the rationale for this because it didn't seem to be connected with anything that was, you know, if this was an emergent situation, how come all these things have been so well prepared?
Because garages don't say, well, I think for next month I better order in some some signs celebrating the NHS.
It was weird.
And whenever I asked around about, like, why is this happening?
Who would have given these orders?
Nobody could come up with an answer.
But also, more worryingly, no one really cared that much.
Everyone's just thought, well, it's just one of those things that happens.
Let's just shrug and move on.
Interesting question, you know?
Yeah.
Look, I mean, Well, my next question to you is, you're moving on to the new territory of what is really going on.
How are you going to get past this barrier that most people have, whereby they get their information from the media, they trust the media, they've been reading the newspaper every day of their grown-up lives.
And they trust the government.
They know governments are incompetent to a degree, but governments would never try and steal all their freedoms and turn them into slaves of a supranational New World Order.
How do you get past that?
Well, I mean, there's some natural ways in which you get past that, where as the fear subsides, the mistrust rises.
And, of course, what will happen is there will be other efforts to gin up fear, maybe not in relation to epidemics or diseases.
I mean, monkeypox ain't gonna do it, right?
They're not taking that one seriously at all, and they won't.
So, but there may be other attempts to gin up fear.
But as long as fear is subsiding, the narrative is increasingly questioned.
You can see it, the numbers for all of these mainstream publications and media outlets are in perilous decline, thank goodness.
And the numbers for your independent outlets, like the Epoch Times and so on, they're growing explosively.
Trial Site News, TNT Radio, they have big numbers attaching to them right now.
And so there clearly is demand for independent opinion that's not simply sustaining whichever narrative du jour you care to mention.
That's the first story.
The second thing I would give you is that these are themselves problems that are amenable to being studied and understood.
We are dealing with something, I would say, maybe not novel in terms of what it is, but certainly novel in terms of its breadth and depth of coverage globally.
So, there is a novel aspect to this problem and that needs to be understood and engaged with.
And then the other thing I would say is this is one-way travel.
Once people wake up, they don't go back to sleep again, they don't go back into the hypnotic state, they become properly awake and they become awake to other narratives.
I was a little disappointed how quickly everybody fell for the kind of that very black and white depiction of the Ukraine situation.
In the UK, but certainly they didn't do that here in South Africa.
There are many, many people who saw that there were two sides to the story and that there would be a lot of NATO provocation and so on.
Lots of people understand that here in South Africa.
It's not very broadly understood, it seemed to me, while I was in the UK.
But you've got a lot of signs out there that whilst we may not really be winning right now, we're definitely not losing.
Okay, so what do you think is going on?
Give me your TLDR.
Okay, so high level.
What's the very highest level issue that we can describe?
We're dealing with the age-old drive towards control.
Nothing new under the sun.
People throughout history, powerful people, have sought to control other human beings.
Not a contentious statement.
There's absolutely nothing contentious in that statement, and that sits at the top of this whole story.
Underneath that, if you go a level down, what are the components of the rationalizing philosophy that enable this drive to control to be kind of implemented?
I talk about the three M's.
And that Marxism, Malthusianism and post-modernism, the third M, Postmodernism, a little cheat.
But those three are kind of pervasive in these organizations like the WEF and the Geneva Organizations.
And how so?
Well, what is Malthusianism?
Malthusianism is this notion that we run out of things.
The population continues to grow and get greedy and consume and use resources.
It's going to run out and we're all going to die.
That's Malthusianism in a nutshell.
And that finds expression in all of these concepts which we cannot avoid on a daily basis, like sustainability.
The notion of the Earth as kind of a spaceship Earth that has a finite bound and that If we don't do certain things and cut back and scale back and start shrinking and start, you know, reducing the amount that we consume or the energy that we consume, that certain disaster lies ahead.
So that Malthusian setup is crucial.
And it's something that, again, is not new.
Malthusianism is a political kind of doctrine that resurfaces every generation.
There's always one around.
And then Marxism in what sense?
Well, in the sense of utilitarianism and advocacy for a greater good.
The idea that there is out there a perfect calculation that you can perform to measure the well-being of society in some way, correctly weighted for all of the plurality that there is out there and so on, and that clever people with enough information, possessed of enough information, will be able to make decisions that improve the well-being of the world.
That's a fallacy.
Again, one that has cropped up in numerous guises.
It was the key sort of notion informing Stalinism, Maoism to an extent as well.
But it's wrong, because it's not for want of information that we are unable to create better explanations about the world and make better decisions.
It's for want of explanations that we are unable to improve decision making or make decisions at a very centralized hierarchical level.
So there's the other sort of mythology, the utilitarianism and greater good thinking of Marxism.
Second M.
And then the third M is this postmodern kind of relativism, this idea out there that truth is a matter of perspective, that it's personal, you know, what is my view somehow determines the nature of reality, you know, or maybe they're not even connected to reality, they accept the idea that
It's not even, there's no obligation on anybody to ensure that their ideas and their proposals correspond in any way with the real world.
To me, those are the three that are enabling philosophical constructs.
And that's the, if you want to characterize the enemy, well characterized by the drive to control and the three M's.
Then you get into the mechanisms.
How is that thing being rolled out around the world?
Which organizations?
What overlapping spheres of influence?
How does the funding work?
Where are they finding the people and recruiting them?
What is it that they have to brainwash them with in order to get them to carry on spouting the three M's of the narrative and pursuing ideas that are consistent with that?
And there we could talk for hours.
We can all see the institutional networks in operation.
We know that they're there.
We know what they're telling people.
You can go onto their websites and see it.
I mean, I encourage people to actually go and look at the WEF website, because as exercises of intellectual absurdity go, there are few better candidates.
I mean, it is ridiculous.
The shallowness of the perspectives that are spouted off Vomited all over the pages of the WEF's website is astonishing.
It reminds one of, you know, in the movie there's that trope of the kind of crazy conspiracy theorist in the basement of a, you know, there's steam coming out of the pipes and he's got his He's in some burrow in the basement and he's sticking pictures up and he's got a red pen and string and all that kind of thing.
That's what the World Economic Forum's documents look like.
They have this crazy list, this absurd list of supposedly global crises.
That they then have dots linking, that's all related, you know, gender-based violence is related to climate change, which is related to, you know, this apophenia, this tendency to see connections between things where they aren't, is actually like a real conspiracy theorist, you know, some kook in the basement.
They've got a whole collective of people who've gone often enough to the big champagne-sipping festivals of Davos and talked each other into believing In a set of fabricated global crises and their interrelationship, along with the fact or the idea that they and only they are capable of unlocking the solutions to these global crises, which is another fantasy.
So it's the whole animating philosophy and environment is the world of the crazy.
It's the world of people who have lost contact with reality, who are deeply delusional, deeply irrational people.
And it also happens to be a trade organization for the 100 biggest corporations in the world, hatching plots to behave oligopolistically at the expense of everybody else.
What a terrible combination.
Well, I agree.
It's I mean, one has to keep a sense of humor about these things, because otherwise, yes, you just fall into the pit of despair.
But okay, so let me let me paint you a a bleak but I think actually quite realistic scenario.
So we've got the Ukraine currently being used, like the deep state is essentially using its proxy war with Russia in the Ukraine as a convenient part of its plan to shut down the global like the deep state is essentially using its proxy war with Russia in A convenient part of its plan to shut down the global food supply chain.
You know that, what is it, 60% of the world's wheat comes from Russia and Ukraine.
The Ukrainians have been mining the ports around the back sea.
You've got stories about the Azov actually burning down grain silos.
It's clear that there's going to be problems with wheat.
It's going to affect countries like Egypt, where bread is the staple.
It's going to have knock-on effects across the world in terms of human food and livestock food.
You've got the simultaneous Fertiliser shortages, you've got the deliberate destruction of food processing plants across America and across the UK, and probably in South Africa as well.
I think I've seen footage of beehives in South Africa being taken out by persons unknown.
But I think we can guess who they're working for.
So you've got global famine fast approaching.
You've got simultaneously the engineered collapse deliberately by the central banks of the global financial system.
They've been raping it since 1913.
And now they've been this this crisis was partly engineered to cover up that cover up their tracks and distract people to stop people being aware that they've been robbed by these these these the predator class I call them.
So you've got that.
You've got the possibility of nuclear war, which would be introduced purely in order to frighten the populace and keep them at home.
You've got clearly plans well in place to stop people using their cars, Fuel shortages, you've got whatever disease they cook up next.
I can see things getting really bad as early as this autumn.
And we're only just walking onto the football pitch.
So how do we win this game in the time available?
I'm still not seeing enough people waking up.
I mean, yes, people are waking up, but not in the numbers.
This is a long, I can't tell you a very happy story short term.
I mean, anybody who's approaching the world in an authoritarian way with a view that the science and knowledge is something to be found in highly centralized organizations is frankly wrong.
They're delusional.
So their project is going to fail.
The question is how long it takes to fail and how much damage is done along the way.
But the failure is certain, okay?
There is going to be spectacular failure.
And the knowledge that has to be created by us in order to address this problem is in the future to a large extent.
We are all of us learning very rapidly.
I just spent the two weeks traveling through Europe meeting the most unbelievable network of independent thinkers.
I mean, it is the best part of COVID is the people who I've managed to meet.
There's this process of like distillation of the most intelligent, the most independent thinkers in the world, all finding themselves in a network in the space of two short years.
That is going to be, but incredibly powerful, that network.
They are going to solve problems and generate new knowledge in a way that has never been done before.
It's going to be knowledge creation on steroids.
And those are the people who are going to be addressing these problems.
We win the long game, hands down, because the people on the other side are so pathetically mediocre.
Anybody who believes in authoritarian science, well, I mean, that's just a basic intellectual blunder.
Science is obviously About questioning assumptions.
Science is obviously about conjecture and criticism.
All knowledge creation, all of it, proceeds in an evolutionary fashion, in a world of competing ideas and diversity of opinion.
No knowledge creation is possible under conditions of authoritarianism.
Never has been.
Whenever there have been authoritarian epochs, they have been accompanied by stasis and a failure for accretion of knowledge, a failure of accretion of knowledge that we know both in theory and in practice.
We know that that happens and we know why it happens.
So ultimately we win with certainty.
But the question is how rapidly that knowledge is created and is it going to happen in time to persuade a sufficient number of people to get up and do something to hang the right people on the lampposts, To put in place the successor organizations, the parallel societies, the competing arrangements of the world.
All of this requires a great deal of knowledge creation.
I made the point at the conference in Bath the week before last, that we've got to be very careful to not try and create mirror organizations.
If the problem is the world towards centralization, if the problem is authoritarian approaches to organizational design and management, then it does not help that we create a competing organization for the WHO, the WEF.
We mustn't think of our parallel society ideas in terms of mirror organizations.
We must get comfortable with the idea of decentralized organizational design and decentralized society and comfortable with everything that that brings with it, the uncertainty and lack of predictability.
entailed in that.
That is something that you have to in principle accept if you accept the notion of growth and generativity, that the future is unpredictable because the creation of new knowledge is fundamentally an unpredictable story.
If we could predict it, then we'd have the knowledge now.
So all these futurologists and futurists, well, I'm sorry, they're deluded people.
You can't, if you're in the world of trying to predict changes in the future that depend on the creation of future knowledge, it's a hopeless, it's a hopeless story.
So, I get quite excited quite quickly about the vast potential of the dissident movement, and I think it can coalesce and produce incredible progress in short order, notwithstanding the vastness of the resources that are arrayed against us.
This will come, and it will become visible increasingly.
I think that we will see tipping points.
We will see sudden developments where people realize, wake up, where you get to a sufficient minority that then convincing the middle ground becomes a very quick process.
You know, sort of, the dam wall is burst, you know, the dark is eroded, whatever, and the knowledge just flows.
So, I can see events like that coming, and some of them might be near-term, you know.
I don't have that crystal ball.
The crystal ball does not exist.
So, for me, yeah, I'm not despondent.
I think there are going to be tragedies and calamities.
There are some at the moment.
You know, that's one of the media control issues, is they're not reporting, for example, the massive famine underway in southern Madagascar right now.
It's one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies that's ever occurred on the planet, and it's simply not being reported.
Why?
Because it contradicts the lockdown narrative.
It was caused by lockdown.
You know, you lock down one of the poorest countries in the world.
Guess what?
People start starving.
Guess what?
Surprise, surprise.
But that's not being reported on.
So the media control.
But guess what?
Also, people in southern Madagascar are pissed off.
Now, when does it happen?
When will this happen elsewhere in the world?
Yeah, I think rising energy prices might be a good candidate for provoking some insurrection, for provoking some changes in electoral systems and so on, or electoral outcomes.
There are many candidates for dissatisfaction and ultimately that's what's going to drive the story.
We've had a situation where the economic damage in developed countries was papered over by these ridiculous practices that fall under the rubric of modern monetary theory, where you can borrow indefinitely and spend to propitiate.
But they ultimately will come unstuck.
There hasn't been grown somewhere in You know, in a courtyard in New York or Geneva, a magic money tree.
So the music's going to stop.
All sorts of things could change very quickly.
I think that that was much more optimistic than you kind of suggested it would be.
I like that.
I just want to ask you one more thing, which is, you're obviously financially savvy.
What have you been doing to prepare for You know, the next few years.
Yeah.
OK, so it's a very good question.
I mean, I get as close when you're in this environment where, you know, that money is being continually debased.
You've got to get as close to real assets as you can.
And I mean that in both senses of the term real.
I mean real as in substantive assets and real as in robust to inflation, protected from inflation.
And happily, where I work, private equity, that is one method of getting very close.
So, I don't have layers of intermediation between my bank account and the The assets that are actually, you know, the actual productive assets, the machines and the systems that are being generative.
And so that you want to be as close as you can to the real assets.
So private equity is not a bad way.
But also anything that involves, you know, property, commodities, farmland, getting close To the stuff that people actually consume, that they need and eat.
So that would mean, for example, staying away from some of these highly esoteric assets that provide people with things that they don't actually need.
The companies that have all the bullshit jobs.
I would not invest in banks.
I would not invest in a whole bunch of these tech companies.
I think they've had their greatest moment and they're going to decline.
Yeah, so that's kind of where I'm positioning, trying to stay as far away as possible from the insubstantial, the nominal, that kind of story.
Yes, yes.
So, guns and butter.
Guns and butter, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, and not Netflix.
I mean, but there's...
Somebody said to me yesterday, just to put it very well, he said to me, you know, one of the reasons why in developed countries lockdowns didn't have an obvious and massive economically destructive effect, or as big a one as we might have expected, is that a lot of people were doing bullshit jobs.
They were, you know, they just get paid.
The book by Daniel Grebber is well worth reading.
But they were being paid to do stuff that actually doesn't contribute to the world or to society, the well-being of other human beings.
And I had a lively feeling of that when I worked in the investment banking world.
You know, you go from committee to committee doing supposedly risk management exercises, for example.
And every year, the guy who runs the risk management area gets burnt out and changes.
You get a new character coming along, and he has a completely different approach to risk management.
And you do more reporting and more calculations and spreadsheets and so on and so on.
And you know, when you're doing that work, that it is completely meaningless drivel because the real risk management lies elsewhere.
What are we doing in private equity to manage risk?
It's all about people and School of Hard Knocks learning and making sure that experience is in the room, making sure that the people are aligned and paying attention.
That's where the risks lie, actually, in very performative, behavioral, real-world substantive stuff.
It's not a calculation in a spreadsheet.
Doing some calculation to help you manage risk by balancing things and doing, you know, some risk measure in some hectically complicated Basel III framework or whatever, you know, that stuff's all garbage.
It's of no value to man or beast, and there are so many people employed in jobs that are involved in what is essentially garbage.
Yes, I remember Mark Stein terrified me a few years ago with a book, and I'm sure the percentage has increased since he wrote it, where he said that 10% of the US economy was compliance.
Yeah, I'm surprised it's so little.
I'm sure it's more.
I'm sure it's probably more like 20.
Yeah.
But so the big fat parasite is gorging itself on the productive sector of the economy, which is dwindling.
And I, you know, I talked to I talked to children about to go to university and quite a lot of them are going to read completely pointless things like marine biology.
It's because, you know, they like the idea of scuba diving and stuff and they think that, you know, biology is kind of nice because it's got animals in it and stuff.
I mean, maybe that's a bad example.
I suppose anyone going to university Studying a degree which is involved with sustainability or diversity.
These are all completely invented things, invented for parasites.
Yeah, I'm not sure I agree with you when it comes to conservation and ecology.
I mean, I adopt a fundamentally conservative mindset in the sense that I think when you tamper with complex systems you can have Really unexpected and unattractive outcomes, you know, the law of unintended consequences comes to bear and I regard our ecological inheritance as part of that, as within the boundaries of my intuitive conservatism.
That's a given Nick, but I think I refer you to the Great Barrier Reef.
The Great Barrier Reef is not in danger, but you've got thousands of marine biologists, trained marine biologists and experts in sustainability and ecology, telling you that it is one of the world's great environmental disasters.
And they lie.
That's what I mean by that.
Yes, I agree with you as far as that goes.
But one of the casualties, one of the casualties of this whole sustainability net zero type thinking is the diversion of funds away from The protection of real diversity in real ecologies, you know, in Africa, in South America, in Southeast Asia, they're a casualty of this whole relentless drive towards minimizing this little molecule, CO2.
Oh, totally.
Everything just gets sucked away.
I can't remember which sinister member of the predator class it was who said that it was actually, you remember to tell me, that it was absolutely perfectly legit for the West to dump all its toxic waste in Africa, that this seemed eminently reasonable.
It'd be one of the usual suspects anyway.
But yeah, no, I agree.
There are real, and this is one of the things that really annoyed me, but you know, when I got into the whole environmental or the anti-environmentalist business, it was because I started out as an outraged, affronted nature lover who saw Bird, but bat slicing, bird chopping eco crucifixes being being put up on every hillside and and rainforest being cut down to grow sort of palm oil for eco fuel and just yeah.
The planet being devastated in the name of saving it.
That's what really annoyed me.
And I'm afraid to say that the industry, the environmental industry is so captured now.
You know, even if you wanted to go to university to study genuinely like fish behavior, you wouldn't get any of that.
It would all be about ecology.
It'd be all about global warming.
So that ship has sailed.
I mean, I agree the environment, sorry, I hate the environment, that word.
Conservation is important, but we need to distinguish between the two things, conservation and environmentalism.
I agree.
Yeah.
Anyway, I've asked you the things I wanted to ask you.
I've really enjoyed talking to you and just tell people where they can find you and where they can read you and stuff.
Sure.
Panda's website is www.pandata.org and our social media handles on almost any platform you'd care to mention are typically structured as at pandata19 or Straight Pan Data 19, so P-A-N-D-A-T-A-1-9.
Those handles will be, you'll find us on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook and so on, Instagram, you name it.
And then, you know, I'm a click away on the Panda website.
Yeah, we do depend on, we're not funded by any particular organization or special interest group.
We have a diversity of funders, members of the general public crowdfunding us predominantly, and so we're very grateful for donations towards the organization.
We operate very efficiently, there's not a big overhead, and we're funding, I believe, some of the most important work that's being done anywhere in the world in any organization, namely The work that has to go into understanding and fully describing the problems that we are engaged with, which are big ones that go well beyond the domain of a virus.
Oh, the biggest ever.
Yeah, well, Nick, thank you for all the work you're doing.
I agree that this is a tremendously important cause.
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Nick, thank you once again.
I've really enjoyed it and I hope I meet you next time you come or next time I go to South Africa, if that ever happens.