All Episodes
Previous Next
July 8, 2022 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
28:17
Clive De Carle - part 1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I love Danny Paul!
Come and subscribe to the podcast baby!
I love Danny Paul!
And there's another time, subscribe with me!
I love Danny Paul!
Welcome to The Delingpod with me, James Delingpole, and I know I always say this about my this week's special guest, but look, again, it's one of your favourites.
It's the man with the voice you all love, Clive de Carl.
Clive, I just... I totally love you.
You live in the kind of place that Clive de Carl would live in.
It's an idyll.
It's fantastic.
Well, it's just a tiny little cottage, actually, and I could just give you a quick...
Zoom around and you can basically see it's just a little cottage and we're relatively speaking in the middle of nowhere and it's very nice particularly on a nice sunny day like this.
I hope the sound is going to work.
No, it's working just fine.
Even though it's over with me.
Because the mic's touched your leg.
I'm glad you're in.
You were about to tell me a story about your youthful experience which kind of blew your mind and changed your understanding of the world.
And I had to stop you because I think, don't waste it.
Let's get it on camera.
So tell me about your meeting when you were a young man.
Well, when I was 10, I met John Lennon, which made a massive impact on me.
This was in 1964, and I thought that everything that came along with John Lennon and The Beatles was going to happen.
That there would be a peaceful People's Revolution in 1967 and that everything would get better and war would be over and then by 1968 I was in a bit of a state of shock because it hadn't happened and I realised that it wasn't going to.
But then the following year, I was out in the Bahamas, and I was on a tiny boat with somebody, and we were fishing.
Now, I didn't want to catch fish.
That was the last thing on my mind, but that's what we were doing.
Because I had problems.
We were using live maggots, and I didn't want to touch the maggot, let alone impale it on a hook.
What I really dreaded was having to take the hook out of the fish's mouth.
You know, I thought that was barbaric and horrible.
I did not want to do it.
So we had a bucket with a glass bottom so with the glass bottom Bucket in the water you can see everything you see that each hook each of our hooks totally clearly in the maggot and Within minutes there were like 20 fish around the other guys hook desperate to Give themselves up There were none around mine So I'm 11 at this point.
I want your fishing rod.
So we switch.
And we can see with the glass bucket that the moment that I touched the fishing rod that had previously been in his hand, the fish slowed down and were disinterested.
And then suddenly, whoosh, they went over to him.
And we could switch fishing rods over and over, and the fish were reading my mind.
It was totally obvious to me the fish were reading my mind.
There was no other explanation.
He caught loads of fish.
He was looking forward to eating them.
I caught zero.
The only thing I caught was some stroke.
And I was in bed for about three days.
Whoa!
So I realised I couldn't read their mind, right?
I had no idea.
But it was clear to me that fish had consciousness in a serious way, you know?
Because we don't think of fish as being particularly intelligent.
All you've got to do is go to the London Aquarium.
Right at the end, there's a fish petting section.
Yeah.
Oh, the rays?
Yeah.
And the place.
OK, but rays are a different order, aren't they?
I don't know.
Your average fish.
They are more intelligent.
But anyway, look, I love that story.
I love that story.
And it actually... As I've... As my consciousness has developed, particularly in the last two years, I've become so much more aware that there are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than I'd dreamt of in your philosophy.
And, I mean, I watched it...
A Netflix documentary the other day about how everything is collected by fungi.
Yeah.
And that fungi send signals to trees.
Trees can communicate with one another through the sort of subterranean fungal network and decide where to put the nutrients, which areas of the forest are in danger, All sorts of things.
So, I mean, I don't like to say Prince Charles is right about anything, but in the days when he was talking about talking to plants... Well, I had an actual experience of this very thing you're talking about, and the Postman is about to do a delivery, clearly.
Back in the late 90s, I read an article that a friend of mine had written.
He was the editor for the Evening Standard Colour Supplement section.
And he wrote about this lie detector that had been invented, about the size of a cigarette packet.
And you could hold it to the radio and it would tell you whether the person was lying or not.
But not only that, it would go down to each individual word.
And I thought, this is brilliant.
We can unmask politicians wrongdoing with this.
We can change the world with this.
We can unmask lying.
So, um, I rang my friend up, said, where do I get one of these machines?
And he said, Oh, I made it up.
I got paid 700 quid for that story.
Just made it up.
Wasn't true.
I'm a journalist.
So anyway, I was disappointed, but there was something in me that I felt, okay, this has got to exist.
Yes, got to exist.
Two weeks later, I'm reading Wired magazine, and there's a tiny little article about an Israeli who'd seen a car bombing, and a woman come out carrying a dead baby, and He knew he had to develop a lie detector to ask a question, are you a terrorist?
Yeah.
That was his motivation.
Here's the post-it.
Hello there.
Oh, right.
Illegible, it says.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
And, um... So... I follow it up and I start phoning Anyway, I get in touch with the company, I get in touch with the guy, and I fly out to meet him.
He's like 21, and like all Israelis, he's a spy.
Yeah.
And he tells me the development of it.
His dad was the head of mathematics at Tel Aviv University, so he had a head start to build an algorithm that would work.
He then had a motorcycle accident and was never quite the same again and wasn't able to develop the software as much as he had originally planned.
However, it worked.
And so I was so impressed with it that I decided to go into business with it.
And how it worked was simply over the telephone.
You had a computer program, an algorithm that worked on voice analysis.
So what you did is you calibrated the person by asking them some questions which you knew were true already.
Yeah.
Yeah, by the way, what's your address?
Yeah.
Yeah, anything just to calibrate truth.
And then, if you had a trained operator, you could see the waveform, and it didn't just say if somebody was lying, it would say if they were uncertain, or whether they were withholding information, if they weren't confident about the information, that kind of thing.
Yeah.
It's quite, quite subtle.
And so I started using it on every phone call that I made, for a year.
Including on my mum, who always told the truth, by the way.
Right.
And it was very, very, very interesting.
So what I thought would happen would be that everybody would see it the way I did.
Oh my God, we can unmask politicians.
Yeah.
But what I found out was that maybe 10% of people liked the idea and the others were horrified.
Horrified.
What if my husband or wife got hold of it?
What if they asked me a difficult question?
And I realized how many of my friends had secrets from people really close to them.
And so I'd never ever let anybody use it on a family member.
Except once.
And this guy said, well, I'm just going to phone my brother to find out.
He was going to a party on Saturday night.
I want to find out whether he had a good time on Saturday night.
So he rings up his brother.
What harm can be done?
So he rings up the brother and the brother says, yeah, I shagged this girl and it was all fantastic.
And he said, did you use a condom?
Yes.
Lie.
You know, and he didn't think his brother would lie to him.
You know, it was a shock.
So after that I decided I'm just not going to let anybody use it on family members again.
But if you wanted to use it for negotiation, you know, how much is that house worth?
I ask you, you say 200,000.
And I say, well, would you take 100,000?
No.
Truth.
Would you take 150,000?
No.
100,000?
Truth.
160?
No. Truth.
Would you take 150,000?
No. Truth. 160?
Uncertain. 170?
170.
I wouldn't take that offer at truth.
I mean, lie, rather.
I mean, so, it could be useful.
So, I phoned up John Pilger.
And I thought, look, this is an incredible thing.
And he said, well, it's just rubbish.
I said, what do you mean?
He said, look, you think you can ask unmasked politicians if their lips are moving?
They're lying.
You don't need a machine to figure out they're lying.
And I realised that actually was right.
So, um, anyway, there was just profound disinterest of everybody I knew.
Anyway, uh, the people who were interested were insurance companies.
Cool.
Now, uh, insurance companies do not want to pay out, number one.
Number two, they don't want to go to court about it, because then people might discover the secrets of swindling insurance companies.
So I started going to meetings with insurance companies.
And the boss of one insurance group said, do you know that more Rolex watches are stolen every year than have been made in the history of the factory ever?
Because when people do an insurance claim, they tend to pick a Rolex watch.
So the moment a Rolex pops up as being stolen, that's red alarm bells all over the place.
So, we started doing trials for insurance companies, and I felt this was a good use of it, because insurance fraud is wrong.
It makes everybody else's insurance more expensive, and I couldn't see the harm of doing it.
So, over a couple of years, not only did the people who were trained to use the technology get really good at it, but we developed a script, which in the end was more powerful than the machine.
And usually in four to five minutes, any insurance fraudster, we could trap them.
We could get them.
Because we knew everything that was true or true or uncertain or whatever.
And so, what would happen, the end of the conversation, now the person's quite scared, because they've been caught out, pretty much, or they haven't got decent answers for obvious questions and they've Tied themselves up in knots.
You know, our questions were clever.
And so what the insurance company operator would say at this point is that it must be very difficult for you.
You know, you do realise that the consequences here could be very, very, very serious.
So my supervisor has gone home now, but what I'd like you to do is I'm going to give you the telephone number, I'd like you to ring her in the morning.
Or ring him in the morning.
And of course they never would.
You could see the relief the machine would tell you.
Yes.
They would just relax.
Yes.
And they would think, well, if I didn't phone, maybe I could get away with it.
And they don't want you to phone back.
They just want it to disappear.
They just want you not to claim.
Yes.
That's it.
And so the insurance companies still use that technology.
Do they?
Your machine?
Well, I sold the business in the early 2000s.
That was it.
You've been around the block, haven't you?
I've done a few things.
You've got Hinterland.
That's great.
Sorry, but how does that relate to animals and trees communicating?
Well, I got in touch with America's most famous lie detector man, a guy called Cleve Baxter.
Anyway, so I rang him up.
And he asked the phone.
He was very, very nice.
And he told me his history.
And he sent me his book, which is called Primary Perception.
Fantastic book.
I lent it to somebody.
I wanted to buy a new copy.
The only copy I could find on eBay was 500 quid.
Really rare book.
Primary Perception.
Worth buying.
Anyway, so he was using the old-fashioned type of lie detector that uses galvanic skin response, right?
So one day he's thinking, I wonder if my plant is conscious.
So he wires up the plant to the lie detector.
He's got a big, thick-ass rubber plant in his office.
He wires it up with a big leaf, and he turns it on, and the first thing he thinks is, I wonder what would happen if I cut a leaf off with a pair of scissors.
Immediately the plant responds.
And he's aware that the plant is reading his mind.
And he starts a whole series of experiments.
He uses the plant, and three o'clock in the morning, when he knows that he'll be asleep, everybody around the plant will be asleep, he rigs up a little robot arm to pour boiling water into a pan of live shrimps.
The moment that happens at three o'clock in the morning, the plant goes mental.
So, he starts playing with things like live yoghurt.
So he takes some live yoghurt, splits it into two pots, puts the lie detector probes in one pot, and in another room he stirs some jam into the yoghurt.
The yoghurt responds in this position.
He was the first person, if you like, to prove that everything has consciousness.
Everything.
So yoghurt doesn't like jam being put into it?
No.
Right.
Well, there's...
Yoghurt.
I like the concept of yoghurt and cruelty, that you can actually be... See, of course, taken to this logical extreme, Clive, this means that everything we eat is murder.
Well, you see, if you're a meat-eater, in theory, let's say, one cow could feed, if you spread that over, one cow over a year or something, it would feed at least one person, probably maybe, because it would be two, I don't know.
So one consciousness is gone.
Now if you're vegan, and you decide to plough a field, you have wiped out Probably millions of insect consciousnesses.
You've turned the soil over for a start and exposed it to the sun, so a lot of things have died.
You know, vegans are mass murderers.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'm glad you said that, because look, I do believe very strongly that God meant us to eat meat.
I mean, you know, even if you're not a Christian, I think it's...
You have to look at the benefits of eating meat to know that in order to be really healthy... I know vegetarians will say, I've been a vegetarian all my life and it's fine.
Even vegans try and make that claim.
But we know, I think pretty, with a degree of certainty now, that meat is good because it gets those nutrients.
Say it's a cattle.
When the steer eats the grass, the steer then converts the nutrients in the grass to things that we can digest.
We can't go around eating grass, but, well, grass-fed beef, it's a good thing, isn't it?
Well, of course, every child knows that cows eat grass, but not really.
Not a healthy cow.
A healthy cow would eat rich, lush pasture with wildflowers and mushrooms and herbs.
You know, a diet of grass maybe isn't that healthy for cows, actually.
So, I mean, there are different types of diet out there.
I would class myself as an omnivore or an opportunivore.
If the opportunity arises and it looks alright, I might eat it.
Then there's the Clinton diet, which is a humanitarian diet where you eat humans.
Right.
I mean, every vegan I know... That's going to get you offed, by the way, if you realise that.
You're going to get Arkansas-ed.
I guess, like, how many people have got 50 friends who've died in suspicious circumstances?
Everyone.
Everyone.
It's normal, Clive, don't worry.
It's normal.
Um, yeah, every vegan I know who's long-term stopped because they got so weak they couldn't get out of bed.
Dr. Jennifer Daniels, who's a wonderful medical doctor, she told me that after over 20 years, I think it was, of being vegan, she couldn't get out of bed.
She didn't have the strength anymore, and her intuition said to her, "Carves liver." I love calves liver.
Well, the carnivore, they kill the prey and they eat the liver first.
That's what they go for, because that's where the richest nutrition is.
Yeah.
They leave the flesh for the scavengers, generally.
So, she felt better that day, on calves' liver.
And, you know, because we are intuitive beings, we know what we want.
I mean, let me give you a good example.
If we were foraging, you know, let's say we lived the primitive life, we're living in the forest, we'd know where everything was, and we'd be waiting for the wild strawberry season to kick in.
And if we'd stumbled on the wild strawberries, or looked for them, and they were ready, we would have stuffed them until we were full, until we didn't want any more wild strawberries, right?
And then we'd move on to the blueberries or whatever was happening next.
But we'd eat one food at a time.
If we killed an animal, we'd eat that.
Yes.
Now, take a baby.
This is how a baby should be fed.
Once it's, you know, off the milk, it should be being fed one food at a time.
That way, if strawberries don't agree with them, you know about it.
Yeah.
But what parents do is they think fruit salad.
Mixed vegetables.
And they feed more than one thing to a baby at a time.
Now, let's say the baby was allergic to strawberries, but every few days they keep giving it strawberries in the fruit salad.
And the baby's never quite well.
It's never quite right.
And they never figure it out.
But they would have done if they'd done one food at a time.
Yeah.
And so I believe that some people maybe are really missing the point, food-wise, because we should be, in the sunshine, barefoot, getting electrons from the surface of the planet.
We should be eating seasonally and locally, and most importantly, perhaps, freshly.
If we pick a red pepper, for instance, it's going to be, hopefully, if it's grown properly, full of vitamin C and minerals and what have you, and full of minerals.
Now, the minerals will last forever.
Minerals are eternal.
But vitamins deteriorate with heat and time and light and so on.
So by the time we've got the red pepper on our kitchen table ready to cook or eat or whatever, how much vitamin content is left?
Probably not very much.
So everybody's pretty much deficient because they're not eating fresh food.
Yes.
And now, with the...
threat of food shortages, everybody needs to be growing stuff.
You know, you can take a lawn, if you're not using it for something, put potatoes on top.
Let's say it's too hard to dig.
You can put potatoes on top, put some cardboard with holes for the potato, spread out all over the grass, then get some straw bales, open them up and put them on top, a couple of feet, water it, come back.
Say two months later, whenever the potatoes are ready, you just take the straw away, the cardboard's probably rotted by this time, and the potatoes will have dug your garden for you.
They will have sent the roots down to make the soil sort of friable, and the potatoes will mainly be right on top.
It's not like you have to dig most of them up.
And, you know, people can do other things with potatoes.
You can do vertical gardening, where you get a big bucket or any container you like, With some holes in it, or you could get chicken wire and make a barrel-shaped chicken wire circle, and you can put in some straw, soil, potatoes, straw, soil, potatoes, in a few layers.
Then you water it, and now it will be green from every angle.
So even if you've only got a small spot, by vertical gardening, you can grow upwards, and then you can start picking new potatoes at the top and work your way down I really like that potato thing, the way it aligns with no dig, which is clearly the way forward.
My wife writes about gardening and stuff and talks to people who do all sorts of things like that.
You don't get the weeds.
You don't get the hassle.
And the ground doesn't get depleted so much, it seems.
Well, absolutely.
It keeps its structure, at least.
Yeah.
And I've got loads of wild strawberries which cover a lot of ground.
It's a fight between me and the pigeons as to who gets them, of course.
Well, you can eat the pigeons, of course, as well.
This is true.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I absolutely agree that it's...
Just going back to that point about sentient plants and sentient animals.
We can't not eat stuff because otherwise we'd die.
How do you sort of make your peace?
How does one make one's peace with the animals that one kills and the plants that one kills?
I mean, for most people, most people won't give a shit about this.
Actually, no, that's not true.
People listening to this podcast will give a shit.
I imagine that most people out in the big wide world would not care about this question, but I kind of do.
What do you think, how does one reconcile oneself to this?
Well, I would say, if you want a description of the world that we're in, you could describe it as the great eating.
Everything is eating something else.
I mean, isn't that the case?
Yes.
Everything is eating.
So, you know, I witnessed the fish, as far as I could see, giving themselves up.
to my friend.
Because it's their job.
Well, you know, I can't explain it.
I mean, there's that...
Have you read The Botany of Desire, the Michael Pollan book?
No.
So he has some great stories in there.
One of them is about the bee.
So the bee gets up in the morning and it knows that it's in charge of its own day.
Right?
It knows that.
It spots that flower over there, and it goes to it, and it gets the pollen, and it's in charge of its day.
The flower, on the other hand, when it wakes up in the morning, it's equally convinced that it's in charge of its day, because it has bred itself to be attractive to the bee.
You know, the bee thinks it's manipulating or working in harmony with the plant.
You know, who's in charge?
Well, actually, everybody's in charge, because We should be living in a symbiotic, perfect relationship where everything works in harmony.
Yes.
And, you know, what happens, well, there's a weak... The flock, it's got a weak member, maybe it's old or broken its leg or something, well, the predator will take that one.
Yes.
And, you know, when they put the wolves back in the wilderness, you know that story, where I can't, maybe it was Yellowstone.
It was Yellowstone, where they didn't go for the deer as they were supposed to, they went for the penned in sheep and cattle and stuff from outlying districts.
But they fixed the whole ecology of the region by letting nature take its course.
Oh, I heard a different story.
They put wolves back in Yellowstone, and they'd been wiped out previously, and the fear was that everything would go wrong, but everything went right.
It balanced out the whole ecosystem that had gone out of balance, because the predators weren't killing the right numbers, so everything had gone wrong and the land was getting parched, or whatever the problems were.
By putting the wolves back, they fixed the problem.
Yeah, OK, that sounds like a good story, but I am suspicious of rewilding.
I'm very suspicious of the motives of George Monbiot in particular, who I think is a bad actor.
I mean, I think he's actually an agent of the forces of evil.
Well, he has to be, he works for the Guardian.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think he genuinely is.
So, you know, we've had sea eagles being brought back to Scotland and killing... I'm not sure that Great Britain is really suited to having wolves and sea eagles.
No, no, I don't think people would go for that, or the bears.
No, all bears.
Nicely, it would be... I mean, I would like to revive bear baiting.
Not because I think that bears deserve to be tormented, but just to annoy the sort of people who would get annoyed by it.
And what about my... Am I going to...
I mean, I try and stop eating... I've tried to stop eating seed oils.
And I know that if you don't eat seed oils, you're less likely to get burned.
Because I've stopped using sun cream recently, but I now have to sort of start worrying about... Ah, well, let's move to a spoty surface.
Probably here might do us for a short time. - By the way, I'm with the apricots.
Yes.
The kernel.
Absolutely right.
They're surprisingly good.
It's absolutely right.
Well, if they're fresh they don't.
Yeah, the kernel.
Is that right?
Absolutely right.
They are really, really good.
They're surprisingly good.
It's absolutely right.
Well, I have to say, the kernel did not taste bitter.
Well, if they're fresh, they don't.
It's when they get old that they start tasting like marzipan.
Well, isn't the bitterness the thing that makes it good?
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think it's just that most people have them and they're not fresh.
They've already been taken out of the apricot.
When you've got them in the apricot, they stay fresh.
But when most people eat them, you just get the kernels by itself and they're usually just old.
Right.
How many do you reckon you've got to make to not get cancer?
Well, if only it were that simple alone.
I mean, they say a minimum should be six, you know, if somebody... Every day?
Well, that would be if you were actually fighting something.
Personally, I'm not going to get it, I trust, and so I'm not taking it as a prophylactic.
So I hope you enjoyed that short interview.
▲
Export Selection