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May 11, 2023 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:28:00
Dick Delingpole
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I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I'm not excited this week because it's not a guest!
Sorry, it's not a special guest, it's a guest!
He's a guest but he's just not special enough.
I know, I know.
Because I've been away, Dick, I've forgotten the routine.
All your protocols.
Hang on, I'm just... Can you hear me OK?
Yeah.
Oh, well, I don't know whether I'm hearing you through my headphones or through the computer.
I'm fuming through my headphones.
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What is MCT Olding?
It's kind of the thing that can help you with ketosis.
You're not supposed to heat it up, you're meant to take it as an oil in itself and it's unrefined, well in its uncooked form.
You can put it in coffee and things like that and it turns it into a bulletproof coffee.
The wife has been using it.
You know the thing the Americans have for putting butter in their coffee that most of us found absolutely repellent but actually it's meant to be quite good.
It's the same sort of thing and you end up making yourself a coffee that pretty much fills you up without having a meal.
That's the general gist of it.
It's one of those good things.
I was thinking about Um, you know how you hear all this stuff about the NHS being overwhelmed and about how, you know, doctors going on strike and nurses going on strike and, um, how...
Increasingly, doctor's receptionists are going to be diagnosing you and dealing with you to keep you away from the doctor.
And I was thinking, wouldn't it be fantastic if all this meant people were spending less and less time in the poison system?
I mean, how many lives could be saved if the NHS just collapsed and nobody used Rockefeller medicine anymore?
Yeah, well it's, um, wising up and sort of doing your own research, as they say, is key to it.
Our friend, who you know quite well, Andy, recently, He initially diagnosed himself with type 2 diabetes.
He was getting up constantly, peeing in the night and various other things.
Diagnosed himself quite successfully because he went to the doctor as well and said, look, I think I've got this.
Give me the tests and everything.
But in the meantime, he knew what to do.
He'd read enough, and he eliminated all sugars from his diet, he cut out the beer altogether, ate a whole ton of cabbage, basically completely changed his diet overnight, and he nailed it within two months.
But meanwhile his doctor had prescribed him whatever the standard pill, medicine... Yeah, some by-product of oil.
Yeah.
There's some added poison.
So when he went back for his next test, the doctor was delighted.
He said, your numbers are way down.
This is fantastic news.
The pills have really been working.
He said, I didn't even get the prescription.
I didn't even pick it up.
And the doctor was like, well, what?
He said, no, I just changed my diet.
I think a lot of people are aware of this one, but there's other things like that.
And I was thinking about this the other day.
The NHS should be paying you to join a gym, not sorting you out when you're ill.
If they really cared for our health, gym membership would be free, but you'd pay for hospital treatment, not the other way around.
You know my theory on smoking?
So I've just been, as you know, I've just been travelling and I'm gonna, you know, we'll talk about that in a moment, but I noticed that on my travels The best conversational moment.
You know what it's like when you're travelling, particularly when you're staying in a hotel and you kind of feel slightly resentful of the other guests and you sort of eye each other warily and you sort of make judgements on them and things like that and everyone else is sussing out at you and deciding whether they like you or they think you're a tosser and stuff.
The ice-breaking moment in every case was... It's not just in England that the war on smoking is happening.
Apparently, if you go to Tokyo, for example, I mean I thought if there was one country that was never going to give up smoking it would be Japan because Japanese just like, well throughout the East don't they, they smoke like chimneys.
But apparently if you go to Tokyo now the end place you can smoke are these sort of tiny little sort of bunker areas where you're treated like a complete pariah.
And it's the same, I was in Singapore and there's this Tiny designated strip of gravel and you have to stand on the gravel.
If you step outside the gravel you're going to get the fascist police coming down on you like a tonne of bricks.
So we went into this fascist smoking area and this Chinese bloke appears and pulls out this Very elegant packet.
I thought communist cigarettes would be, like, grim and sort of made with, I don't know, sort of ground-up horrors.
But they were beautiful, slim cigarettes with this sort of, where the filter is, this sort of golden lettering and stuff.
Really, really nice.
And this was a mainland Chinese who worked in the offshore oil and gas industry.
His English was quite limited, so I couldn't work out whether it was actually his company or not, but he was moving out to Singapore.
And he offered me one of his Chinese cigarettes, so I smoked it with him.
And I was thinking, you'd never get this conversation if you didn't have that sense of camaraderie that smokers have.
And I'm convinced that the real reason, because we know that the powers that be, the cabal, the predator class, they don't give a flying toss about our health.
You can rule that possibility out.
No, they've got a vested interest in us not being healthy.
Yeah, exactly.
And they do it every which way.
They poison us with chemtrails and they poison our water supply and they poison us through vaccines and everything else.
So they're not trying to stop us smoking because they care about our health.
What they want is to stop us being able to have chats about stuff.
And you have really good chats.
So we were staying in this fancy hotel and Again, there was a sort of little smoking area around the corner because you couldn't... I suppose this is the way things are going.
I'm sure they didn't want to do it to their smoking guests, but it's just the way.
And just great conversations.
It's like turning up to a party and there are people who want to chat to you.
Smokers are just You know, there's another element to it, because we have it a lot on a third Wednesday, the smoking area at the barn in Leadbury.
It's kind of a plant showroom during the day, but it's semi-covered.
It's quite a pleasant place to be, especially on a summer evening.
You're going out there for a limited period of time, so it's almost like you're grabbing yourself a five-minute party, and you can drop whatever you're doing inside, no matter who you're talking to, and you've got this little impromptu gathering of the cool kids.
And it's kind of time-limited, which is another nice thing about it.
It's not like you're going to be stuck there.
But you inevitably end up having the best conversations of the evening out there, because as you say, all the cool kids smoke.
This is why, by the way, one of the reasons I'm so missing the hunting season, because one of the best things about hunting is exactly that time-limited thing.
That you have these chats with people, and you know you're not going to run out of things to say, because any moment the horses gallop off and you're with a completely different crowd.
It's great.
It takes all the social pressure off you.
Yeah.
I, incidentally... Carry on, I'll save it for later.
No, tell me your thing.
When you phoned earlier to see about whether or not we could do a podcast, I was, as you know, drifting through Worcester, and there's a place that I've become a bit of a regular at.
It's called Minute Massage.
Can you imagine a pop-in shop where you can just go in, literally grab 10 minutes of massage and they get straight to it.
So it's lying?
It says a minute massage and it actually gives you 10 minutes.
You pay by the minute, it's a pound a minute.
You see, this is what they're up against, this narrow-mindedness.
No, basically, your minute is for free.
Your first two minutes, in fact, are free.
Just so that you can back out if you... But that's the consultation period, where they're trying to decide, have you got any injuries?
No, no, no.
They start the timer when they start the treatment.
The consultation period is... Is there anything terrible wrong with you?
It's all beforehand.
Anyway, I'm getting on really well with the Australian guy who runs it.
We put the world to rights before and after, but he's completely sorted out my back for the afternoon.
So when I would normally be doing your sort of thing, you know, trying to do an interview like this, or what have you.
Oh yeah!
But I'm feeling good about my back right now.
I've been through about three or four weeks of really bad back.
I think it's something to do with chopping logs with this arm.
But yeah, my Minute Massage guy in Worcester, I'd just like to big him up and recommend everyone grab themselves ten minutes with him, because, you know, for a tenner, you can't go far wrong.
Is he awake?
I was starting to touch on this, because he was having a moan about various things, and it kind of alludes to your smoking conversations with your fellow guests at the hotel.
What are the probing questions that you ask?
And then there's a whole other set of questions about faith.
The best thing to do is to accidentally bump into a completely wide-awake Christian.
You've hit pay dirt at that point, but just wide-awake is pretty good.
So what are your go-to questions for probing?
You've got five minutes and you want to find out whether someone's awake.
Oh, I'm really unsubtle.
I just go for the most obvious.
I'm unvaxxed.
Hello, I'm James.
I'm unvaccinated.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing.
And then you move on to the fact that the whole of...
We had dinner with the owner of the hotel, because we were on this kind of, pretty much a freebie, because we're both writing about an amazing hotel called The Datai, on this island called Langkawi, which is in Malaysia.
And it's a sort of paradise island.
It's very lovely and the Datai is owned by the Malaysian government and they've just bagged the best part of the island.
They've bagged this sort of pristine rainforest and they've got the best beach on the island.
I mean, it's so wrong in so many ways because, you know, as a backpacker you're never going to experience this thing.
It's just for the experience.
Well there's a selling point already.
There's no backpackers there.
Yeah, well, that's true, although I think we might have felt differently had we been at that backpacker stage of our lives.
Well, of course, we've been there, but we've moved on.
Yeah, exactly, so tough titty backpackers.
And we had dinner and I went straight into the COVID stuff because they had to close down the hotel for a year, for a whole year.
Can you imagine what that was?
I worked out that they had a refurbishment in 2018 and it cost I think 60 million dollars and as you can imagine in the tropics, I suppose you've got to do it everywhere really, that when you run a hotel like that you've got to factor in Refurbishment of rooms because in tropical climates that the floors warp and things like that and the air conditioning systems break down So you've got it.
You've got to constantly renew this this stuff.
I was thinking When are they going when are they going to get a return on their on on their that that capital Outlay and then I started doing the math.
So now I reckon that that hotel must be bringing in about Grossing about 50 million a year.
That's just my guess.
So they would have lost, in the pandemic, that wasn't a pandemic year, they'd have lost 50 million straight.
And they kept all their staff on, which was very nice of them.
They were on full salaries throughout that time, which I can't imagine many places were able to do.
Where am I going with this?
So we had this dinner and he was a Frenchman.
So I told him my theories on the pandemic.
I didn't go full black pill.
I gave them a pretty red pill account.
I said that the reason that they invented this fake pandemic was because they wanted to shut down the global economy while they covered their tracks with all the money they've been stealing off us, which is the sort of the Catherine Austen Fitz theory of it.
I mean, I didn't go into death jabs.
I didn't go into the fact that this is actually a population cult.
That was a step too far because he was obviously a normie.
But I cited the England and Wales age-adjusted mortality statistics going back to the 1930s and I pointed out that in every year prior to 2009 the age-adjusted mortality was higher than it was in the alleged deadly Covid year of 2020.
And so he says to me, well, that may have been the case in England, but I don't think in Italy and in France, and so there was definitely an increase in the blah blah blah.
And I said, oh really, right, OK.
And so I then sort of Googled the death figures for France.
That evening, straight onto the computer.
Yeah, yeah.
At Florence I didn't get told off by the wife, which is what you normally do when you're looking at your Telegram or your Twitter on holiday.
And sure enough, the figures were much the same as in England.
Up until the 1970s at least, you know, so within this guy's lifetime, there were way more deaths than there were in the deadly pandemic year of 2020.
And yet, mysteriously, they didn't close down the French economy at all.
They didn't force everyone to wear masks.
People are so, so misinformed, and yet this information is out there.
Do France have an ONS like us and is theirs compromised like ours quite possibly is?
Well it is now but the ONS only started being compromised from about I think 2021 onwards.
So before that it was kosher and I'm sure that's the case of a lot of things.
I think what we've experienced in the last three years is an acceleration of a trend that was always evident in the media, did we but know it, which is that it is a lie machine, but it's become an even more shameless lie machine than it was before.
Yeah, because they've seen that they can get away with absolutely anything.
Yeah.
You look back to the swine flu years, and swine flu was a dry run.
It was a sort of test run for COVID to see how much shit they could get away with.
And you had Institutions like Channel 4 questioning the necessity for these vaccines and calling out the fact that children were getting narcolepsy as a result of these vaccines.
They had not got a sufficiently brainwashed populace to be able to get away with such shameless lying, and to a degree the media still did its job, as evinced by Channel 4, which is now completely on board with the whole lie programme.
Well, it gave him a chance to make sure that all the media was on side as well between then and the next one.
The sleight of hand of taking out full-page wraparounds on all the papers as a means, ostensibly, of getting the message out to the people.
But of course, if you're a failing newspaper, you're rubbing your hands with glee at the amount of money that's bringing in.
Is there any other kind?
A failing newspaper.
It's always redundant.
Failing.
Dead tree press.
Have you seen...
Have you seen Tucker Carlson's recent, some of his interviews he's been saying about, there was one where he talked about how Jeffrey Epstein was definitely, definitely killed in prison, definitely murdered in prison, and that Bill Barr, who I think was the US Attorney General at the time, lied blatantly about it, and he goes into details about exactly how they, you know, it was obvious that
I mean, stuff that we know, like the cameras being turned off, and the section he was in being sort of closed off, and there being 14 inmates in that section, any one of whom could have offed him.
And now there is no evidence.
Where have these people gone?
We don't know their names or identities.
Anyway, it was really interesting.
Hearing somebody like Tucker Carlson saying this, because he's got prominence, he's got presence.
And I know people on our side of the argument say, well Tucker's not to be trusted, he volunteered to join the CIA when he was younger, his dad I think was possibly CIA, he's preppy, he's past the system, he's definitely controlled opposition or a gatekeeper or whatever.
Some of the things he's been saying gel so very much with my own experiences.
This thing we journalists get accused of, how can you possibly have not known that the media is a lie machine?
And the answer is, well, we genuinely didn't.
We genuinely didn't.
I mean, if I'd been American of Tucker Carlson's generation, I too might have thought that working for the CIA was kind of a cool thing.
No, if you'd been approached by MI5 when you were at Oxford, for instance, you'd have been in like Flynn, wouldn't you?
Well, I'd certainly have been tempted because I would have seen James Bond.
Yeah.
And James Bond tells us that MI6... Which is why they try to make it all look so cool.
Like, you've got this thing, the Union Jack, the Union flag, and it's great because we have this fantastic empire and it's really worth defending because we are one of the bastions of freedom and Magna Carta, I mean, the sort of article that Dan Hannan writes every other week, Over the Anglosphere and Winston Churchill.
All this lie stuff we're told.
And don't get me on to the royal family.
The idea that we are, we've won the lottery in life and it's great and we do freedom and whereas the Russians and the Chinese don't and we're great.
I think until you wake up it's so so hard to To go against the paradigm because because you've been brainwashed since you were born pretty much.
I was noting on today on Twitter that there was someone lamenting the fact that there's some of us who were awake to the covid lie awake to the climate change lie.
Awake to other big lies, but they've fallen for the royalty thing.
They're still out being flag wankers and you know sort of like... Flag wankers, do you say?
Yeah.
I don't care what anyone says.
I'm proud to be British and proud of our royal family.
Say what you like about Prince Charles, but the monarchy is such a great institution and it's...
It's a little bit awkward, because they're a bit like those of us who are awake, who don't get the Ukraine part of the whole jigsaw.
They can be ticking every box, and yet they're still flag-wankers for Ukraine.
You know, they've got the Ukraine flag on their bios, and you just sort of want to facepalm, because it's all connected, it's all part of the same PSIOP, and just by being awake to one or two of the things, you don't necessarily get on board with all of them.
So, you know, the whole coronation thing was just another test to see, to check your purity.
Yes, I was thinking about, I was going to bring it up actually, you know Christopher Monckton?
Christopher Monckton, who's been an absolute stalwart in the climate wars.
I often used to see him at conferences at the Heartland Institute in the US, the sort of sceptics organisation, and every year they have a conference where all the kind of, the sceptical scientists, Atmospheric physicists and geologists like Ian Plymer and stuff, people who know, they've got solid evidence that climate change is complete bollocks and so on.
And Monckton's, I've been in debates with him, with him on my team and I think I had one with Monckton and Nigel Lawson and me at the Oxford Union and so on and so forth.
And people say, oh, why didn't you get him on your podcast?
But the problem is that he's bought into the whole COVID was real and vaccines are necessary bollocks.
And you think, hang on a second, you understand how they lied to us about climate change.
Why is it that you think that just that one field is the area where they lied to us?
And in every other aspect of our lives, they tell us the truth.
How does that work?
Yeah, it's a frustrating one.
I mean, the assumption is you wake up and that's it, but there's so many elements to it, and consistency is not a given, unfortunately.
No.
I suppose in the flag-wanker category, you'd certainly have to include people like Calvin Robinson.
Calv is completely on board with the Royal Family being a great thing, isn't he?
For me, it's a bit of a tell.
A lot of these people will say they've got to guard their living, you know, they've got to guard their slots on GB News, peace be upon them, and it's... To some extent, you can only sympathise.
They will say, no doubt, that, yes, I believe all the stuff that you believe, but I've got to play a more careful game than you have.
I've got more to lose.
Is that what they say?
I think it's pretty much what a lot of them would say.
I think they believe it.
What's the difference if they believe one thing and they say another while they're behind the camera?
In front of the camera, rather.
Yeah, I don't know.
I do find it mystifying that once you make the connections, everything seems to me comprehensible.
You have this grand, universal theory of everything which can be applied to, for example, any so-called conspiracy theory.
Because the MO is the same, isn't it?
Every time, they respond by Insulting you, calling you a conspiracy theorist, a tinfoil hat and stuff.
Setting up straw man arguments all the time.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean the Andrew Bridgen thing.
I don't know where you're currently standing on the Andrew Bridgen thing, whether he's a gatekeeper, controlled opposition or what have you, but the way Spiked have suddenly gone under, as far as they are now creatures of the establishment, having been living Marxism, they are They've now completed their transformation to... They might as well be trigonometry now.
And that's possibly the worst thing you can say about anyone.
I think they are.
But it's... I've forgotten where I was going with this now.
Making the spiked trigonometry connection will... That's a good one, Jim.
I think we should call them spiked-onometry.
Because that's what they are.
Yes, sorry, the way that they were using the Andrew Bridgen thing, they were trotting out this line of...
Andrew Bridgen compared Covid to the Holocaust.
And of course, if you compare anything to the Holocaust, you're a Nazi.
So, you know, job done.
You've said the unsayable and that will forever be used as the one line to trot out.
And of course, we know he did nothing of the sort, but by the time you're defending that argument, you're already on the back foot.
And so he spends all his time explaining why He never said that and he'd be prepared to take you to court to prove he didn't say it, but you're already away from the subject matter by then.
You're already not talking about Covid, you're talking about one of the sacred cows, the Holocaust.
Yeah, yeah, that's horribly true and depressing.
I'm sure you remember, I went to Radley with Brendan O'Neill and we were sort of
We were invited by this rather cool teacher called Steve Rathbone, who's a proper Christian among other things, but he's very keen on exposing these privileged boys to interesting and edgy ideas which they might not otherwise encounter in their comfortable circles.
And so we went along to fire a rocket up their arses.
And it was great being with Brandon, and it seemed that although he comes allegedly from Marxism... Poorly handed son of toil.
Yeah, exactly.
And he's good at making the cases for whatever he does.
And I thought, we're on the same team.
And I really don't understand how somebody like that can now be shilling, if that's what they're doing, for the pharmaceutical industry.
And it makes me wonder about the business model of Spite, which I would suspect It's partly dependent on finance from America or something.
Somebody obviously had a word.
But how they can... I don't understand how it can work for them in the long term or even the medium term actually.
If your shtick is we are going to say stuff that the establishment doesn't want you to say and we're against the system and stuff, and then to be calling out anyone who wants to speak the truth about vaccine injuries as a conspiracy theorist, even now of all times, and then to be calling out anyone who wants to speak the truth about vaccine injuries as How does their readership, I mean, how can their readership live with themselves from
Well, from the sound of the reaction on Twitter, they're abandoning them in their droves, but I'd love to see that borne out with a few figures, but you'll never know, you'll never work out whether or not whatever their financial model was is suffering.
Well, exactly, because have we reached the point where the people who finance institutions like Spite Don't even bother writing in a clause about your traffic needs to be above a certain amount.
The only thing that matters is for them to be on message.
It's just another...
Well, it's like the various institutions now that don't seem to need to make money anymore.
Like the BBC.
We all know that we are hurting them by not paying our licence fees.
They're almost certainly going to do a sleight of hand bit at the last minute and say, yeah, we've decided that we will stop the licence fee and we're going to fund them directly from central taxation.
So we're going to keep the institution that everyone in this country loves and respects for their honesty and integrity because it's unthinkable a Great Britain without the BBC.
So we are just going to fund them through direct taxation now and we're going to do away with the licence fee, which is outdated.
And everyone's going to say, oh, it's been a long time coming, it was a very old-fashioned way of funding it, and I think that's quite reasonable.
So, the fact that we were hurting them will never be acknowledged.
It will never be a case of, at this rate we will have no money coming in at all, because their money's not coming from us.
They're being funded from everything, from Bill Gates to Soros and to the EU, all the other payments that we know.
have been gradually taking over from what we've withdrawn.
They don't need our money and a lot of the big corporations don't seem to need to make a profit anymore.
So where is this dark money coming from?
Yeah.
Well it's like ESG.
I was having a conversation with the wife this morning and she's still got this faith in the paradigm which says that get woke, go broke.
She believes that the businesses which lose sight of the bottom line will eventually be punished for it in the form of a reduced share price and so on.
But it seems to me that the market has now been so captured by BlackRock which is behind a lot of the ESG policies that companies, and you've probably got the pension, the people who run the pension funds who will buy the the people who run the pension funds who will buy the shares in these companies They're not gonna leave in their dress.
And after all, it's the institutional investors who count.
So, really, Retail investors like us, you know, even if all the retail investors are awake and move away from woke companies, I don't think it's going to make any difference.
So the shining example at the moment would be Bud Light, wouldn't it?
The Bud Light debacle with Dylan Mulvaney.
Were you following that from your Paradise Island?
Dylan Mulvaney is this man who pretends to be a woman, advertising a drink that's pretending to be a beer.
Bud Light got in this Harvard grad girlie who thought the best thing to do Now she's in charge of this particular brand would be to detoxify it by making it less jock-like and less macho.
So what better way than get pretend girly Dylan Mulvaney's face printed on a can and therefore selling it as the chosen beer of the trans community.
It hasn't exactly gone down very well.
To the point where, at baseball matches and football matches, the stands selling Bud Light in its very distinctive blue can are absolute ghost towns.
There's no one going near them.
Sales in off-licences have fallen to almost zero.
It's been absolute carnage.
The price that Anheuser-Busch's share price has been down in the billions, it should be utter carnage, but I was just wondering whether you had an even further down the rabbit hole take on whether or not it's contrived, whether or not they knew exactly what they were doing, whether it's an opportunity to get the share price down to get a few more people in to buy.
I don't know.
My mind was actually boggling at the concept of something which is even lighter than Budweiser.
I mean, it's like diluted cat piss, isn't it?
And then so you've got, this must be like homeopathic cat piss.
Homeopathic cat piss.
There you go, that's what it must be like.
And yet it is the beer of choice for red-blooded Americans to drink while they're watching their sporting things.
Is it?
Is it like an equivalent of a session lager?
I don't think light is meant to be the alcohol content I think it's just a light in taste I think that's a mistake a lot of us make to think it's either low alcohol or diet but I don't think it's the same as that I think they're light beers are just a sort of light drinking easygoing session well what we'd call a lager I don't know enough about it.
It's not something that would ever pass my lips as an ale drinker but apparently it was once quite popular.
I've got to do a London calling later on today.
I haven't listened to one of those for ages.
No, well this is the thing, so I'm, do you think it matters that I say things here, that I talk about things here, that I'm also going to talk about on London Calling?
Well I don't think you'll get the Toby line from me, so you can run things past me to see what reaction you get, but I won't be giving you the Don't worry, it's all a cock-up and it will be sorted out soon when the next wonderful Tory Prime Minister comes in.
Or if we get Boris back or something like that.
Yeah, that would be great, wouldn't it?
Good old Boris.
One thing you're going to have to do with Toby is make sure he sticks to his promise that he will never vote Tory again.
Because I remember during The debacle that some are calling the pandemic.
He said, well, if they don't reduce restrictions in this next announcement, I will never vote Tory again.
And of course they didn't.
But he needs to be held to that.
I've got a feeling he will vote Tory again and probably has done already.
Yes, he's probably bought Tory Futures.
It seems almost cruel to be talking about, it's tragic to be talking about Toby really.
I think that if the Conservatives came round to his house and just killed his dog, whatever his latest dog is, that he'd still vote for them.
Because he's just-- - He wouldn't go John Wick on them. - He wouldn't, would he?
He really wouldn't.
It really would be the worst ever remake of John Wick, wouldn't it?
Assassins come in to kill Toby, but all they manage to do is kill his dog.
And so Toby goes on a wild revenge thing of forgiving them.
Because it was just a bit of a cock-up, a little bit of a misunderstanding.
Yes, it was, it was.
They didn't mean it.
They've bought him another dog.
Everything's good now.
We've all learned from the experience.
Yeah, vote Tory.
Yeah, exactly.
And by the way, isn't Jacob Rees-Mogg the most fantastic TV presenter?
I mean, I was on his inaugural show and he was just, he was so professional.
And you're thinking, hang on a second, this guy that you're really pleased to be on his show, This guy is in the cabinet of this regime which is...
Poisoned lots and lots of people.
People are going to be dying for the next years and decades because of this thing that the government forced them to take.
Meanwhile, the government rewarded lots of cronies with these PPE contracts and stuff, for which we're going to be paying for for years in the form of massive, massive taxes.
And they're fully behind these things like 15-minute cities where Every city is going to be turned into a kind of a simulacrum of the districts in the Hunger Games and they're taking away our cars that work and forcing us to drive electric cars that we can't afford and there isn't enough charging points.
And they're trying to drag us into war with Russia over a gangster, child-trafficking, adrenochrome state, Ukraine.
And so on and so forth.
And you're thinking, I love this guy because he talks a really good game and he's got this great show on GB News.
I mean, how do you rationalise that attitude?
Um, yeah, but it's trying to get back into the normie mindset, isn't it?
It's a tough one.
I mean, the further we go down the rabbit hole...
The more difficult it is to understand how the normies think.
I mean, some time ago I talked about that thing when Neo is in the Matrix, when he's back out, he's been artificially placed back in the Matrix and he sees everything for what it is.
I mean, I still feel that when I'm walking down the high street.
I feel I'm the only person walking in that particular direction and everyone else is walking the other way.
Which is why it's so nice when you meet someone who is awake, but normie world is, you know, it's very enticing.
It's that blue pill that gives you the most delicious steak you've ever eaten, even though you know it's just a bunch of zeros and ones.
Have you tried catching bullets?
Yeah.
I've got a lot of bullets here, actually.
Do you want to hear my little bullet story?
Yeah, yeah, tell me.
Right, see this?
This is a strip of bullets that feed a St Etienne machine gun, yeah?
And I've been cleaning those up.
And this is one dirty bullet from a Hotchkiss.
So these were World War One French machine guns that were strip fed.
You can see that these I've been cleaning nicely.
So, I had these at a show I was at the other day, and this is a complete red herring now from what we were talking about, and one of my fellow reenactors said, oh, I saw a strip like that in an antique shop in Oxfordshire the other day.
I thought, that's really, really unlikely.
Why would an Oxfordshire antique shop be selling French machine gun ammunition?
Because we had one nicked from one of our shows.
We did this Dunkirk event where it was one of the small ships from Dunkirk was appearing at this event and we were going to be on it and having rides on it and pretending that we had been Rescued from the beach at Dunkirk and this was resting in one of our wooden machine guns and we had a friend keep an eye out for it because this is a really valuable piece of kit.
Yeah.
Anyway some scumbag member of the public stole it.
He just pocketed it and disappeared with it.
So this was 2019 and this friend saying he'd seen one somewhere in the same county I said I guarantee you that is ours and I sent him to buy it 35 quid is worth four times that and sure enough it was our our stripper bullet mine mine and my friend Christopher we bought that thing and so
The owner of the antique shop said I can't remember who brought it in or you know it was part of a job lot things I honestly can't remember but...
Whether he was... He would say that, wouldn't he?
But, you know, I wasn't going to pursue it.
I've got my bullets back.
Sorry, your mentioning bullets immediately made me... No!
For 35 quid, that's an interesting story.
That's possibly the best anecdote of the show so far, so I'm really glad.
And what sort of noise do the machine guns make?
Well, they...
They're not the dagger, dagger, dagger, dagger that you might think.
I mean, say, an MG42, the ultimate World War II machine gun, apparently sounded like ripping cloth.
The rate of fire was so intense, it just sounded like cloth ripping, and it was the most terrifying sound.
But, with a gun this old, and bear in mind they're both, not water-cooled, they're both air-cooled, You don't want the barrel overheating.
Now, although a machine gun crew will carry spare barrels with them, the idea is not to have to stop the battle and dismantle your gun to replace a barrel that has become warped through overheating.
So you're firing very short bursts.
So it's a da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da.
And you're firing it up to a distance of a kilometre.
You've got that much accuracy with these things.
And so they're not for blatting away like you might in Call of Duty.
But if you are genuinely interested in knowing what they sound like, you should go to Forgotten Weapons on Gun Jesus's channel on YouTube.
Because he's really big on his French weaponry.
And so he's got an actual Hotchkiss firing, I think, the sound of it.
But it's well worth listening to because it's not what you think.
Because I was thinking that the other machine gun you mentioned... I thought it might make the sound... Yeah, I thought it might go... But only love can break your heart!
That was a lame joke that you were building up to.
What does it sound like?
You silly boy.
Honestly.
But Dick, on the way, to be fair, you did say more interesting stuff.
It made me happy.
I wasn't bored with your answer.
I think the connection is Saint Etienne is where the French arsenal is.
So all their weaponry was made in Saint Etienne.
as an arsenal and i think obviously the band sintetgien are named after the town of sintetgien and it's one of the same thing when it comes down to it tell us about your your coach because that's quite yeah i i'm just gonna take the headphones off and show you briefly and i'll talk about it
right so i found this coat online it's
It's supposedly a 1914 French greatcoat, when they were wearing red trousers and red and blue keppies like that.
It's the early war look, before they went over to Horizon Blue, and I've been looking to buy a repro one, and this apparently real one appeared.
And I snatched it up, snapped it up rather, and it did say the buttons are no longer original and it's been adjusted for a theatre.
I'm still trying to fathom whether I bought an original early World War One French greatcoat or whether I've got some theatrical reproduction.
It's all a bit distressing because it was quite a lot of money and I rather liked the idea of owning an original so I'm having to do a lot I'm having to become an expert very quickly on the colors of things.
Fortunately I've got these two books which are the absolute Bible of all things World War One, French military.
About 120 quids worth of book there.
But in it you've got immense amounts of detail and information.
And this is the capote section that shows you what you should be looking for for detail.
But you can see that there's two different types of blue going on there.
Yeah, there's a lot to unpack.
What's the one that's not Horizon Blue called?
Well there was something like Steel Blue and there's a deeper, darker blue.
I don't know what the colours are officially called.
What have you got there?
This is exactly what I was doing when you called to start this podcast.
I was going to try and find out which of those blues this is an approximation of, because you can see it's still on camera now.
It's kind of a mid-blue.
I don't know.
It's fraught with... And you've worked out that you've got Seven days from the day of purchase.
I could conceivably return this.
I'm through most of those seven days now.
Whether or not I say, look, I don't think it is what you're advertising it as and take it back or whether I just wear it as an early war French greatcoat anyway and just say it's a repro.
So that's a decision I'm due to make.
I will make adjustments to it.
I will do some sewing and I will Change the epaulettes and the buttons and various other yes, but 400 quids a lot to pay for a through if it is just repro would cost me 350 quid Okay, and I'd be in a on a waiting list all the good stuff is currently coming from Ukraine there's some tailors in Ukraine that are churning stuff out and I bought some quite nice 1940 kit from them some Pantelon golf What do you think Pantelon golf are?
Golfing trousers.
Yes, but for my 1940 uniform.
So it's very much, they look like quite severe plus fours.
Okay.
Yeah, that's the 1940 look for the French uniform.
So the Ukrainian economy isn't just adrenochrome, traffic children and biolab products.
It's all of that and reenactment equipment.
That's amazing.
Yeah, fantastic.
What a thriving economy.
So there is hope for the Ukraine after all.
You've just reminded me of something which is still quite a sore point with me.
You know that thing where you say to yourself I'm not going to worry about things I can't change and that's where I am now.
So the other day I bought a second-hand car and Maybe I should have spent more.
Maybe I should have been ready to spend more rather than be a cheapskate.
I only spent 6,000 quid in the end and I wanted a replacement for my Freelander.
Is it Freelander?
Whatever bastard model of land rover I'd got, which had done It had done like 180,000 miles and the gearbox had gone and it was going to be three and a half grand just to replace the gearbox and I thought, not with a car that's done that many miles.
So I was asking, I asked my friend James Ruppert, who is the second-hand car guru, and he's written a book called Bangalomics and stuff, he knows all about it, and he said, yeah, so well, here are some models you want to think about getting.
One is the Toyota RAV, another is a Subaru, another is this and that, and I thought, well, I quite like the sound of the Toyota RAV, because I liked the idea that the Toyota is the The model, the brand that the Taliban drive and the Toyota Hilux I think it's called.
All these in Libya.
But you had his vehicle of choice.
Yeah, because they're low maintenance.
You can Put things together with pirated parts and stuff.
You can put a heavy machine gun on the roll bar.
That's what I wanted.
I couldn't get that anywhere.
So I saw this Toyota RAV.
Well actually James pointed me to this garage selling Toyota RAV.
So I drove over to Bedfordshire.
It wasn't a garage.
There was no showroom or anything.
It was just a yard.
And it was full of cars.
And took the wife along.
It took about over an hour to get there.
So I didn't really want to drive home again not having bought a car.
Which is always a mistake, I think.
You've got to be prepared not to go for it.
No, you've got to be prepared to walk away.
That's got to be your default setting.
Yeah, and I was punished for this.
I was punished for this.
The Garage was run by these Muslims of some variety, I imagine probably, you know, sort of Pakistanis.
And weirdly, rather stupidly, I thought, well, these are people of faith.
Yeah, he had the sort of the Muslim music going on in the background, Muslim radio going on, when we were signing up, doing all the paperwork and stuff.
And I thought, well, these people are men of gold.
They're not going to be They're going to do the right thing.
And of course that was not actually a very wise assumption.
And they basically lied about things like the road worthiness of the car.
And as I discovered when I... So I bought the car for six grand and took it back to my garage where I get my car fixed.
And they looked it over and said, well, I'm sorry, you can't drive this car.
It's unsafe to drive.
The brakes are just absolutely... the front and rear sliders.
Do you know what sliders are on brakes?
I don't know what a slider is, no.
No.
Anyway, in order to be able to use the car I had to spend over 400 quid getting the sliders repaired and getting one of the tyres had perished and all things I would have, if I'd known anything about cars I'd probably have noticed and I thought This is a nightmare.
I've just gone and bought a lemon because I wasn't prepared to walk away and I trusted them being Muslims and I'm a complete dick.
But one of the things that really encouraged me to make the purchase, I felt really safe because this This place was registered with the AA and came under the AA code of practice and there were big signs saying the AA is going to look after you, the AA is going to make sure.
And so I then ring up the AA and the AA are absolutely bloody, they basically don't give a toss.
They really...
It's clear to me that the protection they offer is just non-existent.
It would have been better for all of us had there not been an AA sign there because I wouldn't then have the faith in the purchase, which I did.
I'm really pissed off at the AA about this.
I then inquired via the, what's it called, the Citizens Advice Bureau.
So I went to the AA and I went to the Citizens Advice Bureau.
And do you know what they said to me?
Don't trust second-hand car salesmen?
No, they said, although I would have been protected, I would have been able to return the car, because there are various reasons why you can return a car.
And one of them is this car was unfit for purpose.
It was not as sold.
It was not road-worthy.
Which is what your car was.
But guess what?
Because you've had things done to it, it's no longer... By getting the things repaired, I invalidated my consumer rights.
So I couldn't drive the car.
The car was unsafe to drive until my garage had fixed it.
But by getting it repaired, I was not protected.
Oh dear.
Consumer protection is a complete illusion.
You know that we had this terrible experience where we had this dodgy financial advisor who basically took most of our life savings and completely shafted us and gave me 10 years of abject misery in which I sort of contemplated suicide and stuff.
I'm completely over it now.
It was one of those things but it was horrible at the time.
There are all these, the FCA, the FCA is going to protect you.
But, when it happens to you, what you discover is that the... Normally we'd be able to help, but there's a specific provision for what this guy has done.
Well, first of all, number one, number one, they're only covered for a certain The amount that you lose.
I think you're covered up to about 80,000 and stuff or whatever.
But in order to be able to claim that you are entitled to this compensation, you first have to demonstrate that the guy who ripped you off was a crook.
That he was not just merely incompetent.
And there were loads of people in the same position who'd lost their life savings.
The financial crime sector of the police are so absolutely hopeless.
The financial crooks run rings about them.
Because you can imagine, rozzers can just about maybe, at a push, solve a murder.
But when it involves complicated financial things, they're just not up to it.
And so, because this guy had not been prosecuted, and of course, by the way, he'd All the money he'd stolen from us, he'd made it impossible for us to reclaim any of the money.
It was hopeless in every single way.
So when you go to a financial advisor and you think you're going to be protected by the FCA charter or whatever, you're not.
FSA I think it is, isn't it?
Oh yeah, FSA.
It's hopeless.
It would be much better if we lived in an environment where there was no AA sign telling you that this garage follows the AA code of practice and there was no FCA or FSA protecting you from dodgy financial advisors.
Because at least then you'd be going into these things with an awareness of the risks you're taking and you're basically on your own every time.
It's the same with food.
Take cereal, for example, which is something I'm just about giving up right now, having cereal for breakfast.
For years, we've grown up thinking, well, cereal's good for you, isn't it?
It's the best way to start your day.
Well, ReadyPack gives you a massive glow all around you.
And Kellogg's wouldn't lie about their product not being Good for you?
I mean it surely it's the best way to start your day and yet it's possibly the worst thing you can be spooning into your mouth in the morning but we trust them because they've got various organizations to sign off on these things and it's not until you read the small print that it says as part of a nutritious diet where they're basing their whole statement on the fact that you will probably have this thing with milk which is good for you And of course the serial part of it isn't.
Little things like that, but there's so much things that we trust in institutions, and we trust in various organizations that say things are good for you, and we want them to be good for us.
It's not like they're telling us something we don't want to believe.
We want to believe these things are good for us.
All the institutions are part of the con.
I've become convinced, since going down the rubber hole, that of all the jobs in the so-called economy, probably 85% are just an absolute con.
So you've got the entire medical profession, including all the cancer specialists.
I mean, maybe people who fix your broken leg, I mean, they might be more or less okay.
Although I'm even suspicious of the... Had I had my time again, I would not have had a pin put in my shoulder to repair my broken collarbone.
Because I think that they're desperate for the work.
They'll always persuade you that you need a pin.
I don't think actually you do need a pin.
These bones, those bricks repair themselves.
I mean it might be a bit wonky, but at least you haven't got this stupid centipede, sort of titanium centipede inside your body forevermore.
So, the whole of the medical profession, pretty much, is pushing poison.
They don't know what they're talking about.
They believe it, but it's bollocks.
Anyone, of course, in any industry to do with sustainability, the environment, diversity, those are all complete non-jobs.
The entirety of academe, complete waste of time.
They're just pushing Workism, whatever.
What else?
Teachers.
They're part of an indoctrination machine, a sort of Bismarckian, you know, to create these cogs in the machine.
Nothing more.
They're not designed to open your minds or tell you about it.
The stuff they tell you is just, again, lies.
What else?
Lawyers.
Any of the major big corporations?
Yeah, exactly.
All lawyers, I'd say.
What are the other big jobs out there?
All the media.
All the media, exactly, all the media.
So, I mean, I may even be... Most of the job.
Yep.
The church?
Like 95% of it.
And that's across all denominations.
So maybe my suggestion is that 15% of the economy was actually worthwhile.
Maybe it's just like 10%?
Well, what that leaves you is small businessmen.
Like my massage chap today.
He was trying to do his best in a world competing against corporations and the people couldn't afford to rent shops at a loss all around him that price him out of the market.
I mean, who are good?
independents are the ones that pretty much they're the place you want to be when you go to a cafe you want an independent cafe when you when you're buying your food you want to be buying it from as close to the farmer as you can get these are the guys who are being squeezed out by all the whatever it is the 85 percent that is full of wrong-uns i mean who are good farmers i think all
Some of them are fully on board with let's stick up some wind turbines and do away with our rare breed herd.
Do you know, I've been, by the way, I've been promoted The sheep farmer who farms the fields around our house.
I was his assistant shepherd because I'm really good at doing things like spotting weak lambs.
I discovered a lamb the other day that had something called joint ill.
And I called up the farmer and I said let's go and I got the lamb's number and we went around the field and we found the lamb with joint tail and I helped collect him and hold him while the farmer jabbed him and stuff so I saved that lamb's life.
So he was jabbed, he didn't come round and dispatch him?
That would have been a bit harsh.
Yeah, I sometimes get the impression that lambs die so easily that they're not that bothered about when the odd one goes.
You kind of get that reading the Old Testament as well.
You get the idea that a lambs lot is not a happy one.
Well, tell me about that bit in the Old Testament.
Well, I'm on numbers at the moment and it seems to be an endless God telling Moses that he's got to find out new ways of sacrificing unblemished lambs for this and that and there's bullocks for this and goats for that.
It's just that the Old Testament seems to be an endless stream of animal sacrifice.
Yeah, yeah.
It gets a bit weird.
Although...
Although you get to later bits in in the Bible where God makes it clear that he doesn't he's sick and tired of the smell of animal sacrifice He doesn't want it.
Well, it's good.
I hope to get to that bit obviously what numbers has got is Balaam and the angel and and the talking And the talking donkey.
Yeah donkey, which is great.
Um and Yes, I'd forgotten that detail.
I was telling you my sheep story.
Yeah, sorry, we got distracted on a biblical red herring.
So I spotted ahead of me on the walk this white lump and it turned out of course to be a dead ewe and all the flies were around it and then Further up the field I found another dead ewe.
So I rang up the farmer and I said you've got two dead ewes here and he said that's terrible.
I was in the field this morning and I didn't spot them.
I said well maybe they died after you visited because they don't look that bloated.
They've got a few flies but their eyes haven't been pecked out yet.
And He said well even so I think that I'm going to promote you to head shepherd because you're doing such a good job So I'm now head shepherd.
Do you get a badge?
No, I just get the the honor of being a head shepherd.
Is there a uniform?
Can you start dressing as a Kind of like 19th century shepherd or even better a biblical one?
I am a biblical one and what I do is I carry a slingshot to get the wolves away, the ravening wolves.
My thong.
Do I have a thong?
What do I wear?
Yeah, you'd be in, yeah, sandals and just generally loose-fitting sort of hessian, well not hessian, that's a 1940s thing.
Yeah.
Can I have linen?
Linen, it would be most likely be linen and well wool obviously as a shepherd.
Coarse wool.
Well, obviously if it gets cold at night.
Yeah.
Wool, a wool jacket, a bit like they had in World War Two.
I mean World War One in the trenches there.
Yeah, like a sheepskin.
So, yeah, all of that.
But, yeah, I expect to see this in action.
It's going to be a good new look for you.
And a crook.
And a crook.
Well, if you can maybe look when you're next looking online for military outfits.
Shepherd cosplay.
Before we go there, I wanted to tell you about this weird film that I saw on the plane.
Which was... So I saw... A film I don't recommend, by the way.
Significant Other.
I've got to tell you about Significant Other, first of all, actually.
It's got... Hang on, I'm just going to look up the name of the actor in it.
I've seen him before.
Significant Other movie.
It's a really bad film.
It's got Jake Lacey.
What's Jake Lacey in?
You'll know him.
I'm not very good on actors and stuff.
Yeah, he's in the American office.
Oh, much as I admire that, I just don't watch it and haven't even seen a full episode.
I've seen enough clips on YouTube to have almost seen it all.
Okay, there are going to be spoilers here, but I think... That's for our audience rather than me.
I'm doing, I'm doing the audience a favour I think by sparing them having to, having to, oh he was in, I think maybe, maybe he was in White Lotus as well.
Anyway, what else has Jake Lesley been in?
Is it Google?
High Fidelity?
What was he in High Fidelity?
Anyway.
So, why should I not see this film?
Come on, cut to the chase.
Okay, so I thought it was going to be like Deliverance and or Sudden Comfort because it starts out as this film in which this couple go out on the trail into the Redwoods.
And you know that something bad's going to happen and there's a sort of awkwardness in their relationship because he wants to get... He's kind of a goofy, jockish American and she's a kind of... As is the way with movies these days, she's more knowing and sophisticated than he is because she's a woman.
And so they go out on this Redwoods trail and he's all gung-ho and she's slightly reluctant.
She doesn't feel safe.
And you think that creepy backwards people are going to get them or something.
But anyway, it's not that.
It turns into an alien movie.
And this this or a bit like predator this this alien Scout has come down and he has the ability to shape-shift and adopt the the body of adopt the form of the people he's killed and and My favourite bit of the film is because she's trying to kill him off, this alien who's inhabiting her boyfriend's body, having killed the boyfriend.
And there's a point where she's a surfer.
She's a surfer and they're on the Pacific Northwest.
And she goes down to the beach with him.
He wants to show off his spaceship.
And she spots a great white shark in the surf.
And so what she does is she grabs his knife, stabs him, and then flees into the sea and he goes swimming after her.
And guess what happens?
He's trailing blood.
Well, her gambit would be death by Great White, obviously.
No, no!
Because the shark gets him, because he's the one who's bleeding.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's what I mean.
But it's a very interesting... It's the first film I've ever come across where the Great White shark has been used as a sort of friendly, helpful device to kill the boss.
Anyway, the film is crap.
Don't watch it.
But the film that really slightly weirded me out, and I kind of recommend you see it, although in a way I'm going to spoil it for you, sort of.
It's called Silent Night.
Do you know about this?
No.
Okay, so Silent Night is one of those movies a bit like Peter's Friends or Four Weddings and a Funeral where posh people gather at a venue and they have sort of emotional clashes and small talk.
The MacGuffin of this one is that these friends gather at this house for Christmas and the inevitable mixed-race lesbian couple and the most successful character is a black guy who's a cancer surgeon in a In a far more expensive car than I think even a cancer expert would be driving.
But he has it because he's black.
So you get all these annoying woke tropes.
These poshos gather together.
And one of the poshos is Keira Knightley.
Which I imagine is how the film got made.
And they've got these children and stuff.
Who are quite sassy and swear a lot.
But the premise is that this is their last Christmas ever because everyone is going to die.
Because there is this deadly kind of swirly fog thing which is going around the world and there are different theories as to what caused this deadly swirly fog thing.
Is it the Russians?
Or is it we didn't listen to Greta?
And so on.
You don't know this at first.
Gradually you become aware that something is overhanging this festive event.
And what's interesting about this film is that one of the kids, one of the posh kids in the film, Oh, I haven't told you the key detail yet.
They've all been issued by the government.
The government has decided that rather than subject them to the hideous, vile death that this fog will impose upon them, because apparently it causes your lungs to bleed and your eyes to bleed and you die, you know, your guts come out and you die really horribly.
The government has issued everyone with this easy death pill, which everyone's going to take to ward off the nasty death.
And one of the kids is quite smart.
He's the best character in the film.
And the smart kid has a discussion with the black cancer surgeon, cancer expert guy.
And the boy says, "Well, how do we know "that the experts are right?" That we should take this death pill?
How can we trust the experts, the government and stuff?
What if they've got it wrong?
He said, for example, there was a teacher at my school and one of the boys in the class called him out on something and the boy was right and the teacher was wrong.
And the cancer experts?
No, no, no.
These experts have looked into this and the experts wouldn't be wrong because they're experty experts and the government wouldn't tell you to do anything that wasn't good for you.
And the boy says, well I'm not going to take the pill.
I'm not going to.
I'm going to take a chance.
And then the cancer expert gets very frustrated and goes to the boy's parents and says, he's not going to take the pill.
Can you talk some sense into him?
Can you tell him to take this death pill which he needs because otherwise he's going to die horribly.
And I thought, This film is really a spookily prescient commentary on what's just happened.
It was made in 2021, I think, at the height of the fake pandemic, when of course we were all being urged to take this cure which was worse than the alleged problem.
And I thought, did they know what was going on here?
Because I understand that rewrites were made to the script.
It was produced by Marv Films, you know, Matthew Vaughan, who did all the Kingsman movies and stuff.
And it had apparently been sitting around on Matthew's desk for a long time, and he hadn't got it made, and he finally got it made, and then he got it made at the wrong time.
The film absolutely bombed at the box office, because it was, well, I mean, it's quite depressing, but also I think it was felt that it was just, yeah, it never even got a cinematic release, which is why you see it on aeroplanes.
Well, that's going to make it bomb, isn't it?
Yeah.
But I thought how weird that this is basically the theme of the film.
Or one of the themes.
It was my take-home theme anyway.
Here is this kid playing the Dick and James role saying, well hang on a second, why are we... I'm not going to take this death pill.
I'm not going to take the death jab.
Are you just not revealing how it ends?
I mean this is the one, the bit that isn't the spoiler.
I'm not revealing how it ends because I think that you should watch the film just to see how it ends.
Right, okay.
I'll do that.
Last night I ended up watching the Banshees of Kilkannon or whatever it is.
Of Insurin or something.
Insurin?
Yeah, that's something like that, yeah.
Which is... And?
If you liked In Bruges, and The Guard, it's kind of along those lines, but the whole lot essentially... Same actors, isn't it?
And the same team making it, apparently.
It's one of those very slow-paced things that's got Father Ted-like humour throughout it, in a sort of Irish-y sort of way.
No car chases, obviously.
It's on a remote Irish island.
And the entire plot is a bloke decides that he no longer likes his best friend.
And does he have a reason for it?
He just said he suddenly discovered that he was dull.
He said, well, we live on a remote Irish island.
Everyone here is dull.
And you know, he's got a point.
But that is essentially... It would have been such a hard sell if you were trying to pitch that to a Hollywood studio.
A friend decides he no longer likes his friend.
Is it a recommend?
I noticed when you tweeted it out people were saying yeah it's just boring.
It's not an action-adventure film it's a gentle but dark sort of observational thing some people are saying it's a metaphor for the Troubles and the Irish Civil War which is all well and good but you know it's not a particularly deep point but There's some lovely bits in it.
It's one of those things where if you were going to do nothing instead of watching it, then watch it.
But yeah, not a massive recommend because those films are difficult to place.
Sometimes you want to be entertained and you want action, even if it's mindless.
If you're in that sort of mood, then really avoid.
But I was laughing out loud frequently in it, so it certainly got its moment.
Have you seen Seven Kings Must Die?
Yes, why have I seen that?
Well, it's the film ending for Last Kingdom.
Oh yes, yes.
With Uhtred.
It becomes very, very clear that they're rushing it.
They're just trying to get through, tying up all the loose ends for Uhtred.
Because...
I didn't know Athelstan was gay.
Did you?
I think they'd hinted at it previously.
Had they?
I think so.
Yeah.
Athelstan.
King of the Anglo-Saxons.
Historically gay or gay in the series?
Gay in the series.
Right.
A distinguished and courageous soldier, he pushed the boundaries of the kingdom to the furthest extent.
So yeah, so Brunenburg was his... Brunenburg was his big battle.
I... I obviously... If... Oh!
He never married and had no children.
I suppose from that thin bit of biography they've decided that... That's essentially gay.
He was a bender.
He was essentially gay.
Yeah.
I mean, it has... Confirmed spatula!
If it's on Netflix, anyone that could be turned into a gay has been made a gay.
And by the way, for all our many gay listeners, I want to point out that some of the nicest people I met on holiday were the gay couple from Japan.
We went on the jungle trek with them.
Can you imagine what a sort of middle-aged, late-middle-aged Japanese gay couple are like?
No, I can't.
It's got comedy potential.
Well, yeah, they were great.
And what was really touching was at breakfast on the last day, they were genuinely pleased to see us.
They were so excited and they just came over and they were so sad to see us go.
It was lovely.
I never discovered their names.
I think, had I given it 10 minutes longer, I reckon that we would have got an invitation to Japan.
And that would have been good, because apparently, apparently, Boyd Allingpole says, you know, because he's just been traveling around in the East, he says that Japan is the best.
He went to Thailand, he went to Korea, he went to North Vietnam, sorry, to Vietnam, he went to Malaysia, he went to...
He covered them all off.
Apart from Laos and Cambodia.
By the way, do you say Laos or Lau?
Oh, I struggled on this one the other day.
I said Laos.
Yeah, quite right too.
It's like, we should say Laos, Kenya, the Ukraine, the Sudan, obviously.
The Congo.
The Congo, yeah.
Rhodesia.
I can't bear these people who call it Lao.
I haven't heard that one.
In the same way that Chennai should be pronounced Madras, I think.
Bombay.
Although this does contradict my anti-British empire.
Yeah, it's a thing, isn't it?
But.
But.
Boyd Allingpole says that Japan is just the coolest and that people who go to Japan want to go back there because they realize how incredibly amazing it is.
The food, the culture is so weird that you Because the Japanese are so resolutely Japanese.
And one of the things I liked about it is there are lots of places where they simply won't serve you if you're not Japanese.
Or at least if you don't speak Japanese, they don't want to know.
Which I kind of respect.
I love that.
Yeah.
Try that over here.
Yeah, yeah.
See where it gets you.
Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Sorry, I can't serve you, you're not Japanese.
Oh, I've just seen the return of my wife.
Yeah, well, I've been sort of waved at.
I think I'm being called for lunch.
Well, I'm going to continue the research under my greatcoat and obviously it's a saga that all our listeners will be wanting to follow with They're going to be gripped by so many aspects of this podcast.
They're going to be wanting to know what's happened to my Toyota RAV.
Am I ever going to get any more freebies from hotels in Malaysia?
Will the gay couple get in touch?
Will you ever get Dick and James in Japan?
It's got more unresolved threads than an episode of Uhtred.
Yeah.
Do you think they're going to particularly love my Saint Etienne joke or do you think they're going to think it's a shit joke?
Niche.
For an audience below a certain age, it'll go right over their heads.
They won't even know us.
I've never even associated the machine gun with the band, and yet I've been a fan of both for quite a while.
So yeah, well done for making that connection.
Good.
Thank you, Dick.
Well, let's do another podcast sooner rather than later.
You're the one who keeps buggering off to the Far East.
I want to go live there, but unfortunately the wife won't let me.
I'm just about managing Northumbria later in the year, so I'll be back there.
You can catch me there.
That'll be nice.
It's covered in sodding wind turbines.
Yeah, I suppose.
Good, well thanks for listening everybody.
And just to remind you, I love it when you support me on Subscribestar, Patreon, Substack, Locals, Buy Me A Coffee, all these things.
I really appreciate it.
We've got to fight the enemy, fight the power.
And you help me doing it when you give me your money.
So, thanks a lot.
It's been a good one.
OK brother, see you soon.
Alright, bye bye.
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