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May 18, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand

01:10:11

Hang On, The CIA Are Recruiting Russians For WHAT?! - #132 - Stay Free With Russell Brand

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	I'm going to be a veteran on the second floor. I'm going to roll a deal. So I'm looking for the steel. I'm looking for
	the steel.
	I'm going to roll a deal. I'm going to roll a deal. I'm going to roll a deal. I'm going
	In this video, you're going to see the future.
	You are awakening, you are wonderful, and today we are going to implement your enlightenment further by simply telling you the truth as best as we understand it about a wide variety of subjects.
	The CIA, for example... I'll take these off, I feel embarrassed now.
	The CIA... They look quite cool, I thought.
	They're cool, aren't they?
	All right, I'll put them back on.
	I've crumbled to clear pressure there.
	What about there, and then I can... No, no, you've ruined it.
	Stupid.
	The CIA are recruiting Russian spies in Russia.
	I suppose it's a good place to get them.
	It's the best place.
	There's loads of them.
	They're ten a penny, or whatever their money is over there.
	Well, it's not the worst thing that's happening.
	There's that whole war, and the CIA sending over propaganda via the YouTube, of course.
	If you're watching this on YouTube, we're going to do the first 15 minutes or so, then we have to kick off.
	On to Rumble exclusively to give you new information, I'm afraid, about ventilators being used in the pandemic and the efficacy of them.
	We're also going to be talking to you about, well, hold on, I've got loads of things I want to tell you about.
	Big Pharma?
	Yep.
	Rampant corporate lawlessness costing America 40 billion.
	The new Fauci!
	The new, new, new, the new Fauci!
	We're going to be telling you a lot about the new Fauci.
	We spoke about it yesterday, didn't we?
	I'm not going to rehash.
	I'm not going to reprise everything that I've told you.
	Why would you?
	What's the point of that?
	Make it look weird?
	What is the point exactly?
	You remember what we told you in yesterday's show.
	It's up on Rumble now.
	Go and have a look at it again.
	If you've not learned about the new Fauci from what we told you yesterday, I wonder if there's any hope for you.
	Gareth, do you know that you get wishes for these little guys?
	You're not going to blow those in my eyes, are you?
	I was going to, but I shan't now.
	When we go to Disney World, it establishes that we live in a crazy, crazy world, as I believe it was Baudrillard who said.
	Ah, yes.
	Yeah.
	Did you see my sunglasses?
	He go, Baudrillard, the fact that there's a Disney World in America distracts you from the fact that Disney World is America.
	If you have a sort of a ludicrous space that's contained within America that sort of You forget?
	Hold on a minute, this mall's exactly like that!
	My whole world is this sort of weird simulation.
	We're in the Truman Show right now, baby!
	What kind of simulacrum do you think you're living in?
	Anyway, Disney World, what's funny about Disney World is it can't sort of stay within its own parameters, like, you know, there's always a mouse taking its head off and scratching itself under the armpit, or, like, someone being sick, or those tunnels under it where dead bodies are carried around and all of that.
	Is that a conspiracy?
	I think it probably is.
	It's true!
	Oh, is it?
	All right, I made it sound worse on purpose.
	But what it is, is if someone dies in Disney World, which people do, because they die everywhere, because one of the things we keep ignoring is that we're all going to die, because we can't cope with it, because we can't confront our own temporality, because then we have to sort of think, well, what's the point in spending all your time in vanity and competition, when in fact all that matters is love and those rare moments of love and relief that you feel in this world?
	Anyway... You know what?
	That was very childish!
	That could have given me hay fever!
	You could have hay fevered me then!
	Plus, you've left me barely two wishes.
	Right, like, when someone dies, they transport them in a tunnel under the ground.
	Of course they do.
	I've heard this.
	Even like that song in Little Mermaid.
	Under the ground, under the ground, all the cadavers and things you'd rather that people did not see, yeah.
	Also, when there's brawls down Disney between... What's really weird about this mainstream media news story and a brawl in Disneyland, or world, is the way they keep sort of going like there's a family and a larger family.
	We can't work out if it's a family of people that are large or just a family of greater number, can we?
	Or that they're called the larger family.
	Right, they could be called that.
	There's three things.
	Let us know in the chat comments which you think it is.
	Let's watch these people beating each other.
	up for the privilege of having a photograph next to, I guess, Donald Duck.
	Yeah. Could be him or maybe it's one of the mermaids.
	It could be, yeah, one of those little, the little one. Let's have a look.
	An all-out brawl at Disney World.
	All-out brawls.
	It's an interesting adjective.
	It's like it's not a tempered brawl.
	Yeah.
	Brawl!
	I say that's a tautology because brawl already suggests that it's out of control.
	Sure.
	An all-out brawl.
	A desperate brawl.
	Yes.
	An awful, violent, aggressive brawl.
	Yeah.
	Where are we going?
	Right.
	Come on, news.
	We're going Disney World, then the Epcot Center, which is frankly going to be a disappointment.
	It's not the type of thrill fam was expected to see earlier this week.
	Natalie is back with what unfolded in what is called Well, like it says, it's not the type of thing families expect to see at Disney World.
	No, I don't think it is.
	What were you expecting?
	Oh, Mickey Mouse, one of those rides, they're brilliant.
	Uh, is the third one people beating each other up?
	Yeah, I would hope so.
	I'd like to see Doc and Snoopy and Dodo and all those guys kicking each other up the ball bag.
	Yeah, well, of course, it says Mickey Mayhem.
	They've just gone for alliteration.
	They've had all that time to work on that as well.
	Are Fox News reporting on it because, like, you know, they love Ron DeSantis, they don't like Disney's... Interesting.
	...wokeness at Disney?
	I wonder, I wonder.
	Like, Disney World can't sustain... Oh, that's not very woke.
	Yes.
	A brawl.
	Yes.
	Where's your wokeness now?
	I know.
	The happiest place on earth.
	Don and Corey, you expect lines at Disney World, even when you want to get that perfect photo.
	But apparently one family...
	You expect lines at Disney World, even when you want to get that perfect photo.
	That doesn't make sense.
	But not a brawl?
	No.
	Because they're, like, for a photo?
	Yeah, those lines.
	I mean, you do expect lines.
	Oh, it's a line.
	I expect that.
	But a brawl?
	For the perfect photo?
	Just couldn't wait.
	Screams and people throwing punches at Magic Kingdom.
	It's crazy.
	You pay, like, to take your kids to the most magical place in the world.
	Because what it is, mate, is it's not the most magical place in the world.
	It's corporate exercise.
	It's a crushing disappointment.
	They're going to fill you up with sugar and disappointment.
	It's going to be awful.
	The brawl is merely the expression of the sublimated reality.
	You're frustrated.
	You're bored.
	It's not as good as you thought it was going to be.
	Nothing's as good as you thought it would be.
	The promises and pledges that have been made to you by the free market capitalist corporatized system Are going to remain unfulfilled.
	What happened when you went to Disney World?
	Do you imagine that you're ever going to come back from Disney World and say this?
	It was really easy to park.
	We breezed in.
	There were no lines anywhere.
	I had the most delightful picture stood next to Goofy.
	There weren't other frustrated people on antidepressants scrambling around on the floor in ennui and desperation because all of their dreams, not just this one, have been crushed by an unloving What elements of it would be the most magical place on Earth?
	Of those things you've just listed, the queues, the, like, oh, it's just, there's an awful atmosphere in parts of Disney World, isn't there?
	Space Mountain, like, like maybe when you sort of, like, say if you go in a shop and you see a lot of cuddly toys for sale.
	Yeah.
	I quite like that.
	Right.
	They're very expensive, though.
	Very.
	Of course they are.
	Magical.
	Magically expensive.
	Wow!
	The fox and the hound!
	This bill is so magical!
	With Mickey Mouse money, they can't spend nowhere.
	I went to Disneyland.
	No, I know.
	Twice.
	Right.
	I went when I was little with my dad.
	Yeah.
	No, I liked it, I think.
	I seem to think I liked it.
	That's a classic parental thing to do, isn't it?
	And especially, like, your mum and dad weren't so... Divorced dad.
	Right.
	Right.
	So what, I take you to Disney World?
	You're gonna love it, son!
	I don't like it here!
	I'm confused!
	Nah, you're gonna love it!
	Where's mummy?
	Why don't you love mummy?
	What's going on?
	I'm gonna get in a brawl!
	You're gonna be right proud of your father, you are!
	Here, do you reckon that princess is single?
	I don't know, Daddy.
	What do you mean?
	Don't let none of this influence you, will you?
	I don't know.
	I don't suppose I shall.
	Take me to Epcot.
	I want to go to Small World and learn about different cultures.
	What goes on in Japan, Dad?
	And I have to stand and watch other people fight over a photo.
	It's just ridiculous.
	Get that son of a b****!
	Get that son of a gun!
	I think that'd be my favourite bit.
	That's the bit you would talk about, isn't it?
	Yeah, because it's the, as you suggested, it's the kind of physical manifestation of the internal feelings that you feel when you experience all the problems that come with going to Disneyland.
	You want reality, really?
	We're craving some moment of the real.
	Although many people, many philosophers will say there's only so much reality we can take, what we're actually, I think, all craving is a sense of something natural and actual.
	Like, not suspended on some meaningless conveyor belt, your life on rails.
	And Disney World is promising for you that it can synthesize a pleasant experience, but actually they can't deliver that for you.
	What they're going to have is a brawl that actually looked quite good.
	Why don't they double down on that?
	Come to Disneyland and watch people kick each other to death in a state of... Yeah, Fight Club.
	Yeah, Fight Club.
	The main thing, the first rule of Disney World, don't talk about Disney World.
	Second is, we've overpriced a lot of our merchandise.
	We've had to do that for over... It's simply necessary.
	Listen, we are unable to continue to broadcast on YouTube for these simple reasons.
	We're about to talk about the CIA, right?
	They're trying to recruit Russian spies.
	That's what they're trying to do.
	Best place to do that, Russia.
	You should see their mad propaganda video, though.
	You can still see it.
	It's still up on YouTube.
	What you won't know about is Putin's response.
	What you won't know about yet, unless you were watching the show yesterday, is Big Pharma's recklessness and the new falchion.
	Yes, we told you about her in detail yesterday.
	But we're not going to rehash that, but we're just going to skim over some of the finer points, aren't we, Gav?
	That's right.
	It'll be a skim.
	But it's just a skim.
	It's only a skim.
	It's just a skim.
	A light glaze.
	It's a light drizzle.
	Just drizzle it.
	Wait a minute!
	What's that drizzle made of?
	Just pinch a gland like that, squeeze it, get all the squid ink out for the pasta sauce.
	That's right.
	Get that squid ink out.
	Where did you get that squid ink?
	From a gland.
	Where else would you get squid ink?
	Anyway, how ever do you get a CIA agent in Russia?
	Propaganda.
	That's how you do it, darling.
	Listen, if you're watching this on YouTube, join us on Rumble right now.
	We've got so much coming up.
	New Fauci, Big Pharma's lawlessness costing you 40 billion dollars.
	Your views in an item we call Freech.
	Football is nice where we talk about the beauty contained within football.
	So much to talk about we can't talk about on YouTube.
	Simply, not because of hate speech, because we Because of actual love speech, and true love brings people together against the establishment, and they're not going to allow that, baby.
	See you over on Rumble, there's a link in the description.
	And, by the way, if you're already on Rumble, press the red button now and join us on Locals.
	Yeah, keep coming deeper!
	And if you're on Locals, come here!
	In person!
	And if you're already here, blow dandelion stuff in my face!
	Come and live with me, maybe!
	Clamber inside of my mind.
	Yeah.
	Like the Phantom of the Opera's inside your mind.
	That's where he is.
	Yeah.
	Where's the Phantom of the Opera?
	Inside my mind, the Phantom.
	How on earth do you recruit CIA agents in Moscow in this day and age?
	I mean, the irony of us coming off YouTube is that you can literally see this video on YouTube.
	Yeah, but not like this, baby.
	I know.
	Not with that.
	What's Putin?
	Putin's a tolerant man.
	I'm sure if he finds out that people are watching YouTube videos that have been put there by the CIA in an attempt to recruit them to bring down Russia and to end his tyranny, he's gonna just go, Oh, well, you roll with the punches.
	You win some, you lose some.
	After all, people are free to watch whatever they want.
	What has he said, Gal?
	So Vladimir Putin has warned his compatriots to be on their guard against traitors and Parliament voted last month to increase the penalty for state treason from 20 years to life in prison.
	So do not like and subscribe to this video I would suggest.
	Life and subscribe, is what we say here.
	Let's have a look at how that propaganda's rolling out on the definitely not propaganda network, CNN, who, by the way, broadcast by the very person who tried to cajole Trump and say, who do you want to win?
	You're not being patriotic!
	20 years!
	20 years!
	You know, propaganda's a two-way street, baby.
	Let's have a look.
	The CIA is now trying to recruit Russian spies.
	Pretty openly, the agency dropping an emotional two-minute-long video just last night targeting disgruntled Russians.
	Their goal?
	Persuade them.
	Disgruntled Russians?
	Not disgruntled, are they?
	Earlier today I was gruntled, but now I'm disgruntled!
	It's not enough of a reason to become a spy for America and potentially serve life in prison is if you're feeling disgruntled.
	Yeah, disgruntled is this, this, ugh, bloody hell.
	Oh, come on!
	I came at Disney World, I've queued up for 15 bloody minutes, I'm no nearer the front, 30 quid for this replica of Todd the Fox from Fox Aloud.
	I think, do you know what I'm going to do?
	I'm going to become a spy.
	Like that's, you're not gonna turn against Vladimir Putin, an alleged war criminal,
	simply because you're disgruntled. I think you have to be broken, spiritually broken.
	So maybe a lot of spies are broken.
	Or believe in like the American myth so much that you would be willing to do it.
	But they can't do that.
	Well no, I wouldn't suggest so.
	The American myth of yesteryear, have a McDonald's, have a Coca-Cola,
	wear some Levi jeans, everything's gonna be great.
	You can't make those pledges anymore.
	Country's deteriorating, it's falling apart, everybody hate each other, all of the treasured institutions, whether they're electoral, media, judicial, are totally mistrusted, either by one side or the other side.
	Come and live here!
	Yeah, also, as we were kind of talking about earlier, you know, the US has imposed sanctions on Russia with the sole purpose of, like, Uh, I guess making people's lives much worse in Russia.
	I don't know how much it has worked, but I wouldn't imagine that you would think of the Americans as, oh, those wonderful Americans.
	Let's go join them.
	Right.
	What I did like is they're using like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in the content.
	Have a look anyway.
	For any secrets or sensitive information they may have that could help the CIA.
	CNN Senior National Security Correspondent Alex Marquardt is joining us live from Washington.
	Alex, you got an exclusive interview with CIA officials about these efforts.
	What exactly is it that they're doing here?
	That's right, Caitlin, and we also got an early look at this video.
	Now, the CIA officials I sat down with, they told me that they see Russia's war in Ukraine.
	What about when Trump and Russia went, you're a nasty person, by the way?
	He just said she was nasty!
	Like, Trump gets personal, doesn't he?
	Yeah, he does.
	You're a nasty person, by the way.
	Like, in the middle of a conversation.
	Interesting, man.
	as a rare, even historic, opportunity to recruit more Russian spies.
	Now they're taking their efforts up a notch with this new recruitment video,
	trying to communicate to Russians who have sensitive information,
	we know what you're going through and what you have is valuable.
	What you're going through and what you have is valuable.
	You can't communicate to people like that in the middle of a war.
	And America, like, ain't the answer, and I know you are American and we love you, but the answer is not U.S.
	unipolar hegemony of the world operating on behalf of corporations, in particular the military-industrial complex.
	That's not better for anyone.
	No, I liked also when he said, like, the CIA taking things up a notch.
	By what?
	Putting a video on YouTube.
	Like, the CIA, you can imagine it, like, all these brilliant, genius minds coming up.
	Right, we're taking this up a notch.
	What are we doing?
	YouTube video?
	We'll go with that.
	Okay, we've already inspired an insurrection in the Ukraine.
	We've brought back down the government of Niki Uyghur.
	We've killed JFK.
	But now we're really gonna take it to the limit!
	Go on, oh my God, what are we going to do now?
	Well, I've made this YouTube video, as a matter of fact.
	Well, that's nice.
	Like, subscribe.
	I'm not turning on the notification bell.
	Well, that's a pain in the ass.
	That's an intrusion in my privacy.
	I thought you guys liked that.
	Alright, shall we have a look at some of the information?
	Let's look at Biden picking new Fauci.
	We can't watch that propaganda again.
	Now, you remember we talked about this yesterday, and Gareth, I think you made some great points.
	Didn't I?
	At times, your use of a Jamaican accent was ill-advised.
	That was wrong, that was wrong.
	Biden taps Cancer Centre director Monica Bertinelli to lead NIH.
	So she knew Fauci.
	Yeah.
	She's a bit like Angelica Houston, as I think you said yesterday, Gareth.
	I did, yeah, I did make that observation.
	Although your continued attempts to woo her...
	I'm only a human.
	I'm a human.
	We're just humans, aren't we?
	I think you made some good points about her yesterday.
	She is a cancer survivor.
	She's a cancer survivor.
	That's good.
	Not so good.
	She's accepted $290 million from Pfizer.
	Is that going to make her regulate Pfizer?
	This made up 89% of all her research grants.
	So you would suggest that is a lot of money coming from one place.
	How much percent?
	percent of all the research grants came from Pfizer and obviously what we know
	about Albert Baller at the moment is that like Pfizer are seeing that the
	next big market I think it's their third biggest market already but the next big
	market for them is the cancer. Cancer is the new Covid except Covid well except
	cancer is real and it kills people.
	Nah, we're on rumble!
	Well, obviously, the issue with COVID and cancer is that a lot of cancers have skyrocketed.
	As a result of COVID.
	Well, certainly of hospital waiting times, people not being able to get access and all that kind of stuff.
	Cancer is the new COVID in so much as COVID made cancer a lot worse because a lot of people with cancer were unable to get treatment.
	So now cancer has become a lot more problemable.
	Yes, I would suggest that probably is the strategy.
	Let us know in the chat and the comments.
	And what was the other story we were going to briefly glimpse at?
	Big Pharma.
	It's got rampant and corporate lawlessness.
	They do look rampant.
	Yeah, this is the amazing thing.
	I mean, like, when we're kind of talking about Big Pharma, we're talking about Albert Baller and the opportunities that they see in, like, cancer medicines, and now the kind of revolving door that it seems like someone who gets loads of grants and money from Pfizer are now going to be head of NIH.
	The kind of things that Big Pharma that's been found in this report that they do, like, literally break laws.
	To ensure that prices remain high, that American people, everyday people, can't afford that medicine.
	And apparently they're breaking laws here.
	Some of the stuff is absolutely mad.
	So in the case of Bistolic, a blood pressure medicine, Allergan entered a legal pay-for-delay agreement to prevent the delay of generic competition.
	So what that means, Russ, I'll leave it here, but what it means is the opportunity for cheaper drugs, for things like cancer, these are not nothing drugs, cancer drugs, These pharmaceutical companies broke the law to stop generic versions of those drugs becoming available for American people.
	And of course Biden will not legislate to reverse that and make drugs white label, which would save loads of money and loads of lives.
	Let's tell you this as well, you know ventilators, they were one of the heroes of the pandemic, but like other pandemic heroes, teachers, nurses, law enforcement officers, it's time to abandon those heroes because they Well, they're not useful anymore, and possibly, in the case of ventilators, they were not useful then.
	A new paper offers fresh evidence ventilators killed COVID patients, suggesting ventilator-required pneumonia, not COVID itself, caused many deaths.
	Another kick up the nuts for those of us that may have entertained the mainstream narrative.
	We'll be unpacking that in more detail over the coming days, but it's time now to look at another astonishing story from that period of time.
	You remember, don't you, the great myth That even symptomless people could be spreading COVID.
	And it's even hard now to say that that was not true.
	I hardly can believe it myself.
	Worse than that is that as early as May 2020, a test was available that would have proven that people without visible symptoms were not themselves infectious, meaning that many of the rules, masks, lockdown, distancing, were irrelevant.
	This is an extraordinary revelation.
	Here's the news.
	No, here's the effing news.
	Well, here's the fucking news!
	Hey, conspiracy theorists, as you know, questioning Albert Baller, CEO of Pfizer, or Anthony Fauci, former head of everything important, is basically an attack on science itself.
	So, if there were a test that could have revealed that many of the laws and measures that were undertaken during the pandemic were unnecessary and the CDC ignored that test, then that would be what?
	Unscientific?
	It depends on what they say it is.
	Stupid, you bloody conspiracy theorist!
	You remember Albert Baller saying that RFK in questioning certain medications is questioning science itself.
	And Albert Baller, by coincidence, made a bunch of money from certain medications.
	Read his great book, Moonshot.
	He's such a hero.
	Anthony Fauci essentially said in a weird Judge Dredd way, I am science.
	They collapse their individual identity into dogmas, into doctrines, into ideals, so that you can't question them.
	Oh, why are you still going on about the pandemic?
	It was just a massive wealth transfer.
	It just made children stupider.
	It just made the powerful billionaires more powerful.
	It just gave the government more power.
	Why are you going on about it?
	We've got new things to think about now!
	It's a little thing called freedom, baby.
	Let's remind ourselves what these smug dictators were telling us just a matter of months ago and try to remember this is the world you're still living in.
	This is the price you're still paying.
	When you walk down a high street and you see businesses closed, when you see education standards falling, think how relevant it is then.
	What is your level of concern that we're going to discredit public health officials to the point of You know, look at Russia.
	I see you.
	I look at them and I raise you.
	Proxy war with them.
	And also we can say that they even caused Donald Trump.
	That's not going to work for long.
	They actually have a good vaccine and none of their citizens will take it because they don't trust their own government.
	It's very dangerous, Chuck, because a lot of what you're seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.
	Oh, you are the embodiment of science, are you?
	What a scientific thing to say, that an entire dogma could be embodied in an individual.
	That would be the sort of thing that would come out of the mouth of Einstein or Heisenberg or Isaac Newton.
	They were always generalizing and coming up with stuff that seemed dogmatic and propagandist, weren't they?
	What we love about those guys, right?
	Let's see what the private sector's got to say in the figure of Albert Borla.
	What needs to be done to counter this wider assault on vaccines?
	I think it's a very difficult situation and I would say unfortunately it's not an assault on vaccines, it's on science.
	Yeah, it's on science.
	You're attacking Galileo.
	Some of this, though, would become more difficult to accept if we were to learn that there was a test developed during the pandemic that would reveal that asymptomatic people were much less likely of transmitting the virus, because then there'll be no need for everyone to wear masks.
	Right?
	There'll be no need for social distancing.
	There'll be no need for all of that surveillance, all those regulations, all of those laws, all of those sales.
	And then your whole argument would start to look like, God, I suppose, like propaganda and lies, if that were true.
	So let's learn about this test and its potential repression, or at least the fact that it was ignored, so we can inform ourselves further.
	In spring 2020, the public was bombarded with a message that would soon permanently embed itself into the national consciousness.
	People without COVID symptoms could unknowingly be infected and, more importantly, transmit the virus to others.
	You remember that, right?
	We all remember that.
	Oh, the thing about this virus is you might not know you have it, but then you could give it to like a grandmother or something like that and kill them.
	So that's why you should do X, Y, Z. Even though we now know, I believe it's possible to say this on YouTube, that they didn't test on transmissions at Pfizer This was the justification given by Anthony Fauci, or as I call him, science itself, in the first week of April 2020 for his 180 on community mask recommendations.
	A lot of people who were asymptomatic were spreading infection, he said, so everyone should wear a mask.
	Yeah, simple as that.
	A chorus of public health professionals, including Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the FDA, made the same argument as did the CDC.
	The spectre of asymptomatic transmission undergirded not just policies on masks, but on distancing and quarantines as well.
	A lot of things went on in that three-year period.
	We learned that people could be told what to do, people could be told to stay in their house, people could be told to ignore the most sort of primal ceremonial duties in life, weddings, births, funerals, all in order to serve an even higher principle, protect one another, look after the sanctity of life.
	And if indeed that's what we were doing, what could be more noble than that?
	And this willingness to come together in pursuit of a noble cause is the one thing that may yet save us.
	The entire apparatus of our pandemic response, which most consequentially kept millions of healthy children out of full-time school for more than a year, was based on this notion.
	Now, a paper from researchers at Stanford University School of Conspiracy Theories and Stuff David Icke Made Up, sorry, of Medicine and Stanford Hospitals, raises an extraordinary prospect.
	Transmission from asymptomatic people is far, far less common than we were led to believe.
	From a special test they developed, the researchers found a remarkable 96% of people who were PCR positive but without symptoms were not infectious.
	96% of people who were asymptomatic, or another way of saying that would be, All of them.
	Most people who don't have symptoms, of course, are not infected.
	So the likelihood of someone who is not noticeably sick actually being infected and infectious was exceedingly rare.
	Negligible.
	Not something where you would, for example, make everyone in the world wear masks, make everyone in the world stay inside their house.
	Now, I know it's hard for some of you to hear this.
	I know it's gratifying for others.
	I know some of you are like, I knew I was right!
	when other people it's like god god this means that much of the actions we were told or compelled to take including an acceptance of all those closed or half empty schools had little to no benefit all of those lockdowns all of the things your kids went through all of the mental health suffering all of the failure of small businesses was a waste of Time?
	Worse still, the novel test at Stanford that showed a very low rate of infectious asymptomatic people who had tested positive was available as early as May 2020.
	Yet the CDC and other health authorities did nothing.
	And all the while they were doing that, by the way, they were saying science, science, follow the science.
	That's not very scientific, is it?
	Interesting that they didn't grip hold of that test and celebrate it.
	Why wouldn't that be?
	Let me know in the chat.
	Despite the narrative, the idea that substantial portions of infections were acquired from people without symptoms never had a strong evidence base.
	I remember, like, listening to it on the radio and seeing it on TV.
	Just because you don't have symptoms doesn't mean you can't spread the virus.
	Never had a strong evidence base.
	Huh.
	In June 2020, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of the World Health Organization's Emerging Diseases and Zoonosis Unit, said that transmission from asymptomatic people was very rare.
	So just a month later, the World Health Organization said it's rare.
	There was a test available a month earlier than that that proved it, and the WHO said it.
	Strange.
	This conclusion was based on a number of countries doing very detailed contact tracing, she said.
	Oh yeah, because remember they made us all put stuff on our phones so that they could capture our data and observe us.
	But it was only for the pandemic, right?
	Because, you know, it couldn't be for any other reason.
	It was just because even asymptomatic people could be spreading the virus.
	Oh no, that's not true, is it?
	No, it's just to make sure that you've taken the medications because the medications help prevent transmission.
	Oh, that's not true, is it?
	So then why did we have to do all that stuff?
	Could there The next day, after criticism from some health professionals, WHO officials walked back her statement and Van Kerkhove said it was a complex question.
	it's a complex question.
	Authors of an editorial reviewing the evidence of asymptomatic transmission published in BMJ
	in December 2020 said, searching for people who are asymptomatic yet infectious
	is like searching for needles that appear and reappear transiently in haystacks.
	It's already odd to look for a needle in a haystack.
	Whoa, God, oh my God, it's a wave, it's a particle.
	Ah, follow the science, follow the needle.
	What a haystack.
	Some views went in the other direction.
	The following month, a paper in JAMA Network Open suggested that more than half of all transmission came from infected people without symptoms.
	Naturally, this finding, which supported the health authority's messaging and justified various community interventions, was covered everywhere, from CNN to PBS to NBC to Fox.
	Huh!
	So one study they ignore, and another study they really cover and pay attention to.
	Almost as if the mainstream media is presenting you some information and denying you other information.
	Yet this conclusion was based on mathematical models, which are based on numerous assumptions and subjective choices by the researchers, which is to say, in layman's terms, is a guesstimate.
	They ignored the one that was based on empirical research and evidence.
	they highlight the mask on.
	Oh, I reckon that maybe if we'd carry the one, carry the one over there, then if we were to extrapolate
	that naturally, then everyone should do what the government says.
	And I suppose a side effect of this would be that Moderna and Pfizer and a lot of those guys probably benefit.
	But let's forget about all that for a while and get in your house
	and put a mask on just to check who are our sponsors on the show.
	You've already said their names.
	Oh, great. Should I say it again?
	Yeah, why not? Pfizer.
	In short, plenty of studies have demonstrated that indeed, people without symptoms can transmit to others.
	That's never been a mystery.
	The question has never been, can people without symptoms transmit SARS-CoV-2, but rather to what extent this occurs in the general population.
	So, that's a significant question.
	If it's 100% of asymptomatic people, then obviously there's legitimacy behind measures such as double mask, keep apart, stay in your house in an unprecedented fashion.
	But if it's 4%, then we have to have a different conversation, don't we?
	About the various competing interests.
	Mental health, small businesses, general fitness, liberty.
	Freedom!
	All of those things are back on the table.
	The Stanford test does not answer that question specifically, but it tells us something related that's more important.
	How likely is it for someone who has COVID but doesn't have symptoms to be infectious?
	Most everyone has heard of the standard PCR test, which detects whether someone has the virus, but it cannot detect whether the person is capable of infecting others.
	In May 2020, the Stanford researchers created a specific PCR test that could do this.
	The minor strand test.
	A pretty significant breakthrough, one might imagine, in a world that was dealing with something so seismic and traumatic.
	The purpose of the test, Dr. Benjamin Pinsky, one of the authors of the original paper on the test, explained was to help clinicians in the hospital accurately find out if patients were infectious or not.
	Yeah, I get it.
	Hospitals were delaying procedures and delaying treatments such as chemotherapy and implementing various infection control measures unnecessarily on patients who tested positive on a regular PCR test but who were not infectious.
	We all went through that, right?
	Oh, there's nothing wrong with me.
	Oh, I can't do X, Y, Z. Well, imagine instead of like going to an event or whatever, it was going to get chemotherapy.
	That test would be pretty significant, I would argue.
	Let me know in the chat.
	The minor strand test gave a definitive answer one way or the other.
	To be clear about the importance of all this, as early as May and June 2020, a test existed that if it had been rolled out in medical centers and regular labs nationwide, could have enabled people to know for certain whether they were infectious or not.
	Even if you were a very cautious person, you go, am I infectious?
	All right, I'm going to go see my grandma or whatever, because this test has revealed that I am categorically not infectious.
	Therefore, I can go and tend to a relative and their other needs.
	There are so many areas where this would have been useful, where it actually perfectly makes the argument.
	Science, the importance of testing, the importance of trust in those bodies, an opportunity to have a conversation.
	I know these people are clearly not pursuing an agenda either to regulate a population or to profit.
	That's the basic argument, isn't it?
	Oh, did the pandemic serve the ability of governments to regulate and control at a time when more democracy is clearly an option?
	Did it get used to help companies to profit because of various factors?
	In a conversation around this and the release of this test would have meant that we would have gone, oh no, because otherwise they wouldn't have released that test.
	That's what we would have had to have said, but they didn't release that test.
	Unlike the ambiguities of epidemiological studies or models, this was a biological test.
	The CDC ultimately published Pinsky and his colleagues' paper about the test in January 2021, but it began use at Stanford more than seven months earlier.
	Not only is it an alternative model, it was a more effective model, not based on mathematics, conjecture, it was based on, oh, well, we just see by using this test.
	Isn't that extraordinary that that wasn't taken advantage of?
	This raises serious questions for those in charge of the CDC, NIH, NIAID, for why resources were not allocated toward making the test broadly available.
	I've got a few hunches, and I don't think they'll be answering those questions, do you?
	Good luck with those, Rand Paul!
	Though the test was developed for use in hospitals, its utility outside of a medical setting is obvious.
	Regular people could have paid for the test to find out after they got over a bout of COVID whether they were still infectious or not, enabling them to go to work, visit relatives and so on.
	Millions of kids could have tested out of isolation.
	More broadly, the CDC could have immediately conducted a huge study to actually answer the question health officials had only been conjecturing about.
	What percent of positive people without symptoms have the capability of infecting others?
	All upside if your objective is to protect a population, to protect an economy, to protect across a number of intersecting factors, mental health, etc.
	This test was a godsend.
	Why was this godsend test ignored?
	Or a science send?
	Enter the second groundbreaking piece to this story.
	Researchers at Stanford later looked at data from this test from July of 2020 through April 2022 and answered the question, helpful for it is neglected to answer.
	And what they found out does not match the narrative about a common threat of people walking around without symptoms infecting others.
	For the majority of the pandemic, only 4% of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 PCR positive patients were shown to be infectious.
	During the Omicron wave, the percentage peaked at about 25%, so there was some variety and variation.
	It's all data that would have been invaluable.
	We can't narrativise it just to our own ends.
	We could have used science to create better conditions for everyone, all of us.
	It could have been something that we were genuinely all in together, as it was for about 15 minutes at the beginning of the pandemic, if you can remember that, before we all started thinking, Wait a minute, are we being exploited again?
	Dr. Ralph Thayer, an infectious diseases fellow at Stanford, said, Think about it this way.
	Even if every single student in a school without symptoms was infected, 96% of them still weren't capable of transmitting to others.
	Yet, of course, most people without symptoms are not infected.
	Moreover, just because 4% were technically capable of infecting others, that does not mean in actuality they had a sufficient amount of replicating virus to do so.
	We are talking about subgroup of a subgroup of a subgroup.
	How extraordinary.
	Subgroup of a subgroup of a subgroup.
	It's fractaling down into minutiae, isn't it?
	And yet, The most extreme measures were taken.
	Under what circumstances would that make sense if there is an agenda that's not related to the well-being of the population?
	And I'd invite you at this moment to consider, when you look across society more broadly, does it look like everything's being arranged quick?
	What do we do?
	What's best for everyone?
	Does it look like that in economics?
	Does it look like that in justice?
	Does it look like that in democracy?
	What's best for everyone?
	Or does it look like They look for opportunities to benefit an economic elite.
	Let me know in the chat.
	Outside of hospitals, the harms were arguably far more extensive.
	Schools, if they were open at all, operated at half capacity in order to comply with distancing rules.
	In many states, all children were required to mask all of the time, and students were quarantined repeatedly for long stretches of time, even though they were not infectious.
	All of these rules that kept healthy children home or in masks were based on the idea that we didn't know who could be infected and contagious, but we could have known.
	We should have known.
	Why didn't we know?
	We were made to believe that each of us was a potential unwitting one-person WMD.
	Did they have those WMDs?
	I don't remember.
	Who can forget those video illustrations all over social media and major news outlets of little red poison dots floating out of people's mouths and noses toward innocent individuals nearby?
	While medical centers and other places with particularly vulnerable people may have benefited for some time from the more stringent rules, schools, as they did in Sweden, and most of society, could have simply followed the classic advice, if you're sick, stay at home, and we would have ended up in the same place.
	But possibly with some different results in different areas of life.
	Isn't this yet another piece of information that makes you query the underlying philosophy behind the pandemic?
	Whether it was unconscious, whether it was ineptitude or by design, just for a moment remember the events you missed, the inconvenience you experienced, the money you lost, the relatives you missed, the funerals you didn't go to.
	Just for a moment think about how your children have been affected, where Ever or not people took their own lives because they couldn't cope with being in isolated circumstances, whether chemotherapy, heart disease medications were lost out, whether resources were directed incorrectly, whether or not you were made to feel that you were not doing the right thing because of particular medications.
	Every single measure appears to have been designed to impede freedom and maximize profit.
	Appears to have been designed that way.
	Whether it was unconscious, whether it was ineptitude, or by design, I'm not suggesting malfeasance of this scale.
	It's not my job to do that.
	I don't have access to all of the information in the world.
	It seems that much of the world's most important information is kept from us.
	At this point, can you with hand on heart continue to call people conspiracy theorists because they don't accept what they are told by the media, the government, and big corporations?
	I don't think you can.
	But that's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the comments.
	I'll see you in a second.
	Thank you for choosing Fox News.
	No, he's the fucking loser.
	Dealing as we are with all of this intensity, all of this complexity, isn't it sometimes wonderful,
	like the Cheers theme song used to say, to get away.
	Wouldn't you like to go somewhere different? You know, that's not the idea.
	Anyway, let's lose ourselves in the beautiful game that is football, because, after all, football is nice.
	Football is nice.
	Maybe you're an American, maybe you're a conspiracy theorist, maybe you're thinking, why the hell are those two limeys?
	You might be thinking, those bloody limeys talking about football, because it provides a beautiful framing for all of our social understanding.
	Tribalism, opposition, friendly competition.
	Gossip, glamour, heroes, the narrative itself can be found in football.
	As someone once said, the world is not made of atoms, the world is made of stories.
	And the stories that emerge from football are some of the greatest stories available.
	It also gives me and Gareth an opportunity to make predictions in a game that I'm sure to win, where we have to predict the scores of certain fixtures.
	We get three points if you 100% get it right, one point if you get the general result correct.
	That's our system, isn't it?
	got lots of things to talk about, who's going to get relegated from the Premier League,
	are West Ham United, the football club that I support, going to reach a European final,
	or be it one that Simon Jordan of Talk Sport calls the Papa John's, meaning it's sort of a
	low-rent, Papa John's is a sort of a pizza parlour that sponsors a sort of low-rent domestic
	competition. Still a European competition. It's a nice looking trophy as well.
	And if you can get past AZ Alkmaar, I would say... You know, they've got a good AZ Alkmaar of Holland.
	You know, the big thing is that they're one of those moneyball teams.
	The press likes to go on about it.
	Are they moneyball?
	Don't get seduced by the glamour.
	There is my football team, West Ham United.
	Jared Bowen used to play for Hull, which is a team Gareth supports.
	Then in the background is Paqueta, a Brazilian World Cup star.
	Zouma is in the very middle there.
	He famously kicked his own cat.
	Cech, a brilliant, tall player from the Czech Republic who's really good in the air and strong.
	Maybe he's the Eastern European Fellaini, maybe.
	Declan Rice, who's like the hero of West Ham, too good for West Ham and is also going to be leaving.
	And Mikel Antonio is second from the left.
	Alright, let's have a look at our predictions.
	We can't tell how it went just by analysing the numbers.
	I always lose.
	Gareth got five right, but I win because I got one exactly correct.
	Well done.
	Actually, we both did amazing.
	That's the best we've ever done, and I actually have got ten points.
	If you want, you can add it to where we were up to last time round.
	No, let's start fresh.
	A whole new season.
	Two more games?
	Is there three more games?
	Two, three more games, yeah.
	You could do it, Brand.
	You could do it.
	Don't try and get in my head.
	You're trying to get in my head.
	I tell you what, I would love it.
	I would love it if I beat you at this.
	Which ones did I get 100% right?
	I must have got some 100% right, mustn't I?
	You must have done, mustn't you?
	To win, because I only got four right.
	You got five right.
	That's not bad, is it, really?
	What ones did I get 100% right?
	You need to mark it up in some way that makes it clear.
	Yeah, this is hard.
	Colour code it.
	That's too difficult to look at for a stupid person.
	Right, there's lots of things to cover.
	I want to cover that so I could win.
	Couldn't I?
	I'll pause it.
	I'm not consistent.
	No, have a bit of faith.
	Bit of faith.
	Alright, I might win.
	So, hold on, there's a few things I want to talk about.
	Luton, I want to talk about Luton.
	Yes.
	Like, Luton beat Sunderland.
	That's right.
	Didn't they?
	In the playoffs, in the championship.
	Yeah.
	And you might have Luton coming back into the Premier League.
	I want Luton in.
	I do.
	That's the anti-Wrexham.
	Yes.
	Because Luton is an old school football team.
	Like, I think, I don't know this and I don't want to judge you if you're a Luton fan, but I have a sense that Luton still has what you might call traditional 80s fans.
	Don't you think?
	Yeah, I guess, yeah, I mean, like, Luton conjures a lot of memories, doesn't it, from when we were younger, like?
	Yeah, because you think of David Pleat.
	Yeah.
	And you think of the AstroTurf.
	AstroTurf, yeah.
	That AstroTurf.
	You maybe think of Paul Walsh.
	Paul Walsh, yeah.
	I think of.
	Yeah.
	They had a good forward that had a bunch of brothers.
	There was three black players up front and they all had three different brothers.
	Someone's a bit like Lufa Blissett but not Lufa Blissett.
	The amazing thing about Luton is that their stadium is 10,000 people.
	I love that.
	10,000 people.
	What, a Man United are going to have to go there?
	It's incredible.
	It's brilliant.
	So like Bournemouth, I think Bournemouth is about 12,000.
	Everyone was like, how ridiculous that Bournemouth would come up with a stadium the size of 12,000.
	Steyn, it's them Steyn brothers.
	Luton's even less than that.
	It's like, where are we going with this?
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's also, like, Bournemouth, like, Luton are not, I would say, I'd call them unreconstructed.
	It's gonna be weird there.
	And even, like, when they won against Sunderland, there was a pitch invasion, and it felt like a bit... It doesn't feel like a sort of a friendly pitch invasion.
	I'm not criticising Luke fans.
	I don't want to do that.
	I'm not trying to do that.
	I'm just saying, this is the point I'm trying to make.
	Football has had to become sanitised in order to commodify it to the degree where it could become an innocuous global brand, even though it's still full of the glory that football will always contain and present.
	That's what you can't do.
	You can't strip football somehow of its magic.
	It's too potent.
	But as it becomes more and more commodified, more and more detached from the fans that it's traditionally associated with, the gentrification of the game, something that began a long, long time ago, really, sort of with the advent of the Premier League, most notably, in our country, it's sort of certain aspects of the game, the sort of eating a pie, drinking Bovril, getting punched in the face by a stranger, All of the things we are proudest of.
	I think it's like that thing with stadiums.
	I think we want to retain, we don't want all football to become, as you say, sanitised.
	We don't want every stadium to be one of those new, all look exactly the same stadiums.
	And so when you get a stadium like Luton's that's 10,000, I guess it's the difference between Upton Park and the new stadiums.
	Exactly, the perfect example.
	Because, right, at West Ham, you used to have to walk down Barking Road, or Romford Road, or Green Street, and you're walking through, like, communities of- Communities.
	Houses.
	Bengali people, and shops full of saris, and little pie and mash shops, and pubs that have had generations of West Ham fans there.
	The statue of my peers, and Bobby Moore, and Geoff Hurst, and it's sort of full of real ritual.
	The inconvenience of arriving at Upton Park, or maybe getting out of Plastow, because there'll be too much people at Upton Park.
	You'll get off one earlier or one later.
	And now, you're in a Westfield shopping centre at Stratford.
	You're moving for a place of commerce.
	If you look at the economic class that are represented by the walk along Green Street versus where the kind of tax arrangements probably enjoyed by the unit proprietors in any Westfield.
	Who owns Westfield?
	Where's Westfield registered for tax?
	If you were to look at that, it would tell you a story.
	There's information in that story about the way that the game is being co-opted and changed.
	It's impossible not to regard it through a political lens.
	So whilst I'm not glorying in, like, the aspects of football in the 1980s that were obviously prejudicial, violent, what I'm saying is it was something that was clearly owned by a particular community, and that there was something... I feel a kind of nostalgia about that, even though at the time I was Probably quite frightened.
	Well, we know where these massive stadiums and franchises lead us to.
	It leads us to something like the Super League, doesn't it?
	That's the trajectory of the way football is kind of going, and we don't want that.
	Retaining something like Luton being in the Premier League would feel like a kind of resistance to that.
	You can have a look now at the entrance to Kenilworth Road versus the LA Galaxy, say, entrance, just to sort of see for yourselves.
	So that's on your way into Luton, and then what's it like to go into LA Galaxy?
	Wow, amazing.
	Wow.
	That's all that Royal Road tells you a great deal and almost you can feel they'll come a point where people
	almost welcome a Super League because they'll say oh well, you know, what's
	the point man city always win the Premier League Bayern Munich always
	win the League in Germany. Yeah, once it's we're doing it already
	then why why not, you know?
	Yeah And what's people's competitive stadium kind of looks like
	that and man city type teams and franchises keep winning all the leagues and all the trophies then it'll
	be like well why not?
	Why don't we just do the Super League?
	Yeah, that's right.
	It's harder.
	And then before you know it, you've forgotten your own history.
	And this kind of amnesia and disassociation, I think, are deeper themes of what we continually talk about in our show.
	You don't talk about the fact that you're forgetting your heritage.
	you're forgetting your connection to the past, you're forgetting your connection to your
	grandparents, your community, it suddenly just all feels like, oh did any of that happen,
	does any of that matter anymore?
	And I think that football is a great representation of that and if you lose touch with that, you
	lose touch with a lot.
	That's why it's always been exploited, I think, politically, whether it's Rishi Sunak, WEF
	Stooge and Prime Minister of the UK never elected, attending a game at Southampton,
	the first team to be relegated at the bottom of the table, there he is, being a normal
	person, being a normal man at Southampton.
	Or things like Tony Blair playing football with Kevin Keegan, the then England manager,
	because he, for reasons I've never fully understood, supported Newcastle.
	Newcastle were amazing then, perhaps as now it's like an exciting time to be a Newcastle fan.
	And I still remember this moment of watching Tony Blair exchanging headers with Kevin Keegan and I still, for all the war crimes and all the dead Iraqi children and all of the globalism, this still in part
	informs my impression of Tony Blair favourably.
	Like for example, if like some world court arrested Tony Blair and were about to execute him as a war
	criminal, let's face it that's no different to what happened to Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi,
	and unless you're making the argument that it's more right to do that to brown people
	than white people, then why would that not happen? It's not a great argument. It's not a great argument.
	Like, this would be what I would say in Tony Blair's defence.
	Not that he would need it, his whole family's lawyers.
	But I'd go... Also, I don't think he'd call you up as his first witness.
	Well, you know, get Russell Brand.
	He's always been making cheap jibes.
	When we were doing the trues, he went, like, I literally don't know what he means.
	I don't understand what he means.
	What is he?
	I don't think he was talking about a thing that you were saying.
	I think he just meant you.
	What do you mean?
	Your essence.
	What do you mean, what do I mean?
	I don't mean a thing.
	I am a thing.
	Let's check him out doing headers with Kevin Keegan.
	Witness Blair's head tennis with Kevin Keegan.
	The symbolism was clear.
	Back in 1995, New Labour, just like Keegan's Newcastle, seemed to be a breath of fresh air set to topple the established order.
	Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out for the tune.
	Or the country.
	Or the people of Iraq.
	Or really anyone.
	Margaret Thatcher famously said, when asked what's your greatest achievement, she said Tony Blair.
	Because then politics became sanitised, centralised, the idea of an alternative, a challenge to the relationships between corporate power and the state.
	It was gone forever.
	We can look at a bunch of things now, Gael.
	We can either look at Boris Johnson elbowing a boy.
	We can look at... Oh, we can watch Rishi Sunak.
	No, not Rishi Sunak.
	We can watch Roy Hodgson.
	Little gangster, Roy Hodgson.
	And Ancelotti doing sort of keepy-uppies.
	There's two things we can talk about there.
	Yeah, we can talk about any of that.
	I'd love to know what your thoughts about the football was there.
	Well, I can tell you this, that Alan Shearer's writing on The Athletic is like David Foster Wallace or Proust or something.
	Listen to all this.
	For no apparent reason, Antonio Rudiger is crouching.
	His head is nestling inside Erling Haaland's right armpit, close enough to check the strength of his deodorant.
	And then he switches to the left.
	His arms are extended, but he's not really using them, nudging rather than pulling or grabbing.
	One of Haaland's hands rests on Rudiger's shoulder as if hugging an old mate, but this is not a particularly friendly encounter.
	There are swats.
	Elbows up.
	That's unbelievable!
	This is apparently by Alan Shearer on the Real Madrid Man City contest, which resolved yesterday in our weird timeline.
	The moment is captured on Twitter.
	A funny hypnotic clip taken from City's 1-1 draw last week.
	Taken out of context, it's like an interpretive dance or a human version of whack-a-mole.
	The ball is in irrelevance.
	Haaland, who has his back to goal, is staring at it, never allowing his gaze to flicker, but it is elsewhere.
	And yet this peculiar little interaction was also central to a Champions League semi-final.
	You know, like, it's incredible the way that Shearer is constructing this prose.
	Incredible, and I would argue, somewhat unlikely.
	Who knows?
	Let's get him on.
	Ryan versus Shearer.
	I would like to see if he can reliably produce prose of that standard.
	I suppose, yeah.
	Well, the big news, obviously, is that Man City have basically won the title now, haven't they?
	Yeah, because Brighton are too good at football, inexplicably.
	And like, now that, this is what I think, now that Spurs aren't going to have Nagelsmann as their next manager has been confirmed, I think they're getting Deserby.
	That's what I think.
	Yeah, that's what I think is going to happen.
	I think Spurs are going to get Deserby.
	Oh no.
	And I think that he's got, there he is.
	Hmm.
	Do you think he shaves those bits?
	He's pictured here with a beard.
	Right.
	And he's got sort of a, like, he's got a beard that's, I would say, a little too General Zod.
	A little too managed around the middle of the chin.
	I've got places in my beard that don't grow.
	Yeah, I've got a couple of bald bits at the extremes of my mouth there.
	Maybe it's just, yeah, who knows?
	Maybe he does that.
	I mean, he's very exact with his football, so maybe he is with his beard as well.
	Exact with his facial hair.
	Because I thought that what deservedly looked like is the sort of least popular member of a boy band.
	You know, like they have one that's sort of like, you can be in the boy band, but we know that you're struggling with your weight.
	And we're not going to let you be near the front.
	He's like that and he deserves it.
	But he's taken over from Graham Potter and he's fundamentally improved.
	It doesn't make sense that Brighton, Southampton used to be like that.
	They keep being a bit too... Right, when they brought in Pochettino for example.
	Yeah.
	They're not deteriorating as a result of the transitions.
	I always think that's surprising.
	I was listening to a podcast the other day that was saying that there's never been anyone like him in the Premier League in the kind of effect that he's had on Brighton.
	Never!
	Never!
	That's what they were saying.
	This was on a BBC football podcast and they were saying there's never been anyone who's done what he's done.
	I guess in the fact that he's come in like midway through a season.
	He's changed Brighton in terms of the style of the way that they play.
	It seems to have changed massively under Graham Potter.
	I mean it's amazing.
	Apparently he's a lovely, lovely guy as well.
	Potter got the job at Chelsea on the basis that What he'd done at Brighton was incredible, as well as his previous employment in the game of football.
	He eventually ascends to one of the top positions in British football, manager of Chelsea, albeit a position that's understood to be quite temporary.
	Then De Zerby's come in and sort of been a bit better, a bit better than him.
	Quite a lot better.
	When you go on holiday, you want people at home to say it's raining.
	Of course you do.
	People go, it's raining here, you're having a good time on holiday, it's raining here.
	You don't want to go, it's brilliant weather here.
	It's great here, we love it.
	Potter must have been looking at Brighton and thinking, oh no, I've got all these too many good players here at Chelsea on contracts that are too long and Brighton are better now.
	He must have experienced some self-doubt.
	Yeah, you would think so, yeah.
	I mean, it's got to be hard.
	I think you've got to turn to your character at that point, don't you, to kind of get you through.
	Because there'll be another job for Graham Potter.
	Yeah, but what happens?
	Because, like, I think that there's a sort of, there's an upward trajectory.
	Say Hasenhuttle of Southampton, there was a minute where he was looking like, oh, he's in the ascendancy.
	Yeah, he's new clop at one point.
	He's gonna get a new, he's gonna get a brilliant job, and then it sort of doesn't, if you don't, there's so much timing, if you don't jump ship at the right moment, then you go back into descent.
	Like, other than this peculiar anomaly of Frank Lampard being given another job at Chelsea temporarily, what can, like, and I like Frank Lampard, But he's seemingly can do no wrong in the managerial sense.
	Doesn't matter how many times he fails.
	Gavin, have a go.
	Have you worked it out?
	What can he realistically be trusted with after this?
	That seems like a genuine representation of where he is.
	Well, they're getting poached now, aren't they at Chelsea?
	That's the thing.
	Chelsea are getting Pochettino.
	I suppose the main story is this.
	Here are some main actual football stories.
	Are West Ham going to win a European trophy?
	Are Man City now unstoppable?
	Of course they are.
	Will Arsenal be in the running next year?
	Or will Chelsea be better?
	Yes.
	Will Tottenham be better?
	Probably.
	Will Liverpool be better?
	Probably.
	Will Manchester United be better?
	Probably.
	I think if I was an Arsenal fan, and I know it's a peculiar curse to bear, an Arsenal fan.
	At least if you're a West Ham fan, you don't expect anything.
	Do you know what I think will happen?
	AZ and ACMA, they'll beat us and we won't get to the final of that mad, stupid, made-up competition that we're doing well in.
	That's what I expect.
	No, I think you'll go through and then you'll face this other Fiorentina or Basel, isn't it?
	And Basel, I think, one up from that.
	Or 2-1, one of those.
	I don't know.
	Are we going to go to a 22,000 seater in the Czech Republic?
	The answer is yes!
	Let's go to the Czech Republic to a final!
	It would be amazing.
	It would be amazing to watch that.
	And then are Arsenal going to do well next season?
	I don't think so.
	Because I think Man City are just an unstoppable sort of killing machine now.
	And perfectly embodied by the red-helmeted Haaland.
	There's nothing that can realistically be done to stop them.
	The Man City thing, isn't it, is like, you know, in terms of, like, from a footballing sense, people were like, well, look at the size of their squad, they're able to, like, you know, rest certain players and bring in other players who are just as good as those players.
	But there is another, and obviously with Arsenal, you could point to the injuries that they got at the wrong time, in a Saliba got injured at the wrong time of the season.
	Yeah, but like Gary Neville says, you can't just have one injury and then say that the whole project doesn't work anymore.
	Well, exactly.
	So there's got to be something else, hasn't there?
	And that's when people start saying, you know, phrases like Arsenal choked it and stuff like that.
	Bottled it.
	Bottled it. It's a mentality isn't it at that point and it's always a fascinating thing for me in football
	That you know as many tactics as you've got and as many like amazing players and everything that's something like
	you know Personality and character and that. A clear example of that
	is Fergie's last title like in In his final season as manager, they managed to win the Premier League, which in retrospect looks like a team that shouldn't have been capable of that, certainly on the basis of what they did for the subsequent 10 years now and immediately afterwards.
	That person was able through will and belief.
	My fascination with football, even though I'm fascinated with many aspects of it, the game itself, the moments of drama it can produce, transfers, the history of the clubs, the behaviour of the fans, what it really comes down to to me, I think, is the power of belief and thought.
	That's why I fixate in particular on managers, So I think, like, can individuals create meaningful change?
	Now, look at that team.
	Mind you, it does look like quite a good team.
	You've got Patrice, you've got Wayne Rooney, you've got, like, I mean, yeah, I'm Percy.
	Rio's still there.
	There's me on the left.
	There's you.
	I mean, he looked more like you then, didn't he?
	Even more.
	Like De Gea still regarded as a good footballer before West Ham ended his career with that gently rolling blunder by Benrahma.
	Yeah, that somehow, through belief, you can create something.
	And it's like, with Guardiola, obviously there is a kind of genius in him, but it must be, I think, the power of charisma.
	Trust me.
	If he just relayed all of his information into an AI device and it dispatched that information, I don't think the results would be the same.
	There is something human and interpersonal.
	And I think as we continue to see the power of commerce and technology dehumanising us and stripping our culture of meaning, Even when enhancing superficial beauty or efficacy or safety or convenience or whatever the claims that are made by commerce are, the idea that something about human beings can't be replicated, that amounts to sacredness, I think, in the world now, that they have a sacred role to play.
	I heard someone say the other day that there were certain managers that you never would see on the pitch.
	You know, like if Fergie, now you're in trouble if he'd come down, or they'd ruin things, like their ideas would be annoying, you wouldn't want them, it's left to the coaches, that kind of stuff.
	But it almost is a totemic and talismanic power that these figures have.
	And I suppose there's many ways of doing that, whether it's Roy Hodgson's presumed avuncular sweetness, or... You know, what is it they're bloody well doing?
	I mean, look at Allardyce.
	I mean, Leeds the other day, that was an amazing game.
	I actually watched that, and it looked like Leeds were going 2-0 up at one point, and then Bamford missed the penalty, and I mean, that would have been a massive result for Leeds.
	They ended up drawing 2-2, and they look good.
	Like, Leeds look good.
	Leeds have looked so, so bad.
	And then Sam Allardyce comes in, and I just thought, what a joke of an appointment.
	No offence against Sam Allardyce, but it feels so long ago that Allardyce had anything to do with the game.
	And yet, evidently from the way that they played, and what a lot of pundits are saying is, it hasn't had an effect on them.
	And what's he doing?
	Sam Allardyce isn't getting involved like De Zerby does with Brighton.
	It's something else, isn't it?
	He said, didn't he, that he knows as much as Klopp or Guardiola, right?
	And then afterwards when they sort of went, you can't say that, because of their achievements in the game, like you've not won the competitions that they have won, he said, I was doing what Fergie done, like I was taking attention away from the players and putting it on me.
	So he sort of actually made yet another claim while trying to... Yeah, I saw that and I thought, with Sam Allardyce, I wonder if he could sort of say, like, is it that you can instill in the Leeds team, like, listen, you're going in the Championship next year, this is about, you're playing for your lives, you've got two games.
	Otherwise, everything's going to change for you.
	You don't know what it's like yet.
	You ain't had that experience.
	You don't want to have that experience.
	I wonder what it is you say to people.
	I mean, the way that in their style of play, it literally looked like they were trying harder.
	I know there's that, like, joke that we say, like, pressing is trying harder, but they were chasing everything down in a way that Leeds haven't done maybe all season.
	So, I mean, if that's one of the results that Allardyce has had, then I don't know.
	But something's changed.
	We got some stuff here.
	G Held said, I just caught episode one's Barbecue with a Neighbour story, it was priceless.
	Has Gareth seen The Neighbour recently?
	Has Gareth been to any other social events recently?
	Have you?
	No, I haven't been to social events, and The Neighbour, I worry about every time I drive back to my... Casey hears this.
	Well, no, I worry about bumping into him, because I think that, I think, now, as a result of telling you this story, that maybe he's feeling awkward about this as well.
	Because it was a bit of a, it was a strange night.
	It was a strange night.
	Why don't you go round there tonight and secretly record yourself making sexual remarks in his presence?
	Okay.
	And then we'll play it on the show.
	Okay, right.
	Like that you're just round there going, I enjoyed that barbecue.
	You know I've charred my chops.
	Okay.
	You know I've smoked my bacon.
	Or the tip of my sausage.
	Right.
	It was black as new.
	Goat's knock-off.
	Stuff like that.
	You want me to ensnare him, do you?
	Yeah, ensnare him with innuendo.
	Right.
	I call it sexual barbecue entendre.
	Nice.
	I don't think he'll respond well to it.
	He was a very matter-of-fact guy.
	He'll fart you straight out the door.
	His arsehole will be wide, gaping wide open, like Arsenal's defence without Saliba, and it'll stink about as bad.
	Right.
	And he'll say, hold on a minute though, the man downstairs By which he means his penis.
	Seems to want a lot more from me.
	I've kept a very low profile in that flat.
	I really have.
	Sneaking in and out most mornings.
	PrimalColin, my mate from the chat, PrimalColin2, you didn't say what position you'd be in at Fiverside.
	AtHammy goes, did you play Fiverside?
	Did you play well or too anxious?
	I didn't go.
	I went to the cinema and watched Guardians of the Galaxy 3.
	Well, that's not the same thing.
	I ate some really bad food and I felt really bad about myself because of it.
	I went with my children.
	They got bored.
	I did a U-turn on a dual carriageway in a camper van like there was proper mental.
	Oh my good God.
	Um, I should- You know what that is?
	That's karma, that is.
	That's the universe telling you you should have manned up and played- Sorry to use that phrase these days, but you should have- Personed up.
	Personed up and played football.
	Adulted up.
	I should have done, because here's the chat for the group, the five-side chat.
	You're in the chat.
	You can't be in the chat.
	I'm in the chat!
	I'm contributing to the chat!
	You haven't even played!
	I'm gonna say, I'm coming.
	Alright, I'm saying I'm coming.
	Right.
	Hi, guys.
	Good.
	Good start.
	Can I see whether your willy's in my willy?
	No.
	Could be bound together with scotch tape.
	No, that's not... Oh no!
	Delete!
	Delete!
	Oh no!
	I've said it!
	Different text.
	Guys, why don't you and us... No, no, I'm not going to do that.
	I'm not going to send that.
	Look, I will.
	I want to do it this week.
	I just... What day is it on?
	It's very revealing about my personality problem.
	Uh, Thursday night.
	Thursday night, okay.
	Yeah, so essentially tonight when we play this out.
	Got it, alright.
	So I could be going.
	Yeah.
	Should I go?
	They play every Thursday, do they?
	Every week.
	Oh my word.
	Well, I do want to come.
	One Thursday, I'm dragging you there.
	You're going to drag me there?
	Yes, yes.
	You've told me what to do.
	Play at the back and focus on distribution.
	Right.
	Keep my head up.
	Yeah.
	Be confident.
	Just think of it as exercise.
	Don't overthink it.
	There you go.
	The problem is vanity.
	Yes.
	Isn't it?
	It's like I only want to do things I'm good at.
	But increasingly we're finding out... Like this!
	I know!
	It's extraordinary.
	Like look at the standard I'm holding myself to today.
	You'd think, why would I expect to go on that pitch and be Franz Beckenbauer, when it's
	something that I do for a living.
	Imagine if you do it and then everything changes for you.
	You just give up the rest of your life.
	About five years of side football.
	With my mates.
	At Sharon, I love the gerbils story.
	Peed myself laughing.
	I hope not at the death of my little gerbils.
	Those little guys.
	I've had a lot of tough times with animals.
	I've got a lot of scars from rabbits.
	Rabbits?
	What about, didn't you have little mice that all ate each other?
	Or was that the gerbils that ate each other?
	So I had some rats that ate each other.
	I had a mouse that lived in my hair.
	I had the gerbils, of course.
	Rabbits that bit me, for a while I had that.
	I had those little shrimps that all jumped out of the floor.
	Then I backed them up with Henry the Hoover and they burst out the bag.
	What's all these shrimps doing in the hoover bag?
	I wish I could tell you about that.
	Why's Henry the Hoover crying?
	That's between Henry and myself.
	Why did your mum keep allowing you to have pets?
	I was trying to... She thought it would be good for me, socialise me, as I see it was.
	Did she call them friends?
	Go on, go upstairs with your friends.
	You'll be alright.
	They're not friends!
	They're no friends of mine!
	Predictions.
	I thought Russell was spreading misinformation.
	How could Russell proclaim ever and had any sort of chance against Man City?
	Turns out he didn't.
	If Man City then become actually invincible to the romance of the underdog, that's when it's all over.
	I don't want City to get beat by Raoul.
	So, you know, that result's done now, isn't it?
	I want City to do well in the Champions League to establish dominance of the English game over our European competitors.
	I think it's a shame if they... Do you want them to do the treble?
	I mean, they're just going to.
	It's either going to be this season or next season.
	There's an inevitability about Man City.
	I think that's the slightly depressing thing.
	That's why I wanted Arsenal to win.
	I don't actually really like Arsenal.
	Man City and nothing against them. Again, I like Pep Guardiola, I like a lot of those players.
	It's actually not about the individuals. It's not even actually about the team. It's about
	it's impossible to extract it from the fact that there is, it's currently the most obvious example
	of how outside factors are influencing the game. Chelsea used to be that, Man United used to be
	game. Chelsea used to be that, Man United used to be that and
	that and but when people sort of make arguments about Nottingham Forest being it, I think that's
	but when people sort of make arguments about Nottingham Forest being it, I think that's when it's because Nottingham
	when it's right because Nottingham Forest, that's the ingenuity obvious example of how outside factors are influencing a
	Forest, that's the ingenuity of individuals and the cohesion of a team like Clough
	and Taylor and then like and now it feels like we are sort of moving towards like whilst it's always appalled
	me that in American sport franchises like the LA Raiders have come from
	somewhere else or they've gone somewhere like they'll just move about. Like what do the fans feel?
	They've just took their football team and put it somewhere else.
	But like now you sort of in a way have that.
	The fans are in a sense set dressing for an Abu Dhabi enterprise.
	Like you could, as we learned during Covid, that you can extract the fans from the experience.
	Albeit, it does massively diminish the entire spectacle.
	It does hollow it out.
	It is weird to hear the ringing shouts of players talking to one another.
	And the expletives.
	It is difficult to be denied things like this.
	There's a TV show called The Chase.
	Have a look at The Beast first, actually, guys, to establish the idea.
	There's a TV show called The Chase, and there's this guy in it called The Beast, and The Beast looks like that.
	And have a look at what fans... I don't know what the game was like.
	It's Cambridge versus Stevenage.
	Look at that.
	Like, there is that guy.
	Look at him in the high-vis, the big guy, by the post.
	Listen to the fans shouting this thing.
	It's funny.
	Chains in the morning, chains in the morning, chains in the morning.
	You've got to chase in the morning.
	I've got that in me.
	As much as he's got to just sort of stand there and listen to that.
	It's enjoyable, it's fun.
	I love the commitment to that.
	And one person will have just said it and other people join in.
	Yeah, it's incredible.
	That's what's beautiful about it.
	It is beautiful.
	It's one of the things that's beautiful.
	And also, I don't feel like what's Underline that.
	Yeah, let's destroy this guy and hurt him.
	No, I think it isn't.
	It's playful.
	It's fun.
	And the amazing thing about that, just to come full circle, is when you have these modern grounds where you can't get anywhere near the bloody pitch anymore, you don't have situations like that.
	In fact, it's...
	Even its architecture is sanitary if you think of the feeling of the London Stadium.
	It's sort of low, there are no enclaves, there are no sudden little ghettos of dank darkness where culture might brew in that mushroom fungal environment.
	Hey listen, we're going to do the rest of this show over on locals now and after that we're going to look at a very very nice footballer, Declan Rice.
	On the show tomorrow we're going to be looking at RFK's Fauci claims, you're going to love that.
	We're going to be looking at succession and what he can tell us about the role of media in elections and is succession unwittingly a kind of a tool for the liberal assumption that there are goodies and baddies in the old school way.
	We'll also be talking to former MI5 intelligence officer Annie Mashon.
	Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.

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