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Aug. 29, 2012 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:01:42
Edition 90 - Gregory Sams

This time we talk with theorist, self-styled change agent and wholefood pioneer Gregory Samsabout Chaos Theory – how and why – things really do have a habit of falling into place!

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you for coming back to the show.
Thank you for the great emails that I've had recently.
Some very supportive, very good ones that I've had in many from brand new listeners in places right across the United States and the United Kingdom.
Thank you for those, but wherever you are, thank you.
Benckley, a recent emailer in Australia, thank you to you for yours, and also regular emailers like Ed.
Good to hear from you again, Ed.
But a lot of emails, and I will do some shout-outs on a future show.
I've just got to collate all this material.
Some very good guest suggestions that I'm getting into as well.
They are always welcome.
And like I said on an earlier edition, maybe we should put the pressure on some of the bigger name guests, the people who maybe think that they're too big to go on an online show.
And if you could email them too and suggest they come on here if you like this show, then maybe we're going to get somewhere with some of these people.
You know, I've had some very big name guests on here.
One or two of them are reluctant to go on online shows, which is something we have to persuade them about because online is the future.
With the mainstream media consolidating all the time, it may be getting bigger.
The companies are getting bigger, but the operations are getting smaller.
Shows like this are vital, and I think a lot of content is going to move online.
And that will provide great opportunities for people like me who are doing independent shows, I think, because the future is pretty much there.
Now, the guest this time is a man very different from other guests that we've had here, but I think he's got an important message at the moment.
His name is Gregory Sands.
He's based in London.
Made his fortune, if you can call it that, I guess you can, in the whole food and good eating industries.
Before they were even an industry, this man is a pioneer of some household names here in the UK.
Very interesting man, but a man with a social conscience and a man who thinks about the way things are organized.
He got into a thing called chaos theory that he'll be talking about here on this show.
Gregory Sams is a great listener, so please stay here for that.
Like I say, if you want to get in touch with the show or make a vital donation to it, we very, very much at the moment, especially with the way things are, we could do with any contributions that you might be able to make to the show.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv and there you can do that.
All right, let's get to the guests now.
It is Gregory Sams in London, England.
And Gregory, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
Hey, Ken, it's a pleasure to be here, Howard.
Now, you're a man with a very comprehensive and fascinating life story and biography.
You have a fabulous biography that gives all the details of the things that you've done.
By the looks of it, your story started with you starting, running, maintaining, and developing a business that was in a pioneering field back in the 1970s and 1980s, and that's organic and whole foods, which, you know, if you were in London, they were much more accepted than they were in Liverpool where I was brought up, where you would really have to search for those kinds of things.
I do remember there was one place in Liverpool that sold them, you know, as a sort of lunchtime place, and all the business people used to go there on the quiet.
By and large, though, London was the place to do this, wasn't it back then?
Well, it was.
I mean, my brother and I opened up a restaurant back in 1968, Seed, that was the first and only restaurant selling natural and organic foods, brown rice, seaweeds, soya products, sesame seeds, chickpeas.
Natural foods comprised the menu, and it was completely strange stuff to people.
And we were pushing the concept that what you ate affected your health, which people, you know, a lot of people think you're crazy to suggest such a thing.
It just wasn't in the mindset.
And it was part of the hippie movement, the cool countercultural London of the late 60s and early 70s.
So that was our clientele.
But it rapidly sort of spread out into larger society.
We had to open up a shop.
I opened up a shop so that people could buy brown rice and chickpeas and the things we were serving in a restaurant somewhere.
And then the shop, because I had to import large quantities of some of the things in order to obtain them, because there was no suppliers in the UK, we started to wholesale to other shops.
So that created Harmony Foods and Whole Earth Foods and started to manufacture some products like peanut butter and out of stone flour, milted milk flour.
And it was a very big warehouse.
And yeah, the idea caught on.
People ate the foods.
Their lives were improved by eating stuff that was part of Mother Earth, something that had been alive not that long ago and still has qualities to it.
People felt better, so they told their friends about it and kept doing it, whatever the people in white coats, however much they dismissed it.
You know, in America, there was an article on calling this the killer diet.
You were threatening your health by straying from hamburgers.
I suppose if you were a conspiracy theorist, you would see the heavy hand of commerce behind articles like that, wouldn't you?
Well, yeah, there's a lot of that now, but at the time, it was just alien.
And I was on TV in Grenada against this fabulous guy, Bill Weeks, who was a leading nutritionist at the time.
And we got on very well.
But I presented the natural foods.
And at the end of it, he said, well, I've got to concede, Greg, that, you know, there's nothing dangerous about this diet.
But of course, I can't accept that it's any better than a diet of hamburger and chips or picky chips.
So on one hand, I'll say, you're not doing anything terribly wrong.
But on the other hand, I'm going to say that you're not doing anything fantastically right.
And he wasn't in the pockets of anybody.
We had drinks later in the Piccadilly Hotel late into the night.
We got on really well.
But that was just the mindset now, of course.
But of course, before I went on the program, they said, the programmer said, don't say anything bad about white bread because the white flour industry was very litiginous and they would sue them if they did.
So they just said, please don't knock white bread.
Boy.
And I think the place where you were doing that interview, I think there were an awful lot of bakers back In the day, before everything got consolidated in the way that it is today.
The question I would ask you, and being a journalist, I suppose I'm supposed to ask questions like this, so I will.
If living this way and eating this way was so right back then, how come today more people aren't doing it?
Well, in those days, you know, we used to turn over a few hundred thousand pounds a year, got up to a million or two.
And that was pretty much most of the natural food, whole food industry in Europe was our little company.
Now you're talking billions of pounds and a few billion dollars in America.
So it is a big industry.
And, I mean, at one point, 99% of the sesame seeds sold in this country were on hamburger buns.
Yeah, well, we made an impact on that ratio.
I'm not quite sure what the figure is now.
I've got to say that I'm like an awful lot of people, and especially those of us who've worked over the years in the media, you do tend to eat a lot of fast foods, you exist on a lot of stress, and then every so often when you have a health problem, you get religion, which I've done a few times, and I've cut the coffee.
In fact, I've got a great big mug of black coffee right in front of me now, so I shouldn't talk about this.
But you cut the coffee out.
I instantly go out, which I've done today, and buy herbal tea.
You know, I love peppermint tea in particular.
It's very cleansing, I find.
But then, unfortunately, when I have my little detoxes, because I get a bit afraid of stuff, I lapse and I go back to my old ways and I eat the fast foods and drink the coffee and, you know, enjoy the Chardonnay and it's just the same as it was.
How can you, when you're on this path, and we will get onto your core subject in just a moment, when you get onto this path of improving the way that you eat, which is so fundamental to all of us, I do believe that.
How can you stay on the path?
Willpower, I suppose.
Willpower and also recognizing the connection between what you're eating and not just your health, but your state of mind.
I became a vegetarian when I was 10.
I stopped in my mid-20s.
And I would just occasionally have a bit of meat when I go out with friends to an Italian restaurant.
And I was running a 55,000 square foot warehouse with 40-odd staff, lots of stuff going on, lots of stuff going wrong.
And I could notice that when I went into work for the next day or two after eating some meat, I would respond to crises in a much more negative, fuck, heck, what's going on?
These bastards, you know, what are they doing?
Instead of just dealing with it.
And is that because the meat is stuffed with hormones and chemicals?
Well, it's not just stuffed with hormones and chemicals, but we share 95% plus of our genes with those, with pigs, cows, and sheep.
What so you can see by consuming those things, which I do.
They are absolutely filled with fear and horror as they approach slaughtering in the slaughterhouse.
And you think that affects us?
Well, that pumps out hormones that are identical or very similar to the hormones that are in our bodies when we experience stress.
I mean, they create insulin comes from pigs.
Hormone replacement therapy for women comes from horses because those hormones work in humans, too.
And Gregory, what about those companies that say that, you know, we have nice arrangements for slaughtering the animals?
You know, we have to slaughter them anyway, but we do it nicely.
Does that make any difference?
I think it does.
Yeah, there's a new slaughtering technique for cattle, which isn't very much in use, but some people do, and it's an S-bend.
And they get the sort of the head cow, if you like, the alpha cow, goes into this, and there's an S-type of a curve.
And the cows are curious, so the other cows sort of follow it.
And when they get to the end, you know, they are stunned, dropped through a chute, and then the killing and slaughtering takes place.
So the cows never know what's about to hit them.
And so they're not pumped full of all that stress and angst and hormones.
Well, that certainly sounds a lot better from their point of view.
And by the sounds of it from our point of view, I can remember my dad when I was a kid.
I've no idea why he did this, but he had a friend who worked at a chicken processing production plant in Liverpool.
And we went to see this thing.
And I was absolutely horrified.
You know, I must have been 12 or 13 or so.
I was horrified by seeing them go around on this curtain rail.
Conveyor belt thing.
Conveyor belt thing.
But I still eat chicken.
You see, this is the problem.
We are all, those of us who eat meat, we are all compromised, I think.
I eat organic chicken because I know they've had a better life.
And with the slaughtering techniques, to me, you're giving, the reason the animal is alive is because we're going to eat it.
So from one point of view, cows, pigs, chickens have done really well evolutionary.
They're really very successful as species by linking themselves by being eaten by us.
Conversely, as it is.
But if they're giving their life to us, we should at least let them die and not in horror and freaking out.
We should give them a nice death, at least, and preferably a nice life as well.
And the problem is, as most of us, you know, rush into work or rushing from work and we grab whatever product we grab and stuff it into our mouths, we probably would prefer not to think about that.
Yeah, well, there's lots of things people don't think about.
Well, listen, you had these very, very successful business strands, and there are a few of them.
And, you know, it looked like not quite the case because there are a couple of little cul-de-sacs there on the road.
But it seemed to me that in developing that business, everything that you touched turned to gold, partly because you were first in the field, and obviously because you were good at it.
So what brought you on to thinking about the nature of life, the world, and everything, which is what you're much into now?
Well, I get bored with doing the same thing all the time.
And I did the little natural organic foods, a bit of a millstone around my neck with its success.
And I left and I set out with a new product, which was the very first ever Veggie Burger, which I coined the term for that product.
And that was successful.
I ran it as a virtual business.
And when I sold that six years later, I left the food trade.
I said, that's enough, because the more successful you get in the food trade, the more suits you're dealing with.
And eventually I thought I was going to become a suit myself, and that way I didn't want to go.
So I sold that, and actually took a two-year advance installment on my retirement.
And this is at the age of 40, and I had a lot of fun for a couple of years.
And then there's a New Zealand artist, Howie Cook, told me about Chaos Theory.
And I read a book about Chaos Theory.
And six months later, I opened a shop dedicated to it, selling all sorts of fractal images.
But that was because I saw how important Chaos Theory was.
Which I saw in your biography, and I have to say, I never came across the shop dedicated to chaos theory, but an amazing step to take.
And I just thought the understanding of chaos theory was hugely important to us as our society and our civilization to see how successfully things do organize from the bottom up.
Okay, so for those who don't know what it is, I can remember touching on it in a few university lectures years and years ago, but only touching on it.
Let's explain what it is.
It is the, when you have a chaotic system where all the parts with lots of an uncountable number of components, all of which are acting unpredictably and independently, you get an order arising, a stability.
So in a weather system, it's all those water molecules and the heat and the pressure and the wind speed.
You can't predict any of that, but they organize into something stable.
Same in a rainforest.
Nobody plots where the frogs and the rivers and the trees go, where it's going to rain and when.
But it organizes into this really stable interlocking system until we come along with our bulldozers.
And even in humanity, you see, you know, two bicycle mechanics in Ohio, the Wright brothers, invented the airplane, kind of for kicks.
But, you know, humanity self-organized this into international airline industries.
You can fly all over the world now in different sized planes.
And that's this sort of self-organization.
It's even feeding a city the size of New York or London is a miracle because nobody's planning it, yet all these millions of inhabitants manage to get fed what they want and what they can afford every day.
Well, in that instance, in the instance of New York or London, no single central hand is doing this, of course not, unless you believe there is some kind of higher power behind it all.
But it's lots of individuals all motivated to a common end.
And you see, what I saw from that, that's chaos theory at work.
And then you see when you put the deterministic thing into effect, when the government thinks, as they did in Russia and the Soviet Union, food is so important that we've got to control it.
We will run the agriculture.
We'll run the food industry.
There was nothing on the shelves.
And farmers starved.
So chaos theory, from the way that you describe it, is just the free market.
Well, it's free enterprise.
It's letting people self-organize and do things, which we've been doing really well for 35,000 years.
But what happens when the free market in its completely natural state becomes what we have today, where you get businesses agglomerating and conglomerating into massive, massive outfits.
And so often we find them becoming actually not more efficient, but less efficient.
Where does that fit in?
That's absolutely right.
But we don't have a free market or free enterprise at this time.
You know, you cannot stand on a cigarette corner, I'm sorry, on a street corner and sell cigarettes out of a packet one by one.
This was a revelation to me when I was in Morocco in a cafe, and there was a kid on the street, 16 years old, selling cigarettes individually.
And he was in business for himself for the price of a packet of cigarettes.
And smokers could just buy one cigarette instead of a whole pack, which was, to me, I said, wow, why could that never happen on the streets of London or New York?
Because we're so controlled.
And really, to do business, you have to be a large corporation.
But that's part of the evolution.
I can remember when I was a school kid, and we're talking about the 70s now, and we're talking about the start of it all in the early 70s, where you could go to one of the sweet shops locally where I used to live in Liverpool, and they'd been around for decades.
Probably the people who are running those were coming to the end of their careers, but they were doing things the way they'd always done them.
And if you'd wanted to buy one sweet for a penny, you could.
They also used to sell cigarettes singly.
Not that we're advocating anybody should be smoking these days, but I understand the principle.
But there is now so much control that it's really hard for an individual to set up a business.
You've got to understand VAT, bookkeeping, employment regulations, all these different regulations.
And it's not like all these regulations bring us healthy, safe food.
There's more people in hospital than ever with nutritionally related diseases.
So you seem to me, Gregory, and it is fact, I'm totally riveted by what you're saying to me, but you seem to be implying that the best state for us all is not to have a state at all, is not to have a government, not to have all the bureaucracy, not to have all this nanny organization that we have, and we will somehow find our own level.
Well, my first book, in fact, is titled Uncommon Sense, and an homage to Thomas Paine, Uncommon Sense, the State is Out of Date.
And I really do make that point in that book.
And I also suggest that if 60 to 70% of the money that we create as a society each year was still in our pockets and not sucked into the state, we would not have nearly so much homelessness,
hunger, unemployment, and despair as we do today because that's how much when you add all the taxes together, the charges to park in front of your own street, the sort of computerized fines when you go over the speed limit.
When you add these together, it's a massive chunk taken out.
Gregory, have you been to Africa?
I've been to Africa, yeah.
All right, well, you know, I know Africa pretty well, and you've been to Africa.
When I go to Africa, I see there a very free situation in many cases, depending on what country you go to.
But the people who are poor are desperately poor.
I mean, many of them are very happy, even though they are desperately poor.
And many of the people who have wealth in this natural, less organized system than ours, do not pass it on to the people who don't have wealth.
There's an example of a free market that doesn't, to my eyes, when I've seen it, although the people at the bottom end of the scale are often happier than people at the bottom end of the scale here.
But it doesn't seem to be functioning in the way that you were talking about that.
I'm not sure what the picture would have been like.
I'm not saying it was different, but it would have been like in the 19th century before Africa was colonized and carved up.
I know you had tribes who would fight each other.
There was conflict.
But I really, you know, we have had a huge impact on changing different societies.
India used to be a major world trading partner.
I think it was either a third or a quarter of world trade went through India before England went in and really ripped it off and just brought or sucked all that wealth into the UK.
Then India became regarded as a third world nation.
You go there now, there still is a lot of poverty.
But they were doing well.
But force of arms, guns, steel does have an impact, however well organized you are socially.
I mean, one area in our own society here where this theory might apply very well is, and it's something very close to me at the moment, is the way that we look after our old people.
You know, in third world countries, it's still, in many of them, a bit of a duty.
It's just a natural duty that you will look after your parents, that they will look after their parents, and so it goes.
In our society, we don't do that.
I know.
There's a fantastic thing called community.
Human beings are really good at it.
We are community animals, not single predators animals.
And we're really well equipped to look after ourselves and our families.
But in the 19th, early 20th century, with the best will in the world, a lot of people thought, well, these things are so important, looking after the homeless, the poor, the unemployed, that the government should be taking care of it.
And there were a lot of industrialists and people who set up charitable organizations then, but that all sort of faded away when the government took over to look after it.
And I give it the credit, it was with the best will in the world, but it was, again, top-down deterministic control instead of organizing from the bottom up.
And we now have a system where in England it costs 500,000 pounds.
That's about $700,000 per year to keep a child in care because the state thinks this child must be protected from his parents.
£500,000 a year.
You can put six children through a top private school for the same price.
But if we didn't do that, how would that child be looked after?
What would happen to it?
Well, the curious thing is, these children they're looking after and that they decide every year roughly 10,000 need to be taken into care is matched by another figure that is within the care system where there are 80 or 90,000 children.
The police estimate that as many as 10,000 a year, same number, go missing, unaccounted for.
They disappear from the system.
Whether they're dead, kidnapped, run away, gone home, they don't know.
So what is really going on there?
It's so important they take kids into care because we have scandals occasionally when some child suffers horribly and the care authority should have known about it.
And you have a system where kids disappear.
Now in a community where people know each other and somebody's really abusing their children, you know, society might take care of it.
People might rebuke them, you know, you don't know.
But of course, society, I think that's great.
And I'm a total believer in community.
And as a kid growing up in Liverpool, we had a certain amount of that still.
I don't think it exists there now, but it did then.
However, you get problems like a very well-reported one a few years ago that I'm sure you'll remember here in the UK, where a guy who was a pediatrician working for children, the people living in his community mistook that for paedophile and they went round in a kind of lynch mob to get the guy who needed to be protected, quite wrongly.
Now, that was a community working not as well as it ought to.
Well, yeah, you get people on the streets in America shooting Sikhs because they think they're Muslims, which is appalling.
That does happen.
Not that anybody should shoot anybody else for any reason other than infractions of the law in circumstances where that cannot be avoided.
That does happen.
And we can pick out lots of things that society does, that people do, that aren't good, but they tend to be much more self-correcting than things that are happening within the state.
When you get people in industries, whether it's supermarkets or chains who have been found to be embezzling funds or who've been stealing things, they tend to get sacked and thrown out.
In government, many of them just get promoted or sidelined.
Yep, until, of course, the scandal becomes so big that the government or whichever organization it is can't ignore it.
True enough.
As we've seen time and time again.
What is the power driving chaos theory then?
What is the dynamic behind the natural order that allows things mostly to find their own level?
What do you think drives it?
This really leads into my new book, my most recent book, which is called Son of God, S-U-N Of God.
And it talks about the self-organizing principle that underlies, or consciousness that underlies everything.
And it's really, I put it down to consciousness as being that which allows things to self-organize.
And I, by recognizing the sun as a conscious entity, which seems like a really strange out there idea, as did, you know, food affecting our health all those years ago.
But it's an idea that was the most common idea on the planet before Christianity and the Roman Empire got together.
And that's undeniable if you look at Hinduism.
You know, it is based on the sun, isn't it?
The sun is a key symbol.
It's a major Hindu god and God of the sun.
And it doesn't matter whether you're looking at Celtic England, the Mayans or the Cherokees in America or the Japanese, wherever you went in the world, people saw the source of the light of life as enjoying life itself.
This brought us everything we know.
Everything we are came through stars because we started off with nothing but hydrogen gas.
And we try and kid ourselves that we are bigger than all of this now, and we have everything under control.
But of course, it only takes a major solar flare to knock out power grids, communications, and everything that we depend on.
Yeah, and we do.
We think, you know, in this 13.7 billion-year-old universe, that we're the only example of consciousness and intelligence.
And we try and explain everything else away as being absolutely accidental happenstance.
And it's a very arrogant attitude, and it's not even a very scientific attitude.
We tend to view that as being scientific, but scientists before the Roman Catholic Church used to feel free to study spiritual matters and investigate the nature of spirit.
Even Isaac Newton, his main work was as an alchemist, studying the spirit of matter, not the mechanics of it.
But the church suppressed all of that because they had a monopoly on spirituality.
They didn't want other people studying it or looking at it.
And it became a taboo for science to look at that.
And they still maintain that taboo, even though the church doesn't have the power to burn them if they break that instruction anymore.
Okay, one half of the title of your new book, Son of God, Discover the Self-Organizing Consciousness That Underlies Everything.
One half of it, I understand.
That's the second half.
Discover the self-organizing consciousness.
But I don't understand where the sun comes into it.
Can you explain?
Well, the sun is our local representative of the light force.
I mean, light, electromagnetic energy, is one of the four fundamental forces of the universe.
And it's the all-pervading one.
It's in the electro, the virtual electrons, sorry, the virtual photons that circle every electron rotating around every atom in existence.
It's permeating every point of space.
Every time you can see a galaxy from some point in deep space, photons of light are permeating that area.
And it is what stars do is create light.
They create light out of matter.
They also turn hydrogen into all the elements of the periodic table, which enables things like planets and people and trees and rocks to exist.
And then they store, you know, the light from the sun is stored in plants and trees.
And that is, when we eat plants, that is the energy that is then recycled as life.
Well, that's photosynthesis that they teach us about in school to some extent, anyway.
But that's science, isn't it?
is that the hidden hand that guides everything?
Well, that's when I, the When I then looked at the science, everything I could see about it, about the sun and the behavior of stars, supported that concept.
And as I was, what I'm saying is that when we eat the foods, the energy created through photosynthesis, the energy that we're absorbing and expressing as life is solar energy.
So we're recycling sunlight as life.
And we're not going to be able to do that.
And yet we don't recognize the source of it as anything but a dead ball of gas.
And in fact, the science that shows us now that our sun has seven different layers to it.
They're all totally different composition.
Some of them turn around each other at different speeds.
It's permeated with electromagnetic fields.
There's a magnetic portal that connects Earth to sun.
It's the diameter of the Earth, comes out of the Earth's electromagnetic field, and comes out of the corona, which is the Sun's external electromagnetic field.
And they join up every eight minutes.
Tons of high-energy particles come through them.
This was discovered by NASA in 2010.
And the fact is we're discovering more about the Sun all the time.
We're able to see it better because of the optics that we have these days, the opticals we have these days.
But I don't understand, apart from having more respect for the sun, which is always a good thing, bearing in mind how important it is to our life, I don't understand what difference this makes to everything.
It's recognizing where we come from.
There have been two religions in the history of the planet that recognized light as the ultimate God, worshipped the ultimate deity, worshipped the sun and fire as representatives of the light force.
And the prominent one of these was Zoroastrianism.
Zoroastrianism, out of this recognition of light Came a very enlightened religion.
I suppose that was the question that I was too Britishly polite to ask you just a moment ago.
Knowing this then, what we're talking about now, what should we do about it?
I mean, as a society, as a bunch of people on the earth.
When you recognize the nature of light, you recognize that the sun itself is an agent, a divine agent of that life force.
And when you look at how the sun, how this consciousness of the sun comes about, you realize it takes you to the recognition, it's kind of inevitable, that consciousness pervades everything.
That we're not the only living part of the universe, we're just one part of a living universe.
And when you understand that we share that faculty, it does give us a lot more respect for the world.
We don't treat the world as a storecupboard designed specifically for human benefit.
So do you believe that we are existing here on this planet with our consciousness in some kind of synchronicity, synchronism with the sun?
Yeah, we're part of a universal consciousness, and the most direct link for that to us is the sun.
And it also lets you let go of this inbuilt mindset that came from the biblical perspective of the whole earth being created, that we had domain over every creeping,
crawling thing, every rock, every tree on earth, which enables us to go out and blow up mountain, destroy a whole mountain and whole oceans to sort of suck things out of them for our own usage and not realize, as ancient civilizations did, that we're part of the world.
We can communicate with it and we can work with it.
And working with it is much more beneficial to us than just ravaging it.
Do you believe that the solar system, as we understand it now, is almost like a machine then?
The sun is a big part of the machine, and we're another part of the machine, and we're all turning in perfect harmony.
Yeah, I wouldn't use the term machine unless you want to speak figuratively, but certainly the sun's, the extended spinning off of the sun's corona is this, it's a giant electromagnetic bubble that spirals out and it creates the heliosphere.
Now, there's a whole bubble of electromagnetic field from the sun which embraces the solar system.
So we all travel through the galaxy in this, in the sun's bubble, and all the planets are actually spiraling through space as they orbit the sun and move through it.
It's not like a straight line movement.
And yeah, it's like we're one family.
And the sun is in the middle of that.
Now, I don't know what purpose or why stars have planets, how that figures, what they get out of it.
But it is a living system.
So once you understand that you're part of this much bigger whole and that's how the whole works, what difference does it make to our lives?
Or should it?
It gives our lives a perspective.
It gives us understanding of who we are, what we are, why we are.
It's like eating organic natural foods.
It makes us healthier.
And, you know, from a physical point of view, and understanding where we come from makes us spiritually healthier, happier, higher, more intuitive, more understanding, more generous.
I've got a lot of time for what you're saying, Gregory, but I think there will be people who are going to email me because they always do and say, how do you know that?
Well, let me just talk about the linguistic body language because we use our language without really thinking about why.
But when we understand something, we see the light, and that might be because somebody's been shedding light on the subject.
And the most, you know, the total understanding of everything is called enlightenment.
And we talk about divine light.
We speak of the light in somebody's eyes when they're really being inspired.
When we leave our body, the lights go up.
When we're really excited, we're all lit up or fired up.
You know, when we're really happy, we're delighted.
We call intelligent people bright.
Great ideas and thoughts are brilliant, especially brilliant ideas are dazzling.
True enough.
We use light throughout our language to express intelligence, spirituality, good things, the forces of light versus the forces of darkness.
So we intuitively understand the nature of light, but we don't bring that into our actual lives and appreciate it.
So if we do build that into our daily lives and our consciousness here on this planet, you believe that things would organize themselves a little better down here?
Well, and that, yes.
And if we took some more responsibility for our lives and recognized that as much as we would like the state to look after our health and look after the safety of food and make sure the environment is clean, they're not doing it.
They're the ones giving the subsidies to the farmers who mow down the rainforests.
They're the ones building the roads into the rainforest to take raw materials out.
And we just say, well, we need more government, more controls.
Yeah, we'll give them more money to look after our problems.
And they come up with things like biofuels.
And biofuels use more energy to create than they produce.
And we have 40% of the American corn crop, which is a huge amount of food, is being fed to cars as ethanol instead of human beings and driving up food prices to starvation.
And the government is not good at dealing with the major problems of the world because they're generally behind them.
And yet I heard a guy on some American radio station earlier this week once again espousing the greatness in his eyes and brain of growing lots of crops like They do in South America to stick into the fuel tanks of cars.
He said that was the way forward, so we didn't have to be dependent.
I'm talking about the United States now, on the Arab oil.
Well, there's a case, you know, sugar cane production in Brazil for fuel is efficient.
You end up getting more out than you put in.
You certainly don't in America with the corn crop, which is a much bigger source of so-called biofuels.
I mean, in Europe, as you know, the common agricultural fisheries policy thought we've got to sort of look after fish stocks and get a firm grip on this before we run out of fish.
And the result of their legislation is that half of the fish fishermen catch is thrown overboard dead because of the quota system.
And if they're fishing for, if they're allowed to catch so many cod and they get a lot of other fish as well, they have to throw them out.
It's illegal.
But how do you, in that specific example, though, if we were going to a more free market, how would you stop great big industrial Spanish trawlers coming up into our waters here?
And I don't want to sound jingoistic and very British about this, but coming up into our waters and fishing out the stocks that our own smaller scale fishermen want to be able to get hold of in the way that they always used to.
It's a good question.
But I just also say that's happening already.
Fish stocks are being depleted.
But the regulations, such as they are, and I'm not a big one for European regulations, you know, I don't think it's the greatest operation in the world.
People will disagree with me about that.
But it's one way of control.
It's one method of trying to get a handle on a situation.
Otherwise, in the case of cod, for example, we just won't have any.
Well, we are.
It hasn't gotten a handle on it.
Cod are declining.
Not in Iceland, because they have self-regulated in Iceland.
They've restricted their cod catches because from the fishing industry point of view, it doesn't make much sense to wipe out the fish.
But that might happen.
I do know one good spin-off from the Second World War was that fish stocks rebounded.
Yes.
Now, when I was studying economics many, many years ago, not as the, to use the phrase again, the brightest student of it in the world, I don't think, at that time, but our teacher always used to quote to us, because it was the 1970s, somebody called Schumacher, who was very big in the late 1970s.
And I remember Schumacher.
The only thing I remember about Schumacher is that Schumacher's theory was that small is beautiful.
That was his book, yeah.
And that was the great thing.
And it made a hell of a lot of sense to me that if we took everything back to its roots, if we started organizing ourselves as communities once more, life would be a hell of a lot better.
This seems to me to be what you're saying.
I am, yes.
And it's not just theory and sky thinking.
In the early medieval period, in the 15th century, there were a few hundred cities in Europe that were independent cities.
They were not beholden to a duke or a lord or a king.
They were thus termed peasants.
It was all peasants, but businessmen, traders, a whole society.
And in Florence, you had as hospitals, they had schools, they had universities.
They organized on a street level, then streets, the blocks, in different areas.
The tradesmen had guilds, whether they were jewelers or builders.
There were guilds and tailors, so you knew you were getting good quality stuff.
And if somebody was selling bad clothes or dangerous bread, they get thrown out of the guild.
It was a self-regulating system because we're really good at doing that.
And my ancestors come from a place in Germany that was also a free, what's now Germany.
It used to be Dittmartian, and that was a free country for several centuries.
And they had no prisons, no police, no standing army, and they did really well.
They outcompeted all the neighboring peasants who had lords and dukes because it was just cheaper to do it.
So it can be done.
But the process was frozen 100 years ago.
And it's been progressively frozen as the government takes over more and more things.
It says it's so vital that they have to run it.
And we don't, you know, I suggest that the evolution of business and trade would have been much more wholesome and beneficial had the guild system continued than had the government decided to regulate it all.
Now, we can reflect on all of this, of course, and it is fascinating and very, very interesting to reflect on, but I would imagine that these issues are not going to be brought into sharper focus unless an event brings them there, which makes me think that over this year I've talked to a lot of psychics and scientists, and a lot of these people seem to agree, even though they do vastly different things, that we are heading for some kind of crisis, a banking crisis, a planetary crisis, you know, very, very soon.
It does look like the smoke and mirrors is about to run out.
And certainly, and that is, I'm actually busy at the moment upgrading that first book on common sense for today, because if we face sovereign bankruptcy, there's a situation where the state actually runs out of money.
And they haven't got any money to pay themselves.
They haven't got any money to give away to needy people.
And they're just not there.
And that is the situation where we should really not look at it as a horror story, but look at it as a situation to establish a system that works and that works long term and that self-corrects as it needs to, rather than waiting years for the government to pass a law because enough people have been lobbying it.
Society is much more rapidly responding than that.
Trouble is that if those sorts of problems happen and human beings, not all of them, but some of them, isn't it likely that instead of when the big financial collapse comes, people are not going to say, okay, well, here's time for us to organize a much better society.
What they're going to do is collect a handful of bricks, throw them through the windows of shops, and take whatever they can.
That's the problem, isn't it?
Well, I think it depends on whether they read my book or not.
Well, I think they should read your book.
But I do think that it might not all be people rampaging mobs in the streets when this happens.
It depends where you are, perhaps.
But we are better at helping each other out and organizing in times of crisis.
We are good at that.
And there was a bank strike.
It was just a bank strike, but you couldn't use the banks.
Gosh, it was about 30 years ago in Ireland.
And people managed.
They traded fish for petrol, all sorts of things, but life went on.
And in Baghdad, when the U.S. hit it with everything in 2003, Operation Shock and All, for 10 days was designed to knock out all the infrastructures of communication, of transport, of power, of food production, and even the sewage works.
And 10 days, they just blitzed all of that.
But life continued.
Within a few days, life was not back to normal, but it was back to fine, and everybody was getting on with it because we're really good at that stuff.
Truth is that, you know, I come from things from a journalists and news perspective, only because that's, you know, what I've done for a large portion of my life for a living, for better or worse.
But I fear that we're heading for something not great.
We're heading for a great big shakeout.
That's what I think we're headed for.
And a lot of these predictions of the banking system going down, of governments being challenged and all the rest of it, a lot of this is right.
And I also feel and fear, but it's only a gut feeling, but the news keeps confirming it to me, that we're being not exactly lied to, but we're being misled about the scale of the problem by our politicians.
If that is the case, as I and many other people fear it is, what kind of plans should we be making now?
Based on what you've written and what you know.
Well, I've just put solar panels on my roof recently so I can survive.
I mean, that's very laudable.
A lot of us can't afford to.
I know, I know.
I think the first thing to do is to stop expecting the state to sort it out.
Because that's why we are where we are.
We've just given them so much more power and so much more money that we have so fewer resources.
But the problem is for right now, in most of the countries like the United Kingdom, the United States, if you take matters into your own hands, they put you in jail.
There was a couple in America, I forgot their names now, a husband and wife team, and they didn't pay their taxes.
And they got threatened with fire and brimstone for not paying their taxes, for on a matter of principle, not paying their taxes.
I don't know what happened to them.
There were a couple who were killed.
The father was killed because he wouldn't let his child go to school.
And they sent in a SWAT team to get the child, and the father protested he was shot.
That's the coercive state.
But if the state and the mechanisms of it, the banking system and all the rest of it, if they start to break down, then those of us who live our reasonably comfortable little suburban lives, we better be making a plan.
Yeah, it could and probably will get scary and desperate.
And, you know, we don't want to.
I'm going to add these words.
I don't want a scaremonger here.
I mean, this is a fear, and I might well be wrong, and so might you.
This stuff may not happen.
None of it may happen.
But, you know, I have a feeling that some of it might well, and possibly before the end of this year.
But we will see about that.
I've given a fair amount of thought, though, lately, because I've had time to think about it.
What would I do?
You know, what would I do about there's so much stuff that I don't know about self-sufficiency, about organizing myself.
I just haven't bothered to confront those things.
And I've allowed society and the way things work to support me and everything that I've done.
And that's how it is.
But what would happen if life as we knew it began to fall apart?
I don't know.
And I'm sure I'm not alone.
No, you're not alone.
And we could be a third world country in 10 or 20 years.
And as you touched on earlier, when I first went to third world countries, Morocco and Nepal in the 80s, what really amazed me is everybody seemed to be smiling.
And when people passed each other in the street, they would always make eye contact.
That's utterly true.
I can remember being high up in the Dragonsberg Mountains in South Africa many times.
And I think things have changed a little bit now.
I think they've got a few more facilities.
But, you know, in the years just after Mandela, things were as they had been for hundreds of years.
And you would drive through these little villages by the roadside, ribbon developments by the road, and there would be people living in mud huts, most of which didn't have a television aerial back then.
These were people who were just living a very basic existence.
And they would all come out of the mud huts, and they weren't looking for money or anything.
They were just interested to see what was coming through town.
I say town.
And they were all smiling.
Yeah.
You know, we are not as totally dependent on electricity, running water, supermarkets as we think we are.
And I used to have a beach cottage in Goa that cost me a thousand pounds a year to rent, which wasn't much.
And I'd spend a few months there in the winters.
And I didn't have electricity.
I didn't have telephones.
I didn't have running water.
Food was a long way away to get.
But everything was fine.
But what about the mechanics of this organized society that we have?
For example, the one that everybody quotes and I'll quote to you now because it's so important to me.
Here we are talking with all the modern panoply of technology.
I'm doing a show that is facilitated by modern technology.
I don't need a big broadcaster to put this out.
I was trained by the big broadcasters, but I can do this myself now.
What happens when all of that starts to break down?
We don't have the luxuries that we've become used to.
Well, there's only one way to find out, and that's see what happens.
It's a new situation.
We've never experienced sovereign bankruptcy.
I'm not entirely sure how they managed in Iceland and Argentina, but they seem to have managed.
Banks lost money, but they do seem to have managed.
And we don't know what's going on underneath the surface in the banking system.
We do know that a dollar is worth five cents 20 or 30 years ago.
Today's dollar is worth a nickel.
And it's curious that in Somalia, which has been a failed state for 20 years, the Somalian shilling is the most stable currency in the world.
And it's not based on anything, but there's nobody printing money.
Nobody's got the power to print money over there.
That has to be a fact that we need to wake up to, I would have thought, as we stare down the barrel of whatever we might be staring down the barrel.
And I have to say, for those of you who worry about these things, none of this may be correct.
None of these bad things that we suspect may happen.
None of them may happen.
Some of them may happen.
But the ultimate fact, I suppose, Gregory, is that even if some or all of them do happen, there's not a whole lot for right now we can do.
We need to be acting when they happen.
I mean, yeah, and if we function as human beings, as the sort of animal we actually are, which is cooperative and community-oriented, rather than top-down control people telling each other what to do and putting them in jail if they don't, if we can revert to true, to kind, we're much more equipped to deal with whatever poo hits the fan for the American disnaps.
Well, in this day and age, the local baron or squire is not going to come out of the woodwork and have you executed for your views.
But I'm just wondering how easy it will be for you to get this message out there, because the mainstream media hasn't had a whole lot to do with you.
I know you have had some contact with it.
You know, I'm not doing this part of the mainstream media.
How are you going to get this message out there?
And are you afraid of the consequences of doing what you're doing?
No.
When I've upgraded, the first book on Common Sense will go out on Kindle and download for either a dollar or a pound.
It's not going to be a high price because people aren't having to pay for books and bookstores and all of that.
And that's really, that's what I'm doing.
I mean, all my life I've been trying to chip away and do things to improve society and a lot of humanity on Earth.
And I realize with uncommon sense, the state is out of date.
It's a hard one for people to grab because people are so plugged in and dependent.
But do you think people, bearing in mind that a lot of unthinkable things have actually happened, things that we never thought could happen, they've actually happened and we're contemplating stuff that we never thought we'd have to contemplate.
Do you think people are more receptive these days because of that?
They are.
I've given a couple of lectures recently on that first book and people were surprisingly receptive to it because a lot of people have actually given up faith in the state sorting things out.
And they're not quite sure what to turn.
So they're really happy to hear how well human beings are at sorting things out when we really need to.
And in my little world, I have to say over these last five or six years, I'm rapidly losing faith in big corporations and big government.
Yeah, well, because it's not showing me anything that gives me any great hope.
Well, big corporations are taking over.
They're today's people running the controls of government, and they're then producing legislation, or the government is producing legislation which makes it harder for their competitors to start up.
The pharmaceutical industry has pushed through legislation that shuts down herbal remedies, natural remedies.
That's going on.
There was a time, and there are places where the military runs the government, or where the church runs the government, or when some powerful family dynasty runs the government.
Because when you have sort of organized, you could call it theft, you know, taking money by people and threatening them with damage if they don't give it to you, when you have that in place, all sorts of characters want to run it and handle the controls.
And today it's corporations, but it's not really the corporations that are the problem.
It's the fact that you have this institution which tells you what to do and threatens you with damage if you don't do it because that's not a good way to raise children.
It's not a way to treat your employees in a company.
It's not a good process.
Doing things through coercive threats doesn't usually achieve the results that you want, even if they're good results.
Even if you want to save the fish, save the planet, and you pass laws and regulations as your main tool, operating tool, you rarely get the results you want.
And that's, again, one of the points that chaos theory teaches us.
I can remember sitting in a lecture hall at my university in Liverpool many, many years ago, learning about some of these things.
And we used to use the example of the fire brigade, which is an oft-quoted example.
A fire brigade is something that has to be organized on a big community-wide scale.
And there has to be coercion to make the people who didn't want to pay for a fire brigade pay for it.
Because ideally, as human beings and rational in the way that we behave, most of us would say, well, I want a fire brigade locally, but I'd rather the guy next door pays for it.
We need coercion sometimes.
Well, a lot of your American listeners, I hope, will be emailing you on that point because throughout America, outside of the big cities, it's all volunteer fire brigades.
Is it?
I never realized.
I've been to America loads of times.
I had no idea.
It's all volunteer fire brigades.
And when the bell rings, the baker, the doctor, the nurse, they all run out and they, you know, and they've all, the community has chipped in together to buy the fire truck, and they're really proud of it.
And of course, in England, the entire, you know, life-saving Coast Guard is voluntary.
It's not government-funded.
And that still works.
And they go out and they save people and they don't waste money on more boats than they need.
I can remember when 9-11 happened.
And of course, we all have those visions of the wonderful New York firefighters, some of whom I was lucky enough to meet and interview.
But there were also people, and you're just putting this into my mind right now, like a guy I met who was from a little local community.
And as soon as he saw that horror that was 9-11, he raced up to New York to be part of it all.
Right, right.
So that, I suppose, is proof of your...
I think you have some fascinating things to say to us, Gregory.
I'd like you to see, I'd like you to get the platform to be able to get those ideas out there.
Because just like Schumacher and my dear old economics teacher all those years ago in Liverpool fired my imagination with Small is Beautiful, you fired my imagination with this, and I think you should get a bigger platform to say it.
I'm working on it, Howard.
Small is beautiful, people are beautiful.
Okay.
I don't know at all from your point of view whether we've covered the territory you wanted me to cover.
Is there anything else you'd like to say?
Well, my website is GregorySams.
That's S-A-M-S.com.
My entire, the unupdated version of my first book is online in its entirety or downloadable as a PDF.
And there's more information about Son of God and my early days in the natural food industry with my fractal activities and chaos theory and all of that.
It's all there.
Well, I think you have a lot to give to us, and I hope you continue to give it to us, Gregory.
Fascinating.
I've really, really enjoyed this hour talking with you.
I've got a problem now, though, because I have to write a little summary of the person that I'm talking to and what they're talking about.
I've no idea where to begin.
Can you give me a little bit of help with that?
You want me to shed some light on that, do you?
How would I sum you up in two sentences?
I have no idea.
I used to call myself, I still do, a change agent.
Lovely.
That'll do me fine.
And some people will say to me, you're not talking about UFOs this time round, and you're not talking about the work of Nikolai Tesla this time round, and you're not talking about earth changes this time round.
But I do think that what we've just talked about is pretty fundamental and needed to be talked about on this show.
So thank you very much, Gregory.
Great.
It's been a pleasure for me.
The thoughts and words of Gregory Sands.
They're based in London, a fascinating guest with some pretty interesting thoughts for this modern world, don't you think?
Let me know what you think about this show.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv, triple w dot theunexplained.tv, and you can leave me some feedback there or a guest suggestion or tell me what you think about how we're doing the show and how we might improve it.
Always good to hear from you.
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Martin, thank you again for the theme tune.
And above all, thank you to you for keeping the faith, for supporting me and for backing this show, The Unexplained.
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