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Oct. 20, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:38:05

Live Stream with Neil Oliver - What Has the World Become? Viva Frei Live!

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	Oil companies, OPEC, Saudi is not exactly eager to make sure prices are low before an election where Democratic candidates are vulnerable.
	It's also why Saudi Arabia might want to suddenly announce a cut in oil production right before the midterms.
	Of course, Democrats can't just throw their hands up and say, oh well, because the future of American democracy is in, as we report night in and night out on this program, real peril, existential peril.
	I don't know how much we can...
	One of the two major parties is currently under the thrall of the guy who tried a violent coup unsuccessfully, but has basically announced he'd do it all over again.
	If I want analysis, 60% of Americans will have an election denier on their ballot this November.
	I'll stop it there to save us all the gag reflex that would result from watching this two minutes of hate.
	I mean, it is literally Orwellian two minutes of hate.
	Coming out of Chris Hayes.
	And anybody watching that, do you not get the impression that Chris Hayes, by demeanor and by overall presentation, is trying to mimic Tucker Carlson?
	I'm noticing a distinct attempt to replicate the Tucker delivery, the Tucker formulation, the Tucker demeanor.
	He's just got one problem.
	He's nowhere near as smart as Tucker Carlson, and he's spewing.
	Spewing propaganda points out.
	I wanted to start with that because I couldn't really think of...
	I was going to start with a Neil Oliver clip, but we're going to have about 90 minutes of Neil Oliver real time, so I didn't want to spoil the surprise there.
	I was going to start with Justin Trudeau, but I think I punished the audience enough this week with Justin Trudeau clips.
	Today is going to be amazing.
	This is like one of those moments where the first time I met Robert Barnes online because of what we had both been doing...
	In the world, you know, it turned into an amazing relationship, but it was also just like, it was a spiritually satisfying moment for me when I did that first stream with Robert Barnes, Nate Brody, and now it's Neil Oliver, who I only got to know because of the madness of the world through which we are all collectively living.
	I listened to Neil speak.
	I call it intellectual poetry.
	He puts into words what I know people feel, but some lack the words or ability to put into the words themselves.
	And we've connected, and now he's going to be here today.
	I told him I was going to let everyone trickle in at the early part of the stream, do my intro, do my promo, because I've got to thank the sponsors now who have had the courage to sponsor a channel that engages in wrongthink, that engages in asking questions that apparently we're not allowed asking anymore.
	The small fringe minority with unacceptable views.
	And we're going to be talking a lot about the madness and the destruction that has been going on for the last two and a half years of our collective lives, which is a good segue into staying healthy and being healthy and thanking the sponsor of this particular stream, Field of Greens.
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	One spoonful, one serving, morning, evening.
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	Fieldofgreens.com.
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	It's not a supplement.
	It's not an extract.
	Made in America.
	And it's damn good.
	As everyone continues to trickle in.
	Oh, the link is in the description as well.
	As everyone continues to trickle in.
	Neil Oliver.
	Historian.
	I did not know this.
	I only knew Neil Oliver as another individual engaging in ostensible wrong think at a time where you're not allowed asking certain questions.
	You're not allowed saying certain things.
	I had no idea he was a historian, an archaeologist, an author, a documentarian.
	And that explains...
	Why he is able to so eloquently put into words what so many of us have, you know, storming around our heads.
	I like to see my vegetables.
	This is true, random roses.
	And you should not avoid eating vegetables and substitute it, but not everybody can eat their vegetables.
	When I was in Texas, I couldn't find vegetables.
	I couldn't find vegetables.
	No judgment on Texas.
	It was just circumstance.
	So Field of Greens.
	It's a spoon.
	Full of powdered vegetables.
	Nutrients, antioxidants, healthy, healthy.
	Okay, we're done with that.
	It's five minutes in.
	Neil is in the backdrop.
	In the UK, five-hour difference.
	Tough to coordinate, and we did it.
	Neil, I can see you.
	I'm bringing you in right now.
	Everybody, the man of the hour, Neil Oliver.
	Neil, how are you doing?
	It's lovely to see you.
	I'm doing fine.
	I was just enjoying listening to all of that.
	And I'm delighted, as you say, that we've been able to hook up.
	And I'm looking forward to a free-flowing, no-holds-barred conversation.
	It's a digital hookup, an intellectual hookup.
	Neil, look, I like to delve into people's childhoods.
	But before we even get there, for those who don't know who you are, I think I've given the 30,000-foot overview.
	But give us the elevator pitch, and then we're diving into your childhood.
	As you say, I began really in my adult career as an archaeologist.
	I studied at Glasgow University.
	I worked as a freelance excavator for a few years.
	Struggling to make it financially viable, I jumped ship and retrained as a journalist.
	I worked in newspapers, qualified as a journalist, worked in local weekly papers in a couple of places around Scotland.
	I then worked, believe it or not, I was an internet webmaster for BT.com, which is the third website that was ever built in Britain in the mid-90s.
	So I had a history with early internet.
	Then I stumbled into television, making archaeological documentaries, historical documentaries.
	And there I was for a happy couple of decades, really, making quite light, cheerful, I think, interesting documentaries about the past.
	And then all of this started to unfold.
	Lockdown, COVID and the rest of the nonsense.
	I found myself with a platform.
	First of all, I was being interviewed weekly on a top radio station here in the UK.
	Then I was approached by a fledgling TV channel called GB News, who signed me up from the beginning.
	And I do a weekly show on GB News.
	Where I've, again, I've had the great good fortune to be able to vent, spleen and give my opinion about what's going on and to talk to people from across the spectrum about all that's going on.
	I consider myself to be, I'm not a specialist.
	I'm not a politician.
	I've never been a card-carrying member of a political party.
	I treat politics and politicians with deep scepticism and suspicion.
	I'm just a reasonable person, I think, insisting on being able to ask reasonable questions and get factual answers back.
	And until the last breath in my body, I will continue so to do.
	Fantastic.
	Well, okay, and we're going to flesh out probably all of those visual chapters of what you just said.
	But born and raised, where were you born and raised?
	You're Scottish, but I know you've, I've seen a few interviews, you consider you British.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah, well, I was born in a town called Renfrew, which is on the other side of the River Clyde from Glasgow, which maybe makes it easier for people to visualize in Scotland.
	Mostly grew up down in the southwest in a place called Dumfries, near the English border.
	I've lived most of my life in Scotland.
	Work has taken me all over, all over the UK and all over the world.
	You're right, I consider myself to be, and it was never a political thing, I consider myself to be British.
	When I was a kid, if you were on holiday in Europe or whatever, someone asked you where you were from, I was likely just to say from Britain or that I was British.
	And then if people asked more specific questions, as you just did, I would say where I was born, which is Scotland.
	But for me, I always felt being part of the bigger family of the countries of the British Isles was much more interesting, much more fun.
	I came to some prominence in 2014 when there was a referendum about Scottish independence.
	For me, it was never about Scottish independence, but that's a whole other story.
	I don't think that's really what was on offer.
	Nonetheless, I spoke up and said that I thought it was a better idea to remain part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
	And that threw me into a bit of a spotlight.
	But until the end, I will consider myself to be a British Scot.
	And I didn't mean it in a political sense or a judgmental sense.
	I was listening to a few interviews and trying to analogize it to life in Quebec, where if you're a French-Canadian, French-Quebecer, and you don't support the separation of Quebec, sometimes people tend to view you as...
	You know, kissing the butt of the English or not being a true Frenchman.
	And so I imagine it's a similar sort of...
	Very much so.
	It's very much like that.
	For those that are blood-and-soil nationalists who want secession, anything short of shouting from the battlements about independence is high treason.
	There's no middle ground.
	If you're not in that camp, then you're the enemy.
	And a Scot, a born Scot, who prefers the union is the worst of all worlds for the blood and soil nationalists.
	That carries a charge of treason with it by definition.
	So it's always been very difficult since 2014 to articulate a position of loving Scotland.
	Well, simultaneously loving England, Ireland and Wales.
	And I know Ireland, North and South, there's the Republic and then there's the North, which is part of the United Kingdom.
	But I love the island of Ireland, North and South.
	And for me, I've always, the analogy I've tried to use to express my feeling is that for me, having been born and raised, feeling part of Britain, to have that all cut away.
	I think I would feel like one of these old soldiers that 60 years after they lose a limb, they're still scratching for that phantom missing leg.
	I think that's how I would feel if I was suddenly cut off from my sense of belonging to the bigger place.
	I mean, it's fascinating.
	Whenever I have a guest, I try to look for scandals.
	And this was the most scandalous thing I found on you, was the controversy.
	Because I thought you had a Scottish accent.
	You know, we don't fully appreciate the nuance, the Northern Ireland, Southern Ireland issues, Scotland, England thing.
	But now I can imagine it's totally analogous and understand why it might have been controversial at the time to be one of the French Canadians saying we should stay part of Canada, to be one of the born Scots saying we should remain part of the UK.
	And we might get back to that in a bit.
	Childhood.
	I was trying to find things out and I don't know.
	I just want to take a guess.
	Were you an only child?
	No, I've got two big sisters who both still live in Scotland.
	My mum is still alive.
	I lost my dad.
	My dad died a couple of years ago now.
	And I had a very typical, I would say, working class Scottish-British childhood.
	My mum worked part-time sometimes.
	I went to state school, you know, just an ordinary school.
	I had a very normal, happy childhood.
	Unremarkable, I would have said in most ways, the kind of childhood that, you know, 60-70% of people born and raised in Scotland in the 60s and 70s would recognise and identify with.
	You know, just a happy, regular childhood.
	I was the only member of my family, or the only one of my siblings, to go to university.
	If you were to ask me why, I don't really know why.
	It's just the way things worked out.
	And so I went off to Glasgow University and decided to study archaeology, as I mentioned at the top of the show.
	But unremarkable.
	You know, that's just...
	I think I'm a typical Scot, a typical working-class Brit.
	And if I may ask, did your dad pass away during COVID or before?
	Well, nearly two years ago now.
	So just as the whole thing was starting to take shape, my dad had been ill for a while.
	He died of cancer, and he had been ill and diagnosed for quite a long time, but he hung on in there for quite a while.
	And the end came relatively quickly, I suppose.
	So, no, he didn't.
	My mum was up visiting with me just as she was up seeing me and the family yesterday from down home in Dumfries.
	And, you know, she was saying, I wonder what your dad would have made of all of this these last two years.
	My dad, in some respects, I wish he was still here, but, you know, he hasn't had to come through this.
	The Covid paranoia, the lockdowns, the dereliction of duty on the part of the ruling class, the gross removal of basic rights, right to travel, freedoms, coercion around vaccines and the rest of it.
	And the economic hit, the town of Dumfries that we moved into, gosh, how long ago now?
	40 odd years ago, 50 years ago.
	It's completely changed now.
	It's been hit very badly economically, and it's been very, very badly hit in the aftermath of the cost of lockdown crisis.
	Yeah, so I think about him every day, but in some respects, I do think I'm glad he's not seeing this.
	If I may ask, were you able to mourn properly, like have a proper funeral?
	We did have a funeral.
	I was able to attend his funeral with my mum and one of my sisters and my wife, Trudy, and our kids came down.
	We went down to Dumfries for it.
	It was very low-key, though.
	There were nobody else at the service.
	But to be honest, my mum and dad were very private people.
	It would have been uncharacteristic for them to do anything.
	You know, large-scale or ostentatious.
	There hasn't been that element to their characters throughout my life.
	So it was a very quiet, intimate goodbye.
	And now, childhood, say unspectacular or just relatively normal, but what does a childhood in Dumfries look like?
	Is it countryside running around?
	Dumfries would characterise itself traditionally as a market town.
	It's in the southwest of Scotland, as I say, about 20 odd miles, nearly 30 miles from the English border, set in soft rural landscape, gentle rolling hills and woodland and rivers.
	And for the longest time, the people there made their living from farming.
	And Dumfries was a principal town.
	You know, sitting at a nexus of roads and traditionally it was where people would have brought animals, you know, for sale and trade.
	And so it was that kind of market town that we moved into in the early 1970s as a family.
	And a population then as now of, I suppose, around 30,000 people.
	I don't know, actually.
	I haven't looked at the figures for Dumfries for a lot of years.
	That kind of scale, though.
	A few primary schools, a few high schools.
	There was a little bit of industry, but all of that, all of the industry is gone now.
	Dumfries has been very badly hit by, you know, at the moment you would say it's a place of low-paid employment where there is employment.
	There's a little bit of tourism because of the scenery, the local scenery, but there's no industry anymore.
	And the farming market, market town aspect of it has also...
	Diminished in recent years.
	So it's become something of a backwater, I would say.
	It was bypassed by a major road.
	There was a major trunk road, motorway put into, rather than passing through the town, it left it in a kind of an Oxbow Lake, kind of a, you know, left as a backwater.
	But it was a lovely, it was a happy childhood.
	I was...
	I did perfectly well at school.
	I was probably in the top half of any given class, but unremarkable.
	I wasn't ever interested.
	I certainly didn't excel at any kind of sport.
	Yeah, I mean, I lived a life below the radar, really, for most of my life.
	I became an archaeologist and so on, and I worked in newspapers.
	When I stumbled into television, and it literally was accidental, I think as many people who...
	We find themselves making documentary television.
	I was in the right place at the right time to get a tap on the shoulder to see if I would.
	It was initially a television series about battlefield archaeology, which came out of the fact that with a friend, we had set up an excavation at the battlefield of Isandaluana in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
	People who've seen the film Zulu, Michael Caine, Stanley Baker.
	That war between Victoria's red-coated soldiers and the Zulu nation had been a fascination for myself and a friend.
	And we set up a project in the late 90s, early 2000s to go out and excavate the battlefield.
	And it attracted the attention of television.
	And so I was in my early 30s, I was about 30, 31, when suddenly I was on television and suddenly exposed to that kind of, you know, People looking at me.
	And it was certainly never anything that I had intended.
	I never sought the spotlight.
	And so what has happened to me in the last few years of becoming increasingly controversial, I suppose, notorious even, and being characterised as all sorts of right-wing, tin hat-wearing, swivel-eyed, lunatic extremist, has been a very, well, unexpected, certainly, but also undeniably uncomfortable experience.
	Because it's not anything I ever set out to do.
	It is.
	I mean, look, the first thing is watching your demeanor and now knowing your childhood.
	I was like, there are certain people you say, if they were any different in real life, I would be shocked.
	And looking at your demeanor, it's not something someone can do by accident or by practice.
	It just has to be innate.
	And it now fits in what you describe as your childhood and your reaction to...
	You know, I've seen the way you're characterized.
	In fact, when people started sending me the first clips that I saw of you, I saw the context in which you were being described.
	And I was like, oh, I knew how media worked.
	I was like, oh, another one of these.
	And now I know so much better.
	So actually, you studied archaeology in university?
	Glasgow University, yes.
	And did you always have an interest in history and the world?
	Yeah, at school, my best subject, I suppose, would be English and history.
	My mum and dad were big readers.
	The house was full of books, novels, fiction and non-fiction.
	So there were a lot of books around.
	So I read.
	So English was a natural fit for me.
	I loved storytelling.
	I loved writing stories.
	I loved reading stories.
	I loved language.
	I love the cadences and rhythms of the spoken word and the written word.
	History, and I was drawn to history because to me, I think it's really storytelling of the sort that will go back to a time beyond the reach of memory.
	I would have thought when people were sat around the campfires of the hunting world tens of thousands of years ago, effectively what they would have been telling each other and spinning stories about would be some kind of history.
	They'd be telling the story of the family, the story of the tribe, which by any other name would be history of a sort.
	And so it was the storytelling that always attracted me to history.
	You very kindly introduced me as a historian.
	I can't claim to be a historian because I don't have a degree.
	I don't have any academic qualification.
	I am an archaeologist, but I'm a lover of history.
	I'm an enthusiast about it.
	And when I got the chance to go to university, when I realised that my exam passes were, you know, were going to let me do that, I latched on to archaeology because it seemed to me an opportunity to get back to the story of humankind from as close as I was going to get to page one.
	I've always been interested personally in where my family came from.
	I learned very early on that both of my grandfathers had fought in and survived the First World War.
	And my mum's dad died long before I was born, but he carried wounds from Gallipoli until the end of his life.
	And my dad's dad was at the Somme and Passchendaele, and he was wounded and carried shrapnel in his arm and behind one ear.
	So from a very young age, I was very aware of the fact that both of these men had taken part in something as enormous, as planet-changing as the Great War.
	That fed and led into a fascination with me about what the rest of my family's story was, how we fitted in.
	Why did we live in Dumfries?
	What had brought that bit of my family to there when my grandparents lived in Glasgow?
	All of that just piqued my curiosity.
	That was what pulled me into being interested in history.
	Archaeology seemed to me the way to get back to the beginning because it also occurred to me You know, very early on, like everybody else, I must have ancestors who saw the Romans, ancestors who were there with the first farmers and people building stone circles and the great burial tombs.
	And I also must have ancestors who were amongst the hunter-gatherers that walked dry shod into what became the British Isles.
	15,000 years ago.
	I thought, I'm connected to all of those stories.
	And archaeology seemed to me the way, the path leading as far back as I could hopefully get, as close as I was going to get to a time machine to find out more about where my people had come from.
	And I can honestly say, when I began studying archaeology, it was like one of those moments in the cartoons where the love heart's pink and the rainbow and everything appears above.
	Above the focus of your adoration.
	I just loved it.
	I just loved everything about archaeology.
	I loved the stories.
	I loved the fact that we spent the summers away from university on digs, taking part in excavations, actually physically finding things, touching things from thousands of years ago.
	I just loved it.
	And, you know, at that time in my life, my early 20s, I thought I was going to spend my life as an archaeologist.
	But financially, it was just a non-starter.
	I woke up one morning.
	I had been excavating a bit of Roman road in the winter.
	Digging in the winter is a lot different than digging in the summer.
	And I woke up one morning.
	I was probably about, I don't know, my late 20s.
	No, my mid-20s.
	And I thought, one day I'm going to be 40. And I'm going to be arthritic from working in the cold and the rain.
	And I'm never going to be able to afford to buy a house.
	And it was with that realisation that I...
	I jumped ship, as I say, and I got the opportunity to join a weekly newspaper and retrain, retrain as a journalist, because I thought, well, it's got writing.
	It's all about writing.
	And journalism is digging.
	The same curiosity that makes me wonder what people were doing 10,000 years ago makes me curious about why people did what they did yesterday.
	So that archaeology and journalism are both driven by nosiness.
	I'm nosy about and curious about and fascinated by what people do and why and where they do it and what are the consequences.
	And so journalism seemed a fairly logical opportunity step for me.
	I'm just saying, I love that.
	You put into words what people can only, in retrospect, appreciate were emotions in their mind.
	The idea of digging in journalism is no different than digging in the ground for archaeological finds to understand the past and the present.
	Yeah, I'm just nosy.
	There's an undeniable magic, though, about archaeology that's meant that archaeology has always...
	I drifted in and out of it.
	You know, it was like a first love from whom I became estranged.
	And then almost as though the universe was determined that we meet again.
	And so I circled all the way back round to making television programmes about...
	Archaeology.
	So I couldn't escape the gravitational pull of it.
	And it is all down to the magic of being able to, you know, if you're on an excavation and you find, say, the remains of a campfire, and you can find the remains of a campfire from 10,000 years ago, charcoal, fire cracked stones.
	And so you can find that in the landscape somewhere.
	And you know with absolute certainty what people were doing when they were looking at it.
	You know, when they were there, it was a fire.
	And they were warming themselves or keeping wild animals at bay or they were cooking or whatever.
	But you know what they were doing.
	And you know also in your head that you're separated from them by, say...
	Whatever, 5,000 years, 10,000 years.
	But that diaphanous separation seems very slight because you know you've got that human connection because we like fire, they used fire.
	You've got that direct connection to them.
	And you put your hand down on things that they touched.
	And I find that a profoundly moving experience.
	I always have.
	And as I talk about certain things, it always puts the hairs up on the back of my neck because I find that ability that archaeology provides to reach back as much as you can and touch things from distant past is profound.
	What we're going to do now, it's a good time because the next question is going to be a whole new subject.
	Everyone, let's move it over to Rumble because we're going to dive into the...
	How Neil became...
	A boogeyman of sorts, just by digging, just by asking.
	And I got a bunch of questions to get there.
	So everybody, we're going to wind it up on YouTube, move over to Rumble, and I'll give everyone 30 seconds to do it right now.
	Three, two, one.
	And as everyone trickles in, I've got some questions for you, Neil, from YouTube, but I'll get to that in a second.
	The question is this, just to contextualize in the framework of your life, when did you get married?
	When did you have kids?
	So that we can appreciate how old they were as this COVID thing was going on.
	Oh, that's a good story.
	I met my wife at university.
	We met when I was 19 and she was 17. I was in third year at university.
	She was in first year.
	And we were together for a long time and then we were apart for quite a long time.
	A bit like I parted from archaeology.
	I also parted from Trudy for a while and then we came back together again.
	Really, around the same time I got reunited with archaeology, Trudy and I came back together.
	We circled back around to one another.
	But in answer to your question, Trudy and I met on the 10th of October 1986, and we got married on the 10th of October 2009.
	So we got married on the same date.
	Let me just ask you one question.
	Why on earth do you remember the exact day and date?
	Was it because of the anniversary or did something occur on that date on which you met?
	Yeah, it did.
	Yeah, it's one of those moments that I think is a central, essential moment in my existence in the universe.
	I was on the day in question.
	It was what we called Orientation Week or you think other people call it Freshers Week or whatever.
	It was the week just right at the start of the first term when all the clubs and societies lay out stalls in a big hall and new students are invited to come in and maybe join whatever, you know, the hockey club or the rugby club or the archaeology society.
	You know, everybody's there in the one room.
	And I was there.
	I was there with a group of friends.
	I was the president of the Archaeology Society, heaven help us all.
	And one of my friends on the day, Dorothy, had one of those throwaway cameras.
	You know, you still get them.
	Yeah, like the cardboard Kodak things.
	You put them in the chemist, the pharmacist, and you get the pictures.
	So she was clicking away with this, just taking shots.
	Anyway, I looked around because you can't keep your eye on the door for new people coming in.
	And I looked around and I saw this girl come in and I just knew she was the girl for me.
	And I kind of...
	Which was unlikely for me.
	I ran.
	I got up from the desk and ran around to get to her as quickly as possible.
	I got her to sign up and join the Archaeology Society.
	That was how we met.
	And a couple of weeks later, I was in a lecture and Dorothy came in and she got the pictures, the photographs back from the...
	From the day.
	And we were just looking through.
	She was sitting beside me.
	We were just going through them and looking at them.
	And there was this picture and it was me at the desk.
	And I was just kind of looking, beginning to, I was looking up at Dot, Dorothy, and in the back behind me, over my shoulder, like right here where my hand is now, was Trudy's face in the picture, which meant that Dorothy had accidentally captured The last second before I actually turned around and saw her.
	We were actually in the same photograph before we met.
	And when we got married all those years later, by which time we had three kids, we got married in 2009.
	And my daughter by then, what age was she in 2009?
	She must have been about seven.
	Seven.
	And my boys were sort of five or four and three, like four and two.
	And I got the picture, I got the photograph blown up to be like, you know, four foot by three foot so that the people, when I made my groom's speech, I could tell the story of the fact that, you know, this was the moment.
	This was one of the last seconds before we met.
	I think possibly uniquely in the population, we have this moment captured accidentally on film.
	And it's just one of those moments, I think, you know, that was us kind of entering each other's orbits.
	And Dorothy happened to drop the shutter on it.
	You still have the picture, obviously?
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah, yeah.
	That's amazing.
	And so, not to pride, so you had kids before getting married?
	Yeah, we did.
	We had all three kids by the time we got married.
	I don't know.
	If that became a question, I don't know.
	I can tell you that having three kids that age at a wedding complicates matters enormously.
	I can imagine.
	Three kids under 10 is complicated in general, let alone at events.
	So your kids are older now, so the impact of COVID or living through COVID would be different with them.
	Jamie Lee McFadden said, what was the hardest part of your switching professions?
	So you go from archaeology into journalism, but I presume now you get into journalism.
	When you get into it, the pay is probably not much better, but the prospect is better.
	Yeah.
	When I jumped into journalism, yeah, there was no financial incentive to do it.
	That's for sure.
	I just thought this will lead to another kind of career.
	And I just liked the thought of the flexibility of it.
	You know, I thought, if you become a journalist, you can work anywhere.
	It's one of those, it's like, you know, I don't know, it's like being able to pull a pint or being able to be a hairdresser or be able to be a plumber.
	There are certain things that if you pick up the ability, you can do it here, you can do it there.
	So I thought, if I'm a journalist, it's something that translates.
	And I would be, well, anywhere in the English-speaking world, I thought I could...
	I could potentially take that, but the incentive was not financial.
	So you get into journalism, and what type of journalism?
	Because I guess, how does it segue into documentary filmmaking?
	Gosh, yeah, well, it was where I lived.
	It was down where I had gone to school.
	It was back then in Dumfrieshire, and I joined a little group of three privately owned weekly papers, the Annandale Herald.
	The Annandale Observer and the Dumfries Courier were the three titles.
	We rotated between the three and it was in the rural environment.
	So a lot of it was to do with going to agricultural shows.
	You know, going to, you know, horse riding events and covering those.
	You know, the kind of lives that unfold for people who work in, you know, in farming, you know, in small towns, small town life, attending local council meetings, parish council meetings, going to the local court, you know, covering whatever people up for, you know, driving offences and whatever petty crimes and writing those stories up.
	Those are the kind of stories that people love to read about their neighbours.
	Got into trouble with the forces of law and order.
	So just the cut and thrust of everyday life.
	Everyone probably at some point in their life must have come across a weekly paper.
	And weekly papers, traditionally, they're dying out now because of tech.
	But back then, they were very fondly regarded.
	People liked to see them because they would see photographs of their neighbours and people they were at school with would be, oh, their so-and-so's got married and their so-and-so, whatever.
	Up in court for speeding.
	And people are very affectionate towards the local paper.
	And it teaches a lot of things.
	It taught me shorthand in typing for a start, the two greatest skills I've ever picked up and have done more for me over the years than being able to touch types, been more used to me than my degree or my driving licence over the years.
	It teaches you how to approach people, ask questions.
	Often about sensitive subjects, you're trying to get people to talk about things that perhaps they don't really want to discuss.
	So it teaches you how to approach people, handle people, get information from people, even if they don't maybe necessarily start out wanting to part with that information.
	It makes you become quick at picking up the necessary to write a story about something.
	You know, you've got to be fairly...
	Quick at becoming a temporary expert on something.
	One day you're writing about a court case, about fraud, and then the next day you're at a Highland show talking to owners about their prize-winning cattle.
	You've got to jump between disconnected, disparate subjects and become expert in them.
	I think training as a local newspaper reporter was a fantastic education.
	My life would not have unfolded as it did.
	My degree was one thing, but the time I spent as a journalist I think really gave me the skills that then made all the difference when I accidentally stumbled into television.
	Stumbling into television and then I guess stumbling into political controversy over the Scottish debate, how did that happen and then what happens after 2014 to 2020?
	Well, believe it or believe it not, once I put my head above the parapet about the union and Scottish independence, the gunfire never stopped.
	Once you single yourself out as a target for that, because the call for independence in Scotland has never gone away.
	Although there was a referendum that was supposed to settle the matter for a generation.
	Immediately after the referendum came in, those wanting independents just redoubled their efforts.
	So it never quietened down.
	And so I was continually then being approached and re-approached to reiterate my reasons for maintaining the union.
	So I remained in the spotlight in that way at the same time that I was still making documentary television.
	So I was making all sorts of quite soft.
	Documentary television.
	But at the same time, I had the sideline running where I was being asked to comment about the latest stage and the redoubled efforts to secure a second referendum.
	But then, well, as it was for planet Earth as a whole, COVID-19 just appeared out of a clear blue sky.
	Like everybody else, I watched the strange...
	Bizarre footage coming out of China, coming out of Wuhan about this new virus that they said they had discovered that was making people fall face first onto the pavement in the street.
	And then it was in Europe, into Italy, and then people started to panic that it was spreading like wildfire.
	Well, you know, we all know the story.
	But then when lockdown came, and initially, I suppose for the first couple of weeks, my wife and I, we didn't know what it was.
	What is this?
	COVID-19?
	What are we talking about here?
	What are we dealing with?
	Is it dangerous?
	I really don't know.
	Neither of us was involved in any way in the medical profession.
	We weren't immunologists or virologists.
	It was all, God, what's this?
	But after a few weeks, because we're self-employed, I've always been a self-employed person, and I couldn't work.
	I had just come off the back of, as a sideline, I had been touring one of my books.
	You mentioned I'm an author.
	I had been...
	Doing a kind of a one-man show, I'd been going around theatres up and down the country, talking for a couple of hours a night in front of an audience about, it was called The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places.
	And I had made it into a two-hour show that I could talk the audience through the story of Britain in relation to 100 locations around the UK.
	And it was really good.
	It was really good fun and it was good business for us.
	And of course, amongst everything else, COVID shut the theatres.
	I had been going to do another tour.
	And suddenly it was like, well, all the theatres are shut.
	And so my wife and I, we kind of looked at each other and thought, well, that's pretty significant.
	Because it cut off a whole line of work for us.
	And so we started to look at the lockdown in a completely different way and thought, how long is this going to go on?
	And really, how dangerous is COVID?
	We were starting to ask each other those questions.
	And it was around that time I was already on social media.
	And I think I must have, I can't honestly remember, but I must have put out a few comments and remarks on Twitter or wherever.
	And I was approached by a radio journalist who hosted a morning show five days a week talking about the events of the day.
	And he contacted me and said, would I come on and talk to him this particular Wednesday morning about lockdown and freedom of speech?
	Because I was already becoming aware that people asking questions about the vaccines, not the vaccines at that point, but asking questions about lockdown, were being vilified.
	And also, obviously, our freedom of movement was being severely curtailed, to put it mildly.
	So I went on and had this initial half-hour show with Mike Graham, the journalist in question.
	It gathered a bit of an audience, and so it became a weekly event.
	Mike and I would have a conversation just like this.
	We would spend half an hour chewing over the events of the week.
	And again, I started to gain this notoriety because I was speaking out about asking questions about lockdown, about the rights and wrongs of what was going on.
	There were other things going on at the same time.
	It was things like the BLM, the Black Lives Matter movement, was in full swing earlier on.
	Statues were getting pulled down in Britain.
	And other aspects of British history were being challenged on that basis.
	And I was being outspoken about that as well.
	So before I knew where I was, I suddenly was a controversial character for the second time.
	I imagine the first one never goes away.
	And then with Brexit, that debate gets brought up again.
	But we want to talk about this stuff.
	That's one of your Irish wolfhounds.
	Yeah, there's nothing I can do about that.
	You've got dogs that size and they want to bark.
	You've just got to let it happen.
	Oh, yeah.
	So you have all the training.
	First of all, you've dabbled in controversy that's never gone away.
	You have not just half a functional brain, but a very functional brain.
	You start asking the questions that maybe a lot of other people have, but don't ask because too scared.
	Don't want to be the nail that's sticking up.
	I remember one of the anecdotes.
	I forget who it was.
	It was a celebrity who said, what are we doing this for?
	Protect the old people.
	Someone who just died from COVID was old anyhow.
	She got lambasted, virtually cancelled.
	At the same time, you talk about BLM.
	At the same time, other mass gatherings were somehow finding a justification.
	You do the weekly show.
	I had not seen it, but did it become a thing between the two of you or did it come to an end?
	It was radio.
	It was radio.
	But you know, nowadays with radio, they have cameras in the studio.
	So there was a visual aspect to it.
	But it was a radio show.
	It was very much like this.
	Conducted over one of these platforms.
	And it lasted, I don't know, I think Mike and I were doing this weekly for several months.
	But then GB News, this TV channel, came out of nowhere in Britain.
	And I was approached.
	You know, because of my exposure on talk radio, I suppose I was just someone that had a face that had come to the surface as being, quite frankly, one of the few people who was speaking out and was running some of the counter-narrative.
	You know, 90% of the mainstream media were just banging the drum for lockdown, banging the drum for, you know, there was a narrative almost as though it came in a laminated car that they were all just reading from the same script.
	Which I was very suspicious about as well.
	Everyone seemed to be using the same words at the same time.
	You know, as though there was a mailing list for some kind of script that I wasn't seeing.
	And so I was running this.
	I was part of this counter-narrative.
	And so GB News asked if I wanted to get on board and they offered me this.
	I do a Saturday night show where, amongst other things, I talk about in a monologue about the affairs of the day.
	And sometimes some of those monologues, you know, attract.
	Quite a bit of attention because, again, I am saying things that a lot of people want to hear, but not a lot of people have been prepared to say.
	And that aspect of it, I couldn't understand that.
	I couldn't understand why people wouldn't just tell the truth.
	And none of this thing about my truth.
	Just the truth.
	The truth is a thing.
	Everybody knows it.
	Everybody can tell the difference between right and wrong, good and bad.
	You might follow, that doesn't necessarily dictate what path you follow, but everybody knows the difference between right and wrong, true and false.
	There's the truth.
	And I couldn't understand why people weren't just standing up and speaking the truth, because there were inconsistencies about the way in which, as you say, certain protests were absolutely cool.
	And the police would run alongside dancing the Macarena and other protests on the same streets about another subject, you know, would bring down the cudgels and the horses and the, you know, and the pepper spray.
	And I thought, there's no consistency about this.
	And I was then and have remained deeply troubled about the hypocrisy, the inconsistency, the lying, the deliberate propagandising, the nudging.
	The psyops, the imposition of fear, the determination to put people on edge and keep them on edge, to frighten people and keep them frightened.
	And as more and more time went on, I thought there's a profound and it's immoral.
	I thought what is being done is immoral.
	And I had gone through 50 odd years of my life understanding the world one way.
	And it was as though for the first time I saw the world differently.
	Now, you know, that experience has been described, obviously, many times as waking up.
	Well, and maybe that is what happened to me.
	Maybe after 52 years of, you know, Sleeping Beauty, I woke up and looked at the world differently.
	But having, as everyone says, once you see it, once you see what you understand is wrong...
	You can't stop seeing it.
	It's like those, you remember those Magic Eye 3D pictures that were very popular for a while?
	At first glance, it was just a random pattern, but then if you kind of squinted a bit, you made this three-dimensional image step forward.
	And once it was there, you couldn't make it go away.
	It was, oh, there's the sports car or the stag.
	It's been like that.
	For me, I looked at the world, the old familiar world, and the truth just stepped forward for me in 3D.
	And once I saw it, I couldn't not see it.
	And I thought, why won't anybody else describe the truth?
	It's right there in front of us.
	And that's just what I ended up doing.
	Not out of any desire to be a contrarian or to make a name for myself.
	I just thought, I'm not having that.
	I guess actually one question before is, you're working in journalism in a small town.
	You get exposed, I imagine, to local corruption, local wrongdoing.
	When you start delving into this and you start...
	The image pops out and it's never going back in.
	I mean, is there a part of your soul that despairs because what you're seeing and understanding is corruption at a larger scale beyond anything you've ever experienced or could have conceived in your life experience?
	Absolutely, 100%.
	It has never stopped.
	It feels...
	And this is where...
	Anyone who's following this path, you know, that you're on and I'm on and lots of other people are on.
	It's, you know, it's asking the question again.
	No, no, it is seeing corruption on a scale and breadth of levels of evil.
	I started out being very concerned about what was happening in the context of COVID.
	But once I saw that, as I say, Everything else just seemed to become visible to me to the extent that I thought, how have I managed to overlook all of this for so long?
	And now I just seem to see everywhere this inherent corruption around all of the institutions.
	I see it in academia.
	I see it in the judiciary.
	I see it in the police.
	I see it in the National Health Service.
	I certainly see it in the government.
	I see it in the political class.
	I see it in the mainstream media.
	I just feel as if there's been a concerted attempt out there to dupe the population, as many of the population as possible.
	And I understand why people are duped, because I was too for the longest time.
	But I think with COVID, it unlocked something.
	I think with COVID, there was then an attempt by those with a wish to establish greater authoritarian...
	Almost totalitarian control over their fellow human beings.
	I think COVID seemed to present an opportunity.
	I mean, it was widely reported that those contemplating lockdown didn't really think that the British people would accept it.
	But then lo and behold, the British people did, the same way every other population did.
	And I think that was red meat to the wolves, red rag to a bull.
	I think those with a view to taking control of people and keeping control of people felt that now was the time.
	And a whole, I think, an agenda, a whole set of ideas that was simmering and had been on the back burner was suddenly brought forward.
	And I think that attempt has gone too far too fast.
	And I think that's partly why so many people are waking up in the same way Paying attention to things that hitherto they might have overlooked.
	I think actually those with a view to seizing and maintaining control have shot themselves in the foot.
	Now, when you say, and I have the same experience and the same check and balances, once you see it, you can't unsee it.
	And once you see it, you see it everywhere, including in places where it might not actually be.
	The question, you know, I think we...
	Those with the degree of reflection, such as yourself, you go through this journey.
	How do you keep yourself in check throughout this journey to not get carried off by your own imaginings and also those which are not imaginings have not just...
	You're right.
	I think there's a bit of a process.
	You know how they say that there's a kind of a five-stage process around grief?
	And now that I've embarked upon that sentence, I can't for the life of me remember what the five stages are, but there's like denial and then there's anger and then there's, you know, I'm flashing back to the episode of The Simpsons when Homer eats the fugo.
	It was definitely denial, anger, sadness, acceptance.
	And then there's one more there.
	There's a process.
	There's a process that you go through.
	And as you say, once you've jolted, I've described it before.
	I felt as if There was a little bit of reptilian brain, you know, right primitive in my amygdala or something that had been dormant for all of my life.
	But subject to this particular fight or flight assault, it flicked.
	And I felt it for the first, and I thought, I'm having a physiological response to threat here for the first time in my life.
	I've never felt frightened of the state before, but I'm going to pay attention to it because it's real.
	It's a genuine response.
	And then I think you become, you're right, I think one of the phases that we all go through is you then become almost paranoid.
	You think, what else should I be aware of?
	Then you come through that and I think it has settled down for me into a kind of a reasoned scepticism.
	I now find that whatever I'm being told, I just want to question it.
	And that doesn't necessarily mean that in every case I will conclude that I'm being lied to.
	Where before I would just have waved everything through.
	Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
	Or if the government's saying that, it must be okay because, you know, it's the government and they've got our best interests at heart.
	I now question everything.
	It's just a scepticism and a determination to check it for myself.
	I think I was probably, you know, on websites, you know, where it says, you know, will you accept the terms and conditions?
	And you're in such a hurry to get to the next stage that you just kind of click yes, because you just want the website to open up.
	I would have been like that about life.
	Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
	Click OK.
	I don't do that anymore.
	In life, I've become, metaphorically, I insist on reading the terms and conditions.
	And sometimes everything looks all right.
	Other times I think, no.
	No, that requires further research.
	And I think I won't do that at the moment until I've had time to think more about that.
	So I went through the awakening.
	Everyone's out to get me, paranoia.
	And then I've settled down into this feeling that all of us have an obligation, not just a right, but an obligation to be sceptical about authority.
	Just keep an eye on them.
	I think some people would like to keep more than an eye on them, but setting that aside, your demeanor is very soft, calm, and soothing and reassuring to people.
	This might be my own projection, but is there a part of you that actually despairs, where you say, we've gone through this awakening, a lot of us, in real time together.
	Once upon a time, I would have said, the government would never lie about...
	WMDs cause a quarter of a million casualties, civilian casualties, simply for regime change, financial interests.
	Now I look back and say, well, I was an idiot.
	And in real time, we're living through an era where people are saying the government would not lie about medicines, increase deaths by however much.
	But when you know that they've done it within the last two decades, and you appreciate there's nothing too dark, too sinister.
	And you view the world through those lenses.
	Do you, in your soul of souls, despair at the state of the world and at the future?
	My honest answer has to be yes.
	I do spend a lot of time despairing and I feel desolate a lot of the time because, as I mentioned, I do feel as if I'm grieving for...
	If not the world as it was before, the world as I understood it.
	Because we've all got a personal take on reality, what we're making of the world in front of us.
	And so I'm grieving for the world as I previously understood it.
	And I wish it hadn't happened in some respects, but there's that line about in much wisdom is much sorrow.
	You know, there's no denying that the more you know and the more you understand, it's not necessarily going to bring you unrestricted joy and happiness.
	you know often often the more you understand the less you can forgive and I think I've I've come I've I've It's been a process.
	It's been a process of coming through.
	But I would have to say, alongside the despair and the sometimes feelings of desolation and the wondering about what's going to happen to the world and what it will mean for my children, if you were to say to me, do I wish I hadn't woken up?
	I would say, oh no, I absolutely want to be where I am now.
	Because, and this is a big collateral, The people I've met and the paths that I have crossed, you know, the encounters that I've had with people who otherwise I would never have met.
	You and I wouldn't be talking now.
	It just wouldn't have happened.
	Our paths would not have crossed.
	And I've had many encounters in the past couple of years with people who I would never have spoken to.
	Whose points of view I would never have experienced.
	Whose wisdom I wouldn't have shared.
	And I wouldn't be without that for the world.
	I have met a most unexpected but genuinely wonderful and inspiring cast of characters.
	All sorts of disparate personalities.
	People from what would have previously been characterised as the left and the right.
	People from all sorts of walks of life that my life of before would not have brought me into contact.
	And my experience and my perspectives on life have been so enriched that although my understanding and my sudden realisation that there's so much wrong with the world.
	And that there is corruption out there and that we are nudged and taken advantage of and sometimes treated with contempt by those that are supposed to be looking out for our best interests.
	I would far rather be where I am now with the connections that I have established in the last couple of years than to go back to my time of before.
	I keep comparing it to The Matrix and just chewing on a steak that you know is fake but it tastes good in the moment.
	By the way, here's another question.
	You're soft-spoken.
	You are very intelligent, eloquent, which might make you harder to demonize, and which might make you think that nobody would want to demonize you.
	What does it feel like when...
	I don't think you're speaking your truth.
	I think you're speaking the truth and asking questions in order to arrive at the truth.
	Normal?
	Intellectual exercises of being a thinking being.
	What does it feel like when people try to come and destroy what makes you who you are, not just for yourself, but to others?
	How does that feel and how has that shaped the way you view the world now?
	Well, I think the first time it happens, and for me it was a long time ago now, the first time I was vilified in that way was around the Scottish referendum in 2014.
	Years ago now, and regularly since then I've been a target for hate and ridicule and the name calling that arrives at all of us, that you're just derided as being stupid, an idiot, a mad person.
	You know, you've lost your mind.
	I see the same brick bat being swung at everyone that puts their head above the parapet to ask a question.
	So the first time it happens, it hurts.
	A bit like the first time you get a punch in the face.
	But then, once the shock of it wears off, the next blow doesn't hurt quite as much, because at least you know that it's not going to kill you.
	And by now, I've had so many, I've had so much, you know, ridicule and all the rest of it that you never quite get used to it, but I see it for what it is.
	And I also have to say, which matters more by orders of magnitude, the amount of support that I get, that I have had, especially over the last couple of years.
	It's humbling to the point where it makes me cry salty tears at times.
	And I am not a person who cries.
	But I get letters from all over the world.
	I don't know if you've been aware of that.
	People started writing to me a couple of years ago.
	A letter came addressed to Neil Oliver, a guy off the telly, lives near Stirling Castle.
	And it came.
	The postman delivered it to my house.
	And I took a photograph of it and I put it on social media.
	To show that this had come to me.
	It wasn't my address.
	It was just the guy off the telly, you know, lives near Stirling Castle.
	And from then on, I have now received thousands of letters and cards from every continent.
	All addressed to things like the guy with the beard, the coast guy, the history guy, you know, the guy with the wolfhounds.
	And they all come.
	And inside are these letters that are...
	Heartbreaking, uplifting, inspiring.
	People saying, you know, I thought I was the only one.
	I thought I was going mad.
	You know, you've been such a comfort.
	And I've received thousands of letters like that.
	So the same sequence of events that exposes you, me, all of us to abuse has also opened a different channel where I've had the kind of support that...
	I cannot adequately describe the emotion and the sincerity that's in thousands of letters.
	I've got them in baskets all over the house.
	And how can you not, how can you not, being in receipt of even just one letter like that, far less thousands, how can you not think, well, if I'm helping, if what I'm saying resonates with even just one person?
	It's worth doing it.
	And the fact that you get this reassurance or confirmation that...
	I mean, in the last week, I've had a letter from Canada, a couple of letters from Canada.
	I get a lot of letters from Canada.
	Singapore, USA, France, all over Britain.
	And it's all variations on people saying, I really needed to hear this because I thought this is what I think.
	And for the longest time, I thought it was only me that thought it, so I must be mad.
	But when I heard you speak and I realised that you thought it too, I thought, no, I'm going to be all right.
	And you think, that is so worthwhile.
	And you call me names if you want, call me mad, you know, call me a right-wing extremist if you want.
	But I know that there are people out there, reasonable, ordinary people, parents, youngsters, you know.
	Rich and poor, of faith and atheist, of every creed and colour, writing to say that it mattered to them.
	And you think, well, that's worth it.
	I'll take it.
	A married man with three kids and two dogs is a right-wing extremist these days.
	What were your, if I can ask, the biggest, the most shocking things, revelations you've come to in the context of COVID?
	I mean, I imagine you can...
	Well, I think...
	I was always suspicious about the...
	I was suspicious from the very beginning with how quickly the vaccines came forward.
	Because I knew enough to know that, you know, vaccines take a decade.
	You know, always have.
	And this one seemed to be already in the top drawer.
	Just ready to...
	I thought, how?
	That can't be.
	What is that?
	And so...
	When they started inviting people to come forward and get it, my wife and I just said, well, at the beginning, we just said, let's just wait.
	That's real quick.
	I don't know about that at all.
	And so we didn't...
	I haven't taken the vaccine.
	But then the coercion started.
	And, you know, it was everything.
	I mean, people were losing their jobs.
	People were being ostracised by family and friends.
	Then they started offering people hamburgers.
	You know, and flights and all sorts of nonsense to take it.
	There was a brothel in Austria that was offering people an hour with the women of your choice if you come and get the vaccine.
	And you think, how can people look on at this and not realise that something is so out of whack it defies description?
	And that a government...
	My government and the health service and medical professionals would stand in line to take part in that kind of coercion was shattering to me.
	I could not believe what I was seeing because there wasn't anyone, it was not possible to say to anyone that they had the long-term data to show that these procedures were safe, far less effective.
	There was no way that anyone could Could say that they had because no time had elapsed.
	And that whole establishment got into lockstep with each other, with most of the mainstream media, calling people COVID-iots and granny killers for not wanting to take something that I never felt I needed in the first place.
	And I still don't think I need.
	And now, of course, that recent revelation that Pfizer...
	I spoke up a director in the European Union in a hearing, admitted that they hadn't even tested to see if the product would stop the transmission of the virus from person to person, which meant that we'd been being lied to.
	It wasn't just hubris for 18 months.
	It wasn't just people hoping for the best.
	These people who were saying it will stop you killing granny, you don't take it for you, you take it for your community, that was a lie.
	And when you realise that you've been lied to in such a bare-faced way about something that's directly about your health, something that now demonstrably could injure or kill you, that we were being lied to about those products, well, in answer to your question, that was and remains the most shocking revelation to me.
	Agencies that I had assumed all my life had my best interests at heart.
	Absolutely didn't.
	And there was the UK Health, which, sucking and blowing, at one point was saying safe and effective for pregnant women and breastfeeding women, and at the same time?
	Yes, they're still doing it.
	All this has come out.
	All this information is out there.
	I mean, I don't even bother to quote figures, you know, because I don't know which figures to rely upon.
	But let's say that it's beyond doubt that people are being injured and killed by these products.
	I don't know how many, but people are being injured and killed.
	And traditionally, when a product is brought forward that kills 10, 20, 30 people, that product's withdrawn for a rethink.
	But they're still out there saying, you know, come now, get your flu vaccine combined with the next COVID booster.
	Let's give it to children.
	Let's give it to babies.
	Let's give it to pregnant women.
	I look on at that and think that that is abhorrent and immoral.
	Yeah, but this is the question.
	The black pill and potentially seeing things that are not there or maybe refusing to accept that they are there.
	What else can a rational person attribute this to?
	Because the old expression, don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to negligence.
	At this stage, and now you've got the CDC in America voting 15-0 to add this to the list of kids, whatever the list is for vaccines for kids.
	Knowing this, there are people out there talking about, call it a conspiracy theory, or black-pilled individuals saying they've come to the conclusion it's overt malice, population control, whatever.
	Without jumping there, what does a reasonable, rational person with an understanding of history Attribute this to.
	I really don't know.
	I haven't come to a conclusion about that which you are describing there.
	I've heard all the same stuff and I'm just, I remain, as to whether there's intent, you know, actual intent to harm, I'm holding back.
	I'm holding back at the moment because I think it's enough.
	It's a strong enough case to know that we were being lied to, that here was something that will stop you passing it to the community and it's 100% safe and effective and it will stop you passing it, that that was based on nothing and that the people seeing it were therefore lying.
	That's enough for me.
	That's enough for me to demand root and branch investigation charges and criminal cases for malfeasance and malpractice and all of the rest of it.
	For me, at the moment, I don't need to go the next step into thinking that people have done this out of an intention to harm.
	But I just remain on the fence about that because I've been so shocked and the whole experience has been so revelatory that, you know, to coin a cliche, nothing would surprise me.
	As to why I think it's happening, I do think, I do now subscribe to the belief that there is and has been for a long time an intention to establish a centralised one world government.
	To dissolve national boundaries, to take away the notion of independent states and independent nations, a homogenous population.
	I believe to some extent that there's an intention to re-establish a kind of a feudalism, a neo-feudalism.
	This narrative that's been there for a long time from the World Economic Forum about, you know, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy.
	I think that intention is there.
	The desire to remove the freedom to transact.
	For me, freedom to transact, I've realised over the last 18 months, freedom to transact through Trump's freedom of speech.
	For me, if you can't buy and sell Anonymously, if you wish, without the state tracking in real time what you're buying, where you're buying, why you're buying it.
	If you don't have that freedom to transact, then you've got nothing.
	And so even the threat, but I think it's more than a threat of central bank digital currencies.
	That makes my blood run cold because I think it's all part of a piece of an elite, a small group.
	Who are seeking to establish total control over the mass of the population.
	And I think that once COVID was up and running, I believe that that was the intent behind the COVID passports and encouraging people to put themselves onto some kind of global international database.
	That would have enabled the state potentially to track your movements.
	I think that intention is there.
	So when you say, why do I think it's happening?
	I think a blue touch paper has been lit by a group who are intent in the short term to establish total control over the mass of the population.
	But I think they're really going to do it via things financial rather than things viral.
	This is one of those moments where we've evolved in real time almost in tandem together.
	And I know that two years ago I would have said, oh, this sounds over the top.
	And even now I'm struggling because I say it sounds over the top.
	Have you ever seen the movie Idiocracy?
	No.
	Oh, Neil, you must see it tonight.
	It's a classic.
	I mean, it's a comedy, but it's more of a documentary disguised as a comedy.
	I would have said this is one step too far two years ago, three years ago, and now you can't deny it.
	Digital currency cutting you off, cutting your ability.
	To survive off if you say things that run counter to the narrative.
	I've already seen it.
	You saw it in Canada with the truckers.
	I mean, I thought it seems like so long ago now, the truckers.
	I thought the truckers were going to be the, were going to be the, were going to make the difference.
	I thought this in Canada is going to put these authoritarian politicians back in their box.
	But it was by financial, it was by taking control of people's bank accounts that that was throttled.
	And so what government, having seen the potential of cutting people off from their ability to transact, isn't going to leap on that with both feet and both hands and grab it, and having taken hold of it, never let it go.
	If you can control what people...
	Where people go, what they buy, in real time.
	For the sort of people that are motivated by power, why would they not go for that?
	If you want power, you know, some is good, more is better, and too much is just right.
	I've never heard that, and I love it, but I hate that I love it.
	And now that you say it out loud, Neil, the Justin Trudeau...
	Trudeau is in the WEF poster child.
	Christian Freeland is on the Board of Trustees.
	There were people saying that the only reason Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, brought in a militarized police busted heads, was to freeze bank accounts.
	And you say it out loud, I don't know how else to see it.
	Because the freezing of the bank accounts in the context of suppressing that protest was so superfluous, so over the top.
	There's no other sense to make of it.
	I mean, most people don't know about the existence of far less the reach of the Bank for International Settlements.
	You know, the 60-odd central banks around the world are enthralled to the Bank for International Settlement.
	They take their instruction.
	To a greater or lesser extent from the Bank for International Settlements, which sits in a glass tower in Basel in Switzerland.
	And the director of the Bank for International Settlements is on the record lamenting the fact that when somebody uses a $100 bill, the bank doesn't know what they've done.
	They don't know what they've bought.
	Whereas with a programmable digital currency...
	The bank would know absolutely what that person has just bought.
	The Bank for International Settlement wants to be in a position where it can track in real time every transaction.
	And once you open that door, I mean, obviously that means that if you're someone who says something that the authority doesn't approve of in the manner of the Chinese Communist Party social credit system, then they'd stop you paying your mortgage.
	Like that.
	They just cut off your access to the supply of liquidity.
	And the Bank for International Settlement controls the flow of 95% of the world's currency in this way.
	And the central banks that are signed up to it, that are affiliated to it, include the Bank of England, the Central Bank of China, the Central Bank of Russia, even banks from Failed states like Afghanistan are under the thrall of the Bank for International Settlements.
	And the director of the Bank for International Settlements said it would be better if they could see what people were doing with their money at all times.
	Why?
	There's no happy answer for why a bank wants to track everyone's every transaction in real time.
	Well, they'll only argue that it's to track criminality.
	And then the problem is...
	When wrong speak becomes criminality.
	When wrong diet becomes criminality.
	That's all very well if you're under an authority that's benign.
	But once that power's in the hands of an authority that is less than benign, who says what's criminal?
	Who says what's bad behaviour?
	You think you've got an idea about what bad behaviour is.
	You've got an idea about what you think would be reasonable to protest about.
	You've got an idea about if something is done to you, you might want to speak out about it.
	But what if somebody with a bigger stick than you says, I don't want you saying that.
	And they don't need a stick anymore because they just stop you paying for food.
	I'd say, who's deciding?
	The criminals are deciding the crimes.
	The point is, I spent most of my life like everybody else.
	I mean, to accuse somebody of being a conspiracy theorist was always and has only ever been a pejorative.
	You know, you don't say that about somebody that you like.
	It's just another stick to beat people with.
	And I spent the longest time writing things off as conspiracy theory.
	But lo and behold, eventually a sequence of events unfolds in a certain way where you think, well...
	I've ruled out that as an explanation.
	I've ruled out that.
	I've ruled out that.
	I've ruled out that as an explanation.
	I'm running out of explanations for what this is all about.
	So eventually there comes a point where you have no option but to think the unthinkable and to say the unsayable.
	And in any event, things that sounded like conspiracy theories two years ago have come to pass anyway.
	So the precedent is there for that which had been dismissed or dismissible as a conspiracy theory.
	It turns out to have been a prognostication, a prediction of the future.
	You're familiar with Operation Northwoods, I imagine?
	No.
	Neil, Google this after.
	It'll blow your mind.
	But this is back in JFK's era where it was the Department of Defense floating an idea, running it up the hierarchy of the U.S. government to bomb planes.
	Carry out mass shootings in public.
	Blame it.
	I think it was to blame it on Cuba so they could justify a war on Cuba.
	To turn public sentiments to support the war on Cuba.
	It involved terrorism on American citizens.
	JFK shouted it down, voted it down, but it had reached the higher levels of government.
	And then a year and a half later, JFK is assassinated.
	And what they had talked about in Operation Northwoods as potential things.
	Rhymed exactly with 9-11, which is why now in retrospect when I heard people in 9-11 saying this is inside job whatever, who then knew things that I didn't know but I know now, whether or not they're right, I can at the very least understand what they were thinking at the time and can't exactly write it off as conspiracy theory.
	You need rational skepticism.
	That's really been my takeaway from all of this.
	My middle ground with which I...
	Kind of try to stand.
	I just feel entitled to rational scepticism.
	So whatever anyone tells me from any side, things I used to just accept or dismiss out of hand, I don't do that for either now.
	Things I used to dismiss, that can't be true.
	I go and have a think and a bit of a look and I read around it and I see what I can find out.
	And likewise, when the government or anybody else says, this is...
	You know, we're from the government.
	We're here to help.
	Where in the past, I might just have accepted that.
	I don't do that either anymore.
	I've just become a sceptic.
	Just a rational, reasonable sceptic.
	Which, to be quite honest, I think is where everyone should be 100% of the time anyway.
	We're not children.
	You have to take responsibility for your own destiny.
	And that means that you might not want to do the homework.
	You might not want to have to go away and do the reading for yourself.
	But really?
	That's where we are.
	Just go and do the reading for yourself.
	People in the chat, in the stream, they want inspiration.
	I think we've all taken the red pill.
	The question is preventing people from taking the black pill.
	Some people say this is following the same path as the fall of Rome.
	I was trying to find an audiobook to understand the fall of Rome a little bit better, but do you see?
	Not to be predictive and not to give people false hope.
	How do you see this playing out in the coming years?
	Is this the fall of the free Western civilization and we're all going the way of China?
	Is it the fall of an empire being the West?
	Or do you hope, foresee, and wish for an awakening and the people taking back the power?
	I think it's unrealistic to imagine You know, 100% of the sleeper's awakening.
	I don't think that's going to happen.
	But also, furthermore, I don't think it's necessary.
	I think the forces of evil, the baddies, can be held in check by just a few.
	If you wanted to put it in percentage terms, I don't know, maybe it's 10%, maybe it's 15%.
	But in relative terms, it's a fraction.
	And I think that is realistic.
	I sense all around me people quietly, or maybe some with more volume than others, people asking questions and asking the right questions.
	And I think that the attempt at authoritarianism and totalitarianism is running full steam.
	I think that bid for control is happening.
	But there's also an extent to which if 15% of people are just aware and point the finger and say, we see you and we know what you're about, I think there's every possibility of stopping them in their tracks.
	I think we do.
	I think perhaps what has been the West...
	I think maybe there has been a decadence and a taking for granted that many of us have been guilty of.
	I think we're enough generations away from those that spilt blood to secure freedom and to turn back tyranny that we've learned to be contemptuous of that.
	To take it for granted and to believe that the life that's been possible here in the West is somehow in the natural order of things.
	And of course it's not.
	You've only got to look at the wider world to see the natural order of things.
	With a few honourable exceptions, most of the world is in the grip of bandits, tyrants, thieves and crooks.
	Our life in a handful of countries really...
	Where we've had equality before the law, the right to pursue a life shaped by ourselves and those protections, it's been a soap bubble of almost unquantifiable fragility.
	And we have taken it for granted and been rough with it, but we should have been cradling it in our hands and passing it very carefully from generation to generation.
	But I think what has happened in the last couple of years has been a necessary wake-up.
	It's been a necessary glass of cold water, slap of the face, waking up.
	And I believe that there is still everything to play for.
	I mean, you know, you say and you're right.
	You don't want to give people false hope.
	But right wins.
	Right is unsupportable.
	Right is irrepressible.
	Like the grass, you can pour concrete over grass, but after a while, the grass will find a way back through the concrete.
	Right is irrepressible.
	I wouldn't necessarily put a timescale on how long I think it will take for our side to win the argument and the battle.
	So I don't know whether it's today or tomorrow or next year or 10 years.
	It might be a long struggle, but I believe in my heart, and I say this with my hand on my heart, that right will prevail.
	Because right wins.
	It's perpetually challenged by wrong in the same way that the light is perpetually challenged by darkness.
	But every day the sun rises.
	Right will prevail.
	May I ask one question?
	I didn't ask it, and I don't want to be intrusive.
	Are you a religious man or atheist agnostic, just from perspective?
	I'm as skeptical about organized religion as I am about anything else.
	But I believe in a transcendent aspect.
	I believe that there is something out of reach and out of sight, but they are nonetheless.
	And I think it's, you call it logos, call it reason, call it right, call it God, call it whatever you want.
	But I believe the transcendent is there and that consciously or unconsciously we navigate by it, like true north.
	I don't go to church, but I believe...
	In the transcendent good that I think all of us try or a lot of us try to find our way back to, you know, looking for a light in a fog bank.
	We can sense it and a lot of us try to navigate towards it.
	I don't trouble myself too much with what shape it is or what to call it.
	I just trust that it's there.
	That's quite beautiful.
	And Neil, if I don't ask the question, people in the chat are going to go crazy.
	What's going on in England right now with the news of the night?
	I'm sort of familiar, but I can't make hay of it.
	Shortest prime ministership in the history of England?
	Yeah, well, it's, well, back in 2016, Britain voted for Brexit, 52 to 48, to leave the European Union.
	And I believe in my heart.
	That absolutely took the authoritarians by surprise.
	I think they thought they had that one in the bag.
	I often think, I can't believe they allowed a referendum to happen, but maybe they just got to the point where it was the unstoppable force against the immovable object, and they just said, OK, let the proles have their referendum, but we can make sure we get the result we want.
	And I think against all odds and expectations, Britain voted for Brexit.
	And that was apocalyptic as far as the globalist authoritarian one world order people were concerned.
	They just cannot believe it.
	And basically from then, I think there's been an orchestrated attempt to take the United Kingdom down and to take the United Kingdom apart.
	You know, we can't have this because they cannot have the EU fracturing and Britain leaving was just the unthinkable.
	And so Britain has been being punished ever since.
	The political class and the media and the institutions of state got into lockstep and collaborated to try and overturn that referendum result.
	They did everything humanly possible to stop that Brexit being realised.
	And then, of course, along comes Boris Johnson.
	Now, whatever people know about or think about Boris Johnson, he was a charismatic figure and he polarised a debate, but he was able to establish himself as somebody who was pro-Brexit.
	I don't think he ever really was in his heart, but he used Brexit as a lever to get to where he wanted to be.
	With that in mind, he then secured, at the general election in 2019, an 80-seat majority, against the odds.
	He won votes that had hitherto been Labour, in Labour strongholds.
	He won this unexpected, unprecedented general election.
	He gave this Brexit-driven mandate, this majority.
	And that was, again, anathema to those that wanted a single...
	European edifice of which Britain was supposed to be an obedient part.
	And since then, they've taken down Boris.
	Poor old Liz Truss came in promising whatever she was promising and has been taken down.
	As sure as eggs is eggs, she didn't stand a chance.
	I don't believe, I mean, I'll say this loud and say it clear, I don't believe decisions about Britain are taken in Westminster.
	I think in the Palace of Westminster for a long time, it's been nothing but a pantomime.
	And if you've ever been to pick a pantomime, Cinderella, you get different actors in the different parts, but the story unfolds the same way every time.
	And it culminates in a happy ending, but it's not a happy ending for you.
	It's a happy ending for them on stage.
	So I don't think Liz Truss mattered.
	For a while there, for a few minutes, she had a Chancellor of the Exchequer called Kwasi Kwarteng.
	They did their budget together.
	Anyway, they have been whipped off the stage and now what has been installed there are one world, globalist, anti-Brexit, pro-lockdown, pro-vaccine mandate.
	Yours and my worst nightmare have now been handed the starring roles in the latest iteration of the pantomime, and it's all a product of what happened in 2016.
	The uppity, upstart British people who voted to reclaim borders, reclaim the nation state of Britain, have been put back in their box, or so the authoritarians think.
	All right.
	I don't know if that's going to be a black pill to end it, but okay.
	I'm going to have to go make sure I can flesh this out on my own to understand what's going on, but I saw the news and had to ask.
	Neil, first of all, this has been amazing.
	Where can people find you?
	I'll post your links in the pinned comments, but what are you up to?
	Where can people find you?
	Social?
	You're on Patreon?
	Yes, I have a Patreon site.
	If you go to patreon.com, look for me by name.
	I'm there.
	I have a YouTube channel.
	I have a channel on YouTube that's just called the Neil Oliver Channel, so that's easy enough to find.
	I'm on Instagram.
	I'm on Twitter.
	On Twitter I go, well, you'll find me as Neil Oliver, but my handle is TheCoastGuy.
	And, yeah, my books are available in all good bookshops.
	I'm going to put all of the links.
	In both Rumble and YouTube.
	I'll say for myself, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.
	You know, I'm so glad.
	You and I, you know, we've been sort of floating around this idea of coming together for a chat for a little while now.
	And finally, finally we've got together.
	And I definitely hope that it's just the first of, well, more than one conversation that we can have.
	Absolutely.
	And Neil, look, I don't believe in these numbers things.
	Coincidences are coincidences.
	I met my wife when she was 17. I was 19. No!
	I swear to you, three kids, two dogs.
	I just said, it's like, other than the demeanor.
	It's quite funny.
	I try not to make too much of it, but coincidences are awesome.
	That's brilliant.
	I'm sure you mentioned that.
	There's more.
	I have to remember what they were, but those were the big ones.
	And 2009 was the birth of our first kid, but now I can start stretching.
	Neil, we will definitely do it again.
	I don't know when I'm going overseas, but if you ever are out here, we'll stay in touch.
	In my unvaccinated way, I don't know where I can go at the moment, but I'd rather be here and untouched than any other way.
	So if the accident will, you and I will.
	Breathe the same air in the same space someday.
	Absolutely.
	Now, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	I'll end the stream with everybody else.
	I'm going to do it.
	I said I was going to put up a video because Rumble cuts off short, but I forgot to line it up.
	So, whatever.
	Neil, stick around.
	We'll say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat, thank you very much.
	Snip your way, and I'll put all of the links to Neil everywhere so you can find them, including books and documentaries.
	Neil, thank you very much.
	Oh, thank you.
	Brilliant.

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