TRIGGERnometry - TRIGGERnometry DESTROYS TRIGGERnometry

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Part 3 of TDT in which KK and FF discuss the impact of COVID and lockdowns on our society. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. We have neither for you today because it's me interviewing Francis and Francis interviewing me. So welcome to the show. How are you doing, Francis? I'm very good. How are you? I'm good as well. It's been a long time since we've done one of these. So we did one which we put out to the main list only, which was probably about a year ago. And then we did a trigonometry, destroys trigonometry, probably at our last studio. Yep, which was over a year ago now.

A lot over a year ago when we did it. It was probably two years ago now. So it's the state of the disunion or whatever is going on now. What have you made of the last year? Well, we're all fucked, aren't we? Get the antidepressants out for the lads, everybody. Yeah, just get them all out. You're going to need loads of them.

No, I find it actually very worrying what's been happening, how we've actually seen a nation simply capitulate to the COVID regulations. And also as well, how we seem to have been fed a diet of fear by this government. And as a result of that, we have started blindly following the rules, even when the rules don't make any sense. Like, for example, why is it, as we film this now, in the Euro 2020 final, 60,000 people are going to be allowed into Wembley Stadium but parents can't go and watch their kids

during sports day. Yeah, but the kids are shit. Yeah, that is true. Nobody really wants to watch the kids. No, look, I'm joking, but you make a very good point. And more than that, we've got this thing, as we're recording, this will go out a week from when we're recorded, most likely. It's not just 60,000 people in the stadium,

which you can sort of start to go, well, they're unlocking the country. But they've got these two and a half thousand UAFer VIA, who are coming over from other countries, they're not subject to quarantine, and they're just being allowed in. And that, like... Yeah, but they're rich. Yeah, they're powerful. Yeah. And the truth is, they're just better.

Absolutely. They're better than you, better than me, and they're definitely better than you. So what you're currently seeing is a double standards in society. And somehow, we're still being told to protect the NHS, we're still being told to socially distance, and it is deeply, deeply unfair. And I feel incredibly sorry for those people whose businesses are being affected as a result, people who've lost their businesses and their livelihoods, when the rules no longer make sense. And they don't apply to certain echelons of society. You have to wonder what's going on and what's going to happen. Now, Boris said, I think it's mid-July. I can't

remember the exact date that we're going to be on July the 19th. Do you think we're going to be on locking again on July the 19th? I actually do. In fact, we may be even unlocking earlier than that, in my opinion, but I certainly think we'll be out of it by July the 19th because it seems like, yes, numbers of infections are going up, but hospitalizations are going up very slowly. Very few people are dying. Today, as we record this, 10 times more, the data has come out. For the last few months, 10 times more people have been dying from flu and pneumonia than COVID. So I do think the government will unlock. The thing that can concerns me. And we're again, we're recording this in the immediate aftermath of what is now being

described on our locals as the black-pilled stream, where I dropped a lot of truth bullets about what I think is going to be happening. And just to summarize that maybe in a slightly negative way, what I think is essentially lockdown is now a permanent tool in the public policy toolbox. And what that means is whenever anything comes up that is likely to threaten some people's lives, this will be pulled out of the toolbox and applied. So the flu. I mean, the flu is being predicted now as being more dangerous this winter than COVID.

Which actually does make sense because we've all been locked inside, we haven't been mixed, and we haven't been mingling. Our immune systems are depressed. Yeah. So, yeah, that's probably going to happen. I've been mingling. But no, seriously, though,

I think the flu will be considered a bigger threat. As we know, the NHS has goes through winter crisis almost every year. And so what I think will happen is we are now going to start to see people demanding lockdowns. They'll be renamed into something like restrictions or temporary annual

NHS protection measures or something. It will be rephrased in some kind of a well-in way. And then you will have a lockdown almost every time anything like that happens. And from there, it's very easy to see how you go further and further down the line. I mean, we know for a fact, like you and I've talked about this in the past,

you and I spend a lot of time in London, you live here. Living in London, statistically speaking, is as bad for you as smoking if you live outside of London, right? So why not, you know, we've seen a massive reduction in emissions and pollution in the last 18 months. Why not lockdown to save the planet? It makes complete. Don't you want to save the planet?

Do you want to kill Granny? Yeah. I mean, you do because you want to get on the property lighter, but still. Absolutely. So look, my worry is this, is that we are obsessed, with saving lives. Look at me. Don't look at them. They don't deserve it.

Yeah, that is true. But we're obsessed with saving lives. Okay. It doesn't sound like a bad thing, to be fair. It doesn't sound like a bad thing. But in the pursuit of that, we seem to be sacrificing everything else. And as a result of that, you go, well, is this sustainable? Because I don't think it is.

How can it be sustainable that we watch people's businesses go to the wall, that people aren't working? That we've got all these people on furlough. when the reality is, how many of them are going to have a job at the end of this? The brewery industry, it's on his knees, hospitality it's on its knees, the live arts and entertainment is done, travel. All the restaurants in this area seem to be doing fine on France. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. But that's because, you know, I'm a philanthropist, mate. That's what I do. I walk in and then, you know, I help people. I help local businesses. Yeah, and they really appreciated it. The last time we went for a meal around here, literally went, oh, Francis, we'll take you over to your table.

Exactly. And they had no idea who you were other than you just spend a lot of money in this restaurant. And I called up and I booked for two of our favorite patrons at this restaurant. And then I called up, gave them my number. They went, oh, Francis, lovely to hear from you. Of course they did. But look, we deviate. But you know what, maybe for the sake of balance,

we should actually have a conversation about COVID and the reaction to it and sort of looking over the last 18 months. You and I were, well, I don't know about you, were you in favour of the first lockdown? Yeah, I think most people were. I was. Yeah, most people didn't know what this was. It could have been far more deadly than it actually was.

We didn't know how we were going to cope. We didn't know the effects of it. We didn't know the long-term. I mean, you can argue we still don't know the long-term effects of the virus. It was a sensible thing to do in the circumstance. Now, actually, we've both spoken with people in the NHS. The argument was we didn't lock down soon enough. It was the argument.

And I know people who make the argument that if we'd lock down, shut the borders early, not let the virus in, if you like, or at a lower level and protected everything, then we could have had. Gone full Brexit. Yeah, I actually don't think that would have happened, though. I don't think that would have happened. And politically, I just don't think it was possible to close the borders because people have short memories.

But if you remember at the time, the left was all about closing borders as racist at that moment in time. There was a mayor, I think, or a politician in New York who, who said go and hug a Chinese person. It was in Italy. He was in Italy. There was a mayor of Italian town who said hug a Chinese person. And somebody, a politician in America said,

yeah, go out and enjoy the Chinese, whatever. Go to Chinatown, have a meal. So at the time, I just don't think it was going to happen. But let me ask you this, because I think in light of how we've changed our thoughts on it, given that lockdown has opened up what we've just talked about, which is the possibility of endless lockdowns

or lockdowns being a permanent feature of our lives. Do you think the first lockdown was a mistake? No. In retrospect. I think it's an unfair question. Because nobody at that point knew what was happening. Nobody knew what was going on. It's an unfair question.

Because when you were confronted with an uncertainty and a new virus, you have to do what is necessary to protect the population, especially when you don't have the facts of the influence. So I think at that point, no, I don't think it was... Well, the argument might be whether lockdowns actually do protect the population. Well, Toby Young famously said that, you know, that actually deaths were decreasing at that point. Well, right. And add to that the fact that lockdowns also kill people,

and we still don't know. I made this point on G.B. News last week, which is, we don't know how many people lockdowns kill, and we still don't... No one seems to want to find out, which bothers me. Well, the reason is, is because then these people, have it on their conscience that the policy that they implemented has directly led to people losing their lives or dying. But don't we want it on their conscience so that when people are making that decision in the future, they weigh both sides?

People don't want that. How many people on Twitter, on social media advocated lockdown demanded stronger, harder, faster? Do these people want it on their conscience that they advocated for a policy, which unfortunately meant a lot of people lost their lives? I don't think so. It's interesting and it's interesting for us, for you and I to be talking about it, because if we wind the clock back 18 months and think about where you and I were in February of 2020, I was smashing gigs, guys. That's about all you were smashing me at that time.

But honestly, like if you think about our lives, your personal life, my personal life, our work, this great thing that we're involved with, are personal circumstances. all of that for us is better. And yet we are now simultaneously with that two of the harshest critics of the government's policy. How has that happened? I think the reason why it's happened, look, we did very well over lockdown.

Lockdown for us personally was a boom time. It was a boom time, it just was. Just to recap for people, before lockdown kicked in, we were doing what, one interview a week? We were doing one interview a week. one live stream a week. We're on about 96,000 subscribers. Yeah, yeah. You know, and we went from there to where we are now, which is over 250,000. And we're doing this full time. We put four raw shows

out every week. We do two interviews every week. We, you know, we've interviewed people like Jordan Peterson twice since then, Heather Heying, Brett Weinstein, a huge ton of really, really spectacular guests. And that's because we've been able, you know, I think lockdown gave us permission to do remote interviews, which we always resisted. And there's a reason, by the way, to resist them. They're not as good as in-person interviews. They're not as good as in-person interviews, but it also gave us a large captive audience for us to tap into. The fact was, you know, they cup TV production. You know, everybody was sat at home. Nobody knew what was going on. Then, you know, then you had the BLM marches and everything that happened around that.

So for us, it was a very fertile time. But what our platform has created is an audience of 250-odd thousand people, more when you include the audio. So let's say 300,000 is a conservative estimate. Now, for us, and at times, I must admit, I fall into this pattern. I've seen these are just arbitrary numbers. But these are real people where they're concerns, their struggles, their difficulties. and when you get these people messaging you

or talking to you via the live stream and they're saying to you, you know, you have good, thank you, you're keeping me sane. Some people were saying, look, I'm going to be honest, I can't handle your interviews, I'm just not in the frame of mind, but I really love the raw shows. They help me to keep me, they help me laugh,

to keep me laughing. And you think, well, look, that's great. And, you know, we're both really happy that, you know, we're keeping people sane. But is it the job with two idiot comedians to stop tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people from losing their minds? Yeah. I don't think so.

Yeah. So I guess what you're saying is we are hearing that a lot of people are finding it very difficult. Yeah. We are. And what you get, especially from the comedy industry, where a lot of people are, you know, middle class and, you know, the media liberal elite, if we want to use that term, they're like, well, I don't see the, problem. You know, I'm, you know, you spoke to a guardian journal, you know, who's a very nice

person, actually. And she was saying, well, what's the problem? I'm sitting in my garden, it's lovely, I'm drinking shabbily. Peter Hitchens made the same point. But the reality is, there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in this country whose lives have been wrecked and destroyed by this policy. So why is lockdown so popular then? Because the government have been giving the population financial methadone. But the problem is you can't be on methadone forever. Eventually you have to get off methadone. And then you're going to face a brutal, bleak reality of the situation,

which is we're in one of the worst economic crises for the last however many hundreds of years. There's very few jobs to go around. How are you going to get a job if you don't have a job? And the real kicker is, If you work in a particular industry, let's say the hotel industry, and you've had a great career, and then you wake up and, let's be fair, there's no jobs in the hotel industry, what are you going to do? Are you going to be like Fatima in that government advert and retrain as a coder if you're in your 50s,

and you've been a concierge most of your life? No, it's bollocks. So COVID is, lockdown is basically Margaret Thatcher just for the hotel industry. Yeah, and the airline industry. Yeah. And the travel industry. and hospitality and live entertainment, it's been a disaster. And I think one of the things, look, you know,

you could say that there's been things that, you know, could we have handled it better, could we have done this? Absolutely. But one thing I think we need to take credit from is the realization that we've been very fortunate, it has been great for us, but we never shied away from the fact, and we never misunderstood the fact

for the vast majority of people, this has been an unmitigated disaster. When did the penny drop for you? I think it was at some point between the second and the third lockdown. I supported the first lockdown, but I asked you this question, and as I think about it now, I am troubled that I don't know the answer because the first wave really was a big wave. Yeah. There was a tremendous number of cases and a lot of people died. But the precedent we've now set in terms of... This is really the problem with lockdown. The reason we've been saying the word unprecedented about lockdown and everything that's been happening for the last 18 months, what does unprecedented mean? Well, it hasn't happened before. It hasn't happened before. Is this going to be the last pandemic?

No. Is this the last virus to come out of China? No. Is this the last virus to come out of anyway? No. Right. So this is going to keep happening, but it's not going to be unprecedented anymore. So we've had SARS, we've had MERS, we've had swine and avian flu, whichever one of those was SARS, right? SARS was something different. So all of them, and dozens of others, by the way, that have just been completely ignored. I remember teaching through swine flu. Right. And the schools were, you know, there was...

No one noticed it, really, right? I mean, there were kids off, but, you know, we all just cracked on. Right. That's not going to happen again. No. That's never ever going to happen again, right? Not in the lifetime of everyone who's alive today. Will it ever be the case again that someone's quote-unquote shagged a bat in China?

And we are like, oh, yeah, well, you know, they do that. You know, the viruses happen. That's not going to happen again. every time a new virus now comes out, there's going to be a minimum of all borders closed, minimum, right? And probably some form of lockdown as well. Am I wrong about that? No.

No. So the question for me then is, in setting the precedent of the first lockdown, we saved possibly, possibly. We may have saved lives, we may have not. But let's say that we did. We saved lives then. But what is that Pandora?

box that we've opened. That's what I think about. When I think about the long, when I play the movie forward, that's what I think about. And, you know, a lot of, a lot of the thinking in this period of time in COVID has been very short term. We've been dealing with short term challenges. As you said yourself, you know, the first lockdown was like, you just got to do whatever you can. Sometimes when you do whatever you can, you end up pulling out pillars that underpin elements of your society that can't ever be replaced again. And that's why I'm hesitant, very hesitant, to say the first lockdown was a mistake, because we didn't know what we didn't know. And it's, and it, in my opinion, it probably did save lives, if I'm honest. But the consequences of that

over the next 50 years, I don't know what they are. Yeah. And I don't. I don't. And I don't. And there's going to be some. There's going to be some. And it worries me what they're going to be, to be, to be honest with you. Well, look, I found it incredible that nobody... Well, I mean, Brendan O'Neill, one of the few people, and of course Brendan Wood, was worried that, you know, that public protest was banned. Yeah.

Even when the science said transmission in the open is practically zero. And still it was banned. So you're there thinking, hang on a second. There's something slightly nefarious going on here. And it was only with the women's march when that picture came out of that red-headed woman with the police officer with the knee in the back.

Did everyone stop and think, hang on a second? Maybe this is wrong. Yeah. That's very worrying. Then so many people gave up their right to protest and didn't think about it for one iota. But look, Fed played to Brendan. He was very consistent about this and spiked in general from the beginning.

And I laughed at them if I'm, I made jokes about it. Yeah. About them being that like, I was like, come on, guys, you know, we just need to pull together, blah, blah, blah. Maybe they were right. Yeah. You know, I'll happily publicly apologize to them. I think they were making some good points at the time about the fact that we have voluntarily given up a lot of the freedoms. And what worries me now is you've got these, you know, people like, they're not bad people.

No. You know, Dan Hodges and Tom Harwood and others who basically said, well, we're not in lockdown anymore. The reason that you have to wear a mask, the reason you have to socially distance, you know, all of these, that's just restrictions. It's not lockdown. You know, look, why not? You know, it's just a little thing.

It's just a little inconvenience. Yeah, sure, you can't travel to almost any part of the world that you, like you used to. But, you know, just get the vaccine that the government is essentially forcing you to take now, because they're going to make it impossible to live a normal life without it. And to them, that's not lockdown. And so that's what worries me is that when we talk about the new normal, that's what they're really talking about. Yeah.

The idea that these restrictions are going to be done at some point is nonsense. I hate that phrase a new normal. Yeah. Because what it means is the life that we used to have and we used to enjoy, normality is done. Yeah, it is done. That's what it means. In this country, it's done.

It's done. And I find that terrifying. And for the life of me, I don't understand why other people don't find that terrifying. Where we as a nation have gone from one where we see ourselves being in charge of our own destiny. I mean, you as a person, seeing yourself as being in charge of your own destiny, making your own decisions. That's the beauty of the West. You make your own decisions. You have your own opinions.

You live your own life. And you pay the price. And you pay the price, you know, and that's life, you know. Cause and effect. And we've gone from that to wanting big brother to look after us. Big government to give us our money, you know, so that we can go to certain places, decide how and when we socialize if we wear a mask,

how we do public protests, how we congregate. It's interesting you saying this because you are generally to the left of me when it comes, to like the size of government. You don't, you're quite happy for the government to be spending a lot of money on public services and stuff generally. Yeah. But I don't want the government impinging on my, on my liberty. And I don't understand particularly, and it's not just people on the left, there's people on the right who are like, yeah, what's the problem? And maybe it's because of our backgrounds, you know, Soviet Union, Venezuela, that we go, no, this isn't a good idea.

Why do you think there's so many people seem to be fine with this? Yeah, I think the lack of background is kind of part of it. I almost think it's like an abusive relationship. Like the first time you're in one, you don't really notice what's going on. If you talk to women about it, they're like, well, I just thought it's normal or maybe I was doing something wrong or whatever. But then the second time you find or the third time or whatever, eventually you work out what's going on. And you just go, the guy's an asshole, you know. Whereas if it's your first time, and you've never experienced authoritarian government,

you've never seen that every time the government takes your liberties from you, they never give them back. No. They never give them back. Think about this. Before 9-11, right, do you remember what I was like flying before 9-11? Oh, it was brilliant. You bring your own shotgun.

Yeah. Sit there. You know what I mean? Yeah, shoot a couple of people. You shoot a couple of people. Waitress or whatever brings you a beverage. Yeah. Yeah, a case you shout, Aloak, Akbar.

It was fine. It was great. The whole plane joined in. Yeah, now this video is getting taken down. But you know what I mean? Yeah, of course. Or before that, some guy decides to take shoes on a plane. They don't even explode.

Richard Reed, yeah. Now we're all taking our shoes off for the rest of our lives. For the rest of our lives. That's never going to stop. And liquids as well. Do you remember that? Do you remember being able to walk into a plane with liquids? Yeah.

You know, Islamists could be like, you know what? We're actually going to, we're going to get all our money. We're going to fund an expedition to Mars. and we're going to build the Martian caliphate. And all the Islamists go to Mars, and we'd still be fucking taking our shoes off. Yeah, of course. And fucking sipping little bits of breast milk or whatever

just to get on the plane with your baby. That's never coming back. So what makes you think all this other shit is going to end? And the thing that I've found absolutely infuriating is vaccine passports. And again, people who at one time I would have considered to be intelligent, sane, reasonable, rational, people going, but what's the problem?

Why not? Why shouldn't we? If that means I can go to a club and dance around with 300 sweaty other strangers, like I used to be able to in 2019 in early 2020, then why shouldn't we have vaccine passports? If that means I can go and go to a theatre

and go to a festival, why shouldn't we? And I just find it, it's not baffling, it's not upsetting, it doesn't make me angry, it breaks my heart. Because what it shows is either there's two things. People don't understand the freedoms they have

or they don't care about them. And I don't know what's worse. I think it's Benjamin Franklin. It's his quote. Those who will sacrifice liberty for a little bit of temporary safety will deserve neither and get neither. I'm paraphrasing.

But yeah, if you give up your freedoms for what you perceive to be safety, then you're never going to get the freedoms back. And you're probably, by the way, not going to be that much safer either in the long run. It's all illusory. Yeah. Well, exactly. So I think that's why it bothers us.

And let's be honest, I think the truth is that that's a fight that we've lost. It's a fight that we've lost. I don't believe lockdowns will ever be forced out of the repertoire of government. I don't believe there's enough opposition to vaccine passports. They don't need to call them vaccine passports, but essentially you're going to have to have a test or a vaccine to go anywhere, to travel, to go to public venues, whatever. And I just don't see that turning around.

And look, I know that people would feel that this is pessimistic, but this is just the truth. And I don't think there's any use to you and I are pretending otherwise. No, no. But again, it's a way that people have capitulated. The only way this ends is if there's a mass public movement of civil disobedience, which, as you rightly say, as long as the government is paying people not to work, self-employment grants, business grants, furlough, whatever, that's not going to happen.

I mean, I think it's something like 70% of people in the country according to polling, which we don't have to trust. But there are a lot of people who I know, they support more lockdown. I was having an argument with somebody today about this on social media. And I got them. Doesn't sound like you, mate. But at the end of the conversation, I actually got them to say themselves that they support annual restrictions for flu. I said to them, look, if you believe that COVID lockdown is what we need to do continually, flu currently kills more people.

Why wouldn't we have a flu lockdown? And he went, actually, yeah, I do think we need. So that's how people think. Right. And yeah, of course, if you give people 80% of their wages and a chance not to work, you could get a majority. in the polls to fucking remove the statue of Winston Churchill and replace it with one of Osama bin Laden. Without any pandemic on that basis, if you paid them enough and if you gave them chance not to have to get up at 6 a.m. and get on this filled tube next to someone's armpit.

Like, that's not appealing, and I get it. I understand that. So I do think the only way that this ends is a mass protest and mass civil disobedience like every week. And I don't think that's going to happen. It's not going to happen. I'll go to every protest that I can from now on. That's the decision I've made. And I see a lot of people who don't ever go to protest doing that. They're going to do that.

But unless that takes on a mass scale, I don't think anything's going to change. And by the way, look, one of the formative experiences of my early adulthood was the war in Iraq, right? One million people marched. Millions of people marched. Not only in this city of life, but around, I was in Edinburgh at the time, and there was half a million people on the streets of Edinburgh,

right? And the war still happened. And so I just don't see it changing. No, I don't see it changing. The problem is, is you use the phrase, play the movie forward. Not enough people do that. And go, right, so we're doing this now. Is this sustainable? Is this way of life going to be sustainable? Is it going to work in three to five years time? I don't understand why people, don't ask themselves that question. Why is that such a difficult thing to comprehend? And we haven't even talked about economics yet. The truth is, 40% of US dollars

that have been printed ever were printed in the last year. In 2020, there was a month, I think it might have been July or August. Don't quote me on this, but there was one month in which the US government, essentially, printed more money than had been printed in the pre-term. previous two centuries in one month. Now, if you think that's not going to have economic consequences,

you haven't understood what I've just said, right? So there's the economic side of it as well, which people seem... And you know what? I go back to our interview with Mike Driver, which almost no one watched. And he predicted all of this, if you remember. He is an Ostradamus. He predicted all of this. Yeah, he did. And I was right, I remember him, do you remember the first interview and he was banging on. I'm like, come on, Mike. Yeah. You know, put down the pipe, son. Yeah, you know, maybe we should have picked up of the pipe. Yeah, because the reality was, he was bang on the money about all of this. 100%. 100%. Anyway, so that's the good news, guys. So cheer up. It's all going to be great. But actually, I think, Francis, you make, and you know how much

it hurts me to say this, but you've been making a very good point on this. which is a lot of this stems from the modern attitude to death. Yeah. We in the West have made death a taboo subject. We don't want to talk about it. We don't address it. We believe that our lives are going to go on forever. And any sign of aging can be cured.

Cured. We can, you know, get a facelift. We take Botox. We have hair transplants. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We go to Turkey. teeth done. You can see this in our celebrities with their weird, smooth, expressionless faces.

And why is that? Because we can't and don't want to accept the fact that our time here is finite. Whereas before we had religion, and when you believed in religion, well, I'm going to die, but at least I'm going to go to heaven. Most of us don't believe that anymore. I think we're going to say most of us don't go to heaven. We go to hell. Yeah, but most of us don't believe that anymore. So we think this is all we've got. Then all of a sudden, this plague enters our country. We have a panic because we think we've conquered illness. We think we've conquered death. And all of a sudden, nature has given us a massive wake-up call and said to us, you're not in control. You are mortal, you are human, and you are vulnerable. And that, for the

vast majority of us, have been brought up in this country and have been insulated from illness, disease and death, that was a wake-up call too far, and it induced panic. And that's what we've seen a lot of it. I think people suddenly realize, and they're human, they're mortal, that they could contract this illness and they could die. And not only could they die, but their parents could die. Do you remember this was our first ever interview with Simon Evans, where he talked about what are we going to do? It was the last question we asked him. This is before the pandemic. This was way before the pandemic. This isn't 20. This was around about May, June 2019.

And he said there's a lot of people in the West being kept alive with drugs. Elderly people. What are we going to do with these people? How are we going to support them? How can, you know, what are we going to do? Maybe Simon Evans, one of Britain's best comedians, did in fact leak this virus from a lab to take care of that problem. Yeah, he might well have done.

Simon, if you're watching, well done, mate. But the reality is, nature or this lab or whatever it was created a virus that is dealing with that problem and we couldn't bear to see people who are elderly, infirm, sick,

vulnerable, die in such in such swaves because we've never seen it before and it was too much for us. And look, just for the sake of not being misunderstood, I think we do want to protect people from disease and the NHS from being filled with just so many people that it can't actually operate as normal. But yeah, I think you're right. The fact that we don't have a cohesive explanation of what is the meaning of our lives,

what is the purpose of our lives, what happens when we die in the absence of religion. And you and I are both non-believers, I think, still. despite everything that's happening. I think in that situation, it's very hard to have a moral framework that allows you to act with rationally. Yeah. You know, it was interesting.

I remember when the Fukushima reactor exploded and not exploded, it got hit by a tsunami and then it was some kind of thing. Japanese people in their 80s said, send us in to fix it. Don't send young people to fix this nuclear thing that their lives are long

and they could live a long life I'm in my 80s okay I'm going to get radiation poisoning and probably die but I've lived a long and full life and this idea that we would sacrifice the young to protect the old to me seems like

it's a sign of some kind of perverse mindset to me that we would sacrifice sacrifice young people's education. And we had David McWilliams on the show to talk about the fact that young people never recover from From problems with education. It's called scarring in economics You know, it's YouTube so we can't get into the vaccine, but the joint the committee the joint committee for vaccination and immunization As we record this says that it's not worth the risk to inoculate and vaccinate young people

people under 18 So there are risks with the vaccine too. And the drive to vaccinate young people, despite the fact that those risks exist, and the upside to me is non-existent, really, because they're not vulnerable to COVID. That is a very dangerous trend that you would risk even a little bit of the health of young people to save the very old and the infirm, etc. It's a sign of some kind of perversion in our mindset to me. But if you think about it, our entire society is biased towards old people.

They have the money, they vote. Yeah, they have the pensions. Well, our generation aren't going to have pensions. I mean, that's widely accepted. If you look, they get winter payments. They have been the beneficiaries of the housing crisis. What are we doing for young people? Lockdowns happened to protect the old and the vulnerable.

What's happening for young people? We're not looking after them. They've been thrown on the scrap heap. Let's be honest. I mean, you saw it with universities, charging nine grand for a Zoom lecture, and effectively locking them in their dorms. And, you know, demonising young people for wanting to go out, for wanting to see their friends, and, you know, for wanting to integrate back into society.

It was interesting as well, wasn't there? There was a period when the case number started rising, and the narrative suddenly became, it's all these young people who are going out. Selfish. But it wasn't, though. No. You have nothing to do with young people who were supposedly spreading it.

But the narrative was that. Yeah. I hadn't really thought about it in that level of detail, but there's something there that's off to me. That is not a trade-off that a healthy society makes, sacrificing the young to protect the old. You have to look after the elderly, and these are people who've given their life to this country

and they've paid taxes and whatever. you have to protect them. But I'm just talking, if you were a tribe of 250 people, hunter-gatherers, that would not be a viable long-term strategy. No. At all. Do you know what I mean? So we've gone against our nature in some way in doing that. And yeah, that's a... The brunt of this is going to be born by young people. It's not going to be born by the elderly. Yeah. Because by the time, you know, we lift, you know, we lift restrictions. We hopefully get back, to some semblance of normality, who are going to be the ones paying it off? It's not going to be them because they're not earning. Yeah. And, you know, it's going to be our generation. And

the people I feel most sorry for, imagine being a kid trying to get a job now, fresh out of uni or college. It's going to be impossible. This has been an complete and utter disaster for them. Well, there's another factor that I think we should talk about, as we've got about 15, 20 minutes, which is the impact all of this has had on, and this is very much in the context of our show, freedom of research and freedom of speech and freedom to discuss what the government is doing. So the WHO set some rules for what can and can be said. YouTube and other big tech platforms essentially implemented them. So for example, for a year it was against the rules to discuss the idea that COVID may have

leaked from a lab. As we know from our interview with Brett Weinstein, it is perfectly possible and quite likely that it did leak from a lab and the big tech companies have now allowed that conversation to happen. It was against the rules and Brett is likely to lose his channel quite possibly as we record this for talking about various drugs that may or may not be effective to treat COVID. We've now seen as of this morning on the BBC itself the Ivermectin, which is one of the drugs that we're talking about is being studied in the UK as a potential treatment for COVID, right? So it may turn out to be that it's not effective, but it may be effective. And yet for a year and a half, that was not allowed to be discussed.

So that essentially means that YouTube is now telling scientists and researchers what can and can't be talked about in the science. They are now the arbiters of what is scientifically allowed to be discussed. What do you make of that? disaster for free speech. I think it's a disaster for society. And again, not enough people seem to be caring about this. What about David Fuller argument from rebel wisdom who had us on his show and he challenged us for interviewing Dr. Suchar Abadi, who had some pretty choice things to say about, this was before the vaccine actually came out, but he knew how it would be made. And when you said to him, will you take the vaccine? He said, no, because I'm not mad. Yeah, I remember laughing

quite hard at that, not because it was funny, just because I didn't know any other reaction that would be appropriate. Yeah, and since that moment, Dr. Sucharibacter is known on our channel as Dr. Big Bulls or Dr. Grozbollah in his native German. What about David's argument, though, that by broadcasting conversations about, you know, treatments that are not scientifically 100% verified or whatever, or the WHO says that we shouldn't talk about them, we are potentially causing people not to have the vaccine or not to do this or not to do that and, you know, somebody could die as a result. I think there's a big, big difference for having someone like David Icon, who is saying

that 5G causes COVID, to have somebody on who is a chair of medical microbiology at Minds University or to have, you know, the people on that Brett has had. These are reputable scientists. These are experts in their field having a discussion. But his argument is you and I are not able to verify independently whether what they're saying is true. And if it's not true, people could die. Do you think people aren't having these discussions day and day out and day homes? No, but what the argument is, and I'm just playing devil's advocate here, the argument is that by amplifying the message with our 250,000 subscribers,

we are spreading it way beyond what might be happening around a kitchen table somewhere. This is a whole purpose of science. You have hypothesis. You have people who believe one thing about a virus. You have people who believe another. And then they challenge each other. And eventually the truth comes out. You come to a consensus.

Somebody gets disproved. But the whole purpose and the whole process of science is that's how it works. And suddenly we're going, no, you can't say this, you can't say that. Well, what happens if one of these long voices is correct? They've been cases right the way from, you know, You know, take the whistleblowers, for instance, when thalidomide. You know, everybody thought thilididemide was a miracle drug.

There was a few line voices going, oh, hang on, this is going, this is going to end badly. What, do we just silence those people? You need the lone voice. You need the critic. You need the whistleblower. They might be wrong. But it doesn't mean that we can't have hypothesis and our beliefs challenged. Because if we do, then we're living in a police state, aren't we?

Well, I mean, I think your point about the way science works is absolutely true. Like, as I've said before, both my parents are scientists. My dad actually worked in the Soviet Union making viruses and making vaccines. And, you know, we had books in our house about all sorts of crazy and strange hypotheses that turned out to be true or untrue or whatever. But that's the process of science. You look at the fact, you look at the hypothesis, you investigate it, you test it, experimentally, and then most of the time it turns out that what you thought was wrong.

But the discussion around it may often produce something that's valuable anyway. And the other thing that I think worries me is, you know, we had Brett on the show, and as we speak, he's just done an interview with Joe Rogan, and so we weren't able to get him back and have the unfiltered conversation that we wanted to because he had to reschedule. But what if most of it, what if most of what he's saying is not true, but 5% is. Yeah. What if, let's say, I'm not saying this is true, just to be clear, because I don't know, but what if the vaccine is just a little bit more dangerous than we're being told? Yeah. Just a little bit. It's only going to, let's say, cause complications, including death for an extra, I don't know,

5% more people than we thought. Shouldn't people know that? Isn't that not knowing that going to kill people? Of course. So to me, this argument by is about how, well, if you've talked to this person and they say this, people will die. Well, people will also die if we don't talk to him, potentially. So this very simplistic narrative, I sort of, I play back our interview with David on his show. And I start to think that maybe we gave in a little bit too much to this idea that it's on us to not have conversations. that could have an impact somewhere down the line because I think at the time I was also not thinking about

the impact of not having the conversation. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. It's a complicated thing, man. But it's like Jordan Peterson was saying. You know, the modern world and modern technology has unlocked a thing that is way more complex than we can understand,

just like the printing press did. I mean, the printing press essentially caused 200 years of religious warfare. Correct. The tour Europe apart and eventually. you could argue, to some extent, led to the creation of the United States and whatever, gradually over time. It was part of the process. Did it destroy people with faction logic?

It actually did, believe it or not. And so social media, modern technology, it's kind of like a nuclear printing press. It's like times on crack. It's a printing press on crack. And so this is a conversation and a debate that needs to be had. I don't, I don't cover it, as David's... darky said. I don't think we can just say, well, look, everything should be everywhere and anything should be discussed without any rules at all. I don't think so. I don't think,

you know, people saying we should go and burn down 5G master or whatever should be on YouTube. But then where do you set that line? I don't really have an answer. I think if somebody is an expert in their field, they should be allowed to talk. But what if they're not an expert in their field? What if they are just someone who, for some reason, like Brett Weinstein, he's not an epidemiologist or virologist. He's an evolutionary biologist. So theoretically, you could argue he's not an expert on this stuff. But he's hosted conversations with people who are.

So if we, that doesn't mean that we are experts on it. I think we are. Yeah, me and you well, you're going to get all your COVID updates from us going forward. We've got another, let's say, 10, 15 minutes. Is there anything else you want to talk about? The thing that I find worrying is how big text censorship is essentially eroding freedom of speech and again, people aren't worried about it. We saw it with Trump.

We saw it with Hunter Biden and now we're seeing it with COVID. But see, Francis, you say that though, and I'm going to have a go at you here because you weren't worried about that story with Hunter Biden when I told you about initially either because it's all like this shit that we can't do anything about. When it happened, I came in into the severe room and I said to you and Anton both, like, this is one of the biggest stories ever. And you were like, yeah, yeah, okay, what's for breakfast? And then most other people also react that way to it because they feel like there's nothing they can do. So maybe from your own psychological, like health point of view, maybe not giving a shit about all this stuff as the right decision.

You know, I think about my granddad who's, he died many years ago, but like all he wanted to do in his life was have a farm, grow vegetables, have chickens, have grandkids that he could feed the chickens to, you know, and just do that. And he's the happiest man I've ever met.

He was the happiest man. I'm not as happy as my grandfather worrying about all this shit. Maybe that's the right decision. Maybe we should just go and live on a farm. Yeah, but ultimately what will happen with this will affect you. Look at lockdowns. That will affect people on the farm eventually. And that part of that is dictated to what's happening online.

If there's a massive pushback to what's happening online, that will affect government's decision. We've seen that. We've seen how things and movements and organizations online have affected people in the real world. So what? We're just not going to have this conversation. We're going to strangle it right at the source. And if we continue to do that,

I really think we're done. I think we're done. And I find that really worrying. I find it just baffling and again heartbreaking. And what do you mean when you say we're done? Because we have lost our ability to challenge. We've lost our ability to discuss. We've lost our ability to share.

ideas and we've lost our ability to create new solutions. Well, what about, we're having this conversation here now to a certain number of people. You and I will both be on GB News, putting this point forward. You know, Dan Wooden, whose show I'm on regularly challenges lockdowns and talks about it. There are other people with big audiences. Joe Rogan has just hosted Brett Weinstein and Pierre, I think Corey's his name. Like, the conversations are still possible. they're still being had.

But they... Agreed. But they can't happen. Rogan absented himself from YouTube. He left. Maybe it's because he got a sweet deal, or maybe we're not giving him enough credit, and he saw which way the wind was blind.

So he absented himself. He left the platform. G.B. News, right? You are not going to be able to go into as much detail as you can in these shows here. And we know there's a lot more we'd like to be talking about

and we can't because if we do... Birds. Yeah, lovely ones. But, because if we do, we lose the channel and that's censorship. It just is. It just is. And it's very, very, very worrying because maybe the government's right on everything.

But shouldn't they be challenged? And shouldn't they be challenged by people who are experts in their field who have medical background, the correct medical background? Look, this is the point I made when we were having that conversation about Dr. Bacti.

Why doesn't the government, if Dr. Bacti was wrong about every single thing, if Bred is wrong about every single thing, which let's just for the sake of argument say that. How hard is it for the government to put out a video which breaks down our interview with Dr. Bacti

or breaks down our interview with Brett or breaks down his interview with other people he's interviewed by ivermectin and vaccines and whatever, and go, well, you are being told this. Here's the medical and scientific data to counteract that point and to counteract this point. And look, you know what? Fuck it.

I mean, YouTube is attaching all these COVID warnings to any discussion about COVID. Fine. Take our video with Dr. Bagdi and link that other debunking video right there. I don't care if you run an ad every fucking 15, 20 minutes in that interview going, here's an alternative explanation by a government-approved scientist. Fine.

Give people the information. But why are you suppressing that discussion in the first place? To me, the answer is always to educate people. I want to be educated. I want people to tell me what is wrong with what Dr. Bakdi said. I'd love to hear that. Yeah. I'd love to get a clear, simple, scientific explanation. Look, I'm not a scientist, but I've got a mind. enough to be able to understand things if they explain to me well enough. Let's have that explanation. Let's have the interview that we did or the interviews that other people did be the launching pad for a genuine conversation between scientists and let the public see how science is supposed to happen. Yeah. This is the thing that's really been pissing me off about the last

18 months is this idea, Francis, that we have been following the science is absurd nonsense. Of course it is. It doesn't mean anything. We had a story just the other day that in this country, the restaurants and bars were forced to put up these plastic- And comedy clubs. Separators between different tables and different groups. Turns out they help COVID to spread. Is that following the science? No.

Is keeping people mostly indoors for a year when we know the virus doesn't spread outdoors, essentially? And it actually boost your immune system so you're more resistant to it if you're outdoors, if you're exercising. and we were allowed to go out once for months. Is that following the science? And we know vitamin D. If you have high levels of vitamin D, you need the sun. I remember how people had a go at me

when I said people should be allowed to sunbathe. And all of Twitter piled up on me going, you were responsible, you're killing Granny. That's not following the science, right? And that is the conversation that needs to be had. But it's an infantile slogan. There is no such thing as the science. And this idea that there is consensus between

all the different scientists is wrong. They don't all believe the same thing. They don't all think the same thing. They all have their different viewpoints and beliefs. This idea that we're all following this one magical thing called the science, it's crap and it's infantile and it's stupid and it's immature and you're treating people like idiots. I agree.

And people know this. None of our rules make sense. Yeah. Why is it I can walk into a gym, right? and I wear my mask. And then I walk up the little stairs when I go into the changing room where I'm surrounded by lots of other little people

and I get out and then I walk Song's mask into a room with 40 other people and I lift weights and I'm breathing everything out. And you're touching objects that they then touch themselves. Yeah.

And then I put my little mask on and then I walk downstairs out of the gym. That's just a nonsense. I was walking down in the park the other day somebody had cordoned off a log. There was hazard tape around the log. Like we're going to go and touch the log and die. You know, one-way systems in a supermarket.

Well, like the virus is going to go, oh, right, yeah, sorry, I have to go up this way in order to get to the fruit and veg oil in order to infect people there. Or you walk into a restaurant. You wear a mask, you get to your table, virus stops working when you're sitting down. Yeah.

It just operates at a high level. Exactly. you know. So I'm going to regret asking this question, Francis, because this is not a question that you should ever be asked. But are you optimistic about anything in the future? No. No, look, there are some good things that's going to be coming out of this. Look, number one, we've all had a, you know, in the words of original D Hunter, we've all been sent to our bedrooms to think about what we've done. And some good is going to be coming out of that. We've had moments of self-reflection. I think we've realized that the way we had of working, our methods and our manners of working,

were pretty much unsustainable. The idea really that for the vast majority of people that you need to commute into work every day, I mean it belongs in the Victorian Times. There's a lot of people who can do two days at work and the office, three days at home. You don't need to be in work all the time, all day, every day. But I think the problem is, as you said yourself,

the cat's now out of the bag. We've done this, we've set a precedent, and we're going to be able to do it, again. And any time the NHS is in danger of being overwhelmed, which is every winter, you've got to be aware humans act in their own self-interest. Are you going to want to be the politician who let the NHS become overwhelmed? Do you want to be that person? Because there's always going to be one story in the mail, you know, little girl had leukemia, blah, blah, blah, contracted flu and died. All right, something like that, which is obviously awful. Of course it is.

No one's going to advocate that. It's heartbreaking for her, her parents, all the rest of her family. But you could have saved her life if you just locked down. Will be the argument. The fact that you end up killing loads of other people with cancer doesn't really matter in that. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Because you are protecting your own reputation as a politician. And they're going to do that because it's a survival mechanism. Because they're acting in their own self-interest. Anton, we're going to call this episode of the show

10 reasons to be cheerful. Well, I agree with you. And I actually don't want to end on a positive here because... You need to be depressed. No, it's not that you need to be depressed, but I think you need to... I think...

The thing you and I have always tried to do with varying degrees of success is be honest with people who watch the show. Whether that's when we're doing raw or when we're doing interviews, we've tried our best to ask the questions that we find interesting, of people that we find interesting, and to have honest conversations.

And the truth is, this is how you and I both feel. So for us, I know that for a lot of people, our show is, you know, particularly the roars can be light relief, and it's just us taking the piss out, whatever's happening, and you've got to, and we will continue to do that. But I also think that if there's a small chance to reverse some of this crap, that's been happening, which I'll be honest,

I'm skeptical that there is, but if there is, it's in everybody who watches the show and everybody who comes across it, understanding what's happening and writing to their MP, going on protest, whatever it is that's gonna prevent this from rolling and getting even worse, which is where it's going. And we've got a level with people about it.

Now, people can take a different view, of course they can, And by the way, I'm not saying any of what I've said, and I don't think you're saying any of what you've said, because you think you have some unique power of prediction. I'm not saying this is what will happen. I'm saying this is the direction of travel. And I hope it can be reversed, which is one of the reasons that you and I have had this conversation,

because in a very, very small way, not to pretend to be bigger than anything that we are, making people who think that what we have to say about it has some value, making them aware of what's happening, can contribute to that. But yeah, I don't want to end this on a cheap joke because it's just the truth. It's what you and I believe at this point. You know, it just is what it is.

And birds love it. And birds absolutely love it. Not ending on a cheap joke. Well, we're going to do some questions for locals, which are building up. We are. Looking forward to it. But thank you for watching. remember, this is just two comedians talking. We could be completely wrong. But we're probably not. We hope you've enjoyed this incredible interview. Remember to subscribe and hit the bell button

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