Latest / Radically Genuine / 133. The New World of Manipulation and How To Resist It w/ Laura Dodsworth

Transcript

133. The New World of Manipulation and How To Resist It w/ Laura Dodsworth · Radically Genuine

• Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. I am Dr. Roger McFillin. Reflecting on the global response to the COVID -19 pandemic, we witnessed firsthand how behavioral science was employed to condition the masses into compliance, nudging individuals to relinquish their cherished freedoms. It was a time when previously unthinkable restrictions became the new normal. prompting us to confront the uncomfortable reality that our own liberties can be swiftly eroded under the disguise of necessity. Despite the presence of compelling evidence suggesting potential harm and the earnest pleas from established scientists supported by published research, dissenting viewpoints challenging the measures implemented by governments worldwide were met with fierce resistance. Nevertheless, the public readily embraced experimental vaccines, while others complied with mandates with minimal pushback. Even now, the echoes of pervasive brainwashing persist. The mere utterance of the word vaccine triggers an immediate association with protection, despite the glaring evidence of its failure to shield most people from that infection. How long will we continue to delude ourselves in the face of undeniable reality? In my field, we've normalized the routine prescriptions of mood and mind -altering drugs, experimental concoctions that tamper with the delicate balance of the brain, often with catastrophic outcomes. I witness individuals trapped in the grip of profound despair and deteriorating health, yet dutifully comply with their medicine, oblivious to the fact that it's only exacerbating their suffering. How much of our perceived reality and sense of freedom is merely an illusion, shaped by techniques subtly woven into the fabric of our lives to influence our behavior and shape our perceptions. History serves as a sobering reminder of the potent force of propaganda and the authorities capability to condition individuals to participate in unspeakable atrocities. Sean (02:31.63) to even act against their own self -interests. Through established techniques, new truths can be meticulously constructed, serving as potent tools in the arsenal of brainwashing. We are all vulnerable, and it's happening right now. Do you want to know how to protect yourself against such mind control? If so, today is the episode for all those who continue to awaken. uncomfortable truths. We'll be peeling back the layers on how governments and institutions utilize psychological techniques to nudge individuals toward compliance, sometimes and often without their conscious awareness. For this conversation today, I'm honored to welcome esteemed author and journalist Laura Doddsworth to the Radically Genuine podcast, her new book, Free Your Mind. The New World of Manipulation and How to Resist It was an instant Sunday Times bestseller when it was published in July of 2023. It's been described as an informative and engaging read by Forbes, an important book by The Telegraph. And her previous book, A State of Fear, How the UK Government Weaponized Fear During the COVID -19 Pandemic, was a Sunday Times bestseller. That's about how fear was leveraged to encourage compliance. during an extraordinary period in British life and politics with stories from members of the general public and revealing interviews with psychologists, politicians, scientists, lawyers, Whitehall advisors, and other journalists. It's also been called an important book, a chilling post -mortem and dark and compelling. Her substack, which is absolutely amazing, is titled The Free Mind. And she writes about culture, politics, critical thinking, media, gender, free speech and free thinking. This sub stack is about freeing minds as will today's podcast be about. Once a month, she also publishes a written interview with someone she finds interesting, brave, who occupies the forefront of their field, which I was honored to be featured on this past March. Sean (04:55.118) So Laura Dodsworth, I want to welcome you to the radically genuine podcast. Laura Dodsworth (05:01.556) Well, I am, I'm really thrilled to be on it. I've been listening to your podcast for a while now and, um, um, you know, in your introduction, you said you're also about free minds. And I think that's what's really drawn me to the kind of content you put out. It's always really fresh and interesting and about how to be more of an individual and have more agency over your life and your health and your mind. So yeah, this is a really great place to be. Thank you for having me. I've got to say as well though, at the beginning of your introduction. I just find now, you know, a few years old when people describe the lockdowns, I get this horrible, chilled, unpleasant, claustrophobic feeling. I don't think I'm ever going to get over it. You know, when you talk about never before used tactics and the way our liberties were taken away, it's chilling. It's almost incomprehensible that we lived through it. Who would have thought in our lifetimes that we would... have experienced that. Sean (06:04.014) Unfortunately, Laura, I think it's only the beginning. And so I'm curious for you, was COVID an epiphany? Like how did you start to awaken to the strategies that were being used against us, which ultimately influenced the development of your books? Laura Dodsworth (06:25.14) Well, it was a huge epiphany. I feel like I've said it over and over and I don't want to be boring the way I describe this. It's just impossible to overstate what an epiphany it was for me. I think like a lot of people when news about the virus first came out, I had some nervousness, you know, because the response was so drastic and... I was a single mother and I thought, well hang on, if I get this and you're saying I can't leave the house to give my children to my, how do I look after my children? I remember stocking up on tinned food. Yay, so healthy. So just in case if I got ill, my kids would have something to eat. That fear didn't last very long though because I very quickly became much more frightened. I was frightened, so I'm no paragon of virtue. I'll just say this right out. I became frightened by the government's response because I just could not believe what I was seeing and hearing and the change in people, you know, around me, neighbours and friends and family. I felt very quickly at odds with a lot of people. And there was something frightening about that, this odd feeling of isolation. It was a bit like being in a sort of a dystopic film like The Stepford Wives. What are they called? The Stepford Wives? you know, were you wondering if everyone else has been taken over by the same mind virus? Mind virus, you know, because they were behaving weirdly. When I'm really interested in something, I will start researching it. I was just sure, I was an armchair epidemiologist, like a lot of people trying to learn about this virus at the beginning. I don't claim any special authority, but the thing is there were lots of very authoritative sources. Sean (07:49.614) Yeah. Laura Dodsworth (08:11.508) that we're giving a much more balanced perspective than we were getting from our governments. You know, there's a World Health Organization report in February 2020 that was extremely clear that the risk was stratified by age and comorbidity. This virus never presented an equal danger to everybody. Now, when our Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the nation on TV and said that we must stay at home, I found that so alarming. At that point, I wasn't really frightened of the virus. I was just frightened that we were in this crazy situation where we're being told that even if we weren't unwell and we didn't have any symptoms, we had to just stay in our home. So to bring it back to my own situation, a single mother has to work to keep the walls from the door and having two kids that need to go to school and a divorced dad that they have to see. I'm thinking, well, hang on, what am I supposed to do here? What are we all supposed to do? It struck me from the beginning as frankly immoral. And that's something that I've learned about myself since that sometimes that moral response you have at the beginning is the right one. It's a good one. We're told too often to be systematic thinkers, to be logical, or even to be obedient and to trust experts, to follow the science. And actually there are instincts and first reactions that we can and should listen to. So I had my own fear response. I was doing my own research. And the reason I started looking into the sorts of strategies that were used to encourage docility in the population is because the behavioural scientists put it out there. They weren't ashamed, they weren't hiding what they were doing, they were talking about it. So I'm an English graduate, I've studied, you know, taking a journalism course, I did quite a lot of linguistics at university too. Sean (09:57.134) Mm -hmm. Laura Dodsworth (10:05.332) You don't have to be any kind of particular genius to spot the sorts of tactics that were being used right from the outset, very martial wartime language, a lot of triadic structure. Here in the UK, we had things like hands, face, space, that little earworms designed to get into your brain and affect you. And they published, eventually they started publishing the minutes of meetings. And in one set of meeting minutes, The social scientists, SPI -B, Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour, talked about how the government needed to increase the sense of personal threat that the complacent felt because they weren't going to follow the rules. And this was a truly astonishing thing to read from government advisors. So raising the sense of personal threat, i .e. frightening people. official advice and boy did our government take it and roll with it. They never explained who the complacent were, how you target them, how you define them, how you don't risk overly frightening those who already are terrified out of their wits because pandemics are frightening times and again this just struck me as completely immoral. It seems to me that no psychologist should be setting out to frighten people, even if it's supposedly in people's best interests to be compliant with rules that are supposed to be good for them. It was just obviously morally wrong. That's my starting point. And so I started researching who these people were and what they were doing. Sean (11:50.254) Yeah, I was introduced to the Nudge Unit and maybe you can tell our audience a little bit about the Nudge Unit. Laura Dodsworth (11:57.268) Sure. Well, the Nudge Unit started here in the UK in 2010. It was set up under a Conservative government and at the time it was one third owned by the Cabinet Office, one third owned by the founders of the Nudge Unit and one third owned by a charity called Nesta. It has since been bought out by Nesta, which has made a very tidy profit for the founders of the Nudge Unit, which was set up at taxpayer expense. The Nudge Unit is an organisation devoted to behavioural science. So, I mean, they'll have some really fluffy, charming way of describing themselves. But effectively, behavioural science is about creating choice architecture. So creating choices for people whereby they will be encouraged to make what's considered the right choice. It should always be about choice, not mandates, although we can get into that, how much choice there really is. It would be about, for instance, putting fruit, not sweets, by a supermarket till rather than banning sweets. That would be an example of a nudge. Now, nudge used to be considered a pretty fringe theory, and yet there are now about 300 nudge units around the world which are embedded in governments or advise governments. So we have a nudge unit which, while it's not part of the government anymore, it's still very much has broad contracts. Framework with the UK government and I'm sure it's in and out of number 10 all the time. But we also have behavioural scientists who work directly in the Cabinet Office and in other government departments and in government agencies like the NHS and DEFRA and the UK HSA. We also have SPI -B, this little group of social scientists that advise the government in times of emergency. So Nudge is now everywhere. I mean, in some ways I don't really have a problem with nudge. You know, we're always trying to persuade people to do what we want all the time. You know, we're trying to persuade each other right now in a conversation and trying to persuade your viewers that all we're talking about is important and it should change how they think about the world. Companies do it all the time. I do have a different issue though when it comes to governments having nudge units, because there's never been a democratic mandate for this. Laura Dodsworth (14:23.028) The kind of choices they're putting in front of you are supposed to work because they're at a kind of a pre -conscious level. They're working at a subliminal level. And that means you don't really know they're doing it. And we've never been asked if we want to be governed in this way. So while democracy should be about the will of the people from the bottom up in a nudgeocracy, which I'd argue is what we're in in some ways now. It's about government changing the will of the people from the top down, but without the people even knowing about it. They do things like work on obesity campaigns, try to discourage people from smoking, which use knife crime. And on the face of it, it's quite hard to take issue with campaigns like that. They sound pretty good, don't they? I mean, one document I read somewhere from behavioral scientists, they talk about wanting to help us look up the biscuit tints. Well, a lot of people want help. locking up the biscuit tins. When I became alive to the Nudge Unit is when they locked us up, when they used all the tools at their disposal to encourage us to stay indoors, stop working, stop being educated, have vaccines, wear pointless masks on our face, etc. Sean (15:27.918) Yeah. Sean (15:40.974) Yeah, what's interesting for me as a psychologist, I'm aware of a lot of the techniques that were outlined in your book, because part of our job is to influence behavior change. When that behavior change is kind of universally viewed as something that is positive, like to improve health promoting behaviors, to improve relationships, things that are generally accepted to increase the value and purpose of our lives. I think generally speaking, people understand how these behavioral methods can be utilized in positive ways. The question is when there's a kind of a dark underbelly and aspect to this, to controlling behavior to in order for institutes aspects of control to in a lot of ways just advance the agenda of a small group of people, potentially even against the freedom and liberty of the masses. And even in some situations, as we've seen throughout history, like Nazi Germany, to actually participate in atrocities. So it's the intention of the behavior change matters. And you used the word mind virus. And I think that's the best way to describe what really infected a lot of people during this time, because there was a complete disconnection from reality. Fear impaired our ability to think logically. I'll never forget this session that I had with a client during the pandemic. And this was months and months in, at this point, the data was fairly clear that the most vulnerable were the ones who were very ill and who were old. So yes, if you had multiple comorbidities, you were elderly, you were at much greater risk of having a negative response or even die from this virus. But the general speaking, healthy people, young people, really not at risk at all. In fact, so many people got infected with the virus and hardly even knew that they had it. So there was a young, healthy woman in front of me and I just asked her some questions regarding just logical analysis about the degree of threat because that's the thing about fear. It can over exaggerate threat. And I said, so what's the... Sean (18:07.79) likelihood percentage wise that you're going to obtain the virus and what is the percentage that it could have severe health consequences and even death. And she said to me, I think it's about, you know, 50 -50. Like if I become infected with this virus, there's a 50 % chance the consequences will be quite severe and I could even die. And I said, wow, I mean, if that was the case, I would not be sitting in front of you right now. I'm not taking a, I'm not flipping a coin, whether I'm going to live and die by having a session with you where you're sitting, you know, four feet in front of me. But really logic was suspended. So Laura, I mean, how was fear weaponized against us? What were some of the messages that were so carefully constructed to provoke and maintain fear during that period? Laura Dodsworth (18:59.7) Oh my goodness, there were so many ways. I mean, I want to say something about that assessment of risk to you, because I think that that is really interesting. I mean, people aren't very good at statistics numbers in general. There was one study in the UK and it showed that the British public thought that six to seven percent of the population died from coronavirus. Now, that was about 100 times the actual death rate. It's that many people have died. the streets would have been lined with bodies, but they couldn't work out what the numbers would be and what that would look like. So figures were used to bamboozle, confuse, and upset, and disrupt and reframe all the time. That's a technique that's used, disrupt and reframe. You talk about how people can't think logically when they're frightened, well, of course, this is why fear is used. Oh, can I just say something before I go into the tactics? Because I get really upset about this. I think it is absolutely disgusting that people in government and psychologists thought it was okay to use fear to encourage docility. You know, we had some leaked WhatsApp messages from government ministers and our own Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. Okay, this is the chapping government in charge of health. said we must frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain. So they were holding this like kind of new strain. I can't remember what codes they eventually gave. It was, we called it the Kentish variety here. They kind of holding it in their back pocket and working out when to tell people to frighten them so that they would cancel Christmas. One of the founders of the Nudge Unit wrote a kind of mayor culpa in one of the publications over here and said that one of the most egregious mistakes in the pandemic was the level of fear. that was deliberately conveyed upon the public. The cabinet secretary, so that's the chap in charge of the civil service basically, agreed that the fear and guilt factor was vital in communicating with the British public. This is disgusting, this is how they were thinking of us, like we're very naughty, bad children who need to be frightened to do what we're told. And yet it is so well known that fear affects mental health and physical effects. Laura Dodsworth (21:19.412) physical health and could have long -term ramifications. Now, the head of the Nudge Unit, David Halpin, was talking about the use of fear in one of our big newspapers, The Telegraph, and he showed not only no remorse for having weaponized fear, but obviously still believed it was a really good thing, you know, really doubling down, saying that the use of fear is right if you have to recalibrate how people think. Now, you don't normally talk about calibrating brains, you talk about calibrating bits of machinery. So you really get that kind of flavor of technocratic thinking. Oh, people need to be calibrated. Well, They got the risk wrong. They told us that we were all equally at risk. We weren't. That we had to act like we've got it, which is mental. No one's ever been told this before. Act like you've got a disease that you don't have and don't have any symptoms of. And you know what was really disturbing about this interview with David Halpin in the Nudge Unit is he said the British public will follow stay at home orders again, easily and willingly, because we know what the drill is. That was the term. We know the drill. So we've been drilled. We've been drilled. Sean (22:24.718) Mm. Laura Dodsworth (22:30.484) It's hard for me to convey how disgusting I think it is for people in public health, psychology and government to talk about it this way. So how did they do it? How did they frighten the public? One thing was the use of numbers and statistics. Now that creates salience, big numbers stick out in your brain, you remember them. You'll see this a lot with climate change since. So they would talk about the number of people who had been admitted into hospitals. And it was very sneaky the way they did it because they would use a big number, which actually included people who'd been admitted to hospital with COVID, but it also included people who had caught COVID in hospital, but they never split it out. They didn't tell you the difference. So it was a kind of inflated number. Also, they'd focus on hospital admissions, but they would never talk about hospital discharges or recoveries. So you'd have the sense people go into hospital and they never come out because they would never talk about that. Sean (23:22.35) Mm. Laura Dodsworth (23:28.18) They'd also talk about deaths and hospital admissions every single day. Now you'll know in psychology there's something called the truth illusory effect. If you repeat something often enough, it becomes very much fact for people. I'm not saying these figures weren't facts, but they were inflated and they were focusing on the negative and not the positive. So that was being drilled into us every day. Masks themselves, I would argue were deliberately used as a signal. That's one of the parts of my book, A State of Fear, which was considered... controversial, but I'm only saying what the behavioural psychologist said. David Halpin said in a select committee to parliamentarians that the mask was a signal. And then he talked about the underlying evidence. It's a signal. It turned us into walking billboards for danger. Of course, that's not necessarily how sociology, psychology and physics work, because I'm not saying it's necessarily they've done exactly what they wanted. Sean (24:09.486) Conditioned for your response. Laura Dodsworth (24:25.492) There are even some studies that show that wearing masks may have increased risk because people then stood much closer to each other. Anyway, lots of advertising. So the UK government and the NHS here in the UK became one of the biggest advertisers in the media. And I think they spent more than has been spent on communication since the Second World War. I don't have the latest figure, but it is something mind boggling and eye watering. Some of the campaigns were really unpleasant. I know hundreds and hundreds of them on social media. There were TV, billboard, magazine, radio, newspaper ads. And they'd say things like, act like you've got it, which I've already said is a completely mental thing to say to people. There was one targeted at teenage boys, which really stood out to me because I have teenage boys. And it said hanging out in the park could kill. Well, I don't think teenage boys hanging out in the park ever killed. Sean (25:21.486) Mm. Laura Dodsworth (25:24.564) Don't let a cup of coffee cost lives. That was supposed to deter people from doing something that was entirely legal, which would be getting a takeaway coffee and going for a walk with a friend. If you think about it, going for a walk with a friend with a cup of coffee may have been life -saving for somebody who had really bad mental health problems and lived on their own. But no, don't let a cup of coffee cost lives. Then there was the quite infamous campaign called Sean (25:28.558) Hmm. Laura Dodsworth (25:46.74) look him in the eyes and tell him you never break the rules. So a big close up of somebody's face, very, very grainy with a sort of a horror film aesthetic with a mask on the face and the big eyes looking at you. And of course, when you see eyes, it makes you feel like you're being watched. So again, this is well known in psychology that if you feel like you're under that watchful eye, you will behave yourself more because you feel like you're being spied on, being observed. So a lot of money spent on advertising. Sean (26:10.126) Mm -hmm. Laura Dodsworth (26:14.388) There was also a narrative that was constantly pushed that people who followed the rules were COVID heroes and people who didn't were COVIDiots. You would see newspapers running articles about people at the beach on a bank holiday and calling them COVIDiots or selfish. And again, they weren't actually doing anything that was illegal and it would be hard to think of anything that would be better than being in the sunshine. Sean (26:24.718) Yeah. Laura Dodsworth (26:42.196) and the fresh air in an outdoor space, but there we go. A particularly egregious type of shaming was targeted specifically at children, which was really unpleasant. And we're not the only country to have had that. There was something similar in Germany, and I bet it happened in lots of places. Our own health secretary actually parroted it himself, don't kill granny. So that was supposed to make children and young people be very vigilant about their behavior. But of course, what was horrible about it was it's elderly people who were going to die. It's always the elderly who are going to die. And it was never going to be the grandchild's fault. It would simply be an artifact of their grandparent being elderly. There was a horrible, horrible moral burden to place on young people. How else did they frighten us? Well, I think I think those are some of the key ones. So PR, advertising, cherry picking statistics. Oh, the daily briefings, there were daily briefings on TV and they would have the experts on podiums and they used a kind of a ticker tape around them which was yellow and black stripes. I mean these things once you become alert to them they're really obvious. That looks like the kind of tape you would have at a police disaster area making sure people don't cross the line because it's dangerous or it's like the yellow and black of a wasp. You know, this will sting you. It's very much a do what you're told colour. When we moved into the summer, when things kind of opened up again after so -called Freedom Day, that changed to yellow and green ticker tape. So, you know, they'd use colors to sort of make the message harder or softer. And these briefings on TV were given quite a martial tone. They would use wartime language. They would talk about the battle. as though a virus is an enemy that can be defeated or turned on and off like a tap at the government's behest. And of course it's nothing like, you know, a real enemy. I think that was actually quite a dangerous message to push because before we've seen the enemy as nation states, often a long way away, you know, a vast snowy country with a powerful red button at its fingertips, then the enemy has morphed more into terrorism. You know, people that sneak into your country with suicide vests or... Laura Dodsworth (29:06.676) or knives and dastardly plots. But COVID turned all of us into each other's enemy because you could harbor a virus. You know, you were the danger. And that is another way they used fear. They made us frightened of each other. And in fact, snitch lines were set up here in the UK for people to report their neighbors for wrongdoing. And there were hundreds of thousands of reports to snitch lines. I remember that atmosphere. It felt really kind of febrile. I actually fell out with somebody who posted on Facebook that I'd broken the rules. And I remember just being so shocked that somebody I know and love and would think of as loyal and like in my corner would say publicly that I'd broken the rules because it felt like that could be a dangerous thing for somebody to think about me. Like would that make people watch me and report any rule breaking? I actually didn't really break the rules too badly for ages. But there we go. That was someone's impression of me that I had. Sean (30:03.31) I'm going to go to bed. Laura Dodsworth (30:06.132) So we were encouraged to do the heavy lifting and police each other as well. And then that creates this kind of feeling of fear among people you know. Are people watching me? Are they going to tell on me? Sean (30:17.422) Uh, Laura and Roger, um, in my conversations with people, with friends, I still recognize that having conversations about COVID and maybe some of these tactics that were used for fear is quite polarizing still. So I had been kind of reflecting back on our developmental years when we were growing up in the eighties, our adolescent years into a teenager. And it made me think back to during that HIV. AIDS crisis, and if fear was used in a way to, to nudge us. And one thing that stuck with me during that time period was they said, when you have sex with somebody, you're not having sex with that person. You're having sex with all the people that person had sex with and all the people they had. And I remember just seeing a visual of like hundreds of people, and it was to put the fear in you to not. have any type of relations with someone. And it carried into my college years. I remember I was dating somebody and we were at that point in the relationship where we might progress to the next step. And she said, um, I want you to go get a STD HIV test. And I was like, wow. And I was like, okay, I have no problem doing it, but I could just see how that fear had connected to an entire generation of people because of what could potentially go wrong. Laura Dodsworth (31:41.844) I think that's a really good comparison. And funnily enough, here in the UK, people talked about the AIDS campaign as an example of how successful fear was. And they kind of claimed that that fear is their own success story. Whereas actually, if you talk to some sociologists who are experts in public health here, they think that that was a disaster. And what really helped during that time was grassroots. Sean (31:51.086) Yes. Laura Dodsworth (32:10.132) charities and just doing very discrete targeted things with people who were really at risk. I mean, I remember that campaign, that's my kind of age group as well. And we had this massive tombstone on it. And it was really scary. And I remember thinking that this was something to be really scared of. I didn't actually quite know what sex was. But the first thought that gave me about sex was it was something really dangerous and frightening. And actually, although it's claimed as this success here, Sean (32:28.718) Mm -hmm. Sean (32:34.094) Yeah. Laura Dodsworth (32:40.532) At the time, the government thought the fear had gone too far and they said to pull back and to stop using the fear in the AIDS campaign. Sean (32:48.878) Why do you think they pulled back? Laura Dodsworth (32:51.924) Because it was considered too heavy -handed and unpleasant and not necessarily effective. I mean, that's the other thing. Psychologists know that the use of fear isn't always completely effective. What you need to do is tell people what to do about the thing they're frightened of. You can't just frighten them. I mean, it's long been known that there are lots of ramifications for using fear. And in fact, the chief medical officer during the AIDS campaign pulled pulled back and explicitly rejected the use of fear messaging. I think we were a lot more sensible then than we are now. I mean this use of fear I don't think is going away. I think unfortunately it's not so much just that they've drilled us, they've drilled themselves into using really unpleasant methods. Sean (33:41.39) Yeah, it makes me think about, um, there was a time where Jordan Peterson put out a video that popped up in my feed and he was talking about how these fear tactics are used and they, they push you a little bit further. They push you a little bit further and then they realize at what point they can't push any longer. And then they adjust tactics and they maybe push a little bit further and push a little bit further until the public pushes back. So if during that HIV. AIDS crisis, they realized at which point they could push no further and maybe was doing harm. And, and now with this crisis, you would think they would have learned from that and adjusted tactics a little bit and reached a point where, where you can't go any further. And I remember watching Jordan Peterson, uh, talk about it and he talked about it in a way to really get people to, to be scared about how this can go wrong. And it made me think. about the role of psychologists and their approach and their knowledge and understanding of how this could really go wrong. And at, even at the time, my brother was speaking out about a lot of things and I don't think I've ever used foul language on this podcast, but I was like, you know, you might be right about things, but why do you have to be such an, like an a -hole about it? Like, can we just have a conversation about this? So our, our clinical psychologists that had been speaking out about this. Laura Dodsworth (34:56.052) Oh. Sean (35:03.278) balancing it by using fear to bring people back to where we need to be, which is in the middle applying some critical thought. Well, let me bring up some alternative views on this. It was very lonely. I was angry about it. You were. And we started the Radically Genuine podcast as an opportunity for me to speak out on a number of things, because the same tactics that were used within COVID and Laura Dodsworth (35:11.316) Yeah. Roger, did you find this a really lonely place as well then? I mean, I found it really hard. Yeah. Sean (35:32.014) pushing vaccines were the same tactics that are used in the psychiatry field and on the masses to push psychiatric drugs, which are mind and mood altering substances with significant consequences. So I found that the pushing of a vaccine, both through influence and through mandation, was a crime against humanity. And even the use of the word vaccine, like the powerful use of language as a weapon, on people. So what happens when you think about vaccine, what comes to mind? Protection, right? They even changed the definition of vaccine during this period. Are you aware of this? Like Webster dictionary changed vaccine. I actually just brought it up on my phone. Let me just look at this real quick. Here was the previous definition of vaccine. A preparation of killed microorganisms living attenuated organisms or living fully. virulent organisms that is administered to produce or artificially increase immunity to a particular disease, right? That's how we viewed it. And we viewed it as having very low negative consequences. And it immunized you against the disease. So you really could protect other people because you wouldn't get it and you couldn't spread it. It was exposing you to a virus. so that your body can build up the immune response so that when you are maybe exposed to it again, your body knows what to do. Yes. Now the new definition reads a preparation that is ministered as by injection to stimulate the body's immune response against a specific infectious agent or disease such as an antigenic preparation of a typically inactivated or attenuated pathogenic agent such as bacterium or virus or one of its components or products. such as protein or toxin. They then also changed the definition of anti -vaxxer. So an anti -vaxxer now reads as a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating them. So you are now a anti -vaxxer. Laura Dodsworth (37:39.38) I'm feeling really triggered again. This is like the beginning of the podcast. Oh, I'm feeling really triggered. And the thing about vaccines, I'm going to talk about them a bit more today than I normally do then because I mean, I had to take a hard decision when I was writing a status for, I thought, okay, I mean, this, this title of my book and the subtitle of my book almost gave my publisher a stroke, you know, to accuse the government of recognising fear. It's not a small thing. And I thought, I can't do that and talk about vaccines. You know, I can't do all of that. Sean (38:03.79) Yeah. Laura Dodsworth (38:09.012) You've got to some extent you have to pick a lane. So I did write about vaccines in a state of fear, but the COVID vaccine specifically. But what I wrote about was that weird and totally unprecedented campaign to persuade and psychologically bludgeon and mandate people to have the vaccine because we've never ever done that before. So I've got a very clever, um, very clever friend who's an expert in the field of nutrition and cholesterol and you know she's a Cambridge maths graduate PhD and she did some analysis of the trial data and I read her analysis of it and I thought well okay I won't be having that vaccine because they're talking about the relative benefit not the absolute benefit that's naughty that's another trick that was used you know and kind of reversed all about the big numbers that we used. to scare you into thinking that, you know, how COVID is very deadly and affecting vast numbers of people. Well, they didn't talk about the absolute benefit of the vaccine, which would be the honest thing to do. They talked about a relative benefit. So they came up with this 95 % effective thing, which wasn't really, that doesn't mean anything. It's a relative benefit. And, Sean (39:24.398) Yeah. No one knows what that means. Can you distinguish between the two relative and absolute just for our listeners? Cause that was a revelation to me when. Laura Dodsworth (39:39.284) Oh no, please God, don't expect me to explain the matter that. Like doing it live would be really difficult. I'd have to sort of write it down, but it's, go on then. Sean (39:42.318) I Sean (39:47.502) I can try to jump in here on this. Okay, you go ahead. Okay, when you don't have a randomized control clinical trial, so when you're not measuring it against somebody who got a placebo, it is impossible to determine how effective something actually is in comparison to someone who got an alternative or didn't get a treatment at all. So right there, Laura Dodsworth (40:10.292) Yeah, well, that's of course a completely separate point to the one I'm making, but it's another problem with the study. And another one is they didn't pick old and vulnerable people to test on. They picked healthy people. So, I mean, there was a lot wrong with the study. And I thought, well, you know, they did say it's not for anybody under the age of 50. I'm under 50. I'm healthy. My lungs are good. I'm a runner. I'm just not having it. Sean (40:18.958) Yes. Laura Dodsworth (40:33.044) But the language around the vaccine was instantly very authoritarian. You know, there was no deviation allowed from the message and they use this panoply of persuasions to make people have it. And that's really when I started thinking, well, is a nudge a nudge as well? Because they didn't stop there. Then they went on to mandates and said, oh, I see, no, a nudge is definitely just a tool in the policy toolbox. And then after that you go to mandates and The kind of language about the refuse NICs was just awful. It was, you know, you can see that this might sound extreme, but you can see how something like Nazism can take hold really quickly because people are, people were encouraged to demonize shame and other so quickly. And it makes you realize that the most appalling regimes wouldn't really take very long to take hold. anywhere. I mean, this has been a big preoccupation of mine since March 2020 and it's a big part of the reason behind writing Free Your Mind then. But you know, with the vaccine, just, I mean, if you just, if you just say these things now, they sound mad. I mean, we had a petting zoo buy the vaccine for children. So come and stroke a sheep and get your vaccine. Well, this is weird. You don't have to do this with measles or rubella vaccines. Obviously, the kind of the normal stickers, there were raffles for football tickets in the US. You had raffles for college education. Now that is a huge incentive. If you have an incentive like that, what does that do to informed consent? Because your informed consent should only be based on the risk and the benefits of the product for you. That's the other thing that made me very uncomfortable. This wasn't about the individual. You were doing this for others. Well, you're not supposed to have a medical procedure for others, for a totally different cohort of people. Now, If your vaccine as a teenager was to protect elderly people, well, why did you need to do that? Because the elderly people can have the vaccine. You know, this was just all, it was all the wrong way around. In Washington, they had jabs for joints, you know, persuading people with marijuana to get vaccinated. There was a brothel in Vienna. You could go and have the woman of your choice and a hot dog if you had. Sean (42:47.79) What? Unbelievable. Laura Dodsworth (42:48.468) the COVID vaccine. I mean, when you think about what these incentives were, they were really weird. And then it was like, well, if you don't get vaccinated, you're never going on holiday again, or you can't go to a cinema, or you can't work. So the jabs for jobs here in the UK was only, I say only, it was with devastating results for health and social care workers. So in an industry, elderly and residential homes, which is already suffering from recruitment problems. They said you couldn't work unless you had the COVID -19 vaccine. So already that would be like a whole group of people who due to their ethnicity or culture would be more hesitant about vaccines. They would be a good chance they've already had it because of their field of work. And so they'd have natural immunity, you know, for whatever reason they had not to have the vaccine, you know, that was their right. That was their right to have informed consent and turn it down and they lost their jobs. Sean (43:46.062) Yeah, a number of people who did get the, I'm not even going to call it a vaccine because this was new innovative technology, mRNA technology that we use the word vaccine to really condition people to believe it's just like any other vaccine. But a lot of the reasons why people got it was for a return to freedom. They believed it was their ticket to be able to get back to living life again. And that was what was scariest for me. is how easy it was for people to violate their own supposed principles and give up their own freedom and rights and just comply in order to get it back. Right. In order to get it back. Yeah. Uh, Laura, I, I got the, the COVID vaccine. Um, I was, uh, had moved back to, from Los Angeles to Pennsylvania and I was temporarily living in a community of 55 and older. So I was with my, my mother as we were looking for a home and it became available to me and. Laura Dodsworth (44:11.124) Yeah. Sean (44:40.27) It was, I don't want to use the word altruism, but I felt like it was my responsibility, especially living in a community of older people when I'm walking, because I was walking around a lot and being exposed to people that it was part of my responsibility. Yeah. And I wanted it to be over. I wanted to go back to the way things were. And that was the conditioning. Yep. Laura Dodsworth (44:57.044) Yeah, and so you were really just believing the messaging that had been pushed towards you, but of course if the vaccine stopped transmission then the person that had the vaccine was protected and it would make no difference at all whether you've had it or not. This was just a logical point that was completely, totally brushed aside and of course the jab did almost nothing to stop transmission anyway. So you never could have protected anyone else really by having it. Sean (45:10.51) Yep. Yeah. Sean (45:23.15) Yeah, we know that now. Well, we knew it then, but maybe the awareness of this type of information was not prevalent. Laura Dodsworth (45:24.852) We know that now. Laura Dodsworth (45:30.068) I mean, you know what you said there that people had this this jab in order to have their freedoms returned to them. I found so disturbing. I mean, I decided I would. I wasn't going to have it for a whole number of reasons. First of all, I'm very, very cautious about pharmaceuticals. I'm the one who I'm the person who if I need something, I say to the doctor, no, I don't want that new thing because this has happened to me before. What's something that's been around for decades? that you yourself have anecdotal information for. I don't just want the stats. You know, I'm really cautious. So there's that. I also have a very unusual type of anaphylaxis. I was astonished that they wanted people like me to have the vaccine at all. I was like, okay, so I would have to have it in hospital with steroids at the ready and you're not even going to tell me what ingredients are in it. This sounds completely mad. I'm not up for that. I've had COVID anyway, thanks. It was never supposed to be for people my age. And then when they... brought in the vaccine passports, I thought, well, that's it. This is now the hill I'll die on. Because if I have to submit myself to have something injected into my body that I don't want in order to have basic freedoms, I have no freedom. There is no freedom. I would rather die on my own, on a hill somewhere, than be injected. You would have to have strapped me to a gurney and forced to be injected. That's the world we'll be in if you're saying there's a pharmaceutical product I have to have. to go to the shops or the cinema. And I decided, well, if I never have to travel again, if I can never go on holiday again, this beautiful septid aisle is my home forever. I won't travel. I'm not going to be bullied into having it. Now, if we're talking about something that really would have helped other people, which for some reason when they took it themselves didn't help them, and of course, this is a very illogical nonsense premise for a vaccine, then maybe I could have been persuaded, but none of that was true. Sean (47:23.118) Yeah. Laura, your book does a great job of speaking to our own inherent vulnerabilities. And one of those vulnerabilities is the authority bias. How was that really leveraged against us globally in order to make decisions that in so many different ways, you know, violated our own logic, logical kind of understanding of what we're seeing. Laura Dodsworth (47:49.108) Well, I mean, I think there are ways in which it really worked and ways in which it didn't. For instance, one problem with the response to Covid was it became very partisan because anything orange man Trump said was bad. And so people took the opposing view. Now he's, you know, the president of the United States should be the ultimate authority figure. I mean, the behavioural psychologists knew very quickly, you're not going to ask people to believe prime ministers and presidents. You need messengers, you need celebrities and you need public health experts. So a lot of that authority fell to public health people. We were told to follow the science, to trust the experts. So the authority wasn't always in our actual key authority figures, but they were more like proxy authority figures. So yeah, we were told to believe the science, almost like it was faith. There was almost this new priest caste of information and authority we're supposed to follow. But... What happened actually behind the scenes was that the real authorities, governments paid celebrities as well to post vaccination selfies. So they use them as proxies. I mean, here in the UK, the Royal Family posted Instagram vaccination selfies. Now, of course they wouldn't have been paid. And I have no doubt they thought they were doing that absolutely in order to encourage a good public spirited attitude towards the take up of a vaccine. You know, all have been done with the best intentions, but that's what happened. celebrities were used to push the message. I mean, of course, the thing about authority figures is some we think they're infallible and they're not. You know, if you draw the curtain back in The Wizard of Oz, it's an old man, little old man with a pair of glasses on, he's no one special. And that's always the case. They're always, they're always fallible. But we are primed to believe authority. So, One way that you can try to arm yourself against manipulation tactics such as propaganda from a government is understanding your cognitive biases. The universe is infinitely vast and we just have little brains. Now, I think we're capable of a lot and our brains are wondrous, but they are limited. And so we've evolved with these biases to help us get by in life and they've absolutely made sense. They've worked for us. Laura Dodsworth (50:13.716) So conformity, authority, scarcity. But if you understand those biases, you'll understand how they're used against you time and again. And you saw that in COVID. So we were all supposed to conform and be the same. We're supposed to listen to authority. If you thought anything was running out, you're going to be scared that you might miss out on it. So for instance, when I got my vaccine text, one thing it said was that there was limited availability for appointments. So book now. So even that scarcity one was used to encourage me to buy a vaccine actually that we had probably billions of doses for. So. Sean (50:47.15) Mm -hmm. Laura Dodsworth (50:48.148) it does really help to understand those biases because then you can spot them when they're used against you. Sean (50:54.862) One of the things that concerned me and still does is the personality types of people who actually seek out fame and power and influence, those who are prone to government, much more likelihood that they demonstrate sociopathic and narcissistic tendencies. And it's their viewpoint of the other. So how easy it is to create an us versus them or the other group. So we're talking about those who are in positions of great authority and influence who are in... an elite class globally, their potential to dehumanize others, to see them as peasants or even parasites, ones that could, we could all be experimented on for the, in their own minds for the greater good. Did you see that at all, Laura, that the potential exists for the greater population, those they see as peasants and parasites? for just mass experimentation, especially when you're trying to test out mRNA technology. Laura Dodsworth (51:59.796) Yeah, I mean, I don't know how far I go with all of that. And I think partly it's because one of my own biases I have to watch is hopefulness. I'm afraid I'm terribly optimistic about people. And, you know, there's one example, I think I give it in Free Your Mind of when I was completely suckered in by a hope scam. There's a high street chain. Sean (52:12.366) I am equally as guilty Laura. Um, I am an optimistic and hopeful person. Laura Dodsworth (52:28.308) over here in the UK called Woolworths. And it's the shop of my childhood. It's where you buy pick and mix sweets. It's where people bought their vinyl records. So I bought my first make -up, my first record. It was a great shop. And then it went out of business. And someone launched this scam on Twitter saying that Woolworths was coming back to the high street. Now I was delighted and I instantly reshared this. I didn't notice the many red flags, such as the kind of the dubious Twitter handle and the spelling mistakes in the tweet. Lo and behold, a few hours later, people said, ha ha, look at the idiots that fell for this scam. I was one of those idiots. I fell for hope. Because at a time when the world was shut off to us and the high street shops were shutting, going out of business because of the lockdown, the idea of the return of my favorite childhood shop coming back was just too much. You know, think about the Obama campaign. It was just his face with the word hope. It's not always our fears that are played on, it's our hopes. So I... Sean (53:22.734) Yeah. Laura Dodsworth (53:26.484) Anyway, a long preamble, sorry, to answer you. I don't know how much people would kind of be psychopathically planning to experiment on populations. I'm open to the idea of it. I mean, I think the only true conspiracy theory is that powerful people don't collude in their own interests. You know, we listed a few conspiracy theories which turn out to be true like MK ultra in free your mind You know, it's amazing how many people have never heard of MK ultra. It's the most Good for you We just put a few paragraphs in and this did a few conspiracy theories But you know, it doesn't take you very much Google research to find out how many horrible things the government have done to people that you know Most people don't even know about so Yes, potentially Sean (54:01.294) Just wrote about it. Laura Dodsworth (54:20.884) But I do think most people involved in the vaccine probably thought it's a good thing that's going to help people and rush the technology through. Look, I don't know. I just don't know. Sean (54:21.134) I got some facts though, Laura. Sean (54:35.022) Yeah, Lord. Laura Dodsworth (54:35.092) What I've had to focus on is how to help individuals who want to help themselves work on their own agency. Sean (54:41.582) Yeah, so this was the challenge for me because when they were trying to push this experimental vaccination, I was knee deep in looking at the data for antidepressants. And so here are some, here are some facts and I can't get past certain facts. Facts are about 4 % of the population exhibits sociopathic personality. And the defining aspect of that is like the lack of empathy, not caring about another person. And of course, you know, the ability to create harm for one's own self interest. Now we have a long history of experimenting on people, usually third world countries, we've done that with vaccines, the way the birth control pill hormonal birth control pill was first tested, it was on young mothers in Puerto Rico, who were impoverished. And when I was looking at and reading all the lawsuits against the various pharmaceutical companies for wrongful deaths in antidepressant use is it was very clear that they suppressed data that was inducing suicide in a percentage of people who were using the drugs. They misrepresented data on children. So we have this history of creating the other for financial gain or for positions of power and influence, where it's clearly that a subset of people do view human beings as, as long as they're not part of their own family, as people who are parasites or simply are people that we can experiment on without their consent as a way of trying to better understand how various technologies may work, sometimes maybe even in their own minds. being able to frame it in a way that it is for the greater good. Listen, we're all gonna die anyway. And you see this in various subsets of the book, The COVID -19 Reset. You see this through the World Economic Forum in the way that they are talking about the human population. It's very clear they see the world as overpopulated. I don't think anyone can listen to some of their... Sean (57:02.222) speeches or read some of their work and not walk away of saying that we are destroying the world, we are destroying the planet, there are too many people on it. So how can we not come to the conclusion that we are at risk to these people, that we are vulnerable to the mass manipulation for someone else's benefit that could create harm? Yeah, that's where I always struggle when... Yeah, this is all right. So then I'm... Laura Dodsworth (57:24.372) I completely agree with you. I completely agree with you. But I think we're at least as risk from the people who work for pharmaceutical companies as we are for people who work in government. You're always going to get a mixed bag of people. I mean, look, here's another one. I have found your podcasts and writing about pharmaceuticals fascinating. I mean, it's really opened my eyes. It's birth control pill and antidepressants. But here's another example. Look, those sorts of people at the World Economic Forum and there are people in climate organisations or governments who really want us to eat insects because they say that eating insects will be good for the planet. How much contempt do you have to have for human beings to think you can foist some weird, unhealthy, disgusting insect diet upon them? Now, when we think of insects, we think of very unwelcome visitors in our house or in our hair or on our pets. This is not stuff we want to eat. We're naturally revolted by them and they want us to eat them. So yes, there are people that don't just think of us as parasites. They think we should be eating them. It tells you everything. Sean (58:35.822) Yeah, but what where I get caught up and maybe this is my bias is that yes I agree 4 % of the population does lack that empathy and they may be in positions of power and they may be running organizations but in those organizations there's lots of people that are working towards solutions and they feel like they're working towards making improvements and improving the lives of others and the only thing that makes me maybe on board with the things that you're saying and maybe about the depopulation movement, which I don't necessarily want to, I don't, I don't know if I want to go there, but is that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I guess the only solution is when someone like Laura writes a book about freeing your mind, how, how can we use tools to open up to the possibilities that maybe the things that we're working on that might improve the lives of others and may lead to. positive change could in fact be contributing to more harm. How can we become more aware? Sean (59:42.798) Well, I mean, you're asking a very difficult question, because one of the things you're referring to is the power differential that exists. And you ask yourself questions, why are people more willing to, who are working for larger organizations, how can they engage in potentially harmful practices under the disguise that it is potentially helpful for greater humanity? How well, maybe how can they? understand that they may be doing something that's creating harm when in fact they think they're working towards solutions. I think that's where I think people get stuck in the middle. Don't you think it's about critical thinking and analysis and being able to observe patterns and being able to reality test and protect yourself from, you know, means of influence? So even in my field, and that's what I can speak most to is people who are working for pharmaceutical companies believe they're working under the agenda. to be able to decrease human suffering. That's a good example. Or to heal diseases or a number of other things. But the overwhelming majority are now pigeonholed and shaped into thinking that there's one avenue towards health, right? So you'd be getting conditioned that the way in order for us to improve the human condition is through advances in technology, through these types of pharmaceuticals or chemical compounds even. Yep. That idea in itself is misrepresented. Because listen, what's the job of a pharmaceutical company? Who are they beholden to? They're shareholders, right? They're there to make money. And that's what's most important. And you see it from very clearly when there are these lawsuits that are wrongful death lawsuits or drug regulatory agencies throughout the world find these. organization, sometimes in the forms of billions, they're able to identify clearly where there was fraud, intentional fraud. So if your greater question is how do we protect ourselves against people like that, that's where this book comes into play. Exactly. Right? And it's not an easy answer. And that's why I think Laura writes this book is because she's able to identify clearly what those biases and vulnerabilities are and how they're used against us all the time. Sean (01:02:03.822) One of those I want to open up the conversation with, because I think it's a very fascinating aspect of the book, is the slippery slope technique. Which is that strategy where you can introduce these ideas, which may be seemingly like seem very unacceptable or extreme when you gradually implement it over time. And one of the things, I don't know if you, I don't think you really mentioned this in the book, but you know we're at a point in human evolution where people are no longer able to, define what a biological male or female is anymore? Laura Dodsworth (01:02:37.172) Oh no, we do put trans in the book. Yeah, we did. Yeah, no, exactly. The ultimate confusion marketing and ideology. So, I mean, it's really interesting listening to you both wrestle with these ideas about sociopaths and who's working for the good or not. And it's just this unsolvable conundrum. You know, for those people who had this epiphany, March 2020, you could... Sean (01:02:39.822) Oh, okay. Laura Dodsworth (01:03:07.22) You know, it takes you to the biggest questions. What does it mean to be human? You know, you might have a spiritual answer for that. I got really preoccupied with the psychological answer and I'm not a psychologist, you know, that I just made this kind of a field of interest for a while. And I really wanted to know, you know, what makes some people manipulable and others not? Why are there people who want to control? How can people suddenly go along with something that's so cruel and, or be so stupid, you know? And the real answer to this conundrum is that we will do it over and over and over and over again, because it's how we're designed. And you can have better or worse systems of government and better and worse systems of legal protection or social protection. But it turns out that liberty, democracy, freedom, it just flips on a dime. You know, it's all an illusion. It could be taken away like this. And it's because of how we think. So yes, I come back to what... what can we do about it for ourselves? If you think of society as being like a plane in free fall, you know, like a lot of people have this sense right now that everything's going completely mad. The fact that they can't define a biological man or woman. I mean, come on, we've been involved for all these millions of years and now we're wrestling with that question. Don't be so stupid. So if society is a plane in free fall, you've got to put your own oxygen mask on first. That's all there is to it. because you can't do anything about the plane. Just put your oxygen mask on, learn how to think for yourself and recognize and deflect manipulation. And now, oh my goodness, I've got to come back to your question. So sorry, you said the thing you were interested in was the biological question of men and women. Sean (01:04:47.694) Well, how do we get the questions? How do you get to that point in society where educated people now can't answer the question? Laura Dodsworth (01:04:51.316) Oh, yes. Okay, so I think there's a lot going on there. I think there's been a role probably, there's been a constellation of interests like pharmaceutical companies and also individual surgeons who make money out of this. It's an industry. So it's an industry. So you have corporate interests. I think you can only get confused about very basic questions like that. If you don't have guiding principles, you don't know what's real and what's good anymore. Otherwise, how could you be confused about something so basic? The youngest toddler knows the difference between a man or a woman in drag. We instinctively know this as humans. We just know it. I think we're at a stage where we're told to disregard our instincts and the things that we just know in favor of some other ideology. That's a very dangerous place to be. I know that a man who's dressed as a woman is a man. What I then choose to do about in terms of observing pronouns or bathroom policies or sports policies, whatever, that's a separate thing, but I know. But being asked to disregard the evidence of my eyes and my own instincts is something I shouldn't be asked to do. It's very confusing, it's very destabilizing. And if you disrupt the way people's brains work like that, you can reframe almost anything. So we have to watch for that kind of ideology. We have to hang on to what we know to be true and right and good. I think that our society is quite adrift at the moment. I think we're at a... I mean, the truth is, I'm not really that optimistic about where we are. I think we're in a phase of civilizational decline and that's why we have mad ideas like transgender ideology. Sean (01:06:33.55) Are you aware of the work of Matthias Desmond, Mass Formation Psychosis? Laura Dodsworth (01:06:37.876) Yes, no, I haven't read all of his book, but some of it, but of course that term mass formation psychosis, I mean, mass formations comes from Jung. Jung first coined that term. It's about psychic epidemics. I think that's exactly where we're at. I think that's where we're at with COVID and we're still in it. You know, that kind of really deep energy hasn't gone anywhere, which is why people keep taking over by one mind virus after the other. They're constantly settled. There's nothing that's anchoring them. So that's why you see these, um, emojis just swap out one after the other on Twitter as a new mind virus takes hold. People are getting really hysterical about stuff. Sean (01:07:15.47) I'm sorry. What was interesting about Matthias Desmond when he came out speaking was he was a Belgian psychologist. He was teaching classes on mass formation. He's also a statistician. Yeah. And what was interesting about that is he started looking at some of the data and he realized that it was being drastically misinterpreted. And then he came to actually misrepresented, misrepresented, which was leading to a lot of policy changes, policy approaches in other countries based on the incorrect Statistical model which is when he came to a conclusion. Oh, we're in a mass formation psychosis right now Well and Laura makes a really good point about how destabilizing it is when there's no objective reality right floating anxiety creates that free floating anxiety and what where his work I think has informed us about the vulnerabilities of where we are now is historically that is how totalitarianism and dictatorships were able to assert control over the masses, they were actually able to create such a destabilizing effect in their cultures and societies that you are now vulnerable to that authority figure. And now you almost were brainwashed in order to have to follow that person out of fear and you lose the internal trust in your own ability to think rationally and to connect with reality. Laura Dodsworth (01:08:42.356) Absolutely, as a chapter in Free Your Mind called Watch Out for the Blip, at its most basic level, it's something that everyone that goes to AA or NA knows, okay? You halt, you watch out for hunger, anger, loneliness and tiredness, okay? So if you feel yourself in a dip, which could be just because you're hungry or you've got too emotional, angry or frightened about something, you're more likely to fall off the wagon. It's the same, I think a lot of people fall for transgender ideology or... start calling for global interfada like we're getting at the moment when they go to university because they leave the stability of their home, they're upbringing their school and they're basically on their own little mini -adults in this kind of new petri dish at university. It's why the divorcee starts the pyramid selling scheme but now look at it on a societal level. So whole countries had their lives totally turned upside down and were told to be very frightened and act like they had a virus they didn't have. very, very destabilizing. You know, we were cut off from time. Think about all of the normal rituals that we didn't follow. I mean, there was crazy stuff going on here. At one point, I started keeping a track of dates that had gone odd. And then I just gave up because there were so many. Like, I remember a really important law came out on the 25th of December. I said, hang on, this is Christmas. Or, you know, Beltane, bank holiday, the first of May became a day that we had. silence for veterans. It's like you just swapped a day round. Christmas sandwiches were out in July in Pret. Time just went upside down. The Olympics had the wrong year attached to them. The Euros, football, had the wrong year attached to them. You weren't going out to work every day. You were in your house, on your TV or social media. We just lost all sense of normal time. You were cut off from people, cut off from friends and family and normal social influence. Like you might feel like you're going a bit mad at home, getting scared of a virus, but then you'd go to the pub later, wouldn't you? And you'd talk about it and you'd feel fine just with your friends. No pub, no talking to your friends. You weren't sticking to the normal kind of schedule of school or work. Men weren't even going to the births of their babies. Weddings were cancelled, funerals were cancelled. We were so utterly detached from normal life. It was like a gigantic blip while being told, broadcast to every day. Laura Dodsworth (01:11:07.284) about how many people were dying or going to hospital. It was the ultimate disrupt. Now I'm not saying that was done deliberately to disrupt populations to reframe, but it's the effect of it. And in fact, there were some behavioral scientists who said that this was the time to push climate message. When people were malleable, yes, that's the word that was used, and habits were weak, that's when they could be reconditioned to change their behavior about carbon net zero. Sean (01:11:35.502) Yeah, I think the other thing is the role of media. It's almost like there was a uniform message, almost as if it was crafted by a single PR firm. And it was like relentlessly echoed throughout all different types of media outlets, like a slick advertising campaign, you know, trust the science, you know, words like safe and effective became repeated with vaccines. the role of social distancing, protect the vulnerable. And this is something that's really concerning for me is the loss of independent media. And I do actually think just us having a conversation right now is kind of like the reaction to the industrial funded media, which has become the mass media, which is, you know, previously kind of all we knew was like, NBC, ABC, Fox, you know, these type of channels here in the United States is that like how they were so unified in that in that message. How did that happen? How did they have such a unified message as part of this? And this is where I have the distrust. Like it was something that's not necessarily it's not a conspiracy theory. It was so well organized and so well constructed. And so how did that get organized so fast? Laura Dodsworth (01:12:54.42) Yes. Do you know the one I hated, new normal? When that term was first used here, I, you know, my hackles were immediately raised. It was like a kind of a skin prickling goosebump moment. Cause I thought, hang on a minute. What are you talking about? New normal? We've only been in this craziness for under three weeks. Why are you saying at this stage, the old normal doesn't come back? Sean (01:12:59.598) Then do normal. Laura Dodsworth (01:13:21.364) What's new normal? Why do you think I want it? I don't like this very much. You know, the term new normal was used very, very early and I didn't get it. And I thought, wow, you know, that would be, that would be a good study in itself. Trace the first appearances of the term new normal and see where it came from. I think that some of these terms would have come, you see from like kind of war game type planning about disasters. And why did different governments, and health authorities use them at the same time? Well, that's, I suspect, my hypothesis would be, is because there's a network of comms people, behavioral scientists that are connected between them all. You know, it's quite an incestuous world. So the World Health Organization will be very connected with the NIH and with the NHS and with the different nudge units. You know, they all talk to each other. And I think that's probably why these terms spread. the way they do. Something like Cass Sunstein, who used to work at the World Health Organization, was in the Obama administration. He was the director at the Nudge Unit, the behavioral insights team. You know, he's been in and out of the White House and number 10. I'm not saying he's some dastardly mastermind. It's an example of how one person is involved in different governments and a worldwide health authority. So I think that's how the terms spread. But there's something a little bit Yeah, no, very uncomfortable, very uncomfortable, a bit spine -tingly about hearing these terms pop up everywhere at the same time. It's eerie, it doesn't feel natural, and we recognise that, you know, as human beings we don't just recognise sex, we recognise when there's something unnatural in communication. Sean (01:15:05.23) Um, regarding new normal, just did a quick search and apparently it's been used repeatedly after significant periods of global situations. So world war one, world war two, the financial crisis. Um, and here's just another random one because the whole six feet of space between individuals, apparently it was just kind of set in a room and that's what led to this big, uh, kind of like quarantine effort. on Netflix. Yeah, here's the here's Yeah, so that's right in the UK you we do feed you do meter so about two meters. I was watching on Netflix, the Challenger, which was the space shuttle explosion here in the United States and Krista McCullough. Yep. So there's this it's maybe like a five episode series. One of the episodes she's riding a bicycle it's right before the launch. And they're already in quarantine before they Laura Dodsworth (01:15:35.764) It's made up, it's not based on any science and it was two metres here so slightly different distance. Sean (01:16:04.302) go up in the space shuttle. And in a moment in that clip, she looks at the cameraman and says something like, as long as you stay six feet away. And I had this reaction. I was like, I wonder if this just came from NASA. Like somebody said something in a meeting like, well, what we've been using in the past for keeping distance to protect people was six feet. And somebody just said, all right, let's use that. Not based on science. Well, there's, yeah, there was so much that wasn't based on science. Here's the thing that I was concerned about. I had you read Sean before we started this podcast, the great reset the book that was put out by the world economic forum. Do you know when that book was actually published? May of 20. It wasn't it actually I think it started getting mass produced in on July 9 of 2020. That's very, very early in the pandemic. It was just the end of March. And so that book was already written. in order for it to be mass produced in July. So it seems to me that there was so much that was coordinated, there was so much that was purposeful, and that's why I have my guard up. I don't necessarily have that hope bias that maybe the two of you do. In fact, I am probably skewing more a little bit to the opposite end around needing to protect against illegitimate authorities. And so when a book like that comes in, that's going to usher in a completely new revolution, on how the world is going to operate, that very clearly is going to benefit some, very small amount of people, at the expense of the masses, like from eating insects to not owning anything and you will like it. You know, all these things are dispiriting and they go against everything that I know about human nature. Human nature desires freedom. It desires innovation and... I think we all need to be on this planet for multiple reasons. Often it's around love and it's around family, but it's also around learning and growth and purpose. And in a free society and even free, you know, economic society is that we have at least some degree of independent power to be able to create a lifestyle that we desire. So anything, yeah, tell me about what your thoughts are in that. Yeah. Is that an, is that an illusion? Laura Dodsworth (01:18:22.676) Or we thought we did, Roger, because it could all be turned off like a tap. Laura Dodsworth (01:18:30.388) Well, it obviously was. It was all turned off like a tap, wasn't it? When we were told to lock down. And people just kind of consented to their businesses going under or not having a funeral for a loved one who died. It was mad. I mean, while I have a little bit of a hope bias, I mean, I think the truth is that the world has changed completely and it's not changed for the better. And I see it getting worse and darker. My response to it in a way is to opt out. I'm just kind of opting out a little bit. I watch almost no TV. I use my smartphone much less than I did. I mean, this is my great weakness, I have to say, Twitter. But you know, the process of researching and writing for your mind made me, if anything, start with too hypervigilance. I could see manipulation everywhere. It was quite a dark place to be, to be honest. Mind you, I really realized times I've been manipulated without having known. But I've kind of swung back now to more of a middle ground. And I think really, you know, the great act of resistance is you make alliances and friendships and businesses and find and nurture love in the good places. I know people who are miles better now. And I've just got the most amazing friends at my fingertips through these dark times. You know, I've met incredible people and I never... ever would have thought I'd write a book like A State of Fear. That's not the direction my career was going in. But in a way, I just kind of opened myself up to the experience. I let it take me in a way. I think I might sound a tiny bit flaky about this, but it was almost a kind of a form of divine challenging. It's like, okay, I think I see what's going on. I'm going to open up and do what I feel is my path and be truthful and be courageous. and while there are doors that have closed or other doors that have opened and I see myself more and more sort of opting out of the big stuff that I can't control and just trying to make my life good and be a good person. Sean (01:20:38.446) I love that. And that's, that's the same approach that I've taken as well. Watching news. I don't watch news. I stay off social media and I've said it in this room before that I decided to just ignore some of that stuff and focus on my family, spend time with my child, do the things that I enjoy, be out in nature. And yeah, maybe I'm missing some things out there, but I'm happier. And isn't that what a life worth living is? And I look at Roger as a clinical psychologist. And he speaks out about these things and it, I read your, uh, Laura, I read your. Substack this week and in there, you talk about, um, the psychologist, Gary Sidley, who wrote, uh, to the BPS and in there, he had the code of ethics and conduct, uh, a statement of values and the first one, 3 .1. I'm just going to read it directly. psychologists value the dignity and worth of all persons with sensitivity to the dynamics of perceived authority or influence over persons and peoples and with particular regard to people's rights. And so when psychologists are speaking out, it's, I think it's almost inherently who some clinical psychologists are because of their awareness, but they actually have almost a responsibility to speak out and to talk about where things can go wrong. Yeah. You're also. Laura Dodsworth (01:21:56.916) Well, yeah. Sean (01:21:57.07) I mean, you're using the word clinical psychologist with many different psychologists. I'm a clinical psychologist, so I work with people clinically, but there are social psychologists, behavioral psychologists, psychologists who are doing a lot of research and that research is actually used for industry and for governments and so forth. So, I totally agree with what you just said and Laura's assertion on that. I just want to come back to one thing. that the both of you did say about like kind of how you grow through something like this. My concern, and you can tell me if I'm wrong about this, is I do think this is only the beginning. I think this is about a reset. I do think that there are forces at play that are trying to create the way the world operates and trying to, in my opinion, trying to eliminate national sovereignty for a more global way of approaching You know how we face the problems that exist on planet Earth and that there are people that are vying for the power to do so. And I think we have to protect ourselves against them because we're going to put in, we're going to be placed in another situation where we're going to ask to be able to, to enter into behaviors that are going to restrict our own freedom, our own liberty, our personal rights, potentially at the harm of ourselves or others. History informs us that we're going to do that. That's going to happen. That's going to be next. So there has to be an active form of resistance. And that active force of resistance can only occur when we band together. How else are we going to be aware of what is happening to us unless we have a way in our communities to be able to connect to reality, to be able to make decisions that resist that global authority and rules or regulations that actually violate our own bodily integrity? or our own personal choices. And I don't know if the answer to that is just to turn everything off and focus on my family. I do think there's something a little bit more important than that. Laura's doing that, right? We're trying to do this on this podcast. Laura Dodsworth (01:23:56.788) Hmm. Laura Dodsworth (01:24:02.068) Well, look, you know, these are really important points and I agree with you. I do wrestle with it a little bit. My co -author, oh my goodness, I feel so disgraced for what I haven't mentioned that I wrote Free Your Mind with the very clever psychologist and behavioral scientist, Patrick Fagan. It's a co -authored book, huge shout out. Now he's much more switch -off -y than me. And when he first told me he switched off, part of me was a bit judgmental. I thought, well, that's a bit selfish. So you're gonna make sure your life's really happy. What about all these other important things that are going on in the world, Patrick? Don't you care if he's listening to this? This will be the first he's heard of it. But so there is, I do feel that I know what you're talking about, Roger, I do, but let's go back to Jung. Okay, now this I think is a very important concept. The first thing you have to do is self -individuate. Now we self -individuate through different ways. You know, different people will have different things are important to them. It could be your community. It could be your work if your work is meaningful to you. Maybe not. Maybe your job is just a shit job and you get your meaning through other ways. Maybe it's spirituality slash religion. Maybe it's your family, your love relationship, but you have to find meaning in your life or you have no use to the community or the society. So I do believe, I mean, this is the thing I've been wrestling and wrestling with and it's really at the heart of free your mind. It's that you have to come back to the individual. And that's something in the pandemic we were told was selfish. You know, we're all in it together. You wear your mask to protect others. Bullocks, it doesn't do anything for the others. You get your vaccine to help others. No, it doesn't, whatever. But you know, we were told constantly, don't think about yourself. Don't think about the meaning in your life. Do everything for other people. Well, this isn't the right way to be. You have to be strong in your own values, principles, and what provides meaning in your life. Now, if there's any kind of... lockdown type scenario again, I assure you that I will do what I think is right, even if it's a cost to myself. I can promise you if I saw something happening in the streets, like a fight between people, I would intervene. After October the 7th, I spoke out very strongly about anti -Semitism. I lost thousands of pounds from my sub -stack instantly when I did. I will do what I think is right because I know what my values are. Laura Dodsworth (01:26:17.556) I know what's important to me. I know what I think is morally, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, creatively right to do and I will do those things. But it had to start with me as an individual. Now, you know, when we look after our families, I think that's the most important thing we can do because our children are in our inheritance. We wouldn't be evolutionary successful at all if we didn't care about doing the right thing for our children. So again, that's natural. That's normal. And, you know, let's not underplay what we're doing here. We're three. Hopefully Free Minds, Independent Thinkers, all talking on a podcast that's come out absolutely in response to what you've learned about pharmaceuticals, COVID, it's the same thing for me. And so we're spreading our own message in a kind of an alternative media ecosystem. And more and more people aren't watching the big channels and watching the news, which is just like the most blatant form of propaganda, and they are looking for other sources. There is something that's... also very exciting about this time, you know, there's a flowering. I really believe in human beings being incredible. Yes, 4 % of us might be sociopathic and people have a powerful tendency to conform, much as I hate it. You know, there are things that we may look down upon about ourselves, but we're also incredible. We're incredible. And every invention, every great work of art, anything pioneering the world's religions, everything wonderful has come from the edges, it's come from the outliers, it's come from the people that have the courage to do something different and put it out there. So I do have a lot of confidence in what's happening right now. Sean (01:27:53.198) That's well said. And then that's going to take us into our final topic area. And it's around greater morality and spirituality. We had a American pediatrician on here once, Adrian Getty, who said, listen, my authority is not the American Medical Association. My authority is not the medical authority in the United States. God is my authority. And it brings up really important points around the role of authority and conformity. If we are vulnerable to the authority figure based on fear, doesn't that in some way represent a disconnect from our greater morality and connection to each other? Robert Kennedy Jr. recently said there are things that are much, much worse than death. Death isn't that of, inevitable. We are all going to die. And so our time here, is limited. In my opinion, from a moral perspective, how we live our life matters. And fear is one thing that can control us because what are we afraid of? We're afraid of losing our lives. We're afraid of losing the lives of the ones that we love. But when there is faith, when there are religious institutions, when there is spirituality, when there's a greater morality, people are much more courageous because they're willing to do what is right based on that morality, based on that love and the connection to all of us. That's where empathy is so important. And so that's why I read a book like this. And one of my takeaways too, is that we have to do some reflection on what is our life purpose? What is our meaning? How are we going to define our existence? Is... our existence and quality of life defined by how long we get to live, regardless of how we live? And so I do want to bring that question, that final question to Laura about how us becoming less religious has negatively influenced our own abilities to protect each other and to resist illegitimate authority. Laura Dodsworth (01:30:13.908) Yeah, I think this is so important, but my goodness, this is the big stuff right at the end, hey? Yeah, we have a God -shaped hole in society, and I think it's important that we talk about this in a way that is going to be relatable for people who are religious, spiritual, agnostic or atheist, because it's the same point. Sean (01:30:19.31) Mm. Laura Dodsworth (01:30:37.428) Now, Free of mind got one pretty so -so review from an atheist humanist who didn't like that they felt that the conclusion of the book is that you need religion. That isn't true. I don't, I would not. not dare to presume for other people whether they need religion or not. But it has been a question I've asked myself quite a lot because while I said the response to my epiphany in March 2020 is a psychological one, you know, what are we made of? How do our brains work? There is a deeper spiritual one. And of course it's unknowable. It's all a question of faith. But the ultimate authority is what's, you know, in theory should hold absolute monarchs in check because there was an authority above them. And we don't have that now. We don't have that in the liberal West. We're becoming increasingly spiritually and religiously adrift. I've always personally believed in God and had faith, but not being a very religious person. And it made me wonder, what would the value of more religion in my life be? I mean, I decided last year to pray every day. and to go to church at least once a month as an experiment to see what it gave me. It gave me quite a lot. I'm not sticking to it anymore. It's a new year. I've got a new set of resolutions. I'm just doing it when I feel like it now. But I always got something out of it. I think that I have enough spiritual faith that maybe religion doesn't add that much for me, but it can be the answer for some people. Look, you know, people have been going to a place of worship every week. Laura Dodsworth (01:32:21.524) For millennia, you know, it's not anything new or controversial I'm suggesting here. But even if it's not God or religion, you definitely need to know what you stand for. If you don't stand for something, you fall for anything. A big part of that is related to fear of death. Look how people totally lost their shit when they thought they would die of a virus. I mean, insanely so. You had to wonder, where's the courage? Where are the people who once would have gone to war to fight for their country or, you know, family, faith and flag? Where's the courage? Where's the courage? Seneca wrote about death a lot, and I'm going to paraphrase, but it's something like, you know, the man who has learned to stop fearing death stops being a slave. It is the work of a lifetime, but if you work out what fears haunt you, then they can't be played on. the same way. It's natural we're all going to be a bit afraid of death. It's fine. Or we don't really know what the other side is. You know, that's only faith that sustains people through that fear. But if you can at least acknowledge it, you're going to die one day and it's inevitable, you might be able to muster up a little bit more courage. And if you know what matters to you and how to live a good life until that point, you are much less manipulable as well by bad actors, bad authorities. So there's no easy answer for somebody. It's not like go to church. It's not necessarily to decide what you believe in, but you need to start that work. And it starts with you. What are your hopes and fears? What's important? What are your values? And the stronger you feel within all of that, I think the better life you live, the less fear you have, and the more psychologically resistant you are to this information battlefield that we live in. Because you know, your brain is a battlefield. Everybody wants a piece of it. Sounds dramatic, but it's true. You know, it's very hard to quantify how much information is thrown at you every day. One statistic we put in the book is 174 newspapers a day. That's a lot. Everybody wants a piece of your brain. So if you at least know who you are and what's important to you, you will be somewhat protected against the worst of it. So yeah, for me, faith is important and I'm not sure how important religion is. Laura Dodsworth (01:34:43.892) is for me, but whether you go to church or not, you know, you will be living in a country that is informed by a religious and cultural backdrop, you know, 10 commandments, whatever they are. And they're important. They're important. We need those ultimate rules, barriers and guiding lights. Sean (01:35:05.262) Well said. Yeah. I mean, that's just perfect to end on. Laura, this has been a fascinating conversation, but to be honest with you, your work is fascinating. So I want to direct our listeners to be able to find out more about you. Where's your website? How can they get a hold of your book? How can they have access to your writing? Laura Dodsworth (01:35:26.1) So I'm on Twitter and that's at Bear Reality, Bear like naked, not the animal. You have to check out my first three books to see why. So at Bear Reality, laurdoddsworth .com and all my books are on Amazon. They weren't always, A State of Fear disappeared from Amazon for several days when it came out. Yes, it did. It's a whole other story. But you can find, for your mind, a stated there on my first three books about the body on Amazon or from good book shops. And you can order them in if you... They're probably not as available in the United States in book shops, but they're all orderable. Sean (01:36:04.334) And I really encourage, especially those here in the United States who might have not been yet exposed to Laura's work, be a subscriber for her sub stack. And then you get exposed to this new writing, you know, I think almost every week she has something coming out. You know, I think it's really thought provoking. And if we are going to be just critical thinkers, we have to be aware of how easy it is to be manipulated. And that's part of the antidote to all this is first having these conversations, building awareness to them. And now you can see them. You can see them clearly in how it's attempting to control our own thought and our own behavior. I think the next time around, and there will be next time, there's gonna be another attempt. COVID wasn't the first time. I think we're just more well -prepared for it. So Laura, I wanna thank you so much for a radically genuine conversation. Laura Dodsworth (01:36:59.828) Thank you so much for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure.