(0:00 - 3:03) It's called nudging, a form of psychological warfare where people are convinced to go along with a narrative while believing that doing so was their own idea. Globalist organizations such as the WHO, governments, and major corporations today all have nudging departments staffed by people who are experts in psychological manipulation. And clearly, it works. As worldwide large numbers of people masked up even before masking was mandated, while others lobby governments for stricter environmental controls. Dr. Gary Sidley, a clinical psychologist in the UK, has written extensively on this subject, and especially how nudging has been used to advance both the COVID narrative and climate alarmism. In this interview, you'll learn how nudging works, and specifically what psychological buttons are being pushed to manipulate the behavior of the masses. But more importantly, you'll learn how to recognize when you're being targeted by nudging messages, and how to resist them. Gary, welcome to the show. My pleasure, Will. My pleasure. And thank you so much for not just for taking the time for this interview, but for all the articles you've written on nudging. And some of us are aware that this is something that's been happening, but not even I wasn't aware of the depth of it until I read some of your articles, and it's triggered a whole bunch of questions. But for the viewers who may not understand what nudging is, could we simply start with that? Okay, there are various definitions of nudging. The most straightforward would be that it's a psychological strategy of persuasion that often has its impact on targets below their levels of consciousness. So in other words, the people who are being persuaded often are not aware that they are being persuaded in that way. And so a lot of it is covert. There are other definitions, like there's a more academic one that came from a document called Mindspace back in 2010, which is one of the most famous nudge documents and was published the year that our Behavioural Insight team, the nudge unit, came into existence back in 2010. And their definition is a bit more convoluted. I'll just read it to you. It's the application of behavioural strategies that achieve low cost, low pain ways of nudging citizens into new ways of acting by going with the grain of how we think and act, unquote. So it's how we think and act, going with the grain. (3:04 - 3:26) I think that is quite telling. I think what that's reflecting is that what nudges do is that they utilise humans' imperfections in the way they make sense of their complicated world. So it's all the kind of shortcuts and the thinking areas and perceptual areas that we make. (3:27 - 4:14) Behavioural science, nudging, uses those to get us to think and behave in a way that they wish us to. So nudging is essentially, it's using psychology, behavioural psychology, to get people to go along with whatever the agenda is and make them think it was their idea. Well, yes, because it's covert. A lot of it's covert. Not all, but a lot of it's covert. They don't always know. They're not aware that they are being influenced in that way. And so, yeah, that's what it is. And it's managed to find its way into every nook and cranny of our life here in the UK, and I think probably across the Western world as well. (4:14 - 10:55) And I was surprised. I wasn't, well, OK, I'd expected, for example, that the government was using nudging. But the WHO, they have their own whole nudging department, a whole behavioural psychology department. And so I'm going to assume a lot of these other globalist organisations do as well. And so let's get into some specific examples, because you've written a lot about the masking and how people were nudged into doing that, to complying with this idea of wearing masks, even though prior to the COVID narrative, and I happen to know this myself because I was a paramedic when I was younger, mask manufacturers would print right in the boxes, it's not effective against viruses. And yet, they get all these people to wear masks. How did they do that? Yeah, you're correct that behavioural science has a presence across the world, including the WHO, called the TAG, I think. And it's headed up by Professor Susan Michie, who's a prominent UK nudger, behavioural scientist. And masking is a topic very close to my heart. And that's why I've written so much about it, because I think it's wrong and unhelpful on so many different levels. At its simplest, of course, it's one of the recommendations, one of the restrictions that was recommended during the COVID era. And like many of the others, it had very little evidence for effectiveness as far as a viral barrier. So it was, in many ways, a pointless kind of restriction. But it's worse than that, because there's so many harms associated with it. Some of them physical, but for me, the most important are the social and psychological effects of masking in the community, where everybody's wearing these things and no one can see the face of their colleague or their friend. The whole raft of harms with two numerous dimensions, I might just highlight one or two. We know now, we've got robust evidence that mass masking leads to some impediment in children's verbal and emotional development. So having caregivers and teachers masked up all the time, they get behind on their language skills, they get behind on their cognitive development. Masking also results in an increased risk of falls in elderly people. It adds confusion. At times when you don't want confusion, such as doctor surgeries, when you have other elderly people in there who are already confused, and not being able to hear what's being said, because masks impact, of course, on how clear your voice is. And it's anathema for people with hearing impairments. If you are a suicidal teenager, or a child in acute pain, the last thing you want is a kind of robotic individual whose face isn't on the show, and who therefore cannot connect in a human way with you. There's no kind of rapport, there's no banter, there's no empathy, there's no compassion. So masks are harmful in a variety of ways. But another layer of them being kind of unhelpful, and one that I'm particularly interested in, is their impact on nudges. Because what a mask does, is it strengthens three of the main nudges that were used in the COVID event. Three of the main nudges that have caused a lot of concerns around the ethics of their use. And those three nudges are fear, elevation. The frightening population tends to be a compliant one. So if you increase fear, that tends to make people comply. The second is shaming. And the third is peer pressure, which can very easily swing into scaregoating. So fear, guilt, shaming, and scaregoating. And a mask strengthens each of those. Well, obviously it kind of perpetuates fear. Because when you and or I are wearing a mask, that screams that one of us must be a biohazard, must be a risk, it causes alarm. And the behavioural scientists knew that, and that's why they supported it, and that's why they never criticised it. Even the one or two that thought it wasn't a great idea. Also, the thing about masks and fear is that it stops fear being dissipated. If you wear a mask 24-7 when you're out and about, you never learn that the world's a safe place. So you come back each evening, you take your mask off, you've survived, you haven't caught anything nasty, but you don't attribute that to the world being benign. What you do is you think, phew, just made it, near miss, narrow escape, if I hadn't have had my mask on, who knows what would have happened. So a bit like wearing a clove of garlic to keep the vampires at bay. It doesn't reduce your belief in vampires even when you never get bitten, because you've had your garlic on and that's protected you. So it inflates fear. Also, equally importantly, is that it's quite shaming as well, because it allows people to demonstrate what they call an ego-nudge, which is equating wearing a mask with being a good, worthwhile individual. And the nudges have exploited this plus, plus, plus. They've equated mask wearing with being the right thing to do for your community. So I don't know what happened in Canada, Will, but over here we had lots of adverts during the COVID events where actors would say things like, I wear a mask to protect my mates. I wear a mask to keep my grandmother safe. (10:57 - 15:10) And there was this constant kind of effort from nudges to equate wearing masks with being a good person. And the flip side of that, of course, is if you don't wear one, you're a bad person. So if you don't comply, you're a bad individual. And that kind of shaming applied to masks, applied to vaccination as well, actually, was largely responsible for a lot of the harassment and abuse that people who didn't comply actually got during the COVID event. You know, from other people in the public, we've all seen the videos, somebody unmasking in a shop, getting the abuse. We've got a whole range of people abusing the unvaccinated, lots of world leaders who got in on the act on that. And it's also, the third nudge is around what we call normative pressure, which is a technical term for peer pressure, which exploits the idea that humans do not like to be on their own. They like to be in the centre of a crowd. They like to be with the majority. Because being in this kind of small minority can be a really uncomfortable place to be. And what masks do is they allow the instant identification of the rule followers and the rule breakers. So if anybody wants, any of your listeners want to kind of get an idea of what it's like to be on the wrong end of normative pressure, back in the day, in the COVID era, going massless in a room full of mass people and reflect on how that feels. I've been there, I'm sure you may have, I've been there in shops and pubs and social events. And even if no one verbally abuses you, which has happened to me occasionally, but even if nobody verbally abuses you, you can feel it. You can feel the pressure. You can see little people looking, people kind of talking behind their hands to their friends about you. So masks are so multilevel, they are really unhelpful. And just the last thing for now, if I'll say on masks, is that's why I and colleagues at a group called Smile Free have recently produced a 40 minute video that we released about two weeks, three weeks ago, called Masking Humanity. So it's maskinghumanity.com. You can get that. And folks will put a link to that beneath this interview. Okay. Great. And that film will, focuses on the detrimental impact of masks in healthcare and social care. And the reason we've done that, focused on that area, is that one, here in the UK, we've just passed the five year anniversary of the first mask mandates in health and social care. So it's a five year anniversary. But the second one, a more important one, is that health and social care is the area that remains the outlier. Don't know what things like in Canada will, but here in the UK, thankfully, most people have moved on from masks. It's a rare occurrence to see anyone wearing one on transport or in pubs or in the street. Except for maybe those who have a cultural leaning towards it, those of a particular ethnicity. But otherwise, it's a relatively, it is a rare occurrence, really is a rare occurrence. (15:11 - 16:46) But the one exception to that is healthcare. They will not let it go. There's always at least half a dozen healthcare trusts, six to 10 typically, who intermittently reimpose mask mandates on staff, visitors and patients. And that is so damaging. And alongside everything else, detracts from the quality of healthcare. And for elderly people in care homes, elderly people are already confused, who struggle to recognize carers, who struggle to recognize the families often. That is anathema. It's the epitome of cruelty, as somebody on the film says, who was a dementia specialist. So I feel very passionately about masks. And that's the main reason, because in a nutshell, it is wrong on so many different levels. The most insidious of all the restrictions, in my view. And we had all the same experiences here in Canada. Yes, the advertising, save grandma. And yeah, all the messaging that this is for the social good. And yes, being rejected, if you don't go along, I myself never wore a mask, I refused to do it. And yes, I did get abuse from people who were buying into the narrative, although most people just ignored me. Now, the thing that surprised me, though, was before they mandated the masks, but they had started to recommend them. About one in four people was wearing them. (16:47 - 18:27) And I was kind of surprised by that. I mean, I thought that was actually quite a high number. When, I mean, let's face it, if you use your common sense, it was obvious the entire COVID narrative was false. People were not dropping dead in the streets. Nobody I spoke to knew someone who had died of COVID, or even become seriously ill with it. And yet we get one in four people walking around wearing masks even before it was mandated. And then came the mandating of it. So that kind of messes things up. So what I'm asking about now is has to do with that period of time where one in four people were voluntarily wearing them. Were the masks themselves not a form of nudging? Yes. Yes. And that's what I was trying to explain before the, you know, the actual activity of masking does convey messages that nudge other people. But it perpetuates fear. It shames non-compliers, not just about masking, but around all the other restrictions as well. And it harnesses normative pressure and results in scapegoating. I suspect those one in four, which I don't think is that unusual across the Western world. I think back at the start of the COVID event, there was a huge amount of fear that was instilled, not just by nudges and behavioural scientists, but there was a pretty significant chunk that they contributed to it. And masks give the impression, don't they, that they might work from a common sense point of view. (18:28 - 18:57) You know, if I've got a terrible infection, we've all been schooled in the idea of viral infections and how pathogens are passed from one person to the other. So this idea that, you know, wearing a mask blocks the, you know, covers the nose, covers the mouth, that must help, mustn't it? So I think a lot of people were frightened. A lot of people adopted what they would regard as a common sense precaution. (18:58 - 20:10) But of course, if they'd spent 10 minutes stepping back and looking at the science, there was a scene that for many years, even since the COVID event, the bulk of the more robust scientific evidence, the real world studies, the randomised controlled trials, pretty much all come to the same conclusion that masking healthy people in community settings has a negligible impact on transmission of a virus. But like I say, from a common sense point of view, you know, lay people would think the frightened, sensible thing to do. But now this question occurs to me, Gary, because as we've established in the first few minutes of this interview, that the nudging was extremely intentional. It was based upon fear, shaming, peer pressure to get that first one in four, my own rough number, wearing the masks. But they wanted everyone wearing the mask, because as we've already discussed, the masks themselves were a of nudging. If everyone is wearing a mask, well, then there must be a dangerous virus out there. (20:11 - 23:15) And so I think, and I want your opinion on this, because it seems to me that this was very carefully planned by these nudging departments with the WHO, with National Health Services, that what they would do is they would start by sending out these messages to get the early adopters to start masking up. But it would become obvious that they were a minority still. But because they've been walking around for a couple of months wearing these masks, and they had continued hammering away with this messaging about how dangerous COVID was. Now they had justification for the mandates. Well, it's obvious that, you know, because we've got one in four people wearing them, and this is a very dangerous virus, and not enough people are adopting this voluntarily, now we have to force them to do it. Yes, the transition from authorities recommending against masks, and they did at one point, back in the early stages. Again, this is UK-based, Will, obviously, because that's... Even Anthony Fauci originally said there was no reason for the public to be wearing masks. And then a year later, he's telling people to double and triple mask. Exactly, yes. And I've written a lot about the flip-flop, as I call it, which is quite a fascinating story here in the UK, and I'm sure in other countries as well, where from March, April, even into early May, all the experts, all the government officials were saying, you know, healthy people should not be wearing masks. It'll be counterproductive, it won't do any good. And then somewhere between like mid-May 2020 and early June 2020, things changed. Now, as to the reasons why, well, all of a sudden it changed the tune, the ones that... Look at them all on video, all saying, you know, masks do not work, do not wear masks, if you're healthy and don't have symptoms, blah, blah, blah. And then literally, you know, double figures, experts all flipped roughly about the same time. And it wasn't in response to any new breakthrough science. There wasn't any great study that came out at that time. In fact, on the contrary, the main study that came out around June 2020 was one that had looked at influenza and 14 randomized controlled trials of influenza and masks and concluded they're ineffectual. So there was no new evidence. And that then begs the question as to why, why did it flip at that point? Now, I can't go into all the details of that. It's a long story and I've written about it extensively. But it would appear that some messages came from people in influential places who rather liked the idea of masking. (23:15 - 25:29) And they thought it was a general effective method of gaining control over the populace. Control, not just wearing a mask, but control for everything for making people more obedient. And I know in the UK and many other Western countries, there was evidence that the COVID operation, if you like, the governmental agencies that were in charge of the COVID response were military based. It was the military industrial complex that were influential. They took the reins. They weren't public health. That changed from March, April here in the UK and in several other Western countries. Not quite sure about Canada, what the situation was there, but it was being run like a military operation and mass masking appealed. And I think that was one of the key reasons why things changed. We'd always had people who were pro-mask, even before March, 2020. And we had some experts, particularly those from a particular political ideology that liked the idea of collectivism, would have been called left of center politics, maybe the idea that we're all in this together. It's a collective of people. They've always leaned towards masks, but they were in the minority. But from May, June, 2020, that flipped. WHO flipped. They were saying in May, don't wear one. By June, they were saying, yeah, wear one. And they pretty much admitted that that was due to what they call political pressure. A BBC journalist here in the UK put it to the WHO at the time. Why have you changed your recommendations? Was it due to political pressure? And they did not deny it. They did not deny it. (25:30 - 26:13) So there were some powerful people, powerful actors, I think, who were keen on mass masking, probably for a lot of the reasons around control of the masses that I've mentioned. All right. And one of the things that you mentioned, and you just referenced it a few seconds minutes ago, was trusted messengers. And this is another form of that nudging, where they use well-known people, sometimes famous actors, personalities that people know to make public statements in favor of particular the masking or other things. And that's another form of nudging. So how is... I think I need to go deeper with this question. (26:14 - 28:05) I think we need to back up a little bit and talk about why nudging works. Now, I'm not a psychologist myself, but I have a strong interest in psychology. So there's certain things that I already knew. And you make reference to this in some of your papers, in that much of our decision-making is on autopilot. And it has to be. Because if we had to think about every little thing that we do, if you had to think about pulling the blankets off in the morning, swinging your legs over the side of the bed, standing up, balancing, if we had to do all of that consciously, by the time we were done breakfast and ready to leave for work, we'd be exhausted. And so the human brain has to work on autopilot, which means there's a lot of times we just don't think about things. And this is where the nudging comes in, where they're pushing those subconscious buttons. So now that we're sort of established that that's how it works, and that there's nothing we can do about it, the human brain has to work that way. So we're always going to be susceptible to that. Then within that context, the question I'm asking, because you refer to it focusing on three main areas. There's the fear, there's the shaming, and there's the social acceptance. So when people get messages from celebrities, for example, what buttons are they pushing there? Yeah, your outline of the distinction between fast and slow brain that you've just given is spot on. That is absolutely right. 99% of the time we're on fast brain, using shortcuts, heuristics, jumping to conclusions, which for the most part gives us accurate, useful responses. For example, normative pressure followed the crowd. If I walk out my house this evening and there's 200 people all charging in one direction, screaming and shouting for their lives, I might be sensible to follow them, even without thinking. And I probably would, because my fast brain would kick in. (28:07 - 29:03) So most of the time, fast brain gives sensible responses. But of course, it can be exploited, and that's what the nudges do. With regards to the messengers, trusted messengers, that is a nudge, the messenger nudge. I mentioned the Mindspace document of 2010, that is listed as one of the nine nudges. And this is like our inherent, intrinsic inclination of humans to put more trust in the validity of people who have either some kind of qualification or authority, or are similar to ourselves in some way. So throughout the COVID event, of course, the messenger nudge was used extensively. (29:04 - 29:49) We'd have chief medical officer and chief scientific officer stood behind the lectern telling us to mask up, telling us to stay at home, telling us to keep our distance. And because they had authority, professor, head of science, head of medicine. In addition, though, we had actors, people that we like, and who have a big fan base, sharing these kinds of messages as well, which influenced some people, because liking somebody, you will tend to agree with them and follow their advice more than if you didn't like them. (29:52 - 31:30) And also people with regional accents that was used widely here in the UK. So when the adverts came on, we'd have people telling us to, whether it was mask up, telling us to stay at home, social distance, whatever it was, and it was done in a variety of accents. So we'd have a, like what we call the Northern accent, like I've got, and then we'd have a London accent, which is very different than a Yorkshire accent, which is different. And again, based on the idea that we tend to trust people who we see as being similar to ourselves, rather than people who are different. So yes, messenger nudge was one of many nudges. I mentioned the three before because those were the most ethically questionable, I think, the fear of inflation, the shaming, and the peer pressure scapegoating. But a whole range of nudges, all of the nine that's mentioned in that Mindspace document were used to some extent during the COVID event. And the messenger one was used very widely. Because, you know, like the Milligram experiment with the following, the white coats, somebody's authority figure telling you to put electricity into a patient, a research participant, because they've got authority, because they're the doctor, because they're the head of the research, because they've got a white coat on. (31:30 - 33:39) All the majority of people obeyed, which is quite concerning. But true. One of the challenges that we have is, everybody knows that in the last 100 years, technology has advanced to an extreme degree. But what a lot of people don't realize is that the science of psychology also has. Trying to manipulate people into doing something that wouldn't otherwise do is hardly new. Human beings have been trying that throughout our entire history. But we're getting very, very good at it. And all we need to do is to look at the COVID narrative and see how easy it was for governments to get people to comply with things that they would not otherwise do. And so that leads to a real, well, I think a very important question for an expert such as yourself, who you are a psychologist, and this is something that you know a lot about. How far do you think this could be taken, Gary? When they really refine all of this, could they potentially, I mean, they're preying on people's fears, they're shaming their desire to be part of the herd. Yes. But for the most part, the behaviors they got people to engage in were non-destructive. To an extent, they were harmful, yes. But they weren't, for example, typically going out and attacking, say, other people. Do you think it could get to the point where they would be able to manipulate the average person into doing something that would be potentially extremely detrimental to others? That's a really good question. Not the easiest one to answer, really. I think the problem that we have with the information wars now, as you said, propaganda, manipulation has always gone on in various forms. Private companies have been using nudges for a long time. (33:40 - 39:03) I think the difference now is just the intensity of it and the fact that, obviously, in the digital age, we can, you know, 24-7, we can pipe it into people's homes and into people's minds. Whereas when I was younger, I watched the television occasionally, but there was no phones, there was no kind of internet. We'd hear things, but it would be fragmented and it wouldn't have the intensity that it does now. So I think that's the main problem, is that it can be 24-7. People spend so long on their phones, people spend so long listening to the mainstream media, and with repetition, that has an influence. As to whether that would make us do extreme things, I think potentially it could. I think a lot of that would depend upon any balancing contributions in people's lives. And by that, what I mean is nudges aren't so powerful that we're all going to succumb to them. It's evident that a lot of people didn't, to a large extent. A lot of people managed to see through it. And you then ask the interesting question, wonder why that was? And I think there's a variety of reasons for it. I think some of the existing maps that people had, mind maps of the world, would have some influence there. And by that, I mean there was a subsection of our society that were already very sceptical about what our political elite were getting up to. So I think they were kind of prepared. It depends on what people you've got around you. If you've got other people who are visibly expressing dissents or expressing a different point of view, that can help counterbalance things. Sometimes it just comes down to, I don't know, looks the right word in a way, but I'm just thinking of my own situation, Will. I've often acknowledged on podcasts such as this that I'm naive, or I was until 2020. Up until March 2020, I broadly believed, despite my psychological knowledge, I probably believed that the world was a reasonable place, that our governments generally were trying to do what's best for us. And there may be incompetence here and there, and perhaps a bit of corruption around the edges, but by and large, they were trying to do what's best for their citizens. And it was only with the COVID event, and when they started, and I was very early on that one, something about January, February, I would say, this isn't right. This is not right. Something's going on here that I don't like. And of course, got to express that both verbally and in writing. Then they got a lot of abuse for that, you know, that was cruel and putting other people at risk, the usual stuff. But I've often reflected on why I actually got it. I mean, for most of my life, I'd been naive, head down, working hard, trying to do the best for your family, assuming people were generally okay, that our political leaders were not targeting us in any kind of egregious way. And then January, February, March 2020, all that was shattered. And very briefly, I think the reason personally why I twigged at that point was that while I'd worked in health and mental health for many years, so I did have some experience of working alongside or in juxtaposition to, let's say, infection control departments. And don't want to disrespect them all, but I would say that one of the characteristics that often shone through from them was that they were very blinkered in their view. They couldn't see the bigger picture. All they saw was germs and nothing else mattered. So that was always in my mind. I had a lot of experience of risk assessment and risk management in the mental health sphere. So I realized how horrendously poor we are at predicting risk, more risk of suicide, risk of harm to others. We're not very good at predicting those kinds of things. And there is a propensity for the authorities to be risk averse. So what they tend to do is always be on the safe side, but being on the safe side can often be so destructive in the mental health field. And therefore, I extrapolated that to a larger sphere, which is the world and this so-called pandemic that was being pushed. (39:05 - 39:48) So that got my alarm bells ringing as well. And also some of the parallels between psychiatry, who I'd fought against for most of my career, biological psychiatry, I have this idea that mental health problems and human distress is primarily due to some kind of brain disorder or some kind of biochemical imbalance, that kind of thing. And that's pushed by biological psychiatrists, the medical doctors in the mental health arena, and not least because it kind of supports their request for more resources, et cetera. (39:49 - 42:04) But in a way, what I'm trying to say is that mental health, for me, provided a microcosm of what we then saw on a much bigger scale with the COVID event. So we had people in positions of influence and power or abuse in that power. The psychiatrists did that, political leaders were doing it. The pharmaceutical industries, far, far too much power and influence happens in mental health. Not suspected it would happen in the COVID event. Risk aversion, one of the bearings of my life in mental health, trying to get people not to be reckless, but to actually give people a chance to progress rather than suffocating them with safeguards and goodness knows what. See that in mental health, started to see it in the COVID event. So the parallels to me were quite stunning. And it was really frustrating because in January, February, March 2020, I'm there who've been working in mental health all my life. And for the last 20 years of my career, working alongside other people with similar views of the way power was abused in the mental health system. And then we're seeing a rerun of it on a much greater scale. And only a few of those mental health people actually saw it. Most of my colleagues thought I was cruel and relationships were strained, lost contact with quite a number of them. Openly hostile, they were openly hostile with me on a few occasions. And I just couldn't get why people didn't see it. And I think the reason I saw it was probably because of my, like I said, my background in risk and how it's assessed and how it's abused. And also my grasp of what infection control departments get up to and the evil of big pharma. I'm sure everybody knows now, don't they? It's the most egregious industry in the world, without a shadow of a doubt. (42:04 - 43:20) And knowing that, I think allowed me to resist and to actually realise what was going on. And since then, of course, well, I've kind of done a lot more reading around other subjects now, and the climate stuff, I think it's nonsense. The climate emergency stuff, I think using all the same tactics. I'm questioning a lot of these war rhetoric, again, to keep us fearful, to keep us under control, to keep us at the whim of our political elite. So I'm rapidly learning new stuff, revisiting past events and going, wow, how naive I was. And that's an unsettling place to be. I think when you, it's really difficult to start to trust sources that you, or information that seemed factual, that you took as a given, that you've grown up with all your life, assuming was true. And then you start to question it. Really unsettling area to be. (43:21 - 49:45) Yes. Maybe I digress a little bit. No, it's quite all right. And I was in exactly the same spot that you were back in 2019. I was blissfully unaware of most of what was going on behind the scenes at Westminster 2020, that I woke up. And of course, since then, I have now interviewed hundreds of experts and probably know more about the globalist agenda than the vast majority of people. But I had asked that last question, Gary, about whether or not they could get to the point where they nudge people into doing things that were actively damaging to other people. In order to ask this question, and for this question, I have to give a little bit of background for the sake of the viewers. Think first about the fact that back during the Nazi era, Hitler youth would often report on their parents for not being sufficiently on board with the Nazi agenda or whatever you want to call it. And I've done quite a number of interviews, Gary, with lawyers, especially, where we talk about the corruption of our courts, with people who are involved, say, with the trans agenda that they're brainwashing our children with in the schools. And out of those interviews, it becomes very clear that it is the plan of the people who are behind all of this to make of those of us who push back against it, who don't go along with it, essentially enemies of the state, just as those not sufficiently Nazi parents were to their brainwashed Hitler youth children. And this is the great concern that I have, that if these narratives continue, if people continue to buy it, and of course, they're continuing to push it, that we've got, now we get the bird flu, and there's, you know, they keep trying to come up with more things to fear modern people with that are no more valid than the COVID narrative was. And there are those of us who are pushing back, who continually say, no, we're not going along with this, there's no science behind it, it's utter bunk. Do they get to a point where they are able to nudge those who are still buying it, and they are still the majority, into seeing those of us who do not, as dangerous enemies of the state, to be reported to the authorities, possibly to be attacked in the streets, to be shunned, not just shunned from society, but to reach a point where, say, with the Jews and the Nazis, we need to erase these people? As I said, I think there's a risk of that happening. And when we reflect on the COVID era, I think we can both see, as you mentioned, behaviours that were definitely a step in that direction, where the unvaccinated were abused and vilified, people who were not wearing masks were attacked. In fact, I think there was one, I've forgotten the lady's name now, even been in Canada, where there was a lady with a learning difficulty in one of the hospitals, who was actually suffocated to death by the security guards for not wearing a mask. She had a mask under her chin. I think that was Canada. I've forgotten the lady's name now, tragic case. So I think that is a possibility. Just alongside that, though, I don't want to overstate the power of nudging. It's one tool in the armoury. Propaganda, censorship, smearing, cancellation of alternative voices, all the things that the digital age allows the state to do much more effectively, has big power as well. There's a big issue. But in answer to your question, can nudging and these other propaganda techniques and censorship techniques lead people along that line? I'd say yes, potentially it can. And I suppose history suggests that that can happen. However, I am optimistic. Maybe I'm naive again, but I am optimistic. And the reason I'm optimistic is that the number of people, the percentage of the population who are beginning to get this is increasing. I agree with you, still in the minority, but I don't think we need to get into the majority to actually stop what's actually happening. And there is some suggestion from the literature that if you can get maybe even as low as 15% to 20% of a population, and this is the key, visibly expressing dissent and non-compliance. So it's no good behind a keyboard on the internet under some anonymous name. That's not good enough. No, that doesn't do it. But if you can put your name to something and in the routine interactions of day-to-day life, express dissent at the agenda of our political elites, of the globalists, if we can do that. And opportunities arise regularly to do that. Example, three weeks ago I was in the hairdresser's having the old grey locks cut. And the lass who was cutting my hair, the girl who was cutting my hair, was talking away and talking about her husband's a bit of a non-conformist. Oh, is he? Yes. He does this, he does X, he does Y, he does Z, and he didn't even have the vaccine. And I went, no, I didn't either. And this was at a crowded hairdresser's. Everybody could hear, everybody could hear. I think that's what we've got to do. We've got to express dissent. We've got to be visible. We've got to break that illusion of consensus, which that great Canadian journalist, Jules, I've forgotten his name, terrible with names, but there's one of your journalists or in Canada has been writing about breaking the illusion of consensus. Well, I believe you're talking about Julian. (49:46 - 49:58) You know him, don't you? His last name's not coming to me right now either. So important, so important. And undoubtedly the number of people who are not buying it anymore is increasing, definitely. (49:59 - 50:23) It is. The number of people who are actually feeling empowered enough to say something. I'm not talking necessarily about just protesting in the streets or being very, very kind of energetic about it. It's just people who are bold enough now to go, no, that was rubbish. I never bought that. Mass never worked. (50:24 - 51:18) And opportunities arise on a regular basis. And my optimism is based on that. And also here in the UK, and again, I've no reason to believe we're any different. When you look at articles pushing the climate Armageddon narrative, if you actually look at some of our mainstream papers, still talking about, ooh, this weather event clearly indicates that we're all going to boil up, blah, blah, blah. Then if you read the comments underneath, 95% at least are critical. Most of them are ridiculing what's being said. Most of them were ridiculing what's being said. Most of them were laughing emojis. And that wouldn't have happened in 220. (51:19 - 52:14) That wouldn't have happened in 221. I think there's been a gradual push. And of course, the authorities will try other ways. But I think once you can recognize the tactics, once you can become, that's why I go around preaching stuff like that, once people can start to pinpoint when you're being nudged, when you're hearing a bit of propaganda, when somebody questions whether something's being censored, or some poor guy or lass who's being abused online is being vilified because they have a minority view, when you start to have the antennae to become aware of that kind of thing, I think we can kick back. And I think we are pushing back against it. So I retain optimism that we can turn this around. (52:14 - 53:29) And despite some of the frightening things we've discussed today, Gary, I agree with you. Yes, the number of people who understand what's going on is growing all the time, and it's making it harder and harder for them to push these messages on us. But we still have a challenge. As we've discussed in this interview, it's just the way the human brain is wired, that we do a lot of things on autopilot, we don't stop to think. And let me give an example. I knew from the beginning that the COVID narrative was false, because I knew a particular fact about epidemiology that the vast majority of people do not know. And that is that the longer the incubation period of a virus, most of the time, the less virulent the virus will be. And they told us right at the beginning, it had a longer incubation period than seasonal flu, from which I concluded, well, therefore, it's less virulent than seasonal flu, which is exactly what the statistics today show, when you look at the real numbers. And so I was not susceptible to the fear messages because I knew that particular bit of science. But here's the problem. None of us can possibly know everything. The volume of knowledge that we now have as human beings, even if you are, say, a nuclear physicist, well, that doesn't mean you know anything about medicine. (53:30 - 54:42) So it doesn't matter who you are, whether you're a scientist or not, you are still susceptible to messages that are going to prey upon your ignorance. And because that is not a solvable problem, because there's no way that any of us can know everything, how do we then recognize when we are being nudged, absent the knowledge that the foundational message itself is false? Yeah, and we will never reach a stage where we're 100% immune to this kind of stuff. But I think we can get better at recognizing, and are getting better at recognizing what's happening. I used to, I don't do it anymore, but perhaps I should do it again with regards to maybe the climate narrative. But on my blog, I used to have a nudge of the week competition. So people would notice something that they'd heard on telly or on the radio or whatever, coming from a politician's mouth, and say, ah, that's a nudge, you know, and send it in, and we'd collate them for the full week. (54:42 - 55:16) And at the end, we'd have a vote on which was the most egregious of those nudges, which I think was quite a good way of increasing awareness, as people then start to actively look for these things in action. I think once you get more aware of these things, that's a step in the right direction. Often people talk about our emotional response to things that we can't quite put our finger on, but it doesn't quite seem right. (55:16 - 57:32) People are fluttering in the stomach, maybe, or to hear something and just trigger something, you can't quite put your finger on it. I think that is often a warning sign that you're probably being nudged, or you're being manipulated, or someone's attempting to manipulate you in some way. Alongside other bog standard approaches, well, like minimising your contact with mainstream media, switching the telly off, coming off the phone now and again, going for walks in nature, being mindful. Again, sadly, I think a whole kind of commercial operation developed on the back of mindfulness, but the concept is still a very valid one, I think. Rather than anticipating what's going to happen in the future, or ruminating about what's happened in the past, you just stay in the moment, preferably in a place where you can be in contact with nature. You just listen, and smell, and look around you at what's happening. You just stay in that second. Just these kinds of things, I think, allow us to keep grounded, to keep perspective, to resist. The more people do that, the more hope I have. I still have my moments when I feel really kind of despondent, and you hear something on the news, or somebody that you valued and trusted, and find that they're spouting what seems to be erroneous. But that's the last point I would make on that, though. I do think we've all got to remain humble about it, though. None of us, which relates to the point that you were talking about, none of us is perfect, far from it, at being able to make sense of what's going on in this world. We're all riddled with biases. If anyone says they've been 100% objective, and they've kind of sussed it, exactly what's happening in the world at the moment, I think they're telling us lies. (57:33 - 59:32) Maybe not deliberately, but they're spouting untruths, because we're all biased. We're all kind of making these errors. Our current beliefs will significantly influence what we notice, what we pay attention to, how we interpret things, what we remember. We're all riddled with biases. The best we can hope for is to become a little bit more objective, a little bit less riddled with these things, and to be importantly aware when someone, or somebody, or some organization is strategically attempting to shape us in a particular way that meets their rather than our own needs. It seems to me that because you've identified the three areas in which they target us with NGIN, and that is escalating fear, shame, and peer pressure, that the critical questions that people should ask anytime they hear a message that is, a message that is trying to get them to do something, adopt a certain behavior, be that something in the COVID narrative, you know, public health, or be that by a product, whatever. The questions that people should ask is, is this promoting fear? Is this attempting to shame me? Is this threatening my position within society? And if people ask those questions, and the answer to any of them is yes, should we not be very suspect of that message? Oh, yes, exactly. Excellently put. And what you're illustrating there, Will, is deliberative thinking, isn't it? It's slow brain thinking to step back and go, no, what's happening now? Now, what does this actually mean? Now, can I trust this source? You've got out of automatic pilot there, and you're into slow brain behavior. (59:33 - 1:01:13) And the problem is that slow brain behavior is effortful. It's not as easy as fast brain. And it's quite limited in capacity as well. Whereas fast brain capacity is pretty vast, and we can be nudged in all kinds of ways. But you're right to do that, to know the difference between slow thinking and fast thinking, type one and type two thinking as behavioral science call it. It's a really good step, because you can then start to try and consciously switch to deliberation, just like you illustrated then. Fear, a lot of fear. I know a lot of fear elevation has been going on, strategic fear elevation and shaming. Okay, just listen to this politician or just listen to this expert. I'm just wondering, could this be one example? You're stepping back and you're applying your slow brain thinking to those kinds of processes. And I think if you're able to do that on a reasonably regular basis, you're a long way down towards getting out of this, not being a vixen. Prominence, still for the majority, sadly, I think, for a variety of reasons, they don't do that. They don't think about it. They don't even know. But as I said, in my positive moment and my optimistic kind of view, I think more and more people are waking up. (1:01:13 - 1:01:48) I think more and more people are becoming aware of what our elite are doing to us. And we don't need, we don't need 60, 70 percent to get it. I think certainly one in five would do it. And I think we're getting closer to that. And you raise a very good point in talking about the thinking fast and thinking slow, because they are preying upon our fast thinking brain. In order to question that message, we do have to step into the slow thinking brain to analyze it. (1:01:48 - 1:04:03) And I'm a person who likes simple, all-purpose rules. And I always try to come up with them whenever I can. So as you were just talking there, and I'd started out by asking the other question of, well, does it escalate fear? Does it promote shame? Does it threaten my social position within society? I think that there's a simple rule, and I'd want your opinion on this. If the message triggers a negative emotional response, that should be the signal to your slow thinking brain, let's analyze this. Because those are all negative emotional responses, aren't they? True. Yeah. And that links nicely with what I said earlier about, you know, a lot of people talk about having an emotion, a feeling, a sense that they can't quite put their finger on that something's not quite right. That's emotion. That's emotion. And I've come across an increasing number of people who talked about that being their early warning sign. Just didn't feel right. There was something flutter here, or just something that made them feel uneasy when they hear something. And they learned that when they reflected on it, that's kind of an early warning siren for them. That's something someone's trying to manipulate them here. So yeah, I think rules like that are good. I think people find their own ways. I'm not sure there'll ever be a generic, universal kind of way for us to do this. But being prompted by emotional change would be a good one. Because that happens so quickly. And I think probably most of us can identify with feeling and emotion that we're not quite sure where it's come from. Getting emotional in a situation that at first viewing doesn't seem like it should. And again, if that activates us into deliberative thinking, into slow thinking, into type two thinking, then that's good. Yeah. Deliberative thinking is good. (1:04:03 - 1:04:50) Automatic pilot, not always. But we need automatic pilot, as you said at the beginning of this interview, because otherwise the world would be such a complicated place and we'd have to agonize over every minutiae of decisions, which would paralyze us with hesitation. So we do need to be on autopilot some of the time. But if we can increase a little bit the amount of time we spend in slow thinking, that would be a really, really positive step. All right. Dr. Sidley, thank you so much for your time today. And for the excellent articles you've written on this, folks, you will find links to many of those articles, as well as the documentary that was mentioned earlier beneath this interview. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.