Nick Hudson, thank you for joining me in the trenches. Good to be back again, Jim. It's been quite a long time, hasn't it? Nick, you are probably one of my most popular guests going all the way back to 2020. Well, I'm pleased to hear it and a little bit surprised. Well. It's got nothing to do with what you have to say, it's all to do with your looks, your very good, charming looks, Nick. Can't tell anything about that, can I? Nick, let's let's start at the
start. What is your background? Well, I mean by profession, I'm a, a private equity investor. I run a private equity fund. And so I've been, I've been in the world of finance since I left school, already studying and then working in an insurance environment and then in corporate finance and then the last 20 something years in private equity, which I'll absolutely love and would turn, it turns out to be very well suited to me. So I've got no plans to do anything else because I keep on
learning. And that's the, the most important thing in life is to have that feeling that your curiosity is continually provoked by the thing that you're doing. And I'm very pleased to report that after, yeah, two more than two decades in private equity, my performance isn't dropping off and my interest isn't dropping off. So that's what I'm going to carry on doing, adding to the sort of range that, of things that I look at and the range of tools that I deploy.
And yeah, that, that was the setting. I, I guess you're asking because it's kind of strange that this private equity guy ends up studying COVID. But you know what, what private equity is characterized by is that the practitioners are always on the wrong side of a very profound asymmetry of information. When you're looking at buying a business, the, the private business, the owners of that business typically know a hell of a lot about it and you know nothing when you walk in the
room. And so most of the art is really around trying to resolve or make irrelevant that information asymmetry. And so if you, what you should be hearing in all of this is that private equity investors are basically professional skeptics. We, we're, we're there to detect BS. And when the COVID phenomenon hit, I detected a lot of BS very
quickly and scratched. And if you looked at any data at all, you realised that the media narrative was complete and utter nonsense and that it was propped up by state and security apparatus. And this, this whole pandemic preparedness industry which exists to fleece us on the suspicion of a bug or pathogen doing the rounds. And so very quickly I just realized that wall to wall, we were dealing with absolute lunacy there.
You know, to this to this day now, I don't believe there was a risk additive pathogen spreading at all. All of these stories about gain of function and Wuhan Institute of Virology, it's all nonsense, complete nonsense. There is no such thing as successful gain of function research. I have no doubt that some money is thrown at that kind of problem to try and sort of almost create the the the sense that they might actually be a gain of function going on. But that's complete nonsense.
It's the even the science that is used supposedly in these gain of function experiments rules out the plausibility of gain of function research. So it's we we're dealing with a a vast complex of lies in COVID and the complex of lies of course extends way beyond COVID. But now let's go back to 2019, right? We were all doing our thing. Life was going on as per normal and suddenly 2020 came about and more specifically March. And then suddenly everything
just fell apart. Now the data started coming out, I think it was from Johns Hopkins initially and the the mainstream media. I'm sorry. Faked data from Johns Hopkins University. But but nonetheless, that was the data that was now being distributed across the mainstream media. I remember stumbling across something called Panda, which is of course how you and I became friends. But you had the same data, right? But you were concluding something different.
Take me through that. Well, it is. I didn't have the same data in the sense that I was looking at far more than just the the Johns Hopkins University data. If you, if you had the Johns Hopkins University as the entirety of your universe, you were being misled. I mean, even that data wasn't compatible with a global emergency, but it it it was really more a case of, yeah, well, there's the story of the Diamond Princess.
OK. Well, as soon as the data is available, let's take a look at that. Oh, a couple of elderly people were on a cruise ship, and in the ensuing months, some of them died. Well, that happens on every on every cruise. You know, cruises are populated by typically obese and retired people, so nothing surprising there.
And in fact, when I look back on it, I made a mistake there because it caused me to believe for a while that there might be some kind of pathogen involved, that they could just be a, you know, circulating virus or something like that. And I no longer believe that to have been the case, but it was clear from that data that we weren't dealing with anything
catastrophic. And and very early on, you know, there was just this absence of young people dying and the people who were dying were being put on ventilators, which is a very non stated a non standard treatment for influenza like illnesses. So basically the hospitals were
dispatching them. The hospitals became killing grounds, killing fields and of course all the catastrophic silliness around cloth masks and in South Africa that we had bands on, open toed shoes and selling of hot chicken and all of these. This complete silliness emanating from the minds of such catastrophically bigoted and and corrupt people like Professor Karim and the the National Institute of Communicable Diseases and the South African,
what were they called? s s AM D South African Medical Research Council, S AM RC. All these junked up pseudoscientists pumping out in the streams of nonsense validating this whole construct. And that's just in South Africa. I haven't even gone on to the rest of the world and the true story behind the fact JSU. Sorry, JHU data, I think, you know, let's let's not go there because it's quite a long and detailed story, but yeah, it it, it.
And once you've seen through the wall of BS, you can't Unsee, you know, And so it you it gets you into a kind of permanent location. You got you. And I have had a number of conversations about those sort of red Pilling moments and the dangers of becoming a blackpooled individual. It becomes too cynical in the reality of anything or the, the validity of any kind of story or theory. But you know, I, I, I think, and I think we, we made good points when we had those chats.
But the reality is that we are living in a sea of lies. Funnily enough, long before COVID, when I was a young corporate finance analyst in New York on Wall Street, I began to see how complexes of lies can be sustained and be believed by the practice practitioners in, in, in corporate finance, The the, there's often a a challenge in assessing the value of a
company. You know the the corporate finance here is trying to persuade his corporate clients that in a particular acquisition makes sense. If you can get him to agree with that, then the deal happens and the corporate financier earns enormous fees. It can be several percent of the transaction value and from that
their bonuses get paid. And there are a number of sort of trappings of these corporate finance valuation exercises, little methods and techniques that they use to try and create the, the, the appearance of the valuation being scientific or methodical or, or valid in some way. And one of them is this thing called a comparables analysis. And when you do a comparables analysis, what you do is you
form what's called a peer set. You go and find companies that according to you are similar to the one you're you're valuing and you go and build the set and create various metrics about the businesses. So for example, it could be their price earnings ratios that you're averaging in this pair set. And round about that time, enormous databases were becoming available that you could crunch through, you know, 10s of thousands of companies for with a quarterly history going back 10 years.
So you'd have sort of 40 financial data points full price history for 10,000 companies in America and and more overseas. And I decided to run a test of this comparables technique. So what I would do was I would build this entire database of
pricing metrics. So it was enormous database and I would throw in the standard industrial classification code as a variable and see whether it had any value in terms of informing you about the price earnings ratio or the the enterprise value to EBITDA ratio. I looked at lots of different valuation metrics. It was a very carefully conducted exercise with proper data scrubbing and lots of correction of unusual items and all this kind of hard work, the grunt work that goes into such
kind of such kinds of analysis. And the answer I came up with was that in the the industrial classification of a business, which is the main sort of approach used to characterize a peer set was information free. There was no, there was no value in, in trying to compare a company to other companies in the same industries if you're trying to conclude that it's undervalued or overvalued or whatever the case may be.
And when I showed this information to corporate finance practitioners that they almost didn't want to look at it. They just didn't, didn't want to, didn't want that to be the answer. Because every single pet pitch book that they'd ever done, we had to have a nice little table or several tables with a lovely little industry based comparables analysis. And they, the charts got sexier
and sexier over time. They got better ways of representing the the data and making it look impressive and so on. I didn't want to hear the answer that this technique was actually, yeah, codswallop from beginning to end. And, and I began to see the whole corporate finance industry that way, that there were really hoods trying to persuade their clients to do transactions that they shouldn't be doing and, and in in the process stripping out
enormous amounts of fees. So I guess that was a a bit of a framing. And I only recently began to, to connect that little exercise that I've done and the kind of scepticism that it built in me with my thinking as it developed over the years, becoming a private equity transactor. And then, you know, Midway, well, 3/4 of the way through that career, being outraged by the the lockdowns and yeah.
But but the thing, Nick, is that created the context for where your mind was at in 2020, how you immediately started being suspicious and skeptical of what was going on. Now, I don't have the same background as you. And, and I mean, I effectively talk to people and draw pictures, right? I don't have that analytical mind, mind. But yet, as Matthias Desmond said, around 30% of people at any given time will go against the sort of mass formation slash convention.
Why do you think that is? Yeah, I don't know if it's as high as that. I would, if I had to hazard a guess, it would be some something like 10% my actual. I don't know for sure why it is, but I have a conjecture. I think that if the whole society was made-up of Mavericks who push against the grain, life would be chaotic. You need to, you need to allow institutions to develop and be stable over time and across geography and so on. You need to allow things to accrete.
And yet The Mavericks have an important function because they are the the people who generate innovation, solve problems resulting in improvements. You know, doing the same thing can't solve problems. It can't result in improvement. So you need people who are saying, hold on a minute, that's there's a better way of doing this, or you guys have been telling me this for 50 years and it's not, there's no benefit,
there's no result. You know, people calling the BS, but you can't have too many of them. So I actually see it through the kind of social evolutionary lens that that you can't have the the rebels for all of us, but you have to have but. What's funny? Forming people, yes. But what's funny is that you and I are basically suggesting that we are Mavericks. But everybody likes to think that they are Mavericks, right? It's, it's never it's, it's, it's always them and not the
other person. But it's it's obviously quite evident that looking at Pandas data, you were going against the grain. And if I look at my own, my own discussions in early 2020, I was going against what everybody around me was was saying and they thought that I was cuckoo. And I think probably people around you thought you're cuckoo. I mean, if I look at the media and how they were going after you. For sure, not just the media, the intelligence community.
You know, it was, it was a very widespread attack. Yeah, we had to intelligence assets teaming up with South African journalists who wrote to write smear campaigns based on completely fabricated information. When you and and when you notice that kind of thing happening to you, you need it again. It's it's sort of, well, if this was just a pandemic and people were responding to it, that kind
of stuff wouldn't be happening. There's clearly a psyop going on. You know, what is a guy like a creature like Dasim Ahmed doing teaming up with complete critic called Rebecca? What's her name from the Daily Maverick? Davis. Yes. Rebecca Davis. Becky Young, Becky Little. Yeah. Teams up with like a a known intelligence asset to write a complete junk smear article for the Daily Maverick. Why is the Daily Maverick editorial allowing that to
happen? Well, it's because they're not independent and they, they are a controlled entity and they are funded by people who are promoting this nonsense. You know, that's the reality. And when you start seeing through that and you realize, oh, well, then my pretty much have to be suspicious of anything that they write.
And, and sure enough, the Ukraine exercise comes along and one of their funders gets op-ed to write about, you know, George Soros, about the, the, the Putin bad meme, you know, basically the sudden notion that there was no backdrop to the Ukrainian conflict. One day Putin just woke up on the wrong side of bed and went marching across the border.
That's the whole story of UK. That was Soros article, you know, just completely ignoring the Madan and the, the, the long history of NATO and US intervention, the, the colour revolution, the top, the deposing of democratically elected president and the, the creation of American citizens as cabinet ministers in Ukraine overnight. Like they had them become Ukrainian citizens and installed them in the government. You know, things like that were
just completely left out. And so you realise that these, these are not independent media organisations with thinking, breathing editors. They're these, these guys are, are hacks and they're, they're bribed or or or funded into or or or controlled by other means, even into just writing nonsense about major events. But what I came to realize eventually was actually if a large noise is being made about anything in the media, then the story is false.
Yeah, yeah, it's funny. Because there are no real big stories. Yes, but what's funny is that you're tapping into a very interesting psychological phenomenon, which Jessica Hockett recently said very funnily said on my show. And she said in 2020 she started questioning the COVID event and very quickly thereafter was asking, did man land on the moon?
And 100 other questions, you know, I mean, this morning I was reading a paper, you know, I, I, I tend to get my reading in before everybody else wakes up. And I was reading a paper that had done what's called out of sample testing of climate models. And the, a comment I've made frequently is that the lack of after sample testing of climate models actually tells you everything you need to know that that the practitioners are either stupid or fraudulent or
both. OK, because you don't build models and fail to do out of sample testing the, and let me just maybe unpack that a little bit. So, so you've got some data and you're trying to build a model to describe the future of the trajectory of that data. And the the data includes many variables. It'll be temperature readings over here, there and everywhere. It'll be measures of cloud cover or days of sunlight at a location. It'll be humidity.
You know, you might have a whole ton of variables in that that you now must try and fit a model to, with the idea being that your model would then be able to predict the future. And you can can make claims about how we're all going to die from overheating and the the water's all going to boil and the ice caps are all going to melt and the polar bears are going to die. And we can say all those things because we've got our model and it's predicting the future.
But when you've got lots of parameters in the model, you can get what's called spurious fit where statistically. The model is a close match to the historical data, the data that you are fitting to, but performs very poorly in what's called out of sample testing, where you take values for those parameters or variables, values for the variables that are not included in the time series that you're using to fit the data. And you test whether the model predicted those values.
If, if you, if you were to build a model in a hedge fund setting or something and you failed to do out of sample testing, you would be fired on the spot because employing such a model that hadn't been tested in an out of sample testing fashion is you got a very real risk of just absolutely drilling it. You're losing tons of money. So, so you know, where modelling has a economic importance, it's always performed with art of
sample testing. And I just noticed that these climate models don't, they don't do it. And so now somebody's come along and done it. And guess what? The models are hopeless. They they're, they're scandalously bad. It's embarrassing and and we can see it all around us if you open your eyes and ignore the media headlights. Nobody's getting hot. No, there's no polar melting happening. The weather isn't changing. We're not getting hurricanes in Cape Town, you know?
But you're making a very profound point though about the the uselessness of of models. Let's just bring it back to the COVID event, right? Everything was based on models, was it not? Yeah, and, and they were so easy to pull apart. I mean, and, and people think there's some kind of mystique. These were very simple models. If you'd done like one year of mathematics and statistics after university, sorry, after school, I'm not even sure that that
would really be necessary. If you had a good schooling and you, you did mathematics, you know, concentrated on mathematics in high school, you'd be able to understand these models. There's no, there's no mystique to them. They're called Sir models or susceptible infected recovered models, Sir very simple little equations that that that describe them and but almost impossible to fit to data real time.
And so it's very important to check quickly, like, and you should be able to check within days that they're performing well against your out of sample data. And none of that was done. And I've had conversations with the people who build these models. And what you realise is to a man or in, in the case of COVID, very often to a woman, they, they are just exceptionally clueless individuals. They are not practical. They don't live in the real world.
Their their jobs do not require a tether to reality. There's no market test or environmental test of the quality of the work they do. They do what is what Daniel David Graber called bullshit jobs. And so they become completely disconnected from reality and their impulse to according or corresponding with reality is
extremely low. And, and that's the reality, most people, I would say in corporate and bureaucratic jobs are of that nature where where their ability to connect to reality has been so profoundly eroded for so long that they've become these virtually incompetent human beings. If they lost their jobs and had to do something in the real world, they would die, they would fail. They can only do the bullshit job. And it it's, it's completely phenomenal how pervasive that
has become. But now there's a philosophical aspect to this because modelling is something that's very common to say, climate, climate change, science, which is disconnected from reality. Very obviously virology is much the same. And I guess there are other fields that that probably fall into that same type of critique, but. It's not just models, it's theories in general, because models are like a subset of
theories, you know? But what I'm trying to understand is, Nick, what I'm trying to understand is why then do you think someone will always ask the question? Yes. But are you saying that those scientists and others working within those model paradigms, are they deliberately lying? Let's go. I'll tell you the best way to answer that question is to, is to pick up on what I was saying is not just models, it's
theories. Because you know, in, in a way we can say, OK, let's look at critical theory, OK, because that's, that's a sort of, that's a model. Let me let me explain why it's a model. OK, the model works like this. There are these terrible creatures called white males and they discriminate against everybody who's not male or not white and they pay them terrible salaries when they employ them. They they discriminate in the workplace and they don't listen to them and they don't promote
them. And so there's this awful depression. So the model is white bail bad. OK. But you know, in my 30 years of working in and around corporations, I, I have never seen an instance of somebody being passed over because of their gender or the colour of their skin. And I don't expect to see one because I know as a as a professional shareholder and business owner that when skills are available, you grab them with both hands. You do not care what package they come in.
Because the the the art of solving problems in the business world is very difficult and the prize is large. If you can solve those problems, you make lots of money. No sane entrepreneur or businessman is going to give up the chance to solve problems just because he doesn't. He doesn't want women in the workplace or black people in the workplace or something like that. It's a nonsense construct. It does not conform with
reality. And sure enough, when you do multi multi dimensional analysis of women's salaries versus men's, there's no difference. The differences that exist in the simple averages are explained by such phenomena as childbirth, taking women out of the workforce, that kind of thing. And, and also it's got a lot to do with choice of work. Yeah, women don't tend to apply to become garbage collectors and and garbage collectors and the
collection is an unpleasant job. So it actually gets paid a bit more than other types of manual labour. You know that kind. Of working in the mines. Yes, mine workers, anything that's got risk and danger and unpleasantness to it, you know, so, so you find that the, the, the, their model, this idea white man bad is faulty.
It, it doesn't comport with reality, but there's a whole industry around that white man bad model, you know, critical theory, critical race theory, critical gender theory. It informs the entire garbage construct of DEI diversity, diversity, exclusivity, and sorry, what does it increase? Diversity, equity and inclusivity, you know, and, and people have bullshit jobs doing DEI type work.
They've become experts in DEI, you know, and, and those are completely useless, incompetent individuals who would not survive in the real world of commerce, commerce or in the real world of the environment for, for for much longer than a couple of days. They would just die basically. No, but what I'm, what I'm trying to get to is you'll, you'll have let's say a virologist or you'll have a, a meteorologist, right? And they've been working in the
field for 10-15 years, whatever. And the virologist might genuinely believe that SARS COV 2 was this deadly pathogen that was spreading around the world and is sitting in a laboratory doing of a highly specific, highly specialized line of work. And or you might have the meteorologist who genuinely thinks that we're all going to drown, you know, because of ice caps melting. Now are are they, are they just genuinely decent people doing their best?
Or are they deliberately lying? That's kind of what I'm trying to get to. Well, I suppose that, you know, let's say their average decency, let's give them, let's give them that. But the problem is that in their fields, there's no hard feedback loop. See, in my field, if I get something wrong, I lose my investors money and my fund gets closed. Simple. It happens very quickly. I've got the the gap between making a couple of major errors and no longer having a career is short.
It's a few years, you know, and then I'm unemployable. So I've got a real hard feedback loop. I'm either good at this or I'm not. And if I'm not, I'm not allowed to do it. But if you're a climate scientist and you come up with a codswallop forecast, there's no feedback loop. People don't start losing money and firing you. If you get the temperature prediction for 2027 wrong, nobody's even going to remember that you made it. And, and so it's the absence of feedback.
And it's the same with with virology. You know, these guys. Oh, we've analysed the genetic tree of these viruses and the Omega variant is closely related to the beta 2.1 variant. Well, if that turns out to be wrong, what's the consequence? You know, the guys, nobody loses money. You don't have investors beating down your door to throw you out the top floor window.
It's just a there's. They live in these highly research kind of artificial worlds where tethering to reality is just simply not part of the the job requirement. Yeah, so as as Nassim Nassim Taleb calls that, they don't have skin in the game. Yes, that's one way of putting it. Skin interpreters. Money. Yeah, Skin. There's no skin in the game. They don't suffer. The ironically, he got it very wrong, didn't he?
Well, you got it terribly wrong. And that that in itself is interesting because I, I went in the scratched around in the background to see where he went wrong. And it's quite interesting. There's quite a divided story about how these public intellectuals were actually primed for years prior to the COVID event to, to see epidemics as a material risk or pandemics as a threat.
It was a sophisticated operation, very expensive operation, with a man by the name of John Brockman at the centre of it and some very creepy characters hanging around the edges. By the way, paedophiles and strange, strange, very strange. Nick listening to you now it, it makes one very nervous about the future of science and and medicine and everything else because of the inherent flawed of modeling. If you zoom out a little bit,
what does this mean? It's sort of on a, on a on a, on a, what is on on an existential level. Look, good science will be done under conditions of freedom always because better technologies afford the possibility of making money and, you know, doing doing more with less. So as long as there is freedom,
science will be fine. It just it just, you know, I don't know why people expect it to take place in universities where there's no skin in the game and the incentive structures all messed up and so on. It always kind of surprises me that people have, you know, but universities, that's where science is done.
No, actually, I think most of the universe, most of the science is done in, in small corporations trying to innovate, trying to come up with a new gadget or gizmo or to solve some engineering or, or, or data problem. Those people are highly incentivized and motivated to get the solution, and that's where the science is done. Professors don't really do science, you know, they do.
They also have bullshit jobs. And so there's this kind of mystique around the university which I don't think is well deserved. And I'm not at all surprised that that, yeah, I don't look at it and say, oh, the enterprise of science at universities is deteriorated. I'd look at it and say it probably never was much. So I don't think that's that. That presents an existential threat. Bad bad thinking, bad theories, bad models have always been with us.
It's just when you allow non commercial organizations and institutions to become so large, you know, so these massive organizations with no skin in the game and no feedback loop. Government is an example. Institute of virology would be an example that any anybody doing climate sciences. These are all examples of mega institutions that are not tethered to reality. And and that's the dangerous thing is the centralization and concentration of resources in
these untethered organisations. So you, what you want to do is smash them people, some people said to me, oh, you need to reform these institutions. No, the problem is the centralized structure. There is no such thing as reforming A centralized organization. You need to you need to dismantle it. You need to absolutely obliterate it and put safeguards in to prevent it from happening again.
You need to have unclad laws that prevent governments from becoming bigger than 5% of GDP, never mind 55%. You need to prevent the ownership of money or the the control of money by the state. That shouldn't happen. You need to build in freedom into the into the sort of the fabric of reality that that that's the defence, that's the
technology that's required. And as long as you do that, you'll have a good science and bad science, and the good science will tend to survive instead of the bad science. What we have is a world where bad science can persist because the institutions are untethered from reality and have no need to test their theories against the real world.
But what you're kind of alluding to also is the the cascade of false dichotomies because the COVID event has led me to question philosophical aspects or ideological aspects of how we view the world. You've not spoken about, for example, communism being a silly term, capitalism being a silly term. Left, right, all these terms are are very empty. Very much so, yes.
And, and, you know, they, they also, they create this sort of this notion of a kind of pure model that can, that can, you know, we can consider as being plausibly applied in the real world, you know, the ownership of the, the commanding heights by the proletariat, the, the blue collar workers, whatever, or in, in capitalism, the, the unfettered free market. And of course, none of these things can ever exist.
You're always going to have mixed models and, and ideally I would say you want to have multiple sort of structures being tested at different levels of, of annularity all the time. Also an idea ruffled from Taleb was this thing that is quite reasonable to be a communist at home and a radical libertarian at the level of the state. You know, the size of the organizing unit is, is very, a very important consideration when it it gets down to working out how to govern it.
So yeah, my house is proudly communist. Everybody in the house gets the same level of healthcare. Even though I produce all 100% of the income, I get the same healthcare as everybody else. So the house is communist. But when I step out of my house, I lose my communism very quickly because I'm dealing with a bigger level of scale. And then I become libertarian quite fast. I don't like it when I get told that I need to say certain
things or do certain things. I recently retired, resigned in protest from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK after they I went through a five year kangaroo court disciplinary process. And yeah, I got the expected result, which is a very poorly reasoned legal judgement, totally unconnected to the original charges that were brought against me, which were misinformation and killing people by telling them not to get vaccinated and things like that. Quite childish altogether.
And it's surely sure enough, after five years, they eventually found me guilty of offensive speech for calling Professor Karim A bigoted nut job, you know, a public figure. So, so much for freedom of speech these days. And yeah, isn't that just so pathetic? And guess what? The lead the, the, the lead tribunal of the, the, the the chair of the tribunal was, was an expert in DEI was exactly fame, you know, so she could saw
me coming. And she gave the game away several times where she, you know, that she'd made a presumption of guilt. It was very clear they were going to they were going to get me on something, no matter how silly and frivolous it was. An undercurrent of your commentary over the years, which I have very much enjoyed, is the idea of, of, of complex models. The world is highly nuanced and
complex. And why I'm bringing that up is because the polar opposite would be somebody like David, like who I like, but he simplifies everything down to there's a small group of people right at the top and everything is well oiled and slick. And your position is will know because we are we are human beings. We are complex and we are competing with one another all the time. Yes, I, I would say that there
are competing elites everywhere. And this idea that there's like a Council of 300 or 30 or an Illuminati or a Jesuit High Court or a Free Masonic, whatever, these may all be real structures that are being spoken of, but they're, they're, they're the idea that one community of dark Lords is in, in the shadows quietly manipulating the entire planet and all societies, I think is false. There's, that's not to say that there isn't a great deal of
manipulation that takes place. I mean, it's, it's become really clear to me right now in South Africa that there's a third force trying to stoke up racial animosity. Yes, you see these bots and, and you, you become very sensitive to bots. Like you detect them quickly after you've been through four years of facing COVID bots. And I can just see that somebody is paying somebody full time work to come up and provoke. Racial animosity on social media accounts and they're very active accounts.
These are not people who have real lives and jobs. These are hired individuals. And I think the money for that comes from outside the country. It's just all kind of disturbing, you know, why? What's the interest? Why are we trying to divide South Africa and fan the flames of racist legislation bought out by the ANC and so on? Why is this suddenly happening, you know?
You reminded me now of I think it was the CIA that that funded something like 60 or 100,000 people to push an anti China COVID Wuhan narrative already back in 2020 already. So I mean, these sorts of shadowy people do exist, but they don't necessarily controlled everything from the top. Yes, so, so who was Michael Singer's handler? You know, he wrote that book, What is it called again? But basically trying to pin the entire COVID phenomenon on China, which was nonsense.
You know it's A and. That's also a red flag. Yeah, yes it is. That's a red flag. Good pun. But in in one conversation with him, basically he said to him, you're you're pretty good for a spook. And he just chuckled. He laughed. He kind of admitted that he was a spook. Amuses me.
You know, there are a couple of people who consider themselves skeptics and so on. Who who they, you know, who then fall for Make America Great Again and Donald Trump or maybe they love Putin. They can become big fans of Putin, you know, because he's giving a stick to NATO. He's a hero. You know, that that they just fell to see that. No, these guys are all somewhere between thugs and actors, you know, or sometimes a mixture of the two. Donald Trump's an actor.
He's not a real statesman, you know, and, and, and I'm, I'm not, I've got no gun in the fight. I, I, I think it was better that we got Trump then, then Kamala, Kamala Harris. I mean, what a flake, but I mean, she's, she's an actor too, right? Actress. So, you know, they all, it's all dance. It's all stage managed. The the Overton window is tightly controlled. Available candidates for election are controlled. It's establishment people or establishment friendly
candidates. Even the destruction that causes is that it must be the right type of destruction. You know. And so you now have this. Yeah, some of these people are such patent assets like Carney in Canada. I've been watching that guy for years. He's he's never very high profile, but there, if you ever want to see a person who's simply marching to the narrative and has become so schooled in the narrative that he almost can't do anything else, he's kind of got a robotic nature to him.
Then you look no further than Carney. You know the new. Yeah, you mentioned. Every election? Never. Sorry, no. I was going to say, you mentioned the Overton window, and I'm reminded of, I think it was Noam Chomsky who said that a great way to control narratives is by encouraging very aggressive debate, but within
certain parameters. That's it was a Chomsky line of thinking, yes, that you want to create the appearance of a vigorous social discourse so you allow people to have a debate about, for example, covert natural origin versus lab origin. Yes, don't allow me to enter the room saying bullshit. There was no risk additive pathogen, so this whole discussion is irrelevant. They would, you know, would. So it's meaningless to talk about the origin of a thing that didn't exist.
And you will have a smear campaign. There'll be a whole bunch of people who jump on you. You're a Nova, you're a virus denier and and so on. And they'll shut you down and they will not allow you into the debate. And that's happened. You know, the Overton window moves around. So at the beginning to to make the claim that COVID presented no risk to children, that was a COVID denier. You're not allowed to say that Now. You're allowed to say that. That's not even a battered
issue. But at at the time when they were trying to close schools, they wanted to close schools. They wanted to close society. They didn't want to hear that children were not at risk of COVID. And, you know, they would come up with elaborate ruses like that. Oh, children infect their grandparents, you know, that kind of thing. And so that's a rationale that when the when the window started opening, the, the, the reasoning becomes different.
That's no longer that the children are at risk trying to scare the parents into agreeing to school closures. It's now that no granny's at risk from the child. And that's why we did it. So there's a rationale provided after the initial narrative has collapsed.
Yeah. Another way of thinking about it is since we're talking about it, it's come to my mind that you'll have, let's say in the states, you'll have the the Biden camp that will say, well, there was a pandemic, but it came from a wet market in China. And then you'll have the Trump camp, that camp that will say, well, no, it came from a lab in China. Both camps are saying that there was a pandemic, right? So they're both arguing the same
thing. Or you might have the Obama camp saying, well, human activity is warming up Earth. And then you'll have the Trump camp saying, well, no, that's it's not coming from our cause, but it's coming from geoengineering. They're changing the climate. So both camps again, are arguing that humans are warming Earth. Whereas the third option, which as you pointed out, you're not allowed to say that perhaps humans are not powerful enough to change Earth's temperature and perhaps there was no
pandemic. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Look, I think, I think a lot of people are coming around to those ideas. When I say a lot, I mean on a comparative basis, but the man in the street, well, what does he think? Well, I think I think actually, you know, most people who have non bullshit jobs were never taken in. They they maybe haven't got a platform to say anything all the time of day to spend themselves in indulging thoughts about the
grand narratives of the time. But certainly Uber drivers were people who I found so straight through the COVID phenomenon and and don't give a rats about the phenomenon. But we've got, you know, when it get when you get to the laptop classes, it's a different story. And those people gloss over when you when you confront them with evidence of a scam, of a grand narrative that is entirely false of a of a art artificial construct like climate change, climate crisis.
But yes, the lack, the lack of humility is, is a fundamental characteristic of the people who go in for these ideas. They, they do have this sense that because they believe in centralized control as a, a, a plausibly beneficial or generative kind of polity, you know, it's the same, the same intellectual error allows them to conclude that, yeah, humans can control climates of the planet. That's, that's, that's definitely viable.
You know, that the net force of this, what did Stephen Hawkins call it? The, the, the thin chemical scum on the surface of planet. You know, that's kind of how these guys think that, that that thin chemical scum could overcome the science and, sorry, the sun and clouds and, you know, the mass of the atmosphere and all sorts of other variables on which humanity has no bearing. Yeah. It's that that that sort of arrogance, the epistemic humility is lacking.
I was wanting to ask you earlier, just quickly, you've spoken a couple times about centralized control. Let's just unpack that just very briefly because I've been asked about what that means, because in your home there's a degree of central control. So so how does this scale? Well, the problem, the problem is that as you scale things, complexity increases. And I mean, and let's just let's be clear what we're talking about in in a domain, OK?
So if you scale the political unit, the complexity of that unit increases, right? If I have gas, a single gas in a jar and I make the jar bigger, my model doesn't really change for the behaviour of the gas. You know, complexity is not really increasing in that kind of setting. So we're not talking about this kind of idealised models and so on. We're talking about the real world. When you increase scale, when you, you, you increase complexity and complexity very
quickly becomes overwhelming. Your, your, your theories about what will happen if I do this, if I introduce this policy, if I build this product or provide the service, the predictive ability becomes rapidly eroded and the only way to make progress in the face of complexity is through trial and
error, conjecture and criticism. And what the IT what large polities, centralized organisations necessarily do, Otherwise they can't become centralized organisations is they rule out conjecture and criticism. Yeah. If you're going to operate an organization from a central point, it must have rules and inhibitions of of ideas and freedoms and independence. That that that is the same thing as that inhibition is the same thing as a centralised organization.
So centralisation stamps out the only mechanism for solving problems in the face of complexity, and therefore it stamps out progress in human flourishing. It's very simple. So it there isn't a obvious way in which to gauge that metric. You just kind of feel it as you go along with with that scalability well.
So yes, are you sort of saying it you have to operate with rules of thumb, you know that when a when a corporation gets beyond a certain number of employees, you should start considering selling off some business units or. Yeah. I mean, like, for example, yeah. So for example, we both will agree that a centralized political entity like the government is a bad idea. It's better off if it's more decentralized.
But then, for example, a community like let's say a little town can still be fairly successful if it's centralized. Yeah, yeah, small, small units can Yeah, they need you Look, centralization is not a university bad thing at all levels of scale. That was the point of my analysis. Communism at home. The the, the, the scale is important.
And the, the really important thing though, is, you know, you, you want, you don't want to have this kind of cookie cutter imposed, clean, spreadsheet based sort of determination of the units of scale, you know, dividing of the, the, the world into nations and then into provinces and then into municipalities. That's the kind of way in which
a centralized thinker operates. There's nothing wrong with having fluid organizational units where the the scale of the unit is spontaneously arrived at and where in different places different scales are attempted and it could be reflecting different underlying realities. So if your if your community is rather homogeneous, then yeah, you can probably have quite a large scale organization making local decisions.
But if it's very heterogeneous and their pockets of people with different mindsets and different wealth and income and different problems and their lives different size families, all sorts of parameters might differ, then something smaller might be better because you allow differentiation and attends attention gets directed at solving different sets of problems. Which actually feeds into what you said earlier about complexity.
It gives it gives us an idea as to why, for example, the US is culturally collapsing and why China, for example, isn't. Yeah, yeah. It's very hard to gauge what's going on in China. I mean, there's a very homogeneous country, Han Chinese constitute, you know, most of the people in, in, in any kind of political office and so on. So there are more, they speak one language for the most part.
I mean, I, I know that it's a huge country and there are other cultures in, in embedded, but, but for the most part you've got this, this very homogeneous story. Whereas yes, America is is is significantly more diverse if you've spent any time, Japan's very homogeneous as well. They are they they actually do it with tight control of immigration policy. I don't think the Chinese have to prevent a lot of people from trying to move there.
But the Japanese have for many years run very tight culture, culture confining policies. Korea, another one. And America has had this fluidity and, and profound regional differences. The culture in Texas is very different from the culture in New Hampshire. And well, that's a bad example from Maine or something like that. The culture in California is very different from the culture in Florida, you know, and, and that's, that's been a pronounced feature of America.
Yeah. And, and, and actually, you know, the, the, the centralisation in America, the erosion of states rights and independence has been a very long story and A and a very tragic story. In my opinion, America would be in a much better position if federal government had never been allowed to swell. If that confined confined it to like 1% of GDP or something very low, America would be a wonderful and poor place. Nick, I know your time's tight, so let's come in for a landing.
Give me a nugget of wisdom. But they've been 20 there, haven't they been, have more children? There you go. I've just had three months old at home and it's, it's, it's a wonderful experience at the age of 51 to be having a kid in the home again. I'm totally enjoying it. I'm also enjoying it, so our little boys must play soon together. Yes, they must. Yeah. OK, quickly. How can I follow you, Nick? I'm, I'm not as active as I used to be.
I'm, I'm sort of doing an interview a week on some, or every couple of weeks on a platform somewhere. And I, I have lightweight communication on Twitter. My handle is Nick Hudson CT. And and that's about it for now because my concentration is on doing the deep thinking and trying to understand things a bit better before I shoot my mouth off and also on learning what I can from my very interesting business. Nick Hudson, thank you for joining me in the trenches. Cheers.