Hearts of Oak Podcast

Prof Norman Fenton - How Statistics Are Used to Manipulate and Trick Us

Prof Norman Fenton has been analysing the COVID data throughout the scamdemic. His background as a mathematician and his insights into data, statistics and risk have made him a go to person for many high profile commentators. We start the interview by looking at some short videos Prof Fenton used in his classes to show how easily fooled we can be. We ask how and why officials manipulated COVID data to exaggerate the crisis. Decision makers used data to fit their predetermined narrative. And we look at whether the government and MP’s have taken Prof Fenton's challenge to ask the ONS specific points on their data. He has laid out the questions that MP’s need to ask them, he is still waiting for a response.
Prof Norman Fenton is Professor Emeritus of Risk at Queen Mary University of London (retired as Full Professor Dec 2022) and a Director of Agena, a company that specialises in artificial intelligence and Bayesian probabilistic reasoning. He is a mathematician by training with current focus on quantifying risk and uncertainty using causal, probabilistic models that combine data and knowledge (Bayesian networks). Prof Fenton has published 7 books and over 400 peer reviewed articles. His works covers multiple domains including especially law and forensics (He has been an expert witness in major criminal and civil cases), and health. Since 2020 Prof Fenton has been active in analysing data related to Covid risk.
Interview recorded 12.1.24
Connect with Prof Fenton...X                         https://x.com/profnfenton?s=20WEBSITE           https://www.normanfenton.com/ SUBSTACK        https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/
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The Week According To . . . Godfrey Bloom

Welcome to our weekend edition of free speech and straight talking as Godfrey Bloom is back with us for some news driven chat and discussion, giving his unbridled opinions on some of the top stories bouncing around this week on the web, in the tabloids and on his social media.Topics under the spotlight...- Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has approved bitcoin ETFs. - Why it seems like everyone is sick right now? — and Covid isn’t to blame.- Thousands of Polish patriots take to the streets of Warsaw to protest the illegal jailing of conservative MPs by globalist puppet Tusk.- Not my King? Royal Family faces breaking point as support drops below 50% for the first time.- How disgraced ex-Post Office chief nearly became the Bishop of London after being 'supported' by the woke wet-wipe, Archbishop Canterbury Justin Welby.- Huge blow to EV car revolution as sales to Brits plummet – with electric cars just a quarter of new purchases.- Bus go BANG! Electric double decker bus in London bursts into flames after huge 'bang' heard.- WHITEWASH: Covid inquiry postpones vaccine investigation.- Almost 4,000 migrants caught pretending to be kids to sneak into Britain — with some in their thirties.
Godfrey Bloom is a libertarian author with six books published on both military history & Austrian School Economics.He worked in the City of London where he won an international prize for fund management (fixed interest) with Mercury Asset Management. Bloom finished his city career as General Manager of a life assurance company.He represented Yorkshire & Lincolnshire in the European Parliament & was a staunch campaigner for Brexit for twenty five years.During his term of office he attracted over sixty million views on his chamber speeches exposing State bank & tax malpractice on Facebook & You Tube. Thought to be an all time record. He brought experience if not influence to the mainly lay EU Parliamentary Monetary & Economic Affairs Committee, putting both members & European Central Bank President under unaccustomed pressure.Godfrey Bloom passed out of Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1976 & served as logistics liaison officer to 4th Armed Division in Germany. He is an Associate Member of the Royal College of Defence Studies & has presented papers & lectures to The RCDS, Joint Services Staff College, National Defence University Washington & too many universities to list. His speciality is procurement & geo political military strategy.Godfrey Bloom is holder of the Territorial Decoration & bar, Sovereign’s Medal, Armed Forces Parliamentary Medal & European Parliamentary silver medal.
Connect with Godfrey...WEBSITE:              https://godfreybloom.uk/X:                           https://x.com/goddersbloom?s=20SUBSTACK:          https://godfreybloom.substack.com/
Interview recorded 12.1.24
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Episode links...bitcoin https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/11/bitcoin-etf-approved-sec-explained-meaning-securities-regulator-tweeteveryone is sick https://metro.co.uk/2024/01/07/seems-like-just-everyone-a-cold-right-now-20077354/Polish patriotshttps://x.com/JackPosobiec/status/1745461397037998519?s=20https://x.com/EvaVlaar/status/1745425877461037509?s=20Royal Family https://www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1853699/royal-family-support-drops-poll-king-charlesPost Office chief https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12944243/How-disgraced-ex-Post-Office-chief-Paula-Vennells-nearly-Bishop-London-supported-application-Archbishop-Canterbury-Justin-Welby.htmlEV car https://www.thesun.co.uk/motors/25269522/electric-car-sales-decrease/bus banghttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12950765/London-electric-double-decker-bus-fire-Wimbledon.htmlCovid inquiry https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67935037migrants https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/25273358/migrants-pretending-kids-britain/#:~:text=NEARLY%204%2C000%20asylum%20seekers%20have,turned%20out%20to%20be%20adults.&text=That%20includes%20887%20rumbled%20from%20January%20to%20September%20last%20year

Jann-Harro Petersen - German Farmer Gives Update on Protests Sweeping Germany

Jann-Harro Petersen has been a farmer for nearly 20 years and runs a dairy farm with over 200 cows and sheep. He joins us today to discuss the German Farmer Protests against the government. We have seen a repeat of what happened in the Netherlands with governments trying to shut down farms and the public waking up in vast numbers and not accepting this net zero nonsense. Towns across Germany have been brought to a standstill as farmers from across the country have travelled to the cities en masse to demand the government back down. This is the 21st century story of David and Goliath, of real hard working Germans saying no to their globalist bureaucrats.
Interview recorded 10.1.24
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*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20 

The Week According To . . . David Atherton

Dave Atherton is with us to discuss our way through the big stories this week in the news and we have a look at what he has been posting on his awesome X account.It's not for snow-flakes, expect free thinking, free speech, freedom of expression and plenty of opinion as Dave let's us know what he really thinks about the topics this episode including.....- Ex professional footballer Joey Barton currently bossing Twitter/X, the bedwetters are well soiled! - Religion of Bestiality? Islamic teaching from Ayatollah Khomeini... It's a funny old religion! - The barbaric regime of Iran has resumed the public flogging of women for failing to wear a hijab.- "Fundamentally, British people need to be housed first." Professor of political science speaks sense.- BREAKING NEWS: Lee Hurst is bloody hilarious!- Do you want to know how Muslims have infiltrated the Metropolitan Police?- Gay Story: Plagiarism charges downs Harvard’s president. - Reports at refugee hotel of the alleged rape of a 12-year-old girl and sexual assaults made by 17 different hotel staff members.- BULLSHIT ALERT: Home Secretary says UK asylum backlog cleared as almost 100,000 wait for decision.
Follow Dave on X  https://x.com/DaveAtherton20?s=20
It's Alright to be Dwight: Ep #007 https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/e/dwight-schultz-its-alright-to-be-dwight-007/
Originally broadcast live 6.1.24
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*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20 

Dwight Schultz - Its Alright to be Dwight: #007

Welcome to 'Its Alright to be Dwight'A podcast with the television, film and voice actor Dwight Schultz, exclusive to Hearts of Oak.This episode Dwight lets rip on Biden's campaign donations, Barack and his radical associates, the consequences of socialist ideologies, education and revolution, child trafficking and the Southern Border, Grand Jihad and the Islamist threat, shifting priorities and the takedown of Trump, election manipulation and spiders luring their prey.
Dwight refers to THE GRAND JIHAD by Andrew C. McCarthy which can be found here https://amzn.eu/d/fUI6vRB
A respected performer on Broadway, Dwight Schultz found everlasting fame by playing the certifiable "Howling Mad" Murdock on the action series "The A-Team" (1983-86).A living, breathing cartoon with a seemingly endless selection of voices and accents at his command, Murdock provided the air power for the A-Team's clandestine adventures, provided that his compatriots could break him out of the mental hospital where he resided.One of the show's most popular and memorable figures, Murdock ensured Schultz steady work on television and on the big screen playing Reginald Barclay in "Star Trek: The Next Generation"An accomplished voice actor, Dwight can be heard in numerous hit computer games and in countless animated shows. To sign up for our weekly email, find our social media, podcasts, video, livestreaming platforms and more... https://heartsofoak.org/
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Brian of London - Israel/Palestine: Who’s Indigenous?

Shownotes and Transcript
The question 'who is indigenous' comes up a lot while discussing demographics and immigration.  And no country has this been asked more than Israel. Brian of London joins us to discuss a Twitter/X post and article titled "Israel Palestine: Who's Indigenous?". For some reason this question is contentious. Brian breaks it down (according to anthropologist Jose R Martin-Cobo) under a series of headings of Land, Culture, Common Ancestry, Language, Religion and Blood. Basically we are looking at a historic continuity. Brian uses these headings to look at whether it is the Jews or the Palestinians that fit this indigenous definition 
Brian of London completed a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics just as the Web was emerging.But then he left academia to do management consulting and eventually moved to Israel to do business.Brian's working on the cutting edge of the new Podcasting 2.0 to make sure this relic of the early web, stays free from capture by the centralising forces of Web 2.0 and their dangerous desire to turn us all into dairy cows.Brian was also the admin on Tommy Robinson's Facebook account that had over a million followers before it was nuked!In his spare time, he assists with a gigantic class action lawsuit in Australia on behalf of the entire crypto industry.
Interview recorded 2.1.24
Connect with Brian...X                        https://x.com/brianoflondon?s=20Connect with Hearts of Oak...WEBSITE            https://heartsofoak.org/PODCASTS        https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/SOCIAL MEDIA  https://heartsofoak.org/connect/
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*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and on X https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20 
Transcript
(Hearts of Oak)
And it's wonderful to have Brian of London join us once again.Brian, thanks so much for your time today.
(Brian of London)
Well, thank you very much for having me on. 
Not at all.There's lots to discuss in your neck of the woods, as they would say in the Brits, in your part of the world.And obviously we have had, we have a Tera Dahl who was just back from Israel.She'd been there three, four weeks for Real America's Voice reporting.We had Bridget Gabriel on actually discussing.But I think we want to go on a slightly different tact, and it was one of your tweets looking at, and I think part of it was from another article, Israel-Palestine, who's indigenous?and I've always had a very firm understanding because of biblical history and where I come at this from a Christian but even there's confusion amongst parts of the Christian world and community but that may mess this conversation up even more.But let's, Israel-Palestine, who's indigenous?Maybe tell us why this was of interest to you, and then we can go with some of the categories and how you define this term indigenous.Yeah, and I just realized I've got my window open. So if you're hearing background noise, tell me, otherwise I'll leave it open. I'm in my bomb shelter, which everyone should know.And fortunately, we actually haven't been in it for about 10 days now and the last major barrage of rockets was just to the south of us on midnight on new year's eve obviously they did the fireworks for us and that. 
We we had our Muslim mayor, Sadiq Kahn do the fireworks for us as well in London but it was different firework. 
Different and the thing with that was actually it was, they fired them. They always fire them at exactly on the hour.In fact, there's a joke that the guy controlling the missiles, his name is Abu Dekar.Dekar means on the minute.So we say, oh, Abu Dekar is firing again.Because they fire at exactly 12, so then the alarm goes at sort of 12.01, and the missiles arrive at sort of 12.01 or 12.02.Anyway, I didn't hear an alarm because it was south of me.I just heard the booms when we intercepted. But yeah, I'm in my bomb shelter. But what I sent you, I sent you an article which actually was published in 2014 by a friend of mine.And I helped get this published because Israeli Cool, the blog that it's on, the guy who runs that and me both found this guy who is a Métis Canadian indigenous person.Or they call them First Nations in Canada.That's the politically correct term. He doesn't mind being called an Indian.He's quite happy with that or whatever terminology, but he's Métis, which is a tribe that its original area was sort of somewhere in Canada.But he put out this article in a very obscure kind of place, and I just grabbed it and I said to him, can you just say all of this stuff again for the Israeli audience? And that's what we did.And because he has studied properly the way the UN came to regard what an indigenous person was.Because indigenous means something completely different from people than it does for plants and animals. Plants and animals are indigenous when they've been in the same place for thousands or millions of years.But people is a totally different beast. We have moved around the world ever since we were people.Vast migrations out of Africa.The term indigenous just doesn't mean anything.It doesn't mean the same thing for a person as it does for a plant.The kind of way that this is seen in the academic literature, and remember, this is infused with leftism, so we're picking and choosing here a little bit.And this guy, Jose Martinez Cobo, he came up with this definition. And this has stuck.And this really is the way the entire field looks at indigenous.And I'll just read or direct from the summary of his work what these rules are.Self-identification as indigenous peoples at the individual level and acceptance as a member by the community. Okay, so you have to actually feel that you're indigenous, okay?Historical continuity with pre-colonial and or pre-settler societies, okay?I'll read them off and then we'll sort of go through them and what they mean for Jews and Israel and what they mean for Palestinians, for example, and then we can sort of look at this in relation to Brits and Irish people and, you know, English, Welsh, Scottish, and, strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, distinct social, economic, or political systems, distinct language, culture, and knowledge.I'm going to skip one, and then I'm going to say resolve to maintain and reproduce ancestral environments and systems as distinctive peoples and communities.Okay, this is anthropology language. But the basics are, and my friend summarizes them like this, land, language, culture, spirituality, and the last one is blood.And we'll get back to that because that's actually that's the one that's just the least important actually for Jews, especially for Jews. So Jews self-identify this is obvious it's like, we've been three and a half thousand years or so I mean the the numbers claim there's a book to my right, if you go full screen there's a book the atlas of Jewish history just behind me. And in that, this one here, the Atlas of Judaism, okay, we can go back to.If you go back to that, if you start looking for dates, Abraham kind of is dated at about 4,000 years ago, to 2,000 BC.He walked from Mesopotamia all the way down across the Middle East, Iran, Iraq.It's mixed up because none of those are real.Well, Iran and Persia became real soon, you know, later.Basically, none of it is what is there today.And he walked across that. And then he walked down through Israel.And he walked on a road that we have in Israel today called Highway 40.It's the road that runs down the backbone of what we call Judea-Samaria, what the Jordanians renamed the West Bank, that road follows the path that Abraham took and is described in the bible as the path that Abraham took and when you when you drive quickly down that road today you see the road signs in the order in which they appear in the bible. It's as real as that and that is 30 or 40 kilometres that way I'm pointing off to the east, the sea is that way that's my west, this stuff is real.Now, whether you believe the story of Abraham was real or not to the Jewish people, it is foundational.It is our ethnogenesis. It's the start of what led to being Jewish, but that's really.
But I just want, actually, when you say it, it depends what you believe is real or or not, the level of documentation to actually prove that actually the Old Testament story and New Testament story is more documented than nearly any other historical event.And yet the world believes parts of history, but you've got this mountain of evidence and they say, oh no, that's just fables.So when you say, if you want to believe it or not, actually, it's there staring you in the face that there is no more evidence for the biblical events than there is for anything else in the world.Correct. And it's even more than the biblical events.It's that the book that was woven around it, the Hebrew Bible, it was something that Jews preserved through an enormous act of preservation that I don't think has a parallel in the world. Okay.The Torah, as we call it, the way it is passed down is we write it out by hand.And the people who write the Torah, they write it without making a mistake.And if they make a mistake, they throw it away and start again.And there's no tippex and there's no scratching it out and there's no backspace key.This is and this document is so unbelievably well preserved that when you dig up the dead sea scrolls that were that were, you know in the caves of Qumran for three thousand years or two and a half thousand years when you dig those up, actually I don't know they might be a bit more modern than that but when you dig them up I can go and look at them and my Hebrew is not great but I can read the words.Biblical Hebrew is different from modern Hebrew, but I recognize the words.And if I open a modern Torah, they are the same.The transcription errors down the Torah is… We have this record.Abraham ends up in Hebron. He buys a cave to bury his wife in.That purchase of the cave in Hebron again.It doesn't matter whether you believe it happened exactly.That purchase forms the basis of our property rights in the modern world.That purchase of a cave is the oldest recorded land transaction that follows the modern form of transactions, offer, consideration, acceptance.Our whole edifice of modern contract law is built around that cave purchase.And that's part of Judaism.Judaism, then, of course, and I'm no biblical scholar, but Joseph goes to Egypt, the children of Israel become numerous, they leave Egypt in a hurry, which is also a story of the emancipation of slavery.Again, Jews led the way in that.What's interesting about our civilization today is not that we had slavery.It's not that the Americans had slavery. It's that it was abolished, and Jews abolished slavery within their own systems a millennia before.What's interesting about the West is not having had slavery.What's interesting is having got rid of slavery.I'll put forward that that's a Jewish.You get that because eventually, and it took the South Africans a lot longer than anyone else to realize this, but when you read the Bible and you read all men are created in the image of God, you just have to get rid of slavery. It doesn't work.Again, a Jewish thing.All of these stories, and then the Jews come back to Israel, and yes, there's wars and stuff, and there's Canaanites and Philistines and battles and Jericho, and the walls come tumbling down.All of these phrases I can just throw at you.The majority of a reasonably educated Western populace, they just understand those cultural references in a way.I don't need to explain Jericho.You know, I don't need to explain a lot of this stuff.David and Goliath, that's David the Jew versus Philistine Goliath.It happened actually near Gaza.Well, in the hills, sort of inland from there. But Samson, Samson and Delilah, that story is in Gaza.All of these foundational stories for Jews, which Christianity also adopts, the whole of the Hebrew Bible is basically part of the Christian canon.That happens here. Those are place names.Into the New Testament, Armageddon is Megiddo. It's 80 kilometres that way. I can drive there.Yes, I think I can still drive there. It's not closed.We have such ties. We have our ancestors buried.The reason why Hebron is special today and why Jews want to live there is because there's a massive building that Solomon built.It's the same era as the famous Western Wall, the Temple Mount.That building is built on top of this cave that Abraham bought.That's why it's there. That's where we buried our matriarchs and our patriarchs.This is a, and you know when when Martinez talks about historical continuity and strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources, the strongest link you can have is ancestral burial sites, you know everybody sort of knows the kind of, from America, the you know, how, oh this is this is ancient burial lands, well Hebron is the burial site of Abraham's family, basically.Nablus, who is the modern name. The old biblical name is Shem.That's actually closest to me. That's literally inland from me now.That's the burial site of Joseph. There's a building there called Joseph's Tomb.Now, the Muslims sort of revere it because they stole our prophets and stuff.But they only revere it because we do. The site of the temple in Jerusalem is the site on which Abraham was supposed to sacrifice Isaac, where the whole story of the ram and the burning bush, the.. sorry, the ram caught in the bush, not the burning bush, that's Moses. That story happens on what is now today the temple mount.That was the position of the high holies.That's why we built the temple there, twice. That's why the Romans destroyed it.That's why the Muslims came along when they conquered it and built a mosque and a mausoleum on that spot, because it matters.Those are elements of colonization.These other components like distinct language, culture, and knowledge.Now, yes, we revived Hebrew as a modern language.That was controversial because some very religious Jews would say that Hebrew is the language of prayer.It's the language of the Torah. are we shouldn't use it for day-to-day stuff when we're going to be obscene and tell jokes and in fact what tends to happen is we use Arabic for the worst stuff but um, that was controversial but it was also hugely important that there is continuity that any Jewish child living in Israel, any Israeli child, can pick up an ancient scroll that was buried in the desert, and all the letters look familiar. That's amazing.Nobody reads hieroglyphics. The Roman Catholic Church teaches their clergy to read Latin, but it's not a day-to-day language anywhere.Hebrew is a day-to-day language, and it has biblical continuity back 3,000 plus years.Now, when I read through this list, which we'll post later, I missed one.I said I was going to miss one.In the UN, they've got this one line, status as a non-dominant social group.I can't help, and I've discussed this with Ryan. Ryan Bellerose is the Métis Canadian.That's almost like they had to put that in to try and find some way to make Jews not indigenous in Israel.Because we are, Jews are now the dominant social group in one place in the world, Israel. It's like we we won, we're the only ones actually, we're really the only indigenous people that lost our land and got it back and that is essentially, Zionism is that, it is the return of Jews to Zion, you know, by the rivers of Babylon, where, you know, that psalm, that's, what, 600 years BCE?That's Zionism. We've been trying to get back to Zion, Jerusalem, Israel, for thousands of years, ever since we were cast out by the Romans.I think the last time Jews really ran the place was up until when we revolted too much and the Romans kicked us out on 135 or 132 or whatever it was, and changed the name.And again, this is colonizer versus indigenous.What do colonizers do? They bring a new language, they try to crush whatever markers there are of indigenousness.And then they destroy, they build their new stuff on top of old stuff.They try and erase indigenous identities.And that's what's actually happened all over the world.You know, Native Americans cling on in America. Across Europe there are sort of lots of indigenous identities that were crushed by the Romans that never reappeared.I would say that the EU itself was trying to do this, it's it's trying to sort of flatten Europe and you all become Europeans in a horrible Marxist sense and I think that's one of the reasons why Israel is so hated by this globalist elite type thing, is that we are just this total exception. We are the indigenous people that came back, made it work, and made it work.And it doesn't mean, and let's just sort of circle back to the blood, and then I'll let you get a word in edge ways.Blood. This is the bit that gets thrown at us all the time on the internet.Okay? Every time I post indigenous, oh, you're from Europe. Well, actually, I was born in South Africa, so I'm African.You know, bite on that, you chumps.I'm second generation. My parents were born in Africa. I'm second generation African.So I don't know where you think I should go back to.I grew up in London. Yeah, that's true. My accent is London, but I never felt English actually.I've got my British citizenship, but am I English I don't think so. I'm Jewish, Jews belong here, so blood is uniquely unimportant to Jews for one good reason and the reason is Ruth, the story of Ruth in the bible is the story that actually to this day means that Jews accept converts.As soon as you accept conversion, it means blood doesn't matter.Now, we do not have an easy conversion process, okay?And in fact, you know, whenever I've, and I know some of my best friends here are converts, and they're more orthodox than me, more, you know, they observe of Sabbath, Shabbat, more than I do. And in many ways. But there's no hint or there's no feeling for me personally, or you don't find it anywhere in Israel, that if somebody has gone through the process of an Orthodox-recognized conversion, nobody here looks down upon them.In fact, many of us realize that's a lot harder than just being born.So blood. I don't know where his blood is from. In fact, I think the two converts I know the best, Australians and both, I think, from Catholic families, doesn't matter.So I don't care about blood. Now, it turns out I actually am Kohanim, and you can check, but there's DNA markers.But that's not what makes me Jewish.What makes me Jewish is self-identification, keeping the rituals, doing Shabbat dinners. And it doesn't even matter the level of observance.It's some level of observance and some recognition that it means something to be Jewish.So when they throw at you this Khazar crap and go back to Europe, and I mean, even that is ala panim, on its face.That doesn't mean the same thing. On its face, it's just ridiculous, because more than half the Jews in Israel are of Middle Eastern backgrounds.Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Syria.All of these places is where Jews came from. Right now, and Ethiopia, of course, we've airlifted them.All of these things mean that we're just a mongrel mix these days.And our kids are all meeting and intermarrying between different...There really isn't a level of racism that I can certainly recognize in America.So blood, what does blood mean? It doesn't... It's important. It's one of the markers.But it is not who makes you a Jew.Well, I think, yeah, there are a lot of points to pick up. For me, actually, it's the history.Abraham 4,000 years ago, David 3,000, establishing Jerusalem as the capital.So you've got 2,000 years of history on the land, in effect, before the Romans took over.The renaming of that land as Palestine to remove Israel off the face of the earth, just like Iran want to do.. 
That's deliberate..
Just exactly.
Syria, Palestina and yeah of course the word came from the Greek from palash invaders from the sea, you can, it's like you can get you can get locked in all that crappy silly detail, it doesn't matter and it doesn't matter if it's Israel or the kingdom of David, it was or Judah or Samaria. Today it's Israel because when you form a modern nation, within the framework of modern nations that arose in the 1850s onwards.I can't remember the philosophical name for this, but Israel slots in within modern nationhood as the land of the Jews.Should there be a Kurdish nation? Yeah, sure.I just want to tell you something else about this. indigenous status is not zero sum, because there are indigenous people does not mean that nobody else is indigenous.Now, and I'm not coming to the Palestinians by any means next.We have Aramaic Christians living in the Galilee region.They are following a kind of Christianity that emerged very soon after Jesus died.And they are speaking Aramaic, or they're doing their liturgy in Aramaic.I've met one. There's a famous picture of Tommy Robinson standing next to a bearded guy with a big hat wearing his Mossad t-shirt.That's Father Nadav, and we went to meet him in Nazareth.That's in Nazareth. He lives there.There's a community of Aramaic Christians. The only place you can be an Aramaic Christian safely in the whole Middle East is Israel.And then we've got Druze. Druze is a kind of, it's wrong to call them completely Muslim.They're something else entirely.And their geographic region encompasses Syria and Lebanon and Israel.But where are they best off?Most of them, realize, in Israel.We've got some Baha'is who came from Iran, settled here.They're up in Haifa. We have Samaritans, actually. That's very close to me.This town of Nablus, okay?What's the Palestinian town of Nablus? Well, it comes from Neopolis, the Roman for new city.So even their name in Arabic of Nablus, it's a corruption of a Roman word. It's not Arabic.And you know this because Neopolis, anything with a P is not Arabic. So the P gets converted to a B. It's just like the Palestinians, when they say it, they call it a phalestini, because they can't say P, so they change it to E.So Nablus, which is the place of Shem, again, Romans, they knew Shem is in the Bible many times, but they have to rename the place Neopolis to assert Roman dominance, and that's what you do.The Samaritans live on a place called Mount Gruzine, which overlooks that. They're there.We've got Bedouin Arabs who have lived here for a long time, but Bedouins have moved across the whole Middle East for centuries.To call them indigenous, they have parts of their culture here, but it's not unique to Israel. That's the point, the Bedouin culture is across the whole of the Arab peninsula all the way out.So did any part of their culture arise in Israel? Not really.But they have something called rights of longstanding presence, for sure.And they serve in our armed forces, and we have all sorts of internal political disputes over where they live and how they live and what their place.But again, that's stuff we can deal with.It's not sort of virulent hatred all the time.But this point of, is Islam indigenous to Israel?No, nothing of it.The only bit that they talk about is the farthest, there's a passage in the Quran that talks about the farthest mosque, and that has been reinterpreted.And there's a very famous clip from Al Jazeera from years and years ago.Professor Mordechai Kadar, he went on Al Jazeera in Arabic and he asked the host, how many times is Jerusalem named in the Quran?And the Quran was written 700, 800 years after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.Everybody in the whole world, the known, educated world, knew the name Jerusalem.But yet it does not appear once in the Quran.Not once. There's an oblique reference to a night journey by Muhammad to the furthest mosque.And he tied his horse up outside and ascended to heaven.That is the entire basis for Islamic claim to Israel and Jerusalem.Other than the fact that they assume everything. They're a replacement theology.So they brought in all of Christianity.They brought in all of Judaism. They then tell us we forged it to take out Muhammad.And they write their book, the Quran, which they then say, we're the corruptors of.Jews are worse than Christians because we went astray.Jews are the ones who went astray. Christians are the ones who were just led astray.You followed us instead of the Muslims so we're both cursed but Jews are cursed a bit more.But that's that's not the claim, that's the claim, that's what we're fighting over.
And of course well yeah and of course you'd, you've got the period of the Romans and then the period of Arabs or Muslims from what 600...
And crusaders, Sala in the Kurd, This history just goes, but all of it, the constant theme throughout is, one, there were Jews always here. Jews never left.
There were Jews in Sfat. They came back in 1200 and 600.The only people who ever regarded this land as the place of genesis of their entire civilization is Jews. 
Yeah. And then you go through, you're right, all those histories with the Ottoman Empire, whatever morphing of Arabness or Muslimness there was on there.And then you're right that Muslims tie Jerusalem to a story about a flying donkey, but we'll not even go into that.We'll not have to base what you believe in that. But the issue, I guess, you have now is that the clash between Romans and the Jews living there was a land grab and dominance.It's something much deeper in terms of Islam, and I 100% believe that Islam was started.One of the main reasons is to eradicate who Jesus is. You can't say Jesus, son of God.You cannot, that he was simply a man. And at its heart, and that means at its heart is also hatred of the Jews and the Jewish people, because without Judaism, you do not have Christianity.It's impossible. But that hatred we have seen over the whole time, and 1948, it is an absolute miracle to see what happens.I think maybe the hatred is from, one, the hatred that Islam has against Judaism.That's one. But also there's a second hatred that I think the miracle of modern-day Israel, that many people cannot accept that, and they look for something darker.You know, Israel being the centre of everything, being in control.And they come up with this idea to remove any understanding that actually you can't explain.1948, when you read about what happened, I've read it in 67, 73, and all of those, it is a miracle. It could not happen, should not happen.And yet Israel stands there as a proud country, hugely successful in the midst of basket cases of countries.But yeah, talk to us about that level of vitriol against Israel and against the Jewish people that exists not only in the Middle East, but actually exists in the media and across the world, really.Well, I, you know, every Jew does, you know, I guess my kids are starting to do it now.You start, you know, when you're brought up Jewish, eventually at some point you understand that this thing called the Holocaust happened. And what it does to a lot of us is you go through a phase where you try and, why? What's with the hatred?Why the hatred? And Islamic Jew hatred, I can see that in the Quran.I can see the hundred and whatever verses it is that mention Jews.And whereas we start off a little bit favourable in the early stuff, once Jews reject Muhammad and say no you're not a prophet we're done with our era of prophets, that was a thousand years ago, you're not one of them, once that happened he really then just goes on a the rest of his life is like, how can I f these Jews? And you know he kills a lot of Jews in Khaybar he takes their wives, their daughters, their and then also in Khaybar this other story, this very pivotal battle, after the battle when he kills all the men and he's got the women and one of the stories that's not well, it pretty authoritative, but again this doesn't matter whether it happened or not, it matters whether Muslims believe it, is that he was poisoned by this Jewish woman that he'd taken prisoner before he rapes her and that he died five years later from the poison he was was given then.Now, again, you get all sorts of scholars saying this is unlikely and it probably didn't happen. It doesn't matter.Do Muslims teach their children that a Jew killed Muhammad?Yes, they do. In large numbers, very large numbers.And so Jews rejected the prophet Muhammad.We don't call him a prophet. He isn't a prophet. He's their prophet.He's not our prophet. We rejected that.He fought lots of battles against us. He killed a lot of Jews, and eventually he was poisoned by a Jewess.These are not good things to teach your kids for coexistence.That's what they do. That kind of antisemitism, I understand that.That's ancient and it really hasn't changed.It can be dialled up or dialled down depending on the authoritarian rulers.UAE today might be dialling it down a lot. Great. In two or three generations, I'll feel a lot happier.Now, Nazi anti-Semitism, European anti-Semitism, again, Christianity had its creation stuff, and Christianity for a long time said that Jews killed Jesus.Despite Jesus being one of us, we, you know, and it took until, when did the Catholic Church change that?I mean, it was like in 1960 something or other, was the papal, you know, it's like, okay, thanks.It was the Romans. We can all agree on the Romans, but yes, Jews are stood accused of killing Jesus. That was one thing.Jews are successful. I don't know what it is. I personally have come to believe that Intel, the guy who founded Intel, Andy Grove, his autobiography was called Only the Paranoid Survive.I think Jews have been bred to be paranoid. There's other reasons which are genetically passed down.Whereas the Catholic Church, for a lot, makes its priests celibate, they become the most highly educated members of society, but yet they don't procreate.Jews did the opposite. You become a rabbi, the town supports the rabbi, and the smartest people who become rabbis then have 18 children.Perhaps that's the reason why we've got higher IQ. I don't know.We certainly value, as a culture, we value learning. We value books.We value, the fact that we've got troops in Gaza.What do they do at the weekends? Some of them, they drive armoured personnel carriers into Gaza with a gigantic Torah scroll so that they can stand in some house with bullet holes all around and do the Shabbat service with a real giant Torah scroll.First, they take in little ones, but once the roots are secure, what are we doing? Are we taking a book? This is the most ridiculous.And then what we do is, we do Talmudic rituals, as the Nazis and the anti-Semites would say.We're not doing it. It's not because, we're not out looking for the blood to drink and make my matzah.That's just utter crap.We're doing it because we value these traditions. We passed them down, and the continuity of Jews as a people has depended on us revering those words.That's why copying the Torah accurately for 3,000 years by hand, that's an astonishing cultural achievement that no culture on earth has managed.You know, Aborigines in Australia might have told stories orally, and that's a great sort of pass down.But we wrote it in a book, and the story of Abraham buying the cave becomes the root of Western civilization.So, you know, you can argue Judeo-Christian civilization for sure.And, you know, some people will say that democracy comes from the Greeks or whatever. Much more of our morality comes from the Jewish Hebrew Bible, the Ten Commandments, than any other foundational thing.And again, the Americans, I'll criticize the Americans and I'll criticize the West in a very specific way.Rights versus responsibility.Okay? If you read the Ten Commandments, what you are reading is not a charter of rights.You do not have the right to life. You do not have the right to property.You do not have the right to your wife. You read a responsibility.You read about honouring your parents. You read about not murdering people.You read about not coveting the other guy's ox or wife.Those are responsibilities. You follow those responsibilities within your tribe.Your rights are implied.And I think America and the whole Western notion of human rights and stuff, it puts the cart before the horse.What are your responsibilities? Your responsibility is not to lob rockets at civilian areas on midnight of new year's eve, your responsibility is not to break out through a fence and go murder and rape people in the most horrible way, if you follow the responsibility of not being complete and utter bleeps then you can have a right to life, we are going to remove we, you do not have a right to life when you commit those acts against us. That's what we're seeing now.We're not Christians, and the whole turn the other cheek thing, it's not in our book, and quite rightly.There's too much of that, and the modern Western Christianity has gone too far.Yeah. Yes. That's an interesting. Here, I'll not go down that route, but actually, I want to finish off with, I'm sure you've had, well, you face, I'm sure, a lot of abuse.And if you are a Zionist Shill, maybe you can share some of that, Brian, because I'll happily be a Zionist, but never get paid for it, which is a bummer. 
None of us get paid for this.It costs me a fortune living here. 
I know it would be much easier if we did get paid, but that's not how life works.But it's interesting what's happened. Maybe the backlash you get whenever you talk about Israel's existence and the history and that clash, and also what we are seeing at the moment.It's interesting, what's the term?Proportionality is the term that's used. And I always wonder, what's proportional to rape or murder of children?Do you really want to go down that? Because that's a very perverse path if you want to go down that.But yeah, tell us about that, the backlash, but also then Israel doing what it has to do to exist.And if other countries want to be peaceful, then that makes life a lot easier for everyone, including the Arab countries around.
Well you know the backlash, first of all, hurty words on the internet doesn't doesn't hurt me, you know I'm very much a bit of a free speech absolutist, I'll block and I'll mute if they're boring. I mean but mostly I like, you know and I'll spar with a few of them you know. I'm just looking to my left, I've got a screen here, sort of one of these things that kicked this off was because someone said, so I get that a lot of Israeli Jews are scared right now. So here's an idea.Why don't we offer them refuge in our own countries? Invite them to Britain, the States, and Canada. It's a win-win.Israelis get to live somewhere they feel safe, and the locals get their land back.Now, after everything I've just said to you, firstly, we've tried living in other people's countries.It doesn't always go so well.You know, German Jews felt great in 1929, and Polish Jews felt great also.This was not a long-term, tenable solution.And so what I replied was, lol, no, we're home. When you dig up London, you find Roman stuff.When we dig up Jerusalem, we dig past that crap to the city of our Jewish King David.Pithy, short, you can't put all the history of the Middle East in a tweet or an x-post or whatever we're supposed to call it. Praise be to Elon.Now, so I get this back. This isn't how the world works. Just because you've owned something thing doesn't mean you always will.Also, the Celtic tribes inhabited London long before the Romans, and Canaanites existed in Palestine long before Israel.Well, as and when some Canaanites show up, and as long as they're not still doing the child sacrifice shit, we will give them a nice little bit of the country, and they can live and practice their whatever Canaanite religion.But the point is, there is no continuity of Canaanites, because probably because Jews genocided them, whatever, I don't care.Canaanite was absorbed into the Jewish tribes. That's what happened.There's nobody doing Canaanite today, so they don't exist.The Palestinians are not Canaanites. They're not Philistines either.They don't know anything about Canaanites or Philistines.But, you know, you get all of this stuff.David, this is a good one, actually.Chrissy, David was a corrupt criminal whose family came from Iraq.That's the Koran version of David.
I was wondering. I missed that.
I know. I know. That one's just brilliant.And it's just very simple. And it's with a little Canadian flag.And Chrissy is the name. Compassion, confidence, something about a sire.170,000 followers.  You kind of and then you know you get from sama Lebanese when you check your DNA it's east European, okay my yes yes my DNA did come a bit, because before South Africa we were somewhere in northeast Europe but again and then you know when I look through all of this telling me that I don't belong where I know I belong.Look, I came to Israel when I was 39 years old.I married my Israeli wife some years before that, tried to learn Hebrew in London.I'm crap at Hebrew, okay? I can barely read.I can sort of read, but more often than not, I'm copy-pasting into... Oh, Apple.Apple does not translate Hebrew by default. It's like not not one of their default languages.It's like, get with this. Anyway, I arrive in Israel as a 39-year-old PhD physicist, basically illiterate, but I feel more at home than I did in London.Explain that. I can't explain that. There's this woman, Eve Barlow, she's here visiting right now.She lands and she immediately feels at home. She lives in LA, She's a writer or she wrote, and writes about music. Why does she feel at home?And so many Jews you talk to, and this is a funny thing, when non-Jews come here and feel at home, they then start looking through their family tree and discover that four generations back, they are Jewish.And they start questioning their self. There's something that I can't explain to you that is is magical about being in Israel. Because it's tough.It is more comfortable to live in America and Britain.It really, it wasn't the easiest place to move to, but it just felt better.100%.I think we'll finish it there. I think it's good to get a short conversation about this in Israel.And of course, you could take it wider into other countries.But that makes it very convoluted.And I think this perfectly fits to this current time. But, Brian, thank you so much.All the links for these will be in the description and our social media posts so people can follow the article and your post on it and have fun at the replies, which is sometimes the best part of Twitter posts.It certainly is. Anyway, yeah, we can do updates about the whole situation another time. But, yeah, thank you. This was really good.This is stuff I like talking about. This is positive. This is the reasons that people need to understand why Israel's not going anywhere.And that's the other. The last thing I'll say is this.You know, for 75 years, the Arabs have fought the correct, well, since 67 in particular, and through the 60s, basically, with the rise of Arafat and the PLO, which was a creation of the Soviet Union, the whole Palestinian identity.That's another point, but I'll just finish with this.They fought the correct battle to remove a colonial occupier from land.They fought the right battle that would have got the British out of India.Or the French out of Algeria, or half a dozen European countries out of bits of Africa.They fought the correct guerrilla warfare tactics, sort of terrorism, murders, all of this stuff.And it spectacularly fails to move Jews out of Jerusalem and Israel, because we are not colonial settlers.We will never be colonial settlers. The mindset, you know, and that's the other thing is, you know, when the Americans come here and tell us that we're not fighting the ground war in Gaza the correct way, and they're going to tell us how well they did in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were fighting thousands of miles from home.Our soldiers can actually stand at the top of a building with binoculars and see their homes.They go home, you know, if they're released at the weekend, they get taken to the border and they're home in 25 minutes.We are not projecting power as an imperial conquering army trying to make Iraqis be Democrats.It's not that. And so that the whole way in which the Palestinians are fought, encouraged by the entire world, encouraged by people shouting free Palestine from the river to the sea.When you do that, you encourage millions of poor Arabs to fight a war that they will never, ever win by the methods that they're fighting.They will never, ever win.They will never commit an act so atrocious that I will wake up in the morning and say, because believe me, October 7th was that act, that I will wake up in the morning and say, you know what?I think I'm going to go live in Berlin. That's not going to happen.You're not going to force me off my land with these acts.They don't work. it's wrong it's just totally the wrong approach, killing us doesn't matter, how many you rape, how many you kill, the only thing that will happen is the scale of our response and the sheer biblical nature of the response will come out, go read the story of Dinah, the men of Shechem, that's the story that's what's going on in Gaza right now, go read that story if you don't know your Bible.One woman was raped in the Bible. Dinah, go read that.Well, maybe those who live in Gaza, the Muslims or the Arabs, if they took this indigenous rights, then maybe they can move the refugee camp to Mecca.I'm sure it would be wonderful and they can enjoy that. 
Here's a little bit about Yemen.Yemen is Arabia, Arabs to Arabia. 

Stephen C Meyer - DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

Shownotes and Transcript
Intelligent Design may not be an idea you are familiar with but it has interested me since I was a child. I find it impossible to accept that the world we live in and the complexity of human beings is all based on luck and chance. There has to be an intelligent designer. Stephen C Meyer is one of the most renowned experts on this very topic and his recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience has made many people question the theory of a universe without God.  At what point did intellectuals decide that scientific knowledge conflicts with traditional theistic beliefs? Is it even statistically possible for such complexity to just appear? What about the question of who is this intelligent designer? Stephen Meyer will help you view the world around you with a brand new perspective.
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in the philosophy of science. A former geophysicist and college professor, he now directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. In 2004, Meyer ignited a firestorm of media and scientific controversy when a biology journal at the Smithsonian Institution published his peer-reviewed scientific article advancing intelligent design. Meyer has been featured on national television and radio programs, including The Joe Rogan Experience, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CBS's Sunday Morning, NBC's Nightly News, ABC's World News, Good Morning America, Nightline, FOX News Live, and the Tavis Smiley show on PBS. He has also been featured in two New York Times front-page stories and has garnered attention in other top-national media. Dr. Meyer is author of the New York Times bestseller Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design and Signature in the Cell, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. He is also a co-author of Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism and Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique.
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Interview recorded 13.12.23
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Transcript
(Hearts of Oak)
Dr. Stephen Meyer. It's wonderful to have you with us. Thank you so much for your time today.
(Stephen C Meyer)
Thanks for inviting me, Peter. 
No, it's great to have you.And people can find you on Twitter @StephenCMayer. It's on the screen there.And also discovery.org, the Discovery Institute.And you obviously received your PhD in philosophy of sciences from England, from University of Cambridge, your a former geophysicist, college professor, and you now are the director of Discovery Institute, author of many books.The latest is Return of the God Hypothesis, Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, and the links for those books will be in the description. But, Dr. Meyer, if I can maybe, I think I remember as a child, church loyalty, being at church and getting a stamp for attending.I remember asking for a book on creationism then, and we may touch on different creationism, intelligent design.I mean, it was 10 or 11. And I remember being fascinated by this whole topic of how God can be seen in the world around us.Maybe I can ask you about your journey. What has been your journey to being one of the, I guess, main proponents on intelligent design?
Well, I've always been interested in questions at the intersection between science and philosophy or science and larger worldview questions or science and religion the questions that are addressed about, you know, how do we get here and what is, is there a particular significance to human life, what is the meaning of life, in the early part of my scientific career I was working as a geophysicist as you mentioned the introduction and in the city where I was working, a conference came to town that was investigating that intersection of science and philosophy, science and belief, and it was addressing three big questions, and they were the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin and nature of human consciousness.And the conference was unique in that it had invited leading scientists and philosophers representing both theism, broadly speaking, belief in God, and scientists and philosophers who rejected theism and who affirmed the more common view among leading scientists at that time, which was materialism or sometimes called naturalism.We have the New Atheist Movement with their scientific atheists and people of more of that persuasion.So it was, let's look at the origin of the universe from the standpoint.What do the data say, what do you theists say about it, what do you non-theist materialists say about it, and it was a fascinating conference and I was particularly taken by the panels on the origin of the universe and the origin of life because surprisingly to me it seemed that the theists had the intellectual initiative that the the evidence in those about the origin of the universe, and then about the complexity of the cell and therefore the challenges it posed to standard chemical evolutionary theories of the origin of life that in both these two areas, both these two subjects, it seemed that there were powerful, theistic friendly arguments being developed, in one case about the, what you might call, a reviving of the ancient cosmological argument because of the evidence that scientists had discovered about the universe having a beginning.And in the other case, what we now call the theory of intelligent design, that there was evidence of design in the cell, in particular, in the digital code that is stored in the DNA molecule, the information and information processing system of the cell.And was it that time? And still to this day is something that undirected theories of chemical evolution have not been able to explain.And instead, what we know from our experience is that information is a mind product, which is a point that some of these scientists made at this panel, that when we see digital code or alphabetic text or computer code, and many people have likened the information and DNA to a computer code, we always find a mind behind that.So this was the first time I was exposed to that way of thinking.I got fascinated with that.A year later, after the conference, I ended up meeting one of the scientists on the Origin of Life panel, a man named Charles Thackston, who had just written a book with two other co-authors called The Mystery of Life's Origin.He was detailing in that book, he and his colleagues were detailing sort of chapter and verse the problems with trying to explain the origin of the first cell from simpler chemicals in some alleged or presupposed prebiotic soup.And the three authors showed that this was implausible in the extreme, given what we know scientifically about how chemistry works versus how cells work.And over the ensuing year, he kind of mentored me and I got fascinated with the subject and ended up getting a fellowship.A Rotary Fellowship to study at Cambridge for a year and then ended up extending on.I did my master's thesis and then my PhD thesis both on origin of life biology within the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge.And while I was there, I started to meet other scientists and scholars who were having doubts about standard Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories of life's origin.And by the early 90s, a number of us had met each other and connected and had some private conferences.And out of that was born a formal program investigating the evidence for intelligent design in biology, in physics, in cosmology, and in 96, we started a program at Discovery Institute.
You were very kind to me to call me the director of the whole institute.I direct a program within the institute called the Center for Science and Culture, which is the institutional home.A network of scientists who are investigating whether or not there is, empirical scientific evidence for a designing mind behind life in the cosmos and and the program just continues to grow, the network especially continues to grow, we've got fantastic scientists from all around the world now who are sympathetic to that position and I would mention too that it's a position that's kind of reviving an ancient view going back to certainly the time of the scientific revolution.In particular, we've discovered back to the scientific revolution in Cambridge where I had been fortunate enough to study.There's a, in the college that I was part of, St. Catherine's, there was back in the 17th century, one of the founders of modern botany, who was also one of the first authors of what's called British National Theology. His name was John Ray.Ray was the tutor of Isaac Barrow, a mathematician who in turn tutored Newton and so this whole tradition of seeing the fingerprints of a creator in the natural world is something that was launched in Britain, particularly in Cambridge there were other figures like Robert Boyle who were in other places but the Cambridge tradition of natural theology was very strong from that time period in the 17th century, late 17th century, right up to figures like James Clerk Maxwell, the great physicist in the late 19th century who was critical, sceptical of Darwinism and articulated the idea of design.And I think that's now being revived within contemporary science.There's a growing minority of scientists who see evidence of design in nature. Now, the understanding of intelligent designer, that's a new thinking, but through the millennia, that's been the norm.Individuals have viewed the world through the lens that there is a God, and that has helped them understand and see the world.But there must have been a point, I guess, when intellectuals decided that scientific knowledge conflicts with that that traditional belief, that traditional theistic belief.
Yeah, that's a great way of framing the discussion, Peter.There's a historian of science in Britain named Steve Fuller, who's at Warwick.And he's argued that the idea of intelligent design has been the framework out of which science has been done since the period of the scientific revolution at least and that the the post Darwinian deviation from that, denying that there's actual design and only instead as the Darwinian biologists say the appearance or illusion of design, you may remember from Richard Dawkins's famous book the blind watchmaker, page one he says biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.And of course, for Dawkins and his followers, and for Darwinians from the late 19th century forward, the appearance of design is an illusion.And it was thought to be an illusion because Darwin had formulated an undirected, or had identified an undirected, unguided process, which he called natural selection that could mimic the powers of a designing intelligence, or so he argued, without itself being designed or guided in any way.And that's kind of where we've engaged the argument. Is that appearance of design that nearly all biologists recognize merely an appearance, or is it the product of an actual guiding intelligence?And that's why we call our theory intelligent design. We're not challenging the idea that there has been change over time, one of the other meanings of evolution we're not challenging even the idea of universal common descent though some of us myself included are quite sceptical of that, the main thing we're challenging with the theory of intelligent design is that is that the appearance of design is essentially an illusion because an unguided undirected mechanism has the capability of generating that appearance without itself being guided or directed in any way and that's, to us the key issue.Is the design real or merely apparent?You may remember that Francis Crick also once said that biologists must constantly keep in mind, that what they see was not designed, but instead evolved.So there's this, the recurrence of that strong intuition among people who have studied biological systems.And I would say, going back all the way to Aristotle, you know, this has been, the Western tradition in biology has been suffused with this recognition.That organisms look designed, they look like they're designed for purpose, they exhibit purpose of behaviour.And now in the age following Watson and Crick, following the molecular biological revolution of the late 50s and 1960s and 70s, we have extraordinarily strong appearances of design.We've got digital code. We have a replication system.We have a translation system as part of this whole information processing system.Scientists can't help but use teleological wording to describe what's going on. We see the purpose of nature, of all of the biological systems and subsystems.And so what we've argued is that, at least at the point of the origin of life, there is no unguided, undirected, or there is no theory that invokes, that has identified an unguided, undirected mechanism that can explain away that appearance of design.Many people don't realize that Darwin did not attempt to explain the origin of the first life. He presupposed the existence of one or a few very simple forms.And so he started it effectively with assuming a simple cell and then said, well, what would have come from that?We now know, however, that the simple cell was not simple at all and displays this many very striking appearances of design that have not been explained by undirected chemical evolutionary processes.Dawkins himself has said that the machine code of the genes is strikingly computer-like.And so you have this striking appearance of design at the very foundation of life that has not in any way been explained by undirected processes.Well, I want to pick up on a number of that, the new discoveries, how things have changed, the complexity.But I can go back, you're challenging, I guess, hundreds of years of new thinking that the complexity of the universe simply points to luck and chance.And I guess there's a statistical side of that, whether that's even possible.We look around and we see things just working perfectly.And I wonder whether it's even possible for a chance element to make all those things come together and make the world as it is.
Well, in my book, Signature in the Cell, which was the first of the three books that I've written on these big topics, I look at the argument for the chance origin of life and even more fundamentally, the chance origin of, say, DNA and the protein products that the DNA codes for.And one of the first things to take note of in addressing the chance hypothesis is that no serious origin of life researcher, no origin of life biochemist or biologist today reposes much hope in the chance hypothesis, it's it's really been set aside and the reason for that, I explained the reason for that in in signature in the cell and then do some calculations to kind of back up the thinking that most origin of life biologists have adopted and that is that the cell is simply far too complicated to have arisen by chance.And you can, and the large biomacromolecules, DNA and proteins, are molecules that depend on a property known as sequence specificity, or sometimes called specified complexity.That is to say, they contain informational instructions in essentially a digital or typographic form.So you have in the DNA you have the four character chemical subunits that biologists actually represent with the letters A, T, G, and C.And if you want to build a protein, you have to arrange the A's, C's, G's, and T's or the evolutionary process or somehow the A's, C's, G's, and T's must have been sequenced in the proper way so that when that genetic message is sent to the ribosome, which is the the translation apparatus in the cell, then what comes out of that is a properly sequenced protein molecules.Proteins also are made of subunits called amino acids.There are 20 or so, maybe as many as 22 now, protein-forming amino acids.And to get the protein chain that is built from the DNA instructions to fold into a proper functional conformation or three-dimensional shape, those amino acids have to be arranged in very specific ways.If they're not arranged properly, the long peptide chain, as it's called, will not fold into a stable protein.And so in both cases, you have this property of sequence specificity that the function of the whole, the whole gene in the case of DNA or the whole protein in the case of the the amino acids, the function of the whole depends upon the precise sequencing of the constituent parts.And that's the difficulty, getting those things to line up properly.Turns out there's all kinds of difficulties in trying to form those subunits, those chemical parts, out of any kind of prebiotic chemical environment that we've been able to think of.But the most fundamental problem is the sequencing. And so you can actually run, because there's, if you think of the protein chain, you have 1 in 20 roughly chances of getting the right amino acid at each site.Sometimes it's more or less because in some cases you can have any one of, there is some variability allowed at each site, but you can run numbers on all this and get very precise numbers on the probability of generating even a single functional protein in the known history of the universe.And it turns out that what are called the combinatorials or the probabilities associated with combinatorials, the probabilities are so small that they are small even in relation to the total number of possible events that might have occurred from the Big Bang till now.In other words, here's an example I often use to use to illustrate, if you have a thief trying to crack a bike lock.If the thief has enough time, even though the combination is hidden among all the possibilities, and then the probability of getting the combination in one trial is very small, if the thief has enough time and can try and try and try again, he may crack it by sheer chance.But if the lock is, we have a standard four-dial bike lock, but if the thief encounters a 10-dial bike lock, and I've had one rendered by my graphic designer to get the point across, then in a human lifetime, there's not enough opportunities to sample that number of possible combinations.If you've got 10 dials, you've got 10 to the 10 possibilities, or 10, that's 10 billion.And if the thief spins the dial once every 10 seconds for 100 years and does nothing else in his entire life, he'll only sample 3% of those total combinations, which means it's much more likely that the thief will fail than it is that he will succeed by chance alone.And that's the kind of, that's the, so the point is that there are, there are degrees of complexity or improbability that dwarf what we call probabilistic resources, the opportunities.And that's the situation we have when we're talking about the origin of the first biomacromolecules by reference to chance alone.Only it's not just that you would with those events, you know, all the events that have occurred from the beginning of the universe until now could only sample about one, I think I've calculated about one ten trillion trillionth of the total possibilities that correspond to a modest length protein.So it's like the bike thief trying to sample that 10-dial lock, only much, much worse.You know, it turns out that 14 billion years isn't enough time to have a reasonable chance to find informational biomolecules by chance alone.
I mean, is the whole scientific argument that removes God, is it just an attempt by science to play God, because whenever we are told that scientific principles break down and no longer exist at the very beginning, for instance, and it doesn't make sense, but we're told that that's just how it happened and you have to accept that.And it seems to be people jumping over themselves with a desperation to try and remove the idea that there is an intelligent designer.Well, I tend to think that the questions of motivation in these debates are kind of a wash.I think as theists, we have to, I'm a theist, okay, I believe in God.In my first two books, I argued for designing intelligence of some kind as being, of some unspecified kind as being the best explanation for the information, for example, in the cell or the information needed to build fundamentally new body plans in the history of life on earth.So, but in my last book, I extend that argument, I bring in evidence from cosmology and physics and suggest that the best explanation for that, the ensemble of evidence that we have about biological and physical and cosmological origins is actually a designing intelligence that has attributes that, for example, Jews and Christians have always described to God, transcendence, as well as intelligence.For example, no being within the cosmos, no space alien, and some scientists have proposed even Crick, Francis Crick in 1981 in a little book called Life Itself floated the idea that yes we do see evidence of design in life.The origin of life is a very hard problem, we can't see how it could possibly have happened on Earth so maybe there was an intelligent life form from space who seeded life here.He was subsequently ridiculed a bit and said, I think he was embarrassed that he'd floated this and said he would not, he foreswore any further speculation on the origin of life problem. It was too difficult, he said.But in any case, back to your question, I think the whole question is.Oh, I was finishing a thought, and that is that the evidence of design that we have from the very beginning of the universe and what's called the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics and the initial conditions of the universe, the basic parameters of physics, which were said at the beginning, are exquisitely finely tuned against all odds.And no space alien, no intelligence within the cosmos could be responsible for the evidence of design that we have from the very beginning of the universe because any alleged space alien would itself have had to evolve by some sort of naturalistic processes further down the timeline, once you have stable galaxies and planets and that sort of thing and so no being within the cosmos could be responsible for the conditions that made its future evolution possible nor could a space alien to be responsible for the origin of the universe itself.So when you bring in the cosmological and the physical evidence, I think the only type of designing intelligence that can explain the whole range of evidence we have is one that is transcendent, that is beyond the cosmos, but also active in the creation, because we see evidence of information arising later, and information, as I've mentioned, is a mind product based on our uniform and repeated experience. But as to the motivation issue, I kind of think it's a wash.I think theists have to acknowledge that all people, including those of us who are theists, have a motivation, maybe a hope that there is a purposeful intelligence behind the cosmos.I think there's a kind of growing angst in young people.Harvard study recently showing that over 50% of young people have doubts about there being any purpose to their existence.And this is contributing to the mental health crisis.And so I think all of us would like, to be possible, for there to be life after death, for there to be an enduring purpose to our lives that does not extinguish when we die or when eventually there's a heat death of the universe.I think theism, belief in God, gives people a sense of purpose in relation, the possibility of a relationship to our creator.That's a positive thing. I think there's also a common human motivation to not want to be accountable to that creator and to have moral, complete moral freedom to decide what we want to do at any given time.And so oftentimes theists or God-believers, religious people will say, well, you just like these materialistic theories of origins because you don't want to be accountable to a higher power.That might be true, But it's equally true that the atheist will often say, well, but you guys just need a cosmic crutch.You need comfort from the idea of a divine being, a loving creator, father, whatever, you know, the divine father figure.And Freud famously critiqued or criticized religious belief in those terms.So I think that those two kind of motivation, arguments about motivation are something of a wash and that what I've tried to do in Return of the God Hypothesis is set all of that aside, look at the evidence that we have, and then evaluate it using some standard methods of scientific reasoning and standard methods of evaluating hypotheses, such as a Bayesian analysis, for example, that come out of logic and philosophy.And set the motivation questions aside. And my conclusion is that the evidence foran intelligent designer of some unspecified kind is extremely strong from biology, and that when you bring in the cosmological and physical evidence, the evidence of fine-tuning and the evidence we have that the material cosmos itself had a beginning, I think materialism fails as an explanation, and you need to invoke an intelligence that is both transcendent and active in the creation to explain the whole range of evidence.
Well, let me pick you up on that change, because initially there is a change from someone who believes the evolutionary model, big bang, there is no external force.That step from there to there is an external force, there is intelligent design feeding into the universe we have.And then it's another step to take that to there is an intelligent designer, now there is a personal God. And that step certainly, I assume, is frowned upon in the scientific community.Tell us about you making that step, because it would have been much safer to stay, I guess, in the ID side and not to make the step into who that individual is.Tell us about kind of what prompted you to actually make the step into answering that who question. 
Right. Well, I've been thinking about this question for 35, 36, I don't know, since the mid-80s when I was a very young scientist.And it was at the conference that inspired it, because at the conference, there were people already thinking about the God question, especially the cosmologists.At that conference, Alan Sandage announced his conversion from scientific agnosticism he was a scientific materialist to theism and indeed I think he became Christian, and he talked about how the evidence for the singularity at the beginning of the universe, the evidence that the material cosmos itself had a beginning was one of the things that moved him off of that materialistic perspective, that it was clear to him that as he described it, that the evidence we had for a beginning was evidence for what he called a super, with a space in between, natural events, nothing within the cosmos could explain the origin of the cosmos itself, if matter, space, time and energy have a beginning and as best we can tell they do and there are multiple lines of evidence and theoretical considerations that lead to that conclusion and I developed that in return of the god hypothesis, it is the evidence from observational astronomy and also developments in theoretical physics converge on that conclusion.And if that's the case, if matter and energy themselves have a beginning, and indeed if space and time themselves have a beginning, then we can't invoke any materialistic explanation to explain that.Because before there was matter, before the beginning of matter, there was no matter to do the causing. And that's the problem.There must be something. For there to be a causal explanation for the universe, it requires a transcendent something.And when you also consider that we have evidence for design from the very beginning in the fine-tuning of the initial physical parameters of the universe, the initial conditions of the universe, the initial establishment and fine-tuning of the physical laws, then you have evidence for that transcendent something being a transcendent intelligent something.And if something is intelligent, capable of making choices between one outcome or another, that's really what we mean by personhood.I mean, this is very close to a, the idea of a personal gun, now that entity may not want to have anything to do with us, but we're talking about a conscious agent when we talk about evidence for intelligent design, and then we have further evidence I think in biology with the presence of the information and information processing system inside cells.And so when you bring all that together, I think you can start to address the who question.So after I wrote Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt, a lot of my readers were asking, OK, that's great.We have evidence of a designing intelligence, but who would that intelligence have been? Is it a space alien, something imminent within the cosmos, like Crick and others have proposed?Or is it a transcendent intelligence?And what can science tell us about that question? So I thought it's a natural question that flows from my first two books.I would stipulate that the theory of intelligent design, formally as a theory, is a theory of design detection.And it allows us to detect the action of an agent as opposed to undirected material processes.We have this example that we often use. If you look at the faces on the mountains at Mount Rushmore, you right away know that a designing intelligence of some kind was responsible for sculpting those faces.And those faces exhibit two properties which, when found together, invariably and reliably indicate a designing intelligence.And we've described those properties as high probability and what's called a specification, a pattern match.And we have evidence of small probability specifications in life.If something is an informational sequence, it's another way of revealing design, so that we can get into all of that.The point is, we've got evidence of design in life, but, the cosmology and fine-tuning allow us to adjudicate between two different design hypotheses, the imminent intelligence and the transcendent one.And I thought, well, let's take this on. It's a natural, it goes beyond the theory of intelligent design, formally speaking, and it addresses one of the possible implications of the evidence of design that we have in biology, that maybe we're looking at a theistic designer, not a space alien. 
I just want to pick one or two things from different books. Signature in the Cells, you have it there behind you.And when you simply begin to look at the complexity of cells.You realize that they are like little mini cities, that actually everything, so much happens within.And I guess we are learning more and more about everything in life.And you talk to doctors and they tell you that they are learning more and more about how the body functions. And there's a lot of the unknown.But when you look at that just complexity of, we call it the simple cell, which isn't really very simple, that new research and that new understanding, surely that should move people to a position that, this is impossible, that this level of complexity simply just happens.So tell us about that, just the cell, which is not simple. 
Yeah, that's the sort of ground zero for me in my research and interest in the question was this origin of life problem.That's what I did my PhD on.And I think it's really interesting. We could have debates about the adequacy of Darwinian evolutionary theory.I'm sceptical about what's called macroevolutionary theory.But set that all aside. Darwin presupposed one or a few simple forms.And in the immediate wake of the Darwinian Revolution, people like Huxley and Heckel started to develop theories of the origin of those first simple cells.And they regarded the cell in the late 19th century as a very simple, as Huxley put it, a simple homogenous globule or homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.And they viewed the essence of the cell as a simple chemical, it's coming from a simple chemical substance they called protoplasm.And so it kind of, and they viewed it as a kind of jello or goo, which could be produced by a few simple chemical reactions.That viewpoint started to fall by the wayside very, very quickly.By the 1890s, early part of the 20th century, we were learning a lot more about the complexity of metabolism.When you get to the molecular biological revolution in the late 1950s and 1960s, nobody any longer thinks the cell is simple because the most important biomacromolecules are large information-bearing molecules that are part of a larger information processing system.And so this is where I think, and in confronting that.And so any origin of life theory has to explain where that came from.My supervisor used to say that the nature of life and the origin of life topics are connected.We need to know what life is in order to formulate a plausible theory of how it came to be.And now that we know that life is much more complex and that we have an integrated informational complexity that characterizes life, those 19th century theories and the first origin of life theories associated with figures like Alexander Oparin, for example, from the 1920s and 30s.These are not adequate to explain what we see.But what's happened, and this is what I documented in Signature in the Cell, is that none of the subsequent chemical evolutionary theories, whether they're based on chance or based on self-organizational laws or somehow based on somehow combining the two, none of those theories have proven adequate either.This problem of sequence specificity or functional information has defied explanation by reference to theories that start from lower level chemistry.It's proven very, very difficult, implausible in the extreme.Here's the problem. Getting from the chemistry to the code is the problem.And undirected chemical processes do not, when observed, move in a life-friendly, information-generative direction.And this has been the problem. So the impasse in origin of life research, which really began in the late 70s, was documented by this book I mentioned, the mystery of life's origin and books, another book, for example, by Robert Shapiro called, Origins, A Sceptic's Guide.That impasse from the 1980s has continued right to the present.Dawkins was interviewed in a film in 2009 by Ben Stein, the American economist and comic.And very quickly, Stein got Dawkins to acknowledge that nobody knows how we got from from the prebiotic chemistry to the first cell.Well, that's kind of a news headline.We get the impression from textbooks that the evolutionary biologists have this all sewed up.They don't by any means. This is a longstanding conundrum.And it is the integrated complexity and informational properties of the cell that have, I think, most fundamentally defied explanation by these chemical evolutionary theories.And I think that's very significant when you think of the whole kind of evolutionary story.Darwin thought that if you could start with something simple then the mutation selection, oh, he didn't have mutations, but the mutation, sorry, the natural selection variation mechanism, could generate all the complexity of life. You'd go from simple to complex very gradually.Well, if the simplest thing is immensely complex and manifest a kind of complexity that defies any undirected process that we can think of, well, then you don't have a seamless evolutionary story from goo to you.Because I guess when you're Darwin's doubt, the next book you wrote, I guess when Charles Darwin wrote Origin of the Species, he assumed it was settled.But science is never settled.There are always developments. And yet it seems, oh, that's sacrosanct, and that cannot be touched and must be accepted.
Yeah, and what I did in the second book was show or argue that the information problem is not something that only resides at the lowest level in the biological hierarchy, at the point of the origin of the first cell, but it also emerges later when we have major innovations in the history of life as documented by the fossil record, events such as the Cambrian explosion or the origin of the mammalian radiation or the angiosperm revolution.There are many events in the history of life where you get this sudden or abrupt appearance in the fossil record of completely new form and structure.And we now know in our information age, as it's come to biology, that if you want to build a new cell, you've got to have new proteins.So you have to to have information to build the first cell.But the same thing turns out to be true at the higher level.If you want to build a completely new body plan, you need new organs and tissues.You need to arrange those organs and tissues in very specific ways.And you need new proteins to service the new cell types that make the organs and tissues possible.So anytime we see the abrupt appearance of new biological form, that implies the origin of a vast amount of new biological information. And so in Darwin's doubt, I simply asked, well, is there, can the standard mutation natural selection mechanism explain the origin of the kind of information that arises and the amount of information arises?And I argue there that no, it doesn't. That we have, there are many, many kinds of biological phenomena that Darwin's mechanism explains beautifully, the small scale variation adaptation, that sort of thing.So 2016, a major conference at the Royal Society in London.First talk there was by the evolutionary biologist Gerd Müller.The conference was convened by a group of evolutionary biologists who think we need a new theory of evolution.Whereas Darwinism does a nice job of explaining small-scale variation, it does a poor job or a completely inadequate job of explaining large-scale morphological innovation, large-scale changes in form.And Mueller, in his first talk at this 2016 event, outlined what he called the explanatory deficits of Neo-Darwinism, and he made that point very clearly.And so it's, I think it's a new day in evolutionary biology, the word of this is not percolating so well perhaps but that was part of the reasons I wrote Darwin's doubt is that within the biological peer-reviewed biological literature it's well known that the problem of the origin of large-scale form, the origin of new body plans is not well explained by the mutation selection mechanism.At this 16 conference, the conveners included many scientists who were trying to come up with new mechanisms that might explain the problem of morphological innovation.Afterwards, one of the conveners said the conference was characterized by a lack of momentousness.Effectively, the evolutionary biologists proposing new theories of evolution and new evolutionary mechanisms had done a good job characterizing the problems, but had not really come up with anything that solves the fundamental problems that we encounter in biology when we see these large jumps in form and structure arising.And in Darwin's Doubt, I didn't just critique standard neo-Darwinian theories of evolution, but many of these newer theories as well, showing that invariably the problem of the origin of biological information and the form that arises from it is the key unsolved problem in contemporary evolutionary theory. Mueller and Newman wrote a book with MIT Press called On the Origins of Organismal Form, which was a kind of play on the origin of species.Darwinism does a nice job of explaining speciation, small-scale changes within the limits of the pre-existing genomic endowments of an organism, but it doesn't do a good job of explaining new form that requires new genetic information.And these authors, Newman and Mueller, listed in a table of unsolved problems in evolutionary theory, the problem of the origin of biological form.That's what we thought Darwin explained back in 1859, and instead we realized that the mechanisms that he first envisioned have much more limited creative power and much more limited explanatory scope.So that's what my second book was about, and also I think it's still, this is still very much right at the cutting edge of the discussion in evolutionary biology.We can explain the small scale stuff, but not the big scale stuff.Let's just finish off with actually disseminating the information, because all of this is about taking issues which are complex and actually making it understandable to the wider public.And I guess part of that is, I mean, obviously being on the most popular podcast in the world, Joe Rogan, I was like, oh, there's Steve Meyer and Joe Rogan.And taking that information and that turbocharges that.So maybe just to finish off on the ability to disseminate this, because I think in the US, the ID movement is more understood, where I think maybe in Europe, it's certainly it's more misunderstood and not as accepted where there is an acceptance in the States.But tell us about that and how being on something like podcasts like that turbocharge the message.
Yeah, well, I can tell you, you know, now that I'm getting introduced at conferences and things after The Joe Rogan Experience, it's as if I never did anything else in my life.No, that's the only thing people care to mention.I mean, he's got a monster reach. He's extremely, his questions on the interview were very probative.Of course, slightly to moderately sceptical, maybe more, but I thought they were fair. I thought it was a great discussion and it was a lot of fun.And, you know, we've had not only, I think he gets something like 11 million downloads on average for his podcast.We couldn't even believe these numbers when we were told them.But there have been over 25 million derivative videos that social media influencers and podcasters have made about the Rogan interview, analysing different sections of our conversation.So, yeah, that was a huge boost to the dissemination of our message.But one thing I realized in our conversation that there's a simple way to understand the information argument.And that's one of our tools in getting some of these ideas out is distilling some of these things that we've been talking about at a fairly deep level to a more understandable level.So let me just run that argument, that argument sketch or the distillation of the argument by your audience.And then they would talk about some of the things we're doing to get the word out.Our local hero in the Seattle area here is Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.And he has said, like Dawkins, that the digital code in the DNA, that the DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created.Dawkins, as I mentioned before, says it's like a machine code.It contains machine code.Well, if you think about that, those are very suggestive quotations because what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, is that information always arises from an intelligence source.If you have a section of software, there was a programmer involved.If you have a hieroglyphic inscription, there was an ancient scribe involved.If you have a paragraph in a book, there was a writer involved.As we're effectively broadcasting, we're transmitting information, that information ultimately issues from our mind.So whenever we look at information, an informational text or sequence, and we trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind rather than a material process.All attempts to explain the origin of life based on undirected material processes have failed because they couldn't explain the information present in DNA, RNA proteins.So the presence of that information at the foundation of life, based on our uniform and repeated experience about what it takes to generate information is therefore best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence.It takes a programmer to make a program, to make a software program.And what we have in life is, from many different standpoints, identical to computer code.It is a section of functional digital information.So that's a kind of more user-friendly sketch of the argument but the point is some of these some of these key ideas that are that make intelligent design so, I think so persuasive at a high scientific level if you actually look at the evidence, can be also explained fairly simply and so we're generating a lot of not just Joe Rogan podcast interviews but coming on many many podcasts and that sort of thing but also we're generating a lot of YouTube video short documentaries that get some of these ideas across and for your viewers, one that I might recommend which is on of any it was out on the internet it's called science uprising and it's a series of 10 short documentary videos, another one that we've done called the information enigma which I think would would help people get into these ideas fairly quickly, the information enigmas I think it's a 20 minute short documentary it's up online and we've had hundreds of thousands of views so we're doing a lot to sort of translate the most rigorous science into accessible ideas and disseminate that in user-friendly ways.The best website for finding a lot of this compiled is actually the website for my most recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis. So the website there is returntothegodhypothesis.com.
Okay, well, we will have the link for that in the description. 
Dr. Stephen Meyer, I really appreciate you coming along. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your experience and understandings of writing and making that understandable, I think, to the viewers, many of them who may not have come across this before. 
So thank you for your time today.
I really appreciate you having me on, Peter.

The Week According To . . . Matt Le Tissier

Join us as we take a meander through some of the news, articles, stories and social media posts that have piqued our interest or made our blood boil this week and we are excited to welcome back a good friend and previous guest, the football legend, Matt Le Tissier.Matt has made a new army of fans through his straight talking and common sense over the last few years so we look forward to hearing his thoughts on tonight's topics, including...- Not So Rare: Footballers dropping at an alarming rate.- Bernie Sanders: 'I am glad to be fully up to date with the vaccine'- Are you or those around you are getting ill? What you can do to prevent illness and stay healthy.- Christmas Massacre: Jihadi nightmare for Christians in Nigeria.- Rishi & Co Don't Care: Millions of hardworking taxpayers in this country were purposefully left to rot during the 'pandemic'.- 40 candidates and 25 elected officials from 17 states demand that the COVID shots must be pulled off the market.- Diversity is our Strength? Fears grow of sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Muslim migrants on the floating immigrant hotel, Bibby Stockholm.
Matt Le Tissier is a bona fide football legend, often described as one of the most naturally talented players of his time, the man that south coast residents call ‘Le God’ and one of the most famous soccer stars of the 1990's.Matt joined Southampton FC on the YTS scheme in 1985, signed professional forms with them the following year at 16 years of age and for the next 16 years he put loyalty above riches and remained at the club.A hero to his fans for his creativity, he was the first midfielder to score 100 goals in the Premier League and Matt's penalty taking abilities were renowned, converting 47 out of 48 from the spot.Then for 15 years he was on our TV screens every week on Sky Sports giving his commentary on the Premier League football matches.This all came to a screeching halt when he tweeted his thoughts on the Ukraine/Russia conflict, refused to wear a badge on-air of an organisation he had no interest in being associated with and also retweeting a post that questioned the government line on COVID.These actions were apparently outside the accepted new-speak and for these crimes he was sacked.
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Recorded 29.12.23
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*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
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Links to topics...Not So Rare https://mlt7.com/ Bernie Sanders https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/1740394578266792371Prevent illness https://twitter.com/lawrie_dr/status/1740333887736479778Christians in Nigeriahttps://twitter.com/PeterSweden7/status/1740127117961285722Excludedhttps://twitter.com/ExcludedFighter/status/1740087392084930770COVID shots https://twitter.com/MdBreathe/status/1738738547451179091Bibby Stockholm https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12906641/Fears-grow-sectarian-violence-Sunni-Shia-Muslim-migrants-Bibby-St