Gareth Icke: The Panopticon Is Already Here

Timothy Allen: What’s your view on AI? I’ve heard a few people here say they don’t like AI. For my podcast, probably about 75 per cent of the production now is done by AI.

Gareth Icke: Well, it’s like anything. For me, I think everything’s neutral. I can use a knife to prepare you some food or I can stab you with it. I think AI is the same. It’s whatever you use it for. You can use it to target individuals and bomb them, or you can use it to make a pretty cool thumbnail for your YouTube video, or suggest a good thumbnail.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, I’ve got into that recently. I don’t like it at all. Our numbers on YouTube aren’t huge, so it’s hard enough to crack algorithmically. But in the last six months I decided to actually have a go. The thumbnails have changed, we’ve put three large words on there that are quite extreme, and it’s worked. I’ve had a couple of episodes with 13,000 or 14,000 views, which is unheard of for us. But I don’t like it, and I don’t like what it’s trying to make me do. It’s trying to make everyone do that. Does that ever stop? Will there be a renaissance where people start saying, screw the clickbait? If people are listening to long-form, they don’t need the clickbait.

Gareth Icke: I think they will. I think you always find that. You go back to the eighties and nineties, which was the music I was listening to. You would have rock and roll bands that sometimes became famous on their fifth or sixth album. They’d do all their touring and all the hard yards. Then suddenly X Factor, fast food, fast music came along. Everyone wanted everything straight away, and that was huge for a long time. I remember bands like The Kooks having two number one albums and then their label dropped them. You think, two number one albums? But no, it was all about done, famous, see you later, next one off the production line.

People started rejecting that. They started rejecting The Voice, The X Factor, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent, whatever variations of it, and started going back to listening to old-school bands. I’ve got young kids and my eight-year-old is listening to songs I remember from the eighties, like Culture Club, and I’m like, what the hell?

Timothy Allen: Yeah, I’ve got a 13-year-old who’s into country and western. She wants to see Dolly Parton live, which is a strange thought when you think about it. We were talking about this the other day at the kitchen table. There are five of us in our family, and me and the wife were talking about when Glastonbury started being headlined by the bands that we knew when we were younger. Suddenly you’re thinking, wow, people are going to Glasto to listen to someone that was in the charts when I was younger, Fleetwood Mac coming back and all that stuff.

I’ve always thought that we’ve reached the pinnacle of pop music. I don’t know how old you are. I’m 54, but I came of age during the acid house days. In 1988, 1989, I went to Ibiza, we discovered all that stuff and it changed my life completely. That was dance music, electronic dance music. Since then I’ve not noticed a movement in the music world that’s been as obvious. There have been little bits and bobs, drum and bass and this and that, but not the move from acoustic music to digital music and repetitive beat. Nothing seems to have changed since then for me personally. I don’t know what you think.

Gareth Icke: I see things going in cycles. I had an older sister, so my musical upbringing was probably younger. I was listening to Nirvana when I was eight, which I wouldn’t have been if I didn’t have a big sister. All my friends were still listening to whoever was big in that period, 2 Unlimited or whatever, whereas I was listening to Nirvana, Green Day, The Wonder Stuff, bands that my sister was into.

Then guitar music went out for a bit, and I saw it come back maybe ten years later with nu metal. For me, all nu metal was the grunge from the nineties just rebranded. So it goes in cycles. Something becomes big for a bit, then it disappears, then maybe a decade or two later you’re listening to bands and thinking, they just sound like the bands that were around 20 years ago. I don’t know if it’s because they’ve grown up listening to it, so they’ve become it, whether it’s a natural cycle or whether it’s a cycle that’s predetermined.

Timothy Allen: My take is, think back to tribal music, banging the drum, repetitive beats. Then rock and roll was that. Prior to rock and roll we were in the realm of classical music, ballads, folk music and stuff, but the beats stuff went through rock and roll. It’s like tribal music, then rock and roll, then techno, and then pretty much nothing, just variations of that. At the base of it is a repetitive beat.

Gareth Icke: Yeah. I think that’s where John Lennon, didn’t he famously say, “Before Elvis there was nothing”? I think he was referring not to there literally being nothing, because there wasn’t, but probably that beat, that rock and roll.

Timothy Allen: Well, I mean, folk, you could say. The Morris Men.

Gareth Icke: I guess, yeah. There’s no one banging a drum, but it’s still a melody. It’s a heartbeat, I guess. Without going off too much on a tangent, repetitive beats and spirituality do go hand in hand, because beats have been used to help you achieve altered states for a long time. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that techno at its roots was about getting out of your head.

Timothy Allen: Well, yeah. Dropping an E and listening to a…

Gareth Icke: Bach?

Timothy Allen: Yeah, or maybe the Morris Men. That would be quite fun, honestly.

Anyway, look, we don’t talk about music. What I want to talk about to start with, and tell me if I’m going places you don’t want to go…

Gareth Icke: I’ll go anywhere. It’s fine.

Timothy Allen: Good, because I want to talk to you about your dad first. I read all his books when I was younger. I would say now I’m very normal, nothing too weird going on, but I’ve always hung around at the edges. I remember when he went on Wogan. I might have been quite young then, but I read, I think it was Truth Vibrations. Was that one of the first?

Gareth Icke: That was early nineties. Might have even been late eighties.

Timothy Allen: Was that one of the first ones he wrote after he came out?

Gareth Icke: Yeah.

Timothy Allen: So maybe 1990. I read it, and then I read all the other ones up until a certain point. I think the one that had the most impact on me was called The Robots’ Rebellion.

Gareth Icke: Yeah, ’94.

Timothy Allen: I haven’t thought about it for years until I saw your name. Then I started thinking, oh my God, I did invest a lot of time in this. I found it fascinating.

What I wanted to talk to you about was the weird stuff versus the normal stuff. You’re obviously quite grounded in the reality of the kind of stuff your dad used to talk about, but not necessarily all the out-there stuff. I think I was the same. I loved him putting all the dots together with the Bilderbergers and the Rothschilds and all this kind of stuff. But then when it veered into the shape-shifting stuff, it was fun, but I never thought that bit was true. It didn’t matter, though. I thought it was all archetypes. Is that a good characterisation of you?

Gareth Icke: If my wife was watching, she’d be laughing. I am a bit out there at times. But with him, he’s being literal when he’s talking about that stuff.

Timothy Allen: Is that right?

Gareth Icke: Yeah. I know a lot of people say, “Oh no, he means the Jews.” No, he doesn’t. A lot of people think that stuff about the reptilians was code. It wasn’t.

For me, I always judge everything on my experience and what I feel. I don’t take anyone’s word as gospel at all. I would look at certain elements of it and go, well, that’s interesting, it’s a bit out there, but I’m open to everything, so who am I to say?

But over the last few years, even pre-COVID, I was looking at everything governments were doing around the world, all the policies and what everything was being pushed towards, and thinking, this is becoming more and more anti-human the whole time. Everything is anti-human. It’s geared against humanity, not for it. That started to open my eyes a little bit to the idea that maybe the reason why everything is anti-human is because it quite literally is.

I’ve been having similar conversations while I’m here, where people say, “I used to think that stuff was a bit whatever, and now I’m thinking, hang on a minute.” I think there are a lot more people like that now. The more they look at certain things, the more they think there’s something behind this. You’ve got your politicians. I don’t think anyone thinks they’re making the decisions. They think there’s the X-Files guy with a cigarette in the background type of character, and I’m sure they exist as well, handlers and whatever. But now I think more people are open to the idea that there might be something above that.

Timothy Allen: I think you’re right. I think I am as well. Something I’ve noticed in the last couple of years is that the idea extraterrestrials exist is now quite normal. I don’t know what the stats are, but without even being weird about it, you’ve got to think we live in this gigantic universe, so the chances are there are. It’s not much of a step from that to imagining someone might be pulling the strings in the background, in another dimension, blah blah blah, whatever.

Gareth Icke: A hundred per cent. I can remember getting grief at school, “Icke believes in aliens”, stuff like that, whereas now, like you say, I would suggest the majority, probably a vast majority, think, yeah, I believe in aliens of some description.

What you tend to find is those who think aliens are a hideous idea are often very staunch religious types. They’re like, well, the whole idea of things being manipulated by aliens kind of kills the God story, so I turn away from that. But at the same time, in religious texts they’re talking about the gods coming down and all this sort of stuff. Is it too much of a leap that the gods they refer to, which again is plural, are a series of people, beings, entities, whatever? It’s written in their texts as well that this kind of stuff went on, interbreeding with humanity and all the rest of it.

Timothy Allen: There are going to be some existential crises happening if that kind of stuff does start coming out into the open.

What I really appreciated about your dad’s books was that he was the first person, I suppose, who made me realise that the matrix was a thing. I think he even called it the matrix back then, Children of the Matrix.

Gareth Icke: That’s right.

Timothy Allen: The backbone of all his books was showing you that your life is trapped within a kind of network of things trying to manipulate you. The digital panopticon wasn’t something I could grasp back then, but it is now, and it fits that model absolutely precisely. It’s been a few years now that it’s very easy to see the digital panopticon as the matrix, because we’re already stuck in it to a degree, each one of us with our phones, with our lives interconnected.

Gareth Icke: A hundred per cent. In the UK you’ve got our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, saying she dreams of a panopticon where the eyes of the state are on the citizens at all times.

Timothy Allen: Really?

Gareth Icke: Yeah. She said that to Tony Blair, of all people.

Timothy Allen: What, in public?

Gareth Icke: On a podcast, yeah.

Timothy Allen: I didn’t hear that.

Gareth Icke: That’s what I mean. They just flat out come and say it. She dreams of a panopticon. I’m thinking, there are better things to dream about than that, for a start.

Timothy Allen: Well, yeah, but that’s the dream of a psychopath, isn’t it?

Gareth Icke: Yeah. Someone who wants to control you. And I also think that doesn’t come from a position of strength. That’s weakness. If you’ve got a partner that decides when you can go out, who you can speak to, what you can say, goes through your phone and wants to know your business all the time, that’s not a self-assured, confident person. That’s a paranoid, frightened person. That’s what these people are. They’re control freaks. They want the eyes of the state on you at all times because they’re terrified of what you can do and what you can say.

Timothy Allen: Right. When you say that, it makes me think there are two options here. One is that there’s a grand conspiracy and they’re having their strings pulled. The other is that they’re just people with psychological problems, which we all have to a certain degree, but they’ve got quite strong ones, they’ve ended up in positions of power and as a result they’re acting on those.

We were talking about Patrick Henningsen. I think he explains this well to the layman. I did a whole two-hour podcast with him about whether there’s a grand conspiracy, and his answer is, well, kind of. Think of it like pools of global capital that get moved around the world and cause things to happen. You’ve got very wealthy groups, families possibly and all this kind of stuff, but they do conspire in a way because their power and capital has to work. They move it around the world. Right now we’re going to China because that’s on the up, for example.

That’s one version. The other version is the more spiritual battle version. Which way do you fall?

Gareth Icke: I think it’s a combination of all of them. I think there is a grand conspiracy. I think the conspiracy is on a spiritual level. And I think they place psychopathic people in positions of authority, so-called authority, because they’re the perfect ones to enact it. There’s no empathy with a psychopath.

So if I have a grand conspiracy and I want to kill 3,000 people in the Twin Towers on 9/11, the person I put into the presidency, or the person behind the Pentagon or whatever, can’t be that really nice guy called Steve, because Steve’s going to go, “What do you mean you’re going to kill 3,000? No, I’m not doing that.” So you manoeuvre the likes of Tony Blair and all these people into these positions because they will do the bidding.

Timothy Allen: But why do you want to kill 3,000 people? Tell an empath. What is that? What’s the spiritual battle going on there?

Gareth Icke: I think these people feed on suffering and death and destruction.

Timothy Allen: What is that? I’ve heard people say that, I just don’t know what it is. Are you talking about the kind of person who has a morbid fascination with snuff movies, say? Is this the same kind of thing?

Gareth Icke: I think there are certain people out there that enjoy killing people. You would look at them as your Jeffrey Dahmers or whatever. I think there’s that psychopathic element.

I also think that if I have no empathy and I need to sacrifice 3,000 people to achieve an invasion of Iraq, a Patriot Act that I want to get through or whatever, the normal person would go, “Oh no, that’s not…” But to these people, because they have no empathy, 3,000 people, who gives a shit? I’ll warn a few of them, give them a call so they don’t turn up for work that day, but everyone else, I don’t care.

I think this is the thing people struggle with, although they’re struggling with it less as they see the world get worse and worse. People struggle with the idea that someone could do something like that because they judge everyone by their own capabilities. Whenever someone says, “They wouldn’t do that,” it’s like, no, you wouldn’t do that because you’re not a nutcase. But they would.

There are people out there right now doing absolutely horrific things. The idea is disgusting to people, but it’s happening. You couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it, but there are people who will. Because most people are inherently good, in varying degrees, they struggle to compute how evil people can be. But if you take away empathy, which is essentially all a psychopath is, then these people are capable of anything.

Timothy Allen: It just seems weird that they end up in positions of power. What’s that all about?

Gareth Icke: I suppose I think a lot of these people are selected anyway, and groomed, and often abused themselves through private boarding schools and stuff like that, where they’re taken away from their families and horrific things happen to them. Their brains are scrambled and all the rest of it. I think a lot of these evil people are victims themselves as well. That’s not to let them off the hook, but I think they are in many ways.

There’s a selection part of it, but there’s also the element that the psychopath rises to the top of business because they don’t care who they step on. They don’t play fair in any situation.

Timothy Allen: You know, I like some of the things Maradona said, in terms of Palestine and whatever, but the ability to punch…

Gareth Icke: I’ll go back to football again. To cheat.

Timothy Allen: To cheat. Yeah, it was a cheat. There’s no sense of justice there.

Gareth Icke: No, because the end justifies the means.

Timothy Allen: You’re still bitter about the World Cup.

Gareth Icke: Mate, I’m angry. I’m angry. But you get my point. He won a World Cup that year because he punched the ball in the net. He cheated. Fully cheated. But he doesn’t care. That’s why I think a lot of these psychopaths will rise to the top of business, finance, banking, whatever, because they don’t really care who they step on and they don’t care how many victims lie behind them.

Timothy Allen: Do you know what, though? It’s very hard not to see the absolute… It’s almost a beautiful thing that we lost to them this time round, because it pointed out that archetype of the British sports fan, the British sports person, didn’t it?

Gareth Icke: Oh, it became a cliché, yeah. But it really did happen again in exactly the same way. I’ve got respect for it. As soon as the opportunity was there for us to go down that route, I thought, it’s going to happen. I was in our local pub, there weren’t many of us in there, and everyone looked at each other and went, “Oh my God, we’re going to lose.” We were winning, and it was, “We’re going to lose.” We knew what was going to happen because this is what always happens. It’s replaying the same arc. It’s a cycle, and someone has to come in who is a disruptor to break that cycle, otherwise it just keeps happening.

The crazy thing was, the manager wasn’t even a Brit. He didn’t even know, but he got sucked into it.

I said this to my wife when I watched at home. We were all right at nil-nil. Argentina were nothing special. They’re relying on a 39-year-old guy who just wanders around all day. He doesn’t make a tackle. He’s a talented guy, don’t get me wrong, but he’s well past his best.

Lots of people are scared of losing. They’re scared of fucking up, scared of getting up on stage with a guitar and hitting a bum note, scared of getting up on stage today and speaking and fumbling your words and the screen falls over and you have a nightmare. Lots of people are frightened of that. England are terrified of winning. We were fine at nil-nil. We went one-nil up and psychologically that’s when it changed.

When we played Italy in the European Championship final, we went one-nil up early. It’s the worst thing that could happen, because their heads went, “We could do this. We could do this.” Another country, say the Spanish, Italians or Argentinians, would go, “We’re going to win this,” and it would be a positive thing. Whereas with the English it’s terrifying.

Timothy Allen: It’s funny because if you study psychology, we all do this as individuals. We create the scenario in the real world to prove to ourselves that what we feel is correct. In the case of England, “We always lose.” We’ve got this chip on our shoulder, we’re the losers. Then if we get into a position where we’re winning, we self-sabotage to lose so we can go, “See, we always lose.”

Gareth Icke: No, you’re right. It’s defeat from the jaws of victory. That’s England.

Timothy Allen: I’m a Derby County fan.

Gareth Icke: We’re the same. We’re exactly the same. Those sorts of characters are in life as well. I know some of them. It’s like, “What a beautiful sunny day.” “Yeah, but the bloody clouds will come out in a minute.” Maybe they won’t, but you create your own self-fulfilling prophecy.

Timothy Allen: What’s really fascinating, and relevant to our conversation, is that this happens on a group scale as well as an individual scale. These are things I think people manipulate. You can manipulate a whole country by tapping into that thing. If you want to piss the Brits off, if you want to make something happen, you can tap into that thing as a group.

Gareth Icke: Yeah. You tap into what people fear and you keep feeding that. What’s the saying, which wolf is the most powerful? The one you feed the most, or whatever. I’ve probably just butchered that quote, but it’s something along those lines.

I’m seeing that in England now, this division and all the rest of it. Yes, there is a real problem with mass immigration. There are lots of real problems, but it’s just feeding this fear all the time. Poking, poking, poking.

Timothy Allen: When I look at the UK now, I’m very despondent, I’ll be honest. It doesn’t really touch us. We live in a remote place. I can hear about it on the news, but it doesn’t come to our door. What I notice is that the powers that be, the people in charge, are relentlessly and constantly not doing what a lot of people want them to do. It’s wearing them down, because it’s wearing me down. Every time they do something I think, oh my God, read the room.

Gareth Icke: It’s meant to.

Timothy Allen: Read the room, yeah.

Gareth Icke: It’s meant to. For me, you’ve got three groups of people. There are two they’re absolutely fine with and one they have a problem with.

If you’re apathetic, saying, “Britain’s lost now, it’s already lost, all the cities are gone, the towns are gone, the villages will be next, there’s nothing about Britain that’s British anymore, waste of time, mate,” that’s fine. They’re happy with that because you aren’t going to do anything.

Then there’s the other side, “They’re coming over here, they’re doing this, I’m going to set fire to a migrant hotel, I’m going to chuck a brick at a copper.” They’re fine with that too, because they can crack down on it. They can bring in legislation to deal with that.

It’s that group in the middle that, in many and varying ways, says, “I don’t like this and I’m not going along with it. I’m not putting up with it. I’m not complying with it,” but in a peaceful way. “I’m going to do something to stop this happening, to protect my family,” whatever. They have an issue with that group, because what can you do with them?

When I look on social media, which is where a lot of people get their information now, the voices they elevate are the polarities. They elevate Tommy Robinson and types like that, where it’s all the Muslims’ fault, everything. He said fuck all during COVID, by the way, but now everything is the Muslims, sort that out, they’re the enemy.

On the other end they’ll elevate the more so-called far-left attitude, the alphabet mafia and all the rest of it. They’re fine with those two because you play them off against each other, and so they get big numbers and therefore big money.

Then you have the group in the middle, which I would consider myself, and people like Patrick Henningsen, who are basically going, “Guys, it’s not all the anything. We’re all in this together. Whether you’re a Muslim or LGBTQ with blue hair or whatever, you’ve all got more in common with each other than any of the so-called rulers or spokesmen and women for your so-called side.” You’re algorithmically destroyed because they don’t want any reasonable voice in the room.

Timothy Allen: You’re talking about the silent majority in the middle, I suppose.

Gareth Icke: Yeah, because I think most people are reasonable. Most people want to get on. They want a roof over their head, food in the kids’ bellies, they want the kids to be safe. If little Tommy wants to go to the park, I don’t want to have to be frightened that the guy’s going to get stabbed or abducted. Most people want the same things. A couple of beers on a Friday night, a trip to the ballet or a trip to the football, whatever. Just get on. Most people don’t want to fight and argue.

Timothy Allen: That’s all we see all the time. It’s pushed heavily as well.

Gareth Icke: It is. It’s rage bait.

Timothy Allen: Even the free market pushes it. The algorithms on social media arguably aren’t trying to create a conspiracy. They just know that if they show you the extreme thing, you’re more likely to comment or watch.

Gareth Icke: That’s why Facebook made an active decision to start pushing politics not that long before Brexit. That was an active policy decision by Facebook.

Timothy Allen: To try and steer Brexit, you mean?

Gareth Icke: No. Well, that might have been. But what they realised was that Facebook wasn’t for young people anymore. People were leaving Facebook and going to other platforms, TikTok and all the rest were just emerging. They realised most people using Facebook were people in their thirties and forties, making friends with old schoolmates and having chats again. And they realised people in their thirties and forties tend to be more politically active than 18-to-25-year-olds. So to make more money and get more engagement, they started promoting political, potentially divisive conversations algorithmically.

Then Brexit came along and Facebook became a cesspit. I couldn’t go on it in the end. All I was watching was people I went to school with, who had no interest in politics ever, suddenly becoming absolute bloody know-it-alls and putting their opinions across in fucking block capitals constantly, because it looks like you’re shouting, and writing “FACT” after everything they’d written. I’m looking at it going, but I went to school with you. I know you. You’re an idiot. But if you put FACT at the end of it, surely I believe everything you say.

People were biting and going back and forth, and Zuckerberg, or whoever is really behind Facebook and Meta and the rest of it, must have just been laughing.

Brexit was my big awakening. I know COVID woke a lot of people, but for me it was Brexit. I learned so much about society and myself during that time. I was shocked, because I was a leaver, but I wasn’t the leaver they thought I was. I was a leaver because I believe in decentralisation. I don’t want big centralised power sources over there.

I was quiet through the whole thing, just thinking, I’m going to vote Leave. Then the night before I thought, I’ll put a post up. I was thinking, how am I going to say something without infuriating everyone? I come from a very liberal world. I also came from the media. The media was very liberal.

So I wrote something about Tony Benn. Do you remember Tony Benn?

Timothy Allen: I love Tony Benn.

Gareth Icke: Yeah, exactly. Me too. Love the guy. He’s kind of universally loved by liberals as well, but he was a staunch anti-European. So I said something like, on the eve of this, I’m wondering how Tony Benn would have voted.

Oh God, the shit I got. I couldn’t believe it. I went to bed and woke up the next morning and everything had changed. Over the next few days I thought, fucking hell, this is like a dream. I was hanging out with people who’d been talking to me normally who now considered me something else. I hadn’t changed at all. I was exactly the same bloke. I had the same ideas. I just happened to have voted a different way on a piece of paper.

Then the Trump election came after that. I felt like I had a superpower. I was watching Trump thinking, this guy’s going to win. He’s doing all the things that just happened. Everyone was saying, no, he’s got a one per cent chance, all that nonsense, and then he did. I never recovered from that. It smashed my brain apart. It literally pulled a veil down.

I had the same thing in COVID, to be fair, where a lot of my anti-war friendship group had been very pro-EU and had sort of disowned me. During COVID they were all very pro-everything, and a lot of them have suddenly sort of rewritten history now, which is quite funny to watch.

I remember talking about why I wanted to leave the EU for the same reasons. I don’t even think where I live in rural Derbyshire that our decisions should be made from Westminster, let alone Brussels. They should be made by the people who live in the place. I’m all about decentralisation.

At that time, 2016, you’d had the 2014 raid and massacre in Gaza and the 2015 massacre in Gaza. You’d had two back-to-back, killing thousands of people, leading into Brexit. For the two years before, I’d been raising money for Palestinian charities. There was one particular one I think I raised about £15,000 for. I did a few charity bits and bobs, left my guitar case out at gigs, that kind of thing, and over a period raised a big chunk of cash.

Gareth Icke: During this whole thing I was talking about leaving the EU, and then I saw a post from a friend of mine in London who worked with this charity, a pro-Palestinian guy. He’d gone on this big diatribe about how if you wanted Brexit, if you were voting to leave the EU, you were an Islamophobe, you were this, you were that.

I remember seeing it and thinking of that Ricky Gervais joke, I should have left it. I should have just gone, “Oh, for God’s sake,” and kept scrolling. But I didn’t. I replied, “Mate, I’m massively against the EU. I want us to vote to leave the EU. I just sent you £15,000 for Gaza. There are Christians there, but they’re overwhelmingly Muslims. Am I an Islamophobe then?”

He replied, “Well, by very definition, yes.”

Timothy Allen: Oh God.

Gareth Icke: I remember writing back, “I am the shittest Islamophobe ever. Can I have the money back? Fifteen grand. I want to give it to somebody who appreciates it.” It was just idiocy. Everyone lost their minds. Then they lost their minds again during COVID. Then when Putin cured COVID by going into Ukraine, they lost their minds all over again. You see people come back, “Oh mate, I was crazy for a bit,” and then the next crisis happens and they’re off again.

Timothy Allen: After COVID, I swore no PSYOP would work on me again. Even I was feeling a little bit at the beginning, is this really that bad? I remember tentatively writing something publicly on social media about the fact that I thought closing down small shops was completely idiotic, but I was really thinking, God, what is everyone going to say about this? Which is bizarre now when you look back in hindsight. It’s crystal clear what was right and wrong back then. It’s so clear.

Gareth Icke: I had an issue with it from the beginning, so I didn’t go along with it from the beginning. But I very much had an attitude of, if you’re frightened, do what you feel is right for you, fine. I don’t think any of it should be coming from the state. But if you want to shut down your business and stay home, fill your boots, mate.

It was funny because I was saying, if you’re worried about getting ill, start with your immune system, boost your immune system, vitamin D and whatever. I remember that got fact-checked on Instagram. I was like, if we’re at a point where we’re fact-checking vitamin D, then this is clearly a psyop. I vocalised from the start that this doesn’t make sense, this doesn’t add up, this is nonsense. It went on and on, and I was looking at people I thought were relatively on the ball, and they just went hook, line and sinker. They fell for it completely, and then became aggressive against anyone who didn’t believe it. It was very strange.

Timothy Allen: The simple solution to that whole pandemic was something that works in life in general, which is, if you take responsibility for yourself, you’re good. The classic in COVID was, all right, are you scared of getting COVID? Cool. Stay at home. Obviously don’t make Gareth stay at home. He’s not scared, he can go out. You stay at home. You live in an age where you can press a button and all your groceries come to your door in five hours.

It’s that simple process of saying, why don’t I do what I want to do and not tell everyone else what to do? That actually works. It works in life in general.

Gareth Icke: It does, yeah. That’s a far-right attitude though, to be fair.

Timothy Allen: Oh yeah, we’re all far right.

Gareth Icke: But I think what they did as a trick was this new term that suddenly appeared, “public health”. Health isn’t public. Health is individual. I don’t have the same health as a 35-stone alcoholic who smokes 40 a day. I don’t have the same health as that guy, but suddenly I do. Suddenly we’ve got a situation where I’m responsible for him and he’s responsible for me. So that whole idea of taking responsibility for yourself is suddenly off the table, because you might not be scared but you’re still killing granny.

Timothy Allen: I think when you go deep on what’s wrong with the current state of the world, you often find yourself there. People have put all their trust, or not even trust, their decision-making choice, elsewhere. They outsource it. They outsource it to the government, which is basically the collective.

I think the big battle, the yin and yang, is collectivism and individualism. It’s a constant battle. You never win. You win individually if you’re an individualist, of course, which I think we probably all are. There’s a bit of collectivist in me, but not much. I mean, you’re a football squad, so you’re a bit of a collectivist. But really, at the end of the day, it works when everyone takes responsibility for themselves. It’s almost like nobody says that anymore. Nobody tells their kids that anymore. Well, not nobody. A lot of people do, actually.

Gareth Icke: Yeah, but I get your point. I think that’s where politics is as well, where everyone’s looking for a saviour. Even those who claim to be, or maybe genuinely believe they’re awake, want Trump to save them, or they want Rupert Lowe to save them, or Nigel Farage, or whoever. They’re still outsourcing. They’re not taking responsibility for themselves.

I understand it. I don’t agree with it, but I get it, because no one wants to build their own house. No one wants to cook their own dinner if they don’t have to. So if I can outsource it to Donald Trump and he can sort all the world’s problems, nice one, mate. It means I don’t have to do anything.

Timothy Allen: Tell me, what is your game plan for life? We’re taking for granted that the panopticon is trying to limit us. I think it’s obvious there’s an undercurrent of control, and control and freedom are battling it out at the moment. What are you doing for freedom, for individual freedom?

Gareth Icke: Well, I don’t comply for a start. That’s my attitude. I question everything. I teach my kids to question everything.

And I also try to find joy. One issue with a lot of people within the freedom movement is that it’s constantly pointing out the problems and what the issues are. I get that. I do it all the time. We have to try to wake people up to what’s going on. But at the same time there are great things happening. There are great people around. Humanity is an incredibly powerful, wonderful thing, and no one focuses on that. They focus on the negative all the time, and that can drag you down.

I look at the way the system’s set up, and it’s set up for you to feel like that, to be angry or disillusioned, apathetic, despondent, depressed, whatever. So I try to find joy and promote joy in stuff, almost as an act of defiance. I try to act in a way that I want the world to be.

You’ll see people saying, “I wish everyone was friendly.” And you look at them and think, you’re a right moody bastard, you’re the least friendly person I know, but you want everyone to be friendly one day. Why don’t you start with yourself today? It might sound like nothing, but say something nice to someone. When your wife comes downstairs, compliment her on something. Hold a door open for someone at Asda. Do something. Say something nice to an elderly pensioner who then goes back to the house and tells her husband, “This lad said this today. That was nice.” They might then be inspired to pass on something else that’s nice. Suddenly you create that whole butterfly effect.

If you want the world to be better, be better. Health is a perfect part of that. It’s in balance. I like pizza and I’ll have a couple of beers after I speak today, but generally I try to look after myself and be healthy because I want the world to be a healthier place. Well, start with yourself then. I want people to be friendly. I want people to be happier. Well, let’s be happy then.

Point stuff out, but at the same time, if everything is negative and everything is bad, you sort of become that. You resonate that negative. My wife will be laughing if she watches this because she thinks I can be a right miserable sod as well, and I can. Everyone can. But overwhelmingly I try to put humour into speeches about stuff that’s not funny, really. The way the world’s going, it’s not great news most of the time.

I think they want us to focus on the negative all the time. I remember when I was a kid, and you’ll remember this, you had a good-news story at the end of the news.

Timothy Allen: “And finally…”

Gareth Icke: Yeah. You don’t have it anymore.

Timothy Allen: No, you’re right.

Gareth Icke: It doesn’t exist anymore. You’d have war in the Middle East, because that’s been going on as long as time, an Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, whatever. Then you’d have your good-news story, then sport before it was political, then the weather before it was, “We’re all gone, climate change.” So it was bad news, bad news, bad news, but also, look at this giant bloody watermelon some guy’s grown. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Brilliant.

They took away the good-news story and I don’t think they did that for no reason. I don’t know whether it’s still going, but I used to get a newspaper called Positive News.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, it’s still a thing, but I think it’s online only now.

Gareth Icke: That would make sense. It was an actual newspaper.

Timothy Allen: I was thinking about something when you said that and I’ve forgotten. Just before I turned the mics on, you were talking about the fact that there’s this fatigue at the moment. No one believes anything.

Gareth Icke: Yeah. Nothing’s true. No one believes anything.

Timothy Allen: Sorry, can I go back? I just remembered what I was thinking. About being positive, creating a positive environment around you and so on. My family come from Kent and I was down there recently. They live near Crowborough. It doesn’t affect them, but a number of people mentioned it while we were down there. There’s a pretty small village there, and an army base, and they basically filled it with a load of migrants. It’s pissed everyone off.

How does that work when you’re trying to compliment your wife when she walks down the stairs, if things like that happen in your life that are so blatant?

Gareth Icke: I get your point. I think you can also have a more hands-on approach to certain things like that, where you withhold taxes. There’s that other element of, if you’re going to make decisions that negatively impact all of us, then I’m not paying for them.

I know people who do that. I know people who do it in terms of the military-industrial complex as well. There’s one guy I interviewed, and I’ve interviewed a couple of people doing this, but one guy in particular in the UK had been getting letters because he’d been withholding tax.

His attitude was, if someone comes up to me and says, “Can you give me £500 so I can go and buy a gun?” and you say, “Yeah, all right,” and give him £500, then he buys a gun and shoots up a shopping centre, the police are knocking on your door because you funded that. You knew what was going to happen. You didn’t fire the bullets, but you’re directly involved. You could end up in prison for that.

He was saying, I’m supposed to pay these taxes, but I need to know these taxes aren’t going to be used to fund what he described as the genocide in Gaza, or sent to Ukraine to drop drone bombs on people. “I just need you to confirm in writing that that’s not where my money’s going, because if it is, then I’m an accessory to that.”

Timothy Allen: What happened?

Gareth Icke: They just left him alone.

Timothy Allen: Did they? HMRC?

Gareth Icke: Yeah. He doesn’t pay. I’ve not caught up with him for probably six months, but when I interviewed him he’d been doing it for a while and he was saying, they just stopped hassling me. And he’s not the only one who’s said that.

Timothy Allen: I have fantasies about doing things like that, but I also know they’ve got much more willpower to ruin my life than I have to stick around and not pay tax.

Gareth Icke: This is the one negative with these people, beings, entities, whatever. They’re freaking organised. I don’t think they’re creative. I think they’re very predictable, which is why lots of people can stand on a stage here at Liberpulco and tell you exactly what’s going to happen in the next six months. They’re very predictable. It’s like watching reruns of Peak Practice. You know what’s going to happen. But they’re very organised.

That’s where I think the freedom movement, for want of a better term, is lacking. It’s not particularly organised. It’s quite chaotic. There are too many egos, for a start, where people want the credit. I couldn’t give a toss. If I came up with a plan and a scheme and someone ran with it, got all the credit and plaudits, and it made my kids’ futures better, fill your boots, mate.

Timothy Allen: But you’re not political, right?

Gareth Icke: No. I take an interest in it because decisions made at the political level, even if they’re made above it but played out at the political level, affect my life and my children’s lives and all of us. So I have an interest in it. I just don’t think it’s a solution. I don’t think politics is a solution.

I don’t think if Rupert Lowe gets in, suddenly everyone’s living in a utopia. That’s not just a dig at him. I could say the same if Jeremy Corbyn comes in with his party or whatever. I don’t believe that’s how it works, because you’re just moving deckchairs around the Titanic. The system as it is is stacked against the people, and I think it has been for centuries.

Timothy Allen: That’s indisputable. I interviewed Lucy Connolly for this podcast and a few other people around that movement. It was pointed out by a number of people that when the government changes, only about 200 people actually change jobs.

Gareth Icke: A hundred per cent. The permanent government is the same.

Timothy Allen: The actual bureaucratic blob is exactly the same. Whilst they’re supposed to be non-partisan, I know the public school boys who work there. They’re all a bit lefty, kind of, but they’re just looking out to keep their jobs. They’ll spend as much money as they can to keep expanding the budgets. It’s a job for them. It’s not necessarily something where they’re hoping to change the world or make it a better place.

Gareth Icke: This is what annoys me. Most people know that, really.

Timothy Allen: I didn’t, actually.

Gareth Icke: But I think most people know the government doesn’t work for them.

Timothy Allen: Right, that’s true.

Gareth Icke: But the next one might. If you went back however many centuries and into some tavern or alehouse in old England and started talking politics, talking about fucking Oliver Cromwell or whatever, they’d all be having the same conversation. They’d still be talking about a tyrannical leader, how there’s a small percentage with all the wealth and how we’re being shit on. You’d be having the same conversation.

It just goes in cycles. This party comes in, they promise X, Y and Z. They come in, they don’t do it. So you think, I’ll punish you by voting you out. I’ll vote the next party in because they’ve promised X, Y and Z. They come in, they don’t do it. You vote them out. I don’t know how long ago it was when the Liberal Democrats were last in government, but since then it’s just been Tories, Labour, Tories, Labour, Tories, Labour. Maybe you get two terms, but normally it’s the same cycle.

Timothy Allen: I’m not a fan of the democratic system. I don’t think it works.

Gareth Icke: I don’t think it’s set up to work.

Timothy Allen: Well, it doesn’t. It definitely always arrives at this. The real red pill is that the democratic system ends up in communism. That’s basically what it does. It causes this cycle of giving people free money, then making them rely on you in exchange for votes. Slowly but surely the productive people get priced out of everything because you’re taking their money to fund the welfare state. In the end, the government owns everything and anyone productive has either left or is in prison.

Gareth Icke: Yeah. The point of the left wing and the right wing, I mean, the Overton window has moved so much the whole thing’s mad. Like you were saying earlier, you’ve not changed. I haven’t either. My views are the same as when I was a teenager, which is, you do you. As long as it doesn’t negatively impact anyone else, do what you like, whatever. That used to be a liberal view, and then suddenly during COVID that became a far-right view.

I went from being a southern softy leftist with long hair, whose nickname when I used to play ice hockey was Swampy, to a far-right extremist with exactly the same views.

Timothy Allen: Swampy? Because you looked like a hippie?

Gareth Icke: Yeah. They used to call me Swampy. I was just a southern softy leftist. And now I get into the Hope not Hate State of Hate, four years running, for being the same bloke with the same views.

Timothy Allen: Just looking at what you’re wearing is such a statement these days.

Gareth Icke: Yeah, that’s part of the reason I do it.

Timothy Allen: Isn’t it mad that something as simple as that, if you go back 50 years, was symbolic of something completely different? Now you look at that and think this bloke’s trying to assert something, he must be a supremacist.

Gareth Icke: Yeah. It’s so strange, the way things have gone. But you have this pendulum all the time. There are so many analogies you can use. They say left wing and right wing, but for me they’re feet more than wings. The left foot comes in, takes a step forward, and people oppose it because they don’t like where that’s leading, this road to dystopia or whatever. Then they bring the right in, but the right is marching the same road. Then you vote that one back in and three or four elections later you’re however many miles down the road. But they’ve both marched you there.

When people talk about mass immigration they’ll say, “Tony Blair opened the gates,” and all the rest of it. No one talks about the Boris wave. He let in probably even more than Blair. It was insane when Boris Johnson was in power.

Timothy Allen: Did I get it right, you’re a bit of a history buff?

Gareth Icke: More industrial history, but I’m open to it.

Timothy Allen: I was just wondering whether, currently, we really do not respect our leaders, but if you go back 100 years or more, you did. I’ll give you an example. I worked at The Independent for seven years and I used to go to Downing Street all the time. Downing Street had the bars at the end of the road and you had to go through a scanner just to stand outside. In the old days you could walk into Whitehall as a member of the public, walk up that road and knock on the door of Downing Street.

Things like that make me feel that in the past there was more accountability, even at that large scale. I agree with you, you want local councillors you can have a word with down the pub and say, come on, do what’s right for all of us. Centralising it in London is a bad idea. But I get the feeling that back in the day, maybe because the country was a bit more unified, there was more accountability, more connection with power.

Gareth Icke: There probably was. They weren’t serving the people or whatever, but they weren’t so obviously serving another master. I don’t think you’d find a former prime minister going back 100 years sitting down in an interview with a journalist and admitting that they would choose Davos over Westminster, like Keir Starmer openly did, and didn’t care.

So I think the whole situation was different. If you go even further back, I don’t think they necessarily respected politicians or royalty, as it was before that. They probably feared it. There was probably more fear. I don’t think people fear authority as much anymore.

Timothy Allen: Do you reckon? I think they do. I saw that a lot during COVID. I lived in a village at the time, I still live in a village but a different one. No one was scared of the police coming if they broke the rules. They weren’t scared of Boris Johnson knocking on the door. They were scared of what the guys down the pub, who they used to knock about with, would say. They were more frightened of whatever Joan would say on the local Facebook group. That’s where the fear was. The fear wasn’t with authority, it was with the people around them and becoming almost a pariah in the community.

Gareth Icke: That is a dangerous situation.

Timothy Allen: Falling out with your neighbours for stupid reasons is a really bad idea. I live in a small community as well. Nobody in one of those communities wants to fall out with anyone, because you have to see them all the time. It’s horrible, unless you’re the kind of person who can make up very well and break bread.

Gareth Icke: Totally. That’s where people were frightened. In my local community there were people terrified not to clap at 8pm because they’d be grilled.

Timothy Allen: That whole thing. Talking about making big subjects funny, that is the single most ridiculous thing that’s ever happened, walking outside your house and banging pots and pans. It’s so useless. It’s so obviously virtue signalling. I’m not going to shit on the boomers, but I do shit on the boomers a lot. It was all the boomers feeling good about themselves. They were at home in jobs that didn’t really need them to go out, going, “Well done, everyone,” then going back inside, drinking wine and watching TV. It was so bad.

Gareth Icke: There was a woman across the road and a couple of doors down from me. I lived in a row of terraced houses. She’d be outside, and I never used to go out for the clapping. She already didn’t like me anyway. She would crane her neck while banging her pots and pans, looking to see who hadn’t come out. “Number 42 hasn’t come out. They might be dead.” It’d be straight on the Facebook thing.

When I realised that, I had some fun. At that time all the gyms were closed, couldn’t play football, couldn’t do any of that, and I wanted to exercise. I was getting bored, stuck at the house or in the garden, so I’d take myself out for runs. I’ll be honest, I hate running. I’ll run 15k on a football pitch all day long, but if it’s a straight run I get bored.

Timothy Allen: Me too.

Gareth Icke: I was doing these 10k runs every couple of days, quite a leisurely pace, about 55 minutes. Then it got to Thursday and I said to my wife, “I’m going to go out about five past seven today.” She was like, “Why have you picked a specific time?” I said, “You’ll see.”

So I went off. It comes to about a minute to eight and I’m coming round the corner of Chapel Street, the end of the street I lived on at the time. I came running down and they all came out. I put my arms out and did a little sprint finish. There’s a guy who lived across the road from me crying, howling. A couple of people started laughing. Crane-neck’s face was like thunder.

I just thought, I’m going to mock it. I’m not going to say, “Get back in your house, you divs.” I’m just taking the piss.

Timothy Allen: It was quite primordial. It reminds me of Monty Python. “Shame.”

Gareth Icke: A hundred per cent.

Timothy Allen: “Shame.” It really was an archetypal response. Bizarre.

Gareth Icke: It was a strange time.

Timothy Allen: Coupled with the arrows on the floor of the supermarket.

Gareth Icke: Yeah. Sometimes they’re still there now, which is crazy.

Timothy Allen: Extraordinary. What do you think the next PSYOP is going to be then? Are there going to be things on that kind of scale? Are we in them now?

Gareth Icke: I’m waiting for the aliens, mate. I’ve been waiting for the aliens for a long time. The more supposed disclosure that comes out, the more I think, actually, we could be onto the aliens now. Then it seems to go quiet again for a bit. But I wonder if that’s just laying the groundwork, feeding you little bits of it so that when they do the great big thing it’s not a, “What?” It’s already there in the subconscious that there’s something coming.

Timothy Allen: I think it already is, like you say. It’s much more normal to believe in that stuff now.

Gareth Icke: Yeah. In terms of how you could do something like that, you can back-engineer stuff, of course, if there are genuine ships that have been here. But at the same time, with the use of technology and holographics and all the rest of it, I remember watching a video of Tupac singing at a music festival about 30 years after he was dead, and it looks real. So you could create this War of the Worlds thing, which would then lead to lockdowns. You could do anything with that.

What I find funny is the so-called conspiratorial types, the tinfoil-hat maniacs that we all get called, have spent decades having conferences and making videos about ancient aliens and talking about the fact that aliens exist. All the normies have been going, “You’re a bunch of nutters.” If it happens, all the normies will be going, “Oh my God, the aliens are coming,” and all the conspiracy theorists will be going, “No, no, they’re not. It’s a scam.” I can just see how that’s going to flip.

Timothy Allen: The funny thing, if I look back, when I was reading your dad’s books and going to festivals, I had long hair and I was exploring all those kinds of things. The one thing that was definitely a part of those ideas was the mark of the beast, the digital panopticon, the matrix, all that. That was the thing.

That is the one that’s come to the forefront, and it’s quite remarkable. Like I said earlier, I could understand it back in the day, but I couldn’t visualise it. Now I can fucking visualise it. It’s really happening. There was never a good outcome from that. It was always a warning, “This is going to happen if you’re not careful.” And it’s like, okay, it’s happened, and it’s going to get worse. So what do you do?

In my case I try everything I can not to be a part of it. I use certain hardware. I use certain operating systems. I make their lives difficult. I live on the frontier, on the edges, on purpose. But most people don’t.

Gareth Icke: No, most people don’t. I think in the end, and I’ve heard a couple of people talking about this over the weekend, instead of trying to get the system to stop doing what it’s doing, saying, “Please can everyone just stop it,” you just go, well, we’ll create our own then.

Rather than trying to get them to be nice, because that’s not going to happen, you say, “We’re going to create our own system.” If there are enough people who buy into it, that can grow and grow.

I’m already seeing that in certain parts of the UK in terms of homestead communities and things like that. They’re a lot more organised than they used to be. A homestead community would generally be one hippie couple, the wife had hairy armpits and the kids were quite dysfunctional, and they’d grow their own food. Whereas now these are whole movements of people who buy up land and live together. They’re people like us, for want of a better term, just regular folk who have identified that we’re on a collision course here.

I can sit in the car screaming at the driver to put the brakes on when he’s probably not going to, or I can jump out the next time there’s an opportunity.

Timothy Allen: The only problem I see with that idea is that you create a two-tier society. You have to, by definition, because you can’t interact with the panopticon without basically using their apps, using their “computer says no” systems. Is that even going to be allowed? If you’re a community in Berkshire living off-grid, which you may not want to be anyway, you may want a much more modern life, someone’s going to come and knock on your door, or you’re going to have to fill in some form online at HMRC.

Gareth Icke: That’s where it becomes a numbers game. I’ve always felt that. Take the COVID protest movement as an example. When we were in Leeds and Sheffield and there were more coppers than people, there might be 50 of us or whatever, nothing was changing. The coppers were just arresting people. They didn’t care.

Then once you got to the numbers they got to in London, suddenly the police were stepping aside and letting people through. It was quite a simple visual representation of what happens when enough people come together.

The one thing that pissed me off about that whole COVID thing was, if in March 2020 people had just said no, “We’re going to shut down your business.” “No, you’re not,” it would have ended in March 2020. It took a year, two years, for people to go, this is hell, I don’t want to be in hell, I’m resisting. When they resisted, then they fought back.

The way I’m looking at the world, particularly in the West, they’re creating situations where people have now got nothing to lose, sometimes literally nothing to lose, financially nothing to lose. When people have got something to cling on to, even if it’s just that much water in the bottom of a bottle, they’ll shut their mouths overwhelmingly and say, just leave me alone and let me have my little bottle, please.

Once that’s gone, normally as a result of stuff getting worse, you’ve got nothing to protect. You may as well have it, then. You may as well fight back. It’s like if you’ve got a couple of lads chasing you. As long as you think you can get away, you’ll run. Probably the right decision, leg it. But then you hit the ravine, and if you take another step you’re over the edge. You turn around and they’re still coming. Well, now what? You might as well start throwing haymakers because you’re dead either way.

Timothy Allen: Out of interest, you may not even know this, what does your dad think about the solution to this? Like I say, I haven’t clocked in for 20 years probably on all that stuff. What’s his solution?

Gareth Icke: His solution has always been the same. It’s individual. It’s for the individual to stand up. No fake saviours, none of that stuff. You need to take responsibility for yourself and for your own life. Peaceful non-compliance has always been his position.

Timothy Allen: And that’s yours as well?

Gareth Icke: Yeah, yeah, a hundred per cent. To just say no. It’s the most important word in the English language, and it has been for a long time now.

Timothy Allen: Would you risk getting put away, taken away from your family? These are the real-life scenarios you find yourself in. If you really want to do this, are you prepared to, like Lucy Connolly, do 13 months in prison?

Gareth Icke: This is how I look at it. I never say stuff or do stuff for effect. If I say something, whether you think I’m an idiot or not, it’s because I genuinely believe it. My thing is always to be authentic, whether people like you or not. Say what you believe to be true.

If me being authentic means I spend 13 months in prison, 13 months away from my kids, which would be hell on earth just thinking about it, if the opposite of that is to be inauthentic, not be who I am, edit who I am at the behest of the state, then I’m already dead. I’m done. That’s the choice for me. It’s not necessarily being dead as in they’ll take my head off, hung, drawn and quartered and all the rest of it, but I would be done as a person, as an individual.

Timothy Allen: But take a decision like this. You feel strongly about something. You have the option to tweet about it or not. If you tweet about it, you know, albeit completely retardedly, someone’s going to come and knock on your door. Do you tweet or not?

Gareth Icke: Yeah, you do tweet. A hundred per cent. I’ve never edited anything if I believe it to be true.

There are certain things I’ve thought and I’ve gone, I think that, but I’m not sure. I don’t think I’ve got it a hundred per cent. I might be slightly wrong about that.

Timothy Allen: So you don’t, you mean?

Gareth Icke: Yeah. I’ll think. Sometimes I am wrong and I go, fucking God, I’m glad I didn’t say that, because I’ve found out a bunch of stuff since and, okay, maybe that muddies the water. Whereas a lot of the time I’ll find more bits of information and go, I know I was right. Say it, and let the chips fall where they may.

Timothy Allen: Have you ever had any problems?

Gareth Icke: During COVID my kid got kicked out of nursery because I gave a speech in London.

Timothy Allen: Really? Nothing to do with the fact they thought she might not be vaccinated or something like that?

Gareth Icke: No. They basically said she needed to not come in, I think for a month, because I wouldn’t have been socially distancing and all this kind of stuff. I just went, no, she won’t be back, thanks.

Then I had people phone child services on me twice, and once social services turned up at the house, which was horrendous.

Timothy Allen: People in the local community, or someone online?

Gareth Icke: Online. They proved that in the end because when one of them phoned up they said, “He lives in Derbyshire, I’m a neighbour.” They went, “Whereabouts in Derbyshire?” and they didn’t know, because they’re not my neighbour. It was that I was a danger to my kids because of my anti-vax views and all the rest of it.

Timothy Allen: Someone actually turned up at your door?

Gareth Icke: Yeah. That was the worst one because we got a phone call from social services, my wife did, at about half eight at night. The next morning I was going in for groin surgery. This was pre-COVID. I’ve always been outspoken about vaccines anyway, even before COVID.

So I had to go under the knife for my surgery not knowing what I was going to wake up to. I woke up, straight on the phone, and had a message from my wife saying, “They were sound.” They came round, we had a chat. They were more checking up on us to see if we were okay.

Timothy Allen: Really?

Gareth Icke: Yeah. But I remember before the operation, I didn’t know if I was going to wake up and find they’d fucking taken them or whatever. That wasn’t pleasant. But it didn’t shut me up.

Timothy Allen: We’ll finish. I’ll wrap it up now. I want to end on a positive note, or I’m quite interested to hear what you think. How is all this going to pan out over the next few years? It looks like things are getting worse. It looks like the powers that be are getting much worse. I’ve never known this much discontent in my own country. I go down to the pub and it’s palpable.

Gareth Icke: Yeah, it is.

Timothy Allen: There’s no jovial anymore. Not least because it’s six quid a pint as well. The pub isn’t the pub anymore. You don’t go down there all the time. You have to decide which day you’re going to go down.

Gareth Icke: They’re pushing people to despair. It’s what they want. But I also don’t think any of that comes from a position of strength. I’m of the opinion that they’re not as far down the path as they would like to be.

I think they would like for COVID to have carried on longer and caused more economic damage and physical damage and all the rest of it. I think there were a lot more people who said no to the jab than they would ever admit. So I think they’re playing catch-up a bit now, which is why I think they’re out in the open.

You can look at it as though they’re so emboldened they don’t care that we know anymore. Maybe that’s part of it. But if you’ve been running the show from behind the curtain, as we discussed earlier, for centuries, since the dawn of time maybe, and it worked, you could manipulate world wars and achieve your goals to a certain degree, why would you step out from behind the curtain unless you had to?

Now I can put a name to Klaus Schwab. I can point at a person. He won’t be the head of the snake or whatever, but you can name these people and point at them, which you probably couldn’t have done 100 or 200 years ago when these decisions were made, maybe in smoky rooms at Yale University in Skull and Bones or whatever. You didn’t really know who these people were.

If I was behind the curtain and I was manipulating stuff and it was working, unless I had to, why the hell would I step out? I think they’re behind schedule and desperately trying to catch up to get to 2030, which seems to be a massively important year for them. We’re not far away from that now. That’s how I see it, and I think it’s a risk for them.

Timothy Allen: That’s not very positive.

Gareth Icke: It’s not, no. But I am positive, because I think more and more people are seeing through it. There is an awakening happening. For me that is undeniable, as someone who’s grown up around this information from one man in a telephone box, and even he was shouting abuse, to now suddenly being in a position where you’re having these conversations all the time with people who can see it.

Timothy Allen: I agree with that, actually. The average bloke down the pub now understands that the country’s fucked and it’s not good. The people in charge are not good. They’re not doing something right. The problem is they think, for example, Rupert Lowe is going to sort it.

Gareth Icke: There is an element of that. But I also think the biggest realisation that’s probably happened over the last year to 18 months, if not slightly longer, is that the excuse that it’s incompetence has gone.

Timothy Allen: Right.

Gareth Icke: I think that’s why they elevate morons. People like Matt Hancock, he was a moron. Ed Miliband’s a moron. David Lammy, Jesus wept. The guy’s an idiot. My uncle calls him a ten-watt light bulb, and it’s a great description.

So the idea that it’s incompetence, that made sense. He’s an idiot. But now I think over the last little while people are going, no, this is calculated. I think that’s a Rubicon a lot of people didn’t want to cross, whereas now they have crossed it. The immigration, the net zero stuff, the war on farmers, no, this is on purpose.

Timothy Allen: They’re pissing too many people off, is another way of looking at it.

Gareth Icke: Yeah, I think they are. And they’re creating, as we were discussing earlier, more people who don’t have that thing to protect anymore, more people with nothing left to lose. If I was in a boxing match against some guy and found out just before the fight, “You do realise that guy’s lost everything, he’s got nothing left,” shit. I don’t want to fight that dude because he’s just going to go to the end.

Inadvertently, this is what I’m saying, it’s dangerous for them. By coming out into the open and making life so unbearable for everyone, and creating a situation where so many people have nothing, and that’s only going to get worse over the next few months, no doubt, they’re almost building an army of people who are going to stand up against them.

Timothy Allen: I hope so. I don’t want to poo-poo the parade, but when COVID happened and the lockdowns happened, I didn’t necessarily feel like I was standing shoulder to shoulder with brothers and sisters from the word go.

Gareth Icke: No, not from the word go.

Timothy Allen: Even when you look at the movement that came out of it, there were large swathes of the population who didn’t, and still don’t, give a shit about that at all.

Gareth Icke: No, but I think you just need a significant minority to make a big difference. To make a difference in Britain, for instance, you don’t need 70 million people on board.

Think about what was originally called the five million unvaccinated in Britain. “What are we going to do about the five million?” They kept saying it, as if we’d gone back to Nazi Germany all of a sudden. “What are you going to do with them?” Five million was a minority, quite a small minority in terms of the country, but they still stood firm.

Then what changed? I remember a government minister going on, I think it was Good Morning Britain, and they spoke about the 20 million. The presenter never picked them up on it, but I heard it and other people heard it. People went straight on social media saying, “Did you see that? She said 20 million unvaccinated.” She said it again later in the interview, so it wasn’t a slip of the tongue.

All of a sudden everyone went, well, 20 million, we’re still a minority, but we’re a pretty big minority actually. A lot of people who’d probably been wavering suddenly got that little bit of a puffed-out chest. Hang on, I was one of five million, now I’m one of 20. Right, let’s have it. I remember seeing it and thinking she’d said something stupid there, because it inspired a lot of people to hold firm.

Timothy Allen: I feel like I’m still missing something. I hear all this, and I don’t want to drag this on because I know you’ve got to speak. Look, it’s quarter past four. You’ve got time, but I look at the situation and I think it’s inevitable.

All the bad stuff, all the predictions, all the panopticon stuff, I think is going to happen. It’s like an unstoppable force because the incentives of the masses to join in with this stuff are too strong. It’s too easy to slip into that.

Say it’s 20 million, use your example of the people being unvaccinated. I get that those 20 million could live a parallel life. I just can’t visualise it. A bit like I couldn’t visualise what the panopticon looked like 30 years ago, I can’t visualise what the parallel life looks like in terms of how it works on a day-to-day basis. How does it work?

Gareth Icke: Well, I don’t know, is the answer, the honest answer. I don’t know how that works. But necessity is the mother of all invention, right? You have to make it work one way or another. We will make it work.

Timothy Allen: Gareth, mate, thank you for speaking.

Gareth Icke: No, I’ve enjoyed it, mate.

Timothy Allen: I really enjoyed this.

Notes on this transcript

This transcript was produced from the audio recording of the episode. The host’s opening introduction, the sponsor message, the supporter and conference announcements, and the closing remarks about supporting the show have been left out, so the text begins where the conversation itself begins and ends where it ends.

Speaker names are shown in bold. The recording is a two-person conversation between host Timothy Allen and guest Gareth Icke. The source transcript did not include reliable speaker diarisation, so speaker turns were inferred from the flow of the conversation, context, interruptions and repeated references.

The transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words, repeated false starts and verbal tics have been removed, and a small number of overlapping or fragmented exchanges have been smoothed into complete sentences. The wording, meaning, order and character of the conversation have been preserved throughout, including its digressions, interruptions, humour and profanity.

Names, places and specialist terms have been rendered in their standard spellings where they could be identified with reasonable confidence. Among those that appear are: David Icke; Truth Vibrations, The Robots’ Rebellion and Children of the Matrix; Shabana Mahmood; Tony Blair; Patrick Henningsen; Donald Trump; Nigel Farage; Rupert Lowe; Tommy Robinson; Tony Benn; Mark Zuckerberg and Meta; Lucy Connolly; Jeremy Corbyn; Oliver Cromwell; Boris Johnson; Keir Starmer; Klaus Schwab; Matt Hancock; Ed Miliband; David Lammy; Hope not Hate; State of Hate; HMRC; the NHS; Liberpulco; Davos; Skull and Bones; and the digital panopticon.

No independent fact-check has been applied to the substantive claims made during the conversation beyond checking spellings and likely identities of proper nouns. Figures, dates, allegations, medical and public-health claims, political characterisations, historical interpretations, and speculative or conspiracy-related claims are those of the speakers and should not be read as editorial assertions by the Free Cities Foundation.