Ep 399 | Australia Embraced Tyranny During Lockdowns | Guest: Topher Field

Summary

Kibbe on Liberty Ep 399 | “Australia Embraced Tyranny During Lockdowns”
Host: Matt Kibbe
Guest: Topher Field
Date: August 12, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Matt Kibbe has an in-depth conversation with Australian filmmaker and activist Topher Field about the extreme lockdown measures in Melbourne and the state of Victoria during COVID-19. They discuss authoritarian overreach, mass compliance, psychological manipulation, surveillance technology, civil disobedience, and the enduring relevance of limited government principles. Drawing parallels between Australia, the US, and other nations, the discussion explores not only the history and specifics of Australia's experience, but also the global implications of how societies respond to fear-driven state power, the fragility of rights in emergencies, and the necessity of individual courage.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Melbourne’s Lockdown: Authoritarian Excess

• Victorian Lockdowns among the Harshest Globally
  • Topher describes Melbourne as "the most locked down for the longest" during COVID-19 ([01:28], [04:35]).
  • Daniel Andrews, Victoria’s Premier, wielded almost unchecked power, shutting down parliament, deploying military checkpoints, restricting movement to five kilometers from home, and detaining citizens without charge ([02:34], [07:24]).
  • Even outside full lockdown, constant dread reigned; snap announcements could change rules instantly, wreaking havoc on businesses and lives ([07:34]).
  • Memorable quote:
    “We had a thing called the Ring of Steel, where they had military checkpoints around the city that you couldn’t pass through without government approved paperwork...and they would scan number plates...” – Field ([07:24])

Parallels with Totalitarian Regimes

• Kibbe contextualizes the Australian case by recalling a visit to the Stasi Museum, noting chilling similarities in surveillance and social atomization ([01:47], [02:13]).
• Topher frames state-upheld fear as a recurring historical virus, referencing “mass psychosis” phenomena and books like “They Thought They Were Free” ([02:34]).

How Lockdowns Take Root: Incentives, Fear, and Political Competition

• Both speakers highlight maladaptive political incentives:
  • In times of crisis, doing nothing is political suicide; overreaching is safer for politicians ([24:39], [41:02]).
  • Lockdowns, according to Field, may have been motivated by genuine panic at a possibly man-made virus, but quickly devolved into a “pissing contest” of harshness among leaders ([24:41]).
• Quote:
  “The worst atrocities of history are not in our past… The cost of operating a tyranny is now a fraction of what it used to be.” – Field ([43:00])

Surveillance: Technological Authoritarianism

• Both discuss advanced surveillance methods:
  • Facial recognition at protests, number plate tracking, Flock cameras, and the British ULEZ system are dissected ([41:02], [44:00], [53:08], [55:19]).
  • Field gives a stark warning:
    "If someone is building a prison around your house, you don't have to wait until they've shut and locked the gate before you go, Listen, guys, I'm not real happy about this." ([50:31])
• Modern surveillance is transforming the “cost of tyranny”—what once required thousands of human informers can now be done with software ([43:00]).

Civil Disobedience, The “Asshole's Dilemma,” and the Spirit of Liberty

• Field discusses the importance—and the personal price—of being “the first to say no,” even if it means being labeled an outlier or “asshole” ([66:58], [69:01]).

• The necessity of self-governance, uncomfortable action, and solidarity with imperfect heroes is emphasized.

• Quote:
  “You either have to be willing to go first and be the asshole, or you have to be willing to let someone else and know that they're going to be an asshole and the media will find what they want to find on them.” – Field ([66:59])

• Kibbe adds, humorously yet pointedly,
  "My own stubborn assholeness is sort of my shield. And I wouldn't have been able to do that unless I was willing to say no to really big things at the most uncomfortable moment.” ([70:11])

Lessons & Implications for the US and Beyond

• Kibbe and Field warn that the apparatus and psychology for authoritarian “emergency” responses are now entrenched in Western societies, including the US ([42:45], [43:00], [57:58]).
• The value of constitutional protections is only as strong as their defense by people willing to disobey unjust gains in state power ([46:36], [57:59]).
• The role of Maslow’s hierarchy: Fearful societies can be easily manipulated when obedience brings a fleeting sense of belonging and actualization ([80:01]).

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• Lockdown Severity and Living in Fear
  “For us, those times would go on for months at a time. The whiplash was so extreme...there was this deep anxiety because at any moment...it would all be over.” – Field ([05:34])
• Historical Parallels
  “Everything that the East Germans did, pitting family against family...censorship and bugging...now everything’s gone high tech.” – Kibbe ([02:15])
• Political Incentives
  “There is this overwhelming political incentive…If on the other hand you say we’re going to do something, then you can’t lose…a pissing contest between the countries and then between the states.” – Field ([24:41])
• Self-Governance at Protests
  “We had a couple of guys who basically appointed themselves as interveners…almost every single attempt at violence against the cops was thwarted, almost.” – Field ([19:52])
• Technological Tyranny
  “The cost of operating a tyranny is now a fraction of what it used to be...you cannot escape the gaze of multiple cameras.” – Field ([43:00], [44:00])
• On Surveillance Infrastructure
  “The product isn’t the cameras. The product is the data. And there is the question of who does the data belong to?” – Field ([55:43])
• Civil Disobedience and Personal Cost
  “Standing up for what you know to be right will cost you. That’s why most people don’t do it. But can I say that it rewards you then for the rest of life.” – Field ([71:08])
• Defending Liberty Requires Action
  “None of these things defend themselves. And here’s the way I say it: the limit of the government’s power is defined by the limit of the people’s obedience. And in the end, nothing else.” – Field ([57:59])
• Emotion Drives Compliance
  “If you question the policy decisions, they defend it like their life depends on it. Because actually, it does. They have never felt better. And here’s the thing. They know in their soul they never will again either.” – Field ([80:01])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Matrix of Fear: Parallels to Stasi and historical totalitarianism ([01:47]-[04:35])
• Lockdown mechanics, "Ring of Steel," police powers, and business destruction ([07:24])
• Role of technology and fear in enforcing compliance ([09:54]-[12:53])
• Origin theories of lockdowns, lab leak vs. emulating China ([16:44]-[24:41])
• Protest tactics, self-policing, and police provocateurs ([19:52]-[24:39])
• Surveillance State: from China to US/UK/Australia, rise of Flock/ULEZ ([41:02]-[56:18])
• Foundational American/Australian principles and the reality of limited government ([57:59]-[64:59])
• Civil disobedience, first-mover disadvantage, and the necessity of courage ([66:58]-[72:08])
• Emotional value of belonging under lockdown, Maslow’s hierarchy and manipulation ([80:01]-[82:52])

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Additional Resources & Where to Find Topher Field

• Documentary “Battleground Melbourne” and a highly recommended 45-minute keynote interweaving protestor stories:
  topherfield.com → Documentary Tab ([71:08])
• Books:
  • “Good People Break Bad Laws”
  • “Good Christians Break Bad Laws” (theological perspective on civil disobedience)
    Both available on Amazon. ([77:57])
• Find civil liberties and anti-authoritarian resources: freethepeople.org

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Final Thoughts

The episode is a compelling, sometimes chilling meditation on how societies—through fear, technology, and trust in authority—can slide toward totalitarianism even in countries once renowned for freedom. The conversation stresses the enduring necessity of civil disobedience, solidarity, and the courage to resist, warning that the "hour is later than you think," and the digital tools of oppression are vastly more powerful and accessible than in the past.

Essential Message:
Liberty is not self-executing; it requires ordinary people—often dismissed or vilified—to risk comfort and reputation by drawing the line. The tools of tyranny are now cheap, efficient, and easily normalized. “We need to be more like the original America, not like Australia, not like Europe...you’ve got a limited window of time to make that happen before that trap gets sprung.” – Field ([64:59])

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. I'm talking to Topher Field in Australia, who is a leader fighting against the authoritarian lockdowns in Melbourne in the state of Victoria. We talk about the apparatus of control and dominance that they used in Australia and why that same apparatus is being built in the United States as we speak. AKA flock cameras and other surveillance tools. Check it out. Welcome to kibby on liberty. Topher, Good to see you.

[B]

Well, good to be here. And thank you very much for the invitation.

[A]

Yeah. I've been. Our mutual friend, Spike Cohen connected us, but you may or may not know that I've been looking for someone to speak to from either Australia or New Zealand. Yeah. About lockdown authoritarianism.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because I've been obsessed with this since March of 2020.

[B]

Well, you guys had it here as well, and parts of the US got pretty bad. But as far as I'm aware, no one got as deep or went for as long as what we did in Melbourne, Australia. I'm led to believe we were the most locked down for the longest.

[A]

Yeah, I think that's true. And I just watched your documentary, Battleground Melbourne.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it's shocking the levels of power that Dan Andrews had. And I want to go back and look at it because I'm watching your film and I just happen to have been at the Stasi Museum by the Berlin Wall in East Germany. And my wife and I, Terry, we left the museum and almost simultaneously said, we're not paranoid enough.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because everything that the East Germans did, pitting family against family, husband against wife, certainly citizens against citizens, you know, they didn't have the same tech we have now, but there was all sorts of censorship and bugging and now everything's gone high tech.

[B]

Well, you know, it's quite incredible because people say, oh, you can't compare Covid to Nazi Germany. That's just. Or post war Germany, et cetera, the ussr, you can't make any comparisons to these things. And my response is, well, having. Having read the book they Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer, who was a German Jewish American who was in America during the war. And he was sent by, I think the University of Chicago to Germany about a year after the war, was very shortly after the war ended. And he spent a year in a university town and his job, he had a cover story, but his job was to meet Nazis. His job. Not the Hermann Gorings and the Goebbels and, you know, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. That's. That was his job. And to get inside their heads and understand what did they think they were a part of, what did they believe they were doing when they were dobbing people in and. And so forth. It's an incredible book. But what was haunting was as I was reading it, I realized if you updated the language slightly and normalized the names and places to Australia, the story being told was exactly the story of, of the lockdown paranoia, the fear driven lockdown paranoia. And people forget that even in times, or certainly in the times of the ussr but even in pre war Germany, before there was a war to be fought, there was othering, there was ostracization, there was fear and actually fear of disease. A typhus epidemic was being blamed on Jewish people. And that was the reason why the segregation was, was being justified. And this fear driven mind virus, there was a term that was coined for mass psychosis sort of came out as a term. Maybe it pre existed that, but that's what was the first I'd heard of it. This is a repeating pattern. And this is why I'm grateful that there are people who still want to talk about what happened during COVID Not so we can dwell in the past, but for exactly the reason you describe. They are developing better and better technology and our capacity to deal with fear is not improving. And so the next time they drive a fear narrative into us, they're going to have even more capability for tyranny of unimaginable kinds.

[A]

So if you're claiming the dubious prize of being the most locked down, I feel like we have some competitors in the United States and the. Now this, this discredited Andrew Cuomo in New York City also did these daily briefings.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

My, my personal theory is that the reason that, that Donald Trump platformed Anthony Fauci was ratings.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

He wanted a TV show just as cool as Andrew Cuomo. And I think they started compet other. But here in D.C. we, we lock down pretty hard. I am a member of the media, so I got a letter from Blaze TV's lawyer.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That would let me cross state borders.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So the same, the same model.

[B]

Yeah. You're essential or you're not essential.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Etc. Yeah.

[A]

And you know, we, at, at certain times we were not allowed to leave our homes. Yeah, but you guys did it for us.

[B]

For us. Those times would go on for months at a time. The whiplash was so extreme. We, we did have moments. So it went for over 570 days in all. And we did have moments where relatively speaking, the restrictions were quite minor. It wasn't as though it was this monolith of time. However, there was this deep anxiety because at any moment in time, the TV could. Could switch across to a sudden press conference and it would all be over, literally. They. Daniel Andrews would come on and announce, oh, we've had three cases in the state, or five cases. They were. They were reacting to just the most minuscule numbers and would announce a lockdown. He did that for February 14, 2021. We'd been in a period of over Christmas. That's our summer. And over Christmas, actually, things have been kind of okay, ironically, because Daniel Andrews himself had been injured in what he calls a fall. What the conspiracy theorists say he probably got the crap beat out of him from. For political reasons. He's a very, very interesting man, and we can. We can come to how compromised he is with the Chinese Communist Party, if you'd like to a little bit later on. But whatever happened, he spent time in hospital, and all of a sudden we had a breather. The. The lockdowns actually eased mysteriously while he was. Was not in the big chair. And then he came back into the big chair and there were a handful of cases. And all of a sudden he announced a lockdown for that evening. And this was February 13th. And of course, Valentine's Day is the very next day in Australia. I don't know when it is here. And so all of these shops that had been bleeding cash for a year, all of these cafes and restaurants, the florists, everyone that had been just barely hanging on by their fingernails, had geared up for one good day. Finally, we're gonna, you know, we're gonna make some money. We're gonna make it. And then all of a sudden, everything. Heartless, harsh lockdown. No. No one goes anywhere. And that was a breaking point for a lot of people. So even when we weren't in the lockdowns, we were on tenterhooks the whole. The whole time.

[A]

There's no way to plan around that. Which is what destroyed all the businesses.

[B]

Yes. And people. People couldn't get married when people died. Only a handful of people couldn't attend their funerals. And I know you guys had a lot of that sort of stuff as well, but we had a thing called the Ring of Steel, where they had military checkpoints around the city that you couldn't pass through without government approved paperwork. You weren't allowed to be more than five kilometers from your home. That's three and a half miles, roughly. You had to have paperwork, and they would scan number plates and they'd pull you over if that. If your home address came up as too far and you had to have, you know, papers, please. They were just doing this unironically, with no sense of historical context for this at all. We. They actually shut down the parliament. We didn't even do that during World War II. So there was no oversight. There was a disaster declaration, which is the highest level, and it gave the premier, you call it a governor, but our state premier in Victoria, my home state, my former home state, just dictatorial powers and the ability to just arrest and detain people, really without charge. And then the police themselves, they were tasked with shutting down protests, people like me. And they came in with incredible escalating levels of violence over time, because it was embarrassing to Daniel Andrews, the premier, that we kept on having successful protests and his ego, I believe, was driving his anger directed at the police. And then the police are saying, well, we need to do something about this. And the violence escalated to the point that we had armored cars driving down the streets, we had mass shootings with rubber bullets, we had mass arrests of hundreds of people at a time when they figured out who was organizing the protest. To be clear, I wasn't an organiser, I was a mouthpiece. I was a. I was an interface with the public. But I was very careful not to organize because that would have put me at the top of the list for arrest and then my voice would have been silenced. There were incredible people who stepped up and took those risks and then they'd get taken out, often very violently arrested, Shoulders popped out of joint, bones broken on purpose, that kind of thing. Door beaten down at 4 o' clock in the morning. It was that kind of an arrest situation. And then the amazing thing, and you would have seen this in my documentary, and it's still almost brings me to tears to this day, every single time they did that to the current crop of amazing people that were organizing things, other people just stepped in and filled those gaps and essentially volunteered to be next. And it was the most amazing thing. It was a very small movement to begin with. We grew into a very large movement. I have the privilege of being kind of a spokesperson for it, I guess, because I directed the documentary and I was there from the start and I was there all the way to the end, but it's actually not about me at all. It was the invisible hand, is what it was from an economic point of view. The invisible hand, we know what that is. It also works at a social level and I got a front row seat of watching it happen.

[A]

That's why the censorship Industrial complex has tried to control the social media narrative because those are the tools that people use to organize. I have to say that as someone that I think I wrote my first piece against lockdowns. March 12th, 13th, 14th, whatever that day was when Trump said, we're going to have to do this. As an economist, I'm thinking about it. As an economist, I'm like, if you actually prevent people from leaving their homes, it'll be a catastrophe for people at the margin. Specifically, and only later did we all have to become amateur epidemiologists and peeling out back the onion because we're all like, what just happened? All of these pretenses of, of liberal democracy. Liberal in the. Do you guys use liberal? How do you.

[B]

What's your. So this is incredibly confusing because there are three uses of the word liberal. There's liberal as in a progressive. There's liberal as in a traditional liberal, a small L sort of liberal as in liberation, freedom. And then there's how we use it in Australia, which we have our Liberal Party because they were meant to be our more conservative one, but they are certainly not a Freedom Party, but neither are they progressive. So it gets even more confusing. So I tend to. I've moved because I speak internationally. I'm trying to figure out what language can I use that makes sense everywhere. So I tend to go with progressive. And I haven't settled on the right term for. For. I mean, libertarian, obviously, that's what I am. But when I'm talking more broadly about the right, which I don't like as a term either, I really haven't found a term.

[A]

And, and classical liberal is confusing, but people don't understand. But you know, when the. And the left, I think, has coined this term liberal democracy to mean something approximating the rule of law and the fact that. That individuals have. Have rights and they. They vote for their governance and they have some control.

[B]

But that's, that's. If I may borrow their sort of terminology, that's problematic in America because you're not a democracy, you're a republic.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So again, it's kind of. It just doesn't. I'm trying. I've adjusted my accent to be as understandable across the Anglosphere as possible because I talk very fast. So I didn't want to sound like an Australian, sound like an Aussie all the time because then a lot of people can't understand what I'm saying. So I want to sound. I can talk faster.

[A]

We all saw Crocodile Dundee.

[B]

Yeah, that's right.

[A]

We're pretty fluent.

[B]

But also then the actual nomenclature that I use, I'm trying to do the same thing. And this is a tricky, that's a

[A]

tricky one and that gets to context. You know, obviously Americans, a lot of us have been radically red pilled by how leaky our constitutional protections are in a state of emergency. But just as quickly as possible explain the city of Melbourne, the state of Victoria, the country of Australia. And you mentioned, I think one of the answers. But why did Andrews have so much power to do whatever he wanted?

[B]

So there's a lot there but I'll blast through it very quickly. Melbourne city is the southernmost mainland city in Australia. It was my home since I was two years old. Beautiful city, four and a half million people set in the state of Victoria, which is about 6 million people. I would describe us though as the California of Australia just without the weather. So take California and make it worse. That's, that's Victoria. But it is, it's a genuinely, it's a beautiful city in the summer, especially vibrant sports culture, vibrant arts culture. It has a lot of the upsides that can come with a lot of this sort of progressive politics. Really good coffee, for example, really vibrant art scene. And when I grew up, it really was. You won the lottery to be born in Australia when I was born there. And to be fair, that's still true to this day, but not as true as what it was. Similar to being born in America is winning the lottery. But again you've got some challenges ahead of you where maybe that won't be as true in the future as what it has been. And that's, that's, I'm sure what we'll, we'll be talking about. But the city itself, it became a one party state. That's the main area where I mean it's like California. And this funny thing happens if you have at least two different parties who viably could win power in any kind of, whether it's a democratic system, a Republican system, any voting based system. They have to appeal to the swing voters, the people who could change their minds. In between they're being pulled towards some sort of center. Whether that center is the center or not, of course changes. But they're being pulled towards somewhat the centre. As soon as one side is confident of victory. The only question is who gets to climb to the top of their greasy pole. And that's no longer about appealing to the center of the population. That's about appealing to the most extreme people within their own party. And so Victoria becoming a one party state, which. Which happened, you know, approximately in the year 2000, shortly after round about the year 2000. That then meant that for the last two decades, we'd been feeding this feedback loop of who can be more extreme within the Labor Party. That's our. That's our Democratic Party. Who could be more extreme. Now, we also know that. That sociopaths and psychopaths exist. They're a relatively small percentage, but really enough that we come across them from time to time in life, and we know that they excel in environments like politics and the top end of the corporate world. These are the two. These are two areas where they really do do very well, and it plays to their. Their skill set, their particular psychology makes them very successful in those environments. So I've read, and I cannot verify, but I've read that something like 1 in 100 people will have psychopathy or sociopathy. And about 1 in 25 people who get towards the top of politics or the top of the corporate world will be that profile. They will be overrepresented in those numbers. And I'm sincere when I say this. This is not a pejorative, throwaway line. I sincerely believe that this Daniel Andrews is a psychopath. I genuinely believe that that's the case. Now, one little interesting note on him for anyone that thinks, oh, well, you know, whatever. You remember Xi Jinping not long ago, had a bunch of world leaders come to China. We had. We had Putin, we had Kim Jong Un. We had a bunch of people, they came to China, I assume that would have made news here in the US and he rolled out the red carpet and did all the meetings and everything else. And then they did this thing that in Australia we call the family photo. And it's this big photo of all the world leaders. And Xi Jinping's in the front and Putin's next to him and Kim Jong Un and everyone else. If you get that photo in the top right, there's a little face strategically positioned, I think, so that it can be erased easily later. That's my sneaking suspicion. But he's popping out the top of the photo there. That's Daniel Andrews. He was the former state premier of an Australian state. Everyone else in that photo was either a current head of a country or the wife of a current head of a country. He. He doesn't belong in that photo. There is no sensible justification for him to be there. But he's there. Now, make of that what you will, but there was something going on with that man and what he was doing while he was in power. That meant that he was able to get himself into that photo.

[A]

Yeah, a hero of the revolution, something. And this, this begs a question I've been asking almost from day one. Where did lockdowns come from? And there's. There's two theories that, that may be quite, unfortunately quite symbiotic. One, one, and this is Jay Bhattacharya who's been on the show many times and he's featured in my, my series on the COVID up itself. Yeah, he thinks out of desperation. A lot of these countries embrace the Chinese model which, which was early and horrific and welding people into their apartment buildings. You had something quite similar.

[B]

I will credit China. They didn't do it till after we had already eased up and we were most of the way through. But I will credit China with coming up with the idea of welding people's doors shut. Daniel Andrews didn't come up with that one. We didn't, we didn't quite have that. What we did have was things like curfews and people being arrested for taking their bin out to the curb at 8 o' clock in the evening. We had people being arrested for sitting on park benches. So you were locked in your house for 23 hours a day. You were allowed out for one hour, but you still had to have an excuse. There had to be a reason why you were out of the house. One of the acceptable excuses was exercise, but you had to be actively exercising. And people who literally stopped and sat on a park bench, elderly people, would go shuffling down the street and sit on a park bench before shuffling back again. They were getting arrested so they didn't need to weld our doors shut. They just created such an atmosphere of fear. They shut down the playgrounds. And my kids have never played in more playgrounds than what they did during lockdowns. When the playgrounds were closed. I made a point of it and I would go from one. So I would go to a playground, wait till someone started shouting at me. That's not verbally abusing me. Even though my kids are right there. I'm like, oh, time to move on to the next playground. We just go to the next one. And twice I saw the cops arrive and, and then just choose not to. Not to even get out of the car and interfere with me. But many, many people abused me early on for daring, for being so irresponsible. And then actually in the second half, once this had dragged on for over a year, the people from the houses that have been shouting at me began to come out and join me. And it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, barring the best day of my life, which happens at the end of the documentary or close to it, and to have these people come out and shake my hand and just be like, hey, yeah, sorry, can my kid play with your kid? Yeah, you know, it was just one of the most beautiful things.

[A]

Not sure we ever got there here.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

One of my gravest disappointments as a former Tea Party organizer. I thought in March, Certainly April of 2020, people were going to start showing up Tea Party style and protest. And I don't think we ever saw it. I mean, obviously there was a large subversive community speaking up, but we never gathered. And there's something about gathering that creates a real dilemma for authoritarians. Because the visual.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Shown throughout your film of. Of arresting grandmothers and throwing people to the ground and dragging them off and.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, just for speaking. Yeah. Peacefully. Like, I didn't see any violence. Did you ever. Did you ever have.

[B]

So there's two things I want to come back to. So can we put a pin in where did the lockdowns come from? I want to come back to that. I want to put a pin in the value of gathering. But to answer your question directly, the, the violence, we certainly had some people who tried to join our ranks and cause trouble. That happens all the time. There are, especially in a progressive state like Victoria, there are people that are just looking for a fight with the cops, and they're usually jumping on every single left wing cause because they're the people that are normally out there protesting, but they actually don't care. The minute there's a protest and there's a chance to have a fight with a cop, they're going to get in there. So what happened was we had a couple of guys, and this is the invisible hand at work. Everyone spotting their own problem and going, I think I can help with that. We had a couple of guys who basically appointed themselves as interveners, and so they were on our side. They were part of our movement, but they would be right up there where the cops were, but not facing the cops. They'd be looking into our group to find those. It'd be. It'd be one or two in a day, but the media were waiting for them to do their thing.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so they'd see someone coming forward with their hand inside a backpack or these sorts of things, and they'd just be in and like, grab. Let's get back into the crowd. Let's Have a talk about this. Let's, you know. And, and so almost every single attempt at violence against the cops was thwarted, almost.

[A]

So self governance.

[B]

Correct. Now what's incredible is there's one particular guy who's, who's worthy of a shout out. Matt Lawson. There's actually, there's a lot of people worthy of a shout out and I won't, I won't be able to do all of them. I'm sorry. But Matt Lawson, he was one of these self appointed peacemakers and this had been going on now for long enough by the time this incident happened that the police knew who he was and they knew that he was okay. And so he was actually able to get quite close to the cops in order to be able to better see us and, and, and see what's going on. And a lot of the cops knew who he was, but what happened was so he'd, he'd intervened on behalf of the police and literally protecting police multiple, multiple times, many times over the journey of, of a year and, year and a quarter by the time this happened. But the police were rolling out escalating violence and escalating weapons systems. And this was when they brought out the, the armored cars were still a couple of weeks away, but they brought out the, the rubber bullets for, for the first time. Now the way it works is different officers are trained on different devices. So when they roll out the rubber bullets, there's a whole bunch of new officers who haven't been a part of these protests up to this point in time. So they don't understand the dynamic. They don't understand that we're self policing. They don't understand that we have amazing people like Matt Lawson who's willing to put himself on the line for their sakes. And when he's out there and he, you know, he chats with some of the cops and he sees this guy with this massive barrel thing. He says, what's that? What's that? You're not going to use that. And then he ended up being the first guy to get shot. They shot him right in the abdomen with that rubber bullet. Now the thing with the rubber bullet is the blunt force trauma is especially, I mean they were not quite Udemy, but it was maybe double Udemy was the range at which he was shot. It was a direct hit into. And if it got him a bit higher, I dread to think what might have happened if it had shattered his face.

[A]

Could easily be deadly.

[B]

Correct? Yeah. People are killed by rubber bullets. He lost four internal organs because the blunt Force trauma. The liquefaction of the cells in his abdomen as a result of that impact then caused just a cascade of organ failures and so forth and two years of surgeries. And I know he won't mind me saying that he's been on a long, slow recovery mentally as well, because that changes you. Now. To his credit, he actually worked with Victoria police to try and make sure that would never happen again, because Victoria police recognized that that was a. That was a wrongful shooting that should never, ever have happened. But that was the level of tension. We were on a hair trigger the whole time. So, yes, now we also had agitators. And I saw one. Sorry, when I say agitators, I mean police officers who were actually pretending to be us. And I saw one on one occasion. It was a complicated day. The armored cars were out. I was trying to link up with the protest. They would dad headed down Swanson street towards ultimately the Shrine, which is where the shooting with the rubber bullets happened. I was trying to link up with them, but there were police everywhere. So I was high tiling it down Elizabeth street, which is parallel, but I couldn't get through because there were too many cops. And I go past two homeless people fighting in the street. It happens. And I ignore them and just keep going because I'm focused on my mission. And behind me, I hear a voice that isn't one of them. And I turned around, and there was a very, very tall guy who I recognized. He'd been a part of our protest crowd quite a lot. Very tall guy dressed in high vis clothing, looking the part. And he's pulled a badge on them and said, I'm a cop. F off, you know, stop your fighting, blah, blah, blah. And I was actually live streaming at the time, but I didn't get the camera whipped around fast enough to catch the badge. I got him, but I never got the badge. And that for me was. We knew that there were, but I literally saw with my own eyes a. A police officer who was pretending to be one of us. And we know that some of them. I don't think him individually, but we know that some of them were also instigators and troublemakers, and they would just always happen to cause their trouble right where the cameras were and. And that sort of thing was going on. But I want to rewind for a moment.

[A]

People will recognize this tactic. This is something that our government.

[B]

I mean, January 6th, I think, unquestionable. Now, we now know there's plenty of evidence. So you asked earlier, where did the Lockdowns come from. I heard a theory which I found interesting at the time and then I actually chatted with Senator Rand. Paul. Paul at Freedom Fest the other, the other week and he actually brought it up. I, I didn't. The theory that the reason why the Anglosphere reacted so harshly and so quickly is because they knew it was a lab leak of a man modified virus and not something that had come from a, a wet market right from the get go. And I find that quite a compelling framing to explain what happened and why. We saw Boris Johnson in the UK try and take a bit of a measured approach and then he capitulated and all of a sudden went all the way the other way. Why? In Australia, each state was different, but certainly we had a spineless Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, Scotty from marketing we used to call him, an empty suit of a man. And he shut down the borders. He locked Australians out of Australia. You think what you want of citizenship and the, the, what do you call it? The, the, the, the bargain of, what's what's it called? The social contract. Say what you will of that, but if your own country can lock you as a citizen out of your own country, there's something, something's gone pretty fundamentally wrong there. Why did these English speaking countries, New Zealand played, tried to play fortress, New Zealand shut its borders completely. What if it's because they knew from the get go that this was not a naturally occurring virus and they actually believed it was far worse than what it proved to be? Now it proved to be pretty significant in viral terms, but not outside of the range of what we have seen naturally occurring. But what if they were sitting there going, this is a bioweapon on the loose. That for me goes a long way to explaining the overreaction. But then the political incentives kick in. And I covered this in my first book, Good People Break Bad Laws, where I talk about the perverse incentives of politics and the do something reflex. If you're a politician and there's fear, if you say, listen guys, let's just wait and see, you cannot win. If it turns out you were right and you should wait and see, you will never get credit. If it turns out you were wrong and you should have done something, your career is over, you'll be pillared forever. If on the other hand you say we're going to do something, then you can't lose because if it turns out to be a nothing burger, you can claim credit. Well, that's because we took to decisive action. If it turns out to be really super serious. And even if what you did didn't help at all, you go, can you imagine how much worse this would have been if it weren't for what we did? So there is this overwhelming political incentive. And of course all the advisors around the politicians have an incentive to feed the politicians egos and to tell them to do the politically convenient thing, not the right thing. And so you end up with this bubble where very quickly everyone from the barista through to the advisors through to the politicians themselves are all in fear. Agreement, we have to do something. And then the only remaining risk is what if someone else has done more than me? And so you end up with this pissing contest between the countries and then between the states. And we had a pissing contest in Australia and Daniel Andrews was determined to win that pissing contest. No one was going to outdo him with just how harsh and how strict and how long the lockdowns would be. And so from a political perspective, he won and he actually did because he went on to win the following state election. He played the politics beautifully, eventually paying a price. So he resigned from politics. And side note, by the way, I'm slightly probably more proud of this than I should be. So I managed to be not arrested all the way through because other people, amazing people, were stepping up to actually organize and I was only a mouthpiece and so they weren't as interested in me. Then I announced I was going to make the documentary Battleground Melbourne. And as you saw in the doco, that wasn't in my head for a second, the beginning. That was because I saw, and it was this moment we had the shooting at the shrine of the rubber bullets and just this human rights violation of unimaginable proportions in a supposed liberal democratic country. And we had this moment of if we go back out there and protest again, the next step is live ammunition, the next, like, someone's going to get killed. And I wasn't one of the organizers, but I knew by then who a lot of them were and they were in contact with each other agonizing over this question of can we, can we tell everyone to get back out there and have on our conscience that someone doesn't go home? Like, is that, can we do that? And so there was this genuine moment where the whole movement might have been about to stall and Daniel Andrews might have been about to win simply on the basis that he was willing to be the most violent. And none of us wanted that to happen. But in real time, when you're trying to make these moral Choices, it's what do you do? So what I did was I got in my car the next day and I drove to near the city, avoiding all the police roadblocks and everything. And I parked and I sat on my phone, refreshing my phone, waiting to see is there anyone going to do anything. Because if someone's going to do something, I'm going to be right there with them. But, but I can't start something I'm not, you know, I can't have that on my conscience. If someone else starts something, I'll go and take my chances alongside them, but I can't have it on my conscience. To that I'm the one that said do it. And one or two things did happen but they weren't in areas that I could get to. People were avoiding the city. And then I refreshed my feed and one of the streamers had gone live. So there were people who just livestream everything. You know, Rukhshan, Fernando, Avi Yemeni are worthy of a shout out. But there were others as well. And someone went live and it was nurses and teachers, mostly women and they were dressed in white and they had written on pieces of paper and sticky taped or pinned to their uniforms. You know, nurse for 25 years fired because I refused the jab. Or you know, teacher for 20 years. I haven't seen my students for 18 months. These sorts of messages, they all wore masks and they socially distanced and they were just standing in this park. And the cops showed up in massive numbers. They brought the riot police, they brought the rubber bullet guns, the armored vehicle was parked over there, the horses were over here. The massive full on response, the way that they just literally 14 hours earlier they'd been shooting at us with rubber bullets and they were, they were coming in there to do it again. And they were confronted with mostly women, many young, some older nurses, teachers, people they identified with who weren't rabble rousing, they weren't chanting, they weren't, there was nothing. They were just standing in the park with their message. And so I think that was the moment where the police realized they couldn't, they couldn't keep doing this. Now we didn't know that that happened. It took a little while before they then said look, we're not going to continue the violence. But that was when I went, okay, someone's got to tell this story. We can't allow that kind of courage to fade into history unacknowledged. So I made the decision, someone's got to do this. And I thought, well who's that someone. And then you go through what they need to do. They need to know how to make a documentary, have the context, know what the story is, be trusted by these people so that they'll actually interview with you and tell you their story, but be willing to take the risk of making it, have an audience that can help crowdfund it. And I went, well, if someone's going to do it, it's got to be like, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. I'm basically the only one that actually has all of this. So I made the decision, I'm going to make this doco. And I announced that and I started crowdfunding to just get a small budget to be able to do it. And a week later I got arrested. After 18 months of not being arrested, speaking out the whole time, being very public and high profile, all of a sudden I reached the top of the list a week after I said, I'm going to record this for history.

[A]

It's a.

[B]

It's a coincidence, pure coincidence. Now, the reason I bring that up is because you mentioned Daniel Andrews paying a price later. So I was. They maintained criminal charges against me for two and a half years. Now, the charge was incitement, criminal incitement, which is meant to be a charge you use against someone who encourages terrorism or drug dealing or a hitman, you know, hires a hitman. You're inciting someone else to commit a crime. They used it against me because I encourage people to break the Chief health Officer's orders and participate in their human right of protest. They prosecuted me for two and a half years. And the way these things go is the process is the punishment and they drag it out. And you have hearing after hearing, not going anywhere, mention hearings they're called in our system. And so two and a half years later, we were still going through this endless stream of mentions and so forth, and Daniel Andrews announced his resignation, nation from politics. At the very next court appearance, all my charges were dropped. Pure coincidence. I was arrested one week after saying, I'm going to tell this story. And they dropped the charges at the next court appearance. After Daniel Andrews left politics. I actually, I wear that as a badge of honour. I think that's one of the highest compliments that I've ever been paid that the, the tyrant, the petty tyrant of Victoria either personally knew of my prosecution or at a minimum, the prosecutors knew that they had to maintain my prosecution until he was gone, otherwise I'd get in trouble.

[A]

Are you enjoying the show and do you enjoy all of the series? And Documentaries and artwork. We created Free the People. Then I've got good news. You can become a paid subscriber for just $5 a month at freethepeople.org join. You'll get early access to Free the People videos, behind the scenes content, deleted scenes, and plenty of other material you won't find anywhere else. When you join, we'll send you an exclusive sticker three pack including a design made just for paid subscribers. You can't get this anywhere else, but most importantly, you'll be supporting a lasting movement for liberty through video content. Claim your stickers now and join the [e-mail] join. So philosophically these petty tyrants and I want to go back to the Chinese model versus something possibly more cynical. Some coordination with English speaking countries under the five eyes, intelligence, cooperative. And I think these things actually fit together because the, the Chinese model is ultimately a philosophical model. And I wouldn't consider Xi so much an actual communist as just a technocratic authoritarian who values the collective over the life of any individual.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So yes, lock people into their apartments and they'll starve to death. They'll, they'll jump, they'll commit suicide, all of that. Tiananmen Square would be a classic example of this. We will mow down all these students in the most unspeakable, inhumane way possible. Because the collective.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And in a lot of ways it dovetails with the progressive project, which is the rule of experts.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And you know, the progressive dream was we're going to get rid of all this messy market stuff and replace it with very smart people telling us how to live our lives. And you know, you can even trace the origins of socialism was not, it was not Marxism, but it was, it was this what, what would later be called scientism.

[B]

Yeah. I would have phrased it as, as sort of old school elitism that then found a cover story for why they were superior.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And all that goes together and there's, there's elements of, of gross racism in there and elitism and did you go to the right school and you know, did you start study the right place? And in that sense of of course they tried to technocrat our way out of this and of course they would use any means necessary to make us comply. Yeah. But, but perhaps a more cynical thing and quite related is, and this, this is what I've been trying to dig up in my investigative series of COVID up. Ultimately I think this was a military operation and not a public health operation.

[B]

And it goes the response or the release.

[A]

I won't call it a release. The leak itself.

[B]

Yeah, so you're arguing that the leak was unintentional, but the response once the leak had happened was driven by military

[A]

calculus rather than I don't know if it was unintentional.

[B]

Neither do I. To be clear, I don't want to

[A]

live in a world where our government is creating bioweapons and releasing them on the public.

[B]

I mean, the most compelling argument against a deliberate release is actually just how ineffective it was. Yeah, right. If it was a deliberate release, I mean, to get to go deeper into your discussion of sort of the philosophical underpinnings, I believe we'd have a genuine collision between an anti human worldview and a pro human worldview. And ironically, the anti human worldview is largely owned by people who call themselves humanists. Now not every humanist is anti human, but we essentially have these two competing worldviews. I'm going to frame it as sort of the, the, the Christian origin story worldview, which is fill the earth and subdue it. It's yours, the resources are yours. You can change things. You can, you can expand your population. If you think you can make something better, you're allowed to use whatever resources are there to try and do that. That's the Judeo Christian pro human worldview. And you don't have to be a Christian to recognize, hey, humans can make things better and we can use resources and this is okay, we can do develop technology. But that's, that's the one framework. The other is the anti human framework. This is the limits to growth. Malthusian, you know, Paul Ehrlich, population bomb. These are the expressions we see. The, the Georgia Guidestones was a particularly bizarre little expression of that worldview where the, the first of the guiding principles was to, to reduce and maintain the human population at 500 million people, whether that's through birth control or through genocide, they didn't elaborate on. And the people behind that project were never really revealed. But there's, there is this worldview and we see it expressed in so many different ways that is fundamentally anti human. Now from that point of view, not only can you sacrifice some people for the good of the collective, sacrificing a bunch of people is inherently good for the remainder. If you adopt that worldview, there's too many of us we have to get rid of, you know, 90% of humans need to go, well, okay, and from that perspective, if you were going to release a bioweapon to pursue that kind of an anti human agenda, well, the one they released wasn't very good. So that I. That I find the most compelling argument.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

That it was an accidental release rather than a deliberate one.

[A]

It did having originated in China. So the. The rationale.

[B]

Made in China. That was the problem.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

If it'd be made in America, then it would have killed.

[A]

Well, we were making them in America.

[B]

That's right. That's right.

[A]

And for some reason, again, under the. Under the rationale that we must develop these bioweapons agents so that we can come up with a solution to them. And then once Obama ostensibly banned this sort of research in the US Those. Those projects were exported to China and apparently Ukraine.

[B]

Ukraine.

[A]

Yeah. According to Tulsi Gabbard. Why you would do that so close to Russia and in China, them sort of begs. Well, credibility.

[B]

The. The only rational explanation, in my view, is that that's a cover story for the development of bioweapons. The idea that you are going to correctly predict which mutation is going to happen in a natural mutation and is then going to become a pandemic, and that that will be the one that you've already studied and found a counter for. The. The odds of that are vanishingly small. That. That is not a rational argument for a benefit of this kind of research.

[A]

Yeah. And so where you get that fatal conceit of, oh, we can actually engineer our way out of this combined with really perverse incentives. There is, in fact, something called the pandemic industrial complex, and it's a very lucrative business. I'll mention one more piece of this Debbie Lehrman. I forget the name of her book, but she's written a book for Brownstone.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Where she sort of digs into the military origins, which when you hear about, like, jackbooted thugs arresting people for peacefully protesting, like, that's a military response. That's not. That's not something we've really seen employed so broadly as now.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I do think that, you know, lockdowns themselves and all of this forced compliance with rules is what you would do in a zombie apocalypse. I've seen all these movies, and that's what they did. So it's a combination of a fatally conceited philosophy that doesn't value individual life with just brute force.

[B]

And we will because we can. So this sort of legal positivism, we have the ability to write the rules. Rules and enforce them. So therefore, we have the right to write these. These rules and enforce them. I would go a little bit further even than. Than what you have and say that There really is very little distinction between police and military now and that the police have functionally become standing armies. That's, that's what has functionally happened. Now I know in the American system there is still a bit more of a guardrail between the different sort of PDS and sheriffs and, and so forth. In Australia there is this essentially no separation whatsoever. And the military and the police were deployed side by side in Victoria throughout that, that, that pandemic response period. But the, especially in a place like Australia where we are disarmed by law. We, there are legal gun owners in Australia, but relatively few. And you know, even the, the gun licensing system was weaponized against them. So the police would deploy cameras and I'm sure we're going to talk about flock and other things in a minute, but they would deploy facial recognition cameras around our protests, use that data to then identify who was on the gun license register, go to their house and say if you ever show up to another anti lockdown protest, we will deem you to no longer be a fit and proper person because the police have discretion over Australian gun licenses. So basically we're going to take away your guns, we're going to take away your license and that's going to be. You'll never get your guns back. So any sort of licensing, any of these sorts of parts of government to which they assure us are going to be done for the best of intentions and purposes will be weaponized in a moment of crisis. And you cannot really delineate anymore between civilian elements of government and the militarized standing army elements of government because they will use whatever leverage they can find.

[A]

Which is why you and I are still talking about this. Because the mechanics of this authoritarian response are stronger today.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like exponentially bigger than they were at the beginning of lockdowns.

[B]

I regret to say that I have extreme confidence that the worst atrocities of history are not in our past. Now I don't know exactly when they'll happen. Will it be in my lifetime? Will it not? But the worst atrocity atrocities of history are not in our past. The cost of operating a tyranny is now a fraction of what it used to be. You, you talk about the of State Stasi museum, the, the man hours, the manpower involved in, in the, the peer policing that was going on and then the reporting and that feeding up and only fragments of information would have ever actually gotten up to where it could get assimilated and actioned. That's a different story now. So I was in China, in Guangzhou in 2018 I was working on a business that was going to start importing merchandise from, from the, from China. They had this massive fair there and it's, it's an impressive, from an industrial capacity point of view, it's an impressive place. But it is essentially a, a fascist country, which just to be clear, is not the opposite of a communist country. It's, it's, it's another nuanced variation.

[A]

It's a different flavor.

[B]

Correct, correct. It's, it's communism with Chinese characteristics is fascism. That's, that's what, that's what they're actually talking about. So we arrive and it's, I've got my wife, my young son and my mother in law and we're traveling as a, as the four of us. We're going to do a week in China, then a week in Hong Kong and then, and then come home and we had a couple of suitcases with us and their taxis are very small. And so we get out the front of the airport and we call a taxi and they try to get us to get into two taxis because we would have had luggage in our laps and everything else. And we're like, no, we're not paying for two taxis. I want to be in one taxi. And the taxi driver ended up having to argue with the guy who was coordinating the taxi, taxi at the airport. And of course they're speaking in, in I think Cantonese down, down that end of China. And we didn't know what was going on, didn't understand. And so we end up all piling in. We got our suitcases and bags in our laps because the boot was so tiny. And he's driving us along and we have to go into these gantries that are just festooned with cameras. And he is visibly shrinking into his seat as he goes under these gantries. And he spoke very, very broken English. And I was essentially able to extract out of him that he was essentially afraid that he was going to get in trouble because he had allowed western tourists to arrive in the country and not have like a luxury experience. They were crammed into his taxi and he was going to get in trouble for that. And there were just cameras everywhere and monitoring everywhere. And so then we began to walk around and realize you cannot out within the touristy areas or the, or the high end areas, you cannot escape the gaze of multiple different cameras. And we know that data is being fed back to, to data centers and it's all being, you know, they have their social credit system and of course it's got some Teething issues. But don't, don't discount the rate at which processing power is increasing and AI is improving in its ability to do what it does. And then you realize that things like flock cameras are being rolled out absolutely everywhere in America. And this raises an interesting philosophical question that I don't have a stone cold answer to yet. But I began to think about it in the context. I'm going to talk about the UK Ulez cameras, because I don't know what America's like, but in Australia, if we're rolling out the monitoring cameras and I say the wrong things about the rolling out of the monitoring cameras, I can get into a lot of trouble. Now, I know you have a first amendment here, but I'm not actually sure if that applies to me because I'm not an American. So I'm going to talk about the UK if that's all right. And regrettably, for those that are watching going, what's, what's happening here? This is what happens when you don't have a first amendment. Okay, just, just keep that in mind. So I began talking about the.

[A]

We're still clinging to ours. Yeah, yeah, we haven't lost it yet.

[B]

Well, this is, this is the thing here, right? Too much 1984, not enough 1776. And you only have the rights that you're actually willing to stand up and defend. It's fantastic that you have a bill of rights written down, but if you don't stand up and defend it when, when that line gets crossed, then you might as well not have it.

[A]

It's still just a piece of paper, correct?

[B]

Correct. So it is about recapturing the spirit of 1776 for you guys. But when, so, so let me, let me frame this for you. In London, they're trying to save the world from global warming, the CO2 emissions reductions. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, he introduced an ultra low emissions zone scheme. So the center of London, you could really only go in there with a vehicle if it was a pure EV or a hybrid type of vehicle. And if you drove another type of vehicle in there, your number plate would be captured by a camera and you would be charged what amounted to, I believe it was about 12 pounds per day, something like, I think 18 or so US dollars, something like that per day. Now who's driving a dirty old diesel into the middle of London? Plumbers and maintenance people and cleaners and, you know, people who can't afford a nice shiny new EV and don't live in rich areas that have access to the tube or have to carry a lot with them, like working class people. This is actually a deeply regressive penalty if you, if you want to put the political layer onto it. This is hurting poor people the most. So what happened was I put up a bunch of cameras to be able to capture people's number plates. And then the Blade Runner movement started. And these people were going out there with reciprocating saws and cutting down the poles or filling the housings with expanding foam. And a big argument erupted over, is this vandalism? Is this something? Is this just the BLM movement for a different cause? Are we just. Are we just going to start smashing shop fronts now and looting people? Like, are we just not caring about. About anyone's property anymore? And so I had to think philosophically, where do I, where do I stand on this? And let me put to you the position that I've come to. Vandalism means destroying the, either the form or the function of somebody else's property that doesn't belong to is not yours to destroy. You can, you can vandalize your own stuff as much as you want. That's not a crime. It has to belong to somebody else. And you have to be either depriving them of the use of it because it no longer functions correctly, or even just aesthetically defacing it. Okay, that's, that's vandalism. And I got to thinking about what the Ulez scheme even was, and I realized that that is government sanctioned vandalism. He's taken the roads that were paid for by ratepayers. They belong to the British people, not to Sadiq Khan, the mayor, or to the City of London or anyone else, not to the Crown. They, they belong to the ratepayers who paid for that to be improved for the purpose of driving their cars. And then he began to deprive a bunch of them of the use of it. Well, that's vandalism. And I came to the position, and I am still of the position, that for as long as they are targeting the infrastructure of the Ulez scheme, specifically, the Blade Runners are not the ones committing acts of vandalism. They are restoring the full function of the property that is owned by the British people. Now, the situation with things like Flock cameras is a little bit different because it's not causing people to be charged money directly. It's just kind of watching everything. So the philosophical question becomes a little bit different. But my question becomes, if you realize you're being stalked by somebody who's taking photographs of you all of the time and monitoring your movements and tracking absence, everything. Do you have to wait until they conduct a kidnapping or break and enter your home while you're not home or something? Do you have to wait until they've actually directly come at you before you go? Hang on. That's not right. You're stalking me. You're surveilling me. You're keeping track of me in a way that. There is no benign reason why you should be doing that. Now, some people argue the government's reason is benign. It's for law enforcement. It's so that when something goes wrong, we can find that bad apple. Well, I'm sorry. I've. I've done this thing. You might have heard of it. It's called reading a history book. It's probably something that I.

[A]

We used to do that.

[B]

Yeah. Look, I. I hope it comes back into fashion someday, but if someone is building a prison around your house, you don't have to wait until they've shut and locked the gate before you go. Listen, guys, I'm. I'm not real happy about this, so I'm not. Again, I have to be careful. I'm. I've. I may yet one day become an American citizen and enjoy the benefits of your First Amendment, but I have to be careful how I say things. But I'm certainly not going to come out and condemn the people that are cutting down the flock cameras and these sorts of things. I think from a. I think it's very borderline. I think they're right on the cusp of what would be regarded as acceptable civil disobedience versus just actual vandalism. Because we do see that one of the problems with civil disobedience is people use it as an excuse to go and commit arson or just get a flat screen TV or, you know, exact revenge on a shopkeeper that I don't like. Like, we see people use this philosophical concept of civil disobedience for just outright thuggery. And I've. I've no patience for that whatsoever. I think it's. I think it's not only is it morally wrong, but it's. It's actually you're undermining one of the most important tools we have for keeping government power in check, which is civil disobedience. Even your founding fathers, before the Declaration of independence in 1776, there was 11 years of petitions for redress of grievances, and there were some incidents in there, some civil disobedience, some kind of. Beyond even civil disobedience. But there was 11 years before they finally went, you know what? We're just going to have to have a shooting match. Like, looks like we need to water the tree of liberty. And that's a necessary process in order for us to have a clear conscience, irrespective of. Of what happens. Beg your pardon? One of the things that concerns me is people that almost seem to be looking forward to another civil war. There's going to be another civil war. And they're like, I'm going to keep my powder dry and do absolutely nothing until the shooting starts. Then I'm going to be out there. Two problems with that. Firstly, I don't think you are, mate. If you don't have the guts to have a tough conversation with a local school board, then I think you're kidding yourself. If you. If you think you're going to be out there playing Rambo number two, if you don't try every available non violent means of effecting real change, then I don't think you're on a solid moral footing when you resort to a violent means. So I think what's happening with the Flock cameras is right on the very edge of what would be considered acceptable civil disobedience. But I'm not going to come out and say that they've gone too far.

[A]

I. I'm just now schooling myself on Flock cameras and I don't even know the name of the company. I know it's happening. And I.

[B]

Safety, Flock safety. It's for your safety.

[A]

And this is. This is one of Peter Thiel's investments.

[B]

And now, to be clear, there are also other people who say, no, the guys cutting down the cameras are completely wrong. We need to do this at a contractual level because there are many cities and even places, police departments. I think it was the LAPD just recently allowed their contract to expire. They didn't renew it. And so there are other ways of pushing back besides cutting them down. And there are people that say the people cutting these cameras down are making it harder for us because they're creating sympathy for the company and they're being louts and. And it's bad optics and all the rest of it. And I understand that argument. Having lived through the COVID situation and heard all of what was said about us as protesters and. And all of the different. The. The different attack angles that they used. I. I'm a big believer in the invisible hand, which means I'm a big believer in all of the above.

[A]

Yeah. At Kibbe on Liberty, freedom is a lifestyle 24, 7. Something you live and breathe and wear every day. If that describes you, you need the very best liberty swag in the market today. Just like this shirt I happen to be wearing. Go to freethepeople.org kol and check out our exciting merch. You too can love liberty and look cool. Well, let's. Let's link this. What I'm trying to get at is, you know, you land in China in 2018, they have a social credit system. A key part of the social credit system is mass surveillance in a way that even Americans can't comprehend. It ties back to determining from the top down who's a good citizen, who's a bad citizen. Your taxi driver is scared to death that he will get flagged in his account and they can do anything to you. They can take away your home, they can take away your bank account. They can put you in prison. And I was saying I only started to dig in to Flock. But my assumption, any tech company, you know who is financing this rapid implementation of surveillance cameras. I assume these are mostly government contracts.

[B]

The vast majority are. There are some private ones. And again, America is a much more fragmented and I say that as a good thing. It's a lot more subsidiary decisions being made at the most basic level in America than what there is in Australia. But you might have some universities that have put them up, even some HOAs that have put them up. But a lot of this is taxpayers money. This is government, you know, taxpayers money. But here's the reality.

[A]

Which means there are.

[B]

Well, correct. They belong. They belong to the people.

[A]

We didn't want them, but apparently we bought them.

[B]

Correct. And you were forced to pay for them against your will. So much for that social contract. But also, the product isn't the cameras. The product is the data. And there is the question of who does the data belong to. Now, that's a tort law, a civil law type of question. But there was just recently an interesting US I think it went all the way to the Supreme Court in the US you might know more about this than I do that found that telephone data is protected under the fourth amendment against warrantless search and seizure. Did that come across your desk?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Yeah. And so what that says to me is that the Supreme Court is leaning on the side of saying your data belongs to you. So this puts companies like Flock Safety and even just your big tech companies that are collecting data on our habits and behaviors online and everything else, if it's protected from warrantless search and seizure, if it's protected under the Fourth Amendment. Right. Then it's an individual property that is being protected. And I wonder if an enterprising lawyer looked into that, whether there's an opportunity to actually create a legal precedent that basically says these companies cannot turn you into their product in the form of your usage data or travel data or whatever other data there may be.

[A]

Yeah. I've interviewed Naomi Brockwell about this specific question and she's sort of, she's my go to source on this and she helps my favorite congressman, Thomas Massie, write model legislation that's been introduced that would codify.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So I bumped into Naomi at Freedom Fest and was stunned to discover that she actually remembered me. We'd cross pat before and I was like, oh, I feel special.

[A]

It's a secret handshake, right?

[B]

Yeah, that's what it is.

[A]

But. And like data. So like there might be a direct way that those Flock cameras are in fact government property. But what we're learning about big tech, obviously Palantir, but certainly Flock as well, and Amazon and Google, a big part of their business model is selling your private data.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

To the government.

[B]

You are the product. Yes.

[A]

To, to surveil you and to make sure that you're behaving as a good citizen.

[B]

Correct.

[A]

And that's already happening.

[B]

Now. This is, this is an inversion of the intended relationship between government and, and the government. And this is true across the Anglosphere. If, if you are derived philosophically from the uk, then then this philosophy that the government is meant to be the servant is baked in. We, we see again, this is Judeo Christian kind of heritage. If you want to be great in God's kingdom, learn to be the servant of all. We call our Prime Minister our chief public servant. This language exists because that was the idea. That was the concept. The idea was in your founding fathers terms, that there was meant to be this life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness at the individual level. And a government is necessary to administrate the affairs. That's kind of, you know, you are going to pursue your idea of what, what life ought to be. And the government is going to just make sure that stuff gets kind of managed in a way that nothing gets in your way and you can pursue happiness. No guarantee that you'll get it. What happens now, and we can see it even in the political campaigns, is they come to us with their agenda of what they think America, Australia, the uk, Canada should be. Let me, let me share with you my vision. If you elect me, I'm going to do all of these things and Then if they win the election, they say, well, I have a mandate from the people to do all of these, all of these things to pursue this agenda. No, government as a concept in the Western context has no mandate to pursue any agenda. That as a concept is invalid. You are an administrator, you are at best the chief butler of a grand house where you have many things that you have to administrate and make sure are happening properly. But all in all, the service of the owners of the house, and the owners of the house are us. And so this inversion has now happened where we accept this idea that the government is going to set the agenda and pursue. The government has the. The vision for what America should be or Australia should be. No, no, you have a vision for what Matt Kibbe should be. I have a vision for what Topher Field should be and for, you know, for my kids and, and my community and, and the things that, that matter to me. And the invisible hand of everyone making those decisions is what decides where we go in our future. But if you accept this premise that the government can pursue an agenda, then you have to hand enormous amounts of power over. You have to allow them to stop and to deal with anyone that is getting in the way of their agenda. So no longer are they simply administrating things and making sure no one gets in your way. Now you're going to be punished if you get in their way. And we've flipped this on its head so we're already a lot more closer to the Chinese model than I think a lot of people realize. And I include America in that. And I'm sorry to say this, I love America. I'm not sorry to say I love America. I'm sorry to say what I'm about to say next. I love America. America is genuinely a phenomenal place founded on the most incredible principles. And the more I learn about your history, the more I love this place. For example, I only learned recently that in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence there was this massive section that was completely opposed to slavery. The original vision of 11 out of your 13 colonies was that there would not be slavery in this country from the get go. And it was only because they agreed that everything had to be unanimous. And then two of the colonies would not agree to that section. That you were not founded with zero slavery from the very. You would have abolished slavery decades before the UK did. Maybe closer to 100 years, I'm not sure exactly, but decades before England did, regrettably, that didn't happen. But to look at the caliber and the core quality of the people and the ideas. Reading the Federalist Papers and also the anti Federalist papers, which I strongly recommend Americans get into that because these people, they lost the argument. But, but maybe they won the argument. When you, when you read what they said and the warnings they gave and what they predicted would happen, it's not to say that you shouldn't be a federation, but you need to learn from, from them. They, they saw this coming anyway. You're an incredible country, but unless you are willing to get off the couch and actually defend the freedoms that you have written down on paper, your constitutional rights, the separation of powers, the limits of government, the Bill of Rights, of course, being a particularly obvious one. But none of these things defend themselves. And here's the way I say it, the limit of the government's power is defined by the limit of the people's obedience. And in the end, nothing else. All the other stuff is great, it's important and it makes it easier to defend your freedoms. But if the people won't actually reach the point where they say, no, no, we're done enough, we're not going any further on this, or I don't care what you say, I'm going to do it anyway. Unless the people reach the limit of their obedience, then the power of the government is never actually limited. What that means is that anyone that believes in limited government, which should be every American, every American, you should be a big believer that the government does not have unlimited power. And if you believe that, then you must believe that there is a point where you individually, personally are going to disobey. And if you don't, then you don't believe in limited government. You can't hold both of those things at the same time. So what I am hoping to see from America, you guys, the, the hour is later than I think a lot of you realize because of what we've been talking about, the technological aspect of things, the cost of running a tyranny is so much lower than what it used to be. Guys like the Fourth Amendment is breached all the time. All the time. Warrantless search and seizure. It's happening all over the country in the name of the drug war, in the name of ICE and immigration enforcement, in the name of all sorts of things. The First Amendment. Yeah, okay, it gets pretty consistently upheld if you have the money. Second Amendment rights, I'm sorry, a thing called the nfa. I'm pretty sure that's a pretty big violation of your Second Amendment rights. Hopefully going to get overturned soon because there's no longer a tax attached to it. And that was the only reason it stood when it got to the Supreme Court the first time. And you could go through a bunch of the other amendments, the 10th amendment, you know, those. The powers not delegated to the federal government or reserve for the states, the federal government tramples all over that. You go through and say, I'm sorry to say, it's not about, we need to defend our freedoms. We need to push the government back to within the lines that were drawn originally. One of the reasons why people find it so hard to see where the line is is because it was crossed 200 years ago and you've never known a time when it wasn't crossed. And so when you go looking for that line, you're saying, is it the latest violation of my rights or was it the one before that? No, no, it was, it was in your grandpappy's day. Like that's when it actually started. And we got to, we got to get back there. And that is going to require a pretty big cultural shift within the US not to, you know, so many, so many people come into America and say, the problem with America is you need to be more like Europe, more like Australia, more like the UK Nonsense. Please tar them, feather them and run them out of your country. Never let them back in. Those people are idiots. The problem with America is that you need to be more like America. Not, not today's one, the original one, the. The og that's what needs to happen. And you've got a limited window of time to make that happen before that, that trap gets sprung.

[A]

I'm thinking about something you said early in this conversation and, and your T shirt at the same time. I like to point out that as amazing as Thomas Jefferson was, as amazing it was that George Washington voluntarily gave up the throne.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

As amazing as Ben Franklin was. The founders, we have this mythology in the US that there was sort of this Immaculate Conception. Somehow magically these guys showed up and did the right thing, even though governments never do the right thing. And I don't think it was that at all. I think it was the spirit of 76. And I think you could go back 10, 20, maybe even 30 years in American history, before our 250th birthday, and talk about the fact that there was this bottom up philosophy that said that the individual mattered and not this tyrannical country across the pond. And there was something about that. And it was a special moment. But I feel like in a lot of ways the founders were Doing what they knew they had to do to not disappoint the. The people that had gotten there and them there in the first place.

[B]

So can I speak to. To this idea of, we're going to dig up the history of each and every one of these people, and often they misrepresent the history. But you're absolutely right. This wasn't immaculate conception. These weren't perfect human beings. I'm not. You're not. They certainly weren't. One of the chapters in my first book is In Defense of Assholes. Now, I hope I can say that on this podcast. Okay. Okay, good. Now, just to be clear, it's the sophisticated F version of. It has the R in it. A R, S, E. So it's. It's all good. You know, we're. We're using the English spelling in my very proper. Now, the reason I felt the need to, to write a chapter and literally defending the. Not the indefensible, but defending the humanity of people who engage in civil disobedience. Every single one of your heroes. You know, there's a reason why they say, don't meet your heroes, because the version you see from a distance is the. Is the sanitized version.

[A]

They're insufferable and stubborn.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Insufferably stubborn.

[B]

Yes. So in the context of civil disobedience, my argument is basically this. The first person that stands up and says no, and someone has to go first. Once. Once someone goes first, other people find the courage to go, yeah, I was thinking the same thing. But someone has to break the ice. By definition, that person is an outlier. They're not in the middle of the psychological, you know, curve of your typical psychological profile. They are an outlier by definition. And if they're an outlier in that part of their psychological profile, well, they're probably an outlier in lots of different ways. If they are willing to cop the slings and arrows that come with being socially disagreeable in this area, they've probably spent their whole life being socially disagreeable. They've probably made all kinds of enemies. They've probably made lots of stupid judgment calls where they've spoken out and they were the one who was wrong. They've probably got all kinds of baggage and all kinds of people in their life who are very enthusiastic, willing to come out of the woodwork and tell you all the horrible things that that person's done in the past, and those things are probably true, but without that person, no one goes first. And so here is the civil disobeyer's dilemma. You either have to be willing to go first yourself and be the asshole, or you have to be willing to let someone else and know that they're going to be an asshole and the media will find what they want to find on them. They will be attacked. Everything in their past will be dredged up and then in that moment of the two minutes hate, it'll all get embellished and blown out and things will just get made up and published as fact anyway. And the idea, the purpose of why that's happening is to try and make that person radioactive so that no one will join their cause. And if you believe that the power of government ought to be limited and that you therefore have a line where you will limit your obedience, then you need to make a choice as that line comes, are you willing to go first and be the asshole and be the one who is the target of the 2 minutes hate, or are you going to let somebody else go first? And there's not always a guarantee someone will. I mean, Alexander Solzhenitsyn talked about that from the, in his pamphlet the Gulag Archipelago. How we burned later in the camps. If only we had grabbed pokers and what have you and you know, dealt with these people kicking our doors down when they were in the foyer of the buildings. You know, not sometimes, sometimes no one goes first, which can be the worst outcome of all. But if you're going to wait for someone else to go first, just know in advance that person's going to be an asshole. And you have to be willing to be there for them and defend them and ally with them and ignore what's being said about them in the newspapers. I've been called everything under the sun. The other people in the movement have been called even worse than what I have. I actually, I actually got through relatively okay compared to some, some people really, really copped it. All kinds of fabrications and lies and people coming out of their past and yeah, okay, there's some truth there, we've all made mistakes. But then it just gets embellished and turned into this massive, massive thing. Some people were pushed. The media, I believe, were literally trying to push some people to kill themselves in our movement on the basis of their past mistakes and what other people were willing to say about that. And that's unfortunately a necessary thing. We, we, we are going to be allied with assholes. It's the game if we're going to resist government.

[A]

I like to say, and I think it's true. It's, it's a joke. But not a joke. That. That my own stubborn assholeness is sort of my shield.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

My armor. Like I've. I've worked in Washington D.C. my entire career.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And I like to believe that I'm still as libertarian as I was when I was 16 years old.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

And I wouldn't have been able to do that unless I was willing to say no to really big things at the most uncomfortable moment.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

And I. I try not to be an asshole about it, but sometimes just saying no is. Is the most asshole thing you can do.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Especially from people who are used to being able to. In a town like this, manipulate with money or power or opportunities. And then you're the person that they can't. They can't manipulate.

[A]

Yeah. I assume after this show I'm going to get some lucrative offer from Flock to. I'm sure sell my soul for a couple of minutes. So we're about running out of time, but I want to give you five minutes to just talk about the various things you've mentioned. Where people can watch your movie and where they can find your books and what we can do if we either want to be that asshole that goes first or want to join up with other assholes to fight the power.

[B]

Yeah. So. Well, thank you and this has been a wonderful conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Let me just say that there's another chapter in my first book which is it sucks to be right early, but that's the only time it matters. And there is a silver lining. There is a beautiful thing that happens when you find yourself a part of a movement like the anti lockdown movement in Victoria when compromise rewards you in the short term. And this is. This is why people compromise. There's some sort of an incentive though. If you take the money, your life's going be to be more comfortable. Take the position, take the prestige, or at the very least there's the avoidance of punishment. That's why people compromise. The problem is you then know that you didn't live according to your values and you know that for the rest of your life. And so it punishes you for the rest of your life. It eats you for the rest of your life. Standing up for what you believe, standing up for what you know to be right will cost you. That's why most people don't do it. But can I say that it rewards you then for the rest of life. Your. Your life as well.

[A]

You.

[B]

I. I genuinely feel like when I made it was. It was the first protest was the one where I nearly lost my nerve and I nearly didn't do because I've been such a goody two shoes. I was raised as a conservative. I was a clean skin. I was, I was obnoxiously, nauseatingly well behaved for most of my life. And here I was because I'd spoken out against the lockdowns and I was one of the only people with a public profile to do so. I was invited to speak at the very first anti lockdown protest and I agreed to do it. And then on the day, because we couldn't advertise it earlier, the police would have come and arrested us. But on the day I posted up that I was going to go down there, it was an hour's drive and I drove down there and I parked and I looked across at the park and the police had obviously read my social media posts already because they were there waiting for us. And I thought, you know what, if I just delete those social media posts, turn the car around, drive home, pretend like it never happened, only a handful of people are going to know and I can avoid whatever's waiting for me. Arrest. Who knows how this is going to impact me financially. How's my future going to be? Am I going to be able to travel again if I've got criminal records and all kinds of things, you know, they're going to beat us up. Like, we genuinely had no idea. And the problem is I would have known that I'd deleted those posts and turned around and driven home. And so what I did was I grabbed my phone and I started live streaming. I started live on Facebook and everyone was locked down at that point, so. So no one had anything better to do. And very quickly I had a thousand people or more watching this live stream. And I did that specifically because I knew that once that number hit a thousand, then I knew that if I. What I was afraid of was that I was about to discover that I was a coward. Now, none of us want to be a coward. We want to believe that we're the hero. We want to identify with that character in every movie, in every book. But none of us actually know until we face some kind of a test. And this wasn't the highest level of test. This wasn't combat. This was. I'm not trying to put myself on that level, but this was the most serious test I'd ever experienced up to that point in time. And I was sitting in the car terrified that I was about to discover that I was a coward. And I used that live stream to bully myself, to manipulate myself into doing what I knew was right. And did it cost me? Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, that was, that was a turning point for my life and a descent into madness. And it cost me in my family, it cost me in my finances, it cost me in my mental health. 2024, actually, years after the end of COVID 2024 was the year when it all just crashed in on me. And I've been rebuilding, you know, in the two years since then. And thank God I've got, you know, wonderful family and people that have helped me to do that. But it comes at a very, very high price. But can I tell you it's worth it? It's absolutely the privilege of being able to, in my case, tell the story. But even for those that don't, there are many, many people who are part of that movement and now they're just getting on with normal everyday life and they know who they are and they know that they passed their test. Whatever their test looked like, they passed that. And that is something that money can't buy. So if people want to hear more about my story or what's happened, easiest thing to do, and it's free, is just to go to topherfield.com click on the documentary tab at topherfield.com. now you're going to find two videos there. The first one's the documentary that you've watched most of. And I will say I'm not super thrilled with how I finished it. I tried to turn it into a campaign tool to get rid of Daniel Andrews, but of course that means it dates very quickly and in hindsight that was a mistake. So if you've watched 90% of it, probably just stop there. That's that, that's fine. The ending became a bit of a campaign message for the upcoming state election, but that tells the events. The actual thing that I would love for every, everybody to watch is to scroll further down that same page. So this is the documentary [e-mail]. there's a second video there. It's 45 minutes long. This was a keynote session that I directed at CPAC Australia and they gave me 40 minutes, which is unusual at CPAC. And Andrew Cooper, who runs CPAC Australia, gave me a three word brief. He said, make them cry. There were no rules. There was nothing else to make them cry. He wanted, he wanted a conference where people actually felt something rather than just got fed knowledge. And so I reached out to three of my friends, including Matt Lawson, who got shot with a rubber bullet, plus A police officer who resigned from her 15 year police career, plus a small business owner who was the subject of a two minutes hate and was pushed to borderline, you know, suicide. And I sat with them and we, I wrote their three stories with their approval and then I wove my story in with it as well. And we tell over 45 minutes. We tell all four of our stories. Stories, but with the same sort of rising arc of the story. And it's mixed in with moments from the documentary to kind of meter the time and show the events that were happening. This is to this day my proudest piece of work. And if I can ask for one thing from your viewers, watch the second video on that page, but have some, some tissues handy. We, we broke the room. My brief, make them cry. Mission accomplished. So that would be my number one thing that I would ask from people if you're interested in. My book says my first book, which is Good People Break Bad Laws. This is a defense of civil disobedience in the modern context because people recognize it from 40 years ago. So yes, that was just, that was justified. But then when it happens in front of them, they, they can't recognize it. And I understand why that is. So I address that in Good People Break Bad Laws. Then I got attacked because I'm, I'm not shy about the fact that I'm a Christian. So people came at me saying, how can you call yourself a Christian and be advocating disobedience to the government? Haven't you read Romans chapter 3:13? Haven't you read 1st Peter chapter 2, verse 13? To which I reply, yes, and I've also read the rest of the book. And so I had to write my second book which is Good Christians Break Bad Laws. And that's a theological defense of civil disobedience. So that's for Christians. And if you're not a Christian, then that's, that's really not for you. Unless you've got a God bothering relative that you want to put in their place, then it might be, it might be quite handy. So those are my two books. Best thing for Americans to do is going to be to get them from Amazon. So if you just search for the title of either of those, you'll find them on Amazon. We are having trouble shipping my merch into the US So I need to find a local distributor who can, who can stock it and, and link up with them. But I haven't managed to solve that.

[A]

Do we have, do we have tariffs?

[B]

So it's the administration of the tariffs that's the problem. Right. So we have to. There's this weird system that I have checked and triple checked and had somebody else check, and I'm sure it's set up correctly, and they should be able to just deduct the tariffs from a bank account that has money in it. It should be fine. And it's just not working.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I. It's. It's driving me insane, to be honest. So if you'd like my books, please go to Amazon. But actually, my number one thing is I don't. I don't need your money. If you want to buy the books, great. But would you please go to tofufield.com go to the documentary tab, and if not both videos, watch that second video.

[A]

Yeah, I found that one as well. Yeah. And I will watch it.

[B]

Yeah, please do. That's. That is honestly, if I die, and that is still my highest creative achievement. I'm okay with that. I'm completely okay with that.

[A]

I love that I'm meeting a fellow libertarian that realizes you have to connect with people's emotions before you can connect with their minds, because we like to do it the opposite way. And that marginalizes us in a broader cultural conversation.

[B]

I got in trouble, if you, years ago for referring to the Australian libertarian sort of conference as the Asperger Elite.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And I thought I probably deserved to get in trouble, to be honest, because I thought I was talking about them. I'm not. I'm not like that. Of course I'm talking about them. And then, look, my first clue should have been when they started giving me Libertarian of the Year awards. At that point, I should have been like, is it them or is it. Is there maybe more of an ask going on? Well, I've since discovered that I've collected the whole set. I'm now officially diagnosed asd, adhd, ptsd. Yahtzee. Buy one, get one free. I don't, you know, at some point, do I get a loyalty card? They're kind of a part of my reconstruction of myself over the last two years. Has been sitting down with. With professionals and going, okay, help me to understand myself better. And they put you through the assessments. And I'm basically collecting the whole set at this point in time, which is just kind of funny to me. But, yes, we do. We do make the mistake of thinking that it's about a superior argument. Can I borrow three more minutes? Is that. Is that okay?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So there's a thing called Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It's this triangle I'm sure many of you will have seen it in high school or in university. Down the bottom is your most basic needs. Survival for oxygen, water, food, your really central stuff, shelter. At the top of the hierarchy is someone who's living their best life. It's what Maslow calls self actualization. You've got purpose, a sense of belonging. You feel loved, you feel like you can love. You've got this connection with the world around you and everyone is somewhere in between those two extremes Now. The reality is most of us are sort of halfway in between. In wealthy countries like the west, there's not a lot of people who are at that survival point. But also, let's be honest, there's not very many people who are living their best life either. When you introduce lockdowns to the blob of people in the middle, a really interesting thing happens. There's the obvious thing, which is that a whole bunch of people who, who are suddenly non essential lose their jobs. What have you get shoved towards the bottom. They are now anxious about their survival in a way that they may never have been before. That's obvious. What's less obvious is what happens to the people that are laptop workers or on welfare or retired or deemed essential. Not only do they not get pushed towards the bottom, but thanks to that daily press conference, the psychology of what was going on with Daniel Andrews. I'll use the Victorian example. Daniel Andrews is on there. You are part of the team that is helping us to win this war against a once in a hundred year pandemic. Staying home saves lives. Thank you for caring about the most vulnerable people. These sort of Orwellian staying apart keeps us together. Like they're saying this stuff in press conferences with a straight face. And at 11 o' clock every day these people would come shuffling out from their, from their bedroom with a cup of hot coffee, cocoa in the middle of winter and sit on the couch and listen to their new demigod, the new high priest, tell them what a good boy or what a good girl they had been. They didn't just not only were they not pushed towards the bottom, they were invited. The closest to the top, the closest to self actualization, a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, a sense of being loved and acknowledged and appreciated, a sense of being a part of something bigger than themselves. They were invited, the closest to the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs that they've ever been before. And so this was never about data, this was never about did we make the right policy decisions. When you talk to these people to this day. If you if you question the policy decisions, they defend it like their life depends on it. Because actually, it does. They have never felt better. And here's the thing. They know in their soul they never will again either. They will never have another moment where they feel the way they felt during that time. And unless we can deal with this at a feelings level, then the next petty tyrant that comes along and offers them that feeling again, they will fall in love with instantly.

[A]

Well said, Topher. Thank you for doing this.

[B]

Really appreciate it.

[A]

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