Hi, I'm David Fahri, journalist from New Zealand, keeping an eye on conspiracy theory culture around the globe.

Here are some things you need to know about New Zealand. This year, our population finally reached five million. That was a big day for us. We love Lord of the Rings so much. So we made three Lord of the Rings films before making three more Hobbit films before deciding this year. We're also making Lord of the Rings TV show. Another thing we love festivals, music at cars. It doesn't really matter if you put a festival on. New Zealanders will show up.

One of New Zealand's longest running festivals made headlines last month for all the wrong reasons. They illuminate. Festival has been running for over a decade now, touted as New Zealand's most environmentally friendly festival. Browsing through the festival's website, people discovered a new section had appeared the 13 crystal seeds of positive change. What followed was a who's who of modern conspiracy thinking American Bruce Lipton. Was there a man who claims that human biology is dictated by belief as opposed to DNA?

An Australian celebrity chef, Pete Evans, made the catch. A guy who spent a great deal of the year saying covid-19 is a hoax. Fans of the festival and previous musicians had attended made their feelings known. A headline reading Luminato Festival organisers criticised for promoting far right conspiracy theorists. Eventually, his people threatened to pull out or not go at all the festival, drop the list of names from its site. But the damage was done. No, I understood why people were upset that the Health and Wellness Festival had aligned itself with a bunch of dangerous conspiracy theorists.

It made the whole festival seem like a bit of a joke as well as dangerous, especially one name that listed as inspirational and that made me laugh and cringe at the same time.

David Icke.

So, David, I'm so excited for our first episode of Armed and Dangerous to do a deep dive on something I know nothing about. The only thing I really know we're going to be discussing today is reptiles.

It's all we need to know is the reptile episode, right? Yeah, it's a guy.

His name's David Icke and he is a British conspiracy theorist who I've been fascinated with for such a long time, because I guess primarily because he came up with this incredible idea about reptilian shapeshifters. You hear reptilian shapeshifters. And I was I mean, how did you feel when I said that just now? Did you sort of feel it in your bodies?

Yeah, well, scaley Well, yeah. And just immediately, a bazillion questions like my guess, my only understanding of a shape shifter comes from may be true blood that show where people could kind of transform into animals.

So let's do some cursory knowledge. What's a shape shifter and is it agreed upon in the scientific community as a thing?

Yeah, it's definitely not agreed upon in the scientific community. And that's what makes this theory so good.

And I guess even pulling back from the Reptilians, you almost need to fill in a little bit about who David Icke is, because he was a very together sports broadcaster for the BBC in the UK. So he was really respected. And you'd tune in and you'd hear the sports news from the sky and you'd trust him.

What era was this? What time frame was he popular?

And this was like around late 80s, very early 90s. OK, and he was a soccer player before this. Oh, yeah. Daily soccer because he got arthritis. He became a sports broadcaster.

And then one day he held this press conference.

That was a big surprise to everyone and told everybody that he was the Godhead. So essentially that he was like another Jesus. And this came out of totally left field like no one was expecting this guy to do this.

Was he under contract with the BBC or anything at that point or did he, like, retire and then go, OK, finally and get this off my chest?

He was weirdly in this dispute because he was a bit anti authoritarian. And so he wasn't paying his broadcasting tax, which is how the BBC survived. And he has kind of essentially refusing to fund his own employer, which was quite a funny position to be. And so he was already in this kind of tiff with them and then him coming out and saying he was Jesus was the thing that pushed them over the edge. I think.

Yeah, that's a quick way to get out of your contract, is declare your Jesus. Yeah, it's up there.

And he started dressing on, like, these amazing track suits that were just turquoise. Like, he just loved the colour turquoise all of a sudden. And he did a few talk show appearances. And that was almost like as crazy as the stuff he was saying, that he was essentially the son of God and that he had had all these revelations come to him.

Did you watch his press conference? Do you remember seeing it? I saw it years later because it was this Wogan show, just famous talk show in the UK. And there's a few famous guests he's had. And David is at the top of the list because there's this point where David is sitting there and Wogan is saying to him, you do know that the audience is laughing at you and not with you.

Right.

And it was really brutal because whatever revelation, David, I had that made him think he was a son of God and sent him on what would eventually lead him to be one of the world's biggest conspiracy thinkers, something happened and he was being openly mocked and he's talked about that since that interview happened.

He said that was the time that he openly decided that I'm just going to walk straight into the mockery and not let it bother me and be my true self, which sounds like a really noble thing. Yeah, but when you see the stuff he ends up talking about, it actually gets a bit depressing.

Did he give any proof for his claim? Not his proof was that he had walked into a bookstore that he'd been into a million times before and he suddenly had this voice in his head that was telling him to walk over to the other side of the bookstore. So he walked over the other side.

He followed the voice and he was in the romance section, apparently, which had never go into because he was a sports guy sports section.

And then this section was this book by the psychic.

And he slid the book out. He looked at it and he just knew he had to go and see the psychic, which is what he did.

He went and saw her a couple of weeks later and he explains that he heard the voice again and he felt like cobwebs on his face, which he puts down to like an electromagnetic spectrum that he was suddenly a part of. And that's when he got the revelation that he was there to, like, lead humanity and tell us the truth about everything, like the real story.

Was it detailed enough to know if the psychic agreed with him? Like, did she sign off on this revelation?

She signed off. And I would love to know what she thinks of this now because he. Really ran with it to the point where David now sells out huge theaters around the world. What's a huge theater? Typical crowd is about 6000 is his number that he'll max out at. Wow, that's a lot. It's a lot of people.

He's not just talking to two hundred people. And, you know, he came to New Zealand back in 2011 and I think he actually came back in twenty sixteen. And his lectures notoriously go on for between eight and 12 hours.

So that's longer than our show, which is a shocker. Yeah, we can barely hold a live audience's attention for like two fifteen and I have professional training as a comedian. I feel bad for the psychic.

That is like a dream come true for her. Somebody comes in and thinks that they discovered together.

Yeah, I think that's what they want, someone to come in and feel like there's a revelation or something. I totally agree.

And for her to witness, assuming she really does believe it. Yes, she's waiting for that moment where she meets the second coming as well. And it all happened again. What years are we talking? So he was a big sports broadcaster in the 80s and 90s. And then he he was on the talk show. Like what year?

I think it was like 1990 that he had this revelation from the psychic after seeing her book in a bookstore.

And then he held this press conference in nineteen ninety one where he basically said, Hey, everyone, I'm David. OK, you may know me as a soccer player and a famous broadcaster, but I'm actually the son of God. I dress in turquoise now and nothing else.

Here I am. Oh wow.

OK, so he's been at this for twenty nine years. Was he asking anything of people like come follow me or here I got some marching orders, please execute them.

What was his agenda. His agenda was mainly just having an audience which he monetized primarily through selling books like he's a prolific author.

I've got two of his books. He's written, I think, of between 25 and 30 books. And they sell like hot.

Yeah. And they're big books. These aren't like little tomes. These are really big books.

OK, so before we get into disagreeing with him, I just want to say on the surface, what an impressive life and truly a metropolitan man, if he was a professional soccer player and then a broadcaster wrote 25 books and then you throw in Son of God, you pop that in there, that's a resume that's very hard to beat.

In fact, if I'm across the desk from him, I'm not believing it.

Even without the God part, you know, completely, you would think he wouldn't need to take that extra step unless he really believed it. And I think he does really believe this because his whole life now has been talking about his ideas that he's got.

And the thing that makes David such a big deal is that his theories, they kind of fuse like new age and health and with aliens and conspiracy theories with those things under his umbrella, he covers such a wide range of topics that if you're into any of this stuff, when you hear him talk and when you read his books, he doesn't sound unhinged. He remarkably sounds quite logical. And he doesn't get to the reptilian shapeshifters and the holograph being sent from the moon until you're like eight hours into the 12 hour lecture.

So it's a bit like Scientology where it doesn't start with Xenu, the galactic warlord it starts with here, have a personality test. And so it's the same thing with him.

Yeah. And that you have repressed memories that are getting in your way, which is probably truth. If you had to assess the makeup of the audience, do you think they primarily were there because they were a fan of his as a broadcaster or these people that have fallen in love with his post broadcast work into these areas and his books? They're all the readers of the books.

Yeah, a lot of his fans won't even know he was a sports broadcaster. When he comes to New Zealand and he comes to the United States, people are there because they've read his books and they love what he has to say. So it's primarily like the message which he'll be incredibly proud of.

And the message is big. He was banned in the last couple of months from Twitter before that. This year, he's been taken off YouTube and Facebook because his conspiracy thinking links into the side saying covid-19 isn't a real thing.

So he's got some pretty hot water lately. But before that, his primary big idea is that eons ago these aliens came down to earth, these big lizards. So at 12 foot lizards, and they started interbreeding with humans like aristocracy, the important people in society. And so you now had these alien human hybrids, these half human half reptile creatures that are slowly taking over key parts of the planet. So according to like David today, George. Bush is a reptilian, the queen's reptilian, the Rothschild family, they're all reptilian, so that's his main thing.

If we work off of that, Homo sapiens have been here for two hundred thousand years, does he have a rough date of when the reptiles arrived?

He brings in a bit of biblical timeline stuff. So I think for him, the reptilians are 12000 years ago, they're a little bit more recent.

Do they tie in with Egypt at all? They definitely tie in with Egypt. He goes pretty deep into that and it gets pretty confusing. He talks for 12 hours about this stuff. So, like, it's a lot to summarize in a short amount of time.

You haven't sat through one of them, have. You know, when he came to New Zealand, I met with him and I interviewed him because I was working as a journalist at the time. And I thought it would be funny to bring him into the newsroom to interview him because no one in the newsroom know who this man was. And I just found that quite funny, that this lunatic was like wandering around and then New Zealand newsroom.

And, you know, he seems really sound like he's really had to trip up on anything he doesn't come across. Like he has particularly crazy ideas.

He'll start quite softly, like he'll he'll worry about what's happening with A.I..

And is Facebook tracking our data? He talks about things that are incredibly logical and will only be over time that he spirals into the whole lizard people thing.

What was he wearing, his turquoise suit? No, he disappointingly, he's changed now. He just dresses in a reasonably light jeans and, like, jacket over his shirt. It's really disappointing.

What a bummer. That is a bummer. I guess what I was wondering about his live show is if you had any sense of how much of it is, quote, on script and how much of it is he improvising and discovering new ideas as he talks is the rantings of a lunatic and that he gets on to something and does some real time discoveries, or is he just laying out all the stuff in his books?

He's laying out stuff that he absolutely knows for sure is the truth.

So, OK, it's a slide show.

So he's got like a PowerPoint behind him and he'll click his little clicker and he'll go through various images. But yet he's not inventing up madness in the spot. It's all stuff that he knows that he's researched, that he's properly vetted, it's all properly vetted stuff.

All that sounds like it. Yeah. OK, OK.

So his big theory is that the reptiles from another planet arrive, you know, maybe twelve thousand years ago and they interbred.

Yeah, there was some interbreeding. So the Reptilians wanted this. They were very purposefully thrusting their DNA forward down very specific bloodlines. And the trouble with David Icke and where it becomes less hilarious and more all this is actually a bit awful, is that this bloodline of reptilians, a lot of them end up being Jewish.

People often call them out and they say, look, this is quite anti-Semitic, but he's like, no, I'm not talking about Jewish people.

I'm talking about the 12 foot lizards. And he sort of tries to skirt around it. But it's actually a lot of those 12 foot lizards.

You are talking about Jewish people and he's got other quite bad ideas.

He's very sceptical about aspects of the Holocaust, and he thinks that it's bad that scepticism of that isn't taught in schools. And so there's certain things he says we are just like, oh, OK, this isn't great as kind of not funny anymore. You actually have some quite bad ideas.

Well, don't all roads seem in this space to lead back to anti-Semitism, or at least many of them?

Yeah, they do. And unfortunately, David Icke is another one that does his whole thing about reptilians is that they feed off our pain and our angst. His other defence for racism is that he can't be racist. He doesn't want to have any hate in him because he knows that will feed the reptilian overlords. So that's how he skirts around. Am I racist?

That is this incentivise. Yeah. Incentivized to be racist.

So if I was in the reptilian bloodline and I wish I was, I would bet if these existed, you are continuing.

OK, is it like a Harry Potter situation where I can just become a smaller version of the Lizard or the 12 foot lizard at any moment?

Yet you're a shapeshifter, so your eyes will go black before you're about to shift and then you will literally transform into a 12 foot lizard so you'll get green skin. It's like a literal lizard that is just under your skin, like a Komodo dragon.

And has he said that he has seen these lizards walking around outside of the island of Komodo?

His main evidence is that he has spoken to people that have seen people morph from human to lizard.

Okay, this is probably off topic a little bit. But what happens to the. Clothing, it makes me think of the Hulk when Bruce when he would turn into the Hulk, the clothes would be gone. You like magic? Well, they'd ripping to shreds. And then every time the transformation happened, you'd have on the floor a bunch of tattered and torn clothing that wouldn't fit the lizard.

Yeah, there are real problems with this theory. Like why would you even bother to shape shift? Like, what's the advice, what you want.

Yeah. Yeah, things like this, he just kind of freezes over in a major way. And so the agenda of the alien lizards, though, is to gain power and perpetuate their own bloodline. Is that or do they have a more sinister plan?

It's to control the world and to keep humans under their control and also to create certain things like war and famine so that they can feed off the negative energy that humans are putting out there, so that this big bad, which has a lot in common with the Kuhnen conspiracy theory, because reptilian strangely also love harassing and torturing and eating children, which is Kuhnen says, a lot of the Democrats like to do as well. So, David, I.

I almost feel like it was the preachy and on all encompassing conspiracy theory because he covers everything he's all about 9/11 being a hoax. He thinks that vaccines are simply a way for the reptilians to control the population. All the stuff that Kiernan's into he was into before Q and on. But he had the alien back story, which Kuhnen weirdly doesn't have.

Yeah, it's almost auspiciously so, but so it sounds like he's synthesisers a ton of stuff into one cohesive narrative, pulling tons of stuff into it. Yeah.

And it all comes back to the lizards. In the late 90s, he wrote the biggest secret, which was his biggest book talking about the Reptilians.

And then he expanded on that a couple of years later with this other idea he had called the moon Matrixx. His other big theory, which is that the moon isn't the moon. It's a reptilian spaceship slash moon base.

And what that does is it gets its energy from Saturn's rings, like Saturn's rings of the charger spinning around that charges the moon and then the moon slash spaceship slash portal to another dimension is like this big VR machine that shoots down onto Earth and creates the matrix like we're in The Matrix. Like a lot of what's going on around us isn't real. It's generated by the moon that says are the big thing.

OK, so the moon is like a big film projector and it's creating a lot of the imagery we're seeing.

But more psychically, it's more psychically gets into our brain. So it's not like it's projecting imagery for our eyes. It goes directly into the brain. So we see what the Reptilians want us to see.

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There is overlap, as I understand it, I am not an authority on it, so don't sue me. But my understanding of the Xenu story in Scientology is that the bad aliens were put in a volcano. The volcano exploded and then invaded the bodies of humans. And those are Thebans. Maybe you got it. And that that is the source of all fear and angst. It's very similar in that way. Totally.

It's very much about energy and the fact that we are being manipulated by ultimately an alien race. So it's very similar.

That's like Christianity, too, with Satan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Satan is is a force that invades your body and it makes you pull pulls you in the wrong direction and tries to exercise evil on planet Earth. Is there criteria to identify the lizard people also? Is there a plant they, I would assume should be killed?

Yes, but is very true. His take is that ultimately that we should get rid of the Reptilians. But I think he kind of just believes that we're living with them now, like they're so entrenched and they're so secretive and sneaky that we'll never managed to catch them all. So we just have to be aware of it.

And ultimately, like, his end goal is kind of nice in a way. He thinks that we should all just be peaceful and love each other so that they don't get any of our energy, which is a nice endgame to have. But you've got to give it to him.

Except not Jewish people. Yeah, because Jewish people are probably going to be the reptile's. Sorry. Yeah, but probably the reptile's.

Yeah, I do think so many movements are just trying to put a face on angst and the human condition, the unpleasantness of being alive and fear and jealousy and all these things. And so for some reason it feels helpful to anthropomorphize that into the devil. Thena whatever it is now, these lizard people. And then funny enough, the solution is a beautiful solution to your point, if the lizards can exist, if we don't carry around fear and shame and hatred, we could accidentally reach some great state, even with a flawed premise.

Yeah, it's a really nice idea and I would give credit to him for that. Unfortunately, the bad with it tends to outweigh the good and that can be as simple as he takes a lot of people's money for these lectures and these books for ideas that most of them, they're not great ideas.

His big thing that he was putting out there when covid was kicking off earlier this year in March and April was that covid was definitely not real and that it was primarily the outcome of 5G cell towers being put up. So I don't know if you remember, but there are a number of cell towers being set on fire around the world at one point.

Well, I learned from you that it happened in New Zealand, which shocked me. Yeah.

And it happened in the UK as well. And he was not helping that at all. His whole take was that 5G, the electromagnetic radiation is breaking down our body's natural defences and we get sick.

So when he started saying that and that started getting a lot of traction, that's when YouTube and Facebook booted him off. And he just lost his Twitter account recently because his conspiracy theories aren't exactly spreading the most helpful health information around.

Is he popular enough that he's ever gotten a response from, say, the queen of England or the royal family? Have they ever officially responded to that accusation?

The queen hasn't. Mark Zuckerberg, there was a Q&A in twenty sixteen and someone put the question to him, are you a reptilian shapeshifter like David Icke has suggested? And he said, no, he wasn't a lizard here in New Zealand.

We had a prime minister a few years ago now called John Key, and someone put an official information request here to say, is the prime minister a 12 foot green shapeshifting reptilian? And the prime minister's office actually put out a response to that, saying we don't have any evidence of that, which made it even worse because they didn't deny it.

They were just saying we got evidence.

And so, as you would, if you're a 12 foot lizard, you would deny it if the question is put to you, right?

Well, that was my question. Has anyone said I actually am?

If I ever get asked Liz, I'm going to definitely say I am. Well, you are.

He also said that New Zealand is going to disappear after a whole lot of earthquakes and volcanoes erupted, and that's never happened. He did get into sort of prophecy for a while. But I think when he started getting those things wrong, he backed away from that, which is probably a smart move to his longevity.

Yeah, it's a really risky business to make predictions.

I don't know why anyone bothers. Why would you even go there? Are one easy tests, it seems to me, unless these reptiles from the other planet are in fact warm blooded, but from what I know about reptiles, they are cold blooded. So if any photo of the prime minister in 20 degree weather, but still moving around and being able to be active, that would to me prove it's not a lizard.

I think what he would say is that because the lizards and the humans have interbred, the lizards have got some of our warm blood coursing through the veins. I think that's how he sidestep that that zinger.

OK, well, it's convenient that they can just cherry pick whatever things they want from us, but mostly just take us over but keep, you know, whatever things we're good at. I guess Viva parody and some other mammal traits.

I think I think the remarkable thing, like it sounds like listening to us now talking about this stuff, it does sound completely mad. But if you watch any of his lectures, he's got DVDs, he's on YouTube, although probably a lot of his videos have been removed now.

But it's amazing how incredibly together and trusting he seems. I was listening to a podcast he was on last night and he was talking about his theory that covid is a hoax. And, you know, he's just slowly talks like no one I've ever met, which is how you fill up 12 hours of lecture time.

But he's very good at laying the groundwork and really logical small steps.

So you sort of find yourself agreeing with them for quite a lot of it, or at least not instantly finding a reason to jump in and go, oh, no, you're clearly full of shit.

It's really clever how he does that. And it's probably because he has this broadcasting background. He knows how to talk. He knows how to sell something. And listening to him, you can see how people feel then that's like a salesman technique. It's like, do you enjoy getting places faster?

Yes. Do you like when your wife's kind? Do you. Yes. Like you just start establishing this pattern of saying yes for an hour and then now would you like to drive home in this? And then you just kind of the pumps primed to say yes. Yeah, absolutely.

I think why he's done so well internationally as well as because he's not like an Alex Jones who is just yelling a lot of quite obscene, extreme stuff. He's British, he's very measured. He comes across like he's someone you can trust. And I think that's worked for him an incredible way. Despite the early days, wearing nothing but turquoise and talking about lizards, apart from that stuff, like he's very together. And I think that seeing him survive, you know, he's been doing this for like 30 years now and he's still making as much money as ever.

Why do you think he is doing this? Because it sounds like he was successful and probably like gaining from the establishment. So what could have caused this change in thinking? Or is it just he wants followers and he's just made all this up and he doesn't really believe it?

Yeah, well, I was going to say one of the signature signs of schizophrenia is people often believe that they are a God.

I mean, I'm not the one to say, but I feel like he does genuinely believe it. I don't think he is a grifter. I don't think he's tricking people. I don't think he's doing this just to make money. I think he genuinely believes all this stuff.

You know, there's a decent chance it is a mental health thing. The problem is he's been empowered over the years by publishers and broadcasters and platforms and a lot of people listen to him. So at some point, the mental health I find that difficult to look at is an excuse for his behavior because he has people around him who at some point could step in and say to him, day David, I'm not sure if you should be saying that covid-19 isn't real.

You've got a lot of people that are going to believe you and not put on a mask. And this is a problem. Yeah, it's tricky.

It's tricky with something like this because it's definitely a genuine belief.

He has when he was kicked off of Twitter, how many followers did he have? Most of his followers and most of his revenue online was via YouTube. I think he had about a million subs on there. So it's not massive numbers. But for a British conspiracy theorist, it's up there. And now he doesn't have a voice except for his lectures and his books. So it'll be interesting to see over the course of the rest of this year and next year how well he does, because obviously social media is a pretty good way for him to get himself out there.

How old is he at this point? He must be in his 70s. He's in his late sixties, I believe old I OK, if you Google him, he's got white hair. It's some mullet, very intense face.

He's gotten more preachy as times gone on in the early days, he was a bit more loose and easygoing, but he's very preachy. And once you set him off, he just won't stop talking.

When you interviewed him, what topics did you bring up? I brought up the lizard thing because that's what fascinated me so much at the time. You know, it's. Like if you say to a Scientologist, tell me about Xenu, he won't he'll just be like, that's outrageous to talk about that. Now you need to know all the background to what I'm doing.

One thing he did talk to me about, which I thought was kind of interesting at the time, he said when he was a kid, his greatest fear was being ridiculed. That was like this thing he always hated, which I think probably all of us hated that when or at school or any time. And so when he went on this big British talk show, he was sitting there talking about how he was the God he had and about energy and about his different theories.

And the audience was laughing at him so loudly. And then after that appearance, that shocked him into superstardom. And, you know, he couldn't go to the store without people going.

Yeah, David, I mean, can we get a photo with you and teasing him again and again and again? That's the point. He just said to me like that was a decision he made, whereas this is my life now. I'm going to be teased, but I'm just going to lean into it. And ever since then, he's just done exactly that.

So does he regularly make the rounds on British TV as kind of like a funny guess that people have the last couple of years since the anti-Semitic stuff has been a little bit more in people's faces?

That's happened less and less, which is great.

But definitely whenever he is travelling the world, you'll see him pop up on Australian daytime TV or he'll be on TV in the U.K. He will pop up because he's the reptilian guy. Why would you not want to book the guy that thinks the Queen's a lizard?

You know, I'm dying to talk to him for sure. And he's likeable.

He's a really likable guy. Like when I brought him into the newsroom here in New Zealand that I was working and he was a lot of fun. And you want to spend time with him?

Yeah. Does he have any formal education?

No. Post school? It was nothing. It was just soccer. He joined the Green Party for a while after playing soccer, and he started getting into the environmental movement a little bit, which I think ended up marrying up with some of his more extreme New Age ideas. The Green Party eventually kicked him out because he just got too extreme for them. But education wise, not a lot. But listening to him, you couldn't tell.

Yeah, I just imagine someone who could write twenty five books is prolific. I haven't written any books.

Yeah, me either. I've, I've wanted to write a dozen and yet I don't have a finished one so my hat's off to him. Yeah.

Twenty five percent say they're not small books. They're like really, really big volumes. But you know, he just goes into such extreme detail, you know, he's talking about the moon matrix and how it's powered by Saturn's rings. I'm saying that in a couple of sentences. But there's so much detail that he puts into it page after page after page. And then his theories backing that up goes on and on and on.

It almost sounds like when he learns something new, like when you see he worked for Greenpeace as opposed to rejecting something he believed before, he just figures out a way to fold it in.

He absolutely is. And new information will just compliment his other ideas. And it's a great way to write books, because you're right, one book laying down the groundwork and then your next book will be voting on that and expanding on that. And because he's got so many different bases he's covering, he's got this New Age side. He'll talk about nine eleven as well. What's his theory?

On 9/11, it was all orchestrated by the Reptilians so that the US could invade Iraq, which that's what happened. But his back story is all his own bullshit. He's also very good at fusing things that happened with his mad theories. And so they fuse quite well together.

Well, I can imagine if you didn't live in the US and you were critical of our previous CIA operations and our many things we've done to pursue oil. I can see someone almost buying into the 9/11 conspiracy to justify us going to Iraq. But I would expect him to put us as the bad guys in that conspiracy as most people did. So does he even have geopolitical enemies or people that he thinks are bad or just as any bad actor or reptilian?

His whole thing is that he doesn't see political boundaries or race or creed or anything. It's all goes back to whoever is the reptilian is the one pulling the strings.

And so when he got kicked off of YouTube and Twitter, was there a shitstorm that followed?

He went old school. He went on every radio talk show he could possibly get on. He started incorporating that. He's got his own radio broadcasts that he has in the UK newspapers, all the old channels. His whole thing was that they're just trying to cover up the truth about covid being fake. Like, of course, this would happen. So like with any filming, the person that's been the platform just uses that to further their own conspiratorial thinking.

And so, of course, his followers are probably going to buy into that.

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If I could lay out concisely the argument for the people who've been de platformed, I believe it goes like this, we have a right to free speech in this country. And the Internet is basically a utility. It's something that all of us should have access to and everybody uses Facebook. So to be making choices of who's on Facebook and who's not is in violation of that. And you're a journalist who has a pretty good understanding of the First Amendment, I would imagine.

Could you say why it's taking that too far? I have my own opinion on it. Yeah.

I think if you have a platform that is a broadcaster like YouTube is and a publisher like Facebook is, you have a built-In responsibility to not spread en masse and promote by your algorithms really dangerous information. So free speech is certainly important, but it's not trumped by being allowed to simply speak really loudly to a massive audience about something that will potentially get someone kills. And when you getting massive numbers promoting an outright lie that covid-19 isn't real, then I think that's where free speech shouldn't get held up as the number one thing.

Well, I think it then treads into the it's illegal to yell fire in a theater argument, which is prohibited. But I would go further and say that Facebook is not the government, YouTube's not the government. Twitter is not the government. You have a right to not be silenced by your government. You don't have a right to not be silenced by Gucci or Chevrolet or Kmart. You don't have access to Wal-Mart, the site of their building to hang your poster on.

You're not insured. A right to use someone else's enormous creation to amplify your own voice.

No, and you're on someone else's product doing that. Facebook is a product and surrounds a product. You're using those places to yell your rubbish. Nothing is stopping David Icke to being de platformed from Twitter, from going on and speaking on a TV station or going down to the park and yelling out his theories from the corner. You'll often find people that are screaming and yelling about being de platformed. They're doing it from a platform like you're hearing them say that because they're on a platform somewhere.

So, yeah, it's people that are upset because they're being removed by a business from shouting dangerous, terrible things. They're still going to have places to shout those things from.

Yeah. If you go into Macy's and you start preaching, they will ask you to leave Macy's. They have not infringed on your First Amendment right. You're inside Macy's. Is there been any terrible outcome, like have any of his followers done anything illegal or crazy that has gotten into the news?

It's not particularly to announce levels of crazy.

No assault rifles at pizza parlor, no assault rifles. I mean, the thing with him is he will appeal to the right. They've taken on certain ideas of his, especially the more anti Semitic stuff. Obviously, he's out there promoting the idea that face masks are absolutely useless in any way. But I think that's also his aesthetic of being British. He's not on the Alex Jones screaming in a violent way. He's a little bit more subtle. His ideas are still insidious, but I don't think he incites violence in the same way that other conspiracy theories would.

Now, I have a perverted question. Any time there's been a leader of a lot of people who think that leader is a deity of some variety, generally what follows is some sexual exploitation, be it the Bikram or the Bhagwan or Keith Ranieri.

No, it's a really good point.

I mean, in my mind, I think sometimes money is enough for people. And if people see the revenue coming in, then that is going to be enough for them.

And you could age out of it, I guess. Like, how horny are you being?

I'm being serious, David. The reason I don't want to be a cult leader is I want to stay married. I would not feel comfortable starting a cult. And so I was like seventy in my penis. Didn't work anymore.

It's very it's very responsible of. You figured the reason for not starting a cult. Thank you so much. I've thought about it a lot. But is this gentleman married.

Yeah, he's been remarried at least once. OK, so I don't know, maybe it's that British thing of being slightly more reserved. He just seems very happy. He's not like he's got a whole group around him that adore him. There's no power structure within his organization. He is merely one man who has a lot of people that read his books. It's not like he's called. Jesus, number two, he hasn't called 12 disciples to be around him or anything like that, he just seems very content, writing about moon matrixes and reptilian shapeshifters and making enough coin from that to do what he does.

I think he genuinely believes that something has flipped in his brain where he believes this stuff wholeheartedly. And I think that's enough for him.

Does he have any source material or this is entirely his discovery? And how did he discover it?

Do you know, I think his original story about knowing that he is like Jesus 2.0 was from that direct download into his brain where he just knew a lot of these things that Jesus new stuff.

And so, David, I just know his stuff to religious people, especially Christians. Do they support him? Is his base often religious? Because that seems like counterintuitive. If you're saying he's Jesus number two, you'd think they'd be like, well, no.

Yeah, yeah, totally. I think a lot of hardcore Christians are not Big David fans for that exact reason. He's more channeled into the spiritualist movement. So people that are big on energy and energy transferal because that's what he's all about. So he's gone into the sweet spot of New Age spiritualism, people that love aliens and people that think that there's a bigger master plan going on by people that don't have our best interests in mind. Hmm. Oh, wow.

That's a lot.

That's a lot. Does he have any collaborations like is he bedfellows with any other conspiracy theorists?

No, he'll go on their shows, but it's just him. And that's something I think is kind of charming about him. Like he's pure. Yeah. If Davidek has written a book, you know, it's probably going to be some mostly fresh ideas that you haven't heard before, that he'll occasionally recycle other texts. And there's certainly been science fiction stories before David came along that had giant lizards and aliens infiltrating the human race. So it's not, oh, fresh thoughts, but his take on everything is very unique.

And, you know, when you're reading a David Wright book or you're listening to a David Wright lecture, that is definitely David, I think.

OK, so out of ten, I think we maybe we should get into a habit of assessing a power ranking or a threat ranking.

Yeah, I originally got excited by David because it was kind of cute, the whole lizard thing and the Saturn Moon Matrix, all that stuff was like quite novel.

But if you add in the code, it isn't real, the anti-Semitism, the anti vax stuff, because of course, that's the reptilian thing. You start to add all those things up. And I think it does become a little bit more insidious than the ha ha. You're the guy that thinks we're all lizards. You're right. You're right.

Because, yeah, there's no action to be taken if you do believe the queens a lizard. But if you're making a decision, then I'm not going to vaccinate my child for polio or I'm not going to vaccinate my child for, you know, measles or any number of things then. Now, the lizard thing's not that funny because some child's growing up very vulnerable to diseases from the seventeen hundreds.

And also his ideas are quite catchy. This New Age festival in New Zealand recently that I wrote about listed Davidek is one of their big inspirations. His name was listed alongside a lot of the more common these days, sort of the kuhnen type people. And so I think he inspires a lot of other people as well. And so he's a little bit more of a subtle mover and shaker. He's not an Alex Jones that's screaming and he's not yelling at his audience that school shooting victims are crisis actors.

He's a little bit more subtle. He's got a really big influence within the conspiracy community. His ideas spread an insidious way.

So I'd always give him like a good seven out of ten, I'd say, to be around seven.

And he does sound like a gateway, like you might come for the lizards, but then stay for the vaccine and the antidote and the gateway in like the sort of the spiritual thing and what we're talking about earlier of him not wanting to feed the reptiles to try and wipe out war and any kind of angst. That's a really beautiful way into this thing. But then from there, it slides into some stuff that's a little bit not quite so delightful.

I think a lot of people that love David. I think it takes a while for them to slip out of that belief system.

I got to say, I'm a little shocked, am I right, in that New Zealand only has three million people, right?

Five million. So we're doing pretty well.

Oh, congrats. Oh, yeah. Really good job. Thank you. We're breeding. We're really doing well done here, you guys. Very horny, very horny.

All the reptiles are you.

We're going to have reptiles that have them down here in our country of over three hundred million people. It's not shocking to learn. At one hundred thousand believe in any one thing that's zero point zero zero percent of the population, and I naively would assume in a country of your size four million that there's no way you could get more than 10 people to gather to watch him. Do you think that's a little bit alarming when you look at percentages out of four million that he can fill a three thousand seat venue?

It is a bit alarming.

So not New Zealand is not immune. I don't think any country is immune to these sort of I like to call it woo! Like it's sort of woo thinking just through its with this, it's hard to avoid.

Yeah. There is some very fascinating phenomena when you're in a ingroup that is accessible by everyone, but it doesn't feel accessible by everyone.

And I think there's some really abstract borders on the Internet where people feel insulated. The only people consuming this are people who all of agreed on this common culture and common sense of humor and common everything.

Do you have any data on what percentage of people believe in some conspiracy theory? I only ask because when I was in high school, and that is the perfect age to get into conspiracy theories. Oh, same. Yeah, yeah. This book, Behold the Pale Horse, just kind of made its rounds and the punk rock community that I was in and we all read it and we were super into it for about four months. And then you just lose interest in it because there's not a second book to read.

And now because it's on the Internet, everyone has access to it. And then the conversation is furthered and you could stay endlessly interested in it because new stuff's coming. So I'm just curious, what impact has the Internet had on the mass acceptance of conspiracy theories?

It's debated this whole topic and different surveys and different polling will tell you different things. But the general idea seems to be that belief and conspiracy theories hasn't gone up or down at all. There's always been a certain type of human brain that will fall into magical thinking and distrust of power systems, and that will fall into that every year.

So and so conspiracy goes through the roof, etc.. The reporting of it is almost amplifying the actual belief and the actual amount of belief there is and that stuff.

That's a great ethical question for you, right, because you report on it. Yeah, exactly. I would imagine your ostensible goal is to shine a light on how dangerous, preposterous it is. And then yet in doing so, you're giving attention to it. And I'm doing it right now with you. So I'm not throwing a stone in a glass house. No, completely.

But I also think that's what a lot of the polling suggests, is that belief isn't increasing. But I think what is changing is that some of the real world reactions to this conspiracy thinking is affecting our behavior more.

So I think some of the behavior we're seeing in the United States and I think just the fact that you up until may well be ending very soon. You have a president who openly promotes conspiratorial thinking and endorses certainly the kuhnen movement through his retreats. I think some of the outcomes of that is getting a little bit dicier than what it once was.

There's a difference to believing some of the stuff Cunanan believes to believe in whether the moon landing was fake or not. So that's why I feel really confident reporting on this and talking about it, because I think we need the tools to know how to talk about this stuff, and especially if we have friends and family that are slipping into this kind of thinking just to be able to pull them out.

Oh, undoubtedly, people will be gathered with family members on the coming holidays hearing stuff.

Oh, yeah, we have a lot of that.

Do you guys have any family members or friends that are heavily into this? I have a couple uncles that send my mom really out there. Conspiracy theories.

Yeah, it's always the forwarded emails that you've got to watch out for, isn't it? Your parents are getting what you need to look at your parent's inbox. That's where it's all popping off.

Yeah. And of course, you can chart it quite easily. They just get increasingly more hostile. The tone is just ever expanding and getting more aggressive.

Absolutely. And I think the rhetoric around the stuff is getting more it's getting angrier. So, again, I think that's why it's important to talk about it.

But in general, where as stupid as we've always been as far as believing in stupid ideas is always going to be a certain amount of the population that is going to love Woo with the Internet exists or not.

Yeah, OK, well, we're going to stay on top of all of them. Oh yeah. All of them. Yeah, all of them.

They're coming hot and fast and we're going to go through them. So I think pretty much now I hope everyone has a pretty firm understanding of what's going on in the royal family and elsewhere.

Oh, the other wild thing I found very funny about David is that he thinks it's terrible that Schindler's List is often taught in schools. He sees that as being like a main bit of propaganda for what happened or didn't happen during the Holocaust. So he's very anti Schindler's List, which is awful, but also just a very funny fact about someone being anti Schindler's List, one of the greatest. Of all time, well, that's the thing is when you're going to be critical of something, you shouldn't pick one that won the Academy Award, it's just it's a bad strategy.

Yeah, it's a really, really bad strategy.

Well, David, I love you. I can't wait to learn more about what else is happening out there on the Internet and planet Earth. Stay safe down there in New Zealand.

Yeah, we'll talk to you next month. Yeah, that'd be great.

And please stay safe up there in the United States of America. Will do.

There's enough of us to hide in plain sight. So, yes, that's true for today. Yeah. All right, David, we love you. Love you guys, too.

Nice to see you. To see you, Monica. Bye bye, guys. See?