Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: So how do we want to kick this off then? What do you want to. What should the intro be? Shall we? Or should we just play with it?
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Welcome back to humanizing.
Yeah, is that not it?
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Oh, I think that sounds reasonable enough to me. Welcome back.
Hello and welcome to Humanising, the podcast that allows you to understand how you've been programmed by both evolution and culture so you can liberate any behavior you choose and be who you would like to be. Today. I'm Ginny. I'm the map holder. I'd like to introduce Maheen.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Hello.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Maheen is the explorer. And together we will journey through this programming so you can understand through the questions you ask, and definitely the questions Maheen asks, how to liberate yourself and be the most amazing person that you choose to be.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Roll up, roll up.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Life's got in the way as it does. And the actual fact we're not a publishing house or a set of celebrities or a magazine or whatever, this gets recorded when we can.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Speaking of.
Absolutely. It's actually very timely. There was a post yesterday by Mister Stephen Bartlett himself on LinkedIn. A photograph of him with his head in his hands talking about how he had over committed. And it was a post about how he is trying not to.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: I wouldn't suffer from that at all.
[00:01:45] Speaker B: Exactly.
She's being sarky.
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Sarcastic, being mega sarky. There's always too much to do.
[00:01:54] Speaker B: Yeah, he was.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: And there are too many things that need to be changed and done and made a difference, too.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Absolutely.
For those of us who are minded, Mike has.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: It's great. It's really, really cool.
[00:02:08] Speaker B: Right, guys? I'm recording for a podcast studio.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: We're getting all grown up on ourselves, guys.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: I mean, I'm in a real podcast studio. I've got headphones at, a real mic and a roadmaster thing.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: That sounds like you're in a truck.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Come to me.
I'm just vying for Roadmaster to sponsor us. I better learn the name of the thing.
Roadmaster classic. A servo biased preamp. Apex on the wire.
[00:02:35] Speaker A: I have no idea what that means.
Personally. I'm on shore.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Me either.
[00:02:39] Speaker A: Everything is sure. I didn't order it either. Oh, I get beautiful. I'm working.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: I'm working on a podcast pro microphone.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: So what are we doing back then, kid?
[00:02:55] Speaker B: I just think we want to talk to the peeps about programming, reprogramming, un programming, just being brave and thinking about what you think about.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Well, that sounds pretty deep. Do you want to explain a little bit more?
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Okay, so let's use this upcoming election as our starting point for various reasons. This is a really important vote for me. One of the main reasons is that we've been governed by people in a party that I certainly haven't voted for any time recently. And so I think it's vitally important that we come out and tick the box, mark the box that means something to us. It's also the vote. Well, we're going to have id.
So it's going to exclude a huge number of the population who don't have it, can't afford a passport, don't have a driving license. They don't have, you know, a form of id that they can bring to a booth. And that's a real problem. That's, that's excluding this right. From, from people, which I think is disgraceful. But it's also a chance for us to take the temperature of the world stage and really think about who we want in power so that we are safest.
And I don't know, I feel like if we don't really start critically thinking about what a safe, healthy, unified world looks like and then voting like that. So I have a, we're going to.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Keep repeating it is I don't think any of them are that or I'd vote for them.
I have always been challenged by the fact they're all incredibly short termist. They only care about the next three years. Why would they not? Because that's how long, you know, that's how long they're in power. And if you're managing anything to do with the country, surely your focus should be 50 to 100 years.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Have a big plan.
[00:04:59] Speaker A: And then, and, but then are we arguing technically for the democracy, if that's what it truly is, to work in a different way because you can't focus on three years. Some of the reasons why I know the, what are called dictatorships and I completely understand that, can be viewed in that way, such as in Asia and in Russia. But they plan for 150 to 100 years out. Right.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: China has a 500 year plan.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Where's ours? I mean, that would change it because it would be not the plan but how you executed it. That matters.
[00:05:42] Speaker B: Well, so you and I talk about how what we in the west called indigenous populations view ourselves as part of a wider eco cycle, recognizing that we've been here for a very long time, the planet's been here for a very long time. We've arrived at some point is going to go on way beyond us and we have a little flash in the pan moment where we have to make it, preserve it, be part of it and not destroy it, because it's going to be handed over to the next generation of people.
If we viewed our political system in that way, recognizing the power that we have had, have. It's probably a different conversation to be had there. We would treat it differently if we treated our political globe like we treat. Actually, we probably shouldn't treat it this way. How indigenous tribes treat the actual earth upon which we live, where we make sure there's plenty for everyone. We don't overdo it with our taking of resources.
Yeah. We'd probably have a very different political system.
[00:06:49] Speaker A: Oh, totally. And we've not actually had this political system for a long time, you know.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Tell me what, tell me more.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: I think the first prime minister in England, somewhere around 1720, 1730, someone's going to write in and tell me I'm completely wrong, but I think it's Robert Palmerston who's recognised as the first prime minister and 17, even if it was, say, 1700, not that long ago. Sorry I whispered. It's not that long ago. It's a couple of hundred years.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: So why we think whisper on a podcast?
Whisper on a podcast. It's like me nodding my head in earlier episodes.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: They can see you now if they want to, but it's not been around that long and, well, 2300 years, if that. And yet we all accept it as though this is the way of doing things. It doesn't have to be. It just happens to be the one we will remember and have written down.
And I'm not arguing back to the divine right of monarchy or anything like that before, because even then, that wasn't around for that long, that was any about. Even in the UK, you know, we're couple thousand years. This is nothing in the whole human span of history. Human history. Let's low planetary history. If we look at planetary history, we might as well go, oh, blink, rise. That was the humans.
They don't really matter, they'll be gone. I mean, the Earth could quite happily be waiting for that. But she says they're going to get rid of all of themselves soon, so I don't have to worry about it. Blink of an eye.
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Exactly.
So are you voting for the Green party then? Is that what we've discovered?
[00:08:36] Speaker A: I said my biggest problem is I'll know people I wouldn't vote for, for not parties, because none of the parties ever have a long term plan. And that is a problem. No business runs on. Well, very few businesses run on a three year. We're only going to look three years ahead.
So why would country that way?
[00:09:02] Speaker B: I didn't study politics at all during my formal educational years, so I don't know whether there's something in the teaching of it that tells, you know, those of those of them who are minded that way. You're only here for a flash in the pan. So get done what you want or what you think at that time, and then let the people after you clean up the mess. And that's kind of the cycle that keeps going.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: I don't know. I've not. I know some stuff about politics.
I would hazard a guess that, like history, politics is written. All political theories are written by the victors, which doesn't mean it's right, it just means they won that particular time.
And there's a lovely phenomena which you see happening about how people vote. And I can't remember where I saw this, but if you start off young, most people start off labor, earn money, and get more and more right over the time. So start left, wherever you are, and get more and more right over time. The more money you have, the more right you go, apparently.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: Got you.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: And I believe that's underpinned by the cult of the individual.
So we believe, or we've believed from past couple of hundred years, that everything's you. It's all down to you. So if you're taught that the only person who will ever look after you is you, and you have to do stuff, the more you have, the less you want to share. But if you're taught it's who we are as a group that matters, you wouldn't ever behave like that.
[00:10:34] Speaker B: It's such an important thing, isn't it? So the reason I was clicking was because I read a quote by Jurgen Klopp the other day who said that he'd never vote for the rich 1%. Of course, he's what would be translated to be a labor voter, because no matter how much money he makes, he can afford to pay that tax.
So he doesn't want the loopholes in place for those people who have a ton of wealth. Because you have a ton of wealth.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: But he's very unusual. I said, this is what happens. Most people start left and go right, because, as I said, I believe the underpinning is that it's the cult of the individual. If you decide you don't want to believe in the culture of the individual and you believe something else, you will do it. But that's not a globally held viewpoint.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: Do you think it would be different if we nurtured that viewpoint.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: But then again, what you would be doing was be dismantling 250 years of a way of thinking and probably a thousand years of religious education, which is also fountained on. It's all you.
[00:11:43] Speaker B: I can do that.
[00:11:44] Speaker A: I feel fine. Well done. Let's get on and do it then.
[00:11:49] Speaker B: I feel really excited about that, actually. Let's start dismantling it.
[00:11:52] Speaker A: And I mean, lots of things we've talked about on what we do here is to give you the ability as an individual to look at how, and I saw this word written down the other day, I'm still not sure about it. Individuate, how do you take personal responsibility for what you want to do? So you're an individual, but you get to take control and not be a programmed part of the system.
And that, to be fair, that's what we've talked about from different angles, right, since we very first started. This is you are programmed whether you like it or not, but you have choice if you want to take it.
[00:12:41] Speaker B: When we talk about deprogramming, we're talking about you becoming conscious around your thoughts, which is.
[00:12:47] Speaker A: Yeah, and feelings. I think you have to recognize you feel and feelings, then you'll think and then you'll behave.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: And in that consciousness comes in time, if you're minded a bit of interrogation, because that's the thing that changes you, really, is that you're. Why do I behave like this? Why do I feel like that? Why do I want this? Why am I.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Yes, why is it my choice? Or is it something I've never thought about? And one of the absolutely things we'll be doing in this sort of series of programs, whatever you call podcasts, I can't remember now, episodes. Episodes is bringing people in who have walked that journey, as it were, and started to interrogate their own ways of looking at the world. And whether they actually decided that or it was something they'd received by whatever osmotic process happened in their surroundings, to think something without challenging it, because that's the insidiousness, isn't it?
[00:13:56] Speaker B: This is probably quite an interesting place for you and I to start as we go on this journey, continue on this journey together, is. Can you think of a moment or an experience or a time that made you go, oh, what?
[00:14:11] Speaker A: As in how I stood back from whatever else was going on and thought, I don't want to be like that. I might have to say, I think I've always been like this in the way as I never understood all the individual. It just doesn't happen in my head. I don't understand why you don't do stuff for everybody and not for everyone.
I never have. Right. Perhaps like I'd be a yoking klopp if I ever had that much money, which I doubt, but I've never understood it. I still don't get it. I don't think I'm ever going to understand. Why would you take just for you take too much or take just for you? So remember a thing going back years ago, and it is years because I'm very old at school. So it's 40, probably 40 years ago.
[00:15:01] Speaker B: I think you should own that. This is wisdom. We're talking about history. We talk about. We talk about if you were a cheese or a wine, you would quite rightly be bloody priceless. You are as a human, this wisdom is this one.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: I shouldn't put myself down. Yeah, right. I.
[00:15:19] Speaker B: Absolutely not. I will not let you. It's my first interrogatory act here. I mean, I've got a half a head full of grey hair, I've earned these stripes. I'm taking it.
[00:15:30] Speaker A: So when I was at school. So two things. One happened when I was really young and I only know this story because I've been told it because I was a bit little to remember. I think it was about five or six, but I was in primary school and in England that's between the ages of five and eleven.
And I the headmaster of this little bit of this junior school because we were in the infants and as juniors. Anyway, he brought me out because my grandma came to pick me up. My grandma, I have say, we've talked about it all, was a force to be reckoned with and I have no idea why she came for. I can't remember this. All I know is the story. I remember seeing my grandma in a fur coat in June with shoes. So she must have come from a business meeting. Anyway, so she stands there, I can see her put her hands on her hips like, what?
And she's tiny. She was like five foot one. I mean, huge personality. What's it ran a great business. Five foot one.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: It was what we in modern times call.
[00:16:27] Speaker A: Oh, definitely. And she knew it.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: So I was wondering. And I had a black eye apparently, and the headmaster had come out with me because apparently for some reason he knew my grandma was going to come and pick me up. You know, these details you lose as a child. I don't remember why that would have been happening. It could be my sister was being born. I had no idea. Anyway, she picked me up and she looked at me and she looks at headmaster, and she was scary.
And the story she tells me, well, it was over Virginia. Virginia, obviously. And I know he got pulled up for that because my grandma always called me Ginny because she hated my.
[00:17:04] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: And she got a black eye because she. She tried to stop someone being bullied and she got in the way, oh, and it won't happen again, et cetera, et cetera. And I was five or six because I know where it was and I know which school I was in at the time. And then if I look consistently at what I've tried to do over my life is like it. I don't see why people don't want to be fair. So I can't tell you a particular moment in time when I stood outside the social conditioning and said, no, I personally think I have. It feels like, for me, anyway, I've always looked at it and gone, why are you not doing that? And it doesn't look right. Why would you take more than you're going to eat or take stuff and then not share it with someone else or use something too much? I don't get it. Right. I seriously didn't come out the box that way. I came out of the box with going, you know, you're not selfish, you're not jealous. I don't know. So there you go. That's a very, very, very long winded way of saying, I think I was born this way.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Fair nature. Nurture.
[00:18:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Because definitely wasn't nurture. We didn't grow up, you know, the. The seventies and eighties were not a time of, well, we know what Margaret Thatcher says. There's no such thing as society. She couldn't be more wrong.
So what about you? Is there a particular moment in time when you went, oh, no, that's really wrong?
[00:18:37] Speaker B: I think I'm similar to you in that I came out this way. However, I rejected.
I remember the moment. I thought, what is this they're showing me? And how is this okay?
And how were people not, how is this happening?
And it was when Britain went to.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: War.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: She says, in inverted commas with Kuwait and the BBC News, the 09:00.
[00:19:18] Speaker A: So that was a broadcast politics moment then there. So that was. Was that I'm trying to remember, was that it was movement?
[00:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Just saying they're all as bad as each other.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Yeah. So, I mean, I think my world came down around my ears tenfold in this moment.
It was lots of stuff happening at the same time.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: So 1990s, the british forces would know it as Operation Granby does it all.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Yeah. So I would have. I was 1011, maybe a bit older, maybe. And I remember watching it on the news, sitting in my parents house, thinking to myself, I'm watching bombs drop on people and they are dying on tv.
And that if you were born and raised in this country through this education system, the key message of all of the education that you have around wars is lest we forget.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: Every english class is war poetry.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: We read Wilfred Owen, right?
[00:20:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
We read Carrie's war. We read the diary of Anne Frank. We, you know, wear poppies. We go to the war memorials. We have. When you were raised in eighties, nineties England, the way I was, lest we forget, was massive.
And I thought that was a really wonderful thing.
I thought it was really important. I'm absolutely a pacifist. Absolutely.
So watching that, it pulled the rug out in a million different ways. Suddenly we weren't. Lest we forget because we'd forgotten.
[00:21:15] Speaker A: Or had we conveniently been remiss with the actuality.
[00:21:24] Speaker B: Yeah, that too.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: We've made it fit for us at the time. It's a bit like. And, you know, right. You can argue everything's great in hindsight because the more we move forward, the more we know about the decisions we made in the past.
But one of the reasons the United nations and European Union became who they were was because we didn't want to forget all of those things.
And it's almost as though if you have generations who that didn't happen to, who didn't fight and who didn't do that and didn't go through those things, that it all that it's forgotten because it's not something you experience. So your general population's motivation for not going to war or not supporting the political parties, who would want to execute that?
It's not something I know. So how would I know how bad it was to be fair? And I find that continually challenging that today we have something, you know, we have a humanitarian disaster in Gaza that no one seems to want to do anything about. And it doesn't matter what we do, it's still being prosecuted.
So what can we do?
[00:22:56] Speaker B: I mean, march?
[00:22:59] Speaker A: Well, you see, I'm not sure that we've tried that. It doesn't seem to do anything, you know, I don't know.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: We'll do stuff. I mean, I'm a big fan of the boycott, divestment sanctions. I think money is where our power.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: Is or not buy something. That's very true, but I think it's coming back to this thing of. And sometimes I think this happened over Covid as well, which is the people who are in power are no better than you and I or anyone else. And they don't know the right answers. They know what they know now and they know what they think. They probably think what they're doing is right, but none of them are any cleverer, any better, or have any further right to be in power and make the decision for a country and for you than you or I know. And that's why it's so important for you to think about what you want to do, even if it's not vote. I mean, I'm still nothing. There is no one I want to vote for. I have this complete fit. There are individual peoples, but there are no parties, because I don't trust any of them, and I don't trust any of them ever to represent either me or our country in the way it should be represented on the world stage.
And I will not be told by anyone that they do, because it's quite patently obvious that they don't.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: So would you be a spoiler your voter?
[00:24:20] Speaker A: I haven't decided yet. I'm a swinger in that respect. I'm a swing voter. No one's got my vote, so I'm up for my vote. That said, in the area of the country I live in, to be fair, Martin, doesn't matter.
And that's why I want.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: Is it a fairly safe seat representation?
Yeah, I think that's really important, actually.
[00:24:42] Speaker A: I'm not sure. I didn't realise what that was till I started to look it up, why my vote didn't actually matter. But proportional representation isn't done on a constituency or seat basis, which goes back to what is now House of Lords controlling how votes were done back in the day. It's the fact that my vote would go into a great big pool and as our overall country, the vote would be taken, so it would be the proportion of the vote of every single person. So where I am, it doesn't matter what I voted. We are solid conservative and I don't think that would ever change. And therefore I'm disenfranchised. I have no power. Proportional representation would give me power, but it would also change the political landscape of the UK.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: I think therein lies something where we can meddle, because I think that, as we said at the top of this, there are lots of people out there who vote out of habit and or because they're, to quote Thatcher again, sadly, the lady's not for turning, but actually be for turning each time.
B for turning.
[00:25:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And if you ultimately are, you know, blue as blue can be through and through and you like everything that they represent or anything. I was going to say enough.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: I'm not sure you'll ever like anyone, but enough. I mean, in my heart of hearts, I'm a liberal.
As liberal or social Democrat party as would have been in the early eighties.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: As in the whatsit five. Now we're talking about stuff no one else will remember but the SDP as was, which came together. And with liberals. I've always been liberal.
I'd defend everyone's right to free speech, even people I don't like or whose opinions I don't agree with.
[00:26:41] Speaker B: Yeah, that's an interesting one, isn't it? Free speech versus hate speech. We talk about that a lot. That's a hard thing. Does it make someone unsafe, the things that you're saying?
[00:26:48] Speaker A: No, I don't see. It's. This is really interesting. It's something that's come around in the past, what, five or ten years? In the end, I should be allowed my opinion and you should be allowed yours. And proper debate comes from hearing all voices, not making your voices quiet, even the ones you don't want to hear. It's not up to you what they think. Going back to your thing, which is what we'll be doing with some of the people going to be coming in to be interviewed, is intellectual debate. And access to knowledge changes people's mind, not shutting them in a corner.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: Yeah. If you don't have the tricky conversations, it's a hard thing, isn't it? If you're going into a conversation to have your mind opened, then brilliant on both sides. If you're going in to make your point and stand doggedly by your point, I mean, it's not worth wasting your time having the conversation, I don't think. But if everyone comes into a conversation being curious.
[00:27:48] Speaker A: Totally. So one of those questions might be, and we're going to close shortly, would be, why have we killed curiosity?
Well, why and how? I mean, I know how. What I think about that, because if you're not curious, you'd be more controlled.
But this, as we say, is probably a topic for any other time. And I'd like to briefly close on the fact we might have touched on loads of things which are political anti motive today, but as a country, we're moving into that period of in time and it would be remiss of us to just stand by and not discuss how a lot of those things have been programmed into who you are, because this is why humanizing exists, at least to give you a couple of things over a cup of coffee, and I've been drinking mine. That might make you think differently, might make you stand back and stop and think.
Thank you for listening.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Thank you for coming on the journey with. With me, with us.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: Well, you're the explorer, Maheen.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: I'm off. I'm bashing into the undergrowth of our.
[00:29:09] Speaker A: Brains and into all that program prodding around, gallivanting within that programming. What we want to do, as we've always done with this, is help you understand why you feel the thoughts that you do and then the behavior behind that. So you have a choice of how you behave and who profits by it. And if it's not you and it's not humankind, then stop and think and go. Who's controlling who's behind my steering wheel?
So I want to invite you back, whether you're on a walk, going for the train, on that commute, taking a bath, even cooking, driving a car.
Wherever you find yourself, come and find us. We will be waiting.
