Gregory Sams - Original Macrobiotic Gangster

Full transcript: Gregory Sams on London Real

2:47 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. This is Nick Gabriel and joining us today is Mr. Gregory Sams. He is an author and a cultural change agent. He’s written two books. One is called Uncommon Sense. This date is out of date. I think you’ll rename that. We can get to that later.

3:23 And what is called The Son of God, which Nick read three years ago, who was raving about it. You’ve got such a long CV, Gregory. It’s not even funny. You invented the veggie burger. you opened the UK’s first natural food shop.

3:36 So much to talk about, but first, welcome. Okay, great to be here. Thanks for being here. I wondered if you were familiar with the term called OG, which is what some of the gang members in LA used to call the the guys that started it off back in the day, the original gangsters. And when I heard that term, that’s what I thought of you first.

3:54 Well, my brother and I used to call ourselves the Brown Rice Barons. We were the only people selling brown rice and importing and selling brown rice in this country and we had nine varieties of brown rice on the price list. So you couldn’t walk into a supermarket and find brown rice in this country? You couldn’t walk into a health food shop and find brown rice or sesame seeds or miso or seaweeds or hundreds of different foods. When we first took our package of natural foods to the main health food distributor who also owned Holland Barrett, the buyer there famously, we never let him forget it, told us, I don’t see any future for natural foods in the health food trade.

4:35 How many times does that happen in different aspects of life throughout the world in history? I guess that’s what a pioneer is, right? Someone who just has a vision and sticks to it, you know? But I, I mean, now everyone takes this stuff for granted. But what was it like back in, I mean, you had a shop on, on All Saints Road in like 68?

4:51 That’s right. 69. 69. And, you know, I mean, you know, John Lennon was, was making posters for you and all sorts of crazy stuff. What was it like back then when you talked about health food in a country like the UK?

5:02 Well, it was great. It actually started off with a restaurant. Okay. And that’s where John and Yoko used to come a lot. And the restaurant led to the health, to the natural food store because people ate the food at the restaurant and they wanted to make it at home.

5:16 So I opened up the shop for them to do it then. But it was the only counter-cultural, it was only the restaurant, the only restaurant in hippie London in the sixties. So a lot of people used to come down there because of that. So it was always a good buzz. And what we were doing was really trying to get across to people that what they ate affected their health.

5:41 And that was a really bizarre concept. People looked at us like we were nuts, you hippie dippies, you know, you are what you eat, give me a break. Even nutritionists, you know, there was no concept that diet affected health other than too much sugar affected tooth decay. That was it. Okay.

5:57 30 cups of coffee a day, it would never be associated with insomnia. They could live on white bread and, you know, milkshakes or something, and that would never be associated with constipation. It was… So that was the hard thing, getting it across, and then we had a message about what to eat, but the first criteria was what you eat affects you. It’s incredible. There’s a Bible verse that has been playing over in my head for the last two years, and I’m not a Christian or anything, but I just… I remember from my days as a Christian, a few of the verses, and it is, my people perish through lack of knowledge and, you know, so many people are just not educated about nutrition so they think when they see, like, the Coca-Cola poster that says, the latest campaign says, open happiness and it’s got a polar bear opening of Coca-Cola, they think, wow, this is, like, going to improve my life when it’s going to have a completely detrimental effect.

6:46 Yeah? I just saw that on the way here. I said, what are they trying to say here? It’s crazy. But people know it’s like sucrose and caffeine.

6:54 Do they know? I guess if you just need you need a little trickery, well, you know, I guess you just need plausible deniability and then people will drink it I mean did would you see something equivalent to what you were doing in 69 in today’s culture where the majority of it’s just like You guys are crazy, but you think in 30 years that people will adopt it Sure. Good question. I know he’s good with those I mean like meditation comes to mind where like I know a lot of people meditate But a lot of most people would not try it and think there’s no way sitting quietly for 20 minutes can affect my life. Oh, I think contrary back in the early 60s or mid 60s things like yoga and meditation people had no idea of Now there are yoga centers everywhere there are lots of people getting reflexology massage when I went to get acupuncture in 69 I had to drive to Leamington Spa, just south of Coventry, to find an acupuncturist.

7:58 The only one near London was in Jared’s Cross, and he was booked up for nine months ahead. So I’ve seen this huge change, and I named my first company Harmony Foods. I also had a magazine called Harmony. And Harmony was not really in use in the English language. It was in the dictionary, it was referred to as an Oriental concept of balance.

8:21 But it wasn’t something, we were all conflict and fighting and working for stuff, but harmony wasn’t part of our mindset at the time. So I’ve seen this enormous change going through things today, things like driverless cars, which horrifies me actually. People don’t think that’s ever going to happen, but at some point they will all be driverless and people will think how crazy that people used to get behind the wheel of something driving 50 miles an hour, when you think of all the health and safety thing we have in our lives, being able to go out in a car seems crazy.

8:58 But it does show how incredibly good we are at being responsible for ourselves in situations like that. You know, you mentioned John and Yoko. You just dropped their names earlier. And when I think of 1969, I think Woodstock and I think all this time changed, but all I can do is watch it on the old movies. and I was wondering if you could take us back to what it was really like.

9:20 I mean, you live in London now, so this is, this is what, 43 years ago? Am I doing my math right? And 44 years ago, what was it like? What was the vibe like? What was it like on Portobello Road?

9:30 What was the city like? You know, what was the feeling? Well, it was all revolutionary and change. I was only 19 years old when I opened the restaurant. And, you know, at that age, you think 10 years is a huge span, because it’s half your life.

9:49 And then I thought, gosh, in 10 years’ time, everybody will be eating natural organic foods. It’s so obvious. Now, 40-odd years later, I look back, and I think, my god, we’ve accomplished a lot. Look at what’s happened. Look at how things have changed.

10:05 So that’s really reassuring. But going back to your last question, two things, yeah, that we do today, which I hope we’ll see absolutely bizarre 30 years from now. One is the illegalization of old drugs. Just seems so insane. I like him already.

10:25 That smoking cannabis or taking psychedelics is illegal throughout the world. I mean, that is so crazy. And I mean, I’ve got a couple of arrests myself on cannabis. cannabis and I look forward to the day you know if I might tell my grand nieces I don’t have any grandchildren coming up yes I was there can you believe I was actually arrested for doing something as simple as this the other one that is really crazy is that we spend a trillion dollars a year of our money is used to buy devices, weapons, that kill us.

11:11 To finance the international military and arms trade, it’s just crazy what is going on there. And I really hope that we reach the day and people look back and say, my God, were they really spending all that money to kill each other? So do you think humanity is moving towards a stage in its consciousness where war and violence against each other will just fall away? Well, on one side, we have, with the internet and the worldwide connection that that gives everybody, in our minds, the international borders are kind of dissolved.

11:52 It used to be you’d go online and you’d think, wow, I’m in contact with Spain or China or Argentina. Now you don’t even think where the site is. it’s all one world, but we still have this huge military-industrial complex that has vested interest in wars. The governments of the world have a vested interest in war because fear is what keeps them in power. So it’s balancing that across the fact that in our minds, we’re much more internationalized.

12:23 So I really, really hope that’s what my first book is about. Was there a big anti-war, anti-Vietnam feeling in 69? And at that time, did you think war would be abolished in 10 years or 20 years? Yeah, you did. You thought, how can this go on?

12:40 It was such an obvious, crazy mistake, but 40 years later, we had the war in Iraq that we all know there were no weapons of mass destruction, that was a set-up war, it was planned before the Twin Towers were brought down, and that sort of stuff is still going on. Interesting. Were there protests in London for anti-war, or was that more of a phenomenon in the States? I don’t know. There was a major march on the American Embassy in London.

13:12 Yeah, there were demonstrations, because England was involved, albeit on a lesser level. I would love to spend a day in 1969 in London, just walking around and being like, oh shit. You know what I always think of is that Austin Powers, I don’t know which one it was, but when he gets transported back to the 60s and he’s just walking around in London covered in psychedelic colors and everyone’s driving like beetles and it looked really cool. Was it like that or?

13:37 It was, it was really cool and it was very small, I mean everybody tended to know everybody else. The city or the culture you were in? The culture I was in, yeah. I just think of Portobello Road on a Saturday morning when I think of the 60s in London. I mean, it hasn’t changed much, right?

13:54 It’s gotten a lot bigger, but it hasn’t changed in that respect, but it’s three times as long as it used to be. Okay. Was All Saints Road a really rough place, a really tough place, and were there drugs there and was it, you know? Well, I opened my shop there before it became crack dealing and all that sort of stuff going on in All Saints Road, but it was a really cheap place. That’s why I got a good corner shop there, but I used to be right next to me was the the Mangrove Restaurant owned by Frank Critchlow, who was the leader of the Black Power Movement at the time. And he used to meet with his buddies in a beat up old jaguar, which was the only safe place to plot and plan in front of his restaurant. And I was part of the conteculture, so my friends would all talk about fashion and music and stuff like that. But Frank and I would get together and we could talk shop, we could both talk restaurant to each which was always fun, but his restaurant used to get busted regularly by the police, totally harassed.

14:53 Really? Just because of who he was, yeah. Because of the movement, they weren’t. Did you ever get any of that because you were kind of, I’m guessing, hippies was probably the closest word, but did you ever get resistance from the authorities or from police? Well, at that level, they did come into my shop next to the Mangrove restaurant once, And they were being really bureaucratic and annoying, and then they apologized to me and said, sorry about this, Mr. Sams, but we’ve just been next door haranguing this guy, and they’re going to think we’re being prejudiced if we don’t do the same to you.

15:30 But our problem was really with the trading standards officers, people like that, because they didn’t like this natural food or the stuff they weren’t familiar with. So we always had a little bit of a hard time with them, but it was just the cost of doing business and we got through that. It’s crazy that now the Whole Foods movement, they’re opening on every store and people are like, look, Whole Foods. And I’m guessing Gregory’s like, we were doing this 40 years ago.

15:59 Is that frustrating? No. For me, one of the payoffs of all my work is I can go into my local supermarket now and get organic stuff. I mean, that was just so unthinkable even 30 years ago. So no, I just love to see that moving out.

16:17 Fantastic. Wow. Abundance mentality. Yeah, no, that’s true. It just must be weird because like the last 10 or 20 years it seems like maybe the last 10 years people are celebrating a lot of things that were happening in the hippie generation in the 60s.

16:29 It seems like it’s almost a second wave. Do you agree with that? It is. And it’s such a shame that it didn’t really take off in the 60s, but the sort of iron foot of the status quo really stomped on the 60s, particularly shooting the students at Kent State and banning LSD and the other drugs that were sort of the engine of the 60s. Was that, or do you think that movement wasn’t sustainable at that intensity, at that time?

16:58 It was. Did you get to charge the gates a few times of the castle before you get through? Well, a lot of the early people charging the gates said, screw it, we’re just going to move to the country and set up our own self-sufficient community in the country rather than keep battling and risking prison and that sort of stuff, particularly in America. But I mean, the sixties, if we had let it continue and acted on some of the understandings and insights that people were having in the sixties, we would not need terms like global warming and carbon footprint and all of that today.

17:32 World is really hurtled downhill a lot further than it was in the 60s when the early people were seeing what was going on. And it kind of reminds me of a phrase that Barry Commoner once informed, my brother and I. Barry Commoner is the guy who single-handedly, the scientist, single-handedly stopped atmospheric testing and nuclear weapons. And he gives a great lesson, he said, you can only spot the pioneers by the arrows sticking out of their backs. That’s awesome.

18:01 Great line. We were cognizant of that, so as we progressed, it was a good lesson to have, actually. Crazy they used to do that, they used to do nuclear tests, like in the White Islands. You know why a woman’s bathing suit is called a bikini? Because the bikini at all.

18:16 Because the bikini islands in the Pacific, where they were literally like blown out of the water by U.S. nuclear experiments. That’s insane. That’s crazy. I think, you know, I was listening to another podcast, Psychedelic Salon, listening to a talk by Timothy Leary and he was like villainized by the US government and if you listen to what he’s saying it’s so progressive he’s saying just he was just talking about expanding your mind and maybe using psychedelics or a little bit of weed and the guy was thrown in jail and harassed and tormented for years and I don’t see that happening too much these days right that doesn’t really happen does it or am I confused?

18:50 So there’s not much LSD about anymore. It’s not talked about much, ayahuasca is creeping in. Yeah. And mushrooms are making a bit of a comeback. Bit of a comeback.

19:01 Perhaps. But Timothy Leary was regarded as really dangerous, and I think you kind of understand it when the people in control see kids going up and sneaking flowers and gun barrels at protest. It just, it scares them, because what do you do? How do you deal with this kind of mentality? just scare the hell out of them.

19:20 Do you think Ayahuasca will, and Salasayevan, or magic mushrooms, do you think they’ll reach a point where the government will step up its crackdown on them and they’ll become the LSD of our generation? I really hope not, and Ayahuasca, it’s done in a much more contained setting with a shaman. It’s not something you can just take on your own, I don’t think. I think you need to be in that more controlled setting, so… It’s much more acceptable, the Iowas experience, and sometimes that bothers me about it, because like sometimes I tell people about my experience, and I’m like selling it to them, I’m like, no, no, no, it’s not in a party, no, no, no, I throw up and have a horrible night, and then I think to myself, why am I trying to pitch this as a bad thing in order just to get it by your, your, your front lines?

20:11 What’s wrong with a tab of acid that’s going to just take you right there? Why are we apologizing? I don’t know. What do you think about that? There’s a CIA website on drugs, and when they get to LSD, they’re very straight about it.

20:22 It’s not addictive, it’s not a problem, and they have quite an insight into what it is. To be fair, LSD can’t fuck you up properly, though. Because you can take some heavy doses without knowing it. Well, I mean, there’s countless stories of … I knew a guy in high school.

20:39 He took LSD, and he was just cooked afterwards, literally. I think he was certified afterwards. So, I mean, of course, this anecdotal evidence does travel a lot. Well, I mean, he was a friend of mine, like I can tell you his name. Yeah.

20:51 So it’s, at least he’s something I’m very, very wary of personally. Have you, have you tried that Gregory? Can we ask you that? Do you mind answering? Yeah.

20:58 I mean, since I was 18, I think he lived in Berkeley. Yeah. And, and I, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve come across two or three people who have had their lives fucked up by it. I’ve met hundreds of people who’ve had their lives messed up by alcohol or pharmaceuticals. It’s always a risk when you do some of these things.

21:27 But so many people, whether it’s Francis Crick discovering the DNA molecule or Stephen Jobs the Apple Macintosh. I mean it has had been such an engine of creation and development and in the sixties that is what opened people’s minds up to things like natural healing, natural foods, meditation, yoga, because nobody ever used to look inside. It was always the external world and we were just bodies trying to do it. I mean the idea of looking inside was an alien concept and that’s so much part of the culture now, even though maybe only 5% or 10% of people are doing anything like that, it’s still a huge number.

22:13 Because the 50s were all about economic recovery after the war, and let’s go beat the Joneses, and let’s get the car, and let’s do all this, and then. It’s a very gray, very gray world, literally and metaphorically. Do you watch Mad Men, that show from the States? Okay, they’re kind of in the mid 60s, but it’s weird just because you see them dealing with LSD is brought up, them dealing with race relations and all this weird stuff. It’s weird to see, it’s almost like people today dealing with ayahuasca.

22:41 It’s like almost everyone’s going through the same cycle of discovery. God, I love that show. Yeah, it’s a good show. Gregory, I wanted to speak to you about your book, Son of God, because as I mentioned before the show, I read it a few years ago and it completely altered my perception of reality. So one of the basic premises of the book that the sun, our sun is an actual sentient being that is going through its own journey.

23:08 Is that correct? And can you respond on that a little bit, please? If that’s a realization I had in Berkeley in the 60s, in fact, a very powerful realization that the sun was a conscious entity. I never did anything with that, other than appreciate sunsets and sunrises more. There was no place to hang it, no place to bring it up in conversations.

23:34 It was such an alien concept to our culture, and it was only in the year 2000 that I decided to write, to look into this further, and write a book about the sun. And as I started to write that book, it was an incredible journey, because I just found about how much the scientific evidence supports that viewpoint, which I had never realized, the connections. And obviously if the sun is a conscious entity that applies to all the stars. And this was the default mode.

24:16 2000 years and beyond. Are you saying the people 2000 years ago just naturally assumed that the sun was a conscious entity? It was an automatic natural assumption that you made, and even though they didn’t know the mechanics of photosynthesis, they didn’t realize that our lives are powered by, or the actual energy of life is recycled sunlight, our bodies are made from recycled star dust, they still recognized it was a conscious entity. And the only reason, it wasn’t science that taught us this was some primitive, ignorant idea, it was the Christian church that banned people, burned them, whether they were scientists, scholars, or whatever. I mean, they just branded this as pagan. It was the biggest competition.

25:04 And they did a very effective job of burning this out of our culture, so much so that when I took my book into the Atlantis Occult Bookstore outside the British Museum, the owner Geraldine there, she was just so happy. She sort of clapped her hands. And then she said, we’ve got this many books in here on the moon and we haven’t got a single book on the sun, which was once the most widely worshiped deity on the planet for centuries it was. Yeah, but we also used to think that the sun revolved around the earth, you know, thousands of years ago.

25:38 The earth was flat as well. Yeah, that’s true. And some people would say the sun is one big fusion reactor converting hydrogen into helium and just giving out energy. Yeah, that’s what we believe and what probably does happen at the core. But A, how did that come about and how is it that this fusion reaction that’s converting five million tons of matter every second into energy doesn’t create an explosion that blows away the whole solar system.

26:07 It’s got a ring around it, the radiative zone, which is outside of the core, which is the diameter of 26 Earths and the density of gold. That’s holding the reaction in, and there are five more layers, visible and invisible, outside of that. It’s a very complex organism, and in the visible, the hard part of the sun, some of those layers rotate around each other at different speeds. We have a magnetic portal. This is something that I found that was discovered after I wrote the book by NASA. There’s a magnetic portal connecting Sun to Earth, which is the diameter of Earth, and it goes from Earth’s magnetic field to the Sun’s corona, which is its magnetic field, and these two bits of the portal join together every eight minutes, and tons of high-energy particles pass back and forth.

27:08 So the Earth and the Sun are communicating with each other? Well, they’re in constant contact. They’ve since discovered other electromagnetic fields leading from the Sun’s corona to Earth. But this magnetic portal at NASA, they say they’ve never believed this thing existed until the satellites discovered it. The Sun is also connected to other stars by electromagnetic fields.

27:33 What makes this different than physics? Because I might say, well, the only reason we’re observing this in our solar system is because we are orbiting and we are at a state of somewhat static beings between these things. And that’s why we observe these beautiful attributes of physics. But are you saying it’s a sentient being on top of that? Absolutely, yeah.

27:50 Okay. If I’m playing devil’s advocate, can you explain how, as opposed to just laws of physics that keep these things in check? Well, the basic behavior of stars, I mean, the other aspect of stars is that they live as couples. Almost all stars are what the scientists, astrophysicists call a binary system. But they live as pairs.

28:18 The sun is very possibly paired with Sirius as a long-distance partnership. These couples travel through the galaxy to gather, they spin around each other, they They exchange gases with each other. Stars live in communities of hundreds, thousands, or five or 10 million, called clusters. As I mentioned earlier, they’re all connected by electromagnetic fields, stretching light years across space, hooking stars together. Now, is this an accidental phenomenon?

28:49 Because everywhere else we see electromagnetic fields, which are sort of photon-based, we see them in plants that connect to each other, in bacterial colonies connect to each other, communicate with photons, or our cells communicate with photons. We use them to get x-rays, MRI scans, to send radio, to send television signals to each other, through the air, all of our smartphones feed off of photons and we think, okay, well, stars are connected, but this is just like us belching after a heavy meal. So we just assume.

29:29 We assume it’s accidental because the idea of stars being conscious has been, you know, if a scientist, if an astrophysicist comes out and suggests that they’re out of a job, they’ve lost, you can’t go into that area. What spoke to you about the book? Because you’re not into astrology, per se. You never mentioned it to me. Becoming more so, man.

29:50 I mean, I definitely believe that when you pick up the newspaper and read the astrology column that that is 99% total bullshit. But I think that there is something to astrology, the basic tenet that I agree with is that it’s a Gnostic term which states as above, so below, which is that we are just reflecting the cosmos, human beings, like for example, our sun, if it’s my understanding that our sun is a relatively adolescent star, it’s… It’s, we think it’s halfway through his life.

30:23 Okay, let’s say so. So if you think of our son as a 35 year old man or a 35 year old woman or whatever you want to call it and it’s on its own journey, right? It’s in the galaxy or in the universe, learning and exploring and experiencing creation the same way we are but using a completely different set of, I mean, we have a body where the sun has the nuclear reacting fields and everything you just mentioned earlier. And I know it sounds incredibly out there but my instinct tells me that that is what’s happening.

30:53 Yeah, but as humans, we always like to transfer all of our human emotions on objects and animals and pets and things, and I don’t buy it. That’s just me. Fair enough. So, is it not just us projecting and trying to fit our own selves into a universe that is physics or not? Well, we’re not doing that.

31:10 I mean, this hasn’t been done for 17 centuries. Nobody has been trying to do that because we haven’t been allowed to, but as a natural, as a default mode, we did. But then I ask you, what is the energy of life? What is consciousness? Science is still debating the nature of consciousness and even whether we have consciousness.

31:34 There’s the argument that everything we think and do, this entire interview, was determined by the arrangement of particles at the Big Bang. Now, does that make sense to a rational mind? Consciousness, I don’t think will ever, I mean, consciousness in itself is hard to prove because it never will be, will it? Because we’re all observing ourself and we’re in our own consciousness. But it is some sort of an invisible field.

31:56 It’s not actually part and parcel of our physical body. And it is sunlight being recycled as the energy of life. And that’s purely scientific statement. Right, because we wouldn’t be here without the energy of the sun, is what you’re saying. Hence our consciousness is a consequence of that.

32:16 It’s not even like we wouldn’t be here. We are actually recycling sunlight as the energy of life. And, you know, it’s been stored in plants or the animals that eat the plants. That’s what that energy is. It’s stored sunlight and the sun itself.

32:32 So we have some sort of a field we don’t really understand that is that life energy. Well, the sun has its corona, which is an electromagnetic field that takes up three or four times the volume of the sun itself. We only see that during a total eclipse of the sun. Now, solar scientists say that the corona of the sun manages and directs solar flares, coronal mass ejections, sunspots, and coronal filaments. These are four varying aspects of solar behavior and nobody quite understands, but we’re well aware of them.

33:11 And they say, they actually say the corona manages all these. You ask them, well, what do we know about the corona? Oh, that’s the most mysterious aspect of the sun. But it’s managing these random thing, not random. They’re all coordinated.

33:26 We now know that all of those four features are acting in a synchronized manner because we have satellite looking at the other side of the sun as well. So that just kind of speaks to me that it’s not mechanical, it’s not predictable. This corona is also the one that has the magnetic portal connecting to Earth, it’s got electromagnetic fields connecting to other stars. There’s a whole sort of community of the original life forms of the universe out there. What’s been the reception to your book?

33:56 What do people say, what do scientists say, what do other non-scientist people say? People who read it get very transformed by it. they have actually recognized what, it just makes so much sense to them. They keep saying, oh yeah, why didn’t I think of that? I get lots of emails and communications from people just ranting about how it did change their life.

34:21 And speaking of astrology, Jonathan Caner, who’s this country’s most well-known sun sign astrologer, listened to one of my lectures. And he went and took the microphone afterwards and said, you know how you hear about some people going to a party, and they take a pill or something, and it changes their life forever? Well, I just took that pill listening to Greg’s lecture, you know, because he’s been doing sun sign astrology, and he never thought maybe the sun is conscious.

34:56 Maybe that’s got something to do with what astrology is about. What blows my mind more than anything is if the sun is conscious, right? There’s this video on YouTube I watch which shows the size of the sun relative to the other stars, the known stars, and I mean, it’s tiny. Like, compared to… Betelgeuse.

35:16 Regal or Betelgeuse, or it’s a literally tiny little thing. And imagine, like, in some far-flung galaxy, a planet similar to Earth floating around a star a thousand times bigger than our own. Think of how complex all the systems would be around a far more complex sun, so that planet might be way more sophisticated than Earth is. And the beings living on that planet might be way more sophisticated as well, which I find very interesting. Wow, that’s really trippy.

35:45 But those giant stars only live sort of five, ten million years, so they may not have the time. Oh, I see. I mean, they’re much more short-lived. But the sun is not tiny, it’s an average-sized star. Average-sized.

35:57 There are giants out there. Do you address the Big Bang theory in your book at all? What are your thoughts on it? refer to it, and it is a theory, and it’s just based on rewinding the universe backwards and assuming it was a steady progression of expansion, and it is. I heard the Rupert Childrich referring it to as if you give me one miracle, I’ll explain it, which is a great way of looking at it.

36:23 It was quoting Terence McKenna and saying, yeah. As I put it in my book also, we still don’t know who shot JFK. When we have a lot of evidence now, there’s less evidence to hand about what was there before time and space, a matter in time and space came into being. I don’t believe for a second that scientists know how this universe came into existence. Just to paraphrase what Rupert said, if people didn’t watch Rupert’s episode, I think Terence was quoted as saying that if you believe the theory of the Big Bang, then you can believe anything.

36:56 He said something like that. It was almost the most preposterous thing, and then you hang the rest of your scientific theory on this event. Give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest. Yeah, we don’t know if it existed. Of course, you have to start somewhere, I guess.

37:07 Yeah, for sure. What do you think happened, Brian? I mean, when you read about the Big Bang, you can read Stephen Hawking’s, I think it’s a short history of something, it’s called, of time, yeah, and he talks, he walks you through these micro-milliseconds in the beginning of the Big Bang. I mean, it sounds like, I mean, it just sounds crazy, and I know it all started from nothing, and then this happened, and this happened. I mean, if you do take a look up at the sky, and you start looking at what’s going on up there, it is really hard to get your head around it.

37:32 And I can also see, if you were taught as a young kid, this is the way it works, that you adopt that, and then when you hear new ideas like Gregory’s, your first reaction is, that’s nonsense, because they told me when I was a kid that this, this, this, this, this. Especially somebody who can’t get your head around like those things, where you can’t see them, you know? It’s hard to believe that all the matter in the universe was once compressed into a space smaller than an atom.

37:56 That is really very hard to take on board, but- Even with LSD, that’s hard to get your head on. Yeah, yeah. But how I address it is that if you look at matter and energy, and they are exchangeable, 3E equals MC squared, Energy is just a vibration. It doesn’t actually need any place to exist because it doesn’t take up any space. So energy could exist without space or time.

38:33 Because energy traveling at the light, traveling at the speed of light, is everywhere at the same time. It’s, so if you had energy existing, and then condensing into matter. So you’re saying it’s plausible. So it could have been a big whoosh instead of a big bang, because we refer to our bang as the biggest bang, we have the nuclear explosion when matter is being turned into energy. If you had energy being turned into matter on some enormous scale, that could have been the starting point of the universe.

39:11 That already sounds better to me. That sounds crazy. I gotta downshift here, because Gregory’s here also. One of the reasons I’m glad he’s here is because I do believe he’s a capitalist as well. And I want you to talk about the veggie burger and it’s something I think you introduced in 1982 and tell me if I’m wrong.

39:29 And it’s weird because your name is associated with this invention, but yet obviously you’re so much more than this just invention. But I thought we should ask, what is the veggie burger? What happened with it and can you tell us the story? First of all, I would just minor correction. I much prefer the term free enterprise to capitalism.

39:47 Okay, cool. I’d sneak that one in. They might be synonymous, but free enterprise is, for me, what it’s about, just the freedom to go out and do things. What’s the difference between that and capitalism? Capitalism is focusing on capital, on making money, nothing more.

40:06 Every enterprise is focused on letting people free to go out and do things, exchange goods with each other, all of which involves making money, exchanging things. But it’s not within this make money, make money consumerism scale. And the Veggie Burger, speaking of capitalism, came about because I was running a large natural food company at the time, Harmony Foods, Whole Earth. Had it gotten bigger by this point because you had started in 69? It was really big.

40:40 I had a huge warehouse, hundreds of tons of food coming in and out, going out of it every weekend. So the demand had risen? Oh, massively. Yeah, massively. And I was still an old hippie, you know, just trying to run this whole thing from what I see in my pants.

40:53 And we needed something to save the company because it wasn’t doing well and we had people breathing on us. And I came up with the veggie burger for that reason. I wanted a product that nobody else could just copy because after you introduce people to brown rice or sesame seeds, it takes money and leaflets and working on that and telling them what to do with it. But there’s no brand loyalty. Right, right.

41:15 So anybody else can jump in and do it. Or with veggie burger, I came up with the words, I trademarked it so nobody else could call anything a veggie burger. I had a secret formula and I manufactured in such a way that not even the manufacturers knew the formula was at first. And there was a real market for it. I was peed off with people coming out with alternatives to stuff that cost more. Because we were always going, you know, you need ten pounds of grain of vegetable protein to make one pound of meat protein.

41:50 In the case of beef, it’s less with chicken. What a waste. And then people come up with vegetable protein stuff and they’re selling it for more than the meat. So the point the Veggie Burger, when I came out with the Veggie Burger, it was in a packet, it was 69p, made you four burgers, which was cheap even in 1982. Same price of ground beef? It was cheaper.

42:11 And I really worked at it. I worked six months getting the product, trying every type of dried onion, every type of, every ingredient in there was really vetted. What was in it? Can you tell us? Yeah, sesame seeds, rolled oats, wheat protein, soya protein, and then, but soya was the fourth ingredient.

42:31 Okay. And then dried onion, dried tomato, spice mix, stuff like that. They taste good? They tasted really good, yeah, because I wanted, I’m very into taste and flavor and quality. I’m not a food chemist, I’m a chef if you like.

42:48 So yeah, they tasted good and they were a big hit. I mean, people thought it was crazy, though, even in the natural food trade, because there’s no market for this, you know, Greg, I think I ended up leaving Harmony Whole Earth and setting off on my own to run Veggie Burger out of a spare bedroom. And as a virtual company with other people doing the mixing, the manufacturing, the packaging, the distribution. And didn’t even know virtual companies existed back then.

43:14 I didn’t know the term. This was just, I was in my idea of how to save Harmony Whole Earth. conceive this as something that wouldn’t involve any extra overheads, any extra, you know, staff and stuff. And our investors and our bank and our accountants all thought veggie burger, smedgy burger, you know, 95% of new products fail, we want hard action. So I said, well, okay, I’m gonna go with the veggie burger. And it was it was brilliant. It worked really well and it was soared. And there was a huge sort of black hole of people out there who were vegetarian and had nothing to eat and I got letters from my one letter I remember was from a girl in Scotland he said I became vegetarian six months ago I’ve eaten nothing but pizza since thank God for veggie burgers and your recipe leaflet it was it was very young and did you distribute this all over the world I mean it made it to the States and everything all over the UK okay you know a little bit of export but after six years it was doing really well, and I could see that, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Peter Principle where you rise to the level of your own incompetence.

44:21 No, no. I’m not thinking… That’s interesting. Can you explain that real quick? It’s…

44:26 Well, I experienced that previously, you know, in a business you keep saying, oh, I can do this too. I can do this too. And you keep scaling up, and then you get to a point where, no, you can’t do that. And you’ve already made the commitment to do it, and then things go down. Okay.

44:42 Many foods whole earth. By the time I had a huge, big warehouse, you know, lots of staff. You really, I just couldn’t quite keep a handle on everything that was going on. You weren’t the guy to be able to take that business forward? That’s right, yeah.

44:54 Okay. You had maxed it. You were the creative creator guy, not the… And I could take, I could do quite a bit of the entrepreneurship. But when Veggie Burger got to that point when I was having to negotiate with supermarkets who wanted to spend 7,000 pounds on a page in their in-house magazine, or throw me out, and I’d have to call their bluff and say no. It was just too much. So at that point I started looking around for buyers and rather than say I can make this up and worth hundreds of millions and take that risk. So I got out of it in 1988, which was good and then I…

45:30 Smart move. Was it a smart move in retrospect? It was, yeah. I’m really happy because my life sort of changed from then. I didn’t go back in the food industry. I retired for two years, took an advanced installment on my retirement, had a lot of fun.

45:43 Then I discovered chaos theory, which led me into opening up a shop. I’ve got to open the first shop in the world dedicated to chaos theory. And I was like racing to do it. There’s nobody chasing me on this. You couldn’t make this bio up, Gregory.

45:57 I mean, seriously, I mean, you know, you kind of seems like you’re a guy that just explores what he wants to explore and then moves on to the next thing that’s interests you and then moves on to the next. I guess, yeah. Most people are afraid of doing that, you know, afraid of giving up. That’s something that was your passion, like Veggie Burger, not to mention your business. Do you ever get fearful about these decisions?

46:15 No, one of the lessons my father gave me, my father gave me some good lessons when I was growing up, and one of them was keep off the beaten track. And that just seemed like an obvious, desirable thing to do when I was a kid. But of course, most people don’t do it or they wouldn’t be a beaten track. And that’s rarely evidence you get, that’s rarely advice you get from your parents. And people after Veggie Burger was a success, people would say, God, that was really courageous, Greg, going out and doing that.

46:47 And I thought, well, the guy who tries to come out with a new variety of cornflakes is courageous, because he’s charging up a hill that’s heavily defended. There was nobody defending Veggie Burger. There was no competition. I could just go and do it. So that seemed easier to me than doing something that everybody else is doing.

47:06 That’s cool. Same with the chaos shop, selling fractal posters cards. Same for London Real, right? Yeah, I guess so. I’m in a weird way. So what had fractals always been in your mind, and what was that whole business about? Well, when I discovered chaos theory, I had had a course talking about free enterprise from the Free Enterprise Institute I took in the 70s, which taught me about the power of freedom and the non-power, if you like, or the dangers of coercion, because all the governments run, You know, it’s coercively based.

47:40 Could you explain that a little bit more? Yeah, it’s top-down control. I mean, every government in the world, it operates on the principle of coercion, to do this, or we’re going to damage you somehow. It doesn’t matter what this is. It could be recycling, being green, or it can be something nasty, but that’s how they do it, and that doesn’t work.

47:59 Whenever you sort of do something or I’ll damage you as your technique, you get something other than what you were hoping for. And only children, you know, think you beat people up to get what you want. And not even most children. So when I discovered chaos theory, I saw, well, that’s how the universe works. It’s self-organization from the bottom up.

48:25 It’s not nowhere. Do you have this top, you know, one group of trees in the Amazon telling everything and where to go. You know, the Amazon, it’s the rainforest. Nobody plots where the rivers are gonna go, when it’s gonna rain, where the frogs are. It just itself organizes into a harmonious system.

48:47 Can you give a brief description of chaos theory for people that just might not know exactly what you’re talking about? It’s the recognition that when you have a complex system, a complex system is something with more parts than you can count, all of them acting independently and unpredictably, you get a harmonious, you get some sort of order forming out of it. You know, whether if it’s in a weather system, you get the, well, we used to have stable weather systems where the winds would come and the clouds would come at a certain point.

49:20 Or you get human beings, you know, we have a complex system and you’ve got two air, two bicycle mechanics invented the, Wright brothers invented the first airplane. They didn’t plan, nobody ever planned, well in 70 years time you’re gonna be able to fly from London to New York and back for 300 pounds. That was self organized out of this complex system known as humanity. And now we’ve got an international airline industry out of two bicycle mechanics inventions and that was never planned in advance.

49:58 It’s a miracle that in a city the size of London, everybody, just about everybody, eats every day. And they get fed what they want according to their tastes and what they’ve got in their pockets. That’s a miracle scientifically. That’s capitalism at its finest. It’s free enterprise.

50:17 So when I found this science that underpinned everything I’d learned in this course about free enterprise. It was, wow, that’s, I’ve got to write a book about this, because the scientists would never go into social organization. That’s a no-no for science. Sociology, it’s, they don’t go there. And I thought, well, we’ve got to get this message out about chaos theory to the popular, you know, to the people.

50:49 And no one was talking about chaos theory much in 88. And it was, to me, it’s just so important, because everywhere we have top-down organization, we’ve got problems. Whether it’s the education system, the health system, defense, you know, I mean, our national health system should be, we should be proud of how few hospitals and doctors we have, because we’ve got a healthy population. And instead, we want more hospitals, we want more money spent on drugs, we want more on this, you know, that’s gone wrong because it’s not health from the bottom up, it’s health from the top down, and of course, pharmaceutical companies come in and take charge.

51:33 So the top down is like it’s trying to control the chaos and that never works? Yeah, because one butterfly can change the whole system, as we now know. It’s down to every single component, every single person, I mean, before I ever heard about chaos theory and actually started work on a book and get very far with it but it was it was going to be the fart that started World War III and it began with somebody queuing for a newspaper in Hong Kong and somebody in front of them let out a horrible fart and so bad they kind of missed the bus and because of that they met somebody else. It’s the butterfly effect basically. It’s the butterfly effect yeah.

52:14 You know Charles Ford? I don’t know he said something similar at the beginning of the last century He said not a ketchup bottle shall fall from an apartment block in New York that will not affect the price of rice in China Yeah, you believe that well, it’s the butterfly effect, isn’t it? I mean, yeah, my question is you believe in the butterfly effect Oh, yeah, I mean the butterfly isn’t causing the tornado But that do you know how it came about it was Edward Lorenz had a weather system set up on artificial weather system on his computer And one day he had to rerun it from a previous point because of a computer breakdown.

52:50 He keyed everything into the third or fourth decimal point, wind speed, temperature, etc., and then rerun the program. And it was the same for a little while, but then it started to subtly alter, and alter and alter until he had a completely different system a while later. later, and the third decimal point was equivalent to the wind speed of a butterfly’s wind flap. You know, one thousandth of a mile per hour change in that little parameter of wind speed affected the whole system.

53:25 But most butterflies don’t affect anything, right? Who knows? Who knows? I mean, he did later on say he wished he’d have called it the seagull effect. Oh, for us.

53:33 Because that would have convinced people like you. Like me, yeah. So I wanted to… I have to be honest about my skepticism. With regards to your observations from your time spent studying chaos theory, what advice would you give someone who wanted to implement those learnings into their lives in order to make them practically happier and more content?

53:54 I would say just recognize more the self-responsibility that we have for ourselves for ourselves, because so many people expect the state to take care of them, to keep everything going right and proper. And I think more and more people are realizing that the state is faltering at that. And we have this sort of crazy money supply system now that could completely collapse and nobody’s not going to know what could happen, which is why they’re frantically panicking to bail out banks and God knows what, but to have that self-responsibility and the trust that human beings, that we can do things ourselves because we are going to be let down seriously if we rely on the state to take care of us all.

54:47 I always think that’s an interesting answer. I thought you were going to say that you should just leave everything up to chance and the chaos element will naturally sort it out and organize it. That’s that’s an interesting way to take some responsibility yourself and affect that change on a bottom-up level. Yeah Yeah, I thought he would have said something similar You were you were born in America, correct? Yes, and you moved here when you were three. That’s right and you stayed here Yeah, well, I went back. It was kind of accidental that I went to America for college Berkeley, California, but after three months I fell out of a tree and broke my back, right We should talk about that for people that are only seeing the the upper part of Gregory He’s he’s in a wheelchair. He’s in a wheelchair. He did all of this in wheelchair. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, so that so can you tell us when that was and what happened and what it’s like? It’s a New Year’s Eve party 6667 in Berkeley in Berkeley I wasn’t the name drugs But I was dancing in a tree and a dead branch which fell and I landed on my back broke my back instant paralysis and then I um How old were you?

55:58 I was 18. 18, okay. And then I came back to London because Stoke Mandeville at that point was the only place in the world that knew how to work with spinal injuries. And they were great. And they were really in a hardcore too, look after yourselves.

56:15 And there was no sort of molly coddling or PAs or assistance they believed. Even guys with one arm, they decided wheelchairs that you could have two rims so you could push both things with one arm. It was amazing. And so I got out of there, and I was going to go back to university. But my brother, Craig, had planned to open this restaurant up, this macro-biotic restaurant.

56:39 And he unexpectedly had to leave the country, went back to America. And I then stepped in a few months later and completed this restaurant, opened it up. So you’d been in a wheelchair for one year. You’d never. Not even a year.

56:58 Not even a year. You’d never run a restroom before. You were 19 years old. I mean, mind blowing. How did it affect you, the injury?

57:06 Mentally and everything. As I had become macrobiotic about two years earlier, which was amazing, is an amazing diet. And I was just so full of health and vitality from it and faith that this would cure anything. So I kind of thought I would be eating myself out of the paralysis. Whether it was gonna take me six months or six years, it was gonna be an adventure and a journey.

57:35 Okay, so you were optimistic. I was pretty optimistic about it, yeah. That’s unbelievable. But then, you know, but the rest, then I got started to open up the restaurant, which led to a shop and everything else. And I never really had the time to devote.

57:51 You can’t just do it in, I didn’t even have any spare time. Then it was, I mean, at one point I was running a restaurant, a magazine, and shop all at the same time. And, but I was having great fun. I mean, it was really, really fantastic fun all the way. So, I mean, I still work at, you know, I still think maybe I’ll fix it somehow someday, but it’s been, it’s been a fantastic life.

58:16 So it’s not, and I see how miserable and unhappy a lot of people are, and I’m not. How awesome is this guy? That’s pretty powerful. I mean, a lot of people would use that as an excuse to stop trying. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people identify so much with their disability that that becomes their life.

58:39 Right, and that’s what they talk about in New Orleans. And I just don’t do that, I mean, it’s like, I mean, I once wanted to have a t-shirt which said crippled outside because it’s very visible. I see people, much more crippled than I am, but it’s all inside and you can’t really realize how damaged they are. I wanted to ask you something. There’s been troops, American troops that have lost their legs in Afghanistan and a lot of those guys call that moment, their alive moment because they found that they’ve started to appreciate a lot of these things in their life that they took for granted.

59:13 And I was just wondering if that makes sense to you, that kind of mentality. Maybe that didn’t happen to you, but when people describe like what would look like a debilitating injury, they seem to take positives from it mentally. I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve done that particularly. I’ve just, I’ve just got a non-method.

59:32 Yeah, I’ve just got a non-method, yeah. Yeah, fair enough. I don’t know. Where were we? We were talking about, oh, sorry, we were talking about London.

59:40 Because it seems like a man like yourself, you know you could live anywhere and so this you know we live in london is London Real and i was just wondering if you could tell us yeah why you stayed in london and how you’ve seen the city change well when i was a kid we used to go shopping at selfridges and my dad would park the car outside selfridges on oxford street are you serious well there were many cars and uh he’d he’d had a because the american government would ship your car over from american and we had a Nash Rambler, which was green with wood panels on the side. When we’d come out of Selfridges, there’d be like 67 people outside just looking at the car because every other car was black.

1:00:23 But I’ve seen London change enormously. We lived near Whiteley’s at one point, and it was the only, it was the best food hall in London. And my brother and I pooled our pocket at money one year, one week, and went and bought a peach and reverentially divided the peach because it was an exotic fruit, so there was, and there was, that was the 50s, but even in the 60s, there was no Chinese, Thai, Arabic, Japanese restaurants in London. There’s There’s a couple of Italian restaurants, a few Indian.

1:01:06 It’s just enormous, the change in London, and I do love London. I cannot bear the CCTV’s everywhere, I’m really horrified by that. I was in America just a few months ago, on the west coast, I didn’t see any CCTV’s in the whole time there. It’s something that kind of snuck under the radar here, and they got it through. But it doesn’t happen in the States, but they just kind of put it out there and then they use it for the congestion charge.

1:01:35 For people that don’t know London, you pay to drive in the city and then they track your license plate. But now they have this whole system set up that I don’t think would be tolerated in New York or… Probably the absence of gun control in America has stopped that because people just be shooting them out. That’s an interesting thought. That might be true.

1:01:53 So you’re here to stay in London for a while. You never know. nice house here now that I quite enjoy my house a nice garden. Do you go to Burning Man on a regular basis? Only once. I went in I went in 98 and it was one of those things I thought well I’m gonna come here every year from now on it was so fantastic. It’s early days, very early days. It was yeah it didn’t seem though because it had been going for about seven or eight years I think at that point and it was enormous when I went which was about six to six or 7,000 people I think and I thought that was huge but it’s gotten even bigger now yeah that was a fantastic have you been I haven’t known for the listeners you need to get on Twitter or you need to get on the Facebook page and bug Brian and get him to agree to come to burning man and do it London Real with me there oh yeah you’re going this year you don’t know I don’t know about this year because you chickened up that’s because of me day how many times have you been I haven’t been but I want to go I really want to go yeah that’s really great yeah well Well, Nick’s trying to convince me to do some London Real shows there on the Playa.

1:02:56 Absolutely. But it seems like kind of up your street. What do you do for fun these days? Or what’s a typical week or a month like for you? What keeps you interested?

1:03:07 I enjoy my work, and I do spend… I was once married for 21 years, and I really appreciated quite how much my wife did to make life easier. I do spend the I love cooking but it takes up a lot of time shopping cooking. Are you macrobiotic now or are you very concentrated? Yeah macrobiotic is an approach to diet it’s not specifically what you eat I certainly am. Could you explain macrobiotic diet a little bit please? It’s the recognition first and foremost of what you eat is integral not just your health but your happiness your mental state as well and then how you approach that it depends on true macro products depends on where you live but it really is very into eating local foods in season a diet based on cereals pulses which like beans and lentils vegetables seaweed soya products and and certain amount of animal products but but not as a core of the diet or anything but it’s Just that recognition, so when you, let’s put it this way, when I was running Harmony Foods it was very stressful, all sorts of things going wrong, I had to deal with every day and very occasionally, because I wasn’t, I was vegetarian from age 10 to my late 20s and then I sort of had to start to include very rarely meat in my diet, so now and again we’d go out and I would have a lamb steak or something like that, and I would noticed the next day that when things were going wrong, I’d say, what’s this happening?

1:04:49 And I’d get really stressed out and pissed off on what’s going on here, instead of just dealing with it. And I could tell that’s meat, you know, this is the last thing this animal experienced was a horror freak, what are they doing to me, my God, what’s going on? And those sort of, you know, we share 95 plus percent of our DNA with these mammals that we eat. So you know, I felt some of the ends, whatever had gone into its system. Stress hormones.

1:05:20 Stress hormones was coming through me. What are your thoughts on that, Brian? Not as anti as they used to be, you know. I think there’s something to be said. I mean, it sounds like microbiota is more also how you interact with the world and being responsible.

1:05:32 Yeah. It’s also, I mean, George Asaba, who was founder of Maccabar, really stressed self-responsibility, you know, whether it’s for your health, your life, what you eat through your eyes and through your ears is relevant as well as what you put into your mouth. It’s strange that the Maccabaric guide stresses self-responsibility because if you think about several of the large patriarchal mainstream religions, they stress the complete opposite. It’s like rely on God completely, you know, don’t think for yourself, just.

1:06:03 Yeah, that’s the Abrahamic religions, the prophet-driven religions, which are the root of all the wars and strife we have in this world. Do you really believe that they’re the root of all the wars and strife? Not all of them, no, but a heck of a lot of them, a hell of a lot of them, I’ll use the correct term. Yeah, it’s hard to disagree with that. Yeah, it’s quite appalling, the idea that the conquistadors went into the Central America with, that these native people are worth nothing because they don’t appreciate God.

1:06:43 And it’s just, it’s really quite scary, the whole biblical headset. Yeah, Graham Hancock wrote the foreword to, was it Son of God? Son of God. Oh, you wrote the foreword, I didn’t remember that. And I just remind, cause Graham was in here talking about his next fictional book called War God.

1:07:01 Oh yeah, yeah, I’m so excited for that. He’s sitting here, we were like, um, he, he, yeah, so I think it talks all about some of the carnage that was going on. What would happen if we got Rupert Sheldrake, Gregory Sams and Graham Hucker in the same room? It would explode. It would just explode, right?

1:07:18 Do you keep in touch with your, kind of your peers in the industry, you know, a guy or, you know, I don’t know what peers, but guys like Sheldrake and Hancock and Do you guys kind of have this respect relationship among them? To a degree, but we’re all kind of hard at work as well. I see Graham occasionally, not friends with Rupert Sheldrake, but I’ve sat down and spoken with him a couple of times. I’ve been a fly on the wall for that conversation. But, you know, when you ask me what I do to enjoy, I enjoy my work.

1:07:49 And what is your work? Well, at the moment, it’s my two books. So I’ve just done a complete upgrade to my first book, Uncommon Sense, which is now called The Power of Freedom. Power of Freedom. Is the state out of date.

1:08:02 And again, the power of freedom is how well we self-organize. So I’ve done that, and I want to come out with that as a Kindle, as an e-book, and for a pound rather than 10 pounds. So I can get wide distribution. It’s very sort of tuned into the whole Occupy movement, what’s going on now. Son of God, I’m working on a audio version of it. Excellent. Which is great fun. I really I love it I love every there was a guy with a voice for an audio version of a book Yes, it was him and I love it when authors do their own audiobooks It’s like it’s it’s night and day for me, you know, if you know that if the guy that wrote it is actually telling you It’s powerful. Yeah Thank you. Um, what I just talked I don’t have to write. Um, what are your thoughts on the Occupy movement?

1:08:47 Um think it’s great. And I also get irritated with their single-minded attack on capitalism, not recognizing how capitalism has been distorted by the state and how much the state channels things towards large corporations rather than small startup businesses because it’s much you to take to tax 20,000 people at once through a large corporation than to try and get the money out of 20,000 small traders, vendors of food on the street corners, people who have opened up restaurants in their spare room of their house, all of which is banned by laws, health and safety. I had a great insight in Marrakesh ones. I was sitting at a cafe a few times and I noticed this kid right outside us on the street, he was about 15 with a pack of cigarettes and he was selling cigarettes one by one to passers-by. He’d break every law in the book in this country but over there, free enterprise, he was a 15-year-old kid setting up in business for himself for the cost of a price of cigarettes. I just thought that’s great. So Occupy, I love what they’re doing because it’s a peaceful it’s a non-violent protest and after the Hurricane Sandy and the east coast of America recently they were apparently the guys right out there at the forefront doing aid because they know how to do this. I was very involved with with Reclaim the Streets and the road protest in this country in throughout the 90s.

1:10:33 And I went to most, you know, Reclaim the Streets. No, I don’t. They were a group who were trying to stop the entire planet from being paved over, which was happening at a pace. So they were putting on parties in the streets. And the third one was the whole motorway link up between Shepherd’s Bush and the Westway.

1:10:55 Right. Do you know that? That big highway, basically. Yeah. Both sides of that three-lane highway were occupied in this completely nonviolent protest, advertised months in advance, but they set it up so the police didn’t know where it was going to be and didn’t until it was already happening.

1:11:12 I’ve got time to go into how they managed to do that, but they had one end of the motor where they had about 100 cyclists cycled into it and stopped the traffic and sent the back that was coming the other direction. On the other side they had a truck full of sound, dumped sound in the middle of the road. And we partied there until midnight. Planted a tree in the middle of the road in the course of it. It was a great sort of statement on, hey, don’t pave over the whole world and devote it to car culture.

1:11:42 And what I loved was their devotion to nonviolent protest. It was just, just once you get violent, then you’re using the techniques of the state, They know how to deal with that, you’re on their turf, and forget it. They’ve been doing that for a thousand years. But the idea of non-violence, or sort of bolting your arm into the ground lying on a mattress and you’re hooked in there, and they’ve got to dig up the whole ground to get you out or chop your arm off, which they don’t do in this country.

1:12:15 And I just- Give me chopping arms, for sure. Mine and pure one of the- Oh, definitely. So, that’s what I like about Occupy, it’s a viable opposition to the state, but I would like them to recognize how much the state manages businesses and how much those large corporations manage the state. So they’re attacking capitalism and you think they should be maybe focused more on the relationship states has with large corporations. Yeah, because somebody will always have an undue influence on the state.

1:12:44 At the moment, it’s large corporations go in and they say, make these laws, like the pharmaceutical companies make laws to ban herbal remedies, stuff like that. But at other times, you’ve had military go in and manage the state. You’ve had the church running the state. You have family dynasties running the state. As long as you’ve got this central organization that can take money out of everybody’s pockets willy-nilly, somebody’s going to get the control of that. And obviously a lot of them are going to be evil people who are criminal minded and who will sort of take, I mean, the United States of America is run by the military industrial complex.

1:13:29 What are your thoughts on that? Do you believe that statement to be true? I mean, I’m a big fan of less government, big, big fan, because there’s just huge inefficiencies just to start off with, not to mention conflicts of interest. I mean, like you said, the to share a great example, too, with NHS, and it’s socialism in disguise, really. But yeah, I mean, I’m a big fan of decreasing government, but it’s so hard. I mean, government is the government is like one of the best biological organisms, because it knows how to reproduce and people know how to stay in office and keep themselves relevant.

1:13:58 But it is collapsing. I mean, we’ve seen the whole Soviet Union collapsed. It’s a question of what replaces it, that we need to address. could argue that the Soviet Union can’t exist in a democracy. They’re having a real hard time with it, and they’re going right back to Putin and all that good stuff. But I don’t know if it’s changing. I don’t know if government is really going to change. I hope it does.

1:14:22 Yeah, me too. Me too. But I think it’s likely to collapse from inside at some point when the money system collapses. Who knows what’s going… I mean, this whole European Union thing is very scary, but also very impossible to figure out.

1:14:40 It’s such a complex set up of smoke and mirrors and fiat currencies that are based on absolutely nothing. You pull out a 20 pound note and it says, I promise to pay the bearer on demand 20 pounds, which is, it’s a piece of paper saying I’m worth 20 pounds. That’s all it is. It’s a very complicated system. Yeah, it’s very complicated.

1:15:00 And that’s its big strength. lot of, you know, important, powerful people control it at the top, and it’s a big poker game as well. And with Greece, it’s a big poker game, whether they’re going to, you know, try to let it fail or not. It looks like they’re going to stay in the Euro for now. But it’s a big poker game, back and forth between Merkel, and it’s all about control, really, at the end of the day, and Germany controlling the EU.

1:15:19 But I don’t think it’s going to collapse any time soon. I think anyone predicting collapse is just embellishing a little bit that they’re living in this world. I think maybe it should collapse, but I think it’s going to still tick along in some weird way. I was on the same, singing the same tune in 68, 69, saying, oh, it’s all gonna collapse. That’s why we need people like you.

1:15:37 It’s still going on. You know, before we wrap up, I just wanted to know, what advice do you have, Gregory, to a 20-year-old listening to this podcast as far as, you know, what they should do in this, what might seem like a very chaotic world? You know, we don’t know what’s happening and unemployment’s really high, banking system, who knows? I mean, you know, what do you tell people? I might ask you, you know, what’s the point? Or, you know, do they have any faith in humanity?

1:16:05 I don’t know. Do you give out advice to younger people? Yeah, I do sometimes. But it’s about kind of mechanical things like changing what you eat, taking responsibility for yourself. The Son of God is very much about recognizing. It’s not so much about, it’s not all about the sun. It’s about the implications of solar consciousness, Once you get that on board, there’s one chapter which really convinces you of that, the rest is the implications of that, and it really comes down to the point that consciousness pervades the entire universe, from every atom to the expanses of wide space.

1:16:46 I mean, the electromagnetic force is everywhere, it’s what holds atoms together, it’s light, which exists everywhere in the cosmos. us. And that recognition actually tunes us in to our lives and how we live them and how we respect the world around us a lot more because we need to respect, whether it’s inanimate objects or other people or animals and plants, we’re all part of a unified system. And getting that into our minds rather than thinking well there’s us and there’s everything else. It really does change your life and it’s not a one, two, it’s not a ten points on how to change your life, it’s just recognize what the nature of our lives is and recognize that the system we’re living in will only support us as much as we play a part in it. Not be passive and expect the state to fulfill its promises about our lives or keep paying us when we’re out of work. So that’s really my biggest advice is self-responsibility. That is, I mean, you know, I mean, I think that’s big advice.

1:18:00 Start with yourself, you know, if you wanted the world to start changing, start when you wake up and the interaction you have with that fellow human and all that stuff. And it does, you know, be happy. You know, really, what’s the point of life if it’s not a gift? I mean, it is a gift. Be happy is dropping all this hippie stuff on us. I was just reading yesterday about the Chinese dating match program versus the rise of capitalism and consumerism, which a lot of capitalism just turned into consumerism.

1:18:40 In China, and there’s this statement that went into the legend, this guy said, I would rather be crying in the back of a BMW than laughing on a bicycle. Jesus. That sounds so much like you. Was it you? The Chinese are taking it to a new level over there, really.

1:18:59 They are taking hardcore capitalism to a new level. Why aren’t you in China, Brian? I couldn’t compete with them. I mean, seriously, the consumerism and the conspicuous consumption over there, it sounds like it’s on a whole nother level. Worth checking out.

1:19:14 The last question I had for you, Greg, it’s a question we ask a lot of our guests, is that if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Gregory Sams and give him one piece of advice, what would that be? Keep doing it. I mean… You get that one a lot in different forms, you know? Yeah.

1:19:33 What do you mean by that? Well, I’ve been following my nose and joining up the dots, as Stephen Jobs would say. You never know how the dots join up until the picture has been made. And the picture is never made, right? Well, I’ve had lots of pictures which were made and I’ve gone on and I’ve done other ones in terms of joining up the dots.

1:20:02 But I have never really gone for five-year plans or that sort of stuff. And I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve been doing through the years. Powerful. This was a black belt episode of London Girl. That’s Nick’s way of giving you a major compliment.

1:20:20 Thank you very much. Of all the belt levels. Greg, how do people get a hold of your books and how do they get a hold of you? Son of God, S-U-N of course. Google it, and it’s right at the top of the page.

1:20:33 Gregory Sams, likewise, I’m the only, when you come up on the first 20 pages. Books available through Amazon, through any online retail it has, but has a son of God on sale. Only Amazon has Uncommon Sense on sale. And your new version of Uncommon Sense will be at one, do you expect? I’m waiting to hear from my publisher.

1:20:58 I would hope within the next few months. Okay. Fantastic. Wow. What an awesome time. Thanks so much for coming by.

1:21:07 I saw a video in him before he came and I was just like, I already like this guy. I don’t know, you have a really cool energy about you. I don’t know, it’s real calming and real centered energy. It’s really nice to be around. It’s a great show. Thank you.

1:21:20 So thank you so much. Anyone listening out there on iTunes, if you want to see what we all look like, We’re on YouTube. You can come visit us at Channel London Real TV. We’re on Twitter as well and on Facebook. Come hang out.

1:21:34 Nick runs our forums on our website. It’s LondonReal.tv. Join in. Let us know what you’re thinking, because it’s a total two-way street. And if you enjoyed the episode, tweet it out.

1:21:45 Yeah, do that. And if you want to get bonus points, you can go on iTunes and just give us a quick review. We would appreciate it. Big time. And there you go.

1:21:53 I got nothing else to say. Thanks, Greg. I appreciate it.