In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand, we talk about the Biden Train Wreck, the Chernobyl disaster, the Minsk deal, and how to deal with an economic crisis in a time of crisis. We also hear from the David Finch Foundation's founder, Dr David Finch, about his own experience of dealing with the 2008 financial crisis and how he managed to get through it, and why he thinks we should all be doing the same. And, of course, there's some news about pandemic profiteers. Stay Free with Russell Brand is out now! Stay Free, wherever you are, and whatever you ve done, there s a way back home. Stay free wherever you re at, and don t forget to stay free everywhere else. We love you, whoever you are - wherever you're from, whatever you've done - there's a way home, no matter where you're watching this right now, the whole show will only be available on Rumble. After about 10 minutes, we'll click over to Just Being On Rumble, the platform where we discuss things that require an absolute commitment to freedom of speech. We ve got a fantastic show for you today, so it's really worth staying for the entire hour, us on RUMBLE! (RUMBLE is our community's favourite streaming platform, so stay tuned for the rest of the show). . In this video, you re going to see the future. In this episode, you're going to be astonished when you realise that the future is already here! - in this is possible. - In this is the future, you can be your own. You're gonna be a place where you can create your own food by heart by heart, by your own people by heart... - you're gonna see the world in your head by heart and your own localisation, your own personal food, by heart. . . . and so much more! In the meantime, stay free, you'll get a little bit of everything you need in your local community, and you'll be in control of your local food, so you don't have to be left behind by the mainstream media by the corporate media... - it's not just the news, it's the local food you're getting a chance to be in charge of your own heart, they're not just your own, they'll be helping you to grow your own home, they can help you grow it.
00:01:14.000Thanks for joining me on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:01:18.000We love you, whoever you are, wherever you're from, whatever you've done, there's a way back home.
00:01:24.000No matter where you're watching this right now, the whole show will only be available on Rumble.
00:01:28.000After about 10 minutes, we'll click over onto just that platform because we talk about things that require an absolute commitment to freedom of speech.
00:01:36.000If you're going to attack We've got a fantastic show for you today, so it's really worth staying for the entire hour.
00:01:43.000us on local stats our members community people like Ashela she's saying get well soon oh they
00:01:48.000just talk to each other on that chat. What's she going to say are you ill? I'm fine I think so yeah
00:01:53.000unless she knows something that you don't. Oh no. It's plain it's written all over my face.
00:01:59.000We've got a fantastic show for you today so it's really worth staying for the entire hour.
00:02:03.000First of all we're talking about the literal Biden train wreck.
00:02:08.000His presidency has been a train wreck for some time and now there's an actual, sadly, tragic environmental disaster of a train wreck to sort of almost epitomise it.
00:02:17.000It seems that in some ways that administration is culpable for not taking necessary safety measures.
00:02:23.000And also for not paying workers enough and reneging on a promise to be a pro-worker president.
00:02:29.000We were talking about that aspect in particular.
00:02:32.000NATO and Ukraine, they need some more ammo now.
00:02:36.000And also we're going to be talking to you about a sort of recent revelation that Zelensky said he never was going to obey that Minsk agreement anyway.
00:02:43.000He never cared about a Minsk agreement.
00:03:00.000When we click over to just being on Rumble, we're going to tell you this unbelievable tale of... Well, the WHO have just admitted they're not going to try and find out where COVID come from anymore.
00:03:44.000We're going to be talking about pandemic profiteers.
00:03:46.000You're going to be astonished when you learn some of the people that earned extraordinary profits during the pandemic period.
00:03:52.000And the reason I was astonished, and I guess, you know, probably we're similar in some ways, you and me, it's because there's some people that were right mouthing off during the pandemic about exactly what we should do.
00:04:00.000Oh, you should do this, you shouldn't do that.
00:04:33.000Yeah, well here's a few things it could be.
00:04:36.000You've got to look at how corporate interests in the government cooperate to ensure that ordinary people never have a chance to alter or penetrate the system.
00:05:52.000Well, now China, they've got their own clip-clop.
00:05:54.000And I think actually their clip-clop looks a bit better than American clip-clop.
00:05:59.000So when it comes to the kickoff, which, you know, if these balloons keep floating by this rate, global Armageddon is inevitable, necessary, some would say.
00:06:08.000Let's have a look at... This is Chinese clip-clop.
00:06:23.000Clip-clops, wherever they're from in the world, have a common gait.
00:06:28.000I wonder if these clip-clops at some point during a sort of a Terminator 2 style war might think, hang on a minute, why am I killing them clip-clops over there?
00:06:37.000Just because they've got different coloured clothes on to me.
00:06:40.000Aren't we all the same beneath the surface?
00:06:43.000What if all the clip-clops go, hey, we, instead of, you know, In a kind of introversion of the, or an inversion rather, of the typical expected sci-fi dystopian step, they go, we want peace.
00:06:55.000Sky Knight realised the humans were silly and they had to look after them.
00:06:58.000They have a little game of football maybe on Christmas Day.
00:07:00.000Christmas Day, the Klip Klops come out and say a piece of World War One mythos for English and German people that on Christmas Day.
00:07:07.000People realised temporarily that the war was pointless and played football.
00:07:11.000In a sense, I suppose it's one of the great metaphors.
00:07:38.000If you had to have sex with Klip Klop, and the day may come where you do have to, because what are you going to do if Klip Klop goes, take your temperature, get in your house, or whatever?
00:08:49.000stop the fight in Donbass. They were going to stop it. They would have stopped that fight in Donbass,
00:08:54.000but apparently Zelensky never had any intention of obeying it or going along with it.
00:08:59.000And this, while there is, we've got that story there, he said, look, he didn't plan on implementing them agreements, that it was the agreement that sought to end the Donbass War.
00:09:11.000You're aware of this, even if you watch mainstream news, if you're still imbibing that toxic claptrap no-good-stuff-you-getting-into-the-soil-like-train-wreck fluid.
00:09:20.000Ukraine's military is consuming more ammunition than Western countries are providing, almost a year after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion.
00:09:28.000NATO's General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg said, anyway, give us some more weapons is what he wants.
00:09:35.000I guess the issue with this is if, as Lenski said at this point, they never intended to implement those agreements and we literally discovered last week, didn't we, by Naftali Bennett that, you know, the peace deals were blocked and scuppered by Western leaders.
00:09:50.000It doesn't bode well for peace at this stage.
00:09:53.000Look, why don't we just have a guess when peace will come?
00:09:56.000They have to at some point come to peace so that the Black Rock reconstruction can take place.
00:10:02.000Sometimes I see a bit of mainstream news and I'm reminded of the horror that there is an actual war going on, that Ukraine is under attack, like ordinary people's lives are being destroyed and decimated.
00:10:39.000You've got Zelensky vowing to retake Crimea and Russia saying that that would spark nuclear war.
00:10:44.000You know, whilst you're saying it has to come to a resolution at some point, the signs are that this is just going to continue.
00:10:50.000You've got NATO calling for more weapons.
00:10:52.000You've got Lloyd Austin saying he wants to weaken Russia.
00:10:55.000What I think it's about is that I think that ultimately Zelensky will only be backed as long as his interests converge with globalist, corporate, military-industrial complex interests.
00:11:06.000If there's a bifurcation of those interests, then Zelensky's power is redundant.
00:11:10.000We talked yesterday at length to Michael Racey Tracy, who told us that what began, he described the phenomena of mission creep, plainly the aid at the commencement of the conflict was about Humanitarian aid and he used the example it was likely things like blankets and nourishment and nutrition.
00:11:28.000Then the phrase lethal aid entered the lexicon and it became clear that what the West and in particular the America but even more accurately the military industrial complex were doing was arming Ukraine and using this as an opportunity in my opinion to profit from this conflict. I reckon it will go on for a
00:11:46.000little bit longer. I hope it ends as soon as possible, but it seems to be being
00:11:50.000governed by economic interests rather than the humanitarian ones that were used at the
00:12:10.000This goes back to when these was signed and Zlensky now admitting that he never intended to honor them just shows this is something that's been building from 2014 onwards.
00:12:19.000Let's know what you think in the chat and the comments about how this story is being told and how do we square our knowledge about what's happening and how the conflict has been engineered and perhaps misrepresented with the ongoing need of people that are suffering as a result of this war.
00:12:34.000It's something that I Hey, what about that train wreck?
00:12:41.000I don't mean Joe Biden's presidency in general, I mean this literal bloody terrible Ohio train disaster.
00:12:48.000I know loads of you think that the balloons and UFOs are a distraction in part from this story.
00:12:54.000Look up there in the sky, not down there on the floor, where this terrible train wreck has happened.
00:12:58.000I know loads of you are intrigued by the environmental damage that it's caused.
00:13:18.000But what we want to talk about is could this disaster have been avoided?
00:13:22.000And it's so often the case that these disasters, when investigated, come down occasionally to human error.
00:13:29.000And we're all human and we can all make mistakes.
00:13:31.000But in this instance, it seems that cost cutting measures were implemented that could have been avoided.
00:13:36.000And it's a matter of record that Joe Biden reneged on his promise to ensure that train workers were properly paid, given proper packages that included rest time and remuneration.
00:13:46.000Let's have a look at the story from that perspective, the potential blame that the Biden administration must bear.
00:13:52.000For unionised rail workers, the train derailment exposes systemic failures in a railroad system that is driven by profit, not safety.
00:13:59.000It should be driven by safety continually.
00:14:01.000Remember, when new advances are presented to us, whether it's digital ID cards or Medications.
00:14:39.000There's the threat now of automatisation, enhanced robotics, and a general sense that most people are losing their power, even the power of their labour.
00:14:48.000You'll notice there's strikes in the agricultural, industrial and travel fields across the world.
00:14:52.000Sri Lanka, Germany, our country right now.
00:14:55.000There are loads and loads of strikes in the health industry, in the railway industry, because people aren't being paid enough.
00:15:02.000Joe Biden and the US Congress blocked rail workers' right to strike by rapidly passing legislation that forced workers to accept an agreement without sick days.
00:15:20.000Railroad Workers United argues that precision-scheduled railroading and the overworking layoffs and lack of safety measures that unionised workers are fighting for last year were primary reason for the derailment, while opposing a plan that would have required them to spend $321 million to give workers seven paid sick days.
00:15:42.000The main railroad companies raked in more than $7 billion in profits and paid out over $1.8 billion in dividends.
00:15:49.000Again and again we hear stories, don't we?
00:15:51.000Let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments, where profit is prioritised over safety and even efficacy.
00:15:58.000That profiteering is no doubt connected to this disaster.
00:16:05.000I heard somewhere, Gal, that some of the tech that them railroads are using was like General Custer's tech, like Civil War type stuff.
00:16:11.000Yeah, it was ancient tech and what they needed was, you know, new technology for like the braking systems and that was something that was lobbied against.
00:16:18.000The same kind of lobbyists that are giving $13 million to Congress and making sure that Biden pushes through this bill to make sure that these rail workers can't strike.
00:16:30.000But who's to say that a train having breaks is necessary anyway?
00:16:33.000This train being able to stop, for example, may not have been of any use in stopping it from spilling all those harmful toxins all over the country you live in if you're in America and the planet you live on wherever you are right now.
00:16:46.000This is like a literal deadly manifestation of what happened in Congress a few months ago.
00:16:52.000You get something whereby money funneled to the right people, pushing the president to make a certain decision, punishing people who he vowed to give sick days to, a pledge that he gave when getting into office to become president in the first place.
00:17:07.000Now manifesting in this situation where not only wildlife but some of these toxic fumes are carcinogens linked to various forms of cancer.
00:17:14.000It's like a huge thing that they're saying is actually could be worse than first reported.
00:17:18.000Throughout the pandemic we had caused to question the impact that pharmaceutical lobbying money had made on the decision to fund that process in the way that it was funded and the kind of regulations if not legislation that was passed.
00:17:31.000Now we can see once more the negative impact of lobbying money in the on the lives of ordinary Americans.
00:17:38.000If you believe, like we do, that the practice of lobbying should simply be ended, then let me know in the chat and the comments.
00:17:44.000And what would be the impact of that if lobbying, the practice of lobbying itself, was outlawed, banned?
00:17:49.000What difference would that make to the kind of policies that were passed?
00:17:53.000And also, would it be a policy that was beneficial to ordinary Americans while being punitive to corporate America?
00:18:02.000Okay, hey listen, I think we've got to go over to Rumble now.
00:18:04.000We can carry on talking about that railway, and in a minute we're going to be talking to Bob Roth, my meditation teacher.
00:18:09.000He had his work cut out, getting me to sit still and shut up and repeat a mantra inwardly until consciousness became impersonal and connected to the limitless cosmic consciousness that some people believe underwrites all reality as a kind of unitary force, or in a simpler, shorter word, God.
00:18:50.000They're beautiful peepers that Bob Roth's got, and if you don't meditate yet, you might need to, because Bob Roth believes we're globally suffering from PTSD, a trauma culture on our prison planet.
00:19:01.000Now, right, should we come off of Rumble?
00:19:03.000We're going to only be on Rumble now, because I want to talk about this thing.
00:19:06.000If you're watching this on YouTube, click over to Rumble, because I want to talk about the WHO dropping the Wuhan lab investigation, and I'm going to express myself freely, so join us on Rumble right now!
00:19:26.000It came out that lab where you were funding EcoHealth Alliance and various other American interests, where they changed their air conditioning unit, where people were off sick with weird coffee colds just months before.
00:19:37.000It came from there, you yourself were discussing it, the Fauci emails revealed that.
00:21:51.000The WHO said at the time, oh, we are definitely investigating it, even though it turns out, I mean, I don't know if you want to read a couple of these things or not.
00:22:03.000You said it's like a who's who of things?
00:22:05.000I wanted to say like what if it was a guess who and you had to go is it Andy Fauci and you click them down like the game guess who which I don't know if you have in America but it's a game I kind of like my kids to this day.
00:22:26.000I still think it could be them. So here is that story from The Intercept read out in a grown-up
00:22:32.000manner. According to a recent report, Dr Anthony Fauci conspired with influential scientists
00:22:38.000around the world, including Sir Jeremy Farrar at the World Health Organization, to quell concerns
00:22:42.000that SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. An academic paper, The
00:22:47.000Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2, published in March 2021, definitively propped up the rival theory to
00:22:52.000to the lab leak theory that SARS-CoV-2 had natural origins.
00:22:55.000But behind the scenes, the authors themselves were taking the possibility that the virus escaped from a laboratory more seriously.
00:23:02.000Why would they entertain it more behind the scenes?
00:23:04.000And because the WHO set the guidelines on YouTube, that's just a fact that YouTube use when it comes to health matters, and in particular the pandemic, the guidelines set by the World Health Organization.
00:23:15.000So we literally can't talk about the WHO Abandoning this investigation with, you know, openly on YouTube.
00:23:24.000Isn't it just a massive thing like the origins of this?
00:23:26.000This is like one of the main things that we all want to know.
00:23:29.000It's like the it's the foundation of this whole thing.
00:23:33.000Like things have been redacted even when we're talking about Jimmy Tobias before he's like he had to go through thousands and thousands of redacted documents.
00:23:40.000Freedom of information requests, even to find out that these emails existed between Fauci and them.
00:23:45.000You know, it should be the basis of what we understand about the pandemic.
00:23:49.000And if you call yourself the World Health Organization, you can't say, oh, we can't keep looking into where that pandemic came from.
00:24:00.000And the next pandemic, where's that going to come from?
00:24:03.000Well, you know, it's their job if you call yourself a World Health Organization.
00:24:07.000Let's see what this story is all about then.
00:24:09.000They've released the latest draft of its own international pandemic treaty, which will give the unelected global health agency new sweeping surveillance powers if passed.
00:24:20.000The treaty requires the WHO's 194 member states, which represent 98% of all the countries in the world, to strengthen the WHO's One Health Surveillance systems.
00:24:30.000So they want to surveil us, not only for COVID, but for flu.
00:24:34.000And essentially they want biometric control and insight into your innermost secrets.
00:24:40.000It's only a matter of time before probes are introduced, in my opinion.
00:24:43.000Yeah, and I think we were talking about this the other day, and some of the ability that they're going to have is to legalise these things, is to create law.
00:24:50.000So like we were mentioning that, you know, this is an unelected body who are now going to be heavily funded by the Bill Gates, essentially, who are now going to be able to essentially create laws for the rest of us.
00:25:03.000Let me know in the chat and the comments if you think it's right that Bill Gates, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and another body as well, funds that WHO.
00:25:12.000That WHO is then, if, you know, democratically endorsed, but only by its member states, by its own emissaries, will be able to introduce laws that you will affect your life, that your country will have no choice but to obey.
00:25:26.000Isn't this what we most fear about globalism?
00:26:39.000Wouldn't it be mad if we found out that the very people that were recommending the measures and medicines for that pandemic were the people that benefited?
00:26:46.000That would actually make me quite angry.
00:28:07.000Bill Gates secured hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from his foundation's impeccably timed investment in BioNTech, the Pfizer partner for its mRNA COVID shots.
00:28:29.000Gates turned his 55 million dollar vaccine investment in Pfizer partner BioNTech into over 550 million dollars in just under two years.
00:28:37.000But before you get cynical, think of the amount of help that he's gonna be able to give people.
00:28:43.000The Gates Foundation banked roughly $260 million in cash from the stocks with $242 million being untaxed profit given that the money was invested through the foundation.
00:28:53.000That doesn't account for the additional 2 million shares that the Gates Foundation sold prior to that from its original pre-IPO equity investment.
00:29:00.000In the Q3 2021 sale, the Gates Foundation secured a return of over 15 times more than its initial investment.
00:29:07.000Over the next quarter, Gates unloaded over 1.4 million shares of CureVac, banking an estimated $50 million.
00:29:13.000Bloody hell, this is such good news for philanthropy everywhere.
00:29:44.000Topping the Chronicle of Philanthropy's annual list, Gates gave $5 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to back the grantmaker's work in global health development, policy and advocacy, and US education.
00:29:56.000So let's put aside our cynicism because he's made the biggest charitable donation in the world, $5 billion, and he's given that to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
00:30:04.000Wait a minute, if I got this pen and I gave it to Russell Brand, wait a minute, I've still got the pen, look!
00:30:12.000Sounds a bit to the layman, probably my lack of education, that Bill Gates gave a donation to himself, untaxed, and that can't be the reason, would it?
00:30:40.000Get the vaccine, it stops transmission.
00:30:42.000And certainly no one's going to question that.
00:30:44.000An investigation by Open the Books found that Anthony Fauci in the NIH received and hid $350 million of royalties from pharma companies.
00:30:52.000In 2021, the National Institutes of Health, Antony Fauci's employer, doled out $30 billion in government grants to roughly 56,000 recipients.
00:31:01.000However, Open the Books found hundreds of millions of dollars in payments also flow the other way.
00:31:06.000Oh, wow, like a revolving door between the NIH and the pharmaceutical companies.
00:31:24.000So let's put all of that behind us and all of your suffering as well, because Anthony Fauci now is showing his true colours with his philanthro... Oh, Anthony Fauci is charging as much as $100,000 for speaking engagements, months after leaving his position in the Biden administration.
00:31:39.000Yeah, but remember when he would stand behind Trump and sort of go...
00:31:44.000The former director of the NIAID's listing on leading motivational speakers is listed under the motivational speakers and healthcare speakers categories.
00:31:52.000Certainly motivated me to do a lot of things.
00:31:55.000Were there any voices that were more significant than the voice of Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci during the pandemic?
00:32:01.000They set the narrative, they set the measures, they ultimately decided what direction things went in.
00:32:06.000The only voices of rebuttal and dissent came from what was called Conspiracy theories, you know, like Joe Rogan having Robert Malone on, stuff like that.
00:32:14.000Now let's get into this article which takes us the whole way through the pandemic from a position of good faith belief in the measures, i.e.
00:32:20.000it's a unique situation, we've got to do what we can to handle it, to where we are now.
00:32:24.000This is from that conspiracy theorist journal, oh, Newsweek.
00:32:27.000And in it, a madcap conspiracy theorist.
00:32:30.000Oh, Kevin Bass, MD, PhD student at medical school in Texas.
00:32:35.000Sorry, I get confused when it's not convenient and I sometimes jumble those terms up.
00:32:38.000As a medical student and researcher, I staunchly supported the efforts of the public health authorities when it came to COVID-19.
00:32:44.000I believe that the authorities responded to the largest public health crisis of our lives with compassion, diligence and scientific expertise.
00:32:50.000I was with them when they called for lockdowns, vaccines and boosters.
00:33:19.000I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies.
00:33:31.000There's your moment, conspiracy theorists.
00:33:34.000Now get on and believe what you're supposed to believe about war or China or balloons or whatever.
00:33:38.000Including on natural versus artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates and vaccine effectiveness and safety, especially among the young.
00:34:07.000But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was and continues to be.
00:34:13.000It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands, if not millions, of preventable deaths.
00:34:20.000It's not like we're seeing excess deaths everywhere.
00:34:23.000What we did not properly appreciate is that preferences determine how scientific expertise is used, and that our preferences might be, indeed our preferences were, very different from many of the people that we serve.
00:34:34.000We created policy based on our preferences, then justified it using data, and then we portrayed those opposing our efforts as misguided, ignorant, selfish, and evil.
00:34:42.000If you were saying that at the time, well done.
00:34:55.000We made science a team sport, and in doing so, we made it no longer science.
00:35:00.000It became us versus them, and they responded the only way anyone might expect them to, by resisting.
00:35:04.000We excluded important parts of the population from policy development and castigated critics, which meant that we deployed a monolithic response across an exceptionally diverse nation, forged a society more fractured than ever, and exacerbated long-standing health and economic disparities.
00:35:19.000So in a sense, the conversations that we were having, that Joe Rogan was having, those were exactly the conversations that needed to take place.
00:35:25.000And importantly, as the writer here says, you needed open-mindedness and conversation, not contempt and condemnation, not certainty and rigor, not alloying medical and scientific procedures to political beliefs.
00:35:41.000And now that this has happened, what's required is an assessment and an address and an attempt to redistribute And right the wrongs that took place during that period.
00:35:50.000Our emotional response and ingrained partisanship prevented us from seeing the full impact of our actions and the people we are supposed to serve.
00:35:57.000We systematically minimised the downsides of the interventions we imposed.
00:36:01.000Imposed without the input, consent and recognition of those forced to live with them.
00:36:06.000In so doing, we violated the autonomy of those who were being most negatively impacted by our policies.
00:36:10.000The poor, the working class, small business owners, blacks and Latinos and children.
00:36:15.000These populations were overlooked because they were made invisible to us by their systematic exclusion from the dominant corporatized media machine that presumed omniscience.
00:36:23.000Ultimately, everything that we were saying has proven to be true over time.
00:36:28.000Many of us did not speak up in support of alternative views, and many of us tried to suppress them.
00:36:33.000When strong scientific voices like renowned Stanford professors like John Ioannidis, Jay Bhattacharya and Scott Atlas or of University of California San Francisco professors Vinay Prasad and Monica Gandhi sounded the alarm on behalf of vulnerable communities, they faced Severe censure by relentless mobs of critics and detractors in the scientific community, often not on the basis of fact, but solely on the basis of differences in scientific opinion.
00:36:59.000When former President Trump pointed out the downsides of intervention, he was dismissed publicly as a buffoon.
00:37:04.000And when Dr. Anthony Fauci opposed Trump and became the hero of the public health community, we gave him our support to do and say what he wanted, even when he was wrong.
00:37:12.000But he's making a lot of money from those public speeches now, so it's not all bad news.
00:37:16.000Trump was not remotely perfect, nor were the academic critics of consensus policy.
00:37:21.000But the scorn that we laid on them was a disaster for public trust in the pandemic response.
00:37:25.000Our approach alienated large segments of the population from what should have been a national collaborative project.
00:37:31.000When you start to accept that this analysis is correct, you have to also suspect that they knew that they were doing that and didn't care, or it served the agenda they were pursuing so effectively that they were unable to resist it.
00:37:46.000I think ultimately that elite institutions of media, corporatism and government benefit from a divided population.
00:37:52.000So a situation like this was beneficial And we paid the price.
00:37:56.000The rage of those marginalised by the expert class exploded onto and dominated social media.
00:38:02.000Lacking the scientific lexicon to express their disagreement, many dissidents turned to conspiracy theories and a cottage industry of scientific contortionists to make their case against the expert class consensus that dominated the pandemic mainstream.
00:38:14.000I would say that it wasn't an expert class, it was a one-sided cadre of experts being utilised to underwrite a required agenda and a preset objective to ultimately facilitate the wealth transfer that we've already described and, as always takes place whether there's a pandemic or not, the advance of the interests of the powerful.
00:38:32.000Simply put, the pandemic provided a lens to help us witness what ordinarily happens but is not so easily observable.
00:38:39.000Labelling this speech misinformation and blaming it on scientific illiteracy and ignorance, the government conspired with big tech to aggressively suppress it, erasing the valid political concerns of the government's opponents.
00:38:50.000This isn't just happening in the pandemic.
00:39:48.000Those are the things we still care about.
00:39:49.000And don't worry, because those things are still valid, and they're going to be more and more valid as what I call the establishment continues to amplify its need for control in the service of corporate interest.
00:39:58.000Now you can use that as a utensil to analyze any news story.
00:40:02.000Hang on, this balloon story, are they going to use this to generate funding and impose control?
00:40:07.000Yeah, down the line, almost certainly.
00:40:08.000The war with Ukraine, are they going to use that?
00:40:10.000Climate change, are they going to use that?
00:40:12.000So now you can just sort of stick relatively firm.
00:40:14.000It's a good thing, because now you know you were right.
00:40:17.000So you're able to go, oh good, I'm not crazy.
00:40:19.000So what's necessary is you continue to support our channel, you continue to support one another, you continue to communicate and you stay firm and strong.
00:40:30.000But if you stick to the facts, then ultimately the truth will win out.
00:40:34.000And this despite the fact that pandemic policy was created by a razor-thin sliver of American society, or an elite, who anointed themselves to preside over the working class, members of academia, government, medicine, journalism, tech, and public health who are highly educated and privileged.
00:40:49.000From the comfort of their privilege, this elite prizes paternalism as opposed to average Americans who lord self-reliance and whose daily lives routinely demand that they reckon with risk.
00:40:59.000That many of our leaders neglected to consider the lived experience of those across the class divide is unconscionable.
00:41:05.000Incomprehensible to us, due to this class divide, we severely judged lockdown critics as lazy, backwards, even evil.
00:41:12.000We dismissed as grifters those who represented their interests.
00:41:15.000We believed misinformation energized the ignorant and we refused to accept that such people simply had a different valid point of view.
00:41:22.000We crafted policy for the people without consulting them.
00:41:25.000If our public health officials had led with less hubris, the course of the pandemic in the United States might have had a very different outcome with far fewer lost lives.
00:41:34.000Instead, we have witnessed a massive and ongoing loss of life in America due to distrust of vaccines and the healthcare system, a massive concentration in wealth by already wealthy elites, A rise in suicide and gun violence, especially among the poor.
00:41:46.000A near doubling of the rate of depression and anxiety disorders, especially among the young.
00:41:50.000A catastrophic loss of educational attainment among already disadvantaged children and among those most vulnerable.
00:41:56.000A massive loss of trust in healthcare, science, scientific authorities and political leaders more broadly.
00:42:01.000So there you are, that is a voice from within the scientific establishment telling you what you already knew.
00:42:22.000And ultimately, what is a crisis other than an opportunity for the powerful to double down on their interests and increase their power, to increase their authority, to eliminate the opportunity for dissent, to smear opposing voices?
00:42:35.000All of this we've seen take place over the pandemic, but this takes place across culture, across society, all of the time anyway.
00:43:36.000And on the subject of shamans and their garb, We've got a fantastic guest on the show now.
00:43:41.000As I've already told you, if you've been concentrating, Bob Roth is a teacher, a great teacher of Transcendental Meditation.
00:43:48.000If you're wondering why you're suffering in this world, it might be because you're not accessing the limitless power that is already within you and around you.
00:43:54.000Bob is the CEO of the Lynch Foundation, that's set up by David Lynch, of course, and the author of Strength in Stillness and Change Begins Within.
00:44:23.000Sometimes I'll keep a particularly precious pair of boots, like worn at the VMAs or something, or these blood-spattered Converse trainers that I once wore at the Edinburgh Festival when I got injured in what I might call a fracar.
00:44:35.000But most of my clothing goes into what I call the circle of life.
00:44:40.000oddly dressed people walking around Oxfordshire.
00:45:07.000You can't win the compassion war with me.
00:45:10.000I'm a very compassionate and loving person.
00:45:13.000Now, Bob, people watching this will be disenchanted and disillusioned with establishment power, globalist elitism, the inability of any democratic process to deliver the will of ordinary people, the failure of our economic and political institutions.
00:45:30.000How, Bob, do people heal from the struggles of this world?
00:45:34.000And how does the personal and spiritual journey interface with the necessary collective change that needs to be instantiated if we're to be pulled back from the brink of the apocalypse?
00:45:46.000Okay, and we have how many days to talk about this?
00:45:51.000So the thing is, I was a student at the University of California in Berkeley in 1968, and I had many, many friends who were working at that time to make changes, to overturn the government, to do all these different things.
00:46:03.000And I saw them 10 or 15 years later completely burned out, Russell.
00:47:08.000And the key thing is there's now this enormous amount of scientific research that shows that meditation properly understood in practice is very empowering.
00:47:23.000And I think it's the basis for any kind of change that a person wants to facilitate in the outer world.
00:47:31.000The people that perhaps need it most, not to suggest that we don't all need to have a relationship with this limitless power that grants us the insight that what we perceive as total reality is but a fragment of it.
00:47:43.000The people that perhaps most need this access are unlikely to need it, excuse me, unlikely to access it.
00:47:50.000I mean people that are really busy or people that are really suffering.
00:47:54.000Those seem to be people that find it difficult to make space, make time to meditate.
00:47:59.000That's before you get into sort of desperately poor folks.
00:48:02.000Yeah, but the thing that we're working on now with the David Lynch Foundation is we're working with insurance companies and private insurers, self-insurers, and like Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield in the United States and Medicare is to have the meditation reimbursed by the insurance companies so people can learn it and have have it prescribed by a doctor and then have it reimbursed by insurance companies and then we're also working with
00:48:32.000Schools, hospitals, businesses to set aside a meditation room where a person can do their meditation before when they get to work, before the day begins or before they go home at night.
00:48:45.000Now, I want to make a very strong point.
00:48:47.000There's some criticism that, oh, meditation is like the opiate of the masses.
00:48:51.000There's changes that have to take place in business.
00:49:02.000Transcendental meditation is not an escape from anything.
00:49:05.000Transcendental meditation is a preparation for activity, for that resilience and that creativity and that clarity of mind and that inner fulfillment that we need in order to make sustained change in our own lives and in society as a whole.
00:49:20.000So we want we understand that it's very hard for anybody to find time.
00:49:25.000But if we make meditation times available in the workplace right now, for example, in New York City alone, we're offering transcendental meditation for free in about 50 hospitals, frontline doctors and nurses and who are working in the ICU units and and emergency rooms, and they have increasingly setting aside places for them to take 20 minutes to meditate.
00:49:49.000Bob Roth, sometimes when I hear about measures like enabling people to work, to meditate within workspaces, or indeed the advance of allowing or facilitating insurance payment for Transcendental Meditation as a health measure, I can see that that is to a degree progress.
00:50:11.000But what I note is it is change within the accepted parameters of a very, very powerful system.
00:50:17.000And it seems to me that at this point we need disruptive change, confrontational change.
00:50:23.000This is a time where spirituality needs to be brought to the forefront, not to be regarded as a supplement to the accepted and understood presumed conditions of our late capitalist culture that is underwritten by individualism, materialism.
00:50:40.000I feel sometimes that we ought be more radical and disruptive in the way that we present these ideas.
00:50:46.000How do you and how did the Maharishi square the necessity for fitting in with secularism with the requirement to disrupt this machine that appears to be driving us to extinction?
00:50:59.000I think disruption has to take place in both ways.
00:51:02.000That's why I started off saying that we want to bring meditation to the disruptors.
00:51:23.000So I think when you have people who are meditating in a workplace or in a hospital, they're not becoming passive observers.
00:51:31.000They're actually able to take a more leadership role and guide those kinds of changes.
00:51:36.000And Maharishi himself was very radical.
00:51:39.000I mean, his assessment of the weapons industry, the pharmaceutical industry.
00:51:43.000I mean, the fact that the number two cause of death In in hospitals in in health care is iatrogenic disease caused by modern medicine.
00:51:53.000Number two cause of death caused by modern medicine.
00:51:55.000So he was slamming that at the same time.
00:51:58.000The reality is work has to be done on the ground, whether it's from the outside, empowering people from the outside or empowering people from the inside.
00:52:07.000In our locals community, that's our members and anyone can join that if they choose to.
00:52:40.000People like Jerry Seinfeld that never misses a session?
00:52:43.000People like Lynch that never misses a session?
00:52:45.000People like you that's probably sneakily meditating below the waist right now?
00:52:50.000What do we do and how do we become more like you?
00:52:54.000I think that it's just inevitable that a person has to have the desire that they want to learn to meditate.
00:52:59.000I mean, the thing is, is there's this wonderful ancient proverb where you see a person running, there's a burning little a little house that a hut that's burning and then there's a big building down there and you see a person running and are they running towards the big house?
00:53:14.000Are they running away from the burning hut?
00:53:18.000And so stress, trauma, we're living in a and if you want to say a pandemic, Uncontrovertibly, unarguably, this is a pandemic of stress, toxic stress and trauma that's in the world today.
00:53:31.000Whether you look at what's, again, the number two cause of death among teenagers is suicide and the rates of Addiction, you know all those numbers.
00:53:43.000So the fact of the matter is, human beings want to get away from suffering, just like that wonderful woman's comment.
00:53:49.000You want to get away from a migraine headache, you want to get away from insomnia, you want to get away from constant anxiety.
00:53:55.000Now, yes, change has to take place in the structures of the organizations of the institutions, but in the meanwhile, we also have to take care of our own health or else we'll die.
00:54:06.000So, I think people, it's a self-motivation.
00:54:09.000People, when the time is right, some people never miss a meditate.
00:54:12.000Russell, you're pretty darn good with your meditations.
00:54:26.000It's a very demanding work environment.
00:54:28.000Some say that much of that stress emanates from a very particular and very unusually dressed I would like us to be able to make TM part of what we do here.
00:54:40.000Have you seen it succeed in workplaces?
00:54:42.000Have you seen it successfully scheduled?
00:54:45.000Well, I mean, even David Lynch, you know, and the group that's around him, they all meditate.
00:54:55.000Deirdre Parsons, who you know and we love, runs the David Lynch Foundation in the UK and she can arrange to teach everyone in your office.
00:55:05.000And she's been, I have to tell you, she's been doing amazing work in the UK with the foundation.
00:55:10.000She's brought it to about hundreds of people who drive ambulances, people who are veterans, people who are on the front lines in hospitals.
00:55:18.000There's a big research study going on at the University of Cambridge right now on TM in the brain.
00:55:24.000All of this is Let me pause and say, you don't like it so much, or often when I talk science, but the fact of the matter is, as you well know, there is no difference.
00:55:55.000So when one sees that a person's blood pressure went down or they have less anxiety, they're sleeping better, in a technique that is, you could say, is good for health but also develops consciousness, then you can see there is credit.
00:56:10.000There's something very profound going on because it's just a purely mental technique that changes all levels of life.
00:56:18.000So I didn't want you to give me a bad time on the research.
00:56:21.000I appreciate the research and its necessity.
00:56:23.000I suppose I sometimes I don't see odds with mysticism.
00:56:27.000And I know that Maharishi was himself a scientist and I recognize the value.
00:56:31.000And in fact, the way we frame our information is evidence based, empirical, well thought out arguments.
00:56:39.000We don't It's necessary to adopt the lexicon of our day, but I suppose that there's something about new age rhetoric, and I know that I lapse into this myself sometimes, that makes it feel like we're doing this just to somehow be more attractive or more effective in the workplace, rather than change the paradigm entirely.
00:57:12.000You pick certain words in your conversations that resonate with people, that people understand.
00:57:18.000And you could use other terminology, but there's certain terminology you use.
00:57:22.000And I think that's, it's not to water anything down.
00:57:26.000It's like, let's not let vocabulary get in the way of an experience, of a transcendent experience.
00:57:33.000Once you have that transcendent experience, once you have that experience of that inner calm, that silence that lies deep within everyone, then it leads to freedom.
00:58:26.000What are your questions about meditation?
00:58:28.000Yeah, I was really interested in what you were saying there, Bob, especially when you mentioned, I know it's obviously an awful subject, but things like suicides and depression, and obviously one of the issues with the pandemic, one of the more, I suppose, unspoken Manifestations of some of the measures you could argue.
00:58:46.000Certainly the lockdowns and some of the things that they created was this huge spike in depression and suicides and all sorts of other dreadful things.
00:58:55.000And I wondered if you had any thoughts about the kind of methods that We were kind of encouraged to use as coping mechanisms through the pandemic rather than turning to so it was things like turning to fast food and being able to easily order things from Amazon and things rather than a more holistic approach that you're that you're talking about here which is about methods where we can attain some kind of freedom even when we're locked inside our homes.
00:59:26.000I think ultimately a person has to make a decision themselves.
01:00:13.000The surface of the mind is the monkey mind or the active thinking, gotta, gotta, gotta mind.
01:00:18.000But deep within every human being, there's this ocean of consciousness, this silence, this peace, this power, this energy.
01:00:26.000And Throughout time, people have been accessing that.
01:00:30.000It was lost for hundreds of years, and look what's happened to the world, or thousands of years, look what's happened to the world, and now it's coming back, and it will completely transform the human being, and the human being will completely transform society, because society is, as you know, the expression of the human being, and if we can have human beings living higher states of consciousness, which just means healthier, more integrated, more intuitive states, then society will reflect that.
01:01:07.000Bob, I'd love to have you come on for a longer conversation.
01:01:11.000If we can schedule it, it would be wonderful to spend more time speaking with you.
01:01:16.000Also, when we're in the United States, where I'm doing two stand-up shows, as a matter of fact, one in Florida, one in Los Angeles, I would love to meet up with you and to meditate and stuff if you have time, or you're not wrapped up in your own concerns, you're in a giddy carousel of endless selfishness and hedonism that has come to define you.
01:01:37.000I know, it's just terrible, it's just terrible.
01:01:39.000Russell, I would love to spend time with you, it would be great.
01:01:43.000I mean, what is this, 14 years now or something?
01:01:49.000Mark on my wall with a penknife, a groove.
01:02:26.000You can follow Bob Roth on Instagram at Meditation Bob and find out more about his work at MeditationBob.com if you want to learn to meditate.
01:02:34.000I know that the David Lynch Foundation are eager to provide free meditation to people who can't afford it.
01:02:57.000And I guess meditation maybe is one of those ways that it doesn't seem like you're directly changing power.
01:03:03.000But if you're changing yourself, if you're kind of creating a strength in yourself, That then multiple people and communities are doing it at the same time.
01:03:12.000I guess maybe what Bob's saying is we'll be more ready to affect change.
01:03:16.000And I thought that's where it can be like a really useful tool.
01:03:23.000I often think about... You're too kind.
01:03:26.000I'm thinking about the example of the tulips.
01:03:30.000The tulips temporarily became central to Dutch economics and then people instantaneously lost interest and they became almost without value.
01:03:39.000Tulips were changing hands for thousands of pounds.
01:03:42.000People talk about it as an example of inflated value quite a lot.
01:03:47.000I'm also thinking recently about, remember that story that we covered about that game store that was going to get shut down and people started to artificially inflate its price, which is probably as I understand it, common practice in the financial industry and a fundamental aspect of global finance.
01:04:03.000But Makes me recognize that all systems are a reflection of human consciousness and our facilities, our humors, our tendencies for good or bad, jealousy, greed, kindness, love.
01:04:16.000And the technique of meditation, I suppose, if it changes your individual consciousness and it changes the individual consciousness of enough people, Oh man, we could have talked about him, but if we'd have talked to him longer.
01:04:27.000They conducted experiments, you can look this up, in Chicago where they had people in their hundreds meditating, it affected the crime figures, you can look at this stuff.
01:04:35.000It's like that consciousness is a continuum.
01:04:38.000Bob sometimes, I guess, is reluctant to get into the mystical aspects of it, because I feel like they popularize it as is perhaps necessary in this climate with some of the more easily, rationally explained functional aspects of meditation.
01:04:54.000You will feel better, you will feel more effective.
01:04:56.000And I guess what I'm always pushing for, what I want is real change, probably because I want real change in myself, but certainly I want it in the world also.
01:05:03.000I can see that if you don't have people focused on just um what's right in front of them or what they're kind of angry about necessarily or or what they want or what they desire or all the all the distractions that we're offered to stop us thinking about how are you going to create change actually just think about this
01:05:23.000Worry about the culture war, buy some stuff from Amazon, think about some celebrities on Instagram, rather than actually, what Bob's saying is, focus on what's real, what's inside you, and therefore you will create the focus to actually make real change, rather than being distracted by all the bullshit.
01:05:42.000You know that I'm using this as part of an underlying campaign to make meditation mandatory I'll be into it.
01:05:49.000And then doing it on locals and staff, do just 20 minute meditations.
01:06:58.000There's a beautiful exclusive with a conversation we had with Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who finally had the nuts to say that the Nord Stream pipeline had been blown up by America.