On this episode of Show 101, Russell Brand is joined by Chris Best, co-founder of Substack, an online media organisation that hosts many so-called journalists like Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, many friends of the show, to talk about independent journalism and how, because of them, counter-narratives that centralised authority would prefer to suppress just get out there into the world. Plus, we do a deep dive into the TikTok hearing, and ask, and indeed answer, because it's a rhetorical device, what exactly is this Congressional hearing about when so many of the accusations levelled at TikTok could equally be leveled at US-based social media companies where there's obvious deep state infiltration? And we talk about vaccine injury compensation cases in the UK, and what infuriates me about this and why we can't talk about it on YouTube, and why it should be able to be reported elsewhere in mainstream media. And so are you at the point now, if you're appalled in particular by Joe Biden's recent sanctimonious grandstanding around Big Pharma prices, that doesn't do enough to cap them? And if you don't think Big Pharma doesn't have enough to do enough, even better, let me know in the chat in the comments below! we're chatting away to you on Locals, where you have the chance to directly communicate with us directly. We're chatting to us. and post us down there! We'll be talking to you, too! . . . Stay Free! Stay free! - Russell Brand Subscribe to our new show Stay Freeze It! Subscribe to stayfree with Russell Brand on Podulp and let us know what you think of this episode? Leave us a rating and review it on Apple Podcasts! or wherever else you're listening to this podcast. You'll get 10% off your favourite streaming platform, and we'll be giving you 5% off the next episode of Stay Free with a coupon good for 5 stars and a discount on our new ad-free version of the Stay Free With Russell Brand's new book out next week! Get in Touch with me and get 20% off my next week for a chance to win a FREEbie! Become a supporter of the podcasting membership starting at $99.99, and receive 5 stars, and get 5GB free, and 5GB of free shipping throughout the rest of the month!
00:00:52.000Thank you for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand episode 101.
00:00:58.000We couldn't celebrate the 100th episode because it was a terrible national tragedy in your country, America.
00:01:03.000Today, on show 101, we are celebrating having done this a century of times.
00:01:08.000If you're watching this on YouTube, the whole show will be available on Rumble.
00:01:12.000We're going to give you this first part for free.
00:01:14.000To let you know what free speech sounds like, baby, but we can only give you an inkling, we can only give you a tickle, the full thing will be over exclusively on Rumble and what a crescendo it promises to be.
00:01:25.000We're going to be talking to Chris Best, the co-founder of Substack, an online media organisation that hosts many so-called journalists like Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, many friends of the show.
00:01:36.000I suppose we're going to talk to him about independent journalism and how, because of Substack, counter-narratives that centralised authority would prefer to suppress Just get out there into the world.
00:01:51.000That's what they do over there on Substack, so we're excited to talk to Chris Best about that, and I suppose the success of Substack demonstrates your appetite, your ongoing appetite for truth in a climate of fiction and falsehood.
00:02:04.000We do a deep dive into the TikTok hearing, and Ask, and indeed answer, because it's a rhetorical device, what exactly is this Congressional hearing about when so many of the accusations levelled at TikTok could equally be levelled at US-based social media companies where there is obvious deep state infiltration, one of the things that Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss and Michael Schellenberger's revelations showed us.
00:02:31.000When we click over to being exclusively available on Rumble, we'll be talking about You know it's it's it is I mean it's plain it's often it's obvious and frequently we cover this subject because it's still something that's censored because it's become a pivotal and revelatory cathartic moment we're going to be talking about vaccine injury compensation cases in my country the UK we can't talk about it on YouTube and I think we should be able to it's been reported elsewhere in mainstream media and what
00:03:01.000infuriates me about this and i'm gonna use the word infuriate this is show 101 i'm off the hook oh wow that's right if you're watching this on youtube get ready because like this i'm really going to express myself like this is what bothers me about that entire period of the pandemic and in particular the suggested medical solutions we paid for the development of those products you overpay to buy it from big pharma Moderna currently charging a 4,000% increase.
00:03:31.000A drug that they could sell for $2.65, they're selling for hundreds of dollars.
00:03:36.000And then when it all goes wrong, and there are vaccine injuries, allegedly, still on YouTube, you pay for the compensation.
00:03:45.000Let me know in the chat, in the comments, particularly if you're a member of our Locals community, where you have the opportunity to directly communicate with us.
00:04:06.000It's as if Joe Biden don't know that we're celebrating Show 101, because the adorable devil he is, he's dithering about the great Vivified cadaver from place to place, all bewildered and delirious.
00:04:19.000And so are you at the point now, Joe Biden, that even if you're appalled in particular by his recent sanctimonious grandstanding around Big Pharma, the new bill that doesn't do enough to cap Big Pharma prices is super diluted.
00:04:34.000We'll be talking about that in more depth over the course of the coming days.
00:04:38.000Even evoking the phantom of his father to say, you know, like, I know what it's like
00:04:43.000to worry about a family member getting cancer, when there is a piece of legislation already
00:04:46.000in place that would mean that they could prevent people profiting from cancer drugs by rescinding
00:04:54.000their patents and ensuring that there would be, well, actually capitalism, free market
00:04:58.000capitalism, and those drugs could be made at competitive prices.
00:05:01.000Socialism in development, capitalism in the profits, very, very interesting modality.
00:05:06.000Nevertheless, I, as a compassionate person on a path of individual awakening, on a journey like you, just a fallible, flawed person like you, not as bad as Gareth, worse than some people, Adorable Dan on Dan Cam.
00:05:18.000He's a person that's on the path as well.
00:05:21.000On some level I still feel sad about Joe Biden.
00:05:25.000It's gone beyond the just condemnation of him.
00:05:28.000Because I feel like it ain't right dragging him around like this anymore.
00:05:31.000Like when you see him on some sort of like construction site.
00:05:34.000Also I think like we're aware of like what Biden used to be.
00:05:37.000Whether you agreed with his politics or not.
00:05:38.000Like the earlier versions of Biden in Congress and he had such a kind of demeanor about him.
00:06:23.000Tell us about... Martin Luther King had a dream.
00:06:26.000It was a dream that we'd all learn to get beyond our cultural differences and fight against centralised power, build a better world for the oppressed minorities, recognising that ultimately we all have the same interest, to rise up and confront centralised authority.
00:06:49.000I think because I saw this clip last night when we were Twitter scrolling, as we do around here, and I think it just got into my head.
00:06:55.000And then I had this dream where Joe Biden was a bit like his ear and he was sat next to me and he lent on me and he put his head on my shoulder.
00:07:04.000And I turned to my right and Jill Biden was there.
00:08:13.000Let us know in the chat and the comments.
00:08:15.000Join us over on Rumble in a minute when we start talking about vaccine injuries.
00:08:17.000Before that, though, we've got a lot to talk about.
00:08:20.000We're talking about gangster globalism.
00:08:23.000How we've forgotten now that there's a lot of ongoing international racketeering happening, whether it's Bloody the Shakedown, The TikTok are experiencing because ultimately all the things that are coming up in the congressional hearing could be leveled at American social media organizations.
00:08:55.000It's not a coincidence, is it, that he goes to Congress and then on the same day someone from the IRS turns up at his door and leaves a note on his door.
00:09:11.000The IRS, they don't, we don't do that.
00:09:13.000That's unhygienic and it's just not tax efficient.
00:09:16.000But what we do is a simple note on the door.
00:09:18.000Let's have a look at Joe Biden being gingerly read around a construction site with an ongoing commentary that's required to ensure he doesn't misplace a single Tootsie and end up in one of Gareth's sweet little dreams.
00:09:42.000It's like the director's commentary of that visit.
00:09:46.000Also, we've got some people lined up here.
00:09:48.000He should be able to work that out, shouldn't he?
00:09:50.000I think that guy's just gone into the rhythm of explaining everything.
00:09:55.000I don't want to speculate as to Joe Biden's conjugal activities, presumably with Jill Biden, but do you reckon there's a running commentary there?
00:11:04.000I guess the thing with this is just that there's nothing actually extraordinary that occurs here.
00:11:09.000I guess what's got to people is that this president who is in charge of, essentially, whether or not we go to World War Three or not, has to be guided around in this manner, told that your mark's there, told that some people are over there that you need to talk to.
00:11:23.000It seems too much manhandling for someone who's with that amount of power.
00:11:30.000Let's have a look at old previous president Donald Trump.
00:11:34.000I mean before we get into this actually I just want to mention that over the last hundred shows we've made a lot of important discoveries since show zero.
00:12:02.000It's people that support Ukraine have done that.
00:12:06.000We've learned that both Biden and Trump have got top secret documents lying around their home.
00:12:10.000But as Trump pointed out, Biden kept them on a garage floor where they could be subject to damp.
00:12:15.000US military spending is at a record high and a couple of government agencies have said that they believe that COVID originally came from a laboratory in Wuhan.
00:12:25.000That's just over a hundred shows and I bet we've missed some stuff.
00:12:27.000What else have we learned in that hundred shows?
00:12:29.000Not that we're claiming credit for breaking those stories, although we've had some incredible investigative reporting go on, my own and others.
00:12:36.000We got the first interview exclusive with Seymour Hersh, didn't we?
00:12:39.000Seymour Hersh, who it was on his sub stack that it was like the Nord Stream Pipeline story
00:13:09.000One of the things that makes Trump an interesting and engaging orator is his ability to trust himself in the moment and follow tangential threads and see where they may take him.
00:13:20.000But in this instance, he ends up sort of speculating too deeply on what your relationship with your children might be.
00:13:25.000It's a weird way to approach a sort of a farmyard death tax.
00:13:30.000And I made farmers happy and rich again, and they're doing a fantastic job.
00:13:39.000Someday it'll become time for them to leave this beautiful Earth And they'll be able to- Because, like, describing the Earth as beautiful, that's already an unusual choice that he's made.
00:13:51.000It's just, someday they will die, is all you need at that point.
00:13:53.000Someday they'll die, like- In fact, even that!
00:14:50.000There are still a lot of people that are deeply angry about the presidency of Donald Trump, pointing to their perception that he created, caused that, what they believe to be an insurrection on January the 6th and many other issues.
00:15:02.000But for me, I'd just lean into the fact that when that man talks to a camera, it's engaging and a departure from the typical sanctimony that we see elsewhere with the current White House incumbent.
00:15:14.000We're going to expand on our idea, if you're still with us on YouTube, that we're living in a sort of state of global gangsterism.
00:15:22.000And one of the ways that we want to explore that right now is that the current congressional hearing where TikTok are being investigated badly by people who don't understand what Wi-Fi is, on the evidence of some of the stuff we've covered elsewhere this week, is that in banning TikTok, the government would get sweeping powers to crack down on tech Elsewhere, when we say crack down on tech, we don't mean demonopolise, we don't mean control or break up tech, we mean ultimately grant them the ability to censor information that they don't agree with, which has always been their agenda.
00:15:52.000A bill introduced in the Senate designed to ban the video sharing app TikTok would give the Biden administration sweeping authorities to crack down on transactions between people in the US and countries deemed foreign adversaries related to information and communications technology.
00:18:23.000Don't worry about my mental breakdown.
00:18:25.000Just do not let any disinformation, by which I mean information that could awaken me and cause me to be critical of centralised state power.
00:20:04.000I think they've been corralled into that fire station.
00:20:07.000I think they came for something else and then Trudeau turned up.
00:20:09.000What we're going to do is we're going to teach you about fire safety,
00:20:12.000but first, as a little treat, it's Justin Trudeau with five minutes on flat earthers.
00:20:18.000Any moment back in recorded history, not the ancient Greeks or the ancient Babylonians or the Incas or whoever else, who actually wondered whether the earth was actually flat or not.
00:20:33.000Christopher Columbus, they knew the Earth was round.
00:20:35.000There was no danger he was going to fall off the edge of the world.
00:20:38.000That wasn't what people worried about when he was setting off to discover the Americas or discover a shortcut to India.
00:21:06.000Like, just even if I disagree with him, out of politeness, but these people, given their due, they are coldly, stone-facedly, almost ignoring Justin.
00:21:16.000I don't know what they would do differently if he wasn't there, other than perhaps smile congenially at one another.
00:21:22.000But recently, over the past few years, a whole bunch of people have decided that the world is flat.
00:21:29.000And they hang out with each other, ...and they find different ways of proving to themselves that the earth is flat.
00:21:35.000Now that may not seem like a very... ...this event.
00:21:38.000Come and stand near a fire engine and listen to Justin Trudeau riff on flat earthers.
00:21:44.000I also feel that the kind of pose of conviviality ought be denied to people in that position when we know the kind of legislation that they pass.
00:21:52.000the kind of relationships they have with globalist corporations. It's the same sort of resentment I
00:21:56.000feel when I hear Joe Biden using those sanctimonious yarns about his own family and
00:22:01.000even, and I'm sorry to say this, family tragedies when you know that when he's in a position of
00:22:05.000authority and able to make decisions and guide legislation and promote the interests of ordinary
00:22:10.000Americans, time after time, right now and historically too, they lean into their alliances
00:22:16.000with corporate interests. They always ultimately back their paymasters. So in a way, even something
00:22:21.000like this that's sort of quite innocuous on the surface, although visually bizarre because of
00:22:26.000what the hell is he doing by that fire engine, ultimately becomes kind of offensive. I don't
00:22:32.000think we should give Justin Trudeau and that fire engine any more time. Later this week, we're going
00:22:36.000to be talking to Matt Taibbi. He's got the IRS shaking him down because he's attacking establishment
00:22:45.000I feel that this too is an indication that if you speak out against establishment authority, they will use their might, much in the manner that we would assume an organised crime family might leverage their particular authority.
00:23:02.000In fact, this happened in New Jersey, so it's very Sopranos.
00:23:05.000House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan has revealed that Matt Taibbi received an unannounced home visit from an IRS agent.
00:23:10.000Mr. Taibbi told Mr. Jordan's committee that an IRS agent showed up at his personal residence in New Jersey on March 9th, the same day Taibbi testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about what he learned on Twitter.
00:23:26.000In this time of managed decline where we're continually told, even by Joe Biden, that there's nothing he can do about powerful interests, that he's like some kind of David and Goliath figure standing up to entrenched corporate power, it's interesting to note that there There is the ability to organise a response, to manage perception, to do deals, to when required, quantitatively ease financially failing industries.
00:23:53.000It's extraordinary that this sort of pretence is maintained, that we are subject somehow to cosmological forces that are beyond Everybody's control.
00:24:02.000If you're watching us on YouTube, we're going to click over to being exclusively on Rumble right now.
00:24:06.000Remember, in a minute, we're going to be joined by Chris Best from Substack, who's going to be telling us about the importance of free speech and independent journalism, the right that we all have to disagree with one another and how that, in fact, will bring us together against centralised authority.
00:24:20.000And also, we're going to be talking to you about You know, vaccine injury stuff, which we simply can't talk about on YouTube.
00:25:07.000Some of the things that you kind of find from this are pretty worrying.
00:25:09.000So there's been over 4,000 claims related to the COVID-19 vaccine have been submitted since November 2021.
00:25:17.000334 of those relate to a claimant who has died.
00:25:21.000If this is, for me, the worst bit of it, if a person is left severely disabled as a result of receiving certain vaccines, they could be entitled to the one-off payment from the government, which they're debating over how much that should be.
00:25:32.000Under this, severe disablement means a patient must be at least 60% disabled to qualify.
00:25:37.000Which sounds... I mean, how are you working that out?
00:25:53.000Again, there's got to be ongoing logistical gerrymandering in order to minimise these payouts, but I would say the fact that they're staffing up is an indication that they know that the lawsuits are coming.
00:26:04.000Since January 2020, the UK government was found to be the largest funder of Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, contributing £33 million of UK taxpayers' money.
00:26:17.000They've overpaid by 1.8 billion for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
00:26:22.000Sometimes when I'm reading these things out, even though it's been going on for a while, the pandemic is... I remember Bill Hicks used to talk about the Kennedy assassination and that people were sort of tired of hearing, I'll stop going on about the Kennedy assassination.
00:26:33.000But what the problem is, is that there are certain pivotal moments in cultural and public life that are revelatory the true meaning of the word apocalypse as you know is revelation and the pandemic was a kind of apocalypse because it showed how corporate and state interests converge and
00:26:52.000How brilliantly the media cooperated in preventing the information that should have been made plain from the beginning.
00:26:59.000It was kept out of, you know, most of our awareness and consciousness.
00:27:03.000Deals for doses happened behind closed doors between the EU and pharmaceutical companies.
00:27:06.000We remember those text messages between... That's right.
00:27:09.000Albert Baller and that woman at the... Von der Leyen.
00:27:15.000I'd say a villainous moniker from the get-go.
00:27:18.000A bit like an Austin Powers femme fatale, I'd say.
00:27:22.000New variants, international competition and darkness around manufacturing costs have allowed Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna to increase the bill for European taxpayers.
00:27:29.000The New York Times report that the European Commission... Aha!
00:27:32.000President Ursula von der Leyen and Albert Borland had been exchanging text messages leading up to the purchase of 900 million doses of the vaccine worth up to 9.75 billion euros.
00:27:42.000So that was a deal that was not done publicly, that was not subject to democratic vote.
00:27:46.000This is why you need independent voices.
00:27:48.000This is why you need to be able to communicate openly about these sorts of subjects.
00:27:51.000The fact that WHO guidelines prevent this kind of thing from being openly discussed on YouTube to this day and that we have to tiptoe around subjects like the vaccine industry The vaccine injury, well I don't know, do you want to call it a scandal, shows that still it's something that's subject to considerable censorship and I suppose that's an indicator of what kind of interests are at play.
00:28:13.000Yeah, I mean just these relationships that you have, like the reason why that one between Baller and von der Leyen and basically doing deals over text messages, that shows the kind of relationships and how kind of casual and how, I don't know, how well those kind of two,
00:28:28.000where the EU should be basically taking Pfizer to task. They should be saying, you know, do
00:28:33.000these work? What are the, you know, why are you overcharging by this amount? Whereas
00:28:36.000rather than that, they're just sending text messages. Yeah, we'll take 900 million doses.
00:28:40.000Just have another 900 million. It's only 9.75 billion euros.
00:28:44.000Yeah, it's a little like when our, I'm talking about in the UK, Health Secretary Matt Hancock's
00:28:50.000WhatsApp messages were revealed, It was shown that he was sort of just casually...
00:28:56.000Uh, exchanging information with other members of the government saying, no, no, we can't admit to that.
00:29:04.000It's almost like in so many cases, your worst suspicions are confirmed that the idea that even something that I personally consider to be somewhat ludicrous, like a flat earth conspiracy is something that people will consider entertaining.
00:29:19.000Although it's very deliberate that Trudeau Attempts to conflate something more ludicrous with something evidently legitimate, like the concerns around the pharmaceutical industry that came to the forefront once more during the pandemic, but have been a concern for many years.
00:29:37.000It's like a matter of years, a couple of years after the opioid crisis, billions of dollars of out-of-court settlements have been made.
00:29:45.000The pharmaceutical industry is plainly not one that warrants trust, so an attempt to conflate Anti-vax is a term that's like, you know, had its
00:31:06.000Today's subject is a particularly good example of how we have been educated by you.
00:31:10.000Because the last time there was a kangaroo court hearing around the behaviour of big tech giants, we took a misstep thinking, oh, this is good.
00:31:59.000Actually, and really, should we just, you know, have a sort of kangaroo court hearing and then say they can carry on but give us a slice of the pie?
00:32:06.000This is one of those stories that shows you how corruption and criminality within globalist politics is not a bug, it's a feature.
00:32:13.000It shows you why those Mafia films, particularly The Godfather, are a great window into how American institutional life operates.
00:32:20.000Nice big tech business you've got there, be a shame if something happened to you.
00:32:25.000How many people watching this think that the ultimate result won't be you help us to regulate TikTok, you give us some sort of slice of the action and we'll leave you alone?
00:32:33.000Is it really going to be an end to corruption?
00:32:41.000You know that people in Congress own stocks and shares in the big tech companies that they're supposed to regulate.
00:32:47.000This is another example of that, except of course in this instance, it's from a powerful international rival.
00:32:52.000So let's learn what's going on in those congressional hearings and the three or four main ways that this is happening.
00:32:59.000Total hypocrisy, total corruption and how nothing meaningful will get done because the systems that are governing, administrating and judging are totally corrupted.
00:33:10.000The social media tip-top came under very intense scrutiny yesterday on Capitol Hill.
00:33:15.000Firstly, it's not Tip Top, it's Tik Tok.
00:33:19.000In other news, Tik Tok's just basically the same as all social media sites, but the people in charge are Chinese, though.
00:33:25.000Tik Tok's chief executive was met with intense skepticism on Capitol Hill Thursday over the app's security and privacy practices.
00:33:33.000We do not trust TikTok will ever embrace American values.
00:33:38.000If those values are corruption, taking a piece of the action, surveilling ordinary people, banning dissenting voices, you're going to get along just fine.
00:33:46.000Then stop pretending this is about anything other than, look, if you want to carry on with TikTok and give us some of that data and do our propaganda for us, just like all the other social media companies.
00:33:56.000ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government.
00:34:02.000You're suggesting that the government and big tech organizations don't have deep state infiltration, and the people at the state can't control the narrative, and if there were stories that were inconvenient to the government, that you wouldn't stop them or censor them?
00:34:15.000Are you still talking about China and TikTok?
00:34:56.000You damn well know that you cannot protect the data and security of this committee or the 150 million users of your app because it is an extension of the CCP.
00:35:07.000Also, there's the added advantage that this amplifies tensions between the United States Just in case a proxy war with Russia isn't enough for you to worry about, let's get a proxy war with China started.
00:35:17.000There's another way of making us all scared, all the bloody time, when probably the truth is that all big tech platforms are by their nature exploitative, all of them engage in surveillance, and even organisations like the CDC, after promising that they wouldn't, Spied on 55 million people in ways they assured you they would not during the pandemic.
00:35:36.000Once again, there is no legitimate moral platform from which to make these judgments.
00:36:13.000You can see why it's going to break down because they are the partners.
00:36:15.000What they're trying to do is negotiate a better partnership with TikTok so TikTok are more compliant in spreading their propaganda and preventing independent media, probably like us actually, from using social media sites to convey our message to receive your stories and to create alternative movements.
00:36:31.000Let me know in the chat in the comments if you agree with that.
00:36:33.000I have seen no evidence that the I find that actually preposterous.
00:36:39.000This would only become more obviously propagandist if they started claiming that TikTok was somehow bad for kids and that this whole thing was in order to protect children.
00:36:47.000The panel also probed what safeguards the app has to shield teens from harmful content.
00:36:53.000TikTok could be designed to minimize the harm.
00:36:58.000It's clear that the attempts to isolate TikTok from its competitors to treat it differently than dozens of other companies with atrocious records for endangering kids and abusing private data is a pointless exercise.
00:37:16.000The truth is that if TikTok were to vanish tomorrow, its users would simply flock to any number of other apps that have no qualms about surveilling the most private moments of their lives and amassing, manipulating and selling off sensitive information about them.
00:37:27.000Congress was handed ample opportunity to address concerns about children's minds being warped by social media more than a year ago, but when Facebook was caught creepily referring to preteen kids as a source of untapped wealth, Congress in response did nothing.
00:37:40.000What they have to do is make the conversation about something that any sensible person would think was important in order to get on with their normal business of financial control and psychological domination.
00:37:53.000Why would the government in particular not be interested in privacy?
00:37:56.000Possibly because they are more likely to spy on you than anybody else and have more power to spy on you than anybody else and necessarily spy on you because they're not going to cater to your demands, requirements or even democratic rights.
00:38:09.000Records show that the same politicians who've publicly attacked TikTok and voted to restrict its use have also accepted donations from top executives with TikTok and its parent company ByteDance.
00:38:20.000So that shows that what they say means, well, sort of less than nothing really.
00:38:24.000TikTok spent over $30 million lobbying the federal government since 2019, according to Open Secrets, including a record $5.4 million last year.
00:38:33.000ByteDance's spending on lobbying was reportedly the fourth largest among internet companies, behind only Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet.
00:38:41.000So other people that do exactly what TikTok do is Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta.
00:38:46.000So do you imagine they have a similar agenda?
00:38:48.000I mean, doesn't the institutional practice itself tell you what results it's likely to yield?
00:38:54.000In 2021, Sludge reported that 18 senators or their households owned stock in the tech companies nicknamed Fangam for Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google, parent company Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft, valued at a minimum of $9.9 million and a maximum of $24.6 million.
00:39:10.000Three Senators with stock holdings in Big Tech are members of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.
00:39:16.000Eight other Senators whose households own shares in Big Tech are members of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation's Subcommittee on Communications, Media and Broadband, which has jurisdiction over the So you have particular subcommittees with a responsibility for regulation of industries that have members that own stocks and shares in the companies that they're literally supposed to be regulating.
00:39:36.000Couldn't you, in five seconds, with the stroke of a pen, ban that forever?
00:39:40.000Every time they try and do something like that, though, of course, at the last minute, they insert a loophole going, oh, it'd be better if we could carry on doing it in some more opaque way.
00:40:11.000Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy people's data from third-party companies, Safegraph and Cubic, who are in the business of tracking physical locations.
00:40:23.000So the CDC have definitely, demonstrably, literally done exactly that.
00:40:30.000The CDC did this in a bid to check on how citizens were complying with lockdown and other COVID restrictions.
00:40:36.000One of these companies received $420,000 while the other deal was worth $208,000.
00:40:40.000The CDC was allowed to buy this data thanks to emergency rules enacted because of the pandemic.
00:40:46.000But the idea that that emergency was amplified and escalated and utilized in order to bring about new regulation or create opportunities for profit is a conspiracy theory, even if you can literally see those things happening.
00:40:59.000Don't trust your eyes or your own mind.
00:41:02.000The data Safegraph and Cubic are able to get hold of and sell comes from apps installed on phones.
00:41:08.000But that's different from TikTok, because those apps are just, um, they are, well, they're not Chinese!
00:41:13.000In Safegraph's case, this information covered points like neighborhood patterns, revealing the frequency at which somebody visited a place of interest, as well as where they came to that place from, and where they went from there.
00:41:26.000Well, all we did was installed an app on your phone where we observed how you got from a place to another place than where you went after that place.
00:41:33.000But other than that, you were free to do whatever you wanted to do without us looking at all.
00:41:41.000Cubic, meanwhile, sold its shelter-in-place index data set, and that reveals for how long a phone is inside a house, expressed in percentages, as well as the time people would spend in another state.
00:41:51.000The goal was to assess who was sheltering in place, as the authorities had mandated.
00:41:56.000Do you remember all the while from that pandemic them telling you that wouldn't happen?
00:42:01.000Are you seeing now that the entire congressional hearing around TikTok is totally hypocritical and will only lead to an ability for the state to propagandize TikTok more efficiently and censor ordinary users of TikTok more efficiently.
00:42:15.000What it will not lead to is more privacy for you.
00:42:18.000When they say they're going to protect you, they mean they're going to control you.
00:42:22.000When they say they care about you, they mean they want to regulate you.
00:42:26.000When they say they're concerned about TikTok, they just mean they want a slice of the action and the ability to control it like they presumably do all the other big tech companies that they own stocks and shares in while they regulate.
00:42:37.000All this stuff is palpable and observable.
00:42:39.000Anyone who tells you this is a conspiracy theory is interested in just some other version of the mainstream.
00:42:47.000What we should do, because we're more sensible and academic, is keep stuff basically the same, because we're invested in this system too.
00:42:54.000These congressional hearings are a facade, a sham.
00:42:57.000It's beneficial to the state in a number of ways, escalating tensions between the United States and China, creating another platform that they can ultimately control, creating more cynicism and suspicion.
00:43:07.000suspicion, capturing your data, utilizing it to their own ends, like they've been doing
00:43:10.000with the other social media companies, like they did during the pandemic, like they said
00:43:33.000That would mean you'd only have people in Congress that were like, oh wow, I care so much about this, I'm going to give up my right to make money in the stock market.
00:44:23.000Look at this, a Einstein University drug company using lawless, unregulated... Oh, the comments are coming thick and fast!
00:44:32.000I want to focus on the people analysing Gareth's dreams, like Tamara Spencer.
00:44:35.000Gareth's dream could be expressing his feelings about Biden running again, and that no one seems interested in talking about if that's what's best for him.
00:44:42.000At his age, I'd want to be enjoying my retirement.
00:45:26.000You tell us what to do and we do it, whether we agree with you or not, because we trust your judgment.
00:45:31.000We'll persuade you as best we can, but then we'll hand over to democracy, trusting independent journalism, free and independent voices to guide us.
00:45:40.000How excited we are on that basis to be talking right now to Chris Best, the CEO and co-founder of Substack.
00:45:48.000Chris, thanks so much for joining us today.
00:46:39.000The very fact that they don't know, I mean that is very telling isn't it?
00:46:43.000They're doing a hearing, a congressional hearing, they don't know what Substack is.
00:46:47.000We're talking to Matt, he's coming on tomorrow and I know that what he feels is like the whole tone of it, It was like really aggressive and condemnatory.
00:48:10.000You get Matt Iglesias, who writes Slow Boring, who's sort of like center-left establishment on the spectrum.
00:48:16.000You know, he's exactly in the mainstream politically, but he's challenging the orthodoxies.
00:48:22.000He's coming out early against defund the police, all this stuff.
00:48:25.000You get people saying what they believe on Substack, and I think that matters.
00:48:29.000I suppose, yeah, we've often said that one of the indicators of the kind of cultural shifts we've experienced is that journalists like Chris Hedges used to be at the New York Times, and indeed Seymour Hersh, and now they are migrating to these kind of spaces as centralised authoritarian institutions increasingly censor and smear dissenting voices.
00:48:48.000I suppose organisations like ours, Rumble, and like yours, Substack, are gonna, we're gonna have to form alliances of some kind, aren't we?
00:49:14.000Yeah, a lot of people, in fact, Daniel Pinchbeck, who writes on Substack, he always cites, I think it's like Buckminster Fuller, who said, like, you shouldn't compete with the atrophying institutions.
00:49:26.000Simply build new systems and people will migrate organically to them, as is Hopefully happening, although a sort of centralised authority will continually condemn them.
00:49:35.000That's what tends to happen, isn't it, Gareth?
00:49:37.000I mean, I just had a quick thought when you were talking about that.
00:49:49.000But I was just wondering, do those hearings make you in any way worry about the power of those hearings and Congress and government in its ability to potentially censor Substat, in its potential to make a difference to your business platform and all of that?
00:50:53.000This is a free speech platform and we use that free speech, of course, to attack centralised authority and to provide counter-narratives where necessary, support great journalism, for many of the people that are On your platform, what kind of things, what kind of guidelines do you have so people know that Substack's not just some sort of Wild West gangnam lunatic hole?
00:52:07.000God knows where they'd stick that flagpole.
00:52:09.000I suppose that ultimately that's the kind of creep that might lead to regulation and censorship of platforms like ours, because we've actually saw an article about how the EU do have plans to regulate online spaces like Rumble, and I imagine that will ultimately affect Substack.
00:52:25.000So I guess we're going to need to form alliances, aren't we, to fight against trusted flaggers.
00:53:30.000I didn't, it's not like I went, Chris, Chris best, best in show, Chris best, kissy kissy, I'd like to stack you on my sub, you son of a gun!
00:54:39.000Chris Best, he's just an innocent guest, I've got a few things to get off of my chest, but Chris Best, I've been blessed with a stack and it's under the water, a submarine, smarter than it ought to be, oh baby!
00:54:53.000Staring at me through those porthole eyes.
00:54:56.000Look at those octopi, look at those squid.
00:58:43.000Hey, listen, if you want to join the locals' community and be able to comment directly on the sort of things that go on on this show, if you want to come and join us when we do live recordings, see people like Graham Hancock and Vandana Shiva in live conversation, If you want to come and see our community event, we give away free tickets to join us at Community in the middle of July.
00:59:00.000We'll post all of this information in the chat.
01:01:26.000If in a dream, and I ask you this at home as well, if in the middle of a dream you were running away from, I don't know, 101 Dalmatians, say, and someone came up to you in the dream, not Cruella de Vil, you're not going to trust her after what she's done, someone came up to you and went, stop running, it's just a dream, it's just a dream, you in the dream would be unable to respond to that.
01:01:43.000You know, because it becomes an immersive and total reality, even though it's entirely within your own consciousness.
01:01:49.000Some people believe that that's what we're experiencing now.
01:01:51.000And in fact, when you think about it, it's more unlikely that this is the deepest and ultimate level of reality.