Russell Brand is joined by journalist Matt Taibbi to talk about the war on free speech and why Hillary Clinton is running for president in 2020. Plus, a look at some new data on vaccine side effects from a controversial new drug trial, and a look back at some of Russell s favourite moments from his time as a child growing up in the 60s and 70s. And a look ahead to what's in store for 2020, including the first Democratic primary debate, the first primary debate of 2020, and the first presidential primary debate in the 2020 Democratic primary field, the Democratic primary debates of 2020. And, of course, there's still time to catch up on Russell's favourite TV show, Stay Free With Russell Brand. Stay Free! Subscribe to Stay Free with Russell Brand wherever you get your shows, and don't forget to Like, Share and Subscribe to stay free on all social media platforms so you don't miss out on any new episodes of Stay Free, and stay free in the long-term. You'll get exclusive ad-free versions of the show wherever you re listening to the show, and wherever else you listen to your favourite podcasts. Stay free, and remember to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, wherever you're listening to podcasts are available. You're not going to want to miss it! If you like what you listen, please tell a friend about this podcast and tell us what you think about it. We'll be looking out for it in the comments section below! Thank you for listening and we'll be checking it out! Love ya! - Yours Truly, - EJ & EJoshes Love Birds, EJ and EJobs, Matt & Ej & Eleses - P.B. - The EJ is a big thank you, - Thank you, Ej and Ej is a lot, too! - Saje Cheers, P.A. & P.S. - AYO. - M.C. & E.BEN JAMES - R. BONUS EPISODES - SONGS - - JUICYANDSHAKE & PODCAST: - A.J. & A. B. C. & C. M. WELCOME - B. P. S. & KAREN MCCARTO - MATT TAYLOR
00:00:02.000Thanks for joining me on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:04.000Wherever you happen to be watching this, maybe you're watching it on YouTube, the whole show will be exclusively on Rumble and you ain't going to want to miss it because we're talking about Big Pharma today, Biden's broken promises to lower drug prices.
00:00:56.000I'm going to go, yeah, this is what I'm going to do.
00:00:57.000All right, Matt, tell us exactly why you appeared as a Republican witness and how the issue of free speech transcends normal political boundaries, because ultimately it will always affect all of us because we don't know who's in authority.
00:01:08.000We've got, OK, so me and... I'm going to just go, it's my time, it's my time, it's my time.
00:01:14.000And then implicit, it's my time to shine like the girl boss queen I am deep down.
00:01:21.000Once we're only on Rumble, we're going to be talking about, as usual, some new data on vaccine side effects.
00:01:26.000Can you euphemistically tell me what that is?
00:01:36.000Do you mean to say, Gareth, that when they were trialling those medications, they weren't pregnant women going, yeah, you can test that medication on me and my unborn... This is the bit where we don't.
00:02:09.000What is the whole tone of this piece of propaganda?
00:02:12.000This is obviously a piece of propaganda of some kind.
00:02:14.000It's one of those probably sort of an online education facility of some description that hasn't gone to the trouble of investigating Hillary Clinton's past.
00:02:29.000She's so cool and down with the cats and kids!
00:02:33.000It's such a terrible misstep, misinterpretation of what reality is.
00:02:37.000And I suppose that's the fundamental problem, isn't it, with contemporary politics, is they live in a different reality.
00:02:43.000They live in a different America, so their rhetoric and their presentations of what America's meant to be like seems like some sort of vacuous Aldous Huxley-esque What are you all upbeat about?
00:03:31.000You know that woman who spent a whole doggone life trying to impose herself on us, whether it's by crushing the aspirations of Bernie Sanders, who was a populist representation of a traditional leftist movement, or whether it's sort of clambering over the complications, shall we call them, in her marriage, or whether it's starting up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
00:03:51.000Making up lies about Lying about Russia and Donald Trump.
00:03:54.000You know that sort of relentless force for power that potentially has got all sorts of expressions in forms that we... would we discuss that ever only on Rumble?
00:04:04.000Like some of the... should we say the statistically high number of people that have taken unusual decisions after knowing the Clintons?
00:04:56.000If that was Hillary Clinton's actual tootsies, toes, toenails, and soles of her feet, bunions, corns, et cetera, and hey, we all get older, then that would be the only authentic thing.
00:05:19.000The enthusiasm of the young people, the claims that this is a legitimate political voice rather than an institutional, like in a sense the epitome of the political class.
00:05:29.000This is not about Hillary Clinton as a person.
00:05:31.000It's not because I know Hillary Clinton as a mother and a wife and in some ways like has succeeded in you know the narrative of a woman succeeding in a male world is i think a significant and important narrative and i think worthy of celebration but what also has that she didn't uh get involved in any bombings i would imagine
00:05:50.000Well, God, to tell you the truth, if you've got involved in loads of bombings, that would, for me, that would undermine the whole, you go girl, woman succeeding in a male world.
00:05:57.000I'd say, look, that is good, but I also want to consider if there's been any bombings, if you've funded bombings, if you've voted for wars, if you've accepted money for war criminals, if you've acted in ways that are undemocratic, we're going to have to include that in the story.
00:06:09.000But so far, we don't know if that's true.
00:06:12.000All I'm seeing at the moment is some authentic little tootsies running down a corridor.
00:07:40.000And I'll cover what it was actually like in the room during the bin Laden raid, the Iran sanctions, the What is it like to simplify that issue and epitomize all of it in the figure of Osama Bin Laden, when there are complex issues at stake to do with the historic clash between East and West, the representation of energy companies, gerrymandering and manipulation, the ongoing colonial impact of Western interests in the Middle East, the disruption that is caused when a military acts on behalf of corporate interests?
00:09:14.000Clinton helped assert the right of the US government to intervene in any country of its choosing, using the most brutal means possible to achieve its end.
00:09:21.000As a mother, what's your drone policy?
00:09:24.000Clinton was in enthusiastic support of Obama's decision to step up the use of drone warfare in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
00:09:31.000Clinton and the Obama administration sold the drone program as a precise and effective way to ruin weddings.
00:09:37.000Sorry, to target terrorists with fewer risks of collateral damage.
00:09:40.000But the numbers tell a different story.
00:09:42.000During one five-month period of an operation, 90% of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.
00:09:48.000But only 90% of them were innocent people who shouldn't have been killed.
00:09:52.000Think about that 10% who were the intended targets.
00:09:55.000Think about that and dash down a corridor all pleased with yourself to present a course on truth and foreign policy.
00:10:02.000What was your relationship with the military-industrial complex, Hilary?
00:10:15.000From securing defense contracts for Lockheed Martin to brokering deals to build nuclear plants for Westinghouse, Clinton and her ambassador CEOs traveled the globe to bring foreign governments and U.S.
00:10:26.000We have to position ourselves to lead in a world where security is shaped in boardrooms and on trading floors, as well as battlefields, Clinton said.
00:10:33.000Surely you didn't take donations, though, from military contractors American military contractors and their affiliates who donated to the Clinton Foundation were awarded $163 billion worth of arms deals authorized by the Clinton State Department.
00:10:47.000And governments seeking to buy arms got the same preferential treatment if they sent money the foundation's way, no matter their human rights record.
00:10:54.000Clinton's department authorized $151 billion in Pentagon broker deals for 16 of the countries that gave to the Clinton Foundation.
00:11:01.000But the main thing is that She is running down a corridor in a male-oriented world, bringing about the exact same or worse values that someone who happened to have a penis would have done anyway.
00:11:22.000It would be amazing if some of the students in her class actually asked some of those questions.
00:11:25.000That's what I'd like to imagine was happening.
00:11:28.000So if you're in that class, Ask those questions because in a way we're doing that as a sort of comedically aren't we Gareth?
00:11:33.000That's our dedication to comedy because for us comedy is more than pretending to run down the corridor because the word run means run for office and also run down the corridor.
00:11:42.000What would be lovely from a sensible serious perspective is to actually hear those questions answered.
00:11:48.000Like it will come down to things like well the system is saying Essentially set up in this way, so you have to accept these donations.
00:11:57.000Ultimately, I think the answers to those questions would leave you quite dispirited with the state of modern democracy in American globalism.
00:12:04.000Certainly don't ask any questions about the war in Ukraine off the back of that.
00:12:08.000Just that's the past and what's going on now is a completely different thing.
00:12:12.000What I like about the present is it has no relationship to the past, has none of the same players involved, none of the same institutional interests, and certainly isn't founded in the same mentality that brought about those exact problems.
00:12:23.000It's not the same businesses, companies, profit motives, everything basically exactly the same.
00:12:27.000Some of the same rhetoric where you could literally like that thing, whereas they take Harry Potter characters and Star Wars characters and just go like, Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker, is met by an elder who's a bit of a mystic, Hagrid, or, you know, Ben Kenobi.
00:12:41.000Ultimately, they have to fight their father, Darth Vader, Voldemort.
00:12:43.000They go to a place to learn to become a wizard, Jedi.
00:12:59.000Yeah, and you can do that in the way that these days these former either presidents or political leaders in some form like Clinton and George Bush are being kind of reintroduced into society and reframed as these elders who should be teaching politics to kids or doing courses on painting like George Bush has done and kind of mates with Michelle Obama.
00:13:25.000Have you noticed, let us know in the chat in the comments, have you noticed how they're repositioning and repurposing war criminals and stooges of the system as a sort of avuncular, lovable, oracular elders that we're supposed to embrace and look to?
00:13:41.000Because we're not super young, I'm sorry to admit, George Bush, that was the same as Trump.
00:13:46.000Like they were acting like that was the issue, but after a little bit of time and a whole lot of money, they're willing to go, look, we're all in the same team.
00:13:53.000This is almost basically a bloody sport.
00:13:56.000And this is when something like the ongoing corruption in the world of big pharma becomes incredibly relevant.
00:14:02.000And we're not Even talking about the craziness of the pandemic, we're talking about Big Pharma's relationship with the state, a relationship it achieves not only through making huge donations to both parties, not through the enormous amount of money that it spends on lobbying and people in Congress that own stocks and shares in the companies they're meant to regulate, but kind of a broader mentality that it is more important to serve corporate interests than to serve the interests of
00:14:27.000Ordinary Americans who are paying too much money for drugs that they funded the development of, drugs that are sold abroad at a profit by those drug companies, even when people are writing letters about family members dying of cancer for the want of drugs that cost up to $180,000 a year in the case of one prostate cancer drug.
00:14:49.000The kicker though is that they're sold abroad much, much cheaper.
00:14:53.000Absolutely, because they've been developed by America, so they're exportable and they're profitable in a way they would never be if you hadn't taxed the Americans both emotionally, spiritually and literally, financially.
00:15:03.000To watch Joe Biden use the familial, folky rhetoric of a kind of sort of uncle in Dungarees chewing on a bit of straw, kicking back on the stoop, sharing home truths with you, part of the heritage of Twain, some pastoral image of the great patriarch, and that's what we look to, isn't it?
00:15:23.000We look to our leaders as a kind of father or mother figure, some patriarch, elder, some chief, and they use the folksy rhetoric to evoke that kind of atavistic response all the while, Acting as the, in this case, disgusting stooges of profiteering corporations.
00:15:50.000Too many of you, laying in bed at night like my dad did, staring at the ceiling, wondering what in God names happens if your spouse gets cancer.
00:16:03.000Are you going to have any money to pay for those medical bills?
00:16:06.000Kamala Harris at the back is going, where's he going with this?
00:16:12.000I mean, I think with Kamala Harris, I don't know what her inner life is like.
00:16:17.000I do remember in the primaries there was a minute, unless this was propaganda, Well, it seemed like Kamala Harris sort of confronted Joe Biden about, hey, your record on race issues ain't so good, and really had him on the back foot and seemed like an angry sort of firebrand woman that was really going to shake things up.
00:16:35.000But as is often the case, once in a position of some authority, her morality was usurped by expedience.
00:16:43.000At the core of the issues that we would like to showcase to you here is the figure of this dude, Beretta.
00:16:50.000Or Bereke, like a congressperson who, while in opposition, lobbied furiously for legislation that would prevent drug companies profiting from products that they had developed at taxpayer expense.
00:17:53.000So the idea of taking on powerful interests, that sounds like odd rhetoric for a career politician who's currently the officer commander in chief of the United States of America.
00:18:09.000What offends me is the nature of this rhetoric when related to the administrative choices that are being made.
00:18:16.000In particular we're going to learn about something called the Bayh-Dole Act.
00:18:23.000For 40 years now there's been a piece of legislation Well, that means that the government can waive patent exclusivity for drugs whose research was funded by federal government dollars, speeding the arrival of far cheaper generics to the market.
00:18:36.000And yet, despite marching rights enshrined in the Bayh-Dole Act, federal officials have never exercised those rights, even as drug prices have skyrocketed.
00:18:45.000So what this means is, is if a pharmaceutical company is charging too much money for a drug, they can say, you best charge a reasonable price for that, otherwise we're going to That's a brilliant piece of legislation.
00:18:57.000and white label it and everyone will be able to sell it at a reasonable price.
00:19:01.000I won't say an obvious example of a drug that was readily and cheaply available
00:19:05.000because it was out of pattern a couple of years ago, because at the moment there are no clinical trials,
00:19:09.000because no one's paid for them to determine whether or not it is effective.
00:19:13.000So that's a brilliant piece of legislation.
00:19:15.000The point we're making here is even when within the corrupt machine of government
00:19:19.000there is a piece of legislation that could be utilised in the service of people,
00:19:23.000people that are suffering, in this instance people who have family members
00:19:26.000or are themselves suffering from cancer, then it is not utilised primarily because of lobbying
00:19:32.000and the amount of lobbying dollars that's spent preventing the Bayh-Dole Act being used.
00:19:37.000So this is when they can rescind the pattern when a medicine is not available to the public on reasonable terms.
00:19:44.000And what the Biden administration are saying is $180,000 a year is apparently reasonable terms for people with cancer to be able to afford.
00:19:55.000I mean, obviously the price of life is high, but this drug called Xanthi, the Biden administration refused to force the manufacturer of a life-saving prostate cancer drug developed completely with public funds to lower its nearly $190,000 annual price tag.
00:20:10.000As Gareth says, that would seem to me to be a legit target for the utilisation of that piece of legislation.
00:20:16.000The patent holders of the prostate drug Xanthi, whose ingredients were developed at a California public university, Have earned more than 20 billion dollars from the drugs.
00:20:23.000It's not like they ain't profited up till now.
00:20:26.000The US Chamber of Commerce spent more than 80 million dollars lobbying in 2022.
00:20:47.000That money is to ensure the government do not act in your interest, but in the interest of the industries that truly fund them and truly control them.
00:20:56.000Not all drugs are subject to negotiation.
00:20:58.000Instead, the plan will kick off in 2025.
00:21:03.000When you hear Joe Biden say we beat Big Pharma this year, he is talking about legislation that will be passed to cap some drug prices.
00:21:13.000But again, this is something that when you look into it is not as exciting as it sounds.
00:21:18.000What I've found to be the case frequently is they find a piece of rhetoric that they can use, like we've beat Big Pharma this year, posing themselves as little guys up against corporate Goliaths.
00:21:28.000But What is broadly speaking understood is that this piece of legislation will not meaningfully impact the pharmaceutical industry, and they'll find ways around it, they'll find loopholes, and they will continue to profit.
00:21:38.000Yeah, and this isn't new for Joe Biden either.
00:21:40.000So Biden was vice president when the Obama administration rejected congressional Democrats' demand The government used the same power to lower the skyrocketing prices of medicine in America.
00:21:50.000So he's got history of doing this, Biden.
00:21:53.000Amazingly, when he's making those speeches about his father looking up to the ceiling and we beat Big Pharma, he doesn't then mention, oh, by the way, I'm sorry about when I was vice president, making sure that those skyrocketing drug prices couldn't be meaningfully affected.
00:22:06.000Our system requires of us a certain type of amnesia.
00:22:10.000Increasingly, we are asked not to even recall the events of a week ago in order to sustain our faith in the efficacy and legitimacy of a state that operates entirely on behalf of corporate interests, only making concessions to us when it becomes so obvious and galling that to not do it would be against their own self-interest.
00:22:29.000The build back better idea, which emerged from centralist globalist force, I mean, everyone
00:23:14.000So we're going to have to find more ingenious ways of bailing them out because we have to
00:23:17.000protect our partners in the financial industry.
00:23:20.000And as has been explained, while there may not directly be a taxpayer bailout, banking fees will have to compensate for the losses endured by Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse and all of them.
00:24:06.000So it's, I would say, a piece of legislation designed to grab headlines and continue to appease the pharmaceutical industry.
00:24:16.000Before we click over, well, right, as I guess we should, we're going to have to leave YouTube now, because firstly, I want to name that white label off-brand medication that cannot be named on YouTube.
00:24:28.000And also, what about the story about death and heart diseases and AstraZeneca and all that stuff?
00:24:33.000I can't talk about that, can I, YouTube?
00:24:48.000Okay, listen, join us over on Rumble because I've got to talk about, like, while we're on the subject of the pharmaceutical industry, why don't we talk about what was essentially their gold rush, the pandemic era, where the government and the pharmaceutical industry, some might argue, ...operated... Allegedly!
00:25:02.000...collaboratively to ensure that favourable outcomes for each were reached.
00:25:07.000Okay, so if you're watching this on YouTube, click on that link, join us, join us on local if you want, then I can read out your comments and all that kind of stuff.
00:25:45.000So the Office for National Statistics analysed hospitalisations and vaccination records and death registrations in England among 12 to 29 year olds to assess the impact of the COVID-19 jab and infection.
00:25:57.000This is from the Telegraph, which is a British newspaper.
00:25:59.000So it's well done to them for reporting on this subject at least.
00:26:03.000And it's another example of the way that the narrative is moving.
00:26:07.000This is one of those things that when AstraZeneca, that when that vaccine was pulled,
00:26:42.000She remains unwilling to cooperate to this day.
00:26:47.000So after one dose of a non-mRNA vaccine, which includes the AstraZeneca jab, there was evidence of an increased risk of cardiac death in young women, the ONS said.
00:26:56.000Cardiac death could include cardiac arrest, heart disease and myocarditis.
00:27:02.000That's inflammation of the heart muscle.
00:27:04.000If there is a difference in the risk of death after vaccination compared to longer term, this shows a link to the jab, researchers say.
00:27:10.000Most of the young people who received the AstraZeneca jab before April 2021 would have been prioritised due to underlying health conditions or because they were healthcare workers.
00:27:18.000Therefore, the 3.5 times greater risk cannot be generalised to the whole population, the ONS said.
00:27:23.000And what was pointed out earlier when we were putting this piece together is to remember When we were all talking about lockdown measures and we were talking about the near imposition of vaccines, but it was imposed if you worked in certain sectors.
00:27:34.000Remember those people in New York that were kicked out of a job?
00:27:36.000Remind us what kind of pressures you would have faced to take that medication, which may have been good for you, may not have been good for you.
00:27:43.000Remember when people saying, oh, but aren't you noticing a lot of the people that are dying have got like comorbidities or they're obese or they had an underlying condition.
00:27:50.000Don't you remember the rhetoric was, so what?
00:27:52.000That doesn't mean they deserve to die!
00:27:54.000And I remember thinking, no, that is a good point.
00:27:55.000Just because someone's old or ill, that doesn't mean they deserve to die.
00:27:59.000But when it comes to addressing the impact of the AstraZeneca jab, they are pointing out that you can't generalize the results across a population because they, in particular, are going to negatively impact people with comorbidities.
00:28:12.000So it's another example of the way that the information is managed and manipulated.
00:28:16.000Yet another example of the from COVID with COVID.
00:28:19.000The whole way that this information has been managed in order to create the most beneficial results from those that seek to regulate and those that seek to profit.
00:28:28.000If you're trying to understand this landscape and you go, were people able to benefit by imposing regulation as a result of this aspect of the narrative?
00:28:37.000Or were they able to profit as a result of this aspect of the narrative?
00:28:40.000You can normally trace a line that leads you to one of those two conclusions.
00:28:44.000Yeah, I mean, look, with all of this, I think it's, I mean, for me, it's about the lack of access to information.
00:28:50.000I mean, even going to the Moderna case, because obviously we've had Rand Paul in Congress at the moment with the head of Moderna, billionaire owner of Moderna at the moment.
00:29:00.000He's pressing him on myocarditis and getting some more information and whether or not Moderna actually hid this information.
00:29:06.000And actually Robert M Kaplan, Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, was something that we actually talked about earlier in this year, wrote that they'd found through studies a series of adverse events for 1 in 800 vaccines, which was, you know, a lot of a smaller amount than, or a bigger amount you could say, than had been reported.
00:29:29.000Numerous vaccines have been pulled for a lot less, 1 in 10,000, 1 in 100,000 vaccines have been pulled previously.
00:29:56.000Now, having spent some time in the company of so-called entertainers and so-called radicals, why don't we invite onto the show a so-called journalist, the author of Hate Inc.
00:30:06.000Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another, that's a so-called book, and also he appeared As one of Elon Musk's stooges when releasing the vital information that... Cherry-picking!
00:30:19.000Cherry-picked information that appeared when you look at it superficially to reveal that there was some collaboration between the deep state and social media.
00:31:12.000And you need a Carlton the Doorman character, you know, who kind of appears regularly, all that.
00:31:16.000I guess that could be, I don't know, one of the former, Bob Rubin or somebody like that.
00:31:25.000Matt, you can try and entertain us all you want, but I know for a fact, did you, have you got more money now than when you were a little boy?
00:31:34.000Right, so where did the money come from?
00:31:38.000How can you be a Republican witness, which is a necessary part of the congressional procedure, and not call yourself, I use this word deliberately, a terrorist?
00:31:50.000Yeah, I mean we're laughing about it, but in the moment I actually made a mistake.
00:31:55.000I got so caught up in whether or not What she was saying to me was true, uh, that I forgot to just say to her, it's none of your business whether I make money or not.
00:32:05.000And you wouldn't ask that question of any other kind of journalists.
00:32:09.000Like, did you get a book deal out of this story you're telling us about?
00:32:12.000I mean, nobody would ask that question normally.
00:32:17.000Uh, and the, you know, the way they all use exactly the same phrases when they talk to you is, It's incredible.
00:32:26.000In the case of that hearing, I think you're referring to, you know, the cherry-picked, spoon-fed evidence.
00:32:33.000I must have heard that a million times since the beginning of the Twitter files.
00:32:37.000What I imagine must be interesting about an experience appearing at that congressional hearing is that something that, for me at least, usually feels abstract, like corruption, the way that information is manipulated, Smearing of opponents, like sometimes we encounter these things, sometimes we're even personally subject to it, but to actually be within the machine, did it make somehow more visceral, personal and emotional your broad sense that there is entrenched corruption taking place?
00:33:13.000Yeah, it was a little bit of an eye-opening moment for me.
00:33:16.000I mean, I've obviously been doing this for a long time and seen a lot of crazy things in my lifetime, so I'm not surprised when politicians are corrupt, but it was It was very shocking the degree to which they didn't even think about engaging with the material.
00:33:35.000It was just pure attack, attack, attack from the very, very beginning.
00:33:39.000And then as you noted, every time I tried to answer a question, it was just reclaiming my time.
00:33:46.000You don't get to talk over and over again.
00:33:49.000And like, you know, that was a little shocking.
00:33:53.000Yeah, I suppose the danger is that if it were not a subject that I were personally invested in, I wouldn't inquire.
00:34:01.000And yet what is revealed is the MO of the institutions, that it presents itself as an objective and investigative process, when in fact it's a propagandist and condemnatory process that's, in a sense, designed to help us reach the favorable conclusions that it is already predetermined as evidenced by the use of the phrases like spoon-fed and cherry-picked.
00:34:31.000And I suppose this must be happening continually elsewhere and is symptomatic of a deeper malaise that won't be as easy to observe elsewhere.
00:34:39.000As the ongoing Twitter revelations continue to Be released.
00:34:45.000Do you feel that at this point, it's just further augmentation of the ideas of corruption that were sort of present in the first Imprature?
00:34:54.000Or do you feel that it's sort of evolving?
00:34:56.000Is there anything like new and interesting?
00:34:59.000And how does it relate to things like our personal deal over here at Rumble, where we're subject to some attacks?
00:35:05.000And sometimes I feel like, oh, well, yeah, I guess there are a lot of people that are right wing on this platform.
00:35:14.000That's one of the things people are allowed to be in the world.
00:35:17.000And what do you think about the sort of TikTok congressional hearings?
00:35:20.000Because they seem to also be sort of like an odd combination of utterly inept and biased and corrupt, because all the things that are being alleged of TikTok are applicable with the American state's relationship with US social media sites.
00:35:38.000Yeah, I mean, We are still finding stuff that speaks directly to all the things that you're talking about.
00:35:48.000For instance, we found a whole bunch of communications just recently about In preparation for a hubbub they were all having at the Aspen Institute in 2021, where they were discussing ideas like the Restrict Act, which is being proposed for, you know, in response to TikTok.
00:36:07.000There's, I guess, the European Digital Services Act, or whatever they call it.
00:36:11.000That's that they're thinking about for the EU.
00:36:14.000All the ideas in both of these bills are sort of wish lists that have been passed around in this community for a long time.
00:36:22.000The governments want absolute full and complete access to all data that these platforms provide.
00:36:30.000Uh, and then they want a couple of other things that are really important.
00:36:33.000They want, um, they want to have the authority to come in and moderate, uh, or at least be part of the process of moderation.
00:36:41.000Um, and they also want for people who are called like trusted flaggers.
00:36:46.000Uh, that's how it's described in the European law.
00:36:49.000They want those folks to have access to these platforms as well.
00:36:53.000And what they mean by that are these sort of outside quasi-governmental agencies who tell these platforms what they can and cannot print about things like vaccine safety, right?
00:37:08.000And then we found out more about that, where they're openly talking about censoring true information.
00:37:14.000So yeah, we're still finding out a lot of stuff about this, and I think there is more to find, unfortunately, which is kind of disturbing.
00:37:23.000I've not heard a Maxim more disturbing lately than a trusted flagger.
00:37:30.000If someone comes to me claiming that they're a trusted flagger, I think I'd be more at ease with someone who announced themselves as a paedophile.
00:37:38.000It just sounds like a disturbing thing to call yourself or to set up.
00:37:49.000If you look at the bill, there's a whole list of Things that would apply to the various different types of companies and one of them is sort of access for trusted flaggers.
00:38:01.000Twitter has its own language that's similar to that.
00:38:04.000They have people they call trusted partners who determined for them who are allowed to make determinations about content or whose whose determinations they will take seriously.
00:38:51.000But hey, the EU apparently are introducing legislation that means that what was covert is now becoming sort of overt, where they're sort of saying, platforms like Rumble, we're just going to shut them down and ban them from EU states, which doesn't include Britain anymore, as a matter of fact.
00:39:06.000But like, it's interesting, isn't it, that they are essentially just Going to legislate against free speech because they have to.
00:39:15.000And one of the ways they can do that is by saying that free speech is a code for racism or hate speech or whatever.
00:39:20.000And of course, there is such a thing as racism and hate speech.
00:39:23.000But what we continually say is we want to use these platforms to tell the truth and attack powerful institutions and also to have the ability to speculate and have fun and joke and all those kind of things, but not really to hurt people.
00:39:35.000I hate the idea that someone would be hurt as a result of my words.
00:39:41.000Do you think Matt that we're going to see more and more overt legislation and maneuvering to shut down the ability
00:39:48.000to communicate openly in the way that these platforms facilitate?
00:39:52.000Absolutely, that's one of their primary goals is to make it impossible for people to have unfettered communication.
00:40:03.000If you look at the Digital Services Act, it's a lot like the recommendations of the Aspen Institute, and it's got a lot in common with the Restrict Act here in the States.
00:40:13.000When you look at the sections about giving the government access to data, what they really mean by that is they want Everything, every kind of content that's created on the platform has to be done in a format that can be algorithmically searched.
00:40:33.000So even video, or if you have like, you know, something, a conversational platform, they have to be able to automatically generate a transcript quickly, so that whatever AI they're attaching to surveil and monitor people has to be able to look out for keywords.
00:40:52.000Quickly, and it's funny, we did a thing about this thing called the Morality Project, and they were upset.
00:40:58.000One of the things they were upset about when they were reviewing COVID information was that a worldwide freedom rally that was held last year, I think, or two years ago in Europe had been organized on Telegram.
00:41:13.000And so, like, that's part of their thinking.
00:41:16.000We don't want any more of those spaces where we can't search.
00:41:19.000We want everything searchable and we want it instantly searchable.
00:41:22.000So it continues to be about control and they continue to present it as about safety.
00:41:29.000We're trying to protect you has become, it is actually, we're trying to control you.
00:41:34.000When you say that about AI and a kind of pressuring to put data into searchable formats, it makes me feel that AI will of course be used to generate commercial opportunity by creating very particular and bespoke advertisements, but also it's going to be utilized to exert more control and while it might start as a resource that is accessible to all and fun for everyone, it will quickly, like water, find its level as a tool of commerce and of the state.
00:42:04.000So there is a, in spite of, however they frame the problems within platforms like TikTok or Facebook or Rumble, free speech has to be a kind of absolute principle because the alternative ...is predicated on a centralised authority, and when you see even terms like cherry-pick and spoon-fed starting to emerge, or, you know, build back better, it's that these are the indicators that centralised authority is at work, and like you said, those various bills all bear the same hallmarks, so you have to have some absolute principles, don't you, Matt?
00:42:41.000And I think what's really striking about all the people who are backing these censorship measures is that they have absolutely no understanding of what the principle of free speech is all about.
00:42:53.000The whole idea that you could have a centralized truth-deciding authority is completely counter to Every Enlightenment idea about what speech is for.
00:43:07.000You can't have a government body that decides fact and fiction.
00:43:13.000We don't believe that that's actually possible.
00:43:15.000What we believe is that people freely discuss things and they arrive at a kind of truth together.
00:43:24.000Factual truth is always a moving target in journalism, but as a society, you can't just decide what's true and what's not true, because as we learn, even scientific fact changes constantly.
00:43:35.000So if you don't allow free speech, if you don't allow weirdos and people who are crackpots to have their say, you know, because they're right a lot of the time, like you just never know, right?
00:43:47.000And the folks who want to Get rid of all of that are deluded and extremely dangerous people because what they believe is that they have all the answers like we're the experts we know and you know never mind what you think.
00:45:03.000And the way they branded him in that hearing was disgrace.
00:45:06.000And what's so ironic at the moment, literally listening to you two talk about, I guess, authoritarianism, is what we're talking about here, is Biden and Trudeau, literally the other day, uniting together against authoritarian regimes, you know, when they kind of met.
00:45:19.000And it's just, it's so mad that they can be like, we're just against authoritarian regimes.
00:45:24.000Oh, what about all these things that are going on at the moment?
00:46:08.000That's part of the deal over there, as well as ad-free content, access to a weekly show that me and Gareth do called Stay Connected, meditations, podcast.
00:46:16.000I mean, there's so much stuff on there.
00:46:18.000I literally don't have time to list it all.