This week on Stay Free With Russell Brand, we look at the idea of proxy war, and why it's a good idea. We're joined by Ken Klippenstein and Professor Brad Evans to discuss all things disinformation and fake news. Plus, there's a new lab that's going to grow your babies in scenes that look like they're out of the Matrix. Stay Free with Russell Brand is on all of the social medias, if you search for Stay Free, you'll find us. Stay Free is a charitable organisation that helps junkies, alcoholics and mentally ill people get the help they need. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsors and use the promo code: stayfree to get 10% off your first pack! To find out more about the Stay Free Foundation, visit stayfree.org.uk/support and find out how much you can get for your free box of chocolates and mugs here. Keep up to date with what's going on in the news and stay free with us on social media by using the hashtag and stay safe, and don't forget to tag us in your stories! We'll be looking out for you in next week's episode of Stay Free! Stay safe, friends! Timestamps: 4:00 - I'm Looking For Oh, I took a Cold Stole 8:00 | I'm Trying A Cold Stake 13:00- I'm Taking a Cold Steak 16:30 - Who's the Realest Person? 17: What's a Good Person? 18:30- I Don't I Need a Good Deal? 27:00, I'm Not a Bad Idea? 31:30, I Don t Need Peace? 36:00 36:15 - What Would You Do with a Good Idea? 37:00 Is It a Good Thing? 39:00 Christmas? 40:00 Peace? 45:00 Do You Need a Miracle? 47:00 Can I Have a Merry Christmas? 48:00 What Would I Need A Christmas Present? Theme Song by Ian Dope? Theme Music by Jeffree Starretta_ Theme by Ian McKellen Theme song by Squeep Music by Brian McDart 5th Grade - "A Little Late? 5:00 (feat. ) - "I Think Sober? & Other Words?
00:02:20.000Shouldn't even bother to have opened it.
00:02:22.000In our presentation, Here's the News, we're talking about microplastics that are going to make your nuts not work proper, and a new lab that's going to grow your baby for you, in scenes that look like they're out of the Matrix.
00:02:35.000They're not happening yet, but they're planning them.
00:02:37.000I'm going to update you on the Stay Free Foundation, which is a foundation we've started to help junkies, alcoholics, and mentally ill people.
00:02:44.000We're talking to Ken Klippenstein later.
00:02:47.000He's one of those dudes breaking the Twitter files, and we're going to be talking about disinformation, misinformation, and in particular, this thing.
00:03:05.000Twitter was like the playground of rabscallions.
00:03:08.000They was lying, they were doing propaganda, and in addition to sort of like blacklisting things and kicking people off if they weren't into it, they also had this thing where they let the American government just type out what they wanted.
00:04:36.000One miracle would be if Boris Johnson hadn't gone to Ukraine and put Zelensky off doing a little peace deal with Putin, which the terms which Putin had said were acceptable.
00:04:45.000Some of these kids asked Saint Nicholas, which is what they call Father Christmas, don't be confused, or Santa Claus, for iPhones.
00:05:07.000Think of all the things you think you want.
00:05:08.000You want the perfect partner, you want the perfect life, money, cars, whatever it is you're into.
00:05:12.000But if you actually had peace already, then things don't matter anymore.
00:05:15.000So if you can move your way to the limitless love that's within you, you'll be alright.
00:05:19.000I'm not saying that these Ukrainian children in particular should be held responsible for that, because they're living in a terrifying war, aren't they?
00:05:25.000Anyway, this one of these kids, Yevon Vorobyov, oh no, this is others, said Yevon Vorobyov, he's dressed as Father Christmas, asked for air defence.
00:05:34.000Oh no, no, don't ask for a military system.
00:07:08.000But now he's gone into much more, he's got terrible diseases and he's well into a war.
00:07:14.000Washington does not want to be seen publicly giving the green light to Kiev attacking Russian soil.
00:07:18.000Antony Blinken, Secretary of State in December, we have neither encouraged nor enabled the Ukrainians to strike inside of Russia.
00:07:23.000But we've got a whole bunch of information that suggests that that's pretty far from the truth.
00:07:27.000There's this $45 billion aid package coming in.
00:07:31.000Can we see that list of the most egregious things they've done?
00:07:35.000The interesting thing about this, Ross, is that America's now with this new 45 billion that it's sending to Ukraine, will have spent over a hundred billion on Ukraine aid, obviously including weapons.
00:07:46.000And to put that into context, Russia's projected defense budget for 2023 is 84 billion.
00:07:50.000So it's like America, the country who aren't supposedly in a war, certainly not in a proxy war, how dare you, have spent more than Russia.
00:08:11.000We're in a war, we want to win it, we want these territories back, we've got indigenous population there, NATO infringement, they've got their whole own narrative.
00:08:19.000If you're in Russia, if you're a Russian dissident saying, I'm sick of Russia, that I'm part of, starting these wars, you've got your whole own tyranny that you oppose.
00:08:28.000The only thing that I object to there is the deception, Gareth, that 100 billion has been spent by the US compared to 84 billion by Russia.
00:08:51.000In an effort, wartime, oh yeah look, wartime procurement powers.
00:08:54.000In an effort to expedite aid to Ukraine, lawmakers are relinquishing accountability measures to grant the Pentagon what have been characterized as wartime procurement measures.
00:09:02.000That means they can do what they want.
00:09:03.000These emergency authorities enable the Pentagon to deliver Ukraine more weapons faster.
00:09:09.000That's extraordinary because they already don't pass audits, they already do pretty much what they want, they already give 50% of their budgets to the military-industrial complex, I hope I'm not oversimplifying this.
00:09:19.000I'm just putting it into a language you can understand.
00:09:21.000And I'm certainly not suggesting that Russia's actions, and Putin in particular, aren't baddies and that.
00:09:36.000Let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments.
00:09:38.000Do you think that the military-industrial complex are motivated primarily by Altruism, philanthropy, the higher things in life, the things that we should all be aspiring to as individuals, as members of communities and families, or do you think that the military-industrial complex is about selling weapons?
00:09:53.000It's also setting a new precedent, isn't it?
00:09:55.000The fact that you can invoke essentially emergency powers when you're not supposedly directly involved in a war just means that, I mean, what's the next use of the emergency powers?
00:10:05.000It's a little bit like You could argue with Covid, or for example in Canada with the truckers, the way in which emergency powers were used to justify certain new powers.
00:10:15.000This is where it intersects with culture, right?
00:10:16.000Because if you could say it's an emergency that there's a war somewhere else, and actually in a way that'd be a nice thing.
00:10:21.000Imagine if we actually did think that, oh my god there's a war somewhere, this is an emergency, let's stop it right away, right?
00:10:26.000But like the evocation of those emergency powers is obviously for economic aid, to avoid checks and balances around weapon sales, that's what I think, or do you think?
00:10:35.000Same as like, um, In Canada, they are legitimizing now their actions against them truckers by saying that they were violent because they were violent against the economy.
00:10:44.000Language is being sort of used like a cookie dough and shaped to fit whatever purpose is required.
00:10:51.000Brad Evans, when he comes in here, we'll ask him about that, won't we, Gareth?
00:10:53.000That could be your Christmas question.
00:10:55.000Threats to economic security was apparently one of the ways in which they're How dare you!
00:11:04.000And because you've gone on strike to oppose actions, which is the only way working people can ever really oppose state power, our money's gone down a bit.
00:11:18.000At least 20 federal lawmakers, all their spouses and dependent children, hold stock in Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, which manufacture the weapons going to Ukraine at the moment.
00:11:28.000Would you like to see a law passed where Congress folk couldn't own stocks in the organisations that they regulate, like the Military-Industrial Complex?
00:11:37.000Listen, we've got to come off YouTube now, all right?
00:11:39.000So you've seen where we're going with this.
00:11:40.000We're going to say, we're going to bloody well go out and start talking about establishment powers, centralised authority.
00:11:46.000We're starting to start working it all out.
00:11:48.000We've got proper journalists coming on here in a little bit, philosophers, everything.
00:13:14.000We've got Ken Klippenstein on the show with us.
00:13:17.000Ken Klippenstein has come to prominence as he is one of the journalists that has broken this incredible, earth-shattering, Twitterphile story.
00:13:54.000Now, the latest spate of revelations off your mate, Lee Fang, suggests that not only have Twitter been deleting stuff off there that they didn't like, but they're also promoting things that they do like.
00:14:07.000I wonder if you can tell us a little more about that, and perhaps also let us know how that aligns with your revelations about the Facebook, what I'm calling the naughty portal.
00:14:20.000Yeah, I think that to put some context here, a lot of this goes back to 9-11, shortly after which the U.S.
00:14:26.000government created the Department of Homeland Security.
00:14:29.000People forget how young that agency is.
00:14:31.000And this is the department that contains within it the largest number of law enforcement officials in the country.
00:14:42.000And so after DHS was created, of course, their initial purview was to look at terrorism, do counterterrorism.
00:14:49.000Now, you know, ISIS having been defeated, Al Qaeda having been largely defeated, they've moved on from that.
00:14:55.000And I think that there's sort of a hammer in search of a nail and uh you know one thing that they've turned their attention to if you recall a lot of the content moderation stuff in terms of taking down posts um suspending accounts began with isis accounts so really the origins if you look at the dna of all this goes back to the war on terror
00:15:14.000And so, you know, those groups having been defeated and their priorities having shifted, there's really a lot more of a focus domestically.
00:15:20.000A lot of those practices have come home.
00:15:22.000A lot of the extremism is being, you know, on the part of the intelligence community, which I spent a lot of my time talking to folks from that world.
00:15:30.000They perceive the extremism threat now coming from within the United States.
00:15:36.000And you know, the president gave a speech recently in which he was describing, you know, MAGA individuals as extremists.
00:15:42.000They're not particularly secretive about this shift in their focus, but part of what that has brought about has been a You know, overwhelming focus on not just what they consider extremism, but thoughts that they consider extremist.
00:15:58.000And so recently the Department of Homeland Security created what's called the MDM team.
00:16:03.000It stands for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.
00:16:07.000The language around this is evolving very rapidly.
00:16:10.000And to explain what each of those are, misinformation is unintentional falsehoods, disinformation is intentional falsehoods, and malinformation, that's an interesting one.
00:16:18.000The idea is that there's not anything expressly false, but the context is missing.
00:16:23.000And so, you know, a concern that I have about that is that there's a lot of discretion in terms of how they determine, you know, is there sufficient context for what people are promoting.
00:16:33.000But in any case, that was DHS's creation.
00:16:35.000Now at the same time, FBI created something called the It was the Foreign Influence Task Force.
00:16:48.000And so at the same time, in parallel to DHS, the FBI member of the intelligence community was also using this subcomponent of their agency to respond to what they think is the uptick in extremist Speech and a lot of this stuff began with the 2016 election, countering malign Russian influence, as they saw it.
00:17:07.000But something people don't understand is that these things tend to evolve and grow and metastasize.
00:17:13.000And by the time 2020 came around, the concern was COVID disinformation.
00:17:17.000And now with Biden in office, it has moved to disinformation about the Afghanistan withdrawal, disinformation about racial justice movements.
00:17:24.000And, you know, these things have a pretty political valence.
00:17:28.000So I, you know, I think that there should be a debate around how this all is being pursued, and I'm grateful to the extent that the Twitter files have gotten people to continue to talk about these things and interrogate these notions of who's deciding what disinformation is, how are we defining this.
00:17:43.000Terrifying that these agencies are ironically like Russian dolls begetting more and more agencies within themselves, more and more subsets of agencies with more and more particular powers.
00:17:56.000And it's also curious the sort of creep of designation of this term terror.
00:18:04.000Initially wars were fought against nations, then they're fought against radical individuals.
00:18:09.000and then to the terror is brought home and then it's the war against germs and now it's the war of like this the
00:18:16.000tone and timbre of communication in particular the third component of that misdismail seems incredibly open to misrepresentation
00:18:25.000and one would say, misused rather, and one would say that you would want such tools to be wielded by, I can't even
00:18:33.000conceive of an individual, I don't know, Christ?
00:18:36.000But given that their own conduct is so dubious and inappropriate, how could they ever hope to enact those kind of powers amidst such hypocrisy?
00:18:45.000Just a few of the stories like, you know, like Joe Biden's, the change in Biden's stance in Saudi Arabia, the ongoing revelations that Lee Fang made, and also the fact that these problems appear to be endemic and almost institutionalized, being functional rather than erroneous.
00:19:08.000Mate, I can't imagine what sort of force can oppose such an entrenched and immersive corruption.
00:19:17.000Do you feel a little bit like the Twitter files revelation is going to move things forward?
00:19:23.000Or do you think that this is so staggering that it's kind of beyond opposition?
00:19:29.000Well, to give you a sense, just on the human side, sources that I have in FBI, they were describing as recently as in 2020 to me, these are guys tasked with, you know, following foreign spies in foreign countries around tracking counterintelligence, it's called, trying to counter foreign governments' intelligence services, attempts to try to penetrate ours.
00:19:50.000they described to me being reassigned from that kind of work to looking at Twitter accounts
00:19:55.000that were posting what they described as sarcasm and ironic jokes and things and not really
00:20:01.000appreciating that level of subtext, humor, and thinking that it's literal.
00:20:13.000They were just pissed off because they felt as though, you know, I signed up to follow
00:20:17.000Russian spies or follow Chinese spies and try to help the country.
00:20:21.000Why am I worrying about CommieKid69's obvious joke on Twitter that my boss doesn't understand is a joke?
00:20:29.000And so this is something I heard from multiple people.
00:20:32.000So there's been a huge resource shift away from what the intelligence community has traditionally done, whatever you think of that, towards this perceived domestic threat.
00:20:44.000If resources are being used to that degree, Ken, does that not suggest that it's something that's significant and important and that there's a kind of new emergent tyranny unfolding before our eyes?
00:20:56.000Yeah, we're at the forefront of this, and I'm glad that the public discourse since my story and more significantly since the Twitter file story, because that's garnered a lot more interest.
00:21:08.000Some of the attempts that people have made to try to downplay the trend that this type of reporting is trying to get at has said, oh, this is already known, it's already out there.
00:21:31.000Because to someone like me, who had been following this for years, yes, I could sense the... I could see the weather vane sort of turning and some of these trends happening.
00:21:41.000But that doesn't mean that an ordinary person has the time to dig through all these obscure
00:21:45.000reports, cultivate sources, and understand what it all means, because people just don't
00:22:06.000I suppose then, in addition to the reporting and the scope of the revelations that the
00:22:12.000Twitter files represent, the very fact that a figure like Elon Musk, with his demonstrable
00:22:17.000power, is willing to oppose these forces is very interesting.
00:22:23.000Of course, for optimism, because it doesn't seem to be the type of topic that either political party is meaningfully going to, I suppose.
00:22:34.000Do you start worrying that the right are the only people that are going to do anything about this?
00:22:39.000Well, that's been one of the most frustrating parts of all of this has been the attempt to try to politicize what's going on because the agencies that I was sketching out for you before predated the Biden administration.
00:22:48.000Now, that is not to defend the Biden administration in not stopping these things, but that's to say that a lot of what's taking place takes place at a bureaucratic level of unelected officials that staff these national security agencies and are not political appointees.
00:23:02.000And furthermore, it may not even be something that people at the presidential level are particularly paying attention to.
00:23:07.000Because, you know, when this was taking place, I mentioned the MDM team, which was created under the Trump administration.
00:23:13.000Judging from Trump's public statements, he's not a fan of this kind of thing, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to change the conduct of these national security agencies.
00:23:21.000You know, I'm working on a story now about a key change to the FBI's handling of the terror watch list, returning to the theme that I was talking about before, you know, focusing more on domestic stuff.
00:23:37.000In researching that story, it became clear to me a lot of people in Congress and at different points of government that should know about this don't.
00:23:45.000So this assumption that there's this monolith that's deciding all these things and Trump is responsible for this and Biden's responsible for that.
00:23:53.000Maybe they should be because the buck stops at the president, but that doesn't mean that they know what's going on.
00:23:59.000Or that they have control over what's going on.
00:24:01.000I mean, there's a huge element in all this, which is that the national security state is able to do things ad hoc to an extent that I think is really frightening.
00:24:12.000I think for a while as well, Ken, there's been a pervasive sense that these kind of
00:24:16.000agencies have a power that's not usually within the remit of ordinary democratic procedures
00:24:24.000that won't alter in accordance with the fluctuations in the White House in bipartisan or congressional
00:25:16.000Yeah, I think mission creep is the right way to put it, and that's what I try to articulate to people, because there's so much attempt to try to—I was talking to someone in the intelligence community, he was just laughing at the idea that this was a right or left thing, because he said, oh, that's great, that lets us off the hook.
00:25:30.000Once you make it a Trump thing or a Biden thing, half the country can just write it off, and then you'll never get the critical massive support you need to reform these kind of things.
00:25:39.000I'm not saying I don't have my own political views, of course I do, but I think it's more constructive and not to mention true to just look at this as a feature of this national security apparatus that exists and is going to exist regardless of who is in power.
00:25:57.000If you look at their conduct around a lot of this, What's really striking about it is the lack of oversight that exists.
00:26:07.000So if you talk about the intelligence community, to give you a sense of the oversight post-church committee that was put in place following the Watergate era and all those scandals that the CIA and the intelligence community was involved in, it's called the Gang of Eight.
00:26:21.000They're briefed on a lot of these top-secret matters.
00:26:24.000My understanding is they do get briefed on most of it, but the idea that eight people are going to oversee, again, All of these agencies with hundreds of thousands of personnel and huge numbers, you know, I was reading a book in which a very senior national security official told the interviewer, the only person that knows all of the special access programs, these are some of the most highly classified programs that the government engages in, the only person that knows all of them is God.
00:26:50.000And that's not even a feature of the height.
00:26:53.000It's not like they're hiding it from officials.
00:26:55.000It's just that by design, the oversight is so small and so weak and has the responsibility over so much in terms of all these agencies and the personnel that they represent that there's no realistic way that they're going to be able to keep up with everything that's going on.
00:27:08.000And that's a feature that I would really like to to draw people's attention to.
00:27:12.000I mean, the intentional secrecy is one thing, and just the design of this huge system and the very small number of people policing it is such that they're going to be doing all sorts of things that the oversight officials aren't going to see.
00:27:27.000To say nothing of all of the ethical compromises that exist as a consequence of these, it's called the gang of eight, the head of the Senate and the House, in the intelligence committees. They themselves are getting
00:27:41.000money from a lot of national security contractors and things like that, just completely setting
00:27:45.000that aside and assuming that there's no bias that exists there. It's still just, hey, guys, how
00:27:51.000much are they going to be able to go through? These are the only guys that have the clearances
00:27:55.000to see it. It's pretty almost marvelous what you describe, a kind of non-local, unaccountable
00:28:02.000consciousness that's almost a precursor of the algorithms that we commonly understand
00:28:09.000dictate online spaces, traffic and Trends, but in a, well, not a human form because it was just implied that it was almost in divine form.
00:28:20.000Ken, when you're encountering this amount of information and a sort of almost a corruption that transcends even the possibility of legitimate scrutiny given that it is so discursive and atomized and difficult to track, how do you maintain what I consider to be quite a cheery and calm disposition?
00:28:43.000I try not to take myself too seriously.
00:28:44.000Something I always cringe at is when I see the Washington Post.
00:28:48.000And it's like, guys, we're just regular people with a job that, you know, maybe puts us in touch with some horrible things, but it's like, we're just doing our best.
00:30:51.000Okay, well, having moved from one groundbreaking, earth-shattering, revelatory conversation with Ken there, it's now time for a presentation on a particular news story that we choose, and then we do a bit of research on it.
00:31:05.000Why are you looking at me like that, Paul?
00:31:27.000Not only do I investigate in journal, I know all about littlest tiniest things and bloody great big things and their biochemical compounds.
00:31:35.000Yeah, these microplastics, mate, it's a worrying tale, but all the more concerning given that it leads us to a kind of Willy Wonka chocolate factories where they're making babies in little pods.
00:32:26.000Researchers in Auckland have used advanced chemical analysis to calculate the amount of microplastic particles falling from the sky over the city equating it to 3 million plastic bottles each year.
00:32:36.000While plastic waste is generally understood to be widespread across the land and seas, scientists have recently started to drill into the ways it can get swept up into the air to travel far and wide.
00:32:45.000Stories just keep getting worse and worse, don't they?
00:32:47.000Well, at least it doesn't lower your testosterone and turn you into a eunuch.
00:32:51.000A 2021 study shows that chemicals known as phthalates, a chemical element of microplastics, have been linked to health problems that have been detected in food from popular chains McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Domino's, Taco Bell and Chipotle.
00:33:03.000I wonder if these plastics are in any way connected to this?
00:33:07.000Shanna Swan, Professor of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, documented how average sperm counts among Western men have more than halved in the past 40 years.
00:33:17.000Do you ever feel that there's a broad globalist project to neuter and neutralise people and their reproductivity?
00:33:22.000To make males into kind of eunuchs and create a world where people can't fight back and resist?
00:33:27.000Let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments.
00:33:29.000To turn everything into a commodity, to grow meat in laboratories, to get people to eat insects and surely they would never get people to buy babies from a factory.
00:33:37.000Her research reveals that phthalates lower testosterone and so have the strongest influences on the male side, for example diminishing sperm count.
00:33:44.000There's an onslaught on nature, almost our psychic nature and our biological nature, is being attacked by a system that sees us primarily as customers and doesn't want us to have any vitality, liberty, or ability to fight back.
00:33:56.000If you follow the curve from 2017's sperm decline meta-analysis, it predicts that by 2045 we will have a median sperm count of zero.
00:34:03.000That's the median, so some people might have one sperm.
00:34:05.000It's speculative to extrapolate, but there is also no evidence that it's tapering off.
00:34:09.000This means that most couples may have to use assisted reproduction.
00:34:12.000Of course it could be argued that assisted reproduction creates yet another industry and turns another natural resource and process into something that can be profitable.
00:34:21.000In 2017, scientists created a biobag that functioned as an artificial womb.
00:34:25.000Ah, way back in the biobag we knew that you'd become a footballer.
00:34:36.000Recent footage from Ectolife shows what childbirth might look like tomorrow.
00:34:40.000This is a startling glimpse into what is 100% feasible and already Elon Musk has affirmed that Ectolife is viable and likely needed.
00:34:48.000The best case scenario then is that the pollution they created and ultimately led to infertility will be utilized to create a new industry selling us babies instead of us having them at home.
00:34:59.000The worst case scenario of course is an army of sentient cyborgs that will imprison us all in our homes.
00:35:16.000Introducing Ectolife, the world's first artificial womb facility, powered entirely by renewable energy.
00:35:24.000If you want to know any further about your real life matrix baby factory, that energy better be renewable, because your fucking soul isn't.
00:35:31.000Ectolife allows infertile couple to conceive a baby and become the true biological parents of their own offspring.
00:35:38.000Perhaps it's why we live in times of delirium, where we're uncertain about how we're supposed to live and who we're supposed to be.
00:35:44.000And to clarify, I believe that people should be able to express themselves however they want to and identify however they want to.
00:35:49.000But the industrialization and technologization of the most natural processes that are afforded to us, I don't think is going to lead to a utopia.
00:35:58.000When you look at this, do you think utopia's on its way?
00:36:04.000I don't really feel that comfortable with a sushi bar where what's on the menu is little babies.
00:36:09.000I'll have one brown one and two white ones, please.
00:36:33.000You can't sort of digitally recreate the experience of someone else's beating heart and love.
00:36:38.000And I know that some people actually believe that you can.
00:36:41.000That this is all just a synthetic experience.
00:36:43.000Absolutely devoid of spirit and that everything can be mechanised, materialised, rationalised, recreated through technology.
00:36:50.000But what that will lead to, in my opinion, is the centralisation of more and more power and control and the loss of the most vital thing we have, our spirit.
00:36:57.000Our ability to be human in all our fallibility and all our flaws.
00:37:00.000We have lost our connection to nature and I feel that old ectolife there, perhaps with the best intentions in the world, might be doing the work of Satan.
00:37:08.000A single building can incubate up to 30,000 lab-grown babies per year.
00:37:13.000Listen, I love the concept, growing babies in a lab.
00:37:47.000Every growth pod features sensors that can monitor your baby's vital signs including heartbeat, temperature, blood pressure, breathing rate, and it's slow dawning realization that it's been entirely extracted from nature.
00:38:01.000The artificial intelligence based system also monitors the physical features of your baby and reports any potential genetic abnormalities.
00:38:22.000What, are they gonna be super babies coming out speaking ancient Greek and being able to do calculus?
00:38:27.000The bad news is you've all compromised your soul and allowed the world to become one kind of apple planet where everything's a commodity and we can have designer babies that we order.
00:38:36.000The good news is, though, that your baby... Well, give it the clarinet.
00:38:41.000Ectolife improves your bonding experience with your baby thanks to a 360 degrees camera that's fitted inside your baby's growth pod.
00:38:49.000The state offers you safety and the corporate world offers you convenience and there is no area into which they will not reach.
00:38:56.000Surely we couldn't say that it would be more convenient to grow a baby in a lab that uses fertilizer as a kind of fuel than just naturally having your own babies.
00:39:06.000Well I think we could say that because nobody's balls work anymore because of the raining down of microplastics.
00:41:02.000Which are supplied to your baby through an artificial umbilical cord.
00:41:05.000What we've done is we've wrung out a shrek and we feed it straight into your baby's belly.
00:41:10.000This bioreactor also contains a liquid solution that serves as the ambiotic fluid that surrounds babies in the mother's uterus.
00:41:18.000And that bioreactor's got some nutrients in it that can synthesize long traditional connections to the Earth and your ancestors and your family and evolution itself and God and the human spirit and the complexity and suffering and pain that human beings have to learn to accommodate.
00:42:10.000The artificial umbilical cord helps the babies to release their waste products into the second bioreactor.
00:42:15.000Hopefully, those two things will never get mixed up, and we'll create an army of shit-eating babies that poop vitamin C. With ectolife, miscarriage and low sperm count are a thing of the past.
00:42:28.000Well, they're a thing of the present because the same interests that will benefit from this created that problem.
00:42:33.000Also, now you're a sterile, docile little drone who's happy to buy a baby from a factory that you visit once in a while and sing at like an idiot in an iPod commercial.
00:42:46.000Prior to placing the fertilized embryo of your baby inside the growth pod, in vitro fertilization is used to create and select the most viable and genetically superior embryo.
00:44:24.000All of the stuff about social credit scores, the introductions of lockdown, making us all infertile, centrally controlling food, breaking down agriculture, the whole world over, creating bodies that are global and are not responsive to national democracies.
00:44:39.000They're creating a technological dystopia before our very eyes.
00:44:42.000And look how anodyne it looks, just an attractive couple standing there In inappropriate clothing, looking at a baby that they've selected from a menu.
00:44:53.000After discharging the amniotic fluid from the artificial womb, you will be able to easily remove your baby from the growth pod.
00:44:59.000Excuse me, it's stuck in the growth pod!
00:45:02.000Everything is perfectly designed so you and your partner can enjoy the delivery process.
00:45:07.000Now, I know people have very difficult births and, like, death in childbirth, blessedly, is not as common as it once was, but even though I know lots of people that have suffered as a result of their experience giving birth to children, it's very much part of your connection and bond to the child, whether it's a cesarean or what is called a natural childbirth process.
00:45:23.000The idea that you can replace that with, like, a little Kinder Egg being opened by a mouse fart is rather reductive of one of the most astonishing and strong experiences that a human will ever know.
00:46:04.000Grab a thing under your head, have a baby grown in a lab, and just wait for death, which will be a relief when it finally arrives.
00:46:10.000So, the bad news is you're being made infertile by a constant torrent of microplastics nullifying your masculinity, your femininity, all your innate and inherent powers are being reduced now so that you're an obedient little servant of the state, but the good news is you can go to this horrifying, dystopian, sanitized hell mouth and purchase yourself a lovely little kinder baby.
00:46:33.000I suppose ultimately what we have to do is cling to our humanity, cling to our nature, not be judgmental of people that necessarily require assistance or take unusual pathways to parenthood, but not to commodify and industrialize every aspect of our nature.
00:46:48.000Perhaps all this is no different from agriculture and the industrialization of food and treating nature just as a resource.
00:46:53.000Perhaps this is what inevitably happens when a species loses its way.
00:46:57.000But it seems to me that this could mark a turning point or mark a point of Who do we want to become as a species?
00:47:03.000Do you want your consciousness controlled by tech?
00:47:06.000Do you want your reproductive system annihilated then replaced by tech?
00:47:10.000Do you want everything in your life to be a product?
00:47:12.000Or do you think there's a way back for humankind?
00:47:15.000Let me know what you think in the comments and chat.
00:47:30.000Let us know what you thought in the chat and the comments.
00:47:32.000Hey, I wanted to update you before we move on to our fantastic, glorious guest, friend of the show, inaugural Under the Skin subject, Brad Evans.
00:47:41.000I want to talk to you about the Stay Free Foundation, which is a foundation we started here so that we weren't just all the time saying, oh, look, Isn't centralized power corrupt?
00:47:51.000Look at the alliances between big tech and the state.
00:47:54.000Look at emergent globalist forces and the new technological dictatorships that are being introduced over the world.
00:48:21.000Why are you talking about the foundation?
00:48:22.000I'm keeping the money because I've got myself addicted to kombucha.
00:48:25.000Now I'm going to be taken to a lovely little place in Peru, actually, where I'm going to be slowly weaned off kombucha with cuddles and ayahuasca, which I will then get addicted to.
00:49:05.000So the additional revenue we're giving to this little crowd, if you want to make a donation, go to RussellBrown.com and you can donate to it.
00:49:12.000Also, we do events like community live events.
00:49:14.000For example, we did an event in the town I'm from, Greys, where we campaigned or we supported an existing campaign, Save Your Thameside, where a library and theatre where I performed as a kid was being shut down by what looks like a bit of a corrupt or at best, inept council.
00:49:30.000Remember, you can support the Stay Free Foundation by acquiring merchandise or by attending our live events.
00:49:35.000For example, Community next year, a three-day festival.
00:49:38.000Brad will be there, Wim Hof will be there, Vandana Shiva will be there.
00:49:41.000And I think I want to get some sort of survival-type people there, someone to teach us sort of like, what I want this festival to be is a place where we could all come together and like learn to start communes, really, so that one day, if it comes to it, we can start communes and everyone will know what to do.
00:51:23.000Now, Brad, in some ways, Christmas Carol has reinvigorated, reinvented and determined the kind of pseudo-Victorian Christmas that has become iconic, hasn't it?
00:51:38.000I think, you know, people sometimes forget the importance a single literary text can have in terms of shaping a kind of cultural context.
00:51:46.000And, you know, if you think, you know, we know the idea of Christmas begins in the Middle Ages, around 25th of December, we start celebrating that date.
00:51:53.000But by the kind of Victorian period, life was so tough for people that they didn't really celebrate Christmas at all.
00:51:59.000It was almost like a two-day reprieve from the horrors of existence.
00:52:07.000But then we have almost like a ten-year period in the 1840s where Dickens publishes A Christmas Carol, which puts family and community and charity central to the narrative of Christmas.
00:52:19.000Then in the same period, Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, brings over the Christmas tree from Germany.
00:52:55.000I suppose the narrativization works because that messaging is congruent with the ideology of Christianity and the figure of Christ.
00:53:05.000In particular, although of course the way that Dickens tells that story is in a, through a kind of a very beautiful and, well frankly, blasphemous fable because it's like the undead, it's sort of mysterious and extraordinary.
00:53:23.000What do you think about that, the nature of his genius, it's connection to the messaging of original Christianity and also I'm still dazzled that a cultural artifact can be established so quickly and whether or not there was
00:53:34.000some sort of propagandist undertone to legitimize Victorian imperialism or whatever but I'll part
00:53:39.000that for a second because I do want to know what you think about like what exactly is he
00:53:44.000successfully constructed there? Well I think it plays into something which you know I'm trying to think
00:53:51.000about the earlier VTs you were playing today and this kind of now I kind of come on you're trying to
00:53:56.000raise a bit of Christmas joy and then you know you suddenly realize we're heading to this
00:54:00.000horrible dystopian future in which everything is knowable, everything is certain, everything
00:54:26.000That we all want to know that actually there is something, what we might call the ineffable.
00:54:30.000And the idea of ghosts, I think, is such a special idea.
00:54:33.000You know, the idea that, you know, we all know that we are forever haunted by ghosts, by, you know... I find the whole thing of, like, you know, when I even look back on some of the VTs, and I hate doing it, but the VTs of myself on this show... Don't do them, Brad.
00:54:46.000But you realise you yourself are a ghost in the past, right?
00:54:50.000And we're always projecting images of ourselves, and we're always... Particularly at Christmas, people are no longer with us.
00:54:56.000We're always having conversations with them.
00:54:58.000You know, this idea that everything can be technologically explained is utter nonsense.
00:55:02.000We like to believe in ghosts, because we like to believe that there is something greater to human existence, even in a very humanist way.
00:55:09.000You don't have to be religious to believe it.
00:55:12.000No, but in a sense we must become religious again, I feel in some way.
00:55:17.000Like these visitations that Dickens renders are, as all literature must be, a form of mythologisation.
00:55:27.000And I was thinking earlier today that as one learns to spot emblems and symbols in our own dreams, increasingly it appears that all of waking And waking life and a dream life is alive with a kind of symbolism that there are continually messages being offered that are particular to your narrative and therefore you could say just a solely subjective mythology and it's difficult to have a mythology without archetypes, without meaning, without purpose, without an essential set of values.
00:56:00.000I feel that in spite of it not being perhaps a Christian book, you know, officially of course, it's so sort of loaded with myth and mysticism that it's difficult to avoid that it is religious, particularly when the end point is to throw off, you know, the chains of the past and your attachments, you know, ultimately.
00:56:22.000And also, of course, it's a book about redemption.
00:56:25.000Well, I think there's three themes which kind of, at the time of its publication, made the book actually quite revolutionary.
00:56:30.000And I think the first thing is, if you look, you know, the ghosts actually convey messages, they communicate.
00:56:37.000Now, the first thing the first ghost does is actually, he renders the powerful completely powerless.
00:56:42.000They can no longer intervene in the world.
00:56:46.000And there's that scene at the end of the first stave, where, you know, he goes to the window and he sees all those people walking around, wanting to atone for their sins, but can no longer do that.
00:56:55.000And I think, so rendering the powerful powerless is a big move.
00:57:03.000I'm thinking of Stephen Knight's brilliant adaptation, actually, with Guy Pearce and Tom Hardy in that film.
00:57:08.000And what they show in that adaptation is Scrooge, through his life, Becomes wicked.
00:57:14.000You're not born evil, which was the old theological idea.
00:57:17.000You know, it's a life experience which can make anybody a Scrooge, right?
00:57:21.000If we suffer the loss of love, if we get abandoned as a child, and I think there's an intricate understanding why does a Scrooge become a Scrooge?
00:57:31.000Life circumstances could make anybody like that.
00:57:34.000But I think the third point, which I think is phenomenal in the book, What you might say is Christian, but I actually think is very humanistic, is a radical forgiveness.
00:57:43.000I think one of the most remarkable things I find constantly when I read this is the way in which, for instance, you know, Cratchit or the nephew don't give up on Scrooge.
00:57:52.000It's easy to shed a tear for, you know, a dead child like Tiny Tim, but to try to reach out constantly to somebody who's utterly disagreeable, I think that's a real radical move in the book.
00:58:04.000You know, it's to say, I'm going to invite this person over to Christmas.
00:58:37.000I suppose like all myths are about aspects of one potential whole individual.
00:58:42.000The idea of redemption, even beyond forgiveness, the thing that's embedded in redemption, which I would say is distinct from forgiveness, perhaps, is like, as you said earlier, mate, is the sense that the optimal and indigenous condition is benign rather than malign.
00:58:59.000And redemption has, like, even scripturally stitched into it the idea of belonging.
00:59:06.000So, sort of the aberration is the period of malevolence and selfishness and greed and miserliness before necessarily returning to God, returning to goodness, returning to I suppose that is a sort of a rather optimistic idea and one that we've somewhat extracted from our culture, the idea of redemption.
00:59:28.000The genius writer and songwriter Nick Cave said that he was speaking of wokeness, although he made clear that he regarded anti-wokeness in a comparable light.
00:59:39.000He said that wokeness has all of the elements of a religion without forgiveness and redemption.
00:59:45.000Well, I think there's two really interesting points.
00:59:48.000I think Nick Cave, first of all, is one of the most brilliant poets of our time because he deals with death and he deals head on with death.
00:59:55.000He's not afraid to walk away from that.
00:59:57.000Now, one of the things about our society is we don't like to talk about death.
01:00:00.000Now, the interesting thing you talk about with Scrooge, the redemptive moment, You know, and the more I've read this book, the more I've kind of come to realize that, you know, we kind of think, well, he has this profound shift because of seeing the crutch of Tiny Tim.
01:01:42.000This is the problem of lacking all doubt.
01:01:44.000This is the problem of polemicism and a polarized culture that for energy, for motion, you require two poles that somehow are repellent and charged and this ongoing sanitization denies us that.
01:02:00.000Marcus Aurelius said that, as well as obviously it's a sort of a strong theme within Buddhism and perhaps within all religions, the idea of dying unto ourself like it's a franciscan idea also huh that to like your life is over you are dead now what are you gonna do like because otherwise you're just a slave to some cultural or biochemical idea just that the either the appetites whether they are you know inhered or whether they are
01:02:34.000And so I suppose the story of redemption is always heartening because this is the... I suppose what Dickens has done and I suppose what all storytellers of genius are able to do is say, this is the worst case!
01:03:03.000What does Wilde say of Dickens' writing, in particular, I think the death of Little Nell in Curiosity Shop, whatever.
01:03:11.000He goes, you need a heart of stone not to laugh, I said for a while, because he's like, too much, like, oh Jesus Dickens, chill out mate!
01:03:20.000He hammers you with the emotion, doesn't he?
01:03:22.000He has such a gift for, I don't know, what do you want to call it, sort of characterising, I suppose, a particular emotion or state that it's almost, gag on it!
01:03:32.000But there's always a sense of the optimistic that runs through it, which I think is important.
01:03:36.000The nice thing I think he does with Scrooge as well towards the end, it's not somebody who suddenly says, I'm going to completely change my life, I now want to be immortal in a different way and I'm going to set up these amazing things and all this kind of stuff.
01:03:49.000The first thing he wants to do is simply be loved by the people who are around him, his family.