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Oct. 5, 2022 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:15:32
Stay Free with Russell Brand #006 - Is This The Age Of Fake Narratives And Bullsh*t Distractions?
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Time Text
You're not alone.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Here we are on Stay Free with me, Russell Brand.
Oh no, that's my remote control.
I need that.
You know, like, one of the reasons... It's okay.
Yeah, come get it, young Putin.
Thanks, man.
The reason we're here is because, um, on this platform, we can speak freely.
Now, we, of course, use that freedom of speech to spread love and truth and unity and...
In particular, to tell you stories that you won't get anywhere else.
The mainstream media, thanks Putin.
It's not actual Putin, he just looks a lot like Putin when he was young.
No thank you to Putin.
The last thing we want is Armageddon.
In fact, that's one of the things we're going to be talking about in the show today and in the coming shows as we enter into a phase of brinkmanship in this war.
In Europe, what games are they playing with our lives?
Thanks for watching us.
If you're in New York City, it's sort of noon.
In LA, it's 9am.
In the UK, it's 5pm.
Or you could be watching this on Rumble Catch-Up and you're completely free to watch it at any time.
No one can control that question, really.
...in the show today is, is this the age of fake narratives and BS distractions, yeah?
That's sort of what we're asking.
Like, I suppose the reason we're asking that is that if you glance at the news on any given day, you're forced to vacillate between stories that are kind of terrifying...
Like potentially sabotaged pipelines and threats of nuclear war and then people are playing football in space and there are Happy Meals available in McDonald's.
How are you meant to get a grip on reality?
How are you meant to find who you really are?
How are you meant to find your place in the world?
What principles and values and what meaning are you meant to pursue in this world?
So, today we're talking to a former MI5 agent, a real-life spy, Annie McMahon.
Yeah, that's how I see her, as a real-life spy.
That's the way I understand it.
Is that a guitar?
It's a brilliant piece.
In many ways, I see myself as the new Philip Glass.
I'm an experimental musician.
Very good.
That's my mouth.
Amazing.
It's a mouth sound that I'm using.
Gareth Roy is the producer of the show.
Hello.
It's weird that I sort of address that to you.
It's like I'm telling you who you are.
Yeah.
Some people believe that there is one consciousness and we are all expressions of it.
So when you're looking into someone's eyes, you're looking back into yourself.
What is this entity of consciousness that we participate in?
And surely, on some level as individuals and collectively, we have to connect with something essential if we are to overcome these Atrophying systems that seem to be bringing us towards destruction.
That's something you won't hear in the mainstream media, isn't it, Gareth?
There we are.
This is some news.
Real news.
Elon Musk, this is real news, Elon Musk, who's going to be coming on this show pretty soon, Elon Musk is reviving his deal to buy Twitter.
That's what he's doing, he's revived it.
He is also, amazingly, dominating the mainstream media narrative with every single tweet he makes.
Every single tweet he makes is magic, isn't it?
Every single tweet leads to news.
It certainly does.
And the press is saying this is Elon Musk caving to Twitter's legal demands.
But the thing is, was it always part of his plan?
That's what we'll never know.
That's what you can't know.
Let us know in the comments, let us know in the chat.
Is this part of Musk's master plan?
Or do you think that Musk is being sort of contained?
And do you think that there's something in the fact that his name is Musk?
That that's a powerful pheromonal entity that's difficult to understand?
If you get a whiff of someone's Musk, like, by God, will you know it?
Yeah.
Because Musk is, you know when you smell something and you're Simultaneously, like, oh!
Right, but you like it a bit.
Like, oh no!
Oh no, Rex, no!
Give us some examples, come on.
Alright, I will.
Like, sometimes I smell... I know you mean your own farts.
I would go a little further than that.
Like, for me, sometimes I'll say something like, no, no, that's not right!
Oh, you bloody, what, oh, what, no, don't you dare, get out!
Oh, like that.
You know, maybe you go and dribble a bit.
Oh, that's disgusting!
Oh, that's disgusting!
What the bloody hell's going on?
Yeah.
Are you also proud of the thing that you've just done?
I stand bolt upright!
What's that?
That's disgusting!
When I spoke to Elon Musk on the phone, yeah.
About that?
First thing he said, he went, Russell Branding.
And I went, Elon Musking.
And I knew then we would be firm friends and that's why he would come on the show.
You don't want to bother someone if you've got a powerful friend.
No.
You don't want to bug them, like remember when you for example... Not the Eckhart Tolle thing again.
Yep, I ruined my friendship with Eckhart Tolle.
Eckhart Tolle is also coming to the show, I managed to win him back because he's very forgiving.
If you're in touch with the limitless love of which the universe is founded, you can forgive someone if they ring you up the whole time, innit?
You can forgive them.
Yeah.
He's gotta forgive people, hasn't he?
I forgive you.
That's right, eventually.
Yeah, if you like Elon Musk or... No, not Elon Musk.
If I can't tell, it's like, fuck off!
Like, you think, oh, this meditation ain't working.
Isn't it?
Yeah.
He's got to just go, ah, don't worry about it, mate.
Yeah.
There's got to be some version of that.
So Elon Musk, he is coming on the show.
I mean...
This is the thing, you know, like, we're streaming every single day, from five in my country, don't know what it is in your country, but for one hour, but also on Stay Free AF, that's our members area, we do longer interviews, we've got my stand-up special, we've got loads of stuff on there, and, like, that's where there'll be the longer-form interviews of, like, all of this kind of stuff, so consider joining that if you wanna, if you've got time.
Listen, let me do the main mainstream news.
In a minute in the show, we're gonna be talking to you about some brilliant stuff about how Political players from like yesteryear, like Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, who were sort of powerful statespeople in their time, are now sort of openly admitting, in the sort of forum, admittedly, of masterclass,
But the whole thing is a construct.
Like, we're being invited to believe that Madeleine Albright, God rest her soul, you know, she's no longer with us, and Condoleezza Rice are, like, examples of how women can make it in politics and therefore progress is working, things are going in the right direction.
That is one narrative that you could look to.
But another narrative is, both of these figures presided and governed over a time where, like Iraqi people, were needlessly killed Based on stuff out of people's imagination, wasn't it?
They imagined, oh, let's pretend Saddam Hussein's involved in 9-11.
Right, bomb them!
Starve them!
And like, it was all actually made up.
So if we know that that stuff's made up now, what kind of questions does that lead us to ask?
With current conflicts, for example.
I'm not into conspiracy theories.
Where's my bloody tinfoil hat?
We should never have it more than a yard away.
Should we?
Paris Hilton says... Yeah, I'll take that, young Putin.
Thanks, mate.
Paris Hilton says that seven pet psychics say her missing dog is still alive.
Now, you might think that's stupid.
Mightn't you?
Like, oh, seven pet psychics say her missing dog's still alive.
That's actually as many mice as were tested upon for the latest booster shot of the COVID-19.
Actually, no, they tested that on eight mice.
Oh, no!
Misinformation!
That's why we're kicked off of YouTube!
It's because of the misinformation.
If I wear the tinfoil hat, that is sort of an acknowledgement that, you know, I only half mean it.
So, uh, yeah, like, so Paris Hilton's dog, uh, hopefully it will get found.
It says there she's talked to seven pet mediums, but I like to think of that as medium pets, and that's what she's talked to.
What do you mean?
Like, she's talked to seven medium-sized pets about it.
Like, that's a too little pet.
Yeah.
That's too big a pet.
A gorilla.
Bloody hell.
Chaos.
Don't talk to them about it.
No point having a tick as a pet.
Medium-sized pet.
Maybe, what, hamster?
Guinea pig?
Maybe.
What just fell down there?
Does that affecting our ability to broadcast?
It don't matter much.
I just heard something sort of tumble over there and it went like that.
You can still see us.
Let me know in the chat.
Let me know in the comments if the stream's still working.
Let me know about those audio levels as well.
Kendall Jenner subtly supports Jaden Smith walking out of Kanye West's Yeezy show.
That's a potentially complex race discussion to be had there because both Kanye and Candice Owens wore White Lives Matter shirts.
So I reckon what we'll do is we'll talk to Kehinde Andrews, who's a professor of Black Studies.
We'll talk to him tomorrow and talk about these aspects of that.
What if Kanye West and Candice Owens, as African-American people, want to have that protest?
Who should say no?
What about the complexities of racial relationships in America?
What other things will I want to know?
Are people will use that to bolster racist arguments?
And what about the phatic component within movements that get corporatized?
We'll ask him all those questions because I don't get dragged into that.
He's an expert in Paris Fashion Week as well, isn't he?
King Andrews is an expert in two things.
Black Studies and Fashion Week.
But the whole thing about fashion is it's just made up and it's silly.
I mean, I like fashion and I'm not being disparaging.
We can tell.
Look at my outfit.
I've won awards for fashion.
Absolutely.
And also I've been derided as a fool in the world of fashion as well.
But fashion is all part of the spectacle, isn't it, ultimately?
John Galliano, probably a genius, though he said some crazy stuff.
Alexander McQueen, probably a genius, though I think he said some crazy stuff.
Did he end his life, dear Alexander McQueen, in the end?
I think he did, didn't he?
Yes, he did.
Sad news.
...of yesteryear.
Senior MPs urged Tories, that's our British government, not to quit and give Liz Truss till Christmas.
Liz Truss is the Prime Minister of this country at the moment.
Not that you'd know it.
Hold on, let's see what the pounds have been.
Oh no!
No pounds!
Are you proud of your currency?
Do you care?
Let's get it nice and high.
There you go.
It's nice to have the pound that I love.
Look at that.
I'm proud of that guy up there.
Like that.
Leave him.
There you go, mate.
Well done.
Lovely little drawing by our mate, Jade.
Liz Truss is doing their conference, the Tory party conference.
Every year, the political party does a conference where it really galvanises the memberships so they can get pumped.
Oh, yeah.
believe in themselves and believe in one another. I don't know if you do that in American politics.
You have rallies and primaries and stuff like that, don't you? Well, check out ours. Our
one's getting pumped. Let's have a look at Liz Truss, new Prime Minister, emerging onto
the stage at the Tory party conference. You think that we in Britain can't do glamorous
politics? You think we can't match you over there in the United States of America? Well,
get ready, because we're moving on up. Here's Liz Truss, Prime Minister of our country.
Get it, Liz!
The Prime Minister.
We're moving on up. We're moving on up.
Yeah!
We're moving on up.
Yeah!
Yeah, that's right!
Oh dear.
In this time of fuel crisis where a lot of people can't afford to heat their homes, what you can do is simply watch that video and allow the embarrassment to rush through your body and warm you up.
Oh God, I can't afford to pay for actual fuel, but watching Liz Truss sort of jitter out like Elon Musk's AI robot.
I'm moving on now, I'm moving on now.
Give you a nice little generation of heat.
Do you want to know what the lyrics to that song are?
I'd like to know exactly what they are, yeah.
Obviously it's by M People, we all know that.
Of course, we all know about M People.
The lyrics are, you've done me wrong, your time is up, you took a sip from the devil's cup.
There's strange lyrics to choose for Liz Truss.
They've not analysed that correctly.
They haven't.
Because took a sip from the devil's cup, that's a bit like that musk smell territory, isn't it?
It is, indeed.
If you took a sip from the devil's cup, what's that?
Where have you put those fingers?
I took a sip from the Devil's Cup.
I'm moving on!
What did you eat last night?
You can't run a country on sips of the Devil's Cup.
That's no way to run a nation.
Okay, more news though.
Should we have a look at... I wouldn't mind seeing the bit where there's some other crazy stuff she does, Liz Truss.
Oh yeah, look at... Even though that's a... I would call that a rousing speech.
Brilliant.
Like, worthy of Kennedy or the other great orators of the 60s.
Look at some of the people that are watching that stuff.
Check it.
Look at how many are asleep.
That one's asleep.
He's going.
Like, that's too many people asleep.
Like, that guy's biting his own thumb to sort of stay awake.
One of them's covering his face, pretending not to be asleep.
Him there.
And a few of them said, yeah, just blatantly asleep.
That is not going well, is it?
As a conference, you'd have to say.
And here's Liz Truss confronted on the subject of mortgages.
Because at the moment in our country, I don't know if you know this, we've got this massive economic crisis.
Interest rates are increasing.
There's no way to prevent hyperinflation because of a balled up budget.
Liz Truss here is being sort of confronted in an interview and asked if she's got a mortgage herself.
What I find interesting about this is she's being asked to straddle the evident divide between ordinary people and politicians.
She's unable to do it.
In this situation Liz Truss would either require charisma Like a demagogic figure, the ability charisma is, Quentin Crisp said, the ability to influence without logic.
Some politicians have charisma.
If you don't have charisma, what you have to have is authenticity.
You have to believe in your policies.
You have to believe in your ideas.
We contest on our channel, on Stay Free with Russell Brand, that we have an age where people don't believe in what they're saying.
It's performative.
Liz Truss is just sort of saying stuff.
So when she's asked a very simple question, Is this going to affect you?
You've got a mortgage, what are you going to do?
It's kind of just baffling and bewildering for her to have to deal with that question.
Watch the sort of emotion she goes through.
And there's a moment where she sort of almost thinks she'll be able to nullify the inquiry simply by wearing training shoes.
Final question, I've run out of time.
Do you have a mortgage?
I do.
And do you have an issue about remortgaging?
Well, I... That's sort of it's beginning to break down.
Oh, no.
God, what am I supposed to say here?
I can't be authentic.
I can't be charismatic.
Maybe if I just pull the sides of my head together.
Could someone put moving on up on?
If only I could take a sip from the devil's cup.
The trainers haven't worked.
Come on, I've got a kicky boot on.
Why won't you love me?
I mean, I do have a mortgage, yes, I do.
The reason I'm asking you is that a lot of people are now facing a spike in interest rates
and if you have to remortgage on a variable rate, you could be facing hundreds of pounds
in additional costs.
So I'm just asking you, is this...
So really what I suppose this shows us is that figures in...
We have to come to terms with the idea that our leaders are disconnected from the reality that most people live in.
I don't just mean economically, in that Liz Trust probably earns relatively good money.
It's pretty easy to check out.
Nothing like as good as it's going to be when she leaves that job and takes up a role in a corporation, which is, you know, inevitably what will happen.
That's what always happens.
Just look at the people who have been in a job in the past.
Look at what they do now.
Oh, I've got this foundation where I help people.
How do you help people?
Having all this money, mostly.
That's how I help them.
You know, so like, and it's just even rhetorically, there's a disconnect.
She's unable to have a conversation.
So when you have people on here like, we had Mick Lynch on here the other day.
Now you lot might be not be into trade unionism, but I would...
I ask you to open your minds and open your hearts to the possibility of having people in positions of authority and power that are drawn from the communities that they govern.
And also, even govern's not the right word.
Neither is lead.
We have to have a more consensual form of leadership.
You know that there were models of leadership in a bygone age where people in positions of authority had less.
That leadership was understood to be about sacrifice, about giving and yielding.
Our entire modality and mentality has to alter.
Sometimes I don't think people understand how serious and radical the change that's required actually is.
But if you take a moment to look at something like...
Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright's masterclass where we're invited to look at them as two successful politicians, as states people that have overcome the odds to rise to position of power.
It sort of fetishizes the fact that Madeleine Albright's father mentored Condoleezza Rice.
I'd say what it really tells us is the differences between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are pretty insignificant.
Millions of people died as a result of policies that they implemented and were behind, and isn't that the real story?
How can you pretend for a minute that this is a masterclass to, you know, that's literally the product that this is drawn from, in how to be a good diplomat?
When, in reality, there's a very different story just a moment away.
That's why the question of the show today is, is this the age of fake narratives and bullshit distractions?
Let's have a look at this.
Pay attention, because it just casually talks about things like there being an imaginary scenario where Saddam Hussein and Iraq are responsible for the 9-11 attacks.
It's just that such a short period of time ago for us to already just think, oh, OK, we'll just accept the narratives now, shall we, in the current conflict.
Every time we even mention that, you have to say, of course, our sympathies lie with the people in Ukraine that are suffering.
But what happens is, as happened around 9-11, The understandable, necessary sympathy for the victims of that tragedy and that terrorism were pushed to the forefront to stop you thinking about what was going on in the Middle East.
There never were weapons of mass destruction.
They knew there were no weapons of mass destruction.
A war was implemented on the basis of weapons of mass destruction.
This is primarily what this channel is about.
Us having the ability to communicate openly with one another, to recognise that we're flawed and that we make mistakes, but at least we're not overtly and deliberately lying in order to implement hegemony, even if it requires genocide.
I think that's what we're trying to do, isn't it?
That's exactly what we're trying to do.
And also have a bit of a laugh.
So it's time now for... Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
Thank you for choosing Fox News.
Here's the news.
No, here's the fucking news.
In a world beset with wars founded on dubious motives, why not consult the opinions of proven war criminals on
diplomacy?
BLEH!
So, you remember that masterclass that George W. Bush did where he repositioned himself as some old lovely old watercolourist grandfather cuddle duck?
Alright, I'm gonna do another flower.
Well, now, Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright are similarly being repositioned as diplomats and statespeople.
And at a time where there is a war between Russia and Ukraine, Where that pipeline's getting blown up, where we query the motive behind the war, where of course we accept that Putin seems like a crazy, despotic individual but still have questions about the motives of our own nations.
Broadly, people that were prominent and culpable during a period of American foreign policy that was really dubious and brings up a lot of questions about the nature of war, the nature of government, and what these figures really represent.
Particularly as on this channel we continually discuss with you how trustworthy politicians are.
And the idea that there's this cycle where one minute they're in a position where they're killing children, or at least making decisions that lead to the death of children, and then the next they're just sort of smiling and throwing their heads back.
Laughing about how they can be good role models and making it all about like, you know, women getting to the top like it's 9 to 5 with Dolly Parton.
It's not 9 to 5, is it?
It's not women in the workplace.
It's women killing Iraqi children.
It just seems to me that we're framing our reality Incorrectly.
Just to let you know, I'm a father of daughters.
I want women to have good pathways to power, self-fulfillment, self-realization in every way imaginable.
But I feel it's more of a priority to have a culture and sets of systems that are representative of our highest set of values and principles.
Rather than I'll just chuck a few women into this warmongering.
Before we get into this masterclass video with Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright, both prominent states people during their Clinton and Bush era respectively, let me give you a little more detail about what they achieved in office.
Firstly, Condoleezza Rice.
In her roles as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, along with the rest of the Bush administration, created an imaginary scenario that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York City on 9-11.
Imagine if it was like...
Saddam Hussein's fault that that happened.
Yeah, we'd have to go over there and kill him.
Well, shall we say he did?
Yeah, yeah!
There's nothing to do with it.
There's no connection.
We might as well have invaded Iceland, or like wherever it is that Moana lived.
This led the US into the illegal invasion of Iraq, killed millions of innocent Iraqis, along with over 4,000 US soldiers.
Condi approved numerous war crimes on behalf of the Bush administration using visions of mushroom clouds and other scare tactics.
She also allowed torture to displace diplomacy as the hallmark of US foreign policy.
Employing circuitous logic and Nixonian explanations, Rice recently explained away our misunderstandings about torture and international obligations by saying, by definition, if it was authorised by the President, it did not violate our obligations in the Convention Against Torture.
That's the distillation of the idea that if the American government does it, then it's okay that they did it.
And I suppose that that's a violation of any kind of principle because it means that The principles themselves are irrelevant, it's just whatever you need to do in order to achieve your objective becomes the dominating idea.
And if that was the dominant idea then, who's to say it's not the dominant idea now?
How are we supposed to say, oh there's no way they would destroy that pipeline, that would just be wrong?
But they did do that whole war based on a lie.
Right, so that's Condoleezza Rice.
Albright played a central role in America's foreign policy in the 90s, first as United Nations ambassador, then as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton.
That period of history and its consequences for the war on terror can't be understood without understanding her actions.
In particular, Albright spearheaded Clinton's disastrous stance towards Iraq.
Albright's approach was both vicious in its own right and helped lay the foundation for the 2003 Iraq war.
It was already vicious!
And then, let's push it a notch further with war!
In the context of the ongoing claims that the US and NATO are leading a worldwide campaign against Russian war crimes in Ukraine, the celebration of Albright's bloody record is a demonstration of grotesque hypocrisy.
Albright was an advocate and apologist for Much more brutal actions than any taken so far by Vladimir Putin in Ukraine.
We've got very short term memory in some sense.
In some areas of culture, revisiting the past to analyse the attitudes that were at play then is considered necessary.
But in a military and geopolitical context, It's only 20 years ago that ideas and beliefs were being used to underwrite military action that were proven to be false and we're pretending that that sort of didn't happen.
Don't you feel like you're in some giddying kind of illusion that doesn't make sense?
That history is all speeding up and you can't situate yourself in it anymore.
You're being told that things that happened only 20 or 30 years ago are irrelevant now.
Sometimes diplomacy is downright hard.
You're dealing with people that you'd really rather not be dealing with.
I haven't seen you lose it ever.
Diplomacy.
That's where we make it look good that we killed those children.
Look at the presentation of it.
You know what this will be about?
It'll be framed as these two women achieve success in a male-dominated environment.
And if you take that in isolation, that is a sort of good thing, I suppose.
But when it's stacked up against illegal wars and torture and That's good.
That's really good.
and the suffering of the American population and the service people that
gave their lives. The idea that these people, guess what, they've both got boobs.
That doesn't seem like enough of a good... that's good, that's really good.
Here's some dead children. I'm not as interested now in the boobs.
And here's some people that were tortured in Grand Thenimo.
Bye!
Yeah, the boobs are almost, at this point, irrelevant.
You can't be distracted by highly contextual successes like improvements in gender relations, even though those things are important when they are contrasted with genocide, for example.
My relationship with Madeleine Albright goes well back before either of us was Secretary of State.
I was a failed piano major at the University of Denver.
I was about to end up teaching 13-year-olds to murder Beethoven.
But then I decided to murder 13-year-olds for a living.
We took Beethoven out of the picture altogether, and the pianos.
We could have dropped pianos on Baghdad and killed 13-year-olds, but in the end we went with bombs just because Raytheon don't make pianos.
And I wandered into a course in international politics taught by a man named Joseph Korbel.
He was Madeleine's father.
He opened up the world to me of things diplomatic.
It's a pretty amazing story that this refugee diplomat basically trained two women secretaries of state.
Believe me, I'm fully behind the empowerment of individuals from all backgrounds and of all identities and genders.
I think that is a good thing.
I think an inclusive, loving society is great.
But I don't think using those ideas to mask Unnecessary wars, resource wars, the death of American service personnel, lying.
Don't just march that to the front.
Look at this.
This is a story against two women who, against the odds, killed some Iraqi children.
It's not Thelma and Louise, is it?
Way to go, Thelma!
They didn't, at the end of that film, drive that car into a school playground and run over a lot of innocent children, did they?
They killed themselves.
It was a self-sacrifice.
Thelma and Louise isn't the issue here.
What I'm saying is, look at how we're being invited to view this as a success.
One Republican, one Democrat.
Two women, sisters, coming together, showing the establishment what's what.
Don't matter.
We may be women, but we can torture people in Guantanamo Bay if we want.
If we want to bomb innocent children, or if we want policies that will lead to the starvation of half a million Iraqi people, you go, girl!
It's not Lizzo twerking with a flute.
It's children starving to death.
When I found out she was a Republican, I said, Condi, how could you be?
We have the same father.
And then we decided it doesn't ultimately matter because the same policies will be pursued regardless of which administration is in power and we're all funded by the same people.
So we overcame differences and we did this video.
All bomb kids together at the end of the day.
You can wear a blue shirt, red shirt.
If you're an Iraqi kid, your shirt's gonna end up red.
This is an amazing handful of advice that can be used in everyday life.
Say, for example, you need to get some energy resources from your next-door neighbor.
Be willing to starve those to death and then just say it's necessary and it don't matter because they're from a foreign place.
Finding common ground, working with people who are different, those are skills that you can use in everyday life in whatever you do.
It ain't relevant also.
The skills required to be a person operating at that level of government ain't going to apply if you're running like a bicycle shop or a CAF somewhere.
Because those are skills that are backed by state power and the potential for monumental and monstrous violence.
That's the nature of that power.
That's the point of that power.
I should mention actually that Madeleine Albright did die last year, so God rest her eternal soul.
It's not a criticism of her as an individual, it's more a critique on the vacuous, vapid, artificial, superficial, manipulative, propagandist nature of contemporary politics, where figures that participated in the large-scale annihilation and murder of innocent people can be trotted out as diplomats.
Also note that it doesn't matter which team they're on, the whole thing's just a ludicrous spectacle.
So the video's about that and with all due respect to Madame Norbright and people that are grieving her death.
Perhaps the most notorious episode in Albright's career came in 1996 when she was asked on the CBS program 60 Minutes
about the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children because of severe economic sanctions imposed on that country as part
of an effort to undermine the regime of Saddam Hussein.
More children have died in Iraq than Hiroshima, interviewer Leslie Stahl said.
The price was worth it, Albright responded.
I suppose that's the nature of international diplomacy is you have to be willing to sanction the death of half a
million children and then say it was worth it.
We think the price is worth it.
The colossal death toll among Iraqi children will be repeatedly cited by Islamic fundamentalists like Osama Bin Laden as a reason for their shift from alliance with the United States during the U.S.-backed guerrilla war against Soviet military forces in Afghanistan to targeting the U.S.
for terrorist attacks on 9-11.
The U.S.
massacre of innocents became the pretext for al-Qaeda's Some people would say there is no objective reality, there are merely narratives that we're invited to participate in.
And the narrative we're being given here is one where one patriarchal figure stewards two daughters of different hues.
Interpositions of political power.
A triumph of feminism against male power.
A more chronologically accurate narrative is that sanctions imposed under Clinton and Albright led to deaths in Iraq and the cold response of Albright, it was a price worth paying, leads to Al Qaeda mobilizing against the United States and the 9-11 attacks, which are then in turn used to attack Saddam Hussein again for something he was nothing to do with.
So in the end, what you're left with is a circle jerk of bogus diplomacy, senseless, needless attacks, resource-led attacks, many people would say, on Iraq.
And at the end of it, you're asked to believe, oh, look, sisters are doing it for themselves.
Albright's vociferous support of violence and regime change as US policy helped set the stage for the war that took place a few years later after she departed the government.
In 1998, she expounded on America's right to bomb Iraq, proclaiming, if we have to use force, it's because we're America.
We are the indispensable nation.
We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.
But remember, if you're an ordinary American person, you may not be benefiting from that hubris, because you know that America is now a country in decline, and ordinary people are neglected and maligned.
In a sense, when they say America, they mean American elites.
And those, if you ask me, are globalist elites.
So there you have it.
We're invited to look at the contributions of these two women as a great achievement for their gender, a great achievement for their sex, but actually, politically, their actions led to a series of violent exchanges between America and the Middle East, millions of people dying in Iraq unnecessarily, attacks on America provoked By that action, ordinary American service people losing their lives.
And then a few years later, they're trotted out to talk about it as if there's a real victory for women in the workplace.
I don't think this can be seen as a victory for women in the workplace unless the workplace is Guantanamo Bay or the rubble of Baghdad and the victory includes dead children.
But that's just what I think.
Tell me what you think right now in the comments.
Let me know what you think in the chat.
I'll be responding to you in just a second.
Thanks for watching Fox Farmers.
Good day.
No, he's the fucking loser!
Get that pound down a bit.
Down there, that's where you want the old pound.
Dene Krar.
The Bush family, Obama's Clintons, are all in this together.
They've been working together from the beginning.
I guess that's one of our sort of central ideas, that democracy is a kind of charade.
Ultimately, power doesn't meaningfully get impacted by a democratic process.
Japan, Seattle.
I started to pay attention to politics because of Bush.
It led me to vote for Obama.
I've since come to adulthood and reason.
GinPhoenix22.
Who's taking these masterclasses?
It's like they're making them up as a laugh.
Is anyone like, yeah, I'd love to learn from these people pretending to be normal.
Yeah, they're taking these masterclasses.
Have you taken a masterclass?
No, not one of those.
I have.
I took the Aaron Sorkin one on writing.
Pretty good actually.
I'm glad it was on writing and not foreign policy or something.
Aaron Sorkin on dossier diplomacy, how to win resource wars, being willing to do the undoable.
What other comments have there been?
Sue B over there.
We've had a Rumble rant, $5 from Salty Snipe.
Oh yeah.
They say Elon Musk will merge Truth Social, Rumble and Twitter together to make one super.
Elon Musk would be able to do that because, in a sense, he's like part Willy Wonka, part Steve Jobs, part Donald Trump, I mean, part Richard Branson.
He's sort of an incredible figure, so yeah, if anyone can do it, he can.
So, Gareth, this story, the masterclass Madeleine Albright Condoleezza Rice story that's sort of presented in a very particular way using, I would say, cultural ephemera to underwrite the Well, deny and distract from underlying power and, you know, massacre.
Tell us a bit more about it, like, doesn't Bill Clinton enter into this tale at some point?
Yeah, I mean, I guess we're talking about Madeleine Albright serving under Bill Clinton and we've talked about, you know, post 9-11 and the kind of effects of Of this, um, foreign policy with Iraq, but I just thought it'd be interesting to look a bit of context as how some of these airstrikes happened in the first place and the kind of justification for them.
Must be a good reason.
Don't start striking someone from the air for that jolly good reason.
No, absolutely not.
Well, this is from history.com.
On December 16, 1998, President Bill Clinton announces he has ordered airstrikes against Iraq because it refused to cooperate with the United Nations weapons inspectors.
Clinton's decision did not have the support of key members of Congress, who accused Clinton of using the airstrikes to direct attention away from ongoing impeachment proceedings against him.
Just the day before, the House of Representatives had issued a report accusing Clinton of committing high crimes and misdemeanors relating to the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
At the time of the airstrikes, Iraq was resisting unfettered access by UN inspectors to its alleged operations to build weapons of mass destruction.
After repeatedly refusing the inspectors access to certain sites, Clinton resorted to airstrikes to compel Hussein to cooperate, apparently.
In a minute we're going to be talking to Annie Mashon, former MI5 spy, whose name I've been saying incorrectly.
I've been saying Macon.
It's Mashon.
She actually went on the run when she became a whistleblower against illegal activity that she'd observed within MI5.
Illegal phone tapping, files being kept on journalists.
She now celebrates other whistleblowers and supports them.
Celebrates them.
Praise you like I should!
Like Daniel Hale, for example, whose one of his revelations was 90% of airstrikes, drone strikes specifically, in Afghanistan did not kill their intended target.
They killed someone else, 90%.
And all the time we were sold the idea that these drone strikes are super efficient.
And I suppose what this leads me to query is the legitimacy of...
At least the accepted US-Western position on current conflicts.
They're not inquiring about it.
I don't think it's responsible.
I'm not saying that I have a definitive opinion, of course I don't, nor do I have insights that other people don't have access to.
I just thought as a general stance, discernment would have to be your position.
Now Madeleine Albright, she Sadly, I guess I'm going to say, he's no longer with us.
You know, all of us expire.
That is the nature of our kind.
What kind of business interest did Madeleine Albright have?
As well as being, of course, a glass ceiling, smashing femme fatale, girl boss, what other business interest did she have?
Right, well this is from The Intercept.
After leaving office, Albright followed the standard path of self-enrichment for figures with her pedigree.
She founded the Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategic advisory and commercial diplomacy firm, and its partner firm, Albright Capital.
Washington is full of such enterprises which allow former public officials to leverage their connections they made while espousing democracy and human rights for less rosy business ends.
Among Albright Stonebridge's many clients is Pfizer, During the last years of her life, Albright was doggedly urging the Biden administration during the midst of the coronavirus pandemic to protect American intellectual property.
So it's very much she did, you know, profited and did well out of that.
Another one, Albright was a longtime brand ambassador for Herbal Life Nutrition, a dietary supplement company.
According to the New York Post, she was paid $10 million for these efforts over six years.
In a 2016 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, Herb Life agreed to pay $200 million in response to charges that it deceived customers into participating as the dupes into a pyramid scheme.
Ah.
There you go.
There you go.
That's the true nature of that power.
Yeah, I suppose that's why it's interesting for us to be able to talk to someone like Annie Mashon, who's been on the inside of a deep state organisation, if indeed you like that term.
Someone who's worked for the MI5, Real Life Spice.
Dingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingalingaling Who's able to give us insight into the reality of those organizations because at the moment Julian Assange is still in prison, Edward Snowden is exiled in Russia, not the first place that he sought refuge obviously, and these stories are ongoing because we live in a time of continual conflict where there's seeming espionage and sabotage all around us.
Hey, we're going to talk to Annie in a minute.
Before that, I want to let you know that we do podcasts every week.
I do a meditation one, Stay Awake, and it's called that, even when I'm trying to get you to fall asleep.
And as well as this show is available as a podcast, you can listen to it anywhere.
And I do Subcutaneous, which is a replacement for Under the Skin, where we have a deep Interview.
So some of the stuff we stream on here, like conversations with Eckhart Tolle coming up and Elon Musk coming up, we stream about like 40 minutes of it.
And then we do additional content with the guest in Stay Free AF, which is our members area.
Have a look at this conversation that we had with Wim Hof on Subcutaneous.
And in particular, Wim's camera technique.
Have a look.
Oh yeah, yeah.
We had such fun.
But he saw and he went to do the Ant-Man's Tale in Canada and all.
He was there in Vancouver and all America.
It's a western country!
It's a western country and when you go walk in Vancouver, beautiful!
And then you walk into that avenue There you see all these people, homeless, in some tents and they're victims of the pharmaceutical painkiller industry.
Yeah, modern-day shaman, but his relationship with the camera is, I would say, erratic.
It looms right in there, doesn't it?
It's like no one's told him he is on camera.
That's right.
That's how he carries on.
He's pure id, pure essence.
Either that or he just really wants people to see his nose.
Proud of it.
That's an integral part of Wim's beautiful visage.
We've got Annie Mashon joining us now.
Annie, thanks for coming onto our show.
It's so lovely to have you here.
My pleasure.
Thank you for inviting me.
One of the things I think people don't understand, or certainly I hadn't formally understood, was that actually, as a whistleblower, you place yourself in incredible danger.
When you first revealed that there'd been illegal activity within MI5, including files being kept on journalists and illegal phone tapping, didn't you have to literally go on the run and fear for your life and think that you were going to get assassinated, like in a film?
Pretty much, yes.
This was with my former partner and colleague, David Shaler, who was the primary whistleblower.
Oh yeah, I remember that!
Yeah, yeah.
We literally went on the run around Europe for a month and we had to live in hiding in a remote French farmhouse.
What was it like?
It was terrifying.
I mean, there's nothing like being hunted by, you know, the secret police and MI5 across Europe.
No, I suppose not.
Was the atmosphere quite charged if you're in a farmhouse with David Shailer and you feel like you're being hunted?
I don't mean to be rude, but didn't it feel like, God, my life's fantastic!
Or did it feel like, oh no, I'm going to die?
A little bit of both.
It was a very primitive French farmhouse as well.
No heating, no TV, no car, no nothing.
So we were pretty much stuck there.
A bit like Withnow and I. Yeah.
Very good film, that.
Yeah, yeah, I love that.
Hey, listen though, I don't want to get pulled into that area because wasn't there a plan to assassinate Gaddafi and wasn't that one of the things that you revealed?
And I'd like to understand a little bit, if I may, what the process is like of recognising that you have powerful information and what the cost will be of revealing that information and how you undertook that decision and what kind of conversations presumably you and David had before deciding to go public with it.
It was a very long and difficult process.
It's a bit like boiling a frog.
We saw things going wrong in three different sections, and they got significantly worse, culminating in the Gaddafi plot, where MI6 funded, illegally, a branch of al-Qaeda in Libya to try and assassinate Gaddafi.
And it went wrong and killed innocent people.
Now, you can't think of anything much more heinous than that.
So we tried to raise our concerns on the inside.
And we were just told to shut up and just follow orders.
So at that point, we thought we've got to do something about this and try and create a little bit of a scandal, get people saying there must be a proper inquiry, tightening up the oversight of the spies, that sort of thing.
But we also knew that the price we pay would be very, very high.
So most whistleblowers from other sectors will lose their jobs, their professional reputations.
That's bad enough.
But if you blow the whistle on the intelligence agencies, you automatically face prison too.
So it was a very difficult decision to take, but we felt we had no option but to act.
Is it?
No.
Wow.
What's extraordinary about that is that it feels like it belongs in the realm of fiction and fantasy, and indeed in the current discourse in particular, in the realm of conspiracy, that if you were to say that MI5 are funding a branch of Al-Qaeda in order that they will assassinate Gaddafi, but they've bungled it!
That seems like stuff that you'd make up to discredit MI5, but it's actually happening.
How much have we become accustomed to criminality within government agencies like CIA, FBI, MI5?
And how much have we become, in a sense, inured to criminality as part of foreign policy?
And how have we become inured to it?
I think just because it is done much more in the broad daylight now than in the shadows.
So people for decades have been talking about dirty ops, particularly carried out by the CIA, MI6, Mossad, KGB.
I mean all countries do this sort of thing.
Everyone does dirty ops.
But I would suggest that the Gaddafi plot particularly is an exemplar of this moral slide.
Because back when we reported it in 1996, 1997, that was all very shady and the whistleblower had to go to prison for doing this.
Now you fast forward to 2011, when Gaddafi was assassinated by Western-backed groups that were exactly the same as the 1996 plot.
It was done in the full glare of the media.
No one cared anymore.
It was great, yeah.
So that shows a very dangerous moral slide, I think, and a numbing of our sensibilities in the West about what might happen to people in other countries.
I think this numbing is pretty immersive and pervasive.
You know that when Gaddafi was assassinated I remember seeing his corpse like
Jostled about like some grim grizzly version of weekend at Bernie's then
Like I'm seeing him at speaking at some Arabian summit before saying listen. I think we're in some trouble
They've killed Saddam Hussein. I think they're gonna kill all of us
I I suppose it makes me feel that there are various strata of power in continual operation.
When we spoke to Yanis Varoufakis on the show recently, that's coming up as a podcast on Stay Free AF, he helped me to understand that there is a global financial elite that are immune to taxes and trade laws and penalties when their actions go wrong.
It seems that similarly there are deep state relationships that are not penetrated by ordinary morality or even law.
These presumed resource wars that we talk about You know, the petrodollar wars, the persecution of Libya.
Is this something that you know about as a result of your work since leaving MI5 and now being a kind of advocate for other whistleblowers?
Very much so, yes.
I mean, not only am I an advocate, but I'm also friends with quite a number of other intelligence whistleblowers.
We're part of a group called the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence.
I'd like it if that group became a bit corrupt and then someone had to whistleblow like...
Right, this has gone out bad!
Oh, you whistle-blow me?
I'll whistle-blow you right back, mate!
Don't you whistle-blow me!
I will whistle-blow you so hard!
What do you do in your whistle-blowing alliance, and how do you know, what sort of stuff do you know about these, like, resource war petrodollar schemes?
Well, a lot of the people in Sam Adams tend to be American intelligence whistleblowers.
So you tend to hear a lot about the deep state, as it's called, working in America.
Now, one of the fascinating organizations was a think tank of right-wing neocons that was set up at the end of the last century.
I think it's now defunct, but it was called the Project for the New American Century.
Yeah.
And it was designed to ensure continuing American hegemony over this coming century.
And they came out with a paper called Rebuilding America's Defenses, published in 1999.
which basically said that they wanted to shore up their power, shore up access to things
Oh no!
like oil and other energy resources.
Oh no.
And in order to do that they needed regime change in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and weirdly
North Korea.
Now, you can see how that's panned out with the wars over the last 20 years.
Yeah, but you can't just invade Iraq.
You'd need some sort of incentive.
You'd need some event to underwrite that.
So, like, what kind of speculation and contemplation does that lead us towards, may I ask, Annie?
It certainly leads us towards the conclusion that the media is very easily manipulated and controlled.
Because if you remember in the run-up to the Iraq war, all this weapons of mass destruction and Britain is only 45 minutes from Armageddon and things like that.
So there was a stampede to war, even though it has subsequently been disclosed that Tony Blair had already made a deal, I think it was way back in April 2002, that he would support Bush in his endeavours across the Middle East.
What you've said there is so unpatriotic, it's actually brought the pound down a little bit there.
I'm afraid to say.
In fact, the question today is, is this the age of fake narratives and BS distractions?
That's what we're asking.
So even at that time, we're always sort of given this idea that our children are getting hurt, women's rights, We're given these cultural ideas which are valuable and that's why we're sold these ideas.
They're important ideas for the protection of children, equality of people regardless of their identity, necessary, important, ethical conversations and ideals.
But often what's being masked is the relentless pursuit of power and resources and peculiar submerged schematics.
Absolutely.
I mean, I would call this the war on concepts.
The way that our perceptions can be manipulated around things that will erode our power as the people.
What do you mean by that?
That's confused me.
So if we look at the justification for wars, we're all, you know, told massive lies which have been exposed now to go into Iraq or the fact that Syria is using chemical weapons and All that sort of thing, or Russiagate, that was another biggie, when they were trying to corral Trump into stopping his attack against the CIA.
One of the big ones at the moment though, is that privacy is a basic human right, but that is being eroded massively, particularly on our lives online.
We have to live online now, it's not a choice because of post-Covid, we've got used to it.
People, you know, say this narrative that if you're doing nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide.
I hate that.
Blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, so do I. Because everyone wants privacy for certain activities.
It doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong.
But without privacy, you can't operate.
You can't inform yourself and articulate and have freedom of expression as an individual.
And if you lose that basic right as an individual, that erodes the very concept of a functioning society and a functioning democracy because you can't share information.
It might have an ontological impact, even in the nature of your being.
We were talking the other day about Jeremy Bentham's, is it Panopticon?
Panopticon, yeah.
Panopticon, that idea of Foucault's, or that Foucault's, some Foucaulian philosophy derived from that, the idea that when you're under constant observation the very nature of yourself is Challenged.
And I sometimes feel that partly what we're trying to do with this channel is generate a movement where people had the confidence to say that we declare independence from the state.
We declare independence from the system.
We don't want to be part of it anymore.
In the same way as we've had revolutions on the basis of political ideology or cultural or religious ideology in the past where people have said, I don't want to be part of this.
That we ought to establish the tools for people to declare their independence.
Not give them an ideology, because some people might want to do it on the basis of religion, or there could be any ideology at its centre, but the right for people to opt out of a sort of fully immersive, tyrannical experience that we're being...
...presented as if it's somehow progress, as if it's a progress in terms of technology and medicine and cultural understanding, when it seems that what's behind it are very, very old ideas indeed.
Annie, does it make you cynical and sceptical about current geopolitical conflict, knowing what you know about the machinations that were concealed with previous wars?
I'm obviously referring to the war in Ukraine.
The potential sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline and just simply the way that the media cooperate with narratives that benefit people that are currently in power.
I wouldn't say cynical.
I don't think I feel cynical still.
It gives me a certain different perspective when I'm looking at current affairs but I still feel a sense of hope and this is partly why I focus very much on online human rights now as well because if we can learn and get these different perspectives I'm not talking about you know going down some weird rabbit hole But just be aware that the mainstream media can peddle lies.
It won't tell the full truth.
We can build a greater sense of community globally with all sorts of dissident groups and people who are concerned about the direction of societies.
And that is very empowering, which is why they're trying to, they, the elites, are trying to strip out our access to that sort of information.
So, for example, if you think about the hacker community or hacktivist community, they are effectively opting out of the mainstream thinking about how we use technology.
So most people don't even know that you don't have to live on Microsoft or Apple software.
You can actually move on to something like open source software, which is much more secure.
All the code is out there in the public, which is why it's called open source.
And it means that a global community of geeks and hacktivists can read that code, And make sure there are no nasty spy back doors built into it, or criminal attacks going into it, or anything like that.
So it's much more secure, but so few people even know of its existence.
So it's arguing that there are alternatives.
I mean, that's just one particular example.
There are political alternatives.
There are media alternatives.
But you have to have the will to try and find it.
Once you do, though, it's very empowering.
That's why I'm not cynical.
That's really encouraging.
I didn't know about that open source thing, but then why would I?
I'm too busy consumed thinking about dumb stuff.
Yeah, okay.
So that's something we can do.
Should we start doing that?
Like, should we join that open source thing?
Absolutely, yes.
Push it forward.
Well, I have a new book out.
I've given you a copy as a present.
Alright, hold on.
Let's do, yes, promote your book.
Hang about.
Wait a sec!
There's a book over here.
The Privacy Mission, Achieving Ethical Data for Our Lives Online by Annie Mashon.
That's how that's pronounced.
Yeah.
My word, who's written this?
This is a masterpiece!
You've got to buy this book!
It'll be irresponsible not to.
Get a hold of it.
So, what's your book about?
What you were just saying.
Pretty much, yeah.
I mean, why the concept of privacy is so important, what the main threats are to it, which I call the dark triad of the intelligence agencies, state actors, criminals, and the corporations who harvest our data.
And then I offer solutions both for the individual and for society and for democracy.
I'm including open source, which I think should be something that's taught as a mandatory subject in anyone doing IT subjects.
And just try and give people hope.
You know, you don't have to be this data farmed consumer online.
You can take very basic steps, very easy steps to protect yourself, your family, your community.
And we can get governments as well to do that sort of thing.
If we can, you know, lobby hard enough.
Yeah, that's really lovely and quite inspiring and encouraging.
Now that you've evaded death in spite of betraying MI5, and may I say, Her Majesty, God rest her soul, do you see yourself as invincible and that you can trot around the world, doing as you wish, free from the threat of assassination?
I wouldn't say that, having only recently fallen down and broken my arm.
Aha!
Oh, did you fall or was you pushed?
Oh, that's the question.
Talk me through the event.
I was just washing some salad for lunch.
You're washing a salad?
And the water went all over the floor in the kitchen.
It's the bloody deep states on them cucumbers!
Definitely.
No, no, it's the lettuce.
I blame the lettuce for spraying the water everywhere.
And off I went, smack.
You peel away a layer, there's another layer!
That's how lettuce power operates.
And then you slip the waters on the kitchen floor on the linoleum.
And then over you go?
Yeah.
It was that simple and that stupid.
But no, I have been globetrotting over many, many years now and talking about a lot of stuff, but I do know very clear boundaries around the limits of the Official Secrets Act in the UK.
Oh!
What do you mean?
What are they?
Well, if I come up with new information I learnt on the inside, they will automatically prosecute me and stick me in prison for two years at the moment.
Although they're trying to tighten up that law and make it 14 years in prison.
Of course they are.
For any whistleblower and any journalist who breaks a story.
Oh no, that makes me feel a little bit nervous hearing that.
Yeah, you better be careful.
I will be.
I'm trying to be careful.
I'm trying to be careful.
I'm trying to walk a line.
I'm trying to walk a line of awakening as many people as I can within our limitations while acknowledging my own fallibility so that communities begin to form and individual power becomes less significant.
Individual rights, yes, are important.
But like, I don't want to get myself in a position where I'm knotted off or I'm slipping about over a salad or something.
You might do yourself some damage, son.
You might be cutting up a carrot and find yourself in a little pickle one of these days.
You might watch your step, my friend.
You're a very brave person, Annie.
Sometimes I suppose many of us question whether or not we would be brave enough to pursue our ideals when the consequences are so fearsome.
I don't know.
I think, you know, many people, many, many people try and affect change by going public about what they see is wrong, even if it's just internal within the organisation.
And I think it's wrong to almost fetishise, you know, the whistleblowers that come out.
And I saw a lot of that.
What Snowden did was phenomenal.
Yeah, it was cool, I thought.
I mean, the sheer scale of what he exposed, it was sort of proof of all the deep, you know, fears that many other whistleblowers had had up to that point.
Suddenly we knew about programmes like PRISM or TEMPRA that hoovered up all our information between North America and Europe illegally.
And suddenly we knew about a hideous programme called Optic Nerve.
Have you heard about that one?
I don't like that they used OpticNerve, because that's when your eye's dangling down on your cheek and you've got to pop it back in.
Tell us more about the actual programme.
This is a hack that basically means that they can watch video streaming programmes online.
Like this one every day at five across the world.
We want them to watch it.
Yeah, or Zoom.
But it turns out that about 10% of these sort of conversations are, say, Slightly salty in content.
What do you mean by that?
Well, the idea... Salty?
Spicy?
Salty, salty, yeah, spicy.
So, you know, in this era of long-distance relationships, people traveling for business, you might want to talk to your partner remotely.
I see.
And about 10% of conversations like that are... 10%?
Yeah, yeah.
And people are watching them?
Yeah.
That's optic nerve.
Optic nerve?
What on earth?
That's the point of it.
To like, perf.
Optic perf, more like.
Why don't they just get on with proper spying?
What's the benefit of watching that?
Well, they just want total mastery of the internet.
They grab all data now, which we know from Snowden.
But the key point is, going back to the argument about privacy, you know, you're in a consensual relationship.
You're doing nothing wrong.
Yeah.
You certainly want to keep that private, right?
I think so.
If you're being an optic perv, you don't want an optic nerve prying down your spile.
Do you remember that thing in Citizen Four when Snowden's revelations came to light and they made a film about it with Glenn Green, old friend of the show?
There's a moment where he's in the hotel room and he's like, there'll be stuff in this!
He's just picking up objects from around the room going, this phone, this'll be bugged, they can watch you through that!
Reality looks different to him because he's been exposed to a layer of truth that most of us necessarily ignore.
That's why the question of the show is, is this the age of fake narratives and bullshit distractions?
Precisely because, in a sense, it is uncomfortable to confront that.
Sometimes when it's frightening.
It's frightening to hear that it's real.
It's better to almost think of it as an abstract thing.
Oh, the state wouldn't do that.
There's no false flags.
There are no self-sabotaging acts in order to undergird military action in foreign countries.
You want to believe that they're good people.
You know, because this is It's recently, your discoveries and actions are recent enough for us to conject that perhaps there haven't been hugely significant changes in the last 30 years.
You know, I feel like when Donald Trump said things like, well you think we don't do stuff like that?
That's why, that was what I think broke through.
This is a politician that's not like other politicians.
Even though I would ultimately argue that economically, this is a dude that's not going to help ordinary Americans.
You know how I feel about that.
Let me know in the chat.
I know loads of you love him.
But like, what frightens me is that we have become somehow inured and blinded to it because it's sort of almost too terrifying.
But you say, Annie, we can stay optimistic because of stuff like open source.
We can take actions and there are communities all over the world that we can actually become part of.
There are solutions and there is a way out, not to engage too much in fear and paranoia.
But you must be pretty paranoid, are you?
I've had my moments.
It's about trying to control it and take a risk assessment.
But I mean, I do see hope as well.
One of the organizations out of many I work with and campaign with is called the World Ethical Data Foundation, where we're trying to develop tools that will ensure easy access to information and future proof data, so that everyone who needs to know things about, for example, human rights, can find a way to do it securely, no matter what the threat is that they might face in their home country.
And we also have a forum coming up at the end of this month.
And the idea is to get people from all sorts of different specialities and expertise.
So not just, you know, tech corporations or government people, But whistleblowers and journalists and philosophers and futurists and even sci-fi writers to try and predict what's going to happen and just mash up all these ideas and come up with something creative and new rather than something that's old and stale and, you know, you just get trapped in that paranoid paradigm without seeing that there may be hope to break out of it and perhaps try a new system, perhaps try something new.
So that's what a lot of us are aiming to do.
Thanks Annie.
We'll make sure that there's a link in the description to all of the things that you have mentioned, the groups and organisations and of course here's Annie's book again and we'll put a link up for Annie's book The Privacy Mission as well.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
Thanks for giving us that information in such an easy to understand and occasionally Rather dramatic way.
I wish we'd had a little bit more time to get into the farmhouse.
I wish I'd had a bit more time to say, do you see someone across the road, sort of talking into their sleeve, going, and you think, oh, shit!
Is that happening?
Those kind of things.
Did you have anything?
I think they need to talk into the sleeve anymore, don't they?
Well, because they'd have just something there.
Yeah.
They'd have something in their snout.
Yeah, they don't need that.
They've moved on from all of that.
OK, well, actually, it's time for us to end this stream, but we will continue to be on.
We're going to continue to broadcast at Stay Free AF, which you can join.
I've told you how to join.
There's a link in the description.
There's a small yearly fee and you can get access to all of our additional content coming up.
Over the course of this week we've got a wonderful deep dive into Elon Musk, not literally, into Elon Musk's current media activity, his tweets about Ukraine and Russia.
Is it possible, should Elon Musk have the right to free speech?
What do you mean when you say that you back Ukraine?
Do you mean back Ukraine all the way to Armageddon?
These are questions and conversations that we want to have.
Yanis Varoufakis is coming up on the show.
He talks to us a lot about international finance and most importantly, please remain with us.
Stay with us because we're going to continue to chat and look at some of your, we're going to answer some of your questions on Stay Free AF.
Stay free.
See you later.
Thanks for joining us.
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