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Dec. 21, 2022 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:05:18
Xmas Special: We’re All F*cked! - #051 - Stay Free with Russell Brand
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Oh, I took a cold steal. Oh, I took a cold steal.
In this video, you're going to see the two turtles.
Hey, hello, thanks for watching Stay Free with Russell Brand.
I'm in it.
We talk about the news.
We provide analysis.
We tell you stories that the news wouldn't tell you.
And then the stories that they do tell you, we give you a different perspective on them.
That's about it.
Other than that, we just try to focus on joy.
It's a better perspective, I think.
Better perspective.
You have a better perspective on reality.
For example, you know there's that conflict in Ukraine.
Who's really at war with Russia?
So we're sort of examining the idea of proxy war and in fact presenting you, I would say, a watertight case for there being a proxy war.
Open and shut.
Open it, then shut it again.
Shouldn't even bother to have opened it.
In 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.
Baby factories.
They're not happening yet, but they're planning them.
I'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.
We're talking to Ken Klippenstein later.
He's one of those dudes breaking the Twitter files, and we're going to be talking about disinformation, misinformation, and in particular, this thing.
Do you know this bit?
This is one of the worst bits of all that Twitter files thing.
While they're distracting you with Elon Musk, is he a nice person?
Do you like him or not?
Well, no wonder they was bricking it about Twitter getting bought, innit?
Because look what's been revealed.
Twitter was like the playground of rabscallions.
They 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.
They would let it on.
It was called, what was it called?
White Bottoms.
I think that's it, yeah.
It's a White Bottom program.
We're going to get into it with a proper journalist, Ken Klippenstein, a bit later.
Professor Brad Evans is back on the show to do our book club, Books with Brad.
It's a Christmas Carol, which is by Charles Dickens.
It's fitting, isn't it?
Yeah, because it's Christmas and also it's a Dickensian hellscape.
Someone told me the other day that Charles Dickens reinstated Christmas and it was going out of favour and out of fashion.
It might have been Leon, the producer of the show.
I can't remember.
Anyway, hit rumble.
It helps us if you do that.
And now we're going to tell you... Should we get into the news right now?
I've told you what's coming up.
If you're watching this on YouTube, remember for the first 10 minutes we allude to what's going on.
We hint at it.
But after that 10 minutes when we're only available on Rumble, by George do I let some Trooves out.
I let them out, I blast them out.
Not like a... Every orifice.
I've put Trooves out, the Luxies out, the Bum, even out of the...
No, only after.
That's when warm jets of truth.
Sticky white truth.
Oh.
What?
I thought it was the yellow truth.
No, not piddly truth.
Not puddles of truth.
Truth all coming down your trousers, warm for a moment, shame for a lifetime.
Nice for a bit.
I like this bit.
Oh no, no, it's gone itchy.
Listen, we've got important things to tell you.
Look at this.
A holiday celebration in southern Ukraine.
Kids still need miracles.
One 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.
Some of these kids asked Saint Nicholas, which is what they call Father Christmas, don't be confused, or Santa Claus, for iPhones.
Some asked for peace.
Which camp would you be?
Peace or...?
It's tricky, isn't it?
iPhones are good.
No doubt about it.
They're a good device.
They're good.
But peace... That's also good.
Once you've arrived at a state of peace, you don't need anything else.
Imagine you achieve peace.
Think of all the things you think you want.
You want the perfect partner, you want the perfect life, money, cars, whatever it is you're into.
But if you actually had peace already, then things don't matter anymore.
So if you can move your way to the limitless love that's within you, you'll be alright.
I'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?
God bless them.
Anyway, 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.
Oh no, no, don't ask for a military system.
Some wanted clean water.
You'll get one anyway, because like I tell you what, Biden's doling out stuff left and right.
What else is going on over there?
We've said enough about those children's Christmas presents.
Oh, Zelensky is actually in America, remember?
I think he's on his way.
He's on his way there right now.
Yeah.
I wonder what he's going to be like over there.
Still in the hoodies, do you think?
I wonder what the flight's like.
First class business?
Movies?
Economy?
Military sort of jet?
Probably.
Military sort of jet?
Yeah, you've got to have good security on that, I would have thought.
Remember, we like Ukraine, love Ukraine, and just think that there's some skullduggery afoot.
During Zelensky's visit, Biden is to unveil a $2 billion military package that includes Patriot missiles.
Now that could irritate Russia.
As Vladimir Zelensky visits the U.S.
to address Congress and meet with Joe Biden, the U.S.
is expected to send misleadingly named precision bomb kits to Ukraine.
Is that not what they are?
Are they not that precise?
Yeah, they're not that precise, yeah, because you still have to drop them.
They are a bomb kit.
They are, but you have to drop them from planes, meaning, and it was quite tricky dropping things from planes in Russia.
Even dropping this pen from here, There's risk.
But like a bomb from a plane, all sorts can go wrong.
Moscow has deemed the planned shipment as a provocation warning of unpredictable consequences.
They do some interesting threats, I think, the Russians, don't they?
Unpredictable.
I don't know what I might do.
I'm crazy, baby.
I could do nothing.
I could pull down my trousers and pants.
I remember when Putin, all we used to think about was he takes a lot of pictures of himself with his top off.
On a horse.
On a horseback.
With a rifle.
I called him the only fans tyrant.
But now he's gone into much more, he's got terrible diseases and he's well into a war.
Washington does not want to be seen publicly giving the green light to Kiev attacking Russian soil.
Antony Blinken, Secretary of State in December, we have neither encouraged nor enabled the Ukrainians to strike inside of Russia.
But we've got a whole bunch of information that suggests that that's pretty far from the truth.
There's this $45 billion aid package coming in.
Can we see that list of the most egregious things they've done?
The 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.
And to put that into context, Russia's projected defense budget for 2023 is 84 billion.
So 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.
Hold on, let me do some math.
Go on.
So America has spent more money on the war We're in a war, and they're not in it.
Then Russia, who have spent on the war, and Russia definitely are in the war.
Yeah they are.
No one in Russia is going, this isn't a war, we're just trying our hardest to make friends.
We'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.
If 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.
The 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.
That's more!
And so, how are you not in a war?
Where's the list of war facts that we've got, where it's like the number of things they've done that make it like it is a war, really?
We can keep going.
Yeah, let's see them.
In an effort, wartime, oh yeah look, wartime procurement powers.
In an effort to expedite aid to Ukraine, lawmakers are relinquishing accountability measures to grant the Pentagon what have been characterized as wartime procurement measures.
That means they can do what they want.
These emergency authorities enable the Pentagon to deliver Ukraine more weapons faster.
That'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.
I'm just putting it into a language you can understand.
And I'm certainly not suggesting that Russia's actions, and Putin in particular, aren't baddies and that.
I'm just saying, look at this.
What have you learned lately?
Have you learned that there are often economic motivations for these type of actions?
Just think back last couple of years.
Let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments.
Do 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?
It's also setting a new precedent, isn't it?
The 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?
It'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.
This is where it intersects with culture, right?
Because 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.
Imagine 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?
But 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?
Let me know in the chat.
Same 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.
Language is being sort of used like a cookie dough and shaped to fit whatever purpose is required.
Brad Evans, when he comes in here, we'll ask him about that, won't we, Gareth?
That could be your Christmas question.
I'd love it, yeah.
Threats to economic security was apparently one of the ways in which they're How dare you!
How dare you threaten my economic security!
That's how much money we've got.
And 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.
Yeah, that's defined as violence.
Right in my money sack!
Also, just a little fact for you.
I don't know if this is connected.
At 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.
Would 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?
Listen, we've got to come off YouTube now, all right?
So you've seen where we're going with this.
We're going to say, we're going to bloody well go out and start talking about establishment powers, centralised authority.
We're starting to start working it all out.
We've got proper journalists coming on here in a little bit, philosophers, everything.
They're all coming on.
So if you're watching this on YouTube now, That platform has been co-opted by mainstream media narratives.
Now get over onto Rumble!
I just think they're saying that Rumble is a conspiracy theory because they don't want you to know the truth.
We want you to know the truth.
You can't handle the truth, you can handle the truth.
Here, have dirty great lumps of the stuff over on Rumble.
We'll see you in a second.
And meanwhile, over here on Rumble, on our channel, Gareth, I'm really going to let rip now.
Go on, you go for it.
I noticed you moved the old... That's what I do.
I know that's when you get excited.
I take this breast and I shift it up a couple of gears.
Ken Klippenstein's coming on later, he's gonna... Tell us a thing or two.
Just two journalists...
Chowing down on the facts is what we'll be.
And before that we've got our presentation, here's the news, no here's the effing news.
But I think what we've pointed out is that actually America are sort of at war.
Procurement powers, that's basically an emergency, that's one thing they're doing.
What was the other thing we just said?
Spent more money than Russia.
That's not good luck.
Telling Ukraine to bomb them, giving them inside their territory.
Essentially a green light to use missiles.
They're saying, we're not saying do or we're not saying don't, but here are some missiles.
Here's some missiles.
Do what you want with him.
I'm going to look over there now.
Whatever you do with those missiles.
Absolutely ridiculous.
We've got Ken Klippenstein on the show with us.
Ken Klippenstein has come to prominence as he is one of the journalists that has broken this incredible, earth-shattering, Twitterphile story.
Not strictly true.
But he works with Lee Fang.
Lee Fang is one of the journalists who has.
He's mates with Lee Fang.
He is.
We've got someone on here because they're someone's mate.
Klippenstein, you're out!
No, he actually pre-empted this whole thing by saying that Facebook had a sneaky little portal that people were pushing stuff down.
Absolutely, yeah.
Think of it like Wonka's factory.
Yeah, he was the original.
He was the OG.
Ken Klippenstein.
Ken, hello.
We're calling you the OG.
Hello, Ken.
Hey, thanks for having me.
We're very happy to have you on, Ken.
Now, 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.
I 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.
Yeah, I think that to put some context here, a lot of this goes back to 9-11, shortly after which the U.S.
government created the Department of Homeland Security.
People forget how young that agency is.
And this is the department that contains within it the largest number of law enforcement officials in the country.
So this was a huge development.
in the course of the U.S.
national security community.
And so after DHS was created, of course, their initial purview was to look at terrorism, do counterterrorism.
Now, you know, ISIS having been defeated, Al Qaeda having been largely defeated, they've moved on from that.
And 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
And so, you know, those groups having been defeated and their priorities having shifted, there's really a lot more of a focus domestically.
A lot of those practices have come home.
A 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.
They perceive the extremism threat now coming from within the United States.
And you know, the president gave a speech recently in which he was describing, you know, MAGA individuals as extremists.
They'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.
And so recently the Department of Homeland Security created what's called the MDM team.
It stands for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.
The language around this is evolving very rapidly.
And to explain what each of those are, misinformation is unintentional falsehoods, disinformation is intentional falsehoods, and malinformation, that's an interesting one.
The idea is that there's not anything expressly false, but the context is missing.
And 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.
But in any case, that was DHS's creation.
Now at the same time, FBI created something called the It was the Foreign Influence Task Force.
And 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.
But something people don't understand is that these things tend to evolve and grow and metastasize.
And by the time 2020 came around, the concern was COVID disinformation.
And now with Biden in office, it has moved to disinformation about the Afghanistan withdrawal, disinformation about racial justice movements.
And, you know, these things have a pretty political valence.
So 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.
Terrifying 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.
And it's also curious the sort of creep of designation of this term terror.
Initially wars were fought against nations, then they're fought against radical individuals.
and 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
tone and timbre of communication in particular the third component of that misdismail seems incredibly open to misrepresentation
and one would say, misused rather, and one would say that you would want such tools to be wielded by, I can't even
conceive of an individual, I don't know, Christ?
But given that their own conduct is so dubious and inappropriate, how could they ever hope to enact those kind of powers amidst such hypocrisy?
Just 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.
Mate, I can't imagine what sort of force can oppose such an entrenched and immersive corruption.
Do you feel a little bit like the Twitter files revelation is going to move things forward?
Or do you think that this is so staggering that it's kind of beyond opposition?
Well, 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.
they described to me being reassigned from that kind of work to looking at Twitter accounts
that were posting what they described as sarcasm and ironic jokes and things and not really
appreciating that level of subtext, humor, and thinking that it's literal.
And they were really frustrated.
And by the way, a lot of these guys are not, by any stretch of the imagination, progressive
activists or anything.
They were just pissed off because they felt as though, you know, I signed up to follow
Russian spies or follow Chinese spies and try to help the country.
Why am I worrying about CommieKid69's obvious joke on Twitter that my boss doesn't understand is a joke?
And so this is something I heard from multiple people.
So 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.
What's the implication of that?
If 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?
Yeah, 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.
Some 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.
But knowledge is not a binary thing.
It's not like, well, technically it's in some obscure report somewhere that you can read about.
That's different from Ordinary, everyday people are having it articulated to them in a way that they can understand.
And that's really what's changed here.
Because 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.
But that doesn't mean that an ordinary person has the time to dig through all these obscure
reports, cultivate sources, and understand what it all means, because people just don't
have time for that.
So what's really changed, even if we grant that one could find out some of these things,
is that now it's a lot more accessible and it's critically in the public discourse in
a way that it just wasn't for years.
I suppose then, in addition to the reporting and the scope of the revelations that the
Twitter files represent, the very fact that a figure like Elon Musk, with his demonstrable
power, is willing to oppose these forces is very interesting.
Of course, for optimism, because it doesn't seem to be the type of topic that either political party is meaningfully going to, I suppose.
Do you start worrying that the right are the only people that are going to do anything about this?
Well, 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.
Now, 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.
And furthermore, it may not even be something that people at the presidential level are particularly paying attention to.
Because, you know, when this was taking place, I mentioned the MDM team, which was created under the Trump administration.
Judging 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.
You 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.
You'll see this Come out shortly.
In 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.
So 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.
Maybe they should be because the buck stops at the president, but that doesn't mean that they know what's going on.
Or that they have control over what's going on.
I 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.
I think for a while as well, Ken, there's been a pervasive sense that these kind of
agencies have a power that's not usually within the remit of ordinary democratic procedures
that won't alter in accordance with the fluctuations in the White House in bipartisan or congressional
politics.
And isn't that a suggestion that in a way this power is rather deeply embedded?
And as it creeps and becomes more entrenched, as the ability to surveil, censor, control,
attention, and consciousness itself increases, the sort of kind of fears one hears hysterically
spoken of in the darker corners of the online world of conspiracy, globalism, unaccountable
centralized powers, corporatism that's beyond reproach, a military-industrial complex that
ultimately controls the trajectory of American foreign policy, all appear to be more legitimate.
Thank you.
Yeah, 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.
Once 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.
I'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.
If you look at their conduct around a lot of this, What's really striking about it is the lack of oversight that exists.
So 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.
They're briefed on a lot of these top-secret matters.
My 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.
And that's not even a feature of the height.
It's not like they're hiding it from officials.
It'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.
And that's a feature that I would really like to to draw people's attention to.
I 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.
To 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
money from a lot of national security contractors and things like that, just completely setting
that aside and assuming that there's no bias that exists there. It's still just, hey, guys, how
much are they going to be able to go through? These are the only guys that have the clearances
to see it. It's pretty almost marvelous what you describe, a kind of non-local, unaccountable
consciousness that's almost a precursor of the algorithms that we commonly understand
dictate 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.
Ken, 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?
I try not to take myself too seriously.
Something I always cringe at is when I see the Washington Post.
Democracy dies in darkness.
And 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.
Like, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't take myself seriously enough to get all worked up about it, I guess.
I get to take you so seriously, that's quite good.
I'm going to try that technique in my own investigative journalism, which I consider to be on a par with yours and Lee Fang's.
Ken, thank you so much.
My apologies for being confused about where you entered the narrative of these revelations around social media.
I'm afraid I'm something of a dilettante.
It's amazing to speak to you and thank you very much.
You can follow Ken on The Intercept and he's at Ken Klippenstein on Twitter if he hasn't been banned.
He might be because he seems to me like the sort of person who's a bit too jolly to just be going through life reporting.
You're supposed to be angry on Twitter.
That's what it's for.
You're supposed to get mad.
Get off!
One of them disillusioned CIA agents will sweep you off of there instead of doing a rear naked choke on a spy in an alley in Moscow.
It's a real come down.
Thanks, man.
Ken, thanks for coming on.
It's really lovely to speak with you.
Thank you for your time and expertise.
Thanks for having me.
See you, Ken.
Take care, mate.
Well, Gareth.
I hope you're satisfied.
Sorry about that.
I just wanted you to know before the interview.
What did you want me to say?
I think because I actually bear a lot of responsibility.
Total responsibility.
You're like them eight guys.
I am a lot like those eight guys.
Or even God.
Because I am actually just living life.
Sure.
Yeah.
It's because I'd said that his story was the precursor to the Twitter files.
Do you think I got a bit confused?
I just think you ignored the word precursor.
I always ignore that word.
I don't like it.
No, I didn't even feel confident using it.
Precursor?
That's a good word.
Right.
We've agreed on that then.
You should have said it a bit louder!
Okay, 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.
Why are you looking at me like that, Paul?
No, no!
I thought you might be mentioning sperm or something.
I am gonna!
Microplastics be tumbling from the sky like what I call dirty, naughty little bits of sperm ruining snow.
They get in you, your nuts ain't gonna work right.
You didn't say you were a science major also!
Oh yeah!
Not only do I investigate in journal, I know all about littlest tiniest things and bloody great big things and their biochemical compounds.
I know all about it.
Yeah, 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.
Really weird.
It's really weird.
You're going to love this.
It's going to crack you up.
It's going to make you nervous about the very air that you breathe.
Although we will find you some solutions for that.
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
Thank you for choosing Fox News.
The news.
No, here's the effing news.
Microplastics falling down from the sky like Christmas snow, making us all nice and impotent and reducing our
testosterone and turning us into limp, neutered men.
The good news is, though, you'll soon be able to buy babies from factories.
Welcome to Planet Earth, everyone!
Microplastics are everywhere and they're ruining your ability to procreate.
Merry Christmas!
Researchers 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.
While 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.
Stories just keep getting worse and worse, don't they?
Well, at least it doesn't lower your testosterone and turn you into a eunuch.
Oh, it does that as well.
A 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.
I wonder if these plastics are in any way connected to this?
Shanna 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.
Do you ever feel that there's a broad globalist project to neuter and neutralise people and their reproductivity?
To make males into kind of eunuchs and create a world where people can't fight back and resist?
Let me know in the chat, let me know in the comments.
To 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.
Her research reveals that phthalates lower testosterone and so have the strongest influences on the male side, for example diminishing sperm count.
There'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.
If 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.
That's the median, so some people might have one sperm.
It's speculative to extrapolate, but there is also no evidence that it's tapering off.
This means that most couples may have to use assisted reproduction.
Of 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.
In 2017, scientists created a biobag that functioned as an artificial womb.
Ah, way back in the biobag we knew that you'd become a footballer.
And they used it to grow baby lamb.
Now a concept has been unveiled showing how the same could be done for humans.
But surely no one would ever do that.
Recent footage from Ectolife shows what childbirth might look like tomorrow.
This is a startling glimpse into what is 100% feasible and already Elon Musk has affirmed that Ectolife is viable and likely needed.
The 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.
The worst case scenario of course is an army of sentient cyborgs that will imprison us all in our homes.
You remember the Matrix?
Yeah, yeah, I remember thinking we shouldn't let that happen.
Oh, that we shouldn't?
Oh.
Introducing Ectolife, the world's first artificial womb facility, powered entirely by renewable energy.
If you want to know any further about your real life matrix baby factory, that energy better be renewable, because your fucking soul isn't.
Ectolife allows infertile couple to conceive a baby and become the true biological parents of their own offspring.
Perhaps 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.
And to clarify, I believe that people should be able to express themselves however they want to and identify however they want to.
But 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.
When you look at this, do you think utopia's on its way?
I don't really feel that comfortable with a sushi bar where what's on the menu is little babies.
I'll have one brown one and two white ones, please.
Well done.
Each state-of-the-art lab can accommodate up to 400 growth pods or artificial wombs.
Choose whichever way you want to describe this hellscape.
Hmm, I think I'll go with growth pods.
Nice choice, sir.
Welcome to freedom.
Every pod is designed to replicate the exact conditions that exist inside the mother's uterus.
It's exactly like that.
You can't sort of digitally recreate the experience of someone else's beating heart and love.
And I know that some people actually believe that you can.
That this is all just a synthetic experience.
Absolutely devoid of spirit and that everything can be mechanised, materialised, rationalised, recreated through technology.
But 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.
Our ability to be human in all our fallibility and all our flaws.
We 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.
A single building can incubate up to 30,000 lab-grown babies per year.
Listen, I love the concept, growing babies in a lab.
I love it.
What's not to love about all babies looking like little roast chickens, rotisserie chickens, all lined up in their little pods?
But is there enough babies in that lab?
Sir, there's up to 30,000.
Well, that's all I needed to know.
You have my money.
Ectolife allows your baby to develop in an infection-free environment.
Right, the heightened fear, pandemics, germs, disease.
You don't need to worry about that, ma'am.
We'll grow your baby in a germ-free and love-free environment.
Actually, the Matrix now.
I hope I'm not one of those babies like...
Fuck this!
I'm out of here!
Every 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.
The artificial intelligence based system also monitors the physical features of your baby and reports any potential genetic abnormalities.
Hmm, them fingers is a bit stubby.
Straight to the lab, little buddy!
Ectolife growth pods feature internal speakers that play a wide range of words and music to your baby.
Fuck off.
What, are they gonna be super babies coming out speaking ancient Greek and being able to do calculus?
The 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.
The good news is, though, that your baby... Well, give it the clarinet.
This is gonna blow your fucking mind.
Ectolife improves your bonding experience with your baby thanks to a 360 degrees camera that's fitted inside your baby's growth pod.
The state offers you safety and the corporate world offers you convenience and there is no area into which they will not reach.
Surely 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.
Well I think we could say that because nobody's balls work anymore because of the raining down of microplastics.
Oh, no, well, we should say it then.
Through the app, you can choose the playlist that your baby listens to.
The app!
It's enough fucking trouble looking after the little bastards when they're born.
I don't want to be doing their playlists before.
You can also directly sing to your baby and make them familiar with your voice before birth.
I've given up my spirit and my soul for this!
Quiet, baby, or straight to the lab!
I'm afraid to say your baby was non-compliant.
We asked it to wear a mask, and I think it refused.
I couldn't understand it.
It was speaking in Mandarin, which is impressive, which is why it's all decided that we've had to flush it.
Our goal is to provide you with an intelligent offspring that truly reflects your smart choices.
Your smart choice is to extract yourself from reality.
What we're being offered now is progress and technology in place of spirit and acceptance.
That there's only so far that humanity can go and only so far that humanity should go.
That perhaps our focus will be harmony here on this planet.
Respect for one another.
A new relationship with nature where we don't regard it solely as a resource but something that we are symbiotically evolving with.
All of these evolutionary steps are impossible as long as we live under the auspices of corporatism and state kleptocracy.
As long as that's continuing, you're not going to be able to awaken to deep reality.
You're heading towards a future, if you're lucky, where you might be able to grow a baby down in the old Matrix Walmart.
In the worst case scenarios, you're going to be so poor that you will be either executed or starved.
With Ectolife, your baby will receive the best nutrients that can support their growth.
Each group of pods is connected to two central bioreactors.
Do you not worry that this could become corrupt?
Excellent, Smithers!
And now, to release the vampire gene!
The first bioreactor contains nutrients and oxygen.
Lovely, green, Hulk-spunk nutrients.
Which are supplied to your baby through an artificial umbilical cord.
What we've done is we've wrung out a shrek and we feed it straight into your baby's belly.
This bioreactor also contains a liquid solution that serves as the ambiotic fluid that surrounds babies in the mother's uterus.
And 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.
We actually didn't put that in there.
It made the green too brown.
Thanks to a system controlled by artificial intelligence, each baby receives custom nutrients tailored to their needs.
I was suspicious of AI when they said that they might let it drive a fucking cab.
They don't really, like, let it grow a big room full of babies.
Listen, I'm done about letting AI drive an Uber.
What if it goes wrong?
Crashes into someone's fence?
Now, that won't happen.
Oh, okay, then.
Well, why don't we let it grow 30,000 people for its little army of AI bastards?
Well, sir, it's already underway.
The second bioreactor is designed to eliminate any waste products produced by the babies.
As well as very naughty babies.
The artificial umbilical cord helps the babies to release their waste products into the second bioreactor.
Hopefully, 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.
Well, they're a thing of the present because the same interests that will benefit from this created that problem.
Also, 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.
We've lost our souls.
Prior 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.
Genetically superior?
Have we been down this road before?
Something about genetic superiority rings a bell.
No, no, no.
I don't remember that being part of a dangerous ideology in the past at all.
Giving your baby a chance to develop without any biological hurdles.
And if you want your baby to stand out and have a brighter future, I do.
Tell me how to do it.
Will it cost me my soul?
Our elite package offers you the opportunity to genetically engineer the embryo before implanting it into the artificial womb.
Medically engineer it!
Finally, a master race without the messy PR.
Thanks to CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool, you can edit any trait of your baby through a wide range of over 300 genes.
Lonely?
No.
Edit, edit.
Too reflective?
Edit, edit.
Non-compliant?
Edit, edit.
I'll take Princess Leia.
I'll take Princess Leia.
The Elite Package allows you to customize your baby's eye color, hair color, skin tone,
physical strength, height, and level of intelligence.
I'll have a nice, strong, little Princess Leia.
It also allows you to fix any inherited genetic diseases that are part of your family history
so that your baby and their offspring will live a healthy, comfortable life,
free of genetic diseases.
And tradition and grace and any connection to reality.
Ectolife provides you a safe, pain-free alternative that helps you deliver your baby without stress.
They're actually planning for hell.
They're planning it.
They're getting it ready.
All 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.
They're creating it now.
They're creating a technological dystopia before our very eyes.
And 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.
They might as well fucking eat it.
After discharging the amniotic fluid from the artificial womb, you will be able to easily remove your baby from the growth pod.
Excuse me, it's stuck in the growth pod!
Everything is perfectly designed so you and your partner can enjoy the delivery process.
Now, 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.
The 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.
Okay, let's get ready for the birth!
Thanks.
Hey, do you have any brown ones?
Tired of waiting for a response from an adoption agency?
Unable to find a suitable surrogate mother?
Worried about pregnancy complications?
This is complicated.
Can I just get one?
Worry no more, because Ectolife got you covered.
Worry a little bit more, because we're trying to annihilate and commodify everything.
Why bother falling in love?
Why look out of a window?
Why fly a kite?
Grab 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.
So, 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.
We're all going to hell.
I 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.
Perhaps all this is no different from agriculture and the industrialization of food and treating nature just as a resource.
Perhaps this is what inevitably happens when a species loses its way.
But 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?
Do you want your consciousness controlled by tech?
Do you want your reproductive system annihilated then replaced by tech?
Do you want everything in your life to be a product?
Or do you think there's a way back for humankind?
But that's just what I think.
Let me know what you think in the comments and chat.
I'll see you in a minute.
Your sperm don't work, but you can get babies down the shop.
That's basically what that story was.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Let us know what you thought in the chat and the comments.
Hey, 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.
I 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?
Look at the alliances between big tech and the state.
Look at emergent globalist forces and the new technological dictatorships that are being introduced over the world.
The commodification of everything.
The desacralization of our planet.
Loss of connection with God.
To cheer you up a bit, we started a foundation to help junkies and alcoholics and stuff and it's been going six months now.
I drank a bit too much kombucha just then and so I'm having a sort of subtly burp on my way through this.
I'm addicted to it.
That's the irony.
I've started a foundation.
Why are you talking about the foundation?
I'm keeping the money because I've got myself addicted to kombucha.
Now 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.
No, we've been helping people.
We donate to places... Well, it's your money, actually, so I don't know why I'm trying to make it about me.
The narcissism.
We've donated to people like BAC O'Connor.
That's a treatment centre in Burton-on-Trent.
Friendly House, that's a women's treatment centre in Los Angeles.
Treasures, they help women that are coming out of NIC and prison and going, like, getting back into life in East London.
And Trevi House, which is the only treatment centre that helps women that have got children.
We've made donations with the money that you've spent on our merchandise.
So if you buy some of our merchandise, or if you donate to us, that's what we do with the money.
We do all right.
We're OK.
So 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.
Also, we do events like community live events.
For 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.
Remember, you can support the Stay Free Foundation by acquiring merchandise or by attending our live events.
For example, Community next year, a three-day festival.
Brad will be there, Wim Hof will be there, Vandana Shiva will be there.
And 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.
Some protest groups, aren't we?
Yeah.
Yeah!
Well, not against me, though.
They might go, let's take this back to the source, start protesting you.
Now, it's, uh, without any more silliness, if indeed altruism and philanthropy can be, it sounds like communist propaganda.
It's not communist propaganda because I believe in God and I don't believe in centralizing force.
I believe in decentralization.
If anything, it's a narco-syndicalist propaganda.
Right, now it's time for us to delve into literature, philosophy, and ourselves.
It's time for Books with Brad.
Are these the shadows of the things that will be?
Or are they the shadows of things that may be, only?
Still the ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.
Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead.
Said Scrooge.
But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.
Say it is thus with what you show me.
I feel like the titles themselves are a work of art.
That's by Brad's wife, Chantelle.
Professor Brad Evans is joining us now.
He's a political philosopher and writer from the University of Bath, here to talk about A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Welcome, Brad.
Oh, it's a pleasure.
Lovely new setting as well.
Isn't it lovely in here?
Now, Brad, in some ways, Christmas Carol has reinvigorated, reinvented and determined the kind of pseudo-Victorian Christmas that has become iconic, hasn't it?
Has it done that?
Because it just sort of seemed like it was a question I'd start with.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I think, you know, people sometimes forget the importance a single literary text can have in terms of shaping a kind of cultural context.
And, 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.
But by the kind of Victorian period, life was so tough for people that they didn't really celebrate Christmas at all.
It was almost like a two-day reprieve from the horrors of existence.
Merry Christmas!
A two-day reprieve from the horrors!
Ho, ho, ho!
But 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.
Then in the same period, Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, brings over the Christmas tree from Germany.
So this happens.
The same year that Dickens publishes A Christmas Carol, the first Christmas cards are printed.
And two years later, we have the invention of the cracker.
So all these things we associate with Christmas today are very much revived as the symbols within this kind of tenure period at most.
But Dickens is the one who basically says, no, Christmas should be about family, Charity and forgiveness.
And I think it's a real powerful thing that stayed with us from a real small text, which is phenomenal if you think about it.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing.
I suppose the narrativization works because that messaging is congruent with the ideology of Christianity and the figure of Christ.
In 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.
What 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
some sort of propagandist undertone to legitimize Victorian imperialism or whatever but I'll part
that for a second because I do want to know what you think about like what exactly is he
successfully constructed there? Well I think it plays into something which you know I'm trying to think
about the earlier VTs you were playing today and this kind of now I kind of come on you're trying to
raise a bit of Christmas joy and then you know you suddenly realize we're heading to this
horrible dystopian future in which everything is knowable, everything is certain, everything
is set.
Now, I think you're right.
There is an element of Christianity in the text, but I think it's so much more than that.
You know, as you say, there's a kind of a blasphemous element to the book.
There's also a way in which, you know, He plays to the mysticism which we all want to believe in in life.
We all want to think there is something more to existence than being born in a fucking pod.
Right.
That we all want to know that actually there is something, what we might call the ineffable.
And the idea of ghosts, I think, is such a special idea.
You 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.
But you realise you yourself are a ghost in the past, right?
And we're always projecting images of ourselves, and we're always... Particularly at Christmas, people are no longer with us.
We're always having conversations with them.
You know, this idea that everything can be technologically explained is utter nonsense.
We like to believe in ghosts, because we like to believe that there is something greater to human existence, even in a very humanist way.
You don't have to be religious to believe it.
No, but in a sense we must become religious again, I feel in some way.
Like these visitations that Dickens renders are, as all literature must be, a form of mythologisation.
And 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.
I 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.
And also, of course, it's a book about redemption.
Well, I think there's three themes which kind of, at the time of its publication, made the book actually quite revolutionary.
And I think the first thing is, if you look, you know, the ghosts actually convey messages, they communicate.
Now, the first thing the first ghost does is actually, he renders the powerful completely powerless.
They can no longer intervene in the world.
They can no longer change.
And 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.
And I think, so rendering the powerful powerless is a big move.
The second thing is with Scrooge.
Scrooge doesn't enter into the world wicked.
He becomes wicked.
I'm thinking of Stephen Knight's brilliant adaptation, actually, with Guy Pearce and Tom Hardy in that film.
And what they show in that adaptation is Scrooge, through his life, Becomes wicked.
You're not born evil, which was the old theological idea.
You know, it's a life experience which can make anybody a Scrooge, right?
If 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?
You're not just born that way.
Life circumstances could make anybody like that.
But 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.
I 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.
It'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.
You know, it's to say, I'm going to invite this person over to Christmas.
I know he's going to be a misery.
I know he's going to say a racist joke.
I know I'm going to hate him, but I'm still going to try to reach out to him anyway.
And I think that is a beautiful part of it.
That is beautiful.
I like that, you know.
Of course, the version I like is the Muppets one.
Because the Muppets one is a good one.
Michael Caine rips it up in that movie.
But like that, the nephew is like, old uncle Scrooge, why do you bother with old uncle Scrooge?
He's determined to love Scrooge.
He's determined to love him.
I suppose like all myths are about aspects of one potential whole individual.
The 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.
And redemption has, like, even scripturally stitched into it the idea of belonging.
So, 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.
The 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.
He said that wokeness has all of the elements of a religion without forgiveness and redemption.
Well, I think there's two really interesting points.
I 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.
He's not afraid to walk away from that.
Now, one of the things about our society is we don't like to talk about death.
Now, 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.
I don't think that's the moment.
I think it's when he's confronting his own death.
That becomes the real moment of change.
Now, we know so many people in their lives will change their life once they have to confront their own death.
Right.
But I think there's a real deep philosophical question.
We've always been taught that the history of philosophy as a discipline from Plato onward has been, how do we learn how to die?
And what that basically means is, how do we learn to become something new constantly?
Mourn the death of somebody who's gone, even in ourselves.
What Scrooge does is he takes that a stage further.
He says, how can we assess our lives from the perspective, if we looked at it, that we were already dead?
Yeah.
How would we then live our life from the perspective that we were already dead?
I think that's a real radical philosophical move.
And I think it's a brilliant move.
The second one, you talk about redemption and Nick Cave and wokeness.
You know, one of the things which I find completely tragic, you know, A Christmas Carol is a book of so many tragedies.
But the real tragedy I find today is, a Scrooge could never exist today.
We would never trust a Scrooge to have that redemption.
He would be forever haunted by the ghost of Christmas past.
We would never allow him to be forgiven.
Twitter would never forgive Scrooge, right?
He would always carry that past with him.
So in that sense, there is no possibility for redemption, even people who are well meaningful in today's cancellation age.
And I think that's the real tragedy.
There couldn't be a Scrooge today.
This is the problem with certainty.
This is the problem of lacking all doubt.
This 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.
Marcus 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
Inculcated.
They become your god.
They become your god.
And 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!
Scenario of what a person might be.
Scrooge, which has become a byword for total mean bastard.
Well, if this guy can find his way back.
Tiny Tim, I'm a little irritated by Tiny Tim.
I think he pushes it too much, Tiny Tim.
I'm glad when that little dude gets shut down.
Tiny Tim, he's all right, isn't he?
But that's not that.
What does Wilde say of Dickens' writing, in particular, I think the death of Little Nell in Curiosity Shop, whatever.
He 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!
He hammers you with the emotion, doesn't he?
He 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!
But there's always a sense of the optimistic that runs through it, which I think is important.
The 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.
The first thing he wants to do is simply be loved by the people who are around him, his family.
It's friendly.
And it's how we get accepted by the people who are the closest to us, first of all, which is what is the basis of community, right?
It's the basis of, you know, if we can't start there, then where can we start?
You know, and I think that's an important point.
If you ain't got religion that you're applying in your actual life right now, you ain't got religion.
If it's like an abstract set of ideas, I reckon you should do this.
That's bullshit.
And this is like, what?
What are you doing right now?
Are you being kind to people?
I struggle with this.
I think we all struggle with this.
As a person in recovery, I like many of the themes in Christmas Carol are powerful.
The idea of redemption, the idea of second chances, the idea of revision, revising your life, finding a new way of living based on spirit.
These are all sort of powerful themes for recovery.
And I guess this ability to narrativize is one of the things that makes the type of recovery that I'm involved with at least.
So powerful that you can tell a different story.
We're going to have to continue this conversation over on Locals now because otherwise we'll be too late.
You can join us right now.
It's our membership community on Locals.
Just go over there.
We're going to carry on.
Tomorrow we've got Michael P... Oh my god!
Scrooge, you bastards!
What have you done now?
That's a mic cable falling out.
Is it my mic or am I still... Can you still hear me?
Michael P. Singh is on the show.
How the US and China colluded over the pandemic.
You're going to love that story.
On Friday, my friend, the comedian actor Duncan Trussell is on the show.
You're going to love this conversation.
It's very holy, playful, spiritual, joyous.
And we'll see you tomorrow on Rumble, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
Stay free.
Join us on Locals right now.
We're going to continue this conversation.
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