Is The System Collapsing? With Guest Tim Pool - #083 - Stay Free With Russell Brand
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So, I'm going to be doing a little bit of a walkthrough of this. I'm going to be showing you a little bit of the
process of how to do this.
So, I'm going to be showing you a little bit of the process of how to do this.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
We're doing organic converting and we've got a lot of stuff there.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
Thank you for joining me for a very special show.
Wherever you're watching this, the full show is only available on Rumble.
As you know on Stay Free with Russell Brand, once a week, on a Friday, I do a special in-depth conversation with free thinkers, radicals, academics, shamans, wanderers, great geniuses in the field.
And today, it's Tim Pool.
I ended up with over 750,000 viewers.
A magnificent journalist.
His organization started grabbing my feed straight from my cell phone.
I just want to understand and I want to share it with everyone.
A platform that is so powerful in our American discourse that foreign governments are using it as weapons against us.
Does your journalistic integrity require that you stay within certain lines?
It's at the point where you have to say the most psychotic and insane thing imaginable.
If I do use this headline, I'm going to get a million views.
You recognize there are certain narratives that are evocative and provocative.
I don't know if this is sustainable.
The Kanye moment, what was that like?
He's gone.
I think it was staged.
You probably would do well with the black vote, absolutely.
There's a lot of black people that don't like me.
Cameras turn on and, y'all man, let me tell you something about.
They tried to lock me up.
I don't think there is an easy outcome.
I don't want to be anywhere near this if this keeps escalating.
And I don't know what to do.
I don't know what's right.
Tim, I know you're really, really busy now because you're running an incredible organisation.
What have you already done today?
Oh, it's early for me.
I just recorded one morning segment.
That's about it.
Talked about simulation and conspiracies.
Do you mind doing stuff like this or do you sometimes feel a little bit beleaguered?
You mean like doing these kind of interview shows?
I do other people's stuff.
Yeah, I would say beleaguered is probably the right word.
I get requests frequently, and it's just hard to do, I suppose.
I mean, maybe back a few years ago when my channels are growing, I'm excited.
You know, everyone's hitting me up, they want to talk to me, and I'm like, these are opportunities.
Now it's my schedule's so full, it's like, oh man, who wants to, oh geez, Russell Brand?
Oh, definitely for Russell.
You know, so I'm here.
Thank you for doing it, because one of the things I'm always struck by is your capacity to consume and disseminate information, to hold complex narratives together, to try to contain counter-arguments while you're making an argument, to imagine the kind of critiques that are going to be leveled at you and you have some pretty unique threats to
deal with as well due to I suppose the success of your
organization, the popularity of your voice and the attempts to shut down newly emergent independent voices like yours,
although yours is of course fairly unique. When I spoke to Martin Goury, the CIA
analyst and writer of the revolt of the public, he said that there's been a fundamental shift in the
discourse because centralized power can no longer control the narrative in
the way that it once did through managed institutions, through censorship that was easier to exert.
How do you find... Andy indeed said that the terms of left and right are becoming, in a sense, defunct and more diffuse, because it's now easier to view power in terms of centralised power versus peripheral power.
Where do you find yourself as an independent journalist who reports continually on stories that, in a sense, require a trans-political coalition if ever there were to be a movement to change them?
And how do you manage that space?
And good luck, Tim.
It was a big question.
I know, that was a lot there.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes I go back and forth.
Do the establishment authorities, powers, have control over the narrative still, or is it a sinking ship?
And I kind of feel like maybe it's a sinking ship, but as we've seen with the Twitter files, as we've seen with Facebook, YouTube, and their censorship, they're still able to manipulate the system.
So maybe Back with the emergence of the internet and the expansion of its popularity in the late 2000s with social media into the 2010s, they had lost control.
You end up with a President Donald Trump.
But I do feel like over the past few years they've been continually centralizing control to re-establish narrative control.
That being said, I wonder if still it is just a sinking ship and they're desperately grasping at straws.
So I'm not entirely sure It's hard to know.
I mean, we're on the outside, or at least I am.
But I think for the space that I'm in, you can look at it one of two ways, especially as you mentioned, left and right seemingly don't mean anything anymore.
There are many people on the right that are, you know, diehard Trump supporters or nationalist ultra-MAGA who say that, you know, I'm a milquetoast fence-sitter, a do-nothing, who doesn't do enough to actually get people active.
Then you have more moderate individuals and maybe more conservative individuals saying, well, you know, I watched him and then it, I sort of opened the door for me to look into other things.
And then you have the left, which just argues that I'm far right or whatever.
But in the space that I'm at, You know, I said this earlier, I recorded a segment earlier, and I said I try not to be someone who knows things.
I'm doing air quotes when I say that.
What I mean is, I don't want to come out and just say outright, hey, I saw this video on the internet, therefore I know for sure when internet video can be faked, especially now with deep fakes and all this AI stuff.
So when we see these stories about, you know, there's an interesting story pertaining to the Ohio train wreck, that the CDC just updated its toxicological reports on vinyl chloride one month before the spill, and, you know, obviously people then jumped to the conclusion, you know, it must have been staged, it must have been planned, why would they A month ago, update this report for the first time in 17 years, and then three weeks later, you get a train explosion, vinyl chloride getting burned off.
And, uh, you know, maybe.
I'm not gonna tell you I know for sure there's a conspiracy.
That's kind of my point.
I think there's a lot of people in corporate press and independent media who will just outright say, therefore it is true.
I try to avoid that, and because of that, you know, the joke is that I'm a milquetoast fence-sitter.
Yeah, which I would see, in fact, instead as retaining credibility and journalistic integrity, because one of the continually levelled accusations at people that operate within these spaces is that they are conspiratorial, is that they are reactive, refluxive, visceral.
I suppose because many of the people that have succeeded in this space, perhaps early on, have been defined by an evangelical component.
Perhaps the first wave was defined by Alex Jones, whose imprint looms large as an alternative voice, who in his kind of, I would say, in his corroding evangelism allowed himself, now demonstrably and legally, to enter into territories that were complex.
So I am It's one of the questions I sort of ask of myself.
On one level, I like the reporting to be incendiary.
I like it to be emotional.
One of the things about the conventional liberal establishment that I don't enjoy, or the traditional left, is the kind of piety, earnestness, A lack of emotion and connection.
So I do enjoy investing the stories with emotion, but I feel that there is an absolute necessity for journalistic diligence.
And it's certainly not a claim that I'm making personally, because I work an entirely different way than you do.
I know that you're much more responsible for the creation of your content.
I'm lucky to work with some great people in developing the content.
But do you feel often that it would be easier if you took a deliberate stand?
Or do you think inquiry and a general anti-establishment position is strong enough?
And does your journalistic integrity require that you stay within certain lines?
I think I can't assert things that I don't know or believe, and I know there's a lot of people who do.
I know that you can see the fall of some once great independent media establishments, I'm not going to name any, but they used to be considered truth-tellers, but then over time they realized where the money is and how to make money.
And I said this back In 2011, during Occupy Wall Street, when I'm getting a bunch of attention, I get all these activists saying, oh, Tim's a real journalist.
He's telling the truth.
And, you know, not like the corporate press and all that stuff.
And I said, it's only a matter of time before you will turn on me and say the exact same thing in the inverse, that I'm a corporate shill or that I'm a liar, that I'm a spy or something like that.
Because when the narrative supports their political agenda or tribal ideology, then you're a truth teller.
But when the narrative doesn't, then you're a shill.
And sure enough, that happened.
It happened with the 2016 election.
There was a shift happening.
I'm posting on Twitter.
I'm saying the same thing.
I'm like, look, I'm not going to sit here and just condemn a guy I don't know.
Hey, Trump didn't really say that.
Hey, you're lying about that.
And then all of a sudden, the narrative changes to these activists who once said I was the real journalist saying, wow, Tim Pool sold out, and now he's shilling for Donald Trump.
And I'm just like, well, no, it's not that.
It's that Donald Trump literally did not praise white supremacists.
That never happened.
But Joe Biden launches his campaign on it, you know, 2020 or 2019 or whatever, and they believe it's true.
Therefore, I must be a liar.
And I think we'll, I often say this, to all the people who now support me, it's going to be the exact same thing.
And I think, to varying degrees, I experience that all the time, where if I come out and say, hey, this thing that you desperately want to believe is true, there's no fact to support it, boy, do they get mad.
And then there's like an ebb and flow.
But I imagine the end result of this is just going to be that the hyper-tribalized individuals will just hate me no matter what, and that's basically what happened.
What's happening?
And then there will be middle-of-the-road people who are looking for, I don't know, more moderate assessment who will keep following me.
During the 2020 election cycle, I mean, the amount of views that I was getting were absolutely insane.
We were getting about 120 million hits per month across my channels.
Then, of course, Donald Trump loses the election.
this fraud narrative emerges that there were watermarked ballots,
that China was sending fake ballots, that the Dominion voting systems,
et cetera, et cetera. And I said, guys, there's no evidence for that.
I mean, this is ridiculous. We can talk about the lawsuits.
We can talk about Texas v. I think it was Pennsylvania and the procedural
changes that affected the 2020 election.
And then all of a sudden all of the diehard Trump supporters said I was a
shill and I was a liar and I wouldn't tell the truth. And then of course,
view counts dropped from that, but I'm not going to come out and entertain ideas without
fact or basis just because it makes money or panders to a tribe.
And thus I think the end result is maybe in 10 years there's no Timcast Media Empire or whatever people are calling it.
It's just a small podcast in the, you know, in the mid-range space where people who are interested in hearing a general assessment without a tribal, you know, point of view, although I do think there is a decent tribal point of view in that I'm anti-establishment, I'm pro-free speech, and if you are those things, then they just call you right-wing.
But, I don't know, I think we'll, I'll capture middle-of-the-road people who are interested in hearing a general assessment, but as tensions escalate, I think that the demand and the thirst is going to be for hard tribal passion, whether it's true or not.
I'm seeing that all right now.
And I gotta admit, it is quite demoralizing to see people fervently believalize who you previously thought were looking for the truth, but they don't care about the truth.
And I don't think any human is immune to this.
You know, you hear something that maybe conflicts with your worldview, and then you just have to latch onto it.
I think that's everybody.
I think it's everybody.
When you said the thing about the Trumpers, let's call them, dropping off after you didn't toe the line with the election fraud story to the degree that they would emotionally want to, it's an interesting education in how this new space operates and what this new space affords.
Clearly, economically, there is the possibility of creating and garnering kind of closed-loop media audiences that will remain devout As long as you continue to feed them the stories that they enjoy.
And as you say, it's clear that those kind of organizations are emerging.
And I must say, I sometimes I feel the presence of that pull.
Even when it comes to thumbnails, titling, you recognize there are certain narratives that are evocative and provocative.
I guess the sort of line I feel myself walking is, how do we harness this necessary, authentic and legitimate anti-establishment sentiment without falling into what I believe are the traps of some of the less savoury tropes that tend to be alloyed with some movements in that space?
Let me tell you the sad reality of this and all human interaction.
And I'll give you an unrelated topic as an example.
I remember reading about the Red Pill forums.
These are dating advice, you know, platforms, and there's pickup artists.
And the pickup artists would teach men how to attract women, and they would quantify the behaviors that were more, you know, alluring to women.
And people got mad.
And many feminists, many liberals said, that's disgusting, it's manipulative.
And my response to this was, it's a fascinating idea.
Those who naturally do these things, men who naturally behave in this way, without realizing it, are good and attractive.
Men who try to behave that way and learn how to do it are manipulative, evil, gross, and creepy.
That means that the people who naturally do these things will succeed without any kind of moral qualm, and those who seek to understand it are the bad guys.
Which means, when it comes to the news space, the people who unintentionally or ignorantly are creating shock content because they genuinely believe that, say, you know, Politician X is a lizard, They end up getting millions of views and massive growth because they naturally do the evocative thing.
And the people who then try to assess what they're doing to figure out how to attract new viewers are manipulative liars and creepy for doing so.
Don't get me wrong, those who are making the evocative content, if they're wrong, they're wrong.
If they're lying, they're lying.
But I think there are many people who genuinely believe they're telling the truth that are going to get millions of views, make millions of dollars, And that's just, what are you going to say?
They're just wrong.
They're not liars.
So it's not considered a manipulation.
It's considered someone just being ignorant.
You can call them that.
So as for you, as for me, I mean, there was a period a few years ago where I found myself titling one of my videos something about, you know, the left going insane.
And I genuinely believed it.
You know, it was a story about something pertaining to failed economic policy and social issues.
I can't remember the exact story.
It was probably three or four years ago at this point.
And I'm genuinely thinking to myself, in shock, I can't believe they're trying to implement these policies.
This is absolute psychosis.
There's no basis for this.
And so I titled it something like, you know, Democrats have truly gone insane.
Here's why.
And then right before I published it, I thought to myself, is that too much to say they're insane?
And I'm like, well, I do think they've lost their minds.
I mean, with the anti-free speech, with child sex change operations, I think they're going crazy.
And then I thought about, well, if I do use this headline, I'm going to get a million views.
And then I'm thinking, I don't know what to do.
I don't know, I don't know what's right.
Do I, do I at this point stop and say, maybe my view of this is too far and too evocative and would make things worse, but I really do think they're losing their minds.
So I decided to roll with it and just go with what I thought.
Of course, the video ended up getting 500,000 views in a day or something like that.
And then, you know, eventually as, as time goes on, I'm starting to think more and more to myself that I don't know the path out of this budding culture war, and it does feel like the left and the right, though they may not mean anything easily understandable, it does signify which tribe you exist in and which one you don't exist in.
So you can claim you're not a conservative or right-wing, but if they deem you are, then you're certainly not with them.
Now I'm at the point where it's kind of like, I don't know if this is sustainable.
Because the degree to which people are hyping up and ramping up and making their content more and more shocking, it's at the point where you have to say the most psychotic and insane thing imaginable.
So just two weeks ago, For the first time, I think, ever, I decided not to do a segment at 4 p.m.
on my channel, youtube.com slash timcast, which I'm now effectively retiring and going to be using for my website.
And the reason for this is Joe Biden had classified documents in his house.
We talked about it for two weeks.
Every day, the media adds more to the story.
Every day, the pundits who hate Joe Biden talk about how it's worse than we realize, it's worse than we realize, it's worse, it's worse, it's worse.
And then it got to the point where it's a Friday and I'm reading the news, and once again, people are saying, oh, you know that thing about the classified documents we all talked about ad nauseum for two weeks?
It's even worse!
And I said, no, stop.
No, it isn't.
We know what the story is.
And so you know what?
If this is the principal narrative of the day, if this is the big shocking news revelation, I'm not doing it.
And so I said, I'm just not, I'm going to talk about something else.
And then I like made commentary about a woman in a gym, you know, because she wasn't getting help from guys or whatever.
And I'm just, I'm just not going to, I'm not interested.
You know, and I feel like, for me, it's kind of breaking down to where I don't know what the path forward is.
I really don't.
Because we cannot exist in a space where every day things have to be worse than they were yesterday in order to attract viewership, but people aren't interested in hearing that, they're not interested in hearing stories that don't shock them, scare them, or evoke some kind of emotion.
And that means there may come a time where the news of the day is actually quite mundane, but people are demanding that you latch on to something.
So what we're seeing now, what I've experienced, which is, I don't know if demoralizing is the right word, maybe enlightening is the right word, is that in the absence of shock, people will invent shock.
And we're seeing stories that make no sense, which I don't want to cite because it would just create psychotic controversy.
Stories that make no sense and have no public merit all of a sudden are generating millions of views and it seems like this is destabilization.
I look at the demoralization Yuri Bezmenov talks about, and the next phase being destabilization, and I'm wondering if we're at that point where people have no strong morals anymore, the only thing that's driving the media ecosystem is to be as shocking as possible, and then when there's literally nothing at the top, people invent things to be shocked by.
And then the system destabilizes.
So that's what I'm kind of feeling right now.
We'll see where that leads to.
But I guess I can only say for me, I'm over it.
If I'm not seeing the news, if I'm not going to make something that just says it is more shocking, it is crazier.
just because that's what people want to hear.
And that may mean the people who intentionally do it, and the people who inadvertently do it,
will get more views, make more money, grow bigger channels, and that will be the perspective that people will live by,
because it's how you drive traffic.
My sense is that without being able to ever appreciate how algorithms operate,
particularly ones that are apparently altered, that from a human perspective,
there will be an ongoing appetite for the tombra of authenticity.
Clearly, as you've worked in this space for a long time in various guises, you've learned to discern different types of stories and narratives to the point, in fact, of observing Templates that can be mapped onto stories, trends that appear to take place as new stories are released, their life cycles, the discourse and dialectic that grows up around them, the inadvertent or unconscious oppositionism.
One of the things I've appreciated while working in this space for less time than you has been when I have encounters with journalists like Chris Hedges or the other day Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who recently wrote about the Nord Stream Pipeline and how it obviously was American Special Forces allegedly I'll say there.
And indeed obviously Glenn Greenwald because I still have an appetite not to become the thing that you're describing, sort of a hysterical siren adding to the overstimulation, the sort of intensely sugared hysteria of our new space.
because I suppose when I hear you talk to him, one thing I hope emerges is the potential
for new alliances between people that would have previously have been presumed to have
been in opposition.
As in this broadcast space, I tend towards people who have had at least a dalliance with
or a cultural relationship with the left, i.e. yourself or Jimmy Dore, over people that
are avowedly traditionally and evidently conservative, even though sometimes you do find that those
people on a personal level are much easier to get along with, much sort of sweeter, you
Like when you sort of talk to someone like Tucker Carlson, he's just absolutely lovely.
Like, it's extraordinary.
Like, one of the things on my journey that has changed is how I regard the left.
You know, I went down, while you were heavily involved in Occupy, I went there.
I was still an actor at that point and I was in a movie and I went down and visited that space and I was fascinated by it and what it might represent and what it might mean and how it actually did represent the emergence of new communicative abilities and the potential for a new populist movement and obviously you know more than most people about how that ended up.
About how it became diffuse and where it fell apart, perhaps.
But like, today we were talking about an old story where there's sort of an attempt in academia to make the word freedom become a right-wing trope, that freedom is a sort of a racist or Bigoted word and we did a presentation on how really that is an attempt to keep people divided.
That's an attempt to calcify existing interests.
We also did a story about how lobbying, there are literal lobbying groups now overtly using diversity as an opportunity to bring together groups like Walmart, Pfizer, the usual suspects under a banner of diversity with absolutely nothing about diversity Taking place.
So it feels to me that one of the greatest failings or contributors to the current climate that you've been describing in your answers has been that there is no political movement now that represents ordinary people.
I don't think the libertarian right or the Tea Party right.
And I don't even really think any aspect of the Democrat Party is interested actually in the nuts and bolts, blood and guts of what's going to improve the conditions for ordinary Americans.
So perhaps all of the invective and incendiary rhetoric that we've been discussing Becomes the only emotional, the only place that catharsis can take place.
Even in the example of the Trump fans migrating after you couldn't service their feelings of injustice.
Because surely their feelings of injustice are legitimate, if not some of the targets of their rhetoric, in my opinion, as a somewhat old school liberal person, in some regards, you know, the presumed arguments about immigration and all that sort of stuff.
So I wonder, do you agree, do you tend to lay the blame at the door more of the Liberal establishment than anyone else for this new emergent space?
I have no idea, to be completely honest.
I mean, there was a period, obviously, where we look at the corporate press, we look at the institutions, and we accuse them of being power-hungry.
But I wonder now, with how things are going, if this, in fact, was just... I think in the past few years, this conversation has come up with institutional capture, or the Great March to the institutions, in that over the past several decades, Marxist-Leninist ideas made their way into our institutions over the span of a few decades, took control, and are now pushing out these ideas to younger people, which results in destabilizing forces, confusion, and it's a demoralization.
So I think most people are probably familiar with Yuri Bezmenov, former KGB.
He gave an interview in, I believe, 1984, where he said that this process has begun in the United States.
And I think he was saying that in the U.S., it's already too late, that the institutions through the baby boomers had been corrupted with this ideology, which would demoralize a nation.
And this, or more than that, I mean Western culture, and demoralize as in not morale, but in morals.
So people have no cohesive moral structure anymore.
And I think you can see this, as you mentioned, there's no movement that really represents anybody.
And I think that's because no one has a shared moral perspective anymore.
There are arguments being made by postmodernists that morals are subjective and don't exist as it is, and while that's technically true, without shared morals, then you have a bunch of competing groups with no shared goals, fighting with each other, ultimately leading to total destabilization.
I think that's where we're at now.
You know, a lot of people are suggesting that what we're seeing with the balloons over the skies, the UFOs being shot down, there's a fuel line disruption from California to Nevada.
We've got chickens being culled, egg shortages.
We have the train derailment in Ohio and the toxic chemical spill affecting the water base for five million people.
People are shooting up power substations across the United States.
Man, maybe it just feels like we've completely destabilized, or this is the beginning.
I don't want to sound too pessimistic, but I don't know what's going on with you guys over in the UK, but in the US, it sounds like crazy stuff is happening.
Maybe it just sounds like it.
These things happen normally, but nobody ever talks about them, or without the internet, we don't hear about them.
Or maybe, as Yuri Bezmenov described, we are now entering into the next phase of destroying a country, which is the destabilization period.
I mean, whilst it could sound hysterical and somewhat culturally narcissistic to assume that this is some kind of end time, it perhaps would also be naive to not acknowledge that we don't live in a limitlessly sustainable cultural space and that our culture doesn't appear to be adapting well.
to new phenomena, such as our ability to communicate.
It makes me wonder.
He says, mind-gooey, that numerous publics can now form around numerous topics almost instantly, and counter-narratives can immediately appear.
In 2001, there was as much published information due to the advances in online technology as there were in the previous In all of published history, and the year after that, there was as much information published again.
And now there is just so much information, there's a kind of an impossibility for the maintenance of centralized entities and institutions, let alone the incumbent moralities that would have to underwrite and legitimize those institutions.
So there is a tension, and perhaps we're feeling the Playing out of that tension in the events that you just listed, it suggests to me that what's required is either a process of decentralization that's reflective of the realities that we're now experiencing, i.e.
the potential for community organization to happen more locally and more
democratically.
But what is happening at the moment, it seems, is the opposite of that.
An attempt to double down on centralized power and to create the conditions that legitimize authoritarianism,
whether that's the necessity to censor and control the public discourse because of
all sorts of thought crimes and language crimes, the need to lock people in their homes because of
successive, presumed successive, pandemics, the requirement to monitor people's medical
situation and movements, either because of immigration, but again more likely
because of germs.
What it feels to me is that as power requires now more tools to enact its power and to continue
with its telos trajectory, we have to create the conditions in which that power is legitimate.
It seems that really what is required is a negotiation.
I don't think there is an easy outcome.
Certainly I think decentralizing power, devolving power would come with a great deal of complexity.
I'm sort of wondering what the alternative is.
I wonder, you know, you bring up good points about this, what seems to be a hyper-authoritarian
rise, pandemic lockdowns lasting years, you know, forced vaccination, things like that.
And I have to wonder if the fragmentation of our cultures in the West, because it's not just, you know, every country has something similar happening.
The U.S., obviously, we have our culture war.
I wonder if the reaction from the machine is to try and wrap itself around this fragmenting You know, multicultural system and try and gain control of it.
But in doing so, it's just actually adding to the destabilization.
You know, obviously, well, I'll put it this way.
When the pandemic first started here in the US, a lot of people were saying this will finally unite the fractured cultures.
People are going to come together on a common enemy.
It certainly didn't.
The opposite.
It fragmented even worse.
So now, when we see the rise of these authoritarian measures, when we see, you know, in the U.S., for instance, we had several Democrat governors, like Cuomo and Wolf and Newsom, putting COVID patients in nursing homes and actually killing people, or I should say, at the very least, if you want to be light on it, exposing vulnerable individuals to the virus directly for no reason, resulting in their death.
These efforts just result in further destabilization.
Or another example is the 2020 election.
In the United States, you had what I would only say is illegal and unconstitutional action being taken by several states to alter the voting system.
Pennsylvania is the easiest example, where their constitution actually says absentee ballots, meaning voting by mail, can only be done under certain circumstances, but they ignored the constitution, passed a law anyway, and this is Republicans and Democrats together, and that had a significant impact on the outcome of the election in Pennsylvania.
That effort, I suppose, to help Joe Biden win results in no one trusting elections at this point.
And then it results in people outright refusing to participate in elections.
And then you end up now with the narrative being, How did Democrats do so well in the midterm when by every metric they should have failed?
And it's for two reasons.
One, many Republicans don't care anymore and they're not going to participate in a system they think is illegitimate.
And then you have universal mail-in voting expanded despite the fact the pandemic's over.
They've retained these broken systems.
And now it's no longer about whether or not someone wants a politician for their policies.
It's a question of, can you get the vote?
Can you go knock on someone's door and say, fill it out?
And if that's the case, the only thing anyone's competing for at this point
is an arbitrary number that looks bigger than yours.
With that, the system is just further destabilizing.
So maybe they're trying to get ahold of the system, maybe.
They thought Donald Trump was breaking it apart and Joe Biden must be the man to save everybody.
Sure, but it's like a Chinese finger trap.
The harder they pull, the worse they actually make it.
I suppose there's no real obvious solution because if you don't pull,
then you just keep your finger stuck in the trap.
Maybe the real solution would have been I don't know.
I don't see how they pull their way out of this.
And with the way things are going internationally, I wonder if we're actually just in either some kind of destabilization or it could be World War III.
That's maybe a bit hyperbolic to say.
Maybe it'll be a good headline to put on a YouTube clip or a Rumble clip.
But maybe what we're experiencing is information warfare meant to disrupt our efforts and our economy because there are competing international interests that are trying to gain control of either Taiwan or Ukraine.
And thus, the whole system may not come crashing down in nuclear hellfire, but in economic destabilization and ideological destabilization.
Certainly destabilisation has come up a lot in this conversation and I perhaps would track that to a loss of faith in institutions.
Perhaps that's a trend that's been taking place for longer than a century and is certainly
increasing exponentially now.
And you tag a lot of interesting geopolitical narratives there, like the dealing with the
way that this Russia-Ukraine story has played out, the way that it has similarly been a
censored narrative, an inability to acknowledge the complexity of the conditions that have
led to this complex conflict, an unwillingness, I think, to openly iterate the beneficiaries
of the reconstruction of Ukraine, the potential illegitimacy of some aspects of Zelensky's
past.
I'm just talking about like the Pandora Papers saying that he had some offshore investments and that Ukraine is a deeply corrupt country and that many of the oligarchs or one at least of the oligarchs they booted out was heavily, heavily connected to him.
And of course, obviously, Hunter Biden.
I'm not telling you anything you don't know.
I know that, mate.
I mean, I'm just saying that That with stories like that being presented to us so reductively, so simplistically, I think it increases this lack of faith in institutions.
It seems that there is still an audience, in the same way as perhaps there were for newspapers, that will remain with the news sources they formerly had.
And now with the advance of this, you know, tensions between the United States and China, and the peculiarity of the bomb, the balloon and UFO stuff, It appears to me, and it sometimes feels to me, and I don't know if this is my own grandiosity, Tim, and there's a fair chance that it is because it has been in the past, that it isn't enough for us to report on this stuff, that you have a background in activism, that there appears to be a sort of a faith given to people in this space that has absented the old order institutional areas, and do you ever feel
That there is perhaps even an obligation to enter into more active areas of the culture rather than report, arge and analysis.
That's everything we've been doing at TimCast.com.
We started expanding.
I mean, obviously, I've got my show, TimCast IRL.
People sign up to become members so that they can watch our uncensored segments.
It's a fairly typical thing people do with podcasts and vodcasts.
And instead of investing that money in more commentators, libertarians, conservatives, whatever you want to call them, We invested in cultural shows, like we have one show called Pop Culture Crisis, which is just talking about movies, video games, actors, etc.
And that is the first foray in this reporting space, this communication space, into a cultural space.
We're also in the process of, we've purchased a building, we're setting up a coffee shop and hangout, because we need physical spaces where people can come together and hang out to build communities.
So I often say, you know, the investments we're making are not in, you know, I'm not taking the money I make from all of this and just buying myself boats or something ridiculous.
I'm buying cultural endeavors, trying to push back on the cultural decay and bring people together in maybe some last attempt at saving some kind of, you know, communal family structure based community with certain moral values or whatever, independence, freedom, liberty, personal responsibility, all of those things.
And I tell people, because I tell people to be active.
But what that means is, for one, obviously you gotta vote.
As much as you might think the system is busted, if you think they're cheating, make it hard for them to cheat.
Go out, take the time that you can and vote.
If you get a mail-in ballot, you fill it out, you do it.
But more importantly, you need to eat healthy, you need to exercise.
I recommend, and you know, maybe people don't have to listen to me, I say get out of cities, Get a place, become as self-sustainable as possible, as possible.
So I told people, I've been telling people for years, get chickens.
And everybody, they laugh and they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, chickens are funny, silly little things.
But guess what?
Now we got a chicken and egg shortage in the US, and I'm getting hit up by people being like, I've not noticed because I get six fresh eggs every morning.
So my attitude is, if the system is decaying, if it is destabilizing, You can try and hold on to each side and pull them together as hard as you can.
And I would say, you know, try your best.
But it does seem like a single individual trying to hold the ropes as a boat is sinking to pull it.
It's not going to happen.
If everybody comes together, you can try and save it.
But the problem is, as this ship is sinking, you have a million people on one side and a million people on the other, and they are actively pulling in opposite directions.
In which case, I say the best thing you can do is Sharpen your blade, figuratively.
Strengthen yourself, strengthen your family.
Be prepared for what destabilization may mean.
And if that means food shortages, fuel shortages, then take that into account.
We've had power outages.
We now have, you know, I've told people for a long time, Get emergency food, get emergency water, not because you want to prep for the apocalypse, but because sometimes it rains, sometimes it snows.
And if it does and your road gets shut down, maybe it'll be good to have some water and food in your closet if you get trapped for a couple days.
But then, of course, for those who live in West Virginia and Ohio and Indiana, right now they're dealing with mass contamination of the groundwater by a whole bunch of crazy chemicals.
Now we're hearing that they're burning off vinyl chloride.
Hydrogen chloride is being produced, going up into the atmosphere and produces acid rain.
We're seeing photos of cars drenched in some kind of white residue that seemingly is stripping paint off to a certain degree on this car.
Now, I can't confirm that car, that that's actually what happened to this car.
For all I know, it's just salt or something.
But at least that's what people are saying.
What we can say is that politicians in western West Virginia are concerned about the groundwater because the Ohio River Basin is presumably about to be contaminated by all of these chemicals from this train.
If you are someone who stored up a little bit of water and food, you may not be as concerned.
But now the scary thing is you got a woman in this area, all her chickens are dead.
So this is freaky stuff.
Maybe it's anomalous, maybe it washes away in a few months, we won't think twice about it.
Or maybe things are as bad as many people claim they are.
Maybe Joe Biden is as bad of a president as many people think he is, and I certainly think so.
In which case, the smartest thing you can do is, sure, be active politically, be active culturally, but you better make sure you have the tools to survive if the machine isn't there to save you.
Because I'll tell you this, man, I was in New York when Hurricane Sandy hit.
And it was a crazy sight when the power was out for I don't know how many days or whatever.
I went to a bodega and they had two guys standing out front holding two-by-fours or some kind of, you know, wood for bludgeoning people.
And there was a line and they were allowing one person at a time.
And I walked in and he said, all the perishables are expired.
You can't eat them.
Sorry.
Anything that's not perishable, you can buy cash only.
And it's a crazy thing to experience that the system, and even a place like New York, broke because of a storm.
If you think one storm is bad, wait till you see the expansion of...
You got law enforcement reporting extremists are shooting up power substations
and shutting the power grid down.
And this has happened like 30 times in the past couple of months.
Imagine what it will be like in your area with millions of people and no electricity.
So I don't know.
I'm not saying the apocalypse is happening.
I don't know anything about that.
All I know is if you follow the rhetoric online, it's sounding freakier by the day.
And if you're not prepared for something freaky to happen, well, then you probably won't survive.
Yeah, it's extraordinary because no one wants to sound like a prepper but you want to be aware that we're held together by machines of increasing instability and that we have become for, you know, nearly a century spellbound by comfort now, latched to this system in a thousand different ways via screens and Easily accessible food, and that we sometimes feel like a species who've forgotten who we are.
When you talked about sharpening your blade, I thought about how local that kind of chaos is.
Do you ever consider moving out of your country?
Do you ever consider building a community?
Do you ever think about where you might go?
Do you ever harbour those kind of ideas?
Oh yeah, yeah, but I'm not entirely sure those are feasible or rational.
If there's one place I probably would go, it'd be El Salvador.
They've implemented a Bitcoin economy.
Crime is dropping.
Prosperity is through the roof.
It's really improving.
And, you know, I've got some friends, Max Keiser and Stacey Herbert, very prominent Bitcoin personalities are down there and they're doing a lot of work.
And so that, you know, I'm not like the biggest crypto person, but it is really promising to hear what's going on down in El Salvador.
So when we look at the destabilization in this country, the escalation of political violence, the weaponization of a government against its ideological enemies, yeah, yeah, you know, we've talked about maybe we just invest in some property down there.
So worst case scenario, we got somewhere to go.
Well, for the time being, where I'm at is, uh, I was in New York for five or so years.
And then it was a black nationalist executing two police officers and bombs being planted that made me decide to leave.
So I first moved to the Jersey side, thinking, okay, I'm away from the chaos, but still close enough to the city to do work.
That's when the bombs got planted, and it was in Jersey and in New York, and I said, okay, I don't think people really care.
The metro is the metro.
So I moved further south, and then I moved to South Jersey.
You know, I moved to the southern area of the New York metro, closer to Staten Island, in a place called Bayonne.
Then I decided, okay, it's not enough.
Moved to southern Jersey.
I'm thinking, okay, and now I'm in South Jersey, Away from all the cities, but I'm close to Philadelphia.
Close enough.
But we're on the other side of the river, so we're probably fine.
Then the Summer of Love happened, and the rioters crossed the bridge into Jersey, and we could hear the sirens and the helicopters, and I said, okay, I don't want to be anywhere near this if this keeps escalating.
So now we're in West Virginia and we're an hour and a half from the nearest major, from like Washington, D.C.
We're close enough to some smaller metro areas.
We're a few hours away from Pittsburgh and Philadelphia still, but we're in an area that is mountainous and fairly rural.
And when people come here to do the show, they're like, I'm driving through the forest and these long winding roads, no idea where I'm at.
And I'm like, yeah, that's kind of the point.
We don't want to be near other crazy people when crazy things happen.
We want to have enough space to where we can sustain ourselves so that, one, I don't want to be a drag on the environment.
Hey, if you're a lefty, you should be thinking the same thing.
You're living in cities.
You're causing all this pollution.
You're using these vehicles.
You're using these plastics.
You're contributing to climate change.
Why don't you move out of the city?
Why don't you reduce your carbon footprint, get some animals, and be self-sufficient?
You're conservative?
Same problem.
You live in these cities, increasing destabilization, political violence.
The policies don't seem to make sense.
They're taxing to oblivion.
Why don't you move out of the city, get away from the chaos, become self-sufficient?
That's step one.
If in the event the U.S.
government does get weaponized to a more extreme degree, like with what we've already seen being bad enough, yeah, then maybe it's time to go to El Salvador or, you know, Costa Rica or something.
Yeah, next stop, El Salvador, appears to be the route.
Before we wrap up, Tim, I wanted to touch on a few of the moments where your show has burst beyond its already huge audience and into the broader consciousness.
Yeah, I think it was staged.
I think they set us up.
the Kanye moment. What was that like in the room? I know that you sort of went through a lot of rigmarole to get him
there and he sort of exploded out of the place.
But what was that like now with a little time to reflect on it in the mythology of your world?
Yeah, I think it was staged. I think they set us up. When when when Ye stormed out of the show,
he went right to the municipal airport 15 minutes away with a private jet waiting for him.
Anybody who's flown in a private jet, which is a very, very small group of people, knows that the ability to book a private jet typically cannot be done in the span of a couple hours.
And you factor in a couple other things.
We know the jet that picked him up came from Where did it come from?
It came from New Jersey about 45 minutes away, flight time, and landed with a crew ready and available and fueled up for a five-hour flight to the West Coast.
What people need to understand about why I do not believe that was a legitimate, oh, I just happened to book a jet, is that the FAA has regulations on how many hours a crew can be active.
And if they're contacted before their wait period is up, it resets their wait period.
So, sure enough, Ye comes on the show.
Before the show starts, he is calm and rational, and we are discussing, we're setting the cameras up, we're testing the audio, people are going to the bathroom, getting something to drink, we're about 45 minutes out, completely calm.
He starts talking about how he thinks Jewish people control things, and I said, yeah, but come on, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and he's calm and he goes, yeah, well, you know, Elon, he works for them anyway, right?
He looks up at our TV where we have this article, Excuse me.
Accusing him of being anti-semitic, and he very calmly says, so what's this about Mike Pence?
You know, he betrays Trump or something, and then Nick Fuentes responds and explains the situation, and he's just like, yeah, okay, okay.
As soon as the cameras turn on, he goes from talking like, yeah, it's really interesting you bring that up, because I kind of thought this, and that's his demeanor.
Cameras turn on, and y'all, man, let me tell you something about this, they call me, and I'm saying, and then I'm just like, whoa, what the, just happened?
All of a sudden, he's behaving totally differently.
I, before the show started, I said, let's talk about what happened with this White House thing.
And he's like, yeah, of course, of course.
Then the camera turns on and he goes, yo, I want to talk to you about Jewish people.
And then when he asks me a question that I said, it's not they though, or whatever the question was, he just gets up and leaves.
He says on the show, I could book a PJ and get out of here or whatever.
Like he could book a private jet within a matter of an hour or so and have a jet at the Frederick airport in Maryland.
I think it was a plan, and I think either they were trying to get what they got with Alex Jones, where he said all that stuff about Hitler, from me, but I'm not going to give it to him.
And Alex Jones was more accommodating, I'm not trying to be disrespectful, but he was more willing to let Ye say whatever he wanted.
I think it was a setup.
I think the idea was, look, they know, as much as they would try to say, yeah, Alex Jones says, no one knows who Tim Pool is, no one knows that show or whatever.
We are consistently the most viewed live show on YouTube for our time slot.
You know, we get 40,000 to 60,000 concurrent views, 8 p.m.
Monday through Friday.
They know that.
Milo tells them that.
I don't know if Milo is in on it or whatever.
He disavowed them.
He's not working with them.
But I personally believe the most likely scenario is They pre-booked a private jet to leave at that time.
They knew they were going to cause a scene and storm out because it would get them the front page of the news.
If Ye came on this show and just talked normally like he had talked to me, like we have a show we call The Green Room where we pre-record The guest arriving.
Watch that.
It's on TimCast.com and you will see a calm and rational Kanye saying, I gotta figure out how to become president though.
How do I do it?
And he's very calm.
Then you watch him on the live show, totally different.
I think they knew that if they did the show as normal, nobody would care.
But if he got mad, said something offensive, and stormed off, he'd be on the front page of TMZ.
Lo and behold, he was instantly.
Then, you can see in the viral videos from the paparazzi, paparazzi were already at the airport, 15 minutes away, filming him as he boarded his private jet and left.
I called a private jet broker, and I said, for one, Did you give him the jet?
Did you give him a jet that was already available?
And they said, there wasn't one, no.
And I said, then how did he get this jet?
And they were like, I don't know.
And I said, is it possible to book a private jet and have it waiting for you within a couple hours?
And the broker started laughing and said, I've never seen it.
The only time I've ever seen anything like it is when some sports celebrity, they named him, I'm not gonna say their name, Needed to fly for an emergency meeting and it was like San Francisco to San Jose or something.
That was the only time I've ever seen it because it's like a 10-minute jump.
But she was like, I have never seen someone claim successfully that they booked a private jet an hour out and it was already landed with a crew available, fueled up for a five-hour flight, and they took off, you know, within a few hours.
That being said, It is yay.
You know, he is arguably a billionaire or was a billionaire.
And she was like, maybe somebody canceled their flight he knew or he convinced someone to drop their flight and he took it instead.
But boy, does it sure sound like he won the lottery on that one if that was true.
So anyway, long story short, I think they staged it for press.
That's what it sounds like to me.
And it worked for him really, really well.
And I got to be honest, in the end, it sort of worked out for all of us.
I would have much preferred to have a real conversation about the news.
But the press I end up getting is even leftists were saying Tim Pool pushes back on anti-Semitism, Kanye West storms out, raises everybody's profile.
I wonder if the man is just a PR genius.
I mean, I know he is.
And that he planned this whole thing because all it did was made everybody get more attention in a way that worked their agendas.
Thank you, it was beautifully described and analysed.
With the Crowder Daily Wire story and your subsequent conversation with Stephen, what do you think this story tells us about this emergent space, the personalities within it and the power coalescing around independent media, obviously in this case in particular of the right.
How do you think this, what does this tell us about this new emergent technology, these new voices and this new power I suppose?
I feel like Steven Crowder is, I agree with him ideologically.
And the controversy here is he was offered a contract by the, I'm sorry, a term sheet laying out the terms potentially that would go into a contract for a deal with the Daily Wire that said you'll be penalized if you get a strike.
And the view from Crowder was this basically means he has to abide by the rules of big tech.
He made an interesting point.
He said, why wasn't Rumble included in this term sheet?
If Crowder is getting comparable views on Rumble when he's suspended from YouTube, why penalize him just because YouTube gave him a hit, when he can still get, I think he's saying he gets like 75 to 80 percent of the traffic on Rumble?
Obviously there's some loss, but why should he be penalized when he could just move to a different platform?
And that, I think that's an interesting point.
What I see with all of these networks, there's a problem, and how it relates to Crowder, I don't think Crowder understands running the business.
And I don't mean this to be disrespectful, I like the guy.
But he hasn't run a business, he's worked for other people.
I then take a look at these other networks, Rumble or Daily Wire or anyone else trying to do something similar.
Rumble's doing something somewhat different, but they are signing people to do these podcasting deals.
And I just don't feel like, I feel like there's a big driver of maximizing revenue over a sustainable system.
And that is, these networks, you know, mainly the Daily Wire, want you to do these injected ads, or they want to sell ads and they don't quite understand the space, and the space is subscription models.
That's what Crowder was saying.
Crowder was saying, the ads create problems for the audience and for the system, where it degrades the content and then makes you beholden, it sours the content.
I agree with him on that.
We do almost no sponsorships for any of our content.
Almost not.
Only a small handful.
And that's mostly out of loyalty, because they help us get to where we are.
And we like them.
We like these companies.
But it's interesting, because there are two potential futures described in the Crowder-DailyWire conflict.
I think both do good work.
I like the DailyWire guys.
I don't agree with how they do contracts.
So when we negotiated, I said, nah, not for me, guys.
But I appreciate it.
You do good things.
Keep it up.
There's a future where the independent media space goes the route of Hollywood, and creates the same kind of infrastructure that Hollywood has, but with a different ideological slant, more free speech.
Or it goes the route that Crowder is describing, in that individuals retain the things they create and build, and never have to worry about being fired, cancelled, or censored.
I mostly agree with Crowder.
I think any new creator, any new influencer, any new personality or commentator should control their own networks.
And I don't know if a centralized system with contracts and limitations and penalties is the future that we want to build.
For the time being, I don't know where we're going to go.
But I think the Hollywood model is going to be the stronger model because you go to an up and coming young person, you say we're going to overpay you.
But we're going to own it.
They're going to say yes in two seconds.
That's the way the system's always been.
But I always advise people, if you do it yourself, and that means sacrifice early on, work really hard, you will eventually own it and never have to worry about being fired.
The alternative from, say, The Daily Wire is, yeah, do a two-year deal with us, we'll own what you make, but when you leave, you'll be famous and have a kickstart.
So it's an interesting argument to be made.
I don't think either is, you know, apocalypticly bad, but We'll see which one wins.
We'll see which format takes over.
I suppose what this space is affording all of us is the possibility, at least, you know, other than the gatekeepers that are emerging in the big tech space and the ever plain alliances that they're making, that the Twitter files in particular revealed, and we long sense, and because they have the kind of commercial partnerships that traditional broadcasters always had, and therefore the same kind of It seems that the tendency will be towards some form of centralization and perhaps what we're talking about here is something that's quite marginal.
power and ultimately the same conversion interests have always governed
institutions of that size. It seems that the tendency will be towards some form
of centralization and perhaps what we're talking about here is
something that's quite marginal. What I'm starting to sense is the possibility for
organizations like yours to have a value beyond the reporting of news in the same
way I suppose that branding has always assumed to have had.
It represents people in a way beyond the perfunctory usage of the product.
It represents who they are, who they feel that they are, and I'm interested to hear about the kind of cultural artifacts that you're starting to create and the potential for organization beyond that and a possible community in El Salvador.
Oh yeah, possible community in El Salvador.
I mean, the El Salvador thing's probably just retiring, you know, by the water and finding a cheap property and saying, leave me alone.
But I probably would keep doing this work to a certain degree, depending on, you know, it would take an extreme event to get me to want to leave to go to El Salvador if I ever did.
But in terms of what we're building and where we go, I don't know if the model we're building actually is the future.
So, you know, a lot of people talk about Tim Pool's building a media empire or whatever, and I'm like, I kind of feel like it just looks like one.
You know, we've got a lot of projects.
We've got Tales from the Inverted World.
We've got Pop Culture Crisis.
We've got Cast Castle.
But these things are just fun things.
They're fun projects.
I've got a show.
I guess it's a big show.
I've got a morning show, which is smaller.
It's about half as big.
And I don't, you know, Timcast IRL isn't in the top 10 podcasts around the world.
It's not that big.
I mean, it's big on YouTube, I guess, but combining all the views, it's kind of interesting that people think it's as big as it is when I don't think it is.
We get a lot of live viewers at night at once, but we don't get nearly as many as Tucker Carlson does.
Granted, they're mostly older and we have younger people.
No, what I see happening is maybe we're visible and maybe the actions I've taken with like, say, buying a Times Square billboard create the perception that we're more powerful than we are.
But I think the reality is most people who make money in this space hoard it.
They make money, they put it in the bank, they invest it, they give it to their families or things like that.
Me?
I just spend it on weird stuff.
Like, I bought a 95-foot tall billboard of my rooster in Times Square, because I thought it was funny.
Because my view is, you gotta throw a pie.
You gotta do something.
And I just don't like the idea that so many people come to their work, say their thing, but their real priorities are elsewhere.
They're not actually interested in affecting the culture in a positive way.
So I think the fact that I'm willing to reinvest the money we make from the show back into other projects makes it look like we're bigger than we are, when in reality there are way better funded shows with way more viewership that seem smaller.
So, I don't know.
Perception is reality, I guess.
Maybe it's just I'm good at making it look like we're doing big stuff.
Or maybe we really are.
Thank you, Tim.
Tim, thanks so much for joining us today.
Thanks for the ongoing work that you do and the difference that you're making in this space and what seems to me to be an almost pathological commitment to integrity and authenticity that I think perhaps even goes beyond What you're measuring, because when I heard you tell the Kanye story, I thought, God, look how much analysis and detail and scrutiny has gone into this anecdote.
I really appreciate you, Tim.
I really appreciate you being in the space.
Thanks for the help that you've given us as we evolve and develop our projects as well.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks for having me.
We look forward to having you.
Yeah, I can't wait to come down that winding mountain road and travel through the pines and see the skateboard ramp and act normal in the green room.
And then the minute that the cameras go on, kick off and start saying, this should be recolonized.
King George III, tip over, throw coffee on the floor.
Oh, man.
Thanks, Tim.
Thanks so much for your time.
Lots of love, man.
Thanks for having me.
Take it easy.
You can catch Tim's show every weekday from 8pm.
That's Eastern Time at Timcast.com.
You can follow him on Twitter at Timcast.
And of course, you can watch him on Rumble or wherever you consume your content.
Please join me next week when my special guest will be Jeremy Corbell who's of course going to talk to us about UFOs, balloons, the deep state.
Are they using these UFO stories right now to distract us or are we finally entering into a phase of history where we acknowledge that we're not alone in the universe and perhaps even religious entities and scriptural tales of lore are filled with extraterrestrial entities.
We'll also be speaking to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges and Christian Smalls will be live in the studio with me, the Amazon Labour Union leader that we spoke to a couple of weeks ago, who will be joining us to talk more about the potential for a global workers' movement.
Sign up to Locals for my weekly exclusive show, Stay Connected, a weekly meditation.
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