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April 6, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
01:01:02
Oh SH*T! NATO EXPANDS! Russia To Retaliate?! - #107 - Stay Free With Russell Brand
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I'm going to go ahead and do that. And then I'm going to go ahead and do the other one.
I'm going to go ahead and do that.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
We've got a live shot there.
Hello there, you awakening wonders.
Thanks for joining me on Rumble for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
If you're watching this on YouTube right now, join us on Rumble, particularly after about 10, 15 minutes or so, where we will be using freedom of speech to say the most uncanny, absurd, and ultimately truthful things.
Things that might not please the establishment, but will certainly present opportunities for you to awaken, form new alliances, and ultimately new systems that will replace This corrupt carnival that's taking place even now, particularly around Donald Trump's arraignment and ongoing criminalization.
We'll be talking about the criminalization of Trump and how it distracts us from significant global events like Finland joining NATO and speaking to Aaron Maté about that at length.
Aaron Maté, our fellow conspiracy theorist and far right-wing, not just right-wing, Far right.
We see, we look over our shoulder, there's Mussolini, Oswald Mosley, and the big little guy.
They're just back there going, come back!
Come back to neoliberalism!
Come back to the lack of inquiry that passes for mainstream media reporting.
How are you today, on-screen assistant, Mr Gareth?
Yes, very well, very well.
Oh, you feel quite well, do you?
Oh, yes.
How are your old biochemical and immune systems holding up?
Doing alright.
Thanks Ross.
Fortunately this is a period of grind, of sustained broadcast.
How you know that the Trump trial is being exaggerated is the fetishisation and amplification of the smallest detail.
Have a listen.
to this reporter trying to discern and diagnose anger from the side of someone's head like using a still listen to it like i mean i've been obsessively in love with people over the course of my love life over the course of my life i've been obsessively in love with people But I've never, like, scrutinised a person's face, like, trying to discern some sort of real emotion in quite the manner that this CNN reporter scrutinises Trump, trying to divine anger as if it was some hidden stream being pursued by a rod.
Let's have a look.
If we could go back to the picture that we just showed a second ago, he was looking off to the distance.
He looked really irritated and annoyed.
It was a profile photo that we just showed.
There it is.
The one before, that wasn't it.
Oh no, that wasn't it.
It's this one.
This one, see?
It's very distinct, this one.
Look at that!
Look at, like, that, like, also, wouldn't you just freeze someone?
Like, and actually, one of the ways that I can tell a really good actor in a movie is, you know, sometimes when you press pause in a movie, not for any nefarious or onanistic reason, you're just pausing it because you do now, the same way as you watch everything with subtitles on now, the way the world's all changed and everything.
Do you watch everything with subtitles?
I actually do, yeah.
We do, don't we?
We do, everyone does.
Like, when you pause it... That's my dog, Bear.
Bear!
Stop it!
Stop it, Bear.
We're trying to understand the news.
You might as well analyse Bear doing that now and say that that has got some sort of mythic, archetypal connotation.
Something I would do, actually.
Staring off into the distance, as he was.
Bear staring off into the distance.
Could it be because of these dog treats?
Or is it because he knows that he made an illegal payment to Stormzy Daniels?
There he goes.
Bear, what the hell was that hush money all about, damn you?
Was it a misdemeanor or a felony?
It's a felony.
It might have started as a misdemeanor, but by God, we're going to amplify it.
It'll be a felony by the time we've finished with it.
It's either amplify this to a felony or address the fact that our political movement offers no meaningful alternatives to systemic corruption, and we ain't going to be doing that anytime soon.
Yeah, if you pause a film, you can tell.
Like, say if you pause Daniel Day-Lewis, probably at any moment in There Will Be Blood, he'll always be sort of going, Hey!
My milkshake!
I stole... Like, I mean, he'll always be being that dude.
Sure.
Like, you won't catch him just sort of going, what's that?
You know what I mean?
Like, he'll always... Look, that's the mark of a good actor, I would say.
He's always... I imagine that was what you did on the set of... I'm another example.
Sure.
Sarah Marshall.
Sarah Marshall, Arthur, the one where I'm a rabbit, the one where I'm a mouse, the one where I'm a troll.
The one where you kiss Dalek Baldwin.
The Baldwin one.
Any one of those, you pause me, I'm conveying the exact right emotion.
So, like, the way that they're sort of trying to... Like, Trump there, he could be about to go, like, mate?
Yeah.
It could be anything.
That's not like... Even the bit where they said, uh, staring off into the distance.
I mean, how distant can it be?
It's a courtroom.
It's not even that big.
Yeah, he's not, like, at the Grand Canyon, is he?
No.
He's not going to be, like, looking... He's just looking over there a bit.
Yeah.
They're filling time, is what they're doing.
They're filling!
Unlike us, where we've already... Oh, we're not filling.
We've got a Chris Hedges quote coming up that's going to knock your socks off.
We're going to be quoting Baudrillard.
As usual, because we're interested in pointing out that this is more than a political crisis.
This is an existential crisis.
And by God, we need a crisis, because as they say, crisis is opportunity.
Christ-a-tunity, as Homer Simpson said.
Because this is an opportunity for us to address what's happening geopolitically.
While all this is going on, while Putin's being endlessly compared to Hitler, Finland are joining NATO.
We're being told... We've got this in a minute.
We're going to show you a clip in a bit.
The description of NATO is worthy of The Simpsons.
You're going to love this.
But anyway, let's just watch a bit more of Trump's face and see what we can project onto this banal image.
Amy Gengel, you've been covering Donald Trump for a long time.
That is a pissed off Donald Trump.
Right.
You know, this is not defiant.
We've seen pictures that sort of are sobering.
No question, that is an angry Donald Trump.
That is angry.
That's not defiant.
They've got no moral authority anymore, I don't think.
I just want to use this.
This is a great quote from John Baudrillard, or Jean, to say it properly.
Nice.
Even as much as the French have irritated the English over the years, many long years, I will say their names properly.
Well done.
Check this out.
The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent.
They can't on CNN go, look, to be honest... Don't know what he was thinking.
Don't know what he was thinking.
He could be thinking anything then.
He might be holding a fart.
Yeah.
Because you know Donald Trump will have been thinking things that weren't about the trial, or weren't about this case.
of a sock and he could be just sort of trying to go, oh can I get an alpha there? Oh I can't.
Yeah.
Like trying to move a toenail inside a sock.
Because you know Donald Trump will have been thinking things that weren't about the trial,
or weren't about this case. Because we all do at all times.
I in the middle of some of the most important moments of my life still stop to sometimes
think I wonder if West Ham are going to be alright.
You know what I mean?
That crosses my mind.
I can't believe I'm actually thinking about that now, because I've got other stuff going on.
But humans are complex, and thoughts are rather complex.
But the mainstream media is not.
They're reductive and simplifying everything and they're participating, consciously or otherwise, in a mass distraction right now.
The really important things can't be talked about.
Let's get back to our old friend Beaudrillard before moving on with our media analysis.
Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters.
There's no alternative but to feel the screen.
Otherwise there would be an Irredeemable void.
We're back in the Byzantine situation where idolatry calls on a plethora of images to conceal itself from the fact that God no longer exists.
That's why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of a presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.
That they're terrified that they cannot provide an alternative to the nihilism that materialism and post-enlightenment rationalism has created.
If all that matters is what you want as an individual, if your religion is just your preferences and your aversions, Then who are we?
If you negate the possibility of the unknowable, the possibility of the mystery, the possibility that we are infinitely and limitlessly connected to one another in ways that are difficult to discern, if you accept that we are somehow connected to one another, and even if that's from a cosmological perspective, i.e.
we are all in the same little pinhead that exploded into the universe, then you have to have a different set of obligations.
You can't lose yourself in banal sectarianism the way we have done around the Trump Trump.
Let me know in the chat and the comments if you agree with me on that little piece of analysis.
What are we going to look at now?
Is this the surreal bit?
Yeah.
Oh, this is interesting, because here, essentially, this is another bit of news where they've got nothing.
In a minute, we're going to hit you with some home truths about what's going on in the world with Aaron Maté.
We're going to be talking about what's happening with NATO expansionism ongoing.
But for a moment, let's enjoy the banality of this.
Essentially, ABC News, Frota reporter, and listen to this, she describes something as surreal, but It's one of the realest things I've ever heard.
She just described someone walking in a room and sitting down, I think.
It's not like someone, like, has an orange fall out of their ear, or sort of like blows their nose and peanuts come out of it, or they open their mouth and like the universe is seen forming within it.
Have a listen.
So, uh, a big day for our country.
Uh, let's bring in ABC News investigative reporter and producer Olivia Rubin, who was inside the courtroom today when Donald Trump was there, along with... Big day inside the courtroom.
Again, sort of magnifying the situation and sort of suggesting to you that the reporter has access to something intimate.
But you've probably seen some of the footage inside there.
There's just people going, Mr. Trump!
And him just walking by.
It's not like they're gonna... What are they gonna do?
Smell a pheromone coming out of his bum crack?
Let's have a look at the word surreal.
Let's just have a look at a dictionary definition of the word surreal.
She'd walk us through what happened.
Terry I think surreal is a terrific word to describe what was happening in that courtroom.
As I've said the former president entered into the room.
Alright, let's have a look at the word surreal.
Let's just have a look at a dictionary definition of the word surreal.
Having a disorienting, hallucinatory quality of a dream.
Unreal and fantastic.
Here are just a few popular examples of the surrealist art movement.
That's by René Magritte.
There's Dali's Persistence of Memory and the recent film being John Malkovich.
And I suppose what they do is they play with form and context and our expectations of reality.
Yeah, well, what more do you want?
She said he entered the room, Russ.
How more surreal do you want?
Whoa!
He entered the room and he didn't manifest himself within it or drop into it in the form of molecules and then recoagulate as a solid object.
That would have not been surreal.
Back to David.
President entered into the room and he had sort of a grimace on his face.
He took into- he took in- Sort of a grimace, and that's actual news.
You can't legitimize all of the authority that ABC claims.
Just to say he had sort of a grimace on his face, describing that it's sort of a grimace.
I wouldn't like to say it was exactly a grimace.
No, no.
I wouldn't go that far.
That's too much.
That'd be irresponsible.
That'd be conspiracy theory.
That'd be fake news.
That's the sort of irresponsible crap you get on the internet.
People saying that there's a grimace when it's more like sort of a grimace.
That's irresponsible.
That's misinformation.
They should be shut down.
Thankfully, we're forming a body now to be able to censor that kind of madness.
We don't have a barometer for the amount of emotion that Donald Trump should show in an arraignment.
You can't quantify it.
He sat there, he showed very little emotion throughout the entire hearing.
Very little emotion?
Because like what would be the right amount?
Right.
Or too much?
I mean, we don't have a barometer for the amount of emotion that Donald Trump should show in an arraignment.
No.
You can't quantify it.
Absolutely not.
Like, ahhhh!
Or like he's sort of switched off.
That's just, that's how people are.
Yeah.
Essentially what they should be saying is, look, come on, nothing's happened except actually we are funded by the pharmaceutical industry and we get military industrial complex employees on and claim they're experts offering you A reliable, unbiased opinion.
That's what they should say.
When Baudrillard talks about in the silence there is like this sort of truth, like the godlessness, I would say that there is still, because I'm a religious person, that God is in that silence and you're confronted with the deception that you've been watching.
Deception or distraction, ultimately the same in a way.
Imagine if I broke down Gareth's movement.
at the DA's team who was speaking. He at times leans side to side speaking with his attorneys
and that was sort of how the former president...
Imagine if I broke down Gareth's movement. Gareth looking down now, he's nodding his head a bit.
Doesn't look like he's spent as much time combing his hair as he usually might.
There's a little bit of a forelock falling over on the left side of his face, possibly because he himself is moving closer to the left in response to the allegations that this is a far-right channel.
You could endlessly commentate on Mnuchai if you wanted to, but what was...
Better, I think, is to acknowledge that they are amplifying the significance of this trial, amplifying misdemeanor into felony, amplifying the importance of the entire narrative, because systemically and centrally, there will be no meaningful change as a result of, or you know, whether Trump stands again, doesn't matter, like this is, the stories that are important cannot be covered.
by virtue of the fact that they would potentially lead to significant change.
And the kind of stories that we should be looking at are ones like this.
Finland, who hate Russia so much that they possibly even participated in the Nord Stream Pipeline explosion.
Allegedly.
It was either them or Norway, we don't know for sure, because no one's willing to carry out an investigation,
because if they did carry out an investigation, the UN have decided they're not going to carry out an
investigation, because it would probably turn up the fact that the United
States were involved in that.
Allegedly.
Russia will beef up forces, beef them up, in the northwest as Finland joins NATO.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko has said that Russia will beef up its military presence in its northwestern territory in response to Finland joining NATO.
Finland's ascension into NATO will more than double the alliance's territory on the Russian border.
The Russian-Finnish border is about 810 miles long and will now become More militarized.
They're militarizing the Russia's borders.
Right.
So this is obviously a good thing.
I mean, obviously, it's great that Finland have joined, because more militarization, more chance of war.
Ah, more weapon styles.
Closer to Armageddon.
I mean, it's all good, isn't it?
I can't see any downsides.
There's no harm in amplifying a potential nuclear conflict.
I mean, what this does is it plays into Trump's hands.
When Trump can go to Mar-a-Lago, the historic Mar-a-Lago, and say stuff like, they've tried hoax impeachments in the past, they silenced the Hunter Biden laptop report, they're bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war, You can't say those things aren't true.
Let me know in the chat, in the comments, what you think.
Those things are true!
So if you actually despise Trump so passionately, isn't it beholden upon you to alter your own ethical and moral stance on significant geopolitical events rather than continually fetishizing Trump?
Even if you believe it to be to his detriment.
I mean, it's just that I can't understand the world view.
Have a look at this piece of reporting on CBS, of course, another mainstream media outlet.
You know, sometimes on The Simpsons where, like, they show the class, like, you know, zinc!
Like a video on the importance of zinc or something like that, or hormones, you know, and you think, God, this is so reductive and oversimplified.
It's like a Jebediah Springfield video.
Yeah, like when they sort of explain, Jebediah Springfield, okay?
He was great.
He was a great guy.
Oh my God!
And then they find out he was a terrible man.
This is like that.
We're going to give you one perspective on NATO.
This is the mainstream media's perspective on NATO.
But you know now, right, you're an adult, that there's more than one perspective.
NATO's not Superman.
I never liked Superman anyway, because I thought he was too simplistic of a guy.
He's super, and that's it.
He's not complex.
He's not weird.
He's not, like, touching himself.
You like Batman, don't you?
Because he's complicated, and confused, and difficult, and plus he had to make his own way in this life, and you know what happened when the necklace got pulled off his mum, and you know... Are you drawing comparisons between yourself and Batman?
Yes.
I'm like Batman, except that bit where he dresses up like a bat and solves crime, which some say are his defining characteristics and what makes him so interesting.
Other than that...
I'm a lot like Batman!
Other than in the way that matters.
Let's have a look at NATO being described by the mainstream media in a reductive, and I would say, let me know if you agree with this in the chat and the comments, in an insultingly reductive way.
NATO's a defensive alliance that protects the US, Canada, and most of Europe.
And that's all it is.
Yep.
It's not anything else.
No.
I mean, already, right, just bear that in mind.
Defensive.
Defensive.
We don't attack people.
Not aggressive.
We're not militarizing Finland's borders or anything like that.
We're certainly not participating in arms sales.
All those things couldn't legitimately be called defensive, could they?
So just remember, defensive.
Let's write it down so that you're cleverer tomorrow.
The tackle of one country is considered an attack on all.
Okay, thanks!
Today it's newest member is Finland.
This is maybe the one thing we can thank Mr. Putin.
Actually, right, I will say this.
Isn't it like that historic?
It wasn't a treaty between Gorbachev and Reagan, but it was an agreement not to encroach upon former Soviet territories by even one inch.
I don't think Finland was a Soviet territory, but like that's another nation on the borders of Russia that is about to be militarized.
That doesn't seem like the right thing to do.
It's a doubling down on the perspective that Russia is an aggressor and according to many,
Putin is a war criminal and has, and Russia have, committed war crimes in Ukraine.
I've got no problem with that.
I tell you who does have a problem with that, the United States of America, because if they
acknowledge that, then they're going to have to accept that their previous administration
and current administration are also guilty of war crimes.
I mean, it's so much more important than whether or not Donald Trump and Stormzy Daniels hushed
each other up the money pipe, isn't it?
That's right.
I believe what happened is someone's been hushed up the money pipe, Stormzy I think,
and as well as Daniel, and the pair of them, or if you ask me, they're as guilty as one
another.
It takes two, baby, to tango, doesn't it?
Let's have a look.
Because he, once again, here has precipitated something he claims to want to prevent by
Russia's aggression.
In the lead-up to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, he complained about NATO's expansion in Europe, but I... Complained.
Hey, I don't like... I do not like the way that Russia is expanding in Europe, because it is an aggressive act that is against many historic agreements.
It wasn't a complaint, was it?
It was more like, you said you weren't going to do this, and therefore we're going to have to... You know, it wasn't a complaint.
A complaint sounds like you've just kicked a ball into someone's garden or something.
NATO borrowed Vladimir Putin's lawnmower, and then when Vladimir Putin said, could we have that back, he said, that's always been our fly, Mo.
We've always had it.
And you can't prove that we haven't always had it.
It was an agreement, a mutually beneficial agreement, in that so much as everyone benefits from there not being a nuclear war.
Ironically, Putin's achieved the exact opposite of what he wanted.
Before Russia's invasion, about a quarter of Finns supported joining NATO.
It says ironically he's achieved exactly what he wanted, or what he didn't want.
Yeah.
But which is ridiculous, there's no irony about it.
That's not irony.
No.
You've not understood, right, as is often the case with American media reporting, they've
not understood the meaning of the word irony, and that probably offends me more than bringing
us all to the brink of Armageddon, actually.
After Moscow attacked its neighbour, that surged to around 80%.
It's a good thing I have a good heart.
Since Finland's frontier with Russia is over 800 miles long, its membership has more than doubled Russia's border with NATO states.
And right next door, Sweden's also seeking to join the alliance.
Finland's military is considered one of the most capable and modern in Europe.
Moscow says that if forces from other NATO countries are now deployed to Finland, it'll respond by bolstering its own military in that region.
Noam Chomsky says that one of the ways that the media treats us is a kind of an ongoing infantilising process.
Most ads targeted towards the general public use discourse, arguments, characters with especially childish intonation, often targeting frailty as if the viewer were a creature of a very young age or mentally impaired.
The more you try to fool the viewer, the more childish the adopted tone.
Why?
If one goes to a person as if she had the age of 12 years or less, then due to suggestive quality, the other person tends, with some probability, to respond or react with much the same thought as a person of 12 years or younger would feel.
So they're talking to us like children, placing us in the roles of children.
There's a kind of paternalism at play.
Yeah, that's exactly what that report was doing.
Yes, it was.
You don't need to worry.
Finland have just joined.
And NATO!
And also that entire appraisal of NATO was reductive and childish.
This is from friend of the show, Pulitzer Prize winning conspiracy theorist, Chris Hedges.
Chris Hedges said, OK, so this is another take.
You just heard them say NATO is a defence organisation and that kind of crap.
Well, check out this.
NATO and the arms industry that depends on it for billions in profits has become the most aggressive and dangerous military alliance on the planet.
Created in 1949 to thwart Soviet expansion into Eastern and Central Europe, it has evolved into a global war machine in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Asia.
NATO expanded its footprint, violating promises to Moscow once the Cold War ended, to incorporate 14 countries in Eastern and Central Europe into the alliance.
It bombed Bosnia, Serbia, It launched wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, resulting in close to a million deaths and some 38 million people driven from their homes.
It's building a military footprint in Africa and Asia.
It invited Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea, the so-called Asia-Pacific four, to its recent summit in Madrid at the end of June.
It's expanded its reach into the southern hemisphere, signing a military training partnership agreement with Colombia in December 2021.
It's backed Turkey with NATO's second largest military, which has illegally invaded and occupied parts of Syria, As well as Iraq.
So this is another perspective.
Defensive alliance though.
Just defending there, just a little alliance.
NATO is like a, you know in the playground when you hold hands with another child, well it's a bit like that.
Like it's a really sort of insulting way.
to present that and I suppose that's what is so all-pervading that we forget to even criticise it.
Like the attitude towards us is you are children, you don't need to participate. How could you even
begin to legitimise censorship if you didn't believe that the recipients of that information
are incapable of discerning for themselves whether or not the information is legitimate.
Like, even just 10 years ago, you could talk to people with all sorts of crazy crackpot ideas and just go, well, that's cool and interesting.
I don't think it's true though, but nice one.
I mean, let's face it, some people think some of the most literally Religious perspectives in the world are ridiculous.
On one hand you've got Richard Dawkins, on the other hand you've got the Catholic Church, and you just sit and listen to both and go, oh cool, cool.
The irony of all this is that Chris Hedges, who literally wrote that about NATO, was obviously censored in terms of when RT was censored.
No more Chris Hedges on the internet.
Unfortunately he's found his way back through other means and Substack and things like that.
I just want to congratulate you on the correct use of the word irony, Gareth.
But, um, thank you very much.
But yeah, the very fact that these are the kind of things that they don't want out there.
When we're talking about censorship, it is from facts like this about NATO, because what they want us to know about NATO is what was in that news report.
NATO is for this.
It's good that this is happening, and it's good that Finland has joined NATO.
This is all good.
Yeah, Chris Hedges isn't saying, uh, you know, I don't like Spanish people.
It's not racist, is it?
It's not like, oh, I don't think trans people should be able to... That's not what Chris Hedges is about.
Chris Hedges is going, wait a minute, I've got another perspective on NATO.
Here's another perspective from Chris Hedges on war itself.
That is a kind of view that's being even more elegantly extracted from the mainstream discourse.
If we really saw war, What war does to young minds and bodies?
It would be impossible to embrace the myth of war.
If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war.
This is why war is carefully sanitised.
This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill, but are spared from seeing war's consequences.
The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining.
You remember during 9-11, in the end, they wouldn't show the people leaping from the buildings rather than dying within it because a decision was made that that's too unbearable.
But in the ongoing wars that are sponsored by the military-industrial complex,
from which they benefit, that the media continues to tacitly support through their reductive reporting,
support through their reductive reporting, to prevent us having adult conversations about,
they are sanitizing exactly the way that Hedges describes.
The wounded, the crippled and the dead in this great charade, swiftly carted off stage.
They are war's refuse. We do not see them, we do not hear them.
They are doomed like wandering spirits to float around the edges of our consciousness,
ignored, even reviled.
The message they tell is too painful for us to hear.
We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nations imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism and heroism.
Words in combat become empty and meaningless.
That's Chris Hedges, the conspiracy theorist and father of the world.
All right, nutcase.
If you're watching us on YouTube, we're going to click over to be exclusively on Rumble now, where we're going to give you a fantastic insight to how your houses are going to be taken away from you by the financial industry.
In short, you will own nothing and you will be happy.
Sounds like empty rhetoric.
Sounds like a conspiracy theory.
Sounds like fear mongering.
Here are the policies that are going to bring it about.
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
No, here's the fucking news!
While we're all distracted by Trumped-up charges, Wall Street is quietly buying up your homes and by 2030 will own 40% of them!
Bloody Trump!
In a climate where we're being distracted by admittedly alluring and exciting criminal trials, reality and centralised power continues uninterrupted.
We're talking specifically today about Wall Street buying up family homes and how that relates to the Great Reset Agenda.
You will own nothing.
But will you be happy?
Not with escalating rents.
Not if by 2030, 40% of family homes are owned by the financial sector.
This is a significant shift in the balance of power.
These are the kind of stories that aren't sufficiently reported on and observed.
These are the kind of things that will happen whether you have a Republican in the White House or a Democrat in the White House because we believe they're part of a corporate globalist agenda that will not be interrupted while we're distracted by sectarian politics.
Let's get into it.
For years, John and Angie Collier saved.
This is nice!
Eager to buy a first home in Fishers, Indiana.
Attracted by the good schools and proximity to work.
But pursuing the American dream has proved daunting.
As real estate investment groups buy up houses in cash and rent them out, in some cases, to the very families who dreamed of owning them.
In a sense, it is our sweetness and innocence that defines us.
We don't fully understand the way that the financial world works, that houses are being bought up, that agricultural land is being bought up, that pharmaceutical companies spend as much money managing the prices of their stocks by investing in them, by buying them back, than they do investigating new and potentially beneficial drugs.
We live on a layer of reality that prevents us from accessing the bigger and perhaps more significant picture when it comes to determining the outcomes of our lives.
And here, when it comes to those most basic of amenities, the basis of Maslow's Pyramid of Needs, shelter, even there, true power is getting involved.
True power is buying up property.
True power may prevent you from having a home.
In January, 33% of all homes purchased in the US were bought by investors.
43!
Illuminati!
Illuminati!
I'm guessing that the Colliers are just an example, that the Colliers aren't the news.
Ah, what are the Colliers doing today?
The Colliers currently rent in a town near Fishers from one of the nation's biggest house rental companies.
I'm guessing that the Colliers are just an example, that the Colliers aren't the news.
Ah, what the Colliers doing today?
Oh my god, he's left her! You bastard Collier!
Four times in recent weeks, they've been outbid by investors with all cash offers.
It can be, you know, discouraging when you get overbid by, you know, companies.
How do you save when you're spending $2,200 a month just to rent?
In a sense, what they're intelligently, I suppose, on the mainstream media news doing is using the Collier family to represent an ordinary American family and demonstrating how the difficult to observe movement of the financial industry and the increasing cost of living are affecting ordinary Americans.
What the mainstream media will not be able to do, is what we will do, is tell you exactly why this is happening and what is required to stop it.
So these companies have you on both ends?
Yeah, it's definitely a conundrum.
Good old Mr. Collier, smiling his way to homelessness.
I actually quite admire his spirit.
Can I come and live with you, Mr. Collier?
Yeah, sure.
You seem like you might be quite high maintenance.
I actually am.
In some Fishers neighborhoods, investors own more than half of the homes, according to realtor Laura Turner.
This is one of the neighborhoods that investors have really targeted.
They're coming in, they're buying it at cash, and then they're going to hold them as rentals.
Remember something as fundamental as Julian Assange's claim that the function of government is to extract public money and put it into private hands?
These sort of simple maxims help me to understand the nature of reality, i.e.
in this instance, the function of real estate development ought to be to provide homes for ordinary Americans.
One might imagine that in the 1950s, for all of its cultural problems and challenges, it was a simpler ...metric or mechanic that existed between the construction industry and the American citizen or consumer.
But now the financial industry has become so deregulated and sort of terrifying and vast.
There's like, hang on a minute, if we buy up all the homes, then we'll be able to profit by 5%.
It's like some terrible, terrible mathematics that's revealed that you should just fuck ordinary people to death.
Fisher's mayor, Scott Fadness, is frustrated by the surge of distant, faceless landlords.
I like the surge of distant, faceless landlords.
What's that?
Coming over the hill?
That's just the surge of distant landlords.
But what about this featureless, blank expanse?
Oh, they're faceless?
Don't let that worry you, though.
The fact that they're not participating in humanity.
Oh, OK.
Do you think they're going to be reasonable if I'm letting them rent?
I don't know.
Try and tell from looking at his face.
So take, for instance, if you have a high grass and weed issue, a code enforcement issue.
I mean, if they own 4,000 homes, who is the individual that you can go talk to about a specific problem?
Excuse me, the plum is not working very well.
After getting outbid time and again, the Colliers say they've given up on fishers.
Is the American dream still accessible?
I think the American Dream is changing.
We all know that it's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it.
Our society may be going in that direction where we are getting further away from ownership.
But I don't think it's the right direction.
I actually think Mr. Collier should be in charge of the country.
His upbeat demeanor is exactly what we need right now.
Okay, so this proxy war we're engaged in and the prosecution of Trump, which is a distraction from the fact that centralized government's never gonna do anything about issues that are affecting me and you.
Isn't that right, dear?
That's right.
How do you keep smiling?
I don't know, dear.
I don't know.
Anyway, gotta run.
We're gonna start another war with China.
Oh, guys, do we really need to do this?
Do we have time?
Also, the showers stopped working.
They put in a bid on a home in a town farther out.
Their American Dream modified, not broken.
The conclusion of the report can't be that the American Dream is modified, not broken.
It's a terrible dream of compromise and centralized corruption and financial brutality and faceless landlords.
We've modified the American Dream now, so it's got this scary, faceless landlord in it.
I think I'm not gonna go to sleep tonight.
Institutional investors may control 40% of US single-family rental homes by 2030.
Goodnight!
The single-family rental industry got its start with government backing in the fallout after the 2008 financial crisis.
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
The thing we learned here is you can really, really exploit single families.
Well done.
Lesson learned.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, and will I be going to prison for my part in all this financial travesty?
No, no.
Just focus on exploiting those single families.
As I say.
It was that rare opportunity that attracted the institutions to build a portfolio out of these foreclosed properties, said Steven Zhao, an assistant professor of finance and managerial economics at the University of Texas, Dallas.
It's another example of what's a crisis to ordinary Americans or people across the world being an opportunity for those dominant financial interests.
We've seen this play out again and again.
You know that's what happened in the pandemic.
We presume that's what happens in a military crisis or indeed a war.
And It demonstrates that there is a fissure between your lives and needs and the requirements, methods and agenda of powerful institutions.
Well, at least it's just free market economics and it's stuff that's not costing you any money and you're not paying for it even after the criminality of 2008 where you bowed out the people that plunged your country and you personally into economic despair.
What's outrageous is your tax dollars are helping Wall Street buy up single-family homes.
Representative Ro Khanna said in an interview with CNBC.
Yeah that is outrageous isn't it?
It's not like they're brilliant business and economic minds, they're just people that are operating in a legislative space that is deliberately unregulated that allows what is essentially a type of criminality to take place.
In the midst of this hysteria around the Trump trial, where because of a kind of minor technicality, money from the campaign fund was spent on hush money that might lead to this, can it be a misdemeanor or felony?
While that's being focused on, stuff that should be a crime, like the deregulated corruption that led to 2008, the exploitation that's going to lead to your home likely being owned by a Wall Street bank instead of you or your children, No one's doing anything about that, and we participate in it.
I participate in it.
I find it hard to care more about this than I do Donald Trump.
Oh, I wonder what he'll be wearing.
Will he have a pocket square?
What shoes will he be wearing in court?
Does it matter, really?
We should be focusing on this!
Since the early 2010s, Tricon Residential, Progress Residential, American Homes for Rent, and Invitation Homes have each bought thousands of homes.
Some of these companies are financed by private equity firms such as Blackstone, and investment managers such as Preeti and Partners.
It's almost a captive market, said Jordan Ash, Director of Labour Jobs and Housing at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.
They've been very explicit about how people are shut out of a home buying market and are going to be perpetual renters.
I don't have Enough of an understanding of global economics and real estate to determinedly tell you that it's best for you to own your own home.
But I do, from a general moral and philosophical perspective, sense that what you want is authority and control in your own life.
This particular issue seems to suggest that what's happening is that power and resources are becoming increasingly centralised.
This is exactly what they mean when they say you will own nothing and you will be happy.
They like to pretend, oh it's just a conference, it's just a bit of fun, oh it doesn't matter that both the leader of your country and the leader of the opposition of your country are all going there and the biggest companies in the world are all going there.
I'm not suggesting it's anything I'm not suggesting it's anything other than PR for the globalist agenda so that the solutions to the problems we all face can always be presented in a way that won't disrupt the agenda of the powerful.
That's exactly what I'm suggesting it is.
But the ideas that emerge out of there are ideas like this.
And if you spoke to these companies like, you know, Progress Residential, American Homes for Rent, There'd be someone nice that you'd speak to, that would tell you that they're going to provide better homes and better services and all that kind of stuff.
But you're a person.
You live in reality.
You know what your experience is.
You know what happened to your family and you and the people you love in 2008.
And you know what this centralization of resources and power is going to lead to for you.
And it isn't good, is it?
Although dear old Mr. Collier, he'll smile his way through it.
Okay dear, we can just live in this pile of dust.
I can heat you up with my breath.
Maybe if I can keep laughing.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
These tears, we can use them to bathe our son.
Ha ha ha ha ha.
These calls come after fierce housing inflation hit many sunbelt states,
including Texas, Florida, and Georgia, according to the National Association of Realtors.
The prices in some Sunbelt markets have outpaced national figures for rent inflation.
Between January 2020 and January 2023, rents for a two-bed detached home increased about 44% in Tampa, Florida, 43% in Phoenix, and 35% near Atlanta.
Florida, 43% in Phoenix and 35% near Atlanta. That's compared with a 24%
increase nationwide. So not only are you not gonna own your own, you're gonna be
extortionately overcharged for your rent.
This is ultimately another one of those wealth transfer techniques, where low-income, ordinary folks, middle-class folks, all will pay more money for stuff, and it will aggregate in the hands of the elites.
Plainly that, it's a technique to do that, and it's being soft-sold to us.
By 2030, the institutions may hold some 7.6 million homes, or more than 40% of all single-family rentals on the market, according to the 2022 forecast by MetLife Investment Management.
We heard from community organisers who are surprised at how many of the homes on a particular block will be owned by corporate landlords, PESP Housing Director Jordan Ash told CNBC.
Home ownership is the main way in this country that people build wealth.
And while in some ways it may not look very different if someone is renting or owning a home, financially it's very significant both for that individual family and for communities, whether or not they do own the home.
Part of the problem with private equity involved in housing is that they're in it for the short term, Ash continued.
Their goal is to take a company, increase cash flow in order then to sell it or to take it public, which they did in the case of invitation homes.
Unlike smaller landlords, who are still looking to have a profit, maybe in it for the long term and see it as a long term investment, are more concerned in terms of stability, concerned in terms of satisfied tenants and wanting there to be less turnover, with private equity it's really about maximising the short term returns.
So in a sense, it's a mentality that you don't want to play a role in housing.
And in particular, the housing of families that are looking for stability.
Not that people that are single or live different types of lifestyle aren't also worthy of secure instability.
Of course they are.
But they've probably long been subject to the mentality that is now beginning to prevail in this particular market.
What this is evidence of is the kind of expansion that prevents choice, even while we're told that free market capitalism is leading to more and more choice for all of us.
I consider it to be similar to food.
It's kind of like you're only eating the type of food that's available for you.
And because that's the type of food that's mass produced, it's very difficult to eat healthy food.
We know we should be eating healthy food.
We can't get it.
It's more expensive to buy organic.
Once that kind of thing starts happening because of market forces in homes, you're ultimately moving towards a time where you live in a cell and are attached to a drip.
And if you can't offer the machine something of value, you'll ultimately be criminalised, homeless or executed.
I mean, that's the general direction, isn't it?
What do you think about that, Mr. Collier?
Well, I quite like the old drip.
Hey, once in a while, I take it out of my arm and have a sip and I pretend it's a slushie.
Oh, back in the arm for now.
What a little boost, Junior!
Before 2010, institutional landlords didn't exist in the single-family rental market.
Now there are 25 to 30 of them.
So it's just a new, emergent market.
Like, a hundred years ago, no one ate processed food.
Now everyone eats processed food.
It's not good for us.
The general trajectory, while we're told it's progress, and in certain ways, technology, medicine, in certain fields, it obviously is, it's also centralising and aggregating and accumulating wealth in a very particular direction.
You recognise that, don't you?
Let me know in the chat, in the comments.
From 2007 to 2011, 4.7 million households lost homes to foreclosure and a million more to short sale.
So that means that 2008 was a period of great opportunity and advantage.
It's a bit like the pandemic, isn't it?
Like the pandemic and the financial crisis definitely have comparable components in that it was a devastating crisis if you were in a particular strata of society, but an incredibly lucrative opportunity if you were in another strata of society.
Private equity firms developed new ways to secure credit, enabling them to leverage their equity and acquire an astonishing number of homes.
After the 2008 crash, the unprecedented supply of cheap housing in good neighborhoods made corporate single-family home management feasible for the first time.
It's only regarded as a financial opportunity.
That's homelessness from another perspective.
Neighbourhoods that were formerly ownership neighbourhoods, that were one of the few ways
that working class families could build wealth and gain stability, are being slowly or not
so slowly turned into renter communities and not renter communities owned by mom and pop
landlords but by some of the biggest private equity firms in the world, says Peter Coons,
the former Los Angeles director of the activist group Alliance of Californians for Community
Empowerment.
In some ways I'm glad because it's now so magnified, amplified and obvious that there
is corruption that it's affecting everybody.
So whether you're sort of part of an underclass, ordinary working class, middle class, even affluent middle class, they're coming for you in the rhetoric of Donald Trump.
What is really dangerous to tenants and communities is the full integration of housing within financial markets, says Maya Abood, who wrote her graduate thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the single-family rental industry.
Because of the way our financial markets are structured, stockholders expect ever-increasing returns.
All of this creates so much pressure on the companies that even if they wanted to do the right thing, which there's no evidence that they do, all of the entanglements lead to an incentive of not investing in maintenance and transferring all the costs On to tenants.
Blackstone spent over 5.5 million dollars lobbying in 2022 with several members of Congress owning stocks in it.
So once again, it's the same story.
Centralizing financial interests in alliance with a government that they lobby, with people in Congress who own stocks and shares in their company, moving in a direction that is not beneficial to you and will eventually reach a tipping point Where ordinary people are so disempowered we can no longer participate in the game.
All the while, eyes are on Donald Trump for minor legislative foibles and failings, and if they're illegal and justice is consistent, anyone who breaks the law should be subject to the punishment that are associated with breaking those laws.
But we all know that that's a political trial, and we all know that everyone benefits from the distraction
that it provides.
And that these kind of stories are the stories that are going to affect your life.
This is going to come between you and owning a home, and ultimately your ability...
ability to organize and control your own life and resources.
So, while the Trump trial is fascinating, these are the stories that we have a responsibility to
understand, these are the kind of situations that we have to demand
that the powerful deal with, or we have to replace the powerful with ourselves.
But that's just what I think.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
I'll be reading those comments in just a second.
Thank you for choosing Fox News.
The news.
No, here's the fucking news.
I hope you understand life a bit better now having seen that,
having heard us explain to you how abstract ideas like, you know, you will own nothing and you'll be happy can
gently become implemented as policy and how the financial industry
and now able to enter into territories that would have been unthinkable just 10, 15 years ago and how 2008,
a financial crisis for many of you was a financial opportunity
for some of the world's most powerful interests.
It's an ongoing theme.
Gareth, it's exciting.
Another day, another Maté.
I like to speak to at least one member of the Maté family every single day of my life.
Today we're speaking to the friend of the show, a journalist for the Grey Zone and co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast, Aaron Aaron Maté, conspiracy theorist, far right pundit, probably far far right.
If we're far right, I don't know where he is on that particular spectrum.
He has the honour of being known by the Guardian as the most prolific spreader of disinformation.
So let's, while we're having this conversation, carefully observe and pay attention to make sure he's not misinformationing us right where it hurts.
Alright, Aaron, it's good to see you.
Good to see you too, Russell.
Happy to fill your quota of Maté family members and disinformation spreaders, so good to be here.
Thank you for coming on.
Straight after you, we're going to be speaking to Oswald Mosley, the far-right British politician from the 1940s and the starter of the Brownshirt movement.
See what he's got to say about stuff.
Mate, we wanted to talk to you actually about the expansion of NATO, the Finland recently joining NATO and also the sort of broad framing of NATO as a force for good in the world.
And if you wouldn't mind tying that all into the sort of current show trial of Donald Trump and how the exaggeration of these misdemeanors into felonies is a convenient way to maintain a convenient framing of American politics at a time when perhaps we could be looking at more important geopolitical issues.
Well, the indictment of Trump ties into issues like the expansion of NATO because back when Trump first broke into the political scene in 2015-2016, one of the things that he was saying that really freaked out the political establishment in the U.S.
and other NATO states like the U.K.
was that he was questioning the existence of NATO.
And people couldn't believe someone could possibly in the political spectrum say such a thing.
And I think that was one of the factors in all this freak out about Trump and all the motivation to then paint him as a Russian agent is because he was actually saying things that you're not supposed to say inside respectable NATO state politics.
And we've seen now in the real world the results of NATO and this drive to expand it uh in this proxy war in Ukraine.
The fact we're having this war now is an outgrowth of a you know three decade long policy of pushing NATO to Russia's borders uh trying to bring in states like Ukraine and Georgia and doing so in despite doing so despite pledges to the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War that we're not going to expand NATO one more inch to the east and that's been violated and that's a major reason why we have this war today.
So, Finland joining the club is just one more provocation.
It's not to me as serious as the attempt to bring Ukraine in, because Ukraine has an actual historical tie to Russia.
There are millions of people inside Ukraine who consider themselves to be ethnic Russians.
Parts of Ukraine used to be apart.
Of Russia.
And Russian officials have long warned that any attempt to bring Ukraine into NATO would put Russia in a bad position because basically, as William Burns, the then ambassador to the US, wrote back in 2008, if Ukraine joins NATO, Russia feared that that would trigger a civil war and that would force Russia to intervene on the side of people who support Russia.
And that's pretty much what has happened.
And so Finland joining NATO, I don't think is Something Russia is too concerned about, but certainly expanding NATO's borders to Russia does increase the tensions.
And the idea that NATO is supposed to be defensive is just, as you've talked about, is a joke.
I mean, look at its recent record, destroying Libya, invading Afghanistan, you know, destroying
Yugoslavia and turning that into separate states.
I mean, that's the real nature of NATO.
And the idea that it's there to protect people is just completely undermined by its own record.
They have an explicit relationship with the military industrial complex.
Is there any evidence that they are involved in the brokerage of arms deals, that they
facilitate it, that an expansion of NATO somehow leads to the expansion of the military industrial
And also, Aaron, just to say, that is fascinating what you... When Trump, who I'm not broadly speaking a... like some... he's not something I blithely support.
I enjoy him as an establishment wrecking ball, I do have to say.
But when he sort of mentions something like, you know, don't have to be in NATO, there's something that I enjoy about that kind of anarchic and sort of outsider perspective.
So, yeah, I just wonder if you can just talk about NATO's relationship with the military-industrial complex and the possibility of disbanding NATO.
Yeah, well, on Trump, I mean, that's why elites hate him so much.
Not because he's actually a threat to their agenda, but sometimes he blurts out the wrong things.
So he'll question the existence of NATO, while still policy-wise, he encourages NATO states to spend more on the military-industrial complex.
So policy-wise, he pretty much continued the NATO agenda, but sometimes, occasionally, he'll speak the truth.
And he'll say the wrong things.
Also, in Syria, for example, when he announced that US troops were staying after he initially tried to withdraw them, he said we're staying to take the oil.
And you're not supposed to say that.
You're supposed to say we're there to fight terrorism and spread democracy.
So that's why they don't like him.
And that's why there's constantly attempts to undermine him.
Not because he's actual policy-wise, he's a threat to the conventional agenda, but because sometimes he just speaks out of turn.
And yes, in terms of NATO's relationship with the military-industrial complex, if you look at the multiple rounds of NATO expansion, And how that's been received in the U.S.
Congress, which has to vote to approve these expansions.
Every time that happens, there's a massive influx of lobbying money by the military-industrial complex in support of NATO expansion because the military-industrial complex recognizes that NATO expansion is hugely profitable for them.
Back in the 1990s, there was a lobby group in the U.S.
called the Committee to Expand NATO or something like that.
And it was headed by a guy named Bruce Jackson.
But that wasn't Bruce Jackson's only job.
Bruce Jackson's day job was that he was a vice president at Lockheed Martin.
So he recognized that expanding NATO was very good for Lockheed Martin.
So yes, I mean, because if you expand NATO, your military has to be up to NATO standards, which means spending billions and billions of dollars on weapons.
So there is a huge connection there.
And that's why Jan Stoltenberg, the NATO Secretary General, He's not really a general of anything.
He doesn't have a military role.
He's just basically an arms dealer.
He's an arms lobbyist.
That's what he is.
He's there to sell the public on the need to spend more money on weapons.
Aaron, you know Russia arrested that Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gerskovich, and the Biden administration are up in arms saying you can't just arrest journalists and put them in prison without trial.
What do you think You can't just use the Espionage Act as a catch-all way of arresting people of dissident voices that you don't agree with or approve of.
What do you make of that while dear old Julian Assange is banged up in Belmarsh here in Blighty and dear Edward Snowden abides in exile in Russia?
Is there some hypocrisy there?
I mean, yes.
I mean, I think this arrest of this Wall Street Journal happened just as Assange marked 1,000 days inside Belmarsh, this maximum security gulag inside Britain.
And that was on top of all the years he spent locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy because he couldn't leave or else he would be Put in prison then.
So yes, of course, it's massively hypocritical.
It's a joke to see NATO state leaders in the US and UK and elsewhere complain about the arrest of this Wall Street Journal reporter.
And it's just like, I can't even think about Assange sometimes.
It's so depressing.
I don't know how you feel about it, but it's so depressing.
It's like I have to try and think, there must be something I'm not understanding about this because otherwise it shows that aside from aesthetics we do live in a kind of banalised tyranny because otherwise you wouldn't be able to put journalists in prison.
without trial and claim it was somehow legitimate. So yeah, I went to see Julian Assange when he was
in that embassy. He later described that in his diaries as the worst day of his incarceration.
Like, yeah, so I'm in touch with Julian Assange's wife and I feel like it's, in a way,
I hold on to the idea of Assange and Snowden when I'm attacked for being far right or a
conspiracy theorist because they're kind of the ace aren't they?
They're dual aces in the pack.
You know your liberal, righteous agenda?
What is it doing about this and why can't it address it?
It's kind of a Vulcan death grip on their bullshit because they have to sort of go, They have to sort of shut down the debate there.
And that's when you know what the establishment is.
So I suppose, aside from the sort of deep personal agony that they as a family and the individuals must be facing, I feel that they are sort of avatars of what the reality of our sort of deep state corruption is.
Absolutely.
I mean, no one in the world has done more to expose state crimes than Julian Assange.
And Forest Services, rather than being given every journalistic award in the world, which he deserves, he's being caged in a gulag with no sign of him being able to get out.
I think the plan from those torturing him and imprisoning him is just to hold him for as long as they can behind bars and hope he dies behind bars.
That seems to be the plan.
And the media in the US especially is totally complicit in this.
There are sometimes, you know, establishment journals speak up in defense of Julian, but not nearly to the level that they should be.
And they still run all these smear pieces that take part in the propaganda effort to demonize him.
And so we're all just sitting by and watching it happen as, you know, this, the most important journalist in, I think, in Western history is being murdered, tortured.
It's just unbelievable.
And so, yes, so what Russia has done to this Wall Street Journal reporter, by all accounts, it looks terrible.
I do, though, have to question the wisdom of his editors who sent This reporter to a really sensitive Russian military industrial complex site and asking questions of people.
They must have known that this would arouse suspicion from Russian authorities and would possibly put this reporter in danger.
So I hope, of course, that he's freed, you know, immediately.
But I do have to question the wisdom of whoever sent him to this really sensitive site to ask these questions, especially at a time Of such high tensions between the U.S.
and Russia, people are going to be used as pawns to negotiate for the release of other prisoners, and it looks like this Wall Street Journal reporter has gotten caught up in that.
Yeah, well, you would say that, Aaron, because you are a conspiracy theorist and you never miss an opportunity to attack the establishment.
Aaron, I'm going to have to wrap it up there.
It's always fantastic to speak with you.
Thank you for your honesty and your wisdom and your ongoing integrity.
Aaron Maté is an investigative journalist for the Grey Zone and co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast.
We'll put a link to both of those in the chat straight away.
Aaron, thanks for joining us, mate.
Thanks Russell.
Cheers, take it easy.
I always feel mad saying mate to a mate because their name is spelt mate but that has got that accent on it that makes it mate.
If you want to come and see me live at Stay Free HQ, you can!
I'm going to be talking to, and this is live, I don't think we're even going to broadcast this.
No, we probably will broadcast it in some form.
It's Brian McDermott, former Premier League manager and my personal friend who has recently just joined NATO.
He's being militarised even as you speak.
Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are putting missiles all up and down the nape of his neck
and they're, I'm sorry to say, that they're aimed at Russia.
So that's going to provoke even more problems. You can come and see me talking to
Brian McDermott about his recent membership of NATO
on Saturday the April 15th, doors at 6, tickets £35, all profits go to the Stay Free Foundation which I own and
keep. Now I don't keep them, we give them to drug addicts.
That's where that money goes.
We don't need no more money. Hey, listen, thank you very much for joining us,
Gary. I think you need to let people know Brian McDermott and a bit of context there or...
Yeah, he's going to be talking about... Alright, I will.
Brian McDermott used to play for Arsenal, top flight football club. He managed Reading when they got
to the Premier League. He managed Leeds, one of the biggest clubs in this country, and he's
talking about mental health, winning and losing and how our framing of success is built on
materialistic and individualistic notions rather than on community and connection. And from
his personal experience as a top flight athlete and manager. He tells us that...
Winning and losing have to be accepted as part of life and you can't tether your identity to external success and plaudits.
You have to find a deeper connection with meaning and purpose.
Nice.
But he would say that because NATO... Exactly, they told him to say that.
Told him to.
Probably Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, they've probably gotten in his ear as well.
Of course they have.
Of course they have.
They're not fools, these people, are they?
Hey, thank you very much for joining us for the show.
We've got one more show this week before we take a little well-deserved break, but we'll continue to put out content every single day while our Lord Jesus Christ is resurrected, as if by magic, something beyond magic, the miraculous.
Almost as if there is a field of unmanifest energy that can be channeled and directed by us if we are able to overcome the limitations of the self.
And that is true, Gareth.
Don't... Gareth Roy, look to the side there, as if negatively, I would say, well, I've seen, that's not defiance, that's pure loathing, that's what that is.
Join us tomorrow, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
Until then, stay free.
Man he switchin', switch on, switch on.
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