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Transcript
It’s been 17 months since I recorded what was supposed to be my last episode of The Nick Broadhurst Show. In that time I have received constant requests to start the show back up. But to be honest, I just didn’t feel the world needed another podcast. We live in a time of radical distraction, so who am I to add more to the mix? But then this little thing called covid came along and, in my opinion, changed the world forever. All of a sudden I felt that urge to have a voice again outside of my music.
But my hope with The Nick Broadhurst Show is to offer you a source you can come to that helps you climb out of rabbit holes and put on a new lens to see through the matrix of mainstream confusion.
I believe this is a pivotal time in human history and now more than ever we all need to find our own truth and power amongst all the noise and confusion. This show is a diary of my own sensemaking through this time. But it won’t be all pandemic talk. We will still have loads of fun diving into topics as far-ranging as blockchain and digital currencies to creativity, arts, music, performance, sex, relationships, healing, spirituality, food, health and so much more. Just my humble way of offering some tools for living a life on the path of truth, curiosity and love.
To create this episode I consulted with some people I love and respect in an attempt to make my own sense about what’s happening in the world right now, before I could offer anything that may help you make more sense. So with that in mind, let’s dive in…
Now, I love a good Bill Gates, 5G, smart tattoo, vaccination, reptilian cult conspiracy. I’ve watched the videos, I’ve seen the memes. We’ve all seen them — they’ve been spreading across the internet like wildfire. Which got me thinking…
Why have conspiracy theories all of a sudden gone so viral? Millions of people are tuning in live to hear some pretty wild stuff. Millions of people are reading entire documents, watching hour-long videos, and seeking out answers. Why? And then it occurred to me that in a time of such great uncertainty, what do people crave? Certainty!
This has been a time of huge uncertainty — everything from ‘what’s going on’, ‘who can I trust’, through to ‘will I be able to pay my bills this month?’ and ‘Are my 70-year old parents going to be okay’? There’s uncertainty everywhere.
And the thing with a good conspiracy theory is that the person or people delivering it have absolute certainty. They have a religious fervour to them. This conviction is very powerful. It sucks you in, clearly, because we have seen millions of people drawn to these alternative narratives. And in particular, people love a bad guy in times of uncertainty. They love having someone to blame.
It can feel really good to start getting some answers when you’re listening to these sources of certainty. (Especially if what they’re saying makes sense to you on an intuitive level.)
But what we need to be careful of is not allowing ourselves to become agents of propaganda, just because we have allowed that conviction to take hold of us. Being an agent of propaganda only adds to the confusion. It’s not helping anyone. For a while there I found myself telling people that “this virus is a hoax” and “you can’t create a test or even a vaccine for that matter for a virus that doesn’t exist.” Now, was that helpful or did it add to the confusion?
Anything that feels like, “Hey, we have a version of the truth, and we are going to help you find the truth, which just so happens to be OUR truth”, is most likely not going to be coming at the issue with the level of balance and discernment that is needed in the world right now. It’s interesting, yes. Discerning, no.
Anyone who has absolute certainty, you should be very cautious of. If you listen with any type of discernment you have to think, well, how do they know that? How do they know this whole pandemic really is a plan for mandatory vaccination in an attempt to create a Hunger Games society where our every move is tracked? How do they know this was planned by a global conspiracy of greedy multi-nationals?
Honestly, I don’t know what’s going on right now. I don’t know if covid-19 is as dangerous as we have been led to believe. I don’t know if it came from a lab or a fish market. I don’t know if the 5G rollout has anything to do with this, or if Bill Gates wants to inject us all with vaccines that have smart ink in them to track our antibodies. I most likely will never know. And that’s actually ok.
But what’s not ok is for me to say ‘this is what I think’, ‘this is what I know’, or even worse, ‘this is what is’. How do we even establish what is fact anyway, especially if we are not aware of our own bias? A more constructive, balanced way to proceed is with a level of inquiry and curiosity.
And here’s the thing: both sides would do well to proceed with more balance; with a level of inquiry and curiosity. Right now, if you question the mainstream narrative, you are labeled a conspiracy theorist. If you question a conspiracy theorist, you’re labelled a mainstreamer. It’s like we’re disincentivizing people from questioning *anything*. So where is the middle ground? Surely there has to be space for us all to ask valid questions, to inquire when something seems a bit’ off’?
No matter where you sit, we need to allow people to inquire, to be curious. That’s the space I’ve been trying to sit in — allowing inquiry and uncertainty for myself, and for others — and you might find it a helpful space to inhabit too.
When I allowed myself the grace of not needing to be certain, I was able to be a whole lot more objective and discerning. (There’s that word again — discerning. It’s so important right now.)
And it was from that space that I honed in on something that had been eluding me when I was caught up in the drama and finger-pointing… the real protagonist of this story. The real ‘bad guy’ of this pandemic…
I am not talking about governments, Bill Gates, China, or reptilian cults… And I’m not talking about viruses, symptoms and people who don’t wear masks…
… I’m talking about fear.
We hear that word, ‘they’; ‘they’ are doing this, ‘they’ are doing that. But is there really a ‘they’? The institutions that we love to demonise are less likely to be puppets of some evil overlords or a group or cult, and more likely to be puppets of a broken system.
I have no real clarity around who is really pulling the strings right now, or whose agenda is in play. But think about this for a second; if you want to control an agenda, you are far more effective if you keep people in fear rather than united. Which is why it’s more important than ever to stay centred and not in fear. To stay together not divided.
Fear keeps us stuck in indecision and paralysis. Fear keeps us bickering and pointing the finger of blame. Fear keeps us from taking responsibility for our own lives, and for treating other people with respect and courtesy.
Fear alters the energy you put out into the world. (And let’s be real: the world needs your best energy right now.)
(And incidentally, fear is also terrible for our immune system, and can make it a whole lot harder to fight off pathogens and viruses… which is an interesting point to consider as you sit in your state of inquiry, right?)
Fear really is the puppet-master’s best tool. And the greatest trick of fear is for fear to make you its agent in the name of justice. For you to be fighting on its behalf without even realising you’re doing so. To create division amongst those who were once united. That’s why for me personally, it’s fear we are really battling now.
It might not seem like it at first, but this is a real lightbulb moment. Because now that we know fear is the boss, we get to choose whether or not we surrender our sovereignty and acquiesce our power to fear. And once you know who and what you are dealing with, it’s much easier to be discerning about what you let in…
Which brings us back, full circle, to what we’ve all been consuming online. So much of this fear comes from information. We used to fight with weapons, we now fight with information. And fear is the driving force behind this information warfare. Media today is intentionally designed to keep us fearful. YouTube is literally designed to get us fearful and outraged. Social media moguls make money when we’re in conflict. We interact with technology more than people and become unwitting slaves to non-human forces such as algorithms.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. To the contrary. Humanity is going through a huge upgrade from certainty to unprecedented uncertainty. The challenge is to stay centred and fearless in the face of the unknown. We are being forced to stop. To try and make sense of something that’s near impossible to make sense of and to do it without pointing the finger or pulling people into conspiracy theories. It’s a monumental task, and a task that fear thrives in.
When I’ve found myself feeling too tapped in to the fear, or when those close to me have been feeling that anxiety, as well as being really discerning about what I let in, I’ve also been looking at what this is going to bring forth…
Milton Friedman, a Nobel Laureate economist and public intellectual once said, “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
He’s basically saying, we require a crisis to enable a leap forward. During that crisis, it’s the mavericks or people who were once ridiculed who become our saviours. What once seemed far out and impossible, can become our ‘new normal’.
While we are undoubtedly in a period of great uncertainty, there is an opportunity like never before to take part in the next great change. Friedman said that the transformation will depend on the ideas that are lying around… those ideas have to come from somewhere, so why not you? You can spend your time listening to shapeshifters, or you can be the one taking part in shaping the future. YOU get to choose.
So what future do you want to see? A future where people without the wisdom and consciousness of gods are being given the power of the gods to control us through information? No thanks. A system that allows global debt to surpass 250 trillion dollars? Just print more money! Keep the good times rolling! No thanks.
The system is broken. A good old shakeup leads to a big wake up. People are moving to nature, getting out of the rat race, realising they don’t need as much as they thought. As my friend Andrew Hewitt so beautifully said to me earlier today, “People are waking up from the nightmare to create their own dream.”
We navigate this next growth point by recognising who the real boss is. Fear. We tune into our subtle senses, our energy, to sense when we are in fear as opposed to discernment. You can feel when you are panicking. You can feel when something is contracting, squeezing you like a vice. But you can also feel when you are being moved through expansion. Exploring the uncertainty from your centre to find a path forwards. A path centered in love, trust and compassion.
Because no matter what is happening in the world right now, what you believe to be true, or what you have personally experienced, this great shift that is upon us can become our heart’s desire.
I would love to hear from you, so please tag me @iamnickbroadhurst on social media. Please also leave me a comment below (I read every single one!). And if you could take a minute to leave me a review on iTunes I would be very grateful. Tell me what you want more of! I am at your service.
P.S. Always listen to your intuition (and your doctor or practitioner) before trying any new health or lifestyle practice.
so-called ‘conspiracy’ is about the biggest menace there has been in the last two years–when is it going to get through to people that it is just a word that was ‘put into use’ in the 1950s, by a guy named Karl Popper, then the CIA got a hold of it. look in the dictionary–it only implies a pre-conceived plan of someone(s) PRIOR to some event, such as, for example, 9/11, which there is all kinds of physical evidence about in the last 20 years, yet no one has even ever been charged for that alone, so how the hell can you call it a conspiracy? ‘heretic’ played the same role in the Mediaeval Era, so obvious what’s behind this phenomena of what seems to be ‘cursing words’, isn’t exactly new. it has been all too clear in the last two years that ‘conspiracy’ has done nothing but oppress anyone who rebels at the mainstream narrative of so-called covid, and i was warned by one person, at least, in the 1990s, that this was all coming and people would get very ”hard to deal with’, and he sure didn’t lie about that.