Today, my guest is Derek Brose.
Welcome, Derek. So glad you're with us and thank you for taking the time. I know how busy you are.
Yeah, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.
Yeah, great to see you.
Derek Brose is a professional freelance investigative journalism and he's an author, musician, speaker, and activist.
Quite a remarkable person.
I met Derek first at the third Greater Reset Conference in January of 2021 in Relia, Mexico, which Derek and John Bush were collaborating on producing.
And we're going to be talking more about those conferences in a bit.
And then I had the pleasure of participating in what I believe was your first online investigative journalism class. Is that correct?
Yeah.
In the fall of 2022.
So Derek's website is theconsciousresistance.com and let's spell it out for those folks who may be listening to this as a podcast.
Do you want to go ahead and spell that out for us, Derek, just so I make sure I got it right?
Sure. Yeah, that's the T-H-E. And this is important, conscious, not conscientious or conscious. I've noticed sometimes people spell that different.
So theconscious, C-O-N-S-C-I-O-U-S resistance, resistance, R-E-S-I-S-T-A-N-C-E.com.
Theconsciousresistance.com is my main website.
Great. Thank you. That's so important because there's so much great information there.
And I pulled a little, I don't know whether it's a little, it's not a tagline, it's longer than tagline, but I'm going to share it from your website, which I thought was very concise and astute, gives an idea of what you do.
And it says, consciously resisting is to engage in self-reflection and pursue knowledge of the self without knowing our own doubts, fears, hopes, dreams, insecurities and strengths.
We cannot truly know what freedom means to us as an individual.
To become conscious and aware of one's actions is one of the most important steps towards claiming your own freedom.
So that was like a radical statement for me. People don't usually, when they start talking about resistance, they don't in the same sentence usually start talking about self-reflection and pursuing knowledge of the self.
So we'd love to hear just a little bit of an introduction from you of what that means, like your overarching philosophy of conscious resistance.
Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. And thank you for sharing that description there.
I like to tell people that when I first started to, I guess the term wake up is what we usually use.
When I first started to question the world around me, I think as an adult legitimately question the things that I'd been taught by parents, teachers, society, etc.
I was about 2009, 2010. And for me, that experience was coming after going to prison at a young age of 20 years old.
I got addicted to drugs after dealing with depression, dealing with some trauma in my young life.
All these kinds of experiences, once I got through prison and had the time to basically sit, I chose to use my time in prison being stuck there.
I started meditating, I started praying, I started doing a lot of journaling and self-reflection and trying to understand like, why was I using all these different drugs or what was I trying to avoid?
What was I trying to get away from? What was I trying to heal from?
And so I was kind of already on that journey while I was in prison when I got out and I was, you know, when it was all said and done, it was October 2008.
I was now out back in Houston, Texas. I was a felon, but I was happy to be free.
I was just free and no more paperwork and jumping through hoops and all kinds of stuff like that.
It was just like the nightmare was finally over.
And I grew a lot in that time period and most of it I would say was due to being in solitude and that was either in prison being forced to be kind of alone and using that time to the best ability I could to do that healing
or choosing to get into meditation and prayer and spend time alone in reflection once I got out.
And I was just emerging into the world with this excitement and this thirst for knowledge and really feeling like just like I wanted to help the world. I wanted to learn more about it.
And then again, with that kind of understanding or that realization that maybe I wasn't taught everything, everything I was taught probably wasn't correct, wasn't even accurate and started to question just my fundamental beliefs.
So it was kind of the combination of those two things like going to prison, having this deep bottom where I needed to start questioning my whole life and then through that starting the healing process.
And then after that getting out and then getting into activism kind of having this thirst for justice and wanting to help the world in terms of exposing corruption as I was learning.
And for the first couple years I had these two different lives where I went to the Houston Zen Center because I was very much into Zen Buddhism at the time and I was going to I was organizing meditations, just all kinds of things like that drum circles that whole kind of spiritual conscious aspect of my life.
And then I had this other part of my life which was protests rallies marches activism of various sorts.
And for the first couple years it seemed like the two different groups would never meet and I just had this dual life because when I would talk to my spiritual conscious friends and I'd say hey you guys want to go to the protest the rally or the march for this and that calls, you know sometimes in the spiritual
community in my experience it's a lot of like put your fingers in your ear put your head in the sand like no bad vibes don't talk about the bad things are going to manifest it.
So it was not a very welcoming attitude towards that side of my life. And in the same vein I would go to my activist friends, political oriented friends, and maybe invite them to a meditation or something in that area and there was just a lot of disinterest a lot of the activists I knew at that time were atheists.
Nothing wrong with that per se but that was just where they're coming from very logical rational kind of people. And so, yeah, for the first couple years there was just this separation.
And then in 2013, I had a, I don't know another shift if you will the summer of 2013. I was just up watching videos all night and just this phrase the conscious resistance was kind of whispered in my ear.
And that's when I realized that I couldn't keep these things separate anymore that for me this was the same thing, you know, the struggle that I was going through to understand my healing journey and to heal my trauma and to heal intergenerational trauma in my family was the other side of the same point to the struggle I was having in the physical realm of
learning about all the corruption in government and learning about just conspiracies and all this kind of stuff. To me, I realized like this is the same thing I cannot separate these anymore and that was the year that I launched the conscious resistance website and eventually the book series and everything.
So, you know, sorry to give a long one to answer but that's kind of embodies like what it means for me, you know, and I try to, through my books and talks but also through my journalism, you know, not just come at journalism purely through just the strictly objective, obviously reporting facts and sticking to the truth and stuff
but also my spirituality, my, you know, my lens as a human being is going to impact and affect the way I cover things and so I don't shy away from that. I kind of make that a part of it.
Yeah, I think that's why I've been drawn to your work so much because it is an unusual combination and, you know, I lived in an ashram for 13 years so this whole the spiritual aspect of things and I've been an activist for a long time so finding a model for how those things come to me.
So, how those things come together is really beautiful and I think it's so necessary right now. Some people say we are in a spiritual war and I happen to agree with that.
So, I was also really drawn to your motto on your website which is leading by example and helping others in their pursuit of freedom. So, you're definitely leading by example and I look forward to getting into that a little bit more in this interview.
So, can I just say something about that report? Yeah, yeah.
I would say that even that phrase there is kind of like, I guess my restating of just like the principles and the attitude of the bodhisattva.
It's like that's definitely, there's probably an old video on my website. I don't even know if it's still up there because it probably was deleted by YouTube.
But it was a video I did years ago called Bodhisattva Activism and was kind of talking about how that's like that idea of somebody who maybe puts off or delays their own enlightenment to for the desire of helping other people is very much kind of how I do approach my activism and journalism as well or just that kind of mindset of how can I find things that matter,
information, solutions, whether it's health, spiritual, just knowledge and use that for myself but also share it with other people and kind of take you along in the journey and you know just if I can inspire the people along the way then you know that's definitely the goal.
But it really does come from those principles. Absolutely. Yeah.
And it seems like when one thinks about why we were put here that maybe maybe we were put here to implement some degree of spiritual awareness into the work that needs to be done in the world.
So seeing models of that I think is important for people, not just what you choose to do with your life or you know how you're personally stepping out of the technocratic state, which is huge that model but also how you do that with kindness and grace and compassion.
So I love that. It's great.
So you've also been the founder of the Freedom Cell Network and the Greater Reset Conferences which happened once a year and the next one's happening in January.
So I'm hoping we can touch on that as well. But I'd like to dive right in about your book, How to Opt Out of the Technocratic State,
which provides some history about how society got into the mess that it's in now and how our thinking and actions need to change in order for us to have a better life and a better world.
So bottom line, what inspired you to write this book?
So I started writing, well first off, thank you to give me a chance to talk about the book. I do think it's an important work and I'm glad to see that more people have resonated with it.
I started writing it in 2019. I think I got the idea first in 2018.
A lot of my journalism over the years has focused on digital technology, digital rights, tools like facial recognition, license plate readers, drones, you name it.
It's been something that I've kept up with both on a local level in Houston, but also more broadly just across the world trying to keep up with this growth of the surveillance state.
And it wasn't until 2019 though that I kind of started to get the history of technocracy and that movement and kind of put that piece of the puzzle in there.
And see it as not just a sort of disparate pieces of the surveillance state that it is true. There's facial recognition, there's cell phone wiretaps.
There's all kinds of ways that we're under surveillance. And that was something I was very aware of, but I hadn't quite understood that there's actually a philosophy behind the use of these technologies
and even more so the use of this sort of trust the experts mentality that we've seen become very popular the last couple of years.
So in 2019, as I was writing the book, I mean, I was seeing warnings from attorneys saying that they were basically saying the United States should put a moratorium on facial recognition technology.
They were warning back in 2017, 2018, 2019 that AI was moving pretty rapidly and that maybe there should be some kind of regulation.
And you know, my personal political beliefs, I really don't look to government regulation as the answer in a lot of areas, but I do think we're dealing with a particular situation here that is unprecedented.
And so I took those warnings serious. And as I was writing this book, it was one part kind of a warning to the future of saying, Hey, guys, this is what we're facing right now.
This is what's already happening in China. This is what's already happening in India. This is what's already happening in parts of the world that have fully embraced this mindset and this technology, everything, this internet of things that we're kind of moving into now with 5G smart cities.
A lot of these things that more and more people are familiar with. In 2019, when I was writing, there was less people paying attention to these terms.
So I wanted to write a book that would give people that history, a little bit of awareness of where we're at, as you said, as well, where we've come from, and the philosophy of technology behind it, because I think it's the backbone of a lot of what we're seeing.
But most importantly, besides being a kind of wake up call, also being a call to action and trying to provide solutions based on my own experience, as well as just people I've met and spoken with through the Freedom Cell Network and people around the world who are trying to build new systems in terms of new technology or new ways to grow our food or new ways to exchange, you know, monetary value, things like this.
So the book is that, you know, it's warning to anybody who's paying attention, hopefully, because I originally published early 2020, we just recently published the second edition this past year.
And just in that short time of three years, the world has rapidly changed. And some of the things I was writing about in the first edition have come to pass, are much quicker than I imagined.
And so I released this new edition with more information because I felt like, not only did I want to kind of comment on, hey, here's what happened since the book came out.
But more importantly, say, here's what we learned. Here's what I was seeing in Mexico when we were helping bring people down from other countries, so that they could get to Mexico to avoid shots and quarantines and things like that.
Right. Here's what people were showing me they were doing in their local community to make sure they had access to good food and clean water and things like that during lockdowns.
Just trying to crowdsource all that information that I gathered from people as I traveled in Mexico, traveled across the United States during the middle of lockdowns and as well as my own thoughts and ideas.
Yeah, there's there's, it's an interesting blend in the book because it's got case studies of various things. It's got history, philosophy, if you will.
And then it's also got in certain parts kind of checklists of things you can do to get out of the technocratic state.
So it runs overlap with, as you know, I've been wrestling this document to the ground, this checklist and blueprint for exiting the matrix and creating parallel society.
And so there's there's a lot of overlap in the thinking of that, but I realize they need to do a side by side and see what I missed in the checklist from what's in your book as I was preparing for this interview.
I'm excited for yours as well. I think we need as many of these kind of guides and you know, I think also the the tact and the approach you're taking is probably going to be more valuable maybe to some people than even than even the way I approached it because like you said,
I do have some checks list and some kind of to do items, but it's not always like the way I can, like just the way my brain operates.
So I tried to make it as hands on as possible, but I think yours is going to be even more so because I have found that some people literally are looking for a line by line item of do this than this than this than this.
And so, you know, the more tools available my book as well as what you're working on I think is just going to be great for people who are thinking in these areas.
Well, thank you. I look forward to continue to evolve these things and hear about other things people are doing as you said I think it's going to take a big village to get us out of the current situation.
So, does the concept of parallel society match what you think we could collectively create if we opt out of the technocratic state, or you know what would be the result of opting out of the technocratic state and what would we call it.
Hmm. Yeah, so those are great questions. I mean in in the book. And in my vision I I imagine that we're opting out of systems that we see as a moral or antithetical to liberty to privacy to bodily autonomy to a lot of the principles that I think people hearing this will hold dear to their hearts,
opting out of those systems which do not align with our values and then trying to create and or collaborate with others to create to build because obviously again this is not a single person or a one group I think we're all going to we're starting to see how these labels that have divided us in the past are becoming
more and more useless and we need to just collaborate where we can. The idea being that we're creating new systems that would align with our values and would respect our principles and bodily autonomy privacy liberty etc the things we care about.
So I do think that the goal at least for me is to create.
I don't want to say necessarily a parallel world because obviously we're existing here in the same physical space, but perhaps the idea and the idea of Samuel conkin who is the founder of algorithm which is where a lot of my work was inspired by, you know he
envisioned that as we are creating these pockets these pockets of a gore or what I think are the freedom cells and these hubs of people around the world that are starting to trade together starting to buy land together starting to, you know, live outside of these mainstream systems and find ways to avoid things like
CBDCs and all that kind of stuff that those pockets of people that are now happening all around the world that we're kind of the seeds to whatever the next stage is going to be for this next parallel system or alternative system and the way I like to explain it to people is that.
Ideally, the new young ones that are going to be born into this world that are not even here yet that they might have the opportunity to come into a world where you have one path that is smart cities and tracked and trace society facial recognition and all these things that we see ahead of us and maybe you
get to drive and maybe there's no more personal individual property ownership and some of these things we've heard from the World Economic Forum. And then there's another path of people building communities of all types and growing their own food and trading amongst
each other and freedom of religion and freedom of speech and all the things that we've believed our world was about. You know, that's kind of the way I see it and of course, it's much more simpler to say, you know, one path or the other, obviously there's graves within there, right, there's
but the idea of being that people have a choice. And I don't I think that if we see what's coming and we see the plans of folks who are working on as I briefly touch on in my book Agenda 2030 and the Great Reset and some of these ideas, which we have even heard about the Great Reset when I wrote the first
edition, which is another reason why we wanted to kind of update it. If we see the visions of what they have, you know, for example, the phrase you will own nothing and be happy is a part of that. If we choose not to act personally, I believe on a spiritual level that we are failing our
ancestors who work so hard to get us to this point, no matter what skin color background you come from, as well as those who are coming after us, who I believe are 100% depending on us to step up to the plate and to get organized and try to protect freedom and liberty and save this very young idea that humanity is just
barely hanging on to at this point in our, in our history. I mean, I feel like it's very it's that crucial that this idea could disappear as quick as it came into our, you know, our awareness and obviously liberty has been with human, I think humanity for a long time in our consciousness
but in terms of it actually being recognized in a lived experience, it's still not there. We're still not, we haven't gone far enough. And already it could potentially slip away from our hands if we allow these people to have their way. So I think it's important for us to recognize that and I don't see much hope in trying to take back the system
by electing a new president or prime minister or violently overthrowing the government or something like that. I think the best strategy is just again like we said earlier to lead by examples so rather than me trying to say let me force you to want freedom the way I want, or just put our people
to power and we'll know what's better for everybody. We just say let's just build the world that we want that actually does reflect our values and principles and whoever wants to come along with us let's co create together. And of course our goal is to inspire more people and bring more of our families and friends
along with us. But humans learn by by you know what they see and so if we lead by example, and we go build these communities whether that's in Mexico United States or wherever people feel free to do so and have the ability to do so. I think that will be part of helping more people
exit these systems as the systems, the mainstream systems inevitably get more tyrannical, less free as inflation increases. And this is what Samuel Konkin predicted is as the state gets more and more aggressive people will naturally have a reaction to look for alternatives.
But if there's no alternative, well they'll just kind of accept it and suffer and, you know, until things get pretty bad. But if we, the people who can see what's coming choose to build these parallel systems and alternative networks of trade and food and you know everything we can think of, then we might provide some path for those who are coming after us.
Yeah, I personally feel that it's all about the kids, the ones that are here and the ones that are coming. So that's, that's what I'm dedicated to. I mean, it'd be nice to have a to enjoy my stay here on planet Earth this time around.
But my work is definitely dedicated to the, the little ones and the not so little ones that are already here. So, well before we leave the topic of your book. How can people get a hold of your book.
Yeah, so the book is available to download for free on my website and you can purchase it all usual places I encourage anybody to purchase it anywhere else but Amazon, but on my website the conscious resistance.com slash how to the conscious resistance.com slash how to there's a landing page there, and that'll link you to the couple of
places you can purchase the second edition in English. You can also purchase the second edition in Spanish. And there's an there's an audio book available there for free as well and it just recently got translated to German we haven't released that one yet.
And it's in the process of being translated Japanese right now to some excited about that. But yeah, that's that's the main place the conscious resistance.com slash how to
Great, and I'll put that link also on the video so people can read it as well as hear it. So, let's talk a bit about the freedom cell network you've mentioned it that was something that you and john bush created.
And can you give us a bit of a description about what that is and how people can find out more about it.
Absolutely. So, the freedom cell network is, it's an idea. It's a movement, I guess you could say of people around the world, who are focused on what we just finished talking about building parallel systems building new systems right, but in the process of doing that
obviously it's much easier said than done okay let's build new systems parallel systems to the current ones okay well where do we start. Well we're going to need a lot of people. Well, not all of us are blessed to live in, you know areas where we have family and friends
and networks, even whether you live in a small city or a big city a lot of people feel very alone they don't know anybody they're not kind of plugged into any activist groups or maybe through their church or whatever other organizations they're a part of.
They, they might not really know anybody. And part of the freedom cell network is trying to solve that problem. And so we have our website freedom cells.org that's freedom as it sounds and then cells CELS.org like the cells in your body.
I like to explain people that each group each cell or hub or hive or circle the name is largely irrelevant. It's the idea behind it but each group is and each cell in your body is individual it's powerful it's unique on its own, but it's also part of the larger collective which is you.
And that's kind of how the freedom cell network is is we encourage people to create local hub circles, hives cells in their in their area that come together and focus on a goal setting so getting together and say hey what are the what are the interests we have here.
Well we're worried about inflation we're worried about having access to clean food. Let's sit around and brainstorm and discuss what steps can we take to, you know, build some group security in terms of food maybe we start one by one we go to the take some grocery
trips together we start buying back up food together in case of an emergency or just whatever steps are necessary to start moving towards the goals that you're setting for yourself in terms of six months to a year and beyond.
And so the idea being that we're creating these groups everywhere everywhere people, you know people are and that they want to focus on this. You encourage people to create freedom cells I've been promoting it since 2016.
And thanks to cove it and Bill Gates there are our best friends in terms of recruitment. We saw massive growth from January 2020 we had about 2000 people on the website, and probably, I'd say 10,000 people broadly paying attention to through telegram and email and stuff.
But after cove it started and great reset announcement, you know there's now 40,000 plus people on the site 10s of 1000s more using telegram and other apps to organize their freedom cells or their kind of freedom groups inspired by what we're doing.
And, you know, many more people just doing it who they don't put it on the internet they're just out there and their communities, organizing and getting things done.
But the idea is again to build this local decentralized network of people focused on solutions and so you know the groups in Houston are going to be different from the groups in Denver and the groups from Denver are going to be different from Germany and Australia and it really has grown to that that point you know
there's 20 plus freedom cells around Mexico for example, we know that there's active groups in Australia, parts of the UK and parts of the US obviously are very active Canada, and it's become a worldwide movement the website itself is available in Spanish, German, Dutch all of that translated by people within the network who just volunteer their time to do so.
And so when people go to the website, they can search, they can create a free profile and say this is what I'm interested in these are the skills I have this is the goals I'm interested in, and they can put their location on our map, we don't want your home address but put an approximate location of the area you're in.
And then that adds you to the map, and you can search our member maps and our cell maps and say show me everyone within 10 miles or 50 miles, or show me all the groups that have been formed within 10 miles, and you can go through there and look at the list see what their descriptions about.
See if they're meeting you can look at people's profiles and all this person's within 10 miles of me they sound like they're interested in homeschooling as well that's, you know, message them oh look they have a meet up I'm going to go to that next meet up.
The website and the telegram groups they're really just filters to the real action of the freedom cell network which is the in person and that's kind of why I explained it that earlier take the freedom cell network is this idea this movement.
There's the website, but the website's not the network, the network is the people in the real world, doing things, hosting meetings getting organized growing food.
And again we've had so many success stories are during during Kobe whenever I traveled around the US during the activation tour. I heard from people who said when they were locked down and they didn't have anybody in their community they use the website to find like minded people for one to just not feel alone and they started
gathering when they weren't supposed to. Some people started homeschooling their kids together because they realized they had that in common. Other people started community gardens started growing food so they didn't have to go to the grocery stores and deal with masks and all that stuff.
And some people even bought land together so the people who have taken the idea and the concept of organizing and decentralized way on a local level. And as I discussed in my book setting goals and you know just kind of just knocking those down as a group building that group security so we're not all dependent on Derek or Melanie together.
Derek or Melanie to get things done instead we have this kind of group knowledge and power diffused among our numbers. And, and this I think are is the the agoras or the seeds that conkin was predicting I think that we're at that point now, where it's happening where people are looking for ways out of the system.
Right now some of them are just nice social clubs and groups but I do think as this evolves in and as food gets more involved food production and more community gardens and urban farms that we're going to get to a point where the freedom cell network and the maps on our website can be used to trade goods and resources amongst
each other in these parallel networks that we're trying to build so yeah if anybody's looking for community freedom cells.org is one place to try to find it.
That's great thank you and and and I'm a case study actually because a friend of mine knew about you before COVID and was following your work and at a point when COVID happened.
We're talking and he said well you need to check out Derek Brosos work and the freedom cell network and then it turned out that a freedom cell started in my city.
And I got connected through those people but mainly got connected to the greater reset and to to you and to John through the freedom cell network that my friend knew about so word of mouth and things just organically and that's leading myself and my partner to you know as you know the
exit and build land conference that that John and Rebecca Bush have done and then we're connecting with communities through that and it looks like we're moving to one of the communities that we connected to through that process so.
That's amazing kind of like the poster child for how the freedom cell network has helped my life so thank you so much. You're very welcome. That's so great and that that's why we I mean that's why I do interviews promoting this and I'll just mention one other thing about the freedom cell network.
They do go check the maps and you don't find anybody there and you don't have an you know the sort of response that Melanie just described. I encourage you to start the freedom cell in your area because I guarantee you there are other people checking it and saying the same thing.
Nobody's in my area. Oh well and then they leave but we want to encourage you to plant that flag in your community you know even if you don't know what it's going to be yet just start the whatever your town's name is freedom cell or whatever you want to call it doesn't matter.
Create it on the website if you use other apps like telegram or session or signal maybe create a group there too and you can link them to them there and just wait I guarantee you people will come behind you and they will reach out to you and before you know what you will start to make some connections so just be patient with it.
We've had some times where people have literally been posting on our website and organizing locally for years before the right combination of you know other motivated people came along and they really started to do some awesome things but she was patiently in this one case plugging away for years organizing small meetings and just didn't give up so yeah if you if you join and there's nobody there yet.
Go ahead and start the group we nominate you and see where that goes.
Yeah and you never know what the untapped need is you know in a in a related story.
I got connected to a whole other group of people through a group that was started by Christopher Hassel which was called Santa Fe unmasked and it spawned a group in Albuquerque that my friend Karen Loray started called Albuquerque unmasked Christopher had asked me to start one in Albuquerque and I knew I didn't have the bandwidth for it was moving around too much so Karen's group now is like.
800 people who have found sanity and information and networks like the freedom cell network and you know all sorts of things through that group and who would have known that there was such an untapped need in this area for information which overlaps the freedom cell information not.
They're not identical for sure different bodies of information but they definitely overlap so you never you never know what you're going to find and who is going to find you when you start something.
And Karen's done great service for our local community as you and John have done for the world so really appreciate the leadership so let's jump in for a few minutes to what the greater reset conference is and especially since the next one is coming right up.
So what is it. Why did you start it. What should people know about it.
Sure so the the greater reset was it will is an initiative of the freedom cell network so we've mentioned John John Bush is a friend of mine based here in Texas as well he's a couple hours away in Austin.
And John and I were talking in the summer of 2020. So obviously COVID lockdown start in the spring by June 2020 the World Economic Forum puts out a video and makes an announcement of something they're calling the great reset.
And that I think literally sent shock waves through the freedom health freedom kind of truth communities of people just terrified of what was about to happen and knowing like oh my God vaccinations are coming soon and lockdowns are happening and all the insanity we witnessed.
And for us it felt like the fear was palpable. Like we were looking in the different chat groups and then telegram and social media and there was just so much fear even from our particular kind of subset of the community which we always try to stay very solutions focused.
And it just felt like we need to do something we can't just watch this you know this plan unfold that they're doing. And as we try to typically do is like how can we counter them how can we offer an alternative to what they're doing right it's not like let's go storm the Davos meeting and take down Schwab.
Let's just give people something else to watch. Let's just give something better you know for our community to pay attention to because instead what happens I've noticed especially in my roles as a journalist is like you got to kind of keep one eye on them because sometimes there's
relevant stuff but then you also want to tell people ignore them let's do our own thing. And I noticed that often when there's World Economic Forum meetings people will just obsess over it for a week and there's all these clips of here's what
Clash Bob said and this and that and again there's a place for that. But what if we just tune them out and we talked about what we're going to do for five days from our bottom up community grassroots perspective and that was kind of the the original ideas like
Let's get together five days we knew that the World Economic Forum was planning to meet January 2021 and announced the full unveiling of their great reset plan. And so we said look let's let's host an event. And it was actually two events because John was in Texas and I was down in Mexico.
And the first four events we've had simultaneously broadcasted from two different countries so two locations at once one in Mexico one in Texas and then streamed online for free to people all around the world. And the first one we did in Zewatanejo Mexico and John was in the Austin area.
And in the middle of the lockdowns and everything we had 100 people show up at to both places and that was kind of just like wow that's cool people actually showed up and more importantly people who were locked down tuned in from all around the world we had I think 100,000 people throughout the first week of the first
greater reset. And we had so many powerful speakers from Charles Eisenstein Foster Gamble and Rosa Corey which was actually her last speech before she passed away shortly after that. This is all available for free on the greater reset Odyssey channel that you can find on the greater
reset.org. And, you know, we know we tapped into something special because the event went great. It was great success and people responded very authentically to it so we knew we wanted to continue doing that. And so we've done four events now.
We've now gotten the rhythm of doing it every January which again is sort of, we don't necessarily aim to do it on the exact same days but around the same time as the Davos conference.
We meet and this January 2024 we're doing one single event in Morelia, Mexico so John and his wife and some of the crew are going to be coming down to Mexico and we'll have all the in person speakers in Mexico.
We'll have a few virtual speakers but this year it's 98% in person, which is really great. We made some exceptions for the great James Corbett and Catherine Austin fits they can't come in person but they're going to do some virtual presentations.
Anybody else will be in person including yourself which I'm really excited about and have you on there and it's five days. Mental physical spiritual health permaculture and food independence, building parallel networks, taking back our tech getting off big tech and community
and that's everything from organizing tips and tools to homesteading advice and you know we're just we're still announcing the speakers we've just started to announce them on the website and through our social media and I will mention the tickets are going to go on sale the
early bird price of just 150 US dollars starting on November 11th so if you go to the greater reset and just sign up for email list you'll get all the all the details you need and yeah we hope that you can come down and if not again it's streamed for free online post a watch party with your
freedom cell your freedom group in your area I mean I think it's really a good time to bring people together because there's not a single talk on our bill that is going to be focused on the problems. It is all solutions focused and we do that on purpose because we all know the problems by now
hopefully and are ready to do something about it so you could choose the day that works best for your community maybe you know permaculture and food independence is most relevant to your community and you guys get together and pick a venue and invite the friends and family
promote it in your neighborhood and listen to the presentations and have discussions and see how they apply to your community what steps you can take you know our hope is that we gather again in a couple months we hear from everybody who was here last year and they have stories to tell about how their lives have changed and how they've been moving forward in these goals
and that's the cool thing is we actually are hearing that we're we're we're hearing in real time that the freedom cell network and the greater reset is giving people the motivation and the inspiration they need to take those steps to you know make big changes and and that's that's just an amazing feeling that I'm blessed to be a part of.
Yeah it's very inspiring I will testify to that. And it's not just about the information that you receive you have an amazing opportunity to network with like minded people from all over the place and those people are very inspiring and it fosters the building of relationships and
you know kind of breaking you outside your bubble of what you think is possible because there are people doing incredible things just really smart savvy wonderful people doing amazing things actually all over the world which you and John have curated these presentations in these relationships and so
you know I personally went to the first one I went to was in Morelia two years ago and I loved being in Morelia so take the opportunity and go it's a it's a lovely city very fun to visit and then last year I went in Austin and that was also great opportunity and you guys have done the tech masterfully of smoothly going back and forth from place to place I think your
experience doing this several years in a row now has you've gotten better in the two times I've been I'm sure it's going to be an order of magnitude better even this time so
I'm excited to welcome you back and have you as a speaker because this and I will second and third anybody who's thinking about it to come because it's it's a life changing experience I know for us to be involved in the organization but when we get to step back and just see all that magic happening not only on stage and the great presenters as you said that knowledge sharing
but the community around it is really what's so special to us and particularly just the decentralized nature of workshops and things that we have and for this to be our fifth event and we're doing one event this time it's going to not only reduce any potential tech headaches that might come with streaming across two countries
but we're expecting the best one yet with in terms of attendance and the presentations and speakers and just community overall so I really would invite everybody to come out if you can make it down to Mexico you'll have a great time and meet I think this year we counted 350 plus people from 15 countries so we're all gathered in Mexico and we had 20 countries tuned in through the live stream
Yeah that's great and it's such a reasonable offering to I mean the fact that you make this available for free to people online it kind of blew my socks right off and really showed me how much you and John are dedicated to change and the fact that the early bird price is only $150 I mean that's like crazy for a five day event so thank you and it's a lot of fun there are a lot of their fun events to music dancing
I had a really good time at both events so let's just restate what the website is for the greater reset is it the greater reset.org with the
Yep the greater reset.org is the website there and as I said the email list you'll see it's right there just sign up for the email list and we are now kind of at the point where we're working on it daily so you'll be getting weekly updates on our speakers you can see the speakers we've announced so far on the website and there's a blog there where we're posting all the relevant details as we get them.
Awesome thank you so I know we're kind of on in time but I wanted to jump into one more topic if you don't mind before we wrap do you have the time Derek for another five minutes okay great.
So and this really kind of goes back full circle to the beginning of this discussion where I said that the. Your focus on self reflection and personal growth and spiritual growth as a foundation for creating change in the world is really striking to me and so and you just you started at the
beginning of this by talking about your experience as a youth and you've shared freely about drug use and prison time when you were younger and then that you changed your life dramatically after that and some of that was based on the on the reflection that you had while you were in prison and the
spiritual growth that you had so most people have some degree of trauma in their past and many people struggle with addiction I've heard this planet called a trauma planet.
To what extent do you think your beliefs as a young person about live people and yourself contributed to those earlier struggles and to what extent did trauma contribute to forming those beliefs.
Well that's a great question. I would say trauma 100% influenced my various beliefs that I held as a as a youth even things that I didn't necessarily consciously think out like oh I feel this way about this thing but as you know especially when I got locked up and of course with hindsight I could
see oh yeah I was dealing with this thing and I was acting this way and I could very clearly see how my well just for one like my inability to trust people when I was younger or to suspect that every person was going to you know do me harm or do me
harm was directly learned from my father coming in and out of my life at a young age and writing letters from prison promising to be there you know I remember getting these letters at five six seven years old you know crying every time and then he'd get out and we might see him
once or twice and then one day my mom would come home and tell us like well he's he's back in jail again and you know having those cycles and to the point until my mom was just like alright I'm not telling you guys anymore you know she just kind of got sick of being in that role
but I definitely could see as I got older how that those experiences kind of ingrained a mistrust of pretty much everybody and just an assumption that people lie people say whatever they want and just little things like that that then started to become some of my own worse behaviors especially when I was using drugs and so yeah definitely I
was able to see with the benefit of the gift of solitude and silence which is what I chose to do with most of my prison stay I could you know I could really start to peel back those layers and see like wow like I've been feeling this way because he you know and it was at a point where it was actually
I wrote him while I was in prison because he got out the week I went in which is also really like I felt so stupid about that I've been angry at him my whole life you know I was like oh you know that was the thing I remember clearly thinking I'm repeating the family tradition if I continue this because my family on both sides is a history of
drug and alcohol abuse in prison going back a couple generations and so I felt really you know bad about that but I wrote him and I told him as I was starting to heal it like how I felt about it and I didn't get the answer I was hoping to looking for and it kind of you know the healing would come later
it was the beginning of me starting to really untangle all that mess you know and take some personal responsibility to because in the beginning it was like I was entangling it and it was like oh it's his fault that's that's why I'm this way you know and then of course it was realizing like okay well that may be true to some extent I felt
or was hurt this way because of actions he took but I have to take responsibility from for who I am what I'm doing now and just that whole healing process but yeah definitely the trauma played a role in it and kind of internalizing various lessons that then impacted me growing up.
Yeah so I worked in the trauma field for a little over a decade and so I've seen a lot about we all experience some kind of trauma at some point and it does help I mean in my view it does form our beliefs and the tricky thing is it's that I'm always saying this that saying that Einstein says that you can't fix a problem with the same consciousness that created it
and so it's an inside job like we have to change our own consciousness in order to be able to see the possibility of a new life for ourselves and for other people and for the world so that that goes with addressing our trauma and looking at what our beliefs are about ourselves and other people and about the world
and so it's amazing that you did so much of that on your on your own you know what what role do you think that for most people changing our beliefs are looking at our beliefs in order to be able to create happy personal lives and as a collective to create a happy
parallel society or parallel networks or whatever we're calling that you know what what would you like people to take away from what you'd like to see everybody doing in terms of looking at their beliefs are examining.
Sure, kind of a big question I know. No I mean I think that you kind of touched on there just examining our underlying beliefs and you know being willing to question ourselves. I write about this in the conscious resistance trilogy that I the solitude for me was such a huge gift it was going to
be a big person and then another time after I got out, I went on a bike tour and spent months on the road by myself. And in those experiences I learned so much about myself one was voluntary one was not voluntary, but both times it was that solitude and just making time to be with
ourselves for a little bit, which is very difficult in our fast paced world or at least it can be we allow ourselves to be swept up in it. So I mean even if it's just spending five 10 minutes alone at night or journaling throughout the day or at the end of the day or making that
regular time to just tune into yourself I think that can go a long way is as simple and as try it as that sounds like if each of us did spend more time on ourselves and I do think it would help the planet I did a video a decade ago called for the good of everyone focus on
ourselves and you know that's kind of I think part of it right like not to the degree of being like in you know enabled in capable of having empathy and compassion for other people. But yes we do need to take care of home base we do need to take care of
our health and work on our healing and in that process we help each other and being able to be there with each other for each other to because I just realized more and more as I've gotten older like we never know what other people are dealing with what other people are going through their day to day struggles and how close they are to
you know just whatever they may be dealing with and it doesn't cost us anything to really try to be supportive and listen to somebody despite all the differences we may have and all those kind of things like at the end of the day I do think for me, even though I know there's a large swath
of the population that might not agree with the things that we're talking about today or the desires we have that ultimately we're working for them as well. And if we truly hope to embody that that we need to recognize that not everybody is going to be on the same page but that doesn't mean we can't still treat them like a human
being deserving of respect. Absolutely. Yeah. And a tool that I've used portions of is your holistic self assessment, which I believe is well why don't you say a word about where that is and how people can use it.
Sure. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, the holistic self assessment is also on the conscious resistance calm under the books tab. I believe we have that available to download for free you can purchase it of course, and that was actually a short little handbook it's definitely meant to be
more of specifically like a guidebook slash something you can write in and jot your your thoughts down in that I developed based on these experiences I'm talking about in prison, you know just really trying to work through different parts of myself and different exercises that either I picked up from other places
or just came to me naturally and kind of made my own. It's something to get started with I think I think it's something to use and it's I tried to make it as concise and simple as possible and as least fluffy as possible if that makes sense and just kind of whittle down like the best pieces of the information
that I think is necessary to get the concepts across, but also to be useful and helping people essentially just get to know yourself better and get more in line with the values and principles and goals you have.
Great, thank you and you know we've taken a lot of your time I want to direct people backed to your book how to opt out of the technocratic state. Again coming back full circle to the beginning that Derek talks quite a bit in the book about how he personally has opted out of the technocratic state
financially in terms of privacy and information security and censorship in working towards creating an intentional community and in terms of transportation and a variety of other ways that he has chosen and it's not been easy to opt out of the technocratic state
but that's inspiring it's a great case study example, and I think it would be best if you check it out and read it in his own words. And then Derek want to throw it back to you for a wrap up anything else you'd like to share or bring to conclusion with the items we've talked about in this interview.
Well thank you so much for wanting to talk to me and share with you, you're growing audience and excited to see where you take your work and just to be a part of your journey as well, it really does mean a lot. And I don't know if we've already mentioned it but I think for me what's very cool about this is to have somebody I get to collaborate with through
the journalism course, and now see you take on your own path. There's been a couple of people who took that course who are now doing really exciting things that I'm happy to share more with and just see where it goes because we need more people asking questions, promoting truth and looking for solutions.
So thank you for being a part of that.
Welcome and thank you for offering the course it was really great. And if anybody has an opportunity to take Derek's course I felt like I was quite fortunate that we were the first audience maybe the guinea pig audience and you did a great job it was wonderful material and I learned a lot so
Thank you.
Yeah. So thanks so much Derek I know I'll be seeing you again soon if not before then in January and we'll be in touch.
Thank you so much.
See you in Mexico.