Russell Brand Part 2

22:10Russell Brand:But we don't have that society. And so in the society that we have with, you know, there are people on the planet who were abused and methadone and suboxone work unbelievably well. Yeah. So like methadone treatment is the thing where it's a form of an opioid, which helps people deal with cravings and withdrawal symptoms when they are going off of other opioids. So if you're trying to kick heroin, you will take methadone or suboxone as a way to make that process easier. And they're less fatal, right? And there's so many studies on this of like in the long term, people who are using methadone are significantly less likely like a year after they start treatment to be using opioids again.

22:52Russell Brand:They're also way less likely to overdose because the problem with abstinence programs is that when you stop using, you lose all of your tolerance. So if you go back to using the amount that you were using before you stopped, oftentimes you will overdose and die. Like this happened to a guy I went to high school with, right? He got sober, he fell off the wagon and had an overdose immediately. And so if you are using methadone, you keep some of the tolerance and you're able to kind of taper down. And so that way, if you do fall off the wagon, which is relatively common, you don't fucking die. So like statistically, empirically, methadone treatment works extremely well.

23:29Russell Brand:At no point can Russell Brand like just look at an issue as like, oh, this is a large societal phenomenon. I am one person among millions of people who use drugs for all kinds of reasons. He can't do that. And that is like the guiding principle of his ideology going forward. I do think that having more people who have experienced substance use disorders talking about their personal experiences is like has a great deal of social value to reduce stigma around talking about dealing with substance use issues. And the context here that makes this really fucking tricky is that he's going and that's why I'm against methadone treatments and treatments that I haven't opted into or that I don't see use in.

24:10Russell Brand:And he's increasing the stigma against methadone, right? He's like, oh, you're still using drugs. In that way, it's sort of former fat person kind of energy of like, I did it the right way or whatever, where you're like, this sucks. I hate it. So from there, he kind of becomes like a general purpose left wing political pundit. In 2012, he visits the Occupy Wall Street protests. He visits Africa to look at global poverty. He writes a pretty well-regarded obituary of Margaret Thatcher when she dies in 2013, where he's like, she fucking sucks. We then in 2013 have the kind of, I think, coming out of Russell Brand as like a major political figure when he edits The New Statesman.

24:52Russell Brand:So in 2013, he starts dating a woman named Jemima Khan, who is the daughter of some billionaire. and she is one of the associate editors of the New Statesman. It's a center-left magazine, sort of the way that we have the New Republic in the United States. She asked him to write an article on religion because he is touring a show called Messiah Complex. And then later they're talking about like, oh, who should guest edit the new issue? And she's like, oh, Russell Brand would be fun. So he guest edits an issue about revolution on the theme of revolution. Oh, Revolution is the one where he's popped out the EVOL so it looks like love backwards.

25:33Russell Brand:That's the cover of his book, which comes out the following year. It's so annoying. Relovolution is how I always said it in my head. Could all our sign ha? Yes. Here is the first couple paragraphs of his introductory essay. When I was asked to edit an issue of The New Statesman, I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me. I chose the subject of revolution because the new Statesman is a political magazine and imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way I can be enthused about politics. When people talk about politics within the existing Westminster framework, I feel a dull thud in my stomach and my eyes involuntarily glaze.

26:15I have never voted. Fuck God. He's one of these guys. He's one of these guys. Like most people, I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people, I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites. Billy Connolly said, don't vote. It encourages them.

26:42Russell Brand:So this is another thing that is core to his political ideology is the entire political system is just a pantomime. Everyone is like fake and pretending that they care about these issues, but it's all theater. It's all bullshit. And so the way to enact political change is to just not engage. It just feels supremely unsurprising to me that he would land in this like burn it down place because that's what he does with his personal relationships and his work stuff, right? Allegedly sort of across the board, right? Like Mr. Oppositional, of course, doesn't want to engage with an existing system. He doesn't want to engage with his fucking work calendar.

27:13Russell Brand:So the main thing that comes out of all this is there's an interview with Jeremy Paxman, who's like a legendary tough questions interviewer in the UK. And they have a vituperative discussion about Russell Brand's politics, which goes mega viral. This is one of the most watched YouTube clips of 2013. This is like a huge deal. Really? Yeah, so we're going to watch a small snippet of it. You've never ever voted. No, do you think that's really bad? So you struck an attitude, what, before the age of 18? Well, I was busy being a drug addict at that point because I come from the kind of social conditions that are exacerbated by an indifferent system that really just administrates for large corporations and ignores the population that it was voting in to serve.

27:55You're blaming the political class for the fact that you had a drug problem? No, no, no. I'm saying I was part of a social and economic class that is underserved by the current political system and drug addiction is one of the problems it creates when you have huge underserved impoverished populations. People get drug problems and also don't feel like they want to engage with the current political system because they see that it doesn't work for them. They see that it makes no difference. They see that they're not served. I say that the apathy... Jeremy, my darling, I'm not saying that the apathy doesn't come from us, the people.

28:27The apathy comes from the politicians. They are apathetic to our needs. They're only interested in servicing the needs of corporations. Look at what, ain't the Tories going to court and taking the EU to court because they're trying to curtail bank bonuses? Is that That's what's happening at the moment in our country. It is, isn't it? So why am I going to tune in for that? You don't believe in democracy. You want a revolution, don't you? The planet is being destroyed. We are creating an underclass. We are exploiting poor people all over the world. And the genuine, legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political class.

28:55All of those things may be true. They are true. I wouldn't argue with you about many of them. Well, how come I feel so cross with you? It can't just be because of that beard. It's gorgeous. It's possibly because... And if the Daily Mail don't want it, I do. I'm against them. Grow it longer. Tangle it into your armpit hair. You are a very trivial man. What do you think? I am trivial? Yes. A minute ago, you were having a go at me because I wanted a revolution. Now I'm trivial. I'm bouncing about a lot of the place. I'm not having a go at you because you want a revolution. Many people want a revolution, but I'm asking you what it would be like.

29:24Well, I think what it won't be like is a huge disparity between rich and poor where 300 Americans... All right, we can stop there. We can stop there. This is like 7 million organising meetings that I've been part of where someone goes, what's the positive vision? And someone goes, I'll tell you what it's not going to be. And you're like, that's specifically not what was asked of you.

29:45Russell Brand:Dude, we once had a strategy meeting at my NGO where we were talking about like, which issue should we work on next year? We had like five different options. And somebody was like, I think we should prioritize all the options because they're all very important. I was like, what do you think the point of this meeting is? I get it. He's a compelling presence. And I also think this is like kind of, what year is this that this airs 2013 yeah so this is airing in 2013 which is a few years before Donald Trump takes office in the U.S. and I think there's like some kind of through lines here which is just like this feels like a person who is more unstudied this seems like a person who is just sort of telling you with some degree of candor where they're actually at and like expressing some frustration you've got a bunch of like valid critiques here and then you just take a turn that I don't think you have really earned here.

30:36Russell Brand:So for this, I read a really interesting paper called Russell Brand, Comedy, Celebrity, Politics by Jane Arthurs and Ben Little. Their explanation for what was going on here is, you know, this is before the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. I mean, he was around, right? He's an MP, but he wasn't a kind of a big deal in labor until after the 2015 general election. It's before the emergence of Bernie as like a major political figure, right? But it's also kind of after Occupy. So you have this sense of like people are pissed, but there's no real figure to like put that into. There's no real vessel for that.

31:09Russell Brand:And so I think people were like crawling through the desert and drinking the sand. Very few other people, especially institutional people, were speaking like this. Well, and also like Russell Brand fucking sucks for a lot of reasons, but he is also a working class dude. Yeah, yeah. telling off a middle class dude with a more sort of upper crusty accent. So for the next couple of years, Russell Brand is like pretty highly regarded. Gawker says, this is after the interview comes out, Gawker says, Russell Brand may have started a revolution last night. Time Magazine has an article called, Russell Brand, world's greatest thinker, summons a global revolution.

31:50Russell Brand:Which like they're obviously being tongue in cheek here. But the subhead is, why can't America get some articulate celebrities? the guardian named him one of the heroes of 2014 fandy fair publishes a glowing profile in 2014 where they describe him as a legit political thinker and voice for the dispossessed so this wave of positive credulous media coverage kind of crescendos in 2014 with the release of his book revolution revolution revolution uh-huh seven which comes out in 2014 and i fucking read aubrey for this because I hate myself. He does an okay diagnosis of the problem. He says like the monarchy is bad and like inequality is bad, but you can tell he just doesn't really like read things or like know anything.

32:38Russell Brand:Like at no point in this book, do you feel like you've learned something? Like at one point he's like, oh, the Christians say that LGBT people are bad, but nowhere in the Bible does it say that. And you're like, right. I was also on the internet in 2005. They say gay people are bad, but do they send their wives to menstrual huts? I mean, it's so boring. It's like exactly this shit. So like, whatever. I agree with it, but it's just like not very interesting. I'm going to send you one excerpt of how boring it is, which I might cut from the episode. Oxfam say a bus with the 85 richest people in the world on it would contain more wealth than the collective assets of half the Earth's population.

33:20That's three and a half billion people. Though I can't imagine they'd be getting on a bus with that kind of money or be hanging out together. I bet there'd be a lot of tension, jealousy, and petty bickering on that bus. My corporation is bigger than your corporation. Yeah, I've got my own media network. Yeah, I've got an elite organization that controls global politics. Stop the bus. I want to return to my subaquatic palace with my half fish brides and sing a song about the supremacy of marine life.

33:53Russell Brand:Again, how is he not on drugs writing this shit? Grow your beard out. Connect it to your armpit hair. What are we doing? It's like fine. Like, I obviously agree with the kind of core point. Like inequality is bad. But he's then doing a bunch of schtick. And then the schtick is not very good or funny. well and also like i would say you know he's like i don't think they'd be hanging out together and i don't think the conversation would be great i would argue that we now know quite a bit more than we did sort of as a collective about the personalities of billionaires and i would argue that russell brand would fit in pretty well i like how you're like the bus wouldn't be like that the bus would be like this russell would be on the bus he just doesn't have enough money to be on the bus So what really stood out to me is toward the end of the book, he starts specifying what he actually wants.

34:42Russell Brand:So here's this. Reign in the power of big business by renegotiating trade treaties to insist that multinational corporations be place-based and accountable to nation states, revoking the charters of any corporation with revenues larger than the smallest national GNP. Be meaner to corporations. I'm into it. Relocalize food and farming by taxing food miles, removing subsidies and research for large-scale capital and energy-intensive agriculture, giving support to small, diversified organic production, and to the growing number of young people who want to take up farming. Those ones where you're like, sweetie, I like where your head is at, but these specific things are pretty dumb.

35:28Prioritize life over profit by rejecting GNP in favor of indicators that measure biodiversity, community coherence, personal well-being, and other life-affirming criteria. Radically reducing public spending on defense, granting legal rights to ecosystems and non-human species. rewriting educational curricula to meet community and environmental needs rather than the needs of

35:58Russell Brand:industry like what well i mean what's what's so fascinating to me about this one and like all of them is just like these are all political programs these are all reformist projects they really are like if you want to relocalize food and farming these are political changes right rein in the power big business i mean if you look at the way that like the scandinavian countries are regulated like business stuff way less say in politics there. It's just weird reading this book where, you know, he says he's talking about David Cameron. He hates David Cameron as he should. And he says like, we don't want to replace Cameron with another leader.

36:30Russell Brand:The position of leader elevates a particular set of behaviors, which indicates that like, you don't even want political leaders. Like he's talking in these grand terms of like, we destroy the whole system. But then you actually get to the outcomes that he wants. And it's like, oh yeah, like legal changes. Like you can have relatively quickly if you elect the right politicians. Like a lot of those stuff was pretty doable yeah it to me it strikes me as like his deployment of revolution which i think is generally i would say politically a red flag when people talk about revolution but don't talk about what that would consist of how it would come about like i think that's generally a red flag but i also think he's deploying it in sort of the way that like i'm a washington outsider gets deployed yeah right which is just sort of like it's different i want a different thing i want a thing that's really different, radically different.

37:18Russell Brand:He has like a list, like a little bullet list in his final chapter where it says like, guarantee a living wage. All new housing developments should have 70 % affordable housing. Abandon, stop and search and the harassment of the homeless. Citywide free Wi-Fi. Employee investment funds where like all profits have to be or 20 % of profits have to be given to employees. These are things they have in like democratic countries. Yep. The whole project feels more a function of his personality disorder than anything else. Because all of this revolution stuff. I'm so sorry, Michael. Do you mean re-lovolution?

37:51Re-lovolution stuff.

37:53Russell Brand:It just allows him to like position himself as smarter and kind of above it all, basically to look down on anybody who talks about like, okay, you want citywide Wi-Fi. How would we do that? Who should we elect? Like, how can we pressure existing politicians to do that? It's like, he doesn't want to get involved in those details. So he's like, hey, man, I'm talking about a revolution here. Right. I'm just saying everything has to change. And like, actually, the both the unpopular part and the part where things actually change is where you have to get specific. And he is pretty studiously not getting specific here.

38:25Right. It sort of has the energy of like the guy in your workplace who just wants to be the ideas guy.

38:30Russell Brand:And the minute you're like, OK, open a spreadsheet. Let me know exactly how this would work. Disappears. Make a phone call. Goodbye. His sort of fame in the UK as a political commentator peaks in 2015 when Ed Miliband, who is the head of the Labour Party, kind of goes groveling to Russell Brand to try to get an endorsement. He is seen as a way for Labour to reach young people and this kind of like disaffected kind of block, you know, the kind of Occupy types. Ed Miliband thinks that Russell Brand might help him do this. So he goes and he does an unbelievably boring interview. Why not go to the guy who's like, definitely don't vote?

39:05Russell Brand:Well, the thing is, it sort of works in that Russell Brand does eventually explicitly endorse labor. But what's interesting, and why this kind of marks the beginning of the end of his time is like a credible left wing political commentator is that his audience kind of turns on him. So if you read the comments, all the comments are like, you said I shouldn't vote. And now you're endorsing fucking labor, right? It's a hard turn to make if you've built an audience on sort of anti-establishment views. And then you go for a very establishment party. Right. And also that's the sort of the anti-establishment people kind of turn on him for this.

39:42Russell Brand:But then the establishment people also turn on him because it doesn't work. Like labor loses the 2015 general election kind of like embarrassingly. And then David Cameron takes over. Then Brexit happens. Like this is a disastrous election result. And people within the sort of the labor party, like establishment left types were like, you know, they're not pinning the whole thing on Russell Brand, obviously, but they're like, well, this guy didn't result in any more votes. Like he can't actually bring people out. Right. He commands a don't vote block. And this is kind of the argument against the don't vote people.

40:12Russell Brand:Is it like, as soon as politicians realize that you don't vote or there's a low likelihood they're going to vote, they will fucking ignore you. So he sort of flames out as like a left wing political commentator. And he basically just becomes like a YouTuber. How soon after becoming a YouTuber does he start with the like electromagnetic frequencies? Oh, I mean, there's even even in his book, he says like cell phones cause cancer. Like he's quite conspiratorial very early. And he has even before the sort of the sort of right wing turn that he has now made. He has numerous videos with Wim Hof, this guy who says that you can beat cancer by doing like cold plunges and shit.

40:51Well, also abuser game recognized. I mean, of course. What a fucking situation that goddamn guy is.

40:59Russell Brand:The Wim Hof situation is crazy. That's what it'll be when you become a YouTuber. When I become moist critical. But then, okay, but then it wouldn't be a chapter of the Russell Brand episode if we didn't have yet another sexual assault allocation. Jesus Christ. In 2014, the woman he's dating at the time, Jemima Khan, for his birthday, gets Russell Brand a massage. So like a professional masseuse comes to their house. They are alone in a room. the masseuse says that russell brand assaulted her it's not clear the details of that she reported it to the police the police investigated but it is kind of definitionally a he said she said situation right she says he assaulted me russell brand says no i didn't the case basically stone walls as like a police matter and so this woman the masseuse starts she reports this to her mp she's like can you do anything about this she starts going to the newspapers so what happens is he sues her and gets an injunction so she cannot talk about this for folks who don't have like a political memory before 2015 say it's really hard to overstate how hard people went on survivors of sexual assault yeah people would like hold out for a forcible violent like sexual assault at knife point or something.

42:17Yeah, yeah. And then even when that thing arrived, they would have a reason for why that wasn't, still wasn't like legit.

42:23Russell Brand:You can imagine how this would play out. Yes. Oh, you're a professional masseuse, really? Oh, and he touched you, really? Yeah. It would have been really fucking ugly and annoying. And also the fact that this was public and no one seemed to have cared is itself super telling. Like no one did anything with this. Even, I mean, if you look this up, you Google like massage, allegations, Russell Brand. there's like one article. The other thing that's so interesting to me about his career in general is how he goes into these little fields and he flames out so quickly, right? He's like hosting awards shows, but then he kind of embarrasses himself enough times that he just isn't asked to do that anymore.

42:56Russell Brand:He's in Hollywood for like four years and flames out. He's then a left-wing political commentator. And again, within a couple of years, he kind of flames out. Like other people take that forward and he kind of disappears. So just like over and over again, he has these little blips where he shows up on people's radar and then the more time you spend with him you're like yes i think we can do better than this guy and he disappears again he sounds like still an absolute fucking nightmare to work with yeah no totally yes being offered a big role in a big movie that requires you to go from la to san diego which is a two hour drive i'm so stuck on that anecdote too i am so fucking stuck on it like this you giant baby yeah if you're dealing with that shit just to get a meeting scheduled no totally and he's just opposing shit for the sake of opposing shit yeah it's honestly surprising to me that he got as much mileage out of those fields as he did so the rest of this episode we are going to talk about his youtube channel and kind of what he does after this he just becomes like an unbelievably prolific youtuber like he's he's posting numerous times a week if you look now he's posting i think once a day or more i mean he just posts his fucking ass off and he's been doing this since like 2015 so i went through the archives of all of his videos i obviously didn't watch every single one but i watched like a shocking alarming number of his videos when we started this morning you were talking about how grumpy you were.

44:26Dude, I'm in such a bad mood. I feel like I know why now.

44:29Russell Brand:Most of his videos are, he literally just sits there with a newspaper in front of him and he just like reads an article and kind of reacts to it. But it's not like he's done any work. Like at no point have I watched a video where I felt like he knew more about a subject than me. Even though I'm like not like well informed on at all. I'm like, I know more about Syria than you do and you don't, like I don't know shit about Syria. Right. You and I talked off mic a few weeks ago about me watching Tim pool clips for the first time and having a similar response where I was just like, I feel like I know fewer things now than before I watched.

45:04Russell Brand:It's like dumbass osmosis. You're like losing information. I'm like losing information. Absolutely is it. I know less things. One of the other main themes of his videos is these unbelievably tedious like woo-woo wellness videos. These are some titles of some of his videos. Could mass meditation change everything? Meditation for sleep. How I'm handling grief. God, the universe, and meaning, senses, and consciousness beyond the five senses myth. Yeah, big Jasmuheen Breatharian energy. Yeah, exactly. Yep. So there's two themes that I want to talk about that start to show up in his videos and remain even after he becomes much more right-wing later.

45:42Russell Brand:The first is he has this idea that all of politics is kind of fake. He wants to stand aside from and above politics. He has this video in 2018 called Can Vegan Jokes Kill? Which is a now totally forgotten story where you know what Waitrose is, right? Fancy Pancy British grocery store. Yes. And they have a magazine. It's in the aisle before you check out. And it has like 10 salads for summer or something. And it basically acts as a form of marketing for the stuff that they're selling at Waitrose. Sure. So there's a weird controversy in 2018 where a freelancer writes to the editor of the Waitrose magazine.

46:24Russell Brand:She's like, oh, why don't I do like a little series on like vegan meals? The editor of the Waitrose magazine writes back to her and says, hi, Celine. Thanks for this. How about a series about killing vegans one by one? Ways to trap them. How to interrogate them properly. Expose their hypocrisy. Force feed them meat. Make them eat steak and drink red wine. why what are we doing this poor vegan lady's like what what the fuck are you talking about i'm just pitching like a cute story you can say you're not interested this feels very reminiscent of the uh paula dean episode i saw years ago where she was making like a butter and meat thing and she was like if you want to make a vegetarian version of this you can just tell him to go outside and eat some grass i don't know like so weird why are people this fucking resentful so the woman who gets this message i believe like forwards it to the waitrose like people and is like why is your editor talking to me this way it goes public eventually it's like a little mini scandal the editor is eventually fired but in russell brand's video about it he has this kind of little summary of it so i'm gonna send you a clip is he vegan he's vegetarian and he says in his book that he did it out of spite because somebody told him like vegetarians are bad.

47:40Russell Brand:And he's like, I'm going to be a vegetarian. And then he just like stuck with it for like 40 years. I'm looking at so much of his chest. Oh yeah. And also do you see in the thumbnail, the name of his podcast is Trues, which is like the true news. He's not, he's not a gifted brander. Ironically. Me, if I was in charge of sacking people at Waitrose magazine, knowing that my job is primarily to generate money for waitrose i don't know that i would have sacked that person whenever you find yourself engaged in a fake phony storm of controversy it's always good to note the context within which it takes is ultimately one of capitalist consumerism and there'll never be a clear example of this this is uh you know being discussed on commercial television is a commercial enterprise talking about sort of diet is any of it real in a way none of it is real none of it is real.

48:33We are living in a spectacle. Perhaps that's what's most offensive. Should people be nice to one another? Of course they should. Should people be able to take a joke? Of course they should. Do we have a society that enables us to access our better selves? Not really. No. We live primarily in an illusion that designates us as consumers above all else. Citizens secondarily, spiritual beings having a real and authentic experience barely barely on the radar so ultimately as you know deep down none of this matters on vibes sure man yeah but there's not there's just not really

49:12Russell Brand:any there there this is what i meant earlier when i said his his ideology is fundamentally narcissistic because in every single little controversy like this he thinks that he's above of taking a side and actually arguing for one of the sides, like, this is good or this is bad. He's like, actually, you're all just losers for even arguing at all. This is a kind of dude on the left, for sure. Dude. Who is like doing a I'm above it all kind of thing. Yes. Like the whole system's rigged. I'm not part of it. I'm not buying into their bullshit, blah, blah, blah, blah. Functionally, just as an organizer who has tried to work with this type of dude.

49:51Dude. The thing that I have observed being at the root of that is that they are like profoundly afraid of advancing a solution and they don't actually have ideas. And they think that the way to be the coolest guy in the room and therefore have the most social power in the room is to be aloof and above it all. Yeah. Rather than like actually rolling up your fucking sleeves and attempting some shit.

50:15Russell Brand:If you want to argue this, you know, dumb little nothing burger of a blip of a one day story doesn't matter. right? It's a fake debate. That's like kind of vaguely defensible. But he takes this position for things like the presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This is what he says about literally everything. Right. And again, like if you're concerned about corporate influence in politics, one approach to that is to be like both parties are the same. There's no difference. They're both bought and paid for. And another approach is to go, OK, what would it look like to really get together a proposal to get money out of politics?

50:49Yeah, exactly. Being the guy who just goes, it's all the same. There's no difference. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Is ultimately like the function of that is to support the status quo. Yeah. Right. If you're saying none of this matters and there's no point in engaging with it, then you are allowing it to continue unabated. Right. It is at this point repeating truisms that have been around since fucking Ralph Nader

51:11Russell Brand:ran for president. Wait, truisms, T-R-E-W-isms. Oh, truisms. Excuse me. God. Truzisms. The other theme that emerges from this is I chose this video specifically for you. So I'm scrolling through his old videos from like 2017. He has a video called Tess Holliday, a vacation from body shaming or modern marketing. Oh, fuck off. So tell us who Tess Holliday is and the whole kind of thing. Tess Holliday is a high profile plus size supermodel who is, I remember reading an article about her talking about being a size 26, which is also my size. so like she is a fat lady she has been on a number of magazine covers and every time it leads to like an absolute freak out meltdown yes from people who really didn't want to see a fat person yes looking happy and okay and great so i i was dreading that his video about tess holiday because i'm like oh what is it promoting obesity or something like really fucking boring yeah but what he does is like vaguely more interesting and I think like more insidious.

52:20Russell Brand:He basically is doing a both sides thing from the left. You know, so obviously after she's on the cover of Cosmopolitan, there's a huge, just flatly fat phobic freak out. People just lose their minds. Like there's a fat lady in Cosmopolitan. He like is willing to condemn this. He's like, you know, it's hard to be a fat person in society and there's a lot of fat phobia. Like he actually says like some of the things that we would like roughly agree with. So then he says, but the problem is that fat activists think that being on the cover of Cosmopolitan is some sort of achievement, but actually you shouldn't need the approval of a women's magazine.

52:55Russell Brand:And it's sort of like, you're desperate to blame both sides here. I don't think Tess Holliday or fucking anybody was like, ah, yes, we're finished now. A fat person's on the cover of Cosmopolitan. Ah, yeah, fat activism, like everyone could just go home. We don't need it anymore. There's nothing else. I think people were probably like, okay, it's, it's a signal of mainstream acceptance. That's not, that's not it. It's just like one little small thing, but it's like, he's scolding people who are like sort of finding representation in this as if the only thing they want is like the cover of cosmopolitan.

53:26Russell Brand:There's zero like hard left fat activists who think cosmopolitan is like a good thing. If you talk to fat activists, they'll go, Hey, uh, the reason that Cosmo matters is that it matters for people to get accustomed to seeing fat people and to stop freaking the fuck out about seeing fat people so that they can stop saying unhinged things to us, so that they can stop treating us in unhinged ways. So there's this desire to turn it into a frivolous question of like, I want everyone to like me. He's doing the same thing he always does, where he's positioning himself as like smarter than the debate, above the debate, right?

54:00Russell Brand:He's like, well, both sides are making mistakes. Smarter than women. above women but it's like on one side you have fat phobic garbage like actual societal discrimination of which there is like ample evidence and on the other side you have this fake thing that you made up well and like well and truly who asked if you're not gonna sort of take a moral stance on what feels to me like a pretty clearly moral issue of like people flipping out about seeing a body that looks different. It's the easiest moral stance to take. My God. Yeah. It is in fact notable and discriminatory that that is the first time that a fat person appeared on the cover of this magazine that has been around for decades.

54:44That's not evidence of weakness in fat people. That's evidence of discrimination at Cosmo.

54:50Russell Brand:He has at this point around 1 million or like 1.5 million followers on YouTube. His videos are typically getting 50 to 100 ,000 views. Some of them have as little as like 30 ,000 views. Like I have videos that have more than 30 ,000 views. You can see him kind of experimenting of like, what's going to work on this platform? He, he gets like one video that does okay about like dating apps. So he does, what is gaslighting? What is ghosting? Surviving a breakup. He's like, he's like desperately trying anything to get views. I haven't trusted anyone to define gaslighting for the last like decade. Easily.

55:26Russell Brand:I definitely don't trust Russell Brand to define it. We then get the start of the COVID pandemic. He has like a video called How to Deal with Feeling Anxious Right Now that has 109 ,000 views, which is actually pretty high for him at this time. But then he does one called Why the Left Can't Handle Donald Trump with 1.4 million views. He also does one called Matthew McConaughey and Russell Brand Discuss Politics and the Left that gets 1.5 million views. Can't wait for these couple of big brains. What's interesting about it to me is like, it's just a really boring celebrity interview. They like don't really discuss politics that much, but he puts politics and the left in the title.

56:05Russell Brand:And I think that's why people click on it. They're like, ooh, two celebrities shitting on the left. Yeah. And or algorithms pick it out in autoplay for them or whatever. Yep. Yeah. I think this is what he's starting to realize is that like, there's numbers in criticizing the left. And then on January 24th, 2021, he publishes probably his first kind of like official conspiracy video it's called the great reset conspiracy or fact why in the fuck are we entertaining this even in a clickbaity way he did i don't want to do too many of these but he then goes like back to woo woo stuff releasing pain from the body 68 000 views he then does another great reset video 2.7 million views literally making money off of entertaining like anti-semitic and racist conspiracy theories cool cool cool cool and then he has a video on april 4th 2021 called five ways brazilian jujitsu changed my life and that is the last normal video that he ever does like these are like the next five videos what causes covid the virus or the system vaccine passports this is where it leads protested covid police laws you've been recorded bill gates's book is rubbish the worst conspiracies are in plain sight russell brand and jordan peterson why is bill gates buying up stolen native american land he does a lot of anti-bill gates stuff that doesn't bother me yeah whatever man this feels like the like well then why don't you stop defending bill clinton in the epstein files i'm like nobody cares yeah no one nobody's coming to rush to the defense of bill gates it's not happening it then becomes things like how everyday people were screwed by liberal politics trump was right about clinton and russia collusion hunter biden paid by ukrainian energy company right now it's just like fully partisan yeah he's kind of cosplay i mean everyone fucking does this but he's still cosplaying he's like i'm an independent thinker but then you look at like who he has on his podcast and it's like tulsi gabbard tim pool dave rubin right candace owens like a bunch of other independent thinkers mike so the kind of last thing that happens is in april 2023 this big investigation comes out that has a bunch of allegations of sexual assault we've been talking about those kind of in the timeline but like the night before the article drops he posts a video like responding to the allegations because of course the fact checkers had to contact him before the article came out to be like, how do you respond to this?

58:36Russell Brand:He puts out a video and I'm going to send you a bit of a transcript from it. As I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous. Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent. And I'm being transparent about it now as well. And to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny makes me question, is there another agenda at play? Agenda. Particularly when we've seen coordinated media attacks before, like with Joe Rogan, when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of.

59:20And we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same language.

59:26Russell Brand:Oh, that's another, that's another thing where he thinks, he thinks there's like coordination behind the scenes when you see like the same, like Russia invades Ukraine. Like there's only so many ways that you can say that. Well, and also like the issue isn't that Joe Rogan dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of. No one fucking cares. It's that he has one of the most popular podcasts in the country. And there is a demonstrated track record of people taking his terrible advice on things. The only other thing to say is that after this happens, Russell Brand like announces his Christianity.

1:00:00Russell Brand:Gotta catch them all. Yeah. People say that he did this after the allegations came out and he kind of did officially. But if you look at his old YouTube channel, he has like a lot of like spiritual videos. I think because the 12 steps have that sort of acknowledge a higher power. Yeah. I think he's actually been kind of like quasi religious for a while. It's just like the specific Christianity that is new. Right. He's changing out his blouses button to the navel. Yeah. For like a white linen baptismal tunic. That is also somehow cut down to the navel. Last thing we're going to do is we are going to go to his YouTube channel.

1:00:38Why?

1:00:39Russell Brand:I just want to give you a flavor of like the kind of stuff that he's now producing. Oh, wow. Okay. So one of the first thumbnails I'm seeing. I know which one it is. This is terrifying. oh wait you're you're focused on that one i thought you were going to focus on muslims versus dogs fuck your dogs no the background is a bunch like a bunch of buildings in london that appear to be decorated with giant posters with a single eyeball that just say conform the third eye yes and then in the middle ground you see keir starmer grinning nefariously and ripping through a union jack. Do you see the no whites one?

1:01:23Russell Brand:He has one where the thumbnail just says no whites. Oh no. We all know whites are banned in the UK now. There's an anti-Bill Gates one where he has used an AI image of Bill Gates looking like he is in agony. Crying like a baby. Yes. He has one just called the problem with Billie Eilish. But also, you know the most cathartic thing about this? Like the best news about all of this? What? Look at the view counts, Aubrey. I mean, they're abysmal, dude. 25k 32k yeah muslim mayor yeah 54 000 views so there's there's very little interesting here but what is interesting to me is that he has also kind of flamed out as a right-wing influencer yeah there there was a period during the pandemic where he was regularly getting over 1.5 million views for like most of his videos and now it's like he's lucky if he breaks 200k yeah it's wild I'm just looking at I just found the first one that I've seen that's over a million views.

1:02:18And it's Candace Owens. Yeah, exactly.

1:02:21Russell Brand:Interview with a thumbnail of Erica Kirk where you're like, oh, yeah, that's people who are watching for that thing. That's Candace Owens fans coming over. That's not Russell Brand fans. Which is like bleak as fuck in its own way. So that is the Russell Brand story. It is ongoing because his trial begins in June of 2026. So I already regret doing this episode because it means he's like on our radar. Now we have to follow up. Yeah. Like, it's like, as soon as I did the RFK Jr. episode, I was like, fuck, I have to keep covering this guy. He's in like the cast of characters now. Yeah. But so I just wanted to ask you what, I mean, we started out with the question of like, you know, what explains this guy's shift from the left to the right?

1:03:01Russell Brand:How would you answer this question after six hours of recording about this? I think a couple of things. One, I think he wears out his welcome really quickly in different spaces, right? And I also think, you know, the money stops flowing at a certain point, right? Yeah. He's in Hollywood and then Hollywood turns off the money tap, right? He's in the UK and then the UK kind of turns off the money tap, right? I do think this is like a very common pattern. Like if you look at somebody like Rob Schneider or like Nicki Minaj, these people as their career is fading in this kind of normal way, like nobody stays at the peak of their career forever.

1:03:43Russell Brand:But as people start to become less culturally relevant, they get this, it appears kind of resentment or anger and they don't know where to place it. And that tends to result in them siding with the right basically. Right. Instead of doing the normal career and decline thing of like getting a residency in Vegas and starting a skincare line. Yeah, I know. Like, just chill the fuck out, dudes. I also think a really important component of this is Russell Brandt, as we said, his only kind of core guiding belief is don't tell me what to do. And right-wing media has been very good over the last 10 to 15 years of pitching themselves as anti-establishment and as pitching the left as the establishment, right?

1:04:24Russell Brand:Who is the establishment? Oh, it's the feminists on Twitter. It's the elite universities. but it's like the left writ large is like the mom who is constantly telling you to eat your vegetables and i think he's just vulnerable to that stuff because he doesn't really have any core guiding principles there's like a real peril to not having a positive vision and i don't mean like positive in terms of uh like uplifting i mean positive in terms of like what is present how do things work what do you think is the answer here right i also think the incentives of social media are really important. We've talked about how he starts getting views the minute he leans into this conspiracy slash right wing stuff.

1:05:02Russell Brand:First of all, I want to say that I'm stealing this argument from Abby Richards, friend of the show, who made a really good Media Matters video essay about this where she traced like the view counts. Also, I think that there's a tendency when you look at these things, aha, he's getting views by shifting to the right, to act as if that means he's not sincere. I don't think that's what's happening. I think there's something like a human thing that when you get rewarded for something, you do it more. Like all of us have a million little pet peeves or a million little views. And, you know, if I made a video or an episode about like people using Bluetooth speakers in public, and all of a sudden that got like three times more downloads than any other episode we've ever made, I'd probably make another one about that, right?

1:05:46Russell Brand:It's not that it's an insincere view. That's why we have two Russell brand i haven't actually checked the download numbers for the first part but it's probably not good i also haven't checked it but i'm like well knowing the content yeah but like you you lean into things that do well even if they're sincerely held so i also want to say i don't i don't want to imply that he's faking this i think the other thing that's fascinating here is that he is someone who was publicly accused of sexual assault ran for shelter on the right and it hasn't really panned out for him which is not usually how that goes i know it's so delicious it's so delicious it's oddly heartening to be like okay i know there is actually a rock bottom unfortunately it's not sexual assault it is when you won't go to san diego for one single fucking meeting

1:06:52Thank you.