Maintenance Phase - Russell Brand Part 2

00:00:00.000 hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that loves to remember 0.93

00:00:14.660 sarah marshall but wouldn't mind forgetting the other fucking guy 0.81

00:00:17.420 thank you hi sarah we love you sarah i was gonna have a joke about how i respect that movie because 0.95

00:00:26.480 it's named after my favorite podcaster but i like yours better yours is good too i'm aubrey gordon

00:00:32.620 i'm michael hubs if you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com slash

00:00:37.080 maintenance phase or you can subscribe through apple podcast it's the same audio content same

00:00:43.460 stuff my goal today you're returning me to a nightmare yes so as with last episode we also

00:00:50.060 have like a fairly omni trigger warning for this one there's lots of sexual assault stuff oh great

00:00:54.320 And so we basically find Russell in 2008. He has been kind of disgraced and fired from the BBC. He's sort of on the outs in Britain, but then he reemerges as a fairly mainstream Hollywood star starting in 2008 with, yes, the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, where it appears they essentially wrote the role for him.

00:01:19.440 so he's the love interest of the main protagonist's kind of ex-wife he's trying to get back together

00:01:25.660 with her but she's shacked up with this like uh sort of woo woo over sexed british guy the role

00:01:32.120 was originally written as like a nerdy librarian but then when he auditioned they were like oh

00:01:38.060 let's make him this kind of like rock star stoner type of guy the only thing that's interesting

00:01:42.920 about this in the book is still he has this weird thing where he's just opposed to authority

00:01:48.360 regardless of whether it makes any sense so at a certain point when he's going through the audition

00:01:52.540 process they ask him to go to san diego to do like line readings with kristin bell who's going 0.65

00:01:58.940 to be playing his love interest in the movie and for no fucking reason russell is like what if i 0.91

00:02:04.340 don't want to leave what if i want to stay in la and his agent is like dude this is a huge you're 0.85

00:02:09.760 a nobody and they're they're offering you a major role in a major hollywood movie they're offering

00:02:15.860 you the coveted james corden path i've worn out my welcome in the uk and the u.s is rolling out

00:02:23.600 the red carpet and again he's telling this scene as if it's like kind of cool or he's like

00:02:28.020 in some way sort of this like rakish raconteur type of figure but it's like you're just being 0.99

00:02:32.340 a dumbass for no fucking reason you're like making people talk you into doing this thing 0.99

00:02:36.640 that is manifestly in your self-interest this is behavior that would be immature in an adolescent 1.00

00:02:42.740 this movie comes out in 2008 the movie is a big hit his role especially is like really memorable

00:02:48.960 and it's kind of remarkable if you look at his imdb he starts showing up in like everything

00:02:54.180 immediately so he's in a julie taymore version of the tempest who the fuck does he play in the

00:03:01.560 tempest uh trinculo whatever that is yeah i'm reading his wikipedia entry it's fine i'm just

00:03:08.680 glad they didn't cast him as like prospero or like a you know what i mean like don't don't give

00:03:13.180 him a don't give him a role that matters they sound like car names to me um he shows up in the

00:03:19.120 despicable me movies he gets his own spin-off to forgetting sarah marshall called get him to the

00:03:25.120 greek oh that's the same character yeah yeah yeah and then it's sort of like the misadventures of

00:03:30.000 jonah hill trying to like get at me and getting him to the greek i saw it i do not remember a

00:03:34.460 single thing from that movie based on what we know now what a set to be on like he shows up on

00:03:39.380 the simpsons he eventually gets a starring role in a remake of arthur yes the coveted arthur

00:03:45.520 which does flop but the fact that he's in like essentially a star vehicle within three years

00:03:52.500 of anyone even like knowing his name at all in the u.s is really remarkable they were really

00:03:57.460 really really trying to make russell brand happen over here and he did to a degree right like yes

00:04:03.280 but it seems to me that he never really developed like a diehard fan base based on his comedy or

00:04:09.820 comedic acting right his second memoir my bookie wook to colon this time it's personal which makes

00:04:17.080 no sense the first one was very impersonal most this is like one of the worst memoirs i've ever

00:04:21.420 read because he he sort of went through all of his like drug addiction and stuff in the first

00:04:25.380 memoir and like that's borderline interesting right it's like the sort of the rise of somebody

00:04:28.780 who becomes a successful working actor part two only covers like three or four years in hollywood

00:04:34.980 and so it's just a bunch of like really boring anecdotes of like i hung out with jonah hill and

00:04:39.460 i went to dinner at his house and he's a nice guy okay okay just not interesting at all but

00:04:45.160 one of the stories he tells i think is just like so typical of the way that he just like deals with

00:04:51.660 people around him so are you familiar with theresa palmer no i don't know that i recognize that name

00:04:58.120 She is an Australian actress who is in a movie called Bedtime Stories with Adam Sandler and Russell Brand.

00:05:06.800 It's one of these weird kind of 80s style high concept comedies where Adam Sandler tells bedtime stories to his kids with the bedtime stories come true.

00:05:16.160 Oh.

00:05:16.640 And then there's like hijinks ensue.

00:05:18.380 I could barely get through the trailer.

00:05:20.100 Like it looked so bad.

00:05:20.980 It has 27% on Rotten Tomatoes.

00:05:23.060 I was going to say Adam Sandler and Russell Brand.

00:05:25.580 I know.

00:05:26.120 Don't threaten me with a bad time. 0.98

00:05:27.640 She has a love interest in that. So Russell Brand gets like a little crush on her on set and talks about her, like, dedicates an entire chapter of his book to like the crush that he has on her and what happens afterwards. So here is him describing his feelings.

00:05:44.860 Teresa Palmer is pretty. So pretty, in fact, that she could probably spend the rest of her life 0.96

00:05:51.140 sat passive in a market square being pelted with money by desperate men.

00:05:56.300 Like what? She's pretty. So beautiful that it seems like no one should be allowed to have sex

00:06:02.460 with her, that her hymen should remain for alien archaeologists to peruse in the year 5000 when

00:06:10.640 maybe they can quantify such beauty like an action figure remaining untroubled behind cellophane 1.00

00:06:17.260 too perfect to be tampered with not a toy her hair seamlessly fell in honey rivers from her golden

00:06:24.940 skin each feature a monument to its ideal the perfect nose the perfect mouth the teeth too good

00:06:32.800 to eat what you can't eat her teeth plus she was a nice bird australian down to earth what choice 0.96

00:06:39.360 do they have they're all crooks and the price of a no class system is no class christian too

00:06:47.160 she was and all bound up in moral swaddling boy i have never felt less like russell brand than

00:06:55.620 trying to read russell brand's sentences you're gonna read so many this episode christian too

00:07:02.840 she was is not a thing that my accent says also it's one thing that is truly remarkable to me is

00:07:09.660 his ability to describe people in language that he thinks is complimentary but it's like so

00:07:15.820 degrading one million percent why would you mention her hymen horrifying and even this like

00:07:21.580 like the tedious joke about like they're all crooks in australia like wow yeah groundbreaking 0.94

00:07:27.080 stuff and then at the end says all bound up in moral swaddling like oh she thinks she's so good

00:07:33.040 she's such a goody two-shoes kind of like she's like a conquest for you well also the way he 0.99

00:07:38.360 describes her is honey hair from golden skin which that sounds like your hair and your skin are the 0.57

00:07:44.260 same color which is unnerving so this is him describing the sort of onset crush that he has

00:07:50.420 on her on a work colleague on a work colleague who will be reading this book or at least like 0.98

00:07:55.040 someone will tell her the content of this book so she probably feels like shit after this comes out 0.92

00:07:59.720 if someone has written about your hymen in a book a girl's girl will tell you there's a weird thing

00:08:08.160 where throughout the course of like a fairly small section like a couple pages where he's

00:08:11.860 talking about filming this movie three times he mentions that he is picking off extras to have 0.98

00:08:18.740 sex with jesus fucking so this echoes the accusations that we had from last episode 0.99

00:08:23.000 about how women at channel four were asked to comb the audience of the tv shows that he was hosting 1.00

00:08:28.120 to find attractive women and like deliver them to him so you're infatuated with this woman but 0.93

00:08:33.140 you're also fucking a bunch of extras apparently and like thinking that's like a funny story the 0.98

00:08:37.140 nutty part isn't that he thinks it's a story the nutty part is that it is a story to some 0.97

00:08:41.760 section of his audience right that they're like oh yeah he also at one point is talking about a

00:08:46.260 scene where she gets out of a swimming pool wearing a bikini and he says i wanted to be 0.98

00:08:50.820 sick out of my penis michael this is as good a time as any to tell you i'm quitting the show 0.99

00:08:56.820 i think i'll leave in the full silence after that jesus fucking christ so there's then 1.00

00:09:03.040 i guess like a wrap party or something at lucy lawless's house sure in the hollywood hills and 0.93

00:09:10.320 i'm i was gonna read this but i'm gonna make you read it because it's problematic

00:09:14.680 um great luckily the mandatory mexican housekeeper had brought her son to work

00:09:22.040 he was about four and a likable sort of cove i don't know i'd been pulling faces and such

00:09:29.320 and shooting him with an imaginary gun for ages and he was lapping it up but as yet teresa hadn't

00:09:35.700 noticed my incredible unaffected rapport with children so he's playing with a kid so that

00:09:40.840 Teresa will notice uh he then does a sort of like ma I'm a monster the way that you do with little

00:09:47.080 kids yeah and the kid starts crying and the kid pisses himself shocking that Russell Brand can't

00:09:52.960 figure out how to do a like basic play with children and figure out how to like have a

00:09:58.400 boundary Teresa's watching him or kind of watching this from across the room he says Teresa made for

00:10:03.500 the bathroom I seized the opportunity and caught up with her no which to me is interesting because

00:10:09.660 at least two of the sexual assaults that he's accused of took place where he dragged a woman

00:10:13.920 into a bathroom into the bathroom yeah and he also has the other one where a woman says that

00:10:18.520 he followed her into a bathroom jesus we can do this as like a little script i think so you can

00:10:23.400 be him i'll be her okay she says kids huh kids i love them well you've got a funny way of showing

00:10:30.620 it she said frowning a beautiful frown yeah i'm complicated i muttered staring off into the

00:10:37.060 distance where the child's sobbing could still be faintly heard. I hope he's playing this up for

00:10:41.940 comedic. I don't think, I hope he didn't like traumatize the child at a party. He like must be,

00:10:46.100 but also I wouldn't put it past him. Oh God. Beautiful girls spend their lives getting chatted

00:10:51.480 up. So to get past their defenses, you need some pretty potent artillery. I gave her hair a pull. 1.00

00:10:58.640 Fancy coming for dinner? I've heard about you, mister. Yeah. What have you heard? That I'm a

00:11:03.360 rogue a heartbreaker i had such a good speech for this kind of approach but before i could embark 0.67

00:11:08.940 she interrupted no that you're a prat lesser men would have been swayed but you'll get nowhere in 0.95

00:11:14.740 life if you can't skip past a few superficial insults like alan devonshire evading a clumsy 0.51

00:11:20.780 right back context clues yeah great great great great i know every word that just got written

00:11:27.300 we both know exactly what this means but like it would be so boring to explain to our listeners

00:11:30.400 we'll just move on we're like total Ellen Devonshire heads over here let's go for a walk

00:11:36.800 and see if we can't get past a few of these terrible misconceptions so again he's telling

00:11:42.480 this kind of bragging that he got past her defenses and that she's skeptical and he pulls her hair to

00:11:49.040 get her attention it's like while she's trying to go to the bathroom at a party it's all every no

00:11:54.240 is a challenge for this man she relents and they go they sort of walk around the grounds

00:12:00.860 of lucy lawless's house they end up jumping on a trampoline they end up flirting he of course this

00:12:06.520 is his description so we don't know what really happened but he talks her into like hanging out

00:12:10.720 again and like she seems to soften toward him again this is a pattern that he has where like he

00:12:15.480 when he is infatuated with a woman he pays her a huge amount of positive attention yeah and then

00:12:21.100 they appear to engage in some sort of negotiation where he like wants to start seeing her and she's

00:12:26.840 skeptical but he talks her into it apparently so this is the final part of this do you think

00:12:33.720 you'll ever change she asked me with breathtaking sincerity and for the moment i was safe i fell

00:12:40.460 into the kiss i'll change for you i whispered and i did for a week and then he never mentions her 0.87

00:12:48.460 again jesus fucking christmas this is the pattern that he has in both of his memoirs he's like 0.99

00:12:52.680 these all-encompassing infatuations right with these women like she will complete me 1.00

00:12:57.260 she's this perfect angel the minute they have sex you they just disappear from the book completely

00:13:02.100 and he's not specific about what happened for a week what happened after a week russell this is

00:13:06.900 a particular thing that like adult men will do not all of them but a good number of them will

00:13:13.720 sort of like recognize that they have these personality traits or ways of going about

00:13:18.540 sort of relationship building or whatever that are not widely accepted they're not approved of

00:13:24.360 by the people around them so they'll kind of turn it into a shtick yeah yeah i feel like i have

00:13:28.840 witnessed this with like older men in particular will sort of put on like i'm a grumpy old guy

00:13:34.660 like i'm a cantankerous dude and you're like right you're sort of doing a shtick but you're also

00:13:41.180 So that is how you feel about things.

00:13:43.620 And you're just figuring out how to pitch that.

00:13:46.640 It's sort of like, I understand that you don't like this aspect of me, but I'm not sure what to do with it.

00:13:51.700 I'm definitely not going to get rid of it.

00:13:53.360 So here's another way of presenting it.

00:13:55.000 So the other thing that happens during this period is we have two more alleged rapes in 2009.

00:14:02.240 These are from the charging document.

00:14:03.860 As we talked about, these are not described in any great detail.

00:14:06.580 So all we have from the charging document from the Met Police is the two alleged offenses took place in London in 2009.

00:14:13.960 There's also in 2010 a woman who sues him for sexual assault in a bathroom on the set of this movie Arthur.

00:14:22.480 She says Russell exposed his penis to her in full view of cast and crew of Arthur.

00:14:27.960 The accuser alleged the assault happened on July 7th, 2010 in a bathroom on set as a member of the production crew guarded the door from the outside. 0.61

00:14:36.300 Jesus.

00:14:36.960 He denies this allegation, of course.

00:14:39.000 He also, in 2010, has his marriage to Katy Perry.

00:14:42.860 There's not that much to say about this one,

00:14:44.060 mostly because neither one of them talk about it that much. 0.97

00:14:46.920 Her documentary is, like, pretty substantially about what a shitty husband he is.

00:14:51.420 Like, he, like, refuses to go and visit her on tour. 0.94

00:14:54.220 So she's on this, like, insane world tour,

00:14:56.340 and she's, like, flying back to London for, like, hours at a time.

00:15:00.340 And then she flies back to, you know, Hamburg or Beijing or wherever she is.

00:15:04.140 and so she at least according to the documentary which of course is like from her perspective

00:15:07.640 sure she is like trying to make the relationship work and he basically refuses to and then he

00:15:12.020 divorces her with a text message great famously like minutes before she goes on stage what a

00:15:17.600 catch and it appears that neither of them have spoken since which is fascinating it's like they're

00:15:23.720 in this whirlwind romance 14 months they get married and then he sends her the text message

00:15:29.120 breaking up and they just never talk again and like their lawyers handle it apparently if someone

00:15:33.280 divorce me by text i would definitely never speak to them again oh yeah like i don't know what his

00:15:38.140 deal is actually i do know what his deal is this seems to be very much part of his pattern the

00:15:42.800 last thing we have to cover from his adventures in hollywood is yet another uh alleged rape oh

00:15:49.340 sure there's a woman who in the investigation is called nadia this is not her real name of course

00:15:54.400 she meets him at a party they have a consensual relationship it appears it's kind of like a

00:16:00.360 hookup thing they're like they're they're hooking up but it's not like a romantic relationship it

00:16:03.360 appears but then one time later it appears like in the middle of the night he calls her kind of

00:16:08.400 frantically pleading with her to come over eventually she's like whatever fine so she

00:16:14.240 comes over she says the door was unlocked and i walked in he comes running out of the bedroom

00:16:18.980 naked jesus nadia says brand took her to a wall and kissed her and made a comment something along

00:16:24.100 the lines of i'll keep you safe he then told her that a friend was already in the bedroom

00:16:29.940 and he wanted her to join them jesus so this is like the weird sort of mania thing that we were

00:16:36.700 talking about last episode where it's like he already has a woman who he presumably already

00:16:41.060 had sex with and is like frantically calling this other woman this really feels like a personality

00:16:47.640 disorder territory or like very profound mood disorder or something like i'm like something is 0.89

00:16:54.000 definitely capital you up with this guy this is another thing i think about too is this whole

00:16:59.740 think about like kind of male conquests for women right yeah from afar maybe you could say like oh 0.63

00:17:05.640 man this guy's like getting laid with up to five women a night he's having all the sex he's having

00:17:09.740 a bunch of threesomes wow what a cool guy but then you look at what he's actually doing and 0.99

00:17:13.900 it's like really pathetic yeah he's basically badgering this woman yeah like oh i need to see 0.53

00:17:18.700 you i need to see you like calling someone in the middle of the night this is how you behave if you 0.98

00:17:22.360 believe in your core that you are not a lovable person you shouldn't be doing i mean you shouldn't

00:17:26.900 be this regardless but it's like you're like a middle-aged man you're not 37 is not middle-aged

00:17:32.940 but yes it is no it's not middle age is 40 to 65 what yes i am 44 and i can call 37 year olds

00:17:41.440 middle age you're in here with me you're trapped in here with me okay but so the ending of the

00:17:46.180 story is really rough uh she basically is like i do not want to have a threesome with you in the

00:17:50.840 middle of the night and then he like basically like presses her up against the wall and like

00:17:54.460 forcibly rapes her according to her like it's not surprising since we've heard so many stories of

00:17:59.520 this but it's also not it's still like alarming the investigation includes their text messages 0.97

00:18:05.880 from the next day she's like that really fucking scared me last night that's not cool and he's 0.73

00:18:11.020 like i'm so sorry they also have the medical records from the rape crisis center that she 0.88

00:18:16.040 went to jesus god there's also one more uh we're almost done with these there's a woman named uh

00:18:22.780 quote unquote Phoebe, who he meets at AA. They have a consensual relationship. That kind of trails 0.66

00:18:28.160 off and she starts working for him because she's like trying to break into Hollywood. That actually 0.94

00:18:33.120 seems to go well for a couple of months. But then there's a night where they're filming something

00:18:37.200 at his house and other people kind of trickle away. And she looks around eventually and she's

00:18:42.580 like, it's just me and Russell. And then he disappears for a second and he comes out of

00:18:47.880 his bedroom she can't remember either naked or in his underwear and starts like chasing her around 0.75

00:18:54.040 being like i want to have sex with you and she's like running away again like physically starting 0.76

00:18:58.940 like physically force her into sex according to her she eventually is like fighting him off 1.00

00:19:03.800 screaming at him get the fuck away from me what are you doing and then she says he immediately 1.00

00:19:08.500 flips and is like fuck you and he says you're fired and they never speak again that to me feels 1.00

00:19:13.640 like very very classic sort of abusive dynamics right which is just like denial of anything i 1.00

00:19:19.880 want at any point no matter how unreasonable is actually on you and you're a disaster for not

00:19:25.720 giving me whatever i want whenever i want it so he then basically like disappears from hollywood

00:19:31.860 he's in this movie arthur in 2011 that flops and he's in rock of ages in 2012 which is like a

00:19:38.800 jukebox musical with tom cruise which also flops good and then by 2013 he basically never works

00:19:44.900 again i blame katie perry it is actually interesting to me because like other people 0.98

00:19:48.640 have been in movies that have flopped and continue you know having a career like fucking 0.52

00:19:52.260 jared leto right yeah it's not like for ethical reasons we're not going to cast you in movies 0.79

00:19:55.960 anymore that's not how it works right right right i would love to be able to claim that this is like

00:20:00.180 the industry did the right thing and they ousted this dude who was bad news and we knew it was bad

00:20:04.660 news no my guess is that it has a whole lot more to do with the what if i don't want to go to san

00:20:09.520 diego he does seem like he'd be a nightmare to work with he's like a child so that's kind of

00:20:14.020 the end of his like hollywood chapter we then get the beginning of his political chapter he does

00:20:20.300 this on the back of a sort of wellness slash recovery pivot so in 2012 just as his hollywood

00:20:28.820 career is waning. He presents a BBC show about the drug war. It's called Russell Brand from

00:20:34.780 Addiction to Recovery. And it's sort of like a little biography thing of him and also talking

00:20:39.840 about like the downstream effects of the drug war, basically. And as part of that, he does

00:20:44.340 a Newsnight interview. So Newsnight is kind of there like 60 minutes. He talks in the interview,

00:20:49.140 they're talking about like drug war, like, you know, how should we proceed? And he says that

00:20:52.680 he's against methadone treatment. What? He says we might as well let people carry on taking drugs

00:20:58.180 if they're going to be on methadone? Obviously, it's painful to abstain, but at least it's hope

00:21:03.260 based. What? Here is this from a Guardian kind of recap of the interview. He insists that addiction

00:21:09.980 can be tackled only by addressing the root causes. For Brand, drugs were an escape from

00:21:16.660 a troubled upbringing. There was, Brand says, quote, an emptiness inside, a sadness, a loneliness,

00:21:23.540 and unaddressed pain at the core of alienation. Unless you have some mechanism to deal with that,

00:21:30.540 I think you'll deal with it with various forms of anesthetic, starting with drugs and perhaps

00:21:36.040 ending with shopping. That's like his little joke at the end there.

00:21:39.580 As we get into his political ideology, what you see here is he's incapable of thinking of issues

00:21:45.880 outside of his own personal experience. For him, he was using drugs to self-medicate, right? Because

00:21:50.760 he didn't like being alone with himself. And that is the experience of some people. And abstinence

00:21:55.420 worked for Russell Brand. That is also the experience of some people. But we have like

00:21:59.740 thousands of studies on this. We have like harm reduction programs. We would all love a world

00:22:05.680 where like we quote unquote address the root causes and like nobody is abused by their parents.

00:22:10.420 But we don't have that society. And so in the society that we have with, you know, there are

00:22:15.180 people on the planet who were abused and methadone and suboxone work unbelievably well yeah so like

00:22:21.980 methadone treatment is this thing where it's a form of an opioid which helps people deal with

00:22:26.680 cravings and withdrawal symptoms when they are going off of other opioids so if you're trying

00:22:32.540 to kick heroin you will take methadone or suboxone as a way to make that process easier and they're

00:22:39.780 less fatal, right? And there's so many studies on this of like in the long term, people who are

00:22:46.680 using methadone are significantly less likely like a year after they start treatment to be using

00:22:51.000 opioids again. They're also way less likely to overdose because the problem with abstinence

00:22:56.780 programs is that when you stop using, you lose all of your tolerance. So if you go back to using the

00:23:04.380 amount that you were using before you stopped, oftentimes you will overdose and die. Like this

00:23:08.000 happened to a guy I went to high school with. He got sober, he fell off the wagon and had an

00:23:11.960 overdose immediately. And so if you are using methadone, you keep some of the tolerance and

00:23:16.960 you're able to kind of taper down. And so that way, if you do fall off the wagon, which is

00:23:20.240 relatively common, you don't fucking die. Statistically, empirically, methadone treatment 0.98

00:23:26.860 works extremely well. At no point can Russell Brand just look at an issue as like, oh, this is

00:23:33.060 a large societal phenomenon i have one i am one person among millions of people who use drugs for

00:23:38.020 all kinds of reasons he can't do that and that is like the guiding principle of his ideology going

00:23:42.960 forward i do think that having more people who have experienced substance use disorders talking

00:23:49.060 about their personal experiences is like has a great deal of social value to reduce stigma around

00:23:54.500 talking about dealing with substance use issues and the context here that makes this really

00:24:00.600 fucking tricky is that he's going and that's why i'm against methadone treatments and treatments

00:24:06.600 that i haven't opted into or that i don't see use in and he's increasing the stigma against 0.98

00:24:13.000 methadone right he's like oh you're still using drugs in that way it's sort of former fat person 0.94

00:24:17.580 kind of energy of like i did it the right way or whatever where you're like this sucks i hate it

00:24:23.800 so from there he kind of becomes like a general purpose left-wing political pundit in 2012 he

00:24:28.860 visits the Occupy Wall Street protests. He visits Africa to look at global poverty. He writes a

00:24:35.000 pretty well-regarded obituary of Margaret Thatcher when she dies in 2013, where he's like, 1.00

00:24:40.360 she fucking sucks. We then in 2013 have the kind of, I think, coming out of Russell Brand as like 0.99

00:24:47.200 a major political figure when he edits The New Statesman. So in 2013, he starts dating a woman

00:24:55.340 named Jemima Khan, who is the daughter of some billionaire. And she is one of the associate

00:25:00.380 editors of the New Statesman. It's a center left magazine, sort of the way that we have the New

00:25:05.340 Republic in the United States. She asked him to write an article on religion because he is touring

00:25:11.680 a show called Messiah Complex. And then later they're talking about like, oh, who should guest

00:25:16.480 edit the new issue? And she's like, oh, Russell Brand would be fun. So he guest edits an issue

00:25:23.700 about revolution on the theme of revolution revolution is the one where he's uh popped out

00:25:29.780 the evol so it looks like love backwards that's the cover that's the cover of his book which

00:25:35.680 comes out the following year it's so annoying revolution is how i always said it in my head

00:25:40.520 could dollar sign ha yes here is the first couple paragraphs of his uh introductory essay

00:25:48.620 when i was asked to edit an issue of the new statesman i said yes because it was a beautiful

00:25:53.300 woman asking me i chose the subject of revolution because the new statesman is a political magazine

00:25:59.260 and imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way i can be

00:26:04.300 enthused about politics when people talk about politics within the existing westminster framework 0.92

00:26:10.020 i feel a dull thud in my stomach and my eyes involuntarily glaze i have never voted fuck 0.98

00:26:17.600 these guys like most people i am utterly disenchanted by politics like most people i 0.99

00:26:27.080 regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a

00:26:32.660 bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites billy connolly

00:26:38.940 said don't vote it encourages them so this is another thing that is core to his political

00:26:44.580 ideology is the entire political system is just a pantomime everyone is like fake and pretending 0.98

00:26:49.180 that they care about these issues but it's all theater it's all bullshit and so the way to enact 0.92

00:26:54.280 political change is to just not engage it just feels supremely unsurprising to me that he would 0.97

00:26:59.140 land in this like burn it down place because that's what he does with his personal relationships

00:27:03.260 and his work stuff right allegedly sort of across the board right like mr oppositional of course 0.99

00:27:08.980 doesn't want to engage with an existing system he doesn't want to engage with his fucking work 0.86

00:27:12.780 calendar so the main thing that comes out of all this is there's an interview with jeremy paxman 0.96

00:27:17.660 who's like a legendary like tough questions interviewer in the uk and they have a vituperative

00:27:23.960 discussion about russell brand's politics which goes mega viral this is one of the most watched

00:27:30.260 youtube clips of 2013 this is like a huge deal really yeah so we're gonna watch a small snippet

00:27:35.860 of it. You've never ever voted? No do you think that's really bad? So you struck an attitude what

00:27:43.300 before the age of 18? Well I was busy being a drug addict at that point because I come from

00:27:47.180 the kind of social conditions that are exacerbated by an indifferent system that really just

00:27:51.100 administrates for large corporations and ignores the population that it was voted in to serve.

00:27:55.060 You're blaming the political class for the fact you had a drug problem? No no no I'm saying I was

00:27:59.960 part of a social and economic class that is underserved by the current political system

00:28:04.680 and drug addiction is one of the problems it creates

00:28:07.120 when you have huge, underserved, impoverished populations.

00:28:10.680 People get drug problems and also don't feel like they want to engage

00:28:15.200 with the current political system

00:28:16.340 because they see that it doesn't work for them.

00:28:18.360 They see that it makes no difference.

00:28:20.160 They see that they're not served.

00:28:21.560 I say that the apathy...

00:28:22.280 Well, of course it doesn't work for them if they didn't bother to vote.

00:28:23.560 Jeremy, my darling, I'm not saying that the apathy doesn't come from us, the people.

00:28:27.180 The apathy comes from the politicians.

00:28:28.700 They are apathetic to our needs.

00:28:29.960 They're only interested in servicing the needs of corporations.

00:28:32.080 Look at what, ain't the Tories going to court and taking the EU to court

00:28:35.740 because they're trying to curtail bank bonuses?

00:28:38.600 Is that what's happening at the moment in our country?

00:28:40.380 It is, isn't it?

00:28:41.120 So why am I going to tune in for that?

00:28:43.120 You don't believe in democracy. You want a revolution, don't you?

00:28:45.940 The planet is being destroyed. We are creating an underclass. 1.00

00:28:49.140 We are exploiting poor people all over the world.

00:28:51.380 And the genuine and legitimate problems of the people 0.68

00:28:53.360 are not being addressed by our political class. 1.00

00:28:55.460 All of those things may be true.

00:28:57.300 They are true.

00:28:58.100 I wouldn't argue with you about many of them.

00:29:00.040 Well, how come I feel so cross with you?

00:29:02.020 It can't just be because of that beard.

00:29:03.600 It's gorgeous.

00:29:04.420 It's possibly because...

00:29:05.260 If the Daily Mail don't want it, I do.

00:29:07.440 I'm against them.

00:29:08.600 Grow it longer.

00:29:09.560 Tangle it into your armpit hair. 0.96

00:29:11.300 You are a very trivial man. 0.97

00:29:13.500 What, do you think I am trivial? 0.64

00:29:14.880 Yes.

00:29:15.320 A minute ago, you were having a go at me because I wanted a revolution.

00:29:18.080 Now I'm trivial.

00:29:18.460 No, I'm not having a go at you because you want a revolution.

00:29:21.820 Many people want a revolution, but I'm asking you what it would be like.

00:29:25.080 Well, I think what it won't be like is a huge disparity between rich and poor

00:29:30.120 with 300 americans we can stop there we can stop there this is like seven million organizing

00:29:35.280 meetings that i've been part of where someone goes what's the positive vision and someone goes

00:29:39.180 i'll tell you what it's not gonna be and you're like that's specifically not what was asked of

00:29:45.240 you dude i we once had a strategy meeting at my ngo we were talking about like which issue should

00:29:48.880 we work on next year we had like five different options and somebody was like i think we should

00:29:53.240 prioritize all the options because they're all very important i was like what do you think the

00:29:57.920 point of this meeting is good i get it he's a compelling presence and i also think this is like

00:30:04.480 kind of what year is this that this airs 2013 yeah so this is airing in 2013 which is a few

00:30:09.880 years before donald trump takes office in the u.s and i think there's like some kind of through

00:30:15.040 lines here which is just like this feels like a person who is more unstudied this seems like a

00:30:21.140 person who is just sort of telling you with some degree of candor where they're actually at and

00:30:27.100 like expressing some frustration you've got a bunch of like valid critiques here and then you

00:30:32.240 just take a turn yeah but i don't think you have really earned here so for this i read a really

00:30:37.020 interesting paper called russell brand comedy celebrity politics by jane arthur's and ben

00:30:41.900 little their explanation for what was going on here is you know this is before the emergence

00:30:48.100 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

00:30:53.220 deal in labor until after the 2015 general election it's before the emergence of bernie

00:30:57.620 as like a major political figure right but it's also kind of after occupy so you have this sense

00:31:03.800 of like people are pissed but there's no real figure to like put that into there's no real

00:31:08.400 vessel for that yeah and so i think people were like crawling through the desert and drinking the

00:31:13.800 sand yeah very few other people especially institutional people were speaking like this 0.98

00:31:18.660 Well, and also, like, Russell Brand fucking sucks for a lot of reasons, but he is also a working class dude. 0.98

00:31:25.760 Yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:31:26.240 Telling off a middle class dude with a more sort of upper crusty accent.

00:31:32.560 So for the next couple of years, Russell Brand is, like, pretty highly regarded.

00:31:37.900 Gawker says, this is after the interview comes out, Gawker says,

00:31:41.360 Russell Brand may have started a revolution last night.

00:31:43.920 Time magazine has an article called Russell Brand World's Greatest Thinker Summons a Global Revolution, which like they're obviously being tongue in cheek here.

00:31:52.300 But the subhead is why can't America get some articulate celebrities?

00:31:56.880 The Guardian named him one of the heroes of 2014.

00:32:01.420 Fandy Fair publishes a glowing profile in 2014 where they describe him as a legit political thinker and voice for the dispossessed.

00:32:09.580 so this wave of positive credulous media coverage kind of crescendos in 2014 with the release of his

00:32:17.480 book revolution revolution uh-huh which comes out in 2014 and i fucking read aubrey for this

00:32:25.520 because i hate myself he does an okay diagnosis of the problem he says like the monarchy is bad 0.88

00:32:32.100 and like inequality is bad but you can tell he just doesn't really like read things or like

00:32:37.220 know anything like at no point in this book do you feel like you've learned something like at

00:32:42.660 one point he's like oh the the christians say that lgbt people are bad but nowhere in the bible does

00:32:47.520 it say that and you're like right i i was also on the internet in 2005 they say gay people are bad 1.00

00:32:53.260 but do they send their wives to menstrual huts i mean it's so boring it's like exactly this shit 0.99

00:32:59.320 so like whatever i agree with it but it's just like not very interesting i'm gonna send you 0.95

00:33:04.260 one excerpt of how boring it is, which I might cut from the episode.

00:33:10.280 Oxfam say a bus with the 85 richest people in the world on it would contain more wealth

00:33:16.180 than the collective assets of half the Earth's population. That's three and a half billion

00:33:22.400 people. Though I can't imagine they'd be getting on a bus with that kind of money

00:33:26.560 or be hanging out together. I bet there'd be a lot of tension, jealousy, and petty bickering on

00:33:32.320 that bus my corporation is bigger than your corporation yeah i've got my own media network

00:33:38.200 yeah i've got an elite organization that controls global politics stop the bus i want to return to

00:33:45.700 my subaquatic palace with my half fish brides and sing a song about the supremacy of marine life 1.00

00:33:53.720 again how is he not on drugs writing this shit grow your beard out connect it to your armpit 0.99

00:33:58.540 hair what are we doing it's like fine like i obviously agree with the kind of core point like 1.00

00:34:04.000 inequality is bad but he's then doing a bunch of shtick and then the shtick is not very good or

00:34:09.740 funny well and also like i would say you know he's like i don't think they'd be hanging out

00:34:14.140 together and i don't think the conversation would be great i would argue that we now know quite a

00:34:19.480 bit more than we did sort of as a collective about the personalities of billionaires and i would

00:34:25.500 argue that Russell Brand would fit in pretty well. I like how you're like, the bus wouldn't be like

00:34:29.980 that. The bus would be like this. Russell would be on the bus. He just doesn't have enough money

00:34:35.880 to be on the bus. So what really stood out to me is toward the end of the book, he starts specifying

00:34:40.720 what he actually wants. So here's this. Reign in the power of big business by renegotiating

00:34:47.140 trade treaties to insist that multinational corporations be place-based and accountable

00:34:53.140 to nation states, revoking the charters of any corporation with revenues larger than the smallest

00:34:59.500 national GNP. Be meaner to corporations. I'm into it. Relocalize food and farming by taxing

00:35:06.040 food miles, removing subsidies and research for large-scale capital and energy-intensive

00:35:12.760 agriculture, giving support to small, diversified organic production, and to the growing number of

00:35:20.860 young people who want to take up farming.

00:35:23.560 It's one of those ones where you're like, sweetie, I like where your head is at, but 0.99

00:35:26.140 these specific things are like pretty dumb. 0.96

00:35:28.840 Prioritize life over profit by rejecting GNP in favor of indicators that measure biodiversity, 0.96

00:35:36.860 community coherence, personal well-being, and other life-affirming criteria.

00:35:43.180 Radically reducing public spending on defense, granting legal rights to ecosystems and non-human 0.75

00:35:50.480 species rewriting educational curricula to meet community and environmental needs rather than the 0.78

00:35:57.740 needs of industry like what well i mean what's what's so fascinating to me about this one and

00:36:03.320 like all of them is just like these are all political programs these are all reformist

00:36:08.220 projects they really are like if you want to relocalize food and farming these are political

00:36:13.220 changes right rein in the power big business i mean if you look at the way that like the

00:36:17.160 scandinavian countries are regulated like businesses have way less say in politics there

00:36:21.420 it's just weird reading this book where you know he says he's talking about david cameron he hates

00:36:25.600 david cameron as he should and he says like we don't want to replace cameron with another leader

00:36:30.040 the position of leader elevates a particular set of behaviors which indicates that like you don't

00:36:35.380 even want political leaders like he's talking in these grand terms of like we destroy the whole

00:36:39.500 system but then you actually get to the outcomes that he wants and it's like oh yeah like legal

00:36:43.840 changes like you can have relatively quickly if you elect the right politicians like a lot of

00:36:48.520 stuff is pretty doable yeah it to me it strikes me as like his deployment of revolution which i

00:36:54.400 think is generally i would say politically a red flag when people talk about revolution but don't

00:36:59.440 talk about what that would consist of how it would come about like i think that's generally a red

00:37:03.940 flag but i also think he's deploying it in sort of the way that like i'm a washington outsider

00:37:09.100 gets deployed yeah right which is just sort of like it's different i want a different thing i

00:37:14.820 want a thing that's really different radically different he he has like a list like a little

00:37:19.440 bullet list in his final chapter where it says like guarantee a living wage all new housing

00:37:24.840 developments should have 70 affordable housing abandon stop and search and the harassment of

00:37:29.360 the homeless citywide free wi-fi employee investment funds where like all profits have

00:37:34.280 to be or 20 of profits have to be given to employees these are things they have in like

00:37:38.400 democratic countries. Yep. The whole project feels more a function of his personality disorder than

00:37:44.820 anything else because all of this revolution stuff. I'm so sorry, Michael. Do you mean

00:37:50.040 revolution? Revolution stuff. It just allows him to like position himself as smarter and kind of

00:37:56.340 above it all, basically to look down on anybody who talks about like, okay, you want citywide

00:38:00.940 Wi-Fi. How would we do that? Who should we elect? Like, yeah, how can we pressure existing

00:38:04.940 politicians to do that it's like he doesn't want to get involved in those details so he's like hey

00:38:09.580 man i'm talking about a revolution here right i'm just saying everything has to change and like

00:38:14.580 actually the both the unpopular part and the part where things actually change is where you have to

00:38:21.600 get specific and he is pretty studiously not getting specific here right it sort of has the

00:38:25.980 energy of like the guy in your workplace who just wants to be the ideas guy and the minute you're

00:38:31.300 like, okay, open a spreadsheet. Let me know exactly how this would work. Disappears.

00:38:35.260 Make a phone call. Goodbye.

00:38:36.920 His sort of fame in the UK as a political commentator peaks in 2015 when Ed Miliband,

00:38:43.200 who is the head of the Labour Party, kind of goes groveling to Russell Brand to try to get

00:38:48.320 an endorsement. He is seen as a way for Labour to reach young people and this kind of like

00:38:53.240 disaffected kind of block, you know, the kind of Occupy types. Ed Miliband thinks that Russell

00:38:58.340 brand might help him do this so he goes and he does an unbelievably boring interview why not go

00:39:03.480 to the guy who's like definitely don't vote well the thing is it it sort of works in that russell

00:39:08.560 brand does eventually explicitly endorse labor huh but what's interesting and why this kind of

00:39:14.460 marks the beginning of the end of his time is like a credible left-wing political commentator

00:39:19.820 is that his audience kind of turns on him so if you read the comments all the comments are like 0.99

00:39:24.980 you said I shouldn't vote and now you're endorsing fucking labor. 0.99

00:39:27.940 Right. It's a hard turn to make if you've built an audience on sort of anti-establishment views 0.98

00:39:34.500 and then you go for a very establishment party.

00:39:38.460 Right. And also that's the sort of the anti-establishment people kind of turn on him

00:39:42.260 for this. But then the establishment people also turn on him because it doesn't work.

00:39:45.860 Like labor loses the 2015 general election kind of like embarrassingly. And then David Cameron

00:39:51.040 takes over then brexit happens like this is a disastrous election result and people within the

00:39:57.140 sort of the labor party like establishment left types were like you know they're not pinning the

00:40:00.760 whole thing on russell brand obviously but they're like well this guy didn't result in any more votes

00:40:05.200 like he can't actually bring people out right he commands a don't vote block and this is kind of

00:40:10.080 the argument against the don't vote people is that like as soon as politicians realize that you don't

00:40:14.940 vote or there's a low likelihood they're gonna vote they will fucking ignore you so he sort of

00:40:20.140 flames out as like a left wing political commentator. And he basically just becomes 0.98

00:40:25.500 like a YouTuber. How soon after becoming a YouTuber does he start with the like

00:40:31.580 electromagnetic frequencies? Oh, I mean, there's even even in his book, he says like cell phones

00:40:37.500 cause cancer. Like he's quite conspiratorial very early. And he has even before the sort of the

00:40:43.420 sort of right wing turn that he has now made. He has numerous videos with Wim Hof, this guy who

00:40:47.880 says that you can beat cancer by doing like cold plunges and shit well also abuser game recognized 0.99

00:40:54.500 i mean of course what a fucking situation that goddamn guy is the vim hof situation is crazy 0.99

00:41:00.760 that's what it'll be when you'd become a youtuber when i become moist critical but then okay but 0.99

00:41:05.020 then it wouldn't be a chapter of the russell brand episode if we didn't have yet another

00:41:08.780 sexual assault allocation in 2014 the woman he's dating at the time jemima khan for his birthday

00:41:15.640 gets Russell Brand a massage. So like a professional masseuse comes to their house.

00:41:21.280 They are alone in a room. The masseuse says that Russell Brand assaulted her. It's not clear the

00:41:26.760 details of that. She reported it to the police. The police investigated, but it is kind of

00:41:33.740 definitionally a he said, she said situation, right? She says, he assaulted me. Russell Brand

00:41:38.200 says, no, I didn't. The case basically stonewalls as like a police matter. And so this woman, 0.97

00:41:42.840 the masseuse starts she reports this to her mp she's like can you do anything about this she

00:41:47.400 starts going to the newspapers so what happens is he sues her and gets an injunction so she cannot

00:41:55.620 talk about this for folks who don't have like a political memory before 2015 say it's really hard

00:42:03.820 to overstate how hard people went on survivors of sexual assault yeah people would like hold out for

00:42:11.500 a forcible violent like sexual assault at knife point or something yeah yeah and then even when

00:42:18.840 that thing arrived they would have a reason for why that wasn't still wasn't like legit you can

00:42:23.740 imagine how this would play out yes oh you're you're oh you're a professional masseuse really 0.96

00:42:27.820 oh and he touched you really yeah it would have been really fucking ugly and annoying and also 0.81

00:42:32.380 the fact that this was public and no one seemed to have cared is itself super telling like no one 0.95

00:42:37.300 did anything with this. Even, I mean, if you look this up, you Google like massage allegations,

00:42:42.180 Russell Brand, there's like one article. The other thing that's so interesting to me about

00:42:45.780 his career in general is how he goes into these little fields and he flames out so quickly,

00:42:51.160 right? He's like hosting awards shows, but then he kind of embarrasses himself enough times that

00:42:55.380 he just isn't asked to do that anymore. He's in Hollywood for like four years and flames out.

00:43:00.220 He's then a left-wing political commentator. And again, within a couple of years, he kind of flames

00:43:04.860 out like other people take that forward and he kind of disappears so just like over and over again

00:43:10.280 he has these little blips where he shows up on people's radar and then the more time you spend

00:43:14.780 with him you're like yes i think we can do better than this guy and he disappears again he sounds 0.62

00:43:19.780 like still an absolute fucking nightmare to work with yeah no totally yes being offered a big role 0.59

00:43:25.600 in a big movie that requires you to go from la to san diego which is a two hour drive i'm so stuck 0.99

00:43:33.260 on that anecdote too i am so like why are you like this you giant baby yeah if you're dealing 0.97

00:43:41.560 with that shit just to get a meeting scheduled no totally and he's just opposing shit for the 0.98

00:43:47.620 sake of opposing shit yeah it's honestly surprising to me that he got as much mileage out of those 0.99

00:43:53.180 fields as he did so the rest of this episode we are going to talk about his youtube channel and 0.95

00:43:58.100 kind of what he does after this he just becomes like an unbelievably prolific youtuber like he's

00:44:04.680 he's posting numerous times a week if you look now he's posting i think once a day or more i mean 0.93

00:44:09.540 he just posts his fucking ass off and he's been doing this since like 2015 so i went through the 0.97

00:44:15.600 archives of all of his videos i obviously didn't watch every single one but i watched like a shocking 0.99

00:44:20.560 alarming number of his videos when we started this morning you were talking about how grumpy

00:44:25.600 you were dude i'm in such a bad mood i feel like i know why now most of his videos are he literally

00:44:31.600 just sits there with a newspaper in front of him and he just like reads an article and kind of

00:44:36.460 reacts to it but it's not like he's done any work like at no point if i watch a video where i felt

00:44:41.160 like he knew more about a subject than me even though i'm like not like well informed on at all 0.91

00:44:46.920 i'm like i know more about syria than you do and you don't like i don't know shit about syria 0.96

00:44:50.620 Right. You and I talked off mic a few weeks ago about me watching Tim Poole 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.

00:45:04.400 It's like dumbass osmosis. You're like losing information. 0.97

00:45:07.560 I'm like losing information. Absolutely is it. I know less things.

00:45:12.380 One of the other main themes of his videos is these unbelievably tedious like woo woo wellness videos.

00:45:18.380 These are some titles of some of his videos.

00:45:20.160 Could mass meditation change everything?

00:45:22.460 Meditation for sleep.

00:45:23.600 How I'm handling grief.

00:45:25.220 God, the universe, and meaning.

00:45:27.040 Senses and consciousness.

00:45:28.520 Beyond the five senses myth. 0.98

00:45:30.320 Yeah, big Jasmaheen breatharian energy.

00:45:33.760 Yeah, exactly. 0.98

00:45:34.940 Yep.

00:45:35.340 So there's two themes that I want to talk about that start to show up in his videos

00:45:38.480 and remain even after he becomes much more right-wing later.

00:45:41.600 The first is he has this idea that all of politics is kind of fake.

00:45:48.220 He wants to stand aside from and above politics.

00:45:52.160 He has this video in 2018 called Can Vegan Jokes Kill?

00:45:57.660 Which is a now totally forgotten story where, you know what Waitrose is, right?

00:46:02.640 Fancy Pancy British grocery store.

00:46:05.260 Yes, and they have a magazine.

00:46:07.480 It's in the aisle before you check out and it has like 10 salads for summer or something.

00:46:11.980 And like it basically acts as like a form of marketing for the stuff that they're selling

00:46:15.080 at Waitrose.

00:46:15.760 Sure.

00:46:16.400 So there's a weird controversy in 2018 where a freelancer writes to the editor of the Waitrose

00:46:23.180 magazine.

00:46:24.360 She's like, oh, why don't I do like a little series on like vegan meals?

00:46:28.560 The editor of the Waitrose magazine writes back to her and says, hi, Celine.

00:46:32.840 Thanks for this.

00:46:33.740 How about a series about killing vegans one by one? 0.99

00:46:36.660 ways to trap them how to interrogate them properly expose their hypocrisy force feed 1.00

00:46:41.620 them meat make them eat steak and drink red wine why what are we doing this poor vegan lady's like 1.00

00:46:48.600 what what the fuck are you talking about i'm just pitching like a cute story you can say 0.99

00:46:53.720 you're not interested this feels very reminiscent of the uh paula dean episode i saw years ago 0.99

00:47:00.060 where she was making like a butter and meat thing and she was like if you want to make a

00:47:04.380 vegetarian version of this you can just tell him to go outside and eat some grass i don't know like

00:47:10.560 so weird why are people this fucking resentful so the woman who gets this message i believe like 0.89

00:47:17.380 forwards it to the waitrose like people and is like why is your editor talking to me this way 0.94

00:47:21.980 it goes public eventually it's like a little mini scandal the editor is eventually fired

00:47:25.560 but in russell brand's video about it he has this kind of little summary of it so i'm gonna send you

00:47:32.480 clip is he vegan he's vegetarian and he says in his book that he did it out of spite because

00:47:38.800 somebody told him like vegetarians are bad he's like i'm gonna be a vegetarian and then he just

00:47:42.520 like stuck with it for like 40 years i'm looking at so much of his chest oh yeah and also do you

00:47:48.700 see in the thumbnail the name of his podcast is trues which is like the true news

00:47:55.440 he's not he's not a gifted brander ironically me if i was in charge of sacking people at

00:48:04.280 waitrose magazine knowing that my job is primarily to generate money for waitrose

00:48:08.900 i don't know that i would have sacked that person whenever you find yourself engaged in a fake phony

00:48:13.860 storm of controversy it's always good to note the context within which it takes is ultimately one

00:48:19.180 of capitalist consumerism and there'll never be a clear example of this this is uh you know

00:48:23.080 being discussed on commercial television is a commercial enterprise talking about sort of diet

00:48:28.940 is any of it real in a way none of it is real none of it is real we are living in a spectacle

00:48:34.380 perhaps that's what's most offensive should people be nice to one another of course they should should

00:48:39.460 people be able to take a joke of course they should do we have a society that enables us to

00:48:44.720 access our better selves not really no we live primarily in an illusion that designates us as

00:48:51.620 consumers above all else citizens secondarily spiritual beings having a real and authentic

00:48:57.660 experience barely barely on the radar so ultimately as you know deep down none of this matters

00:49:06.440 on vibes sure man yeah but there's not there's just not really any there there this is what i

00:49:14.360 meant earlier when i said his his ideology is fundamentally narcissistic because in every

00:49:19.460 single little controversy like this he thinks that he's above taking a side and actually arguing for 0.93

00:49:26.200 one of the sides like this is good or this is bad he's like actually you're all just losers for even

00:49:31.240 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 0.99

00:49:39.400 kind of thing like the whole system's rigged i'm not part of it i'm not buying into their bullshit

00:49:44.260 but functionally just as an organizer who has tried to work with this type of dude dude the 0.93

00:49:52.160 thing that i have observed being at the root of that is the that they are like profoundly afraid

00:49:57.400 of advancing a solution and they don't actually have ideas and they think that the way to be the

00:50:03.060 coolest guy in the room and therefore have the most social power in the room is to be aloof and

00:50:09.440 above it all. Yeah. Rather than like actually rolling up your fucking sleeves and attempting

00:50:14.740 some shit. If you want to argue this, you know, dumb little nothing burger of a blip of a one 1.00

00:50:19.920 day story doesn't matter. Right. It's a fake debate. That's like kind of vaguely defensible. 0.99

00:50:24.640 But he takes this position for things like the presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and

00:50:29.600 Donald Trump. This is what he says about literally everything. Right. And again, like if you're

00:50:34.580 concerned about corporate influence in politics, one approach to that is to be like, both parties

00:50:40.720 are the same. There's no difference. They're both bought and paid for. And another approach is to go,

00:50:45.220 okay, what would it look like to really get together a proposal to get money out of politics?

00:50:49.040 Yeah, exactly. Being the guy who just goes, it's all the same. There's no difference.

00:50:53.480 Is ultimately like the function of that is to support the status quo. Right. If you're saying

00:50:59.080 none of this matters and there's no point in engaging with it then you are allowing it to

00:51:04.620 continue unabated right right it is at this point repeating truisms that have been around since 0.95

00:51:10.080 fucking ralph nader ran for president wait truisms t-r-e-w-isms oh truisms excuse me truisms 0.93

00:51:18.520 the other theme that emerges from this is i chose this video specifically for you so i'm scrolling 0.99

00:51:24.040 through his old videos from like 2017 he has a video called tess holiday a vacation from body 0.78

00:51:31.620 shaming or modern marketing oh fuck off so tell us who tess holiday is and the whole kind of thing 0.94

00:51:37.780 tess holiday is a high profile plus size supermodel who is uh i remember reading an article about her 1.00

00:51:44.660 talking about being a size 26 which is also my size so like she is a fat lady she has been on 1.00

00:51:52.120 a number of magazine covers and every time it leads to like an absolute freak out meltdown

00:52:00.100 from people who really didn't want to see a fat person yes looking happy and okay and great so i

00:52:08.080 i was dreading that his video about tess holiday because i'm like oh what is it promoting obesity

00:52:13.280 or something like really fucking boring yeah but what he does is like vaguely more interesting and

00:52:18.300 I think like more insidious. He basically is doing a both sides thing from the left. You know, 0.97

00:52:24.320 so obviously after she's on the cover of Cosmopolitan, there's a huge, just flatly

00:52:29.040 fat phobic freak out. People just lose their minds. Like there's a fat lady in Cosmopolitan.

00:52:33.500 Yep. He like is willing to condemn this. He's like, you know, it's hard to be a fat person 0.93

00:52:37.540 in society and there's a lot of fat phobia. Like he actually says like some of the things that we

00:52:42.200 would like roughly agree with. Sure. So then he says, but the problem is that fat activists think

00:52:47.440 that being on the cover of Cosmopolitan is some sort of achievement, but actually you shouldn't 0.94

00:52:53.020 need the approval of a women's magazine. And it's sort of like, you're desperate to blame

00:52:57.720 both sides here. I don't think Tess Holliday or fucking anybody was like, ah, yes, we're finished 0.97

00:53:03.740 now. A fat person's on the cover of Cosmopolitan. Ah, yeah, fat activism, like everyone could just 1.00

00:53:07.660 go home. We don't need it anymore. There's nothing else. I think people were probably like, okay,

00:53:11.540 it's a signal of mainstream acceptance. That's not it. It's just like one little small thing.

00:53:17.440 but it's like he's scolding people who are like sort of finding representation in this as if the

00:53:23.100 only thing they want is like the cover of cosmopolitan there's zero like hard left fat

00:53:28.380 activists who think cosmopolitan is like a good thing if you talk to fat activists they'll go

00:53:33.120 hey uh the reason that cosmo matters is that it matters for people to get accustomed to seeing 0.96

00:53:38.540 fat people and to stop freaking the fuck out about seeing fat people so that they can stop saying 0.96

00:53:44.160 unhinged things to us so they can stop treating us in unhinged ways. So there's this desire to 0.99

00:53:51.020 turn it into a frivolous question of like, I want everyone to like me. He's doing the same thing he

00:53:56.020 always does, where he's positioning himself as like smarter than the debate, above the debate,

00:54:00.600 right? He's like, well, both sides are making mistakes. Smarter than women. Above women. But

00:54:06.460 it's like on one side you have fat phobic garbage, like actual societal discrimination of which there 0.99

00:54:12.180 is like ample evidence and on the other side you have this fake thing that you made up well and 0.98

00:54:17.620 like well and truly who asked if you're not gonna sort of take a moral stance on what feels to me

00:54:24.820 like a pretty clearly moral issue of like people flipping out about seeing a body that looks

00:54:30.380 different it's the easiest moral stance to take my god yeah it is in fact notable and discriminatory

00:54:38.360 that that is the first time that a fat person appeared on the cover of this magazine that has

00:54:43.060 been around for decades. That's not evidence of weakness in fat people. That's evidence of

00:54:48.820 discrimination at Cosmo. He has at this point around 1 million or like 1.5 million followers

00:54:54.880 on YouTube. His videos are typically getting 50 to 100,000 views. Some of them have as little as

00:55:01.360 like 30,000 views. Like I have videos that have more than 30,000 views. You can see him kind of

00:55:07.420 experimenting of like what's gonna work on this platform he he gets like one video that does okay

00:55:12.380 about like dating apps so he does what is gaslighting what is ghosting surviving a breakup

00:55:17.240 he's like he's like desperately trying anything to get views i haven't trusted anyone to define

00:55:22.980 gaslighting for the last like decade i definitely don't trust russell brand to define it we then get

00:55:30.180 the start of the covid pandemic yeah he has like a video called how to deal with feeling anxious

00:55:35.260 right now that has 109,000 views, which is actually pretty high for him at this time.

00:55:39.760 But then he does one called Why the Left Can't Handle Donald Trump with 1.4 million views.

00:55:46.060 He also does one called Matthew McConaughey and Russell Brand Discuss Politics and the

00:55:51.340 Left that gets 1.5 million views.

00:55:54.000 Can't wait for these couple of big brains.

00:55:57.240 What's interesting about it to me is like, it's just a really boring celebrity interview.

00:56:00.440 They like don't really discuss politics that much.

00:56:02.260 but he puts politics and the left in the title and i think that's why people click on it they're

00:56:07.560 like oh two celebrities shitting on the left yeah and or algorithms pick it out in autoplay for them

00:56:14.180 or whatever yep yeah i think this is what he's starting to realize is that like there's numbers

00:56:18.780 in criticizing the left and then on january 24th 2021 he publishes probably his first kind of like 0.88

00:56:25.200 official conspiracy video it's called the great reset conspiracy or fact why in the fuck are we

00:56:31.920 entertaining this even in a clickbaity way he did i don't want to do too many of these but he then 0.79

00:56:37.500 goes like back to woo woo stuff releasing pain from the body 68 000 views he then does another

00:56:42.980 great reset video 2.7 million views literally making money off of entertaining like anti-semitic

00:56:50.960 and racist conspiracy theories cool cool cool cool cool cool and then he has a video on april 4th

00:56:58.580 2021, called Five Ways Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Changed My Life. And that is the last normal

00:57:04.920 video that he ever does. Like these are like the next five videos. What causes COVID, the virus or

00:57:12.520 the system? Vaccine passports. This is where it leads. Protested COVID police laws. You've been

00:57:17.720 recorded. Bill Gates's book is rubbish. The worst conspiracies are in plain sight. Russell Brand 1.00

00:57:23.080 and jordan peterson why is bill gates buying up stolen native american land he does a lot of anti

00:57:29.060 bill gates stuff that doesn't bother me yeah whatever man this feels like the like well then

00:57:34.220 why don't you stop defending bill clinton in the epstein files i'm like nobody cares yeah no one

00:57:40.560 nobody's coming to rush to the defense of bill gates it's not happening it then becomes things

00:57:46.400 like how everyday people were screwed by liberal politics trump was right about clinton and russia

00:57:52.040 collusion hunter biden paid by ukrainian energy company right now it's just like fully partisan 0.96

00:57:59.000 yeah he's kind of cosplay i mean everyone fucking does this but he's still cosplaying

00:58:03.740 he's like i'm an independent thinker but then you look at like who he has on his podcast and 0.90

00:58:07.840 it's like tulsi gabbard tim pool dave rubin right candace owens like a bunch of other independent

00:58:14.300 thinkers mike so the kind of last thing that happens is in april 2023 this big investigation

00:58:21.140 comes out that has a bunch of allegations of sexual assault we've been talking about those

00:58:25.260 kind of in the timeline but like the night before the article drops he posts a video like responding

00:58:31.340 to the allegations because of course the fact checkers had to contact him before the article

00:58:34.680 came out to be like how do you respond to this he puts out a video and i'm gonna send you a bit

00:58:40.420 of a transcript from it as i've written about extensively in my books i was very very promiscuous

00:58:46.480 now during that time of promiscuity the relationships i had were absolutely always

00:58:52.360 consensual i was always transparent about that then almost too transparent and i'm being transparent

00:58:59.260 about it now as well and to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that i

00:59:05.900 absolutely deny it makes me question is there another agenda at play agenda particularly when

00:59:12.000 we've seen coordinated media attacks before, like with Joe Rogan, when he dared to take a medicine

00:59:17.460 that the mainstream media didn't approve of. And we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets

00:59:23.860 across the world using the same language. Oh, that's another that's another thing where he

00:59:28.500 thinks he thinks there's like coordination behind the scenes when you see like the same

00:59:31.920 like Russia invades Ukraine. Like there's only so many ways that you can say that.

00:59:36.160 Well, and also like the issue isn't that Joe Rogan dared to take a medicine that the mainstream

00:59:42.500 media didn't approve of. It's that he has one of the most popular podcasts in the country.

00:59:49.120 And there is a demonstrated track record of people taking his terrible advice on things.

00:59:55.460 The only other thing to say is that after this happens, Russell Brand like announces his

01:00:00.080 Christianity. Gotta catch them all. Yeah. People say that he did this after the allegations came

01:00:05.680 out and he kind of did officially but if you look at his old youtube channel he has like a lot of

01:00:09.600 like spiritual videos i think because the 12 steps have that sort of uh acknowledge a higher power

01:00:15.380 yeah i think he's actually been kind of like quasi-religious for a while it's just like the

01:00:19.820 specific christianity that is new right he's changing out his blouses button to the navel

01:00:26.820 yeah for like a white linen baptismal tunic that is also somehow cut down to the navel

01:00:34.520 last thing we're gonna do is we are going to go to his youtube channel why i just want to give you

01:00:40.880 a flavor of like the kind of stuff that he's now producing oh wow okay so one of the first

01:00:47.520 thumbnails i'm seeing i know which one it is this is terrifying oh wait you're you're focused on 1.00

01:00:54.040 that one i thought you're gonna focus on muslims versus dogs fuck your dogs no the background is 0.99

01:01:02.560 a bunch like a bunch of buildings in london that appear to be decorated with giant posters with a 1.00

01:01:09.380 single eyeball that just say conform the third eye yes and then in the middle ground you see

01:01:15.900 keir starmer grinning nefariously and ripping through a union jack do you see the no whites 0.88

01:01:23.300 one he hasn't where the thumbnail just says no whites oh no whites are banned in the uk now

01:01:27.900 there's uh an anti bill gates one where he has used an ai image of bill gates looking like he

01:01:34.260 is in agony crying like a baby yeah he has one just called the problem with billy eilish

01:01:40.440 but also you know the most cathartic thing about this like the best news about all of this what 0.92

01:01:44.600 look at the view counts aubrey i mean they're abysmal dude 25k 32k yeah muslim mayor yeah 0.79

01:01:53.900 54 000 views so there's there's very little interesting here but what is interesting to me 0.92

01:01:58.360 is that he has also kind of flamed out as a right-wing influencer yeah there there was a period

01:02:02.920 during the pandemic where he was regularly getting over 1.5 million views for like most of his videos

01:02:09.160 and now it's like he's lucky if he breaks 200k yeah it's wild i'm just looking at i just found

01:02:16.020 the first one that i've seen that's over a million views and it's uh candace owens yeah

01:02:20.800 interview with a thumbnail of erica kirk where you're like oh yeah that's people who are watching

01:02:25.000 for that thing that's candace owens fans coming over that's not russell brand fans which is like

01:02:28.660 bleak as fuck in its own way so that is the russell brand story uh it is ongoing because

01:02:36.100 his trial begins in june of 2026 so i already regret doing this episode because it means he's 0.94

01:02:44.220 like on our radar now we have to follow up yeah like it's like as soon as i did the rfk junior

01:02:48.860 episode I was like fuck I have to keep covering this guy he's in like the cast of characters now

01:02:52.760 but so I just wanted to ask you what I mean we started out with the question of like you know

01:02:57.780 what explains this guy's shift from the left to the right how would you answer this question after

01:03:03.440 six hours of recording about this I think a couple of things one I think he uh wears out his welcome

01:03:11.320 really quickly in different spaces right and I also think uh you know the money stops flowing

01:03:18.320 at a certain point right yeah he's in hollywood and then hollywood turns off the money tap right

01:03:25.100 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

01:03:32.000 common pattern like if you look at somebody like rob schneider or like nikki minaj these people as

01:03:38.360 their career is fading in this kind of normal way like nobody stays at the peak of their career

01:03:42.460 forever but as people start to become less culturally relevant they get this it appears

01:03:48.020 kind of resentment or anger and they don't know where to place it and that tends to result in them

01:03:52.340 siding with the right basically right instead of doing the normal career and decline thing

01:03:57.960 of like getting a residency in vegas and starting a skincare line yeah i know like just chill the

01:04:04.720 fuck out dudes i also think a really important component of this is russell brand as we said

01:04:10.180 his only kind of core guiding belief is don't tell me what to do. And right-wing media has 0.99

01:04:15.160 been very good over the last 10 to 15 years of pitching themselves as anti-establishment and as

01:04:22.060 pitching the left as the establishment, right? Who is the establishment? Oh, it's the feminists on

01:04:26.240 Twitter. It's the elite universities. But it's like the left writ large is like the mom who is 1.00

01:04:31.620 constantly telling you to eat your vegetables. And I think he's just vulnerable to that stuff

01:04:35.540 because he doesn't really have any core guiding principles there's like a real peril to not

01:04:40.500 having a positive vision and i don't mean like positive in terms of uh like uplifting i mean

01:04:47.240 positive in terms of like what is present how do things work what do you think is the answer here

01:04:52.840 right i also think the incentives of social media are really important we've talked about how he

01:04:57.760 starts getting views the minute he leans into this conspiracy slash right-wing stuff first of all i

01:05:02.800 want to say that i'm stealing this argument from abby richards friend of the show who made a really

01:05:06.600 good media matters uh video essay about this where she traced like the view counts also i i think that

01:05:12.680 there's a tendency when you look at these things aha he's getting views by shifting to the right

01:05:17.480 to act as if that means he's not sincere yeah i don't think that's what's happening i think

01:05:22.560 there's something like a human thing that when you get rewarded for something you do it more

01:05:28.380 Like all of us have a million little pet peeves or a million little views.

01:05:33.060 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.

01:05:46.700 Right.

01:05:46.920 It's not that it's an insincere review.

01:05:49.080 That's why we have two Russell Brand episodes.

01:05:54.160 I haven't actually checked the download numbers for the first part, but it's probably not good.

01:05:58.380 I also haven't checked it, but I'm like, well, I'm knowing the content.

01:06:02.560 Yeah.

01:06:03.180 But like you, you lean into things that do well, even if they're sincerely held.

01:06:07.520 So I also want to say, I don't, I don't want to imply that he's faking this.

01:06:12.380 I think the other thing that's fascinating here is that he is someone who was publicly

01:06:16.960 accused of sexual assault, ran for shelter on the right, and it hasn't really panned

01:06:24.240 out for him, which is not usually how that goes.

01:06:27.420 I know. It's so delicious. It's so delicious.

01:06:29.840 It's oddly heartening to be like, okay, there is actually a rock bottom. Unfortunately,

01:06:36.960 it's not sexual assault. It is when you won't go to San Diego for one single fucking meeting. 1.00

01:06:57.420 Thank you. 1.00

Maintenance Phase - April 01, 2026

Russell Brand Part 2

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