Russell Brand Part 2

What do you do when you've flamed out as a Hollywood actor, a political commentator and a wellness guru? You make a YouTube channel. Support us: Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks! Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuseExposing Russell BrandRussell Brand And The Conspiracy GriftRussell Brand on revolutionCelebrity Capital in the Political Field: Russell ...

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Hi, everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that loves to remember Sarah Marshall but wouldn't mind forgetting the other fucking guy.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good one.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Thank you. Hi, Sarah. We love you, Sarah.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  I was gonna have a joke about how I respect that movie because it's named after my favorite podcaster, but I like yours better.

• 0:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, good job.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Yours is good, too.

• 0:31Speaker 00

  I'm Aubrey Gordon.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I'm Michael Hubs.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase, or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Same stuff.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  My goal.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Today...

• 0:46Speaker 00

  You're returning me to a nightmare.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Yes. So as with last episode, we also have like a fairly Omni trigger warning for this one. There's lots of sexual assault stuff.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Oh, great.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  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. So he's the love interest of the main protagonist's kind of ex-wife. He's trying to get back together with her, but she's shacked up with this like sort of woo-woo, over-sex-to-British guy. The role was originally written as like a nerdy librarian, but then when he auditioned, they were like, oh, let's

• 1:38Speaker 01

  make him this kind of like rock star stoner type of guy. The only thing that's interesting about this in the book is still he has this weird thing where he's just opposed to authority, regardless of whether it makes any sense. So at a certain point, when he's going through the audition process, they ask him to go to San Diego to do like line readings with Kristen Bell, who's going to be playing his love interest in the movie. And for no fucking reason, Russell is like, what if I don't want to leave? What if I want to stay in LA? And his agent is like, dude, this is a huge... Nobody and they're they're offering you a major role in a major Hollywood movie.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  They're offering you the coveted James Corden path of I've worn out my welcome in the UK and the US is rolling out the red carpet.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  And again, he's telling this scene as if it's like kind of cool or he's like in some way sort of this like rakish raconteur type of figure, but it's like, you're just being a dumbass for no fucking reason. You're like making people talk you into doing this thing that is manifestly in your self-interest.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  This is behavior that would be immature in an adolescent.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  This movie comes out in 2008. The movie is a big hit. His role especially is like really memorable and it's kind of remarkable. If you look at his IMDb, he starts showing up in like everything immediately. So he's in a Julie Taymor version of The Tempest.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Who the fuck does he play in The Tempest?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Uh, Trinculo, whatever that is. I'm reading his Wikipedia entry.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  It's fine. I'm just glad they didn't cast him as like Prospero or like a, you know what I mean? Like, don't, don't give him a, don't give him a role that matters.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  They sound like car names to me. Um, he shows up in the Despicable Me movies. He gets his own spinoff to Forgetting Sarah Marshall called Get Him to the Greek.

• 3:25Speaker 00

  Oh, that's the same character?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it's sort of like the misadventures of Jonah Hill trying to like get it, you know, getting him to the Greek. I saw it. I do not remember a single thing from that movie.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Based on what we know now, what a set to be on.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  Like he shows up on The Simpsons. He eventually gets a starring role in a remake of Arthur.

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Yes, the coveted Arthur remake.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Which does flop, but the fact that he's in like essentially a star vehicle within three years of anyone even like knowing his name at all in the US is really remarkable.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  They were really, really, really trying to make Russell Brand happen over here and he did to a degree, right? Like,

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  But it, it seems to me that he never really developed like a diehard fan base based on his comedy or comedic acting, right?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  His second memoir, My Bookie Wook 2: This Time It's Personal, which makes no sense.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  The first one was very impersonal.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  This is like one of the worst memoirs I've ever read because he, he sort of went through all of his like drug addiction and stuff in the first memoir. And like, that's borderline interesting, right? It's like the sort of the rise of somebody who becomes a successful working actor. Part two only covers like three or four years in Hollywood. And so it's just a bunch of like really boring anecdotes of like, I hung out with Jonah Hill and I went to dinner at his house and he's a nice guy.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Okay. Just not interesting at all. But one of the stories he tells, I think is just like so typical of the way that he just like deals with people around him. So are you familiar with Teresa Palmer?

• 4:55Speaker 00

  No, I don't know that I recognize that name.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  She is a Australian actress who is in a movie called Bedtime Stories with Adam Sandler and Russell Brand. It's one of these weird like kind of eighties style, high concept comedies where Adam Sandler tells bedtime stories to his kids with the bedtime stories come true.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  And then there's like hijinks and so I, I could barely get through the trailer. Like it looked so bad. It has 27% on Rotten Tomatoes.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, Adam Sandler and Russell Brand.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  I know.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Don't threaten me with a bad time.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  She is 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.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Teresa Palmer is pretty, so pretty in fact, that she could probably spend the rest of her life sat passive in a market square being pelted with money by desperate men. Like what?

• 5:58Speaker 01

  She's pretty.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  So beautiful that it seems like no one should be allowed to have sex with her, that her hymen should remain for alien archaeologists to peruse in the year 5000, when maybe they can quantify such beauty. Like an action figure remaining untroubled behind cellophane, too perfect to be tampered with, not a toy. Her hair seamlessly fell in honey rivers from her golden skin. Each feature a monument to its ideal, the perfect nose, the perfect mouth, the teeth too good to eat. What?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  You can't eat her teeth.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Plus she was a nice bird, Australian, down to earth. What choice do they have? They're all crooks and the price of a no class system is no class. Christian too, she was, and all bound up in moral swaddling. Boy, I have never felt less like Russell Brand than trying to read Russell Brand's sentences.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Dude, you're gonna read so many this episode.

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Christian too, she was, is not a thing that my accent says.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Also, it's, one thing that is truly remarkable to me is his ability to describe people in language that he thinks is complimentary, but is like so degrading.

• 7:17Speaker 00

  One million percent.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Why would you mention her hymen?

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Horrifying.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  And even this like, like the tedious joke about, like, they're all crooks in Australia. Like, wow, yeah, groundbreaking stuff. And then at the end says, "all bound up in moral swaddling." Like, oh, she thinks she's so good. She's such a goody-two-shoes. Kind of like, she's like a conquest for you.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Well, also, the way he describes her is honey hair from golden skin, which, that sounds like your hair and your skin are the same color, which is unnerving.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  So this is him describing the sort of onset crush that he has on her.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  On a work colleague.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  On a work colleague who will be reading this book, or at least like someone will tell her the content of this book, so she probably feels like shit after this comes out.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  If someone has written about your hymen in a book, a girl's girl will tell you.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  There's a weird thing where, throughout the course, like, a fairly small section, like, a couple pages where he's talking about filming this movie, three times, he mentions that he is picking off extras to have sex with.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  Jesus fucking Christ.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  So this echoes the accusations that we had from last episode about how women at Channel 4 were asked to comb the audience of the TV shows that he was hosting to find attractive women and like, deliver them to him. So you're infatuated with this woman, but you're also fucking a bunch of extras, apparently, and like, thinking that's like a funny story.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  The nutty part isn't that he thinks it's a story. The nutty part is that it is a story to some section of his audience, right? That they're like, oh, yeah, woo.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  He also, at one point, is talking about a scene where she gets out of a swimming pool, wearing a bikini, and he says, "I wanted to be sick out of my penis."

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Michael, this is as good a time as any to tell you I'm quitting the show.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  I know. I think I'll leave in the full silence after that.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Jesus fucking Christ.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  So there's then, I guess, like, a rap party or something at Lucy Lawless's house in the Hollywood Hills, and...

• 9:12Speaker 01

  I was gonna read this, but I'm gonna make you read it, because it's problematic.

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Great. Luckily, the mandatory Mexican housekeeper had brought her son to work. He was about four and a likable sort of cove?

• 9:26Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  I'd been pulling faces and such, and shooting him with an imaginary gun for ages, and he was lapping it up. But as yet, Teresa hadn't noticed my incredible unaffected rapport with children.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  So he's playing with a kid so that Teresa will notice. He then does a sort of like, "Ma, I'm a monster," the way that you do with little kids.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And the kid starts crying, and the kid pisses himself.

• 9:51Speaker 00

  Shocking that Russell Brand can't figure out how to do, like, basic play with children, and figure out how to, like, have a boundary.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Teresa's watching him, or kind of watching this from across the room. He says, "Teresa made for the bathroom. I seized the opportunity and caught up with her."

• 10:07Speaker 00

  No.

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Which, to me, is interesting, because at least two of the sexual assaults that he's accused of took place where he dragged a woman into a bathroom.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Into the bathroom, yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  And he also has the other one, where a woman says that he followed her into a bathroom.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  We can do this as, like, a little script, I think. So you can be him, I'll be her.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  She says, "Kids, huh?"

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Kids! I love 'em!

• 10:28Speaker 01

  "Well, you've got a funny way of showing it," she said, frowning a beautiful frown.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  "Yeah, I'm complicated," I muttered, staring off into the distance, where the child's sobbing could still be faintly heard.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  I hope he's playing this up for comedic. I don't think, I hope he didn't, like, traumatize a child at a party.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  But also, I wouldn't put it past him.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Oh, god.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  "Beautiful girls spend their lives getting chatted up. So to get past their defenses, you need some pretty potent artillery. I gave her hair a pull. Fancy coming for dinner?"

• 11:00Speaker 01

  "I've heard about you, mister."

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Yeah? What have you heard? That I'm a rogue? A heartbreaker? "I had such a good speech for this kind of approach, but before I could embark, she interrupted."

• 11:10Speaker 01

  "No, that you're a prat."

• 11:11Speaker 00

  Lesser men would have been swayed, but you'll get nowhere in life if you can't skip past a few superficial insults, like Alan Devensure evading a clumsy right back.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Context clues.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Context clues.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Great, great, great, great. I know every word that just got written.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  We're, but we, we both know exactly what this means, but like it would be so boring to explain to our listeners.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  We'll just move on.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  We're like total Ellen Devonshire heads over here. Let's go for a walk and see if we can't get past a few of these terrible misconceptions.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  So again, he's telling us kind of bragging that he got past her defenses and that she's skeptical and he pulls her hair to get her attention. It's like while she's trying to go to the bathroom at a party.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  It's all, every no is a challenge for this man.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  She relents and they go, they sort of walk around the grounds of Lucy Lawless's house. They end up jumping on a trampoline. They end up flirting. He, of course, this is his description, so we don't know what really happened, but he talks her into like hanging out again. And like, she seems too softened toward him. Again, this is a pattern that he has where like he, when he is infatuated with a woman, he pays her a huge amount of positive attention.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And then they appear to engage in some sort of negotiation where he like wants to start seeing her and she's skeptical, but he talks her into it apparently. So this is the final part of this.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  "Do you think you'll ever change?" she asked me with breathtaking sincerity. And for the moment I was safe. I fell into the kiss. "I'll change for you," I whispered, and I did, for a week.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  And then he never mentions her again.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  Jesus fucking Christmas.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  This is the pattern that he has in both of his memoirs. He's like, these all encompassing infatuations, right? With these women, like she will complete me. She's this perfect angel. The minute they have sex, you, they just disappear from the book completely. And he's not specific about what happened for a week. What happened after a week, Russell?

• 13:06Speaker 00

  This is a particular thing that like adult men will do. Not all of them, but a good number of them will sort of like recognize that they have these personality traits or ways of going about sort of relationship building or whatever that are not widely accepted. They're not approved of by the people around them. So they'll kind of turn it into a shtick.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  I feel like I have witnessed this with like older men in particular will sort of put on like, I'm a grumpy old guy.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  Like I'm a cantankerous dude. And you're like, Right, you're sort of doing a shtick, but you're also, that is how you feel about things.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  It's not a shtick.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  And you're just figuring out how to pitch that.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  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. I'm definitely not going to get rid of it.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  So here's another way of presenting it.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  So the other thing that happens during this period is we have two more alleged rapes in 2009. These are from the charging document. As we talked about, these are not described in any great detail. So all we have from the charging document from the Met Police is the two alleged offenses took place in London in 2009. There's also in 2010, a woman who sues him for sexual assault in a bathroom on the set of this movie, Arthur. She says Russell exposed his penis to her in full view of cast and crew of Arthur. 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.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  He denies this allegation, of course. He also, in 2010, has his marriage to Katy Perry. There's not that much to say about this one, mostly because neither one of them talk about it that much. Her documentary is like pretty substantially about what a shitty husband he is. Like, he like refuses to go and visit her on tour. So she's on this like insane world tour and she's like flying back to London for like hours at a time. And then she flies back to, you know, Hamburg or Beijing or wherever she is. And so she, at least according to the documentary, which of course is like from her perspective.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 15:08Speaker 01

  She is like trying to make the relationship work and he basically refuses to. And then he divorces her with a text message.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Great.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Famously, like minutes before she goes onstage.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  What a catch.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  And it appears that neither of them have spoken since, which is fascinating. It's like they're in this whirlwind romance, 14 months, they get married and then he sends her the text message breaking up and they just never talk again. And like their lawyers handle it, apparently.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  If someone divorced me by text, I would definitely never speak to them again.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Like, I don't know what his deal is. Actually, I do know what his deal is. This seems to be very much part of his pattern.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  The last thing we have to cover from his adventures in Hollywood is yet another. Alleged rape.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Oh, sure.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  There's a woman who, in the investigation, is called Nadia. This is not her real name, of course. She meets him at a party. They have a consensual relationship. It appears it's kind of like a hookup thing. They're like, they're, they're hooking up, but it's not like a romantic relationship, it appears. But then one time, late, it appears like in the middle of the night, he calls her kind of frantically pleading with her to come over. Eventually, she's like, oh, whatever, fine. So she comes over. She says, "The door was unlocked and I walked in." He comes running out of the bedroom naked.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Nadia says, "Brand took her to a wall and kissed her and made a comment, something along the lines of, 'I'll keep you safe.'" He then told her that a friend was already in the bedroom, and he wanted her to join them.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  So this is like, the weird sort of mania thing that we were talking about last episode, where it's like, he already has a woman who he presumably already had sex with, and is like frantically calling this other woman.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  This really feels like a personality disorder territory, or like, very profound mood disorder, or something like, I'm like, something is definitely capital U up with this guy.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  This is another thing I think about, too, is, this whole thing about like, kind of male conquests for women, right?

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  From afar, maybe you could say like, oh, man, this guy's like getting laid with up to five women a night. He's having all this sex, he's having a bunch of threesomes, wow, what a cool guy. But then you look at what he's actually doing, and it's like, really pathetic.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  He's basically badgering this woman.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Like, "Oh, I need to see you, I need to see you," like, calling someone in the middle of the night.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  This is how you behave if you believe in your core that you are not a lovable person.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  You shouldn't be doing, I mean, you shouldn't be doing this regardless, but it's like, you're like a middle-aged man.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  You're not, 37 is not middle-aged, but okay.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Yes, it is!

• 17:34Speaker 00

  No, it's not. Middle age is 40 to 65.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  What?

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  I am 44, and I can call 37-year-olds middle age. You're in here with me. You're trapped in here with me.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  But so, the ending of the story is really rough. Uh, she basically is like, "I do not want to have a threesome with you in the middle of the night." And then he like, basically presses her up against the wall and like forcibly rapes her, according to her.

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Like, it's not surprising since we- We've heard so many stories of this, but it's also not, it's still alarming.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  The investigation includes their text messages from the next day. She's like, that really fucking scared me last night. That's not cool. And he's like, I'm so sorry. They also have the medical records from the rape crisis center that she went to.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  Jesus God.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  There's also one more. We're almost done with these. There's a woman named, quote unquote, Phoebe, who he meets at AA. They have a consensual relationship. That kind of trails off and she starts working for him because she's like trying to break into Hollywood. That actually seems to go well for a couple of months. But then there's a night where they're filming something at his house and other people kind of trickle away. And she looks around eventually and she's like, it's just me and Russell. And then he disappears for a second and he comes out of his bedroom. She can't remember either naked or in his underwear and starts like chasing her around, being like, I want to have sex with you. And she's like running away. Again, like physically, he's trying to like physically force her into sex, according to her.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  She eventually is like fighting him off, screaming at him, get the fuck away from me. What are you doing? And then she says he immediately flips and is like, fuck you. And he says, you're fired. And they never speak again.

• 19:12Speaker 00

  That to me feels like very, very classic sort of abusive dynamics. Right? Which is just like denial of anything I want at any point, no matter how unreasonable, is actually on you and you're a disaster for not giving me whatever I want, whenever I want it.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  So he then basically like disappears from Hollywood. He's in this movie, Arthur, in 2011 that flops. And he's in Rock of Ages in 2012, which is like a jukebox musical with Tom Cruise, which also flops.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  Good.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  And then by 2013, he basically never works again.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  I blame Katy Perry.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  It is actually interesting to me because like other people have been in movies that have flopped and continue, you know, having a career like fucking Jared Leto, right? It's not like for ethical reasons, we're not going to cast you in movies anymore. That's not how it works.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. I would love to be able to claim that this is like the industry did the right thing and they ousted this dude who was bad news and we knew it was bad news.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  My guess is that it has a whole lot more to do. With the what if I don't want to go to San Diego?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  He does seem like he'd be a nightmare to work with.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  He's like a child.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  So that's kind of the end of his Hollywood chapter. We then get the beginning of his political chapter. He does this on the back of a sort of wellness slash recovery pivot. So in 2012, just as his Hollywood career is waning, he presents a BBC show about the drug war. It's called Russell Brand From Addiction to Recovery. And it's sort of like a little biography thing of him and also talking about like the downstream effects of the drug war, basically. And as part of that, he does a Newsnight interview. So Newsnight is kind of there like 60 minutes. He talks in the interview, they're talking about like drug war, like, you know, how should we proceed? And he says that he's against methadone treatment.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  What?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  He says, "We might as well let people carry on taking drugs if they're gonna be on methadone. Obviously, it's painful to abstain, but at least it's hope-based."

• 21:03Speaker 00

  What?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Here is this from a Guardian kind of recap of the interview.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  "He insists that addiction can be tackled only by addressing the root causes. For Brand, drugs were an escape from a troubled upbringing. There was, Brand says, quote, 'an emptiness inside, a sadness, a loneliness, an unaddressed pain at the core of alienation. Unless you have some mechanism to deal with that, I think you'll deal with it with various forms of anesthetic, starting with drugs and perhaps ending with shopping."

• 21:37Speaker 01

  That's like his little joke at the end there. As we get into his political ideology, what you see here is he's incapable of thinking of issues outside of his own personal experience. For him, he was using drugs to self-medicate, right? Because he didn't like being alone with himself. And that is the experience of some people. And abstinence worked for Russell Brand. That is also the experience of some people. But we have like thousands of studies on this. We have like harm reduction programs. We would all love a world where like we quote unquote, "address the root causes" and like nobody is abused by their parents. 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 meth- Methadone and Suboxone work unbelievably well.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  So like methadone treatment is this 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.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  And they're less fatal.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Right?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  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. 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, often you will overdose and die. Like this happened to a guy I went to high school with.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  At no point can Russell Brand like just look at an issue as like, oh, this is a large societal phenomenon. I have one, 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.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  And he's, he's increasing the stigma against methadone, right? It's like, oh, you're still using drugs.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  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 asks 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.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Revolution is the one where he's popped out the E V O L, so it looks like love backwards.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  That's the cover, that's the cover of his book, which comes out the following year. It's so annoying.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Revolution is how I always said it in my head.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Good dollar sign, huh? Yes. Here is the first couple paragraphs of his introductory essay.

• 25:48Speaker 00

  "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. I have never voted, fuck, god."

• 26:18Speaker 01

  He's one of these guys. He's one of these guys.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  "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."

• 26:38Speaker 00

  Billy Connolly said, "Don't vote. It encourages them."

• 26:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 26:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  So the main thing that comes out of all this is there's an interview with Jeremy Paxman, who's like a legendary like 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.

• 27:33Speaker 00

  Really?

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we're going to watch a small snippet of it.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  You've never ever voted?

• 27:40Speaker 03

  No. Do you think that's really bad?

• 27:41Speaker 02

  So you struck an attitude, what, before the age of 18?

• 27:44Speaker 03

  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 voted in to serve.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  You're blaming the political class for the fact you had a drug problem?

• 27:58Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:21Speaker 02

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

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Jeremy, my darling, I'm not saying that the apathy doesn't come from us, the people. The apathy comes from the politicians. They are apathetic to our needs. They're only interested in servicing the needs of corporations. Look, ain't the Tories going to court and taking the EU to court because they're trying to curtail bank bonuses? Is that what's happening at the moment in our country? It isn't it?

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  So am I going to tune in for that?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  You don't believe in democracy. You want a revolution, don't you?

• 28:45Speaker 03

  The planet is being destroyed. We are creating... 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.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  All of those things may be true.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  They are true.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  I wouldn't argue with you about many of them.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  Well, at come I feel so cross with you. It can't just be because of that beard, it's gorgeous.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  It's possibly.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  And if the Daily Mail don't want it, I do. I'm against them. Grow it longer, tangle it into your armpit hair.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  You are a very trivial man.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  What do you think I am trivial?

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  A minute ago, you're having a go at me because I want a revolution. Now I'm trivial. I'm bouncing about a lot of places.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  Because you want a revolution. Many people want a revolution, but I'm asking you what it would be like.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  Well, I think what it won't be like is a huge disparity between rich and poor. Where 300 Americans.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  All right, we can stop there, we can stop there.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  This is like 7 million organizing 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 gonna be. And you're like, that's specifically not what was asked of you.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Dude, we went to 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?

• 30:00Speaker 00

  I get it, he's a compelling presence. And I also think this is like kind of, what year is this that this airs?

• 30:06Speaker 01

  2013.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is airing in 2013, which is a few years before Donald Trump takes office in the US. 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.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  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 Labour until after the 2015 general election. It's before the emergence of Bernie as like. 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. And so I think people were like crawling through the desert and drinking the sand.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Very few other people, especially institutional people, were speaking like this.

• 31:18Speaker 00

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

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Telling off a middle class dude.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  With a more sort of upper crusty accent.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  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. 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. Vanity Fair publishes a glowing profile in 2014 where they describe him as a legit political thinker and voice for the dispossessed.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  So this wave of positive credulous media coverage kind of crescendos in 2014 with the release of his book, Revolution.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  Revolution.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Revolution, uh huh.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Sesevenin.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  They say gay people are bad, but do they send their wives to menstrual huts?

• 32:56Speaker 01

  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 gonna send you one excerpt of how boring it is. Which I might cut from the episode.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  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. That'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 sub-aquatic palace with my half-fish brides and sing a song about the supremacy of marine life.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Again, how is he not on drugs writing this shit?

• 33:55Speaker 00

  Grow your beard out. Connect it to your armpit hair.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  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 shtick, and then the shtick is not very good or funny.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  I like how you're like, the bus wouldn't be like that, the bus would be like this.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Russell would be on the bus. He just doesn't have enough money to be on the bus.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  So what really stood out to me is toward the end of the book, he starts specifying what he actually wants. So here's this.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Be meaner to corporations. I'm into it.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Relocalize food and farming by taxing food miles, removing subsidies and research for large-scale, capital- and energy-intensive agriculture.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Giving support to small diversified organic production and to the growing number of young people who want to take up farming.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  It's one of those ones where you're like, sweetie, I like where your head is at, but you, these specific things are like pretty dumb.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Prioritize 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 industry. Like, what?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  These are all reformist projects.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  They really are. Like, if you want to relocalize food and farming, these are political changes, right? Reigning the power of big business. I mean, if you look at the way that like the Scandinavian countries are regulated, like businesses have 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. 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 politician. It's like, a lot of that stuff is pretty doable.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  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."

• 37:17Speaker 01

  He, 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 wifi, 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.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  The whole project feels more a function of his personality disorder than anything else. Because all of this revolution stuff.

• 37:48Speaker 00

  I'm so sorry, Michael. Do you mean re-evolution?

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Re-evolution stuff. 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 wifi? How would we do that? Who should we elect? Like,

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:25Speaker 00

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

• 38:30Speaker 01

  And the minute you're like, okay, open a spreadsheet, let me know exactly how this would work, disappears.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Make a phone call. Goodbye.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  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 grovelling 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.

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Why not go to the guy who's like, definitely don't vote?

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Well, the thing is, it, it sort of works in that Russell Brand does eventually explicitly endorse Labour.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  But what's interesting, and why this kind of marks the beginning of the end of his time as 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 Labour.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Right. It's a hard turn to make if you've built an audience on sort of anti-establishment. And then you go for a very establishment party.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Right. And also, that's the sort of the anti-establishment people kind of turn on him for this. But then the establishment people also turn on him because it doesn't work. Like, Labour 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 Labour 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.

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Right. He commands a "don't vote" bloc.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  And this is kind of the argument against the "don't vote" people. Is that, like, as soon as politicians realize that you don't vote, or there's a low likelihood that you're gonna 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.

• 40:26Speaker 00

  How soon after becoming a YouTuber does he start with the, like, electromagnetic frequencies?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  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 Vim Hoff. This guy who says that you can beat cancer by doing, like, cold plunges and shit.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Well, also, abuser game-recognized game.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  I mean, of course, yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  What a fucking situation that goddamn guy is.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  The Vim Hoff situation is crazy. That's what it'll be when you become a YouTuber.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  When I become moist critical.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  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 allegation.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ, man.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Uh-huh.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  So what happens is, he sues her.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  And gets an injunction so she cannot talk about this.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  For folks who don't have, like, a political memory before 2015, say...

• 42:02Speaker 00

  It's really hard to overstate how hard people went on survivors of sexual assault. People would like hold out for a forcible violent like sexual assault at knife point or something.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:17Speaker 00

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

• 42:23Speaker 01

  You can imagine how this would play out.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  Oh, you're you're oh, you're a professional masseuse. Really? Oh, and he touched you? Really?

• 42:29Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  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 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. 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, eh.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Eh, I think we can do better than this guy and he disappears again.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  He sounds like still an absolute fucking nightmare to work with.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, totally. Yes.

• 43:24Speaker 00

  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?

• 43:32Speaker 01

  I'm so stuck on that anecdote, too.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  I am so fucking stuck on it. You giant baby.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  If you're dealing with that shit just to get a meeting scheduled.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  No, totally.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  And he's just opposing shit for the sake of opposing shit.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  It's honestly surprising to me that he got as much mileage out of those fields as he did.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  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 did not watch every single one, but I watched like a shocking alarming number of his videos.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  When we started this morning, you were talking about how grumpy you were.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Dude, I'm in such a bad mood.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  I feel like I know why now.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  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 if 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.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  It's like dumbass osmosis. You're like losing information.

• 45:07Speaker 00

  Losing information. Absolutely is it. I know less things.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. Big Jasmohine breatharian energy with babies. Yep.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  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 a much more right wing later. The first is he has this idea that all of politics is kind of fake. He, he wants to stand aside from and above politics. He has this video in 2018 called Can Vegan Jokes Kill? Which is a like now totally forgotten story where you know what Waitrose is, right?

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Fancy fancy British grocery store.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  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 like, it basically acts as like a form of marketing for the stuff that they're selling at Waitrose.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  So there's a weird controversy in 2018 where a freelancer writes to the editor. Of the Waitrose magazine. 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.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Why? What are we doing?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And this, this poor vegan lady's like, what? What the fuck are you talking about? I'm just pitching like a cute story. You could say you're not interested.

• 46:55Speaker 00

  This feels very reminiscent of the Paula Deen 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.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  It's so weird.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Why are people this fucking resentful?

• 47:14Speaker 01

  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 going to send you a clip.

• 47:33Speaker 00

  Is he vegan?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  He's a vegetarian. And he says in his book that he did it out of spite because somebody told him like vegetarians are bad. And he's like, I'm going to be a vegetarian. And then he just like stuck with it for like 40 years.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  I'm looking at so much of his chest.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. And also, do you see in the thumbnail, the name of his podcast is Truez? Which is like the true news? He's not, he's not a gifted brander, ironically.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  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 that the context within which it takes is ultimately one of capitalist consumerism. And there'll never be a clearer example of this. This is, 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. We 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?

• 48:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  On vibes, sure, man.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  But there's not, there's just not really any there there.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  This is a kind of dude on the left, for sure.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Dude.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  Who is like doing a I'm above it all kind of thing.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  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.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Dude.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  The thing that I have observed being at the root of that is the, 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.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:10Speaker 00

  Rather than like actually rolling up your fucking sleeves and attempting some shit.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  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 just what he says about literally everything.

• 50:33Speaker 00

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

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Being the guy who just goes, it's all the same. There's no difference, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is ultimately like the function of that is to support the status quo.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  Right? It is at this point, repeating truisms that have been around since fucking Ralph Nader ran for president.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Wait, truisms? T R E W isms?

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Oh, truisms. Excuse me. Truisms.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Oh, fuck off.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Vacation from body shaming or modern marketing.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Oh, fuck off.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  So tell us who Tess Holliday is and the whole kind of thing.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  From people who really didn't want to see a fat person.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Looking happy and okay and great.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  So I was dreading that his video about Tess Holliday because I'm like, oh, what is he promoting obesity or something like really fucking boring? But what he does is like vaguely more interesting and I think like more insidious. 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.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  There's zero like hard left fat activists who think Cosmopolitan is like a good thing.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  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.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  So they can stop treating us in unhinged ways.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  So there's this desire to turn it into a frivolous question of like, I want everyone to like me.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  He's doing the same thing he always does where he's positioning himself as like smarter than the debate, above the debate, right? He's like, well, both sides are making mistakes.

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Smarter than women. Above women.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  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.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  It's the easiest moral stance to take.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  My god.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  So fucking easy.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  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.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 00

  That has been around for decades. That's not evidence of weakness in fat people. That's evidence of discrimination at Cosmo.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  You can see him kind of experimenting of like, what's gonna 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.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  I haven't trusted anyone to define gaslighting for the last like decade.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Easily, I know.

• 55:26Speaker 00

  I definitely don't trust Russell Brand to define it.

• 55:29Speaker 01

  We then get the start of the COVID pandemic.

• 55:32Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 55:45Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  He also does one called "Matthew McConaughey and Russell Brand Discuss Politics and the Left", that gets 1.5 million views.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Can't wait for these couple of big brains.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  And I think that's why people click on it. They're like, ooh, two celebrities shitting on the left.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, and/or algorithms pick it out in autoplay for them or whatever. Yep, totally.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this is what he's starting to realize, is that like, there's numbers in criticizing the left.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  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"?

• 56:30Speaker 00

  Why in the fuck are we entertaining this even in a clickbaity way?

• 56:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Literally making money off of entertaining like anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  And then he has a video on April 4th, 2021, called "Five Ways Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Changed My Life", and that is the last normal video that he ever does.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  That doesn't bother me.

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, whatever, man.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  This feels like the like, well, then why don't you stop defending Bill Clinton in the Epstein files? I'm like, nobody cares.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no one.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Nobody's coming to rush to the defense of Bill Gates. It's not happening.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  It then becomes things like how everyday people were screwed by liberal politics. Trump was right about Clinton and Russia collusion.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  Jesus, God.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Hunter Biden paid by Ukrainian energy company.

• 57:56Speaker 00

  Right now, it's just like fully partisan.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's kind of cosplaying. 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 Poole, Dave Rubin.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  Candace Owens.

• 58:12Speaker 00

  A bunch of other independent thinkers, Mike.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  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? He puts out a video and I'm going to send you a bit of a transcript from it.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  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?

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Agenda?

• 59:11Speaker 00

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

• 59:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 59:36Speaker 00

  Well, and also like, the issue isn't that Joe Rogan dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  No one fucking cares.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  The only other thing to say is that after this happens, Russell Brand like announces his Christianity.

• 1:00:01Speaker 00

  Gotta catch them all. Yeah.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  I think he's actually been kind of like quasi-religious for a while. It's just like the specific Christianity that is new.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  Right. He's changing out his blouses button to the navel.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Speaker 00

  For like a white linen baptismal tunic. That is also somehow cut down to the navel.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Last thing we're gonna do is we are going to go to his YouTube channel.

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  Why?

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  I just want to give you a flavor of like the kind of stuff that he's now producing.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. Okay. So one of the first thumbnails I'm seeing.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  I know which one it is.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  This is terrifying.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Oh, wait, you're, you're focused on that one. I thought you were gonna focus on Muslims versus dogs.

• 1:00:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  The third eye, yes.

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  And then in the middle ground, you see Keir Starmer grinning nefariously and ripping through a Union Jack.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Do you see the no whites one? He has one where the thumbnail just says, no whites.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  We all know whites are banned in the UK.

• 1:01:27Speaker 00

  There's a an anti Bill Gates one where he has used an AI image of Bill Gates looking like he is in agony.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Crying like a baby.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  He has one just called "The Problem With Billie Eilish."

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Bro, so you know the most cathartic thing about this, like the best news about all of this?

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Look at the view counts, Aubrey.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  I mean, they're abysmal, dude.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  25K, 32K.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, Muslim mayor, 54,000 views.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  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 and it's Candace Owens.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Interview with a thumbnail of Erica Kirk, where you're like, oh yeah, that's people who are watching for that thing.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  That's Candace Owens fans coming over. That's not Russell Brand fans.

• 1:02:27Speaker 00

  Which is like bleak as fuck in its own way.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:45Speaker 00

  Now we have to follow up.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  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? How would you answer this question after six hours of recording about this?

• 1:03:05Speaker 00

  I think a couple of things. One, I think he wears out his welcome really quickly in different spaces, right?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  And I also think, you know, the money stops flowing at a certain point, right?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 00

  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?

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  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. 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.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  Right. Instead of doing the normal career in decline thing of like, getting a residency in Vegas and starting a skincare line.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  Like, just chill the fuck out, dudes.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  I also think a really important component of this is, Russell Brand, 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? 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.

• 1:04:37Speaker 00

  There's like a real peril to not having a positive vision. And I don't mean like, positive in terms of, like, uplifting. I mean, positive in terms of like, what is present? How do things work? What do you think is the answer here?

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  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. 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

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  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? It's not that it's an insincere view.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  That's why we have two Russell Brand.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

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

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. But like, you lean into things that do well, even if they're sincerely held. So I also want to say, I don't want to imply that he's faking this.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  I know, it's so delicious. It's so delicious.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  It's oddly heartening to be like, okay, 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.