Russell Brand Part 2

Hi everybody, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that loves to remember Sarah Marshall but wouldn't mind forgetting the other fucking guy. That's a good one. Thank you. Hi, Sarah. We love you, Sarah. 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. I'm Aubrey Gordon. I'm Michael Hunt.

If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content. Same stuff. Today You're returning me to a nightmare. Yeah. So as with last episode, we also have like a fairly omni trigger warning for this one. There's lots of sexual assault stuff. Oh great. 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 out. in Britain, but then he re-emerges 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 uh sort of woo-woo over-sexed British guy.

The role was originally written as like a nerdy librarian, but then when he auditioned, they were like, oh, let's make him this kind of like rock star stoner type of guy. The only thing that's interesting about this in the book is that 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 gonna 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 you're a nobody and they're they're offering you a major role in a major

Hollywood movie. 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. 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 raconture 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 yourself in.

This is behavior that would be immature in an adolescent. This movie comes out in two thousand eight. 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 Tamor version of The Tempest. Who the fuck does he play in The Tempest? Uh Trinculo. Whatever that is. Yeah. I'm reading his Wikipedia entry. 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. These sound like car names to me. Um he shows up in the Despicable Me movies. He gets his own spin off.

to Forgetting Sarah Marshall called Get Him to the Greek. Oh, that's the same character? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it's sort of like the misadventures of Jonah Hill trying to like get it getting him to the Greek. I saw it. I do not remember a single thing from that movie. Based on what we know now What a set to be on. Like he shows up on The Simpsons. He eventually gets a starring role in a remake of Arthur. Yes, the coveted Arthur remake. I know. 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. They were really, really, really trying to make Russell Brand happen over here. And he did to a degree, right? Like

But it it seems to me that he never really developed like a diehard fan base based on his comedy or comedic acting, right? His second memoir, My Bookie Wook Two, Colin, This Time It's Personal.

Which makes no sense. The first one was very impersonal. Most 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. Okay. Like, 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? No, I don't know that I recognize that name. She is an Australian actress.

who is in a movie called A Bedtime Stories with Adam Sandler and Russell Brand. It's one of these weird like com kind of eighties style high concept comedies. Where Adam Sandler tells bedtime stories to his kids with the bedtime stories come true. Oh. And then there's like Hijinx and Sue. I I could barely get through the trailer. Like it looked

So bad has 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. I was gonna say Adam Sandler and Russell Brand, but don't threaten me with a bad time. She has 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 uh describing

His feelings. 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? I don't know. She's pretty 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 five thousand, 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? You can't eat her teeth. Plus she was an iceberg. 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. Dude, I You're gonna read so many this episode. Christian too, she was, is not a thing that my accent says. Uh, 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? One million percent. Why would you mention her hymen? Horrifying. 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 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. So this is him describing the sort of onset crush that he has on her. On a work colleague. 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. If someone has written about your hymen in a book

A girl's girl will tell ya. There's a weird thing where throughout the course of 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. Jesus fucking. So this echoes the accusations that we had from last episode about how women at Channel Four 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. The nutty part isn't that he thinks it's a story, the nutty part is that it is a story to some 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.

Michael, this is as good a time as any to tell you I'm quitting the show. I think I'll leave in the full silence after that. Jesus fucking Christ. So there's then I guess like a rap party or something at Lucy Lawless's house in the Hollywood Hills. And I'm I was gonna read this, but I'm gonna make you read it'cause it's problematic. Um Great. Luckily the mandatory Mexican housekeeper had brought her son to work.

He was about four and a likable sort of cove? I don't know. 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. So he's playing with a kid so that Teresa will notice. Uh he then does a sort of like Ma, I'm a monster, the way that you do with little kids. Yeah, yeah. And the kid

Starts crying and the kid pisses himself. Shocking that Russell Brand can't figure out how to do a like basic play with children and figure out how to like have a boundary. 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. No. 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. Into the bathroom, yeah. And he also has the other one. Where a woman says that he followed her into a bathroom. Jesus. We can do this as like a little script, I think. So you can be him, I'll be her. Okay. She says kids, huh? Kids! I love'em. Well, you've got a funny way of showing.

she said, frowning a beautiful frown. Yeah, I'm complicated, I muttered, staring off into the distance where the child's sobbing could still be faintly heard. I hope he's playing this up for comedic. I I don't think I hope he didn't like traumatize but also I wouldn't put it past him. 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? I've heard about you, mister. 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. No, that you're a prat. 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 Devonshire evading a clumsy write back. Context clues. Yeah. Context clues. We're b we we both know exactly what this means, but like it would be so boring to explain to our listeners. Total Allen Devonshire heads over here. Let's go for a walk and see if we can't get past a few of these terrible misconceptions. 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. It's all every no is a challenge for this man. 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 to soften toward him.

Again, this is a a pattern that he has where like he when he is infatuated with a woman, he pays her a huge amount of positive attention. Yeah. 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. 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. And then he never mentions her again. Jesus fucking Christmas. This is the pattern that he has in both of his memoirs. 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? This is a particular thing that like adult men will do. Not all of'em, but a good number of'em. 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.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like I have witnessed this with like older men in particular will sort of put on a like I'm a grumpy old guy, 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. And you're just figuring out how to pitch that. Right. It's sort of like a

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 gonna get rid of it. So here's another way of presenting it. So the other thing that happens during this period is we have two more alleged rapes.

In two thousand nine. 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 two thousand nine. There's also in twenty ten A woman who sues him for sexual assault in a bathroom on the set of this movie Arthur. She says Russell uh exposed his penis to her in full view of cast and crew of Arthur.

The accuser alleged the assault happened on july seventh, twenty ten in a bathroom on set as a member of the production crew guarded the door from the outside. Jesus. 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.

Sure. She is like trying to make the relationship work and he basically refuses to, and then he divorces her with a text message. Great famously. Like minutes before she goes on stage. What a catch. And it appears that neither of them have spoken since.

Which is fascinating. It's like they're in this whirlwind romance fourteen months, they get married, and then he sends her the the text message breaking up and they just never talk again. And like their lawyers handle it, apparently. If someone divorced me by text, I would definitely Oh yeah. Like I don't know what his deal is. The

The last thing we have to cover from his adventures in Hollywood is yet another uh alleged rape. Oh, sure. 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 later, 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. Jesus 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. Jesus. 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. 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. Th this is another thing I think about too is This whole thing about like kind of male conquests for women, right? Yeah. 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 the sex. He's having a bunch of threesoms. Wow, what a cool guy. But then you look at what he's actually doing, and it's like really pathetic.

Yeah. He's basically badgering this woman. Yeah. Like, oh, I need to see you. I need to see you. Like calling someone in the middle of the night. This is how you behave if you believe in your core that you are not a lovable person. You shouldn't be doing I mean you shouldn't be doing regardless, but it's like you're like a middle aged man. You not thirty seven is not middle aged, but Yes it is. No it's not. Middle aged is forty to sixty five. What?

Yes. I am forty-four and I can call thirty-seven year olds middle age. You're in here with me. You're trapped in here with me. 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 like presses her up against the wall and like forcibly rapes her, according to her. Like, it's not surprising since we've heard so many stories of this, but it's also not

It's still like alarming. 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. Jesus God. There's also one more. Uh, we're almost done with these. There's a woman named uh 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 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 wanna 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. 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.

Fuck you and he says you're fired and they never speak again. 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 your adjustment. disaster for not giving me whatever I want whenever I want it. So he then basically like disappears from Hollywood. He's in this movie Arthur in twenty eleven that flops

And he's in Rock of Ages in 2012, which is like a jukebox musical with Tom Cruise, which also flops. Good. And then by 2013, he basically never works again. I blame Katy Perry. It is actually interesting to me because like other people have been in movies that have flopped. And continue, you know, having career like fucking Jared Leto, right? Yeah. It's not like for ethical reasons we're not gonna cast you in movies anymore. That's not how it works.

Right, 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. 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 Diego. He does seem like he'd be a nightmare to work.

He's like a child. So that's kind of the end of his like 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 twenty twelve, 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. What? He says we might as well let people carry on taking drugs if they're gonna be on methose.

Obviously it's painful to abstain, but at least it's hope-based. What? Here is this from a Guardian kind of recap of the interview. 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, 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. 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 methadone and suboxone were. Unbelievably well. 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. And they're less fatal. Yes. Right? And there's So many studies on this of like in the long term, people who are using methadone are significantly less likely, like a year after they start treatment, to be using opioids again. They're also way less likely to overdose because the problem with abstinence.

programs is that when you stop using, you lose all of your tolerance. So if you go back to using the amount that you were using before you stopped, oftentimes you will overdose and die. Like this happened to a guy I went to high school with. Yeah. 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 yeah statistically, empirically, methadone treatment works extremely well. Yeah. 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. 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. And he's he's increasing the stigma against methadone, right? He's like, Oh, you're still using drugs. In that way it's sort of former fat person kind of energy of like I did it the right way or whatever, where you're like this sucks. I hate it. So from there he kind of becomes like a general purpose. left wing political pundit in twenty twelve. He visits the Occupy Wall Street protest.

He visits Africa to look at global poverty. He writes a pretty well-regarded uh obituary of Margaret Thatcher when she dies in twenty thirteen, where he's like, he's like she fucking sucks.

We then in twenty thirteen have the kind of I think coming out of Russell Brand as like a major political figure. When he edits the New Statesman. Oh. So in twenty thirteen, he starts dating a woman named Jamaica Conn, who is the daughter of some billionaire. And she is one of the associate editors of The New Statesman. It's a center left magazine, sort of the way that we have the New Republic in the United States.

She asked him to write an article on religion because he is touring a show called Messiah Complex and then later they're talking about like, Oh, who should guest edit the new issue? And she's like, Oh, Russell Brand would be fun. So he guest edits uh an issue about revolution on the theme of revolution. Revolution is the one where he's uh popped out the

E V O L so it looks like love backwards. That's the cover that's the cover of his book, which comes out the following year. It's so annoying. Relevolution is how I always said it in my head. Kodalar sign ha? Yes. Here is the first couple paragraphs of his uh introductory essay. When I was asked to edit an issue of the New Statesman, I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me.

I chose the subject of revolution because the New Statesman is a political magazine, and imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way I can be enthused about politics. When people talk about politics within the existing Westminster framework, I feel a dull thud in my stomach and my eyes involuntarily glaze. I have never voted fucking. He's one of these guys. He's one of these guys. Like most people, I am utterly disenchanted by politics.

Like most people, I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites. Billy Connolly said, don't vote. It encourages them. So this is another thing that is core to his political ideology is the entire political system is just a pantomime. Everyone is like fake and pretending that they care about these issues, but it's all theater, it's all bullshit. And so

The way to enact political change is to just not engage. It just feels supremely unsurprising to me that he would land in this like burn it down place because that's what he does with his personal relationships and his work stuff, right? Allegedly sort of across the board. Right. Like Mr. Oppositional of course doesn't want to engage with an existing system. He doesn't want to engage with his fucking work calendar. 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 twenty thirteen. This is like a huge deal. Really? Yeah, so we're gonna watch a small snippet of it. You've never ever voted. No, do you think that's really bad? So you struck an attitude what before the age of eighteen?

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 involved in the world. 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 uh they want to engage with the current political system because they see that it doesn't work for them. They see that it makes no difference, they see that they're not served. I say that it hasn't worked for them if they didn't bother to vote. Jeremy, my darling.

I'm not saying that the 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 at what ain't the Tories going to court and to taking the EU to court? Because they're trying to cutel Is that what's happening at the moment in our country? It is, isn't it?

Yeah, there is no. So why am I gonna tune in for that? You don't believe in democracy. You want a revolution, don't you? The planet is being destroyed. We are creating an underclass. We are exploiting poor people all over the world and the genuine and legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political community. All of those things may be true. They are true.

I wouldn't argue with you about many of these. Well, how come I feel so cross with you? It can't just be because of that beard. It's gorgeous. It's possibly because If the Daily Mail don't want it, I do. I'm against them. Grow it longer. Trangle it into your armpit hair.

You are a very trivial man. Well do you think I am trivial? Yes. A minute ago you're having a go at me because I want a a revolution. No, I'm asking. I'm not having a go at you because you want a revolution. Many people want a revolution, but I'm asking you what it would be like. Well, I think what it won't be like is hu a huge disparity between rich and poor.

With three hundred Americans. This is like seven 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 Specifically not what was asked of you. Dude, I we once had a strategy meeting at my NGO where we were talking about like which issue should we work on next year? We had like five different options and somebody was like, I think we should prioritize all the options.

Because they're all very important. It's like what do you think the point of this meeting is? I get it. He's a compelling presence, and I also think this is like kind of what year is this that this airs? 2013. Yeah, so this is airing in 2013, which is a

few years before Donald Trump takes office in the 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.

Yeah. That I don't think you have really earned here. So for this, I read a really interesting paper called Russell Brand Comedy Celebrity Politics by Jane Arthur 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 he wasn't a kind of a big deal in labor until after the twenty fifteen general election. It's before the emergence of Bernie as like a major political figure, right? But it's also kind of after Occupy. So you have this sense of like people are pissed. But there's no real figure to like put that into. There's no real vessel for that. Yeah. And so I think people were like,

crawling through the desert and drinking the sand. Yep. Very few other people, especially institutional people, were speaking like this. Well, and also like Uh Russell Brand fucking sucks for a lot of reasons, but he is also a working class dude. Yeah, yeah. Telling off a middle class dude with a more sort of upper crusty accent. So for The next couple 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. The subhead is Why Can't America Get Some Articulate Celebrities? The Guardian named him one of the heroes of 2014.

Fandy Fair publishes a glowing profile in twenty fourteen, where they describe him as a legit political thinker and voice for the dispossessed. So this wave of positive, credulous media coverage kind of crescendoes in 2014 with the release of his book Revolution. Relevolution. Relevolution. Uh-huh. Sevenin. Which comes out in twenty fourteen 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 the Christians say that LGBT people are bad, but nowhere in the Bible does it say that.

And you're like right, I I was also on the internet in two thousand five. They say gay people are bad, but do they send their wives to menstrual huts? I mean, it's so boring. It's like exactly this shit. So like whatever. I agree with it, but it's just like not very interesting. I'm gonna send you one uh excerpt of how boring it is.

Which I might cut from the episode. Oxfam say a bus with the eighty-five 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 subaquatic palace with my half-fish brides.

And sing a song about the supremacy of marine life. Again, how is he not on drugs writing this shit? Grow your beard out. Connect it to your armpit hair. What are we doing? It's like fine. Like I obviously agree with the kind of core point like inequality is bad. But he's then doing a bunch of shtick. And then the shtick is not very good or funny. Well, and also like I would say, you know, he's like, I don't think they'd be hanging out together and I don't think the conversation would be great.

I would argue that we now know quite a bit more than we did sort of as a collective about the personalities of billionaires. And I would argue that Russell Brand would fit in pretty well. I like how you're like it's the bus wouldn't be like that. The bus would be like this. Russell would be on the bus. He just doesn't have enough money to be on the bus.

So what really stood out to me is toward the end of the book, he starts specifying what he actually wants. So here's this Rain in the power of big business by renegotiating trade treaties to insist that multinational corporations be place based and accountable to nation states. Revoking the charters of any corporation with revenues larger than the smallest national GNP. Be meaner to corporations. I'm into it. Relocalize food and farming by taxing food miles.

removing subsidies and research for large scale capital and energy intensive agriculture. giving support to small diversified organic production and to the growing number of young people who want to take up farming. Sweetie, I like where your head is at, but you these specific things are like pretty dumb. 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 Well, I mean what's what's so fascinating to me about this one and like all of them is just like these are all political

programs. These are all reformist projects. They really are. Like if you want to relocalize food and farming, these are political changes, right? Rain in the power 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 politicians. Like a lot of those stuff is pretty doable. Yeah, it to me it strikes me as like his deployment of revolution, which I think is Generally I would say politically a red flag when people talk about revolution but don't talk about what that would consist of, how it would come about.

Like I think that's generally a red flag, but I also think he's deploying it in sort of the way that like I'm a Washington outsider gets deployed. Yeah. Right. Which is just sort of like, It's different. I want a different thing. I want a thing that's really different. Radically different. 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 Wi-Fi. Employee investment funds, where like all profits have to be or 20% of profits have to be given to employees. These are things they have in like democratic countries. Yep. The whole project feels more a function of his personality disorder than anything else. Because all of this revolution stuff I'm so sorry, Michael.

Do you mean revolution? Revol revolution 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 city wide wi fi? How would we do that? Who should we elect? Like yeah. How can we pressure existing politicians to do that? It's like he doesn't want to get involved in those details. So he's like, hey man.

I'm talking about a revolution here. Right. I'm just saying everything has to change, and like actually the both the unpopular part and the part where things actually change is where you have to get specific, and he is pretty studiously not getting specific. Right. It sort of has the idea energy of like the guy in your workplace who just wants to be the ideas guy. And the minute you're like, okay, open a spreadsheet, let me know exactly how this would work, disappears.

Make a phone call. Goodbye. His sort of fame in the UK as a political commentator peaks in 2015 when Ed Miliband, who is the head of the Labor Party, kind of goes groveling to Russell Brand to try to get an endorsement. He is seen as a way for labor to reach young people and this kind of like disaffected kind of block. You know, the kind of occupy type. Ed Milliban thinks that Russell Brand might help him do this.

So he goes and he does an unbelievably boring interview. Why not go to the guy who's like definitely don't vote? Well the thing is it it sort of works in that Russell Brand does eventually explicitly endorse Labor. Huh. But what's interesting And why this kind of market?

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

That's the sort of the anti-establishment people kind of turn on him for this, but then the establishment people also turn on him because it doesn't work. Like Labour loses the twenty fifteen 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 type.

We're like, you know, they're not pinning the whole thing on Russell Brand, obviously, but they're like, Well this guy didn't result in any more votes. Like he can't actually bring people out. Right. He commands a don't vote block. And this is kind of the argument against the don't vote people 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. How soon after becoming a YouTuber does he start with the like electromagnetic frequencies? Oh, I mean, there's even even in his book, he says like cell phones cause cancer. Like he's quite conspiratorial. very early and he has even before the sort of the sort of right wing turn that he has now made he has numerous videos with Vim Hawk.

This guy who says that you can beat cancer by doing like cold plunges and shit. Well also abuser game recognizing what a fucking situation that goddamn guy is. The the Vim Hof situation is crazy. That's what

it'll be when you'd become a YouTuber. When I become moist critical. But then okay, but then it wouldn't be uh a chapter of the Russell Brand episode if we didn't have yet another sexual assault allegations. In twenty fourteen, the woman he's dating at the time, Jamai McConn, for his birthday gets Russell Brandt 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 stonewalls 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. Uh-huh. So what happens is he sues her. Oh And gets an injunction so she cannot talk about this. For folks who don't have like a political memory before twenty fifteen, say. It's really hard to overstate how hard people went on survivors of sexual assault. Yeah. People would like hold out for a forcible, violent

like sexual assault at knife point or something. Yeah, yeah. And then even when that thing arrived, they would have a reason for why that wasn't still wasn't like legit. You can imagine how this would play out. Yes. Oh you're you're oh you're a professional masseuse.

Really Oh, and he touched you? Really? Yeah. It would have been really fucking ugly and annoying. And also the fact that this was public and no one seemed to have cared is itself super telling. Like no one did anything with this. Even I mean, if you look this up, you 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, uh Yes.

Uh I think we can do better than this guy and he disappears again. He sounds like still an absolute fucking nightmare to work with. Yeah, no totally. Yes. Being offered a big role in a big movie That requires you to go from LA to San Diego, which is a two hour drive. I'm so stuck on that anecdote too. I'm so fucking stuck on it. You giant baby.

Yeah. If you're dealing with that shit just to get a meeting scheduled and he's just opposing shit for the sake of opposing shit, it's honestly surprising to me that he got as much mileage out of those fields as he did. So the rest of this episode we are going to talk about his YouTube channel and kind of what he does after this.

He just becomes like an unbelievably prolific YouTuber. Like he's he's posting numerous times a week. If you look now, he's posting I think once a day or more. I mean, he just posts his fucking ass off. And he's been doing this since like 2015. I went through the archives of the U.S. When we started this morning you were talking about how grumpy you were. I feel like I know why now. 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 on stuff I'm like not like well informed about at all. I'm like, I know more about Syria than you do, and you don't like I don't know shit about Syria. Right. You and I talked off mic Like a few weeks ago about me watching Tim Pool clips for the first time and having a similar response where I was just like

I feel like I know fewer things now than before I watched. It's like dumbass osmosis. You're like losing information. Losing information. Absolutely is it. I know less Things. One of the other main themes of his videos is these unbelievably tedious, like woo-woo wellness videos. These are some titles of some of his videos. Could Mass Meditation Change Everything? Meditation for Sleep. How I'm Handling Grief.

God, the universe, and meaning, senses and consciousness beyond the five senses myth. Yeah, big Jasmuheen breatharian energy. Exactly. Yep. So there's two themes that I want to talk about that start to show up in his videos and remain even after he becomes 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? Fancy pantsy British grocery store. Yes. And they have

A magazine. It's in the aisle before you check out, and it has like 10 salads for summer or something. And like it basically acts as like a form of marketing for the stuff that they're selling at Waitros. Sure. So there's a weird controversy in twenty eighteen 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 meal?

The editor of the Waitrose magazine writes back to her and says, Hi Celine, thanks for this. How about a series about killing vegans one by one? Ways to trap them, how to interrogate them properly, expose their hypocrisy. Force feed them meat, make them eat steak and drink red wine. Why what are we doing? 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 can say y you're not interested. This feels very reminiscent of the uh Paula Dean episode I saw years ago where she was making like a butter and meat thing and she was like, If you wanna make a vegetarian version of this, you can just Tell him to go outside and eat some grass. I don't know. Like so weird. Why are people this fucking resentful? So the woman who gets this

message, I believe like forwards it to the waitros, 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 Grant's video about it He has This kind of little...

Summary of it. So I'm gonna send you a clip. Is he vegan? He's 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 gonna be a vegetarian. And then he just like stuck with it for like 40 years. I'm looking at So much of his chest. Oh yeah, and also do you see in the thumbnail the name of his podcast is Cruz, which is like the true news. He's not he's not a gifted brander, ironically.

Me, if I was in charge of sacking people at Waitros magazine, knowing that my job is primarily to generate money for Waitros,

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 a 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? Not really, no. We live primarily in an illusion that designates us as consumers above all else.

Citizens, secondarily, spiritual beings having a real and authentic experience, barely, barely on the radar. So ultimately, as you know deep down, none of this matters. On vibes, sure man. Yeah. But there's not there's just not really any there there. This is what I meant earlier when I said his his ideology is fundamentally narcissistic. Because in every single little controversy like this.

He thinks that he's above taking a side and actually arguing for one of the sides, like this is good or this is bad. He's like, actually, you're all just losers for even arguing at all. This is a kind of dude on the left, for sure. Dude. Who is like Doing a I'm above it all kind of thing. Like the whole system's rigged. I'm not part of it. I'm not buying into their bullshit. Blah blah blah blah blah.

Functionally, just as an organizer who has tried to work with this type of dude. Dude. 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. Yeah. Rather than like actually rolling up your fucking sleeves and attempting some shit. 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 his position for things like the presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

This is what he says about literally everything. Right. And again, like if you're concerned about corporate influence in politics one approach to that is to be like both parties are the same, there's no difference, they're both bought and paid for. And another approach is to go, Okay, what would it look like to really get together a proposal to get money out of politics? Yeah, exactly. 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. Yeah. Right. If you're saying none of this matters. And there's no point in engaging with it, then you are allowing it to continue unabated. Right, right. It is at this point repeating truisms that have been around since fucking Ralph Nader ran for president. Wait, truisms T R E W isms. Oh

Cruisisms, excuse me. Cruisisms. The other theme that emerges from this is I I chose this video specifically for you. So I'm scrolling through his old videos from like twenty seventeen. He has a video called Tess Holiday, A Vacation from Body Shaming or Modern Marketing. Oh Fuck off.

So tell us who Tess Holiday is and the whole kind of thing. Tess Holliday is a high profile plus size supermodel who is uh I remember reading an article about her talking about being a size twenty-six, 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 um from people who really didn't want to see a fat person.

looking happy and okay and great. So I I was dreading that his video about Tess Holiday because I'm like, oh what is it? Promoting obesity or something like really fucking boring. 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 this huge just

flatly fat phobic freak out. People just lose their minds. Like there's a fat lady in cosmopolitan. Yep. 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. Sure. 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 Holiday or fucking anybody was like, ah yes, we're finished now.

A fat person's on the cover of cosmopolitan. Oh 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 a cover of cosmopolitan. There's zero like hard left fat activists who think cosmopolitan is like a good thing. If you talk to fat activists, they'll go Hey, uh the reason that Cosmo matters is that it matters for people to get accustomed to seeing fat people and to stop freaking the fuck out about seeing fat people.

So that they can stop saying unhinged things to us. Yeah. So that they can stop treating us in unhinged ways. Yeah. So there's this desire to turn it into a frivolous question of like, I want everyone to like me. He's doing the same thing he always does, where he's positioning himself as like Smarter than the debate, above the debate, right? He's like, well both sides are making mistakes. Smarter than women. Above women. But it's like on one side you have

fat phobic garbage, like actual societal discrimination of which there is like ample evidence. And on the other side, you have this fake thing that you made up. Well and like well and truly who asked, if you're not gonna sort of

take a moral stance on what feels to me like a pretty clearly moral issue of like people flipping out about seeing a body that looks different. It's the easiest moral stance to take. So fucking easy. It is in fact Notable and discriminatory that that is the first time that a fat person appeared on the cover of this magazine that has been around for decades.

That's not evidence of weakness in fat people. That's evidence of discrimination at Cosmo. He has at this point around one million or like one point five 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 thirty thousand views. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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.

Desperately trying anything to get views. I haven't trusted anyone to define gaslighting for the last like decade, but I definitely don't trust Russell Brand to define it. We then get the start of the COVID pandemic.

Yeah. 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 one point four million views. He also does one Called Matthew McConaughey and Russell Brand discuss politics and the left.

that gets 1.5 million views. Can't wait for these couple of big brains. What's interesting about it to me is like it's a just a really boring celebrity interview. They like don't really discuss politics that much, but he put Politics and the left in the title.

And I think that's why people click on it. They're like, ooh, two celebrities shitting on the left. Yeah, and or algorithms pick it out in autoplay for them or whatever. Yep, totally. I think this is what he's starting to realize is that like there's numbers. In criticizing the left. And then on January twenty fourth, twenty twenty one He publishes probably his first kind of like official conspiracy video. It's called The Great Reset.

Conspiracy or fact. Why in the fuck are we entertaining this even in a clickbaity way? He did. I don't want to do too many of these, but he then goes like back to woo-woo stuff. Releasing pain from the body. 68,000 views. He then does another great reset. Video 2.7 million views. Literally making money off of entertaining like anti Semitic and racist.

Conspiracy theories. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. 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. 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' book is rubbish. The worst conspiracies are in plain sight. Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson. Why is Bill Gates buying up stolen Native American land? He does a lot of anti bill gates.

stuff. That doesn't bother me. Yeah, whatever, man. This feels like the like, well then why don't you stop defending Bill Clinton in the Epstein Files? I'm like nobody cares. Yeah, no one Nobody's coming to rush to the defense of Bill Gates. It's not happening. It then becomes things like how everyday people were screwed by liberal politics. Trump was right about Clinton and Russia collusion. Hunter Biden paid by Ukrainian energy company. Right. Now it's just like

fully partisan. Yep. He's kind of cosplay. I mean, everyone fucking does this, but he's still cosplaying as 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, Candace Owens, like a bunch of other independent.

Thinkers, Mike. So the kind of last thing that happens is in April 2023, this big investigation comes out that has a bunch of allegations of sexual assault. We've been talking about those kind of in the timeline, but like the night before the article drops.

He posts a video like responding to the allegations because the 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 gonna send you a bit of a transcript from it. As I've written about extensively in my book. 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 it makes me question, is there another agenda at play? Agenda. Particularly when we've seen coordinated media attacks before, like with Joe Rogan when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of.

And we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same language. Oh, that's another that's another thing where he thinks he thinks there's like coordination behind the scenes when you see like the same Like Russia invades Ukraine. Like there's only so many ways that you can say that. Well and also like The issue isn't that Joe Rogan dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of. It's that he has one of the most popular podcasts in the country.

And there is a demonstrated track record of people taking his terrible advice on things. The only other thing to say is that after this happens, I think that's a good thing Russell Brand like announces his Christianity. Gotta catch them all. Yeah. People say that he did this after the allegations came out, and he kind of did officially, but if you look at his old YouTube channel, he has like a lot of like spiritual videos. I think because of the twelve steps

have that sort of uh acknowledge a higher power. Yeah. I think he's actually been kind of like quasi religious for a while. It's just like the specific Christianity that is new. Right. He's Changing out his blouse's button to the navel. For like a white linen baptismal tunic. That is also somehow cut down to the navel. Last thing we're gonna do is we are going to go to his YouTube channel. Why?

I just want to give you a flavor of like the kind of stuff that he's now producing. Oh wow. Okay, so one of the first thumbnails I'm seeing. I know which one it is. This is terrifying. Oh wait, you're s you're focused on that one. I thought you were gonna focus on Muslims versus dogs. Fuck your dogs. No. The background is a bunch like a bunch of buildings in London.

uh that appear to be decorated with giant posters with a single eyeball that just say conform the third eye, yes. And then in the middle ground you see Keir Starmer Grinning nefariously and ripping through a union jack. Do you see the no whites one? He has one where the thumbnail just says no white. Oh no. There's uh an anti-Bill Gates one where he has used an AI image of Bill Gates looking like he is in agony. Crying like a baby. Yes. He has one just called The Problem with Billy Eilish.

But also you know the most cathartic thing about this, like the best news about all of this? What? Look at the view counts, Aubrey. I mean, they're abysmal, dude. Twenty five K, thirty-two K Yeah, Muslim mayor.

54,000 views. So there's there's very little interesting here, but what is interesting to me is that he has also kind of flamed out as a right-wing influencer. Yeah. There there was a period during the pandemic where he was regularly getting over one point five million views for like most of his videos. And now it's like he's lucky if he breaks two hundred K. 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

uh Candace Owens interview with a thumbnail of Erica Kirk where you're like, Oh yeah, that's people who are watching for that thing. That's Candace Owens fans coming over. That's not Russell Brand fans. Which is like bleak as fuck in its own way. So that is the Russell Brand story. Uh it is ongoing because his trial begins in June of twenty twenty six.

So I already regret doing this episode because it means he's like on our radar. Now we have to follow up. Yeah. Like it's like as soon as I did the RFK Jr. episode, I was like, Fuck, I have to keep covering this guy. He's in like the cast of characters now. Yeah. But so I just wanted to ask you what I mean, we started out with the question of like, you know, what explains this guy's shift from the left to the right. How would you answer this question after

six hours of recording about this. I think a couple of things. One, uh I think he uh wears out his welcome really quickly in different spaces, right? And I also think uh you know, the money stops flowing at a certain point, right? Yeah. He's in Hollywood and then Hollywood turns off the money tap, right? He's in the UK and then the UK kind of turns off the money tap, right? I do think this is like a h 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 it appears kind of resentment or anger and they don't know where to place it. And that tends to result in them siding with the right, basically. Right. Instead of doing the normal career and decline thing of like

Getting a residency in Vegas and starting a skincare line. Yeah, I know. Like just chill the fuck out, dudes. I also think a really important component of this. is Russell Brandt, as we said, his only kind of core guiding belief is Don't tell me what to do. And right-wing media has been very good over the last 10 to 15 years of pitching themselves as anti-establishment and as pitching the left as the establishment.

Right? Who is the establishment? Oh, it's the feminists on Twitter. It's the elite universities. But it's like the left writ large is like the mom who is constantly telling you to eat your vegetables. And I think he's just vulnerable to that stuff because he doesn't really have any core guiding principles. There's like a real peril to not having a positive vision. And I don't mean like

positive in terms of uh like uplifting. I mean positive in terms of like what is present? How do things work? What do you think is the answer here? Right. I also think the Incentives of social media are really important. We've talked about how he starts getting views the minute he leans into this conspiracy slash right wing stuff. 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 uh video essay about this where she traced like the view counts. Also, I 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. Yep. 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 if I made a video or an episode about like people using Bluetooth speakers in public. And all of a sudden that got like three times more downloads than any other episode we've ever made. I'd probably make another one about that. Right? It's it's not that it's an insincere review. That's why we have two Russell Brand episodes

I haven't actually checked the download numbers for the first part, which it's probably not good. I also haven't checked it, but I'm like Well knowing that whatever Yeah. But like you you lean into things that do well, even if they're sincerely held. So I also wanna say I don't I don't wanna imply That he's faking this. I think the other thing that's fascinating here is that he is someone who was publicly accused of sexual assault.

ran for shelter on the right and it hasn't really panned out for him, which is not usually how that goes. I know it's so delicious. It's so delicious. 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.