Russell Brand Part 2

Introduction

0:00hi everybody and welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that loves to remember sarah marshall but wouldn't mind forgetting the other fucking guy 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 yours is good too i'm aubrey gordon

Support the Show

0:32i'm michael hubs if you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase or you can subscribe through apple podcast it's the same audio content same stuff my goal today you're returning me to a nightmare 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 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 outs in britain but then he re-emerges as a fairly mainstream hollywood star

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

1:11starting 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 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 make him this kind of like rock star stoner type of guy

Teresa Palmer

1:41the 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 you're a nobody and they're they're offering you a major role in a major hollywood

Hollywood Career

2:14movie they're offering you the coveted james corden path i've worn out my welcome in the uk and the u.s 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 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 this is behavior that would be immature in an adolescent this movie comes out in 2008 the movie is a big hit his role especially is like really memorable

2:48and 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 taymore 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 they sound like car names to me um he shows up in the despicable

3:19me 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 you know 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 which does flop

Marriage to Katie Perry

3:48but 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 u.s is really remarkable they were really really really trying to make russell brand happen over here and he did to a degree right like yes but 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 2 colon 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

4:22he 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 okay it's 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

Addiction and Recovery

4:53so are you familiar with teresa palmer no i don't know that i recognize that name she is a australian actress who is in a movie called a bedtime stories okay with adam sandler and russell brand it's one of these weird like kind of 80s 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 hijinks ensue i i could barely get through the trailer like it looked so bad it has 27 on rotten tomatoes i was gonna say adam sandler

5:24and russell brand i know don't threaten me with a bad time she has a love interest in that so russell brand gets like a little crush on her on set and talks about her like dedicates an entire chapter of his book to like the crush that he has on her and what happens afterwards so here is him 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

5:57she'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 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

6:33what you can't eat her teeth 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 you're gonna read so many this episode christian too she was it's not a thing that

7:04my accent says 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 it's 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 she's like a conquest for you well also the way he describes her is honey hair from golden skin which

7:41that 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 you 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

8:15that 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 section of his audience right that they're like oh yeah he also at one point is talking about a

8:46scene 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 wrap party or something at lucy lawless's house sure in the hollywood hills and i'm i was gonna read this but i'm gonna make you read it because it's problematic um great here's this luckily the mandatory mexican

9:19housekeeper 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 theresa hadn't noticed my incredible unaffected rapport with children so he's playing with a kid so that theresa will notice uh he then does a sort of like ma i'm a monster the way that you do with little kids yeah and the kid starts crying and the kid pisses

9:50himself 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 theresa's watching him or kind of watching this from across the room he says theresa 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

10:21script i think so you can be him i'll be her okay she says kids huh kids i love them well you've got a funny way of showing it 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 don't think i hope he didn't like traumatize the child but also i wouldn't put it past him god beautiful girls spend their lives getting chatted up so to get past their

10:53defenses 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 right back context clues yeah context

11:23great great great great i know every word that just got written but we we both know exactly what this means but like it would be so boring to explain to our listeners we'll just move on we'll just move on we're like total alan 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

11:57and 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 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

12:31part 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 christ 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

13:06this 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 yeah yeah yeah 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 like i'm a cantankerous dude and you're like right you're sort of doing a shtick but you're also that is

13:42how you feel about things not 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 going to 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 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

14:132009 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 uh 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 jesus he denies this allegation of course he also in 2010 has his marriage to katie perry there's not that much to say about this one mostly because

14:44neither 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

15:15before 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 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 if someone divorced me by text i would definitely never speak to them again oh yeah 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 the last thing we have to cover from his adventures in hollywood is yet another

15:47uh 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 whatever fine so she comes over she says the door was unlocked and i walked in he comes running out of the bedroom

16:18naked 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

16:54capital u up with this guy 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 threesomes 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

17:24are not a lovable person 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 you're not 37 is not middle-aged but yes it is no it's not middle-aged is 40 to 65 what yes i am 44 and i can call 37 year olds middle-aged you're in here with me you're trapped in here with me okay 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

17:55according 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

18:28she 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 want to have sex with you and she's like running away again like physically he's trying to like physically

18:59force 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 and is like 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 you're a 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 2011

19:33that 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 katie perry 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 yeah it's not like for ethical reasons we're not going to cast you in movies anymore that's not how it works 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

20:08if i don't want to go to san diego he does seem like he'd be a nightmare to work with 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

20:18political 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 news night interview so news night is kind of there like 60 minutes he talks in the interview

20:49they'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 methadone 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 quote

21:19an 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

21:50he 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 work unbelievably well yeah so like methadone treatment is this thing where it's a

22:23form 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

22:56programs 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

23:29no 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

24:03i'm against methadone treatments and treatments that i haven't opted into or that i don't see use in and he's increasing the stigma against methadone right it's like oh you're still using drugs in that way it's sort of former fat person kind of energy of like i did it the right way or whatever where you're like this sucks i hate it so from there he kind of becomes like a general purpose left-wing political pundit in 2012 he visits the occupy wall street protests he visits africa to look at global poverty he writes a pretty well regarded uh obituary of margaret thatcher when she dies in 2013 where he's

24:40like he's like she fucking sucks we then in 2013 have the kind of i think coming out of russell brand is like a major political figure when he edits the new statesman oh 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 states she asked him to write an article on religion because he is touring a show called

25:12messiah 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 revolution is the one where he's uh popped out the evol 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 revolution is how i always said it in my head could all our sign ha yes here is the first couple paragraphs of his uh introductory essay

25:48when 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 he's one of these guys

26:18like 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

26:50issues 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

27:20interviewer in the uk and they have a vituperative discussion about russell brand's politics which goes mega viral this is one of the most watched youtube clips of 2013 this is like a huge deal really yeah so we're 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 18 well i was busy being a drug addict at that point because i come from the kind of social conditions that are exacerbated by an indifferent system that really just administrates for large

27:52corporations and ignores the population that it was you're blaming the political class for the fact that you had a drug problem no no i'm saying i was part of a social and economic class that is underserved by the current political system and drug addiction is one of the problems it creates when you have huge underserved impoverished populations people get drug problems and also don't feel like they want to engage with the current political system because they see that it doesn't work for them they see that it makes no difference they see that they're not served i say that it doesn't

28:22work for them if they bother to vote 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 at what ain't the tories going to court and to 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 is isn't it yeah there is why am i going to tune in for that you don't believe in democracy you want a revolution don't you the planet is being destroyed we are creating an underclass we are exploiting poor people all over the world and the genuine legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political all of those things may

28:56be true they are true i wouldn't argue with you about many of them well how come i feel so cross with you it can't just be because of that beard it's gorgeous it's possibly because the daily mail don't want it i do i'm against them grow it longer you are tangle into your armpit hair you are a very trivial man what do you think i am trivial yes a minute ago you're having a go at me because i want a revolution now 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 a huge

29:28disparity between rich and poor with 300 americans it's up there we get it's up there 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's specifically not what was asked of you dude i we once had a strategy meeting at my ngo 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 good i get it he's a compelling presence and i also think this

30:04is like kind of what year is this that this airs 2013 yeah so this is airing in 2013 which is a few years before donald trump takes office in the u.s and i think there's like some kind of through lines here which is just like this feels like a person who is more unstudied this seems like a person who is just sort of telling you with some degree of candor where they're actually at and like expressing some frustration you've got a bunch of like valid critiques here and then you just take a turn yeah i don't think you have really earned here so for this i read a really interesting paper called

30:37russell brand comedy celebrity politics by jane arthur's and ben little their explanation for what was going on here is you know this is before the emergence of jeremy corbin in the uk i mean he was around right he's an mp but he wasn't a kind of a big deal in labor until after the 2015 general election it's before the emergence of bernie as like a major political figure right but it's also kind of after occupy so you have this sense of like people are pissed but there's no real figure to like put that into there's no real vessel for that yeah and so i think people were like crawling

31:11through the desert and drinking the sand yeah very few other people especially institutional people were speaking like this well and also like russell brand fucking sucks for a lot of reasons but he is also a working class dude yeah yeah telling off a middle class dude yeah 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

31:44time 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 fandie fair publishes a glowing profile in 2014 where they describe him as a legit political thinker and voice for the dispossessed so this wave of positive credulous media coverage kind of crescendos in 2014 with the release of his book

32:17revolution revolution revolution uh-huh seven which comes out in 2014 and i fucking read aubry 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

32:48like right i i was also on the internet in 2005 they say gay people are bad but do they send their wives to menstrual huts i mean it's so boring it's like exactly this shit so like whatever i agree with it but it's just like not very interesting i'm gonna send you one uh excerpt of how boring it is which i might cut from the episode oxfam say a bus with the 85 richest people in the world on it would contain more wealth than the collective assets of half the earth's population that's three and a half billion

33:22people 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

33:55grow 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

34:29the 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 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

34:59smallest 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 so those ones where you're like sweetie i like where your head is at but you these specific things are like pretty dumb prioritize life over profit by rejecting

35:32gnp 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

36:02about 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 reign in the power big business i mean if you look at the way that like the scandinavian countries are regulated like business stuff way less say in politics there it's just weird reading this book where you know he says he's talking about david cameron he hates david cameron as he should and he says like we don't want to replace cameron with another leader 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

36:37in 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

37:08outsider 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

37:39the 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 revolution 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 citywide 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

38:12everything 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 right it sort of has the 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 milliband who is the head of the labor party kind of goes groveling to russell brand to try

38:48to 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 types ed milliband 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 marks the beginning of the end of his time is like a credible left-wing political commentator is that his audience kind of

39:21turns 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 to him because it doesn't work like labor loses the 2015 general election kind of like embarrassingly and then david cameron takes over then brexit happens like this is a disastrous

39:54election result and people within the sort of the labor party like establishment left types were like you know they're not pinning the whole thing on russell brand obviously but they're like well this guy didn't result in any more votes like he can't actually bring people out right he commands a don't vote block and this is kind of the argument against the don't vote people is that like as soon as politicians realize that you don't vote or there's a low likelihood they're gonna vote they will fucking ignore you so he sort of flames out as like a left-wing political commentator and he

40:24basically 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 hoff this guy who says that you can beat cancer by doing like cold plunges and shit well also abuser game recognized i mean of

40:55course what a fucking situation that goddamn guy is the vim hoff 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 a chapter of the russell brand episode if we didn't have yet another sexual assault allocation 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

41:31investigated 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 so what happens is he sues her and gets an injunction so she cannot talk about this for folks who don't have like a political memory before 2015 say

42:01it'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

42:32also the fact that this was public and no one seemed to have cared is itself super telling like no one did anything with this even i mean if you look this up you google like massage allegations russell brand there's like one article the other thing that's so interesting to me about his career in general is how he goes into these little fields and he flames out so quickly right he's like hosting awards shows but then he kind of embarrasses himself enough times that he just isn't asked to do that anymore he's in hollywood for like four years and flames out he's then a left-wing political commentator and again within a couple years he kind of flames out like other people take that forward

43:07and he kind of disappears so just like over and over again he has these little blips where he shows up on people's radar and then the more time you spend with him you're like yes i think we can do better than this guy and he disappears again he sounds like still an absolute fucking nightmare to work with yeah no totally yes being offered a big role in a big movie that requires you to go from la to san diego which is a two-hour drive i'm so stuck on that anecdote too i am so fucking stuck on it like this

43:37you giant baby yeah if you're dealing with that shit just to get a meeting scheduled no totally and he's just opposing shit for the sake of opposing shit yeah it's honestly surprising to me that he got as much mileage out of those fields as he did so the rest of this episode we are going to talk about his youtube channel and 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

44:09he just posts his fucking ass off and he's been doing this since like 2015 so i went through the archives of all of his videos i obviously didn't watch every single one but i watched like a shocking alarming number of his videos when we started this morning you were talking about how grumpy you were dude i'm in such a bad mood 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

44:42subject than me even though i'm like not like well informed on at all i'm like i know more about syria than you do and you don't like i don't know shit about syria right you and i talked off mic a few weeks ago about me watching tim pool clips for the first time and having a similar response where i was just like i feel like i know fewer things now than before i watched it's like dumbass osmosis you're like losing information i'm like losing information absolutely is it i know less things one of the other main themes of his videos is these unbelievably tedious like woo woo wellness videos

45:17these 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 jasmine 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

45:49from 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 fancy 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 waitrose sure so there's a weird controversy in 2018 where a freelancer writes to the editor of the

46:22waitrose 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 the meat make the meat steak and drink red wine what are we doing this poor vegan lady's like what what the fuck are you talking about i'm just pitching like a cute story you can say

46:53you're not interested this feels very reminiscent of the uh paula dean episode i saw years ago where she was making like a butter and meat thing and she was like if you want to make a vegetarian version of this you can just tell him to go outside and eat some grass i don't know like so weird why are people this fucking resentful so the woman who gets this message i believe like forwards it to the waitrose like people and is like why is your editor talking to me this way it goes public eventually it's like a little mini scandal the editor is eventually fired but in russell brand's video about it he has

47:29this kind of little summary of it so i'm gonna send you a clip is he vegan he's vegetarian and he says in his book that he did it out of spite because somebody told him like vegetarians are bad 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 trues which is like the true news he's not he's not a gifted brander ironically

48:00me if i was in charge of sacking people at waitrose magazine knowing that my job is primarily to generate money for waitrose i don't know that i would have sacked that person whenever you find yourself engaged in a fake phony storm of controversy it's always good to note the context within which it takes is ultimately one of capitalist consumerism and there'll never be a clear example of this this is uh you know being discussed on commercial television is a commercial enterprise talking about sort of diet is any of it real in a way none of it is real none of it is real we are living in a

48:33spectacle 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

49:06on 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

49:39thing yes the whole system's rigged i'm not part of it i'm not buying into their bullshit 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

50:10rather 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 this position for things like the presidential debate between hillary clinton and donald trump this is what he says about literally everything right and again like if you're concerned about corporate influence in politics one approach to that is to be like both parties are the same there's no difference they're

50:42both 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 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 truisms

51:16excuse me truisms 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 2017 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 holiday is a high profile plus size supermodel who is uh 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

51:49she has been on a number of magazine covers and every time it leads to like an absolute freak out meltdown yes from people who really didn't want to see a fat person yes looking happy and okay and great so i i was dreading that his video about tess holiday because i'm like oh what is it promoting obesity or something like really fucking boring yeah but what he does is like vaguely more interesting and i think like more insidious he basically is doing a both sides thing from the

52:23left 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 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

52:54women'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 oh 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 the cover of

53:25cosmopolitan there's zero like hard left fat activists who think cosmopolitan is like a good thing if you talk to fat activists they'll go hey uh the reason that cosmo matters is that it matters for people to get accustomed to seeing fat people and to stop freaking the fuck out about seeing fat people so that they can stop saying unhinged things to us so 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

53:59debate 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

54:30different it's the easiest moral stance to take my god yeah it is in fact notable and discriminatory that that is the first time that a fat person appeared on the cover of this magazine that has been around for decades that's not evidence of weakness in fat people that's evidence of discrimination at cosmo 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

55:03videos that have more than 30 000 yeah 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 he's like he's like desperately trying anything to get views i haven't trusted anyone to define gaslighting for the last like decade 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

55:37views which is actually pretty high for him at this time but then he does one called why the left can't handle donald trump with 1.4 million views he also does one called matthew mcconaughey and russell brand discuss politics and the left that gets 1.5 million views can't wait for these couple of big brains what's interesting about it to me is like it's a 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 and i think that's why people click on it they're like oh two celebrities shitting on the left

56:09yeah and or algorithms pick it out in autoplay for them or whatever yep yeah i think this is what he's starting to realize is that like there's numbers in criticizing the left and then on january 24th 2021 he publishes probably his first kind of like official conspiracy video it's called the great reset conspiracy or fact why in the fuck are we entertaining this even in a clickbaity way he did i don't want to do too many of these but he then goes like back to woo woo stuff releasing pain from

56:40the 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 and then he has a video on april 4th 2021 called five ways brazilian jujitsu changed my life and that is the last normal video that he ever does like these are like the next five videos

57:10what causes covid the virus or the system vaccine passports this is where it leads protested covid police laws you've been recorded bill gates's book is rubbish the worst conspiracies are in plain sight russell brand and jordan peterson why is bill gates buying up stolen native american land he does a lot of anti-bill gates stuff that doesn't bother me yeah whatever man this feels like the like well then why don't you stop defending bill clinton in the epstein files i'm like nobody cares yeah no

57:40nobody's coming to rush to the defense of bill gates it's not happening it then becomes things like how everyday people were screwed by liberal politics trump was right about clinton and russia collusion hunter biden paid by ukrainian energy company right now it's just like fully partisan yeah he's kind of cosplay i mean everyone fucking does this but he's still cosplaying he's like i'm an independent thinker but then you look at like who he has on his podcast and it's like tulsi gabbard tim pool dave

58:10rubin right candace owens like a bunch of other independent thinkers mike so the kind of last thing that happens is in april 2023 this big investigation comes out that has a bunch of allegations of sexual assault we've been talking about those kind of in the timeline but like the night before the article drops he posts a video like responding to the allegations because of course the fact checkers had to contact him before the article came out to be like how do you respond to this 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 books

58:44i 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

59:18mainstream 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

59:53terrible advice on things the only other thing to say is that after this happens 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 the 12 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 blouses button to the navel

1:00:26yeah 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 you're focused on that one i thought you were going to focus on muslims versus dogs fuck your dogs no the background is a bunch like a bunch of

1:01:04buildings in london that appear to be decorated with giant posters with a single eyeball that just say conform the third eye yes and then in the middle ground you see keir starmer grinning nefariously and ripping through a union jack do you see the no whites one he hasn't where the thumbnail just says no whites oh no whites are banned in the uk now 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 yeah he has one just

1:01:37called 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 25k 32k yeah muslim mayor yeah 54 000 views so there's there's very little interesting here but what is interesting to me is that he is also kind of flamed out as a right-wing influencer yeah there there was a period during the pandemic where he was regularly getting over 1.5 million views for like most of

1:02:08his videos and now it's like he's lucky if he breaks 200k yeah it's wild i'm just looking at i just found the first one that i've seen that's over a million views and it's uh candace owens yeah 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 2026 so i already regret doing this episode because it means he's like on our radar now

1:02:45we 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 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

1:03:21hollywood and then hollywood turns off the money tap right he's in the uk and then the uk kind of turns off the money tap right i do think this is like a very common pattern like if you look at somebody like rob schneider or like nikki 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 right instead of doing

1:03:55the 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

1:04:25the 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

1:04:58the minute he leans into this conspiracy slash right-wing stuff yeah 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 yeah 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

1:05:30million 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 not that it's an insincere review that's why we have two russell brand i haven't actually checked the download numbers for the first part but it's probably not good i also haven't checked it but i'm like well knowing the content yeah but like you you lean into

1:06:05things that do well even if they're sincerely held so i also want to say i don't i don't want to imply that he's faking this i think the other thing that's fascinating here is that he is someone who was publicly accused of sexual assault ran for shelter on the right and it hasn't really panned out for him which is not usually how that goes i know it's so delicious it's so delicious it's oddly heartening to be like okay i know there is actually a rock bottom unfortunately it's not sexual assault

1:06:38it is when you won't go to san diego for one single fucking meeting you you you you you you you you

1:07:15you you you