Maintenance Phase - Russell Brand Part 2

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

What do you do when you've flamed out as a Hollywood actor, a political commentator and a wellness guru? You make a YouTube channel.Support us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuseExposing Russell BrandRussell Brand And The Conspiracy GriftRussell Brand on revolutionCelebrity Capital in the Political Field: Russell Brand’s migration from stand-up comedy to Newsnight“Arthur” lawsuit against BrandBBC says it received five complaints about presenterWoman says star exposed himself to her Russell Brand, SeriouslyHow the U.S. is sabotaging its best tools to prevent deaths in the opioid epidemicRussell Brand And The Conspiracy GriftRussell Brand’s fellow travellers should defend their claims in courtThanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Hi everybody and welcome to Sarah Marshall but wouldn't mind for getting the other fucking guy. Thank you. I was going to 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 Hobbs. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at Patreon. dot com slash maintenance phase or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. 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 reemerges as a fairly mainstream Hollywood star starting in 2008

with, yes, the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, where it appears they essentially wrote the role for him. So he's the love interest of the main protagonist's kind of ex-wife. He's trying to get back together with her, but she shacked up with this like 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 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 L.A.? And his agent is like, dude, this is a huge, you're a nobody. And 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 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 rakeish 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 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 10. Tempest. Who the fuck does he play in the Tempest? 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 give him a role that

matters. They 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 and 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. 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 U.S. is really remarkable. They were really, really, really trying to make Russell Brand happen over here. And he did, it's fascinating. Yeah. 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. This is like one of the worst memoirs I've ever read because 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. You're 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 a Australian actress who is in a movie called Bedtime Stories with Adam Sandler and Russell Brand. It's one of these weird, like kind of 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 could barely get through the trailer. Like it looked so bad. It has 27% on Rotten Tomatoes. I was going to say Adam Sandler and Russell Brand. I know. Don't threaten me with a bad time. She is a love interest in that. So Russell Brand gets like a little crush on her on set and talks about her. Like, dedicates an entire chapter of his book to like the crush that he has on her and what happens afterwards.

So here is him describing his feelings. 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? 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 archaeologist to peruse in the year 5,000, 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 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. but then trying to read Russell Brand's sentences. You're going to read so many this episode.

Christian, too, she was. I know. It's not a thing that my 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 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 you. There's a weird thing where throughout the course of like a fairly small section, like a couple of 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 Christ. So this echoes the accusations that we had from last episode about how women at Channel 4 were asked to comb the audience of the TV shows that he was hosting to find attractive women and like deliver them to him. So you're infatuated with this woman, but you're also fucking a bunch of extras apparently and like thinking that's like a funny story. 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 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. is 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 was going to read this, but I'm going to make you read it because it's problematic. Great. Here's this. 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. He then does sort of like, I'm a monster, the way that you do with little kids. 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. 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 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 hope he didn't like traumatize a child at a party. But also, I wouldn't put it past him.

Oh, God. 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, Mr. 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 Pratt. 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. Context clues. Great, great, great, great, great. I had no

every word that just got written. We both know exactly what this means, but 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 Devincher 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 this 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 church. 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 pattern that he has where, like, 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 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, 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 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 schick.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel like I have witnessed this with like older men in particular. We'll 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 schick, 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, 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 2009. There's also in 2010 a woman who sues him for sexual assault in a bathroom on the set of this movie Arthur. She says Russell exposed his penis to her

in full view of cast and crew of Arthur. The accuser alleged the assault happened on July 7, 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 neither one of them talk about it that much. Her documentary is, like, pretty subsisting. 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, 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, 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 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 hooking up, but it's not like a romantic relationship, it appears. But then one time late in 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 you 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 threesums. 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 just regardless, but it's like you're like a middle aged man. You're not 37 is not middle age. Yes, it is. No, it's not. Middle age is 40 to 65. What? Yes.

I am 44 and I can call 37 year old's middle age. 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 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. We're almost done with these. There's a woman named, quote, unquote, Phoebe, who he meets at AA. They have a consensual relationship. That kind of trails off and she starts working for him because she's like trying to break into Hollywood. That actually seems to go well for a couple of months. But then there's a night where they're filming something at his house and other people kind of trickle away. And she looks around eventually and she's like, it's just me and Russell. And then he disappears for a second. And he comes out of his bedroom. she can't remember either naked or in his underwear and starts like chasing her around being like I want to have sex with you and she's like running away again like physically he's trying 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 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 Yeah, 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 that flops and he's in Rock of Ages in 2012, which is like a jukebox musical with Tom Cruise, which also flops.

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? 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 if 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. He does this on the back of a sort of wellness slash recovery pivot. So in 2012, just as his Hollywood career is waning, he presents a BBC show about the drug war. It's called Russell Brand from Addiction to Recovery.

And it's sort of like a little biography thing of him and also talking about like the downstream effects of the drug war, basically. And as part of that, he does a Newsnight interview. so News Night 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 going to 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, 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 issue 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 work unbelievably well. Yeah. 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. term, people who are using methadone are significantly less likely, like a year after they start

treatment, to be using opioids again. They're also way less likely to overdose because the problem with abstinence programs is that when you stop using, you lose all of your tolerance. So if you go back to using the amount that you were using before you stopped, often if you'll overdose and die, like this happened to a guy I went to high school with, right? He got sober, he fell off the wagon and had an overdose immediately. And so if you are using methadone, you keep some of the tolerance and you're able to kind of taper down. And so that way, if you do fall off the wagon, which is relatively common, you don't fucking die. Like, statistically, empirically, methadone treatment works extremely well. 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 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 obituary of Margaret Thatcher when she dies in 2013, where he's like, he's like, she fucking sucks. We then in 2013 have the kind of, I think, coming out of Russell Brand as like a major political figure when he edits the new statesman. So in 2013, he starts dating a woman named Jemima Khan, who is the daughter of some billionaire. And she is one of the associate editors of the new statesman. It's a center-left magazine, sort of the way that we have the new republic in the United States.

She asks him to write an article on religion because he is touring. a show called Messiah Complex. And then later they're talking about like, oh, who should guest edit the new issue? And she's like, oh, Russell Brand would be fun. So he guest edits an issue about revolution on the theme of revolution. Revolution is the one where he's 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. Re-lovolution is how I always said it in my head. Could all our sign ha? Yes. Here is the first couple paragraphs of his introductory essay. When I was asked to edit an issue of the new statesman, I said yes because it was a beautiful woman asking me. I chose the subject of revolution because the new statesman is a political magazine and

imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way I can be enthused about politics. When people talk about politics within the existing Westminster framework, I feel a dull thud in my stomach and my eyes involuntarily glaze. I have never voted. 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 2013. This is like a huge deal.

Really? Yeah. So we're going to watch a small snippet of it. You've never ever voted. No. Do you think that? That's really bad. So you struck an attitude, what, before the age of 18? Well, I was busy being a drug addicts at that point because I come from the kind of social conditions that are exacerbated by an indifferent system that really just administrates for large corporations

and ignores the population that it was voting into serve. You're blaming the political class to the fact that you had a drug problem? No, no, no. I'm saying I was part of a social and economic class that is underserved by the current political system. And drug addiction is one of the problems it creates when you have huge, underserved, impoverished populations. 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.

Well, it doesn't work for them if they didn't 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 take in the EU to court because they're trying to cartel bank bonuses? Is that what's happening at the moment in our country? It is, isn't it? So what 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 and legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political class. All of those things may be true. They are true. I wouldn't argue with you about many of them.

Well, at come I feel so cross with you. It currently because of that beard. It's gorgeous. It's possibly... And if the Daily Mail don't want it, I do. I'm against them. Grow it longer. Tangle it into your armpit head.

You are a very trivial man What do you think I am trivial? Yes A minute ago you're having to guide me because I want a revolution No I'm trying to 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 disparity between rich and poor With 300 Americans Oh we get it up there We get it up there This is like 7 million organising meetings That I've been part of Where someone goes, what's the positive vision And someone goes, I'll tell you what it's not going to be

And you're like, that's specifically not what was asked of you. Dude, we once had a strategy meeting at my NGO where we were talking about, like, which issue should we work on next year? We had like five different options. And somebody was like, I think we should prioritize all the options because they're all very important. I was like, what do you think the point of this meeting is? Good. I get it. He's a compelling presence.

And I also think this is like kind of what year is this that this airs? 2013. Yeah. So this is airing in 2013, which is a few years before. Donald Trump takes office in the U.S. And I think there's like some kind of through lines here, which is just like this feels like a person who is

more unstudied. This seems like a person who is just sort of telling you with some degree of candor where they're actually at and like expressing some frustration. You've got a bunch of like valid critiques here and then you just take a turn that I don't think you have really

earned here. So for this, I read a really interesting paper called Russell 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 Corbyn in the UK. I mean, he was around, right? He's an MP, but he wasn't 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. And so I think people were like crawling through the desert and drinking the sand. Very few other people, especially institutional people, were speaking like this. Well, and also like Russell Brand fucking sucks for a lot of reasons, but he is also a working class dude. Yeah, telling off a middle class dude with a more sort of upper crusty accent. So for the next couple of years, Russell Brand is like pretty highly regarded. Gawker. says, this is after the interview comes out, Gawker says, Russell Brand may have started a revolution last night. Time Magazine has an article called Russell Brand, World's Greatest Thinker, summons a global revolution, which like they're obviously being tongue-in-cheek here, but the subhead is

why can't America get some articulate celebrities? The Guardian named him one of the heroes of 2014. Fandy Fair publishes a glowing profile in 2014, where they describe him as a legit political thinker and voice for the dispossessed. So this wave of positive, credulous media coverage kind of crescendos in 2014 with the release of his book Revolution. Relevolution.

Relevolution. Which comes out in 2014, and I fucking read Aubrey for this because I hate myself. He does an okay diagnosis of the problem. He says, like, the monarchy is bad and, like, inequality is bad. But you can tell he just doesn't really

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

than the collective assets of half the Earth's population. 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. 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.

I obviously agree with the kind of core point. like inequality is bad, but he's then doing a bunch of schick, and then the schick is not very good or funny. Well, and also, like, I would say, you know, he's like, I don't think they'd be hanging out together, and I don't think the conversation would be great. I would argue that we now know quite a bit more than we did sort of as a collective about the personalities of billionaires. And I would argue that Russell Brand would fit in pretty well. I like how you're like, the bus wouldn't be like that.

The bus would be like this. Russell would be on the bus. He just doesn't have enough money to be on the bus. So what really started 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. Re-localize 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. That's for those ones where you're like, sweetie, I like where your head is at, but these specific things are like pretty dumb. Prioritized life over profit by rejection. 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 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? Rane 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. 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 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, 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 has like a list, like a little bullet list in his final chapter where it says, like, guarantee a living wage. All new housing development 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 relevolution? Relevolution 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, how can we pressure existing politicians to do that? It's like, he doesn't want to get involved in those details.

So he's like, hey, man, I'm talking about a revolution here. Right. I'm just saying everything has to change. And, like, actually the, both the unpopular part and the part where things actually change is where you have to get specific. And he is pretty studiously not getting specific here. Right. It sort of has the energy of, like, the guy in your workplace who just wants to,

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 types. Ed Miliband thinks that Russell Brand might. 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. But what's interesting and why this kind of marks the beginning of the end of his time is like a credible left wing political commentator is that his audience kind of turns on him. So if you read the comments, all the comments are like, you said I shouldn't vote and now you're endorsing fucking labor. Right. It's a hard.

turn to make if you've built an audience on sort of anti-establishment views and then you go for a very establishment party. Right. And also, that's the sort of the anti-establishment people kind of turn on him for this. But then the establishment people also turn on him because it doesn't work. Like, Labor loses the 2015 general election kind of like embarrassingly. And then David Cameron takes over. Then Brexit happens. Like, this is a disastrous election result. And people within the sort of the Labor Party, like, establishment left types were like, you know, they're not pinning the whole thing on Russell Brand, obviously, but they're like, well, this guy didn't result in any more votes. Like, he can't actually bring people out.

Right. He commands a don't vote block. And this is kind of the argument against the don't vote people is that like, as soon as as politicians realize that you don't vote or there's a low likelihood that you're going to vote, they will fucking ignore you. So he sort of flames out as like a left-wing political commentator. And he basically just becomes like a YouTuber. How soon after becoming a YouTuber does he start with the like electromagnetic frequencies? Oh, I mean, there's even, even in his book, he says like cell phones cause cancer.

Like he's quite conspiratorial very early. And he has, even before the sort of the sort of right wing turn that he has now made, he has numerous videos with Vim Hof, this guy who says that you can beat cancer by doing like cold plunges and shit. Well, also abuser game recognized game. I mean, of course. What a fucking situation that goddamn guy is. 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 a chapter of the Russell Brand episode if we didn't have yet another sexual assault allocation. Jesus Christmas. 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 assault. her. It's not clear the details of that. She reported it to the police. The police investigated, but it is kind of definitionally a he said, she said situation, right? She says, he assaulted me. Russell Brand says, no, I didn't. The case basically stone walls as like a police matter. And so this woman, the masseuse, starts, she reports this to her MP. She's like, can you do anything about this? She starts going to the newspapers. So what happens is he sues her and gets an injunction so she cannot talk about this. For folks who don't have like a political memory before 2015 say, it's really hard to overstate how hard people went on survivors of sexual assault. Yeah,

yeah, 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 still wasn't, still wasn't like legit. You can imagine how this would play out. Yes. Oh, you're a professional masseuse, really? Oh, and he touched you, really? It would have been really fucking ugly and annoying. And also, the fact that this was public and no one seemed to have cared is itself super telling. Like, no one did anything with this.

Even, I mean, if you look this up, you Google like, massage, allegations, Russell Brand. There's like one article. The other thing that's so interesting to me about his career in general is how he goes into these little fields and he flames out so quickly, right? He's like hosting awards shows, but then he kind of embarrasses himself enough times that he just isn't asked to do that anymore. 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 and he kind of disappears. So just like over and over again, he has these little blips where he shows up on people's radar. And then the more time you spend with him, you're like, eh. 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 L.A. to San Diego, which is a two-hour drive. I'm so stuck on that anecdote, too. I'm like, why are you like this? You giant baby. Yeah. If you're dealing with that shit just to get a meeting scheduled.

No, totally. And he's just opposing shit for the sake of opposing shit. Yeah. It's honestly surprising to me that he got as much mileage out of those fields as he did. So the rest of this episode, we are going to talk about his YouTube channel and kind of what he does after this. He just becomes like an unbelievably prolific YouTuber. Like he's posting numerous times a week. If you look now, he's posting, I think, once a day or more.

I mean, he just posts his fucking ass off. And he's been doing this since like 2015. So I went through the archives of all of his videos. I obviously didn't watch every single one. But I watched like a shocking, alarming number of his videos. When we started this morning, 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 if I watch a video where I felt like he knew more about a subject than me. Even if I'm like not like well informed on at all. I'm like, I know more about Syria than you do. And you don't like, I don't know shit about Syria.

Right. You and I talked off mic a few weeks ago about me watching Tim Poole clips for the first time and having a similar response where I was just like, I feel like I know fewer things now than before I watched it. It's like dumbass osmosis. You're like losing information. Absolutely is it. I know less things.

One of the other main themes of his videos is these unbelievably tedious like woo-woo wellness videos. These are some titles of some of his videos. could mass meditation change everything? Meditation for sleep, how I'm handling grief. God, the universe, and meaning, senses and consciousness beyond the five senses myth. Yeah, big jasmuchin breatherian energy. Yeah, exactly.

Yep. So there's two themes that I want to talk about that start to show up in his videos and remain even after he becomes a much more right wing later. The first is he has this idea that all of politics is kind of fake. He wants to stand aside from and above politics. He has this video in 2018 called Can Vegan Jokes Kill, which is a now totally forgotten story where you know what Waitrose is, right?

Fancy Pancy British grocery store. Yes. And they have a magazine. It's in the aisle before you check out. And it has like 10 salads for summer or something. And 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 cause.

diversity in 2018, where a freelancer writes to the editor of the Waitrose magazine, she's like, oh, why don't I do like a little series on like vegan meals? The editor of the Waitrose magazine writes back to her and says, hi, Celine, thanks for this. How about a series about killing vegans one by one? Ways to trap them. How to interrogate them properly. Expose their hypocrisy. Force feed them meat. Make the meat steak and drink red wine. Why? What are we doing? And this poor vegan lady's like, what? What the fuck are you talking about?

I'm just pitching like a cute story. You can say you're not interested. This feels very reminiscent of the 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. It's 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 Brand's video about it, he has this kind of little summary of it. So I'm going to 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 going to be a vegetarian. And then he just like stuck with it for like 40 years. I'm looking at so much of his. 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 a gifted brander, ironically.

Me, if I was in charge of sacking people at Waitrose magazine, knowing that my job is primarily to generate money for Waitrose, I don't know that I would have sacked that person. Whenever you find yourself engaged in a fake, phony storm of controversy, it's always good to know. The context within which it takes is ultimately one of capitalist consumerism, and they'll never be a clear example of this. This is, you know, being discussed on commercial television is a commercial enterprise talking about sort of diet. Is any of it real?

In a way, none of it is real. None of it is real. We are living in a spectacle. Perhaps that's what's most offensive. Should people be nice to one another? Of course they should. Should people be able to take a joke? Of course they should.

Do we have a society that enables us to access our better selves? 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 just not really any there there. This is what I meant earlier when I said his, his,

his ideology is fundamentally narcissistic. Because in every single little controversy like this, he thinks that he's above taking aside 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 at all kind of thing. Yes. The whole system's rigged. I'm not part of it. I'm not buying into their bullshit. 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 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 this position for things like the presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This is what he says about literally everything. Right. And again, like, if you're concerned about corporate influence in politics, one approach to that is to be like, both parties are the same. There's no difference. They're both bought and paid for. And another approach is to go. 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-W-isms. Oh, truisms. Excuse me. Truisisms. The other theme that emerges from this is I chose this video specifically for you. So I'm scrolling through his old videos from like 2017. He has a video called Tess 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. I remember reading an article about her talking. about being a size 26, which is also my size. So, like, she is a fat lady. She has been on a number of magazine covers. And every time it leads to, like, an absolute freak out meltdown from people who really didn't want to see a fat person. Yes. Looking happy and okay and great. So I was dreading his video about Tass 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 a huge, just flatly fatphobic freak out. People just lose their minds. Like there's a fat lady in cosmopolitan. Yep. He like, 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, oh, yes, we're finished now.

A fat person's on the cover of cosmopolin. I 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 a signal of mainstream acceptance. that's not it. It's just like one little small thing. But it's like he's scolding people who are like sort of finding representation in this

as if the only thing they want is like the cover of cosmopolitan. 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, 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. 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 going to sort of take a moral stance on what feels to me like a pretty clearly moral issue of like people flipping out about seeing a body that looks different. It's the easiest moral stance to take. My God. Yeah. It is in fact notable and discriminatory that that is the first time that a fat person appeared on the cover of this magazine that has been around for decades. 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 1.5 million followers on YouTube. His videos are typically getting 50 to 100,000 views. Some of them have as little as like 30,000 views. Like I have videos that have more than 30,000 views. You can see him kind of experimenting of like what's going to work on this platform. He gets like one video that does okay about like dating apps? So he does what is gaslighting? What is ghosting? Surviving a breakup. He's like he's like desperately trying anything to get views. I haven't trusted anyone to define gaslighting for the last like decade. Easily. I know. 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 1.4 million views. He also does one called Matthew McConaug and Russell Brand discuss politics and the left that gets 1.5 million views. Can't wait for these couple of big brains. What's interesting about it to me is like it's just a really boring celebrity interview. They like don't really discuss politics that much. But he puts politics and the left in the title. 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 24th, 2021, he publishes probably his first kind of like official conspiracy video. It's called The Great Reset, Conspiracy or Fact. Why in the fuck are we entertaining this even in a clickbaity way? He did?

I don't want to do too many of these, but he then goes like back to woo-woo stuff, releasing pain. from the body, 68,000 views. He then does another great reset video, 2.7 million views. Literally making money off of entertaining, like, anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories. Cool, cool, cool, cool, 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'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.

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. Jesus God. 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 Poole. Dave Rubin, Candice Owens.

A bunch of other independent thinkers, Mike. So the kind of last thing that happens is in April, 23, this big investigation comes out that has a bunch of allegations of sexual assault. We've been talking about those kind of in the timeline. But like the night before the article drops, he posts a video like responding to the allegations because of course the fact checkers had to contact him before the article came out to be like, how do you respond to this? He puts out a video and I'm going to send you. a bit of a transcript from it. As I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous. Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual.

I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent, and I'm being transparent about it now as well. And to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny, makes me question, is there another agenda at that? 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, Russell Brand

announces his Christianity. Got to 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 spiritual videos. I think because the 12 steps have that sort of acknowledge a higher power, I think he's actually been kind of like quasi-religious for a while. It's just like the specific Christianity that is new. Right. He's changing out his blouses button to the navel. Yeah. For like a white linen baptismal tunic. That is also somehow cut down to the navel. Last thing we're going to do is we are going to go to his YouTube channel. 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, you're going to focus on that one. I thought you were going to focus on Muslims versus dogs. Fuck your dogs. No, the background is a bunch, like a bunch of buildings in London that appear to be decorated with giant posters with a single.

eyeball that just say conform. The third eye, yes. And then in the middle ground, you see Kier-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. We all know whites are banned in the UK now.

There's an anti-Bill Gates one where he has used an AI image of Bill Gates looking like he is in agony. Crying like a baby. He has one just called The Problem with Billy Eye. Irish. 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, 54,000 views. So 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 was a period during the pandemic where he was regularly getting over 1.5 million views for like most of his videos. And now it's like he's lucky if he breaks 200K. Yeah, it's wild. I'm just looking at, I just found the first one that I've seen that's over a million

views and it's Candice Owens. Yeah, exactly. With a thumbnail of Erica Kirk where you're like, oh, yeah, that's people who are watching for that thing. That's Candice 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 Brain story.

It is ongoing because his trial begins in June of. 2026. So I already regret doing this episode because it means he's like on our radar. Now we have to follow up. Yeah. Like it's like as soon as I did the RFK Jr. episode, I was like, fuck, I have to keep covering this guy. He's in like the cast of characters now. Yeah. But so I just wanted to ask you what, I mean, we started out with the question of like, you know, what explains this guy's shift from the left to the right? How would you answer this question after six hours of recording about this? I think a couple of things. One, I think he wears out his welcome really quickly in different spaces, right? And I also think, you know, the money

stops flowing at a certain point, right? Yeah. He's in Hollywood and then Hollywood turns off the money tap, right? He's in the UK and then the UK kind of turns off the money tap, right? I do think this is like a very common pattern. Like, if you look at somebody like Rob Schneider or like 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 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 Brand, as we said, his only kind of core guiding belief is, don't tell me what to do. And right way 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 feminist 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 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 video essay about this where she traced like the view counts. Also, I think that there's a tendency when you look at these things, aha, he's getting views by shifting to the right to act as if

that means he's not sincere. I don't think that's what's happening. I think there's something, like a human thing that when you get rewarded for something, you do it more. Like all of us have a million little pet peeves or a million little views. And, you know, if I made a video or an episode about, like, people using Bluetooth speakers in public, and all of a sudden that got like three times more downloads than any other episode we've ever made, I'd probably make another one about that, right? 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, but it's probably not good. I also haven't checked it, but I'm like, well, knowing the content. Yeah. But like you you lean into things that do well, even if they're sincerely held. So I also want to say, I don't, I don't want to imply that he's faking this. I think the other thing that's fascinating here is that he is someone who was publicly accused of sexual assault, ran for shelter on the right. And it hasn't really panned out for him, which is not usually how that goes. I know, it's so delicious.

It's so delicious. It's oddly heartening to be like, okay. Hey. 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.