QAA Podcast - Episode 251: Russell Brand (Part 1)

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

British comedian-turned-Hollywood-actor-turned-Youtube-guru Russell Brand is facing serious sexual assault accusations. Annie Kelly takes a look at his relationship to his audience as he slides into the conspiratorial and contrarian. This is part one of two and includes an interview with Dr. Rob Topinka, senior lecturer at Birkbeck, the University of London. Subscribe for $5 a month to get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like Manclan, Trickle Down and The Spectral Voyager: www.patreon.com/QAnonAnonymous Dr. Rob Topinka: https://twitter.com/robtopinka Music by Pontus Berghe. Editing by Corey Klotz. http://qanonanonymous.com

What's up QAA listeners? The fun games have begun. I found a way to connect to the internet. I'm sorry, boy. Welcome listener to the 251st chapter of the QAA podcast, the Russell Brand episode. As always, we're your host, Jake Rakatansky, Annie Kelly, Julian Fields, Liv Aker, and Travis View. Hello, everybody. We've got the biggest team in a while back together to celebrate the greatness of the mother country, the one that started it all, the one that founded the United States, kind of by mistake. And we are here specifically to celebrate two of its finest achievements. The great, intelligent, fantastic Annie Kelly.

Thank you. And Russell Brand, the two best British friends. people that the crown has ever produced, the jewels falling from its circlet. Yeah. We are so often mentioned in the same sentence together. So true. It's like you can't have one without the other. You have the same accent, same sense of humor, same hair.

We like to go on the same shows and podcasts. Well, we're both interested in conspiracy. That's, yeah, that's true. Travis to celebrate has worn for the first time ever a title. shirt, which I really do appreciate. It's like he's playing me for a day. Yeah, it's a loose Monday. What can we say?

It's a loose Monday. It's also laundry day. It was slim pickings in my closet. Yeah, I'm wearing a shirt that I wore yesterday, actually, to be honest, as well. So, yeah, Jake currently looks like he should be on the call as a correspondent with, like, a TV news show. And Travis looks like he got kicked out of his parents' place for... not paying the token rent.

The polls have reversed. Every five years, the QAA polls reversed. And I become the buttoned-up smart one. And Travis descends into madness. Yeah, it's a freaky Friday situation. That would be so funny. That would be really good. Meanwhile, Liv has spent, as far as I can tell,

the last few days posting AI-generated versions of SIS, Liv, which is the funniest and you know what? Like, I don't even know what to expect anymore. I'm always like, oh, this is the latest thing that Liv is up to online. Okay. That was such a... I was just like scrolling on Twitter and I saw your

like AI montage and I was like, what the heck is going on here? I honestly never understand anything. Live posts, but I always fave out of solidarity. You know what, but the people do. Sometimes Live will post something and I'll be like, I have no idea what that means. And then I'll look down and it'll be like

35,000 likes I'm just like so I am so out of touch I'm so out of touch but I'm happy for Liv that she's in touch making the people good content you know it's that expression I love that for you I love that for you Liv

that's so cool I just I like it because I'm pretty sure it arrests my cellular degeneration like due to aging like every time I like a live post I'm a little bit younger I think honestly being in touch just makes you worse like the more in touch I am, you can, like, kind of measure my, like, well, mental well-being based

on how many hours on TikTok? Yeah, it's running out there. This is part one of a two-part episode. Greetings, my sweet little pumpkins. It's your UK correspondent, Annie Kelly, here. As the nights get longer and the weather gets colder, I've been recruited to shepherd the lost and lonely QAA listeners into the cozy embrace of Christian girl autumn. No!

It's the hats Jake hates. It's literally the hats Jake hates taking over the city over here. Well, it's too late, Jake. I'd advise curling up by the fire with a hot mug of mold cider for this episode because today we're going to be discussing a decidedly not heartwarming topic. I know, shocking for a nanny episode. Listen, just because one sober guy did something doesn't mean you should wish me to drink a hot mug of mold cider. It's very dark.

You can have non-alcoholic mold cider. Sure. Should you? Should you? Yeah. Should you? Because that's disgusting. Actually, you know what?

Maybe even just apple juice. Because sometimes cider has clove in it. And I think that that's an herb to be smelled, not tasted. Mm-mm. And then telling me to sip apple juice out of a little muglet. A hot mug of mold cider. Except if you're Julian and you can have a hot chocolate instead. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Finally, I get the treatment I deserve with lots of mallowes in it. For many years now, I've been fielding requests from many of you to host an episode explaining what exactly is going on with Russell Brand. The 48-year-old British comedian turned Hollywood actor turned YouTube guru has had a complex political and spiritual evolution over the 20 years or so he's been in the public eye, but has definitely dipped his toe into the conspiracy world more than once and seems increasingly comfortable there. Strangely, though, I've always felt a little reluctant to begin investigating him. In September this year, something happened that made me change my mind. Sometime on the 15th, a rumor began going around social media that a big expose was about

to come out about a famous comedian. Now, I'm no metropolitan media insider, but I had heard some pretty persistent rumors about a certain big-name comedian from this part of the world before, who, if true, had frankly had a reckoning coming for a very long time now. So I was actually pretty surprised when Russell Brand launched what I guess you could call the YouTube conspiracy world's equivalent of a preemptive strike. Annie, before we jump into this first clip, can you explain how one develops this accent? Because it's not quite cockney, but it's also just, it's grading and it's annoying. Is this a Russell Brand specific accent that he's developed for himself, or does this represent your people?

No, I mean, that's a very sharp ear you've got. It's not quite cockney. It's actually an Essex accent. They're often called like estuary accents. They're kind of accents that sort of develop around the sort of counties that sort of revolve around London, where it's like a little bit London, but a little bit not. Okay. Yeah. So he comes from a place that has sex in the name.

Got it. Yeah, I mean, but that would be to condemn pretty much half of England. I condemn half of England. Hello, there, you awakening wonders. Now, this isn't the usual type of video we make on this channel where we critique, attack and undermine. the news in all its corruption because in this story, I am the news. I've received two extremely disturbing letters or a letter and an email, one from a mainstream media TV company, one from a newspaper listing a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks as well as some pretty

stupid stuff like my community festival should be stopped that I shouldn't be able to attack mainstream media narratives on this channel. But amidst this litany of astonishing rather Baroque attacks are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute. These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. And as I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous. Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent. And I'm being transparent about it now as well. And to see that transparency,

metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny makes me question, is there another agenda at play? 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. I'm aware that you guys have been saying in the comments for a while, watch out, Russell, they're coming for you, you're getting too close to the truth, Russell did not kill himself.

I know that a year ago there was a spate of articles. Russell Brand's a conspiracy theorist, Russell Brand's right wing. I'm aware of news media, making phone calls, sending letters to people I know for ages and ages. It's being clear to me, or at least it feels to me,

like there's a serious and concerted agenda to control these kind of spaces and these kind of voices. And I mean my voice along with your voice. Liv has pointed this out, but there's a jump cut right before he says consensual, mid-sentence. It's so obvious.

It's like in the video it's insane like what could they have possibly cut there Look at this look at this the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual I was always transparent about that then oh my good there's a jump cut before the word consensual Russell I'm gonna say take that one twice take that one twice do a second take man no He's like no he's one take brand I don't know it's like I think somebody out there is like well Sometimes there's a millisecond gap between the words that Russell Brand says, we need him to be even more relentless.

Like, that's the most unnerving thing about this guy. Just the never-ending eye contact and just talking at such a high rate so that you just feel kind of overwhelmed, kind of bombarded by his words. Yeah, he keeps pushing the air in front of him towards me. Like, he's just constantly pushing something at the screen. I don't know why you would do your, like,

I'm getting canceled video on Coke. It's an interesting choice. On Saturday the 16th, the Times published the results of its joint investigation with Channel 4 dispatches. The piece detailed the claims of four separate women accusing the comedian of rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse. That same night, Channel 4 released a documentary detailing the allegations titled Russell Brand in plain sight. Both the report and the documentary are extremely tough to get through. All of the women accuse the comedian of sexually violent and abusive behaviour. One of them says she was 16 years old at the time.

of their relationship while he was in his 30s, and that he would send taxis to her secondary school to take her back to his home. Another woman alleges that after being raped by Brand in Los Angeles, she had to go to a rape crisis centre the next day. Several people who worked on shows hosted by Brand describe his behaviour as an open secret in the media industry. The events described in the allegations span from 2006 to 2013, so very much at the height of Brand's international fame, and as he himself said, when he was heavily employed in the mainstream media. But it seems fair to say that the man has been through something of a personal political transformation since he was an A-list Hollywood star.

His YouTube channel at which he started in 2007 has increasingly pivoted to conspiratorial content in the last couple of years, particularly on the topics of COVID, the Great Reset, and Ukraine. Before the Times piece was released, his last videos had titles like, Bill Gates has been hiding this and it's all about to come out. and the FBI have been harvesting your DNA? Yeah, they're all extremely YouTube clickbait. Like, he really embraced the format.

Yeah, and I think clickbait is the right word, because actually when you click through, many of the titles are a kind of bait and switch in a way. Like, you kind of expect the full-throttle tinfoil hat rant, but what follows is kind of something more like a mixture of genuine news stories and legitimate critiques of state and corporate power mixed with comedic ad-libbing, sly implications, and the infamous just-asking questions tactic.

This is partially why I was reluctant to cover brand for so long. His content is undoubtedly in the conspiratorial style, but it's still a bit more complex than lots of brands detractors will claim. He's often pointing to conspiracy theory answers, but it's not as if everything he's saying as a pack of lies or easily debunked misinformation. So here, for example, he discusses the use of surveillance drones and policing and border enforcement,

a real news story, and then kind of twists it to hint at this. dark upcoming future. Meanwhile, customs and border protection, CBP, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, have refined their surveillance operations by including detection of sentiment and emotion by using AI-powered software. Sentiment and emotion. Like sort of inner states, the archetypal inner organs of your life are being evaluated by government agencies now. To what end? Well, to help you, of course, and to keep you safe, I assume, Those targeted by the software targeted are travellers either arriving to or leaving the US who are considered a potential threat to a fairly wide range of interest, public and national security, trade and travel.

They're introducing it with a community that they don't imagine will have much support. Migrants. Whether you are pro or anti-migrants, whether you're concerned about migration or not, let me know in the comments. Surely you will agree that this is a community that will be an easy way to pilot this idea. This is just people that are coming into our country. We've got to monitor their sentiments and facial expressions. You think that that's going to be the end of it? Have you ever experienced anything lately where it was introduced for a short time and then prolonged, whether it's the Patriot Act or measures around the pandemic? Do you really believe that your government and its corporate partners

have the discipline and goodwill to use this stuff judiciously? Do you have that kind of trust? Let me know in the comments. My God. Yeah, so he does this kind of a lot. It's like he kind of keeps in asking his audience questions where he's just like, do you trust your government? Let me know in the comments.

Do you, how do you feel about migrants? Let me know. Like, where, I don't know, he's kind of not really saying anything. Do you know, he's kind of leaving that stuff for his audience to say. And end in a way that'll boost engagement, too. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, I can't wait to write a message to the YouTube video recorded three days ago

that won't be able to respond to me. I'm talking to Russell Brand. He's capable of a conversation where he listens to you. Uh-huh. Actually, do quite a lot, like, little videos where he will, like, read, comments that he's liked or that yeah he thinks it interesting so there is a bit of back and forth I guess here now would this kind of content be enough for the establishment to try and take Brand down with a well-timed Me Too story I'm not so naive to pretend

that the media doesn't target people who dissent from the hegemonic political consensus there have been countless stories in this country of political activists or even just ordinary people who in some way criticize challenge or embarrass our ruling class, being subjected to the eye of Sauron that is the British tabloid press swinging in their direction, in a way that can be very genuinely life-ruining. Could there be some truth to Brand's implication that this was an attempt to silence him, as a result of the challenge he presented to the post-COVID political consensus? In order to answer that question, it might be worse covering Russell Brand's career,

alongside his personal, political and spiritual journey in a bit more detail. A comedian first gained national prominence in 2004, when he presented Big Brother's Big mouth, a spin-off chat show to complement the Channel 4 reality TV series. This was Brand's prime time debut for his idiosyncratic comedy style, where he combined his strong Essex accent with laddie sex jokes, rapid-fire literary and theatrical references, and the back-home bouffon, eyeliner and skinny jeans fashion that had become the uniform of the 2000s indie slees genre. Chantelle's views on Big Brother are so bovine that Old Testament favourite Noah said

on Des and Mel, being nominated by God as the only human to survive was an honour which is almost impossible to express. Gathering examples of each of earth species from the lowliest insect to the most complex mammal was a challenge that made heaven on earth for me a reality. He added, mind you, that arc stank of shit, and sometimes the loneliness was crippling.

I'm ashamed to admit that one night I was sucked off by a monkey. Mikey's views. Mikey's views are so poor sign that when I heard them, I went to platform nine and three quarters at Kings Cross Station, got on the Hogwarts Express, body pop to the Quidditch Arena, where a tournament was about to take place, beckoned Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger into a close huddle,

pulled down my trousers and pants, waxed my dinkle till it was stiff as a bruise, mandel and yelled lads this magic wand will terrorize those burks at slivering keep your midst of my philosopher's stones though Hagrid reported me to the

police this is Big Brother's Big Mouth I think the whole island needs to be I think that felt like a fake TV show from like one of the television screens in idiocracy you know what I mean

like a fake show Like a Mitchell and Webb look. Yeah. Yeah, funnily enough. So all of these Big Brother clips have been on YouTube for like, you know, I think that one was like six years old or something like that. But interestingly enough, since these allegations came out, the company that like produces Big Brother has been going through and like doing all these copyright strikes on them, which is why I had to like download it because that was one of the last ones standing. Yeah, which I just found funny. Comedy is dead.

They're banning funny stuff. Fanning Harry Potter sex jokes now. Yeah, no longer can we hear about this full-grown man jacking off to child wizards. Believe it or not, Brand's presenting style was a success. And from there, he leapt from strength to strength on shows that were the television backbone of the British comedy circuit, like Have I Got News for You? By 2007, he was hosting his own BBC travelogues and comedy shows. He had very much become an ubiquitous name in the United Kingdom by this time,

which was certainly helped by the fact that nobody else looked or sounded. quite like him. For good reason. He cut his teeth on shows like, What's that, love? And... Brand's first attempt at breaking into an American audience was something of a mixed bag.

After his appearance in the Hollywood comedy forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which he played bohemian rock musician Aldous Snow, he was given an opportunity to host the 2008 MTV Awards. Here he used his opening monologue to discuss the upcoming U.S. presidential election, in which he referred to George W. Bush

as, quote, a retarded cowboy fella, and compared Britney Spears to Jesus Christ. Rand later claimed to receive a huge amount of death threats over the episode, but also noted that MTV had said the outrage was good for ratings, leading to him getting invited to present the awards the next year too. Meanwhile, his eldest snow character was apparently so popular with audiences that he garnered his own spin-off buddy comedy film Get Him to the Greek, released in 2010 and co-starring Jonah Hill.

It was apparently on set for this film, that Brand met the American pop star Katie Perry. The two were married a year later, and while it's not really relevant for this episode, while researching, I found out that apparently her hit song, Teenage Dream, is about him. So there's a little bit of pop trivia for you. Because Brand's first forays into the political arena

were all very UK-focused, it might be worth talking a little bit about the reputation he had earned here, which might not be quite as apparent to our listeners from other countries. To British audiences, Brand's stratospheric success was very much a tale of working-class achievement.

The comedian made no secret of his humble beginnings growing up in a single-parent household in Essex. He's spoken pretty movingly about feeling a sense of powerlessness when bailiffs came to his mother's house as a child and how that general sense of disempowerment contributed to him first becoming a bulimic as a teenager and later a heroin addict. His struggle with drug addiction and later recovery is a frequent topic in his comedy routines. Right, so I used to be able to distract myself from feeling embarrassed and ashamed by drinking and taking drugs, cheer me up a little bit, can't do that anymore, because I've spoiled it, took too much of it. But, thanks. Thanks for cheering the old near decline.

It's part of me that's not really over it, there's a little part of my brain that's, Russell, where are the opiates? I'm afraid we can't have any more opiates. Why? Nearly killed me, didn't she? It's just a joke All of this is to say that there was a fair amount of sympathy for brand

particularly on the British left when the comedian began to get more explicitly political and openly anti-capitalist in the 2010s. In the wake of the 2011 riots that ripped through London and other large cities in August that year, he wrote a commentary piece for The Guardian, outlining the conditions of poverty and despair

that had made the violence and destruction possible and condemning the punitive response of the political class. Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, mindlessly, motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic, mindful, kind, but then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out. Perhaps that's why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got away with a lot more than a few fucking pairs of trainers. Oh my God, that's actually uncanny, man.

Yeah, it's kind of like, you give it a kind of sex pistols vibe, I don't know, like. Yeah, it's easy. You just go high, you scream and then like my like kind of bad British accent, like kind of works in this sense. This is kind of weird. Yes. In 2013, he took his political outlook one step further when in an editorial for the new statesman, he called for a revitalized holistic left-wing movement and expressed his disdain for the the current cross-party economic consensus.

I don't vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance. I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars and one world cup and so that I'd have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I'm concerned, there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner

by obediently exing a little boy. Total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political, and economic system is what interests me, but that's not even on the ballot. Is utopian revolution possible? The free-thinking social architect Buckminster Fuller said humanity now faces a choice. Oblivion or utopia? We're innately ambling towards oblivion. Is utopia really an option? Wow, you have really managed to capture him because it is just as annoying.

First time, by the way, never done a Russell brand imitation. Oh, yeah. A celebrity popular with young people, declaring not only that he didn't vote, but that it was a deliberate political choice, got people's attention in a way I'm not sure it would today. This was a time of general ambient anxiety in the mainstream media around the lack of political engagement with the younger generation. And Brand had essentially declared himself a figurehead of that disengagement.

He was invited for an interview on Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman. British TV's notoriously tough interviewer, to answer for his self-disenfranchisement. How do you imagine the people get power? Well, I imagine there are sort of hierarchical systems that have been preserved through generations. They get power by being voted in. That's how they get it. You can't even be asked to vote. It's quite a narrow, quite a narrow prescriptive parameter that changes within the... In a democracy, that's how it works.

Well, I don't think it's working very well, Jeremy, given that the planet is being destroyed, given that there is economic disparity of a huge degree. What are you saying? There's no alternative. There's no alternative. No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying if you can't be asked to vote, why should we be asked to listen to your political point of view? You don't have to listen to my political point of view. But it's not that I'm not voting out of apathy. I'm not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness

and exhaustion from the lies, treachery, deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations now and which has now reached fever pitch where we have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that are not being represented by that political system. So voting for it is tacit complicity with that system and that's not something I'm offering up. Well, why don't you change it then? I'm trying to.

Well, why don't you start by voting? I don't think it works. People have voted already and that's what's created the current paradigm. When did you last vote? Never. 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 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 voted into serve. You're blaming the political class of the fact 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 that 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 the... 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. I think they deserve him. And I think this is his best role. He should be, they should force every person on the BBC males, especially, to have to sit with this man and be called darling. Has it a debate brand? Yeah, being called darling by like a vampire of some sort. Look at his outfit.

It's pure Count Dracula. He also just loves to do like the three D's. Like he'll throw out like disillusion, dissonist, disenfranchised, disenfranchised. It's like he's like Hamilton rapping, but he's speaking. He is. Love making fun of Hamilton. Absolutely. The interview went viral on social media.

I remember watching it at the time and while I didn't necessarily agree with Brand about not voting as a tool of acceleration as change, I still felt pretty sympathetic with him. Paxman's interview style of sneering condescension, usually highly effective against politicians of a similar class, just came off badly to me up against both Brand's cheeky chappy persona and the very real problems he was outlining, even if it was kind of clear that the comedian hadn't really ironed out the details on how exactly his revolutionary solutions were going to work. 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 class. All of those things may be true. They are true. But you took...

I wouldn't argue with you about many of them. Well, outcome I feel so cross with you. It can't just be 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 hair. You are a... very trivial man. What do you think I am trivial? Yes. A minute ago you're having to go at me because I want a revolution. No, I'm bouncing about a lot of place.

I'm not having you 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 where 300 Americans have the same amount of wealth as the 85 million poorest Americans

where there is an exploited and underserved underclass that are being continually ignored where welfare is slashed while Cameron and Osborne go to court to defend the rights of bankers to continue receiving their bonuses. That's all I'm saying in the space. That's all I'm asking. What's the scheme? You talk vaguely about revolution.

What is it? I think a socialist egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth, heavy taxation of corporations and massive responsibility for energy companies and any companies that's exploiting the environment, I think the very concept of profit should be hugely reduced. David Cameron says profit, a dirty word. I say profit is a filthy word because wherever there is profit there is

also deficit. And this system currently doesn't address these ideas. And so why would anyone vote for it? Why would anyone be interested in? Who would levy these taxes? I think we do need to like there needs to be a centralised administrative system but built on. Yes. There needs to be a government. Well, maybe call it something else. Call them like the admin bods so they don't get and how would they be chosen? Jeremy, don't ask me to sit here in an interview with you in a bloody hotel room and devise a global utopian system. I'm Merely pointing out that the current calling for revolution. Yeah, absolutely.

I'm calling for change. I'm calling for genuine alternatives. Brand was offered a book deal in which to expand on his answer to Paxman on what his ideal political system would look like, which he naturally titled Revolution. The book was advertised with taglines like, the people who think the system works work for the system, with imagery that self-consciously styled Brand as a new Che Guevara.

Hmm. Che Guevara sings for the cure. It's interesting to go in and actually read the book almost 10 years after it was published in 2014. Despite all of the Occupy Wall Street-esque branding, the first thing that struck me was how much more of a religious treatise that was than a political one. The importance of faith and the belief

that Western culture's obsessively materialistic perspective is responsible for our lack of solidarity are both constant themes. Brand had previously talked about how spirituality had been a useful tool in his recovery from addiction, But revolution at times feels more like it's making the case for the centrality of religion in all our lives as a form of collective liberation from our consumerist, individualist programming, as he writes in the introduction for the book.

The cultural anthropologist Joseph Campbell said, if you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings. In medieval societies, the biggest buildings were its churches and palaces. Using Campbell's methods, we can assume these were feudal cultures that revered their least, and worship God. In modern Western cities, the biggest buildings are the banks, bloody great towers that dominate the docklands, and the shopping centers which architecturally ape the cathedrals they've replaced, domes, spires, eerie, celestial calm, fountains for fonts, food courts for pews.

I mean, this guy is sounding like a Roman statue Twitter account right now. Yeah, he really puts the pervert and Bronze Age Pervert. To be fair, I think Bronze Age Pervert also puts the pervert Very true Yeah, maybe he just like emphasizes the pervert and Bronze Age Pervert It's in italics

No, and one thing that's really interesting Actually in this book is that I think Joseph Campbell might be like The second most quoted person in it Which is, you know, unusual for a book that's supposed to be a kind of like a left-wing kind of political theory book Yeah, I blame Carl Young for a lot of these types of guys

Yeah, yeah, Young comes up a lot as well as you can imagine. It comes back to the thing we invented on Manclan, where we need to go back in time and kill Young. Mm-hmm. Why not Freud, too? Yeah. It might be more accurate to say that revolution is less about beginning a revolution in the material sense of the world, and more making the left-wing case for a refocusing on the immaterial, the spiritual and the divine. This is something that comes up a lot in Brand's old YouTube videos too,

such as in this one where he responds to a commenter saying religion causes more harm than good. Hello, welcome to the Truth's Comments Edition. Here are some comments that you've sent us to communicate what you're feeling than that. Josh Green, Russell, quit hating on Dawkins. You know religion has done more armed than good. How can we measure that? I'm not, like, anyway, what you call religion, I call territorialism and sort of ideological imperialism.

I don't think it's good to go around on crusade. or do jihads or light of people or have a go at people but I do think it's good to have a system that connects the known and the unknown and for us to have a ritualised way of understanding the limitations of our own perspective and embracing ideas that are beyond our consciousness and that's what religion's meant to be for me

and old dickie darkens with his way of judging the world prevents the positive things about religion and I think if we issue those positive things then we ain't got any chance of cantonenting the materialistic ideologues that currently govern us like you know government big corporations and that. So I think religion might be a way of circumnavigating them.

I don't think we can do it with old leftist ideas or old revolutionary notions because we don't think they work anymore. Obviously, there'd have to be loads of administration, collectivization, all that, but I'm saying part of it is a sense of spiritual connection. There really just isn't much under the surface here. It's just like, things are bad, and then it's like, well, what is your account of that? And it's just like, he's just throwing words at you. Yeah.

I'm trying to think of what that actually means and there's no real coherent. Like, he's like a Christian social Democrat, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I'd say so. I mean, I have to, yeah, I have to admit, like, I don't actually think he's making, like, a bad point here. Like, as a religious person whose political sympathies do lie on the left, it's probably not too far from what I believe to. But you're certainly right. I think he's, like, really not a details guy at all. Well, he's also, like, old leftist ideas, you know, which is always code word for, like, a weird third way that just doesn't want to do a class analysis that confuses materialism with materialism, you know? Yeah, I definitely get the impression that as Brand explored this newfound philosophy,

he became increasingly uninterested in the practical issues of material solutions to the real problems he identified. Increasingly, as you watch his videos throughout the years, you can see him slowly shifting towards what he clearly sees as a spiritual rather than an economic maze. The thing that remains constant is his strong distrust for elites. It's also by this point pretty indisputable that there is a powerful digital pipeline from many of the spaces dedicated to the kind of wellness practices and spirituality that Brand was interested in, that leads towards right-wing conspiracism.

Some have termed this pipeline, Conspiruality, and there's a great book out about it by our friends Julian Walker, Derek Beres, and Matthew Remski, who hosts the podcast of the same name. They describe conspirituality as a kind of online religion in its own right, which fuses together two faith claims, one, that the world is possessed by evil forces, and two, those who see this clearly are called to foster in themselves and others a new spiritual paradigm. I think it's useful also to take a look at one of his recent videos here. The FBI have been harvesting your DNA question mark, exclamation mark. You can see all his faded tattoos of Ganesh and like references to the chakras.

Those are faded. But his fresh one is Jesus Christ on the cross on his bicep. Ah. Oh man, you're doing tattoo analysis, Julia. That's right. I'll measure his skull too. this is the kind of yeah we've got like live doing like forensic digital analysis of the jump cuts and the videos too this is what happens when we get the whole team together that's right you got me

doing his obnoxious squawking and Travis the calm peaceful observer as always yeah Travis overseas yeah that we don't don't get off track the gal line sometimes it feels like brand's newer content as the perfect synthesis of these two ideals that you can't help but wonder if you didn't read the Conspiratuality Book, and take it to be a user manual. Here, for example, is a clip from a longer video in 20203, in which brand bemoans the results of a recent survey, which found that only half of Americans claim to believe in God. Now, I've got skin in the game. I do believe in God.

I believe that God is unity, love, service and kindness, and I sometimes act as if I am separate, and all that matters is me and what I think and what I feel. and often I feel very unhappy as a result of that. And what helps me to navigate myself back to a position of faith and love is acting in accordance with those principles. In a way, it doesn't matter if you believe in God or not. What matters is that you believe in something and that that something includes kindness, service, community, love, tolerance, acceptance.

If you believe in nothing at all, the world will be in trouble. And I would say that this lack of belief in God is undergirded by our lack of belief in anything at all, that we know that the FBI and the CIA are corrupt, that the Republican Party and the Democrat Party are corrupt, that the WHO appears to be behaving in a very strange way, that the IMF leverages loans against nations, and that the military industrial complex seems to be able to lobby for wars,

that people continually lie to us in the media. How can we believe in Christ or Muhammad Peace be upon him or the Buddha, even though Buddhism is to some degree an anti-daistic theology? How can we believe in God? Well, we have to believe in God by finding God, within ourselves. Oh, man, when his, like, lips kind of draw back and you can see his gums, like,

I experience a visceral terror. It's like an Alien 3 when the xenomorph gets, like, right up close to Ripley's head and its lips kind of peel back and you're in the drools coming out and you can see the silver teeth. What's that now, love? You've got me queen inside of you. She's got a queen. She's got a queen inside of her.

I'm not going to touch her. You've been listening to Bloody Klaus Schwab, in it? Prior to COVID, Brand's YouTube channel was generally focused on 10 to 15 minute videos which just shared some select clips, usually with commentary, from Brand's longer-form podcast interviews with philosophers, academics and journalists. Most of it is unobjectionable and even pretty interesting content, mainly as a result of the caliber of guests that brand is able to pull. Two things stick out to me watching this content

and the run-up to brands foray into more conspiracy-friendly topics. One was that, in keeping with his social media strategy now, many of these pretty mild interviews have very conspiratorial titles. An interview with an economic anthropologist Jason Hickle about global inequality and third-world debt is transformed with the title How Global Puppet Masters created a New World Order. A conversation with the journalist Gary Young about night,

crime and systemic racism becomes the truth is they want us to hate each other. Now without knowing Russell Brand's future trajectory, you might just think this is a condemnation of social media's incentives for creators more than anything else. Clearly, inflammatory conspiracy titles are a winning strategy. The second was Brand's increasing complementary use of the word populism and his references to his YouTube following as a community that helped ground him to the views of the people. Here's one video from 2021, where he re-watches the the infamous Jeremy Paxman interview and comments on his confrontation strategy.

Can I realise now, older man, that I am, that many of the things that caused that interview to go viral because I was a mouthpiece to what a lot of people are feeling and that's something that I recognise now is really important. Stay in tune to the populare. Stay in tune with what people are feeling.

Subsequent to this, politics blew up, didn't it? Donald Trump, Brexit, loads of things that are related to democracy and the power of voting and only time will tell how significant those moments were in terms of the actual power dynamics in so much as they affect the lives of you. I'm assuming you're an ordinary person like me. How did your life actually change? What things happen now, of course, something like Brexit,

if you're a sort of a trader that relies on EU relationships, it will have an impact. If under the auspices of Trump's tutelage, there was, I mean, I don't know what actually changed. I know that the discourse sort of radically ordinary. I know a lot of you really liked Donald Trump, and a lot of you really hate Donald Trump. Me, what I'm interested in

and what I think politics really means is getting power to the people that are affected by the decisions that they're made that are being made. Make those decisions yourself. Be involved in making those decisions. You are not an ordinary person, sir. I'm sorry.

The way you can kind of tell us because he's talking about his YouTube audience as like the populare. Yeah. That's what keeps... The people are the commenters on YouTube I really worry for humanity if that is the case. Right.

We are so fucked if that's the case. Yeah. Now, if you've listened to my work on this podcast before, you might have heard me talking about how we often think of radicalization on YouTube as a top-down process, where creators beam messages of conspiracy or hate into the receptive minds of their passive audience. But researchers like Becca Lewis at the University of Stanford have shown that it's not that simple. Often audiences demand increasingly radical content from their.

preferred creators too. We've democratized the brain rot through social media. Yeah. Brand was making dissenting noises about COVID for a while, but his videos were, for the most part, on the reasonable side of the line of general policy disagreements. He disputed the efficacy of vaccine mandates, for example, citing research by health historians that suggested compulsory vaccination increased hesitancy. It was content that was highly critical of various governments' pandemic policies,

but despite the bombastic titles, it was careful to to stay within YouTube's content guidelines, a restriction that Brand himself would acknowledge at the beginning of the video. Watching the content through chronologically, I felt as if I was watching Brand gradually lose touch with real concerns about COVID policy and begin to substitute that material with increasingly dark warnings about terrible dystopian futures right round the corner. One of his first videos about the Great Reset in 2021 began pretty reasonably, in which brand criticised the concept of sustainable development as one that still prioritised profit and growth over the environment. And then he seamlessly slipped into the dark world of science fiction

promised by so many conspiracy telegram chats. I'm glad that so many of you were engaged by the great reset video and I'm really happy to have this opportunity to dive deeper into a subject that, let's face it, it's going to go on and on as globalisation continues and the sense that we are separated from power and the way that we are evolved to live becomes more and more distant and remote. We don't live as tribes. We're not in control of our own resources. The idea that we will own nothing and we will be happy.

Sounds like a terrifying, not Orwellian, but sort of Huxleyan idea that we will be somered into compliance, drugged by a sort of a magical substance in our water, into dumb compliance with the objectives of the powerful while we live as kind of human drones. It's crazy to me to be, like, older than in the 11th grade and still do the, like, well, it's not 1984. It's Brave New World, actually. Yeah, the two books.

Yeah, two books he read. Yeah, that tribes thing as well is something that he brings up quite a lot, actually. I think it's based on a book that he's read, which basically argues that kind of civilization has become too advanced for, like, the kind of way that human brains have evolved to keep up. and actually what makes us happy is to live in communities of, I think, like, max 500 people or something. He, like, kind of brings it up or, like, references this idea a lot that we're not in tribes anymore, which, again, I kind of find quite interesting because even though he doesn't really sound like a return guy, do you know, like, he doesn't have that kind of, like, far right, like, style or aesthetic. It's, like, undoubtedly a reactionary argument.

Right. And, like, central to, like, early fascist critiques is, like, the global, you know, bankers or whatever, for finance capital is the problem, and we need to return to a more holistic, organic society. What does he propose, though, a whole tribe of people who dress in derelict fashion? Whole tribe of people who do not brush their hair. Here in January 2022, he responds to a couple of news stories

about trials of under-the-skin microchip technology, a concept that has been red meat-to-conspiracy networks for decades now. They're already getting under the skin of the Swedes and may soon become just another normal part of modern life and of the human body. Tears of Jesus Christ, weeping in the heavens as human beings blindly and dumbly march into their own terrible Armageddon. At this tech fair, a chipping event for those on the cutting edge.

Oh, you're on the cutting edge, turn me into a sheep. I wonder what these various camps are going to become. Unless we can achieve some kind of global awakening where people like their young folk in this video that are gleefully grant in access to interests that have proven to be somewhat unreliable. I'm talking about the state and big tech to actually inside their bodies.

Before long, it's consciousness itself, isn't it? We can insert this chip into your mind and it will prevent you from thinking certain thoughts. I mean, that kind of, that level of control is already being granted through propagandist means, through censorial means, about around communication anyway. I spoke to Dr. Rob Topenker. a senior lecturer at Birkbeck, the University of London,

who has been researching Brand's YouTube channel. He explained how Brand's shift on COVID very much seemed like part of a deliberate strategy to court a more right-wing COVID-skeptic audience. So for him to pick up on COVID makes a lot of sense in that way, because he was someone who has always sort of rejected centralized power. There was a very clear shift on his YouTube channel, and this is what really encouraged me to do a deep dive on his work, is because prior to, and the date is the 16th of January, 2022,

His YouTube channel was full of all sorts of vaguely anti-elitis stuff. Like, he would interview anarchist philosophers. He would talk about chemicals in McDonald's food. He would talk about the importance of nature. He would talk about meditation and wellness. And sometimes he would talk about COVID. And you could see it coming up in the comments. People say, you know, he had one video about phalates in McDonald's food.

And a lot of the comments were saying, this is just before he shifted to COVID skepticism in January 16th. A lot of the comments were saying, these are the same people who want us to get jabbed. You know, the people putting the phalates in our food also want us to get jabbed. Suddenly on January 16th, Brand shifted to nonstop COVID skepticism. So like 10 videos before January 16th, one was about COVID. The 10 videos after, eight of them were. So he tapped into something.

His viewing numbers went up. The number of comments went up. The number of people saying, you know, I didn't used to like you, Russell, but now you might go to source for information. That became a consistent theme. So he clearly realized there was an audience waiting for this sort of content. And he tapped into it. More recently, in the weeks leading up to this.

Channel 4 report about the allegations against them, he was really moving further to the right. I mean, a lot of his videos were saying Biden, the titles would be, like, Biden's big lie. And he would, in the video, not necessarily endorse Trump. I mean, actually, he almost never really takes a political position. He's very cagey about it. He'll say, you know, a lot of you like Donald Trump. I don't know what to think. Let me know what you think in the comments.

But he got more and more kind of agitated and animated about Democratic figures and more implying and suggesting Trump is the only one who is resisting these sort of mainstream lives. And he started, you know, one of his most watched videos is an interview with Tucker Carlson. And he also got famous. One of things that made him famous politically in the mid-2010s was his attacks on Fox News. So there's a bit of a very clear shift that's gone underway. And as he's tapped into that COVID-sceptic audience, the kind of right-wing momentum has, in some ways, carried him along.

Dr. Dupinker described an in-depth analysis he performed on Brand's YouTube comments section, exploring a data set of the comments to see if he could identify a connection between the changes in Brand's content and the online community that interacted with it. He found several changes in how commenters responded to the comedian before and after what he called Brand's COVID-skeptic shift. For this paper, what I did was try to identify where this shift to COVID skepticism happened. And it does seem like it was a kind of content strategy that he had either on his own or with his team because it was so stark that he occasionally would talk about COVID,

often in the context of talking about Australia, which had the kind of most draconian measures. But then suddenly on January 16th, he did, he does daily videos. And his next eight after January 16th were all about COVID. And that pattern continued. Now it's kind of opened up a bit. He talks a lot about Ukraine, a lot of criticism of Biden. But COVID is still kind of the dominant theme. So I was interested in this shift.

And I was wondering if I could figure out why it happened and what happened with his audience. So I picked 10 videos. I did a weekly sample. He posts every day. So I didn't look at every day's video. looked at one per week for the 10 weeks prior to the shift and the 10 weeks following the shift. And I used a tool that if anyone is really into YouTube, it's called YouTube Data Tools. And you can grab every comment from a YouTube video.

So I grabbed all the comments from 20 videos, 10 before, 10 after the COVID-Sceptic shift. It was like 200,000 comments. And then I did things to look at. First, I looked at the number of replies and I visualized that to see if people were talking with one another. And one thing that was really interesting was that before the COVID-Sceptic shift, there was a lot of conversation. And you can see this if you graph it, that there's all these people exchanging ideas back and forth with one another. After he shifts to COVID skepticism, those replies almost entirely

disappeared. There's almost no conversation in the comments, but there's a skyrocketing number of likes. So replies went way down, but likes increased. And the way I explained that in the paper is that there is a shift from a kind of idiosyncratic, anti-elitist, vaguely anarchist, also conspiratorial community, discussing things with one another to a shift, to a community. To a community. that's focused entirely on being fans of brand and praising Russell Brand and saying brand you're a hero brand be careful they're going to come for you they're going to cancel you I can't believe they're letting you get away with this you're my only news source so it shifts from this kind of discussion section to a fan section so that was one thing that was that was really

interesting the other thing is as that shift happens the viewpoints get much more right way and the way I measured that is just based on what people were saying and and whether they were coming from the left or right and these are very obvious so after the COVID skeptic shift people would frequently post, let's go Brandon, you know, or Trucker's Convoy or, you know, criticism of Trudeau, criticism of the Democratic Party. Before that, there wasn't praise for the Democratic Party, but people didn't talk about partisan politics in that sort of way. They tended to be much more anecdotal. A lot of stuff about getting back to nature, advice about, you know, you should recycle your beer bottles. So it's of this kind of like sort of almost charming, kind of vaguely reactionary,

but also just sort of like, you know, no one should tell you what to do. You should discover for yourself. You should live off the land. We should live off the grid. Stuff that clearly could feed conspiratorial ideas, but wasn't so hyperpartisan. And then after the shift, it's clearly very, very hyperpartisan. So we know that as Brand pivoted his content towards COVID skepticism, his audience changed too. And one big change was that they were vastly more flattering of Brand himself. The reward for Brand talking more about these topics wasn't just an adoring fan base, though. According to a BBC article, where Brand was previously racking up about 100,000 to 300,000 views per video, posts on ivermectin, vaccine passports, and Donald Trump

topics gained him figures in the millions. Now, videos featuring figures associated with the alt-right in the US, like Tucker Carlson, I'd perform earlier interviews with celebrities, including actor Emma Watson and presenter Jamila Jamel. A recent interview with Bear Quills about surviving in the wild, more similar to Brand's old style, saw his viewing figures back down to 167,000 views. Yeah, I found that, like, really interesting that this new fan base of brands are basically, like, not loyal to him at all. It's like the second he, like, tries to, like, steer off topics that they want to talk about, like, Ivermectin and Donald Trump and things like that. They're just immediately just like, no, not watching. They want to see you, like, interviewing a celebrity about survivalism.

Teaching him to reshape his editorial line. Yeah. Yeah. That's the deal with the devil, right? It's like you get a massive fan base that's very fervent, but they're very fickle. They will turn on you in a second when you start stepping. out of line. And that teaches you, you know, as a content creator to stand right in the line. Yeah, yeah. Like, discipline is pretty strict. Another finding of Dr. Tabinkas' analysis was that

Brand's audience seemed to change from what we might call old school conspiracy theorists who would discuss specific theories and explanations for events that they were interested in to people who just seem to be fans of conspiracy theories as an abstract concept in general. And the other thing that happens that's really important is that conspiracy becomes a kind of dominant theme. But what was interesting to me is that although there was less discussion of conspiracy before he shifted to COVID skepticism, in those comments, before he started talking about COVID skepticism, people would actually discuss conspiracy. So they would kind of old-fashioned conspiracy. So people would mention like the Bilderberg group or the Trilateral Commission or the Rothschild, the Rothschild. And they would

explain that there was an elite conspiracy. But then after he shifted to talking more about conspiracies himself and more about COVID skepticism, people would just say, oh, you know, this must be a conspiracy, or, oh, I need a new conspiracy, all the ones I believe came true, or conspiracies should be called spoiler alerts. They wouldn't actually name any conspiracies. They would just name the fact that people get criticized for believing in conspiracies, but conspiracies actually have this unique insight that other forms of political analysis don't. So it was almost like it didn't become more conspiratorial. It became oriented around conspiracy while becoming less conspiratorial in content. It was really bizarre. People weren't really

naming or discussing or arguing for any conspiracies, they were just saying conspiracies are banned by the mainstream and that by that almost proves that they're true. As they talked more about conspiracy, in a way they talked about it less. And it just became a way of saying, I'm on the conspiracy team. I'm on the Russell Brand team. That's the right way to think about politics. That's what brings our community together. Let's celebrate it. But again, not getting to any of the details. And Brand himself doesn't. I mean, he doesn't name, he doesn't really name them all that specifically. So I think that's interesting for efforts to combat conspiracies and misinformation, because often there's this focus on, well, what do these people believe? Why,

you know, what piece of misinformation are they connecting with? How can we debunk it? But here there's nothing to debunk. It's a kind of emotional orientation to politics. It's not about, I literally think, you know, that the Great Reset is being planned in X, Y, Z way, or I literally think, you know, that there's a, that the Democrats are kidnapping children for, you know, sexual trafficking. Nothing of that. Just conspiracies are the right way to think and orient yourself to the world. That's a really interesting point. Yeah. The emotional, it's the emotional connection. I mean, I see that so much on social media that it's just, yeah, that all you really need is this kind of general distrust, you know, of the sort of, you know, academic news or the, I don't know,

the agreed upon, sort of generally agreed upon narrative. that it almost doesn't matter what the details are. It's just that you oppose it. And it's, you know, and they view themselves, I think, as like the count, you know, this like counterculture. And that's kind of enough, I guess. I mean, yeah, it's like, it becomes like just a posture where it's like, all their general posture is that whatever is mainstream or common or accepted is just a lie. When you go like, well, you know, actually, you know, vaccines don't cause autism. That's just not true.

there's no evidence of that. They say, oh, so you're saying that, like, you know, the mainstream politicians and the media and the scientists are always telling the truth always. That's what you believe? It's like, no, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying in this particular instance, you're mistaken. And then so it becomes a little bit more, you know, black and white position for them. Yeah, it just goes, where'd you get that from? Who, where, who, which talking points did you get that from? Did you read that on CNN? Did you read that here? Yeah, it's, it's really interesting that I don't think I'm quite, uh, I don't think I'm not intelligent as the wrong word, but it's such a very specific sort of thing. I don't know if I can characterize it

properly, but it's like, yeah, it's just this, this emotion, it's like going against the grain, how it feels good to like the movie that nobody else really likes. It's contrarianism. Yeah, this contrarianism, and there's, in a way, you know, I think people view themselves as, they view that as freeing because then they don't have to go and look up anything further and way specific cases versus other specific cases or specific facts versus other ones. It's just sort of this general vibe that it's like, no, I don't trust anything. I don't trust anything. And the people I do trust are the ones who are telling me not to trust anything because

that aligns with how I feel about this stuff. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it's something that I think often attempts to satirize modern conspiracy culture can often miss, that kind of general antagonism that I think is so important to wit, that it's not just about believing something crazy or believing something out there. It often feels to me to be about believing something that you believe the powers that be or the powerful do not want you to believe. Do you know? And it's often kind of a sense of like, yeah, kind of, you know, well, I'm sticking it to those guys by believing this. Do you know?

Like, I think, yeah, it's often like easier when you think about it like with specific, specific figures. So for instance, people would kind of, I think often adopt like a kind of belief about Hillary Clinton sacrificing kids or whatever. And kind of, if they were asked about it, they would kind of often respond, resort to this pose where it's just like, well, it's the kind of thing she would do. Do you know? Like, and I know people, and I know she and, you know, all these other kind of, you know, elites sort of Washington elites don't want me to believe it.

I feel like Glenn Greenwald is probably a good example of like this sort of contrarian attitude and where it takes you where he's just like, well, I'm going to say something and if people yell at me, that means I'm hitting the mark. so like that's where he kind of followed the one of the reasons why he followed that sort of anti-woke thing out of any sort of and now he's like pro-ball scenario because he's followed that so far a lot of conspiracy people will measure like how they're attacking the powers that be in like a really awkward way like which which opinion is the most socially and polite like will get me stared at the most if I yell about it in a denies well and it's so dangerous too that like

people are able to brush off criticism real criticisms in this well I must be over the that if people are pushing back against me, that means I must be right. That is an insane, and I think that's a pretty natural place for at least, you know, most people on the internet that are arguing about this kind of stuff, that it's like, well, if I'm getting pushback, you know, that means that I'm right. It's so much easier to claim what you don't believe in than what you do. It's, it's so much easier because you can just say like, well, well, I don't subscribe to that, as opposed to saying like, well, here's what I subscribe to and why.

Tune in next week for part two of what many are calling the most Russell brand episodes of our entire catalog. Thank you for listening to an episode of the QAA podcast. You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get access to the full feed, which includes an extra episode for every regular one, access to our archive of premium episodes, plus all of our mini-series like Trickledown, Manclan, and The Spectral Voyager. We've also got a website QAnonanonymous.com. Until next week, may the UK bless you and keep you. It's not a conspiracy, it's fact.

And now, today's auto-chew. AI can be used to give us chilling visions of how celebrities who died tragically might look had they not died tragically. The reporting on this is really weird, and it's sort of part of the chaotic, psychedelic, nightmare clown world that we all now just ordinarily inhabit. This isn't how they have to explain on this quite light news item how all these people died. As a result of the sort of pressure of being famous, direct assassinations, drug addiction, all those kind of things, generally what killed them. In some cases, there might be even more nefarious reasons behind their death. I'll leave you to guess which ones.