Bret talks to Russell Brand in the wake of his Baptism.Find Russell on X: @rustyrockets (https://x.com/rustyrockets)Find Russell on Rumble: https://rumble.com/russellbrand*****Moink: Delicious grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb, pastured pork and chicken, and wild caught Alaskan salmon. Visit www.moinkbox.com/darkhorse to get a year’s worth of bacon free when you sign up.*****Join DarkHorse on Locals! Get access to our Discord server, exclusive live streams, live chats for all streams...
I have the delight of sitting with a man who needs no introduction whatsoever.
This is, of course, Russell Brand, who has given us, loaned us a space in which to film this discussion.
Russell, welcome to Dark Horse.
Thank you so much for having me on your podcast in my home.
Yes, well, I'm really glad you could make the time, and I know you've got a tight schedule today.
Prior to this, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
After this, I assume, making content for my show.
That would be my assumption.
Right, right.
Well, you never know.
Somebody is, of course, in charge of these things for those of us who can't keep track of them ourselves.
Well, why don't we start at the obvious place?
Yes.
It's not the reason for this discussion.
I happen to be in the UK for other reasons, but I'm here in the immediate aftermath of, fair to say, your having found God.
Well, if it was going to be absolutely literal, it's being baptised and becoming a Christian.
And do you know what I think is interesting?
Because what I've felt generally is incredibly embraced.
And then I thought, this is one of those things that if the establishment could stop you doing it, they would stop you doing it.
If it was possible to forbid it, they You're not allowed to do that!
You're not allowed to do that when I think of the detractors and the forces of enmity and what seem to be relatively cohesive forces of attack, condemnation.
Yeah, so it's interesting that you're here.
So, finding God, I recognise the convenience of the idiom, but what it has felt like is a Gradual and then extraordinarily sudden acceptance that what I have been looking for does have a clear lineage and path and liturgy and hermeneutics and practices and principles.
It's sort of kind of astonishing.
Well, that's a little unfortunate, because if you had found him, I was going to ask you to get him a message.
Yeah.
Sort of seems we need his help down here.
And I mean, the two things are not unrelated, Brett.
I think petitioning at this point and intercession are vital components of faith.
And indeed, the aspect of Christianity in particular, that is not institutional, and I recognize much of it is.
And one of the things that's been very encouraging is to hear people within Christian institutions speaking very openly and candidly about the obvious failings that anyone could list of Various institutions within the church.
But what's been radically appealing to me has been that you and I, last time we spoke, in the end, we end up circling a dialectic around rebellion and revolution and the inability of our current systems of governance to deliver the changes that are required, whether that's from a health perspective, a military, industrial, geopolitical perspective.
It's sort of sometimes exhausting, isn't it, to speak to someone within Congress, even if they're a relatively radical individual within it?
You think, well, how, God, this is going to take ages.
Although they can tack a TikTok ban on pretty quick when they need to.
Yeah, well, this brings us back to your original point, though.
There is this odd antipathy of those who, I don't know, I don't know if they really harbour utopian views or if they only pretend to, but nonetheless, there is a recognition That people who, to quote Oscar Mayer, what is it, that they are subject to a higher authority, often have courage in the face of things that those without faith don't.
And this is something I noticed amongst the COVID dissidents.
And we will get to what my position on religion is in a second here.
Among the COVID dissidents, a great many were observant in some way, had some kind of faith, and I took that to be significant because I think that Folks who believed that the here and now was the sum total of it were easily cowed.
And people who believed that they were part of something eternal and that there was somebody judging them and no matter what was thrown at you on this planet, it was going to pale in comparison to some larger context, those people had courage.
I think whether or not there's anything to the epistemology, there's certainly something to the effect on the person.
If it makes you better to believe because you have courage in the face of tyrants, then that's a strong argument in its favour.
Certainly, there is a pragmatism to spirituality whether or not it would not have endured.
And to your point about a It's not a cadre or cohort of dissidents that appeared to draw from some source other than the secular.
It's, I suppose, self-explanatory that if the state has become a de facto deity in so much as it sets your principles, your hierarchies, your ethics, your morals, your consequences and your aims, then it is God.
And you do believe in God.
You just don't believe in a Very worthwhile, useful or authentic God.
You believe in a set of systems that are ultimately punitive and predicated on control.
You believe in a...
Well, in the case of many of our governments, you believe in something that is not even time-tested and is certainly highly corruptible.
And I think that's part of the problem.
So let me just tell you roughly where I am.
You're not my only friend who has Found faith in recent months.
Oh yeah.
This is a pattern.
Oh wow, that's interesting.
Yeah, it's clearly happening and I think I know why it's happening.
Which is, so I'll just say, I refuse to call myself an atheist.
It's almost a matter of principle.
I'm so frustrated with the way the new atheists have treated religious belief that my feeling is I want no part of that movement.
That said, although I would be perfectly open to any sort of evidence that suggested there was a supernatural, so far I haven't seen anything that requires it.
My guess is everything that we encounter can be explained in material terms.
I'm not sure it's good to, but can be.
Can't it just be this?
Yeah, oh absolutely.
In fact, this is one of the puzzles that other people regard as very difficult and I don't really see the problem with it.
Well, there's a set of neurological and synaptic patterns that have aggregated to form consciousness and within it a set of ethics and moralities that are universal and ubiquitous and seem to reward what you would consider to be good and ethical moral behavior.
And that, of course, would be because of evolutionary biology and reciprocal altruism and the kind of new atheist arguments.
Not exactly.
But that's very good.
I mean, not many people can do that off the top of their head.
What I think the reason that we regard consciousness as hard, the so-called hard problem, is that we mistake the fundamental nature of consciousness as individual, because our own individual consciousness is something to which we have a profound connection, and any other kind of consciousness is remote.
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I would argue that the problem is solved if you imagine that evolutionarily this came about.
It is an adaptation whose fundamental nature is intersubjective.
It is between people.
And that what we experience as individual consciousness evolves later.
Once you have a tool that lets you tap into somebody else's mindset, being able to be of two minds and have an argument within your own head, for example, is extremely useful.
But by putting the individual consciousness first, we create a problem, because it's a very expensive way of getting to anything.
Why would selection have done that?
And the answer is because you can't do it with another person.
We have to be able to do exactly what we're doing now.
I have to be able to put an abstract idea into your mind using language, and we have to actually hold that idea between us in order to have a discussion about it.
And the point is, well, The utility of that is obvious, right?
The utility of personal consciousness is less so.
It is useful, but if we imagine that it evolves to facilitate the shared mindset of a lineage of people first, then it makes a great deal more sense.
And of course, taps right into questions of shared religious belief.
In a sense, I hope I was listening properly to everything else you said, because I began to disagree when you spoke of individual consciousness as the predetermining or predeterminate condition.
If I were able to articulate it, then it's due some kind of Nobel Prize, wouldn't it?
So I'll do my best.
I consider consciousness to be the prima materia of all reality from which material reality has evolved.
The reason that there are archetypes, whether they are geometric, mathematical or The semantic, linguistic and intercommunicative as you described using, it seems to me at least, some of the arguments that Noah Harari advances in that Sapiens book that it's about the exchange of concepts and the ability to successfully track and kill a mammoth and then from this flows naturally purge-o.
I don't feel that.
And indeed, this notion of feeling as opposed to the kind of gymnastics of the intellect, I think, too, becomes fundamental.
Because in Christianity, because of all its familiarity, it's quite easy, and speaking personally, to dismiss it and to sort of regard it only through a pejorative light as a sort of a set of institutions that are about conditioning, that it's for people that are either utterly banal or dreadfully hysterical.
and that it drowns itself out in its own ubiquity.
And someone like me, I'd be much more attracted to the exoticism of the Vedas or Tao Zen or some irresoluble Cohen, but somehow, you know, and you alluded to this earlier, but somehow, you know, and you alluded to this earlier, Brett, the efficacy of Christianity in inducing states,
And in this primary notion, which I'd love to see how you unpack using sort of, as we've discussed on previous occasions, materialistic vernacular, the ability to see the self The first object accrued by a materialistic mindset and to transcend it using either epistemology or practice
is the function of Christianity and it's not sort of there very plainly that it's telling you if you don't transcend this set of beliefs you will live your life in pursuit of material goals.
Material goals will lead to individualism, individualism will lead to despair.
Now I know Christianity is not unique in that offering, it sort of sounds kind of Buddhist even when I'm saying it.
But what I feel when it comes to, like, you know, this is obviously a C.S.
Lewis argument, that the reason you can't see God in space is because the thing you're looking from is God.
The thing you're looking from is and of itself God, it's already present.
And speaking as a sort of a recent convert and with the concomitant zeal that one might assume would accompany that, what I've felt is almost like a new facility has been turned on, like an in this case wanted, but usually unwanted in the case of Apple, some new upgrade on your phone that's normally going to mean that you've got to buy a new charger.
Or delete a bunch of emails, or some photos have got to go now.
What I feel like is, since the event... I speak as someone who's taken, obviously, a lot of drugs.
And when you are interested in drugs and psychedelics, and if you're a drug addict, you'll sort of always... I'm speaking personally, but I've done a lot of research when it comes to communication with other drug addicts.
Some sort of T.S.
Eliot-like longing, Brett.
Like, when?
When's it going to actually be it?
Is this going to be it?
Is this actually going to be it?
When is it going to be love?
When is it going to be God?
When is it going to be salvation and resolution?
And, like, you take LSD and I'm still there.
You take heroin and I'm still there.
You take crack, you go to Nepal, you meet the Dalai Lama, and there you are throughout it.
With the baptism though, something different, something different.
And I can see why, you know, when you mention your point of the inadvertent creed exposed by the pandemic witch hunts, It's like, that's a type of insanity because you see people, you among them, go, well, I can see this is going to lead to trouble.
This is going to cost me money and cost me time and I'm going to be attacked.
But something don't feel right about this.
And you're completely able to evidently, plainly get there rationally.
And I don't know what resources I was drawing upon, but since that baptism, I feel a closer alignment with some resonant, ever-present thing, ever there and redolent, always abiding and there, sacred and present, no longer necessary the profane.
Something has happened, something has sort of happened, and I should know because I was there.
Well, let's put it this way.
That's fantastic.
Yeah?
Either way.
Either way.
And let me try something out on you.
This is something I haven't spoken about publicly, but I've done a lot of thinking about it.
My sense is that a proper understanding of religious devotion, especially to an ancient tradition, is explainable in material terms.
Right?
Of course you do.
You think everything is.
That's how your mind works.
Right, exactly.
But here's the point.
I think Darwinism explains religion and not the other way around.
The question for me, if I can see that these are adaptive states of being, and that there's tremendous utility in them, or at least has been relative to the world in which they evolved, Then why do I find myself outside of the state?
And, I should also say, there's no part of me that wants a universe that doesn't have somebody who gives a damn about us in charge.
I'd prefer a universe in which there was a backup plan because we're in big trouble.
But, that said, I do feel, let's say, there's a God.
That God has given me An analytical mind and an upbringing that cultivated it has given me an almost unbearable amount of evidence of the evolution of creatures and has placed me in history at a position where I can tap into that evidence and I can see what it implies, maybe even beyond where my field can see often.
So here's the question.
Wouldn't it be reasonable if you Had that perspective, that religion is not a bad thing.
In fact, it's been a profoundly good thing frequently.
It's done a lot of evil as well.
But the point is, it is part of an adaptive state, every bit as much as an eye or a wing.
It seems to me that if there is a God, that that God must want me, I don't want to say atheist because again I don't use that term for myself because I'm angry at other atheists, but it seems to me that God wants me as a non-believer if there is one.
Is that a fair thing to conclude from your perspective in light of the world that he has presented me with?
I can only say that from my perspective that And this is actually someone called Byron Katie said this.
God is reality.
And so...
Everything that happens is God's will and all of the rather weary and juvenile arguments about why the bad things happen and this is where it's nice to borrow from the post-structuralists and try to analyse, scrutinise and unpack what good and bad might mean and whether or not we can see the entire picture or whether we're in such a position to even make that observation.
Certainly what I'm experiencing is that there is a function to suffering that, as Simone Weil says, Christianity may not be a way out of suffering, but it certainly sanctifies suffering.
It certainly places it in an important context.
It sacralizes.
You don't see, I guess, the last conversation even comparable to this one I've had is with Jordan Peterson.
You know him, of course, and I love him.
You know, I've worked out what the collective unconscious is.
It's AI.
And I'm like, oh, God, here we go.
We're in for 10 minutes.
And, you know, I talk to people.
Wow.
Who was that guy, probably?
know him, Dr Nels, who can tell you how sort of nutrition and toxicity are being used to induce states that are correlatives of sociological forms of conditioning,
that both our nutritional inputs that both our nutritional inputs and toxicity inputs are creating states of compliance that are amenable to and function alongside sociological measures to generate a compliant zombie population is one of these terms.
I was thinking wow everyone just uses various metrics and nomenclature to analyze the various challenges that confront them.
Now if you are a Devout Christian or devout Buddhist or devout Muslim or devout atheist, then you're sort of saying, this is my position.
You might be an atheist.
I'm a Christian.
You might be a Christian.
I'm taking a definitive position.
It's a personal position.
And it's, as I say, it seems to have resourced me.
But I certainly don't feel that there is I'm not, like, bemused, baffled, confused or concerned by your well-undergirded and researched atheism.
I'm just, in a sense, as you speak, thinking about what I've read in sort of C.S.
Lewis or Thomas Aquinas or whatever that sort of might be useful in helping us with that.
And in a way, many of what I've felt is a kind of it's like a kind of homecoming that's very kind of gosh feels kind of folky but like when it comes to tackling the how i would usually oppose atheism i would say if there are resolute and absolute states that can be determined and diagnosed through the analytical mind what is it that happens to that mind
when you consume ayahuasca or dmt in large doses and planes of reality is suddenly exposed to you that seem to defy our proceeding paradigm and what i suppose there and this is sort of very almost i can't believe that i would lay something so rudimentary before you pearls before not pearls before some kind of opposite of Dorothy Parker's famous maxim is that
Brett, everything we're discussing is on the basis of the limitations of our sensory instruments and our knowledge base.
And if you were to assume a set of instruments that could determine subtler vibrations and forms of light and forms of information, then whole new paradigms would immediately open up to us.
And I think that's what the religious experience is.
It's the immediate sacralisation of the profane and the immediate intervention of a set of data that is not accessible with this set of instruments.
Well, if I might.
Of course, of course.
I think it sounds to me almost like you're suffering from a kind of... Suffering?
A little bit.
From PTSD.
Very happy.
It's a pleasant kind of suffering.
We're in a jump with an ice cream on it.
I'm having the time of my life!
But the materialists are—the arrogance of the materialists is insufferable, right?
And so the point is, everything you're saying resonates perfectly fine for me.
It's not—I'm not even arguing that it's If the universe is entirely, in principle at least, explainable in materialist terms, I'm not arguing that that's a better way to go through life.
But why would it be?
I mean, of course it would be.
Yeah.
No, it would be.
But of course it would be in terms of even if God is like a sort of a personal anthropomorphic God and shazammed us into being with a sort of like a pop goes the weasel, it would In its implementation, pass through material reality.
And, like, if you are an atemporal, an aspatial being, the fact that these things take place over time and have a cellular lineage, that doesn't defy it.
That's just how it happened.
How did Van Gogh render those paintings?
How did Tchaikovsky write those symphonies?
Just sort of go and he wrote it down on that page.
Doesn't explain the mystery of what... How the fuck did you come up with that?
Well, I mean... And what is it that the beauty is?
Why beauty?
Right.
Not symmetry, Brett.
Beauty!
Well played.
But if I can maybe over-interpret what you've just said.
You could.
The quantity of mystery is effectively conserved.
And you can drive it all the way to the initial moment, right?
The universe that came into being and let all of this other material stuff happen.
That's all of that mystery concentrated in one place.
Or you can distribute it and you can say things, frankly.
Disagree with them, but I think it's a useful belief I hear from many of my favorite people about how consciousness pre-exists and is somehow inside of matter or something like this You know panpsychism.
My feeling is well.
I don't think literally that can be true, but I think it's a cheat code to access some important stuff.
But basic point is it doesn't really matter whether from the point of view of how you should live your life, it doesn't really matter whether the universe is perfectly explicable in materialist terms with no gaps or there are jumps, you know, what would be called strong it doesn't really matter whether the universe is perfectly explicable in materialist terms with no gaps or there are jumps, you know, what would be called strong emergence where there are, you know, gaps between this level
So anyway, none of these things matter in terms of how we should be treating each other.
Can I just ask you a little question?
Sure.
You see how there are epistemological apexes.
I don't know how you pluralize apex.
I'm going to say apices, but it's not a thing.
I'm pretty sure.
Like where it's like, right, OK, you know, the the earth is the center and everything goes right.
Oh, no, sorry.
And the smallest thing is this.
No, the smallest thing is that.
You're sort of doing another version of that, of like now we do know, except for the mystery of how all reality rushes out of that sort of moment of the finite.
I would like to think that I'm more sophisticated in the following way.
I believe there are elements of our scientific materialist story that are so close to right that they might as well be.
And there are other elements where, for example, in my field, in biology, we are so new to understanding anything about truly complex systems that most of what we do understand, we understand approximately.
It's metaphorical in many cases.
And so the point is... I mean, if it's a metaphor, Right.
So when I look at the biology that I think I know, if I think about how the immune system functions, what I learned about how the immune system functions, right?
I know that a lot of that is a story that if humanity survives, we will one day understand how crude that story I learned actually is.
But that story is good enough to extrapolate from in certain ways, right?
So the point is, I know that what I believe is not a map, you know, the map is not the territory.
I have a map of the truth, and it's pretty crude, right?
There Be Dragons is all over that map.
So if I know that, you know, that the best I can do is a crude approximation of that world and that my worldview involves trying to understand more, but knowing that that's a slog and there's only a small distance you can go in a lifetime, and I hope to live to but knowing that that's a slog and there's only a small distance you can go in a lifetime, and I hope to live to see important changes, but nonetheless, you know, I am the descendant of chimp-like ancestors trying to So I'm not sure.
So, I don't feel like, when we discover that we've got it wrong, There's no part of me that's indignant about that.
It's like, oh, that's good.
That's evidence we're doing the job right.
We're learning.
In that requiem of complexity down there in biology, and in the interstices between metaphor and material reality, given that they're part of the point of what we're Circling is the ability of a material modality to absolutely explain reality.
I wonder where we posit precisely the domain of philosophy and theology, i.e.
i.e. beauty, meaning, awe, love.
Now, and again, this is, I'm doing something clumsily that C.S.
Lewis would do masterfully, but where one might anticipate laws that appear to suggest a form of morality, cohesion, and for want of a better word, Sacredness, where one might, within our subjective experience.
We find that these laws are indeed there.
Awe, beauty, love, duty.
There they are.
We don't know what might be within a stone and there's no reason to assume that it's in there having its little stone dilemmas about how long it'll be a stone and what it was like when it was a meteorite and what it was like when it was a bit of iron on that star and some gold on that star that heated up a little hotter.
None of these mysteries, when you remove the temporal, the spatial and the profane, contain anything but more poetry, more beauty, more Christ for me, more further demonstrations of the very particular mission that we have here.
And, excuse me, given that these are the points of difference that I'm Offering you, as well as, the kind of, it's tricky I think, Brett, to sort of go, the materialist, you know, the Terence McKenna's rather lovely refrain, shall we call it, you know, materialistic sciences, give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest.
But we find only in the subjective experience, we find evidence of it and it plays out archetypally everywhere in the world more or less.
And if you extract it, You create the most dreadful dirge, and in fact our whole analytic of what constitutes bad is the extraction of it.
So it's empirically powerful, it's universally present, and it seems to me it's only buttressed when we make Infantile demands of the world, like it sort of treat us like some kind of fairy godmother, or, you know, not of the world, of God.
We know that it's just like, why can't everything just be essentially how I want it?
Which, by the way, is fundamental to the function of true religion or spirituality.
Like, if I can overcome my interminable rustleness, everything's going to be okay.
You know, everything is going to be okay.
So I wonder what you do with the awe and the love and all the stuff that I was listing.
Yeah, well, first of all... And that miracle.
So there's a famous bit where Richard Feynman talks about a friend of his.
I'm not sure he's ever specific about who he's talking about.
But his friend challenges him that, you know, you scientists look at a flower and all you can do is take it apart.
You don't recognize the beauty of it.
And Feynman responds something to the effect of, well, no, actually, I see the beauty of the flower, and I see the beauty of what's inside it.
Now, I've never quite fully accepted Feynman's formulation, because it's just additive, right?
I get that beauty plus another kind.
And I do think you destroy something in scrutinizing these things, and it probably isn't for everybody.
However, there is a kind of I hope he wouldn't be bothered by my using it this way, but Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot.
something that is also greater in the process.
And I would, I hope he wouldn't be bothered by my using it this way, but Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, you know the picture?
The idea of gazing back at the earth and realizing that it is literally a speck of dust.
And that everything that you care about, everyone you love, every historical event that has ever taken place has happened on this infinitesimally tiny speck of dust.
That does actually have a powerful philosophical influence on you and it does, if you look at it right, I think emphasize the preciousness of what we've been given and the horror of the way we are squandering it.
So I don't feel diminished by, even though I recognize there is something lost in taking the flower apart, I don't feel diminished by it in the end.
Actually, I don't think if you approach it entirely from a materialistic position that it's one small speck in every single poem and Shakespeare and Dante and all that's going on on there.
If you don't believe in meaning, then so what?
So what?
I do believe in meaning.
Then what undergirds it?
Trajectories, telos, momentum, electromagnetism?
Well, OK, that's a fair question.
I think the problem is this.
That ultimately, if you do take a materialist trajectory, if you try to understand the universe in the terms that it presents itself, the terms that we can test, You ultimately get left in one of two places, right?
You either get left with an sort of existentialist abandonment of meaning, because you know that nothing can mean anything, even the universe itself is finite, and so nothing we could do will matter in the end, right?
Or you have to surrender.
To that, in a sort of, I'm, you know, I'm not an expert on Buddhism, but it does feel like a kind of Buddhist embrace, you know, building these miraculous sculptures on the beach where you know they're about to be washed away, right?
We're living that, and the question is, can we make the absolute most of this incredibly strange and wonderful opportunity?
Mate, I think that's just mute epicureanism.
It's like, sort of, pleasure but not too much!
No, no.
Like, let's just make the most of this because that's all there is, and all the mystery in life, or it couldn't have happened and yet it did, and it's a miracle in its own way, but not really.
I suppose what I'm saying is, earlier we touched upon this sort of intersubjectivity perhaps being sort of part of the necessary steps for the establishment of individual consciousness.
I wonder if in this sort of relational dialectic we might discover some important components of what reality in the final analysis ultimately constitutes.
I suppose it's a type of unitive point, whether you consider that to be the moment prior to the Big Bang or some sort of discernible frequency upon a golden scale.
Present now amidst the cacophony present between you and I, playing out on the retina, playing out in the mind, somehow identifiable and recognisable to us both.
And what I feel like in the sort of almost pornographic adornments of the molecular, as this blue dot and Shakespeare was down there and Muhammad Ali, and God, it makes you think, don't it?
Like without God in there, what I feel like we're sort of saying is that, hold on a minute.
You know, we're talking about something like, why Shakespeare?
Why Muhammad Ali?
Why, or why even this discussion?
How, how is, you know, like the point you made that God would be fine with your atheism, and of course he would be, otherwise I suppose there would be some kind of damascene moment.
No, no, wait, wait, hold on.
One of two things ought to be true.
Either he ought to be okay with my atheism, which is my hypothesis, and I think it's kind of an unlikely one, but Or he would require me to abandon it in order to forgive me, right?
In the Christian mode, that would be the assumption, is that my atheism is okay, it's a sin, but I better come around before it's too late.
You talked about faith a moment ago in terms of making some beachside mandala happy and the acceptance of it being tidily deleted inevitably as just part of the acceptance of our ongoing entropy.
That there is faith, that faith is unavoidable, that God is unavoidable, that liturgy is unavoidable, that commitment is unavoidable.
So in a way I suppose that's sort of part of You know what, this is what's interesting when clever people talk and let's just get it out of the way and get it said.
You're clever, I'm clever.
We're two clever people.
There we go.
We're different.
I'm a clever person out of show business and chaos and you're a clever person out of academia and then your own rebellions.
Take it back, science!
Science can be a subset of many things.
We've seen science as a subset of economics, but science, ultimately, should be its own empirical thing, subset to nothing but reason, shouldn't it?
Yes.
And that's part of the problem.
That's where you and I come together, don't we?
We come together there, that they misused science.
They turned it into an orthodoxy.
They turned it into a weapon.
They turned it on its head.
It is doing the inverse of... They inverted it.
Yes, they inverted it, like so many things.
Like, wouldn't it?
And I mean, you know, you're one of those people.
Let's get into something we agree on.
Like, you know, what in fact your, let's call it, success is built upon, is like, you're going, yeah, hold on a minute, you don't vaccinate during a, wait a second, no, that's not going to work, that's not actually a vaccine, that's a gene therapy, wait a minute, hold on a second, that doesn't look like it could have emerged from a wet market, hold on a second, that spike protein's going to migrate!
Hold on, what about the tissue around the heart?
Hang on a second, this data doesn't make sense.
What about these excess deaths?
Right, so on and on and on.
Data, data, data, data.
And all the while, from them, propaganda, propaganda, zeal, demand for obedience, astonishing galling, and innocent, innocent.
A transgression, I would say.
The reckoning can never come, even though we know that today, isn't it, Peter Daszak's having some hearing, and tomorrow Fauci's having some sort of hearing.
How can they ever have the reckoning required?
How can they?
Because it's going to be, right, you lot, fuck off!
All of them, isn't it?
There would need to be a god for them to face the proper reckoning.
I've got some good news, Brett.
I'm glad to hear that.
I've got some good news for you, friend.
Because otherwise I think they're going to get away with it.
Come on in!
Yeah, so like, what was I saying here?
I mean, I suppose what I was saying is that, in a way, probably everything I say, you think, I've heard some version of that, and everything you say, I think, yeah, I've heard versions of that, I've read bloody straw dogs, I've read Dawkins, and I know that you've vastly moved on from sort of selfish gene and good lord, look at dear old Dickie Dawkins circling back to, I actually like those cathedrals!
Well, I mean, first of all, it hadn't even occurred to me that I've heard all this before.
Oh, cool.
You're definitely a one-off person, and one can say that about everybody, but you are a deep outlier, for sure.
Your ability to integrate things from many domains is spectacular, and to do so from a place of Well, I'm not going to just let that compliment pass because I'm a person who faces a fair degree of criticism.
I don't take this to be well-trodden territory at all.
Well, I'm not going to just let that compliment pass because I'm a person who faces a fair degree of criticism.
I've noticed.
As far as those two are aware.
Not everyone out there likes me.
Some people are going right out of their way to destroy me.
As a matter of fact, conflating, inflating, exaggerating, attributing extraordinary odd anecdotes.
I mean, it's a vile concerto being played by a berserk orchestra out there.
That's true.
Thank you.
Yeah, you're very welcome.
And, you know, it is one of the I mean, it's maybe the conundrum of the era, is that in order to do what you must do, you have to abandon any obligation to that system that's judging us.
And, you know, that's not a solution to any problem, which is why I think we're watching this revival of religious belief.
You know, our system, the failure of it is so evident to anyone who is paying attention that I think people are attempting to Reboot the last thing that worked.
And I don't think we can actually get out of it that way.
I don't see that because there's a continuum.
No, no, no, I disagree.
Because I think with the conversion of Constantine, the institution of Christianity becomes allied to empire And this remains unbroken to right here, right now.
Westphalian treaty or not, it doesn't matter if we're droning people neatly with perfect Huxley-esque white orbs, or if we're hysterically in turban slashing away at clerics.
Violence is violence, and however you undergird your dominion, Whether it is through hermeneutics or politics, for me, you can't make that claim.
I don't agree with that.
Power is power, I believe.
Well, all right, let me try this on you.
Oh, no, you had somewhere you wanted to go.
I was just thinking about, like, see what's going on with the emerging discourse around Trump, Brett.
I'm jumbling this together as I go along, there'll be no surprises for you.
for you there but like say if you say so isn't the assumption behind something like uh not the original book by margaret atwood handmaid's tale but by the televisual version of it but what we're experiencing in the ascent of trump is this sort of attempt to um purvey and impose a sort of christian patriarchal system and like if i imagine that they would say that what it's a critique of and what it's an exploration of is the idea that these sort of strongman leaders across the europe
and you know you know those arguments but it seems to me actually that what we've that what we have in government in your country now is more tyrannical and terrifying than trump than This sort of banalised bureaucracy of terrifying authority.
So that they're creating this concoction of, you know, watch out for this sort of militaristic, charismatic, wild man, child, Trump figure.
When in fact what they are doing is far more insidious, nefarious, dangerous and observably more bellicose and destructive and apocalyptic than happened in these four years of somewhat clumsy, forgive me, I know there's a lot of Trump fans watching, of his administration.
I'm saying this preemptively when you're about to say it's an attempt to reboot the institutions of Christianity, which of course failed.
Remember, we've already covered that the orthodoxy of science was utilised in the same way that you would have burned heretics, that poor dude that understood the cosmos, that monk, Bruno, whatever he was called.
Enough of that gear went on, enough of that went on during the period where you and I are aligned and allied.
To suggest to me that a revival of spirituality, and in my personal case, Christianity, is not likely to lead to some sort of Atwood-like dystopia of like, now you women folks get in the house, it's like just a set of principles and morals based on fraternity and like, you know, sort of, I don't know, like what Methodism bestowed upon this country, for example, that there's much that is beautiful that will come from it,
And even in the most dystopic version, it is as nothing compared to what is being delivered under the auspices of neoliberal friendliness as they pat us into total submission.
Well, I don't disagree with you about the terrifying nature of what is taking place in my country, and it isn't even really my country.
It's at least as broad as the Five Eyes, so your country, too.
But that thing is, I think, as grave a threat to humanity as there has ever been.
And when I say that I think this religious revival is an attempt to reboot the last thing that worked, that is not in and of itself an argument against it.
In fact, I would argue that's probably an ancient historical pattern for our species.
And the only reason that I don't think that's necessarily the right thing to do at this moment is that the religious traditions in question evolved in a world we don't live in anymore.
And so I'm afraid that although they contain many things that are superior to the system that we are living in, they are inadequate as presented.
But this will be an adaptation and part of an ongoing evolutionary flow.
Let's hope.
Therefore, it will not be necessarily a sort of an atavistic throwback flux, but a remodification and not repurposing, but utilisation temporally through time of those principles.
goals.
Indeed, isn't what we're experiencing now this new banalised tyranny, this sort of friendly Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare?
You know where, just to give you a clear example, when YouTube, if you tried to go, excuse me, why have you done that?
The team have decided that you have violated our community guidelines.
Do try again later.
You know, it's like, who am I talking to?
Hello?
Hello?
Like sort of 1960s sci-fi. 100%.
Horror.
So isn't what they're terrified of, and this is sort of, again, Martin Goury stuff from his book, you know, The Revolt of the Public, like, oh no, the potential now exists for mass decentralisation and incredible radical Overthrow of our systems of power.
In fact, it's already happening whether it's examples like Occupy or the Arab Spring or Napster.
There are countless examples of it working or the emergence of someone like Bobby Kennedy or indeed Trump and Twitter or Elon acquiring X, the emergence of Tucker.
They're realizing that independent media is very dangerous and if it Organically, you're the evolutionary biologist.
Wouldn't the next natural step for it to become a set of political alliances, decentralized but unified political alliances, where you would go, well, we want to run our community on these principles.
And obviously, Russell, I'm not Christian.
And obviously, Russell, you are Christian.
Are you cool with that?
Yeah, cool.
OK, good luck.
That is exactly what they are afraid of.
And it would result in, I believe, a 2.0 version of all of the stuff that does work, including Christianity and other ancient traditions.
So they are trying to forestall this, and they are doing so telegraphing their fear, in fact.
If you look at what they're doing at the World Health Organization and the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty and the international health regulations, They are attempting to gain the ability at the international level to shut down all of the processes that would allow us to do that decentralized thing which is obviously utterly necessary given the failure of every single mainstream institution simultaneously.
Yeah.
So they know that this is what we should be doing and we don't yet quite know broadly enough.
We need to accelerate this process and we need to defeat that treaty and those health regulations.
Yes.
Because we can't afford to fight against that disadvantage.
No.
But, yeah, go ahead.
Do we see how they're manoeuvring the language and they're noticing and sensing the opposition and they're trying to create new categories for censorship to prevent the burgeoning opposition?
Like they realise that the first wave of it, people are like, we ain't gonna let you pass laws globally.
What, for climate change?
Be a bit more specific about what constitutes a global health emergency.
What do you mean you'd be able to impose medical requirements for certain vaccines?
People are starting to question it now.
It's terrifying and fast and it's out, you know?
So they're making a break for it, right?
This is actually, we are watching Right.
game dynamics where they are pursuing a radical shift in the rules before it's too late from their perspective.
And so that's the race we're in.
We need to win it.
And that actually involves us beating the odds this month at the World Health Organization.
That treaty and those international health regulations are up for vote on the 27th, I believe.
Who votes?
The member nations.
In their Congress?
The nations decide individually and then they participate.
They vote in the UN, I believe, and then there is something like 10 months to decide to reject it.
So all of you as an American, me as a Brit, I'm like with whoever our delegate is, Oi!
You best vote against this, otherwise we're going to seriously start some uprising gear.
Right, but I would point out, they have already shown that we are beating them.
Because they have been forced to remove the teeth from the agreement.
Now, that does not save us, because they will pass a version that is just simply vague, and then they will install the teeth later.
So it's a trick.
But at halftime, we're ahead.
We are forcing them to revise that treaty, because the people of the world are aware of what's going on.
Are you saying nothing less than a rejection of the treaty for stop will be a victory?
Yes.
We have to reject the treaty.
This month, and if we fail, which is probably, frankly, pretty likely, then the next 10 months we have to reject it in our home nations.
Could you see it as a significant pillar in the next step for inserting the ability to have centralised global governments that subvert and bypass national sovereignty and democracy?
Well, let me explain it very clearly.
I know we don't have much time.
They screwed up during COVID.
Their narrative broke, right?
We managed to use the equivalent of pirate radio, which happens now to be podcasts, to have enough of a discussion that enough of the population of the world got wise to it before it was a fait accompli.
That people are now angry and frightened of their own government's desire to erode their rights.
So, that pandemic treaty and those international health regulations are their dream set of rules.
It's the rules they want in retrospect.
Now that they know how we beat them, it's the change in the rules that allows them to win a rematch.
Yes, if we could stop them doing that!
Right.
And we make that law, and that's not allowed.
If we can zero out Joe Rogan, right, that's what they want.
And so it's in there.
It's actually, if you look at the original versions of this, the right to mandate gene therapies is in there, the right to censor for the UN to decide who needs to be censored inside all of the member nations, the ability to transfer drugs around the world.
Oh, ivermectin.
Well, you can't get it because we've just sent it to Timbuktu, right?
All of those things were in that document.
So we know what they're trying to do.
Brilliant.
You can see what it's trying to impose from the blueprint, even though they've tried to mask it in vagueness.
And they've renamed it, and they've done all kinds of things, and the thing was so deadly boring that you were supposed to just imagine, oh, the UN is an ineffectual body, the WHO isn't able to do anything, we don't have to worry about any of this, and the point is, no, no, this is important stuff.
It's such a pertinent point, the idea that they sort of bore you into compliance, just the weary weight of all of it.
Oh God, I can't be bothered.
I mean, all of us know now.
Excess deaths.
All of us know now.
Adverse events.
All of us know now.
Bioweapon research.
We know all of this stuff.
Right.
Oh, I can't be bothered to fight this thing anymore.
It's so tedious.
Just shut up and leave us alone.
I mean, I wonder if there's actual, like, they won't be so clumsy as to put in the legislation.
And if we need to put Joe Rogan in a steel cube, we'll bloody well do it.
What's this bit about Joe Rogan?
Sorry, did we leave that in?
Scrub that out.
I mean, look, I noticed something the other day, Brett, about... This is cool.
Perhaps you would have spotted it anyway, but you'll certainly spot it now.
In the three pieces of propaganda released probably in a 36-hour period, we saw Kamala Harris on Drew Barrymore, in which she sort of casually said, we should call you Mamala Harris, because we just need you to be a mother.
We see Joe Biden on Howard Stern.
Do you know what?
You're a good dad.
You're a decent man.
And I know you're a good president because you're a good dad.
Then at the press conference, the, well, you know, the White House press conference dinner, Colin Jost, the SNL guy, you know, you're like my grandfather.
And they're using words like decency and they're using familial terms, as I think a kind of a hack and an attempt to bypass our reason and our obvious understanding that what's being Well, I mean, there are negative things about family, but the worst possible version of family, some sort of dreadful genetic trap, some land of shadows and dishonesty, not a world of nurture and decency that we're being presented with.
And as you said with the WHO treaty, they are signalling their despair.
Even the sort of risible Figures that populate the stage, whether it's Biden himself or Kamala Harris, I feel like are almost an archetypal indication of the level of decay and inefficacy and desperation.
What is this you're presenting us with at this point?
What is your argument?
What is your vision?
What is your claim?
Right.
I'm stunned by this every day, right?
I'm told by people with a straight face that I, you know, I'm required not to vote for Bobby Kennedy because it could elect Trump.
And my feeling is, first of all, that's not a good argument.
But even if it was a good argument, you have an obligation to run a plausible candidate before you even get to utter those words.
You think I have to vote for a senile guy who even back when he was competent was a crook, right?
This is an absurd argument.
If the Democratic Party was really that afraid of Trump, then the point is they would put aside their influence-peddling racket in order to run somebody popular.
Excellent.
Excellent.
And yet they aren't doing that.
So that's when it gets very confusing.
Or not confusing.
Or you see it for what it is.
It is that.
It's a bit like, you know, sort of at the beginning, at the advent of a proxy war with Russia, the layperson might go, You can't do an Afghanistan on Russia.
They've got nuclear weapons.
Won't, like, Putin eventually just nuke Britain and France and declare war?
Yeah, that's right.
That's what'll happen.
And as that slowly and incrementally is revealed, oh no, I understand this at least as well as they do.
And I'm me with all of my flaws.
God help us.
Right, I agree.
They are showing their incompetence and it is frightening.
Frightening incompetence.
So I suppose we must become, for one way or another, materially or spiritually, we must become incredibly competent by whatever means necessary, to quote that great Muslim, Malcolm X. Both spiritually and materially.
And there is a Hopi saying that I'm very fond of, which is, we are the ones we've been waiting for.
Oh yes, good on them.
So, I know you have to go.
I really appreciate your sitting down with me for this and I hope we can pick it up soon.
