Russell Brand explores consciousness as the sole reality, critiquing how elites distract masses from class issues while advocating tax refusal and non-voting for systemic change. He connects his 12-step recovery from heroin to broader critiques of late capitalism, citing Yanis Varoufakis's ouster in Greece as proof of systems preserving themselves against citizens. Brand argues truth must be sought internally rather than told, rejecting the notion that comedians are superior to their audiences. Ultimately, he envisions a decentralized future retaining comforts like toilet paper but eliminating tech tyranny, suggesting spiritual awakening requires dismantling the ego's trauma-based deities to foster genuine community connection. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Empire Illusion00:09:36
What's up everybody and welcome to Flagrant and today we are joined by the brilliant, the glamorous.
The Flagrant one himself.
We have Russell Brand and the motherfucking building.
Thank you.
I hope that you know you've not brought me here to f ⁇ me up and annihilate me.
That's why I came in camouflage.
All reality is held within your consciousness.
There is nothing that you are aware of that you do not know about.
Whether it's the Big Bang or the dinosaurs or political assassinations or quantum physics, all of that exists within your individual awareness.
That is anticipated in all of the great ideologies.
In Islam, in Christianity, in Buddhism, they tell you this.
It's an illusion, but you have to participate as if it is real.
You have to find the beauty in it.
You are creating reality while you're living it.
You are God.
Thank you.
Can I say something to you real quick?
Hi, this is also Bear.
I have Bear Here.
Hey, buddy.
Good boy.
Why don't you cooperate?
He's meant to be an emotional support animal, you know what I mean?
But I got, like, I went to the doctors and got an emotional support animal card.
And you have to support him every day?
That's how you do it.
These are unrelenting support that he requires.
I double bluffed myself, though, because I went to get the dog so that I could take him places.
But then I realized when I can't take him places, I'm antagonized by it.
And it freaks me out.
So I actually do require an emotional support.
That's how I found out.
You need another dog.
You can't take it.
Now I need two dogs with a meeting so big to take anywhere.
Like you can't fly with this guy.
It makes you nervous.
Yeah, you gotta run a private jet.
He's just sliding around.
It's gonna be a whole thing.
He's scampering about the place.
You'd be better off with a terrorist.
At least there's a chance.
Because they say you can't negotiate with terrorists, but you actually can.
Yeah, just give him a chance.
That's what you have to do.
What are your needs?
What's the historic problem that you're trying to address?
Otherwise, what's going to happen?
Cycle of violence.
Perpetuating a cycle of violence.
Right.
So I might get an emotional support terrorist.
I don't know.
I'm like, what if he don't cooperate?
Listen, I've got doubts about the outfit.
I'll tell you now.
It's one of those things I put it on.
I felt confidence.
Then I see myself in the wing mirror in my car and I thought, you look like Randy Savage, you know, the wrestler.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We melt.
I keep doing that.
I keep dressing, thinking I'm looking cool, but it's always a wrestling.
I went to a slim gym.
No, this shit is fire.
Yeah, I like that.
I love it.
Take that.
That's it.
It's closed.
Yeah, you've got black American approval right now.
You're black America.
So sorry for the colonial history.
I'm going to look at the floor until you say it's okay for me to look up.
You're good.
We've got to have another conversation.
The whole continent.
Shultz, Dutch.
Fine.
European.
I think, yeah, it's like probably German.
It's Russian, actually.
Well, he's actually.
And you should apologize to me.
To whom?
To everybody.
Germany.
They made it.
Well, they didn't start it.
They exacerbated it.
Have you seen that Doug Standhub joke?
Go on.
No, you're not.
He goes, you know what?
Germany did London a favor by blowing it up and they rebuilt it the same way.
That's funny.
Man, that brilliant man.
You were my first YouTube wormhole.
Oh, nice one.
Thank you very much, I think.
That's a compliment.
That is a compliment.
I forget which special you were touring in the States, but you came and you did all these interviews on morning shows, daytime talk shows.
I think it was Messiah Complex.
Was it Messiah?
Okay, it was Messiah.
And it was so interesting because you were known enough where you were touring, but some of these people that did like daytime TV and shit, they don't know who you are.
Right?
Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It felt like...
They were rude.
But this is what was beautiful about it.
You would come in and they were kind of like, they didn't really take you seriously that much.
And then you would fucking steamroll these people.
Oh, you're very good at that.
It was so fucking satisfying to watch.
They would go, they judge you by the shit that you wore.
And you did lean into it.
You wore some wild shit.
And they thought you were like this rock star dude, whatever.
You didn't take anything seriously.
And then you would fucking pommel these people, charm the chicks.
You're flirting with the guy, even the guy's like, what's going on?
He's like, crazy straight now, you're flirting with the girl.
And like, everybody's just caught in this fucking whirlwind.
And then you're out.
And I went on this and it was just like one video after another and after another.
And I remember going, it was the first time that I saw somebody propel themselves to superstardom without a media complex, even though you were within industry.
I didn't, you didn't become famous to me from industry.
That's cool.
YouTube popped and then I was like, this guy's an FX show?
This guy's a stand-up thing.
You know what I'm saying?
And now that's how people become successful.
That's brilliant.
That's good.
Cause that means, I think in an indirect way, very indirect, because it doesn't seem you're explicitly saying it at all.
You're giving me some, if not all, of the credit for your rise.
Well done, my mighty prodigy.
I was like, I was just done liking you.
I thought he was going to say for your own rise.
And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then you took it away.
Come on.
I've got to take credit for stuff that I'm not connected to at all.
Although, if you think of the British Empire, though, that's sort of what we do.
Yeah, it's on brand.
It's on brand for the whole empire.
Yeah, exactly.
Nice.
On brand.
Now, did you go to America going, I'm going to do this.
This is easy?
No.
Look, when I first came famous, I was doing movies and all that kind of thing in your country.
And like, I was really excited about it.
I'd been famous in this country where we are now, England.
Ah, Your Majesty.
Like, I've been famous here a couple of years.
When I went out there, I weren't sure what to expect, but it's the sort of, it's the heart of our culture.
So I wanted to sort of succeed there.
This is the moment I remember most.
They got me that gig hosting the MTV VMA awards.
And like at that time in your country, George Bush was president.
I goes, oh, you know, I goes, I said something like, oh, you got that cowboy fella in charge of your country.
That's very good to like, you know, give back to the mentally ill because in our country, you wouldn't be trusted with a pair of scissors, right?
And I was very pleased with myself.
And I made some jokes about the Jonas brothers and all of that.
Oh, they wear those Virginia rings.
I didn't know they wore them on their cocks.
The next day, the death threats was flooding in.
Death threats, proper death threats.
And like, it was weird because we'd had this party to celebrate.
They was doing these VMAs and the room was filled with helium balloons.
And by the time I got home, they were, you know, when a balloon is hanging at half height, you know, like just hovering, like the party's over, baby.
And I was just like looking at, I was googling my own name there.
And that's why I was infatuated by phone.
And like, it was like, I'd become like one of the most googled things in the world.
Do you know when that sort of thing happens?
No.
But it was not good news.
You keep up with that terrorist shit.
But it was not good news.
And my agent, I was with WME.
Like, he goes, well, Russell, you wanted everybody in America to know who you are.
And now they do.
And they don't like you.
Pretty heavy diss.
And that was the guy who was on 15% of that shit.
So, but yeah, that's how.
And so I came, I think, I didn't, like, I came adoring American culture as much as, you know, we're all aware of what the sort of corporate and financial aspects of American culture and how that sort of contributes to problems that all of us are experiencing at the moment.
But still, the front of house shit is amazing.
And we all want a little bit of a lot of people.
What do we adore about it?
I think some of the greatest geniuses of contemporary art have like a mood emerged out of America, the thing that you and I do, like all, you know, the folk artists, like stand-up comedy, the best practitioners of it, with a few notable exceptions, come out of the United States, the musical legacy, what's emerged from that culture.
It's created things that are before it, there's this sort of like aristocratic, jaded cultures.
This is like the sort of birth of a different type of hustler intensity, true melting point, a true global society.
I mean, the tragedy is, it seems to me that it has become corporatized like no culture ever before.
That everything, whether you look at sport or music or comedy, everything is commodity.
And I think like the area that like, you know, we, if I may say, are working in now is an attempt at least to have a new frontierism, a new pioneering spirit to operate in a place that ain't been fully, yeah, to check it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You took the wind out of his sail, though.
He was gone.
And then he was like, you just said that shit.
Fuck you.
But, you know, you've got to have different meters, ain't you?
You've got to have a rhythm section.
Not all big guitar solos.
Exactly.
He's doing a bunch of cool way to.
Yeah, I wonder if the goal is to say the exact thing that you want to say and how you want to say it.
Yeah.
You can't do it within a corporate system because they have to answer to too many people, probably.
Yeah.
Right.
And if the exact thing that you want to say isn't going to be acceptable to the masses that are consuming that corporation's content, then you only have one other option, right?
I think you're operating at a really interesting place with what you did with your special and all that.
And I see when Louis came on and like you sort of talked about like, because I was aware that he was doing stuff like that a little while ago.
And like, I've, I think this is how we're going to operate now.
Like they call it, don't they?
I guess you lot are all there'll be members of your team that are across it.
I'm trying to scan who they all be because they all look, is it you, mate?
Like things like internet free and that.
Like it's like now we will deal directly with our degree.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because like for me, like one, it's amazing to go through something like that, a studio system movie, to do a movie that's been made by a big studio.
They take you in a room and like there's all posters of your face.
Which poster do you think of your face is the best one?
Like, you know, I like them all.
All these posters of my face.
Addiction and Pain00:12:22
It's so, it makes you kind of delirious and mental.
But as a friend of mine who's like a film star, he said, he goes, you realize in the end that all of that stuff, the billboards on sunset, that's just an inadvertent symptom of someone else making money off you.
Yeah.
That's all that is.
But like sweet little narcissists that we are, we think, I'm important.
I'll show them I'm not a tubby little boy anymore.
But you know, you're trying to get over the childhood obesity.
Who would come to a fucking interview in this dressing gown unless they were a fat child?
No one.
You wouldn't come in an house coat in a sex worker's lingerie.
Yeah, I didn't know about men having eating disorders until you.
Another area where I was at the forefront.
You sort of pioneered, yeah.
Hold on.
Hold on, hold on.
This is, I think, you taking Indian culture again.
No, no, it's bulimia, not anorexia.
Yeah, but still your eating disorder.
Food we paid for.
You crazy?
That's fair enough.
You just said eating disorder, the umbrella.
Bolemia specifically, though.
Got you.
I got you.
Beneath the umbrella.
I understand more than anorexia because at least you get to taste it.
Yeah, but you got to vomit.
That's a whole, I mean, you can speak to it better than we can, but that seems awful.
If you've brought me in here as a vomiting consultant, all this flattery.
Like, yeah, I did like with that addiction modality.
We got to butter you up a little.
Show you some nice stuff.
Are you brilliant?
I won't store your interview.
You are brilliant.
How many fingers does it take?
Not too much butter.
You also can speak about vomiting in a way that I can.
Let's get into it.
Now, like, I reckon the sort of I, that model of addiction is a very useful model.
I feel like, see, I'm a 12-step person.
That's like how I stay clean from the old drink and drugs now.
And once you look at how your addiction issues began, there's a sort of a biographical component where you go through your past, you look at how you was as a kid.
So retrospectively, I can recognize that the way I was eating chocolate when I was a little kid, the way I was watching TV when I was a little kid.
All them things are the tendencies of addiction.
And as soon as you find the appropriate object or an effective object, like smack, like in heroin in your country, and crack, I think that's a ubiquitous term.
Cracks have been globally branded.
We've accepted that.
Their agent's amazing.
Yeah, we all accept it fully.
Like those things, they are a shortcut, the shortest gap between two dots.
But like the behavior and the tendency is already latent and present.
You can sort of see it in all sorts of things.
So I reckon that eating disorders, even though they're more complex in some ways, because food is life-giving and anorexia seems like a bizarre and awful reversal of the process of nurture.
I heard an anorexic person's parents say that once.
It's as if they're undoing and reversing all of the things that we gave them, all of the food and the care and the love is being undone.
Yes, fucked up as a novel.
But yeah, the bulimia thing, I reckon when I was in treatment, in the first couple of days I was in treatment, I was like on a drug called Subutex, the sublingual opiate blocker that helps you come off of heroin.
And on the first night there, I like, there was like a packet of biscuits in my room and I ate all them biscuits and puked them up.
And I thought, fucking, that's really weird that I've done that.
And I remembered that I'd not done it since I was about 14, 15, which was when I started to use drugs addictively.
So in a sense, we were all looking for an expression of something, which is why another like little note within the rubric of addiction philosophy is that the genesis of addiction, longing, craving, yearning is a very powerful force and can be directed to something.
You know, what is drive?
What is yearning?
What is longing?
It can be, if you live in a culture that will direct it, it's very, very powerful force, very, very powerful source.
Go on, undercut it, undercut it.
Do the undercut.
And I'll have a fucking undercut.
Sorry.
I'll get to that.
That doesn't bother me.
What I need is caffeine.
Thank you.
Was it society that you were craving something from?
Or was it usually it's like childhood stuff?
So you say you're craving something.
Have you identified what it was you were craving with the with this addiction?
I feel like Akash that there is a sort of emptiness, hollowness at the heart of us.
Why did my pronunciation elicit laughter?
I think he thinks you're about to call me out on something, which you might be.
I know I'm not.
I thought you were going to call Akash empty and hollow.
If you knew how much weight he has gained in the last few months, he is anything but empty or hollow.
It's marriage, you know?
It fucking fills you up.
Fills you up in every way, stretches you out.
Addiction is pain.
Addiction begins with pain and addiction ends with pain.
And it probably given what do you the most basic, I want to say, palette of emotions are going to be familial, I suppose.
So it's going to feel like a sense of loss or lack.
But I don't want that to sound like a critique of my own parents.
Not that I can imagine either of them watching this.
But like, you know, I don't want them to, God, they've suffered enough.
Don't say it the wrong way.
Yeah, yeah.
They're elderly.
Undercutting now.
It's a race to the bottom.
Where will we end up?
So I reckon, yeah, I suppose it's an emotional thing.
I mean, that's the treatment of addiction that I am familiar with is an attempt to address the underlying cause that is normally pain, sense of low self-esteem, worthlessness, all things like that.
But I find these things to be pretty common among people outside of addiction as well.
And actually, the solutions that recovery provide are effective for, you know, for people that don't have an explicit addiction.
Because if you've had that bulimia, I'm sure all of us have some sort of attachment, something that we're using to hold ourselves together.
And if you find something that operates successfully within your culture, then you're all right.
You know, no one cares about comedy, making money, until latterly, pursuit of consensual sexual relationships, all those kind of things were like, they're sanctioned.
It's only when you do stuff that fucks you up in an evident or criminal way that it's a problem, isn't it?
Okay, so you remove those things, but you need to find something to transfer that addiction to, I imagine.
Yeah.
Okay.
You wake up, if you will.
Is that fair to say?
It's exactly 100% accurate, Andrew, because the 12th step of the system of recovery I believe in is having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps.
It's about awakening, the suggestion being that you are in some kind of stupor.
Now, if it's alcohol or drugs, I suppose that's obvious, but we can all become spellbound through attachment.
We can all find things to sort of hypnotize us.
And this awakening is an awakening to the reality of who you are in both its beauty, but also in its trauma and its flaws.
And what about an awakening to like what existence is?
Yes, I suppose that would also be true.
But tell me how.
How we fit within existence.
I guess what I'm trying to say is like, I have certain friends who have woken up, if you will, and they got there because they experienced some traumatic shit maybe as a child or throughout their life, and they were incredibly depressed and sad.
And then they distracted themselves with drugs or addiction and then realize that that drugs and addiction just continued to make them incredibly sad.
And they were forced because it was either killing themselves or finding a way to live within this structure that we call life.
And they were forced to like analyze life in a different way and forced to like figure out what their maybe purpose is or if there is even a purpose.
But they were really forced into being awakened.
Yes.
And sometimes those friends have tons of empathy for people who aren't awoken yet.
And sometimes they don't.
And my question to you is, do you see someone who's not awake yet and go, well, maybe they don't need to wake up.
Maybe they're not suffering in the way I was suffering that forced me to go through what I had to go through to wake up and figure out a way to basically continue living because it was death or this.
No, we must all awaken.
This is what I've learned from it.
I feel like I'm lucky to have had the journey that I had in terms of being a smackhead and a crackhead because those things are extreme enough to warrant intervention.
At some point, you have to stop it.
But I think what we're dealing with now are cultural modalities that keep us all sort of loosely numbed and distracted.
Like, I find it really hard to deal with drug addicts when I have to deal with them.
Like, it really bugs me and annoys me.
Sometimes maybe I'll like part of my recovery is I have to, and it's wise that I help others, right?
Help the others.
Oh, God, isn't it exhausting?
Others.
Not even them.
You're not actually me.
And I've got sort of care.
And you're still existing when I'm not there.
And I've got to do stuff.
Sometimes I'm lucky when it's locked.
When they're a proper light down on the streets, lesion covered smackhead needle out the arm missing an eye.
Oh, I'm all over them.
Oh, I'm like, Jesus.
Jesus, if it was a WWF virtual disease, like I'm over there, I'm helping a man's on, not too close, you know, like giving them everything that's required and that.
But like, what about all people have unconscious tendencies?
If you're not doing what you're doing consciously, you are likely doing it unconsciously.
Sometimes we don't know our motive, what our motivations are.
All these conflagrations, inadvertent and irrelevant, even in the quote idiots, some skirmish in the street or in a parking lot.
What is it really?
What is it really when someone gets out their car ready to kill you because you cut them up in traffic?
First, my whole fucking life and now this and now this.
And like every single bit of pain, you're willing to express it all in that moment.
So if you are awake, you are able to observe, oh, look, I'm becoming anxious now.
I'm afraid now.
If I come into a situation like this, like a sort of a very Mao environment, you are all strong, gifted people.
I'm aware, like, I hope that, you know, you've not brought me here to fuck me up and annihilate me.
That's why I came in camouflage.
Should it be required?
I could just slink off like a leopard, but like a, but like a, you know, like I'm stay conscious.
I stay conscious.
And then I operate on these principles.
If I, in my heart, am not trying to be mean to anybody, I feel like I've got a contract.
Like, so if I come in here and I've start saying nasty shit, then I feel God's got my back if I'm behaving properly.
That's what my life's shown me.
life has shown me i i ask that question more because i find it like when i'm interviewing somebody like you who i obviously respect but more so than that i don't feel like i can you at all so i'm very specific in the things that i'm asking you because i feel like you see bullshit so sometimes is required for social lubrication yes right so we do it in life we're getting a coffee this that the other but there are certain people And you almost immediately upon meeting you,
I was like, okay, there's going to be no room for bullshit right now.
So I have to ask you the things that I'm really curious about.
I can tell you the things that I'm genuinely curious about.
Even if I look dumb doing it, or maybe I look smart, it doesn't matter.
As long as it's pure and authentic, I think it works.
Yes, you have to do that.
It's necessary.
And you obviously do it to a degree naturally anyway.
Otherwise, you wouldn't have been able to enjoy the success you do, either as in this format or with the live stand-up format.
What I feel like, like, I'm what people do, and like you were kind enough to say about when I went on them normal TV shows where it's all graphics and glistening is like they think I like you're gonna be an idiot because they think like you're a celebrity person, but that's not what I'm from.
That's not, I was 30 before I made any money out of this business.
Before that, I was having to live in very, very different circumstances and I was born in different circumstances and they left my mark on me.
Now, I'm not trying to be Ice Cube here.
I'm like from Gray's in Essex.
It's sort of a bit like dull.
It's not ice cube your idea of like the rough life.
I'm sort of like ice cube.
You know how rough it was.
Oh my God.
I was straight out of Compton.
I had to knit back.
I'd left the gas on.
Back into Compton.
Put a few coins in the meter out of Compton again.
No, it's not like I'm saying it's sort of super street.
I'm English.
I'm white.
All of those things.
But what I'm saying is like that there's a degree of poverty and there's addiction and all of those things.
And then having to acknowledge like the amount of personal failings and learning to deal things like authenticity and integrity are for me incontrovertible ideas.
I'm still wrapped up and strapped up in all manner of hopeless flaws and stuff.
But what I do have now is, I think, presence.
I'm present and I'm like, I'm watching what's happening.
And also, you don't have to like, you know, make excuses for your struggles just because you're white.
Like white people have to deal with a lot.
JoinHoney Promo Code00:02:51
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BlueChew First Month Free00:03:33
When you went on the shows, if you reflect and you're honest about it, do you think you leaned into being unassuming because you liked winning them over?
I feel what I feel like if I go...
What is it winning?
Like as an adult looking back.
Like the Paxman interview I saw was a very similar one.
It's a political one.
Yeah.
But it was very, and he didn't play up the goofy as much.
But it was again, somebody trying to get him and talk him in circles and then you talk them in circles.
Do you lean into kind of being aloof?
Because you know I can win that way and the win is that much more satisfying?
Actually, I wish I could say that because that sounds really cool.
But like it's much more this.
I'm involved in a negotiation with fear quite a lot of the time.
Like, so I'm not like, I don't walk into environments and think, yeah, fuck all you.
Like, I'm like, oh, shit.
You know what I mean?
So I'm dealing with the reality of that.
I'm dealing with the reality of fear.
Like, not in a hopefully a high-pitched, anxious way, but I'm observing the fear, which I've come through training and time to regard as your body is energizing now in case you have to be fast, you know, dealing with what adrenaline is rather than pathologizing adrenaline into a neurotic state.
But I don't feel like I'm going to go in there and I'm going to fuck him up.
Although in my mind, I do think when I'm dealing with someone like Jeremy Paxman, who's like, I don't know, he's like, maybe he's like Anderson Cooper or something like that.
He's like a political commentator and he again was like trying to get you.
Trying to get me.
Yeah.
Right.
And also that stuff, the other thing is, which I like, is I believe in that stuff.
I believe that like that primarily political discourse is carried out in a way to exclude ordinary people.
And even the distractional tactics of turning people against one another on the basis of race or gender ignores the crucial arguments around class that most ordinary people have more in common with one another than they have in common with the elites that govern them.
And that's always kept off the table while they exacerbate our differences to turn us against one another.
So when I'm like actually confronting one of those people, I think, fucking no, I'm talking to them right now.
So when I'm like, I try to stay very, very calm.
And then if they personally fucking do me, yeah, that's it now.
I'm ready.
Let's go.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, because that's rude.
I'm an Englishman.
That's a gauntlet around the chops, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So what it is, is I don't go in there sort of overly confident, but I do go in there with a sort of a set of beliefs that I sort of hold on to.
So something like that morning joke.
I weren't in a very good mood, actually, that and that morning.
Yeah, yeah.
That one where it's that lady with the blonde hair, Micah.
You know, like when like when I went on that, I didn't feel that good.
And now I weren't particularly happy with the trousers I was wearing, to be honest.
And like, so like when on top of that, they was started mugging me off.
I thought, oh no.
And yeah, they thought that they were trying to have like, I think they thought they were going to have fun with you.
Like they thought that you were going to come in, they were going to tease you.
Yeah, you were going to be the clown and they were just going to kind of laugh at you.
You didn't look that happy going into it, which is always funny when you're trying to convince people to come to your happy state.
You know, I'm terrible at that.
And, buddy, there was a moment where you just decided you're like, okay, well, this interview is about to get taken over right now.
And I'm going to tell these people who I am, and it's going to be really interesting.
And they fucking folded.
Yeah.
They got nothing to lock at them people.
No disrespect to them.
They're probably all like beautiful human beings.
No, didn't he kill his secretary or something?
Well, that doesn't seem right.
Was the secretary particularly inefficient?
Was there a tribunal process?
Was there an opportunity to discuss KPIs?
You're not delivering in these straight to execution.
Nihilism to Presence00:15:39
Yeah.
No.
Not enough justice on an individual level.
So, how can we make sure that you don't run for government so you can still do the great things that you're doing?
Well, because people are going to fucking beg you to do it.
I think I've got to watch the old ego.
Same as you.
How do you check it?
It's not going well.
It's out of control.
I'm going out wearing nighttime clothes for southern bells.
I'm going to dress like a Tennessee Williams heroine and a wrestler combined.
I mean, I suppose how, how I'm going to do it is like, I remember this.
Like, this is what I fundamentally believe is that those sort of systems with an apex person, like, you know, presidents, prime minister, monarchs, that's not representative.
The centralization of power is not a solution.
So, if, like, this happened before in our country, I did when I'd done that Jeremy Paxman thing, mate, like, like, there was a lot of suddenly a lot of heat, and I'd say, stuff, there's no point voting.
You'll get the same sort of party anyway.
They're all paid for in corporate interests.
It's all bullshit, right?
And it really blew up, and they talked about me in the houses of parliament in our country and all of that.
And what I should have thought, what I should have thought was, oh, this is amazing.
I'm voicing things that a lot of people are feeling.
And I did feel that for a while.
And then I thought, you're really important, Russell.
And what do you think is important?
Then it went all wrong.
It vibrated too quickly and I span off out of the road.
So, like, I won't, I'm not going to do that again.
In a sense, how do all of us manage the challenge of knowing that we are infinitesimal into?
Well, perhaps by not being able to pronounce a single word.
But this is, yeah, this is the dark shit that go goes.
Know that you are infinitesimally small, but also that all reality is held within your consciousness.
There is nothing that you are aware of that you do not know about.
Like, oh, whether it's the Big Bang or the dinosaurs or political assassinations or quantum physics, all of that exists within your individual awareness.
It's like, I think the trickiest thing about like essentially waking up, and I've seen a lot of celebrities sometimes suffer this.
I think Jim Kerry suffered from this.
When he woke up, he got dark.
When he realized, I think his coping mechanism for the world was, well, nothing's important.
Nothing matters.
And when you start really believing that, you go, oh, fuck, well, nothing matters.
Well, why should I wake up?
Why should I go to the grocery store?
Why should I be in a cloud?
The nihilism is crippling.
The nihilism is fucking crippling.
And there's another side to it, which I think he's at right now, which is like, okay, nothing matters, but life is what we make of it.
And we need connectivity.
We need relationships.
We need community.
It makes us feel good to help one another and treat one another good.
So, like, but getting from nihilism to this is important.
What a fucking joy it is that we get to be here.
A lot of people don't make that jump.
That's fucking tough, man.
But we have to make that jump, Andrew.
And there's a reason to make it in that jump is anticipated in all of the great ideologies in Islam, in Christianity, in Buddhism.
They tell you this.
It's an illusion, but you have to participate as if it is real.
You have to find the beauty in it.
You are creating reality while you are living it.
You are God.
The father and I are one.
It's like trying to tell you simultaneously, yes, it's meaningless, but you invest it with meaning.
You create purpose.
The Tao.
You are the path that you are walking.
So, in a way, Jim Kerry's got no excuse for going all dark.
Still, but he's doing the mask.
Not that one with a scratchy poster.
We want Ace Ventura.
Not when you go all scary.
I mean, like Jim Kerry, bona fide of genius, hey, like proper old school fucking physical comic genius vibrating on a very, very high frequency.
His fascination with Kaufman, a situationist.
Kaufman's work is about, oh my God, none of this is real.
It's ridiculous.
We could just do anything.
We can make chaos.
You can suddenly stop participating in the sanctioned rules of reality.
It will fall apart because it's consensual.
Faith is a component of the fucking stock exchange of economics, science itself at its most fundamental levels.
The level of quantum physics requires consciousness and belief in order for it to collapse between waves and particles.
You know, so what the challenge we have is to invest it with meaning while recognizing it's meaningless or as Christ says, in the world, but not of it.
And I can see how, my personal opinion, I can't, on my own, I go fucking mental.
I go, I fall down a hole into the solipsism and the nihilism.
I lose my connection.
I lose my erection.
I become unbearable.
I become unwearable.
I can't live within it.
I need meaning.
I need connection.
And the only place I can find it is if I sort of think, oh, fucking hell, Andrew's a human being the same as me.
He's got the same life as me.
He's got a pass.
He's got things he's having to carry.
Every single person I look at, they're the same as me.
They've got to carry on living their life.
And it don't seem like that when I'm lost in my own solipsistic self-obsessiveness.
But like, that's why that 12-step stuff's good, Andrew.
Because on one level, it says, awaken, awaken to the fact that your life in the past was unlivable.
And now the secret, be of service to others.
Don't live a life.
You know, and I'm not, I have no means got this cracked because I still spend a lot of my time thinking, I want this, I don't want that.
The devotee of my preferences dedicated to what I want and what I don't want.
But thankfully, I've got this fucking system that continually reminds me, why are you thinking about yourself all the time?
Who gives a shit?
You're going to die.
You're going to die.
It doesn't matter.
So why wouldn't you run for office?
Become the elites you hate.
Become those elites.
Get in the system and change it.
But good.
It's a great question.
I'm curious your answer, but please don't.
Don't you think that what we should do as people have to have the ability for amplification is try and find people that we think are legit and then like them shine.
Yes.
Legit sociopaths.
Okay, okay.
What if we audition them?
But what if it's this?
What if it's like we exercise our demands to a point where they have to fulfill them?
They being the elites or they being the people that are in control.
And I think that's the only way to make change, right?
Is that we just go, we want this thing so much.
That's why I loved the idea of not voting.
If everybody not voted, if we didn't vote in mass, it would be the loudest way to say this system is not working for us.
It's two-party people.
Don't they not want us to not vote in America?
Isn't that the whole thing?
No, no, no.
They want their people to vote.
They want old people to vote.
Republicans want old people to vote.
Liberals want their people to vote.
It's that's who we want to vote.
We want the other side enough.
If everybody's like, yo, this electoral college is fucking stupid.
Nothing is actually going to get done.
You're all the same.
And everybody was like, we're not voting.
It would be so globally embarrassing that things would have to change at the very least.
Yeah.
And particularly if you coupled that with don't vote, don't pay back any of your debts.
Like stop paying all debts immediately.
Stop paying all tax.
One person don't pay tax, you're going down.
But a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand people, stop paying your join this movement.
We're not doing it out of nihilistic selfishness.
It's not just some libertarian whim to save a little bit of cash back on an ATM.
This is, we're not cooperating with your system anymore.
Like your economic systems are faith-based.
These are our, and I like the use of the word demands because it's gangster, but it should be a manifesto.
Should it be?
In America, we're not allowed to say that word.
We're not allowed to say manifesto because it's all right.
Constitution, new constitution.
New constitution.
In fact, the principles are already enshrined.
Just do the fucking shit that's already written down.
Allow people to have control of their own communities, control of their own lives.
Allow people to like, there has been no vision in politics, I think, since the death of the great ideas of the last century, since the death of fascism and communism.
No one is saying this is how we could live.
You can organize and run your own lives.
People don't think that they could be spending their time in leisure.
We're all defined by our work.
Our education systems are about preparation for the labor market.
You're written off at that point.
I have a question about that.
In terms of spending your time, I'm talking about embarrassing, and you're talking about fight club.
We left.
Let's shame the politicians.
Let's kill them.
I don't see you as president.
I see you like a dictator.
I think you do way better as a president.
You dress like a Daffy already.
I feel like you would do.
Perfect.
And I think it ended really well for him on that weekend where they jostled his dead body about in the desert.
Am I still in charge?
That wasn't even female security.
You know what I mean?
That was his issue.
That was his whole year.
He only had hot models to block him.
Like, that's not going to work.
Have you ever seen like a Colonel Gaddafi addressing like some Arab summit where it's like all the leaders of the Arabian nations, they're going, listen, we need to fucking step up because the West's getting proper Larry, you know, saying like they've killed Saddam Hussein.
I don't know who's going to be next.
Well, we do now.
Poor old Colonel Gaddafi jostled along all naked and dead.
Shouldn't have happened this out of order as a human being with rights and feelings.
I apologize for that.
But you did put him in a comedic position when you said, I look like a dictator.
That's what we do here.
I mean, you get it.
You're the guy who went to MTV dressed as Bin Laden on September 12th.
You get it.
It was too soon.
That was too soon.
That was too soon.
Had you done it today?
Comedy's timing.
It would have killed him.
You don't do that yet.
That was too soon.
I apologize again.
In hindsight, when 20 years passed or whatever, pretty funny.
I mean, yeah.
That's exactly the argument I made in the tribunal.
I was saying 20 years' time, there will be streaming services that will look upon me as a kind of profit dictator.
Then we will be laughing.
I think we gravitate towards leisure.
Yeah, leisure, leisure.
Leisure, leisure.
Potato patar.
Yeah, people want to chill.
I think that if you look at the course of history, you see ancient societies and what they gravitate to.
And I'm shocked that like the British haven't figured this out yet because they've been around the world, they've seen everything in the world, and they still keep working for some reason.
But like you look at Italian, you look at the Greece, the Greeks.
The Greeks are literally just going to go, okay, we're not going to work.
And then Germany's like, do we have to bail them out again?
We're like, can you?
And they're like, fine.
And then they just keep not working.
They don't change a single thing because they understand it's fun to hang out with your family, eat nice cheese, drink nice wine, enjoy the beach.
Italians, same thing.
This idea that the French take fucking months off in the summer to do something.
This is like novel to Americans because we're young.
We're immigrants, right?
We're trying to get the money.
I think eventually we all gravitate towards the things in life that we actually do value, which is time with the people you love and indulgences, but not to a point where they are addictions.
You can't, like indulging in a sunset.
Can you get addicted to it?
No.
But it's important.
What a lovely person.
Because what you're describing, of course, is freedom, that people want to be free.
And what I like, as a touring comic, what I have noticed when you're like, and it's mostly in my country because I've not been out of travel and stuff, but like what I've learned from people is people want to be left the fuck alone.
They want to be left alone.
Just leave people alone and let them live.
Now, that sort of tends towards the kind of in your national political rubric, the kind of Republican right-wing small government stuff.
But without like the reason, the argument between the communists and the anarchists is that without some sort of centralized state power, the people have no true representative against the might of corporate and financial interests.
But of course, where we find ourselves now is that the state and the corporate world are essentially an alliance so that people have no representation anyway.
Well, you don't need the state, you need, I guess, the unions is the equal and opposite reaction to corporate power.
I reckon you're right, Andrew.
I reckon that there needs to be a confederacy of delegated power where the true democracy can operate.
So, this community, like that where you have true confederacies and assemblies, where people say, This is how our community want to run things.
This is how we're, but there is a necessity for some municipal governance.
There is a requirement for roads need to be run.
There needs to be some understanding of military, of law and order.
But my sense is that, and when they've tried these experiments, there's been some success.
Is that if you allow people to govern their own communities, they do it relatively successfully, successfully.
And the thing that perhaps agitates me more than anything else about our current establishment and our current system is the assumption at its heart of misanthropy that people are not good, that people are stupid.
Misanthropy is a hatred of people.
Like that, meaning that they don't like us.
They think we're stupid.
They think we're dumb.
They think we can't run our own lives.
That's what bugs me most of all.
That with the whole censorship of the left thing, that people aren't able to watch something and go, oh, that's probably a joke, or that's not a joke, but I don't agree with it.
They're almost infantilizing people.
Infantilizing us, keeping us numb and dumb and consuming.
So we're just a node at the end of the line.
All you are is you're just there to consume sugary food and sugary shit.
No control over your own community.
And what you described there, that model where people just live their lives according to their fucking will and their freedoms and spend time with their family.
That's not ridiculous.
That's what basically everybody wants, I think.
But how do you afford that?
How do you afford it?
Because the countries that are doing that are not in the best economic state, though they might be in the best emotional state.
Well, because you have to look at what the economic history of that situation is.
And like there was a after the 2008 crash, where the Democrat Party bailed out the banks in a way that was a fundamental betrayal of the entire ethos that they purported to have.
And in my opinion, laid the pathway for Trump's ascendancy.
What happened in Europe at that time is there's the rising of populist British party, or not British, excuse me, European parties.
There was Saritsa in Greece, like this dude called Yanis Varoufakis and his partner.
They were elected on a popular mandate of basically, we ain't fucking paying them banks back.
They don't fuck off.
Right.
And they got to, they, the people elected them.
They went to the EU.
The EU went, you've fucking giving us that money.
It's over.
And that Yanis Varoufakis, who ran it, you should have him on one time.
Like when he came on, he said that when he went to the EU, he said he realized no one in the establishment has any real power except for the power afforded to them by their role, i.e. the president of the United States or the head of the EU.
If he just goes, free money, or if he goes, like, you know, there's a spring break, you know, like you can't do that shit.
You can only do what is prescribed.
That means the system will always preserve itself.
If you ever try to act against the interests of the system, you will be removed from your position.
That's the whole point of, I'm not saying this to say that's, but yeah, that it has to be that way.
That's the point of a government.
I can't allow a person to usurp the government.
That's a coup.
Yes.
It's inherently not going to happen.
The system is self-preserving above all else.
So when you grant, when you grant systems more power, it exacerbates and continues.
This is why something like the pandemic was interesting because it inherently granted more power to the government that will unlikely be rescinded.
State power increased, corporate opportunity increased, the wealth transfer took place.
Any situation that's beneficial to the most powerful interests in the world is, you know, by definition, advantageous.
And it's, I don't know, would that mean that they would prolong it?
Would they see it as an opportunity?
Do the government and financial interests act in accordance with the will of ordinary people?
These are all questions for people to consider.
And I suppose really, it's not like we're, there's this, there's a philosopher called Mark Fisher.
He's a British political philosopher.
He dead now, killed himself.
So I suppose his ideas didn't work on a personal level.
But like, hey, it's tough at the top.
But like, you know, David Foster Wallace, he was a pretty good writer.
But in the end, I'm out.
You know, even he couldn't read that whole thing.
Oh, fucking hell.
Infinite jet too literal.
Like Mark Fisher says, but he coined the term late capitalism.
It's like we cannot even envisage a culture beyond it.
We can't even imagine what it would look like.
That's its greatest triumph to rob us of the ability to sort of go, well, what if it was like European people and we just fucking eat long into the evening and we hang with our kids?
And then immediately we do their argument for them.
But how do you economically underwrite that?
Hold on a minute.
How did the most resource, how did the most rich, resource-rich continents and nations in the world end up the poorest ones?
How the fuck did that happen?
How did that happen?
It was the British.
Strong Coffee Company Horse00:05:57
But like, that shows you that imaginary faith-based systems usurp practical ones.
It don't matter, gold is fucking diamonds and gold and agricultural land.
We're all the rich people in some cold country in northern fucking Europe.
The one, interestingly, where their use of Christianity is the individualized Protestant, work-based one rather than the Catholic, communal-based one.
Exactly.
All right, we're going to take a break for a second because listen, the coffee y'all drink is pussy.
I mean, it's from the bottom of my heart.
All y'all drinking coffee right now is pussy, bro.
You still drinking coffee from the dude on a horse.
What's the Colombian guy's name on the horse still?
Horse coffee?
It wasn't he on a horse, Al?
Colombian coffee.
What's that?
I think it was Columbia coffee.
Yo, we're not drinking that coffee no more, dude.
Folgers, yeah, I'd like to suck taint.
No, I like Folgers.
Fucking listen.
No, no, no.
You drink Folgers, you suck taint, bro.
Folgers got no adaptogens.
Folgers got crazy jitters afterwards.
Folger's got no neurogenesis.
Listen, bro.
Folgers got no C8, C10, MCT oil, theanine.
Listen, Folger's don't even got coconut extract, bro.
And there's mad coconuts where that fucking horse guy was at.
Listen, my point is this: Strong Coffee Company.
Do you know why I'm buzzing right now?
About to drop dick off?
Do you know why right now I'm buzzing crazy, about to drop dick off?
Why?
If I was on Strong Coffee Company, the horse would be riding me on the mountain.
If I had Strong Coffee Company, there'd be a horse on my back.
Like, yo, chill out.
Chill out.
Chill out, horse.
Chill out, horse.
Why don't you hop on my back?
We'll walk up and down the hills.
You can't carry me.
I can carry you because I got motherfucking strong coffee.
This is the best coffee on the motherfucking planet and it's powdered.
You snorted it?
I didn't snort it, but you could.
Okay.
You could do whatever you want.
I don't know if you can't.
You don't know if you can't.
You don't think you did.
Oh, when we're at Burning Man on the motherfucking plier, you think I'm pouring that shit in water?
No.
Caterpillar rails.
Oh, we call it coffee out there.
My point is, I've had four sips of this and I'm literally about to bench press a Samoan woman.
Wow.
I'm about to go in and I'm about to steal something from Walmart and a Samoan woman's gonna try to stop me.
I'm gonna lift her up and I'm gonna dig a hole six feet on the ground minimum.
Not gonna kill her or anything like that.
But we together will have a pig down there or one of her family members.
Listen, listen, listen, listen.
What is the point?
The point I'm trying to make is literally the best coffee I've ever tried in my entire life is available at strongcoffeecompany.com.
Don't forget to use the promo code Flagrant.
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I'm about to slap my tits.
Oh, don't, don't, don't.
Don't.
No.
Oh, my, whoa, chill.
I just hit the thing.
My point is, right now, the coffee, your coffee, when you go home, can I have a watt sucks that?
If you want your coffee to stop sucking that, okay, and start getting sucked, this is the type of coffee that gets sucked.
Okay, look at all this.
And it's powdered, bruh.
Oh, I grind my own beans.
Do you?
Do you also grab your own ankles?
Is that another thing that you like to do for a living, maybe?
Strong professionally?
Strong coffee company.
Look at all this shit right here.
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Make sure you use that promo code flagrant for that 20% off.
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Or don't get sucked.
I'm sick and tired of motherfuckers not taking their health seriously when all you got to do is drink a goddamn green juice in the morning.
You can be sexy.
Okay.
Would you like to be pure sex?
Would you like to literally walk down the street and be pure sex, girls dripping like snails?
Would you like to see women leaving snails trails on the sidewalk?
S car go.
S cargo, as Alex said.
Literally, S Cargo.
When Alex was in Paris, he wasn't eating S Cargo.
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Let's get back to the show.
Emotionally Abundant Humans00:15:45
Here's what I find tough to reconcile about that.
I can complain about that, but at the end of the day, I'm not giving up my toilet paper.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like my life is fucking creative.
I benefit from the system.
You benefit from the system.
Everyone here, some less than others, benefits from this system.
So how do you say, oh, this whole thing needs to burn down when you know at the end of the day, you're probably not willing to give up the shit that you got from this.
This is interesting.
I saw you talk about this as well, but I think this is an interesting point.
I think you were talking to maybe Taibbi about this, and he wrote this, but this idea that you could use fear to motivate people in elections in the past.
And the fear meaning you don't want your life to get worse, do you?
If you vote for that guy, your life's going to get worse.
And then for the working class, life got so bad that they're like, it can't get worse.
Yeah.
I'll vote for that Trump guy.
Yeah.
Because something's got to change.
Even Obama ran on like change.
Hope.
Hope.
Sorry, side note.
I saw your truths when Trump got elected.
He said a lot of that stuff, which I very much agreed with.
You can't, he's his, he said this.
I'm stealing your stuff, but like Trump gets me a little bit down.
Basically, the news is like, hey, if you elect Trump, things will get terrible.
But for so many people, they were like, things are already terrible.
So fuck you.
I'm going to vote for this guy to see if something changes.
So that's exactly to your point.
And that's something I really aligned with what you said.
So it's like, you can't, I think that's the great failure of the, if we will, the they, the elites or whatever.
The great failure is they let the poor people get too poor.
If they keep them at a level of comfort, you learn to love your slavery.
That's my question with the freedom thing.
It's like, how intrinsic to humanity do you think it is that we need freedom?
Or do you think we can just learn and to love our slavery and learn to be placated?
Evidently, Mark, we are a highly adaptable species.
And this is perhaps to our detriment because we will adapt to whatever conditions we have to survive in.
People adapt to war.
Famine.
For hundreds and thousands of years, hundreds and thousands, maybe longer.
I'm sure you're interested in the same kind of content I'm interested in that look at different historical human narratives.
We lived in tribal communities of 30 to 150 people.
And in our closest primate neighbors, when they hit 150, they split.
That we're not designed to live in concentrated, centrally led hierarchical cultures.
I'm not saying hierarchy full stop is wrong.
I'm saying that broadly speaking, one of the things we could be looking to when engineering social models is how did we live for hundreds of thousands of years?
What things would we like to keep?
The toilet paper, the phones?
What things do we want to get rid of?
The tech tyranny, the government interference, the inequality, the imbalance, the propaganda, the dumb entertainment, the bullshit, constant bullshit.
I'm not picking on you.
That's my genuine struggle with this is I believe all of these things, but I also know I like nice watches.
I want to take care of my wife and kids and other people.
Sorry.
What's going to be comfortable first?
That is interesting.
Human beings are individualistic.
Of course they are.
Part of the reason that I'm so devoted to these ideas is because I've not met that many people that are more individualistic than me, that are more like, do not fucking tell me what to do.
I don't like, you know, and like my starting position, anarchist calisthenics, break rules every day so that you just stay in the habit of breaking rules.
I'm not fucking doing that.
Why?
Why should I do that?
That's how I'm doing it.
You're flirting with me now.
I see you're stepping it up.
What are we?
Are we in the third quarter?
Where are we?
So like, but like, of course, that's what I'm saying.
For me, what that suggests, Akash, is that what we have to do, mate, is not have top-down dictatorial systems.
And like to your earlier point of why don't you run for some kind of office is because those systems create people that occupy those systems.
And what I believe we need are a new set of systems.
And I also, yeah, I recognize that.
I'm compromised.
I'm compromised by, it's called, I am sybaritic.
I like luxury.
I like comfort.
I grew up poor.
I like shit.
I want stuff.
You know, but I recognize that the reason that I want the watch or the attention is because there's some deeper deficit.
And once I like once in a while, when I'm about to drop a load of cash on some stupid thing, I think some little voice in me says, do you think you would feel better if you were to do something worthwhile with this?
And I'm just about ready to start testing myself on this altruism of like, would you feel better?
I say it to my wife sometimes.
And because like she's less mentally ill than I am, she's like, what if we just let like loads of homeless people live in a house?
Wouldn't we feel better than if we went on another luxury holiday?
And she, you know, I wonder, like we are told, like these same.
This is why you need a wife.
These say, thank fuck, thank fuck.
I'm not alone.
I didn't do well out there, Andrew.
Like, you know, like those same spiritual doctrines or templates that we referenced when we were talking of how do you navigate nihilism versus purpose when you recognize that you are infinitesimally small in limitless vastness, you create the meaning.
Well, by some other crazy, wacky coincidence, also in those books, they tell us that we should be of service, that we should devote ourselves to service, that that's a way that we will find purpose and meaning.
And also that our, look, we are flawed, that we are flawed.
And also, I like to remind people in pursuit of real change that we're not trying to create perfection.
We're just trying to make something better than this, just better than this.
That's all we're aiming at at first is to improve on this.
And if we think this is the ceiling, then things have got more desperate than I imagined because I think that it's possible for human beings to do better.
I don't think it needs to be about believing in one centralized figure, although you need people that are good communicators and that can make this stuff funny and accessible and are comfortable being honest.
You need that.
It's collective.
It's truly a collective endeavor.
How do you think your workspace should be run?
How do you think your community should be run?
What do you want to see?
Like, trust people.
It's the opposite.
And once in a while, there will be crushing blows of disappointment when people are bloody idiots as they sometimes are, as I sometimes am.
You know, like what I believe is and what I was taught is we're all fucking crazy, but not on the same day.
Not on the same day.
So like to look at different models.
So you can keep toilet paper and watches replay.
A minimum of free play, but we're going to be so abundant, we'll be wiping our asses on Rolexes.
We'll be throwing Cartiers away.
Have you been to Burning Man?
I didn't go because of the drugs.
You know, like even though they say there's a lot of people they're not drinking or using, I don't, the drugs and the hedonism, when I'm, I'm all right, as long as I don't see too much of it, Alex.
If I see the hedonism, I get that's going to be hard for you there.
Oh, yeah.
But there are, there are kids there.
They're like, you know, people go with their families.
There's older people there that aren't really using, but there's a lot of people using that might be like triggering.
But a lot of what you talk about is, yeah.
It gave, I don't know, when we went, I went a few times.
It gives you a lot of faith in humanity.
If everybody's on drugs for a week, people are really good to one another.
And that is like the cynical look at it.
But when you leave, you're like filled up a little bit.
It's like the closest that I felt to kind of like being awake.
And then it goes away and you get caught back up in the rat race and the things that you want to achieve, et cetera.
But if there is a way for you to like pop in and see what humans can not only, not only like achieve in terms of like interpersonal relationships, but like also build.
Like these people just decide to go to the desert with very little communication with one another and build a city where there's no money.
You can't buy anything but iced coffee.
It functions.
Dude, this is the craziest thing about it.
You were talking about earlier about like people being left up to their own devices.
In the weirdest way, it's like shockingly conservative, but nobody there would admit it.
Right.
Like it, it's or libertarian, if you want to call it, because it's basically like there's no fucking police really running around.
There's no security.
There's no rules.
There's absolutely nothing.
And people are building these structures.
Nobody dies.
One guy ran into a fire.
That was on him.
He was planning on going.
He took the name too, literally.
Literally.
But like the idea that you could go to this place and like people are doing all these drugs, et cetera.
But they say that you are relying only on yourself.
And when you rely only on yourself, you go, oh, shit, there's no safety net.
I better not take too much of that because I could pass out in the desert and die.
Oh, shit, I better take some food because everybody has a backpack full of water.
When you are self-reliant, you take more care of yourself.
When the government or somebody is out there looking after you, you push it a little bit.
I feel like the system only works though because there's abundance.
And there's also a week.
Well, wait, wait, go.
Start with the abundance thing.
It's a function of time also, but like once there's genuine scarcity, like all of a sudden all the hugs and kisses go away.
No, no, no, 100%.
100%.
What it looks at for me, I'm looking at it as not a way that we can live life.
You cannot live life like this, but it is what humans are capable of.
So that to me really just opened me up.
I was like, oh my God, like in the right circumstance with abundance, humans are willing to share and help.
Oh, yeah.
It probably existed like that in communities.
But keep in mind, keep in mind, like I'm from New York where with abundance, people hoard still.
Right.
So I'm like, every second I walk out of my house, someone's trying to find a way to get money out of me.
Hey, you want to support the environment?
Hey, you want to do this?
And then I go to this place where with abundance, they're like, hey, can I feed you?
Hey, do you want to take a nap?
Hey, do you want to massage?
And they're not asking for any money from me.
And it was this fucking huge shock to my system to see that humans even wanted to do this for one another.
Will it go away in a week?
Absolutely.
Is there like a very tuned down version of that that maybe we could get to?
That would be awesome.
Yeah.
And it shows that a value system other than an economic one, or at least a financially motivated economic one, is applicable.
And also, that we can be bold in the types of visions we have.
I suppose when we're utopian in our thinking and our conversation, the practical part of us thinks, oh, that can't happen.
Like you say, it's only for a week.
Anyone can pull it off for a week.
Anyone can pull it off for an hour.
Maybe I won't even get home from London without breaking some of the principles that I've like espoused about enthusiastically in a chair for an hour.
You know, maybe I will shout in traffic or be impatient with someone.
Certainly, there will be examples of selfishness, but at least we have an ideal.
And what I return to is the idea of having a set of spiritual principles and values that are broad enough for people to approach them in their own way.
And the spirituality is a kind of a personal declaration, not you should be doing that or you shouldn't be doing that.
Just like, this is how you might live.
This is how philosophers used to take it in the classical world.
It's almost like you don't know something's possible until you see it.
And then once you see it, now you believe it can be attained.
You know what I'm saying?
So like, if maybe before that, I didn't know it was possible for somebody to just give me something and not want anything back and to find joy in giving me something.
I literally didn't know that that was a real thing.
That's right.
And I'll be honest, I was quite drawn to priests because of this.
Because every time I spoke to a priest, even in adulthood, they were just like curious and thoughtful and like asked questions and like, but it didn't feel like they were trying to get anything from me.
I was too old to be able to do it.
You run into the wrong priest.
Here's another question.
Would you like to sit on my lap?
Here's another question, although shorts are a little tight.
I didn't feel like true altruism existed before going to Berningman.
And to y'all's point, maybe we're cynical because we haven't been.
Yes.
But I guess what the nice thing about seeing it, and I've spoken about this before, but even seeing it myself, and unfortunately, I got this feeling through a drug, but maybe you experience it through drugs as well.
It's like instead of the drug making me just feel good and everything was just about me, me, me, I did Molly and I found out what it was like to feel like full and have extra joy.
And with the extra joy, I was calling my parents and saying how great they were.
I'm calling my friends.
I'm just sharing the love.
And I was like, oh, is this what humans do with abundance?
Is this what humans actually do when we have more?
And if we're constantly put in this position where we have to strive to get more, where we don't have a nice enough watch, we don't have a nice enough car.
We don't have a nice enough house.
And once we do get that house, there's somebody with an even nicer one.
If there is, I don't know what the system is.
And I don't know even if, even though if it's a psychological change, but if we're put in the position where we have enough and that enough is set much lower, with this extra, we will share.
Well, to maybe this is Russell's point in the end, to the in the end, maybe the abundance is emotional.
It's not physical, you need what you need.
But if you feel emotionally abundant, then you give.
If you don't feel emotionally abundant, no matter how financially abundant you are, you're just filling those voices.
But if you feel emotionally abundant and you have enough to survive, then you give.
I have enough to survive.
I feel emotionally abundant.
Why don't I give?
And that is the idea of like a priest or like a mother Teresa whoever.
That's why Catholicism or Christianity works, like unconditional love from the Father.
You can get filled from God.
Yeah.
Now, what do we do?
And that's why people say it's a control, not they say all religion is to control the poor people because it fills them up and I can still keep being abundant.
Shit, I can keep all this money there filled up in the world.
Populist views in a cynical view.
That's it.
So then what happens when you replace religion in America with money, knowing that there's always going to be somebody richer, there's always going to be somebody with more things, and having the most things is what makes you feel the most fulfilled.
You're going to have that scarcity.
You're going to have people robbing each other.
Like you're going to have people committing violent acts to attain some of those resources.
Yeah, it's a weird thing.
Like we've completely shunned religion in America and we feel like we're like these philosophers by saying like, oh, religion doesn't make sense or whatever.
Whether it makes sense or not, which is what you were saying earlier, if it provides emotional stability to people where they actually treat one another better, isn't that a better system?
If you meet and spend real time with a truly religious person, you will never knock religion again.
You just won't, because you'll be like, oh, this is the good it can have.
God bless you for being religious.
Good for you.
That's what got you there.
But just like any system that will fucking abuse it, just like with capitalism, we'll get abused.
Just like with communism, it gets abused.
We're abusers.
That's what humans do.
So it's like the internet.
Any tool that's powerful can be misused.
God is the most powerful idea on earth.
Of course, it can be misused, but that doesn't mean you get rid of it altogether.
You still see the good in it.
You in particular with the internet, see the good in it.
Whenever I think about like, ah, this whole thing is shit, get rid of it.
I'll think about great points you've made about the internet, not only our livelihood, but like other things that it's brought.
And I'm like, I guess it's not all bad.
It's just how you use it.
I think religion is the same thing.
It's incredibly powerful.
So it can be misused in the worst way.
But used at what it's supposed to be, it's a beautiful thing.
See, what you're saying, it seems, is that religion is something that can only be applied to spiritual ideas.
But in fact, religion is a sort of a set of principles that can be applied anywhere.
And to your point about money there, Andrew, is that if you, when Nietzsche says God is dead, people forget that what he means is God is dead and there's not enough water in the world to cleanse our hands of the blood that we've spilled, that man is religious.
So if you take away the idea that God is a set of values that are about altruism, kindness, mutual support, a set of principles that make it easier to deal with the fact that we're alive and we're going to die and everyone we love is going to die.
So here are some ideas that have consistently been found to be useful.
And I really love your point that when you're around a religious person, you feel its value.
You feel its value beyond rationalism and materialism.
The Enlightenment gave us a set of principles, many of which were incredible.
It gave us what I believe to be the false markers of progress around science and medicine, technology and medicine.
Because we have progressed so evidently, unignorably, and indefatigably in these areas, we are unable to see that in some areas, we have stayed the same or even possibly regressed.
If you extract these principles from our life, love, kindness, care, you create a kind of nihilistic abyss is what emerges.
And like you see that when you've talked about your experience of Burning Man and how it gave you a vision for how things might be, it brings, I believe, an important point to the forefront.
Beyond Material Progress00:14:24
We're told that our cultures and societies are neutral.
They're not neutral.
It's not just like this is what it is.
That's a set of values that have been arrived at because they are beneficial to a certain remember when we touched on the pandemic a moment ago.
Sometimes we think the system is broken.
Well, when you think the system is broken, look at who it's working.
It might be working perfectly.
And if you find that it's working really well for the most powerful interests in the world, do you think that that is a coincidence?
Or do you think that the system is perhaps a reflection of their intention?
And when you see an alternative vision, like the famous example in our culture, you know, there's nylon, you know, simultaneously, they invented that tech across the Atlantic.
That's why it's called New York, London, nylon.
That tech was simultaneously as if there is some ethereal connection, some unitary force that underwrites all apparent separateness.
That consciousness precedes material, that consciousness does not emerge from evolutionary processes.
Evolutionary processes emerge from consciousness.
These are the ideas of Bernardo Castrop.
He's another good guest you could have on your podcast.
The other example, and it's dumb in a way, no one could break the four-minute mile, then one geezer broke the four-minute mile, then another one does the next day.
Oh, yeah, you can do this.
I think calculus was the same way, right?
Was it really?
It's like both, they came up with it at the same time simultaneously in different countries never talk to each other.
If consciousness is non-local, if consciousness is something we arrive at at a certain point in our evolution, but the idea of a frequency that we can all be strung along like flags upon a string, then it's something that we're all simultaneously accessing.
And this point of modeling of like creating communities that function well to demonstrate to it.
The problem is, is whenever anyone starts a cult, it always goes the same way.
You find out that Lalida's got a bunch of watches and he's fucking everyone.
Oh, no, that's why it's so disappointing when people that use those values, then you think, oh, fuck, they care about the same things.
They care about the values of sex and materialism.
They don't really care.
I suppose that's why the idea of asceticism emerges.
If you can live without sex, if you can live without drugs, if you can live without material pleasure, then perhaps you're right.
Not suggesting that everybody has to do that, but to demonstrate the value of those principles and ideas.
So I think that's a very lovely conversation between the two of you about like that the, you know, all these things are about utility.
How do you use it?
Democracy could work well.
America can work well.
Internet can work well.
God can work well.
It can work well.
And if we had to like restructure society, if you had to like sit down with a bunch of people and go, like, what is the best system to get the best out of people?
The best treatment of people, even if you want to just extract all their resources.
But like, what was the best way to control these people?
Making them value God, being like the coolest person in the city is the guy who shares the most, cares the most, like wants to help the most.
That makes you the coolest guy.
Oh, he's the most helpful.
Value the immaterial and I'll value the material.
And I think it's like, it's a, it's a brilliant system.
I don't know why they went away from it.
Why is there this push away from religion?
If you were a rich guy that is just greedy and wants to take all the money from it, why would you shun God?
If anything, double down on it.
Yeah, the people who misuse it, I think, turn those people off.
But yeah, I was even thinking Christianity, the idea of Jesus eating with like the sinners.
And you know the line better than I do, but like the compassion that teaches.
If God is eating with these people and breaking bread with these people that are supposed to be untouchable, and that's like, oh, how can I?
Why would I be above that?
Why would I be above being compassionate toward these people?
The issue with religion, though, like governmentally, is that it's ascribing power to something beyond the government.
So you have to somehow hijack that or have some sort of like church and state like unity or manipulate it because you can't change what God says.
It's like in China, it's like, the religion is the state.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
What about this?
We've seen, I forget what I was watching when you were talking to, and we were talking to about like channeling.
I don't know if it's God.
I don't know if it's a higher power, but like I remember certain moments in my life where I've seen something and I felt like that person was attached to a higher power for that moment in time.
I mean, I remember my brother who's had, you know, a lot of trouble with mental illness, schizophrenia, that kind of stuff.
I remember he was playing drums in a jam band at the Blue Note and he went on a riff.
And I thought that I thought he was God for a second, man.
Like it was like, I've never experienced anything like it.
And the entire room is like watching this happen.
And he is operating with this band, but clearly to everybody else in the band who has played with him all the time saw it happen and they were like, what the?
It was his solo.
And they were like, what is happening right now?
And he was so lost in it.
I think he had his eyes closed.
I don't even know if he knew what was going on.
And I think you see this happen.
Sometimes you see it happen in sports.
Sometimes you see it happen in music.
Sometimes you see it happen in comedy.
I'm sure we can all think of like moments where maybe we even felt like something is happening.
I'm not in control of all this.
There's something else going on.
And what do you think that is?
I think that there is a unitary force under things.
And I think when you get out of the way, it comes through you.
And I think when we're describing genius in athletics or arts, what we're describing is that process exactly of channeling that the person just gets out of the way.
Because when you see it in sport, you think, how does that person do that?
That's impossible.
That's what genius is.
It's the defiance of a rational undergirding.
You know, we'd like to think, oh, well, if you train and if you do this and if you do this, and then you will arrive at this point of excellence.
But sometimes people are just amazing.
And sometimes it kills people to hold on to that because there are so many examples in particular, you know, like, why do you think all them people are killing themselves and becoming drug addicts?
It's a very bright thing to hold on to that.
It's a very hard thing to hold on to that, particularly if you live within a model that denies its existence.
What would God really be?
All the ways that we discuss God are symbolic ways of discussing God due to the nature that is by it's necessarily beyond language.
But what would it be?
It's a bit like a father, it's a bit like sort of a light, it's a bit like the force of consciousness.
It's not like any of these things, actually, but we know it when we see it and we know it when we feel it, and we know when you feel that something is more important than you, when it comes to you through love.
And what is love really?
I believe love is the bodily acknowledgement of oneness.
You love a sports team, you love a pair of shoes, you love your wife or your child or whoever it is, and you feel in that moment, like that molly moment that you described.
You thought that I've got so much, I just want to love them.
I just want to love them, I'm connected to them, I'm not separate.
But our culture doubles down all the time on the worst values: the greed, the selfishness, the separateness, the competition.
All of those things can be useful assets.
And we've all had to, in various ways, learn how to use that stuff in order to not be crushed.
You know, because if you don't know how to do that, you will be crushed.
So, like, but like, what is God really?
Unity, a loving oneness.
Does it have a charge?
Is there an energy to it?
What is this phenomena, really?
Well, it seems from some of the conversations that I have recently that the material model no longer holds up.
You cannot describe and define how the universe emerges and functions using solely a material method because of some of the obvious examples in quantum physics.
Because when someone takes psychedelics, you would think that there would be more neurological activity, not loads less of neurological activity.
Does that happen?
Yeah, when you under bro, yeah, under neurological scan, if you give someone a powerful psychedelic and they go, oh my God, I was in this world and I met this orb of light and these Faber J eggs of pure consciousness were talking to me and I met Muhammad, peace be upon him.
Like under a scan, what's happening is nothing.
Like, so what is it?
It's almost like what's happening is the removal of the systems of restriction and there is God.
That is, that makes sense.
That makes sense when you're saying, get the person out of the way.
Yes.
Oh, shit.
So when you're just like, I guess I'm curious, like with channeling, how can you trust that you are channeling some type of like positive cosmic deity that's there for good and not some type of like, and I don't want to like ascribe like demonic because that puts it in like a Judeo-Christian sense, but like some type of negative cosmic energy.
Like, you know, like you mentioned just in like the beautiful example of your brother in a flow state doing that drumming, but you're that's what some people call it as well.
Yeah, yeah.
What you've also mentioned is that your brother has problems with mental illness.
And isn't it curious that it's the you know dictators and the mentally ill, the people that claim that God is talking directly to them.
You know, and like what I feel like is that we, all of us, when it says do not worship engraven images, the engraven image that we worship is the image of the self.
I have created this little inner deity called Russell through trauma and memory and biochemistry.
And this has become the most, this is my God.
What Russell wants is my God.
When this is suspended, either through the use of narcotics or breath work or meditative practice, there is nothing.
There is like a vibrant nothing that could be anything or a superstate of potentialities, which is how the quantum field is sometimes described, a superstate of possibilities.
The horrifying truth, if you ask me, mate, is that it is neither good nor bad until we make it so.
When we talk about the Tao, when we talk about the agency of the individual, when we talk about the great British painter and poet William Blake, who saw angels in the trees and tried to illustrate them both through his brush and through his pen, he says, like when he done these engravings of the book of Job, Yahweh, who is God, of course, and Job are depicted as the same being.
Like God and Job look the same.
This is a Jungian analysis by a person called Edinger.
And he says that God and the ego are being depicted here.
Job is the ego.
Yahweh is the higher self, the highest attainable self that is already impresent within you.
Because where would the enlightened man be except within you?
It's not anywhere else.
It's within you and accessible.
Yahweh shows Job here is the behemoth that I have made as I made thee.
The behemoth is a dumb carnality.
It's all mouth and sinew.
I know the behemoth well.
I know what appetite is.
Here is the leviathan that I made as I made thee, this deep, deep, this serpent of the deep.
It is suggested in this text and in these illustrations by William Blake that we must become good in order to make God good.
God is beyond good and evil in Nietzsche's phrase.
God can be all things and indeed is good things.
That's why the rather moot arguments of, oh, why would God make this creature that does this or allow cancer and all of that?
Because in the limitless oneness where all things are connected, there is no register.
If there is no space and time, how can there be any context at all?
Because everything is absolutely unified.
For a moment, when you get the ego out of the way, you channel it.
It's present.
It's impresent.
We've all got access to it.
That's one of the messages of Christianity.
It's one of the messages of Islam.
It's one of the messages of Buddhism.
Don't give it to some other person and tell them, excuse me, will you look after me?
It's there always.
So it could be either.
It could be a demonic or demonic or evil jinn force.
It could be any of those things.
That's why these myths consistently address these possibilities.
That's why I believe that any political systems that we devise have to honor spirituality, but the robustness and the transdenominational nature of spirituality, that if we might all have different ways of getting there, and like someone like you is not going to want someone like me telling you what to do.
And I think most people feel that.
I don't want no one telling me what to do.
I don't like it.
If I choose to follow some system, whether it's political or religious, then I will.
But I don't want centralized forces dominating that landscape, whether they're financial, governmental, cultural, or corporate.
Bring this shit down.
That's what America was meant to be anyway.
It was meant to be federalized.
Everyone was meant to, all these nations that established it were meant to run their own states.
Allow people to run their own communities.
This is what I feel must be the principle.
And the reason we do it is because no one has no more value than anybody else.
Well, first of all, I love that these ideas are resonating with you because it is the foundation of Hinduism.
Like everything, it's everything that Hinduism is.
I told you, bro.
Yeah, so the jets are sick, but that's close enough.
That's pure Hinduism.
Yeah, okay.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
I actually really admire that you study Hinduism.
I think it's beautiful when other people study other religions.
And I love that you are very conscious of your ego and you are always watching it.
Now, my question to you is, how do you reconcile that with the first 30 seconds of all of your YouTube videos now?
Hello there, you 5.8 million awakening.
Because you're going to generate a little bit of heat.
You've got to get people going.
You've got to get rid of the toilet paper, bro.
You keep a little bit of toilet paper.
I was a riled up listening to this.
I was like, this is the truth?
Vaccines?
Have us meditate, yo.
Let's do some truth.
We've got to do all of it.
We've got to do all of it.
We have to awaken them.
It's all of our responsibility.
And even over the course of this conversation, we've seen how there are different contributions that we're all making.
I don't think I'm any better at being you than you are.
There's no way you are the best person.
You're a miracle at it.
You're marvelous at it.
You're doing such an incredible job.
And like, I want to be left alone to kind of be me and look for opportunities to collaborate and cooperate.
And I feel like I think we're finding them right now, aren't we?
Here's my thing is you really are so brilliant and so influential.
And then to say truth is a politic as opposed to truth is the God within is the Otman is what Greg achieved, which is we are all God inside.
And Greg achieved that for a minute.
It was beautiful.
That's truth.
Yes, I agree.
And I just think you're so influential and so smart and have such a grasp of it that when you call the things you're about to say about the vaccine or whatever, all of it.
I agree with a lot of it.
It's just not truth.
Truth is this thing that you understand very well.
Yes.
Truth is a very, very complex idea.
But if you think about that, those kind of, that kind of content doesn't exist in a vacuum.
I'm like trying to address a very particular problem that there are certain narratives that are being offered.
And I believe it's part of my role to create populist connections between diverse communities, including, in my opinion, blue-collar communities in my country and in your country, so that people start to recognize, hold on a minute, there are other ways of approaching this.
And I'm always careful to say, you do whatever you think is right.
I don't think I know more than you.
Your child is different than mine.
You've got different grandparents than me.
You've got different ancestors.
I don't, like, because I'm, this is where we're luckiest stand-ups.
We get to look in their eyes.
We get to look in their eyes.
And I tell them, I don't think I'm cleverer than you.
I know you're sick of being spoken to like you're an idiot.
I know you're over it.
And I see that this is how we conduct our discourse.
We're comedians.
We're not better than them.
We are them.
We're a certain part of their spirit.
I don't say nothing on that channel I don't believe in.
And even collaboratively, the people on my team who I'm wise enough not to put on camera, Andrew, little notes for you there.
Like, you know, they don't agree with me.
So like I'm continually having to go, well, this is what I think.
They go, no, this study says this.
I actually agree with a lot of what you say.
And it's a small thing, but it gets as a Hindu, it means a lot to me that truth is not, especially because you know, truth is not something to be told.
It's something to be sought from within.
Recording Studio Gratitude00:02:03
That's beautiful.
I will honor that piece of advice and I will honor that note.
I'll take that on board.
Thank you.
You helped me to grow.
Beautiful thing.
Listen, Russell Brand, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me on your amazing show.
You're so bad.
I appreciate you for taking the time.
This is awesome.
So glad I came here.
Thank you for coming to our country.
Thank you for having me.
Brilliant.
Thank you for coming.
Thank you very much.
Okay, everybody watching at home, now that we're in this beautiful studio right here, not the one we did the KSI interview in.
That was a fucking dump.
It was basically like a Hampton Inn that we made into something that was respectable.
God bless this team.
But now we're in this decadent, ornate studio, not built for podcasting, okay?
Built for much more elevated things.
This is Fiction Studios and it is absolutely beautiful space.
And a lot of people come here.
They record albums.
They record fucking anything.
It's a recording studio and they were nice enough to accommodate us and then went above and beyond so we could have this beautiful space and we just wanted to shout them the fuck out.
Nathan at Fiction Studios, make sure you ask for Nathan, okay?
He looks like one of them twins from Matrix 2.
And he's a good man and you should, you should ask for him if you ever need to record out here, literally anything, but you have this amazing space you could do it in.
So check them out.
And then also, the way that we got in touch with it was through Yaz at Hot Patch.
Now, Hot Patch is essentially Airbnb for recording studios.
So Vala, new Yaz and Yaz made this whole thing go down with Nathan with Nathan.
So if you're ever trying to, especially if you're in London, I think they got a place in Dubai now.
They're out there in Korea.
We're trying to get them over to United States so they can work with WTF.
But Hot Patch has got your back.
UK people, you need a studio where you can record your podcast, record music, whatever the fuck it is you need recorded, you go through Hot Patch, okay?
We're partial to Fiction Studios, but they have like thousands of different places you could also record at, but record at Fiction Studios.
But if they're not available, you can record at some of them other bumass stupid places.
Just don't do it at the Hampton Inn or wherever the fuck we did that one.