Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

June 8, 2023 - On Brand

02:56:58

OB #3 - Politics of Fear, an Exercise in Hypocrisy

Al and Lauren have the joy of wading through COVID conspiracies with Brand and guest Laura Dodsworth, who has written a terrible book about use of fear during the COVID-19 pandemic, which she is grossly unqualified to write about. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand.
	I'm Al, and I know a lot about Russell Brand.
	And I am Lauren B. I actively try not to learn anything about Russell Brand.
	Entirely justified.
	Lauren, what is your bright spot this week?
	Oh, my bright spot is it's Pride Month.
	It's the most wonderful time of the year.
	It's Pride Month.
	And so everything's very gay and there's so much gay content.
	Hulu is showing pride parades for the first time I've ever known.
	It's like actually broadcast, which I think is fantastic.
	free plug to Hulu, blue, whatever. But I think it's great.
	And I've, I've been making a lot of stuff for pride months. So here's Chicago, like where I can
	sign. I made a bunch of magnets.
	I actually have I went too hard in the literal paint making this Dorothy.
	I made a bunch of Dorothy's Bornak.
	No, I will not have a nice day magnet.
	So I'm actually pressing those on my terrible web store.
	But yeah, so I've been I've been awash in all rainbows for less like A week and a half.
	It's been fun.
	But I think a lot of people are also rightly concerned that this Pride Month is probably going to get a little spicy.
	So this is also my PSA.
	In America, it's going to get a little spicy.
	I mean, hopefully everything will be fine.
	Yeah, we're getting some of that trickle over here as well.
	One circus of bullshit tends to mirror the other.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So I would encourage folks to find out if there are counter-protests or anything.
	That does make a huge difference, especially in smaller locales.
	PFLAG is a great resource for finding out what they're doing, if you want to get involved, or any other local... there's a ton of local organizations.
	I say just keep your head on a swivel, and just showing up in a counter protest does make a big difference, and that includes parades and all that kind of stuff.
	And tip the dolls!
	Go enjoy and tip the drag queens.
	Because they need the support right now, which is insane!
	Yes, there's a policy of this podcast, always tip your drag queens.
	I think that is fair.
	Yeah, so what's your bright spot?
	I'm gonna be a little bit sneaky and I'm gonna have two.
	First up is my oldest and longest serving friend.
	We're a little bit old to have best friends these days but he would certainly qualify.
	My buddy Matt got married this weekend and the wedding was just Absolutely beautiful from start to finish.
	I had a reading and I choked up in the middle of it, you know.
	Honestly, the second the bride came around the corner I was like, I'm gonna cry, I can't help it.
	And then Matt turned around to sneak a peek and just burst into tears.
	It was very cute.
	And yeah, the The whole thing, honestly.
	It was a beautiful day, weather-wise, etc.
	I will ramble on for hours if given the chance.
	It was just absolutely gorgeous and definitely will remain one of the highlights of my memories forever.
	Wonderful!
	It was wonderful, and I also got completely shitfaced, which I then later regretted.
	I sent you a voice message the next day and I was in dire straits.
	You were sounding raw.
	You earned it.
	You earned that one.
	I consumed, I know the British have a reputation for drinking, but I consumed at least three bottles of wine, and about four or five pints as well, and had nowhere near enough water, so the next couple of days were just agony.
	But yeah, you know, ultimately it's still a bright spot.
	I had such a wonderful time, and I can leave some of the blame of that.
	I had a little empathy hangover just through the message.
	I was like, oh, out!
	Honestly, yeah.
	I can lay some of the blame of that on on the groom's sister Michaela because we both have a bit of a thing about table wine you know like well it's it's that's the best kind of wine is the kind of wine I don't have to pay for and so within within five minutes of sitting down at the table she she just came and plonked a bottle in front of me it was like right here we go It's too pleasant.
	Wait, it was good wine as well.
	That was the thing.
	It had like an Argentinian Malbec.
	I was like, oh, that's lovely.
	Yeah, that split my brain in half, I think.
	My second bright spot, I have to say, has been the response to our first episode.
	Well, I say episode.
	It was released in two parts, but nonetheless.
	It's been huge and overwhelming and so many people have listened and so many people have said wonderful things and so many people have donated to the Patreon as well, which we'll get into in a minute.
	It's just been unbelievable and I am beyond grateful.
	Probably one of the most successful things I've ever done.
	I don't know about you.
	Well, I almost have no frame of reference.
	So I'm just blissful.
	I'm like just in a little I'm bouncing around in a little cloud like this is neat.
	I like this.
	Yeah, well, yeah.
	I wouldn't have expected four and a half hours of deconstructing this guy's bullshit to be so popular, but I'm glad that it is.
	Right, now before we get to anything else I do need to make a small correction from last week's episode.
	There was a moment where we were discussing Egyptology and how the pyramids were built and we believed it was slaves and we made a Red Dwarf reference about some big whips.
	Though this is still commonly believed, due to some archaeological discoveries in the 1990s there is a consensus that the workers who built the pyramids were in fact paid laborers, predominantly local farmers who were unable
	to work their lands due to flooding.
	Many thanks to Dudley for bringing this to our attention.
	Well, so I got roasted by my partner via text message as soon as he heard that,
	which I feel like supportive roasting, I'm here for it all the time.
	And I knew, I didn't have the recall at the moment, but normally I would be like, um, actually, but I prioritize the Red Dwarf comment, like in the moment.
	I'm not going to argue about this.
	I'm going to say the fun thing.
	Right, and also we have some new patrons to thank.
	We did have a donation on an elevated tier that we are yet to name due to wanting the title to come organically through the show.
	It may take me a minute to source all of the content for a good enough and long enough drop, so hang in there Benjamin and we won't forget about you or anyone else who donates on an elevated tier either.
	But in the meantime, we have several brand new Awakening Wonders.
	So without further ado, Street Rat Punk, you are now an Awakening Wonder!
	You are indeed an Awakening Wonder!
	Thank you very much!
	Thank you!
	Bunny with a Switchblade, you are now an Awakening Wonder!
	You are indeed an Awakening Wonder!
	Thank you!
	Yeah, the most dangerous bunny.
	Elias Jackoman, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you very much.
	Mike Face, hey, we know this guy.
	You are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Hey, thanks, honey.
	Appreciate you.
	I wasn't excited enough and I got in trouble, which is hilarious.
	Thank you very much, Mike.
	Nicole!
	You are now on Awakening Wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you, Nicole!
	I love you, thank you!
	This is my friend from back home that I miss desperately, and I am giving her an extra special sous-sans of appreciation.
	Thank you, pod friend Nicole, exclamation mark.
	Juan Jalapeña, fantastic name.
	You are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Also, homie, I see you.
	I love it.
	I appreciate you.
	Thank you, my friend.
	We'll see you soon.
	Lisa Bees, which is either a name, a person who really likes bees, or someone comprised entirely of bees.
	I think it's the third one.
	You are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you.
	Another vote for the third one.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's a person made of bees called Lisa.
	And finally, Michaela Peterson, you are now an Awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an Awakening wonder.
	Thank you so much, all of you.
	And if anyone wants to support us and what we do, become an Awakening wonder, or even donate on a higher tier, please head to patreon.com slash onbrand and you will have our eternal love and gratitude.
	Oh, and please note that while you can easily listen to our audio version anywhere you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube or if you listen in the Spotify app, the video should come up there too, which I think is pretty cool.
	Agreed, and the Spotify thing surprised me and is pretty neat.
	We have mixed feelings about Spotify, but that's a good feeling.
	Yeah, yeah, as a musician, my feelings on Spotify are complex at best, but I think that's a pretty cool feature.
	Right, let's get down to business and defeat some Huns.
	Right, so let's take a look at how Russell opens the show here.
	Hello, you Awakening Wonders.
	Thanks for joining me for today's fantastic show.
	It is going to be magnificent.
	Obviously, the entire conversation cannot be held here on YouTube, if that's where you're watching it, because it becomes too powerful, too truthful.
	Remember, here on Rumble, what we're interested in ...is spreading not misinformation and disinformation but truths that are challenging the centralized authority.
	There's a red button on your screen right now.
	Press it and join us on Locals.
	Become a member of our community so that I can see your comments and questions as they come up live!
	Yeah, that's why he's not on YouTube.
	He's too true, is the problem.
	And also, the only thing here is that this entire episode that we're about to cover is pre-recorded and stuck together as Russell went on holiday.
	Were I a Paid Up Locals member, I'd be pretty pissed off about that, to be honest.
	I guess he doesn't do remote.
	Well, no, I don't think we're going to expect anything from a hotel room, let's put it that way, thankfully.
	But you know, he's got his studio and his 20 crew and whatever else, and I think he wants to keep it on that tip.
	But yeah, all of this is pre-recorded, and I mean, he's back off holiday now, but this was recorded just before they went off.
	And I'm going to be honest, when I looked at this episode, when I first looked at it, I thought, ah, this is going to be a shorter one.
	That's going to be good.
	Because I found a lot of it kind of boring, particularly the interviewee.
	And then when I was cutting the clips, I was like, oh no, there's some shit here, isn't there?
	And then when I was writing my show notes, I was like, I'm getting really pissed off with you now, and you're gonna see why.
	There's a surprising amount to cover here.
	Oh, good.
	Great.
	Help me.
	Yeah, and without further ado, let's have a little glimpse into what we're going to be looking at.
	Today, our special guest is journalist, photographer, filmmaker, and author, Laura Dodsworth.
	We talked about her book, A State of Fear, how the UK government weaponised fear during the COVID-19 pandemic.
	But wherever you're watching this in the world, America, Canada, some nation in Africa, Latin America, Scandinavia, wherever, you will notice that your government, to varying degrees, use nudging, behaviouralism, propaganda, and in some cases, downright lies.
	Allegedly.
	Allegedly in order to control you.
	Obviously we cover topics that we cannot discuss on YouTube.
	As you know the WHO still got their sticky little fingers in that platform.
	So we'll be clicking over exclusively onto Rumble around 15 minutes when I'll be asking some important questions about images from horror, downright propagandist lies and all sorts of stuff.
	We're going to be getting into some COVID narratives today, baby.
	Oh, yeah.
	Though there's little to do with vaccines and more about politics of fear.
	That's the main theme.
	Fucking fantastic.
	W.H.O., famous political, like, No, I'm saying that like, you know, information, health information is political.
	Yeah, yeah.
	his whole thing, you know, it's the WHO controlling YouTube and getting people kicked off for,
	in his eyes, speaking the truth, which is complete nonsense.
	Covid conspiracies are arguably the most famous point of reference most people have for brands
	turn into right-wing narratives, so it'll be good to dissect a couple of those today.
	One of the big points that's going to be hammered on again and again is that no one should ever,
	ever use fear to influence a person's emotions or decisions.
	And with that in mind, let's just take a little look at the trailer for Laura Dodsworth's interview.
	The government operationalised a campaign to make everybody frightened.
	Laura Dosworth.
	Writer, photographer and filmmaker.
	She's written for the Sunday Times, The Telegraph and The Spectator.
	A State of Fear.
	A controversial book, A State of Fear.
	Was it favourably reviewed by the mainstream media?
	One of the worst book reviews known to man in the Times.
	So, what was Covert?
	Miss Laura.
	To not mince our words, the government used fear to control you.
	In order to make those people afraid you have to deceive them.
	In our time, and who'd have thought that we'd see it, we've seen the mass evocation of fear and propaganda to gain compliance.
	I can never trust centralised authority again in any form.
	The most basic of freedoms you took for granted are not real at all.
	If you don't want to turn off the TV, you have to watch it mindfully.
	You have to understand that it's not a one-way process.
	They're trying to influence you as much as entertain you.
	I wonder if you have concerns about what the next steps will be.
	Well, what's next is the story of humanity.
	It always has been, it always will be.
	Are you scared?
	People can be manipulated.
	Stay free with Russell Brand. See you first on Rumble.
	Are you scared? Cause that was pretty fucking scary, right?
	The words weren't, but the music was.
	The music punctuated with a boom after every point.
	Well, to be fair, so I have had a challenge.
	I am very new to this podcast game, so I've found it to be challenging not to fill in the dog whistle-y, like the dog whistles that I'm already aware of and try to just listen to what's being said.
	And yeah, what she was saying was Very disparate ideas in my mind that were just that are very fear mongery and don't make a lot of sense.
	Yeah, we'll be delving into those quite a lot.
	So for the record, Laura Dodsworth is known as a photographer, author and supposed journalist, though I can't seem to find any work of hers that escalates above being an op-ed.
	She's most famous for taking pictures of people's genitals and writing about the people the genitals belong to, which, more power to her.
	But I'm not entirely sure how her career...
	The video!
	For those listening, and I had a little bit of lag in the video while I was kind of cutting through pictures, and I didn't really see much of anything except for a hairy male upper thigh.
	Ah, right, yeah, that's one of the covers of one of her books.
	So she did a hundred things of male genitalia and a hundred things of female genitalia.
	I mean, fine, I've not got a problem with that at all.
	But what I'm not sure about is how her career up to the pandemic made her qualified to comment on either politics or psychology.
	Her educational background is unknown and kept secret, as is virtually the entirety of her private life, other than the fact that she has two sons.
	That's it.
	There are a lot of question marks surrounding this woman.
	But let's get into the interview proper.
	Thanks very much for joining us to talk about this book, A State of Fear, which is a bestselling book, I understand, Laura.
	It was.
	It was on the Sunday Times bestseller list for four weeks.
	Was it favourably reviewed by the mainstream media?
	That's funny you should ask.
	Well, actually, it's had really great reviews.
	Before I launch into some of the bad reviews, I shouldn't just start off with doing my own book down, should I?
	It had great reviews.
	You know, Lord Sumption called it an important book.
	It had reviews in Telegraph and the European Journal of Psychotherapy.
	Some great reviews.
	But the Sunday Times bestseller list didn't actually protect it from one of the worst book reviews known to man in the times.
	Known to man?
	Objectively, it's one of the worst.
	Well maybe I'm not very objective as the author but it wasn't a great review.
	So I read this book in preparation for this episode and boy do I regret it.
	If she thinks The Times Review was bad she's not going to want to hear my thoughts on it.
	In short, it's a sophomoric attempt at journalism at best, with very few things referenced, and most assertions and statements just haphazardly thrown together, usually followed by an inane question like, shouldn't we be the authors of our own stories?
	It insinuates a grand conspiracy around the COVID-19 pandemic, that the entire thing was simply an exercise to control the populace by the use of fear, and that's bad.
	The worst part, by far, is that the chapters are often punctuated by a statement or interview from someone struggling to live in lockdown during the pandemic.
	The entire purpose of this book is to leverage fear and anger against the UK government for what was a fairly standard public health response.
	This book is not just stupid, but exploitative and sickening in both its lack of responsibility and shame.
	And I must say, Laura Dodsworth, you can go fuck yourself.
	Oh, worse.
	Okay.
	Worst.
	The hyperbole that you have.
	Worst review in the history of the times.
	That alone, I'm like, all right, gal, I'm out.
	Have a great day.
	Bless you.
	You know, bless your heart, ma'am, I gotta go.
	I'm not gonna... I mean, and listen, though some of you may be saying I'm disregarding it out of hand, I think that that's fair, that that's... because it wasn't like a joke, she meant it.
	She meant that, like an adult woman said that, and in a serious way.
	Yeah, yeah, I mean, she then qualified it by saying, you know, maybe I'm not objective because I am the author, and it's like, well, Yeah, maybe you're not, maybe you're not, you know?
	Oh!
	Also there?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Just, just fuck off.
	That's my basic feelings on Laura Dodsworth, and they will become abundantly clearer as we go along.
	But let's get into the first little nugget of what they want to say.
	Mate, look here.
	We've got, uh, this is a quote from the advisor on SPIB.
	Do you know what that is, advisor on SPIB?
	Are we talking about like that nudge unit and all that type of stuff?
	I know exactly what this is because this is somebody that I interviewed for my book.
	SPI-B is the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviors.
	They're a group of social Scientists, behavioral psychologists, various social scientists.
	And what they do is give the government advice in times of emergency, such as a pandemic.
	And I interviewed several of them when I was researching my book, A State of Fear.
	And this one here broke cover, actually, to speak to me because he was so concerned about the way the government was using fear.
	Behavioural psychology.
	I mean, to not mince our words, the government used fear to control you in lockdown.
	Big scary point.
	Um, yeah.
	So their description of what this organization does is fairly accurate, but rather than the James Bond-like title of Spy Bee, I prefer to call it Spib, we'll get into that quote in a minute, but first, while still on YouTube, Brand wants to just hedge his position a little bit.
	That's fascinating, and in a sense perhaps it's something that we would have anticipated and something that we can appreciate.
	Sometimes I try to approach the extraordinary events of the last couple of years in good faith, not to the denial of what is evident and plain, that there have been regulations, legislations and advantages that have been accrued through that period that appear to point to an agenda, But at least not to leap to conclusions.
	Perhaps you and I together, through the course of our conversation, can highlight a case for how the pandemic was a revealing period.
	How we learned about how power functions, how we learn about how propaganda operates, and how we are manipulated, how our behaviour is affected by messaging.
	Ooh, hedging.
	Needless to say, once we get off YouTube and go solely to Rumble, he shifts his position quite a bit.
	Yeah, yeah, we noticed a little bit.
	Because those were all general statements enough to kind of hide your motive.
	Seems almost reasonable.
	It did reveal a lot of things.
	COVID revealed a lot about the way that our society works and the injustices.
	And about us as a species in general, yeah.
	And you could almost think, like, oh, you know what, he's got a bit of a point there.
	But yeah, we'll see the turn a bit later on.
	But now let's get back into that quote.
	Starting with this quote, Laura, that we've just referred to.
	The way we've used fear is dystopian.
	We have a totalitarian government in respect to propaganda, but all governments engage with propaganda.
	The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable.
	It's been like a weird experiment.
	Ultimately it backfired because people became too scared.
	So there was an explicit intention to use fear.
	It's interesting to note that in the end we're dealing with a basic palette of emotion.
	Rage and fear and shame and Even when something feels secular, mechanical and bureaucratic, its resources are quite emotional and deep, and that obviously raises ethical questions.
	So this kind of clip is why I thought this would be a shorter episode, because I thought, oh, this is a bit fucking dry, isn't it?
	You know, it's a little bit dull, a little bit just like, ah.
	Very standard.
	Yeah, and Bran's not got much energy to him right now.
	He looks a little bit under the weather, to be honest.
	And his voice keeps kind of hesitating a little bit here and there as well.
	So I do wonder if there was something going on.
	And also, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance going on here.
	I mean, you're like, disregarding out of hand, like, a lot of people had very good reason to be scared.
	So like, using fear, you're throwing out anyone's real fear.
	Wait until you see the things he disregards later on, because he just goes through a phase of disregarding everything.
	In the meantime, let's have a listen to Doddsworth's response.
	Wow there's so much to pick up on there but I'm gonna go back to your first point that you approach this with good faith and I think that's really important because when I wrote the book there were a lot of people that just said to me well why?
	Why would the government use fear as though it had to indicate that there was some evil conspiracy theory or agenda?
	You know there may or may not be but there's a very simple answer.
	To the question, and that is that governments use fear because it encourages compliance.
	There is a gap between your rational thoughts and your suppressed emotions, and it's that gap that allows governments or any would-be manipulator to control you, to manipulate you, to exert undue influence on you.
	And fear is the steam in the emotional engine.
	Fear is the big one.
	Is it a breach of ethics to use fear?
	I think this really depends on where you sit personally and ideologically.
	So there may be a conspiracy.
	Who knows?
	Her book, by the way, certainly seems to insinuate that there is one.
	I would like to point out at this stage that Laura Dodsworth is unfortunately not just a shithead in isolation.
	Her research and narratives have been spun into articles in The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, The Spectator and HuffPost UK.
	Her work is dangerous and far-reaching.
	And now I'm going to take her cue here to tell you how I feel, personally and ideologically, about a government using fear as a tool to promote compliance.
	In the event of a deadly airborne virus for which we have no cure or remedy spreading rapidly throughout the population, I'm completely fine with it.
	Fear is the correct fucking response.
	Personally, I can't really think of another way to properly illustrate a deadly threat to your own safety and that of those you love.
	That's just my take on it.
	However, Laura has a different position.
	I would probably put myself right at one end of the spectrum that says you should not use fear to control people.
	It is unethical.
	I have bad news about Laura's book and indeed the show that she is on.
	Here is a clip from later on in this very same show.
	Let's have a look at some more details around the story of how we're being slowly poisoned
	Like that film, The Phantom of Fred, where they make us ill so they can look after us.
	Are you ill, mate?
	Are you not very well?
	Yeah, I caught myself a dicky belly.
	Do you want some medicine?
	Not really?
	You're having some!
	Nothing fear-based at all there.
	Also, I've been listening for movies because we know that Alex Jones, as an example, doesn't really differentiate that well between reality and movies.
	I've been listening for that from Bran, and we didn't get much of that last episode, but we got one today.
	Put that on the bingo card!
	I've not seen it.
	I do not know the plot to that film, but I'm going to assume it's bad.
	The fact that he's using a film that...yep.
	Nope.
	Got it.
	Got it.
	Noted.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So nothing fear-based in any of Russell Brand's content whatsoever.
	Including the delivery right now.
	He was just intense about it and fear-mongering in real time.
	Cool.
	Cool indeed.
	If this was a laboratory experiment, if a psychologist wanted to put their fingers in your brain, reach around and use fear to control you to see what happens, then they would need to go through an ethics approval procedure.
	Excuse me, Mr. Ethic...
	laughter Yeah, that's the first step!
	laughter Excuse me, uh, Ethics Approvals Board,
	I'd like to do spirit fingers in someone's brain.
	I'd like to do spirit fingers in someone's brain.
	I'd like to take someone's brain and just mush it about a bit and see what happens.
	I get the feeling that application would be denied.
	Oh god, but... Yeah.
	Listen, nobody has the best analogies all the time, but Wowzers.
	Maybe think that one through a little bit?
	And apparently that would be a psychologist doing that for some reason?
	Not like a brain surgeon, a psychologist doing it.
	I'm picking up on that too.
	She's mixing a lot of disciplines together that are very separate.
	She will do a lot more of that.
	But wait, this analogy of hers gets better.
	You would sign a consent form.
	None of us signed consent forms at the beginning of the lockdown, did we?
	And what's more, at the end of the experiment, they would make sure that you left happy.
	You know, you would probably watch a rom-com and have a slice of chocolate cake.
	They wouldn't send you out a gibbering wreck with COVID anxiety syndrome.
	Here, I've just mushed your brain about a bit.
	Let's watch Sleepless in Seattle and have some fudge cake and I'm sure you'll be right as rain.
	That'll fix all these finger holes in your hopes and dreams and memories.
	And you'll just fix right up.
	Wow!
	This piece of shit.
	Yes.
	Completely.
	There is an important point to make about consent in here.
	So your consent comes from living and participating in this country.
	It's an implied consent, but it's a consent nonetheless.
	And the government is democratically elected by you and your peers, and they're elected to do what's best for the country, even when some of the country doesn't particularly like it.
	It's their job to know more than you and to try and protect you, possibly even from yourself.
	Next you'll be complaining about not being able to drink and drive or explaining to me at length why we should all be running around with scissors.
	It's just a completely infantile position.
	But in this next clip, unfortunately, we get a glimpse, we get a little glimpse of what Laura's really here to rail against.
	There was never any end to this.
	The advisors that I interviewed for A State of Fear, the ones who spoke to me on the record and those who spoke to me anonymously, I asked them all, what is the plan for de-escalating fear?
	And there was no plan.
	What really worried me and sent chills down my spine, actually, were a couple of advisors who were not only very content with the use of fear because they thought it was proportionate in a pandemic, Because pandemics are frightening.
	But they said, well, hang on a minute, why don't we de-escalate fear?
	We will move from this to the next crisis, which is climate.
	Oh, there it is.
	Great.
	Cool.
	Cool.
	Lady.
	Yeah.
	I can't take this seriously at all.
	Also, disease and climate, same crisis.
	Just saying.
	They're definitely intertwined, at the very least.
	I would argue to the point where one and the other, like, we can look at those, I think, as parts of a whole.
	Yeah, it's kind of a lattice of overlapping horrors, in a way.
	If you have one, you're going to get the other.
	So, to her first point, the de-escalation of fear came when we had a vaccine response, and people were at a much, much lower risk of death.
	It's why we're all now wondering about more or less, over here anyway, like nothing happened.
	But she's about to twist the entire thing into an anti-climate change narrative.
	And what's more, she's actually Yeah, she's actually misrepresenting one of the quotes from her own book, in which an anonymous SPIB advisor asserts that actually all the lockdowns have been good for the environment.
	And I quote, That's it.
	"The way we have gone about adapting to the virus has been quite beneficial in terms of working patterns and reducing
	carbon.
	All the things we are going to have to go through to adjust to the new future."
	That's it. That's all she's actually complaining about here.
	Is someone saying...
	That's what she's dissecting and claiming.
	Yeah, that's what she's referring to, yeah.
	That is from her book.
	Yeah, it's just someone saying, hey, you know what?
	All of this not using carbon, the environment's pretty fucking happy with it.
	And do you know what?
	People are enjoying these new working patterns.
	Those that have access to them, absolutely.
	Certainly, certainly.
	Would you say that maybe in terms of her purposes, that quote was a bit of a damp spib?
	I'm sorry.
	I'll see myself out.
	Yeah, your apology is entirely justified.
	[Laughter]
	Oh god, but she's got a little bit more to say on climate right now.
	And I think that, you know, there is a risk here that governments lean on fear and nudge, which is a form of behavioural psychology and propaganda, to shut down debate, legislation, disagreement, in fact, because these covert ways to influence you are successful and they bypass all that kind of procedure.
	So if you, you know, the The COVID pandemic and the lockdown created what academics have called a window of malleability.
	Our habits changed, and that meant we were ripe for more change.
	You know, it's a great time then to push the idea of changing habits towards, say, net zero goals.
	Hmm.
	So I couldn't find anyone calling it a window of malleability, academic or otherwise.
	And she does have a bug up her ass, however, about net zero carbon emission goals.
	And that's going to keep coming up through this interview.
	In case it wasn't obvious already, Laura Dodsworth is a climate change denier.
	And seems to base most of her beliefs on the government said it so it must be a lie.
	Which I really do fucking wish I was kidding.
	I quote from an interview that she did with Talk Radio, "I have big questions about the science
	because frankly various authorities are trying too dogmatically and too hard to tell us we're
	not allowed to question the science and in my humble experience with the authorities
	and this government that's never a good sign."
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Yep.
	I don't know what I mean.
	All right.
	So here's I need to take a step back and address that like, again, I do feel a bit green to the The podcasting experience and everyone has been so kind and lovely and a few people don't like it and I appreciate you too.
	I really thought that I had been desensitized to misinformation and disinfo like I thought I was coming in this I'm like I can handle it but I'm still in a position where I The like red Kill Bill screen and siren comes on immediately when I hear these people talk because it's so much bullshit that's condensed and the video has me.
	Also, I get to look at a thing that makes me angry.
	I mean, it's a lot and I appreciate every, I mean, like I mentioned before and I feel like it's very relevant that I just keep feeling like I get hit in the face with a fish.
	And it's a like it's a very specific feeling and it's a little hard to think quickly and straight when you're getting hit with a fish.
	But I played roller derby for many years and I one thing I know is that you can get used to thinking Honestly... Yeah.
	in a full contact situation, so I don't think I'm going to get hit with the fish less, but
	I feel like I will get used to it, and I'll be able to finish whole thoughts, and I'll
	be able to use words instead of smile, laugh, and make faces. I'm getting there, but it's
	so much more jarring than I thought it would be.
	And I'm in- - Honestly-
	I'm in Kill Bill mode with this woman adding in climate.
	I wouldn't stress like my Like I said, when I first went into it I thought this would be boring because on the surface she is a little bit dull and the interview is a little bit dull and then I started actually looking into what she was saying and I spent the entire of this last week just going,
	What the fuck are you talking about?
	And the book only accentuated those feelings, I can tell you that.
	Oh, I bet.
	But yeah, don't worry.
	There's almost a little bit of whiplash from having to deal with what these people are actually saying.
	Anyway, Russell wants to... Fishlash.
	I gotta get some fishlash.
	Yeah, fishlash, yeah.
	Russell wants to drag things back towards COVID-19 conspiracies, because that's why he's here.
	Do you think that the entire endeavor is to a degree covert because they were not explicit about their operation?
	It's obviously incredibly convenient that many of the things that were used to mobilize fear and compliance have subsequently been demonstrably untrue, whether that's the efficacy of the medication... Allegedly!
	Or the origins of the virus.
	Allegedly.
	Or many of the subsequent measures.
	There's nothing good there.
	Not a single good thing.
	And the bird farts are back, everybody.
	The bird farts are back.
	The bird farts are an ever-present feature of this show.
	Yeah, and I've gotta say, amazingly, Dodsworth's response is even worse.
	So what was covert, Laura?
	I think a lot of it is covert.
	A pandemic is an emergency.
	But back in February 2020, World Health Organization documents showed that at that point it was very well understood that COVID risk was stratified according to your age and your clinical status.
	So the elderly or people with particular comorbidities were more at risk.
	By March 2020 we locked down.
	No, wrong.
	And the government's obviously asked this panel, spy via question, crikey what are we going to do?
	We're going to lock down.
	We're going to mass quarantine the healthy.
	How are we going to make sure people follow this rule?
	Because it's unprecedented.
	I know from talking to these advisors they were worried about things like You know, the poor old working class chap missing football in the pub.
	You know, there's quite a lot of classist assumptions going on here.
	And so Spy B advisors reply with this whole gamut of suggestions.
	One is that people's sense of personal threat needed to be increased because they were complacent, because they understood the risk to their demographic group.
	So...
	Yeah, as I said earlier, using fear to illustrate the risk of a deadly virus is the absolute correct move in the interest of public health.
	And particularly in March 2020, when we actually didn't know that much about the virus.
	I don't know if you remember that time particularly well, but I remember thinking, fuck, this is scary, because we haven't been able to properly examine this thing yet, and it is tearing countries apart.
	It was not well known at that point that different age groups reacted differently to the virus, only that the elderly and the already unwell were at the highest risk, because they are at the highest risk to literally all viruses.
	That's just the way that works.
	Yeah, they're the highest risk outside.
	They're the highest risk to everything.
	To be clear, all of this, yeah, the ramp up to the eventual lockdown is etched in my brain in a very specific, very Real crappy beginning to my year.
	I actually had a minor, like the most minor, but still like I had cancer surgery on my face.
	Right when this was all happening, you know what?
	I'll say it was a little crappy at the time.
	Not nearly as bad as everything that came after it, but I was in a hyper... I had a hole in my face that I had to heal, so I was pretty aware of the stuff that was going around, and I wanted to be extra careful.
	All the Health staff that I interacted with, I feel like they were taking it a little easy breezy and kinda trying to tell me like, eh, it's fine, it's fine.
	I'm like, you know what?
	I'm gonna pretend it's not.
	And I learned about, I was a little extra cautious because I am a chronically ill person.
	Sharing that on the pod, that's fun.
	But also incredibly relevant, like I knew I had to watch out for myself because No one outside of my, you know, like no one collectively was really going to.
	So I really try to keep my ear to the ground.
	And when you pay attention and you know about history and then you're right, if you're actually like right in your caution, it never feels good.
	It's not like a fun feeling.
	It doesn't feel nice.
	It's still scary.
	No, I apologize.
	Kaylee, the podcat, was slightly detracting from the seriousness of what you were saying there by leaping in front of the camera.
	But yeah, thank you for sharing that.
	We are, as a podcast, supportive of people with chronic illnesses.
	She's being supportive too.
	Yeah, maybe that's what it was.
	She sensed that, yeah, you know what?
	I need to give my love here.
	And a little comic relief.
	Break it up.
	Her way of showing love is showing up.
	That's the, you get to look at me.
	That's her way of doing things.
	But yes, we are endlessly supportive of people with chronic illnesses on this podcast.
	And yeah, definitely some of the people who the pandemic affected the worst, I would say.
	So, in this next clip, Doddsworth, I think, outs herself as breaking the law during the pandemic.
	Another way of looking at that is that people understood very well what the risk was.
	They understood the risk to their age.
	If I think back to that time, my mom started shielding long before they were supposed to.
	She's in her 70s, she's got terminal lung conditions, she's poorly.
	Her and her husband hold themselves up.
	I, on the other hand, was trying to finish a big photography project and I thought, right, okay.
	You know, my work might be thrown off the table for a while.
	I'm off.
	I'm taking some hand sanitiser.
	I'm going to be careful.
	I'm not going to go into services.
	You know, we understood our risk.
	That's insane to say!
	Yeah!
	To say it out loud!
	With pride!
	It was mandatory in this country, certainly during those first couple of months, to stay at home.
	And we were only allowed to leave the house for very specific purposes, such as one short piece of exercise, or to like go and get groceries, right?
	That was the law, and you could have been fined for breaking it.
	And apparently Laura Dodsworth was just swanning about the country to finish her
	very important photography project instead.
	Of like "Nas and Butts"?
	Cool.
	Yeah.
	I think, I think.
	Or maybe it's not that.
	Probably.
	I'm not trying to be condescending.
	Do your do, make your art, but like your photography project.
	Yeah, no one's industry comes above the pandemic, I'm afraid, Dodsworth.
	No, no.
	Yeah.
	Next up we have an example of something flying entirely over her head.
	The Spidey advisors never explained how they would only target the complacent or those at risk.
	No, what happened was the government operationalised a campaign to make everybody frightened.
	This isn't unheard of in public health problems.
	If you think back to AIDS in the 1980s, we were told that everybody would know someone that died of AIDS within 10 years.
	And that didn't happen, you know, that never came to pass.
	I don't know anyone, luckily, who died of AIDS.
	Apparently it hasn't occurred to her that the reason she doesn't know anyone who died of AIDS is at least in part because of the public health messaging that happened.
	This is either blind stupidity or intentionally missing the point.
	Wow!
	Oh, not on this Pride Month is get AIDS out of your mouth, lady.
	That's nuts!
	And the, the government, like the notion that the government said anything about AIDS for, wait, for far too long, they completely, like it was a policy that they ignored it.
	And then the, the, the primary, The population primarily affected by AIDS, gay people, fought very hard for messaging.
	You, ma'am, are throwing so much important activism and horrible actions taken by our government in the US that need to be examined and need to be critiqued.
	Ours was not much better.
	I'm less aware of the UK response.
	No, no, no.
	Ours was not much better at all.
	A big turning point for us was when the son of a UK politician died of AIDS and that kind of, funnily enough, when it starts to actually affect the people in power, they tend to do a bit more about it.
	But still, it was still very much a case of too little too late.
	You know, and I think, honestly, I think the really big kind of turning point in this country was when Freddie Mercury died, because he announced he had AIDS and died literally the next day.
	And that was, I think it was 1990, I think, which is pretty fucking late.
	Was it 92?
	Either way, either way, pretty fucking late to the party.
	Yeah.
	You know.
	So yeah, there's so much to really hate about this woman.
	The alarm is on!
	Teacher's kiddo's got her sword by her side ready to go.
	I need to chill out.
	I try to make it a policy of not hating anyone.
	But I will say, this is the closest I've felt in some time.
	I don't even hate Russell Brand, for instance.
	I don't hate the guy, but this woman is something fucking special.
	I agree.
	In the next clip, she makes a claim that she's going to regret.
	So there's a kind of a trend in public health to increase the sense of risk, to democratise the sense of risk, if you like.
	So to stop people being complacent, to increase their sense of risk, they did things like ads.
	You know, nearly a billion pounds was spent across 11 government departments in the UK over three years, most of it on Covid.
	So many ads, some of them taking quite a horror film aesthetic.
	They were designed to make you feel that, you know, if your loved one died, it was your fault.
	Let's have a look at some of those ads.
	Let's have a look at some of those ads.
	In the event that people have correctly deduced that they are not at risk, then in order to
	elicit fear, you have to mislead them.
	So it's not only covert, it's duplicitous at that point.
	If people have correctly deduced, oh, I'm not really a risk, so I should go out.
	In order to make those people afraid, you have to deceive them.
	Laura will later be sorry that she made a claim of it being a billion pounds spent on advertising, but here we're about to get into how public health messaging is all lies and may even be a global conspiracy.
	Oh my god.
	Yeah, it's great.
	Let's have a look at some of these assets.
	These are obviously assets that are derived from the UK.
	Why don't you post in the chat some of the assets from your country?
	They won't regard them as assets, they will regard them as propaganda, quite rightly.
	So if you're in America or if you're in Canada, why don't you tell us the most egregious examples in your country?
	Show me what they were using in the US.
	Show me what they were using all around the world.
	Because that indicates that there was a degree of cohesion and collaboration transcendent of national sovereignty, which one might argue is appropriate during a pandemic, but possibly had more nefarious ends than, you know, the preservation of human life.
	In fact, Laura, one of the things that I continually queried is, This seems at odds with how we organize society in other areas.
	It doesn't seem to me that, broadly speaking, the way we organize society is, all life is sacred!
	We must protect everyone!
	That's why our economic systems, social justice systems, are all reflecting this sanctity of human life.
	Elsewhere, it looks like elitism, control, opportunity for regulation, opportunity for profit, are the mandates that drive the way the culture functions.
	There's a lot.
	There's a lot there.
	Social justice systems?
	What?
	Yeah, I think he's referring to actually the regular justice system on that point.
	Firstly, yeah, apparently it's a big global conspiracy that most countries kind of did more or less the same thing in response to COVID.
	Apparently that's a conspiracy for some reason.
	But that last complaint, it seems like a bizarre one from Brand on its face.
	But here he's actually insinuating that the concept of every life being sacred and the government trying to do their best to save lives was actually a grand lie and that somehow the government or corporations were profiting off it.
	It's not possible that a government simply didn't want its populace to die because that would mean giving the government credit and that is simply not allowed on this show.
	It's okay.
	So it is a little dissonant to listen to that because this is all like kind of UK based analysis.
	And I live in the wild wild west of the United States.
	Where boy, I don't even think that any of these arguments could be I don't even think anyone's making these arguments over here, to this degree, because it just didn't happen.
	Like, it was a decent response.
	The public health response, yeah, yeah, it's true.
	Though, having said that, RFK Jr.
	is a frequent guest on Russell Brand's show, and I'm quite sure We will be dissecting him at least at some point, and probably considerably more in the run-up to the elections next year.
	I'm chomping at the bit, and also my stomach hurts right now.
	Yeah, I was gonna say.
	I have honestly avoided that man for as long as I possibly can, and I will continue to do so, but yeah, we're gonna have to get into him.
	I mean, for the sake of our election.
	Yeah, well, yeah, I'm just his general ream of bullshit God's right.
	Yeah Hmm pin in that pin in that let's go Next we have the departure of the show from YouTube.
	Oh All of these require us to accept, and we might have to leave YouTube now, guys.
	We might have to leave YouTube, so there's a link in the description.
	Join us exclusively on Rumble right now, because I'm going to say things that still, because the WHO's power still extends to the domain of YouTube, where on Rumble we can speak freely to convey love, not to convey hate, to convey unity, not yet more division.
	The reason the WHO still have to keep an eye on YouTube is because of shitheads like you, Brand!
	The second they turn away, you'd be right on your anti-vax bullshit trying to grift
	people out of as much money as possible.
	Ah, yeah.
	That's incredible.
	And WHO.
	I know.
	I just, like, okay.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Anyway, remember earlier when Russell was hedging his position in something
	semi-reasonable or at least cautious?
	Watch what happens now that we're off YouTube and solely on Rumble.
	The vaccines don't prevent transmission and we're not trialled to prevent transmission.
	And asymptomatic people could... 96% of asymptomatic people tested did not spread the virus and there was a type of PCR test available as early as March 2020 that could demonstrate that.
	Yeah, so we have an immediate turn.
	So the vaccines weren't developed to prevent transmission in the first place.
	They were developed to stop the virus from being so deadly.
	Interestingly, the vaccine has actually been proven to be at least somewhat effective at reducing transmission of COVID-19.
	It's kind of an afterthought, but that is actually something that's happened.
	And everything else he said was an outright lie.
	I actually don't know how else to put that.
	I could hammer on his statements being easily Google-able as false, but he must know that, surely.
	Yeah.
	And so I do want to say, I'm going to venture slightly afield into more kind of bad faith Anti-vax pundits generally.
	What I think is outrageous and rich, and we do hear Alex Jones, you know, like this, these kind of people say this all the time, that COVID was just the flu.
	They, they want to associate COVID with your standard flu, which also does kill people.
	And we have flu shots.
	It's not better.
	Every year, the flu shots have to change because we understand that coronaviruses Mutate quickly when they travel through populations, which makes the vaccines less effective.
	And we've known that about the flu for a very long time.
	So to me, insisting it's like the flu is explaining why a vaccine is not a magic bullet, which they're not anyway.
	But I mean, it's, you know, it's not chicken pox.
	It's a different family of diseases.
	It's not the right word, I'm sorry.
	A group, whatever, of diseases.
	And so they insist that it's just the flu while pointing out that the vaccine, they think they're proving something.
	It works exactly like the flu vaccine that we've had for years.
	I know I'm oversimplifying.
	I'm just some dummy.
	I'm not a doctor.
	But this seems extremely simple, and that's another thing that makes me see red that I have to hear all the time.
	Yeah, no, and in terms of, you know, it doesn't prevent transmission, it's like, well, yeah, so?
	It wasn't made to.
	And also, it does a bit.
	Yeah, it does what it's supposed to do, which is the best it can.
	Bodies are not perfect.
	Yeah.
	But we've later discovered, I think it was in about 30% of cases or something like that, it does actually reduce transmission of COVID-19.
	So it does do something in that respect.
	Because the viral load in your body, you have less to spread around because you're not making as much germies.
	I don't know.
	I'm going to put it in Russell Brand terms, less yucky boys in your body to shoot out around you.
	Yeah, I don't know, I'm not an immunologist, but I do know that even on its face, even if I took his thing at face value, he's wrong.
	Even if that was a thing.
	But yeah, next up, apparently all of the public health measures were irrelevant.
	So any propaganda predicated on that idea was false.
	Whether they knew it at the time or not can be contested and can't be proved, but it was false.
	So anything like, tell him I always keep a safe distance, irrelevant in most cases.
	Tell him you never bend the rules, irrelevant in most cases.
	Tell him the risk isn't real, irrelevant in most cases.
	What's your view of this propaganda?
	And we'll spin through some of the stills that we have available, guys, while we have Laura.
	Notice he doesn't say how or why these are irrelevant, just kind of claims that they are.
	Okay, Russell, good job, buddy.
	They've been breezing through with absolutely not even a sous-en, of like- Not a second thought, no.
	Even like fake proof.
	They're not even giving fake proof.
	They're just like, let's assume, okay, so we assume A, and then we assume B, and then we assume C, and then we assume D, so equals E, duh!
	Yeah, I mean, here we've got social distancing is irrelevant, bending the rules is irrelevant, that's fine apparently, and apparently the risk of COVID was never real in the first place, according to what he's just said.
	Absolutely fucking baffling.
	Yeah, and next up, even better, we have Doddsworth's expert take.
	You make a really good point.
	We were told that one in three people didn't know they had it, and that was presented as something that was really scary.
	Wow, you know, you may come across your grandchild, or your lover, or someone you work with, or your neighbor, and they're a biohazard.
	They won't know they've got it.
	They could infect you.
	Another way of looking at that is, one in three people experience it so mildly, they don't know they've got it, but it was twisted around always to be frightening.
	Yes, great.
	One in three people experience it so mildly they don't know they've got it, but they could still give it to other people which at the time could have killed them.
	And did.
	And did in many cases.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	It was, it was, it literally happened in front of us.
	In this next clip we have some, we have some classic whataboutism.
	I mean, those stills we just looked at, they're really grainy, the eyes are looking at you.
	It's supposed to make you feel like, if you've killed, you know, if someone's died, it's your fault.
	Don't look at what the government might be doing wrong, which is maybe care homes, or lack of PPE, or hospitals being built, like, you know, cities for infection.
	No, no, no, no.
	Don't look at all of that over there.
	Are you bending the rules?
	Is it your fault?
	You're a risk to your neighbour, you're a risk to your loved ones.
	So it's a responsibilisation.
	What about what they're doing?
	What I'm doing doesn't matter.
	Fuck me.
	If only.
	I know very few people that actually felt all that responsible for others over here across the pond.
	Yeah, I think.
	In that respect, I think you guys had it worse than we did.
	I think probably because of the difference in public health responses.
	You know, most people took it a bit more seriously over here compared to the States, which was just fucking bananas.
	It was the Wild West.
	Absolute bedlam.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, well, and even in Chicago, you know, like I'm in Chicago proper. And the, we thought
	people were being a bit cavalier until we like ventured for, and this was way after
	lockdown and all that kind of stuff. But when we ventured forth into the rest of the country,
	or we know people, you know, like we have a lot of friends in Texas, we have a lot of
	friends kind of, kind of all over. And we would get a little cranky about like, oh,
	people aren't wearing their masks.
	And then I had to find out what my friends were dealing with in other parts of the country, and I was like, oh.
	Our situation is actually pretty good.
	And Chicago, I think they did take it pretty seriously.
	Well, I know that.
	So did my governor.
	We were one of the places that did take it seriously.
	We also have a lot of, we have a fairly sizable non-white population.
	And I don't mean to necessarily, this is anecdotal.
	Statistic.
	But in our neighborhood, non-white people had masks on first.
	They were being especially careful, probably because they are closer in proximity with their family members, usually elderly family members.
	And so when we saw people starting to take it seriously, it wasn't the white people around us that were doing it.
	And then eventually people kind of got with the program.
	But I think that if you see people that are in marginalized communities
	trying to protect themselves, maybe then you as a member of society should take that
	seriously also.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Maybe you don't look at that and be like, "Oh, well, that's not my problem."
	Yes, it is.
	Air is a problem.
	Yeah, well, yeah.
	So they're both problems.
	So there's personal responsibility, there's personal responsibility, and then yes, there is absolutely governmental responsibility.
	And were I to get into the legion of ways the UK government, Boris Johnson and his cronies fucked up, both from their ineptitude and pig-headedness, I would be here all day.
	But needless to say, We don't.
	The lion's share of public health messaging was not at fault.
	Boris Johnson was.
	Next, we learn that wasps are yellow.
	We've got those chevrons at the bottom, you pointed out, the yellow and the red and the black.
	You know, what does that remind you of?
	Well, it reminds you of disaster cordons, do not cross, danger, but also a wasp, a wasp sting, this could hurt.
	You know, everything about the visual is designed to create alarm, to hold you back.
	Is that what you mean by, sorry to interrupt you again, Laura, is this what is meant by nudges?
	That isn't a nudge.
	What is a nudge?
	A nudge is a form of behavioural psychology which is supposed to nudge you into a form of behaviour that is better for you.
	Because luckily, Russell, there are lots of people that know better than you what's good for you.
	It's what's called choice architecture.
	It's supposed to encourage you to make a better choice.
	An example would be if you're in a shop putting fruit at eye level and putting chocolate out of reach.
	Um, an example of a nudge would not be taxing chocolate and making fruit cheaper.
	So it's not about mandates, it's not about price, it's about encouraging you to make the so-called best choice.
	But that's all predicated on somebody knowing what's best for you.
	Yeah, it's covert manipulation with the assumption that the person making those nudges has the moral authority that I would require before trusting them with making that choice on my behalf, which I bloody well wouldn't.
	How you doing there, Laura?
	You, uh... I might spontaneously combust.
	Okay.
	I just called you Laura because we've got Laura Doddsworth on.
	I meant Lauren, sorry.
	I heard the first part, I'm good.
	Oh boy!
	Wow!
	Okay, the nudge thing is specifically also making me see red.
	It's like they know.
	I feel like I'm being gang-stalked right now.
	Okay, so the podcast If Books Could Kill, that's wonderful, just covered the book nudge recently.
	that was in that book got popular in like I think early 2000s and the actual book is
	bullshit.
	Fully.
	That's a very quick summary.
	I would absolutely encourage you to go listen to the episode listener about nudge because the nudges they cite are often mandates put in place by a government.
	So not actually even the nudges don't work and the nudge is not a nudge.
	It's not a nudge.
	It's a law or a policy.
	And so the book is wrong, and then she is wrong, and it's a silly thing.
	I mean, it's one of those things that was such a popular notion, and there were nudge committees in governments all over the world, and everybody was wrong because they thought a thing and they tried it and it doesn't work.
	Unless you, you know, make policies.
	Our representative make policies that can make our society better in theory, Yeah, but the whole nudge concept was actually, like, the book is inane.
	It's inane.
	That's interesting.
	I doubt if you'd noticed, but the whole nudge thing is a pretty common theme of Laura Dodsworth.
	To address Bran's point, Other people do know better than you.
	Like, nutritionists know better than me what I should be eating, personal trainers know better than me how I should be exercising, scientists know science better than I do, and democratically elected governments know how to govern better than I do.
	Like, should I trust the nutritionists to push the apples my way rather than the chocolate bars?
	Yes!
	It's a classic anti-intellectual jag they're both on here, which serves only to demonize expertise and encourage the
	audience to trust only Russell as their source of information.
	Yeah, and picking and choosing the expertise you actually listen to. It's that motivator.
	Yeah, yeah, it's it's yeah, 100% it'll be him or the people he platforms and those are the
	people we can trust and anyone else is a problem.
	And so this is just good use of propaganda, good use of semiotics rather than nudging.
	I'd say so, but I think it is, you know, it's incredibly well staged.
	Look at that.
	They did these briefings in Downing Street.
	They'd be well spaced out.
	They gave it a kind of a military feel.
	You've got the chevrons.
	See, when the messages stay home, the chevrons are red.
	As soon as it's stay alert, which is you can sort of get back to normal life a little bit, it's green, green for go.
	They'd have these experts, they'd use very martial language.
	The whole thing was incredibly well staged.
	So what we have here is a picture of the COVID-19 briefings which were how the government got information regarding the pandemic across on a daily basis.
	I'm not sure where other than Downing Street she thinks these should have been held.
	Like a local swimming pool maybe?
	Someone's front lawn?
	Like the circus?
	Wait no, fuck people are afraid of clowns and that would be too much fear.
	So I have to ask, right?
	In a pandemic briefing, what do you suppose the relevant information to get across would be?
	Oh, okay.
	I'm so overwhelmed.
	I can't even... It's a lot.
	I had five answers at the same time, and I'm thinking if also there's a picture of a wasp next to... Yes, sorry, there's a... ...that I'm looking at that is also driving me batty.
	Like, the wasp claim they're doubling down by using an image, and I...
	It is hard because, again, like my experience, my experience in the U.S., the messaging was outrageous and not cohesive.
	And y'all at least hired, like, a graphic designer to have coherent, like, messaging.
	Brand name.
	Yeah, we had to.
	The same color is fine.
	It was done with intent, and to her point of it being incredibly well-staged, it's the UK government!
	It's supposed to be well-staged, and the reason that they're all spaced out is because it was social distancing.
	They were all two metres apart.
	And that was that was the point writing all of the experiences that we actually had.
	And she's focusing on this like police that crime scene tape.
	You know, it's a crime scene tape is an image we're all very familiar with.
	that would invoke a response of caution, which is entirely reasonable.
	Yeah.
	It's the most reasonable thing to do to use an image that we all respond to
	because we understand what it is and we all watch too much "Law and Order."
	Like that's pretty simple.
	What's actually interesting as well is that I'm pretty sure that's American tape,
	whereas in this country it's blue and white that's usually used to coordinate areas.
	Oh really?
	Yeah, we have different colours.
	Well the picture also fooled me!
	So the wasp doesn't even apply!
	Okay!
	I mean, it applies to the little signs that they've got at the front, you know, because they're yellow and therefore that means wasp.
	I would think it could also mean, I don't know, the sun.
	It could mean any number.
	Butter?
	Butter's yellow.
	I like butter.
	Cheese?
	Cheese is fucking brilliant.
	Maybe, maybe this thing is actually telling me I should eat some cheese and you know what, I might follow it later.
	Oh my god.
	Okay, so for those listening, there's a there's like a collage of they're putting all these things together like all these images are trying to correlate them on the screen and one is the parliamentary announcement where they have the signs that look like caution tape and then a picture of caution tape and then a wasp With the yellow butt, which, a stripy yellow butt, which, I don't even think wasps, like wasps that I interact with over here in the Midwestern United States don't look anything like that.
	But also I found that the crime scene tape doesn't even look like your crime scene tape!
	So she's really grasping at this connection.
	I feel like we're at a weird conference and a religious fanatic is explaining to me why the Monster Energy Drink logo is satanic.
	That's where we're at.
	Yeah, let's just say it's a leap.
	In terms of what these briefings would cover, because it was daily, and what they would
	mostly get into was how many people have died of COVID, how many hospital admissions we
	have, how many known new cases were happening, that kind of thing, right?
	What I would describe as the essential information in a pandemic as to how bad it is and what's
	happening with it.
	But Laura disagrees.
	And don't forget it was daily.
	You know, we were bombarded daily with messages about death.
	We were always told how many people died, but never recovered.
	We were told how many people were admitted to hospital, but never left hospital.
	And do you remember the COVID dashboard that the UK government ran?
	It was probably the same in lots of other countries.
	It showed you all these stats, but it didn't show you other key performance indicators.
	So you'd know how many people died, went to hospital, didn't say how many children had dropped off the register at school, Or how many people have missed their cancer appointments, or what had happened to mental health stats.
	The focus was always on these very deathly Covid stats, to the exclusion of everything else.
	It took over the mind.
	Apparently, in her estimation, we should have been fed a swath of statistics from all different walks of life.
	Statistics that were readily available elsewhere, by the way, in the middle of the COVID-19 briefings in order to, I don't know, fluff them out a bit?
	Like, they would have taken hours had we covered all of this.
	Also, my kingdom for a daily briefing that had anything to do with reality.
	Trying to find that information over here was your own part-time job, and it was so disparate, and that's, now there's a lot of kind of post-mortem, like, there are a few people that are realistic and live in the real world, and they're doing, over in the States, and, you know, like, scientists and, like, People that actually can do something about it want to learn from the pandemic and understand that the messaging over here was so bad.
	A daily briefing?
	Well, I mean, it's not like briefings ever went well here, but if we could have that like really basic overview situation that you guys had it seems yeah yeah yeah we did we did it was it was it was helpful you know and and it helped to to illustrate and understand when things were getting really bad when when we were having thousands of of new uh of new cases a day it was like oh fuck okay um whereas whereas yeah the the information in the u.s i mean i was trying to you know occasionally at least
	Have a look at what the hell was going on over there and it was impossible.
	And that's why you guys got to 100,000 deaths pretty fucking quickly.
	It was a lot.
	It was a lot.
	And I, for one, am perfectly grateful that we had these briefings that were actually...
	Well, nobody, I mean, we weren't even, like, we weren't getting counted when we got sick.
	We were gonna go to the hospital.
	Right, right.
	Like, everybody that was getting sick, and I mean, I, we, we made it a long time, I'm really grateful, but, and we only got sick once, but like, and it was after getting vaccinated, people were sick all the time.
	I was texting with my friends, and they're like, oh man, I feel like crap, and, and, Hell no, I'm not going to the hospital.
	You know?
	Yeah, no.
	Yeah, no, so over here we had a--
	If the numbers are even, probably a lot higher than we estimate.
	Absolutely, I agree with that.
	And over here we had a system where if you had the symptoms, before we had testing readily available,
	because that took a while, before that it was if you have the symptoms
	and you're pretty sure you've got it, or even if you're not pretty sure you've got it,
	and you think it probably could be, then you would,
	I think it was in the app, or there was an NHS app or something like that,
	and you would just report it to the NHS, and then they would add it to their stats,
	generally speaking.
	So it was helpful to be able to Keep track of it in that respect, you know, it was yeah, it was it was a decent response in this country.
	That's the thing like we Generally, there were a lot of fuck-ups, but we did.
	Okay, we we did.
	Okay So in this next part Russell says something that I genuinely don't understand Laura, what I feel is that a helpful analytic tool with the pandemic, and perhaps anything really, is to remove the subject and then observe the behavior around it without the biases that the subject induces.
	And what you can see here is how power functions when it comes to organizing our reality.
	You highlight this information, you eliminate this information, What the fuck is he saying?
	I genuinely don't know.
	That was vague!
	I don't understand the point he's even driving at.
	Remove the subject and see the things around the subject?
	I don't get it.
	I think he was trying to say something.
	Subject of discussion?
	Subject a person?
	Remove the pandemic as the subject maybe?
	COVID as the subject and look at the things around that?
	But even then that doesn't make sense with what he said after it.
	I don't know, I don't know.
	And next we have a mention of one of your favourite people, and Russell forgets which country he's in.
	We had RFK on the show recently, he had a terrifying array of information to share with us, including a significant amount of the funding for the vaccine rollout So, the funding and rollout of the vaccine involving the military in the USA is neither surprising nor staggering.
	It's a massive organisation that is mobilised and ready to be put to work in situations exactly like this.
	And I dare say this is one of the few benefits of actually having such a massive military.
	But in the UK, however, the military had pretty much zero involvement over here, as would be expected.
	Him bringing this up in an interview with a British woman about the UK's COVID response is ironically designed to do one thing, spread fear.
	Ooh, the military were involved, therefore it's bad.
	Leave alone the fact that it happened in another country.
	Yeah, people are dropping dead at a rate where we had to use the one funded public institution that we have to address a very high volume problem.
	There was a big problem and we don't have other stuff to take care of us.
	We don't have other services.
	You don't have a National Health Service, you have a military, right?
	Is it bad?
	Yes!
	Is it bad in the way he's saying?
	No! I just... laughs Okay. Okay.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's a great example of I think the challenge that we're going to have with his public-facing content versus the Rumble.
	The Rumble, it got different quick, I will say.
	Yeah, it goes hard, right?
	Real quick!
	But he's still, he's being super vague, hedging his bets.
	And like, he's being very cunning, and I'm worried about the argument that could be made as like, oh, he doesn't mean that, you know, like, folks providing cover and saying that we are overreacting.
	and I'm gonna... Right, right, right. Well, you know, I wanna try to make an impact of some kind and, you know...
	No, no, I mean, if anyone wants to say that we're wrong, come at me, that's fine.
	I've spent a long time putting this together and actually looking at what the fuck he's saying,
	and I will happily back up what I'm saying, as I think I'm doing.
	I agree completely, I agree completely. It's hard to nail him down because he's so mean. - He is slippery.
	He is slippery.
	As a character, the way he talks, the way he uses language, you know, he is so fucking good at just dodging the pitchfork.
	He is a snake dodging a pitchfork.
	You know, and when he just, yeah, no, he's fucking dodged it again.
	But, but... Mongoose Team, activate!
	We'll get him!
	Uh, but there are definitely, there are definitely things that we can nail him down on.
	And things that we can nail Laura down on.
	Uh, so remember I told you that Laura would regret saying that billion pounds figure was spent on COVID advertising?
	Hmm, well.
	Another bit of information, the Cabinet Office spent £586 million in the last three years with a vast majority going on public health awareness campaigns during lockdown.
	Let's have a look at that bit of propaganda from Scotland and please post your favourite propaganda in the chat.
	There we are, 586 million, not a billion, and not even the full 586 million either.
	So just a bit less then.
	Just a bit less.
	Over three years as well.
	They really post things that disprove them immediately.
	It was great.
	I get the feeling she, uh, she, if you watch the video, she, uh, she kind of, her stomach churned a little bit in the moment that came on the screen.
	It's like, ah, fuck.
	Flash it up for a second.
	It was a headline and that disproved what called her a liar right in real time.
	But then that goes away and they have pictures from movies.
	We're about to get into that.
	Yeah, no, it's The Exorcist this one, but we will get into that.
	We're about to get into that.
	Yeah, no, it's The Exorcist this one, but we will get into that.
	Isaac The Shining.
	Welp.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I'm out again.
	Bye guys.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Both excellent horror movies from similar era.
	But, um, right, so, yeah.
	It's fine, don't worry.
	Fantastic.
	Y'all are just gonna hear me say that shit.
	It's fine, don't worry.
	I love all those movies.
	Fantastic.
	Right, next up we have on this specific subject, more of Laura's expertise.
	This is what you mentioned earlier, Can you talk us through this, Laura?
	Yeah, so the images on the left are from a Scottish Government health ad showing how COVID can spread.
	Of course, it's all, well, most loosely a metaphor.
	COVID is not green slime.
	It doesn't spread around like this.
	And I remember when I saw it, I thought, God, this is horrific.
	It's frightening.
	If I'd seen this as a kid, I know this would have given me nightmares.
	I would not want to trust it.
	What we have on the right is what it reminded me of when I racked my brains, which is a scene from The Exorcist, which has an age rating of 18.
	So, you know, they said these ads were to target 18 and above, but there was no way to stop children from seeing it.
	So, this advert that we're looking at here was premiered on Twitter and it aired on social media to target 18 to 44 year olds who researchers believed were most likely to spread COVID-19 unwittingly.
	Children aren't allowed social media accounts, so I've solved that problem for you, Laura.
	Comparing this advert to The Exorcist is both stupid and reductive, and disappointingly, no one in the advert itself tells me that my mother sucks cocks in hell, so... I also, I think she is gang-stalking me for making me say The Shining.
	Her misinformation has worked.
	I'm so mad.
	I'm mad about important things and an incredibly dumb thing at the same time.
	That's a little... I mean, okay.
	I don't know that that would be the ads I would choose because green barf is very visible and maybe doesn't really get the point across.
	Well, it was quite widely praised by a lot of people at the time, just to illustrate.
	So what happens in the advert is basically this young woman shows up to what I think is her elderly father's house to make him a cup of tea and see him.
	She's got green slime on her mouth that is supposed to be COVID-19 and she then she then goes around and makes a cup of tea etc and by the end of the advert there's green slime everywhere and then he has a sip of tea and then it's on him.
	Idea being you've just given this old man COVID-19.
	It is effective in its message if a little bit on the nose you know but at that time I think we kind of needed a bit of that you know Public health messaging in certain areas of the country needed to be hammered on to make sure that people took it seriously, especially around the elderly.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	I do see, like, there's a still from the movie, the handprints on the cabinets behind them that's like, this is where your germs are.
	I thought that we all learned that when we learned, like, safe food handling when we were little.
	I learned some version of safe food handling, you know, like don't touch your raw meat and then touch a cabinet.
	I found in my lived experience as an adult through the pandemic that I guess that all just went out the window, all that messaging and understanding went out the window.
	People disagree, though.
	Things like washing your hands as well was surprisingly uncommon.
	But yeah.
	Yeah.
	Still bummed out about hearing people get really excited about like proudly not washing their hands.
	still...
	Grim.
	That's just disgusting.
	Guys, soap and water, it's great.
	It's the best.
	But we have more of Laura's take on this advert here.
	And what an ad like that has the potential to do is to disrupt intergenerational relationships long term.
	I think it's really created a lot of suspicion between people.
	You know, are we safe?
	What might we give each other?
	Can we hurt each other?
	It's really changed how we go about families.
	Those sound like perfectly reasonable concerns to me.
	Like, what we could infect other people with should be a basic consideration.
	In many parts of Asia, it's perfectly normal to wear masks, particularly when you're unwell, as a courtesy to those around you.
	It should be normal.
	Yeah, that's it's totally Wow.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Yeah.
	I'm okay.
	I need to get back to like, my regular brain that is just like picking my weapons.
	I'm like in a weapon picking screen and a video game.
	I need to like chill.
	Yeah, that's a It's very jarring to hear them say reasonable thing.
	It's like crazy thing, reasonable, reasonable, crazy and reasonable crazy because yes, people should be concerned.
	People should amend their behavior based on the environment around them and the things that are happening.
	I feel like that's how they get away with this in their own mind?
	because it's the thing that I hear they're saying is like at the very
	beginning of a tirade of some kind or some kind of point they're trying to be
	like I mean of course it was a pandemic of course it was a pandemic but and then
	throwing that entire idea out I feel like that's how they get away with this
	in their own mind yeah yeah it was earlier when she said all pandemics are
	scary but No.
	Pandemics are fucking scary and fear is the correct response.
	Yeah.
	Deadly virus.
	Ah.
	Anyway.
	Anyway, next up, we have some more fear mongering from the fear expert.
	You just mentioned authority before and I think that takes me back to the existential crisis.
	This whiplash of shock.
	I felt when we when we locked down because before that I'd had this idea that we were free, you know that I had agency that I could choose pretty much what I did in my life and that we were part of a democracy and then emergency hits and you find out that the most basic of freedoms you took for granted are not real at all.
	You can be told you can't work.
	I mean, I'm a freelancer.
	Yeah, no one told you you can't work, Laura.
	Also, you were swanning up and down the country for your photography project.
	Yeah, you didn't!
	Yeah, you just carried on anyway.
	But no one told you that you can't work, just that you probably couldn't work in your industry at that time.
	How do I know this?
	The UK music industry basically died in March 2020, and is yet to fully recover still to this day.
	Most of my friends were out of work, and as self-employed people had very little financial recourse from the government, Personally, I ended up working in customer service for one of the large supermarket chains over here during that time because while my industry wasn't allowed to work, others were and I needed the cash.
	And in regards to democracy, the democratically elected officials that you and your peers put in power told you you had to stay home because they know better than you.
	You might not like it, but it is democratic.
	And what's the alternative?
	Like, a vote?
	Like, yeah, let's take a look at how well that whole Brexit referendum thing is going.
	Oh yes, it's all terrible, thank you!
	Fuck.
	Yeah, it's the notion that you have to sign a piece of paper to say, well, I choose to care or choose not to care about the people around me in my society that is trying to function.
	That's a lot.
	That's such a leap.
	It's such an assumption.
	That's like pretty gross.
	Yeah, you live in a society.
	Your choices affect other people.
	I just hear like, I hear whenever someone is making that kind of argument of like, we didn't consent to this and we didn't whatever.
	Yeah, well, we don't really consent to getting pulled over for speeding either.
	Imagine trying to make that argument.
	Yeah, well, most of us don't just like, you know, open her up on every single stretch of highway.
	Because there's also a degree of understanding that tearing through a subdivision might hurt someone, and we all just kind of get that.
	The disconnect is, I feel, is willful.
	I think it's entirely intentional.
	Yeah, no, I completely agree.
	I do not think that this woman is stupid.
	I think she is doing this deliberately, and I think she knows what she's doing.
	Yeah, me too, me too.
	Thankfully, I guess the lesser of these two evils, Russell, has a point to make.
	It's interesting to note, Laura, that there's a class impact here, and that particular effort was made to manage what you might call, in our country, working-class people in America, blue-collar Americans, people that do necessary work, that were temporarily, what do I want to say, deified, or at least celebrated, before being damned once again when it was convenient to do so.
	In our country, a lot of key workers and health workers were celebrated primarily through the medium of rainbows and meaningless platitudes, That's true.
	to paying them more, those pay rises were not offered. 34,000 key workers in New York City,
	of course, lost their jobs because of a refusal to undertake certain medical procedures.
	He means vaccines, that's what he means.
	Those are two very different things that happened.
	Two very different things.
	And it was actually 10,000 healthcare workers fired for refusing to be vaccinated.
	And the other 24,000 out of that 34,000 either retired, were furloughed, or resigned.
	In terms of pay rises, Brand is absolutely correct on that point.
	And the NHS, for instance, has this year been going through the largest round of strike action in its history over this very issue.
	And funnily enough, it's up to the government and they don't want to pay nurses.
	So, but you know, it's ongoing.
	Well, I can tell you that the private industry on this side of the pond gave certain massive pay increases that were very polarizing and
	difficult to deal with within the healthcare industry. Capitalism did not do a better job. I'd say it
	did a way worse job if we're comparing apples to apples in a basic way.
	I'm not sure how, I've not actually looked into how private healthcare responded in this
	country because we do have some private healthcare options.
	They're just infinitely smaller.
	But that could be interesting to look at, actually.
	But yeah, I mean, in general, the only people who were getting pay rises were, you know, CEOs and CFOs, etc, etc.
	You know, those were the people because big businesses did shockingly well out of the pandemic in a lot of cases, depending on their industry.
	I can't possibly imagine why.
	Oh, how could we ever figure out what happened to cause CEOs and massive corporations to make lots and lots of money?
	Who will ever answer this age-old question?
	Oh look, the economy's taking a shit, but for some reason the stock market's fine.
	That's, hmm, okay.
	Right, yeah, here's the next clip.
	It shows you actually that freedom is temporal and illusory and takes place within such boundaries that it can scarcely be called freedom at all.
	What's the alternative?
	What's the solution, right?
	So, freedom isn't free.
	What next, Russell?
	What's the next step here?
	It's crazy to hear him make points that are very far, in my estimation at least, how I hear it, is far left.
	That a very extreme anti-capitalist argument is that there is no freedom under capitalism because wages are free.
	So, it is It is so... it's a dissonance to hear him say these things on such a... I don't hear other right-wing pundits using
	Extreme left, making extreme left points.
	I don't hear them saying that the same way he does.
	They seem kind of singular to him.
	If you'll forgive the pun, rebranding them in order to hack onto the right-wing grift.
	Yeah, yeah, basically.
	I think it's just to make himself feel better.
	I think it makes him feel better to say that and be able to shoehorn those ideas that he believes he has into really dangerous propaganda that makes him money!
	Absolutely.
	I think things like that go back to his kind of roots back when he was ideologically left.
	And maybe somewhere in his mind he still believes that he is.
	I don't know.
	I bet.
	I bet.
	We are yet to arrive at the conclusion to that.
	I wonder if you have concerns about what the next steps will be.
	Like when you said a minute ago, all of the measures came down to individuals.
	You as an individual, you killed granny.
	I think we've got a headline there.
	That was our former health minister, now reality TV star, Matt Hancock, was offering up that you're killing your granny.
	Don't know how you could possibly kill your granny given What?
	Some of the revelations that have since come out about the lack of clinical trialing for transmission and that asymptomatic
	people were scarcely infectious.
	But nevertheless, the propaganda has been spread and the damage has been done.
	I know elsewhere when it comes to matters like climate change, there's no...
	Which, let me know in the chat where you stand on that.
	It's normally 15 minute cities, taxes on ordinary people.
	It's seldom.
	This is why we are going to control corporations in this way.
	It's interesting that many of the measures suggested amount to ways of controlling and prohibiting the freedoms of individuals.
	What do you feel like is the next wave and how do you think it will continue to be utilized, Laura?
	So again, what he said about the vaccine is still bullshit, and he seems to be getting on side a little bit in terms of climate change, just from a libertarian kind of stance there.
	That is totally off the wall.
	It is crazy to hear, and I think it's a great point to make, that this is the Rumble Talk, not the YouTube Talk.
	This is what he wants to say on YouTube, and he's like, oh, I can't say this.
	This is what he's saying to what he knows is a safe audience of people who will agree with him.
	So out of interest, do you have grandparents at all?
	I do.
	Cool, yeah.
	I've still got a couple that are alive.
	I've got two that are still with us.
	I dare say many, many grown adults do as well, but Doddsworth doesn't seem to think that that's an option.
	I've got to say something about the Matt Hancock thing.
	Because that's evil.
	I think what he said was nothing less than evil.
	It's one of the most egregious things that was said.
	The idea that a child should feel responsible for their grandparent dying is disgusting.
	Because a lot of grandparents died.
	And it wasn't the grandchildren's fault.
	It's because Covid is particularly dangerous for elderly people.
	What a terrible thing to say to kids.
	Just terrible.
	Just to control them.
	You didn't have to say that, Val.
	You didn't have to tell on yourself at the end.
	Yeah, I know, I know.
	She's acting like Matt Hancock went on a children's TV show.
	He went on CBeebies over here and was like, don't kill your granny, kids!
	That's not what happened at all.
	So what Matt Hancock said here was both vulgar and distasteful.
	But underlying the former Health Secretary's obvious incompetence was a point, that people needed to be particularly wary when interacting with the elderly population, especially as various strains of COVID-19 had higher numbers of asymptomatic carriers at that time.
	But of course, Russell doesn't seem to think that they could spread anything, so why should he give a fuck?
	The statement was, yeah, not directed at children, so Doddsworth is deliberately misleading the audience here.
	That's another save the children thing, too.
	It's like invoking children in your argument.
	Think of the children!
	Like, well, we are.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	It's fine, because kids, just because the way their mucosums are built, it was easier to be a carrier instead of someone who got sick.
	And that's exactly what the problem was.
	Do we not know that kids are balls of germs?
	Did we forget?
	You know better than I do!
	I was going to say, I've got a two-year-old, you know, and it's a constant thing of wet wipes and washing hands.
	That's just the way it is.
	Yeah, so this next clip presents the crux of what I would say is Russell Brand's messaging and why we should be worried about him in general.
	What an idiot. You're right because actually mate, like we're all like quite um what do I want to say
	susceptible to propaganda as discerning adults but children who knows and also I think the contract
	between us and those that govern us has been irrevocably altered, broken I might argue. I can
	never trust centralised authority again in any form. This is why I think judiciary will always
	be questioned, the media will always be questioned, the results of elections will always be questioned
	because we've just seen again and again and again that there is literally no reason to trust them
	unless you're absolutely fucking terrified. Unless you're terrified to the point of oh god just look
	after me daddy, you know there's no point in paying any attention at all.
	So.
	So.
	From this clip, Brands states that we can't trust the mainstream media, we can't trust the government, we can't trust the judiciary, and we can't trust election results.
	Need I remind him what happened the last time some famous dickhead was shouting about election fraud?
	There was an attempted coup, people died, and thankfully now a lot of arseholes are going to prison for seditious conspiracy.
	I mean, not the person that caused it.
	Well, well, I mean, there are a couple, but a couple of the people who caused it have
	gone.
	Proud boys.
	Yeah, right?
	Yeah, so the biggest problem here is that if you can't trust any form of centralized
	authority, which is what he just said, who can you trust?
	Well, Russell Brand, obviously.
	Trust only in him and the shitheads that he decides to platform, so you can stay in the ecosystem of right-wing conspiracy theories and ultimately give him and his friends a lot of money, while going further and further down the rabbit hole, most likely never to return to reality.
	This is cult shit right here, and it is sickening.
	Well, cult programs work.
	Oh, yeah, it's effective.
	Oh, it's definitely effective.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	Marge Simpson noise.
	I only have Marge Simpson noise.
	I can only Marge.
	I can't.
	Yeah, and this is what I'm worried about, though, with him.
	His statements are so squishy.
	They're always squishy and there's some stuff mixed in that like, oh yeah, well, I can latch on to a critique of the way that the government operates.
	Ours kind of doesn't anymore, like at all.
	That's the issue.
	It's just that he's pointing out the symptoms of these systemic issues with no analysis or thought to changing it.
	Yeah, you're right.
	It's like, give me money, listen to me.
	But they'll still use government figures, like they'll still use the evidence gathered
	by the people they say they don't trust, the groups they say they don't trust, and they'll
	still use it if it works for them in the moment.
	Which also makes me filled with rage.
	As though I could burst into flames.
	I just can't.
	The hypocrisy.
	They don't care about getting called out for hypocrisy.
	Doesn't still make me mad.
	Don't worry, we are going to get into hypocrisy a little bit later on.
	There are a couple of clips.
	We've come on to it quite a lot already, to be fair, but it's going to come up later.
	It seems in retrospect, correctly, many people were smeared as being anti-vax.
	By the way, they changed the meaning of the word anti-vax in the dictionary during that period.
	So again, as I say, the subject itself is of limited interest because we live in a fast-moving
	time defined by an ever-shifting news cycle. But the behavior that it revealed is
	fascinating. We can see how powerful interests will collaborate. We can see how apparently innocuous free-letter
	global organizations like the WHO are able to assert and continue to assert
	incredible control over the way that information is promulgated and many of that ain't been
	rolled back yet. It's because of you!
	Sorry.
	Quit your bullshit, and I'm quite sure the WHO would be happy to stop having to hunt down disinformation.
	As for the dictionary definition of anti-vaxxer changing, Merriam-Webster changed their definition to include people who are against regulations mandating vaccination.
	That's all that was, which I'd say is a fair assessment.
	Those people are anti-vaxxers as well.
	Yeah, criticizing aspects of vaccine, like making more subtle arguments to undermine from an anti-vax perspective is still anti-vax.
	Yeah, it's still anti-vax.
	It's not some, they changed the definition to include us.
	It's like, no, no, you were already in it, mate.
	You were already in it.
	It's just they've...
	Included a little bit more nuance in the definition.
	Yeah, so in this next clip, I suspect Russell has been playing Plague Inc.
	on his phone.
	New pandemics are always being rehearsed all over the gaff.
	They're always spending money doing sort of like weird games to prepare for new pandemics.
	It's a great game.
	So apparently here what he's taking issue with is preparing and running scenarios in the case of a new health crisis.
	Which is something that government departments have done for literal decades.
	But also, right, imagine if they didn't do that and a fresh virus hit the country.
	Who do you think would be the first person shouting about how the government's trying to kill us all?
	Oh, it did happen.
	It did happen here.
	Because our response was bad.
	And when all of these misinformation agents first started covering the pandemic, they were like, it's over for humanity.
	There will only be lone survivors.
	That's a quote.
	But that's what they would have said.
	That's what they would have said.
	Yeah, you practice things that are difficult and can be very confusing and complicated.
	So practice is how you learn how to cope.
	Which also, even the practicers were disbanded by the Trump administration.
	So, cool!
	Right, right.
	And in the case of the United States and countries that, let's say, handled the pandemic in a less-than-stellar fashion, we're supposed to fucking learn from our mistakes.
	That is the point.
	You know, something goes badly, we go, okay, let's run some scenarios just in case anything like this happens again, which it will, because that's literally how history works.
	Can you tell kids not to do a fire drill?
	Or an active shutter drill, which is what we do here now?
	You know, you know, we've we've there are lockdown drills in schools over here now as well, which is a horrifying development.
	I think it's only started happening the last couple of years.
	But yes, it's nothing good.
	Not usually not usually in response to an active shooter, but more people with knives, etc.
	Or just like some nut job, you know, finds his way into school grounds.
	But but nonetheless, it's it's disconcerting.
	It's yet another thing that has Spread.
	Right, next up we have a further exercise in irony.
	What do you reckon is going to happen, mate, with forthcoming pandemics and forthcoming climate change type stuff?
	Well, you know, sometimes I tune out of the specifics because the thing is the principles are always the same.
	What people won't want to hear, but it's the truth, is that your brain is a battlefield.
	And it's not just the terrain, it's the target.
	You are the target.
	It's governments, it's corporations, would-be manipulators, they all want to influence you.
	You know, you're subjected to millions of pieces of information every day, and your brain's basically got bouncers on the door.
	It lets some information in and others, so they're competing the whole time for your attention.
	And they will compete using emotion.
	Sometimes it's hope.
	Do you remember the Obama posters?
	Just his face with hope underneath.
	Quite often it's fear.
	You know, like I said before, fear is the steam in the engine.
	So avian flu, monkey pox, climate, blah, blah, blah.
	They're all the same.
	They're using the same techniques to grab you.
	Blah blah blah!
	They're all the same, they're all the same.
	What techniques are you using, Doddsworth?
	What techniques is Russell using, you fucking hypocrites?
	Unbelievable.
	The one thing I do believe that came out of her mouth is that she tunes out with details.
	Yeah, I believe that as well.
	A hundred percent.
	And once again, that speaks to her qualifications and expertise in talking about any of this bullshit.
	She's a photographer.
	She doesn't fucking know anything.
	Anyway, anyway.
	Hmm.
	Anyway.
	I would trust her with F-Snap.
	Uh, I assume.
	100% I would trust her to take a dick pic for me, right?
	Oh, absolutely, absolutely.
	It would be the most beautiful dick pic that I'm sure has ever been taken.
	But in terms, not down to me, down to her, but in terms of knowing anything about... I just thought I'd clarify.
	Just thought I'd clarify that.
	Let's not go further on this discussion.
	I'm just going to play the next clip.
	Think about climate.
	I mean, here's a few examples.
	Whatever you think of climate change, and whether it's man-made or not, and what the response is, do you know how they're trying to influence you and manipulate you?
	You know, script writers for films and series, they're invited to workshops.
	For instance, there was a workshop for scriptwriters about how to increase vaccination uptake.
	No way!
	Did that really happen?
	I mean, I know people talked about it because on soap operas in the UK, and let us know if this happened in your country, there was just sort of like casual bits of chat about, have you had your booster shot yet?
	I ain't getting a booster shot and there's no proof that it works.
	That's a conspiracy theorist!
	That literally was a scene from EastEnders for the BBC.
	That's 100% and it's not new.
	This kind of thing's been going on for decades.
	It's the history of the BBC and governments have had hotlines to soap opera managers and broadcasters forever.
	I think what's different is how out in the open it is.
	Now I've got documentation about the scriptwriters being invited to talk about vaccination uptake Oh, you've got documentation, do you?
	Perhaps because... Well, it's perhaps because no one's trying to hide it, because it's a perfectly sensible piece of public health policy to try and encourage vaccine uptake in the interest of the public health at large.
	She's absolutely right that this has happened for decades, but not to any nefarious ends that she's thinking about.
	At least not in this country, anyway.
	Yeah, especially with like people in the US of any kind of conspiracy, any stripe of conspiratorial information.
	If you believe conspiracy theories, you're just interested in them.
	What we know is that's absolutely true about our military.
	So she can use that kind of in the ether to support this idea.
	And are soap operas every day during the week in the UK or is it still just once a week?
	Ah, God, you know, it's been a while since I've checked in.
	They were every day for a while.
	I think a couple of them were down to like three days.
	It changed during the pandemic, and I'm not sure what the situation is now, to be perfectly honest.
	Yeah.
	It's so hard to write a soap opera.
	The amount of stuff they have to... Any headline is also just soap opera-wise.
	You gotta talk a lot every single day, and it's gonna be about the stuff that's happening in the world.
	In the world, right?
	So, can you imagine, right, had any of these soap operas just ignored COVID?
	That would have been fucking bizarre!
	It would have been, yeah.
	Because the whole concept, especially in this country of soap operas, is that The people in them are supposed to be normal like most of them are not like handsome Very attractive people like they are in the US soap operas, but like over here.
	These are very normal-looking individuals and Yeah, no, it's it's it's great and what they're supposed to be doing is reflecting society and then you know amplifying like all people get murdered and everyone's sleeping with everyone it said fine and I get it.
	But the actual kind of subjects that come up...
	Oh, it's the teats. Hey, I get it.
	Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. You know what?
	And you have people coming back from the dead and everything.
	Oh, there's some great shit that's happened over the years.
	It's vile.
	Yeah, but at large, the things that they're supposed to discuss on these shows
	are supposed to be a reflection of our society.
	and luck.
	Imagine if they were just like, oh well, we're not going to talk about the vaccine at all.
	I know everyone's getting one, literally everyone in the entire country pretty much is getting one, but nah, we just won't mention it.
	It would have just been entirely bizarre.
	In the next clip, I think I'm detecting what her actual problem with this might be.
	There's a big soap opera here in the UK.
	They had just the kind of cheesy vaccination scene you're talking about.
	Is that Corrie?
	The other one?
	Coronation Street?
	Coronation Street's another one.
	I was on my EastEnders though.
	So, you know, they had one.
	There was a couple of ethnic minority characters talking quite virtuously about how they'd had their vaccine and then a white woman comes onto the scene, ironically called Karen, and she hasn't had it and they call her one of them anti-vaxxers and make fun of her because she's buying cigarettes but she won't get the vaccine.
	There's loads of that.
	When you watch it, it actually feels quite artificial.
	Ah, so we're making white people look bad.
	I think we found the source of the problem here.
	Just an inkling that perhaps there's a little bit of something under the surface of what she's saying here.
	First off, she didn't have to bring up that they were ethnic minority characters at all.
	Could have just left that information out.
	It wouldn't have made a difference.
	A hundred percent.
	A hundred percent.
	They're making this white woman look bad and I'm a white woman and I felt bad because I also didn't get the vaccine.
	Well, I'm a white woman and I know how awful we can be sometimes.
	Because I'm realistic and I live in the world.
	Also, sorry that I made the actual anecdotal observation that was then directly represented in EastEnders.
	That scene she just described is spot on to my actual experience in my actual life.
	Right, right, and there we go.
	There we go.
	God forbid that we represent the things that are actually happening in the country.
	But, Dodsworth wants to go back to climate change, so here we go.
	But in COP26, all of the UK soap opera storylines converged.
	They crossed over.
	They mentioned each other.
	This does not happen without coordination.
	It was all deliberately to nudge people into being more worried about climate change.
	And the reason for that is to soften people up for net zero goals.
	It's a very contentious political policy, which involves a lot of hair shirts.
	And by the time you get to wear the hair shirt, you'll be glad of it because you'll be cold.
	You won't be able to afford your heating anymore.
	Fuck you!
	Sorry, oh my god.
	Right, so, so... Sorry, I know you're supposed to be more of the reactionary than me, but just every time I hear her I'm just like, argh!
	So, COP26 was the UN Climate Change Conference in 2021 held in Glasgow, Scotland, for anyone
	wondering.
	She's absolutely right that there was a concerted effort among soap operas.
	So Casualty, Coronation Street, Doctors, EastEnders, Emmerdale, Holby City and Hollyoaks all filmed scenes that covered different aspects of climate change and environmental issues.
	Each program also referenced one another for the first time.
	So characters from other shows appeared to discuss moments debated in their respected programs to raise awareness for climate change.
	And yeah, this was the first time in history that this happened.
	It was a phenomenal thing to see, and of course it took work and coordination that was deliberate.
	What a stupid fucking thing to say.
	I actually, I actually can't find- Can I say that I find it adorable?
	Like that's adorable to me.
	That they all got together and were like, you know what, we're going to make a point.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	That was very, like, hands across America, give peace a chance of them.
	A hundred percent.
	And you know what, like, a couple of these soap operas have existed since the 60s and are still going, right?
	And this is the first time in history that they have mentioned or acknowledged each other because the issue is that fucking important.
	That's why.
	I actually can't find much pushback about net zero carbon emission goals, at least in the UK.
	We as a society seem to be mostly fine with them, but Laura Dodsworth fucking hates them for reasons that she never really explains.
	It's a boogeyman, I think, for her, and that's it.
	She's going to prop it up whenever she can.
	It's her Jade Helm, it's Agenda 21, it's- Yeah.
	Yeah, that's a buzzy thing she gets to say.
	Or like, you know, Russell's saying 15 minute cities, which- Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I can't.
	It's one of those that I can't even understand.
	I know what they're saying.
	I know what the conspiracy theorists are saying.
	I know the words.
	I can't stick them in my brain and understand that humans think that it's bad.
	It's just wild.
	Okay.
	So, next up is, I would say, another spectacularly bad take from Laura Dodsworth.
	The closing credits of EastEnders, this iconic British soap opera, on one episode showed London if sea levels rise by two meters.
	Now, even the IPCC does not say this is a plausible scenario.
	But the point about using a graphic, you know, we're not in an observable climate crisis in London.
	We're not wading through water.
	We're wading through woke, but we're not wading through water.
	The point of the graphic is to trick you into thinking that this climate crisis is there on your doorstep.
	One day you might walk out and the city's underwater.
	Although the Netherlands have managed to hold back rising sea levels with medieval technology, and we've got terms barriers, you know, it's to frighten you.
	But does she think that people saw the end of EastEnders and thought, FUCKING HELL THE CITY'S UNDERWATER!
	And like, ran around the house trying to protect their belongings from the flood?
	Like, in her mind that seems to be what happened.
	No one show her WALL-E!
	It was a water world, right?
	It was an exaggeration to make a point to get people to realize that if we don't do anything now, we will be fucked in the future and we will be partially underwater if we don't do anything.
	Yeah, yeah.
	There is something to be said that feels like not great, that I'm in a very landlocked part of my country.
	So it's like, well, that's the one that...
	Where I am, I'm right on the coast of the Northeast, so I am, I shit you not, a stone's throw from a tributary from the ocean, so like, for me it's a little bit more real.
	Heaven forfend!
	I'd be concerned about your safety.
	That doesn't affect me directly!
	But worry about the safety of yourself and only yourself, Lauren.
	Jesus.
	Her last option, I think, is fucking fascinating.
	So in her mind, we should build big walls to keep the water away?
	That's what she's saying?
	She's saying, oh, the Netherlands has kept water away with medieval technology and everything, and we have the Thames barriers.
	It's like, well, how fucking big do you think...
	How big do you think we're going to have to build these?
	It's completely nonsensical.
	Also, levies are technology.
	Stamps are very sophisticated technology.
	Especially these days.
	Piles of dirt.
	Especially these days.
	We have come a ways since then, let's put it that way.
	From here, she pivots to talk about how she doesn't want to eat insects, which is fine.
	And think about insects.
	You know, there's no great clamour among the world's people to eat more insects.
	You know, we're not all going, oh yes, give me mealworms and crickets.
	But have you seen how many programs are talking about using insects, like in cookery programs or celebrities eating insects from Angelina Jolie barbecuing?
	Tarantulas, which was truly horrific, to Robert Downey Jr.
	talking about a protein drink that's made from insects.
	You know, there are some kind of technocratic public policy do-gooders, academics and politicians, that really want you to eat insects, so you'll see it everywhere in the media.
	Many of these have been regarded as and dubbed right-wing talking points.
	Let me know in the chat and the comments if you're aware of that.
	And let me know also how you identify in terms of your political persuasion.
	My personal belief, of course, is that neither right-wing nor left-wing party organisations are going to deliver to you the individual freedom that you will come to require.
	Neither right-wing nor left-wing parties will deliver you your freedom, but I will.
	So sign up to my locals chat, eh?
	Yeah, and I know which side pays.
	Yeah, 100%.
	Which side has the money?
	In terms of insects, it's just a weird fucking argument that she's making, to be honest.
	Yes, it has been a big thing in public awareness in recent years to eat more insects, because it's pretty common in Asia, and it's actually a really sustainable form of protein.
	It's not vegan, but it also doesn't kill any animals.
	Also, the xenophobia is not thinly veiled, because we do know that there are portions of this world that are perfectly used to eating certain types of insects, and we know what they look like.
	And this lady does not give a shit about them and thinks that they're probably barbaric, because she's racist.
	They're in Asia and Africa, you know, and as far as she's concerned, they can fucking stay there and eat their insects.
	No one is even slightly curtailing any of the issues in our food system.
	Nobody's doing it.
	The cricket barbecuers are the only people that are doing it.
	And frankly, that's not nearly enough.
	It's like, no one's trying to force you to eat them.
	If you don't want to eat them, don't fucking eat them.
	It's that simple.
	It really is.
	I, for one, am perfectly on board.
	I've had cricket crisps and that kind of thing before.
	They taste perfectly fine.
	They taste like food, to be honest.
	Anyway, next we have a bit more libertarianism and an encouragement to be above the left-right paradigm like Russell here.
	Like that.
	The climate change conversation for me is bypassed by reverence and love for the environment that I evolved in harmony with.
	That I can see that we ought to behave respectfully towards our planet and that regulation and control when it comes to the protection and love of our planet and the species that we share it with should target first and foremost the most powerful corporate entities that currently enjoy significant subsidies from us.
	Wealth transfer and redistribution of wealth are already taking place.
	It's just in the upward direction.
	Don't be mired in the left versus right conversation or paradigm.
	It's far, far too limiting.
	Corporations are being taken to task.
	Arguably not enough, but nonetheless there's virtually no one who the net zero carbon emissions goals hits harder than big business, as they are rightly the cause of most carbon emissions.
	But we are also individually the cause of some, and can do our best to minimize the damage that we are causing to the environment.
	That's it.
	It's not an either-or situation, Russell.
	We can fucking do both.
	That also isn't left-right.
	That's not above a left-right paradigm.
	The left has been saying a lot of those things, maybe from a different angle.
	Maybe an angle that's based in facts and what we've learned.
	Yeah, I would say... It's so frustrating.
	It's so frustrating.
	Who do you think is going to do that?
	How do you think the regulation situation got so bad?
	Deregulation happened!
	Yeah, and you know, who's going to be responsible for that?
	Almost like we need a government of some kind to do that kind of thing.
	Yeah, but we can collectively make choices for our own safety and to have a society that isn't... Alright, okay.
	We're going to skip ahead just a little bit because there was some waffley bullshit that didn't lead to anything.
	I mean and you wonder why um the ratings are going down for soap operas it's because they're shameless propagandists for government public health messaging and in fact there was a report that came out I think last year from the government's nudge unit and Sky the broadcaster and it's called the power of tv and it's about nudging people towards net zero and this is what I mean about it being more in the open they talk about using the whole gamut of programming from news which you'd like to think is impartial to children's programming and cookery, travel,
	documentaries, product placement, everything in between, in order to make people compliant for net zero
	policies. It's quite astonishing that it's just out there in the open. I'm astonished at what she just
	said. So this is true.
	There is effort to nudge viewers on television networks towards decarbonising their lives.
	To which I say, good!
	It should be out there in the open because it's a positive thing.
	And it's not just me, right?
	The Behavioural Insights team did research in this country showing that 8 out of 10 people agree With broadcasters nudging green choices through content, and one in three people say that television has inspired them to make changes.
	So it's working, to a degree, and Doddsworth cannot stand it.
	It's the most, just, it's also the teeny-tiniest little thing to do.
	Because we know that as individual consumers, and I'm a person that has built my entire life to try to be as environmentally conscious as possible.
	I have very hippie tendencies in that way.
	My creative process is completely recycled and secondhand.
	I think about this way more than your average person because I've got a little bit of a screw loose, but hopefully in a way that I see is positive and is a positive impact.
	So getting real about What quote-unquote propaganda, we're going to say marketing.
	Marketing derailed the responsibility for climate change conversation in the 90s.
	It was a concerted effort to take the focus off of environmental protection through government regulation and put it on the individual.
	So even this effort is this little teeny weeny little piece of a much larger picture That is Eva.
	It's like she's outlining these efforts that are so minimal.
	And not to say that they're bad.
	I think that, you know, attack from every possible front.
	Absolutely.
	People need to understand, you know, like what their consumer choices support.
	They need to vote with their dollars.
	All of that.
	But making it a thing on TV a little bit is a great, it's a nice thing.
	It's a nice thing to do.
	And also, according to her, news reporting on climate change is biased now, just by default.
	Because they're talking about it, that's biased.
	Like, fuck off with this nonsense.
	That's just absolute bollocks.
	And they talk about the historical use of TV for social engineering.
	So, you know, I would never tell people to turn off the TV, although there is a chapter of my new book with that title.
	But if you don't want to turn off the TV, you have to watch it mindfully.
	You have to understand that it's not a one-way process.
	They're trying to influence you as much as entertain you.
	Yes, yes they are.
	Yes you are.
	I know I've hammered on this point a lot today, and perhaps it's getting a bit tired, but you're doing the same thing, but for even worse reasons.
	I would never tell someone what to do.
	Except for everyone who reads that chapter of my book.
	I would never tell someone what to do, except for the entire interview that we've just had.
	Yeah, except for all the times I tell people what to do.
	Like she's un-gripping.
	Like she has, she's without grip.
	She's not, she's a non-gripped person.
	That's really like, and even switching to Rumble, like I know it's subtle and maybe I'm making this up, but I can hear, there's like a venom in her voice the more she talks.
	That's very, like, a Phyllis Schlafly kind of vibe of this, like, I'm coming from this place of, like, female white fragility that I'm, like, I'm so mad that they're changing my TV shows.
	Like, it's very, like, there's a little bit more, like, like spice to it as she talks.
	Yeah, she gets angrier as she goes.
	Thankfully, now Laura Dodsworth fucks off.
	And as far as I'm concerned, she can keep fucking off until she's so fucked off that we never see her again.
	But we do have a little bit more of Russell's own content to get into.
	And in this next clip, we learn who the upcoming guests on his show are going to be in this next sort of season.
	And I have to say, none of it is good.
	Be honest, do you feel just a little bit brighter?
	Do you feel that all the things you suspected and deep down knew were true?
	Let me know in the chat and the comments.
	If you're watching this anywhere other than locals, click on the red button, become a member of our community.
	You get all sorts of access to me, meditations, extra content, and even the opportunity to come here in the livid, lurid flesh.
	We're going to take a little break now so as we don't go absolutely crazy from the burden of our endeavor.
	But when we return on the 5th of June, our guests will include Tulsi Gabbard, Richard Dawkins, Roger Waters, and this just in, Elon Musk will be joining us.
	Join us next time, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
	Until then, here's the news.
	No, here's the effing news.
	Stay free.
	Are you excited?
	Are you excited?
	We get to deal...
	We get to deal with Tulsi Gabbard, who I honestly forgot existed.
	We also get to deal with Richard Dawkins, who has turned into way more of a shithead over the last decade.
	We have maybe anti-semi-in-chief a little bit, certainly anti-Israeli-in-chief Roger Waters, who I have very conflicted... Oh really?
	Yeah, oh yeah, he's been on that fucking tip for years, for decades, which I have very mixed...
	I have very mixed feelings about because his contribution to Pink Floyd, and specifically
	The Wall, is one of my favourite albums of all time. And yeah, going through...
	Yeah, we will get into Roger Waters properly when we actually deal with him, because we will be
	watching that, and I get the feeling I know what they're going to be talking about, because I have
	been keeping up to date with his recent shenanigans. There's a...
	There's an investigation in Germany over him wearing a sort of Nazi-ish uniform on stage.
	But I will fill out some context to this.
	So it's actually something that he has been doing since the conception of the wall, because the entire point of the thing is the character Pink becomes a Nazi in the album, right?
	And so it goes down that whole militaristic thing, and he's been doing this for ages.
	But obviously, in light of his more recent comments about Israel and Jewish people in general, I think Germany have been investigating it.
	Because also, they take things like Nazi stuff very fucking seriously over there.
	If you dress up as a Nazi, you go to prison over there.
	That is a thing.
	You do not fuck around with them on that point.
	We'll see what comes of it.
	But yeah, needless to say, I'm not excited.
	And then we have Elon Musk!
	I'm mad.
	I'm pre-angry.
	He's just the worst.
	So we're going to accept, yes, all the bad things about Elon Musk, but then actually just, I'm going to go ad hominem.
	I apologize.
	I'm going to go ad hominem.
	He makes my skin crawl off of my body.
	He is such a creep.
	He's like, if you look up creep, you should avoid in the dictionary.
	A lot he's just gives he he gives serial killer to me in a way not like that he'd really bother just his vibe is like I am Not human.
	Yeah, there's a little bit of, um, no, no, no, there's definitely a vibe of kind of, um, kind of psychopath, kind of, kind of, you know, like American, American psycho kind of vibes from him.
	I could, I could picture that.
	Um, you know, yeah, as I say, this is all, this is all conjecture and, um, you know, just, just our feelings, but, uh, But yeah, regardless of our feelings, factually he is a piece of shit.
	And yeah, I would say I'm looking forward to it, but that would be like looking forward to a colonoscopy, so there we go.
	He is profoundly pathetic, that is occasionally.
	There is that.
	There is that.
	He's so, to his marrow, he's just like a pathetic, sad boy that just wants people to like him, but also can't understand why it's not working out for him.
	Yeah, it just can't quite get through.
	Right, anyway, let's move along.
	Let's get into what Bran's editorial piece is about.
	Thanks for watching Zika Box, everyone.
	Good day.
	No, he's the fucking loser.
	The food you're eating is not only causing you cancer, it's also making you stupid.
	I'm loving it.
	fart You know food?
	Yeah, what, food?
	What I require in order not to die?
	That you require in order that you die?
	Because most food is now so bad for you, you'd be better off just eating tablets and staring off into limitless space, drooling.
	So, here we've got a piece on processed foods, which is absolutely going to pivot into a conspiracy about how food companies are trying to make everyone sick.
	And of course, there's no use of fear in this editorial whatsoever, of course.
	Yeah.
	Food companies make food shitty to make money.
	They make more money if they work less hard at making the food good.
	All the processing is so they make money.
	End of discussion.
	Apparently not end of discussion according to Russell.
	He is far from done.
	I figured.
	What's the point in a society if all it does is supports powerful business interests while turning you into a dumb, thick, cancer-ridden lump?
	We're eating more processed foods than ever, and ultra-processed food make up nearly 60% of Americans' diets on average.
	That's not just processed, that's ultra-processed.
	Hey, whoa, whoa, where are you going?
	We've already processed that!
	Yeah, I know, but we're gonna ultra-process it!
	Dumb, thick, cancer-ridden lump.
	One thing I did notice throughout this piece is that Brand is going hard.
	He's really putting everything he's got into it, which I thought was a little unusual for what is seemingly a fairly standard editorial that he does every week.
	I later found out there is a reason for it, which we will get to.
	But first, Russell... Russell... Russell, he takes things a step too far.
	A diet heavy in ultra-processed food could be responsible for increasing your risk of depression.
	I'm loving it!
	Australian researchers say even packaged products sold as healthy may leave us feeling down.
	Down.
	Down under, more like!
	Have you seen Bluey?
	If he comes for Bluey, I swear to God I'm gonna put hands on him.
	I have a two-year-old daughter, and there is a reason that Bluey is hailed as a savior among children's television shows.
	It's phenomenal in its breadth of content, overall tone, and entertainment factor, while remaining wholesome and often downright beautiful.
	Russell, you come for Bluey, and I'm coming for you, motherfucker.
	I've never seen Bluey.
	I don't know anything about it.
	But I know of a sacred and hallowed ground, and I defy people that are parrots, because I trust your judgment.
	I know grown adults who do actually just enjoy watching the show on their own, so you know, if you want something that's, you know, gonna be light and wholesome, guaranteed, like, give it a try, just throw it on, because they're only like five minute episodes or something anyway.
	Oh yeah, no shame.
	It's just a happenstance that I haven't seen it.
	It's not intentional at all, I'm just acknowledging my lack of experience and saying that I support anybody that's into it.
	That's great.
	Bluey is great and brown can fuck off.
	Anyway, next I don't think he particularly enjoys being vegan.
	These days there's plenty of factory food at our fingertips.
	Ultra processed foods are typically foods that come in packages and they typically include a long list of ingredients so things like artificial sweeteners and emulsifiers.
	So even if you If you are vegan or you're a carnivore, we're not at war with one another.
	If you're eating those kind of vegan foods that has that long list, I do sometimes eat, because they're delicious, because they're one of the few things that make being vegan bearable, then you're participating in the problem.
	You're eating stuff that is not good for you.
	Society's not going to do it for us, is it?
	The government's not going to do it.
	Big corporations aren't going to do it.
	We're going to have to do it ourselves.
	We have to individually awaken and support one another.
	We're going to have to help one another along the path.
	We're going to have to check in with one another.
	Are you eating well?
	Are you doing alright?
	Have you had any broccoli today?
	I've got kids.
	I know how hard it is.
	You have to almost hold a gun to their heads to get them to eat a bit of spinach or something green.
	We're going to have to do this collectively together because they're not going to do it for us.
	Yeah, so here we get into a fascinating narrative, given what the entire rest of the show was about.
	Oh, they're not going to do it for us, the government isn't going to do it for us.
	Like, didn't we just spend 45 minutes, well at this point, two and a half hours, talking about how the government should stop trying to influence us, and that we know what's good for ourselves, blah blah blah.
	Wasn't that the entire point?
	Like, oh, the government should fuck off and leave us alone.
	We'll make our own choices.
	Like, all that libertarian bullshit.
	But now it's, oh, well, the government's not going to do it for us, so we're going to have to do it as a bad government.
	Bad government!
	Oh, my lord.
	It's such an intellectually dishonest argument.
	Just complete cognitive dissonance.
	Complete cognitive dissonance.
	But we need to understand, it's very basic.
	Government regulations have not kept up with food production, at least from what I can tell.
	There has to be an impetus for the government to impose a regulation and they're always developing new kind of wild food science.
	And then it has to make people sick and then get regulated because regulations aren't enforced nearly enough At the, like, you know, at the production level, they're complaining, like, there's a reason that
	US versions of the same food are different here than you have access to in the UK.
	Because our government doesn't protect us from bullshit!
	We have much safer versions over here.
	Oh yeah!
	Oh yeah!
	So that answers your question of the impetus to regulate and keep people safe is what keeps your food supply safe.
	Yeah.
	My government is not doing nearly enough to keep our food safe.
	Or water.
	It's not happening.
	So, like the complaint of ultra processed foods, again, everything that I just heard is putting it on the individual.
	When the companies that make the food and make tons and tons and tons of money off that food, To the detriment of other food options, potentially.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I'm at a loss.
	That's so weird.
	This whole thing is a case of him having an underlying decent point.
	It's just he spins it off in the worst possible fucking directions in order to either make money or cast suspicion.
	You know, and it's... Yeah, and do you know what?
	In this next clip, I've actually got to give him some credit because he makes a point that I do wholeheartedly agree with.
	Now, Deakin University's Dr Melissa Lane has linked the consumption of lots of packet meals and snacks with having the blues.
	The blues.
	Australia, even the news in Australia is so casual.
	I had the blues so bad that I couldn't stay alive no much longer.
	That's not the point.
	He found those whose diets were comprised of at least 30% ultra-processed foods were at much higher risk of psychological distress.
	People who are eating more ultra processed foods had about a 23% increased risk of depression.
	Yeah, that's quite significant.
	You are much more likely to be depressed if you're eating that stuff.
	Let me know in the chat in the comments.
	You feeling alright?
	Right.
	Is the answer no?
	Are you eating a lot of processed food?
	Right, that's part of it.
	Can you not afford to eat other food?
	Right, that's another part of it.
	Do you have no access to delicious organic food that could grow abundantly if we were willing to alter systems that benefit the most powerful institutions and interests in the world?
	Well, obviously, we're going to sign up to your local's channel, Russell.
	It seems to be the only solution.
	In earnest, one of the biggest problems facing the obesity crisis that we're dealing with worldwide is the lack of affordable fruits, vegetables, grains, etc., particularly when compared to junk food and processed food, which often provide significantly more calories for a significantly lower price.
	It's a huge problem that no one is really getting around to solving.
	Not even close!
	Barely even trying.
	But this is one of those cases where, you know what?
	You're right.
	I completely agree with you.
	As do I. Yeah, it's possibly the only time in this entire show, but you know what?
	I'll give it up to the Somali Pirates.
	You were correct on this one.
	But where is he coming from?
	Is individual, like individual responsibility, which is absurd to put the onus on the, like, yeah, he's, he's identifying the problem, but isn't being specific about any solution or like a systemic understanding.
	He sees the systemic results.
	Well, we're going to get to the solution a little bit later.
	And it's more of an inferred solution than anything, but you'll see.
	But next, we're going to get a sense of how Russell actually feels about processed foods.
	The potential mood-lowering fodder is not just limited to buns and burgers.
	Delicious, I'd love to eat that thing.
	If I was in that room, I'd snatch that out of that man's hand, eat it, and then lick what remained out of his mouth.
	I mean, gross, but he loves it.
	He loves meat and he loves processed foods.
	Which, by the way, not to throw any shade to any vegans or anyone out there who do also love the taste of meat, because that is a pretty common thing.
	That's not throwing shade at you guys, more just him when he's so fucking ardent about it elsewhere.
	But yeah, he loves this shit.
	You don't need to look far to find the reason people like it.
	You just said it.
	And also the reason people eat it.
	Right.
	He's looking at these images on screen and going, oh, fuck yeah, that's what I want.
	That's his whole response.
	It's such a bizarre kind of piece for him.
	It's kind of, on the one hand, he's like, oh, these are disgusting and they're poisoning you, but oh God, I want them.
	Doesn't that look delicious?
	Yeah, it is even more simple than the argument he could make.
	Yeah, you're right, you're right.
	I'm almost reading too much into what he's saying.
	Which I guess is illustrative of the problem, in that we all know that these things are bad for us, but we all definitely also want to eat them most of the time.
	I mean, this all looks normal!
	I mean, maybe he's doing it deliberately and making a point, but all the...
	It's coming off as... I don't know, I think the lady doth protest too much.
	Let's put it that way.
	Things like diet soda, things that we might consider to be relatively healthy for us.
	I mean, this all looks normal. Firstly, that's the food I grew up on,
	and it's still the food I crave right now.
	So, Brand grew up in the poor seaside town of Clacton-on-Sea.
	So odds are his childhood, much like my own, was full of cheaper processed foods.
	So it's not unusual to crave that sort of thing, even as you're older.
	But what is strange is then saying like, this all looks normal when running an editorial about how bad processed foods are.
	Again, I think he's just letting the mask slip a little bit so he can just be like, Fuck, that looks good!
	You know, instead of just being like, oh, that doesn't, that doesn't look like food.
	You know, which, which is what the response should be.
	Or even, like, that's, I mean, that's almost a little, I take great issue with.
	arguments against processed food, unless you're really coming from like,
	let's remedy this on a systemic level, because there is this demonization of poverty
	and a total misunderstanding of the reality of living in a food desert, which I have.
	I've lived there.
	I've been a poor most of my life.
	Yeah, me too.
	There have been places where like, oh yeah, it's really hard to get food and get food that is healthy and it's easier and also you're working and you're exhausted and just throwing something in a microwave or whatever.
	It's just, there's a million reasons.
	Why this is working and happening.
	And it is kind of hilarious that he's just distracted by the images of like burgers.
	That looks so good.
	Yeah, like think about it a little yourself.
	Just because you hate being vegan doesn't mean you need to take it out on us with distracting propaganda.
	Just don't be vegan if you hate it so much.
	The reason for the propaganda is coming.
	But yeah, he doesn't seem to be a fan of it, honestly.
	You can stop being one, Russell.
	I'm not going to judge you.
	Yeah, that's the freedom that you have!
	Do what you want, you know?
	That's entirely your choice.
	There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, etc, etc, etc.
	There are degrees.
	I'm not going to get into veganism right now.
	I'm on side with vegans in general.
	If we were all acting purely on a moral compass, we would all be fucking hardline vegans.
	But that's not the reality that we live in.
	That's not the world we live in.
	I don't have that kind of money.
	Don't have that kind of money.
	Truly.
	Exactly.
	Anyway, so again, we've spent the entire episode so far saying how the government should stay out of things and not influence us in any way, right?
	Now watch this.
	A study by Imperial School of Public Health found that higher consumption of ultra-processed foods was associated with a greater risk of developing cancer overall, and specifically with ovarian and brain cancers.
	It was also associated with an increased risk of dying from cancer, most notably with ovarian and breast cancers.
	But do remember, it's delicious, and it's highly profitable for the people that make it.
	How is it they're able to continue doing this when everyone knows that it's bad for us?
	Why are the government not doing something about it?
	Surely the government should be operating on your behalf to regulate these industries and ensure that where possible we're given the best opportunities to stay healthy and fit.
	So why is that not happening?
	Okay, so now he wants regulation.
	Okay.
	But wait, let's see where he takes this at the end of the editorial.
	So there you go, a simple story that shows you how you are being slowly poisoned by delicious foods.
	In a sense, it's a perfect metaphor for the way that we live today.
	Things that taste delicious because we were not evolved to have access to them in these proportions are slowly killing us and the government's not going to do anything about it and the corporations aren't going to do anything about it except set up regulatory bodies that are invested in things staying the same.
	Where's change going to come from then?
	You and me.
	But that's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the chat.
	See you in a second.
	So, regulatory bodies wouldn't do anything now.
	Because they're all bought and paid for.
	But what would do something?
	You and me, apparently.
	Again, the only answer to any problem that he presents seems to be sticking with Russell Brand and subscribing to his ideas and his local's channel.
	I thought, I've been very concerned with oversimplifying arguments.
	I don't wanna embarrass myself like that movie snafu earlier.
	I don't like saying things out of pocket.
	But compared to who's gonna fix it, you and me, I think I'm gonna be pretty safe.
	For the oversimplification problem.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	But the kicker is that it works.
	It clearly works.
	You and me, we'll stick together.
	We'll get through this hellscape.
	Just subscribe to my local channel.
	So next, I referenced this earlier, but we get to discover why Brand decided to do an editorial on processed foods for this episode specifically.
	Good bacteria in your gut can impact every process in your body, even that one.
	But did you know 99% of probiotics don't even work at all?
	That's because they don't make it to your gut.
	They go down the mouth hole, they could end up anywhere.
	Unlike this smart probiotic by Hite, the only product on the market that's proven to work by science.
	Gone are the days of feeling bloated, blocked and lethargic.
	And that's thanks to the world's first probiotic that targets gut, mental and immune health, you little capsule of glory.
	So there it is.
	We're selling a probiotic pill, which links perfectly into his editorial on processed foods.
	Did you see it?
	Did you see it coming?
	Did you?
	I said it!
	I said it!
	Last episode I was like, I don't see any supplements.
	What's up?
	What's the high markup?
	Ooh, the trickery.
	Oh, you son of a bitch.
	I don't even know who you is!
	I'm mad!
	Jeez!
	That entire editorial is just for the purpose of selling this.
	But Brand continues to go hard in this next clip.
	You only need to take one capsule a day, which means you can say goodbye to foul-tasting liquid probiotics like this.
	Oh, you dirty devil.
	Where did that come from?
	An abscess?
	That looks like a cup of pee.
	That looks like a cup of pee.
	Disgusting.
	For anyone wondering... He's holding what looks like a cup of pee.
	Yeah, he's holding up like a glass of like brownish-orangey liquid, meant to be a liquid probiotic, and then he sniffed it and called it abscess juice.
	And finally, finally here, we get to see why Brand has been going so hard at this editorial today.
	Take control of your gut health and keep yourself regular, you know what I mean, with the smart probiotic.
	Use brand 15 at checkout to get your exclusive discount.
	Now let's go back to that other magnificent young man.
	I think it was supposed to go back to him in the studio, I think, but he's already fucked
	off on holiday.
	So there we go.
	Brand will be getting a cut of the profits anytime someone uses the code brand at checkout when buying this product.
	And that is why he's put his all into this editorial.
	It directly profits him.
	So the more he scares the wits out of everyone with how bad almost all food is for them and how bad a state their guts must be in, the more likely he is to shift more units of this probiotic.
	Here's this big scary problem, but ah, let me sell you the thing that'll fix you.
	It is both shameless and disgusting fear-mongering and propaganda in order to make a buck.
	Yep.
	There it is.
	Yep.
	There are the supplements.
	Yep, there it is.
	There it is.
	He got me, gal!
	He thought there weren't gonna be, and there are... Also, I'm sorry.
	15% code is just insulting.
	code is just insulting. 25% and above or you're wasting it.
	Not everyone has the margins of Alex Jones, this is the thing.
	I know.
	I don't know how much he's going to be making off that, but I'd wager it's a good amount.
	That's wild!
	It's wild!
	That full 10 minute editorial that was there was all in service of just selling these pills.
	That's it.
	I feel a perverse sense of accomplishment finding this.
	This is your paid advertisement.
	this is your paid advertisement, this is wow.
	Oh, right.
	Yeah, it's pretty disgusting.
	and...
	And that there is the close of this show.
	And given that he said he'd be back on the 5th of June and is back now, I would guess that one of the next subjects that we're going to cover is possibly going to be one of the shithead guests that he mentioned.
	So we'll see.
	We'll see.
	It'll be great.
	It'll be wonderful.
	I love it.
	So how are you feeling about today's episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand?
	I'm unhappy.
	Violent, I think.
	I don't know.
	That's the American part of my psyche.
	I don't know.
	Yeah, it's really- Rage.
	Yeah, right?
	Yeah.
	Blind.
	Rage.
	Yeah, I- Wow.
	That lady sucked.
	Yeah, right?
	Laura Darnsworth, fucking awful.
	Fucking awful.
	I really, I, um, yeah.
	I do feel good about Finding common tropes that we've seen other places and how he's repackaging them in a way that is very, um, kind of like bland enough to blend in with regular programming.
	Cause he's, he's capitalizing on his celebrity cachet that has nothing to do with his political stance.
	And that's what he's going to get more audience capture from the Russell brand of it all.
	Not the rumble of it all.
	Yeah, that's it.
	And I mean, you know, when I was at this wedding at the weekend, you know, I was telling people about this new venture, etc.
	And every single one of them, as soon as I said, oh, I'm doing a podcast about Russell Brand, they'd go, oh, I love him.
	He's great.
	Like, oh, he's so good with words.
	He's so funny and charming.
	And then I have to be like, yeah, he is.
	He's also a massive shithead.
	And here's why.
	Well, I spent a lot of my weekend doing that, to be honest, and then explaining to one of the fellow groomsmen the issues with Joe Rogan as well.
	Oh boy!
	Yeah, bless him!
	Not jealous of that!
	Yeah, Gaffer's god-loving, but he just he just kind of didn't have an awareness, you know, and I don't know I think I might have burst a bubble a little bit for him You know, I feel I feel a bit bad because I think he just he's not really into any of the the kind of the conspiracy shit that the wrote. I think he just likes
	the interviews and kind of, you know, the character, but yeah, sorry, sorry, Geoffers, if you're
	listening.
	That's the argument that I get from people that enjoy Joe Rogan. And I'd say,
	throw the baby out at the bathwater because there's a lot of damage that's been done.
	A hundred percent.
	The only episodes of Rogan that I've ever enjoyed are when he's had people on who push back.
	One of my favorites was when Bill Burr went on during the pandemic and Rogan was like, oh yeah, people who wear masks are pussies.
	And Burr was like, oh, look at you all manly with your open nose and throat.
	You know, just willing to be like, come on, you're a guy with like six Elks in your freezer, what the fuck does it matter to you?
	Whereas Burr conversely was like, no, if they tell me to wear a mask, I wear a mask.
	If they tell me not to wear a mask, I take the mask off.
	That's how that works.
	You know, I'm not a fucking expert.
	It's so simple.
	Oh, anyway.
	Anyway, here comes the close of the show.
	I believe you had a plug.
	I do!
	So, uh, I even wrote stuff down.
	And this is a fun, this is less chaotic, but even my notes are chaotic.
	Let me just expand the view a little bit.
	I wonder if I can put you in solo view, actually.
	Oh, no, I've put me in solo view.
	That's not what I wanted to do.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	We get more cat though, not mad at that.
	It's just you, there we go.
	Pressure, okay.
	For anyone listening, this was all video shenanigans, just trying to get just Lauren on the screen, not me.
	Anyway, off you go.
	Yeah, so we're going to be in Kansas City this weekend, Kansas City, Missouri this weekend.
	Mike, my partner and I, we are both artistes and we are actually our friends are putting on this like show event market called Scene Double.
	You can follow them on Instagram, see kind of what artists are going to be bringing to
	the table.
	It's Saturday, June 10th from 12 to 6.
	The market is going to be, and then I think there's an opening reception the night before
	as well, and we're going to be there.
	It's this place, the event is at Fifth Floor Space, which is a little vague for a name,
	but I bet it's Googleable.
	And actually, I have carved some plaques.
	In my former life as a tattoo artist, I still have a lot of images and stuff that I enjoy.
	And so I have carved art plaque stuff.
	Oh, that's cool.
	Thank you.
	And my partner, Mike, is a printmaker.
	And so he has And he does kind of dabble in both conspiracy, Cold War, UFO, alien, like that's kind of his interest as an observer.
	And so I've been making, I make shrines, which doesn't really explain anything, but yeah, I made, so this little alien eyeball UFO guy.
	We have some of those.
	Something I'm very proud of is I just started printing myself, like, you know, like carving like lino cuts and printing on fabric.
	And so I've been making the show that we love is called Yellow Jackets.
	If anybody, if any Yellow Jackets fans are out there, the first episode of the second season.
	That's a cool cushion.
	Thank you.
	Well, and it's all made from recycled materials, like I printed.
	For anyone listening, it's a cushion version of a pie that says, I want my lawyer and frosting on the top.
	But it's a cushion.
	That's excellent.
	Yeah, it's like a little stuffy pillow thing, because t-shirts are great, but I feel like if I buy another t-shirt, I'll lose my mind.
	So I try to find things that are a little different, still art that you can use and enjoy.
	Outside of just having t-shirts, even though t-shirts are also great.
	We always need to be clothed.
	But yeah, I Want My Lawyer was like a cookie thing that Misty Quigley made in the first episode of season two.
	It was so funny.
	It was this great moment.
	Christina Ricci, her performance in the show, tour de force, and it just won me over.
	Yeah and it was so the I did like the red icing I carved all that out of like linoleum and then printed all that and then I had fabric that I tie-dyed to look like a cookie but not be brown because brown's not cute.
	Yeah yeah.
	Basically, I'm extremely extra is what I need people to know.
	And you can purchase little pieces of that insanity in like art form.
	Yeah.
	And also thank you to everybody watching and anyone that's interested too.
	See what I'm doing.
	And I do have the world's worst web store.
	I promise I'll do better soon.
	I promise.
	It's really bad right now, but you can still get stuff even if you're not going to be in Kansas City or if you're not in Chicago.
	But if you are in Kansas City, it'll be cool.
	And my partner is super talented and creative and funny.
	I would absolutely encourage you if you're in Kansas City, we're rolling out a whole Next level portion of his campaign to blow up the moon.
	That's his thing right now.
	And it's pretty spectacular.
	Like, he's getting real weird with it.
	I follow him on Instagram and I can confirm it.
	It's looking pretty cool, I've got to say.
	Anyone who wants to follow Lauren or find her art, go to, on Instagram, it's at made.by.lauren.b.
	And I think you're able to find links to the web store and stuff like that through there as well.
	And info for the event and stuff too.
	And also events that we have coming up.
	I'll do my best to keep it up.
	Absolutely, and I'm on Instagram at alworthofficial, and I've had a couple of people follow me on Twitter as well.
	I don't really use Twitter, to be perfectly honest.
	You'll have found that I've occasionally signed in just to shout at some politician or another.
	That's mostly how I've used it.
	But you never know, I might be more active on there in the future, who knows, but that's where I'm at anyway.
	And Lauren, you've been setting up official on-brand socials, haven't you as well?
	Yeah!
	We have an Instagram, and so on-brand is a very common phrase.
	It seems extremely common for people that want to start projects and immediately quit, which is hilarious.
	Lots of marketing podcasts out there that have died after about six episodes.
	Yeah, lucky to get to six sometimes.
	There is another on-brand podcast and more power to them.
	They're doing great.
	There's a bunch of other usernames that we'll never get to because they're just languishing.
	So you can find us, probably most likely what we've been kind of settled on is the on-brand pod.
	And on Twitter, I had to get a little creative.
	I thought it was going to be fine.
	It turns out I was incorrect, so it's on underscore brand underscore podcast.
	Well, you know what?
	Show notes will have the actual handle, because I just escaped my brain.
	But yeah, I'm trying to get socials on TikTok, on Instagram, and we do have a Twitter.
	Also, I'm terrible at Twitter.
	I can't guarantee that there's going to be much Action?
	But I think we'll try.
	I would love to try.
	And also Facebook, I think we're probably working on, too.
	But trying to figure that out is harder.
	Yeah, we'll get there.
	We'll get there.
	Cat keeps knocking my camera.
	For anyone wanting to email us as well, it's the same handle.
	It's theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	And fire us an email, by all means.
	Again, if you like us and want to support what we do, it would be very much appreciated if you could go to patreon.com on brand and donate at whatever tier that you can or feel like it and we will be endlessly appreciative is all I can say.
	Yeah, thank you, times a million billion.
	I mean that from the bottom of my heart, even though it sounds kind of dumb to say.
	No, no, no, no.
	Do you know what?
	It sounds cheesy, but I'm 100% with you on that one.
	Oh, my feelings are quite cheesy.
	Well, yeah, you know what?
	Sometimes it's like that.
	But yeah, I'm so unbelievably grateful for all of the support and everyone for listening.
	I think that's it, isn't it?
	Are we done?
	Are we done?
	Was that it?
	We're done.
	That was it.
	Okay, well.
	Well, got plenty to look forward to, and without further ado, we will see you next week.
	Bye!
	Take care, bye bye!
	Bye!

▲