Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

June 15, 2023 - On Brand

03:40:35

OB #4 - The Brand Delusion

This episode Al and Lauren dissect Russell's interview with Richard Dawkins, and in the process discover that Russell Brand is a religious zealot (no, we are not kidding). Interview with Barbara Genova at Runaway: https://barbaragenova.substack.com/p/on-brand 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'm Lauren, and I'm learning reluctantly.
	Yep.
	Gutted for you.
	Lauren, what is your bright spot this week?
	Oh, it's, um, it's so stupid.
	It's, uh, so my partner, my first appropriate, probably.
	Um, so I want, and just to let everybody know, I'm going to mention my partner, Mike, a lot.
	Cause we were already like, uh, emotionally, we were like the couple that wears like matching, uh, tropical shirts and like cargo shorts on a cruise.
	Like emotionally, we were already there.
	And then lockdown happened, and I think a lot of people either were like, oh, this isn't working, I need my space, or you just meld the thing monster into one person.
	So I'm like, I'm sorry guys, it's just going to have to... We are the Borg, whatever.
	Uh, we had a big drive for the event this past weekend from Kansas City to, uh, from Chicago to Kansas City and back.
	And, uh, We were at points a little sleepy and had to occupy our time.
	And what we did was I made this huge playlist on Spotify of like 50s doo-wop.
	So like Frankie Valli was rocking our world and we were just screaming songs like Ragdoll at the top of our lungs.
	It was, um, I, You love to not have a witness in a car.
	You know what I mean?
	Like it was, I would say, I think that like being cool is like dumb and boring.
	So being a weird nerd and singing really poorly to a whole section of pretty ridiculous songs from a specific time and place in America.
	So like late fifties, early sixties.
	Do falsetto, like the really extreme... It's just like, it didn't feel very adult, but it was really fun.
	And that's a thing in our home.
	It's just, we can't stop, like, yelling, like, RADOL!
	Like, at the top of our lungs.
	Which made talking kind of tough.
	I found that out the hard way.
	I would argue that's damn near wholesome.
	That's very cute.
	Absolutely!
	Yeah, I was raised by the California Raisins.
	It's just how I am.
	And if anybody is interested, I think you probably search for a playlist.
	It's just three cheese emojis in a row on Spotify.
	It might show up.
	Have a party.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	If you would like to be a weirdo with us.
	What's your bright spot?
	My bright spot is my daughter and her mum have returned from they're in Italy for 10 days.
	And it's kind of, it's one of those those weird kind of situations where I'm like, I really like being alone.
	I really like being on my own and in a kind of Peaceful space, you know, just in my own little world kind of thing, doing my own stuff.
	I value alone time a lot, but at the same time, particularly with a child, like a young child, them not being there is kind of like just losing a limb for a little while and you're like, oh fuck, how do I now cope with, you know, not having a leg for the next 10 days, you know?
	It definitely feels just like, ah, this is, this is okay.
	I'm functionally the same, but I'm not.
	So it's.
	Yeah, just like a gaping emotional hole in your very deepest depths of your heart.
	Great.
	No, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Simple, simple stuff.
	You know, it's.
	Yeah, but it's nice that she's back, you know, and we can spend some time together and stuff.
	We've just been hanging out, you know.
	Well, that was sweet.
	Yeah, no, it's great.
	Just being grateful to having your child back.
	Until the inevitable moment where they start to drive you up the wall again.
	That's just part of parenting life, I think.
	It's just unavoidable.
	But there we go.
	Right, so at the top of the episode, I want to draw everyone's attention to an interview that I did with Barbara Jennever over at Runaway on Substack.
	I know a bunch of you have read it already, and it does get into why we're doing this podcast, the dangers of Brandt specifically, and a little on his background as well.
	Barbara is a really insightful interviewer and has some other great reads on there as well, including an interview with Matthew Remsky from Conspiratuality as well.
	I'm stoked!
	It's cool!
	Yeah, it's great.
	There's some really cool stuff on there.
	The link to the interview is in the show notes, and if you want to follow Barbara on Instagram, It's at call Genova or Genova, I'm not quite clear on the pronunciation actually, but it's at call G-E-N-O-V-A.
	Many people have graciously seen fit to donate to our Patreon, Lauren, and I think it's about time that we thanked them for that.
	I'm into it.
	Let's party.
	Let's party.
	So, Keith Egan, or Egan, Egan, you are now on Awakening Wonder.
	If the clip will play.
	Let's find out.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	There we go.
	Thank you!
	Thank you, thank you.
	Keith egging us on to make more content.
	Okay.
	Never heard that one before, I'm sure.
	No, no, no, not at all.
	Cal Heartflood, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you very much.
	Hand of Yawgmoth, you are now an Awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an Awakening wonder.
	And not to be angered, I'd imagine.
	Or woken from the depths.
	Yep, 100%.
	Tannen, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you!
	Christina Old, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you, Christina.
	Thank you, thank you, thank you.
	And finally, David Pratt, you are now an Awakening Wonder.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wonder.
	Thank you, David.
	Thank you!
	It is very much appreciated.
	And if anyone wants to support us in what we do, become an Awakening Wonder, or even donate on a higher tier, head to patreon.com slash onbrand and you will have our eternal 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.
	Oh, and a big welcome to all of the new YouTube subscribers as well.
	I keep forgetting about that, and it's not that you don't have my gratitude, it's that I'm eternally absent-minded.
	But thank you for that.
	That's great.
	Well, and we're a little overwhelmed with...
	There's that.
	I feel like I talked about this a lot, like, yeah, we'll have plenty of time to like ease into it, and I'm sure nobody will be listening at first.
	Yeah, we'll have like five people, yeah, yeah.
	Right, and y'all showed up and showed out, and I appreciate it, but also frightened and timidly appreciate you so much!
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's a mixed cocktail of feelings, but all of them from a good place, no doubt.
	Absolutely!
	Fantastic!
	I love it, but also, oh God.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Right, so what we have here is a bit of a weird episode, and I'm going to get into why, but first let's allow Russell to introduce his interviewee.
	Hello there you Awakening Wonders!
	It's Friday and of course every Friday, as you by surely are now aware, I have an in-depth conversation with intellectuals, visionaries, radical thinkers and spiritual leaders.
	Joining me today is one of the most influential philosophers, evolutionary biologists, social influencers, inventor of the term meme, he's the best-selling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion and I'm very excited to be communicating with Professor Richard Dawkins.
	That's right, we have Bran's promised interview with Professor Richard Dawkins.
	If you don't know who Dawkins is, he's a famous natural scientist, author, and ardent atheist whose most infamous work is probably The God Delusion.
	He's spent several decades essentially dunking on religious people, often in a fairly callous way.
	In recent years he's developed some more troubling ideas, a couple of which will rear their heads in this interview.
	Oh, man.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, we've got another Brit being interviewed.
	Do we want to like just full disclosure our quick like thoughts on Dawkins up top?
	I feel like I want to acknowledge that as a young, you know, like I was I was not really raised in but had a For a number of years I was raised in a fundamentalist church in my teen years and it was a poor experience.
	So, you know, watching YouTube videos or being exposed to ideas like the God delusion really helped me deconvert and sort my head out as far as my own atheist beliefs and really kind of gave me Not just... I mean, there's a lot of anger, like, reactive anger in it, which I feel, but it's not just that.
	It's like, okay, your feelings have a basis, and it's okay to think that...
	That religion's a little weird, and here's why.
	And I'm disappointed at how this has played out.
	Yeah, I mean, the thing is, Dawkins has done some great work, and he has written some great things, and said some great things, but he is ultimately human, has his flaws, has his faults, and is pretty epically wrong about a couple of different little things.
	You know, I say little things.
	At that point, you have to take the ideas that are good and try and get rid of the ones that are bad.
	Agreed.
	It's unfortunate, but it's very similar to separating the art from the artist, that kind of deal, but in a more academic sense, I suppose.
	So, here's a little trailer of what's to come.
	Dickie Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, the foremost atheist in the land, talking to me, one of the world's most religiousist folks.
	Science is interesting, and if you don't agree, you can f*** off.
	I mean, how's it gonna go down?
	Do you feel that society's in trouble?
	Maybe I do.
	Yeah?
	Yes.
	Right.
	So what do you think the answer is?
	Well, not religion.
	Well, I do!
	I think religion is relatively too small to deal with big problems.
	There's this assumption that science and religion are at odds with one another.
	I agree that there's a lot we don't know we may never know.
	And I want to know.
	I want to work on knowing.
	How come you're doing this?
	I don't know.
	That's not very interesting.
	These are some of the things I've always wanted to ask you about.
	Okay, we can certainly disagree on that.
	I mean, of course we can.
	We can, I'm not arguing with you.
	Oh, a couple whisper fight in an Ikea just happened?
	That's exactly how that felt!
	So, despite that exciting trailer with exciting music, this has to be one of the worst interviews I have ever seen in my life.
	Not because of any obvious gaffe or particular hostility, but because, as you may have noticed, Brand has the tendency to be a bit verbose.
	Where I would use one word, he would use 15 that require a thesaurus and an encyclopedia to understand.
	The issue is that Richard Dawkins, though flawed, is an incredibly intelligent man who actually does understand what Russell is trying to say, or at least understands the words, which only serves to egg him on.
	I'll illustrate this a bit later, but the sheer amount of waffle and run-on lines of bullshit thoughts Russell goes down is genuinely insufferable.
	Oh, well at least that's my least favourite part.
	Cool, good.
	Yeah, yeah, it's exacerbated.
	It is worse.
	And to make matters even worse, this interview is plagued with them both talking at cross-purposes, to the extent where Dawkins believes he's saying one thing, and Russell believes Dawkins has said something else entirely, but neither of them notice.
	I was like, the first thing I thought was like, oh, I bet they won't agree on definition of terms, so this will be useless.
	Like, they're going to say the same thing and mean two different things, so this is going to be a pointless endeavor.
	Oh good.
	Oh good!
	We will get into that.
	So I'm going to level with you.
	When I was first listening to this, I honestly thought that we weren't going to cover it because of its tedium.
	I sat there listening to it just like, oh fuck, this is dry.
	But it revealed what was a significant blind spot of mine in examining Russell Brand, which is this.
	Russell Brand is a religious zealot, specifically a Christian evangelist.
	I've sort of gotten to the bottom of when and why this happened, which I will get into later, but needless to say, I had little idea that Brand was so overtly Christian, especially not to this extent.
	And when I say this extent, what I'm referring to are the genuinely troubling extremist ideas that this man believes, which come up through the course of his conversation with Richard Dawkins.
	That's surprising to me as well.
	I was assuming there was going to be a woo angle, and I get that there's a Christian woo, and Christian woo is not new.
	I'm going to gesture to the song, Jesus is just all right with me.
	These things have been in the zeitgeist, and Jesus freaks in the 70s.
	This is a new But I know it's a problem.
	OK.
	Yeah, particularly the things that he's going to come out with and the positions he is going to assert and defend are incredibly worrying.
	So as mentioned, this is a car crash of an interview.
	So I've been as ruthless as I could when cutting clips, which means we enter somewhere about five minutes into the interview discussing Darwin and one of his contemporaries.
	Um, although that I don't know that Darwin explicitly said that there wasn't a designer, like the theory of natural selection prohibits the idea that there is an intelligence or a God or a creative force or creative component behind the processes of evolution.
	And what do you think about Alfred Russell Wallace's contribution to those theories and how they aligned with some of these interests, for example, in sort of mysticism?
	Yes.
	Wallace and Darwin definitely independently arrived at the same idea.
	So Wallace does deserve great credit.
	Darwin had it first, but he didn't publish.
	And so it was, as you know, it was Wallace's paper that he sent to Darwin in 1858, which spurred Darwin on to write The Origin of Species So, Wallace and Darwin independently discovered it.
	Wallace actually described himself as more Darwinian than Darwin at one point.
	He even thought that Darwin was a bit too mystical.
	Surprisingly, that obviously surprises you, and so it should, because later on in his life, as you know, Wallace did become quite mystical.
	Wallace became a spiritualist, he became interested in communicating with the dead.
	So, do you have any concept of who Alfred Russell Wallace is?
	Would I know from a spiritualist?
	Did he get big into spiritualism?
	It's really hard to remember everybody that did that.
	Yeah, so Alfred Russell Wallace was born in 1820.
	We'll say no.
	I'm going to say no.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I don't know.
	He was born in 1823 in Llanbadog Monmouthshire, which is in my home country of Wales.
	He was a naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist, and illustrator.
	His work directly inspired Darwin's Origin of Species, and he also co-published with Darwin.
	Beyond that, he was a social activist, a spiritualist, had a fairly impressive beard, and believed that the higher mental faculties of humanity were God-given rather than something derived from evolution.
	Oh, and he believed séances were real, you could talk to the dead, and was, by the time he was middle-aged, an ardent anti-vaxxer.
	Strangely enough, our boy Russell Brand seems to love this man, I can't think why.
	It's a mystery.
	Yeah, right.
	He's basically, he's basically found a version of him, a more interesting version of himself from the 19th century and gone, ah, this guy's good.
	Um, and, uh, yeah, he, he just absolutely loves him.
	Well, and couched also like couched kind of a separate question in the beginning of his actual question.
	It was a little, I couldn't tell who was supposed to be more spiritual because Russell said one and then Dawkins said the other.
	Yeah, so Alfred Russell Wallace and Darwin were both, let's say for, I don't know, up to like 40 or whatever, they were both kind of going down the same road of like, Evolutionary theories and stuff.
	Very scientific.
	Very, you know, let's kind of stick to things.
	But Darwin was still, he was still Christian.
	He still believed there was a God, etc.
	So that kind of factored into things somewhere.
	And that's what kind of Russell Wallace kind of objected to, to a certain degree, was where God kind of comes into the equation.
	And then later on in life, he had his mind changed to a pretty drastic degree and then believed that seances were a thing and that you could commune with the dead.
	And that was later on.
	But I would say that Wallace is definitely known as more of a spiritualist at this stage than Darwin ever was.
	But I think what Dawkins was referring to was, oh earlier on in their lives, actually it was the opposite.
	And Wallace was calling Darwin a bit too woo for his liking.
	And boy did that turn around!
	Okay.
	All right.
	I mean, it's tough because also, in my art life and in my interest life, I am obsessed with religious art and the The way that churches have been built and the way that they've been decorated and religious art, I see it as a supremely human achievement.
	I think it's very high, beautiful, amazing human achievements.
	But I am also staunchly atheist, so I come from a very specific spot.
	So I'm familiar with a lot of spiritualism stuff.
	I think it's really interesting, especially as like a period of time in our, you know, socially, like a movement, a period of time.
	It's very entangled with feminism and suffragettes and abolitionism, like the whole There was a lot of social movement that was mixed in with spiritualism and it was a very hard time.
	I mean, I think anybody to this day is extremely susceptible to the promises of spiritualism when you go through something tragic.
	I'm assuming that maybe this man had an event that is usually a real event or they found out they can make money.
	As far as I'm aware, he actually just, it was more in an academic sense.
	I think it was his sister that kind of talked him on to it.
	I don't think there was any kind of inciting moment or anything like that.
	And I don't think he ever directly profited off it either.
	So I think he just, he genuinely had his mind changed.
	I mean, you know, it was 200 years ago.
	I'm confused by that.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's a lot, but you know.
	Or you want to go to fun parties.
	I get that too.
	Yeah, maybe that.
	He just wanted to hold hands with people.
	This next clip is the moment my ears pricked up and I realized that something was off.
	I guess the reason that I, when I speak with atheists, I usually end up becoming quite passionate.
	I believe in God myself.
	So I must admit that up to this point I had thought of Russell's use of the word God to be a more generic one, referring to a higher being of any kind or perhaps even nature itself in a very woo sort of sense.
	It's something he did for years, especially after his period of being Buddhist.
	It may be worth noting to the audience at this stage that my one personal moment of seeing Russell Brand in a live setting was when he was compare-slash-host to the Dalai Lama when he came to speak in Manchester.
	It was a strange experience on many fronts, but Brand and the Lama vibed on Buddhism and Enlightenment, honestly getting along pretty famously.
	Yeah, rich, famous dudes usually do.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But here his use of God is entirely different.
	When he says God in this interview, make no mistake, he is referring to the biblical Christian God and no other.
	Yeah, so next up we have the argument that Russell principally wants to make throughout this entire interview.
	Is it reasonable to suggest that there might be entire dimensions and realms of data to which we do not have access and the assumption that because we cannot measure them they are not there is such a sort of a limiting premise and whilst I understand what the science is and science is about what can be measured and what can be observed is this not an important time to Once again, mark the bifurcation that Wallace appears to note that the rational has its realm and the mystery has its realm also.
	Yeah, so to be clear, what Brand is saying here is that science has its place, and religion and spirituality has its place, and the two should never meet.
	There are things that can be explained by science, and things that cannot and should not be explained by science, and basically, Russell wants science to fuck off and leave his thoughts about God alone.
	Yeah, that's the position that he's coming from.
	That was the position, I think, whenever the Enlightenment started, was that science was not threatening to the state of God.
	There's a lot of religious people throughout history that did research into science and learned a lot about science because that's where the resources were to experiment and learn were in like monasteries and other religious organizations.
	So I get that this was a way to combine both Thoughts when we were confronted with science, basically, with evidence-based and using the scientific method and actually applying that, learning things about the world that we had previously attributed to religion.
	That's what I understand it to be because our views are so extreme and there is such a fundamentalist-bent, aggressive Christian ideology that is quote-unquote Bible-based that is very like, okay, so everything happened exactly how it was written in the Bible.
	The Bible is this divine word and that wasn't necessarily the, that's what's popular now.
	But it wasn't always that way.
	for most, I'd say, scholarly, theological trains of thought.
	I think Brand is honestly coming at this from a slightly more unique position, where
	he is viewing, and this will be illustrated pretty significantly later, he is viewing
	science not only as something that can deconstruct and negate religion, but he is also viewing
	He's viewing science as a competitor to religion, that it is treated as a religion itself, and people worship at the altar of science.
	That is the position that he is coming from, and it gets worse than that.
	He takes it to a greater extreme.
	Anyway, Dawkins' response to his initial thoughts, I would say, is fair if not generous to Brand's ideas when starting out.
	Are there beings in the universe, extraterrestrial beings perhaps, who already understand things that we cannot understand?
	I love the science fiction book The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle.
	The Black Cloud is a superhuman intelligence and it approaches Earth and gets in touch with humans and they ask him to teach them its advanced knowledge.
	And two of them volunteer to be taught the physics that this creature knows.
	In both cases, their brains just burn out.
	They die of an overheated brain because the human brain is not capable of understanding.
	And this may well be the case.
	It may well be that there are profundities which we can never understand.
	On the other hand, maybe we can understand them, and I'm open-minded about it.
	I would like to live another 500 years to see how far the human brain can advance in understanding these things.
	And as I say, I don't know.
	Now, this clip, I'll be honest, is not terribly important in the grand scheme of this interview, nor is it particularly important to our purposes, but it does set up the next clip.
	And I said earlier that Bran's ability to waffle is only encouraged by Dorkin's being able to actually understand him.
	And I wanted to illustrate my point.
	This will be a bit of a different sort of clip for us.
	And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to play the clip, right?
	And what I want you to focus on is, firstly, how many topics Brand gets through and how long it takes for him to arrive at a question.
	Yeah, and bear in mind that the whole interview kind of was like this, so feel perfectly free to talk over him, and bear in mind that this is supposed to be an interview with Brand asking the questions and Dawkins answering.
	Here we go.
	Oh boy.
	No, this is true, isn't it?
	with your reference to the black cloud, I felt the eerie and uncanny shadow of AI appear,
	this potential for limitless intelligence, if not consciousness itself.
	In the, as you say, the potential for advanced beings is, you know, sort of impossible to
	rule out, but also, you know, sort of difficult to prove.
	Although I'm just curious, the conversation around UFOs is radically altered, literally
	in the last couple of years.
	We have someone on here, Jeremy Corbell, who's forever releasing CIA and military files,
	observation of artifacts, and just over the weekend, non-human craft, and they seem to
	be sort of more credible than these reports have ever been before.
	When I spoke to the science entertainment speaker Neil deGrasse Tyson, he follows the I'm sure famous example of the two percent difference in DNA between us and chimps represents all architecture and art and the litany of wonderments that you Outlined and to imagine a creature two percent more advanced of us Suggests I suppose perhaps literally unimaginable realms you reference to of course quantum theory and Einstein and on the precipice of each of these epochs there was this hubristic assumption that we were at the summit of all human understanding in fact it appears when looking back at history that part of our condition has always been to imagine
	The contemporary height of our knowledge and understanding represents the absolute height.
	When we get into quantum theory, and you strike me as a man who might be somewhat irked by the mystification and woo-woo-ification of quantum theory, so I'm not going to agitate you through any of that, but it does appear that in that sub-particular realm, Newtonian and indeed Einsteinian physics appear to sort of fall away at the fundament as it were. And I start to... I don't know. I want to again
	turn our attention to something that you alluded to, that it's an important scientific
	question. If there is a God, an intelligent creator behind the universe, haunting nature,
	as C.S. Lewis says, this is a very different proposition than if it's a sort of a random, sort
	of a set of random events, or selective events, actually, the opposite of random. But
	from a social and cultural perspective, the presence of...
	I How is he still going?
	Theism.
	And I know that this is something that you've spoken about in depth.
	You've outlined incredibly articulately, of course, the damage that can be done and has been done by religion.
	The ridiculousness of saying, this baby is a Christian or... This is elder abuse.
	This isn't fair.
	It's a Tottenham fan or something of a baby.
	And all of this, I appreciate.
	But now that we live in a somewhat, I want to say, simultaneously nihilistic, peculiarly puritanical, oddly free of redemption and salvation, a sort of a materialistic, hollow, Listless, joyless society.
	I wonder if this extraction of the mystery isn't a little costly.
	I don't feel that human beings, in order to flourish, thrive and communicate lovingly, require a retrospective tumbling into idiocy and superstition.
	But the humility that comes along with the acceptance That is found at our current frontiers, i.e.
	the famous hard problem of consciousness, the potential before consciousness precedes matter.
	The odd combination, as observed by Huxley, that exists between the acknowledgement of the nuministic, and this is actually CS Lewis, The acknowledgement of the nuministic and a credo and set of morals and traditions that are somehow connected to this nuministic experience, i.e.
	there is an awesome creature on the, not creature, a creator, at the end of the tendrils of the uncanny and that somehow this bestows upon us a set of duties and obligations.
	But there are There are aspects of spiritual life that are aligned to morality that are valuable.
	I wonder what you think of the terrains, the sort of psychic terrains that are found through psychedelic experience, through shamanic experience, through the utilization of non-sensory stimulation, which by its nature is difficult to corral into data sets and to lean into empiricism.
	It sure is difficult!
	I wonder if you feel, as I do, that there is a cargo there that we are feeling the lack of in our current decline.
	You covered a whole lot of ground there.
	Didn't he just?
	Ow!
	What?
	Oh my god, right.
	So that was five minutes.
	That was five full minutes of question.
	Oh, here's the thing.
	No, it wasn't.
	No, it wasn't.
	That wasn't the question.
	No, no.
	Do you know what?
	It was three seconds of question at the end and five minutes of bullshit preceding it.
	My god.
	So, okay, okay.
	The whole interview is like that.
	The whole interview.
	Oh, man!
	So I need to address the first thing I hear when I heard that little clip.
	That's my sister.
	Russell's my sister.
	Because I also have a bit of a meandery thought pattern.
	I have a serious issue with my train of thought.
	I'll give maybe the engine in the caboose and a lot of the cars in the middle get lost.
	I have a tendency to meander quite a bit and I'm working on it because I don't think it's helpful with communicating.
	I don't want to indulge it.
	I'm trying to work on that for myself and I'm an amateur.
	He is a pro.
	That should be curtailed.
	Supposedly.
	You would, you would, you would think, you would think, and I think he's, he's got questions written down in front of him.
	He's got, he's got notes.
	He's got things that he has prepared.
	And I feel like writing stuff down means nothing.
	My brain, it's written down, it disappears forever.
	But I know that about myself, as does my therapist, and we work on it!
	But I feel like if you were in this setting, there is no way you would have just rambled for five minutes before finally asking a semi-relevant question, you know?
	It's Richard Dawkins!
	Even with the bullshit he's saying now, I'd want to sound smart!
	I'd want to practice and prepare!
	He's the start!
	I'd want to not sound like a doofus!
	I'm coming from a place of love and care that that is... I get it.
	I get where it is, but my love and care stops it.
	You can work on that, sir.
	And you get paid for this.
	He gets paid to communicate as well, you know, it's... hmm.
	Right.
	Anyway.
	So, Russell said a lot in that clip.
	And also nothing.
	As Dawkins pointed out.
	Well, well, what I wanted to highlight was just a A brief portion of what he said.
	The point he was getting at here was that a focus on secular and scientific pursuits has led to our society becoming, and I quote, nihilistic, peculiarly puritanical, oddly free of redemption and salvation, materialistic, hollow, listless, and joyless.
	He then goes on to cite C.S.
	Lewis, who he loves at least as much as Wallace.
	Specifically, he's citing C.S.
	Lewis' belief in an objective morality, meaning morals are inextricably tied to religion or God.
	Lewis argues that atheists contradict themselves when they act morally because they have no inherent basis for morality.
	Yeah.
	Our boy Brand shares these beliefs, and throughout this interview he attempts to lay the groundwork as to why we should all live in a Christian theocracy and that atheism and secularism are a corruption to our society.
	Truly, this was an oh fuck moment for me.
	I knew we were dealing with a right-wing propagandist shithead, but similarly to Brand's apparent social views, I thought he was something of an outlier when it came to Christian extremism.
	But apparently not.
	He is on the same tip as Stephen Crowder, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson and all of those fuckheads, and it paints him in quite a different light.
	My whole brain was screaming the entire time you said that.
	And I'm so, I can't, I, guys, I'm not going to do that to you, but it's happening in my head.
	Just full volume.
	Frankie Valli, even scream, just.
	A tone, a pitch.
	Man oh man.
	So I kind of assumed because he's so into meditation that his inaction, like his social and political inaction would be driven by like a theosophical, like from a meditation, a new age, not a Christian active. I was duped. Colour me surprised. I'm very
	surprised.
	Me too. When I started actually delving into what the fuck this guy is saying, holy shit.
	So let's get back into the interview.
	So we've just had a five minute question, and Dawkins could have taken this in a great many directions, a great many interesting directions and rebuttals, but instead we have a swing and a miss.
	Shifting around.
	I know, but you can do all of it, can't you?
	I remember with Jordan Peterson you wouldn't have that, you wouldn't have a diffuse question, you took issue.
	Let me go back, first of all, to your talking about the puritanical joylessness.
	Because I agree with you, but I feel strongly about that.
	And I think that this is one of the faults of extreme Islam, that it is joyless, hating of music, hating of dancing, hating of everything that makes life fun.
	And so I find that there's a difference between Evangelical Christianity, for example, and Islam.
	Evangelical Christianity has this, you know, love of music.
	But there are also aspects of Islam that are abundant and voluptuous.
	Sufism, for example.
	There have been.
	There have been.
	That's true.
	But some of the militant Islam at present actually squashes any attempt at enjoyment and fun.
	So that's that point.
	I'm gonna explode.
	I'm so mad.
	This is one of the troubling views that I was mentioning earlier.
	Yeah, so a little bit of a xenophobe.
	Brand believes that atheism is the reason society sucks, and Dawkins believes Islam is the reason society sucks.
	I believe both of them are contributors as to why society sucks, and they can quite frankly do one.
	I'm so, okay.
	All right.
	So I do specifically have, and I love art history.
	I'm saying things that I feel like as soon as I say it, it means nothing.
	It basically the version of like, do your own research.
	I like art.
	But specifically, I'm absolutely in love with Early Islamic art, and so they're both taking issue with just fundamentalism, which can wear any hat you want.
	And that is a massive issue.
	I would encourage anyone who's interested, Waldemar Janicek actually did an amazing series on early Islamic art and architecture.
	BBC is like a three-part thing.
	I'll put a link somewhere on our Instagram or whatever.
	It's wonderful, and there's a rich, gorgeous tradition of representative art, just because we have these very fundamentalist There are powers that be in this moment in society that happen to use Islam as their cudgel.
	that has nothing to do with the rich, gorgeous tradition that was extremely innovative and
	it was, it was, it came from a whole new place creatively.
	I mean, you know, especially like in the Ottoman Empire, like there was all these really
	beautiful works from miniatures, like miniatures and illuminated manuscripts that are, that
	are more incredible than I could possibly imagine.
	And they didn't have electric lights.
	What are you going to do?
	It's beautiful stuff.
	I think what's happening is that Dawkins is, let's be generous and say, painting with a very broad brush.
	He's a racist!
	Yeah, certainly xenophobic at least.
	I think it is definitely interesting that he is very quick to decry acts of Islamic extremism and doesn't go towards the same thing with Christian extremism, for instance, which the US is currently fucking rife with.
	But yeah, that's his issue, as we say.
	He's gone down a bit of a bad fucking path the last decade or more, probably two.
	But yeah, anyway.
	Next we discover what Brandt meant when he described society as peculiarly puritanical.
	And also the austerity that's in our culture, in our sort of very economically-led, materialistic, rationalistic culture, like the sort of the joylessness of contemporary cancel culture, for want of a better word, the piety, the puritanism, the moral certainty.
	Yeah, I agree about that.
	And I think that's a more significant cultural influence at present than militant Islam, which post-Covid, everyone seems to have gone off it.
	Yes, no, I agree.
	And that puritanism is horrible.
	There he is, railing against cancel culture.
	The only notes I've got written down for this bit is, ah, cancel culture is the problem, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.
	That pretty much sums up my feelings on it.
	It's not cancel culture, it's consequence culture, you fucks.
	I do think that we breeze through some of these ideas that we take for granted.
	We know that the whole cancel culture argument is bunk.
	It's ridiculous.
	Oh, it's complete bullshit.
	You look at Dave Chappelle, who has supposedly been cancelled for his transphobic views, and yet he's there on the fucking front page of every newspaper the next day decrying how no one's listening to him anymore because he's being cancelled.
	Fuck you, you still have the biggest platform in the world.
	All of his Netflix specials are still up?
	He's still making money off of it?
	He's making more!
	No one's been cancelled!
	No one's been cancelled!
	No, no.
	Least of all people like that.
	It isn't happening!
	Least of all people like that.
	It isn't happening!
	Not in the slightest.
	What they're arguing is, they say something about...
	These pundits say something about free speech and the First Amendment, which is political speech.
	That's between humans and the government, not between individuals, broadly speaking.
	People who have a private right to decide whatever the fuck they want to platform or do not.
	you know, platforms like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube who have booted people like Alex
	Jones off. It's not a fucking free speech issue. It's that these are not public institutions and
	these private organizations can do whatever the shit they want. Yeah, their issue is that
	the Ameri- which also it's only in America so shut up.
	But like, the American government has decided that corporations have the same rights as individual citizens.
	Corporations are people, so they have all those rights that they can exercise.
	So their complaint should be completely different.
	Like, if you're mad that corporations are people, be mad about that.
	They can make whatever decision they want.
	It's not public.
	If you want to talk about making, like, social media and the internet a public utility, I'll have that conversation, because I think there are worthwhile fucking ideas there, but that's not what they want.
	They don't want it.
	They don't want to touch that at all.
	No, no, not with a 40-foot barge pole.
	These are the people that are just screaming about privatizing every aspect of life, and all they can do is complain about the private rights of a corporation.
	So no, you don't.
	No, you don't want any of the things that you say that you want.
	You are just bitching to bitch because it feels good.
	I'm sorry, I'm so livid.
	I'm so livid.
	This makes me so angry.
	Oh, good.
	Yeah, I mean, ultimately, when you get to what these people want, they want to be able to say whatever horrible shit they want and have no one ever disagree with them.
	That's all they actually want.
	Um, you know, they, they, they, they, they just, they don't like the fact that people don't agree with their views.
	Um, you get to a certain point of, um, of, I don't know, fame or whatever.
	And, and I guess you're not used to hearing that, especially when it happens on mass, but, uh, but yeah.
	And, and, and needless to say, neither of these people have been canceled yet anyway.
	Um, you know, Not at all!
	Dawkins has troubling fucking things that he says, you know, pretty regularly, as we've just seen, and nobody bats an eyelid, pretty much.
	Brand, well, we're doing this entire podcast getting into the shit that he says, but he's still in fucking A-list movies.
	He's as far away from cancelled as it could possibly be.
	And he's still on YouTube!
	Yes, yes he is.
	You're on YouTube!
	You just have to, like, code some of the things that you still absolutely get to say.
	Like, their one weird trick works.
	They get to do one weird trick and it works.
	And they're still bitching.
	It's just outrageous.
	Yeah, I mean, you know, it's not uncoincidental that it's straight white men taking issue with having to do anything that they don't like.
	Anyway, next Russell makes what can be described as an honest attempt to talk an atheist round to religion, even if he sucks at it.
	Yeah.
	When I say that, by the way, in the next episode that we're going to cover, he literally says he thought he could talk Dawkins round in this interview.
	He literally said that.
	So I know for sure that that's what he is trying to do here.
	It still is to me that since the Enlightenment, since we've had an irrational, individualistic, materialistic, egocentric culture, it seems to me that what the mechanics that emerge from that are indeed rather selfish and that the metaphors that we use are somehow creating a culture that is antithetical to What might be a favorable outcome were we to use a different image system.
	So what he's saying here is that since the Age of Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, is that the world has become irrational, individualistic, materialistic, and egocentric.
	And the fault of that can be squarely laid at the feet of science, according to him.
	That is just completely wrong.
	Yeah, I don't I can't address that.
	It's just wrong.
	Yeah, it's it's it's your entire premise is completely fucking false.
	And it's it's very difficult to to argue with something that is just inherently wrong.
	But yeah, I have a very hard time with because basically that was Make America Great Again.
	Like that was just a different version of the good old days.
	And I imagine that's going to come out of his mouth a lot, which is nice.
	Don't forget, in the first episode we did, in the segment about Tucker, he did mention about needing to get back to traditional values.
	Oh, I would love to forget.
	I wish I could.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So this whole conversation paints that in a very different light as well.
	Oh my.
	Can I say, I'm going to sound spicy.
	And it's not... Al, I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at the dirt.
	No, no, no, please.
	I'm afraid I might come off rude and mean.
	I'm not mad at you!
	I'm mad at the dirt!
	If there was an episode that required spice, I can assure you it's this one, because you have no idea how bad this is about to get.
	But next, Russell wants us to open our hearts to religion.
	Whilst in botany and biology it's possible to emerge that which looks like intelligent design is a kind of, I believe, a kind of teleology, an intention spilling into the world and adapting in harmony with its environment from which it cannot be separated.
	But when it comes to organising a society, the ideas that might be derived from the acceptance of Gosh, what am I trying to say?
	That unity and love underscore reality, that the meaning can be derived from it, that a sort of an open-heartedness to it rather than a sort of a foreclosing cynicism.
	So this clip isn't terribly important, but Dawkins' response is interesting at the very least because I think he begins to out himself as a robot.
	These are emotional words and words like love to me are things that emerge from nervous systems, especially human ones, and to regard something like love, something emotive like that as Lurking in the material world doesn't sound at all convincing to me and I think you've got the cart before the horse.
	Things like love emerge late in evolution as a consequence of the evolution of highly complicated nervous systems and they don't come first.
	What is love?
	When he speaks it, because he talks about it a little bit later as well, it just feels like he's like, yeah, I've heard of that.
	Yeah, love.
	What is this earth thing called kissing?
	Emotions.
	I'm familiar with the concept.
	Well, I get what he's saying, it just feels like he's looking past each other.
	Because there's no other way for them to discuss this other than past each other.
	Yeah, pretty much.
	His argument of, like, well, love is actually, you know, something that is derived from evolution, a very complicated thing that happened later on, is completely accurate and reasonable, but it's definitely not answering the question that Brand asked at all.
	Right, so next up we encounter a theme of this interview, a disappointing theme is that Dawkins falls into agreeing with Brand without fully realizing what he's agreeing to.
	Elder abuse.
	Now you also, earlier on, used words like egocentric and selfish and things.
	Again, I don't think that kind of language belongs in when you're talking about science, materialism.
	Again, selfishness is something that emerges from living things.
	And I've written a book about that, Selfish Gene, which is actually about selfish gene rather than selfish individual.
	But nevertheless, It's not the right level of language to use for pre-living entities like pure physics.
	So you would say then that there are discrete categories.
	There is the domain of science where the lexicon and nomenclature of science are appropriate.
	Then there is the domain of morality and the domain of social... I think I would say that.
	And those latitude domains So, here we have one of the biggest misunderstandings between these two, which is the word materialist and the word materialistic.
	Okay.
	Yeah, yeah.
	We have one of the biggest misunderstandings between these two, which is the word materialist
	and the word materialistic.
	Brand is using materialistic in a colloquial sense.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Meaning a reverence or even worship of material goods like phones, cars, etc, etc.
	But Dawkins is using the word materialist in the scientific sense.
	When he says materialist, he means anything that is provably real and made of matter.
	It leads to some colossal talking at Cross Purposes later on.
	Yeah.
	And then we have... So they're just talking about two completely fucking different things.
	Who's on first sketch?
	Who's on first?
	That's it!
	At the very least, at the very least, Russell is definitely conflating the two things.
	And so they just, they don't have a fucking clue what the other is saying.
	And then we have the end of that clip, which is, ah, so you do agree that science can stay the fuck away from religion, that science, atheism and secularism have no morality and should stay out of society.
	Ah, good.
	And Dawkins just kind of nods along.
	Oh yes, no, I would say that they're separate.
	That is insane!
	Of all people, I would think that Dawkins would have something on deck.
	To argue that in some way, like have a rebuttal, like an old, well-worn rebuttal.
	I don't think that he realizes what is happening until fairly later on in the episode.
	I don't think he realizes that this is not a conversation in good faith.
	And I think that's also a little much.
	Maybe.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I could see that immediately, but.
	We could, but we go in with the foreknowledge that Brand is a shithead, and lots of people still don't have that awareness, and I don't think Dawkins does either, because they have spoken- I don't think he cares.
	Maybe that, maybe that, but I think they did have a conversation for some other show that Brand did about eight years ago or something.
	I haven't looked at it.
	I imagine it went quite differently because Brand was an entirely different human being eight years ago.
	Anyway, this just wouldn't be Russell Brand's show without getting into some COVID narratives.
	I think, since the advent of, you know, whenever rationalism, materialism, say post-enlightenment thinking, becomes the sort of dominant purview, that we do use scientific discourse and scientific language, and my God, look at the last couple of years, science, some of which has subsequently been proven to be somewhat shaky, shall we say, is used to underwrite political action, is used to underwrite social policy.
	A couple of examples, well, very broadly the idea of social Darwinism, the idea that it's sort of acceptable, like the utilisation of Darwinian ideas to legitimise poverty.
	Oh well, that's appalling.
	I mean that should never happen.
	You should never use scientific ideas, inject them into ideology in that way.
	And that was a terrible thing that happened in the late 90s, early 20th century.
	So again, I think Dawkins doesn't realise entirely what Brand is saying here.
	Brand is not talking about the way capitalism utilised Darwin's ideas to further crush the lower classes in the early 1900s.
	He's talking about now.
	On its face, the argument is reasonable, particularly when I'm living in a country with its first oligarch prime minister.
	But when taken in conjunction with Brand's views on COVID conspiracies and how the government is just trying to control everyone, I am not going to treat his argument with such generosity.
	Not a chance.
	Yeah, my deep-programmed subconscious brain hears all the things that I know that I agree with in my own moral code.
	Not Bible-based, by the way.
	Just the way that you should treat people.
	To be right and to treat people fairly and to try to do the right thing as best you can.
	I don't hear, oh.
	Yeah, I mean, it's so hard to be confronted with their thought-ending statements over and over and over.
	So they work!
	They stop my thoughts!
	And they just obviously talk past each other again.
	It's very obvious.
	Yeah, 100%.
	100%.
	They're having two different conversations.
	In the meantime, let's get into COVID proper.
	And then I was going to say, like during the pandemic, that some of the use of data and the way that that data was conveyed, and I would again say that my argument would be that science, or particularly pharmacology, is a subset of an economic system.
	It's not its own separate silo.
	Only the clinical trials that are taking place are the clinical trials that are profitable.
	Where do these places get their grants from?
	Who is funding that?
	What is the intention behind it?
	There is no... Of course I understand double-blind experiments.
	I understand what a clinical trial ought to be.
	I understand what peer-reviewed papers are.
	But I also understand how economics works and I understand how Pfizer operates, for example.
	Yeah, you're probably right about that.
	I'm not here to defend the economic influx into the way science is done.
	Swing and a miss!
	The correct response to an anti-vax tirade is not, you're probably right about that, when what you're addressing is actually almost a totally separate point.
	If you want to talk about getting money out of science and medicine, sure, let's have that conversation.
	I am all for it.
	Me too!
	Not what is based around this bullshit.
	Jesus Christ.
	He's just yes-anding without understanding what the fuck he's agreeing to.
	I'm just shocked that there aren't stock responses.
	People have obviously said this kind of stuff to him a million times.
	To Dawkins, a million times.
	I feel like he is caught slightly off guard.
	I really don't think he notices.
	I feel like if he knew he was going into a combative interview with someone who would not be operating in good faith, I think his answers would be quite different.
	And maybe that's a generous view to Dawkins here, but having seen some of his other stuff where he can and will dunk on people that present this shit to him, I feel like he just wasn't prepared.
	Yeah, the same exact thing!
	Yeah, exactly.
	I feel like he just was not prepared for what was about to happen.
	In this next clip, Russell asserts that the problem Dawkins has with Islam is that he's looking at it from a scientific viewpoint and not a religious one, before highlighting yet more issues with his own thought process.
	And then, closer to home, even your analysis of Islam is the deployment of scientific critiques to a realm where, like, I'm not Muslim, but I hold the faith of Islam in high regard, and I would say that the problem, the critiques one could level at Islam, one could equally level at secularism.
	You could say, oh look, these Atrocities were carried out in the name of Islam.
	These atrocities were carried out in the name of Christendom.
	These atrocities were carried out in the name of late capitalist imperialism.
	The atrocities of what's significant and how people undergird them, whether it's through science or capitalism or Islam or Christianity, is not as relevant and I feel it's just a sort of a Uh, it's just a particular moment in time where religion was used to undergird violence.
	That's probably true.
	And now, people will use different religions.
	Christianity had its bad moments in the Middle Ages and Islam is having its bad moments now.
	I'm proud to say that.
	So he just had to cap that off there, didn't he, the piece of shit?
	Islam is having its bad moments now.
	It's so intellectually dishonest!
	Being rich and famous rots your brain.
	That's gotta be the explanation.
	Maybe!
	I mean, I know that scientifically, heaven forbid that I reference a study or two, but it's proven that being rich and famous breaks your brain, but that has to, because, I mean, of all May we never reach those heights.
	Baby brains!
	I'm looking at two baby brains!
	Yeah, so I'm gonna treat what Brand was saying there about secular atrocities with an actual... I'm gonna treat what he's saying as an actual argument rather than an off-the-cuff kind of...
	Bullshit thing of just saying that secularism is bad.
	So, atheist or secular atrocities, especially in the name of science, are not a thing.
	But religious folks tend to lean on what has been dubbed the atheist atrocities fallacy, usually naming Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot of examples of dictators who've done terrible things in the name of atheism.
	It's a completely fucking bizarre statement, particularly when you take into account that Hitler was demonstrably Christian, Pol Pot was demonstrably Buddhist, and Stalin, while a confirmed atheist, studied for the priesthood and stepped into a position of power that was designed and supported by the Russian Orthodox Church.
	He very famously utilized religiosity as a tool for the subjugation and control of his people.
	This argument has so many holes in it, it makes Swiss cheese look watertight.
	But here, Brand uses it to argue that secularism, science, and atheism have done things just as bad as the Crusades in the Middle Ages.
	And Dawkins, instead of pushing back in the slightest, gloms on only to say, oh, don't forget the Muslims are bad as well.
	It's disgraceful.
	Of all people!
	Of all people!
	Of all the people!
	Oh, the one Crusades!
	The Crusades and then the 9-11, I guess, is what they're like.
	I mean, really?
	It's so, it's, it's, I mean, it's so short-sighted.
	It's so basic.
	It has to be intentional.
	You're not this stupid!
	Christopher Hitchens is rolling in his fucking grave right now.
	You could create an engine from the energy of him spinning in his grave at this stage.
	Really?
	It's just so... I mean... Oh, God.
	I can't...
	Again, Russell's my sister.
	Our brains don't work great sometimes.
	And I'm finding myself in this place where I just can't even hold on to what- because I'm in rage mode.
	It's really- because it's so fucking insulting!
	It's insulting to anyone that's learned anything about history or- and also like- Every person who's an atheist, at all, do not put me in a camp with fundamentalist religion!
	The thing that really grinds my fucking gears- Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
	No, no, no, I was just gonna say the concept that atheists, you know, have done the equivalent of the Crusades, of what were fucking genocides, you know, like, fuck off, is the only argument I have to that.
	It's just complete bullshit.
	Yeah, let's add any of the Inquisitions.
	Yes, you should know what it is.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, I'm- - That's also a money problem.
	I guess you should know what it is.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Maybe he doesn't, 'cause no one ever expects it.
	(laughing)
	Al, guys, I'll be here all week.
	Hey, hey, hey.
	Really?
	Really?
	So the things that drive me absolutely nuts, and I swear to God, if I have one honest discussion on social media, I'll eat my fucking hat, because the argument is always... Yeah, I think I've had one.
	Right.
	I mean, right.
	So just because people call themselves something, Just because people call themselves, just like a leader calls themselves atheist, I'm using your example, does not mean they're an atheist or they're qualified.
	And just because they say that their, you know, their country is communist does not mean that it's not actually a totalitarian regime.
	Oh yeah, oh yeah, we could get into that, yeah.
	Those are the two definitions of terms that are actively skewed that straight up make most conversations I have on social media impossible.
	Because if you're gonna lie to my face out the gate, I'm not gonna be nice.
	I'm not gonna, I can't.
	Because you're already lying to me.
	You're already lying by claiming something wrong, and you don't have to ask me.
	Don't talk to me.
	Do a cursory Google.
	Don't make Google work for you.
	They won't listen to you anyway.
	Whether you realize it or not, you know, and obviously one of the biggest problems that the US has in trying to discuss fucking anything is the conflation of Firstly, there's what communism actually is and is supposed to be.
	And secondly, there's the conflation of communism and socialism as being the same thing, according to most of America.
	And it's like, well, no, no, they are fundamentally different.
	Britain is, by and large, socialist.
	We have a socialist system of healthcare, and it works.
	It works very fucking well when the government isn't a piece of shit.
	Yeah, and even then that just comes down to actually paying people, not the actual administration of the thing itself.
	And it's not even paying people!
	You're redistributing wealth that we are all generating.
	Yeah, that's it.
	It's deciding what to do with our taxes.
	It's so ingrained into the fabric of society that we say the wrong things just to be able to talk about it.
	Because the terms have been so completely skewed and misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented.
	Yeah, I think that's more like it.
	That's more like it.
	You know, some enterprising dickhead went, oh, you know what?
	We can we can make these two things sound the same and make this thing that is actually quite good.
	We're going to make it sound scary.
	Yeah, his name rhymes with Bickbarthy.
	Among others, absolutely.
	We've got people like Rupert Murdoch doing similar things as well.
	We can't list people we hate, we gotta stop.
	No, no, the list is pretty long, let's say that.
	Right, we've gone off the beaten path a little bit here.
	I know, I know, I'm just so mad, I'm sorry!
	No, no, no, I'm not complaining, but let's get into the next clip.
	I'm saying that, say, if you want to sling together post-enlightenment values with a little bit of Nietzsche, God is dead and we can't get the blood off our hands, or we have killed and we can't get the blood off our hands, is that where we find ourselves now is that in our culture, if you look at the morality that was formed during the pandemic period, lent into scientific understanding for its authority, for its moral authority, For example, you know, it is immoral if you don't undertake these medical procedures, it's immoral if you don't remain within your home.
	Well it turned out that that morality was incorrect and one might argue that different interests were being served By that being presented as a moral decision, when in fact it wasn't.
	Just to be less cryptic, for example, the Pfizer never clinically trialled their vaccines for transmission, and yet the way that the vaccines were presented to the public was as a remedy against transmission.
	So I know this is not your field of expertise, but... Then don't ask him about it!
	I know this isn't your field of expertise, then don't fucking...
	So we've gone over the vaccine issue in our last episode, so I'm not going to hammer on that again, but actually it was never tested for transmission because it wasn't designed for that, and also it actually does help prevent transmission, so shut the fuck up, Russell!
	Yeah, and every single science communication which I paid attention to were using ratios of percentages.
	Oh, this is going to significantly decrease the likelihood of getting sick.
	Of many, many deaths as well.
	Getting as sick.
	Transmission.
	Again, because we know how coronaviruses work, and we have known for a long time.
	Yeah, so here are the beginnings of the argument that science is now religion and is being used to provide moral authority.
	We get more comparisons like this down the line, but it's safe to say that it's disingenuous at best, especially when spinning an anti-vax yarn about the pandemic alongside that.
	But let's let's catch the rest of this clip here.
	This is but one example of how in the way that the church once would have been used as the sort of storehouse of a collective morality, the institution of science is currently being used and I would say it's equally fallible and similarly being utilized to undergird the interests of the powerful.
	That all the while that people were being burned at the stake and martyred and slung off cliffs, that really they were not like, are you happy with this God?
	But really they were interested in power and in the same way, well we can show you the data, this is you know, it's being used in the same way and it's about power, it's about something that's abstracted and from that you can deduce that science is neither good or bad, it's about sort of cold hard facts and religion is neither good or bad.
	It's an attempt to deal with the unknowable and to derive from the unknowable a sense of meaning and purpose.
	And if you want to apply empiricism to this, Professor, what are the results of a successful religion?
	People behave as if there is a God.
	You need to stop and let me get a word in the other way.
	No, come on, I've done loads of quiet.
	I've done loads of quiet.
	Yeah, yeah, sure you have, mate.
	Sure you have.
	At least the lies are varied!
	Like, at least... Yeah, it's true!
	But that makes it so much fucking harder to keep track of, right?
	So, in order of his nonsense, so no science is not being used as a storehouse of morality the same way that, say, the Catholic Church was and is.
	Science is not equally as fallible as religion.
	One is based on centuries of scientific discovery, peer-reviewed papers, and constantly checking that we're correct, while religion is generally based on some stuff that some men wrote down a long time ago.
	And with that, religion can absolutely be bad.
	All three of the main Abrahamic religions, being Christianity, Judaism and Islam, would have me killed because I have slept with men if the texts were to be taken literally.
	There's a fucking reason that I can't go to Uganda or Saudi Arabia.
	I would potentially be murdered or imprisoned.
	Right?
	Religions can, of course, be fucking bad.
	Yeah, I had to.
	I had to settle with basically as soon as I learned about all the things that pissed people off that got them burned at the stake.
	And that's like most of my day.
	It's a long list.
	That's most of my day.
	Yeah, I mean really any sex.
	Wearing clothes with two fibers.
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	Clothes with two fibers.
	You were in a poly cotton.
	Stonem.
	That's just, like, the book has nothing to do with morality.
	That's a brick and yeah, that has nothing to do with morality.
	Like, I mean, the premise that's being agreed upon here is that religion having anything
	to do with morality is like, you have to reject that on its face.
	And I'm sorry, those of you that disagree with me.
	I just want you to hear me out, especially those of you that have had experience in church, and maybe you still do.
	There's just as many assholes in that building as there are everywhere else.
	So no, going to church does not make you a good person.
	Doing things that are right and fair make you a good person, and none of us are perfect.
	We all judge.
	It's just because that's part of what the human brain does and what we do with that.
	Instead of beating ourselves up because it's a sin and then just pretending you don't do stuff, instead you reckon with that in real time.
	You help your brain understand, okay, that's a thing that I was programmed to believe and we're not going to hold on to it.
	That's the moral choice and religion has nothing to do with that.
	If you are a nice person and go to church, those things are not there.
	You need to understand the difference between correlation and causation.
	Yeah, and especially when you're looking at religions that are based around things that people said in the fucking Bronze Age.
	We're looking at a different set of moral and ethical values for back then.
	Yeah, slavery was pretty okay.
	According to the Bible.
	The R word was pretty okay.
	Depending, just, you know, I was property, which I'm going to say I'm not a great investment if that's the case.
	I'm a little wily.
	Me either.
	Me either.
	Right?
	Me either.
	I'm too cantankerous.
	You're outrageous.
	Yeah, right?
	Oh god.
	I only need so many exorcisms in my life.
	One's enough, I'm good.
	I'm good on the rest, and you know what?
	It clearly didn't work.
	We went through that in the last one with Laura Dodsworth.
	I'm real!
	Right.
	Like, humans!
	Morality came along so much sooner!
	Like, we're not all, you know... Yes, he's the rub, right?
	There's very basic realities that we adapt to.
	Like, we have all kind of agreed, hey, let's not eat each other so it's easier to sleep at night.
	Yes, it will make you sick, potentially, if you cannibalize another human.
	That is the reason that we don't eat each other, sure.
	But I'd say the big one is, it's pretty...
	It's impractical.
	If you want to have neighbours and work together and exist, because you want to be able to not have to sleep with one eye open.
	It's just practical!
	There's so many practicalities!
	If nothing else, even if you don't have that strong moral pull of, no, this is wrong because of whatever.
	I was fucking raised atheist.
	I was raised atheist and yet I still have what I would consider to be a stronger moral core than Russell fucking Brand does.
	Even if you don't have that pull, there are still aspects of like, well, we all have to get along.
	So maybe I shouldn't just go around murdering everyone I feel like.
	Because that as a society would be insane.
	I don't want to live in the purge.
	Thank you very much.
	Anyway, there's a lot that was in that clip that could be discussed here, but Richard Swing and a Miss Dawkins addresses a slightly different and impossibly fair point while offering little in the way of pushback.
	The advice about vaccine and whether it prevents transmission, as I understand it, the What appears to be moral advice was kind of more what they thought to be common sense and which might not have been actually, based upon what you could call the measles model, where a disease like measles
	Where it is actually a public good, it's actually a social good to get vaccinated because the more people who are vaccinated the less chance the epidemic has to get going and so if you refuse to be vaccinated you are in a sense a problem, a social problem.
	Aha, so here Dawkins illustrates quite well why anti-vaxxers are in general a social problem, and is on track to make what I would say is a fairly decent point.
	But listen to what happens when Brand interjects and Dawkins nods along.
	Oh man.
	I think the advice that was given over Covid was taking off from the measles model, and that could have been wrong.
	And epidemiologists were saying at the time that in those instances you do not do that during a pandemic you wait till after the pandemic people were trying to and those people curiously another weird coincidence were being censored almost as if yes there were an agenda conscious or otherwise to create conditions remember that there was an urgent need for hurry there was nobody quite knew it was it was brand new this was unknown territory and so Possibly what was going on was that the measles model was the best that the advisors could come up with.
	And if they were wrong, then people can be wrong and they need to climb down and say they were wrong.
	I don't know whether they were or not.
	As you said, it's not my field.
	Then don't talk about it!
	Like, you're a scientist, man, you should know how irresponsible it is to talk about scientific issues which are not in your field to shitheads who want to manipulate their audience into saying, look, Dawkins, the scientist agrees with us!
	Also the notion that we are unfamiliar with the flu-like pandemic because it's never happened?
	Get fucked.
	That's insane.
	That's insane.
	The whole reason that the quote-unquote herd immunity trick, I guess the measles model that you say, like measles is totally different than a flu and then a coronavirus because Flu viruses mutate so rapidly when they tear through a population, the last immunity doesn't apply to the next one.
	So herd immunity would never work because of the way the disease works.
	It's not like chickenpox!
	That's basically the point that Dawkins is actually making.
	So he's saying, well, perhaps the idea of getting everyone vaccinated was flawed because it doesn't prevent transmission.
	And if the thing mutates enough times, etc., etc., we're just going to have a fresh pandemic on our hands because no one will have any immunity to what the thing then becomes.
	Which would be significantly reduced with vaccines.
	There is that.
	But you know, there's something of a reasonable scientific argument in there.
	But as he has said multiple times, it's not his fucking field.
	He shouldn't be talking about this.
	And just as a quick note, I couldn't find exactly who Brand was talking about in regards to his censored epidemiologists who were apparently saying that It also just wouldn't work.
	It wouldn't work.
	It doesn't make sense.
	to mass vaccinate, but it goes without saying that waiting until after the pandemic would
	have led to hundreds of thousands more deaths worldwide, probably millions, and he can fuck
	off with this ridiculous idea.
	It also just wouldn't work. It wouldn't work. It doesn't make sense. I'm not a doctor, but
	I mean, it was explained to me, like the way that COVID, the disease worked was explained
	to me through the, you know, honestly, um, what is it?
	This Podcast Will Kill You did a great job, right?
	Whenever it all came out, it's February 4th.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And it made sense that because our vaccines for the flu change every year, because the flu changes every year.
	And if this is the same family of diseases, We absolutely know that we... No one ever claimed...
	That 100%, no transmission, no disease.
	No one ever said that.
	Not once.
	And they've been rewriting history.
	And the fact that- Not once.
	I'm sorry.
	The first things I did when I saw the pandemic coming down the pike and I told all eight followers that see my post on Instagram is go watch the Forgotten Plague.
	I think it's the Forgotten Plague.
	PBS did a thing on the flu, did a documentary on the flu, and it was brilliant.
	I watched it years ago, and I re-watched it, and just understanding there's a really lovely Morbid, in-depth Black Plague documentary that the BBC did.
	And it talks about the flagellants, the people, which I did not understand.
	I always thought it was totally outside the realm of what our brains could do in a modern context.
	Whenever the Black Plague really took hold, there was this religious fervor and a sect of people went around to cities in Europe, and their religious idea was to flagellate, to basically whip themselves in public and have this little march, which spread way more plague.
	Of course, yeah.
	Blood and all sorts of fun things.
	And they thought that they were doing the religious thing that was correct to appease God, and guess what?
	Instead they just killed a lot more people.
	And I was like, that's nuts.
	Who would do that?
	And then I found out.
	Who would do such a thing?
	Hi, Russell.
	How you doing?
	I fucking found out.
	It's not hard.
	There's so much history for us to understand and to call from.
	I'm so disappointed with the human fucking race for having to go through the flu pandemic a hundred years ago.
	And yeah, we've had leaps and bounds in medicine since then.
	And it didn't mean a fucking thing.
	Not in my country.
	We had the 19 teens all over again.
	It was outrageous.
	I feel like disappointment in the human race kind of sums up the last seven years, at least, to be honest.
	Since 2016, I'm just like, ah, this is just terrible.
	What are we doing?
	What are we doing?
	Do you remember in our last episode where Bran specifically said that COVID-19 messaging in the UK was deliberately duplicitous?
	Apparently he's not saying that anymore or something.
	But I don't think you can be too censorious about this.
	I think you have to say that the pandemic came upon us so suddenly, it wasn't clear what had to be done.
	No.
	An honest attempt was made to give the best advice.
	Maybe it was the wrong advice.
	I don't know about that.
	We also don't know that it was honest.
	We don't know that it was honest.
	I'm not suggesting that it was deliberately duplicitous, but the set of assumptions when lined... the set of assumptions when corralled together...
	Yeah.
	Oh my god.
	look favourable, i.e. they censored credible sources that offered contradictory information.
	Many of them were credible.
	Oh my god, I'm not sure about that.
	If that's actually true, then publicly acknowledge it.
	We don't need to get that out of our course.
	I get that.
	I know more.
	We don't need to go down that rabbit hole, of course.
	Let's not get into details.
	Oh my god.
	Maybe Dawkins, what I don't know about that, is my screaming and table flipping.
	That is his version.
	He is just far too British.
	Well, I don't know about that.
	That's as far as we go in this country.
	I'm already mid-flight.
	In terms of pushback.
	Jesus, it's Mary and Joseph again.
	So, I feel like I should point out that this interview, or rather this garbled, meandering conversation, is available in full on podcasting formats, though not on YouTube.
	On the one hand, Brand is most definitely hedging, as he knows it will be going out to those more mainstream platforms, and he doesn't want to get de-platformed.
	On the other hand, he's also saying some crazy shit that is just getting entirely glossed over, and I wonder whether he's banking on that stuff just being so deeply embedded in the waffle and bullshit of this conversation that no one will actually spot it.
	Well, I did.
	Well, that's why he needs to be worried about AI, because that's who's going to find you saying some bullshit.
	That's who's going to find your shit!
	Because all these fucking conservative grifting pundit motherfuckers People are using high volume of content to hide their true motives and to hide everything because if you just pump out tons of content, it's impossible to sift through it.
	It's impossible for us to sift through every single thing that he says.
	This is a big problem.
	Because AI can find it.
	A big problem that we have at the moment is that I do not have time to go through more than an hour, hour and a half of his shit every week, and he's putting out at least double that.
	And hey, if people want to donate to the Patreon, patreon.com slash onbrand, I would love to be able to do more of this.
	It's an unfortunate reality.
	Our free time and hours in the day is directly correlated to our ability to survive.
	Yeah, 100%.
	I would love to do at least two episodes a week, if not more, because there is a lot to get into with this guy.
	But yeah, volume is definitely one of their fucking tactics.
	That is a big thing with Brand.
	Yeah, Alex Jones said over and over again in the quote-unquote trial, they didn't actually participate in the trial, so it was damages, anyway.
	Yeah.
	See, I'm digressing.
	That's my sister.
	All right.
	That you can say, oh, well, that's taken out of context and like, well, no, we have the context around it.
	We have the 20 minute clip.
	Like, no, no, no.
	It's a three hour episode.
	You don't know what I was talking about.
	You could always say, you always claim it was taken, like that your quote is taken out of context.
	Yeah, and then it turns out when you then look at the actual context, it's fucking worse.
	Worse!
	And that's the thing, Brand could definitely make the argument that we're taking his stuff out of context because we don't play the full show all in one fucking thing or whatever, but I promise you if any listener or watcher or whatever ever goes to check out his content, It is worse than what I'm saying.
	You put it all together and it's even worse than what I'm saying.
	So, you know, it doesn't help your case.
	So, in this next clip, Brand lays out more COVID conspiracies for Dawkins, who unfortunately basically capitulates.
	Because in a sense, Professor, I'm really merely using it to say that the presence of power is what is significant in both the cases of science and religion.
	Neither of those... I think that's unfair.
	I think that's unfair.
	Is that the good point you said that was approaching?
	Yeah, I mean...
	What I'm calling the measles model was possibly the best they had to go on at the time, and if that was wrong, then that's a pity.
	But it was the best advice they had available at the time.
	It was assumed that They didn't communicate it like that.
	I mean, I'm only continuing because you're continuing.
	They communicated it with a good degree of certainty and this erroneous assumption that they made was very profitable for some of those powerful interests in the world and allowed governments to regulate in ways that are increasingly becoming difficult.
	I wouldn't wish to make the economic accusation at that point.
	I think it was a fair point that epidemiological wisdom at the time, and still is, that vaccination is a public good.
	And if there's some disease where it's not the case that vaccination is a public good, because vaccination does not actually guard against transmission, Then that's something we need to take account of in the future.
	But I don't think I would wish to point fingers and say there was economic interests which were overriding this case.
	I think it was, if there was a mistake, I'm not even saying there was a mistake, but if there was a mistake, then I think it was an honest mistake.
	So you get pushback from him about the potential conspiracy there, but when you say, oh, I'm not saying there was a mistake, but if there was a mistake, to a propagandist, you are essentially saying there was probably a mistake, and your suspicion and conspiracy theories have a point.
	Yeah, and actually it wasn't a mistake at all, it was on purpose, but it looked like a mistake.
	Here's the thing, if this was a conversation being had in good faith, Dawkins would be perfectly fine here, but what he seems to have missed is that Russell is a bad actor, and I'm not just talking about forgetting Sarah Marshall here, he's operating in bad faith and will twist and manipulate anything you say to fit his narrative.
	I don't think they've said the same thing, like, I don't think they've actually spoken to each other directly once yet, truly.
	Because I can hear, there's two levels to everything that Russell is saying.
	I'm hearing there's chunks of what he says that are absolute, like, that are correct on it, on their face.
	As, like, yeah, capitalism is bad and government control is bad.
	Question authority.
	No one authority should be, you know, like, do your research.
	These are all statements and notions that used to be safe, but they're not anymore because they mean two different things.
	And he is wading in those waters of ambiguity where, like, I know that we don't get to use Basic concepts and assume everybody's on the same page anymore.
	We just don't.
	And he's helped.
	He's part of the problem.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	The man who collects words, you know, and uses them against anyone that he can find.
	Just be a poet.
	Poetry doesn't pay.
	Sure.
	No.
	But if he was an anti-capitalist, he wouldn't care.
	This does.
	Quick side note, by the way.
	Did you ever see the George Monbiot interview with Joe Politics?
	Did you see that?
	He's a British journalist.
	Monbiot interview or Monbiot Monbiot interview with Joe Politics. Did you see that? He's a
	British journalist. So he was well acquainted with Brad. I'll get into this more later.
	He was well acquainted and friendly with Russell Brand and has been paying attention to his turn and explores some of the anti-Semitic narratives that Brand is spinning.
	But apparently George has also had a look at Brand's finances of his company.
	I don't know the details or whatever, but apparently it is millions.
	He is making millions a year, as predicted off of all this stuff.
	Well, maybe we could do another episode, a separate episode, and go over it a little bit.
	Yeah, yeah, I think there's definitely stuff to look into there.
	It was, yeah, it was an interesting, interesting little thing.
	It's only like a five, 10 minute interview.
	But, but yeah, very, very curious.
	We can bring it to the people, to our people.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And thanks to Barbara Jennefer for sending that to me actually, because I wasn't aware of it either.
	I think it had been doing the rounds a little bit, but yeah, it's quite interesting.
	So, now, Brand could get into evidence for his Covid conspiracies, but, you know, it would just take too long.
	We've got some incredible information on this, which, to outline now, would take us such a long while, but there's some quite credible sources that are... Hasn't stopped you yet!
	The institutions of the media, the government, the pharmaceutical industry, unelected global
	bodies like the WEF, WHO, philanthropic organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
	who had previously run sort of pandemic, had gamed out what might happen in a pandemic
	situation, conveniently aligned to generate a scenario where the outcomes were favorable
	to governments whose general tendency, one might argue, based on their name, is to govern
	and regulate and legislate and to corporate interests whose, broadly speaking, exist in
	order to generate profit.
	And that might sound unduly cynical, but I'll just take as just one sort of simple example.
	At the beginning of the pandemic, Albert Ball, the CEO of Pfizer, said it would be unconscionable
	to profit from this pandemic and that they would ensure that that didn't happen.
	And yet, by the end of the pandemic, curiously, Pfizer had profited by $108 billion.
	If I remain silent, it's not because I accept what you're saying, it's because I just don't know enough.
	Which I think is reasonable.
	The way he keeps saying that almost implies that Russell knows more than him.
	He doesn't have to say it that way.
	Yeah, in a way.
	But I think the issue is that they have different standards of what knowledge is.
	Russell is like, headline, fantastic.
	I know things.
	Whereas Dawkins is like, right, I'm going to read 15 papers on this and see what's the situation.
	And still have an ambiguous view because that's how science works.
	Yeah, exactly, which is why I don't understand why the fuck he was talking about the measles model just a minute ago.
	He's like, it's not your field, you haven't done the reading, shut up.
	Well, there's a degree of that politeness, you know, the politeness, the drive for humans to be polite, especially when you're in somebody else's house.
	I'm here for an interview, I suppose I should talk about something and muddle his way through.
	Maybe it's that.
	Maybe it's that very British tendency to just try and keep things going.
	And smart guys think they know everything.
	There's that as well.
	It almost feels a little like, maybe if you should have said, I don't know about that, I'm not going to.
	But you could say, I don't think either of us know enough to discuss this.
	Yeah, right.
	It's a subtle difference, but it's a difference.
	What Russell said at the end there about Pfizer is more of a reasonable point, but it has nothing to do with the things that he mentioned before about the WEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation all coming together to form this big global conspiracy.
	It's not a thing.
	Yeah, he does have something of a point, but he is misrepresenting what Albert Baller said.
	So what Baller said in June 2020 was that the company wasn't considering profit on the vaccines at this time, but more on finding, quote, a medical solution to this crisis.
	Which is to say, we aren't thinking about profit yet.
	He never said it was unconscionable, not even once, because he firmly believes that his company should profit off it, and he has gone to great lengths.
	He's gone to great lengths to defend that position as well.
	Our laws dictate that CEOs have to make profit.
	That's their job, I don't think you get stewed.
	At that time, they weren't thinking about profit because they were a bit busy doing the research.
	Pfizer have since gone on to have their COVID vaccines as one of the most lucrative products ever, which is fucked up, particularly when you take into account that BioNTech, the company who actually invented the Pfizer vaccine, was funded by the public.
	Yeah.
	But what we see here again though is Russell wrapping lies in the truth and serving it all as one shitty reheated dish.
	Yeah.
	How you feeling about that?
	Shitty!
	Yeah, you don't look pleased.
	Boo!
	Boo!
	I'm trying to find words to represent the faces I make.
	I feel like there's a whole section of this podcast that you can't hear and I'm working on it.
	I'm doing my best.
	Because the video watchers get a full show.
	They know, they know.
	It's a three ring circus over here.
	The expressions are definitely a delightful little treat for anyone who is choosing to watch rather than listen.
	Delightful's so kind!
	Not always the case!
	It's delightful for us, you know.
	So next comes a favourite buzzword among right-wing propagandists, and I'm quite sure that you will pick up on this.
	Absolutely.
	And also, to tell you the truth, it's something we cover in such detail elsewhere.
	It's not something I claim to be an expert in.
	What I'm interested in is the utilization of science as the sort of godhead, forgive the phrase, of a new sort of moral authority in order to bypass Ordinary discernment and a way that it's become, in that instance for example, I would say undemocratic.
	I wouldn't call it moral, I'd say it was more that science has to give the best advice available and it's not a case of moral advice, it's a case of just expedient advice.
	It should never be fused with morality.
	This is expedient.
	This is what we know right now and morality is not our domain.
	We do not have the tools for morality.
	Yes, fair enough.
	Discernment!
	So the leap that Brand is making here is that science giving advice on public health crises is somehow undemocratic and immoral, and at the end there Dawkins is agreeing with him!
	Oh yes, no, absolutely, yes.
	What are you doing?
	I honestly think a part, like, I can hear a little politeness and a little exhaustion, for sure.
	But that's not an excuse.
	It's not an excuse.
	Because you're like, you got famous on a thing, man.
	Stick with the thing.
	Yeah.
	Why is that hard?
	Stick to your field.
	There is also, I get the feeling, right?
	So for anyone who is listening, not watching, Brand is there in, He's wearing kind of a it's a short-sleeved t-shirt with like a it's got a very low slung kind of collar on it where whereas Dawkins is there in a full suit Not not a tie, but but he's there and definitely a suit Jack and and his cheeks are a little bit red I get the feeling that studio is warm but but Dawkins
	Maybe, maybe.
	So he's probably not in a comfortable situation.
	And Bran does love showing his titties.
	He's a titty show.
	He does.
	And his chest hair.
	He's a clean bitch man.
	He's proud of the chest hair is that man.
	Go ahead girl.
	Next up we learn why Dawkins has bothered to come on the show at all.
	So, Professor, though, I guess where I would like to sort of advance this conversation, and is there any... How come you're doing this?
	Well, last year's book was Flights of Fancy, about flight.
	But I'm also starting a podcast of my own.
	I think that's probably why I'm doing it.
	Yes, go on then, what's that?
	Well, it's called Poetry of Reality, and science is the poetry of reality.
	And I haven't really started it yet, but I want to ask your advice about how to run a podcast.
	Oh my god.
	Oh dear.
	Oh my god.
	Dawkins!
	Dawkins!
	Do not take advice from this man!
	Hello, I'd like to make a deal with the devil if I could.
	Wow, man!
	Are you accepting deals, sir?
	Wow!
	Is there any of that Russia money going around?
	I'd rather enjoy some of that.
	I've heard about this thing called the crossroads.
	I don't know if you're familiar with road scratch.
	I'd love to retire somewhere.
	Do I actually have to suck Putin's dick personally or can I just do it, you know?
	My teeth come out, I will, I will.
	Do I have to fondle the balls?
	But you know, if I can retire somebody, that would be lovely, fantastic.
	What's his preference?
	Wow, man!
	That's bananas!
	Guess what, Richard Dawkins?
	You're Richard Dawkins!
	Hire somebody that knows what they're doing!
	Is that for okay?
	For real, they're, oh... That is outrageous to hear.
	I am so surprised.
	What advice do you think Russell is going to give to... Russell is going to say, if you do this long enough, you're just going to ramble worse and no one will check you.
	So you just get to do whatever you want.
	You get to do whatever you want and get a shitload of money.
	It's great.
	All your bad habits get worse and people just pay you.
	You're more effectively surrounded by SEGA fans.
	Awesome!
	People love fighting on the internet!
	hateful things you say the more money you get. It's it's yeah that's that's definitely the-
	People love fighting on the internet. Have at it.
	That's definitely the advice that I would expect but instead let's hear what uh what Russell has to say.
	Oh, he does?
	He actually says it?
	I think it's the two of the truth of the advice I'd give you seem to me to be areas where you would not struggle, remain rigorously truthful to what you believe in, speak to people that you are interested in, be entirely willing to have conversations with people with whom you thoroughly disagree, and enter those conversations in good faith.
	Ha!
	That's it, that's it.
	Do as I say, not as I do.
	Whenever I'm not doing that, I get really bored really, really quickly and I do loathe
	to be bored, Professor.
	I mean it would be excellent advice if Russell was following any of it.
	Yeah.
	Like, as soon as he's like, "I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm bored."
	So far, in all of the interviews I've seen on Brand's show, he's wholeheartedly agreed with every single one of his guests, to the point where Dawkins' milk-toast pushback here is the biggest conflict I've yet seen on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	Really?
	Yeah, and this conversation is not being had in good faith, either.
	No!
	Not at all!
	Of course not!
	Not at all.
	Not in the slightest.
	Oh my god, that's just... what?
	Okay, I mean...
	I don't know, be Richard Dawkins, end of advice.
	Talk about fucking science and shit, do the thing that you do, just with a microphone in front of you.
	People will listen, people are interested in that crap.
	Except the big bags of money that you can get from this endeavor, and do whatever you want!
	This is true.
	See, I'd be worried about the off-screen advice that he gets, you know, like, oh mate, you know, if you talk more about the Islamophobia type stuff that you really like to talk about, clearly, these people over here will give you bags of money.
	You know, I worry that there's some of that that's going to happen in the background.
	I don't know.
	If it even needs to.
	Honestly, if it even needs to.
	There's probably people lined up already.
	Dawkins doesn't need to put the feeler, but that's also just like an awkward way to, like, the notion that Richard Dawkins wants Russell Brand's advice is a little rich.
	Fucking bizarre, to be honest.
	Bizarre is exactly right.
	I agree completely.
	So this podcast of his is nowhere near fruition yet, but we might need to check in on it at some point, just to double check that he's not gone down these roads.
	I don't know.
	I'll look into it and I'll let you know when it comes out.
	But yeah, in this next clip, I get the feeling Russell has, at some point in his life, attended some sort of management class.
	So I've got lots more questions.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	So like my belief in God and I'll listen to your podcast.
	What's it called?
	The Poetry of Reality.
	Yes.
	Who's coming on?
	Are you doing it all on your own?
	Well, we don't know yet.
	I'm pretty fascinated by Alfred Russell Wallace.
	I'll tell you why.
	Alfred Russell Wallace.
	Yes.
	Because I'm from Gray's in Essex, right?
	Yes.
	And I went back there recently on some sort of pilgrimage because actually I'm like deeply religious.
	I'm obsessed with the religion.
	I'm obsessed with the unknowable.
	I'm obsessed with the mystery.
	I'm obsessed with the unknowable but that's the scientific unknowable.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, go on.
	And you similarly seem to be trying to derive from it some ethos, some ethic, some way that we might live.
	I know that I'm so, what do I say, incredibly grateful To you, for your rigor, for your work, for your fortitude, for your willingness to endure, I imagine, many difficult and challenging conversations and it must have been incredibly difficult to create the body of work that you've created.
	You can feel the butt coming, can't you, right?
	So he's doing the classic critique thing of saying a good thing first, and then slamming in with the negative, which we will get to in just a moment.
	Also, yeah, it appears that Dawkins' podcast seems to be a sort of random idea at this stage, rather than anything concrete.
	He's not gotten very far with it yet, but anyway.
	Now, the butt.
	sometimes it does seem to me that you are almost determined to arrive at a materialistic outcome
	with the kind of zeal that one might attribute typically to someone of a particular religious
	persuasion in the same manner that I am determined to believe in God in the same way that I lean into
	Joseph Campbell's observation when watching a vine wind its way across a trellis that it appears to
	be moving to the warmth. So yeah yeah so science is a religion of the materialistic not the material
	according to Brand and Dawkins is an evangelist.
	What he doesn't appear to understand is that being determined to arrive at a scientific conclusion based in materialism, i.e.
	the knowable reality we live in, is not the same as being determined to attribute any and all things to a magical sky wizard hiding behind the fabric of reality itself.
	I apologize if my comments here come off as obtuse to any of our religious listeners.
	I believe that religion has its place in society and that people can get a whole lot out of it if acting responsibly and without malice.
	But Russell Brand is not one of those people.
	Here, he's painting Dawkins as the enemy, almost as his cultural opposite, and Dawkins has no fucking idea that it's happening.
	I am.
	I'm so sorry.
	Listeners, I'm so sorry.
	I let the faces happen first and then I get to the talking part because it's just a lot.
	And I wish I was as understanding from those who are coming with a religious perspective.
	I had a very specific religious experience in my upbringing that it was very unpleasant.
	And so I have baggage that To some degree, I'm going to carry with me my whole life, and it makes me especially sensitive to religion being used as a cudgel toward anyone, for any reason, at any time.
	So I have very little patience for Any religious dogma.
	And if you're arguing from a religious perspective, I'm happy to hear you out.
	To a degree.
	I mean, listen, I'm not, I'm not, this podcast just started, but I already can tell I'm not going to be known as the nice one and sorry.
	It's just the way it is.
	The thing is, is like, I, I, I want people to be happy and safe.
	And I don't think that religion, the way that it works, the way that I've experienced it, doesn't help people be happy or safe for them or the people around them.
	That's just my lived experience.
	Right, and I think, you know, there are very different kinds of religious people in the world.
	I mean, religious people, for instance, in the UK, by and large, are very pleasant, polite people who, you know, who genuinely don't want you to burn in hell, etc., and don't think that that's going to happen just because you sleep with someone of the same sex, etc.
	But it's in the book!
	I know, I know.
	Well, oh, yeah.
	I think it's fair to say that in the UK we have a very different relationship with religion compared to the US.
	I would argue probably less extreme.
	So the religious people that I've met in this country have generally been very pleasant, for the most part.
	You get the odd fuckhead, but you know.
	But what we're dealing with in Russell Brand, this is kind of the situation that we're looking at.
	We're not trying to shit on religion as a whole, you know?
	Right.
	I'm trying very hard, but it's tough.
	It's tough for me.
	I want to address my shortcoming in it because I just don't have patience for it at this juncture in my life.
	And it's understandable, you know, because especially, you know, with your own lived experience, etc.
	And there are very justified critiques to level at religion and religions, and they are deserving of it.
	But what we are trying to do is cover him and his religion specifically, and In all cases, this might seem a bit of a turn of phrase, but he's not operating in good faith in any fucking sense of the word.
	Right.
	Yeah, it's just a fucking lot, isn't it?
	I mean, so here's where I'm coming from, and this is where I'm going to try to leave it, and then I just won't say anything.
	If I can't be nice, and it's not funny enough to get away with, I'm not going to say it, but just as an example.
	How I feel in my heart is if you're giving, like you can be the nicest, most kind, wonderful Catholic in the world, but if you give a dollar to that organization, you are supporting an insidious, prolific pedophile ring.
	Yeah, there is that.
	So don't give one dollar to that organization in any form.
	If you give one dollar to these religions that are supporting the abuse and termination of gay and trans people, and if any part of that little church that you go to, anyone in that organization is child trafficking or is Subjugating women, making them work for free for decades, all that.
	If they're doing an exploitation, you're supporting it.
	Don't do it.
	Just don't do it.
	If you're interested in any of that or any of that debate, go and see the famous Intelligence Square debate with Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry on one side, and Anne Whittacombe and some bishop on the other, as to whether the Catholic Church is a force for good in the world.
	It's a fucking fantastic debate, and yes, particularly as Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens just fucking own the room as predicted.
	Well, and it's not even about owning.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I agree completely.
	They own the room because of the points that they make.
	You know, it's in the substance of their argument rather than the style in which it's presented.
	You know, you can't help but be floored by the things that they say.
	And you're like, well, OK, well, obviously the Catholic Church is not a good fucking force for good in the world.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Well, and there are Catholics, as much as any other group, there are Catholics that have done a world of good for human rights.
	And I find those people fascinating because I'm not attributing God to it.
	That's just like a good person.
	That's a good Spanish person that went and tried very hard in a Latin American country and probably got murdered.
	That's how it went a lot.
	It sucks.
	I think it's very easy to differentiate between the two.
	There are individuals that had their own moral compass and they followed it.
	And Catholicism is as relevant as hair color to me.
	Yeah, there are good people and there are bad people, full stop, in all walks of life, in all fucking religions, in all of everything, and that's just the way it goes, and trying to present it as otherwise is bullshit.
	Right, so, where are we?
	In this next clip, Brand lays his sales pitch for spiritualism down to Richard Dawkins, arguably the world's most famous atheist.
	I wonder if love is the sort of felt understanding of unity.
	A kind of sense that I have a duty to a child or a sense that I have an affinity with another.
	That love implies duty.
	That it implies connection.
	The idea that separateness, the idea that I am this separate biological entity is temporal and spatial and an animalistic interpretation of a narrow strata of reality which can never really be measured because we don't have the instruments, we don't have the instruments, we don't have the bandwidth, but we can intuit it, that we sense it, that this is the job of the shaman, the job of the priest, the job of the mystic, the realm of the psychoactive and psychedelic experience, that these are not just fluctuations and the flatulence of a busy mind, that there is something here that is vital.
	And I wonder how you approach those questions in yourself and where it leaves you with regard to the joy and the grief and the stuff I said an hour and a half ago at the beginning of the question.
	I never had a psychoactive experience, in which case I'm obviously deficient You're not deficient, Dawkins.
	You're not deficient, you just need to do more drugs.
	Also, we measure that shit all the time.
	We measure that shit all the time.
	Safely and responsibly.
	But hey, maybe try some LSD or something.
	Try a tab.
	It's not a religious experience, but it is pretty cool.
	Yeah, it's just amazing to me.
	I'm shocked at how I'm not shocked at Russell.
	I'm shocked at Dawkins.
	Like, bro.
	The lack of pushback is real.
	The things that he is choosing to discuss out of the legion of things that Russell says, he's going for like, let's try and have one, you know, let's pick the one that is the path of least resistance, you know, let's almost pick the entertaining subject rather than dealing with any of what you're trying to say because I don't like any of it.
	So in this next clip Dawkins reinforces my theory that he is in fact a robot.
	I understand what's meant by words like love and empathy and they are.
	They mean a lot to me, on a personal level.
	I don't get mystical about it.
	Why?
	Because I'm a materialist, because I think science will or can explain everything, and if it can't, nothing else can.
	I said that before.
	But that doesn't demean it, that doesn't reduce, that doesn't in any way minify the importance of love.
	Love is deeply important to me, but I don't get mystical about it.
	You don't sense yourself being at the edge of what it's possible to understand?
	Oh, I think I sense that, yes.
	What do humans say about love?
	What is that thing?
	It means a great deal to me.
	The dancing around is really amazing.
	But also, yeah, we measure this stuff all the time.
	We do.
	We can measure brain activity.
	But what I keep finding myself Making these arguments that I wish Dawkins would be saying to Russell.
	But then I know that whatever you respond to Russell's postulations with, He's gonna have a different argument for it.
	Yeah, it's true.
	He'll move the goalposts.
	Yeah, exactly.
	They'll be shifting around constantly because science knows that chicks imprint on their mother And that's to keep this baby chick safe until it can live on its own.
	There's a totally evolutionary practical reason for things that we call love.
	The dog knows who feeds it.
	The dog also knows who cuddles with it, but the dog gets fed and also enjoys the company of its person.
	It's very simple and basic and it has been measured and documented and there are scientific reasons for it.
	The fact that that's not even coming out in this discussion is weird!
	It's weird!
	Yep, and also at the end of this clip we have another example of Brand and Dawkins talking entirely at cross purposes.
	Just the last little bit of what they said here.
	So you'll see from this next clip that what Brand was asking here was whether Dawkins felt that he's pushing at the edges of what humanity is able to understand.
	Meaning, does he acknowledge that there are things above and beyond us as a species, i.e.
	the mystical realm.
	Dawkins, on the other hand, takes the question to mean, do you struggle to understand things sometimes, which becomes apparent here.
	But then I feel the urge to try to understand it at a scientific level.
	There's much of physics I don't understand.
	When I talk to physicists, I feel awed and wish I understood better.
	So there are plenty of things I don't understand.
	I feel I'm on the edge of understanding things.
	Yes, I feel that.
	If politeness makes you let people talk like this, throw it away.
	Straight up.
	Yeah.
	Oh my god.
	If politeness makes you let people talk like this, throw it away.
	Straight up.
	Yeah.
	Politeness is over fucking rated.
	Yeah.
	As a British person I do agree.
	I do agree.
	We have too much of it in this country.
	If you're hiding your true feelings, then people like this will keep doing what they're doing, because no one's ever pushing back.
	You don't have to do it like I do.
	That's fine.
	No, no, no.
	I agree.
	I make people real mad.
	That's okay.
	Do it in a British way.
	Yeah, well, maybe a little less.
	Maybe a little less.
	A little less British.
	The Dawkins British.
	There's probably other British ways to do it.
	Yes, that's too British.
	Yeah, no, you want to go for more of a Northern, like, oh, fuck off, mate.
	Get Sean Bean in there to have this discussion.
	I don't think Sean Bean would fuck around, to be honest.
	Just my position.
	Well, that does sound fun.
	Yeah, I would love that.
	I would love that.
	Sean Bean is as straight-talking a person as there is in this country, basically.
	His interviews are fantastic.
	It's not hard.
	You don't have to come from a place like, and I think that even what the toxic internet culture
	that Dawkins absolutely contributed to is that like owned, roasted, ugh,
	like come from a place of love and care for another person.
	And even if it's not the, like if the person that you are talking to is a brick wall,
	you don't know who else is around and who else is listening and needs to hear your point of view.
	It's not just for the, especially, and don't let this ruin your day, which I know it's hard, we've all done it, but a conversation publicly on the internet.
	Even if that person has already decided that they're going to be disingenuous to you, it ain't for them, it ain't just for you.
	It's for everyone around you who doesn't have the tools to give them the tools.
	And that person that's a problem is going to keep being a problem until they get some kind of pushback, any pushback.
	Because without consequences, they'll just get worse.
	We have a responsibility to each other.
	I think as well, but because of that, it's so difficult to have a genuine conversation in spaces like online forums or Facebook groups or, you know, subreddits, etc, etc, because there are other eyes on it.
	Anyone in that discussion wants to kind of save face.
	They want to win.
	They want to win the argument.
	And so it becomes that thing of, oh, I want to own you with my points rather than, OK, let's just take it down a notch and actually try and figure out where each other is coming from here.
	And see where we're at.
	It just becomes this, no, I'm going to stick to what I've said because I've said it in public and therefore I must stick to that until I die.
	Yeah, learning's fine.
	Learning and growing is like, pretty cool.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it's not... the internet's not a great place.
	Now, this may shock you, but it seems sometimes even Brand doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about.
	It appears that we can never reliably say, ah, this is the Genesis.
	What am I trying to say to you?
	I'm trying to say that...
	I don't know what I'm trying to say.
	I think I said some quite good things there.
	You keep using the word numinous and I'm curious what you mean by it.
	So numinous is a word I don't think I'd heard until this interview and it means having a strong religious or spiritual quality indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity.
	It was coined by theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto, who used it to describe the feeling of the other, which is to mean like some divine religious feeling.
	Otto's work was a major influence on Carl Jung, Murcia Eliade, and C.S.
	Lewis.
	There we go.
	That's where he's getting that word from.
	He just, he read some C.S.
	Lewis and he likes it.
	I like big words, too.
	That's fine.
	Very well-known Christian apologist, C.S.
	Lewis.
	Decent novelist.
	Great friends with Tolkien, as a matter of fact.
	But yeah, anyway.
	In this next clip, Brand basically says outright that science is at fault for society being shit.
	Well, I like C.S.
	Lewis's description of it.
	He goes, he goes, if I told you that there was a tiger in the next room, you would feel, you would feel afraid.
	And if I told you there was a ghost in the next room and you believed it, you would also feel afraid, but not afraid in the same way that you would be afraid of a tiger.
	Oh no, what's this ghost going to do?
	No one cares what a ghost is going to do, like in Scooby Doo.
	But you are aware that your understanding of reality is glitching and twitching and being challenged.
	Imagine if, I would say, there is a mighty spirit in the room next to you.
	You might feel that you might feel yourself on the edge of something and as Shakespeare said, and here my genius is rebuked.
	But the knowledge that there is a great power and I don't feel that we're at odds by Perceiving it in nature or fetishizing its particular understanding over what it somehow suggests at its root.
	I feel that in a sense we're talking about the same thing but I suppose what I'm trying to draw from it or extract from it is the possibility that there is something in religious thought that is valuable culturally.
	and necessary in fact and that if we allow science to encroach continually upon that
	territory what will happen is that this materialism, the materialism is a word that's come up several
	times, the materialism will lead, that does lead to, because it has led to and this is
	where we are, a kind of, what do I want to say?
	A grimly metastasized capitalism where all that matters is that which can be measured.
	And in science, all that matters is that which can be measured.
	Of course, that makes perfect sense.
	No other science would be of any value.
	Of course, conjecture will exist there.
	Capitalism sucks.
	Now, subscribe to my locals channel, guys.
	Just click the red button.
	What does your book say about capitalism, Russell?
	That a rich man is more likely to fit through the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of heaven.
	And y'all just threw that the fuck away.
	So get out of here.
	Get out of here!
	Beating?
	You're already wrong!
	It's amazing how many religious people like Russell don't read their own book.
	Well, it would really interfere with their day-to-day lives.
	That is true.
	It would make life a lot harder, wouldn't it?
	Next is the nail in the coffin for anyone wondering if I'm hyperbolising that Brand believes atheism, secularism and science are at fault for all of society's ills and that we should all live in a Christian theocracy.
	Here are his views in a nutshell.
	But in this establishment of a society, in the establishment of a culture, in the establishment of a family, If all that matters is that which can be measured, you will get individualistic, materialistic, ultimately nihilistic, pious, moralising but oddly unforgiving cultures with no real values.
	We are seeing it.
	And I think, and my faith is, my belief is, that we need to reintroduce the mystery.
	And I don't want it to be just like some sort of mad dogma or some stupid thing that's used to make people feel bad about the way they are or who they have sex with or something.
	It makes people be able to endure and love and I feel that we need it.
	Indeed it is a scientific endeavor because I believe people require it.
	The results are everything.
	I know what a tiger is.
	I have no idea what a great spirit is.
	Shut up!
	And so I would not be impressed if you said there was a great spirit in the room next door.
	I would want to know what it was.
	When you come on to equating a scientific materialistic worldview with materialism in the other sense, materialism in the sense of a sort of economically only caring about money and selfishness and things
	I don't own that.
	I don't approve of that.
	I don't feel that that should be laid at science's door.
	Science is bigger than that, more important than that.
	And I think it's disingenuous to suggest that the only escape from materialism in the demeaning sense, in the economic sense, is religion.
	I think religion is relatively unequipped, too small to deal with these big problems that we're dealing with.
	An actual reasonable amount of pushback from Dawkins there, possibly because he's finally grasped something of what Russell is laying down.
	I feel like we start to see it's still not enough pushback, but at least a little bit.
	We start to see a little bit of a turning point in the interview here.
	So this next clip is a little bit long, but at the end we see Brand actually get genuinely pissed off at Richard Dawkins.
	I would recommend just... What's that sound?
	Oh, that'd be yard work.
	We can wait.
	I'll do the timeout so you can see it to edit.
	That's cool.
	I think it's cool.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Yeah, just holler at me whenever if you can hear it.
	And then we'll just Make signals and be like, okay, bad part, bad part, bad part.
	They're usually pretty quick because, you know, I live in a city, so the yard's a potion stamp.
	Yeah, I'm familiar.
	Jeez, Pete, dude, this is a lot.
	Right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I'm disappointed for a whole other reason than I thought I would be.
	Yeah, yeah, me too.
	Me too.
	It's gone darker than I anticipated it would.
	Am I smarter than Richard Dawkins now?
	In a very specific context?
	I do feel like at a certain age people just shouldn't be allowed to say things in public anymore.
	I think that should just, you know, like once you hit like 70.
	They didn't used to have to!
	They would be dead!
	Yeah!
	It's okay, you can stop.
	Just stop.
	You ain't gotta do no more.
	I mean, listen, I voted for Joe Biden.
	I'm an elder abuser.
	It's not right.
	What we're doing.
	It's not elder abuse when he decided to go for the job.
	That was his choice.
	It still doesn't feel great.
	It really doesn't.
	We could have had someone else.
	No, no, I know.
	I know.
	Maybe my attitude is part of it, because I'm like, I'll heave this man at that problem as my only option.
	I'll heave this decrepit man.
	It doesn't feel awesome.
	What else can we do?
	I'll just do the intro to the next clip again.
	So this next clip is a little bit long, but at the end we see Brand actually get genuinely pissed at Richard Dawkins, and it's fascinating to see.
	I would recommend paying particular attention to his facial expressions if you are watching.
	Beyond the coincidence of the shared semantic term, I feel that there is a corollary between materialism in the two senses, because I feel that there...
	Beat about the bush here.
	Secularism is predicated on the idea that the abiding and dominant idea now is that the state is the ultimate authority.
	Nothing to do with it.
	What's got to do with the state?
	Why would you equate materialism with the state having authority?
	Secularism.
	And I'm saying that secularism... Secularism, yes.
	I say that secularism, we have to separate church and state, we have to get religion out the bloody way and let the business of the state be the business of the state.
	But somehow man worships I'm sure for you this might be somewhat hackneyed, but you're pretty evangelical and zealous and pretty devout and those things, regardless of the object, they're interesting qualities to have as a person.
	Anyway, my point is this, that materialism can lead to secularism.
	All that matters is that's what we can measure and what's rational.
	Let's get this hocus-pocus crap out of the way.
	Yeah, let's.
	And get and build a lovely state.
	Right, now let's get on with putting poor people in jail!
	No, come on!
	It is, Richard!
	That's what's happening!
	Well, it may be happening, but it's nothing to do with it.
	I mean, it's nothing to do with secularism.
	Okay, we can certainly disagree on that.
	Of course we can.
	We can, I'm not arguing with you.
	Oh, the look on his face then.
	He looks like he was about to kick off and murder the man.
	Good lord.
	You're already working on it with the temperature in the room!
	Yeah, he's trying, he's trying.
	Yeah, Russ is already trying to take him down a peg just by having no A.C.
	I'm sorry, Dawkins is like, looking pink.
	He's looking peachy.
	He's looking like, warm.
	That's not nice.
	A little unchristian if you ask me.
	Definitely a little bit roasted in there.
	So, examining Bran's views here, he's saying that secularism, meaning the separation of religion and the state, is what's led to throwing poor people in prison.
	Not that anything bad has ever come from any Christian theocracies, and of course poor people have always been treated wonderfully by those governments.
	Oh my god.
	Oh my god.
	I do find it necessary to point out that the UK government is not secular.
	You may not be aware of this, but our government and the Church of England are legally tied to one another, with King Charles as the head of the church.
	Though I've always marveled at the fact that we over here seem far more secular than the USA, for example, which is supposed to have separation of church and state.
	In either case, it seems Russell doesn't believe either example is religious enough for him.
	Because your country has a long and storied past and has had to reckon with that past with ecclesiastical courts.
	And we've never had that in this country.
	We're getting there.
	Oh, I would say honestly that this current Supreme Court that we were dealing with is ostensibly an ecclesiastical court with two floundering women that are trying their best.
	It's awful.
	It's absolutely awful what's happening here.
	It's why our country, on paper, it's why our country started so that we didn't have to That we couldn't be thrown in jail because a mucky-muck whose brother is a Marquis whispered to his Sky Wizard and decided that you did something wrong so you get to die in jail of cholera.
	That's something we were trying to avoid but probably not really because we're not avoiding it at all.
	That's like the leap between quote-unquote secularism and then putting poor people in jail.
	To even try to make that correlation.
	To me, it's so random.
	He may as well just start, like, that's to me.
	Russell may as well just started quacking, because it's so absurd.
	It is completely absurd, and it's worth noting that he is describing secularism, atheism, and science itself all as pretty much the same thing, in his view.
	That's all under one fucking umbrella, according to this guy.
	which is just, it's inaccurate for a start. - Our entire cultural state is founded and is
	reinforced by the notion of morality and that you have to be punished,
	even though we know it doesn't work to punish someone for a crime.
	Like it doesn't, like a punitive, like, oh, I'm sorry.
	I'm so sorry.
	I'm not.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No, it doesn't.
	It doesn't work.
	Punishment does not deter.
	It does not.
	No, no, no.
	The improvement of material conditions are what keep people from doing primarily crimes.
	Security and safety is what keep people from doing crimes.
	The countries that have had a significant focus on rehabilitation in their justice systems have proven exactly what you said time and time again.
	You look at Norway, you look at Denmark, et cetera, et cetera.
	These are countries which focus on actually rehabilitating the person in question and not just dehumanizing and punishing them.
	I'm actually trying to understand... Yeah, because it's fucking awful here.
	It's fucking awful.
	Among other things, it's an extension of slavery, isn't it really?
	Which is sanctioned by the Bible in no uncertain terms.
	Thank you!
	Yeah, buddy.
	Right, we could spend hours on that, but let's not, because we've got a few more clips to get through.
	So, in the next clip, Bran seems to think he's creating a gotcha moment, and it doesn't quite go the way he wants.
	I'm saying, what I'm saying is, is that perhaps a way of changing- like, I feel that- do you feel that society's in trouble?
	Maybe I do.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	Right.
	What do you think the answer is?
	Well not religion.
	Well I do!
	So we're gonna have to somehow get along because for the next six months we're going to be in a caravan together touring the British Isles.
	Oh my god!
	You preaching materialism and me wandering around with like um burning sage and I'm only wearing a blanket and stuff and I'm like Richard I'll pray for you.
	Hey Richard I've bought you a crystal.
	Yeah yeah.
	Yeah I've prayed for it like that and giving you like treatments.
	You believe in crystal healing by the way.
	I would actually watch that show.
	Odd Couple Dynamics in confined spaces make for fantastic television regardless of the subjects.
	I would definitely watch that.
	I feel like by the end of it they would absolutely detest one another and Dawkins would probably end up- They already do!
	They already do!
	They're just pretending!
	They're pretending to tour and make money.
	That's it.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	God, right.
	Yeah, evidence of this is proven by Brand talking down to talk-ins about science in this next clip.
	I believe in the power... I believe that fundamental to the human experience, obviously, is consciousness.
	That consciousness is a thread that we are all strung upon.
	That if we have emerged from consciousness, that we are its avatars and its angels.
	Now, when you start to codify something that's that mystical into this particular trinket as an attribute, I acknowledge that it's absurd.
	I adore all that I can understand about science.
	I adore it.
	I adore it when people can explain to me this is how this has evolved and look we can prove the monkey, the capuchin monkey on this side is like this and on that side of the mountain like that.
	I mean oh my god you geniuses it's so magical and yet for me there is something more.
	There is something more and I think you've inferred that society is in trouble.
	I think that it's due to our belief systems and the way that those belief systems are playing out and when I say religion, actually Richard, I don't mean let's all dress up a particular way or worship a particular thing.
	Oh, I adore it.
	I adore it.
	Science is so cute.
	Oh, look at the little scientists discovering things.
	Who's a good scientist?
	It's you.
	It's you.
	Yes, you are.
	Who's a good scientist?
	Yeah, so he's just entirely belittling the entire thing.
	What he just described is that he has an affinity for parlor tricks when science can make a third graders volcano experiment, you know?
	Yeah, that's what he wants.
	Beyond that.
	I like looking at the ass of science.
	He likes the cool shit, but he doesn't think it matters.
	He does not think it matters at all.
	He's like, oh I love it when people can explain things to me, but it's not important though, is it?
	viewpoints already, then I'm sure he's all for it. I'm sure he's all for it.
	[COLIN
	[COLIN
	[DAWKINS
	but individually... [BRANDON
	Okay, but that doesn't mean religion.
	I agree that there's something, as lot we don't know, we may never know.
	And I want to know.
	I want to work on knowing.
	But we may not ever know.
	Yes.
	And I feel that what we may endeavour to do is create the conditions where we have a sense that we are pursuing something together, that we are respecting individual and community freedom, we are acknowledging the observable fact that we are all here together, potentially in limitless space, potentially the only example of conscious life in the universe.
	And that this ought be revered and honoured and that there... It's a bit of waffle from Russell at the end there and the full interview, if you ever dare to watch it, is stuffed full of bullshit like that.
	But he leads it into yet another pitch of trying to convert Dawkins over to theism.
	The earliest forms of religion say because it seems like what you don't like institutional religions where it's sort of like people at some point or another get a gun or a candelabra and say that our religion is about this.
	But what about totemism?
	What about the earliest forms of religion where people revered their food source and acknowledged that they needed to have an intuitive relationship with that food source that was somehow sacralized and ritualized?
	I don't revere that.
	I mean, you have a relationship with your food source, you work out how to grow it, you work out how to fertilise it, manure it, water it.
	But where do people get all this spirit from to do all of this stuff?
	You're very unusual.
	Right.
	So, very reasonable response, I thought.
	We become farmers, that's what we do.
	No need to worship the thing when you can understand it instead.
	Yeah, but he's also- Richard Dawkins is also just ignoring this huge chunk of human experience because we do gravitate to ritual as a species.
	And you can't just ignore that.
	That's that, like, ownage and debate me shit.
	Active like he's being intentionally obtuse in some way to make his own point but that's his point is moot if you don't address what he's actually like if you're just if y'all are both just ignoring parts of what each other is saying it's not a conversation.
	Yeah, well, no.
	He does acknowledge it a little bit more at the end of this next bit, but yeah.
	Probably not to my preference, but I'm gonna go with my preference.
	I doubt it, yeah, no.
	Well, he at least mentions it, let's put it that way.
	And in this next clip, I dare say Brand asks what I think to be a disgusting question to ask pretty much anyone, particularly in this kind of setting.
	Have you had any diagnosis for particular neurological conditions and neurological diversity?
	What?
	Have you?
	No.
	Well, I have one, because I think people might not be willing to start farms and go hunting for stags if they don't believe that there is some intuition.
	That there is the sensory realm, there is that which is observable, and there is that which might be observable by some advanced Oh, I accept that that's historically how it happened.
	I mean, of course, that's the relationship that people had with their animals they hunted and the crops that they grew and so on.
	I mean, that's historically what happened.
	It wasn't the best way to do it, but that's the way it was done.
	There's a fair bit to unpack here.
	So first, Brand is saying that if people aren't religious or spiritual, they will lack the desire or drive to hunt for food or grow crops.
	It's a stupid argument, and I'm not sure if he thinks all farmers are inherently religious people, but as someone who grew up in the middle of Wales around a lot of farmers, I can assure you they are by and large not especially religious, certainly around here.
	The dig he made at Dawkins at the start of that clip was honestly just gross.
	He makes it clear in the next episode that we'll be covering that he was referring specifically to
	autism because of Dawkins' extreme intelligence, but more than that because Dawkins is unwilling
	to shift on his positions in the face of Brown's arguments.
	He's saying, "Ah, you must be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, which is bad, because you're
	stubborn and don't want to change, which is also bad.
	Anti-autism and anti-neurodivergence narratives dovetail perfectly with anti-vax arguments,
	so it's not terribly surprising that Brand holds these beliefs, though he says he loves
	all neurodivergent people.
	Autism is not- Autism is not some great boogeyman hiding in vaccines that then breaks the children who get the vaccines.
	It's a different way of existing which occurs naturally that is inherently valuable to our society as a whole.
	If we have any listeners that are neurodivergent or autistic in any sense, you are not broken.
	Even if your parents spent years arguing that you've been vaccinated and the vaccines broke you, you are not broken, and you are loved for who you are, not what some fuckwit suggests you could have been.
	There's a lot to get into about the anti-autism narratives, but I'm going to leave it there for now before I lose my shit.
	Well, and also Dawkins, he's like, oh heavens, not me!
	Never!
	Okay, man.
	Pump the fucking brakes.
	Yeah, and they both clearly have that.
	That was unpleasant across the board.
	That was really inappropriate.
	They both clearly have the held belief that it's a bad thing to be neurodivergent in any sense.
	It can certainly be difficult.
	Well, I mean, yeah, for the individual, for sure.
	In the world.
	Yeah.
	There's a lot of challenges.
	But that's, yeah, that is the one thing that I do want to say is like, listen, not everybody is an autism superhero.
	Not everybody is a neurodivergent superhero.
	Sometimes you can just struggle every day with your executive function like I do.
	It's hard.
	And I'm not, I'm not like, I'm not awesome at everything.
	I'm not going to pretend that I am.
	Sometimes shit sucks.
	And sometimes you're not as good at things as you used to be.
	And it usually gets worse as you get older.
	And so I think toxic positivity is just as bad around this kind of topic.
	Like it's hard and it sucks.
	And the more understanding you can be with others and the more like, I don't know.
	Tap into that shared humanity that Russell says he cares about but clearly does not!
	Just offer some understanding for others, and it's not that hard.
	It's not that bad.
	Oh man.
	Wow.
	Yuck.
	Yuck.
	Yeah, I was taken aback by that when I first heard it.
	It's a shocking thing to ask anyone, especially in an interview setting, for fuck's sake.
	Have an ounce of professionalism, you bellend.
	Well, he doesn't.
	He doesn't.
	Well, there is that.
	Let's get into the next clip, where Brand once again talks down to Professor Richard Dawkins.
	Yes.
	And do you feel that there is something?
	Do you feel that there is nothing in it?
	You see it just as cold and full of edges and that where the edge ends there is nothing.
	There is nothing between the edges of things.
	That it's not alive with possibility.
	I don't know what you're saying there.
	Between us, in the space between us.
	And within you, the experience of you being Professor Richard Dawkins and the
	experience of me being Russell Brand, that there might be some commonality and the
	evidence of that commonality might be found in the ability for us to share this
	linguistic experience, the ability for us to interpret the vibrations in the air.
	So I feel that somehow your ability to understand mechanics, micro mechanics, evolutionary biology.
	has somehow stripped, if I may, it's not insulting, stripped away the sort of somehow wonder and awe.
	And I know you say, oh, I do feel wonder at Mount In or some discovery of Isaac Newton or whatever,
	I'm sure, or indeed Darwin, your great hero. But...
	So scientists for start must view everything as cold with hard edges,
	supposedly, and no scientist can ever feel awe. What a stupid fucking perspective.
	They're first in line for that sneaker release.
	Yeah, exactly!
	Scientists, like, when the new AWW sneaker drops.
	They're lining up in the store parking lot a day early.
	The awe-inspiring thing.
	That's absurd.
	For full disclosure, my brother is Senior Scientific Advisor to the Welsh Government.
	That's his gig.
	I was surprised as you, to be honest.
	He's a doctor in nuclear engineering, so he went and studied, I think he started out with physics and then did a bit of aerospace and then went into nuclear, and then worked at the University of Manchester for a decade.
	And in terms of awe and wonder, that's why he fucking got into the whole thing!
	There is no one I know who expresses more awe at life and science and the wonders and the natural wonders and beauty than him, to be honest.
	This entire argument is just fucking nonsense.
	It's just wrong.
	That's something that atheism absolutely unlocked in me.
	As even just like an older teenager, whenever it all kind of started setting in, it was a warm blanket around my shoulders, knowing that there isn't some weird creep Staring down and letting and like giving babies leukemia, you know, like that's like the God of the Bible is a crazy sadist.
	Like that, that, that entity is a, is a nightmare.
	I, I would much rather live in, in the, like in a world without it.
	I mean, it's just, it's, it's completely like, that's, The argument that Russell is a couch and a couch and a couch and a couch.
	You're assuming so many things about morality by trying to direct the conversation in this way.
	Atheism has given me more, and I don't mean like Reddit atheism, just being freed from the trappings of religion and having to, especially like a child feeling the need to appeal to a sky wizard for the safety of their family every night before they go to bed, because if they don't, maybe their family will be hurt if you don't whisper the right spell.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's evil.
	It's an evil thing to do to a child.
	And so if you expand that idea, as I have in my own life, I feel way more like in, in touch with Oh man, I don't know.
	Every possible experience is just more magical.
	It's like religious art is so much more magical and you're like, man, somebody figured this out and did it.
	And like people got together and made this thing and it's incredible.
	And it's like, to me, it's a testament to the human condition and human achievement has nothing to do with.
	Okay.
	I'm sorry.
	Jesus.
	Do you think we could have a couch as a piece of merch?
	You know?
	A couch and a couch and a couch?
	Like the Troyshkin dolls, but they're couches?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	A hundred percent.
	Because you know what?
	Good merch and it's practical.
	And it's practical.
	Right?
	Like a nest of tables, but a nest of couches.
	Right?
	That's what I want.
	That's what I want.
	Give me any excuse to call my whittling skills.
	I won't do it.
	That's hilarious, man.
	It's just, it's a lot.
	It's a lot.
	I, and I do, I do get heated and I do get, I get my feelings hurt.
	I get offended when the claim is made that atheism is, cause to me, atheism, what a lot of people refer to as secular humanism, The whole premise is that you don't have religion establishing arbitrary in and out groups to begin with.
	That's what religion does.
	That's the impetus of religion is the me and not you.
	And you're no good unless you agree with me.
	That's what religion wants you to think and to do.
	Fundamentally.
	Yeah, it's everyone towing the same line, isn't it?
	And I do find that people that are raised atheist are so much nicer about Christianity than people that aren't!
	I like that we have that dynamic.
	I really do.
	I've not been burned in the same way.
	I've always looked at it and thought, that seems fucking silly.
	That seems ridiculous, but you know what?
	These people seem to like it.
	My issues with any religion only occur when there is harm done, which is the case of every single religion, even including Buddhism and Taoism, etc, etc.
	Any fundamentalist extreme is that.
	Yeah, and anything that gets fucking organized.
	Because it involves people, and people are shit.
	So there we go, that's the takeaway from this episode.
	Right, so, we had that clip, and Dawkins now responds.
	And he responds in what I would call a very generous manner.
	I think it's... I feel that there was a relationship between what I'm saying and love, a kind of an intuitive... You talked about what's passing between us, which is words, and it's waves of pressure, sound pressure waves, and that goes in the ear and it's interpreted in an amazingly complicated way.
	A mathematical analysis of the waveform, Fourier analysis.
	It's astonishing.
	And that's what passes between us.
	And do you feel that this happened as a result of single cellular entities evolving as a result of their relationship with their environment, the precise conditions for which were afforded to them, and ended up in this mathematically impossible miracle of our current communication?
	And beyond this you think that there is nothing to revere or marvel at?
	There's plenty to reveal and marvel at, but it's not supernatural.
	It's natural, and it's beautiful because it's natural.
	And maybe one day it will succumb to understanding.
	We understand a lot more than we used to.
	We understand what sound waves are now.
	We understand, in principle, how they're analyzed by the brain.
	That's wonderful.
	Had that been me sat across from Russell, I'd have probably reached over and bitch slapped him for the sheer arrogance of the idea that only religious and spiritual people experience any sense of wonder or awe.
	But Dawkins, I don't know if he was trying to take the high road or whatever, but he completely went the other direction with it.
	It does sound like he's got some canned responses in there too that are kind of like, but they're just not the ones that work.
	And I pointed out Miracle because Russell was trying- he still described science.
	Like, he started off his little statement, because he disproves himself constantly through it.
	That's something I've learned, is that he just contradicts himself left, right, and center.
	And you use the word miracle, describing the scientific angle.
	So, I would use the word miraculous, my definition would be different, but I think that as an awe-inspiring and incredible, seemingly miraculous environment that created life on the planet.
	Yeah, he couldn't.
	He still used the word miracle.
	And that's what I'm saying.
	Like, we're all talking about the same thing, except you want to put limitations on it, which is also what God says to not do.
	Well, well, well, there is that there is that.
	So we're going to skip ahead a brief amount here because because Dawkins just used the word succumb, Brand decides to go go back into some COVID narrative bullshit.
	And I have no interest in covering that again.
	So we're going to skip ahead through that and we're going to go to Brand once again talking down to Richard Dawkins in the name of... It's just outrageous!
	I would die of embarrassment!
	I would die!
	Yeah, and he does it all in the name of making jokes, he says.
	And I put it to you, Professor Richard Dawkins, that your problem has always been about the dogma derived from this evident and observable mystery, rather than the mystery itself, and that that mystery could just as easily be utilised to create more harmony and to create more hope.
	And I don't think it's possible to create that harmony and hope if you foreclose it all the time.
	We'll understand this in a couple of weeks, this is Codswallop.
	And giving people a wallop with a microscope every time they try to write a poem.
	Are they?
	I was just saying it's a joke, you know, that's what you're like.
	Like everyone at times goes, isn't it beautiful, man?
	I was standing on the edge of a cliff and I saw a sunset and you go, oh, that's just ridiculous.
	It's just a refraction of the light.
	That's the opposite of what I would say.
	And I'd go, look at that rainbow.
	That's the exact opposite of what I would say.
	I'd go, look at that rainbow.
	And you'd go, it's just from the vapours.
	And you'd hit me around the head with a glove.
	It's just vapour.
	You're being ridiculous.
	I would respond in a poetic way just as much as you would.
	What do you say?
	We're seeing a rainbow.
	It's you and me.
	We're observing it.
	I would say it's a beautiful thing and it's even more beautiful because we understand what put it together.
	Thanks to Newton.
	So his jokes come across as nothing short of bullying a fairly mild-mannered scientist while in Bran's home turf.
	That's exactly what I was going to say at a much higher volume, and I had to keep it together.
	I think that anyone that has to exist in the world in a female or even effeminate-seeming body and presentation Is very used to hearing, I'm only joking.
	No, you're fucking not.
	You're not joking.
	You're a bully.
	Period.
	That's the thing that like, I want to give license to anyone who can sniff that out to use my approach if you so choose.
	You're not fucking joking.
	You're a bully.
	Don't gaslight me to my fucking face.
	It's rude.
	Oh, I'm hot.
	Yeah, and he keeps going with it.
	He keeps going with it.
	And in the final moments of this interview, Bran sort of tells on himself a bit.
	I appreciate the pushback.
	And in spite of our apparent separateness, here we are, sharing in this rainbow together.
	Yes.
	And then you go, "I'm off to study" and I go, "I'm going to use it to start a system
	of government."
	Well, how are you going to use it for government?
	I don't know, Richard.
	Who's going to start a system of government?
	Me.
	I'm using that.
	You're just off back to the lab.
	Yeah, okay.
	To write a book, to take all the fun out of it.
	Maybe write a poem.
	And I'm darting off to use it.
	So, all right.
	I think we've got quite a lot out of this.
	Hopefully.
	So, Dawkins would go off and study the rainbow and apparently take all the fun out of it
	while Brand would form a system of government?
	That's his go-to thought.
	That was in the moment, off the cuff.
	That's his go-to thought.
	Not start a revolution, not form a religion, not meditate under it.
	But form a system of government.
	It really does speak volumes as to where his head is actually at with all of this shit.
	He doesn't want people to stay free like his show says.
	He wants people to join in a theocracy of his own design.
	That would be his ultimate goal if he were able to achieve it.
	I can't.
	fucking like, ah, I can't I mean, that's the leap. You you, you would have to have the amount of
	programming in your brain to hear what he wants you to hear and to reinforce the idea is extreme
	because I don't know I don't know how he's making those that that connection is too tenuous for me
	to necessarily discern in a way that makes sense. I I can't make, I cannot make, I'm just like, that's crazy, I don't know what you're talking about.
	And people getting together and making decisions about their society has to happen in some form.
	What do you think is going to happen?
	What else do you want, Russ?
	What else do you want?
	I'm floored that this interview is apparently so that these two people can go talk together on a tour.
	That's outrageous to me.
	I think that was just Russell being facetious.
	I hope it was facetious.
	I'm pretty sure he was making a joke and that that's not an actual thing that will happen, but you know what?
	If it does, I'll watch it.
	I thought I saw a banner ad and it terrified me about some tour, and I was like, anything's fucking possible.
	I don't know, these people just want to make money.
	You never know with this guy.
	You never know!
	Like, just frick!
	Ricky!
	Dick!
	You can leave!
	You don't have to do this!
	It's true, but he doesn't want to be rude.
	So, before we leave this interview, Brian's audience sent in a few questions for Dawkins.
	Jimmy Greenwood said, why not acknowledge, oh he's going to hate this, why not acknowledge that a soul or spirit exists otherwise one can miss out on so much you're going to really piss him off with this question.
	Denying religions is fine but atheism is not dissimilar to other religions, a belief system, and creates division in much the same way as churches.
	God is simply a handy three-letter word to describe soul connection.
	What's your thought?
	I think we've kind of covered that.
	Is that enough of that?
	You've annoyed him.
	Nah, I'm not doing it.
	I'll take that as a table flip.
	I'll take that as a table flip.
	That's a British table flip.
	That's British for table flip.
	No, I won't answer the question.
	We've already covered that.
	So Bran's audience believes that atheism is a religion, much like Russell does.
	It seems not entirely surprising.
	And we have one final question from the audience.
	And we can't dive into that.
	We can't.
	Google the argument if you want to argue.
	Yeah, we've covered it a little bit.
	We have one final question from the audience and one final clip from this interview and Russell sort of tells on himself again.
	Did you ever believe in God?
	And if so, what put you off?
	That's from Christine Hart, when you were little.
	I certainly did.
	As St Paul said, yes, when I was a child, I speak as a child, I thought of it as a child, I understood as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
	If it's St Paul saying that, and I think that you're strawmanning Christianity there.
	But we'll talk about this off air when we do our caravan show.
	So he knows what a straw man argument is then, which means he knows when he's doing it, which is all of the fucking time.
	Yeah.
	So there we go.
	He's told on himself there.
	And yeah, I'm pretty sure that show was a joke, but you know what?
	I will keep an eye.
	You never fucking know with these people.
	I mean, honestly, I feel like that was like...
	Dawkins like that, drag her work.
	That was a great answer.
	And that's a great answer to me as an atheist who's very familiar.
	I don't like it, but I'm very familiar with scripture.
	So using a scripture as an answer, I think is a cute little, it's a cute little flex, but obviously too cute.
	Because Russell has to corner the market on cute on his show or else he's going to get pissed.
	Absolutely.
	That's what a bully does.
	So, that was the end of that interview, but we're not done.
	After what was a pretty heavy, lengthy, and verbose interview, I thought we could do with a little palate cleanser, which is just as well, because I got curious about something.
	If Brand is a Christian evangelist, what the hell is going on with one of his other shows?
	Hello and welcome to Stay Awake.
	It's a weekly guided meditation with me and a guest from our community.
	Hey, that's right.
	We're going to take a little look at the guided meditation sessions that Brand offers to his locals channel.
	So these are put out in podcast form, though are largely not available on YouTube.
	Going into this, I was not entirely sure what to expect.
	But it seems each week he has one of the members from his local's channel on to direct a guided meditation towards them, which everyone else then follows along with.
	In principle, this is completely fine, but it feels like Brand has something of an abusive relationship with his audience.
	Oh no!
	Yeah, just watch this clip!
	Today I'm going to be meditating with Caleb Kendall from Auckland, New Zealand, who claims to be 26 years old and a cat owner.
	He says he'd like to cope with the stresses and pressures of being in New Zealand, which as far as I can tell are no stresses and pressures at all, because no one in New Zealand is taking life seriously.
	Let's face it, they're too relaxed.
	They don't care about anything.
	Caleb, how's it going, mate?
	Very well, thank you, Russ.
	So you want to relax into being able to manage your own life.
	What's the problem though?
	I don't even understand what the problem is.
	There isn't a problem.
	There's nothing wrong with you.
	So that's the opening.
	What's the problem?
	Why are you here?
	There's nothing wrong with you.
	This may seem couched in comedy at first glance, but much like it just did with Dawkins, watch where this goes as the session continues.
	Because it's not good.
	It is not good.
	You enjoying the vibes of this meditative space so far?
	No, of course not.
	Could you meditate to this man's voice?
	Well, that's not anybody's fault.
	My brain doesn't work, but... I don't... Do you know, I actually, there was a point, there was a point when I was listening to this, when he was kind of going through kind of the main chunk of the meditation side.
	I was like, you know, I'm going to try closing my eyes.
	I'm going to, I'm going to see, I'm going to see what I can achieve from this and couldn't do it.
	Couldn't, couldn't fucking do it.
	His voice.
	I just can't.
	I just can't.
	And it doesn't help that he, he, um, As a guider of this meditation, he just keeps getting distracted and going off on tangents here and there.
	Isn't that the point?
	That's against the point you're supposed to be at.
	He's supposed to stay completely fucking focused, but he can't help himself.
	And the thing is, meditation is fantastic, and it really does do a lot of good for a lot of people, and I was being a bit facetious, like, I think it's great if that's what works for you.
	It's a very healthy thing to do.
	Yeah, a lot of like, the meditation voice is calling you through the door.
	That makes my skin crawl a fair amount of time.
	We get a little bit of that.
	Yeah, like my personal experience, a little weird.
	Things that calm me down, maybe don't calm other people down.
	I am going to plug Eddie Pepitone every single time.
	He's the best meditation guidance around.
	I encourage you to listen if you so choose.
	Different people relax in different ways.
	Some people will just throw on some black metal and that'll make them feel better.
	That's a meditative state for them.
	Yeah, well and when you get tattooed a lot, and those of you that watch have seen that I'm covered in a lot of pictures, and it hurts and it's boring to get tattooed.
	So I think that you don't always get to choose what calms you down, and it's often surprising, and music choice that calms me down and helps me focus, I would say black metal adjacent, something similar to that, or like You know, I'm going to like something that's different than what others would.
	So I think that even just like, you know, what gets you in the zone and gets you in a place is it takes all kinds.
	And I think that's fantastic.
	I think that's actually really cool.
	But I don't think that like a weird bully Prodding you the whole time is super positive.
	Yeah, speaking of which, let's have a look at a little- I didn't know this was what it was going to be!
	I'm so surprised!
	Let's have a little look at some more prodding.
	I had a little chat with James before and it was more based on yeah just going from a younger person that has like no responsibilities you know moving into an older person and now being a young adult where we've got all these different like you know things that we have to pay for rent and then work and all these things and it's nice to just be a child again every every now and then.
	Alright, so you want to deal with maturation, but also retaining your spirit of joy.
	Alright, sit comfortably mate.
	Sit comfortably, mate, this is about to get weird.
	You can tell even just listening to him that Brand is annoyed that he's even there.
	It's possibly clearer from the video, watching his facial expressions during that clip, cause he's there just like, gesticulating.
	But damn, he just doesn't wanna fucking be there.
	Yeah, this is tough.
	This is tough because...
	Um, you know, I make no bones about the fact that I love a drag queen.
	I love a drag race.
	It's the best show on TV.
	Not up for debate.
	That's my, if anything, that's the only real religious thought that I have.
	It's completely unfounded reality is that drag race is the best show on TV.
	I'll die on that hill.
	But!
	My favorite drag queens, like say if this is Bianca Del Rio and I got to go into her little YouTube show and she roasted me, that'd be a hoot.
	It'd be a hoot and a half.
	Reading is great.
	Like reading and shade, all of that, that whole tradition is awesome and fun, but it really, I hate to rely on the, like a flimsy argument of like, well, I'll know it when I see it.
	You know, sometimes it's bullying and sometimes it's cute, and I can't define either of those stances in clear terms.
	It's tough.
	I would say it does really depend on the intention of the person who's speaking, but when I watch this, I see bullying.
	When I heard it, because I listened to the audio version first, when I heard it without even seeing his face, I was like, this is a bit fucked up.
	This is the way you're treating your own fans, your own people who pay you money every month for your bullshit.
	Well, and Bianca would be like, I'm roasting you.
	Not like, we're doing a guided meditation, but I actually just roast you the whole time.
	I think that the two-facedness is maybe the issue.
	That's a different thing.
	What Brand is purporting to do here is to help his audience.
	That's what he's supposed to be doing.
	He's supposed to be guiding a meditation to aid this person in the things that they are struggling with in their life.
	Especially being an adult.
	I think that Russell Brand is the last person I would ask for help and guidance on how to be a grown-up.
	There is that.
	And with that in mind, in this next clip, Russell gives us some indication that he is actually deeply depressed.
	Now, Rambass, he wants us to sit with our head, neck and chest roughly in alignment.
	That means sometimes pulling the chin in a little bit.
	Now, when we close the eyes, Natural to feel a little peace and sometimes of course
	You start to feel a different type of awareness.
	The visual realm is so stimulating and defining.
	When we close the eyes, I'm more aware of sound.
	I'm aware of buzzing noises I wasn't aware of before.
	And I can feel my tiredness and just behind the tiredness, I can feel sort of a sadness.
	That's why it's not good for me to get tired.
	But this isn't a meditation about me and my life.
	It deals with the challenges of being a father of children and running a complex business.
	This is a meditation to help Caleb I guess it is to help Caleb, so stop talking about yourself and see a therapist, man.
	There's a similar comment from him that will be coming up in our next show as well, but I have a working theory that in spite of his presentation and the positivity he attempts to display, Russell is actually in some pretty serious trouble regarding stress and depression, and were he listening, I would urge him to seek help either from psychology or medication, possibly both in tandem.
	Um, but there's definitely something going on there.
	So we have a new thesis of, like, shit dudes'll do to not avoid going to therapy.
	This is one of the things.
	Maybe!
	Maybe!
	Become a propagandist!
	Yeah, kingdoms of rose and pollen, because dudes don't want to talk about their fucking feelings.
	Yeah, there's that, and there's also, you know, psychology is a science, and I don't feel like he would trust it, and he definitely doesn't trust pharmaceuticals, so I don't think he would take any medication either.
	So I genuinely don't know, don't know what kind of, what help would be available to someone with those views, whether he's just penned himself in, you know, and... That's really dismal.
	It's such a, like, it's such a, like, and we get confronted with this over and over.
	You know, by all kinds of different people, not just Russell Brand.
	No, no, no.
	And his audience.
	His audience get dragged into the same views.
	It's an example of why it's so fucking dangerous.
	Because that's how you get fucking school shooters and whatever else.
	These people who feel like there's no other option, so I'm just going to do something fucking extreme.
	When it sounds like this kid just needs a spreadsheet!
	Yeah.
	Paying your bills gets complicated.
	So you just need like a spreadsheet.
	You need a budget, buddy.
	And if you want to be calm and feel good, meditating great, but yeah, just, you know.
	Maybe a time management app, you know, like there's stuff out there that can help you.
	It's pretty simple.
	So coming up, we have our first mention of God while in a meditative setting.
	Oh, and some heavy breathing.
	see, embrace, and gently and unselfconsciously worship the meetings with God we have each day in the eyes of
	others.
	Who watches this?
	Who is this for?
	That's the thing, right?
	That's it!
	So it's only available to his locals channel.
	But yeah, it's a little bit much.
	It doesn't make for great audio content, it's gotta be said.
	I was sat there listening to it, I'm like, aw, I feel like I've got a breather on the phone, you know?
	I've got someone who's just...
	Yeah, well frantically, frantically masturbating.
	I would have checked my app.
	I would have been like, oh my app crashed.
	Like straight up.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Somebody definitely did.
	Whoever did gets a prize.
	That's wonderful.
	That's so funny.
	Yeah, if you stopped your app to check what was wrong when you just heard that, then send us an email.
	It's theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	We'll send you something, I don't know what.
	We'll figure it out.
	I don't know how many of our listeners will be familiar with meditation, but for most people when you kind of get into it, you enter like a trance-like state, which is pretty susceptible to ideas, especially if someone is leading the meditation and guiding you down that path.
	So bringing religiosity into it is irresponsible and could be argued as a form of brainwashing his followers, at least a little bit at a time.
	You know, it's A little bit fucking dangerous, especially as, and I listened to a few of these, occasionally he will make a vague reference to the evils in the world and the powers that be, the big conspiracy narratives that he likes to draw.
	He will occasionally reference those, even in that moment.
	It's like, man, this is fucking cult shit going on here.
	I've not listened to enough to find any kind of specific, you know, him in the middle of a meditation being like, and the WHO is terrible.
	I've not found any of that yet, but I dare say it's probably out there.
	LW: It's so...
	Okay, I'm not an expert at literally anything that I'm thinking, feeling, or wanting to
	talk about, which is making me feel trepidatious.
	But I do know that there are speech patterns that you can practice that are very effective
	in leading another individual's thinking, especially if they're open to it and they're
	very commonly understood.
	And he gets a lot of practice doing this for other people.
	And they're like their, their voice or his voice is trained in all of them in a way, if he's leading all of them in these meditations over and over that he's an authority and he knows what he's talking about and that he's this like spiritual guide as well.
	It just, it, it, it programs so much trust.
	Into the people he's talking to.
	Yep.
	Even at like a subconscious level, like not even consciously.
	And that's something that is absolutely cult shit.
	Straight up cult shit.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	And it's extremely dangerous and it's all in the name of profit.
	So between... With an eye and a knee.
	Yep.
	Well, well, well, I think he'd like it to be both.
	Um, so between the heavy breathing, uh, Bran's brain gets a little bit stuck.
	All of us sharing this moment.
	This moment.
	This moment.
	Number nine?
	Number nine?
	And then, some more heavy breathing.
	Oh, those are weird noises.
	Again, fantastic audio content.
	Thank you, Russell.
	Oh, fuckin' hell.
	Who watches this?
	I'm so bored!
	I know, I know!
	People join in!
	People join in!
	Annoyingly, through the locals thing, because I'm not a paid member, I can't join in, which means I also can't see how many people are watching along at the same time.
	But I would love to know.
	It ain't making him millions of dollars, though, I'll tell you that.
	There's no fucking way.
	I don't believe it.
	Not this bit, that's for sure.
	This is not the bit that makes the money.
	Which is probably why he resents doing it, I think.
	I've gotta put time in with these fuckheads.
	He dug his grave and now he's gotta lie in it?
	And pretend to like these idiots?
	Sorry, buddy.
	You want to be a guru for these fucking people?
	You've got to spend time with them.
	I'm afraid that's the rule.
	Okay.
	What is outrageous to me is, we have just started this venture, right?
	I am brand spankin' new to podcasting, and every single person listening, I'm worried about overestimating your intelligence and not explaining enough.
	I'm worried about you being too smart.
	I'm intimidated by what other people... In a great way, I think it's important You, listener, right now.
	Yeah, you.
	I think that you're smart, and I'm afraid that I don't explain enough because I'm assuming you know too much.
	I trust you, and that's why we're doing this.
	I don't want to insult your intelligence, but I do want to explain myself, or I want us to explain ourselves and cover our bases.
	The opposite is clearly happening in this different kind of community.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It's pretty unpleasant to watch play out, to be honest.
	It's weird!
	It's weird!
	This may surprise you, this may not, but next up, it's time to pray.
	God, I pray to you, God, not my limited perception of you, God, the limit of my little Russell Brand consciousness, but I pray to you, God, as you know yourself to be and you that abide in, beyond, beneath and around all things, I speak to you now, God, through the portal and connection of my consciousness, and I pray That I become of maximum use to you, of maximum cheerfulness, of maximum joy in this world, that I quickly spot when I've lost my connection to you and have become once again consumed and subsumed in the illusion of self, my own preferences and aversions becoming my default religion, which I believe all human beings do to a degree.
	God, I ask that this continue community continues to grow and that we are granted the ability to communicate with each other and to be of service to the highest values that we that we mutually connect with your presence.
	Simple things, kindness, service, open-heartedness, joy, fun.
	Amen.
	Immensely fucked up to insert a Christian prayer into a meditation session.
	And a little more fucked up that one of the things he prays for is for his audience to grow.
	I mean, I get the thing is I get it.
	I get it.
	I get it.
	I don't like it.
	But I pray that this community grows.
	I pray that I make millions of pounds.
	That's basically what he's saying.
	Oh man, that's a lot.
	It sucks because again, and we've talked about this, essentially crowdfunding and crowdsourcing is the model that you and I are using as much as Russell is.
	And it's really unfortunate that, because I think that people should get paid for the work that they do.
	I wish there was a better system.
	If I did not need money to live, The shit I would do for free would be epic.
	I'd be busier than I've ever been because it wouldn't be as stressful and I could like I would make art all the time and we would be making this podcast all the time.
	And yeah, that's just not the case.
	But that's not where he's coming from.
	There's an amount that I need, and I promise you I'm cheaper than Russell any day of the week.
	Our hourly rates are considerably less, let's put it that way.
	ALICE Yeah, it's just... I wasn't expecting to hear a Christian prayer in a meditation.
	Because again, people are more fucking susceptible to everything, and again, it's the kind of thing you hear Alex Jones do, the kind of thing you hear Steve Crowder do.
	It's fucked up when you hear it.
	At all.
	Yeah.
	I wasn't expecting this from him, but there we go.
	I think we've pretty well demonstrated in this episode that he is on the exact same fucking tip as those people.
	Anyway, let's get back to a little bit more bullying of Caleb, shall we?
	Caleb, how was that little meditation, mate?
	That was very good.
	I'm going to sleep like a baby, Ross.
	It's 11 something here, so that was fantastic.
	Thank you so much.
	When we come to New Zealand or even Australia, come and see us.
	Come to, like, I'm going to be in Australia doing something.
	I would absolutely love that.
	I have family in Australia, so I could make a double journey out of it.
	It's not a double journey.
	You're not doing the journey twice.
	Swim through meditation.
	I'm not fully back yet.
	Give me a chance.
	It's not a double journey.
	It's one journey.
	You don't go to Australia, come back.
	That's worse.
	That's a terrible idea.
	You know, like get on a plane in Auckland or whatever, fly to Sydney, see me, then go home again and come back and see your cousin in Darwin or whatever depraved, foul thing you do.
	You got me there.
	You're tricky, alright?
	You can't slip around Russ.
	You cannot do it!
	It can't be done.
	Thanks those of you that joined us in the community.
	ALICE Yeah, I mean, he's just a shithead.
	Again, it's under the guise of comedy, much the same as he did with Dawkins, but it's not fucking good-natured at all.
	He's giving that presentation, but he means what he's saying.
	He means what he's saying.
	LAURA He's telling Caleb, come buy tickets.
	Come fly to another country and buy tickets to come see us because I guarantee you he ain't putting you on the list.
	No, no, that's it.
	That's it.
	And I feel like the badge.
	I feel like that was something I heard him say something similar to one of the other one of the other people in a different meditation.
	So I feel like that's just something he says, but I don't think he wanted to hear.
	I think he was like, yeah, come come and see us.
	I suppose that was very, very.
	That was weak.
	A little bit forced.
	Caleb, he is not that into you.
	Honey, he doesn't like you.
	Yeah, I know, I know, but... You can leave!
	Yeah, no, Caleb is viewing it, I think, looking at him in the most generous way possible, you know.
	He clearly loves Russell, you know, and wants approval.
	He's definitely not getting it.
	That's the thing is, if it were me...
	I can just like, I was like, yeah, like, Oh, let's let's get roasty.
	Like, Oh, getting roasted.
	That's funny.
	But don't like, make it also a meditation.
	That's very weird.
	Also, I hear the whole thing is fucked.
	I hear puppy noises.
	Yeah, sorry, that's Teddy.
	Right, hang on, I've got to let him out.
	It sounds very cute.
	Yeah, no, he's excited.
	He's holding his bone.
	He's running about the place.
	I just need to let him out of the room because my daughter has returned and he's very excited to see her.
	So I'll just be two seconds here.
	Right.
	Right.
	I think we're okay too.
	This poor child.
	I know, I know.
	I feel so bad.
	Also, in this next clip, we get a fairly troubling insight into what Bran's locals chat is saying.
	I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say it's supposed to be a joke, but I can't for the life of me figure out what the joke is supposed to be.
	Oh look, a lot of people are saying, Caleb should be put in a maximum security facility for his own safety.
	He should be arrested without trial.
	Taken to Geneva where he should be tried as a war criminal.
	So it says that in the chat.
	I'm actually surprised that someone's gone to trouble saying that.
	What do you think about that?
	Everyone's got their own opinion.
	Everyone's got their own opinion.
	People can try you as a war criminal if they like.
	You will be found innocent unless you've committed war crimes, Caleb.
	In which case, you have nothing to worry about.
	I would hope so.
	I would hope so.
	Justice will prevail, Caleb!
	What the fuck was that?
	What was that?
	Bear in mind that this is presented entirely without context, even in the episode itself.
	I didn't just pluck this out.
	That's pretty much how it appeared.
	I've got no fucking clue what that was about.
	It's just bizarre and slightly worrying.
	Like, what the fuck?
	That was so out of left field.
	And also just mean, but like, what?
	Okay.
	Caleb, do anything else.
	any other person. Yeah, just, yeah. Don't. So we. People don't mean to you.
	I mean, whatever.
	Some people are into that.
	And those types are more expensive.
	Yeah, like he was actually getting a pretty good deal.
	You know, just get someone else to stand on his testicles while it happens, and there we go.
	You get pretty much the same experience.
	He'll get there.
	He'll get there.
	Yeah, he's still a little young.
	We've come to the end of the meditation episode, pretty much, so let's make another dig at Caleb, who is apparently officially enlightened now.
	Alright, well, thanks Caleb for joining us for that meditation.
	It's lovely to meditate with you.
	I hope we get to meet in real life.
	And wherever you're watching or listening, sign up to my Locals community for your chance to join me for a meditation like Caleb just did, who I think is now officially enlightened.
	If you're watching this on Locals, let me know if you'd like to have a little meditation like Caleb, otherwise I'll just do another one with him.
	There's a lot of work to be done, clearly.
	Fucking hell.
	Like it's real!
	It's just not good, he can't help himself.
	He can't help himself.
	He really doesn't like- Again, sign up and I'll roast you.
	That I'm cool with.
	That's fine, that's fine.
	People love that kind of shit.
	But this is not that.
	This is not what Caleb signed up for here, poor little fucker.
	So do you remember that I mentioned that Brand was holding a festival with his wife next month?
	He's got his community festival in Hay-On-Wye.
	I'm so bummed, yes.
	Again, would love to forget, can't.
	There's a little bit more on it in this next clip.
	And one final parting shot at Caleb.
	And join us at Community this year between the 14th and 17th of July.
	We do ice baths, breath work, yoga, live music.
	Wim Hof's going to be there.
	Biyet Simkin, Satish Kumar, Vandana Shiva.
	It's going to be fantastic.
	And get your tickets at RussellBrand.com.
	If you want to come, you can come.
	All right.
	Thanks very much.
	See you soon.
	If you're watching this on Instagram or YouTube or anyone else, come on Rumble.
	Bye-bye, Caleb.
	See you later.
	Bye.
	You can buy it.
	That's right.
	That's what people do.
	Well done.
	It's not difficult, is it?
	These people.
	Stay awake and stay free.
	Till next time.
	Bye bye.
	These people.
	These people.
	He paid you money.
	Yeah, right?
	You could at least be nice to him.
	And that's it!
	Help me meditate because I can't manage my money!
	I wonder why!
	I have trouble with adulthood!
	I know what expense you can knock off of your little spreadsheet, Caleb!
	Yeah, I have trouble with adulthood because I give you money and I keep watching your shit.
	I wonder to what degree Russell genuinely dislikes his own audience.
	I really hope we get to explore that a bit more going forward.
	I imagine it will come up.
	The festival is something I plan on getting into in another episode, and I'm in two minds as to whether to try and attend and see whether it gets a bit fucked up or not.
	But safe to say it's a pretty significant bit of income for Brandon, helps solidify the cult of personality that he's forming around himself.
	Well, and if we have enough Patreon support, you just have to.
	Well, yeah, there is that.
	100%.
	If there's enough to fund that... I mean, I'm safely an ocean away, so I can say whatever I want, but it doesn't really matter!
	Yeah, this is true.
	I have to actually fucking go and stay in a tent!
	And be around these people.
	Yeah.
	But I would, I absolutely would.
	It might be funny!
	I think it would probably be funny.
	I imagine it would be possibly a little bit more fucked up.
	We see what he says to a wider audience, to a wider world.
	Imagine what he's saying when nobody's recording it.
	Oh, I imagine it's wacky.
	And I think that seeing, so to use a podcast as an example, like QAnon Anonymous, I think that they're, I think it's incredible the documentation they've been able to do of the QAnon movement in America.
	Cause like they were like the first, like them and like Will Summer, like the first ones on it and actually attending events.
	And it does give you a totally different perspective.
	Then just I mean and they do that skeptics with a K they do the same thing you know they go they attend these events because witnessing it witnessing these kind of closed door Quote unquote, you know, like meeting places that are like supposed to kind of be behind closed doors.
	Yeah, things get weirder and you get more of a sense of who's being affected because that's the reason we're doing this is is there is a negative impact coming from this content and we need to shed light on it and let people know what's going on and where their money is going and where their attention is going.
	It's tricky.
	ALICE Because it's incredibly fucked up.
	So that was the last clip that we had.
	And finally, what I wanted to get into- yeah, exhale, indeed.
	LAUREN What's the opposite of meditating?
	[laughter
	out of each other?
	I don't know.
	What I wanted to get into finally was how and when Brand's turn to Christian extremism happened.
	Now, I already mentioned that I saw Brand back when he was a Buddhist, when he was talking to the Dalai Lama.
	That was in 2012.
	In 2016, Russell attended the School of Oriental and African Studies, or SOAS, in London.
	It's a reputable school, right?
	I'm not entirely clear on what he studied or for how long, but according to Premier Christian News, Brand wanted to learn more about Christianity and would also be studying Islam and Baha'ism.
	It seems clear to me that the conclusion of Brand's studies was that Christianity was the way forward.
	The next article is from 2018 in the Christian Post, so two years later, and the headline reads, Russell Brand declares he's changed his ways, never been closer to Jesus.
	And a quote from Russell himself, my personal feeling is the teachings of Christ are more relevant now than they've ever been.
	I think we've been tricked into not believing in God.
	There's a duty to reclaim the true meaning of religion.
	Oh, so that's when that happened.
	And none of us fucking noticed or knew about it other than the Christian Post and Premier Christian News, apparently.
	I must have missed those issues.
	That's shocking.
	It's a regular subscription, you know, but clearly years and years.
	I got stuck in the back.
	I just missed that one.
	Oh, yeah.
	I wonder if it's I wonder.
	And conspirituality does a really great job of outlining asshole Jesus, which is kind of like Marianne Williamson's Course in Miracles sort of theology.
	And it's very scary and very bad.
	The notion of Jesus that she actually believes in is an asshole.
	Is a massive asshole.
	He's a real dick and I wouldn't want to put him in charge of a parking spot, let alone everybody's eternal damnation or whatever.
	And I wonder if it's a similar thread.
	That we're going to pull it and find to Marianne Williams, just because she's like a rich white.
	And so whatever appeals to both A Course in Miracles, like her interpretation of that, or a prosperity gospel influence, I'm interested because I didn't expect the Christianity angle at all, at all.
	No, no, it came to me out of left field, that's for fucking sure.
	I thought that we were going to get into it with Dawkins and that it would just be, I don't know, some kind of, you know, general, more spiritual New Age bollocks.
	I did not expect hardline Christian fundamentalism, but that's what he's selling, and that's what's coming through.
	It's really.
	Yeah.
	But also it's lucrative.
	I get it.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Anyone doing the faith plus one turn?
	I don't agree with it, but I understand it.
	You want to make some money?
	I get the grift.
	I get the grift.
	And like, again, it's something that, you know, when packaged with his pro-Russia anti-vax, you know, the general fucking right wing narratives that he spouts, It does make perfect sense, but I think because Russell Brand is Russell Brand, you don't expect it.
	You don't expect him to come from a theological standpoint, shall we say.
	Because I did not think this was a specifically fundamentalist Christian bent that he was coming from, I was less worried about the potential exploitation and obfuscation and the foundation that I guess that he has that is to drug rehab.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	His drug rehab foundation.
	Because in America we're still very okay with sending folks to Alcoholics Anonymous or some other religious or sentencing people through the court system to a religious Basically carceral drug rehabilitation program and that is wild and awful.
	The 12-step program has religious foundations to it and religious steps.
	And that is something that I know that Brand, I can't remember if he's been through it or not, I don't know if that was part of his recovery, but he definitely advocates for it.
	And I think it's something that comes through because he has a charity for for sobriety.
	Right, right.
	It's that charity is something I will be looking into because, you know, like shitheads with money who have charities tend to just use it kind of to embezzle.
	So, yeah, we'll see if there's anything if there's anything obvious that's there.
	Yeah, he's actually like inflicting harm.
	But especially if you go into a religious program.
	That, or just stealing money from people, which is definitely possible.
	I'll have a look.
	We'll get there.
	The financial records are public, so I'll have a quick glance at some point.
	But yeah, that brings us to the close of this episode.
	Fuck, what a journey.
	[laughter]
	ALICE: Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It was- [laughter]
	ALICE: As I went through this I realised, like, oh fuck, this is actually quite an important
	episode to cover.
	[laughter]
	ALICE: This is...
	I...
	I thought it was just gonna be some fairly dry bullshit, you know, that we wouldn't even get into, and then I actually start digging in and it's like, oh no!
	This is a turning point, I think, already in our coverage of Russell Brand.
	I love that we're just going to keep turning over rocks and finding new turds.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	New, new profit.
	Fresh piles.
	Yeah, that's crazy.
	That's a lot.
	That's I really well.
	And I'm just I'm also super bummed about like Dawkins.
	Like you're going to like constantly still saying out of pocket shit, but not to Russell Brand.
	No, right?
	Like that's like, come on.
	Come on.
	Yeah.
	I genuinely feel that.
	I mean, I do think that politeness is overrated.
	And you know, people can say whatever they want about that.
	I genuinely believe that a lot of A lot of bullshit skates by because of politeness and the appeal to being cordial.
	Yeah.
	And I think that if you hear somebody saying things that are outrageous and that have a body count, and if you can speak up and if you are in a safe place to do it, please do.
	And sometimes it takes practice.
	Standing up for yourself and standing up for others.
	It's not just for the person you're talking to.
	No.
	for everyone around you.
	And it's for everyone that person will talk to from that day forward.
	Just try and make an effort and try a little bit of resistance
	because I guarantee you're not gonna change their mind that day.
	You're just not. - No.
	But there's plenty of like, there's plenty of, you know,
	like beliefs that I held, I'm almost 40.
	Like, I thought tons of problematic shit!
	Like, I've had plenty of time on this earth to fuck up!
	And then you learn!
	Haven't we all, yep.
	Yeah!
	And you get better!
	And, you know, some might say, Poe buddy's nerfect, hey!
	You know, like, we're all a work in progress, so give somebody the chance!
	Even if it's ten years down the road, or twenty, or whatever, give somebody the chance to maybe change their mind, or just make them think twice next time whenever they say some out-of-pocket shit.
	Yeah, that's true.
	Because it can be really hurtful.
	That's true, that's true.
	To someone who would never know.
	That's very, very true.
	If someone's saying something crazy, or that's bullshit, fucking pull them up on it.
	Don't be afraid of being like, eh, what the fuck are you saying?
	And I wish I could be in the room to lay into somebody for, I really do.
	That's how I feel about, in my heart, is I wish that you could just play a flute and I would show up and scream.
	Summon you, yeah, yeah.
	That's it.
	That's it.
	I'm like, "Oh, this person's full of shit. I'm gonna summon Lauren."
	"And another thing, motherfucker!"
	I didn't choose. That's the thing. I didn't choose to be a pit bull with lipstick on,
	but you get confronted with enough ugly shit in your life and you gotta do something about it.
	It's exhausting now. It didn't used to be. We're all just here doing our best,
	and I just encourage anybody that...
	Feels like they need to speak up to do your best, assess if you're safe, because you don't need to get hurt.
	It's not fair to you.
	But I'm here.
	Just know that I am like a frothing rabid dog in your corner.
	And that makes some people feel good.
	And I actually like the people that are listening right now.
	Absolutely.
	We've got your back.
	They all seem fucking great so far, it's got to be said.
	Right?
	Right!
	I think that brings us to a close.
	If people want to find us on social media, it's mostly just at the On Brand Pod, isn't it?
	For wherever, for Instagram?
	Yeah, the On Brand Pod!
	And I'm going to start posting some stuff You know, if there's visuals, I know not everybody can watch as well as listen.
	So I'm, I'm going to try to put the relevant visuals, um, on Instagram for sure.
	Instagram is my main social, but I'm going to try to branch out a little bit or we'll, we'll try to branch out a little bit further.
	And there's an event if you want to, um, we have, I have pluggables too.
	Yeah, yeah, go, go, go, go.
	Plug away.
	Plug away.
	So we are going to be outside of St.
	Louis, and me and my partner Mike, he's currently carving an eyeball the size of a door so that it can be printed with a steamroller.
	Fantastic.
	It's not stressful at all.
	It doesn't hurt his back at all.
	Yeah, so it's going to be like printed with a steamroller out outside of the Foundry Art Center in St.
	Charles, which is outside of St.
	Louis.
	So any of our homies back home, come see us on Saturday, June 24th from 11 to 5.
	Again, that's Block Party at Foundry Art Center.
	And we're going to be demoing stuff and bringing things.
	And actually, I showed off some Carved pieces that I've been making, because I just started carving.
	So let's see, we've got the temple-y bird guy and I showed one of these last week, but I'm a dummy and they weren't dry in time.
	So I thought I inked him up plenty of time and I did not.
	So they weren't actually available for the Kansas City thing.
	But yeah, and I got these little weird folk art flowers and let's see where it goes.
	Very cool.
	Got a few and some visual content for for the video viewers.
	But yeah, they're just old tattoo designs that I, you know, used to use back in the day and just trying to make something cool out of them.
	And Mike's going to have stuff.
	I'm going to have stuff.
	And we're just hanging out, too.
	It'll be fun.
	Cool!
	Very cool, very cool.
	And if people want to follow us individually on Instagram, I am at Al Worth Official.
	I'm on Instagram, very rarely on Twitter, but I have noticed a few new followers, so thank you people on there.
	I may update it sometime next year, who knows.
	And if you want to follow Lauren, it's at made.buy.lauren.b.
	And if you want to send us an email for any reason whatsoever, it's theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	And yeah, just drop us a line, say hi.
	I know a couple of people have reached out already, and I think I've replied to everyone, I think.
	And thank you for that.
	Always cool to have a conversation with our listeners.
	And of course, if you want to... Because also DMs get weird, I know on Instagram.
	DMs can get a little weird.
	Instagram doesn't like to show us stuff all the time.
	Yeah, that's true, that is true.
	And Facebook, that kind of thing.
	Meta likes to hide messages.
	Yeah, you might get hidden among the message requests somewhere.
	And if anyone would like to donate to our Patreon we would be endlessly grateful and that's patreon.com on brand and you know hopefully that'll support us doing much much more of this kind of stuff right here and that would that would be great.
	But yeah, I think that's it.
	Thank you so much again.
	Yeah.
	Hi, person listening, pat yourself on the back.
	That's from me.
	Yeah.
	I appreciate you.
	And from me.
	It's kind of a big deal.
	I'm really happy.
	I'm so happy so far.
	I don't know if I'm going to continue to be so.
	Fantastic.
	Good shit.
	Can't wait to see where this goes and what we uncover about this weird fuckhead.
	But, you know, we'll see.
	Right.
	Until next week.
	Should be next week.
	Take care and thank you and goodbye.
	Stay safe.
	See you soon.
	Bye.
	Bye bye.
	Bye.

▲