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June 22, 2023 - On Brand

03:35:01

OB #5 - The WHO

In this episode Al and Lauren address some commentary from their last episode about religion, before getting into Brand's steadfast hatred of the World Health Organisation, who he believes are undemocratic and controlled by corporations (spoiler: they're not). Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand The episode of Stay Free With Russell Brand debunked in this show is from Jun 8th 2023, entitled 'The WHO's Global POWER GRAB Is Happening!'

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	This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand.
	I'm Al Worth, and each week I go through an episode of Brand's show with my co-host Lauren B. And I'm Lauren B, and I'm unaware of the grenade I'm about to land on for you, dear listener, so you don't have to deal with the blowback.
	Lauren has no idea what's coming, which is great fun for me.
	So Lauren, what's your bright spot this week?
	Well, oh!
	Specifically because of this podcast, we have new internet in my home.
	Oh yes.
	Thank you, Al.
	Thank you, listener.
	I had no idea how royally hosed we were getting on the service we were paying for because I found the exact same amount of money to spend and get more than 10 times the bandwidth.
	Would it be bandwidth?
	Yeah, about speed, yeah.
	Yeah, add a zero, and then add about a 250.
	So I went from, they were charging us for 75 MBP, whatever.
	Megabytes per second.
	Megabytes, yeah.
	And now we're gonna get a gig for the same amount of money in a different company, so.
	That's astonishing.
	It's incredible!
	That's astonishing!
	Yeah, Melissa fucking blows!
	It's nuts!
	Well, when we were talking about it, I was like, fuck me, that's expensive for what you get.
	That's insane.
	How is that possible?
	And it turns out you've been living in the dark ages without realizing it, basically.
	It was crazy.
	Well, like we've noticed that, you know, we've noticed things here and there.
	But like, you know, when you don't have to record over a you know, a transatlantic podcast, it's not super important.
	Um, and you just kind of deal with your internet being shitty.
	Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also, we're also used to, um, a total monopoly and every like
	major metropolitan area. So there are, there are just now becoming new options. And the company
	that's been sending us flyers, I've been meaning to look into for over like a year at this
	point, cause we got to turn the wifi off on our phones. If you want to watch Hulu and now
	we don't have to anymore.
	It's revolutionary.
	Honestly, I'm excited for our podcast, because obviously you don't have as much lag, and there's not as much digital noise in the audio, etc.
	But what I'm excited about is yours and Mike's life is just going to completely change.
	I think I need a new router!
	I think I need to install I asked, I was like, "Should I replace the router?"
	And he looked at me like I was beating a dog.
	Like he was really disappointed with me for what I was putting that machine through
	when I should have put it down a long time ago.
	It was, I was like, "I am embarrassed.
	You're right to judge me. That's fine. I get it."
	See, over, over.
	Over here, when you change internet companies, they send you the router.
	They send you a new one, so I've got mine next to me here that's been sent from my internet provider.
	They'll charge you for the thing, but it'll be more expensive, and you will rent it from them, and if you lose any of the parts...
	Guys, the culture shock has been so wild.
	They send it to you and then you have to send it back at the end of your contract or if you change or whatever.
	They send you an envelope and you send it back to them.
	That's the way that works.
	That is different.
	Now I do have the modem they provide for free.
	Which is very cool.
	Right.
	Okay.
	I'm still paying more than you per month, which is funny.
	But like, yeah, like if I want Wi-Fi, they will sell me one.
	At a premium, or they will rent me one at a premium.
	It depends on the company.
	It's also, this used to be a lot worse.
	This is better.
	This is an improvement on the years of internet service we've had.
	And right, so yeah, that is, so yeah, I don't have a new router yet, but I do feel like when I get a new router, I will have basically purchased a time machine for myself.
	It's wonderful.
	You've gone forward by a decade.
	Exactly!
	That's my Jetsons fantasy.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So that's kind of like a communal bright spot.
	Absolutely.
	Right.
	But yeah, I do want to point out, listeners, because there's been some kind of light discussion about this.
	So Al and I have just met basically to make this podcast.
	Pretty much.
	And so, yeah, this is a new friendship, so you guys get to come along the journey with us, and like I said, the culture shock things are hilarious.
	And really wild.
	We've kind of established that the United States is a third world country, and no one really realizes it.
	And it's, sorry, sorry, sorry.
	So, what's your bright spot?
	Oh god.
	Do you know what?
	There's a lot of great music coming out at the moment.
	So over the last month the Foo Fighters have a new album and that's very much because it's Dave Grohl back on the drums that's very much gone to like color and the shape kind of era.
	Oh I live.
	The sound is very much there and then lyrically that you know you're dealing with the death of Taylor Hawkins and stuff so it's super raw.
	It's really fucking good and then Ben Howard's put out a new album and that's really great.
	I love Ben Howard.
	His first album was kind of acoustic-y stuff that was quite light-hearted and then by his third album he just went full fucking weirdo.
	Good, we love it.
	He's still a little bit on that tip and that's what I like.
	But I would say the winner for me at the moment is Queens of the Stone Age have a new album out.
	In Time's New Roman.
	And it's really good.
	It's their first one in like five years.
	Those motherfuckers.
	They're so good.
	It's awesome.
	My daughter was born to a Queens of the Stone Age song.
	I kid you not.
	Fortress.
	It has meaning.
	Because it is written from the perspective of a parent to a child.
	Like, if ever your fortress caves, you're always safe in mine, you know?
	Which is very sweet.
	But yeah, their new album is... I believe it too!
	We've gotten to know them enough.
	I buy it.
	Yeah, there are issues going on at the moment with Brody Dahl and him, and custody, and there's big legal battles and some ugly things going on between the both of them, so far as I'm aware.
	Honestly, if anyone is interested in my take, I think they're both just a little bit fucked up in very specific ways.
	Does anyone not agree with that?
	And like, we accept it.
	Like, live your life.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I don't know.
	There's a lot of shit.
	We all have faults.
	That's fine.
	But yeah, no, it's a fantastic album.
	It's the third in what they describe as like a trilogy of albums.
	So you had Light Clockwork, then Villains, and now this.
	And so I'm assuming after this there'll be probably a pretty drastic tone change somewhere.
	Yeah, really good from start to finish.
	Really impressed, really glad that they're probably one of the most consistently good bands in the world, I think.
	None of their albums suck, that's for sure.
	None of them are even mediocre.
	They can be quite different to one another.
	But, like, damn.
	Damn.
	Well, and, like, there, I'm, I, my take is, like, they really, they know how to put a whole piece of art together.
	Like, it's very well thought out, and, like, the vision is crystal clear.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And I, I, I'm, uh, I'm, like, an old music snob person.
	I'm an old music grandpa man, and so I, can take some time to warm up to bands that are maybe very popular and like the fans can grit can be a bit grating and so like when songs for the deaf came out I think is whenever like I was like okay big time yeah yeah well yeah I thought people were just yeah I was like I just thought people were like annoying so I didn't listen to it and then I'm completely wrong and I was one of those moments where I was like I need to calm down
	I need to calm down and be nice and understand that some people may be... I don't know, I think also, like, getting to know the juggalos.
	Maybe you don't like ICP.
	And those people I think from afar can seem a bit off-putting.
	But when you actually get to know the Juggalos, they're kind of great in their own way.
	I came to the Insane Clown Posse entirely without any foreknowledge of who they were.
	And I bought, there was a triple album or some shit that they put out.
	And I bought that and listened to it for quite a long time, really enjoying it, etc.
	before I had any concept of who they were.
	And then my Genuinely, I had no idea.
	I was just like, well, this is a bit fucking weird, but it's a bit dark.
	It's, do you know what?
	They're pretty good.
	They're pretty good rappers.
	It's a bit dark.
	It's kind of a carnival.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	I was like, this is, you know what?
	This is a bit fucked up, but I'm kind of, I'm into it.
	Cause I was a goth, et cetera.
	You know, I was listening to Marilyn Manson and all kinds of other shit.
	And this, I'm also a big f***ing Eminem fan, right?
	I have been since I was about 10.
	So this fits in between them quite well.
	And I had no idea, it was only a couple of years later that my friend Matt, the one who got married a couple of weeks ago, was like, oh yeah, they had a big feud with Eminem, etc.
	That's why this song does this.
	And I'm like, I had no f***ing clue.
	No concept of who these people were whatsoever.
	I'm quite enjoying this music.
	That's hilarious, because the Gathering of the Juggalos, and I don't know if it's changed location since, but from its inception, It was I believe in Carbondale, Illinois, which is like a two hour drive from where I grew up and my partner.
	I both grew up.
	My partner has been like, I don't know that he's listened to a song.
	I'm not sure.
	I know he has, but he's obsessed with the culture of the Juggalos because it was very close to where we grew up and like where we're from.
	So I don't even know that I've heard a song that they made until the Magnets one came out.
	I can I can make some recommendations if you want.
	Turns out I know some deep cuts.
	I also worked in tattoo shops for 11 years, so I definitely have since then, but that was like one of those moments where I was like, oh, this is theirs because I was so familiar with the culture way before I ever like heard Ass On.
	Wow, we came from totally opposite directions then.
	Completely.
	But it's also around where I grew up and where I live, so that's...
	I'm lit.
	I've never ever met a person that listened to the music first.
	I'm a little blown away.
	Genuinely.
	Genuinely.
	It was in my local CD shop, Rainbow Records, back when that existed.
	And I was in there just fucking around, looking at stuff, and I can't remember whether it was discounted or what, but I had no idea who they were, and I just bought it on a whim.
	I was like, let's have a look at what this shit is about, because it looks interesting.
	Do you know what?
	It was.
	It was definitely interesting.
	And they apologize for problematic views!
	They address things in real time!
	They're a part of the woke mob!
	They're kind of great!
	As human beings, they try very hard.
	I have no problems with them.
	I'm hoping that neither of us are going to be proven wrong on this point by anyone.
	Michael, let us know.
	Yeah, someone, someone will definitely... Mike updates me every two weeks on, like, straight up, like, on Juggalo culture.
	Well, I mean, especially on, like, this is a thing in our house.
	It's really funny that it's even coming up right now.
	Yeah, no, that's fascinating on its own, to be honest.
	Tell me more.
	The Juggalos are a regular feature of our breakfast talk.
	Literally.
	Yeah.
	Coffee talk.
	Our coffee talk.
	100%.
	Okay.
	Well, new podcast.
	Now we're talking about Juggalos.
	We're talking about... Sorry, guys.
	I don't know.
	I don't think there's anything to debunk there.
	I think it would just be us being like, oh, these guys are nice.
	Well, it'd be like, this really horrible thing happened and they tried to handle it as best they could.
	And then this horrible thing happened and they tried to handle it as best they could.
	You could do like a history of the Juggalos podcast.
	I'm sure that exists.
	There have got to be Juggalo podcasts, right?
	It's 2023.
	They better.
	I mean, ACB better have a fucking podcast.
	I think they do.
	I don't know.
	No, because it's a big thing.
	ACB better have a fucking podcast.
	I'm sure, I think they do.
	I don't know.
	I'll just make.
	They must.
	But even if they don't, there's gotta be a fan one.
	There's gotta be, you know, 'cause the community's pretty,
	the Juggalos, they're pretty tight knit and they're into what they're into.
	The worst tattoos you've ever seen and like really mostly like maybe a little rough around the edges but kind of lovely people if you Yeah, well, well-intentioned at the very least.
	I mean, legitimately, I've had really good experiences in like a, you know, like not necessarily a festival, but like if there's like a show with a lot of different bands and folks are hanging out in a parking lot, it's almost like a Grateful Dead vibe of like everybody's just like cool and like wanting to kick it if you're like, you know, not gonna, I mean, yeah.
	Gotta say, there were a lot of things I was expecting from this episode, but ten minutes of Juggalo talk was not one of them.
	Yeah, Michael, keep us updated though.
	If there's anything really problematic, we'll let you know.
	Do you know what?
	This might become a regular feature of the show, Juggalo updates, you know?
	The ICP minute.
	Yeah, yeah, we'll pull in our broadcaster, Mike, to fill us in.
	Our man on the street.
	No, he's already recording it on his phone right now.
	He's in the bathroom at work and like, it was 2022.
	Anyway, okay.
	I don't have enough facts ready for his show.
	He's been doing this for years, he just hasn't told you.
	No, I've been the only witness!
	Yes, yeah, maybe that's the bigger problem.
	Yeah, would you like your partner to read an entire article to you?
	And pause the TV show you're watching about ICP, because that happens to me kind of on the regular.
	I don't hate it.
	I don't hate it.
	I'm okay.
	I'm fine.
	I'm fine with as much Juggalo as I have in my life presently.
	I will probably, now that we've been talking about it, I will probably revisit those albums.
	He's gonna DM you.
	If he doesn't, he's fucking up.
	I've said something that's not as informed and he's like, y'all are gonna have a conversation.
	I don't need to be there.
	Again, I know fuck all other than the music, pretty much.
	I learned about that later.
	Anyway, right.
	We're kidding.
	We're not going to make an ACD podcast.
	No, no, no.
	Well, well, I mean, you know, that could be a Patreon special or something.
	That'd be interesting.
	If patrons decide that's something they want, fuck it, who cares?
	I guess that's true.
	You know, I don't think that's a harmful thing to have to do.
	I'd be up for it.
	Also, if there's an overlap... Also, if there's a weird stretch goal... If there's an overlap with Russell Brand... That would be interesting!
	That would be interesting!
	And the Juggalos?
	Oh, I want to know about it!
	We'll be the first to report if that's the case!
	I tell you what, yeah, if I do have a conversation with Mike, I will have to ask in terms of, like, conspiracy theories and the Jugglers, because you feel like there would be an intersection, right?
	There is.
	Right, okay, okay, well, maybe we will do a Juggling Podcast!
	He's DMing you right now.
	We'll talk about it, that'll be a future Bright Spot, I'm sure.
	Okay, okay, this is taking an interesting turn already.
	Fuck me.
	This is already a weird episode that goes in directions I don't expect, so we're off to a flying start.
	And we've had weird days before the record.
	We were kind of commiserating.
	Yeah, we've both had a week.
	Maybe talked for too long.
	Yeah, just like weird days.
	Yeah, we just had a two hour conversation before recording this because we're both just, yeah.
	Guess what you're not supposed to do?
	Existence.
	Listen, we're new.
	We're not really professionals.
	We're working it out.
	Bah, we're fine.
	Right, so, right up top of the episode, we do actually have a few things to address.
	Most of them good, some of them questionable.
	First up, the response to last week's episode has been a lot.
	When putting it together and uploading the episode, I was like, It's about religion, but how controversial can that be?
	And boy was I wrong!
	We pissed quite a few people off!
	Honestly, do you know what?
	I feel like that was maybe a very British perspective to have.
	Because I've never had to deal with that level of really pissed off religious people.
	It's fine.
	It's an experience, I'll say that.
	I mean, I feel like it, meanwhile, my experience is like, oh, that went great.
	Yeah, you're just like, oh, this is a breeze.
	This is way better.
	There aren't burning crosses on my lawn.
	This is this is a good start.
	I've been in pride parades.
	A lot.
	Right, right.
	It was a delightful field of wildflowers caressing your knees as you gallivant across the prairie compared to what I'm used to.
	I think it's great.
	I think everybody was awesome and two people were kind of a turd and that's fine.
	Over here, the most religious pushback you'll get is from Doris, and it'll be about the strength of her cup of tea, probably.
	You know, because that's just the way it works over here.
	It's a very different thing.
	Very different!
	We also had our first instances of brand's actual followers engaging with us, which was about as productive as you'd expect.
	Ultimately, we are living in two separate realities when someone is that far down the rabbit hole, unfortunately.
	There have also been a lot of hot takes from people about brand being stupid.
	Oh no.
	and how years of drug use has destroyed his brain, despite him being 20 years sober.
	And I have no time for these ideas, honestly.
	Firstly, he's a damn clever guy, however ridiculous his presentation may seem.
	And secondly, don't attempt to diagnose someone based on your outrageously limited knowledge
	of their background.
	It would be irresponsible for a doctor to do, let alone a random person on the internet.
	Worse is that it demonizes addicts and people in recovery as being too far gone to be able to think responsibly, which is a dangerous ideology.
	And if anyone comes to us with a notion of, oh, he's an addict, what do you expect?
	I will tell you in no uncertain terms to get fucked.
	An added element to this... It's just not nice and not fair to think about people.
	No, it's a fucking, it's a stupid perspective.
	And an added element to this is that by saying that he's stupid and that his brain's broken, you're absolving him of the responsibility of his actions and the things he says, which I also have no time for.
	He 100% knows what he is doing, and he is 100% responsible for his actions.
	Yeah, and you don't stay famous on your own.
	You can bumble and fail into a lot in this world, but I don't think that's what's happened with him.
	And he is smart.
	On whatever level you think that he's smart on, there's at least a couple that he's wildly competent.
	Maybe not in a way... Of course, my stupid phone.
	Hold on.
	Jesus Christ yeah that's like that's you can't assume that someone no and it's just kind of not nice or not fair and I no no it's it's a completely unfair perspective um and it's just it's grossly misinformed as well it's just gross to be honest um so yeah please you know if if that is a view that you hold somewhere even a little bit in the back of your mind question it um because because honestly you know it You're holding swaths of society in this kind of very horrible place in your head.
	Yeah, and you don't know necessarily who you're talking to or who you're saying it about in the room at any given time.
	I want to make myself clear.
	I'm not speaking for anybody but myself, but I can infer, but I'm not going to assume, that I'm not coming from a place where I just want to make fun of somebody.
	First of all, I'm not funny enough to make a podcast that's just making fun of somebody.
	Sorry.
	It's not me.
	I might get there someday.
	I'm not there right now.
	Also, yeah, temper those expectations.
	But I don't want to just make fun of somebody.
	I did come off a bit passionate about religion and I'm gonna again in the future because that's how I feel.
	Those are my experiences And that's going to color my view and I have very good
	reasons that are pretty thorough in there
	in my background of experience like I have my reasons for feeling that way, but I'd say people that
	that do ascribe to religion and people that Subscribe to Russell Brand
	I'm not mad necessarily at any of you individually.
	There's a lot of reasons why people gravitate to religion or to, you know, a certain personality.
	And your reasons are valid.
	Your feelings are valid.
	But once your eyes are open to some things, that's when it's on you.
	I can think religion is stupid without thinking religious people are stupid.
	You've got your reasons and that's valid.
	There's a distinction there that I think some people struggle to delineate.
	We got a message from Rascal Bean regarding a comment I made about the Abrahamic religions all prohibiting homosexuality, meaning Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and they wanted to provide a small correction regarding Judaism.
	There are sects of Judaism that outright ban homosexuality and others that are much more tolerant, but even among the Orthodox communities, the directive is to abstain from the behavior rather than condemning the actual Feeling, you know, it's not that you're a bad person, it's a bad action that you need to avoid doing.
	There's a lot of nuance in Judaism, and part of the task is to wrestle with what God wants and what feels moral.
	And I've got to say, if I had to pick one of the three, I'd probably go with Judaism as my personal choice, if nothing else for the amazing food.
	My reasoning for making what seems like a blanket statement is that in each instance, I'm going by what it says in the Holy Book.
	Naturally, only the more extreme elements of any religion follow Bronze Age texts to the letter in this day and age.
	And there is also the fact that while Christianity and Islam pretty much just stick to the one book, Judaism have several different religious texts that are core parts of the religion.
	And I'd say there's a greater deal of examination and questioning therein.
	Agreed.
	And actually I didn't even know the... I didn't have a clear understanding of Uh, Judaism's thoughts.
	That can't be the way that you're supposed to say that.
	Anyway, you get what I'm saying.
	No way that was grammatically correct.
	Yeah, thoughts on an approach to abortion until Roe was overturned here
	and there was a lot more public discussion.
	And I think that it just exposes how single-minded and like Christian the perspective of most of my government
	in America displays and enacts on people against their will.
	And so I actually, I also would like to point out that I think when your religion has a culture,
	'cause there is a distinction between like just the religious ideas in Judaism
	and Jewishness as a cultural practice.
	And I think if you have to wrestle more with including everyone in your community,
	then maybe you're a little more tolerant.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I prefer that.
	I would say, rather than even just the religious discussion, the cultural perspective can be more inclusive and more thoughtful than some other experiences I've had personally, specifically with Christianity.
	Yeah, I feel like Judaism in general just has a different approach to what it is to be religious, essentially, which is cool.
	We could talk about that for a long time.
	Well, and thank you for pointing that out.
	Yes, no, big thanks.
	We're always happy to have any corrections or input from any audience.
	And if you want to drop us an email, if anyone's got any thoughts, it's theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	And just drop us a line, even just simply.
	That's perfectly fine.
	We've had a couple of people email already.
	Yeah, we have people, we don't even actually interacting on like Reddit
	and the, I mean like kind of through the knowledge fight groups on like Reddit and yeah, and on Facebook.
	But if you don't necessarily want to email or if you want to have, you know, just drop a comment,
	YouTube has a comment section for video.
	We have a YouTube channel.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Just, yeah, drop a comment somewhere on there.
	We'll see it.
	Yup.
	Yep, we will.
	It's just us.
	I am woefully shit at responding, but I'm working on it.
	I'm working on it.
	I'd like to blame my executive function.
	I'm medically bad at responding, but I try very hard.
	You know what?
	I'm 100% with you right there.
	So, there's also something exciting to share with you, in that we have our very first voice message that's been sent in.
	Yay!
	Maybe.
	Yay, maybe!
	Depends what they say.
	Fuck.
	No, no, no.
	It's not hateful, I promise.
	This is from Rob.
	So just a thought about the love situation on the recent episode, episode 4 with Richard
	Dawkins.
	(laughs)
	Love, Russell Brand goes on about it in kind of like an ethereal manner, when in actual fact, love, we know what love is!
	It's oxytocin!
	When animals, including humans, give birth, oxytocin floods the brain and When they look at their child, that's when you feel that ultimate love.
	When you look down at your child and you see them, it's oxytocin!
	It's not some ethereal, mad, unscientific plane of nut jobbery!
	Jesus!
	A hundred percent.
	Thank you, Rob.
	I was going to say Roberta Flack, but I had a whole list of Rob names.
	I like a long nickname.
	Oh man, Rob, thank you so much.
	That's what I was saying, was like, yeah, baby chicks imprint on their mothers.
	We've measured love.
	We know what love is.
	It's something that's not... it's not a mystery.
	No, no, 100%.
	I was honestly surprised that Dawkins didn't bring it up.
	Again, he was so off form.
	I think he was just so blindsided by what happened.
	And he was being cooked.
	To be fair.
	Yeah, yeah.
	In retrospect it was obvious.
	There was some elder abuse going on.
	Yeah, all of us have a tough time when we are boiling and pouring sweat, which I actually, so speaking of being able to reach out and interact more with you guys that are listening, I've been trying to, I had a very fun brain fart for this artist who's been on Instagram like since it started.
	I've never been faced with the decision Um, which I realize like, oh, I can't just make a post with the podcast art every week because it's just the same picture.
	Oh, I need to actually figure out a different picture to post every week.
	And so I've been trying to pull some stuff from our episodes and put it up on Instagram.
	And one of those is the picture of Richard Dawkins boiling alive.
	Boiling alive!
	So you don't have to watch the video to get some visuals that we mentioned.
	And also if we mentioned stuff in general, I'm trying to post it.
	So you can find us there too on Instagram.
	The on-brand pod is mostly where you can find us.
	Didn't mean to do plugs.
	Look for that somewhere.
	No, no, that wasn't intentional.
	But yeah, that is where we are.
	That's where you can find us if you want to sing along.
	And hearing from you guys has been pretty great.
	It's awesome.
	It's awesome.
	Yeah.
	I'm very pleased.
	Everyone is very, very pleasant.
	What more can you hope for from an audience?
	Right, so we do have a show to do, but first... We'll fucking get there.
	Half an hour in, we'll get there eventually.
	But first I'd like to thank all the new subscribers.
	We have a number of new YouTube subscribers, so thank you.
	Hey, thank you!
	And Spotify and Apple Podcasts and everything.
	I do see all of you.
	Thank you very much.
	And watchers.
	And it makes a big difference!
	It's huge.
	We deeply appreciate your joining us, even more so when you take the time to share our content as well, leave a review or get involved in some way, as we've just been talking about.
	It's really great.
	And what is really, really great is we have some new patrons to thank.
	So without further ado, Scorpion the Bird, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	I am not a fan of scorpions, but I like to think this is a bird called scorpion.
	That's my take.
	Please, patron, feel free to correct me on that one.
	Message on Patreon, message on... Pretty cool bird name, gotta say.
	Scorpion the bird.
	Yeah, I'm into it.
	I'm into it.
	Not into scorpions.
	I'm into birds a little bit, so yeah.
	Haley Vesey, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you!
	Collected Echoes, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you.
	Thank you, thank you, thank you.
	John Barwood, you are now an Awakening Wander.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wander.
	Thank you!
	Bryn Grunwald, you are now an Awakening Wander.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wander.
	Good strong Welsh name there.
	Sarah Williams, also possibly a Welsh name, you are now an Awakening Wander.
	You are indeed an Awakening Wander.
	Lauren Leslie, you are now an Awakening Wander.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you.
	And I think I forgot to say thank you to Sarah, so thank you, Sarah.
	War and the world unite.
	Thank you.
	And finally, I've been assured this isn't a sexual thing by this patron.
	Always good when you have to preface it with that.
	Right?
	I buy it completely.
	Yeah, right.
	Sure, we believe you.
	Natalie's Hot Tea, the Elixir of Life, you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Ah, thank you very much.
	Thank you.
	Oh yeah, that's not, no, no, no.
	That's not sexy, that's gay.
	Natalie's Hot Tea, the Elixir of Life.
	I guess everybody says hot tea now.
	I mean, you know, it depends what kind of tea, to be honest.
	Spill the tea, mom.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It could be that.
	It could be, I don't know, if Gwyneth Paltrow was selling tea, that could be a sexual tea, right?
	You're right.
	This is, yeah.
	Fair.
	Anyway, if anyone wants to... Accept your blind spots, people.
	Listen.
	Exactly.
	You never know what kind of tea someone might be serving.
	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.
	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 comes up there too.
	Now, without any further preamble, let's start with an out of context drop from today's episode.
	Boris Yeltsin, you big gorgeous man baby. He looks really soft.
	I, from looking at him, I, he's one of the few adults I imagine having no pubic hair.
	Oh, I see.
	Imagine Yeltsin's pubic hair free.
	Even if you looked in the very cleft of his bottom, between the taint, between the nut sack and the bum crack, the perineum itself.
	Nothing.
	Beautiful.
	Not a whiff.
	Not a whiff.
	Lovely.
	Nut sack to butt crack.
	That's hilarious.
	Yeah, it's a serious show.
	They deal with serious topics.
	This is news.
	Take it seriously.
	Get it together.
	Oh boy.
	I do love when British people say cleft.
	We don't say it enough over here.
	Cleft.
	It's a good word.
	It is a good word.
	It's so descriptive and we don't use it enough here.
	Less of a good word when you're talking about Boris Yeltsin's taint, but there we go.
	You know what?
	We don't all take occasion to talk about it.
	To each his own, I guess!
	Maybe it's something that's not discussed enough.
	I don't know.
	I mean, he's dead.
	We can talk about it now, right?
	That's the way that works.
	Oh yeah, because when he was alive it was totally inappropriate.
	But now that he's dead...
	Well, depending, he might have had you murdered, so... It's definitely safer to talk about it now, that's for sure.
	Right, so let's let Russell introduce the topics that we'll be covering today.
	Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
	Thanks for joining us on Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	If you ain't been told yet today that you are loved, that you are complete, that you are beautiful, and that you are whole, and you're going in the right direction, then let us convey that very message to you right now, you beautiful Awakening Wonder.
	Joining me for the show is my on-screen assistant, Gareth Roy, with whom I will be discussing matters such as Merc, suing to kill Medicare drug pricing.
	We'll be with you on YouTube for a while, we'll be there, maybe Twitter, are we on Twitter still?
	We don't know, you never know with Elon, do you?
	You never know what moves he might make.
	Hopefully we're on Twitter.
	When we get to exclusively being on Rumble, the original home of free speech,
	where we bring people together in a spirit of love, WHO have got a plot to use the EU's vaccine passport tech.
	Is that true?
	Allegedly.
	Or is it simply an allegation we're making?
	We'll be discussing it in depth later on in our presentation.
	Here's the news.
	We'll be talking more about the WHO, where they get their money and what exactly it is they're up to with this new treaty that they propose should be allowed to bypass the laws of the country you are in.
	So this whole thing is just Russell and Gareth.
	We've had a couple of interviews in a row, so it's nice to get back to the usual bullshit show that happens mid-week.
	Nice is doing a lot of work, but yeah, sure.
	Not to say that Bran hasn't been doing interviews.
	But I've got little interest in covering them just yet, to be honest.
	But yes, we will be getting properly into the WHO.
	Not to be confused with seminal rock band, The Who, who probably have much more questionable medical advice, I imagine.
	You know, like, I don't know, drive your car into a swimming pool.
	I think that was them, wasn't it?
	Oh, that's just a good time.
	I'm so thankful for Keith Moon, you know, false false.
	Yes, you know, he was he was a character what he what he did for drumming as well, though I did once have an argument with someone about who was more influential as a drummer Keith Moon or John Bonham.
	I was on the John Bonham side, Led Zeppelin.
	They were on the Keith Moon side and I love that you guys thought that it matters.
	That's adorable!
	We're musicians!
	That's what we do.
	I once had a debate with one of my closest friends about who was more influential on metal music, Black Sabbath or Metallica.
	Very different questions, but I was firmly Black Sabbath, again.
	Without Black Sabbath, there is no Metallica.
	That's just like the time dimension.
	Well, her argument was that Metallica have then influenced more bands kind of thing since, and I beg to differ on that point.
	If we're talking a numbers game, that's just a different discussion because there are more human beings that are alive.
	Let's think, John Bonham and Keith Moon, I'm not, listen, it's not fair to pick a favorite.
	I just love them.
	Love them all.
	Doing great.
	They're both great.
	They're both great.
	Killing it.
	Out here killing it.
	Keith Moon, pretty great stories.
	Very true.
	Well yeah, one of the proper rock stars, you know, of that era.
	They were fucking nuts.
	Yeah, if somebody's gonna confidently drive a farm machine, they absolutely shouldn't.
	A Rolls Royce?
	A Rolls Royce is one example, but I'm also just picturing Tommy.
	I don't think he asked anybody about that big tractor.
	I think he just hopped on there, if I remember correctly.
	He was gonna drive it.
	If it was drivable, I bet he tried.
	And I, listen, I'm here for it.
	Obviously, I'm here for the chaos.
	I'm a fan.
	Keith Moon was an arbiter of that, that's for sure.
	Saint of chaos.
	Yeah.
	So before anything else, Brand and Gareth get into a story about some people in Japan taking smiling classes to remember what life was like before masks, now that their mask mandate has been lifted.
	Yeah, it's exactly what you'd expect.
	Somewhat predictably, they go off on a little bit of an anti-mask jag, but mostly it's just them talking shit.
	And then they finally get to murk suing over Medicare pricing.
	What exactly are Merck doing?
	Well, look, you know that Medicare have been granted access to directly negotiate for a small number of high-cost prescription medicines.
	That's one of the things that Biden boasts about a lot.
	That, you know, we beat Big Pharma, a small number of high-cost prescription medicines can now be negotiated by Medicare.
	And obviously Merck, being one of the big players in Big Pharma, don't like this.
	So, in principle, I and any left-leaning person will agree with them on this point.
	Pharmaceutical pricing in the US is completely insane.
	And with myself, Russell Brand and Gareth Roy all being from a nation which has socialised healthcare, it seems especially bizarre to us.
	Here, Gareth also decides to use it as a little dig to Biden for not doing enough to beat back Big Pharma.
	When anyone with even the tiniest concept of how US politics works will be aware that it's a miracle Biden has achieved even this.
	Yeah, they could do more but also we know who the problems are.
	Right, exactly.
	It's a bit of a cheap shot, but whatever.
	The main reason I'm playing this clip is it's yet another illustration of Brand actually not having a clue what the story is beyond the headline and having to ask Gareth Roy what's going on.
	It's why he asked at the start there, you know, so what's going on with Merck then?
	Because he doesn't know.
	The evidence is mounting, I'm going to say that.
	Okay.
	Well, and I do want to point out, because not everybody is a Knowledge Fight listener, that's how we met, and that's how we kind of started this little project, but...
	So if you listen to Knowledge Fight, I think it's a well-worn idea that Alex Jones reads headlines and just makes the rest up.
	Yeah, he just makes it up from the headlines.
	Yeah, and even the headlines can be from his own website and he'll still get the content wrong.
	You can find a headline that says anything.
	Especially on impulse.
	Yeah, right.
	When your reporting is entirely vibes-based, you don't need to read the article.
	For someone like Russell or someone like Alex, they're just going to riff with no real content related to the reality of the situation.
	Absolutely.
	And it leans into my theory that Gareth Roy is the one pulling the strings here.
	Gareth Roy is the one who actually knows the stuff and chooses the stories and finds the shit.
	Russell Brand is the one presenting them.
	And it's not that Russell Brand disagrees with them, but he certainly seems to have a significant level of ignorance compared to Gareth Roy, who is the series editor for this show.
	Yeah, I think there's definitely some shit going down here, for sure.
	And we'll see it later again as well.
	But next up we start to dip our toes into coverage on the WHO.
	Yeah, so this is something that we've spoken about regarding the UK, but now the US, Canada and France have expressed support for this as well.
	So it does seem like it's starting to have a kind of global interest.
	For anyone listening, the screen shows a headline of US, Canada and France express full support for WHO pandemic treaty.
	And it's, yeah, this this treaty is absolutely the main story of the episode, which we will be covering in more detail later.
	But first, I want to draw your attention to the little logo in the top right of the screen.
	We've seen her before.
	We have!
	Again, for listeners, instead of citing the name of the source they're getting their news from, Stay Free with Russell Brand just shows the logo of the publication, meaning it can be pretty tough to decipher where they're getting their information.
	It's a deliberate move to obfuscate some of their more questionable news sources.
	So this is the same image that we referenced in our first episode, a shield with a globe on it, and I've gone and found the website they're sourcing.
	It is reclaimthenet.org.
	No, never heard of it!
	Possibly because it's a conspiracy site advancing theories about plans around the world, though curiously only the Western world, to curtail freedom of speech and invade everyone's privacy.
	They have headlines like Canada, companies band together to advance digital ID agenda and Mayo Clinic suspended professor over comments on COVID and transgenderism.
	Basically, it's a rag that furthers right-wing ideas under the guise of freedom of speech, and it seems to be a regular feature on this show.
	As you pointed out the first time we saw this, it will later be put alongside more legitimate news sources like the Telegraph or even the BBC, making it appear like this website is at the same level of quality and journalistic standards, which it fucking is not.
	Conflating by proximity, yeah.
	And I do want to say about the Merc, lawsuit situation. I don't know anymore about that story. I
	haven't heard a lot about it, which also I will say compared to what we're used to
	hearing on Knowledge Fight, I at least kind of have an idea where those news stories are coming
	from. But this arena is different and it's surprising. So I'm less informed as to like where
	the, what's the word, the origin of the sensational headlined article is coming from.
	So I don't like recognize it right away. Like, okay, I know what's going on. But I
	will say that corporate like, The corporate imperative in America is to the shareholders of the corporation.
	So the CEO and any kind of legal moves they make are going to be in service to the company.
	That is their legal imperative.
	So it shouldn't be surprising that Merck is going to sue.
	Is it good?
	No.
	Is it surprising?
	Also no.
	And that's been around for a long time.
	Joe Biden, well, I mean, Joe Biden kind of probably helped because he's been in government for a million years.
	But I mean, it's not great, but he definitely did at some point.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	But like, it's not it's not great, but it's not new.
	And they're kind of reporting it.
	It's like a new different.
	Odd.
	Business is gonna business, right?
	That's just... Unfortunately, yes.
	Unfortunately.
	So, you know, you spoke a little bit about motive there, which we're about to get into, because after a bit of riffing about global organizations, Brand reveals the real reason that we're going to be covering this story.
	I feel like that these WHO, WEF, World Bank, IMF, all these organisations are by their nature an attempt to create a global bureaucracy.
	I think beneath these institutions there are the funding processes.
	Some of them are national funding, i.e.
	5% of our health budgets will go to supporting this treaty in the necessary measures.
	Also, they receive a great deal of money, as you know, from philanthropic so-called organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
	Ah, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
	The great boogeyman of the right wing.
	Now, there are legitimate grievances one could level at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
	Clearly the world shouldn't be resorting to philanthro-capitalism to solve its problems in the first place.
	It's a terrible system.
	It's wildly inefficient and not particularly effective.
	Not overly ethical either.
	Not to mention their questionable stances on things like vaccine patents.
	But I found zero evidence of the critiques hurled at them from the right wing, such as tax evasion, profiteering, microchips in vaccines, Bill Gates having Epstein killed, or an overarching plan to have the entire world vaccinated and give everyone autism.
	Those are all genuine conspiracy theories that float around about this.
	It's all completely unfounded nonsense, primed by Gates being one of the largest proponents and funders of vaccine research in the world, basically.
	Yeah, there's so many real things to complain about.
	There's so many real things.
	Yes, and these are exactly none of them.
	So now we're going to get into a bit of Brand's misinformation on the WHO.
	Now let me know in the chat if you think this is a significant strata of power.
	Look at the level of influence that we're discussing.
	The WHO is not democratically elected.
	They're going to be able to pass, essentially, laws.
	Binding advice is a law, isn't it?
	I bindingly advise you not to break that house.
	I bindingly advise you not to drink and drive.
	So this binding advice thing will come up, but essentially it's that there's a suggestion among the right-wing shitheads specifically That advice from the WHO will become binding in terms of your membership to the WHO.
	So you have to follow what they do, no matter what.
	Which is complete horseshit, and we will absolutely get to that in a minute.
	Yeah.
	As a country that has had binding resolutions, they don't usually bind all that much.
	For a start, the second issue is that no one's actually trying to do that, and we'll get into that in a little bit.
	Firstly, I have to say, Brand is acting like his only issue with the WHO is that they take Bill Gates' money, and that argument is complete shit.
	If they stopped accepting donations from philanthropists, charities or businesses, Brand would still rail against the WHO, because they promote vaccination where advisable, which he's entirely against, and their advice on how to prevent viruses spreading involves things like lockdowns, which he's also entirely against.
	Worst of all, they're part of the dreaded globalist cabal of bureaucrats, and Russell can't stand the notion of literally anyone being told what to do.
	One of Brand's greatest accusations against the WHO, as we just saw, is that they are unelected and therefore undemocratic.
	Let's get into how their hierarchy works.
	So, at the bottom you have the World Health Assembly, the decision-making body of the WHO.
	All member states of the WHO send a delegation, which are decided by the governments of said member states, who are in almost all cases democratically elected.
	Russia and China are members, so you know, there's nuance there.
	Their main job is to determine the policies of the WHO, to appoint the Director General by a vote, to supervise financial policies, and review and approve the proposed program budget.
	They then meet and debate a specific health agenda prepared by the Executive Board.
	The Executive Board is made up of 34 technically qualified members who are elected by the World Health Assembly for three-year terms.
	And their job is to agree upon the agenda for the World Health Assembly and the resolutions to be considered by them.
	And once decisions have been made by the World Health Assembly, it's the Executive Board's job to actually implement the policies.
	And then, at the very top, you've got the Director General of the WHO, who is the Chief Technical and Administrative Officer.
	Basically, they'll take a bird's eye view and try to ensure things are going in the right direction from a strategic standpoint rather than an operational one.
	When election time comes up, the World Health Assembly all decide a short list of nominees, which then gets passed to the executive board, who in turn vote on who becomes the next director general.
	The system is long-winded, but it is democratic, and member states have a say about everything from the very beginning.
	So he's just completely talking out of his arse here.
	That's a lot, alright.
	It's a lot, yeah, yeah.
	I mean, you know, you kind of assume.
	That there are well I guess what really baffles me is like and maybe what I'm noticing is he Russell is disregarding out of hand the validity of any international symposium or governing body which to me Denies the reality that there are international implications to health crises.
	We just all live through it.
	We're gonna get into that.
	His take on it is fantastically stupid.
	Of course!
	Well, I mean, it's probably obtuse in a way that, you know, to obscure beyond even like making any sense.
	It's just...
	You have to throw so much out like so much of the experience we all just had.
	You have to throw so much of that away and ignore it just to get to where he's coming from.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I think, you know, he's basically, for him, anything that is beyond a local level is a problem.
	And that sounds like, that's even questionable, honestly.
	Like, which local...
	Does he want?
	Is what would be my view.
	Yeah, exactly.
	How local are we going to get here, Russell?
	Is county level okay?
	Probably not, knowing him.
	I don't know.
	Are you supposed to do everything by your fucking parish council or whatever?
	I don't know how he wants anything to work.
	It doesn't sound like there's a solution anywhere.
	It just sounds like he's complaining that there's a No, he doesn't provide solutions, he provides complaints.
	That's what he does.
	I've not once heard him provide a solution in any of this.
	And part of that is the grift.
	Part of that is, oh, there's a revolution coming and we need to make this big systemic change.
	It'll never happen.
	It'll never come.
	If it actually arrives, then he loses his income stream.
	I'm going to keep talking about it in these vague ways and you're going to keep giving me money and we're just going to do that dance for the next, I don't know, 50 years.
	Right, next up, the boys leave YouTube because the conversation is getting too hot!
	We're going to go into this in more depth in our presentation in a minute, but I think we're going to leave YouTube right now.
	Did you want to say anything before we leave YouTube?
	It's safe to say this.
	I'm going to watch you like a hawk.
	Thank you very much for that.
	I know you've always cared about I don't want to get a strike!
	No, no, we don't.
	We won't do that.
	So member states will be obliged to follow the agency's instructions when responding to pandemics, including introducing vaccine passports, border closures and quarantine measures under the draft regulations.
	So that's quite, that's a lot of power, you could say.
	It's too much power.
	Any power is too much power to someone who is anti-any authority.
	It's too much power.
	It's a real cut your nose off to spite your face kind of vibe.
	He just summed up his entire political ideology.
	Well, we're done.
	Bye!
	Yeah, that's it.
	On brand is finished.
	It's been real.
	Yeah, because genuinely, I am kind of mystified because that's the one thing that It's been real hard to nail down threads, frankly.
	And we're only a couple episodes in, but it feels like he's got a very scattershot approach.
	But the trend, the only trend I can see is government bad.
	And listen, I don't disagree necessarily, but we have to remember that the government is made up of the citizens that like someone's got to be in
	charge of some stuff.
	So what we should invest in is the connection between the citizens and the government being
	dynamic and creative and proactive in solving problems that face all of us instead of just
	saying you're bad and that's it because it's not it's so short-sighted I guess.
	I don't know.
	Yeah, short-sighted, reductive, it's facile, it takes all nuance out of any conversation.
	But basically, his perspective seems to be I don't think he'd like those either, honestly.
	Honestly!
	of any kind reaches a certain size, it's bad.
	And this includes charities.
	It doesn't matter what the fuck it is, if it gets to a certain size and is operating in more than
	a local area, then it's an issue.
	I don't think he'd like those either.
	Honestly. Honestly.
	Yeah, probably not. Probably not.
	He'd like that.
	I mean, the reality is if those didn't exist, then he would find something else to fucking complain about.
	Well, right.
	But also, I'm looking at his desk right now, and there's stuff on his desk that if there weren't international trade organizations and international trade in general, you're not going to have any of the stuff you have right now.
	Don't ask him to think about consequences to things.
	Christ, Lauren.
	Implications of his, like, worldview, I guess?
	Like, if you want that computer, there needs to be an international organization for it.
	Nah, local communities made.
	We can all build one.
	We can build one.
	We've got electrical parts.
	I'm sure someone can solder.
	There we go.
	We'll figure it out.
	Did you know that Brand got a YouTube strike last year, by the way?
	One?
	Just one?
	Yeah, that I'm aware of.
	So he got a strike and a video taken down for COVID misinformation.
	Surprise, surprise.
	One?
	Yeah, just one, which then prompted his move to rumble.
	He threw his toys out the pram a little bit, and he definitely doesn't want more strikes or his channel taken down because that would cripple his reach and his income potential.
	Hey, what's that many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many many many. That's the thing. I heard him say, "Oh, we
	don't want a copyright strike!"
	Well, uh, or not copyright strike, we don't want a YouTube strike. I mean, here's the thing,
	uh, I would love, I know, I, I don't mean that.
	It would behoove us to monetize our YouTube output, right?
	Oh, right.
	Yeah.
	But like we we it's a gray area with Russell Brand's content and we do swears because we're grown ups.
	We do swears.
	We probably can't afford it.
	But like we're not gonna worry about monetization because it's more important to get our point across and to do this project.
	Yeah, there's an ethical standpoint in terms of accepting advertising as well from our perspective.
	We're dealing with a different thing but yeah also from a legal perspective I think just to be safe as well on YouTube because part of the way that intellectual property rights and fair use works over here does depend on whether you are making money off of someone else's content And at present we are not doing that whatsoever because people are donating to us.
	That is a different thing.
	Whereas there could be an argument that we were profiting off of his content in a way, in a roundabout fucking way.
	Now I do feel that people need to be paid for their work 100%.
	But if we can afford to like not monetize to the nth degree on YouTube, maybe he can too.
	Maybe that, like, people are paying you for your time, Russell.
	Maybe don't worry about that.
	There is also, you know, the more people he can reach on YouTube, the more people he can drag over to Rumble, the more people he can indoctrinate and, what's the word I'm looking for?
	Radicalize, that's the word.
	Right, so, in this next clip, Russell gives the game away a little bit.
	To preface this for anyone listening, Russell is wearing a West Ham football shirt with sponsors Betway, a gambling company featured prominently on the front.
	It's too much power.
	OK, listen, if you're watching us right now on YouTube, click and join us on Rumble right away.
	Of course I'm going to be talking about West Ham United.
	Of course I'm going to be saying don't gamble.
	Gamble responsibly.
	Stop gambling.
	Gambling is mental because I'm inadvertently advertising a gambling organisation.
	But we want to talk about how global or continental bureaucracies are used to utilise corporate profit and bypass systems of democratic power.
	And we're going to speculate now in ways that are potentially risky, aren't they Gal?
	Because they're not entirely undergirded by facts.
	So he just said they're not entirely undergirded by facts.
	Look at the link in the description, click over, join us on Rumble because I simply can't say this to you, the 6.5
	million Awakening Wonders, I want you to join us, we're gonna have a fantastic time.
	See you over there.
	So he just said, he just said they're not entirely undergirded by facts. Those are the words he just said.
	laughter We're gonna speculate on things and yeah, they're not
	entirely undergirded by facts. Anyway- All I can do is flare my nostrils as hard as I ever have in my life and stare at my foot.
	Russell, you didn't have to say that for a start.
	That was a voluntary thing you just said.
	What the fuck are you doing?
	It's your show!
	It's your show!
	You don't need to tell people that things are not entirely undergirded by facts on your show, you don't need to say that!
	Just play, just do the thing!
	Like, oh, good lord.
	So I thought that was hilarious.
	The opposite day stuff that he does, like, well, the government official said this thing, so they mean the opposite.
	And he's like, it's really disorienting.
	Like, why would anyone listen to him?
	There's a worse version of that coming later on.
	But first, we have some more bullshit takes from reclaimthenet.org.
	All right, Gal.
	We're at home.
	We can relax.
	Undo your belt.
	Take your pants down.
	Get your mask off.
	Express yourself.
	Smile a bit.
	The WHO plots to use EU vaccine passport tech to form global digital health certificates.
	Vaccine passports?
	Well, look, this was, again, a conspiracy.
	Mandatory vaccines?
	This was a conspiracy, wasn't it?
	That during the pandemic, when vaccine passports came in, And we were told these won't be, this is just for the pandemic, they won't be, you know, turned into like an everyday thing.
	That's not, that's not what we're doing.
	It's just for this.
	And again, it's now seems to be coming true that vaccine passports will be now used to form this global digital health certificates.
	In other words, digitizing your health in order that, I guess critics could say, you can be spied on by your government.
	We could show some of our content from 2020 and I bet we're saying it's all well and good passing these regulations and allowing these temporary measures but the concern would be that they continue to deploy them.
	I'm going to read to you from Research Briefing Number CBP-9550 from the House of Commons Library, titled The WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty, which is the document we're actually discussing.
	The research was done by Dr. Patrick Butchard and Bucky Balligan, which I mention solely because that is a fantastic name.
	That's spectacular.
	I want to watch his whole 1890s baseball team.
	I want to watch their whole season.
	It's B-U-K-K-Y.
	B-A-N-O-G-U-N.
	Yeah, Bucky Berrigan.
	That's fantastic.
	Champion.
	Anyway, a quote from the research.
	Recent reports have highlighted concerns that the WHO may be given powers to impose certain restrictive measures such as lockdowns, mandatory quarantines, or mandatory vaccines.
	The proposed treaty does not currently have any provisions for such measures, nor grant the WHO such powers.
	It appears that most concerns originate from a single set of proposed amendments to the international health regulations suggested by Bangladesh.
	So it's all complete fucking bullshit.
	So what's what?
	Vaccines have been required or recommended for international travel as long as I've been aware of international travel in my lifetime.
	There is that.
	And I promise that Russell Brand has gone through that plenty of times.
	Yeah, he's traveled to Africa quite a lot.
	Are you expecting me to believe that the guy's never taken any sort of vaccine?
	Fuck off.
	And been happy to do it.
	This is old hat.
	This is standard, regular shit.
	This is nothing new or different.
	The vaccine stuff in general goes back to, you know, Poison the Well narratives.
	We're delving into ancient anti-semitism there.
	I mean, just the idea of getting vaccinated to go travel to a country safely because you don't have the same immunities as, either, whatever, for whatever reason.
	Apparently it's evil.
	You need to go into another country and to protect yourself from diseases that are prevalent in that part of the world.
	Nah, it's evil.
	It's evil, Lauren.
	Oh yeah, fuck me.
	Fuck me, I guess.
	Of course, great, cool.
	Nah, it's evil.
	It's evil.
	Fuck you, you're wrong.
	It's evil.
	The denial of basic reality that we've all lived through is blowing my mind.
	It shouldn't blow my mind.
	It still does.
	Oh my god.
	What's important to note at this stage is that the treaty that we're talking about is in zero draft stage.
	What that means is that basically this document was the first draft and then every single member state is allowed to propose amendments.
	There have been more than 300 proposed amendments and the WHO's working group are in the process of considering which of those should be included in a package of amendments to then be proposed to the World Health Assembly in 2024.
	Sounds democratic, can't be true!
	Right, exactly.
	Which then, yeah, the member states again get to discuss and debate, etc, etc.
	So in essence, there's absolutely nothing to this entire fucking thing about the Pandemic Preparedness Treaty.
	It's all made up bullshit to sow fear and make money.
	And the government, don't you, don't you speak a word to me about worrying about the government tracking you with a cell phone, with like a smartphone in your pocket.
	I'm not being funny, but I don't think Russell Brand is particularly hard to find either.
	I could probably tell you exactly where he is.
	Come on, man.
	I know that that's something that we have to hear constantly.
	I just gotta say it.
	You have a phone.
	Shut up about being trapped.
	Be quiet.
	Just go to bed.
	Go to bed, Gareth.
	Speaking of bullshit, here's some more nonsense and conjecture from Ross.
	Also, it looks like there's relationships between the EU and vaccine manufacturers.
	Primarily in the form of, what's her name?
	Ursula von der Leyen, with her villainous name.
	And who is she again?
	She's the EU Commissioner, I think.
	And didn't she exchange texts with Albert Baller?
	She did.
	Ordering swathes, billions of pounds or euros worth of vaccines without it being ratified, verified or signed off.
	There's considerable power now.
	So it's potentially true that there were text messages between Ursula von der Leyen, who is President of the European Commission, basically the EU, and Albert Baller, CEO of Pfizer.
	There is, however, no way of knowing what was said, because according to the European Commission, text messages, in general, do not contain important information relating to policies, activities and decisions of the Commission, and so they were likely deleted.
	The reality of this situation is that we will never know what was said in those texts, but Russell and Gareth don't let that lack of information slow them down, so they just make up the best lie of bullshit.
	You've made that all up?
	Yeah, 100%.
	It's just the best lie that fits the narrative.
	That's it.
	That was just complete horseshit.
	Huh!
	Yeah, so nobody has any idea what texts were sent to who and why.
	And to be honest, I don't really care.
	From my personal perspective, even if Ursula von der Leyen did say, yes, the EU needs billions of vaccines, please, yes, we will give you lots of money.
	That's pretty much her fucking job.
	I don't really care.
	Especially mid-pandemic, because the EU, I don't know if you're aware, was behind a lot of countries because of the size of it and the kind of bureaucracy involved.
	They were behind a lot of countries in terms of actually receiving vaccines.
	So the US and the UK got vaccines before the EU did, which you wouldn't expect, but I imagine they were pretty desperate for them at that time.
	So yes, I think texting Albert Baller and being like, mate, please just send us some fucking vaccine.
	It's a reasonable thing.
	I wouldn't care if it did happen.
	And in the US, there was a lot of PPE and stuff that hospitals had to bid on and throw money at.
	That was disgusting.
	So that makes sense.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	OK.
	Not ideal, but... Who gives a fuck at the end of the day?
	It's her job!
	So in this next clip, Brand weighs in on Brexit.
	Joy.
	Of course in this country, the United Kingdom we're in, we Brexited ourselves right out of Europe and that was widely regarded as a symbol of sort of, I don't know, racism, troglodytism, foolishness, and of course there's been an astonishing economic downturn in the subsequent period, but I feel that people want to be able to control their own lives to such a degree that even symbolic opportunities to exit Economic and bureaucratic entities like the EU that are non-representative and plainly have interesting relationships with pharmaceutical companies, big tech, big corporations, look to impose measures that could look like social credit gateways, gateway to things like social credit scores.
	I can understand why the EU is viewed with cynicism.
	Yeah, you can.
	Not social credit.
	Not social credit.
	Get.
	The fuck.
	Out of here.
	Hey, we have one!
	Yeah, it's called a credit score.
	Since 1989.
	It's not been here forever.
	It is not intrinsic to human existence.
	And it absolutely is a social credit score.
	And it has everything to do with Okay, alright, alright.
	We've been triggered.
	My house, my home.
	There's a couple of buzzwords that, like, just set my skin on fire.
	And that's one of those things.
	And guess what?
	My credit score sucks.
	So yes, I'm biased.
	But it does not mean that, like, people, okay.
	Jobs won't hire you if you have a shitty credit score.
	What else would a social credit score be there for?
	Also, how are you going to get better?
	Oh, it's okay.
	It's a whole thing.
	Credit scores should be abolished because they're complete fucking made-up bullshit.
	It is so discriminatory.
	It's insane.
	There are so many things wrong with them.
	Anyway, back to what Brand was saying.
	I bet you've got a totally different thing that was also wrong.
	Yes, yes.
	I apologize.
	No, no, no.
	It's okay.
	It's okay.
	It's definitely worth saying.
	So, for a start, right, there was literally nothing symbolic about leaving the EU.
	I don't know why the fuck he said that.
	And I'm not going to stand on my... For him, maybe.
	Maybe.
	I'm not going to stand on my soapbox for too long about this, but the biggest issue about Brexit was the campaign of outright lies from Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Cambridge Analytica advocating for people to vote to leave the EU.
	Yes, it did pull the xenophobes and racists out of the woodwork, but that was a minority compared to the huge swaths of people who were lied to and led down a path of misinformation.
	Even now, people will insist that the EU is undemocratic and goes against our sovereignty when members of the European Parliament are elected.
	We had elections for them in this country!
	And laws or regulations are debated and voted on by those elected members from different countries in the European Parliament.
	And finally, of course the EU has relations with big tech pharmaceutical companies and big corporations.
	All governments do.
	These organisations are massive parts of a country's economy and quite obviously are important in dealing with things like new technologies, medicine or whatever the fuck else these places are making that said country might want.
	Like, it's just fantastically stupid.
	They just listed social infrastructure!
	Yeah!
	How dare you?
	How dare you acknowledge each other's existence?
	What?
	How fucking stupid.
	Alright.
	Well, but you know what?
	The thing is, it's not stupid.
	It's calculated.
	And it's motivated.
	Well, yeah.
	Yeah, there is that.
	I think it's worth pointing out that this is a calculation.
	It's stupid if he genuinely believes it.
	It's stupid then.
	And that's the question that we still don't have the answer to.
	Yeah, the EU thing being undemocratic, which he did infer in that clip as well, which pisses me off.
	I remember the 2014 MEP elections, which were the last ones we had, and UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party, Nigel Farage's fucking party, won most of the seats, basically.
	And do you know what they did?
	Do you know what they did?
	They took a paycheck and they barely ever showed up.
	That's what they did.
	Representing their country.
	Representing their country, they took the money and didn't fucking attend.
	It was disgraceful.
	Oh wow, really?
	Yeah, they barely ever showed up.
	It was only certain things.
	And they're there calling the fucking EU undemocratic, etc.
	It's like, well, it's not democratic at the moment because we're not representing- Because you're not showing up!
	We're not represented by anyone, you daft cunts!
	Oh my god, it was just... Honestly, I would happily fucking feed Nigel Farage into a blender at this point.
	But anyway, that's... It's not an actual threat, I'm being funny or something.
	Cat?
	There we go, there's a cat.
	Yeah, I'd feed him into a blender politically.
	In Minecraft, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	So, Next Brand apparently believes that the lack of trust in media, government and other institutions is a bad thing.
	So, like, what you don't want is a digital dystopia in which your freedom is endlessly diminished and we're ushered into a black-cracked mirror world without due process, when we're losing contact with deep emotional truths, where nearly half of all men think about ending their own lives, where there's a deep suspicion in institutions, where half of us don't believe in God and barely any of us believe in the government, where none of us trust the media.
	We don't want to turn ourselves into little blocks of data that are ushered about by regulations that you never voted for.
	It's you doing that!
	Yeah.
	You're the one causing the lack of trust, you fuck!
	It just feels like him telling on us, like all he's saying is telling on himself.
	It's really...
	I just, yeah, I don't- I wouldn't know what to think if I was listening to- I mean, I guess I would- I don't know.
	I don't understand.
	The cognitive dissonance- The audience experience here, like- The cognitive dissonance that must be present in the audience right now.
	It's like, yeah, God, I don't trust any of the media or the government.
	That is a bad thing.
	Also- Why could I possibly- Also, I'm gonna- Where could I get those ideas from?
	Also, Russell is telling me I shouldn't trust the media or the government.
	You know what?
	He's got a point.
	Like, oh, you're just going to run yourself around in circles.
	It's like an endless fucking hamster wheel.
	Okay.
	And I do want to say, like, that's what breaks my heart.
	So last episode, we met Caleb.
	Oh, Caleb.
	Yeah.
	Caleb's been in my thoughts and prayers.
	Yeah, we've been texting about Caleb as like a totem for, like, these kids.
	So you're listening to Russell Brannan and it's just sad because...
	The thing is, I don't blame... I don't necessarily blame Caleb for falling for it, because if this is what you're being fed... No, it's not Caleb's fault!
	Yeah, no, it's not the audience's fault.
	It's not Caleb's fault.
	Much in the same way that Brexit, I don't blame the people who were dragged down that path.
	They were fucking lied to.
	They were sold a bill of goods that was not true.
	And yeah, that happens when you've got dishonest actors like this.
	Fuck wit.
	Yeah, my heart breaks for Caleb.
	I'm not mad at Caleb.
	No, a hundred percent.
	Maybe his taste in decor wasn't great, but he was a sweet kid.
	Pulp fiction poster.
	I mean, a little dated, but good movie.
	Gaming chair.
	Hot topic.
	Gaming chair.
	Yeah, that's fair.
	That's fair.
	But you know, he's living his best life up in there.
	I'm old.
	I don't get it.
	It's fine.
	I'm probably wrong.
	It's okay.
	No, I get a gaming chair.
	You know, my current chair is getting a little worn out at this point.
	Maybe think about it.
	Well, here's the thing.
	We're friends, so if you buy a red and black gaming chair that looks like you bought it in the Matrix... Nah, I'll probably tell you anyway.
	You definitely would be the first thing you said.
	It would be the first thing you said.
	Be like, oh, did you get a trench coat and shades with that?
	Like a hundred percent.
	That would be what came out of your mouth.
	I pre-apologize.
	That's okay, I do have to say.
	You don't need to.
	Y'all have gotten to know me a little bit by now.
	If I made that decision, I would stand by that decision, right?
	That's where I would go.
	And I am 100% behind that.
	Yes.
	If I bought one of those chairs, the first time you saw it, I would be wearing sunglasses.
	100%.
	You'd just take a picture of the chair.
	You'd be like, deal with it.
	I would photoshop a picture of Keanu Reeves sat in the chair.
	I do want to point out.
	But I'd make it John Wick Keanu Reeves just to piss you off.
	Oh, nope.
	Because here's the thing, his dog died.
	And they killed his dog in a way that hurt my feelings.
	Oh yeah, no, no.
	He's right.
	Everything he's done is fine.
	I just meant in terms of getting the wrong Keanu in there.
	Oh, I see, I see.
	Subtle digs.
	In terms of a plot device, yeah, killing someone's dog, that's a very quick fucking way to get the audience on side, isn't it?
	The entire world when they saw that was just like, yes, yes, murder everyone.
	Murder every single other human.
	So I do want to point something out because y'all have got to know me a little bit and I do come off, I'm very passionate.
	I have, I have a big feelings about a lot of stuff and some of those feelings can sound a little hostile.
	I know.
	It can sound a little hostile and some are, uh, but the passion, like the, the passionate among us, like it goes both ways.
	So I can feel kind of very negatively about stuff, but I also really care a lot about people And what they go through so I'm not being facetious when I'm talking about like my heart hurts for Caleb and those people and even like anybody that's being affected by this type of like misinformation disinfo content.
	It hurts my heart to think about and so I can sound like mean and pissed.
	A friend, very dear friend, told me many years ago, Lauren, you could recite the Lord's Prayer and it would sound fucked up and mean.
	And yeah, that's probably true.
	Fine.
	But, it's not all bad.
	It's certainly not coming from a bad place.
	I'm upset because this has real life impacts on people and I feel very passionately about it.
	Absolutely.
	These are people who've been led so far down this path that they no longer live in the same reality that we're in.
	That was one of the things that became abundantly clear when we were interacting with Bran's actual followers.
	Trying to get into a conversation about the war in the Ukraine, etc.
	It was talking in circles.
	Underlying everything was conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, and there's no way that you were going to be able to convince them that that was bullshit.
	And it has real-world effects on people.
	I have very little but empathy for Bran's audience.
	audiences of other shitheads like him, you know, because it's a tough road that they've been led down and they don't even
	know it.
	Yeah. It's rough.
	That's the worst part.
	So I do, like, I feel like I'm going to sound shitty.
	Sometimes. I feel.
	They're genuinely shitty feelings.
	And I'll be honest, I'll stand by them if I believe it.
	Just because hyperbole is fun, but there's a core to it.
	And I do feel a lot of compassion.
	And it's honestly what makes this stuff hard to hear sometimes.
	I feel it very strongly that it's hurting.
	I know that there are people listening right now who are being hurt, but people in your lives are frustrating you and upsetting you repeating this content because someone's making money off of it and they're taking advantage.
	Yep.
	And I think about you.
	I don't know you, I think about you.
	And I feel very strongly about it.
	I guess I just want to say that because it's easy to just be shitty and it comes from a place that maybe doesn't sound as shitty.
	A couple of listeners have pointed out that their close family members or close friends are super into Russell Brand.
	That sucks.
	You have my commiserations, you really do.
	Yeah, same.
	The problem that we're yet to deal with is de-radicalization and getting people out of those kind of thought patterns.
	The consensus is still out without it being a process that takes literal years.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	But yeah, you have our solidarity at the very least.
	Absolutely!
	And listen, I get why Russell isn't offering solutions.
	Solutions are hard.
	Yeah, solutions are tough.
	Complaining, however?
	No, that we can do.
	Aces.
	I got that.
	Yeah, that we can do.
	I can complain for my country.
	That's fine.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And Russell's going to complain for money in this next clip.
	Apparently 20% of our vaccines will be controlled by the WHO.
	So like they're going to have the ability to regulate and control us.
	And what's this?
	20% of all pandemic products will be in which way controlled?
	Through partnerships with the WHO?
	Yeah so basically yeah so I mean this is in this form is the one of the issues that we had during the pandemic in terms of kind of pro-vaccine thing was that vaccines weren't spread distributed equally to nations.
	Poor folks.
	That's right nations that couldn't afford them because obviously the vaccine makers what they wanted to do was to stop the pandemic that's obviously was their main aim here.
	That's why we're giving them to everyone, except for people that we can't make money from.
	Hold on then, isn't at least part of the reason to get money?
	No, it will be unconscionable, Albert Baller, to make a profit from this product.
	Two years later, biggest profit ever!
	Yeah, Albert Baller never said that, as I covered in the last episode.
	So this seems like something Brand would agree with, right?
	Making sure that the poorer countries have access to pandemic-related products in the event of a future pandemic.
	He's all about raising up the little guy, you know, power to the poorest people.
	He's all about, you know, addressing inequality, right?
	Watch where they take this.
	That's not a conspiracy theory, is it?
	No, it isn't.
	That's money.
	I guess what their point is, if we control 20% of them, now we can distribute them. But I guess the other side of
	it is if they're controlling 20% of vaccines and then you have, for example, Bill Gates making profits
	from vaccines and certain vaccine manufacturers. What do you lot think?
	Let us know in the chat and the comments if you think that this kind of legislation, imposed by unelected bureaucracies, that are funded by ultimately private interests, albeit in the guise of philanthropic organisations, does that leave us open to undue influence?
	Is it potentially something that could be corrupt?
	Particularly when you couple it and it can't be decoupled from the ability for the WHO to regulate, to bypass national sovereignty.
	As more and more it's becoming plain that democracy is irrelevant.
	Don't you want more power in your own life?
	More control over your community?
	Not less.
	You don't want to be moving further and further away.
	That's the march towards globalism and the new order that we're continually told is the territory of the crackpot.
	Globalism and the New Order.
	He just missed out world in there.
	He has said it before, but didn't quite go New World Order, as is the trope.
	It's important to point out that talk of globalists and the New World Order are often coded antisemitism, and Brand has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories before this.
	The question is whether he's aware of what he's doing, and it's something I hope to get to the bottom of.
	That's also not a question for me.
	I don't care.
	If you do it, and someone calls your attention to it, and you keep doing it, because he has to just look very, very briefly.
	This is assuming someone's called his attention to it.
	I don't know.
	I don't know if he lives in such a fucking isolated bubble.
	I don't know.
	But if he's in an isolated bubble, that's also his fault.
	Oh yeah, 100%.
	I'm with you.
	I do think that motive matters though.
	I do think it's important in studying the character that is Russell Brand as to whether he knows what he's doing or not.
	There's a certain degree of malice that is involved if he does know what he's doing.
	It's a question of whether he is an outright anti-Semite or whether he's doing these things kind of incidentally in order for attention and money.
	Neither are good and they both lead to the same fucking outcome.
	But for my purposes, from an academic perspective, I would definitely like to know.
	Totally!
	I think from a moral perspective.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, I'm a godless heathen, so I don't even know where I would get a moral code of any kind!
	Aren't we both?
	I mean, but I do actually have a very strict understanding of morals and ethics that I try to apply in my own life as much as possible, and I hope everybody else does too!
	I would say you have more of one than he does.
	Yeah, because I think it's a bad thing to...
	Did you notice there how helping the poorest countries in the world suddenly became about giving Bill Gates money, therefore making it evil?
	I guess Brand really wants equity and equality, but that pesky Microsoft man keeps getting in the way.
	I know this is simple, but it's a non-profit.
	Well, this is what I was about to say.
	For the record, any profits made from investments by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation go back into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a charity.
	This is only a bad thing if you believe the conspiracy nonsense that's tied up in it.
	Also, did you notice again that Brand had no clue what Gareth was getting out there?
	He had no idea.
	Let me wind the clip back for just a little bit and just watch this part again.
	That's not a conspiracy theory, is it?
	No, it isn't.
	That's money.
	I guess what their point is, if we control 20% of them, now we can distribute them.
	But I guess the other side of it is if they're controlling 20% of vaccines and then you have, for example, Bill Gates making profits from vaccines.
	Investing in certain vaccine manufacturers.
	What do you lot think?
	Oh my god.
	He's free associating.
	Yeah, that's it.
	He's just throwing out words.
	He's pre-associating.
	Yeah, literally.
	He's trying to guess at what gets...
	He has no idea what the fuck they're actually talking about.
	This is all Gareth Roy.
	He is the one 100% leading this conversation.
	conversation.
	And Brand is just grasping at straws trying to hope he hits on the right one.
	It also wasn't super clear what he was getting at.
	I kind of don't necessarily blame Russell Brand for just grasping because none of it really made sense.
	Equally, you would think that, you know, in a production meeting beforehand, maybe they would discuss this.
	Maybe Russell would have an idea of the importance of this story and the content therein.
	I do not believe under any circumstances they discuss any of this before they start recording.
	A little bit of professionalism would go a long way, boys.
	I think that's a bridge too far.
	You are probably not wrong.
	He's just so obviously clueless.
	We're going to skip ahead a bit now to Brand welcoming in the MAGA crowd.
	Can I say one more thing?
	Yep, here we go.
	So, I will say the non-profit situation, there are plenty of loopholes to launder money and hide money for corporations, for individuals, all that stuff.
	of all that stuff.
	So I don't want to disregard the issues with nonprofits and Yeah.
	Yeah.
	making profits when maybe you shouldn't be.
	But Russell should be taking issue with the regulations of nonprofits,
	not nonprofits themselves.
	They operate this way because it's how they're structured.
	And that's, places like America allow for a lot of tax loopholes that could be closed, but they're not.
	So he's right to be concerned, but he's looking in the wrong place for the profit.
	But then again, as was with the ultra processed foods, you know, he's going to talk himself in circles because you can't trust the government, but also you need the government to regulate.
	Yeah.
	You're fucked either way, according to him, basically.
	Right, let's see if I can actually get this clip to play.
	You can't just dismiss those voices.
	That's why, if you are a person, and you're very welcome here, and we absolutely bloody well love you, the super, inter, MAGA, or whatever, start thinking about the kind of alliances that you might afford, because no lesser person than Ben Shapiro said that he would be willing to form alliances with people from BLM and the trans movement.
	In order to have more localised democracy, without localised power you're not going to get anything.
	What kind of systemic change do you think we're discussing here?
	I don't know, you've never made it clear even once.
	Yeah, there's no fucking way that Ben Shapiro would operate in good faith with BLM or the trans community.
	They are his arch-nemeses.
	Further, I can't find the quote that Brand is referring to here.
	I imagine it's in Russell's appearance on The Ben Shapiro Show last year, which I don't think we're going to cover because I can't fucking stand that man.
	No, I don't want him.
	Audience, if anyone does find it, let me know, but please don't spend hours trawling through Ben Shapiro's content.
	Personally, I'd rather shit in my hands and clap.
	I, oh boy.
	Yeah.
	It's just, it's so, it's so no for me, dog.
	It's so disingenuous.
	I mean, but he's also like Russell is accepting things that Tucker Carlson said about himself or just say what sounds good in the minute.
	And like, and Ben Shapiro, I'm sure it was saying something to like placate A more broad view of social inclusion that Russell Brand was saying to him in the moment, and he just said something to placate him.
	Yeah, I have little doubt that that is exactly what happened.
	They were talking shit and Ben Shapiro went, yeah, sure, I'd talk to the trans community, yeah.
	I hear that short asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	I talked to them before I found my rifle.
	Looking for his evil trap door button to shoot their chair into.
	He's got a Rube Goldberg machine that drops an anvil on their head or something.
	He is basically a cartoon character.
	There's a lot of shit talking through this episode so we're gonna skip ahead again but there was yet another moment here for Russell where the mask seems to slip.
	We never know what he's like.
	Where do you go to my lovely?
	What are you like?
	You're not alone.
	I'm angry.
	I'm sad.
	I have quite intense emotions.
	Hold on.
	What are you doing?
	Using your free speech on me?
	Do you think that was a joke alongside his previous talk of feeling a deep sadness, anxiety and stress?
	Do you think what he just said was a joke?
	Because I don't.
	Here's the thing.
	I mentioned this last episode, too.
	I hear very relatable thoughts and feelings coming from Russell Brand as an emotional, chaotic carer about things in the world.
	That's my sister.
	I hear my sister.
	And I believe that to be true, that you have very intense feelings.
	And I think it's also easier to kind of like brush it off as like, oh, that's whatever.
	Well, he has diagnosed bipolar as well, so I have little doubt that he is feeling those things.
	The question is, I don't know, this seems to be coming up fairly often and I question whether he's doing anything about it is the problem.
	Yeah, I don't know whether he's medicated or not.
	I have no idea.
	My guess would be probably not, knowing his views on pharmaceuticals and anything that alters your brain, basically.
	So my guess would be no, but I could be wrong.
	The honest answer is I don't know, but yeah.
	And as a bipolar person who is medicated, listen, it's not super.
	Don't really have to, yeah.
	It's not super, but I also know that it's important to, like, you gotta manage it.
	Yeah, you gotta have some way of dealing with it.
	Yeah, like, you gotta, like, admit where you're at and that's okay.
	But, like, Russell, maybe the stuff you're doing is making it worse.
	There is also that.
	That's my postulation as he's feeding into his own anxieties.
	His own anxieties and stress as well of doing the show, having this big high production fucking thing.
	Well just saying, incendiary things that are designed to upset people that might, you know, that might not do great for brain chemistry.
	The job that he's made for himself here is not easy.
	No!
	No!
	Not at all!
	It takes a lot of different skills for him to do this.
	And a lot of time.
	I imagine there is actually a lot of time that gets spent doing this.
	I imagine Russell's schedule is pretty fucking full.
	Particularly between all the other bullshit he does.
	But yeah, he's not helping himself, is my insight.
	Which is his right, as a human being.
	True, true, but my job is to point it out.
	Not the best plan.
	Not the best plan in my estimation, but do your due, I guess.
	In last week's episode I said we'd cover that Brand thought he could change Dawkins's mind and I come with receipts so here it is.
	This is a genuine question from Flyguy.
	Why do I need to watch your interview with Dickie Dawkins?
	You don't need to but you should because it's an interesting discussion on the nature of God and him a devout quite Rigid.
	Atheist.
	You've got to say so.
	Yeah, he's not going to change his mind now.
	And to be honest, I was very much had that in mind at the beginning of the conversation.
	I didn't go into my conversation with Richard Dawkins thinking I'm going to change his mind.
	But there was a moment where I was looking into his eyes and I felt like he was moved.
	There was a bit where like, uh, I suppose if you had to self tested basically for various, let's call it neurodiversity is the term now.
	You know, he's amazing.
	He's so clever, but he's like, no, I don't think so.
	About everything.
	Right, so more of the autism insinuations.
	Cheers, Russell.
	Oh my god!
	Also, the balls on this joker!
	Straight up!
	You think that you're gonna win Richard Dawkins over for the Lord in an afternoon?
	It does make you wonder, you know, I mean, he's joked about being the Messiah, etc.
	for years, but I do think there is a bit of a complex there, you know.
	His recent tour of, quote, stand-up that he did was called 33 because Partly because that's the year that he thought he was going to die.
	He thought he was going to die at the age 33, which coincidentally is the age that Jesus died.
	So, did you notice that there was a cut there as well?
	I did.
	Not ours, right?
	No, not ours.
	There was an edit in there.
	There was an edit in there.
	And so that wasn't me.
	Also, I'm deeply interested to know what the hell these guys leave on the cutting room floor.
	No shit!
	Given the things that they're willing to say.
	I'm, again, I am dead against getting a local subscription of any kind to join these live streams and I really don't want to see the state of the chat.
	But I would be interested.
	I would be interested in knowing, like, what gets left out of these and how much gets left out as well.
	Because they make it very much appear like it's, you know, one fluid thing from start to finish.
	It's quite well done in that respect.
	And I am very curious to know that.
	So I don't know.
	If we ever get to the point where, you know, there's an insider who's already subscribed or whatever, then I'd be curious to go down that road.
	But then you just have to watch more.
	I would, but you know what?
	I'm doing the thing anyway.
	I'm down that road anyway.
	It could be half an hour of like, and here's why the Jews are bad.
	We don't know.
	This is the thing.
	I really want to find out.
	It could also just be the chat itself.
	It could just be a dark corner of the internet.
	It could be complete bollocks.
	We need you healthy!
	Don't worry, it's fine.
	I would be fascinated.
	I don't think it's something I would do often.
	Especially because of the kind of inherent interactions and awareness of Brand's audience and what they're saying at the same time.
	I don't think I would like that very much.
	But I would be very curious to know what it is that they're talking about.
	It already feels like anything goes.
	Right!
	I mean, it's Rumble.
	You can say Nazi shit on Rumble.
	So I'm curious, yeah, what the fuck they're leaving out here.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	Right, so next up, Gareth Roy calls Richard Dawkins a prick, and we learn what Dawkins thought of Brand's ideas.
	Yeah, there's a bit where I go, look mate, you're taking all the fun out of everything.
	I really got into it.
	You really challenged him.
	Look, there's some good bits where he goes, listen, you're on the brink of making a good point there.
	That was the most he conceded.
	And there's a bit where I talk about Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-founder, the co-establisher of the theory of evolution, a contemporary of Darwin.
	That was a highlight.
	That came in quite early in the conversation and I think really established me as a serious interviewer.
	What's really funny, you can see in the promo, I go, do you like my ideas?
	Have you been persuaded now?
	And he goes, I thought your ideas were interesting and erratic.
	That's a pretty good summary.
	Interesting and erratic, Richard Dawkins.
	My favourite part of that clip was, you really challenged him.
	And you can tell Gareth Roy genuinely believes that Russell really challenged him in that interview.
	You challenged him because he did not think he felt like he could leave!
	You had him trapped in a room!
	You weren't challenging his ideas, you were challenging the old individual who you were abusing for your own entertainment!
	You were challenging his health.
	I don't think they challenged him in any ideological perspective.
	I think he was a bit baffled and a bit blindsided by most of it until about 40 minutes into the interview.
	Yeah, that's like the best you could possibly... Oh my gosh.
	Okay, yeah, you really challenged him.
	Yeah, you really challenged me too, buddy.
	You really That made me chuckle.
	And Russell was talking over it, but yeah, after Dawkins said, you know, you're halfway
	towards a point there, yeah, Gareth Rory did say, "Oh, what a prick."
	So, yeah.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Okay, man.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	That's my- So.
	Hey, uh, be- okay, like, I mean, here's the thing, and what I really feel about the free speech argument in general.
	Everybody's entitled to their opinion, and you put your opinion out there, and then everybody else gets the same vote to think you're an asshole.
	Yep, that's the way that works.
	Everybody gets to have their free opinion, and they're free to think you're a dick, and he can think that Richard Dawkins is a dick, and I can think he's a dick.
	You know what, Richard Dawkins probably is a bit of a prick in some ways.
	Oh, I mean, I got that loud and clear.
	He didn't deserve to be fucked.
	It was unpleasant to listen to what he had to say.
	Yeah, you know, he has some ideas.
	Sure.
	And we're all still breathing.
	And we're all still existing in the world.
	And it's fine.
	Okay, so into the meats.
	I feel like if you put Richard Dawkins, like if the input was Richard Dawkins like chat GPT, those are the answers you would get if you asked him those questions.
	It didn't seem incongruous to What Richard Dawkins has said up to this point.
	So then don't be surprised when you invite him on your show and then he says the things that he's made very clear in a million other forums over a number of years.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's the kind of the rage that Russell felt that Dawkins wasn't being persuaded.
	Wild!
	Right, so into the meat of this content we go.
	We have Brand's editorial on the WHO, this pandemic preparedness treaty and how the WHO get their money.
	And by the way, there's nothing I trust more than someone telling me something is all facts.
	Have a look at this.
	This is all facts and it tells you how the WHO is funded.
	Here's the news.
	No, here's the effing bloody well news.
	Thanks for watching Fox News News.
	No, here's the fucking news.
	Remember that conspiracy theory that the WHO would be able to close borders and enforce vaccine passports?
	It's actually going to happen.
	So is it worth knowing who funds the WHO?
	I'd say so.
	We are talking today about the WHO's new proposal that they have the ability to impose on your country, wherever you are in the world, because it's the World Health Organization.
	The World Health Organization wants to be able to impose certain restrictions.
	So because it's the World Health Organization, does he think that that means that they can just do whatever they want to any country in the world?
	Right, so there are 194 member states who are part of the WHO, which is nearly every country in the world.
	But the thing is, membership isn't mandatory.
	If a country didn't like what the WHO were doing, they could just leave.
	And even then, just because you're a member state, it doesn't mean you must comply with anything and everything the WHO says.
	Like, this became abundantly clear during the pandemic.
	Yeah, we all just lived through it.
	Also, the national baseball competition in America is called the World Series.
	Just because you call it a thing doesn't mean it is actually that.
	So it was called World Health Organization as opposed to International Health Organization because at the time when it was formed, they wanted to kind of illustrate that it was supposed to be an aspirationally global thing.
	It was supposed to be inclusive of everyone.
	That was the idea.
	Acknowledging that health affects the entire world.
	Yes, yes.
	Things happening elsewhere in the world, things happening in China for instance, affect the rest of the world.
	That's what happened.
	Disease and any kind of health ramifications.
	Disease, environmental pollution, they do not respect borders.
	That's kind of the point.
	No, no.
	Industrial accidents.
	Nuclear power plants going haywire.
	Yeah, so yeah again Russell, the people you and your countrymen elected to run the country decided to keep up membership of the WHO and the UK has been a member state since 1946 as has the USA.
	It's a bit embarrassing to suggest that he was Unaware, yeah.
	It's clearly like a bugbear for him, because that's the one.
	I thought that there were like trends that I would see, like the 9-11 and CIA.
	That was just for that particular guest.
	But the WHO is a thing that sticks in his crawl all the time.
	Yes, that is a regular feature.
	It feels like it's a buzzword and not a thing he understands.
	Well, he definitely doesn't understand it.
	Either he doesn't or he is intentionally lying.
	because yeah it just it doesn't function in any way near the way he thinks it
	does as is illustrated in this next clip So how do the World Health Organization even get their money and their legitimacy?
	I don't remember voting for them.
	I don't remember being asked if I wanted a World Health Organization.
	Well apparently we've got one.
	Oh that's all very lovely for you.
	So Again, 1946.
	1946.
	Fucking political expert and awakened wonder Russell Brand had no clue that the WHO existed, apparently.
	It's entirely reasonable to feel disenfranchised by our current system.
	That's entirely reasonable.
	But also understanding that there has to be Some kind of bureaucracy to organize international efforts for the safety of the world and the health of the world.
	We have to have, like, somebody's got to be in charge!
	Like, it's just, I, oh man.
	I'd love it.
	I'd love it if he engaged one real point.
	There's plenty of complaints to be made.
	Yeah.
	Pick one!
	Yeah.
	He doesn't.
	Hate to break it to you.
	So in this next clip, Brand has a weird take on charitable donations.
	Who funds them?
	What are their intentions?
	I mean, presumably part of it is really helping people and providing medicines.
	But one way of working out what the intention of an organisation is, is looking at where they get their money from under the assumption that people won't give them money if that organisation is not going to be advantageous to the economic ends preferred by the donor.
	That's a fair assumption.
	So what he's just said is that a donor won't give money to an organisation unless the organisation is going to be economically beneficial to the donor.
	Does he just not understand how charities work?
	of this new proposal that they're able to impose on your country and therefore you,
	regulations that you didn't vote for.
	So what he's just said is that a donor won't give money to an organisation unless the organisation
	is going to be economically beneficial to the donor. Does he just not understand how charities
	work? Is this the fundamental problem that we've got here?
	He just, you know, he assumes that that anyone who donates to the Gates Foundation therefore
	wants something out of it.
	I could donate money to them now.
	Should I expect a return?
	Is that the way this works in his head?
	The thing is, there's a kernel of truth in that, especially in America, there are a million little loopholes that Do make it advantageous to donate a lot of money to a foundation.
	Yeah, you get things written off in your taxes, etc.
	Right.
	All that.
	But it's not like you're then going to get a return from the charity.
	The charity aren't going to give you money back.
	You know, it's not going to be some kind of, you know, that's what he's insinuating here.
	Right, right, right.
	I am kind of trying to shore up his argument more than he is.
	Yeah, I'm giving him more credit than it's worth.
	I know.
	Yeah, no, he's not making this argument at all.
	He's not saying tax loopholes are the problem.
	He's saying that no one gives to charity unless they expect something out of it.
	I'm even filling in the holes.
	In the vagaries he's saying, for my own bias.
	I feel like that's valid to at least point out that this is how this works.
	What you have is a legitimate grievance.
	What he has is nonsense.
	He just, you know, I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I don't know how he thinks any of the world works.
	I don't see Al flatline, like, emotionally.
	Yeah, just short circuit.
	You can see me do it all the time.
	Yeah, the short circuit, like, where I, like, build up and then, yeah, the circuit breaks and I just go dark for a second and have to reboot.
	I get to a point and I'm just like, what the fuck is it that's going through your head?
	I fundamentally don't understand your position.
	It makes no sense.
	It's like there's no other point he could possibly make than just to be fear-mongering and to be incendiary for the sake of being incendiary.
	It's kind of wild to listen to him complain about how no one respects the government or institutions and then it's exactly what he's doing.
	That's his entire project!
	It's bizarre.
	He's got a second half to this line of thought.
	Let's have a listen to Margaret Chan, former director of the WHO, explaining how it's funded.
	You ask an excellent question.
	If I tell you WHO as an organisation only 30% of my budget I mean, how far into this video are we going to get without saying, it's Bill Gates!
	In the end, Bill Gates is going to turn up, isn't he, with some money?
	But let's let Margaret Chan have her moment.
	Dignified, a hat, begging around the world.
	Anyone got a few quid?
	Anyone got a few dollars?
	Anyone got an agenda?
	And when they give us the money, they are highly linked to their Preferences.
	Okay, here's some money.
	And I've also got some preferences.
	That's how we've always understood the relationships between organisations like the WHO, various national governments, and the corporate world to be.
	That money is funnelled in, expectations are funnelled out.
	Right?
	Let me know in the chat.
	I'm curious what expectations he thinks the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would have of the WHO in order to somehow make a profit for a charity.
	I, again, I don't understand.
	Well, and, uh, so what she said agrees with him.
	He's just filling in a lot.
	Just filling in kind of way too much.
	They're coming at it from very different perspectives.
	So what Margaret Chan is saying is that we need more predictable funding because having to beg every year, it gets in the way of the entire organization functioning.
	Yeah, you can't establish something consistent.
	Yeah, you can't establish a consistent organization if you don't know where the money's going to come from.
	There are other problems with it that we'll get into shortly, actually.
	Maybe even problems inherently in charity itself.
	Yep, yep, there's other questions there as well.
	But yeah, I just don't understand, with his conception, how a charitable foundation, I mean, is it the vaccines?
	Because the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation They did own part of BioNTech, which then produced the vaccines for Pfizer.
	Does he think it's for that?
	But then Pfizer were going to make a fuckload of money anyway, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, I think, over this last year donated like $400 million or something.
	That would then cut into their profits, etc.
	I don't know what he thinks happens.
	We'll get into how that money actually gets spent because the WHO don't hide it, funnily enough.
	But in the meantime, let's get into some of Russell's evidence about the WHO funding.
	So, who's top of the list of donors?
	Germany.
	Who's second?
	The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation alone is responsible for 88% of the total amount donated by philanthropic foundations to the WHO.
	Over the years, the billionaire philanthropists... Are we still calling them billionaire philanthropists?
	I mean, like, aren't philanthropists?
	They're just doing stuff because they're love of mankind or humankind, right?
	Over the years, the billionaire philanthropists have become the WHO's second biggest donor, making the health agency heavily dependent on their support to keep functioning.
	As Margaret Chan said, they have to go round with their hat out and these people have preferences.
	I wonder what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's preference is.
	So here we have a misleading statistic.
	That quote there was, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone is responsible for over 88% of the total amount donated by philanthropic foundations to the WHO.
	How many massive philanthropic organizations like that exist, let alone donate to the WHO?
	So is it any particular wonder?
	By using this statistic, Brand is intentionally conflating the amount of funding the Gates Foundation gives to the WHO, using a massive number to make it appear as though basically, without Bill Gates, the WHO would crumble and fall apart.
	Take a guess, Lauren, a wild guess if you want, at the percentage of the total WHO budget that the Gates Foundation provides.
	Oh no.
	Oh God.
	Any number, doesn't matter.
	Fire away.
	2020 2026.9% is the actual answer. As of December 2022, based on the WHO's audited financial
	20?
	20.
	20?
	statements for the year ended 31st of December 2022. And that that's, that's 6.9% is behind
	both Germany and the United States, who come in at 14.49% and 10.35% of the WHO's total
	budget respectively.
	So not just Germany as Brand asserted.
	It's curious that he left that out.
	I'm not sure whether it's ignorance or not wanting to mix conspiracies.
	Because if you start bringing the US government into it, then you've got to go down that whole road.
	CIA probably come into it.
	Oh my god, right?
	My complaint would be, yeah, consolidating wealth to the degree that we've consolidated wealth on the planet is an issue.
	Anyone with too much wealth has too much power because they've hoarded the wealth.
	That would be the complaint, in my estimation, to address on your platform.
	There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire.
	Let's start from there.
	Thank you!
	So this may shock you, but next we have Brand making a disingenuous argument.
	Global health experts say that while this money is welcome, it gives the Gates and outsized influence and underscores the chronic funding problem the WHO faces, even as it contends with more and more health crises.
	Over 80% of the WHO's funding relies on voluntary contributions, meaning any amount of money given freely by donors, whether member states, NGOs, philanthropic organizations, or other private entities.
	The voluntary contributions are typically earmarked for specific projects or diseases, meaning the WHO cannot freely decide how to use them.
	I mean, that means their whole legitimacy, or at least 80% of the legitimacy of the organisation, is up for question.
	80% of their funding comes from people or organisations, as it just listed, that say, you can have this money if you agree to...
	And we can all fill that in depending on how much we've educated ourselves of the events of the last couple of years, the involvement of the pharmaceutical industry in various health crises, not just the obvious one over the last few years, but the continent of Africa has had all sorts of peculiar stuff inflicted upon it, as well as the nation of India.
	This is an ongoing problem that merely became concentrated and some would say more visible and perhaps even relevant during the pandemic because it affected everybody in ways that became observable, if not relatable.
	So, right, we're gonna get into the weeds a little bit here.
	Right, there are two different types of funding that the WHO receives.
	Assessed funding and voluntary funding.
	Assessed funding is a percentage of money based on a country's GDP that every member state must pay, sort of like a membership fee.
	Membership dues, yeah, right, totally.
	This is the thing that they want to increase to make funding more predictable and grant them more flexibility because essentially the WHO can do whatever they want with that money within their remit.
	The same thing that Brand was just a second ago railing against because it takes sovereignty away from a country somehow.
	It's a stupid argument.
	The other type of funding is voluntary contributions, which then get earmarked either for specific diseases or for the program of priorities that the World Health Assembly, that democratic body, decided on.
	His figure here is incorrect, by the way.
	It was actually 84% of the WHO's budget in 2022 that was made up of voluntary contributions.
	Want to know how it was spent?
	Well, funnily enough, they do actually tell people.
	55% of those voluntary contributions went to emergencies programs, 19% for polio, and 26% for other segments of the voted-on and approved program budget.
	Oh, and one last percentage figure.
	Of those voluntary contributions, 62% of them came from the member states of the WHO, 15% from the UN, 12% from philanthropic organisations, 7% from partnerships, and only 4% from other non-state actors such as businesses or the World Bank.
	I apologize if that was confusing to anyone there's a lot of percentages of percentages in there but basically all voluntary contributions go to things that are already part of the WHO's purview that has been voted on so there's very little room for any shady shit to go down here.
	Yeah well and also he's gonna pick and choose which reporting numbers like If your conspiracy, if your overarching conspiracy is that they're lying to you, then which numbers are you even going to choose to believe?
	Yeah, why would you believe any of the numbers?
	Why would you believe any of them?
	Yeah, like that's the whole point.
	Like, why are you citing some number?
	I just ran out of my mic, sorry.
	Well, I freaked myself out real good because I thought I was gonna knock it over and I can't afford that.
	So, yeah, like, I don't understand why he's... I mean, and I get that this is the, you know, this is the misinfo, disinfo guy's job to exploit numbers.
	It still is just shocking to hear, in real time, the disregard Disregard for a source and the absolute believing of the same source, depending on what fits your narrative.
	Yeah, a hundred percent.
	Yeah, that's exactly where he stands.
	Yeah, don't believe the mainstream media unless they're saying something I agree with, basically.
	And don't look, if I say they're not talking about it, definitely don't Google it and figure out if they're saying it or not.
	God forbid.
	I should mention, by the way, while we're talking about these, this article that he's quoting from is from Euronews.
	Which, it seems just like a fairly centrist thing, but this article is definitely slanted against the WHO.
	Like, there are just, there are certain terms of phrase and things that they say that are very anti-WHO.
	The website in general seems fine.
	Centrist, you know, meh.
	Who gives a shit.
	But yeah, this article is pretty much garbage.
	Especially as I've already proven they've gotten their facts wrong.
	Yeah.
	So, you know, that tells you a bit.
	Anyway, and now a bit of a ramble from Brand.
	The WHO has had to do the bidding of rich donors, not only rich nations in Europe and North America, but also rich philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation, said global health expert Lawrence Gostin.
	Kelly Lee, a professor of public health at Simon Fraser University, who authored a book about the WHO, said, the sheer size of the funds from the Gates Foundation compromises the WHO's independence.
	Whether it's political parties being funded by the donations of corporations and billionaires or the WHO being funded by billionaires and corporations and philanthropic organisations that many people say are about tax breaks actually and influence and power.
	What both Larry Gostin and Kelly Lee were both actually lobbying for here was fewer voluntary contributions and more assessed funding.
	I think their way of doing so was alarmist, and saying that the WHO must do the bidding of the Gates Foundation is almost entirely false.
	But their intention was at least reasonable.
	Unfortunately, their intentions go out the fucking window as soon as it gets picked up by shitheads like Brand and his ilk.
	So, a bit irresponsible there.
	Kelly Lee, by the way, she wrote a book about the WHO in 2008, and it's not a while ago, and she's a former employee of the WHO who still supports the work they do at this point.
	So, meh.
	Well, I would like to propose that the Ramble firm brand be referred to as a Bramble.
	A Bramble!
	I'm just gonna throw that out there.
	I like Brambles.
	We can, yeah, cavort among the Brambles because I think that's what we like to do.
	Bramble Jam!
	Bramble Jam.
	Man oh man.
	I just imagined like a Shatner-like album with a jam band underneath.
	Get The Grateful Dead.
	Get Russell Brand doing a rant over the top.
	I would probably listen.
	I probably would.
	Or get Phish.
	Get Phish in.
	Oh my word.
	Okay.
	I maybe draw the line.
	He's a bramblin' man.
	He's gonna bramble on.
	Led Zeppelin's been the theme today.
	Yeah, that's been the theme of the day.
	The secret theme, sorry.
	Referencing T Swift, I know we're being very old.
	Yeah, so what does... Even referencing Taylor Swift is outdated at this point.
	We need to be... I know!
	I don't know who we need to reference in order to be current.
	I fully just outed myself as like, I like Taylor Swift fellow kids.
	Yes.
	Sorry!
	It does grind my gears so much to hear him reference points that, like, I absolutely believe in the arguments that are being made and there's critiques that are completely valid on their face.
	But when you actually, like, when you listen to his context, He doesn't give a shit!
	He takes it in a completely fucked up direction every single time.
	It's pretty amazing.
	This is motivated reasoning.
	It's such a bummer.
	We have some more brambling on, so let's go.
	It shows you that these organisations have such particular relationships with powerful economic entities that democracy itself becomes irrelevant.
	For example, have you been offered the opportunity to vote on whether or not your country follows the edicts of the WHO?
	If you use this platform, YouTube, did you know that YouTube and Google accept the WHO's regulations and recommendations when it comes to things that can be said on this platform?
	That's not no power at all, that's the power of censorship, influence, it transcends.
	Who has more power?
	Google and the WHO or you and your vote.
	Which one of these basically the same individuals shall I... Google!
	So it's not terribly clear what he's getting at in this clip.
	No!
	It seems like he just ends it with "Google!"
	It seems like he wants all 194 member states to individually hold a referendum
	as to whether to remain part of the WHO.
	"Forgive me, forgive me here, but seeing how Brexit went, do I fuck trust the public to make an informed decision
	without having the narratives hijacked by shitheads like him.
	Well, and he would rely on that.
	Oh, yeah.
	He'd love it.
	He would love it.
	What I heard right now was, I liked the people I could access on YouTube, and y'all are cutting into my bag.
	I want to make more money.
	I want to say whatever the fuck I want.
	Yeah, right?
	Like, I want to say whatever I want and make all the money and you have to do what I say.
	On YouTube, there are less people on Rumble, you bastards.
	There are less people on Rumble, so I want to make more money on YouTube.
	Thank you.
	I wasn't, I was so disoriented.
	I wasn't even being specific enough to make sense.
	I got you.
	I got you.
	Yeah, right?
	Like, I just, dude.
	Yeah, I want to be on YouTube because it's easier and cheaper and I can make more money.
	Me, me, me, me, me.
	Like, yeah, you know what?
	If everybody could just be on Instagram, that'd make my life easier too.
	Not that much easier.
	If everyone could just find our content and look at it, that'd be fantastic.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Great.
	Cool.
	Yeah.
	Do we have to do it anyway?
	Okay.
	All right, man.
	Yeah, I get it.
	Work is hard.
	Fine.
	So far we've mentioned a couple of questionable sources of Brand's editorials.
	I'd say this next one is established but I would say definitely still questionable.
	I'm waiting for epic time.
	So let's have a look at the WHO's current agenda to impose a treaty that would mean that you would have no control over whether your borders were locked down, certain medications might be made mandatory or the carrying of passports.
	This is from a British newspaper.
	Lockdown measures could be imposed on the UK by the World Health Organization during a future pandemic under sweeping new powers.
	Member states will be obliged to follow the agency's instructions when responding to pandemics, including by introducing vaccine passports, border closures and quarantine measures under a draft update to its regulations.
	So this is from the Telegraph, otherwise known as the Torygraph over here.
	It's a right-wing rag that spins the same alarmist nonsense as the Daily Mail, but packages it in a classier format.
	And here they're pretty much just making shit up, taking one of the proposed amendments from a member state and insinuating that it's already part of the treaty.
	Yeah, it says, we're looking at the quote right now on the screen, obliged to follow the agency's instructions and under a draft update to its regulations.
	Just vague enough.
	Member states would be obliged to follow.
	Right, right, right, right, right.
	Would be obliged.
	Under a draft update.
	Not sanctioned.
	Not compelled.
	Not legally.
	No, I hate the Telegraph.
	It's the newspaper my grandfather reads, and he insists that it's not right-wing.
	That's a whole other conversation, but it's just an absolute rag.
	It really is.
	Owned by billionaires.
	But it looks classy.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's kind of like the middle-aged and upwards version of the Daily Mail.
	It presents itself in a more refined kind of way but still says the same bullshit.
	And I would ask Russell Brand if he's so concerned with the people that own Charities or operate charities.
	How about look at who owns the papers that you're citing?
	Yeah, there is a little bit of that.
	Also, I'm quite curious to get into his charity as well.
	I haven't started looking into it yet, but he does have a charity and that raises some questions.
	Right, next up in the middle of this editorial, something that genuinely surprised me.
	Now we have to go around the world as well with our handout begging for money from all sorts of people.
	Mostly though, they're pretty legit.
	And this one is going to be fun and enjoyable.
	Stay to the end.
	I'll make it funny.
	I'll put little jokes in there.
	Stay with us.
	Stay with us for this little ad.
	See you in a moment.
	Health Review research why people take supplements.
	The top response was hope.
	They hope, these poor bastards, vitamin and mineral supplements will help overcome a lifetime of poor diet and exercise, and they hope they might offset family health issues.
	There is little evidence that the vitamin and mineral supplements we take are anything more than placebo.
	Sorry, I'm just... For anyone listening, I am laughing at the face that is currently stuck on the screen at the moment.
	The expression that I've unintentionally frozen Russell Brand's face in is hilarious.
	So, he's doing a mid-roll ad.
	Which, by the way, do pay more.
	But it's not only mid-roll, it's in the middle of his editorial.
	Like, what the fuck are these people doing?
	It had nothing to do with what he was talking about!
	This is shockingly unprofessional.
	So incidentally, I took a look at this product, Field of Greens.
	It seems mostly fine, like literally powdered fruit and vegetables.
	That's basically what it is.
	And then I saw a warning label saying, warning, this product contains green tea extract and beetroot, which can expose you to chemicals including caffeic acid, which are known to the state of California to cause cancer.
	Did you know about this?
	Apparently, certain foods specifically promote the formation of caffeic acid in the body, too much of which can give you cancer, especially when in combination with certain other processed foods.
	It's a complete aside, and I don't think this is Field of Greens' fault here, and this is obviously a wider issue, but at the same time, it did make me think, like, no, you can keep your cancer powder.
	That's fine.
	That's kind of wild.
	I mean, so we're really used to, and the states are really used to, like, the state of California warnings.
	Yeah.
	Which just tells you... Took me aback!
	What a pitiful job our, like, federal government does regulating anything, because California can make a suggestion and you can... Research can find that something can be extremely dangerous and harmful, and basically California will be like, hey, this is a bad idea!
	and you can still sell it.
	Yeah, I mean, I'm probably stuff that's not legal in your country at all.
	I don't know. I'm speaking entirely off the cuff.
	In this case, I imagine there are definitely things like that.
	But in this case, like the you know, I can't imagine that we prohibit beetroot
	powder and green tea extract here.
	I don't think that's something that we'd prohibit, but I don't think any of our products come with that warning either.
	I would have liked to have known about this maybe 20 years ago, to be honest, because there are other things that have the same reaction, like black olives.
	Those are a thing that can do it as well.
	I don't know how, I don't know whether, you know, in terms of if you just ate the food, how high a quantity of that food you would have to eat to provoke the same reaction as, for instance, a powdered version of it.
	Because the powdered version is by its nature condensed, isn't it?
	Right, right, right.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That's also tricky because, you know, isn't there like a whole like Twitter There's a whole Twitter account that's just like in rats or something because we test stuff in rats and sometimes it's such high dosages that it would be literally impossible for a human to ingest the amount that we test and then...
	There's a whole discrepancy.
	I'm not a scientist.
	I went as far as I could with it.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	If there are any science awakening wonders out there who understands this better than we do, by all means, drop us an email.
	It's theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	I would love to know more about it.
	Yeah, comment on YouTube.
	This is a blind spot.
	We don't know.
	Drop us a DM, whatever.
	But yeah, I was just looking into that.
	I was like, oh, that's fucked up.
	OK, I'm not going to have the cancer powder.
	Thank you very much.
	But OK, but yeah, let's anyway, let's let's let's take a look at how they come out of the ad just to show how sloppily this ad was shoved into the show.
	Visit BrickHouseRussell.com and use promo code brand.
	That's BrickHouseRussell.com promo code brand.
	A new pandemic treaty under discussion would also force Britain to spend 5% of its health budget on preparing for another virus outbreak.
	I wonder if you fund something, whether it's more or less likely to happen.
	Let me know in the chat.
	Let me know in the comments.
	Some ministers are understood to be alarmed by plans to increase the WHO's powers enabling its governing body to require countries to hand over the recipe of vaccines regardless of intellectual property rights and to counter misinformation.
	So uh so yeah just straight back in there just just not not even a buffer not even a little and here we are no just beep bam there we go It's not even Whiplash.
	It was the brick wall.
	What the fuck are they doing?
	Whiplash almost implies a motion.
	So bizarre!
	Damn!
	That was crazy.
	So strange.
	Who's going to pay attention to this and absorb the information?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	So Brand made a weird assertion just now.
	It was one of his just asking questions.
	He said, do you think if you're funding something that it's more or less likely to happen?
	Right, so by funding pandemic preparedness, it therefore means that there are machinations to make another pandemic happen, apparently.
	We've got some mental gymnastics going on here, but by this rationale we should stop funding literacy programs because it means there'll be more people who can't read or write.
	And we should stop funding amputee charities because obviously they'll be chopping people's limbs off in order to make more money.
	This is what he seems to think.
	Like, I don't understand how he thinks the world works.
	No, we know who chopped limbs off to make more money.
	That actually happened.
	And it wasn't an amputee charity.
	No.
	No.
	I'm referencing Leopold's.
	Yeah, right.
	Different episode.
	That's just Imperial adventures that I can complain about to no end.
	Deep reach there.
	It's where I went!
	No, no, I like it.
	I'm into it.
	I'm into it.
	But I just don't understand how he thinks the world works.
	I don't understand what his construct.
	So if you fund something that is going to create more of it, that's his logic here.
	I give money to a Jeff charity.
	Does he think that they're going to make more people deaf?
	Does he think that's what's going on there?
	I did think you said the word Jeff, the name Jeff, for a second.
	I give money to Jeffs, right?
	The Jeffs are having a tough time.
	Which I was like, I bet you have a great reason.
	How many children do you think are named Jeff every year?
	I'm gonna tell you now, it's a diminishing amount.
	Think of the Jeffs!
	Think of the Jeffs!
	They're slowly going extinct, right?
	Let's just give some love to the Jeffs.
	That's absolutely bananas!
	But he even says in his own show, in our episodes, that he puts forth contradictory... Okay.
	Yeah, it's obviously motivation.
	It's incredibly fucking stupid, but this isn't the only stupid argument we're going to get from Brandt in this segment.
	He wants to circle back to his feelings about trust.
	Do you notice that increasingly we are being invited to not trust one another, to loathe one another, to engage continually in conflagration, to believe that people are sort of stupid and ugly and untrustworthy and that there is a cadre of experts, a technocratic level of government that we should all be yielding to.
	If you believe in yourself, your ability to run your own life, to run your own community, to make your own decisions, why would you participate in the funding of an organisation that clearly has strong relationships With corporate interests that require a profit that they can get by imposing certain regulations.
	Why would we even participate in systems like that?
	Let me know in the chat and the comments.
	And notice that there's a dimension to this that's about social dynamics, about spirituality, about personal awakening, about the necessity to have a population that is ridden with fear and doubt and alert to conflict and totally mistrustful of other people.
	If you felt that you could trust yourself, if you felt that you could trust other people, If you felt that you could run your own life in your own community, why would you need these organisations?
	Look, for viewers, look at the shit-eating grin on that man's face.
	So again, the one sowing distrust is you, Brand, you fuck!
	It's you!
	This is what you're doing!
	It's you!
	And as for, oh, if we can all individually run our own lives, why would we need these organisations?
	Perhaps because none of us are individually equipped or able to deal with a pandemic when it happens, or the dozens of other health emergencies that the WHO manages and prevents.
	He seems to want it to be...
	The roads!
	We don't fill our own potholes!
	We have to hire an organization that has decided who to hire to fill the potholes!
	Because if we all had to do it, it would not work!
	It would take forever for a start!
	He seems to want it to be every man for himself and survival of the fittest when a pandemic hits, which is just bananas!
	But also still, he wants his collective, his channel, his like, oh, join this movement of individuals.
	Don't work together, but work together.
	Don't agree, but agree.
	Don't work together or interact, just follow me.
	Just follow me.
	This, not this.
	Also, I do feel like he makes a lot of claims about how people see each other, how he perceives, like, oh, don't we all just, like, distrust and hate each other?
	How we're being made to see each other, yeah.
	Right and I do want to point out that he's got money and money is has been proven like if you have a lot of it and you hang around with other people that have a lot of money or power prestige all of that then you are more disjointed from your fellow man on the street because you're in this kind of higher to actually so uh some more news Even more news, they did a really great episode on it.
	I'll post it on Instagram.
	Try to link it wherever.
	It's awesome.
	The information is terrible, but their research is awesome into how being rich kind of rots your brain and makes you feel bad things about other humans that you wouldn't if you're interacting.
	you know, like if if me or you walking through the street and doing our job and interacting with others
	I lost the thread That's cool, don't worry.
	I think I got the gist of where you were going with that.
	You know what I mean?
	I think he's telling on himself and maybe he's even frustrated because you said that he grew up in a very like a lower income area.
	He was a working class person.
	Working class, working class, yeah.
	Working class person.
	I bet his actual experience in life as he's gained money and fame,
	that he probably does feel worse about people generally 'cause that's what happens to rich people.
	Mmm.
	And I will say, I don't feel like the media or whatever else is trying to make me feel like other people are ugly or unpleasant or whatever else or sowing division or distrust.
	I do feel like Russell Brand is dividing the world into people who have been awakened and people who have not.
	And those who are awakened are, according to him, inherently better.
	It's in the fucking name.
	And therefore anyone who isn't awoken in some way is just a sheep.
	They're just an idiot wandering around.
	And believing in the mainstream media and the government.
	Oh you morons.
	That's the presentation that he gives and yet every single time he will claim to be against division and he will call out the mainstream media for turning people against each other.
	And that's what he does every day.
	That's how he makes his money.
	He makes people feel like they've been awakened and everyone else is a moron.
	That's what he sells.
	He's not even saying go meet your neighbors.
	That's like the pithy thing that gets thrown out there in the media.
	That's the most pithy thing that I'll interact with in the media, I can assume.
	Put it on yourself, don't acknowledge the systemic issues that are actually keeping us siloed as individuals.
	And that's capitalism, by the way, it's doing that.
	His version would more be, I'll tell your neighbours to subscribe to my locals channel.
	Right.
	That would be his version.
	Right.
	Anyway, next up, Brand presents a problem that's already been solved.
	And of course, I know that WHO have participated in, I imagine, all sorts of beneficial programmes that have alleviated all sorts of tensions.
	And in fact, if you're going to have a global body, it should be funded very responsibly and it should be democratic.
	These are just the sort of things that people say, aren't they?
	I'm suggesting that we do them.
	Yeah, we're already doing that.
	So next.
	Yeah, it's done.
	Well done.
	Fucking idiot.
	So next.
	Yeah, I enjoyed this next clip.
	MPs have written to ministers to warn of an ambition evident for the WHO to transition from an advisory organisation to a controlling international authority.
	That's very interesting that many bureaucratic organisations on the basis of their expertise are moving into positions of domination where they're able to bypass democracy.
	The WHO though is not from God or the sea or nature or a philosopher.
	It is funded, as we just saw Margaret Chan say, by corporate entities.
	They go with their handout and they say to them, what do you want us to do?
	That is a bad model.
	Would you agree?
	Don't you want to decide for yourself?
	Have you been watching what's going on?
	Have you noticed the undue influence of these global corporations?
	Have you noticed the ineptitude of your government?
	Have you noticed that these two entities are ideologically interlocked?
	Have you seen that?
	Let me know in the chat.
	I think he wants Cthulhu to take over the WHO.
	He's from the sea, he's an Elder God, he's definitely got philosophies, right, mostly destructive ones, but still, he's got everything Brand is asking for here, plus tentacles.
	So hey!
	Wow, what?
	Would you prefer it be from God?
	From God!
	That's bananas!
	We want the GHO, we want the God Health Organization, that's what we need.
	[laughter]
	Oh no, oh no, I'm bummed I said it!
	And as for the bit there about MPs writing to government ministers, this did happen.
	Do you know how many Members of Parliament we have in the UK?
	No.
	Right.
	650.
	Do you know how many joined in this letter of concern?
	Four.
	Kidding.
	Six.
	Six.
	Oh no!
	Six MPs.
	Bye, I'm out.
	I can't talk anymore.
	It was led by shit-for-brains Esther McVeigh, who we'll be getting into in just a second, and one of the other signatories other than this woman was her husband, who is also an MP.
	So there we go.
	Oh my god.
	I hate myself.
	I'm done with this.
	650 MPs.
	I knew it was going to happen!
	I knew it was going to happen!
	Fuck!
	It was a joke!
	So in this next clip, Brand advocates for nationalism, which is always a good sign.
	In their letter, seen by the Telegraph, they urge the Foreign Office to block powers that appear to intrude materially into the UK's ability to make its own rules and control its own budgets.
	You can see why there's a rise in nationalism when things like this are happening.
	That nationalism, to some degree, is a response to feeling invaded.
	My personal belief is that these decisions should have nothing to do with racial, religious, gender or sexual identity.
	But the idea that power is elsewhere and being imposed on you should be rejected by It's interesting there that he says, none of this should be anything to do with gender, sexuality, race or religion, then follows it with a big but.
	He says, but if these things are being imposed on you, then it's okay to reject it and fight it, which then leaves it to the individual to decide when things are being imposed upon them.
	There are people in this world who see two gay men kissing on television, see that as sexuality being imposed upon them, and take it upon themselves to beat up the next gay person they see.
	Or worse.
	Just look at the responses to the trans community in recent years, drag queens, the BLM protests, and the amount of right-wing violence imposed upon these communities.
	And Brand is stood here saying it's fine as long as you feel these things are being imposed upon you.
	Fuck yourself, Russell.
	Irresponsible cunt.
	It was like, are you complaining about nationalism?
	Are you endorsing nationalism?
	Do you know what you're saying?
	He's 100% endorsing it, and he is 100% endorsing people taking it upon themselves.
	Yeah, it's a justification.
	When they feel that they're having something imposed upon them, any of the things that he listed, that it's fine to then reject and fight against it.
	I'm not going to lie, like the way that he talks about this stuff, it feels like the sentence or the phrase that he's trying to get across just starts somewhere and then just kind of does a little whoopsie doodle shooting ladder and then ends up somewhere else.
	It's hard to follow because it's so kind of like, yeah, so twisty turny.
	It's difficult.
	There's nothing he's trying to say.
	So he up top says that, you know, he doesn't believe that there should be any discrimination
	basically to do with gender, sexuality, race or religion.
	And then by the end of it is saying, oh, but if any of this is imposed upon you, fucking
	have at it.
	That's why it feels twisted.
	Because it is?
	Yeah, it is.
	He's 100% twisting it.
	Fuck, it's just horrible.
	It's just completely legitimizing acts of violence on these communities.
	I just wonder what he's expecting or what people that are listening.
	It's like, you can't necessarily...
	I'm trying to reconcile the first part of what he says with the last part.
	And they don't match?
	So the only way that you could follow and feel like you're getting something out of what he has to say is you've gotta, you know, plot along the garden path with him.
	Because I don't see, it doesn't make sense to me to hear the first part and remember that with the last part.
	It just doesn't seem congruous.
	Yeah, no, because it isn't.
	You just gotta trot along with them.
	That's his drift.
	So in this next clip, Brand implies that the WHO is going to commit a genocide of some kind.
	The treaty was first proposed by world leaders including Boris Johnson in 2021 during the pandemic and was originally designed to improve alert systems, data sharing and the production of vaccines to foster an all-of-government and all-of-society approach.
	Yeah, that sounds terrifying and the people involved are people like Boris Johnson which is the last thing any of us want.
	Even Boris Johnson doesn't trust Boris Johnson.
	But among 300 proposed amendments to the IHRS are changes to make the WHO's advice binding.
	You can't have binding advice.
	Hey, I've got some advice for you.
	You know, maybe you should look out for someone who's more suitable for you.
	Oh, yeah, I might do.
	I don't know.
	It depends how I feel.
	That's binding!
	Oh, okay.
	Advice shouldn't be binding.
	Okay, we're just thinking of rounding up this demographic and this demographic based on our personal preferences.
	Oh, no, that doesn't seem fair.
	We think everyone should be able to get along and make their own choices.
	Binding!
	Apparently unity across the world is terrifying to Brand, and an all-society approach to things like a pandemic is a problem.
	It's curious for someone who spends all his time promoting unity, supposedly.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Boris Johnson is a sinister piece of shit who has done some truly awful things to curtail democracy in the UK, but in this case he just signed a piece of paper and said, yep, this seems good.
	Yeah, that was a weird, like, including Boris Johnson.
	It's not something that Boris himself did.
	He just agreed to do it.
	You know, he just agreed to sign the thing.
	He was like, yeah, all right.
	And that's it.
	You know, it's not like it's Boris's fucking idea.
	And here's the point.
	I think that people really are not being either being intentionally obtuse or just not thinking about it.
	It's like telling a kid, you know, you're a parent.
	You tell your kid, like, don't drink poison.
	And you know, as a parent, because the poison will hurt your kid, but the kid can be like, well, because you told me not to, I'm definitely going to drink the poison.
	Like, some things are just inherently a bad idea.
	Like, do we throw out all laws?
	It's just, yes, oppositional defiance.
	Oppositional defiance for the fucking sake of it.
	For the sake of it.
	And again, if that kid's like, well, I'm definitely going to do it now.
	That's just, it's not good!
	The result is going to be bad!
	That's kind of outrageous!
	It's not a positive thing in society.
	No!
	These things feel, to me, cut dry!
	But I've also been engaged, I've interacted in the world and I get that the cognitive dissonance is ripe, you know?
	Okay, fine, fine, fine.
	Uh so next Russell continues down his little binding bit.
	And introduced new requirements for countries to recognize it as the global authority on public health measures.
	Sounds like an egomaniac!
	I'd like you to recognize me as a global authority on public health measures.
	Well we'll base that on your effectiveness actually and also how you funded.
	Shut up!
	Mind your own business!
	I got some advice for you!
	You better fuck off!
	Well I think I'm gonna start binding!
	He's definitely showing off his comedic chops here.
	Even if the Foundation is complete bullshit and he knows it, he's still entertaining, especially to the people who believe the words that he's saying.
	I can't think of another right-wing propagandist who can riff and pull this together in the same way.
	I do genuinely think it's part of what makes him dangerous.
	And you just get better at it.
	Yeah, but all I can hear Is like, I'm drinking the poison!
	That's me!
	I'm gonna drink it, you can't stop me!
	Okay, man.
	Like, what?
	Like, it's, but even the drinking poison isn't a good enough analogy.
	It's like, I'm gonna give all the poison everybody else I know, too!
	Like, okay, man.
	Like, what, what are you, what could you, what, what alternative is there than all of us working together To keep everyone safe.
	I don't... Communes?
	I don't know what the fuck he wants.
	He never spells it out, he never has, he never will.
	Right.
	So there we go.
	I've had a loss at this point.
	Yeah, that sums up my feelings about him pretty succinctly.
	There's a key part of the quote in this next clip that I want you to bear in mind while it plays, and that's, if passed, The plan would require member countries to recognise the WHO as the guidance and coordinating authority of international public health response and undertake to follow the WHO's recommendations in their international public health response.
	If passed, the change would mean the WHO could enforce border closures, quarantine measures and vaccine passports on all member countries, including the UK.
	So that means they've got the right to lock you up in your house.
	Let me just have a look.
	Before we sign this treaty, what does it entail to do?
	Oh, nothing really.
	Just to close your borders.
	What, so no one could come in or out?
	And also quarantine measures, so we'd have to stay in our house.
	Mm-hmm.
	And vaccine passports, so everyone would have to... Listen, let me give you some advice.
	Just do what we fucking say.
	Well, actually... binding!
	If passed, Russell.
	Which, out of the over 300 amendments, I seriously doubt it will be.
	Likely because most member states, especially the likes of Russia and China, would 100% leave the WHO if they tried to assert binding authority over all member states.
	But see here, yeah, he's continued the bit here to great effect.
	Even, like, why would it not pass?
	Cause it's voted on!
	Exactly.
	A democratic process!
	There we go!
	And that's, that's, uh, yeah.
	It's your movie!
	Why are you writing it like this?
	His arguments defeat themselves.
	You don't have to say it, but you pick another thing!
	Oh man, that's wild.
	Cause yeah, he's ignoring the fact that earlier we acknowledged on the show a draft.
	Mm-hmm.
	Mm-hmm.
	A draft.
	Draft proposal.
	He said those words.
	If passed.
	How do we get draft proposals?
	Is it magic?
	Is it voting?
	And again, there's no fucking way.
	There is no fucking way that this makes it in to the end result of the treaty.
	And do you know what?
	As a random aside, if it did, I don't think it would be a bad thing.
	But there we go.
	That's a separate issue.
	Forcing countries to actually... We already have vaccines.
	Forcing countries to be responsible is not the worst fucking thing in the world.
	Yeah!
	Anyway, but also, also, what kind of power, in this whole binding thing, what kind of consequences do you think would happen if you didn't follow, if a country didn't follow WHO's advice?
	Well, binding is supposed to be, you know, legally binding or whatever.
	You break the law, you end up in prison or you get fined or whatever.
	WHO doesn't have those powers.
	It never has, it never will!
	I was waiting for you to get to that, because yeah, the actual quote, and he puts it on the screen, which he doesn't have to do.
	The word binding is in quotes.
	Yeah.
	On the screen.
	So that means it's binding, which doesn't mean binding in the same way you think it means, it's just why we put it in quotes.
	Yeah, no, it's absurd.
	It's completely absurd.
	He doesn't have to do that.
	He didn't have to do that.
	He could have just read it or whatever.
	I don't... Okay, fine.
	Yep, but... It doesn't matter.
	It doesn't matter.
	It's making him money.
	Um...
	Oh, yeah.
	And, uh...
	Yeah, he's, uh...
	God, he's all about the trust, this guy.
	He just loves trust.
	Well, except for in this next clip.
	They're using bureaucracy and health and safety to legitimise new forms of tyranny that are presenting themselves as all kind of friendly and here to help.
	And if you attack them, they say you're a conspiracy theorist or have got some atavistic throwback nationalistic ideology that don't belong in today's modern world.
	But actually, this is the tyranny now.
	Always the conversations about despots and despotism use the semiotics and image systems of the most recent examples of tyranny and despotism.
	But it won't be like that, plainly.
	In a more technologically advanced version of events, in a more media-savvy, data-oriented tyranny, everything will be like a kind of soft sell.
	That's what I'm starting to realise.
	They'll be just, oh, hi, do you want some help with your... Yeah, we've just got to do... And before you know it, you're locked in your house with a passport and unable to go anywhere.
	Well, that is despotism.
	Yeah, but we're doing it for a reason.
	Despots always do what they do for a reason.
	You have a passport to not go anywhere?
	What?
	Yeah.
	I think you have a vaccine passport.
	Yeah, but we know that's bullshit because it's not a thing that's happening.
	So if everything is a soft sell, he's basically telling his audience, even if people are being nice and genuine and wanting to help, don't trust it.
	It plays into his audience.
	If you recall the people in the US who didn't trust the vaccine because it was free, and nothing in US healthcare comes for free, right?
	It's like that, right?
	It's a nice little twist because it means even if the WHO is doing nothing obviously nefarious that he can point at, he can say, oh it's just a soft sell, it's coming, it's coming, the tyranny's coming.
	You know, it's just he's playing it both ways.
	Yeah, in the same show, in the same, like, segment.
	Yep, a hundred percent.
	A hundred fucking percent.
	Let's get into, I mentioned Shit for Brains' Esther McVeigh earlier, the lead signatory of the six MPs' letter of concern.
	Might as well be four.
	I'm going to give myself a They might as well be foreigners!
	Well, I mean, if you discount the husband who probably just signed like, okay, yes, darling, that at least takes it down to five.
	Right?
	That's what I'm saying!
	Right?
	You've heard it happen in podcasts!
	And it happened to me.
	That was an event horizon that I met today.
	I'm so glad there's a witness.
	Jeez, EP.
	Okay, yep, Esther.
	Ol' Esther.
	So let's get into Esther McVeigh.
	A draft of the treaty itself would commit member states to spending 5% of their health budgets plus a proportion of GDP to pandemic preparedness.
	That's your money!
	Esther McVeigh, the former cabinet minister, said, "There is rightly growing concern about the WHO's pandemic
	treaty and international health regulations.
	The plans represent a significant shift for the organisation
	from a member-led advisory body to a health authority with powers of compulsion."
	I don't like seeing power and compulsion that close together in a sentence.
	You can't go from a, hey, we're member-led, here's some advice, to compelling power.
	That is like in Star Wars where they're crushed in that thing.
	Oh no!
	That is a compelling power.
	You're going to be crushed.
	You don't have any choice.
	When advised that this is binding, you're in an interesting territory.
	I would say, and I would advise you, this isn't binding, to resist that.
	You can do that if you want to.
	Because it's just advice!
	Yeah, it is just advice, so you can resist it.
	You're telling on yourself, Russell.
	So, I wonder if they can be sued for that clip, I don't know.
	Here's the thing, I would assume not.
	Except Disney owns Star Wars now.
	That's true, and Disney are the most litigious company in the world.
	They absolutely are!
	Yeah, it was the trash compactor scene where Luke Skywalker and everyone were getting crushed.
	So, Esther McVeigh previously served in one of Boris Johnson's cabinets, but apparently that's fine according to Russell.
	Probably because she's an anti-vax, anti-lockdown moron who once had to delete a tweet stating that the EU was forcing Britain to join the Euro because it never happened.
	And was never going to happen.
	Somehow this woman is an elected member of parliament.
	It's worth noting that the powers of compulsion quote is just a continuation of what she was saying.
	So Brown's riffing on it has no actual relevance to the WHO, just what some moron thinks the WHO is.
	Yeah it was really, yeah.
	And she was talking about the proposed resolution, the proposal, not the actual result.
	Not the actual.
	No, no.
	She's all about the pandemic preparedness treaty that we are.
	Which we really need.
	We need it.
	We do.
	We really do.
	Seriously.
	OK, so as not as someone who is not an awakening wonder, he's selling me on this proposal?
	Donate to the show and you can be.
	Or like, as not as, you know, I'm not a Russell Stan.
	He's selling me on this treaty.
	Like, for real!
	These seem like great ideas that are very necessary.
	Considering how fucked up your country got, I don't blame you.
	Having someone else force the US to do the things that are responsible in this situation, yeah, I don't blame you for wanting that.
	I love that.
	That'd be great.
	Listening to your different, like just even covering in previous episodes, listening to how, oh my God, it is crazy.
	The notion that you could, there would be like ramifications of any kind for someone that does something horrible.
	Yeah, we had laws.
	We had laws.
	That's fucking nuts.
	That's fucking nuts.
	In this next clip, we have a continuation of McVeigh's quote.
	Hopefully though, the WHO have a good track record and that this mad, egotistical, narcissistic demand for authority is based on experiences like LeBron James saying, I'll be in charge of basketball because I'm the best at it.
	Something like that.
	Let's have a look.
	I'm particularly worried when you consider the WHO's poor track record on providing consistent, clear and scientifically sound advice for managing international disease outbreaks.
	That's like me taking control of basketball.
	They've got a bad track record.
	Consistent, clear and scientifically sound.
	That is totally well worn.
	That is the bare minimum for an organisation calling itself the World Health Organisation.
	Isn't it?
	So, again, that was just Esther McVeigh saying that.
	That wasn't anyone fucking reputable or with any knowledge of anything.
	And notice that she didn't provide any examples of what she was on about there.
	It was just, oh, they're bad.
	They're bad at what they do.
	And that's it.
	She can't point to anything, she can't cite anything, and neither can anyone else because they've not mismanaged, they've not done anything fucking wrong.
	And I'd even... I'd postulate That effective funding that was reliable would help them hone a message and be more effective.
	Right?
	More than likely.
	More than likely.
	So what do y'all want?
	Pick a thing.
	Yep.
	But Brand takes her quote as the gospel truth because he's either a fucking idiot or he's blatantly lying.
	Next we get into some Chinese virus territory.
	Campaigners also expressed concerns about increasing the WHO's role in identifying misinformation after its experts dismissed the lab leak Covid origin theory only to later accept it remains on the table.
	Hmm yes it does remain on the table because it's not been wiped down properly like the WUAD lab itself.
	Brand believes that COVID-19 was a bioweapon created in a Chinese lab.
	That is what he believes.
	The reality is we still don't actually know precisely where COVID-19 originated, which I agree is a problem, but the WHO dismissed these claims in the start of the pandemic because the argument was pure conjecture and was mostly just being used to discriminate against Chinese people.
	In the UK and the US, Chinese people suffered horrifying levels of racial abuse because of this narrative, being screamed at, spat on and physically attacked.
	But that's all fine, according to Russell.
	Let's just keep going with it, even when we have no evidence whatsoever.
	That shit happened in Chicago.
	It was messed up.
	So Chicago, like Chinatown, Chicago has a Chinatown.
	It rules.
	And yeah, whenever all this stuff went down, It was a ghost town.
	And that's an excellent tourist destination.
	It's right by downtown.
	It's super cool.
	It's historically relevant to the experience of our entire city.
	And the businesses there were decimated.
	It's that's basically, you know, least of the concerns when you're talking about,
	you know, Asian directed violence.
	It's man, oh man, it's honestly like such a bummer to like the the stories of.
	Violence and aggression towards Asian people after basically what Donald Trump said it bums me out to the
	point where I can't even think about it.
	It hurts.
	Definitely.
	I mean, Trump definitely exacerbated the problem, didn't he?
	I remember reading stories of, you know, Chinese people having to avoid public transport because they'd get shouted at, you know?
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Just every aspect of their lives was turned fucking upside down.
	And do you know what?
	Not just Chinese people, Asian people in general, because people are fucking stupid and don't see the recognizable differences between various different forms of Asian.
	So yeah, it's just fucking brutal, but I'm fine with it.
	Let's keep going.
	Yeah, there's a well-defined human cost to the things that he's saying.
	I can't look past that.
	I kind of can't forgive it.
	Yep, it's, it's, his narratives almost undoubtedly have already led, because I mean, I don't know if he was saying this same thing in 2020, but I would, I would make heavy fucking bets that he was.
	And if that is the case, then yeah, he, he is directly responsible for a lot of genuine harm that has befallen people.
	And that's without getting into his anti-vax bullshit, without getting into any of the other crap that comes out of his mouth.
	So that's the asterisk that you put next to what he's saying when he's like, loving you with all people all over the world!
	Well... Well... Start with you, homie!
	Yeah.
	Start with you!
	Be the change you want to see, man!
	Come on.
	Unreal.
	Yeah, Guru Russell.
	Get fucked.
	Next we have an example of the Telegraph's exceptional level of journalism.
	Molly Kingsley, co-founder of the Us For Them campaign group, said "We should all be concerned
	about the WHO being ordained as an arbiter of pandemic truth, especially given its poor record
	during the pandemic, such is its claim that COVID was definitely zoonotic in origin and its April
	2020 denial of the role of natural immunity in protecting against infection." I wonder if what
	Margaret Chan said about the way that it's funded and those two errors have any kind of relationship
	with one another?
	Who could ever possibly work that out?
	Not you or me.
	We're just stupid people that need unelected, corporate-funded bodies to tell us what to do.
	And thank God you're going to have no choice, because what would you do with your choice?
	You'd just mess it up.
	So it was definitely a choice to put in a quote from this group for The Telegraph to interview these people because it paints it in a specific way, doesn't it?
	So the Us For Them group self-described as...
	Yeah, yeah.
	The Us For Them group self-describe as a passionately committed team of grassroots volunteer campaigners who first joined forces in May 2020 to stand up for children's interests during the pandemic.
	Their list of notable achievements includes successful campaigns to reopen schools in the height of the pandemic, successful campaigns to remove mask mandates from schools, and successful campaigns to prevent isolating and bubbles in schools.
	While also campaigning against children getting vaccinated.
	They're a dangerously effective group of ill-intentioned idiots who have most definitely exacerbated the spread of COVID-19 in the UK with their insane ideologies.
	all under the guise of protecting the children. The WHO's supposed denial of natural immunity
	in fighting COVID-19 was the WHO saying yeah that's not going to be enough and millions of
	people will die if we leave it up to natural immunity.
	Which is what happened. That's also what happened.
	Yeah, but without the vaccine it would have been much fucking worse.
	Yeah!
	But apparently that's a problem to these people, so we should all have just not had the vaccine.
	Oh, and I will say, so I don't know that it's come up that much for us yet.
	I'd imagine it will, but using children as a cudgel is wildly unethical and extremely insidious.
	And in this case, it was exposing them all to fucking COVID.
	You reopen the schools, you get rid of the masks, you prevent isolation.
	What's going to happen?
	It's just a fucking petri dish.
	It's astonishing.
	Absolutely astonishing.
	So we finish this editorial now with a bit of a pep talk from Russell.
	You're not intelligent enough to make choices for yourself.
	You're not part of the limitless oneness that underwrites all reality.
	You're not capable of re-metabolizing yourself into glory.
	You're not capable of putting your past behind you and moving forward into a glorious new future based on love, pragmatism, rationalism, democracy, sharing, overcoming former prejudices and errors in order to create a better new world based on the technological advances and spiritual awakening that we are currently undergoing.
	You are!
	All of that was just rhetoric.
	You can do it.
	I believe in you and I do not trust them.
	But that's just what I think.
	Let me know what you think in the chat.
	See you in a second.
	I believe in you and I do not trust them.
	There we go.
	Don't trust them.
	Trust me though.
	What if a you becomes a them?
	Then what do you feel?
	Who's a them?
	Who's a you?
	How big do you have to be to be them?
	Because I feel like six and a half million YouTube subscribers is pretty fucking big.
	That's just my take.
	How many are thems?
	Yeah, that's just, it's so vague.
	I mean, I'm a thems, but I don't think that's the condiment.
	I'm coming around to thems.
	I'm coming around to thems.
	Yeah, we're getting there.
	We're getting there.
	A them cast at some point.
	Yeah, man.
	Wow.
	That's like...
	That's a lot.
	As I say, yeah man, by the way.
	All of these gendered terms, I sucked the gender out of them long ago for myself.
	I don't want to overstep bounds for any of y'all.
	We've had this conversation, you know, use of guys, dude, etc.
	It became so ingrained in language, it really does depend on who it's coming from.
	Genuinely, if someone who knows that I'm non-binary calls me dude, it really comes down to whether they're a decent human being and I know they respect my identity, or whether they're a dick.
	And that's all it comes down to.
	And you know I talk like an idiot for fun.
	I feel like the audience will give you the benefit of the doubt.
	But I don't want to model behavior that I would think is inappropriate myself.
	But talk like an idiot all you want.
	I couldn't possibly tell you not to.
	So what comes next in this episode for the second time is something I genuinely did not expect.
	The world is a complicated place.
	It's difficult to follow the regulations and the rules.
	It's difficult to locate where power really resides.
	Football is not like that.
	Football is nice.
	[Laughs]
	And what a day it is to be a football fan, and what a time it is to be a West Ham United fan.
	We are recording this yesterday, so at this point I already will know the results of West Ham's historic match against Fiorentina in the Europa Conference League final.
	And this happened because we held a lovely West Ham United party, and Eva, It was a magnificent and historic night and West Ham rightly triumphed against Fiorentina.
	Or it was a night of corruption, historic transgressions, bribed officials.
	Did you know that Russell Brand and Gareth Roy have a football podcast?
	Like a separate whole thing called football is nice.
	That's what they do.
	That's what that is.
	That's what that is.
	Right.
	And it was just tacked on to the end of this with no fucking warning whatsoever.
	No introduction.
	No anything.
	Just no.
	No.
	Oh, we're going to be doing this just straight in.
	It's something that I was aware of, but honestly hadn't really thought it worth covering as it's pretty much just them chatting about player transfers, manager changes, getting into the weeds about football, which is pretty irrelevant to our purposes.
	For some reason though, they decided to tack it onto the end of Stay Free with Russell Brand, so I thought, fuck it, let's give it a look.
	So in this next clip, Russell does at least acknowledge that it's a bit bloody weird to expect an American audience to watch a podcast about what you call soccer.
	And they're discussing a new Australian manager here.
	And did you see him, have you seen him do stuff and hear him talk and stuff?
	Yeah, it's lovely hearing him talk, because it's like watching, I know this is going to sound awful, but it's like watching someone like Alf Ramsey off Howling Away or something, there's a reference.
	If you thought us talking about football on this platform where our audience is primarily American was negligent, Let's hear some of Gareth's insights on the cast of Home and Away in the late 80s.
	They've just got a different kind of... I like Australians.
	I love the whole culture, and I say culture, whatever it is they do instead of culture.
	I think most Aussies who hear that would probably laugh.
	It seems like the kind of thing that's said in the name of banter, but you can also tell he does kind of believe what he's saying there.
	Yeah, that was... The self-aware moments are strange.
	Like, we shouldn't be doing this and no one's gonna get it.
	Which, like, fine.
	I'm not mad.
	It's a choice.
	It's a choice.
	It's here.
	And just like the choice to bring up an Australian soap from the late 80s, you know, okay, fucking whatever.
	Yeah, sure.
	Yeah.
	Okay, fine.
	Fine.
	I kind of was like, should I know what that is?
	I don't know.
	No, no, don't worry about it.
	It was aired in the UK as well.
	I remember watching Home and Away when I was like a I remember it being on.
	That and Neighbours, that was the other Australian soap that was big over here.
	I think that's finished now.
	So next we get into Russell's feelings on football, to which I have a little bit of pushback.
	This show is called Football is Nice because we are continually observing that what really football is, is nice.
	Blown up?
	It entails so many beautiful things.
	Rivalry undertaken in good spirit.
	Competition but without malevolence.
	That it creates community, togetherness, fun, humour, buoyancy.
	Rivalry in good spirit is an interesting one.
	Considering the fans of rival football teams regularly, and by regularly, I mean almost every week, get into mass fights and mini riots.
	Football hooliganism is a real fucking thing.
	Just a few weeks ago, 45 Manchester United and Manchester City fans were injured in running battles between the opposing sides, according to the Daily Star.
	That's just the ones who were injured.
	Right?
	Imagine how many more were participating and were not fucking injured, right?
	Y'all clearly don't have guns over there.
	Holy shit.
	Oh man.
	Yeah, no, we have fistfights.
	We do not fuck around.
	We have fistfights, sometimes knife fights, right?
	But yeah, mostly football hooligans.
	Honestly, that sounds kind of lovely.
	Well, I mean, the problem is you can't have weekly shootouts, can you?
	That's just not going to go well.
	All of the football fans will be dead.
	I can say from a place where weekly shootouts happen, it's bad.
	You couldn't really have a consistent rivalry if you just killed all of the other people, could you?
	The reality is that football hooligans, they get a lot out of that kind of interaction.
	They get a lot out of the aggression and the rivalry.
	It's their kind of fucking outlet.
	Another thing to note is that reports of domestic violence in the UK surge during football competitions
	such as the World Cup and European Championships.
	Estimates vary but this rise in reports has been found to be somewhere between 25 and
	50 percent according to the Behavioural Insights team.
	A 2013 study found that the number of domestic abuse reports rose by 26 percent when the
	English national team won or drew and increased by 38 percent when the national team lost.
	And that's just the national team, and only the cases actually being reported.
	Winning and losing both have increases.
	Even if they win, that's an increase of 26% of domestic abuse.
	That's wildly depressing.
	It's fucked up.
	It's depressing at first, and then you made it worse.
	Yeah.
	When I've talked about these things before, what I've typically had is very not-all-men comebacks.
	To which I say, your community has a problem with domestic violence.
	You need to fucking solve it.
	Unfortunately, like it or not, you are a part of the problem.
	You included, Russell and Gareth.
	Football is nice.
	That seems contradictory.
	Right, right.
	And I have friends who play football for established teams, right?
	One of said teams went to fucking Europe and participated in that cup.
	I have people who I am friends with who are in these communities.
	I'm not just talking out of my arse as some intellectual sat behind a desk here.
	These are problems that need to be addressed fundamentally, and he's just kind of glossing over all of them.
	That's a lot.
	I know it's supposed to be a light-hearted football podcast.
	You're not supposed to address the tough issues necessarily in there, but fucking hell.
	I mean, if you're a person who's publicly concerned about money and power and influence, Avoiding some issues and emphasizing others.
	Maybe with all that money and influence they could do a little work on the domestic violence issue also.
	Especially if you have a football podcast.
	I don't know what his listenership is like.
	I don't know how much of an audience there is for this.
	It's impossible for me to tell without seeing his actual figures somehow.
	One would think with that kind of platform he would be able to recognize issues within that community and then try to solve them, especially as someone with lots of influence and money, but apparently not.
	It does seem like tapping into football fans is an excellent pipeline to his content.
	There is that as well.
	There's an element of education, let's say that, with sports that does come into play.
	I'm reluctant to cover it too much because I honestly I'm not particularly prepared.
	I don't have, like, facts and figures and shit.
	Sure, sure, sure.
	It also seems hard to even know.
	Yeah, but I would say the anecdotal kind of feeling is that more working class people are into, say, football, compared to middle class and upper class.
	And directly correlated with that is level of education.
	That follows.
	The worse educated someone is, the easier it is to radicalize and propagandize in their general direction.
	Well, I mean, I'm not even... The thing is, I don't think that it's... I mean, education helps in most instances.
	Some instances, as far as being able to gird yourself against... protect yourself from misinformation.
	I guess it depends what kind of education is it.
	Critical thought, specifically, is what you need.
	I'm not even saying that, I just think that this seems like an excellent entree into the grift.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It seems like a pretty obvious kind of like marketing maneuver that's potentially quite effective.
	Because I mean, if he gets people on board and they want to see more of his content, well, they've got to go to the other stuff, don't they?
	You know, if they like this lighthearted stuff, you know, and they like his little jokes and whatever.
	That's what I'm saying.
	It's a great way to bring him in.
	Yeah.
	For anyone wondering, by the way, I'm more of a rugby fan, personally.
	I used to play in high school.
	Rugby union, not league, for anyone wondering about that as well.
	It's so complicated.
	It's not.
	Rugby looks like a lot of fun.
	It seems great.
	I mean, I played roller derby for five years, so full contact sports, obviously.
	Rugby is awesome.
	Rugby is awesome.
	Women's rugby is fucking brutal, I will say.
	Yeah, people's limbs getting broken grosses me out, which is mostly why I don't want to go to a rugby game.
	That doesn't usually happen.
	I think you'd be more likely to see that in an NFL game than a rugby because we don't have any of the padding, so stuff hurts more.
	So if you try, it's like with boxing.
	It's like with boxing, you know, the only way you can really like break someone's face is when you're wearing gloves.
	Because if you try and do that with bare knuckle boxing, you're going to break your hand first.
	It's going to hurt.
	So you've got that.
	So the impacts are less, but it's more visceral because they don't have the protective gear, you know.
	But no, I love rugby.
	I support Wales, you know, surprisingly.
	But yeah, next up, Brandt has some thoughts on the union of the United Kingdom.
	It seems like when they were naming, yeah Argyle, what did that mean?
	Plymouth Argyle, who Lyon supports, that didn't mean anything.
	Argyle, it would be some sort of Celtic word for saying it, some sort of Celtic word.
	Down there in Cornwall, they might as well be Irish.
	Like down there, they might, I'm not offending, I'm saying they don't think they're English.
	You know, there's bits of, like Welsh, they don't want to be in Britain.
	Scottish, absolutely hate England.
	Irish, it was never ours in the first place, shouldn't have nicked it, it was a reprehensible crime against humanity.
	But then, even within it, when you get into it, you start to recognise localisation is the answer.
	I thought we'd get to this at some point.
	Decentralisation.
	He's throwing the narratives in even here.
	Cornwall, for reference, is in the very south of England.
	It's at the very, very bottom.
	Scotland, if allowed to vote on it, would most likely vote to leave the UK.
	They want their independence, they've wanted it for a while, they didn't want to leave the EU, blah blah blah.
	Northern Ireland are heading in that direction and full disclosure I'm a huge advocate for Welsh independence and I make no bones about it.
	We get shafted the hardest out of any of these countries and the evidence is overwhelming that we would be better off on our own.
	In any case, his point about the Cornish is somewhat misinformed, at least.
	The Cornish don't believe they're English for much the same reasons that the Welsh don't.
	Did you know that the Cornish have their own language, Cerniweg?
	It's similar in form to Welsh, actually, but the people of Cornwall They take their heritage pretty seriously, and it doesn't surprise me whatsoever that after being invaded and taken over hundreds of years ago, some people there still don't want to self-describe as English and would rather advocate for independence.
	I think that's fair enough.
	I think that that would be, well here's the thing, our states are the size of countries in the EU, you know, and I can tell you that having a lot more land mass and a lot more people to manage is a little tricky.
	So, while I don't necessarily think that ethnostates are a great idea, because people should just be able to, like, get along, I think, and have systems that can support them to run effectively, maybe this country is way too fucking big to actually manage in a way that is effective and efficient.
	So yeah, I would think that if England's gonna really repair the imperial past, then they should just do it.
	Well yeah, the problem is they don't want to.
	England specifically don't want to.
	And Scotland are in a fucked up situation where they have to ask the government permission to hold a referendum on independence.
	Which is baffling to me.
	Having to ask your abuser permission to leave the relationship.
	It's that.
	That is exactly what is happening to Scotland right now.
	They are not allowed to have a vote on whether to remain a part of the UK because the English government won't let them.
	As a woman-oriented person, I can tell you that having to ask your abuser to leave a relationship is something that has happened quite a bit.
	In all of history.
	And doesn't work out great.
	Nope.
	It's a bad system.
	It's a bad system.
	And also, you know, you're American.
	I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure that the United States did not ask for permission to leave.
	I'm pretty sure they just fucking did it.
	Which I think is probably the correct response and what Scotland should do, I think.
	Personally, they should hold the referendum anyway, and what the fuck is the government going to do?
	I don't like it.
	Okay, tough tits.
	We're going to have one anyway.
	Well, even the way America did it, they were like, oh, Washington DC, the place where we make all the decisions, we're not going to let any of these people vote because it's the District of Columbia.
	So there's plenty of imposition that is completely undemocratic in my country.
	Oh yeah, for sure.
	Equally, Scotland could just fucking leave.
	They could just say, we're done.
	And what would happen?
	Do you think the government would send fucking tanks to the Scottish border?
	Because I don't.
	I think we're a little bit past that point in our society.
	I mean, I'm an American, so all bets are off.
	True.
	If we had anything to do with it, the place would be a wasteland.
	I'm not asking what America would do.
	That is a very different question.
	That is a very different question.
	I mean, if fucking Texas decided to secede just one day, there would be a bloodbath.
	There would be a bloodbath.
	There would.
	No government is going to accept that.
	Well, not in America, anyway.
	In the UK we're a bit more polite about it, you know?
	We'd sit down and have crumpets.
	Crumpets and scones is what we have.
	American foreign policy is petulant child.
	Petulant child with a side of bombings.
	Yes!
	Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
	All implications.
	All possible implications involved.
	Anyway, there is mounting evidence, as we've already gone over, suggesting that Russell is not in a good place mentally, and here's a little bit more.
	I think if he was going to... that's a simian face.
	Yes.
	That's like, he's most naturally there.
	He wants to jump across that desk and savage that person, doesn't he?
	He wants to morph into Ferguson at this point, doesn't he?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And have the sort of power, the power to sort of shut people down.
	But like, it's horrible to feel that vulnerable.
	I've felt it most of my life, really.
	Buddy, get some help.
	See someone.
	Do some talking.
	Jesus Christ.
	What bothers me a little bit is saying that's how he feels most of his life, but still hand-waving, or just not really taking it seriously.
	I don't know that I believe him, you know?
	I wonder if it's denial a little bit.
	There's a little bit of, I've felt like that most of my life.
	Oh well, you know.
	Rather than actually being willing to address the problem.
	So we've got one final clip here and it suggests to me that Russell Brand would really not enjoy the experience of watching our show.
	And just for additional context, he recently played a five-a-side football match with some people who are in recovery with him.
	Me?
	I'm on a razor's edge.
	I realise now that I don't like to be in situations where I'm incompetent because I don't like that feeling.
	I don't like the feeling of exposed... I don't like being exposed to my incompetence and ineptitude and total lack of power.
	Even though, ultimately, that is the deepest reality there is, universally.
	It's a total lack of power in everything that's meaningful, like, you know, the affairs of the heart, the inevitability of death, the inability to prevent serious things happening in your life.
	That's closer to reality.
	You have nothing.
	But we distract ourselves from that, don't we?
	And you can't distract yourself.
	My game of football!
	But football for me is it concentrated that.
	It brought it into sort of like, you know, like, like they say, like saying like uranium, it weighs more.
	Like sort of it's like something, imagine something that's the size of a ball bearing, but weighs as much as a planet.
	That's what it felt like out there.
	Like everything had been sort of, sort of concentrated into this dense, One would think that possibly he shouldn't play football anymore.
	Or maybe he should.
	Maybe working through those feelings would be good for him.
	But either way, if he wants to avoid the feeling of being exposed to his own incompetence and ineptitude,
	he should really avoid this show.
	(both laughing)
	Well, again, here's the thing.
	I hear my sister.
	That's my sister.
	'Cause listen, I fucking hate bowling.
	And that's just a fact.
	And my friends have to accept this.
	Here's the thing.
	I have tried to get better at it.
	I can't!
	I don't know why.
	It hurts my thumb, and I'm bad enough at it that it's not fun to play, and I get that other people enjoy it.
	And you can have all the tips from me in the world.
	Whatever it is, I don't like bowling.
	Bowly doesn't like me.
	I do get a little wrapped around the axle about it sometimes when being forced to bowl.
	But I know that's me.
	I know that that's, I address that as part of who I am as a human being.
	And you're right.
	I just don't bowl.
	Or I'm going to invest in improving, like if I bought one of those like skull balls or like one of the, you know, like big rows in a bowling ball, like resin, that might prompt me to make an effort.
	Maybe.
	A sincere effort.
	I've worked through things that I'm not good at.
	That I get better at that take a lot of work.
	That's what we're doing with the podcast right now.
	I'm not, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm looking to improve every week and get better at what we're doing.
	So yeah, it is uncomfortable and that's okay.
	But don't put yourself in that position.
	Also, how would that make everyone feel that he played soccer with?
	Football?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	He plays with, as I said, his group who he's in recovery with, which is apparently made up Partly of ex-convicts and partly of very sensitive individuals.
	So it seems like quite a mixed group.
	Apparently they're all lovely.
	I would bring as much humility as I could muster to that group.
	And I wouldn't bitch about the activity I participate with them in on my show.
	That's a little bananas to me.
	The other thing is that, you know, he didn't, he wasn't forced.
	He volunteered to do this.
	And he does say on the show that, oh, I'm probably going to do a lot more of it.
	Okay.
	I don't know whether that's a good thing or not.
	Are you going to secretly hate it the whole time?
	Well, this is it.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	Maybe the act of tackling it head on will help him.
	I don't know.
	I hope that for everyone involved.
	It just feels like... I will probably never find out because I don't intend to cover this Football is Nice podcast.
	That's consistent with how he was talking about how much he wanted to eat a hamburger but he's vegan.
	Buddy, there are just some choices that if you want to make them, you can.
	And I I I'm concerned that he's experienced like he wanted to be rich and famous.
	And now we're like experiencing this in real time.
	It isn't all it's what it's cracked up to be.
	And I think he's disillusioned by that in some way.
	And putting that on people that are looking to him for guidance is not great.
	I think he was disillusioned with it a decade ago.
	And by that?
	And I think now we're just, we're burnout grifter, Russ, is what we've got.
	And burnout gets levels, I mean, it can still get, it can multiply by degrees.
	Like, as a person who's experienced it, like, professionally, to the point where I couldn't take it.
	Like, yeah, burnout just multiplies.
	Yeah, he's not doing anything to help himself.
	It's frustrating to watch and to keep finding these little kernels of, like, troubling things that he says about himself.
	Because it's like, dude, just do something.
	Do anything that is actually beneficial to your wellness and health.
	Particularly your mental health.
	Well, if nothing else, I hope, you know, I hope folks listening, if you need someone to tell you that you don't have to bowl or don't have to play football, I'm here to tell you, you just don't have to do it.
	If you don't like it, don't do it.
	If anyone does like bowling, I quite enjoy a bowl.
	You know, I can't be very good at it, but I quite enjoy it.
	I love it for everyone that, like, listen, we got friends that get like their custom bowling balls and their coolest tits.
	I'm into it for them.
	It drives me... I don't... Honestly, it's irrational.
	I know it's irrational.
	I hate having to do it.
	I hate it.
	I'd rather do all the dishes in the connected restaurant.
	It's completely reasonable to not want to have to do this thing that you are bad at and don't enjoy.
	I think that's fair.
	Profoundly bad!
	That is fair.
	I don't think anyone should criticize you for that.
	If your friends want to bowl, that's fine.
	You can sit there and have a beer, right?
	There's no harm in joining the social activity, just not doing the throwing the ball down the thing.
	I guess it's just like the fact that he's playing football with Yeah, with this group, I don't know.
	I would find that to be incredibly humbling.
	And you know what?
	If the bowling happened with a group and I was kind of in charge of it and I spearheaded the event, I don't think I'd care as much that I was bad.
	It almost would be more fun if there was a point.
	It'd be comically bad if commiseration and fellowship was the point.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I think he did stipulate that he was on the losing team, so maybe that's how, and he feels like he's the reason?
	He did say that the other side were demonstrably better.
	I think his team got thrashed.
	But, you know, that's part of team sports, you know, that's just, and especially like
	friendly bloody five-a-side matches among your friends.
	You know, I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I see that he did not examine the Betway sponsor that's been on his chest for this entire episode.
	Not on the footballers' nice bit.
	No, no, he did mention it on the stay free Russell brand thing.
	But yes, it's mentioned it but didn't talk about like the sponsor because he's so concerned about where funds are coming from.
	It's curious that he puts wearing his West Ham United shirt above that.
	For anyone who is curious, by the way, I know he mentioned it briefly but this was just before... I can't remember what cup it was.
	European something.
	Anyway, they won for the first time since like 1980 something or whatever and they did show a video of Gareth Roy and there were about 20-30 people in a room watching it celebrating.
	But I didn't think it was particularly important to keep that in.
	But they did win, so you know, good for them.
	Okay, great.
	Anyway, that brings our show to a close.
	It's been a journey.
	It's been a whole fucking episode of unexpected shit.
	I think that happens more when it's just Russell and Gareth in a room talking bollocks.
	I feel like there are just so many more spurious directions for it to go.
	Yeehaw!
	compared to the interviews that we've covered. I don't know.
	I'm not sure what we'll be covering next. I have not yet decided. So we shall find out. It
	might be an interview. It might not.
	It might be something completely different. Let's see what I can come up with.
	[laughs]
	Yee-haw. Cool.
	Yeah.
	All right. Well, plugging for this weekend.
	Anybody that's in the St.
	Louis area, we're gonna be in St.
	Charles at the Foundry.
	We being me and Mike, he's been carving an eyeball the size of a door.
	Oh, I saw that on Instagram.
	That was cool.
	Yeah, to be steamroll printed with Graphic House.
	And that is the 24th on Saturday.
	It's coming Saturday.
	If anybody's around, come say hello.
	And if you're not around, but you want to watch the events unfold on Instagram, Mike is much better about posting it than I am.
	But we know.
	We share the fun.
	We try to anyway, when our hands aren't covered in ink.
	Because we're also part of the process.
	Which is quite messy.
	I would expect nothing less.
	Cat running in front of my camera.
	God damn.
	She's been trying to do that for the last hour and I've been stopping.
	And there we go.
	She's now stood between my laptop and my monitor.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Thank you.
	Well done, Kayleigh.
	Yep.
	Good cat.
	Right, if you want to find us anywhere on social media, mostly it's theonbrandpod.
	And if you want to drop us a line, drop us an email, it's theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	And that'd be cool if you want to join our Patreon because you like what we do and want to support it.
	That is patreon.com slash onbrand.
	Am I missing anything?
	I don't think so.
	We've got our social media links, personal ones, up on the screen right now, but I'm at alworthofficial on Instagram, etc.
	And I'm at made.by.lauren.b on Instagram, but madebylaurenb pretty much anywhere you can find me.
	Yeah.
	Do we have any other plugs?
	Is there anything else?
	I don't think so.
	I don't think so either.
	Comment!
	Comment on YouTube.
	Even if you don't listen.
	Yeah, comment, subscribe, like.
	Kind of.
	Like.
	Yeah, that's still a thing that happens on YouTube.
	People like things.
	Yeah.
	Like things.
	All the stuff.
	If you like the thing, interact with the thing.
	Get in touch.
	Say hello.
	You know, drop us a line.
	It makes a difference.
	No, it's cool.
	It's really, really cool.
	We hope you enjoy and we'll see you next week!
	Thanks so much, bye!

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