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Dec. 1, 2023 - On Brand

01:40:57

OB #31 - Lee Fang Is An Idiot

One of Russell's favourite news sources came on his show, so what better time to assess the journalistic ability of Lee Fang? Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Buy a magnet! - whaaaatthewhatyeahwehavemmagnets

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	This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of Russell Brand.
	I'm Al Worth and each week I go through an episode of Brand Show with my co-host Lauren B!
	That's me!
	I do not know what this episode's gonna be about!
	But it can't be good!
	Nah, it's definitely not gonna be good.
	It is in fact gonna be bad, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
	Lauren, what is your good thing before the bad thing?
	Ding dong!
	The witch is dead!
	Fucking Henry Kissinger has kicked it!
	How did I not guess that's what it was gonna be?
	I was afraid we'd have the same one!
	I was afraid we'd have the same one!
	No, no.
	I've got a different one.
	That's not why my head was out of tilt.
	But yeah, okay.
	Okay!
	Now that calls for celebration.
	Calls for celebration.
	Don't care.
	Best one.
	Yeah, that website has now changed, hasn't it, to a yes, you know, ishenrykissinderdead.com or whatever it is.
	Mike, like, made a whole, like, public speaking podium style production of, like, finding it out on his phone last night and he's like, honey, I have something to tell you.
	You need to give me your full attention right now, like, and it was just a moment.
	It was like, it was very, it was like, I was so happy I didn't know what to do with myself.
	So, um, and for any, I mean, I haven't seen hardly anyone saying like, oh, you shouldn't be celebrating anyone.
	First of all, he's a fucking hundred.
	He didn't deserve all those years in the first place.
	I've seen a few people like in a couple of online spaces.
	Well, shut up.
	Shouldn't celebrate someone's death.
	I'm like, well, Some people though, you know.
	Ask Cambodia.
	This one?
	Fuckin' stuff it.
	Fuck it.
	Like, I don't, like, nope.
	This, like, is like a, like, this person was like exist- like world existentially Evil.
	And still, up until the end, getting involved in modern conflicts.
	All the time.
	Yeah.
	It was like a month ago.
	Being hideous and horrible.
	Not an ounce of remorse for the fact that he's dead.
	Very valid good thing before the bad thing.
	That is for sure.
	Finger guns!
	Pew pew pew!
	What's your good thing?
	Ah, it's been a week.
	My good thing is antibiotics, y'know?
	Not even fucking kidding.
	Not for me, I've got a toddler with an ear infection which is just...
	The absolute worst thing imaginable.
	Because, like, toddlers don't understand any kind of pain, really.
	They're just like, this horrible thing is happening to me for the first time, though in this case, second time, and I don't get it, and I can't do anything about it, and it's fucking miserable!
	And you're like, yeah, I get it.
	And then you feel fucking powerless because there's nothing you can do to fix it, and so they're just there feeling horrible.
	You're feeling horrible.
	No one's getting any sleep.
	It's a fucking miserable time.
	However, yeah, the...
	The banana-flavored, uranium-colored liquid that she's drinking that is children's antibiotics.
	It genuinely looks fucking nuclear.
	Yeah, it's doing the trick.
	She's getting a lot better.
	So, honestly, praise be antibiotics.
	That is absolutely my good thing for the bad thing this week.
	Yeah, I couldn't think of a good- I just wanted to- I kept wanting to say, like, I'm sorry you live in Bleak House, but I don't know if that's the correct reference.
	I don't know if that particular Dickensian situation is also full of infection.
	Like, you were like in a ward, like in a Victorian, like, I feel like any kind of house with young children who also attend places with other young children is just that.
	It's just fucking gross all the time.
	And it's like, ugh, why?
	And tis the season.
	Tis the season for getting sick.
	Tis the season for snot and horrible things.
	By the way, I realized as we started this record, I want to fill everybody in if you're not watching.
	We are accidentally Christmas colors right now.
	And I'm like, I'm like red in the background, red shirt.
	And then you're like, you're all green.
	You're full red.
	I am all green.
	My hair is now green.
	Yeah, that's the thing.
	This is weird.
	This is pretty weird.
	Unintentional festive edition of Ombrand, there we go.
	Probably won't happen again, but there we are.
	At Christmas we'll be in black or something, who knows.
	Oh my god, that's funny.
	Or, I mean, it'll be December 1st when this comes out, so then, never mind, it was on purpose.
	Haha!
	Aha!
	Yes.
	This was all part of an elaborate plan.
	This was all the globalists doing.
	That's all it was.
	They suggested to us individually that we need to wear these clothes.
	Santa Claus, the ultimate globalist.
	Literally.
	I mean, he literally travels the whole globe in a night.
	I mean, he doesn't get more globalist than that.
	Now we have a show to get to but first we should thank some new patrons and it is just the one this week so Lucy you are now an awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you very much Lucy.
	Thank you Lucy!
	I have no idea if that's a Lucy that we know or a Lucy that we don't know but either way all Lucys are welcome here and thank you very much.
	Not my Lucy!
	I would know.
	I don't have any Lucy's.
	Okay, okay.
	I have a couple.
	If anyone wants to support us and what we do, become an Awakening Wanderer, join the Invisible Hand, or donate on an elevated tier, head to patreon.com on brand and you will have our eternal gratitude.
	It's this which allows us to be editorially independent and ad-free, and as a patron you will also get a shout-out on the show and access to our patron-only show Off-Brand, where we talk about pretty much anything but Russell Brand.
	And please note that while you can easily listen to our audio version anywhere you can find podcasts, you can also watch us on YouTube, or if you listen in the Spotify app, the video should be there too.
	Also, Lauren has fixed the international shipping issue with magnets!
	Not international!
	No, no, no, that's just expensive.
	No, not international.
	Oh, international's still fucked.
	It's just... Okay.
	Other shipping, however.
	And that's just, that's the country's problem.
	That's a country problem.
	That's a, that's an, it's an absurd amount of money.
	We'll figure it out.
	We'll get there.
	We'll get there.
	Other shipping, however.
	I fixed domestic U.S.
	and here's the magnets again.
	We're the only, we'll actually sell you gold.
	Good looking magnet.
	Real gold!
	Yeah, real gold.
	And, uh, leaf.
	Fuck you, American Huff, and gold.
	We have the real thing.
	I'm actually selling gold on my podcast.
	Fuck it.
	But yeah, I fixed the shipping so that it'll calculate.
	Guys, they really don't like me not paying them a ton of money for a really crappy service, and so it's a little bit of a struggle, but we got it.
	So, Shipping will not be exorbitant.
	Oh, I do have a correction as well from last week.
	Women get the right to vote.
	I have no idea where 1953 came from.
	I don't know.
	I've looked.
	I don't think women got the vote anywhere in the world in 1953 specifically that year.
	I checked.
	Because I knew I was like, oh, maybe I'm thinking of France, and that's closer.
	So in the UK, it was 1928.
	And so your weather was kind of close to the US in the same decade.
	But it was until 1944 is when women got the vote in France.
	So I knew I was like, fucking what?
	Oh, 1944?
	Wouldn't expect that of France, would you, really?
	Right.
	But also, looking it up, it's an abysmal statistic kind of across the board.
	Yeah.
	And also, like, rights in general.
	I was gonna say, there are a ton of other rights that women everywhere definitely didn't have in 1953, so there we go.
	I still get one-sixth of one vote here anyway, because of where I live.
	I think it was it was 1977 in this country before women were allowed their own bank accounts, I think.
	That should tell you something.
	So yeah, the 50s were definitely still bad.
	But yeah, good correction.
	It is nice to be accurate as possible.
	I don't know where 53 came from, but I was like, where did, oof, hoi, ugh, yeah.
	Hilariously wrong.
	I do also want to mention something from last week that has seemingly rocked our community more than expected, and that is my enjoyment of Evanescence.
	No one's ever told me that they like, and again, I support your right, but like, I was talking to Mike about it and I was like, no one's ever said that out loud.
	I said that, I said to him, this is how this went.
	I was like, I don't know anybody that's ever said to me, like, I like Evanescence.
	It's like a classically like shit-honorable band, which like, I like those too.
	Like I have punchline bands, whatever.
	Also, Evanescence is vastly more popular than most bands I like, you know, if you're talking about sales and worldwide acclaim, right?
	So again, it's not my place to bitch, like, for anyone else, but what I said to Mike was that no one's ever said it to me before, and I was like, no one's ever, like, I don't know anybody that likes Evanescence, like, you haven't heard anyone say it to you.
	You very well have met plenty of people like Evanescence, but no one has caught up to you.
	So it was a novel experience to take me to 2023, and that's entirely fair.
	And honestly, hashtag brave.
	Well, I wasn't expecting such a response to it from the audience, to be honest.
	I was just like, oh yeah, I like this thing!
	And then everyone was like, PAH!
	But yeah, I'm gonna stand by it, and I will even tell you that they don't have a single bad album.
	Not one.
	Like, their self-titled output from 2011 is straight fire from start to finish.
	And I know most of our audience haven't heard it, so go listen before you lay judgment on me, right?
	You know, like two songs and you're judging them on something from 2001 or whatever, 2003.
	I didn't think it would be if the rest of the songs sound like those songs!
	Well, they do develop.
	They've developed quite a lot as a band.
	But I mean, it's still very dramatique, you know.
	It puts many goths and emos to shame with its emotional melodrama, but it's fucking great!
	I like Zappa songs that are, like, dumb.
	Like, it's okay.
	Zappa's great.
	But also, some of them get a little fucking silly.
	Oh yeah, esoteric and fucking stupid.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	But I mean, I know a whole bunch of people are going to disagree with me, and that's okay.
	you're allowed to be wrong. That's just where I stand.
	Now then, this show is up a day late.
	It's up a day late and it's gonna be a little bit shorter and next week's is gonna be a couple of days late also, but I think that one will probably go pretty long.
	And I know with absolute certainty our audience are gonna love that one.
	But as for the rest, scheduling sucks, adulting sucks, life is relentless, and things are tough until we get to the point of doing this whole podcasting thing full-time-ish, but we'll always Yeah, I know, I know, right?
	We'll always get there.
	We're just making it work.
	We're making it work.
	We'll get there one way or another, right?
	It will fucking happen.
	Now, normally I let Russell introduce the guest, but this week I'm going to tell you straight up, Lauren, the person that we're dealing with today is none other than Lee Fang.
	Okay.
	Right, yeah.
	Shitty sub-stack journalist extraordinaire with seemingly intentionally low editorial standards.
	So we've dealt with him before on this show.
	He used to work at The Intercept, The Nation, and Republic Report, and once upon a time basically wrote vaguely left-wing pieces for vaguely left-wing publications.
	Now, he's a quote, independent journalist unquote, which is to say he's a guy who provides a source for idiots like Russell so they can then seem legitimate.
	As mentioned, because he has no editorial standards or an editor or editorial staff, when he says he has a source or he's seen a classified or secret document, it is literally impossible to know if he's telling the truth unless he provides the source or the document, which he never does.
	So...
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Pretty much.
	It's like, well, yeah, you could be telling the truth, or you could be making shit up whole cloth.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	And given the things that he writes about, I'm gonna lean more heavily in one direction than the other.
	That's not how protecting your sources works.
	No, just because they are anonymous to the public doesn't mean they're meh.
	Like that's not just in the ether.
	Yeah, you still have to be able to just to cite your sources.
	If you're an independent journalist, especially that's that's when you have to come with the proof like that's that's part of the burden of doing things on your own.
	And it's part of why it's a lot harder.
	To do than working for a larger institution that has an editorial team But yeah, let's let's get straight in here and we'll listen to Russell's introduction and first question for Li Fang Now it's time for our conversation with a fantastic real-life journalist, and some would say eye-candy, Lee Fang.
	Thanks for joining us, Lee.
	Hey, good to see you.
	It's lovely to see you, as always.
	You are regarded as something, as a heartthrob on this channel, you know that, as well as a much-admired journalist.
	We're obviously really interested in your recent Moderna I was really astonished and even though we've made content about it already, I'm still not sure that I entirely understand why Moderna have former FBI employees, why they spend money spying on people.
	Can you explain this to us?
	Because it's not really typically what we understand as the role of a pharmaceutical company, one might imagine would have as their priority, the manufacture of medicines.
	Tell us exactly what this story is and how you came by it, please.
	Well, this is a pretty rare look behind the curtain.
	This is a story about how a large corporation is really manipulating concerns around public health and public discourse to its own benefit.
	Moderna essentially classifies in its own internal documents Uh all legitimate criticism of the vaccine industry as quote-unquote dangerous misinformation and that includes categorizing any criticism of the effectiveness of the vaccines, criticism of policies that coerce individuals to inject the vaccine,
	Oh, okay.
	I mean, he's talking specifically about the COVID vaccine there.
	Yeah.
	And there's no reason anyone would consider things like that dangerous, of course, especially not the people literally manufacturing the vaccine.
	Like, if nothing else, it's dangerous to their profit margins, and so they're concerned, especially when the things being said are blatant lies.
	Like, if someone was going around saying, listening to on-brand puts a chip in your brain!
	I'd be quite concerned as well.
	Like, I might have more of a vested interest in fixing that problem than some rando journalist who doesn't give a shit.
	Which is, of course- I'd be so curious.
	That as well!
	That as well.
	I'd be insatiably curious.
	Absolutely.
	There are so many, many questions.
	Yeah, I'd be compelled.
	Yeah!
	Which is also, like, this is ignoring the fact that this stuff that he's just talking about is dangerous misinformation in the first place, and it's not just the vaccine companies who are concerned about anti-vax propaganda.
	Like, we are concerned about it, for instance.
	It is bad for society, you know?
	And sure, there can be legitimate criticisms of The pharmaceutical companies and vaccines in general, like there are of course legitimate things that you can do.
	Way fewer these days than you used to be able to do, that's for fucking sure.
	But none of that is what he's talking about.
	He's talking specifically about COVID-19 vaccines and all of the bullshit surrounding them.
	Um, in terms of Lee Fang being a heartthrob, uh, for listeners, I would say he looks kind of like an Asian Adam Driver.
	That's, that's, that's kind of what I see.
	Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	But if you like, if like it was a Shrinky Dink and you kind of like squished it top to bottom a little bit.
	Yeah, squish his face a little bit.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I get that.
	Um, I won't deny he's, he's an attractive man and I can't tell... Oh, good for her!
	Right!
	Yeah, I can't tell from this camera shot, but I can only assume he has really long arms because this guy is reaching!
	Good lord.
	Anyway, the... That's your thing!
	Right, right.
	Maybe.
	The story that they're talking about is one which Lee Fang published to UnHerd.
	That's uh, U-N-H-E-R-D dot com.
	UnHerd, get it.
	And it's titled... I know, right?
	Listeners, if you could only see the eye roll, you could probably hear the eye roll.
	And it's titled, the article he's written is titled, Moderna are spying on you.
	Bold claim.
	He asserts this is the case because Moderna scour the internet for what people are saying about them and vaccines in general, all on public forums mind you, and because they work with an NGO called Public Good Projects who in turn hired former FBI analysts to quote confront the root cause of vaccine hesitancy while working to shut down information.
	So Moderna want to know what's up so they hire a company that finds misinformation in public forums and because that company then hires FBI analysts to do that job who are undoubtedly going to probably be the most qualified people to do that job.
	That's exactly what I was thinking.
	Yeah, I'd hire them too.
	Yeah, no.
	All of that means that Moderna are spying on you specifically.
	Also, are they FBI employees or contractors?
	Because if they're contracting with the FBI, that's even more obvious.
	Former FBI.
	Former FBI analyst.
	So definitely, like, contractors, consultants.
	Yeah, they had jobs working as analysts for the FBI, now they work for PGP.
	For a private company.
	Yeah, for PGP, finding shit on the web.
	I'm like, well, yeah, of course you're good at that.
	Okay, so we're done.
	So this episode's done?
	We can go?
	You would think.
	You would think.
	But yeah, that's basically the crux of his article.
	And it's all kind of bullshit.
	But you know, it's scary.
	Very scary stuff.
	In the next clip, we hear where Lee Fang got one of his sources.
	Even the pandemic profiteering, you know, this massive effort to make as much money as possible
	during the pandemic, you know, they were actually fingering you and some of these reports for your
	criticism of the amount of money made by these large corporations. So this is really the documents
	show the blurring of the lines between misinformation, disinformation, and corporate marketing.
	You know, it seems like there's no distinction between those two categories.
	You know, there's, of course, dangerous misinformation out there in terms of lies and, you know, bad information that spreads on social media, sure.
	But they're taking basically any criticism of corporations that benefit from the vaccines,
	of any of these policies around the pandemic, and attempting to say,
	"Hey, you should ignore these stories.
	Potentially these social media platforms should censor these stories."
	And they're also equipping health care professionals with some of their partners to rebut some of these claims.
	So they're basically recruiting the medical profession to fight any criticism of these corporations.
	And, you know, I should say that we obtained these documents.
	We also I'm using some of the documents that I obtained from doing the Twitter files reporting.
	There's a couple of different sources I'm using.
	Ah, the Twitter files.
	It's basically the new WikiLeaks.
	Because it's thousands upon thousands of documents of mostly inane bullshit, no one is willing to sift through it in its entirety and verify what is and isn't in there, and so people like Lee Fang can come along and say, We got this from the Twitter files.
	I mean, I can't show you because that'd be crazy, but that's where we got it.
	All right, good.
	Subscribe to my sub stack.
	All right.
	Yeah.
	That's weird.
	That's fucking weird.
	He's always getting shit from the Twitter files, this guy.
	I'll show it.
	Yeah, he shows one thing in his article and it's a screenshot of an email and that's it.
	That's his evidence that he's citing.
	And the email is not particularly damning at all, it just shows that PGP were helping scour Twitter for misinformation.
	Oh okay, so doing their stated job?
	Doing their job!
	Doing the thing that they're supposed to do.
	You prove that they are doing what they were hired to do.
	Pretty much, the bastards.
	Okay, so it's like all spin.
	All spin, right?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	I need a red flag.
	I got the support hammer.
	I need a red flag.
	I have red behind me.
	I have red tassel.
	Laura, you are a red flag.
	Look at yourself in the camera.
	I mean, more ways than one.
	But yeah, I have red tassel.
	I could shake a tassel at it.
	Shake a tassel at this man.
	He has cheesy feet.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, he's mad that healthcare professionals would be brought in to rebut medical misinformation, which is a hilarious thing to take issue with.
	Like, how dare they fight bullshit with facts from people who actually know the facts?
	The reality is even dumber than this, however.
	What it is, is that a network of 45,000 medical professionals were given handouts telling them how best to respond when confronted with anti-vax bullshit.
	That's all it was.
	That's literally like, hey, you're gonna get a lot of people saying all this stuff to you.
	Here are the facts so that you can, you know, deal with these people because you might want the information to hand.
	But apparently you get- Like, a pamphlet?
	Yeah, you get given a fucking leaflet and all of a sudden you're a part of the Moderna machine, apparently.
	You get like a leaflet about ulcers.
	Like, hey, this new medication might, you know, like, hey, you're getting up there.
	Maybe you need to think about ulcers.
	You never know.
	Here's a pamphlet.
	I've lost count of the number of pamphlets I've been given about various fucking religions.
	I'm clearly now part of so many religions.
	I've got to get in somewhere, right?
	You know, when I die, my bets are hedged at this point, according to Lee Fang's rationale.
	And as to his whole, oh, there's seemingly no difference between misinformation and corporate marketing thing, fuck off, Fang.
	Like, what a stupid argument.
	Like, one is yes, often suggestive and annoying bullshit, but the other one is provably false.
	Like, it's a lesser of two evils situation, I will grant you, but I will go with marketing over lies any day of the week.
	I mean, it's just like the slippery slope of it all.
	Like, okay, so then what else do you have a problem with?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Bud?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Even within the medical field!
	I have a number of complaints before we get there.
	There's a beer advert where they're saying it's the best beer in the world!
	Well, the lying bastards!
	Ads for medication on TV!
	That's true!
	That's wrong!
	Fucking complain about that first!
	Why has that not been a fucking thing on Russell's show?
	Oh my god!
	We need a whole episode at some point of like, thing is not covered on Russell's show!
	That are actual problems?
	Well, I'm sure he'll bitch about it, but like, if I mean, I'm just like, and it's not and again, I think that it is like
	a false dichotomy of like, Oh, well, you should be told what's other thing. I'm not trying to be like that. I'm
	just saying it like taking this thought process to sure, but like to his logical conclusion is like, I'm, I'm
	concerned that his priorities are already skewed.
	In addition to, I mean, I know that it's kind of like bullshit.
	So I mean, obviously I'm going to be biased because of my viewpoint, but man, oh man, like, come on.
	Like if you're going to be worried about marketing, let's talk about marketing.
	There is some serious pearl clutching going on here.
	It's got to be said.
	It's just a lot of smoking mirrors, man.
	You know?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So in the next clip, Russell gets scared.
	But Moderna is different than Pfizer.
	You know, Pfizer is a mega pharmaceutical corporation.
	They have dozens and dozens of products.
	Moderna is unique because this is a company that was essentially a startup for a very long time.
	The COVID vaccines, they're only Approved product.
	So this is a company that went from complete obscurity to becoming, you know, worth a valuation of over a hundred billion dollars almost overnight because of the vaccine.
	Now that the pandemic is waning, it's kind of in the rear view mirror, there's less, there are less people buying their products, so they're even more concerned with using And really manipulating these public discourse debates to get people to continue buying their product.
	They are really dependent on more governments and individuals buying their product.
	I'm terrified by this, Lee.
	Of course you are, buddy.
	Predictably, Lee Fang's presentation of Moderna is not especially honest.
	It is true that Spikevax, bad name, the COVID-19 vaccine from Moderna, is their only commercially available product.
	So what were they doing before that?
	They were founded in 2010, so a pretty young company in the vaccine game, that's for sure, and they basically spent a decade accruing investors while working with already established companies to help production of their vaccines.
	As a for instance, in 2013 they worked with AstraZeneca to develop treatments for cardiovascular, metabolic, and renal diseases.
	They've worked with Merck and Co.
	to develop treatments for cancer.
	In 2015, they developed their first mRNA vaccine for the flu, which had its first antibody encoded by mRNA in 2019.
	Because of all their previous work, they were awesome candidates for Operation Warp Speed, and they got a shitload of money from the U.S.
	government and developed one of the most successful COVID-19 vaccines out there.
	Consequently, their profits went from around $60 million in 2019 to $18.5 billion in 2021.
	A story of how capitalism is gross?
	Absolutely.
	Some grand conspiracy about a startup suddenly making billions?
	Absolutely fucking not.
	It's very straightforward.
	It's also kind of weird to say, like, they were a startup for a number of years.
	Yeah, what, since 2010?
	overlapping overlapping
	overlapping overlapping
	overlapping So then that's not a startup anymore?
	One would think.
	And I think they set records for the amount that it went for or whatever.
	Because they had funding from the Gates Foundation and fucking everyone under the sun.
	Because they'd spent a decade Also, don't these guys love startups?
	what they were doing and courting people like Bill Gates to do that.
	And so like, yeah, everyone was like, "Fuck yeah, have all our money."
	I'm like, "All right, fair enough."
	Also, don't these guys love startups?
	It's just like, it's a weird shade to throw.
	Yeah.
	That does come back about a different company later on as well.
	It is just weird.
	In the next clip, Russell, he's going to force me to do something I really, really don't want to do.
	As you say, a company can come from nowhere.
	Obviously, being British, we know that our current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, was part of a hedge fund, I think invested $500 million in Moderna just prior to 2019.
	the UK government had several officials that subsequently went on to work for Moderna.
	Moderna have received funding for a sort of a 10 year project
	from the UK government, as well as, I know you're aware of this, like various,
	or at least two FDA officials have gone on to work for Moderna.
	And this is a company that has a single product.
	And of course, you know, like in the last couple of months, I've experienced some like unprecedented levels of attacks
	that were generated in media by media.
	So to hear of something this nefarious is concerning and intriguing.
	laughs I don't- I don't understand why he threw that in there, to be honest.
	It was just like, all of this stuff to do that's relevant, and then, I've been attacked!
	And so, well, yeah, this other thing is interesting, isn't it?
	I'm gonna nominate Malignant Narcissism for the candidate.
	They did spend a long time there not talking about him, so, you know, he had to even the scales.
	Also, accusations.
	I know this is an aside, but like...
	Generated in media by media.
	How fucking like no in media by victims.
	By the people that you assaulted.
	That is so dehumanizing and like cruel to say as just like an offhanded comment like how you talk all the time.
	Conveys your character to the rest of the world, not just at your best times, not just at your worst times.
	All the time.
	Like, you are you the whole time.
	Tip of the iceberg as to the things he says about the accusations against him.
	Right.
	Of course, of course.
	And I don't want to get hung up on it, it's just that, boy, didn't like that.
	Yeah, no, his narrative around it is disgusting, that's for absolute sure.
	Also, why did you, yeah, to your point, why did you say that?
	Why bring it up now?
	It's your show!
	It has no relevance.
	You don't have to say that!
	It has no relevance whatsoever.
	So anyway, it looks like I'm going to have to defend Rishi fucking Sunak, our dear oligarch Prime Minister, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris Johnson, during which time the pop chain Weatherspoons dubbed him as Dishy Rishi.
	Dishy is in quite a dish, you know that- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Dishy.
	A piece.
	I disagree, incidentally, but I do usually find people of immense wealth, status, and privilege unattractive, and people who actively fuck the poor even more so.
	So, there we go.
	To go back a ways- Not a great thing to do, if you want to- That's also, like, calling people, like, Trying to make heartthrobs out of, like, politics.
	Like, politicians and stuff.
	Oh, honestly.
	When you come over here, I'm going to take you to a Wetherspoons and I'm going to show you the little propaganda magazine that they do in every single one.
	And they've got, they're, I think, I think there are more Weatherspoons in this country than there are McDonald's at this point.
	I think that's a statistic that's accurate.
	I'm sorry.
	What is a Weatherspoon?
	It's a pub chain.
	Oh!
	I thought it was like a magazine.
	No, no, no.
	Pub chain.
	Pub chain.
	Yeah, but they put out a little propaganda magazine that they've been putting out since Brexit, because they were very pro-Brexit.
	And yeah, it's been pretty grim times.
	There's like... that's a nesting doll of weird... I've learned.
	I'm just gonna have to sit with that.
	I'm just gonna have to sit with that information and know it.
	We'll save Wetherspoons for an off-brand at some point.
	There is a whole culture around Wetherspoons specifically that is just...
	Weirdly fascinating in its own way.
	But yeah, the long and short of it is that they're massive and provide the cheapest beer and food.
	Okay, that's just a capsule of information.
	I'm just going to have to accept it.
	It's just a thing I have now.
	Okay, I've accepted it.
	That was very confusing!
	Yeah.
	Their propaganda arm dubbed him as Dishirishi because they're very conservative and so, you know, they want to make him look good in any way possible and that was apparently the best that they could find.
	So to go back a ways from 2010 to 2013, Rishi Sunak co-founded Thaleem Partners Investment Firm, which was a hedge fund.
	He then quit to come into politics during David Cameron's reign as Prime Minister, but of course not without still having a good chunk of his finances tied up in Thaleem Partners.
	The investment firm itself was managed by a blind trust, and the blind trust had invested in Moderna.
	Now, the whole point of a blind trust is that the people in the company don't have any clue where the money's going, therefore avoiding the need for financial disclosures, right?
	It's a dodgy system that can absolutely be abused and I see the appeal for someone in politics with a lot of money.
	In any case it was brought to Rishi's attention back in 2020 at least that the Blind Trust had invested in Moderna at which point he probably should have untethered himself from them financially but he just kind of continued down the it's a blind trust I don't know what's going on path.
	It was technically true that it's impossible to say how much of Rishi Sunak's money was gained from Moderna shares, but I do know that the Moderna shares Thaleen Partners owns accounted for nearly 35% of their portfolio value back in November 2022.
	for nearly 35% of their portfolio value back in November 2022.
	So that's, you know, a third of their profit is made from Moderna.
	So I think it's also fair to say it's pretty unlikely Rishi didn't profit from Moderna shares while Chancellor of the Exchequer and their value shot up while he was in a position of government power.
	Not a good look.
	Of course, here's the rub.
	In spite of it all, technically he's legally in the clear and hasn't had to declare any conflict of interest or any of that.
	Oh great, well I'm so relieved now.
	That's the whole point of the Blind Trust.
	But yeah, as ever with any of Russell's commentaries, the reality is more complicated than he makes out and it occupies a lot more grey areas.
	I wouldn't describe this so much as a conspiracy as just another case of capitalism being gross.
	That's kind of my take on it.
	You'd think.
	That sounds like a complaint that's valid and deserves scrutiny.
	In fact, I consume plenty of media that does that exact thing.
	There's an audience for it.
	There's an audience and it's a growing but considerably smaller, unfortunately, market share in the moment as like stochastic terrorism.
	But hey, you know, those guys had to start out small too.
	I think if he framed it in the right way, if he framed it the way he does his current content, but just like against capitalism, I don't know, he might be able to swing it, maybe.
	Like, I don't know.
	Honestly, I don't see why, I mean, okay, no, I do see why not, and it's money, and it's easy money, and it's not having to work very hard, I get that, but like- Subscribe to my local's channel, that's why.
	It's like so close, it's like right, you're like, oh, you're, you're, you can- The right thing is, like, singeing your eyebrows, like, come on, man!
	He's taking issue with everything around the shape of capitalism without actually saying the thing itself, and you're just like, oh, fuck's sake, you have very clearly painted the silhouette of this thing and are just ignoring it, you son of a bitch!
	Yeah, right.
	Oh, dear.
	As for people from government and people from the FDA going on to work for Moderna, so what?
	You mustn't ever work in both the public and private sectors in your entire career, according to Russell.
	That's just unacceptable.
	I mean, and again, like, there's plenty of complaints to be made.
	There's plenty of, like, glad-handing and, like, industry and, like, and there's, I mean, I don't want anybody from Raytheon in the cabinet!
	Yeah, like, obviously there's problems, but like, how do we fix that?
	It's regulation, it is accountability, like, this is a smokescreen.
	What they're doing is distracting people from where they should be putting their attention, and that's actually really fucking dangerous!
	And he knows it!
	I take way less issue though with people going from public sector to private sector.
	That's way less nefarious.
	It's just like, oh, I want to make more money, so I'm going to go make more money.
	Fair enough.
	Also, maybe the public sector should get paid adequately, and then this would not happen.
	There is that.
	Paying for services.
	What the fuck, right?
	Crazy.
	It's bananas.
	People only think that taxes pay for the things that they don't like.
	So, taxes pay for everything.
	Especially regulation.
	And especially legal representation.
	Yep.
	Oh, and that 10-year contract with the UK government, by the way, is actually a 10-year partnership with the UK, with Moderna, to invest in mRNA research and development in the UK and build a state-of-the-art vaccine manufacturing center with the ability to produce up to 250 million vaccines a year.
	It's terrifying.
	I mean, anything like this thing is in there.
	Like, that's actually great.
	But in their framework, anything developing vaccines is instantly bad.
	Yes.
	Because of their fake rules they made.
	Anything involving a big pharma company.
	And the frustrating thing about that is that there is a question mark around that story whereby the UK government haven't actually disclosed what the deal is that they've made with Moderna because it's commercially sensitive, scare quotes, right?
	So they haven't actually disclosed that.
	I'm like, that's the real story here!
	What the fuck is going on?
	Yeah, if it's commercially sensitive, what's the government doing?
	Hiding?
	No, no, no.
	No, that's the real story.
	Why the fuck are we talking about that?
	Fuck!
	Fuck!
	Come on!
	It would be such a slam dunk for him as well.
	Like, come on, man.
	Let's let's discuss this.
	Oh, ridiculous.
	Okay.
	All right.
	All right.
	Anyway, let's get back to Lee Fang's bullshit.
	You know, I was at a left wing outlet for the last eight years, including much of the pandemic.
	There wasn't any influence from Moderna or Pfizer in terms of advertising or anything of that nature.
	But there was a culture of, hey, you know, we've got to support public health.
	So, you know, we can't publish any stories that might discourage people from taking the vaccine.
	It's just it's just it's a cultural problem in journalism today.
	You really have to look outside to independent content creators to independent media platforms that are willing to go against the grain, both in terms of pushing back and not being dependent on big corporate advertisers, but also pushing back on the culture of journalism.
	You know, a lot of the journalists and editors out there, simply for whatever reason, they act as a herd and work in one direction.
	You need people who say, stop, let's wait a second, let's be skeptical of these trends, let's be skeptical of these policies.
	Perhaps, Leifang.
	Does he live on?
	Okay, alright.
	Well, I know you must not have considered this, Leigh, but perhaps all of these journalists work as a herd, as you put it, because they agree on a shared reality in which vaccines are generally a positive thing and invading sovereign nations is a bad thing.
	Because this guy's pretty fucking pro-Russian, by the way.
	Great, great.
	But no, we must fight the culture of journalism.
	I will say, that he is doing.
	He is fighting the culture of journalism by being everything but journalistic in his work.
	Doing a bang-up job, guys!
	Killing it.
	Keep it up, buddy.
	Great.
	Yeah, it's like pushing back on what?
	Journalistic ethics?
	It seems like.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Because if, okay, if you walk into one house and you smell dog shit and you're like, oh, this house smells like dog shit.
	And so you leave and then you go in the second house.
	And it smells like dog shit.
	And then you leave in the third house.
	You walk in and it smells like dog shit.
	Check your shoes!
	That's like the thing that you need.
	Like that's critical thinking on a basic level.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I mean, like, okay, if every, every journalist that you, like, that you can see in the, you know, legacy mainstream media is doing what, like, it's, okay, I know, I'm- They're all acting as a herd, Lauren.
	Yeah.
	They're a herd of- Agreed upon journalistic ethics.
	You're heard.
	Okay.
	Bastards.
	Bastards the lot of them.
	We need to go against this culture of journalism.
	That's what's crazy and this is honestly like what is striking me in this particular moment because there has had to be especially with like You know, what's going on in Gaza, there's a lot of debunking constantly going around in media that is, and like, and there is a conversation with like, sane people.
	That's about like, you know, like being critical of where you're getting your information and what the information is.
	And so there's like a lot more discussion in places where I don't normally see discussion about like media literacy.
	And so listening to this person, it's just like, it's, The, uh, it's, it's extra dissonant to have that very rational, like helpful conversation in the, in, you know, in my media diet that's been happening now for what?
	Yes.
	Over a month, you know, it was like two months now that like people have been like rational and helpful, at least from my algorithms.
	Right.
	Whereas like this person is just presenting a totally different, like, Well, it's remarkable that someone who has worked in media as a journalist for this long is so fucking illiterate in terms of media and is this dumb.
	Because, good God.
	Well, he just, it's almost hard to listen.
	Okay, and again, maybe this is me.
	Also, y'all, I've had a week.
	I've been very, very busy with these two little paws making a whole lot of stuff.
	Maybe I'm dumb today.
	I don't know.
	Entirely possible.
	My hair's a mess.
	I'm wearing the overalls.
	Viewers, at this point, know Lauren's kind of a wreck right now.
	But I find it hard to follow him.
	Like, to listen and follow what he's saying, because it's all very, like, woo-do-do-boot.
	Like, it's very... Yeah, yeah.
	It's hard to keep track of the point he's trying to make, that's for sure.
	I definitely...
	I'm coming for someone that says, um, and pauses, strike me dead.
	That's not fair.
	I'm not saying that, but like, yeah.
	No, no, no, no, no, no.
	His sentences, the words he says.
	It just doesn't drive a point.
	No, no.
	He takes a good long while to get anywhere with it.
	And he's quite a slow communicator.
	It's hard to like, it feels like he's making it up.
	Like it just...
	Because that's what I'm saying is like usually I will hear okay media is a herd and then Here's example, researched and investigated examples of A, B, and C. And so we're going to connect this information and this is like, okay, here's where the media... This is my experience of working in the media in a left-wing place for eight years.
	They're all a herd.
	Okay.
	Well, but that's like, that's the end.
	Whereas in my media diet, Making a statement like that, and we've heard those statements, like, wow, these mainstream media is saying these very wrong things when reporting has, you know, like, reporting on the ground is the opposite.
	Why is that?
	And it's like, media is a herd, is the, like, thesis, like, conclusion he's making, whereas media is following this problematic narrative, and then we're going to cite examples.
	and then we're gonna find out why or postulate why or at least consider it so that we have like
	something to keep in the back of our mind when me as a consumer of media moves forward and like
	talks about it. Maybe I'm being over simple.
	I don't know.
	It just hit me today.
	It's completely valid because that's pretty much all you're going to get with his writing is, ah, trust me.
	And you're like, well, I don't.
	So where do I go from there?
	What am I left with?
	So in this next clip, we get a little bit more stating the obvious.
	But, you know, I have a follow-up on my substat coming out next week that looks at more of these files, and it really shows that Moderna was particularly concerned with independent voices, with people like you, with people like Megyn Kelly, Jimmy Dore, many other independent voices that have been critical of these policies, because they see that these independent voices are gaining a huge following, and they're shaping the way people see these vaccines and see these vaccine policies.
	So close.
	So close.
	Company takes issue with prominent shitheads lying about its products.
	I'm shocked.
	Shocked, I tell you.
	Like, oh, they seem really concerned about all the things that these loudmouth jackasses are saying.
	My concern list?
	What do you know?
	I guess I'm a meteor herd.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	May I say.
	Okay.
	All right.
	What?
	Yeah.
	Also, I mean, uh, I don't know.
	This is just, it seems like the most normal corporate shit.
	Like normal corporate marketing shit, but like way more important to people's like health and lives.
	Yeah, yeah, exactly.
	It's, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's PR, but with actual public health consequences, you know, because that's, normal corporations do that as well.
	All of it.
	Absolutely.
	But like, this is not that.
	This is not like the Sackler family, you know, like, this is, you know, this is not the opioid epidemic.
	Oh, I said academic epidemic.
	Like, yeah, that's I am kind of dumb.
	I'm sorry.
	But today, maybe all the time used to say, but you know, dude, like, ah, Yeah, I know!
	You're so close!
	You keep doing a little dance around the point, but then missing it entirely.
	It's just... Grazed by the point over and over!
	Gonna keep doing a little dance.
	Make a little love.
	Oh, man!
	Also, I do want to say, Lee Fang has already mentioned, oh, they singled you out specifically, Russell, in a little flattery moment earlier.
	But what actually occurred is around the time the allegations came out, Brand was trending and was big news.
	And so the anti-vaxxers defending him got all riled up, which Moderna simply made note of.
	Like, they were like, oh, this thing is happening.
	Let's keep an eye on it, I guess.
	Yeah, Russell decided to spin it and incite that very thing.
	That's literally all Russell.
	We saw it!
	All the anti-vaxxers were like, oh, it's because he's spoken out about COVID.
	And Moderna obviously were like, huh, we should be aware of this.
	And that was it.
	And like Fang in his article frames it quite a bit differently, but he does write that same information in his fucking article.
	So it's like, well, what?
	What's crazy is when you hear about when you learn about the history of propaganda, right?
	Like, especially within government.
	And obviously, I'm in the US.
	And so like, that's where my scope is, right?
	As far as what I know.
	Yeah, that's very standard.
	Knowing your media environment, knowing the social environment thing, you're going to find that this is a very common trend.
	This is a great example.
	He would be completely right.
	And not like we would be able to critique.
	He would just be correct if he was coming from the stance of, Here's who our enemies are and they're coming after us.
	So we have to counter attack.
	Like if that was the situation, if we were talking about propaganda, we were talking about the mission in an honest way that then, yeah, this is a perfect, like it's a very thinly veiled examination of where they are.
	Weak in their PR war, essentially.
	Like, this is a study on how we win the PR war and how we win the propaganda war.
	And if he's coming from that angle, he's spot on.
	He's spot on.
	If he was going to, like, break kayfabe, so to speak, and just come out and say it.
	That's what I'm saying.
	Yeah.
	There's also, there's especially like 50s, 60s, 70s, like a lot of, especially like, you know, with the, um, The McCarthyism, all that kind of stuff.
	Oh yeah.
	Plenty of dudes were very explicit about saying hideous things, and you can hear it, and it's a public record, you know what I mean?
	And that's what this sounds like.
	If that was the goal, Nailing it.
	Fucking nailing it.
	Interesting.
	I just, I feel like examining like, okay, what's the benefit here?
	And obviously it's distraction and kind of like, you know, it's misinformation.
	It's, you know, you're deflecting, but like, where does this work?
	Like, where is this person coming from where it makes sense in their head?
	And I think that like coming at it critically from like, okay, what do they think is right?
	And or like where not even what they think is right, but like that.
	Logical like that sense of logic and then seeing how that progress progresses
	because you can also connect the dots between propagandists and people saying hideous things, and then the results are
	the country does awful things here and abroad like.
	So you can connect the dots from thoughts to actions.
	Oh no, let's consider the patterns we've experienced in the past and what this dude's aiming at.
	What these dudes Like, maybe they don't know, but they're ratcheting themselves into place for this very bad thing that they're doing.
	Oh God, yeah.
	Oh God, yeah.
	I completely agree.
	We got a snapshot of that with the first Trump presidency, and we can only hope that that is the last Trump presidency is all I can say about that.
	I mean, it's not looking great at the moment.
	I know, I know.
	I'm going to have to have some kind of faith that the country's not insane.
	There's already states that won't put him on the ballot, which I think, honestly, that's a thing that...
	That's already been happening, and that is a little bit of a relief to know and to hear.
	I mean, the results from those actions... I was gonna say, what's the legal ramifications of that?
	That's interesting.
	Well, legally, if he's a criminal, the states can say, like, I'm not putting him on the ballot.
	He's a criminal.
	Oh, no, yeah, well, yeah, no, I understand that perspective.
	Yeah, I just, I just, I don't know.
	I wonder if they're... I don't know how to wriggle out of it.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	Yeah, no, they're very, very... Oh, God, we live in interesting times.
	It's that ancient curse, isn't it?
	We live in interesting times and here we fucking are.
	So, Russell is about to ask what he considers to be a genius leading question, where he's almost asking the very question that I would ask Lee Fang, right?
	Is it possible, without significant changes to the law or other, say, anomalous events,
	to even countenance silencing voices as significant as Tucker Carlson's and more particularly,
	I suppose, still, Elon Musk?
	Isn't that beyond the reach of an organisation like Moderna?
	What other interests would they have to be working with to even be able to consider shutting
	Because these are not like, you know, sort of little online vloggers or whatever.
	These are sort of like, you know, pretty powerful voices at this point.
	What kind of...
	What kind of cooperation would they require from other interests or other institutions to be able to challenge voices like Tucker's or Elon's?
	Oh, he's pleased with himself for this one.
	So he's already mentioned at the very beginning of the episode the notion of former FBI people working for Moderna, which is what he's desperately hinting at in that question.
	Or how could they possibly silence someone like Elon or Tucker without wider cooperation?
	Like, "Come on, Fang, pick it up. I'm throwing truffles down. Now you pick 'em up like the little propaganda thingy
	that you are."
	"Yes, come on! Get 'em!"
	So let's see what we've received.
	So you said that that was the question you were going to ask.
	But you would come from the opposite direction?
	No, I would ask the first part of it.
	It was like, how the fuck are Moderna supposed to silence Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson?
	How is that even remotely possible?
	Please answer that question for me, Mr. Fang.
	I was like, it's funny how inflection and intent, boy, just really changes the whole pie.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	So let's see what Lee's response is, and for those watching, pay particular attention to Bran's expression throughout.
	For listeners, I'll provide some commentary as Russell to explain his expression so you don't miss out, okay?
	Well, look, we are in the benefit.
	You're in the UK.
	I'm in the US.
	I'm in San Francisco.
	We live in an open society.
	To varying degrees, we have free speech.
	We have the First Amendment.
	We have similar laws and provisions around the West.
	I'm going to stare at him.
	No, I'm going to have to look at him.
	I'm going to stare at him.
	No, I'm going to have to look at him.
	Maybe if I stare at the camera, do you think he'll get it by just looking at me?
	Nod a bit.
	Tell them I'm listening.
	Alright.
	Critical voices.
	And at the same time, we see very common voices stigmatizing independent reporting.
	They say, you know, people like you are dangerous.
	They say, you know, you're crazy.
	You're someone who's endangering the public health.
	And so even when they're not technically censoring, they're marginalizing you to a degree that your voice is not heard or not believed.
	And that's the kind of strategy of shaping public opinion.
	I'm so bad at this job.
	He's an idiot.
	see in the West. It's not the command and control system that we see in totalitarian
	states, but it still can be very effective in terms of controlling the information that
	people see and what they believe.
	Okay, well, yeah, so that's, that's, that's, that's right.
	He's so pissed.
	He was like, looking for nothing and wasn't finding. Yeah, he was, he was, he was gritting
	his teeth throughout, throughout that.
	I laid it before him.
	My observation is that those big ol' bushy eyebrows laid very heavy and unmoving as though they were carved into stone on his temple.
	Why is he not understanding me?
	Uh-uh, uh-uh.
	Russ, pro tip for Muppet people, you don't hide how you feel,
	even if you think you are. - No.
	Look at the fucking monitor, bud.
	Goddammit, just do a fucking pre-interview.
	What are you doing?
	We're supposed to be talking about the juicy prospect of the FBI working with Moderna and instead he's just like, well, we live in an open society.
	Goddammit!
	Lee!
	I do, however, briefly want to pick up on something that Lee Fang was saying there, which is, oh, even if they're not actively censoring people, they're marginalizing alternative voices to make sure they're not taken seriously, to which I say, so fucking what?
	Like, this is the same both-sides perspective that media has had for decades, which is what has landed us in so much shit, which is to say, oh, we have 90% of people agreeing with this one thing, so what we need to do is bring on someone who represents the 2% of people who vehemently disagree with this thing to balance out the scales.
	We need someone who agrees and someone who disagrees.
	Which is total bullshit and does nothing but amplify fringe and minority views which are almost invariably hateful and/or
	fucking stupid.
	Like the British media, for example, need to be hoisted on a pike for allowing Nigel Farage so much screentime in the
	early 2010s.
	Because that right there has a direct link to Brexit happening and our entire country getting ratfucked by Boris
	Johnson.
	And you guys have been at it with every hate group you can find for a long time now.
	Hey, I'm like-- - In the interest of ratings.
	Yeah.
	David Duke thanks you.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Abso-fucking-lutely.
	Yeah.
	It's completely bananas.
	I can't think of it.
	There's another guy, there's another fuckin' KKK racist, and they're like, oh, he's good, he's handsome, he wears a tie.
	He's charismatic.
	Shut up!
	Yes, I am.
	I'm so sorry.
	People, you better be yelling it at me right now.
	I'm so sorry.
	I can't think.
	The only word coming to me is Burton Cummings.
	That's the lead singer of The Guest Who.
	Not talking about him.
	I hope not.
	My brain isn't giving me that.
	He's Canadian, it's totally different!
	I wouldn't sweat it, any guy in a white hood is immediately a shithead.
	Enough of you now.
	I'm psychically absorbing your correct answer right now, I promise.
	Yeah, you've got it, you've got it.
	So Lee Fang is upset that there's not more of a mission in social media spaces to amplify fringe voices, and I'm quite content in telling him to get fucked.
	Yeah.
	It's just my position.
	Legitimately also.
	The thing is, again, the legitimate concern is that American media, I mean media in general, with the advent of the internet and with the decline in a newspaper, and also a newspaper's unwillingness to adapt to new media, frankly.
	and corporations demanding such high profit margins that like smaller media organizations
	were eaten up by conglomerates.
	And then you, so you don't have independent, you know, like research desks.
	You don't have independent journalists.
	You don't have investigative journalists on the ground.
	I mean, it's virtually nothing.
	It's why podcasts have filled in part of that gap.
	I mean, podcasts, blogs, and social media have had to fill in that gap where there used to be actual, like, Compensated career investigative journalists that made a living by investigating and writing and reporting.
	And we don't have that anymore because capitalism and because corporate fucking greed, like on a number of levels.
	And that's the complaint!
	That's the complaint as far as smaller, independent media organizations.
	They're not all for propaganda.
	In fact, a lot of them weren't, specifically.
	They were reporting on the news that was relevant in a region, and they had the...
	Boots on the ground and they had the knowledge of a local area and the way that politics and the way that this, you know, a local community function.
	So they could most effectively investigate and report on that thing.
	And we've lost that.
	And this is the result.
	And that should be this fucking...
	Like, this should be this guy's complaint.
	I was trying to make an Adam Driver pun.
	I can't, anyway.
	I haven't seen enough Adam Driver movies to... Yeah, there's... It's a fun... It's name is Driver.
	There's something in there.
	I'll get there.
	Oh, there's got to be something.
	There's got to be something.
	Yeah.
	So after a little while, Russell gives up on the FBI shtick and we get to the meat of the interview based on a portion of Fang's article.
	Here it shows.
	That powerful corporations like Moderna and like Pfizer, through these NGOs and other organizations that they work with, were attempting to shape the public discourse and to really control the information that we saw.
	Yeah, and beyond that, deep state agencies, of course, I know you did the reporting.
	Can you tell me a little bit more about what NewsGuard is and what their censorship model is and how they're merging corporate and state power?
	And can you tell me what you know about the Trusted News Initiative as well?
	And these other global organisations that seem to incorporate state-funded media and appear to have an agenda to impose narratives and shut down counter-narratives, can you tell me about the power that they have?
	Well, yeah, there's this, this is, you know, there's some overlap with this story.
	But there's a cottage industry of NGOs, some of them privately funded, some government funded.
	Most of them are nonprofits, and they go out and they say, hey, we've got this misinformation, disinformation problem.
	You know, foreign influence problem.
	We need Tell me what?
	down websites or we need to warn people about dangerous information on the
	internet. Well, that's all fine and well, but you know, a lot of these organizations essentially have their own
	biases.
	They're basically using their own subjective reading of the truth and then
	claiming that they're neutral arbiters of what's real and what's not and what's
	fair and what's not. And what NewsGuard does, this is a startup that was founded in 2018.
	No, they're actually a for-profit company.
	So they're slightly different. They're trying to monetize efforts to control what
	people see on the internet and where advertising dollars go.
	So they rate websites on a, you know, one to 100 scale of trustability. Um,
	but they have their own criteria and I've talked to a lot of the websites that
	they've been, that they've been targeting.
	And they say that there's a clear conflict of interest.
	There are many issues at play here.
	News Guard received a $750,000 contract from the Pentagon, from the Air Force, in terms of looking at misinformation.
	Well, who do they target after receiving that contract?
	Some of the left-wing sites that have been incredibly critical of the war between Ukraine and Russia.
	They've been pointing out Issues in terms of neo-Nazis in the Ukrainian military, stories around U.S.
	influence over Ukraine's politicians.
	These are areas of legitimate public debate.
	These are stories that have been confirmed by other news outlets.
	This isn't misinformation.
	Nonetheless, NewsGuard, after receiving this Pentagon contract, has classified sites like Consortium News, a site that's been around for 30 years, that's published 20,000 articles just because of Five or six articles that are critical of Ukraine, they brand the entire site as dangerous misinformation.
	I'm gonna call Prison Planet.
	Like, I don't care how- It's been around for decades, and it's wrong.
	Like, that's Alex Jones's- one of Alex Jones's ventures, by the way.
	Exactly what I was just about to say.
	So because a website has existed for a long time and has thousands of articles, that makes it legitimate!
	Like InfoWars, for instance.
	Like, there are a number of shitheel sites that fit that description, yeah.
	So yeah, I'm curious that Lee Fang seems to be using that specific description to the trend.
	Yeah, you can say that about the Drudge Report and it's fucking trash.
	Just because it's being prolific...
	Like, looking at you, L. Ron Hubbard, being prolific doesn't make you good.
	I mean, it's crazy.
	100%.
	I was like, wait, wait, stop, stop, stop.
	Sir, stop.
	What's your criteria?
	What is your problem with their criteria?
	Can you tell me your problem?
	Oh, you're not going to?
	Oh, you're going to cite one example?
	The thing that he's complaining about, well, they've cited a few articles through this entire entire website. So, and they just assume that it's wrong.
	You've cited one instance that you find as an issue to completely throw out that organization
	without explaining to me what the actual, like your problems with the criteria itself
	that they are applying.
	Yeah, no, he doesn't really get into that. He does provide a second example in a minute.
	Okay, welfare.
	We'll get to that.
	That said, it is only still two total, and I'm like, well, if they're that big a problem, you know.
	I want to know the problem with the root, you know?
	Yeah, with their actual assessments.
	What's the problem with their system of how they rate things?
	So NewsGuard is a tool that assesses the credibility of news and information websites, as well as tracks online misinformation.
	It's designed to help users distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources of news, and it was founded in 2018 by journalists Stephen Brill and Gordon Krovitz.
	Crovitz was a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and served as an executive vice president at Dow Jones.
	Stephen Brill, on the other hand, founded The American Lawyer, Court TV, now True TV, Brill's Content, which was a media watchdog publication and has written quite a few books.
	So these guys have priors, right?
	They're pretty serious about what they do and they're both the co-editors and managers of NewsGuard.
	NewsGuard rates over 7,000 websites which collectively account for about 95% of all news and information shared online in the US, UK, Germany, France and Italy.
	The only real criticism of NewsGuard that I could find was that it might be targeting conservative voices over left-wing ones.
	I have an alternative view that maybe, just maybe, the conservative voices are the ones telling the most lies.
	That's just a possibility that crossed my mind.
	Maybe it's a standard problem.
	Maybe there's an issue.
	Yeah.
	Speaking of lies, Lee Fang just said an interesting thing
	right at the beginning there about NewsGuard coming along and doing their own subjective
	reading of the truth and determining what's true and what's not and what's fair and what's not.
	what's not.
	Here's the thing about the truth, and that is that truth is absolute and binary.
	Something is either true or false.
	There is no wiggle room on that issue.
	Where things get muddied is when people don't know the truth, or in many cases, don't trust the truth because of who's saying it.
	When people don't know, it leads to conjecture, and when people don't trust whomever is telling the truth, it leads to conspiracy.
	NewsGuard's job is to rifle through all of those things, determine truth from falsehoods, and note when people are spinning conspiracies.
	That's it.
	To give you a clear notion of kind of where they land on things, they've rated Jacobin with a green checkmark, right?
	Because while we've seen plenty of shit flinging from that site, outright lying is a different question, right?
	So, overall green checkmark, which is not to say they got 100 out of 100, they absolutely didn't.
	But, you know, a reasonably high score, let's put it that way, because not necessarily outright lies, just shitty positions.
	Right.
	If my criteria... Dishonest positions.
	Yeah, like if it was my criteria and it was only the Jacobin stuff that we talked about on the podcast, Russell uses as citations, I'd be like, well, that's a zero for me.
	Yes.
	But those are where we're examining the difference in the assessment criteria.
	And mine is not fair.
	Well, yeah, yeah, and there's that, and there's also that obviously, you know, out of the entire website, we're only dealing with the articles that Russell is picking up, you know.
	Exactly, exactly.
	And so, as you have mentioned, there are plenty of articles on Jacobin that are perfectly fine.
	There's just a whole tiny little fucking subset of bullshit that's there for people like Russell.
	Anyway, this whole thing brings us to Consortium News, right, who he just mentioned, that site of 30 years, so since 1995, so not quite 30 years, that was brought down by NewsGuard because of their reporting on the Ukraine war.
	I mean, it's still up, it's still there, they just didn't like the rating they got.
	They're another left-of-left kind of site that also dabbles in conspiracy theories and it's almost entirely made up of the kind of shit-flinging that we've seen from Jacobin with sprinklings of pro-Russia narratives in there as well.
	Don't like that!
	No, no, and honestly it looks like a website from about 2005, like you go and look at it,
	it's pretty remarkable.
	Their battle with NewsGuard is actually from December 2022 and what happened was Consortium
	News had been parroting the usual pro-Russia lines that Ukraine is full of Nazis and that
	the US performed a coup there and that Ukraine was trying to lead a genocide on the Russian
	people within the region and they did some crowing about false flags as well.
	Accordingly, NewsGuard pointed all this out and gave the site a kind of shitty rating, along with saying that Consortium News didn't adhere to many journalistic standards.
	I completely agree with that assessment.
	Oh, and they're also super into Julian Assange, which usually says something.
	They have a whole little segment on the header of their site just dedicated to Julian Assange.
	I'm like, okay.
	Very flattered.
	That's a choice.
	That's a choice.
	That's another thing is like when you said that there's like, that, um, that NewsGuard is, has been criticized for focusing more on, uh, conservative than, um, than the left.
	The first thing I thought was like, yeah, cause the left fucking rips each other to shreds.
	I'm in it.
	I'm one.
	I know.
	I know.
	But also like the, the, what that gives most of us, It's critical thinking skills.
	It's being able to assess several different sources of information and compare.
	Compare and contrast.
	Yeah, and this is the problem.
	A lot of the time, if someone bullshits on the left, it's the left that goes, shut the fuck up!
	And we deal with it ourselves.
	Whereas the right is just like, yeah, let's go along with it, guys.
	This fits what we want to achieve.
	Okay, fucking fantastic.
	If you will.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, you know what?
	That's a good description.
	I like that.
	It is true that NewsGuard received funding from the Pentagon, so the Department of Defense awarded them a contract totaling approximately $750,000.
	It was part of a federal grant through the Small Business Innovation and Research Program aimed at aiding the development of NewsGuard's Misinformation Fingerprints technology, which is described as the most comprehensive data set of provably false narratives online.
	Less scary than they've made it sound, basically.
	It's a bad name for what it is, and I think that's just going to play into some conspiracy theories right there.
	They can't win for loose.
	I mean, come on.
	No, I know, but it's a comprehensive data set of provably false narratives online, and you're showing where things come from, and they call it misinformation fingerprints.
	Yeah, that's really bad.
	That's a terrible brand name.
	It's just not.
	Not great, but then... It makes sense when you think about it, but it's like, I still gotta... Yeah, it takes a second and it's not the first place my mind goes.
	When I hear misinformation fingerprints, I'm like, what are you doing with my fingers?
	Is that Pete Holmes bit of like non-fiction, like fiction, not, not, not, non, not true.
	It's like the non-fiction, not true, non-fiction.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	It's that like, Yeah, yeah, that moment.
	Which fuckin' one is which?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Annual versus perennial.
	Basically, Newsguard are fine.
	I don't really take any issue with them.
	Obviously because they're for-profit, it's not particularly helpful to wider society unless governments and things kind of sign on.
	I think some states are interested.
	There are some places where it's installed as a thing in libraries, in the browser, that kind of situation.
	Which is helpful.
	Yeah, great.
	But yeah, it needs to be a wider kind of thing in order to be effective.
	And whereas, like, for the average consumer, it's, I think, like, I don't know, $5 a month or something to have the little add-on in your browser.
	Oh, I see.
	That's too much.
	Yeah.
	Who's going to fucking pay for that?
	Who is going to pay for that?
	And it's going to be people...
	Yeah, and it's gonna be people like you or me, right, but with more money, in that situation.
	Not, yeah right, not the people who actually fucking need the thing, who are people like Russell.
	Russell needs that, absolutely.
	It's an opt-in of an opt-in of an opt-in.
	Yeah, exactly, exactly.
	But with a financial barrier, and it's like, well that's not actually that helpful.
	Yeah, kinda.
	And it's like, I appreciate what you're doing, but also you need to possibly think about this in terms of public good more than private profit.
	But, you know, what are you going to do?
	Next, in our final clip, we have that other example from Lee Fang that I mentioned.
	It did tickle me quite a bit, this one.
	Now, another example is the Daily Skeptic, a libertarian site in the UK that's been very critical of COVID policies, of vaccine policies like the mandate.
	They tried to respond in good faith and go back and forth with NewsGuard and respond to their criticism when they were being labeled as dangerous misinformation.
	They even updated all of their articles with an appendix of showing the criticism of their articles and showing After engaging with Newsguard and promising to engage in good faith, Newsguard downgraded their rating and rated them as even more dangerous misinformation.
	That's some selective shit right there.
	That is.
	Well, here's the thing.
	Here's the thing.
	I can tell you now exactly how that conversation went based on this website.
	It went, ha, this looks bad, huh?
	Wait, wait, here's all the things that we've gotten, where we've gotten this information.
	Oh God, that's literally screenshots of Stormfront and 4chan.
	This is worse than we thought.
	But guys, we're telling the truth!
	And that was the whole thing.
	That was the interaction.
	Oh no.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Oh, and I forgot to mention, by the way, the other one, Consortium Fuckheads, when they initially got their rating, they sent a 9,000 word essay to I bet they did.
	To the editor.
	I bet they did.
	Yeah, it's funny.
	There's a whole back and forth between them.
	So to give you an idea of what the Daily Skeptic do, I'm going to read some of their headlines off their front page from today.
	So right at the top, right, we have Ron DeSantis versus Gavin Newsom is the debate that really matters.
	Poor take, but okay, fine, sure.
	Then you click on it and oh, it's about COVID and lockdowns being a disaster and okay, I see where this is going.
	New listeners, circle back to our Ron DeSantis interview if you're interested in that chucklehead and the blood on his hands.
	But yeah, very much, Newsome has failed and DeSantis did the right thing.
	Okay.
	And also, I think that, man, that was a very fortuitous moment, I think, for, like, a lot of the things that we were like, I don't know, really have played out.
	Yes, yeah.
	I don't like it.
	No, no, no, this is true.
	Being right about this stuff usually feels like shit.
	It's a monkey paw situation.
	So let's take a look at some other headlines.
	Oh, yeah, this one's pretty offensive.
	Trannisaurus Rex, the activist academics queering dinosaurs.
	What?
	Yeah.
	There's a there's a time when things were, you know, like efforts were being made to reclaim Yeah, that was my experience with it.
	Like I've always heard that as a slur and then I think from my memory it went through a period of reclamation by people in that community but then yeah largely I've never really heard it used even you know between so yeah it's definitely it's not good it's definitely it's definitely very intentionally Um, very intentionally, uh, I've gotten to witness it all pretty much in front of me as like, okay guys, well, that's, well, that's the RuPaul song we don't hear on the show anymore.
	But yeah, it was also something, you know, I think that, I mean, you know, a lot of terms were pretty squirrely.
	Yeah.
	But, but whereas, whereas this, the, the use of it is, is very intentionally, you know, yeah.
	The fact that that word is on the website.
	Do you know what it actually refers to?
	There's a museum in the US, I can't remember which one, where they had dinosaur bones of a Tyrannosaurus rex and they were like, hey, we don't know what gender this dinosaur was.
	Our dinosaur is non-binary.
	It's come out as non-binary.
	There we go.
	That's it.
	And that's the article that they've written about that.
	So they chose that word for the headline.
	Well, that person should be fired.
	That's crazy.
	Oh, we've... tip of the iceberg.
	Right, so the next one... Yeah, this is the first one!
	Oh no!
	Oh god!
	Well, that's number two.
	So the first one was Ron DeSantis.
	That's right, that's right, that's right.
	So we've got, will the Irish become a minority in Ireland by 2060?
	What?!
	That's another article.
	Oh my god.
	The Mets' heavy-handed treatment of Tommy Robinson was another example of two-tier policing.
	The police are treating Tommy Robinson too badly.
	Ben and Tommy Robinson, if you don't know, will come up eventually.
	I don't know if we're getting through or not.
	British Nazi, I hope I never have to deal with him.
	No proof face masks ever worked against COVID and they may have made things worse.
	Jesus Christ.
	Next, BBC admits concept of white privilege is contested.
	And finally, how we're being gaslit on immigration and climate.
	Okay, so it's a real wonder.
	It's a real wonder that these guys didn't get a good rating for honesty.
	That gets a big red thumbs down from the Lauren meter, that's for sure.
	Honestly.
	Wow!
	That's like Georgia court shit.
	That's like Breitbart shit.
	That's a libertarian.
	Let's just fucking loot it.
	It's fucked up, and it's a pretty popular site as well.
	Gross!
	Bad!
	Over here it does, I know it gets a lot of clicks.
	Because the headlines are very fucking shareable by your fucking idiot uncle, you know?
	that's on Facebook and that's what you're gonna see.
	And then you look at it and you're like, "Well, this is obviously fucking bullshit."
	But yeah, so that's the second of the sites that Li Fang is defending here.
	That's who he's deciding to throw his weight behind.
	And I think honestly, that's enough out of him because I'm quite happy to describe him
	as an idiot by this stage.
	And we get enough of that from Russell.
	So bye Li, we'll deal with you next time we've got another one of your shit articles on the show.
	But other than that.
	It's easy to dip the hook.
	(laughing)
	Oh God!
	Incredibly, because there's just no information backing it up.
	Right.
	So I'm just like, well, this is easy.
	Okay.
	He just sounds like, like, I'm just writing in my journal with my thoughts and my feelings and my conclusions and like... How did this guy have a legitimate career in journalism for at least eight years?
	I'm like, I don't... Not everybody's good at it.
	He's not still doing that.
	So that tells you something.
	That's true.
	That's true.
	I don't know the circumstances.
	He's not anymore.
	I don't know the circumstances of him no longer being at any of these places.
	Maintain a job for, like, kind of a while while being absolute dog shit at it?
	That's true.
	More than we like to consider.
	I will say, I think a huge portion of it is just showing up on time.
	Or just showing up at all, ideally on time.
	And if you can do that, you know, for consistent periods of time, you'll probably have a job.
	Well, and like, we don't know.
	Was he talking about sports?
	Like, what kind of reportage was happening?
	You know, like, what does that player look like?
	I haven't looked too much into that, to be fair.
	I feel like there's been a lot of this.
	There's been a lot of this itis going around.
	And I think that, like, the Twitter files is a really great linchpin to look at because, like, Matt Taibbi.
	Like, that was a person, especially when I was, like, dude.
	Well, this is not the same person that we know from your career who is now doing this, like, reporting on the Twitter.
	I was like, like, oh.
	God, no.
	He's been on Russell's show a couple of times now, and we've not dealt with it.
	Mostly because whenever he comes on there, it's just him and Russell going, I'm being censored!
	And that's pretty much the sum of it.
	And if you remember, Russell hosted a live conversation between Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger, the other shit Substack journalist that posts complete fucking nonsense.
	And yeah, I did take a brief look at that.
	It doesn't have much actual content from Russell, it's mostly the other guys talking, and it's just really bad.
	I might vote for that, for looking at that at some point, because I have also seen Michael Schellenberger, like, Like, that's another career trajectory that's interesting.
	To be like, wow, you weren't always here.
	You weren't always, like, Well, the thing is, they need to use these legitimate outlets to give themselves the air of legitimacy to be able to propel themselves forward.
	That's where it is.
	They have to do that, and then they can be like, hey, I can make a load of money by lying!
	And because I've come from this other environment, that makes people take me seriously.
	Here I go!
	Like Scrooge McDuck jumping into a fucking thing of money.
	And that's pretty much the whole model, which is fucking fantastic.
	It's just crazy.
	I don't know.
	I remember when I was watching some documentary.
	It was an Al Jazeera English documentary.
	A number of years ago, and I was like, I saw, it's funny, because I saw Michael Schellenberger show up on the screen and say one rational sentence, and then he did not, he was not visible in the rest of the documentary.
	I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, what about that one?
	I get the feeling they, yeah, they might have cherry picked just a little bit there.
	I don't know.
	But it was just like, I mean, the guy can get in a room, you know, like with legitimate journalists.
	Or at least he could.
	He could.
	I don't know.
	It's interesting.
	He's got public on his sub stack.
	Okay.
	Oh God, it's bad.
	It's so fucking terrible.
	But like, those are the guys that are like running cover for this shit.
	Because Russell can't do it by himself.
	Like, that's not... No, no.
	He needs Schellenberger.
	He needs Taibbi.
	Tucker, yeah.
	Like, all those kind of people, right.
	Well, the thing is, Tucker... Tucker also needs a person like a Schellenberger or a Taibbi.
	Exactly, exactly.
	Schellenberger and Fang here, they're the ones providing the sources, you know.
	And then you look into it and it's like, oh no, this is complete bullshit through and through.
	You know, but because they're able to say, Yeah, this person who used to do this thing.
	Clearly they know what they're doing.
	We can trust them.
	I mean, don't trust anyone or anything and think for yourself and do your own research, but also trust these guys.
	Yeah, because we know that we can trust them.
	Okay.
	Not enough cognitive dissonance to go around.
	Yeah.
	That's our show, everybody.
	Lauren, I understand you have some pluggies.
	I do!
	Pluggies.
	Pluggies.
	I thought you were going to say, like, have more work to do.
	Have more work to do, yes.
	Kind of a lot.
	That as well, that as well.
	But what are you doing this weekend?
	I'm doing the work for, so we have two events coming up in St.
	Louis.
	So if you're there, and I know that I got some pals that are, that are listeners.
	Oh boy, I'd love to see you.
	Your Mizzou crew.
	Technically, that is Columbia, which is different.
	But, since you live in the UK, yes, absolutely, good job!
	Hooray!
	Hooray!
	You did it, awesome!
	Thank you, thank you.
	I dare an American to- I bask in your applause.
	But yeah, so the first- So Saturday and Sunday- Name me three UK counties, go.
	Right, so- I know you can name one, because there's a source named after it.
	Well, I can... I have to right now?
	I bet I can.
	I can fake it.
	No, no, no.
	But the one with the source named after it, you can name that one?
	Worcestershire.
	Yeah, Worcestershire.
	Yes, yes.
	Good, well done.
	Worcestershire.
	Cork?
	Uh, nope.
	That's an Ireland.
	That's an Ireland.
	I knew it was wrong when it came out of my mouth.
	Is that better?
	So close.
	Are there other cheeses?
	There's cheeses, right?
	Yes, yeah, that's true.
	That's true.
	So, so county adjacent to mine, there's Shropshire.
	You get a nice Shropshire blue.
	Those are lovely.
	Equally, I'm in the county of Lancashire.
	Yes.
	Yeah, that's it.
	That's another one.
	Good job.
	The Cheshire, Cheshire.
	Is Essex a county?
	Essex is a county.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Essex is huge.
	I don't know.
	We don't do, the thing is, is like counties are like, if you have to know it for, like, because they're all just squares in America.
	Yeah, exactly.
	In the US, county is a different kind of concept.
	In the UK is kind of equivalent to our states.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, and it has kind of its own like cultural development and accent and it's very, so I'm like, I just immediately start kissing myself.
	Good job, buddy.
	That's great.
	Good for me.
	How many wrong times can I be?
	I knew it was wrong as soon as it came out!
	Irish listeners, please go easy on Lauren.
	She didn't mean it.
	She didn't mean it.
	Oh boy.
	Listen, a flub's a flub.
	What are you going to do to my flub heads out there?
	Yeah, that's that's the one for the flub heads.
	Right.
	Anyway, so defense, man.
	I spilled paint thinner in here today.
	It's not my fault.
	My head hurts.
	Because I'm painting really cool stuff!
	So, let's see, December 2nd and 3rd, so that's this weekend, Saturday, December 2nd, is Cherokee Print Bazaar.
	It's one of the coolest events back home of the year as far as art goes.
	All the printmakers come out, they show up, they show out, and we will be doing the very same.
	So, Saturday, 11 to 6.
	So it's also at a bunch of different businesses down Cherokee Street.
	Antique Row, for the boomer type.
	That's what we used to call it.
	And we will be at So Jeff Retro.
	It's not on Jefferson.
	It's on Cherokee Street.
	We got confused as well.
	But they do have adorable furniture.
	It's pretty great.
	So we're gonna be there.
	It's like, I think it's...
	Oh my god, I already said it.
	I don't need to think about the cross streets, that's silly.
	But yeah, we'll be there, and I've got stuff, Mike's gonna have stuff, and it's all gonna be print-centric.
	I've definitely showed y'all some hand-carved plaques and stuff, so that kind of thing is gonna be there.
	And then, all the hand-painted and blah blah blah, the other shrine things that I make, December 3rd, Sunday, is the Holiday Bazaar, and we do it every year, and it's awesome.
	Noon to five, and it's at Four Hands Brewery, and it's the downtown, or like, Soulard, you know, location.
	Upstairs.
	And that's why I've been so busy this week, is because I have two big events back-to-back.
	I'm going to take some consignment to the Foundry in St.
	Charles hopefully as well.
	So even if you can't make it this weekend, I always try to keep some pieces in stock at the Foundry and St.
	Charles also because I consign there.
	If you happen to be in the county and you need to pick up a Christmas gift and you need something weird and oddly specific, if you want to win Christmas, I can help.
	Absolutely.
	My favorite thing is to see, you know, pictures of like, oh, my mom cried because she liked this so much.
	And here's a picture.
	I'm like, yeah, another mom is crying.
	I've done it.
	Like, it's very weird.
	Your metric of success is not everyone's metric of success, that's for sure.
	It's very specific.
	Go and take a look at Lauren's Instagram, which is at made.by.lauren.b, and have a look at her stuff there, because it's all super cool.
	Oh yeah, and when I come back it's all going to be listed.
	Purchase it!
	Yeah, anything that I have left I'm putting up on the shop, which I can't guarantee.
	Which is also where you can buy a magnet!
	That's absolutely true!
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Right.
	Yes.
	And the shipping is fine for other stuff.
	This is the magnets situation.
	The link to the magnets is going to be in the description.
	But, you know, if you click around on the site, you can see all of Lauren's other cool stuff.
	I have other really dumb magnets.
	Yeah, great.
	Everyone wants a dumb magnet.
	And you can have our dumb gold magnet.
	Yeah, it's stupid.
	I love it.
	It's stupid, but cool.
	I figured out a way to sell gold on this podcast.
	Fight me!
	Fuck yeah.
	Alright, if you want to support us and what we do, head to patreon.com slash onbrand.
	We will be very, very grateful.
	If you want to get in touch, drop us an email at theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	We have a Facebook group out there for anyone who wants to come along.
	We've got a few new members this week.
	It's On Brand Awakening Wonders.
	Come and say hi!
	There's also a subreddit with some super duper cool people over there and that is onbrand underscore pod yes yes yes yeah I'm confusing myself here.
	Socials we are the onbrand pod in most places except for Twitter and you can just look for us there.
	Yeah, and everywhere else I'm at alworthofficial and Lauren is at made.by.lauren.be.
	Yeah, thank you for listening everybody.
	Like I mentioned, next week's show is going to be out a couple of days later than usual.
	It won't be Thursday, it'll probably be Saturday, should be.
	But you're gonna like it, I know that.
	Well, thank you so much for your patience and understanding.
	Yeah, thank you for your patience and for hanging with us and sticking with us.
	We really appreciate it.
	And we should, yeah, after the next week or so, we should be back on track until holidays, which throws everything off track again.
	And I have some more History Corners on Offbrand, too.
	Yeah!
	If y'all are feeling those, there's gonna be more.
	There's cool stuff coming.
	Alright, thank you everybody.
	We love you very much.
	Thank you for your patience and we will see you next Saturday.
	Have a great weekend.
	Love you very much.
	Yeah we do.

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