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Feb. 8, 2024 - On Brand

02:22:37

OB #42 - Narcissism, Thy Name Is Russell

We tackle Russell's coverage of his interview with Tucker, which is just as narcissistic as it sounds. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/theonbrandpod Buy a magnet! - ooolookittheshinyshiny

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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 Show with my co-host Lauren B. That's me, I'm Lauren B. And I don't know what we'll be talking about today, but I know it's usually not great.
	It is not great.
	It is usually bad, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
	Lauren, what is your good thing before the bad thing this week?
	Fucking sewing!
	Okay, so... Sewing, nice.
	And how much stupid fun it is, and I wish I had more opportunity to do it.
	Because it's our birthday time, but it's also our dealing with a lot of Personal or just like life bullshit time.
	The timing is bad.
	So I actually, and hopefully I'll have a real maid to put on my Instagram for something, some content since I haven't posted since November on my personal Instagram.
	But yeah, I sewed a bunch of, so I take t-shirts, I started this process with my own shirts and I've taken these t-shirts and then you take a t-shirt that like we also had I mean you know
	We've gotten a little fluffy, comfortable in the years we've been living in Chicago.
	But also we had this dryer that was really intense.
	So shirts that don't fit anymore, you take the thing off the shirt and you find, you take the image off the shirt and you sew it on to a shirt that you like.
	And I made a bunch of them for Mike for his birthday.
	And so yeah, and they come out.
	It is, I will say, not easy.
	Because t-shirts have like a, they're like liquid.
	It's like sewing liquid.
	But, man, they just, well I gotta say, this Mossy Oak one I'm very proud of.
	This guy right here.
	It's hella tight.
	So they don't look all puckered, you know?
	Like it takes a lot of kind of just very careful Not a lot of measuring, though.
	There's a lot of gut instinct of, like, don't stretch it too far, pin it a million pins.
	Yeah.
	It really helps.
	But yeah, and keeping it, like, you know, the form's a little organic, a little kind of rough around the edges.
	They don't end up looking rough around the edges.
	They end up looking, like, tight as hell.
	They look cool.
	I'm really happy with how they came out, and I encourage anyone That like, if you're like us, I mean, being with a screen printer means T-shirts are like water.
	They just fill every vessel in the house.
	And that's just part of it.
	And then especially if it's like a misprint or something and Michael just ended up wearing that to work for two weeks or something like that.
	Like it just, it works out that way.
	So we do have a surplus, but anybody that has a lot, And maybe stuff that you like, but you don't, it doesn't fit or whatever.
	Be it because of a dryer or candy.
	I would say it's a combination of both for us.
	Doesn't fit great anymore.
	Then you just kind of work it out.
	And it's, uh, I know it's fun.
	I kind of have a lot of those weird little, um, clothing tricks up my sleeve, but it's hard to know how to explain it to people and show people.
	Cause I'm like, well, I've been doing this for my entire life.
	So, but I'm also not like great at, I'm not great at the regular sewing stuff.
	I take t-shirts and I put them on other t-shirts yeah yeah yeah.
	Well and resizing and remaking.
	Yeah yeah resizing up up yeah yeah yeah.
	All that kind of stuff when you're tall and uh you know tall and don't like new clothes it really is sort of a necessity.
	But yeah it came in handy and it was really nice to um get back on the sewing machine too.
	What's your good thing?
	That's very cool, and happy birthday, Mark, as well, by the way.
	Thank you.
	Yeah, my good thing is, so a friend of mine makes various kind of, well, they do like cartoons and that kind of thing, and they make various kind of pins and t-shirts and stuffies and that kind of thing.
	Art stuff, okay.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And they sent me this pin here, which I'm holding up to the camera badly.
	Focus, you thing.
	The camera's only going to do so much for you.
	I know, I know.
	It's a funny little pin of a character called Corazon from One Piece, and it's great.
	And they also sent me a matching t-shirt here, so you can see the design a bit better there.
	Yeah, it's great.
	It's very cute and fun.
	And yeah, perked up my week very nicely.
	And yeah, all their other stuff is great.
	They have an obsession with the character Buggy the Clown for some inexplicable reason.
	But then again, I have blue hair the same.
	All of the One Piece fans out there are vibing to this content, by the way.
	I know it's flying over so many people's heads, but I'm like, yeah, Buggy the Clown, right?
	I'm so happy for all of you.
	Yeah, it's fantastic.
	It's such a good show.
	Anyway, yeah, that's my thing.
	It's really great.
	It's just a very nice gesture from a friend, so that's cool.
	That's lovely.
	Yeah, right.
	We do have a show to do, but first we should thank some new patrons.
	We have just the one this week, so Sarah Richardson, you are now an Awakening wonder.
	You are indeed an Awakening wonder.
	Thank you, Sarah.
	Thank you, Sarah.
	If that's one of my Sarah Richardson's, thank you.
	You're the best.
	Or if it's, it's kind of a common-ish name, so... If we know you... You're mine now.
	Either way, thank you.
	Yeah, you're ours now.
	Welcome!
	Yeah, 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 slash ombrand and you will have our eternal gratitude.
	It is this which allows us to be editorially independent and ad-free.
	As a patron, you will also get a shout-out on the show and access to our patron-only show, Offbrand, where we discuss anything but Russell Brand.
	Yeah, head to patreon.com on brand to check that out.
	There's good stuff there.
	CIA discussion incoming.
	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 will come up there too.
	So, the last week was a bit of a lot, what with Glennie G and Tucker to deal with, and my intention was to give us a nice light bit of fluff to kind of have, you know, something stupid like the whole Taylor Swift being a psy-op nonsense, you know, that's been doing the rounds, that kind of thing.
	And that one is... I don't know.
	That's so stupid.
	It's so dumb, even Russell was like, yeah, no, Taylor Swift's not a son of a bitch.
	I was gonna say, calm down.
	I was kind of hoping he'd pick it up just for the fun of it, but no.
	The whole ass news needs to take a nap.
	You guys need to take a nap.
	Not the way.
	It ain't the way.
	Well, how dare she exist, I guess.
	Exist?
	Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
	I was gonna say have a political opinion, but then I'm like, no, she's been criticized for pretty much everything.
	She's guilty of existing while female.
	Yes, exactly that, exactly that.
	And so we will get round-the-clock coverage.
	Yeah.
	But unfortunately, instead of something light and fluffy, Russell put out an editorial that caught my attention.
	And, you know, it's not going to get too bleak, but it does need looking at.
	So I went on Tucker Carlson, the program, not the person, to talk about recent attacks and how a whole story is beginning to unravel.
	Hello there you Awakening Wonders, thanks for joining us on this voyage to truth and freedom.
	Thank you for your ongoing support and for being part of this movement as we oppose clear, coherent, cogent, yet insidious, intertwined interests in order to become free together.
	If you want to support us, click the link in the description to become an Awakened Wonder and you get additional content.
	We do an additional video every week, you get early access, you get to participate when we interview what I would call real real journalists. And right now, there's an exclusive
	conversation between me and Tucker Carlson that you cannot get without becoming a supporter of
	our content. An additional conversation that we did together.
	So, first things first, my instincts were correct, and Tucker has come back on Stay Free, but the conversation has paywalled to Russell's paid local subscribers, and I refuse to give the bastard money, and we are not covering it.
	No.
	No.
	Yeah.
	Oh.
	Uh-uh.
	Yeah, no.
	No.
	It is in Russell's studio, so he did fully come over and do the thing.
	It's not even a remote interview, which was surprising.
	Wow!
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And yet it's behind the paywall.
	Okay, okay.
	I'm not 100% sure when they recorded it exactly, but...
	Yeah.
	I mean, but there's no way that they would just recycle content from the last episode.
	I don't think so.
	I don't think so.
	There are differences within the studio itself.
	I think it was post-allegations.
	It might have been like that week.
	Something lined up somewhere, I think, but at the same time I don't think it's especially current either.
	It's not after this one, is what we're saying.
	No, no, no, I don't think so, I don't think so.
	Yeah, second thing is that, yeah, this whole editorial that we're about to look at that was, what, 22 minutes, acts as a self-aggrandizing piece about how dangerous he is and how great his interview with Tucker was, and him, you know, Documenting how the allegations against him were all some big coordinated attack by the media and Deep State.
	So essentially what's happened is he's had the time to digest the interview with Tucker and then expand on the things that were said and provide a bit of new spin and direction for how he is in fact the victim.
	God.
	Yeah, I know.
	It's so easy to make his content.
	Guys.
	Listen.
	Everybody.
	I gotta bend over good damn backwards to make a sewing reel.
	This just, ugh.
	It just feels harder.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Real simple shit.
	Like, man oh man.
	Okay.
	Great.
	I don't know.
	There are aspects of our content that is harder than his, I think.
	We actually have to look things up.
	Yeah.
	Let's finish it.
	Ah, who needs it?
	Who needs it?
	Who needs it?
	Us.
	We do.
	We do.
	Pretty essential component of our show, actually.
	And like, not him.
	So I'm mad.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So I was in two minds about whether to cover this, you know, because Tucker's interview with Russell was a show mostly covering the Dispatch's documentary, so a show covering a show.
	And now that Russell is covering that interview, like that's a show about a show about a show, and now we're covering Russell's coverage of that, so it's a show about a show about a show about a show, which on its surface sounds maddening and like an insane thing to do, but I promise there are absolutely worthwhile things to discuss here today and we're not just going to be endless, you know?
	In practice it makes sense.
	I think we just need to not say it that way.
	I feel like that's an over-complicating kind of...
	We get it.
	We get it.
	We know what's going on.
	We got it.
	We're here for a reason.
	It is silly, though.
	I promise.
	It is very silly.
	To lay it out.
	It's very, very silly.
	That's very silly.
	So let's take a look at the very first thing that Russell wants to expand upon, and it starts with him replaying a clip from Tucker's show.
	What was interesting about this is that, in fact, it was the final scene in a long movie that had been playing out for the preceding couple of years outside of public view.
	This was an attempt to make Russell Brand shut up.
	Russell Brand has views that diverge from those of most Western governments on big issues, not small things, big issues, questions of Economic policy and war and peace.
	And they decided we have to make this man be quiet.
	Why Russell Brand?
	Well, because in contrast to a lot of us who give our opinions for a living, Russell Brand had the capacity to win people over from the other side.
	He hadn't spent a life identified with the far right, just the opposite.
	Russell Brand was a man of the left, and to most people, a cultural figure.
	Everyone knows who Russell Brand is.
	And so he had the power, the capacity, So here's some additional information from our own internal research facilities.
	March 2022, UK government organisation Coda Story publishes a story on its anti-disinformation newsletter linking Russell Brand broadcasts on Ukraine with pro-China propaganda.
	The organisation is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the non-profit under the State Department that was spun out of CIA initiatives in the 1980s.
	You can go back and look at the content we were making in March 22.
	A lot of it stands up pretty well, actually.
	We were asking questions about the handling of the pandemic worldwide.
	We were also questioning the legitimacy of Western funding of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and its potential to escalate out of control.
	Look at what's happened in the meantime.
	It is extraordinary, isn't it, to see the UK government, CIA-inspired organisations, accusing an online public commentator of spreading Chinese propaganda.
	To this day, I don't know what that might even mean.
	I don't have strong views about China.
	I certainly don't advocate for China's political policy or cultural policy.
	I'm sort of a bit interested in Buddhism and ninjas.
	That's about it.
	What?
	China?
	What?
	Ninja are Japanese.
	Yeah.
	And the plural of ninja is ninja, by the way.
	It's like sheep.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So I mean, do you know what?
	When he says he doesn't know anything about China, I believe him.
	Yeah.
	Checks out.
	Had ninja not been a cultural phenomenon?
	Like, mustaches and owls?
	I would not be so surprised.
	But I am.
	There was a whole thing for years, Pirates or Ninjas, there was a whole thing, you know, two very successful anime based on those two things.
	But anyway, here we are.
	So the first thing I want to point out is that the source that Russell is reading from through the entire of this editorial is Stay Free Media.
	Great.
	So he's got his own logo up on the screen there in the writing that someone in his own staff did.
	Source me!
	Yeah, right!
	That's what I do!
	Excellent journalism.
	Not even.
	I source.
	I try very hard to cite, actually.
	I just usually don't have it in the moment.
	Gosh.
	Wow.
	Well, the thing is, like, I don't know.
	I just, I don't understand.
	Let's put the words up on the screen to make it seem more important, I guess, is the entire thing.
	Because he could just say it if it's just from him, you know?
	But no.
	We know why.
	This is the main thing that I had to deal with last in our emergency episode and it turns out I was exactly right about the supposed CIA connection to Coda Story being the NED.
	He also calls Coda Story a UK government organization with absolutely zero mention of what that's supposed to be about.
	So there's still no clarity on that point.
	My guess is still that it's, you know, some of the people who work at Coda Story used to work for the BBC.
	who are, according to the Gray Zone, you know, an MI6 propaganda outlet.
	Once again, the NED is not the CIA, and receiving funding from the NED does not somehow make you a CIA affiliate.
	Yeah, that's just... it's just not.
	And I will happily be proven wrong with evidence to the contrary if anyone can bring me any at all.
	That would be wonderful.
	I'll read a whole freaking book about it if you got it.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Not a crazy self-published one.
	Yeah.
	The claims need to be verifiable.
	Cannot be in all caps.
	Yes.
	Cannot be in all caps.
	No business secrets of the pharaohs, please.
	Yes.
	But I'm happy to find out.
	Must include punctuation.
	That kind of thing.
	Also, I'm going to re-read, I'm going to quote from the managing editor of Codastory, Ellery Biddle, once again, when asked to comment, quote, Regarding Carlson's assertions about our connections to government, I should first state that we only take grants on the condition that our funders will have no direct influence on our sway over reporting.
	We're an independent newsroom and we maintain the highest ethical standards in our reporting.
	Our only allegiance is to the truth.
	The only connection we have to the U.S.
	government is that we at one time were grantees of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is funded by U.S.
	Congress.
	We no longer receive money from the NED, but this is beside the point.
	NED had no editorial influence on our reporting whatsoever.
	Carlson also casually referred to us being connected to the CIA.
	We have absolutely no connection to the CIA whatsoever, unquote.
	And once again, there is zero evidence to the contrary.
	Yeah, and to top it off, as previously mentioned, they never accused Russell of being an agent of Chinese propaganda.
	In a piece from March 2022 about a guy in the UK spreading COVID conspiracies that were later picked up by the Chinese government, there was a footnote at the bottom under the heading, in other infodemic news, meaning that Russell was repeating the conspiracy theory that the US were manufacturing bioweapons in Ukraine.
	They mentioned that.
	That was it.
	Then there was a follow-up retrospective piece in December 22 which covered Russell saying that and the piece mentioned how the Chinese government also loved that conspiracy theory because it feeds into spreading the lie that the US government created COVID-19 as a bioweapon.
	And that's it.
	Yeah, that's the evidence.
	That's all there is of Russell being called an agent of Chinese propaganda and being attacked by the CIA and UK government.
	And when I say that's the evidence, what I mean is there is none.
	There is not a single iota of evidence within any of what Russell is saying.
	It just fits into the victimhood narrative perfectly.
	And Coda Story do a big chunk of work tackling disinformation and debunking people like Russell and Tucker.
	So, Russell has quite a lot to gain by eroding Coda Story's credibility.
	As a matter of fact, using the power of his platform and many millions of followers to de-amplify and shut down Coda Story seems perhaps a little bit hypocritical.
	Particularly as you can virtually guarantee that Russell has a bigger audience than they do.
	He likes to claim he's the little guy, you know, the David taking on the Goliath that is legacy media, whereas in actual fact he's just throwing his weight around and shitting on a genuine news organization who are much smaller than him.
	I'd argue we, us two, would be some of the most interested in any evidence there would be a CIA or a, you know, a UK government plot.
	Of any kind.
	I'm speaking for myself here.
	I would be, I'd be enthralled.
	I've had to find out plenty, like there's, that's part of learning about, you know, our real history is confronting ideas That are distasteful to think about and disappointing and uncomfortable, you know, the process of discomfort with unlearning.
	I'm super fascinated by You know, any kind of three-letter agency, you know, whoop-de-woo.
	And so, we'd be the first, I think.
	Absolutely.
	The first in line that would want to know.
	That would change this whole podcast.
	Especially if it was focused around Russell.
	That's what I'm saying.
	He's the subject of our show.
	Yeah, literally.
	Literally.
	We would be the first people in line being like, oh yeah, let's look at this.
	I want to know.
	Let's look at this.
	Tell me all about it.
	Yeah.
	Ah, proof!
	Just one!
	Just the one!
	I... pshh!
	We're...
	Email us!
	There's a link!
	Do it right now!
	Fire away!
	I'm all ears to anyone who can- I'm the most interested.
	Please.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And yeah, we may come back to the conversation of standards of evidence, but you know what?
	Give us what you got, I guess!
	Or apply those standards first!
	You can also just do that by yourself!
	Yeah, I feel like that's an optimistic outcome.
	I'm coming from a restorative justice model where we're expecting the best possible outcome and then dealing with the result.
	Fair, fair, very fair.
	It's incredibly fair.
	The next clip is pretty short, but it does demonstrate how you just cannot win in a battle with conspiracy theorists.
	September 2022.
	Logically AI is hired and paid $3.2 million by the Department of Digital Culture, Media and Sport.
	Logically AI disputes Brand's criticism of the central bank digital currency and claims such concerns are just conspiracy theories without evidence.
	Ironically providing us with some evidence that many of these theories have some validity.
	What?
	So here's the general sequence of events, right?
	A thing happens that Russell can spin a baseless conspiracy theory from.
	He then spins said baseless conspiracy theory.
	An anti-disinformation company takes note that Russell is spinning a baseless conspiracy theory.
	And then, according to Russell, the anti-disinformation company taking note and covering this baseless conspiracy theory is actually validation that the conspiracy theory must be true.
	It sounds incredibly stupid, and it is, but this little clip is a perfect demonstration of why you can't, in fact, argue with these people, because any possible addressing, questioning, or debunking of the conspiracy theory, and either you've gone too far down the MSM pipeline, or you're somehow part of the cover-up, and you're part of the conspiracy yourself.
	It's one of those two things.
	And yes, and no matter what, anyone who is debunking and explaining and will write 17 hours of a book with lots of evidence and 20 years of research, as an example, And they all say that same thing.
	They're like, I know that conspiracy theorists will still be able to, like, they explain in great detail the pattern that we just saw happen.
	That exact pattern, I have heard it explained eight ways from Sunday.
	Books, podcasts, any kind of coverage, articles, blah, blah, blah, whatever.
	Like, and it makes zero difference I understand, fundamentally, maybe because I'm used to seeing this kind of content and interacting with this kind of content, but there is misinformation.
	There are false flags.
	There's all that kind of stuff.
	Sure.
	And when it's researched and reported and presented, the difference between an evidenced connection and a spurious one is really fucking obvious.
	Yeah.
	I just think they gotta, like, Russell and people like him have to rely on someone that's, like, never interacted with voracious research.
	You know, like, a provable, tangible, like, if you're only doing, like, Google and YouTube University, that's not, like, it's reinforcing a bad pattern of behavior.
	So you're already starting out on the back foot.
	I completely agree.
	That makes me sad.
	Yeah.
	As an example of this whole thing, by the way, just this last week someone suggested that I am paid by the globalists and that I roped you into the show to make it seem more authentic.
	Oh, you think I'm authentic?
	Thank you!
	What a complimente!
	It's nice.
	I'm putting you on my Christmas card list, person.
	Yeah, it made me feel.
	Sure, it's a person.
	Yeah, I know.
	Who would write this?
	Come on.
	Get out of here.
	I don't know.
	It made me smile.
	That's adorable.
	Just for clarity, I can assure the listeners, this is firmly not the case.
	Oh no, I'm not real.
	I'm a figment of your imagination.
	I'm like Tyler Durden.
	I'm not real at all.
	Oh god.
	Yeah, it's a bad sign.
	Okay.
	I mean, it explains a lot to be honest, but yeah, okay.
	I've just, I've just gone down a hole of my own madness.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Okay.
	Val's not here.
	Val's gone away.
	Gonna start making soap.
	Right.
	Let's, uh, no, no.
	Um, yeah, we're, we're, we're, we're both still, still pause.
	Um, and, and were I to receive any Soros or Schwab money, I would of course share it evenly with you, Lauren.
	Um, I, I would at least do that.
	You wouldn't have been so excited that you replaced your mouse today.
	Or as an elaborate ruse.
	Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
	Oh, dear, dear, oh, dear.
	That said, of course, you know, Soros, Schwab, anyone else who wants to throw money at us, go to patreon.com slash onbrand.
	We'll be very grateful.
	Or, you know, for larger sums in the millions, you know, drop us an email first, maybe, theonbrandpod at gmail.com.
	We'll have a chat.
	Oh, let me get my checkbook and routing number right.
	Yes, yeah, right.
	Yeah, my international banking thing.
	Oh, dear.
	Yeah, that was cute.
	Anyway, next up, Russell gets a little bit more into logically AI.
	We would have been talking about central currencies and their potential to be manipulated and to facilitate social credit score type systems where, in conjunction potentially with passports for certain medical measures, they could be used to, for example, freeze people's bank accounts, as has happened already in China.
	Or people who haven't taken certain medications could be refused access to certain venues, as has happened across the world already.
	Or people applying for universities might not be permitted to get into that university as recommended by Anthony Fauci went talking about universities and said when people are told they won't be able to join a certain university they'll lose their ideological bullshit.
	Oh.
	The AI did make this for me.
	This clip, this is for me.
	Oh yeah.
	Oh yeah.
	Every iota of it.
	Ooh, let's go.
	Let's go!
	I think I've got one later that's going to rile you even more, but okay.
	One of the various definitions of what a conspiracy theory is, is connecting separate events to imply a malicious plot by powerful and sinister groups.
	Ta-da!
	We just saw that right at work.
	So there's a list there, right?
	We had social credit scores being implemented, vaccine passports, frozen bank accounts in China, the unvaccinated being refused access to certain venues, and the unvaccinated being refused admission to universities.
	All of this apparently stemming from central bank digital currency, according to Russell.
	So, let's do a little roundup.
	Firstly, we're making some leaps, but I'll be as brief as I can.
	CBDCs are just states in conjunction with banks getting in on the cryptocurrency game, basically.
	It's a digital form of regular currency like pounds or dollars, as opposed to something separate like Bitcoin.
	In Russell's estimation, because the state is involved, it's a nefarious conspiracy to take power away from the people and make us a cashless society.
	In actuality, there are significant benefits to having digital currency in the form of a CBDC rather than cryptocurrency, and I will quote from the Bank of England website here, Firstly, cryptoassets are issued privately.
	If anything goes wrong with a cryptoasset, there's no central bank or government that can step in.
	Secondly, the value of a cryptoasset is volatile.
	It can go up or down quickly in a very short space of time.
	This isn't ideal when making payments.
	If we decided to issue them, digital pounds would be stable and retain their value over time."
	And from somewhere else on the website quote if we introduced it we it would not replace cash We know being able to use cash is important for many people That's why we will continue to issue it for as long as people want to keep using it You would simply have even more choice when you make payments unquote There is no evidence that the UK government or the Bank of England are trying to make us a cashless society over here We are yet to introduce what's being commonly called Britcoin.
	Don't like the name.
	No.
	No.
	Sketchy boots.
	But all in all, I am kind of fine with the concept.
	Our financial system has been based on a game of seemingly opaque digital numbers for quite some time now.
	And it's not like we- It doesn't seem new.
	No, no, it really doesn't.
	No, I know.
	Yeah.
	And yeah, it's not like we had hit the gold standard anymore.
	You know, we left that in 1931.
	And of course, Federal Reserve and the states have been looking into the exact same thing, the digital dollar.
	So are they trying to make us a cashless society?
	According to their website, quote, the Federal Reserve is committed to ensuring the continued safety and availability of cash and is considering a CBDC as a means to expand safe payment options, not to reduce or replace them.
	Unquote.
	And again, there is zero evidence to the contrary.
	So I'm going to take that at face value for now.
	Yeah.
	Russell, conversely, conspiracy, conspiracying all over it.
	Yeah.
	Bitch, we've been using PayPal for 20 years.
	I know!
	What are we doing?
	What is this?
	Why is it different?
	I genuinely don't understand the diff.
	Straight up.
	I don't know why this is different in any way.
	I don't trust crypto as far as I can throw it, which is no distance because it is not a tangible object.
	This is different than crypto.
	Yeah, well, it's crypto, but backed up by a bank and a government.
	So, you know, it's secure in that sense.
	Being secure makes it not crypto, as we understand it.
	That's literally the point.
	No, that's true.
	That is exactly true.
	Yeah, it's digital money.
	And, you know, the reality, I think, for most people is most of their interactions are already with digital money.
	That's what I'm saying!
	Most people I know pay using their phones as a start and they've got their bank account and everything like that just on their phone and it's all just there in the ether and you never actually see the physical cash.
	No!
	You buy something from me at a market?
	Oh, I love cash.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	Uncle Sam, plug your ears.
	But that's still, you know what?
	I'll take Venmo.
	I got a QR code.
	Sure.
	Let's go.
	Let's party.
	Yes, you can have that.
	I'm not going to stop you.
	Yeah.
	Cash app.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Whatever.
	Whatever.
	Right.
	Okay.
	I don't... I don't understand.
	No, it's stupid.
	Right?
	It's like extra.
	So the whole idea of Russell's here hinges on the idea that currency will become purely digital and will then get tied to a social credit score, which we don't have and no one wants to implement.
	Also, separate subject, but the regular credit score is bad e-fuck enough.
	I'd argue worse!
	I'd argue worse!
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, probably.
	Can you volunteer at an animal shelter and then make your social credit score better?
	You can't do that with a credit score credit score.
	No, that's true.
	People forget.
	Dude, we've only had credit scores since 1989.
	That is nothing.
	My parents and everyone before them did not have to deal with this at all whatsoever.
	They were already established.
	They already worked it out.
	Can we not see what has happened?
	Just a credit score?
	Also, opaque, arbitrary, completely ridiculous.
	The fact that checking it makes it go down is bonkers.
	That tells you it's also imaginary.
	So, don't make me prefer a social credit score.
	I mean, I will say you're making a good argument at this point, to be honest.
	Like if I had to pick, if I had to pick, you know what I mean?
	There's a comedian's bit out there.
	I'm sure a lot of you have seen it on Instagram if you scroll instead of sleep.
	There's like a bit, it's like the interest on a loan should be based on how interesting you are.
	If you come in and do a backflip, you're going to get a low APR.
	I think that's a really like, listen, I don't have a lot of money.
	I got some stories.
	I can draw some pictures.
	I can spin my yawn, let's do it!
	Yeah, let's see.
	It's so absurd.
	The thing is, conspiracy theorists for a long time have been able to make a meal out of social credit score, and I think before we had a raft of apps on our phones just to manage the credit score and we were so like those commercials are on our streaming whatever the the number of your credit score is so paramount and and it has gotten so much more so recently and been like you know since like the actual like smartphones and shit have kind of like come into our lives that like
	I'm saying, like, it sounds better to have a social credit score.
	Because, like, I don't know, if you're nice, is it better?
	I know that's an over-simple, but, like, there have been these hysterias since, like, as, like, a techno-fear.
	UPCs, whenever the UPCs came out, like the barcode that you scan to buy something at the grocery store, when those were going to be implemented, again, we forget about a world before the UPC, but like a barcode, the UPC is the number, the barcode is the scan.
	There was a, Christians and maybe other religious sects saw that as the, they were like, fire and brimstone, tent revival, mark of the beast, were saying that was the mark of the beast and that was going to usher in the apocalypse.
	Was a barcode.
	At the grocery store.
	That, so like, this has always, this is the new version of that, to me.
	Because we already have a credit score.
	I can see that.
	Obviously, to Russell's idea of things, the social credit score is there to punish the unvaccinated.
	If you don't get vaccinated, your social credit score will go down!
	It's not a thing that is happening in the Western world at the very fucking least.
	So, according to him, CBDCs will get tied to vaccine passports and university admissions, and you might get your bank account frozen by the government.
	Yeah, there is no connection between CBDCs, social credit scores, and the unvaccinated, but in the interest of fear-mongering, he's tying them all together, right?
	So...
	Bank accounts being frozen in China.
	There was a scandal in 2022 where four banks in the Henan province were under investigation for a massive case of financial fraud amounting to about 1.25 billion dollars, apparently instigated by white-collar criminals engaging in unsubstantiated loans.
	All of the bank's accounts were frozen.
	Oh, that always works out fine.
	I know, right?
	Yeah, I'm sure they're fine.
	Let them have their fun.
	Yeah, all of the bank's accounts were frozen, meaning none of the thousands and thousands of customers could access their money.
	Perhaps not the most sensible response.
	Over a thousand people went to protest and to try and counter that, the authorities in the city of Zhengzhou tried to use health code apps meant to prevent the spread of COVID-19 to shut down transport systems and stop the protesters from being able to travel.
	That sounds like a real story.
	It does, doesn't it?
	It's not the bit that Russell mentions.
	No!
	It has nothing to do with COVID vaccines or CBDCs and has everything to do with corruption and crime.
	And yeah, real story, real fucked up, real interesting.
	And yeah, as a final thing, Fauci did want universities to enact vaccine mandates and he said that Uh, if you make people's lives difficult, they'll drop their ideological bullshit and get vaccinated.
	Um, perhaps not the most tactful way to go about making his point, but the quote is from 2021 and I imagine by this stage he was more than a little bit exasperated with politics and the general public preventing him from doing his job, which was supposed to be managing public health.
	And the fact that COVID was ripping through colleges.
	Like, there was memes and like, there were like, TikTok challenges for kids that couldn't taste or smell anything because they all got COVID.
	That's like, and that's, that's not like the silly story.
	Like that's a thing that happened.
	There were like parties.
	It was a whole thing.
	That's what, this is the kind of stuff that is just so, because like, here's the score that keeps you out of universities.
	Money.
	If you can't pay for it, you can't go.
	And it's a vast amount of money to go to college.
	Are we worried about that barrier?
	No?
	No, we're not?
	Okay.
	It doesn't bring it up.
	Yeah, you know, especially when you start looking at Ivy League and all that shit, it gets off the chain.
	And legacy, yeah, legacy admissions.
	Dude, the scandals coming out about college.
	I cannot keep up with them all.
	We've discussed my podcast listening at length.
	Listen, I think I managed to get about three college admission scandals in before.
	I don't have enough hours in the day.
	I don't have hours in the day.
	There's already a disparity that is deep and abiding with higher education.
	Talk about that.
	I agree.
	I would have come to study in America.
	I was accepted to Berklee College of Music, but could I afford to go there?
	Could I shit?
	I was looking at at least 40 grand a year for four years.
	Nope!
	Nope, nope, nope!
	That's just not feasible or reasonable for any human being.
	So I didn't do that.
	They do it!
	They do it all the time!
	Yeah, I know, I know.
	Lots of human beings do it!
	Definitely still not reasonable.
	And they'll be paying till they're dead!
	Yes, yeah, yeah, or hopefully, yeah, inherited wealth, etc.
	Oh boy.
	Yeah, but I went to London instead.
	Had a great time.
	So there we go.
	Shiny side of the coin.
	Next up, we're going to take a little look at FOIA requests.
	So many of these stories, all of these stories in fact, are either based on publicly available content, the views of academics, and admittedly when it came to the pandemic, often the views of academics who themselves have been censored.
	And much of the reporting that we've looked at indicates that I'm not alone in this kind of censorship, I'm just one of the more public and visible figures conveying information that is widely available.
	Indeed, in the comments under here, many of you will be going I've known this for ages, won't you?
	I knew this years ago.
	What took you so long to catch up when it comes to the Ukraine war, or the CIA, or Project Paperclip, or disinformation, or malinformation, or misinformation?
	There's no claim that this information is exclusively available here, just that clearly it must have caught the attention of people that care about it, and indeed we've made Freedom of Information Act requests to many of these organizations, and it's astonishing when you do it.
	They really drag their heels.
	They do not want to hand over the information about how extensively they've been spying on you, surveilling you.
	Okay.
	Okay, it's Operation Paperclip.
	Goddammit.
	That made me mad.
	Again, this wasn't the thing that I was... but also yes.
	In the US and the UK it's mandatory for state organizations to respond within 20 working days of a FOIA request.
	As in, it's the law.
	If the thing being requested is particularly complicated or voluminous it can then take, you know, it can take up to 60 full days to actually have the whole thing sorted but they'll at least bloody respond to it and then it'll be Within that 60 day time frame, it will be back to them.
	But the norm anyway is 20 days, as long as it's nothing ridiculous.
	Russell has been harping on about FOIA requests every now and then for a little while now, a good few months, saying it's amazing what these people have on you and how long it takes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But he's never once actually shown any of the information that he's apparently requested, which should be somewhat telling.
	I think because he's not doing it.
	That's why.
	Either he's not doing it or he's getting nothing back that's of interest.
	Well, but like, oh yeah, or that, absolutely. Um, I don't know. I think they could make...
	True, they could make hay out of anything.
	They can make hay out of anything!
	But, like, I've, you know, again, I've listened to enough investigation podcast type things, because FOIA requests fuel the ability to especially report on, like, financial crimes or, you know, like, whatever.
	Really important.
	Some kind of, like, especially, like, government overreach or malpractice.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, because there's a ton of rules.
	That are expressly written, and maybe they're complicated, that's absolutely feasible, but like, he should... When I listen to these investigations that are trying very hard to, you know, like, pursue a FOIA request, it may not always be easy, but they are still, at least, they have a course of action.
	And they can describe the steps in detail and where they are in the process.
	And they often do for the sake of transparency.
	And saying like, we have had these before requests, we have requested interviews with this person, this sheriff, this, you know, DA, this retired DA, and They have or have not commented on or off the record, especially with like long form, you know, investigation.
	There's the luxury of explaining all that.
	And this is also he's he could he could say it.
	He could just say it.
	Yeah, he could.
	He could.
	He could bring up evidence.
	He could show the world if he wanted to.
	It's, yeah, conspicuously absent, one might say.
	Yeah, but before all that, though, I did enjoy the implication of, oh, we're not the only people providing this information.
	Of course we're not, but we are the most dangerous because they're trying to shut us down.
	Which, you know, again, connecting separate events, right?
	The allegations against Russell have absolutely nothing to do with his show or the things he says.
	It's the things he did that landed him in trouble.
	You know, but there we are.
	Now we get back to CBDCs, apparently.
	Full concern about CBDCs to be dismissed as a conspiracy theory is yet more ridiculous when we know that during the trucker protest people did have their bank accounts frozen and it's since been decreed that that was illegal activity.
	We were simply pointing out that CBDCs would make it even easier for governments to shut down private citizens' personal finances than it already is.
	We already know that many tech sites that handle finance and funding will
	cooperate with governments and we commented some years ago I mean the
	comments up you can go and look at it yourselves we simply commented that this
	would be vulnerable to exploitation and I think that's pretty legitimate.
	Okay...
	Sure, CBDCs would cooperate with government in the event of a legal situation, and so would digital currency sites.
	You know, the private ones.
	Likely because, legally speaking, they have to comply.
	But also, you know, so do banks in general.
	Like, CBDCs aren't inherently more vulnerable to that than regular banks, and it isn't any easier to shut down someone's account.
	If you commit a crime and you're on the run, for example, the police do have the power to freeze your assets to make sure you're unable to flee the country or whatever else, regardless what form your bank account takes.
	The only possible solution to that problem is to have literally all of your money in cash at all times and keep it somewhere physically in your property or about your person, which sounds insane to me.
	But I couldn't think of another way out of it.
	You don't have American grandpas, so... This is true, this is true.
	But even then, you diversify.
	Yes, yeah, exactly, exactly.
	You have some backyard money and you have some bank money.
	Yep, got some trunk-in-a-hole money.
	Now, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did freeze the bank accounts of people involved in the COVID-19 trucker protest, and a court in Canada deemed Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act, which he used to do so, as not justified.
	This decision is of course under appeal by the Canadian government, and so the case isn't quite settled yet.
	It is not settled or established law.
	In a way, I do almost kind of hope that the appeal is unsuccessful, in a way, because a judge saying that this was unlawful and that being upheld in a higher court would entirely dismantle the narrative that there's some great state conspiracy against the anti-vaxxers, wouldn't it?
	Like, it's hard to rail against the system when the system is defending you.
	I also, I mean, I don't know what kind of ramifications there would be to losing.
	Yeah, that's it.
	For public health and safety, it's probably not the best outcome for Canada, but still.
	Yeah well but I mean even just like if they just got to pay the money back like I don't know how I don't know what damages are I don't know I'm I'm yeah I don't know how that would work no no I mean in terms of that side of things I've no clue because really like that they they just needed it over with Yeah, that was it.
	They were still committing a bunch of crimes, that's why.
	It was mostly a demonstration, but the protests, they were attacking people.
	Truckers were attacking people for wearing masks outside their homes.
	And they were being violent and bullying and attacking.
	And they couldn't get it to stop.
	I've not seen any legal action about the bank accounts being frozen specifically.
	So yeah, I don't know whether that would kind of be litigated in a separate kind of forum.
	I guess that's what I'm wondering.
	How it's going to shake out, I guess.
	Yeah, I think it would have to be like a separate suit, I guess, after this one shakes out properly, I think.
	Because if it is then proved unlawful, then I suppose they would have standing to be able to do that, I guess.
	Yeah.
	We'll see.
	It'll be interesting.
	It'll be interesting.
	I'm gonna stay tuned.
	Yeah, yeah, me too.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I feel like either way the outcome is... It also feels like they're coming for Canada because Canada is like super fair.
	Like, or at least trying to be fair in these instances.
	Yeah, they... And like admitting that they're being fair.
	Canada has a lot of stuff that is not cool, but they're being fair and transparent and so they're just going after him, whereas I know that we don't.
	Well, and Justin Trudeau is a supposed leftist.
	Again, he's centrist in my eyes, but the perception on the right is that he's a lefty and therefore they are happy to fling as much shit at him as they possibly can.
	So there we go.
	But yeah, good luck Canada.
	We're with you.
	Oh dear.
	So Russell, he's jumping about quite a bit in this editorial and so now we're going to get back to Logically AI.
	Many of the stories that we cover are centrally about the transference of individual personal sovereignty to state or corporate interests and often significantly partnerships between corporate and state interests, which is precisely what's happening here.
	Groups like Logically AI or many of the other agencies that seem to be involved in just this story receive government funding, that's taxpayer funding, that's your pounds and dollars in taxes in order to spy on you, surveil you and clearly, as you'll hear later, publicly attack you.
	What?
	We're going to be publicly attacked?
	Presumably he means his audience here rather than us agents of the globalists.
	But what is that supposed to mean?
	We're in context of the supposed attacks on Russell.
	Are all of his audience going to have allegations thrown at them?
	Is that what he's getting at?
	I mean, here's the thing.
	I think it's safe for him to bank on at least a portion of his audience having been called out on a Karen account or something.
	For being racist at a falafel cart person.
	It's interesting you should say that.
	It comes up a little bit later.
	What do you know?
	I might know a thing about a thing.
	There is a good chance that if you're pro-sexual assault then you'll probably be a fan of Russell's as well.
	But equally I don't think that could be his entire audience.
	He's speaking to at least a section of the school.
	Yeah and I mean clearly it's effective.
	As for, logically, AI spying on everyone with their own tax money, I mean, yes, it is our own tax money being given to these disinformation companies, but all they do is troll the internet looking for made-up bullshit on social media platforms and figure out where it's coming from.
	Like, if you're posting things in a public forum and then someone else on the internet sees it, that does not constitute them spying on you.
	Like, here comes spy on our Instagram, everybody.
	It's at the on-brand bot.
	It's giving very, this Facebook post, like, I am posting this Facebook post and Facebook has no right to my photos or my information, like, baby.
	You clicked yes on the terms, you agreed to the terms of service.
	That is a hundred percent Russell's audience.
	A hundred percent.
	Yeah, but yeah, that's very genuinely, that is the extent of the powers of companies like Logically AI.
	And it's their purpose, right?
	To be able to track the scale and scope of disinformation and figure out the main sources and then report that information to whoever hired them, be it state or private interests, right?
	That's all.
	I mean, Russell could hire them if he wanted to.
	And I mean, that's, yeah, there, you know, and there are privacy concerns and they're like, as far as But we've kind of been dealing with our public versus private persona and social media presence.
	We've kind of been dealing with that as a society for a while now.
	It's tough because, again, I know that he's pitching to people like me.
	Maybe a little less fastidious, but nonetheless, coming from where I'm coming from as a demographic, right?
	Because I just finished a book called Fight Like Hell by Kim Kelly.
	It's about kind of a really solid overview of the history of American labor struggles.
	And hearing all of the ways that labor has been able to organize over a century, I... Government in and of itself, or corporations being allowed when they were once not allowed.
	They were limited by the government.
	Those limits have been taken off in their efforts to tamp down labor organizing.
	It's...
	As I was going through this book, I could hear the doors slamming behind all of these very effective labor movements.
	Like, well, that worked before, and we can't do that anymore.
	And AI has a lot to do with that.
	To be able to crawl through information, to be able to aggregate You know, data that seems disparate, but is in fact not.
	That's what all these data breaches are about.
	And they're very dangerous.
	It's very dangerous to have all this kind of data out there, especially if you want to do anything like, you know, community organizers are very often targeted.
	No, that's usually like we see a lot.
	I see that a lot on the left and it's really tough to hear all these like very inspiring and like very cool, smart, interesting tales of success or even little wins, not always big wins with the labor movement.
	And so there's a lot that I'm concerned about as far as the power of A.I.
	to So, let's talk about that.
	Yeah, that's a very worthwhile discussion.
	The implication from Russell is obviously that somehow, logically, AI are going further than information that is publicly available.
	Right.
	That's the implication, and there's nothing to support that assertion whatsoever.
	Right.
	Yeah, yeah, yes, absolutely.
	But it's something we need to keep an eye on, but I don't know what he's saying.
	Oh, for sure.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	Now, we are going to get back to Dame Caroline Dainage.
	That's a name I keep saying a lot at the moment, who I hope is regretting sending these letters by now.
	November 2022.
	Think Tank, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue hired by the Department of Digital Culture, Media and Sport.
	You've heard that name a couple of times now, and that is the department that Caroline Dinege, MP, runs.
	Caroline Dinege is, of course, the Member of Parliament that petitioned X, Rumble, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram to demonetize, censor and control our content.
	And in the case of YouTube, they responded positively.
	This is the department that was receiving government funding to carry out this type of operation.
	It was just TikTok and Rumble that Dame Caroline Dionys contacted.
	None of the other ones.
	And yeah, she hasn't been a member of the British government since September 2021.
	However, something occurred to me that I hadn't thought of before.
	So there are a few official government pages for politicians, right?
	Plus, you know, their own website, generally speaking.
	They'll have one for their constituents and all that good stuff, right?
	Plus a Wikipedia page, whatever else.
	Now, one of the official government pages for Dame Caroline Dainage appears not to have had the main text updated since 2020.
	The most recent thing right at the top says, quote, Caroline Dainage was appointed Minister of State for Digital and Culture in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on 13th of February 2020.
	Unquote.
	That's the most recent entry on there.
	If you scroll down far enough, it does say, previous roles in government, Minister of State, Minister for Digital and Culture 2020 to 2021, but it's further down on the site and it's smaller.
	The text is smaller.
	Nonetheless, it does occur to me that there is a possibility that research standards at Stay Free are in fact so low, particularly when all the allegations came out and Russell was working with a proper skeleton crew, that they just read the top sentence and have never looked back since.
	"Oh, she's in government!" You know? And they might genuinely think that. I've heard it said
	to never attribute to malice that which can be easier explained by stupidity. And so I am willing
	to entertain the idea that in fact these people are just lazy idiots who can't look up the most
	basic of facts. Well, or they thought they did.
	They were like, bingo, done, bye.
	Yeah, exactly, exactly.
	There is, of course, a third possibility that they saw that sentence despite knowing that Dame Dainage is no longer in government and thought, ah, we can get away with this now.
	But that is entirely conspiratorial of me and I have no evidence to back that up.
	So that's just, it's just, it's a possibility.
	But yeah, definitely believable that they think this based on that entry.
	I did, when I realized that, I reported the entry and I was like, you need to update this government because it's been a minute.
	It's been four years.
	She's doing other stuff now.
	Yeah, she's still select committee, covered it last week, covered it way back when.
	Dame Caroline Donnage.
	You know, that's another thing that, like, the poors interact with more than the richy-riches is government websites.
	Because you pay some- when you're rich!
	For your property taxes or whatever, you pay somebody to take care of all that shit for you.
	That's true.
	But whenever you're a little poorer, like this one, specifically, I interact with them whenever we go on road trips and I want to camp in a city and they're like, it's a city park, blah, blah, blah.
	And you can see, honestly, the...
	The dilapidated city websites in this country are a point of joy for me that I can't explain.
	The charm is off the charts.
	The broken links, the outdated information, the 2017 blog post that's so enthusiastic about more developments on the way.
	Oh, mwah!
	I love ya.
	Love it.
	Love it!
	Charming.
	Again, you're used to it if you actually care about knowing stuff.
	Yeah, yeah, for sure.
	And you don't have to do it by yourself!
	I will say, it is something of an outlier in my experience of .gov.uk, which is our government website.
	Normally they're pretty fastidious with it, like, they're pretty on top of things, so I was like, Well, how dare you, government!
	You're wasting my taxes not keeping Dame Dainage's page updated, so report it immediately!
	And also, if you trigger something, that's the thing, triggering a process is just like a FOIA, you trigger a process, and there are steps that are usually very clearly outlined by somebody.
	Yep, there's a little button that says, is there a problem on this page?
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	What is it?
	Right.
	It hasn't been updated.
	This needs updating.
	There we go.
	Are you the 40th person that has hit that button?
	That triggers a process.
	Ideally, anyway.
	I'm just saying, like, you know, they don't always... Oh, those hopeful blog posts.
	What are you gonna do?
	Bless them.
	Bless them.
	Adorable.
	So another of Russell's greatest hits of victimhood is, of course, the Trusted News Initiative.
	November 2022.
	Think Tank, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue hired by the Department of Digital Culture, Media and Sport, targets Russell Brand as a conspirituality influencer that promotes anti-climate narratives.
	Multiple UK newspaper articles, from newspapers including The Times, Telegraph and Independent, label Russell Brand a conspiracy theorist for his videos regarding Big Pharma vaccines and US government foreign policy and the military
	industrial complex, although there were pieces also in the New York Times, the Atlantic and
	numerous other legacy media sites. We also have reported somewhat extensively on the Trusted News
	Initiative, which are a conglomerate or cartel of legacy media organisations allied together
	against independent media and can support one another. The days of legacy media companies competing
	with one another for scoops are long gone. They are competing against independent media and
	essentially, as they themselves explicitly admit, attempting to choke out, control and destroy
	independent media, usually through misinformation and malinformation type angles.
	Oh, did we just say the quiet part out loud?
	Again, the TNI aren't against independent media organisations, they're against disinformation outfits like Stay Free With Russell Brand.
	There are plenty of independent media organisations doing diligent journalism, it's just that Russell is lying and making up conspiracies.
	And that is a direct competitor to the truth.
	Of course, when Russell says, ah, it's usually through malinformation or misinformation angles, it isn't actually some great admission that that's what he's doing.
	He's engaging in the very doublespeak that he criticizes the legacy media for, right?
	War is peace, hate is love, misinformation is truth.
	In Russell's world, if you're being targeted for misinformation, you're actually a great truth teller.
	Like, there's no other explanation.
	It can't possibly be that you're full of shit and causing severe societal decline while profiting from your lies, and maybe some people take issue with that.
	No, no, you are a bastion of truth!
	Yeah.
	It means you're over the target.
	Yeah, yes, exactly, exactly, which is the main thing.
	That was the main response from comments after the allegations against Russell came out.
	That was the top comment.
	Exhausting.
	Yep, and they attributed it to Tim Pool.
	Magnificent.
	Yeah, you couldn't write it.
	You really couldn't.
	Um...
	So we covered the TNI in more detail last week and in our Russell Brand Returns episode, so go there if anyone needs a refresher.
	August 2023.
	Public Good Partnerships, a content moderation non-profit funded by a lobby group for Pfizer and Moderna, repeatedly targets Brand as a conspiracy theorist for pointing out revolving door corruption in the UK and for discussing evidence that the US government misled the public about the justification for vaccine mandates.
	Now I know you're a well-informed audience so you know how well undergirded those arguments are.
	I also know that you are aware of that actual revolving door and you can actually see the faces and know the names of some of the people in that revolving door.
	Jonathan Van Tam, who was significant in this country for advising people to take vaccines, now works at Moderna.
	You'll be aware that at least two FDA officials now work at Moderna.
	The fact that there are financial ties and relationships between private corporations, in particular big pharma, military-industrial complex, the financial industry, the energy industry, and the state, is hardly a conspiracy theory.
	You can observe that, you can track that, it's visible, it's understood, it's evident, it's obvious.
	So again, we come back to the idea that if you've worked for the state ever at all in any capacity, then that's it.
	You're tarnished forever as providing these various companies and corporations with connections to the state.
	Jonathan Van Tam, as the example here, was the deputy chief medical officer for England from 2017 to 2022.
	He then spent a year at Nottingham University, where he's worked on and off throughout his career, and in May 2023 began work as a senior medical consultant to Moderna.
	So that was just last year.
	Before that, his career was a combination of both private and public institutions, working initially in clinical medicine before spending many, many years training in public health and epidemiology with a specific interest in influenza and respiratory viruses.
	Fuckin' good guy to have around when COVID hit, I will say that.
	His CV is really quite something and it's not worth rattling off the whole thing right now, but suffice to say any private pharma company would leap at the chance to hire this man for his expertise.
	Now obviously, the implication here is that because JVT, as he's known, was a government advisor, he will in future be providing inroads for Moderna to the British government and allowing collusion and cooperation and whatever the two supposedly want to achieve together.
	There's a further implication that he only got this job because he somehow was treating Moderna favorably while he was a government advisor and just none of that has any weight of evidence to it at all.
	It's just heavily implied without any need for substantiation on Russell's part according to him.
	Fantam is prohibited from using privileged information from his time in government to further his business interests.
	It is the law, and that was reported on pretty extensively by the Financial Times.
	However, Rose Whiffen, the Senior Research Officer at Transparency International UK, who are an anti-corruption organization, said, quote, "When
	companies employ former officials, regardless of whether they worked in that industry before
	their government role or not, it raises the risk of privileged information being misused
	for commercial benefit.
	Currently, there are only minimal safeguards against abuse of the revolving door between
	the public and private sector. The government should prohibit ex-senior civil servants and
	ministers from taking up positions where they have had substantial responsibility for policy
	relevant to the hiring company." Now, I'm not sure I fully agree with that last part,
	as it does seem to infringe upon people's personal liberty and freedom a little bit.
	You know, you can't work anywhere else if you have worked for the government in any capacity.
	You could maybe, like, put a timer on it?
	I don't know.
	There are ways to do it, I guess.
	But either way, we could definitely have a discussion about how effective the safeguards preventing former ministers and senior civil servants from using privileged information to further their financial position are, and how to improve and make those safeguards more rigorous, at the very least.
	That's a genuine discussion that could spark genuine legislative change and help prevent corruption within government, and Russell makes no mention of it at all.
	Once again, his propaganda is not only spreading bullshit, but actively distracting from the actions that could do some good in the world and make a positive change.
	Which we desperately need, by the way.
	We do!
	We really do!
	But also, if that kind of mission statement, if you're looking at it from the position of like, that's their negotiating position.
	That's what they're aiming for, and if they can get Yeah.
	a portion of that. Because yeah, obviously keeping people entirely from working in a
	public or private sector, that almost seems not feasible really to enforce. But if that's
	their starting bid, that's the bid they're coming out of the gate with, I can understand
	that as a metric to gauge their success against. If they're going for none, then any percentage
	would you be able to measure their success?
	Yeah, again, these are huge problems within the government that we need regulation for.
	You need to be, like, austerity doesn't just affect us and our bottom lines in our regular lives.
	Austerity, which we have been living through for way too long.
	Oh, no.
	Hi, Chicago.
	Well, I'm gonna make a note then.
	Okay.
	Fuck me.
	It's kind of not been that bad lately.
	If we have these regulations in place, and like, that's the thing, is that austerity has stripped the government of its ability to enforce these kind of regulations and safeguards.
	Watchdog groups.
	And what's tough, and what I feel really, like, What makes me feel disheartened is there is at this point like a lot of these problems have gotten way out of control as far as like you know insider trading we're calling it something else but it's Congress because it's Congress it's fucking insider trade you know like all these like regulations that have gone
	Way beyond the pale and having to rein them in is going to take so much work that seems kind of impossible without some like major major changes that our government seems unwilling to make or even move towards.
	Um, to the point where there are bills that are being proposed that are really great as far as curtailing this kind of like, you know, how Congress is running roughshod over all these regulations and kind of like moral questions.
	Um, to the point where like you can propose bills that sound awesome and it's just a signal.
	Like it's, it's, it's this kind of like performative moment.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Um, and we all know that.
	Yeah, so even somebody who looks like they're, you know, like pioneering and trying really hard to make a difference.
	Oh, they could just be signaling for their next election like it and very often they are, which is a fucking bummer because like we're not addressing like the amount of Resources that are going to these kind of like corporate intertwined government bodies at this point are are so vast and then just expecting you know like watchdog groups that have to scrabble for grants or get like other kinds of like you know like foundation funding and that kind of stuff it doesn't seem like
	No, no.
	force against these problems is nearly enough to stem the tide.
	No, no.
	Because we're getting lost in the weeds and not having the conversation that you were
	just outlining as a very valuable conversation to have.
	Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah.
	We're like not even getting there.
	It's relying on underfunded public institutions and journalists to hopefully be able to pick
	up the pieces, but invariably there's just not enough resources to do so.
	Let alone be able to then kind of...
	Enforce the thing as well.
	So yeah, that's the discussion we could be having but... Should.
	Should.
	Should be having.
	Absolutely should be having.
	Also, coming back to the standard of research done by Team Stay Free, just at the start of that clip there, there is no public good partnerships non-profit.
	What they meant was public good projects.
	Um, who are a misinformation tracking NGO.
	Uh, Russell has talked about Public Good Projects before, it's one of Lee Fang's big talking points, and I'm pretty sure we brought it up in the Lee Fang is an Idiot episode.
	Um, and yet somehow Russell didn't pick up on this mistake either.
	Uh, these people, they just don't have a clue what they're talking about.
	Like, how would you read that and be like, no that's not right, you know, how...
	How would you not pick up on that?
	Just how?
	I have some ideas.
	There's a couple of options for how to not pick up on it.
	Nowhere in his reports on Bran did Moderna highlight any incorrect information, but the reports noted that they monitored Bran because he has a large platform with over 6.6... 6.7.
	That's misinformation.
	6.7 million YouTube subscribers and over 21 million followers across multiple social media platforms.
	Moreover, his videos are widely circulated in anti-vaccine spaces, where he's viewed as a truth teller and a threat to authority, and that Bran maintains support from Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk.
	These are just a few of the peculiar investigations and operations involving the government, deep state, former employees, deep state inspired agency, big pharma funded organizations prior to the legacy media attacks in September.
	At the start there, there's a claim that Moderna didn't highlight any factual inaccuracies with any of Brand's videos when they did a report about him.
	There's no way that's true.
	There's no way that's true!
	Here's the thing, I would look into it, but I can't because Lee Fang and shitty conspiracy trafficking site Real Clear Investigations are the only people who claim to have actually seen these internal documents and reports from Moderna, And neither Lee Fang nor Real Clear Investigations are trustworthy enough to warrant simply having faith in their editorial standards.
	We've covered Fang multiple times on this show and he's been full of shit every single time.
	Plus, not for nothing, but if you do have these amazing smoking gun documents and want the truth to be out there, why would you not release them?
	Like, surely it's proof that Moderna have some grand conspiracy in the works.
	Surely that would be worth releasing to the public.
	One would think.
	It seems like it'd be a smoking gun!
	You'd think!
	How.
	Strange.
	Trust me.
	I have a smoking gun in my storage unit.
	I've had it for years.
	Like, really.
	I have a smoking gun.
	She goes to a different high school.
	Yeah, right.
	She's in Canada.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Oh, boy.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
	Yeah, now we're going to broach the subject now of trusting your government.
	September 2023.
	Brand is subject to an investigation by The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4's dispatches.
	Themselves, legacy media organisations, cooperating in a shared endeavour.
	YouTube demonetizes Brand's channel without there being any content violations on the platform.
	This is the first time a content creator has been financially punished by the company for reasons other than the videos published on the site.
	Joe Ondrak, Logically AI's investigations head, provided different quotes to nearly half a dozen news outlets including Vice, Wired, the BBC, and two separate articles in the Times that depicted Brand as a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who had finally been held to account.
	So Joe Ondrak, Logically's Head of Investigation, is essentially a government-funded proxy whose funding comes from you, the taxpayer, telling you that we convey dangerous information without ever telling you that you fund him telling you that via the government who plainly have an agenda.
	I mean, an agenda, perhaps, is a pejorative term because governments have to have policies, they have to have ideas, you have to decide whether or not you trust them, their ideas, their policies, or agenda.
	Implication being that you shouldn't trust them, their policies or their agenda, and should instead trust Russell Brand and maybe subscribe to his local channel.
	Now, should you trust your government?
	It's a broad question and my instincts tell me, fuck no, you shouldn't.
	But what it comes down to is trust them to do what exactly?
	And when I ask, should I trust them to maintain public health, or ensure education is a high standard, or make sure crime numbers are kept down while ensuring an equitable justice system, or keep us from fighting unjust wars with either soldiers or finances, the answer is varying degrees of sometimes.
	Sometimes the government does a good job of maintaining public health.
	Other times, very much not.
	Looking at you, Flint, Michigan.
	Sometimes they make sure education is at a high standard.
	It's just usually that standard is for white people in privileged areas.
	Sometimes crime numbers are kept down and the justice system does its job, but mostly, especially in the US, it's a mechanism for keeping black people in prison and extracting slave labor from them.
	And sometimes our money or armed forces are sent into unjust wars like in support of Israel and sometimes they're sent into much more just wars like supporting Ukraine.
	Everything must be tackled on a case-by-case basis, viewed on its merits and weighed and measured by the evidence.
	Problem being that with Russell, there is no evidence.
	There are vague gestures to grand conspiracies.
	And if you try and scrape under the surface, you'll find it's empty air.
	It's like trying to see inside of a particularly sinister grifter balloon.
	It's just nothing.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	That's that.
	Yeah.
	Then he's modeling that behavior for all of his followers and listeners.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Painting with an incredibly broad brush there.
	Yeah, there's some kind of a questionable notion is enough.
	And then, I mean, and letters to the editor.
	What's tough is people don't understand how effective an active constituency can be if it's this kind of unified force.
	Absolutely.
	You know anything about the John Birch Society, you know how effective like the mailing list, like the conservative GOP coveted mailing list.
	There are people out there that can mobilize and get things done.
	It's... I'm not crazy about who can manage to do it.
	Because this is the wrong... You're scattering people to the wind if you're just saying, like, take this sinister notion and then build on it and try to learn about your world and try to learn how to effectively interact with your world and fill your civic duties.
	It just doesn't... It's smoke and mirrors.
	It's such a bummer.
	It's so disempowering.
	We know by now that makes my heart hurt is to see people be disempowered in real time.
	No, it's completely fair.
	And it does every single one of them a disservice as to the power they could have as a collective.
	You know, and obviously you've got, you know, unions and that kind of thing is an example, but as a country, you know, the NRA, that's like, what, 100,000 people or something?
	It was a crazy small number, crazy small number of people, of people actively doing shit.
	And yet they control America, or did, anyway.
	And, you know, it's... Well, they don't have to, like, they've done it.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
	The thing is, that's decentralized, you know, like, decentralized organizing.
	They did it.
	Yeah.
	They don't have to, like, you've got people doing your job for you.
	Yeah, by this point.
	Which is proven.
	Dude, I'm not gonna, nope.
	That might be another off-brand.
	Well, it's a fantastic season of Gangster Capitalism, go listen to it.
	Cool, okay.
	Wayne LaPierre, oh brother!
	Wowie wow wow.
	And then the NRA is like, yeah, they're the gun law.
	People are paying money to participate in the lobby for guns and bullets.
	It's crazy, isn't it?
	I mean, what?
	Nuts!
	And obviously I grew up steeped in it.
	Oh, massive, massive grift that is this like, and it's a virtue signal.
	The people that are like, I'm not a snowflake.
	I don't virtue signal, but I've got an Info Wars and an NRA sticker on my truck.
	Okay.
	Well, maybe we all do it and you need to calm down and maybe examine your values.
	Like, it's not.
	Or just statistics!
	Man, oh man.
	I will say, trucks covered in right-wing bumper stickers are one of my favorite things to see on the internet.
	It is always entertaining to me because I live so far away from it.
	All on the internet.
	Yes, exactly.
	All on the internet.
	Yes, I would not want to see it in real life.
	The notion you don't have to see it is crazy to me.
	Oh boy.
	I've never once seen an InfoWars sticker in my entire existence.
	Yeah, not a single one.
	Not a single one.
	I've seen, like, occasional other right-wing stickers.
	You know, the kind of thing that, like, I don't know, David Icke would throw out there.
	More kind of British-based, I guess, conspiracy bullshit, but yeah, I've seen anti-5G, lizard people, you know, just up in places.
	Yeah, anti-5G and anti-vax shit.
	Seen plenty of that, but yeah, never an InfoWars sticker.
	Not one.
	Not threatening to murder you, because they usually do here.
	That's a whole thing.
	Not usually, not usually.
	Another one of those cultural differences, I guess.
	To put it mildly, yeah.
	So yeah, with the particularly sinister grifter balloon, like the example of what Brand was saying about Joe Ondrak there serves as a perfect example.
	So logically, AI were hired by the UK government to look into and track disinformation.
	Joe Ondrak is the research technology and policy lead of Logically AI.
	He specializes in large-scale research projects, extremist threat detection, and narrative tracing and mapping for interdiction and countermeasures.
	He has a PhD in literature specializing in digital narratology, social media fiction, ontological ambiguity, and digital cultures.
	He's also acted as lead investigator in projects exposing multiple QAnon influences, anti-vax networks, extremist influence efforts, So, it's got some credibility, this guy, right?
	Now, naturally, a disinformation tracking company will come across Russell Brand, especially with the UK as its focus.
	Accordingly, Ondrejk is credentialed enough for newspapers when wanting an expert on disinformation and Russell Brand specifically to come to for comment.
	Because, well, in Russell's view, logically AI had a contract with the UK government and that means that, aha, Joe Ondrak is nothing but a government mouthpiece and can't possibly have any views of his own based on his own expertise.
	I will say, it is quite probable that Ondrak's comments and views align with those of the British government and this podcast when saying that misinformation is bad and Russell Brand is a lying conspiracy grifter.
	But no, because money changed hands openly and transparently, I might add.
	You know, none of it was hidden.
	Ding ding ding.
	But it's all corrupt!
	Subscribe to my locals channel.
	Yeah, you could find it.
	Not wanting to find it doesn't mean it's not there.
	No, just because you didn't get like a little notification or anything or it didn't show up in your algorithm doesn't mean that it's not there.
	It's just, it's really boring news.
	You know, government signs a contract with a company, okay, they do that thousands of times a day.
	Wonderful times.
	Yeah, oh, and the whole thing about him being the first person taken off YouTube for stuff that wasn't content, that's not true.
	No, no, no.
	Because of course it's not true.
	He might be probably the most famous person who that has happened to, you know, being demonetized for stuff that's not content.
	But also, his content flies enough fucking red flags, like, I don't know.
	Yeah!
	Like, he shouldn't be courting people to look further at his content, in my opinion.
	Right like that yeah exactly and that I mean like listen even YouTube knows that some of their content guidelines are a little much like and they it is crazy to see how much they've changed and how much they've changed content like that's that's again that's a separate conversation that really needs to happen.
	Yeah there was there was a lot of worthy discussion that could be had about the power of YouTube and and and and all of that and Yeah, I mean, you know, it's another one of those kind of sites where you're like, should this be a public utility?
	You know, it's that kind of essential to the species at this point, you know?
	You look at social media and you look at that and you're like, hmm, maybe?
	There's an argument that could be made there.
	But again, not the conversation we're having.
	Right.
	Like, just because these private companies have blown gigantic holes where loopholes once were doesn't mean that, like, I don't know, it doesn't mean what he says it means.
	Yeah, yeah, no, I agree.
	It's frustrating.
	It's very frustrating.
	It's frustrating.
	So, Logically AI had an interesting observation about Russell's audience.
	And Lauren, I can say with certainty, this is the clip that was going to rile you.
	Logically claims that social media accounts trotting out the innocent until proven guilty refrain were among those perpetuating common myths about sexual assault.
	The site published a follow-up video reiterating the claim that those seeking the presumption of innocence for brand, a principle dating back to the Magna Carta, were spreading a dangerous myth.
	It's difficult for me to be objective on a subject that so plainly includes me and in this instance is about me.
	But what I can safely say is not about me is the Magna Carta and the presumption of innocence.
	Those are principles that have been valued since the dawn of civilization of this nature.
	The idea that a government-funded agency paid proxies that exist solely to crush dissent would start to invite us to challenge some of our deepest-held beliefs about the judiciary, about democracy, about civilization, about sovereign individual rights, about the Magna Carta itself, shows you that what's being attempted is some kind of cultural reset that will play out way beyond this individual story.
	ALICE Okay.
	Um.
	Before we go there, if anyone wants a dive into the Magna Carta and how alt-right idiots like Russell profoundly misuse and misunderstand it, head to our Lauren Ladd special episode entitled Magna Carta, Magna Fata, Magna Blata, Mall Cop for an in-depth explanation.
	But that said, Lauren, is there anything you would like to address about the Magna Carta based on what Russell just said?
	Well, let's start a whole new episode right now.
	Okay.
	Uh, I mean, so one of my, um, one of the points that I kind of came to at the end of that episode was the use of the lore of the Magna Carta.
	What my concern kind of like ultimately bubbled up while working on that episode was that Invoking the Magna Carta as this historical moment that meant something to every human being, there is an implication that that means it's fixed.
	Because the Magna Carta happened in a way totally removed from how it is presented by pundits like, you know, like right wing or just grifters or misinformation, like people like Russell.
	There's an implication that, oh, well, we all get due process now.
	So why are you even complaining?
	And because we all get due process now, I am allowed to have whatever my version of due process is.
	Which, to a degree, Russell should feel bolstered in a way by Magna Carta because it was issued to assuage the protestations of the very tippy top of the Krusty Krust.
	Of the nobility.
	So he should probably identify with the, you know, the recipients of the Magna Carta.
	And it's, you know, and, okay, nope, too much.
	Nope.
	Oh my gosh.
	It's so easy to go down a rabbit hole.
	But you know what I mean?
	Like the issue is, he's even saying before the Magna Carta, due process is just this inherent natural law that rises out of the mud.
	No!
	No, it definitely wasn't.
	The points that were made and are very useful and interesting is when people actually understand the history of the Magna Carta and how it was reinvigorated post-British Civil War and in the Parliament.
	Having this idea Come back to the surface and try to like we should be fighting for those rights we have to constantly fight for that we have to be fastidious and we have to pay attention we have to constantly be fighting and crying for these rights.
	Exactly.
	That's, thank you, that's what I was looking for.
	And so that's the thing, is like, there has to be a constant defense of the rights we have and fighting for rights that are more robust to protect us from exploitation by the government, right?
	So, or the judicial system, whatever.
	And to...
	To call it this static, natural law?
	That's not even common law, that's natural, like, we, like, ah.
	Indeed.
	Like Stonehenge, and then Magna Carta, like Stonehenge means due process, because it's such an absurd notion to assume that as naturally given, and not a development in the, Again, like the fastidious nature of maintaining government and developing government, which is something that scares the holy living shit out of me as an American watching my government deteriorate and just fall apart when we should be progressing and we should be getting somewhere better instead of just like, just like tumbling back into history in a way that's very dangerous and getting more and more difficult to combat on any level.
	It just, Or we could go five different ways.
	I'm mad five different ways about it.
	I pitch one, I'm good.
	Okay.
	Everyone go listen to the Magna Carta deed, yeah.
	So he's saying the presumption of innocence has been stripped from him and that a government-funded agency paid proxies that exist to crush dissent.
	It's confusing, but it's also in contravention of the Magna Carta.
	The main point to highlight here, however, is that Logically AI confirmed that those supporting and defending Russell Brand after all the allegations came out were also the most likely to be promoting and spouting rape myths, including asking why the victims didn't report the incidents, claiming the victims are financially motivated, suggesting that these celebrities, they're rich enough to use sex workers, and in Brand's case, pointing out the legal age of consent in the UK is 16.
	Mm-mm.
	there at all with a 30 year old man grooming a child.
	Uh, so...
	Nope.
	Yeah.
	So to read from the Logically Facts article, quote, "One of the most pernicious narratives
	that persists is that men are extremely likely to face false allegations and that the accused
	are innocent until proven guilty, even when multiple victims come forward.
	In fact, when it comes to actual or attempted rape, men are more likely to be raped than
	falsely accused.
	By one measure, this was 230 times more likely.
	Yeah, bleak.
	Rape Crisis Scotland found that the rate of false accusations was around 3%, while Home Office research suggests the figure to be about 4%.
	This corroborates worldwide, with the figure estimated to be between 2 and 6%.
	Unquote.
	Nonetheless, seemingly half the internet made their case last September as to why they can't be trusted by victims of rape.
	Wonderful times we live in.
	Just, uh, just tremendous.
	Any amount of undermining, like, it takes so much education.
	Genuinely though, like, what I am What gives me hope is that some of us are in a conversation that is very different and much more sophisticated than we were even before Me Too and miles away from when I was young and when I could have very much used this kind of discourse and information and understanding.
	And I think we all could have.
	And we would have benefited massively.
	So I think that the change is in the air somewhere.
	There's a lot of reasons that people cling to these falsehoods, and a lot of them are personal, and a lot of them are reactive.
	So, even in that, like, I don't feel bad for people, like, I don't feel bad for Russell, but there are people that are defending Russell that are coming from a place of, like, a lack of agency and a lack of feeling, like, and having been victimized, and then feeling, as a result, having a lack of agency.
	And my heart breaks for them, too.
	Like, it's...
	To see someone, people I've known, you know, people in my life, throughout my life, where they have gone so far the other way and they have reacted so far the other way because they've been in danger, they have been hurt, and they are reacting especially...
	They are going far enough the other way.
	It's almost like magical thinking that if they're especially hostile to people that were that are now in a situation they were once in when they were they were once in that type of peril.
	and they seemingly have moved past it, and someone else in that peril, well, it's their
	fault that they're there.
	And that is, or, or they, we just can't help it.
	They're just going to be there.
	Yeah.
	It's, it makes me sad.
	It makes me sad in a whole different way.
	Like, because you're using those people.
	Yeah.
	Or using those people and their pain.
	I think it's one of those things that to other women, often one of the kind of, the other,
	the great agents of the patriarchy are often other women.
	It's through trauma and conditioning and whatever else.
	Well, it can just be either.
	The patriarchy doesn't care about your gender if you are on their side.
	They will enlist any version of you.
	If you are willing to take up the mantle for the patriarchy.
	Absolutely.
	Don't be an agent of the patriarchy.
	You should be thinking that every day.
	It's something that you should be... There are historical examples and just current day religious examples in particular where there'll be some... I was reading, this is depressing, but I was reading about female genital mutilation Um you know not that long ago really tough topic um but often it's it's usually the female family members who are the greatest advocates for it because you know and they themselves have been through it and everything and it's it's it's that's really hard to read about um you know and and yeah they're the enforcers of that cult like they yeah they wear it as a badge of pride like a cultural badge of pride which is
	It's so incredibly sad.
	And yeah, I absolutely get where you're coming from in terms of this kind of thing as well.
	And it's something like, you know, in terms of the conversation being so radically different to where we were, you know, even before the Me Too movement, like absolutely.
	I think the openness and willingness to have the conversation has kind of come forward a lot more.
	But I will say there are definitely things that you'll be able to see that That I will have less of an awareness of because, you know, I've been a victim of this twice.
	I've mentioned this on the show, but because I am white and a lot of people perceive me, I'm fairly masculine presenting, a lot of people perceive me as male, then I don't get the same amount of scrutiny when I come forward, when I talk about this.
	People don't fling these accusations at me, you know.
	That's absolutely true.
	To say that, like, You look up a radio voice in the dictionary, and you're going to hear Al.
	You're not going to encounter the same kind of interaction in the world.
	The world does not treat you the same.
	No.
	Not even close.
	And that's the reality that we have to deal with, which makes this all so much more complicated.
	I again like I wouldn't wish this on you I would not wish that you have to go into doctor's offices being a heavily tattooed loud lady like it's not it's not a fun it's not a fun time you know or whatever like any kind of judgmental situation I think that I What I will say and because I that's too depressing.
	I'm gonna I'm gonna scoot right past that.
	Like the difference is fucking I don't know what else to say.
	It sucks.
	But I think that what the solution has been what not the solution a solution that does work is anecdotal stories and reinforcing if if someone in your life.
	Especially if they're coming from a place of pain and you know that, allowing them to come to that on their own terms and maybe address that on their own terms and gently maybe pointing it out or at least opening up dialogue.
	Opening up dialogue on a person-to-person basis with someone that you care about because no matter what.
	Like, no matter how right or wrong this is, we are the most receptive as human beings from messages from people.
	Like, we are the most receptive.
	To people, people who look like us.
	People who look and sound like us, we are going to hear them the, it's going to be the most effective.
	It's tough, especially with like men, you know, or mask presenting or men, whatever, that spectrum of person advocating for A traditionally woman's concern.
	Yeah, there is extra weight to it.
	And it's hard to say like, oh, well, men have no business talking about it or advocating.
	No, that's not the case.
	Like we all need to be on the same side and we all need to be supporting the same kind of goal.
	Yeah.
	And so it's very tough because it can get paternalistic and it can get condescending very quickly and very easily.
	It takes a lot of work to understand.
	But it doesn't take that much work.
	Listen to people.
	Give them the space to say, hey, stop.
	I don't need a knight in shining armor.
	I need someone to listen and understand.
	And having that kind of Interaction on a personal level is the most effective way to deprogram this kind of reactionary and defensive emotional thinking.
	Because you have to understand, it's coming from an emotional place.
	You never know what people have been through.
	Really, really, really.
	It's tough.
	It's hard to hear.
	Even every single guest and Russell themselves, every single person who's been on this show that we have looked at, there is some part of me that feels bad for them.
	Yeah.
	Mostly.
	Yeah.
	Not Tucker.
	All the rest of them.
	Not Tucker.
	I don't think.
	What about Candace?
	I feel like I made that pretty clear.
	Do we have... I don't know.
	Candace, I'm not sure about either.
	But yeah, Tucker.
	Tucker, absolutely.
	Oh, I'm not... I mean... It's a tough one.
	It's a tough one.
	For gals?
	Yeah.
	It's ugly.
	Yeah, that's true.
	There's something that's ugly that makes one behave that way.
	That's true, that's true.
	Yeah, okay.
	Sympathy for Candace Owens.
	I'm feeling weird, I'm gonna move on.
	Okay.
	Sitting in it doesn't feel great, and it takes practice.
	It's not easy.
	It's not easy.
	All of what we've said, I think at the very least having the discussion is the first steps towards doing it.
	I have brought the mood to the...
	Oh, the bottom of the ocean.
	It's not you.
	Let's move it.
	It's not you.
	Let's keep it pumping, Queen.
	Let's go.
	My bad, my bad, my bad.
	Absolutely not your fault.
	So I mentioned doublespeak earlier and how Russell engages in it.
	Well, here is some of his critique of that thing that he very much does.
	For me, this is part of that Orwellian double-speak trend that we're seeing everywhere.
	When you see Jens Stoltenberg saying, we have to continue with the war, it's the only way to get peace.
	That the meaning of language is being flipped before our very eyes.
	A kind of psy-op against an entire population.
	A kind of berserker principle, designed to leave us all collectively bewildered about what right and wrong are anymore.
	Why don't you increasingly feel like you're not able to speak or open your mouth in case you say the wrong thing, that the rules might have changed?
	Well, the rules are changing.
	Now, innocent until proven guilty is being trotted out as a myth.
	The Magna Carta, a foundational principle, a keystone of most democracies, along with the American Constitution and many other, Semi-sacred, if secular, pieces of documentation are being regarded as ideas that can be dispensed with.
	To what end?
	To what purpose?
	Ultimately what it seems to me is to legitimize control, to shut down dissent, to create a censorship industrial complex that's already been created, but to ensure that the power of said complex is absolute, that the trajectory of power can continue uninterrupted, that all dissenting voices can be shut down, and the people can be kept in a state of docile, uninformed compliance.
	Docile, uninformed compliance, eh?
	Press one in the chat for globalists are bad or two in the chat for globalists are good.
	So we're dispensing with the Constitution apparently.
	That's going.
	It's gone.
	Done.
	Out the window.
	If only.
	Right?
	Right.
	Oh dear.
	Koda Hamurabi.
	Fucking go way back.
	Go all the way back.
	Why not?
	Why not?
	Nothing means anything anymore.
	Nope.
	Words.
	Cyrus Cylinder.
	Here we go.
	Ancient rules!
	We can go way past the Magna Carta.
	Yep.
	I covered that in one of my history... I think the first history corner I talked about the Cyrus Cylinder, if you're interested.
	Yeah, I think it was the first one.
	So there was a lot in that clip.
	It's pro-religious tolerance.
	You might hate it.
	I don't know.
	But anyway, cultural religious tolerance.
	So we'll see.
	I bet it's not Russell's cup of tea.
	Probably not.
	It's so absurd.
	The victimhood, he's putting himself in this historical context.
	The grandiosity is live.
	It's off the shelves.
	I know.
	Large and in charge.
	Chunky yet funky.
	It is big time, big time, big time.
	That's just so absurd.
	I don't know.
	If there was a cross he would insist that he be mounted upon it.
	Let's put it that way.
	Now I do specifically, out of all that bullshit, the thing I want to point out specifically is the moment of, does it feel like you're afraid to say anything anymore for fear of being wrong or the rules might have changed?
	It's an emotional appeal to Russell's audience that is virtually guaranteed to be effective, as the clear majority of them are right-wing Trumpers, we've established that, who spend their time flinging shit at minorities in the LGBTQ plus community.
	That's well established as well.
	And that is the target of that narrative of them.
	Do you feel afraid to say anything anymore?
	The underlying idea being that if you misgender a trans person, or use the wrong word for black people, then you'll be shut down and cancelled forever.
	And it's, all according to Russell, an effort to exert control over you, led by the censorship industrial complex, as he calls it.
	Beyond being an effective bit of emotional manipulation, he's also lumping in minorities in the LGBTQ plus community with that censorship industrial complex.
	And in Russell's land of guilty by association, that only serves to affirm his audience's bigotries.
	And a quick note, if you do misgender someone, or use the wrong word for minorities, as long as it wasn't a slur and was unintentional, apologize and move on.
	Plenty of people misgender me.
	Hi, I'm Al, still non-binary, my pronouns are still they them, and if you misgender me for whatever reason, just apologize and move on and that's fine.
	Or even better, self-correct.
	Don't over-apologize and make me spend the next five minutes telling you it's fine.
	And definitely don't swing the other direction and start yelling at me about how everything's woke now and how it wasn't like that when you were a kid.
	Lots of things are different than when you were a kid.
	Everybody.
	Literally everybody.
	Guess what?
	Yeah, we used to go on our bikes and didn't show up until the streetlights came on.
	It's true.
	And we all could have been stolen and murdered.
	Listen, listen, that like afraid to say anything, but it does take practice.
	It takes practice to not feel guarded and not feel, and even in like the Queer Spaces episode a little bit, you know, we've talked about like how we've had to adapt before.
	Yeah, language changes.
	I'm almost over the freaking hill, and I'm, like, not stoked, so I'm not trying to talk about it.
	But, I mean, like, things have changed a lot.
	Language changes.
	Society changes.
	And it can be exciting if you want to participate and understand why These changes are good.
	That's the thing is that the conversation is so polarized and we don't understand or like we it's hard to take that you know bird's eye view of the polarization of social conversation while it is facilitated By this interconnectedness in social media, we still have to understand they are owned by companies that are trying to sell ads.
	So that kind of dynamic has made us very polarized.
	Whereas, again, like I was saying earlier, we can talk in person and it's going to be a totally different scenario than if you're trying to just fight.
	You can't just fight somebody on the internet into agreeing with you or into being nice.
	You can't fight into being nice.
	Nope.
	Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity.
	You can't fight into being a nicer, more considerate person.
	You can share how you feel and where you're coming from and encourage compassion, but we don't know, again, where someone else is coming from either.
	Afraid to say anything is so absurd.
	I mean, you said it, but like...
	I'm trying to reiterate that it's okay to be wrong and just asking and being better informed, the more you do it, the easier it gets.
	Yeah.
	And you can get, I get stuff wrong constantly.
	Sure.
	And then I just, I'm like, okay, cool.
	And I haven't died once from it yet.
	Nope.
	Nope.
	Absolutely not.
	Absolutely not.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, just apologize and move forward with the correct thing.
	It takes half a second and I think the only person that will probably be focused on it drastically will be you, most likely.
	Yeah.
	Oh dear.
	Now we get back to, oh yeah, Tucker Carlson.
	Tucker Carlson himself had a very particular role in the culture up until recently.
	He's someone that's worked on MSNBC.
	He's also famously worked on Fox, becoming a phenomena on that channel.
	And I, belonging to the cultural groups that you might assume I belong to, always was somewhat suspicious about Fox anchors.
	Indeed, you can look on YouTube right now and see us Deliberately riling Bill O'Reilly and deliberately trolling Fox as an institution and getting into it on a variety of subjects like war in the Middle East, the nature of their funding, their conservatism, all sorts of, I would say, anti-establishment attacks.
	I have remained anti-establishment for many, many years.
	Clearly Tucker Carlson is a person who's always had a particular perspective in the culture, but the culture has kind of moved around this outspoken pundit.
	Tucker Carlson was kicked out of Fox News for a bunch of reasons that are still quite clandestine and ill understood.
	No one really knows why Tucker Carlson was sacked from Fox, but some people think it's because he became increasingly outspoken around war, specifically anti-war narratives, and I'm still struck That claim the mantle of progressive or liberal don't identify that Tucker Carlson is perhaps one of the most outspoken critics of war, or war, anywhere in the world.
	And for me, the position of peace, of diplomacy, of ending war wherever possible, ought to be a principle that wherever you are in the political spectrum, you aspire to.
	The idea now that war is becoming normalized as a kind of progressive perspective shows us once again how meaning is being flipped and inverted.
	War is good now.
	War is peaceful.
	War is progressive.
	War is necessary.
	War is progressive.
	Okay.
	So, Tucker Carlson does kind of, you know, he does present himself as very anti-war,
	all while doing his best to stoke the very real coming civil war in the United States.
	But beyond that, back in the early days of the Iraq War, he was a veritable hawk.
	He was piling on anyone who didn't go to war in Iraq and declaring them unpatriotic.
	Uh-huh.
	He's not anti-war, is the point.
	You can say you're anti-war all day.
	You can say you're a chicken.
	Doesn't make you a chicken.
	Sorry.
	No.
	Bark bark, bitch.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And with regards to the Ukraine war, yeah, I mean, he's, he's, I guess he's anti-Ukraine in general, I suppose.
	He wants the war to end and for Russia to win it.
	He does want the war to end, I will give it that, but he wants it to end in a very specific way.
	You know, he wants Russia to be successful in their thing, not Ukraine.
	Um, so yeah, I don't know how anti-war that can be considered, really.
	Not.
	It's not.
	You should be anti-violence, you should be anti-imperialism, and he's fine with that.
	Yeah, no, he's completely fine with both of those things, that's been very well established.
	As for his firing from Fox, yeah, that is pretty, pretty opaque, but I don't think the anti-war thing fits at all.
	I don't think that's got any merit to it whatsoever.
	This is well-tread, I think.
	This is very well-trodden.
	Very well-trodden thingy.
	What's the word?
	Content.
	Now, as for Russell lampooning Bill O'Reilly, that clip is from about a decade ago when Russell was still doing the Truce.
	He most definitely doesn't shit on Fox News or their anchors these days, and the only time he ever has is to get upset with them for disagreeing with Rand Paul or Donald Trump.
	That's the only times I've seen it.
	Um, you know, so, um, uh, a bit of a far cry from, uh, from when he was, you know, making fun of them for hating Mexican children or whatever.
	Um, cause that's, that's the kind of shit he used to do back then.
	Well, and so the clips that they played, they had an old clip for anyone that's listening.
	They had a very old clip of obviously a younger Tucker and then a more current Tucker.
	And I don't know how much work they had to do to find a non-bow-tied Tucker.
	Yeah, I thought that.
	From his early days, yeah.
	He was wearing, like, resort wear.
	That was like a linen, like a Florida Keys vacation top.
	Which seems weird.
	It's like they found him on spring break.
	But, like, somebody made sure not to use the bow tie.
	Somebody did.
	That seems calculated to me, which entertains me.
	I also feel like the If you're going to reference trolling as a positive, if you're saying like, yeah, we used to troll Fox, it's almost like you don't have a moral compass or a moral center that drives your content, but you just court, clout, and outrage.
	That's what gets you your looks and your clicks and your views.
	Because again, Antagonizing is not a way to pursue peace and unity, or whatever he said.
	Antagonizing people isn't the way you do it.
	No, it is not.
	No, it is not.
	Yeah, you may have cut a little bit close to the bone there for Russell.
	He's a narcissist, so it doesn't matter.
	That's fine.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Very true.
	Now we get back to the key clip, I would say, from the interview with Tucker.
	How does it make you feel to know that you were in the crosshairs of two of the most powerful governments in the world and their intel agencies?
	The UK government censorship that Tucker's referring to was driven by MP Dame Caroline Dainage, the head of the UK Parliament's Culture, Media and Sports Committee.
	Dainage's husband was a commander in the British Army's PSYOPS division, the 77th Brigade, who were deployed straight from a tour of the Middle East, implementing behavioural change strategies against ISIS to countering dis- and misinformation during the COVID-19 crisis.
	That sounds like such an anomalous jump and peculiar marriage.
	Someone that works for the Department of Culture, Sports, Media and Entertainment, but ultimately advocates for censorship.
	Indeed, it is she who sponsored the new online safety bill, which is alarmingly similar to numerous censorship bills across the world.
	In Brazil, in Ireland, across the EU, United States, Canada's one's already been implemented.
	And it's an extraordinary detail that her husband is a military figure Whose particular expertise was psyops in foreign territory against terrorists whose skill set can now be deployed domestically against the homeland population.
	That, extraordinary though it sounds, is not an anomalous or even particularly unusual journey.
	It is very common these days for techniques and ideas that are developed to counter foreign enemies to be utilized with domestic populations.
	What essentially appears to be happening is our independent thought, our freedom, Our ability to communicate, our ability to cultivate relationships, develop ideas and, importantly, oppose authority is being regarded as a type of terrorism.
	Certainly, at very least, a type of threat.
	I'm bored, Al.
	I'm bored.
	Right?
	Oh, my God.
	I'm so bored.
	Yeah, I know.
	You keep bringing this up.
	To start, Russell and his ilk are so dangerous they're being regarded as a type of terrorist, or at least a type of threat, and Dame Caroline Dynadge's husband, Baron of Kimbolton Major General John Lancaster, they never name him, by the way, and he's got such a great, like, full name and title, I'm like, why wouldn't you?
	It sounds scary!
	Yeah, maybe.
	He sounds like a villain!
	Yeah, exactly!
	Why wouldn't you say that?
	Perfect!
	Absolutely perfect!
	Barren anything!
	Yeah, barren anything!
	Yikes!
	Yeah, he's the one, anyway, targeting them with PSYOPs.
	At least, that's what the slant of this would have you believe.
	There's been suggestion from Russell that Major General Lancaster has been using PSYOPs against the British public after using them against ISIS.
	Only this time to combat COVID-19 misinformation and Ukraine dissenters.
	And that was from the gray zone initially.
	And according to Russell, this is now commonplace.
	There is, of course, no evidence to support that theory, though Lancaster's time in the army was with the 77th Division, who do engage in psychological warfare.
	And we also covered this back in our Russell Brand Returns episode.
	I know, I know.
	Like, if I have to say the words Dame Caroline Dainage again this week, I'm going to throw myself out of this here ground floor window.
	Also, should point out how weird it is to be throwing shade at Dame Dainage and Major General Lancaster's marriage.
	It makes perfect sense to me in terms of class politics, but also, like, it's two people getting married.
	What's so weird?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	It's really strange.
	I can't care.
	I'm too bored.
	The thing is, though, if it was real, if we were actually talking about... And I feel like I've proven it at this point.
	I would be fascinated if any of this was real.
	I'd be reading the books.
	I'd be... Oh, I'd be so into it.
	But it's not.
	So I'm gonna die of boredom!
	And the thing is like, I've covered this, this is the third time we're covering this specifically and I promise you that is a fraction of the number of times that Russell brings it up.
	It was fatal boredom.
	Fatal boredom.
	Every week he's harping on this.
	Every week since September.
	How?
	How do all of your audience not just switch off?
	Because that's what I would fucking do.
	It doesn't seem like he's attached enough.
	Also, I don't watch all the content, obviously.
	But it doesn't seem like he's attached enough emotional spark.
	It's not like a George Soros.
	It doesn't seem spicy enough to hit that kind of endorphin switch in his audience.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's weird.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I agree, because Dame Dynage, you know, in terms of the grand scheme of British politics, is a nothing.
	You know, former cabinet minister, now a Tory backbencher.
	That's it.
	There's nothing there.
	Like, the stuff about the husband would be more interesting.
	Oh, Baron of Kimbolton is trying to get me.
	I'm like, well, that's fascinating.
	How are people barons these days?
	Let's talk about that.
	That sounds fucking stupid.
	I'm saying!
	There's so much that could be way more interesting than this.
	There's tons of meat on a different bone!
	The one next to the bone that you're picking at!
	This thing is picked clean!
	It has been picked clean!
	Yeah, yeah.
	And her husband sits in the House of Lords.
	I'm like, come on.
	Why do we have a House of Lords?
	Right?
	Go there!
	Yeah, why don't we have an elected upper house like you guys do?
	Like we should have because ours are appointed and that's a problem.
	Yep.
	You know.
	Sure is.
	Don't get me wrong, there are problems with elections as well.
	Yeah, as you guys, as you know.
	That's perfect.
	As you know, yes.
	No, exactly, exactly.
	Oh boy um all right we get we get one final point from Russell to this editorial which is uh mostly just terrorizing his audience.
	This is obviously a story that's continuing to unfold and that I'm just a small part of that's why I'm very grateful to have conversations with people like Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford who was subject to the same kind of scrutiny from the same organizations.
	Journalists like Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger who report on the censorship industrial complex and why I'm very keen to cultivate and create relationships with people from across Across the political spectrum because I'm beginning to think that spectrum is fracturing into a new prism of potential new light of new relationships between different political religious and cultural and ideological factions that previously would have been opposed to one another but are increasingly realizing now that we are at a unique tipping point
	Credit scores.
	It already exists, dog!
	Bitch about that!
	globalist forces together, we are, one by one, or in vast numbers collectively, going to be facing
	tyranny such as we have never seen before, all the while being told it's for our convenience
	and our safety.
	I mean, I bet his credit score's great.
	Yeah, unless we find new ways to resist these globalist forces together, we're going to be facing tyranny such as we've never seen before!
	And the globalist forces are, of course, British MPs sending letters and disinformation tracking companies.
	It's tyranny, I tell you, tyranny!
	Goddamn.
	It's unreal.
	He's laying it on thick, though.
	The fear, like, it's... I just... I don't know where, like a listener, like a follower, a listener, a person who's into this.
	Yeah.
	I don't know which organ they have in their body that gives them the energy to give a shit about this.
	Like about his coverage in this regard.
	And like the cancel culture of it all.
	I know that it's there.
	It must be a pancreas type device.
	I don't know.
	But it's something in them that I don't have.
	I just, I care deeply about Censorship and and and the the impacts of free speech and where like free speech should be like as far as it's laid out in our constitution as in free speech from the government like there there was a very specific
	Freedom of Press, The Fourth Estate, there's all these very important tenets that I care deeply about.
	And he's doing this puppet show that's adjacent, but wholly divorced from reality.
	And it's so much less exciting and interesting to me.
	I don't have the mega-pancreas The Mag Anchorius, if you will, to give me that.
	The appendix.
	I like Meg Anchreis.
	Yeah, the Meg Anchreis.
	Whatever, that produces the give a shit about, like, these rich boy grievances.
	I just can't be bothered to care.
	And I don't... I don't get it.
	Because, like, there's even the notion that, like, I don't know, all I could think about, like, the clip, earlier clip, anyway.
	The ISIS thing, yeah, the previous clip, the ISIS thing, and the insisting that there's this kind of disinformation industrial complex thing that's like psyops, right?
	When cops from America are being trained in Israel, like, there's very sketchy, like, School of the Americas.
	There's very sketchy, fucked up things where we are kind of trading this clandestine, you know, like the blur between the militarization of the police, like a blur between law enforcement and the military.
	Those are all massive problems that need to be addressed, like Cop City in Atlanta, all this like nightmare shit, and where our government is plugging their ears and going la la la to what all of the citizens, or this giant Section of the citizens or even like going to a city hall meeting and every single citizen that shows up and makes their cases roundly ignored and just told to kick fucking rocks.
	There's, ooh, it's so close.
	Like they're so close.
	And we were talking about this before we recorded a little bit, like they're so close to the real thing.
	They're so good at the pantomime.
	To the real thing.
	And it's scary to me that they're sucking all this energy out of people that would otherwise be able to have agency and actively participate.
	ALICE Yeah, no, I completely agree.
	And I also, I get what you're saying about the finding it hard to give a shit about the stuff coming out of this guy's mouth, but I think for two people, almost To a fault based in reality, it's probably quite hard to try and feel the fear, you know?
	Because we don't believe that any of this stuff is real.
	That's true.
	That's a really good point.
	But if you do believe that all of it's real, then holy shit, be terrified!
	But also like, how self-important do you have to be to think that cancel culture is going to come for you?
	Well, yeah, I think on your couch in Tacoma, Washington or fucking whatever, like, man, oh, man, I think part of it hinges on the the temporarily disgraced millionaires theory, you know, it's like, oh, but I will be famous, you know, I will be, you know, and I don't want to be cancelled, you know, for when I am famous.
	So, so, you know, they finally accept my survivor audition tape.
	Exactly.
	Well, I mean, I guess.
	I guess you're absolutely right.
	And they also probably want access to their content creators that they have kind of been mentally, chemically hooked on to.
	So the threat of taking away their endorphin button masher probably is a big threat.
	Yeah, yeah, that's true.
	That's true.
	Yeah, there is just the fact that they don't want to be rid of people who they like.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	All right.
	We've got one final clip here, and it was tacked onto the end of the editorial.
	And what it is, is a trailer for Tucker returning to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
	I thought it'd be fun to just take a little look at what we'll be missing out on.
	What's happening, Tucker?
	What happens here tends to act as a preview for what's about to happen in the rest of the West.
	[MUSIC]
	Ultimately, the current set of global conflicts, will they be used to legitimize further authoritarianism
	and control?
	Without question.
	And the irony is that control will be exerted in countries that don't have ongoing wars.
	I just feel sad for everyone.
	But I know lies when I hear them.
	I can't deal with that.
	Fox News is parting ways with primetime host and conservative commentator Tucker Carlson.
	How do you feel about the fact that, you know, in your career you've moved from being in one media space to another one that had a very different identity in terms of Fox and the role that you had there?
	Are you aware of the risk?
	Do you feel that risk?
	I have the great advantage of being 54, so I'm not...
	I'm not afraid to die, you know?
	I'm not shooting for another 30 years in media.
	I think it's enough to say what I think is true now.
	The window within which democracy operates is so narrow that you're able to present it as a type of freedom.
	You're articulating my darkest thoughts, which I never say out loud, but what you just said.
	The definition of democracy has changed from the people rule to the institutions rule.
	They're really afraid.
	They know how unpopular they are.
	And a lot of their decisions are made not simply out of greed and selfishness, but out of panic in the way that all illegitimate regimes behave toward the end.
	end.
	Outrageous.
	I say that's the one legitimate fear that he absolutely has that I will understand if we can internalize.
	That's fair, yeah.
	He's painfully afraid of death and will do anything he possibly can to feel important while he's on the earth.
	Are you aware of the risks of moving to independent media spaces?
	I'm not afraid to die.
	It killed me, it killed me, it really did.
	It's a dipshit thing to say.
	Oh god, well, that's the most that we're ever gonna see of that.
	I don't think we're gonna be missing much, frankly.
	No, me either, me either.
	Yeah, it does look like a real pal sesh between these two chuckleheads.
	Yeah, that's a lot.
	What we were talking about before, and I'm sorry if this is an alienating reference for you, but I'm sure there's going to be listeners out there that are going to get it, I'm going to bring it back from where we were talking before, is my concern And it's been my concern, like, as soon as we started this project, I'm like, I'm afraid of this.
	And everything that we have covered, oh, I'm only more afraid of it now.
	So the idea that, like, I have watched as an adult taking in media in the world, the Alex Joneses are Very identifiable, you know, or even like Joe Rogan or like the people that Rogan has on that are like kind of like bombastic and very kind of obviously off the wall.
	I'm so concerned and what I was so concerned about with the previous episode with like Tucker and Russell and what I want to make sure to point out and because I want to be fair, I want to give the most leeway as far as like helping me understand What we're up against is they are so close to being convincing.
	They are so close to the truth and the right idea.
	They scoot way further, much closer to that edge of like, oh yeah, I agree with 90% of what came out of your mouth.
	Whereas you're going to have an Alex Jones or a Bill Cooper or whatever.
	And they're talking about fighting the literal Christian devil or demons or whatever and like, oh, OK, well, you're.
	Wacky.
	But I liken it to Bill and Ted's bogus journey, where there's the two robots.
	There are Bill and Ted robots that look exactly like the actors.
	I'm sure it has nothing to do with budget.
	And it's very convincing as a fantastic device.
	There's these copies of our intrepid heroes.
	That are convincing in every way.
	And then there's our, like, station robots that are very clunky.
	These, like, Rosie, like, Rosie the Robot, kind of, like, very, like, clunky robot-looking.
	Obviously animatronic kind of thing.
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	Or, like, you know, the Showbiz Pizza Gorilla.
	Like, they're very obviously a robot.
	And that, to me, is, like, that kind of pundit that's, like, bombastic.
	Or even, you know, like, Jim Baker.
	Like, that, you know, that kind of, like, televangelist vibe is, like, Very much extra and very wild.
	And they're playing to a certain audience, but I'm very concerned with how well these Westworld-ass robots are like, they're so close to imitating a good faith Pundit, argument, understanding of the world.
	And then at that last minute, they switch it and they're like, oh, all of this corruption and government overreach and all these other complaints.
	I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I agree with all that stuff.
	And then you get to the punchline and it's cancel culture.
	And it's a conspiracy against me.
	It's this elaborate, Seemingly impossible conspiracy against me.
	And it's like, oh, no, no, no, no.
	See, you didn't get me there.
	That was like, oh, that last 10%, buddy.
	I saw a little smoke come out of your ear.
	You are, in fact, a robot.
	Yeah.
	It's scary to me to have To see how effective and to kind of see them coalescing and uniting in a way that like whenever Bill O'Reilly was taken off the air, he just like took the wind out of his sails.
	You know, like there was a degree of deplatforming that would like work.
	Yeah.
	And it doesn't anymore.
	I think, yeah, I think you're right, you know, with the Alex Joneses of the world, you know, you see them coming, you see them coming a mile away, you're like, whoop, know what that is?
	Okay, okay, that's nice and obvious.
	Whereas, yeah, the comparative, you know, the Westworld, you're like, are you?
	I'm not sure.
	You know, you get into fucking Blade Runner territory, you know.
	100%.
	Absolutely.
	Alien.
	Whatever.
	Yeah, yeah, whatever.
	Evil android.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	That's when it starts to get scary, is that it's so insidious.
	It can become really, really hard to...
	To tell like I mean as it is with with cutting the clips for this show you know I have to be very kind of specific as to how to how to break it down so that so that it's kind of obvious what they're talking about and how Russell is talking about it and what he's actually saying as opposed to all of the kind of context that he infers around it um you know um to to yeah to be able to nail these people down um is uh is um yeah much harder than than the likes of Bill O'Reilly and the whatnot who just
	Say it.
	A lot of the time.
	Yeah, Rush.
	But they would still be contrite.
	That was the other thing, is there was a time where whenever you had these guys pumping out tons of content, kind of like out of the public eye, in a way that they're not out of the public eye anymore.
	I mean, Fox is like the biggest... I mean, I don't know how much of Fox's numbers are just like a muted doctor's office TV.
	Yeah, right.
	It feels like maybe that's a big part of it, but you know, like the exposure that Fox has.
	In America, just eyeballs-wise, is so much more vast than where the pundits of yore were coming from.
	But then they could hide in plain sight.
	And then whenever something really pissed people off, they would trot out and be contrite and they would apologize.
	And my complaint with the mainstream media is like, okay, well, You stood in the corner, we put you in the stocks for a day, we hit you with some cabbage, so now you can go right back along to exactly what you were doing before with no consequences.
	I mean, depending, you know, certainly there were not every shock jock emerged unscathed, but enough of them have that they just kind of, like, Glide along and get away with it and that's um fucking different.
	It's different and it's uh when they're all teaming up it was kind of better when they all fought and they all hated each other.
	That was cooler.
	I liked that way more.
	Yeah no I'm with you on that one.
	I don't like them grouping together and mobilizing and being friends.
	That's another part of what makes me It makes my pancreas unsettled.
	That's my regular human pancreas.
	Regular pancreas.
	Yeah.
	We're concerned.
	I don't like that.
	I'm not into that.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Well, we'll be keeping tabs on Tucker, obviously, but hoping not to have to cover him in a little while, and we're definitely not covering that!
	Hilarious.
	But obviously we'll be back with some more Russell for you next week.
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	Yes, we are!
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	Oh, it's a magnet!
	Oh, here it actually doesn't have a... Oh, nice.
	I finally tricked the camera into making it look like it does in real life.
	Nice.
	Yeah.
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	Be it.
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	Buy some gold on the internet.
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