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Sept. 12, 2024 - On Brand

02:58:04

OB #75 - Tucker Carlson Live: Russell Brand

Russell joined Tucker Carlson on the first night of his US tour, so two of the richest Christian nationalist white men in the world could pretend to be among the common folk. Support us on Patreon! - patreon.com/OnBrand Buy a magnet! - getyourreallivegoldhere

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	This is propaganda live.
	I only suggest how to take him out of the boat.
	Extraordinary cultural moment.
	Already iconic.
	Already iconic.
	We love you.
	You're welcome here.
	Where did this guy come from?
	It looks like he's been doing it for ages.
	He's very confident.
	Plainly, and this is a matter now of fact and record, I'm right wing.
	I feel that Christ may have had a better vision.
	Is this misinformation or is Vivek Ramaswamy in the lavatory?
	That's sort of like a poem.
	Is this Eminem?
	Man, if we didn't come together in that stream, I'm assuming it was just the Pete.
	Now, these are the kind of conversations I think that the legacy media can no longer compete with.
	Win, win, win, win, win, win, win.
	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'm the host that has no idea what we'll be getting into today, but it's usually kind of bad.
	It's almost invariably bad, which is why we do the good thing before the bad thing.
	And Lauren, what is your good thing before the bad thing this week?
	Tejas!
	So basically, yes, the events.
	UFOs Over Lubbock is the event that, you know, I mean, it has kind of consumed my life, which usually does.
	I mean, we're getting into, like, event season, like, in earnest, so that's sort of common.
	Yeah, every year we go to UFOs over Lubbock and it's very, very cool.
	And it was great this year.
	It's always great.
	And it was really, really fun.
	It's great to see friends and everyone that comes out is just a treasure and a dream.
	And that was great, but that's also kind of like, I talked about that before.
	We mostly spent, we kind of take that trip, because we drive down from Chicago to Lubbock, and so we try to kind of make a road trip vacation out of it, too, because I've talked about this many times before, I'm low-key, high-key obsessed with folk art, folk art environments, and just roadside attractions in general.
	It's the fun thing about America.
	The one thing I Um, and, and so we were introduced to Jim, the wonder dog in Marshall, Missouri, who Jim, the wonder dog.
	Oh, people think it was like, uh, it was like a 1920s kind of very popular.
	They were like animal celebrities.
	Uh, Mike, the headless chicken, Mike, the headless chicken is a much more morbid version, but if you're familiar with those kinds of stories, like Yeah, yeah.
	I have an awareness of Mike.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Google Jim the Wonder Dog.
	Jim the Wonder Dog.
	Just to like, understand what these people believed he could do.
	Because he was a very smart and intelligent dog.
	Legit.
	Right?
	I've had a smart dog, and they can be real assholes, and so you know how smart they are, because all they have is time to scheme.
	And so scheming is fine.
	Anyway, right.
	Jim the Wonder Dog, great.
	We saw the largest ball of twine.
	We got to see monument rocks.
	Mike has never been there before.
	A bunch of folk art environments are in Kansas, and we got to hit a lot.
	And the camping was gorgeous.
	We were on a lake.
	It was very fun, you know, and so that was super cool.
	And especially if you are anywhere near Lucas, Kansas, please, please, please, please, please go to the Garden of Eden.
	S.P.
	Dinsmore, he like built this whole like concrete rebar It's like a legit folk art environment.
	He built his house and then he built everything around it and a mausoleum.
	Everything.
	And it kind of sparked this trend.
	in the town that is like population 400 or something of like they just embraced the folk art of it all and so they've you know they invite they have like several arts collectives like they have it's this little gem and they have this place called the grassroots art center and it's this um you know like museum based it's like a little museum but it's packed
	With some of the coolest shit I've ever seen, and it's all, you know, like, people from Kansas building, like, whirly gigs and ceramics and, like, carving cars, like, Model Ts out of limestone.
	Awesome.
	Cool.
	And I just, we ended up chatting with the gal that is the organizer of the space, and she was there that day, and I still had inventory from the shop or like from the event and she was like, bring it in.
	And so she's like, I want all of it.
	I'm like, well, I have to take some to first.
	I was like, Oh my God, thank you.
	That's too much.
	I need to take some of her concern.
	She's like, pick whatever you need to take home.
	And I went the rest.
	And I'm like, Tight.
	All right.
	And took some of my stuff, too.
	This is where looking a little more refined doesn't necessarily work for you, because you're not going to fit so well in this folksy place.
	But he still has really cool... It's still very that, anyway.
	It worked great for what they've got going on.
	And so I implore everyone that can go to Lucas, Kansas.
	Oh, my God, please go.
	It's amazing.
	And I feel wildly like honored to have for the enthusiasm and like, That was very cool.
	That's lovely.
	And that's also what you get for speaking up.
	You know, clothes miles don't get fed.
	And I wasn't even, I was just relating to a person.
	And she's like, you make art?
	Let me see.
	Let me see.
	And so that was like, wicked, wicked cool.
	And, uh, So, but also like the don't talk to cops stuff that I make.
	She's like, I don't think this will go over great here.
	And I'm like, I know it's okay.
	So that will be available.
	I'm going to have my web store updated this weekend with kind of whatever I can for, you know, like figure out and stuff.
	So if you've been waiting for new things, I'm going to do that, but I'm going to have less because It was a very like- It's all there now, yeah.
	Yeah, there's a lot there and it just felt, I feel, and maybe I'm being, you know, like maybe it's too much or whatever, but like, just being in the same building with like, we just, Art that is so thrilling to me and like, wonderful.
	And maybe there's like, you know, I don't know.
	It was just, it felt really nice.
	Yeah, you're there with your tribe, you know, your place.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And being kind of, and cause like also context is kind of everything.
	So that kind of like space, and we also got some cool shit too.
	Like we got like, you know, we, um, Cause man, I just need to learn how to weld.
	I just want to start welding.
	That's the really fun stuff.
	Which I can't and I'm not going to, but man, I want to.
	So yeah, I know this is a long, I'm being long winded, but yeah, it was just like a really cool, really, really cool trip.
	And also a trip, world's largest butt buckle, world's largest spur, you know, world's largest Russian egg.
	Not the Czech egg.
	That wasn't on the list.
	Very weird.
	Very fun.
	Stupid.
	Sounds fantastic.
	Absolutely.
	You know, all that.
	So, um, and everybody that, you know, is that, that wants to show up, I usually have a pile of stuff I've scooted over for the live stream.
	Like, oh yeah, I'm working on this, everybody.
	Uh, so anybody that's seen that kind of stuff that I'm working on, yeah, that's some of that's in Kansas now.
	Which I did not expect.
	And that was a really cool like, and it's a really cool place.
	It's just like a really cool place.
	Or like, find the place that's close to you.
	It's not that hard.
	And it's such an important thing to support.
	Any who's will be.
	So that's my, it's like such a good thing!
	I'll do, I'll do TV shows and explain in two sentences the next month, I promise.
	So what's your good thing?
	My good thing is, so Linkin Park have a new singer, right?
	I'm sure you've seen this.
	They have to.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I don't know if you've seen much of this.
	I haven't.
	Oh, okay.
	Oh, this is fun, right?
	You've been away.
	Good, I get to break this news to you.
	No, I just don't think...
	We have different news feeds, I feel.
	Fair, fair, fair, fair.
	So Linkin Park have a new singer, right?
	It's a lady by the name of Emily Armstrong, also of Dead Sarah.
	And yeah, there's no way to put it gently, she's a fucking Scientologist.
	and supported Danny Masterson throughout his trial and was part of the cabal who showed up at an arraignment to support Danny Masterson and intimidated witnesses.
	Emily Armstrong was part of that little crew that showed up and the people at the court were pretty freaked out by it.
	But yeah, big ol' Scientologist, big red flags everywhere.
	She's since come out and like People say she's apologised, and if you read it, no she hasn't.
	No she has not at all.
	Nowhere were the words sorry or Danny Masterson at all in that entire thing.
	And there's a reason for that, it's because she's a Scientologist and she's not allowed to come out against Danny Masterson.
	So she cannot name him because she is still a Scientologist.
	And there are lots of people on the internet who are trying to defend her and be like, well, she's apologized.
	Oh, she was raised in it.
	What are you going to do?
	I'm like, No, no, she's still in it.
	She's still doing the thing, still doing the awful, awful things.
	And the reason it's an even bigger kick in the teeth is, um, obviously, you know, Chester Bennington, uh, took his own life, right?
	Scientologists do not believe mental illness exists.
	Uh, so you're like, Oh, this.
	Yeah.
	That's a particular affront.
	The unalive of it all happens at a very high rate for Scientologists because they feel like they can't escape.
	Right, right, exactly.
	So that's been a whole thing and SPTV, I think the YouTube channel is I think like Raised by Scientologists or Raised by Scientology, something like that.
	They've got some Great videos on that.
	Really interesting.
	But the good part about it for me, obviously, is not her.
	I think she's fine as a singer, by the way, but just terrible human by the sound of it.
	The good thing for me is that I kind of, I was thinking about this and like 10, 15 years ago, a band would have probably been able to get away with this.
	Oh, sure.
	Like that would have flown under the radar much more.
	That's the first thing I thought.
	Yeah, yeah.
	How many people are Scientologists that we just never found out about?
	Yeah, exactly, exactly.
	Whereas this, because, you know, because there's been this uproar, because, so Cedric from the Mars Volta and the Drive-In, the Vocalist, Yeah, so his wife was Jane Doe number three in the Danny Masterson trial and so like saw Emily Armstrong there at the courthouse intimidating his wife.
	You're like, oh, okay.
	Well, that's a source.
	That's a confirmed source right there.
	Um you know and it's uh yeah I just I love that that you know they're they're not letting it go like people people are holding it to account on this and and I am I'm hoping Linkin Park have to make a pretty significant change very quickly um or they're gonna be in trouble I think.
	I think she's gonna find out that they already have a lot of records and there's a lot of other bands that we don't at least we don't know or aren't Scientologists Yeah.
	Fucking bummer for you.
	I don't know that.
	I mean, and yeah, don't defend it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	There's no reason to.
	Why would you?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Gestures to all the other bands.
	Would you like another band?
	There are other bands.
	Move on.
	There are plenty of other bands.
	And yeah, so I would listen to a new Linkin Park record, but not with that vocalist.
	So there we are.
	But yeah, I'm happy that the people are not letting the shit go.
	And that's nice.
	Don't get me wrong.
	There are still plenty of people who don't know enough about Scientology to just kind of think that it's fine.
	There's still a lot of that going on, you know, without understanding, you know, the child trafficking and all the other bullshit that they get up to.
	But you know what, though?
	The resources are more available than ever.
	And I think all the documentaries are on Hulu now.
	And I don't know where Leah Remini's TV show is.
	I think it was on Netflix for a while.
	But Check it out!
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's out there.
	There's a lot out there to take issue with and not support.
	And not just individuals, you know what I mean?
	Like, it's a system.
	Yep, yep, absolutely.
	The entire thing.
	Big problem all the way up and down.
	Big problem all the way up and down.
	But yeah, I'm happy that we're in a place now where we are able to kind of spot that and be like, nope, fuck you!
	Yeah!
	Yeah!
	That's progress to me.
	I'm like, yeah, thank fuck for that.
	Okay, we're getting somewhere.
	But, good boy.
	What a decision that was.
	Anyway, we have got a show to do, but first we should thank a new patron.
	So, Laurie Northrup, you are now on Awakening Wonder.
	You are indeed an awakening wonder.
	Thank you very much, Laurie!
	Thank you so much!
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	It is this which allows us to be editorially independent and ad-free.
	And as a patron, you'll also get a shout-out on the show and access to our patron-only after-show, Off-Brand.
	And this week, I led a little Music Is Nice episode, going through a bunch of the protest music that affected me and moved me leftwards when I was growing up.
	And I had a lot of fun.
	And I played everything on there, from Rise Against, to Eminem, to the White Stripes, who, by the way, are now suing Donald Trump for using Seven Nation Army repeatedly without their permission.
	I don't know why more bands aren't doing that!
	I don't know why more bands aren't doing that!
	Do it!
	Do that!
	Do that thing!
	It's great, it's great.
	Jack White absolutely has all of the money and everything at his disposal to do it, so he's like, nah, fuck you!
	I'm like, yes, go Jack!
	Dee Snider was like the only one making a fucking stink about it for a while, and like, no one's gonna listen.
	Like, he's right, but no one's gonna listen to him.
	He has teeth filed into points!
	Like, he's not wrong!
	Yeah.
	Whereas Jack White, big deal.
	And also, like, the white stripes have reunified specifically just to sue Donald Trump.
	And I'm like, that's great.
	I'm here for that.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	I mean, like, that's, again, no shade of Dee Snider.
	No shade.
	I love Twisted Sister.
	I think it's killer.
	But, like, it felt like one voice in the wilderness who's already, like, I mean, there's a lot of things that he's been right about kind of over the years, which is incredible, but like, yeah, just that one voice doesn't really, like, you know, like, come on.
	Come on, y'all.
	You have clout.
	Swing it around.
	Exactly, exactly.
	I think there is a degree of people not wanting to upset their audiences and whatnot and that kind of thing if they're a particular size, but Jack White hasn't given a shit about that for a long time, if ever, and I have a lot of respect for that.
	Oh dear.
	But as for the Music Is Nice episode, head to patreon.com slash ombrand to check that out and the many, many hours of other content up there.
	And please note that while you can easily listen to audio version anywhere, you can find podcasts, you can also watch it on YouTube, or if you're listening to Spotify app, the video will come up there too.
	And reminder, this Sunday, September 15th at 2pm CST, 8pm GMT, we are having a live stream event on the YouTubes!
	And anyone can join us!
	There'll be a post-up on the Patreon, and any member of the Patreon can suggest topics for us to discuss and whatnot, but absolutely anyone can come and join.
	So come along and have a blast.
	It's a really good time.
	Every time.
	Very, very excited to hang out with everybody.
	Ah, boy, okay.
	So, this week.
	We do not, in fact, have an episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand to go through, because Russell made an appearance elsewhere, and it's pretty noteworthy to look at.
	So, let's let the host make the introductions.
	I can't believe I'm here!
	Me neither, weirdo.
	Thank you for having me!
	This is wild!
	It makes me feel much better.
	Thank you.
	Oh, yeah.
	Thank you very much.
	I can't believe I'm here.
	I woke up yesterday morning in the little rural town where my wife and I live with our many, many dogs.
	And it was 40 degrees and I woke up at like five in the morning.
	The dogs are like, what do you mean?
	You stir early, the dogs resent it.
	Particularly the females.
	Very entitled.
	But anyway...
	Yeah, those female dogs are particularly entitled.
	If it were the male dogs, well, they'd just roll with the punches, but no, no, the female dogs were affronted at being up early.
	I think that's the first time I've heard someone's misogyny extended to canines, you know, in that kind of way.
	But I have not heard my bitch wife being extended to my bitch dog.
	That's pretty immersive.
	But that specifically.
	That's weird.
	That's real strange.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, so Tucker Carlson is who we're looking at here today, because Russell was the guest on the very first date of Tucker's live tour across the USA, with this event specifically being in Phoenix, Arizona.
	Other guests further on the tour include the likes of RFK Jr., Dan Bongino, Kid Rock, JD Vance, Alex Jones, Roseanne Barr, and Donald Trump Jr.
	A real murderous row.
	Thrilling stuff, and I have it on good authority that hundreds if not thousands of tickets were given away for free to this specific event that we're about to watch.
	Which, were I one of the people who paid $100 to attend, would upset me a little bit.
	Yeah!
	That's fucked up!
	That's fucked up!
	Indeed.
	In any case, Tucker spends about 20 minutes on a little monologue, 10 minutes introducing Russell, and then Russell comes out for an hour-long conversation with Tucker.
	And I'm going to play some clips from the monologue and introduction that might be worth taking note of, and then we will get to Russell.
	And right off the bat, things get a little bit weird.
	And I just hope that you remember, no matter what happens after this, and it's the beginning of September of an election year, so I can promise you America will not look as it does today in two months.
	It won't.
	It won't.
	A lot's gonna happen that we can't control or predict.
	But trust me, it'll be a different place by the first week in November.
	But no matter what happens, and I'm praying for good outcomes, of course, I know everybody in this room is, no matter what happens, just remember that you are not weird Weird!
	So weird!
	Say the castrate your children, people.
	It's just weird.
	Okay.
	Say the beautiful, I love you too! - - - - - So, Tucker has to insist that neither he or his audience are weird, before immediately bringing up children's genitals, and then one of his audience decides that's the perfect moment to shout "I love you!" I'm gonna have to echo John Oliver here in saying that if these people don't want to be called weird, they should really stop being so fucking weird.
	That is bizarre.
	Really, really strange.
	I like that my, like at the same time I was reacting like this, this gap is too long.
	You are laughing and being, you're being weird right now too long.
	And someone in the audience, like the, like the Patton Oswalt, like.
	The Patton Oswalt versus Heckler, it's like, I have to yell or it'll keep the demons asleep!
	Like, they had to yell something.
	Like, help, help, I'm answering the call for help.
	I'm helping, yes.
	Yeah.
	Yes, yeah, exactly.
	It's all very strange.
	I do love how effective the weird label has been on these individuals, and it clearly bothers them.
	It clearly bothers them.
	There was, like, you know, obviously, like, My Media Dice Very Left.
	And so, initially, after that all kind of, like, popped off on Twitter, it's like, okay, the weird thing is, like, Come on, guys.
	There was kind of this, like, immediate, like, okay, we're overusing weird.
	But then I think everyone saw how effective, like, surprisingly effective it was.
	Like, never mind.
	We're all going with weird.
	Let's do it.
	We're all doing weird.
	We're all doing weird now, and that's fine.
	Like, cool it on brat.
	Hell yeah to weird.
	Like, that's, like, kind of, which I very much appreciated.
	But also, people can change their minds.
	And adjust.
	And that's okay.
	Yeah.
	Absolutely.
	Like that was one of those moments where I'm like, I'm listening to people that are adjusting their opinion based on the evidence that they observe from the world around them.
	That's correct.
	That feels pretty good.
	Good.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	This is the way it was supposed to be.
	Haven't seen this in some time.
	Good.
	Okay.
	Cool.
	Right.
	But yes, they're very upset about it.
	So next we learn about what America is really like.
	But I'm just saying, like, just ask yourself, when was the last time that you were, I don't know, on your front lawn or at Walmart or standing in line at the DMV and you heard one person attack somebody else on the basis of, like, race?
	I'm 55, I've never heard that.
	Not one time.
	I've lived here the whole time.
	That's actually not what the country's like.
	People are really nice to each other, by and large.
	People are really warm to each other.
	They actually have a lot in common with each other.
	And if you watch the way the country is portrayed, RIVEN BY RACIAL TENSION!
	THE HORRIFYING LEGACY OF AMERICA!
	Alright, stop.
	You're boring me.
	But you're also lying to me.
	That's not the America I live in at all.
	People are pretty nice.
	You sort of deal with people individually and you don't, you don't kind of see them as some alien.
	They're like Americans.
	They're just like you.
	Kind of distressed about inflation and their mortgage payments and how their kids are doing and they don't want to castrate their kids, please.
	It's like nine freaky rich ladies in Santa Monica want that.
	That's it.
	You know, that's just like not a common thing.
	It's not, it's, that's just not, it certainly happens a lot.
	I would say it's a disproportionate amount of like fourth grade school teachers I happen to notice.
	As someone who married a fourth grade school teacher, I don't know what happened to that group.
	A lot of them have gone insane, but.
	I don't even know.
	Sorry, just true.
	I used to love fourth grades.
	I was proud to marry a fourth grade teacher.
	They're so sweet.
	This is pre-castration.
	Now I'm kind of freaked out by them.
	But whatever!
	Outside of a couple small pockets of truly unhappy, miserable people who've never had a sound night of sleep in their life, who don't have a single functioning personal relationship, who hate themselves so much that they have to transfer that hate onto strangers, Aside from them, most people are like, they think it's bizarre.
	Because it is.
	They think all of this is bizarre.
	More drug addicts?
	Like, who wants that?
	Nobody wants that.
	There's nothing sadder than addiction.
	There's nothing sadder than watching people kill themselves.
	Like, it's just awful.
	Okay, that was a lot.
	So racism doesn't exist in the United States.
	We've made that clear because Tucker Carlson himself has never personally seen it, therefore it doesn't exist.
	Also liar.
	Some freaky rich ladies in Santa Monica want children to be castrated, apparently, as do a lot of fourth grade school teachers, supposedly.
	And the left, I'm guessing, are agitating for more drug addicts in the world.
	Okay.
	So, in order, racism most certainly does exist, even if you don't see it directly.
	Particularly if you're an immensely wealthy, famous white man and therefore, you know, everyone's nice to you and you are otherwise basically hermetically sealed off from the rest of society, you know?
	Born rich!
	Born filthy fucking rich, and people are paid to be nice to you all the time.
	I did appreciate him saying, like, my America.
	Like, oh yeah, it's very different from mine.
	You live in a totally different one than I do.
	Yeah, yeah.
	His America is very different to the 99%'s America.
	It's gotta be said.
	He floats around in a little cloud.
	A little frozen dinner shaped cloud and always has.
	So yeah, you live in a different country than I do.
	Different plane of existence.
	And I bet that's exactly how rich people feel.
	Yeah, sure.
	Okay.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Because they're just so segregated from reality.
	Yeah!
	I've not heard of any calls for children to be castrated.
	And of course, what he's referring to is the idea that some people want trans children to get gender-affirming genital surgery.
	And it's funny, I've not actually heard anyone argue for that.
	In fact, there was a new study from July this year by Harvard T.H.
	Chan School of Public Health, and they found little to no utilization of gender-affirming surgeries by transgender and gender-diverse minors in the U.S.
	The study in fact found that cisgender minors and adults had substantially higher utilization of analogous gender-affirming surgeries than their counterparts.
	You can sign up for your minor to get new titties!
	You can do that.
	Exactly!
	Particularly surroundings.
	And fix your nose.
	Yep.
	Breast enhancements and reductions and yeah, all these other things as well.
	And to be more specific, statistically out of 100,000 transgender kids aged 15 to 17, only 2.1 received gender affirming surgery.
	That's 2.1 out of 100,000 and those were uniformly top surgeries.
	So, you know, getting rid of the old breasticles, right?
	So yeah, he's, he's just, it's just all dog whistly bullshit.
	Just to be all bigoted and have some fun there.
	And as for the, the drug addicts thing, like saying that we want more drug addicts, like he's being so vague.
	It could be about SSRIs and antidepressants more broadly.
	It could be about weed legalization.
	It could be about a Zempik and weight loss drugs.
	It could be about treating addiction safely through needle exchange programs.
	If you want to bring up the classics.
	You know, it could honestly be any form of unreality that Tucker has decided to spin on a weekly basis.
	It's a choose-your-own-adventure-of-bullshit ideology, basically.
	And he is old, so he will use old tropes.
	His bag of tricks is very diverse in that regard.
	So he can throw out 90s shit.
	Also Scientology.
	That's a Scientology thing, right?
	Yeah.
	Interesting.
	Interesting.
	Anyway, this all leads him to take some shots at the legacy media.
	And it's being pushed on us by people who are truly in misery, who deserve our prayers, but their desires are not an accurate measure of what the country's actually like.
	And so to stand in a room full of people or to travel across the country from my weird little remote place where I live and encounter not a single person who like yells at me or just like, hey man, I don't agree with you, but it's great to meet you or whatever.
	Everyone's just so nice.
	And I have to say, as someone who spent his life in the media, and I won't go on about this, but 33 years in the media really makes me despise them, truly.
	Not just for lying, but for the divisive nature of their lies.
	You know, if you make people hate each other, I'm not sure there's a graver sin than that.
	You know, and if you're a parent, you know.
	Can you imagine anything darker than convincing your own children to dislike each other?
	It's the deepest hope in the heart of every parent, That his or her children will love each other.
	That's the thing that you leave behind, is the love between your children for each other.
	Not for you, you're gonna die!
	But for each other.
	And that's the thing that gives old people comfort as they pass out of this world, is the knowledge, the certain knowledge that their children will continue the family through their love of each other.
	And so as a parent, any normal parent, you don't have to read a parenting book to come to this conclusion.
	It's a product of your deepest instinct and desires.
	You want the people in your care to love each other and get along.
	And it takes a truly sick puppy to want the opposite.
	Uh-huh.
	So it takes a truly sick puppy to want to divide people by spreading harmful lies, say, down the barrel of a camera, for instance.
	I feel like he's trolling me at this point.
	Because if he truly believes that, I have some bad news for Tucker.
	I've also got some bad news about boomer moms, Tucker.
	Sorry!
	Yeah, right?
	Yeah, I was gonna say, this is what's going on in your brain.
	I don't feel like that's a lot of people's.
	Also, not even in your own family.
	We know your business!
	You're rich!
	You're like big time rich.
	We know your business.
	That's amazing.
	That is such a weird thing to say.
	And not weird in the way that we were just discussing.
	It is odd.
	To make that particular point.
	And I think maybe he was speaking to like, you know, like children going no contact from their parents or their family.
	Like, I bet there's a lot of really good reasons for that, Tucker.
	And again, sorry about Boomer Mom.
	And his mother left him, what was it, a dollar?
	In her will, you know?
	And otherwise cut him out because she didn't like what he'd become.
	I'm like, yeah, you know what?
	Fair enough.
	So did you try to make amends with your mother, Tucker?
	Did you?
	Oh, do as I say, not as I do.
	It doesn't sound like it, yeah.
	And there's just, there's no possible way for him to be that ignorant of how he is directly responsible for dividing America down lines of race, religion, and class, Insighting hatred of black and brown people, hatred of anyone who isn't Christian, and hatred of anyone who might be in poverty.
	Like, he's been doing that for decades.
	There is no way that he is not aware of that.
	No, he's entirely cynical.
	Yeah.
	They do love to tell on themselves, you know?
	It's a real thing.
	That's like his shtick.
	He is the best, genuinely, top of the game at that particular gimmick.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Dividing racist dog-whistling bullshit like he's the king.
	I'll give credit where it's due.
	God damn.
	Alright, so now we get to the beginning of Russell's introduction, and there are some troubling ideas coming up already.
	Russell Brand is a foreigner.
	He's from a foreign country called the UK.
	Um, Russell Brand was a movie star.
	I haven't seen a movie since the late nineties.
	Um, Russell Brand is obviously kind of like alternative.
	If you haven't seen Russell Brand, you'll see him.
	You'll, you'll know what I'm talking about in just a minute.
	And Russell Brand has for his whole life been a man of the left.
	And so like, I didn't know that much about Russell Brand other than he's like international Pardon me, foreign, famous person.
	And somebody sent me a YouTube clip about three years ago of Russell Brand talking into camera.
	He's remarkably articulate, like God-given eloquence that the rest of us just really envy.
	But he was explaining What was going on with the COVID lockdowns?
	And it was so resonant.
	It was like something, it was like a tuning fork.
	When you hear something that's true, even if you don't have evidence to support that it's true, the truth rings in your head differently from a lie.
	If you've had this experience, When you hear the truth, it has an effect on you, and you just know.
	You just know in your soul that's true.
	You couldn't defend it in court, but you don't need to because you know.
	So even if you don't have evidence to support that it's true, even if you couldn't prove it in court, you know in your soul that it's true because it feels true.
	I mean, at this point, it's just nice for Tucker to be admitting it out loud.
	Like, hey, we have nothing to back any of this shit up, but boy, it feels true to us, doesn't it?
	So I guess that's the same thing.
	And no, no, no, it isn't.
	You know, we were discussing this just before the show.
	No, that's confirmation bias.
	Yes, exactly!
	There is objective reality and objective truth, and then there's this feels true to me.
	For instance, the objective reality is that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe, except in very, very rare cases of like 1 in 100,000 where there might be issues.
	But what feels true to a lot of people is that Bill Gates put microchips in the vaccines to track everybody, etc.
	There's no evidence of it, no one can prove it in court, but because it feels true to a lot of people, and some folks like Russell, for instance, made a lot of money in spreading that particular conspiracy theory, well, then that's in fact the same as objective truth, because it feels true to these people.
	Well, and what he said was instructive about what struck him about Russell, because I think that Tucker is just the cynical actor, right?
	So just engaging with what he says on its face as a gauge also then of what the The conservative talking point is going to be or is.
	What to expect from others is going to be echoed.
	We run through St.
	Louis whenever we make these trips and hang out with Mike's parents, who are just truly lovely people.
	His dad lets me yell at him about politics, which is really nice.
	It's very nice of him.
	And he asked me, what's the logic here?
	Why do they hate gay and trans people so much?
	And he was trying to find logic.
	I was like, uh-uh, gotta toss that out.
	Listening to these talking points, Because he's also like, yeah, it's based on fear.
	They're fear-mongering, and that's what makes people spend money.
	That's what makes people stay engaged.
	And so he understands that fundamentally.
	So explaining how the fear is instilled with the talking points is kind of how the conversation went.
	And so that's exactly how I feel like I can engage With what's being said.
	From Tucker, I think, especially, is the cynical engineering of a presentation that speaks to people.
	They're already on board.
	They already have the confirmation bias, and he's going to continue to confirm.
	And so, what he said about Russell sounding so intelligent, loquacity.
	I can do it too, see?
	Loquacity does not equal intelligence.
	Using a lot of fucking $5 words is not, it's what a smart person, like, what we say all the time, right, is like, it's what a dumb person thinks a smart person sounds like.
	Yep.
	Well, I'm looking at it.
	Yep, 100%.
	Okay, so next up, Tucker paints Russell in a very specific light.
	And I'm watching this guy, and I'm just, I don't think I've been that thrilled watching a YouTube video.
	Most of my YouTube videos are about tying trout flies, so you know, I've got a pretty boring diet on YouTube.
	But this video, I just thought, This guy, we have nothing in common whatsoever.
	I'm sure he hates me.
	I'm sure he's on the record hating me, and I'll Google myself so I've never checked.
	But this man is on the same page I'm on.
	We're hearing the same music.
	He knows what's true, and he's in that weird, very small percentage of people who know what's true and are brave enough to say so, who've made this decision like, I just don't care.
	Or maybe I do care, but I'm gonna do it anyway.
	And of course, the definition of courage is not not being afraid.
	People with head injuries are not afraid.
	They don't know to be.
	The definition of courage is doing something when you are afraid.
	Jumping out of the airplane anyway.
	And that's what I was watching this man.
	I thought to myself, this guy is really famous.
	And he's famous in the entertainment business, which has no sense of humor about dissent whatsoever.
	He'll never be in a movie again.
	And he's doing it anyway.
	And by the way, people on the right don't even like him.
	It's not like he's jumping to his natural home among American conservatives.
	This guy looks like a freak.
	Are you kidding?
	They'll be like, who's the long-haired Brit?
	Like, no thanks.
	And then all of his buddies are gonna be like, oh, you're a fascist now.
	We hate you.
	Cancel your dinner party invites.
	Like, you're done.
	- He's done!
	And he's doing it anyway!
	Aha!
	What a courageous hero this Russell Brand guy must be, throwing all of his life away to tell the truth.
	Those dinner party invites?
	Goodbye!
	Those Hollywood movie offers?
	Well, they're gone too, and to make it all that much more heroic, even the audience he's trying to court don't like him and think he's a freak.
	I will admit the fact that Russell is successful among conservative Americans.
	Does feel a bit strange on its face, but they fucking love him.
	As for Hollywood movie offers, well, they dried up a long time before Russell started talking about COVID shit.
	And he only started talking about the COVID shit on a more regular basis when he pivoted away from his You know, videos about relationship advice and wellness stuff and move towards vague conspiracies, you know, because his viewers multiplied by 10 when he did.
	You know, he's like, oh, this COVID thing, people are liking this.
	I'm going to carry on.
	And it's just, you know, it's gone down that road ever since.
	It was a cynical move.
	Wait, wasn't he like in Death on the Nile?
	Like, that's what was weird, is that he was in a movie pretty recent to them?
	Yeah, yeah, there were a couple.
	That one was, what, 2018?
	Around there, that kind of thing.
	He was in one final, like, there was a kids film that came out during COVID, I think, and didn't do very well.
	And that was the last thing that he ever got any play in.
	But yeah, in terms of like, big Hollywood stuff.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, it wasn't really.
	I do wonder what the timeline is on that.
	Maybe that's something to look into.
	To just see.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	But the entire, you know, we've documented it before, the entire veer over to the right and COVID and all this stuff.
	It was cynical move from a cynical man.
	And as for his friends taking away dinner party invites, by Russell's telling of it, his only friends are those in AA and recovery who have, shall we say, a unique perspective on Russell.
	And we'll actually get into a little bit more of that later because his friends do come up.
	Yeah, I guess maybe even just as like an argument, a point to argue is like a chicken and egg, like the move towards, like, when was the move starting?
	Towards like right wing shit?
	Was it like, Hollywood isn't, because I think he like lost some stuff, right?
	Like there was like actively like some cancellations of things because of...
	The COVID stuff.
	I wonder.
	I wonder and it's really hard to know.
	You know what I mean?
	Because there's a like you can't know what someone's being offered literally behind the scenes.
	That's like kind of part of it.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Don't talk about projects until they're already like almost done with production.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I know he got booted off the latest Minions movie, but that's because he's a Predator, not because of the Predator thing.
	Yeah, right, right.
	But yeah, either way, it was definitely drying up considerably compared to his late 2000s kind of era.
	And in the final chunk of the introduction here, Tucker tells us about his experience of preying with Russell.
	And I'll just, I'll give you my testimony on this, which is as sincere as I can be.
	That for all the friendships that have been destroyed, certainly the acquaintanceships that no longer exist, all the people who would never text me back, ever, there are so many people I've met who I never thought I had anything in common with, at all.
	In fact, there are some who I really disliked or thought I disliked, and it turned out we had everything in common.
	We had everything in common.
	And the relationships that I have with people now, including Russell Brand, are so much deeper than any relationship I've ever had in my life.
	It is such an abundance of blessings.
	Right before this, I shouldn't even say this, but it's true, I've given a lot of speeches and been on a lot of stages with a lot of people, you know, not all of whom will return my text now.
	In fact, none of whom will, but anyway, whatever.
	And so you sort of know the protocol backstage or whatever, and you sit and tell dirty jokes or whatever you do, talk about run of show or whatever.
	Russell Brand comes up to me and he goes, Will you come back and pray with me?
	And it made me emotional.
	And by the way, if you had said to me five years ago, if Russell Brand had come up and been like, will you pray with me?
	I'd be like, no, I don't, I'm married, dude.
	I don't go that way.
	You know, I just wouldn't, I don't know, I wouldn't even have understood that language at all, and I wouldn't, I would have been so ashamed, just, and self-conscious, and I never would have admitted it.
	If I'd prayed with a man backstage, like, I don't think so.
	I'm not telling anybody about that, that's too weird.
	And we did, and it was beautiful.
	Tucker wants to kiss Russell.
	And now I'm so proud to say it, not because I'm, like, any kind of role model.
	I'm hardly a role model.
	And that's kind of the beauty of it.
	I'm the opposite of a role model.
	I worked in cable television for 30 years.
	You think I'm a role model?
	No!
	And that's okay!
	I'm not gonna speak for Russell Rand, I don't think he's always been a role model either!
	His victims would agree.
	So, we learned a couple of important things there, one being that Russell invited Tucker to pray with him before this show, and secondly, that Tucker Carlson is so insecure in his masculinity and so afraid of being called gay, he was ashamed at the very thought of praying with another man.
	I just heard a bunch of descriptions of a man that has a crush on another man.
	I'm not coming for anybody.
	I'm just like, listen to a lot of dudes talk about other dudes in my life.
	Sounds the same.
	You want to kiss him.
	You want to smooch him.
	And that's okay.
	Right.
	That's the thing.
	You have a crush on him, Tucker.
	All of these things are the descriptions of, you have a crush on him.
	And like that's, there can be a lot of other feelings and other friendships and that's fine.
	You got a quash on him, bubba.
	It's just, it's weird.
	I was like, I was, I was, I was like, I don't know about this.
	And then he said like, I don't want to hang out with you alone.
	I'm not gay.
	As a response to prayer, like, Oh, you've already had this thought.
	Okay.
	All right.
	I'm not out of pocket.
	That is a thought that you've had and you just said it.
	This is clearly an intrusive thought he's had several times.
	Yeah.
	Bob the Drag Queen had a fantastic hot take on the So True pod that came over my newsfeed recently that there are no straight people.
	And I don't think that's wrong.
	And like, if we all just were cool with that, then like, the cynicism wouldn't be the problem in what Tucker said.
	Yeah, I think everyone's at least a little bit gay, and I think there's nothing wrong with that, you know?
	Right, and the issue is people saying that's not true, and that's what causes such a massive divide and a massive issue, is Tucker, like, you just got a little crush.
	You got a crush on your friend, which is fine.
	The response, the response of shame, of praying with another man.
	I mean, compare that to Russell Wright, who, albeit while still using drugs back in 2001, jacked off a guy in a bathroom stall on television to test whether he was fully straight.
	You know, two very different kinds of individuals.
	I was going to say, those are very different situations, I think.
	I mean, this is, yeah, it's like, These seem like inside thoughts.
	These seem like inside thoughts that Tucker is saying outside.
	Yes, exactly.
	Russell never had that same kind of shame surrounding the idea, necessarily.
	Sure, sure.
	Yeah, and he's got to, like, artificially develop it to continue to, like, talk to this audience.
	And we're watching him have a really hard time with that.
	Real tough time!
	Going backwards when you realize that, like, gay and straight people are people, equally people.
	Going backwards is very hard, I think, for an individual, and we're seeing that, like, he can't figure it out.
	Yeah, no.
	He's not gotten there yet, but... Working on it!
	Yeah, let's get to the actual interview now, and I want to preface it with three points.
	Firstly, before the episode aired, I did some digging around TikTok and whatnot to see what the audience who attended the show was saying.
	One lady, who apparently had a lovely time, made the assertion that the interview consisted of about 10% politics and 90% religion and other stuff.
	And that is one way to look at it.
	The other way to look at it is this conversation is between two of the richest white men on the planet, both with a significant audience, and both of these men want to live in a Christian theocratic ethno-state, and are actively agitating to make that a reality.
	And when that's the background, it's all politics, baby.
	Every ounce of this conversation is furthering that aim, and it's very important not to forget that.
	Secondly, I've watched a few of these live shows Tucker has done now, and an enormous part of the aim of the entire show is reputation laundering.
	Serving to make whoever Tucker's interviewing as palatable and heroic as possible while denigrating their enemies and also making Tucker look all big and important.
	So even if he is taking a bath on these tickets and everything, as long as it's mission accomplished at the end and everyone comes out smelling the roses, that's it.
	And thirdly, It's been a while, but we're about to see Russell back on his A-game.
	And I say this because it genuinely surprised me, because it's been that long since we've seen it.
	There is a specific kind of charisma, charm, and almost lovability that Russell can bring to the table when he's got his shit together.
	And for me, this interview feels like the first time we've properly seen it since the allegations against him came out around a year ago.
	It is precisely this, in combination with the dangerous and bigoted ideas he spreads, that makes him so dangerous and such a problem.
	And while it does have the effect of making this interview more entertaining, there's also no small part of me that's pretty alarmed.
	But we'll see.
	Well, live audience, though, like if you're a live performance person, this makes total sense to me.
	Yes.
	Yeah, that's definitely a component.
	All right, let's get into it.
	The very first clip of the interview and the episode itself gets straight down to business.
	I can sincerely say you're one of the people I most admire.
	I grew up in Southern California in the 70s and people who sat barefoot Indian style in chairs were considered not on our side and it's such an incredible thing for me to feel this soulful and real connection to you and to feel like we have the same instincts about things.
	How would you describe, I'm just going to throw it out because you're about to find out how much more articulate he is than I am, how would you describe where we are right now as a world?
	It's a bit weird.
	Whole scenario is rather weird.
	Thank you so much for having me, a foreigner, in your country.
	Obviously it was quite easy to get in, no passport, just traipsed in across the border.
	trafficked a few kids over.
	Yeah.
	Already, charm and wit in combination with harmful bullshit.
	Right off the bat.
	Um, and it struck me, you know, thinking about like, why now?
	Why is this version of Russell suddenly resurfaced?
	And yeah, I think it's partly distanced from the allegations, right?
	It's been long enough where he's not necessarily spending an entire interview having to lie about it anymore.
	But also, and I do think it has something to do with it, there's the size of the audience he's talking to.
	So they're at the Footprint Center in Phoenix, Arizona, which has a capacity of 18,500 people.
	And it's been a while since Russell's done an arena.
	You know, his last comedy special, Brandemic, that we covered, that was in front of 700 people.
	The comedy sets he's been uploading to locals from his pub in Piss Hill is definitely less than 100 people each night.
	So, nearly 20,000 people giving him a warm welcome.
	That's got to feel pretty good.
	That's got to feel good.
	That's what I'm saying.
	He's like, ooh, he's in his element.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But also, that was kind of, I mean, he's doing fine, but I mean, that's, well, and I was also kind of getting, as far as what Tucker is responding to with Russell, and just wants to nuzzle him like a kitten.
	That's also a very, like, From the outside, when you see a cult.
	I think Warren Jeffs is a really great example.
	If you are familiar with the story, and you listen to the podcast, and you listen to the news coverage, and all of their followers are like, he's so dynamic, and he's just so great to listen to.
	And then you hear him, and you're like, this sounds like someone through a McDonald's drive-thru speaker.
	What are you talking about?
	There is a hook that once the hook gets in with someone who is very charismatic, I think their followers and their bias confirmed are responding to something that I think outsiders don't necessarily like.
	He's just talking.
	What do you mean?
	And so I think it takes a lot.
	I was going to add that in as far as what Tucker is responding to that sounds like, I have a crush on you.
	It is also very common in religious circles.
	You know, having within that context, being able to speak affectionately, especially in this like toxic masculine kind of culture is like you have these very narrow windows of being able to talk about your feelings and how much you like each other.
	And so that like, I think that it's because you don't have a lot of practice with that in like in a toxic masculine kind of like worldview, then When you feel allowed to like another man as platonically as an adult, it's easy to get sucked in and then so people from the outside are like, okay, he's kind of funny.
	What?
	He knows how to talk in a microphone.
	And he knows how to work a crowd.
	It's kind of funny.
	I don't see what you're seeing.
	As far as what Tucker is describing as this shining beacon of light, that's because the groundwork has been laid for the charm to really do its job.
	Yeah, Russell is going into a very favorable situation.
	Oh, yeah.
	Yes, absolutely.
	And that's kind of what I'm hearing is a little I'm like, there's not as much shine as y'all are like, y'all have set this person up to succeed very well.
	And from the outside, it's like kind of sounds like a guy talking, but being comfortable, certainly like he's because we've seen him be very uncomfortable.
	At least in the last month or two, for sure.
	Yes, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely.
	And yeah, it is definitely, it's a different experience to what we're used to on that basis.
	All right, so now we come to a question about hope and optimism.
	So it feels weird.
	So I guess the question is, I have felt a mixture of emotions over the past couple of months, experiencing things as I do, like a dog does, which is instinctively by smell.
	And I have felt great hope as I express, but I've also felt anxiety about where things are going.
	So you are spiritually in tune, to put it mildly.
	Are you hopeful about the future or despondent?
	I was listening to you just then, and I don't just mean the bits where you were very kind about me.
	I paid attention to everything you were saying.
	In fact, it was quite difficult because I needed a wee quite badly.
	And I was listening to you talking about me.
	I went, oh no, I'm going to miss what would otherwise be a wonderful experience of listening to someone I admire talking in front of an arena of committed spiritual people about me because of a primary function.
	In the midst of it, I felt, you know, after I'd had the wee now, I'd had the wee, after that I felt a great wave of optimism.
	Because this has been a time of bewilderment and delirium.
	Perhaps, I suppose, the recent Olympic opening ceremony was a good example of how despair and annihilation can come about from the bold desecration of things that we vividly understand the recent Olympic opening ceremony was a good example of how despair and Okay, so Russell knows the audience he's pandering to there.
	Um, so...
	People who don't understand pictures, yeah.
	Uh-huh, yeah, because despite however many times these alt-right ding-dongs have had it explained to them that the scene at the Olympic opening ceremony was in fact a Greek bacchanal portraying the Greek The Greek gods, and I've seen Russell have this explained to him on his show, and it was not in fact a drag queen last supper.
	They're gonna keep banging that drum because it serves both their bigoted ideology and their need to be victimized.
	And bam, just like that, an applause break within the first few minutes, right?
	But yeah, the road has definitely been set out for him to just have an absolute walk through this conversation.
	Also didn't answer the fucking question.
	That was such a long-winded, okay, you had to pee.
	That just felt like a bit.
	That felt like a canned bit.
	Yes, yeah, it definitely was.
	Why?
	I've heard him say, oh, I listened to everything you said, not just the nice bits about me.
	He's made that joke a billion times.
	I don't know.
	I think there's probably some part of him that just wants to kind of go up there and do a set, you know?
	You know, it's like, hey, I've got this captive audience, let's... Well, of course, but I mean, like, you can't even, like, think on your feet fast enough to just riff on what Tucker said.
	That's weird.
	I'm interested.
	I'm gonna keep my ear open for that.
	Because, like, why did he need a bit?
	He, like, already, it's already t-ball.
	Do you need someone to hold the bat for you, too?
	Like, that's really... It's a lot, you know what I mean?
	It is, it is.
	That's a little much.
	It just doesn't seem necessary, unless he just wants control of the conversation, and he uses bits to do that.
	Okay, yeah, let's see.
	There's always a bit of that fun kind of power dynamic, isn't there?
	With these people, anyway.
	So next, the conversation veers towards a familiar face.
	As your great comedian George Carlin said, when interests converge, there is no requirement for conspiracy.
	There seem to be a great many interests that benefit from, as you addressed earlier at the podium, that has mysteriously disappeared now, probably because of the deep state.
	It's probably in Area 51.
	No doubt.
	Alex Jones predicted that would happen.
	The podium will be taken away!
	Someone will come, they'll take that podium, man!
	There's extra gender in the water supply!
	Change that podium's gender!
	All true, by the way, that's the crazy part.
	I know, it's extraordinary, isn't it, with Alex Jones, but if anyone else was on film saying that 9-11 would happen, and then 9-11 did happen, you'd have to give that person a few passes.
	I think there'd be a national holiday, it would be called Nostradamus Day, if you actually called it in great detail, and instead people are like, oh, he's crazy.
	Really, how do you do that?
	He's sort of mystic, and I suppose that our culture makes no room for mysticism.
	Because if you worship rationalism, rationalism and materialism have at their apex humankind and the individual.
	I see.
	So rationalism and materialism are the reason we all think Alex Jones is an awful bigoted asshole.
	If, audience, you're feeling annoyed by this, your instincts are correct.
	This is the same tactic as calling something satanic or evil, or RFK Jr.' 's ad last week saying, you know, if you don't like Trump you must have Trump derangement syndrome.
	The idea is that, well, If you don't like Alex Jones, it's because you've been indoctrinated by a materialist and rationalist secular system and therefore can't see the value in his shamanic prophecies.
	It can't possibly be that anyone has a legitimate grievance against the man.
	No, no, it's the rationalist system.
	To which I must say, I was raised an atheist, but my many issues with Alex Jones are that he's a bigot white nationalist who has caused untold harms across American society and to a degree, the world.
	And Russell wants to riff on that and make fun of him so bad.
	Yeah.
	Because that's a deep well, right?
	Like, obviously, there's so much material there and Russell is figuring out a way to do it without making him mad, which, genuinely, pretty smart.
	That's because he just wants to bag on him.
	Yeah.
	Because it's fun.
	Yeah, because it's hilarious.
	And Russell likes to have fun.
	Russell wants to have Russell fun.
	He really does, and Lord knows he's not getting enough of that these days.
	He keeps voluntarily taking it away from himself.
	If you're interested in more of the Jones talk, I recommend going back to episode 62 of our show, where Alex Jones was the guest on Russell's show, and we had the boys from Knowledge Fight on to tackle him.
	It was a hilarious time, and I feel like we came pretty concretely to the conclusion that Alex Jones is in fact not Nostradamus.
	I feel like that was one of the conclusions of that day.
	I feel like we started with that, but sure.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	Yeah, in fact, we did.
	Bitch, Nostradamus ain't even Nostradamus.
	Like, no, that's... Yeah, 9-11 came up very early.
	But yeah, so the next clip is a little bit longer.
	Shim the Wonder Dog, however.
	Hey, well... You guys weren't there.
	It's so weird to read the things that we read about this adorable dog.
	There was a real psychic and he was a dog in the 1920s.
	I am far more invested in dog profit than I am Alex Jones profit, I will say.
	I'm fine with that.
	We don't have to make a podcast about debunking Jim the Wonderdog.
	Although, you know what?
	Maybe.
	Maybe.
	We don't know what kind of problems that were caused.
	I think we should go the opposite way.
	Start proselytizing for Jim the Wonderdog.
	Yeah, 100%.
	Alright.
	Alright, so the next clip is a little bit long.
	Yeah, we've got XTED and we've got Jim the Wonderdog.
	Yeah, the next clip is a little bit long, but we get an update on something that Candace Owens brought up to Russell, which is the idea that he should have a chat with the Catholic priests at the Brompton Oratory.
	I spoke briefly, by text actually, it wasn't even a proper conversation, I don't know why I'm pretending it was a more intimate connection than it was.
	I had a text message with Father Julian of the Brompton Oratory, and I asked, I guess he's a Catholic priest.
	And he said that the Enlightenment, in spite of the obvious many miraculous achievements of science, could also be regarded as an amplification of false light.
	The false light that drowns out the true light.
	Now a character like Alex Jones, there's no question Alex Jones has said some pretty out there and crazy things.
	But when you have an undue reverence for just the rational, just the material, and that's not to say that the material and rational don't have their place, for they too are a creation of the One Supreme Creator, it's What happens, I believe, is you end up relegating and negating the mystical.
	You end up, in fact, if you, I suppose, replace the state as the apex of our hierarchies of meaning, then you can start to replace all of our values.
	One by one, you can start to remove ideas that are sort of sacred Ordinary, presumed, with new ideas.
	And this state of bewilderment that I mentioned at the beginning is beneficial, I suppose, to power.
	The powerful appear to benefit from chaos.
	The more there is chaos, the more there is conflict, the more there is bewilderment, the easier it is to assert authority.
	And I suppose the clearest example we got of this, or a clear example, was during the pandemic period, where the convergence of interest included Well, one would have to argue pharmaceutical companies appeared to benefit, it would seem, superficially.
	Yes, superficially.
	As measured by share price, I think that's fair.
	Governments appeared to benefit from the ability to regulate.
	It seemed that there was an opportunity to denigrate and marginalize and condemn people So I suppose that's an example of how crises and chaos benefits powerful interests.
	And I suppose that if you have that kind of polarity, a kind of tension where crisis is beneficial to the most powerful interests in the world, it's likely that you will see a perpetuation of crisis, endless crisis.
	If the military-industrial complex benefit from war, you will have war.
	If the pharmaceutical complex benefit from ill health, you will have the perpetuation of ill health.
	If they require you to eat food that's bad for you and take medicine that's bad for you, then you find that this great wonderful nation, in which I'm a foreigner, Traipsing willy-nilly back and forth that border!
	Almost at will!
	Popping in them cages that Obama built.
	Then I suppose that what you have instead of this wonderful nation, even though, you know, of course, I'm still somewhat agitated by your victory in the Revolutionary War,
	Instead of the greatest nation in the world, you have a kind of conveyor belt where we're sort of turned into larvae with parasitic tubes attached to us, one end being pumped full of sugar and seed oil, the other end being pumped full of needless pharmaceuticals.
	I mean, as many amens as I can muster to that, Yeah, so he's landing the fucking plane.
	As Jordan pointed out when we covered Brandemic, you've got to be able to land the plane.
	Doesn't matter how many loop-de-loops and barrel rolls you can do if you can't land the plane.
	And previously, in recent months, we have seen Russell crash and burn in a number of scenarios and interviews.
	But here, he just combined serious political rhetoric, conspiracy theories, jokes, and audience pandering, and he landed the fucking plane.
	Applause break, point made.
	And there are moments in this interview where I genuinely think Tucker is watching him and is impressed.
	You know, it seems that way, or perhaps it's that little crush that we were talking about, but there definitely seem to be these moments of... I don't delineate between those two things, by the way.
	That's fair.
	I think we all have more crushes than we realize.
	Like, there's something I really love.
	Page seven, I absolutely love, like, Jackie Zabrowski and MJ and Holden, right?
	They talk about it like, oh, I just want to kiss him.
	Like, a lot.
	Because they're comfortable with, like, and they're very fluid kind of people, and it's not necessarily even romantic.
	Like, there's levels.
	Again, when we talked about this a couple weeks ago, like, the weird, like, fundamentalist Christian Greek origin word Game that gets played to give gravitas to a preacher's sermon, right?
	There's lots of different kinds of love.
	There's lots of different kinds of expressions of love and friendship.
	And so being comfortable with accessing the length and breadth of the human experience rather than just romance and I can't pray with you.
	I'm not gay.
	Like those are very polar opposites.
	So like in the way that I, you know, I'd like, that's the thing is like, I think everybody like in a cult, everybody has a crush on the cult leaders.
	Like, cause a crush sort of blinds you specifically a crush blinds you to maybe the not so great aspects of like the whole person it's rose colored glasses for a person and you're enamored.
	And so I think that, um, Just as much, I feel like Tucker could just be sitting back at me and like, hell yeah, do it.
	Like, that kind of like, it's like, you're doing great for me and my little roadshow.
	Yes.
	I'd be just enjoying him.
	Because yeah, none of this stuff is particularly sophisticated.
	And I feel like Russell's just like kind of hitting the beats.
	And effectively, but like this is, the bar is Yeah, it's nothing particularly new or interesting, but it is effective in this setting, it would seem.
	Certainly winning people over, being very charming.
	Yes, exactly.
	And just a quick point about the Obama built the cages thing, as it's come up, and honestly these people don't give me that much to fact check in this one, So what he's referring to, obviously, is the cages that Trump used to separate children from their families.
	You know, keeping kids in cages, right?
	And it's a frequent piece of trivia they like to trot out that, oh, Obama built those cages, thereby implying that Barack Obama did the same thing while in office.
	Um, and, uh, no!
	No, we did not.
	The Obama administration did not.
	See, this tracks all the way back to 2014, um, when Central American families, teenagers, and children began crossing the border into the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, turning themselves over to U.S.
	agents in, at that time, unprecedented numbers.
	You know, fleeing poverty, crime, chronic violence, all that good stuff.
	The families were also spurred on by smugglers telling them that children who crossed the border could generally avoid lengthy detention and certain deportation.
	Border patrol stations became so overcrowded that agents began using the sally port areas outside the stations, which were Little more than outdoor garages as holding pens.
	So you've got mothers with babies and young children left for hours in 90 plus degree heat sprawled out on concrete floors with little more than bologna sandwiches and Kool-Aid, right?
	So to handle the situation the government acquired an empty warehouse a few blocks from the McAllen station and converted it into a new facility that opened in July 2014.
	A place that had a capacity for 1,500 detainees.
	The new Central Processing Center, or CPC, was clean, spacious, air-conditioned, and a major improvement over the cramped detention cells and sweltering garages.
	And to keep different demographic groups safely apart, a standard practice in detention settings, the U.S.
	Border Patrol used chain-link fencing to create partitions in the warehouse.
	Um, one area was designated for teenage boys, another for mothers with small children, another for entire family groups and so on.
	And the chain link fencing was cheap, allowed for good ventilation and carried the benefit of allowing agents to supervise the entire facility, um, by affording full visibility into all of the enclosures, right?
	Uh, the- Yeah, that still sounds like a nightmare.
	Yeah, it still sounds bleak as fuck.
	Temperature controlled.
	Yes, exactly, yeah.
	The grim appearance was reminiscent of a livestock operation rather than a humane facility.
	Migrants and some agents soon called it La Parera, so the dog kennel.
	It was controversial at the time, but it wasn't until Trump's zero-tolerance policy in spring 2018 that the facility came to symbolize that kind of administrative cruelty associated with intentional separation of children from their parents by the government.
	So yeah, Obama built the cages, sure, but he didn't do that with them.
	And what happened was still kind of bleak, but people were at least still treated somewhat humanely compared to what came later.
	But yeah.
	You can just hide behind, well, Obama built the cages, and that makes it all okay, apparently.
	Yeah, well, and that's also, yeah, that's a device, particularly good device for like a talking point if you're trying to, like, he does have experience with like, The crunchy left pastel QAnon.
	There is a contingent that Russell can draw upon of people that consider themselves Democrats or leftists or liberal that maybe weren't so much and are kind of resonating with these messages and getting sucked into and getting pilled even further.
	I mean, Yeah.
	So he also, there was a lot in that.
	I mean, there's kind of a lot in every clip, but like that false light Anglican stuff.
	I am glad we talked about it.
	Um, a couple of weeks ago, an off brand.
	So, so that one was, uh, that one was from the, the Brompton oratory, that one.
	So that'll be Catholics.
	Um, that one.
	Um, that one.
	Okay.
	So that was not, that's what I'm saying.
	I couldn't remember if it was cause they, they use the words interchangeably.
	Okay.
	So Brompton.
	Yeah, that is.
	That is Catholic.
	Okay.
	But as far as the false kind of mysticism being false, even if it's true, whatever.
	Yeah.
	I'm glad that we have covered that before, and if you are interested, you can go find it, listeners.
	And the other thing is the government benefit.
	It is very different over here, as far as the government benefiting, the benefit of control post-COVID.
	Mask bans are passing here.
	Mask bans!
	COVID is still around!
	That's insane!
	Isn't it?
	That is completely nuts.
	Mask bans are going into effect, have already been in effect in several like, I don't know if cities or states, I don't remember the most recent, Yeah, so as far as government control and overreach, yeah, I think it's on the wrong side that you're talking about, because the government had very little control and enforcement, and it looked very different in the UK.
	It looked very different in Europe than it did here.
	So I don't necessarily blame Russell for not getting that, because he also doesn't care to, so he's just going to say whatever he knows, and that is a very different Now, the oppression perceptions were rife and massive, and there's a misunderstanding of both HIPAA and what a private business can do.
	But, you know what I mean?
	That kind of overall, there's plenty of things that are working against public health and And are, like, being used as tools of control from the government that they got because of COVID that Russell's team is all about.
	Yeah, yeah.
	The way he presents it, it's a very one-way street.
	Exactly.
	It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
	These other terrible things are happening.
	You know?
	Yeah.
	But as you say, he could be completely oblivious, as he is to many, many things.
	Because we're looking at two very oblivious rich white guys.
	Oh yeah, we are.
	About the most oblivious I think that you can be, and still exists in the world.
	They had Elon Musk.
	It'd be like, The trifecta of obliviousness.
	Yeah.
	Just as to how the world works.
	Yeah.
	At least Russell grew up poor.
	Like, that's something.
	But I mean, it's, you know, I think we talked about that a lot.
	It's like, that seems very far.
	That was a long time ago.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	And more of a, yeah, more of a tool to be wielded rather than like... Yes!
	Rather than actually, yeah, drawing on experiences.
	Drawing on experiences.
	Yeah, exactly.
	More like forget these experiences as quickly as I can.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	All right.
	So from here, we get to discussing Russell's journey to where he is now.
	And naturally, we come to how the allegations against him were all a conspiracy by the legacy media.
	And again, we come to the subject of his son having heart surgery.
	But there's a key update to the story.
	And I think this is one of the clips also where Tucker is quite impressed by Russell's form.
	Blessedly, as a drug addict, I had to get clean, and that's the beginning of an awakening.
	As I say, I'm a very, very slow learner.
	I'm a fast talker, but I'm a slow learner.
	Eventually, through suffering, through seeing the fame and sex that I had so eagerly worshipped turned and metastasised against me by a machine that loathes those that speak out against it, I was forced to recognise my deep, deep foolishness.
	Thankfully, at the same time as I was enduring deep vociferous and vehement attacks from the culture that I had once worshipped at the false order of, my little beautiful son was born and at 12 weeks old he had heart surgery at the famous Great Ormond Street Hospital.
	When you hand over your baby, To the anesthetists, knowing that he will undergo a 10-hour trial.
	It looks like, um, it feels deeply biblical.
	It felt like some sort of slab that he's being handed over to.
	It's terrifying!
	The anesthetists seem unusually large, these sort of giant and towering men.
	And to see a doctor apply gas to this 12-week-old baby's face and The tears of my wife, his mother, to be in the room downstairs, having left my little son, and to see the milk come through her top, the milk she could not feed, because as with adults, before major surgery, you can't feed the infant.
	I experience such powerlessness and pain, but also such a blessing to be shown that amidst the tumult and maelstrom conducted by the spilled and nefarious ink of the desperate liars that operate in the central institutions of propaganda and deceit that once I was happy to break bread with and feed at, I was shown a deeper truth.
	Thankfully, by the excellence of those surgeons and by the grace of our Lord God and my personal Saviour Jesus Christ, my son is well.
	I am a slow learner, so I was shown I was shown.
	He showed me.
	This is what is important to you.
	These are your former gods.
	What have your former gods done for you?
	Where has it brought you?
	To what has it delivered you?
	Okay, so, again, the allegations against Russell of rape and sexual assault.
	Very, very credible, and we've covered those in great detail.
	It's not some conspiracy against him.
	Plenty of evidence there.
	As for his son, I've already shown that the surgery wasn't happening at the same time as the allegations coming out, but yes, that is tragic that his son has A series of heart conditions that will ultimately shorten and make his life more difficult.
	You would think that Russell would show more respect to the medical profession after a life-altering experience like that.
	But also we have a new spin on the story which is it was all Jesus Our Lord J-Town was the one doing it all, and the thing is, like, throwing Jesus in there is the easiest thing in the world.
	He doesn't have to change anything else about the story.
	Just say, oh, by the way, Jesus did it to show me the error of my ways, and listen to that applause.
	Uh, yeah.
	Oh yeah, people eat it up.
	Oh yeah, oh yeah.
	He said Jesus, yeah!
	That was literally the response.
	He is shooting the fish in this barrel.
	They're just bloop, bloop, bloop, over and over.
	I mean, yeah, this is his element for sure.
	It does make me blind with rage.
	I mean, at least he said that the doctors did a good job.
	Like, the things that you should be advocating for that you feel strongly about after having a medical intervention that saves your child's life are so opposite to what he says and what he advocates for.
	With his platform, I can't handle how angry it makes me.
	I'm somewhere else.
	I'm up in the corner of the room right now, and I'm being very pleasant on this microphone.
	I can't imagine how the doctors at Great Ormond Street must feel.
	I bet they're fucking used to it.
	I bet they're like, yeah, okay, people do this all the time.
	And listen, they're too busy to listen.
	Russell is talking so slow I want to die.
	I hate it.
	And I think that is probably a little American of me.
	Stylistically, he's preaching, is what he's doing.
	That's what it sounds like to me.
	Our preachers talk a lot faster here.
	Yes, that's fair.
	God damn it, get to the fucking point.
	Ours do not.
	Let's go.
	Right, and I think that there is something, too, that's another cult leader speaking technique.
	It's a technique that some lawyers use.
	It's a specific kind of speech pattern That like slow, methodical, and methodical, I'm not necessarily saying that it's thought out, it's probably more instinctive, but that kind of like repetition with like a cadence to it.
	It's a specific cadence, yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, he's doing, I'm like, I want, I'm like, Talk faster!
	Oh my god!
	But like, people talking, I think the point is to exchange valuable information.
	That's not what's happening here.
	This is window dressing.
	And he can take as much time as he wants just talking.
	Because he's just painting a picture for everybody.
	And it doesn't have to be, listen, the picture's going to be good enough because he knows his audience.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Oh, and before I forget, the mugs that they're drinking out of are Black Rifle coffee mugs, by the way, just so you know.
	Some of them are.
	So we talked about that on Off-Brand as well.
	Yes.
	The Brands episode.
	The Brands Brands.
	Yes.
	Oh dear.
	Okay, so from here we- That's funny!
	It should be 1775.
	Well, well.
	Rumble bumble.
	Well, Tucker's not on Rumble, Tucker's on Twitter.
	So, and this is Tucker's show.
	So, different sitch.
	And BlackRapple got way more money.
	Interesting.
	Okay, okay.
	Of course I don't care.
	No, no, he doesn't give two shits.
	We get Russell's assessment of Tucker now.
	And the reason that I'm honoured to be able to pray with you prior to coming out here is because I need to continually recognise that, as the great Pastor Rick Warren wrote, the first four words of his book, it's not about you.
	It's not about me.
	And I think you are a great testimony to that, because before, you never seemed nervous, you never seemed concerned.
	I see you from time to time.
	I consider our friendship to be a great privilege.
	And like, You know, maybe you're being massacred in the media.
	Tucker Carlson spoke to Putin!
	Kill him!
	And I'm like, you okay?
	Yeah We didn't say kill him We said he's dumb.
	He's not taking it seriously.
	Tucker Carlson is not taking it seriously.
	Tucker Carlson is doing what he believes in.
	Tucker Carlson is not a racist.
	Tucker Carlson does not believe in dividing people.
	Tucker Carlson doesn't believe in supremacy of any individual race or group.
	Tucker Carlson is a patriotic American.
	Oh my god, this is taking so long!
	And it pains me to say this as an Englishman and as a redcoat, there's nothing wrong with that.
	So...
	Aha.
	Um...
	All right, so we have some reputation laundering coming back the other way now.
	Tucker Carlson isn't a racist, he's a patriot.
	Sure thing.
	I mean, he's one of the most significant proponents of the Great Replacement Theory over the last decade.
	He said migrants have made America poorer and dirtier, suggested Democratic Representative Justin Pearson speaks like a sharecropper and only got into college because he's black.
	He's also described Iraqis as semi-literate primitive monkeys.
	And of course, there's the infamous text message to his producer back on Fox, quote, A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington.
	A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him.
	It was three against one at least.
	Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable, obviously.
	It's not how white men fight.
	Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit him harder.
	Kill him!
	I really wanted them to hurt the kid.
	I could taste it, unquote.
	Tucker Carlson is a bloodthirsty white supremacist who hates most of the USA, and has spent his career dividing the country for profit.
	But because he's constantly speaking in dog whistles, it can be very difficult to pin him down.
	The one thing I'll actually- He just says dog whistles, he just lies!
	And that!
	They're just constant gaslighting and lies!
	And that.
	The one thing I will actually agree with Russell on here is that Tucker isn't taking it seriously.
	He doesn't have to, with literally hundreds of millions of dollars in inherited wealth at his back.
	He doesn't have to take anything seriously.
	No wonder he's up there going, like, yeah, of course.
	You're having a swell time.
	He doesn't have to talk to any of those people.
	That's the thing.
	This is actually very smart, is having this live event.
	Everyone's going to feel like they had a fireside chat with Tucker, and he doesn't have to talk to one of them.
	Not a single one.
	Does not have to talk to one pore, not even.
	Why do you think everyone's so nice?
	Because everyone's getting paid to be around him.
	I mean, the argument being made, and I think is made, is like, oh, well, I mean, I'm not racist.
	That's just what I said was true.
	They happened to be minorities, but I just said a true thing.
	We hear it all the fucking time, and it's legitimately infuriating to try to explain not just individual but also systemic racism when the denial is so thick.
	We saw the debate You can just fucking lie, and lie and lie and lie, and that standard is being set so profoundly and so clearly, yet nothing that they say means anything, because they're just lying.
	So you can say, I'm not a racist, I'm not a this, I'm not a that, I'm not a whatever, and you're myth-making, you're telling your own story, and how dare anyone question that, because I said it.
	I'm not a racist.
	I was watching Russell's livestream of that debate on Rumble as it happened, and all of the Rumble chat was like, yeah, Trump's kicking her ass!
	Oh, okay.
	We're just, this is going to be one of those things where like both sides think that they want, that's, that's what this is going to be.
	And that's exactly what it's turned into.
	It's been that though.
	Like that's, I mean, in genuinely like debates, like presidential debates in America.
	I mean, this is fucking gnarly this, but this is the road that we've been on for quite some time.
	So like we don't get anything out of it and haven't for decades.
	Yeah.
	It's been a minute.
	That's not what the thing has been.
	And having the reason and the incentive to cover and talk about the UK election, boy, it's just a little trauma I get to carry around and snuggle up with in a little present, all just like, oh, it's worse to know that things are so different other places.
	At least more effective, anyway.
	I live on the fucking moon.
	Yep.
	That's wild.
	Oh dear.
	Alright, so now we get back to Russell's journey.
	So, what happened to me?
	I mean, like, I just started to... I read that book, the Pastor Rick Warren book, Purpose Driven Life, because I saw him talking about his son taking his own life, and I saw the way that he spoke about that, and how unabashed and unapologetic he was, and how he was just in the pain of it, without any sort of pride or...
	You know, look, me, because I've been so attuned to ego, I imagined that if you were, and this I suppose is how I would have categorised him, a sort of personal development person, but that's of course not what a pastor is, because there is a difference between personal development and becoming a servant, and becoming a servant of our Lord.
	When he was saying, like, that his son had taken his own life, I thought, wow, he doesn't seem like, sort of, embarrassed, all he feels is sad, because, you know, the loss of your child, and I know there'll be people in here that have experienced that, of course.
	There will be people that have lost children.
	There will be people that have lost people to suicide.
	I'm sensitive to that.
	He just seemed to feel the sadness of it.
	Now at that time I was feeling some pretty profound feelings.
	The person has to die, the old man has to die, the Adam has to die, that Christ may be reborn.
	There's an argument indeed for saying that if we don't make our body a temple for his dwelling, it will be a dwelling place for the enemy.
	Is that an applause?
	I think, you know, as a drug addict, you are trying to synthesize spiritual experiences.
	You are trying to find meaning and connection and purpose.
	You're trying to transcend self.
	Quick talker, slow learner.
	Not a quick talker!
	Slow talker also!
	Jesus!
	Slow talker today.
	But yeah, he's got this down, right?
	The repetition, the Jesus pandering, very effective.
	The one thing that particularly bothers me about that clip, however, is the insinuation that anyone who isn't actively following Jesus is letting Satan in, with a particular focus on addicts letting Satan in.
	And holy shit, isn't that the quickest way in the universe to demonize anyone who isn't Christian?
	Oh, honey, I got some bad news about Christianity then.
	Yes, well, yes, but it's the first time I've heard Russell kind of properly, you know, going down that road of, oh, you're not following Christ?
	Well, then you're building a temple for Satan, you know?
	Well, wait, that's what we talked about with the tarot card thing.
	It's like he's listening even a little bit.
	I think he's giving lip service because earlier he said, like, you know, it's talking about mysticism and he's talking about spirituality and even Presented with the reality of where he has been arriving at with his Christianity.
	You said, you're like, wait, isn't he supposed to be reborn and not carry his experiences with him?
	Mm-hmm.
	Yeah.
	And you're like, wait, rebirth.
	Like, yeah.
	That's supposed to be the thing.
	And Russell is talking about, like, I have 20 years of spiritual experience, whatever.
	All that's supposed to fall away.
	Yeah.
	And I'm using the words.
	I know about it.
	I had to hear about it a fuck ton.
	And like I it's yeah that's you are you have no like experience in the church and you were like wait a minute like you heard it right away like it's not hard to figure out but I do think I mean he's listening but he's also not necessarily I mean I'm still curious how it's going to work out.
	But that's also what we're watching is that kind of like how he's squaring the circle of his like mystical brand and Christianity that very much does not jive with the kind of person he is.
	Whether he can try and thread that needle that no one else has ever managed to.
	That's the big question.
	Oh, I mean, plenty of people have, but not like, I mean, that's, that's the cults abound that do that.
	I mean, that's like, but not on the scale he's going.
	Yeah.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	Well, now we, we do actually finally get to the subject of Russell's baptism and we do get some new information.
	I read that book, Bear Grylls of all people.
	You know Bear Grylls, like Running Wild with Bear Grylls?
	Bear Grylls sort of like appeared in my existence, coming out of the shadows, and like said, said, would you like me to come and baptize you on the 28th of April?
	And I sort of went, yeah, but I meant no.
	I would not like you to make plans.
	I'm not very good at temporal reality.
	I'm always agreeing to things on the basis that those things will probably never actually happen.
	That will never actually happen.
	And if it does, by the time we get there, I'll have thought of an excuse to get out of it.
	Oddly, I was in Florida, Tucker, near where I visited you previously.
	I'd made this tentative plan to be baptized by SAS elite soldier Bear Grylls, which seemed odd even as I was mulling it over.
	I was at an Easter ceremony where three churches, I guess like a Baptist, Methodist, and Catholic church were all doing the sermon at dawn at Easter.
	I was standing right next to you!
	Yeah.
	And like these sort of kids said, Hey, we've been like these sort of gang of kids.
	Hey, we're from North Carolina.
	Hey, we've been following your Christian journey.
	Hey, you want to get baptized?
	And I was like, Oh yeah, I'm going to get baptized.
	I think, well, we can baptize you.
	Yeah.
	We baptized each other.
	I baptized her.
	She baptized me.
	You're not going to gang baptize me.
	Jokes, jokes, jokes, jokes, spaghetti, spaghetti.
	Uh-huh.
	- Yeah, yeah. - But I could feel it, you know. - Come on.
	Went back home to England and sure enough 28th of April did happen.
	That's how calendars work.
	It came immediately after the 27th of April, for those of you that have a nerdish interest in such matters.
	Immediately before the 29th, right there it sat.
	Okay, so for anyone who's not a patron, in Off-Brand a couple of weeks ago we were discussing the fact it seemed like Russell really had no idea what he was letting himself in for when it came to getting baptised.
	And just how miserable his life was going to become.
	And these next clips, I think, conclusively prove this point.
	But also, given that it was Bear Grylls who specifically offered to come and baptize Russell, and Bear Grylls is Anglican, I would now place a hefty bet that the priest who performed the baptism was also Anglican, which would make Russell one too.
	I think we're getting there.
	But we still don't know.
	And they're hiding it.
	They're hiding the truth.
	Legitimately.
	And I can share from what I found was that the Daily Mail tried to figure out who baptized him and they are keeping it a secret, which is weird.
	Really strange.
	Yeah, because a lot of Christians are very excited about being very public about Russell's Christianity and Christian journey, which Russell just explained, so that's correct.
	But if you want Cop to be in the one that baptized him, that's fucked up.
	That's weird and fucked up.
	Also, him and Bear Grylls did an episode together and became buddies.
	It is very weird for Russell to then Say that, like, Bear Grylls just, like, appeared out of thin air.
	They're friends.
	You went on his show, man.
	That's what happened.
	Yeah, like, and you've been, like, you have kind of this, like, you've been professional, at least professional friends or personal friends for years.
	And Bear Grylls had been on your show twice before he offered to do your baptism, you know?
	Yeah.
	Y'all are homies.
	Yes, right.
	Why lie?
	Because it's John the Baptist and Jesus is what it is.
	There's a lot of that going on.
	He came out of the desert in a shirt of hair.
	Like, really?
	Come on.
	There's a lot of that going on.
	It's just to add gravity to the story.
	Do you remember Cali Means?
	The food grifter guy?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Who was in The Void.
	So he was on Tucker's show recently, and then he went on RFK Jr.' 's podcast.
	And RFK was like, oh, you know, it's so nice to meet you.
	I've only known about you since you've been on Tucker's thing.
	And it's like, there are like text messages and shit from between you guys from like years ago.
	What are you talking about?
	Why are you rewriting history now?
	This is weird.
	Why?
	Rich people are rude.
	Yeah.
	Because they don't care about other people.
	That's true.
	Now, I heard about that, and I was like, what the fuck?
	Because also, I know who that person is.
	I'm so familiar with all the characters in the stories.
	I'm like, what the fuck?
	That is strange.
	R.F.K.
	Jr.' 's brain, for sure, is Swiss cheese.
	And he's very open about the abuse he's done to his body and mind to make that so.
	So, like, if he doesn't remember somebody, Okay.
	I bet not.
	I'm sure.
	It's definitely possible.
	I mean, maybe a brain.
	A worm ate that bit, you know?
	I mean, it's a different problem.
	It's a different problem that you can have.
	But again, like, there are no consequences for these people because they're just spinning yarns.
	So like, who cares?
	Like, and genuinely, to a degree, like, it is so inconsequential to add these sort of, like, these arabesques onto the, like, these, like, florid kind of details, right?
	Like, onto your story.
	But it is still just kind of, it's very preachery.
	It's kind of weird.
	Yeah, it's just strange.
	Yeah, it's inconsequential, but there's still a part of me that's just like, why?
	Why bother?
	The why lie is throwing me.
	But at the same time, if Russell wants to do a bit and work on material, That makes perfect sense to me.
	Like, oh, he just wants to fuck around.
	Cause even like, you know, earlier whenever we're talking about like the rationalism thing, like I heard, like what I was processing is like, Russell wanted to pivot to what Russell wanted to talk about.
	And so it didn't really matter what the previous statement was.
	It felt like he's like, I'm switching gears because I want to, and I'm in charge.
	And I think that it's smart for Tucker to let him cook.
	Yeah.
	Logistically and entertainment-wise, it's working, so let the train keep rolling.
	And Tucker also has to work less.
	Fucking aces all around, everybody wins.
	So that kind of just allowing Russell to... Yeah, it's like letting him cook, I think is... It's just...
	If Russell's, yeah, like I said, if Russell's just trying out bits, that's kind of how it seems to me.
	What bothers me- Because he's got a big, big audience to play with.
	Yeah, he does.
	And what bothers me is that this whole interview is vastly more entertaining than the little stand-up sets he's been uploading to his locals channel.
	Like this is, he comes off way better in this compared to the ones he's- Really?
	Yes!
	They're so bad!
	I'm bored out of my mind.
	Oh, wow.
	But I mean, it's also easier to play off of somebody else.
	That's like, especially like with the shows that he's had, you know, like the Big Brother thing, like whatever, like, he's really good in a chat show format, you know?
	And I get that.
	It's a lot easier.
	Like, if I'm in front of a camera by myself, I'm Like, I'm Garth, right?
	I turn into Garth and I panic.
	But if I'm talking to another person, I can speak like a human being, the human that I am in the world.
	So I get that.
	And I mean, he's a guest in this space, and he's...
	I mean, and this is a very, like, it's a big, receptive crowd, and that can really make you feel like you're on your A-game if that's kind of what you wanted all along.
	And if that's what you're used to, like, he's probably feeling his oats a little bit, you know?
	She's feeling herself.
	Yeah.
	And so that, you know, he's kind of on one, and why would Tucker interrupt it?
	It's working.
	Like, that's Tucker, that's a thing Tucker does, is like, if it's working, he lets it ride.
	That's kind of his whole deal.
	That's why it's so cynical.
	Pretty much.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	But at the same time, I'm, like, so fucking bored with what Russell is saying.
	I can't... I can barely see.
	That's fair.
	That is fair.
	All right, let's let him continue the story anyway.
	Yeah.
	And there came Bear Grylls.
	And Bear Grylls does his sort of, like, SAS survival thing.
	He does that, like, all the time.
	Like, even when he's in your house, he's sort of surviving there.
	Watch out for that candle, he said at one point.
	Your fence isn't high enough.
	He bought some hymns.
	I mean, he's excellent.
	He played the piano.
	He bought hymns.
	Sort of amazing.
	I was very overwhelmed.
	It's very difficult to have any pretense about being an alpha male in the company of Bear Grylls.
	I just, you know, I just let it go, you know.
	We were on a rowboat.
	We went and picked up a pasta to do the baptism and everything.
	I live by the river, and that was the river that it was going to get done in, and it's the River Thames.
	And of course, the Thames water municipality's been sold off to multinational conglomerations who, because it's more profitable to dump sewage in the beautiful and sacred River Thames rather than provide a sewage plant, do dump sewage Into the Thames, companies that are in sort of like Hong Kong and Canada.
	It's not to shame those particular nations, but probably the water municipality should be owned by the community of people that live there and shouldn't be a for-profit entity really.
	The people should run that, not corporately.
	It's just a thing I've been thinking about.
	Anyway, like when I was put in that water, you know, they baptised me backwards and I came out there and I sort of felt the Holy Spirit.
	Although, you know, given what's in that water, it could have been E. coli.
	Something was happening.
	So there was never a deliberate choice.
	Christ chooses us.
	We have been chosen.
	Uh-huh.
	So there was no deliberate choice indeed.
	Yeah, he really didn't know what he was getting into, which is why he was merrily dicking about with tarot cards the day after his baptism, not realizing the firestorm it would cause among Christians.
	Oh, they claim that he filmed that before and then just posted it.
	Come on!
	Yeah, but the idea that it was, you know, this thing of Bear Grylls being like, hey, do you want to come?
	Yeah, okay.
	And then it just suddenly happening to him.
	That completely tracks.
	I absolutely believe what he's saying there.
	Also, they picked the priest up in a rowboat.
	Very biblical.
	Definitely.
	That's a lie.
	That's what I found too.
	They would not do that.
	churches I could find anywhere near the river in Henley-on-Thames where Russell lives are owned by the Church of England, which is Anglican.
	So I'm like, that would kind of...
	That's what I found, too.
	Yeah, yeah.
	The one thing I...
	They would not do that.
	That's bullshit.
	The one thing I do agree with him on in that clip is that the water companies should not be privatized.
	I And it's frankly absurd that we've just let them dump human waste into our rivers over here.
	But hey, it's another part of the legacy of Maggie Thatcher, who is still dead, by the way, to borrow your Little catchphrase.
	Maggie Thatcher's still dead, everybody.
	And the Conservatives, more broadly, who Russell is now on the side of.
	There's another way to solve the problem of dumping waste into our rivers, which is regulations.
	But Russell is also on the side of wanting to deregulate everything and allow unfettered neoliberalist capitalism to do its work upon the people.
	It sure was weird to hear him advocating for collective ownership of public utilities rather than privatization.
	And it's also weird to hear, well, but it isn't that weird because when you talk to conservative people and you present collective ownership and social, even like for like either democratic socialist or full on socialist ideas and public utilities and public health, like all that kind of stuff, if it is, Defanged from, like, loaded words and language.
	Yeah, you decouple it from the socialist words.
	Then they actually are really fucking into it.
	Yeah, they love it!
	Yeah, they're really fucking into it.
	So that's just another time that I've seen that happen in public.
	It's infuriating.
	Of the million billion times I've already seen that happen in public.
	And yes, it is infuriating.
	It's so anger-inducing.
	I'm like, you people spend all of your time raging against this, you know?
	You don't even know what you're talking about, and you've been manipulated through fear.
	It's so disheartening, because we are a gnat's wing away from a much better world, and because some people can benefit financially from terrifying you, folks that don't get it, or have a misunderstanding.
	Actively being misled for decades.
	Yep, exactly that.
	By people like this guy.
	Lovely stuff.
	Alright, so next Tucker asks what I would say is the pivotal question before Russell very quickly pivots away from it.
	So how different was it from what you thought it was going to be?
	Well, look, in my country we have a thing called the Church of England and the problem is in the name.
	Is there not a hierarchical implication in the name Church of England?
	Some of the people in the Church of England have been sort of instrumental in educating me in my very nascent early new journey into Christianity and it's certainly not a criticism of those wonderful ministers and teachers and men and women of faith but secularism is all well and good
	As long as the state doesn't behave like a god, as long as the state doesn't give you some new edicts, as long as the state doesn't set up some new apostles and doesn't deliver a new liturgy that seems to be designed to inhibit and prohibit the freedom of the individual and to diminish and dilute the sanctity of the individual and the beautiful space that can exist between us when we live in good faith with one another.
	True diversity is a glory, but superficial diversity to mask homogeneity, I feel, yeah, when there's homogeneity of one idea, one globalist idea, centralizing power, by their fruit shall you know them.
	In the pandemic period, wealth transfer, guess which direction?
	It was that way.
	It wasn't the diversification of wealth.
	It wasn't the empowerment of people.
	It was the centralization of authority.
	It was the centralization of wealth.
	It was the centralization of power.
	Yeah, maybe spread some of your wealth around, Russell, if that's how you feel.
	Maybe get Tucker, too.
	He's got enough.
	Also, how is that answering how different Christianity all is to how you thought it would be?
	Oh, it isn't?
	Okay, gotcha.
	Nonetheless, we get another tick in the Anglican box there, I think, if a bunch of Anglican priests were the ones kind of guiding him through Christianity, particularly immediately post-baptism.
	I'm like, yeah, I think that's another... Well, that's the Alpha Course too, which is also Bear Grylls is like big in the Alpha Course.
	Yes, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Right.
	And then we got some dog whistly shit, because what Russell was actually saying is diversity in modern Western society isn't diversity at all.
	It's enforced diversity to try and obfuscate an enforced homogeneity.
	And no matter what, the end result of that discussion is diversity equals bad.
	The homogeneity he's referring to reads to me as like, hey, we'd like every human to be respectful of other humans, or at least, you know, not outwardly hateful towards large chunks of them, but that is seen as some great woke principle to try and get everyone to think the same way, rather than it just being the basics of human fucking decency.
	And then, well, you know, we keep bringing the brown people and the gays and the transes into the fold because it hides how we've gotten everyone to think the same way.
	It's a trick, a deception!
	Therefore diversity is bad, because it's not true diversity.
	And that's another, I'm not racist.
	That's like, I'm not racist, I'm colorblind, I don't care what color you are.
	I'm not racist to complain about DEI diversity or whatever, because it's fake.
	I'm the truth teller.
	I'm calling it out.
	I'm not racist.
	I am broadly saying that it's fake diversity, not real diversity.
	What does real diversity look like for that person?
	They'll get back to you.
	Because it's quote-unquote fake diversity, then they can attack it and be like, I'm not racist, it's just the truth, you know?
	And listen, we hear it a lot.
	It's rampant.
	But it is a different, kind of more tactful, like...
	I don't know, I feel like, again, watching a lot of UK news coverage around people making excuses for Nigel Farage's words and deeds and being excited about it, it is still shocking to listen to because Americans have found, especially rich white ones, have found, and on both sides of the aisle, all sides, because rich, they have the most solidarity of any group, is that
	They have found so many ways to say racist things and to say bigoted things and problematic things and saying, well, I'm not racist.
	It's just the truth.
	Yeah.
	That's just, that's, that's the, like, that's the trick.
	Yeah.
	Tucker Carlson is, is a master of it.
	King.
	Yes.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	This is also old school Russell, like his diatribes.
	I'm picking up what you're saying.
	Like, I completely agree that like, this is like, this is the Russell that I'm familiar with.
	Yeah, not seen him in a while.
	Is the self-righteous diatribe, right?
	Like really he gets cooking.
	And I mean, He tries, but yeah, it's not the same dynamic, because he's not talking to Tucker.
	He's sitting on the stage with Tucker, but he's talking to the audience, and that kind of self-righteous sort of like... And a lot of things that aren't wrong in a vacuum, like, yeah, sure, I agree with a lot of this stuff in a vacuum,
	Um and out of context and he's and he can like he can really get going and get like very upset about the government and it is a totally different way than he was three seconds ago but it doesn't matter because he's just talking yeah talking and I genuinely think it probably makes him feel really good about himself to say that like it's because Yeah, that's something I picked up on a long time ago.
	It makes him feel really good to be this self-righteous orator.
	And that is, I think, a big part of his identity and why he can feel really good about himself.
	I'm saying all the right things.
	It's one of the things that made him particularly insufferable during the whole, like, revolution phase back in, you know, 2013-14, you know, it's like even- Or effective!
	Well, yes.
	I mean, genuinely, like, that's something that, like, and he also didn't have as much, he wasn't on, like, he had more, he had producers, he had other people making the content for him, so he was still kind of, like, he had editors, he was curtailed.
	Yeah, it was far more disciplined because it had to be real entertainment.
	And he's used to not just having free reign and making slop for the piggies.
	He was used to having production around him.
	So it sounded a lot better, and it looked a lot better, and he was probably more on top of it.
	He was probably more on his game also, because he was used to being in front of a wider audience that didn't have such a low bar for the entertainment and whatever they want to get out of it.
	He still had to kind of be on his toes a little more, and he doesn't have to.
	So why does he now?
	He doesn't have to.
	So that's kind of But it is more of like kind of hearkening back to that old, like he's tapping into old, you know, like old Russell diatribes.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	All right.
	So now we get to the subject of Russell's friends.
	What does your, what does your friends say?
	My friends say, well, hmm.
	You know, like, even though I'm sort of here because I feel that the circumstances permit it, and you've been kind enough to ask me here, and people are kind enough to listen, I'm proselytizing and talking, but like, I don't like to impose myself, you know, like, if people don't ask me, I won't, like, start Hitting them up with the Christianity, like waiting for a moment where they seem sort of a bit weepy and vulnerable and sort of lean in and go, have you considered Jesus?
	Well, those are the rules.
	- But if they ask, they're getting it.
	My wife's cradle Catholic.
	My wife's father, very devout Catholic.
	Most of my mates are people in recovery, and we have to believe in God, otherwise we can't cope and we'll kill ourselves, so we've got no choice.
	It's funny because we're talking about it more, it's becoming more explicit among us, and it's lovely to hear working-class British men getting into Jesus.
	It's sort of like my mate started watching The Chosen and goes, I'll tell you what, I only thought we'd done about 10 miracles, he'd done 10 in one episode the other night!
	I don't know what I'm going to do when they nail him up.
	I'm starting to like him.
	Yeah, that's worrying for a number of reasons.
	Russell just said most of his friends are those in recovery, right?
	And, you know, we've known he's still been active in 12-step meetings and whatnot for some time.
	He was discussing playing football with some of them a while back when football was nice was still a thing.
	And in fact, he apparently went to an AA meeting while at the RNC with Tucker Carlson and RFK Jr., by the way.
	Oh, I bet he did.
	Jesus.
	Right.
	And I'd say doing that is one thing, but having the people in Recovery be pretty much your only friends, when not only are you big fucking celebrity Russell Brand, movie star and formerly married to Katy Perry, Russell Brand, but you are also considered an emblem of the 12-step program and Recovery at large, And put upon an even greater pedestal for a lot of people going through that.
	Like, the power dynamic in those friendships sounds pretty fucking gross to me.
	And like, even his closest friend in the world, Gareth, works for him.
	I'm not sure he has anyone in his life who isn't kind of subservient to him in some way.
	Y'know?
	Well, or even just like of a lower kind of, but I just don't believe it.
	Like he's got friends and that he can talk to.
	And, but I know who, I know the friends he wants to talk about publicly for his image.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Thing is, I don't know.
	I don't know.
	He's quite a... We have no way of knowing.
	No, exactly.
	It's impossible to know.
	So, like, even speculating doesn't necessarily, like, I think it's a fool's errand because, like, there is no way for us to know.
	Who Russell is talking to and who he's texting when he sees something dumb on TV and he wants to send a meme.
	There's no way to know, but it does feel, and I think that what is useful and instructive is to bring attention to the fact that these are the friends he chooses to talk about.
	That's a prop.
	Yeah, exactly.
	That's a specific public image that he is trying to paint, regardless of whether that is the reality or not.
	Because his real friends are fucking Bear Grylls.
	His real friends have fucking TV shows.
	That's who his friends are.
	Or at least that's who his equals are.
	You know?
	His peers.
	And also maybe no one wants to fucking hang out with him anymore because he's a piece of shit.
	Maybe he just doesn't have any friends.
	And those are the people that he can get to hang out with him, because they show up to the meeting.
	But there is no way to really know, you know what I mean?
	Yeah, it feels believable.
	It's one of those things, again, I don't want to fall into the Tucker trap of it feels true, therefore it is true.
	But it feels like it could be true, but we have no evidence to back that up at this time.
	And genuinely, the point that needs to be, I think, needs to be focused on is that he is using those people, those unnamed people, as a prop for his image.
	And even like, you know, the picking up the priest in a boat thing?
	You know what?
	Maybe it happened.
	Because priests have to be too nice.
	All the time.
	It's part of the job, is to indulge people that are being sincere.
	Yeah, it's believable.
	These three idiots went barefoot in the Thames, you know?
	I can definitely see them doing something completely unnecessary.
	You know what I mean?
	Like Tucker thinking everyone's nice, not acknowledging the fact that everyone around you is paid to be nice to you.
	That is not nice.
	You're buying your life.
	Minute by minute and you and you know nothing else because you were born into massive wealth so like.
	People don't realize how much they cannot relate to you you are not presenting the truth tucker nor russell is presenting the truth of their lives which is a wash.
	In more money than any of us that are listening right now will have access to, and definitely in the fucking audience in Phoenix, Arizona.
	They are different species of people.
	They are living in a different world than you are, and you're buying it because you want to feel better.
	That they are like you, and that's just not the case, because it's not marketable.
	That's not what marketing is about.
	You know what I mean?
	So there is no way for us to know who... I'm curious.
	I'd love to know.
	There is no way that we can know, and he's using these people as a prop, even if he genuinely likes them.
	Because I'm sure I like poor people more than rich people, kind of to a person.
	Yeah.
	It's been an issue in my life.
	So I understand, especially if Russell grew up poor, I don't think that he probably wants to hang out with a lot of rich people because they're fucking miserable.
	And not all across the board, I'm sure, but I have enough anecdotes to say that the numbers don't look great for being an interesting, nice, fun, rich person.
	The rich that he has access to, right?
	Yes, yeah.
	Because I don't have access to that kind of rich.
	But he does.
	And so maybe he hangs out with these guys because he likes it, and they like it, and they get something out of it.
	But again, there's no way to know.
	And I mean, it looks good on his public image CV.
	Yeah.
	He's a real working class guy.
	At the very least, he can weaponize it for profit.
	So here we are.
	Exactly.
	Right.
	Using it as a prop.
	Good stuff.
	Anyway, circling back to RFK Jr., he comes up in conversation here.
	Do we have Well, this is a lovely holiday, I must say.
	I'm really enjoying this.
	I probably won't sneak back across that border.
	I might stay here.
	I mean, listen, I suppose one of the great opportunities that we are afforded by bringing our faith to the forefront of this conversation is the possibility of deep unity and of forgiveness, because an election, by its nature, is a time of conflict and competition.
	It is an election.
	It is a choice.
	It is a...
	But after this election you are going to be the inheritors of the new United States of America.
	My hope is that it will be a period of reconciliation and coming together.
	And I suppose in particular I am encouraged by the joining of Trump's Republican MAGA movement by Robert Kennedy.
	Because I've known Bobby Kennedy for a while, not as long as you, of course.
	But I believe Bobby Kennedy to be a very decent and beautiful and kind man.
	And I also note that since he has joined the campaign, he is brought to the forefront, and I'm of course not claiming to be an expert in your politics, but I noted that he spoke about free speech and the integrity of that.
	ending war and children's health.
	From which I can only conclude he must have become some sort of right-wing fascist.
	I think the children's health was the giveaway.
	Anyway, you evil man. - Interesting.
	See, what RFK Jr.
	has actually come out in support of is protecting hate speech on platforms like Twitter, ending the Ukraine war by letting Russia take it over and doing nothing about Gaza because he believes Israel aren't doing anything wrong there, and RFK Jr.' 's children's health defense non-profit organization is dedicated to anti-vaccine misinformation and ensuring children don't get vaccinated against deadly diseases.
	So, in reality, he's advocating for hate speech, which causes immense harm, the continued slaughter of women and children in Palestine, for Russia to just take over a sovereign country because they feel like it, and for children to not be vaccinated against deadly diseases, which inevitably leads to yet more children dying.
	And in its totality, it does sound a little bit right-wing fascist-y, doesn't it?
	Well, but that's exactly what we've been talking about the whole time.
	He can say that he's those things.
	He's anti-war, and he cares about children's health.
	The clickbaitification of the human condition is... That's a thing that makes me just want to stare into the middle distance in a dark room, because I don't know what we're going to do about that.
	It's bad.
	Yeah.
	It's been with us all the time, but like the power of modern technology is what is making this more dangerous than ever.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Just the hoovering up of all context to all of this stuff.
	Fun times.
	So now Tucker weighs in on RFK Jr.
	Bobby, like you, seems like one of those people who had to give up a lot to follow his conscience.
	And he does seem liberated in a way.
	He seems like he's crossed some line where he had to do the most unpopular thing.
	And in so doing, he became kind of a different person.
	That's the feeling I get.
	I just saw him last week and I was really struck.
	He seems different.
	Y'all are calling him Bobby Kennedy!
	Well, yeah, I watched that episode of your show and he was so lucid and articulate when he spoke about nature and our connection to nature and his own love of nature.
	Even though Well, formally, you know, I think you guys like to hunt stuff, don't you?
	And I know I do not judge Americans for hunting.
	I've had that argument and I'm never having it again.
	Well, we, but to be clear, we hunt and release.
	You release them.
	Just kidding.
	You release their wee corpses.
	Fly!
	Oh.
	Non-judgment.
	No judgment, no higher tribunal than him.
	No point in arguing.
	I'm not arguing with anybody at all.
	Well, that makes life easier for you, doesn't it?
	What a convenient way to not have to stand by any values whatsoever.
	Anyway, RFK Jr.
	is seeming much more free and relaxed according to Tucker Carlson, and I think we can all guess why.
	He's no longer having to pretend to be a Democrat or an Independent.
	He's where he always wanted to be, which is having his head firmly in Trump's behind.
	And I bet no longer having to pretend is probably quite freeing, I think, you know?
	That's probably what we're seeing.
	The notion that he has given something up or let something go.
	Right, that he sacrificed something, that he made an unpopular decision.
	His last name is Kennedy.
	His last name is, if his last name wasn't Kennedy, he could not get out of his own town.
	No.
	Straight up.
	None of his life would have happened how it happened.
	No.
	I don't even think that the falconry would have started.
	Like, no, that's not, because he was a fucking Kennedy.
	And there's a lot of baggage and a lot of bad things that also come with that name that I also kind of feel like is disqualifying to be in public office.
	Sorry.
	Especially that one.
	And if y'all listen to the Behind the Bastards episodes, you know, that one's too fucked up.
	He's not, he can't be allowed to be in charge.
	He just shouldn't be in charge of stuff.
	Shouldn't be allowed near anything.
	Um, yeah.
	Well, I mean, it's just, he's not, he can't be, he can't be in charge of things.
	Like it's just not.
	No.
	Um, the, the, the concept of RFK Jr.
	loving nature is a hilarious one to me because it feels like all he really loves doing is murdering nature and mutilating the corpses of its animals.
	Like.
	That's what I've seen of him loving nature.
	It's a very Audubon approach.
	I love birds.
	I will kill them and stuff them and paint them beautifully, I might add.
	Revolutionarily gorgeous, but still.
	You know, conservation had a different face.
	But guess what?
	It's not Audubon times anymore.
	No!
	Don't drip whale juice on your kids.
	Let's not.
	Yeah, maybe not.
	Maybe we're okay without that.
	It's so weird.
	Even that.
	Be eccentric.
	But don't also want to be in charge and say that you can be in charge.
	Because it's just not true.
	Yeah, no, no.
	Your thinker's broken.
	Uh-uh.
	Also, like, I love Tucker's kind of concept that, like, oh, you know, he's sacrificed so much for truth, you know, in what he's doing now supporting Trump.
	Whereas, like, a couple of weeks ago, he was trying to get a cabinet position with Kamala Harris.
	Yeah, he's he's just going with whoever will take him to the prom.
	That's what he's doing.
	Right?
	Well, yeah, that and like, and if you If you read or even hear a report of the RFK Jr.
	that was described in his wife's suicide note, that's not the person that Russell described.
	Nope.
	We do live in a world where both of those people are real and both of those realities are true.
	But it is our job to not be blind, like as human beings, as adults that hold each other accountable in the world, is to not be blind of that other person.
	That it was real enough for her to not want to be around anymore.
	Yeah.
	And you can't just ignore that.
	That was a selling point for Russell for Christianity in the first place, is, well, I'm a Christian now, so nothing I did before matters.
	Yes.
	That's the icing on the cake.
	That's the cake.
	That's the prize.
	I'm reborn.
	That he got.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah.
	All this conversation around values as well kind of did remind me of something that I've been curious about for a bit, yet have no kind of confirmation on at the moment.
	I'm wondering if Russell is still vegan?
	You know, I feel like, given his newfound Christianity and the fact he spends a lot of his time talking to people on all-meat diets these days, I'm wondering whether, like, it's fallen by the wayside a bit.
	Because he used to spend a lot of time complaining about being vegan before, and I've not heard it in some time.
	So I'm curious.
	You know what?
	I think that could just be, um, I mean, cause like he pays someone to make all his food.
	So like, you care, you know, whatever, or buy it or whatever.
	Um, but like, so it's probably very easy for him compared to regular folks to be vegan.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And he's also very vain, so he's going to want to not eat enough to not be thin, which is a legitimate thing that he struggled with in his life, so that's still going to be there.
	I don't know that him talking about it, I think that he's adjusting to his audience because they don't want to hear it.
	This is the other question, yeah exactly.
	Whether he's just stopped talking about it, yeah exactly.
	I mean I feel like that's the attribution I would give because it's also like a status thing, you know?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, oh well.
	I'll be keeping tabs anyway, but yeah, it reminded me this whole conversation around nature and everything.
	I was like, yeah, what about that?
	Alright, so now we meander back to the subject of the DNC.
	He's an extraordinary character to incorporate into that movement, and I think it will be very difficult to come up with continual condemnation to such varied characters.
	Trump, it's easy for them to condemn him indeed as a misogynist or to continue the lawfare.
	Bobby Kennedy, oh he's a kook, he's a crackpot, he seems to think that the pharmaceutical industry have some interest beyond your wellness and your general health.
	The mad conspiracy theorist.
	What are they going to summons up about Tulsi Gabbard?
	I mean, what is it going to be?
	They don't like that streak in her hair.
	That's the sort of thing a supervillain would have.
	She's a lady Zod, they may say.
	General Zod, Superman 2.
	Sorry it was obscure.
	I'm just wondering how the sort of the creeping condemnation and the lack of clarity.
	When I watched that DNC and its sort of giddy excitement for celebrity, which by the way when I was the recipient of it I would have happily sort of guzzled down like a narcissist nitwit, easier to observe its ridiculousness on the outside.
	But there was a fella that came out, you'll know his name, but he was a sort of a somewhat portly billionaire and he was called something like Prieskrig or something like that.
	And he came out to say sort of like, you know, Trump's not a billionaire, I'm a better billionaire.
	You know, he said something like that.
	But just before Bernie... What a message!
	Just before Bernie Sanders had been out there, oh, billionaires!
	Oh, billionaires!
	Of every human persuasion should be stopped!
	And then that guy came out and said, there's good billionaires and bad billionaires.
	And I thought, um, no, they don't have any sort of Strike down Citizens United!
	just the desire to win an argument.
	And that's what happens, I suppose, when politics has been captured by the donor class and the lobbyist class.
	I wonder when we will see donations extracted entirely from politics, the profession of lobbying entirely removed, ameliorated, annihilated. - Strike down Citizens United.
	Is that what you're talking about, Russell? - And yet the audience go fucking wild for it.
	You know, it's a kind of thing.
	Again, these concepts, when divorced from socialism and everything else, they love them!
	Exactly.
	It's infuriating.
	But I can tell you now, it won't be happening this November.
	It's another issue I agree with Russell on, but again, he's presenting this as being very one-sided, like, oh, the Democrats don't have any defining argument, just a desire to win an argument, and that's because of lobbyists, as though all Republicans and even all Trumpers somehow agree on everything with each other, and there's no lobbying money getting thrown around the Trump campaign at all.
	Sure thing.
	Trump has an idea of a plan or whatever he said.
	Yeah.
	Bitch, you were the president.
	You've been at this since 2015 and you have like a passing notion of a plan.
	Yeah.
	That's a glass house I shouldn't throw stones at.
	Also, was he talking about Pritzker, my governor of my state?
	Yes, he was.
	The thing Russell is describing of having Bernie Sanders up the DNC rail against billionaires and later being followed by J.B.
	Pritzker bragging about being a billionaire, that to me is actually a much greater admonishment of the two-party system.
	Like, leftists and liberals shouldn't be forced to share the same stage in the same way that moderate republicans and literal neo-nazis shouldn't be forced to share the same stage either.
	We could have different parties for those.
	We could have separation.
	You guys do that kind of stuff, which blows my mind.
	Yeah, we have a little bit of that.
	It's getting there.
	A little?
	Blows my mind, truly.
	Yeah, that's fair.
	It's so different.
	That is fair.
	And also, genuinely though, Pritzker has done a lot of good for Illinois.
	And because of Chicago and because of these population centers is why we can end cash bail.
	I mean, there's good stuff.
	I think that you have to be very guarded about enjoying any millionaire, but as far as a governor goes, Um, considering the alternative, like a Greg Abbott or a Ron DeSantis.
	Yeah, we're doing okay.
	Yeah, no, it's true.
	It's true.
	Um, you know, credit where it's due, I guess.
	Um, I mean, this is the second time that Russell has brought up the billionaires thing.
	One could argue that he is very much intentionally missing out the point that J.B.
	Pritzker was trying to make, which is that Donald Trump is a billionaire on paper only, with crushing debts up to his eyeballs.
	But rather than let the truth damage the Trump brand, Russell pivots it to, well, they can't decide if billionaires are good or bad.
	Yeah, okay, sure thing.
	Yeah, they're two different men with different views that are allowed to speak under the same Under the same roof.
	Yeah, and making the point that Trump has a lot of legal incentive to be the president again because otherwise his ass will be some degree of grass.
	That's a compromised individual because of his Because if he doesn't win, he's toast.
	He's done.
	He's not even going to be done.
	He could just like have an ankle monitor at Mar-a-Lago.
	Also, to go way back to the start, there are much bigger problems with Tulsi Gabbard than her being a lady Zod.
	You know, she's another bloodthirsty bigot from a cult for a start.
	A point we discussed when she was on Russell's show a couple of months back.
	Anyway, Russell gets to what he wants for the world.
	Radical decentralisation, radical federalisation.
	I wonder when, because surely at some point the possibility would exist to have the experiment that I understand your founding fathers were interested in.
	Unique experiments in republicanism or democracy, you can use whatever term, I don't want to offend anybody, but you could have principalities that were responding to the will of the people.
	And if the people are guided by God, if all of us are attempting On our own, not on our own, but through ourselves and through our community to connect with God, then it's more likely that we will create communities and states and nations and a planet of peace and prosperity from the bottom up, not from the top down.
	Not like the imposition of power structures.
	You can see its homogeneity on every matching high street or main street.
	You can see that it's like it's landed on our cultures.
	It's no different really in my country.
	We have a similarly globalist leader, an authoritarian who claims to care, who wants to protect you from you.
	Yet another Macron, Trudeau,
	These kind of characters that come out often with wonderful haircuts to tell us that they care for us and they care for us so much that we have to have a we have to remain in our homes and cover our mouths and we mustn't travel more than 15 minutes and you sort of get the sense that some dreadful revelations like Mark of the Beast is about to be implanted under your hand all for your safety of course you understand and I feel like can't we just well I'll look after myself it's all right
	I don't need your continual care.
	I don't want to be medicated and cared for so aggressively.
	Libertarian nonsense going down quite well there with Tucker's audience, not particularly surprising.
	So the globalists are going to put the Mark of the Beast under everyone's hands, huh?
	Seems kind of casual for Russell to just be throwing that out there, but all right, fine.
	Oh, he's having fun.
	He is, yeah.
	The amount of medical debt and prescription drug bills I am positive that is in that audience makes me sick to hear what he said.
	And it makes me sick that they have been convinced that cheering for it is the right feeling to have and the right attitude to have.
	That makes me...
	Whereas over here, you know, medical bankruptcy doesn't exist.
	It's not a thing, you know?
	And to try and explain that to that audience, I cannot even imagine how nightmarish it would be.
	Well, they have an excuse.
	Oh, there's a long wait.
	Again, bad news about specialists and just doctors in America.
	Yeah, right.
	Sorry!
	Exactly.
	Also, the Founding Fathers weren't particularly interested in experiments of republicanism or democracy like Russell is saying there.
	They founded a system which keeps the white male aristocracy in power, and it continues to do so to this day.
	The idea that Russell's notion of direct democracy within tiny theocratic ethnostates Is anywhere near what the Founding Fathers were looking at 300 years ago is pretty laughable.
	Yeah, they had a very specific insistence on being as large and cooperative as possible within the states as well to prevent the British from taking the colonies back for a start.
	But anyway, anyway.
	Next, Russell takes some swings at the Labour Party.
	But do you feel like people you know in your country are waking up to what you just said?
	I think so.
	The problem is, and I suppose it's something that you've been very articulate about, is the primary vessels of communication appear to be controlled by a particular class of people.
	And that class of people are somewhat reluctant to unhook themselves from a rather satisfying illusion.
	The illusion that what they're doing is valuable and important and that it's really vital that they continue to protect whatever target, whatever nominated group it is that's convenient for that purpose, from what they regard to be the sort of spilled and disgusting mass of ordinary people.
	And if for a moment they were able to consider that That's no longer the congregation.
	That's not the world they're dealing with anymore.
	I suppose there was, for a brief moment after the cultural and civil rights movements of the 60s, a kind of alliance between working people and the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie.
	It's kind of been steadily Breaking down.
	There's no question that the party of ordinary Americans, working Americans, is the Republican Party under Donald Trump.
	In my country, there's a sense of vagrancy.
	The party in my country that's meant to be the party of ordinary British people is supposed to be the Labour Party.
	But they hate Ordinary British people.
	You can kind of feel the loathing dripping insidiously from their venomous saliva as they angrily orate from their secular pulpits, condemning you for being you, annihilating the culture from underneath, annihilating the culture from on top, and wondering why people feel bewildered, desacralizing nature, desacralizing the land,
	Putting a screen in front of every face, filling every belly with sugar, and then wondering why people are weary and discontent.
	Mm-hmm.
	Annihilating the culture.
	That's some specific dog-whistly shit.
	So, again, I have to point out, like, I have never, through the duration of Stay Free with Russell Brand, heard Russell come for the Conservative Party in this same way.
	Despite the Conservative Party being predominantly made up of literal aristocrats with immense wealth and titles, who despise the working class, the NHS and any brown people, they spent 14 years ensuring to fuck all of those things as brutally as possible during that time, demonising the poor as they went, never has Russell come for them in this same way.
	The Labour Party, on the other hand, well, yep, I've got some pretty significant issues with their current Tory-lite iteration, but they do actually have some people in there from working-class backgrounds at the very least, and they do pretend to help the poorest and most vulnerable in our society, and pretend to lift up the working class.
	There is at least that pretense, rather than the outright vitriol we got from the Tories.
	And you never know, one of the Labour policies might actually end up doing some good somewhere.
	It is possible.
	It's still early days.
	The same could not be said of any of the Tory policies for a decade and a half.
	They roundly fucked the poor and cut taxes for each other.
	That is all they did for 14 years.
	And as for why Russell never came for the Tories in this same way, well, I think it's a combination of wanting to shake off his left-wing past, wanting to bag on the US Democrats a lot more to fit in with the alt-right, and then there's also the fact that the Tories spent all of their time granting tax breaks to the immensely wealthy, and Russell is one of those immensely wealthy people.
	So class solidarity, right?
	Like, he's not gonna come for the guy who's cutting his taxes.
	Yeah, well, and you know what?
	It doesn't help their argument against the fact that there's a Monoparty, right?
	That, like, across the aisle, the people with the most power...
	What I was hearing, Russell's like estimation was certainly like it was tailored for the group that he's talking to because a better complaint for like maybe more thoughtful, less indoctrinated audience is, or at least my fucking complaint, is yeah, the citizens get pandering.
	And the venom is for the immigrants, and that's the thing that I'm not hearing here.
	I mean, the dog whistles are very much there, and I don't think they have to, because they're not riling anybody up.
	Russell's holding court, so he's being nice, and he's sounding nice, and he's sounding palatable, and it is.
	It's this cleansing of the... Oh, what's the word?
	Fuck, shit, cocksucker, motherfucker.
	Yeah, that one, yeah.
	I know it wasn't, though!
	The image, public image, right?
	It's like the whitewashing of the public image.
	But yeah, the venom is for... And this is just... Everyone in...
	In charge is the venom is for foreigners and for immigrants, which to me is the least fucking rational position to have.
	And like, I get the pandering to the citizens.
	Yeah.
	So like, and, but then they're used as a prop again.
	It's like, we, we love and trust and protect our citizens.
	And the venom is for non-citizens, which is a breed of insanity.
	What he was talking about at the very start of like, oh, you know, having what they think they will, what they do is so important, protecting, you know, these, these specific classes from, you know, the rest of us, you know, throwing masses or whatever.
	And it's like, well, yeah, they're in this very recently had to protect, you know, refugees from fucking white nationalists.
	On the streets of the UK.
	Yes.
	Yeah, we have to do that because they were gonna get killed and like they set a hotel on fire like come on It's good lord They're very far away from reality.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	No, absolutely All right.
	Now we get to Tucker's final question so but my last question is Where do you think?
	We are in a year Do you have a clear picture of that?
	No, I don't actually, Tucker.
	I mean, I'm worried about where we're going to be in half an hour.
	Yeah, I agree.
	I'm thinking about sprinting off this stage into the Phoenix night.
	Well, we're going to get dinner because I'm starving.
	My hope is there are for some time technology has created the possibility for further decentralization of power.
	It is clear that this is being resisted by the use of crisis to legitimize re-centralization.
	I wonder like you know when I see that there was of course Napster created disarray in the record industry.
	Then there was the Arab Spring.
	It was clear that the online technology, social media in particular, could create revolutionary moments.
	Then through commercial ingenuity and the assertion of power, the Wild West of online spaces became tiled over by the familiar logos of corporatism.
	I wonder if the technology and ingenuity that is granted, for example, Uber or Airbnb, might be deployed to create more decentralised and localised democracy, where people would have more control over how budgets were used in their region, whether budgets were spent on education or health or migration or security or military-industrial complex,
	This sounds like an utterly terrible idea.
	He sure went to that crypto conference, didn't he?
	Oh, he did.
	That's what this sounds like.
	Micro-referendums is one terrible idea.
	We've heard that plenty of times before.
	But the reason we elect politicians to go and hold office is so they have to deal with all the nitty gritty of the policy and the budgets and all that bullshit.
	A good chunk of it is very complicated.
	And at the very least, there's just so much information Like, these politicians have entire staffs to help them sift through it and understand it.
	And, like, if the average voter had an app like Uber to somehow vote how they want their local budgets to be spent, things would devolve into chaos within about a week.
	Like, I can see it now.
	Oh, this much money goes on migration?
	Well, let's cut all that.
	Oh wait, you mean it was actually for processing the migrants and so now we've just got an insane backlog of people because I cut all the funding?
	Ha!
	Who'd have thunk it?
	Like, the idea is just so incredibly short-sighted and dangerous it borders on the moronic.
	Yeah, like, if you wanted to, like, I just would love to hear, like, I'd like to hear Russell think about it in any practical term, in any kind of practical way.
	You know what I mean?
	You have this ideal that you're wish-casting and you're opining about.
	What he's saying is, I think in his mind, he is saying how it would work.
	Is like, but no, no, no.
	Like if you were in charge of the city planning that had to do it, how would you do it?
	And the fact that he is unwilling or unable or both to even like explain it in those terms and like a policy, like show me you understand policy.
	At all!
	I guarantee if pressed, he would just go, well, I'm a comedian.
	I don't know.
	Yeah, that's for clever people than me to figure out.
	You know, it would, it would just.
	He's got an out every time.
	Yeah.
	He's got, he can, yeah, he can wriggle out of it.
	And that's like, just even if it's wrong.
	How do you think that would look?
	And the thing is, he is the person, the rich person, who is benefiting the most from the quote-unquote disruptive kind of like, I can order anything and have it sent to my house as soon as I want, and it doesn't matter about the price.
	I don't have to think about that.
	I get to have what I want.
	And oh sure, I bet your accountant says that you can't do this, you can't do that, or whatever.
	You can pay the accountant in the fucking first place.
	That is a privilege in and of itself, to have someone else manage your money.
	It's such a denial of privilege and just a blindness to privilege that I keep seeing happen on this stage with both of these fucking chuckleheads.
	It's amazing.
	It's amazing to me.
	Thinking that Airbnb...
	The companies themselves.
	He still thinks Airbnb and Uber are doing great.
	He still thinks that, which is profoundly just disconnected from reality.
	It just isn't.
	That's not true.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Well, I mean, Disconnected from Reality could be the alternative name of this here live show.
	It's a theme.
	Yeah, it is.
	It is.
	And also, like, yeah, there's just so much money.
	These guys are raking it in.
	I'm assuming, not to digress too much, but you've seen the whole thing with Tenet Media and Tim Pool and Dave Rubin getting money from the Russian government for being paid by Russia.
	I've seen a little.
	I haven't been able to be plugged in.
	There's also a lot going on.
	that I'm trying to catch up on right now. - Tim Poole was asking for $100,000 per episode of a show.
	That was his asking price.
	And I'm like, these people just make disgusting amounts of money being shitheads.
	You know, like it's insane.
	It's genuinely insane. - It's there to be made.
	You have to consider – because the thing is, it's not connected to the labor.
	It's not connected to the work.
	You're not doing a hundred – and we need to understand that about a lot of high-dollar jobs that are being paid that much.
	I'd say we need to consider the reality of living in a society that rewards The complete disconnect of earning the money, honestly, versus getting paid.
	It's all vibes.
	We've been in a vibes-based economy for quite some time, and that is, like, even, like, if you think about, like, railroad barons, you think about, like, the Golden Age, Those tycoons were still making the money.
	They were monopolizing, they were colluding.
	It was this whole bad thing that we had antitrust protection for, to some basic degree, that was instituted for a while, that is now completely gone.
	They think that they live in a world that is one of those...
	You know, like a plastic tornado tubes full of money and they just get to grab as much as they want as quickly as they can and nothing is telling them that's not the case.
	They're not getting resistance like Sean.
	Damn it!
	Oh my God, Steven Crowder.
	Sean, I'm so sorry.
	Steven Crowder is an excellent example that the inflated kind of like, the inflated value he put on himself is comical.
	Yeah.
	But there is a, not basis in reality, there's basis in his reality for throwing those numbers out in the first place.
	Someone's allowing him to think that!
	Someone's!
	It's comical until someone's willing to pay it, you know?
	And that's exactly what happened with Tim.
	You know, $100,000 for Tim Pool?
	I'm like, really?
	Per episode?
	What?
	Sometimes you shoot for the moon and you hit the fucking moon!
	And why not?
	If you don't have any ethics or morals and don't think that you're like, I mean, you and I have talked about, I've talked a little bit probably on the show, definitely more off the show, of like my conviction that like, yeah, I make art and I don't, I'm a shitty boss.
	I treat my one employee like crap and I fucking don't pay myself.
	But I also have a very strong conviction that like, I want art to be accessible.
	And even if it's just me doing it, I want people to be able to live with art and fun and nature and all that shit.
	Like, I don't enjoy it in their house.
	I think it's fucked up that poor people don't get to do that and rich people do.
	That's not right to me.
	I have a pretty, again, problematic, probably, carburetor on how much I'm going to claim that I'm worth.
	Because I'm not shooting for the moon.
	I'm also not paying myself, so that's not good.
	There has to be a lack of an ethical... There has to not be an ethical barrier if you are willing to just throw out a number that is that ridiculous.
	Yeah.
	Or even if you see one of your peers getting it, oh, you might as well try.
	It feels just like this game of chicken.
	That's what capitalism is.
	Baby, it's a Ponzi scheme.
	It's a pyramid scheme.
	And it's just like, oh, I'm daring you to do this.
	I'm daring you to do that.
	It's a problem in a lot of places.
	But also, it would not be getting paid to someone if someone didn't think, yeah, it's worth that amount of money.
	Yeah.
	That's something we desperately need to connect these two things together.
	It was like, oh, why do you need all this money?
	They want power.
	I see so many fucking memes about it, like how much money it would cost Elon Musk to pay for the Flint, you know, like fix the Flint water crisis in Michigan.
	And why he doesn't, it's like, oh, why wouldn't he?
	There's a very specific fucking reason.
	And that's the one thing that he is completely clear on, is that that money is his.
	And he wants the money, and he wants the power.
	And he wants all of our tax incentive breaks, and he wants all of our tax money, because it's his and he wants it.
	I will say, it turns out at least three of, I think it was three of the people that he borrowed money from to buy Twitter were Russian oligarchs.
	So, not all of it is.
	The amount of corporate, like, corporate, like, Collusion for corporate money laundering is at a fever pitch, and it's also killing the planet.
	Yeah, we need to be very realistic.
	We need to be way more realistic and way more aware of what is happening.
	Plausible deniability and money laundering.
	Because that's also, like, you're buying Tim Pool.
	That's what you're buying.
	Yeah.
	Because he doesn't have that much value.
	You know, like, the investment, like, you got to ask, like, okay, what are they actually paying for?
	What, who is, like, who is Rumble actually paying for?
	Who is Twitter actually paying for?
	And there's an answer.
	There's an answer.
	But then the Panama Papers people, their cases got dismissed.
	So that's cool.
	Yeah.
	Fuck are we doing?
	Yeah.
	I don't know, man.
	And this is their team.
	That's what they're all about.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Oh, absolutely.
	And yeah, speaking of well, moronic ideas.
	I have a great faith in fact, and you alluded to this earlier yourself, in the wisdom of ordinary people.
	Populism is being perjured as a term and being equated sort of, kind of, cleverly, they're very good at this, the way that they can start using terms like joy or weird, but you know we can Quickly curate and bring together packages of people doing it again and again, these points being reiterated.
	And there's an attempt to make populism a kind of dirty word, a dirty term.
	But populism simply means, as far as I can tell, listening to people and forming government on the basis of consensus, from the bottom up, not from the top down.
	So there is a possibility With the great work that you continue to do, particularly if it's conducted with an open heart and radical inclusivity and a willingness to form new alliances, there is a possibility that something extraordinary could happen in America, and America's the one country where it really ought to happen.
	New alliances that Absolutely defy their language of condemnation.
	We must be radically open-hearted, radically loving, radically forgiving.
	For who was the most radical being that we have ever known?
	Who loved more than anyone else?
	Who forgave more than anyone else?
	Who gave themselves that we might live?
	I can think of I can't see in secularism any solution.
	I can't see in politics anything other than the green shoots of possible change in the alliances that we've touched upon.
	But in our Lord and Saviour, I can see the hope and redemption that was promised us.
	And that will be my path.
	Why hasn't it worked yet then?
	Yeah, so throughout the course of this conversation, Russell has pretty firmly, you know, cemented himself as a, well, as a Christian nationalist, basically, even though he's not from the USA and does not live there.
	Also, we've confirmed that Russell definitely doesn't know what populism is or why it's a bad thing.
	Oh, it's just listening to the people.
	Or, it's pitting the people against some fill-in-the-blanks elite, while the leaders of the movement are always elites themselves, with the end result being fascist authoritarianism, almost always at the expense of minorities, or in this case perhaps anyone who isn't Christian, if we follow Russell's version of things.
	Well, the non-Christians have their own place over there, and it's just as good.
	Right, exactly.
	Except we're very equal, don't you know?
	All the blacks can go over there, all the gays over there, right?
	Yeah, fuck me.
	That's not what he pitches.
	He pitches these homogenous ethnostates where like, oh no!
	Black people and gay people and Jewish people, no, of course they're all welcome.
	It's just we have all these rules that they don't really like, so they don't want to be here.
	Again, I'm not racist.
	It's just the truth.
	They just don't like it here.
	Black people don't like being rich because they can't manage their money.
	Listen, All the Depresso books I listen to, genuinely, they prepare me a lot for the arguments that are made that seem a lot more... Listen, I go to a lot of little museums in rural places, and the phrasing is...
	Very interesting.
	I'm sure.
	With the pioneer of it all.
	Like, truly.
	And so, I think it's less shocking because I've learned a lot about it, right?
	And so that's exactly what, like, that's the That's the oopsie poopsie.
	Well, I didn't really think about it that way, but we already did it.
	So we're here.
	That is a populist kind of like talking point.
	That's like, there's this shiny veneer they're putting on these like really insidious ideas and they're doing it really effectively.
	That's what this is all about.
	Of course.
	Yep.
	A hundred percent.
	All right.
	We've got one more clip here and it's been doing the rounds on the all internet.
	So I wanted to include it to cover it properly.
	So I, I've never asked this before.
	We haven't talked about this, and I mean this in the most open possible way.
	not everyone's gonna share your beliefs from my beliefs, but would you close in prayer? - Oh yeah, all right. - Well, I call on the name of Lord Jesus Christ, our heavenly savior.
	Lord, I humbly in this great congregation in Phoenix, Arizona with my host, Tucker Carlson, in deference to him, But in ultimate deference to you, our Lord and Saviour, to whom we are all your younger siblings and your children, I pray in your name that the forthcoming election be an opportunity for unity for America and for Americans, for forgiveness and for grace.
	That the dark and demonic forces that appear to operate at the level of the state, the deep state, and the corporate and global world experience your light, Lord, that we are guided, that you guide all of our tongues and all of our words and all of our hearts, that we feel your forgiveness and that we feel your grace.
	Thank you, Lord, for the many gifts that you have bestowed upon us.
	Thank you for the glory of consciousness itself, in which we can experience you and live you.
	Thank you for the beauty of nature, in which we see your wisdom and your creativity and your infinite glory.
	Thank you, Lord, for the many leaders.
	And thank you, Lord, that you were born and died, that we may be forgiven and that we may have eternal life, not through merit or anything that we have individually achieved, for surely all of us are fallen.
	But in your holy name, We are forgiven by your act of redemption, by your sacrifice.
	In your name we pray.
	Amen.
	Amen!
	Russell Brand, ladies and gentlemen.
	Thank you.
	So if you're listening and not watching, he like, kneeled on the ground, like little kid sculptures that your grandma would have, just so you know.
	Which was weird.
	Yeah, very strange.
	And he just did the little crucifix over himself there, the spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch, you know, hand signal.
	Yeah, Russell is by far from the first person to need this critique and will undoubtedly not be the last.
	However, let me read from Matthew chapter 6 verses 5 to 8.
	Quote, And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.
	Truly, I tell you, they have received their reward in full.
	But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father who is unseen.
	Then your father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." Nearly 20,000 people does not feel very secret to me.
	Well, you're not going to make that argument.
	No, exactly, yeah.
	That was also fucking milquetoast.
	I've heard Greg Locke throws down.
	It can get buck wild and that was like, why did that go viral?
	I'm sorry, I didn't see that at all.
	Yeah, everyone was just kind of pointing out that Russell was preying on the stage with Tucker Carlson, thought it was super weird and super inappropriate and that he shouldn't be.
	Yeah, and also, yet again, Russell is still a babe in Christ, and so shouldn't theoretically be the one leading prayers and teaching the rest of the world about Christianity, right?
	Yeah, hopefully.
	Well, prayer is a little bit of getting to jail free, because that's like you can pretend to be humble.
	I mean, he gave a lot of lip service to the idea of humility.
	Now, yes, you're right.
	He did it into a microphone in a full stadium of people.
	I guess only God can judge him at the end of the day.
	Well, yes.
	But it certainly doesn't seem like the rules in the book.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	No, it does not.
	I mean.
	No, it does not.
	So what I have heard and taken from this, oh, so two lies, I'm positive.
	I'm just putting this out there.
	Russell said, or not Russell, Tucker said he doesn't Google himself.
	No.
	Bullshit.
	And he hasn't seen a movie since the 90s.
	Bullshit.
	He's pissing on my leg and telling me it's raining.
	I couldn't be fucked to go chasing, like, what was such an inconsequential and stupid lie, but I bet any money there are videos of him talking about movies out there, you know, in the last two decades.
	Of course!
	It's just a weird thing to say.
	Yeah.
	And so, um, like, I just had to, like, I was gonna make a list, but then, like, Tucker kind of stopped, it was, like, the Russell hour, and so, like, I, my list is short.
	Um, I'm sure there were other ones had I had the presence of mind to start that sooner, but, um, yeah, it sounds like Russell is trying to bring out the old school tools to apply to his, he's trying to adapt.
	And it can sound wacky to me, but I'm not the target audience.
	I feel like I started as the target audience when we started the show, and I'm just straight up not Yeah, we used to be, and now he's turning those same skill sets to Christian nationalists, and seems to be quite effective in that room anyway.
	Yeah.
	You know, which, a little bit worrying, but okay.
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, and, and yeah, cause I mean like, cause that's, that's all he's trying.
	He's, he's testing material.
	So he's like trying to figure out, you know, like he's trying, he's working on bits and that's like standard.
	Sure.
	You're a performer.
	That's what you should be doing.
	But like that, man, it seems so like there is so much of it is very milk toast to me.
	So like I, Is he gonna water himself down enough to widen his reach, and then not really, like, who's coming along with him, you know?
	And it was interesting to see the people that we're sending videos in that he decided to play, you know, for his locals thing.
	Yeah, the Q&A thing he did.
	Yeah, it gives you an idea of kind of who's listening and who's watching, because I'm just like, I have this kind of like, Who is this?
	I know who this is for, but also I'm like, who is this for?
	Because Russell is like... Those self-righteous diatribes, those righteous diatribes, he's good at it.
	I'm bored with it because I've heard it and I don't care.
	If I just heard somebody say it, I'm like, okay.
	Okay, girl.
	I can read a Dr. Bronner's bottle too.
	Fucking whatever.
	I just...
	I want to hear him explain what the micro voting would be.
	I just, I want to hear that.
	I would love infinitely more detail.
	I don't need, I need any, I need a surface, give me a synopsis.
	Anything, any kind of brain power being applied to practicality and not just swimming in this sea of good vibes of religion or whatever.
	There's no reckoning with boots on the ground reality of what happens to people.
	That's just... he doesn't have to?
	Yeah.
	And it's infuriating.
	Yeah.
	It really is.
	Because regular people have to have their ideas tested and questioned all the time.
	Yeah.
	So I get fucking resentful when I can see just... and I have that feeling.
	Not just about Russell.
	A lot of people.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Do you think?
	Or do you just talk?
	Yeah, and especially when white, male, and backed up by lots of money, that does seem to consistently be the case.
	Rich!
	Yeah.
	Rich!
	Yeah.
	Those dudes are fucking rich.
	Yup, yup.
	Two of the wealthiest guys on the planet.
	What the fuck are you talking about?
	Like, the way that you approach the world has nothing to do with me.
	No.
	And genuinely, I think that rich people used to understand that and kind of keep it low-key.
	Yeah, I think there is a degree of understanding there.
	I think we're better at it over here, I think, because there's such a kind of legacy of aristocracy and entrenched class and that kind of thing.
	But yeah, Jesus Christ, no one should be listening to these two people.
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	Alright, well, hopefully, everybody, see you Sunday!
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	Thank you very much, we love you, bye!
	Margaret Thatcher's still dead, bye.
	Margaret Thatcher's still dead!

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