Actor Robert Neumark Jones joins me to tackle, well, bad faith actors by the names of Russell Brand, Woody Harrelson, and Tom Cruise.Listen to Rob's show Bliss of the Abyss - https://pod.link/1505320846Buy tickets to see Rob in The Passenger - https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/the-passengerListen to Al on I Hate Bill Maher - https://pod.link/1746469734/episode/3f3cd3a07330270a0dc1ab7159314aa9Support On Brand on Patreon! - https://patreon.com/OnBrand
An extraordinary cultural moment, already iconic, already iconic.
We love you, you're welcome here.
I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but it's a bit late now.
They don't want to have a conversation in the debate, but they're lying.
And this is a matter now of fact and record.
Trump is like Hitler.
Let me count the ways.
I'm a Nazi, actually.
I'm a Nazi, actually, and I've kept it now until now, but this is my chance.
Oh, it's propaganda.
Did you guess it?
Did you guess it?
I feel that Christ may have had a better vision.
Bastards, aren't they?
I mean, you can't watch too much of this without realising they're absolute bastards.
Let's go full screen on Russell.
This is On Brand, a podcast where we discuss the ideas and antics of one Russell Brand.
I'm Al Wirth, and each week I go through an episode of Brand's show with a guest.
And this week, I'm thrilled to be joined by actor, writer, comedian, and podcaster Robert Newmark-Jones.
We end up discussing Gaza, DEI, plus the many interesting views of Woody Harrelson and Tom Cruise.
But before we get into that, allow me to thank a couple of new awakening wonders here.
So, Lofontaine, you are now.
You are indeed an awakening wonder.
Thank you very much.
And thank you for reaching out as well, by the way.
And Matthew Ashby, you are now an awakening wonder.
You are indeed an awakening wonder.
Thank you so very much.
And if anyone wants to support the show financially by becoming an Awakening Wonder, joining the Invisible Hand, or donating on an elevated tier, head to patreon.com slash onbrand and sign up, and you will have my eternal gratitude, and you'll be able to access additional content and a completely ad-free version of the show.
Speaking of additional content, I would like to announce that the on-brand monthly live stream is in fact returning on Sunday, March 16th at 8pm GMT on the YouTube.
And patrons...
I will be going through and reading excerpts from Russell's first autobiography, My Bookie Wook.
That's right!
We are beginning the on-brand book club, diving chapter by chapter into Russell's past, and hopefully having a lot of fun along the way.
You won't need to have read the book, though if you would like to, I'd encourage you to pick one up second-hand to avoid giving this guy any money.
As always, everyone will be able to join in on the live stream, and then the recording will be available after the fact for patrons.
Also, it was lovely to see so much positive feedback about Will Weldon's appearance on the show last week, and good news for those of you who like both he and I, because if you go and check out Will's show, I Hate Bill Maher, right now I am the guest on the latest episode.
That's right, I had the privilege of being subjected to not only Bill Maher, but Howard Dean, Pat Buchanan, Ariana Huffington, Jason Alexander, and Andrew Sullivan.
And don't ask me why, but there was something...
Oh, and I am also now a provisionally credentialed member of the Creator Accountability Network, which is terrific.
And I'm going to explain more about it in greater detail, possibly with some verbiage directly from Cannes next week.
But that is all a thing that has happened and is good.
In the meantime, let's get into a fun chat with Robert Newmark-Jones.
Robert Newmark-Jones, thank you so much for joining me today.
Pleasure to be here, Mr. Alworth.
Not Mr. Alworth.
Which word?
That's actually, that's a great question.
You know, and I might, honestly, might leave this bit in, because, like, here's my problem with it, in terms of, like, titles, is that, like, technically I use MX, like, a lot of the time, but I'm like, how do you pronounce that?
How do you pronounce that?
You know?
Because I dislike the pronunciation of mix, you know?
I'm like, that's not a great one for me.
Yeah, I've been tempted to be like...
I need to get a ship or something so I can be captain.
I need a gender-neutral title for that regard.
But yeah, it is a difficult question in general.
I know your pronouns are they, them, but I suppose as a culture we haven't worked out how to get gender-neutral titles.
Other than ones that already exist that aren't gendered in the first place, I suppose, right?
Yeah, yeah, and it's like, you know, I feel like we've managed to nail it in terms of the written form of them, but in terms of actually, you know, speaking them aloud, you know, like...
Professor, you know, I guess.
There are versions of them that exist in regards to professions, but nothing without that.
So yeah, we'll get there.
In the meantime, I'm going to work on getting a boat, I think is my plan.
I shall call you captain, regardless of whether you have a boat or not.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
That's...
That's all right.
You can come back.
Good.
Okay.
So, yeah, my pronouns are they then.
What are yours, Rob?
I know he is.
Yeah, cool.
Sorted.
We did it.
So, you are, among other things, you're the host of the Bliss of the Abyss podcast, but primarily you're an actor in your day-to-day life.
How long have you been acting for, Rob?
Since I was four, but not professionally.
I'm not one of those kiddie actors, although I did do some professional acting as a child.
I was on Grange Hill and some other BBC shows, stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I played a bully.
Oh, I cannot picture it.
I'm sorry.
Couldn't be further from the truth, if I'm honest.
As I was playing the bully, I was like, well, I'm reenacting my trauma because I'm the one who's getting bullied at school right now.
Yeah, revenge on the world, and this poor little other actor kid had to take it, but he was a regular on the show, so I'm sure he was just fine.
But professionally, I've been acting since around 2011, I think.
Yeah.
Okay, quite a while.
Equity card around then.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And so it's something you've been interested in and like doing since you were a kid then?
Yeah.
That's right, my mum was always taking us to the theatre, taking us to see shows, so I got really into it very young.
Yeah, yeah, I'm assuming that's your educational background as well, you know, drama school, all that fun stuff?
I did, although I actually went to university first, I'd got a BA in philosophy first, because I was in love with a girl, which, yeah, that will make you do crazy things.
And so I went down that path for a bit, and I was like, what, am I going to be a philosopher?
Really?
Well, this is the question that's in my mind, Rob.
Normally, if people go in and do a degree before getting into the arts, it's something that's like, okay, I'll make sure I have a backup plan.
A backup plan in philosophy is an interesting way to go.
Yeah, I know.
It's sort of a bit of a narrow career path.
Although, that being said, my friend who I studied with did go on to actually become a philosopher.
He's an actual philosopher, which is quite a good thing.
I mean, you're Captain Al, but he's philosopher nils.
I mean, that's...
That's pretty good.
That's pretty good, yeah.
I've got a number of friends who study philosophy, only one of which is a doctor of philosophy and everything.
Whether she'll ever pursue that academically further, I don't know.
But yeah, there is a subsection of people who manage to do that as a thing, and I'm fascinated by just that on its own, to be honest.
So you made the leap into professional work around 2011 kind of stuff.
What sort of gigs were you taking around that time?
It was all just terrible.
Juvenalia.
Just some really bad stuff.
Some of it I wrote myself as well.
Some of the better stuff.
Thank you.
Went to the Fringe quite a few times and farted around doing various productions.
And then decided, you know, if I'm going to do this, which I do want to do, then I should go to drama school where I can actually learn.
You know, sometimes I'd be good, sometimes I'd be bad.
And I wouldn't know sort of what the difference was, apart from maybe if I was like on a whim feeling that good that day, which is not really, you know, you need it to be a repeatable craft acting.
And I think I was just looking at it as like an art.
Which it is in some ways, but it's also a craft.
And so, yeah, learning the actual skills, honing the toolbox was, I decided, an important thing to do.
And that's when I went to Drama Centre, which is, of course, Russell's alma mater, which you rest in peace.
And yeah, and then after that, obviously, I got more professional work and, you know, eventually became the Hollywood A-lister that I am today.
Well, yes.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
I will say that you finished the course, presumably, whereas Russell was kicked out.
So, you know, there is a distinction.
See, in order to go to Hollywood, you need to be kicked out, right?
See?
Fucked it.
Fucked it on the first time.
But yeah, absolutely.
The craft is essential and sometimes we do need to just learn from people who know more than us in regards to that.
Because I feel like acting is a similar thing to particularly singing, I think.
A lot of people feel like, well, you can just do that.
You can just pick it up.
Anyone off the street can probably do it.
And you're like, oh no.
No.
I know.
And there are always those people, you know, you hear people say, I can't sing.
There are always these people who go, everyone can sing?
And you sort of think, well, I mean, to a certain extent in that I'm able to open my mouth and the noises will come out that will technically have musical notes.
Will that be singing?
In the karaoke, you know, some people can't sing and mustn't sing and shouldn't sing.
Yeah, my position is that everyone can sing with training.
Everyone can be taught, is my experience anyway.
And there can be a sliding scale as to how much work that's going to be, but everyone can get there.
But yeah, you can go from untaught to taught, and to taught you should be able to at bass or carry a tune.
Whether or not anyone's going to want to listen to that tune, or you're any good at it.
Singing is kind of that amorphous bit in between that turns it from not just craft to art, right?
And to the great...
Right!
Exactly.
And I think that's the same thing with acting.
I mean, I've only studied a marginal bit of acting when I was doing a performing arts diploma in college.
But like that...
That seems to be the thing there as well.
There is a distinction between being able to recite lines and then acting as a craft.
It's a different thing.
Yeah, it's funny you bring up the lines thing because I'm in this play right now and I'm on stage for the whole play and it's about an hour and a half, a bit more.
And it is one of the things that people who don't really know much about theatre, if they come and see, will be like, how do you remember all those words?
And you just sort of think, that is honestly often the least of it, really.
If it was just remembering words, I promise you, you could do it too.
There's a lot more going on, did you notice?
Yeah, it's all the other bits, the blocking and the emoting.
The wandering about and reacting and all of the other things going on around you.
No, wandering about is important.
That was week 23 of Drama School, honestly.
Wandering about is really interesting.
Yeah, no, it's trying to wander about without wandering into anyone else.
I mean, that's an art formative itself on stage.
That's a higher diploma.
We didn't get to that, mate.
That's the way it was.
So after that point, you've had some pretty cool gigs in recent years, including working opposite Michael Sheen in a very royal scandal.
I've got my little flask right here.
This is not product placement, though.
It's just a nice hot Yeti thing that they gave us when we wrapped filming on the show.
Synchronicity is what it is.
That's what it is.
How was the experience of having to yell at Michael Sheen?
It was very good.
He's easy to yell at.
He chases it like Ryan.
Sorry.
No, he's great.
I mean, the man can yell.
What that means is, you know, he's very good.
But what that means is that you feel like, you know, and I can yell.
And I'm like, yes, I can actually.
Because if he couldn't yell, I'd feel a bit bad having to yell.
And maybe I'd subconsciously think he's a big star.
I'm just me.
Maybe I shouldn't try and out yell him because then it'll look like I'm trying to steal the scene or something like that.
But if we're both going full bore, brilliant.
Then let's just have a yellathon.
Which I'm not sure if that's exactly what the scene is.
Well, I mean, look, if anyone needs encouragement to watch it, I think that's it.
Watch the yell-a-thon between Rob and Michael Sheen as Prince Andrew.
Yeah.
No, he's fantastic to work with.
Honestly, it was an absolute delight.
It was a great production and it's still available on Prime.
So go and have a watch, everybody.
And I would say come to my show right now, but there's no point plugging my show right now, because it's sold out!
And it's going to end in a couple of weeks, and we might not even have aired the episode by then, might you, Al?
No, no, this will be out in quick time.
But the problem is, yeah, no one will be able to get any tickets.
So you're currently the lead actor in a play called The Passenger.
Tell me about that.
What's the play about?
The Passenger is set in 1938 Germany.
In the day after Kristallnacht, for those of you who don't know, quick history lesson, that's when there was a, at the time it was thought to be spontaneous uprising of violence, but actually has subsequently been unearthed as a state-sponsored and coordinated action against Jewish homes and businesses and places of worship and things like that.
They just smashed up, set fire to...
Beat up, arrested, tortured, all the rest of it.
Thousands and thousands of Jews across Germany.
And the play is set the day after that.
I play this businessman called Otto, who's Jewish, but he's married to an Aryan, as they call it back then, wife.
And he's a very successful businessman.
And so he's sort of passing in society.
And it follows...
The events of his life as he realises that it's getting harder and harder to pass and exist in a state that was in a state of pre-war at that time, but as we know, would further, not that far down the line, turn into all-out war.
And it was written by this guy, Ulrich Boscovitz, who himself had escaped Nazi Germany a few years earlier when they enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which in effect made Jews second-class citizens.
And so he was an exile living in, I think it was Sweden at the time, and he was getting the news from people who were still back there and, of course, from newspapers, and he just feverishly wrote this thing at the time in about two weeks, and it had a small production run in English as the man who took trains.
But it was sort of not really much of a hit.
He himself was interred, sent to Australia on a boat, came back, it was sunk at sea.
He died before the Wonsi Conference.
He had no knowledge of the Holocaust or anything like that.
And it was sort of forgotten about for many, many years, never published in German until 2018, when it was rediscovered and retranslated and became this big international bestseller.
And then subsequently, Nadia Menuhin adapted it for the stage.
And it tells that story of that window.
Between when Nazi life was at its most extreme pre-war to then what would eventually harm it.
And it's prescient in so many ways.
You know, there's a little joke where one of the waiter comes up to him and he goes, you know, the best thing would be to make them wear yellow armlets.
Then, you know, at least we would know.
And this was before that had happened.
But obviously we look back through that lens and we think...
But he died before that was even a thing.
And it's a really interesting piece to have to do and put together.
And so, for example, in the book that's adapted, he mentions he meets a communist who's been to one of the concentration camps.
But the thing is, if you say concentration camp to a 2025 audience, we all think of Auschwitz or one of the others, and we all think of death camps almost immediately.
And, of course, that's not what it was back then.
It was a labour camp.
It was a work camp.
The death camps didn't come in until later.
So we had to actually take out something that was historically more accurate to make it read for the modern times.
So, yeah, it's a fascinating piece, watching this man sort of descend from the bourgeois, upright member of society to what he eventually becomes.
comes no spoilers. - Yeah. - And alongside the disintegration of a state from a democracy to total totalitarianism, which again is why it's perhaps striking a nerve with audiences right now.
- Yeah, I was gonna say, you mentioned prescience there.
And, you know, in playing this chap, you know, Jewish man moving through late 30s Germany as a fascist dictatorship, you know, cements itself and everything.
How much of that kind of does feel eerily familiar to some present day narratives going on?
You know, we'll finish a run and we'll go back and you'll check your phone and you'll be like, why is Elon Musk standing behind the president's desk?
Isn't that where the president is meant to be?
Why are there shadowy billionaires not being shadowy billionaires but being upfront billionaires?
Why are they passing everything by executive order?
Why are they firing hundreds or thousands of people without any...
Why are they trying to subvert the law?
Oh.
Right.
Oh, fuck.
And hang on, they seem to keep doing Nazi salutes.
That seems to be a thing as well.
And worst of all, denying that they're doing it while repeatedly doing it.
And then doing it again, yeah.
Yeah.
What world are we living in?
What is this?
And we know what this is.
We know what this is.
You're acting in what this is.
You're like, oh, oh no.
Oh no, this feels troubling.
This feels troubling.
So, do you know who else has been an actor, Rob?
Russell Brand.
Oh, look at that.
Captain Segway.
Captain Al steering the ship into the ship.
So, beautiful.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
I've been working on these transitions.
So, how would you rate Russell as an actor, out of interest?
Oh, he's terrible.
I've never seen...
I'm sorry, Russell.
I'm not sorry, actually.
Shove it.
I've never seen him be good in anything.
The best I've ever seen him be is when he's being himself, basically.
Which is not really acting.
It's like an exaggerated version of him.
Yeah, caricature.
That's why Forgetting Sarah Marshall was his biggest hit, because it was the closest to the real-life Russell.
And then the further he got away from it, the bigger the flops became.
And the harder the acting is to watch.
It's all, as we call in the craft, it's demonstrating.
He's always demonstrating.
Everything is always too big, too obvious.
Too hammy hacky.
So, I don't rate his chops much as an actor.
I'm sorry to say, even though he trained at my school, but they did kick him out for a reason.
Well, yeah.
I think that's a fair assessment.
The one I'm willing to give him some credit for, I remember seeing him in Death on the Nile when that came out.
He has like a smaller role in that, but he was quite like, I think he was playing a doctor?
He was someone, but like quite a muted kind of role for him, and I was looking at it, and I was talking with someone about it recently, actually, and they were like, yeah, it felt like he was edited out a lot, though, and I was like, oh, maybe that's what happened.
Maybe he just wasn't in it much, and they cut the bits where he was trying, you know?
Yeah, trying.
That's a good word for it.
He does a lot, yeah.
He's definitely trying.
Trying in many ways.
So what was your first experience of Russell Brand?
So I was maybe your first co-host on this show who was actually a fan way, way back in the day of his radio work.
Shout out the Matt Morgan Appreciation Society.
Back when he was on BBC Six Music, before he was any kind of star, really, he was just a reality TV guy, and he had a very funny, chaotic radio show that was absolutely insane, and then it got bigger, it got to BBC Two, and he started having celebs on it, and it became sort of a bit brown-nosing, and then there was Saxgate, and he lost his job, and I sort of never liked anything else he did.
He had some other TV work that I tried to watch that was...
Always really bad.
He had some stand-up specials that I never really enjoyed.
But I held a fondness for those radio shows from back in the day, even up until maybe about five or so years ago when he started to really go hard right.
And I was like, these are becoming, I can't really listen to these.
There was a subgroup of us on the internet.
We used to talk about how you'd listen to them to fall asleep because you knew them.
And they were just, you know, harmless fun back in the day.
And the more it came out, and then, of course, the sexual abuse allegations came out, which were at that time.
And then it's just impossible to listen to that stuff and fall asleep.
I mean, what kind of monster would you have to be to be that that could soothe you to bed?
Yeah, I'm coming very much from a very old, used-to-be, way-back-in-the-day fan who's quite familiar with his very early work.
Yeah, so kind of like a, you know, because the radio format as well has kind of a higher degree of intimacy, I would say, as well.
So there's a degree of parasociality kind of there, you know, and...
Yeah, you can see that changing after the allegations and everything comes out.
You're like, yeah, I'm less comforted by this now.
Yeah, very different parasocial relationship.
Yes, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Oh, you were just predating the entire time.
Okay, cool, cool.
Guess I'm not going to go back and listen to this, which...
I will say, to Matt Morgan's credit, he's been like, oh, I had no idea this guy was so fucked up the entire time.
So, you know, I've no evidence to the contrary.
So as far as I'm aware, Matt Morgan is still okay.
Yeah, and I think he's deleted any past episodes that he has and any past content and stuff and completely separated himself and made a public statement and stuff.
So, yeah.
Agree.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think at least, I don't know, maybe you can edit the Russell bits out of the shows, you know, and just listen, just have Matt's bits, you know.
There you go.
But yeah, yeah, I definitely, I definitely understand.
People have told me they fall asleep to this show, and I'm like, that's insane to me, but thank you.
Like, I cannot imagine being relaxed by the occasional interjection of Russell Brand, but okay.
No, no, no, no.
Oh dear.
Speaking of which, let's get into some of Russell's nonsense here.
There he is.
There he is.
The man himself.
And I'm afraid we're jumping right in at the deep end here, with Russell yet again being broadly supportive of something he should be vehemently against, were he in any way consistent.
And that thing specifically is an AI video showing Trump, Elon Musk, and Netanyahu lounging in a representation of Gaza if it were turned into a beach resort.
Yeah, after, of course, at the very minimum, theoretically displacing the entire Palestinian populace, but that doesn't seem to enter into the conversation at all.
So let's take a look.
Can we reach some sort of consensus together around Trump's vision for Gaza?
Or is it an enormous step in the wrong direction?
Let's have a look.
Trump Gaza is finally here.
Trump Gaza shining bright.
Golden future, a brand new light.
Feast and dance, the deal is done.
Trump Gaza number one Trump Gaza shine is bright Golden future a brand new light Feast and death the deal is done Trump Gaza number one Certainly the AI was kinder to Elon than it was Trump Because when Trump was reclining there He did look a bit portly And I'd say, bravo to Trump for posting something that could have portrayed him in a more flattering light in the most basic of terms, i.e.
his physical form.
Now, I can see why people get...
I'm perturbed about that because Gaza has become a synonym for, in some people's minds at least, genocide.
And certainly is controversial.
Perhaps it's the controversy of controversies.
But in a way, this is yet another example of Trump's unique brilliance.
He is unbounded by convention.
So we'll post something like that.
Uh-huh.
Brilliant, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
The act of posting this AI video is an example of Trump's brilliance, and we are in no way to find this troubling at all.
Well, that's me sold.
Oh, my God.
And he actually introduces it by saying, can we reach some sort of consensus on Trump's plan for Gaza?
So let's just get this straight.
One of the hottest conflicts in the world...
Which stretches back in the modern era quite a long way, but way predates that.
Can be solved with a wonky AI video showing some kind of Vegas on the Middle East med.
And that's going to bring to get that.
And that is what he calls genius or sublime.
What was the word he said?
Brilliant.
It's brilliant.
Brilliant.
Oh, brilliant.
Yeah, of course.
Brilliant.
No, we can't reach consensus on that, Russell.
You fucking idiot.
That's not going to be the answer, is it?
Trump guys are number one, baby.
Trump guys are number one.
Of course, that will bring us together.
Yeah, you just need a dance track and, you know, some pool lounges.
Yeah, I find it difficult to fully express just how objectionable that AI-generated video and song...
Yeah, honestly, you have to be it if you haven't.
It really deserves viewing to be believed.
For so, so many reasons.
Let alone that the President of the United States also posted this to his social media.
But from this we are to take away that it is an illustration of Trump's brilliance and that he's actually kind of brave because the video supposedly made him look a little bit fat.
So there we go.
Probably seamed him down, if anything.
I mean, that's why he's brave, yeah.
Right.
Honestly.
It's so objectionable.
And it's such a weird thing as well.
Why are there male belly dancers wearing skimpy gear?
Why is there a big golden statue?
Why are there all these things that some religious people would view as sacrosanct in a video?
Why is he throwing money in the air?
It's all so...
Ill-judged and poor taste and it leaves such a gross feeling in your body and your brain and your tongue and your mouth.
Help!
Yeah, there seem to be a lot of shots of Elon Musk eating food as well.
I'm just like, why is that?
That doesn't seem necessary, you know?
I'm like, yeah.
The whole thing is entirely bizarre.
And Russell, you know...
He should be completely against this in every principle.
Even just the fact that it's AI, he should be like, nope, that's not good.
But no, from the ground up, this should be a problem.
But on the one hand, this is par for the course of watching Russell devolve into a bootlicking fanatic over the last couple of years.
And also, that does kind of continue here in this next clip.
Do you remember way back when?
Dave Chappelle on SNL said Trump just does in public what other politicians do in private Deal brokering, deal making, just saying, hey, we're only going to support Ukraine if there is a mineral exchange.
This type of politics is working.
The collective conditions must have been created by what preceded it.
Surely, all of the years of globalism and bureaucracy and dullards and semi-showman politicians like Blair or Obama has led to this point where this creature has emerged that's sublimely suited to the new conditions.
He's amazing.
The merchandise is incredible.
And there is certainly no moral foundation upon which his detractors can attack him because they're the people that bought you the pandemic.
They're the people that have bought you various unnecessary global wars.
Donald Trump has emerged to create a voyage generated by the failing culture that preceded him and he is occupying it.
Deftly and somewhat magnificently.
I, like you, stand on the sidelines in giddy awe when I see something like that AI imagery from Gaza.
But from where can you attack him?
The Democrat part can't attack him.
The Labour part in the UK can't attack him.
The globalists can't attack him.
If it brings peace, if this weird sort of looking at Gaza as a holiday resort instead of a holy land and scene of all this carnage and conflict, if that brings peace...
Who among us is in a position to criticize him?
Maybe that guy just does politics better than the rest of us.
Russell.
Blink twice if you're being held hostage by Donald Trump.
This is possibly the most fawning and frankly pathetic I have seen Russell yet.
The rhetoric is amazing.
The merchandise is terrific.
Nobody has a moral basis on which to attack Donald Trump, supposedly.
And he stands in giddy awe.
Niddy orb on the sidelines.
I mean, there's so much to hate about that clip, pal.
Well done.
You've really centred in on so many things that make the blood boil.
I don't know what I hate most about this.
Is it the fawning bullshit of it?
Is it the...
The complete false equivalence, the rhetorically redundant and bankruptness of it.
I mean, there's so much going on that is awful here that it's hard to just choose one favourite.
What shall I say is my favourite?
I mean, so he's a genius because he will do other things people won't do.
That's what he said, right, at the beginning?
Yeah, yeah, basically, yeah.
It's another word for people who do things that other people won't do.
It doesn't make you a genius.
Yes, and criminals.
There are several ways to describe Donald Trump, but in doing so, we are therefore Donald Trump's detractors, and therefore we have somehow created the pandemic.
Yes, that's right.
We don't have a leg to stand on, but also we're the ones who brought you the pandemic and the previous wars, all the previous wars, they came from us.
All these things are the same to Russell now?
These are all just the same?
Didn't the pandemic happen under Donald Trump's watch?
Maybe a little bit.
That was the globalists, though.
Yeah, but he was the President of the United States.
Yeah, but he didn't know just how deep the globalists went at that point, you see.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, Operation Warp Speed and all that.
Yes, that was Trump's thing, but he was just duped.
He was, you know, he was a tool of the deep state and didn't realize it.
So, yeah, let's have the tool back in power because he's an idiot, but we like him.
He's our idiot, you know?
And is he now saying that because he says it out loud rather than in secret behind those meetings that that's somehow better?
Why is that better?
That's basically the best that Russell is able to conjure up to cover for Donald Trump in both the case of Gaza and the whole mineral situation in the Ukraine as well.
That's Russell trying to rationalize the situation and being like, well, at least it's out in the open.
Everyone else has done the same thing previously, despite no evidence of that actually being true.
But everyone else has done it, so at least he's just doing it in front of us, and that's good.
Is that really true?
And that's true because what's your logic tree there, Russell?
You don't have a logic tree, do you?
You've got just one hole all the way to Donald Trump's penis.
It's a jumble of things that he has to keep in his head as being true, otherwise the whole game falls apart.
He has to keep that in there, otherwise he's finished.
He's acutely aware of that fact, and so no matter the amount of cognitive dissonance, we'll continue.
Oh, boy.
So, anyway, who can truly, who can truly criticize Trump?
Well, it turns out Apple's dictation feature can.
And we get this breaking news from Infowars in an Alex Jones video filmed.
Sorry, Al, sorry.
We get breaking news from Infowars.
I'm sorry.
You must have misspoken.
We get breaking news from Infowars.
Yes, we do.
They are the tip of the spear, Rob.
I don't know if you knew.
They're the tip of the spear, and we get breaking news from Infowars in an Alex Jones video filmed from a gym.
Let's have a look at this.
Apple to fix iPhone dictation bug that replaces the word racist, the word Trump that's very silly.
See, that's what the grown-ups are doing, the apparent grown-ups in places like Apple.
They're replacing the word Trump with the word racist.
We can't trust them.
It's not like they're some superior source or force.
They're poor, scuttling, fallen, broken humans just like you and me.
When you can rely more on Alex Jones for credible and reliable information, Alex Jones for all of his wonderful flaws and his evident brokenness, more than you can rely on the legacy media.
When he's reporting, absurd though it may seem, is accurate, you recognise that the world is changing.
Ladies and gentlemen, we just caught Apple in literal subliminal brainwashing.
That was Sean's turn for it.
He's absolutely right.
This is incredible.
His framing's brilliant.
Subliminal brainwashing.
You wouldn't be able to brainwash me into thinking Trump was a racist just because my iPhone told me.
I'm still irritated that it won't write...
Well, I don't swear as much as I used to, but, you know, it's very slow on the swearing, isn't it?
You're right.
This is incredible.
You see more and more of this type of stuff.
Show people what you just discovered.
So if you do voice note to text and you...
Imagine working for Alex Jones, you must be so exhausted, wasn't it?
What?
Why did it do that?
Let's do that right now!
You watch, you put Trump into the iPhone and it came out racist!
Let's do it now!
Oh, come on, Alex!
Please, let me finish my workout!
No!
We're doing it now!
Get it out now!
This is news!
Why are we not...
Like, have you ever been on X and, like, Alex Jones isn't doing a live stream?
Ever!
He's not all constantly live streaming!
And since he's lost all that weight, we're...
Like, man, if you're working...
If you're working for Alex Jones...
And you need, like, a little decompress.
Come hang with us for a couple of days.
We're pretty chilled over here.
We're working hard.
We're doing well as a team, aren't we?
We're blowing up on Truth Social!
We're trying our best over here!
We've got to fill the gap that Bongino's leaving.
People are leaving Brumbo to go and run the actual bloody country.
So we're going to have to work a lot harder and a lot smarter.
Accent you say.
Racist.
See that?
Didn't work.
Racist.
Racist.
Ooh.
Let me get it closer.
Show people what I see.
That is insane.
This is an apple?
Racist.
Yes, it's an apple, Alex.
Wow.
So, wow indeed.
So for those listening, when this lady is saying the word racist into Apple's messaging app using the dictation feature, it quickly comes up with the word Trump before correcting to the actual word of racist.
According to Apple, this was because the speech recognition models that power the voice-to-text feature might show words with some phonetic overlap.
So, like, Trump has, like, a heavy R sound in there, or can do, as does the word racist, obviously.
Apple also said that other words that have an R consonant were also erroneously triggering the bug, though no one seems to have been able to repeat that effect with a different word.
I will admit, this does seem a bit weird.
But determining the cause without more information would be a little bit tough because there are so many variables.
Like, is it an AI model issue?
Was it a disgruntled employee?
Was Tim Cook trying to fuck with Trump in a petty display of nonsense?
It's possible, though that one feels less likely to me.
Um, and yet, uh, Russell, after flashing up an initial Guardian article describing the problem and how Apple are fixing it, went on to insist that Alex Jones's coverage is in fact more reliable than the legacy media.
So, uh, I guess it is subliminal brainwashing instead.
That's where you'll end.
The Guardian didn't use those words in their reporting.
Not that I spotted.
Alex Jones' theory, as opposed to your three that sound fairly plausible, on degrees of plausibility, but Alex Jones' theory is what exactly?
Yes, it seems to be a deep state brainwashing, a subliminal brainwashing to try and get everyone to think of Trump, associate Trump with racist.
So the best the deep state brainwashing can do is make it so that the dictate feature on iOS...
Briefly pops up the word Trump before racist when you speak into it.
This is the edge, the cutting edge, the bleeding edge that's going to infiltrate all our brains and turn the whole...
Yes, yes.
Because nobody previously had been able to make the association of Trump being a racist.
And so they need to do that.
Because there isn't sufficient evidence prior to this.
Yeah.
Ah, dear, oh dear.
And also, like, without the legacy media reporting to solidify the claims being made, like, I might hand-wave a story like this away as being, you know, crazy InfoWars bullshit, which is precisely why Russell puts The Guardian on screen at all.
So it's like, oh, the legacy media are less reliable, but we do still kind of need them to look legit, you know?
Yeah, because we know too much that it would be actually possible to fake this.
It would be possible to fake this.
I don't know how you do it.
And I don't think Alex Jones would put in the time to make it happen.
But it would be possible.
And so, yeah, he needs the veneer of credibility.
But this is something Russell does all the time, doesn't he?
He puts a headline from some more reputable news source before then, on the course of reporting on that, we'll switch sources to something like, you know, headline news.biz and not tell anyone that that's what he's done.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Just very quietly just move along, you know, without letting anyone know.
And yeah, yeah, like this absolutely, like it could have been faked.
That is an option.
You know, this could be made up.
Had there not been, you know, reputable news sources reporting on it, there would have been an asterisk and a question mark next to this, you know.
For sure, definitely.
But isn't it just the thing?
I mean, this is what always gets me about the right-wing shitheader sphere, is that it's always...
It's always, the other side is always malign and malicious, and it's done with intent.
It can never possibly be someone fucked up, or someone had a grudge, or some, the more, you know, realistic, as we know from our life going around, the more realistic answer can never be it for that side, but it can always be for the other side.
It's always this double standard that is just so unbendable.
It's like, well, isn't it just a more likely thing that there's some bug here?
Or maybe there's some coder who's a...
And why is that not...
Why is that completely thrown out that this is some deep state psyop instead?
Why?
Yeah, yeah.
Occam's Razor cannot exist in a world full of conspiracy theorists.
You know, it's just not allowed.
You know, it has to be some fantastical reason as to why this thing is happening rather than, you know, human error.
You know, or AI error.
Yeah, it has to have all these tendrils in.
Because that's how they make their money at the end of the day.
And so they have to present it in that way.
And, you know, it keeps people in the cyclical thinking and all of that stuff.
And, yeah, eventually they've become radicalized and we're all living in separate realities.
It's a fun time to be alive.
Okay, so one thing Russell said in there that I do agree with, by the way, is that working for Infowars and Alex Jones must be quite the experience.
I feel like it would be like attending an anti-journalism school, you know?
It's like, right.
Here's how you do everything the opposite, you know?
Sources?
What are those?
We don't need those.
I have you people on Twitter.
Cool.
Yeah, absolutely.
As I've watched the video, it pans around and you see this woman and it did say, oh, she looks tired.
And then to give Russell credit, that was the next thing he said.
He made rift on it, right?
Made jokes about it.
But honestly, look at this woman's face.
She looks exhausted.
I mean, I'm sure they are.
Like, they're in a gym is the thing.
Yeah, I'm like, Alex, fucking, you know, just leave it.
I mean, he insists on doing special reports at inappropriate times.
Yeah, yeah.
Is that an apple?
Including, I think he's done them while hiking with his family and stuff before as well.
I'm like, dude, just leave it in the studio, you know?
Oh, Christ alive.
So, the InfoWars video continues a little bit here, before quickly devolving into farce as Russell attempts to make this thing work on his own phone.
You can go test this out.
It'll work on your phone, too, if you have Apple.
Wow.
Here we go, let's see it.
Wow.
Here, Charlotte.
Send me a megaviral.
Right down there and say racist.
Racist.
Oh, it's not working.
Racist.
You do it.
Let's all do it at home.
Racist.
Wait, I can't actually work.
I'm such a nan.
I'm such a grandma that I can't actually.
Now, what's this button do?
There you go.
Racist.
Mine's racist.
This is the news.
Racist.
No, mine's not doing it, Alex.
No.
I'm going to send a message to Alex Jones doing it.
Oh, but then it's just going to say racist, racist, racist.
Let's do it anyway.
Let's see what it does.
Oh, no, I've just sent that to my wife.
Alex Jones.
Alex Jones.
Where is he?
He'll be streaming on X, won't he?
Because it's all he's ever doing.
Alex Jones.
I hope it's the...
Well, here we go.
Alex Jones.
Right.
Yeah, not that guy, Jesus.
Racist!
Racist!
Why am I getting these messages?
Trump!
Racist!
Racist!
What is this show?
I genuinely think this might be the funniest that Russell has ever managed to be, and it's entirely unintentional.
Like, I feel like I'm watching a Larry David sketch, you know?
Yeah, or the Alan Partridge where he's going, Dan!
Dan!
Dan!
He's just yelling racist into his smartphone.
Racist!
Oh no, I sent that to my wife.
Racist!
Trump!
Racist!
What are you doing?
I will say, like, he was at least self-aware enough to go, this is the news.
But then he just carried on doing the same thing.
And, like, this did also carry on for another couple of minutes with Russell finally finishing by actually sending Alex Jones a video saying, I was trying to send you racist, racist, racist!
And providing zero context for that.
Just, like, oh, what is this?
What are we watching?
The world makes sense.
Oh, God.
Tip of the spear.
Okay, so from here, Russell moved into an ad break for Rumble Premium, where Dan Bongino's...
Yeah, that's where you segue after that, wouldn't you?
Yeah, exactly.
If you want more of this, you know, for money, please.
But yeah, Dan Bongino's content was conspicuously not mentioned in the Rumble premium ad, leading me to believe that perhaps he won't be continuing his show while he is Deputy Director of the FBI. But, well, you never know.
Wait, wait, wait.
Are you kidding?
Oh, did you not see that one?
Yeah, yeah.
Dan Bongino is the new Deputy Director of the FBI. With what qualifications?
I mean, he was a junior member of the Secret Service for a while, if that's anything.
I don't think it is, but...
Oh my god, so when he mentions Dan Bongino is leaving Rumba, I thought that was like, oh my god, he's actually in one of the higher echelons of government.
Yeah, yeah, it's actually a fairly important job.
This is troubling.
America, are you okay?
This is troubling.
Definitely not.
I'm very torn about it.
On the one hand, fuck the FBI. On the other hand, this seems bad.
Well, the thing about fuck the FBI is yes, but also they have a lot, a lot of power.
And so who do you want to be at the top of the power tree?
Do you want it to be Dan Bongino?
Do you want him to be anywhere near the top of the power tree?
Or would you rather he just be a lunatic on Rumble?
Because he's gone to the top of that power...
Well, the top of the power tree is Kash Patel, isn't it?
I saw that, which is his own problem.
Yeah, all of the appointments are all their individual problems, and that's part of the point.
It's how you missed Dan Bongino being appointed.
There's so much bullshit happening.
How are you supposed to keep track?
Yeah, I will say from over here, from a distance in the UK, I will be morbidly curious to see the decisions that Dan Bongino was going to make in his new role.
But I am one of the people who will not be suffering the direct consequences of them.
So, you know, it is a little bit easier from a distance, you know?
Yes.
Oh, dear.
But, yeah, I don't think he'll be continuing his show because he has been doing three hours a day.
And I feel like that would, you know, you might need those three hours when you're running the FBI. But, yeah, nonetheless, part of the ad that Russell went into is about how Dunkin' Donuts pulled out from advertising with Rumble a long while ago, you know, because it's neo-Nazi YouTube, and they were like, nope, not doing this, which, credit to them.
Right.
And then, as the ad finishes and it comes back to Russell, we got this clip here.
Now, we just found out that Isaac, who works here running our tech, look what he's drinking.
Dirty Dunkin' Donuts.
Filthy stinking traitor brand.
And as you can tell from his name, Isaac.
Yes, that's right.
He's Jewish.
So...
There you go!
Conspiracy!
Illuminati!
It's all happening.
We've got to stay on top of this stuff because otherwise we could all get in some serious trouble.
We have to awaken to the mighty power of Christ accessible to us now.
Aha!
Dirty...
Dirty Dunkin' Donuts, the stinking traitor brand, right?
Isaac, who was drinking a coffee from Dunkin' Donuts, is in fact Jewish, so there we go, Illuminati.
We've got to stay on top of this stuff and awaken to the mighty power of Christ.
Like, I realize it's supposed to be just like a glib little bit, but at the same time, I'm like...
Oh yeah, when Russell says the word globalist, there is definitely a hard G on that globalist, huh?
100%.
What's your favourite kind of whistle?
Is it a dog whistle?
It couldn't be more clear.
Yeah, like the undertones of Jewish people being traitors and needing to come to Christ is very uncomfortable.
Yep.
I cannot imagine how Isaac feels in this situation.
I'm guessing he's just loving it.
I'm guessing he's just enjoying his life.
You know, it's a regular day at work and he gets maligned for being one of the traitorous Jews again.
Oh, but it's...
Yeah, I mean, imagine being a Jewish guy living in Florida working for Russell Brand.
I mean, what?
Heavy days.
Yeah, yeah, I've got to say, I would read that blog post at the very least, you know?
Possibly a story.
Possibly a biography.
I'd be interested.
Okay, so now we move to a bit of British news.
So we've got something of a sensationalist non-story being presented here.
Hey, guess what's going on in my crazy country, the UK?
It turns out that the Ministry of Defence, that's obviously our defence department, are hiring diversity chiefs that earn more money than British soldiers.
That cannot be right, can it?
Let's have a look.
Let me try and understand this story.
This is from Mario Nufal, who's like a British Muslim, and I would say a brilliant contributor to the cultural conversation.
Nope.
The Ministry of Defence...
It's hiring two diversity chiefs with salaries higher than British Army soldiers because apparently inclusion pays better than risking your life.
Let me know in the comments and chat what you think about that.
It's extraordinary, isn't it?
I mean, look, I personally happen to believe that we should create societies based on holy and divine principles, which would include justice, fairness and love between all of us.
But when you create these weirdly divisive...
If initiatives like DEI that likely and potentially, it seems what's being implied here, lower the overall standard and also denigrate, in this instance, the raison d'etre of an institution like the army, then there needs to be a bit of an appraisal as to where we're deriving our morality from.
This odd godlessness can't help.
Give me a break.
Can I just check the source that he's...
Are they credible?
This person's reporting.
Mario Norfall.
I don't know who that is.
So, yeah, he's a Twitter asshole, and he's making a dumb critique of the UK military.
Or rather, should I say, he's recycling this dumb critique from GB News.
That's where it actually originates.
So yeah, in terms of credibility, not looking great.
So what Russell said there was justice, fairness, and love between all of us is what's required.
And yet, somehow, diversity, equity, and inclusion is divisive and is lowering the overall standard, denigrates the military, and is representative of an odd godlessness.
How these thoughts can coexist in one man's brain, I'm not quite sure.
But Russell must spend quite a lot of his time with a headache.
Like, we need fairness, but not equity.
If he in any way cared about fairness or equity, he would realise that...
The truth of the idea behind these DEI things is to bring fairness and equity.
Now, whether or not some of them have been implemented poorly, yeah, of course.
But that happens across the board in all ways.
Again, it's that thing I came back to.
Do you assign a malign intention or just human error?
So there's been some DEI hiring that I'm sure has been not the best practice.
But the idea that spurred it even to exist in the first place is, number one, society is unfair.
Oh, yeah, in lots of ways.
And it was set up that way, intentionally, by the way.
That's how this tiny little island called Britain became so fucking rich, because it was able to sail around the world and steal people and their resources.
There's no other reason.
So that was set up intentionally unfairly.
And now maybe let's try and tip the scales and make it a bit fairer back the other way.
Now suddenly, that is the thing that is deeply immoral.
Yeah, it's funny that.
But then the other thing that really is such, again, a whistle.
He doesn't even use dog whistles.
He just uses regular whistles.
He's saying, the reporting is saying they're hiring some diversity chiefs, which are going to be paid more than soldiers.
Now, I don't know if you know much about the army, but regular soldiers, they're not on a huge pay packet.
It's not a big whack.
It's not a money spinner to be a regular Joe in the army.
A diversity chief.
An executive position would command a higher salary and would be much harder to find than someone to train in the regular army.
So of course they would be...
Financially, oh my god, I'm losing my temper, sorry.
Yes, yes, no, no, you've got it in one.
So the roles being recruited for by the Ministry of Defence are a diversity and inclusion learning and development professional and a culture and inclusion lead.
And these are both management-level positions with strategic responsibilities throughout the entire Ministry of Defence, requiring a specific set of skills and abilities.
Yeah, they pay a management-level wage.
Like, if they want to argue that soldiers should be paid more, sure thing, I've no problem with that.
I do not disagree.
But two people working on diversity and inclusion within the entire armed forces does not, to me, represent a trend of wasteful spending like GB News and Mario Narfal are trying to imply.
Like, going down this road seems to lead to countries having a shortage of things like air traffic controllers So one might think we should maybe be a little bit more careful about accusations of wasteful spending Before we start going down that way Exactly.
And what's more, as well, one of the great critiques that Russell and his ilk like to try and throw at Ukraine is the Russian propaganda concept of, oh, our troops of Ukrainian Nazis fighting the Russian military, and yet Russell is arguing against the very thing that would cement and prevent our own armies from turning into troops of Nazis.
You know?
If you're against Nazis, then definitionally inclusivity should be a good thing.
Unless we're all soldiers of Christ, Al.
Oh, fuck me.
I hadn't considered that possibility.
That's your problem.
Well, that would explain.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not very good at it.
I think that explains a lot in my own life, to be fair.
To be fair, I've just...
I've been leaning into the odd godlessness, is what's been happening.
Yep, that's where we are.
Anyway, from here, Russell moves to what I think is perhaps the real point of a piece like this.
A diversity and inclusion learning and development professional and a cultural inclusion lead will earn 12 grand more than new soldiers.
Oh, that's not enough, is it?
Like, Keir Starmer's asking these kids to go and potentially, as part of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine, risk their lives for £25,000 a year.
I mean, this story does expose some...
Our priorities are way, way out of whack.
Both jobs require no office attendance and come with 11 grand taxpayer-funded pensions.
Meanwhile, the British Army is set to shrink below 70,000 troops, its smallest size since the Napoleonic era.
Isn't that interesting, even just to hear the Napoleonic era raised?
Because with...
Irony, British troops are essentially being put into conflict against Napoleon's Bet Noir, the Russian military.
It's so ridiculous that history, we think of it as being across some chasm, and yet here we all are making choices and participating in dynamics that help us to understand and appreciate history in a new light.
Man!
We can't get involved in wars with Russia.
We can't have leaders like Keir Starmer.
We can't have false gods like DEI when real gods would bring us to a place that is sublime and superior anyway, beyond any of those initiatives.
But if you love God...
And agree that God means we must love one another.
Then you don't need to grant human beings absolute authority and kowtow and capitulate to these corrupt institutions that would use an initiative like DEI to lower standards and create conflict.
What's the corrupt institution?
Which institution is the corrupt?
The Ministry of Defence?
Is that what we're arguing?
I suppose so.
Or just the deep state?
Or shadow government?
Yeah, it could be.
I mean, that's run by the Tories these days.
And how we fucking manage to...
Without any irony, we can't have these false god worshipping.
When he'd just been...
Praising a big gold statue of Donald Trump about half an hour ago is just enraging.
And yeah, of course, as you said, yeah, of course, and then he makes a way to bring in a...
And we can't fight a war against Russia, which, newsflash, we've been doing that for the last however many years.
And also he presents the fact as if it's a fact.
An idea has been floated that there will be British troops in Ukraine, but they're not there.
But he says...
We're already sending them there.
I mean, it's full of infuriating misinformation and also just a load of twaddle.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
I mean, if he wants to argue that the Ministry of Defence is corrupt, I'm willing to hear him out.
But I would like some more specific evidence other than DEI initiatives.
That, to me, does not spell out corruption in a nutshell.
In any case, yeah, we did get to the actual argument being presented, which was, hey, we can't be going to war with Russia now, can we?
Our military is so small, and isn't Keir Starmer terrible?
And I'm just shocked at this turn of thoughts coming from a place like GB News.
Shocked, I tell you.
Did he even have a point about Napoleon, or did he just notice that history moves in cycles, that countries go to war against each other?
It seemed completely pointless.
I think it's like, well, the Russians even defeated Napoleon, so how could we stand a chance?
You know, that kind of concept.
Right.
Okay, great.
Fantastic.
Yeah, we can use naval battles from half a millennia ago to determine what's happening now.
Cool.
Yes, definitely.
Anyway, yeah, DEI is being used to lower standards and create conflict.
And it is weird how the only people I ever see creating conflict over diversity, equity, and inclusion are uniformly straight white guys.
You ever notice that?
And sometimes Candace Owens.
But, you know.
She presents a straight white.
Yes, yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
She identifies as being a straight white man.
But, yeah, it is interesting.
You know, it harks back to that thing of, you know, like, oh, trying to actually make this world right again.
Perhaps means that you might lose a little bit of the privilege that you've been granted this entire time.
That's why it's always those guys who are making the noise about it, because it's coming for your jobs.
It's coming for their job.
They feel like, well, hold on, if there are less places for people like me, I'm a guy like me.
That's all it is.
It's just, you know, my piece of the pie must never shrink, no matter how small your piece is.
Yeah, yeah.
It must never shrink, even though, you know, it's been vanishing and being taken away by rich oligarchs, who are, again, pretty uniformly white men.
But, you know, like, no, we'll blame it on the brown people over there.
It can't be taken away by the brown people or the women.
Those are the unacceptable ones.
It can be taken away by Elon Musk.
That I'm kind of okay with.
Dear, oh dear.
So from here we move to an area a little bit close to home for you, Rob, and we take a look at a clip of a fellow actor, Woody Harrelson.
And he's going to be talking to Joe Rogan about his SNL monologue from 2023, in which he whined about vaccine mandates.
What I was talking about in that monologue was...
What's really about profiteering?
Yeah.
Okay, so World War II, necessary.
Everyone could say that was a necessary war.
Let's say that this war on microbes was a necessary war, right?
Why is anyone profiteering?
Yes.
Why did, you know, FISA get to make $100 billion in 2021?
Right.
Anyway.
Why did the government profit off of it?
The profiteering of war is just wrong.
Like, okay, if you say that it has to be, there's conflicts happening right now, I disagree with, but I'm wondering, why are people making money off of it?
You know?
Even if you think you have a legitimate vantage point from the other side of it, why does someone get to make so much frickin' money off of it?
Woody Harrelson's like an old school hippie, really, and he's like a lefty kind of pot smoking dude in alternative therapies and good food.
And that's the part of the cultural shift that the legacy media aren't good at tracking, that people from what you would have once kind of regarded as the liberal left have via, in particular, Robert Kennedy's appointment become.
Default members of MAGA with all of its 2016 connotations.
The media can't ever give you a proper diagnosis of that because to offer you a diagnosis that is warranted, you'd have to say the institutions of globalism are now...
Kind of redundant and being revivified and continually defibrillated by deception.
It's odd, man.
To see someone like Woody Harrelson ultimately saying, I am a default Trump supporter now.
And I wonder how the mainstream is going to reconfigure.
Well, yeah.
I don't think Woody Harrelson said that specifically.
What was that analysis?
That was absolutely batshit insanity.
I mean, firstly, the legacy media, you know, conspirituality is a known quantity, and horseshoe theory, and there's all kinds of different ways we can explain how...
If you are far left or far right, you can create an overlap.
Or if you're into certain alternative ways of thinking, other things can get into your...
But that doesn't mean that the structures of globalism are collapsing or that Woody Harrelson voted for Trump or whatever weird conclusion Russell wants to make is true.
Yeah, yeah.
What I find more jarring as well is that Russell apparently can't pronounce Woody Harrelson's name correctly.
That bothers me.
He continues to do it as well.
Even his audience were like, you're not saying that right.
And he was like, yeah, Woody Harrelson.
But yeah, apparently Woody Harrelson is a default Trump supporter now, according to Russell.
Harrelson hasn't said many kind things about Trump, generally.
But the argument of RFK Jr. being the gateway, that I can kind of see, right?
Woody Harrelson, he's a raw vegan guy, who also appears to be perpetually stoned, as I think he was in that clip.
He seems somewhat of the crunchy left-slash-libertarian.
He considers himself as living a highly spiritual life and in May 2022 he said he doesn't believe in the germ theory and he found the use of face masks as a preventative measure against COVID-19 to be absurd adding I'm sick of like you're wearing a mask and you think it contains your breath but if it did you'd die.
You'd be breathing in your own carbon monoxide.
Sure thing, buddy.
So we're taking medical advice from him now?
This is the thing.
Again, it's a man who seems to be perpetually stoned, and the actual clip of him talking to Rogan was peak stoner talk shit.
Just like, why does anyone make money, dude?
War is bad.
Why does anyone profit off of war?
Thank you for your unique takes, Woody.
He seems to not know the difference between a figurative war and a literal war.
So we have World War II, and we have war against microbes, and of course these things are exactly the same.
And why does anyone make any money off it?
Well, I don't know, because we live in a capitalist framework where people sell and buy things?
Yeah, maybe the system of capitalism has something to do with the problem, but maybe it's a little bit hard to see when you're worth millions upon millions of dollars talking to another guy worth millions upon millions of dollars, you know?
And what would the alternative model be?
Pray tell.
So arms manufacturers should be non-profits?
Is this what we're doing?
So how were people meant to not make money off of World War II? So you're saying profiteering, which we're making excessive money.
What were they meant to do?
How does it work?
People take their salaries.
People are conscript.
They make weapons.
How does, what's the alternative model, Woody?
Yeah, they don't seem to be presenting that bit, because, you know, it would come off a lot like, I don't know, socialism or communism or one of these other isms that that kind of ilk doesn't seem to like very much.
You know, it would require changing the entire system.
And also, that's a lot of work.
You know, it's much easier to sit in front of a microphone and complain about it instead.
Good point.
Good point, believe me.
And, like, yeah, no disrespect to you or acting as a profession, but this whole bit, particularly with Russell Brand talking about it, has got me like, why the fuck do we ever listen to actors about anything?
And, by the way, I say this as a musician.
I have no leg to stand on here either.
But I'm just like, why do we listen to people just because they do something else that we like, you know?
This is bad.
In Trump's America, they could be leading a department the next day, so you've got to listen to them.
Woody Harrelson will be...
Oh, fuck.
Yeah, that wouldn't shock me.
I mean, yeah, here's the thing.
We live in a world where it is increasingly plausible that, you know, The Rock is going to be the next president of the United States.
You know, all bets are off at this point.
Oh, dear.
So...
We move now from one actor saying dumb things to another actor saying dumb things.
That's why you've got me on the show.
Well, I thought, you know, I've got to keep it relevant to the guests, Rob.
Because Russell's going to cover a 20-year-old clip of Tom Cruise on NBC's Today, talking to Matt Lauer, as this has been doing the rounds again lately.
Let's look at this clip that's re-emerged and gone viral again, where Tom Cruise openly condemns the pharmaceutical industry in a way that just would have been...
Unimaginable during the pandemic, where the interests of the pharmaceutical industry were so tightly aligned with the interests of the state and the culture that they became elevated and sort of presented as kind of saviors, when now, in retrospect, it looks like what they were is what they had always been.
Vampiric and parasitic entities generating profits by giving us products that in significant numbers are detrimental to our health.
The irony, the delicious irony.
Let's have a look at Tom Cruise talking about Big Pharma.
Here we are today, where I talk out against drugs and psychiatric abuses of electric shocking people, okay, against their will, of drugging children with them not knowing the effects of these drugs.
Do you know what Adderall is?
Do you know Ritalin?
Do you know now that Ritalin is a street drug?
Do you understand that?
The difference is this was not against her will, though.
So intense, isn't he, Tom Cruise?
I met Tom Cruise once.
I'd done a film with him, and actually he was super lovely.
Tom Cruise comes along, he's surrounded by his relatives, and they all look a bit like him.
It's like someone put all of the Cruise family genes into a washing machine, and Tom Cruise took all of the best ones.
Everyone else around him looks a bit like him, except exhausted.
Tom Cruise shines at you like some living sun.
Hey, how's he going?
And everyone else around him is like, totally knackered.
Like Cruise is...
He's got some sort of very powerful centre there.
Rude?
Yes, very rude.
What a prick.
And also, I think that powerful centre, yet again, might be millions of dollars and the things that come with that immense wealth, fame and privilege.
And the unshakable belief in Xenu the saviour.
Yeah, that's the powerful center.
Those of us who have to cook our own food and transport ourselves from place to place and do our own laundry, we might look a little bit more tired than Tom Cruise some of the time.
Yeah, that is true.
So some context for this clip is that Tom Cruise, in case anyone forgot, is a big Scientologist guy.
He's their poster boy.
And around the mid-2000s was causing quite a stir with it all.
In this case, touting the absolute nonsense that Scientologists believe about the field of psychiatry.
According to Scientology, among other things, psychiatry is responsible for the Nazis and 9-11.
This belief, it's completely insane, but this belief and their enforcement of it has had a real and genuine death toll, particularly after Scientologists have forcibly detained the mentally unwell, usually until their death.
You're like, oh, cool.
Cool times.
It's just so awful, isn't it?
It really is.
Yeah.
And Russell's somehow using him, I mean, it's a fake appeal to authority, isn't it?
He's saying, look at him speaking out.
It's like, well, I mean, this is what his religion believes.
Of course he would say these things.
This is not...
Out of character or surprising in any way, shape or form, Russell.
Timeologists don't believe mental illness exists.
No, no.
They think it's all a fraud.
Yeah, yeah, literally.
Fun little window into my life.
I once narrated an audiobook by a guy, because I needed the money.
I narrated an audiobook from a guy who I later realized was Scientologist, and his audiobook was all about the DSM-5, and specifically how it's all bullshit.
And I was there reading through this, and I was like, oh, this is bad.
This is really bad.
Also, I need to eat, but, like, this is not good.
And it was only later where I was like, oh, yeah, of course, this is Scientologist shit, you know, because the guy's in California as well.
I was like, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, that completely makes sense.
Wow, okay.
Oh, my God.
I have to immediately purchase.
Do you get any of the rights if I purchase a copy of the...
I do not, no.
I was paid up front, which I'm grateful for because it appears not to have done very well.
So good.
I prefer it that way.
Thank you very much.
So now Tom Cruise is going to say some dangerous and irresponsible shit in this next clip that is awfully reminiscent of modern-day conspiracy theories about anti-psychotic drugs.
There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance.
I'm saying that drugs aren't the answer.
These drugs are very dangerous.
They're mind-altering, antipsychotic drugs.
And there are ways of doing it without that so that we don't end up in a brave new world.
Yes, there are abuses.
And yes, maybe they've gone too far in certain areas.
Maybe there are too many kids on Ritalin.
Maybe electric shock is...
Too many kids on Ritalin, Matt.
I'm just saying, but aren't there examples where it works?
Matt, Matt, Matt.
Matt.
Matt.
Matt!
Come on!
It's really amazing.
He's on a different frequency.
Sometimes being on that frequency can make you seem and indeed maybe even be a little insane if by insane you mean outside of the mainstream.
That's, I think, one of the challenges of the spiritual life is when you start to experience primarily...
An ulterior reality that's not totally defined by rational and measurable information.
You can seem like a lunatic and you can maybe even become one.
I think that's why discipline has to be such a strong concomitant component in any spiritual life.
You have to be really dedicated to God and really dedicated to what you believe in and really dedicated to the ethical and behavioral expressions of that devoutness, i.e.
kindness, service, fasting.
For a second there, I thought he was about to say something really responsible, like, hey, if you're gonna have beliefs that might get a bit wacky, make sure you stay grounded in the same reality as everyone else as well, which I think would be reasonable advice.
But no, according to Russell, you need to lean harder into God, and that will protect you from becoming a lunatic, in his words.
And how many in his chat are bringing up any of the credible essay allegations against him?
And all of the rest of it that just completely goes against what he's actually saying?
What about the actual actions that you judge a person on rather than the bullshit that they can espouse?
No one.
Nah, nah, that doesn't seem to come up very often at all, funnily enough.
It will do occasionally in the Rumble.
Someone will occasionally pipe up.
You know, they've clearly kind of come in out of curiosity and they're like, nope!
Fair enough.
A little bit more Tom Cruise here.
And in the next one, he presents himself as a further expert about psychiatry.
Matt, you don't even...
You're glib.
You don't even know what Ritalin is.
If you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt.
Do your own research.
That's what I've done.
And you go and you say, where's the medical test?
Where's the blood test that says how much Ritalin you're supposed to get?
It's very impressive to listen to you because...
Pretty mad, actually, because during the pandemic, do you remember that there was someone on Tom Cruise's set, because they were allowed to film during the pandemic, that weren't wearing a mask?
And Tom Cruise went, like, mental, didn't he?
Like, he sort of went insane.
Now, his Scientology had educated him as to an alternative appraisal.
Of drugs when it comes to the assessment and address of mental health.
Like a lot of SSRIs are not that effective.
A lot of medical measures that were undertaken apparently scientifically in the field of psychiatry were a little dubious in retrospect.
The drugs that were prescribed and some of the treatments like electric shock therapy that he ran through.
But by the time we get to the pandemic and when we get to the coronavirus respiratory condition, Tom Cruise was like, Evangelically screaming at someone.
You've got to wear a mask, man!
What are you doing?
Did you hear that audio?
Isaac, try and find that, man.
Yeah, Isaac, you Dunkin' Donuts traitor.
Get to work.
So, Russell appears to be pointing out that, like, hey, the Tom Cruise of 20 years ago seems quite different to the Tom Cruise we're presented today.
And I agree.
His film appearances have been very sanitized, as has his media presence, and...
It appears to be because the Church of Scientology are acutely aware that Tom Cruise is their poster child and must have him be likable.
So fast forward a couple of decades from this interview we're looking at, and Cruise is on Mission Impossible 15 or whatever the fuck, and Top Gun 2, and everyone's kind of forgotten that he's the face of a cult with a history of clear and demonstrated abusive practices who have also been accused of human trafficking.
You know, like, I look at Tom Cruise these days and I'm like, oh yeah, there's no faulting the PR game.
What's going on here?
Like, they've done well.
They've done well.
They've sane-washed him.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, going back to one thing you said there in the previous clip and then again in this clip, you know, just to nail how faulty this logic is, he says there's no such thing as a chemical imbalance.
Well, do we have chemicals in our body and our brain?
Yes.
In which case, does that mean they are always totally, exactly balanced?
That is impossible.
That is literally impossible.
If you feel fear, you have a spike.
If you feel grief, you have a spike.
If you feel love, you have a spike.
This is how feelings and emotions and mental states work.
This is why we experience an array of them, because of the flow of chemicals.
And it is...
Something that we've measured, and they have run thousands of trials.
And yes, I'm sure they get it wrong sometimes, but that doesn't mean that the whole thing is completely bankrupt.
It's just absolutely wrong.
Yeah.
It was interesting to hear Matt Lauer be like, oh, it's very impressive that you know all this stuff.
You're being clever, Matt.
You're being clever.
And I'm just there like, oh no, it was this kind of bullshit and being impressed by it that led to where we are today.
You can see it in real time.
I've done my research.
I, Tom Cruise, have read the studies.
I'm sure.
I'm sure you have, Tom.
He's gone through the peer-reviewed literature.
Exactly.
This is 2005 version.
I've done my own research.
I'm like, oh, okay.
Great.
Fantastic, fantastic times.
But it's a complete false equivalence that he then draws to being the evangelical screaming on set because, number one, COVID is an airborne pathogen.
Not a mental illness.
These are fundamentally quite different things which should be treated in different ways.
But number two, he was screaming like that because he was filming during a pandemic.
Now, we don't know what his...
Let's put aside his beliefs on COVID. And just the reality of the situation is, if anybody on that set had caught COVID, tested positive for COVID, all of production would have to be shut down.
That would mean every single person there would not have their job anymore.
Now, some people might still be getting paid, but other people wouldn't still be being paid.
So this would have been a multi-million dollar movie that would shut down because someone didn't put on their stupid mask.
That is the logical reason as to why.
Not because he's some evangelical, well, I mean, he is in some other way, but this is the actual fundamental practical truth of what filming during a pandemic is.
Well, interestingly, Isaac does find the clip of Tom Cruise yelling at someone not wearing a mask.
So we do get to hear it, and we get to hear Russell's response as well.
So let's take a look.
During the orthodoxy of the pandemic, Tom Cruise on set was a kind of literal...
High priest for Anthony Fauci's orthodoxy, and we'll be looking at Anthony Fauci in a moment, again, because of Woody Harrelson's Joe Rogan conversation, in which he accuses Anthony Fauci of being, I think, downright evil or something comparable.
Can you play that in, the Tom Cruise thing?
You're back here in Hollywood making movies right now because of us!
Because they believe in us and what we're doing!
I'm on the phone with every f***ing studio at night!
Insurance companies!
Producers!
And they're looking at us and using us to make them movies.
We are creating thousands of jobs, you motherf*****!
I don't ever want to see it again!
Ever!
And if you don't do it, you're fired.
And if I see you do it again, you're f*****g gone.
And anyone on this crew does it.
That's it!
And you too!
And you too!
And you!
That we'll ever f***ing do it again!
That's it!
No apologies!
You can tell it to the people that are losing their f***ing home because our industry is shut down!
It created a kind of hysteria, didn't it, the pandemic period?
Even someone like Tom Cruise, who, due to his religious perspective, was willing to be outspoken against psychiatric drugs and practices.
When it came to the pandemic, he was swept into that orthodoxy.
It's significant to see someone like Woody Harrelson straddle the two worlds, because now we're living in a time where new perspectives are available to all of us, primarily because of independent media and free speech platforms like Rumble or platforms like X, which permit...
Open discourse on these subjects.
Isn't it fascinating to see which voices and which figures will succeed?
On the subject of Tom Cruise there, he's probably under a lot of stress on that set, like a lot of people just trying to make sense of a very, very confusing time.
We can't condemn people for not knowing everything.
And certainly there's things I've said in the past I wouldn't advocate for anymore.
But it's very, very...
Curious to note how the world will realign and adjust to new orthodoxies, new understandings and appraisals of science in light of really significant change.
Perhaps Woody Harrelson is the cartilage we all require.
A gentle tendril that attaches the former left world, where people were critical of establishment power, to this new emergent right-wing assessment of corruption.
Woody Harrelson is the bridge between the two worlds.
Woody Harrelson is the avatar bridging the gap of left and right.
Sure thing.
Firstly, I would love some specifics about the things that Russell has previously advocated for that he would now be against, because based on just the last few weeks, I feel like it would be a really long fucking list.
He's now very pro-oligarch, pro-colonialism, pro-imperialism.
I mean, I really would be fascinated by a full accounting of the positions he would have to rescind, you know?
Yeah, I don't think he's going to be willing to do the work somehow.
Yeah, I doubt it.
I doubt it.
I'll do my best in the meantime.
As for Tom Cruise yelling about masks, yeah, he was on the set of Mission Impossible 7 back in 2020, and he was yelling at a crew member he saw not wearing a mask because ignoring the COVID safety protocols at that time could very well shut the entire production down, as you correctly pointed out, and put hundreds and hundreds of people out of work.
I don't approve of the yelling so much, but his point was correct, and ultimately, you know, it fell on his shoulders, and so yes, probably a stressful moment.
Yeah, interestingly, that is, like, his position on that is in line with Scientology at large on the issue of COVID-19.
They came at it from a position of actually following the science for the most part, which seems to be a rare instance of the Church of Scientology doing at least one thing that isn't terrible.
So, there is that.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, but I mean, but yeah, again, it's a false equivalence that Russell is drawing.
An airborne pathogen...
A world which has caused a global pandemic is a very different thing from a mental illness.
These two things are just...
I mean, yes, they affect your body and your being, and they can have negative and positive...
I don't know about positive impacts, sorry.
But the lines between...
And the way that we treat them and the way that society...
There's just so few parallels as to make him drawing them just...
The thread is so tenuous.
Yeah, it's because, well, it is an illness of some description and there is a medicine for it created by Big Pharma, therefore must be evil because Big Pharma made it and it is a medicine.
And it's actually there to make you sick.
It's to make you continually ill.
You're like, there's no evidence for that, but that's the connection he's making.
That's the key line.
Yeah, exactly.
But what is interesting about this, as well, is that, like, because Tom Cruise from 20 years ago was saying things that Russell agreed with, like, hey, Big Farmer is trying to keep us all sick, he's willing to excuse modern-day Tom Cruise for his following the COVID protocols, you know, and about wearing masks and everything else.
Like, he doesn't extend that grace to anyone else, but Tom Cruise, because he's held positions that Russell agrees with, well, he gets a pass.
That's fine.
You know, anyone else wearing a mask, well, they're fucking, they're idiots, they're sheeple!
Yeah, they're breathing in their own carbon dioxide.
And then they will die, as Woody Harrelson pointed out.
Yeah, yeah.
It's all intense bullshit, basically.
Yeah, yeah.
But I did find it fun that by happenstance we got to cover some actors today.
I did think that was nice.
Not our shiniest, brightest and best, but, you know, we'll take what we can get, eh?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
But that was pure luck.
Pure luck that that happened.
Yeah.
How are you feeling about Stay Free with Russell Brand?
I just...
Again, I don't know who it's for.
I know people have said that before.
I don't know who the hell is watching it and why.
The fire hose of bullshit is hard to listen to.
If you're really into Christian stuff, there's presumably better people out there doing that.
If you're really into conspiracy stuff, there's better people out there doing it.
I find it increasingly hard to understand what niche Russell Brand fills.
It's just...
It's just unwatchable.
Even in short bursts, taking the piss out of it with you, it still fucking makes your back hurt and your mind boggle.
I don't know how he gets through show after show of it and who it is who's doing it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm assuming the entire audience isn't made up of people like me, one would think.
Yeah, because it is, yeah, it is a lot.
I think, personally, I don't know, you become slightly numb to it, to a degree after a while, you know?
Like, it all just kind of fades into the background until something pricks my ears up and I go, what was that?
What was this that you've just said?
Yeah, it's a lot.
In terms of, like, in terms of his audience, I would be really interested to see some demos, like some demographics as to, like, what the actual makeup is.
Because, like, I've seen they're very pro-Trump, very, very much based in North America.
So I'm like, okay.
Clearly there's, you know, some draw because it's Russell Brand fame and all of this other stuff, right?
So I'm like, yeah, okay.
And my feeling is that it's kind of a lot of the spiritualist side and kind of the Maha side.
The RFK Jr. types that are on board with Russell, and that's the reflection we've seen.
It's a small niche, but it has been interesting watching him tear bits of himself away, bits of his identity, because he eats meat and everything else now.
And you're like, hmm.
Hmm.
How much...
In trying to capture other people's audiences in that same sphere, how much are you then going to lose?
It is interesting.
How many of the parts can he hold onto as he strips away more and more things that you thought were a central feature?
And the more that it happens, the more you think there is no central feature apart from...
But the thing about name recognition you mentioned is...
I don't know, it's like a movie or you watch a stand-up.
The name recognition gets you the first five minutes, but then if the content's no good, you start to check out, don't you?
Does he still post stuff to YouTube?
Is he still drawing in numbers there?
Yeah, he's still putting stuff up there.
It's not as successful as it was.
He's posting stuff to Facebook these days because they've gotten rid of their whole thing.
Actually monitoring and checking what people are saying.
So he's posting there.
He's posting on Twitter quite a lot.
His actual show will stream to X now.
So that's a thing.
But it's difficult with X and with Rumble specifically to know what are the actual numbers, because a lot of them don't seem real.
No, no, no.
The more numbers you see from those places, the more you think the dead internet theory is real.
And even the responses as well.
You're just like, this is just botted up, down, left, and right.
These are just bots having conversations.
What is happening?
Yeah, maybe Russell's a bot.
I mean, it would explain a lot.
It would explain a lot if it was just, I mean, you know, a bot programmed for craven self-interest, and there we go.
That's what we're looking at.
Yeah.
Is he still breaking bread with people?
Is he still doing that?
Yeah, still doing that.
That's still a thing.
Yeah, he's...
Who was he talking to this week?
A rapper called Lecrae, I believe, was this week.
So yeah, he's still doing that.
Really...
Very dull discussions, usually.
And what else is he doing?
He's on a weekly basis still talking to Neil Oliver and Lara Logan.
Yes, that is the correct response.
Because the conversations, good lord.
I know I need to cover one of them at some point.
That is on my radar.
I should mention this properly and delve into it properly, but they're just such inane conversations.
It's very difficult.
And it'll be dealing with something that Russell's already spoken about in the week.
Because what he's doing now is he will broadcast four days a week.
But I think he's only actually working three days a week.
And so on the Wednesday he will film with Neil Oliver and Lara Logan and then put that out on the Thursday.
I think is what's actually happening.
And so a good number of the talking points are recycled.
Yeah, it's not working, mate.
This is no good.
This is no good.
These are both unhinged and particularly dumb individuals in their own unique ways.
You know, just ill-informed and, oh, good lord.
Yeah, you've got to protect yourself, Al.
We need you out there on the front lines and there's only so much of that shit that anyone can take.
It's my form of practicing self-care, you know?
Oh dear.
Well, thank you so much for coming on, Rob.
It's been an absolute pleasure to have you.
Pleasure's all mine.
Thank you for having me.
And that's the show, everybody.
Please go and check out Rob's podcast, The Bliss of the Abyss.
And if you're in London or the UK in general, go and see Rob in The Passenger.
It's gotten a whole bunch of five-star reviews, and with good reason.
I will, of course, be putting links in the description to all of Rob's stuff, so please go and check those out.
And also, yeah, don't forget to check out the episode of I Hate Belmar that I'm in as well.
Link to that in the description.
Otherwise, On Brand will be back next Thursday.
But in the meantime, take care of yourselves and each other.
