Academy-award winning filmmaker Oliver Stone, behind Platoon, JFK & Snowden, joins Russell to talk about his new docu-film, ‘Nuclear Now’, and why he feels nuclear power is the future to unlock energy for years to come. PLUS, he shares exclusive anecdotes from his conversations with Putin, and his thoughts around new censorship laws in the wake of the Snowden revelations in 2013.For a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here: https://russellbrand.locals.com/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Thank you for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
In addition to a fantastic guest, we'll be taking a deeper look, a forensic look, in fact, in one of the stories behind the news in our item.
Here's the news.
No, here's the effing news.
But I've got a very, very exciting guest to present to you today.
The Oscar-winning director behind Platoon, JFK and Snowden, a documentary maker who spent 20 hours in the company of Vladimir Putin.
And now we are going to be talking about nuclear energy and its propensity to change the world, or at least the potential for it to change the world.
His film is called Nuclear Now.
And also, although he has forgotten it, he did once make a documentary with me.
Please welcome to Stay Free with the Russell Brand, Oliver Stone.
Hello, Oliver.
Thank you for joining us.
Hi, Russell.
Nice to see you again.
You look great, by the way.
Thank you for starting with a compliment.
And I'd like to begin our exchange for apologizing for my broad conduct during a time when we made a documentary.
If you remember anything about it at all, it will be the moment that I had to write a letter of apology to Donald Trump after I met him, which you organized because I think you were working with him because of Wall Street 2.
And I did an interview with Donald and then subsequently made a bunch of jokes with him when I was doing stand-up and it led to a whole furore.
It was a long time ago but nevertheless I apologize.
I see it hasn't impeded your ability to make other documentaries and thank you for agreeing to come on our show.
Well, it's a pleasure.
I don't remember it that way.
I remember you as being very exciting and vital, and it was fun.
Of course, I know a lot of loonies in this business, so you didn't stand out particularly as a madman, but I see you've gotten to be what you are.
It's a genuine article.
Oh, thank you, Oliver.
That's fantastic.
Before we talk about things like censorship and Oliver Snowden, and before we delve into JFK and RFK, I'd love to talk to you about your film Nuclear Now.
Obviously, this has always been a controversial subject.
The connotations of Chernobyl, the broad fear around nuclear power is as prevalent now as it always has been.
Is that why you've chosen to make this documentary?
Well, you asked a lot of questions.
The big picture for me was climate change.
And you can't ignore it, especially since Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 made me very aware of it.
And of course, his solution in that film was renewables, which were essentially sun, solar and hydro.
But 14 years have gone by, 15, 16 years have gone by, and the IPCC has just said that the carbon and carbon CO2 in the world and the methane gas just keeps climbing up.
So it hasn't been solved.
We're going worse and getting hotter and hotter and hotter, as you can see from the heat wave around us.
I just got back from Europe, and boy, was it hot in the southern part of Europe.
Very hot.
And I just don't see it get any better.
And the world is going to get worse in the sense of quality-wise.
And my children and your children, grandchildren, it's all, it's going to be a mess.
And I think there's going to be more tension and more Dissatisfaction, unhappiness, wars, revolution, and so forth and so on.
So, we have to do something, Russell.
This is the most important issue I think we have in the world, beyond anything else, beyond wars, beyond—well, we'll talk about wars later, but this is really crucial.
So, scared out of my mind, I started to read more about it.
And I came across this book, A Bright Future, by Uh, Josh Goldstein and Stefan Skavist, who's a Swedish nuclear scientist.
In that short book, they lay out a very common sense plan saying that Look, go back and think about nuclear energy.
You've completely misjudged it.
You've completely mischaracterized it.
It is not what you think it is.
And it is the miracle that it originally was when Marie Curie founded in 1895.
Albert Einstein endorsed it by saying, it will change everything in this world.
It will unleash new powers we don't even know of.
Except our way of thinking.
That's what he said.
It's a very interesting comment.
And it turns out to be true.
Nuclear energy was confounded from the moment it started in World War II, when we became aware of it with a bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was an ill usage of the bomb, as you know.
Well, we don't want to talk about that history, but it was badly used, and it scared the shit out of the whole world.
It scared the shit out of everybody, and it really dominated our dialogue And the Cold War for many, many years.
But the truth is that nuclear energy for civilian purposes is completely the opposite.
It is not enriched uranium.
It is low level uranium, which is Which is what is processed.
To make a bomb is very difficult.
It requires 80-90% enrichment.
That's why you see all these test tubes and you see all the Iranians going crazy.
And here in the civilian world, we don't have that problem.
But people think it's going to blow up.
They think that a A low enriched uranium is dangerous.
It is only when it explodes, and even then, as we saw in Chernobyl, it is limited in its damage.
Limited in its damage.
We explored the Chernobyl phenomenon in the film.
And, you know, 50 first responders died there.
After that, there was a leak.
That went over Northern Europe because there was no containment structure in the Chernobyl reactor, which has, of course, been corrected.
There's now everywhere.
All the reactors have containment structures, but that didn't.
And it leaked into Northern Europe all over the place.
And they still, after all those years, the U.N.
went back and back and back and the World Health Organization went back and they could only find that possibly, they said, possibly 4,000 4,000 people died from cancers after the fact.
Even that has been in question and some estimates are lower.
So the dangers of radioactivity have been very exaggerated over time.
And when you get into it, and we do in the film, I hope you see it, it's really important to understand that low-level radiation is a part of the world.
We have radiation in our bodies.
We have the ability to fix it.
We have DNA discovered by Crick and Watson and proven to be That it repairs our body tissues.
It repairs damage to our bodies as we go.
We have a double helix.
It's, you know, get into all that if you want, but essentially we are not, we are not in danger from radiation any more than other things like The other, let's call it oil, gas, and arsenics, poisons, toxic waste from oil.
We release it into the universe.
It just throws, and it's part of the problem that we have with With the pollution that we have.
The waste from radioactivity is closely closely monitored in caskets and underwater in caskets and it's kept there for years and after that it's if necessary it's buried deep in the earth.
It's nothing compared to what chemical and oil and coal waste is.
Nothing compared.
I see that your advocacy is founded on the best conceivable principles addressing a problem that elsewise seems almost impossible to alter.
Throughout your career, Oliver, you have presumably intuitively understood stories that have been necessary to tell.
Stories of high-level corruption.
Stories of needless war.
Geopolitical conflicts reported erroneously.
Simultaneous historical narratives left untold because they contain, indeed, to cite the title of Al Gore's
film, inconvenient truths.
With the subject of this film, my concern--
and like I'm watching the chat now, like people are watching this in our locals community--
people have a strong aversion to nuclear power.
Perhaps it's because of the reasons that you're addressing, that they understandably
associate nuclear energy with nuclear destruction and the notable disasters that you've already
cited in addition to the militaristic use of nuclear weapons.
But the point I'd like to take you up on is a slightly different one.
If we don't address our attitude towards consuming Then I feel that we are going to sustain significant problems.
Oughtn't we be looking to alter the manner in which we live rather than looking for methods to sustain what appears to be, by its nature, unsustainable?
Good point, but I don't agree with you.
I don't think it's going to be possible to change human nature.
I think it's if you go to the to the poorer countries in the world, you see a stark example of it in India.
Of course, they're going to look for electricity.
They want electricity for their tools in order to cut sugarcane.
It's just natural that people who are poor are going to want easier ways to do things.
And this is true about China, Indonesia, all these populous countries that are coming into heavier usage of electricity.
And not only that, cars, transportation, which is not electricity, and industries which have not been electrified yet, such as cement making.
In all countries, they're going to make cement.
They're going to continue to have agriculture and fertilizer, and there's going to be demand for For steel.
I mean, it's natural.
So you're not going to stop the demand, and that's consumption.
Now, I know the Greta Thunbergs of the world believe that we should all punish ourselves, but I don't think that's going to happen.
So that's why nuclear power, which is infinite, infinite in its power, millions and millions of times more powerful than coal or oil, it's just a miracle, actually, that it was found.
But we misused it as we do it.
Let's say you have a knife.
Of course you can misuse a knife to kill people.
That happens It happens all the time.
Guns, this, that.
Everything has been misused by human beings.
But to go to some biblical equation of Abel and Cain, let's say, and say everyone's going to misuse, is not valid, because most people will use things well, will use things for positive reasons.
It's just human nature to want things.
Wanting does appear to be part of human nature but there is no question that human nature responds to the systems within which we exist and certainly I welcome a conversation that is about systemic and resource change rather than measures that are continually punitive To the individual 15-minute cities, for example, or impeding people's ability to, inverted commas, progress in nations such as you have already listed.
I recognize that that's an important story to tell, an important conversation to have.
But what I We're all going to have different approaches to these matters, but my personal approach is how do we start to address the fact that we're living in a deeply corrupt, deeply hypocritical, deeply war-torn society currently.
And I suppose another advantage that your film presents to us is the ability to abate and prevent these resource wars.
There's no doubt that the Ukraine-Russia conflict has a component that is to do with territory as well as resources.
The so-called Middle Eastern wars are all undergirded by a necessity for fuels, as you've already listed, and your position on war and indeed the reporting on war has significantly shifted many people's perspectives Oliver, would you talk to us a little about the current Ukraine-Russia conflict and indeed how energy has often been the driving factor behind military conflicts of a global scale?
First, I just want to just say one quick rejoinder to what you were thinking about consumption.
I just want to say the fact is that electricity, the use, the need for electricity is going to grow and grow until the IPCC gives 2050 as an endpoint, saying that from there on, there'll be a tipping point and so forth and so on, the Earth will not be able to recover.
Be that as it may, by 2050, any realistic estimate of the use of electricity will go up from Two times to four times, four times more electricity will be required.
Some people even say five.
Russell, you have no idea how many gigawatts, terawatts that means in the world.
That is just going to be an overload completely.
We don't have it.
We don't have the grid structure and we don't have the generators in place.
It's just going to be worse and worse and worse.
So it's a real problem unless you face those statistics.
As to war, what a tragedy.
It's a huge waste of human Resources, as we all agree, about wars.
It's like watching World War I all over again, and you see the waste and the death and the destruction.
You have to—war is not good, but you have to look at the reasons for this war.
And whenever you do, you know, the Americans like to simplify and say it's a question of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
That's very simplistic and very black and white, and I think you know the story behind it.
I made a film back in 2017-16 called—I produced it, I didn't direct it—Ukraine on Fire, which explained the origins of this war in the coup d'état of 2014, which was sponsored and supported thoroughly by the United States.
It was a very deep plan to penetrate the Soviet—to penetrate the Russian Federation.
From the beginning, the neoconservative movement who started the war in Iraq going back to the 1990s, they've been at war with Russia, these people, and they're deep inside our government and the State Department.
Victoria Nuland, you know these names.
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser.
Anthony Blinken, secretary of state.
They seem to have control.
Biden is an old Cold Warrior, and he really hates the old Soviet Union, which he mistakes—confounds, again, with the Russian Federation, which is not communist.
I really bemoan this because—I say this because Russia and China, which are our two leading enemies now, a few years ago, are still—are allies or friends, potential friends.
And we blew the opportunity, blew the opportunity.
And we still can make that opportunity work, because Russia is the leading—the leading producer of nuclear energy in the world.
They've done the most advanced work.
Why?
Because in the 19—well, recently, but in the 1940s, they started to develop civilian energy.
And they've been doing it steadily, and now they have Rosatom.
Rosatom is a state agency with 250,000 employees who know everything to know about nuclear energy.
They do every department, and they export their generators to all these new countries, Bangladesh, to India, to Turkey, to the Middle Eurasia.
I mean, they're the biggest sellers of it, and they They deliver turnkey factories.
Turnkey, which is the essence of this thing.
How to build nuclear reactors fast on an assembly line, like airliners.
This is what has to be done.
And they're really our potential allies.
They are not our enemies.
And I've been saying this—I made the film on Putin.
You saw it, I hope.
You know, I asked him very honest questions, and he answered—I didn't sense any—the belligerence.
He kept calling the United States his partners, if you remember, in the film, my American partners.
OK, he may have been a little soft on on his perception of the United States, but he is not the monster that has been pictured by the American propaganda machine.
So this is an unfortunate tragedy, as is China, because we alienated them, too.
They are also coming up very strongly in nuclear energy.
They started late.
But most recently, they've announced a program, a half a trillion dollars, 440 billion dollars are going into an investment of making 138, 130 some new nuclear reactors.
138, 130 some new nuclear reactors.
And by 2038, that's almost 10 a year.
OK?
10 a year by 2038.
And President Xi has committed himself to a zero growth policy on carbon dioxide by 2060.
These are big, significant statements, and they're important.
We try to let them honor them.
But by competing with them, instead of cooperating with them, we're making things far worse.
But with the kind of reductive reporting that surrounds subjects like the war, and when you made your film with Putin, you were called a Putin apologist.
Do you remember, I'm sure, the reaction from the audience when you spoke to Stephen Colbert about Putin,
like that the audience are just not willing to listen to nuanced information.
Throughout your career, you've been iconoclastic and you've been willing to tell difficult stories
about war, about corruption, indeed, including the assassination of JFK, of course.
So why do you remain confident that you can make an impact on a subject like, you know, like with your film Nuclear
Now.
Because if there isn't an appetite to monetize this form of energy currently, if the old model is still one that's being sustained, through forever wars and the types of relationships that
surround them, how likely is it that popularizing these ideas with the
public is the route to success with these methods?
You faced, like, you know, I remember at the time of JFK, you faced a lot of cynicism, skepticism and outrage
with the Putin films, with the films around Cuba, with your alternative history to America.
What impact do you believe that you can have when there is a media that works so hard
to curtail alternative narratives and to enforce and continually impose accepted wisdom,
albeit warped wisdom?
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Well, I agree with what you're saying completely.
I think you understand the problem there is.
It is a established media that denies what's facing them, looking them in the face.
Don't forget the Vietnam War, too.
I questioned, I trashed it.
I completely think that was a bogus war, bogus reasoning.
Every war the United States has been in since World War II has Well, starting with Korea has been for these specious reasons, and many lies have been told.
And this is documented by now.
People should know it.
They should be studying their history if they're interested.
And they should read alternate media, alternate sources as to what happened in our lifetime.
I lived through this lifetime.
I was born in 1946.
I can guarantee you that there's been a Cold War against Russia for most of my life.
It's a hatred, a phobia—a phobia, which is a fantasy—about the dangers that they were going to take over the United States.
This is the 1950s.
They were in our State Department.
They were in our schools.
They were teaching us that they were—it was all John Birch kind of stuff, mad stuff, and paranoia.
That was the American point of view on Russia.
It eased off, finally, when Reagan, who was the great Russia hater, came along and looked him in the face.
He met with Gorbachev.
Oh, God, these guys are not so bad.
They're human beings, you know?
And what happened was we had a little bit of a detente, a long, nice area here, and then until, of course, The Soviet Union fell apart, and the Russian Federation came into being.
And, of course, right away, NATO started to worry about them.
They never let up.
They never identified the new regime as non-communist and so forth as our enemies.
Putin was always trying to be our friend.
All that period, he cooperated with us in Afghanistan.
He cooperated with us with so many different things.
He was trying to reach out.
But there was no real attempt by either Bush or by Obama or Trump to really change the picture.
Trump tried a little bit, but he got backed off very quickly.
So there's been sort of a consistent phobia about Russia.
Going back, I can trace it to 1919, the Red Scare in America.
It's all about our labor.
It was all originally about our labor situation in the United States and the strikes that we had.
And this is the fear of communism.
It grew into this monster, two-headed monster, three-headed monster.
It's become something that's unbelievable.
It's almost like radiation poisoning, where you see the 1950s horror films and you see these monsters that come out of the sea, and they're all, they're radiation monsters, right?
Same kind of fear of Russia.
The thing is that money It's proven that you have to accept that the way to do nuclear power is not going to do it through private enterprise.
That's not going to work, because it's so difficult to build, and it takes time, and you have to invest, and it's a long haul.
But it can be done with government agency, and it has to be.
That's what Russia did with Rosatom.
That's what France did.
France has been nuclear since 1965-70.
They've gone nuclear.
They have EDF, which is now completely owned by the government.
It wasn't before.
It was 80 percent.
But now it's owned by the government.
And China, too, has its own agency.
You need government agency to do this, because it requires that kind of will for insurance reasons, et cetera.
There's a thousand reasons.
You've got to cut through the red tape.
But that's not going to happen in a so-called democracy where people can express, push a button and say, I'm scared of nuclear power because it's in my backyard, blah, blah, blah.
It's easy to be scared.
Scaremongering is the easiest tactic of all.
And that's what we've been doing for years in our country.
So my point is that, my big point is, unless we change our direction and change our thinking, our thinking, which is the hardest thing to do, We're going—we're taking Russia to the edge now.
We are really going to the edge.
This is crazy, what's going on, and nuts.
It's suicidal.
We are going to hurt ourselves in a big way.
This is a potential World War III.
This is the same situation as World War I, in a sense, the stupidity of it, because of the alliances and the fears and the built-up phobias.
If we don't stop this, what Biden is doing—this guy is—I voted for him.
I made the mistake of thinking that he was an old man now, that he would calm down, he'd be more mellow and so forth.
I didn't see that at all.
I see a man who maybe is not in charge of his own administration.
Who knows?
But he's going to fall down somewhere.
But it seems that he's dragging us stupidly into a confrontation with a A power that's not going to give.
This is their borders.
This is their world.
This is NATO going into Ukraine.
This is a whole other story.
This is not as bad as we did.
We did a lot of terrible things from the 2001 on.
We put—we NATO-ized a lot of these countries in the far—in Eastern Europe.
Who are anti-Russian because of old hostilities, and, you know, you get dragged into Balkan wars here.
This is really the same thing as World War I. Our allies are rabid anti-Russian people, the Ukrainian government.
And who are they fighting?
They're fighting ethnic Russians in Ukraine.
This is the madness of it.
And our media does not recognize that The—what do you call it?—the ethnic Russians in Ukraine are really the ones who want their autonomy.
That's all they asked for in 2014—autonomy.
And they were about to get it.
There was a deal about to be made with Putin and Ukraine, right, in March of 2022, when the war started.
There was a deal about to be made.
The Americans squelched it.
They didn't want the deal.
They don't want the peace treaty.
They don't want to give autonomy to Donbass and Lugansk.
Now, look where we are.
It's gotten worse, and it's going to get worse.
Yes, there is an inability to address the complexity of the conditions that led to this,
the ongoing infringement of former Soviet territories, as you have said and as you have
documented, the sponsorship of the coup in 2014 and the unwillingness to acknowledge
atrocities within Ukraine, or at least complexities of an ethnic nature within Ukraine, within
those regions.
And indeed, an inability to hold complex stories is perhaps one of the great determinants of
our time, and it's something that you've never shied away from trying to do, whether that's
with your fictionalized and scripted movies or with your documentaries.
I'd like to ask you a little bit now about your film Snowden, which you were unable to
make through the studio system, perhaps because he is such a critical figure in modern America.
A pivotal figure when it comes to understanding the nature of power within the era of big tech.
Who has exposed the degree to which there has been a globalised exploitation of data, globalised surveillance, ongoing lies around war.
His story is, of course, connected to the incarceration without trial of Julian Assange, imprisoned in my country now, potentially awaiting extradition.
I wonder if you feel that it's going to be increasingly difficult to tell these stories, whether it's your current movie, Nuclear Now, or whether or not if you were an emergent filmmaker that you would have been able to make a movie like JFK.
I know you were established, but would you have been able to tell stories like Platoon or JFK, let alone Snowden?
And do you think increasingly we'll see films like Sound of Freedom that have alternative
economic and indeed PR models that independent media now can viably promote movies, bypassing
the conventional centralised media structures, and that there are indeed audiences for content
that perhaps the mainstream media would prefer people didn't see?
as naked as day, everything you say has been so apparent.
What did Snowden do?
What did Snowden really do?
He gave us information that the public has the right to know that their government is eavesdropping on the world as well as on them.
That's all he did.
And that's big news.
And that was what was worth the filmmaking was making the film is worth it.
It was worth it no matter what happened.
And I did pay a price for it because frankly I couldn't get distribution.
I couldn't get financing out of the United States.
I had to do it out of Germany.
And France.
They gave me the most.
And then, eventually, a small American distributor jumped in and gave me the finishing money.
However—gave us the finishing money.
However, it was badly distributed, poorly distributed.
And the film was condemned in some quarters, but really appreciated.
It's a good film.
It's nothing—I'm very proud of it, but it didn't make the impact, because people are scared of this issue.
Are we really a bad guy?
That's what people think, I think.
Is the United States really doing this?
It's hard to believe some of the things we show in that movie, where the eavesdropping is going on everywhere, everywhere.
We go from Brazil to Europe to Asia.
We show the degree of intervention the United States does, which is a hegemon, basically listening to everybody, including Germany, including Brazil.
Remember the Brazilian president?
It's What we do on a daily basis with cyber warfare and with eavesdropping is shocking.
And at the same time, we make these accusations against China and against Russia, but they're a pale imitation of what we have done.
We have set up a worldwide network of surveillance, bar none, with the most financed and the most sophisticated equipment.
All this has changed, Russell.
In my lifetime, I was 50 years old when 2001 happened.
I was, I have to say, it changed.
A mentality set in that, oh, they got, they went after us.
They went after, whoever they is, they went after us.
They have to pay.
It's us against them.
Us against them.
And that mentality set in with this idiot Our worst president, George Bush, was no comparison to anybody else.
George Bush Jr.
became the guy who said, we have to fight the world if necessary.
Global War on Terror, it was called, but many people describe it as the global war of terror.
And it hasn't stopped since 2001.
He has been, George W. Bush, and it's difficult to query your verdict there, but he's been very much rehabilitated by the mainstream, portrayed now almost risibly as an avuncular elder statesman, a chummy figure who can hang out with Barack Obama, and perhaps these kind of relationships, this new corrupt Carnal Mount Rushmore of modern establishment criminals tells you, really, that electoral democracy is redundant.
And I have to query, Oliver, that it seems that the premise of your film, Nuclear Now, is that if you can destigmatise nuclear power, if the public, if we, the people, to use a phrase that was once popular in your nation, accepted the efficacy of nuclear power, there would be no resistance.
But with new censorship laws being introduced in the Five Eyes countries and indeed in the EU,
public opinion is becoming increasingly relevant.
Even while independent media voices and channels like ours and like Joe Rogan, I've watched your appearances
with Joe Rogan, who I adore, even though these new voices are becoming significant,
it is, I believe, approaching the point where it will be impossible to convey stories
that the establishment doesn't want told.
How have you seen this phenomena of censorship amplify over your career as a content creator and as a man who has always been willing to tell difficult stories?
Well, personally, we went to Davos with Nuclear Now last year, or earlier this year, I'm sorry.
And Davos is supposed to be a highly intelligent, educated group who are obviously concerned with the future.
This is their big play.
And Carl Schwab is the German fellow who is behind it.
He's a leader.
And we brought the film there, and we were received grudgingly, I have to say.
We got our screening space at our own expense, and we did our best to promote the film everywhere we went in those few days.
And what shocked me, I suppose, above all, was here is this group concerned with the future, And here, they don't even have nuclear energy on the menu, which is to say, it's been swept aside, somehow forgotten about.
I compared it to the Cinderella story.
I said, this is like putting the Cinderella in the kitchen scrubbing floors while the uglier sisters are out there preening and frowning themselves and wearing all their dresses and going out to the parties to meet Prince Charming.
Finally, they discover, of course, that Cinderella is beautiful, and they bring her out of the closet.
That's sort of the same story which is going on with nuclear.
It just is not talked about.
It's ignored because of these superstitions.
Superstitions that are no place in the modern world.
Science has to be the predominant The predominant educator here, not faith.
So we have a lot of idiots running around saying stupid things.
And the environmentalists, to some degree, are part of that, because they haven't studied nuclear energy.
And that's what we did in this film.
What is nuclear energy?
We went to the basis of it.
What is it?
And it is a great gift.
It's like Prometheus giving the fire to mankind.
And we have ignored it.
Oliver, I'm sure I don't need to tell you what happened to Prometheus.
I'm astonished that you considered taking that film to Davos.
Here in our community, the WEF are regarded as the kind of greenwashing, sportswashing, propagandist unit.
For the establishment ensuring that any globalist measures that are taken never impact the interests of the powerful and are always punitive towards individuals.
The name of Klaus Schwab around these parts is akin to saying Blofeld.
Maybe you understand the picture better, but we had to try.
We have to try to penetrate these establishments.
And to some degree, we have been successful because we find that many people in big business are very pro-nuclear, but they don't get anything done.
They're not able to push their agendas.
A lot of the big banks, they're pro-nuclear.
And it is.
Nuclear is popular in the sense that 60% of the American public Support nuclear.
But, you know, getting us to a place where the government, which supports nuclear, bipartisan, the Department of Energy, they are not putting big enough money into it.
They're putting good money, but now better money with Biden, and they did it with Obama and Trump.
It's not like they're ignoring it, but they just don't understand that it's important to be on the menu.
Not the only solution, but the centerpiece solution.
It is the biggest volume and scalable and cheapest in the long run of any of the energies and less damage to the earth.
So it's it.
It is what it is.
I understand all of that and I hear your passion and I respect that you are often usually ahead of the curve when it comes to making popular issues and controversial and difficult ideas accessible.
I'm not surprised to learn that a community that prides itself in a scientific approach remains cynical and skeptical because in our own investigations we have found that science appears to be a subset of Commercial endeavors in the last few years that's become particularly palpable, that particular aspects of science are amplified, other aspects of investigation and science are definitely muted.
Oliver, while I still have you, I really would love to ask you about the candidature of Robert F. Kennedy.
We've spoken to him several times on our show and in fact I'm about to embark on a contentious, difficult and likely doomed pull-up competition against him.
I don't know if you've noticed his upper body but the guy's pretty shredded and I'm challenging him, he's challenged me as a matter of fact, to a pull-up competition that I'm not likely to win.
I would like to ask you about the ongoing censorship around the murder, assassination of JFK.
He openly says that it was a CIA operation.
Joe Biden, after claiming that further documentation would be released, has only released heavily redacted data.
does this story still consume the American imagination?
What is it about this story that means that it can never be told truthfully?
Well, it's the greatest lie of the last century.
It was not an investigation.
It was a fraud.
And I've done my best with a documentary last two years ago.
It's called JFK Revisited.
And it's actually a big seller on Amazon after two years.
It's one of the number top, top documentaries.
It's because people know in their gut there was a lie.
It's just the Warren Commission is a joke.
It's fairy tale.
And it's never been scientifically supported except by People who are just, we call them in some cases, just enthusiasts for getting this over with, keeping it buried, that they accept this ridiculous scenario because it's convenient and allows the government to continue.
But if we really examine the case and you say that there was a change of power in 1963 that was illegal and our government was involved in it, getting rid of a president who was in the way, You raise a whole host of questions that fundamentally undercut the state.
And that's what needs to be done.
It has to be—we have to be honest, like Germany was honest with itself after World War II.
We need to lose a war, it seems, in order for us to wake up to what we've done.
And it's going to be a long list, true.
But the United States keeps keeping up to the fairy tale, and I suppose they're scared.
Keep the fairy tale going.
Keep the Cinderella story going, so that people don't question it.
Robert Kennedy, I support in many of his positions.
Unfortunately, as you know, he's anti—because he was a lawyer in it, he's anti-nuclear.
But he's anti-nuclear in the sense that I believe for the United States.
I don't agree with his position on that.
I don't think he is up to date.
And I wish he'd see my movie and really comment on it.
But I think he's got to reexamine some of his positions.
Not everybody's right about everything.
John Kennedy, his uncle, was a big supporter of nuclear.
As was Dwight Eisenhower, who was a pro-military man, but he was selling atoms for peace.
Those two presidents would have pushed nuclear onto the United States economy for sure, and if by 2000 we would have been a nuclearized society, let's say 70 percent of our electricity would have come—and energy would have come from nuclear.
But that wasn't the case.
It was cut off, as you know, in the 1980s by people like Ralph Nader and Jane Fonda and so forth, and the accidents that happened at Chernobyl.
By the way, you asked earlier what happened to me, but I was saying, yeah, no question, I got cut off.
After I did JFK, the media shifted, and it began shifting.
And when I, of course, voiced my opposition to our anti-Russia policies, Out of fear of going to war, I was completely, how do you say, I've been appearing only on shows like yours and Joe Rogan, you know, offbeat.
I'm not allowed back on mainstream television.
And I'm glad because, I mean, frankly, I turned on the TV the other night.
I was in Israel.
And guess what?
Jake Tapper, who I suppose represents as much the establishment as Walter Cronkite in the
old days, although there's a big difference, he had General Petraeus on telling us how
Ukraine was winning this war.
It was fantasy time.
Yeah, well mainstream media spaces have become deeply anodyne and highly controlled environments
and they, I don't think, can contain voices like yours anymore.
In fact, almost by definition, it's only permissible to have information that is not threatening.
And this is a quality and phenomena that has increased even in the time
that I've been working in media.
That's why I think the emergence of populist figures, whether that's Donald Trump,
who our audience are very keen on and whom I can certainly see
the pedagogical powers of, there's no doubt about that, and voices like RFK.
This is I think important that there's a new type of populism emerging and I think if there's to be any hope and you know I haven't seen your film Nuclear Now yet but I will because I trust you and I see you as an educator as well as a creator so I'll watch it even though there's people in our chat that's still asking questions about Nuclear waste, although Oliver did touch on the sort of the ability to sensibly curtail and contain the propensity for uranium contamination elsewhere.
But what I will say is that there is no chance of popularizing difficult ideas at a time when the mainstream media is such a heavily curated space.
But I would also invite you again to comment on the possibility that new media models are emerging.
Even your films, I'm sure, are funded now in ways that would have been unthinkable 20, 30 years ago, and with the phenomena of Sound of Freedom, which has been sort of crowdfunded and is like number two in the box office now, and even the candidacy of RFK, and perhaps you could even look at the Trump presidency, where it was a social media presidency, where, you know, as people said at the time, there was governance through Twitter, until, of course, he was kicked off of there.
Do you think that these new models of funding and promotion mean that stories like Nuclear Now can be told?
And do you think that it's going to require a different type of politician to advance ideas that are outside of the mainstream, Oliver?
I don't know about different.
I mean, I would rather see evolution than revolution.
I believe in that.
So there's no possibility.
I always believe in evolution in terms of a person with policies that are ignorant.
Learns from them and opens his mind like Reagan.
Look what Reagan did once he opened up to Gorbachev in Russia.
He opened his mind and he saw his wife maybe played a role in it or maybe his astrologer.
I don't know, but he saw a different way and that was crucial.
Same thing happens with people all around the world.
Do you remember the world before 1989?
All of a sudden, the Berlin Wall came down.
And there was a new let go, a relief in the world.
Something happened.
You could feel it in the air, a springtime.
And that existed for 10 years, almost.
So, I always believe that change is possible from within, and I believe that's the best way to do it, because revolution is very painful, and a lot of people get hurt, and it's not fair to everyone.
I mean, it destroys the whole structure.
I do believe we can evolve the structure.
So I may be different in that respect than you are.
I want to just say, the film is, just to, I know you have to close out, the Biden stuffed the JFK Act.
The JFK Act was passed as a result of my film in 1990.
That was an act that let the American people see these classified files.
That was obeyed, so to speak, in a very halting way for years, and things were released.
Trump, of course, backed off on the last pages—the last pages, which I don't know what they're about.
They could be very much about the CIA, I hope.
Because the CIA—those people who work there are the key to understanding those agents that were in place back when.
We'd like to know more about them.
But that act was stuffed the other day.
On Friday night, when—before the July 4th weekend, make sure that nobody paying attention, it was stuffed by Joe Biden, who was very disappointing.
He just said, no more declassification, except by the CIA has to be involved in all that stuff.
He raised all the—he destroyed the essence of that action by Congress.
He broke the law without knowing it.
But essentially, breaking the law is commonplace these days.
Whenever a government official doesn't like something we're doing, he breaks the law, including going to Iraq or whatever.
Sending weapons parallel, or none, to Ukraine is an act of war, and we don't even admit it.
We don't even act like we admit it.
So anyway, The film is available on, nuclear now, on Amazon.
You can get it, Google Play, Rumble, wherever you want, on YouTube.
Go for it.
It's a DVD.
It's coming out in July in the United States.
We're spreading it gradually to all these countries in Europe and Asia.
We have sales coming up soon.
I can't get it all out at the same time.
I wish Netflix had it, but they're not that, that's not the kind of film that they're going to want.
No, you're not going to be able to get that on there, Oliver, you radical iconoclist, you firebrand, you.
To watch Nuclear Now, go to nuclearnowfilm.com and we'll post a link in the description to Oliver's new film for you straight away.
Oliver, throughout this conversation, I've been reminded of Satish Kumar, the Indian teacher and activist who, when he met Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell was heavily involved in the campaign for nuclear disarmament.
And when he spoke to Satish Kumar, Satish said, like, what is the point in banning nuclear weapons if you don't change the mindset that created them?
Bertrand Russell said, this issue is too vital, too important to sort of approach so sort of metaphysically and ideologically.
We simply have to ban nuclear weapons because of their capacity to destroy the world.
Now, of course, this is a conversation that took place in the 1960s.
And you have made it very plain that you want to draw a distinction between the destructive use of nuclear power and the creative use of nuclear power.
But the point that I feel to be significant is that it's the consciousness itself Our attitudes themselves and systems that need to radically alter if we're to have any chance at all.
So when I talk about revolution I'm talking about a significant shift in perspective and the necessary disobedience to bring that about and significantly the decentralization of power and the radical re-evaluation of some of our institutions rather than a sort of a conventional armed struggle and all the pain and misery that such a thing would bring about.
Yeah, evolution versus revolution.
I remember what I said earlier about what Einstein's quote was, the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking.
And I don't know if we're going to be able to change that.
However, as I said, give them what they want.
If they want more electricity, let's give it to them because we can do it.
We have infinite power in the atom.
Infinite power.
And that's what Einstein understood.
We can't just turn our backs on it and go back to Luddite age or an earlier age.
It's not possible.
Oliver, obviously I agree with you.
And I also appreciate you a great deal.
I appreciate the incredible work you've done over the years.
I appreciate your ongoing passion and your refusal to conform, your intrepidness and your endless endeavors to bring complex stories to people.
And I thank you very much for joining us today on Stay Free.
Thank you, Oliver Stone.
Bless you, Russell.
Bless you.
Thank you, sir.
Thanks for joining us.
You've become quite a citizen.
And it's not over yet.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for joining us, Oliver.
I appreciate your time.
Coming up next week on Stay Free with Russell Brand, we have Vandana Shiva talking to us, of course, about the horrors of big agriculture, her true feelings about Bill Gates, the necessity to support farmer protest movements.
Also, Callie Means will be exposing the truth between We'll be exposing the truth behind big food and big agriculture, plus Wim Hof talking about explicitly how we can heal ourselves without recourse to pharmaceutical measures and the ideologies behind them, and also the scientific undergirding of his methods.
