Russell Brand Part 2

What do you do when you've flamed out as a Hollywood actor, a political commentator and a wellness guru? You make a YouTube channel.

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Links!

• Russell Brand accused of rape, sexual assaults and abuse
• Exposing Russell Brand
• Russell Brand And The Conspiracy Grift
• Russell Brand on revolution
• Celebrity Capital in the Political Field: Russell Brand’s migration from stand-up comedy to Newsnight
• “Arthur” lawsuit against Brand
• BBC says it received five complaints about presenter
• Woman says star exposed himself to her 
• Russell Brand, Seriously
• How the U.S. is sabotaging its best tools to prevent deaths in the opioid epidemic
• Russell Brand And The Conspiracy Grift
• Russell Brand’s fellow travellers should defend their claims in court

Thanks to Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!

Transcript

Aubrey: Hi everybody and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that loves to remember Sarah Marshall, but wouldn't mind forgetting the other fucking guy.

[laughter]

Michael: That’s a good one.

Aubrey: Thank you. Hi Sarah. We love you, Sarah.

Michael: I was going to have a joke about how I respect that movie because it’s named after my favorite podcaster, but I like yours better. Yours is good too.

Aubrey: Good Job. I’m Aubrey Gordon.

Michael: I’m Michael Hobbs.

Aubrey: If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It’s the same audio content.

Michael: Same stuff. 

Aubrey: Michael. 

Michael: Today,

Aubrey: You’re returning me to a nightmare. 

Michael: Yes. So, as with last episode, we also have a fairly omni trigger warning for this one. There’s lots of sexual assault stuff.

Aubrey: Oh great.

Michael: And so, we basically find Russell in 2008. He has been disgraced and fired from the BBC. He’s on the outs in Britain, but then he re‑emerges as a fairly mainstream Hollywood star starting in 2008 with, yes, the film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, where it appears they essentially wrote the role for him. So, he’s the love interest of the main protagonist’s ex‑wife. He’s trying to get back together with her, but she shacked up with this woo-woo over‑sexed British guy. The role was originally written as a nerdy librarian, but then when [Aubrey laughs] he auditioned they were like, “Oh, let’s make him this rockstar, stoner type of guy.”

The only thing that’s interesting about this in the book is still he has this weird thing where he’s just opposed to authority regardless of whether it makes any sense. So, at a certain point when he’s going through the audition process, they ask him to go to San Diego to do line readings with Kristen Bell, who’s going to be playing his love interest in the movie. And for no fucking reason, Russell is like, “What if I don’t want to leave? What if I want to stay in LA?” And his agent is like, “Dude, you’re a nobody.” And they’re offering you a major role in a major Hollywood movie.

Aubrey: They’re offering you the coveted James Corden path. 

Michael: Exactly. 

Aubrey: I’ve worn out my welcome in the [Michael laughs] UK and the US is rolling out the red carpet.

Michael: And again, he’s telling this scene as if it’s cool. He’s in some way this rakish raconteur type of figure, but it’s like you’re just being a dumbass for no fucking reason. You’re making people talk you into doing this thing that is manifestly in your self‑interest.

Aubrey: This is behavior that would be immature in an adolescent.

Michael: This movie comes out in 2008. The movie is a big hit. His role especially is really memorable. And it’s remarkable if you look at his IMDb. He starts showing up in everything immediately. So, he’s in a Julie Taymor version of The Tempest.

Aubrey: Who the fuck does he play in The Tempest?

Michael: Trinculo, whatever that is. 

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael: I’m reading his Wikipedia entry.

Aubrey: It’s fine. I’m just glad they didn’t cast him as Prospero or you know what I mean?

Michael: I don’t know, I don’t know [crosstalk]

Aubrey: Don’t give him a role that matters.

Michael: These sound like car names to me. [Aubey laughs] He shows up in the Despicable Me movies. He gets his own spin‑off to Forgetting Sarah Marshall called Get Him to the Greek.

Aubrey: Oh, that’s the same character.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then it’s the misadventures of Jonah Hill trying to Get him to the Greek. I saw it. I do not remember a single thing from that movie.

Aubrey: Based on what we know now. What a set to be on.

Michael: He shows up on The Simpsons. He eventually gets a starring role in a remake of Arthur.

Aubrey: Yes, the coveted Arthur remake. 

Michael: I know.

[laughter] 

Which does flop. But the fact that he’s in essentially a star vehicle within three years of anyone even knowing his name at all in the US is really remarkable.

Aubrey: They were really, really, really trying to make Russell Brand happen over here. And he did to a degree, right?

Michael: Yes.

Aubrey: But it seems to me that he never really developed a die‑hard fanbase based on his comedy or comedic acting. 

Michael: His second memoir, My Booky Wook 2: This Time It’s Personal, which makes no sense.

Aubrey: The first one was very impersonal.

Michael: This is one of the worst memoirs I’ve ever read because he went through all of his drug addiction and stuff in the first memoir. And that’s borderline interesting. It’s the rise of somebody who becomes a successful working actor. Part 2 only covers three or four years in Hollywood. And so, it’s just a bunch of like really boring anecdotes of like, “I hung out with Jonah Hill and I went to dinner at his house and he’s a nice guy.”

Aubrey: Okay.

Michael: And you’re like, “Okay,” just not interesting at all. But one of the stories he tells, I think is just so typical of the way that he just deals with people around him. So, are you familiar with Teresa Palmer?

Aubrey: No, I don’t know that I recognize that name.

Michael: She is an Australian actress who is in a movie called Bedtime Stories with Adam Sandler and Russell Brand. It’s one of these weird like 80s style high‑concept comedies where Adam Sandler tells bedtime stories to his kids, but the bedtime stories come true. Oh and then there’s hijinks ensue. I could barely get through the trailer. It looked so bad. It has 27% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Aubrey: I was going to say Adam Sandler and Russell Brand don’t threaten me with a bad time.

Michael: She is a love interest in that. So, Russell Brand gets a little crush on her on set and talks about her. Dedicates an entire chapter of his book to the crush that he has on her and what happens afterwards. So, here is him describing his feelings.

Aubrey: Teresa Palmer is pretty. So, pretty in fact, that she could probably spend the rest of her life sat passive in a market square being pelted with money by desperate men. Like what?

Michael: She’s pretty.

Aubrey: So, beautiful that it seems no one should be allowed to have sex with her. That her hymen should remain for alien archaeologists to peruse in the year 5000, when maybe they can quantify such beauty. Like an action figure remaining untroubled behind cellophane. Too perfect to be tampered with, not a toy. Her hair seamlessly fell in honey rivers from her golden skin. Each feature a monument to its ideal. The perfect nose, the perfect mouth. The teeth too good to eat. What?

Michael: Can you can’t eat her teeth. 

Aubrey: Plus, she was a nice bird, Australian, down to earth. What choice do they have? They’re all crooks and the price of a no‑class system is no class. Christian too she was and all bound up in moral swaddling. [Michael laughs] Boy, I have never felt less like Russell Brand than trying to read Russell Brand’s sentences.

Michael: [laughs] You’re going to read so many this episode.

Aubrey: Christian too she was, [Michael laughs] not a thing that my accent sense.

Michael: Also, one thing that is truly remarkable to me is his ability to describe people in language that he thinks is complimentary but is so degrading.

Aubrey: One million percent.

Michael: Why would you mention her hymen?

Aubrey: Horrifying.

Michael: And even this like the tedious joke about like, they’re all crooks in Australia. Wow. Yeah, groundbreaking stuff. And then at the end says all bound up in moral swaddling, like, “Ah, she thinks she’s so good, she’s such a goody‑two‑shoes.” She is a conquest for you.

Aubrey: Well, also the way he describes her is honey hair from golden skin, which-- that sounds like your hair and your skin are the same color, which is unnerving.

Michael: So, this is him describing the on‑set crush that he has on her.

Aubrey: On a work colleague.

Michael: On a work colleague who will be reading this book, or at least someone will tell her the content of this book. So, she probably feels shit after this comes out.

Aubrey: If someone has written about your hymen in a book, a girl’s girl will tell you.

Michael: There’s a weird thing where throughout the course of a fairly small section, like a couple pages where he’s talking about filming this movie, three times he mentions that he is picking off extras to have sex with. 

Aubrey: Jesus fucking Christ.

Michael: So, this echoes the accusations that we had from last episode about how women at Channel 4 were asked to comb the audience of the TV shows that he was hosting to find attractive women and deliver them to him. So, you’re infatuated with this woman, but you’re also fucking a bunch of extras, apparently, and thinking that’s a funny story.

Aubrey: The nutty part isn’t that he thinks it’s a story. The nutty part is that it is a story to some section of his audience. That they’re like, “Oh, yeah, woo.”

Michael: He also at one point is talking about a scene where she gets out of a swimming pool wearing a bikini. And he says, “I wanted to be sick out of my penis.”

Aubrey: Michael, this is as good a time as any to tell you I’m quitting the show.

[laughter]

Michael: I think I’ll leave in the full silence after that.

Aubrey: Jesus fucking Christ.

Michael: So, there’s then I guess a wrap party or something at Lucy Lawless’ house in the Hollywood Hills. And I was going to read this, but I’m going to make you read it because it’s problematic.

Aubrey: Great. Luckily, the mandatory Mexican housekeeper had brought her son to work. He was about 4 and a likable cove?

Michael: I don’t know.

Aubrey: I’d been pulling faces and such and shooting him with an imaginary gun for ages. And he was lapping it up. But as yet, Teresa hadn’t noticed my incredible unaffected rapport with children.

Michael: So, he’s playing with a kid so that Teresa will notice. He then does a sort of like, “Ma, I’m a monster,” the way that you do with little kids.

Aubrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Michael: And the kid starts crying and the kid pisses himself.

Aubrey: Shocking that Russell Brand can’t figure out how to do basic play with children and figure out how to have a boundary.

Michael: Teresa’s watching him or watching this from across the room. He says, “Teresa made for the bathroom. I seized the opportunity and caught up with her,” which to me is interesting, because at least two of the sexual assaults that he’s accused of took place where he dragged a woman into a bathroom.

Aubrey: Into the bathroom? Yeah.

Michael: And he also has the other one where a woman says that he followed her into a bathroom.

Aubrey: Jesus.

Michael: We can do this as a little script, I think. So, you can be him. I’ll be her.

Aubrey: Okay.

Michael: She says, “Kids, huh?”

Aubrey: “Kids. I love 'em.”

Michael: “Well, you’ve got a funny way of showing it,” she said, frowning a beautiful frown.

Aubrey: “Yeah, I’m complicated,” I muttered, staring off into the distance where the child’s sobbing could still be faintly heard.

Michael: I hope he’s playing this up for comedic. I hope he didn’t traumatize the child party.

Aubrey: He like must be but also, I wouldn’t put it past him.

Michael: God.

Aubrey: Beautiful girls spend their lives getting chatted up, so to get past their defenses, you need some pretty potent artillery. I gave her hair a pull. Fancy coming for dinner?

Michael: “I’ve heard about you, mister.”

Aubrey: “Yeah? What have you heard? That I’m a rogue, a heartbreaker.” I had such a good speech for this kind of approach, but before I could embark, she interrupted.

Michael: “Know that you’re a prat.”

Aubrey: Lesser men would have been swayed, but you’ll get nowhere in life if you can’t skip past a few superficial insults like Alan Devonshire evading a clumsy right‑back.

Michael: Context clues, context clues.

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael: Context clues.

Aubrey: Great, great, great. I know every word that just got written.

Michael: We both know exactly what this means, but it would be so boring to explain to our listeners. We’ll just move on. We’ll just move on.

Aubrey: Absolutely like total Alan Devonshire heads over here. Let’s go for a walk and see if we can’t get past a few of these terrible misconceptions.

Michael: So again, he’s telling us bragging that he got past her defenses and that she’s skeptical. And he pulls her hair to get her attention. It’s like while she’s trying to go to the bathroom at a party.

Aubrey: Every no is a challenge for this man.

Michael: She relents and they walk around the grounds of Lucy Lawless’ house. They end up jumping on a trampoline. They end up flirting. Of course, this is his description, so we don’t know what really happened. But he talks her into hanging out again. And she seems to soften toward him. Again, this is a pattern that he has where when he is infatuated with a woman, he pays her a huge amount of positive attention.

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael: And then they appear to engage in some negotiation where he wants to start seeing her. And she’s skeptical, but he talks her into it, apparently. So, this is the final part of this.

Aubrey: “Do you think you’ll ever change?” she asked me with breathtaking sincerity. And for the moment, I was safe. I fell into the kiss. “I’ll change for you,” I whispered. And I did for a week.

Michael: And then he never mentions her again.

Aubrey: Jesus fucking Christmas.

Michael: This is the pattern that he has in both of his memoirs. He’s like, “These all‑encompassing infatuations,” right? With these women. Like, she will complete me. She’s this perfect angel. The minute they have sex, they just disappear from the book completely. And he’s not specific about what happened for a week. What happened after a week, Russell.

Aubrey: This is a particular thing that adult men will do. Not all of them, but a good number of them will recognize that they have these personality traits or ways of going about relationship‑building or whatever that are not widely accepted. They’re not approved of by the people around them. So, they’ll turn it into a shtick.

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aubrey: I feel like I have witnessed this with older men in particular. Will sort of put on, like, “I’m a grumpy old guy,” like, “I’m a cantankerous dude.” And you’re like, “Right, you’re sort of doing a shtick. But you’re also--” that is how you feel about things. And you’re just figuring out how to pitch that.

Michael: Right.

Aubrey: It’s sort of like, I understand that you don’t like this aspect of me, but I’m not sure what to do with it. I’m definitely not going to get rid of it. So, here’s another way of presenting it.

Michael: So, the other thing that happens during this period is we have two more alleged rapes in 2009. These are from the charging document as we talked about. These are not described in any great detail. So, all we have from the charging document from the Met police is the two alleged offenses took place in London in 2009. There’s also, in 2010, a woman who sues him for sexual assault in a bathroom on the set of this movie, Arthur. She says Russell exposed his penis to her in full view of cast and crew of Arthur. The accuser alleged the assault happened on July 7, 2010, in a bathroom on set as a member of the production crew guarded the door from the outside.

Aubrey: Jesus.

Michael: He denies this allegation, of course. He also, in 2010, has his marriage to Katy Perry. There’s not that much to say about this one, mostly because neither one of them talk about it that much. Her documentary is pretty substantially about what a shitty husband he is. Like, he refuses to go and visit her on tour, so she’s on this insane world tour, and she’s flying back to London for hours at a time. And then she flies back to Hamburg or Beijing or wherever she is. At least according to the documentary, which of course is from her perspective.

Aubrey: Sure.

Michael: She is trying to make the relationship work. And he basically refuses to. And then he divorces her with a text message. 

Aubrey: Great. 

Michael: Famously, like, minutes before she goes on stage.

Aubrey: What a catch.

Michael: And it appears that neither of them have spoken since, which is fascinating. It’s like they’re in this whirlwind romance, 14 months, they get married, and then he sends her the text message breaking up, and they just never talk again. And their lawyers handle it apparently.

Aubrey: If someone divorced me by text, I would definitely never speak to them again.

Michael: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughs]

Aubrey: Like, I don’t know what his deal is. Actually, I do know what his deal is. This seems to be very much part of his pattern.

Michael: The last thing we have to cover from his adventures in Hollywood is yet another alleged rape.

Aubrey: Oh, sure.

Michael: There’s a woman who in the investigation is called Nadia. This is not her real name, of course. She meets him at a party. They have a consensual relationship. It appears it’s a hookup thing. They’re hooking up, but it’s not like a romantic relationship, it appears. But then one time, late, it appears in the middle of the night, he calls her frantically, pleading with her to come over. Eventually, she is “Ugh, whatever. Fine.” So, she comes over. She says, “The door was unlocked and I walked in. He comes running out of the bedroom naked. Nadia says Brand took her to a wall and kissed her and made a comment, something along the lines of, “I’ll keep you safe.” He then told her that a friend was already in the bedroom and he wanted her to join them.”

Aubrey: Jesus.

Michael: So, this is the weird sort of mania thing that we’re talking about last episode where it’s he already has a woman who he presumably already had sex with and is frantically calling this other woman.

Aubrey: This really feels like a personality‑disorder territory or very profound mood disorder or something. I’m like, something is definitely Up with this guy.

Michael: This is another thing I think about too is this whole thing about male conquests for women. From afar, maybe you could say, like, “Oh, man, this guy’s like getting laid with up to five women a night. He’s having all the sex. He’s having a bunch of threesomes. Wow, what a cool guy.” But then you look at what he’s actually doing and it’s like really pathetic. He’s basically badgering this woman. Yeah, like, “I need to see you. I need to see you.” Like calling someone in the middle of the night.

Aubrey: This is how you behave if you believe in your core that you are not a lovable person. 

Michael: You shouldn’t be this regardless. But you’re like a middle-aged man. 

Aubrey: You know, 37 is not middle‑aged, but it is okay.

Michael: Yes, it is. 

Aubrey: No, it’s not. Middle age is 40 to 65.

Michael: What?

Aubrey: Yes.

Michael: I am 44 and I can call 37‑year‑olds middle‑aged. You’re in here with me. You’re trapped in here with me. But so, the ending of the story is really rough. She basically is like, “I do not want to have a threesome with you in the middle of the night.” And then he basically presses her up against the wall and forcibly rapes her according to her.

Aubrey: It’s not surprising since we’ve heard so many stories of this. But it’s still alarming.

Michael: The investigation includes their text messages from the next day. She’s like, “That really fucking scared me last night. That’s not cool.” And he’s like, “I’m so sorry.” They also have the medical records from the rape crisis center that she went to.

Aubrey: Jesus. God.

Michael: There’s also one more. We’re almost done with these. There’s a woman named, “Phoebe” who he meets at AA. They have a consensual relationship that trails off. And she starts working for him because she’s trying to break into Hollywood. That actually seems to go well for a couple months. But then there’s a night where they’re filming something at his house and other people trickle away and she looks around eventually. And she’s like, it’s just me and Russell. And then he disappears for a second. And he comes out of his bedroom. She can’t remember either naked or in his underwear and starts chasing her around, being like, “I want to have sex with you.” And she’s running away again, like, physically trying to, physically force her into sex according to her. 

She eventually is fighting him off, screaming at him, “Get the fuck away from me. What are you doing?” And then she says he immediately flips and is like, “Fuck you.” And he says, “You’re fired.” And they never speak again.

Aubrey: That, to me, feels like very very classic sort of abusive dynamics. Which is just like, denial of anything I want at any point, no matter how unreasonable, is actually on you. And you’re a disaster for not giving me whatever I want whenever I want it.

Michael: So, he then basically disappears from Hollywood. He’s in this movie, Arthur, in 2011 that flops. And he’s in Rock of Ages in 2012, which is a jukebox musical with Tom Cruise, which also flops. And then by 2013, he basically never works again.

Aubrey: I blame Katy Perry.

Michael: It is actually interesting to me because other people have been in movies that have flopped and continue having a career. Like fucking Jared Leto, right?

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael: It’s not for ethical reasons, “We’re not going to cast you in movies anymore.” That’s not how it works.

Aubrey: Right, right, right. I would love to be able to claim that the industry did the right thing and they ousted this dude who was bad news, and we knew it was bad news. My guess is that it has a whole lot more to do with the “What if I don’t want to go to San Diego?”

Michael: He does seem like he’d be a nightmare to work with.

Aubrey: He’s like a child.

Michael: So that’s the end of his Hollywood chapter. We then get the beginning of his political chapter. He does this on the back of a wellness/recovery pivot. So, in 2012, just as his Hollywood career is waning, he presents a BBC show about the drug war. It’s called Russell Brand: From Addiction to Recovery. And it’s a little biography thing of him. And also talking about the downstream effects of the drug war, basically. And as part of that, he does a Newsnight interview. So Newsnight is there, like 60 Minutes. He talks in the interview. They’re talking about drug war and how should we proceed? And he says that he’s against methadone treatment. 

Aubrey: What?

Michael: He says: “We might as well let people carry on taking drugs if they’re going to be on methadone. Obviously, it’s painful to abstain, but at least it’s hope‑based.”

Aubrey: What?

Michael: Here is this from a Guardian recap of the interview.

Aubrey: “He insists that addiction can be tackled only by addressing the root causes. For Brand, drugs were an escape from a troubled upbringing. There was, Brand says, “An emptiness inside, a sadness, a loneliness, an unaddressed pain at the core of alienation. Unless you have some mechanism to deal with that, I think you’ll deal with it with various forms of anesthetic, starting with drugs and perhaps ending with shopping.”

Michael: That’s like his little joke at the end there. As we get into his political ideology, what you see here is he’s incapable of thinking of issues outside of his own personal experience. For him, he was using drugs to self‑medicate. Because he didn’t like being alone with himself. And that is the experience of some people. And abstinence worked for Russell Brand. That is also the experience of some people. But we have thousands of studies on this. We have harm‑reduction programs. We would all love a world where we “Address the root causes” and nobody is abused by their parents. But we don’t have that society. And so, in the society that we have there are people on the planet who were abused and methadone and suboxone work unbelievably well.

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael: So, methadone treatment is this thing where it’s a form of an opioid which helps people deal with cravings and withdrawal symptoms when they are going off of other opioids. So, if you’re trying to kick heroin, you will take methadone or suboxone as a way to make that process easier.

Aubrey: And they’re less fatal, right? 

Michael: And there are so many studies on this of, like, in the long term, people who are using methadone are significantly less likely, like a year after they start treatment to be using opioids again. They’re also way less likely to overdose because the problem with abstinence programs is that when you stop using, you lose all of your tolerance. So, if you go back to using the amount that you were using before you stopped, often you will overdose and die. Like, this happened to a guy I went to high school with, right? He got sober, he fell off the wagon and had an overdose immediately. And so, if you are using methadone, you keep some of the tolerance and you’re able to taper down. And so that way if you do fall off the wagon, which is relatively common, you don’t fucking die.

Like, statistically, empirically, methadone treatment works extremely well. At no point can Russell Brand just look at an issue as like, “Oh, this is a large societal phenomenon. I am one person among millions of people who use drugs for all kinds of reasons.” He can’t do that. And that is the guiding principle of his ideology going forward.

Aubrey: I do think that having more people who have experienced substance‑use disorders, talking about their personal experiences has a great deal of social value to reduce stigma around talking about dealing with substance‑use issues. And the context here that makes this really fucking tricky is that he’s going, “And that’s why I’m against methadone treatments and treatments that I haven’t opted into or that I don’t see use in.”

Michael: And he’s increasing the stigma against methadone. He’s like, “Oh, you’re still using drugs.

Aubrey: In that way.” It’s former‑fat‑person energy of like, “I did it the right way” or whatever, where you’re like, this sucks. I hate it.

Michael: From there, he becomes a general‑purpose left‑wing political pundit. In 2012, he visits the Occupy Wall Street protests. He visits Africa to look at global poverty. He writes a pretty well‑regarded obituary of Margaret Thatcher when she dies in 2013, where he’s like, “She fucking sucks.” We then in 2013 have the kind of, I think, coming‑out of Russell Brand as a major political figure when he edits the New Statesman.

Aubrey: Oh.

Michael: So, in 2013, he starts dating a woman named Jemima Khan who is the daughter of some billionaire and she is one of the associate editors of the New Statesman. It’s a center‑left magazine, sort of the way that we have the New Republic in the United States. She asks him to write an article on religion because he is touring a show called Messiah Complex. And then later they’re talking about like, “Oh, who should guest‑edit the new issue?” And she’s like, “Oh, Russell Brand would be fun.” So, he guest‑edits an issue about revolution on theme of revolution.

Aubrey: Revolution is the one where he’s popped out the ‘evol’ so it looks like ‘love’ backwards.

Michael: That’s the cover, that’s the cover of his book which comes out the following year. It’s so annoying.

Aubrey: “Relovelution” 

Michael: Relovelution-- [crosstalk] 

Aubrey: Is how I always said it in my head.

Michael: [laughs] Chödala sign ha?

Aubrey: [laughs] Yes.

Michael: Here is the first couple paragraphs of his introductory essay.

Aubrey: “When I was asked to edit an issue of the New Statesman I said yes, because it was a beautiful woman asking me. I chose the subject of revolution because the New Statesman is a political magazine and imagining the overthrow of the current political system is the only way I can be enthused about politics. When people talk about politics within the existing Westminster framework, I feel a dull thud in my stomach and my eyes involuntarily glaze. I have never voted.” Fuck God.

Michael: He’s one of these guys.

Aubrey: “Like most people, I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people, I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites. Billy Connolly said, ‘Don’t vote, it encourages them.’”

Michael: So, this is another thing that is core to his political ideology: the entire political system is just a pantomime. Everyone is fake and pretending that they care about these issues, but it’s all theater, it’s all bullshit. And so, the way to enact political change is to just not engage.

Aubrey: It just feels supremely unsurprising to me that he would land in this “Burn it down” place because that’s what he does with his personal relationships and his work stuff. Allegedly sort of across the board, like, Mr. Oppositional, of course, doesn’t want to engage with an existing system. He doesn’t want to engage with his fucking work calendar.

Michael: So, the main thing that comes out of all this is there is an interview with Jeremy Paxman, who’s like a legendary “Tough questions” interviewer in the UK, and they have a vituperative discussion about Russell Brand’s politics which goes mega‑viral. This is one of the most watched YouTube clips of 2013. This is like a huge deal.

Aubrey: Really?

Michael: Yeah. So, we’re watching a small snippet of it.

Jeremy Paxman: You’ve never ever voted? 

Russell Brand: No, do you think that’s really bad?

Jeremy Paxman: So, you struck an attitude, what, before the age of 18?

Russell Brand: Well, I was busy being a drug addict at that point because I come from the kind of social conditions that are exacerbated by an indifferent system that really just administrates for large corporations and ignores the population that it-- [crosstalk]

Jeremy Paxman: You’re blaming the political class for the fact you had a drug problem?

Russell Brand: No, no. no. I’m saying I was part of a social and economic class that is underserved by the current political system. And drug addiction is one of the problems it creates when you have huge underserved impoverished populations. People get drug problems and also don’t feel like they want to engage with the current political system because they see that it doesn’t work for them. They see that it makes no difference. They see that they’re not served. I say that the apathy-- [crosstalk]

Jeremy Paxman: It is worth of them if they don’t bother to vote.

Russell Brand: Jeremy, my darling, I’m not saying that the apathy doesn’t come from us, the people. The apathy comes from the politicians. They are apathetic to our needs. They’re only interested in servicing the needs of corporations. Look at what-- ain’t the Tories going to court and taking the EU to court because they’re trying to curtail bank bonuses? Is that what’s happening at the moment in our country? It isn’t, it? Yeah.

Jeremy Paxman: There is no-- [crosstalk] 

Russell Brand: So, am I going to tune in for that?

Jeremy Paxman: You don’t believe in democracy. You want a revolution, don’t you?

Russell Brand: The planet is being destroyed. We are creating an underclass. We are exploiting poor people all over the world, and the genuine, legitimate problems of the people are not being addressed by our political class.

Jeremy Paxman: All of those things may be true.

Russell Brand: They are true.

Jeremy Paxman: I wouldn’t argue with you about many of them.

Russell Brand: Well, how come I feel so cross with you? It can’t just because of that beard. It’s gorgeous.

Jeremy Paxman: It’s possibly because of-- [crosstalk] 

Russell Brand: It is The Daily Mail Don’t want it, I do. I’m against them. Grow it longer. Dangle it into your armpit hair.

Jeremy Paxman: You are a very trivial man.

Russell Brand: What do you think I am? Trivial?

Jeremy Paxman: Yes.

Russell Brand: A minute ago, you were having a go at me because I wanted a revolution. Now I’m asking about that.

Jeremy Paxman: I’m not having a go at you because you want a revolution. Many people want a revolution, but I’m asking you what it will be like.

Russell Brand: Well, I think what it won’t be like is a huge disparity between rich and poor, with 300 Americans-- [crosstalk] 

Michael: We can stop there. We can stop there.

Aubrey: This is like 7 million organizing meetings that I’ve been part of where someone goes, “What’s the positive vision?” And someone goes, “I’ll tell you what it’s not going to be.” And you’re like, “That’s specifically not what was asked of you, dude.”

Michael: We once had a strategy meeting at my NGO where we were talking about which issue should we work on next year? We had five different options. And somebody was like, “I think we should prioritize all the options because they’re all very important.” I was like, “What do you think the point of this meeting is?” [laughs]

Aubrey: I get it. He’s a compelling presence. And I also think this is-- what year is this that this airs?

Michael: 2013.

Aubrey: Yeah. So, this is airing in 2013, which is a few years before Donald Trump takes office in the US. And I think there’s some through‑lines here, which is just like, this feels a person who is more unstudied. This seems a person who is just telling you with some degree of candor where they’re actually at and expressing some frustration. You’ve got a bunch of valid critiques here. And then you just take a turn that I don’t think you have really earned here.

Michael: So, for this, I read a really interesting paper called Russell Brand: Comedy, Celebrity, Politics by Jane Arthurs and Ben Little. Their explanation for what was going on here is, this is before the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. I mean, he was around, right? He’s an MP, but he wasn’t a big deal in Labour until after the 2015 general election. It’s before the emergence of Bernie as a major political figure. But it’s also after Occupy. So, you have this sense of people are pissed, but there’s no real figure to put that into. There’s no real vessel for that. And so, I think people were crawling through the desert and drinking the sand.

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael: Very few other people, especially institutional people, were speaking like this.

Aubrey: Well, and also Russell Brand fucking sucks for a lot of reasons. But he is also a working‑class dude telling off a middle‑class dude with a more upper‑crusty accent.

Michael: So, for the next couple years, Russell Brand is pretty highly regarded. Gawker says-- this is after the interview comes out-- Gawker says “Russell Brand may have started a revolution last night.” Time magazine has an article called “Russell Brand, World’s Greatest Thinker, Summons a Global Revolution.” Which they’re obviously being tongue‑in‑cheek here, but the subhead is “Why can’t America get some articulate celebrities?” The Guardian named him one of the heroes of 2014. Vanity Fair publishes a glowing profile in 2014 where they describe him as a “legit political thinker and voice for the dispossessed.” So, this wave of positive, credulous media coverage crescendos in 2014 with the release of his book Revolution.

Aubrey: Relovelution? Say it right.

Michael: Relovelution, uh-huh.

Aubrey: [unintelligible [00:32:21]

Michael: Which comes out in 2014. And I fucking read, Aubrey, for this because I hate myself. [Aubrey laughs] He does an okay diagnosis of the problem. He says the monarchy is bad and inequality is bad. But you can tell he just doesn’t really read things or know anything. Like, at no point in this book do you feel like you’ve learned something. Like, at one point he’s like, “Oh, the Christians say that LGBT people are bad, but nowhere in the Bible does it say that.” And you’re like, “Right. I was also on the Internet in 2005.”

Aubrey: “They say gay people are bad, but do they send their wives to menstrual huts?”

Michael: I mean, it’s so boring. It’s like, exactly this shit. So, whatever, I agree with it, but it’s just, not very interesting. I’m going to send you one excerpt of how boring it is, which I might cut from the episode.

Aubrey: “Oxfam say a bus with the 85 richest people in the world on it would contain more wealth than the collective assets of half the Earth’s population. That’s three and a half billion people. Though I can’t imagine they’d be getting on a bus with that money or be hanging out together. I bet there’d be a lot of tension, jealousy, and petty bickering on that bus. ‘My corporation is bigger than your corporation.’ ‘Yeah. I’ve got my own media network.’ ‘Yeah. I’ve got an elite organization that controls global politics.’ Stop the bus. I want to return to my subaquatic palace with my half‑fish brides and sing a song about the supremacy of marine life.”

Michael: Again, how is he not on drugs writing this shit?

Aubrey: Grow your beard out. Connect it to your armpit hair.

Michael: What are we doing? It’s like, fine. I obviously agree with the core point, like, inequality is bad. But he’s then doing a bunch of shtick, and then the shtick is not very good or funny.

Aubrey: Well, and also, like, I would say, he’s like, “I don’t think they’d be hanging out together.” And “I don’t think the conversation would be great.” I would argue that we now know quite a bit more than we did, sort of as a collective, about the personalities of billionaires. And I would argue that Russell Brand would fit in pretty well.

Michael: I like how you’re like, “The bus wouldn’t be like that. The bus would be like this.” [laughs]

Aubrey: Russell would be on the bus. He just doesn’t have enough money to be on the bus.

Michael: So, what really stood out to me is toward the end of the book, he starts specifying what he actually wants. So, here’s this.

Aubrey: “Rein in the power of big business by renegotiating trade treaties to insist that multinational corporations be place‑based and accountable to nation states. Revoking the charters of any corporation with revenues larger than the smallest national GNP.”

Michael: Be meaner to corporations. I’m into it.

Aubrey: “Relocalize food and farming by taxing food miles, removing subsidies and research for large‑scale capital‑ and energy‑intensive agriculture. Giving support to small diversified organic production and to the growing number of young people who want to take up farming.”

Michael: So, those ones where you’re like, “Sweetie, I like where your head is at, but these specific things are like pretty dumb.”

Aubrey: “Prioritize life over profit by rejecting GNP in favor of indicators that measure biodiversity, community coherence, personal well‑being and other life‑affirming criteria. Radically reducing public spending on defense, granting legal rights to ecosystems and non‑human species, rewriting educational curricula to meet community and environmental needs rather than the needs of industry.” Like what?

Michael: Well, what’s so fascinating to me about this one and all of them is just like these are all political programs.

Aubrey: These are all reformist projects.

Michael: They really are. Like if you want to re-localize food and farming, these are political changes. Rein in the power of big business. If you look at the way that like the Scandinavian countries are regulated, businesses have way less say in politics there. It’s just weird reading this book where he says he’s talking about David Cameron, he hates David Cameron, as he should. And he says like, “We don’t want to replace Cameron with another leader. The position of leader elevates a particular set of behaviors,” which indicates that like you don’t even want political leaders. Like he’s talking in these grand terms of like we destroy the whole system. But then you actually get to the outcomes that he wants and it’s like, “Oh yeah, like legal changes,” like you can have relatively quickly if you elect the right politicians. Like a lot of those that was pretty doable.

Aubrey: Yeah. To me it strikes me as his deployment of “Revolution,” which I think is generally I would say politically a red flag when people talk about revolution but don’t talk about what that would consist of, how it would come about. I think that’s generally a red flag, but I also think he’s deploying it in the way that “I’m a Washington outsider” gets deployed which is just sort of like it’s different. I want a different thing. I want a thing that’s really different, radically different.

Michael: He has like a little bullet list in his final chapter where it says, like, “Guarantee a living wage. All new housing developments should have 70% affordable housing. Abandon stop‑and‑search and the harassment of the homeless. Citywide free Wi‑Fi. Employee investment funds where 20% of profits have to be given to employees. These are things they have in democratic countries.

Aubrey: Yep.

Michael: The whole project feels more a function of his personality disorder than anything else. Because all of this revolution stuff—

Aubrey: I’m sorry, Michael. Do you mean “Relovelution?” 

Michael: Relovelution stuff? [Aubrey laughs] It just allows him to, like, position himself as smarter and above it all, basically to look down on anybody who talks about, like, “Okay, you want citywide Wi‑Fi? How would we do that? Who should we elect? Like, yeah, how can we pressure existing politicians to do that?” It’s like, he doesn’t want to get involved in those details. So, he’s like, “Hey, man, I’m talking about a revolution here.”

Aubrey: Right. I’m just saying everything has to change. And actually, both the unpopular part and the part where things actually change is where you have to get specific. And he is pretty studiously not getting specific here.

Michael: Right.

Aubrey: It has the energy of like, the guy in your workplace who just wants to be “The ideas guy.”

Michael: And the minute you’re like, “Okay, open a spreadsheet. Let me know exactly how this would work disappears.”

Aubrey: Make a phone call, goodbye.

Michael: His fame in the UK as a political commentator peaks in 2015 when Ed Miliband, who is the head of the Labour Party, kind of goes groveling to Russell Brand to try to get an endorsement. He is seen as a way for Labour to reach young people and this kind of, like, disaffected kind of bloc, the kind of Occupy types. Ed Miliband thinks that Russell Brand might help him do this, so he goes and he does an unbelievably boring interview.

Aubrey: Why not go to the guy who’s like, “Definitely don’t vote”?

Michael: Well, the thing is, it works in that Russell Brand does eventually explicitly endorse Labour. But what’s interesting and why this kind of marks the beginning of the end of his time as a credible left‑wing political commentator is that his audience turns on him. So, if you read the comments, all the comments are, like, “You said I shouldn’t vote, and now you’re endorsing fucking Labour.”

Aubrey: Right. It’s a hard turn to make if you’ve built an audience on anti‑establishment views and then you go for a very establishment party.

Michael: And also, that’s the anti‑establishment people turn on him for this. But then the establishment people also turn on him because it doesn’t work. Like Labour loses the 2015 general election, kind of like embarrassingly. And then David Cameron takes over. Then Brexit happens. Like, this is a disastrous election result. And people within the sort of the Labour Party, like establishment‑left types, were like, you know, they’re not pinning the whole thing on Russell Brand, obviously, but they’re like, “Well, this guy didn’t result in any more votes. Like, he can’t actually bring people out,” right?

Aubrey: He commands a “Don’t vote” bloc.

Michael: And this is the argument against the “Don’t vote” people is that like as soon as politicians realize that you don’t vote or there’s a low likelihood that you’re going to vote, they will fucking ignore you. So, he flames out as a left‑wing political commentator and he basically just becomes like a YouTuber.

Aubrey: How soon after becoming a YouTuber does he start with the, “Electromagnetic frequencies”?

Michael: Oh, even in his book he says cell phones cause cancer. Like, he’s quite conspiratorial very early. Even before the right‑wing turn that he has now made, he has numerous videos with Wim Hof, this guy who says that you can beat cancer by doing like cold plunges and shit.

Aubrey: Well, also abuser‑game‑recognize game-- [crosstalk] 

Michael: I mean, of course. 

Aubrey: What a fucking situation that goddamn guy is.

Michael: The Wim Hof situation is crazy. That’s what it’ll be when you become a YouTuber.

Aubrey: When I become Moist‑Critical.

Michael: Okay, but then it wouldn’t be a chapter of the Russell Brand episode if we didn’t have yet another sexual assault allegation. 

Aubrey: Jesus Christmas.

Michael: In 2014, the woman he’s dating at the time, Jemima Khan, for his birthday, gets Russell Brand a massage. So, a professional masseuse comes to their house. They are alone in a room. The masseuse says that Russell Brand assaulted her. It’s not clear the details of that. She reported it to the police. The police investigated. But it is kind of definitionally a “he said, she said” situation. She says, “He assaulted me.” Russell Brand says, “No, I didn’t.” The case basically stonewalls as a police matter. And so, this woman, the masseuse, she reports this to her MP. She’s like, “Can you do anything about this?” She starts going to the newspapers. So. what happens is he sues her.

Aubrey: Oh, no.

Michael: And gets an injunction. So, she cannot talk about this.

Aubrey: For folks who don’t have a political memory before 2015 say. It’s really hard to overstate how hard people went on survivors of sexual assault. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Aubrey: People would like hold out for a forcible, violent, like sexual assault at knifepoint or something.

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Aubrey: And then even when that thing arrived, they would have a reason for why that still wasn’t legit.

Michael: You can imagine how this would play out.

Aubrey: Yes.

Michael: “Oh, you’re a professional masseuse. Really? Oh, and he touched you. Really?”

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael: It would have been really fucking ugly and annoying. And also, the fact that this was public and no one seemed to have cared is itself super telling. Like no one did anything with this, even. If you look this up, you Google like “Massage allegations Russell Brand,” there’s like one article. The other thing that’s so interesting to me about his career in general is how he goes into these little fields and he flames out so quickly, right? He’s like hosting awards shows, but then he embarrasses himself enough times that he just isn’t asked to do that anymore. He’s in Hollywood for four years and flames out. He’s then a left‑wing political commentator and again, within a couple years, he flames out. Like other people take that forward and he disappears.

So, just like over and over again he has these little blips where he shows up on people’s radar. And then the more time you spend with him, you’re like--

Aubrey: Yes.

Michael: “I think we can do better than this guy.” And he disappears again.

Aubrey: He sounds like still an absolute fucking nightmare to work with.

Michael: Yeah, no, totally. Yes.

Aubrey: Being offered a big role in a big movie that requires you to go from LA to San Diego, which is a two‑hour drive.

Michael: I’m so stuck on that anecdote too. [laughs]

Aubrey: I am so fucking stuck on it.

Michael: Why do you like this.

Aubrey: You giant baby. If you’re dealing with that shit just to get a meeting scheduled.

Michael: No, totally.

Aubrey: And he’s just opposing shit for the sake of opposing shit. It’s honestly surprising to me that he got as much mileage out of those fields as he did.

Michael: So, the rest of this episode, we are going to talk about his YouTube channel and what he does after this. He just becomes an unbelievably prolific YouTuber. Like he’s posting numerous times a week. If you look now, he’s posting, I think once a day or more. I mean, he just posts his fucking ass off. And he’s been doing this since like 2015. So, I went through the archives of all of his videos. I obviously did not watch every single one, but I watched like a shocking, alarming number of his videos.

Aubrey: When we started this morning, you were talking about how grumpy you were.

Michael: Dude, I’m in such a bad mood.

Aubrey: I feel like I know why now.

Michael: Most of his videos are he literally just sits there with a newspaper in front of him and he just like, reads an article and reacts to it, but it’s not like he’s done any work. Like, at no point have I watched a video where I felt like he knew more about a subject than me. Even though I’m like, not like, well‑informed on at all. I’m like, “I know more about Syria than you do” and I don’t know shit about Syria.

Aubrey: Right. You and I talked off‑mic a few weeks ago about me watching Tim Pool clips for the first time and having a similar response where I was just like, “I feel like I know fewer things now than before I watched it.”

Michael: It’s dumbass osmosis. You’re losing information.

Aubrey: I’m losing information, absolutely. Is it-- I know less things.

Michael: One of the other main themes of his videos is these unbelievably tedious, woo‑wellness videos. These are some titles of some of his videos: “Could mass meditation change everything?” “Meditation for sleep,” “How I’m handling grief,” “God, the universe and meaning,” “Senses and consciousness,” “Beyond the five senses myth.”

Aubrey: Yeah. Big Jasmuheen breatharian energy he is.

Michael: Exactly.

Aubrey: Yep.

Michael: So, there’s two themes that I want to talk about that start to show up in his videos and remain even after he becomes much more right‑wing later. The first is he has this idea that all of politics is fake. He wants to stand aside from and above politics. He has this video in 2018 called “Can Vegan Jokes Kill?” Which is now totally forgotten story where you know what Waitrose is, right?

Aubrey: Fancy‑pansy British grocery store.

Michael: Yes. And they have a magazine. It’s in the aisle before you check out and it has like “10 salads for summer” or something. And it basically acts as like a form of marketing for the stuff that they’re selling at Waitrose.

Aubrey: Sure.

Michael: So, there’s a weird controversy in 2018 where a freelancer writes to the editor of the Waitrose magazine. She’s like, “Oh, why don’t I do a little series on vegan meals?” The editor of the Waitrose magazine writes back to her and says, “Hi, Celine, thanks for this. How about a series about killing vegans one by one? Ways to trap them, how to interrogate them properly, expose their hypocrisy, force‑feed them meat, make them eat steak and drink red wine.”

Aubrey: Why? What are we doing?

Michael: [laughs] And this poor vegan lady’s like, “What? [laughs] What the fuck are you talking about? I’m just pitching a cute story. You can say you’re not interested.”

Aubrey: This feels very reminiscent of the Paula Deen episode I saw years ago, where she was making a butter‑and‑meat thing, and she was like, “If you want to make a vegetarian version of this, you can just tell them to go outside and eat some grass.” I don’t know.

Michael: It’s so weird.

Aubrey: Why are people this fucking resentful?

Michael: So, the woman who gets this message, I believe forwards it to the Waitrose people and is like, “Why is your editor talking to me this way?” It goes public eventually. It’s a little mini‑scandal. The editor is eventually fired. But in Russell Brand’s video about it, he has this little summary of it. So, I’m going to send you a clip.

Aubrey: Is he vegan?

Michael: He’s vegetarian. And he says in his book that he did it out of spite because somebody told him vegetarians are bad. And he’s like, “I’m going to be a vegetarian.” And then he just stuck with it for 40 years.

Aubrey: I’m looking at so much of his chest.

Michael: Oh, yeah. And also, do you see in the thumbnail? The name of his podcast is Truze, which is “The true news.” He’s not a gifted brander, ironically.

[video clip starts here]

Russell Brand: Me, if I was in charge of sacking people at Waitrose magazine, knowing that my job is primarily to generate money for Waitrose, I don’t know that I would have sacked that person. Whenever you find yourself engaged in a fake, phony storm of controversy, it’s always good to note that the context within which it takes is ultimately one of capitalist consumerism. And they’ll never be clear at all. Example of this. This is being discussed on commercial. Television is a commercial enterprise talking about diet. Is any of it real? In a way? None of it is real. None of it is real.

We are living in a spectacle. Perhaps that’s what’s most offensive. Should people be nice to one another? Of course they should. Should people be able to take a joke? Of course they should. Do we have a society that enables us to access our better selves? Not really, no. We live primarily in an illusion that designates us as consumers above all else, citizens secondarily, spiritual beings having a real and authentic experience barely, barely on the radar. So, ultimately, as you know, deep down none of this matters.

[Video clip ends here] 

Aubrey: On vibes. Sure, man. 

Michael:  Yeah, fine. 

Aubrey: But there’s just not really any there, there.

Michael: This is what I meant earlier when I said his ideology is fundamentally narcissistic because in every single little controversy like this, he thinks that he’s above taking a side and actually arguing for one of the sides, like “This is good” or “this is bad.” He’s like, “Actually, you’re all just losers for even arguing at all.”

Aubrey: This is a dude on the left, for sure who is like doing an “I’m above it all” kind of thing. Like, “The whole system’s rigged. I’m not part of it. I’m not buying into their bullshit,” blah, blah, blah, blah. Functionally, just as an organizer who has tried to work with this type of dude, the thing that I have observed being at the root of that is that they are like profoundly afraid of advancing a solution and they don’t actually have ideas. And they think that the way to be the coolest guy in the room and therefore have the most social power in the room is to be aloof and above it all, rather than actually rolling up your fucking sleeves and attempting some shit.

Michael: If you want to argue this, dumb little nothing‑burger of a blip of a one‑day story, doesn’t matter, right? It’s a fake debate that’s like vaguely defensible. But he takes this position for things like the presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This is what he says about literally everything.

Aubrey: Right. And again, if you’re concerned about corporate influence in politics, one approach to that is to be like, “Both parties are the same, there’s no difference. They’re both bought and paid for.” And another approach is to go, “Okay, what would it look like to really get together a proposal to get money out of politics.” 

Michael: Yeah, exactly. 

Aubrey: Being the guy who just goes, “It’s all the same, there’s no difference,” blah, blah, blah, is ultimately like the function of that is to support the status quo. 

Michael: Yeah.

Aubrey: Right. If you’re saying none of this matters and there’s no point in engaging with it, then you are allowing it to continue unabated. It is at this point repeating truisms that have been around since fucking Ralph Nader ran for president.

Michael: Wait, truisms? T‑R‑E‑W‑isms? Trew-ism

Aubrey: Oh Trew-ism. Excuse me? Trew-isms.

Michael: The other theme that emerges from this is I chose this video specifically for you. So, I’m scrolling through his old videos from 2017. He has a video called “Tess Holliday: A Vacation from Body Shaming or Modern Marketing.”

Aubrey: Oh, fuck off.

Michael: So, tell us who Tess Holliday is and the whole kind of thing.

Aubrey: Tess Holliday is a high‑profile, plus‑size supermodel who is-- I remember reading an article about her talking about being a size 26, which is also my size. So, she is a fat lady. She has been on a number of magazine covers and every time it leads to an absolute freak‑out meltdown from people who really didn’t want to see a fat person.

Michael: Yes.

Aubrey: Looking happy and okay and great.

Michael: So, I was dreading his video about Tess Holliday because I’m like, “Oh, what is it—promoting obesity or something?” Like really fucking boring. But what he does is vaguely more interesting and I think more insidious. He basically is doing a both‑sides thing from the left. So, obviously after she’s on the cover of Cosmopolitan, there’s this huge, just flatly fatphobic freak‑out. People just lose their minds. Like, “There’s a fat lady in Cosmopolitan.”

Aubrey: Yep.

Michael: He is willing to condemn this. He’s like, you know, “It’s hard to be a fat person in society and there’s a lot of fatphobia.” Like he actually says some of the things that we would roughly agree with.

Aubrey: Sure.

Michael: So, then he says, “But the problem is that fat activists think that being on the cover of Cosmopolitan is some achievement, but actually you shouldn’t need the approval of a women’s magazine.” And you’re desperate to blame both sides here. I don’t think Tess Holliday or fucking anybody was like, “Yes, we’re finished now. A fat person’s on the cover of Cosmopolitan. Oh yeah, fat activism. Like everyone can just go home. We don’t need it anymore. There’s nothing else.” I think people were probably like, “Okay, it’s a signal of mainstream acceptance.” That’s not it. It’s just one little small thing. But it’s like he’s scolding people who are sort of finding representation in this as if the only thing they want is the cover of Cosmopolitan. There’s zero, like hard‑left fat activists who think Cosmopolitan is a good thing.

Aubrey: If you talk to fat activists, they’ll go, “Hey, the reason that Cosmo matters is that it matters for people to get accustomed to seeing fat people and to stop freaking the fuck out about seeing fat people so that they can stop saying unhinged things to us, so they can stop treating us in unhinged ways.”

Michael: Yeah.

Aubrey: So, there’s this desire to turn it into a frivolous question of, like, “I want everyone to like me.”

Michael: He’s doing the same thing he always does where he’s positioning himself as smarter than the debate, above the debate. He’s like, “Well, both sides are making mistakes.”

Aubrey: Smarter than women, above women.

Michael: But it’s like, on one side, you have fatphobic garbage, like, actual societal discrimination, of which there is ample evidence, and on the other side, you have this fake thing that you made up. 

Aubrey: And well and truly who asked if you're not going to take a moral stance on what feels to me a pretty clearly moral issue of people flipping out about seeing body that looks different. 

Michael: It's the easiest moral stance to take. So, fucking easy. 

Aubrey: My God. It is, in fact, notable and discriminatory that is the first time that a fat person appeared on the cover of this magazine that has been around for decades. That's not evidence of weakness in fat people. That's evidence of discrimination at Cosmo.

Michael: He has, at this point, around 1 million or 1.5 million followers on YouTube. His videos are typically getting 50 to 100,000 views. Some of them have as little as 30,000 views. I have videos that have more than 30,000 views. 

Aubrey: Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Michael: You can see him experimenting of what's going to work on this platform. He gets one video that does okay, about dating apps. So, he does. What is gaslighting? What is ghosting? Surviving a breakup. He's desperately trying anything to get views. 

Aubrey: I haven't trusted anyone to define gaslighting for the last decade, but definitely don't trust Russell Brand to define it. 

Michael: We then get the start of the COVID pandemic. 

Aubrey: Yep. 

Michael: He has video called how to Deal with Feeling Anxious Right Now that has 109,000 views, which is actually pretty high for him at this time. But then he does one called why the Left Can't Handle Donald Trump with 1.4 million views. He also does one called Matthew McConaughey and Russell Brand Discuss Politics and the left that gets 1.5 million views. 

Aubrey: Can't wait for these couple of big brains. 

Michael: What's interesting about it to me is it's just a really boring celebrity interview. They don't really discuss politics that much. But he puts politics and the left in the title and I think that's why people click on it. They're like, “Ooh, two celebrities shitting on the left.” 

Aubrey: Yeah, and/or algorithms pick it out in autoplay for them or whatever. Yep totally. 

Michael: I think this is what he's starting to realize is that like, there's numbers in criticizing the left. And then on January 24, 2021, he publishes probably his first official conspiracy video. It's called the The Great Reset - Conspiracy or Fact? 

Aubrey: Why in the fuck are we entertaining this even in a click-baity way?

Michael: He then, I don't want to do too many of these. But he then goes like back to woo-woo stuff, releasing pain from the body. 68,000 Views. He then does another great reset video 2.7 million views. 

Aubrey: Literally making money off of entertaining antisemitic and racist conspiracy theories. Cool, cool, cool, cool. 

Michael: then he has a video on April 4, 2021 called 5 Ways Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Changed My Life and that is the last normal video that he ever does. [laughs] These are the next five videos. What causes COVID? The virus or the system? Vaccine, Passports. This is where it leads. Protested COVID police law. You've been recorded. Bill Gates’ book is rubbish. The worst conspiracies are in plain sight. Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson. Why is Bill Gates buying up stolen Native American land? He does a lot of anti-Bill Gates stuff. 

Aubrey: That doesn't bother me. [laughs]

Michael: Yeah, whatever, man. 

Aubrey: This feels like the well, then why don't you stop defending Bill Clinton in the Epstein files? [Michael laughs] I'm like, “Nobody cares.” 

Michael: Yeah no one.

Aubrey: Nobody's coming to rush to the defense of Bill Gates. It's not happening. 

Michael: It then becomes things like how everyday people were screwed by liberal politics. Trump was right about Clinton and Russia collusion. Hunter Biden paid by Ukrainian energy company. 

Aubrey: Right now, it's just fully partisan. 

Michael: Yeah, he's cosplaying. Everyone fucking does this, but he's still cosplaying is, I'm an independent thinker. But then you look at who he has on his podcast and it's like Tulsi Gabbard, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Candace Owens. [laughs] 

Aubrey:  A bunch of other independent thinkers, Mike. 

Michael: So, the last thing that happens is in April 2023, this big investigation comes out that has a bunch of allegations of sexual assault. We've been talking about those in the timeline, but the night before the article drops, he posts a video responding to the allegations. Of course, the fact checkers had to contact him before the article came out to be like, how do you respond to this? He puts out a video, and I'm going to send you a bit of a transcript from it. 

Aubrey: As I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous. Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent. And I'm being transparent about it now as well. And to see that transparency metastasized into something criminal that I absolutely deny makes me question, is there another agenda at play? 

Michael: Agenda? 

Aubrey: Particularly when we've seen coordinated media attacks before, like with Joe Rogan, when he dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of. And we saw a spate of headlines from media outlets across the world using the same language. 

Michael: Oh, that's another thing where he thinks there's like, coordination behind the scenes. When you see the same-- Russia invades Ukraine. There's only so many ways that you can say that. 

Aubrey: Well, and also, the issue isn't that Joe Rogan dared to take a medicine that the mainstream media didn't approve of. It's that he has one of the most popular podcasts in the country, and there is a demonstrated track record of people taking his terrible advice on things. 

Michael: The only other thing to say is that after this happens, Russell Brand announces his Christianity. 

Aubrey: Got to catch them all yeah. 

Michael: Yeah, people say that he did this after the allegations came out, and he did officially. But if you look at his old YouTube channel, he has a lot of spiritual videos, I think, because the 12 steps have that acknowledge a higher power. Yeah, I think he's actually been like quasi-religious for a while. It's just like the specific Christianity that is new. 

Aubrey: Right. He's changing out his blouses button to the navel for a white linen baptismal tunic [Michael laughs] that is also somehow cut down to the navel. 

Michael: Last thing we're going to do is we are going to go to his YouTube channel. 

Aubrey: Why? 

Michael: I just want to give you a flavor of the stuff that he's now producing. 

Aubrey: Oh, wow. Okay. So, one of the first thumbnails I'm seeing. 

Michael: I know which one it is. 

Aubrey: This is terrifying. 

Michael: Oh, wait, you're focused on that one. I thought you were going to focus on Muslims versus dogs. 

Aubrey: [laughs] Fuck your dogs. No, the background is a bunch of buildings in London that appear to be decorated with giant posters with a single eyeball that just say conform. 

Michael: The third eye. Yes. 

Aubrey: And then in the middle ground you see Keir Starmer grinning nefariously and ripping through a Union Jack. 

Michael: Do you see the no whites one? He has one where the thumbnail just says “No whites.” 

Aubrey: Oh no. 

Michael: We all know whites are banned in the UK now. 

Aubrey: There's anti-Bill Gates one where he has used an AI image of Bill Gates looking like he is in agony. 

Michael: Crying like a baby. Yes. 

Aubrey: He has one just called the problem with Billie Eilish. 

Michael: You know the most cathartic thing about this, like the best news about all of this. 

Aubrey: What? 

Michael: Look at the view counts, Aubrey. 

Aubrey: I mean they're abysmal, dude. 

Michael: 25K, 32K. 

Aubrey: Yeah. Muslim mayor, 54,000 views. 

Michael: So, there's very little interesting here. But what is interesting to me is that he has also flamed out as a right-wing influencer. 

Aubrey: Yeah. 

Michael: There was a period during the pandemic where he was regularly getting over 1.5 million views for most of his videos and now it's like he's lucky if he breaks 200k. 

Aubrey: Yeah, it's wild. I just found the first one that I've seen that's over a million views and it's Candace Owens interview with a thumbnail of Erica Kirk where you're like, “Oh yeah, that's people who are watching for that thing.” 

Michael: That's Candace Owens fans coming over. That's not Russell Brand fans.

Aubrey: Which is like bleak as fuck in its own way. [laughs]

Michael: So, that is the Russell Brand story. It is ongoing because his trial begins in June of 2026. So, I already regret doing this episode because it means he's like on our radar. 

Aubrey: Now, we have to follow up. 

Michael: Yeah, [Aubrey laughs] it's like as soon as I did the RFK Jr episode, I was like, “Fuck, I have to keep covering this guy.” He's in the cast of characters now. 

Aubrey: Yeah.

Michael:  But so, I just wanted to ask you-- We started out with the question of what explains this guy's shift from the left to the right? How would you answer this question after six hours of recording about this?

Aubrey: I think a couple of things. One, I think he wears out his welcome really quickly in different spaces, right? And I also think, the money stops flowing at a certain point. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Aubrey: He's In Hollywood. And then Hollywood turns off the money tap. He's in the UK and then the UK turns off the money tap. 

Michael: I do think this is a very common pattern. If you look at somebody like Rob Schneider or Nicki Minaj, these people as their career is fading in this normal way, nobody stays at the peak of their career forever, but as people start to become less culturally relevant, it appears resentment or anger and they don't know where to place it. And that tends to result in them siding with the right, basically. 

Aubrey: Right. Instead of doing the normal career in decline thing of getting a residency in Vegas and starting a skincare line. 

Michael: Yeah, I know. [laughs]

Aubrey: Like, just chill the fuck out, dudes. 

Michael: I also think a really important component of this is Russell Brand as we said, his only core guiding belief is don't tell me what to do. And right-wing media has been very good over the last 10 to 15 years of pitching themselves as antiestablishment and as pitching the left as the establishment. Who is the establishment? Oh, it's the feminists on Twitter. It's the elite universities. Yeah, but it's like the left writ large is the mom who is constantly telling you to eat your vegetables. And I think he's just vulnerable to that stuff because he doesn't really have any core guiding principles. 

Aubrey: There's a real peril to not having a positive vision. And I don't mean like, positive in terms of uplifting. I mean positive in terms of, what is present. How do things work? What do you think is the answer here? Right. 

Michael: I also think the incentives of social media are really important. We've talked about how he starts getting views the minute he leans into this conspiracy/right wing stuff. First of all, I want to say that I'm stealing this argument from Abby Richards, friend of the show, who made a really good Media Matters video essay about this, where she traced, the view counts. Also, I think that there's a tendency when you look at these things, aha. He's getting views by shifting to the right to act as if that means he's not sincere. I don't think that's what's happening. I think there's something like a human thing that when you get rewarded for something, you do it more, like all of us have a million little pet peeves or a million little views. And, if I made a video or an episode about people using Bluetooth speakers in public and all of a sudden that got three times more downloads than any other episode we've ever made. I'd probably make another one about that. Right? It's not that it's an insincere view. 

Aubrey: That's why we have two Russell Brand episodes. 

[laughter] 

Michael: I haven't actually checked the download numbers for the first part. It's probably not good. 

Aubrey: I also haven't checked it, but I'm like “Well, knowing the content.” Yeah. [laughs]

Michael: But like you lean into things that do well, even if they're sincerely held. So, I also want to say I don't want to imply that he's faking this. 

Aubrey: I think the other thing that's fascinating here is that he is someone who was publicly accused of sexual assault, ran for shelter on the right, and it hasn't really panned out for him, which is not usually how that goes. 

Michael: I know. It's so delicious. It's so delicious. 

Aubrey: It's oddly heartening to be like, “Okay, there is actually a rock bottom. Unfortunately, it's not sexual assault. It is when you won't go to San Diego for one single fucking meeting. [Michael laughs]

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[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]