#1949 - Russell Brand

The Joe Rogan Experience.

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Welcome to America, Russell.

Thank you for making me welcome in your space and your country.

My pleasure. How you been, brother?

It's been an unusual time. I've not been here for three years.

I just went to Los Angeles, I had a house there, visited it.

It was like a time capsule.

Notes for stand-up shows I was doing there.

And the graffiti has changed in the city of LA.

And the feeling of that city has altered.

And you can tell that some sort of window, some portal has been passed through.

And of course I'm aware of, because it's a global event, I'm aware of what that has been.

But it's strange to be back here.

Yeah, it's interesting when you go away from something and then you come back

and there's like a tangible feeling of change.

I guess because I talk about American culture a lot,

I come with a degree of anticipation.

But it was a torrential rainstorm in Los Angeles.

I'm aware that you've moved out of there,

that a lot of significant people in the space that I work in have moved out of there.

And there was a feeling of uncanniness and eeriness.

Some of the familiar sights for homelessness have been cleansed,

as if by Travis Bickle's rain.

Really? They've moved homeless people?

For example, Gower Street.

The Gower Street bridge, there would always be a little tented community there.

That seems to have been moved along and may be a perfect metaphor for that problem.

You know, moving them rather than...

You feel like those homeless people are still somewhere,

rather than that problem has found a resolution.

No one really has a tangible resolution.

I haven't heard one resolution that's like,

OK, that we could put our fingers on, that's real.

Do you know that in our country, during the pandemic,

in London especially, but also in other cities,

they temporarily housed homeless people as one of the pandemic measures.

We can't have people on the streets, they'll cough on someone.

Put them all in hotels, put them in hostels.

They solved it.

And then when they reached the point where they were happy

that the pandemic had levelled out,

they kicked them all back out again.

Right, that's it, we're not worried anymore.

Get back out there.

I wonder why they did that.

Do you think it was just too much time and effort to manage those people?

Like, they're shooting up in the hotels and causing ruckus.

I wonder what was the reason for putting them back on the street,

because it seemed like if they solved that,

they should be like,

oh, well, let's just keep dedicating these resources

to keep these people housed.

I feel like that the anomaly was the housing

rather than the ejecting.

I feel like that when it was convenient and suitable,

they could find a solution to homelessness that was an economic one.

And then when it wasn't necessary anymore,

they just pulled the rug out from under it.

I'm sure, yeah, that comes with complexity.

When I was first working in media,

when I was still a using drug addict myself,

I did these things that I considered to be like psychological jackass.

You know, that was a big show at that time,

those amazing guys doing those incredible stunts.

And I was like, well, what if you did the psychological version of that?

So I had like a boxing match with my dad.

I had a homeless guy move in my house.

I seduced an octogenarian lady.

I jerked off a man in a toilet.

All of these things were the periphery of my limits

as a drug-using young man,

just trying to make my way in media.

When I had that homeless guy come live in my house with me,

James was his name, God rest his soul.

It was interesting to encounter that there's a reason.

Of course, I fully accept and appreciate

that that could happen to any of us,

that any of us with a few wrong choices could end up destitute

and lost without the kind of support and good fortune

I've had in various areas of my life.

I'm sure it could have happened to me.

Of course, it could have.

But there was a sort of like a gravity pulling him back out into the street.

You know, there was a gravity pulling it.

It was like he couldn't deal with being in a house.

Admittedly, these were not organic conditions.

It was like cameras around and stuff.

It was not a high-budget production.

It was really lo-fi stuff on a lo-fi digital channel.

But being around that guy, he was like a heroin user.

I was using heroin with him at that time.

The sort of peak of the show was when we had a bath together.

That was like a thought.

What's the most intimate thing you could do with a person

to sort of overcome the idea that homeless people are somehow dirty or different

or, you know, like they should be excluded from society?

So I had a bath with this guy.

This stuff's still online somewhere, I presume.

And, you know, it sort of pushed both of us to our limit.

In the end, James decided that he preferred homelessness

to living with you.

That's right.

He made his choices.

In the end, we just got a taxi to nowhere.

Just got a taxi for him and just let him out anywhere.

He'll work his own way in the world.

Yeah, so like, of course, that problem of vagrancy and destitution,

it's a difficult one to tackle.

It makes me think that the culture is laid upon the planet.

Like all culture, all civilization is laid upon the planet,

laid upon Gaia, laid upon the earth.

Like, you know, when you have people on here like Graham Hancock

and Randall Carlson and talk about, like, the potential for, like,

these seismic events and cataclysmic events that have reset civilization,

it makes you recognize that all of our reference points,

other than biological and cosmological,

are cultural reference points and therefore temporal.

And so a person living in a tent in the street is, in a sense,

living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in contemporary America

or living a post-apocalyptic lifestyle in contemporary America.

It makes me think sometimes, Joe,

maybe the apocalypse is not a forthcoming event.

Maybe the apocalypse has already happened.

Maybe we're living in the sort of,

already it's gentle threads are encroaching upon apparent civilization.

You know, when you're in comfortable, defined and designed spaces,

you feel like everything's okay.

The end of the world is impossible.

And it just seems like entertainment

when you hear about nuclear treaties being torn up.

Like, it can't actually happen.

But of course it can.

It's so temporal.

It's happened forever.

It's always happened.

The people that it happened to then, they never saw it coming either.

The way you're saying it is very interesting

because I think the apocalypse is here on Earth.

It's just not here, like, right here in Austin.

It's not, like, right here in the studio.

But it's in the Congo.

Yeah.

Like, if you go to a cobalt mine in the Congo

and you see a 19-year-old woman with a baby on her back

mining for cobalt and inhaling toxic fumes,

you're like, okay, well, that's the apocalypse.

They have no electricity.

They have no clean water.

They make very, very little money and they work all day.

And they work for a company that puts cobalt into lithium-ion batteries

that are in everyone's smartphone.

So the height of our technology is directly connected

to what's essentially slave labor.

And that's the apocalypse.

I mean, that might as well be the apocalypse.

That might as well be Mad Max.

That might as well be.

I mean, it's just as bad.

It's just as horrific.

There's a very beautiful bit of investigation.

I saw that episode.

Siddharth Kaur.

Yeah.

He wrote that.

What is the book called?

Cobalt Red.

Yeah.

It's all about cobalt mining in the Congo

and his investigation that he did into it.

It's very, very inspiring that a person is that selfless

and can make that sort of a commitment and risk their life

and go to a very dangerous place and expose this

because he's a real journalist,

like a real boots-on-the-ground journalist

that wants to show the world some things that are being hidden from them

because the people that are making enormous amounts of money from this

that could fix it don't want to.

They want to profit off of it at the exact level they're profiting off of it now,

which means paying people a couple cents an hour or whatever they pay them.

It's horrific.

Yes, and it's a template that is unfortunately imprinted and repeated across cultural life.

As you say, there are people right now living in the apocalypse.

Yeah, there are.

That can't get any worse or lower.

And then even if that was, if you imagine, well, what would justify that?

It could only be if we were all on ventilators that were sustaining life in the West.

Even then it would be morally dubious.

But the idea that it is for some trinket in terms of our phone

that's ultimately a facilitator of ongoing commerce and communication

at a level that's not sustainable.

I feel like when we talk about what are the ideologies that drive us,

the ideology of progress, this is why I sometimes am skeptical,

not about technology, the mastery and the geniuses that work in that field,

but how technology and science as a subset of our economic ideology

can create exactly the conditions that you are describing

and that that journalist has exposed.

If your ideology permits that, then what kind of ideology is that?

What kind of unconsciousness are we living in?

It's not an awakened culture.

And all of the discourse around how we treat one another as individuals

and progressivism culturally in domestic territories,

hey, people should be allowed to do this and that,

it's all nonsense if that is permitted.

Not only permitted, required.

It's a requirement.

You cannot have that economic model without that price being paid.

And as a culture, whether it's me as an individual or our entire culture,

we've accepted that contract.

We've accepted those terms.

Well, we have in some areas of our life for sure.

Hopefully people haven't done that in their interpersonal intimate relationships,

but we certainly have in the way we communicate with others.

We've certainly accepted very bizarre ways of communicating online.

And sometimes that bleeds out into real life.

Like where someone talks to people in the real world as if they're on Twitter

and they get bashed.

You see that sometimes.

I think it's a very strange time where I don't think people have a lot of faith

right now in institutions.

And I don't think they have a lot of faith in authority.

I don't think they really believe that there is someone who is wiser than them

that has a grand plan that's logical, that's workable,

where they're looking out for all of us.

So I think there's a feeling of chaos that exists today

that I don't think has ever existed in my life like this before.

Even back during the Bush administration when everybody thought Bush was a moron,

they still thought this is a good cabinet

and they're following all the checks and balances,

even though they're probably extracting too much money

and there's probably a lot of cronyism and a lot of undercover deals

and a lot of no-bid contracts with Halliburton and that kind of nonsense.

You still thought they have things pretty under control.

It's a very solid institution.

Nobody believes that now.

You see Pete Buttigieg and fucking Kamala Harris

and Biden can't get a sentence out.

You're like, this is madness.

These people are utter fools.

And these are the people that are running everything.

And these are the people that are getting us on the brink of war with Russia.

And I don't have any faith in them, and I think most people don't.

I think you're right.

And with that era of the Cheney-Bush-Wolfevitz-Rumsfeld,

it felt like, oh, these are the Death Star Bods.

What's happening is there's this risen up military-industrial complex,

Rand Foundation ideologues from the Republican right

who were the sanctioned baddies back in those days

are trying to profit from the colonization of the Middle East.

It's part of a new American project.

We understood it.

But from where I'm coming from, it was somehow recognizable.

And a million people went on a march to prevent that war taking place

because they knew there were no weapons of mass destruction,

which we now know to be the truth.

And as you say, now the figures that are in that place

are posing as the good guys, like affable and avuncular presidents

and friendly people across the identitarian spectrum

that's meant to feel inclusive and progressive.

They're wrapping themselves up with progressive identity politics

and then promoting a war at the same time.

It's very wild.

Yeah, it feels like a mask and a veil.

This is what's interesting to me.

As we navigate this new and emergent space

of being able to present counter-narratives

and continually, like all of us now have experienced,

oh, you're a right-wing conspiracy theorist.

You've joined the alt-right.

You're a gateway to this, the dark web,

all of that language that grows up around it.

And I've heard you speak about this obviously a lot,

but the truth is that who isn't sympathetic?

Anyone that's got a family or loves someone

is sympathetic to the idea that people are going to have

various types of identity around culture and religious expression

and racial expression, and this is a conversation

that the whole culture has to be involved in together.

My issue is I don't think they believe in that stuff.

I don't think they care.

I don't think that they are creating an agenda

to advance the interests of vulnerable people.

I think they are using it as a distraction and a veil

in order to carry on with the same kind of corporate

and financial interests that have always determined

what the establishment is.

And if there's one thing we can point to in our lifetime

is that the liberal establishment has become co-opted

by the same forces that traditionally we regarded

the right to have been co-opted by,

military, industrial complex, financial industry.

And now there's palpable evidence for that,

and in order to not acknowledge that that transition's taken place,

they're able to keep the cultural conversation going.

We care about your right to express yourself and your identity.

That's a way of not acknowledging we're just the same.

We're pro-war.

And now when there's that war, you know, like Jimmy Dore

and all those guys did that anti-war march in Washington

or whatever, it's like 5,000 people go.

Now I don't know if that's because of the last few years

and what the pandemic's done to people accumulating

and gathering in crowds or whether people have lost their,

the belief and faith that people have any,

can have any impact on politics anymore.

There's just now this immersive sense of apathy.

This, as you say, loss of trust in institutions and authority.

But something extraordinary has happened

when people that say that they're, you know,

we're the peace and love party,

are the party that are advocating for war,

won't include some of the complex conditions

that have led to this current crisis,

which this is clearly a case for like, you know,

NATO's infringement on Russian territory,

the 2014 coup, and I'm not telling you anything you don't know,

but like it's extraordinary that those conversations don't happen.

It's like, actually, like the post-Trump and post-pandemic,

everything sort of enters into that template.

There are certain things you're not allowed to say now.

If you sort of say, did, were Russia in any way provoked?

Is there any legitimacy to this, to their military,

to their military actions from their perspective?

That's the same as saying,

oh, I don't think you should take certain medications

or maybe masks aren't necessary.

And people aren't, it doesn't seem that the culture is learning.

It doesn't seem that the, as the evidence is evolving,

that people are saying, oh, wow, look,

the stuff you were being told two years ago now,

the things you couldn't say online two or three years ago,

now there's evidence for that.

In fact, I've bought documentation in case the conversation

went in this direction, Joe, in my new position

as a legitimate investigative journalist,

I've got actual papers that I can show you

from conspiracy to fact.

Well, the lab leak theory, that's the best one.

The lab leak theory was openly considered racist.

Yeah.

And you'd be mocked.

Even though legitimate biologists,

like when I had Brett Weinstein on my podcast in April of 2020,

he was saying back then,

there's very clear evidence that this has come from a lab.

And he explained it as a biologist

who worked on coronaviruses from bats.

Like that's literally his expertise, his area of expertise.

So he had a deep knowledge of this.

And when he was describing it, people were furious at him.

They were demonetizing his YouTube videos

and going after him and all these progressive people on the left.

It's like you're falling into this whole alt-right,

Trump this and that.

They weren't even paying attention to an actual biologist

who actually understands and has studied viruses.

And he's saying this has all the indications

of a lab-created virus that we would work on.

All of those conversations you were having,

like Malone and McCullough and Weinstein,

when you actually listen to what they're saying,

they're talking from a biological perspective.

They're scientists and doctors.

It's not political rhetoric.

They don't say, I believe in this,

and this is how we should organize culture,

and these are the hierarchies that should be in place.

So it's extraordinary that what they were met with

was politically and ideologically driven.

At the beginning of it,

it seemed like there was such an appetite

to frame everything Trump was doing as ridiculous.

They sort of highlighted and framed Fauci saying,

I think Trump said it could have come from a lab,

and Fauci said that's ridiculous and implausible.

But like you said, Weinstein's like,

oh no, you can't have that evolutionary step

without the intervention of engineering.

Have you read The Real Anthony Fauci

by Robert Kennedy Jr.?

I read some of it.

The letters are very small in the book, aren't they?

I've got it as a physical book.

It's very small print.

I've only been listening to it.

I've been listening to the audiobook.

Who's doing the reading?

Not Robert Kennedy himself?

No, no, no.

No, Robert has a voice issue.

Yes, he has that voice issue.

Ironically, he got that voice issue from a vaccine injury.

Wow.

Yeah, isn't that crazy?

It's like it got its revenge in first.

It started it off, I think.

He had a side effect from the flu shot,

and that's one of the side effects.

It's a very rare side effect,

but one of the side effects of the flu shot

is people develop some sort of problem

with their vocal cords.

These characters that have become so maligned

and marginalized, even in my lifetime

where I still worked in mainstream media,

people like Alex Jones or David Icke,

even people that were skeptical about them

or even people that ridiculed them

didn't try to posit them as dangerous.

The same, I'm assuming, with Robert Kennedy.

Well, the David Icke one,

they always made fun of him for lizard people

because he always would say that they're shapeshifters

and they're lizards, and there was no evidence.

It just seemed really preposterous.

And then in the beginning of the pandemic,

he was trying to connect COVID with 5G.

There was a lot of weird...

He's got some squirrely ones.

Believe it or not, it's hard to say to the general public,

Alex Jones is way more reliable than David Icke,

but he's way more reliable than David Icke.

Alex made a tremendous mistake with Sandy Hook,

and he did that in a time of his life

where he's experiencing a psychotic break.

He was drinking a lot, and he was having a mental breakdown,

and he really believed that everything was a conspiracy

and that the government is essentially run by these evil demons

who are trying to depopulate America and ruin people,

and he thought they were trying to take away people's guns,

and he was convinced that someone had convinced him.

I don't know how he...

I don't know what documentaries or what videos he saw,

but he was convinced that they were using crisis actors

and that they were orchestrating a false flag.

He was obviously very wrong.

Yes.

And he's admitted that he was wrong about that,

but he's been right about a lot of things, so many things.

And I've talked about this many times,

but he was the guy who told me about Epstein's Island

more than a decade ago,

and I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard.

I was like, what are you saying?

There's an island.

It sounds like a plot in a movie.

There's an island where they fly famous, rich scientists and politicians,

and they compromise them with underage girls and get it on film

so they could use it against them.

I'm like, what?

That sounds like horseshit.

That sounds like lizard people.

It sounds like 5G creates COVID.

Same thing.

But it turns out it was true,

and it's one of many things.

He was the first one to warn me about a social credit score system.

He's like, they're going to try to implement a social credit score system,

and your money is going to be tied.

They'll have centralized digital currency,

and your money will be tied to your social credit score system,

and you step out of line.

You won't be able to buy things.

You won't be able to travel.

You won't be able to do anything.

They're going to try to keep you within a 15-minute radius of your home,

and they're starting to do that in places.

All of it's real.

In China, the social credit score system is 100% real and implemented.

I wonder what our obligation is as people that participate in this conversation

to ensure that there is a distinction made

between the empirical facts that are discussed

and then you in particular with your rather unique cultural space,

the joy of speculation.

Because when you think about some of the stuff that Alex Jones has said

and putting aside Sandy Hook and that acknowledged difficulty and transgression,

some of it as rhetoric is amazing.

Yes, there are centralized systems of corruption that bypass democracy,

and ultimately there is an agenda that can bypass administrative change.

Policies that come out under the Republicans are pursued by the Democrats,

and the military-industrial complex are able,

through lobbying and through their overt and covert connections to government,

are able to dictate foreign policy, at least influence foreign policy.

All of these things you can sort of demonstrate financially.

But when you start to describe it in terms of demons and reptiles,

the kind of language that even 500 years ago was the ordinary way.

He's a preacher, isn't he, Alex Jones?

He's somewhere between a shaman and a preacher.

He operates in that space.

In a way, you need people on the cultural periphery to be able to say,

watch out, watch out, watch the direction we're going in.

Because the thing is that the way that we're behaving at the moment

is all underwritten by rationalism.

Follow the science. This is the rational thing.

But it's just as inaccurate. It's not true either.

Now, of course, when you start talking about UFOs until very recently

or lizard people or shapeshifters,

you're entering into a territory that makes it easy for you to be ridiculed,