Stay Free - Russel Brand - Budget Cuts, Fires, and the Failures of Leadership – SF523

00:00:00.000 Thank you.

00:03:30.000 Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:03:33.000 It's a brand new week and it's going to be a fantastic week for all of us.

00:03:37.000 We've got a brilliant show coming up on Thursday where you'll see me preaching.

00:03:43.000 There's no other way of putting it.

00:03:45.000 Has this show gotten too preachy?

00:03:46.000 How about some actual, literal preaching?

00:03:49.000 Also, I'll be talking to my friends, Neil Oliver and Lara Logan, for our new group show.

00:03:54.000 I don't want to say group show, really.

00:03:56.000 Not all of the gang stuff that's going on in the UK. It sounds so disgusting.

00:03:59.000 But nevertheless, you'll love it.

00:04:00.000 Me, Neil, and Lara.

00:04:02.000 It's a group show!

00:04:03.000 We're going to groom! 0.66

00:04:05.000 Hey, I might be British, but I don't get involved in that stuff, let me tell you.

00:04:10.000 But today's show is going to be fantastic.

00:04:11.000 It's Michael Schellenberger.

00:04:13.000 If you don't know who Michael Schellenberger is, Michael came to prominence during the Twitter files.

00:04:18.000 He was one of the journalists that when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X, he let in and he revealed the depths to which the FBI and CIA had infiltrated those organisations and were curating and controlling the information that we get, priming us.

00:04:33.000 Debunking, rebunking, bunking, cunking.

00:04:35.000 It was all going on.

00:04:36.000 Here's an official bio of Michael Schellenberger.

00:04:39.000 He's an American author, journalist, and environmental policy writer known for his critiques of mainstream environmentalism and advocacy for alternative approaches to addressing environmental challenges.

00:04:47.000 But he talks about it a lot more than that.

00:04:48.000 I guess he's pushed that to the forefront because he's going to talk about those fires a lot.

00:04:51.000 In recent years, Schellenberger had continued...

00:04:53.000 Has continued to engage in public discourse on various topics, including renewable energy, free speech, censorship.

00:04:59.000 He's the first endowed professor, sounds filthy, of University of Austin, serving as CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech.

00:05:05.000 He also founded Public, a substack publication that I use a lot and that you should use too.

00:05:10.000 It's a brilliant conversation.

00:05:12.000 We talk about cancellation, my cancellation personally in particular, how that pertains and relates to extraordinary stories in the UK like grooming gangs.

00:05:19.000 Of course we discuss the California fires, the unique cultural position of Elon Musk and the requirement for radical spiritual change and the importance of nationalism and decoupling nationalism from racism.

00:05:32.000 It's a brilliant conversation.

00:05:34.000 You'll absolutely love it.

00:05:35.000 If you're not a Rumble Premium subscriber, yet become a Rumble Premium subscriber now and you will get to watch I used to chase this kind of thing all the time.

00:06:00.000 I mean, you know, 10 years ago, the notion of having a show that had reached this level of success would have been the dream.

00:06:07.000 And the meetings that I'm having with people in Hollywood, I would have killed to meet with the people who were working for the people that I'm meeting with.

00:06:18.000 And God took all that away from me.

00:06:20.000 I mean, you know, you've had this recent conversion towards Christ.

00:06:25.000 And I think you would probably agree that the thing that preceded it was a brokenness.

00:06:29.000 And this week's break bread will be fantastic as well, because I'm talking to... Nathan.

00:06:39.000 Nathan Pinocchio.

00:06:40.000 I've got to stop saying Pinocchio.

00:06:41.000 I've got to stop saying that, haven't I? Nathan Pinocchio.

00:06:43.000 There he is.

00:06:43.000 Absolutely fantastic.

00:06:45.000 Okay, well, without any further...

00:06:48.000 Without any further hullabaloo or ridiculousness in this crazy, beautiful world that we all inhabit together, let's introduce Michael Schellenberger.

00:06:57.000 We'll be streaming on X and YouTube initially, but eventually we'll be solely available over there on Rumble, which has always championed free speech, and we'll be up on local.

00:07:07.000 So please continue to watch us on X or Rumble or, excuse me, or YouTube, that filthy place, wherever you're watching us, but ultimately we will be available just on, excuse me, this bloody drink!

00:07:18.000 Exclusively on Rumble.

00:07:20.000 Michael Schellenberger, thank you so much for joining us.

00:07:23.000 It's always such a pleasure to see you.

00:07:25.000 Great to see you, Russell.

00:07:26.000 Should we run through a few potential backgrounds before we get into the content, or should we just start talking about a whole host of pretty significant and important topics?

00:07:38.000 Once again, nothing's really going on in the world, right?

00:07:41.000 It's very boring.

00:07:42.000 Oh, man.

00:07:44.000 Like, I was reading the book of Revelation and the book of Genesis.

00:07:50.000 Yeah, I'm doing a kind of top-and-tail thing with the Bible.

00:07:53.000 And, like, in Genesis, it's talking about Sodom and, like, the kind of what sound like...

00:07:59.000 Rape gangs targeting angels inside Lot's house.

00:08:03.000 And in Revelation, it's just obviously like, you know, sort of fires and celestial activity.

00:08:10.000 Just like, well, this simply sounds like antiquated language describing my ex-feet.

00:08:16.000 You know, there's drones in the sky, there's rape gangs across the UK, there's fires across California.

00:08:24.000 Do you think that the ability to communicate more instantaneously simultaneously is creating the sense that there's a greater density of events, or do you think that we're entering into some extraordinary end time?

00:08:40.000 I mean, just those two events are huge news.

00:08:45.000 I mean, we didn't know about the United States.

00:08:48.000 I know it was covered a little bit like 10 years ago, but we really didn't know about the grooming gangs until Elon Musk decided that it needed to be on the agenda.

00:08:57.000 And obviously it's one of the worst sexual abuse and assault scandals ever, and certainly the worst since the Catholic scandals of the last couple of decades. 0.76

00:09:07.000 And then the fires in Los Angeles are completely unprecedented.

00:09:11.000 The problem is actually much worse than people realize.

00:09:14.000 I mean, we are looking at estimates of up to $250 billion, 12,000 homes and buildings destroyed, at least two dozen people dead.

00:09:24.000 And Russell, you know because you read public, but the evidence is now overwhelming that it was the budget cuts that led directly to the delayed response and to the lack of prevention that caused the Los Angeles fires.

00:09:39.000 And my friend Rich McHugh from NewsNation.

00:09:43.000 Just published this devastating video, which shows them, like, literally the proof, hard proof that it took 45 minutes for the helicopters to arrive and just start to dump some water on the Pacific Palisades fire, which is one of the worst fires, the most deadly and destructive fires.

00:09:59.000 That's insane.

00:10:00.000 I mean, you know, I interviewed two, I've had two whistleblowers, firefighters come forward.

00:10:04.000 The response time is supposed to be three to five minutes.

00:10:07.000 I mean, that's how quickly firefighters are supposed to be on site.

00:10:11.000 45 minutes.

00:10:12.000 They could have had that fire contained.

00:10:14.000 You can't stop fires, but they could have had it contained and said, 45 minutes, it was just too late and it was everywhere.

00:10:20.000 You're right.

00:10:21.000 I do look at your report, and I'm looking at it right now, Public, which is available on Substack, and you're talking about LA Mayor Karen Bass claiming that the fire cuts did not, the $17.5 million cuts, did not impact the LA Fire Department's ability to contain, control, or ameliorate, I suppose, these fires.

00:10:43.000 Michael, I suppose that the general shape of debate is this.

00:10:49.000 Is California's unique status as the ultra-liberal, inverted commas, woke state, impact...

00:10:58.000 In serious municipal matters and emergency matters.

00:11:02.000 Crime has long been discussed.

00:11:04.000 Now there's a crisis in California that much of the commentary surrounds the connection between, for example, DEI hires and the manner in which this is being handled.

00:11:16.000 Do you think it's possible to be objective when a state and therefore issues within that state become so hotly and heavily politicized so urgently and the discourse becomes so dominated by tribalism?

00:11:31.000 Do you think it's possible to discern it?

00:11:32.000 Is that why your investigation looks at budgetary cuts and the amount of time it takes?

00:11:37.000 I mean, look, it's a reasonable question.

00:11:41.000 I mean, obviously there's super political atmosphere.

00:11:42.000 People are prejudiced against California in general because it's the most, you know, radical left state in the United States.

00:11:49.000 But in this case, I mean, here you had the fire chief herself. 0.71

00:11:54.000 You know, who's a famously lesbian fire chief who didn't want to kind of acknowledge the role of budget cuts, but there was a very feisty local Fox News reporter who just kept pressing her on the issue. 0.72

00:12:11.000 And she finally said, yes, of course it had an impact.

00:12:14.000 Specifically, it was a little confusing at first because she kept talking about they couldn't afford to pay the mechanics.

00:12:20.000 And you were like, well, what do you mean?

00:12:21.000 What do you need mechanics to fight these fires with?

00:12:24.000 They had 100 fire engines that were in the shop that needed to be repaired.

00:12:29.000 They could have also had another 100 fire engines.

00:12:33.000 You can buy used fire engines for half a million dollars.

00:12:36.000 And the idea is you should station them around.

00:12:38.000 Los Angeles.

00:12:39.000 I mean, Russell, you live there.

00:12:41.000 You know, this is California.

00:12:42.000 It's the most beautiful state.

00:12:45.000 And it's also the most dangerous state.

00:12:47.000 And we deal with that.

00:12:48.000 We're willing to pay for that.

00:12:49.000 It's a premium state.

00:12:51.000 You know, we retrofit our homes.

00:12:53.000 We have all sorts of precautions.

00:12:54.000 We create little earthquake kits.

00:12:56.000 We're very diligent about it.

00:12:57.000 We know that there's a price to be paid for living in California.

00:13:00.000 But that means that everybody down the line, from the governor to the mayor to the fire department, the chiefs, they need to be focused like a laser on this issue of public safety.

00:13:10.000 First of all, half of all fires are set by homeless people who should not be on the street creating fires. 0.65

00:13:15.000 When you're focused on anything other than merit in hiring for firefighting, whether it's DEI or anything else, your eye is not on the ball.

00:13:25.000 I mean, this is a hard job.

00:13:27.000 Firefighting involves both brawn and brains.

00:13:30.000 It actually, you know, you have to look at a structure and decide, can we get in there and out safely?

00:13:35.000 There's a lot of experience that's required, so it's a really tough job, and they've been starving them for funding.

00:13:41.000 I just found out...

00:13:42.000 That they owe the firefighters a huge amount of back pay, tens of millions of dollars of back pay.

00:13:48.000 They won't pay them.

00:13:49.000 They could have easily doubled the firefighter budget in Los Angeles.

00:13:54.000 We estimated something like 2% of what the state spends annually on climate change, homelessness, and migration.

00:14:02.000 Well, we haven't fixed the fire engines and we haven't paid the firefighters, but other than that, it's a pretty tight ship.

00:14:09.000 Typically, budget cuts would be the purview of a leftist and therefore pro-big government argument.

00:14:16.000 Isn't it rather odd that that is a component?

00:14:21.000 Totally.

00:14:22.000 Totally!

00:14:23.000 I mean, you would think...

00:14:24.000 The Democrats are supposed to be in the pocket of the labor unions.

00:14:27.000 Here's the case where I really wish they had been in the pockets of the firefighters.

00:14:31.000 Another thing I learned is that the firefighters are prohibited by their contract from striking.

00:14:36.000 And I can appreciate that.

00:14:38.000 You don't want the firefighters to strike.

00:14:40.000 But I mean, look, they told me stories, Russell, that are just heartbreaking.

00:14:47.000 Firefighters are just everything that we imagine from television and movies.

00:14:50.000 In 30 seconds, you've got to be out the door.

00:14:52.000 You're supposed to have responded to a call in three to five minutes.

00:14:56.000 They're showing up 30 minutes after they get called.

00:14:59.000 People are having heart attacks and dying in those 30 minutes.

00:15:03.000 This whistleblower, this firefighter, told me a terrible story of a child where they were 30 minutes late getting there.

00:15:11.000 We still don't know if that child survived.

00:15:14.000 But the family, of course, you get there and the family's outraged at the firefighters and the firefighters who are like parents themselves are just wrecked.

00:15:21.000 They're heartbroken.

00:15:22.000 I've covered stories in the past where like EMTs...

00:15:25.000 Show up late, try to save somebody, they lose somebody, and they burst out crying because they're just really actually invested in saving lives.

00:15:34.000 And when they can save a life, it's just this incredible, natural high, the greatest experience that they have.

00:15:41.000 And when they can't save a life that they know they could have saved, it drives them absolutely crazy.

00:15:47.000 It leads them to quit their jobs.

00:15:49.000 And so now we have this shortage of firefighters.

00:15:52.000 I mean, they are genuinely American heroes.

00:15:56.000 I mean, they're just out there constantly.

00:15:58.000 They're not taking the breaks they need.

00:15:59.000 So, I mean, hopefully this crisis, this disaster, helps to shine a light on the need to take care of our first responders.

00:16:07.000 These are the people who maintain our civilization.

00:16:10.000 And I think that tells you everything, that the City of Angels has got its head so far up in the clouds that it's failing to deal with the civilization on the ground.

00:16:20.000 That's pretty good.

00:16:22.000 Nice work there.

00:16:23.000 Well done.

00:16:23.000 I'm going to let that pass without compliment.

00:16:27.000 The religious subtext.

00:16:29.000 Over egging the pudding?

00:16:31.000 I mean, it's so awful.

00:16:32.000 It's so dramatic.

00:16:33.000 I mean, it's dramatic enough.

00:16:36.000 We don't need the angels.

00:16:41.000 I'll take your analogy and I'll raise you like that.

00:16:44.000 In this...

00:16:45.000 You know, like the fallen angel, the Luciferian false light, is what's primarily being omitted from that place.

00:16:55.000 There's a deep tragedy, I suppose, in the waste and lack of the human resource, because as you say...

00:17:05.000 Firefighters and first responders are people that have been drawn to these frontline places of crisis by a deep desire to serve and be of help.

00:17:17.000 And what I suppose the California fire example appears to illustrate is a level of ineptitude.

00:17:27.000 That means that that resource, the resource of people's goodwill, bravery and courage isn't being correctly served and directed.

00:17:34.000 Perhaps any governor or high-profile political figure that has access to media and something of a...

00:17:42.000 Profile or legend is auditioning for further future office.

00:17:49.000 And it seemed for a minute in the early spasms of democratic decline that Gavin Newsom was being groomed for greater things.

00:17:58.000 So I suppose this will likely for some time be seen as the incineration of his dreams to be anything other than governor of California.

00:18:13.000 I mean, it's hard to believe he's got a political career after this.

00:18:19.000 I mean, there's now a new recall is already underway, a new recall effort.

00:18:23.000 There's an effort to force the mayor to resign.

00:18:26.000 I mean, you know, for all these catastrophes...

00:18:29.000 There's always a series of failures on the way to them.

00:18:32.000 It's never one thing.

00:18:33.000 I mean, there's also this incredible, the second largest water reservoir that feeds Los Angeles and is part of the, both the drinking water and the fire system are the same.

00:18:42.000 In most cities, they're the same.

00:18:43.000 In Los Angeles, they're the same.

00:18:45.000 This reservoir was empty.

00:18:47.000 I mean, it's just complete madness.

00:18:49.000 It was empty for, it looks like it was empty for years, at least for one year.

00:18:54.000 That is the responsibility of the Department of Water and Power, the city utility.

00:18:58.000 That person works for the mayor.

00:19:00.000 If the mayor can't do her job, then the governor has to step in. 1.00

00:19:03.000 So basically, at every level where all these failures are occurring, you can trace it right back to the governor and the mayor.

00:19:09.000 I mean, the buck stops with the governor.

00:19:11.000 I mean, he's an incredibly powerful position in the state, and he's just incapable of acting decisively.

00:19:17.000 He's somebody kind of at a character level that he acts as though he's a leader and as though he's in charge, but he's always looking to other people to figure out what to do.

00:19:30.000 He's always looking for permission to act.

00:19:32.000 That's not what you need in situations of danger.

00:19:35.000 You need decisiveness.

00:19:36.000 You need authority.

00:19:37.000 He's obviously not able to provide that.

00:19:39.000 I mean, he is the quintessential, you know, weak leader created by good times.

00:19:45.000 I mean, he was someone, you know, really born into and sort of adopted by the Getty family, was kind of handed everything in his career, handed his wealth.

00:19:54.000 So he's just not somebody that's a take-charge person.

00:19:58.000 And he's just like a lot of the people in Hollywood and a lot of people in Los Angeles.

00:20:02.000 just really caught up in ideology, in this identity politics, in this climate apocalypse, and just not really grounded in reality, not really connected to the function of civilization.

00:20:15.000 The rest of this conversation will be exclusively available on Rumble.

00:20:20.000 Join us over there.

00:20:21.000 And if you don't have Rumble Premium yet, consider getting Rumble Premium.

00:20:24.000 Why don't you?

00:20:25.000 You get access to all of my content, including some really interesting and fascinating stuff I've been doing, like preaching in churches, going to Mar-a-Lago, hanging out with Mel Gibson there, extraordinary, shooting on firing ranges, and so much more.

00:20:42.000 Have a look at this trailer.

00:20:43.000 Mar-a-Lago.

00:20:44.000 Mar-a-Lago.

00:20:45.000 I've been here before then.

00:20:47.000 It's nice here, isn't it?

00:20:48.000 Russell Brand is here.

00:20:50.000 I knew because there were Secret Service here.

00:20:52.000 I'm very grateful to be in a double act with Mel Gibson all of a sudden.

00:20:55.000 My life's changed quite a lot.

00:20:57.000 A little while ago, I was a vegan living a simple life in Graves, Essex.

00:21:01.000 Now I'm eating steak at Mara Margo.

00:21:03.000 Funny how the world changes.

00:21:04.000 When we awaken to the continual and perpetual interconnectivity and flow that he grants us, then we are powerful and real change becomes a possibility.

00:21:14.000 Amazing.

00:21:17.000 I gotta follow that.

00:21:18.000 Would you like a very good one?

00:21:20.000 Yeah.

00:21:21.000 Sure. 0.71

00:21:22.000 Come here, you soppy sausage. 0.92

00:21:25.000 Stick to delivering the presents and choosing who's naughty and nice. 0.96

00:21:28.000 Mel, you made a very...

00:21:30.000 You hit me one time when I heard you...

00:21:33.000 Finish that sentence. 0.99

00:21:35.000 It was like rain, it does not give a fuck what falls on. 0.99

00:21:38.000 and there's no umbrella for the truth. 0.99

00:21:41.000 Pretty amazing.

00:21:54.000 Thank you.

00:21:55.000 Is this real life or are we in a dream?

00:21:58.000 This is what happens every day at Mar-a-Lago.

00:22:01.000 Just at Mar-a-Lago and of course then with a troupe of pipers and drummers.

00:22:06.000 Independence is not easy when you've got this accent. 1.00

00:22:24.000 But you are cut from the same cloth, sir.

00:22:27.000 Thank you.

00:22:28.000 You are cut from the same cloth, and I see what you are wearing on your chest. 1.00

00:22:32.000 Our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

00:22:35.000 Dear Lord, bring your saving graces upon Russell and the super work that he is continuing to do.

00:22:42.000 Do you have a cup?

00:22:44.000 You can take my pee.

00:22:46.000 My pee is good.

00:22:47.000 It's clean.

00:22:48.000 You wait till he's here.

00:22:49.000 I think you could.

00:22:51.000 You could probably be drinking.

00:22:52.000 Sober journey has inspired me a lot.

00:22:54.000 How are you getting on?

00:22:55.000 Doing alright.

00:22:56.000 Two years, just the other day.

00:22:58.000 One day at a time.

00:22:59.000 We don't drink, we don't take drugs.

00:23:00.000 One day at a time.

00:23:01.000 Okay, let's get on with the rest of our conversation with Michael Schellenberger.

00:23:04.000 Sorry to interrupt you, Michael.

00:23:05.000 There's this kind of shared and pervasive sophistry that defined the political debate in the period leading up to the election.

00:23:13.000 We're attempts to kind of rewrite scripture or forge from the minds of man new ideologies, new sanctions, to make prohibitions, to cast aside taxonomies, to enter into the domain of God.

00:23:28.000 And it's, I suppose, been sort of roundly truncated by the Maga Maha tradition.

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00:24:54.000 Do you see your role altering Michael as one of the...

00:25:03.000 Appraisers and reporters, journalists, that we rely on, for example, on the subject of the censorship industrial complex, a term that if you didn't invent, you certainly popularised.

00:25:15.000 How do you see your role as a journalist shifting and altering post-inauguration and post-Trump presidency?

00:25:23.000 Do you see it as not altering at all?

00:25:25.000 But the simple fact is, if you take a few symptoms...

00:25:29.000 Not so many pronouns in the bios.

00:25:32.000 Zuckerberg moves from California to Texas.

00:25:36.000 Zuckerberg puts Dana White on the board and Mia Culpers his way around Mar-a-Lago. 0.99

00:25:43.000 How are these changes going to affect people like you and I that work in independent media spaces?

00:25:49.000 Do you imagine, do you suppose there might be a risk that we become sort of the conduits for their preferred information as many would contest we already are, the detractors of that movement.

00:26:02.000 Do you feel...

00:26:04.000 Excited by the fact that men like Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makari, people that you will have known for the last couple of years and had conversations with and reported on, are now in positions of actual power.

00:26:17.000 Does that seem astonishing to you?

00:26:19.000 How can that not result in America's pharmaceutical, health and food industries being significantly impacted?

00:26:30.000 I know that was a lot, Michael, but you talk a lot anyway, so I might as well give you something to try.

00:26:35.000 I mean, there's so much happening, right?

00:26:38.000 I mean, so you have just at the secrecy level.

00:26:42.000 I mean, the government has so many secrets.

00:26:44.000 If you just go down the line, the Russia collusion hoax.

00:26:47.000 COVID origins, COVID vaccines, Hunter Biden laptop, the JFK files, the UAP slash UFO slash drone files.

00:26:59.000 Each of those is a gigantic story on their own with many books and thousands or millions of articles written about them.

00:27:06.000 I have very high expectations.

00:27:08.000 I want a lot of disclosure.

00:27:09.000 We want the Twitter files from the U.S. government.

00:27:12.000 We should not settle for less.

00:27:15.000 I think we saw Tulsi Gabbard apparently made some compromise on the FISA warrants.

00:27:21.000 Of course that's concerning.

00:27:23.000 I would be very disappointed if we don't get disclosure like the level we've seen.

00:27:28.000 And we should have high expectations, and we should put pressure on the Trump administration to follow through on those commitments.

00:27:33.000 That's very important.

00:27:35.000 I also think that the other issue is the preference cascade, to use a bit of jargon.

00:27:39.000 In other words, people feeling more comfortable taking the pronouns out of their bio.

00:27:43.000 Mark Zuckerberg feeling more comfortable firing the content moderators, moving them to Texas.

00:27:50.000 Using Elon's community notes, which is crowdsourcing fact-checking.

00:27:54.000 Everybody, by the way, they said Facebook is ending fact-checking.

00:27:58.000 That was misinformation.

00:27:59.000 They're improving their fact-checking by making it crowdsourced rather than committees of pointy-headed misinformation specialists.

00:28:10.000 So there's so much going on.

00:28:12.000 I think that we're going to see this pressure, for example, on California, I think, as fresh.

00:28:18.000 The local news, before anything happened, the local news in Los Angeles, the progressive news, the New York Times, they start out by being like, there was literally an LA Times story that was like, did Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, did she really cut the budget for the fire department?

00:28:33.000 And they go, it's complicated.

00:28:35.000 It's complicated.

00:28:36.000 It's like, yeah, no, not really complicated, actually.

00:28:40.000 And it took the fire chief coming out and saying that.

00:28:42.000 that.

00:28:43.000 I think she felt some more comfort, like there was more room here.

00:28:46.000 Obviously, a disaster creates some of that room.

00:28:49.000 But I just think that the power of X now, I mean, it's been like two years calling Elon Musk an anti-Semitic racist.

00:28:56.000 That didn't work.

00:28:57.000 He held strong.

00:28:58.000 The traffic from to conventional news media is just massively down.

00:29:03.000 I think they're in a real challenge.

00:29:05.000 And then you see, out of nowhere, the new Los Angeles Times owner who comes out and goes, it was a mistake to...

00:29:13.000 Endorse Kamala Harris.

00:29:15.000 And then you may have seen his latest thing.

00:29:16.000 He comes out and he says he's seen cancers in kids and he thinks that there's some role from the COVID vaccine.

00:29:22.000 And he's not some, you know, he's not a fringe scientist at all.

00:29:26.000 He's one of the, I think he's like the wealthiest person in LA precisely because he's a specialist in medical sciences.

00:29:33.000 So, you know, who knows what's in store.

00:29:35.000 I've heard some very interesting things about things that are happening in FDA. There's a lot there to be revealed, including what happened with the vaccine.

00:29:43.000 And as you said, it's like the guys in charge, Jay Bhattacharya, Marty Makari, these are guys that had been censored, and now they're in a position to release and reveal what really happened during COVID. Yeah, I mean, it's just interesting, Like personally, like to go from kind of, as you say, faceless, pointy heads, whether that's fact checkers at Facebooks or other entrenched bureaucrats in state roles to suddenly, you know, Jay Bhattacharya, I know whether that's fact checkers at Facebooks or other entrenched bureaucrats in

00:30:17.000 Like I've not hung out of him or anything, but there have been moments where I've been talking to Jay Bhattacharya.

00:30:21.000 You know, say if you do a Zoom interview, there'll be a bit at the beginning where you're like, hey, like we just had.

00:30:26.000 And like in those moments, like sort of Jay Bhattacharya being like, hey, are you okay?

00:30:31.000 Like in that sort of seeing his humanity and kindness or say Marty Makari, like meeting him briefly and chatting to him and just sort of seeing like he's sort of like febrile kind of furtive commitment to fact finding.

00:30:46.000 Well, these are actually, like, right, decent people.

00:30:49.000 To your point about the misinformation within Facebook and the fact-checker story, that they're improving it by deploying technology of aggregation, which is, yeah, diametrically different from...

00:31:03.000 Those kind of groups like CRISP and Logically AI that enter into social media spaces and attempt to impose a kind of aristocratic control over information, technocratic, I suppose, more appositely, but both are applicable.

00:31:18.000 These technologies of aggregation are precisely what could radically change politics.

00:31:23.000 I've long thought why isn't there a kind of political equivalent of Airbnb or Uber, i.e.

00:31:30.000 the aggregation of disparate resources.

00:31:32.000 Decentralized through communication in order to disperse and disseminate power information and relationships in ways that are beneficial.

00:31:44.000 And of course, that's because there's an advantage to centralizing power.

00:31:48.000 Now, like, you know, Elon Musk, he continues to be massively attacked and smeared in my country precisely because he's...

00:31:56.000 Of his influence and his impact on British politics at the moment because of the grooming gang scandal and his reposting of Tommy Robinson's film.

00:32:09.000 And I note that it's the EU and Thierry Breton in particular that are being most aggressive around Elon Musk.

00:32:18.000 And I reckon, is it true, Michael, that Elon Musk is an unprecedented figure, even though as an archetype he could be seen as a tycoon entrepreneur, and in particular, I suppose, with regard to his power when it comes to information, although that is on a foundation of financial power that reaches into all sorts of areas.

00:32:35.000 He's a media magnate.

00:32:36.000 He's a Rupert Murdoch.

00:32:38.000 And does it interest you that the left have always embraced some billionaires, George Soros, Bill Gates, and regarded their influence as sort of acceptable, and even Zuckerberg, they like him when he's on that side, but they don't like him when he's on this side.

00:32:52.000 What is Elon Musk?

00:32:53.000 Is he a new type or is he merely an order of magnitude higher of something that we've always had and just of a different, more libertarian and trickster hue than your Soros is and your Gates?

00:33:08.000 What do you think is his functioning role?

00:33:10.000 And if you could touch upon the EU, Thierry Breton, the ongoing attacks on Musk outside of America.

00:33:15.000 If you could, you could look at some of the stuff that's going on within MAGA, like, you know, Bannon's a little down on him and the impact on British politics. - Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting.

00:33:25.000 I mean, so just first on Elon, I mean, what is the archetype?

00:33:29.000 I mean, we know this archetype really well.

00:33:30.000 It's just creative destruction, to use the word by Joseph Schumpeter.

00:33:35.000 Schumpeter, this great Austrian-American, I think he's from Austria, came to the United States.

00:33:41.000 He was this economist in the early part of the 20th century.

00:33:45.000 He borrowed from Marx this idea that capitalism really radically transforms things through technological innovation.

00:33:54.000 And so he came up with this idea that really economic growth is driven by technological innovation.

00:34:01.000 It used to be that we thought about growth as fundamentally about specialization.

00:34:05.000 That was Adam Smith.

00:34:06.000 And then through trade, which is really another form of specialization, through Ricardo.

00:34:09.000 You get to Schumpeter and it's a completely different picture of economic growth.

00:34:13.000 The main event now is technological innovation.

00:34:16.000 And, I mean, we've really never seen anything like it.

00:34:18.000 I mean, the closest you can get to is, I mean, people compare him to Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford.

00:34:24.000 I mean, he's definitely at that level.

00:34:26.000 The role in the media is just so game-changing because In the past, you definitely had these tycoons or industrialists having some influence on politics, and I think you want that because you're trying to get rid of all the capture of the institutions that the older bourgeoisie, the older capitalist class had imposed.

00:34:46.000 You get these new entrepreneurs that are able to revolutionize politics, and in his case, it really happens through X. I mean, X ends up becoming this, you know, Creative destruction of the news media, where when it was captured by the existing establishment, it reinforced the power of the blob, of the uniparty, of the elites.

00:35:11.000 Now you see it playing this incredibly disruptive role.

00:35:14.000 He's probably going to help the ADF and Germany to become, to be elected, you know, come in second place.

00:35:20.000 And then what is happening at the exact time as all of that is that the EU prevented the Romanians from electing a new president.

00:35:28.000 I mean, it's just incredible and nobody's talking about it.

00:35:32.000 But it's like literally the EU and NATO blocked a sovereign democratic country from electing their own president because he was so successful on TikTok.

00:35:42.000 I mean, and meanwhile, of course, they're all, oh, we have to, you know, we have to save democracy.

00:35:47.000 They're undermining it.

00:35:48.000 They've completely undermined it.

00:35:50.000 I just saw another thing that Polish representatives in the European Parliament are having a chance to write about.

00:35:55.000 They're demanding censorship.

00:35:58.000 But I just think masks are off.

00:36:00.000 You can see where people stand on these things.

00:36:02.000 You've got people that want free speech and democracy, and you've got people that clearly don't want it, and they're not hiding it.

00:36:09.000 So I do think, I feel very optimistic.

00:36:12.000 I feel much more optimistic than I did.

00:36:17.000 In fact, I think if the disclosure happens that we want to see happen on all those different things, it's going to just further destroy the credibility of these establishment parties, and it's going to reveal the ways in which they've lied to the American people and people across the West for decades.

00:36:34.000 We can't make this content without the support of our sponsors and partners.

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00:37:35.000 Visit gcu.edu forward slash Russell.

00:37:38.000 That's visit gcu.edu forward slash Russell.

00:37:42.000 Two S's, two L's. 0.97

00:37:43.000 Give it a try.

00:37:45.000 Thanks.

00:37:45.000 I saw Thierry Breton interviewed, Gareth sent it, on a French telly, and he talked about them Romanian elections and sort of just blithely said, you know, he intervened and stopped it, and then I think said, we'll do the same thing in Germany if we have to, all in the sweet and holy name of democracy, with seemingly no understanding or appreciation.

00:38:12.000 Of what he was saying, and that's pretty alarming, and that's the type of, you know, to use an outflowing of Hannah Arendt's idea, that there's this sort of banal and unconscious evil that flows forth from bureaucracy that he exhibits so sort of beautifully, precisely because it is so anodyne.

00:38:35.000 Further on the subject of Musk, when I look at him, I think of Walt Disney a little bit, because Walt Disney...

00:38:42.000 Like, created realities.

00:38:45.000 First through animation, notably, and then through theme parks.

00:38:49.000 And when you're in one of the theme parks, you're like, oh, wow, this is someone that's gone from a 2D medium to a 3D medium.

00:38:55.000 And in a 3D medium, you can't manage the absolute control, so you encounter the uncanny in Disney, because the mouse's eyes won't move.

00:39:04.000 And on the rides, you can't...

00:39:06.000 Some of the ones where they...

00:39:09.000 Holograms on the faces of the dwarves, say, that seems a little more mobile.

00:39:13.000 But I think he's a Disney-like figure in so much as he's got this Wizard of Oz-type power to create realities.

00:39:20.000 Now, on your point of technology, as an economic leader, I suppose it shows that economics...

00:39:27.000 It's not necessarily just the movement of currency in terms of fiat currencies or other nominal tokens of wealth, but perhaps power is the true use of the word currency, and of course it's a synonym and is utilised in that domain also.

00:39:43.000 And I was considering, and consider frequently, Michael, Andrew Breitbart's point that...

00:39:49.000 Politics is downstream of culture, but all of it is downstream of technology.

00:39:53.000 And what we're living within is the fracturing of power spaces by the technological ability afforded to you and me specifically to communicate in ways that were just literally impossible.

00:40:06.000 Because you can on one hand have...

00:40:10.000 Sort of shoot-from-the-hip orators that might be right sometimes and are emotionally correct in ways that sort of resonates, whether it's through a kind of a type of masculine energy that people feel like they've been denied, or nationalistic energy that people feel they've been denied.

00:40:28.000 And those people are valuable too as kind of portals, and in those examples I meant...

00:40:33.000 Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson.

00:40:34.000 But then elsewhere, and more customary in the space, there are people like you, not loads of them, you're pretty special.

00:40:44.000 Like, they are able to provide the receipts and the research and the work.

00:40:48.000 And that, I think, is the biggest threat because there's a greater sort of crossover.

00:40:52.000 With Musk, he, like, you know, one of his most significant acts was his empowerment of you, and Matt Taibbi, and Barry Weiss, and Lee Fang, and all of the other people from the Twitter files.

00:41:00.000 So the other thing I think he has is this sort of puckish, maverick quality, where he's once again sort of introducing fallibility in a powerful people.

00:41:08.000 Like, he is clearly flawed.

00:41:10.000 And we've got to this point through sort of, like, the weird iconoclastic movements of the left, where Martin Luther King, adulterer, Gandhi, pervert, like, everyone, we're just casting people aside.

00:41:21.000 Because of the way that media is functioning now, we're having to reintroduce the possibility of flaws and fallibility and brokenness.

00:41:30.000 Like, not everyone is going to...

00:41:31.000 You know, Gavin Newsom could present as perfect for a while, but how's he...

00:41:35.000 what you've done for me lately, baby, when the fires kick in.

00:41:39.000 So what we're seeing, I think, through this aggregation of information, as you correctly point out, is happening as a result of technology, is whilst there's a great deal of misinformation, it's the information that's the problem.

00:41:52.000 There's so much truth out there that we can't be controlled in the same way.

00:41:56.000 Would you agree?

00:41:57.000 Oh, yeah, there's so much in that.

00:41:59.000 Russell, that I want to deal with.

00:42:01.000 I mean, I think the really interesting thing that you just talked about is this...

00:42:06.000 Because when we were together in London, I guess a year and a half ago now, one of the points you made is that the problem with wokeism as a religion is that it doesn't offer redemption.

00:42:14.000 It doesn't offer a sense of overcoming one's previous self.

00:42:20.000 I think the other thing you're drawing attention to, yeah, it's this notion that we've had this idea under wokeism is that you have to be so good.

00:42:27.000 And by being good, it meant you had to kind of conform to an existing very...

00:42:34.000 Strict morality.

00:42:35.000 And there was none of that.

00:42:36.000 I mean, we see it in every single wisdom tradition, right?

00:42:38.000 You see it in, Jesus says, you know, you can see the log in somebody else's eye, you don't see the speck in, or you see the speck in somebody else's eye, not the log in your own eye.

00:42:48.000 Dostoevsky, the line between good and evil, runs through the heart of all men.

00:42:51.000 And then, of course, Nietzsche, beware when battling monsters that you not become one.

00:42:56.000 The self-awareness of either our own potential for evil, but also our just existing fallibility, as you're saying, it's so, what a relief.

00:43:07.000 I mean, it's like you can breathe a little easier knowing that we can all recognize about ourselves, that we can issue corrections or be like, hey, I changed my mind.

00:43:16.000 That that would be more open and welcome in the culture.

00:43:19.000 I mean, I think it's fun when Elon will say something that he clearly knows is not true, or he'll ask about it, and he'll just kind of get the community notes to work for you.

00:43:29.000 It's such a better model for getting at the truth than this idea that here's the really smart people that understand the true things, and they're going to tell us what's true, and they'll decide whether or not the rest of us, what we can say by what they've said.

00:43:46.000 Totally anti-democratic.

00:43:48.000 It's completely, I mean, it's frankly totalitarian.

00:43:50.000 I mean, it's grotesquely authoritarian, and yet so many people bought into it, particularly on the left.

00:43:58.000 Obviously, there is that overconfidence could show up on the right.

00:44:02.000 Certainly, it was there under people like George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq and the invasions of our privacy.

00:44:08.000 So we really want to avoid that.

00:44:10.000 But I do agree with you on that point.

00:44:12.000 I think it's so lovely.

00:44:13.000 And I think even with Trump, There's that his narrative arc has sort of completed.

00:44:18.000 I mean, he sort of came, he has the popular vote.

00:44:21.000 I think people now understand that often the guy is directionally correct, even if there's sort of some things are wrong.

00:44:29.000 So I mean, like the reservoir, there was an empty reservoir in Los Angeles.

00:44:33.000 It's the potable water reservoir, not the non-potable reservoir.

00:44:37.000 And so Gavin Newsom, they come out and they go, Trump was just wrong about the reservoirs being empty.

00:44:42.000 No, he wasn't.

00:44:43.000 You're just...

00:44:44.000 Describing a different kind of reservoir and suggesting that it makes you innocent.

00:44:50.000 So I do think there's some of that as well, that we all exaggerate.

00:44:56.000 We're all guilty of bias confirmation.

00:45:00.000 And so I think holding that a lot more lightly is a great thing to do.

00:45:04.000 And just disempowering these scolds. 1.00

00:45:07.000 That just were...

00:45:08.000 It was terrifying how much power they gained to censor us and deplatform us and really destroy lives.

00:45:15.000 Well, man, you know, it's not easy for me not to take that stuff personally, given what happened.

00:45:20.000 Now, with your example of Gavin Newsom, you point out pedantry.

00:45:23.000 And pedantry is a kind of form of Phariseeism, I would say.

00:45:27.000 Actually, you shouldn't be doing that on the Sabbath.

00:45:30.000 You know, it's like, hold on.

00:45:31.000 Was the reservoir empty or not?

00:45:33.000 Now, like, you know, over the course of this conversation, we've been talking about a shift in sands.

00:45:37.000 It's hard for me when we talk about redemption, forgiveness, etc.

00:45:40.000 It's like, I know that for years my...

00:45:43.000 Promiscuity was exploitative. 0.98

00:45:46.000 As a famous rich dude, sleeping around, having sex in bathrooms, sleeping with multiple people at once, using the fact that I had massive access to having sex with strangers and was doing it, that was pretty crazy and excessive. 0.83

00:46:00.000 And there's no question that that is sinful, broken behaviour that hurts people.

00:46:04.000 And I beg for forgiveness, and I'm given forgiveness, and I beg for salvation.

00:46:08.000 But what happened in this weird liminal space is that...

00:46:11.000 Behaviour got metastasised and reformed retrospectively into criminal conduct by competing media companies working with groups like Logically and Crisp, working with legacy media companies, collaborating in an unprecedented way in order to go back...

00:46:30.000 To, for years and years, talk to people.

00:46:32.000 Like, have you got a story about Russell Brand?

00:46:33.000 What about that?

00:46:34.000 Well, other people have bravely come forward.

00:46:36.000 What if we shift that?

00:46:37.000 What if we shift this a little bit?

00:46:38.000 What if we tweak that? 0.99

00:46:39.000 Now it goes from, instead of being a heel and a fool... 1.00

00:46:43.000 And greedy. 0.99

00:46:44.000 And, you know, and in some aspects of the culture, a playboy, a womaniser, a gadabout, a player.

00:46:50.000 You know, it was suddenly, it was reformed into, no, this guy's not like all those other famous womanisers that we know are out there, that sometimes have to put out injunctions, that sometimes have to pay lawyers a lot of money to keep stories quiet.

00:47:04.000 No, you're in this different category here, all of a sudden, of the most appalling criminals known.

00:47:10.000 All the while in my country now, There's this explosion that there are Actual grooming gangs that are raping and abusing little girls and young women at an almost institutional and inconceivable level.

00:47:24.000 And it appears that the media and government have repressed and ignored those stories for reasons that I find difficult to understand, but there's sort of a loose way of describing it as multiculturalism.

00:47:37.000 Now, in that, Michael Schellenberger, how is it that I, as an individual, say, hey, listen, it was...

00:47:43.000 I don't think I'm in a discreet category away from lots of other womanizers. 0.94

00:47:48.000 So I hope you're going to get to their investigation sometime down the line.

00:47:53.000 I've got a list of names of other people you might want to look at for womanizing. 1.00

00:47:57.000 Not that I'm a telltale.

00:47:59.000 But more importantly, what are we going to do about the morality?

00:48:02.000 If indeed it is sinful and wrong to sleep around like that, what are we going to do about, firstly, the massive criminal exploitative evil grooming gangs that Let's get to that.

00:48:13.000 The extraordinary number of people in politics that seem to have weird connections to paedophilia or various circuits, groups and rings, whether that's around Epstein or people in Hollywood and Diddy, and that's not just people in Hollywood.

00:48:26.000 What do we do about that?

00:48:28.000 How do I personally handle it?

00:48:30.000 And what does it tell us about our shifting culture?

00:48:33.000 These tectonic plates that have moved around and the people that get caught in the cogs when a culture suddenly decides, you, you know...

00:48:42.000 And, you know, of course, I'm going to mention that it happened not when I was, you know, all over the media every day in Hollywood on talk shows, introducing movies, blah, blah, blah, and actually sleeping with loads of women.

00:48:52.000 It happened when I started to talk about Moderna, Pfizer, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and exploitation and manipulation at the highest level.

00:49:02.000 Yeah, I'm sure it was just a coincidence that it happened then.

00:49:05.000 I mean, I think the grooming gangs is such a great example and such a great contrast because obviously, yeah, the system was and the Telegraph was so good in its coverage.

00:49:16.000 It just said this was multiculturalism was used as a way to sweep this under the rug.

00:49:22.000 And obviously you transgressed the corporate agenda of the blob.

00:49:27.000 And that's why they went after you.

00:49:28.000 If you were just out there doing yoga lessons, there's no way they would have gone after you in that way.

00:49:33.000 I don't think anybody could deny that at this point.

00:49:38.000 It's crazy because it seems like the power of the media to do that has been significantly reduced now by the takeover of X and the rise of Tucker.

00:49:52.000 These attacks are sort of the last gasp of a dying media.

00:50:00.000 Nobody reads it anymore.

00:50:02.000 It's going under.

00:50:03.000 The British newspapers are doing better.

00:50:05.000 But no, I think your point is very well taken, Russell.

00:50:08.000 And I hope you become a crusader against the grooming gangs because it's definitely a cause.

00:50:13.000 It needs some, it clearly needed some leadership that it didn't have.

00:50:17.000 Yeah, plainly too, it's an issue that needs to be handled with some nuance.

00:50:22.000 And this extraction of nuance from these stories is something that's long defined the maneuvering of media.

00:50:30.000 Even, as you mentioned earlier, Michael, when...

00:50:33.000 It was Republican neoconservative power.

00:50:36.000 When we were talking about migration and immigration then, I used to think this is not very nuanced reporting.

00:50:41.000 When we were talking about the causes for the Iraq war, I used to think this is not very nuanced reporting.

00:50:46.000 What's been extraordinary is that in the intervening 2030 years, there's been this extraordinary shift that we've discussed many, many times.

00:50:54.000 And I suppose now what we're trying to discern is what will happen as these power bases rupture.

00:51:01.000 And it looks like a lot of those centralised organisations are going to collapse and we're going to see some extraordinary new alliances made.

00:51:11.000 Like, for example, when talking about something like grooming gangs, when talking about something like Israel, when talking about all of these issues that are contentious, I wonder, you know, is it possible or even desirable that we find a...

00:51:24.000 Compassionate pathway through it.

00:51:26.000 So you can discuss grooming gangs without saying I'm implying that all of Islam somehow facilitates the exploitation of children or that all immigration is bad.

00:51:40.000 How is it that you find your way through that?

00:51:43.000 And have you noticed over time, Michael, that you've found yourself more...

00:51:47.000 More easily categorized amongst, inverted commas, the right, Magamaha right at least, than the way you would previously have found yourself inhabiting.

00:51:59.000 I mean, I think on that particular specific point of how people will say things like, oh, it's Islamophobic to prosecute.

00:52:10.000 You know, Pakistani immigrants for grooming. 1.00

00:52:14.000 It's like, it reminds me of when they were, like, cancel culture where they'd be like, there's a New York Times reporter who was fired because he used the N-word with a bunch of students in a totally benign way, and the students claimed that it was offensive to them.

00:52:29.000 I don't believe for a minute that those students were actually offended.

00:52:33.000 Like, I don't think that they really thought that the guy was racist.

00:52:37.000 They're clearly just using these things as a power move.

00:52:42.000 When you stop believing in decent, basic morality, the golden rule, for example, or you lose some sort of basic commitment to humility or other ancient virtues, truth, honesty, then it basically becomes what Nietzsche described as sort of Will to power and nothing besides.

00:53:08.000 There's a hedonic thrill that people get from exercising power.

00:53:13.000 I also think it's notable that a lot of the cancellations...

00:53:17.000 I interviewed Corey Clark, a psychologist who studies the role of women going into institutions, and it's a very feminine way of ostracizing people. 1.00

00:53:28.000 The attacks, I think, on you and on others are very much attacks on men and on a kind of man.

00:53:36.000 I think, obviously, Andrew Tate, not my favorite person, he describes committing violence against women.

00:53:43.000 It's not great.

00:53:44.000 But it definitely seems like there's been this cancel culture has been driven by a real just kind of unhealthy will to power to basically just ostracize people that don't conform to the existing morality.

00:53:58.000 That's clearly, I mean, that's in some ways you would look at it and you kind of go, it might have peaked around.

00:54:04.000 2020, 2021, and it's been declining since then.

00:54:07.000 I think it's helpful to think of it as like a woke reign of terror that covered basically 2012 to 2024. 2012 was one year after Occupy, is the year of Black Lives Matter. 0.57

00:54:19.000 And then it was sort of combined with millennials becoming really powerful on social media.

00:54:23.000 And you get this just 12 years that was just terrifying and totalitarian in many ways.

00:54:29.000 I think we're now reverting back much more to the mean or much more to the norm of the United States and Western Enlightenment countries where you kind of go, look, we're not going to agree on a lot of issues of morality or religion, but we can all meet at this place called the Enlightenment, which, yes, is secularized Christianity, equal justice before the law, meritocracy, free speech, you know.

00:54:54.000 Law and order.

00:54:56.000 I mean, these basic, you know, protection of the family, protection of children, either from predatory medical organizations or from sexual predators.

00:55:05.000 It feels like there wants to be a majoritarian consensus and there's a potential for it.

00:55:11.000 Obviously, there's going to be some cracks on the right, but really, the right is so well constructed at this point.

00:55:18.000 It has so much clarity about what it is.

00:55:19.000 There's actually a battle in Britain between are the reform or the conservatives going to be the ones that really own this new nationalist populism?

00:55:27.000 But even then, it's hard to tell, at least from a distance, how different those two parties really are.

00:55:33.000 And so then really the question is, what's going to happen with the left?

00:55:36.000 And how does the left construct itself into something different?

00:55:39.000 Because it's trapped.

00:55:41.000 On the one hand, if it continues to pursue this awful wokeism, this awful racism, this kind of this obsession with gender and identity, it's going to alienate a majority of people.

00:55:52.000 But if it abandons that, then it really abandons its base.

00:55:54.000 So in some ways, it's like the right got itself kind of reconstructed, and it's in a position to have a governing majority, I think, across the whole West.

00:56:02.000 I mean, it's not just the United States.

00:56:04.000 It's Britain.

00:56:04.000 It's France.

00:56:05.000 It's Germany. 0.53

00:56:06.000 You know, it's the Netherlands.

00:56:08.000 Then the question is, what kind of response are you going to get from the left?

00:56:11.000 I mean, I sort of go, the right is so powerful now in the United States with Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the death of the conventional news media.

00:56:18.000 I'm actually slightly worried. 0.98

00:56:20.000 I kind of, I'm like, God, I wish the left could really get its shit together to sort of... 0.80

00:56:24.000 ...posed some sort of competitive challenge to the right because, like I was saying, I just think... 0.95

00:56:30.000 I'm looking at young men, like young Gen Z men, my son, 25 years old, and other men like him.

00:56:36.000 They're just saying no to all this wokeism, and they're embracing a much more classical version of masculinity and much more classical virtues.

00:56:46.000 I wonder, Michael, if we look...

00:56:50.000 For example, the assimilation of Maha into MAGA. Note how little that was reported on within conventional media.

00:57:01.000 Note the zeal with which someone like Steve Colbert, just for one example, attacked.

00:57:07.000 And continues to attack Bobby Kennedy and continues to ridicule him.

00:57:11.000 Like, you know, for Trump, it will be the misogyny, the racism, the chauvinism. 0.99

00:57:15.000 Bobby Kennedy, ah, wacko, crackpot, lunatic, says in Scripture, as a matter of fact, like children in the square for John the Baptist, he's too ascetic for Jesus Christ, King of Kings. 0.99

00:57:27.000 It's that he's too open-hearted to being around tax collectors and prostitutes and stuff. 0.96

00:57:31.000 So this globalist power, which I think is at its core godless, and the reason I believe that godlessness is what defines it, is because by denying sublime, supreme, divine power, you can lay claim to the authority that belongs solely you can lay claim to the authority that belongs solely with God.

00:57:51.000 Some other curiously rational positions that emerge from it are the kind of pagan and pantheistic worship of the planet, but...

00:58:02.000 An odd, grafted-on rationalism that only sees the planet as a kind of human resource.

00:58:09.000 It's curious to me how, in Christianity, the relationship between our kind and the planet is a divine one.

00:58:17.000 And this process of desacralization, and that's why I suppose I would query, without knowing enough about it, I'll acknowledge your point that the Enlightenment...

00:58:25.000 I feel that what that...

00:58:49.000 What it does is it leads to individualism, materialism.

00:58:52.000 I think it leads to everything that we've just been encountering.

00:58:55.000 But I do share your concern that, in inverted commas, the left will atrophy into irrelevance.

00:59:01.000 I mean, often when I talk to people on the left, I think, well, who are these people?

00:59:05.000 They're the kind of cultural figures that you've described that just seem sort of like odd Cassandras and redundant harpies.

00:59:12.000 And then there are, like, in my country at least, there are people from, like, trade union movements that feel like they're from a...

00:59:18.000 A million years ago now, sort of like quaking, shaking Jurassic figures.

00:59:24.000 But what is...

00:59:26.000 Interesting, and the reason I began this by talking about the Maha and MAGA movement, is if you think about how, like, you know, you've lived in California.

00:59:34.000 Think about all those people that, like, were fascinated by shamanism, fascinated by psychedelics, that kind of wellness movement.

00:59:45.000 Like, those kind of people, that wellness, I feel, was a kind of solipsistic and somewhat narcissistic embrace.

00:59:53.000 Of spirit.

00:59:55.000 Gosh, I'm speaking personally here.

00:59:58.000 My personal experience was, like a couple of months before my coming to Christ, before being saved, and let me own and declare that a significant part of that was being publicly shamed.

01:00:11.000 Because shame, I think, is the last flaw before you either commit suicide or...

01:00:16.000 Let the self die and become open to what you may find there.

01:00:21.000 I'd been running a festival where I was marching around with a staff.

01:00:29.000 Shout in Ragnarok and lead in a kind of pagan march and hosting rather brilliant and wonderful people, including like Wim Hof and Vandana Shiva and, you know, people like Callie Means, like brilliant folk, like from media space and from, you know, like an activist like Vandana Shiva, who I see almost like a living archetype.

01:00:49.000 You know, she's so powerful and magnificent.

01:00:51.000 Anyway, but for me, what I was doing is I'd become completely...

01:00:56.000 Self-absorbed without really knowing it.

01:00:59.000 Again, without drugs, without alcohol, without sex, I've become once again completely self-absorbed.

01:01:06.000 I think that pantheonism can do that.

01:01:10.000 I think that pantheonism can do that.

01:01:11.000 If God is everything, then God is anything.

01:01:15.000 And when I went back to a yoga, in inverted commas, festival after coming to Christ, there was something felt...

01:01:22.000 Eerie to me there.

01:01:24.000 And I now know what that was.

01:01:26.000 It was that, oh, I saw, oh, if I am taking a little bit of Buddhism, a little bit of Sufism, a little bit of Nietzsche, a little bit of this creature, who's in the middle still?

01:01:38.000 Who's the centripetal agent?

01:01:40.000 Me, Russell.

01:01:41.000 With Jesus Christ, that guy, Russell, you are down on your floor.

01:01:46.000 You are on your knees, broken, naked, weeping, saved, not by yourself, but by his sacrifice.

01:01:54.000 accessing now morality and virtue that acknowledges my fallibility and my flaws, aspiring to be the best that I can as an act of my faith and an expression of my faith, not because I will get anything from it because I'm already saved thanks to him, and that not because I will get anything from it because I'm already saved thanks to him, and that I am just, along with everyone else, down on my knees, broken, along with my enemies, with the people that would shame They're next to me, and I pray for them as well.

01:02:21.000 I'm sorry, we're such a mess.

01:02:22.000 What are we doing, Lord?

01:02:23.000 Help us.

01:02:24.000 Save us.

01:02:24.000 And I don't see how without that, we're going to reorganize this.

01:02:28.000 And the left kind of fashioned itself around atheism because of Marx and our country, UK. It's always been slightly different because they say British socialism, famously they say, owes more to Methodism than to Marx.

01:02:39.000 Therefore it has a bit of John Wesley in the revivification of, you know, socialism because of God.

01:02:44.000 Socialism because of Jesus. 0.85

01:02:46.000 Socialism because we should love one another.

01:02:48.000 Not socialism because there is no God and the state should replace God.

01:02:53.000 Oh yeah, well where do we begin?

01:02:56.000 I don't know Michael.

01:02:57.000 I know that wasn't a question.

01:02:58.000 It was an announcement.

01:03:03.000 Yeah, I mean, it seems like this is a very spiritual moment for a lot of people.

01:03:07.000 I mean, we're having a huge UFO moment right now.

01:03:12.000 People are looking to the skies because they don't believe in the leadership that we have.

01:03:17.000 I think a lot of people are coming back to religion.

01:03:20.000 I think that when you get to politics, where we get unity, I believe, is around the core pillars of civilization.

01:03:30.000 There's a separate question around one's spiritual journey and this revival of ancient virtues.

01:03:37.000 I mean, I look at somebody like Sam Bankman Freed.

01:03:40.000 You may remember the cryptocurrency billionaire who was now in prison.

01:03:45.000 His parents taught him that he should just orient himself around what's called effective altruism.

01:03:52.000 And there's a whole kind of cult of effective altruism.

01:03:55.000 And it's just based on this idea that You should rationally calculate how to best help other people, but it ignores all of the virtues other than caring and compassion.

01:04:07.000 And so, for example, he would lie, so he would violate the need for honesty.

01:04:12.000 He would betray people, violating this important virtue of loyalty.

01:04:18.000 I mean, you've got to go down the seven deadly sins, and he commits all of them, cowardice.

01:04:22.000 Lack of courage.

01:04:24.000 And so I think what we saw is the limits of this kind of extreme secular, atheistic progressivism, which became very mechanical, looking to science for morality.

01:04:39.000 Sam Harris is the most famous for this.

01:04:41.000 You can't look to science for morality.

01:04:43.000 Certainly, the evidence can inform what makes for a good life and how do you get good outcomes.

01:04:48.000 We know that people are happier when they have family, when they have connection, when they have community, when they have spirituality.

01:04:56.000 And that's part of the challenge for the left, which has been a much more secular tradition than on the right, which has a much deeper grounding in the nation.

01:05:07.000 I think for me, when I think about I do think it starts from this picture of the nation, which really is about community.

01:05:16.000 I mean, a nation is a sovereign community of essentially equal individuals that share a common identity.

01:05:25.000 One of the greatest writers on nationalism is a subject I've become obsessed with.

01:05:30.000 She talks about nationalism as a form of consciousness.

01:05:33.000 And a way to kind of build relations with each other.

01:05:37.000 And so for me that's the beloved community that we need to restore.

01:05:41.000 It's a sense of national identity.

01:05:43.000 And from there, you need a full program of all the pillars of civilization we're talking about.

01:05:48.000 But look, I'm with you.

01:05:49.000 I'm a spiritual person myself.

01:05:50.000 I identify as a Christian.

01:05:52.000 I'm also fascinated by all the UFOs and all the unidentified things that are flying through the air and that people are seeing.

01:05:58.000 I think people are clearly not trusting the leaders and they're looking up for some other source of guidance right now.

01:06:05.000 I love what you say about nationalism and your fascination with it and the idea that the nation could somehow again be sacred.

01:06:12.000 Because the fact is that we all can quickly conjure, even if there may be variation within it, the image of an Italian, a French person, the Senegalese.

01:06:23.000 even though these are relatively recent constructs, we do have archetypes in addition to stereotypes.

01:06:31.000 And what I suppose we saw with the, in inverted commas, death of the nation through global bureaucracies and through globalist capitalism was the resurgent interest in patriotism and nationalism.

01:06:45.000 And maybe there's a version of it, and this again relates to what we were talking about with grooming gangs a little earlier, the idea that a patriot...

01:06:52.000 Is a good thing, because that's a loyalty to address that list of attributes and virtues that you kindly took us through.

01:07:02.000 These are things, these are aspects of our nature that we need to valorise, access, act upon, and form systems around.

01:07:10.000 Because when I was talking about, like, you know, the excitement I felt about the appointment of...

01:07:14.000 Jay Bhattacharya or Marty Makkari.

01:07:16.000 It does feel like they're the W.B. Yeats poem.

01:07:19.000 The best are silent and the worst are full of noise and clamour.

01:07:24.000 The worst among us have taken control.

01:07:26.000 And beyond personalities is aspects of the personality, the humours or virtues or attributes that might make up a human being, that might be...

01:07:36.000 Seen as the fruits of a connection with the divine.

01:07:41.000 And I'm interested that you too have gotten interested in nationalism, because nationalism was an idea that's gotten, I guess in my country at least, from the 1980s onwards, been subject to extraordinary attack.

01:07:52.000 And that, I guess, now thinking about it, is concomitant with the rise of global capitalism and the unleashing and deregulation of markets.

01:08:01.000 So maybe one of the things they had to shut down was kind of that patriotism.

01:08:06.000 Well, yeah.

01:08:07.000 I mean, the big lie is that nationalism is the same as fascism or the same as totalitarianism.

01:08:14.000 What Hannah Arendt teaches us is that nationalism is a barrier to totalitarianism.

01:08:19.000 Totalitarianism wants to destroy all relationships that people have except for the one between the people and the state, between the people and the party and the state, which are one and the same.

01:08:28.000 And so what nationalism gets you, you know, like in healthy friendships, In healthy relationships, romantic, platonic, you want your friend to be their own person, to be a strong person, to have their own sense of identity, to have an interiority that is strong enough to match yours.

01:08:46.000 You don't want them becoming like you.

01:08:49.000 You don't want them trying to make you like them.

01:08:52.000 You want them to have that.

01:08:53.000 So when I think about Britain, I have a very similar reaction that Elon has with Britain, which is that I care about Britain.

01:09:01.000 I also care about Brazil.

01:09:03.000 I wouldn't say I care about all countries equally, but certainly Britain, we're all in the tradition of the British Enlightenment and this incredible British liberal democratic tradition.

01:09:15.000 So when I look at the grooming gangs, There's two things going on there.

01:09:20.000 One is this unspeakable cruelty and predation on vulnerable people, but it also reminds me of this really important insight by the scholars of civilization who say when civilization breaks down, it's when the elite, what he calls the creative class of the bourgeoisie,

01:09:40.000 the creative class of people that are really running the country, it's when they stop identifying with their own working class and their own people and And I think that

01:10:12.000 this is where...

01:10:14.000 We've been talking, I think, a little bit about what is the relationship between a kind of political agenda, coalition, etc., and what is your spiritual commitment.

01:10:24.000 I do think that there is a kind, I would call it spiritual, if you don't want to use that word, you could say ideological, you could say consciousness, that you need a strong national consciousness in order to be a strong and healthy country.

01:10:38.000 Why?

01:10:39.000 Precisely so you can protect your most vulnerable girls.

01:10:45.000 I mean...

01:10:47.000 Part of the issue in Britain, and you probably understand this much better than I do, I just observe it from traveling there increasingly, is that the United States is much more egalitarian.

01:10:58.000 We're much more like, if you go to Britain and you're a university professor, they treat you so much better than they do.

01:11:07.000 The United States is like, I don't care, I'm an electrician, you're a university professor, you're no better than me.

01:11:12.000 And that's what's so great about the United States.

01:11:17.000 That snobbery and that elitism led them to ignore the predation of often these vulnerable girls were poor and working class. 0.99

01:11:26.000 A lot of them didn't have a parent in the home.

01:11:29.000 It's very similar to the kids that are preyed upon for sex trafficking or by the priests.

01:11:34.000 And so why do you need nationalism?

01:11:37.000 It's so that you protect all of your citizens.

01:11:40.000 And it's not to say that you sort of...

01:11:44.000 Overlook the abuses of your citizens.

01:11:47.000 It's really more like you have a common ethic and code, but it is so striking that multiculturalism, I mean, this was very clear in the Telegraph's coverage of the Greenman Gangs, multiculturalism was the ideological cover for all of this horrible abuse.

01:12:02.000 And so I kind of go, I hope that Britain revives its own national commitment, because I do think that's necessary for Britain to be a strong, independent ally of the United States and for it to protect its own citizens.

01:12:15.000 And for us to continue this process of maintaining this incredible liberal democratic civilization that allows us to be different individuals and not be subject to really awful confining totalitarian moralities.

01:12:29.000 That's brilliant.

01:12:31.000 I mean, what you said about the lack of cohesion means that the vulnerable will end up being exploited was excellent.

01:12:38.000 And the idea that If elites of different nations are more allied to and aligned with one another than their own population that falls under their protectorate, that will lead to exploitation.

01:12:54.000 Can the concept predate the Westphalian Treaty?

01:12:58.000 Can you apply that to tribes?

01:13:00.000 And of course you can, if tribes anywhere are willing to exploit their own population through slavery or human sacrifice, that will, likely because of trade affinities or affiliations of some other kind with other tribes, regions or groups, that will lead to exploitation.

01:13:15.000 So I feel like that.

01:13:17.000 It works fantastically as an idea.

01:13:19.000 But prior, of course, again, now to somewhat go full circle, or at least to include ideas we've already discussed, what has happened prior to the revelation of this mass exploitation, speaking to the grooming gangs, a scandal and a disgrace, is that national identity has been... 0.53

01:13:38.000 Deliberately unwoven and desecrated, if you consider the nation capable of being sanctified at all, that British people were told, oh, there is no such thing as Britain.

01:13:50.000 And, like, that was a personal slur to a lot of people whose grandparents or parents had died as a result of relatively recent wars.

01:14:00.000 And there was a particular...

01:14:02.000 Disgust for working class people. 1.00

01:14:04.000 Now, I recognise it is much more pronounced in my country, but basket of deplorables, you know, could easily be deployed in the United Kingdom.

01:14:14.000 And that kind of loathing is, I think...

01:14:16.000 What has formed a right-wing nationalist alliance is because there is a centrifugal, there was an explicit centrifugal loathing of working-class people.

01:14:28.000 Prior to Brexit, there was a lot of rhetoric around white vans and people that have flags up outside their houses, which is perhaps the...

01:14:37.000 They're comparable icons to a red MAGA hat or a bare chest or face paint at a sport game.

01:14:44.000 You know, there are correlatives, even discrete though our nations are.

01:14:49.000 And, yeah, I feel that what we're seeing now, of course it's obvious, isn't it?

01:14:53.000 Even if you're talking about someone of seismic significance, like...

01:14:58.000 Hitler, or more contemporaneous and likely transitory significance, like the kind of pop cultural figures of the right that have emerged out of the independent media age even in my country, they cannot have that power unless they are somehow avatars for and totems of an unexpressed feeling.

01:15:19.000 The culture and the cultural centralised forces can sculpt Gavin Newsom and send him forth.

01:15:27.000 But it takes aggregating powers to create the creatures that are being maligned and attacked in the UK, likely because, as we have already touched upon, they are flawed, broken individuals in some ways that are pretty evident.

01:15:48.000 Pull back to the macro issue, that nations need people that come forth and say, we are those values.

01:15:53.000 You've forgotten, you've cast too much shadow on masculinity.

01:15:58.000 You denied the idea of patriotism.

01:16:01.000 You, in particular, thought you could get away with, and pre-social media you could, just out and out.

01:16:08.000 Desecrate and destroy and humiliate the working class. 1.00

01:16:11.000 And it was no coincidence that it's the Labour Party and the Democrat movements that previously fashioned themselves as the representatives of those class that... 0.84

01:16:21.000 We've abandoned them in favour of, oh, there's these other minorities, there's the minorities, actually, specifically minorities, these minorities that you don't like, you homophobes, you racists, you misogynists, and because that's so important, we're going to just get on with these projects over here, and that's not to say that all minority groups don't deserve representation,

01:16:39.000 support, and love, that, you know, Christianity has principles for that, but when it's one suspects being used to lacquer over the abandonment of your core constituency and the foundation, Because who's going to be in it?

01:17:02.000 Well, right.

01:17:03.000 I mean, I think the final piece of it is that you do need this positive alternative vision for people to want to reproduce.

01:17:11.000 I mean, you know, obviously you can maintain and grow your population, you know, either by having more kids or importing more immigrants.

01:17:18.000 But if you just import people from different countries that don't share your core culture, of course you're going to end up changing the character of your country. 0.99

01:17:26.000 And it's not a...

01:17:27.000 I'm not making any generalization about what the implications are of that for immigration, but you just have to recognize there's a real reality to that, that you should come here and you have to, you know, like in the United States, I assume, and Britain too, I assume most countries, you take a citizenship test and you pledge allegiance to the new country's laws and norms and values.

01:17:47.000 You don't have to worship the gods of people there necessarily, but you do have to respect those norms and values, including learning the language.

01:17:54.000 I do think you have to go another step, though, because I just think there's a lot of young people that were told that the world is coming to an end from climate change, that they're guilty of white supremacy just by being white.

01:18:05.000 They were fed and indoctrinated in this awful anti-human, anti-civilization, anti-Western, anti-Christian, anti-Enlightenment ideology.

01:18:18.000 And it's just so dark and is so depressing.

01:18:21.000 Why would you want to bring kids into a world that you thought was like that?

01:18:26.000 And Christianity offered that beautiful story.

01:18:30.000 When we became more secular, we have this beautiful enlightenment story of human progress and of human promise.

01:18:36.000 I'm actually not super into rockets or Mars or anything like that, but I appreciate that Elon is suggesting that there's some ambition there.

01:18:45.000 Some sense of human potential and human possibility.

01:18:48.000 I love that from the human potential movement, the positive psychology movement.

01:18:53.000 You know, when we were kids, Ross, I don't know if it was the same for you.

01:18:56.000 But we were taught, and it's probably not true, right?

01:18:59.000 But we were taught, like, you only use, like, 10% of your brain, you know?

01:19:04.000 They're like, oh, if you untap, you're full.

01:19:05.000 But that is such a positive, that is so much closer to, I think, what we want to be at, is that you have so much more creative potential than you're able to realize.

01:19:16.000 And we want to be in a society and civilization that helps you to realize your most authentic and also your greatest potentials.

01:19:23.000 So we've been teaching children, we've basically been depressing generations of children, overpopulation, nuclear weapons, climate change, species extinction, white supremacy, slavery, genocide, the Holocaust, blah, blah, blah.

01:19:38.000 Look, we've had a rough time.

01:19:40.000 There's been bad things that have happened, but look at where we've arrived at.

01:19:44.000 In the United States, the most...

01:19:50.000 We're more anti-racist than ever.

01:19:52.000 Nobody cares.

01:19:54.000 Nobody cares anymore.

01:19:56.000 And so let's get on with living a fully potential creative spiritual life that we finally have the opportunity to live.

01:20:06.000 And so for me, we need to bring some of the Maha and MAGA do Say that.

01:20:12.000 And that's obviously why they were so threatening because they were saying, look, we can achieve greatness as a country and achieve great creativity and potential as individuals as well.

01:20:25.000 All of our cultural fruits were foul.

01:20:28.000 Did you not see the cloven hoof of Baphomet?

01:20:32.000 For surely to say that all human achievement is dark is to yield to the evil one.

01:20:39.000 To claim that everything we've done is disgusting and dirty is an outpouring of, as it says in the New Testament, three times our Lord says, you know, it's the evil one who reigns down here.

01:20:50.000 Apostle Paul says it.

01:20:51.000 We're not fighting flesh and blood, mate.

01:20:53.000 It's dark power and high principle.

01:20:55.000 We were primed to accept the fall prior to the fall.

01:21:01.000 And all of that ecological stuff that you say, that apocalyptic cult that worships somehow the earth somehow voided of sanctity is part of the problem.

01:21:13.000 It was curious to me that you said that, you know, yeah, you can worship your own God, but, you know, pledging allegiance to the flag is, I would say, sort of paradigmatically the same as saying you will worship our gods.

01:21:23.000 But, yeah, why would you want to come to a culture if you don't like it?

01:21:28.000 That is the sort of common sense, I suppose.

01:21:31.000 And in scripture it would say, if you're not against me, you're for me.

01:21:34.000 So it's sort of, in that, it's like we don't care if you're, like, what you are.

01:21:37.000 I mean, Islam, of course, didn't exist yet, although I'm sure that if you weren't Muslim, you'd have a different perspective on that and how the origins of your faith through Abraham.

01:21:45.000 But, like, at least chronologically it didn't exist, maybe cosmologically.

01:21:49.000 I mean, but anyway, my point is this, is unless you place Jesus Christ at the centre of it, and I say this because I am a Christian, I'm a follower of Jesus, don't know if you know this about me, Michael, like, I would say that without him there, you will start to worship false gods, maybe we can go to Mars and conquer new territories, which as an archetype is a transcendent vision of going to heaven.

01:22:14.000 Anyway, so, and I feel that those false markers of our progress, and I love the idea of the potentiality, that, you know, we're only using 10% of our brain, that lovely if anachronistic trope, like that, because medicine has in so many ways improved our lives, because technology has in so many ways improved our lives, we have not been observant of the fact that we've been worshipping false idols and heading in the wrong direction.

01:22:38.000 And I think the reset of going, wait, we're not God.

01:22:42.000 God is God.

01:22:44.000 We can't have principles at all unless you have some sort of universal notion, and this is what the post-structure is, of course, if you're aware, deny that there is, that there is not, it's not even a homogenuity.

01:22:54.000 It's endless.

01:22:56.000 It's just a mosaic, an ever-shifting mosaic of disassociated fragments, not even a morass of nothingness.

01:23:04.000 Worse than nothingness, just arbitrariness in fragments.

01:23:08.000 Without the vertical principle and the horizontal principle through that, we're...

01:23:15.000 We're in serious trouble, I think.

01:23:16.000 I think we will remain in serious trouble.

01:23:18.000 I do feel optimistic about Maga Maha.

01:23:21.000 I do, because how I came to, not Christ, but how I came to Trump was like, if they hate him this much, there's got to be something he's doing right.

01:23:30.000 I don't know what it is yet, because I was on board with it. 0.76

01:23:32.000 Yeah, you can't say Mexicans are rapists. 0.99

01:23:34.000 That's horrible. 0.98

01:23:36.000 But then, I just slowly, through realising that the institutional Kafkaesque bureaucrats that ultimately...

01:23:43.000 Try to destroy me.

01:23:45.000 I came to think, now this guy...

01:23:46.000 And then more and more, I think, he's...

01:23:49.000 He's an American mystic.

01:23:50.000 That's what I think.

01:23:51.000 He's like some sort of silverback creature of the American imagination. 0.96

01:23:56.000 If there were an American prophet, of course he eats McDonald's and drinks Coke and goes around with a jet with his own name on it.

01:24:01.000 What does the American myth demand of you?

01:24:03.000 Of course you'll have big phallic towers with your name.

01:24:07.000 America created him.

01:24:09.000 America needed him.

01:24:10.000 America got him.

01:24:11.000 And I think that he might be the end of the kind of globalism that we were fearful of before when we were doing censorship, industrial complex stuff.

01:24:19.000 But I just, you know, none of us knows what it will beget.

01:24:22.000 And I say without the one true God, you know, I'd be concerned.

01:24:27.000 Yeah, I mean, it's hard, right?

01:24:31.000 Because it does seem like the wokeism definitely comes out of liberalism, right?

01:24:37.000 But it becomes anti-liberal at the same time.

01:24:41.000 There's definitely something underneath I mean, there's a spiritual commitment that people sort of forgot about when we embrace a system of constitutional law and of law and order.

01:24:54.000 But before you have Locke, you have Hobbes, and you have this kind of deep, underlying community.

01:25:00.000 I mean, I've always been struck by...

01:25:03.000 Because one of the things I'm always interested in is how compassion became cruelty.

01:25:07.000 How do the people that say they care the most, why do they inflict so much cruelty, particularly on, say, homeless addicts, people with mental illness?

01:25:14.000 And really, it's because they're not motivated by compassion.

01:25:16.000 They're motivated by power and a desire to control and a desire to feel the hedonism of feeling powerful and control and have some purpose as an identity, as a caring person.

01:25:27.000 That's very different from what Christianity actually was because the correction by Jesus to the Old Testament, to the earlier...

01:25:37.000 Strictness was a correction, but he didn't want to get rid of all of the beautiful wisdom that came before, including Stoicism, which had been brought into Christianity, God helps those who help themselves, that there's some individual agency that Christianity is not about obeying.

01:25:57.000 It's not submission.

01:25:58.000 That's Islam. 0.83

01:25:59.000 It's about actually realizing your own light and your own potential.

01:26:04.000 So I agree with you.

01:26:05.000 There's something there.

01:26:06.000 Ultimately, we've got countries that are set up on secular terms, and so I think we've got to find a way to both encourage people to have that spiritual life, but also I just think at a political coalition and alliance level, we build support in defending the pillars of civilization like law and order, equal justice in the law, fire departments.

01:26:26.000 That function, you know, respect for fire departments, respect for the preparatory work of fire departments, and of good education and not depressing children or letting them become subject to sexual predators.

01:26:37.000 In some ways, it should be a straightforward agenda because it's so basic, it's so simple, and it's being actively undermined by a particular group of people who are more loyal to foreign elites and foreign people than they are to their own people.

01:26:53.000 Yeah, Michael, I think you've summed it up there, which isn't an easy thing to have done, given it was a pretty diffuse, discursive little chat that we just had.

01:27:02.000 But I really enjoyed talking about all of them subjects, Michael.

01:27:05.000 Thank you for your dexterity and ability to peripatetically wander through subjects like a true garden and pull fruits hither and yon and make sense of it all, pulling it apart.

01:27:18.000 Ah, enlightened apes we.

01:27:20.000 How blessed we are to have had this conversation.

01:27:22.000 Thanks, Michael Schellenberger.

01:27:24.000 It's so great to learn from you always.

01:27:25.000 Pleasure to be with you, Russell.

01:27:27.000 Let me know when you're in Austin, and I'd love to see you when I'm in Florida.

01:27:30.000 Remember, on Rumble Premium, you get additional content from me and other Rumble content creators, as well as an ad-free experience.

01:27:37.000 If you use my code, you get a discount, plus I get additionally paid.

01:27:40.000 So it's a real incentive for me there.

01:27:42.000 Remember, Break Bread this week will be with Geppetto and Jiminy Cricket, and most importantly of all, Nathan Finocchio, who's made theology accessible.

01:27:53.000 If you're a Rumble Premium member, you can join us live for that conversation tomorrow.

01:27:58.000 But remember...

01:27:59.000 You want to see me preaching?

01:28:01.000 Here's me preaching!

01:28:02.000 We're on our way to the ocean church where I've been asked to...

01:28:07.000 I actually don't even know what I've been asked to do.

01:28:09.000 Do you know, I'd forgotten how this had happened.

01:28:11.000 I was thinking, why is it that I am here?

01:28:17.000 And then Michael said, you met Becky in Seaside.

01:28:21.000 I was like, yeah, yeah, I remember that.

01:28:24.000 And then you did a video where you spoke and said, Pastor Michael, I said, yes, this did all happen.

01:28:30.000 And now I'm here.

01:28:33.000 These actions have consequences.

01:28:36.000 I've not been Christian very long.

01:28:38.000 Like, eight months!

01:28:40.000 Since April the 28th.

01:28:43.000 So you all know more about this than I do.

01:28:46.000 So, inadvertently, I've been worshipping false idols, the false idol of fame.

01:28:51.000 And if you do something like that, if someone's more famous than you, Then you might feel inferior because if you invested, it was Benedict Cumberbatch is who it was.

01:29:00.000 In England, it's like they've tried to make Jesus boring.

01:29:02.000 No disrespect to the Church of England because I've met some brilliant and beautiful people in the Church of England since coming to our Lord and they've educated me and they've helped me and they've instructed me beautifully.

01:29:12.000 But overall, it seems like in England, they're trying to make Christianity seem like it's boring.

01:29:17.000 And like when you read from Genesis to Revelation, there's...

01:29:21.000 Fire and power and angels and demons and resurrection.

01:29:27.000 And amidst us now, beyond the limitations of our senses, surely if we could but see with new eyes, we would know that we are surrounded even now that they are among us, our guardian angels and other forces yet, which if we do not submit, might...

01:29:48.000 We've got lots of other additional content on Rumble Premium, like me and Eddie Gallagher.

01:29:53.000 Eddie Gallagher is a Navy SEAL that was detained in a military prison after the death in custody of a member of ISIS that he was charged with the care of.

01:30:04.000 I don't know how you describe it when it's an ISIS member.

01:30:07.000 Anyway, the ISIS prisoner of war died and Eddie Gallagher was vilified and ultimately imprisoned without trial, but ultimately at trial was vindicated.

01:30:17.000 The thing is, is they weaponized, in my situation, they weaponized the The Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is the military justice system against me.

01:30:27.000 Once the government targets you, there is no getting out of that.

01:30:32.000 They will go at any lengths to make you look the way they want to.

01:30:37.000 They will create a narrative.

01:30:38.000 They have the media on their side.

01:30:40.000 A person that can be revered and lionized and celebrated and decorated, I see the amount of medals and ribbons there on you and the cover of your book.

01:30:48.000 When it's convenient...

01:30:50.000 You're able to go based on gossip and rumor.

01:30:54.000 And that's the bit I recognize.

01:30:56.000 Because while it's a million miles away in so many ways, I'm a famous movie star.

01:31:03.000 What are you supposed to do? 0.99

01:31:03.000 I meant to go around and have sex with loads of women. 0.99

01:31:05.000 What were you doing? 1.00

01:31:06.000 I was going around having sex with loads of women. 1.00

01:31:08.000 Is there something about that that's morally wrong? 0.84

01:31:10.000 Yes.

01:31:11.000 Yes, there is.

01:31:12.000 I believe everyone should own a firearm if they want to.

01:31:16.000 This is America.

01:31:17.000 They have the Second Amendment for that reason.

01:31:19.000 But I say, if you are going to own a firearm, that is going to be one of the biggest responsibilities that you have.

01:31:26.000 Because this is meant to do one thing. 0.96

01:31:28.000 To kill. 0.99

01:31:33.000 How's that feel? 0.99

01:31:35.000 Yeah, comfortable.

01:31:36.000 Yeah.

01:31:37.000 Right, well, thanks very much for joining us.

01:31:38.000 We will be back.

01:31:39.000 For a glorious week.

01:31:40.000 Neil Oliver coming up.

01:31:41.000 Lara Logan coming up.

01:31:42.000 Brilliant and fantastic guest.

01:31:44.000 Let me know in the comments and chat who you want to see on our show.

01:31:46.000 Until then, if you can, stay free.

01:31:48.000 *musique* Switching.

01:32:16.000 Switching.

01:32:36.000 Many switching, switch on, switch on.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - January 21, 2025

Budget Cuts, Fires, and the Failures of Leadership – SF523

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