Russell Brand is joined by Jake Chapman to discuss the Ukraine peace deal, turning points in the media, and why it s so hard to know what to believe in these days. Plus, Russell talks about his faith and what it means to him.
00:03:16.000Hey, okay, now look, there's quite a lot to deal with, but when is there not these days?
00:03:21.000I mean, we're going to start by talking about the Ukrainian peace deal and whether or not this Ukrainian peace deal.
00:03:29.000I mean, I actually am uncertain about what to even take seriously in reality in the most general way.
00:03:34.000Trump says only a few sticking points remain in Ukraine-Russia peace talks as Kiev reportedly backs framework.
00:03:41.000But even something like a peace deal in a long-ranging conflict seems secondary to a fractured and fragmented media space where every day brings new, baffling, and confusing stories.
00:03:54.000With most people reaching now into esotericism or conspiracy to try to unpack and understand a world that is, man, it's difficult to understand these days.
00:04:05.000So we'll be covering that in a little bit.
00:04:07.000But before that, I've got a few things to tell you.
00:04:20.000Again, it's another one of those stories where if you only pay attention to one particular stream of media, you would get a very particular impression of it, wouldn't you?
00:04:29.000Like, say, for example, you watched only Candace Owens.
00:04:34.000What would you think about Turning Point and participating in Turning Point?
00:04:37.000But then you see something like, I feel like I didn't even watch the clip because I try not to watch too much of this kind of stuff, to tell you the truth, so as I don't go insane.
00:04:43.000I don't know how you lot cope with it, to be honest.
00:04:45.000And I saw like Erica Kirk addressing the idea that some people said she was having an affair with JD Vance, right?
00:04:53.000And that's the kind of thing, you know, and she just said, well, this is ridiculous.
00:05:06.000But what is so difficult these days is that we're living in such a fluxy, fluctuating, plastic and mobile space that I just find it hard outside of Christ to know what to believe in.
00:05:22.000And indeed, one of the few things that gives me comfort, and let me know in the comments and chat if you agree with this, wherever you're watching us, if you're watching us on Rumble or Rumble Premium, and I hope you are because if you subscribe to Rumble Premium, it benefits me financially.
00:05:35.000And you, let's put you first for a moment, you get additional content from Steve Crowder, you get content from Glenn Greenwald, from all of like Rumble's Premium creators, and you get an ad-free experience over there.
00:05:55.000Because I suppose I've started to see, I'm reading David Icke's new book, and David Icke is, of course, a divisive figure, but think about the number of times he's been right about stuff and ahead of it.
00:06:07.000What I get from reading him is like that all of the cultural and political conversations that we have are kind of, you know, fleas on a dog's back or yet another metaphor.
00:06:19.000You think you're in control of your life, but you don't control your cardiology, your digestive system.
00:07:00.000I've got a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old daughter.
00:07:02.000So I went and saw that film Wicked and it's spurred a lot of thoughts in me.
00:07:06.000Let me know if you've seen that movie and see if you can get on this.
00:07:10.000Kids that are watching Wicked these days, if they watch Wizard of Oz at all, they'll see it from the perspective of already being told that Alphaba is the goodie and that Dorothy killing Alpha Bar was a kind of inadvertent murder of a good person.
00:07:25.000And it's so interesting to live in a revisionist time.
00:07:31.000Is Wizard of Oz the source or is Wicked the source?
00:07:35.000Is independent media the source or is the prestigious New York Times the source?
00:07:41.000And aren't you appraised yet of the obvious fact that none of these places, sources, or resources are 100% reliable or probably even 50% reliable?
00:09:03.000I mean, he was doing like one of his speeches, and he was sort of like shooting it on quite a low, look like he was shooting on an iPad from sort of like down at this kind of angle, and some ink fell out of his nose.
00:09:15.000Now, it might not have been cocaine, but people already a little bit think that Zelensky is getting his charge from, you know, from the coca leaf, the humble coca leaf.
00:09:28.000And do you know, like, well, do you know, like, did you know that the Zelensky story, our friend Gavin DeBecker, I saw Gavin Debecker describing this on Joe Rogan, that Zelensky was, we all know he was a comedian and an actor, but did you know that he was a comedian in the show?
00:09:43.000And in the show, a comedian is a sort of stalking horse candidate in a Ukrainian election and then wins the election.
00:09:52.000And then the name of the fictional party in this actual TV show was something like the people's power.
00:09:59.000And then while still doing the show, Zelensky registered the name of the party, as did the acolytes around Zelensky, you know, the People's Party or whatever.
00:10:57.000Okay, let's cover this Ukraine peace deal and see if we ourselves are capable with the access to information we have and our awareness, hopefully, of our biases, picking our way through this madness.
00:11:10.000With awareness of the irony that this statement should elicit, here's Fox News reporting on it.
00:11:16.000All right, so we are getting an update on the push for peace in Ukraine.
00:11:20.000A US official is now telling Fox that the Ukrainian side has agreed to a peace deal with some minor details still set to be sorted out.
00:11:27.000Meanwhile, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll met with Russian officials in Abu Dhabi, Driscoll's office saying, quote, late Monday and throughout Tuesday, Secretary Driscoll and team have been in discussions with the Russian delegation to achieve a lasting peace deal in Ukraine.
00:11:41.000The talks are going well and we remain optimistic.
00:11:46.000Yeah, I mean, with the language with that, if it is true and the Ukrainians go forward with it and you throw it back into Putin's lap, what does he do?
00:11:53.000Does he accept it or if he rejects it, then what happens?
00:11:55.000Who cares what that bloke in the jacket feels?
00:11:58.000Well, you throw that back into Putin's lap.
00:12:00.000What if his trousers are bunched up and it looks like he's got a heart on under there?
00:12:28.000Horrible, brutal, terrible facts of war.
00:12:30.000The original 28-point peace plan, which was drafted by the United States, has been fine-tuned with additional input from both sides, and there are only a few remaining points of disagreement.
00:12:38.000In the hopes of finalizing this peace plan, I've directed my special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to meet with President Putin in Moscow, and at the same time, Secretary of the Army, Dan Driscoll.
00:12:48.000I mean, I suppose what stares us in the face every time we analyze to the degree we do this type of content is that media is altered forever.
00:12:57.000Trump was the pioneer of this initially on Twitter, like recognizing that he can directly access his audience and he can tell you in not granular detail, but in broad strokes.
00:13:06.000Oh, right, so Dan Driscoll is going to be meeting with the Ukrainians.
00:13:09.000I'll be briefed on all progress made along with VPJD, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of War, Pete Hegzev, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
00:13:18.000I look forward to hopefully meeting with Zelensky and Putin soon, but only when the deal to end this war is final or in its final stages.
00:13:25.000Thank you for your attention to this very important matter.
00:13:28.000I love the way he does that sign-off after doing it.
00:13:30.000And there's all hope that peace can be accomplished as soon as possible.
00:13:36.000So it seems to me, like, from the broadest and most superficial perspective, because that's the only one I can offer you, because I'm deep, deep in trying to discover Christ in myself in my own limited and broken way.
00:13:49.000That what Trump is doing is sort of riding the cascading waves of domestic turmoil by occasionally brokering what seemed to be seismic peace deals like the one in the Middle East.
00:15:01.000Like, the Nobel Peace Prize was set up by the Nobel family after they got some bad blowback, forgive the pun, for their invention and source of their wealth and revenue, dynamite.
00:15:52.000Like, I remember one time, like, early on, my mate, Martino, God rest his eternal soul.
00:15:56.000Like, when like Sarah Marshall came out or was coming out or something, like, he goes, like, he goes, people are talking about you like as a nominee for a best supporting actor, Oscar.
00:16:07.000And I was like, yeah, the Oscars are a verifiable and good thing.
00:16:16.000Like, I remember just like being totally willing to get on board.
00:16:19.000Like, our willingness to participate in the illusion is an absolute requirement.
00:16:25.000We'll be talking about COVID and the pandemic period, by the way, a little later.
00:16:29.000Because it's very difficult if you've vaccinated all your kids to start going, whoa, I just hope that these studies that haven't been done to demonstrate that there's no link between vaccines and autism, I hope these undone studies haven't been undone because there is a link between vaccines and autism.
00:16:47.000Because I don't want to go through that.
00:17:10.000They disappeared my hair and then I had something floating on top of my head that looked like a floating crown, but an extremely small one.
00:17:28.000I'm sort of always like with Trump, like caught between how can he care?
00:17:33.000How can the person that's actually nominally and at least on the surface, as far as we know, the most powerful person in the whole world maybe given the maneuvering in the Supreme Court, the most powerful president in history, how can he care, as he did at the UN when he gave that talk, about the tiles that they used and how he would have used better tiles if they'd awarded his construction company the contracts?
00:17:57.000How can he care about Time magazine thing?
00:17:59.000Like, but in a way, on the other hand, it makes me sort of like him because I remember how it felt when The Guardian, when I in the UK, you know, and I recognize my pip squeak fame compared to this sort of mega historical figure, whether you like him or not, you'd have to agree that he's sort of a contemporarily incomparable figure.
00:18:24.000And I, I, and Joe, you me and you wouldn't have known each other then, nor me and you, Massey, but we're all from sort of similar backgrounds, by which I mean sort of I'm assuming, you know, but somewhere between working class and lower middle class backgrounds, essentially where you're you're not vested in the system because you've, you know, because of it for economic and social reasons.
00:18:48.000And I said at that point, no one votes that I know because they all know it's total bollocks.
00:18:54.000And it really, really resonated and it got a lot of heat and a lot of attention.
00:18:57.000And it was like this big rush of fame outside of celebrity fame.
00:19:00.000It was a different sort of had a different timbre, different quality to it.
00:19:06.000The newspaper that I would have imagined to be most sympathetic to an autodidactic working class person espousing off the cuff on politics would be the apparently left-wing Guardian.
00:19:19.000But when I did a bunch of interviews around it, the one that was most derisory, condemnatory, critical, haughty, and supercilious were The Guardian.
00:19:27.000They were like sneering, contemptuous.
00:19:29.000Even though I went with the journalist to like a soup kitchen and did like some sort of, you know, he goes, oh, you know, you care about people, do you?
00:19:36.000Well, why don't you come to this soup kitchen and where I do stuff?
00:20:24.000Even something innocuous that you look at in your sight line is probably got a bunch of connotations to you.
00:20:29.000Anyway, like the whole article was very sort of snidey and like it started to really fuel this hatred in me of like the intelligentsia and the professional media class.
00:20:38.000So I get what he's saying, but I'm just some peripheral marginal cultural figure.
00:20:43.000He's the president of the United States of America.
00:20:45.000So on one hand, I think it's sort of ridiculous.
00:20:47.000But on the other hand, I think he's like really identifiable and recognizable.
00:20:54.000I can't get my head around what he means or what he represents.
00:20:57.000Even though I read a bunch of content that say he's owned in the same way that you would know that Biden or Harris is owned, he's owned or he's malleable and all that kind of stuff.
00:21:06.000Let me know what you think in the comments and chat.
00:21:08.000Let me know where you are on your personal journey of awakening.
00:21:12.000And let me know when you think the Ukraine ceasefire will happen.
00:21:59.000And like, what I suppose they're good at doing is mapping and tracking data points and compiling information in a way that's somewhat reliable.
00:22:07.000So you could probably use this if, you know, just try not to gamble, guys, because I don't know.
00:23:54.000The only people that have ever beaten that index over the last 30 or 50 years or something like that is Warren Buffett and an inaccessible hedge fund called something like, I don't know, Helio or something.
00:24:50.000Okay, if you're watching us on YouTube, you adorable people, get off it and click the link in the description.
00:24:56.000Come over to Rumble and Rumble Premium.
00:25:00.000Let us know what you think about this.
00:25:02.000Trump might be firing Kash Patel, a man with whom I briefly shared a booth at the Army versus Navy football game that I briefly attended in Jake's boots.
00:25:13.000I went there to the Army, Navy football game in Maryland.
00:25:40.000Emma is now has just learned that FBI director Kash Patel may be out of a job in the coming months.
00:25:46.000Three people with knowledge of the situation, say President Trump and his top aides, have grown tired of Patel and the unflattering headlines he's been generating recently, including using a government jet to visit his girlfriend and enlisting a SWAT team as her security detail.
00:26:54.000Like, Nero, Emperor Nero, who, let's face it, was not a man known for his incredible grace or connection with God.
00:27:01.000He had this very not primitive, classical air conditioning thing put into his palace, like where there was a kind of a version of air conditioning, but a Roman version of it.
00:27:12.000So I guess they had air and fans working in some sort of pre-industrial way.
00:27:17.000And the air vents would like have gold leaf in fine fragments like petals raining down on Nero.
00:27:24.000It apparently took a long time to get that working because it was a complicated project.
00:27:27.000Once they got it working, Nero sort of took an inhalation and went, ah, finally I can start living like a human being.
00:27:35.000And that's how I felt when we were on that G4 jet.
00:27:40.000That's how it's supposed to be when we're flying off to El Salvador to a Bitcoin conference.
00:27:45.000have been in some sketchy private planes too so it's not just all yeah normally i mean us and chris pavlovsky the ceo we went to see don trump jr in one like you know in indiana jones with all them chickens in the back and like it's like weird leather straps hanging off the roof and like things that look a bit like anibal lecter's mask when they wheel anibal lecter about on that There are things like that everywhere, like over the windows, like weird bits of net, like leather technology, like wicker baskets, that sort of thing you'd find at a Wuhan wet market.
00:28:13.000Like also like we're pangolin in a box.
00:28:15.000Like then we've been in other ones, I mean like with our with Stan, like Stan, we get like with Stan's Phenom and King Airplane, like when we sometimes go to DC to do a little bit of graft, a little bit of work, graft, call it what you will.
00:28:28.000Like one time we took a Hungarian missionary with us, beloved Josh.
00:28:32.000Now, like if you're on a very small little jet that's like a rickety old thing, there's a little bit of an unspoken rule that you don't use the bathroom on there because you know it'll be like doing the bathroom in someone's pocket.
00:28:43.000And I Josh went back there and frankly, I'll just, let's just click, let's just call it how it was.
00:28:47.000He was, if the four of us, he was Ringo, right?
00:28:50.000He had no business using that bathroom, right?
00:28:53.000He went back there and done a wee in there and like we were like, whoa, man, what's Josh doing in that bathroom?
00:28:58.000Like, sounds like he goes, and then when he came out, like, Jake was going and I was like, whoa, what are you doing in there?
00:29:02.000And he goes, no, I only had a P, I only had a P.
00:29:04.000And then Stan, the pilot of the plane, sort of like leaned over and went, hey, there's some spray back there if you need it.
00:29:12.000He blew the lid on Josh, the Hungarian missionary's PFAR, as you were calling it.
00:30:01.000But you can see it though, that Michael J. Fox had some sort of quality, some sort of luminous boyishness that without which that film would not have worked.
00:30:14.000Like, say, you know, Tom Cruise, what is it Tom Cruise has?
00:30:18.000Tom Cruise has a radiant yet manageable sexual allure.
00:30:24.000That's what I'd call it in Tom Cruise's case.
00:30:26.000And in the case of Michael J. Fox, he had sort of like just apple line boyishness.
00:30:30.000Anyway, Eric Stoltz in pulp fiction, when he's the drug dealer, he's the one in the dressing gown, like knocking out smack when Travolta comes around to get gear, goes, like this one, this is going to put you on your up.
00:30:41.000I mean, I wasn't a heroin addict yet when I was watching that, but I was thinking, I'm going to become a heroin addict.
00:30:51.000So anyway, this one, this is medium roast.
00:30:53.000If I see medium on anything, I'm like, get out of my life.
00:30:57.000I'm like, this is like, like when we was in Costa Rica, like they, like, someone came round and done like, uh, we own a Costa Rica, like, to, you know, for passport reasons.
00:31:06.000Anyway, like, went to Costa Rica and, like, we had, like, a personal coffee man.
00:31:10.000He was like the number one coffee guy in Christian disposal.
00:31:12.000Yeah, and it was like it was like, oh, try all these coffees and that.
00:31:16.000Me and Dave Joe was there as well, and we're all like drug addicts in recovery, so we're just like, which one's the strongest?
00:31:21.000Oh, and this one, it's like got a fruity taste.
00:32:35.000So, anyway, this, if you want some, go.
00:32:37.000There's a link in the description now.
00:32:39.000Get yourself a coffee that's so good you'll want to drink it using your bottom as a kind of uh, as a sort of a second mouth.
00:32:47.000Um okay, so we've covered quite a lot of news there this.
00:32:51.000When we come back, I'm gonna give you some an analysis about Wicked and and how.
00:32:55.000Uh, the Wicked franchise is, in a sense, the perfect moniker for a post-truth world, and what I mean by that is my kids, when they watch Wizard Of Oz, are gonna be like oh, that's that Dorothy bitch that killed Elphaba.
00:33:10.000Like that, like how are they gonna get their heads around it?
00:33:13.000And they try, and then, but think about this, replace Elphaba for Hitler.
00:33:20.000And now you got yourself a story baby, you know like, are we gonna live at a time where people start to go well, and indeed people do, people do like well Hitler, you know really, he'd worked out that the markets were going this way and da like.
00:33:36.000But you only have to read one account of people going.
00:33:39.000And then I was taken to Auschwitz and then my dad got killed and I'm like oh, hold on man, this is crazy.
00:33:46.000And even when people debate the numbers, there was a holocaust guys, there was a holocaust, but this uh, you know they hey, take it to the limit, baby.
00:33:54.000We'll be talking about wicked, who's wicked, who's not, and what's not.
00:33:57.000Before that though, here's a message from one of our partners.
00:34:00.000Yeah, the Wildness company, Peter McCulloch.
00:34:03.000These are words that mean reliability baby, if you took those vaccines and regret it, and why wouldn't you?
00:34:09.000The bloody things are killing people, causing turbo cancers, potentially myocarditis.
00:34:12.000The government and the media are suppressing information.
00:35:12.000Has been aware of this since 2020, which is why he collaborated with the Wellness Company to create Ultimate Spike Detox designed to help your body clear spike proteins, reduce inflammation, and support heart health.
00:35:21.000With natural ingredients like natokinase, dandelion root, and bromelain, is your daily proactive defense against a man-made virus.
00:35:28.000Don't wait until symptoms strike or until something unexpected happens.
00:35:32.000Experience, the only formula approved and used by Dr. McCulloch, one of the top doctors who risked it all.
00:35:53.000But if you did do it, you know, to help your grandmother or whatever it was they wanted you to do that week or you had to keep your job, all those things, or you wanted to travel, take this now.
00:36:00.000Cleanse yourself of that filthy, Luciferian, stinking thing that they injected into you.
00:36:06.000I'm talking about vaccines, not some sort of, I don't know, one-night stand or fumble in the back of a car.
00:36:43.000Look, let's face it, if ever you see the black English lass and the lass off kids telly promoting this film, it's pretty hard not to feel like something's off-key about it all.
00:37:04.000It's always a relief to watch us analyze, scrutinize Wicked, and employ it not only to look at cinematic history, post-structuralism, and post-modernity, but also how there's a continual reframing of public figures and even the idea of goodness itself.
00:37:20.000Click the link in the description, get off YouTube, get over here.
00:37:23.000We're going to be doing that right now.
00:38:04.000Now, Wizard of Oz is obviously a potent cultural artifact that stood the test of time and reaches people deep down.
00:38:12.000In a way, I think of it like the Titanic.
00:38:15.000Firstly, there was the Titanic itself, this hubristic vessel named ludicrously the unsinkable, which duly sunk.
00:38:22.000And by the way, I'm aware of all that sort of cultural and political and economic analysis that says that J.P. Morgan invested in it and then they sat with the Federal Reserve the next year and all of that kind of stuff.
00:38:31.000But I'm talking about from a mythic perspective, firstly, it represented human power versus the power of nature and human hubris, I suppose.
00:38:43.000It's like the world's best movie and the biggest movie.
00:38:46.000And then they tried to send down that little submarine to have a little look at it and it blew up.
00:38:50.000It's like the Titanic contains deep mythic power.
00:38:54.000And somehow whoever wrote The Wizard of Oz, what's he called?
00:38:57.000Frank Buchanan, I can't remember his name.
00:38:59.000Whoever wrote that original story was working in the mathematics and language of archetypes in the same way that George Lucas was a big fan of Joseph Campbell and understood fairy tale and folktale logic in his creation of his brilliant characters.
00:39:16.000Because as other comedians have pointed out, there's stuff in Star Wars from a dialogue perspective that's rubbish, you know, talking about famously like Harrison Ford.
00:39:24.000So you can't say these lines, they're boring, you know.
00:39:26.000Oh no, they're like a bunch of numbers and crap like that and numerous characters saying, I've got a bad feeling about this rather than it being a catchphrase of one individual character.
00:39:36.000Well, wicked, I think at the moment is being used, and this is what I'd like to ask all you lot about, to kind of tell the story of corruption from a pretty obvious and rudimentary perspective,
00:39:52.000i.e. the character of Oz, the all-powerful Oz, is a weak and fragile man who has the levers of power, but has no real actual power himself, and his power is an illusion.
00:40:07.000In this part of the story, all of the animals of Oz are being cast out.
00:40:13.000And it's, I feel like, and I'm projecting this, I guess, that the cast and filmmakers would very much feel that they're participating in a commentary of modern contemporary American politics, i.e. ICE raids and the subject of migration more broadly and American nationalism.
00:40:34.000I just guess, you know, if you imagine the people that made the film Wicked, the production staff, the director, the people at the studio, is it universal?
00:40:54.000Maybe kind of like AAOC and Gavin Newsom.
00:40:57.000I think it's fair, let me know in the comments and chat, to assume that.
00:41:00.000Therefore, I suppose that when they're making the film Wicked, they're probably making it somewhat as a commentary on American, on contemporary American social and political life.
00:41:11.000But I'm saying that Wicked is deeper than that and better than that, as any archetype or mythic film or artifact will be.
00:41:20.000Because if you were to allow it simply to be a bipartisan commentary on one aspect of American political power, i.e. a critique and condemnation of MAGA republicanism,
00:41:32.000how do you tarry that or tally that with the idea of what took place during the COVID pandemic where all of us were invited to enter into an illusion and were completely deceived because of the power of the media and the state because of the way they lied to us and treated us.
00:41:51.000So in short, what I'm saying is, and in fact it's a theme that we've been talking about all the way through this show, is we're living in such a peculiar time with so much competing information that the only truth that's relevant are the profoundest truths of all.
00:42:05.000And as a Christian, obviously for me, that's the gospel.
00:42:09.000That God so loved the world, he gave his only son that whoever believes in him would not perish but know eternal life.
00:42:15.000That if you can't find a way to access that truth in yourself, you're going to live in forms of illusion.
00:42:22.000You will be double-minded, tossed on the waves of perpetually shifting cultural tides.
00:42:27.000Let me know what you think in the comments on and the chat.
00:42:31.000And let me know what you guys think about what I'm saying so far because we're going into like a bunch of other assets around other great films like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and you know, and other films that have repositioned baddies as goodies, which is a sort of a common trend.
00:42:46.000I see it happen with that Cruella movie.
00:42:49.000It happened with The Joker, you know, so it's not even a left versus right thing.
00:42:54.000It's the idea of shifting perspectives.
00:42:56.000And that's that comes from sort of post-structuralisms and that sort of philosophical and political era where people start saying, well, maybe what if, you know, if you start pulling that thread, like maybe the people we think are good are bad and the people we think are bad are good.
00:43:12.000Like, you know, oh, Martin Luther King was a womanizer.
00:43:35.000Now, beautifully, when you lot are under pressure and under attack, like any family, maybe you can come together.
00:43:41.000But now, this is a time of internal combustion and internal division and internal fracture.
00:43:46.000And a film like Wicked, I think, and the various interpretations that are available for a film like Wicked tell you a lot about where America is right now in the same way that Marjorie Taylor Greene leaving and Kash Patel maybe getting sacked and people sort of revising their opinions and perspectives on Trump does.
00:44:46.000Masses kind of thing you're obsessed with, ain't it, darling?
00:44:50.000Yeah, the left at the moment, they think that like there's a lot of cultural relativism going on.
00:44:54.000So it's like you get it a lot with Hamas, you know, so you get the queers for Palestine stuff, and it's kind of this suicidal empathy that people have.
00:45:06.000And they, you know, they will excuse bad things that people do because of their upbringing.
00:45:10.000Now, I don't necessarily disagree with that, but it's just funny that that seems to be the default position people go to nowadays.
00:45:19.000And maybe it isn't that bad by extension.
00:45:21.000So you see that in films, you see it in the news as well.
00:45:25.000Yeah, because it like I'm sympathetic to those ideas, which I reckon are generally associated with left-wing politics of, well, maybe these people are drug addicts because they had a tough childhood.
00:45:38.000Obviously, I'm sympathetic to that because I was a drug addict.
00:45:42.000And I don't know if it was entirely as a result of childhood.
00:45:46.000But what you know, like the first thing you have to do is unplug.
00:45:55.000If you're plugged into the world, you'll never, never understand.
00:45:59.000You'll just live your whole life like, you know, sort of obsessing about some weird iteration of basically a hobby, even if it's a monetized one.
00:46:07.000The thing is with being an alcoholic and a drug addict is you have to achieve abstinence.
00:46:14.000What most of us do, drug addicts and alcoholics, is we unplug from that, from, you know, consider it, you know, Neo in the Matrix or whatever, but then we plug back into something else, you know, like porn or sex or food or whatever.
00:46:26.000But really what you have to do is remain unplugged until you become the recipient of grace.
00:46:31.000And that takes sort of an incredible amount of discipline, more than I can manage a lot of the time.
00:46:37.000But at least it allows you to receive the source, the Holy Spirit.
00:46:43.000I don't know how you would do it if you hadn't had a punch in the face type addiction like I've had.
00:46:49.000You know, and I know that Joe, you wanted to talk some about addiction, huh?
00:47:36.000Well, this is how I describe this as well.
00:47:37.000Remember, I told you, Russell, that it's like your eternal consciousness, that in you which is infinite, is craving union with its creator, or as Jung said, union with God.
00:47:47.000So I think what we do as alcoholics or drug addicts is you find a counterfeit spirit, the counterfeit to numb you, to escape.
00:47:58.000And like Jung also said that until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life forever.
00:48:05.000But if you look at the symptoms, it will direct you to the source.
00:48:09.000And in this case, like addiction, it's loss of self-control, being possessed by an unconscious force or escape from self by a counterfeit spirit.
00:48:20.000And that's where the quote comes from: spiritus contra spiritum, meaning like spirit, spirit against spirit.
00:48:28.000So like the alcoholic reaches for the spirit, the counterfeit, when the solution is God, the true spirit.
00:48:37.000I suppose that the, you know, like them gutters that come up when you're learning temping bowling that make sure the ball has no choice but to hit the skills at the end.
00:48:46.000Like the culture doesn't really direct you down the right lanes or pathways.
00:48:52.000I think that the culture, in fact, do you think it's fair to say that the point of the world is to distract you?
00:48:58.000Like the actual point of it is to make sure that your energy gets into staring at sort of sexual imagery or forms of materialism.
00:49:09.000I saw like a clip of me talking to Professor Richard Dawkins from an interview I did a couple of years ago.
00:49:15.000And he said, the reason I'm the materialist is because it's measurable.
00:49:18.000And when I heard the term materialist, I felt kind of like, ooh, that is not the answer.
00:49:25.000And I know that Richard Dawkins doesn't mean materialist from a consumerist perspective.
00:49:29.000I know he means if you can't measure it, like whether that's atomic or subatomic or whatever, that he ain't going to rely on it.
00:49:36.000But it still seems to me sort of diabolical because I know what human, well, this human being, and I reckon that I'm pretty normal when it comes to it, what we need is precisely what we need is that spiritual connection.
00:49:48.000And I think that the function of the world is to misdirect and substitute and think of the role of Christ as substitute, to substitute your yearning for God, wholeness, and holiness into some form of false idolatry.
00:50:06.000I think you see it specifically in the fifth step.
00:50:08.000I mean, when you're doing inventory, fourth and fifth, and you're looking at those causes and conditions, you're looking at the stuff underneath it.
00:51:31.000I mean, that's what if you leave a fist step and you didn't learn anything about yourself, you didn't see like, I mean, one, I don't even see how that's possible.
00:51:40.000You didn't really do a fist up if you leave it and not.
00:51:43.000Just to update you on the vocabulary step, we're talking about 12-step programs.
00:51:47.000Step one is the acknowledgement of a problem, that you're powerless over your addiction and that your life has become manageable.
00:51:52.000Step two, coming to believe that power greater than yourself can restore you to sanity.
00:51:56.000Step three, making the decision to turn your will and your life over to the care of God as you understand God.
00:52:01.000Step four, making a fearless and thorough moral inventory of your wrongs.
00:52:05.000Step five, confessing those wrongs to another person.
00:52:09.000And Dave's saying that this process of four and five is what takes the unconscious material into the conscious, into awareness, you know, consciousness.
00:52:20.000I suppose you could, in this sense, just means aware.
00:52:23.000And what I, to my point that I used to pivot from talking about movies and culture into this rather more personal and psychic interpretation of comparable phenomena was that if you're an alcoholic or an addict, as it says in our literature, you have a crisis that cannot be postponed or delayed.
00:52:59.000You're now, your options have gotten limited.
00:53:01.000And in that kind of crisis, it's usually either suicide remains an option or some kind of radical change.
00:53:10.000One of my teachers said that sort of suicide is a radical is a sort of sort of a warped expression of the actual transformation that needs to take place.
00:53:21.000And to put that, I suppose, into Christian terms, like the Adam has to die.
00:53:26.000The earth man, the flesh man, he has to go and be replaced by the spiritual man.
00:53:33.000And I suppose like learning about these things as I have from a new, I suppose the thing I'm trying to get across in this book is that there's, you know, it's weird, isn't it?
00:53:46.000Because if you become like I've done a Christian later in life, you sort of you're accepting that you didn't, you know, you're letting go of the past, you're being reborn.
00:53:56.000I'm like, well, I've been doing stuff.
00:53:57.000You know, it's not like I've just been sort of sat in a room doing nothing.
00:54:01.000I've been going around the world getting into adventures and capers and chaos and reading books and learning and all of that.
00:54:08.000And what's amazing is that all of the things that I've got some sort of sack of stuff, I'm like, well, I feel like that's true.
00:54:18.000That's what's, I suppose, been the single most extraordinary thing is the discovery that the Bible isn't simply a bunch of ethical and moral guidelines utilized to create systems of control, but it's a very powerful, supernatural structure.
00:54:42.000And that's sort of a weird thing for me.
00:54:45.000Like to go like, and what I'm sort of excited about, and what I believe might be the resolution to the very things we're discussing here, a culture that doesn't know itself and it's falling apart and collapsing and imploding.
00:54:55.000And we're watching it happen, like just sort of watching, like watching the Twin Towers, which we've all done, collapsing into its own footprint, thinking, how is this happening?
00:55:42.000It could be on a kind of very sort of granular, just talking to one guy in a shelter somewhere.
00:55:50.000In a way, it doesn't matter because the metrics of the system are becoming increasingly redundant.
00:55:57.000Because as Emmett Fox says, if you change, or you know, the end of Schindler's list, like, you know, if you are changing one soul, you are dealing in the material of eternity.
00:56:17.000It is dissipating as soon as it's created.
00:56:19.000But when you're dealing with whatever is the force that generates it, in which we're all participants, like you were saying, Joe, that we have that portion of eternity in us.
00:56:31.000When you're dealing with that, it no longer matters.
00:56:34.000And I'm sort of feeling the kind of shifting of the inner coastal shelves within me of recognizing, oh, yeah, it's not like I'm sort of, I have to be sort of hyper-focused on kings or hyper-focused on mass markets.
00:56:52.000It's more become hyper-focused on the essentialism of the truths that you're discussing.
00:57:00.000I'll play that video if anyone, unless anyone's got something they want to say.
00:59:20.000What was it about that, Joe, that got you, mate?
00:59:23.000I mean, I've been thinking a lot about this recently.
00:59:26.000I think everyone has this condition to some degree, right?
00:59:30.000Like, whether it's, you know, when you're watching a film, you eat a big bar of tonies and you've fucking eaten the whole thing in two minutes.
00:59:37.000But some people were all right with that.
00:59:41.000Sometimes a bar of chocolate works or a tub of Ben and Jerry's.
00:59:44.000You know, like if you split up with a bird or something and it's the, you know, stereotypical eating ice cream on the couch, it takes you away from yourself momentarily.
00:59:54.000But like he says there in that little speech, with the addicts, it becomes a compulsion.
01:00:00.000So even though it's killing you, you're going to die if you keep doing it.
01:00:04.000The compulsion is like a thought preceded by the action.
01:00:07.000There's no rational thought in between.
01:00:09.000Whereas normal people think, oh, fuck me.
01:01:53.000I've got the pain, the terrible pain, the terrible pain.
01:01:56.000And it works just as well for anything.
01:01:59.000The only way, if you will note that it brings to the forefront some pretty important spiritual ideas, that these things can only take place in the present and you have to engage in a discourse with an aspect of yourself that might be considered supernatural or external to the self, whether you look at it in Jungian or Christian terms.
01:02:15.000How can they close or Einsteinian physics?
01:02:19.000How can a closed system change from within itself?
01:02:22.000How can a closed system change from within itself?
01:02:24.000That's what the miracle of step two came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
01:02:29.000At some point, you have to, in the moment, go, God, I'm going to sit with it.
01:02:37.000And I've been doing that a lot lately, a lot.
01:02:39.000I've been sitting daily, either praying rosary or sitting with ideas around forgiveness and grievance and letting go of grievance and recognizing the challenge in this that actually all encounters.
01:03:01.000You might have seen that film Look Up.
01:03:03.000There's a really good bit in this movie, Look Up, Leonardo DiCaprio and a bunch of other guys sort of save the world from a meteorite.
01:03:09.000No one wants to acknowledge the meteorite initially because of the sort of challenges that come with the earth being struck by a meteorite.
01:03:16.000And Leonardo DiCaprio is the sort of sort of the guy that sees it soonest and is like, oh my God, you guys have better make some changes.
01:03:23.000There's a bit where he encounters a kind of tech oligarch, the kind of tech oligarch archetype that we're beginning to recognize in our culture now, like whether you see it as Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or the Lex Luther character in the latest iteration of the Superman movie.
01:03:38.000The tech oligarch is a sort of a new Faustus, a new character that's made a deal with a devil that now has incredible power.
01:03:47.000Anyway, the version of that character that's in this movie, Look Up, there's a point where he says to someone, like, listen, we've got four million data points on you.
01:04:00.000And I was talking about that with someone recently that like, you know, like every time I use a map, every time I go on social media, every time I do anything on this phone, it's all accumulated and it creates a kind of silhouette of who I am that probably could be more reliably used to describe me than reading my fourth and fifth steps.
01:04:19.000You know, like, unless you're a person who knows yourself very, very well, like, well, he keeps going to that place.
01:04:27.000So he might tell you this or that about himself, but I can tell you what he's doing is he's buying these things pretty fucking regular and he's going there all the time, right?
01:04:36.000Well, that's, you know, the miracle of accumulative data models that define this current iteration of tech, which is passing as AI arrives.
01:04:53.000I've got my encounters, my conversations, my memories.
01:04:56.000So if one of you occurs in one of my dreams, what is it I'm dealing with really?
01:05:01.000I'm dealing with my composite set of data points that doesn't incorporate your relationships, your private relationships with one another, or your parents, or your dreams, or your inner life.
01:05:24.000So like all you're dealing with is like objects, accumulative compounds that you've created of people in their mind.
01:05:30.000So if you, so that's if you dream about someone you know, if you have recurrent dreams about like, wow, the black woman or recurrent dreams about the dragon or whatever it is in a dream, what is it saying to you in your own language in the ecosystem of your psyche?
01:05:47.000What is this protein living substance or phenomena within you trying to inform you of?
01:05:53.000And how are you going to interpret it?
01:05:55.000The fact is, is that if you live in a busy, busy, crazy culture like we do, that's like one minute making you care about football, the next minute making you care about food, the next minute making you care about sex, the next minute making you feel inferior, next minute telling you Armageddon's on the way, you ain't got no connection with God.
01:06:10.000You're not going to be able to find a connection with God.
01:06:13.000But if you go into this, it's such sort of deep, powerful, archetypal, mythic information that sort of the point where myth and truth meet.
01:06:21.000For myth to be relevant at all, it has to have some relationship with truth.
01:06:24.000And one aspect of the figure of Christ that we discuss a lot is that he is God.
01:06:36.000In the same way that mathematics indicates that there's a deeper meaning, and the same way that beauty and symmetry indicate meaning, and the same way that the relationships between musical notes indicate meaning, meaning itself indicates meaning.
01:06:52.000The person that told the story of reality into being tells stories, often accommodating the fact you won't really get it.
01:07:00.000It's a bit like if there was two farmers.
01:07:02.000Like, you know, he knows that we are not going to be able to get it on the level of sort of rushing prismic atoms and storms and vortexes and black holes.
01:07:13.000So like, you know, unless you're willing to sit on your own with it on the edge, like that first image in that Jungian thing, which was an imploding succubus of quicksand, which is what it's like in there.
01:07:27.000And if you are willing to sit on the edge long enough and you can handle it and don't go, fuck me, I'm going to have to open up my arm, then you might come back with something worth having.
01:08:40.000And it sort of was when reflecting on that, as well as the word Phoenix that made me go, I am going to do turning point.
01:08:47.000Because remember, I left you that message and I was like, I'm behind this van that says Phoenix.
01:08:50.000And then this pastor left me a message and just inexplicably used the metaphor of Phoenix.
01:08:54.000I know it's a common metaphor in its way.
01:08:55.000But the turning point event is in Phoenix.
01:08:58.000And I'm thinking, well, if Shapiro's there and Tucker's there and Erica Kirk's there and I get to be in the midst of this thing, I'll get to communicate what I believe to be true at this thing.