Stay Free - Russel Brand - Oliver Stone - Nuclear Power, Putin & Snowden

00:00:00.000 Hello there, you awakening wonders.

00:00:01.000 Thank you for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.

00:00:04.000 In addition to a fantastic guest, we'll be taking a deeper look, a forensic look, in fact, in one of the stories behind the news in our item.

00:00:13.000 Here's the news.

00:00:14.000 No, here's the effing news.

00:00:15.000 But I've got a very, very exciting guest to present to you today.

00:00:19.000 The Oscar-winning director behind Platoon, JFK and Snowden, a documentary maker who spent 20 hours in the company of Vladimir Putin.

00:00:26.000 And now we are going to be talking about nuclear energy and its propensity to change the world, or at least the potential for it to change the world.

00:00:35.000 His film is called Nuclear Now.

00:00:37.000 And also, although he has forgotten it, he did once make a documentary with me.

00:00:41.000 Please welcome to Stay Free with the Russell Brand, Oliver Stone.

00:00:45.000 Hello, Oliver.

00:00:46.000 Thank you for joining us.

00:00:47.000 Hi, Russell.

00:00:48.000 Nice to see you again.

00:00:49.000 You look great, by the way.

00:00:50.000 Thank you for starting with a compliment.

00:00:53.000 And I'd like to begin our exchange for apologizing for my broad conduct during a time when we made a documentary.

00:01:00.000 If you remember anything about it at all, it will be the moment that I had to write a letter of apology to Donald Trump after I met him, which you organized because I think you were working with him because of Wall Street 2.

00:01:12.000 And I did an interview with Donald and then subsequently made a bunch of jokes with him when I was doing stand-up and it led to a whole furore.

00:01:20.000 It was a long time ago but nevertheless I apologize.

00:01:23.000 I see it hasn't impeded your ability to make other documentaries and thank you for agreeing to come on our show.

00:01:31.000 Well, it's a pleasure.

00:01:32.000 I don't remember it that way.

00:01:33.000 I remember you as being very exciting and vital, and it was fun.

00:01:38.000 Of course, I know a lot of loonies in this business, so you didn't stand out particularly as a madman, but I see you've gotten to be what you are.

00:01:48.000 It's a genuine article.

00:01:50.000 Oh, thank you, Oliver.

00:01:51.000 That's fantastic.

00:01:52.000 Before we talk about things like censorship and Oliver Snowden, and before we delve into JFK and RFK, I'd love to talk to you about your film Nuclear Now.

00:02:03.000 Obviously, this has always been a controversial subject.

00:02:06.000 The connotations of Chernobyl, the broad fear around nuclear power is as prevalent now as it always has been.

00:02:16.000 Is that why you've chosen to make this documentary?

00:02:19.000 Well, you asked a lot of questions.

00:02:22.000 The big picture for me was climate change.

00:02:25.000 And you can't ignore it, especially since Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 made me very aware of it.

00:02:34.000 And of course, his solution in that film was renewables, which were essentially sun, solar and hydro.

00:02:42.000 But 14 years have gone by, 15, 16 years have gone by, and the IPCC has just said that the carbon and carbon CO2 in the world and the methane gas just keeps climbing up.

00:02:55.000 So it hasn't been solved.

00:02:57.000 We're going worse and getting hotter and hotter and hotter, as you can see from the heat wave around us.

00:03:02.000 I just got back from Europe, and boy, was it hot in the southern part of Europe.

00:03:06.000 Very hot.

00:03:07.000 And I just don't see it get any better.

00:03:10.000 And the world is going to get worse in the sense of quality-wise.

00:03:13.000 And my children and your children, grandchildren, it's all, it's going to be a mess.

00:03:18.000 And I think there's going to be more tension and more Dissatisfaction, unhappiness, wars, revolution, and so forth and so on.

00:03:25.000 So, we have to do something, Russell.

00:03:27.000 This is the most important issue I think we have in the world, beyond anything else, beyond wars, beyond—well, we'll talk about wars later, but this is really crucial.

00:03:37.000 So, scared out of my mind, I started to read more about it.

00:03:41.000 And I came across this book, A Bright Future, by Uh, Josh Goldstein and Stefan Skavist, who's a Swedish nuclear scientist.

00:03:53.000 In that short book, they lay out a very common sense plan saying that Look, go back and think about nuclear energy.

00:04:01.000 You've completely misjudged it.

00:04:02.000 You've completely mischaracterized it.

00:04:05.000 It is not what you think it is.

00:04:06.000 And it is the miracle that it originally was when Marie Curie founded in 1895.

00:04:13.000 Albert Einstein endorsed it by saying, it will change everything in this world.

00:04:17.000 It will unleash new powers we don't even know of.

00:04:20.000 Except our way of thinking.

00:04:22.000 That's what he said.

00:04:23.000 It's a very interesting comment.

00:04:25.000 And it turns out to be true.

00:04:27.000 Nuclear energy was confounded from the moment it started in World War II, when we became aware of it with a bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was an ill usage of the bomb, as you know.

00:04:37.000 Well, we don't want to talk about that history, but it was badly used, and it scared the shit out of the whole world.

00:04:44.000 It scared the shit out of everybody, and it really dominated our dialogue And the Cold War for many, many years.

00:04:51.000 But the truth is that nuclear energy for civilian purposes is completely the opposite.

00:04:58.000 It is not enriched uranium.

00:05:01.000 It is low level uranium, which is Which is what is processed.

00:05:06.000 To make a bomb is very difficult.

00:05:08.000 It requires 80-90% enrichment.

00:05:10.000 That's why you see all these test tubes and you see all the Iranians going crazy. 1.00

00:05:15.000 And here in the civilian world, we don't have that problem.

00:05:19.000 But people think it's going to blow up.

00:05:21.000 They think that a A low enriched uranium is dangerous.

00:05:26.000 It is only when it explodes, and even then, as we saw in Chernobyl, it is limited in its damage.

00:05:33.000 Limited in its damage.

00:05:35.000 We explored the Chernobyl phenomenon in the film.

00:05:38.000 And, you know, 50 first responders died there.

00:05:43.000 After that, there was a leak.

00:05:45.000 That went over Northern Europe because there was no containment structure in the Chernobyl reactor, which has, of course, been corrected.

00:05:53.000 There's now everywhere.

00:05:54.000 All the reactors have containment structures, but that didn't.

00:05:57.000 And it leaked into Northern Europe all over the place.

00:06:01.000 And they still, after all those years, the U.N.

00:06:03.000 went back and back and back and the World Health Organization went back and they could only find that possibly, they said, possibly 4,000 4,000 people died from cancers after the fact.

00:06:14.000 Even that has been in question and some estimates are lower.

00:06:17.000 So the dangers of radioactivity have been very exaggerated over time.

00:06:22.000 And when you get into it, and we do in the film, I hope you see it, it's really important to understand that low-level radiation is a part of the world.

00:06:30.000 We have radiation in our bodies.

00:06:31.000 We have the ability to fix it.

00:06:33.000 We have DNA discovered by Crick and Watson and proven to be That it repairs our body tissues.

00:06:40.000 It repairs damage to our bodies as we go.

00:06:43.000 We have a double helix.

00:06:45.000 It's, you know, get into all that if you want, but essentially we are not, we are not in danger from radiation any more than other things like The other, let's call it oil, gas, and arsenics, poisons, toxic waste from oil.

00:07:06.000 We release it into the universe.

00:07:08.000 It just throws, and it's part of the problem that we have with With the pollution that we have.

00:07:13.000 The waste from radioactivity is closely closely monitored in caskets and underwater in caskets and it's kept there for years and after that it's if necessary it's buried deep in the earth.

00:07:26.000 It's nothing compared to what chemical and oil and coal waste is.

00:07:33.000 Nothing compared.

00:07:35.000 I see that your advocacy is founded on the best conceivable principles addressing a problem that elsewise seems almost impossible to alter.

00:07:48.000 Throughout your career, Oliver, you have presumably intuitively understood stories that have been necessary to tell.

00:07:59.000 Stories of high-level corruption.

00:08:02.000 Stories of needless war.

00:08:04.000 Geopolitical conflicts reported erroneously.

00:08:09.000 Simultaneous historical narratives left untold because they contain, indeed, to cite the title of Al Gore's

00:08:17.000 film, inconvenient truths.

00:08:20.000 With the subject of this film, my concern--

00:08:23.000 and like I'm watching the chat now, like people are watching this in our locals community--

00:08:27.000 people have a strong aversion to nuclear power.

00:08:31.000 Perhaps it's because of the reasons that you're addressing, that they understandably

00:08:36.000 associate nuclear energy with nuclear destruction and the notable disasters that you've already

00:08:41.000 cited in addition to the militaristic use of nuclear weapons.

00:08:46.000 But the point I'd like to take you up on is a slightly different one.

00:08:50.000 If we don't address our attitude towards consuming Then I feel that we are going to sustain significant problems.

00:08:58.000 Oughtn't we be looking to alter the manner in which we live rather than looking for methods to sustain what appears to be, by its nature, unsustainable?

00:09:12.000 Good point, but I don't agree with you.

00:09:14.000 I don't think it's going to be possible to change human nature.

00:09:16.000 I think it's if you go to the to the poorer countries in the world, you see a stark example of it in India.

00:09:24.000 Of course, they're going to look for electricity.

00:09:25.000 They want electricity for their tools in order to cut sugarcane.

00:09:29.000 It's just natural that people who are poor are going to want easier ways to do things.

00:09:34.000 And this is true about China, Indonesia, all these populous countries that are coming into heavier usage of electricity.

00:09:42.000 And not only that, cars, transportation, which is not electricity, and industries which have not been electrified yet, such as cement making.

00:09:53.000 In all countries, they're going to make cement.

00:09:55.000 They're going to continue to have agriculture and fertilizer, and there's going to be demand for For steel.

00:10:02.000 I mean, it's natural.

00:10:03.000 So you're not going to stop the demand, and that's consumption.

00:10:06.000 Now, I know the Greta Thunbergs of the world believe that we should all punish ourselves, but I don't think that's going to happen.

00:10:12.000 So that's why nuclear power, which is infinite, infinite in its power, millions and millions of times more powerful than coal or oil, it's just a miracle, actually, that it was found.

00:10:23.000 But we misused it as we do it.

00:10:25.000 Let's say you have a knife. 1.00

00:10:26.000 Of course you can misuse a knife to kill people. 0.98

00:10:29.000 That happens It happens all the time. 0.97

00:10:31.000 Guns, this, that.

00:10:33.000 Everything has been misused by human beings.

00:10:35.000 But to go to some biblical equation of Abel and Cain, let's say, and say everyone's going to misuse, is not valid, because most people will use things well, will use things for positive reasons.

00:10:48.000 It's just human nature to want things.

00:10:51.000 Wanting does appear to be part of human nature but there is no question that human nature responds to the systems within which we exist and certainly I welcome a conversation that is about systemic and resource change rather than measures that are continually punitive To the individual 15-minute cities, for example, or impeding people's ability to, inverted commas, progress in nations such as you have already listed.

00:11:21.000 I recognize that that's an important story to tell, an important conversation to have.

00:11:28.000 But what I We're all going to have different approaches to these matters, but my personal approach is how do we start to address the fact that we're living in a deeply corrupt, deeply hypocritical, deeply war-torn society currently.

00:11:47.000 And I suppose another advantage that your film presents to us is the ability to abate and prevent these resource wars.

00:11:56.000 There's no doubt that the Ukraine-Russia conflict has a component that is to do with territory as well as resources.

00:12:02.000 The so-called Middle Eastern wars are all undergirded by a necessity for fuels, as you've already listed, and your position on war and indeed the reporting on war has significantly shifted many people's perspectives Oliver, would you talk to us a little about the current Ukraine-Russia conflict and indeed how energy has often been the driving factor behind military conflicts of a global scale?

00:12:35.000 First, I just want to just say one quick rejoinder to what you were thinking about consumption.

00:12:39.000 I just want to say the fact is that electricity, the use, the need for electricity is going to grow and grow until the IPCC gives 2050 as an endpoint, saying that from there on, there'll be a tipping point and so forth and so on, the Earth will not be able to recover.

00:12:56.000 Be that as it may, by 2050, any realistic estimate of the use of electricity will go up from Two times to four times, four times more electricity will be required.

00:13:07.000 Some people even say five.

00:13:10.000 Russell, you have no idea how many gigawatts, terawatts that means in the world.

00:13:14.000 That is just going to be an overload completely.

00:13:18.000 We don't have it.

00:13:18.000 We don't have the grid structure and we don't have the generators in place.

00:13:24.000 It's just going to be worse and worse and worse.

00:13:26.000 So it's a real problem unless you face those statistics.

00:13:30.000 As to war, what a tragedy.

00:13:32.000 It's a huge waste of human Resources, as we all agree, about wars.

00:13:38.000 It's like watching World War I all over again, and you see the waste and the death and the destruction.

00:13:45.000 You have to—war is not good, but you have to look at the reasons for this war.

00:13:50.000 And whenever you do, you know, the Americans like to simplify and say it's a question of a Russian invasion of Ukraine.

00:13:58.000 That's very simplistic and very black and white, and I think you know the story behind it.

00:14:03.000 I made a film back in 2017-16 called—I produced it, I didn't direct it—Ukraine on Fire, which explained the origins of this war in the coup d'état of 2014, which was sponsored and supported thoroughly by the United States.

00:14:22.000 It was a very deep plan to penetrate the Soviet—to penetrate the Russian Federation.

00:14:30.000 From the beginning, the neoconservative movement who started the war in Iraq going back to the 1990s, they've been at war with Russia, these people, and they're deep inside our government and the State Department.

00:14:42.000 Victoria Nuland, you know these names.

00:14:45.000 Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser.

00:14:49.000 Anthony Blinken, secretary of state.

00:14:51.000 They seem to have control.

00:14:53.000 Biden is an old Cold Warrior, and he really hates the old Soviet Union, which he mistakes—confounds, again, with the Russian Federation, which is not communist.

00:15:05.000 I really bemoan this because—I say this because Russia and China, which are our two leading enemies now, a few years ago, are still—are allies or friends, potential friends.

00:15:17.000 And we blew the opportunity, blew the opportunity.

00:15:20.000 And we still can make that opportunity work, because Russia is the leading—the leading producer of nuclear energy in the world.

00:15:29.000 They've done the most advanced work.

00:15:31.000 Why?

00:15:32.000 Because in the 19—well, recently, but in the 1940s, they started to develop civilian energy.

00:15:39.000 And they've been doing it steadily, and now they have Rosatom.

00:15:42.000 Rosatom is a state agency with 250,000 employees who know everything to know about nuclear energy.

00:15:49.000 They do every department, and they export their generators to all these new countries, Bangladesh, to India, to Turkey, to the Middle Eurasia.

00:16:04.000 I mean, they're the biggest sellers of it, and they They deliver turnkey factories.

00:16:11.000 Turnkey, which is the essence of this thing.

00:16:13.000 How to build nuclear reactors fast on an assembly line, like airliners.

00:16:17.000 This is what has to be done.

00:16:20.000 And they're really our potential allies.

00:16:22.000 They are not our enemies.

00:16:24.000 And I've been saying this—I made the film on Putin.

00:16:27.000 You saw it, I hope.

00:16:28.000 You know, I asked him very honest questions, and he answered—I didn't sense any—the belligerence.

00:16:33.000 He kept calling the United States his partners, if you remember, in the film, my American partners.

00:16:38.000 OK, he may have been a little soft on on his perception of the United States, but he is not the monster that has been pictured by the American propaganda machine.

00:16:48.000 So this is an unfortunate tragedy, as is China, because we alienated them, too.

00:16:53.000 They are also coming up very strongly in nuclear energy.

00:16:56.000 They started late.

00:16:58.000 But most recently, they've announced a program, a half a trillion dollars, 440 billion dollars are going into an investment of making 138, 130 some new nuclear reactors.

00:17:06.000 138, 130 some new nuclear reactors.

00:17:11.000 And by 2038, that's almost 10 a year.

00:17:14.000 OK?

00:17:15.000 10 a year by 2038.

00:17:17.000 And President Xi has committed himself to a zero growth policy on carbon dioxide by 2060.

00:17:24.000 These are big, significant statements, and they're important.

00:17:28.000 We try to let them honor them.

00:17:30.000 But by competing with them, instead of cooperating with them, we're making things far worse.

00:17:36.000 But with the kind of reductive reporting that surrounds subjects like the war, and when you made your film with Putin, you were called a Putin apologist.

00:17:46.000 Do you remember, I'm sure, the reaction from the audience when you spoke to Stephen Colbert about Putin,

00:17:53.000 like that the audience are just not willing to listen to nuanced information.

00:17:57.000 Throughout your career, you've been iconoclastic and you've been willing to tell difficult stories

00:18:02.000 about war, about corruption, indeed, including the assassination of JFK, of course.

00:18:10.000 So why do you remain confident that you can make an impact on a subject like, you know, like with your film Nuclear

00:18:19.000 Because if there isn't an appetite to monetize this form of energy currently, if the old model is still one that's being sustained, through forever wars and the types of relationships that

00:18:19.000 Now.

00:18:32.000 surround them, how likely is it that popularizing these ideas with the

00:18:38.000 public is the route to success with these methods?

00:18:43.000 You faced, like, you know, I remember at the time of JFK, you faced a lot of cynicism, skepticism and outrage

00:18:52.000 with the Putin films, with the films around Cuba, with your alternative history to America.

00:18:57.000 What impact do you believe that you can have when there is a media that works so hard

00:19:03.000 to curtail alternative narratives and to enforce and continually impose accepted wisdom,

00:19:10.000 albeit warped wisdom?

00:19:12.000 [BLANK_AUDIO]

00:19:13.000 Well, I agree with what you're saying completely.

00:19:16.000 I think you understand the problem there is.

00:19:19.000 It is a established media that denies what's facing them, looking them in the face.

00:19:27.000 Don't forget the Vietnam War, too.

00:19:28.000 I questioned, I trashed it.

00:19:31.000 I completely think that was a bogus war, bogus reasoning.

00:19:34.000 Every war the United States has been in since World War II has Well, starting with Korea has been for these specious reasons, and many lies have been told.

00:19:43.000 And this is documented by now.

00:19:44.000 People should know it.

00:19:45.000 They should be studying their history if they're interested.

00:19:48.000 And they should read alternate media, alternate sources as to what happened in our lifetime.

00:19:53.000 I lived through this lifetime.

00:19:55.000 I was born in 1946.

00:19:57.000 I can guarantee you that there's been a Cold War against Russia for most of my life.

00:20:01.000 It's a hatred, a phobia—a phobia, which is a fantasy—about the dangers that they were going to take over the United States.

00:20:11.000 This is the 1950s.

00:20:12.000 They were in our State Department.

00:20:13.000 They were in our schools.

00:20:14.000 They were teaching us that they were—it was all John Birch kind of stuff, mad stuff, and paranoia.

00:20:20.000 That was the American point of view on Russia.

00:20:23.000 It eased off, finally, when Reagan, who was the great Russia hater, came along and looked him in the face.

00:20:28.000 He met with Gorbachev.

00:20:30.000 Oh, God, these guys are not so bad.

00:20:32.000 They're human beings, you know?

00:20:33.000 And what happened was we had a little bit of a detente, a long, nice area here, and then until, of course, The Soviet Union fell apart, and the Russian Federation came into being.

00:20:45.000 And, of course, right away, NATO started to worry about them.

00:20:49.000 They never let up.

00:20:50.000 They never identified the new regime as non-communist and so forth as our enemies.

00:20:56.000 Putin was always trying to be our friend.

00:20:57.000 All that period, he cooperated with us in Afghanistan.

00:21:01.000 He cooperated with us with so many different things.

00:21:03.000 He was trying to reach out.

00:21:05.000 But there was no real attempt by either Bush or by Obama or Trump to really change the picture.

00:21:17.000 Trump tried a little bit, but he got backed off very quickly.

00:21:20.000 So there's been sort of a consistent phobia about Russia.

00:21:23.000 Going back, I can trace it to 1919, the Red Scare in America.

00:21:28.000 It's all about our labor.

00:21:30.000 It was all originally about our labor situation in the United States and the strikes that we had.

00:21:34.000 And this is the fear of communism.

00:21:36.000 It grew into this monster, two-headed monster, three-headed monster.

00:21:40.000 It's become something that's unbelievable.

00:21:42.000 It's almost like radiation poisoning, where you see the 1950s horror films and you see these monsters that come out of the sea, and they're all, they're radiation monsters, right?

00:21:51.000 Same kind of fear of Russia.

00:21:54.000 The thing is that money It's proven that you have to accept that the way to do nuclear power is not going to do it through private enterprise.

00:22:02.000 That's not going to work, because it's so difficult to build, and it takes time, and you have to invest, and it's a long haul.

00:22:09.000 But it can be done with government agency, and it has to be.

00:22:12.000 That's what Russia did with Rosatom. 0.82

00:22:14.000 That's what France did. 0.81

00:22:15.000 France has been nuclear since 1965-70.

00:22:19.000 They've gone nuclear.

00:22:20.000 They have EDF, which is now completely owned by the government.

00:22:23.000 It wasn't before.

00:22:24.000 It was 80 percent.

00:22:25.000 But now it's owned by the government.

00:22:27.000 And China, too, has its own agency.

00:22:29.000 You need government agency to do this, because it requires that kind of will for insurance reasons, et cetera.

00:22:37.000 There's a thousand reasons.

00:22:38.000 You've got to cut through the red tape.

00:22:40.000 But that's not going to happen in a so-called democracy where people can express, push a button and say, I'm scared of nuclear power because it's in my backyard, blah, blah, blah.

00:22:51.000 It's easy to be scared.

00:22:52.000 Scaremongering is the easiest tactic of all.

00:22:55.000 And that's what we've been doing for years in our country.

00:22:58.000 So my point is that, my big point is, unless we change our direction and change our thinking, our thinking, which is the hardest thing to do, We're going—we're taking Russia to the edge now. 0.81

00:23:11.000 We are really going to the edge.

00:23:13.000 This is crazy, what's going on, and nuts.

00:23:15.000 It's suicidal.

00:23:17.000 We are going to hurt ourselves in a big way.

00:23:19.000 This is a potential World War III. 0.99

00:23:22.000 This is the same situation as World War I, in a sense, the stupidity of it, because of the alliances and the fears and the built-up phobias. 0.97

00:23:31.000 If we don't stop this, what Biden is doing—this guy is—I voted for him. 0.98

00:23:36.000 I made the mistake of thinking that he was an old man now, that he would calm down, he'd be more mellow and so forth.

00:23:42.000 I didn't see that at all.

00:23:44.000 I see a man who maybe is not in charge of his own administration.

00:23:47.000 Who knows?

00:23:48.000 But he's going to fall down somewhere. 0.85

00:23:50.000 But it seems that he's dragging us stupidly into a confrontation with a A power that's not going to give. 0.96

00:24:00.000 This is their borders. 0.98

00:24:01.000 This is their world.

00:24:02.000 This is NATO going into Ukraine.

00:24:04.000 This is a whole other story.

00:24:06.000 This is not as bad as we did.

00:24:08.000 We did a lot of terrible things from the 2001 on.

00:24:11.000 We put—we NATO-ized a lot of these countries in the far—in Eastern Europe.

00:24:17.000 Who are anti-Russian because of old hostilities, and, you know, you get dragged into Balkan wars here.

00:24:23.000 This is really the same thing as World War I. Our allies are rabid anti-Russian people, the Ukrainian government.

00:24:31.000 And who are they fighting?

00:24:32.000 They're fighting ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

00:24:34.000 This is the madness of it.

00:24:37.000 And our media does not recognize that The—what do you call it?—the ethnic Russians in Ukraine are really the ones who want their autonomy.

00:24:47.000 That's all they asked for in 2014—autonomy.

00:24:50.000 And they were about to get it.

00:24:51.000 There was a deal about to be made with Putin and Ukraine, right, in March of 2022, when the war started.

00:24:59.000 There was a deal about to be made.

00:25:00.000 The Americans squelched it. 0.94

00:25:01.000 They didn't want the deal.

00:25:02.000 They don't want the peace treaty.

00:25:04.000 They don't want to give autonomy to Donbass and Lugansk.

00:25:07.000 Now, look where we are.

00:25:09.000 It's gotten worse, and it's going to get worse.

00:25:11.000 Yes, there is an inability to address the complexity of the conditions that led to this,

00:25:16.000 the ongoing infringement of former Soviet territories, as you have said and as you have

00:25:22.000 documented, the sponsorship of the coup in 2014 and the unwillingness to acknowledge

00:25:30.000 atrocities within Ukraine, or at least complexities of an ethnic nature within Ukraine, within

00:25:36.000 those regions.

00:25:37.000 And indeed, an inability to hold complex stories is perhaps one of the great determinants of

00:25:42.000 our time, and it's something that you've never shied away from trying to do, whether that's

00:25:46.000 with your fictionalized and scripted movies or with your documentaries.

00:25:52.000 I'd like to ask you a little bit now about your film Snowden, which you were unable to

00:25:58.000 make through the studio system, perhaps because he is such a critical figure in modern America.

00:26:05.000 A pivotal figure when it comes to understanding the nature of power within the era of big tech.

00:26:13.000 Who has exposed the degree to which there has been a globalised exploitation of data, globalised surveillance, ongoing lies around war.

00:26:23.000 His story is, of course, connected to the incarceration without trial of Julian Assange, imprisoned in my country now, potentially awaiting extradition.

00:26:33.000 I wonder if you feel that it's going to be increasingly difficult to tell these stories, whether it's your current movie, Nuclear Now, or whether or not if you were an emergent filmmaker that you would have been able to make a movie like JFK.

00:26:48.000 I know you were established, but would you have been able to tell stories like Platoon or JFK, let alone Snowden?

00:26:54.000 And do you think increasingly we'll see films like Sound of Freedom that have alternative

00:27:00.000 economic and indeed PR models that independent media now can viably promote movies, bypassing

00:27:09.000 the conventional centralised media structures, and that there are indeed audiences for content

00:27:16.000 that perhaps the mainstream media would prefer people didn't see?

00:27:21.000 as naked as day, everything you say has been so apparent.

00:27:26.000 What did Snowden do?

00:27:27.000 What did Snowden really do?

00:27:28.000 He gave us information that the public has the right to know that their government is eavesdropping on the world as well as on them.

00:27:38.000 That's all he did.

00:27:39.000 And that's big news.

00:27:40.000 And that was what was worth the filmmaking was making the film is worth it.

00:27:45.000 It was worth it no matter what happened.

00:27:46.000 And I did pay a price for it because frankly I couldn't get distribution.

00:27:51.000 I couldn't get financing out of the United States.

00:27:53.000 I had to do it out of Germany.

00:27:55.000 And France.

00:27:55.000 They gave me the most.

00:27:57.000 And then, eventually, a small American distributor jumped in and gave me the finishing money.

00:28:02.000 However—gave us the finishing money.

00:28:04.000 However, it was badly distributed, poorly distributed.

00:28:09.000 And the film was condemned in some quarters, but really appreciated.

00:28:13.000 It's a good film.

00:28:14.000 It's nothing—I'm very proud of it, but it didn't make the impact, because people are scared of this issue.

00:28:22.000 Are we really a bad guy?

00:28:23.000 That's what people think, I think.

00:28:25.000 Is the United States really doing this?

00:28:26.000 It's hard to believe some of the things we show in that movie, where the eavesdropping is going on everywhere, everywhere.

00:28:32.000 We go from Brazil to Europe to Asia.

00:28:35.000 We show the degree of intervention the United States does, which is a hegemon, basically listening to everybody, including Germany, including Brazil.

00:28:45.000 Remember the Brazilian president?

00:28:48.000 It's What we do on a daily basis with cyber warfare and with eavesdropping is shocking.

00:28:54.000 And at the same time, we make these accusations against China and against Russia, but they're a pale imitation of what we have done.

00:29:03.000 We have set up a worldwide network of surveillance, bar none, with the most financed and the most sophisticated equipment.

00:29:13.000 All this has changed, Russell.

00:29:14.000 In my lifetime, I was 50 years old when 2001 happened.

00:29:19.000 I was, I have to say, it changed.

00:29:23.000 A mentality set in that, oh, they got, they went after us.

00:29:26.000 They went after, whoever they is, they went after us.

00:29:30.000 They have to pay.

00:29:30.000 It's us against them.

00:29:32.000 Us against them. 1.00

00:29:33.000 And that mentality set in with this idiot Our worst president, George Bush, was no comparison to anybody else. 1.00

00:29:39.000 George Bush Jr. 1.00

00:29:41.000 became the guy who said, we have to fight the world if necessary.

00:29:46.000 Global War on Terror, it was called, but many people describe it as the global war of terror.

00:29:52.000 And it hasn't stopped since 2001.

00:29:55.000 He has been, George W. Bush, and it's difficult to query your verdict there, but he's been very much rehabilitated by the mainstream, portrayed now almost risibly as an avuncular elder statesman, a chummy figure who can hang out with Barack Obama, and perhaps these kind of relationships, this new corrupt Carnal Mount Rushmore of modern establishment criminals tells you, really, that electoral democracy is redundant.

00:30:24.000 And I have to query, Oliver, that it seems that the premise of your film, Nuclear Now, is that if you can destigmatise nuclear power, if the public, if we, the people, to use a phrase that was once popular in your nation, accepted the efficacy of nuclear power, there would be no resistance.

00:30:39.000 But with new censorship laws being introduced in the Five Eyes countries and indeed in the EU,

00:30:46.000 public opinion is becoming increasingly relevant.

00:30:49.000 Even while independent media voices and channels like ours and like Joe Rogan, I've watched your appearances

00:30:55.000 with Joe Rogan, who I adore, even though these new voices are becoming significant,

00:31:00.000 it is, I believe, approaching the point where it will be impossible to convey stories

00:31:07.000 that the establishment doesn't want told.

00:31:10.000 How have you seen this phenomena of censorship amplify over your career as a content creator and as a man who has always been willing to tell difficult stories?

00:31:28.000 Well, personally, we went to Davos with Nuclear Now last year, or earlier this year, I'm sorry.

00:31:34.000 And Davos is supposed to be a highly intelligent, educated group who are obviously concerned with the future.

00:31:42.000 This is their big play.

00:31:44.000 And Carl Schwab is the German fellow who is behind it. 0.98

00:31:50.000 He's a leader.

00:31:51.000 And we brought the film there, and we were received grudgingly, I have to say.

00:31:57.000 We got our screening space at our own expense, and we did our best to promote the film everywhere we went in those few days.

00:32:05.000 And what shocked me, I suppose, above all, was here is this group concerned with the future, And here, they don't even have nuclear energy on the menu, which is to say, it's been swept aside, somehow forgotten about.

00:32:16.000 I compared it to the Cinderella story.

00:32:20.000 I said, this is like putting the Cinderella in the kitchen scrubbing floors while the uglier sisters are out there preening and frowning themselves and wearing all their dresses and going out to the parties to meet Prince Charming. 1.00

00:32:32.000 Finally, they discover, of course, that Cinderella is beautiful, and they bring her out of the closet.

00:32:38.000 That's sort of the same story which is going on with nuclear.

00:32:41.000 It just is not talked about.

00:32:43.000 It's ignored because of these superstitions.

00:32:47.000 Superstitions that are no place in the modern world.

00:32:50.000 Science has to be the predominant The predominant educator here, not faith. 1.00

00:32:57.000 So we have a lot of idiots running around saying stupid things. 1.00

00:33:00.000 And the environmentalists, to some degree, are part of that, because they haven't studied nuclear energy. 1.00

00:33:05.000 And that's what we did in this film.

00:33:06.000 What is nuclear energy?

00:33:07.000 We went to the basis of it.

00:33:09.000 What is it?

00:33:10.000 And it is a great gift.

00:33:12.000 It's like Prometheus giving the fire to mankind.

00:33:15.000 And we have ignored it.

00:33:18.000 Oliver, I'm sure I don't need to tell you what happened to Prometheus.

00:33:22.000 I'm astonished that you considered taking that film to Davos.

00:33:27.000 Here in our community, the WEF are regarded as the kind of greenwashing, sportswashing, propagandist unit.

00:33:36.000 For the establishment ensuring that any globalist measures that are taken never impact the interests of the powerful and are always punitive towards individuals.

00:33:46.000 The name of Klaus Schwab around these parts is akin to saying Blofeld.

00:33:53.000 Maybe you understand the picture better, but we had to try.

00:33:56.000 We have to try to penetrate these establishments.

00:33:59.000 And to some degree, we have been successful because we find that many people in big business are very pro-nuclear, but they don't get anything done.

00:34:07.000 They're not able to push their agendas.

00:34:10.000 A lot of the big banks, they're pro-nuclear.

00:34:13.000 And it is.

00:34:14.000 Nuclear is popular in the sense that 60% of the American public Support nuclear.

00:34:19.000 But, you know, getting us to a place where the government, which supports nuclear, bipartisan, the Department of Energy, they are not putting big enough money into it.

00:34:28.000 They're putting good money, but now better money with Biden, and they did it with Obama and Trump.

00:34:33.000 It's not like they're ignoring it, but they just don't understand that it's important to be on the menu.

00:34:38.000 Not the only solution, but the centerpiece solution.

00:34:41.000 It is the biggest volume and scalable and cheapest in the long run of any of the energies and less damage to the earth.

00:34:49.000 So it's it.

00:34:52.000 It is what it is.

00:34:53.000 I understand all of that and I hear your passion and I respect that you are often usually ahead of the curve when it comes to making popular issues and controversial and difficult ideas accessible.

00:35:06.000 I'm not surprised to learn that a community that prides itself in a scientific approach remains cynical and skeptical because in our own investigations we have found that science appears to be a subset of Commercial endeavors in the last few years that's become particularly palpable, that particular aspects of science are amplified, other aspects of investigation and science are definitely muted.

00:35:36.000 Oliver, while I still have you, I really would love to ask you about the candidature of Robert F. Kennedy.

00:35:43.000 We've spoken to him several times on our show and in fact I'm about to embark on a contentious, difficult and likely doomed pull-up competition against him.

00:35:53.000 I don't know if you've noticed his upper body but the guy's pretty shredded and I'm challenging him, he's challenged me as a matter of fact, to a pull-up competition that I'm not likely to win.

00:36:04.000 I would like to ask you about the ongoing censorship around the murder, assassination of JFK.

00:36:13.000 He openly says that it was a CIA operation.

00:36:19.000 Joe Biden, after claiming that further documentation would be released, has only released heavily redacted data.

00:36:29.000 does this story still consume the American imagination?

00:36:34.000 What is it about this story that means that it can never be told truthfully?

00:36:41.000 Well, it's the greatest lie of the last century.

00:36:46.000 It was not an investigation.

00:36:49.000 It was a fraud.

00:36:50.000 And I've done my best with a documentary last two years ago.

00:36:55.000 It's called JFK Revisited.

00:36:59.000 And it's actually a big seller on Amazon after two years.

00:37:02.000 It's one of the number top, top documentaries.

00:37:06.000 It's because people know in their gut there was a lie.

00:37:09.000 It's just the Warren Commission is a joke.

00:37:12.000 It's fairy tale.

00:37:14.000 And it's never been scientifically supported except by People who are just, we call them in some cases, just enthusiasts for getting this over with, keeping it buried, that they accept this ridiculous scenario because it's convenient and allows the government to continue.

00:37:32.000 But if we really examine the case and you say that there was a change of power in 1963 that was illegal and our government was involved in it, getting rid of a president who was in the way, You raise a whole host of questions that fundamentally undercut the state.

00:37:47.000 And that's what needs to be done.

00:37:49.000 It has to be—we have to be honest, like Germany was honest with itself after World War II.

00:37:55.000 We need to lose a war, it seems, in order for us to wake up to what we've done.

00:37:59.000 And it's going to be a long list, true.

00:38:02.000 But the United States keeps keeping up to the fairy tale, and I suppose they're scared.

00:38:07.000 Keep the fairy tale going.

00:38:08.000 Keep the Cinderella story going, so that people don't question it.

00:38:12.000 Robert Kennedy, I support in many of his positions.

00:38:16.000 Unfortunately, as you know, he's anti—because he was a lawyer in it, he's anti-nuclear.

00:38:21.000 But he's anti-nuclear in the sense that I believe for the United States.

00:38:25.000 I don't agree with his position on that.

00:38:27.000 I don't think he is up to date.

00:38:28.000 And I wish he'd see my movie and really comment on it.

00:38:31.000 But I think he's got to reexamine some of his positions.

00:38:35.000 Not everybody's right about everything.

00:38:36.000 John Kennedy, his uncle, was a big supporter of nuclear.

00:38:39.000 As was Dwight Eisenhower, who was a pro-military man, but he was selling atoms for peace.

00:38:45.000 Those two presidents would have pushed nuclear onto the United States economy for sure, and if by 2000 we would have been a nuclearized society, let's say 70 percent of our electricity would have come—and energy would have come from nuclear.

00:39:00.000 But that wasn't the case.

00:39:01.000 It was cut off, as you know, in the 1980s by people like Ralph Nader and Jane Fonda and so forth, and the accidents that happened at Chernobyl.

00:39:14.000 By the way, you asked earlier what happened to me, but I was saying, yeah, no question, I got cut off.

00:39:19.000 After I did JFK, the media shifted, and it began shifting.

00:39:23.000 And when I, of course, voiced my opposition to our anti-Russia policies, Out of fear of going to war, I was completely, how do you say, I've been appearing only on shows like yours and Joe Rogan, you know, offbeat.

00:39:41.000 I'm not allowed back on mainstream television.

00:39:46.000 And I'm glad because, I mean, frankly, I turned on the TV the other night.

00:39:50.000 I was in Israel.

00:39:51.000 And guess what?

00:39:52.000 Jake Tapper, who I suppose represents as much the establishment as Walter Cronkite in the

00:39:58.000 old days, although there's a big difference, he had General Petraeus on telling us how

00:40:04.000 Ukraine was winning this war.

00:40:06.000 It was fantasy time.

00:40:08.000 Yeah, well mainstream media spaces have become deeply anodyne and highly controlled environments

00:40:16.000 and they, I don't think, can contain voices like yours anymore.

00:40:20.000 In fact, almost by definition, it's only permissible to have information that is not threatening.

00:40:27.000 And this is a quality and phenomena that has increased even in the time

00:40:33.000 that I've been working in media.

00:40:36.000 That's why I think the emergence of populist figures, whether that's Donald Trump,

00:40:41.000 who our audience are very keen on and whom I can certainly see

00:40:45.000 the pedagogical powers of, there's no doubt about that, and voices like RFK.

00:40:52.000 This is I think important that there's a new type of populism emerging and I think if there's to be any hope and you know I haven't seen your film Nuclear Now yet but I will because I trust you and I see you as an educator as well as a creator so I'll watch it even though there's people in our chat that's still asking questions about Nuclear waste, although Oliver did touch on the sort of the ability to sensibly curtail and contain the propensity for uranium contamination elsewhere.

00:41:21.000 But what I will say is that there is no chance of popularizing difficult ideas at a time when the mainstream media is such a heavily curated space.

00:41:32.000 But I would also invite you again to comment on the possibility that new media models are emerging.

00:41:38.000 Even your films, I'm sure, are funded now in ways that would have been unthinkable 20, 30 years ago, and with the phenomena of Sound of Freedom, which has been sort of crowdfunded and is like number two in the box office now, and even the candidacy of RFK, and perhaps you could even look at the Trump presidency, where it was a social media presidency, where, you know, as people said at the time, there was governance through Twitter, until, of course, he was kicked off of there.

00:42:06.000 Do you think that these new models of funding and promotion mean that stories like Nuclear Now can be told?

00:42:15.000 And do you think that it's going to require a different type of politician to advance ideas that are outside of the mainstream, Oliver?

00:42:23.000 I don't know about different.

00:42:24.000 I mean, I would rather see evolution than revolution.

00:42:27.000 I believe in that.

00:42:29.000 So there's no possibility. 0.96

00:42:30.000 I always believe in evolution in terms of a person with policies that are ignorant.

00:42:36.000 Learns from them and opens his mind like Reagan.

00:42:39.000 Look what Reagan did once he opened up to Gorbachev in Russia.

00:42:43.000 He opened his mind and he saw his wife maybe played a role in it or maybe his astrologer.

00:42:48.000 I don't know, but he saw a different way and that was crucial.

00:42:52.000 Same thing happens with people all around the world.

00:42:54.000 Do you remember the world before 1989?

00:42:56.000 All of a sudden, the Berlin Wall came down.

00:42:59.000 And there was a new let go, a relief in the world.

00:43:02.000 Something happened.

00:43:04.000 You could feel it in the air, a springtime.

00:43:06.000 And that existed for 10 years, almost.

00:43:08.000 So, I always believe that change is possible from within, and I believe that's the best way to do it, because revolution is very painful, and a lot of people get hurt, and it's not fair to everyone.

00:43:19.000 I mean, it destroys the whole structure.

00:43:22.000 I do believe we can evolve the structure.

00:43:23.000 So I may be different in that respect than you are.

00:43:26.000 I want to just say, the film is, just to, I know you have to close out, the Biden stuffed the JFK Act.

00:43:33.000 The JFK Act was passed as a result of my film in 1990.

00:43:38.000 That was an act that let the American people see these classified files.

00:43:45.000 That was obeyed, so to speak, in a very halting way for years, and things were released.

00:43:52.000 Trump, of course, backed off on the last pages—the last pages, which I don't know what they're about.

00:43:57.000 They could be very much about the CIA, I hope.

00:44:00.000 Because the CIA—those people who work there are the key to understanding those agents that were in place back when.

00:44:06.000 We'd like to know more about them.

00:44:08.000 But that act was stuffed the other day.

00:44:10.000 On Friday night, when—before the July 4th weekend, make sure that nobody paying attention, it was stuffed by Joe Biden, who was very disappointing.

00:44:19.000 He just said, no more declassification, except by the CIA has to be involved in all that stuff.

00:44:25.000 He raised all the—he destroyed the essence of that action by Congress.

00:44:30.000 He broke the law without knowing it.

00:44:32.000 But essentially, breaking the law is commonplace these days.

00:44:35.000 Whenever a government official doesn't like something we're doing, he breaks the law, including going to Iraq or whatever.

00:44:43.000 Sending weapons parallel, or none, to Ukraine is an act of war, and we don't even admit it.

00:44:51.000 We don't even act like we admit it.

00:44:52.000 So anyway, The film is available on, nuclear now, on Amazon.

00:44:58.000 You can get it, Google Play, Rumble, wherever you want, on YouTube.

00:45:03.000 Go for it.

00:45:04.000 It's a DVD.

00:45:04.000 It's coming out in July in the United States.

00:45:08.000 We're spreading it gradually to all these countries in Europe and Asia.

00:45:12.000 We have sales coming up soon.

00:45:15.000 I can't get it all out at the same time.

00:45:17.000 I wish Netflix had it, but they're not that, that's not the kind of film that they're going to want.

00:45:22.000 No, you're not going to be able to get that on there, Oliver, you radical iconoclist, you firebrand, you.

00:45:28.000 To watch Nuclear Now, go to nuclearnowfilm.com and we'll post a link in the description to Oliver's new film for you straight away.

00:45:38.000 Oliver, throughout this conversation, I've been reminded of Satish Kumar, the Indian teacher and activist who, when he met Bertrand Russell, Bertrand Russell was heavily involved in the campaign for nuclear disarmament.

00:45:52.000 And when he spoke to Satish Kumar, Satish said, like, what is the point in banning nuclear weapons if you don't change the mindset that created them?

00:46:04.000 Bertrand Russell said, this issue is too vital, too important to sort of approach so sort of metaphysically and ideologically.

00:46:11.000 We simply have to ban nuclear weapons because of their capacity to destroy the world.

00:46:14.000 Now, of course, this is a conversation that took place in the 1960s.

00:46:18.000 And you have made it very plain that you want to draw a distinction between the destructive use of nuclear power and the creative use of nuclear power.

00:46:27.000 But the point that I feel to be significant is that it's the consciousness itself Our attitudes themselves and systems that need to radically alter if we're to have any chance at all.

00:46:40.000 So when I talk about revolution I'm talking about a significant shift in perspective and the necessary disobedience to bring that about and significantly the decentralization of power and the radical re-evaluation of some of our institutions rather than a sort of a conventional armed struggle and all the pain and misery that such a thing would bring about.

00:47:03.000 Yeah, evolution versus revolution.

00:47:06.000 I remember what I said earlier about what Einstein's quote was, the unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking.

00:47:18.000 And I don't know if we're going to be able to change that.

00:47:20.000 However, as I said, give them what they want.

00:47:24.000 If they want more electricity, let's give it to them because we can do it.

00:47:28.000 We have infinite power in the atom.

00:47:30.000 Infinite power.

00:47:31.000 And that's what Einstein understood.

00:47:32.000 We can't just turn our backs on it and go back to Luddite age or an earlier age. 0.72

00:47:38.000 It's not possible.

00:47:40.000 Oliver, obviously I agree with you.

00:47:43.000 And I also appreciate you a great deal.

00:47:45.000 I appreciate the incredible work you've done over the years.

00:47:48.000 I appreciate your ongoing passion and your refusal to conform, your intrepidness and your endless endeavors to bring complex stories to people.

00:47:58.000 And I thank you very much for joining us today on Stay Free.

00:48:01.000 Thank you, Oliver Stone.

00:48:02.000 Bless you, Russell.

00:48:03.000 Bless you.

00:48:04.000 Thank you, sir.

00:48:05.000 Thanks for joining us.

00:48:06.000 You've become quite a citizen.

00:48:08.000 And it's not over yet.

00:48:11.000 Thank you.

00:48:13.000 Thank you so much.

00:48:13.000 Thank you for joining us, Oliver.

00:48:14.000 I appreciate your time.

00:48:16.000 Coming up next week on Stay Free with Russell Brand, we have Vandana Shiva talking to us, of course, about the horrors of big agriculture, her true feelings about Bill Gates, the necessity to support farmer protest movements.

00:48:31.000 Also, Callie Means will be exposing the truth between We'll be exposing the truth behind big food and big agriculture, plus Wim Hof talking about explicitly how we can heal ourselves without recourse to pharmaceutical measures and the ideologies behind them, and also the scientific undergirding of his methods.

00:48:53.000 These are fascinating conversations.

00:48:54.000 Until then, stay free.

00:48:56.000 Switch on, switch off, switch on.

00:49:01.000 Just watch it.

00:49:02.000 (upbeat music)

00:49:05.000 Switch on.

Stay Free - Russel Brand - July 28, 2023

Oliver Stone - Nuclear Power, Putin & Snowden

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