Oliver Stone joins Russell Brand to discuss his new film, Nuclear Now, and why he thinks nuclear energy is the most important issue the world needs to address, and why it s better than climate change. He also talks about the time he accidentally wrote a letter of apology to Donald Trump, and how he almost got into a fight with the President of the United States, Robert Kennedy. And he talks about why he believes nuclear energy should be the next big thing in the fight against climate change, and the potential for it to change the world, if we don t get rid of climate change and nuclear power. This is an [Expert] level episode, which means some parts of the conversation may not make sense unless you ve heard it on the radio or TV. If you haven t checked out our new show, please do so before listening to this episode of Stay Free with Russell Brand. Stay Free! Subscribe to Stay Free: A Podcast About Stuff and Stuff and Leave Us a Review on Apple Podcasts Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. Rate, review and subscribe to our new podcast, The Eavesdropping WTF? Subscribe to our newest podcast, You're a Good Eavesdrop: Subscribe, Like, Share, Share and Retweet this episode and leave us a review on whatever podcast you're listening to! Subscribe and review it! You can also join our FB page and become a Friend of the Podcast! to get exclusive shoutouts, polls, and more like it on your favourite podchips! and more! Stay Free on Podchips, and Subscribe to stay free to help spread the word out there and get notified about our newest episodes and more of his work! on the podcast! Thank you for listening and support us on social media! - stay free! I'm listening to stayfree in the podcast? I'll be listening to his work and spreading the word to the world for more like this and more on his podcast, he'll be reading his work out there on his work so you can help out more people everywhere else on the podcharity and other things like it's better than that's good and more more like that can be reached out to him everywhere he can help him out there thank you, he's listening out for his work is more than he can be reachable
00:00:01.000Thank you for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:04.000In 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.
00:00:15.000But I've got a very, very exciting guest to present to you today.
00:00:19.000The Oscar-winning director behind Platoon, JFK and Snowden, a documentary maker who spent 20 hours in the company of Vladimir Putin.
00:00:26.000And 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.
00:00:50.000Thank you for starting with a compliment.
00:00:53.000And I'd like to begin our exchange for apologizing for my broad conduct during a time when we made a documentary.
00:01:00.000If 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.
00:01:12.000And 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.
00:01:20.000It was a long time ago but nevertheless I apologize.
00:01:23.000I see it hasn't impeded your ability to make other documentaries and thank you for agreeing to come on our show.
00:01:33.000I remember you as being very exciting and vital, and it was fun.
00:01:38.000Of 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.
00:01:52.000Before 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.
00:02:03.000Obviously, this has always been a controversial subject.
00:02:06.000The connotations of Chernobyl, the broad fear around nuclear power is as prevalent now as it always has been.
00:02:16.000Is that why you've chosen to make this documentary?
00:02:22.000The big picture for me was climate change.
00:02:25.000And you can't ignore it, especially since Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 made me very aware of it.
00:02:34.000And of course, his solution in that film was renewables, which were essentially sun, solar and hydro.
00:02:42.000But 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.
00:03:27.000This 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.
00:03:37.000So, scared out of my mind, I started to read more about it.
00:03:41.000And I came across this book, A Bright Future, by Uh, Josh Goldstein and Stefan Skavist, who's a Swedish nuclear scientist.
00:03:53.000In that short book, they lay out a very common sense plan saying that Look, go back and think about nuclear energy.
00:04:27.000Nuclear 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.
00:04:37.000Well, we don't want to talk about that history, but it was badly used, and it scared the shit out of the whole world.
00:04:44.000It scared the shit out of everybody, and it really dominated our dialogue And the Cold War for many, many years.
00:04:51.000But the truth is that nuclear energy for civilian purposes is completely the opposite.
00:05:54.000All the reactors have containment structures, but that didn't.
00:05:57.000And it leaked into Northern Europe all over the place.
00:06:01.000And they still, after all those years, the U.N.
00:06:03.000went 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.
00:06:14.000Even that has been in question and some estimates are lower.
00:06:17.000So the dangers of radioactivity have been very exaggerated over time.
00:06:22.000And 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.
00:06:45.000It'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.
00:07:08.000It just throws, and it's part of the problem that we have with With the pollution that we have.
00:07:13.000The 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.
00:07:26.000It's nothing compared to what chemical and oil and coal waste is.
00:07:35.000I see that your advocacy is founded on the best conceivable principles addressing a problem that elsewise seems almost impossible to alter.
00:07:48.000Throughout your career, Oliver, you have presumably intuitively understood stories that have been necessary to tell.
00:08:20.000With the subject of this film, my concern--
00:08:23.000and like I'm watching the chat now, like people are watching this in our locals community--
00:08:27.000people have a strong aversion to nuclear power.
00:08:31.000Perhaps it's because of the reasons that you're addressing, that they understandably
00:08:36.000associate nuclear energy with nuclear destruction and the notable disasters that you've already
00:08:41.000cited in addition to the militaristic use of nuclear weapons.
00:08:46.000But the point I'd like to take you up on is a slightly different one.
00:08:50.000If we don't address our attitude towards consuming Then I feel that we are going to sustain significant problems.
00:08:58.000Oughtn'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?
00:09:12.000Good point, but I don't agree with you.
00:09:14.000I don't think it's going to be possible to change human nature.
00:09:16.000I think it's if you go to the to the poorer countries in the world, you see a stark example of it in India.
00:09:24.000Of course, they're going to look for electricity.
00:09:25.000They want electricity for their tools in order to cut sugarcane.
00:09:29.000It's just natural that people who are poor are going to want easier ways to do things.
00:09:34.000And this is true about China, Indonesia, all these populous countries that are coming into heavier usage of electricity.
00:09:42.000And not only that, cars, transportation, which is not electricity, and industries which have not been electrified yet, such as cement making.
00:09:53.000In all countries, they're going to make cement.
00:09:55.000They're going to continue to have agriculture and fertilizer, and there's going to be demand for For steel.
00:10:03.000So you're not going to stop the demand, and that's consumption.
00:10:06.000Now, 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.
00:10:12.000So 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.
00:10:33.000Everything has been misused by human beings.
00:10:35.000But 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.
00:10:48.000It's just human nature to want things.
00:10:51.000Wanting 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.
00:11:21.000I recognize that that's an important story to tell, an important conversation to have.
00:11:28.000But 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.
00:11:47.000And I suppose another advantage that your film presents to us is the ability to abate and prevent these resource wars.
00:11:56.000There's no doubt that the Ukraine-Russia conflict has a component that is to do with territory as well as resources.
00:12:02.000The 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?
00:12:35.000First, I just want to just say one quick rejoinder to what you were thinking about consumption.
00:12:39.000I 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.
00:12:56.000Be 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.
00:14:22.000It was a very deep plan to penetrate the Soviet—to penetrate the Russian Federation.
00:14:30.000From 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.
00:14:42.000Victoria Nuland, you know these names.
00:14:45.000Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser.
00:14:53.000Biden 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.
00:15:05.000I 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.
00:15:17.000And we blew the opportunity, blew the opportunity.
00:15:20.000And we still can make that opportunity work, because Russia is the leading—the leading producer of nuclear energy in the world.
00:15:32.000Because in the 19—well, recently, but in the 1940s, they started to develop civilian energy.
00:15:39.000And they've been doing it steadily, and now they have Rosatom.
00:15:42.000Rosatom is a state agency with 250,000 employees who know everything to know about nuclear energy.
00:15:49.000They do every department, and they export their generators to all these new countries, Bangladesh, to India, to Turkey, to the Middle Eurasia.
00:16:04.000I mean, they're the biggest sellers of it, and they They deliver turnkey factories.
00:16:11.000Turnkey, which is the essence of this thing.
00:16:13.000How to build nuclear reactors fast on an assembly line, like airliners.
00:16:28.000You know, I asked him very honest questions, and he answered—I didn't sense any—the belligerence.
00:16:33.000He kept calling the United States his partners, if you remember, in the film, my American partners.
00:16:38.000OK, 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.
00:16:48.000So this is an unfortunate tragedy, as is China, because we alienated them, too.
00:16:53.000They are also coming up very strongly in nuclear energy.
00:16:58.000But 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.
00:17:30.000But by competing with them, instead of cooperating with them, we're making things far worse.
00:17:36.000But 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.
00:17:46.000Do you remember, I'm sure, the reaction from the audience when you spoke to Stephen Colbert about Putin,
00:17:53.000like that the audience are just not willing to listen to nuanced information.
00:17:57.000Throughout your career, you've been iconoclastic and you've been willing to tell difficult stories
00:18:02.000about war, about corruption, indeed, including the assassination of JFK, of course.
00:18:10.000So why do you remain confident that you can make an impact on a subject like, you know, like with your film Nuclear
00:18:19.000Because 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
00:19:31.000I completely think that was a bogus war, bogus reasoning.
00:19:34.000Every 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.
00:20:33.000And 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.
00:20:45.000And, of course, right away, NATO started to worry about them.
00:21:36.000It grew into this monster, two-headed monster, three-headed monster.
00:21:40.000It's become something that's unbelievable.
00:21:42.000It'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?
00:21:54.000The 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.
00:22:02.000That'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.
00:22:09.000But it can be done with government agency, and it has to be.
00:22:38.000You've got to cut through the red tape.
00:22:40.000But 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.
00:22:52.000Scaremongering is the easiest tactic of all.
00:22:55.000And that's what we've been doing for years in our country.
00:22:58.000So 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.
00:23:22.000This 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.
00:23:31.000If we don't stop this, what Biden is doing—this guy is—I voted for him.
00:23:36.000I 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.
00:24:37.000And 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.
00:24:47.000That's all they asked for in 2014—autonomy.
00:25:37.000And indeed, an inability to hold complex stories is perhaps one of the great determinants of
00:25:42.000our time, and it's something that you've never shied away from trying to do, whether that's
00:25:46.000with your fictionalized and scripted movies or with your documentaries.
00:25:52.000I'd like to ask you a little bit now about your film Snowden, which you were unable to
00:25:58.000make through the studio system, perhaps because he is such a critical figure in modern America.
00:26:05.000A pivotal figure when it comes to understanding the nature of power within the era of big tech.
00:26:13.000Who has exposed the degree to which there has been a globalised exploitation of data, globalised surveillance, ongoing lies around war.
00:26:23.000His story is, of course, connected to the incarceration without trial of Julian Assange, imprisoned in my country now, potentially awaiting extradition.
00:26:33.000I 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.
00:26:48.000I know you were established, but would you have been able to tell stories like Platoon or JFK, let alone Snowden?
00:26:54.000And do you think increasingly we'll see films like Sound of Freedom that have alternative
00:27:00.000economic and indeed PR models that independent media now can viably promote movies, bypassing
00:27:09.000the conventional centralised media structures, and that there are indeed audiences for content
00:27:16.000that perhaps the mainstream media would prefer people didn't see?
00:27:21.000as naked as day, everything you say has been so apparent.
00:28:35.000We show the degree of intervention the United States does, which is a hegemon, basically listening to everybody, including Germany, including Brazil.
00:29:55.000He 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.
00:30:24.000And 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.
00:30:39.000But with new censorship laws being introduced in the Five Eyes countries and indeed in the EU,
00:30:46.000public opinion is becoming increasingly relevant.
00:30:49.000Even while independent media voices and channels like ours and like Joe Rogan, I've watched your appearances
00:30:55.000with Joe Rogan, who I adore, even though these new voices are becoming significant,
00:31:00.000it is, I believe, approaching the point where it will be impossible to convey stories
00:31:07.000that the establishment doesn't want told.
00:31:10.000How 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?
00:31:28.000Well, personally, we went to Davos with Nuclear Now last year, or earlier this year, I'm sorry.
00:31:34.000And Davos is supposed to be a highly intelligent, educated group who are obviously concerned with the future.
00:31:51.000And we brought the film there, and we were received grudgingly, I have to say.
00:31:57.000We got our screening space at our own expense, and we did our best to promote the film everywhere we went in those few days.
00:32:05.000And 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.
00:32:16.000I compared it to the Cinderella story.
00:32:20.000I 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.
00:32:32.000Finally, they discover, of course, that Cinderella is beautiful, and they bring her out of the closet.
00:32:38.000That's sort of the same story which is going on with nuclear.
00:33:18.000Oliver, I'm sure I don't need to tell you what happened to Prometheus.
00:33:22.000I'm astonished that you considered taking that film to Davos.
00:33:27.000Here in our community, the WEF are regarded as the kind of greenwashing, sportswashing, propagandist unit.
00:33:36.000For the establishment ensuring that any globalist measures that are taken never impact the interests of the powerful and are always punitive towards individuals.
00:33:46.000The name of Klaus Schwab around these parts is akin to saying Blofeld.
00:33:53.000Maybe you understand the picture better, but we had to try.
00:33:56.000We have to try to penetrate these establishments.
00:33:59.000And 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.
00:34:07.000They're not able to push their agendas.
00:34:10.000A lot of the big banks, they're pro-nuclear.
00:34:14.000Nuclear is popular in the sense that 60% of the American public Support nuclear.
00:34:19.000But, 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.
00:34:28.000They're putting good money, but now better money with Biden, and they did it with Obama and Trump.
00:34:33.000It's not like they're ignoring it, but they just don't understand that it's important to be on the menu.
00:34:38.000Not the only solution, but the centerpiece solution.
00:34:41.000It is the biggest volume and scalable and cheapest in the long run of any of the energies and less damage to the earth.
00:34:53.000I 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.
00:35:06.000I'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.
00:35:36.000Oliver, while I still have you, I really would love to ask you about the candidature of Robert F. Kennedy.
00:35:43.000We'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.
00:35:53.000I 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.
00:36:04.000I would like to ask you about the ongoing censorship around the murder, assassination of JFK.
00:36:13.000He openly says that it was a CIA operation.
00:36:19.000Joe Biden, after claiming that further documentation would be released, has only released heavily redacted data.
00:36:29.000does this story still consume the American imagination?
00:36:34.000What is it about this story that means that it can never be told truthfully?
00:36:41.000Well, it's the greatest lie of the last century.
00:37:14.000And 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.
00:37:32.000But 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.
00:38:28.000And I wish he'd see my movie and really comment on it.
00:38:31.000But I think he's got to reexamine some of his positions.
00:38:35.000Not everybody's right about everything.
00:38:36.000John Kennedy, his uncle, was a big supporter of nuclear.
00:38:39.000As was Dwight Eisenhower, who was a pro-military man, but he was selling atoms for peace.
00:38:45.000Those 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.
00:39:01.000It 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.
00:39:14.000By the way, you asked earlier what happened to me, but I was saying, yeah, no question, I got cut off.
00:39:19.000After I did JFK, the media shifted, and it began shifting.
00:39:23.000And 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.
00:39:41.000I'm not allowed back on mainstream television.
00:39:46.000And I'm glad because, I mean, frankly, I turned on the TV the other night.
00:40:36.000That's why I think the emergence of populist figures, whether that's Donald Trump,
00:40:41.000who our audience are very keen on and whom I can certainly see
00:40:45.000the pedagogical powers of, there's no doubt about that, and voices like RFK.
00:40:52.000This 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.
00:41:21.000But 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.
00:41:32.000But I would also invite you again to comment on the possibility that new media models are emerging.
00:41:38.000Even 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.
00:42:06.000Do you think that these new models of funding and promotion mean that stories like Nuclear Now can be told?
00:42:15.000And do you think that it's going to require a different type of politician to advance ideas that are outside of the mainstream, Oliver?
00:43:04.000You could feel it in the air, a springtime.
00:43:06.000And that existed for 10 years, almost.
00:43:08.000So, 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.
00:43:19.000I mean, it destroys the whole structure.
00:43:22.000I do believe we can evolve the structure.
00:43:23.000So I may be different in that respect than you are.
00:43:26.000I want to just say, the film is, just to, I know you have to close out, the Biden stuffed the JFK Act.
00:43:33.000The JFK Act was passed as a result of my film in 1990.
00:43:38.000That was an act that let the American people see these classified files.
00:43:45.000That was obeyed, so to speak, in a very halting way for years, and things were released.
00:43:52.000Trump, of course, backed off on the last pages—the last pages, which I don't know what they're about.
00:43:57.000They could be very much about the CIA, I hope.
00:44:00.000Because the CIA—those people who work there are the key to understanding those agents that were in place back when.
00:44:08.000But that act was stuffed the other day.
00:44:10.000On Friday night, when—before the July 4th weekend, make sure that nobody paying attention, it was stuffed by Joe Biden, who was very disappointing.
00:44:19.000He just said, no more declassification, except by the CIA has to be involved in all that stuff.
00:44:25.000He raised all the—he destroyed the essence of that action by Congress.
00:45:15.000I can't get it all out at the same time.
00:45:17.000I wish Netflix had it, but they're not that, that's not the kind of film that they're going to want.
00:45:22.000No, you're not going to be able to get that on there, Oliver, you radical iconoclist, you firebrand, you.
00:45:28.000To 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.
00:45:38.000Oliver, 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.
00:45:52.000And 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?
00:46:04.000Bertrand Russell said, this issue is too vital, too important to sort of approach so sort of metaphysically and ideologically.
00:46:11.000We simply have to ban nuclear weapons because of their capacity to destroy the world.
00:46:14.000Now, of course, this is a conversation that took place in the 1960s.
00:46:18.000And 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.
00:46:27.000But 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.
00:46:40.000So 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.
00:47:06.000I 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.
00:47:18.000And I don't know if we're going to be able to change that.
00:47:20.000However, as I said, give them what they want.
00:47:24.000If they want more electricity, let's give it to them because we can do it.
00:47:43.000And I also appreciate you a great deal.
00:47:45.000I appreciate the incredible work you've done over the years.
00:47:48.000I appreciate your ongoing passion and your refusal to conform, your intrepidness and your endless endeavors to bring complex stories to people.
00:47:58.000And I thank you very much for joining us today on Stay Free.
00:48:16.000Coming 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.
00:48:31.000Also, 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.