In this episode, Russell Brand sits down with The Critical Drinker to discuss the controversy surrounding the new movie 'Indie Jones: The Rise of Skywalker' and why he thinks it's a bad idea to re-use the same old IPs as a springboard for a new generation of movies and TV shows. Plus, Russell talks about his favourite Spice Girls song growing up in the 80s and why it's not as popular as it used to be. You can watch the full episode on Rumble on YouTube here. See it first on Rumble here. See it second on Rumble there. And if you haven't checked out Rumble there's a good chance you'll find it on your favourite streaming platform. You won't want to miss it! Subscribe to Rumble here! You'll get immediate access to all the newest episodes of the show and subscribe to stay up to date with the latest episodes. I'm a Black man and I could never be a better man on this land. - Russell Brand I want to rule the world so I'm looking for the CEO. - Tweet me if you're looking for a CEO in this video, you're going to see the future. In this video you'll get to see a video that's going to be relevant to you. in the future, you'll be able to see The CEO. Thanks for listening to The CEO? Timestamps: 0:00:00 - Who's the CEO? 5:30 - What's the future? 6: What's The Future? 8:00-10: Why is this movie causing so much controversy? 11:00 | What's your favourite Spice Girl? 12:00 13:30- What do you like about the Spice Girls? 15:00+ - What are you're listening to the Spice Girl's favourite band? 16:00s - What s your favourite pop culture icon? 17:00 Is it a good thing? 18:00 What s the spirit of creativity itself? 19:00 +16: What does the future of creativity? 21:00 The Spice Girl s favourite by me? 22: What is your favourite rock song? 23:00? 26:00 & 27:00 Are you listening to me in the culture of the past? 27:20 - How do you think I'm going to grow up to be a commodity?
00:00:38.000For the first 15 minutes I'm going to be on YouTube and that's going to be relevant to you 6.5 million Awakening Wonders over there because you surely love the critical drinker.
00:00:48.000A man who has analysed and critiqued contemporary cinema with a perspective that you're unlikely to see in the mainstream.
00:00:55.000I think We are definitely stuck in a rut as a culture when it comes to just relying on the past.
00:01:03.000As you say, the motivation behind these IPs and these franchise movies is no one's willing to take a risk.
00:01:11.000What they lack with these modern characters that they try to do is that they're not willing to take that step of have them fail and be vulnerable and have flaws and weaknesses.
00:01:19.000We're going to talk about Sound of Freedom.
00:01:22.000Why is this movie causing so much controversy?
00:01:25.000I'm also going to start referring to The Critical Drinker by his actual human name, and I'm going to ask you to remove them aviators.
00:02:08.000One of your most recent videos that I enjoyed watching was your analysis and review of the latest Indiana Jones movie.
00:02:17.000It seems you kind of reached a, in a sense, a zenith of your analysis in itself, or what Lynch might call the ducks Aye, the point within the point.
00:02:29.000It seemed to me that what you were saying is that our culture is incapable of coming up with new and novel and innovative content, and it's kind of like a Tomb Raider dragging cadavers from the soil, reanimating them, and then not even respecting them.
00:02:45.000Is that the essence of your perspective on sort of mainstream movie franchises, and what do you think that tells us more broadly, if indeed that is your perspective, Drinker?
00:02:55.000I think that's wildly wrong, because that metaphor you just gave me would have at least been entertaining, unlike this movie.
00:03:00.000No, I think we are definitely stuck in a rut as a culture when it comes to just relying on the past and just digging up old ideas, like you say, bringing back old characters, old actors, and just...
00:03:16.000We've lost the ability to create new, innovative stuff.
00:03:18.000and trying to use them as this weird springboard to launch a new generation of characters,
00:04:02.000It's very interesting that you take it to something as essential as the spirit of creativity itself.
00:04:07.000I've got young daughters, they're five and six.
00:04:10.000Their favourite band is the Spice Girls.
00:04:12.000Like, we listened to the Spice Girls and then, like, some other kids were getting dropped off at the school, like, similar age.
00:04:18.000They were listening to the Spice Girls.
00:04:19.000It doesn't even... Even something in the culture, which I think at the time I would have certainly regarded as a sort of a commodity, even though it had a great deal of spirit, and there's aspects of the Spice Girls that I liked, Details I certainly won't be going into right now.
00:04:34.000What I'd like to say is that it's odd that even something that's commercial, you know, we're not talking about like Joan Jett, we're talking about the Spice Girls, even like those kind of commodities aren't being replaced.
00:04:45.000And also with like Glastonbury, Elton John being the sort of closing act, it makes you wonder, well, where is it going to go?
00:04:51.000Now, do you think this is because of economics?
00:04:53.000Do you think it's because of technology?
00:04:54.000For example, it's been sort of oft stated that There isn't a new raft of movie stars coming through anymore.
00:05:05.000And of course, I know those two things are inextricably linked, but what do you put it down to?
00:05:10.000Yeah, I mean, I think the last movie star that we have still active really now that's relevant is Tom Cruise, and he's got Mission Impossible coming out soon.
00:05:18.000That's probably going to do really well this summer.
00:05:22.000But yeah, like, There's a problem now in movies, particularly, where we don't have movie stars anymore.
00:05:31.000We have characters that people are excited to see.
00:05:35.000Particularly with comic book movies, with all this superhero stuff, it'll be a case of, hey, we're going to go and see the new Captain America movie.
00:05:42.000We're going to see the new Thor movie.
00:05:44.000We don't care about the actor that's playing him, really.
00:05:46.000It's just the character that we're going to see.
00:05:49.000Then doesn't translate into a star who can sell movies who can get people to go to the movie theater and see his latest film.
00:05:57.000You know, back when probably you and I were kids, the dominant forces at the box office were like, Oh, I'm going to go and see the latest Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
00:06:06.000I'm going to see the latest Stallone movie, the latest Bruce Willis movie.
00:06:16.000And it's the same problem with You know, with, um, films in general, you know, we, um, we don't want to take the risk now of inventing new things, because, one, movies are massively expensive, and so they don't want to take the risk of investing 200, 300 million dollars on something that's completely unproven, and so all they'll do is say, well, what's a surefire hit?
00:06:48.000Let's just keep recycling the things that older people remember.
00:06:52.000And two, we don't have the talented writers with really interesting life experiences that they can translate into scripts.
00:07:00.000And so they don't have the ability to create new things that are really interesting and cool.
00:07:04.000It seems like Mark Hamill has almost been trying to publicly say that he don't like what the franchise has done to the character of Luke Skywalker, that he personally feels offended and affronted by it.
00:07:19.000Sometimes it seems to me that you're driven by a kind of a love of narrative and story and almost like Joseph Campbell-like ideas of how a hero should function and what a story should do.
00:07:34.000I've got a few things I want to run by you.
00:07:35.000Like, I used to think, it's like a little hypothesis of mine, that American movie stars somehow embody how they regard how that nation in particular, and let's face it, it's still the nation that defines our planet, like how it sees itself at a particular time.
00:07:50.000Like, when it was Schwarzenegger and Stallone, it was a kind of rebooted 1980s America with heft and, you know, an overt masculinity.
00:07:59.000Adam Sandler, who I did a movie with, actually, and who I think is a really interesting and brilliant performer and comic, and he, like, at a time when we were starting to learn, for example, that there weren't actually weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Adam Sandler had this kind of, oh shucks, I didn't mean it, like, kind of mentality that aligned neatly with an America that's trying its best, and erring sometimes, Now perhaps what we have is an America that doesn't know what it's trying to sell itself anymore.
00:08:29.000Trying to present a kind of ethical and moral face to the world while clearly being backed by commodity.
00:08:34.000As you say, the motivation behind these IPs and these franchise movies is no one's willing to take a risk.
00:08:42.000Matt Damon says that you'd never get a Good Will Hunting type movies no more because no one will back a $30 million movie like that.
00:08:53.000But what I want to get into just before, while we're still on YouTube, before we leave YouTube, so do bear that in mind, Drinker, that we're still in a place where censorship is possible, is how do we marry together the idea that you don't want movies all to be big, buff, white movie stars.
00:09:43.000Yeah, interesting points you've made there, because it's like when you talk about the stars of their different eras, like the 70s was like De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, like the interesting character actors, you know, the 80s was the big buff muscle man.
00:09:57.000It was the time of like American confidence.
00:10:33.000So I think that's a self-evident point of it doesn't even know what it wants to be anymore.
00:10:38.000So that's kind of really sad to see because as a Brit, I always looked up to America as the model of the world.
00:10:45.000This is the country that leads us, the free world.
00:10:48.000Um, but yeah, when it comes to, to marrying what you talked about there, like the, the, um, rather than just having straight white guys as like the movie stars, how do we, how do we include, um, people of different genders, ethnicities, all that stuff?
00:11:04.000I guess what I would say, hey, we did it!
00:11:08.00020, 30, 40 years ago, we just didn't make such a big deal out of it like we have to do now.
00:11:13.000And that's the thing that annoys people.
00:11:15.000That's the thing that turns people off.
00:11:16.000When you make the identity of the main character, the main actor, the sole focus of everything, people are just like, well, why are you making such a big deal of this?
00:12:15.000Yeah, it offends you because it's, in a sense, hasn't got any art or care in it.
00:12:22.000So you're contrasting the character like Ripley from Alien or Sarah Connor from the Terminator movies with, say, an example off the top of my head, which I know will go over well on these platforms, Captain Marvel and the way that Captain Marvel was kind of presented as a hero.
00:12:39.000It offends you, I think, Because as I've said before, I'm a fan of your content, that you don't get to see a vulnerable character evolve, a vulnerable character learn lessons, a character that is flawed and has to overcome obstacles.
00:12:51.000In a sense, this is the function of story that precedes the medium of cinema.
00:12:57.000We need to see that a character in position A at the start of the film is unable to achieve something but by, you know, they go through catharsis, challenges, whatever, and at the other side they're able.
00:13:11.000And you think that this new ideology that's about presenting figures or characters in a particular way is unable to serve story and the function of story.
00:13:22.000What's the fundamental thing, like you said, that gets you to identify with a character?
00:13:25.000Is you give a person that's somewhat likable, give them an obstacle to overcome and have them struggle to do it.
00:13:32.000Have them lots of things that get in their way, like they fall down, they pick themselves up, they eventually overcome.
00:13:37.000That is the fundamental essence of what makes you like a character and identify with them.
00:13:42.000It's so easy, it shouldn't even need to be said.
00:13:46.000But what they lack with these modern characters that they try to do is that they're not willing to take that step of have them fail and be vulnerable and have flaws and weaknesses.
00:13:56.000Either because the writers don't know how to do it or because they've got this kind of Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of.
00:14:02.000Prickly defensiveness when it comes to writing things like female characters where they don't want them to be perceived as weak, and so the only alternative they have is well, they just have to be great at everything.
00:14:19.000They don't really have personalities because they don't Them being amazing and being up here and the rest of the world having to learn to accept how awesome they are and eventually come up and accept them.
00:17:17.000I mean, honestly, you'd think it would be a no-brainer.
00:17:20.000I think we can all Come to the same conclusion that children being sold into child sex trafficking is a terrible thing and should absolutely be stopped at any cost.
00:17:31.000And so a movie about trying, you know, a main hero who's trying to prevent that is trying to rescue children from the most horrifying situations imaginable.
00:17:40.000Wow, that should be the sort of thing that you should really have no qualms about supporting.
00:17:44.000And the fact that so many people in the mainstream media are against this, Wow, it really makes me question what their values are.
00:17:56.000Yeah, I don't, because I... Look, we're all familiar now with, like, the Jeffrey Epstein story, and it does appear that paedophilia is, let's say, more popular than I'd imagined it was as a young man, blessedly.
00:18:10.000But it's odd that a film like this, where, as far as I can understand it, the only roots for saying that there's a connection to QAnon or conspiracy theories is that once maybe Jim Caviezel, am I saying his name right, the lead actor, Yeah, Caviezel, I think it is.
00:18:35.000Maybe the lead actor commented on it, and I know it's funded by the same people that made The Chosen, and I knew the guy that played Jesus in that.
00:18:43.000The guy that played Jesus in The Chosen, Will, body doubled for me, I think, in Ballers, an HBO show that I did.
00:18:58.000So, you know, do you think, this is a question I want to put to you as an expert in movies, or at least an authority on movies, do you think that what actually, you know, of course there's the idea that, oh wow, is there actually, is there something to hide around all this paedophile network stuff?
00:19:13.000Let me know in the comments, guys, I know that's a subject you lot get into.
00:19:16.000Or is it, or additionally, is it because of this is a funding model and a distribution,
00:19:22.000not necessarily distribution model, but a PR model that's bypassing a lot of the gatekeepers?
00:19:27.000You know, they're going on podcasts, they're, you're promoting it.
00:19:30.000Tim Pool, I've seen talking about it, but you know, it doesn't seem to have to go through
00:19:35.000the, I don't know, green tomato, red tomato, fresh or whatever stuff.
00:19:42.000Like, first of all, the movie doesn't try to make any connections to some, you know, ring that's, like, operating at the top levels of American society or anything like that.
00:19:52.000It's very much like, this is stuff that's going on in Colombia, Mexico, that sort of thing.
00:19:57.000It's just a guy trying to rescue kids from a hostile situation, you know?
00:20:12.000Like it was made for like well under $20 million.
00:20:15.000This isn't like an Indiana Jones job where it's like 300 million plus,
00:20:19.000God knows how much on marketing and stuff.
00:20:21.000And so they don't have the budget to do TV commercials and all the fancy advertising that you can ask for.
00:20:28.000They do this grassroots stuff where they just make themselves available to talk to podcasters and stuff and sell the movie on its own merits.
00:20:39.000Imagine a movie that's just actually good and people watch it because, hey, it's actually a really rewarding experience and it's tackling an important issue that we should learn more about.
00:20:50.000It's almost like that's foreign now to us.
00:20:53.000Yeah, therefore it's an example, isn't it, of it's quite guerrilla and quite radical because it doesn't have to go through the processes that typically a movie would do.
00:21:05.000The amount, as you've described, that's typically spent on advertising.
00:21:08.000And you know, you work in independent media, I work in independent media, and sometimes what I start to feel, and I wonder if you feel the same, is they're attacking the content.
00:21:17.000They don't agree with my ideology, but Actually, I'm starting to think what they don't agree with is us existing at all.
00:21:23.000That it's more like an economic problem.
00:21:25.000Oh no, this is where people are going to spend advertising.
00:21:40.000I spend zero dollars on anything, but I get millions of views because people are interested to hear what I've got to say.
00:21:47.000And that's the thing that they hate, where you've got news networks and you've got studios with dozens if not hundreds of employees, they've got huge expenses that they go to, and they get a fraction of the viewership that people like us get because people just don't care about them anymore, because they know how fake they are.
00:22:05.000I've heard it said before, it was a very smart man named Robert Meyer Burnett who said, the currency of our current age is authenticity.
00:22:32.000Yeah, in a sense, that's the Joe Rogan superpower, isn't it, Will?
00:22:36.000Like, whether he's talking about mixed martial arts, or whether he's talking about politics, or psychedelics, or hunting, or diet, or supplements, or whatever, you get the impression, because in my opinion, it's true, that he's saying what he believes, and he's saying what he cares about, and that seems sufficient to stand up against, you know, clear attempts to take him out around the Ivermectin horse pace time, which, again, similarly, like, I reckon as well, there.
00:23:03.000You know, Carlin famous, George Carlin says it's like a, you know, you don't need conspiracy where convergent, where interests naturally converge.
00:23:10.000And the mainstream media don't want powerful, independent voices that are able to just bypass their models.
00:23:17.000Because like you say, you've got zero overhead, you can operate on your own.
00:23:20.000And plainly, you're in a position where if you like a movie, you say you do.
00:23:24.000And if you don't like a movie, you say that even more.
00:23:28.000Yeah, and nobody pays me to do this as such.
00:23:32.000I don't have relationships with studios that I can damage by slagging off their movie, and that's the thing.
00:23:52.000And that's why they watch my videos, because I'll give you an honest opinion about things.
00:23:56.000In the Indiana Jones one you listed movies where you sort of where you're you were wrong you said like I thought Dungeons and Dragons wouldn't be any good and you were wrong about that and I feel like even some of the Disney TV shows you've sort of gone oh actually that's pretty good and you've you know so you've like I guess that to your point about authenticity being the currency and in fact this is a broader point we find ourselves continually making on our channels you need principles if you If you have a principle, then sometimes that principle is going to cost you, sometimes it's going to support you, but it remains consistent.
00:24:26.000When you're just like, oh, when I'm talking about this, you know, when cluster bombs, here's an example from the news this week, when cluster bombs are being used by Russia, they're bad.
00:24:34.000When cluster bombs are being used by America, they're good!
00:25:17.000What about, do you sometimes get a bit, let's say, supercharged by the Like, you know, if something isn't, for want of a better term, woke, do you think, oh my god, do you think it almost gets an extra bit of juice because of that?
00:25:30.000I'm talking about films like maybe, you know, Maverick or even the Mario Brothers movie, just by virtue of the fact that it's not pushing that message.
00:25:40.000Or do you think that by not having the kind of gravitational lag The wokeness can apply because it prevents, to use but one example, a character from having a meaningful arc because they're already presented as perfect on the basis of identity, which shouldn't be what's presented at the center of a film.
00:26:00.000And if it's freed of that, it's a little bit better.
00:26:03.000Or do you think that you're sort of like, oh, thank God, bloody Mario Brothers isn't doing that, and you get a bit excited?
00:26:08.000There's the initial emotional reaction of like, hey, wow, this movie doesn't fucking hate me because I'm like a straight white man.
00:26:30.000But it's also possible, this is an interesting discussion about, it's possible for something to be woke by the normal standards, but also be good if it's well written.
00:26:40.000The example that I've given before is a TV show called Arcane.
00:26:44.000Which puts forward a lot of what we would consider to be woke politics, like an extremely diverse cast, gay relationships front and center, a class struggle at the heart of the plot that's driving it forward, very strong female characters, all that stuff.
00:27:03.000That might be considered woke in other movies because it's badly handled, but it's extremely well integrated into a really good story in that TV show.
00:27:11.000And so I was happy to say, hey, this is an example of, say, progressive politics or progressive ideology done well.
00:27:18.000It can be done, but you've just got to write it well.
00:27:21.000That's what we look for, a good story.
00:27:23.000Right, don't use it instead of structure.
00:27:26.000I suppose another film like The Matrix, Matrix is a good example, I'm talking about the first one obviously, of how sort of different ideals and identity transcendent of homogeneity and heterodoxy is presented as aspirational and cool and then the Wachowskis of course, Wachowskis, I can't remember their name no more, Like uh like they had a sort of uh obviously they changed gender during like you know the trajectory of those movies like that maybe that's something for you to touch upon but i also like again with my personal uh position as a father of girls and also as a person that do i do believe there should be stories for everyone there should be stories for everyone but i think i agree with you as a aesthete or as a critical thinker you know to sort of use the phrase from which your name is derived
00:28:16.000Like, I want things to reward me and to make sense, I suppose.
00:28:20.000So, um, would you touch on, like, you know, sort of the Matrix and the Wachowskis, if I'm saying the name right, and also what films would I direct my girls to?
00:28:29.000Sometimes if I watch an old Simpsons and Bart goes, girls are shit, or whatever, I'm like, oh, I don't want my daughters watching that, you know what I mean?
00:28:36.000So, sort of touch on that sort of side of it as well, if you could.
00:28:38.000Yeah, I mean, in terms of, like, if you're looking for movies with good female role models, like, damn, where do I begin?
00:28:45.000Like, you've got the Terminator movies, I suppose.
00:28:47.000Like we mentioned before, you've got, um, uh, you've got Ripley from the first two Aliens films.
00:28:54.000You've got Marion from, um, from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
00:28:58.000Uh, you've got Trinity from The Matrix.
00:28:59.000You've got, um, Geena Davis from Long Kiss Goodnight.
00:29:03.000Like, all of these, these are very interesting characters that, that kind of, You know, they've got flaws, they've got weaknesses, they've got problems along the way, but they overcome those things.
00:29:13.000So yeah, there's been movies all throughout cinematic history that have given us this stuff.
00:29:20.000It's just, really, in recent years, in trying to highlight this stuff and in trying to correct a problem that didn't really exist in the first place, they've made it infinitely worse.
00:29:31.000What about that analytic tool, like I only know because I saw it in Rick and Morty, where they say, like, an analysis of a feminist, a movie from a feminist perspective is, are there two female characters that have names that are talking about something other than a man?
00:29:47.000Like, and also like, There is an imbalance between films that, uh, don't you think?
00:30:48.000I suppose part of the reason is, like, it depends what genre of movie you want to look at and how mainstream you want to go, because the biggest movies at the box office tend to be action movies, they tend to be superhero movies, all those kind of things, but they're generally very male-oriented movies, and so the natural result is you tend to get a man in the lead, because that's what guys look for.
00:31:11.000But if you're looking for other stuff, you just have to go into different genres.
00:31:16.000It could be dramas, it could be romance, it could be historical epics, whatever you want to be.
00:31:21.000There's plenty of movies with characters like that in it.
00:31:24.000They're just not the big blockbusters.
00:31:45.000So this is the same thing with movies.
00:31:47.000And so maybe this is what perhaps, and this is a question, Like maybe what offends you is like they still want their cake of Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, a powerful IP from the 80s or 90s, but they also want to sort of attack, you shouldn't have these figures as the dominant figures, so they sort of live out their own dilemma almost in the movie of attacking and deconstructing the archetypes that they resent but rely on.
00:32:14.000Is that a good bit of made-up analysis?
00:32:16.000Yeah, what they want to do is use them as a springboard to launch their own new characters.
00:32:22.000But it's like trying to take a character that, you know, you've bonded with over a period of years, if not decades, like you grew up with and stuff, like Indiana Jones being a great example, or Luke Skywalker, for example.
00:32:35.000Characters that you've really come to know and love, and then what they'll do is present them as old men who are Sad and lonely.
00:32:46.000They are broken down and they're kind of pathetic now, and they use that as an excuse to say, Hey, they were never that good in the first place.
00:32:52.000And then what they'll do is they'll bring in a new diverse female replacement
00:32:56.000who is stronger than them, smarter than them, more capable than them,
00:33:16.000And so the more you try and slot these, like, fake pod people replacements in to, like, supplement these classic characters that we loved, the more people reject it.
00:33:28.000And that's why Indiana Jones is fucking tanking at the box office.
00:34:08.000It's almost like that you're offended as a cineast and as a cinephile that the movies that you adore and love are being dismantled and deconstructed in ways that's clumsy and not even artfully done that there could be a version.
00:34:24.000And also I think it's important what you're saying about like that kind of hate for their own audience because I think this has broader social connotations.
00:34:30.000I think the movements we've seen like you know and I'll expand this out like the emergence of Trump, the emergence of Brexit, is the sense that people feel like the professional and media class hate them and don't do not represent them whether that's politically or through the cultural content they provide this is something i talked about sort of like for a while with uh the filmmaker adam curtis who i very much admire that and it's been something i've learned more and more about over time is that you have a professional class in journalism now that don't speak respectfully of this for one of a better phrase working class people working class culture there's a kind of
00:35:03.000There's a sort of an antipathy and loathing towards them.
00:35:06.000They don't like working class people or in America blue-collar people.
00:35:11.000There's a kind of condescension and a snobbery and it seems like in a sense this is one of the narratives that's playing out in film.
00:35:18.000I also want to mention like in South Park when they did and that was with the last Indiana Jones movie you know like where they went like they had I think Kyle coming out of a movie theater puking.
00:35:29.000I can't believe what they did to Indy!
00:35:32.000And like, what about that Imaginationland one, where they were like, um, these characters are more real to you, like, you know, whether it's Jesus, and, you know, I'm religious as it turns out, I figure you might be an atheist, but I believe in God and all sorts of stuff.
00:35:46.000But, like, they're saying, like, that these characters are more real to you.
00:35:49.000Luke Skywalker's more real than, like, maybe your teacher, or people that, you know, these are people that you know, and that you're, they've been vessels for your own personal development, and your own understanding of your own darkness, and your own aspirations, and to see those things commodified, when perhaps they don't even care about identity issues anyway, it's, um, insulting, maybe?
00:36:12.000Yes, and it's, uh, I best described it as, like, a lot of these franchises are things that have been created by geniuses and inherited by morons.
00:36:21.000And that's the problem, because they don't have this creative skill to be able to make stuff like this by themselves.
00:36:27.000Like, if you wanna make a shit movie with shit characters, like, eh, fine, I don't care.
00:36:32.000Like, maybe you're just not very good at this stuff.
00:36:34.000I'm not gonna get offended by it, though.
00:36:36.000But if you want to cannibalize These existing characters that were made by someone way more intelligent and way more creative than you, and humiliate them and try to use them to launch the shit things that you've made, that's when I've got a problem.
00:36:51.000Because you are exploiting someone else's work.
00:36:55.000You are raping someone else's creativity.
00:36:59.000That's what you're doing, but you're not adding anything productive to it.
00:37:02.000You're creating something worse to try and replace it.
00:37:05.000As a writer, as a storyteller, that really offends me because I hate to see other people's work get taken advantage of.
00:37:19.000Do you think there'll be a time in the future when Hollywood is making great movies again, or do you think that that time has passed and something else like gaming will take its place?
00:37:27.000I think we're going to see a lot of gaming adaptations.
00:37:30.000The Last of Us was a real benchmark for that.
00:37:32.000I think we're going to see a lot more, yeah, movie or TV show adaptations of video games because it's a massive, massive market.
00:37:39.000But I think also the time of this sort of mega blockbuster that costs $300 million is coming to an end.
00:37:45.000And I think we're going to see a lot more smaller things that they take more risks on.
00:37:50.000And yeah, they're going to have to start making better stuff.
00:37:52.000Otherwise, they will just go bankrupt.
00:37:54.000Yeah, that's interesting because that's almost like decentralised, localised movie audiences, the same way that everything is perhaps becoming federalised in that way.
00:39:40.000To do it, then they say, you know, generally what I found out afterwards is that they were going to make, before Dudley Moore done Arthur, they were going to make it with Belushi, with John Belushi, like, and I thought, like, after, when it was too late, when the, you know, when the damage had been done, I found, I was like, oh, That's the version of ARFA you want to do.
00:41:12.000So what do you think about stuff like, um, the re-editing of the Roald Dahl books and the sort of conversation around, like, life of Brian and change and stuff like that?
00:41:24.000I hate this idea of, uh, we need to, like, soften and we need to start altering these movies from the past without the permission of the people who made them, uh, just to make them more palatable to modern audiences.
00:41:34.000Because God forbid someone might get offended by them somewhere.
00:41:43.000They should be left alone as they were intended to be shown.
00:41:45.000Yeah, both with like in the case of Roald Dahl and in the case like because I know that people well, Roald Dahl has in interviews outside of his fiction said some like overtly anti semitic stuff like you've sent some mad shit.
00:42:00.000But like I mean, but like within the work, he doesn't say that in like Matilda or like Charlie in the chocolate factory like that, like an Again, it's what people like, they want.
00:42:12.000I tell you why, do you know why that happened?
00:42:26.000Let's push for the Roald Dahl estate to reissue those books with Edits and stuff and I feel like I even like you know when I'm I would never use the n-word I would never make a racist joke.
00:42:42.000But like I feel like you know like Enid Blyton books and in a sense these are artifacts of their time.
00:42:48.000It's interesting because this cannibalism we talked about earlier like that they have to use IP in order to keep their economic models going is in a sense what the culture is doing Anyway, it's what the whole culture is pulling itself apart.
00:43:02.000It's pulling itself apart without recognizing, actually, what you're going to have to do if you continue down this line is you're going to have to have a totally different set of principles almost around everything.
00:43:11.000You can't, you know, like the royal family, our whole class structure, everything is predicated on colonialism, imperialism.
00:43:18.000You'd like, in a sense, you, as Kehinde Andrews, who's a sort of a professor of black studies that I've spoken to, is that once you start this conversation, I mean, I'm not a big fan of trying to erase history or trying to alter it to make it more palatable to people because it's like you're trying to pretend that things like mistakes that were made in the past didn't actually exist.
00:43:46.000And so it's like you can't There's like the good and the bad that comes with it, and I think you should just be honest about this stuff, and it filters through to movies and things like that.
00:43:56.000Like, you can look at movies that were made like Gone with the Wind or whatever back in the 30s and 40s.
00:44:02.000Yeah, they don't align with our current standards or our current, like, cultural zeitgeist.
00:44:09.000But they're not meant to because they were made in a very different time, but we respect the time in which they were made and we can look back on them now and say, well, yeah, OK, that's that's changed since then.
00:44:17.000But it deserves to be shown because it's an artifact from when it was made.
00:44:24.000It's pretty plain that all of your work comes from a place of genuine love of cinema and storytelling and, as you say, the currency of authenticity.
00:45:19.000Cordyceps to support physical performance.
00:45:22.000Chaga and reishi to support your immune system.
00:45:25.000And cinnamon, dirty Christmasy filth, for antioxidants.
00:45:30.000It tastes like masala chai and cacao made a really healthy lolly baby.
00:45:35.000Mud water is Whole30 approved, thank God.
00:45:37.000100% USDA organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, vegan and kosher certified.
00:45:45.000Mud water donates monthly to the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics as they believe the country is in a mental health epidemic and see psychedelics as a useful tool tool for individuals with depression, PTSD, anxiety and
00:46:13.000Oliver Stone and Ron DeSantis all on the show.
00:46:16.000Hit the red button, sign up to our locals community where you've got access to new interviews for the first time.
00:46:20.000You can join us live for the Ron DeSantis if you want to.
00:46:23.000Live for Oliver Stone, as well as meditations, behind the scenes stuff, all sorts of things.
00:46:27.000Now, this weekend, I am going to Community, which is our festival where Vandana Shiva, Wim Hof, Callie Means, Hiran Gracie, Brilliant thinkers come together to talk about new ways to organize society.
00:46:41.000Decentralized, democratized, and free.
00:46:44.000We'll be posting content from it on this channel.
00:46:46.000Please watch out for it if you're not joining us on person.
00:46:49.000So, I'll see you next Monday, not for more of the same, but for more of the different.
00:47:24.000RFK welcomes his endorsement even though he disagrees with Trump.
00:47:28.000And of course these are two figures from different political perspectives, different political parties.
00:47:33.000Certainly CNN are not willing to house RFK.
00:47:37.000And my personal experience of RFK, just to be plain, is that I believe he's the very kind of figure we need inside the establishment, the very kind of candidate the Democrat Party should be endorsing.
00:47:49.000But if they shut down Bernie, making the decision they'd rather lose against Trump than win with Bernie, how are they going to treat a figure like RFK, who says he wants to end the forever wars, heal the cultural scars of America, bring people together from across We interviewed him recently on our show, there's a link in the description if you want to watch it, and we posted on Twitter a pretty innocuous clip of his wife, the actor Cheryl Hines, just talking about spirituality and being married.
00:48:27.000Nothing controversial, nothing weird, and yet when it was reposted by another source, this graphic appeared.
00:49:27.000Many Democrats fear that you're a spoiler in the race, that you will damage President Biden in the primary and grease the skids for former President Trump to return to the Oval Office.
00:49:37.000Even that aspect of the question is strange, like the assumption that the best thing to happen is for Biden to have an uninterrupted path back to the presidency.
00:49:45.000He's the kind of president that deserves to face a challenge from a man with integrity, who's authentic, who has some views like anyone I agree with, some views I don't agree with, welcomes the opportunity to bring people together from across the divide.
00:49:57.000This is what politics is crying out for.
00:51:01.000The complication comes when the establishment wants to harness the views that a divisive polarising figure like Trump brings, but still wants to condemn him as an outlier and a maniac.
00:51:13.000If Trump is dangerous but can be platformed in order to get views, what is the reason for not giving RFK his own town hall?
00:51:22.000Are they saying that RFK is more of a threat to the establishment than even Donald Trump, who I thought was the worst human being that ever existed, he should be killed, put in prison, hanging's too good for him, and yeah, oh, get him on the television, he's quite good, bravo, bravo!
00:51:37.000Woah, look at the revenue, it's flying baby, we're relevant again, thank you Trump!
00:51:42.000So what do they think about Do you think on the democratic side you would do a town hall with someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?
00:52:06.000Because he spreads dangerous misinformation.
00:52:10.000In 2005 was when he began, in earnest, his anti-childhood vaccine campaign.
00:52:16.000He wrote a story for Salon.com that was jointly published with Rolling Stone, both of which have since retracted the articles, and Rolling Stone just completely disappeared it.
00:52:28.000That's always a good sign when media start disappearing information.
00:52:32.000How about people are allowed to have opinions and views and share them and discuss them and decide for ourselves?
00:52:38.000Wasn't one of the things that troubled us during the pandemic the fact that legitimate voices were shut down and debatable and even true information was censored?
00:52:46.000And I'm quoting there Mark Zuckerberg.
00:52:49.000I asked for a bunch of things to be censored that in retrospect ended up being more debatable
00:53:06.000That lie that the media's been somehow co-opted by Big Pharma.
00:53:10.000I mean, if only there was like some evidence that they'd been like, I don't know, sponsoring them or something.
00:53:19.000As you know, we did a censorship industrial complex event with Michael Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi, two hardcore journalists.
00:53:26.000Matt Taibbi used to write for Rolling Stone.
00:53:27.000That's not possible now because Rolling Stone are an establishment publication and Matt Taibbi is an anti-establishment journalist.
00:53:34.000What I mean by that is he tells the truth and if you tell the truth that will be antithetical to establishment interest because the world has become centralised and authoritarian and has gone out of control.
00:53:41.000Here he describes what the Virality Project is.
00:53:44.000The Virality Project was a cross-platform information sharing program led by Stanford University through which companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook shared information about COVID-19.
00:53:53.000They compared notes on how to censor or de-amplify certain content.
00:53:57.000The ostensible mission made sense, at least on the surface.
00:54:00.000It was to combat misinformation about the pandemic and to encourage people to get vaccinated.
00:54:04.000When we read the communications to and from Stanford, we found shocking passages.
00:54:09.000One suggested to Twitter that it should consider as standard misinformation on your platform stories of true vaccine side effects.
00:55:57.000We can all get along with one another.
00:55:58.000You can have strong views about a subject, as long as you're alright with me having strong views on a subject.
00:56:02.000We can't say if you don't have the same opinions on medical matters that I do, particularly when the science, it appears, was somewhat ambivalent when we were told it was certain.
00:56:12.000Do you see how certain conclusions were rushed to?
00:56:15.000Certain sides of the conversation were shut down.
00:56:18.000I wonder if we can see the outline of an ideology by tracking these factors.
00:56:24.000They eliminated ambiguities by looking into the minds of users.
00:56:28.000In the Virality Project, if a person told a true story about someone developing myocarditis after getting vaccinated, even if that person was just telling a story, even if they weren't saying the shot caused the myocarditis, the Virality Project just saw a post that may promote hesitancy.
00:56:43.000So this content was true, but politically categorised as anti-vax, and therefore misinformation.
00:56:59.000You could only ever aggregate that from a variety of sources, through consensus, through democracy.
00:57:04.000There's no one point of fallibility, a phrase I learned from Jack Dorsey, that should be afforded that ability.
00:57:10.000A person who talks about being against vaccine passports may express support for the vaccine elsewhere, but the Virality Project believed concerns about vaccine passports were driving a larger anti-vaccination narrative.
00:57:22.000So in this way, a pro-vaccine person may be anti-vax.
00:57:26.000They also wrote that such concerns inspired broader discussions about the loss of rights and freedoms.
00:57:39.000And if they discuss that, they're going to be pissed off.
00:57:42.000That's what led us to the ridiculous situation where people who were pro-vaccination in so much as they had invented vaccines, taken vaccines, were banned from speaking because they were anti-vax.
00:57:53.000That doesn't make sense unless you create new systems of meaning and And then use those new systems to censor the public space.
00:58:01.000It makes you wonder what the intention was.
00:58:03.000And even if it wasn't an intention achieved through conspiracy, it was an intention delivered through momentum, through a convergence of interest.
00:58:11.000It was the same with someone who shared true research about the efficacy of natural immunity or suggested that the virus came from a lab.
00:58:18.000It might all be factual, but it was politically inconvenient, something they called malinformation.
00:58:23.000In the end, out of all these possible beliefs, they derived a 1984 binary, good and un-good.
00:58:29.000They also applied the binary to people.
00:58:32.000Old school speech law punished speech, not the speaker.
00:58:35.000We saw NGOs and agencies like the FBI or the State Department increasingly targeting speakers, not speech.
00:58:41.000The Virality Project brought up the cases of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
00:58:45.000The posts of such repeat offenders, they said, are almost always reportable.
00:58:50.000They encouraged content moderators to make assumptions about people, And not to look on a case-by-case basis.
00:58:55.000In other words, they saw good and un-good people, and the un-good were almost always reportable.
00:59:00.000The filmmaker Albert Maysles once told me, You know from your own life that you have complicated motivations, that you have flaws, that you're not always perfect, that you've made mistakes.
00:59:21.000There's not another class or caste of human beings that are exempted from that in politics or media or social media regulation.
00:59:27.000That's why it's dangerous to grant authority to any set of individuals.
00:59:31.000That's why, in a way, democracy is the only game in town.
00:59:35.000And the more local that democracy, the more controlled by the people affected by it the electoral process is, the safer it is.
00:59:43.000The last thing any of us need are centralised authoritarian models where discussion is shut down, where freedom of speech is controlled, And you mustn't fall into the trap thinking, well, on this issue, I happen to disagree with that person, so I'm glad that their free speech is being shut down.
00:59:59.000For them, you must fight all the harder.
01:00:01.000That makes you a person that has principles.
01:00:52.000That's like, don't take any of these other people seriously.
01:00:54.000And then when you learn that Barack Obama has taken advantage of tax laws that while in office he said should be shut down, you recognize, wow, Maybe that guy wasn't as great as I thought he was.
01:01:05.000So that's why it's interesting that Barack Obama's saying, no, Joe Biden's the only possible option.
01:01:26.000I think Joe Biden has done an extraordinary job leading the country through some very difficult times.
01:01:33.000I do not think that there's going to be any kind of serious primary challenge to Joe Biden.
01:01:38.000No, because we'll shut it down like they did with Bernie Sanders.
01:01:41.000When there is a serious threat or a serious challenge, when someone comes along saying, I'm not sure that the party should be funded in this way or, hey, could we do this better around Big Pharma or do we need these forever wars?
01:01:51.000Yes, we bloody well do need these forever wars.
01:02:01.000You'll remember when he was first elected, because Bernie Sanders had run, that somehow there was this huge split between progressive Democrats and more centrist Democrats.
01:02:10.000And the truth is, is that partly because of how Joe has governed, those divisions have been bridged.
01:02:19.000The example he's used is what demonstrates exactly what's wrong.
01:02:24.000There was an alternative voice within the Democratic Party, and that voice was ignored.
01:02:29.000It's not been bridged, it's been shut down.
01:02:31.000And what they're trying to do with RFK, whose rhetoric at least, and in my view he means it, is even more anti-establishment than Bernie's, The reason he's appealing to people on the right is because all of us, regardless of these sort of almost made-up affiliations to Republicans or Democrats, basically want to be left alone, don't want the state all over our lives, don't want big business to have so much power that democracy becomes worthless and pointless and futile and facile, and are willing to get along with people that are different as long as they leave us alone.
01:03:17.000Until a train falls over in East Palestine and spills toxicity all over the land, then we don't care as much, then we don't turn up.
01:03:23.000What I'm starting to think is they're not willing to deliver and that the Democrat Party has been like that for quite a long time.
01:03:28.000And by the way, I don't think the Republican Party is any better.
01:03:30.000This is by Robert Reich, writing in Right Wing Magazine, The Guardian.
01:03:33.000In the first two years of the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.
01:03:39.000Yet both Clinton and Obama advocated free trade agreements without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.
01:03:48.000Clinton pushed for NAFTA and for China joining the World Trade Organization, and Obama sought to restore the confidence of Wall Street instead of completely overhauling the banking system.
01:03:58.000Both stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class.
01:04:03.000They failed to reform labour laws to allow workers to form unions with a simple up or down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated labour protections.
01:04:12.000Clinton deregulated Wall Street before the crash.
01:04:14.000Obama allowed the street to water down attempts to re-regulate it after the crash.
01:04:18.000Obama protected Wall Street from the consequences of its gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout that allowed millions of underwater homeowners to drown.
01:04:27.000Both Clinton and Obama turned their backs on campaign finance reform.
01:04:31.000They also drank from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans.
01:04:35.000Big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.
01:04:38.000The most powerful force in American politics today continues to be anti-establishment fury at a rigged system.
01:04:44.000Heroes of the Democratic Party like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama created and doubled down on this problem, turning the Democrat Party into the party of Big Finance, Big War, Big Agra, Big Pharma.
01:04:58.000Anti-establishment rhetoric, whether it's from Trump or RFK, terrifies them.
01:05:03.000They would rather lose to Trump than win with Bernie.
01:05:06.000And RFK, they don't even want in the picture at all.
01:05:09.000That's why they're denying he's a threat.
01:05:13.000That's why they're creating machinery for censorship.
01:05:16.000In the United States, in all anglophonic countries, in the EU, because they don't want figures like this rising to political prominence Insisting we have a conversation.
01:05:26.000Insisting that they are confronted when they offer us propaganda that amounts to wishful thinking and expedient ambition for those already in power.
01:05:35.000There can be no real change without real conversation because we all have to be included.
01:05:40.000So conversation is going to be part of it.