Transcript
Well, another special one on one episode, this time with one of the most interesting guys on the planet, Russell Brand, and we'll do that right after this summer might be wrapping up, but Pluto TV's summer of cinema is still going strong with hundreds of free movies. It's never too late to join an epic adventure with Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Step up your movie game with Stomp the Yard. Get in the ring with Nature Leader or set a course for the stars with Star Trek every Star Trek down to the Pluto TV app now, while the Sun still shines on Pluto TV's Summer of Cinema. Stream now. Hey, never. Bertram's back let the record show, I'm a dick. The new animated series created by Adam Carolla and brought to you by The Daily Wire featuring Alonzo Bodden. Hell yeah, we catch you doing something wrong. He took a screwdriver at you. Megan Kelly getting in to be in any sports mob. It's like being a soccer mom who could stay here for Jamas. Kyle Dunnigan it's heated. Does acupuncture and kid insult my competitors in 20 languages? Danny Trejo sharing this moment with you makes Kilimall, isn't it? Patrick Warburton Real man stuff feelings down with red meat, cigarettes and violence, and Roseanne Barr. Hello, Mr. Bertram. Go to Daily Wire plus dot com and enter the code Atom twenty five to sign up for a Daily Wire plus annual membership and receive 25 percent off. Check it out today Daily Wire plus dot com. Back from Gorilla One Studios in Glendale, California, this is the Adam Carolla show. Adam's guest today comedian, actor, activist Russell Brand and now confident and confident. Adam Carolla. Russell Brand, a guy I've been wanting to interview for quite some time as finally a guest on the program, I was a guest on his program. And it went swimmingly, so I suspect this is going to go well as well. His podcast Stay Free with Russell Brand This Live on Rumble weekdays, 9:00 p.m. Pacific I should say 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time. Good to speak to again, Russell. Adam, thanks for making time for me and having me on your legendary podcast. So I'm very fascinated by you. I find you to be very bright and very talented. Sometimes that comes with some baggage as well. You know, thinking a little too much, thinking a little too fast, wanting to do too many things simultaneously. Do you do you feel that burden sometimes or did you growing up? Well, certainly growing up and actually in a way, I think when you work in the media space that we currently inhabit, in particular, if you're keyed into the news cycle, I think it can create a kind of external and internal ADHD, but it never stops this kind of hyper normality. These endless news stories that are disruptive and unreliable and the meshing together of entertainment and of politics that you see in the space of a week. An assassination attempt, a resignation. Megan Thee Stallion supporting Kamala Harris, Hulk Hogan tear in his show. But I love my and it's like I and all the while knowing that sort of geopolitically there are extremely sensitive and urgent matters unfolding. And the idea that we can't really understand what's happening, but there are potentially insidious forces at work that if you're a person trying to be open to a spiritual purview, it seems harder and harder to not feel that we won't be doing something to oppose corruption and then recognizing speaking, obviously for myself. The tendency towards grandiosity and how easily that can be repackaged like, you know, I can go from, you know, I want to be a star in Hollywood, I want to be online commentator. And that's recognizing that none of these roles are. None of these roles are a forum in which to seek personal fulfillment, not to become one. Well, look, you know, maybe we're trying to do the impossible here, which is I. I had a former life where I was a carpenter and it was a very quiet, solitary, peaceful life. You got in your truck early in the morning, you drove to the job site. I worked alone. A lot of the time I would be alone working on a home, just putting up crown molding or hanging a door. You'd have a project for the day. The radio would be playing in the background and there wasn't anxiety. There wasn't stress. There wasn't there wasn't info coming at you. You didn't need to process that much. You really just thought about lunch and what you were going to eat for lunch and you would eat at lunch and you would sit on a pile of drywall and talk to other guys that were working on the job site while they ate their sandwiches. And then you'd go back to what you were doing and you get in your truck and you go back home and there wasn't much to it. It didn't pay very well. It wasn't exciting, but it was. It was peaceful. Like, you had a sort of calmness that you would get the kind of zen of just a repetitive action, just just sanding a piece of wood for a prolonged period of time, just a repetitive sort of Zen Motion. We aren't in that stage anymore. There's stuff to process and it's coming fast. And it's and it's bizarre because it I feel I woke up this morning, and for some reason, I get all the emails from the Biden Harris campaign. They all they all come to me. I don't know every email they send out, I get. And I just woke up this morning and there was an email waiting for me from Joe Biden and it just said, Hey, Adam, you know, when I got elected, I promise to level with the American people and never. Tell a lie, and I'm going to level with you right now, and I'm like, all you've been doing is lying your old crazy f**k for the last four years. And so now I'm sitting in my bathrobe. What was a peaceful morning and I'm becoming agitated because this guy had the temerity to explain that he's always going to level with the American public and with me. And I just don't think we're wired for that. Russell, I think we're wired to go in a pickup truck and go to a job site and work on a project quietly. It is extraordinary to try and find my own equivalency of your unsurprising Harrison Ford, Jesus Christ for my life. Yes, as a carpenter, I can. Yeah, that makes sense. Now that you've been grounded in a trade and in a craft that makes sense because my own equivalent? I've never been usefully deployed. Some may argue throughout even my gainful employment in film and comedy, but I like my equivalent was at that point I was kind of prior to sort of financial success, like living as a drug addict and being on welfare and hanging out in crack houses and fair evading. So I never kind of knew even the stable monotony of work in life, only this sort of somewhat unstable yet still monotonous life of of addiction and acquiring drugs. But that too, I suppose, was at least interrupted by my pursuit of success and attainment and my love of performing, you know, years of doing stand up above pubs and in small venues for small fees and appearing on low rent and low fi TV and going drama scores and stage scores and hustling and finding ways. And it felt in a way analogously chaotic to the time I live in now. Like, I've always felt like I'm bubbling along on chaos. I felt kind of wistful when you were describing sitting on a pile of air boards with the radio on and you're like Jack Daniel's commercial for my life as a carpenter. So it sounds so enviable. And to go from that to receiving an email from Joe Biden, I knew I promised I'd never lie to the American people. And here's an email that he's certainly not written himself. So yet another lie, even while claiming to be leveling with yeah, it's just a bewildering delirium of a time. And you're right, I, when I'm trying to find truth in a post structuralist world where where moral relativism seems to have won the day where the Olympic ceremony, the Olympics being one of those times where the world could come together in celebration of games and fun and joy, albeit there have been historic aberrations, some of which are to be celebrated and applauded the Black Power Salute, you know, a company in the civil rights movement in your country or the non-participation of Soviet nations during the Cold War, even i.e. political events are now immersed in cultural politicization but not emanate in from a nation, but from some force. That's hard to track whose agenda is being played out in that peculiar ceremony because it isn't one particular culture. And I bet even the people involved in the nuts and bolts of that, that seems like an odd phrase to use planning a bit of the event. I don't imagine they're so saying, and this will be a good globalist attack on Christianity. You know, I feel that they're just doing some are a fringe bulls**t. And as an Englishman, we're well aware of our fringe bulls**t. We live just a channel away from it, but still so offensive and extraordinary and baffling and not what we are evolved or designed for. Well, this brings me to a good question that you may be uniquely qualified to answer, which is I feel that a lot of these expressions are. Our performative and they're to agitate. I had a former job. Not the carpentry job, but I worked doing Love Line with Dr. Drew syndicated radio show for a decade, and we would talk to a lot of young people who were abused and and they were angry. And they they did a lot of acting out because they were abused when they were young and they didn't really act out against the abuser. They acted out sort of against society. And I always studied them, and I kind of realized that I see a pattern, which is that the movement started off in some realm that has gravity and it makes sense, like, Hey, we're gay, we just want all the rights that every other American has. We want to be treated equally. We want the right to get married and so on. Health care. I want to be able to be a provider of health care for my partner, even if I'm gay for through his work or whatever sensible things that people like you and I go, Yeah, that make that sounds good, that that makes sense. And I'm for that. And then at some point it just sort of keeps going and then it morphs into drag queen story hour. And then you're sort of like, Wait a minute, you don't need I don't want drag queens reading stories to my five year old at a public library. And then they accuse you of being a hater. And then there's agitation, and then there's pushback, but it's all there so that they can revictimized themselves and act out and agitate. And I believe many of the movements, you know, Black Lives Matter, many of the women's things related to women, LGBT, whatever it's they never say we're here to agitate. They say all we want is to be treated fairly and to have the same rights that other Americans have. But at some point they're burning something down, punching somebody or doing the opening to the Olympics, which was not what was only there to agitate. That was not an expression of anything other than we want to piss you normal people off. And I've seen a lot of that, and I realize I think the end game is to piss off people and to agitate, not to move the cause further along. If they wanted to move the cause, they wouldn't agitate as much. But your thoughts? I love it as a line of inquiry and the inclusion of the psychological perspective of re victimization or re traumatization, it's a big thing. Yeah, it's an interesting idea and I'd not considered it before. And like anything that is an indication the unconscious forces are at work is certainly worth contemplating because by definition, we are driven by either conscious motives or unconscious motives. And again, by definition, we know what we're doing consciously. And of course, don't know what we're doing unconsciously, either as individuals or perhaps as whole cultures. I try to consider when thinking about something like in a drag queen story hour or their rights of trans people or various, you know, to use that term that they would deploy non cis folk. I feel like what is the aim here, I say, and I try to sort of understand in these terms, I've tried to have conversations like this with, say, for example, Jordan Peterson or is it that the sense is the I, the head? Simone asserts that this is what male nurse looks like, and this is what female nurse looks like. And these are the roles that your culture assigns to you. And if you don't feel like those roles match your internal experience, you're going to feel oppressed. So over the argument, I suppose, is that we want to provide pathways for young people who do not feel that they fit in within those taxonomies to not be oppressed or self-hating or ashamed. And that does feel like a sensible thing to do. I was an unusual kid, and I don't, for example, feel like the pathway is available to a UFC fighter or a quarterback or, you know, like a heavyweight boxer is the kind of masculine roles that I'm going to easily in. And if and in a sense, the way that plays out for me, like a small town boy, I'm from a place called Grace, which is likely, as I think I mentioned to you in our previous chat. Like being from New Jersey and like anyone that's from a small town that feels like, you know, you're a bohemian or you're an artist, you migrate to the cities where you recognize are they're going to be more artists. And that, generally speaking, is going to come with more diversity is going to come with more inclusivity, sexual gender diversity. It was understood what bohemian ism was. And there's no reason to imagine that, by its nature, could become the centrifugal and determining aspect of the dominant inverted commas culture. There was a film I don't know if you saw Adam. It was called a Paris is burning, and it sort of tracked Parisian subcultures of actually drag queens who would dress up and assume certain male archetypal identities. A businessman, a general, whatever. But it was, by its nature, a subculture. Now, of course, I'm wondering where the tension lies in affording people who don't feel like and then we all at some point feel like this. I mean, I've certainly feel like an outsider. I've felt like an outsider for a lot of my life, actually. And certainly even I've got to tell you, even when being sort of condemned, attacked, accused of things that I had not done, I feel like it was sort of insidiously present within. That is the even while I was sleeping around as a profligate and self-centered womanizer, you are not allowed to be a profligate, self-centered womanizer. You are too weird. You're not lack of Ryan Gosling or handsome regular guy. You're too quirky. You shouldn't be allowed to sleep with a bunch of women. He can't have been legit, you know, so i-, in a sense, have a sympathy for people are unusual. And I also am mindful of how easy it is to kind of condemn, damn shame, make false allegations and create conditions that legitimize persecutions of unusual people. And I think that the only way that this tension is ever going to be alleviated is if if there is a kind of consensus among us that there is no longer a centralized culture. But whether you are an Anglo kind of person in Australia or America or our country, the UK, and identify with the dominant culture that might be football and beer and Christianity, or if you're a progressive person who identifies with gender fluidity and and whatever tableaux of ideas coalesce around that, there's got to be a kind of right for those kind of groups to live together. And your point of reach, traumatization and agitation, I think, is an interesting one because it doesn't seem like the end goal is harmony and conciliation. And yet that is always the kind of ideological undergirding. We should be inclusive. We should be diverse. And I'm mindful now as a recent convert to Christianity there. All of these politically correct as they were once called ideas could be diffused by the simple principle of kindness. If you are kind. You will be kinder to people regardless of how they express themselves, as long as that kindness is reciprocal and in the case of Christianity, even if it is not. So I think it's so odd to appoint the culture as the arbiter of values and principles when sort of rejecting the fact that spiritual values already afford you, that conviviality and that kindness to be, you know, to be plain about it, and also that the culture doesn't seem at its heart to be actually good faith. You know what? What is the culture about individualism? I think it's about selfishness. I'm not talking about these progressive movement. I'm talking about consumerism and commodity. What drives it? The apex is the individual that the individual and the fulfillment of the individual is the chief set of goals that you're pursuing. And I can see why that leads to so myriad forms of extraordinary expression. Yeah, I'm saying the question was, what do you like on your pizza and Russell? And that's my answer. So what I'm what I've been noticing is I'll I'll use an example like somebody said, Look, I'm a weird person or I'm different, but I just want to be let on the same bus as everyone else on the bus and I want to I pay taxes and I want to be able to use the bus that everyone else is on. And you go, OK? And they come onto the bus and then at some point they're on the bus and there's no problem, but they say, You know what? I'd like somebody seat on this bus and then you go, Well, ever all the seats are taken, and then at some point they go, I'm going to ask you to get up so I can take your seat, and then they take the seat and you go, OK, that's fine. And then at some point they say, I want to drive the bus, and I don't want to let anyone that looks like you on the bus. And then you go, Wait a minute, I don't want to go along with this. And then they go, Oh, so you're bigoted. And I think it's all to get to that point, because if you take a look, especially in this country, over the last 20 years, the LGBT movement, it was very benign. It was just we just want to be accepted and we just want rights and we just want to blend in with society and not be judged. And once that was accomplished. And it was, they moved on to the next thing. And once that gets accomplished, they move on to the next thing. And I'm saying what you got as the Olympic opening was then moving on to the next thing, which is an agitation. But I am telling you, there is a big problem. The problem is people who got abused young and many have especially sexually abused move on. And so many instances of allegations of rape are from people who were sexually abused at a young age who had a consensual encounter as an adult and then process it back through victimhood and circled back and then accused rape and all the stories you hear where the guy goes, Hey, we met at a bar, we had a few drinks, we went back to my room and we had sex. That was it. She spent the night, you know? Four years later, it's getting processed that way because many of these people were victims, and that's how they're processing this information as adults. It's a big problem. It's sort of hard to figure out. The courts can't figure it out and nobody wants to talk about it. So it's not popular at all, but that's what you're seeing. Yeah. So obviously something you know, I'm personally affected by, and I can understand the how that type of volatility might occur. And you know, earlier in this conversation, we were talking about candor and openness. And during the time that I was being as promiscuous, that was not something that I was being bashful about or concealing. It was like, that's what I was doing. Like, I'm here to become a star. Deal with my own childhood trauma of feeling like I'm not attractive and sleep with anyone who wants to sleep with me. It was an extraordinary period, and I suppose I have to take responsibility for the fact that I slept with a lot of people that were sleeping with me because I was a famous guy having very sort of casual encounters, bathrooms after shows, you know, and obviously consensually. But it's a clearly by the analysis that you've just offered something that's vulnerable to volatility and reframing. Certainly, that seems to be the case. And additionally, with your point about agitation to the point till it reaches conflict, I'm well, I. So this is an interesting sort of cultural fact that you might find illuminating or something that you might want to comment on yourself. There was a film made about how in the 1980s, gay rights activists and protesters supported the striking miners in Wales. You know, like during Thatcherism, there was an attempt to shut down and a successful attempt to shut down all of the mines and various other industries in this country. As you know, as capitalism and commercialism took over some of the manufacture and in the industrial jobs that were in our country and this alliance, this beautiful alliance appeared between gay activists that time LGBT, as I would have been. And then, I guess, activists and these miners who were campaigning and just keep their keep their jobs and keep their families alive and, you know, survival stuff anyway. Like what's fascinating is that that alliance? He's still enshrined in gay pride in this country where labor first. You know, in the gay pride parade is so often the miners remain retained their connection to that movement. But as you say, the movement has become so in it. Success has continued to mobilize and as you appear to imply, reaching a bolder and broader set of objectives. And I think when someone like Martina Navratilova, Navratilova, the tennis player and gay woman who was a forebear of that entire movement, finds herself kind of condemned as tough for her doubts and questions about how transitioned former male athletes can participate in female sports and that you find like, Wow, this movement is devouring its own pretty quickly. Or Peter Tatchell, a sort of a campaigner and leading voice for gay rights in this country. Although his Australian has similarly been condemned for not being able to keep up with the sort of pace of the movement and its demands, it does make you wonder whether or not the social unrest and lack of ability to achieve a consensus, or at least peace is benefit in some wider set of interests. I ain't sure are we being played in some way? Well, I feel like there is a contingent of governmental people who like chaos. So it does play into an overall chaotic and overall chaos, which you know, we had during COVID and we had during Black Lives Matters and, you know, all the chaos on the streets. I do. I think at least in this country, certain political groups, like other groups, agitated and I'd like to agitate them and like them in a state of agitation so that they can explain that they can help them and fix it for them. If you take a look at most of what Joe Biden did, most of what Joe Biden did was just tell black people they were unwanted in this country and tell them that they were being not treated fairly and essentially agitating the black community and then explaining he could fix it. You know, that's that's essentially what he did. You know, there's no reason in 2024 we should be talking about race as much as we talk about race in this country. But it's all we do. And I've been here my whole life. We didn't talk about it 25 years ago. Nobody cared. Twenty five years ago, we were done with race. You know, the most popular person on the planet was Michael Jordan, and we all bodies tennis shoes. And Bill Cosby had the number one show on TV, and that was that we were done. But it did help certain people who wanted power. So they came back and we reintroduced it. And the phenomenon that happened in this country as it pertains to race is we always said that racism will officially be over when we elect the first black president. So there's a lot of talk about, you know, how do you know your country is not racist? And it basically was when this country elects a black president that'll mark the end of racism, because how could you be a racist nation and elect a black president? Well, we elected a black president to two terms. But all it served was for the people who made a living off of race and who made a living off of agitating certain races so they could get elected. They all tripled down, including the media, to work harder at creating more race, finding more acts of racism, whether they're real or not. And now we're at a higher level of it than we were. Twenty five years ago and certainly when we had a two term black president, so this is a reaction to Obama being elected because our country looked around and said, All right, we're no longer a racist nation. We have a black president and all the people who benefited from the race agitation said, Oh no, we're not. And then we double down our efforts to agitate on race. That was the phenomenon. Yeah, I suppose, because we live in this information sphere where it's so easy to create stories, narratives that are kind of arbitrary by their nature, arbitrary there is this sense of chaos. Always the old patterns are resting on chaos. The stories are created in order to serve power. And now, because the media is as functional as fast as it is, there are immediate counter-narratives. It's hard to make claims for truth anymore to say that this is verifiably true, whether that's the media, the judiciary, law enforcement, government, there's no trust, there's no moral authority. And I think that's something that comes as a result of a loss of connection to God, because no one can point to moral authority and say, Look, all of us are just in service. None of us are that important. We're all equal ultimately. Or at least we're all part of a sort of a mass individual, but ultimately equal in the eyes of our creator. We're going to have to work this out as best as we can imperfectly. Now there are different groups claiming to be at the top of various hierarchies of authority that all have different groups that oppose them. And earlier on when you said like, it seemed like a more natural way a live to be a carpenter. You know, clearly that's closer to a hunter gatherer lifestyle. And you know, the kind of crazy post-flight tech mad lives that we live now. And I feel occasionally, Adam. But when we try and understand how human beings might live, we do have to consider, Well, how did we live for hundreds of thousands of years, probably in small, interdependent, transparent groups where there were hierarchies, but also consensus? But how do these indigenous tribes that we occasionally encounter south of the border appear to be living? They don't seem to want to centralize authority and live in groups of 300 million people or billions of people. We've at least draws from on high telling everyone how they've got to live now and how their cultures are going to amend overnight. It seems to me that perhaps what we should be looking for, wherever possible, is decentralization, maximum individual sovereignty, maximum community power and the acceptance that people are living differently everywhere. And to your point about race and the potential of race to generate conflict, of course it can, because deep, deep down in our mystic bones, fear of strangers and outsiders is an easy way to provoke dread and conflict. The same way, the disease is an easy way to provoke dread and conflict. These are archaic ideas the disease, the stranger, the outsider. If you can keep kind of defibrillate in that deep dread in people with a culture forever pranking us in a loathing one another or being afraid, it's difficult to find the kind of ease and reason required for people who just get along. And when you were talking about that before, I wonder how, if you could bring back, you know, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and say, How do you think is going and what do you think we need to do and how could it improve? Surely they would say that there has been significant improvement in some areas and in the areas where there's been deterioration. I would say that it's kind of centralizing of power that is been detrimental. So many, many groups, for example, if you take the pandemic period and the wealth transfer transfer that took place is primarily an economic and class based problem, you know, that may disproportionately, depending on the demographics of a region, affect black people, you know, or somewhere else will affect Chinese people. But what it does affect is people that don't have access to resources because resources seem to be being centralized, whether that's through state bureaucracy or corporate power. Morgan and Morgan Live can be crazy sometimes, and one person's negligence can result in another's settlement. That's right. So if you've ever been injured, check out Morgan and Morgan, America's largest injury law firm over 100 offices nationwide and more than 1000 lawyers. More than $20 million recovered for five hundred thousand plus clients. So that's. 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Get in the ring with Nature Leader or set a course for the stars with Star Trek every Star Trek. Download the Pluto TV app now, while the Sun still shines on Pluto TV's Summer of Cinema. Stream now. Hey, never Shopify. Yeah, me and Kimmel, we made a pretty good team. Wonder what happened to that guy? I don't know. I think it's in the Tampa area. Don't drive time radio anyway. The perfect duo for growing your business while that's Shopify and you. The global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business, whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits. Shop AFIS all in one e-commerce platform and in-person POS system has you covered. Turn browsers into buyers with the internet's best converting checkout and sell more with less effort thanks to AI powered Shopify Magic. Shopify Parish 10 percent of all e-commerce in the U.S.. Businesses that grow well they grow with Shopify, right? Dawson. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/ Carolla all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/ Carolla now to grow your business. No matter what stage you're in, Shopify.com/ Carolla. Yeah, so it's really about money and not about race. And so the game that we play here in the United States is, we say black people are three times more likely to have complications at childbirth, and black people are three times more likely not to have access to healthy food and black people. And it's really what they're saying is poor people. It's it's whoever is the poorest, doesn't have access to the legal system, doesn't have access to the medical system. They're saying poor people. But if the poor people happen to be black, then they just say black people and then it turns into a thing where, oh, so Ogbe wins don't want to help black people. And that's basically the implication and then the math that people do. But it's not that it's whoever's poorest and in this country, white people are are pretty far down on the list in terms of financial success or many Asian cultures that are way ahead of me and my brethren. I meet up at the barbecues with every Saturday who look exactly like me. We are down somewhere about ninth or tenth to many, many Asian cultures, but they don't talk about those groups being ahead of white people because it hurts their narrative. So their narrative is white people are on top, black people are on the bottom. And whatever happens to the black people, it's because the white people are doing it to them. When the answer is this doesn't affect. Jay-Z and Beyonce say it doesn't affect any of these people, it affects poor people. And I used to be poor and I understand that you are affected by it, by welfare. You know, we did food stamps and welfare and that whole thing, and I didn't eat nutritious breakfast because they were free being provided by the L.A. US state. But Russell, I wanted I promised myself, it's so easy to talk to you about current events and things like that, but I really kind of wanted to talk about your life and your background and how you grew up and the trajectory and the journey. So can we do that for the second half of this interview? Yes, of course. So you're born in grace. Did you say gray? Yeah, crazy. Yeah. Small town in the county of Essex, which is to the east of London, it sort of is meshed on to the East London, so London spills into it. And were you always more eccentric, a free spirit like a jovial, talkative housemate, like I'm a single parent family and an only child? And my mum was sick a lot when I was a kid, my my cancer a bunch of times. And so I had a kind of peripatetic little upbringing, staying in different family members or even friends home. Sometimes I had a relationship with my dad, but it was somewhat sporadic. He's kind of an entrepreneurial kind of guy that would occasionally sort of get flush and, you know, make a few quid and turn up flash in or automobile. And then, you know, I would experience giddy little thrills for a moment there, you know? And then it would sort of crash away again. So I sort of had a I guess in some ways, a very, very ordinary, almost defined by mediocrity to grow up in Essex in the 1980s, in the 90s. That's such a big part of palette of our culture of like the, you know, the kind of figures that would occupy reality-TV shows, for example, will be drawn from Essex is aspirational. It's trash and glitzy. So that's the kind of world I'm from. And yeah, I guess I was an unusual kid and in a way, Adam, there's so you know, again, we've been talking so much about narrative ization, and it's something that one has a tendency, perhaps, of course, to apply to our own lives. And because I've been in recovery from addiction for so long, the tendency is to look at my life in those terms like, Oh yeah, when I was a kid, I used to obsessively look at chocolate. When I was adolescent, I was obsessed with look at a porn like, you know, like most adolescent kids like, Oh, then when I was a kid, soon, as I smoked weed for the first time, I was obsessed with that. Like the kind of what I want to say, the kind of rubric that I use when trying to understand myself because I'm, you know, in. Recovery is often the lens of addiction and how addiction will be, addiction is, I suppose, a substitute for a code of living in particular, perhaps a spiritual code for living. So you grow up, mom is sickly. Is she alive today? Yes. Thank God my mom. But Babs is alive. And you're your father, Ron. Babs and Ron, they live on, thankfully. And dad was out of your life, but would slide in and slide out of your life and was a bit of a character, perhaps. And you what are you thinking about when you're 15? Or, let's say, 10 years old? Like, I was really obsessed with TV and like watching comedy. I loved comedy. I loved stand up comedy when I was sort of old enough to appreciate it. And I loved sitcoms like British sitcoms, Fawlty Towers, Blackadder, Fools and Horses. Regular mainstay, mainstream entertainment that those things. That was my world. That was the world I kind of lived in. It was a solitary little kid, liked animals and stuff, and a lot of time on my own watching TV sitting too close to the screen. Loved comedy comedy was sort of one of the first things that made me feel like joy, I suppose. And was there a thought that you would pursue that at a young age? I kind of recognize that the second I knew it was a possibility, I began to pursue it. So it kind of registered as a realistic opportunity for me, you know, as soon as it did. As soon as I did, like when I was 15, I was in a school play and I like the feel like it was a such a confrontation with extreme feelings. The, you know, the not necessarily the process of rehearsing it. I don't really remember that, oh, you know, I'm talking about regular public school or state school and doing a school play for the mums and dads, you know, 100 people, parents watching for three nights. I remember that before the first night of doing it, the terror, the horror, the nausea, the sickness, which I now recognize as, you know, pre-show nerves that I still get to this day, which I would now characterize as a kind of massive infusion and download of energy, which at that point I'd obviously never experienced. And then going onto the stage and all of that, so terror and kind of an almost palsy and fit in favor of terror, suddenly coming into a very sharp focus of being on a stage and recognizing, whoa, I'm moving energy around. And when people like laugh and I ad libbed and changed lines and stuff like that. And from that moment, something I took hold of something in that moment that I have in my hand now in life. That was a that's it. And that's the change that from that from the moment I first was on a stage and heard people laugh and had the ability to make people laugh. I did not go back. That was like, Oh, this is my God. Now this is my path. Was that play Bugsy Malone? Indeed, I remember hearing that which is a movie which I talked to Scott Baio about because he starred in the movie. And I saw it in the movie theater when I was a young kid. But I was told in Britain they did it in play form a lot, which is in the US. We, you know, it was in the movie theater and then it left the movie theater, and that was that we never really revisited it. Somehow it caught on in Britain. We weren't willing to let that go. In Britain, even little kids dressing up as gangsters and perhaps more questionably dressing up as Charleston dancers to write a little more borderline there culturally at the 12 year old flappers. I'm not sure. Is that right? So you were bit by the bug. You knew that's was what you wanted to do, and that was it. There was no other thoughts at that point of doing anything else for a career or with your life. Yeah. So or an almost instant devotion and you know, like, you know, so as soon as I did that, I remember, like within weeks looking for how do you sign up to extra agencies to do background work? I was like looking, How do background work? How do you get into state schools? How do you proceed like it was just the devotion from from that moment on? Were there people in your life that supported that or mentored you? Well, yeah, my mom, my dad, my dad, you know, whilst I've said they were sporadic, he was supportive of that, like help me out. And so like I did stuff like Edinburgh Fringe shows. I went to a state school for a year. I did a bunch of stuff that was like pursuing it pretty kind of ardently. From that moment on. But what I've wanted, I guess, to be an actor initially. But the stand up comedy was something that it was. I remember being at drama school and recognizing people were like, most listen, you know, comedians are around comedians. You are a comedian. You know, when you have the I, the you, the recognition that not only can you do it, sometimes you're doing it by mistake. You don't even know, like people with sometimes were laughing. When I wasn't trying to be funny, people were laughing at me, trying to explain myself, trying to communicate things. It kind of just carries you when when you have something like that. So when was your first professional job? Like when I was, I went to my first professional job, I acted in TV shows like when I was 18 years old, I appeared in like sort of British, a British cop show called The Bill, where like, you know, every sort of based on a couple of times a week can be a different villain. In every episode, when I was like 18 years old, I appeared in knots. When I was a professional job, I was like, acting works. You do like one job a year, you know, like in early stages of it. And then I started doing stand up comedy first in a double act when I was frozen out of a drama school because I was drinking and using drugs and going crazy. I was in that school on a government grant. I had a scholarship from a charity to pay my maintenance, and I resolutely and I was signing on getting benefits for like people that are out work simultaneously and every single penny was being spent on drugs and alcohol. So those two influences the possibility of success through the pursuit of entertainment and performance and the sort of deleterious experience that any drug addict, an alcoholic, knows, which was simultaneously running. And when I eventually got thrown out at drama school, I started doing stand up on my own. And as you know, I think the stand up comedy is meritocratic if you're any good at it. If you can hold it together, if you can get together five minutes or 10 minutes, you will get somewhere with it. And that happened. So I kind of initially pretty fast, but I still had a lot of, you know, falling down to do because of the addiction side of stuff. Yeah, I feel like stand-up is a meritocracy. There's always going to be an element of people that aren't that funny, that seem to rise to certain levels. And then the same number of people who are really funny, who you've never heard of, who never seem to really get any traction. But I think you have to kind of throw out the anomalies good and bad, and they all end up in the middle somewhere. And it's it's a meritocracy and it's and it's completely controlled by you. There's not, you know, there's not a lot of who you know or which way the wind is blowing. So that makes it attractive if you feel like you're talented and funny person. You know, it's not going to be attractive if if you're not. So you started doing standup early. And how much standup are you doing now? I've just started doing it again, like lately, like a data of but I appeared at one of Bobby Kennedy's events in Nashville. Yeah, he's doing it. Did his event in L.A., by the way? Oh, cool. Yeah, I love it. I do too is a beautiful guy and I. And so I've and just started doing small gigs here again because of everything that happened in September. I was, you know, obviously shook me pretty significantly. And by the way, I approach stand up initially was I did not prepare like I really wanted to do spontaneous stuff I didn't understand is a craft or discipline. So to your point about mentorship, I didn't understand how important it is, and I really learned this the hardest of hard ways to go in there with some stuff you're confident with to develop some material. I was in it strange. If you've got some look, you know, you've gone from being a carpenter. And so, you know, I'm working in radio, whatever like, it's a very interesting way to marshal your ability. Stand up comedy. Because if you finger like, I don't know, I know that the scene in your country is such a big country that stand up comedy in Austin is different to stand up comedy in L.A. and different to stand up on the road or Nashville or like if you're doing if you're doing stand up and you've got your own audience, then it becomes, Oh my God, what a relief that is to play to your own audience. And when I talk to comedians like when I've spoke to Rogen about that, he says he likes to keep his hand in by playing hostile audiences. And but then someone like Doug Stanhope will say, No, no, I worked hard to get my own audience, and now I've got a man performing in front of them. You know, like when you before like when I got an audience that was just into me. God, I love that. I was so relieved I could be spontaneous. I mean, it's difficult to improvise a 60 minute set in a room of 2000 people, so you better have a good opening 10 and some devices for your interaction and a good close in 20 and some islands and stuff. But I really kept on to that idea of spontaneity. That's the thing I loved most is when you're in a room and you're able to really explore that stuff, but you know, that kind of pugnacious bombast that you sometimes requires a stand up comedian. And that's not the side of it. I really most like the idea that I've got to fight them f**kers to be heard. I like it when you've got an audience that loves you and wants you. And now you can explore stuff with them. I've never really liked dealing with hecklers, you know, having some dry row stuff that you're going to say to them. I've never liked dealing with hostile rooms. I like it when you can get, like into the magic of it. Unlike what's his name? Phil K, a Scottish comedian I saw so early on when I was learning it, who would like really get involved? And Daniel Kitson is a British stand up comedian. You know, like to the point we discussed earlier about it being a meritocracy I can think of like a couple of British stand up comedians, comedians Paul for Daniel Kitts and Daniel Kids, and we very deliberately went, I'm not going down to. These people were just beautiful, spontaneous comedians, and Paul Foy is another one like that. You can see how, like is as an industry, it can reward the people that are willing to do the wise cracking one two punch and have that kind of natural. As I say, pugilistic approach to dealing with a crowd by like comedians that tell an elegant and spontaneous. But that's a dangerous game, man. And I bombed a lot at the beginning and I bombed hard. And it's all, you know, it's terrible. Terrible stories, whole crowds turning against me. Throw in stuff like just nightmare who's really, really steep, hard learning curve. Were you high during a lot of those shows in the early days? Yeah, the star always. Because I was one of those alcoholics and drug addicts. That was if I was awake, I was on drugs. I couldn't stand being alive. Actually, I and so like it was. Yeah, for sure. So and more so for when I was doing it, I couldn't. And you know, anyone who knows that drinking and taking drugs don't make you any funnier. It makes you care less about not being funny. So like I was, I was dying out there a lot. So TV starts to trickle in and, you know, features start to trickle in and, you know, I do. Think that you're uniquely talented and I've definitely seen you in and all, well, not all, but certainly all of your big movies for certain. And I do understand that you have a gift and a ability, and it's sort of, you know, there's people out there that are sort of can do it. And then there are people out there who should be doing it. And there's that. You know, you see it with stand up all the time. There's people that just kind of want to be a stand up, but you watch their act and there's sort of like just because you want to do this doesn't mean you should be doing it, although with enough repetition, they can do it in a way that sort of. Sufficient enough to fool the audience. But but they're probably not fooling you because you have a little more of a discerning ear and eye, but your ability as an actor is, is, is a gift. And I think the problem with people like you is in a weird way. Alec Baldwin has the same problem you have, which is can do whatever they want. Well, so they end up drifting around to Ted to many different facets of the media. You know, I I'm friends with Baldwin to a degree. We're not best friends, but I know him pretty well. And his, you know, he Hollywood just wanted him to be a leading man and, you know, thin and good looking and dire hair black and be this guy, be the submarine commander and save the day. And he clearly didn't want to do that. He would have made the most money and probably had the easiest path. But he didn't want to do that because he was good at a whole bunch of different stuff, and he wanted to do a whole bunch of different stuff. And I I feel that way about you as well. And now with Hollywood. And you know, the allegations, the MeToo allegations, your stance on COVID and things of that nature. Who the hell knows if the Hollywood that we knew will even let you back? Now there's going to be a different Hollywood at some point, but the old Hollywood is not having you back or me back. I felt while I was in that world, I don't belong here, this doesn't work, I don't trust it is an extraordinary world to participate in. That ain't, by the way, a kind of unilateral statement or a blanket statement because I remember one day, like, I guess I was taking writers meetings or something in the brilliant comedian Peter Baynham, who sort of wrote Borat and wrote a bunch of amazing, amazing British comedy Larry Charles. You know, the director and writer on Seinfeld and Curb and Kevin Smith. I guess it was me and potential directors for something I was doing or potential writers and for, Oh my God, these people are so funny and brilliant. And like Hollywood in just full of vacuous, bloody idiots. And to your point about like, you know, like I've worked with amazing people Jonah Hill or or Alec Baldwin or Helen Mirren and Judd Apatow, I like people that are brilliant. So it's not just these these vacuous, sterile place. It's not just that, but what it what is it functionally? What is it actually doing? What does it exist for? And so like, you know, I'm not trying to be dismissive of it, but I'm also kind of aware that, yeah, I'm like while I was in it, I felt like I don't belong here. This isn't really what I am, and I kind of alluded to earlier, like Adam, you get sort of squeezed into something like it was one of my friends said, You see you driving down Sunset Boulevard and you see your face on a billboard and you think that you're a real big deal and you're being flown around in private jets. And then you realize this is just the inadvertent consequences of someone else making money from you. It's not really actually about you. You are temporarily a useful asset or type. And if you can't really do it because of the way you are or the economics you, then you are out. And that's understandable. That's how business works and how business by its own standards must work, I suppose. But for me, I felt like an outsider there, and I look at the sort of way people talk about Hollywood now and some of the things that have gone on in Hollywood in seemingly an institutional level, not at the level of, you know, sort of individual stuff. So, man, you know, it's not when I look at what I've experienced subsequently, it's like, Well, you ain't what I would have done if there were a variety of pathways. You know, I met one of these kids the other day. That's like a YouTube. Perfidious, he's the kid Cyprus that got elected to the European Parliament because he was already a social media influencer. Hey, I'll stand for Parliament got elected in the parliament. Now he's in the European Parliament, saying, I get paid this much expenses. And look, look at what they try to make me do like. He's like exposing it. Or, you know, it's like me like that. That's just the that's what if you live in a culture that tells you that success is success within these parameters, and you're a person that has energy and drive and ambition and drive, you know, perhaps ability, you will go that way. You will go that way. And for what? Maybe it could work out any number of ways you might fail. You might succeed. You might succeed a bit. You're it could be some sort of concoction of all of it. But increasingly, I belong in a me in media where I can speak plainly and openly, where I can be like, you know, do you know, I do miss? It's been something in politics being funny, like a so odd. Like when you're sort of just mired in the, you know, the amount of content that we make and the type of content that we make, I feel like, man, I just want to play. I want to be funny again. I want to be in comedy like, you know, all of this hostility and controversy. And you know that that is what I really, you know, I really miss. But there's so much about the type of media I work in that I'm, you know, is I would have done that in the first place if it was available. It just didn't exist yet. Do you feel like you were targeted? Do you feel like? You know, maybe this. These are my own feelings, but I feel like there are so many voices now that they can't really get those horses back into the barn. I feel like they could sort of control narratives. Not too long ago certainly did it with COVID, but so many voices have sprung up now that they can't really control it anymore. And do you feel and I feel like they would like to they would like a lot of these voices silence for the next narrative they need to push forward. They can't have popular people with a big audience saying something other than what the narrative they're pushing for it. But do you feel like you were deliberately targeted speaking in a general way? It does seem that people with large audiences that have an anti-establishment perspective are more prone to attack from legacy media institutions. And while this is something I have to speak about with a degree of caution, there is considerable suggestion and even some evidence that numerous agencies, some government or some government funded spent a good deal of time working in conjunction with media organizations to create conditions that were pretty unfavorable for me. Perhaps it's interesting to look at other people that have been in similar positions that have experienced attacks on the basis of maybe using profane and inappropriate language or using medicines that are not sanctioned during a time that there was a drive. And at the point when everything happened, I recognize I have to be sensitive because certainly from a moral and spiritual perspective, the kind of promiscuity that I practiced is selfish. But I'm very aware of what consent is. I'm very aware of that as people that have lived like very, very famous people that I've had access to a lot of partners. You've become very aware of what receptivity and attraction and what it's like to be the focus of that level of attention. You've become quite attuned to that sort of stuff, but that doesn't mean that sort of morally and spiritually that level of promiscuity is appropriate. Certainly, that's not how I would live now. Certainly, it's not appropriate for a man of my age with children. But when I was like a man in my 30s and I was single and by what I felt like, women were throwing themselves at me. And that ain't how I grew up. And it was a pretty exciting and overwhelming kind of way to live for for a long while. So I recognize how I contribute to the creation of those conditions. But I do also see that there are strong, coordinated efforts to ensure that people who have large audiences are in one way or another, smeared and discredited. I've certainly knows that with other people, and some of the research that's been done in the sort of last month suggests there has been kind of cooperation between some interesting groups. And when this happens, you know, like this is a matter of public record. A member of the British government wrote to and publicly declared that I should be shut down on various social media platforms, and that person does have ties to agencies that shut down monitor control, surveil social media sites through her marriage. I'm talking about suicide. I call Caroline Dion, who's a member of Parliament and was head of a committee for social media regulation. So there's a lot of like really unusual factors was certainly at play. Yeah. And I I'm hoping that we've made it through this period and COVID sped things along enough that they're not going to be able to do what they've done in the past much longer. And I, I assume. That that's where we're at, and it's people like you that have definitely ushered in that new sort of, you know, the new era of media, and I do appreciate what you're doing out there, Russell. And I hope when you come to the states, you can come by and spend time with us in person. Yeah, will do. I'd love to come out there and I'd love to spend some time with you in person, and I will acknowledge, given the nature of that lovely compliment, that you are one of the few people that set this stuff out. And I know from, like previous conversations, did this when there was no money in it, when it just seemed totally implausible and impossible. So thank you for being a wayfarer, trailblazer, trendsetter and pulled farther in this crazy space that we've all subsequently benefited from. Even if it has meant to some degree enduring astonishing maelstrom. It's great to talk to you again, my friend. I hope we can see you soon in person. The podcast Stay free with Russell Brand. It's live on Rumble weekdays. 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time. Instagram at Russell Brand website. Russell Brand Dot locals that come as well. Great talk to you again, my friend. Thanks, Adam. Thanks for all of our cheers. Thanks, Mike. You can leave us a voicemail at eight eight eight six three four one seven four four and you can always get tickets to see Adam Carolla has Adam Carolla dot com. Summer might be wrapping up, but Pluto TV's summer of cinema is still going strong with hundreds of free movies. It's never too late to join an epic adventure with Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Step up your movie game with Stomp the Yard. Get in the ring with Nature Leader or set a course for the stars with Star Trek every Star Trek down to the Pluto TV app now, while the Sun still shines on Pluto TV Summer of Cinema. Stream now. Hey, never. Summer might be wrapping up, but you don't see the summer of cinema is still going strong with hundreds of free movies. It's never too late to join an epic adventure with Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Step up your movie game with Stomp the Yard. Get in the ring with Nature Leader or set a course for the stars with Star Trek. Every Star Trek. Download the Pluto TV app now, while the Sun still shines on Pluto TV's Summer of Cinema. Stream now. Hey, never.
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