 Comedian and actor Russell Brand has been sober for 19 years, and he started a podcast and a YouTube channel to ask big questions and help people. Personally, I've been sober for 10 years, and I know I'm not the only one who looked up to Russell Brand for his wisdom and views all creating a better world. Since the start of the COVID pandemic, he's gained more and more popularity, but it's not for anything close to the content that he was making before. Today, he thrives off of clickbaiting people to his videos with sensational conspiratorial titles like White, The Great Reset is Not a Conspiracy, and this is why they censor Trump. And hang on, they're owned by big pharma? He abandoned trying to help people improve their overall well-being in lieu of pandering to a conspiracy-prone type of audience. And now he's whitewashing someone like Alex Jones, who has not only done atrocious things in the past, but he's continuing to do so. But I think as a figure, Alex Jones is more like a shaman or evangelical preacher. He operates on the periphery of a culture telling you stuff that sometimes seems mad and hysterical. But many times, of course, not this terrible example around Sandy Hook, but many times he's been ahead of the curve. He's talked about stuff like bioengineering. He's talked about financial corruption. He's talked about elites collaborating. There are examples of things that where Alex Jones has been ahead of his time. But Russell Brand was already a multi-millionaire. So why is he doing this? So Russell Brand has let a lot of people down in the recovery community, and that includes myself, right? So I've been following him for a long time. I read his book. But one of the reasons I want to make these videos, because one of my main concerns is that there are two groups of people in recovery, not just in recovery from addiction, but he was making a lot of mental health content. And then these two groups, there are a group of people like myself where we're just like, all right, you've gone down this conspiratorial path. Okay. But there are also a lot of people who are vulnerable and susceptible to this thing that he's doing. And they got pulled in and drawn in with him. And this isn't anything new. So what I wanted to talk about today is what I believe is going on here. And what I think we're seeing is a recovering addict who has now become addicted to status. And we've seen plenty of gurus just get drawn in by the fame, the likes and all the people coming in just to listen to them speak and confirm their beliefs. But I wanted to take a deep dive into Russell Brand specifically to get a better understanding of what's going on. All right. So a little history of myself finding Russell Brand. Okay. So I was never really into his his stand up comedy or his movies. I don't even think I've ever seen his stand up comedy. And I saw like, like get them to the greet or whatever. And that was about it. Right. But when I was about three or four years sober, I discovered that Russell Brand was in recovery. And I can't remember if I stumbled across his books or his YouTube content at first. But what I do know is that I went out and I bought his book recovery. Okay, this book came out and I read it and I absolutely loved it. And at the time that that book came out, I was actually working at a drug and alcohol rehab center. I was doing kind of peer support. Like I said, I had a few years sobriety. So I would do groups, I would do some one on one stuff, you know, and just share my story and tell people how I stayed sober, give them advice, you know, try to get them to, you know, be like, Hey, maybe 12 pro step programs will work for me too. What if I leave here? You know what I mean? But I also like to explain to people that there's a whole menu of a recovery. And I would tell them, like, it literally does not matter what you do, as long as you do something. Okay. And that's kind of important because that's one of the reasons why I love Russell Brand's book recovery. Okay, because here's the thing when I get sober, I got sober through 12 step programs. I'm an atheist. I didn't think that was possible, but I met a guy who had like five years sober and he was an atheist and AA. So I'm like, Oh, cool. I guess I can do it too. But anyways, and he started to work the program, you start to realize, right? Like once you get the whole God saying out of the way, that this is just, you know, some great principles in life, right? Like, for example, one of the steps is when we were wrong, we probably admitted it, like, who could argue with that? You know what I mean? One of the steps is like taking a daily inventory at the end of the day, take a look back reflect and say, did I cause anybody harm? Do I owe anybody an apology? You know, so one of the things I learned, because when I got sober, you know, I became all like, you know, a completely different person than I was in my addiction. I used to have a lot of friends who come in and ask me like, Hey, you know, Oh, what should I do in this situation? All this like Chris, how do you stay so calm and everything? But anyways, I would relate to them without telling them those 12 step stuff, I would relate to them things that I had learned, right? And that's what I loved about Russell Brand's book recovery. So his book broke down the 12 steps, but he did such an amazing job showing how these principles could work for anybody. Right? So not only did I recommend it to people in the rehab, the clients who were coming in, but I also recommended it to just like friends. I don't know if any like non recovery people actually read it, but I recommended this book just left and right all the time. Another thing that's important to note is, why do I want this time to was when I discovered meditation. So I suffered from, you know, crippling anxiety and depression. And I was on anti anxiety medications. And eventually the medications weren't working as well. And that's how I found meditation. And I was like, Oh my god, this is amazing. And one thing that I love about Russell Brand was that he was into meditation and all this kind of like spiritual stuff as well. And on his podcast, he brought in just so many amazing meditation teachers and people who talked about meditation like Sam Paris, Sharon Salzburg and Ruby Wax and so many other people. And he had just like such amazing conversations. But there is a tendency more broadly say in the mindfulness movement, the wellbeing movement, personal development to present these theologically underwritten ancient techniques in the context of their efficacy in rather more modern constructs, i.e. to simplify it, meditate, and you will become more successful, meditate and that kind of thing. That I don't like. I mean, well, I can't say I don't like the fact of the matter is a transcendental meditation goes back over 5000 years. It's been available and lost and available and lost. And it always has to meditation always has to be taught in the language of the time in the vocabulary of the time and the need of the time. Otherwise, it becomes obscure and irrelevant. Like just look at that clip, look at that conversation they were having. Right. Like in a minute, we're going to dive into some of Russell Brand's current content. But did you see the way that they were talking like I used to love that stuff? And that's what brought a lot of people like me into it. And the other thing that was great about Russell Brand's podcast and his conversations was that he had no problem pressing people on, you know, certain opinions they had. As I mentioned, he used to have Sam Halas on. And I remember one episode when he was pushing back on Sam Halas, because Sam Halas has a lot of criticisms of Islam and everything, but he would push back on Sam and have no problem with it. Jordan Peterson would come on and he pushed back on Jordan Peterson. Then there's his famous interview with Candace Owens. Justice of Unfairness. Because people, do you know what Candace, 90% of people are rich. Do you know why they're rich? Because they were born rich. I'm going to tell you something. I think that economic disparity reads that feeling, but fundamental understanding and economics. Do you know that? That those people that are rich are born rich. It's not like there's a tiny minority of people that are like you, that come from a poor background and manage to overcome it. And this is what a problem I've noticed with a lot of great people is they sort of believe that their greatness is something that can be replicated and I don't think it can. But then something happened. So I think it's pretty obvious that Russell Brand has always been a very spiritual guy. Like I don't know if any of you guys saw him on Hot Ones, but he does everything that you would think like a spiritual type hippie person would do on Hot Ones. He had like meatless wings and nothing against that on Vegetarian as well. But I'm just trying to paint a picture of who Russell Brand is. Very spiritual, very, we're all connected. We're all one. And what's interesting about Russell Brand and how much I used to consume his content is that he was so left leaning. And this is, you know, around the time when I wasn't really into politics the way I am now, but it's safe to say that Russell Brand really introduced me to progressive politics. He had me start looking at the world in a different way. He started having me question things about, you know, who's actually in power? Who's actually running things? How much does my vote matter? Are the people in these systems actually looking out for the everyday people, right? I remember just in all his episodes, he had this question, right? He had this question that he would always ask everybody. He would always ask them who has the power, right? No matter what systems they were talking about, no matter what the conversation was, Russell had this curiosity of like, who has the power in this situation? And I think that's just very interesting because, you know, this is something that us progressives think about a lot, like who's in power, who's in control, is somebody being exploited or things equal or things fair. And Russell really introduced me to that idea. So knowing how much Russell Brand, you know, was kind of like a left-leaning hippie, how much he kind of questioned power, how progressive he was, all that, it's kind of not surprising where he's ended up today. There's a political science theory known as the horseshoe theory that was popularized by Jean-Pierre Faye back in 2002. Faye is a French philosopher, and this theory states that the far left and the far right are closer to each other than they are to the center. The good news is that we have far more in common than many of us think. For example, although it wasn't about political affiliation, there's a famous SNL sketch with Tom Hanks showing how a maga-loving redneck white guy has a ton in common with black people. This sketch is an episode of Black Jeopardy where Kenan Thompson is the host and asks questions that most black people would know the answers to, but white people wouldn't. The contestants are Keely, Shanice, and then Doug, who is played by Tom Hanks, decked out in a jean jacket and a maga hat. Host Don L. Jackson, played by Kenan Thompson, reads the answer for the category They Out Here Sand. And the answer is They Out Here Sand, the new iPhone, wants your thumb print for your protection. Doug intently buzzes in and he says, what is, I don't think so, that's how they get you. And Don L screams, yes, with equal parts enthusiasm and a little bit of confusion. Doug goes on to say, now I read that goes straight to the government. Don L says, well, that is not bad, Doug. So I guess that SNL clip of Black Jeopardy is kind of the perfect example when we're talking about Russell Brand. Because Russell Brand is so anti-capitalist, he's a leftist, and he's found his audience with white wing conspiracy theorists. So here's a quick history lesson for those of you who don't know, maybe some of you Gen Z folks who stumbled across this leftists were kind of the OG anti-vaxxers. So back in the day, there was this guy, this terrible, terrible human being named Andrew Wakefield. And he came out with a fraudulent study linking the MMR vaccine to autism. And this thing spread like wildfire, right? And a bunch of people were afraid to give their kids vaccines. Well, anyways, after more and more reviews, we found out that, you know, this, this whole study that he did was compromised because he was actually getting paid by lawyers and he was trying to develop a patent for his own vaccine, everything, everything about this was corrupt. And the Lancet, the medical journal that actually publishes research, actually had to attract it when they realized that the whole study was fraudulent. All right, to this day, there was no link between the MMR vaccine and autism. But by that time, the damage was done. Well, anyways, during this time, these were the original anti-vaxxers and they were all leftists. So when you think about this, the left is very, you know, like, oh, we're all natural and stuff like that. Like you stick about like, kind of like that, the Los Angeles West Coast or even East Coast, just the coastal liberals, right? Just really into yoga, really into going to Whole Foods, all of those kind of things like these were the original anti-vaxxers. So when we were discussing the horseshoe theory, when you're going so far left, you meet up with the far way, it kind of starts to make sense. So Bland is so far left that he doesn't trust the government, he doesn't trust the system, and he especially doesn't like big pharma, he doesn't trust them either. And I think now's a good time to pause, right? In case any of you Russell Bland fans are out there or any of you anti-vaxxers, here's where I can relate, okay? So as I mentioned, I'm sober. 10 years ago, I was about to die. I had like a 10% chance of living. And thank goodness I was able to get sober. But my drug of choice was prescription opioids. Okay, I spent nearly a decade of my life being addicted to prescription opioids. And I got them by going to doctors, I would doctor pharma, go to them, and find any way that I can get them. And I would also buy from dealers who are like typically old ladies who are being overprescribed these addictive medications, okay? So when I get when I got sober and I started learning about more about addiction, when I started to realize like, oh, hey, I'm not the only addict, there's like an opioid epidemic going on. We have tens of thousands of drug overdoses every single year. And this has been going on for decades, like to this day, the opioid epidemic is still going on. And as I started learning about it, you started realizing that big pharma was behind this. All right, good old capitalism was behind this. To make a profit, they were falsely marketing these drugs as non addictive. And doctors were getting perks, kickbacks, they were getting treated. If any of you haven't watched dope sick on Hulu, it's a lie. Like it's okay. But if you're interested in seeing like, Michael Keaton and many good actors in there. It's an interesting show that kind of covers how Purdue pharma really started the opioid epidemic. But what I'm getting at is I get it. I get it. I do not trust big pharma either. But at the same time, I realized that we have to trust them at some point. Okay, a great example. One of the reasons that I was pretty much about to die was I was 27 years old with congestive heart failure. All right, my heart, my big old heart, like I'm a lovable guy, right? But this heart was the size of my lung. Okay, so I have been on heart medications ever since then. I've been sober for 10 years. I've been on those medications. But what I'm getting at is just because big pharma fueled the opioid epidemic, and I don't trust them. I know that they're just money hungry people looking for profits and don't really care about me. That doesn't mean I'm just not going to take the medications. So overall, we can distrust big pharma. We cannot like them motivations, right? But at a certain point, when the scientific community comes in and agrees, hey, vaccines work, and they're a good thing, that's when we have to trust it and just take our medications or get back. But now that we understand how Brand has found himself with a right wing audience, we have to ask, why didn't he pump the brakes when he realized what he was doing? Brand had every opportunity to pause and realize that he was fueling conspiracy theories to a massive audience. Instead, he chose to lean in and start making daily videos with the latest conspiracy theories while completely abandoning those he was originally helping. Why would he do something like this? Well, it's all about status. I always say that if you want to understand human behavior, you'll have to start by understanding status. We evolved to seek status, and natural selection chose it because it's so beneficial. The number one thing to realize about evolution is that it does not care about our happiness, nor does it care about anyone else's. All evolution cares about is our ability to pass our genes on to the next generation. Once we started evolving for cooperation, we started seeking status. There is a limited number of mates, and one of the best ways to get chosen is to be of high status. Think about it, would someone rather mate with the leader of the tribe or someone who gets bossed around all day? We're genetically wired to seek status, and it's the motivation behind everything that we do. So to understand status, like in the modern age, we have to have a talk about this dude named Thorstein Veblen. All right, so Thorstein Veblen, he was a sociologist, and he wrote this book back in 1899. I'm checking my notes. I believe that's a year that it came up. And this book was called The Theory of the Leisure Class. So Veblen, he wrote this book, it was, you know, decades after like the industrial revolution got really going. And we started seeing like massive amounts of wealth. And this dude Thorstein Veblen, he used to sit around and just look at the wealthy, he would look at the elites. And he would wonder, you know, just about human behavior, are they buying these things? Why are they acting in certain ways? Why do they care about which fork you use when you're at dinner? But anyways, in his book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, he was trying to better understand things in the age of capitalism. And what he noticed was the wealthy and the elites, they were constantly trying to separate themselves from the lower class. All right. So the wealthy needed this, because you don't want to get mixed up, you don't want people to think that you might be one of them. You don't want someone to look at you and think that you're, you know, down there working in a factory or something crazy like that. So something that Thorstein Veblen came up with is what we're going to be talking about next. And it's this thing called conspicuous consumption. And it's a great example of this. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen explains how the old methods of showing status as a male no longer work. He is no longer simply the successful, aggressive male, the man of strength, resource, and intrepidity. In order to avoid stultification, he must also cultivate his taste, for now it becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble in consumable goods. See, back in the day, our ancestors showcased status with strength and acts of courage. When Veblen wrote this, it was a few decades after the industrial revolution, when people started becoming extremely wealthy. The men of wealth no longer needed to be the fastest or the strongest, but they needed to show their status in another way. Conspicuous consumption is the act of buying more expensive goods so people know that you're of higher status. If you want people to know that you're rich and powerful, what better way than to have things that lower class people can't afford? So with conspicuous consumption, just sit back and think about them. Ask yourself, what goes through your mind when you see somebody driving by in a Mercedes Benz or BMW? Or what goes through your head when you see somebody wearing Gucci or Prada or one of these very high-end expensive pieces of clothing? Without even, you know, seeing their bank account, you have an idea of how much wealth they had. All right, I forgot which book I was reading, but it was really interesting. They mentioned, you know, how Gucci like, I don't own any Gucci, but Gucci has very, you know, specific colors. Okay, so even if you just look from a mile away and you see those colors, you're like, oh, that's Gucci, right? Or Louis Vuitton or whatever these high-end things are, what is the symbol that's on this thing that shows your status? What shows your wealth? So capitalist companies, they are just so in love with our constant need to show our status. And they're great at it. That's what all their marketing techniques are. I remember in Johan Hari's book, Lost Connections, one of my favorite books about depression, he said something that I just have never forgotten. And maybe it's because I've worked in marketing for quite a while now. But he said this, he said, the worst marketer in the world would tell you that, hey, you're perfect just the way you are, you don't need to impress anybody. Right? That would be terrible marketing. Marketing is all about telling you that you are not where you need to be. So you need to buy this thing and show people that you are just as good as them. But more importantly, buy this thing to show that you are better and higher status than these people are. Back in July, BMW changed their heated seats from being a standard feature in a car to a subscription model. I first heard about it through this tweet saying, I'm not going to tell BMW their business. Obviously, they know more about selling luxury cars than I do. But I would have thought it would be bad for the brand to make a big show of treating your customers with contempt. So when I saw this tweet, like I was just cracking up, I was like, this is a genius move by BMW, right? Because if you if you drive the BMW, you're already showing your status to show the entire world. Like I said, when you see somebody drive by in a BMW, you don't think that that person is a bagger at your local grocery store, right? You're like, this person makes some money. Man, think about this, think about this from BMW's perspective. Okay, you have a bunch of people who own BMWs. What kind of person is that? What kind of groups are they hanging out in? All right, there's a little something called branding. What are the type of people who are drawn to your brand? Now imagine a man or a woman hanging out with their group of friends, all of them are BMW owners. And all these people have the subscription for the heated BMW seats. All right. Now imagine that this, this person that we're talking about, they're the one person without an $18 per month subscription for the heated seats. When we're talking about status, what do you think the rest of that people in that group are thinking? They're thinking, this is a broke fool. Why can't they afford these heated seats? So BMW understanding this, this isn't contempt for their customers. And frankly, I don't feel bad for them, right? They are pushing this on wealthy rich people. Like if this was somebody like, you know, on McDonald's or on Walmart, taking advantage of the lower class, which they do regularly, but that's a video for another time, I would feel a little bit bad about it, right? But charging rich people $18 a month to make sure the biggest stay on the same status level as their friends, that I will not lose an ounce of sleep over there. Now I want you to remember that story about BMW because we're going to touch on it in just a little bit. But anyways, for all of us, for me and you, okay, we don't want to get suckered into this conspicuous consumption. Okay. So the next time you see some marketing, everything like that, next time we're making purchases, why am I buying this? Because like I'm getting pure in Las Vegas and people spend insane amounts of money purely for conspicuous consumption, right? Like you've probably seen those YouTube videos, I think like BuzzFeed did them all the time, like, you know, $10 burger versus $100 burger, all this stuff. And a lot of times, like, yeah, maybe, maybe the taste is a little bit better. But most of the time, it's not. And they've actually done some really interesting research where they've gotten like wine connoisseurs and they've lied to them and said, oh, there's like a $500 bottle of wine, a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, lie to them. And they can't tell the difference between these things. But anyways, what I'm getting at is when people head down to the Las Vegas Strip and they get very expensive food, or they walk into, you know, a certain restaurant that's hundreds of dollars per plate, this is a form of conspicuous consumption. They're showing off, they're showing the people, hey, here is my status, returning back to the BMW heated seats, people seek higher status within their groups. And that's what we're seeing with Russell Brand. Again, he has all of the money in the world. And he's famous. He's a multimillionaire. And anyone who follows him already knows that. So he doesn't need to buy anything expensive to show off his status. Now that he's found a new following, he has to elevate his status within that new group. In his book, the status game will store, he does a lot of interviews and tells a lot of stories of different people. But there's one story that really stuck out to me. It was the story of this woman named Miranda. And she became really entrenched in an anti-vax community. She was pregnant and about to have a baby, and she had a midwife. And they were talking, and she was telling the midwife, yeah, I'm planning on getting my kid vaccinated. And the midwives is like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't do that. All right. She said the most famous line of conspiracy theorists everywhere. And you probably have heard this one before. Are you ready for it? This midwife said to her, you really need to do your research. Okay. So the midwife had this woman Miranda questioning whether or not she should vaccinate her child. So Miranda started going to Google and she types in, why not vaccinate my child? And the algorithms predicted what Miranda wanted to look for. Google predicted that Miranda wanted to find things that would show the vaccines are dangerous. Okay. This turns into a form of selection bias. By the way, I just want all of you out there to know just because I have a background in search engine optimization. Be careful with what you type into Google. Keep that in mind. Ask yourself, all of you are watching this on YouTube. You've seen how it works. Once you watch something, it recommends something else. It's like, oh, you watched this video from start to finish. Here's another video like right now on your little sidebar of recommended videos. Or if you're on your phone, it's probably recommending you some Russell brand videos. Okay. So keep that in mind. But what happened with Miranda is because she typed that in, Google assumed that she wanted to go and find information like that. And then what happens is the more you click, the more you read, the more Google thinks that this is the content that you want. And that is how people fall into rabbit holes. And that is also why what Russell brand is doing is extremely dangerous. And there it was breakdowns from A to Z on the ingredients in vaccines and why they're dangerous blogs detailing how children developed epilepsy and died following vaccinations videos about put big pharma and the cash premiums doctors are paid for poisoning babies. She clicked on the website of Dr. Joseph Makola, a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the ultimate wellness game changer award. They look professional, serious. Makola, take control of your health. At the time of writing, its main story announced kids given vaccines have 22 times the rate of ear infections, 32 times the rate of sinusitis, four times allergies, two times asthma, four times hay fever, three times ADHD, and 19 times higher odds of autism based on this 7,850 person survey. Yet 98% of parents give it to their children. So I've been trying to teach my son to be a better critical thinker. I have said it to everybody that I've met when we talk about parenting. And I've even told my son on multiple occasions, like if this kid ever ends up becoming a conspiracy theorist or joining a cult or just having really zany beliefs, that is when I'm going to know that I feel as a father, right? So I'm starting him young and teaching him about critical thinking. And when I was all driving with him the other day, I was teaching him the issue with anecdotal evidence. So I looked at him and I'm like, Hey, Dylan, why didn't really look I was driving? What am I doing? I want you to imagine, right? Just pitching your head that 100 people stand up in line in a line to talk to you. And each one of them is going to tell you about their experience with the COVID vaccine. And let's say every single one of those 100 people told you that they had some kind of strange reaction to the vaccine, whether it was rash or whether they're not sick, whatever it was. And I asked him, what would you think? Well, my son and I just finished this amazing book, You Are Not So Smart by David McQuainey. And in that book, we discuss or will we read about it, then discuss the availability heuristic. Okay, the availability heuristic is our mind tends to think that things are much more common than they are, based on the information that we're getting on a regular basis. So what's most prevalent in our mind? For example, you see a bunch of news about the single shock attack that happened in Australia, or California, whatever, you start thinking that's shark attacks are very common. But when you actually look at the numbers, they're not that common at all. So anyways, my son, when I asked him, I'm like, let's say 100 people came up to you and told you that they had a weird reaction to the COVID vaccine. So he realized that this is anecdotal evidence and anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much when it comes to scientific research as a whole. So when we look at the numbers of this thing, like as of the time of recording this, globally, we've given out about 12 billion COVID vaccines, 12 billion doses of the vaccine. Okay, so when you think about 100 people lining up, that is nothing in comparison to the big H. And typically, even if you're, you know, a vaccine skeptic or you're hesitant, and you know, I'm not a doctor, I'm not going to get into all of these things. And this is, you know, a decision between you and your doctors whether or not you're going to get boosted and all that stuff. But I'm going to link a couple of channels down below like Dr. Susan and some others, right, but they talk about how a lot of the anti-vax people like Russell Bland and some other bad actors who are out here on YouTube, they're taking a lot of anecdotal evidence. Okay, and it's a major problem is why we all need to defend against it, because a lot of people who are watching Russell Bland and these other people who are talking about these adverse reactions, they are a, using the availability heuristic, and they're just thinking in anecdotes, and b, what you'll find is if you watch a lot of people who debunk these things, those people aren't even really looking at the research papers correctly. And there's a lot that's missing. Miranda slid further down the rabbit hole. But what made it worse was finding an echo chamber in the form of a Facebook group. Facebook was the big one, she said. You find a Facebook group, join it, and it sucks you in. One of the groups was the great mother's questioning vaccines. She made her first comment announcing herself as quote, vaccine hesitant, and it didn't take long. As Miranda got more comfortable in the group, she started realizing how you can gain status with the other members. Her indoctrination was rapid. She played that slot machine for status and kept on winning. You're socially rewarded for going with the group, she said. It's Facebook likes its comments, like, yeah, way to go, mom. You're so strong. You're so smart. You're doing the best thing. Soon, Miranda was out in the world playing a virtue game, evangelizing her new beliefs. She told her mother and her cousins she began looking for any reason to raise the topic socially. You want to bring it up with people you can argue with because you want to be like, I'm smarter than you. I know more than you look at this thing. I know that you don't. It's really embarrassing to think about now. I thought I knew it all. I thought that's going to show them. They're really going to regret arguing with me. So do you see what's going on here? Now that Miranda was in this group. It wasn't just enough to feel a part of the group. It wasn't enough to be one of the moms in that group. Now she was seeking status. Now she wanted to raise up and she wanted to be like, Oh, here's my story. Here's who I went off on. Here's the fact that I gave them because I did my own research. All right. And we all need to think about that in the context of our own lives, right? Once we have our own groups, think about how we try to one up each other with what we know what we read about, what we heard, all of these other things. When you start looking around, you start seeing this grandstanding kind of everywhere and grandstanding is something very important that we're also going to touch on pretty soon. But this is all this virtue game of seeking status. I asked Miranda if part of the point was to go back to the group and report in for the status reward. That's absolutely accurate, she said. And that went for everybody. I went to the doctors today and boy did I show him. I went to my cousins today and I was spit in fire. You were rewarded for that. The louder you were, the more unmovable you were, the higher you moved up socially. You became someone for other people to strive to be like. You look at them and you think they're so confident in everything they're saying. They believe it is so strongly. They're willing to do anything. I need to become this. I think it's an unconscious thing. Humans want to be revered. They want to be on top of the group. Let's take a look at this in the context of Russell Brand. As you can see, he was getting 100,000 views and sometimes hundreds of thousands of views or it was as low as 60,000. Then look what happened whenever he pushed the great reset conspiracy theory. He got 2.6 million views pushing the great reset. And then after that, his video about being a vegan dropped to 173,000. After that, having a balanced discussion about the culture war only got him 60,000 views. Fast forward to the COVID vaccine rollout and you start seeing that much like Miranda, he's being rewarded for videos about the vaccine and Fauci. Not only that, but he was getting a lot of views from pro-Trump people and people who don't like CNN. Will Stor writes in the status game that there are three types of these games. The dominance game, the success game and the virtue game. Russell Brand is playing the virtue game. Stor defines virtue games as when status is rewarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. He writes, most of the time we don't check for ourselves what's true. We check with our elites. We believe what we're supposed to. This even counts for the most precious of our beliefs, the ones we categorize as quote unquote moral. The moral reality we live in is a virtue game. We use our displays of morality to manufacture status. So Will Stor argues that we treat moral beliefs as though there are moral absolutes. During these extreme polarized times, these moral beliefs have completely, completely trumped science and actual evidence. Like think about how many people just have to do so many mental backflips and they experience this cognitive dissonance just because of what their side believes. And this is something that's just regularly happening where we just completely disregard the science. It does not matter what the science is. My side believes this. So I will find all of the confirming evidence to make myself believe that that's true. Like when we think of moral grandstanding, we typically think of the left. But like if you look around, especially this this last year, and I mentioned this when I made my announcement episode of the podcast of why I was taking a break, this is one of the reasons why the white has become so, so, so bad with this kind of moral grandstanding. And just look at people like Ron DeSantis and what he's doing in Florida and how he is pandering directly to his Republican base. And they are just gobbling it up. We can't just stand idly by why woke ideology ravages every institution in our society. We must fight the woke in our schools. We must fight the woke in our businesses. We must fight the woke in government agencies. We can never ever surrender to woke ideology. And I'll tell you this, the state of Florida is where woke goes to die. Did you hear those cheers in that clip? DeSantis and other Republicans no longer have a definition of what woke is. Due to the virtue game, you simply attack woke and it shows where you stand. And the more that you attack woke, the more status you gain within your group. In grandstanding, philosophers Brandon Warnke and Justin Tosey say grandstanders seek to elevate their social station, at least within some relevant social network. Often they do this by seeking prestige for their moral qualities. They want the reputation for being inspiring moral exemplars, for example. They want this reputation, not necessarily for doing anything that's actually morally heroic, but for simply typing on their keyboard or uttering certain words. They think having this prestige will result in deference from others, at least when it comes to matters of morality. Russell Brand has money and he has fame, but much like when conspicuous consumption theory started, this no longer separates you. There are thousands of millionaire celebrities, so conspiratorial content gives him a niche group where he can rise up the ladder of social status. In her book, The Sum of Small Things, sociologist Elizabeth Curidhalkin calls this inconspicuous consumption. She says inconspicuous consumption is a more subtle, less materialistic form of conveying status to others who are in the know. So inconspicuous consumption, it describes conspiracy theorists perfectly, alright? Because conspiracy theorists really get off on this idea that they are in the know, that they know something that other people don't, okay? And Curidhalkin, she talks about inconspicuous consumption in our everyday lives by kind of talking about things like, you know, when we go shopping at Whole Foods or the Farmers Market, right? Or if we read the New Yorker or certain public pensions, these are things that don't necessarily cost money, like she says, they're a little bit more subtle, okay? So it's more about acquiring knowledge. And this is something that's become even bigger in recent years in the age of the internet, right? If you find these sources, if you find these pieces of information that not a lot of people know about, it makes you feel even better, right? Like back in the day, if you read The New York Times or The New Yorker, cool, cool, good for you, right? But if you find this like kind of like independent blog, I can't tell you how many independent news sources, I'm not talking about like independent news sources, like breaking points or like secular time for the Humanist Report, I mean, like just some random dude sitting in his basement writing quote unquote news, people feel good about that. So when you have these conspiracy theorists, they are playing on this inconspicuous consumption. So when you look at somebody like Russell Brand and he's making his daily videos about all these things that he's coming across. And if you start to look at the sources that he's using, and the way he's cherry picking them, this is helping him elevate his status via inconspicuous consumption with this new audience that he's brought in. But what's terrible about this and the whole reason that I was even motivated to make this video is that now now Russell Brand conspiracy theorist ism has gotten so bad that he is whitewashing Alex Jones. And now Russell Brand is playing into Alex Jones' audience. And this is a problem like I was talking about at the beginning of this video, especially us in 12 step programs. You know, we learned certain principles and Russell Brand talks about them in his book. But because his addiction to this status, he does not mind who he's bringing in as long as he's getting the views, as long as he's getting the likes, as long as he's getting the subscribers and the shares, it does not matter. Like Alex Jones is a piece of trash. At the time of recording this, Alex Jones just lost a lawsuit a couple weeks ago, because these families, these families of victims from one of the worst events in American history will harass so much that they are, you know, experiencing additional trauma on top of the loss of their children. Some of them have had to move multiple times. And now we have Russell Brand sitting here saying, Well, you know, I mean, Alex Jones, he's kind of right sometimes. So maybe we should listen to him. Now the question is, if Russell Brand is promoting conspiracies and feeding off the attention status, does this actually matter? Why does it matter if he promotes conspiracies? And why does it matter if he downplays the harm of someone like Alex Jones? All right, everybody, thanks for sticking with me so long. I got one final segment for you. And I'm super, super honored because joining me for this last segment is the co-host of the Decoding Guru's podcast, Matt Brown. Okay, for those of you who are unfamiliar, Decoding Guru's, if you enjoy this video, if you're interested in this video, if you enjoyed my last video about Jordan Peterson, you absolutely need to go check out Decoding Guru's. I keep trying to get these guys to come on YouTube and make the YouTube channel. I think they do very well. But anyways, they break down a bunch of different people that you would consider Guru's. Like they've, you know, done episodes on like Sam Harris. They did a very old episode on Russell Brand, but it was prior to a lot of this conspiricism. So Matt and I reclocked regularly on Twitter about, you know, Russell Brand and his antics. Nowadays, by the way, if you're not yet, follow me on Twitter at the Rewired Soul, love channel, follow me. Anyways, super glad that Matt took the time to come on here. I am in Las Vegas, Nevada. Matt is in Australia, and I basically just hit him up. I'm like, Matt, I got an idea. You want to hop on real play? Join me for this video, because I was really curious. I wanted to ask Matt, like, how big of a problem is this? This is something that I asked a lot of people when people are worried about something, whether it's like teaching critical race theory in schools, or talking about these people, these YouTubers who, you know, promote conspiracy theories, right? I'm like, how big of a deal is it? Do we have any evidence that this is actually affecting people? So I wanted to ask Matt, what is the worst case scenario? What's wrong with Russell Brand whitewashing Alex Jones? Now, quick disclaimer, okay? Not really a disclaimer, just quick note, I guess. And this is no fault of Matt. Like, it was like super early in the morning of Matt. Matt did me a huge favor. But there's a few times during this conversation where he says Joe Rogan when he meant Alex Jones. So when that happens, you will see this flash on the screen because he meant Alex Jones, but he said Joe Rogan. So I did a little bit of editing. All right. But anyways, here's my conversation with Matt. My main question is, you know, why, why do you think like just kind of whitewashing and kind of downplaying what Alex Jones does is an issue? You know what I mean? Because my concern is it sounds like the slippery slope, just like, oh, this will lead to this. And then this goes here. And people like, no, no, no, no, no. He's just right every now and then. That's all I'm saying. Like, why is this kind of a bigger, a bigger issue? Yeah, I guess I could frame it in terms of this, like a lowering of standards, like a lowering of expectations about what a public commentator, a public intellectual it should be doing and is okay for them to be doing. I think a lot of these people have been so obsessed by the idea of free speech that any kind of pushback to any kind of communication is, you know, any kind of chilling effects that might arise from that is such a terrible thing that they hold up someone like Alex Jones as they defend him reflexively as an example of, well, you know, we need to defend everything, right? Nobody should ever be silenced under any circumstances whatsoever. Nobody should be deplatformed. And I think it's quite dangerous because it's a lazy form of free speecharism where the freer the speech is, the better it is. And they think the implicit assumption here is that there's some sort of orthodoxy, some kind of guide rails on mainstream discourse where someone like Alex Jones is offering some important insight, something useful that the rest of us aren't allowed to talk about or don't feel comfortable talking about. And it's easy to forget that Alex Jones talks about like liberal cities being populated by literal demons that he, you know, sicked on like his hordes of conspiracy theories to actually harass the parents of dead children. And that wasn't an isolated mistake. So his mistakes are not isolated incidents, like Alex Jones is all about that all the time. And yeah, so when more mainstream characters like like Joe Rogan portray him as just a bit of entertainment, just a bit of a fun, maybe a source of some fresh new ideas. That's a total misrepresentation of what Joe Rogan is. Like Joe Rogan is in truth, you know, a hateful person, a far right religious fundamentalist. Joe Rogan or Alex Joe? Sorry, Alex, sorry, Alex Jones. I'm not a huge fan of Joe. And, you know, like recently we've seen people like Russell Brandt who, you know, formerly in his career was a pretty normal, you know, charismatic media personality in the UK sphere, you know, he goes on conventional comedy shows and things like that as an entertainer. But Russell Brandt has found out that by taking his shtick of having this crazy wisdom and taking it to the nth degree in terms of conspiracism and being so skeptical of all orthodoxies, all institutions and, you know, the system in just gesticulating wildly, you know, he's quite happy to defend Joe Rogan as well and really pretty much whitewash him as if he's speaking truth to power or something like that. Yeah, you know, let me ask you this one thing, like, you know, because you guys talk a lot about, you know, psychology and whatnot. When I see someone like Russell Brandt defend Alex Jones or kind of be like, hey, he's been right about a couple of things like Alex Jones over the years has made thousands of episodes. He in each one he has x amount of conspiracy theories, right? So he's obviously going to have a few hits every now and then. And, you know, I was actually just talking with my son about this, right? And you got to look at the bigger, the bigger numbers, right? Alex Jones is spitting out tens of thousands of conspiracy. If he lands on two, how do you think it is that people like Russell Brandt or Joe Rogan are saying, see, he was right a couple of times, you know, like, what is that with him brains that makes us think that that is evidence of anything or someone's ability to know what's actually going on? Yeah, it's just sloppy thinking, I think I don't have a term for it. But obviously, you know, a stopped clock is right and all that. It's not very, you know, just being right a couple of times every thousand wild claims you make is not helpful. You're right purely by chance. And as Chris Kavanaugh has pointed out, a lot of the things that they hold up that Alex Jones was right about, Alex Jones actually wasn't talking about them until they already, till that topic was already in the media. Well, yeah. And then Alex Jones himself will quite happily claim that, oh, I've been talking about this since whatever. But actually, he wasn't. People have gone back and checked. And for instance, he wasn't talking about Oh, who was the guy committed suicide in the jail? Because it was a no, he's Edstein, you know, topics like that. He actually wasn't talking about that, you know, except maybe in the most general terms about all these Democrats are all sex traffickers and doing their evil rituals, whatever. Like if you say all that stuff, this vague general just, you know, evil stuff is happening everywhere, then you can't point to a very specific instance and say, Oh, I was talking about that. Actually, Alex Jones tends to latch onto them after they become a big deal in the discourse. That's interesting. Let me let me just add to this one last thing. So should I specialize in gurus? Because mine, my main concern is the audience who's listening, who's finding these people like Russell Brand. And when we're talking to the context of kind of whitewashing Alex Jones. Have you have you seen or heard from anybody doing your episodes of how somebody got sucked in by a guru, you know, and it kind of like led them down rabbit holes and things like that. And even, you know, your podcast might have helped them like start seeing these guys in a different light, because I'm always like, how big of a deal is it? You know what I mean? But obviously, with Russell Brand constantly talking about Davos and, you know, the vaccines, my concern is how many people have been actually convinced not to get vaccinated. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's difficult to put numbers on it. Isn't it? Like they have these big audiences, they have big viewer numbers. They have a lot of people donating to patrons and things like that, sub stacks. But it's hard. It's always hard to say for for sure how many people are being influenced. We have, it's just anecdotal, but we have received quite a few emails, very nice ones from people who said that they really had gone down these rabbit holes and gotten progressively more and more, you know, worried about, you know, the globalists and, and, you know, all of the stuff that the gurus talk about. And then, you know, it was nice to hear that sometimes, you know, just by listening to our show, it just kind of punctured, punctured the balloon. And, and, and all of that hot air kind of came out and they just, it just gave them a chance to step back and have a bit of a reality check. And, and they could still often say to themselves, hey, I, I read Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life and, and it was helpful to me at the time. But I don't feel any need to go along with the rest of this stuff. Yeah. Beautiful. I'll cut it right there. But yeah, no, that, that, that's perfect. And, and yeah, man, like, that's the thing too. Like I don't, I think it's hard for people to separate those things. Right. Like Russell Brand, I loved his, his recovery stuff, but now it's time to separate who he is now from that. Like I still think a lot of benefits. And I talked a little bit about it in this video, but even, even Jordan Peterson, like you said, he just talked with self-help and he, and he would stop talking about climate change for some reason and like, what are you doing? All right. So you know how we do now. We need to talk about the solution. So one of the things that I wish I left that freaking thing recording, because right after we stopped recording, Matt and I started discussing epistemic trust, right? So we are inundated with so much information these days. We're constantly, you know, just on social media, the news is constantly coming out at us. You live for not on social media, like, I don't know about you, but I have friends texting me about breaking news. And did you see this? Did you see that? And it's not just, you know, national news. It's global news. And I have my local Las Vegas friends, their types of news. So we get so much information. How are we supposed to filter through all of it? So something Matt and I were discussing, and he brought up a great point is that we're trying to simplify this thing. We're trying to find people who can be our trusted source. We find somebody who sounds like they're telling the truth. They sound like they align with our beliefs. They sound like an honorable person. And that's kind of our shortcut. And we just trust them. But it's not that simple. So a few things. And this is what I personally do. It's what I'm teaching my son. That's what I talk to others about when they ask me about like how to find good sources. So a few things. First one is ask yourself, who is this person? Give me the information. Are they an expert in their field? All right. So in the, in the context of Russell Brand, you've seen all the things that Russell Brand talks about. Okay. Davos, the great reset, vaccines, lockdowns, all these other things. Russell Brand is an actor and comedian. All right. We have to look at other sources. But when it comes to even COVID specifically, we have to look because you know, something that kind of sucks is that even people with credentials are human. And some of them are also playing the status game. Some of them are, you know, I, I don't like to put nefarious reasoning behind why people do what they're doing. But, you know, some of them are putting out bad information as well. So first off, we got to make sure it's an expert. Second off, we got to make sure it's an expert that we can trust. The best way to do that is to say, okay, what is the scientific community believe as a whole? Because one of the best things that I ever learned is like, yo, it is 2022. We are long past the days when there's some like lone scientists just in their basement, and they're about to make the biggest scientific breakthrough of the century. That's not how things work anymore. There are scientists all over the world working together. There's not somebody who's just going to figure something out. Okay. So when the majority of scientists believe something, trust that there was a fastest behind it. And there are plenty of books that can kind of teach you how that process goes. That really helped me understand what's going on. Okay. But lastly, fact check information, look into it. One thing that I personally do to avoid confirmation bias is when I noticed something that's just really agreeing with what I already believed, that's a red flag in my head. I'm like, okay, who's saying this? What is the best argument against it? Because like we were talking about earlier, the Google algorithms do you no favors at all. All right, you have to go and actively search counter information. You have to look up the best arguments. And sometimes Google is terrible at this. So sometimes you have to go to a different search engine, like duck dot go. But I have found a lot of people who are experts in different areas. And I follow them on Twitter, and I will tag them, or I will message them. I say, Hey, I heard this or I saw this article. What do you think about it? Okay, so I'd like to check with people because they are more than happy to tell me if it's wrong. All right, but in the case of Russell brand, like, listen, I get it. When it comes to being addicted to status, like, I guess I empathize to a certain degree, because a lot of you are new to my YouTube channel, but there was a time when this channel was blowing up and I got hooked on it too. And, you know, it kind of led to some bad things. And I've had to learn a lot from it. But in the, in the case of Russell brand, it's, it's something that, you know, I think everybody is susceptible to. But I think we addicts is something that, you know, I don't, I don't know. It's almost like what happens when we drink alcohol, like a lot of regular people, they can abuse it, but we become hooked on it. And it's just really disheartening, like I said, because I don't know how many recovering addicts have been sucked in by this conspiratorial videos, you know, when they originally came there for, you know, content that was giving them courage and hope. And, you know, just, just thinking of a better future, you know what I mean. So I hope at some point he snaps out of it. Because like I said, the dude has all the money and the fame in the world. I don't know why he's chasing these subscribers. But anyways, that's all I got for you. Before I let you go, make sure you check down in the description. I have linked Matt's Twitter. Make sure you go follow him. Make sure you check out the Decoding Guru, Decoding Guru's episodes over on their podcast. They have so many, when I discovered them, I was so late to the party, I sort of binge watching them. So make sure you check it out. They have some really cool episodes coming out really soon. Also, all of the books that I've mentioned in this episode are down in the description below. So if you want to check out any of those, like Will Storz, The Status Game. Also, he was on the podcast. So if you want to go check that episode out, the Rewired Soul podcast, take a look. I think I actually uploaded that episode on the YouTube channel. If I did, we'll be uploaded some hero beyond a little card. All right, but I've also linked, you know, theory of the leisure class, the sum of small things. By the way, I can't tell you, I read the sum of small things recently. Again, one of my favorites. Love it. Love it. Love it so much. Explain so much of what's going on. But also lastly, like I said, Russell Brand was probably the high tone too. When I, you know, I was in early recovery, I'm struggling with my mental health. He said a lot of good stuff. But anyways, now something that I do to maintain my mental health, along with all of the other things I do, right, is therapy. So if you're interested in that, down in the description below, there is also an affiliate link for better help on my therapy. It's a service that I've personally used. You work with a licensed therapist from your state. It's affordable. It's super convenient because you could do it anyway. They should do sessions on my lunch break just in my car. Anyways, check out that affiliate link for better help on my therapy. A little bit comes back to help support the channel of what I'm doing and you get some dope therapy. All right. But anyways, thanks so much for watching. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you're new, make sure you subscribe. Share this video if you thought it was good and I will see you next time. The next video, some of you were waiting for a sandbam video. I'll get that out as soon as possible. It's already written now. All right. Have a good one.