 Hey, May 40 here. So here's the goal for my life, for this show. I want to optimize the truth, right? Not in all circumstances, obviously, in my life. My woman says, do I look fat in this dress? I'm not going to optimize the truth. Whoa, in all sorts of social situations, it's not appropriate to optimize the truth. But in this situation where I'm just sharing my views of what's going on in the world, then I want to optimize the truth. That's not where the money is. That's not where the fame is. That's not where the status is. That's not where you get a large following, generally speaking. You don't get it by optimizing the truth. You get it by optimizing for being interesting. And there are values that are more important to me than being interesting. And I want to tell the truth. And I want to offer some thoughts. But I don't want to get so invested in my opinions that I put my opinions above what is true, right? For me, I'd like to think what I'm doing right now by a highest value is true, above what I'm shooting for. So I don't want to get so attached to any perspective, any hot take that I'm offering that I put that over and above the power of truth. So I have thoughts of the Russell brand rape allegations because I was out there, all right? I was highly promiscuous for a couple of years of my life and moderately promiscuous for another 15 years. So I was highly promiscuous between ages 27 to 30. I slept with about 40 women in my life. Then I was serially monogamous pretty much from about 1998 until about 2010 or so. But I think there are some harsh truths in many different directions. And I don't want to be like siding with the Russell brand. I don't want to be siding against Russell brand. You may notice I don't make a whole lot of allies online. That's not something that's important to me. So I guess the normal thing is you stand up for your friends. So Russell brand's friends are standing up for it, all right? They're going to bat for him against these allegations. But someone comes on here and makes allegations about some member of the show or some member of the chat. I'm not going to be going to bat saying, oh, that does not sound like the Elliot Blatt that I know. Oh, that does not sound like the glib medley I know. Or oh, that does not sound like the do that I know. I mean, people hit me up on Twitter and it's like, what's the story with do that? Is he really Jewish? And it's like, yeah, he's really Jewish, but I don't want to talk about do that. I don't want to talk about Ricardo. I don't want to talk about individuals because people are incredibly complicated. So please, for the love of all that is good and true and holy that never try to convince anyone that I'm a good person. There are certain situations where I behave honorably. There are other situations where I behave dishonorably. So you give me the possibility of attention from pretty young women. And God forbid who I will ride rough shot over. God forbid who I will become. God forbid how I will twist and turn and shape myself to try to extract the maximum of attention from pretty young women. Like God forbid what I will become like or just like attention in general. And it is so tempting to me to try to manipulate situations and people and myself to try to extract the absolute maximum of attention from a given social interaction. So that attention seeking side of myself is just like a millimeter beneath the surface. I remember I worked next to a guy who was a genius, like he had all sorts of prestigious degrees from prestigious universities. He earned over a million dollars a year. Astronomical IQ north of 160. And I couldn't stop talking to this guy when I should have been doing my job. I was pestering him in his office for his opinions on all sorts of different things. The chat says great minds talk about ideas, mediocre minds talk about people. Now I enjoy talking about people. I don't enjoy trying to summarize someone and say, oh, this is a good person. All right, yeah, I cannot be counted on. All right, I can be counted on in some situations. All right, I'm not going to steal from you. If I borrow a book or borrow a car or sleep in a spare room in your place, I'm not going to leave these things worse than when I found them. I'm not going to steal money from you. I can be counted on in those areas. But in the sexual arena, it's incredibly complicated. I remember this woman, God forbid, I met her in Orthodox synagogue. She was a quasi-Orthodox Jew, but quite an eccentric character. She was both highly promiscuous and also quite proud of her ability to solicit lascivious commands from prestigious rabbis. And then she would spread the dirt about these rabbis all around. And she had a lot of bi-tendencies. And for whatever reason, she adored me. And we had, to the best of my knowledge, only positive interactions, but they were complicated interactions. They were sexual interactions that are usually short of intercourse. But there was one time that I was engaged in sexual intercourse with this woman. And she said, stop. And you know how hard it is to stop and pull out and stop engaging in sexual intercourse? It was very difficult, but I did it, all right? I did it. I stopped when women have told me, I think maybe two or three other times in my life, three or four, five other times in my life in the middle of sexual intercourse women have told me stop. I have stopped, but God, it is hard. Now, sex outside of marriage and sex outside of some committed exclusive relationship frequently tends to have a sporting aspect to it. And it frequently tends to be a lot rougher than what I imagined marital sex is like. And people often get hurt emotionally and physically. So I'm not coming down on one side of the Russell Brand allegations, but I remember one girl talked about how she got a sore throat from being on the receiving end of oral sex from Russell Brand. Well, I had known women who were, I'll try to use discrete language here. Let's just call them professional sword swallowers. But then they perhaps retired from that or they engaged in, say, some sword swallowing recreationally and when they were ticked off with the bloke, they would complain that he had given them a sore throat from his vigorous thrusting, but these things are complicated. Like pretty much all sex contains an element of violence and sex also usually contains emotional vulnerability and pretty much all relationships have elements of normal relationship sadism to it. All right? So the man will be careless about often spilling food or drink or inconsiderate about her feelings or inconsiderate about tidying up after himself, even though he knows it drives his woman crazy. Women will frequently deliberately do things to infuriate their man. They will spend his money recklessly. They will invite people over who they know he hates. They will deliberately sabotage some of his professional opportunities, relationships because they feel threatened when he becomes too successful. When he's on the verge of becoming a success, they fear that he's going to leave him so they will sabotage his potential success. They will leak damaging information about him. They will be deliberately late even though they know that infuriates him and damages him, right? They will embarrass him deliberately socially, right? These are all things that have pretty much happened to me and I'm not claiming by any means that I'm an innocent party. I have been callous and disregarding of her feelings. I have been sloppy in putting away my clothes or tidying up after myself or paying attention to her needs. So in all relationships, people are deliberately normally doing things to hurt each other. It's normal, marital sadism. Now, you punch someone so that you leave bruises or, God forbid, you draw blood or you break a bone, right? That is not normal relationship sadism, right? That's above and beyond. That's more serious. Probably half a dozen times in my life I've gone out with a woman who's punched me. That's really dangerous. I've never punched back. But that's really dangerous. Someone punches you. There is a male reflex to punch back. Now, I don't know to what extent these women accusing Russell Brand of rape are taking any responsibility for their own choices, but I do know that the 16-year-old, the woman who started out a sexual relationship with Russell Brand at 16, which is the official legal age of consent in Great Britain, but she says her taxi driver, when he was driving her over to Russell Brand's place, when she was 16 and she went there counting on having sex with this famous celebrity, right? The taxi driver fled with her. Don't go in there, don't do it, right? I would expect all sorts of people fled with these women to not engage in recreational sporting sex with Russell Brand, yet they did it anyway. I don't know, tell me, are they taking any responsibility for putting themselves in these dangerous situations? If these women did not have anyone who was pleading with them to not engage in recreational sporting sex with Russell Brand, that tells you a great deal about them. Why don't they have anybody in their life who actually cares about them? Why have they led such a life that they don't have anyone close to them who cares about them, who they could turn to for advice, whom they look for guidance? Here's, now I've reported all sides of this issue, but I've probably done far more reporting on the side of women who accuse famous men, particularly rabbis, of sexually taking advantage of them. And one of the most common things that these women say is he was just so charismatic, right? He was just so powerful with his aura. He just had such an elevated social position that I just couldn't say no to him, but I was just helpless in the face of his charm. I was helpless in the face of his charisma, but I just couldn't say no. And that's incredibly scary. That, I think, may well be more frightening than rape allegations, because you've got adult women who say that they are unable to live up to the demands of moral agency. They are unable to take responsibility for their choices. You would think that such women must have some adult male, preferably a family member or a relative who will take responsibility for their choices, as she will not take responsibility for her choices. And they'll say things like, try to understand he's a magic man, and they just assume that gets them off the hook. So let's say I tell you in my work experience about people who've been completely disruptive and damaging and just wreaking havoc and will take zero zip, zero zilch, no responsibility whatsoever for their choices, none. All right, would you expect that the odds are 50-50 that these damaging, disruptive, dislocating, destructive people are male or female? In my life experience, women are about half as likely as men to take responsibility for their actions, for their words, for their choices. Somewhere between half as likely and say 20% as likely. I mean, that's my life experience. I'm open to being corrected, but again and again and again, I have had the experience in life of adult women just unwilling to take any responsibility for their words, for their choices. I frequently see women speak to men in a way that if a man spoke to a man that way, he'd get his face smashed in. But thank God, most women have not had the experience of being punched in the face, so they are much less responsible in their choices in life. Almost all men have had the experience of being punched in the face, and this I find encourages taking responsibility and being aware of the consequences of your words and actions. So I know various women who would get into bed naked with men and then be shocked, shocked when these men that they knew that they had some kind of ongoing relationship with were dating, and then these men would force sexual intercourse on them and they were shocked and it would happen repeatedly with the same guy, right? He raped me here and he raped me here and I broke up with him and so I went over to his place to return his stuff and he raped me again, right? These are stories I hear, right? So if what I'm saying has some truth to it, then you can understand why many people on the traditional end of the spectrum do not regard women as possessing the same level of moral agency and moral responsibility as men, not because they are inherently less valuable that they are less made in the image of God, they are even less good, but for thousands of years, men have dominated women because men are so much more physically strong and women have not had to take responsibility because usually there's a male family member a male relative or a member of their tribe who takes responsibility for their choices. So women having freedom of choice in how they conduct their adult lives is relatively new development. And so it shouldn't be surprising if it is indeed true that women are less likely to take responsibility and less likely to live up to the demands of moral agency as compared to men. So you can understand why many people on the traditional end of the spectrum do not expect moral agency from women. So there's a terrific David Databock, the way of the superior man. He makes the point, you should not expect women to take responsibility for their choices. You don't want women who will take responsibility for their choices because they will not be feminine. You want a feminine woman and the more feminine the woman, the less likely she is to take responsibility for her choices. That's David Databock, that's his argument in the way of the superior man. I know this argument drives a ton of men, bonkers just makes them furious. But I think the reason that they are so furious is because it has the ring of truth. So if you're a trad and you don't regard women as they're possessing moral agency akin to the way that men do, how then do you regard women? You regard women then as a natural resource akin to flora and fauna, a natural resource that you wanna provide for, that you wanna protect, that you wanna guide. And so that is a very common way of thinking on the traditional end of the spectrum because we see as a result of sexual revolution, all sorts of women have gone out there and had sex that they then regret and then frequently call it rape, right? Sex that they regret that they can send it to the time but then later they call rape and I'm not saying that this is true with the latest Russell Brand allegations. I'm not supporting Russell Brand. I'm not supporting the women. I just wanna follow the truth wherever it leads. I would not be shocked if there's a long unethical track record that Russell Brand has demonstrated in his relationships with women. Now, I entered a 12-step love addiction, sex addiction program myself in 2011. I do not have a proud track record in this degree. Basically between 27 and about age 30, I basically tried to have all the legal sex that I could convince myself was moral and was upstanding. It was nothing to be ashamed of. It was nothing that was damaging but I just tried to get with a lot of women and frequently I was uncouth, I was unsavory. I was anti-social. I did not conduct myself in a very upstanding manner and I heard secondhand that I even made one woman cry because I was just so assertive in the way I... Apparently I cornered her in the kitchen at a Shabbat dinner and tried to make a move on her. Oof. All right, let me catch my breath play a little decoding the gurus. He's become, in recent years, more relevant to us because in the, I think it was the 2013 or thereabouts election, where he was interviewed by a political journalist who's quite famous in the UK called Jeremy Paxman and he strongly urged people not to vote. So he gave this impassioned call for people not to vote and that led to him becoming a popular figure covered in the run-up to that election and they eventually endorsed the left-wing Labour Party but that was like a couple of days before the election. Anyway, he then subsequently went through a bunch of protests and wrote a book called Revolution in which he outlined his political vision, such as it exists. And that was the situation a couple of years ago and then more recently he's essentially stepped back a little bit from commenting directly on politics, although he still does, but he's more now focused on advocating for a spiritual revolution and yeah, and promoting spiritual and mental wellness. So a bit into the J.P. Sears. J.P. Sears, Sear. Yeah, yeah, in listening to him, he really did strike me as someone who sort of sits halfway between J.P. Sears and Jordan Peterson, actually, because he's got the same kind of, you know, scattergun stream of consciousness approach. Yeah, yeah, I think that's actually probably a really neat description of where he fits like in between because he is, as we'll see, he's a comedian and I think a better comedian than J.P. Sears. And but he has a lot of the Peterson like stream of conscious and making references to world religions or literature or psychological theory. So there's definitely a lot of overlap in those two kind of groups of gurus that he's in the middle of the Venn diagram of. Yeah, look, he's definitely quite well read like Jordan Peterson and is able to kind of cite a bunch of stuff through his streams of consciousness. Yeah, so, okay, maybe a good clue. Okay, so this Decoding the Gurus episode is from the 21st of November, 2020. Just to start would be the Paxman, the famous Paxman interview to see the political position he was advocating a number of years ago and then we can go and have a look at the more recent material and how his positions have changed or not. And I should probably say that the main talk that we're looking at this week is this interview with a kind of vegan health guru called Rich Roll who is interviewing Russell Brandt on his podcast. But we also looked at this short clip that he had on YouTube about who he's voting for in the UK election just happened a couple of years back. So we're giving an update on his political views. Okay, so, but before we get to the more recent stuff here is him laying out his view about voting and politics in 2013. Well, you say that, Jeremy. You can't even be asked to vote. It's quite a narrow prescriptive parameter that changes within the... In the democracy, that's how it works. Well, I don't think it's working very well, Jeremy, given that the planet is being destroyed given that there is economic disparity of a huge degree. What you're saying, there's no alternative. There's no alternative. I'm saying if you can't be asked to vote why should we be asked to listen to your political point of view? You don't have to listen to my political point of view but I'm not voting out of apathy. I'm not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies, treachery, deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations now and which has now reached fever pitch where we have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that have not been represented. OK, so Russell Brand has a way with words. I find it kind of icky even discussing him or discussing Andrew Tate because what they both say is just so consistently stupid and just so distasteful that it's just kind of a dirty thing to even dive into these guys. Well, Russell Brand will be tarnished by these allegations. I suspect there are far worse things that are still to come. And I don't think people on the right are covering themselves in glory by going to bat for Russell Brand. This man, British comedian Russell Brand who you probably recognize. You may know him from his stand-up career for roles in several Hollywood films. He's undoubtedly a very charismatic performer. And recently he's taken a sort of interesting career turn. He's become a... OK, so all these women who say that they just can't resist a man who's charismatic. I mean, they are more scary than alleged rapists like Russell Brand, right? If you are unwilling to take responsibility for your adult choices as an adult, right? That's frightening, right? You should legally have to appoint a guardian at Lydum who makes all important decisions for you. I'm a popular, very popular podcaster. He builds himself as kind of a wellness guru but actually promotes a lot... Well, he talks about being in recovery for sex addiction. So a lot of these famous figures who get into trouble for the way they've treated women, they have entered 12-step programs for sex addiction. Now, when you enter a 12-step program and you admit that you are powerless, that doesn't mean that you are then off the hook for everything you have done. That's simply an approach that allows you to come to terms with the enormity of the damage that you have wreaked without hating yourself, without wanting to destroy and obliterate yourself. So as you come to terms with the damage that you've wreaked, then by accepting that you didn't choose to be a sex addict, you then have the inner ability to manage your life and to start making amends for the damage that you've done. If you hate yourself for all the horrible things that you've done, it's a lot harder to turn your life around. So it was just so much easier for me to accept, hey, I didn't choose to be a sex addict. I didn't choose to be a debtor, an underowner, a codependent, all these other emotional addictions, which I believe that I possess. And that then enabled me to increasingly face up to enormity of the damage that I've wreaked over the course of my life and to begin to try to clean it up and to lead a more honorable life going forward. Right, I accept that I didn't deliberately choose to be an addict, but I accept that as I tried to do the best that I could at the time with the tools that I had my availability and for many years, I would try to deal with my anxiety through the pursuit of promiscuous sex. As I was trying to do the best I could to meet my needs with the tools that I had at my available, I caused harm to other people and then I have responsibilities to try to ameliorate that harm. And as early by coming to terms with the extent of harm that I've made and making good faith effort to ameliorate the damage that I've caused that I can then become free of my disabling addictions. A lot of bogus ideas about everything from vaccines to climate change. And his whole shtick is part of this booming, enormous corner of the internet, I wouldn't even call it a corner anymore, occupied by people, audiences of people who are skeptical about institutions in general, often with very good reason, the government and big pharma or globalists as they call them. And the appeal of Russell Brand's particular shtick, although again, a lot of other people are sort of in this game, is a fundamental issue of... Okay, so after the sexual revolution, men welcomed it and it was like, hey, let's go, remember all the tales of promiscuity on college campuses from the 1980s, 1990s? That could not go on forever because that was definitely against female interest. Now, the way that females have fought back is by all these allegations, which can destroy a man's career. But the upshot, however unfair these allegations may be, the upshot is incredibly damaging and dangerous for a man's well-being and for a woman's well-being to engage in promiscuous sex. And so all these allegations, all these abilities that women display to destroy people's lives, often for what appears to be consensual sexual relations, that is fixing a problem that women are simply not cut out for recreational sex and the sexual revolution, as we have known it since the 1960s, whereas AOK for men to try to have any sexual partners as they could legally get away with was really bad for women and for society and you can make a case for men too. So we may not appreciate the means by which society and women are fighting back against what is male sexual nature, which is in its essence predatory. That is the basic testosterone of pure drive by men try to get it off with as many women as possible. That's bad for society and bad for women. So all these accusations of rape and bringing men up before tribunals where often on college campuses, they don't get to face their accusers. Yeah, completely on the face of it, completely unfair. And I appreciate the Trump administration's changing of the rules with regard to campus rape accusations. And I don't agree with the Biden administration's changing back to the Obama approach where men did not have to face there, did not have the opportunity to face their accusers. But still, the upshot is it's dangerous and bad for society and for women and for men to have a hedonistic promiscuous culture where, hey, just all the sex partners that you can get to consent, then just go for it. Well, that's very likely to be bad for you, for them or for society. So it's understandable that society will push back with the Me Too movement. So many of the Me Too movement accusations are absolutely legitimate, valid, glad to see the bad guys punished, humiliated and in some cases put away. Many of the Me Too accusations seem bogus. But the upshot is there's now a much bigger price to pay for promiscuous sex for men. And that's probably a good thing for men, for women and for society, even though the means by which we get to this place where it's increasingly dangerous to engage in a promiscuous sexual lifestyle, the means by which we get here with many dubious Me Too accusations, these means are not thrilling me, but the upshot is probably a good thing. Trust, right? You've got a lot of people out there across the world, different countries, the UK here, a lot of places. You have people who are distrustful of traditional sources of knowledge or authority. Would these allegations against Russell Brand be getting the traction they are receiving if Russell's message was more consistent with the dominant narratives? Well, yes, and the answer is easy and clear because so many male feminists in the media, like Harvey Weinstein identified as a male feminist. He was a big Hillary Clinton supporter, almost all the major Me Too men who were caught out in the news media and the entertainment industry were on the left, right? Who were quite congenial with society's dominant narratives and yet they were destroyed. Me Too is just a tactic to take out an inconvenient personality. No, sometimes it's a tactic, but almost always there is a reality there. Harvey Weinstein behaved abominably. A lot of these men behaved abominably and women were too scared to confront them. People were too scared to confront men behaving badly. Now, the woman does not go to the police with a rape accusation soon after the putative rape took place. Yes, she does lose considerable credibility, but that does not mean she's lying. It may mean that she's lying. Definitely means that she has less credibility than if she'd gone to the police directly. But I note for taking a partisan male or female approach to this, I'm not for taking a partisan pro Me Too or against Me Too pro Russell Brand or against Russell Brand. Let's be open to truth from any source. And then figures like Russell Brand or Donald Trump using that distrust to their advantage. And they tell their audience, you're right. All those other people are lying to you. They can't be trusted. They're corrupt, rigged. I am the one to tell you the truth. I'm the only one to tell you the truth. I am the only one you can trust. It's me, and that's it. They cultivate that distrust to remove any connection their audience has to other sources of information. That could be the so-called mainstream media or the establishment of the... Right, it's called epistemic sabotage, and he's right. The right-wing, pundit, live streamer, radio talk show host, Griff, is to try to disparage other sources of information, set yourself up and your team up as the ultimate dispensers of truth, and much of the time, this is bogus. Just as mainstream media also often tries to set themselves up as the ultimate dispensers of truth, but they're not. The news is not a good way to try to get to the truth about what's happening in the world. News is a commercial medium where they have to grab your attention and you don't grab people's attention by being fair and judicious. You grab people's attention by being meretricious, by being showy, by giving them things that feel good. Just like right-wing talk radio, it gives you the sense, the feeling of profundity. And mainstream news gives you the sense that they are giving you breaking news. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Right, they have various jingles for breaking news. And this is breaking, right? And almost always it's a very low level of importance. So yeah, the mainstream media is not a good source for what is important and for the deepest truths in life. But neither is right-wing talk radio, neither are right-wing live streamers, all right? To the extent that I can contribute something here, it's by not being terribly wedded to any of my opinions, any of my hot tags being open to truth as it develops and offering some useful principles, some useful heuristics, right? Rough approximations of what's likely going on in the world. The deep state or whatever derogatory term they come up with next, the bureaucrats of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. The result of this process, it's playing out day by day in front of us is... I mean, he's absolutely right. The conservatism is largely a con. I mean, look at what happens if you sign up to any major conservative website or right-wing pundit, all right? You just get flooded with the most dubious, stupid, you know, offers for supplements and all sorts of just completely bogus products. So he's right. Much of conservatism is a con. It's a con game. It's a grift. Huge groups of citizens. I mean, millions and millions of people who are so deeply entrenched in this trust, they're essentially unreachable from those traditional sources of authority. They are trapped in this bubble of skepticism and conspiracy theories, and there's no obvious way to pierce it. We've seen this happen with the Trump faction in American politics. We talked about it a lot with regards to the cult of Fox News. Convincing you the viewers, they're the only real news source to trust, right? Their whole marketing thing is those... All right, Fox isn't convincing people by pulling the wool over their eyes. People who are not left-wing are looking for a source of news and entertainment, right? And Fox is basically it. So Fox is giving a substantial portion in the American public what it wants, right? It's not that Fox is manipulating people. Fox is just giving people what they want. We weren't born yesterday, right? That's one of the most useful insights I've read in the last few years, that book, not born yesterday, we did not evolve to be gullible. People choose Luke Ford or, you know, they chose Rush Limbaugh or Dennis Prager or Tucker Carlson or Fox News because it gives something that's congenial to them. Those other folks lie to you, we tell you the truth. And then when they had the viewers, right? In the palm of their hand, spreading lies about... And Elliot Blass says, whose audience is larger, Chris Hayes or Russell Brands? I'm not sure, but there's absolutely no connection between size of audience and the quality of what's being produced. But there's absolutely no connection between size of audience and telling the truth. There's no connection between size of audience and profundity. There's no connection between size of audience and doing good versus doing harm. About fraud after the 2020 election, for which they had to pay like $900 million. And Elliot says MSNBC is wholly dependent on advertising for a big pharma, which GRIFT is more pernicious. Number one, it's not at all clear that MSNBC is any more dependent on big pharma than Fox, right? Number two, they have a lot of other advertisers, far more than big pharma. Three, they also get fees from cable systems that carry them. So big pharma probably accounts for maybe 5%, 10% of their income. Now, does big pharma overall do more harm than good? Absolutely not. I think it's very clear that big pharma does far more good than harm. So if you wanna take like a segment of American capitalism to denigrate, right? I think big pharma overall does more good than harm, even though most antidepressants, most SSRIs are not effective. I mean, I think big pharma does more good than harm when compared to say chiropractic, right? Chiropractic does more harm than good. It's a much bigger con than big pharma. Give or take. Donald Trump uses the same dynamic to his own benefit all the time, right? And Glenn Medley says, I haven't watched more than 10 minutes of Tucker Carlson since he went from Fox to Twitter. Yeah, I guess maybe I've watched over 20 minutes of Tucker Carlson since then. Repeating wild allegations about his prosecutions. He knows his audience has been conditioned to believe them. This one is part of his regular stump speech now. Right, and viewers of MSNBC are conditioned as seeking out a left-wing perspective that makes them feel good. And there's no big difference here between Fox and MSNBC, between Donald Trump and Joe Biden in this regard. They want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom. It's very simple. They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you. In the end, they're not after me, they're after me. Remember, the big day, the capital T day, it's because they were untrustworthy are mad at me for telling the truth about them. I like Crisay's. All right, I don't like him 100% of the time, but for a left-wing pundit, I find that he provides more value than any other left-wing pundit on cable TV news of which I'm aware. I'm mainly thinking about some of his tweets and some of his articles in The New Yorker. And we're seeing another example of this in the wake of these allegations against Russell Brown, allegations of rape, of sexual assault, allegations of abuse. The findings come from a joint investigation by three UK news outlets, The Sunday Times. I mean, honestly, just look at Russell Brand. I mean, you're surprised by any of these allegations. I mean, I'm not. I mean, they seem to have the ring of truth. I suspect that there's a lot, lot more bad behavior by Russell Brand that we don't know about yet. But do women take any responsibility for choosing these bad boys? Russell Brand did not kidnap any of these women. He did not, to the best of my knowledge, point a gun at them, right? They all chose to play with Russell Brand, right? They burned the call and now they have to pay the toll. The Times and Channel 4 dispatches. They spoke with four women who have alleged sexual assaults between 2006 and 2013, including one who is just 16 years old when she says Brand began a relationship with her that was the age of consent in the UK at the time, I should note. She recounts how he would send a car to her school to take her out of lessons to his home. But he didn't do this at the point of a gun, right? This is what she chose. That's the legal age of consent. I didn't see a huge difference between a legal age of consent of 16 or 18, like I couldn't get upset either way about whichever age of consent that a society wants to choose. From a Jewish perspective, you are responsible for your choices after the age of Bar Mitzvah, which is 13. Now, when given a chance to reply to these allegations, Brand's lawyers told those news outlets that their client believes there is a, quote, deeply concerning agenda all this, namely the fact that he is an alternative media broadcaster competing with... Right, the number of times that the Me Too movement has gone after left-wing male feminists, right? People on the left who are big in the news media and big in the entertainment industry who echo dominant mainstream media narratives, right? This is just a completely bogus line of argument by Russell Brand. And anyone who buys into it is just absolutely desperate and removed from reality that someone just absolutely attached to a victimhood mentality. It's like a substantial part of my audience believes that we in the United States right now are living under communism. A substantial part of my audience believes that there's no substantial difference in the freedom allowed in the United States and what's allowed in North Korea and China. And that is bizarre, but a substantial part of my audience, this is not a judgment on them, this is just a description or absolute losers, right? Underowners, people living in the cave, people unable to form and sustain healthy relationships with friends, family, community, build a career. And they don't wanna take responsibility for their own poor choices. They don't wanna face up to the fact that they are failing in life. It's much easier to say, oh, it's this communist system that we live under. And the Communist is just trying to take Russell Brand because he's exposing the communism that is subverting our vital bodily fluids. I think with the mainstream media and then Brand himself released a video statement saying his relationships were, quote, always conceptual that he absolutely refutes the allegation. Okay, when you have hundreds of sexual relationships, I mean, these things from my own burst of promiscuity, these things get incredibly complicated. I mean, there was a period in my life where I was frequently appearing on TV and I thought there was nothing more exciting than for women to hit me up and I'd go meet them and to see what would be the shortest period of time between meeting them and starting sex. And I think my experience was about an hour. No, old fashioned gentlemen, I talked to them for at least an hour and then we'd go off to the races, but these things get incredibly complicated. I mean, a woman can have consent one moment and then change consent the next moment. And very few men, once they are revved up and ready to go can hold back even though the woman has now changed her mind and particularly with the adulation that you get with the level of celebrity that people like Russell Brand have achieved, right? It would make sense that there'd be, you know, a lot of damaged women in their way. And he went on to allege there's a serious and concerted agenda to control these kinds of spaces that he occupies and accuses the mainstream media of a coordinated attack. Now, let me just say, I didn't report this story. We haven't confirmed it. I don't know whether these allegations are true. I can only consider the evidence presented in the published investigation and I would suggest people read it because it's pretty harrowing stuff. Okay, that's a very responsible position that Chris Hayes is taking. Aglyd Medley says dirt bags carry baggage. Some years later, the stuff spills over. Guess what? All of us have behaved like dirt bags at times. It's not like they're at dirt bags and good people, right? I don't generally find that perspective useful, though I'm sure it is useful at times, but all of us have behaved dishonorably, badly, cruelly, callously, viciously, vindictively, embarrassingly. All of us have behaved like dirt bags at times. Most of us don't have it splashed over the times of London. That said, I do find it difficult to believe that Russell Brand has been targeted because of his brave truth-telling on the war in Ukraine. Absolutely, I 100% agree with, I mean, this playing into the victimhood mentality that is rampant on the right is such a low IQ grip. It's incredibly appealing because everybody can make a substantial case of why they're victims. People on the left can do it, people on the right can do it. Right, I can do it, you can do it. Jews can do it, blacks can do it, Jays can do it, trans can do it. Latinos, white American Christians can do it. Everybody can make a substantial and convincing and powerful case why they're victims, right? All group identity depends upon a shared sense of victimhood. You cannot have a strong in-group identity be it Jewish, Christian, gay, capitalist, communist without a shared sense of victimhood. For his vaccine skepticism. And yet that line of defense is a very persuasive one, not just for his audience, but for the whole gamut of folks who are meshed in this lucrative, hermetically sealed, universal discourse. Okay, why is this so pervasive? Why is this so appealing? Because it meets a knee, right? Particularly if you're failing at life or your political party is not in the White House, right? If the world is not turning out as you wished, if reality is not as you wished, then it's so appealing to think there must be dark malevolent forces that are responsible for destroying the potential Eden that I could otherwise be living in. It's such a loser perspective on life, right? Rather than taking stock of, how is my own lack of consciousness holding me back? How's my own lack of consciousness about the effect of my words, the effect of my dress, the effect of my behavior, the effect of the quality of my work? Do I take my trash as the building, say, instructs and put it in a plastic bag and tie it up before putting it in the dumpster? Or do I just dump my trash in there so that then flies gather and bad smells gather and it causes harm to other people in the apartment building, right? Do I follow recommended laundry hours or do I just do my laundry any old time and I don't care about the effect of my choices on other people? Do I show up for my volunteer commitments, right? Do I show up for my 12-step commitments? Do I do the tasks that were assigned to me by my boss? Do I follow through with the commitments I made to a client? Do I follow through with commitments that I make to friends? Am I considerate of how my choices are affecting other people? Am I conducting myself with integrity? Am I trying to hide vast swathes of my life? These are very painful, challenging, disturbing, confronting questions and people would rather avoid them, rather just kind of sleepwalk through life and blame their problems on these dark outside sinister forces like the mainstream media conspiring to taking down a brave truth teller like Russell Brand. And that's what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a lot of people who are very distrust and disinformation and a lot of them, shocker, are expressing their solidarity with Russell Brand. Fired cable news host Tucker Carlson wrote, criticize the drug. Right, everyone who does what I do pretty much who's successful forms all sorts of alliances and they're then highly reluctant to criticize anyone in their online friend or alliance structure. I mean, that is the path for career success, and then you form common causes and you fight together. But you do that at the cost of truth. I believe that I am committed to optimizing for truth. If I optimize for truth, then I cannot form these type of alliances. I cannot betray my pursuit of truth to make convenient alliances with like-minded fellows who could benefit me personally and professionally. Companies, question the war in Ukraine and you can be pretty sure this is going to happen. Far-right conspiracy theorist Alec Jones echoed that claim, seeing the allegations suddenly appeared after Brand came out against the New World Order. And right-wing influencer, self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who you may know was recently charged with rape and human trafficking, called the allegations against Brand a, quote, matrix attack. Conservative pundit Ben Shapiro called the timing suspicious, saying that Brand was being targeted for political views. Even the owner of Axe, Elon Musk, declared his support writing, quote, that man is not evil. Okay, anyone who's just declaring support for Russell Brand, like all those folks just did, lacks integrity, right? They're not people who optimize for truth. It's like a perfect who's who list. It's exactly who you would think. It's exactly the people doing the... He's absolutely right. Right, this lefty is 100% correct here. And all those people on the right who are just getting public with their support for Russell Brand, they're just showing their lack of interest in the truth. Sometimes the lefties are right and the righties are wrong. This is one of them. The same thing. All of these people who are all just a single node and network away from Donald Trump function within the same ecosystem, that combines extreme skepticism, bordering on nihilism for institutions like the law or the media. Elephania says, when the matrix comes after 40, we will be there to support him lightly. Hey, did I support him lightly? Say, oh, this particular allegation doesn't seem to ring true, but this is a performance, all right? This is who I just necessarily really am in real life. You're just seeing a tiny segment of my life. I'm a complicated guy with a tremendous large number of vulnerabilities and there are also some situations that do not rebound to my credit if I happen to enter them. Like, to the extent that I can lead an honorable life is because I seek to avoid those situations where I make a total ass of myself. With just total gullibility towards the supposed anti-establishment truth tellers. I mean, why would Russell Brand lie? Why would Andrew Tate lie? They seem trustworthy. It's a complete inversion. And how you get real information to the folks that trust them without them just dismissing it out of hand, it's... Okay, Chris Hayes, get the point. Some good solid points there. Right, yeah, Decading the Gurus did a nice show on Russell Brand three years ago. Clips for this because I found myself becoming kind of mesmerized by his talk like that. It's almost all like that, where I'm not... I can't really follow what he's saying, really, and it just sort of washes over you a little bit like Jordan Peterson. But just with that, I tried to stop this. Okay, so what exactly is he saying? Well, he starts off talking about how bad to have very sort of narrow ideas and not sort of have that broader focus. And he uses actual physical perception psychophysics as an analogy to illustrate that. And then says, but that's not working. So I was presumed he's referring to the narrow sort of focus of ideas. Okay, welcome, welcome to an earlier slot. What's going on, bro? Blessings, bro, welcome back, man. It was a, what a pleasant surprise. Yeah, I haven't been sick. You know, I've been in great health. I've just been getting up at two or three a.m. pretty much every day, going through my archives and pulling out my best blog post and trying to improve them. But then if you get up at two or three a.m., then you know, come six p.m., that's the equivalent of, you know, 11 p.m. if you get up at seven a.m. So yeah, I'm usually wiped, come six p.m. Oh, okay. So did you find this whole process introspective? Did you sort of like meditate a little? Found a painful. There's just so much stuff on my blog that embarrasses me, that makes me feel appalled, that is just shoddy, sloppy, gratuitously offensive, attention-seeking, grandiose, absurd, badly argued, poor commander of facts, just so much of what I have put out there in public I don't feel good about. I mean, just an avalanche of crap. It's a pretty harsh assessment, man. There was some good stuff too, but that avalanche of crap that I've experienced in the past two months. And some were good blog posts. Yeah, yeah, I mean, they went horrible. I guess. So, well, you know, in your absence, I've been on sort of a whole journey myself. I've been doing two new things. One, I've been consuming a lot of this Vacant, Sam Vacant? Yeah, Sam Vacant, yeah. Yeah, so he's... No, not Vacant. Vacant.