What Russell Brand Learned By Living with a Homeless Man

I mean, I guess because I talk about American culture a lot, I come with a degree of anticipation. But it was a torrential rainstorm in Los Angeles. I'm aware that, like, you've moved out of there, that a lot of significant people in the space that I work in have moved out of there. And there was a feeling of uncanniness and eeriness. Some of the familiar sights for homelessness have been cleansed as if by Travis Bickle's reign. You know, it's sort of like just... Really? They've moved homeless people? For example, Gower Street. The Gower Street Bridge. There would always be sort of like a little tented community there. That seems to have been moved along and may be a perfect metaphor for that problem, moving them rather than really... You feel like those homeless people are still somewhere rather than that problem has found a resolution. No one really has a tangible resolution. I haven't heard one resolution that's like, OK, that we could put our fingers on. That's real. Do you know that in our country during the pandemic, in London especially, but also in other cities, they temporarily housed homeless people as one of the pandemic measures? Like, we can't have people on the streets. They'll cough on someone. Put them all in hotels. Put them in hostels. They solved it. And then when they reached the point where they were happy that the pandemic had leveled out, they kicked them all back out again. Right, that's it. We're not worried anymore. Get back out of there. I wonder why they did that. Do you think it was just too much time and effort to manage those people? Like, they're shooting up in the hotels and causing ruckus and... Well, I wonder what was the reason for putting them back on the street, because it seemed like if they solved that, they should be like, oh, well, you know, let's just keep dedicating these resources to keep these people housed. I feel like that the anomaly was the housing rather than the ejecting. I feel like that when it was convenient and suitable, they could find a solution to homelessness that was an economic one. And then when it wasn't necessary anymore, they just pulled the rug out from under it. But I'm sure, like, yeah, that comes with complexity. When I was first working in media, when I was still using drug addict myself, I did these things that are considered to be like psychological jackass. You know, that was a big show at that time. Those amazing guys doing those incredible stunts. And I was like, well, what if you did the psychological version of that? So I had like a boxing match with my dad. I had a homeless guy move in my house. I seduced an octogenarian lady. I jerked off a man in a toilet. All of these things were the periphery of my limits as a drug using young man, just trying to make a way in media. When I had that homeless guy come live in my house with me, James was his name, God rest his soul. Like, it was interesting to encounter that, you know, there's a reason, of course, I fully accept and appreciate that that could happen to any of us. That any of us with a few wrong choices could end up destitute and lost without the kind of support and good fortune I've had in various areas of my life. I'm sure it could have happened to me. Of course it could have. But there was a sort of like a gravity pulling him back out into the street, you know, there's a gravity pulling it. It was like he couldn't, couldn't deal with being in a house. Admittedly, these were not organic conditions. There was like cameras around and stuff. It was not a high, it was not a high budget production. It was really low fire stuff on a low fire digital channel. But being around that guy, he was like a heroin user. I was using heroin with him at that time. The sort of peak of the show was when I got into it, we had a bath together. That was like, I thought, what's the most intimate thing you could do with a person to sort of overcome the idea that homeless people are somehow dirty or different or, you know, like they should be excluded from society. So I had a bath with this guy. This stuff's still online somewhere, I presume. And, you know, it sort of pushed both of us to our limit. In the end, James decided that he preferred homelessness to live with you. To be with you? That's right. No choices. In the end, we just got a taxi to nowhere. Just like, just got a taxi for him and just, yeah, just let him out anyway. He'll work his own way in the world. Yeah, so like, of course, that problem of vagrancy and destitution, it's a difficult one to tackle. It makes me think that the culture is laid upon the planet. Like all culture, all civilization is laid upon the planet, laid upon Gaia, laid upon the earth. Like, you know, when you have people on here, like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, that talk about like the potential for like these seismic events and cataclysmic events that have reset civilization. It makes you recognize that all of our reference points, other than biological and cosmological, are cultural reference points and therefore temporal. And so a person living in a tent in the street is in a sense living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in contemporary America, or living a post-apocalyptic lifestyle in contemporary America. It makes me think sometimes, Joe, maybe the apocalypse is not a forthcoming event. Maybe the apocalypse has already happened. Maybe we're living in the sort of the, already it's gentle threads are encroaching upon apparent civilization. You know, when you're in comfortable, defined and designed spaces, you feel like everything's okay. The end of the world is impossible. And it just seems like entertainment when you hear about nuclear treaties being torn up, that it can't actually happen. But of course it can. It's so temporal, our hope. It's happened forever. It's always happened. The people that it happened to then, they never saw it coming either. That's a, the way you're saying it is very interesting because I think the apocalypse is here on Earth. It's just not here, like right here in Austin. It's not like right here in the studio, but it's in the Congo. Yeah. Like if you go to a cobalt mine in the Congo and you see a 19-year-old woman with a baby on her back mining for cobalt and inhaling toxic fumes, you're like, okay, well that's the apocalypse. They have no electricity. They have no clean water. They make very, very little money and they work all day. And they work for a company that puts cobalt into lithium ion batteries that are in everyone's smartphone. So the height of our technology is directly connected to what's essentially slave labor. And that's the apocalypse. I mean, that might as well be the apocalypse. That might as well be Mad Max. That might as well be. I mean, it's just as bad. It's just as horrific. There's a very beautiful bit of investigation. I saw that episode. Siddharth Kaur, yeah. He wrote that, what is the book called? Cobalt Red. Cobalt Red, yeah. It's all about cobalt mining in the Congo and his investigation that he did into it. It's very, very, it's inspiring that a person is that selfless and can make that sort of a commitment and risk their life and go to a very dangerous place and expose this because he's a real journalist, like a real boots on the ground journalist that wants to show the world some things that are being hidden from them because the people that are making enormous amounts of money from this that could fix it don't want to. They want to profit off of it at the exact level they're profiting off of it now, which means paying people a couple cents an hour or whatever they pay them. It's horrific. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like,