With each tentative tiptoe and stumble, I had to inwardly assure myself that I was a good comedian and that my life was not pointless. "I am addicted to comfort," I thought as I tumbled into the wood chips. I have become divorced from nature; I don’t know what the names of the trees and birds are. I don’t know what berries to eat or which stars will guide me home. I don’t know how to sleep outside in a wood or skin a rabbit. We have become like living cutlets, sanitized into cellular ineptitude. They say that supermarkets have three days’ worth of food. That if there was a power cut, in three days the food would spoil. That if cash machines stopped working, if cars couldn’t be filled with fuel, if homes were denied warmth, within three days we’d be roaming the streets like pampered savages, like urban zebras with nowhere to graze. The comfort has become a prison; we’ve allowed them to turn us into waddling pipkins. What is civilization but dependency? Now, I’m not suggesting we need to become supermen; that solution has been averred before and did not end well. Prisoners of comfort, we dread the Apocalypse. What will we do without our pre-packed meals and cozy jails and soporific glowing screens rocking us comatose? The Apocalypse may not arrive in a bright white instant; it may creep into the present like a fog. All about us we may see the shipwrecked harbingers foraging in the midsts of our excess. What have we become that we can tolerate adjacent destitution? That we can amble by ragged despair at every corner? We have allowed them to sever us from God, and until we take our brothers by the hand we will find no peace.
English comedian, actor, and podcaster (born 1975)
Russell Edward Brand (born 4 June 1975 in Grays, Essex) is an English comedian, radio DJ, television presenter, newspaper columnist, and occasional actor. Serious allegations of Brand's illegal conduct towards women were reported by the media in September 2023, followed by criminal charges against the performer in April 2025. He denies all claims.
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Russell Edward Brand
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What about the rumours David Cameron smoked drugs as a schoolboy? What worries me most is that he dressed up as a schoolboy to do it, the pervert. Though perhaps, let’s not condemn him regardless. Who among us didn’t smoke just a little bit of weed at school, just to take the edge off those irksome crack come-downs? Actually, as it turns out, it’s about as good an anti-drugs campaign as you’re going to get, don’t take drugs you might end up leader of the Tories with a face like a little painted egg.
That is why I do not vote; that is why I will never vote. Let’s instead participate in a system that is truly representative. In the next chapter we are going to look at some stuff that, if we don’t really concentrate and determinedly remain upbeat, could get all boring, and we hate that. The fact is, though, if we’re to shut up Paxman and the naysayers (good name for a band), we have to show our working out. Like in a boring maths GCSE, which I knew was pointless even as I was failing it.
"Travel in the old ruts," quotes my friend Meredith; some ancient Chinese maxim. The way lain down by elders. Pathways through the world, pathways through the mind—it’s a shame that these days we so seldom have a guide. That our atomized worldview, mimicking scientific doctrine, sees us as separate, distinct, alone, orbiting in space, touching only an infinite void.
[Responding to unspecified forthcoming claims from the media] These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies, and as I have written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous.
Now during that time of promiscuity the relationships I had were absolutely, always consensual. I was always transparent about that then, almost too transparent, and I am being transparent about it now as well.
To see that transparency metastasised into something criminal, that I absolutely deny, makes me question is there another agenda at play.
Aren’t we all, in one way or another, trying to find a solution to the problem of reality? If I get this job, this girl, this guy, these shoes. If I pass this exam, eat this pizza, drink this booze, go on this holiday. Learn karate, learn yoga. If West Ham stay up, if my dick stays up, if I get more likes on Facebook, more fancy cookbooks, a better kitchen, cure this itchin’, if she stops bitching. Isn’t there always some kind of condition to contentment? Isn’t it always placed in the future, wrapped up in some object, either physical or ideological? I know for me it is, and as an addict that always leads me to excess and then to trouble. Do you feel like that? Are you looking for something? It’s not just me, is it?
It terrifies me to contemplate, Tucker, that people like Alex Jones, and in our country, David Icke — who aside from some views that are impossible to corroborate around quite a cultist and shall we call them marginal ideas, difficult to corroborate ideas — when it comes to the subject of globalisation and the increasing authoritarianisation of our planet, appear to have been ahead of the curve.