Name: What Russell Brand Learned By Living with a Homeless Man
Uploaded: 2023-03-02T19:20:30.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Russell Brand Learned By Living with a Homeless Man' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What Russell Brand Learned By Living with a Homeless Man' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-03-02. Transcript available.

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 sites for homelessness have
been cleansed as if by Travis Bickle's rain 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
you
know 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 okay 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 was that leveled out they kicked them all back out again right that's
it
we're not worried anymore get back out 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 what was
the
reason for like putting them back on the street because it seemed like if they
solved that like they should be like oh well you know let's just keep
dedicating these resources to keep these people's hot housed I feel like that
the
anomaly was the housing rather than there at the ejecting I feel like that
they 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 I'm sure like yeah that comes with
complexity when I was first working in media when I was still using drug addicts
myself I did these things that I 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 my 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 there 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 like he couldn't couldn't
deal
with being in a house admittedly these were not organic conditions it was like
a
cameras around the stuff was not a high it was not a high budget production was
really low-fi stuff on a low-fi 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 still online
somewhere I presume and you know it sort of it pushed both of us to our limit
in
the end James decided he preferred homelessness to living with you that's
he made his 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 anywhere he'll work his own way in
the
world yeah so like uh of course that 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 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 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 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 it 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
yeah it's um it's uh he wrote that what is the bold book called uh cobalt red
yeah it's uh it's all
about uh cobalt mining in the Congo and his investigation that he did into it
it's very very
it's inspiring that a person uh is that selfless and and can make that sort of
a commitment and risk
their life and go to a very dangerous place and expose this because he 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 you
you know paying people couple cents an hour whatever they pay them it's it's
horrific