Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / Consent in the Case of Russell Brand: The 351st Evolutionary Lens w/Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

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Consent in the Case of Russell Brand: The 351st Evolutionary Lens w/Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker: (Music) Hey folks, welcome to the DarkHorse Podcast live stream number 351.
• 0:14
  Speaker: 351, it is Tuesday somewhere in November, I would say kind of early mid-November.
• 0:20
  Speaker: Mm-hmm, early mid-November.
• 0:22
  Speaker: Tells you I'm tracking time, which is not my strong suit as you know, but but in any case, here we are 351.
• 0:29
  Speaker: I'm gonna say it's not prime.
• 0:31
  Speaker: It's not prime.
• 0:32
  Speaker: Yeah, because it has more factors than just itself in one.
• 0:35
  Speaker: So that's probably why.
• 0:36
  Speaker: Prime factors including 3 and 13 in fact.
• 0:39
  Speaker: 13 as a fact.
• 0:40
  Speaker: Well, that's kind of special.
• 0:41
  Speaker: Yeah, I think so.
• 0:42
  Speaker: I'm sure that has a name.
• 0:43
  Speaker: Decca primahedron.
• 0:47
  Speaker: Tri-decca primahedron.
• 0:49
  Speaker: He'd run it's not.
• 0:50
  Speaker: No, it's not a he drives a two-dimensional space shape with a bunch of sides.
• 0:55
  Speaker: Anyway, we digress.
• 0:56
  Speaker: Yeah, we often.
• 0:57
  Speaker: So we're gonna talk about Russell Brand.
• 1:02
  Speaker: Yes, Russell Brand who is a comedian.
• 1:05
  Speaker: It's now been convicted of a notorious crime in Great Britain.
• 1:11
  Speaker: In Great Britain, yeah.
• 1:12
  Speaker: And we may do a few other things as well, but that's gonna be the bulk of the show that we talk about today.
• 1:19
  Speaker: But before we get into it, as always, just a few announcements and paying the rent at the top.
• 1:25
  Speaker: We are doing a Q&A today after the show.
• 1:27
  Speaker: You can join us now on Locals, join the watch party, and then that is where the Q&A will be as well.
• 1:33
  Speaker: And we'll be engaging with the chat as it happens and maybe answering some of the questions that come in there as well.
• 1:39
  Speaker: There, that's an old message.
• 1:42
  Speaker: You already did your Patreon conversation.
• 1:44
  Speaker: So that's not coming up this weekend.
• 1:46
  Speaker: No, that's weekends off.
• 1:47
  Speaker: Yeah.
• 1:48
  Speaker: And we're also, we've still got some copies left of some of the books.
• 1:52
  Speaker: We are sold out once of the English copies of the American English language versions of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
• 2:01
  Speaker: We still have copies of my first book,
• 2:04
  Antipode: Seasons with the Extraordinary Wildlife and Culture of Madagascar, published in 2002.
• 2:09
  Antipode: And then also several foreign language versions of Hunter-Gatherer's Guide.
• 2:12
  Antipode: We've got the Thai version, the Spanish, French, Polish, and Brazilian Portuguese.
• 2:23
  Antipode: All right.
• 2:24
  Antipode: So I would say for people who really dig the show and our perspective, the advanced course involves learning either Portuguese or Thai and reading it in those languages.
• 2:35
  Antipode: Wow.
• 2:36
  Antipode: Yes.
• 2:37
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 2:38
  Antipode: Okay.
• 2:38
  Antipode: Portuguese will be easier for you native English speakers because at least it shares an alphabet.
• 2:43
  Antipode: It will be easier if you have a nose with which to put the proper nasal intonation into the Portuguese.
• 2:49
  Antipode: Thai is crazy.
• 2:51
  Antipode: It's going to be crazy hard for native English speakers because it's tonal.
• 2:54
  Antipode: Yes, but it's not as nasal.
• 2:56
  Antipode: I know you're trying to make a joke here, but you picked the wrong language to compare Portuguese to.
• 2:59
  Antipode: If you're like, "Portuguese is hard." No, no.
• 3:02
  Antipode: As someone who doesn't speak Portuguese, and I've been in Brazil and had my half-assed Spanish do okay, and I learned a few words.
• 3:10
  Antipode: Yeah, languages aren't easy, but anything that's tonal and Asian uses a different alphabet, and that's just going to be harder.
• 3:18
  Antipode: That's true.
• 3:19
  Antipode: Although children learn Thai, it can't be that hard.
• 3:22
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 3:26
  Antipode: So DarkHorsePodcast.org/books is where you can put in orders for any of those books.
• 3:34
  Antipode: We'll sign them for you if you like.
• 3:38
  Antipode: Now to our sponsors.
• 3:39
  Antipode: Our sponsors.
• 3:40
  Antipode: Right up at the top of the hour, and then we'll get on to the meat of the show.
• 3:44
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• 3:48
  Antipode: All right, that got awkward because I was addressing that to you, and then you're part of our.
• 3:52
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• 3:58
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• 3:59
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• 5:05
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• 5:07
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• 5:12
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• 5:17
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• 5:22
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• 5:45
  Antipode: Our beloved Labrador Maddie recently passed, but boy did she love Sundays.
• 5:50
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• 5:51
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• 6:16
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• 6:25
  Antipode: Even though you read the previous sentence in a gender non-neutral way.
• 6:28
  Antipode: Correct.
• 6:30
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• 6:33
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• 6:35
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• 6:57
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• 6:59
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• 7:00
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• 7:00
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• 8:33
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• 10:30
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• 10:32
  Antipode: All right.
• 10:36
  Antipode: I would like to say something at the top of this before we get into the substance of the matter.
• 10:41
  Antipode: First of all, this is not going to be a family show by virtue of the fact that the content that we have to discuss is not for kids.
• 10:52
  Antipode: Frankly, it's not for anybody.
• 10:55
  Antipode: And there's a part of me that really resents and despairs over the fact that you and I and our audience will be a bit degraded by having to talk about some of the things involved in this case in order to even get our facts straight.
• 11:10
  Antipode: So that's unfortunate.
• 11:12
  Antipode: And it does point to a real problem, which is that the liberty around sex has reached a point that even parsing important things on which we actually literally have to all agree, like what does consent look like in the modern environment, even to have that discussion, we have to talk about things that at one point would have been so far into the taboo that it would have been unthinkable to talk about them on a public broadcast.
• 11:45
  Antipode: So I wish it wasn't this way, but the issues raised by the Russell Brand case and now conviction are absolutely profound.
• 11:57
  Antipode: And, you know, it's a disgusting way into a topic of the utmost importance.
• 12:03
  Antipode: That's why we're doing it.
• 12:04
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 12:05
  Antipode: Do you want to or should I give just a brief précis of the history and the man before showing the judges sentencing for a couple of minutes?
• 12:19
  Antipode: Why don't you?
• 12:20
  Antipode: Okay.
• 12:21
  Antipode: So it's not totally prepared for that.
• 12:24
  Antipode: Most of our viewers will know already.
• 12:28
  Antipode: Russell Brand is a comic of long standing who in the in recent years has become a fairly outspoken critic of many things on the left, including COVID response.
• 12:41
  Antipode: And, and thus has ended up in our sphere.
• 12:45
  Antipode: And so we have both spent some time with him.
• 12:47
  Antipode: In the, I don't know exactly when he came on the scene, but call it the aughts, I think, is when he was really in his sort of first prime.
• 12:55
  Antipode: I was sort of vaguely aware of him as this British comic lothario, right, who was, you know, always pushing boundaries, both in his comedy, but also in his beyond promiscuous.
• 13:11
  Antipode: Everyone knew this.
• 13:12
  Antipode: And this is part of why the media were so, so focused on him, so excited by him, so titillated by him.
• 13:18
  Antipode: This is, this is what the culture was asking for.
• 13:21
  Antipode: This is what was being created.
• 13:22
  Antipode: He was helping create it and he was part of it.
• 13:24
  Antipode: And I remember to the degree that I had any sense of him at the time, it's like, that's not anyone that I need to pay any attention to at all.
• 13:32
  Antipode: I would not want to be in the same room with him simply because I wouldn't want to be in any such person who was, you know, and I never got predator read off of him and still have not.
• 13:44
  Antipode: I just had the sense of like, you know, all young women have met men who are magnetic, who are charismatic, who attract so much attention that they have a more difficult time knowing where the borders are.
• 14:01
  Antipode: Because so many people are throwing themselves at them that they are more likely to make errors of judgment.
• 14:09
  Antipode: And we'll get to that.
• 14:11
  Antipode: So during that period, there were, you know, some claimed that it was an open secret on the comedy circuit at BBC, that he was a predator, to use some of their words, a rapist, to use some of their words.
• 14:26
  Antipode: Who knows if that is true.
• 14:28
  Antipode: And in 2023, well into Russell Brand's, basically, conversion.
• 14:40
  Antipode: I don't know, actually, if he was, if he had become a Christian yet.
• 14:44
  Antipode: But I think that's later.
• 14:46
  Antipode: I think that's at least not that much later, though, because in 2024, certainly, he was already a Christian.
• 14:51
  Antipode: And, you know, whether whether or not that is a legitimate conversion, I don't know.
• 14:58
  Antipode: I don't know.
• 14:58
  Antipode: But he had already married, had children, had by all accounts changed his tune, and was pointing to his behaviour in the aughts in particular, as despicable and promiscuous and licentious and nothing that he is proud of.
• 15:16
  Antipode: He did not then, does not now, will not ever, cop to claims of sexual assault or rape and and it was questioned at the time in 2023 when the BBC put together this, what they call a documentary, but many documentary, but many have questioned whether or not it is in fact a documentary.
• 15:38
  Antipode: Why now?
• 15:40
  Antipode: Why so many years later, you know, 15 to 20 years after any of the supposed assaults happened, why is this happening now?
• 15:48
  Antipode: And that documentary came out.
• 15:52
  Antipode: And then in the wake of none of the people in the documentary came to bring claims against Brand.
• 15:58
  Antipode: But in the court case that just concluded in Great Britain, six claimants brought seven claims against him, who just showed up having never made any police reports at the time in a contemporary way, something between 15 and 20 or even more years after the events are purported to have happened.
• 16:17
  Antipode: All right.
• 16:18
  Antipode: I want to add a couple of things and ask a question you may be able to clarify.
• 16:22
  Antipode: One thing I want to say is that, you know, the term friend has changed a lot in the modern era.
• 16:30
  Antipode: Russell is somebody I know.
• 16:32
  Antipode: I wouldn't say I know him very well, but I've been to his house.
• 16:35
  Antipode: I've met his family.
• 16:36
  Antipode: I've dined with him.
• 16:37
  Antipode: Our son went with me to help film the podcast that I did borrowing his studio.
• 16:43
  Antipode: So I consider Russell a friend and you will hear things that go both ways in this podcast.
• 16:53
  Antipode: There's some condemnation and there will be some defense.
• 16:57
  Antipode: None of the defense is coming from the fact that I think of him as a friend.
• 17:02
  Antipode: If I believed that this was a straightforward case of a bad guy finally convicted over the crimes of which he's accused, I wouldn't be defending him.
• 17:13
  Antipode: But I don't think that that's what's going on here.
• 17:17
  Antipode: Now, along the lines of the question of what actually is going on here, I forgot to check before the podcast.
• 17:26
  Antipode: The documentary that was made on his purported predation, my understanding is that the women in the documentary were actually actresses portraying real women, but that they were filmed as if their identities were being concealed for their own well-being.
• 17:45
  Antipode: I do not know the answer to that.
• 17:46
  Antipode: If that is true, that is highly manipulative, right?
• 17:50
  Antipode: If they are actresses and portraying other women, you can say that and you can portray them as if you are not protecting them from something or if they were the real women in need of protection, we can see that.
• 18:02
  Antipode: But to pretend that the women who are paid to portray themselves as victims are in need of protection from their faces being shown suggests guilt.
• 18:14
  Antipode: So to the extent that there is an argument that Russell is being, whether or not Russell was guilty of the crimes in question, that he is being set up, that the timing is about his voice in the world having become very inconvenient to powerful people who decided to take him down, that is relevant.
• 18:34
  Antipode: It is.
• 18:34
  Antipode: Is the documentary and the timing of this case and the coming forward of these witnesses, is that organic or is that the result of the fact that somebody decided Russell had to be removed from the stage?
• 18:45
  Antipode: Right.
• 18:45
  Antipode: It is relevant and the amount of time that has passed when there were no public claims at the time also just raises, in my mind, although apparently not in the minds of the jury, a reasonable doubt as to what can really be known for sure.
• 19:06
  Antipode: It's almost entirely here, Sayotse, he said, she said.
• 19:11
  Antipode: And maybe what we want to do now is, actually just in a minute, is show the sentencing.
• 19:21
  Antipode: So the jury conviction came down on November 5th, I believe.
• 19:25
  Antipode: And then yesterday was the sentencing by the judge.
• 19:29
  Antipode: And there were, as I said, seven claims, six claimants and seven claims, I believe that three of the claims he was found not guilty of, and four of them, they found him guilty.
• 19:40
  Antipode: Three of them are of lesser than rape sexual assault charges, including one that has gotten a lot of discussion where the one claimant that had two claims against him, there was a, boy, I can't remember actually the thing that he was found guilty of was grabbing her breast or kissing her, I can't remember what it was.
• 20:06
  Antipode: And then there was a second claim that he then forced her to give him fellatio.
• 20:10
  Antipode: And there was no doubt that other things happened.
• 20:14
  Antipode: And none of that happened.
• 20:16
  Antipode: He is claiming in every single case that everything that happened was consensual.
• 20:19
  Antipode: And the jury found that while the initial, obviously lesser infraction of groping, was in fact not consensual, and he was found guilty, the later in the evening, oral sex that that this woman enacted on him was found to be consensual.
• 20:37
  Antipode: So, or at least there was an insufficient evidence to find that it was that it was not consensual.
• 20:42
  Antipode: So, yeah, there's just, there's a lot of nuance here with regard to some, you know, some, some stories that we normally would not be spending a lot of time with nuance.
• 20:52
  Antipode: And then, okay.
• 20:53
  Antipode: So I want to add something there.
• 20:54
  Antipode: This is a theme that runs throughout this case.
• 20:59
  Antipode: Now the problem, as you correctly point out, is that being found not guilty doesn't mean that he was innocent of the charge.
• 21:08
  Antipode: But for the moment, the legal question aside, if it was true that Russell groped this woman's breast without consent, her then giving him a blowjob implies that she had not felt violated.
• 21:30
  Antipode: So that obviously is not conclusive in this case, because it's possible that both things were forced and somehow because that he was not convicted of the more serious charge and was convicted of the lesser charge.
• 21:44
  Antipode: But just in terms of understanding where we even are in this case, the answer that is going to haunt us here, that haunted us in the case of the Cornell Seven, and that will continue to come up, is that the radical shift in the sexual mores of the culture have now rendered the laws which have kept up completely incoherent.
• 22:10
  Antipode: And the incoherent, and there's some chance that laws are destined to be insufficient in matters of human intimacy.
• 22:19
  Antipode: That the very idea of consent and or that laws cannot be sufficient in questions of human intimacy if the standard that we are trying to define carefully is consent.
• 22:31
  Antipode: That consent, I think consent is inherently such a flawed and static concept that it cannot be applied rigorously and fairly across even two cases, much less all of them.
• 22:44
  Antipode: Right.
• 22:45
  Antipode: And this is exactly what I'm saying is that what is supposed to make the law is supposed to be the last line of defense when all of the cultural agreements have failed.
• 23:00
  Antipode: When those cultural agreements have failed, the law has to adjudicate the question of what actually happened in some sexual context.
• 23:07
  Antipode: But at some level, what we have is everything is permitted under all circumstances.
• 23:15
  Antipode: And therefore, we end up at this legal question when somebody emerges, you know, more than a decade later, and says, here is something that happened.
• 23:25
  Antipode: And the court has to decide whether it did or didn't happen, what the context of it was, what was in person's mind who is accused of the crime, whether there are other incentives.
• 23:36
  Antipode: Right.
• 23:36
  Antipode: The point is this, the law is so inadequate to this job that you have to have the cultural agreements in place in order not to have chaos and injustice across the board.
• 23:48
  Antipode: So last week, Brand was found by a British jury guilty of four of the seven counts of for which he was on trial.
• 23:57
  Antipode: Three of them were sexual assault in terms like they're basically groping.
• 24:02
  Antipode: And one of them was rape.
• 24:03
  Antipode: And let's show the judges sentencing just a couple minutes of the judges sentencing so we can get a sense in his words of what he perceives as going on the judge.
• 24:17
  Antipode: In spring 2009, you raped the victim in count six.
• 24:25
  Antipode: She was 21.
• 24:26
  Antipode: You were 33.
• 24:27
  Antipode: She was a huge fan of yours, which you were happy to exploit.
• 24:32
  Antipode: She had willing consensual sexual activity with you after your show.
• 24:38
  Antipode: You took her phone number.
• 24:41
  Antipode: And if anyone still needs any demonstration of your contempt for your casual sexual partners, you stored her number under T for tart.
• 24:51
  Antipode: You invited her to your house a few days later.
• 24:56
  Antipode: You put on a condom at her request and had vaginal sex to which she consented.
• 25:03
  Antipode: You then flipped over, remove the condom and without asking, forced your penis into her anus, causing her great pain.
• 25:15
  Antipode: She asked you to stop, then asked you again loudly.
• 25:19
  Antipode: You replied and I quote, I want you to feel my come.
• 25:24
  Antipode: You ejaculated.
• 25:27
  Antipode: She was distraught and in severe pain.
• 25:30
  Antipode: The bed was heavily soiled by blood, sperm and feces.
• 25:36
  Antipode: You told her it was her mess and made her try to clear it up.
• 25:41
  Antipode: Shortly after, you went off to get ready, then went to work.
• 25:46
  Antipode: She was driven to a nearby underground station by your driver who for some reason had tissues ready to hand to her as she wept.
• 25:55
  Antipode: She was left distraught, in pain and terrified she might have contracted HIV.
• 26:01
  Antipode: In her victim impact statement, she wrote of struggling to eat and sleep, of taking two to three months off from work and of abandoning the career she had embarked upon.
• 26:15
  Antipode: Although the rape was 17 years ago, she still finds it affects her ability to form new friendships and to know when she can trust people.
• 26:25
  Antipode: From her evidence at trial, I also know she developed alcohol problem partly as a result of your attack on her.
• 26:33
  Antipode: Ordering your victim to clean your sheets was an additional, even if brief, humiliation.
• 26:41
  Antipode: I will not detail the victim's lengthy mental health and addiction problems here, as they might have a tendency to identify her.
• 26:51
  Antipode: But the harm was significant and long lasting.
• 26:54
  Antipode: It could be seen as severe, though she told the police with an openness that characterized her evidence that there had been other issues in her life that contributed to those later difficulties.
• 27:08
  Antipode: There's a lot here.
• 27:12
  Antipode: If what the claimant claims is true as it happened, which is what the jury found, that was unacceptable, what he did.
• 27:25
  Antipode: Right.
• 27:26
  Antipode: He says it was consensual.
• 27:29
  Antipode: Either way, it's disgusting.
• 27:31
  Antipode: I was struck, though, by the judge's eagerness to ascribe cause to the claimant's later problems to this moment in time with Russell Brand.
• 27:54
  Antipode: A moment which was the second moment that she had been with him.
• 27:59
  Antipode: We have not yet said that upon meeting him, within minutes of meeting him some days earlier, she had been in a bathroom stall with a woman she had not met before.
• 28:11
  Antipode: The other woman was fellating him and she was licking his asshole.
• 28:14
  Antipode: That was consensual.
• 28:17
  Antipode: No one is claiming it wasn't.
• 28:19
  Antipode: Then after texting with him about anal sex, she went over to his house where they both expected to have consensual vaginal sex.
• 28:32
  Antipode: And then the thing that the judge described happened.
• 28:35
  Antipode: The only difference in the statements is he says it was consensual.
• 28:40
  Antipode: She says it wasn't.
• 28:42
  Antipode: It's 17 years later, no claim was made at the time.
• 28:47
  Antipode: It can be very, very difficult for rape victims to come forward.
• 28:50
  Antipode: Granted, for sure.
• 28:52
  Antipode: Obviously, we should all know this by now.
• 28:54
  Antipode: But the idea that a woman who had already clearly made dis...
• 29:02
  Antipode: Oh, and also her boyfriend was somewhere in the area during the first event.
• 29:06
  Antipode: So this is a woman who was making extremely poor decisions and afterwards becomes apparently an alcoholic, has mental health problems.
• 29:14
  Antipode: And we are expected to believe that her substance abuse and her mental health problems are downstream of that event.
• 29:26
  Antipode: I cannot actually fathom how we get here.
• 29:31
  Antipode: Now, anyone is expected to track reality or true story narrative.
• 29:38
  Antipode: If that is what you think, as soon as a bad thing happens to you.
• 29:43
  Antipode: And it sounds bad, even if she consented, but as soon as a bad thing happens to you, whether or not she consented, everything that happens to you downstream is due to that.
• 29:54
  Antipode: Like, no.
• 29:56
  Antipode: Adults who had bad childhoods only get out of it when they realize that I am now responsible.
• 30:02
  Antipode: I am now responsible for lifting myself up and putting that behind me and saying, "What's done is done.
• 30:08
  Antipode: I'm going to go forward." That's a situation that many people deal with.
• 30:14
  Antipode: And it's unfortunate that anyone has bad childhoods, but we know that this is what you need to do.
• 30:19
  Antipode: She apparently, the judge says that in her openness, she acknowledges that maybe it wasn't entirely due to that.
• 30:26
  Antipode: My goodness, it sounds like she's more reasonable than the judge in this case.
• 30:30
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 30:30
  Antipode: We effectively know that her issues didn't start there because of the story of their initial meeting, which is so extreme as to raise all sorts of questions.
• 30:44
  Antipode: It does.
• 30:45
  Antipode: This goes to the point that I want to make sure that we make clear.
• 30:51
  Antipode: Okay.
• 30:53
  Antipode: And mind you, again, I really can't think of a topic I want to be talking about less than this, but in light of the fact that a man is going to be deprived of his liberty over our collective will regarding events that we are now forced to discuss.
• 31:10
  Antipode: Okay.
• 31:12
  Antipode: The initial meeting where she, first of all, his sexual transgressiveness is part of his act.
• 31:23
  Antipode: It's no secret.
• 31:25
  Antipode: And it's part of his attraction.
• 31:26
  Antipode: Right.
• 31:27
  Antipode: That's why women were all over him all the time.
• 31:31
  Antipode: So that's what they were attracted to in part.
• 31:34
  Antipode: So this young woman goes backstage knowing that.
• 31:38
  Antipode: And apparently almost instantly finds herself not only involved in a three-way sexual interaction, but licking his asshole.
• 31:52
  Antipode: Now, the fact of that, let's put it this way.
• 31:59
  Antipode: We have a phrase, a colloquial phrase in English.
• 32:03
  Antipode: We say kissing someone's ass.
• 32:06
  Antipode: Now the idea is if you're kissing someone's ass, that is an extreme posture of submission.
• 32:11
  Antipode: Right.
• 32:12
  Antipode: It's like, and subjugation.
• 32:14
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 32:15
  Antipode: It's like a thousand times better than licking their actual asshole.
• 32:19
  Antipode: Right.
• 32:20
  Antipode: So the point is kissing someone's ass is already a measure of subordination.
• 32:25
  Antipode: And this woman has gone so far beyond.
• 32:28
  Antipode: So what can we infer from that?
• 32:30
  Antipode: She is giving in now, mind you, it doesn't apply directly to the case later when she comes to his house, but in the initial instance of their meeting, she is giving not only consent, but the most extreme conceivable kind of consent.
• 32:49
  Antipode: She is consenting to a level of submission that is off the charts.
• 32:53
  Antipode: It's so grotesque that actually society has a right to demand that she not engage in this behavior for epidemiological reasons.
• 33:03
  Antipode: This dumb that we actually get a say in whether this is tolerable, apparently not anymore because anything goes, but this is not a behavior that any person should contemplate.
• 33:14
  Antipode: And this woman is contemplating it, not only contemplating it, but doing it voluntarily, willingly, enthusiastically with a stranger with, you know, not that having taken a shower would necessarily have, you know, protected her.
• 33:28
  Antipode: But the point is she's, this is somebody she's just met.
• 33:32
  Antipode: She doesn't know what showeredness he's been.
• 33:34
  Antipode: So, so anyway, I mean, one of the ways that fans, groupies distinguish themselves is by demonstrating that they're willing to transgress more boundaries than the woman next to them.
• 33:46
  Antipode: Right.
• 33:47
  Antipode: And so the point is legally, this can't carry over to the event later where, where she goes to his house.
• 33:56
  Antipode: However, symbolically, she has basically signed a blank check in terms of her consent.
• 34:06
  Antipode: Now, it is obviously true that any person can withdraw their consent at any time, right?
• 34:14
  Antipode: You can be involved in something and then you can discover for whatever reason that you don't want to be involved in it and you have a right to walk away.
• 34:22
  Antipode: However, the crime, if something is happening that you've consented to at the point that you decide there's a limit, where you decide you're not into it anymore, is a different crime than rape as we conceptualize it.
• 34:39
  Antipode: Rape, a crime that, you know, has multi-millennia history of its human affairs.
• 34:49
  Antipode: It's covered in biblical texts, presumably all of them.
• 34:54
  Antipode: So, so the point is you're, you're now taking a modern mores, you're, this is some sort of mashup of, you know, a new, a new way of viewing sexuality and you're now invoking this ancient crime as the thing that violated when the context is so novel, bizarre, and extreme by your own choosing that that ancient crime is not the appropriate way to even ask the question.
• 35:23
  Antipode: Yeah, I agree.
• 35:26
  Antipode: The judge says when he's sentencing Brand, she was a huge fan of yours, which you were happy to exploit.
• 35:33
  Antipode: So, this is rendering this woman, and by extension, all women who engage in sexual activities with men, which is to say, most women, children, effectively wards of the, of the men, like unable to make choices on their own, incapable of adult level decisions.
• 36:00
  Antipode: And, you know, there's, only one thing in this, in this rendering that women are allowed to do, which is say no, or, you know, go ahead with everything, which you were happy to exploit.
• 36:12
  Antipode: There is no claim that in these first interactions or even in, in the first interaction or in most of the second interaction, there's no claim.
• 36:20
  Antipode: There's exploitation.
• 36:22
  Antipode: It was willing, it was consensual, and it was inherently degrading, but no one was viewing it that way.
• 36:29
  Antipode: There's, there, there are two words that I keep coming back to when I'm, when I'm thinking about this, this case.
• 36:36
  Antipode: And one of them, and I'll get to the other one later, but one of them is charisma, that it was his charisma that brought so many people to him, that, you know, a man with, with that kind of magnetism, with that charisma, has women throwing themselves at him, even when he's acting like an asshole.
• 36:57
  Antipode: And no one claims he was always acting like an asshole, but he was sometimes acting like an asshole.
• 37:01
  Antipode: Women are throwing themselves at him, even when he's acting like an asshole.
• 37:04
  Antipode: Men are laughing at his jokes, even the ones that aren't good, right?
• 37:07
  Antipode: Like that, that is what charisma brings.
• 37:10
  Antipode: And I remember, before I met him for the first time, you said, oh, you know, he's actually, I was like, ah, I don't know.
• 37:17
  Antipode: I'll see about that.
• 37:18
  Antipode: I did not expect to like the man because all I had heard were these, you know, these sort of tabloid stories of what kind of a lothario he was, a Don Juan, like, I'm not interested, right?
• 37:28
  Antipode: And he has long since become a different sort of human being.
• 37:33
  Antipode: I don't think anyone denies that.
• 37:35
  Antipode: Whether or not, you know, the Christianity is for real.
• 37:38
  Antipode: But, you know, he has a loving wife and children, and he has, he has abandoned those promiscuous ways long since.
• 37:45
  Antipode: Upon meeting him, I was surprised.
• 37:49
  Antipode: I really liked him.
• 37:50
  Antipode: And I also saw the charisma.
• 37:54
  Antipode: At the few times that I have spent time with him or in his presence, I have watched because this is one of the things that I really like to be able to do is sort of be the animal behaviorist in the room, like, watch all the animals, in this case, the human animals, doing what they do.
• 38:09
  Antipode: And people are just they are drawn to him.
• 38:14
  Antipode: And he was, you know, there was there was nothing untoward in anything that I saw in, you know, 2024, 2025, 2023, whenever, whenever these interactions were, because he was long since over that.
• 38:28
  Antipode: But the charisma was in evidence, the magnetism, the fact that people of both sexes were being drawn across rooms, across open spaces, just to be in his presence, just to just to be there as he spoke.
• 38:41
  Antipode: I have no doubt that that was the case in the aughts as well.
• 38:45
  Antipode: And that what he was in a different mode in a promiscuous, you know, gross mode, that that was one of the ways that people were throwing themselves at his feet.
• 38:57
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 38:58
  Antipode: And he was a deny it.
• 38:59
  Antipode: I mean, look, Russell is highly unusual.
• 39:05
  Antipode: And I would say at the base of that is extreme intelligence.
• 39:14
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 39:15
  Antipode: And it's not just linguistic, but his facility with language and his extreme intelligence make him a very unusual person and hard to evaluate.
• 39:24
  Antipode: There aren't a dozen of him that you can, you know, use as a sample.
• 39:29
  Antipode: There's one.
• 39:29
  Antipode: Now, I will say, I don't know whether his conversion is convenient or genuine.
• 39:40
  Antipode: I don't know that he knows.
• 39:43
  Antipode: In other words, how people find themselves converting, it may be that they're desperate and feel cornered and because it makes sense and that it eventually persuades them or it could be totally cynical.
• 39:57
  Antipode: But I can say I've literally seen him with his wife and his son.
• 40:06
  Antipode: I've seen him with his staff.
• 40:08
  Antipode: I did not get the sense that I was looking at a building full of secrets.
• 40:16
  Antipode: I got the sense that I was looking at a guy whose history I knew was grotesque, but whose present seemed wholesome.
• 40:23
  Antipode: I don't know what it means.
• 40:25
  Antipode: Obviously, you know, flat out monsters get away with pretending that that's not what they are.
• 40:32
  Antipode: But I don't have the sense that that's who it's a hell of a fake if that's what it is.
• 40:39
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 40:39
  Antipode: And, you know, I was I was going to mention this, you know, like, you know, his wife apparently gives testimony in this case and people will say things like, yes, well, serial murders, serial murderers can have wives who lived under the same roof, shared the same bed with a man who was demonic for years and they never knew.
• 40:58
  Antipode: True.
• 40:59
  Antipode: We can all be fooled.
• 41:01
  Antipode: We can all be fooled.
• 41:02
  Antipode: And there are some who are better than almost anyone else at fooling people.
• 41:06
  Antipode: But nothing in the story of Russell Brand looks like anyone is trying to be fooled like it like he wasn't ever pretending to be something he wasn't.
• 41:16
  Antipode: You know, the place that the story that the two sides part ways is he's saying that everything that happened was consensual and some women from his past are saying, no, everything that happened wasn't consensual.
• 41:28
  Antipode: But the idea that he was having sex with hundreds, thousands of women, that he was, you know, he was a libertine, he was wild and extravagant.
• 41:39
  Antipode: And that was part of why the camera loved him and the media loved him.
• 41:43
  Antipode: That was that that's all in keeping.
• 41:45
  Antipode: And as he turned his life into something else, that was also a matter of public record.
• 41:51
  Antipode: You know, so it's a it's an unprecedented story if the entire thing is a fake, because that is that is several transitions that are themselves fakes.
• 42:04
  Antipode: And to what end?
• 42:04
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 42:05
  Antipode: And I will say, I don't see it.
• 42:09
  Antipode: I don't see it.
• 42:09
  Antipode: I don't think it's a simple story in that a simple story of a simple monster.
• 42:14
  Antipode: It's not like I don't frankly, you know, I I don't I don't see monster in him at all.
• 42:21
  Antipode: I was I, you know, I, as I told you, after I met, I was like, well, I that was surprising.
• 42:26
  Antipode: Really liked him.
• 42:27
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 42:27
  Antipode: You know, yeah, incredibly likable.
• 42:30
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 42:30
  Antipode: There.
• 42:31
  Antipode: It seems to me that there are many questions.
• 42:35
  Antipode: One of them has to do with the tragedy.
• 42:38
  Antipode: Let's say the worst is true.
• 42:41
  Antipode: No, not the worst is true.
• 42:45
  Antipode: The worst would be born a psychopath has been manipulating everybody the whole time incapable of decency.
• 42:52
  Antipode: The alternative is a guy with you've probably mostly seen the clip of him with his father.
• 43:01
  Antipode: There's some very gross discussion about, you know, instrumentalizing women, sex tourism in Thailand.
• 43:10
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 43:10
  Antipode: Sex tourism in Thailand.
• 43:11
  Antipode: Yeah. Sex tourism in Thailand.
• 43:11
  Antipode: He's with his dad.
• 43:13
  Antipode: It's gross.
• 43:13
  Antipode: OK.
• 43:14
  Antipode: So he grows up in a home in which the values are low quality.
• 43:19
  Antipode: And then he finds stardom. Stardom results in the public throwing rewards at him for his willingness to be transgressive and over the top and outlandish and public about it all.
• 43:35
  Antipode: He's being rewarded for this exact thing.
• 43:38
  Antipode: And so.
• 43:39
  Antipode: All right.
• 43:41
  Antipode: I'm not saying anybody ever gets a pass on an actual violation of consent, but there is a question about which part of this story is the result of a particularly diabolical person.
• 43:57
  Antipode: Right.
• 43:58
  Antipode: Maybe some maybe none.
• 44:00
  Antipode: And which part of this is the result of a society so broken that it can't see that it is setting people up for this exact thing by removing all of the expectations about what you're not allowed to do, who you're not allowed to do it with, what are the prerequisites to finding yourself in this situation?
• 44:18
  Antipode: It's clearly anything goes as far as society is concerned.
• 44:22
  Antipode: And then when anything goes, turns into a situation where somebody has consented to the most intimate act one can consent to and then draws a line at a different act.
• 44:36
  Antipode: So she does.
• 44:38
  Antipode: So she does.
• 44:39
  Antipode: In retrospect.
• 44:40
  Antipode: And the point is that second act is now going to be treated as insulated from the consent she gave to regular vaginal sex like that.
• 44:52
  Antipode: This is we are in novel using an ancient crime to adjudicate it.
• 44:58
  Antipode: And this doesn't make sense.
• 45:00
  Antipode: And maybe this is the place to make this point.
• 45:03
  Antipode: There's something look, it is rape is real.
• 45:07
  Antipode: It still happens in the way that it is described in our ancient texts and traditions.
• 45:12
  Antipode: That is a real thing.
• 45:13
  Antipode: However, we use the term for any violation of consent that involves penetration or something like that.
• 45:25
  Antipode: And here's the problem.
• 45:27
  Antipode: Rape is the crime that it is because of the harm that follows from it naturally in a biological sense.
• 45:39
  Antipode: As I pointed out before, once upon a time, if a stranger raped a woman, he was attempting to inflict on her a pregnancy.
• 45:51
  Antipode: And if he was successful in doing so, not only will he have marred her psychologically for life, which would happen whether or not she became pregnant, but he is radically decreasing her ability to find a mate.
• 46:08
  Antipode: He is forcing her to raise an offspring, the father of whom he is forcing her to raise an offspring without the help of a father, which she has the right to require.
• 46:21
  Antipode: So it is a crime of the seriousness that it has because it is a theft of somebody's lifetime well-being, right?
• 46:32
  Antipode: We can compare it to something like if somebody ran up to you and cut off your arm in such a way that you survived.
• 46:41
  Antipode: But the point is we can say something about the quality of life you might have led and then the quality of life you will lead without the arm.
• 46:48
  Antipode: It's not the same thing as death, but it's a big fraction of the quality of life you might have had.
• 46:53
  Antipode: So the seriousness with which we treat rape is about the implications for the woman going forward.
• 47:01
  Antipode: In this case, we've now got, okay, you've consented to this behavior with this guy that you and then he takes it somewhere you don't want to go, assuming that her story is correct.
• 47:17
  Antipode: That is not the kind of theft of life that we are talking about.
• 47:21
  Antipode: It is not some fraction of a life that has just been taken from you.
• 47:23
  Antipode: And if you don't believe that the that rape as an ancient crime is inappropriate to the modern context, think about what our new understanding in light of birth control and abortion and anything goes sex with strangers and all of those things.
• 47:43
  Antipode: Think about this fact.
• 47:45
  Antipode: Historically speaking, it was very difficult, vanishingly rare for a woman to rape a man.
• 47:55
  Antipode: It's just simply biologically almost impossible to do, right?
• 48:01
  Antipode: The guy has to be turned on in order to be raped.
• 48:04
  Antipode: Well, if we take the new understanding of what that term means, then all it is is the withdrawal of consent.
• 48:12
  Antipode: So now women can easily rape men.
• 48:15
  Antipode: You can be in the midst of sex.
• 48:18
  Antipode: A guy can withdraw his consent and be raped.
• 48:24
  Antipode: So the point is that weird fact, right?
• 48:27
  Antipode: Rape is a very symmetrical crime.
• 48:30
  Antipode: But we're now with the, you know, with allowing the court to have to adjudicate this thing, the withdrawal of consent turns something into rape in an instant.
• 48:40
  Antipode: And so well, not only does the withdrawal of consent turn something into sexual assault or rape in an instant, but in this case, we've got here, say, over a decade passing, a man who was changed, all of these things ought to be, if not, you know, a man who was changed feels to me like it's an extremely important mitigating factor.
• 49:05
  Antipode: The other things strike me as reason that these didn't make good cases in the first place.
• 49:13
  Antipode: Like how, what do you mean 17 years after the fact you decided was actually a problem for you?
• 49:22
  Antipode: Right.
• 49:22
  Antipode: When in the moment there are, I mean, I think, I think even the boyfriend, the boyfriend who was somewhere in the environs while she was licking Russell Brand's asshole reports that she said after she went to his house for consensual vaginal sex, and he did anal on her, the boyfriend reports, you know, long since not a boyfriend anymore, the now ex-boyfriend reports that at the time, maybe she thought it was consensual.
• 49:55
  Antipode: Now, all of this is hearsay, like, I don't even know how to find the source on that.
• 50:01
  Antipode: So apologies if I got that wrong, but the whole thing is so crazy.
• 50:04
  Antipode: Like, what kinds of perverse incentives does he have?
• 50:08
  Antipode: You know, he'd be pissed even 17 years later that this woman who he called his girlfriend is now telling him about having met this famous guy and having had sex with him in a variety of ways.
• 50:19
  Antipode: This is an insane landscape.
• 50:22
  Antipode: So I think I would like us to show the Piers Morgan interview.
• 50:27
  Antipode: This is a couple of minutes of Piers Morgan interviewing Russell Brand after the BBC documentary, but before the criminal case that just happened in Great Britain.
• 50:38
  Antipode: My question for you is that obviously you're facing these serious charges.
• 50:42
  Antipode: Obviously, you've been emphatic and consistently emphatic in your denials that you've done anything criminal and that anything was non-consensual, which will be the key determinant of your liberty, actually, whether a jury agrees that this was all consensual.
• 51:00
  Antipode: You know, putting aside the morality aspect, and we'll come to that, which is an interesting different discussion, but it's not about crime, morality.
• 51:08
  Antipode: It's to call it public opinion.
• 51:10
  Antipode: It's a different thing.
• 51:11
  Antipode: But my question, I think looking back on it, and the lifestyle that you've talked about very openly now, looking back on that and saying, look, I was out of control, taking all these drugs, sleeping with all these women, whatever, is how can you be sure that your own memory is good, is sound, is reliable, is truthful?
• 51:32
  Antipode: Most people who've slept with thousands of barrel loads of drugs and led this incredibly hedonistic lifestyle, I would think if I interviewed them and asked them to name even what year it was, would struggle to remember, can you be certain, if you're honest, that your memory is completely sound, accurate?
• 51:54
  Antipode: Do you remember half this stuff?
• 51:56
  Antipode: Well, yes, I can be honest.
• 51:58
  Antipode: It's a relevant question, isn't it?
• 51:59
  Antipode: Of course, it is.
• 52:00
  Antipode: Yes, I can be honest, and I am honest.
• 52:03
  Antipode: And I think what's an important distinction is that I was a drug addict prior to becoming famous.
• 52:10
  Antipode: So that was a very different rhythm and time.
• 52:13
  Antipode: And I think the question was, has it made you a more successful predator?
• 52:15
  Antipode: And even then, I objected to the idea of predation as persecutory.
• 52:20
  Antipode: But predation is simply an amplification of looking for something and the reason I wasn't famous when I was still using drugs because when I was a drug addict, I was an unviable economic proposition for potential media partners.
• 52:36
  Antipode: The reason that I able to remember is something that I think is sort of quite essential is that I'm telling the truth in that GQ article, amidst the sort of flamboyance and the evident hedonism is a person that was looking for a lot of attention and approval and love and connection.
• 52:57
  Antipode: Now, that doesn't mean that there weren't clumsiness and that there wasn't selfishness and objectification and lots of things, though, to your point about there being a moral distinction, flat out wrong, wrong.
• 53:12
  Antipode: But it's very different term than a kind of a bawdy, overbearing, oppressive, controlling.
• 53:20
  Antipode: Obviously, I'm aware of the claims that were made publicly.
• 53:23
  Antipode: So, if he's still in the truth, and it feels to me like he is, his answer to Morgan is exactly right, which is, I mean, he doesn't say specifically, no, of course, I don't remember all of the women I ever had sex with.
• 53:42
  Antipode: He wouldn't.
• 53:43
  Antipode: You couldn't.
• 53:44
  Antipode: He says, I know for sure that I am telling the truth because that is not the kind of man I was.
• 53:50
  Antipode: And not the kind of man I am, not the kind of man he is now.
• 53:55
  Antipode: There are people online saying, why would he rape anyone?
• 54:00
  Antipode: He didn't have to.
• 54:01
  Antipode: Like, no, there are plenty of men in power who will take the power that they have and rape.
• 54:08
  Antipode: That is absolutely the case.
• 54:10
  Antipode: And Brand is saying, no, that wasn't who I was.
• 54:13
  Antipode: That was never who I was.
• 54:15
  Antipode: Even when I was at my worst, and he acknowledges this, acknowledges that this was bad behavior.
• 54:20
  Antipode: What he calls clumsy, many of us would call something beyond clumsy.
• 54:24
  Antipode: He says, clumsiness, selfishness, objectification, agreed on all counts.
• 54:28
  Antipode: But he also says he was looking for a lot of attention and approval and love.
• 54:32
  Antipode: And those aren't things that rapists are looking for, approval and love.
• 54:40
  Antipode: So, maybe you don't believe him.
• 54:44
  Antipode: And then that is not something that we can ever get an absolute objective decision about that we all agree on.
• 54:57
  Antipode: But I listened to that and I think that's exactly the right response.
• 55:02
  Antipode: Piers Morgan didn't want to give him the opening to give a response that says, I know and I am being honest, because that is not the kind of man that I was.
• 55:12
  Antipode: So, what we have is a deeply flawed guy by his own admission.
• 55:23
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 55:24
  Antipode: Despicable behavior, again, by his own admission.
• 55:28
  Antipode: Yes.
• 55:28
  Antipode: A deeply bizarre case is a predator, right?
• 55:38
  Antipode: A case so extreme and disgusting that it raises all sorts of fundamental questions.
• 55:45
  Antipode: Strange though, that the claims, the ones that both he was not found guilty of and that he was found guilty of, are not more strikingly aggressive.
• 56:01
  Antipode: And none of them are violent.
• 56:03
  Antipode: If this was a predator, that's the best they could come up with.
• 56:07
  Antipode: Right.
• 56:07
  Antipode: Especially at the same time as, and I'm sure you're headed here, but at the same time that the UK is ignoring the grooming gang story, what this really forces the public to do is engage a question that they're not very good at thinking about, which is selective prosecution.
• 56:27
  Antipode: Yes.
• 56:28
  Antipode: Right.
• 56:28
  Antipode: Now, selective prosecution is where the West goes to die.
• 56:33
  Antipode: The West is dependent on a few fundamental pillars.
• 56:39
  Antipode: Among them is equal protection under the law.
• 56:43
  Antipode: If you don't have equal protection under the law, if the law decides, well, here are some troubling people and we'd like to look into their taxes, and then here's some people that we like and we're not going to look into their taxes.
• 56:57
  Antipode: What do you do?
• 56:59
  Antipode: We found tax violations among these people and we're going to try them publicly.
• 57:02
  Antipode: We're going to claim that they're betraying the public by blah, blah, blah.
• 57:05
  Antipode: And then we will find that the people with these views are more likely to be convicted of tax violations without pointing out that actually they were more likely to be tried for tax violations, which makes the first point that you made irrelevant, frankly, statistically.
• 57:22
  Antipode: Right.
• 57:23
  Antipode: So, okay.
• 57:26
  Antipode: You have a guy who has become decidedly inconvenient to the power structure and uniquely capable of attacking the narrative tropes that were used to oppress all of us during, for example, COVID.
• 57:40
  Antipode: Yes.
• 57:40
  Antipode: Right.
• 57:40
  Antipode: If you go back and you look at Russell Brand's response to the COVID insanity, it was razor sharp.
• 57:48
  Antipode: Yes.
• 57:48
  Antipode: Okay.
• 57:48
  Antipode: So he's become very dangerous to a kind of power that is, I would say, there isn't a lot of daylight between that kind of power and evil.
• 57:58
  Antipode: And then suddenly he finds himself being accused of an ancient notorious crime and the context of the crime is murky as all hell.
• 58:09
  Antipode: But it does have the advantage of involving grotesque behavior on his part that almost literally stinks.
• 58:16
  Antipode: Right.
• 58:17
  Antipode: Like that's the revulsion that anybody hears thinking about what Russell Brand was doing.
• 58:22
  Antipode: It's palpable.
• 58:24
  Antipode: And so the point is the public gets into this phase where it feels like, well, I'm certainly not going to defend that.
• 58:31
  Antipode: Right.
• 58:31
  Antipode: Right.
• 58:31
  Antipode: No.
• 58:32
  Antipode: Yuck.
• 58:33
  Antipode: Awful.
• 58:33
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 58:34
  Antipode: So anyway, the point is, is this hypnosis?
• 58:37
  Antipode: Is that what's going on here where the idea is actually, you know what really does look like the ancient crime of rape?
• 58:43
  Antipode: Grooming gangs.
• 58:45
  Antipode: Right.
• 58:45
  Antipode: Yes.
• 58:46
  Antipode: We have a, and I understand why, but I think in this case, it doesn't serve anyone.
• 58:51
  Antipode: You keep the victims of the purported victims of rape and sexual assault anonymous, but we have these, you know, faceless people to whom things may or may not have happened 10, 15, 20, 25 years ago, whom we are about the things that they suffered 15, 20 years ago, we're supposed to care more about because the man who supposedly enacted them on him, his politics have changed.
• 59:19
  Antipode: Frankly, that's part of it.
• 59:20
  Antipode: Right.
• 59:21
  Antipode: At the point that he was engaging in this stuff, he was a good lefty.
• 59:24
  Antipode: So his politics have changed.
• 59:26
  Antipode: That's one thing, but why don't we care about the true innocents, the girls and the young women who are literally suffering stranger rape in Europe and in the UK, the grooming gangs?
• 59:40
  Antipode: Where are those prosecutions?
• 59:43
  Antipode: Right.
• 59:44
  Antipode: What are we doing?
• 59:46
  Antipode: What could we possibly be thinking?
• 59:48
  Antipode: It really does look like selective prosecution, which does not, that is true independent of whether or not he was guilty of a crime.
• 59:58
  Antipode: And I would argue that if a crime was committed, it wasn't rape, right?
• 1:00:04
  Antipode: That this thing, which is going to send him away for a decade or the better part of one is at worst an assault, but not a rape in the context of having given enthusiastic consent, having then returned.
• 1:00:20
  Antipode: We haven't even talked about this, but apparently after she says that she was raped, she went back to see a show.
• 1:00:26
  Antipode: It's ambiguous.
• 1:00:29
  Antipode: It seems that maybe she was simply working at a show that then he was at and they saw each other.
• 1:00:37
  Antipode: He texted her and none of this is actually on the record.
• 1:00:40
  Antipode: So she's remembering texts from 17 years ago that are then somehow entered into evidence.
• 1:00:45
  Antipode: But apparently she didn't go to see a show, but she was working a show that he was at.
• 1:00:49
  Antipode: Not clear.
• 1:00:51
  Antipode: Maybe it's not as clear as I think it is, but nonetheless, this is not the behavior of a person who has been the victim of the notorious crime in question.
• 1:01:02
  Antipode: So you're seeing that crime resurrected because it carries this ancient stigma and you're seeing it resurrected against somebody who's become inconvenient to power.
• 1:01:13
  Antipode: And you're seeing it resurrected at a point so late in the process that it raises questions about whether, you know, there's a reason that there's no statute of limitations on things like rape and murder.
• 1:01:27
  Antipode: I'm speaking in the American context here, but I assume it's the same in British common law.
• 1:01:31
  Antipode: But in any case, when we have changed all of these rules, there has to be a statute of limitations.
• 1:01:38
  Antipode: And what's more, it has to be made perfectly clear.
• 1:01:43
  Antipode: Our system among the pillars that it rests on is it doesn't matter that you as the supposed victim have changed your view of the crime.
• 1:01:55
  Antipode: Whether there was a crime depends on whether the person who is being accused of the crime understood you to have consented or not.
• 1:02:03
  Antipode: That is the relevant thing.
• 1:02:04
  Antipode: You might like it if you could change your mind much later, but there are very obvious reasons that we cannot have that standard.
• 1:02:11
  Antipode: Right.
• 1:02:11
  Antipode: It's a kind of power over people that just cannot be allowed.
• 1:02:15
  Antipode: And I mean, this is these kinds of way after the fact changes in what was believed and what was felt are among so many other things bad for women.
• 1:02:30
  Antipode: Yes.
• 1:02:31
  Antipode: This is degrading to actual victims of rape, to actual victims of sexual assault.
• 1:02:38
  Antipode: This is causing us to go back into the dark ages and to cause a lot of a lot of good men to say, for fuck's sake, like I'm not getting anywhere near anything now.
• 1:02:53
  Antipode: And so this is going to be the death of romance too.
• 1:02:55
  Antipode: That's a crazy thing maybe to say in the context of the actual acts that we're talking about here.
• 1:03:04
  Antipode: But if there was a prospect that 20 years after some interaction in a bar in which you get a little handsy with someone because you thought she was interested, she could pull up a case on you.
• 1:03:19
  Antipode: There's not going to be any kind of playful flirtatious, I'm trying to get to know you, you're trying to get to know me interaction that is the beginning of frankly, most romantic relationships.
• 1:03:34
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 1:03:34
  Antipode: Or it was.
• 1:03:35
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 1:03:35
  Antipode: And, you know, look, I don't know what happens if we actually allow this to stand and this becomes the new standard because the answer is actually a man would have to be insane to have sex with a woman that he didn't know very, very well, didn't know was beyond changing her mind later.
• 1:03:57
  Antipode: Right.
• 1:03:57
  Antipode: So, so the point is this could result in actually the death of all casual sex, which I don't think would be the end of the world.
• 1:04:05
  Antipode: I think it'd be a good thing, but this is a weird way to get there.
• 1:04:08
  Antipode: Right.
• 1:04:08
  Antipode: This might resurrect a case in which actually, you know, men become the gatekeepers because they can't afford to interact with anybody who might turn out to be unstable and change their mind later.
• 1:04:20
  Antipode: So that's wild.
• 1:04:22
  Antipode: I will also just add that increasingly we in the public have to be aware.
• 1:04:29
  Antipode: We are being manipulated, obviously.
• 1:04:33
  Antipode: There's all kinds of propaganda.
• 1:04:34
  Antipode: There's one kind of propaganda that is clearly now show trials in the West.
• 1:04:41
  Antipode: Right.
• 1:04:41
  Antipode: And we went through this with like Derek Chauvin.
• 1:04:44
  Antipode: Now, I think, as I said at the time, I think Derek Chauvin is the most common, uninteresting sort of man, not a fallen hero, just a guy.
• 1:05:00
  Antipode: The cop whose knee was on the neck of George Floyd when George Floyd died.
• 1:05:04
  Antipode: Right.
• 1:05:04
  Antipode: But the point is this is a guy who I think was doing more or less what his department trained him to do against somebody who was, yes, resisting arrest, who had done it before, who was sick, who was on drugs.
• 1:05:17
  Antipode: The victim, the dead person had done it before.
• 1:05:20
  Antipode: Yeah, he had done it before.
• 1:05:21
  Antipode: He had actually been a violent criminal in his own right.
• 1:05:25
  Antipode: And the point is Derek Chauvin was convicted because the public needed some red meat.
• 1:05:34
  Antipode: He should not be in jail because reasonable doubt was obvious in his case, but there was no way reasonable doubt was going to be allowed to derail that prosecution because of what would have happened if he had been freed.
• 1:05:45
  Antipode: Right.
• 1:05:46
  Antipode: So what we are looking at are show trials that result in people who should not be in jail losing their freedom.
• 1:05:53
  Antipode: And that is something that must not be tolerated.
• 1:05:58
  Antipode: Again, the West is depending on us, the consumers of the show trials, to not stand for it.
• 1:06:03
  Antipode: And I think this is a very different show trial, but it's a show trial all the same.
• 1:06:10
  Antipode: The timing of it, the compromised nature of the story, the inflammatory nature of the story that causes you to want not to, that causes you to want to distance yourself from Russell Brand, because what he did was grotesque.
• 1:06:23
  Antipode: That's not the same thing as it being illegal.
• 1:06:26
  Antipode: And there's just no way that this guy should be going away for the better part of a decade.
• 1:06:30
  Antipode: You know, he's got a young child.
• 1:06:32
  Antipode: This was a case in which consent was repeatedly given.
• 1:06:37
  Antipode: Was there no consent for this one act?
• 1:06:39
  Antipode: Maybe.
• 1:06:40
  Antipode: But if that's what happened, that was not rape.
• 1:06:43
  Antipode: The ancient crime of rape was not involved.
• 1:06:46
  Antipode: This person had consented to penetrative sex.
• 1:06:49
  Antipode: And if there was a violation of consent, it was some kind of much lesser sexual assault.
• 1:06:56
  Antipode: And in light of the period of time that passed, I'd see no justification for being able to resurrect this incident and force him to defend himself.
• 1:07:06
  Antipode: So I will say, as I said before, I keep returning to these two words and thinking about this, charisma and redemption.
• 1:07:17
  Antipode: And I think putting aside what you think of what Russell Brand thinks, whether or not you like his politics now or liked them before or don't like them now or didn't like them before, there seems to be absolutely no disagreement that he has transformed his ways with regard to having been Don Juan, lothario, libertine, and is not now and has not been for a very long time.
• 1:07:50
  Antipode: And as you say, there's no statute of limitations on rape for a reason.
• 1:07:55
  Antipode: But I agree with you that this doesn't look like it should fall under this ancient, horrifying crime of rape.
• 1:08:04
  Antipode: And what it does fall under, even if what her story is, is the absolute truth, that then becomes something akin to sexual assault.
• 1:08:16
  Antipode: And that's A, a much lesser crime, B, would carry a much lesser sentence, and C, maybe most important point of all, presumably, or at least should have a statute of limitations around it, which does would then suggest, including mitigating factors like, is this guy still behaving the way he was when he did the thing you say he did to you?
• 1:08:43
  Antipode: No, he's not.
• 1:08:46
  Antipode: And he hasn't been for a very long time.
• 1:08:47
  Antipode: Yeah, you know, I don't know what the right thing to think about the statute of limitations question is, how should this be reformulated given modern mores?
• 1:08:58
  Antipode: But it does seem to me that in light of the seriousness of these crimes, and the likelihood of being deprived of one's liberty, having one's reputation ruined, that there's an analog here.
• 1:09:18
  Antipode: Women who successfully misuse this accusation are capable of depriving a man of a substantial fraction of a life, right?
• 1:09:28
  Antipode: It's actually equivalent to rape in that way.
• 1:09:31
  Antipode: And for that reason, you can't have thought it was consensual at the time, and then change your mind.
• 1:09:42
  Antipode: That is, I think that is by definition exonerating.
• 1:09:46
  Antipode: If you thought it was rape at the time, then you have an obligation to go speak then to get the right to take it and to speak then on the record, because the guy has the right to preserve evidence too, right?
• 1:09:58
  Antipode: If the guy is going to be accused of something that is going to deprive him of his liberty, then he has the right to, you know, text messages or whatever, to keep text messages, to find the person who saw the interaction that began it so that that person can go on record and say what it is they saw.
• 1:10:16
  Antipode: A guy has the right to that evidence.
• 1:10:18
  Antipode: And if the idea is actually the fact that there's no statute of limitations, it makes the state acting on behalf of the woman extra powerful because the guy thinks nothing's happened until many years later.
• 1:10:33
  Antipode: And then he has to go back and defend himself.
• 1:10:35
  Antipode: How exactly can he even do that?
• 1:10:38
  Antipode: That is an unfair advantage.
• 1:10:39
  Antipode: It's actually in the US context, exactly the kind of thing that the founders were so frightened of.
• 1:10:45
  Antipode: The founders hobbled the state when the state was trying to deprive you of liberty because the state's power is so great.
• 1:10:53
  Antipode: They hobbled the state.
• 1:10:54
  Antipode: And this enables the state in a weird way because the guy can't defend himself in what is almost always going to be some, you know, he said, she said over private interactions.
• 1:11:05
  Antipode: So the more I think about it, this can't stand almost irrespective of what actually happened, because at this point, the ability to establish what actually happened because these people did not speak up on the record at the time has become so difficult.
• 1:11:24
  Antipode: You can't deprive a man of his liberty over this.
• 1:11:27
  Antipode: You know, the doubt here is obvious.
• 1:11:29
  Antipode: The reasons for doubt are very, very clear.
• 1:11:31
  Antipode: And, you know, I guess I was more equivocal when we started this conversation, but I'm now pretty spooked that this is show trial bullshit against a political adversary of the powerful and diabolical.
• 1:11:47
  Antipode: And that's true almost irrespective of what the sexual realities of this case were.
• 1:11:52
  Antipode: I agree with that.
• 1:11:54
  Antipode: Um, may I share something on a different topic?
• 1:12:01
  Antipode: Let's take a breath.
• 1:12:03
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 1:12:04
  Antipode: Um, I'd like to finish today, uh, by sharing what I wrote for my Substack this week, uh, and then having us talk about it a little bit.
• 1:12:15
  Antipode: Okay.
• 1:12:16
  Antipode: Okay.
• 1:12:18
  Antipode: So I call it, we live in different universes, but everyone can see that our systems are broken.
• 1:12:24
  Antipode: Hmm.
• 1:12:28
  Antipode: Good.
• 1:12:28
  Antipode: Okay.
• 1:12:29
  Antipode: I heard a long and detailed story about the failure of a once functioning organization this week, a co-op, as it turns out.
• 1:12:38
  Antipode: I've heard other stories of failed co-ops.
• 1:12:43
  Antipode: The details are always different, but the broad strokes are always the same.
• 1:12:46
  Antipode: It had worked well for a long time.
• 1:12:48
  Antipode: And while there had always been and would always be disagreements among the board and among the members in terms of what to prioritize and how to balance the budget and what it was that they really stood for, it had worked.
• 1:12:58
  Antipode: And I think that's a good point.
• 1:12:58
  Antipode: Disagreements came and went, but the bylaws and other rules by which they governed themselves were understood and they were adhered to.
• 1:13:04
  Antipode: Then one bad apple, why is this not working?
• 1:13:09
  Antipode: Then one bad apple started making trouble.
• 1:13:12
  Antipode: And as is always true with bad apples, the badness spreads.
• 1:13:16
  Antipode: The rot doesn't stay within the one apple.
• 1:13:18
  Antipode: If you don't get rid of it right away, everything is destroyed.
• 1:13:21
  Antipode: That one bad apple, a woman began saying that the co-op wasn't diverse enough, wasn't equitable enough, wasn't inclusive enough.
• 1:13:29
  Antipode: Why weren't they feeding the homeless?
• 1:13:32
  Antipode: Why were they only concerned about the people who could afford what they produced?
• 1:13:35
  Antipode: Most of the board members rolled their eyes because of course this is not how businesses run.
• 1:13:40
  Antipode: You can't provide to all else who will be left with nothing to give and everyone will lose.
• 1:13:45
  Antipode: This is basic and obvious and yet somehow missed by whole swaths of modern activists, including the up and coming democratic socialists who, in their own words, reject an economic order based on private profit and have a quote, "vision of a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality, and non-oppressive relationships." The democratic socialists now hold several seats in congress and have been elected to lead four major American cities, the same people who aim to take the means of production out of private hands and give it to the state.
• 1:14:21
  Antipode: These ideas have been tried and tried not work.
• 1:14:26
  Antipode: People will not do their best work to have it stolen from them in the name of justice.
• 1:14:30
  Antipode: People will go elsewhere, somewhere where they can enjoy the fruits of their own labors.
• 1:14:34
  Antipode: They may well choose to give to others but not accept orders to do so.
• 1:14:39
  Antipode: This co-op I was told about had the one bad apple, a woman with naive ideas about how to fix and feed the world and it would have been fine if, as before, people had stood up to her and said, "Sorry, that won't work.
• 1:14:51
  Antipode: That's not how we do things.
• 1:14:52
  Antipode: Thank you for your thoughts.
• 1:14:53
  Antipode: Your time is up." But nobody stood up.
• 1:14:57
  Antipode: And she talked for so long, at so many meetings, that finally someone joined her.
• 1:15:03
  Antipode: Even crazy can start to sound good to people if they hear it often enough.
• 1:15:07
  Antipode: Now there were two bad apples.
• 1:15:10
  Antipode: Two people demanding that a business start acting like a charity, a business that already had slim margins, a business that had no business forgetting its charter and pretending to be something that it wasn't.
• 1:15:20
  Antipode: The two bad apples were shameless though in the way of activists and used guilt to make the others feel bad.
• 1:15:26
  Antipode: "Sure, you want to make a living but think of the people in greater need than you.
• 1:15:30
  Antipode: They don't have the opportunities that you do.
• 1:15:32
  Antipode: Can't you just be kind?" The others began to make concessions.
• 1:15:37
  Antipode: "Yes, bad apple number one, you can become head of human resources.
• 1:15:41
  Antipode: Even though there has never been such a position before, no dedicated HR department at all.
• 1:15:46
  Antipode: In fact, the organization is so small." Soon the new head of HR began collecting complaints.
• 1:15:51
  Antipode: Soon thereafter, she was using them to engineer relationships.
• 1:15:55
  Antipode: "Yes, we can increase the size of the board, but why do we need to?
• 1:15:59
  Antipode: Oh, sure, to get better representation, right, because our board doesn't look like the world.
• 1:16:03
  Antipode: And otherwise, to obtain that, obviously we can all get behind it.
• 1:16:06
  Antipode: Goal, to increase diversity, we would need to get some rid of some of our existing board members, and we don't want to do that now, do we?" The new head of HR has four people whom she recommends to the board.
• 1:16:15
  Antipode: Four! That seems like it, doesn't it?
• 1:16:18
  Antipode: No?
• 1:16:18
  Antipode: And all the recommendation is coming from one person, but isn't it?
• 1:16:21
  Antipode: Okay, okay, fine, yes, fine, it's fine, it's all fine, sure.
• 1:16:26
  Antipode: Increase the size of the board by four.
• 1:16:27
  Antipode: "Yes, we hear you that you don't like the chief engineer, the one who has been with us since the very beginning, who has saved our ass several times, but he's great, we're telling you he's great.
• 1:16:37
  Antipode: Okay, yes, we hear you.
• 1:16:39
  Antipode: You heard a complaint in your role as head of HR that maybe he looked at the wrong way.
• 1:16:43
  Antipode: And now that you mention it, he was late several times last month, said something about car trouble, but who knows?
• 1:16:49
  Antipode: What is he covering?
• 1:16:51
  Antipode: Yes, we see it, yes, we should get rid of him.
• 1:16:53
  Antipode: He's probably ready to retire anyway, this will be our gift to him." Some of the board members dropped away quietly, and they were replaced by more clones of the new head of HR.
• 1:17:03
  Antipode: More people who knew nothing of the business of the co-op, nor anything of its rules and regulations, but did very much know how to disrupt a meeting.
• 1:17:09
  Antipode: Everything was done with the saleable goal of creating a more just and equitable world.
• 1:17:14
  Antipode: Within two years, this organization that had always run in the black was over $2 million in debt.
• 1:17:20
  Antipode: Fewer suppliers were bringing their product to this co-op because the quality was down, and it just wasn't pleasant to be there anymore.
• 1:17:26
  Antipode: Nobody was trying to build a career there like they had before.
• 1:17:29
  Antipode: Hourly employees got out as soon as they found other work.
• 1:17:33
  Antipode: Those who remained became suspicious, fearful, and resentful.
• 1:17:36
  Antipode: I heard this story, and I recognize so many pieces of it.
• 1:17:43
  Antipode: I have seen organizations that I have loved destroy themselves from the inside for no good reason at all.
• 1:17:48
  Antipode: And I heard in the way that the story was being told to me that what had happened could have been stopped.
• 1:17:53
  Antipode: If that first bad apple had been thrown out when she first began to speak, there would have been no badness left to spread.
• 1:18:00
  Antipode: That seems harsh, doesn't it?
• 1:18:02
  Antipode: Thrown out?
• 1:18:03
  Antipode: Yes.
• 1:18:04
  Antipode: Thrown out.
• 1:18:05
  Antipode: People who knew and loved the organization could have stood up to the bad apple and said, "Sorry, that won't work.
• 1:18:11
  Antipode: That's not how we do things.
• 1:18:12
  Antipode: Thank you for your thoughts.
• 1:18:13
  Antipode: Your time is up." If they had done that early, it could have worked.
• 1:18:17
  Antipode: It's what we used to do.
• 1:18:19
  Antipode: We honored the good rules and obeyed them, even if doing so meant that some human beings were not in on our good fortune.
• 1:18:25
  Antipode: We used to be able to say, "You know what?
• 1:18:27
  Antipode: Some among the eight billion human beings on this planet did not benefit from our organizational decisions, and that is okay.
• 1:18:33
  Antipode: In fact, most of the eight human beings who live on my block didn't benefit, and that's okay too.
• 1:18:38
  Antipode: This is mine and ours, and it is okay, honorable and awesome even, to strive to create things that are mine and ours." But here's where my experience being told this story got surprising.
• 1:18:49
  Antipode: I said what I said above to the lovely, smart, skilled, and generous woman who was telling it to me.
• 1:18:54
  Antipode: I said that someone needed to stand up and say, "No, that's not how we do things here.
• 1:18:59
  Antipode: Someone needed to defend the system that functions, just like in politics.
• 1:19:02
  Antipode: We need people to defend democracy because it's the best chance that we've got." She smiled then and nodded and said, regarding the midterm elections, the ones that were called the Blue Tsunami that were so one-sided, she said, "Last week, when I saw the results come in, I was just so overjoyed.
• 1:19:17
  Antipode: I thought maybe the elections would be stolen, but no, people showed up and stood for democracy." I lost my voice then.
• 1:19:26
  Antipode: I didn't know what to say.
• 1:19:28
  Antipode: I can't fathom how voting in a slew of democratic socialists could be a sign of hope.
• 1:19:34
  Antipode: They literally want to turn more systems over to the state.
• 1:19:37
  Antipode: Even the more moderate Democrats, who are more abundant and hold more power, are hardly any better.
• 1:19:41
  Antipode: They espouse the virtues of transgender medicine and have dangerously naive views on gun control and immigration.
• 1:19:48
  Antipode: I don't feel any more positive about most of the Republicans, but their failings are different.
• 1:19:52
  Antipode: They don't tend to make the kinds of errors that took down that co-op she was telling me about.
• 1:19:57
  Antipode: "If last week's Blue Tsunami is a sign of life and a failing democracy," I thought then, "we are living in different universes." That bad apple at the co-op was straight up using a modern democratic playbook to get what she wanted.
• 1:20:10
  Antipode: It was clear to me, partly because I had gone through the looking glass when my own organization exploded in a fury of self-loathing identity politics back in 2017.
• 1:20:19
  Antipode: But this smart and skilled woman who was telling me the story hasn't been through a looking glass, and she still believes the Democrats are who were needed to save the day.
• 1:20:28
  Antipode: I look around and think there ain't no way.
• 1:20:32
  Antipode: It's chilling.
• 1:20:36
  Antipode: It is.
• 1:20:38
  Antipode: It's chilling.
• 1:20:38
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 1:20:41
  Antipode: We lived through that.
• 1:20:44
  Antipode: Yep.
• 1:20:45
  Antipode: It wasn't a co-op, but it was trying to be one at Evergreen.
• 1:20:49
  Antipode: And we too had people completely get it wrong, really think that the answer was more of the same, more of the DEI, more of the crazy, more of the letting the bad apples win.
• 1:21:05
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 1:21:07
  Antipode: We are living in a hall of looking glasses.
• 1:21:14
  Antipode: In other words, the number of these stories that aren't identical but have the same characteristic where until you've gone through it, you don't realize how diabolical and broken the system has become, you know, and they're all facing each other.
• 1:21:31
  Antipode: And so at some level, this is the Cartesian crisis where nobody can figure out what to believe about anything as a result of the fact that each of these stories has a sort of a deceptive, onion skin layers to it.
• 1:21:50
  Antipode: Well, and especially in an era when there is too much information and ever more, and it's ever more untrustworthy, we want to be able to rely on some things that we have been able to rely on in the past.
• 1:22:04
  Antipode: And so this woman, like many, are still relying on the Democratic Party, which I can't even say with a straight face.
• 1:22:10
  Antipode: Like I can't imagine relying on the Democratic Party at this point.
• 1:22:13
  Antipode: During the Evergreen debacle, there were people who were still relying on the idea that because racism was such an important defining feature of 20th century America for so many people, and of course, 17th, 18th, 19th century America, but 20th century America for so many people, that literally people would say, "Well, I don't know anything about what's specifically going on, but my bias is to trust the black people." Or they would probably have said people of color.
• 1:22:41
  Antipode: But you can't do that anymore, because as soon as you have a static rule like that, it will rule like that, it will get gamed.
• 1:22:50
  Antipode: And the Democrats did the same thing, like, "Oh, goody.
• 1:22:53
  Antipode: We've got so many people.
• 1:22:55
  Antipode: We've got the working class and labor and so many people who are just going to vote blue no matter who, that we can become as debauched and depraved as we want.
• 1:23:04
  Antipode: And they're still just going to believe that we are going to be their saviors.
• 1:23:08
  Antipode: And oh my God, are they not.
• 1:23:09
  Antipode: The Democrats are going to be no one's saviors ever again.
• 1:23:12
  Antipode: I don't see any hope in the Republicans either.
• 1:23:15
  Antipode: And I've linked to your American Liberty Party here, because that feels like one of the few possible ways.
• 1:23:20
  Antipode: And can it work?
• 1:23:22
  Antipode: Is it sufficient?
• 1:23:23
  Antipode: I don't know.
• 1:23:24
  Antipode: I hope so.
• 1:23:25
  Antipode: We need something.
• 1:23:26
  Antipode: Voting blue isn't going to work and voting red isn't going to work.
• 1:23:29
  Antipode: And how can you have lived that story?
• 1:23:32
  Antipode: This is a woman who was up close and personal with this story.
• 1:23:34
  Antipode: And she told it to me over the course of like 45 minutes and then said how hopeful she was given that so many Democrats were voted in last week.
• 1:23:44
  Antipode: Yeah, she's that close.
• 1:23:46
  Antipode: She's seen the whole thing happen up close and she can't put the last piece together.
• 1:23:51
  Antipode: Forgive me.
• 1:23:53
  Antipode: Did you say what the co-op does?
• 1:23:57
  Antipode: No, you kept that out.
• 1:23:58
  Antipode: So I will keep it out too.
• 1:23:59
  Antipode: But let me say that you will of course recall many years ago before the Evergreen meltdown that I gave a TEDx talk on what I call the personal responsibility vortex.
• 1:24:16
  Antipode: And the personal responsibility vortex is most maddening idea in the universe.
• 1:24:20
  Antipode: Because what it says is if you do what this woman did to this co-op, even if you do so in good faith, thinking that the values you're advancing are the ones that should spread, you will actually cause those values to lose ground rather than gain ground.
• 1:24:39
  Antipode: Right?
• 1:24:39
  Antipode: If you shop your values, you will cause those values to be hobbled, not enabled.
• 1:24:46
  Antipode: And that sounds wrong to people, but the game theory is pretty straightforward.
• 1:24:52
  Antipode: Let's say that this co-op was textiles.
• 1:24:56
  Antipode: Okay, so you've got some local textile manufacturer co-op that is going up against all of the big sweatshop producers.
• 1:25:07
  Antipode: And all the people with sheep are trying to choose where to bring their wool.
• 1:25:10
  Antipode: Right.
• 1:25:10
  Antipode: And you decide, well, you know what?
• 1:25:13
  Antipode: We're people and not only are we going to do our co-op textile thing, but we're going to give textiles away to the homeless and we're going to, you know, whatever your version of it is.
• 1:25:28
  Antipode: What happens to that co-op?
• 1:25:31
  Antipode: Well, exactly what happens in your story.
• 1:25:34
  Antipode: That co-op can't compete.
• 1:25:36
  Antipode: It's already up against, you know, economies of scale that allow the big producers to sell their goods more cheaply.
• 1:25:43
  Antipode: So it's got huge obstacles to overcome to begin with.
• 1:25:47
  Antipode: If you saddle it with having to, you know, clothe the clothesless at the same time, it's going to go bankrupt.
• 1:25:54
  Antipode: What do you have then?
• 1:25:55
  Antipode: Well, then what you have is a world in which you only have access to the people with the sweatshops and you don't have access to this co-op.
• 1:26:03
  Antipode: So if your idea is, hey, it would be great if we went up against the sweatshop people, then the thing to do is to not hobble your co-op with extra moral burdens, but actually to enable them and spread the word that, you know, that they're, you know, being honorable capitalists is actually a positive thing and that we should support it.
• 1:26:26
  Antipode: And that maybe it's, you know, it's worth it to get your clothing there because it's better stuff.
• 1:26:33
  Antipode: Those are good reasons for you to buy it that aren't, you know, some virtue signaling nonsense.
• 1:26:38
  Antipode: So anyway, think very carefully.
• 1:26:42
  Antipode: This is one of the biggest failures of imagination over on what is now the lunatic left is they think that the good is done by saying lofty things and, you know, raising their fists and taking over organizations.
• 1:27:03
  Antipode: But in fact, the values that they claim to like are being hobbled by their inept behavior.
• 1:27:09
  Antipode: Right.
• 1:27:09
  Antipode: They're destroying the co-op rather than enabling it.
• 1:27:12
  Antipode: And that is counterproductive.
• 1:27:13
  Antipode: Yep.
• 1:27:15
  Antipode: That's exactly right.
• 1:27:16
  Antipode: Maybe we should stop there.
• 1:27:22
  Antipode: Yep.
• 1:27:22
  Antipode: Yeah.
• 1:27:23
  Antipode: So we'll be back.
• 1:27:25
  Antipode: Well, we're going to do a Q&A in 15 minutes or so on Locals.
• 1:27:29
  Antipode: Please consider joining us there.
• 1:27:31
  Antipode: And then we'll be back again a week from today on Tuesday once more to accommodate some travel that we're doing.
• 1:27:39
  Antipode: Check us out on Locals.
• 1:27:43
  Antipode: I'll put a link to that substack piece of mine in the show notes.
• 1:27:47
  Antipode: A reminder that we are supported by you, our audience.
• 1:27:51
  Antipode: Your support for our sponsors helps us that again, once again, this week, it was Sundays, CrowdHealth and Cozy Earth.
• 1:27:59
  Antipode: And wherever you watch or listen, consider subscribing, liking, sharing.
• 1:28:04
  Antipode: And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat real food and get outside.
• 1:28:11
  Antipode: Be well, everyone.