Sensemaking this invite that Russell Brand just sent to me

and using it as a musing on how to cope with a zone flooded with shit

I have previously been a huge fan of Russell Brand. On more than one occasion he has been my answer to, “Who would you most like to sit next to at a dinner party?” In 2019 I was invited onto his podcast Under the Skin, to talk spiritual materialism and bipolar disease. I travelled to his home in Henley-on-Thames and we ate cashews and rapid-fired. In person, he was high-energy, kind, generous and yet somewhat, how shall I put it, removed from the room. I had the sense that the onslaught of synapses firing in his brain made it very hard for him to come down to earth and be amid pleasantries and sensible things like folding socks.

Need I say, recently my feelings about the guy have turned more ambivalent. The UK journalist Helen Lewis and I talk about some of the reasons for this in our podcast chat here, one of my favourites to date. Last month Brand was also accused of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse by four women.

And then today I received this invite, below, in my inbox

I want to use it as pivot for a section of my book I need to write.

I won’t include the details for attending the “live”, intentionally.

I did not attend the live.

Most of you here probably know who Alex Jones is. In a sentence: He’s one of the shoutiest and far-rightiest of shouty-righty US shock jocks who started the InfoWars platform to push the bonkers Pizzagate and New World Order conspiracy theories, and to argue that the Sandy Hooks massacre (yep, he was that cooker), the Oklahoma bombing, 9/11 and the 1969 moon landing were all hoaxes…oh, and to sell his branded range of armageddon gear, which netted him $US166million in three years and that he had to hand over when everyone started suing him for, well, all the stuff at that top of this long sentence.

He personifies the madness in the world that we are all feeling.

This Atlantic article gives a good overview of Jones’ particular flavour of pathology. I also really enjoyed this Louis Theroux podcast interview with Jon Robson that touches on Ronson’s personal interactions with Jones.

We could swirl around in clever arguments about platforming and free speech (and exactly how much of Jones’ soothsaying came to pass, per Brand’s line?🤔). But such is my care for the world I can no longer tolerate such distracting, time-wasting and surface-level debates.

What we need is understanding and sensemaking and better ways

This is the space where I want us all to meet in my forthcoming book, and here, particularly off the back of my last video post of my chat with Meg Wheatley. The fruitful, compassionate questions for us might be:

Why have so many caring people like Brand turned conspiracy-obsessed and polarised to the far-positions (right and left) as a reaction to collapse? ¹

What do we need to understand here in order to be the solid “warriors of the human spirit” in our communities?

How do we live amid such noise without blowing our tops and descending into fragmentation ourselves?