Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson | Mikhaila Peterson Podcast #68

welcome to episode 68 of the michaela peterson podcast this episode was co-hosted with my dad jordan peterson we interviewed russell brand the russell brand which was awesome this episode was very intense we go deep we spoke about family life seeing the divine in others fame and much more i can't even begin to describe it really russell has just released an audio book revelation connecting with the sacred in everyday life which is linked below and available at audible.com russell's podcast under the skin is also available on luminary which is a subscription podcast service but i got you a month free you can get that by going to luminary.link mp also linked below please remember to hit subscribe if you enjoy this episodes every sunday and wednesday this episode is brought to you by ground news you may have seen ground news on your twitter feed recently they are the company behind the blind spotter a twitter tool that went viral earlier this week the tool tells you if you have a balanced 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brought to you by self-authoring can't not mention them self-authoring was developed by my dad over the last 30 years with help from two other phds at mcgill and harvard it has past authoring allowing you to write out your past great for trying to work through trauma although please wait at minimum a year after the trauma is gone so you don't re-traumatize yourself it has present authoring which helps you write out your present and identify flaws that you can work on figuring out and future authoring which helps you make a plan for the future with code mp you get 10 off at selfauthoring.com i really believe in this program if you don't have a goal you have nothing to aim for this helps fix that it's also 30 or less with my code so it's very affordable for what it is selfauthoring.com codemp enjoy this episode it was certainly enjoyable for me and again remember to hit subscribe to stay [Music] updated [Music] russell brand welcome to the podcast makayla thank you very much for having me i know it's really late where you are so thanks for doing this and making it possible i'm a little bit starstruck gotta say it's not actually that late it's just an indication of how my lifestyle has changed what it actually is in objective terms is 8 45 but in my new life at 8 45 is late because i live with a four-year-old and a two-year-old and of course their mother my children i uh urgently point out and like so now everything is everything is different there's so much um life around me michaela but of course also so much death i'm handling the death part they're handling the life part okay can you delve into that a little bit what do you mean so much death we're bloody exhausting these children like the children the animals there's dogs there's cats everywhere i look there's more life that that's probably a dog hair in my mouth right now it's just uh it invades every every facet of my being see that's why you're supposed to have children when you're young and stupid instead of old and wise yeah i see that now thank you very much i wish i met you when i was 20. i possibly wouldn't have been able to absorb the information then either no no that's another problem i think you have to have children when you're young by accident that's how i did it it worked out really well yeah is that what if you do you mean you have children or that you are you i do i i have a three and a half year old girl well that's good yeah i can see that'll be good i can see that will be good yeah that's fine yeah there's no other way i could have done it yeah you don't think you could have handled it well how have things you said you have a four-year-old and a two-year-old that's precisely right yeah and they've been home all the time because of coved too huh well as a matter of fact we like they do have like a play group that they can attend part-time and actually in again i should probably from um most people's perspective it's a it's kind of a breeze i mean i'm you know i'm not i'm not a coal face i'm not running a farm and it's actually in loads of ways absolutely blissful in fact all this information really is just to sort of provide some context for how 8 45 in the evening when more sophisticated people are sitting down to dine is to make some kind of witching hour yeah yeah that's fair enough i'm i'm getting tired around seven o'clock uh especially if scarlett comes in at night um i wanted to ask that just before i forget and this is a question for both of you guys but we could start off with russell um what what's been the most difficult part of having kids for you other than being a sleeper early well i don't know if anything about it has been jarringly difficult because it's been such a total transformation from not only a life you know i had a life i'm a performer and like sort of celebrity has been a component in my life and so so both being a performer and being a celebrity can both i i suppose amplify aspects of self-centeredness a way that can in retrospect be rather ruthless and having children in a way that i that i'm present for has been very very grounding so it's very difficult to to break it down because it's so such a holistic change it's very difficult to break it down into components and because it is overall so glorious and sort of wonderful and profound it's difficult to frame it as being in in any way negative but it has been wholly wholly transformative in a way that's [Music] beneficial beneficial incredibly important part of maturation and like had i had this happen to be in my 20s i don't think i would have been able to have rooted myself yeah that's fair i was pretty wild before i had skype really oh yeah like in an uncomfortable way and i mean getting pregnant you have absolutely like you don't really have much of a choice if you're pregnant and you're going to have a kid then you're immediately a healthy sober person so unless you want real trouble yeah unless you want real trouble but um that switched things around really quickly and then the first year staying you have to be pretty much attached like as a man if you're a good and you're there then it's one thing but as a woman if you're breastfeeding then you're just completely attached to the baby for like a year so that kind of takes away the party element too and it was probably it probably sped up um it probably actually ended up speeding up my career because it put the partying on hold which is a funny thing to say about having kids you know well my my observation for young people in university was that for example the students i had who who were studying psychology who also started working in a lab and then so we're working 12 or to 20 hours extra a week got better grades not worse doing more things well because they had to discipline themselves and they quit wasting time yeah and there's some real utility in um shouldering the sort of responsibility that stops you from wasting time and you asked about negative elements of having children yeah i feel i think in some ways similar to russell at least with regards to what he said so far is there was virtually nothing about it that was negative as far as i was concerned um i suppose i i was somewhat um it was difficult to sort out how the attention was going to be split in the household i missed your mother when she was so occupied with the infants but having children more than made up for that and you know kids get a bad rap and people think of them as an impediment to freedom and it's such a foolish way of thinking because it's so remarkable to have children and you can have the best relationship you have the opportunity of having the best relationship with anyone you've ever had in your life when you have children and then all also someone is finally more important than you you know i mean hopefully when you get married or you fall in love with someone they're as important as you or perhaps even more so but when you have children it's definitively the case that now someone is more important than you and that's that's such a relief and it is a it is a crucial part of maturation to have that happen and and i don't believe that people i'll get pilloried for this or maybe you will because it's your podcast i can take the blame i can handle it i don't think it's possible to grow up without having children oh it's unlikely he's still got it what's that he said he's still got it he can still drop a bond mop that's gonna stir people up yeah well i it's hard to grow up until someone's more important than you so why would you why would you why wouldn't you continue being siberic and and and living at least to some degree for pleasure so it's true but children are amazing and so everyone out there who's thinking about having children you should do it because they're they add they add to your life and then when you're older like me i'm 60 almost 60 now i have grandchildren now and i can't imagine what my life how empty my life might be without that and more of that on the way so yeah i know some rather brilliant people as i'm sure you both do that have a foregone or decided against or unable to have children i suppose the values that are brought to the surface in parenthood perhaps duty devotion and perhaps if there is a sort of some transcendent component to your life and i don't mean that in necessarily in a spiritual way but it's difficult to avoid the connotations of that word then perhaps perhaps maturation is possible if you take for example like a straightforward uh mendicants life monasticism celibacy devotion in a very uh explicit way to god then would you say that they are unable to to reach maturity or what if it was a secular version like devotion to the arts or to a sort of a political cause do you not think that that could well of course that reminds me of something i wanted to talk to you about i read your book mentors which is this book right here and um one of the things that it made me think about was i've thought for a long while that the one of the processes that marks the transition from childhood to adulthood is apprenticeship and so one of the things nietzsche said about the catholic church was that the european mind this is speaking in nietzsche's voice the european mind disciplined itself by adhering to a single interpretive strategy for centuries to explain everything under the conditions on to explain everything using the axioms of a single intellectual system and that disciplined the european mind and enabled it then to go off and use other disciplinary strategies to discover other to discover other ways of dealing with the world maybe to develop science for example and nietzsche was very convinced that you had to enslave yourself in one manner or another before you could be free and that's an apprenticeship motif and to me that's what you explored in your book mentors you know you you present yourself i believe as someone who was striving in various ways to mature and that you identified people who came into your life as targets for emulation that could impose a discipline on you and help you mature you would hunger for that like like people do and yes i do think that if you don't have children there are other disciplinary strategies that you can use to further your maturation but it isn't obvious to me that any of them are as profound as having children and i mean i've had a good career and i've been very interested in intellectual pursuits as well and i suppose have disciplined myself in some manner because of that but i still stand by my um statement about children they're in a different category of of profundity it's partly because you have to take on so much responsibility when you have children is it the sacrifice too i mean if you think about people who who work in churches or what what russell was saying about you know people who devote themselves to god and it's kind of what they do is kind of sacrificial and i suppose part of what you do when you have kids is sacrifice that hedonistic part if you're going to be a good parent so is is part of what helps you mature the sacrifice associated with having children or is it something else i don't know if that's part of what helps you mature or if that's a definition of maturation is that it's a sacrificial act but you know people often think of sacrifice in terms of loss but the reason you sacrifice fundamentally is to gain something higher that's that's the sacrificial motif you give up something that's that's attractive in the present but but the purpose of the sacrifices is to is to to organize things more effectively at a higher level of being so and that is a that is maturation that that's the forestalling of immediate pleasure for medium to long-term um well-being and maybe for more than you as well okay um i have a question even though i know it's not my podcast and when you transduce a metaphysical idea like sacrifice and sacrifices as an evocation of a greater power further down the line and you transduce it into materialist and rational rationalist terms perhaps to make it more relevant to a cultural group that don't think in that way anymore do you think that we risk missing part and the essential part of the mystery that much of the devotional life by its nature doesn't have a a direct uh translation in secularism i.e of course yes you know i've heard you say before jordan that it's as if there were a father that's a stern father that's going to guide you and discipline you and chide you into being a stronger man or woman but like uh um but i feel too that there is something that what that through sacrifice we are also acknowledging that on this plane of being on this plane of being all our needs cannot be met in fact really all we can do is generate need and by sort of sacrificing food or sacrificing like sacrificing something important we reaffirm our connection to the sublime okay well i think that whenever you bring a transcendent concept in some sense down to earth you risk inappropriately constraining it if you assume that your act of bringing it down to earth has explained it fully so i don't believe that my explanation of sacrifice explains it fully and so i think you can retain that you can retain the enough you can retain the advantages of ineffability for example if if i assess a piece of literature or film for and make its metaphysical presumptions more explicit i don't believe that that necessarily takes away from the film it it can because it can be reductionistic but it can add an additional by furthering understanding it can add an additional layer of of utility to the to the experience i've tried to do that with the biblical lectures i've done for example i i'm not trying to explain everything away although i do think that generally speaking you should use the simplest explanation that's at hand so it's a risk but but hopefully it can be a a risk that is fundamentally productive yeah i reckon that i suppose i suppose that mentorship and education is dependent on crossing this space between the ineffable and the at least palpable or the apprehendable justice destiny is that if the ineffable stays entirely ineffable then you can't put it to use and i think you're absolutely right that the mentorship does that because and there's a profound religious instinct there and i think it was really operating in you you you make reference to it a number of times for example you had by your own admission a strong tendency to um romanticize the women in your in your life you say you deify them in some sense or maybe more accurately you perceive them that way to begin with and then over time in some sense the stars fall away from your eyes but that's the action of an instinct that would be the anima projection from a union perspective is that there's a an instinct in you that's pushing you towards development and the way it manifests itself is by illuminating certain elements of your experience and those might be that might occur for example when you meet a male figure who you admire who you then start to imitate it's it's the deep workings of your unconscious illuminate that figure and make him say stand out against the background because you've apprehended that there's something about his pattern of being that addresses a lack in yours and the same thing can happen in romantic relationships and and that can al also not be purely illusory you know in some sense when you when you have a romantic relationship with someone you are chasing the divine in each other now both of you may fall short and the relationship may fall apart but by seeing the divine in the person that you fall in love with you also invite them to manifest that and by opening the door to that they're actually more likely to manifest it it's very complex it's very complex and sophisticated instinct i understand this i understand this i have experienced this i recognize that i have spent a lot of time projecting through my inability to comprehend my own psychic energies i've projected onto another resources that were available perhaps through tutelage within myself one of the mentors i write about in that book who's like has been incredibly valuable in my life when we first met like by you know synchronicity or chance gave me a copy of the robert johnson's book on gold and inner gold which is a sort of an essay on mentorship and have it you know holding one another's goal um and i think yes that how mentorship has functioned in my life has i've gained a great deal of perspective i've understood that they are kind of uh psychic uh cynic decays holding for me a space holding meaning i recognize the fallibility of these people that i uh like adore or aspire to but in my psyche they function as coordinates i was just talking to a brilliant therapist today in therapy and like a and he said that you know that you don't need to overcome your father and mother in the physical world with them you need to overcome the imprint of them in your psyche and i said yes in a sense they are hollowed out carapaces in reality i don't mean that of any disrespect to my actual mother and father but like the the mother and father that i deal with and live in my psychic landscape they don't live in essex england you know um so like i recognize yes that we can use relationship as an external coordinate to activate dormant psychic energies so there's a kind of reductionism in that too in some sense right because by by by doing that you reduce the the the experience of the divine in someone else to activation of an unconscious um complex let's say but one of the things you point out in the book and and it's possible to go deeper than this too one of the things you point out in the book is that when you allow or ask or invite someone to be your mentor you also allow them to manifest that element of them that's most mentor-like and they can do that independently to some degree of their other flaws just like when you're a parent a father you can act paternally as a figure of authority even though you are by no means a perfect figure of authority the child still needs you to be the best authority figure that you can be despite your flaws and and you will manifest that but it it that's also not false because the ideal that we're all chasing we we don't know what its ultimate reality is you know if you have an instinct towards further development let's say what that means is that there's something about you that could be greater than it currently is and we don't know the limits to what that currently greater could be and that's where the the idea of mentorship let's say shades into something like religious worship because i suppose if you think about the christian world the ultimate mentor is christ and you could say that being a christian or you could say that being a psychologist and if you said it being a psychologist you would say well it's by definition that the ultimate mentor is christ and what christianity has been as it unfolds itself over the last 2000 years is an attempt to engage all of the people within that belief system in a dialogue about what that ideal actually constitutes you know and there's tradition that feeds into that the biblical stories and the corpus of tradition that goes along with that but all of it is a collective attempt to specify that ideal so that people can use it as a target to further their development and that's not delusional that that furthering of development is unbelievably useful practically yes yes and forgive me because i have a response question once again and i want to ensure that michaela who surely has had a lifetime of tolerating this kind of business her father exciting jung passes by um like i would like to i would like to say when edinger in his analysis of willian william blake's engravings from the book of job says um like of the passage where yahweh shows the behemoth and the leviathan to job and says look upon the leviathan the behemoth that i have made as i may be edinger in his analysis says that yahweh is saying to job here that the all potentiality is held in yahweh it is beyond good and evil how does this transition between an old testament version of god that requires of us to become good that god itself or himself or herself is also good how does this idea this interpretation of our relationship with god this old testament which uh places this sort of obligation that sort of punishes job for his uh phatic impersonation of worship how does that evolve into the christian idea of christ as the perfect mentor christ is perfect why don't you ask a difficult question [Laughter] jesus well you know jung talks about this a fair bit in answer to job and that's a very difficult book to summarize and it's also a very terrifying book but the upshot of it is essentially something like this which is that whatever god is the the best element of him can plausibly be brought forth as a consequence of the manifestation of what's best in us and that might be the willingness to sacrifice and the willingness to trust and the and the the the courage to love your neighbor the courage to love your enemy and and this is a profound question it's like would reality shine a more benevolent face upon us if we're all as good as we could be and that's the christian idea and i i can't see that that idea is wrong now and and i think well certainly jung interpreted the story of job in that light and he believed that job sort of set god back on his heels so to speak by by being a more moral agent in some sense than god himself was but underneath all that was this notion that if you acted as if god was love if you believed that and that would be manifest in your perceptions and your actions that that would invite the deity of love into existence and that's true you know that you know that when you when you when you interact with people with love and there's a tremendous courage in that it makes the world a better place and we don't know how deep that reaches you know it certainly reaches as deep as humanity itself but and is there something transcendentally real about it be beyond that uh who knows who knows it's that's that's a far enough target for for anyone as far as i'm concerned that's a hell of a question russell yeah i'm just sitting here just like yep i'll just that was but but anyway that's that's fine not so much because you said you know before we did this podcast we were talking about mentors and you said that your your one of the things that you've done is to pick someone to imitate and to pull yourself towards them by that process of imitation and then when you got close you'd pick someone else to imitate or to compare yourself with compare myself with not sure but it's the same thing the comparison is the same thing because when you compare yourself to someone you start pulling yourself towards them unless you get envious and resentful yeah before we were before we hopped on the podcast i was just talking about how i have like i i consistently have i'm getting a lot of opportunities with the podcast i have but i consistently have my dad to compare myself to which i think is fine because i have something to aim towards and it's kind of something to get to and that's what i've done throughout my life is hey i you know that person is really smart and interesting try and achieve what they're achieving and then once you get there you pick somebody above you and the problem is that means you're always kind of unfulfilled but it also means you're always growing so that's what we were talking about well that's also why jung pointed out for example he believed that the book of revelations had been tacked onto the new testament because the christ in the gospels was portrayed too much as a figure of mercy whereas in revelations christ is portrayed primarily as a judge and jung's explanation for that was that every ideal is a judge and the ultimate ideal is the ultimate judge and you could say the ultimate ideal judges your soul and because that's virtually the definition of the ultimate ideal and so the ultimate ideal is something transcendent and divine that judges your soul now what that means about the way the universe is constituted again i have no idea but but but the higher the ideal the more severe the judge that's clearly the case and that should make you quake i think it does when you're conscious when your conscience assaults you in the middle of the night for things that you've done wrong it's because you're quaking in your boots morally because you failed to live up to this ideal there's no escape from that not not not truly i don't believe there is how are you two managing to conduct the intimacy of a father and daughter relationship in this new medium i you know having two children my two little daughters myself i love them so dearly they're children they're not adults of course but i um i felt like it made me like fantasize a little um you know i wonder if i'll work with them i wonder who they'll be i wonder who they'll be the idea of um bringing your relationship into this space has it been challenging for for for you michaela particularly when you hold your father up in such high regard and such high esteem and i know you've been through a very challenging time as a family person thank god that you're both well now and but how is it to find yourself in this situation that has a sort of a public dimension to it um yeah it it hasn't been easy i mean for my entire life especially when i've gotten older i've said yes to every opportunity that kind of came my way just to see where it would take me and i think that's something i learned from my dad just just say yes to everything and see what happens um i started like formally working for him in 2018 um because i'd already built his kind of social media platforms just the profiles on you know facebook i knew how instagram worked and i was like instagram's the new facebook like switch we got to get you a profile there so um and then i started like simple with i was cutting youtube videos and just making clips and then i was booking theaters and then i started coordinating between companies or agents um and it's been complicated uh with family it hasn't been it's not all fun and games and we get into serious work discussions where we're we're talking about i don't know maybe producing something and whether or not that's a good idea and it's i i don't really have a comparison so i don't know if it's more stressful than working somewhere else like the other places i've worked when i was a kid i was working at like a hockey rink and as a waitress and i i was working at a club at one point and it's not like that wasn't stressful so i'm still working in this position so apparently i like it uh and it's definitely challenging you've taken a fair bit of public flack i would say for people who because of what's happened to me over the last couple of years because of people who doubt your motivations and yes you know and who feel that you might be exploiting me which i would like to state very forthrightly is not the case um quite the contrary you've been of tremendous help but it's difficult to keep those boundaries straight i mean the problem with working with family members is you run into dual relationship problems and you know many ethicists think those are best avoided completely and there's some real wisdom in that but that doesn't mean it's unethical to enter into a business relationship with a family member but it does mean that it's fraught with difficulties it's difficult to be a father and also supervise michaela's role in my business affairs for example because it isn't clear when i'm one and when i'm the other and it's i suppose not clear to her when she's daughter and when she's employed there are definitely benefits though um i found like part of the reason i thought that i was good at the role i'm doing was because i was more comfortable pushing dads on on decisions that i really believed he should do um pushing much harder than somebody else would push like me for example like you would push she's less she's less agreeable than me so like quite a bit left yeah so i could do i could make congratulations thank you it makes getting along with people hard but uh it's it's entertaining uh yeah it was tricky i i mean i think i like it i've been i wonder forgive me interrupting michaela i wonder when the conversation has a propensity to move into areas such as archetypes and when such strong opinions are being expressed whether or not you feel like it could be exposing just because of the jordan your clinical background and the type of conversations that you evoke and i'm just talking about the actual conversations himself let alone the sort of secondary component when other people start to evaluate stroke judge this stuff exposing in what way what are you what are you thinking about you mean violation of privacy i i reckon provocative more like if someone like i feel like if i was talking to my mother or father it's difficult to imagine why my little innocent albeit potent children like but but with the parent like i feel like that if my mother or father was talking about sort of archetypes and psychic energies and parenting like you know i feel like that i could potentially feel like hey you know that sort of that territory is not entirely academic and not atta and not solely rhetorical but is uh in this context is empirical and and i think the very fact that you're doing it evidence is is evidence of a great deal of a trust and uh rapport a sympatho between you but i just wondered if it like how how it feels now that you're actually doing it i think i can i can answer that okay i've got an answer too so at least from my perspective people are people have asked me is your dad like he is on youtube at home and the answer is yes like you know generally speaking you don't get a 90 minute shirt like sermon like speech with nobody interrupting but we've been talking about the meaning behind the biblical series and myths uh and talking about you know what do you want to do in your future sit since i can remember so it's not something new at all and it doesn't seem uncomfortable because that's how i was raised and it doesn't having a public component doesn't make it jarring it because there's still a distance right like even even in 2016 or 27 to 17 it was there's a distance between reading about a newspaper it's weird like you know you walk down the street and dad was on a newspaper and i'd be like that's that's jarring but at home it's not jarring even doing podcasts like this it's intimate right it's just us three so there's the public element but it would be maybe it would be different if it was in front of a crowd um but it hasn't really seemed less intimidating you've had a different experience i think we're both relieved and pleased to be doing something together yeah that isn't intensely focused on like fatal or or highly painful illness yeah that because that's just it's just been non that's just been non-stop for for way too long way way too long and so this is a break from that it is very strange but we're in a strange world i'll never get accustomed i don't think to the degree to which i've become public and that's something i wanted to ask you about i mean you got famous and there's nothing more appalling than people who are notorious or well-known whining about their fame and i don't want to do that um but but it but it's still something interesting to note and to contemplate it try partly to get a handle on it's very it's been very difficult for me to reconceptualize my circumstances given that i became well known when i was relatively older you know what happened after i was 55 and it's strange strange to understand that the conversation that we're having you know is going to be watched and listened to by some hundreds of thousands of people or perhaps more than that over time um it's uncanny in some sense and and surreal i just don't understand those numbers so it doesn't like i i can't i can't understand those numbers yeah well you've go you've grown up with the the reality of youtube for example like you've grown up in a world where you could be a tv producer as well as a tv consumer i mean when i was grew up when i was your age even a bit younger than that when i was in my teen years we had two tv channels it wasn't long before that that you know the united states only had three and certainly there was never any conceptualization that any particular individual could become a tv station or a media center and so it's a very foreign reality for me and i guess i do have some sense of the numbers perhaps because i've done so many live talks and i've seen very large crowds and in any case the reason that michaela and i do this in large part is because well we're curious we wanted to see how it would go but i we also we're also seeing if we enjoy it and i'm happy to be here doing something like this with her it's a real privilege that goes back to you know having children i always i don't even have a joke i don't even have a joke right now i suppose too this has been enhanced by my ill health in recent years but i always feel that it's a privilege to spend time with my children and i have some sense of how fast time goes you know i've always had a very acute sense of the finitude of existence and so and this is a good hint for people who have children but with regards to your family members at all is don't take it for granted no every second you get that isn't painful you should cherish god a maudlin oh you came up with a joke that's good i felt like uh i took it as an expression of your love for one another just as a with the content that i've watched and i imagine that would be the motivation given the the trials that you've endured with regard to your health and and then this is of course entirely speculative that you know that what preceded it in the rather unique certainly unparalleled cultural position that you jordan had occupied leading up to the period of abstinence and it's a accompanying medical um complexity and i know that you know but that's just tammy and i know um michaela i know that sort of health issues have been quite prevalent and familiar with you and i'm familiar with your work and i sense that it would be it was a sort of a culminative expression of love and gratitude and warmth and an opportunity for you both to be together and it's very heartening to hear that it's that with regard to your inquiry about the nature of public life for me i as i the older i get the more i recognize it was an unsophisticated attempt as perhaps or early grasps at the grail must be of trying to heal the seminal wound of seeking some kind of value of trying to impose some kind of myth in a mythilis world some pursuit something of value to chase after and and then increasingly discovering on as various uh points in the journey were arrived at that it couldn't fulfill me now i was sort of comparatively old also like um you know it wasn't like 16 i was like 30 when i sort of became well known when i started to make films in america and things like that and i always felt that there were i'm sure numerous but at least two sort of streams running one this sort of like a need for validation and approval on a scale that could only indeed be provided by youtube numbers michaela i'd need to see that speedometer clocking up the hundred thousand two hundred thousand there can never be enough never a high enough number this is the the that lies at the root perhaps of all addiction this constant requirement for more than no way of healing that wound not materially at least but some of that's actually some of that's even actually healthy russell i mean one of the things that we do constantly is to evaluate our worth by the responses of others and you know if that's all you do that's a mistake and if you're doing it in a false way that's also a mistake because then you're gaining as a consequence of doing something that isn't real but like the person who cares nothing for what anyone else thinks is actually a psychopath not a saint and so it's easy for that mechanism to go astray in a world that's so dominated by social media because you know when when when before social media if you were a teenager it was really important how your peers responded to you and and it should have been because that's part of apprenticeship you're socializing yourself against the group at that point and their opinions should matter you use them as a proxy for your parents to escape from your parents it's crucial even though it can go too far but now that's elevated to such an immense degree it's like how it's like it's like pornography or cocaine it's you know it it pornography harnesses the sexual drive and drugs like cocaine um hijack the the incentive reward the pleasure circuit and that they're unbelievably powerful um they're unbelievably powerful and it's not surprising that you'd be addicted to watching the numbers rack up i mean i i can see that and ex and experience it as well it's it's almost impossible to avoid wanting to see the numbers climb and to some degree that's egotistical and it can really lead you astray but to some degree it's just the natural workings of a mechanism that is actually there in part to keep you socially acceptable insane this uh potency that you describe with uh cocaine and pornography it's difficult to locate uh comparably potent influences when it comes to more positive attributes along alongside my like craving for you know attention etc and and perhaps some warped ordinary anthropological drives for acceptance was always a vocational urgency a devotion like a an untapped or at least misguided devotion to that was always present there and i feel that sort of many of the things that i've heard you previously discussed chime with this if they do not express this exactly that the problem of not having a shared public myth is that everything is up for grabs for acquire being anointed with that status without a clear depiction of god god as ideals god as shared standards then why not just pursue fame why not just pursue coca if nothing means anything anyway and i it's only sort of more recently with with you know in my case a sort of a spiritual program through the 12 steps through mentorship through the obligations uh that having people that are relying me for their own recovery as well as being a father that these um i wouldn't call them secondary i'm sure they're primary characteristics but they were secondary of my own behavior have been brought to the forefront have been realized actuated and like that to your point earlier about sort of mentorship is not that they just exhibit the divine and that it's you know it's only relevant in so much it may activate the the divinity or sublime energy in the mentee i see it's beyond that i see it somehow as a kind of symbiosis a kind of osmosis a kind of that that isn't ultimately the optimistic view of life one of oneness one of love that's separate that we are not ultimately separate then therefore there is recourse to the universal there is a possibility of me in admiring another person or adoring another person imbibing and taking on these attributes if the ultimate reality is separation separateness um you know i sometimes i think that takes us back to the discussion about the so-called christian transformation of the idea of god i've had jewish friends of mine point out that the god of the old testament gets a bad rap from christians to some degree and that there's a lot more love there than than you might presume if you viewed the new testament as a transformation of the old testament god into the god of love but we'll leave that aside i think it's a valid point but we'll leave that aside um the ques if you're if if you're mentored in a particular direction well here's well here's how you might conceive of it is there something that all mentors share in common well you would say so because they're all in the category mentors and then you might say that well whatever all mentors share in common is the pattern of the divine again that's almost by definition now then there's a deeper question which is okay if that if what all mentors share in common is the pattern of the divine is that a real pattern and the answer to that to some degree is well you'll find that out by acting it out and it seems to me that the answer to that has to be yes i mean if we're adapted to the world and if we pursue the fullest extent of the possibilities of our adaptation through mentorship then and if that improves the quality of our life then it seems that whatever it is that mentorship is pushing towards is is real insofar as it works in the world now does that mean it's materially real or objectively real i don't think that reality is bound completely by the categories of objective and subjective i don't think that captures the entire essence of reality and so but i don't believe that our instinct towards mentorship is a delusion i don't believe that our religious instinct is a delusion either even though all instincts can go astray yes and when you were saying that this uh this idea of christianity uh being that you know if we live in god's light or we aspire to god's light or if we embody god's love then that this is beneficial i was thinking how as a paradigm it's comparable to the taoist idea that you are bringing the path into being as you walk it that you are created like that reality is interacting with your consciousness that your belief your perception the manner in which you behold and enact your life influences life becomes life is life and in in in that um you know tradition and let me tell you i know barely anything about it it's sort of presented in a more gnostic way it's sort of somewhat more opaque it's more minimal as one would expect to housed as it is within that culture but this the central message appears to be the same that there is no object here like that these categories of objective and subjective perhaps have to be simultaneously held perhaps opposed perhaps are interchangeable that reality has been reality is being believed into being through our consciousness through the agency of our consciousness certainly we can never know what reality we're separate from our consciousness is well i i don't think we would ever sacrifice if we didn't believe that reality was opaque to our beliefs because we we we sacrifice because we believe in the possibility of a better future being brought into reality by our actions and it actually seems to work i mean it's quite remarkable we can imagine something we can strategize toward it and it generally me it manifests itself well enough so that we don't stop doing that and it is quite it's quite remarkable that that's the case on that note i hate to break this up because we're getting going i know that we have a heart out so russell brand thank you so much for talking to us oh my god are we done already i know it was fast but uh that was fun thank you very much um where where can people watching find you um i have a podcast called under the skin which is on luminary i have a book coming out on audible which i'd love to talk to you about you know further about the finding the sacred in the everyday rather rather grand title revelation you'll be pleased to hear um like uh like where i'm just talking about that i personally can't live without sacredness present in my ordinary life and how i find it in a post-secular world but when you were just talking just then sorry to interrupt my own hard out but i was like thinking that perhaps much of the dissatisfaction polemicism and fragmentation that we're currently experiencing is a result of people not feeling that agency not feeling like this this the ability that you say to manifest your reality through the practice of certain principles it feels like that we're having a sort of an externally imposed nihilism that you can't influence reality but you can't impact reality these swathes of disillusioned disenfranchised dismissed people it just occurred to me when you were talking just then i think you can influence reality that's what i've decided it's too weird other doesn't make any sense otherwise it's the simplest explanation when is your when is that book coming out russell i think it's in march which might be so far into the future as not to exist in the sort of social space that we're currently occupying in march how long have you worked on it i worked in it for a couple of years sort of like leading up to and during the pandemic do we still have march is march still a thing are there do we have equinoxes now or equinai what is reality now well hopefully we'll return to something more approximating normal reality when this pandemic ceases to exist god willing i'm so um happy i'm so happy to see you looking so well and uh to see you both together as a family as a father and a daughter and it's very comforting for me as a father of two daughters to see you working together well and to sit and to see so many of the principles that you have espoused and beautifully articulated jordan manifesting in you michaela it was a real privilege to meet you both thank you thank you russell brand very good to see you again russell i hope i get to see you i've got your email i'll be in touch i've got both your emails you have a you have a remarkable capacity to to dig into things thank you thank you very much that's a beautiful compliment from you yeah well it's quite striking i remember the last couple of times we spoke i was struck exactly the same way is that you have a very fast mind and it goes very it goes down a long ways thank you thank you very much that's a wonderful compliment if it were earlier in the day and i'd made the giddy life choices to have children in my 20s i would stay up now with pornography on another screen and cocaine on the back of my hand chatting into the long hours but perhaps if those were the choices i made i wouldn't find myself in this esteemed company [Laughter] well have a have a good night yeah have a good night good night good night thank you so we just finished talking to russell brand yeah what did you think of that well i told you i watched rebirth which is his comedy special from 2018 yesterday i don't i wanted to ask him but there wasn't time i wanted to ask him a couple of questions one of them is how he's so verbally fluent so i can just ask you that like is it he's just really smart or is it because he's read a lot and watched a lot or is he just naturally like that he's really smart so then the rest of us that aren't like that or we're just never gonna be that he's really smart uh he's also extremely high in openness that creativity trait and so people who are high in openness can see patterns but a lot of that's that's you're born with that it can be hurt and ruined how would that by trauma it's like ptsd type of malnourishment oh just brain development you mean yeah but a lot of that's that's the way he is you know he was born like that i've met a number of people like that um camille pellias like that ah she's very very sharp and fast ben shapiro although ben isn't ben isn't as open as as uh russell yeah he's crazily open he connects ideas from all over the place yeah you're pretty open and verbally fluent like when i go to your lectures or when i hear you talk sometimes you'll go off on a tangent and i'll be like he's gone yeah there is no way that whatever he started an hour ago has anything to do with what he's talking about now and then it'll be like attach it you'll just attach it at the end like how do you even remember it's so funny how do you even remember what you're talking about it it's like if you're listening to a great piece of music like a bach concerto say um bach will go off on a tangent and then he'll return to a theme and it's so satisfying you yeah yeah yeah and it just flattens you and it is that it's that ability to make things come together it's so exciting to be able to do that and that's one of the reasons i love lecturing is that i can go out on a tangent way out and explore and then think okay that comes right back here and if i'm in good shape i can do that continually in lecture right because i can remember that thread and i can go back but if i'm not in good shape when my health starts to go i can't keep or remember you can't remember it i thought even when we were talking to russell there were times i thought i'd listen to his question long questioning hard and oh yeah yeah most people like i said when i when i went like this i was like that i i don't know what i was i was there and then he said something i didn't know where he was going with that and then i lost it did you lose it or were you afraid and let yourself lose it i don't know what the difference would be well between those i i thought i thought that you didn't give yourself enough credit and that it was maybe your fear of not being able to understand that made you say that i mean did you feel that there were parts of the conversation that you didn't understand all things considered or were you speaking specifically about the question that he asked that was the question about about the transformation of the idea of god it's kind of a highly technical question i don't think that there are i don't think there were parts i didn't understand um there are references he made that i didn't pick up yeah fair enough so that made the questions more complicated mm-hmm one i mean luckily i know a little bit like when he's talking about job and the reference is there he said one thing he said um oh god i can't remember exactly what it was but it was something about job's false um false he said something that just wow something like he was faking something towards god did you pick up on that or no i can't remember that part specifically i can't remember it exactly i just remembered i was like that was weird i was going gonna comment on it but now i can't remember um no i actually do think i have trouble i think because of how ill i was and how many medications i was on like i've done for whatever it's worth i've done iq tests over time and i know it can change when you're younger and when you're older but they kind of this measure that's very stable okay it's stable well in that case when i was on medication when i was trying to get better when i was 22 and so i was taking you know adderall and i was on ciprolex and immune suppressants and tylenol three and antibiotics and gravel and trying to like stay awake prop myself awake and things i hit 122 on a uh on an iq test and i was like yeah okay that's pretty good um i hit 132 after i went off of all my medication right and my memory just my memory has improved so dramatically like i couldn't remember phone numbers i couldn't remember seven digit numbers so i i honestly believe like when i took oxycontin for a while it was about two years after that where my memory just when i was in class and i put up my hand i'd be that student they'd call on and i'd go i don't remember what i was gonna say and it's not because i wasn't paying attention i honestly couldn't remember what i was going to say so i was writing everything down so i could remember it so i i do think you know well part of my developmental years have being sick too not not just the medications but also being sick has dampened down my ability to remember even even like questions like russell was posing yep like it's hard to remember all the ideas that are in there yeah well i was having i wasn't sure but to be fair that was a very he asked some very complex questions as well yeah and i think he went easy on us to tell you the truth i've heard i've heard him talk sometimes and i think he's tired he's good his kids are dampening there's health the health is really relevant because i also find like identifying patterns like that and going way out on a tangent coming back and holding all those things simultaneously takes a tremendous amount of energy you know i found the conversation with russell took a tremendous amount of energy and it isn't obvious to me that i have the stamina for it like i pay for it it also makes me wonder how much i paid for doing all the lectures that i did in in in that short period of time from 2017 when i did the biblical lectures through i get i get people like i don't know i don't know my in i've seen you lecture at university and things and you were on fire when you were lecturing to the public like in 2018 particularly and that must have taken a massive amount of energy because it was really long lecture like it wasn't in how long were you lecturing for 90 minutes yeah so 90 minute lectures then a q a meeting people you were eating like four times a day and then you'd fly to the next city right and you did how many cities did you do 130 to 150 i thought it was 180. no it's not that many well it was whatever 130 to 150 okay that's enough right yeah in about 200 days yeah so a lot of people message yeah well i did the biblical lecture series in 2017 in the fall and then went to europe for the book launch and then i went on the tour yeah and even the biblical series here was intense very so i don't know i get people i wish so much that i could do another one on uh on uh see i can't even remember the book now the moses the moses books um exodus because i have all that material in my head you're gonna get you know like part of part of the problem okay everybody has this if they ever get sick and i've been sick so much that i know this to my core but when you're still sick there isn't really anything you can do about it except wait to get better and then as soon as you're better you don't even remember the period of time that you were sick yeah i don't you're like you're like that that was nobody knows how to wait okay when i was healing my ankle i repeatedly injured it because i was like i'm feeling a little better i'll just and it wasn't my fault really i was like i'll just wear a pair of shoes that are a little bit closer to flat just a little bit closer to flat and i'd go a little bit closer to flat and then i wouldn't be able to walk for three weeks and i'd be like that's not fair that's not because i wasn't paying attention okay it's just because my body is slow and when i like i said when i got off of boxy cotton it was two and a half years and there was absolutely nothing i could do about it and when i got off of ssris it was the same thing there was nothing i could do about it and then when it's gone you gotta wait for the time when it's gone yeah i don't i don't waiting is horrible how to live like that because throughout my whole life i've juggled as many things as i could possibly put up in the air all the time and that was exciting and fun um but i watched yeah there is i don't know how not to do that i've only been experiencing that juggling a whole bunch of things now i didn't experience that earlier and i'm not very old right i'm 29 i'm almost 30. but i'm only experiencing the juggling act now because i was too sick before it's so fun to see how many things you can do you know when the forces you get efficient too in such an interesting way is you know you think well you shouldn't take on more and you think well no that's not necessarily true because as you take on more you get better at delegating and you get more efficient and so then you can do more yeah and it's hard to know when when you can't do more well i kind of learned when i was writing you know when i was writing maps of meaning i spent 90 minutes to three hours a day on that for about 15 years and at the same time i was raising a family and you know although obviously your mom took primary responsibility for the continual child care i was around a lot and i had my job as a professor in my clinical practice and all of that but you can tell if you're doing too much if you can't sustain it across days so i would find some days i could write for five hours but then what would happen is the next day i could i was impaired in my writing or two days later so you have to push yourself to see what you can iterate across days and i found that i should never write for more than three hours i wore i wore myself out so that i was stealing energy from the next few days it produced less productivity rather than more when i worked with counseling i counseled uh lawyers mostly who were they were high-end lawyers working in in very prestigious law firms and the deal that my the company i was working with made with their firms was that we would work with them as individuals but i remember that produce a productivity gain that would pay for the treatment treatment so to speak um and often lawyers you can measure lawyer productivity by billable hours and so the law firms want to push the billable hours up above 2000 if they can that's a lot right because there's only 365 days in a year so that's six hours a day across weekends and everything are of solid work yes a billable work right that's efficient work that's not administrative work and that sort of thing but often what would happen as a consequence of the conversations i had with these people is that we would plan for them to take time off it had to be planned several weeks or months in the future and that actually made them more productive i've heard that i've also heard that if you allow particularly productive people to work from home that they're more productive i was i often worked from home yeah and um although there were conditions for that i it i had to be a junkyard dog this is a good piece of advice for any of you out there who want to write or to pursue anything that's your own interest is you have to cordon off a space and a time for that and then you have to guard that i always thought the metaphor that struck me was junkyard dog like i was a junkyard dog when i was guiding my time guarding my time to write and when your mom would come in i'd snap at her or you kids it was like don't bother me i'm writing and the reason for that was you know i might have had 30 ideas in my head that i was trying to uh that lord i've got okay and then if someone came in and interrupted me oh that would fall and it'd be like an hour of thinking and i had all these plates up in the air and then they would all fall but so yes you can work effectively at home but it's difficult to cordon off your time partly because if you're writing particularly you're doing something that might not work like it might not bring any money you might not be able to sell it um it's a long-term game and there are short-term emergencies that are always calling out for your attention yeah that appear to be more important than whatever you're doing because whatever you're doing isn't showing any benefit yet yeah well that's right it's just a time suck that has a question mark for the payoff right exactly exactly and so so well you can increase the chance of the payoff if you're actually disciplined and productive so i mean i i train myself to sit down and write every day and i wrote even when i didn't have anything to say you know it would take me 20 minutes all the little devils in my head would be telling me that i couldn't i wouldn't be able to think of anything today that there were other things i should have been doing that this whole thing was a waste of time and i'd have to quell all those that's fine and then then i could write as i wrote more and more the amount of time it took to quell those decreased and then if i was tired it would increase again but i found and this is this might be useful for people too you can force yourself to sit and stare at the damn blank page if you do that every day you'll write something you'll write a paragraph you'll write two paragraphs you'll write three paragraphs you write a single sentence if you do that for a couple of years you have a book and hemingway wrote something that was really useful to me too he said uh he said write every day and and make that a habit but he also said stop when you still have something to say and just make a few notes about what you have to say because then the next day you can pick up where you left off and that was also very useful that is useful i'm trying to be smart so i've been i've been writing this memoir so i think i've had i haven't really had times when i don't know what to say because i'm not at least at the moment i'm not connecting grand ideas about the universe i'm recollecting what happened to me so i'm not making anything up not that you're making things up but it's literally events that happened in my life so i i don't usually i don't think i've ever had writer's block i certainly have the problem where i have a whole bunch of other things especially because i'm juggling a whole bunch of different parts of whatever it is i do uh i have a whole bunch of things that i'm not doing all the time there's this huge list of things i haven't had time to do and it's always there that's you're so lucky to have that i had that for so many years and i don't have it at all now and it's killing me the lack of that i just can't stand not having that you're going to get it and it was like that from it's a real pr but it's good to know that that's a privilege yeah your life is full when you have too much to do and then but then you have to learn how to manage having too much to do and the first thing you have to realize is that it's always going to be like that as long as you're fortunate and opportunities keep coming so then what do you do about that and the first answer is well you don't wear yourself out yeah so that okay so that's something we could talk about a little bit and i am i'm completely aware of how fortunate i am because i was so sick that i couldn't do anything like i waited for the periods that i was really sick especially especially when i started the diet went off with ssris and was like having those kind of severe neurological problems i spent weeks being like i just have to stay alive and i'll just watch tv and i hate watching tv like i really don't like watching tv it's a complete waste of time um not if you're watching the simpsons i don't even i don't even like watching the simpsons anymore like i don't like watching tv unless i'm sick and so there were weeks where i was like i'm this is what i'm doing and i'm just and i had like i had this idea i was like i know i'm going to get better one day i'm going to get better i don't know when that is but one day i'm going to get better and so i'm going to wait how do you think you were able to maintain see i i was angry okay like i had a couple of good days where i didn't have any arthritis my skin was healed and i was happy and i was clear and my memory was good and i had a couple of those days and i was off on my medications and i was like this exists and i'm not making it up this reality exists and so when it went away i thought somewhere something i'm doing is wrong perhaps but that reality exists and like [ __ ] you world but i'm getting back to that yeah and you're not taking that away and i was like and i was why do you think you had angry i'm asking partly okay so i lost it i know well i don't you know i had a vision of you once i remember this that you emerged i was i was experiencing some pain because i'd become more aware of in how much pain you were in and i had this image of you coming out of the darkness it's kind of hackneyed when you describe it but you were on the back of a dragon and it was the dragon in the chaos and you were coming out of that on the dragon right now bursting out of it that was right before so that vision was right before i moved out and it maybe half a year before i started getting healthy it was right before if you remember maybe six months before i started getting healthy healthier um so the first time i experienced that was when i needed my ankle replaced after i had my hip replaced and i was so i had my hip replaced people watching would know i had my hip replaced when i was 17 and i was it was i was in so much pain i couldn't sleep i couldn't put my hip in a comfortable position like usually if you have kind of like a broken bone it's just except it was way worse i've broken my arm and needing a hip replacement was way worse i had my hip replacement it was absolutely brutal i healed i was healing from my hip replacement i'd kind of come to terms with the fact that i was a 17 year old with a hip replacement and then my ankle stopped working and i and i just like it's like it makes me upset now to think about it it still hurts so that's that's trauma like i've seen that my clinical practice is that people get traumatized when something bad happens to them and then just as they're recovering they get laid low again boy that takes the yeah that's just because you're like i just i just made it and you're just like climbing up yeah bringing your head above water and then you get pushed and you used a lot of energy to do that like all your energy and i was i was on a whole bunch of medication i was barely holding it together and i was like oh i finally threw it and then my and they're like oh you need an ankle replacement it's going to be three and a half years of waiting and i was like i can't wait that long i'm gonna die like i'm gonna do myself in i can't not sleep for that long and i had like i was in bed you were there and i was just like having a panic attack i had like i don't know hours i don't know how long last lasted hours of pure terror um because i thought i was gonna kill myself um and then i have i don't know how to explain it but something snapped and i and that fear got when what i what i actually did was i thought okay how long can i keep this up for realistically without a plan and i thought oh it was i think it was june because i had my hip done in may i think it was june or july and i thought i can last until nov um october i can last until october and then i'll start to make a plan right i'll just i'll just last until october and then i'll make a plan so i put that off into the future into a bearable moment and then in i believe it was august we found out that i could have my ankle replaced because you did a bunch of organizing to get it replaced faster and we found out i could have it replaced in november and by that time i had a potential end date but something happened that day and i can i remember it kind of visually that i put walls sky high like all all the way up that i could see between me and the pain i was experiencing and like and i turned it into anger and i can remember the walls going up and i've had a really hard time bringing them down and andre's helped me since i got healthy because i'd put the walls up between me and everything that could hurt me um i don't know if any of this is helpful but i all the i can't make contact with that anger like i've been able to use anger my whole life you know it's one of the one of the sources of energy that i've drawn on even in my lectures aggression that energy put in a in positive direction but when you're diagnosed when you're depressed enough like when i so when when i started the diet and when i got off of ssris and i started having those like hallucinating reactions and i was really depressed i didn't have that anger when i was really depressed i only got that anger when it when it came yeah when the depression came up a little bit there's no pot like anger's part of emotion yeah and there was nothing there so but i i know i knew i had experienced it so a lot i a couple of things i i got good at being sick one is i knew that everything i was thinking was possibly a lie because um i was extremely depressed i was having these hypomanic periods and i knew how volatile i was around other people so so i kind of thought okay everything i'm thinking might be a lie so i have to think about this logically and kind of unattach myself um so when i was having these reactions and severely depressed and i didn't have that anger i just kept repeating you know there was that one time that i felt good and i do believe that the body has a capacity to heal and so i should be able to heal and get that again and then i just waited um and then when i got a thanks but i made it through man so it wasn't fun it was horrible but then also experiencing that has allowed me to help a lot of people like i i get a lot of people who their their friends and family don't understand because if you have never experienced severe illness you can't understand it even when you see it and sometimes that means that when you see it it makes you angry so a lot of these poor suffering people who are chronically ill who are going i'm hurt i'm hurt i'm hurt look how hurt i am people are just like stop stop it stop it stop it right i don't want to be around that and it's probably some sort of evolutionary response to avoid to avoid the infection i don't know what it is but sick people get a lot of hate for being sick well it's frustration too on the part of the people yeah and sadness right and it's a lot easier to be angry at somebody than than sad at them well and to understand what they're going through you have to allow yourself to feel that and sometimes if you can't help it's easier being mad at them than being like wow life is so unfair right um so i get a lot of people reaching out saying well you know it is that also brings up the issue you know i don't know what to think of this but sometimes some of that cruelty so to speak is pushing it's like get the hell up get i know it's sometimes people need that although you know i'm less certain of that than i used to be um well do you think you're do you think that what do you think of the way that we treated you when you were a kid and you were sick do you have any residual um i'm let me let me answer that carefully for the most part i think that my illness was so complicated that i don't harbor any resentment about it um i'm probably still a little bit maybe resentful is the right term unfortunately about some aspects like when i was a teenager i drank and i didn't it's not like especially after i had my hip and ankle replacement because i hadn't gone out for a number of years and i just wanted some fun right after being like suicidal for a year and so i i drank and before that i started drinking when i was like fairly young kind of once a week and i was probably drinking more than i should have but i was absolutely miserably depressed i was i had this idiopathic hypersomnia and i couldn't stay awake and drinking made me feel good like it didn't just make me feel normal i had energy um and i think there was some blaming the drinking for my sleeping and my health and i don't think that had anything to do with that i think i was using alcohol as a you know treatment um i don't like i don't know i'm not see your mom asked me the other day if i felt guilty about the way we treated you when you were a kid and well i don't well i mean i can remember one time when i put you up against the wall in the bathroom when you were mouthing off to your mom and you were being very disrespectful to her and i think both your mom and julian who were also there thought i went too far at that point and i think probably i did i was doing it to some degree calculated like i wanted i well you were probably trying to break through the haze i was in but like good work was trying also to ensure that you didn't act in a way that would alienate you from your mother yeah i'm i think like but we you know we we i think it was extremely complicated and you talked about how sometimes negative i guess pushes can push people out like there's some people there's the fact part of the problem i have with the fat acceptance movement there's a whole bunch of problems but one of them is there are people who are okay it's complicated i've heard from people who were pressured to get thin who got thin and healthier i've heard from people who were pressured to get thin and they ate more right so it depends on the person but you always know well the same with disciplining children is the disciplinary strategy has to match the child well and the parent for that matter there's no one-size-fits-all you know you were much easier to discipline especially when you were a little kid than your brother was it was easier to stop you when you were misbehaving i've noticed that scarlett doesn't respond to um negative feedback really julian was like she doesn't really care she's just like yeah who are you yeah i'll just go do what i want and i'm like what i don't really can you talk about the offers that you've got recently yeah that'd be fun i've been i've been thinking of um doing i used to do you put up some q and a's on youtube and do kind of more personal stuff um and i haven't mostly because we've been dealing with health things i think that's actually the main reason but also because i was like well people probably want to hear the interviews more but now that i've become more sure of myself i think i might start the q and a's up i don't think necessarily that people would want to hear the interviews more i mean when i did q and a's they were they were extremely popular now i like more popular than the interviews yeah that's interesting so yeah i think i'd like to do them again but we should start doing them up again like when you were thinking about it what you have to like you're going to be limping along for a while because you can't go through some health catastrophe and then pop back up and it's really annoying especially if you're a hyper productive person and i've talked to a lot of people who have sick kids and they they go oh i'm so like i'm feeling so horrible for this sick child like everything is unfair and what i've told them is one i think that they can get better right if you look everywhere for answers but two it's not as hard in my experience it wasn't as hard being a sick kid as it was being an adult that was sick because if you're healthy and then you get sick you have a comparison like when i when i grew up and was limping around all i did was adjust my movements so it didn't hurt as much i didn't think damn it used to be better when i could run right so it's gonna be harder and then when i got healthy right and then like went off of all my medication and got sick kind of again in a different way i was just like you're kidding me or when i got pregnant my arthritis came back i was just like that's what made me angry i guess because i was like how is this happening again um there's gotta be a way out but it's harder psychologically as an adult for sure but you you're gonna have to limp along and do like do podcasts and do q and a's and that's way more work than most people are doing but you're not holding yourself to a most person standard so that doesn't matter if it's more than most people are doing people work media wise yeah that's what i meant i mean it's not 14 hours it's not 14 hours waiting tables right yeah which is work yeah for sure okay yes we're clarifying that i'm not i'm not ditching on waiters i was a waitress my feet hurt right i didn't really enjoy it right i didn't enjoy it at all um but i just i mean produce and then wait and one day you're gonna snap out of it and then you're gonna be on top of the world and i will be here to tell you that repeatedly throughout this period of time but uh opportunities that i've had um well some summit called the canadian wealth summit this is so random um i said in well i've said i i say yes to everything right for now although i say no to some things now which is nice like oh i'm at the level where i can say no to a few things that's kind of cool um but the canadian wealth summit reached out and asked me to do some of their like are you saying are you choosing between things i'm choosing between things i'm choosing between things that's not the same right knows when you could do it and you say no choosing between things is when you don't have enough time to do all of it yes that's true i'm not just arbitrarily saying no i'm judging opportunity and saying no to the ones that don't make sense right clarifying that so that everybody listens yeah oh this is that thanks good to have you here yeah um but i have an opportunity to to interview edward snowden and a bunch of other like potentially very interesting people and so like one of the things i've been trying to do with my brand or whatever it is is i kind of started in the food health kind of sphere i was doing conferences at paleo fx and ketocon and low-carb stuff um and that was because that's because of how shocked i was that food mattered i was like oh my god everyone look i'm cured how long did your mom tell you that yeah but she didn't say only eat beef okay like she said it's food somewhere but if she didn't say it was all foods who was gonna tell me that

Channel: Mikhaila Peterson

Views: 566,135

Rating: 4.9314394 out of 5

Keywords: jordan peterson, jordan b peterson, under the skin, russell brand, mikhaila peterson, russell brand interview, jordan peterson reaction, russell brand jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson russell brand, mikhaila peterson russell brand, mikhaila peterson podcast, jordan peterson interview, russell brand and jordan peterson, jordan peterson and russell brand, peterson russell brand, peterson brand, russel brand jordan peterson, michaela peterson

Id: ISHmPXOS_Og

Length: 88min 49sec (5329 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/west_pac]

There's something that doesn't quite sit right with me about Russell Brand. He sets off my spidey senses for some reason.

[u/[deleted]]

I’d love for these guys to cover Russels links to the Fabian society.

[u/-Rutabaga-]

Been looking forward to this one

[u/letsgocrazy]

Welcome to the Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - this is an episode co-hosted by @Jordan B Peterson​ . In this episode, we spoke with @Russell Brand​ , an English comedian, actor, radio host, writer, and activist. The three of us explore family life, having kids, the role of sacrifice, mentor/apprentice relationships, seeing the divine in others, working with family, the aspiration of fame, and more.

Find more Russell Brand on his Podcast Under the Skin and in his new book, Revelation: Connecting with the Sacred in Everyday Life: https://www.amazon.com/Revelation-Con...​

A special thank you to Ground News for supporting this week's episode. Download the Ground News app for free http://bit.ly/GroundNewsMP​ to join the fight against media bias and see the full story.

This episode was also sponsored by Self Authoring. The Self-Authoring Suite helps you sort through your past to get past trauma, write your present life, and organize your mind for the future by identifying and prioritizing goals. Visit https://www.selfauthoring.com​ and use promo code “MP” for 15% off.