Russell began his career in stand up comedy, gaining recognition at the ‘Hackney Empire New Act of the Year’ in 2000. In the same year he became a video journalist for MTV. In 2004, Russell achieved his break as a presenter for ‘Big Brother’s Big Mouth’, and reached worldwide fame in the 2008 film, ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’. Since then he has appeared in the films, ‘Get Him To The Greek’, ‘Despicable Me’, and ‘Arthur’. He has also released the best-selling books, ‘My Booky Wook’, ‘Booky Wook 2’, ‘Recovery’, ‘Revolution’, and ‘Mentors’. In 2014, he launched his political-comedy web series The Trews, followed by the ‘Under the Skin with Russell Brand’ podcast in 2017. His show ‘Stay Free with Russell Brand’ broadcasts daily on Rumble.

In this conversation Russell and Steven discuss topics, such as:

 How he thought that fame would fix all of his problems
 Why he distrusts and questions authority
 How his life has been defined by his addictions
 Why spirituality is a survival technique for Russell
 The things Russell has to do everyday to not go crazy


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Russell brand is 1 of the most famous comedians in the world.

the most unmissable performers on the planet.

He don't wanna be around when the laughter stops.

Your earliest years are particularly hard to read.

Drugs and self harm, your mother's illnesses.

There is deep spiritual appetite within all of us for connection, but we have a culture that is predicated upon individualism and materialism.

My initial solution to feeling disconnected and lonely was to try and become famous.

If you are using impermanent means to achieve a permanent solution, you can only fail.

But what I would say is in that loneliness, in that sense of I'm not good enough, I'm worthless, are all the ingredients of success because it is sadly a gift to you.

What can I have added to 10 year old Russell's life?

Do you think that would have made him feel valued?

Russell brand is 1 of the most fascinating individuals I have ever spoken to.

A former self harming heroin addict, self confessed narcissist, bulimic, that craved fame and attention and was so addicted to sex that he slept with 5 women a day that married Katie Perry 3 months after meeting her and then divorced her with a text message, have you ever felt that subtle feeling that the way you're living is not quite right, that something somewhere is out of balance, that you are not living your life as that human somewhere inside you should be living their life.

The Russell brand that sits before me today can relate, and he's found a new cure for that feeling, a better way to handle pain.

A new blueprint to live by, which he believes that you, and me, and all of us will eventually realize through failure and frustration.

We are all addicts, searching for ways to feel less pain through porn and screens and sugar and addiction and drugs and whatever our vices might be.

And maybe there is a simple cure for all of us right there in plain sight.

I read a comment at the top of a YouTube video that of an interview you did, and this was the comment This man is a hero.

He's truly an example of transcendence across the spectrum from the archetype of selfishness enthralled by addiction to complete selflessness and self awareness, I love this man with all of my heart.

That was a comment left regarding you on a recent interview you've done.

Now I'm gonna be completely honest with you.

I should have meant that I wrote that comment.

I sometimes I do even though I know I've written it, when I read it back, it still gives me a boost.

to you before we start talking, I wanted to talk about disconnection.

Disconnection for me and my life started early.

Disconnection for me was coming to the UK from Africa as that the only black kid went to Plymouth.

And that pursuit of filling that void of whatever it was, that shame, that insecurity, which is very clearly the reason I'm sat here.

What do we need to know about your childhood?

How did it shape the man that sits in front of me today?

I have had a life that is being defined by addiction.

And the addiction, and in particular, the models of recovery that are available for addiction is a convenient framework for addressing the problems we have in our age.

That are expressed extensively and identifiable through materialism and attachment.

I was when I was a little boy, I grew up in a single parent family, just me and my mom.

I come from an ordinary background in Essex, Grey's, Ordinaryness, normalcy, these can be terms that are difficult to define.

But I think we all know what we mean when we say a normal, ordinary, modest, blue collar, background, low expectations, state, schools, We know what images that conjures.

My mom was sick a lot when I was a kid, and my mom was and there was a defining influence in my life.

All of us that are lucky enough to have mothers are gonna be defined by that relationship as well as the other parental relationship.

I feel like real early on something in me, which I would now, because it's almost impossible, Steven, not to reverse engineer.

And to thread it through with newly accrued and acquired wisdom.

But I feel that I was looking for something.

I feel that there is a deep spiritual appetite within all of us for connection, the subject you have identified as our framing for this conversation that we are having.

But we do not have a culture that presents us a discourse around connection.

We have a culture that is predicated upon individualism and materialism.

And this is I think across the political spectrum and even in more compassionate narratives around identity, individualism is still enshrined as the centrifugal point.

So I felt like that I was in a state of lack.

I don't know what it is I recognize now, even to feel at ease.

Even to feel serene, even to feel relaxed.

It's probably only by the time I got clean from crack and heroin and alcohol, that I'd noticed that I'd been in having an anxiety attack for basically my entire life.

When I first told my life story in which is an ordinary exercise at treatment centers that help people to get rehabilitated from chemical dependency, and I was fortunate enough go to 1.

When the fella read it, Chip Summers, 1 of the first people in recovery I ever met, when he read it, he went, poor lonely little boy.

So I suppose my life has been find by addiction, and addiction is in part a lack of connection and attempt to synthesize the connection to self, other, and God.

God of your own understanding, perhaps understood as a totality, a sense of unity, a unity force, a highest principle when it says in the Old Testament, worship no other gods than me.

The implication I offer is that we are a species that worships.

And if you do not access the divine, you will worship the Mandeel You will worship the profane.

You will worship the template lane before you buy a culture that wants you, I don't want you, but gets you distracted and relatively done.

So my initial solution to feeling weak and disconnected and lonely and somehow silently brilliant was to try and become successful, was to try and become famous, was to try and have resources, to try and address all of the problems of my original condition, My original condition culturally and socially as I saw it was lack of power, lack of value, lack of connection, lack of influence, and what does our culture tell us is the solution to this be somebody.

And my God, I'm talking about a long time ago now.

I'm talking in the eighties, in the nineties, now the culture.

It is amplifying that message a hundred fold with a million screens in every direct and 50 lenses like the eyes of on the inside of a fly, rather than the almost 2 d experience of lenses that I grew up with.

To 10 year old Russell's life, do you think that would have made him feel valued?

I reckon mate, now that I'm a dad, and you can't be a father to anyone else until you're a father to yourself.

That you are enough, you are sufficient, we are going to be okay.

All conditions that isn't the broad cultural message.

You will not be sufficient until you require this body, these objects, this approval, these affiliations.

Like, whilst like, you know, necessarily our conversation has to be framed by sort of biographical detail that's particular to me.

Don't you find that when you know anyone's story really that the universe was there waiting for you, that there is a ubiquity of this message.

It's a like, it's a else wise, what could Jung have achieved?

Elsewise, what could Joseph Campbell have achieved?

Were they not archetypes strewn about us maps waiting to be discovered?

Most people that sit here have achieved phenomenal things.

It starts with a story of not being enough and you often wonder whether they're driven or dragged.

Driven by their own, you know, because they're framed in books as driven.

But in reality, they're being dragged by insecurities and shame and -- Mhmm.

1 of these things, that feeling of not enough Your your earliest years are particularly particularly hard to read.

And I I when I I I'll be when I when I read about the circumstances of your earliest years, I do see a story that is very unique in in a sense of self harm, your mother's sicknesses, and heart illnesses.

And there's that guy underneath there that knew he was brilliant as you say.

Well, I suppose and I find this to be quite common to addicts and alcoholics.

There's this pre metabolized quality that's waiting to be activated.

Brilliant is obviously a comparative and relative term.

And the training I've been fortunate enough to receive prohibits me from leaning too heavily into a framing like that now, superior to better than But I feel that there I had a sense of a resource that was waiting to unfold.

I was had a sense that there would be a secondary coordinate that might arrive.

All energy, the most fundamental level, requires polarity.

And I suppose that word parent in and that word parenthesis, another word for bracket in, suggests that You need to be held in some way.

You need something that's gonna be able to hold you.

Now, if not me, believe I believe in God.

So the thing that defines me now is I believe in God and I don't believe that I have unique access to God or superior access to God there's this little set of dances or codes or clothes that need to be worn to access God more privately or more privately.

I believe that in absolute loving God that all of us have the right to be here, that I don't need no special adornments or epifets or epilets or badges or medallions.

It's enough for me to be 1 of everybody else.

Back then though, I was a little kid when I felt inferior and broken I just wanted to feel a little bit special.

And I suppose the first time that I really felt that was making people laugh, doing a school play at my little school grace school, bugs him alone, and feeling the overwhelming, terrifying, adrenaline and the accompanying sense of competence that comes with being able to corral and direct that energy when it comes, a sense of purpose, revelation, When you asked that, you know, what could you have added and what do you mean by silently brilliant?

Like, I don't wanna feel better than no 1 else no more.

I don't wanna feel worse than anyone else.

And I wanna participate in other peoples becoming who they are.

There's a beautiful phrasing recovery you may enjoy.

We recover the person we're intended to be.

That somehow we can respect individuality, limitless, limitless diversity, while somehow accepting that there is something unitive among us.

Something collective to be realized and achieved.

So I suppose it was my own savoring of my particularness.

That I was experiencing even though, and this is no fault of my parents, although I might analyze my culture, I felt that that I couldn't express it and I didn't know what value it had and what its use was.

It was in neutral until the culture tells you it can be monetized or it can be mobilized in order to.

Now that framing isn't necessarily 1 that I'll ordinarily gravitate to, but that's the 1 that is available to.

So I suppose that's the 1 that many of us inevitably pursue.

Do you have any emotional sentiment towards that young man's circumstances as you look back on what he the situation he was in and what he was experiencing?

Lately, due to the principles of recovery.

Due to the fact that I have mentors, I have peers, I have people that look to me, for guidance.

I come to feel incorporated with that little boy.

But if you'd spoke to me 10 years ago, I doubt I would like to have heard him referred to.

I wouldn't have liked that specter to have risen a phantom I'd happily put aside.

But now like that little boy, like, hopefully, the little boy that you described down there in Plymouth of all places, that famous rock from where they depart across the oceans.

And he's like, he is a great asset when I'm dealing with young, vulnerable, broken people, when people tell me that they wanna end their own lives, when people tell me they self harm, when people tell me they wanna kill themselves, or they can't cope with life, they don't feel that they're good enough, I'm not faced.

Was there was there I think about this a lot with myself.

Was there another path to where you are now?

I mean, look, you may like, you know, you may a lot of people.

But for me personally, I'll just tell you why I asked that question.

I believe that I had a belief that was ill informed by the society I lived in, and I believe I had to pursue that belief to find out that I was wrong and have it fail me.

So the answer is 100 percent, of course, absolutely indefagably.

This is the reality that was designed for you internally that your consciousness is creating this reality.

This reality is not coming externally at you.

This consciousness is unfolding from within you in the moment.

But potentially limitless alternatives, potentially unbridled possibility.

And for you, you think you could have become the man that sat in front to me now with via a different pathway?

You know, like, because, like, I'm what I suppose I'm saying is I accept this the the path that I've worked and that, you know, that I'm sort of continuing to walk.

And I suppose anyone that's in the engaged in the process of recovery has to as a part of that except the various chapters, episodes that that have led to that.

I mean, I think that's part of self acceptance.

Part of self acceptance is to appreciate and understand the various steps that have led you to where you want.

And just again, I think, to reiterate that that's why I mentioned addiction and recovery early on because it provides you with access to an archetype.

This is the way that I try to handle the challenges that life gives you impermanence, temporality, death, inequality, hypocrisy, destruction, and all of these things.

That sort of are pervasive, whether that's cultural or simply part of being in an atem in a temporal and spatial reality.

Recovery gives you a different set of tools, a different a different way to deal with those same challenges, which for 1 of a better word, I will call spiritual, a spiritual solution to what I regard now as a spiritual problem.

Once again, tag an idea of connection that you've helped us set up this conversation using.

Spirituality as a as a as a as a form of connection.

You know, when a lot of people are put off by the terms spirituality because it sounds a little bit exclusive and a little bit.

But the the you know, I've would class myself now as being spiritual.

That thanks in part, I have to say to my my partner who is a breath work instructor and I met in, you know, Bali and so on.

But 1 of the quotes that I love from you is like many desperate people.

I need God or I cannot cope in this world.

Since I've become spiritual, I found that it's easier to be alive.

The problem perhaps that we have nowadays is that we live in a quantitative reality where all things are measurable, where all things are base predicated on rational principles, but all of us know what love is, all of us know what intuition is.

All of us know as CS Lewis doobly outlines in mere Christianity when we have transgressed against some moral code that appears to have been instilled in us and in spite of the advocacy and campaigning of evolutionary biologists seems to appeal to some new monistic tendency, deterministic meaning simply a sense of awe, a sense of oneness, a sense of glory, a sense of glory you might experience at.

Sunrise or sunset or looking into the eyes of a loved 1 or even a stranger and knowing that the connection is real, knowing that the unity force is real.

And that somehow this connection implies a set of ethics, morals, and principles.

God is 1 that's lose ourself in some hedonistic revel that pleasure is not an endpoint.

That service is our way of acknowledging this unity.

So spirituality for me is a survival technique.

You won't get very far in this world without it.

And if you don't have it in a declared explicit And I don't mean diopteron away.

I mean personal but somehow connected and communal way.

You will try to create God You will try to create spirituality from your preferences.

I prefer it when people talk to me like this.

I repel this my versions and my preferences will become my religion.

If I don't I'm lucky to be such a craving mad smack it, and it's nice to walk around the streets of Shoreditch where I have used, where I've scored, where I know the back streets of brick lane where there are on clothes where they serve up Muslim men wearing for Regalia that would never deal with that kind of business.

It's against the Quran, but serve it up, to slip down them, wrap runs, to see it trace across the silver page, to lose myself in Smack World, and to come back here now with A different way.

The city has changed and I have changed and no man crosses the same river twice and no man visits the same sure that it's twice because the man is different and sure that she is different.

Like, when I was looking around then for smack and crack and all of that, I was looking for the things that I'm looking for now.

And if I'm not very rigorous, in my spiritual practices.

My mom, my wife, they're all better at than I am.

They do it natural because they're not like mobilized by this sort of primer primordial yearning that can become my fuel.

It ain't no easy task to turn all that gungs, that swamp gungs, that neolithic jet fuel into love of 1 another.

There's been there's people now that I live in a life where including me probably too many many respects that are using preference as our God.

Well, because I thought is there chlorine in it?

I don't think there's chlorine and I hope there's not chlorine.

Those people that are choosing preference as they're got now that are living a life maybe where materialism is their is their their savior.

What is there's a couple of questions I have here.

You know, the the Russell that was in shortage for other reasons once upon a time, and the Russell that's in shortage now.

You said that they were both looking for the same thing.

And why wasn't the thing he found as good as the thing he finds now?

What is the outcome of those that are choosing preferences, their god?

What is the long term or short term consequence?

Well, I wouldn't suggest that there is but 1 path.

As they say, as Krishna Murray says, truth is a pathless land.

But that said, there are templates, paradigms, conditions, and practices that might help us.

So I'm not making a judgment on anyone else's path.

My spirituality is not about you should be doing this and you should be doing that.

My spirituality is I should be doing this.

If someone else wants me to judge them or help them or guide them or aid them and I'm able to, then it is my duty to do it.

But what I would say is is if you are using impermanent means to achieve a permanent solution, you can only fail.

If you are mistaking the vehicle for the self, for the essence of the self, you can only fail.

If you have not interrogated, who is this in here?

What is this subjective experience that only I am having?

How do I deal with the tension of the paradox and remember, all energy comes from polarity.

That I am infinitesimally small to the point of being absolutely irrelevant in a cosmic framing and yet all reality takes place solely as far as I know within my consciousness.

You said, well, you can only fail if you go on that pursuit.

You said, if you do this, you can only fill.

You you will only you will only you will only fill.

What is failure for the modern person that is pursuing that?

What is that common failure that those in that sort of impermanent pursuit of Preference.

Pain, pain, disconnection, loneliness, despair a sense of worthlessness.

But even in these flaws and failings offer is the DNA of success.

I know it's a lot with addiction, of course, and forgive me, using this framing.

It's just the best model I've ever been given to not kill myself is that addicts are so close to realizing it Nothing is real.

But in the end, it becomes everything you need to become recovered is present in your addiction.

Everything you need to become awakened is present in your sondulants.

So what I'm saying is, is in that loneliness, in that sense of I'm not good enough, I'm worthless, are all the ingredients awaiting reorganization.

And perhaps this is what a program, a system, a practice.

And some mentors and some peers can provide.

And I think it is different for all of us.

But the the the the the failure is the sort of the sense, isn't it?

Because you you asked an important question, David.

You asked many important questions, David.

But but this 1 in particular is why what is it let's say again with CS Lewis.

See all The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett transcripts on Applepodcasts

E260: Russell Brand FINALLY Opens Up: Escaping A Lifetime Of Anxiety, Addiction & Finding Love!