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Jan. 19, 2023 - Conspirituality
01:07:59
137: Addiction & The Wounded Influencer (w/Chris Boutte)

Perhaps you’ve seen the Rumi quote repeated on social media memes: “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” The wounded healer is a popular archetype in wellness spaces, and indeed, sometimes experience teaches wisdom, enabling the victim to overcome their trauma and help others. But in conspiritualist spaces, the wounded healer can also begin a monetization stream where everything becomes evidence of trauma, only to be healed through this book, or that course, or a brand-new brand of meditation that’s only the marketing scheme of an old form. Speaking of brands, we look at the wounded healer through the lens of Russell Brand, among others. This leads to Derek’s interview with YouTuber and podcaster, Chris Boutte, aka The Rewired Soul, who happens to be in recovery and watched firsthand as Russell went from helpful figure to shadowy archetype. Can an addiction to drugs be healed, only to lead to an addiction to clicks and likes? Stay tuned… -- -- -- Support us on Patreon Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
I'm David.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
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Conspiratuality 137, Addiction and the Wounded Influencer, with Chris Boute.
Perhaps you've seen the roomie quote repeated on social media memes, the wound is the place where the light enters you.
The wounded healer is a popular archetype in wellness spaces, and indeed, sometimes experience teaches wisdom, enabling the victim Welcome to overcome their trauma and help others.
But in conspiritualist spaces, the wounded healer can also begin a monetization stream where everything becomes evidence of trauma, only to be healed through this book, or that course, or a brand new brand of meditation that's only the marketing scheme of an old form.
Speaking of brands, we look at the wounded healer archetype through the lens of Russell Brand.
Amongst others.
And this leads to Derek's interview today with YouTuber and podcaster Chris Boute, also known as the Rewired Soul, who happens to be in recovery and watched firsthand as Russell went from helpful figure to shadowy archetype.
Can an addiction to drugs be healed only to lead to an addiction to clicks and likes?
Stay tuned.
We're going to introduce a concept today that hopefully does some good work toward defining one of the arcs that some of the figures we study take on the spiritual influencer to conspiracy theories to right-wing politics pipeline.
Lately, all roads seem to lead the conspiritualist not only to being anti-vax, but also, as it turns out, anti-woke, as Matthew pointed out in last weekend's brief.
But how do they get there?
Well, we've talked before about the idea of stigmatized knowledge.
Yeah, the idea that's central to the work of political scientist Michael Barkun as he unfolds his Three Laws of Conspiracy Theories.
Nothing is as it seems, nothing happens by accident, everything is connected.
And stigmatized knowledge, representing this notion of how unconventional ways of knowing that transcend evidence and reason and facts, you know, Ancient truths, spiritual downloads, heart wisdom, or revelations revealed in trance or meditation can give the influencer a prophetic glow.
But there's something else often at play in their rise to popularity.
So, in lieu of boring and square mainstream non-stigmatized academic qualifications or, you know, well-researched data, wellness influencers often also rely on a heroic backstory.
Yeah, and it always describes how they came to their special, sacred, very secret knowledge.
Yeah, and so that journey might include that story, that narrative that is used as part of their marketing.
It might include a terrible illness.
That those blue-pilled Western doctors just couldn't diagnose or treat, in which case they now offer the supplement or quack modality that cured them.
Or it might be the terrible story of trauma that the influencer has risen up from like a spiritually awakened phoenix with insights and techniques no 3D hypnotized licensed therapist could hope to understand.
What about a 4D hypnotized licensed therapist?
I guess it would depend on who did the hypnotizing, right?
So for this reason, we're calling this the Wounded Healer Backstory.
But there's one more iteration.
The Wounded Healer Backstory can also be one of overcoming addiction.
And through that particular shamanic journey, discovering spiritual insights and tools that go beyond mere 12-step recovery and imbue the sober hero with grit, gravitas, and the charisma of courageous humility.
What do you think, guys?
You know, I think the crucial point that you've made, Julian, about this in our discussion so far in preparation is that whatever this dark night of the soul is, It always serves to stand in as a kind of graduate program that grants an experiential PhD.
Absolutely.
That's a great way to say it.
If you've been through hell, if you've been in the tomb for three days, if you've been in the belly of the whale, you come out with a story that is your diploma.
It gives you the right to hang out your shingle.
You turn a shame that would otherwise stigmatize you into stigmatized knowledge that you're then able to sell on words.
And we see it everywhere, right?
We all have our personal stories.
I've talked a little bit before, probably too much, about the leader of the first group that I was in, Michael Roach, who he described awakening into the truth of Buddhism after a number of immediate family members died in a short period of time.
And then the second guy I was with, Charles Anderson, who led Endeavor Academy, he said that he was on one of the first landing teams that walked into Nagasaki, Japan, after the bomb.
He reported that looking over that devastation made it clear to him that he would say there had to be another way because this world does not make sense.
And so he mingled that rock-bottom epiphany in with his like 12-step rock-bottom recovery from alcoholism because of course he couldn't process the devastation of what he witnessed in the war.
He started drinking, but those devastations or rock-bottom periods kind of mingled together.
Do you, did you ever find out if that was really true?
Is, is it true that he was in that group who sold Nagasaki after the bomb?
You know, I haven't heard or seen anything that disconfirmed it.
Okay.
Yeah.
My gut says that I don't disbelieve it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe I'm just too awash in the, in the George Santos news cycle.
And then I was, I was just recently listening back to Rachel Maddow talking about Trump claiming to have been the best athlete at everything since before first grade. You know there was a consistency to his story
though that went back over about twenty years because he wasn't just teaching to us in the
late 90s, early 2000s, he also there were these audio tapes where he was telling the same
stories like fifteen years before. Wow. But these epiphanies that have to do with
situations or landscapes of devastation Like even Owen Willis says that he had a similar epiphany, spiritual epiphany, after viewing Ground Zero, right?
And then in your life, Julian, on a forest, your old yoga teacher has a story like this too, doesn't she?
In the 90s, Anna's whole way of legitimizing herself and claiming a certain level of authority was telling a very gruesome backstory about having almost, almost to the level of a satanic panic kind of recovered memory backstory.
It's very intense.
And is it fair to say that she just would not have been on a forest without that backstory in terms of her hold on you?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And I think that's probably still remained true over the decades because it's really, I have overcome the most horrific trauma you can imagine through this method I've developed.
And now you too can overcome whatever your backstory might be.
And if you don't have one yet, Perhaps we can provide you with one through your own recovered memory process, right?
Right, through a few trance techniques, yeah.
I mean, speaking of which, you know, we can think of Teal Swan again, who becomes an expert in trauma therapy because she survived satanic ritual abuse.
We can think in the accident category of Joe Dispenza becoming a quantum healer after he uses the think method to mend his spine after a cycling accident.
There are milder stories, like Zach Bush talking about how his life changed when he thought he was drowning as he was swimming amongst the sardines off the coast of Tulum.
Yeah, and not only that, Zach Bush also loves to tell the story of the first time he was on an acupuncture table and he was looking up at the skylight and saw this cloud passing over and he was there because of like, I think he even talks about being suicidal in that story.
Oh, he does, that's right.
Yeah, and it's on that table that he has this revelatory awakening that there is more to healing than the limited medical model that he's been schooled in.
Then there's Judy Mikovits, who rises up as this brave truth teller after her dubious story about how the SWAT team came in to arrest her.
And then in her case, her loss of academic credibility is made up for with this instant experience of being persecuted. It's like it's because she's
being attacked by the police and losing her credentials that she's now heroic.
Yeah, and Mickey Willis provides the stock footage to make it seem as if it really happened in the eyes of people who
watch Plandemic.
Yeah, then there's like JFK Jr. who, you know, to his credit, I don't think he leans too hard explicitly into the
Shakespearean level tragedy of his family history.
but it's always there in the background.
And when you hear, I hear, in his wavering voice, he has the spasmodic dystonia, the subtext is, I've been to hell and back, right?
Yeah, and you know, he does from time to time link his current conspiracy thinking back to like how his father and uncle were killed.
Right.
And then there's Peterson, Jordan Peterson, who, if he finally loses his College of Psychologists of Ontario license, He'll have nothing but his own kind of heroic survivorship story left, whether it's transcending the attacks from the online left, or being a culture war martyr in other ways, or somebody who resurrected from a medical coma after being addicted to benzodiazepines.
But, like, I also, myself, would not be immune to this dynamic because I've claimed a certain kind of expertise as a cult survivor, right?
Like, I've done some work to back it up.
I've done, I think, enough research and journalism and put it out there to say, like, it's a reasonable background.
And I'm not selling cures or anything.
But as somebody recently pointed out to me, to self-identify as a cult survivor carries an almost unquestionable weight.
As soon as you say it, I think you're making this moral demand that people believe it.
And I think the funniest thing about my story is that, like, surviving these two organizations I was in also becomes my diploma in a logistical sense because I'll also say that if I hadn't been in cults for six years, I would have gone to grad school.
So I get to add some extra resentment in there, too.
Your Charles Anderson story reminds me of someone I knew in New York.
His name was Larry, but he went by Batman.
He says that he was one of the last people pulled out of Vietnam.
He suffered from napalm.
And some nights when I would see him, he would be on the street shaking.
He was homeless.
Right.
But he would also use his knowledge of being—he actually worked for the New York City Sanitation Department.
He had a daughter who he sent money to who lived in New York.
He had a phone.
He just chose to live on the streets, but he used what happened to him in order to teach people Through these, we'll call them workshops, I can't even call them that, like, in the winter, people who wanted to stay for a night outside with him and understand what being homeless was like, he would invite them wherever he was staying at that time.
Wow.
And he would ask, you know, if you wanted to give him a few dollars from food, he wasn't like charging people to do this.
But it just, your Anderson story reminds me of the way, and just as you identified, Matthew, having knowledge of something It does lead to expertise, or it can lead to expertise.
It's how you then frame it and use it.
And I feel like the list you went down are people who are using it to their advantage in an exploitative way.
Yep.
Whereas a lot of therapists, I would imagine, Loretta Wass, who we talked about recently, started working at a rape crisis center in D.C.
because she was sexually assaulted when she was younger.
So I think that distinction is really challenging sometimes to identify, but important to point out.
Yeah, and actually, it goes to your interview with Chris Boute, which is that, you know, being a sponsor is exactly that, right?
Being a sponsor is basically being a peer mentor who has walked the path that you are seeking to walk, and it's selfless, and it's an act of service that is actually about your own sobriety, because through helping others, there's a sense of meaning and connection and, you know, staying on the path yourself.
And it's explicitly framed within the recovery community as not being something that is commodified, right?
So, if we want to talk about how it does get commodified, I think it's important to notice a couple of things about how, in toxic situations, groups can gather around wounded healers in particular ways.
And one of the ways I think that happens is that sometimes the rock bottom experience gives the charismatic person a kind of authority, and that authority becomes transitive to lower members of the group that gather around them, in the sense that the lower members are asked to mimic the leader's suffering, but they don't necessarily receive the same reward.
In other words, the leader has to be the ultimate survivor.
So, going back to Charles Anderson for a moment, the notion of his devastation was very dramatic because it was associated with like an atomic bomb, and it was really important that our group, we all had to have our own devastations, sometimes on a daily basis, so that we remembered that our spiritual certainty came from a despair that linked us to him.
And if we didn't have any juicy devastation material to share, there were strong incentives to make something up for that day, like how depressed you were.
But even if you made up a really good story about being suicidal, that didn't necessarily turn you into a hero, but it did give you space within the group.
In the same way, Michael Roach used to say that no one could really advance on the Buddhist path without substantial loss, without a death in the family, divorce, cancer diagnosis, severe depression.
And then we have this other thing happening where that acceptance within the group being enhanced
by identifying with a devastating experience is something that you often have to perform.
And this biases group members towards the position of vulnerability.
So we know for example, that Teal Swan's SEO team has figured out how to make her videos pop up
on the feeds of young women who are depressed.
But once they enter that stream and the group, if they get that far, if they go to Costa Rica
or if they go to events or whatever, their depression becomes as much of a commodity
as it is something from which they are recovering.
You know, it's like she's, Teal Swan's the Statue of Liberty.
If the carving on the plinth said, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free so that I can keep them that way.
And so, the survivorship of the wounded healer can expose this real contradiction at the heart of New Age ideology as well, because on the one hand, followers have to believe in the leader's ultimate victimization, but then somehow, they also have to get in with the program of not being a victim.
Yeah, that contradiction is so interesting, right?
Because you talked about the Statue of Liberty and bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses so that I can keep them that way.
And like, that is the exact criticism that Swan and others levy at say, like, psychotherapy.
That psychotherapy is keeping you stuck in your victim consciousness and I actually, because of my unique qualifications as someone who has made this shamanic journey through being a wounded healer, I actually have the solution that will take you further.
And actually in your brief, you talk about that with regard to her critique of wokeness as not really being awakened.
It's actually you're staying asleep.
I guess the one last thing that I'd want to say about how people create authority out of the survivorship of trauma is that there's some really tender stuff in there to be aware of.
For instance, I've spoken to a few people who have stories of satanic ritual abuse.
And both of them associated the abuse itself with out of body likely dissociative experiences through which they believed they developed an understanding of the universe.
In other words, the moment in which they were actually Worst off, gave them some kind of enlightening experience.
And then secondly, when I did that book about the yoga guru who assaulted his students while they were in postures, a few of the students who remained faithful to his memory said that when he caused them pain through actions that I would describe as being assault, In that moment, they were transported into a kind of spiritual ecstasy.
I was hurt once by an Ashtanga teacher who forced my hand to the ground very early in my yoga career.
There was nothing ecstatic about that experience.
Yeah, I don't think you probably weren't in the group for long enough to be given that storyline to apply to that particular kind of pain.
So, I just want to note that the experience of survivorship is laden with a lot of complicated storytelling and power, and I think that's part of what makes it so effective in the conspirituality space.
Yeah, and I would add to that, Derek, too, that there's something about the transference that happens within a very intense group, a very intense teacher-student kind of dynamic where the teacher has presented themselves as being so special, such a product of a unique journey.
That things can get reframed in that way, because I think part of what happens is, as the student, it's easy to lose a sense of what we would think of as kind of everyday ethical judgments, because now we're in this other domain, right?
With this very special other kind of teacher.
No, that is true.
I was actually traveling through Miami.
I only had time to take one class, the only studio I could find, Wishes Tonga, and so I dropped in.
So I absolutely had no relationship to anyone.
Yeah.
And so you're like, fuck this guy.
It was a woman, but yes.
Okay.
Yeah, whereas I think that that's often the experience.
I mean, when I was when I was deep, deep into the Anaforest community and getting what felt to me like a lot of benefit, a lot of like really intense, interesting revelatory experiences from it, I would sometimes bring people.
And every now and again, there'd be someone who was just like, oh, yeah, this is just really weird.
And, you know, and I don't.
Yeah.
Thanks for the class.
But I would think as soon as I introduced them, they'd be there every week.
They'd be there multiple times a week.
And then you're stuck with an awkward dinner instead.
Yeah.
In which, of course, my, my way of dealing with that would be to think, well, they just don't get it.
They're not ready.
They're too defended.
Right.
Right.
They don't, they don't get how amazingly important this is.
So what you were saying, Matthew, about this odd kind of inversion of Painful experience as somehow being revelatory or perhaps even initiatory.
It's consistent with a hunch I have that, you know, merciful capacity to dissociate in the face of trauma can sometimes be interpreted in a spiritualized way. 100%.
And this of course also then becomes very literal.
As in, that's when I left my body and realized XYZ higher truth.
Or that's when I encountered XYZ interdimensional alien spirit guides.
Right.
It was called endorphins and stress hormones.
Yeah, and dissociation because you were flooded and overwhelmed.
And so that wasn't actually the moment of you realizing some deep higher truth, that was just the moment of you going into an intense altered state to try to cope with an experience that you didn't know what to do with.
So Derek, I know that you and Chris are going to touch on Russell Brand in your interview, and you and I are actually in the midst of a bonus episode series, we'll record I think the last one or this week, on Russell's interviews with Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss regarding Elon Musk's so-called Twitter files.
Now, we also covered Russell Brand in depth back on episode 97 of the podcast, because since early 2021, His online presence has become almost entirely focused on conspiracism, but I thought to mention him more here because I really think he exemplifies the version of the wounded healer via the pathway of addiction recovery that we've been touching on so far.
So here's his arc.
People generally know that he starts off as an actor and a standup comedian, but in September of 2017, Russell publishes his book titled Recovery.
And from then on, his public appearances to promote the book all focus on his story of intense addiction to drugs
and alcohol, and as the story sort of unfolds over time, also sex.
And on now being sober.
And then more and more, he starts to cut a very Jesus-like figure with his lustrous and now usually clean and flowing
beard and hair.
He has a calmer demeanor as contrasted with his more intense kind of comedic personality.
These lucid unblinking eyes.
He makes a TV appearance with his kundalini yoga teacher and talks about how spirituality, meditation, breathing, yoga have been the keys to his sobriety.
And his personal transformation, he stands before us now as Russell 2.0, right?
Yeah, what is that unblinking thing?
You know, I was watching the CNN clip that I was on last week, and I was like, wow, I was blinking a lot.
And you don't even realize when you're doing it.
When you see someone like Russell, you're like, dude, the intensity through the camera, it's kind of like that Mickey Willis gaze we've talked about before.
And I wonder how practiced that is.
Well, it's clear to me that you weren't in LA in the 90s when all of us were going to satsang and participating in various kinds of spiritual communal experiences where sitting and having that first conversation with someone in a spiritual community context always involved A staring competition to see who had the most transparently non-dual awakened kind of presence behind the trivial conversation that was going on about who you were, where you lived, what you did for a living.
Could you actually do eye yoga exercises to suppress the reflex to blink or something?
Yeah, you certainly could, but you know, that it's like hyper open presence.
Performance of Jesus.
Exactly.
Yeah.
It creeps me out.
Totally creeps me out.
It's such a power move.
Yeah.
You know, who's, who's gonna, who's gonna link first and who's gonna lose that sense of just like uninterrupted expansive consciousness.
Yeah, it's like you take the worst kind of intrusive therapy and then you put it in an unregulated yoga studio and you have a bunch of people trying to make money out of it.
They're really coming out of the screen at you through that intense eye gaze.
Anyway, back to Russell Brand.
During this period of the lucid gaze and the Jesus appearance, Russell's YouTube channel, which had really previously been dedicated to progressive politics in England, goes through a rebrand he's morphing into a kind of
spiritual guide who now can help with addiction anxiety low self esteem and stress by sharing insights and brief
meditation techniques.
And then through twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen his content expands to include interviews with well known
spiritual figures.
And by 2020, he's really been on a roll.
He's got Muji, you know this guy.
He's got Eckhart Tolle, Marianne Williamson, Gabor Mate, Tony Robbins, Brene Brown.
They've all been on his channel being interviewed by him about personal growth.
Awesome.
But we talked on episode 97 about how all of this shifts at the start of 2021.
He made it through most of 2020 actually avoiding the stuff, but now there's a video.
He had some self-control!
I guess!
He was absorbed in his other project, right?
But suddenly, and I actually speculated that Russell got red-pilled over the Christmas break
in 2020, because now there's a video about what QAnon got right and how we move forward.
Then there are multiple installments on the Great Reset, which has become a real calling card for him.
Videos about Bill Gates.
There's a couple of videos about literal blood-drinking elites.
Fauci's lies and vaccines are a big repeated theme, as is the WEF and their meetings at Davos.
And wouldn't you know it, this kind of content massively inflates his view counts, his subscriber numbers, and the spiritual guidance and sobriety confessional videos that represent this wounded healer kind of legitimacy, they all but dwindle away.
And this culminates in where we are now with Brand interviewing Taibbi and Weiss from his show which is being hosted on the right-wing alt-tech platform Rumble about the liberal censorship bias of old Twitter.
And so this arc from gaining spiritual wellness influencer traction with the heroic wounded healer backstory to being drawn to the stigmatized knowledge of conspiracism To parroting right-wing talking points about big tech censorship and authoritarian liberal media bias is strangely familiar, right?
Yeah, you stitched it up.
Working toward this episode with you guys, I know you were doing the Wounded Healer aspect, and then I started thinking about intersecting narratives, which is what I want to just pull out for a moment here before we get to Chris.
And a useful guide for this discussion is the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz's concept of the monad.
Now, I'm taking a version of the monad that is defined by historian Tamim Ansari in his book, The Invention of Yesterday, which I happen to be reading right now while we're preparing for this episode.
And he puts it as basically a way to understand the entire universe from a single point of view.
And again, to be clear, this is shorthand for a much more complex philosophy.
Yet, you see this type of thinking all the time in wellness spaces.
Whenever someone wants to brand their niche.
Everything stems from trauma in one's life, for example.
Every ailment stems from an inability to meditate and put things into perspective.
We have in chiropractic where 95% of your ailments can be healed with the correction of the atlas bone.
Another one is, everything stems from anxiety and conquering anxiety and all of its forms is an assured road to liberation.
Now that's when Atlas shrugs, right?
Now, it reminds me of a term that Abraham Maslow made famous.
He didn't coin it, but it was from the 1880s.
But in the 1940s, it was the idea that when all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail.
Yeah, I resemble that comment.
That's a cognitive bias known as the law of the instrument.
Ansari posits the idea that a single monad or narrative is the driving force behind social reality.
Now, he doesn't deny the role of biology in our evolution, but he says that storytelling is really what defines history.
And so he uses the monad as a heuristic for describing the inevitable fusion of ideas that occur when smaller societies come into contact with one another.
So sometimes they integrate, and sometimes they repel foreign ideas.
There's a great music documentary called Lachodrome that traces music from India through the Balkans that kind of brings home that point.
I highly recommend it.
You can find it on YouTube.
It's available nowhere else.
But in each case, stories form and define new communities.
And the dangers occur when one monad bumps up against one another, and instead of absorption, you have warfare.
Now, we've seen this type of integration in yoga spaces for decades, but in my view, it's a lazy one.
It's this notion that every religion leads to the same place.
Even though someone like, a historian like Ansari points out, belief systems like, say, Taoism and Confucianism are diametrically opposed in their worldview.
Now, from what I've observed in wellness spaces, it's a romanticized notion of every spiritual pursuit being packaged as somehow leading to the ecstatic state one feels after a vigorous yoga session or meditative practice.
So it's this idea that all roads lead to individual bliss.
As we've documented over the years, this narrative has changed drastically.
The story now is a paranoid one.
So you have every power structure, be it government agencies, newspapers, doctors, economic organizations, any politician that leans left, Well, they're all now part of a covert operation undermining our freedom to search for that bliss, and there's no greater writer of this narrative than Russell Brand.
So, I'm starting to get what you're saying, Derek, which is that the Monad is a heuristic that can express a series of positive but totalizing worldviews, but if that flips, if somehow the other side of the coin is turned up, then we go from a pro-Noahic world in which Kundalini has solved every problem to a paranoid world in which the WEF is ruining every bit of our lives.
Yes, very well said.
Yeah, and Tamim Ansari actually, he has this great turn of phrase where he says, you know, every cultural worldview, every specific historical narrative is a view from somebody, right?
It's somebody's particular narrative in which they get to be the hero and their culture gets to be the one that exemplifies what all other cultures or all other belief systems should be leading towards.
Yeah, exactly.
It's a fantastic book, and you know what's amazing about this book is that I've read pretty much all of the history from various sources over the decades, but the way he stitches them together is really new in some ways to me and where he's leading with it, so I find it fascinating.
Now, in one clip we ran last year, Russell specifically cites the British political system as responsible for people like him becoming addicted to drugs.
It's also the reason he gives for not running for office, which he was challenged on by the audience in that discussion, or even voting, which he has said numerous times.
So instead of engaging with the dominant monad or narrative in this view, Russell advocates for completely rewriting it.
Oh, he flips it.
Okay.
And his idea is burn it down, begin anew from this other place that I'm advocating for.
Now, the problem with him is that he actually never offers tangible solutions for what this rewrite means on a structural level.
Nothing beyond a vague identification of the problem, as if merely waking up to the fact that we live in a corrupted system is enough to change it.
Now, this is vastly different from the figures that our recent guest, Anand Giridharadas, writes about, who are out on the streets every day trying to make a difference.
Now, I've never seen anything but performance politics from Russell.
When it comes to recovery, and I'm going to get into this with Chris, here Russell does get in the weeds at live events, through tele events, and with his book that you mentioned, Joy and Recovery.
So, by using his recovery from drug addiction, which I think is a good thing for a lot of people, so I'm not criticizing that.
But it's also an addiction he places specifically on the state.
He's positioned himself to become a political pundit, criticizing the state without really having to engage with it.
He's healed himself, and so now he's pointing the way for broader social healing.
Now, if you follow Russell's content, this becomes a lens through which to view the world, and as we've noticed and you just pointed out, Julian, it's a pretty paranoid one.
The wounded healer has battled his own demons and emerged victorious, and like a good Bodhisattva, he's pulling up everyone else with him who has eyes to see.
Now, at the very least, he's asking that everyone question the world in the same manner which he does, provided that he doesn't have to take responsibility for any answers.
I'm left with two questions with this transition in his career, and one of them I'll get in with Chris here.
How effective are his recovery programs and events?
I've heard people say they've really been helped by him, and I've heard from a handful of critics about his methods, like the idea that you're monetizing recovery or that you're talking about it so broadly.
And Matthew, I know you've been critical of his techniques from afar, the eye gazing that we just talked about, for example, in live events.
Yeah, the live events show some perpetual boundary crossing where his parasocial relationships become immediately social and embodied in a really quick way.
I'm not quite sure what's going on with that, yeah.
Yeah, and that is something that has carried over actually throughout his career as he's gone through these different transitions, his in-person reveling in the adulation and the entry that it gives him to a sense of just all of those good vibes and the Darshan kind of quality of like, yes, I am the special one who is here to anoint you with my love and affection and like, I'm your best friend, I'm your family member, I'm going to hug you and you will feel my energy.
And that's what defenders or fans will say when they come away from those events.
He's just pure love.
It's like they're talking about Amici.
Well, yeah, that's leading to the problem.
So to wrap up, the first question I have, has he really healed if the addiction has moved on from drugs and sex to online engagement and likes?
But what you just identified, Matthew, leads to the second question.
How seriously should we take him as a political pundit?
Whenever I post anything critical of Russell, I inevitably get some of his fans saying that he's only a commentator.
He's just an entertainer making observations.
And I'm always like, do you actually hear what he's saying though?
He's gone pretty far beyond every man just asking questions at this point.
In that way they're kind of framing him as a more playful English Joe Rogan, right?
Yeah, exactly.
He's an idiot.
Don't listen to him, but he's asking really important questions that no one else dares to ask.
And then he's gonna gaze into your eyes and hug you and love you like you've never been loved before.
Joe doesn't do that.
Joe doesn't do that.
Also, it's not very English, is it?
No, exactly.
Well, both.
One throughfare between Rogan and Brand here is the idea that they are not media platforms when they are media platforms.
They always say, we're criticizing the media.
We're not part of that.
And yet they have more reach than a lot of the platforms that are not criticizing, but they won't take responsibility for that.
Yeah, it's the Fox News and Daily Wire gambit, right?
We're the little guy who has no money, who's outside of the mainstream, who's fighting against the behemoth of the mainstream narrative coming to you from CNN and MSNBC, etc.
But it's like, actually, you have more listeners.
What is the wounded healer really healing?
I mean, how much does Teal Swan profit from being an anti-woke activist now?
When Russell blurs addiction recovery with political commentary, where are the lines drawn, and does he even know where those lines are?
What are just parts of the narratives they're pushing forward?
And how do their followers discern rhetoric from reality?
Chris, thank you for taking time out to join Conspiracuality today.
I always enjoy your YouTube videos and your Twitter feed, so I'm glad we have a few minutes to talk here.
My pleasure.
I want to open, as we're talking about addiction and the recovery space in the wellness industry and perhaps some misinformation that happens there, and I want to know if you can share Your own experiences with addiction and then how you got into recovery.
Yeah, so let's see if I can shorten this story a little bit.
But yeah, I'm the son of an alcoholic mom, promised I would never touch alcohol or drugs after a really bad breakup in high school.
And I just wanted to numb everything.
I'm like, I'm gonna try that drinking thing.
And it was just, it was off from there.
Eventually the alcohol turned into prescription pain pills and I had my, my son was born when I was about 24 and things just got progressively worse.
I said, Oh, I'm going to stop when my son's born.
Now I have an excuse to stop.
And I just couldn't.
So 27 years old, I have like a 10 to 20% chance of living.
I had congestive heart failure.
And they said, like, even if I got sober, I probably wouldn't live, but I showed them.
By the time I actually got sober, when I was 27, my mom was actually sober for seven years.
So I'm very, very fortunate because I work with a lot of addicts,
and they don't have family support.
So the fact that my mom was sober, she helped me get sober.
So I got sober on my 27th birthday in 2012.
You know, I've been really passionate about helping others.
That's just what they taught me in 12-step programs.
They're like, hey, you keep this thing by helping other people.
And with my content and stuff, I've kind of broadened that scope.
I try to help people.
You know, understand pseudoscience and becoming better thinkers and all that stuff, because there's a lot of bad stuff out there right now, Derek, and you know this.
Yes.
One thing I've talked about on the podcast before is, in an 11-month period, I went through cancer and I went through knee surgery.
And I was given access to 240 Pain pills.
So I was given a bottle of 30 each time and then with three prescriptions that I didn't have to see the doctor for.
I threw out that bottle, not that I'm against pain medication when it's necessary, but I just didn't have the level of pain that I was required.
I took cannabis.
I was fine through that process.
We're going to talk about the video you did, and I'll include it in the show notes, on Russell Brand.
Now, one thing you said in that video that struck me as very powerful, and it's my view as well, there is serious greed in the pharmaceutical industry.
There's a real problem with the ways that painkillers have been promoted, and we all know that.
But you also say that you're alive today because of your heart medication.
Yeah, it's tricky, man.
It's such a difficult thing to find the balance with, you know?
When you look at, perhaps, people who say, I'm against all pharmaceuticals, and you've had these experiences, how would you express what I just summated?
So yeah, like you were just saying, that's what I noticed.
And it's one of the reasons I was able to live in my addiction for so long.
Like, um, I write a lot about drug policy and stuff like that because they're like, oh, these like shady drug dealers and stuff coming in from Mexico.
I'm like, do you realize that 99% of my drug dealers were either doctors or like old ladies who were getting all of their, like just getting flooded with pills, you know?
So we need to, you know, focus there and have better regulation.
I believe things are getting a little bit better.
But anyways, yeah, when I got sober, I've become like an advocate and I try to talk about this stuff more.
And I've seen like a lot of friends say exactly what you said, like they'll have the most minor pain, right?
I remember my son's mom and we were still together.
She, uh, it was when like the swine flu was around and we went to the hospital, right?
They're like, are you in any pain?
She's like, oh, I have a, I have a quote, little bit of a headache.
They tried giving her morphine.
I'm like, Jesus, what are you people doing?
Right.
So yeah, there's obviously a distrust.
Right.
That's where I empathize with conspiracy theorists and everything like that.
Like, I totally get it.
And that's often where I find common ground when I'm actually able to have a conversation.
I'm like, hey, look, I get it.
I don't trust them either.
But, you know, like I mentioned, I have to take medications.
And I believe, like, the answer and something we talk a lot about in, you know, not just addiction recovery, but in mental health as a whole, is how terrible black and white thinking is, right?
And we see so much of that.
It's all or nothing.
No, not every doctor is bad.
No, not every medication is addictive.
So we have to live in that gray area.
As a recovering pill addict, I'm very cautious about anything I put in my body.
Because I don't know what's going to set me off and make me want to start taking it again.
So I personally do extensive research.
I fortunately found a really good doctor who I can trust, so I'm able to ask her questions.
But something I've learned just in this space of being a skeptic and avoiding the woo-woo spiritual nonsense or the people pushing like ivermectin and all that stuff is I find good sources and I get second opinion, sometimes third, but I spend a lot of time before I take anything or put it in my body.
I don't know.
I think a lot of the issue today is we all want shortcuts, right?
We either want to say, all doctors are bad, or all doctors are good.
Or all scientists are bad, or all scientists are good.
But there's a lot of gray area in this stuff, and it takes additional effort.
Absolutely.
I often think about, I was born in the town called Milltown, which the first billion dollar pharmaceutical was named after the town I was born in.
It was called the Milltown.
It was a tranquilizer.
And it used to be prescribed in the early fifties for the nerves.
For the nerves.
So we have a long history with this, but you did say the magic words there, which was conspiracy theories.
That's going to bring us to Russell Brand.
One thing I always think about with a lot of the influencers we cover is the crossover.
I don't disagree with everything.
Where I disagree is what we actually cover, but I also will point out the things that I agree with them on and what you just said about people being skeptical of the pharmaceutical industry.
Great example.
And you initially were introduced to Russell's work through his recovery work, which is very much where his star rose after what happened with some of his acting.
And you recommended his book around that often, and you also discovered meditation, which he was into at that time.
So can you explain some of the things that Russell was saying at the time?
This was 10 years ago that made sense to you.
When I finally picked up his book, because I was never a huge
Russell Brand fan. I didn't not like him.
He just wasn't my style of comedy.
I didn't really watch his movies or anything like that.
But I don't remember exactly why, but I remember finally checking out
his book. I think I was just grabbing up a lot of books on recovery and stuff, found his.
Something I realized when I got sober and turned my life around was a lot of friends
would come ask me for advice and stuff like that, you know, because my life was getting a lot better.
Some of them, even though they're not addicts, like they just have bad relationships.
And I would just say to them the same things I learned in 12-step programs, but I wouldn't say it came from there.
It was like hiding the medicine when you're giving it to like your dog or cat or whatever, right?
So when I read Russell Brand's book, His book was really talking about how, you know, these 12 steps, they're good for anybody.
There was actually a lot of controversy around that time within the 12-step community because of it, because we have 12 steps and 12 traditions.
It's against the traditions to publicly promote 12-step programs, right?
Although that program saved my life, like with anything, there's things I disagree with.
And I'm like, I would rather promote a free program to people in this country without universal healthcare
than not.
Some of my first videos were actually defending Russell Brand to the 12 Step community and all that stuff.
But when it came out, I was actually working in a rehab program.
I was like, here, read this guy's book.
It's good.
And you know, he like puts it in a way that's easy to understand.
So I was just like one of his biggest fans at the time, you know, so watching this whole thing just go downhill,
you know, and I think you said something that I think about a lot too,
which is some of the things he says are true or that we agree with.
But with all the people that you guys cover or like the Decoding Gurus cover,
like even looking at like someone like Jordan Peterson, it's when we start mixing the truth with the BS,
that gets really confusing.
Because you hear a couple truths and you're like, oh, I can trust this person.
You kind of turn off that critical thinking.
You're just like, okay, I'll just let it all soak in, right?
One of the reasons I made that video about Russell Brand and I was just really set off was because there are so many people who I know
came from the recovery community, he gained their trust, and then he took this hard right turn,
and people didn't see it happen. So I'm like, how many people
have been sucked in by this and didn't know when to back off?
I've heard that from recovering addicts as well, that he really was helpful to them,
and that I think is wonderful if that's the case.
But there was also over the past year, sometimes he'll post on Twitter
or Instagram photos of him hugging people in these recovery spaces.
How do you feel when you see that, bringing up what you just did, which is that one of the facets of recovery is that you don't really publicize it in that capacity?
It's tricky.
From what I gathered, At least back then.
I haven't seen too much from, uh, I haven't, like, followed much of his, like, events lately.
Like, I pretty much just follow him on YouTube just so I can get angry about his thumbnails and clickbait titles.
Back then, I remember watching, and he did a good, he did a pretty good job about being very vague and not saying specifically Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous.
Like, me, I don't mind talking about it because I'm like, what are they going to do, like, excommunicate me?
Like, that's never happened.
So, like, whatever.
I like when people show like, hey, this thing works, and hey, there's other people who are benefiting from it.
But like right now, like in 2022, when 90% of its content is conspiracy theory BS, I don't like how he's going out to recovery communities, right?
Because it's almost like Sucking in vulnerable people into a bad place.
When people first get sober, a lot of us have a lot of trust issues anyways, right?
So if you give your trust to the wrong person, because addicts, we're very all or nothing people as well, and Like if somebody latches on to Russell Brand and says,
oh, his recovery stuff's good, they start listening to his other content
and just think he's all good.
I had to learn how to compartmentalize things very well.
There's great stuff from 12-step programs and there's other stuff I'm like,
nah man, get that away from me.
You know, so it's something I just had to learn to do.
And my fear, even though I try to give people like the benefit of the doubt, like my fear is that other people can't separate different things like you're good over here.
But when you talk about these subjects, You're a lunatic, and I need to shut my hearing off.
One thing I appreciate too, as an atheist, is that you can understand spiritual principles without necessarily taking to the metaphysics, for example.
Yeah.
I want to get into the content of that video a little bit, but first, can you just briefly explain, in these recovery programs, what are the things that you think are valuable, and what are the things you want kind of pushed away?
Yeah, well, something that you'll notice is every meeting's different, right?
So, for example, for anybody out there listening who isn't aware of 12-step programs, a lot of them are churches, but they have nothing to do with church, right?
A church rents out, like, a room to AA programs for, like, $5 a month, just something silly, right?
So, it's an easy place.
But anyways, let's say you have a 24-hour day, because here in Las Vegas, we have 24-hour meetings, because people work all the time, they need a meeting, whatever.
You have a 24-hour day, or in normal places, a 12-hour day.
There might be five or six different groups at that location, right?
So one thing that I hate, again, going back to black and white thinking, is somebody will go in and they see one bad meeting, think they're all bad.
They're not.
So I want to just preface it with that.
But when it comes to 12-step programs, I don't think there's anything in the program that is bad.
But what you will do, you'll meet people who promote bad things.
For example, when I got sober in Narcotics Anonymous, there were some meetings I went to that were 1,000% against mental health medications.
Statistically, most people who turn to drugs and alcohol have a dual diagnosis, so they have a mental illness as well.
So, it is insane to say, don't take antidepressants, don't take antipsychotics.
My sponsor, actually, like going back to compartmentalization, my sponsor didn't want me taking antidepressants.
I was like, hey man, you've helped save my life.
But I'm going to keep taking these.
So yeah, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the program.
I think there are different interpretations.
It's almost like church.
Like, not everybody is an insane evangelical Christian who thinks all the gays are going to burn in hell and everything like that.
You just got to find the right ones who are interpreting it correctly.
But kind of like you said, like, I'm an atheist too.
When I first got sober, I met this guy, five years sober, worked the 12 steps.
He was an atheist.
I'm like, nice.
I guess I could do this.
I've always had to laugh because I've written articles about the good aspects of religion.
I have a degree in religion as an atheist.
Yeah.
And people, and atheists would get mad.
And I'm like, there are forms of community within those in charity that are actually very good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
I actually read, um, I don't know if you've read, uh, Alan Day Baton's book.
That was one of the first ones.
It was called, uh, Oh, it's called Religion for Atheists.
But I remember grabbing that.
But one of the books that really helped me was actually, um, Sam Harris' book, Waking Up.
It's spirituality for atheists or whatever the subtitle is.
But yeah, a lot of books like that help me because, you know, like I said, I am into meditation.
I love Buddhist philosophy and stuff.
And there's ways to, like, navigate this thing, you know, without believing that there's something in the sky that's, you know, going to be there when I die or whatever.
Sam is a very polarizing figure to people who don't consume a lot of his content, and I understand why.
I don't agree with a third of what he says sometimes, but I would say that Waking Up is the one book that people who are interested in this topic should look at.
Exactly.
Put together this theory, which I really liked, and you start talking about a book that I love, The Theory of the Leisure Class, about conspicuous consumption.
You extensively cover someone we had on the podcast, I've interviewed twice, Will Storr, and his book, The Status Game.
Love that guy.
Fantastic about humans just being status-seeking animals, no matter what you're talking about.
And that kind of frames Russell in this way of perhaps he was addicted to substances, and now he seems to be addicted to attention and clicks and likes, and you kind of lay out that landscape.
Yeah.
And then you bring up inconspicuous consumption.
So, can you talk about what that is and how you think Russell fits into that paradigm?
So yeah, like you mentioned, there's conspicuous conception from Theory of the Leisure Class by, what's his name, Thorson Veblen?
Veblen, yes.
So he talks about the things we buy, right?
Buy to show our status.
For example, I always think of Supreme, which was like big, like 10 years ago or whatever.
It was just all of a sudden it was Supreme and people were paying hundreds of dollars, right?
And for us normal people, we look at that, we're like, that's stupid, why would you pay so much?
But it just shows how much money you have.
Because if you have enough disposable income to wear this basic shirt that's hundreds of dollars, that says a little bit of something about your money.
If I'm driving a certain car, if I'm doing whatever, it shows that.
This other sociologist, she wrote a book, it's called The Sum of Small Things.
I think I referenced it in the video.
She calls it inconspicuous consumption, which is something that we actually see from a lot of progressives and liberals, where we showcase our status through knowledge.
So for example, shopping at Whole Foods, like I remember when the pandemic was kind of, you know, even though we're still like pretty much in the middle of it, but when the mask thing was kind of dying down, if you go to Whole Foods around that time, everybody's still wearing a mask because it's a certain type of people.
These are signals of when you go to Whole Foods, when you're still wearing a mask, you're showing not just like maybe your political affiliation, but you're saying, I'm an educated person.
I know these things.
So we're showing status based on our knowledge.
I read the New York Times.
I read the New Yorker.
I read all these books.
With Russell Brand, you can, because Buddhism, the hungry ghost where we keep consuming and trying to buy and all this and we're never fulfilled.
Well, Russell's pretty good at that.
I don't think he flaunts his wealth too much, but he's getting that inconspicuous consumption.
He's showcasing his knowledge.
When you watch his videos, he's always citing these articles.
And he's citing these articles rapid fire, and nobody's fact-checking or seeing what the source is.
Like, there's some good videos out there where they actually, like, say, okay, let's see what this source is, and you see it's, like, some right-wing, like, think tank or, you know, whatever it is.
It bums me out, because I always tell people that one of the core aspects of my addiction was my ego, and I've had to learn how to dial it down, because that can lead me to either, A, relapse, or just being what, you know, I believe Russell Brand is, which we call a dry drunk.
And he's just thirsting after those clicks, but I always just look at him like, dude, you're a millionaire.
You don't need this, right?
Like I'm sure without this YouTube channel.
So like, I think even, even as diehard fans, I wish I would sit back and question that.
Like, why is this dude so obsessed with this?
Like he doesn't need it.
Like that should be a red flag to anybody.
Even if it was somebody I liked, right?
Even if it was you, if you started making content on a daily basis with clickbait and getting these views and just constantly, I'd be like, Yo, Derek, how about you chill out, buddy?
You don't need all that.
I can't imagine it.
I've never been one to turn a phone back on myself.
Every time I do it, I just feel silly.
It's very hard for me to work in that medium.
But I'm also a trained writer, so that's more of where I can go into my reflective space.
And Russell is a very charismatic person.
I get why he'd want to be on camera.
And that's not a problem at all.
Yeah.
But as you were researching him, what are some of the things that he was saying that really jumped out at you as problematic?
Well, again, I think it goes back to the truths and the lies that kind of get mixed together.
Because Russell Brand was a drug addict, right?
So he has a skepticism of the pharmaceutical industry.
I used to just watch him because his old podcast content, he was bringing on like meditation teachers and stuff, like just like Sharon Salzberg, or he'd have Sam Harris on, or I think I, yeah, I show a clip in the video where he's just like on Candace Owens' ass, right?
About her like individualism and like neoliberalist type idea.
And he's just reaming her about how we need to be more collectivist and like helping our communities and helping each other and not everybody's And that's who he used to be.
And without, I don't know, like he didn't put up a sign that said or like make a video announcement like, hey, I'm going to go full blown COVID conspiracy theory.
It's like he never said that.
I noticed his videos getting a little bit more clickbaity.
Like I've been in YouTube for a long time, right?
And I know what gets clicks.
And I started seeing it like, oh, what they don't want you to know.
Or he's doing like the little tricks on the thumbnail.
Where he, like, circles, like, a little pin on Bill Gates' lapel and has an arrow pointing at it like it's, like, an Illuminati symbol or something like that.
I'm like, why are you doing this, Russell?
But there's a lot of YouTubers, actually, where they'll do that, then you go into the video and you're like, okay, they just did that to bring me in.
Now they're being normal.
As I continue to watch Russell's stuff, because he used to do, um, just news, right?
And it was kind of normal.
But I started watching, I'm like, wait, you're like going against all of the things, especially at the height of the pandemic.
Like, he's just like, big pharma is terrible for you.
Like, listen, I want to make it very clear.
I know for a fact that these pharmaceutical companies doing the vaccines, they don't care about us.
They want money.
They want their billions.
Their stock prices have gone up massively.
But just because they're making money does not mean it's not helping us, right?
But he takes that, and he turns it into, therefore you cannot trust them.
And I started seeing that, and yeah, again, it just really bothers me that there's so many people following him.
And I think what broke me and made me finally make that video, because I had it in my mind for months, was when he started, like, becoming, like, this Alex Jones whitewashing apologist.
Like, the Russell Brand I knew The one that went off on Candace Owens would have not given Alex Jones that kind of public grace, right?
He would have empathized, appreciated that Alex is another human being on this planet, but not like, well, Alex Jones kind of gets some things right.
It's like, are you kidding me right now?
That's always challenging to get across.
There's probably not a person on Earth who we all don't have some crossover in ideology with.
But you don't have to promote someone like that.
Like whatever he gets right, quote unquote, you can find other sources to point to.
Yeah.
That would probably be a little bit better to associate with.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, like I'm a vegetarian and I, you know, I've never done too much research, but I heard Hitler was a vegetarian, right?
I'm not going to point to him as my vegetarian brother in arms.
And, you know, with Alex Jones, it's just annoying because it's just, it's one of, like, the basic thinking errors, right?
Like, it's how psychics get away with their nonsense.
You throw out a million different predictions, you land on two, that's not a very good accuracy rate.
So for Russell Brand or Joe Rogan, be like, well, he gets some things right sometimes.
That's the other thing about Russell Brand is you could see, we've seen it just throughout the pandemic.
There's just certain things that you could say that panders to a very specific audience.
Russell figured that out and he will do anything to get their attention, get their clicks, get their views, get their, uh, their comments.
Like, do you know how many times I've gone into Russell Brand's comments?
I'm like, surely.
Surely people are in here saying what I'm thinking, right?
And they're like, Oh, thanks Russell for telling me how it is.
And I'm like, Oh no.
You know what I mean?
Oh, we got some pushback for our Russell Brand episode and there was no actual critical thinking or analytical thinking behind it.
It was pretty much just trolling.
But yes, absolutely.
Let me, let me, let me turn it, turn it around on you real quick, Derek, because you guys cover a lot of this stuff, especially like the spiritual gurus and stuff.
What's your best, theory for why people can't see this.
What do you think it is?
Why do people refuse to see the evidence?
Why do they get so defensive and aggressive about it?
What are your cognitive biases in your video?
Please see the complete disclaimer at https://sites.google.com applicable.
One thing I think about often, though, is that the predominant amount of Russell's audience, at least from what I can see, is white.
have lived through oppression in your life.
There's something about feeling as if you need to rebel against powerful forces that
is really thick in American culture, especially I'm Gen X.
And there is always this struggle against the power systems that you just felt you had
to be doing something.
And I attribute some of it, at least, to a certain lacking that people have, a lacking of meaning, because they haven't had to live through those struggles that they see other people.
That's what the pushback against critical race theory is about.
Yeah.
If you look at what critical race theory is at its 101 level, It's a starting point for a conversation.
A lot of people can't even get there.
So when you can't get there, when your meaning-making comes from this feeling that you're being oppressed and you're fighting a power system by posting your Instagram video, I really think Russell speaks to that audience very well.
You know, whether or not that's purposeful on his end, that is just the audience who's found him, this idea of meaning.
And that would be one of the avenues in which I think people get to him.
The thing that lives rent-free in my head that I try to understand, because, you know, part of being a leftist, right?
We don't like power and, you know, these elites and the rich and stuff like that.
But it seems like from the right side, there's a blind spot.
Recently, for example, Elon Musk has been pandering to the right, the free speech and all this other stuff, right?
And Elon Musk, like, I just want to jump off a roof when I see Elon Musk talking about the elites.
Everybody's like, yeah, Elon, take down the elites.
I'm like, this is the richest man in the world.
What the hell are you talking about?
Or when Tucker Carlson is talking about the elites and the rich and powerful, I don't understand that blind spot.
You know what I mean?
Me, when I see a liberal or a leftist commentator talking about the elites, I'm like, fool, you're a multimillionaire.
Shut up, right?
But they're just like, yeah, Tucker, thanks for having my back, you know, because these rich and powerful people.
I'm like, going to Russell Brand.
Why do you think he's on your level?
Why do you think he's down here?
Like, you should be very skeptical of somebody who has such an incentive to tell you what you want to hear.
Well, Tucker Carlson is a perfect parallel to Russell Brand because he's a trust fund kid who never had to work in his life.
And yet he has been seeking this status through his chosen vehicle, which is media.
We all know he was on MSNBC however long ago.
They're brokering in ego, as you mentioned earlier, and status all of the time.
So sometimes you look for these really complex theories and try to weave together things when you're just like, it's just ego.
Yeah, it's troublesome, and I don't know what it is, like, to pull people out of it, you know?
Because we see the same tropes and everything, and people watching Russell Brand all day, they're like, I've done my research, you know?
Because somebody else did the research for them, but when you research from bad sources, it's not good.
I'll say this, Derek.
I have a little bit of hope with the recent elections, right?
With so many election denialists losing and stuff like that.
It seems like people are, like, kind of turning on Trump a little.
I'm hoping some people are waking up to it and maybe we're seeing the people who follow the Russells and the Tuckers.
That's just a very loud minority.
That's what I'm hoping.
I try to stay optimistic.
I would agree.
I'm feeling actually pretty good this week on that level.
To take a big picture now to close, in the broader recovery space, what are some of the myths and misinformation you've seen that's come through?
You mentioned the call to not take any pharmaceuticals.
Is there anything else you've seen in this space that has troubled you?
Oh, just everything.
I'll tell you my biggest gripe.
If you want to turn me into a triggered little snowflake who will just snap, is when people try to talk about the efficacy of 12-step programs, their success rate.
Here's what I say, and I hope everybody's listening.
Like, look at the second word in any 12-step program.
It's anonymous.
How are you ever going to get accurate data from an anonymous program?
I've been sober for 10 years, gone to thousands of meetings, never once, not once in my entire decade of sobriety, have I seen somebody in a meeting taking down everybody's names and seeing how long they've been sober.
When people do that, they're like, oh, the success rates are low, right?
And I'm like, compared to what?
Compared to a rehab when most of this country is in insane amounts of medical debt?
Because when I got sober, I didn't have anything.
I had no health insurance, no money.
Fortunately, my mom paid a few hundred dollars a month for a sober living for me.
I had to take the bus, like just nothing.
So this idea that, you know, we should just beat down 12-step programs and then just leave people just to have no other options is just baffling to me.
But I'll also say this, when it comes to success rates, those are extremely biased in many cases.
So I worked at a rehab.
It was a, I think at the time, I don't know if it still is, the largest rehab chain in the entire country.
We had facilities in California, here in Las Vegas, in Florida, down south, I think in Mississippi, just all over the place, right?
Part of my job was to call people after they discharged and see if they're still sober.
Now, I also had a lot of them follow me on social media because I had to keep in touch, right?
I would literally see people getting high on social media.
I'd call them and say, hey, how's it going, right?
You still sober?
They'd say yes.
Okay, so that's another reason why it's so hard to get success rates, because I don't know if anybody knows this, but addicts lie.
We lie sometimes, all right?
Then what really made me skeptical of the whole industry was my company was promoting their amazing success rates.
And I knew how BS it was.
That's what really bothers me.
So one of these myths that 12-step programs aren't successful and stuff, from what I've seen, it's just as good as anything else.
It's the same as, I tell people it's like therapy, right?
If I go to a therapist, I do go to a therapist, right?
My therapist gives me things to do.
And if I don't do those things, I'm not going to be very successful.
And I can't blame her, right?
If I'm given a medication and I don't take it, I can't blame the medication.
So I think that's my number one thing is, like, give it a try.
Try different meetings.
There's so many different, there's even refuge recovery, which is rooted in Buddhist philosophy.
So there's so many different flavors.
Anybody listening who wants more advice or not advice, but like resources, email me, contact me on social media.
Like I will direct you.
All right.
But that's something I'm very passionate about.
Thank you everybody for listening to another episode of Conspiratoriality Podcast.
Be sure you join us next week.
Mallory DeMille is joining us again, and she's going to be talking about the Healy device.
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