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Aug. 4, 2023 - Stay Free - Russel Brand
58:18
Gabor Maté on Trauma & Addiction. Plus, Jordan Peterson & Depression - Stay Free #183
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I'm a black man and I could never be a better one.
Brought to you by Pfizer.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
I'm a black man and I could never be a better one.
In this video, you're going to see the future.
Hello there, you Awakening Wonders!
Thanks for joining me on this voyage to truth and freedom.
We've got a beautiful conversation for you today.
I spoke at length with Gabor Maté.
Are you going crazy?
Are you an addict?
Did you suffer a mental breakdown during the pandemic period?
Are you having issues with substances?
Self-harm?
Are you falling apart?
Or is someone you love suffering?
Gabor Maté, I believe, is the most important voice in addiction and mental health Stay free with Russell Brand.
He spoke about his book, The Myth of Normal, and we also talked about mental illness and
how it's treated with pills rather than exploring the psyche of trauma that is the root of pain,
how systems are designed to punish individuals who have trauma through addiction and generational
oppression.
Excitingly, we talked about Gabor's disagreements with Jordan Peterson and his psychological
methodologies and his relationship with hallucinogens.
You're going to love this conversation.
Have a look.
Stay free with Russell Brand.
See you first on Rumble.
Gabor, your new book, The Myth of Normal.
I've read some of it because you were kind enough to have someone send me an advanced copy.
And like all books I enjoy most, I'm in it.
I wrote it for you.
It's a continuation of your important and beautiful work analyzing the complexity of the human psyche.
And I've already told people that you're not a psychiatrist and you don't like people saying that you are and that you're a normal family doctor.
I've already made that clear.
Well, whether I'm normal, that's another question, but I am a family physician, yeah.
I'm not a psychiatrist, which is a good thing.
Why?
Because psychiatrists are trained in a very narrow way.
Mostly these days they're trained in this biological model of mental illness so that all human distress is medicalized and explained in terms of some inherent dysfunction of the brain, genetic and so on, for which there's no proof whatsoever.
But it reduces treatment of mental health concerns to pills and medications.
And they just are not trained, I'm talking for the most part, to look at how life experience actually shapes the brain itself and how life experience is what underlines people's mental distress.
And furthermore, there's an assumption in mental health diagnoses, like And the assumption is that they explain why people suffer, but they don't.
It's totally circular.
So I've been diagnosed with ADHD.
So they say, Gabor has ADHD.
How do we know that Gabor has ADHD?
Because he tends to tune out and he's got trouble sitting still.
Why does Gabor tune out and have trouble sitting still?
Because he's got ADHD.
How do we know he's got ADHD?
Because he tunes out and he's got trouble sitting still.
Or Gabor is depressed.
How do we know?
Because he's got a low mood and is isolating.
Why is he isolating and has a low mood?
Because he's got depression.
How do we know he's got depression?
Because it's totally circular.
So, these diagnoses, they may describe things that don't explain anything, and they certainly cannot be reduced to biological events in the brain.
It's fascinating that you say that because I suppose these diagnostics become more complex when dealing with neurology and when dealing with behavior.
When diagnosing, I suppose, a broken arm you can observe, oh the arm is broken, but when you're dealing with complexity within the mind it seems like what you're saying
is there's a tendency to problematize it and extract the reasons why
these behaviors might be exhibited or this phenomenon might be exhibited and also I've
noticed a tendency to extract social conditions and make the
individual culpable through the process of diagnosis.
Absolutely.
And this is true not only of what they call mental illness, but also physical health.
For example, in Canada where I live, an indigenous woman has six times the rate of rheumatoid arthritis.
Six times the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.
Now, than anybody else.
Now this is in a population that never used to have any autoimmune disease, let alone rheumatoid arthritis.
Now their rate is six times.
Now, The average physician is trained to understand rheumatoid arthritis as a physical event of the immune system turning against the body and damaging the joints and the connective tissues and so on.
Why that happens, when you actually study people's lives and the scientific evidence, has to do with people's lives.
And their social existence.
Why indigenous people in Canada?
Because they're the most oppressed and the most stressed and the most traumatized segment of the population.
And that has everything to do with the physiology of rheumatoid arthritis.
Or, women and multiple sclerosis.
In the 1930s, the gender ratio of multiple sclerosis was 1 to 1.
No, it's three and a half women for every man, which immediately tells us it can't be genetic, because genes don't change in a population in 80 years.
It can't be the environment or the climate, or it can't be the climate or the food, because that didn't change more for one gender than the other.
What is it?
When you look at who develops multiple sclerosis, it's people who suppress their own needs, who serve the needs of others ahead of their own, who don't know how to express or even experience healthy anger, who tend to be very, very nice people, who have trouble saying no.
In other words, precisely the characteristics that this society encourages in women, and who absorb the stresses of other people.
And what's happened in the last 80 years is that women are still playing that role of emotional caregivers to their families and their spouses and their children, of course, and their parents.
But they also have to make a living out there in the work world.
And they're under more stress because there's more isolation.
The more isolated people are, the more stressed they are.
There's no big mystery, but from the point of view of biological causation, there's no explanation.
So only if, as you suggest, we look at the social conditions and cultural environment in which people live their lives, can we understand why people are ill.
And this is, despite all the science that buttresses what I'm telling you, it's completely ignored in medical practice.
My assumption would be, Gabor, because that immediately politicizes these matters of health, and then it becomes an indicator that there are social power dynamics at play, even when it comes to something as observable and rudimentary as physical health, let alone the complexity that we started on with matters regarding mental health.
Now it seems like you're willing and able to underwrite the more complex aspects of mental health diagnosis with these physical examples.
What else are you demonstrating in your book The Myth of Normal?
I know because I've read bits of it, well the bits with my names in it.
I've read loads of it.
What else are you talking about when it comes to addiction and mental health and the social and political aspect of these conditions?
Yes.
So, again, the addiction assumption in society in general is that it's a choice that people are making.
In fact, the whole legal system is based on the assumption that people are choosing to behave in certain ways, consciously choosing.
So they're consciously choosing to become addicted to illegal substances.
That's the assumption in the legal system.
Therefore, I argue that when we call it a criminal justice system, it's a really good name for it.
It's a criminal justice system.
Because it's criminally stupid in its assumptions.
I've never met anybody, and I've worked with really hardcore substance users, who actually woke up one morning and said, my ambition is to become a drug addict.
That's the first point.
Second point is that the medical assumption that we're dealing with an inherited brain disease is equally false, so that there's very little evidence despite what they say for any genetic causation of addiction.
What we're really looking at, and let's just do a little experiment here, I'll give you a definition of addiction and get you to participate.
I'm speaking to the audience here and also to my interviewer.
I'll define addiction as manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary pleasure or relief but suffers negative consequences in the long term and doesn't give up despite the negative consequences.
So pleasure, relief and craving in the short term, harm and inability to give up in the long term.
Now notice I said nothing about drugs.
I said any behavior.
So it could be substances, cocaine, crystal meth, caffeine, nicotine, whatever, alcohol.
Heroin, yes.
Also gambling, shopping, sex, pornography, eating, self-cutting, anorexia, bulimia, work, internet, gaming, extreme sports.
The issue is not the behavior as such, it's the internal relationship to it.
If there's craving, pleasure and relief in the short term, harm in the long term, and you're not giving it up, you've got an addiction.
I don't care what to.
So, here's what I want to ask here from the audience, is if by that definition you recognize that at one time or another you've had any kind of an addiction, just raise your hand.
Okay?
So what we've got here is the vast majority, if not everybody.
Okay?
Now here's what I'm going to ask you now, I don't know if this works for the podcast purposes, I want to ask some of you to tell me, not what was wrong with your addiction, which you already know, but what was right about it?
What did it give you in the short term that you craved, that you wanted?
We'll cover that later, right?
Just for the structuring and production of our podcast.
Because that is one of your great edicts and one of the, what I would call, mates maxims.
I've coined that.
When analyzing addiction, I talk when I'm in a program of recovery, I talk to other addicts all of the time.
And it's a very helpful tool to invite someone that is dealing with chemical dependency or any form of addiction.
Don't ask, don't assess the many negative consequences of addiction.
Look at what it does for the addict, the positive purpose that it serves.
Yeah, it's yours and I like it.
I use it all the time and I usually credit you for it depending on if I'm trying to impress the person or not.
When I'm with my own behaviors, I'm looking sometimes for connection, distraction, sense of self-worth, validation, escape.
These are all motivations.
Escape from what?
Pain.
Right.
So hence my mantra, not why the addiction, but why the pain?
And so what I'm saying is, just as you've articulately illustrated, Addictions, these qualities, connection, self-worth, pain relief, are they good things or bad things?
They're good things.
Yeah.
In other words, addiction, the addicted person just wants to feel like a normal human being.
So addiction is neither a choice nor is it a disease.
It's an attempt to solve the problem.
And that problem is rooted in trauma.
So, once we recognize that, why are we judging people for desperately seeking to escape states of extreme emotional distress, isolation, disconnection, pain?
So the addiction is not the primary issue.
The primary issue is the trauma that induces the mind state from which the person needs to escape.
And if you look at it from the population and the political point of view, like for example under COVID, just to give a recent instance, Alcoholism went up.
Addiction, drug use went up.
All kinds of addictive behaviors went up.
Why?
Because when people are stressed, and they have not the means to resolve their stress, they'll resort, amongst other things, to addictive behaviors.
Now that has all kinds of political implications, because if you look at, at least in the United States, and I bet if you did a class analysis here in Britain, of who's in jail because of addictions, addicted-related behaviors, in the States it's largely minority people by a huge disproportionate percentage.
In Canada, 30% of the people in our jails are indigenous people.
30% of my clients in the addicted area of Vancouver where I work were indigenous people.
They make up 4% of the Canadian population, 30% of the jail population, and indigenous women make up 50% of the Canadian jail female population, 4% of the general population.
What are we looking at?
We're looking at historical oppression and trauma and ongoing racism.
And that's what manifests in that need to escape.
Now, does the medical profession take that into account?
Does the legal profession even know about it?
We just keep punishing people for how we make them hurt.
We're punishing people for how we made them suffer.
And I bet in Britain here, if you did a class analysis of who's in jail, it's not going to be the upper crust.
Yes.
And of course the reason to answer, I imagine, a rhetorical question that was laced within your answer, the reason that you cannot desist from identifying the individual as the primary culprit in criminal activity when it comes to addiction is because the minute you challenge that paradigm, you are confronted with These issues are socially and politically created and it becomes a challenge to power to resolve the problem.
As long as it's individual nodes that are culpable rather than an underlying social issue, you don't have to alter society.
And so a difficult question is never asked.
One of the broader questions, Gabor, when I was preparing for this conversation, using my mind prior to being here, I used my mind, I went inside it and I thought, what do I want to ask Gabor Mate?
Because there'll be a moment when I'm looking into his eyes and now that moment is happening.
And this was the question.
How long do you think we can continue to extract compassion and spiritual solutions that recognize the ulterior oneness from our ongoing ideas around change?
How long can we continue to extract the idea that there needs to be a spiritual and compassionate component to the way that we organize society?
How long can we continue to have economics as the heart of our political and ideological systems?
And what Let's just answer that question, I suppose, first, because Fallout is quite an intense question.
And how do we, I suppose, move these ideas to the center, and is that part of the objective of your book?
Well, so, if I may just step around the question for a moment and then come back to it.
This phenomenon that you described, this extraction of the social, political, the spiritual, the experiential, from particular problems, goes way beyond the question of addiction.
Yes.
Your blessed former Prime Minister Tony Blair once talked about the problem of obesity.
Obesity is a rising problem in the Western world.
In Britain it's a huge problem.
It's a huge health problem.
And he said, this is not a public health issue.
It's a decision.
It's a result of millions of individual decisions.
What Tony Blair and his Neoliberal wisdom utterly ignored was that since the instigation of neoliberal policies, which increase inequality, which put more stress on the lower classes, obesity has become epidemic.
It's a stress response.
Yes.
It's not an individual.
Those individual decisions that he talks about are actually formed by social forces of which he is a prime representative.
Yes.
How long that can continue?
Well, you know, I was just reading a bit of a book, The Social Distance Between Us, by Darren McGarvey, a book that you endorsed.
And he says on the third page, a line that could have been taken from my book, The Myth of Normal.
And he says that he's talking about pre-COVID days.
And he says that the normal to which we would all like to return in a heartbeat was anything but.
And that line could have come out of my book, The Myth of Normal.
And how long?
Well, I can only tell you as long as we're willing to let them get away with it.
And it's not a question of willingness to let them get away with it, as long as people have wool over their eyes and they don't see reality.
And my intention in writing this book, and you know this, View that I have of you Russell as well as that what you ultimately committed to is you're committed to truth You know and and that's all I'm trying to say is just what is true about life.
What is true about human beings?
What is true about what we call human nature?
What is true about relationships?
What is true about health illness and so on?
People can be kept from the truth for a long long time, and I don't know at what point A society will get to the point of suffering where the majority will say, enough.
Because for the minority that actually is reaping the benefits, there's no problem whatsoever.
So when we talk about the system being broken, no it's not.
Yes, this is a challenge that we continually face, is that situations that we would diagnose or recognize as problematic are for the most powerful interests in the world advantageous.
This also, Gabor, already this conversation demonstrates the Impossibility of remaining politically neutral when talking about something that previously and actually is still contemporarily presented as a mental health and individual issue.
There is anything but that.
and requires radical and immediate political action to be addressed.
Immediate mobilization, radical transformation of consciousness,
reorganization of the world of finance, reorganization of our political systems.
This obviously helps us to understand why these questions are presented in the way they are
and answered in the manner that they consistently are.
Because before too long, you have to radicalize an entire population
and invite them to not participate in systems that are primarily about inducing compliance and subjugation
and present themselves as solutions.
As the radical hallucinogenic pioneer Terence McKenna was fond of saying, the culture is not your friend.
The culture is not your friend.
It presents itself as your friend.
Here are some products for you.
Here are some projects for you.
Here are some entertainments and distractions.
But the system requires you dumb and numb and distracted and complacent.
I suppose to sort of follow up a little on my question, I suppose that we have to become, you know, I know that Jordan Peterson, for example, would be a person that you would be at odds with a lot.
I sense this in some ways.
Jordan Peterson, he's been on this podcast a bunch of times, and in some ways I consider you similar figures.
Can I ask you about that?
There's nothing I agree with him about anything.
But you're not the first one to say that you notice some similarities.
So what is it that you notice?
He's infusing political discourse with psychiatric, in his case, understanding with information that's coming from like Jungian archetypes.
I think that he is in some ways fundamentally conservative and in some fundamental ways quite traditional.
And you are socially progressive in ways that are more obvious.
However, I am beginning to believe that one of the most important fissures that must be healed in our culture is this tension that exists between traditionalism and progressivism.
And I think the only way this tension can be eased politically and culturally is with a commitment to the decentralization of power wherever possible.
People must be able to run their own communities.
People say, like, remember the last time me and you chatted, Gabor?
I was going on like Ben Shapiro.
I was going on Ben Shapiro, right?
Who's a very traditional, conservative, orthodox Jew, right-wing commentator.
And of course, for those of you who don't know, Gabor is himself Jewish and a Holocaust survivor.
And we were talking about the issue of Palestine and I knew that I was going on Ben Shapiro or something like that.
And then I would like to talk to you and you gave me such a sort of like a powerful personal perspective on Palestine.
And I just, I feel like I've just been on maybe Ben Shapiro.
Oh, shit, man, I didn't confront him on any of these issues.
Anyway, like what I ultimately feel is Ben Shapiro has got every right to believe whatever he wants to believe as a Orthodox, you know, or near Orthodox Jew.
traditional practice and we have got the right to believe whatever we want to
believe. There are some global power issues that really need addressing but
at the level of a culture if we're continually killing each other over
cultural and social issues, refusing to bind with people have a different
perspective on family, gender, sexuality, if we can't see that what's required
is a degree of individual freedom, collective autonomy, the ability to form
our own societies, the willingness to just let people be traditional or
progressive and that our individual duty becomes about I disagree with you, but I recognize that when it comes to the crunch, it's none of my fucking business, and I'm gonna just leave you the fuck alone.
Unless we're willing to do that, I don't see how we're gonna actually confront, and I don't want to be dismissive of people that have given their lives for civil rights issues, but what I consider to be the most meaningful power base, which is economic and financial and global.
Well, you've been very, as I watched you over the last year or so, you've been very concerned with maintaining an independent point of view while being civil to those that didn't agree with you, you know, and to promote that civility in the discourse.
I think that's great, on the one hand.
On the other hand, I don't mind telling you, In my book, The Myth of Normal, I was going to write a chapter called The Other Side of Jordan, about Jordan Peterson.
Because I think what he represents is repressive, both in the political sense and in the personal sense.
And, no, to say that about him is to immediately invite all kinds of
contumely from his followers, but I can't help what I believe.
And I do quote him briefly in this book, and I'll just give you one example.
And the reason I'm saying it, there's no meaning of minds here.
There's no possible meaning of minds here.
What we have is two very distinct point of views about what it means to be a human being.
So he says that an angry young child should be made to sit by themselves until they come back to normal.
i.e.
anger in a young child is not normal and b. the child should be withdrawn from adult contact until he learns to comply with our expectations.
That's an invitation for self-repression.
That invitation to self... What does it mean to... So we have this disease called depression, with which he's been diagnosed, by the way, as have I. Actually, peas in a pod, the two of you.
But what does it mean to depress something?
It means to push it down.
What gets pushed down in depression?
Our emotions.
He's inviting people to promote depression in their children.
He's also inviting them to repress their natural anger, one of the essential requirements for human development.
And for the child, one of the irreducible needs, and I talk about this in the book, is the ability and the freedom of the child to experience all their emotions, grief, sadness, anger, joy, whatever, and still be fully accepted and celebrated by the parents.
Now, he would wish to deny children that, which, to my mind, promotes not only mental illness, but also autoimmune disease.
Because one of the commonest features of people with immune illness is their incapacity to experience healthy anger.
So from my point of view, and then he talks about intimidating kids, even by hitting them necessarily.
He actually makes the case in his book, 12 Rules for Life.
Well that's pernicious and all the studies show that children who are spent, even occasionally, they suffer as many symptoms of trauma as kids who are abused more severely.
So this is what he promotes.
There's no possible meaning of mine here.
Either I'm right or he is.
Well this is what I would say.
It's possible for us to disagree.
It's possible for... Well, we do disagree.
It's not just possible, we disagree.
So that's that.
We don't agree.
I don't agree with my own wife.
So the idea that I might agree with a set of Canadian academics... So what I would say, with regard to that, is that I'm really interested in hearing Jordan Peterson's opinion.
I know Jordan pretty well.
I respect him.
I respect him.
And I think he's like, I've got a powerful mind.
And I think he's an important cultural influence.
And this is what I feel is what I feel it like say without I'm thinking while you're saying that I'm a parent, I've got young children.
And I'm thinking about my children.
I'm thinking now and I'm remembering my own childhood, of course, I'm doing trying to do to do all these things simultaneously. I'm thinking, no, I
don't want to be, you can't leave Peggy or Mabel on their own when they're raging. You've
got to sit with them and feel that stuff with them. But then I also think, you know, and
that is what I would do. I wouldn't do what Jordan Peterson is suggesting with that matter. I
wouldn't do that. So I would agree with you because I've, but I also recognize it's
really bloody difficult.
It's really so hard to look after children.
It's really difficult to deal with them when they're raging like that.
And I can respect and understand someone having an authoritarian stance.
I can see how someone would arrive at that opinion.
And I also recognize, I also think more important is for, even with something as important as development,
and which you were saying is not only potentially causing psychological problems,
but health problems and both of them, you know what I mean?
You could commit suicide, you could end your own life, you know, from psychological problems.
So, you know, why do we need recourse to stuff that you can measure with a microscope or with a,
you know, with a, in a lab?
But I still think it's yet more important to go, Jordan Peterson believes this, Gabo Mate believes this.
When it comes to our own children, here is a range of information and a raft of data.
You choose what's right, you know, like the, you know, there doesn't need to be a meeting of minds.
I think there needs to be a symposium of communication and discussion.
And for like, and even and I think more, you know, God, if I may say even more importantly, when it comes to something like democracy, that we have to get to a position where you say, I advocate for this, I, I believe in immigration, for these reasons, I think that immigration should be handled in these ways.
But if you don't want If you want immigration in your community, then you are entitled to vote against it.
And if you do want immigration in your community, you are entitled to vote for it.
Phew!
Now the people of Britain don't have to... The working class in this country doesn't have to be at war with each other over the issue of immigration anymore.
Unified working class.
Populism.
Come together.
Fight the real power.
Nullify these phony arguments.
I'm not making any case that anybody should be silenced.
Okay?
Yeah.
None whatsoever.
The reason I didn't write the chapter on the other side of Jordan is because I thought it's just not that important what I think of Jordan Peterson.
And why waste the whole chapter on disagreeing with somebody?
Let them speak their reality and I'll speak mine and we'll see what happens.
Insofar, for example, as he stood up for the right to use whatever language he wanted, I totally support him.
But you know what?
At the end, when I evaluate any movement institution, like my own profession of medical practice, I see this playing not only a much more limited role in healing that it could possibly play, but actually playing an ideological role in buttressing a system that atomizes individuals, atomizes people.
And insofar as I speak of what I think about that, In that same sense, if anybody asks me about Peterson, I'll tell them what I think of Peterson and his ideology.
Do I deprive him, or do I even have the power or the desire to deprive him of the right to speak?
Of course not!
But should I be asked, I'll tell you exactly what I think of his philosophy.
Or that of Tony Blair's, or that of anybody else's.
But I'm much more concerned, actually, about speaking my own truth.
And one of the concerns in my book is really about authenticity, about people being ourselves.
I'm much more concerned about that you should be yourself.
Peter should be himself.
I should be myself as I truly am, not as somebody would have me be.
Not as I would want somebody to be, but as they need to be for themselves.
And my argument, one of the arguments about the health The deleterious impacts on health of this particular social structure and cultural arrangement is that it just denies people their authenticity.
And that has huge implications for their mental and physical health.
And so I'm all in favor of authenticity, whether or not I agree with the outcome or not.
One thing I feel, Gabor, is that many successful polemicists that occupy our cultural space, when I watch them, what I do not feel is love.
And this is what I do feel when I'm communicating with you, that love has to be at the center of our discourse.
Now, one of our challenges is that love can feel a little bit woo-woo, a little bit like it's something that's difficult to...
What do I want to say?
Introducing to patriarchal systems of financial dominance the idea that we have to love one another and also a post-enlightenment system of rationalism.
I feel that the rational argument for love is I feel that love is the felt experience of oneness.
Love is some experience beyond our psyche that we are connected to all things and our body understands this and tells us this.
Absolutely, and that is just the truth about human beings.
And I don't know how this will sound to your audience, but you know about this because I wrote you about it.
Three months ago or so, I was in the middle of a psilocybin ceremony with some indigenous leaders in Canada.
Now these people, for reasons that I've touched upon briefly, amongst the most traumatized people on earth.
Their children were abducted from their homes for over a hundred years by the state into institutions run by the Catholic Church where as one woman I know who was in her 60s now when she was four years old and taking this residential school where the intention was to educate the Indian out of the Indian as they put it.
And she was four years old.
She spoke her tribal language.
They stuck a pin in her tongue.
And for a whole hour she sat there.
She couldn't put her tongue back in her mouth because she would cut her lips.
That's the indigenous experience in Canada.
And in these church-run residential schools, one of the people at this retreat that I was at where we were doing this, which I'll tell you more about in a moment, was an indigenous leader who was next week going to travel to the Vatican where the Pope was going to issue an apology for the appalling suffering that the church had imposed and the church and he traveled to the Vatican and the Pope Francis did issue an apology.
You know what he said?
He said, I'm sorry for what some Catholics did to your people.
That's kind of like saying, a German saying, I'm so sorry to you Jewish people.
I'm so sorry for what some Germans did to you.
It was the most paltry apology I've heard in history.
But to go back to the event, these are leaders of indigenous people in Canada who want to work through the trauma and heal the trauma of their people.
And the trauma is incredible.
It's beyond words.
And they found that working with psychedelic substances is a powerful support for their healing.
So they invited me to participate, knowing my work with that modality.
So I did the work with these people.
The sorrow that I experienced was unlike anywhere else in the world, as was the love and the beauty and the connection to nature and spirituality and welcome.
It was also incredible, but In the middle of the ceremony, you came up for me.
And I actually wrote you that night, you know?
And what came up for me was just the love that you are in the world, you know?
Behind the... I wouldn't say behind, but along with the outrageous humor and just cutting wit and rationality.
I just felt your love.
That's what I felt.
And so I wrote to you from there, you know?
So I get what you're talking about.
So, thanks for that mirroring of whatever love you perceive in me, but it's mutual.
Thank you.
Thank you for saying that.
When people are nice to me... Don't be nice to me, Gabor!
I can't take kindness!
The furnace of adversity built me.
If you're kind to me, you'll kill me.
Thank you.
No, I accept that.
That's a very beautiful thing for you to say.
Thank you.
It's just what happened, actually.
It wasn't like I was thinking.
Your image just came up like that.
Thank you.
That's the state I was in.
That's what happens when you get stoned, people, is that you have hallucinations.
Just to clarify, you were on drugs, so it's possible your perception was warped by this.
Also, during that time, and as is covered in your book, you talk about these hallucinogenic and psychedelic experiences of potentially revelatory.
Around these I have a raft of questions about the potential for the psychedelic experience to allow us to access aspects of our consciousness that may be concealed, as William James said, by veils, but that are ever-present and within us.
Also, Gabor, as a recovering drug addict, I'm just chomping at the bit to take some drugs.
So, is there a way that people in recovery, such as myself, could, under certain circumstances, use hallucinogens for part of an ongoing... First of all, I would say, let's watch your language, OK?
Yes, sir.
They're not hallucinogens.
OK.
You don't hallucinate.
Number one.
And number two, they're not drugs.
OK?
They are medicines.
Do you remember you were saying you love me a minute ago?
Sir?
If so, why are you trying to hurt me?
Yeah, so they're medicines, okay?
There's an important distinction.
A drug is taken, whether it's heroin or whether it's Prozac, a drug is taken to temporarily change the chemical functioning of your brain, so as to induce a different internal mental psychological experience.
The medicine is taken to promote healing.
Narcan doesn't promote healing.
Prozac doesn't promote healing.
I've taken Prozac.
It helped me temporarily.
I no longer need it.
Thank God.
I'm way past beyond that.
But at the time, I'm grateful.
That's a drug.
So I don't use drug in a negative sense.
I just use it in the sense of a substance that you take to temporarily change the biology of your brain so as to induce a different mind state than the distrusting one that you're in.
That's a drug.
A medicine is used to promote healing.
You don't keep taking it.
The Prozac works as long as you take it.
Heroin works as long as you take it.
As soon as you stop taking it, you might even go through withdrawal, but it certainly stops working.
The healing medicines promote a process inside you that actually leads to your healing.
Now, by the way, I'm no psychedelic evangelist.
Recently I refused to endorse a book.
I said, even if this is the best book in the world ever written, I'm not going to endorse it.
Because the title was, How Psychedelics Will Save the World.
And I said, for God's sakes, nothing is going to save the world, least of all psychedelics.
But that doesn't mean they can't be helpful in certain situations.
So, Freud once said that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
Well, today he might well say that psychedelics are another royal road to the unconscious, because As you said, quoting William James, they remove the veil of the conscious and programmed, defensive, egoic mind, and you get to experience what's underneath it.
And you get to experience the terror, And the pain that you've been running away from all your life with not you personally but any of us with our addictions.
You experience the rage that you've been suppressing because somebody told you not to be angry as a kid and you wouldn't be accepted if you're angry.
So you repress your rage and now you've got multiple sclerosis.
Or you got depression.
You get to experience it.
Underneath of that is also this tremendous love that I experienced a few months ago.
There's also the truth, there's also clarity, there's also connection to everything that is.
All of this is veiled by the conscious and repressed egotistical mind.
In the right context, and I have to really emphasize the right context, under the right guidance, with proper pre-experience support and with proper integration afterwards, these substances can be really healing.
And I've seen people recover from addictions, from autoimmune diseases, from mental health conditions.
Some people, of course, Shouldn't take them.
Those with psychosis, mania, heart disease, whatever, you know, there's exclusions.
But we're talking about people who have no contraindications, given the right environment, the right substance, and the right leadership.
This can be profoundly helpful.
And I was talking to Michael Pollan, I don't know if you have him on your podcast?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Michael wrote this book, How to Change Your Mind, about psychedelics, which is a really unlikely bestseller.
But it became a bestseller.
And I said, I asked Michael, and I quote him in my book, were you surprised?
And he says what he was most surprised by is that he expected all kinds of pushback and negative response from within the psychiatric profession.
But he actually said he got a lot of appreciation and interest, because they know how thin their toolkit really is.
They know how essentially ineffective their understandings and methodologies are.
So therefore, they're open, many of them, to looking at psychedelics as a new adjunct to their work.
Now, I would say that would be a minority of psychiatrists at this point, but what I'm saying to you is, don't think of them as drugs.
When you took drugs, you took them to escape from reality, not to experience reality.
When you take ayahuasca, you take it to experience reality.
Even if it's a reality that you don't like, but it's a reality that's healing.
So it's just the opposite.
So we talk about set and setting.
The set is the mindset with which you do it.
Now, if you do it with the mindset to escape, to have a good time with your buddies and so on, well, certain things you shouldn't even try, because they're not going to give you that.
But then you're doing it for the wrong reason, the wrong mindset.
If you're doing it in the wrong setting, it's not going to work.
But with the right set, the right mindset and the right setting, the right guidance, I've seen them, I've experienced them.
They can be very powerful.
So yeah, I spend, out of 33 chapters, I spend one on this question of my own experience with psychedelics and my own clinical observations.
I don't see it as a huge deal, but in terms of what I've experienced, their value is just self-evident.
That's what I would say about it.
Thank you.
The reason I suppose there is a particularity when someone has a history of addiction that is distinct from using these substances, these medicines, to use your preferred vernacular, is that if you're using the medicine in order to transition from active chemical dependency to freedom from chemical dependency, I can understand that.
And also, I guess you cover with your use of the term set and set in what the conditions are and perhaps could be.
In particular, there is a sort of an understanding among people in recovery that to meddle with the kind of this, the thing is, is with the 12 step methodology, there is necessarily in an abstinence based model, some Puritanism, also because of the time of its advent and creation.
1930s America is a kind of a sort of, whilst there is the influence of William James and of Carl Jung, there's a good deal of good old fashioned American Protestantism in there as well.
And what I suppose interests me is that, you know, Bill Wilson, the founder of the Alcoholics Anonymous group, was borderline shamanic profit material, like flashes of white light.
And he used LSD, as you know.
He used LSD, of course, you know, subsequent to his sobriety date.
However, there's a sort of an understanding that for people that are in, e.g., long-term recovery, long-term sobriety, that the use of, you know, even medicines of this nature could could create a kind of a disruption,
and that we're sort of uniquely unable to make rational choices when it comes to mood or in
substances.
So this is just like, you know, that was the, I guess one of the, that was the particular condition
that I was trying to address, and also my inability to even correctly discern
what my own motivations might be.
Yeah.
Because the addict in me remains virile.
That guy's gone nowhere.
And unless he's directed towards, sort of, purpose, you know, like... The things about the 12 steps that, in my opinion, are irrefutable, and we've discussed before the lack of particular address around trauma, although they caveat their information with, more will be revealed, we know only a little, more will be discovered, we're at the beginning of this journey.
You know, the things that are beautiful about this piece of folk technology, this folk ideology, the 12 steps, is the idea that you must overcome precisely this nexus of internal data that we regard as the self this set of patterns and beliefs and memories this conglomeration of trauma that if you that you do not give up the substance you give up this set of beliefs and you will transcend it
And integral to these ideas is the notion of surrender of self-will, which I have found almost word for word in like, you know, sort of some what you might term New Age thinkers, but also in pretty devout and esoterically underwritten Buddhist studies, trying to transcend self, transcend self.
And, you know, I'm sometimes unable, Gabor, to identify which, who's, as they say in Twelve Steps, who's driving the bus.
If I may say, what I hear in your The narration is a certain degree of lack of self-trust.
Like you don't trust yourself to make the right decision.
And I can understand why anybody with a serious history of substance addiction might have that suspicion of, you know, which part of me wants to do this?
The part that really is committed to healing or just the part that wants to space out and have a better, beautiful experience?
Yeah.
I get that.
This is why I talked about the importance of preparation beforehand.
Because it would take some conversation with somebody like you to discern where your interest in a psychic experience might even come from.
We might very well come to the conversation and, you know, Russell, let me issue the public invitation.
Every time you want to have that conversation, just give me a call and we'll have a Zoom talk about it.
Not for public consumption, but just for you and I.
If we find...
I want to know God. I want to know God absolutely.
I want to know nothing but God. I want only God.
I want annihilation of all illusion.
I want absolute authenticity and truth so that I can return with edicts
that I am capable then of spreading and displaying socially, broadly,
so that we can invigorate the population to a radical global revolution,
so that I can infuse politics with true spirituality, so that people can transcend the veil,
so that I can come back with a tablet in my hand, so that I can be the burning bush and somehow not leave it
all to the ego.
Does that seem like a good reason?
Not very ambitious, are you?
No.
That's Thursday!
But actually, sir, may I ask, are there some other things about the... Let me tell you something.
OK.
Let me just tell you something.
The first time I did Ayahuasca... Again, I'm not a traveling Ayahuasca salesman, OK?
And if somebody... Roll up!
And if somebody...
doesn't want it, and they have strict principles that would forbid them.
I would never talk anybody into doing this stuff, okay?
I'm only answering questions.
You know, I'm only saying, what was it that I know?
Now, how did I find out about this stuff?
After my book on addiction in the Realm of Hunger Ghosts was published, I would travel talking about the book, and people would say, what do you know about the healing of addiction in Ayahuasca?
And I'd say, nothing.
And then the next talk, What do you know about the healing?
And I say, nothing.
But the third, fourth, fifth time I start getting annoyed.
Do you remember the scene from The Life of Brian, where they keep saying he's the Messiah, and he's really annoyed by it?
My favorite scene!
Yeah, and finally he says, Okay, I'm the Messiah, now fuck off!
And the people say, how shall we fuck off, my Lord?
I kind of felt that way about it.
I said, I know nothing about it, now fuck off!
But then somebody said to me, did you realize you could experience it here in Vancouver?
You didn't have to travel to Peru, because there's a shaman coming up to lead a ceremony.
So I signed up for it, and I finally realized, Russell, that the universe was knocking on my door.
That this question was coming to me because I needed to hear it.
Then I heard it.
I heard the call and I participated in the ceremony and I took the medicine, listened to the chanting.
There was a little baby in the room cooing away.
Within half an hour, 40 minutes, tears of love started pouring down my face.
Not love for anybody I knew.
Not love for my loved ones.
That was there.
But just love.
And tears.
And I realized In a moment.
Why people have been asking me this.
Because I realized how I'd shut down my heart against love all my life.
Because my heart had been so hurt early in life.
There's an amazing story I could tell you about that, by the way.
Trying to be a runner podcast.
Well, how I'd shut down my heart against love, but how I don't need to.
You know, and so I realized both the pain that I've been running from and the awareness that I don't need to keep running.
That happened within half an hour.
Now, I wish I could tell you that, hey, no, I was a transformed person.
No, I wasn't.
But two days later, I was back to the same.
Because it takes work to integrate this information.
You can have these experiences and be left with a memory.
So it's not like this is a magic wand that somebody points at you.
But I sure saw the possibility.
And that's when I decided to start working with this stuff.
So that was my experience.
And I've seen it over and over again in so many others.
Jung's correspondence with the founder of the 12-step program, Bill Wilson, included the interesting observation that the requirement for recovery from substance dependency, in this instance alcoholism, was a spiritual experience And then the ongoing support of a like-minded community.
And I can imagine that that would be helpful in integrating the kind of epiphanies that you're describing.
We will go to questions for the audience for like sort of 20 minutes.
I just want to say this thing because it came out, it's very personal, I suppose.
When you've had this relationship that I have had with appetite, how do you, Gabor, how do I, Gabor, discern between The appetites that are being guided by what we might call higher purpose, higher case self versus lower case self, and the just sort of the ongoing will and wants.
Have you any experience or understanding?
Because I still feel powerful will and I'm sometimes unable to identify when this is the kind of shack the rising service of a higher entity type energy,
and when it's just, well, I would like that, and I'm gonna do whatever it takes to get it.
I can be very stubborn, obstinate, willful, self-centered.
How do you make those distinctions?
Well, I have in me the same drives.
I have in me the same urgency to escape, and bless her soul, my wife is often a little bit,
more than a little bit skeptical about my desire sometimes to participate in psychedelic experiences
because she knows that escape is part of me all too well.
So I totally get it.
But I also learned to trust the process and the people I work with and the people whose hands I entrust myself in.
And I also trust myself that when I go into that experience, it's not going to be for the purpose of pleasure or escape or temporary joy at the expense of my own true Self, that I'm actually going there to help remove that veil and to see an aspect of reality that otherwise I may have more trouble contacting.
And again that would take some conversation and that would actually take some conversation because I sense at least two parts of you here or maybe even three.
One of them that urgent If you have a child desperate to escape suffering, showing up in the adult body of an addicted individual, you also have this deep desire for truth and transcendence and depth and divinity.
And then you have at least a third persona who's trying to evaluate who's in charge here.
So it would take a conversation to really get at who's really Whose call really do you want to follow?
I can't tell you.
But that's a conversation that can be had, and I believe it is within you to arrive at the truth of it.
At the end of each conversation, with yourself, maybe a guided one, but you'll arrive at, yeah, this is just the addict part of me wanting one more escape experience.
Or no, this is the part of me that wants to go deeper.
And you would know.
One way that we might make such a diagnosis is with some eternal verification and validation, particularly this is built into the sort of 12 step cultural experience that is coming only from inside you, then you are not really able to determine which of this inner familial system is in that particular instance, you know, providing the governing principle.
And for clarity, I was inquiring not only with regard to the matter that we're discussing, but with all matters of appetite where Sometimes, when I'm not careful, my life just becomes the expression of want.
Particularly, almost within the domain, Gabor, of your first book, Hungry Ghosts.
Like, all I want is this thing that wants filling up and it will stop at nothing.
Well, let me jump in and say something.
You did this little routine a while ago, which was very entertaining, I'm going to God and transcend and transform and burning bush.
But you know what?
You are parroting a real, true aspect of yourself.
There is that in you.
Very much.
And I come back to something you said to me when I was writing this book and I was really suffering over it.
And I really had doubts as to whether I could do it, whether I'm big enough.
Maybe I'll finally expose my utter incompetence to the whole world.
You know, all these people expecting the book, publishers paying me for it and I'll deliver a piece of junk.
I went through panic.
At one point my blood pressure started going up.
You know, I usually have the blood pressure of a baby.
Just because I was stressing myself over it.
And I was talking to you.
And you said something extraordinarily helpful.
You said, Remember, you're not writing this for yourself, you're writing this for the world.
So I would say the same to you.
I'm not telling you to do psychedelics, but the question that you're asking about which part of you is driving the boat here, that answer you owe to yourself, because there's a part of you that Wants to serve the world.
And part of your fascination, but sort of an anxious fascination with psychedelics, is there's a part of you that really wants to know, maybe this would enhance my capacity to fulfill my mission on earth.
I'm not saying therefore you should do it, but I'm saying you've got that same tension.
So what I'm saying to you is, like you said to me, that you're not writing this book for you, you're not asking this question just for yourself.
Yes, fear not for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name, you are mine, Isaiah.
We can be free of fear when we surrender to the purpose, when we don't exist anymore, when we belong to God, then there is no self and then we're cool.
Gabor, I'm very grateful to you for joining us.
I feel you are Bodhisattva.
I feel that you help to ferry people across.
I recognize in you great suffering and great beauty and great love and I feel it when I'm around you and I think everybody feels it.
I feel that you are a great teacher and you bring wisdom in an accessible way and you are never As far as I can tell, pious or condescending, and it seems to me that, you know, what I know wounded people need, speaking as one, is of course we need instruction, and of course we need guidance, but above all, we need love.
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
Cheers, you lot.
Thanks very much.
Stay free.
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Hello there, you awakening wonders.
Thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
Thanks for watching.
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Dr. Jordan Peterson.
You know, I was pilloried as a right-wing demon.
You want a goal that you can never attain, so you can always move closer to the goal.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update.
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What does it mean to be an American?
It means we believe in a radical dream that our founding fathers had.
that the people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones
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I had a great time in Talish, Pakistan.
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