Russell Brand: “I Forget Myself and Remember Who I Am”

Elizabeth Rovere:

Hello and welcome to Wonderstruck. I’m your host, Elizabeth Rovere. I’m a clinical psychologist, a yoga teacher, and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. I’m really curious about our experiences of wonder and awe, and how they transform us. The great Russell Brand is my guest on this episode, and Russell – known to many for his comedy and acting – talks about personal transformation and a total commitment to spiritual work as his path to survival. Russell’s gifts for communication and education are evident, illuminating, and frankly delightful throughout our conversation.

His ongoing and deepening study of consciousness and identity make him a very compelling teacher. With profound fluency, Russell explores the temptations of ecstasy, the need for serenity, learning to embrace a higher power, why he strives to live a life of service and what brings him closest to God. As Russell tells me, these are the big ideas that must occupy him. The alternative, he says, is death.

Welcome to Wonderstruck. Our guest today is Russell Brand. He is a podcast host, a comedian, actor, philanthropist, community builder, meditation teacher, husband, dad, and pet owner of 20 cats, you just told me.

Russell Brand:

Yes, I think it’s 20 now.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s amazing. I love it. There’s some very cute ones that I have just seen. So, thank you for having us here at your beautiful studio. It’s wonderful to see you again.

Russell Brand:

Thank you. It was lovely to see you again. Thank you for that lovely introduction. I wouldn’t like to be individually scored on each of those categories that you listed: as a meditation teacher, as a father. I think I would aggregate around mediocre, but I’m certainly happy to have so many qualities tagged in an intro.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, you’re very welcome. As far as those categories goes, I think we have to just be good enough.

Russell Brand:

Yeah, that’s right.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I have some questions that I wrote and rewrote to ask you, and one of the questions that I have for you is that actually, one of the first times that I met you, it was on one of your Zoom phone calls. It was back in 2020 and we didn’t really meet, but you had called out my name and I was so nervous that I couldn’t answer. I was just staring like that. Then we started this whole Wonderstruck engagement and doing some work with Harvard Divinity School in Five Books. You came to our Embodiment Symposium in the summer.

Again, it was so wonderful to meet. You have a very calming presence, so it was easier to talk to you, but I was nervous and anxious. I was curious, as someone like yourself who’s a performer and an actor, how is it for you? Do you ever have that anxiety when you’re about to do something, whether it’s a performance or a show or even going to a dinner party? How do you handle anxiety?

Russell Brand:

I have near constant anxiety is how I would describe it, even now. Not in particular related to what we are doing, but I can always generally locate some feeling of, I guess for simplicity’s sake, let’s call it anxiety in my body. But one of the things that I’m trying to do, Liz, is not call it anxiety, but just to recognize it as a feeling and to try to examine why it is that I have a preference. This is because of a meditation I was recently sent by that guy; he’s called something like Tsoknyi Rinpoche, something like that. Where he talked about beautiful monsters like your anxiety and your shame and fear; beautiful monsters.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Lovely.

Russell Brand:

So, like a lot of people in recovery, I do feel those things pretty regular. I’m just trying to experience them. Ambient anxiety. Now, when it comes to anxiety that is in relation to an event, I suppose I have become over time more adept at seeing that that is a preparatory tool; that potentially this feeling can be metabolized into action and that is how I use it. So, if I’m anxious or nervous about an event, yeah, no. If it’s performance, I can deal with it.

Tell the truth at dinner party, because one of the things when we did that thing, where I came to Italy for your conference, I think I told you at the time and I told Camilla and the people who you work with, I said, “Oh, can I just do the bit where I’m talking?” Because I’m much more at ease with the dynamic of oration or at least public speaking than ordinary communication. I don’t feel particularly comfortable in those circumstances. My mate, James, he says, “We are not nighttime people anymore.” He’s in recovery like me. We’re daytime people now. I attend a lot of 12-step stuff. That’s where I live spiritually and perhaps emotionally, you might say.

In those environments, one of the things I know I enjoy is that the structure that a 12-step environment often has a stated, explicit beginning, a main share is customary to refer to it as, and timed shares back. I feel quite comfortable with that. As a person who deals a lot with chaos and at points has had rather a chaotic life, I enjoy structure, even though I know chaos is a big part of who I am and is part of the access I have to efficacy comes via chaos. Perhaps this sense of abiding anxiety is a component of that. So, in a sense, my attitude towards anxiety is sometimes I bring my presence to it and my awareness to it, and I accept it; at other times, I recognize that there is some utility in it and sometimes I frankly fall victim to it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s a very thoughtful, wise answer. I love that you said that some of your efficacy comes through the chaos. And yet as long as there’s a frame or some structure around it, it helps bring your creativity, I suppose, into being.

Russell Brand:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I love how you said that. As for things like the beautiful monsters that you mentioned, it makes me think of Tara Brach who has this idea of bringing them to tea. So, I can’t tell you how many tea parties I’ve had with fear, more than I would like to count, but it is a way of like, ‘Okay, let’s take some of the edge out of this so that it’s somehow manageable.’

Russell Brand:

I feel that perhaps Rumi and his guest house analogy is the best iteration of this idea that we allow them to visit us and we don’t try usher them out the door. I suppose as an addict and perhaps as a human, epicureanism remains pretty strong in me. I recognize now that I have this relationship with ecstasy and abandon. Ecstasy is a religious word. Ecstatic states I suppose imply a blending, blurring, perhaps even dissolution of boundary and a return to some unitary undergirding that many spiritual people believe is the source of all reality. That the persona in its temporal nature can only facilitate a certain amount of happiness.

But when we live in a culture that continually augments the boundaries of self, which celebrates individualism, materialism, and progressivism, and tells us that the only the things that can be calculated and measured are valuable, even though our subjective experience continually is at odds with that idea, it’s difficult not to think of myself as Russell and Russell’s wants and Russell’s fears as their priority. But I do on occasion and in particular in say, ecstasy, which I’ve experienced much less often than I’d like because if it was up to me, I’d not come down from ecstasy. I’d stay there. I’d get that ecstasy and I’d live in it.

But I live a different life now and I suppose I have to take a more meandering path to bliss. Though I’m always drawn to the shaman, sages, rishis and saints that speak of bliss as sanctioned and even sacramental, rather than the more prudish and aesthetic moral philosophical and political commentators that believe in a stringency in being. I don’t like to live cold, but sometimes I do have to live quite serenely.

Elizabeth Rovere:

No, I hear what you’re saying and what you mentioned about the shaman aspect and living life in this way with the ecstatic and the connection to something that’s a more interconnected web and way with everything, with each other, with nature and other people in the world, rather than this very staunch individualistic way. I mean, it makes me think of, of course, spirituality and how you got your way into that experience. I mean, you’ve said that you came to spirituality through being forced, coming from the place of addiction into a recovery, and yet you still chose to take that path, which was obviously not an easy one. Well, you had no choice. The death was the other option, right?

Russell Brand:

Yeah. It says in the literature of the program that I belong to, to live a life on a spiritual basis or face an alcoholic death is not an easy decision to make. I like that it says that you would have to think about it. What will I do, live a life on a spiritual basis or will I go with this drug-induced or alcohol-induced death? Well, obviously, I don’t want to die, so I have to do this. But I, like many people, wrestle with that choice and that choice comes again, because I think continually through passion, we are invited back into the material. Through carnality we are invited back into attachment. It seems when we are contextualized by sanctioned selfishness, pretty easy to live selfishly and find ways of underwriting that selfishness. It’s not hard. It’s very difficult.

I think I was thinking today in fact that that’s what they must be, the saints. They must never leave the place of service. They must be able to spot when they are at the turning point. They must notice, ‘Uh-oh, I’m going to go selfish again. Back into the ego. No, think about someone else. Think about are you being of service in this moment? Are you loving God? Are you being of service to the person around you?’ At least for me, of course, it’s a choice in that now I’m aware that I could now go and get drugs or I could pursue illicit behaviors or whatever. I suppose the program works. The program I use works. It’s a pretty amazing piece of folk technology.

The acceptance that it won’t work again, the belief that it’s possible to change, the willingness to hand over your life to a secondary force – an ulterior force, a bigger force perhaps – even if that’s a philosophy, rather than a supreme being, even though I’m down the supreme being path myself; it works, this stuff, but it isn’t an easy choice and I haven’t entirely made it. But then I can’t entirely make it now because I only live here now.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, I think of that as that first step about life becomes unmanageable and I choose to surrender to something greater than myself as I mean that is the path of spirituality. That is the path of a mystic. It’s a path of giving over. It’s recognizing that it’s not just about me. There is something greater and there’s a profound sense of power in surrender. It might seem paradoxical, but it’s really engaging and moving. I was thinking about that. It was a beautiful interview that you did with Rick Rubin. I loved it.

Russell Brand:

Yeah, I loved him.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It was really powerful. It gave me goosebumps throughout intermittently. You brought up this book by Rogan Taylor, The Death And Resurrection Show.

Russell Brand:

Yeah, you know that book.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, only because of you. So, thank you. So, I looked into it and this idea of being an artist is, like, a shaman and holding all of this profound energy and creativity, maybe your chaos that you spoke about a little bit. Then what do you do with it? And if you can’t handle… I mean if it’s overpowering, it’s like the descent… the, almost by definition, the shaman goes into the descent into hell or burns up and reemerges in a way that they become the truth teller, the prophet in that way. I think about that also within the 12-step program: going in, you’re in hell, and then coming back out and seeing… being more open to the world from this spiritual perspective. So, I think about you in that context.

Russell Brand:

That’s real kind. You are a very devoted and lovely person. You’re very kind and open and committed. It’s really nice to be around you. I noticed I’m in a different type of mood than I was five minutes ago.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, it’s great to hear. Glad to hear that.

Russell Brand:

Yeah, you’re easy to be around. Thanks. I am a tense person. I don’t know. You know, sort of TS Eliot, “I should have been some ragged claws on a seabed floor” or whatever it is, mangled TS Eliot here. But sometimes I feel like… monastery really, monastery for me, that I should be contained. I don’t do well in civilization. Not because I’m above it, but because I am beneath it. Not because I’m not tempted, but because I am tempted, because stimulation to me is irresistible. Irresistible. I’m sometimes all mouth. He said this. One of the great things about being a recovering drug addict and alcoholic is that it means that you are never able to lose yourself in your culturally allotted position. For example, because I became a celebrity because of being in films.

If you continue to be a 12-step person, you regularly attend meetings wherever you go. This will mean that you’ll encounter people that are from the world, perhaps, that you came from or from wherever, informed of course by the culture and geography of the region that you find yourself in. So, I hear the ordinary wisdom continually and I’m reminded that there’s more interesting stuff in this world than what I think about and what I worry about, and that I can get pretty lost in here and still be pretty self-centered man. Someone said the other day, “It’s really good use of something that’s on the borderline of being a cliche,” but if you stay with it, he says something pretty interesting.

He said that thing about how when a kid opened a present, he might as well play with the wrapping as well as the present. He then talked about that this suggests that it is the subjective rather than objective reality that determines the experience that you are having. I spoke to Gabor Maté recently and he said, “I know what it’s like. You attach to a person and the stars seem brighter and the moon is beckoning, but it’s all in you. It’s all in you.” Alongside this thing about the kid and the wrapping paper, and the guy that I spoke to there, made me feel like, ‘Yeah.’

Michael Singer continually says, “Why are you shutting yourself off from the bliss? Why are you shutting yourself off from the joy? Why would you go, ‘I’m angry now’?” Don’t do it. Don’t do it. This is why you have to live the spiritual life. This is why you have no choice. The problem we have these days – I was talking to Deepak Chopra yesterday – was that it’s being sold, let’s face it, to us as a sundry, as sundry, as supplementary. But my friend Fearne Cotton, who should talk to you one day, she’s very brilliant.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, I love her actually.

Russell Brand:

She has a bunch of stuff. Yeah, she’s fantastic. She said it’s not a side dish, it’s the main course. It’s the main course. That’s the reality. The primary reality is the spiritual reality, your subjective experience. What is it to be you, to feel your body, to feel your anxiety in your body, to observe your thoughts, to observe your wants? What is this experience of being you? This is the opposite of materialism. Of course, in the material world, it is easy to say, “But if you don’t have a nice house and if you don’t have access to mates and if you don’t have access to resources, you will suffer.” But all of us know now, don’t we, that we’ve been around the billionaires and the powerful ones. Well, I suppose not everyone’s been around them, but I have, and it’s not worked out.

I know what it’s like now. See, someone like Amma, she’s just going, “I’m only this now. I’m only this now.” She’s only that. She’s just doing that. It seems so trivial, so trite to just embrace and hug your way through life. But somehow, she’s become the Oprah Winfrey of that and generated schools and hospitals out of it. Then there’s that priest class around her because she’s from a fishing village. She’s a low caste, dark-skinned, Southern Indian woman. I don’t know about Indian caste system, but it seems that that’s not top drawer over in their deal. But the priests that hang around her, like Shubamrita, this guy – they’re Brahman.

When she was 17, she went all wacky; started cuddling everyone and not being proper. Some people are like, “Get her out of here. She’s nuts.” Then the priest folk came and went, “No, she’s a reincarnation of the Kali spirit.” Then they set up a whole cult around her. I don’t know if that’s the right word or certainly not the word they’d perhaps prefer, but an ashram anyway. The upshot of it is ‘by their fruits, shall we know them’. Millions of people have been helped after those terrible floods and the tsunami of 20 years ago, whenever that was. Hospitals were built, schools were built, women are being helped, people are being reeducated, all sorts of stuff’s occurring around her.

She is effective. These, I suppose, are the two questions. One, is how do you feel? Do you feel alright? Two, is there a practice? Are people being helped or is it just a subset of individualism and selfishness? I’m quite capable obviously of lapsing into a spirituality that’s just about, ‘Yeah, I feel all right.’ Well, if that’s what it’s about, you might as well smoke crack.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Spiritualism as a commodity or a spiritual materialism, that thing.

Russell Brand:

As a salve.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You can buy it.

Russell Brand:

You can buy it and you use it for yourself the same way you would use any commodity. When our man JC, the great one, Jesus Christ, feed and clothe the poor. Be among poor people. I do things like that sometimes, usually when desperate, and it never fails to lift me up. It never fails to lift me up. I forget myself. I remember who I am. I forget myself and I remember who I am.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I forget myself and I remember who I am. It’s beautiful. Exactly. That is it, right?

Russell Brand:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I love that.

Russell Brand:

I do very much though, because I’m usually thinking whether or not my eyebrows look all right.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, I know we all are, right? It’s hard.

Russell Brand:

Okay, these guys, the eyebrows. Do you think it’s…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Your eyebrows look good. They look good.

Russell Brand:

Thank you. My daughter – I have two daughters – my younger daughter, her eyebrows are the exact same shape of mine. So, I look at her face and I wonder and marvel at the genetics, to see my own eyebrows looking back at me.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s fascinating, isn’t it?

Russell Brand:

Of course, the eyebrows aren’t looking because there’s no optic nerve there, but they are framing the thing that’s looking back at me. The other daughter is less genetically obvious, but there is something else. There is something else. I’m not being so vain to suggest that the inhered within them is something that is uniquely mine, far from it in fact. The universal is present, the universal is present. Some remembering of them.

What about that bit in the Vedas that says, “Again, this way. Again, this way,” as if it’s some limitless… If spatial and temporal reality are constructs based on our understanding of reality, which is based on – to a degree – post-Newtonian physics and now, to a degree, quantum physics, whereby the way, all this stuff starts to untangle and entangle in ways that are baffling.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Very funny. Yes.

Russell Brand:

If we are outside of space and time, outside of space and time, we live this endlessly, we live this endlessly. Perhaps there is some literal familiarity in feeling the presence of your daughter. You think I’ve known you a long, long time.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I love that. Yes, absolutely, because in some ways, we absolutely have, if you are going to go down that trajectory. I actually wrote this…

Russell Brand:

You’ve done proper questions. Some are highlighted.

Elizabeth Rovere:

What you just said is a quotation, here, I wrote on this note that I just have to read, because I think it’s really cool. It’s from Hindu Shaivism and looking at this concept, phenomenon of Shakti. So, what you just said, think about this. Shakti is an ever functioning, undeniable urge in the direction of expansion, of infinity, of freedom, of bliss present at the center of the yoga body, present in the heart, continuously expanding from within and with the beating and the movement of the heart.

Russell Brand:

That’s pretty good.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Isn’t that good?

Russell Brand:

Yeah, I like that.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s kinda what you just said.

Russell Brand:

This one here says chit Shakti. Chit Shakti: conscious energy. Be aware, direct the energy. That thing there about ever-expanding bliss, coming from the heart, I like that. And freedom. Be who you are, be who you are. This is where inevitably, necessarily – how could it be otherwise? – spirituality has to become politicized. It has to become about the maneuvering of power.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It can’t be separate. Nothing is really separate. It is all this interconnected web and then ‘Be who you are’ is also this way of being interconnected and expansive, right?

Russell Brand:

Yeah. It’s convenient for it to be separated, because of course, any empirical encounter with spirit will inform you that there is a deep moral duty that would profoundly affect the ability of elite establishment machinery to function. Once you encounter that, you have to change everything. You have to implement the principles implied by a unitary experience by the shared right that we have to access to this bliss. The removal of secondary ideologies mapped onto this potential perfection.

Even though of course I suppose those people that I encounter at the esoteric end, the upper echelon to all this, they seem to have adjacent to nihilistic approach. This is it. This is the way it’s unfolding. It doesn’t need you to interfere. It doesn’t need you prodding about in political systems. That doesn’t require it. I don’t know. Who have I met that I felt like that? Many people, they seem to have an acceptance that this is unfolding, that God is beyond all of that, that God don’t require you to do… But then when I think of Gandhi or Malcolm X, they got stuck right in.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. So, I mean are you saying that there’s a way that we could have hope?

Russell Brand:

I must tell you, in spite of everything, in spite of my ongoing personal failings, sometimes in spite of my inability to run my own life or even get a pair of socks on correctly, I somehow have this uninterrupted faith that there is going to be a profound transformation in our terrestrial consciousness that will bring about a different way of living that will be better for the vast… for all people. Not even the majority, for all people.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I love hearing you say that.

Russell Brand:

I’ve been wrong before.

Elizabeth Rovere:

No, I love hearing you say that and I feel like you and Rick Rubin were talking about that a little bit. I’ve heard you talk about that with Vandana Shiva to a certain extent in different ways of saying this. Then how you also just said when you were talking with Fearne Cotton, that spirituality, it’s the main course. If my little sticky note is accurate with the Shaivist that it… we can’t stop this. We can’t stop the heart or the spirituality or this phenomenon that infuses us that we have access to that’s love or this bliss – even when things are kinda horrific and devastating, when you look at some of these things, some of the things that you talk about on your podcast even.

Sometimes I’m like, “Oh, my God.” You do it with aplomb and humor, and thank you because it makes it digestible. But even within all of that, that there is this current, that there is this capacity for transformation. You’ve experienced it, right? I mean in your own life through going into 12-step or whatever it might be for a person, these transformative shamanistic dives and resurrections that I do feel and hope that there is this possibility and potential.

Russell Brand:

I like how Terence McKenna talks about God and obviously, with him, is always – not always, but seems to be often – via the psychedelic and shamanic experience with which he was so well versed. When Terence McKenna says of orthodoxy, of the paraphernalia around conventional religion, this force which I think you described there in the Shakti note you brought, it appears through many centralized faiths that it needs to be approached gingerly and superstitiously, that you have to do things in the right order and it’s full of protocols. But he says, “This is, like, God. This potent powerful force that’s just going to deliver. This is an incontrovertible ‘Tell us’, this solar force, this cosmic power.”

I’m encouraged by that. Although I suppose within it is the idea that perhaps our human aims and ends are of little significance. I suppose that that’s perhaps why we have to get ourselves in line somehow with the eternal when I’m caught up in the momentary, by which I mean my temporal goals. I’m not saying that we don’t want to be here in the absolute present right now, but that there is an eternity that is beyond my wants and my fears that I have to have some relationship with. It seems to me, at least, that that relationship requires some cultivation. I think all the time, I don’t know about you, Liz, about the psychedelic experience, the shamanic experience, about how as a person 20 years now in recovery, that I have a hankering and intrigue for those methods. But I also recognize that for someone like me, I perhaps have to be cautious. I’ve spoken to some pretty great people and some pretty experienced people in those fields. What about you? Are you interested in it?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, it’s such an interesting question and phenomenon, the whole psychedelic aspect. I mean I don’t have a ton of experience with drugs per se, right? I’ve always been too neurotic and afraid of, like, “Oh, my God, what is…” I’m paranoid about what it would do to me. Having said that, what’s happening now with this whole microdosing phenomenon and psychedelics, and MDMA for trauma – because of where we are with trauma and how there’s such a profound need to help people through that process, aspects of present company included. I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s been really helpful for people. My only concern is that it doesn’t become like that’s the only way or it’s a panacea or it’s a quick fix, that it doesn’t become like, ‘Take a drug and you’re done.’

Because the whole point of it, right, is that is to help use something like psilocybin as a conduit to get something awakened within inside of you that’s more sustaining and full. The full truth of who you are in that way and feeling connected to something greater. I think that it’s also possible for us to do that through techniques of meditation, some aspects of yoga, honestly through even the 12-step community. One of the three jewels of Buddhism is the Buddha, the teachings, and the Sangha: the community. It’s like the community is parallel with teachings and Buddha. I mean it is really powerful. It’s got a transcendent vibe to it when you’re really feeling connected to people and can feel connected to everybody.

Russell Brand:

You’re right about that. That’s twice today now. Sangha and community, and team and family. If you can have a tendency to get a bit self-obsessed, it’s good to remember that. It’s good to remember that you don’t have to do everything. It’s good to remember that you’re not alone. It’s good to remember that it’s not all about me. It’s nice, isn’t it? It’s reassuring.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s really reassuring. It’s really reassuring. So, I mean I hope that answers that kind of question.

Russell Brand:

Yeah, you wouldn’t want being commodified or somehow becoming reduced. How can it not? In a sense that I suppose what esoterism is about, the protection, the sacred cults’ secrets, this information is not for everybody. There are perhaps then even if there is a ubiquity behind apparent separateness, it seems there are staves and hierarchies. I’m not suggesting inferiority, although, gosh is it difficult to talk about hierarchies without talking about layers or levels and power dynamics. But at the level of the individual, I don’t think anyone’s advocating for sameness. I think people are advocating rather broadly for diversity. I suppose that, in so much that I find it easy to understand, sadly, as I perhaps have said to you, because I know I think it frequently, that when I think of a disco ball, a glitter ball or a mirrorball – is that the best way to say it? Of the words: disco ball, glitterball, mirrorball, ‘mirrorball’ because of that Arctic Monkeys song. Maybe mirrorball will land on us, the better one – that the light hits the mirrorball and the light shines off in all sorts of different directions, but the light, the source is the same. Whatever the refractory material device is that brings things into material through the process of evolution, that is the same thing, but the little bits of light, they are all projected differently. So, maybe that.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s great. I love that. It’s perfect.

Russell Brand:

Joseph Campbell with his thing of, if the janitor is looking after a municipal building and one of the light bulbs dies, the janitor doesn’t go, “Oh, no, that’s my favorite light bulb.” He just puts another light bulb in. It’s all coming from the same source. It’s all cool.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that’s really cool. I like that a lot.

Russell Brand:

Light, it does appear to crop up universally and archetypally throughout most of the great faiths and scriptures. This is the analogy that seems most useful.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Absolutely.

Russell Brand:

The idea of the light of consciousness. That it’s kind of like light. That it’s not an inadvertent byproduct of biological processes. It’s somehow beyond them.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Um-mmm. Yeah, it is. There is that whole talk about the light and the light body, the transformation or the movement of the body into light as it comes in and out of existence. I’m sorry if that sounds a little bit out there.

Russell Brand:

No, it don’t. Do you want to check all of your notes? Make sure you’re asking me the questions that you want to. We’re not in a rush, but I just want to make sure that you don’t feel like you come out of here and that you’ve not been, er… As I heard Greta Gerwig once say on the tele, I was watching something on the tele – even though I’ve met Greta Gerwig and I really think she’s pretty incredible – I heard her say, “Stay true to the person that came up with the idea.” I think in regard to her work as a filmmaker and often directing scripts that she herself has written. You’ve written these questions: do you still care about them? Or have you gone off ’em?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, we talked about Community.

Russell Brand:

Do you want to come to Community and do your thing there?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Is it here?

Russell Brand:

It’s near here. Wonderstruck. You want to do your thing, ‘Wonderstruck at Community’?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Hell, yeah.

Russell Brand:

It’s between the 14th and 16th of July.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I love to. I love it.

Russell Brand:

Talk to Nick before you go. You could curate some stuff there if you would like to. You’re such an entrepreneurial person.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s fantastic. Do I have to be in an ice bathtub to do it?

Russell Brand:

Yes, there are initiation processes, but they are conducted fairly and justly, and consensually.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Fantastic, fantastic. I would do it at Community. I think it would do it. But now that’s recording that, I would have to do that. So, I asked you about Community and I’m glad you brought that up and thank you for the invitation. I have to repeat this to you because you said it and I think it’s beautiful. You have said what we have, a little bit, talked about. What is your experience, your sense of God, but you said God is an underlying oneness from which all phenomena emanate and that all reality is a symphony emerging from an instrument of God, which I guess is like the mirror ball.

Russell Brand:

I’m consistent. Do not change my mind. Oh, God’s a bunch of separate things. No.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So, I just love that. I think that’s so beautiful. All right. So, I asked you about that.

Russell Brand:

That metaphor comes up a lot, isn’t it? I guess the flute of Krishna is that… the flute of Krishna. He is playing that. He’s playing reality into being.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes. Circling it back almost to that embodiment aspect or the subtle body and the yoga body and some of these things that we talk about is the music, the vibration of music and the sound bowls and all of these things that can get you into that experience of the profound or of the transcendent in a way – with a big T or a little t. Just you feel ‘feeling moved’, right? I think about that. You’re kinda both. You’re an intellectual, but you do all of these. You do the breath work practices, which I was thinking that gets you into your body, right? That’s an embodiment practice. I was thinking about these things like the spiritual perspective of the subtle body, your embodiment versus the psychological one and how they overlap.

Russell Brand:

You should do Biet.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yes.

Russell Brand:

Do you know Biet?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, you showed me. You showed me at the symposium.

Russell Brand:

She’s amazing. Yeah. Did I?

Elizabeth Rovere:

You did it.

Russell Brand:

I always tell her when I’ve done it, because I feel she maybe is protective of it. Quite rightly, she does this wonderful breath technique and she’s a friend of mine and she comes to Community, so you’ll meet her there. This is a good way of recognizing that the body is the root to the transcendent and this… that dude, Tsoknyi Rinpoche as well said, “Grounded in body, open of heart, clear of mind.” It’s interesting to hear, because sometimes you feel like people that meditate the whole time feel like they’re not going to be focused on their bodies enough, but grounded in the body. Otherwise, you’ll try to get into your body with sugar or sex or pornography or…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Exactly.

Russell Brand:

…self-harm, maybe even. I don’t know. If you don’t have a clear relationship with the body, I wonder what they’re an expression of all of these addictions. I wonder what the eating disorders are an expression of. I wonder how they come through the culture. What is the purity behind it? What is the pure thing? It’s a very, very complicated thing. I’ve tried to understand it and I don’t.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, that’s a lot to understand and I can’t necessarily tell you answers, but I can tell you my associations when you’re saying all that. I mean I think of being grounded in the body to transcend, I think of the root chakra. That has to be awake to get to the third eye. I think of the tree of life having roots in order to grow, to get to its expansiveness. When you talk of eating disorders, it’s probably a bit crass, but why wouldn’t you have an eating disorder if you have to take in some of the bullshit of the culture? You want to expel it. You’re trying to get something out or it can also be very self-annihilating too, like destructive of the self and then purification, the certain aspects of that.

Russell Brand:

It’s good, but it doesn’t seem to be able to be unraveled therapeutically, at least through…

Elizabeth Rovere:

Not through here. Yeah, you have to get into the body. I mean meditation with the yogic types of meditation, the physical, doing something physical is really helpful, I think in that way.

Russell Brand:

Maybe all of us want a ‘quick fix’ a bit, because we recognize how adjacent we are to perfection. Maybe all of us feel, ‘Oh, God, it shouldn’t be so hard. Does it have to be so arduous? Am I going to have to go to some gym? Am I going to have to slog along some cold lonely road at 5am watching my breath fog in front of my face just to be able to live another day when I know that God is somehow within me and around me and is all encompassing and everywhere? Why is it so difficult? Why can’t it be easy? Why can’t I buy it like a drug? Why can’t I acquire it with charm somehow?’

Elizabeth Rovere:

Because it wouldn’t be meaningful. You know that. You can answer that.

Russell Brand:

We’ve got to have these contrasts. Must we suffer? Is there an intrinsic relationship between passion and suffering? As I was informed just today, there is linguistically semantically that the etymology of the word passion, patio, I think he said, means to suffer. The passion of the Christ, that wasn’t Christ boogying on down and getting on it. That was our Lord being slashed up and lashed up, and knowing what it is to have a body on his way to the transcendence, the ascendance, and to the rebirth. Yes, I suppose you are right, that there is something of a binary relationship between light and dark and suffering and passion. Perhaps that dualism is also false because perhaps from another perspective that would look like absolute unity outside of the spatial and temporal dimension.

Why would you even look at the chronology of passion into suffering, of attachment into loss? I suppose that’s what I meant earlier when I said access to the eternal. If you maintain access to the eternal, then I’ll be able to withstand disappointment. I’ll be able to withstand attack. I’ll be able to withstand falling in love and heartbreak and my children growing up and yet more kittens. I see now why they are a litter because they are spilled and strewn about my house in packs of five every couple of months. Now a little allotment of those little guys dishing them out on the streets, like I am now.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Can I take one home?

Russell Brand:

Do you want one?

Elizabeth Rovere:

I do.

Russell Brand:

The current batch ain’t ready, they need another few weeks.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Oh, really?

Russell Brand:

Where are you going back to, the United States of America?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, yeah. You want a New York cat?

Russell Brand:

You live in Manhattan, do you?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Brooklyn.

Russell Brand:

Is it safe to go out and about?

Elizabeth Rovere:

We have a backyard.

Russell Brand:

Does it back onto other people’s backyards?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, but they can’t get out of our backyard, because we have two cats already. So, the cat would be…

Russell Brand:

Part of that.

Elizabeth Rovere:

They’d be part of that.

Russell Brand:

We’ve got five currently. I’ll send you some pictures and you can make a choice and we’ll fling it across the Atlantic.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I’m telling you, my kids would love to have another cat. My husband would be anticipatory and unsettled, but that’s okay.

Russell Brand:

He’s persuadable though, your husband.

Elizabeth Rovere:

He’s persuadable. Yeah.

Russell Brand:

Because I felt when I met your husband, although he is evidently a person that has achieved much, he was up for doing some breath work and in fact yielded his consciousness. He went unconscious. He passed out.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah. He embraced it wholeheartedly.

Russell Brand:

He went for it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

He went for it.

Russell Brand:

Takes a lot.

Elizabeth Rovere:

But going back to that thing you said about…

Russell Brand:

Cats?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, no, cats and the eternal. The access to the eternal in that way, then you can tolerate the intensity of the pain and suffering, right? I mean that I think at the end of the day is what gets me through or gets people through. If I can feel that I can connect to that and I’m feeling devastated or I’m crying or I’m feeling so alone – if I can connect to that, I can get through it without the quick escape or I don’t have to leave my body, split it off psychologically, get drunk or whatever it is, and leave in order to survive it. I can actually be present, because I’m connected to this even though it’s really difficult.

Russell Brand:

Yeah, that’s pretty impressive. I mean I suppose I have no choice, but at the moment, what it’s been about is, ‘Where is it in your body?’ When my wife had our first child, she educated herself in… they call it hypnobirthing. One of the things that I liked – because you do the process together, of course – was when they looked at the language around birth and the literal process of birth. They said, “You might want to consider the language you use to describe. Use words like heat and expanding.” It made me realize that even at the beginning of our conversation when we talked about anxiety, what do you mean anxiety? What do you mean? Where is it? It’s just an awareness really. It’s just an awareness in my stomach or it’s just a feeling when I feel like I might cry or whatever.

It’s just a feeling of heaviness behind my eyes. Now if I cannot attach a narrative to the bodily sensation or direct an outcome, if I can just feel it, what happens? I mean it will go. That’s what the Eckhart Tolle and the Michael Singer and all those body work modern day teachers on this subject talk about. Michael Singer, he said the reason you feel like that is you’ve hold onto all of the pain you’ve ever felt is still in there, but let it go. Every time you start to feel, like, sad as you might call it or fearful or angry, get… immediately become present and feel where it is in your body and allow it to come through you. It will come out of you. It’ll come out of you. Be present. He was finding a bliss in it, by my reckoning, saying, “Wow, I’m alive on a planet and I’m sad.”

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s cool. I love that.

Russell Brand:

He’s incredible. I’m going to go see him, I think. He’s one of the people I think I could drag some more out of.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Absolutely. Please do. I would love to listen to it. I mean it also reminds me of what I think you had said about Deepak Chopra. I think it was in your Instagram or something, where you quoted him as saying, “Are you going to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future?” It’s, like, the only way to be a pioneer of the future is to be present. If you’re present, you can let go of that past bullshit. I mean, instead of walking around projecting, ‘Oh, am I talking to you or am I talking to my history?’ I don’t want to talk to my history. I’ve already been there.

Russell Brand:

Yeah, I do a lot, still, I think.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, we do.

Russell Brand:

I guess I’m going to have to really dedicate myself to this a little bit harder. We have no choice. I heard only the really sick people become saints. You have to be driven to it by absolute madness. Otherwise, why else would you bother? Why would you give up yourself unless it was just unbearable in there?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Russell Brand:

Apparently, St Augustine was a lunatic.

Elizabeth Rovere:

They all were.

Russell Brand:

Augustine, it sounds like he was well into, in his case, I believe females. St Francis, my understanding is even after the process of sainthood had been achieved would’ve been a bit annoying, I think, bringing animals in the house, not wearing shoes and socks when the weather was inclement. St Francis. Also, I feel like he was a warlord, chopping people’s heads off on mad principality campaigns across what is now Italy.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s the thing. We can’t escape our humanity even if we’re or if they, not we. But if a person is a saint, you can’t escape it. I think that’s why you were saying, Michael Singer is saying that I’m feeling sad and crazy. By myself saying it, I’m slightly giving space and distancing myself and therefore I can celebrate being alive. That’s part of the repertoire of human experience. All of those emotions and phenomenon. I mean, I cannot act on some of the more devastating or destructive ones, but I’m going to feel them and not run away from it. Well, I don’t know exactly what he’s saying, but that’s my association to what he’s saying.

Russell Brand:

Yeah, I think don’t ‘act’ any of it. He’s saying that you can live your life in, sort of, bliss. It’s available to you.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s available to you. Yeah. The other thing was when you were saying the thing about all the saints, a lot of them were very reluctant.

Russell Brand:

They didn’t fancy it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s that archetype of the reluctant prophet. Moses did not want to go up the mountain and see a burning bush. It was terrifying.

Russell Brand:

I get the idea he was a bit shy or maybe had a stammer or something and his brother did the upfront stuff. Aaron was the more chatty.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I mean maybe.

Russell Brand:

That’s what I picked up from the Bible.

Elizabeth Rovere:

From the Bible?

Russell Brand:

As best I can, I go to the source, but I also read other things as well. Yeah, I suppose so. When people are not reluctant saints, I fancy they could be annoying.

Elizabeth Rovere:

They could be a narcissist, right?

Russell Brand:

I’d say so. I’m very saintly. Do you need any advice? No, thank you.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, that’s true.

Russell Brand:

All right. Back off. I suppose so, and even our Lord take this cup away from me at the last minute.

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s true.

Russell Brand:

Not now, mate. You’ve done the hard bit.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s great. It’s true. It’s true. Then the Dalai Lama too. It’s like, ”I’m just a monk. I’m just like you.”

Russell Brand:

I can’t conceive of what that man’s inner life must be like given that hasn’t he only ever known monkhood. Hasn’t he been just a little boy, then a monk then meditating eight hours a day always? It must be glorious in there.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Right? Okay, well, can you imagine? I heard him speak once in New York City and it was really powerful. I mean, it was on a teaching and it was pretty intense and intellectual. Some of it was like, ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about,’ but it was watching him and connecting to him. At one point, he’s teaching, and all of a sudden, he starts crying. And I was like, ‘Oh.’ I mean, that sounds naive, but I didn’t know that Dalai Lama would cry.

He was crying and he’s like, “Okay, okay, okay. I’m sorry. It’s just sometimes when I’m caught up in the teaching and then I think of the suffering in the world and then I think of the beauty, I just start crying. So, okay. Now I will move on to the next lesson.” That was probably the most meaningful thing that I experienced with him. It wasn’t so much the teaching. It was the being, the person.

Russell Brand:

It’s always beautiful when someone does that, isn’t it? It’s always beautiful through the moment where someone comes to the edge of tears. Because I think this is often where, unless it’s some hysterical lachrymose self-indulgent fit, that’s where we are able to touch eternity with them. It happens a lot in the 12-step context and the room goes silent. People feel it and accept it and recognize that this is part of it. This is part of what it is to be a human being. So, it’s very beautiful. It’s very beautiful to have that and actually encouraging to know that the Dalai Lama… It is a pretty hard path if even the Dalai Lama occasionally kills mosquitoes, if the Dalai Lama says there are wise selfish people, stupid, selfish people.

Stupid, selfish people think of themselves. Wise, selfish people think of others. Then it’s in a sense a pretty simple dilemma that we have here. I suppose the things I hanker after are resolution, ecstasy. I do know that what I’m supposed to do is absolutely let go, absolutely let go. Not try to be in control at all. There is agency, but I am operating on behalf of not this thing. Not this conglomeration. No, I’m operating. I will feel it. The answers will come. If my own house is in order, if I’m doing the basic things, if I’m treating my wife correctly, if I’m treating my children correctly, if I’m behaving correctly at work, doing this interview correctly, drive home correctly, just do these things, the world peace will take care of itself. I like it that… I like it…

Sometimes, I think greatness may be averted because I am too often lost in triviality and snared in the quotidian that Stanley Kubrick wrote a 17-page letter about how to take care of his cats when he’s on holiday, about: don’t pick that one up if that one comes in the room and make sure that you feed that one first. Gandhi, even when negotiating the end of British rule of India, still found time to weave and sew and look after goats. The abstract grandiose version of ideology and philosophy has a certain amount of value, but actually, life is lived here. It’s lived here in the present, in the relationship with the person or activity that you are currently engaged in. Where else would God be?

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, I mean it’s beautifully said and it makes me think of that way in which anything and everything can be a form of meditation or a spiritual practice, whether it’s feeding your goat or…

Russell Brand:

What is genius? You see Maradona. There’s nothing else. That’s all he is. There’s nothing else. That’s how he can do it. To him, it’s easy. To Lionel Messi, it’s easy. There’s nothing else, but they are living that thing absolutely, because there isn’t anything else. There isn’t any compromise. There isn’t any contradiction or secondary agenda. Just the flow, just the absolute flow, Jimi Hendrix. We know it when we see it. We know it when we see it. That is God. That is what we recognize in them.

The culture has created its new pantheon, but as post-enlightenment, individualism, the rights of man, humanitarianism, some pretty bloody glorious and incredible ideas that ended the medieval era, but also perhaps meant that we did not access with such ease the grace and where that grace is truly coming from. That not everything is commodity. Not everything has got a price tag on it. Not everything is just some flash and then gone.

Elizabeth Rovere:

You can’t sell grace. You can’t put a price tag on it. As you said, it’s that experience. When you started what you were just talking about, you were talking about being in the rooms and almost just that it’s like a sublime experience. You feel the sublime. I know you said you see it; when you see it, you recognize it. When have you felt it? Have there been transformational moments in your life in that way where it’s like, ‘I’m in that flow. I feel that. This is the presence of something’? I don’t even know how to call it.

Russell Brand:

I’m lucky that I get granted pretty good access via the chaos. I’m lucky that I live my dharma and that I do what I do for my life, my livelihood. Even though I do get paid for it, I do it all the time anyway. I don’t ever stop doing it. It’s what I’ve always done. It’s what I’ve done since I knew it existed. I’ve not stopped from the first moment that I knew it was possible to this moment right now. It’s not ever ended. Then more socially, I one time went Skid Row in LA – my wife was doing a class with children there, doing craft stuff with them – so, I was there accompanying her. I turned down the razzmatazz. I was a little bit around the back, just administering the ingredients for Play-Doh to these children.

But once the stuff had been done, the work, I fucking let myself off the hook a bit and turned up the revs and played with those children there in Skid Row. They don’t know that they’re destitute and homeless and poor. They don’t know, but we know what’s gone on there and how they’re there and why they’re there. There was a bit where we play like you’re a monster with kids and then you tumble onto the floor. There were one bit where my whole field of vision was just these children’s faces as they piled on top of me. When that happened, all I could see was their faces and their laughing, smiling faces. There was nothing between me and God for that little moment, for that little moment. It has happened other times. It will happen continually, I reckon if I forget myself, if I forget myself.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Do you experience it in the comedy, when you’re doing comedy? Do you just get lost in that moment in what you’re doing? Not lost in a bad way, lost in a good way.

Russell Brand:

That’s where it’s most reliably found.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I love it.

Russell Brand:

With a live audience. That’s what I’m looking for. That’s what I’m looking for there. We go in there and you recognize that there is a third thing. There is the generation of the material. I’m trying to tell them things that I think are funny. I’m always alluding to some idea, I suppose. Then they are receiving it. I have to overcome feelings of anxiety, which always means that I think there’s something to get or something to lose. Then after a moment, there is no separateness and then I’m in it.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Ooh, I love it.

Russell Brand:

You only know afterwards, of course. Yeah, I suppose there is an argument, of course, that addiction is a sacred disease. It is a craving for the sacrosanct that you cannot live without God. You absolutely cannot live without God. You live in a culture that doesn’t offer you God, because it can’t offer you God anymore because it’s trying to replace God with commodity or systems of material and exchange. I’m not talking about some mendacious, globalist conspiracy. I’m talking about unconsciousness. They know not what they do, they know not what they do.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I hear you.

Russell Brand:

But they probably will act like they do know what they do, which is annoying.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Right, it’s very annoying and it is very unconscious. As you know, we were talking about John Vervaeke, the professor. It’s the epidemic of bullshit. Then it’s just like, ‘What are we doing?’ That God or grace or spirituality or sublime, I mean, it’s right in front of us. You were just saying, suddenly, it’s here. I’m in a comedy routine and it’s just… I’m connected. So, it’s here, but we just pretend it doesn’t exist or it’s not in the general consciousness. It’s unconscious. Why are we not awake to it more and more? I think that’s why I love a lot of what you’re doing because you’re saying, “Hey, wake up. Shine the light on this. Let’s talk about this. Don’t you see what’s happening?”

Whether it’s sometimes a political thing and often time it’s spiritual thing. What are we doing? Even when you were talking to Eckhart Tolle, it made me laugh because it’s like Eckhart Tolle, right? I mean, he is a very sublime dude. All of a sudden, you somehow got him to say, “Yeah, people are just being stupid.” I couldn’t believe he said that. He’s like, “They’re being stupid.” Even he is like, ‘What is going on? What are we doing? It could be so much better for us. We don’t have to buy anything. It’s right here.’

Russell Brand:

Yes. It’s all that there is. There isn’t anything else. We are in a very interesting moment.

Elizabeth Rovere:

We really are. Are we getting called? Oh, can I just ask you one more…? Oh, I didn’t see that clock over there.

Russell Brand:

That little guy. It’s only that that prevents me from falling off into the abyss, into the limitless kiss, into the endlessness, 58:29. Because I do a show here and that’s what I have there. Then I know. Also, minute 15 is different to minute 23 if you’re doing something for an hour. With stand-up as well, it has to be counting upwards, you don’t want it counting downwards. That’s terrifying. He’s going to end on zero. I can’t cope with that, but it’s nice to know, ‘Okay.’ This is when you’re doing stand-up. ‘Yeah, okay. We’re at 30 minutes,’ because my experience is even the very best – the Richard Pryor, the Bill Hicks – around 60 minutes, people are ready for somebody else.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, okay, I have that one minute. The thing that I came across that I wanted to just say to you is that this concept of the Shakespearean fool, right?

Russell Brand:

Yes.

Elizabeth Rovere:

So, I mean, I think of, like, it’s the person that’s telling these wonderfully funny things. It’s like you have the access to power, to be able to tell them the truth – through comedy. I was thinking about you and I was thinking about the Shakespearean fool concept. I was thinking about the fool is also the prophet, the one that can tell the truth and not get their head chopped off. So, anyway, I was wondering about… Is it on?

Russell Brand:

This is by Wilde: “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise, they’ll kill you.”

Elizabeth Rovere:

That’s exactly it. I love it. I love it. Well, that’s it.

Russell Brand:

Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde. I read Oscar, I read… You can’t put him down.

Elizabeth Rovere:

He’s so funny and great. I love him. I love him. The Importance Of Being Earnest.

Russell Brand:

Well, you should read The Soul Of Man Under Socialism, which I’m going to read today. You should read The Selfish Giant and rip your own heart out, and The Nightingale and the thorn. His children’s stories – it was Will Self, who I heard say this, but I thought it myself. I thought it before – his children’s stories is where his real genius is. I mean, his genius is him, of course, Oscar Wilde. But his children’s stories… read The Selfish Giant and The Nightingale And The Rose. It’s devastating to read. These are the things he wrote for children, particularly when you think of this glib, brilliant, flamboyant man slipping off out of the house, leaving his wife and his sons at home and going to get his freak on, being the man that he was.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Wow.

Russell Brand:

He comes from such a deeply religious, reverent place that even his talk about aesthetics and beauty was sometimes regarded as superficial, but he was talking about God, really.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Yeah, exactly. Beauty in that context. It’s fantastic. Well, thank you so much.

Russell Brand:

Thanks, Liz.

Elizabeth Rovere:

I am so appreciative of this interview.

Russell Brand:

It’s the calmest I’ve ever been, in here.

Elizabeth Rovere:

It’s wonderful to talk to you.

Russell Brand:

I’m frantic. I’m adrenalized with doing stuff.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Adrenalized. I love it.

Russell Brand:

Thank you.

Elizabeth Rovere:

Well, thank you.

That was Russell Brand. Thank you so much, Russell. To learn more about Russell Brand’s Stay Free Podcast, daily video series, guided meditations, stand-up comedy dates, which will be spectacular, and information about this summer’s Community, please visit russellbrand.com.

Please come back next time on Wonderstruck. I’ll be talking with Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California Berkeley, faculty director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and best-selling author of a stunning and important new book called Awe: the New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. For more information about Wonderstruck, our guests, and some really exciting upcoming events, check out wonderstruck.org and please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. We truly want to hear from you, along with your feedback, reviews and ratings. You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Facebook at WonderstruckPod.

Wonderstruck is produced by Wonderstruck Productions along with the teams at Baillie Newman and FreeTime Media. Special thanks to Brian O’Kelley, Eliana Eleftheriou, Travis Reece, Raf Cross, Phil Plat, James Carpenter, Joe Keely, Lauren Gibbs and Angharad Wood. Thank you for listening. And remember, be open to the wonder in your own life.