The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Josh Peck: The "Drake & Josh" Child Star Opens Up + Shares The Truth Behind His 127lb Weight Loss!
Episode Date: April 13, 2023You feel as if you’ve grown up with him, he was a constant presence in the background of your childhood, the beloved character Josh on the wildly successfully Nickelodeon show ‘Drake and Josh’. ...However, you definitely don’t know the Josh behind the bright lights and rolling cameras. Growing up in poverty with a single mother and under the shadow of an absence father he never met, Josh channeled his pain into comedy and acting, sacrificing a normal childhood in order to support his family as a child star. However, on his journey to fame, these same mental crutches and defence mechanisms became Josh’s worst enemies. In this wide ranging conversation, Josh discusses his life of constant hustling and reinvention, from surviving the pitfalls of child stardom, to a dramatic weight loss journey and finding his niche as a pioneer in social media, this conversation will show you a Josh Peck you’ve never seen before. Josh: Youtube: http://bit.ly/3UABiY6 Instagram:https://bit.ly/414GxBG Twitter: https://bit.ly/41sHCDb Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo
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Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want
to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can
say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would
expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America,
thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack
and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United
States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard
in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And
thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue.
With Drake and Josh, I felt pissed that I... That started this whole mess.
Josh Beck, ladies and gentlemen!
He's an actor, comedian, one half of Drake and Josh.
A staple of my childhood.
Hug me, brother!
The headline of the first ten years of my life was,
single mom, never knew my dad,
didn't have enough money for a slice of pizza.
Fifteen years old, Drake and Josh.
One would assume that you'd be, like, set for life.
There was no residuals,
and I'm as worried about next year's financial status as anyone else.
I don't have that security.
And I do want to say that I was not properly appreciated for my work.
If I wanted to, at will, I could blow that up.
18 years old, you lose 127 pounds.
Yeah.
One would assume that dropping 127 pounds would make you feel different about yourself.
I dealt with the effect, but I didn't deal with the cause.
It was anger at my dad.
It was anger at my circumstance.
Everything was going right, and I still didn't feel like enough.
Substituting what I used food for with drinking and with other substance,
at 21, it all came barreling down on me.
I hurt relationships and work.
I worried the people that love me.
And I realized that I needed to do something.
And what you do in that moment
decides what's going to happen next for you.
You cannot think your way into right acting.
You have to act your way into right thinking.
Is there anything that's really helped you
that you might recommend to someone listening at home yes so
josh having read through your story extensively it's quite clear to me that
the the most pertinent part of your story and really like
the through line begins, the sort of dot in that through line begins with this dynamic your parents
had when you were very, very young. Can you take me back to 1980s in New York to give me the context
that I'll need to understand to understand the things we're going
to talk about today. Sure. I was born in 1986. I was born to a single mom and I never knew my dad.
I was sort of the result of a, I guess what you would call a fling. My mom always says you were a surprise, not an accident.
So I like the way she, the messaging, she's attached to that.
But basically my mom and dad knew each other sort of through business.
They had a night and nine months later came me.
So sort of so many different, especially now having two kids of my own,
knowing how the process of creating life can be tenuous and random and arbitrary, and it can be incredibly
easy or incredibly hard to know that they were together once. And it just sort of happened that
way is kind of crazy. It makes you believe like, oh, maybe I'm meant to be here, or at least that's what I tell myself. But yeah, I was the result of that. And my mom, who was 43 at the time, knew that she'd always whole other family, looked at it differently and decided not to be in my life.
And I wound up never meeting him.
And so my origins were very much my mom and I sort of navigating the world together.
At an early age, did you get a feel for what your mom's your mother's perspective was on your father
did you did you feel the emotion of that how her perspective on him my mom was weirdly
unemotional about my dad i would say it was almost like the fog of war. Or I remember when I interviewed Laird Hamilton and I asked him the
very corny cliche question of, when you're on a 90-foot wave, what's going through your head?
And he's like, you know, your body will sort of give you a bit of amnesia.
So I really can't tell you. When you're in extreme circumstance, your body is a way of
washing your memory. And we see that phenomenon too with like childbirth, right? Because if those
hours during childbirth really were as strong as, as they are when you're experiencing it,
we'd all be only children, right? But the brain has a wonderful way of washing that away. So
my mom did a really good job of presenting all the good qualities of
my dad, that he was a great business person, that he was charming, that he was handsome.
I, you know, he was like the Jewish James Bond walking the streets of New York, this handsome
raconteur. I say in my book, you know, he seemed pretty sterling. His only sort of negative was that
he really didn't want anything to do with me. So I think it wasn't until I got older
that my mom sort of elaborated a little bit more with details.
What was the emotion between you and your mother and the emotion in the household at the time?
Growing up, earning money was tough and things were slightly difficult, especially because your father had chosen not to be part of your
life.
But what was the emotion in your household, you know, below the age of 10?
The emotion in my household growing up, if I had to, if I had to find a headline, right?
Because sure, if you zoomed in on any moment, I could have been bullied at school or feeling insecure or feeling less
then than my friends who had traditional family systems or how come I don't get to experience that?
Surely there was plenty of that. But if we're talking about a headline of the first 10 years
of my life, it was a very extremely loving childhood, not without its challenges. And we would sort of vacillate
between moments of being extremely middle class and then having not enough money for a slice of
pizza between us. But inevitably, even through the struggles, there was a level of comedic relief.
We were always taking the piss
out of ourselves. My mom's a natural comedian. Her being a self-made businesswoman, especially
in the 70s and 80s when she had to be, forced her to be extremely funny and extremely savvy and
sort of puckish about the way in which he navigated the world and men and institutions.
And so I would say that most of the time we were laughing.
And there were certainly times where we were crying, but it was mostly laughter.
When you talk about your mother, the words you use almost make it sound more like a partnership than a mother-son relationship it sounds like you were like yeah partners
certainly we were partners i mean a single mom and an only child you are immediately elevated
to co-pilot whether you like it or not i always say that traditional families growing up were more
like i viewed them as close corporations and the kids were employees and the parents were upper management.
And the upper management was sort of beckoning down orders from the top.
And maybe there was seniority because there was an older sibling, but inevitably everyone
sort of had the same pace structure.
And then for my mom and I, we were more like a startup, right?
So one day I was pitching the clients and she was sweeping the floors.
And most days it was the other way around.
So yeah, I was the man in my mom's life.
Yeah.
Did you have any, you know, when you start talking in your book about
the pain that you were experiencing that led you to food and that, you know, when you start talking in your book about the pain that you were experiencing that led you to food and that ultimately led to bullying and all those things, what was that pain? speak generally as a reflection of something specific that went on with me, but dare I
project that we're all in a certain level of pain. The veil of adolescence falls for all of us at
different times in our lives where we realize that the world is unfair or we become more attuned to where we are not enough in certain areas and
the universe having a beautiful level of balance it's it's inevitable right i don't know of any
of tom brady's shortcomings but he's got to have one he's probably hiding it from the world but
um there's always something that that for for us is is a challenge or something that's uncomfortable.
And I think you'd be hard pressed to zoom in on any kid and especially preteen and teen
who doesn't feel like ultra sensitive, that the world is unfair, wrestling with their
place in this world, their identity, forming their identity. So for me, I just feel
like that was impressed upon me at a really young age. What's particular to me is I was really young.
And I think that was because of the dad stuff. I think that was because I was overweight.
So I just knew that life was going to be more challenging with the set of circumstances
that were at that point felt like sort of thrust upon me. I didn't know that I was sort of eating
in an unhealthy way. I just felt like I eat fruit snacks like every other kid. I just, you know,
do it in an excessive way. So I think that pain was just born out of what we all feel is that it
hurts to be different and it hurts to know that life is going to be challenging.
Earlier on, you said the word comedic relief when you were talking about the relationship
with you and your mother. Comedic relief, the word relief almost makes it sound medicinal, like some kind of medicine in your household.
What role did comedy play in your early years?
Comedy is, for my mom and I, it's everything.
It's everything we loved,
watching movies and television together,
sitcoms and standup comedy.
It was a release, it was a superpower. It was something
that came to both of us naturally, I'm sure as a byproduct of my mom's rearing and upbringing.
And she even talks about her dad, who I didn't know, my grandfather, who sounds like a pretty
deeply imperfect guy, but was a showman and did love to tell jokes and be funny
and a bit of the center of attention. And so for us, it was a currency. It was something that
worked immediately and it could control the energy of a room. It could endear people to you.
So you could really use it to your advantage.
But if anything, it was a wonderful distraction. The other thing you describe as a distraction is
TV. Yes. You refer to it as an escape for you at that time in your life. And you said in your book,
Happy People Are Annoying, that sitcoms were your favorite.
Why were they your favorite?
Well, sitcoms, especially at that time, I talk about how my best friends growing up were
the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore.
And sitcoms had some universal sort of qualities in my experience.
It projected a healthy family, right?
So it was family matters.
It was, I guess, Full House was sort of,
it was a healthy sort of non-classic family, right?
Because it was the dad and the uncles.
But these were people that,
these were families that
I wanted to be a part of. And then there was a justice to the comedy in the sense of you didn't
have to interpret it. It wasn't objective, or I'm sorry, it wasn't subjective. It was objective. It
was clear what worked and what didn't. It got a laugh. And at that time it was a live studio audience so you know something got a laugh
and uh and i would just lose myself in hours of watching these television shows
and i was absorbing the rhythms and the qualities through osmosis i didn't even know it at the time
but it also served as this wonderful escape and i say that becoming an actor was like for me going to work for the hospital
that cured my disease you know it felt like my way of saying thank you for taking care of me
during that time what was the disease well I I know it's a metaphor, but... Yeah, it's just like sort of a metaphor for my discomfort,
for having a lot of time on my hands because I was an only child,
because my mom had to work a lot to support us,
because there was some financial insecurity.
Just sort of all of the discomfort going on in between my ears
was sort of muted when I was losing myself in those shows.
One of the other things that we've touched on briefly
that you describe in a medicinal manner,
I think the quote in your book is actually,
I didn't know it at the time,
but obviously I was definitely medicating something deep within.
For me, when I think about my childhood,
the singular powerful and all-consuming memory
that comes to mind as being fat,
it wasn't a habit.
It was a love, my first love,
when you're talking about food.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's how you put on the weight.
Yeah.
Food is great.
I mean, you're a very fit person,
but I imagine you're a fan of food.
I love food.
Everybody does.
The whole world does.
You know who's not like the biggest food guy?
Who?
John Stamos.
And I don't mean to drop names here, but we did a show together and he's like, you know,
I could eat a turkey sandwich and be okay with it like most days.
And he's like, sometimes I'll forget to eat.
And yeah, I like a nice meal here and there, but I'm not too absorbed with it and I'm like I don't identify with this you and I are built differently
John well we know we know John Stamos is built different um but yeah I mean the whole world's
obsessed with food I was obsessed with it in a way that led to me being very overweight when you say very very overweight how much is that
and i guess the metric here is pounds isn't it i can give you kilos no i can't but what's kilos
about two and a half pounds you're asking the wrong 2.2 um do you want to do stones i know
you're from the uk pounds let's do stones for 14 15 stones yeah i think well like
basically it's funny because i was just kind of like a normal sized human till around eight or
nine and then i got kind of chubby and then i put on a lot of weight but it was only from about 13
to 18 uh where i was about uh 100 pounds overweight i was about 290 pounds okay which is 130 kilograms probably
and you're you're nine or ten you said uh no i i really put that weight on probably around nine or
ten i was probably 180 190 but i was only you know five foot and then as i got a little bigger
and older and also could you know go to restaurants or grab
fast food by myself I put on the pounds I've come to learn over the the years actually quite recently
the um the role the link between how I feel and how I eat yes you know I mean there's lots of
these links in our lives you know one of them is how we feel and money um how we feel and how we eat um i'm sure there's
many many more but um these are all like psychological tools in many respects and
medicinal tools often was there a point when you realized that the link between
your relationship with food and how you were feeling yeah i mean it came later, understanding the nuance and the correlation. But I mean, this is why actors smoke, right? Like traditionally, whenever you see movies where it's about show business and you see the actors sort of hanging outside of a soundstage because you do a take, you do a scene, you're not sure how it went. You think you were good. You hope, you know, there was one take that was good,
but maybe they're going to use the take where you kind of sucked.
And you're full of emotion and you're unsure and you're insecure.
And there's a table of food waiting for you, right?
Beautiful craft service like you've never seen, hot and cold.
And then, but instead you're like,
what can I do to give me that sort of dopamine
hit without, you know, giving me the calories? So, you know, people go outside and smoke.
Obviously now smoking's not as in fashion, so you see less of it. But I remember once I was
working with this actor, Paget Brewster. She's just a gem, brilliant actor. And she played my mom on this TV show. And I'll never
forget once they were serving pizza as sort of like the late night meal. We were working long
hours. And I remember her pulling the cheese and like pepperoni off the top of the pizza and eating
it. And she just sort of said, this is the actress pizza, right? Without the bread.
And I was like, how perfectly said, right?
And so, yeah, I think we all run to food
because it's represented to us as this,
it's a celebratory thing.
It's also something you do when things don't work out.
It's a cheat day.
But like, think about those words right we reward
ourselves with cheating right it's a funny sort of corollary but um and it's ubiquitous it's holiday
it's pumpkin spice season and uh at starbucks like all of these every great event is accompanied by a meal even the worst
events right like what do you hope for after a funeral well there'll be a nice spread we'll go
back and we'll have a nice spread when you say you were you were medicating something deep within
it seems like your relationship with food was a little bit more um unique shall i say yeah i think a lot of i don't think a lot of people
would say that they are using food as a way to medicate something deep within well they're
probably using it it's in some version of to medicate but maybe not it i i did it in excess
right i did it to an extreme in an extreme way yes there's a paradox there which you
highlight in your book where you say that like you were doing it to ease pain but it caused more pain
which is um i guess is the is the case with a lot of things where we have a unbalanced relationship
with them where like there's the short-term reward of the dopamine hit that you describe but then the long-term punishment is like the critique right and the self the self-talk i guess
and the the teasing as you you refer to it in your book that's you you experience that that
they're kind of like short-term pursuit of the dopamine hit short-term pain or um short-term
gain long-term pain yeah yeah i mean it's a paradox of addiction, right?
It's us running to,
I heard it said once,
someone in recovery said,
my disease lies in my dis-ease.
I become uncomfortable
and my coping mechanism,
the thing that my brain is trained to do
is to go to these things that numb the feeling.
It's another great term, numb and run. It numbs the feeling, it cauterizes it temporarily,
but inevitably it never deals with the underlying issue. So that continues to grow and push the
boulder up. So it requires more and more medication
and thus, you know, it makes you more and more unhappy. So, you know, whether that's food or
drug or drink or smoking, sex, you know, gambling, debt, whatever your thing is, it's, I mean, it's,
it's just whatever's triggering. I would would i would think that dopamine serotonin sort
of response it's pretty crazy that at like eight years old you were already doing stand-up yeah
that's that's boggles my mind at eight years old i was doing nothing productive i bet you were doing
probably the things eight-year-olds should do, like times tables and geography.
Yeah, stuff like that.
Like kicking a ball against a wall.
Yeah.
On my own or with a friend.
You were doing stand-up at eight.
You know, I had a couple of comedians on this podcast,
and there's this ongoing stereotype that a comedian is depressed or something.
And one of the comedians said to me that,
a better question to ask, I think it was Jimmy Carr,
he said, a better question to ask is, which one of your parents were you trying to make happy ah jimmy carr is so funny he's funny isn't he what a super like he's like a jedi he's on another level sure what parent
are you trying to make happy what girl are you trying to impress? I just think that we know that most assets
are born out of feelings of being not enough.
You know, how many great athletes were created
because they were trying to impress their fathers, right?
Admonishing fathers
help make very ambitious young men, you know, and, and young women, I don't mean to gender it.
Um, the problem is, is the duality of that because inevitably once hopefully you've achieved that,
you realize that there's no there, there, that there's no perfect moment that's going to heal
that relationship with that parent. Or worse, you don't attain those things. And then you're left to
wonder, well, what could it have been? And I fell short. I wasn't enough. But comedy is one of those
more specific things because there's a justice to it um it's there's not a
lot up for interpretation it's clear uh it's more like boxing i think chris rock akin akin to boxing
which is why they call it a punch line and you know it's on the cards that punch connected that
one didn't you get a point for that you don't get a point for this and yeah i think it's just born out of you know being funny usually comes from very unfunny
reasons and you know growing up and i i don't mean to say this even now like when i'll i'll
meet someone who's like really i'll just name names names. It's like, and he is funny, but it's like sometimes when I watch like Ashton Kutcher
go like in a really hard comedy and he's done some really, really funny things.
I know this is what you're going to clip me like trashing.
I want to be Ashton Kutcher.
I look up to him.
I love you, Ashton.
I'm available for friendship and I love your wife.
I love them both.
But it's like, it's sometimes it's hard for me to reconcile how someone can be that gorgeous and handsome and and also funny right like sometimes i do feel like no
funny's got to be reserved for us you know who who who weren't necessarily that because
yeah it was used as a defense mechanism did you know you wanted to be a comedian or an actor? And if so, when did you,
when did that idea become cemented in your brain that that's the path you were going to pursue?
Being an actor professionally didn't seem like a reasonable career path. Sometimes it still doesn't,
but here I am. It was ridiculous. I grew up in New York. I'm not a nepo baby. I have no connection
to show business other than a very sticky mother. Do you know this word, schtick?
Yeah.
Okay. I have a mom who loves a bit and she's a natural performer. She has a beautiful
singing voice, but literally no connections to show business in any way. So it was not
reasonable to think that
there would be any opportunity to do it professionally. And then I was in sixth grade
and my mom and I were having a really tough moment financially. We're living in an apartment
on the east side of Manhattan. It was like a studio apartment and we would sort of switch
off between the bed and the couch. One night I'd get the bed, one night I'd get the couch.
And I remember my mom saying,
you know, there's a performing arts high school
that you should audition for.
And I said, but I'm gonna go to the high school
in my district, like where my elementary school was.
She goes, you don't have a district anymore.
We don't live there anymore.
And I realized, okay, well,
yeah, maybe I'll give this school a shot because I'm not going to be in high school now with my
friends who I grew up with. And I auditioned and I went and I got in and suddenly I'm walking the
halls of this school, the Professional Performing Arts School, which is in the theater district in New York near Times Square.
And they had alumni like Alicia Keys and Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes.
And they were all older than me.
But all of a sudden, I'm seeing kids who are in Broadway shows, TV shows, and they're studying, but they're also successful on this grown-up level.
And it seemed possible that you could make a living
doing this thing that I loved.
So I remember that was the first time
where I had a suspicion like,
oh, this might be a long-term gig.
And eventually then once I basically,
once it became a way out of my circumstance
and it allowed me to sort of
contribute to the family financially I was I was all in it just seemed like an escape
and you were what age then like 12 16 I think I was 12 yeah 12 and then by 16 a chance meeting
with someone from Nickelodeon sends things in another direction.
No, that was 12.
Oh, when you were 12?
I used to audition like every other day
at Nickelodeon, their Viacom headquarters
was in Times Square.
I've been, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know the one, yeah.
And I auditioned for a movie.
I got it.
They fly me to Canada.
Never been out of the country now.
And if you're going to go out of the country for the first time, make it Canada because it's
lovely. And I'm sitting there one day in Calgary, Canada, making jokes to some 40-year-old guy with
a great laugh and a huge parka. And my mom sidles up to me and she goes, you know who that is? You were
making laugh. That's, that's the president of Nickelodeon, a guy named Albie Hecht. You should
tell him that you want to be on all that, which was kind of SNL for kids at that time. It was my
dream. So I told him and nine months later he called and said, Josh, I'm going to move you and your mom out to California to go be on the Amanda show, which was the spinoff for Amanda Bynes from all that. And that was kind of what changed my life and brought me out to LA and gave me my first TV show and kind of started this whole mess this whole mess interesting way to describe it it boggles my mind that you're
doing that at 12 i i um i don't even know how that's possible for it you know it feels like
there's a lot of other things we're meant to be doing when we're 12 you were you were working
essentially yeah yeah i was what did you miss did you miss anything i in hindsight a lot i mean you can
speak to a better i don't know what i didn't miss i mean but you if you had a more traditional sort
of adolescence right did you yeah i did yeah yeah yeah so like school stuff like the prom and
playing football and with the team and you know primary school primary
school as well yeah figuring yourself out more than anything uniforms i wish i went to school
in the uk it seems awesome yeah it's not bad yeah i loved matilda room for improvement oh
matilda's dope it's dope it's uh it's such a classic i um yeah i i miss out on a lot. Absolutely.
You know, it's funny.
People love this question.
It kills me.
I don't know why.
Because now I have two sons of my own
and they're always like,
you're going to put them in show business?
Like, it's weird.
I don't know why that is.
I don't know if people say to lawyers or carpenters,
like, is your son going to hit nails?
Like, are you going to, like, read your son depositions?
I guess because the idea is that why wouldn't you want them to?
And while I would love for them to, if they love performing, to find some joy in it, my upbringing, my circumstance was so specific. It was inevitable that if this was
meant for me, that it was going to be meant for me. And I mean that as we could move 3,000 miles
because it was just me and my mom. We could uproot our whole life. I was an overweight kid,
so I didn't get a lot of self-esteem from the traditional systems that
people, the kids gain it from. But I found this performing thing. So of course my mom goes,
well, I'm going to nurture this the way I would if it were a little league or it was an instrument.
So my environment, my upbringing allowed for me to go on this really nontraditional path.
My kids don't have that.
They have a very different experience.
They have like a very rooted household.
They have a huge family.
They have a mom and dad.
And it's not necessarily that one's better than the other, but it's just like their experience
will be different.
And if when my son's 18 and he's like, I want to go to juilliard or i want to do it
professionally that's great but maybe his circumstance won't lend itself to start that early
it's so interesting yep but it makes so much sense you know that circumstance and struggle
are factors that orientate us towards um towards our mission and it's so it's so you know
i i think we often understate how like trauma and things we'd never wish on a child end up
creating their brilliance you think about like the the brilliance you've created the work you've
created that is brilliant so much of it has a through line way back to things that you would
never wish on your kids yes right 15 years old you start um
filming the pilot for drake and josh one of the things i found really interesting when i was
reading through your book is one would assume that such a hit show a show that we all knew very very
well in the uk off the back of it one would assume that you'd be like set for life financially yeah
and you write about how that's like,
that was certainly not the case.
Yes.
And I do want to say that my first Kids' Choice Award
was won at the UK Kids' Choice Awards in London.
Now I had been nominated a lot.
It's not sour grapes, but allow me to continue.
I was not
properly appreciated for my work in the American Kids' Choice Awards, but it took you brilliant
people in the United Kingdom to appreciate my overweight but wonderfully comedic work as a young actor. So I want to thank you. Yeah, I think, look,
I'm so pleased to talk about this stuff with you, someone who's like, has wonderful insight
into the book and is interested. And it felt like the book for me was sort of like, I don't, I really, I don't do a lot of this anymore because the book
felt like sort of a chapter ending in my life. It was me editorializing my life. It was commenting
on the things that I felt were perhaps misunderstood or didn't have enough clarification
or description. And also in an effort unknowingly to sort of say like,
and now I'm going to talk about it less.
And if someone is interested, like they can, you know,
read the book and it's now, you know, in the Library of Congress.
And so to that point, I felt the need because over the years,
people would either say it in a cheeky way like,
oh, well, you don't have to worry because of the residuals. Or they would say just something random
like, you know, it would actually be part of decision making or something that would apply
to me. They're like, well, Josh doesn't have to worry. And I was like, well, I'm not complaining,
but I'm as much, you know much worried about next year's financial status
as anyone else because I don't have that security. So yeah, with Drake and Josh, there was no
residuals and Kid C.V. didn't have that at that time. And I got really honest and I sort of broke
it down because Ryan Holiday, my friend and sort of advisor on the book, was like, if you don't, he's like, it's gross to talk about money, but if you don't actually give a sort of
exact picture of what it was, then people won't understand. And so I sort of talk about that,
you know, while doing the show, we made about $100,000 a year for the four years we were making it, which is great money and a
lovely middle-class lifestyle, but no one would assume that once you stop working, that you never
had to work again. So I just wanted to give some clarity to that, to sort of explain the choices
that I made after and why I was so passionate about finding more work. Cause I, um, I had some
people to take care of.
Makes perfect sense. And I think it's really important context because you're right. It's
very easy when you don't know entertainment contracts, especially for a young person that's
15 odd years old, to assume that they made millions and millions in perpetuity from that
piece of work. And then a lot of the decisions and the choices thereafter don't have are lacking in context so when i read that it was like i understood
of course if you make a hundred thousand dollars in the united states living in california whatever
it is for five years in a row um you do need to go back to work and after drake and josh ended
was there was there like a pivotal moment where you realized that that show was big?
It wasn't until much later, funny enough.
I think because when we were making it,
it was only popular with kids who were sort of younger,
who I didn't, other than if I was at a mall
or at a theme park,
I didn't have a huge amount of interaction with.
And then I would say that the power of the show to its credit was that it was slightly timeless
because it had a very sort of classic through line of any sitcom. It was about a family.
And a lot of kids shows can be more fantastical and have more of a sci-fi bent or something more
fantasy or whimsical this was just like very straight down the line two brothers who are
very different trying to get along uh and an evil little sister so because of how much it was rerun
more generations would come to the show and these people grew up so it wasn't as
though it was this moment in time it was every year we were picking up new fans because there
was what 60 episodes or something yeah just like there was so much more i know it's weird why is
that i guess reruns yeah it played for so long after drake and josh ended and as you go into
like you you know the next chapter of your life 18 years old you lose a lot of weight i do a lot
of weight 127 pounds yeah how does that's not an easy feat how does that happen I certainly made a decision that I was
ready to do it um I think I just I always knew that I was going to do it and also in writing
the book it's when you put pen to paper and I know you're a writer yourself it's amazing how
these I feel as though we make these,
everything in our brain is sort of shorthand, right? It's like these picture memories that
are connected. And sometimes they're connected by these really strong connections. And sometimes
it's just like short little hits. But when you're forced to actually explain it on a page,
it makes you look at it differently and i was like wow i
was only heavy from like 13 to 17 of course they're the years that have been enshrined in
television history forever so it feels much bigger but had i just been like a normal kid
i would have burned my yearbooks and sworn my family to secrecy and I'd never bring it up. So I think it was a number of
things. I was ready. I think naturally like my body was ready to let go of it. And I just knew
that I, I felt like because I was so insecure, I had missed out on a lot of my teenage years um it wasn't without lack of opportunity to
go out and and be a knucklehead and experience life i just didn't want to do it because i didn't
love the body that i was in so i felt like if i didn't if i didn't act now i was going to lose
some really important years is there is there a process that helped you?
Because I'm thinking about how you referred to it
as being like medicinal, your relationship with food.
And that's like deeply psychological.
So to like append that deep psychological force
or that relationship with food is no easy feat.
So like what's the process?
Is it therapy?
Is it that makes you,
that kind of appends that psychological force
or replaces it
or i think it was i i had been i i've i've had a therapist that that i've gone to since i was 15
and and i still see here and there so my mom kind of knew i think she saw it in me early on that
there was just a lot going on be it my dad or the weight stuff. And then I think I would just, in the way that change is born,
you know, pain is a great motivator. I was sort of sick and tired of being sick and tired.
And I knew that I had to let go of something. I don't think I knew exactly what it was,
but if I'm looking back at it now, it was it was this anger it was anger at my my dad it was
anger at my circumstance and I just remember I was 17 years old my mom and I would drive back
to New York every year for like two months and we would just go and see family and hang out in the
city and I just started to walk and up until then I would do these really intense, you know, attempts at keto or
these extreme diets on a Monday, and I would fail by Wednesday morning, and then it would be
back on again. But this time, I said, I'm just going to try to make a small change every day.
And I would walk the city for miles, and I would listen listen to music and I would dream of what my life could
be. And I started eating better and slowly but surely that summer I lost like 40 pounds. And
then over the next year I lost another 40. And then over the next year I lost another 40.
In chapter five of your book, you say you had a new body, but the exact same self-hating mind one would assume that you know dropping 127 pounds one would naively assume that dropping 127 pounds
would would make you feel different about yourself yeah well it's um
it's sort of the themes that you've mentioned throughout this interview, it's cause and effect, right?
Like I dealt with the effect, but I didn't deal with the cause.
And unfortunately, there were some issues at play.
There was some unresolved pain and work that needed to be done that I wasn't even aware of.
But it was all at play under the surface.
So when I no longer had that thing that was helping to
sort of keep those feelings at bay, they reared their head and I needed to find something else.
I didn't know that it was going to be in the form of, you know, drinking and sort of alcohol's
cousins. But I just knew that when I finally did find those things
and I did sigh that bit of relief
that I'd been looking for,
I think there was even a moment in that first night
when I went out with some other kids my age
and really tied one off
and thought I was having like a proper teenage time.
I remember this voice in my head being like oh this is it like this is what
we've been looking for um drinking yeah the drinking and and drugs and i i i i think i say
something in the book of like if you've been carrying this invisible bag of stones around
your whole life a weight vest with 50 to 100 extra pounds. I mean,
I quite literally was, but let's just say it's like emotional weight vest. And eventually you
almost forget that it's on. You just know your knees hurt. You know, you're exhausted. It's like,
why am I so tired? Why do things feel tougher for me than it does for my friends?
And then if in an instant that weight vest is lifted off of you and your knees hurt less and you're walking around and you're like,
oh, you wouldn't question it.
You'd just be like, whatever just took that weight vest off, I'm in.
And that was the reaction that I had.
Such an interesting analogy. The, the weight vest, you know, you said the term self-hating mind
for someone that hasn't experienced a self-hating mind. What is, what is that like in detailed
reality? Is it literally thoughts that you can recall that are saying being pessimistic?
I probably, if I could edit my book now, I would be probably less,
I'd be less revealing. No, I would be less, I would be less, I would be a little harder on
myself and say it's self-centered. If we're talking about
the root of it, I remember when I got sober, people would say, you're self-centered. And I
would say, self-centered, that's reserved for people who think highly of themselves. That's
reserved for the quarterbacks, the models, the good looking, the self absorbed people, to me, felt
when you would see that in movies, it was someone who was staring in the mirror and
perfecting their hair. And they would say, No, if you spend all your time thinking about how great
you are, or how shit you are, all you're thinking about is you and you are self-centered. It doesn't matter whether it's great or bad. So I would,
yeah, I would substitute self-hating with self-centered. I was obsessed with self.
My trauma was real. My challenges were real and that played a part in it. But I was just so wrapped up in my feelings of feeling less than and uncomfortable and not proverbially,
not at the cool table that, um, I, you know, found myself in a place to numb my, my feelings
because those thoughts were, were unrelenting.
Nothing in life is free.
And so even a temporary lifting of the weight vest comes with a long-term cost,
as we talked about with food.
What was that long-term cost of temporarily
getting to lift the weight vest once in a while?
I just became a cliche quick.
I hurt relationships and work.
I worried the people
that love me. I just started to accrue a lot of wreckage quickly. It's funny. I interviewed
Hilary Duff on my podcast, Good Guys, the other day and we made a joke. I was asking her about
she brought up something about like, oh, I love an alcoholic beverage. And she kind of looked at
me and said, sorry, Josh. And I was like, no, I love an alcoholic beverage too. Unfortunately,
whenever I drink, it leads to my other favorite beverage, Percocet,
which is a very popular painkiller in this country. And I remember people sort of saying like they were so sort of, they just didn't know sort of my, they didn of how much I would sort of talk about it and,
and, uh, and reveal. And then also sort of this, this balancing of like the things that I also
wanted to keep private. When did you realize that you had a, a problem with alcohol or an unhealthy
relationship with alcohol and drugs? Was a because at the time i imagine you
don't the first time you do it you don't know it's not a problem then is it but at some point
you must have maybe got some feedback or something indicated that this was not oh and i'm sorry i
forgot the point i was trying to make with the hillary thing but oh someone wrote a comment on
that clip on that video said damn josh peck got sober at 21 he really went for it so to answer
your follow-up question yeah i mean i think that i basically was substituting what i used food for
with these you know with with drinking and with other substance,
but it was all sort of connected.
So it wasn't this four-year run.
It was really like since I was nine or 10 years old,
it just was, again, validating and reconfirming this idea
of like you overdo things
and nothing is going to fill up this hole in the soul, no matter what you try to fill it with.
And even like the things that our world tells us is a value, even success isn't going to do it.
Even if girls like you, it's not enough.
And so I remember at 21 having a moment like that when it all sort of came
sort of barreling down on me. And I realized that I needed to do something. Now, I think people have
those moments and they don't do anything and they lose another four years or five or 10 or 20.
But I do think the world and life, catastrophe, challenging circumstance, some version of a bottom, whatever you're going through, being fired from something, uh, a health scare has a way of temporarily waking you up and what you do in that moment, um, decides what, what's going to happen next for you.
You said that happened for you at 21 years old
was that was that in the wake of the film the whackness it was yeah that was certainly a moment
tell me about that moment well again i i had accrued plenty of wreckage but i remember i
i had done this movie the whackness that i was extremely proud of with my favorite
actor sir ben kingsley you know and mean, literally my favorite actor, like getting to,
you know, have my rookie season with Michael Jordan. And it went to the Sundance Film Festival
and I was so proud and we got a standing ovation and it just felt like such a confirmation for me
as an actor that there was going to be, that there was going to be opportunity and there was,
there was more to come for my career,
that it wasn't just this sort of anomaly that I did this one show
and that that was sort of going to be it.
But I remember in that moment all those similar feelings,
that mind that had gotten me in trouble so many times before
was still yelling at me, and all those feelings were flooding in. They weren't
there the night we got the, they weren't there during the 90 seconds of the standing ovation.
They weren't there, you know, when I was smiling in front of the camera, but they were there when
I got home. They were there when I got in bed. They were there when I was waiting in line for
a coffee the next morning or whatever else I was doing. So it was like so short-lived. And it just confirmed this idea of like, oh, like even at your best, even when
everything's kind of going right. Because it's easy to use when life throws you challenges as
a reason to sort of, you know, co-sign your bad behavior but everything was going right and I still didn't feel like enough
and I knew at that point that I needed to make a change or or I might never do it
that next day after the standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival you talk about you know
how you might have felt standing in the coffee line or the next day when you woke up etc
is this are those are these specific thoughts or is it just an emotional state? You know what I mean? Is it
just like a lowness? Yes, it's totally emotional and it's ugly, like the way, like how we're all
pitiful in those moments. I don't think you have to be, suffer from addiction or it's just like when we realize that our way isn't working anymore
and a change needs to occur and so yeah I certainly it's taken 15-16 years to
articulate it correctly I think it was just a feeling. Your solution to that feeling appears to be,
you know, when you hit that proverbial rock bottom moment
to be getting some help.
And that's where you turn to AA, Alcoholics Anonymous.
What is that, like, what is Alcoholics Anonymous?
And like, how did it help you turn things around
and get sober?
Well, you know, it's sort of in the name Anonymous that there's an anonymity portion to it.
So I always want to make sure it's said that I'm in no way sort of a representative or ambassador for it in any way.
It's just how I have found a way in which to get and stay sober over the last 15 years is through a 12-step program.
And it's just a way, it's ancient truths repackaged to make sense to a guy like me.
It's the best way. It helps to mitigate the worst of my character defects. And it's just age old. It's just a sort of, for me,
an age old way of cleaning up your past and looking at bad patterns and habits in my life
and making amends and trying to implement things that through history we have known to work gratitude surrender acceptance
if you want self-esteem do esteemable acts restraint of pen and tongue you know just like
um you know it's not you know your higher power is up to you as long as you know that you're not
god that one's that one's helpful. It just presented
some ways in which for me to apply things to my life that helped me to get and stay sober.
So I think if the efficacy wasn't there, if I didn't see quickly that I started to feel better,
then maybe I would have sought a different way. This was a way that happened to work for me.
And you've been sober for some what 13 13 years
15 15 recently yeah just uh february 15th congratulations thanks it works for me yeah
it's incredible incredible um achievement you know everyone's got their own relationship with
with alcohol and whatever else but it's always incredible to hear um someone being able to
turn a corner in the direction they wanted to turn it
that's the way i can describe it thank you 2013 you kind of start from reading your book it sounds
like you start on a new a new journey and that's the journey to understand who your father is you're
27 at this point so almost 30 years old and your father passes away um and you
make the decision at that point having not met him before and having not seen a picture of him until
you were 24 years old to figure out who he was what did you learn about him and how did that
change your perspective of him well i remember i'd always sort of toyed with this idea of meeting him. And yet I think I knew deep down I never would because my creation of him in my head,
the way that I sold him to my friends or the way I would portray him to people felt like
my weird cosmic consolation prize.
Like I don't get to have him in any way, but I can present him to people in
the way in which I choose. Not that I was telling people that my dad was, you know, the first man on
the moon or anything like that. It just was like, you know, my mom knew that he was Jewish and that
he was Sephardic, which is a type of Jew that tends to be from
either the Middle East or from Morocco or French
or it can be South America, Mexican.
And so for me, I would just like ping pong
where he was from.
Sometimes he was from Spain.
Sometimes he was from Israel.
Sometimes he was from Morocco.
I just would kind of present
it as I so fit. And, and it felt like if I ever met him, well, then I, I lost even the illusion
or this creation of my dad that I wanted to make. So I, but when I found out that he passed away,
it also felt like a little bit of this thing that I'd been carrying around, this emotional grenade that I could, you know, I had the power in the sense that I could show up and he had this whole other family and these grown kids and a wife.
And if I wanted to, at will, I could blow that up for him.
If in theory he never had told them anything.
I was never going to do it, but it was nice to know right like
whatever version my head was telling me like to keep me warm at night so when he passed away i
was like oh damn he won right perfect record like he set his mind to something and he stuck to it
he's like i'm never gonna meet that kid and he didn't and i never got that moment to sort of say
like how dare you I don't know if
it would have been that probably wouldn't have been it probably would have been like hey I'm
your kid what's up like do you want to get a coffee um but you know all of that was sort of
taken away from me so I felt I felt pissed that I had to mourn this guy that I never knew.
And that I was mourning, like mourning is in theory sort of the worst part of,
it's sort of the other side of love, right? The gift is you get to love and the embrace of someone.
And then what comes with that is that eventually if they're not here anymore,
you have to mourn them.
You have to mourn what was.
And I was like, there was nothing.
And I still have to get the crappy side of this?
It doesn't seem fair.
But it forced me to do something
that inevitably led to my amends
and my amends that I gave myself,
which was I randomly looked up his kids on Facebook.
My friend figured out a way to,
my friend, a buddy of mine basically was looking with me
and was like, oh, there was a connection
between him and my sister.
They had attended a similar like workshop
or some kind of like education program.
He's like, maybe under the guise of that, I could become her friend.
And like, then, you know, I could see if on her profile, she has any photos of your dad.
I had never seen what he looked like.
She accepts it.
And I am immediately given this like treasure trove of photos of his life. And I'm seeing him at their bar mitzvahs and
weddings and all these events. And I'm seeing these beautiful tributes that his friends and
family are making to him after he passed away. And it made me realize that like what my dad was
for me wasn't the only part of him you know it certainly was a
real part of him but he also was this great dad just not to me and that's not uh valid there are
that's not not valid that's um that's a part of this imperfect man. So it like gave me a little bit of forgiveness for this guy.
And it made me realize that he was probably scared and he had probably had this great,
perfect record with his family. And then this blemish occurred and he did the best that he
could. So in a weird way, seeing that he was good to them made me a little more okay that maybe he wasn't great to me
and and then of course having a son of my own and being the dad to my two boys now uh that i wish my
dad was for me was sort of like the ultimate amends to eight-year-old josh
what's that journey been like you know from i almost view it as like a an emotional journey
on like some kind of like graph or something almost like a roller coaster from when you were
young to where you are now in terms of the perspective of your father and the relationship
you know was there was there resentment at one point you seem to have gotten to a better place
with it now yeah but what's that journey like the resentment i think at its at its highest
is uh showcased in me being 100 pounds overweight right or you know my struggles after that i i
think that was certainly um it was all that resentment and anger and frustration and unexplored feelings presenting itself as as whatever that was as those addictions
right they were the manifestation of a deeper issue they were a symptom of a deeper issue
i was just pondering because i've i know people that haven't had a relationship with their father
obviously nothing is definitively causal like it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to tell
any other way but um one of the the trends you tend to hear about is when is that connection
between not believing you're enough and your father not being around are they connected for
you like the do you know what i mean i'm saying it does the absence of your father did that ever
leave a thought that said he left but you know that means I'm not enough because he chose not to be here?
It must.
I don't see how it couldn't be.
But what I've also learned in being sober this long
and hearing a lot of other people's experiences
is that my story, my feelings are not rare,
but they're not a monolith.
They're not singular.
I've heard plenty of stories of people who had pretty idyllic upbringings,
and they just happen to suffer from this thing where they do too much.
And this particular mental bend that makes them look at life
or makes them seek out a way of numbing their feelings.
So what I know now is that
certainly I think you're right. It was part of my story, but it's not the only way.
I think I've kind of grown in, that trend in my mind has grown a little bit because I spoke to
Gabor Mate, who does a lot of childhood trauma stuff. And one of the things he said is that
as children, we're narcissists. I've never been able to forget that and we think everything is about us
so right if you know if the father leaves for example instead of thinking well that's
because he has another family or because he's scared or whatever it's that's about me when you
when you're younger um yeah and then you as you say you had your own boy yes now two boys crazy two boys you have kids
not yet i can tell because you're in such good shape
were you scared to become a father feels of your own terrified because i i just didn't
i didn't have any work life experience. Yeah.
I just didn't know.
Look, I'm a formerly chubby musical theater kid from New York.
Like, I never thought anything that was masculine, I never thought I had the prerequisites for that.
That was like inherently dude-ish.
I've always been like a guy.
Like, I love boxing. Like, I've always been like a guy, like I love
boxing. Like I've always bro-ed down. I've always, you know, had all those inherent qualities,
but those things that felt like presentationally macho or dude-esque, I was just like, oh, I don't
have that. And so, yeah, I wanted to have a girl.
And then when my son was born, my wife and I didn't find out the sex.
And so, you know, at nine months and a couple days when the doctor was like,
what is it, Josh?
And I got to announce to the room, like, it's a boy.
I was like, oh, of course.
Because it was required for me. You know, my life turned into man school, you know, especially in sobriety. I had to learn, and I don't mean to make it this
blanketed definition, for me, what it meant to be a man and the qualities that I had to sort of
accrue, the things that no matter how great
my mom was couldn't give me because she was just limited by what one person can do the things that
I learned from my big brother Dan I've had a big brother in in the state of the big brother
foundation I've had a big brother since I was eight years old and things that I learned from
him and then eventually my father-in-law who I really look up to and all the great men in my life and all these, these assets,
these tools that I had learned, you know, when I had my son, Max, I was like, okay,
here's my opportunity now to implement that and see everything that I've collected, what I can
give him. And, uh, it just felt felt perfect it felt like God's way of like
having a laugh and be like you you knew this was gonna happen right
you married Paige yes you had the two wonderful children um I had a guest on the podcast quite
recently who said who described somewhat of a similar upbringing where the father wasn't around and him and his mum acted almost like pilot and co-pilot.
And he, one of the terms he said to me, I can't remember, it was something, something ancestral, something.
I know that sounds strange, but it was something to do with the fact that when you have such a close relationship to your partner to your mother and they end up indirectly or inadvertently
offloading some of the emotional energy around the parent that's not there it can make your own
personal relationships difficult yeah can you relate i can except that i think that everyone
is bad at relationships and i think just like i believe that even if you have a perfect parental structure,
we will self-parent. There's always going to be gaps in our rearing. There's always going to be
spots that were missed as a result of your upbringing and your circumstance and the way
in which you've experienced life up to a certain point and it's incumbent on you to fill in those gaps that's growing up right to even know what those
gaps are yeah right what what for you what were those gaps you had to fill in well i think it was
with the dad stuff it was about in relationships up into my wife i had this like I would call it like the Tony Montana approach to life which was like
if anything went wrong if there was any sort of adversity or any kind of I mean at this point
right like I'm I've dealt with the dad stuff and then I've been in showbiz till you know since I
was 10 right which is the ultimate rejection right right? You're, you're being,
you're going on a job interview at best, even if you're on a TV show, you're interviewing for a job once or twice a year. And if you are an out of work actor, you're, you're interviewing for a job
four times, five times a month, sometimes more during pilot season. Right. So you really have
to calcify or, uh, calcify. Yeah. Like you have to calcify, or calcify, yeah,
like you have to become callous to rejection.
It's like if you ever talk to a doctor
like about death,
they have a very interesting bent on it
because they can't be overly emotional about it
because it's a part of their job.
So until this point in relationships,
if anything went south, I just would go, this is a preview of more bad to come.
This isn't natural growing pains.
This isn't natural discourse or just like the natural arguments that you get in and then you get through them and you become closer.
I would just go, this was great.
I'll be fine without you.
Thanks.
And I would just go, leaving people in my I'll be fine without you. Thanks. And I would just
go leaving people in my wake to feel like what the hell happened.
How did you reverse that to the point that you were able to find someone and get married?
Luckily, I was in a state of doing the work I was willing to be. I was not doing that specific work,
but in general, because I was in a recovery program,
because my mom had put good people around me, and because I had done therapy since I was a kid,
I like knew, I was self-aware enough to know like, oh, there's certainly work to be done here.
But it wasn't until I had a woman like my wife in my life who taught me a better way,
who came from a family that doesn't leave.
And she reiterated that.
So when we get in these fights,
and I would look at her and be like,
so I guess we should call it.
Like, this was great, right?
She'd be like, what?
Like, no, like, I'm not going anywhere.
And neither are you.
We can be mad at each other.
We can go to bed mad.
I love that when people go,
you don't go to bed mad.
I'm like, I don't know, not in my experience.
You can go to bed, you can be mad for a couple days.
Usually it doesn't last that long.
No one wants to be that pissed that long.
But it's like, but when we work this out,
I'll be here because I'm not going anywhere because my siblings never went
anywhere my mom and dad never went anywhere like we stick around through the good and the bad and
that was a revelation for me i can so relate in so many ways i have the same avoidant attachment
stuff for various reasons and then i've i met a person i always say that like got over the wall you know like yeah you know and changed you from the inside um definitely so i
can totally totally relate where that's why you have to have a that's why if if it's for you you
have to have a kid because in my experience and i say it in the book you don't we all work on
ourselves and especially with incredible podcasts like this and we're in the age of optimization and self-realization and everyone's listening to a dozen podcasts at a time and wants to be their best version of themselves.
And that's great.
But we can't be Fabergé eggs, right?
Like we can't be these perfect, pristine things and then we get jostled around a bit by life and we shatter.
And so to me, I think there's
only so much work you can do on your own. And then it has to be like applied into life. And then you
put some skin in the game and you get in a relationship and that forces you to go deeper.
And you're like, I don't want to. And they're like, well, you better. Otherwise this thing's
not going to work. But you meet someone of value and you do
the work and it reveals itself to be worth it. And it gives you a deeper understanding. And then
once you guys get really perfect, you throw a kid in the mix. And that little jerk makes you go even
deeper and work even harder and become even more selfless, hopefully, and less self-centered.
And again, new truths are revealed
and new ways of living are revealed. So yeah. On all the things we've talked about today,
the mental talk, the voice in your head, the feelings of, you know, quote unquote,
self-hatred, self-esteem, happiness. Where are you as you sit here today on that journey i i'm i'm in a wonderful
place my life you know is a reflection of how do i say it my life is is that of a good man's
now i i say that not in like some big self-congratulatory way, but I just did the things that I was told to do by people whose life I wanted.
You know, I surrounded myself with the people who weren't telling me the things I wanted to hear, but their life looked attractive.
And it wasn't because they had a nice car or they had an impressive job. Those things don't hurt, but it was because they seemed deeply
decent, that they had a good spiritual life and that they were good partners. They were good
fathers. They were good sons. And that was attractive to me. So I implemented that into
my life on a regular basis. And the by-product of that was a really good life that I'm completely overpaid to have today.
And I still, just as much as I say, I rarely wake up in the morning in the mood for a salad.
I usually want French toast.
I wake up in the morning most times.
It's usually not the morning.
I am a morning person.
It's usually at 4 a.m. at night or 2 a.m. or 5 in the afternoon when I'm overtired
and I had too much sugar when my mind starts going, just remember, it's all going to be bad.
You know that, right? But I have tools. I have ways in which of dealing with that
to get out of those thoughts, to break that bad cycle. So it's just the voices are never gone, but the volumes turn down.
I have to ask you, I've got one last question here in the diary that the last guest has left for you.
But when you said you have tools, I was compelled because I know that there's someone at home who can completely relate.
And they're sat there thinking josh what are the tools
is there anything that's really helped you sort of turn down the volume on that that you might
recommend to someone listening at home i would just say and my friend john aka wheels um
his motto was action is the magic word and you cannot think your way into right acting you have
to act your way into right thinking and I always felt like I'm reasonably articulate and I've you
know I've prided myself on having what I thought was like a good mind I gotta be able to think my
way out of this thing like I have to be able to think my way out of this thing.
I have to be able to impress my will on this thing
and wrestle it to death.
I just can't believe it.
And it's the duality of these things
because didn't I get myself this far?
Didn't me taking my life and my will into my hands,
didn't I get all this success and notoriety
and blah, blah, blah?
And it's like, well, there was a part of it that that,
but maybe you got that in spite of it.
You know, maybe the truth is,
is that these things, you know,
they need to be governed.
They need to be throttled
because inevitably they'll pervert.
They will, they'll ruin, you know,
that I just learned this this they say a couple bad
apples but the next part of that is a couple bad apples ruins the barrel right so it's like i have
to be careful with those thoughts and those feelings because they can ruin everything so
what i would say is when when i take the action to get out of self, when I become in service to others,
when I do some reading,
when I listen to a great podcast like this
about people who are seekers,
who are trying to better themselves,
if you take the action, something will change.
If you sit and you try to wrestle it,
in my experience, it'll never work.
Amen. The question left for you who is the one person
in your life that deserves the greatest thanks and if you were to give them the thanks today
what would you say well i i i almost don't want to because it almost like,
because she loves her flowers.
But yeah, I got to give it to my mom.
It all starts and ends with my mom.
And we have a deeply imperfect relationship because we're two deeply imperfect people.
But at its core, she did more than I could have ever imagined.
And especially being a father and seeing how challenging it can be
with all the help in the world.
And she did it all by herself.
And I just give her all the credit in the world.
So much of why I'm here today is because of her.
So thanks, mom.
I hope you don't watch this, but thank you.
I love you.
Josh, thank you so much.
It's been an honor to meet you
and learn about your story.
And I'm a big follower now of your YouTube channel.
So please do post a lot more because it's enjoyable to watch.
You bring an important energy to the world.
And your book is one of the most vulnerable, revealing, but wisdom-laced books I've had the privilege of reading in my research for a podcast.
So I recommend everybody to go grab a copy.
I love the title,
Happy People Are Annoying. It's a truly important book. Thank you.