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, 2023

You 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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Starting point is 00:00:00 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
Starting point is 00:00:37 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,
Starting point is 00:00:58 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.
Starting point is 00:01:19 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,
Starting point is 00:01:42 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.
Starting point is 00:02:01 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.
Starting point is 00:02:57 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.
Starting point is 00:04:10 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
Starting point is 00:05:03 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
Starting point is 00:05:50 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?
Starting point is 00:06:32 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.
Starting point is 00:07:29 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
Starting point is 00:08:17 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
Starting point is 00:09:08 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
Starting point is 00:10:06 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
Starting point is 00:10:57 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.
Starting point is 00:11:34 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.
Starting point is 00:12:27 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?
Starting point is 00:13:00 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
Starting point is 00:13:38 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.
Starting point is 00:14:29 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,
Starting point is 00:14:48 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,
Starting point is 00:15:01 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,
Starting point is 00:15:16 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
Starting point is 00:16:06 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
Starting point is 00:16:58 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.
Starting point is 00:18:01 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.
Starting point is 00:18:45 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
Starting point is 00:19:16 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
Starting point is 00:20:12 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,
Starting point is 00:20:53 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
Starting point is 00:21:25 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.
Starting point is 00:22:08 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
Starting point is 00:22:37 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
Starting point is 00:23:26 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
Starting point is 00:24:27 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
Starting point is 00:24:50 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
Starting point is 00:25:37 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
Starting point is 00:26:11 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
Starting point is 00:26:38 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,
Starting point is 00:27:12 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.
Starting point is 00:27:46 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.
Starting point is 00:28:01 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
Starting point is 00:28:39 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
Starting point is 00:29:50 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,
Starting point is 00:30:13 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
Starting point is 00:30:48 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.
Starting point is 00:31:29 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
Starting point is 00:32:00 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
Starting point is 00:32:43 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
Starting point is 00:33:05 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.
Starting point is 00:34:09 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
Starting point is 00:34:48 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
Starting point is 00:35:44 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?
Starting point is 00:36:27 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.
Starting point is 00:37:01 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
Starting point is 00:37:55 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
Starting point is 00:38:46 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?
Starting point is 00:39:45 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,
Starting point is 00:40:02 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
Starting point is 00:40:45 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.
Starting point is 00:41:39 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
Starting point is 00:42:25 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
Starting point is 00:42:58 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?
Starting point is 00:43:49 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,
Starting point is 00:44:33 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,
Starting point is 00:45:28 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
Starting point is 00:46:17 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,
Starting point is 00:46:52 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
Starting point is 00:47:59 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
Starting point is 00:48:41 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
Starting point is 00:49:45 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,
Starting point is 00:50:25 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
Starting point is 00:51:00 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
Starting point is 00:51:57 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
Starting point is 00:52:43 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
Starting point is 00:53:48 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
Starting point is 00:54:32 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
Starting point is 00:55:16 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
Starting point is 00:56:10 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
Starting point is 00:56:32 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
Starting point is 00:57:24 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.
Starting point is 00:58:03 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.
Starting point is 00:58:27 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.
Starting point is 00:58:53 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.
Starting point is 00:59:48 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
Starting point is 01:00:36 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
Starting point is 01:01:29 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,
Starting point is 01:02:04 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.
Starting point is 01:02:34 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
Starting point is 01:03:21 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,
Starting point is 01:03:53 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
Starting point is 01:04:36 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
Starting point is 01:05:21 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
Starting point is 01:06:19 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
Starting point is 01:07:20 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
Starting point is 01:07:55 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.
Starting point is 01:08:24 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.
Starting point is 01:08:56 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?
Starting point is 01:09:16 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.
Starting point is 01:09:36 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
Starting point is 01:10:16 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.
Starting point is 01:10:57 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,
Starting point is 01:11:38 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.
Starting point is 01:12:47 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
Starting point is 01:13:19 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
Starting point is 01:14:18 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,
Starting point is 01:14:41 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
Starting point is 01:14:58 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
Starting point is 01:15:30 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,
Starting point is 01:16:06 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.
Starting point is 01:16:30 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.
Starting point is 01:16:44 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.

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