Russell Kane: How To Build Confidence & Stay Young | E79

(music plays) Russell Kane, he's known as a multi-award-winning comedian, presenter, actor, author, and script writer. But man, this guy is so much more.

I started doing all this biohacking to survive on less sleep, to not lose your hair, or to slow down the aging process. It fucked my life in the proper sense. Everything fell apart. Like a junkie. How can I get more of that? My relationship with my girlfriend fell apart. My bills started to not be paid. I started to look thin. It's the closest thing to a drug addiction that I've ever experienced.

Russell Kane. He's known as a multi-award winning comedian, presenter, actor, author, and script writer. But man, this guy is so much more. He's genuinely, deeply intellectually curious, something that honestly surprised me. And this sounds like it might be e- offensive or a weird thing to say, but I'm gonna say it anyway. I didn't realize how smart this guy is. Remarkably self-aware and on, to top it all off, brutally honest. He says it how it is. He has an ability to point out things that I think most of us muggles miss, and he's also genuinely just a really nice and hilarious human being. Today, you won't hear many jokes. This is the more serious side of Russell Kane, and a side of him that I did not know and would not have guessed before speaking to him. So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Russell.

Hello.

On- (laughs) one of the things I read when I was, um, reading about your story was a quote.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and I'm gonna read the quote to you. You said, "I remained a boy while he was alive, even when I was 18, and I needed to be a man to tell these stories." What were you talking about when you said that?

Um, well, I don't think that's true of just me. I think any boy or probably girl who has a reasonably overbearing and dominant father, you sort of remain a, a child. Now that I'm a, a father myself, I can see that's true. So when my daughter Mina is 40, she's still gonna be my, my baby, so that's the positive side of it.

Mm-hmm.

The negative side of it is if it's quite an overbearing, masculine energy, y- the, you sort... I felt sometimes a bit like a bonsai, like I kept nearly growing and then the roots were trimmed. So I was fully grown but small.

Mm.

So if my dad was in the room, you know, I was instantly s- childlike, I would say, in- inside. So just a very dominating figure and I think that would've been the same had my dad not dropped down dead from a heart attack years ago. I think that would've been the same when I'd been 40, 50, 60. If my dad had been a n- 90-year-old shouting in the corner, I probably still would've been like that.