#611 - Louis C.K.

ABC Tuesdays, Dancing with the Stars is back with an all-new celebrity cast.

You have the crew: Robert Irwin, Alex Earle, Andy Richter, Shen Affleck, Aaron Davis, Lauren Howreggie, Whitney Levitt, Tylene Fron, Jordan Childs, Ilaria Baldwin, Scott Hoyd, Elaine Hendricks, Sanielle Fischel, and Corey Feldman.

This season, get ready to feel the rhythm.

If you got it, Flumton.

Dancing with the Stars premieres live.

Tuesdays, 8-7 Central on ABC and Disney Plus.

Next day on Hulu.

Today's guest is one of the greats.

There's nobody like him.

He's a comedian.

He's a filmmaker.

And now he's a novelist.

This is his new book, Ingram.

And I've read it.

And

it's great.

It's like this Huck Finn, like an emotional kind of Huck Finn.

You'll love it.

I guarantee that.

I'm grateful to spend time with him today.

He's one of my dear friends, and I think he has a lot to offer the world.

So So I feel lucky to ride on this planet at the same time as him.

Today's guest is Mr.

Louis C.K.

Yeah, man, I'm excited to see you guys perform tonight.

The Rhyme is a beautiful place.

Yeah, do you feel uncomfortable ever saying certain things in such a beautiful venue?

And not you particularly, but also definitely you.

Yeah, I mean,

I don't know.

The Ryman feels like, I mean, Harry Houdini was there.

Yeah.

And so was Martin Luther King.

And so was Johnny Cash and Elvis.

A pretty good

balance

of perverts and

wizards.

Perverts and wizards.

Yeah.

I think.

So

I feel okay.

Yeah.

About talking about bad stuff that you shouldn't talk about.

There's places like a symphony space, you know, when you do like one of those

where it's like really hallowed and there's like, you know,

it should be a guy in a tuxedo playing a cello.

Yeah, there should be like a, like the Matri D of Instruments or whatever that guy's called.

What's it?

Yeah, the Matri D of Instruments.

Like a conductor?

the leader, yeah.

Yeah, when you have those guys, and then I'm on there, and I'm talking about

the hair on the tip of my cock, yeah.

Oh, yeah, but then again, I sold the tickets, it's just a bunch of seats, yeah.

But it is, though, you get into something, you're like, oh, this isn't it.

Or I had to do a church once, this man invited me, and I don't want to say he was a

pervert or whatever, or I don't want to say, I don't want to say he was,

he seemed like somebody who was willing to touch somebody that was probably young.

He was willing to touch somebody who's maybe probably young.

Yeah.

He has borderline.

Okay.

He's willing.

Right.

He was willing to.

I'm not going to say he was.

Right.

If somebody was like, hey, this kid, this kid's dick is bleeding.

Yeah.

Anybody, we all feel kind of weird about

applying pressure.

He'd be like,

I'm willing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that kind of guy, like an EMT for small cocks, you know, like that.

He shot his hand up a little too quick.

Yeah, like, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I just would.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Like having a couple small tourniquets in his pocket.

Right.

He's equipped.

But yeah, so that guy invited me to do a show, and it was in like Laughlin, Nevada, or something out in the middle of the desert.

And it was at a church.

And he was a church man.

And he was like a pastor or a leader of a church

we get there and I was like oh man this guy had only seen one of my bits and it was a just more of a safe bit it just had nothing edgy in it right

and I got into the stuff and you could see a man get up with his family and just I mean he was leaving the show he was leaving the church though too you could see oh no I felt horrible and it's I kept looking at him in the back and he's trying to be supportive and I was like

don't support me I was like this shouldn't be happening you know you felt that way?

I did.

You shouldn't have been doing it.

Yeah, but I couldn't.

Just all I had was my material.

I could do some riffing, but it's also in the church.

It was the lights were all on.

But yeah, some venues, it's just a little.

Yeah, it's funny.

I used to be more defiant.

I used to feel more like, you know, hey, man, this is what I, you know,

fuck you.

But I feel less that way.

I'm not going to change what I do.

Yeah.

But I don't want to upset anybody.

I'm not trying to.

Yeah.

But I'm not as defend.

I'm not as like, yeah.

Show them.

I was talking about something on stage recently, and somebody in the balcony yelled, ah,

got angry.

And I said, what's wrong?

And this person, I don't remember what the bit was, but they were like, that's not cool, man.

And I said, are you offended by what I said?

They said, yeah.

And I just said, I'm really sorry.

Like, I had never done that before.

I was just like, I'm really sorry.

Yeah.

Anyway, I'm going to keep doing it.

Yeah.

Yeah, we got to keep going.

I mean, that's, yeah, you got to keep going.

Yeah.

I did a club in Florida down in

Key West.

Oh, yeah.

And it's a good, I love the guy who runs it, this guy Tom.

And it's a fun club.

But a lot of the crowd is like people that are on a cruise and they jump off and they had no context for what I was like getting pure silence on some stuff.

And at some point I just said, listen,

I

just want you to know I'm not trying to upset you.

Oh, yeah.

I just want you to know that this is all, I don't have another way to go.

Right.

This isn't me antagonizing you.

This is just you and I are very different.

Yeah.

And if you could try to open your heart a little bit, I can't, I'm opening up to you, but I can't like invent jokes for you right now.

Wow.

And they are like, okay, okay.

And I could see these sort of old people in pink, pink and coral blue shirts.

I'm like, all right, we'll try a little harder.

Yeah.

Because at first they just thought, well, he's just, he's, you know, sometimes if somebody's upsetting you, you think they want to.

Right.

But sometimes it's just that they're just being what they are.

And if you can know that, I think it helps.

Oh, even as you're saying that, it makes me think, like, even when I was a kid, if my mom would have every now and then, like, I know I'll bring that back things to childhood all the time.

Yeah.

But it's like, or if a parent would every now and be like, hey, I know this is not good.

I know this sucks for you.

Right.

And I know this is everything we're doing here is really,

it's a Barnum and Bailey.

Yeah.

It's a real shit circus.

I've tried to say that to my.

But that's all we got.

Right.

And like, I used to think that about my kids when I would say no about something.

Because when I was a kid, no was mean.

It was always like, no,

and like, no, because I said so, stuff like that.

And no, because you don't deserve it or whatever.

And I don't think no has to be a bad thing.

I think every life is full of yes and no, right?

And the first few years of a kid's life are just yes.

You're just trying to keep them alive and just let them know they're loved.

And then you have to start going, not that though.

And it's tragic for them.

Like, what the person I love is saying no.

Why would they do that?

And because you feel guilty about saying no to your kid, you put a little spice on it.

But you can be nice about it as long as you're firm.

You know what I mean?

You don't roll over because you just go, no, I'm sorry, honey.

Yeah, that's, I know how much that sucks.

Yeah.

But it's not changing.

And think of something else, but it ain't.

That's a wall.

That's a brick wall.

Yeah.

And you'll be okay.

Also, let them know you'll be okay.

Yeah.

And then they'll know that no is just a turn.

It's not a wall.

It's just a, it's just a, it's a curve.

That's all.

Go look something for something else.

Yeah.

And that's a great way to think about it too, because then it keeps you in a space of like, well, what else could I, what's possible?

How else would I figure this out?

You know, it almost puts a little challenge into the child.

That's it.

And also for when my kids would

complain about, and

if they just haranged and said, come on, I just, no, I'm not even going to discuss it.

But if they're like, wait, and they reason and they try to loiter through it, I go, I'm here, I'm listening.

Yeah.

You know, that I'll listen to.

That's a good skill for them to build, you know.

Yeah, I remember at night, if we got, if we got in trouble, like if we got suspended from watching television or something by mom, we could go down and do a performance, right?

Yeah.

And we didn't have a lot of like, we had a little bit of face paint.

I don't want to say it was like, it would seem racial, but some of the shit probably

we didn't have a lot of colors.

Okay.

What colors did you have?

We just didn't have a lot of colours.

Black, red, and yellow.

I mean, we had some.

Yeah.

No, we just didn't have a lot of colors, right?

And we didn't, and we loved a lot of black stuff.

So I think we probably did in the heat of the night or something.

We would do scenes from that.

They called me Mr.

Tibbs.

Yeah.

Why not?

In the heat of the night.

God, dude, we love that show.

I love Carol O'Connor.

He was so, God, he was so multifaceted.

Well, did you ever see the movie?

The movie's amazing.

In the heat of the night?

Yeah, I have.

With Sidney Poitier?

Yeah, and Rod Steiger.

Oh, is that the other guy in it?

A raisin in the sun, man.

Sidney Poitier was something great, huh?

Yeah, he was.

And what do you call it?

Also,

To Sir With Love.

I haven't seen that.

Yeah, he plays a British teacher teaching.

He's

a well-educated black teacher

teaching cockney white kids how to be gentlemen and ladies.

Oh, that sounds good.

It's beautiful.

Oh, I've seen scenes from this, though, just online and stuff.

Um,

but yes, but if we went down and performed, and we would also had-I think we had a kite that we would kind of do this Japanese dragon kind of thing.

So, we had a couple of like kind of motifs that we would use to win back the ability to do something new.

But that was a way of us lot, like, at least show up and show me something, right?

Yeah, don't just sit there and

put on a kabuki and like have like an allegorical play

that says, let us have the, you know, let us eat the Captain Crunch for dinner.

Yes, let us have this chance.

That's all we wanted.

Yeah.

And sometimes it would be nice.

Sometimes you had to sing Mammy to get it.

You had to

swing low.

It got, I mean, there were times, yeah.

I wanted to emulate black people when I was a kid.

When I was a kid, it was all my heroes were black.

I mean,

Muhammad Ali was like the greatest thing in the world when I was a kid.

And

Bruce Lee, and like, I mean, everybody who I admired, Bruce Lee was black, right?

Bruce Lee, no, oh, Bruce Lee

was the Asian, yeah.

But dude, black guys were like, yeah, that's a real, yeah, that's a real one.

Reggie Jackson.

I mean, I grew up different generation than you.

Yeah, yeah, no, but those are still some real heroes.

Yeah.

Yeah, there was something about being black that just seemed.

I went to

fun and risque at the same time.

Yeah.

Yeah, it wasn't.

Well,

at my school, I was a went to public school in Newton, Mass.

And we had a, there was a program called Metco where kids from inner city Boston were brought in buses to our schools.

Yeah.

And so there was a contingency of

kids that were not only black, but living in a very different place.

And

so they would sit at, there would be tables at the cafeteria of just black kids.

And I would just go sit with them I just wanted I wanted to be part of that.

Yeah, and I would sit with them and they'd kind of go all right

Hey fellas

and

I just I

I felt like I just re was reaching for that, you know

But you think it was because I would I definitely noticed that too.

I like being around black kids.

It was fun.

It was interesting.

You didn't know what was going to happen.

Yeah.

There was an element of like kind of crossing the tracks a bit.

Yeah, because where I grew up in Newton, I mean, I lived in Mexico when I was younger, but I mostly grew up in Newton.

And it was a suburb that was already split because there was a working class side and a rich people side.

And

I grew up right on the, literally on the tracks, like the, the, the train tracks, the, the Mass turnpike was a block behind my house, like one block.

I heard, I fell asleep to the sound of traffic.

And so we were right on the line, my family.

we had a little house, a little half a house that we rented.

But

that was all white, though.

Everybody was white in Newton.

Later, I drove a cab in Newton, in my hometown, and found out that there was

a little enclave of black people that lived in one little, like one street in Newton.

But in Boston itself, too, the main city, was very segregated.

So

there was this one kid in our

one medco kid.

His name was David, and

he

his family's house burnt down in Boston.

And my friend's dad had half a house that he rented out, and he donated it to their family so they could have a place to live while they were rebuilding.

Wow.

So this black family moved into our neighborhood.

And they're

and they were nice people.

I didn't think of it.

I knew David.

He was an okay kid.

He was kind of a dick, but he let him let anybody be a dick.

But there was this one.

But he was a black dick.

He was a black dick.

And he had one.

But no, no, no.

But at the time, I wasn't aware of that.

But there was a kid

in our school who was a really vicious bully.

And he had a gang.

And one day,

David went to the park, Cabot Park, and

Michael was the bully.

I'm using real names.

I don't know.

Maybe you should bleep them.

I don't know.

If he did it, he did it.

But Michael

took

his gang, and they took David and they said, we're going to show you this swing is your swing.

And it was painted.

They painted a swing black and they painted a bench black and they painted one of everything in the park.

And they said, that's your, that's the

swing.

That's the

bench.

And I heard that story and I found it hard to believe, but I went to the park and there was a black bench.

And it was black as long as the rain,

you know, until the rain washed off the paint and the park painted it green over.

That's what it was like.

And this was like a kind of like a liberal suburb, you know.

And do you think a lot of that was actual, like true racism?

Or do you say, do you think some of it was just like, I know you're not playing as a racist, but I think sometimes people, if that's what's going on, people will continue it, you know?

Yeah, I think so.

But I think if you actually go get a bucket of paint, if you actually go put your money down as a kid and you paint a bench black, I think that's pretty racist.

I think that's pretty hardcore racist.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was nasty.

I mean, he was mean to everybody.

He found a way to hurt.

He was a sadistic person.

Yeah, scared the shit out of me.

It never hurt me because I was a little bigger.

But I never fought really.

But

yeah, that was that was weird.

It was racism in Newton.

It was weird because it was like...

Yeah, I've been in Boston.

There's still.

Well, and also because there was that division, like down where you were, folks were a more mixed in, weren't they?

A little bit.

Did you live amongst yeah?

I mean, it's just funny in the south, people will be like, it's so racist.

It's so racist.

A lot of times people have this view, but also you have a relationship.

There's like

a lot of connectivity, I feel like.

So

I don't know.

You know, I remember one time, me and my buddy Devin, we were went fishing, and there was these kids on these railroad tracks up above us, up above the river.

And they started throwing rocks at us and calling us the N-word and stuff.

white kids yep calling you guys that yeah

and

and i wasn't black i was you know at the time

yeah yeah i wanted to be part of one of the black periods of your life yeah i was like

but i still was like you don't know us motherfucker you know i was like yelling shit back and even devin's looking at me like dude what the fuck this yeah yeah they'll try to steal my thunder here so it was just like i don't know all that stuff was just like i don't know it was i do think kids throw everything around.

Kids just say stuff.

Oh, for sure.

Because they want to try it on.

Yeah.

Like, I don't trust people that will say,

like, I think if somebody won't say,

some people won't say f, right?

Or they won't say the F-word

about gay folks.

And you know what it is.

Huh?

Gay Fs.

Gay Fs, yeah.

Yeah.

Gay folks.

You mean the folks is the F word, right?

No.

I'm saying yeah.

Some people won't say, and I'll say it really fast because some people don't like hearing it.

Fuck it.

That got right by the people that don't.

Yeah.

They weren't.

They were doing something else.

Well, some of them, yeah, it's like you could have looked away.

You could have been driving and looking out of the street before you know it.

It's gone.

But some people will say the N-word, but won't say that word.

That's what I don't get.

It's like.

Yeah.

How do you even get that you won't say the n-word, but you will say the F-word or that you won't say it?

Which way?

Some people

won't say the F-word, but they'll say the N-word.

Really?

Who's that?

How the truth is that?

That to me is race.

That's racist.

It's like, yeah.

If you have a general sensitivity about like, well, I just don't want some of these words have gotten too hard to use.

Yeah.

I used to say all of them.

Yeah.

But I don't

now because it just has a different effect.

Yeah.

I mean, like you're saying, like you're saying earlier, we we get older.

Something's just kind of, it lands different.

Something.

It lands different depending on how things are.

Language is a living thing.

Right.

And the way people communicate is always changing.

And

the sounds you make are affected by the other sounds in the air.

So

you don't live in a vacuum.

And it doesn't mean that's not a moral thing to me.

That's just, do you want to be understood?

Right.

Do you want to,

what do you want to convey?

What feeling are you trying to put out there?

And sometimes the N-word can be said with a lot of love.

It can also be said with humor or just

experimental confusion.

But at a time where there's like certain things that got tightened up, it doesn't have that effect anymore.

So

make an adjustment.

It's interesting.

I think because first, and also it's by generation, it's like some gen, it's like some people may accept a 15-year-old half-Mexican kid saying it, but some people might not accept a 50-year-old half-Mexican kid saying it.

That's right.

That's right.

And

I mean, the word colored was

no way when I was growing up.

Colored was like the, that's, but now they say it.

But now people are colored, like things

move around.

When you start censoring, you, you freeze yourself and you're no longer hearing what's going on out there.

You know what I mean?

Right, so yeah, which way you got to have the flow.

Yeah.

And

you got to just trust people to go like, okay, let's put N-word on the on the shelf for a while.

Yeah.

And cunt is back.

Colored is respectable now.

It moves around.

It's fascinating language.

It's like the most amazing thing about what we do, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you use it so well, man.

You use it so well.

And it is interesting.

Like, I will try to find a word.

It's like sometimes I'll say something and I'll be like, no, that's not it.

I need the exact word.

Yeah.

And if I can get the exact word, it can help me unlock a feeling.

For sure.

It can help me be extremely specific about what I'm trying to say.

Where do you look for your words?

I look like in my feelings a lot of times.

You know, I, yeah, I look in my feelings.

You got a dictionary in your heart.

Yeah, it's like that's not the word.

And sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't get it.

I bought a big dictionary recently because I write,

I like to have a dictionary with me when I'm writing fiction.

And

I wrote this book and then I started writing this other one.

And I write it with a typewriter.

It's very old-fashioned.

Oh, yeah.

And so

wanted to get a dictionary that had

a lot of depth to it.

Because when I'm looking for a word, I go, I like looking at the reference.

And some dictionaries have like usage of the word.

They give you like, so there was a guy named Samuel Johnson back in England in the early 1700s.

Yeah.

And he was the first person to write a dictionary for English.

He just wrote one.

He was like, somebody should have it.

There was none.

There was like lists of words and catalogs, but he came up with the idea.

I'm going to to sit down and write a dictionary of the whole English language with every word describing the word and giving examples in poetry and literature.

And he just sat down and he did it.

And it's like this, it's huge.

I have two volumes and it sits on my desk on each side of me.

And I flip through these big pages and I read what Samuel Johnson himself, how he described each word.

Was it hard to find those?

I got one on eBay.

The thing that's crazy is I want to get a real, like an original because you can get first editions of that.

Yeah, like that your guys pulling up there.

That's the first, that's the birth of the English language.

You can actually touch it with your hands.

You can actually own that.

The first person to ever fucking do this.

So that's the first dictionary ever?

First dictionary by, and I'm just talking out of my ass.

I'm not educated, but this is what I understand to be true.

Okay.

A dictionary of the English language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, was published on April 1775.

It is among the most influential dictionaries dictionaries in the history of the English language.

There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period.

Yeah, there was nothing around.

It's hard to do.

And I learned all this stuff about language from it.

Like the letter I

and the letter J

were back then were the same letter.

So I and like when you look at in his dictionary, the letter I is defined.

And it says I when it's used as a consonant, it sounds like E or I.

But when it's used as, I I mean, as a vowel, but when it's used as a consonant, it sounds like j.

And that originally

J was just an I with a little tail, just so you know that that's hard I, that's j.

Like this eyes, yeah.

Yeah, and so when you look in the I section of his dictionary, it alternates I and J.

Like it alternates once some words start with I, some start with J, but they're all in the same section.

Wow.

And it's the same with U and V.

U and V were just one word,

but they had these two different,

you know?

Oh, it makes total sense.

Yeah.

But when you get to know this stuff about language, yeah, it gives you more.

You can actually have more feelings if you have more words.

But I like your retro approach, which is you're looking for the words in your feelings.

It's good.

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This is my, this is a hard, because that's a, that's

gonna brought you a hardcover of Ingram.

Let's go.

It's an inscription, but just don't read it out loud.

Okay, I'm gonna see.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'm gonna say that.

Dude, thank you so much, man.

Yeah, I read this.

You sent me, and I still have it inside.

I have, you sent me like,

it was in this green kind of folder that was really cool.

And it reminded me of like, kind of like

something that meant something like 25 years ago or 20 years ago, you get a script and it would be like

and it would be in something, you know, it would be like in this sort of like green

folder.

Yeah.

It was professional.

Binder, yeah.

Yes, it was a binder.

Yeah.

And you gave it to me like that, and you let me read this whole book, dude.

Well, you read a really early version.

Yep.

And it took me two months to read it because I was like, I don't know what was going on.

I was probably, I don't know, who knows?

Taking breaks to touch my body, probably.

Mm-hmm.

But it was awesome.

And every time I came back to it, dude, it was just fascinating.

Awesome, man.

And

it's a book about a boy who's kind of neglected and then he has to take on the world himself.

Is that right?

I would say, yeah.

Yeah.

It's

it's about a boy who grows up on a, that's what it looks like, on a farm, just a shit farm.

Yeah.

And

he lives in a cage, is it?

Or in a.

Well, he just lives outdoors.

His parents don't let him sleep in the house.

Got it.

And he sleeps in the shed and he just sits on the porch steps where the animals are.

His father, it's one of these farms.

His father's got like one pig.

He's just trying to get a little extra.

Yeah.

And his parents are very overwhelmed.

And his father, one day, tells his uh, the bank comes to overtake the house.

They give him a few days, so the father tells the mother to slaughter all the meat, and he

goes on the horse and says, I'm gonna sell this horse, and I'll come back.

And he never, he just never comes back.

Yeah, so the kid's left with his mother, who's just so weak, and uh, she just tells him, uh, you gotta, you gotta go.

And he's like 10, and she tells him, uh, I can't, your luck's worse here than it would be out there.

Wow.

So, and she's just too hollowed out to overcome what's going on with her.

And she probably thinks the best thing she could do to save him would be to send him off.

Get him out there and let him learn how to start taking care of himself.

So all she tells him is stay alive any way you can.

That's like all the advice he's given.

And he just hits the road.

And I started writing it and I didn't know.

It's not,

it's the first novel I ever wrote.

I wanted to write novels when I was a kid.

That was like the first thing I really wanted to be.

Yeah.

And then I just took so many drugs that I feel like I've burnt my brain out and it's only now really recovering.

Is that true?

You're saying that?

I feel that way a little bit.

I used to feel that way.

But were you using opioids or whatever?

When I was a kid, I was doing a lot of smoking a shit ton of a pot.

Oh, yeah.

And we took a lot of acid and mescaline and stuff like that, too.

And I don't think that hurts you.

But

it does take out the linear of your thinking a little bit.

But your life got busy too then yeah and then i became a comedian which i always thought was like just it's a free form scattershot verbal art so i always felt like i could hand it was what i could handle you know

but i wanted to be a writer you know and then i wrote television but writing tv and movies is is more like a blueprint you're you're it's technical writing here's what needs to happen when we shoot this but actually writing something that's meant to be read is what i really wanted to do and

God, so cool.

Yeah.

So I started writing short stories a few years ago and I got really back into it.

And when I, when Ingram kind of like came into my head, I just had this ritual of sitting down every day and asking him like, what happened to you?

And it was just a story that just kept coming.

Asking the child the career.

Yeah, yeah, like what happened.

And I felt like I was taking care of him by like taking an honest account, trying to just be honest and not trying to achieve anything in writing it or trying to, you know what I mean, or be impressive.

I just wanted to be, I just wanted to hear the voice and see what happened.

And I worried about him every day because he has a hard, it's a hard life that he lives.

Yeah.

But I learned from him because he kept like just being curious and

reporting when it stinks, but not complaining.

Yeah, I mean, there's times he takes on some abuse a couple of times.

And I was like, God, it's like you like,

yeah, I mean, there's parts, especially toward like the later parts of the book so harrowing some you're like god why can't he

why doesn't he know better yeah yeah he's he's he's just simple i mean he's not simple like um

uh like mentally challenged he just hasn't had any he's dennis rodman or whatever or who else i'll gonna say that's not fair or no somebody else i mean tennis rodman is anything but simple you're right that's a great

complex dude yeah he's a fucking rubik's cube

all the stickers are different there's not even one color color that's the same.

Yeah, dude.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Even one of those like Indian kids couldn't put that.

Yeah.

Forget it.

Yeah, that was a bad choice.

But

yeah, dude, there were times you're like, oh,

yeah.

You feel for him that much.

And you did such a great job of making me feel for him.

Oh, thanks.

I can't tell how I got to know him so good as I'm reading it.

Well,

I guess I don't know.

For boys,

it's this thing thing of getting thrown out into the world a little bit.

Um

I was alone a lot as a kid

and out in the street just trying to figure out what life is and you just become you're kind of a mic a boy is kind of a microcosm of

a human ape turning into a human being you know what I mean like adapting

evolution's right there yeah evolution from the first day of life especially if you're kind of left alone

if you spend a lot of time alone as a boy, you're just catch

as catch can, and then you go, oh, I guess that's what this is like.

Right.

And some things you get strong at and some you don't.

And

some things you learn from the worst influences, too.

It just happens to be the influence that was passing through town or that stopped and rolled its window down.

It's kind of crazy the way you can get influence.

That's kind of what happens to him in some ways, huh?

Yeah, like there's this one part where he's got, he's been working on a farm,

like just pulling up corn, and he makes money in dimes.

I know.

Just because it's the first currency that he learned to respect was a 10-cent dime.

So he makes them pay him in dimes, and he hides them under a tree.

And when he decides to leave the farm, he digs them up and he falls asleep in his cabin.

And there's this, he wakes up, and there's this guy there about to steal his money.

And Ingram, at this point, has a little knife, and he's he's thinking he's going to have to defend himself.

You know, he's going to have to stick this guy.

But he's trying to figure out because he's never been been taught is it okay to actually harm somebody for money

like is it it to to defend yourself is one thing but to defend this thing yeah

and um

and then it occurs to him that the guy might be a little scared even though he's bigger than him even if it's a kid like it's not easy to beat the shit out of a kid right like it's no small thing so they're yeah they're resilient kids survive yeah i mean you're gonna go through something So, so Ingram says to the guy, why don't we split it?

And the guy goes, I don't have to split it with you.

I can just take it.

He goes, yeah, you can, but it's going to be trouble.

I'm going to give you a hard time.

I'll split it with you now.

And it's my money, but I'll give you half of it if we could just split it.

And then they look at it and neither of them know how to count.

So they got that problem.

But

I didn't know where it was going.

I got to this moment in it where they're in this standoff.

And I was like, what's his solution?

But by following his logic and the way he looked at life without having been taught, he found solutions that I just came to me naturally

that I wouldn't have found in life.

Do you know what I mean?

You just get taught things like you got to defend, you got to, anybody fucks with you, you have to hurt them.

Right.

You do, you know?

Let's split the difference.

Yeah.

Split them out.

I'll take half.

I'll take half out.

I'll take half and nobody has to throw a punch.

I stay alive.

And also, I don't have to feel the pain of if I stabbed you and if I shouldn't have.

That's That's right.

Which can be just as harrowing.

Of course, you got to walk around in life knowing you stabbed somebody for $100.

Yeah.

Oh, dude, it was, there's a lot of great parts.

Man, it's honestly, bro, it's awesome.

It was so much fun to read.

It reminded me of like, I mean, this sounds crazy, but it reminded me of like a real book.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, I feel the same way.

To me, it still doesn't add up to me or make sense that I wrote a book.

I grew up in a world of books.

You look at a book, you're like, well, no, but that's somebody else.

Yeah.

Somebody else can do that, not me.

And I've tried.

I've written short stories and things that have sputtered out.

When I got to the end,

like when the publishers, I got a publisher, this place, Ben Bella.

Simon Schuster, is that you're with?

Yeah, Simon Schuster is distributing it.

Okay.

The publisher is a company called Ben Bella out of Texas.

Really nice people.

And when I started working with them and they were going through the book and the editorial part, they said it was kind of curious that I say the end because it's like a Grimm's fairy tale.

Like nobody does that anymore.

But I I asked to keep it because that's, to me, it was crazy that I got there.

Yeah.

I couldn't believe I got to the end.

And I was just like, the day I finished this, I was like, I wrote a fucking novel.

And, you know, if I wasn't me with a little bit of sense that I could probably sell something, I don't know that it gets out.

I have no idea.

And everybody that's,

I haven't had anybody read it that hates me.

So I don't know if it's good.

But, you know, I don't know.

can buy it.

It's, yeah.

It was great.

And I know it comes for, it's, you can pre-order it now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's

September 20th, 20th.

No, November.

It's coming out in November, mid-November.

Okay.

But you can pre-order it.

It's good if people pre-order it because then they'll

print more.

Put the ranks up.

Yeah.

Get it up there.

Get it up.

And look, I'm not even joking, guys.

Like, you know, I like to read.

I really,

like, especially for like a young man, like

if you've had neglect in your life or you wonder like how a child would start to

absorb the world

with

not even being taught how to be much of a sponge in a way.

Kind of like,

I mean, it's just fascinating.

And it was, it was, it took, I was just right there in it.

I was right there in it with him.

It takes place in Texas, right?

Yeah.

Oklahoma, Texas or something.

Yeah, Texas.

And so like, yeah, he's just like walking along the highway and these car, like things or cars or things he's never even seen.

He's never even seen any of it yet.

It's all fucking great.

Yeah, he calls the pavement hard black dirt because he doesn't really know what because he grew up barefoot in the dirt.

And

it amazed me.

I was like, oh, shit, somebody can do this.

I think.

I think that was probably the, because like, you know, you and I know each other and I knew that I know like your comp and I know that.

And then I, I, I've gotten to know you some as a person, but then to see that somebody can make this and it's a real fucking book.

I have a lot of friends that have made some sh okay books.

Right.

You know what I'm saying?

I'll buy them.

I'm not reading them.

Yeah.

But this, I was like, well, I love doing it.

I wrote another one.

I just finished the second one.

And if I can make that what I do, I'm going to make that what I do.

Like I see in the,

I mean, whatever, when you get a vision of what you want your future to be, you might get 40% of it.

And that's okay with me.

But what I like is the idea of having kind of like a nice cruising altitude stand-up comedy performing and writing novels because I really love doing it.

And now that I wrote one, the second one was a lot.

It took me much longer.

I spent a year and two months on the second one

because this one I was like wanting to finish so that I wouldn't not finish it.

But now that I know I can finish one, I feel like I got a flow.

It's really fun to do.

Yeah.

And do you think it's the most, because all I wanted to be, I think when I was a kid was a writer, probably.

Like I loved to read John Irving.

I loved once I i got into his stuff it was like so exciting like all the different possibilities yeah and the ways that like um

who was that irish lady that

uh

o'carl flannery o'connor yeah unbelievable unbelievable god what an imagination yeah i was like i could be a murderer she has this story about a

kind of cranky woman who lives alone on a farm she like runs a farm and she's just tough and the guy next door who's black she's every, I mean, the N-word, talk about the N-word, Flannery O'Connor, it's like fucking polka dots on wallpaper.

It's everywhere.

It's just everywhere.

If you like some soft use of it.

Yeah, I mean, yeah.

But so within this story, the guy next door has a bull that keeps

getting loose and coming over to her property.

And she hates it.

And it's this, this, just this, you're in this woman's crankiness.

And it's really something to be like, instead of like this thing where we watch Karens on YouTube and say that's somebody else, she takes you inside the mind of a very bitter and cranky person who just doesn't like the world she's in.

And in the end of the story, it's a short story.

The book,

the bull gores her to death.

The bull gets his fucking horns in her stomach and rips her to pieces.

Oh, yeah.

And Flannery over there.

Which ones some black neighbor males will get

if you leave your wife around.

Yeah.

And she

dies

and the book stays in her head while she's dying.

So you get to, like, you see the lights get brighter and you see some, I don't remember.

I read this for a long time ago.

Greenleaf, it says.

I don't know if that's the one, but

does she die with a bull at the end?

One day Miss May is upset to find a stray bull on her property.

She's worried that the bull will breed with her milk cows.

That's it, right?

She blames Mr.

Greenleaf,

who appears reluctant to confront the bull.

Yeah.

There it is.

But

before she dies, Mrs.

May has a moment of spiritual clarity.

The story notes that she has the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored, but who finds the light unbearable.

Wow.

I mean, what the fuck?

And this is the thing.

Flannery O'Connor was just a regular person in America.

And

it kind of, one of the reasons I, that I wrote Ingram is because I live in a world, New York City, you know, modern culture.

And,

but this, America has always had this voice.

People like Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, who were, or Harper Lee,

who were born in little places, quiet little places, people like you, you have this kind of a voice where it's not through like

Harvard education and like, you know, reading.

It's, it's just that

the American voice is very eloquent, simple, and eloquent.

With that sentence I just wrote of hers,

that's not a collegiate sentence.

That's like someone who lived in an old house and walked really far to the grocery store and had thoughts like that.

That's what you grew up in some parish.

You know, people from where I'm from, the word parish just sounds so exotic.

It's just a different, you grew up in America, and it made you an eloquent person.

Like Abraham Lincoln, he, he, a lot of years of Abraham Lincoln's life, he lived in a lean-to with an open that he would lay with his family and there was no wall, and he'd see like a jaguar come up and sniff the family and just lay there.

And he, yeah, and then he ended up saying some of the most beautiful things ever said just by opening his mouth.

Right.

I just think that America has that language in it.

And I started to hear this kid, and I thought, I wonder if I could make a connection with somebody who sounds like that.

And that's a humble, I don't know that I did it, but I, but that's what I was trying to touch.

You know, when you're listening to Ingram, help him guide you to write the book.

Yeah.

Something like that.

Yeah.

No.

And look, man,

you just have such a, I mean, like,

I just, you're so good at like,

you're like the guy who's like,

say, like, your feelings and everything was like a

cave or whatever, and everybody's at the top, and they're like, we can't go in there, you know, and they're, they're not even, there's like one brave Mexican guy who's like selling fucking snow cones or something, but not a lot at the mouth of the cave, at the mouth, yeah, but it's close.

It's no abierto.

No abierto.

Yeah, yeah.

And he says that.

Yeah, no abierto.

But you want a snow cone?

That's it, it, right?

He said, look,

because it's kind of like.

But then you walk up and you have like your fucking spelunkin gear and shit.

You're like, who the fuck?

Yeah.

Is this psychopath?

Yes.

You go, but you're like, I'll be back.

And people are like, what?

You can't go in there.

Look at all the signs.

There's like a million signs.

You're like, no, no, no.

I've been in here.

I've spent a lot of time in here.

I left something down there.

Yeah.

I left one favorite pack of bubblegum down there.

That's right.

But it feels like so good at going in there and like just being in there, man.

But also getting in there and getting in there and like seeing what the like stalactites are that are hangups in our time or in our feelings, in our existence, in what it means to evolve like personally.

Like, man, you're just like such a archaeologist

I don't know what it is.

I don't know if it's emotions or feelings

or just

of existing kind of.

Well, that's what I love to try to do.

What you're describing is what I try to do.

I've never

heard

it that way, but that's what it does feel like:

is being a guy, bringing people to these places and going, it's okay, it's it's you can look at this

without um letting it hurt you or you can let it hurt

and you're gonna be okay on the other side it's okay right and uh having that and because i've been doing stand-up for 40 years now like i'm very beyond taking it personally

so

if i say something to a crowd and i feel them resist I don't take, I don't go like, oh, they don't like me.

Now, that's one, one of the problems with being a stand-up is you're so exposed

personally.

So if they don't like something, you feel like you take it on.

But I'm okay with any outcome.

Like they're all okay.

So if I say something and people just go, what?

I go, cool.

Now we're here.

Now we're here that you're weirded out.

There's a bunch of places we can go from here because I see it all as okay.

I think I see every feeling as worth having.

Especially if you don't, like I kind of came up with this new idea in my life recently, which is that your feelings are like fire and

you warm yourself by them.

You sit by the fire of the feeling.

You don't get in it and let it burn you, but you also don't go away because it's hot.

You don't go away from it and you're cold out there and there's no light.

Just sit and just let it, you know what I mean?

So I'm trying to get better at that.

I think a lot of early in life, I was more brutal about like, yeah, look at this shit.

This is fucked up.

Look at this shit.

And that's, it's, that's just kind of messy.

But I'm trying to get a little more more refined at taking people to hard things to talk about and going like just let's just sit next to this for a second and how does it feel to be next to this you know yeah what are you used to it yeah because uh

every experience in life certainly feelings are i think feeling is living you know i used to think thinking was more or learning but i think feeling when people really feel they're right on there you know what i mean yeah feelings are never wrong they're

oh, yeah, they're pretty pure, huh?

They are.

Even if they're, even if you may not agree with somebody's feeling or something, yeah.

It's interesting to see why they have it if you believe that it's pure from them.

Well, it also goes back to that lady's quote, to Flannery O'Connor's quote.

I mean, that's more like about feeling in there.

Yeah, I finally saw the

world and it was unbearable.

And it is, especially when you first really see it.

But if you're willing to, like Chris Rock, he's a good friend and he's sometimes a mentor.

He says great things.

Oh, he's the best comedian.

He's always been my favorite.

I remember every time I've gone to him in a tough moment, he's never let me out of it.

Like,

I'll, I'll, I called him once.

I was doing a pilot for this show, Lucky Louie, that I

sitcom.

And after the, we did two shows, we did two performances of the pilot.

And after the first one, I was like, I, I'm, I'm terrible.

And I called him up and I said, I'm really scared.

I think I might just be be a bad actor.

And he said, yeah, wow.

Yeah, that's scary.

Shit.

He wasn't like, you're great, man.

He was like, yeah, well, you better

study your lines.

I mean, because maybe you are.

And I was like, oh,

okay.

And at the same time, like, I shot a special once.

I did two shows.

And after the first show, I called him, I said, I just killed.

And he said, you did nothing.

Go do it again.

You did nothing.

Like,

he's a guy that makes you really look at it.

And

Wow, that's cool.

That's cool to be that kind of friend.

Yeah.

It's cool to be that kind of like challenger, too, to challenge people.

Well, just to be real.

I think, you know.

It's so true, huh?

Like in Rocky, you know, in Rocky, one of the great things about Rocky is that it's a sports movie where the guy loses, you know?

I don't think most people even realize that Rocky loses the fight at the end.

But the big moment in Rocky is when he's talking to Adrian the night before the fight.

You know, he goes to the ring and he sees the spectacle and he's been training and they played the music and he went like this.

But then the night before the fight, he goes back home to Adrian and he says, I can't beat him.

It's just a fact I can't beat him.

He's just in another class.

I'm not even close to him.

I will not win.

And instead of saying, you can do it, Rock, she goes, what are we going to do?

Like, she just lets that be real.

And she goes, what are you going to do?

And then he decides, I'm going to pick my own victory.

And I can't beat him, but

I bet I could stand there while he beats me.

I bet I can get through the fight to the end.

Wow.

What a great goal.

And that's what he does.

And at the end of the fight,

Apollo Creed wins and Rocky doesn't give a shit because he got what he wanted.

Yeah, I think if somebody's honest with you, if there's a real piece of honesty there, then you can navigate from that place.

That's right.

Which is pretty real as opposed to like things that are so placated.

And then you're, you're kind of in this fictional space.

Like, yeah, I'm not going to win, you know.

But now you're like, okay, how can I win?

How do I find a way to do this to navigate this?

Yeah, or what do I do about that?

I'm not going to.

What else is there?

It's not the end of the world.

Because both things, like saying you can do it, this fantasy, it's nowhere.

You don't have, it doesn't take you anywhere.

But, and the same with Doom.

I can't do anything.

I got nothing.

No, where are you?

This is reality.

And usually it's your feelings.

that will navigate you to where is like in like rocky did i can't win there it is.

But what do I, and then he goes inside his heart and goes, I don't have to win.

I just don't want to quit.

I just want to do that one thing of standing there.

That because I've had a hard life, because I've never gotten anything I wanted, that I know I can do.

That means I can beat, get the shit beat out of me on national TV, but I could do it for 12 rounds.

Most people can only do it for eight.

Yeah.

That's fucking good.

And it goes back to like finding that thing, like finding the word, finding what is the thing that you really need, right?

Yeah.

Maybe he's a word.

He would have liked to have won for sure.

Yeah.

But what does he really want?

What's the real victory for him?

That's right.

Yeah.

What is victory?

What is it to be victorious?

What is it to be

right?

Like somebody might be working their butt off to make money, but it's like, do you really want money?

Do you want to, do you, like, that may be it, but is that just a blind?

Sometimes we get caught in with like this general goal of society or we all get like herded into what the goal is supposed to be without looking at what exactly it is that we want.

Yeah, which makes sense because people coalesce so that they can survive.

Yeah.

So human beings are shitty animals.

They're like really a human being out in the

wilderness.

It's done.

It's not worth much, but you group together and you're good.

So it's kind of like all the things that are like hard about life are because of what we're good at.

People fight and attack each other, but it's

they're trying to, in a way, get closer to together.

You know what I mean?

I mean, in other words, when people say you shouldn't be doing that,

because that's not what everybody else is doing, their heart's in the right place, because we all want to be.

The weird thing is that now a lot

you get rejected for coming together.

Like it's the opposite.

It's a weird time right now.

It's like a car battery can have a polarity reversal where it gets confused and suddenly north is south, south is north.

We've done something weird where

the accepted thing is to be separate.

The accepted thing is to be like enemies of each other.

You know what I mean?

And to, if you say, if you move towards the middle of any issue, people start getting nervous because they want you to the safe place is these extremes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I know.

That doesn't, that's not, that's not what we're good at.

That's not what, well, that's not what got us through the ice age and the, and the, you know, and not, that's not what got us out of the food chain.

Yeah.

What got us out of the food chain was like, just put aside your shit and try to be, um, you know, try to see other people as important to you so that you'll work together.

But now it's like scary to say, I don't know, I'm like this guy, even though he's not like me.

You know what I mean?

That's cons that you can get ostracized for being for love.

It's a weird, it's a weird time.

And I

can believe what I'm saying.

You can get ostracized for being accepting.

Yes, that's right.

There is a sign at one of the theaters I did this week.

It says

hatred

will not be allowed here.

Our policy towards hatred is zero tolerance.

But that's a weird.

Right.

We hate hatred.

Zero tolerance is something you're...

That's hate.

That's hate, isn't it?

Yeah.

Zero tolerance and hatred are

opposites.

Yeah.

So hatred and zero tolerance

are equal.

They're the same.

Like no hatred of any kind, it said.

I'm like, what about I hate my dad a little bit?

Yeah.

Yeah.

How do I even get that out of my system before I go in here to watch a matinee?

Yeah.

So I don't know.

I think.

Yeah, that's like, but it's not human nature.

I have like a faith in the way things are going to go because, and also I see it.

Like, you know, whenever people complain about like, everybody always says this, right?

You hear that a lot.

You can't say this without saying that.

Everybody does this.

The group that behaves that way is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking.

Because if you really go out on the street, if you get off the, if you look at people in the eyes and you see people every day, most people are just like really eager to find each other again and to, and reaching out to people as, as, as unlike them as they can find and wanting to find love and common ground.

That's how human beings behave.

And sometimes there's a confusion that scatters them.

But it doesn't last.

I don't think.

I don't think it can.

I mean, if it does, then everybody will.

And that's what, yeah, that's what happened.

That'll be the test we didn't pass.

Yeah.

Oh, the test we didn't pass.

Yeah, I mean, it may come or it might not.

Louie, what if it comes then?

We'll get into it.

Some of us can do it.

Some of us can.

Nothing you can't, you know.

We have to have a meeting, though.

If things get really bad, we all have to meet somewhere.

Where would we meet?

I don't know.

Maybe Denver or something.

Yeah.

Someplace where the air is clean, the water's clean still.

So you have like a surviving chance.

Yeah.

Altitude cures some diseases.

You don't even, some stuff you don't even get at altitude.

Really?

Yeah.

Or the Amish.

You know, the Amish have

one-tenth of the

attention deficit disorder.

Really?

That regular.

They have AIDS a lot, though, I heard.

Yeah, Amish AIDS is like

it's kind of.

Oh, no.

I look, dude.

Amish.

Look, yeah, I'm not surprised.

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And

the Amish, like, I don't know how, I don't know if it was like maybe 20 years ago, somebody started recording just on people's genealogy, right?

Like a book.

Yeah.

And that's kind of their dictionary that they'll keep in their Google, where they'll go and look and be like, oh, who is that?

I've heard of them.

And how do I know them?

And they have this, and it's like a recurring book that a lot of different families and

districts, that's what they live in, called.

Like it's a lot of times it's associated with their church.

And so they'll have one.

It's their Google.

It's like, oh, go look and see who they are.

And you can see how much land they have or animals.

You can see all kinds of things about a certain family, what the children's names are and stuff.

So they kind of have their own book.

That's like a form of Google right there.

Descendants of Abe Troyer and Lucinda Summers.

That's the book?

I mean, it's basically something like that because, I mean, they started off from just a couple of folks, you know?

It's

old records of stuff is fascinating.

Like the people used to have to just write everything down.

Yeah.

Forget, you know, I was at the New York Public Library once and they, at the New York Public Library, the big one with lions in front, they have every book there, like ever.

And some of them, you can look at anything you want.

Some of them you got to put gloves on

because they're very old.

Yeah.

And I, I was looking for something about Gloucester Mass and the,

it says, I don't want to describe what I was looking for because it's just boring.

But I found this book that was like the shipping logs for Gloucester back in the 1700s.

And I read it and it's it's like an old writing.

And it just said, in this winter, you know, 16 ships were lost.

There were 34 new widows and 54 orphans and stuff like that.

And just like,

just record keeping, but that would make you cry.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, dude.

Things were so severe back then.

Yeah.

We're fucking,

man.

I'm not, but a lot of us are.

Yeah, no, we.

But when it comes to our feelings, we don't like we're just, I don't know.

we're just, we're softer now.

Yeah, it used to be like.

Or we're harder.

I think people aren't feeling as much, you know, they're avoiding their feelings.

I think people are scared of their feelings, but your feelings are native.

Like, there's no feeling that's going to kill you.

It's just not.

Avoiding a feeling will kill you, but

we do a lot, you know, in addiction and stuff like that to stay away from feeling something.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, even you were talking earlier about go, you like, like a feeling is like a warm place sometimes.

You want to get right by it.

Yeah.

Like I was thinking the other day, and I've thought about this before, but I was rekindling the thought that,

yeah, something, sometimes I don't want to change certain behaviors just because I don't want to,

part of you wants to have an excuse because it gives you an excuse not to

so that other things don't happen, you know?

Like there'd be times where I didn't want to quit smoking because I was like, well, if I quit smoking,

then I'll have to find something else positive to do.

I won't have the excuse that, oh, I can't do that because I'm smoking, or I don't want to feel that because I'm smoking.

Because I would go to smoking a lot of times if I was like, I had an intense feeling, or if I, you know, felt rejected, or I want to, you know, like it became this kind of like

a bit of like a shower curtain to shield me from like real moments, you know?

Yeah.

Well, when your life becomes a series of shit you do, you know, I smoke, I eat

barbecue, I eat, I drink at night, I watch this.

Then you can avoid like a day, a day of just being on earth under the fucking swirling sky is fucking intense.

Like it really, if you're really paying attention, if you really wake up to the present moment, it's fucking terrifying.

It's constantly moving.

Nothing's promised.

Everything that you've accomplished is gone.

And you're just in this, huh?

And so, if you can just set out a bunch of stupid tasks and like, and like

habits, yeah, you know, and whatever all a ladies night at whatever it is

you know bowling and going to see the and now uh they've turned there's this this screen on your phone where you don't need to even choose what that is yeah uh you just let this feed just kind of keep you glazed over just serving cunt serving cunt all night long and uh and you get nobody's even sleeping anymore

and you just kind of go to this thing and you're just not you're not feeling nothing.

You're, you're taking, these are fake feelings.

These are fake feelings in a safe environment.

Can't believe she did that.

I can't believe he said it.

What a piece of shit.

Why are they getting on his case?

Like all these just dumb things and like, you know, just keeping it going.

It used to be that they used to call a thing clickbait, where they they make something so juicy that people would click on it, but nobody's clicking much anymore.

It's just, it's just going by.

It's just that feed.

So they're just going like this and

that's living now.

The thing I don't understand is who's benefiting because if everybody's doing this, I don't know, eight different people are getting incredibly rich.

And oh, yeah, and the rest of us are really going to turn in.

And the phone is burning a circuit somewhere.

You know, when your phone is doing that scroll, there's a there's a physical thing that's there's like a little light that's burning somewhere, like in North Carolina at like a data farm.

Yeah, this isn't, this isn't like, it's not in the phone's not really doing the work.

There's something else that's making that.

There's a processor that's doing that and take putting it on the cloud and bringing it to your phone.

But there's smoke going in the air, hot smoke.

Every time you just go like this.

And everybody's doing this all the time.

Oh, in the middle of the night, I'll wake up literally.

It's almost like I have to do it for like a minute so I can go like to sleep.

I'm not even joking.

I'll wake up.

I'll see like four things.

I'll be like, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

racism murder yeah just to get just as a blanket like murder like a little yeah get you back to sleep yeah someone's dead okay good oh good a little bit of racism

yeah finally i was gonna get a sip of water but that'll that'll do it no it's it's very bad for you and uh

and it's such a lucrative addiction yeah and people are are are convinced that that's where they're going to go to convince people of what's right and wrong and that's where you sell stuff yeah so everyone just gave into it And

it's, it's an unit's like if we were all doing heroin, but somebody somehow stopped calling it heroin.

And the machines that make the, that make the, that run those processes are, are going to get hotter and hotter and AI and all that stuff.

So the data centers are getting crazy, man.

Yeah, it's going to be nuts.

There's, I was reading an article about, uh, in Virginia, they, um,

they want to use farmland a lot for the solar panel because the companies that do data don't like, they, you know, they have a style so they don't want to be um

they don't want to burn coal you know they don't want to burn oil right because it does yeah that seems bad it seems not cool yeah so nuclear no problem all of a sudden like that's no longer a problem and uh and solar right but solar is like heavy so they've it takes a lot of those things which are made in china

and uh they they pollute a lot just to make them the panels the panels but anyway

in virginia there was this county where they're trying to get these panels out because because they're putting them on the farmland.

So,

um,

in other words, there used to be farm fields where the sun, the natural sun, would touch the soil and make green for to eat and to make oxygen.

It's like the most perfect thing, right?

And they're putting these fucking black panels on over the flowers to catch the sun and use it instead.

so you and I can do scroll.

And a lot of the data centers, they're using up like a lot of the water, right?

They're using up a lot of like power in places.

Like they're monopolizing, and they're building them everywhere.

Everywhere.

And it's happening fast.

And we started to look at, well, like we were talking with that Sam Altman guy.

He's a chat GPT.

He's like started that, right?

And I was saying, well, do you feel like the Earth could look like...

Bring up that picture that we had.

It was like the whole Earth is covered in panels.

And it's kind of what we see when we watch like Star Trek, and yes, or like Doctor Who.

I don't know if you ever watched that show, but like, there's if you if you look at um water towers, like it used to be you go into an old town, like in the middle of Kansas or something, and uh, folks are still wearing like cowboy hats, they're still driving old GMC trucks with faded side panels.

Like, going into a place like that is very beautiful.

Uh, when you look at the water towers now, which you these faded, beautiful big tanks in the sky, they're crusted over with these cell cell phone

things.

You could probably find an image like that.

Oh, they attached them all to them.

Yeah, they're all over.

And it's like

they're completely covered in them now.

And it's very ugly.

And it feels like a mold.

Like if you look at it, it feels like there's just this weird.

And so when you look at the combination of that with people on the streets staring into a rectangle of black, of nothing.

You know what I mean?

A black rectangle.

Yeah.

And everyone's just going like this, and there's these crusty things.

It makes it feel like

a creature in a way.

But it's not.

I don't think, I don't have some idea that it's from the outside.

It's like something inside of us

wanted so badly to

not feel or something.

It started little, like this feels good, you know?

With looking at our screens and stuff.

Yeah, or like television first.

I mean, it started with like theater, maybe oh dioramas i remember remember that sure yeah or like stereo stereo uh photos yeah people used to hold up a thing you could see fucking peep and thomen was good yeah and like peep

like a girl with like you know a little with titties and have heavy hips and you

put a nickel in that's where it started yeah porn is the whole thing But that

thing became let's all go to a movie theater and everybody would go sit in a theater together or vaudeville and then TV.

Then we went home by ourselves to do it.

And it got, you know what I mean?

More and more.

We definitely got really used to it.

Yeah.

It happened gradually, but it's become something really fucking weird.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, you're sitting there and you start to notice when you're looking at your screen and then when you'll come out of it, you know?

But you're saying it's like a molten, like a crab, like a shell.

Yeah.

And they start to like get other like barnacles and things on it.

It's barnacles.

It starts to achieve.

Oh, for sure.

It's barnacles of

avoidance, of like love avoidance.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Oh.

And maybe it's because we, like, did you see the eclipse that happened back in a couple of years ago or April?

I did, man.

Dude, I heard one of the most racist things while I was watching it, too.

I hate to even bring it up.

What did you hear?

I was standing next to a guy, and I'm going to assume the guy was racist just because of what he said.

He was talking to one of his buddies.

Yeah.

And the eclipse was happening.

And he goes, oh, look at that.

Even the sun wants to be a.

And he said the N-word.

Oh, my God.

I was like god

you know on its face you could take that as a

being uh loving black people

yeah even the sun like you could if you say it like this

brother even the sun wants to be a black man yeah

you could take it like that yeah you could convert what the guy said and make it that now that's a great point actually yeah you know what there was a big that is actually most racism i think is envious oh for sure everybody wants to be one of those guys, man.

Even the sun.

I mean, some racism gets beautiful because that's beautiful.

Yeah.

That's poetic.

Even the sun wants to be a black man.

That's what he's, what's hurting him is not that black people are bad.

It's that everybody wants to be one.

Yeah.

Damn it.

That's a specific.

Even the sun.

Like somebody gets so racist that they become, that they, you know, I remember when Obama was running for president and there was Sarah Palin's rallies.

Some people would yell out racist shit.

Yeah.

Every time she mentioned his name, they'd go, all right, here we go.

Yeah.

So she said his name, and this woman with a, with a real like town, you know, a real,

you know, old movies with

pitchforks and torches, you know.

Some lady yelled out about Obama, you need gloves to touch him.

And I was like, whoo.

But I thought thought there's a few ways to look at that.

Oh, it's priceless.

Yes.

And also like some part of her is going, I want to touch him.

Why can't I touch him?

But I need gloves because he's just, cause he's precious.

Or like, you need gloves to touch him.

There's a lot of, there's a lot in that, you know?

Yeah.

What do you want to touch him for?

Yeah.

Man, you need gloves to touch him.

You need gloves.

Well, you could also just leave him alone, but something you really wants to touch him, but you're scared to.

It's a complex thing.

yeah oh yeah the truth of that dude yeah i remember the first time a black man touched my hand one time

and it was different sure how old were you i was probably

10 or something nine why do you touch your hand

well i went over to my buddy's house and they were swimming just in like this little kind of round little i don't know if it was a pool or just like it had tetanus in it or whatever it was it looks like a it was like a something for animals that put water in it.

So we're just playing in there and swimming in there or whatever.

And this guy, this black man had come and he was kind of like tickling us and stuff sometimes.

I think he was being okay.

I don't know if he was.

But I, that's, but anyway, I don't know.

But he,

but then he lifted me up out of the thing too.

And I just remember like also he like touched my hand and I just was like, oh, that's interesting.

Hmm.

This was like kind of interesting.

Yeah.

Dude, I remember I walked into a black doctor yeah this is in nashville this is two years ago yeah i'd never walked into a room in my life with a black doctor huh yeah

and i was like whoa yeah and i wasn't like you know i was just i i

it's new it's something's new yeah and i was like you guys everybody you know looks at the same books or charts or you know i just didn't know

You know, it's almost like when you're at Foot Locker and there's a white woman working in there.

You know what I'm saying?

and you're like this is interesting yeah i support i'm here for it last time i was in a foot locker i bought these in a foot locker oatmeal colored new balance i got them in a foot locker in salt lake city oh yeah

and a young guy i mean i am really an old man when i'm in a retail situation i'm just older and uh and this young guy helped me and he took me through a few different ideas and he let me try some different things.

He took the stuffing out of the sneakers for me.

Set me up.

Yeah.

And then I tried them on.

He was patient while I walked around feeling like,

what's this like?

You know, he really likes it.

He was like my mom likes shoe shopping with me.

Oh, yeah.

And he was maybe 19.

And I could tell he was kind of fidgeting like, this guy's making me do a lot.

But

I bought the sneakers and I did something that I think my dad used to do and that I used to do when I was,

I don't know when, but um, I shook his hand at the end, just changed the money, and I said, Thanks very much.

And I shook his hand, and he was like, What the fuck is this?

Like, he didn't know what that was,

but that used to be, it's like, you know, it's the proprietor.

It's like you go into the haberdashery, and you think, you know,

good work.

Yeah, thanks for your help today.

Appreciate that.

He was just like, what's being done with my arm?

Yeah.

It is crazy, though,

that there will be a time soon, Louie, where people were like, so we used to take a guy's hand that you didn't know and move it up and down

for two seconds.

Yeah.

Yeah, some people dap.

That's okay.

The handshake was for real, but then now people are nervous too.

I think when they're around other people, people have wet hands.

And that is scaring a lot of people.

Well, when you shake hands, you really connect because every finger has a different intention in the thumb.

And you grip someone with the perfect balance of like, I don't want to hurt you, but I want you to, I want to make you feel like you're here with me.

I want to, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And then we're going to, I don't know what the shake is about, though.

Yeah, bring that up.

Why did the hands shake after they touch?

Yeah.

I could see them touching.

You know, like whenever they try to make movies about like middle ages or like, you know, the places of lore, like Lord of the Rings or like the future, they always reinvent, like they do like the clasp of the, you do this thing.

But a handshake is a globally widespread brief greeting or parting tradition in which two people grasp one.

One,

you do it.

Two people grasp one of each other's hands, and it is often accompanied by a brief up and down movement of the grasped hands.

Customs surrounding handshakes are specific to cultures.

The handshake may have originated in prehistory as a demonstration of peaceful intent since it shows that the hand holds no weapon.

I like that.

Another possibility is it originated as a symbolic gesture of mutual commitment to an oath or promise.

One of the earliest known depictions of a handshake is an ancient Assyrian relief of the 9th century BC depicting the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III clasping the hand of the Babylonian king Marduk Zakir Shami.

So there's a picture of that down there, right?

Yeah, two guys, two

kings

that were probably just fighting.

And they said, hey, let's

settle it.

I can't hurt you for this one second.

Right.

No swords.

Yeah, because I'm using my fighting hand.

It's going to be punch with the left.

It's going to be weird.

That's a good point because they both have a staff in one hand that shows that they've been walking.

The other hand would grab the sword.

Yeah.

That's your sword hand.

Yeah, brother.

That's what you want.

You can get close to me.

It's all right.

You've got my hand.

I've got yours.

Right.

Or even Steven, brother.

So, but that gives me

back to that fucking eclipse.

That racist eclipse.

Yeah.

Because I saw the the eclipse in

Vermont.

Up in Stove, Vermont, or where were you?

In the center of Lake Champlain.

At the time, I was dating a woman who was very wonderful.

We were together for about a year.

We're not together now, but

she sounded hot.

She was

great.

So we decided to, we wanted to see the eclipse totality.

You know, like there's certain places where there's like a line across America, like this diagonal line.

And only if you stood in that line, could you actually see the sun totally?

Oh, okay.

So it's a real hotbed.

It's a hotbed for eclipsing.

Yes, it's where you see the actual

moon totally cover the sun and you go into total darkness.

It's called totality.

Any other place you'd get a little, it's a little off and it's still basically daylight.

Got it.

And so

we decided to go, and I looked on that line, and the place that was best for where we were in New York was

an island in the middle of Lake Champlain.

And she's like, I have a cousin who lives on that island.

It's like North Hero Island, I think it's called.

And so we went there and it was kind of like a thing to get.

We were kind of just, we got there an hour before the eclipse started and we're seeing people scurrying to where they're going to watch the eclipse.

It was like the world was coming to an end.

Folks were getting coolers with stuff and folks were, you you know, everyone.

And the closer we got, the more quiet the streets got.

And now people were just sitting in lawn chairs all over Vermont, like just like this, getting ready.

And they all had these glasses on.

Yeah.

And it was just like, and we're the only car.

It was like a, like an end of the world movie.

Hell yeah.

And we get there and her cousins are all,

they're all carrying big baggies of cigarettes because they buy their cigarettes at an Indian reservation where they don't sell them in boxes.

They get a deal on them?

Yeah, they get a big deal.

Oh, God, yeah.

So they just walk around with a bag and just take

and smoke.

And these were great people.

We were like right in the right place, just a dead end road on an island in a Vermont, you know.

And we went out into the middle.

Me and this woman, we went out into the middle of this field where, and

we could hear.

So as the thing started and everything started going not black, but but brown, there was this brown,

the sun disappeared behind the moon, and every bird fucking lost its mind.

Every bird was like, What the fuck?

Like you could hear every bird in its own language saying, Bitch, this is fucked up shit, like just screaming.

And then people going, Woo!

And then everything was dark and cold, like really cold.

And

I, it was an incredibly moving thing.

And I thought, and then I heard people, there was fireworks going off.

And the feeling I had was, the immediate thought I had, was, this is what the end of the world is going to feel like.

The end of the world is going to be beautiful because it's going to bring everybody together.

Because you can finally just forget it all.

You can finally just go, here, it's you and me, brother, you know?

Yeah, make a sandwich.

Yeah, let's just, we, let's just, I got nothing against you.

Like boxers at the end of a, like just seconds ago, I was, and now I'm just, I just love you so much that everybody is going to, that nothing that has ever happened is going to matter at all.

Like Warden Gotti, man.

Yes, Warden Gotti.

Like just find at the end, just going like, man, I loved struggling with you.

I got to know you so well in fighting with you.

I got, I saw your wounds.

I saw how you hurt me.

And, oh my God.

And it's going to be this ultimate, especially if we end it.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

We're just going to be like, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

Oh, thank God.

Finally, finally, I got in close enough.

Uh,

and we're together now, and there's nothing all that's left is this one second.

Yeah, because I don't think that time is like, like, my sister asked me once, Are you afraid when you die, it's not gonna feel like it was long enough?

Are you afraid when you die, you're gonna feel like that wasn't enough life?

Yes, are you?

I think so.

I'm not anymore

because when I get a full moment of living, like when I feel open bore, bore fucking, you know, aperture 0.08,

that feels so good.

I feel like that's it.

I got it.

Do you know what I mean?

Like when you get a real moment of existence.

Yeah, I'm like, that's enough.

Right.

Like it can be, and those moments can happen in all types of ways.

All types of ways.

Yeah.

Sometimes it's just.

Hugging a kid.

Sometimes it's seeing a parent, you know,

wipe a kid's cheek or something.

Sometimes it's standing on a subway platform and seeing somebody's phone is next to the the track and going like, oh.

Yeah.

Like, I see life now.

There's so much in that one thing.

It's so shitty.

Sometimes it's reading that sentence by Flannery in that Flannery.

Yeah, sometimes it's that, but sometimes it's just the dumb little.

Oh, yeah.

Just seeing somebody in their dumb little thing.

Seeing one shoe on the fucking interstate.

Yeah, just one.

Fuck.

That's not me.

And then driving by the next day and it's not there anymore.

Oh, yeah.

And you've got it on and then you're like, oh, yeah, it's just getting good.

Oh, but yeah, some people used to think the eclipse was just a time when you can use racial slurs and it didn't get it.

That's right.

It didn't.

But somebody heard it.

Yeah, but still.

Now a lot of people heard it.

Oh, yeah.

But there is little moments you're like, yeah, that's life.

Yeah, so I don't know.

I think it's enough.

I had really ambitious to live more.

I love it.

I'm getting to really love living a lot.

Really?

Yeah.

Dude, remember when we went to Chris Rock's birthday together?

You took me there.

It was an incredible night.

Dude, that was so...

First, we went for Italian food.

That night had no right to be that great.

Oh, we were.

All we did was go to an Italian restaurant

and go to a birthday party.

Yeah.

Did we say that we went to his birthday party or not?

It's okay.

It wasn't private.

Yeah.

It was a big party.

Madonna was there.

Yeah.

I think we can say that we were there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, we felt like Misfits member.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We were like, this is weird.

Because it was super, super famous people.

It was.

And yet the center of attention, Chris, is like my best friend.

So, but I, but it was like, this is not, I don't belong here.

And I didn't belong there, neither one.

So, we were just like a pair.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was like, I was an outcast and you were a not let-in

at the same party.

Yeah.

So we just had each other, dude.

It was so much fun.

And we were just standing in the corner, just going, this is so fucking weird.

And looking at all the famous people there.

And

then Chris went up

and he said, he took a microphone and he said,

I feel like my life must have been good because I got all these, because all these people here and especially the comedians who came to see me.

And he said, Theo, Vaughan, and Louie.

Louis brought Theo here.

It was like the first thing out of his mouth was that I brought you there and how much that meant to him.

And he said it like three or four times.

It was interesting.

I couldn't believe that.

And it was meaning more to him than all these other like big shots.

It was like really, you know, and I hope that's okay for me to share.

No, I think it is.

I mean, I think it it just showed that he was happy that you were there,

you know, and that you were there.

Oh, I couldn't believe that he said my name, but it was also just that, like, yeah, it was just so funny that we were there, we felt uncomfortable, and that he made it so we didn't feel uncomfortable.

That's right, that's what I mean, yeah.

But you know, Theo, you're like a bridge, you know,

as a person.

That's the way I think about you.

Yeah, yeah, because when I first saw you, it's because you invited me to be on here

three years ago, something like that, yeah, 2002, 20 20 21 two two three four years ago

and uh somebody said this guy wants you in a podcast i wasn't i hadn't done any interviews for a long time and then i was just coming out to do interviews for the first time i was pushing a special whatever i was doing and i saw a little clip of you and i was like

and i i'm as bigoted as anybody oh yeah me so i was like mullet red state i don't know fucking southern you know yeah mud

mud mud flap fucking, yeah.

Yeah.

And without contempt, because I love

every kind of American.

So I was just like,

but,

but you reached out with like, we'd really like to have him on.

And I was like, well, just meet somebody new, meet somebody new, you know?

And then I went and listened to your stand-up and I just couldn't believe how funny it was to me and how inventive and how

beautiful, like just really eloquent and funny.

Fucking shit.

It had me laughing so hard.

And then we sat down and and and talked and i never met anybody like you we had i never met anybody that had such sort of uh open sensitivity and such honesty and um

and you you're ambidextrous you you run all over the

you can be loved by anybody who's willing you know and i've gotten to know you you're beautiful i love you man you're

a great guy and uh

And you're an example of when somebody brings people together, folks get a little scared of them.

You know, there's nothing, you're just willing.

You're just, know what I mean?

You'll listen to anybody.

It's with the way I feel.

Um,

but uh, you're like a really important guy in the world to me.

Thanks, dude.

I think.

Um, yeah.

Well, well, thank you, dude.

That's nice of you.

Yeah, I couldn't believe that.

Yeah, I just appreciated you bringing me over there.

It's been fun to like become friends and like, you know, like

be able to talk to.

It's like, yeah, I don't know.

You just, you're able to think without a lot of judgment of yourself.

And I think that it gives us so much information.

Not a lot of people were like, I don't even know if it's bravery if you're just missing a governor inside of yourself.

Right.

That needs to be there.

Well, we have something in common, you and me, because we're, we're born in very different parts of the world, uh, different lives, but we both are broken the same way.

We both have the same problem.

Oh, yeah.

And when you have that,

that's like a language barrier crosser.

Do you know what I mean?

It really is.

You just go like, oh, I get you.

I get it.

I've seen this, man.

I've seen it.

Believe me.

You go, you really see it?

Oh, yeah, I know.

I fucking see it, man.

So, and you've helped me a lot.

You've been very kind to me and helped me a lot in ways I needed.

And you're younger than me, but I, you know, you've kind of given me guidance and helped me.

But, uh, but that's the thing that makes people the closest is that, is their common, like, you were fucked up the same way.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You're fucked up.

I'm fucked up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank God.

Thank God you're fucked up.

Oh, yeah.

Because if I had to look at you and think that you weren't fucked up like me, it would just break my heart.

Yeah, dude.

You know?

Dude, yeah, I think when, yeah, like there was one time you said,

oh, because you've been through, you've been through like a lot of like stuff in your career.

You'd had like, you know, this is when things had gotten kind of crazy in your career with accusations and all types of stuff and

accurate accusations.

Accurate accusations.

Yeah, no, whatever they were.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, but you said, man, I feel so free.

And there was something about that to me.

I think about that once a week.

Yeah.

Cause I think about just like the little pieces of ourselves that we like,

that we try to manage and operate and we don't even know what they are and we don't even know why they're in pieces.

Yeah.

It's like trying to put a, like, a, some glass together so you can get a clear reflection of yourself.

Huh.

And it's just like, fuck, how did this?

I didn't even break this.

And I'm just so tired of cutting my fucking fingers trying to get a look at myself.

Yeah.

You know?

Trying to to piece together that broken mirror and cutting your fingers.

That's beautiful.

It's true.

And

when the, when life fucks it up for you, when it gets torn up, it's a relief.

That's why I felt free, you know?

Yeah.

Because I had to, I had tried to manage these problems I had inside of me for so many years.

And I tried to feel like I was like a normal person.

Yeah.

Or that I was like a...

what I thought of as a good person, but I was doing shit in the background of my life that I was ashamed of.

I was hurting other people and trying to tell myself I wasn't.

And,

you know, those things on the edge, like using another person, but you got their permission first.

You're still using another person.

You're not being with them.

You're using them.

Right.

That took me a long time to learn about that stuff.

But when you're doing that stuff and creating more and more problems, they just keep getting bigger and bigger.

And then the worst thing is if you're having a good life that's successful because you're feeling this like incredible rift between like the way you're representing yourself and who you really are.

And it's getting really, and I used to try, I think some of the early versions of talking on the stage really honestly were me trying to get out and say, I'm, I'm not, I'm, I'm corrupt.

I want everybody to know it.

Right, I'm a corrupt file.

Yeah, and

a corrupt file, yeah.

And uh,

but all of that is like you can't manage it.

And so when you're in front of the world and that's going on inside of you, it's just like a real, it's real hell.

And so when it all, and also when you are successful, because we live in America and there's like you're taught it's a work, working community, like you got to succeed.

So, when you're succeeding, you believe it's a perfect good.

Everything you're getting is important, right?

You're getting stature, you're getting work, you're getting money,

um, importance.

People are saying good things about you, these things, you just believe that after a while, you need those things.

Anyway, when life comes along, and just fucking

by the grace of my own fucking mistakes, my own fuck-ups, they all came back and took everything away from me.

And

it was the most thing I was most afraid of in the whole world.

And it happened.

The scariest possible thing.

And it happened.

Like now, people know about me.

They know, they like deeply know, and not perfectly either.

Like, there's, you know what I mean?

Because it's fantastical fame world.

So they hear their own version, and I'm sitting there going, like, wait, no, it's not quite like that.

And all the, it's like the worst thing that could happen happens.

Yeah.

And you lose everything you were working for.

And you, the people

you hurt, everybody knows about it now.

And also, people who love you are hurt by it.

I hurt a lot of people who love me

by

mismanaging that and letting and willfully becoming big enough as a famous person

that the

downfall hurt a lot of people,

people I love.

So it was like unbearable.

Fuck,

and

you remember me saying on stage one time, and I'll let you finish your thought.

Am I messing up by interrupting you?

Go ahead, Prithio.

Go.

There was, I remember you saying one time, I was trying to find a flight to somewhere, but every flight was landed on Earth.

It was all places to other places on Earth.

Yeah.

And it was so unmanageable.

Yeah, there was no, I didn't feel safe anywhere in the world.

And

I was full of a lot of self-pity i was full of a lot of anger too and also i just didn't feel safe in the world like i also didn't feel safe inside my own head anymore and it was kind of like fuck that's craziest that's the hardest thing you can kind of handle anything except for the inside your own head when that gets you know you know

because i live in a world where like i said before like people coalesce they come together and that's our strength so when you get ejected

love for yourself becomes antisocial.

Do you know what I mean?

Like sitting there going, I hope I'm a good person.

And most people's mistakes, when people get fucked up the way that I had, it's because of a low self-esteem problem to begin with.

So, um, so you're just cat, that's tanned.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, you're just sitting there and you're trying to like feel something good about yourself.

It's difficult.

And so it was just very overwhelming.

And,

but the losses that I like,

I had spent like, I don't don't know, I was, I wasn't like an overnight success.

You know, I was in my 40s when I got really famous.

And

I grew, I built to it very gradually.

I worked really hard.

I learned a lot.

I got my own TV show because I'd learned how to make a TV show from the ground up.

Like, I was a cameraman at a local Access cable station.

And then now I was a director and star.

And I'd met so many people and had so many affiliations and

a tapestry of

a life, a career.

And I remember thinking of it like all like tentacles coming off the back of my head, connecting me with the world.

And when this thing happened, it was like someone twisted all of them into like a braid and put their foot on the back of my head and just pulled out all the wires.

And all of a sudden, I had no,

nobody likes me.

Nobody, everybody, you know, I can't talk to nobody.

Nobody can, everybody's afraid of me.

And I was just spinning.

It was really wild.

But now

I look at that, that thing as like a beautiful thing.

As like, I look at that as like God's hands, you know, or whatever you want to call it.

That that was just like a good

caring thing that said, dude, you need to stop.

You need to stop.

You got to be detached.

You need to stop.

You need out of all this.

And that's for me.

It was great.

Not for other people in my life.

Some people, it was hard for them.

Oh, yeah.

I can certainly imagine imagine that yeah i think it's scary i think having like a different

yeah i mean i mean i've run it like i've had a lot of the same issues in my life with just like affection and those sorts of things and trying to like

never having like any coaching on that and just having severe

like and then you start to figure it out all yourself and you make these crazy like um

like

this crazy Tetris of what it's all supposed to be and how love is and like and then it's also like, um, I'd be a like,

but my low self-worth, I was always trying to fill it with like, um, things that weren't re just

impossibility.

And then, I mean, for me, I got into watching porn and that became this crazy span, just like never-ending thing.

I missed my 20s because I was watching porn, you know, it's like same.

I was a young kid, like, really obsessed with stuff that put me in a dark room when I should have been out in the sunlight.

Yeah.

And it twisted around my sex.

And it was, that was all behind this thing of wanting, just wanting someone lovely and female to look at me and tell me I'm okay.

Oh, yeah.

And tell me that I'm acceptable and even more so and lovable.

And I had such a strange,

twisted trip to that moment.

Yeah.

I never really quite learned it.

And that's my, that's my shit.

But but

those things when you're a kid, they're, they're, they're a pain.

And then when you get to be a grown-up with a life and you have effect on other people, it starts becoming a problem for other people.

So,

but I think that if I hadn't lost all of that, I would, it just would have gotten worse because that's why I felt free when I said that to you, because

I could see the real shape of the world

and I could see that nothing I had, that you can't take anything away from me that's really mine.

And that.

I realized I didn't have much that was worth having.

I had my family and that's private.

That's a different thing for me.

But I realized I need to start making a real treasure chest that has shit in it.

That's valuable.

That's valuable.

I need to stop thinking about why did these people turn their backs on me and ask myself, yeah, why did they?

Like, were you a good friend to them?

Who are you useful to in this world?

Like, that's where I started: was when I wanted to try to reach out and feel less isolated, was

who can I be of use to?

And I started started to try to,

but what was easy to let go of was like fame, money, and connection and red carpets.

That was easy.

That was easy.

I don't want that back.

Yeah.

Oh, it seems like a fucking nightmare.

It's shit.

It's nothing.

Work is different.

And what we do is public.

So it's like the hard thing was like, I wish I was a carpenter.

I could just start making chairs again.

I love stand-up comedy.

I love it.

It's my life.

I love it so much and it's given me so much.

And the other thing that happened too was that when a hard thing that happens to you that feels like an all-encompassing thing,

when you live with it every day, you go to sleep going, I can't do this.

I went to sleep many nights going,

my days are numbered.

I just can't handle this.

This is more than I can handle.

But then I wake up the next day and I go, all right, I'm still here.

It's still here.

It's like a siren's blaring and it's not stopping.

And at some point, you just got to make coffee and talk a little louder or whatever.

You know, it was like, all right, this is life now.

Yeah.

And I started to have to look at it and go like, well, everybody doesn't hate me.

It's just not true.

No.

And there's people that love me and they're reaching out to me.

And I should, I should take their hand.

I shouldn't just sit there and be a little victim, you know?

And

so after like,

what felt like a terribly long time of just feeling hated by everybody, I started to see people coming up in the street and saying, Where are you?

Where are you?

Where were you?

We want to see you.

And I thought, I want to start working again.

To me, work was like the thing.

I love it.

I know I have value there.

So I started working again.

And then it was really hard because I lost a lot of friends for starting again.

And that's crazy to me.

It was, well, it was, everyone was.

I used to react to all of this with a lot of anger and confusion, but I started to

do psychedelic drug therapy

and

see that everyone was acting in their own needs and everyone is doing what they need to do.

And life is really hard for everybody.

It's really hard.

And these times have been really hard for everybody.

The thing that ripped my life in half had been ripping lives all over the world.

And everybody was dealing and some people were so scared.

that what happened to me would happen to them.

And, you know, it was a lot of stuff going on.

So I had to see that.

Right.

And but I also saw

that a lot of people that now knew about me were like, what do you got?

And

I thought, I'm willing.

And I'll get, I was getting shit for trying again, but I'm like, that's okay.

It's okay.

I don't, my, my rule with that whole thing now is I don't take part in it and I don't interfere with it.

There's a thing about me.

I became a symbol for something, which is on me because I

made a trillion carbon copies of myself and threw them out of a helicopter and said, think whatever you want about me.

So when people started to think bad things about me, that's how they use this image.

And that's, I can't go around the world and fix that.

I can't make people that are mad at me not mad at me anymore.

I can't like,

I can't confront this thing on a global level because I'm not a globe.

I'm one guy.

And trying to live that way was what got me in trouble in the first place.

And the damage is done, and I can't fix that.

But what I can do is be a good man to my friends, to my on a one-to-one.

I can shake one hand at a time.

I can be a good father, and I can take care of myself.

I can

constantly try to revise what I think is right and wrong, not depend on it, but just keep asking myself because I thought I was a good guy in a lot of moments where I wasn't.

And I have to go back and go, that wasn't okay.

And try to make amends when I get an opportunity.

And it was really confusing to do all that.

And then

you can cut it out if you don't want it said on the air, but

you told me about this program.

You told me about SLAA and about

a 12-step approach to what I was suffering from.

And

yeah, I was so amazed that

you didn't have some of the familiarity with it.

I never heard of it and I didn't think it was

for me at all you told me about it and i was like yeah that's yeah that's not for me

and uh and you become such a role model to me through that program man you've become like somebody that like when you talk i listen when you want to know how i feel i know you mean it you know when you like

um

Yeah, man, I mean, you've become like just a real role model to me, you know, you become somebody that I

aspire to be able to get through some of the problems that I have

because I've seen you get through them, man.

Well, look at that, Theo, because you brought me into this shit.

So it's like,

if you reach out to somebody that's on the outside and take their hand and pull them in, they can end up teaching you something.

And it's the same for me because, like, when we were, I loved having you as a, I wouldn't have gone into it if I didn't know somebody.

And then, by the way, you took me behind this curtain.

I was like, I know a bunch of these guys.

I had no idea.

But I remember, like, I mean, to get specific for a second, there was one point in my life where during, when I got into this program, where I was like, in what we call withdrawal.

So I was like, this crazy idea to me, don't have sexual release for several months in a row.

What?

Like, I mean, since I first fucking came clear.

liquid,

I've done it every day.

And then what that did to the relationships of my life and my inability to feel real feelings.

And then the kind of reckless behavior and the things I did with other people that came out.

But there was a point where I was like, okay, so just don't, like, don't at all.

And the thing I loved about it, it's like a time that's so important.

I remember when you were doing that, I was like, dang.

Yeah, because I would call you.

This dude's going deep.

Yeah.

And you're like, how long has it been?

And I'd say like two months since I jerked off.

And you would go, what's it like out there, man?

And when you said that, like I think about that all the time.

What's it like out there, man?

It was like, I'm an astronaut who cut from the court and i'm just out and that's what it started to feel like i got out of the gravitational pull i got out of the cycle because every time you want something and you get it you just go back to square one you keep going back to to just oh that's my cycle has just been like for years i was texting women right

and

Like, let's meet up sometime.

And we would never meet up, right?

And it got to a certain point in certain years.

I didn't even know if we knew who each other were anymore.

Right.

But we would both, I meet almost every day.

Shall we meet up this week?

Yeah.

I mean, for years, but just little moments of trying to get approval, right?

Yes.

And then going back to like, and the group isn't like, everybody's not like, everybody may, maybe people have some perversion and stuff, but a lot of it's just like kind of pornography, intimacy disorders, like inability to connect.

It's not like.

Well, it's huge.

When you do the steps, you learn how you got to where you are and you learn what, what in your history made you this way.

yeah and you get some guidelines for trying to undo it and the thing about going through withdrawal is that by not pressing the reset button you go to a new place every day every day you don't do it you're in a new place you feel new feelings and i started realizing that my feelings my actual emotions were coming online for the first time really in my life and uh

And I saw everything really differently.

And I saw that everything that had happened with me was because of me.

And by the way, that's great news because that means you could do something about it.

Right.

And that everyone else is doing what they have to do.

And so I had to start like being a man about it.

And I can't like prove that to the world.

And I can't like do, you know, a big gesture.

I can just do it in my private life.

I can talk to you about it.

People can see this, whatever.

You know, I have mixed feelings about it.

It scares the shit out of me to talk about it.

Yeah.

But,

and that had its own thing.

Like I kept thinking, I have to fix this.

I have to fix this reputation.

I have to go back to where people have at least a neutral feeling about me.

And I realized I just can't.

I just can't.

And also,

for some people, the kind of people I probably would want to know, it's happened naturally.

Right.

And dude, I was shocked whenever we would hang out that you thought so many people thought that you were like, like such a pariah or something.

I was like, dude, Louis, like.

People care, but they don't care that way.

Yeah, no, I'm the last one who gives a shit.

Right.

And not even in a bad way, but like,

you didn't even seem like that bad of a guy.

you know what i'm saying like well i don't know some for some people i am yeah that's a good point but but those no it's okay though those for for some people i'm uh there's a there's yeah you're a boogeyman and that's the way that is and it's like if i did a movie uh for marvel and now i'm on a mcdonald's cup you can still get and i can't really change that i i made the movie i i did that so and maybe it's good for those people in some way i don't know but uh but and i don't like the way it affects people in my life and my family that's that's hard that's what I still carry.

And

I can't, but I'm responsible for it.

That's the thing.

And what it helps me,

my past and the way it's still present in the air around me helps me because my life was completely unmanageable and I had no power to change it.

And now I've changed it hugely.

My life is so different now.

I have real love in my life.

But I need to remember like where I was, you know,

and I also need to remember what is important, you know.

So,

so I'm, you know, and I'm writing, I, I, I'm writing novels because I, I don't jerk off every 15 minutes.

That's really all it is.

And I don't look, I don't look at the phone because for a long time, the phone was a gun pointing directly at my face.

So I completely extricated myself from social media and from scrolling.

I haven't scrolled in, I mean, it's a, it's a guilty pleasure about once every month I'll go and look.

But the chronic looking, I had to, it would have killed me to keep looking at it.

So I got, I'm so lucky what happened to me because of the what I was ejected out of.

And also the culture since this happened with me in 2017,

the world has gone completely insane.

And I've just been watching.

Like I haven't had to comment about it.

I haven't had to pick a side.

Yeah.

I've just been sitting back going like, wow, you guys are, I mean, like, I'm on the bottom of the sea, but I look up and I see,

you know, like there's a, there's still a full-on fucking battleship royale up there.

And once in a, once in a while, I see a body, like a blue body float down.

And I'm like, hey, man, I remember you.

And he's like, hey.

And we're all collecting and there's more people down here now than there was up there.

And it's quiet down here.

Oh.

You know, there's fish and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's all right.

Yeah, it is, dude.

It is like,

I don't know, having a support group and being in a, like, being able to go to meetings and share what's going on, listening to somebody else say something that has unlocked something in you that you never could have unlocked.

Yeah.

Fuck.

It's huge.

It's beautiful.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, it's unbelievable.

It's like you could spend the rest of your life trying to figure that out.

And then suddenly somebody just helped you get to a new place.

One thing I love about meetings is like, you know, there's like the structure to these meetings, like in any other 12-step program where you get three minutes to share, right?

And the regiment of that, it's like perfect.

It's kind of like the way baseball is perfect.

Like someone figured out just the right amount of feet to make the, you know, that the throat of first is always close.

Yeah.

12-step meetings have like this perfect, this three minutes, and there's a spiritual timekeeper, a guy who just says when you're one minute away from finishing.

Yeah.

It says one minute and you acknowledge it, you know, thank you one minute, right?

There's that thing.

But in two minutes, you can get really lost into what a guy's saying.

And you get to have this moment where like a guy's going like, you know, I keep lighter fluid under my pillow because of the days that my father used to come to my room and I'd want to burn him alive.

Thank you.

One minute.

And I

like

these little interruptions because it reminds you, yeah, you're in your shit, but

wrap it up.

There's other guys waiting to talk and the world's going around.

And it's, you know, that was a long time ago, man.

Get over it.

I'm some level.

I'm glad you're sharing it, but you only get three minutes you know yeah dude it's monday brother yeah it's been monday

yeah that sounds like a thursday yeah i need to check in some about what i did today you know oh dude yeah even things like i mean i was looking at pornography the other day just being able to like text somebody and say that to them you know just like yeah and then just like how many times do i want to go back to this feeling of after i look at pornography i just feel like empty you know or i just don't feel like myself the next day that's been the biggest thing that helped change it for me is like noticing that like the next day, I don't feel like myself.

I feel like I'm a little scattered.

I feel like I still need to recover from something.

I still need to like like put my aura back together a little bit.

Yeah, because you ran away into pornography.

So when you, when you, you feel, you get, it's like you froze yourself.

Yeah.

And the next day you start to thaw and that's uncomfortable.

It's like feeling your leg coming back to,

you know, after falling asleep.

Yeah.

It's, it's tingles and it's bad.

It's a bad feeling.

You want to be in one or the other, you know?

So it is, it's hard.

The hard thing about being in recovery from from addiction, something like what we have, is that you can look at something like pornography, but

you're aware now.

So you.

But you know, there's a cost to it.

Yeah, you know, there's a cost.

But thank God, because you get so much of life back.

And being able to tell another guy, like, I'm doing this,

because there's a lot of shame involved with sex and love, like all this kind of thing.

It's

when some, when you tell somebody I'm an alcoholic, people have a lot of sympathy for that.

Yeah.

This one's a little tougher.

So you really need the group because these are a bunch of guys who get it.

And so when you tell them,

I'm struggling not to do this,

the genius of that is just that someone else knows it now.

That's all.

That it's too much for you to carry.

At some point, for anybody who's an addict or not, life got to be too much to handle.

It just was overwhelming.

So you found a way to shift away from it.

And thank God you did.

Like, thank God I had that when I was a kid.

I don't think I could have handled life without this thing that was right there to soothe me.

Yeah, if I didn't have that thing, I mean, I found pornography and then I would, right, when I would get home, I would go, I would look at pornography and stuff like that because it was a way to make myself feel good.

It was like, I felt so horrible, you know, and I didn't even know I felt so horrible about myself.

I just felt like a fucking cavern, you know?

I felt like,

I mean, I felt embarrassed.

Like, I didn't even want to impose myself on people because I didn't,

I don't know.

I just, nobody had time for me, right?

And so it made me think that I wasn't worth people's time.

So I always just felt like I just couldn't say what I needed to say.

I just didn't want to waste your time.

I didn't want to waste time.

I remember that feeling.

Because you would see that I was a waste of time.

Like, if I could just.

How old were you?

Probably 10, 11.

I mean, imagine a 10-year-old kid, like, look at a 10-year-old kid's face and imagine that he feels like a cavern inside.

That's a hard thing to carry.

And so you take on this thing that helps you just simplify life.

Right.

I do this.

I search, I search, I push, I push.

I get to ecstasy.

I'm calm.

Right.

And then it's a homeostasis.

It regulates me.

It's just regulating.

Right.

And

if you're exposed to sex early in life, which I was, in a way that was, meh, you get, that's it.

That's it.

That's what you got.

And then later in life, when your feelings are supposed to be developing, they're still under this muffle thing.

So they're not developing properly and you're ashamed of what you're doing.

Yeah.

But when you, the thing about a fellowship is just so simple.

It's not God, it's not something that's better than you.

It's a bunch of guys who just have the same problem, and you're able to just go, you know, I'm having this problem.

They go, Yeah, I get it.

They don't give you a solution, they just go, I know it too now.

And you go, Now I got two souls to carry this problem, and I'm there for him when he needs that.

Yeah, and

that just makes it a tiny bit easier so that you can

go to the alternative, which is why do I do this thing?

It's because I feel like a cavern, cavern.

And

the detaching from the behavior and stopping the thing I couldn't stop doing gave me the opportunity to go, what's in that cave?

What's in that?

Is there something in that that's worthwhile?

How bad is it?

What's wrong with the cave?

Is it that I'm alone in there?

Am I alone in there?

It gave me the courage to sit in the cave alone and take a look around and go like, you know, with a little flashlight, man, there's like crystals on the roof.

It's fucking cool in here.

You know, how did I get in here?

There is a, there's a little, there's a little door.

Where does that go?

And starting to

really be okay with, I'm just here.

I'm in here.

And then a feeling comes that the kind of things I used to run from, you know, like deep sadness.

I miss my mom, something like that.

I want to just have it.

I just want to have it now.

I just want to have it.

And I've got a new habit, which is that when I get that, huh,

that used to lead to an addictive moment.

When I get that, ah, I know that if I pull away from it, it gets worse.

It actually only hurts if I pull away.

But if I get up to it and I go, what do you got?

And I see colors and I see beautiful things, you know?

And that's the potential is to

welcome every feeling.

And then you don't want out.

And I love my life so much now that the last thing i want to do is is is gray it out with i know uh with a kind of chronic sexual half release fake thing watching a sad person on a video in a weirdly lit room and i'm i'm in it yeah i just don't come on buddy and i don't even know what i'm caring for if someone's in pornography yeah that's crazy yeah which team are you on yeah yeah and you're like oh tie let's just have a tie yeah um

but oh, dude, yeah, it's like,

oh, that sedative.

And it's a full-body sedative.

But yeah, I would,

yeah, I didn't have,

it, it,

it marred really my ability to make a lot of connections because, like, I'll even notice still in my life, and I still have, I still need to go through my steps again.

I need to check in with my sponsor today, but

like if I'm, if I'm face to face with a woman and they say something nice about me, I can't stay there for a second.

Really?

I cannot like even a woman looking at me really, I just I can't eat.

I just have to.

What happens?

What's what makes you run away from me?

It like

inside of me, it feels fucking like, it almost feels like a dirty electricity

comes inside of me that's or just like shows up at the front of me.

It's a power.

It's a weird electronic.

It really is like touching a third rail.

Yeah.

Love and sex are both extremely powerful, and they ain't all good.

It's what I learned after like months of not jerking off.

And then I decided, I talked to my sponsors, like, it's time to try.

Oh, yeah, I remember that big weekend.

We were all excited.

I think I bought one of those Amish fireplaces.

I can just feel some of the distant warmth out there.

But weren't you out of town?

Yeah, somebody had to be out of the way.

You were up in New York somewhere, weren't you?

You had to be in the totality of my first jerk off.

Like, you had to be in that one stripe.

That's right, in the island.

I was out in Shelter Island and

I said, okay, you're going to visit this.

And you're not doing this for pleasure.

You're doing this to visit.

You're going to go to the country you left.

And I did it.

And it was like an electrical shock.

It wasn't like this.

pure pleasure.

And I realized that's what it's always been like.

But I've been putting like wet towels and asbestos and shit over it my whole life So that I could barely feel it So I had to really really rub hard and with the most penetrating fucked up thoughts in order to find it and I've been doing it since I was a kid and I'm like I can't believe I felt that as a kid as a child.

Wow.

That's crazy because I really felt it's raw strength again.

And I said I don't my my little conversation I have in my head with this presence I call Wally.

It's just my own thing.

And I said, I don't, after I did it, after I came, I said,

that's no joke.

And Wally said, no, it's not.

And I said, I think I need some rules.

I should not go there alone very often.

And I should never go there without, with somebody who I don't trust.

And Wally said, that sounds smart, kid.

And that's what I've been living by.

I've been respecting sex as a very hot fire.

That's beyond electricity.

Your feelings are fires that you can sit by and warm yourself, But sex is electricity that you have to deal with with real discipline and thoughtfulness.

And so is love, because that's a two-way thing.

You've got somebody else involved.

And the other thing that the steps did was looking at my life,

really looking at it.

And I was writing down my history of my sex life, you know, from it was the first assignment I was given.

And I got to like, I've blown up my life like twice, really.

And the first time I blew up my life, I looked at that moment.

I was writing it and I yelled onto the paper I said stop to myself you gotta stop

and I felt this huge remorse because I realized I can't hear it he can't hear it that happened

I can't change it oh but then I heard a voice say

please stop And I realized it's my future self whose life kept getting wrecked.

And he says, please stop.

And I'm like, I can hear him.

I can fucking hear that guy.

And I can actually, I'm in this moment.

But I thought, yeah, but I can't.

I'm not strong enough.

And I

asked the universe to, I just said, somebody fucking help me because I want to live.

I want to really live my life.

And

that was a big moment for me.

So that's powerful.

I can hear that guy now saying, thank you, dude.

and please keep it going because you could still

like you have to keep going in this better direction so

that's all just from this stupid 12-step thing that you get it's like a dmv fill out thing yeah anybody can do it yeah when you go to these sla meetings they're like on zoom and stuff there's like a hundred dudes on every meeting yeah it's like and a lot of it

is young guys in like their 20s, some are 19, who can't, who are addicted to porn.

Yeah.

Because they were born into a world where they're being encouraged to go to their phone for love and acceptance and power and money.

And that's where they find sex.

And it's all addicted.

They've turned every human endeavor into an addictive act.

And these kids are so overwhelmed by it.

Everything.

The most important ones.

Well, one of the things that I've learned are: I mean, well, the crazy part is: so, say I'm sitting there, I'm jerking off, and then there's some

just because I'm jerking off on my phone, some county out in

Iowa is they're losing water because they're having to run a data center.

That's right.

That's flaring up a little icon.

That's right.

So now some kid can't even take a hot shower because some other

40-year-old kid won't stop jerking off somewhere in the distance.

Oh, it's unbelievable.

I mean, and here's one of the crazy things.

We had a lady that came on who told us about Pornhub and a lot of these sites.

A lot of the uh content on there isn't even consensual right of course so now you start to realize oh i'm jerking off to crime yes i'm jerking off to possible sexual crime like they found like 70 of it was non-consensual this lady lila mickelwaite is her name she came on was fascinating uh to learn about it um yeah and if you're jerking off to anything on that site you're supporting that even if even if the thing you're watching isn't is consensual it's it's all the money's going into the same pot yeah it's financing this shit that's not consensual and and then also one great thing about being in the program and i've never really talked about it this way i've talked about it with one other comedian on here actually um is that there's we have a buddy in the program named steve and he's awesome and he runs a program called valor and this isn't really an advertisement for it but um

We do free ads for the Valor on the

podcast.

And it's a lot of young dudes in there.

And I'm in some of the meetings and it's a lot of dudes in there who are just going to

get help.

Yeah, because it's really hard to unlearn this shit.

And it does make you, it gets dangerous because it does make you an unthoughtful person.

That's the way I got into the trouble that I got into because I wasn't stopping and thinking.

I was like so blinded by what I wanted that I didn't, and I would just get this basic feeling of like, this is okay.

I would tell myself that, but I wasn't stopping and thinking.

And I just have so many, you know, like when you're in a, if you have a power boat and you're pulling water skiers or people on a tube that kind of boat has an elaborate system of ignition you know what i mean so that you don't chew somebody up with the propeller so like when someone's in the water you turn the ignition off and when you turn the ignition on it beeps really loud before you start the motor and that's before you go in gear you have all these movements before you're harming and that gives everyone a chance whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa right so i got all these beeps and triggers in my life now like especially if I'm looking at a moment of ecstasy, if I'm looking at something that's going to make me feel euphoric, I go, you might be being selfish right now.

Like, that's an automatic thought to me now.

Like, you might, who's, who, is someone paying for this?

Is someone looking like they're okay when they're not?

Is somebody saying yes when it was tough for them to get there?

Can you just wait a second?

Can you cool off?

Can you take a breath?

Because you might be going too fast.

You might be so desperate to get this moment that's going to give you that assuagement, that kind of like I'm okay feeling that you're not thinking, you're not in, you're not in it.

You're not in the room with somebody.

You're not in the room with yourself even.

You're not, you're hurting yourself.

You're using yourself.

Oh, yeah.

So

that's new for me.

That's new.

And

it's become an installed part of me.

So I just move slower.

And

life has a speed.

And if you can get on the same track with it, you're okay.

Like the thing I get from like, every morning morning I look at the sky.

I just look at the sky and the world and nature.

And I just, the, the,

there, there's a, a message I keep getting, which is that you're meant to be here.

You're designed to be here.

You don't even have to look at it as like some conscious being made you.

It's just that you're of this earth

at this time.

Yeah.

So chances are you match.

If you're willing to be in it, the way, as long as you're willing to be in reality, the way things really are, accepting what's not there and because we're human going for it a little trying a little trying to make things happen i think that the universe when we around to find out goes like huh i'm like nice yeah nice

yeah and so there's a little there's an edge there that you want to be at where you're just like, I'm here, which means I belong here.

And everything that happens will basically be okay with me if I really take it in as reality.

And I don't try to just like think my way out of it.

But I'm a clever little fucking monkey and I want to try some shit too, you know, and it means I'll fall.

Yeah.

You know, try, try to, try to try only as high as the fall won't break you.

When you get up really, really crazy high in life.

You're too high.

Your Madison Square Garden and all this kind of crazy shit that I was doing, it's like the fall will kill you.

And

because it's not a human height.

It's not human and there's no oxygen up there and there's no drag on your wings and it's lonely and it doesn't have it.

It's not affected by your feelings anymore.

It's just this other thing.

But

when I went back to work and I was like, I'm doing clubs again.

How's that going to feel?

And I'm sitting in the funny bone in St.

Louis and the Coke, the machine that sends Coke to the bar is

next to my head.

And I'm sitting there.

And there's the smell of chicken wings and pizza.

And I'm doing retail comedy.

One, you know, I was happy as fuck.

I was so happy to be telling the jokes to people whose faces I could see and whose admission price is,

they're giving that to me as

a gift, and they're going home happy.

And I got back to that level of comedy, and it was really beautiful.

That's where I live now.

I mean, I do the theaters because I'm still a fucking pig.

I still want, I still like it.

Well, some of them are nice too.

Some of them are nice.

The Ryman and Nashville.

Beautiful.

I'm excited to come over there.

Well, dude, I just knew I came over to your place and you were making art and you were sculpting and sending me stuff.

And then you sat me down one time with a friend when I was over there and she had made something and you were reviewing it or she was reviewing a project you had made.

It was an anime.

It was like

some type of a cartoon, I believe.

It was a silent film.

Yeah.

Maybe.

Yeah.

It's a movie that I was starting to make and we were making an animatic with charcoal.

Yeah.

It was just fascinating.

I'm like, oh, this dude is a fucking artist, man.

And that's when I realized, oh, this guy really like, he likes being an artist you know it just feels good it's just fun yeah and if you can share this stuff it's great and it was just yeah it was it was great and then you sent this and i was like wow this dude's really in his spot but yeah i agree man having that like having that that like need for attention from women or having watching pornography or watching porno and stuff, it's taken a lot of things moments in my life.

You know, I was on, one time I was on a vacation

with my girlfriend.

Instead of like spending time, I was like,

like texting some other woman or I was like watching pronouns.

And it took us out of this great weekend where we're supposed to, and it's like, and that caught, it's like,

you know, I can never like get that right in a way.

You know, well, because, but it's

understandable because you have that feeling that if you're with somebody, you're too much for them.

You're scared to be alone with her.

You're scared.

She's probably finding a way.

You're finding a way to not be in the room.

Yeah.

And it's just that old pattern, though, that if I don't try and get it under control, if I don't try to do better.

And I think even this year has been tough for me.

It's just like,

yeah, I just feel like

work's gotten busy and it just makes me scared kind of a little bit.

And it's like,

you know, and then popularity makes you scared and that's kind of scary.

And then you're just like

looking at yourself.

You know, it's like, what am I even

you, you're like, I can't even feel like I can't even, the controls feel far from my hand sometimes.

Not an, not like I'm doing crazy stuff or anything, but just like,

you know, I just, I don't know.

No, it's, it's, it is scary and it should be.

That's the thing is it's like another electricity.

You got to respect it.

It's not, it's not a small thing being famous and it can go bad and it's, it's your fault because you got into it.

Yeah.

But that's.

I don't know.

It's also a human thing to want to share your work and want to be out there, you know.

But once when when it goes bad, you get in this predicament of like, I want to go to each person's house and tell them what really happened and what, you know, the little things that are, that aren't in the way this, you know, and that's just never going to happen.

Yeah.

And at this point, with all, to me, I just want to get, I just, I just want to live and I want to, like, I haven't talked about this the way I'm talking about it to you.

We can take it out if you want.

It's scary.

We'll talk about it after.

Okay.

But there's so many times where I just want to come out and tell people, like, I'm fucking sorry.

I'm really sorry.

I hurt people.

And

I feel,

I've felt like in the way that it was so hard to take all of that at once, that much anger at once.

It's like, I just don't have a sorry that covers it.

And so,

and I don't have only one feeling.

Sorry is not the only feeling I have.

And

so I don't want to say something.

And I'm scared of the way that anything I say

can be used by other people.

There's all kinds of fears that come up.

And I'm very raw in that space.

Yeah.

But that's all because I made this, I'm making these choices to stay in this.

And it's because I love the work and I want to share it.

So I guess like I really wish there was, like, I could have a simple kind of watershed where I can say

just yes to everything that happened.

And I'm sorry.

I really am.

And I'm just trying to do better.

And I don't think I can prove that to everybody because it's a private thing.

It's a one-to-one man thing.

It's not a famous guy act.

Right.

And, but I got work that I want to share with people.

i have work that i think is worthy and there i'm like if you don't like it you don't like it that's that's always okay with me when i'm on stage and i'm talking and people don't aren't accepting it like oh that's okay that's yeah that's fair fair enough man um and i don't nobody owes me nothing i'll just i'm trying we'll see what happens dude i'm kind of like in a weird way like i know it sounds maybe crazy to say

it's almost like well i think so many of us probably needed we needed a a guy like you to have some of the same problem because

you have such an ability to look at things and kind of like examine them.

And it's like, we needed an astronaut.

Like, I know it sounds crazy, but it's like we needed like a Neil Armstrong like you.

Well, you know, I walk out there and report what you're feeling under your feet because it's like so many people are struggling and you say things, dude, that like.

I mean, the rest of us just cannot put it into words.

And it's just such a gift that you have, you know?

Well,

it's been a little bit painful because.

I know it has.

Well, because

uh, I felt that when it happened, like, hey, this is an opportunity.

I can tell people what this is like, and I can really

come back with something great to say.

But I just, I'm not, I just couldn't.

Like, I just couldn't do it.

I was too scared, and I was too fighting for my life, and also worried about other people in my life.

Everything I say affects people that love me, I know that, and people that I'm related to.

And I, I can't just decide like what's going to fix it.

And also, I'm completely confused by it.

I still live with this thing every day.

It's still part of my everyday life.

It still imposes limits on me every day.

And

I still don't know what to do about it.

I really don't.

It's really confusing.

But so I wish I could fill, like, I'm like a shitty astronaut.

I'm like an astronaut who's not, they sent the, I'm, I'm, what's his name?

Don Knotts.

In that, whatever he, I think he did an astronaut one, right?

If he didn't, he should.

I think I, yeah, there it is.

Yeah, the reluctant astronaut.

That's me.

Yeah, it's no good.

And I'm Gus Grissom.

I blew the hatch.

And I just was, I was just too weak, man.

And I flailed through it.

You know, I said some things

out of confused anger because I am who I am on stage.

I'm pretty raw up there, you know?

So I'm not like vetting what I say.

I'm not careful about it.

you know but you you may be the reluctant astronaut but i think it's like what we all are it's like we all just want to try and like figure out whatever the truest stuff that's going on inside of us that's right and uh and that's the part that i think you report back like i'm just saying like well life will uh you will never choose the hard road for yourself never

and you're the choices you make in life are a combination of like uh fear you do things because of what you're afraid of to avoid things you're afraid of most things in life.

You work for financial success because you're afraid of being poor more than anything else.

And

you work towards acceptance because you're afraid of being alone.

Yeah, and sometimes you look at pornography or you do stuff like that because you're afraid of going in and sitting with talking with your spouse or your girlfriend and talking about things that are scary to you.

That's right.

So that's how life, that's how a person, and it's understandable.

It's like people just do their best.

100%.

But when life throws a bomb in the middle of your life and

you survive it,

you are given this beautiful opportunity to go like, to see everything from another angle and go like,

what is even breathing?

Like, what is even like, why do I put a sock on?

Like, what am I doing here?

And it breaks everything.

It takes everything away and it goes, start again.

And you look back at your life and you go, that was a fucking mess.

And you're met with real remorse about your mistakes.

You don't have time to regret when you're living life, but when it's cut off and you just go, wow, that was fucked up.

And I can't even fully fix it for some people.

I just can't.

I just, what do I do now?

Put a sock on.

Maybe another sock.

Maybe on the same foot, maybe two socks on one foot.

What's wrong with that?

And you, you get, I got my sense of humor back that way.

So it's just like, this is all pretty silly.

It's all pretty fucking silly in a sense.

Don't you dare take life seriously is like one of my big things.

Even as a comedian, you sort of think I'm a great comedian.

Yeah, lighten up, buddy.

You know what I mean?

And the shows I've been doing on the road now are just, I call the show ridiculous because it's back to, I just want to be, I just want to surprise people with what I'm saying.

Yeah.

And I just want to

be a bit of an asshole for a little, for an hour.

It's just fun.

But also just seeing the, I don't think I would have seen these things if life didn't force me to.

So it's good.

It's good.

Like right now, for me, life is just so fucking good, way better than it was before.

Would to be able to live in such fucking,

I mean, just to be able to like

really face some real challenges in your life, that's pretty fucking crazy.

I mean, you walk away going like, I can do that.

Yeah.

And it's okay.

And what happened that was terrible was okay.

And it wasn't all terrible.

Some of it was so beautiful.

Because when you're exposed to the hardest part of life, you're also exposed to the most wonderful.

Like I was looking the other day.

I don't know why this is, but the word compass and the word compassion, like they share the first, what, seven letters?

I don't know why that is.

But

you get some direction out of life, but you only find real compassion by seeing real pain.

And you go, oh, wow, life is really tough, you know?

And then that, that's all you need.

All you need is to understand how much life can hurt.

Because it's,

well, I don't know, sort of spinning out with what I'm saying, but it's okay.

It's,

yeah, life is

better now.

And I also, what's happened to me can be an example for other people.

And like in fellowship, when I go to a meeting in person and there's a guy who's really hurting, his life's fucked up and I approach him and I go hey you should and he's not sure about being in this program and and he goes oh I ruined my life and I go do you know who I am

and he goes yeah and I go I'm doing pretty good buddy

and the fact that my wreckage can be a mountain for folks to lean on take a little load off that's a beautiful gift

You know?

Yeah.

Well, it's been awesome, man.

It's so funny.

I never really got to know you as a a comedian.

I mean, I got to know you on stage, but I've gotten to know you, I feel like, as a man.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

You're my brother.

Yeah.

I gotta know you just by being kind and being cool.

And yeah, man, I just, yeah, I hope one day I have a cool kid like you, man, that's creative and fun and brave and fucking weird and, you know, not afraid to hide somewhere and fucking jerk off a little, but also be fucking cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Open up.

Stay open.

Yeah.

So I hope that one day I have a cool kid like you.

And yeah, I just feel really proud that

I just feel like, yeah, thank you for being a role model to me, man.

You do a good job of that.

And I think you should know that.

Thanks, bro.

That you do a really good job of that of being important to people, Louis.

And it's definitely been that for me.

So thank you.

Thanks, bro.

Yeah.

I think you're a brave dude.

And

yeah, man, I'm excited to see you guys tonight.

So

let's get the fuck out of here.

She's getting fucking,

dude.

But this this book is coming out of your eyes.

There's jizz coming out.

It was.

Because it's backing up.

Very good.

That's where the gauge is comes out the eyes.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

It's true.

It's true.

Oh, I know it is.

Yeah.

Oh, I've given, I did a four-part series on it online.

Ingram is great.

It's kind of, it's like it's a new kind of Tom Sawyer, but it's just good.

It's written well.

It's not like, oh, this is

a big name writing a book, and that's why it's going to be good.

This book is good if anybody wrote it.

It's magnificent.

And I'm so glad that you finally get to a place in your life where you feel you have the time and the ability to make such magic like this, man.

Thanks, bro.

So it's really cool.

Thank you.

All right, Louis C.K., thank you so much, bro.

Thank you, Theo.

Yep.

Now I'm just falling on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves.

I must be

cornerstone.

Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind.

I found I can feel it

in my bones.

But it's gonna take

a little while.