Transcript of #2564 - Chuck Lorre

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So explain that again. Explain the show that you saw.

It was at the Singer Bowl in 1969. Jimi Hendrix was the headliner, The Experience, right after Monterey. Janis Joplin and the Holding Company, Big Brother and the Holding Company was the warm-up act. Wow. Yeah.

What was that like?

Well, for starters, we bribed a little security guard to get in, me and my friends. I think we gave him $2 apiece. And we walked right up to the stage.

Wow.

Yeah. And watched, like, right there. And then— That was my first— I first went, oh, I guess I gotta start drinking Southern Comfort. 'Cause she's making it look pretty good.

When I worked with Phil Hartman on NewsRadio, one of his favorite stories was he was like a stagehand at the Whisky, and Hendrix performed. And it was his job to stand with his hand on the speaker because he was worried that Hendrix would knock the speaker into the crowd. And so I guess it was just not very stable. So he said he was literally standing there with his hands on the speaker with Hendrix 2 feet away from him playing guitar.

Early on, he would destroy his equipment like The Who would do as well. They'd tear up the amps. He'd set the guitar on fire, you know. And, you know, I'm 15, 16 years old going, oh, man, don't set the— oh, give me the guitar. Don't set it on fire.

Don't smash the guitar. Please, no.

They were always smashing guitars back then. Yeah, yeah, it was— That was an expensive way to end the show, but that's what was happening.

It just was a— I guess it was just a wild rock and roll thing.

It was amazing.

A rebellion thing.

It was an amazing time to be a kid watching that stuff.

Well, it's such a crazy time in human history. I mean, it was one— it's one of the weirdest times in all of culture. If you take the difference in the culture of the 1950s to the culture of the late 1960s, it's like a Just an insane shift. Yeah. Like one of the most insane shifts ever. So radical and so big. It happened so fast.

It was a response to the '50s.

Yeah, it was that and the Vietnam War and drugs. All the above. All of them. Psychedelic drugs, everything all together.

And the birth control pill.

Yes.

That changed everything.

Yes, yes. Very good point. Very good point. Yeah. Gave women freedom.

As well, it did the same for men.

Oh yeah, yeah. Everybody could just do whatever the fuck they wanted, and they're doing drugs at the same time. So everything just boom, just all came together. Yep. Your story is awesome. The book is great. It really is. It's very compelling. You know, one of the things that bums me out the most about the internet and streaming is that we've lost the multicam sitcoms. It's a very weird thing. Like, first, the first thing that killed it, I think, was reality shows. Right? That sort of took a lot of the wind out of its sails. But a few remained. And during COVID me and my family watched Big Bang Theory. I had never watched it. Hmm. Watched it from episode 1. We just binged it all the way to the end. I fucking loved it. I felt like when I was like a comic in the clubs in LA, you never heard about Big Bang Theory. It didn't get It was like there was other shows that people wanted to— you were cool if you liked. And The Big Bang Theory was like, you know, family sitcom, you know, just like real clean and sweet. It's a really well-written show.

It's very funny. It's a really good show, man.

Thank you. We worked hard.

I bet you did.

We worked really hard. It was, it was a general attitude that every episode had to kick ass. Every one.

Well, it was also so unusual. You have this, like, super autistic genius guy as your head character.

Well, the way I entered the show, because I'm clearly not a physicist or by any means a genius, they were outliers. They were guys that couldn't figure out how to behave in the real world.

Right.

That I got.

Yeah.

You know, the physicists, quantum physicists and all that stuff, that was You know, I'm a college dropout. That was never my thing. But being on the outside looking in, that I understood.

Right.

That I understood. Yeah.

Your story is awesome, dude. It really is. It's, it's, it's very— it's such an American story, you know, because it's you trying to figure out how to make it in show business and trying to be a musician and all these different things that happened to you and the whole Scientology thing and And then eventually, you know, starting to write on big sitcoms and the Roseanne story. And it's fucking great, man. 'Cause it's like, it's such a huge part of television history, what you've experienced. You really have. It's like, if you think about television history in America, a big part of it is defined by sitcoms. You know, because sitcoms, like whether it's All in the Family or Seinfeld, Or Friends. There's something about those sitcoms that, like, cement us in this place of comfort and happiness and, like, laughter. Like, those are our— almost like our extra family, these people on TV that we've become attached to watching every Thursday.

For me, it was characters. Nobody remembers the plot of a sitcom.

Right.

There were great plots, especially on Seinfeld and stuff. Larry David. Nobody can plot a comedy story better than Mr. David. But the secret sauce was you wanted to hang out with— you wanted to hang out with these people. You wanted to sit at the bar with Norm and Cliff...

Yes.

...and Woody and Sam. You wanted to have a cup of coffee with Jerry, you know. And the same thing held true with Friends. It was a sort of a surrogate family that you wanted to be part of. But you don't remember the stories. The stories were secondary. It was the characters and perfect casting on these shows as well.

Yeah.

Perfect casting.

Why do you think that— I mean, in '94, when I first came to LA, sitcoms were the thing. That's why everybody came to LA in the first place. Yeah. If you were a comic, you came to LA hoping you were gonna get a deal so that you could be the next Roseanne or Jerry Seinfeld or fill in the blank.

Tom— Tim—

Tim Allen, Brett Butler. There was all those people were like—

Cosby. You go back to Cosby, stand-up.

Yeah. It was all— you wanted the network to develop a show around you, and all these people were scrambling for that. Yeah. And that, for the most part, doesn't exist anymore.

Well, we're trying with Leanne Morgan. You know, we— you know, Leanne's, you know, remarkably successful stand-up right now, and the show we're doing with her on Netflix,

Netflix, you can do it.

Yeah, they have the freedom to do that.

Young Sheldon worked on Netflix. That was great.

It's an amazing thing about Young Sheldon on Netflix was a whole generation of kids watched that show and had never seen the Big Bang Theory. Right. They didn't— and what's wonderful too is when you get to talk to them, they don't know what CBS is.

How weird.

But the show stood on its own, which was— that was our dream come true, that it wasn't standing on the shoulders of The Big Bang Theory. It was its own show.

Right. No, it definitely was. We binged that too after we binged Big Bang Theory. We binged Young Sheldon, which is a great show too. But different, right? Single camera.

Entirely different vibe.

Yeah. The thing about the multicam thing is, like, you're kind of in on it. You know there's a crowd there watching this. It's like you're watching a play. as much as you're watching a comedy.

It is a play.

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Yeah.

It is a play with 4 cameras rolling around in front of it.

Right.

And if somebody makes a mistake, you do it again.

Yeah.

Or something stinks, you rewrite it or you cut it, but you don't put it on TV where, you know, as I've always said, if it stinks in front of the audience, if you put it on TV, it's going to stink forever.

Right.

Right? So it is a little bit of theater. I think it started back in the '50s as theater. That's what they, you know, and started as radio plays.

Right.

You know, and then television happened.

What was the first sitcom on television? It wasn't The Honeymooners, was it?

There had to be something probably before that. Well, it was always, you know, Lucy. But I think even before that, there was Phil Silvers and George Burns and—

Right.

I don't, I don't know. I don't know. The deep history of it, but it all came out of vaudeville and theater, yeah. One of the more interesting things about the— this distaste for the laugh track— we've never used a laugh track, never. Been for 40 years been accused of it, but never used it. And I remember one time I had a reporter— On the set of The Big Bang Theory, who went and sat in the audience and watched us tape a show in front of a live studio audience. It takes 3, 3.5 hours. And then he writes an article complaining about the laugh track. You know, it's sort of like, okay, there's no getting away from this. He sat in the stands with 200 people laughing, and he wrote about the annoying laugh track.

That's interesting. Do you think they just do that because controversy sells and negativity sells and they just have a narrative in their head?

It diminishes the show.

They want to diminish it.

They want to diminish it.

Yeah.

I think I made that pretty clear in the book. Yeah. That the word sitcom, it made sense when you married a fucking witch, you know, or you came back from outer space with a genie. Right. And you don't want to get laid, you know. But it makes no sense when it's a family show like Archie, you know, All in the Family. That's about a family. What's the situation? He's a bigot? He's, you know, he's racially insensitive? That's not a situation. That's life, you know?

Well, the whole sitcom thing, I just don't feel— you talked about this in the book as well, that, like, you wouldn't even say that you wrote for sitcoms. I'd say I wrote a TV comedy.

Yeah, because I'm embarrassed.

Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, I was very insecure. Like sitcoms were dismissed. I was very insecure, and, uh, and I— the word hurt me. It physically hurt me.

That's crazy.

Yeah, because it's—

In Hollywood, it just didn't get the respect that a film did.

No, of course not.

Not even close.

Not even close. So much harder, though, in so many ways, to make 200 people laugh every week for 22 weeks.

It's almost impossible. It's very difficult to pull off. It's ridiculous. And if you watch the writers scramble, and, you know, every week you have to have some new scenario, and you've got 5 cast members you have to juggle around in the scenes and—

Network executives and team and company executives and the managers of the actors and the actors, and everybody's, you know, feeling like we live or die depending on whether the audience laughs or not. There's no grace period.

And if you're a writer, you also have to listen to the executives. And their ideas are—

Early on.

Horrible. Early on. Early on. Before the show gets successful, they want to tell you.

You know, I started to— you know, my testicles dropped at a certain point, and I stopped saying, yes, sir, no, sir. I just, you know, I said, no, this is the way it's gonna go. But that was predicated on having had success. That was all.

This sitcom on Netflix that you were talking about, is this gonna be multicam or single cam?

It's multicam.

It is multicam?

Oh, that's awesome. We just finished our second season.

I didn't know.

Yeah.

The only one that I know that's doing it right now is Miss Pat. She's got a very funny show. But it's, uh— it used to be there were so many of them, and it's such a good genre.

There were 40 or 50 a week.

That's crazy.

Now there's maybe 3. Seriously. Crazy. Maybe 3. In front of an audience, maybe 2. Could you

imagine? Do you feel— first of all, boy, did you get out at the right time. Mm. You know, like, with network stuff? Like, all your gigantic hits? You know, they were all, like, perfect at the right time when everybody was watching sitcoms.

Timing-wise, I've been blessed. Oh, God. There's no question about it.

It's the greatest timing of all time. Yeah. You know? And— I mean, I just don't understand why they can't come back. It's such a good art form. It's so fun to watch.

When it's done really, really well...

Yeah.

...it's extraordinary. And I've seen the eulogy for it many times over the last 40-some-odd years. And— I'm hard to buy into the eulogy because one great show changes everything.

Yeah, it's still fun to watch. That's what doesn't make sense. And this is what I got when we were watching Big Bang Theory. Like, it's fun to watch sitcoms. It's a very different experience than watching anything else. You're aware that it's half an hour, you know, you know all the characters, you know, oh, this guy's gonna say something stupid, and this guy's gonna do— it's like, it's a very interesting art form that that is very— people enjoy it. It's very comforting for people. And it doesn't make sense. Like, it just shows you like the mismanagement of television, that sitcoms were allowed to go away. It doesn't make sense to me.

I don't understand it either. Tastes change, the culture changes. Do you think that's what it is, though?

I don't think that's what it is. I don't think they've changed that much.

There's a— comedy has certainly changed, I believe. I think laughing out loud is frowned upon.

Really?

I think there's a vulnerability to laughing when you let yourself laugh. And, I mean, look at what— look at what gets feted as a comedy these days. And they're great stuff, you know? I mean, they're really wonderful stuff, but you're not laughing out loud. You know, when I— when I— you know, when I watch something like White Lotus and I talk to people about it, they love it. And it's extremely well done. Mike White's brilliant. You don't laugh watching it. It's enjoyable. You know, it's extraordinarily well written and well produced and casting is great. But it doesn't— it doesn't cause out loud laughter.

You think people don't want to laugh? Really?

I think when you laugh out loud, First of all, laughter is not something self-generated. It happens to you.

Right.

Right? It's surprise. It should come as a surprise when you laugh.

Sure.

Right? It's not, oh, I'm going to laugh now. Laughter happens because you've been somewhat— you've been surprised by what you're watching or listening to.

Yeah.

And there's a certain vulnerability. You have to be vulnerable enough to let yourself react. You've seen people watch comedy like this. With their arms folded, they're rejecting you before you've opened your fucking mouth.

You know where that happens the most is Los Angeles.

Yeah.

Yeah, maybe you need to move. Because you're saying all these things, and I respect you deeply, and I'm hearing what you're saying, and I don't agree at all. I think people love laughing. I think they enjoy the shit out of it. It's one of their favorite things to do.

Maybe I am experiencing— maybe I am a victim of Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is an insanely self-important place where people are constantly judging each other's social status. And they would love to be able to dismiss you, and they love to look forward to the opportunity to dismiss you. Not everybody, not everybody. A lot of cool people there. Yeah, yeah. But there's a— there's a percentage of people that come there with a hole in their soul that they're trying to fill that will never get filled. And so they always have this weird way of interacting with people. It's this constant dick-measuring contest, and it's exhausting.

So where would I go?

I don't know. Somewhere else. Somewhere else. I mean, even New York is way better in that regard, 'cause it's not tainted by show business. You know, New York is insanely congested and there's too many people and it's just nuts. But other than that, like, it's a, it's a great metropolitan city filled with everything, all the greatest restaurants, and there's comedy clubs and all these— it's not tainted. There's a thing about Los Angeles where the spirit of the city itself is tainted by people that want attention, and it always will be. It's, it's impossible to avoid. They go there because that's where the auditions are and that's where the plays— and some of them are fantastic people. Mm-hmm. Don't get me wrong. But there's a But there's a larger percentage that aren't fantastic, and they are a mess, and they're exhausting. And those are the people that cross their arms. And that's why you think people don't want to laugh, because they do everywhere else.

Well, clearly, the shows that I've spent my whole life working on do really well all over the world. But, you know, maybe, you know, I'm— but I'm in a bubble. You're in a bubble.

Yeah, that bubble's a little bit of a problem.

It's crazy. I mean, sometimes you see The Big Bang Theory, huge hit in Germany. In Germany! You know? Astonishing how it— Mexico, Brazil.

Wow.

They're the Beatles down there. It's remarkable. You know, maybe not so much In Brentwood. Right.

It's like, that's the thing about it. It's dismissed. And it was dismissed in Hollywood. I remember I was working on a sitcom, and I was dating this girl who was an actress, and she literally— she was unemployed. She literally told me, I wouldn't do a sitcom. I want to do film. I was like, okay. All right. I don't know what to tell you. Like—

The secret, too, that people don't know unless they've been there, it's really hard.

It is hard, but it's—

It's really hard to put on a play every week.

Yeah.

It's really hard. And it's anxiety-ridden. It's nervousness. It's stressful. It doesn't always go well.

Right.

When a joke fails at the Burbank Warner Brothers lot and the audience doesn't respond, you can hear the 134 freeway. Right. Yeah, it's

not

good. But it's an extraordinary teaching device because you learn some humility. Oh, I'm not as smart as I thought I was. That joke died. I thought it was great. It died. Oh, we got to fix it, you know? And that's how I spent the last many decades, you know, rushing around Trying to fix it.

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What's real.

You put it together.

When I was on Roseanne, it was huge. Every week, maybe 40 million people were watching in real time. No DVRs yet. No— basically just the start of the VCR stuff. And, you know, great writing staff. I was really blessed to be part of that staff. But we learned very quickly, John Goodman would walk into the kitchen and say, Rosie, I'm home. The audience would go berserk. And we'd be going, yeah, I wrote that line. They were just glad to see him. Right, right, right. They were so excited to see him that the response was not genuine to— it wasn't a com— there was no comedy in, honey, I'm home.

Right.

But they were so thrilled to be in the same space as John Goodman, who they loved as Dan Connors. And, you know, you have to start learning that those are not the laughs that you hang your hat on. Those are the laughs because the show's become part of people's lives. You know, it's become visceral. You know, people respond to the Big Bang characters. I tell this story in the book. At Comic-Con early on, thousands of people were camping out at night to come in and see the panel at Comic-Con for The Big Bang Theory. And I was sitting next to Jim Parsons at an autograph line, you know, where people come up with a cast picture and they sign it. And this girl comes up to Jim and her hands are shaking and she hands him the picture to sign and she's crying. Oh, my God. out of joy to see Jim Parsons, to be this far away from Jim Parsons' Sheldon. Wow. And I remember thinking, I've been doing this a while. People were always happy to see Jon Cryer and Charlie. Nobody ever cried. Nobody ever cried when they saw Roseanne, you know, or anybody like that.

But they were— she was crying out of sheer joy to see these guys. And that's when I went, something's happening here that we didn't plan, that we couldn't have planned, that these characters have hit a nerve, you know?

Well, I think it is the misfits thing, you know? Yes. I think that's a giant part of it.

And they become a surrogate family. They support one another. Yes. They're losers in a life raft.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Right.

And they hold each other up.

And all odd in their own unique way that's endearing. And I think for a lot of people, you know, you look at Friends, you're like, those fucking people never hang out with me. What's the point? You know, they're all good-looking, hanging out together. They're too cool. Everybody's cool. Fuck, I don't fit there. But they'd watch Young Sheldon, and they'd watch that show, and they'd think, all right, well, these people are just weirdos just like me.

One of the things I loved about Young Sheldon, we discovered as we were doing it, was the show really became about his family.

Right.

Here's this cuckoo.

Right.

Cuckoo's Nest. You know, this odd child... With

normal parents.

With normal parents. His dad's a football coach. His mom's deeply religious. He's got a twin sister who's just a twin— just a kid. Yeah. And an older brother who's kind of a knucklehead. You know, means well, but, you know, it's how they have to accommodate this remarkable human being, it really became watching them. How much love and protectiveness went towards this little boy... Yeah. ...who was oblivious... Right. ...at how caustic he was. He was really an asshole. You know what I mean? And so was the grown Sheldon. He was really a dick. He treated his friends horribly. And it was one of the magic tricks of young Sheldon. Was an 8-year-old being a dick is not acceptable, right? You know, 25, 30-year-old Jim Parsons, you can be caustic. But when it's coming out of a child's mouth, not so pleasant. So it really shifted to becoming how his parents and his brother and sister and eventually his grandmother took care of him. They just— they excused him. for being the way he was and allowed him to be that way. That's a love story.

It is. And it's completely unique to the original show. The Big Bang Theory, you know, obviously Sheldon's older, but it's just a different thing. The whole story's a different thing. The concentration is a different thing. It's really about the family and this extraordinary kid.

Yeah.

But it's great.

Thank you.

When you talk about the Roseanne days, those are some of my favorite days, 'cause, you know, I'm friends with Roseanne, and I know how crazy she is. And, you know, she talks about— well, I bet you know better than I do. But she talks about how crazy she was during those days.

That's nice to hear.

Yeah.

That's nice to hear.

She's like, I was a tyrant.

Yeah, that's a good— that's the nicest word I can think of.

Well, you know her whole story, how she got hit by a car when she was young? Yeah. That's what a lot of people don't know.

Yeah.

And I thought it was really important to have her on after she got in trouble and got fired from her new show. to have her on and explain, like, her history. She had legitimate mental illness. Like, not like, I need attention mental illness. Hit by a car when she was 15 years old. Mm-hmm. Was in the hospital for a long time. Was in a mental health institute for 9 months after that. She was a grade-A math student. After the accident, she could not count. Like, she had a legitimate brain injury that changed her personality completely. And it's responsible for a lot of her erratic behavior and a lot of the chaos that you see. Also, maybe some of the brilliance in her comedic timing. She was just so— so didn't give a fuck. She was so different than any woman comic before her.

Absolutely. No, she was groundbreaking. That initial act that she and her sister— I don't know if she talked about her sister much, but they wrote that act and it was It was like nothing that we'd ever seen before. It was entirely original.

Yeah, entirely original. And—

Now I know why children— why parents eat their young— why animals eat their young was the keystone of that act. Now I know why animals eat their young.

Yeah, she was a force. But just hearing the stories, like how Tom Arnold, they made you put his name as a writer. On the scripts, you'd have to change the scripts and write his name in.

Easy for you to laugh.

That kind of shit. The reason why I laughed is because I'd heard stories, not about Tom Arnold, but about people doing that. Like, that was a real thing. Like, it was almost like a union job that you got with the mob where you didn't really have to show up.

Oh yeah, you know what I mean? The no-show gigs.

Yeah, it was almost like that. Like, people got writers' credits When they weren't writing at all.

It was a lot of money.

A lot of money.

A lot of money.

A lot of money. Yeah, I know many stories.

I remember complaining to a then-agent who— I might have included this in the book, I don't remember. He said, Chuck, you gotta let them fuck you a few times so they know they love you.

Yeah, that's in the book. Yeah, it's a weird business. Man, it's a weird business. And all your stories about just dealing with crazy actors and the Cybill Shepherd thing, how she made you change the joke and then it didn't work, and then she got mad at you for that.

And it worked for Baranski. Baranski could read the phone book. I mean, that was one of the great gifts I've ever been close to watching her work.

But that whole weirdness where people get upset if someone else got a joke.

Yes.

Even if it was like, That person's character to say that line and not your character. Right. People get— it was all about who gets the lines, who gets the good lines.

Given how successful those shows were and how much money was being generated by them, it's hard to defend how, how much cruelty, you know, and malice went into the making of it. It was so unnecessary. It should have been a constant celebration. It should have been an ongoing party. Look what we did. You know?

More often than not, though, in those situations, for whatever reason, when someone is the head, the big star of those shows, you hear nightmare stories. When someone is like the lead actor, the show is written about them, it's all about them. It's like there's just some— something about the intoxicating power of being the top person on the show. Your picture's 6 feet high on a fucking billboard outside the place. Your name's painted on the wall. They can't help themselves. So they just get crazy.

It makes me think of— it was my great good fortune to get to know Bob Newhart and to call him a friend. And he did a bunch of Big Bang episodes. And he taught me something I've never forgotten. He goes, I'm not the funny guy on the show. I react to the funny guys. You know, Larry Darrell and Darrell and Tom Post and Those— the crazy characters would come in, in the show when he was a psychiatrist, even in that one. Right. Crazy people would come in, and the comedy was in Bob reacting. A raised eyebrow would get an enormous laugh because he becomes the audience reacting to the crazy people. And he— I was begging him for years to come and do any show I'd worked on. As I— I was such a fan. And I remember he finally— he watched The Big Bang Theory and he said, all right, I'll do this one, but I have 3 demands. Go. He goes, it has to be in front of an audience. I don't do anything— I said, that's all we do. We only work in front of an audience. Done. Number 2, I wanted— I want my character to have an arc.

I want it to be over a few episodes. Done. Number 3, I want to win an Emmy. He'd never won an Emmy for his shows.

That's crazy.

Isn't that nuts?

That's crazy.

And he did on The Big Bang Theory. He won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor— Best Guest Actor in a Comedy. And it was one of the genuine joys of my life was I got him the Emmy. That's amazing. I mean, he got it. He got the Emmy, but we delivered on all 3.

That's amazing. I can't believe he never won an Emmy. Isn't

that crazy?

That's crazy. That's literally crazy. I went to the Emmys once, and it was after Phil Hartman had been murdered, and he was nominated for an Emmy. So we all went, and he didn't win. And when he didn't win, Dave Foley looked over at me, goes, what the fuck does a guy have to do to win? Oh, that's

cool.

In that moment, beautiful. We were so— we were all We were all so broken. We were so sad. It was so— not that he didn't win the Emmy, just that he had just recently been murdered. It was just— it still was so hard to believe and so painful that Dave just came in with a banger. Whew. Dave Foley was, like, one of the secret producers of NewsRadio. The NewsRadio— Paul Sims was so brilliant that when he created the show, he allowed all these creative people to come up with alternative lines. And Dave was— from Kids in the Hall. So he was just a fantastic writer on top of being very funny. And so he would come up with better lines all the time, and Paul would always use them. It was just— there was no ego there. It was such a great place to be. And so when Phil got killed, it was like we were just broken. We were just like, what? And so for Dave to say that at the Emmys, it was like— I'm like, okay, no one's topping this. I'm never coming back to the Emmys again. Let me get out of here.

No, that's the high note. Yeah, you could come up with that.

I can't believe Bob Newhart never won an Emmy. That's insane.

He did, on The Big Bang Theory.

Yeah, but I mean, before that, for The Bob Newhart Show. That's bananas. That's bananas. It was such a good show. It's, uh, he seemed like a lovely guy. I wish I got to really meet him.

He truly was. Back when I, uh, when I was getting started, I— when that When that set was— I worked on the same lot as the show, the Bread and Beckwith— the second show. And when they were down, when the stage was dark, I'd go sit in that little lobby set in the dark, just kind of drink it in, you know? It's a tiny little set where he'd stand behind the counter and Larry Darrell and Darrell would come in. Yeah. And I'd just sit there in the dark. And just take it in, you know? Shit, this is where they make this show.

Wow.

And later on, we would— a bunch of us on Two and a Half Men would sneak into the West Wing set and sit in the Oval Office. This is as close as we're gonna get to the Oval Office. And we were sitting there, you know, late at night.

That's awesome. Just bringing up Two and a Half Men, like, you have gone through some of the fucking craziest actors. Like, you've worked with some of the craziest people of all time. Charlie, when he was here, he did the podcast and he was telling me about those days. When you hear about those days, like, how did you function? Like, how were you showing up and doing a sitcom when you were living like that? Like, it's kind of amazing that he kept it together the way he did. Mm-hmm. Like, that's one thing that he really deserves credit for. The guy did good work while he was out of his fucking mind.

We did 6, 7 years of in the clear before it all went to hell. Uh-huh. We had, like, 150-some-odd, 160 episodes before it started to go down.

And did— was he heavy using during those times?

Not to my knowledge.

Oh, so—

If he was, he was managing it and keeping it to himself. But as far as I was concerned, we had a great partnership. We were having a lot of fun. The show was insanely, you know, successful. It was, you know, we had something in common. You know, we were all on the same kind of— I thought we were all on the same road, you know, keeping it clean. Right. Staying sober and stuff. And the show was killing it. It was just— and it actually— the success of that show is what granted me the freedom to go You know, and go and do a couple of tries to get The Big Bang Theory right. I mean, we failed at first. You know, we made a lot of mistakes. But Two and a Half Men was so successful, CBS granted me unbelievable leeway to make decisions, do shit over again. Like the pilot. Nobody gets a do-over. We got a do-over on The Big Bang pilot.

Wow.

That never happens. We got one, and it worked out.

Boy, did it work out.

Boy, did it work out.

So I didn't know that Charlie was supposedly sober for most of that time.

As far as I know, he was.

But you talk to him now, right? You guys are friends now?

Yeah, he has a blurb on the back of the book.

So he says he was sober for the beginning, and then eventually he just—

I don't know at what point it went off the rails.

Did you notice, like, a change?

Well, in the 8th season, it was clearly we were in trouble. It was— it was, you know, when his manager calls me and says, Charlie can't come to run-through today at rehearsal. His Bic lighter blew up, and he has no eyebrows. Now, I'm somewhat naive to some of this stuff, but I know Bic lighters. They don't blow up.

Wow. Maybe they do when you're cooking coke with them.

Maybe that's what happened. But there was a lot of— the behavior became more and more erratic, a lot of missed stuff. And, you know, the sad truth about my part of it was I was determined to stay in denial. I just didn't want to know. I wanted to believe it was all okay. I was absolutely, you know, forcefully you know, oblivious. I just wanted to believe it was all gonna be okay.

Just because the show was doing so well?

It was doing so well, and it was fun. I mean, right, we kick ass. We worked really hard. My partner on that show, Lee Aronson, and I, we were ruthless. We every second had to kick ass. We were absolutely determined to make it the best possible show we could. Right. Every week. No bad shows. You know, I liken a bad show on television to going to a restaurant and having a cockroach come across your table. You don't go back to that restaurant ever again. Ever again. And that's how I felt about situation comedies. You make a bad show, people are going to maybe never come back.

You're going to lose a bunch for sure.

You're going to lose a bunch. You know, I just— my own experience, I loved Cheers. I was devoted to Cheers. There was a couple of years there where, you know, you had to get through Cliff going home to his mother. I wanted to be in the bar with, you know, Woody and Sam. And you would tolerate, you know, some of the dips. But then they'd come roaring back with great writing and, you know, stuff. But more often than not, if a show fails on a few occasions, even a show you love,

Yeah.

There's a likelihood you may move on.

And it's usually something happens behind the scenes, like a head writer leaves or someone new gets hired and they have new ideas about stuff. And that's generally how it goes, right?

There's a weird, delicate chemistry to one of these things when they work.

Yes.

You know, um, and, and it, uh, you know, it's really obvious when you think you can spin something off. Do you remember Archie's Place?

No, I don't.

And they tried to spin off Archie Bunker.

I remember the name now that you brought it up, but I don't remember it at all.

I think he ran a bar.

Wow.

And it was a new show with Archie Bunker, but without Meathead.

Yeah.

And, you know, and Edith and—

I remember he went on to do a cop show, and I was very upset. I was like, how is he playing a cop on TV?

The miraculous chemistry of All in the Family was gone.

Yeah.

It was gone. And same thing happened You know, with Joey off of Friends, the miraculous chemistry of that cast.

Right.

You just can't just— you know?

Right.

I think I learned a lesson watching those things going, don't— don't think this thing travels.

Right.

You know?

Right.

It's the characters and their relationships with the other characters are the heart and soul of this thing. It's, you know, you can't just pluck something out and go, here, be successful over here.

Well, that's why Young Sheldon is so impressive, because you didn't— it is kind of a spin-off, but it's not, and everyone's new.

The only inkling of The Big Bang Theory is Jim Parsons' narration.

Right.

You never see him.

Right.

It's off-camera. Him telling the story of being a child in East Texas. That was the only link.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just amazing that you pulled off that chemistry in 2 completely different environments about the same character.

Yeah, that was, that was, that was a roll of the dice, wasn't it? Yeah.

Oh yeah, but it worked.

If we didn't find Ian, then we would not have made the show.

Yeah, there's things about certain sitcoms, like Seinfeld's a great example, where those people just work together so well. Yeah. You couldn't imagine a new person being put in the mix or someone going away. Like, what? You would ruin the whole thing.

Absolutely. And, and again, The characters and their relationships with each other are why you watch.

Yeah.

You know? You know, I can't tell you one plot, but I never missed an episode.

Right.

I, you know, I never missed an episode. Thursday night was gold because of Seinfeld.

Yeah. I mean, the entire country was watching because of Seinfeld and because of Friends on Thursday night on NBC. That was the night.

Yeah. And then Bochco shows at 10. The Bochco shows were impeccable.

Right, right.

I mean, one after the other, you know, Hill Street, L.A. Law.

Yep.

You know, NYPD Blue. It was an incredible run of sophisticated cop shows.

It really was. It's like, it's amazing how many cop shows there have been. It's like, boy, do we like watching cop shows.

Again, they were character shows. Yes. I mean, Bochco understood that as well. That, you know, the— it wasn't the crime of the week.

Right.

Which is the, you know, solving the crime is more the Dick Wolf approach to dramas. Bochco was about the characters, about the cops, about their heartaches and, you know, the torments of being a cop in Los Angeles.

Also, if you're going to write a show about drama, who experiences more drama than cops?

Every day.

It's the perfect genre because you're always going to have chaos. You could write in any kind of chaos, whereas if it's one person who's a plumber who's experiencing that much chaos in his life, you'd be like, what the fuck are you doing with your life, man? How are you involved in so many murders? How are there so many armed robberies when you're around? But if you're a cop, it makes sense to write it in like that.

What was the— there was— I can't remember the name of the guy who— he was a New York City cop. who wrote a whole bunch of books that I think were a big factor in the Bochco lore. I can't remember his name. He wrote— gosh damn it, I can't remember his name. I'll remember it tonight when we're done. But he wrote about cops as people, you know? Mm-hmm. People in untenable Work. Yeah, work was, you know, just incredibly destructive work environment. And starts with an M.

Yeah, cop genres, sitcoms. It's, uh, it's just to me, it's the cop genres are still around, whereas the sitcoms have been reduced by 80%.

More.

90. Yeah.

Again, back, back when I got started, There were 4 sitcoms on every network 5 nights a week or 4 nights a week. So what is that? That's, you know, 16 a night. And then the hour dramas were at 10 o'clock every night for years.

Yeah, I don't believe that's because people don't like them. I really don't. I think it's just a mistake in broadcasting. I think they fucked up. And I think if they came back with some good ones— the problem is It's a hard job.

It's a hard job. And I was— one of the blessings of my career was I got to have a journeyman period where I was on the— I was learning, but I wasn't in charge. I wasn't the guy. I didn't have to, you know, say that way.

Right.

I had maybe 7, 8 years before they said, here, your show. And I wasn't ready. I still was overwhelmed.

Merle Miller?

No.

Nope. All right, we give up. We can't figure out who it is.

But that first show, yeah, I got— I was the keys to the kingdom. I got a show on TV.

Right. And so this is a show after you leave Roseanne. Yeah. And now you're working on your own show, but they put it on, like, Saturday night.

The owners of The Roseanne Show had an idea for a show that was strangely like Roseanne. You know, it was heavyset, unhappy housewife with a domineering husband and problems with her kids. And they went to my then-boss, Bob Meyer and asked him if he wanted to develop that into a series. And Bob quite rightly saw that they were just trying to, you know, rip off Roseanne and do it again, have another hit show with an unhappy housewife. And he very wisely, or whatever, said, no, I don't think so. I don't like this idea. So they went, all right. They came to me. And I thought, This is a ripoff of Roseanne. I'm in. Because what I was thinking is, these 2 people owned The Cosby Show and Roseanne. They were gigantic 8-million-pound gorillas in television back then. I want to work for them. Somehow, I'm not saying no, even though I see it for what it is. And I worked my ass off on it. And we— this lovely lady, a British actress named Miriam Margolyes— Margolyes? Margolyes. And she was a terrific actress, and she tried so hard. She tried so hard to be an unhappy American Staten Island housewife.

And the show, you know, to credit how powerful Marcy was... She was a powerhouse. Kelsey and Tom Werner were, the network couldn't bring themselves to say pass. They couldn't say pass, and they ordered 6 episodes. And they put it on the coveted time slot of 8 o'clock Saturday nights.

For people who don't know, that's the worst time slot you could ever get on network television.

It's like making the show and using it for landfill.

Yeah, everybody's out. Everybody goes out. In the old days before the internet, people would just leave the house. On Saturday night.

If you go back far enough, Saturday night had some huge stuff.

How far you gotta go back?

Back into the '60s.

Really? Yeah. Saturday night was a big night?

Yeah.

Interesting.

Then it went away.

Was that because television was fairly new? It was like a crazy thing? People stayed home. Yeah. To stay home and watch TV. That makes sense.

But anyway, they ordered 6 episodes. They couldn't— they aired 5, couldn't bring themselves to air the 6th one. You know, like it would have hurt. And I thought, you know, okay, that's the end of my career. I'm done. I had my shot. I blew it. And Tom Werner came into my office a few days after they canceled the show and said, it's a noble failure. Let's try again. I had never put noble and failure together in the same sentence, you know?

Did you think the show was good, or did you think it didn't have enough time to get good?

Here's the problem with writing a TV and producing a TV comedy is you don't have perspective. You lose perspective. You're working so hard.

Right.

You don't really have the big picture as to whether— you think it's working. You ask anybody on any staff on any sitcom back in the day, we're doing great work.

Right.

I think it's just impossible to own the fact that it might be mediocre given how hard we're working. Right? So I don't know that I really had a clean perspective on whether it was quality television or deserved to go on or not. I just know I worked really hard and I was heartbroken that it failed.

That's a very honest perspective. I appreciate that.

And then he said— That's real. A noble failure. Let's try again. And I was like, I get another— I get a do-over? I get to try again? Great. You know, because when you're indoors, they bring you lunch. You know, they feed you. You know, you have a parking spot. Yeah. It's pretty cool.

It's pretty cool.

And that's— that led to them saying, we want to do a show about a single mom. And I was like, wait a minute. I wanted the Franny's Turn, the character, the thing that just feels— I wanted her to leave her husband and try and be, you know, single and live with her daughter. And you said, no, she has to be married because Cosby's married. Roseanne's married. They wanted another married show. But what it turned out was ABC was looking for a single mom show. So now they wanted a single mom show. And I said, where do I come in to— what sensibility can I bring to a single mom show? And to their credit, they sent me to Elgin, Illinois, to spend a few days The Chamber of Commerce took me to a women's shelter, a YWCA, hospitals where women were either on welfare or working 2 jobs, you know, killing themselves to support themselves while raising children. And I got this walkthrough. What I— I went, oh. This is Greek tragedy. These women are— they're heroes. I mean, at the time, the single mom was Murphy Brown. Murphy Brown had endless nannies.

Right.

She just went about her life, and there was a kid. But a woman raising children by herself without a safety net, that hadn't been done. And I came back from that trip going, okay, I want to write this. I want to write this because this is— I get it now. It's a hero's journey. It's— you wouldn't think it. It's a sitcom. It's 4 cameras in front of a live audience. But for me, it was the hero's journey. It was this woman against all odds caring for her children after a horrible divorce and having to work her ass off to just to feed them. And then it went a little south when they said, okay, and we found the perfect actress to play that part. And that's how I met Brett Butler. Sure, you laugh.

Well, that's a similar situation to what we were talking about before, where people would just become tyrants when they have their own show.

She was very unhappy.

Yeah.

Out of the gate. Day one.

Seems crazy.

You'd think we should have been celebrating because the show was an instant hit. I— it was Home Improvement with Tim Allen, and then they put it on right after it, and it did great. And she was on the COVID of magazines, and she was on all the talk shows, and she's a truly funny woman. She had a great stand-up act.

Oh, she was hilarious.

Yeah, no questioning. And she took to acting immediately. You know, I've watched people try and do this. Not everybody can do it. Brett could do it. Brett could do it. But it didn't go well for me.

It just seems so insane that someone would get an opportunity that— if you're a comic, that's the opportunity. That's it. You're— it's your own sitcom. How could you be upset? It's weird.

I think— If you're damaged in this certain kind of way that—

Right.

That actors and comics can be damaged, and you succeed, and you learn that horrible, horrible, 2 o'clock in the morning horrible truth, I'm still unhappy.

Right.

I'm still not whole. This was supposed to make me happy and whole. Success was supposed to solve my problems. That's certainly what I was taught.

Right.

when I was a boy, you know, if you make something of yourself, you'll feel— you'll be good. People will like you and admire you, and you'll, you know, you'll be a man of substance. In Yiddish, it was a mensch, right? And then you learn that horrible truth only can happen with success, which is, oh, shit, I'm still a miserable fuck. Now what? Now what? Right. That's not going to solve that hole inside.

And generally, that's where the drugs come in.

That's where the drugs come in.

With rock stars.

Rock stars and gambling and— Yeah. You can't fuck your— drink your way, drug your way, gamble your way out of that. That shit works temporarily, and then it doesn't work. And when it stops working, you're truly fucked.

Yeah.

You're truly fucked. You're trying to find a solution. That, um, the best I understand it, nothing on the outside is going to heal the inside.

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You— it has to be an inside job to get well from that stuff.

It's also, for, for people's perspective, If you're talking about what was Brett— Grace Under Fire was '93? Mm-hmm. In 1993, there was only 4 channels, okay? And then cable, and nobody's watching cable, not like that, not like sitcoms. And there was maybe 100 famous people on earth. There was— nobody was famous back then. There's way more famous people. So if you're a damaged person and then all of a sudden you're one of the most recognizable people in the world, who Brett Butler was when that show was number 2. I mean, that was a huge show. She was on every magazine. You saw her everywhere. Yeah. Like, that kind of pressure and that kind of— for a person who's already, like, struggling to keep it together, that can be devastating.

Yeah. I often threaten to write a screenplay about the perfect murder— the perfect murder of an actress who is malicious and destructive is to make her famous. It'll ruin her. No, I've yet to write that story yet. But you want to do something harmful to somebody who's, you know, damaged in that way, make them famous. It'll absolutely destroy them.

Isn't that nuts?

Yeah.

It's nuts. Did she afterwards— I think she really fell apart after that show was over. I'd heard at one point in time she was homeless. I don't think she has anymore.

It hurt those stories as well. I don't know. I don't know.

It's such a sad turn of events, you know, because people wanted to love her, especially when she was on that show.

They were rooting for her.

Yeah.

Yeah, she was the spokesman for— the spokeswoman for, you know, millions of women.

Yeah.

And men loved her too because she had balls, you know? She suffered no fools.

Yeah.

She worked in an oil refinery.

Yeah.

On the show.

It just sucks that so many talented people have that, whatever the fuck it is, that self-sabotage gene, you know, that makes them not be able to ever change course and enjoy this fortune that they've been given.

Making an audience laugh temporarily fills the hole.

Temporarily.

Right.

Yeah.

And you go home and you're, you're still that guy.

Yeah. Yeah, that's the problem.

Yep.

Yeah.

Okay, what are we gonna do about this?

Right. I don't think there's anything you can do about it. I mean, it's just a, it's a tale as old as time, you know. And you talk about it in your book about if, if happiness and success cured you of all your problems, you would see so many dead rock stars. You know, and I think you're dead on. I mean, that's— they were all drugged out of their fucking mind, and they're all— like we were talking earlier, had you seen at one point in time, you saw Morrison, you saw The Doors play for like 20 minutes before he tried to pull his dick out.

That was the shortest concert I've ever been to. Literally, it was an outdoor— it was at Singer Bowl. It was an outdoor kind of arena. Cops came in on horses hitting people over the head with sticks, right? Because he pulled his dick out. And they just stopped the show. He'd already— I think it was after he did it in Miami and he got arrested in Miami.

That was his new move. It was like Bert Kreischer taking his shirt off.

16 years old or something like that. And I'm standing there with my friends smoking a joint going, this is terrific, this is fantastic. We were watching these horses go by. This is fantastic. We were happy. We thought, well, Yeah, okay, it would have been nice to maybe hear a second song. They opened with Light My Fire, never finished it. Really? End of show. Oh my God.

Yeah. That's crazy.

This is cool, man. This is a great show. Let's get out of here before we get hit.

Who did you say he was performing with again?

Uh, the warm-up act was The Who. Wow. Because, you know, before Tommy, there were a warm-up act there. Wow. Great. So like My Generation. Yeah. I Can See for Miles. They had great stuff. Yeah. Before Tommy. Tommy hit, they were— they never wore a warm-up act again. But this was just prior to Tommy.

Wow, dude. That's it. But again, I mean, how many of them died at 27? Morrison, Hendrix, Joplin. Although the Hendrix one's very weird. There's a lot of very interesting conspiracy theories about the Hendrix murder, or the Hendrix death rather, that it was perhaps a murder. He was leaving his manager. His manager was a shady mob character. His girlfriend, after the murder— after his death, rather, she gets thrown off of a roof. They said it was a suicide. It doesn't— seems a little sketchy. But his former bodyguard wrote a book about it. And apparently, you know, if Hendrix left, you know, his manager would lose out on all that money. But if Hendrix was dead, then he would get royalties from all those songs forever.

He would— he probably contractually would have had them anyway. I mean, most managers back in those days, it was—

Oh, they were predatory.

It was really predatory and corrupt. He would have had a piece of his publishing no matter what, right? Live or dead, you know. Listen, I—

But he wouldn't have anything.

The idea of him asphyxiating on his own vomit is a heartbreaking end to, you know, a generational superstar. I mean, There was— he had a big impact on me.

Oh my God, he was like unlike anyone before him. His sound was so completely unique that, I mean, Eric Clapton famously said like he felt like he wanted to quit playing guitar when he saw him. It was just like— and Eric Clapton was insanely good. Yes, for a guy like Eric Clapton, you know, listen, go listen to the Derek and the Dominos Layla.

Layla.

Jesus.

With Duane Allman.

Oh my God.

Passing How radical is that? Oh my God. That back and forth with him and Duane.

Yeah.

And Have You Ever Loved a Woman. My God.

Listen to that. Eric Clapton and cocaine. Just that. Oh my God. That— yeah, but that story is just— the story of his death is like, oh, it's really— it's a weird one. Whereas some of them do seem like normal drug overdoses, but the Hendrix one, there's a lot of weird stuff to that one where it does seem like it's possible that he was murdered. Unfortunately. But, uh, there's just a huge number of those guys died so young, and it's because of what you're— what you're talking about, that whatever fucked-up thing that makes them so brilliant at performing, and it's like almost an attempt— the more brilliant you get, it's the more you can fill that hole temporarily, the more love you get in these big bursts. And then the crowd goes away, and then you're by yourself, and it's just back to the darkness. And then the drugs, and then the alcohol, and then the chaos, and then fall— ripping your life apart. And then there's another show, and there's another burst. You're feeling good when you're on stage, then you get off stage, it's the same fucking thing, and it never heals.

It never heals from the outside. The outside stuff, as glorious as it is, the fame and adulation and fancy cars—

Yeah.

It's great. It's wonderful. There's no reason to denigrate it. It's just— it's not the real solution. The real solution, you know, I'm going to say it and then regret it, but the real solution is a spiritual solution. You have to find something beyond this world.

Why would you regret that? Because you live in LA? Because you're in your bubble?

Because it's part of my life.

Right, but why would you regret saying that?

Because it might seem like Cliché. Flaky and airy-fairy and, you know, woo-woo New Age bullshit. But I don't know any other way. I just don't know. And I do know that in my own life, seeking a spiritual illusion, not finding it, but the act of seeking it, there's some salvation in that. No,

I think there is as well. I don't think there's anything silly about it. And I think the problem is the term has been co-opted. The term spirituality has been co-opted by people that you do consider to be flaky. That's the problem. Yeah. You know?

Yeah.

It's like, is it possible that you could preach the Word of Jesus in front of a sold-out stadium and really be sincere? Yeah, sure, it's possible. But how many people who are preaching in front of sold-out stadiums and Giant arenas. How many of those are actually sincere? Well, it's a small percentage. It's not the same thing, you know. It doesn't mean it's not possible.

No, it just has a bad name. It

has a bad name, and spirituality has a bad name because it's just— it's attached to a lot of people that, you know, through no fault of their own, they're trying to find their own way and they're using that kind of lingo. And maybe some of them are just still really fucked up, and that word now gets attached to people that are claiming to be on a path to try to fix themselves. But, or you just associate it with people who are unsuccessful in the act, and they're just like, it's like performative. They're like performatively being spiritual. Whereas I know some people that are like legitimately spiritual. Some of the nicest people that I know. Yeah. They're like, I know this guy who's a Christian, and all he does is build houses, like small homes. for homeless people and help them and get them jobs and teach them skills and help them get clean. It's like—

I know people like that too.

They're real.

Yeah, they're real and they're role models.

Yes.

I want to be like that guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They exist.

Yeah, I've been fortunate enough to know a few in my life and they've had a deep impact, giving rather than taking.

Yes.

And yeah. Yeah, no question about it. That was not my nature. I didn't go out to Los Angeles a giver.

No.

I wanted— give me, give me, give me.

Well, it was also the culture back then, right?

It was all I knew, you know? The first page of the book was, if I could have been better, if I could have done better, I would have. That was the best I could do, you know?

Which is real.

Yeah, the selfish, self-centered, you know, dick. That was the best I could— that's the best I had early on. It took a while.

Yeah. Well—

It's a work in progress, basically.

We all are. Yeah. That's part of being a human being. You're a work in progress. If everybody's held to the thing that they said when they were young and stupid, oh my God, if that's who you are forever, some shit you said when you were 20 years old, like, oh, Good Lord.

That's insane.

It's insane.

It's insane. It denies the fact that we change. Of course. We do change.

Yeah.

You know, I— you know, one of the coolest things about this book was me going, oh, what an idiot I was. Who is that guy? Who is that guy? What a horrible human being.

Yeah.

What a selfish, self-centered— Jesus Christ, you just left her? You didn't say thank you? What is wrong with that man? And that man was me, you know?

That's wild.

And, yeah, there's a therapeutic kind of cathartic quality to doing something like this, to try and write about your life. And I'm an absolute laugh horse, so I wanted to make it as funny as I could because otherwise it's just boring. Who gives a shit about your life, Chuck? But if I can make you laugh, then maybe it's worth reading. But beginning with my childhood, you know, when I was a kid working for my dad, you know, those things, that's me, but if I were to be held to what I said in 1969, it wouldn't go well for me.

For anybody. Yeah. It's great that you're reading the audiobook, too.

Was there— you know, I jokingly said in the book that I'd asked Idris Elba or Brian Cox to read it, and they passed.

Brian Cox would be great.

It would be great to have some sonorous kind of really baritone, beautiful— you know, that didn't happen. I made that up. But I didn't really see how someone else could read my memoir. It didn't make sense to me. How do you— how does that make sense?

No, it makes no sense. No. One of the things that you talked about that I think is very interesting is the Scientology angle. And the reason it's interesting is because when I was— when I first came to Hollywood in '94, Scientology was everywhere. There were so many successful Scientologists that a lot of people were thinking about joining Scientology as a strategy to further their career.

Absolutely.

Like, people need to understand that. Like, it's hard for people of 2026 to wrap their head around the environment of California, Los Angeles, 1994, and the impact that Scientology had. Because you had Tom Cruise, you had Jenna Elfman— was that around that time, Darman, Greg? Yeah. You had, uh, I mean, there was a ton of people. Kirstie Alley, a ton of people.

Paul Haggis.

Super successful Scientologists who always seemed to have their shit together, and they were like really focused, and they were real career-oriented. And there were so many of us on the outside like, wow, maybe I should be a fucking Scientologist. Seems like that would help.

That was— listen, they built that thing called the Celebrity Center on Franklin.

Yeah.

For the very purpose of— Hubbard even wrote about it. People admire celebrities. They'll want to do what celebrities do. Let's make an environment that attracts celebrities. It was a PR gesture. He understood positioning, which is, I think, a marketing term where, you know, that's why famous people do TV commercials, you know?

Yeah.

You know, Peyton Manning says, buy this, buy GEICO. Peyton must know, he's a quarterback. Right. No, he doesn't know anything about it. But you're paying attention because he's famous and he's really good at what he does, and now he's telling me how I should insure my car. Makes perfect sense, right? And Hubbard understood that early on, that celebrities position Scientology in a way that will draw people in. And he was right. You know, I thought it would give me an edge. I thought that if I went down this road, it would give me an edge into the career that I wanted.

What was it about it that you felt was going to give you an edge? Was it the philosophy behind it, like the way they structure their lives? 'Cause I bought Dianetics on a late-night television commercial. I didn't even know what it was. Right, right. I didn't understand that that was Scientology.

It's kind of a psychotherapy.

Yeah, I thought it was just a self-help book.

Yeah, digging up past trauma and releasing the trauma, freeing up, you know, your life force because you're releasing the trauma of past experiences.

Yeah.

It wasn't that far off the charts.

Well, that was what L. Ron Hubbard did for the most part.

He borrowed from a lot— But he was a science fiction writer.

He was a science fiction writer. Not only that, he wrote more fiction than any human being that's ever lived, ever.

Absolutely, right up there. He did.

He wrote the most.

Maybe more than Stephen King.

He wrote more than anybody. Anybody, because he never wrote a second draft. Everything was like a first draft. It was all horrible.

It was pretty shitty.

It was the worst. Yeah, but funny in that regard. Like, that Battlefield Earth movie is fucking fantastic just because it's so goofy. Have you seen it?

I have. It's terrible.

It's amazingly bad. But it's good bad. It's bad to the point where it's like, what the fuck am I watching? Like, oh my God.

When you're 21, 22-year-old me and you're scared to death, the world is big, the world is threatening.

Yeah.

I don't know what's going on. I want to be in music. I want to have a career in music as a songwriter. These people promised me they knew a way for me to do that. And I was so vulnerable to that promise.

How did you get introduced to it?

I was playing in a band that was traveling around the country, cover band, and playing bars, nightclubs around the country. And the sax player was a Scientologist. And we were in Columbus, Ohio, and we had a day off from the gig. And he said, I'm going to the Scientology Center in Columbus, Ohio. You want to come with me? I didn't know what Scientology was. I had just totaled my car in Iowa, so I had nowhere to go. I was going to be sitting in my room. So I said, yeah, fuck it, sure, I'll go. And, uh, wouldn't you know, there were pretty girls there. So I'm in. There's pretty girls here.

Oh, they're very smart.

Very smart about that. Yeah. And I bought a thing called the Communications which promised to improve my ability to communicate. What could go wrong with that?

What could go wrong with that?

Obviously, I'm an— I'm a musician, and I'm trying to, you know, become a songwriter. That's, that's a communication issue. You know, anything in the arts is communicating. I could get better at that. Perfect. Why wouldn't I do that? And And what he was doing, he had these drills called training routines, and the first one, TR0, was you would sit like we're sitting right now in front of each other and just be in front of each other. No twitching, no laughing, no giggling, no getting creepy, no getting lost in thought, just sit there. What I didn't know I got really good at it too. What I didn't know was it's just meditation. It was just meditation. It was just learning to be still, which is meditation. Just learning to be still and not being tossed around by every fucking thought that comes screaming through your head like, you know, a tree full of rabid monkeys. And that first time I did it opposite a pretty girl— The— it was a woman who was running the classroom, the communications course. I said, I have this feeling like I'm up in the corner of the ceiling looking down at me.

And she yelled out, Chuck has gone exterior! I didn't know what that meant, but it was an extraordinary experience. I have a very vivid memory of being up near the ceiling, looking down on me sitting in front of this woman doing training routine zero.

So it worked.

It worked. I popped out of my head, and I had an out-of-body experience. I didn't know what was happening. I didn't understand what exterior— I know what the word meant, but I didn't understand this as— but it It felt good. The only other time that happened to me, having that experience, was when I flipped my car over at 70 miles an hour in Iowa, and I remember seeing the accident from up in the sky, looking down at it as the car— That was more like a near-death experience. That was a near-death experience, but it was also a very calm, huh, as the car is flipping over down this embankment. And so, the experience, that's a powerful experience and I wanted to pursue it. I wanted more of that.

Well, that makes sense. I mean, if— what's interesting is if you get a kid, a young guy or a young woman in a very suggestible state and in this heightened moment where they really believe there's some real significance to them sitting there and doing this exercise and that something big is going to happen. Your brain can trigger endogenous states that, that actually are real. So it's like what they're saying is kind of true, even though it's kooky. Like, a lot of it is very kooky. Like, some of these methods of just doing that kind of stuff, it can have powerful transcendent results.

Nobody told me this was going to happen. It just happened.

Yeah.

You know, I was just told to sit there and just be relaxed and just be there in front of another human being without, you know, getting uncomfortable. Or if you get uncomfortable, just deal with it. Just sit there. That's all I was told. That was the entire instruction. Nobody said you're going to be up near the ceiling watching.

Did you try to recreate that experience? Of course. And it never happened again?

On occasion.

Did you ever try to recreate it with the same woman? No. Maybe it's her. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's like being there with a beautiful girl and her looking in your eyes, you're looking at hers. Maybe that triggers the thing.

I don't think it had anything to do with her.

No?

No.

It was just you were in that suggestible moment?

I just— but who was suggesting what? No one suggested anything. It remains a mystery, and I'm okay with it being a mystery. But it certainly It certainly was. It's not one that I've forgotten.

There's a documentary called Holy Hell, and it's about this cult leader that used to live in Austin for a while. And one of the weird things this guy did, he was a yoga teacher, and also he was a hypnotist and a gay porn star. So, the documentary is crazy. But in one of the things that he would do with this cult is he would do a thing called the knowing. And they had to be ready for it. He had to decide they were ready for it, and they'd have the ceremony. And when they had the ceremony, he would touch their head. He would put his hands on their head, and they would experience this unbelievable psychedelic moment where they contacted God, and they all talked about it because the anticipation of this moment was so heightened and they were so suggestible. Right. And he was an actual professional hypnotist, and when he would put his hands on them, whatever it was inside their brain, they would just release. And even after they talked about him being a fraud, after they all left the cult and they said all these terrible things that he did, they still said that moment was the most powerful moment of their life.

Hypnotism is a powerful mechanism.

Yeah.

It really is. Yeah, I think that— that's— I don't know, I've not heard of this, but that's a story of a hypnotist.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes. A hypnotist that really can give you the greatest moment of your life, even though everything else he's done is terrible.

Yeah.

Like, even though he's taking everybody's money and fucking everybody, and it's always the same story, he did make them see God. That's what's weird about it. And so many people are looking for something to take them out of their state, the state they're in now. And if it's Scientology, if it's being a Mormon, if it's Catholicism, whatever it is, like, people are trying to find something that gets them. Jack Daniel's, cocaine. Ecstasy. Yeah. But for you— so I, I never actually went to a Scientology meeting or anything like that. I just got the book, but they never stopped emailing me, or mailing me rather. Every day I had one of those UPS boxes, and every day it would be some new invitation to some Scientology event.

Yeah, you got on the mailing list.

I didn't realize it was even Scientology when I bought the book. Sure. I thought it was just L. Ron Hubbard's gonna teach me how to kick ass.

Yes, absolutely. I always call it, you know, this is gonna give me an edge on the universe.

So when you first started doing it, when did you start thinking maybe this is a little wacky?

My entire community of friends, everybody was in it.

Wow.

Everybody. And I couldn't help notice my life was shit, and these other people who I admired and I looked up to, They were getting in car accidents, getting divorced, catching colds, basically being just human beings dealing with whatever shit was coming down the road. Not the evolved, you know, spiritual titans that Scientology was promising. You know, the exalted, you know, spiritual enlightened beings. People, you know, You know, you weren't supposed to get a cold. You were supposed to be, you know, the promise was you were going to rise up above all these human—

Right.

—minutiae, you know, dilemmas and problems and whatnot and you were going to have this remarkable insight into the world and you have power, power being very powerful, power being powerful. Being a real hook, because if you're a young, scared guy like I was, power was missing. Right. There was no power. I was just scrambling to try and get my foot in any door that would open. And so here these people come in, promise you the one thing you don't have as a young, stupid man is power. And it was an easy sell. And I, you know, And I— it took me 10 years to realize, wait, this isn't working.

It took 10 years?

Yeah, this isn't working. And my wife at the time, she was in Scientology as well. We both kind of went— had a moment alone one night going, this is bullshit. You know, 10 years. 10 years it took. To wake the fuck up. And we bailed out, and we lost all our friends. We were excommunicated.

Did they fuck with you at all?

No, because I had no money. Nobody chases you if you have money.

Right. You weren't successful enough for them to miss you when you left.

Yeah. Goodbye. See ya. And it really began the turn into my life that we're talking about here, which was I decided that I'm not going to look for some outside element to help me go where I want to go. I'm just going to work my ass off. And for the next 10 years, I worked like a dog till I scrambled in and eventually, you know, got on a show where I'm, you know, getting yelled at by Roseanne Barr. But I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

So it didn't hurt you to leave? It hurt you in terms of—

It was imperative for me to leave because I finally took responsibility for my life. It's on me. It's not on what this guy says. It's on me. It's what I believe, what I perceive. And a lot of that perception and belief was bullshit. I was still, you know, a frightened young guy trying to find his way in the world, but it was on me. I wasn't going to I wasn't looking for some outside wisdom to give me leverage. I was just going to work until I dropped to get where I needed to go. And, you know, the funny ending of that story was I succeeded. I succeeded. I had the career I couldn't have dreamed of, and I still couldn't top it, and it still didn't solve the hole, the dark hole in the soul. Mm-hmm. That's what we were talking about.

Right.

You know, which, uh, which, you know, led to the other change in my life, which is— was it 27 and a half years ago? I stopped drinking. So, um, and that's been a massive change, you know. So, because again, you know, what I keep saying over and over again, I'm not sure I'm saying it clearly. The one thing that is clear is the outside The outside stuff, whether they be experiences or stuff or relationships or, in my case, marriages, it doesn't— it's a Band-Aid. It doesn't heal the wound. The wound has to be dealt with in some other way that's personal, a spiritual path of your own. Your choice. You call it. Doesn't matter if it's Christ, if it's Yahweh, if it's the Quran, if it's Latter-day Saints, or if it's Eckhart Tolle. It doesn't matter. Pick one. Pick one. That's your best shot out of that darkness, as far as I can tell.

I think you're probably very accurate. I think you could probably do it on your own, But I don't know very many people who have. It's really hard. It's hard.

We're community animals. You know, I think we thrive in groups. I think that's how we're wired. I think the worst thing that could have happened a million years ago in a tribe was to be thrown out of the tribe. You're going to die.

Right.

You get kicked out of the tribe because of misbehavior. I don't know what misbehavior is in the Pleistocene era. The Neanderthals, but if you got kicked out, you're dead.

Whitney Cummings told me that's why people have stage fright. That's why they have a fear of public speaking. She said because when we were in tribes, if you had to speak in front of the public, you were defending yourself.

That's probably very true.

And you probably were going to get kicked out of the tribe.

Kicking out was a sentence of death.

Yeah.

And so we're desperately in need of one another, and that's not good, bad, or indifferent. It's just the way we are.

Right.

Right?

Which is what makes people so prone to ideologies, to religious cults, to all sorts of different things. You want to be part of a group.

Yeah, even if the group is wrong, it's a group, right? It doesn't matter. Right or wrong is irrelevant. I'm in this group.

Yeah,

look at— I got friends.

And people will do wrong things to defend the group.

They fight to the death. Yes, we go to war over these groups.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's a weird thing. It's just for a lot of people, it's finding a good one. Just find one that works. Find some sort of Some sort of a spiritual path that gives you some sort of peace of mind.

And it doesn't hurt others.

And doesn't hurt others.

Yeah, that's it. It's not really complicated.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, but we don't live in a culture that pursues that. We live in a culture of consumption. You know?

Yeah, I think there's more people aware of that now today. But it's just, there's no guidebook. There's no operator manual on how to be a person that's very effective. And even religions, like, you're kind of figuring it out on your own. It's not as laid out as I'd like it to be, you know, like very clearly from the beginning to the end, this is how you're supposed to behave. This is what's wrong. This is what the— like, this is what the greater spiritual path— this is why it exists.

I was raised in a Jewish household. No one ever talked, ever. No rabbis, my parents ever discussed having a connection with God, pursuing God, seeking God. What's my reason for being here? Why am I alive? How did this happen? It was never discussed. It was just, do this and shut up, right? Here are the rules, do the rules. and moving on, right? Right. And that was how they were raised too. So, you know, it's not like— there was no malice. It was just, here are the rules of our tribe. Do the rules. And at no point was there a connection made with, this could be the most important thing in your life. This could actually solve the whole dilemma of being a human being. It had nothing to do with that. It was a rules-based religion. It honored some wonderful things like education, you know, and there was a great deal of goodness to it, societal goodness, you know. I think I mentioned in my book that my father was one of 11 Republicans in the country

11 Jewish Republicans.

11 Jewish Republicans in the country. I left out the key word because he believed in his heart, each man for himself, you know, pull yourself up by the bootstraps and stuff, and he believed that dearly. But I lost my train of thought.

Well, we were just talking about having some sort of a connection with God and a spiritual connection and that this is what helped you. become sober and get out of the darkness. This is the roundabout way of it. What— so did you do Alcoholics Anonymous? Like, is that what—

Let's not talk about that.

Okay. Yeah, no, I just wanted to know, like, what—

Let's focus on the word anonymous.

Okay.

Okay, just— I got sober.

You got sober. Yeah. But through that, you started exploring spirituality?

It was inevitable.

It was a part of it.

It's inevitable. And, you know, the most extraordinary thing— it's hard to do this and retain anything like anonymity, but there is the encouragement to pursue a God of your understanding, not someone else's. Yours. That was remarkable. That's a remarkable insight for me. Really, I get to choose, huh? Wow. Wow, this is not a ritualistic, here, do this, do that. Right. You know? It's not about don't eat fish on Friday or pork ever. It's about But finding something greater than yourself, it's not that hard to do, given of your understanding. That could be the ocean. It could be whatever you choose it to be. It could be a fucking doorknob. But it's critical. It's critical.

What was the path like? So, you go from becoming sober and this idea of worshiping something or looking at something.

No, no worship.

Okay, what's the word?

The word worship— Respecting something as a higher power? The word worship is— I don't understand that word. No, it's just recognizing. It's just recognizing that there's something else going on here. And it ain't me. That's it. There's no worship involved. There's no genuflecting or, you know, there's service. How can I be better in this world? There is that. There is that, you know. And for somebody like me who was gimme all the time, was always gimme, Gimme, gimme, I need, I need more. More is not enough.

Yeah.

Right? I need more. And when that ceases to work, when you finally wake up and go, there is no more, more is never enough, when you finally give in to the reality is that that will never do the job, I will always be empty if that's the way I'm trying to go about it. Then there's a possibility that's the bottom. And the bottom is where you decide to stop digging. And the bottom is where you go, okay, let's try something else.

Do you have a negative connotation with the word worship?

Not really. It's just, it's not what I recognize.

What do you think worship is? Like, in your mind, what do you— is that being subservient?

You know, it's being subservient. Punishing, you know, all-powerful, you know, thing that's gonna, you know, punish and whatever. Right. The Old Testament stuff.

Okay. I don't know if they have to be connected, though. I don't think of worship in that way. I think a lot of people do, though, especially when you get into the Old Testament stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just, for me, What I've been doing for the last many years, it worked. What can I tell you?

Right.

I don't truly understand it. I really don't. So much of it is counterintuitive, but it worked, you know? Now, I'm, by all means, if you read the book, this is a guy who's got some serious issues. I haven't cleared that hurdle. by any means, but it's better. It's a better life than the one I had.

And is this an— was this an arc for you, or was this a quick realization upon getting sober?

Oh, slow.

Was a slow—

Slow-briety.

Process to get to where you are now?

Yeah, slow, slow, slow.

And do you define it, like what you're serving or what you worship— not bad word, sorry— what you appreciate about The higher power? Or you don't have to define it?

I don't think language is really equipped for it.

Right.

I think language— the very act of putting a word on it limits it. The very act of saying this is a thing, a noun. I don't know if this is going to sound strange, but I think it's a verb. I think it's an act. It's a process. It's action. It's not a brick. Right. It's moving, whatever it is.

Whatever greater power it is.

Whatever that is. It's not a static thing.

I think that's a better way to describe

it.

Yeah.

And again, language wants to solidify it. Language wants to name it. This is this.

Right.

And language is a beautiful thing. I love— language is one of my favorite things. Words have been good to me. Making up words and putting them together in sentences has been terrific for me. I'm really grateful for words and language, but there's a limitation to what words can show you about what's going on.

Yeah, most certainly. And that's a— I think that's an important point. Like, what you're saying is that it's moving and that it's alive. And this is not a— you know, that's, I think, one of the problems that secular people have with the term God. They think of a guy in a robe that lives in the clouds, and it's ridiculous instantaneously.

We see a man in the fucking moon. Yeah, we anthropomorphize everything. We see our images everywhere we look.

Yeah.

Right? And it's kind of a— it's amusing when it doesn't cause war.

Right. Good point. It's also connected to a lot of the ancient depictions of it, unfortunately. You have to think about like ancient depictions of God and Moses and all these biblical figures who are painted in the garb of the day in which that painting was made.

Remember, These people were looking up at the night sky going, what the fuck?

Yeah, exactly.

What the

fuck? Who's making the lightning?

What's happening here?

The gods are fighting.

Yeah, no, they had to come up with a story. We are, you know, I mean, have you ever read any of the Yuval Harari books?

Yes.

He makes it really clear, that's our superpower. We tell ourselves stories. And we believe them.

Right.

And we congregate around them, and we're able to mobilize millions and millions of people around a fiction.

Yeah.

It doesn't even have to be true. We just need to believe it, and we're all moving in, we're all marching in the same direction. It's— monkeys don't do that. Right. Monkeys don't have a monkey god.

Right.

They're just monkeys. Hey, pick these mites off of me. Thank you very much. You know, but they don't organize around what is essentially a belief. It's not true. You want to call it true or not, it's an organizing element that no other animal does. So we get to rule and/or ruin the world.

And we want to define the structure of whatever that thing is. That we want to— even if we're pretending, we want to give order to it.

Absolutely. Disorder is—

Too scary.

Too scary.

Too scary.

Too crazy. It's fucking— look at this.

Also, you can't have people running around making up their own order. That'll fuck everything up. You can't have a bunch of people who are all, well, God's been talking to me. You know what he tells me? Pork is awesome. You can't have that guy.

Yeah. And listen, you know, you can see where, when civilizations or cultures that took God out of the picture, they replaced it with the Communist Party.

Yeah.

Right? With a fascist dictator.

Yeah.

You know, it's the same idea. Organize around me.

Sure.

Right? Doesn't matter if I'm right or not. Organize around me, and people will. And if you take that away from them, they get angry.

Yeah.

It freaks them out because it's like a tent pole. If that tent pole moves, the tent comes down. And everything, you know, if you believe that this is the truth and someone says, no, it's not, it's bullshit, everything else you believe is in fair play. Everything, right? The tent collapses. So people will fight to the death to keep the tent pole up. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. It's the tent pole.

I have a friend of mine who grew up Mormon, and she left the Mormon Church. And when she left the Mormon Church, she said, I'm so susceptible to believing anything because I believed everything they told me for so long that I didn't critically think about anything. So she's like, any spiritual people, healers, all that stuff. She goes, I'm so susceptible, I believe everything.

Yeah, I think growing up the way I grew up, I was a vacuum. I was wide open. You know how to get out of this madness, this world that's so frightening?

Right.

Show me.

Yeah.

I got nothing. I got nothing. I'll go, you know, I was absolutely fragile. Stupid fragile.

Like most people.

Yeah. And, uh, you know, that's— I got to write down— I gotta write it down.

Yeah, well, that's the beauty of it, that fragility and that emotion and all that chaos. It comes out in creativity. And the, the added benefit that Scientology has over everybody is that they've got all these successful celebrities. That was the big one for me

back in the day.

Oh my God, that was the big one. I was like, I felt like they knew something I didn't know. Like, whatever they're on. And I didn't really know the whole story. I didn't really know the whole story until much, much, much later. I had heard versions of what they believe. And it wasn't until Going Clear, Lawrence Wright's book. Great book. Great book. I was like, holy shit. Yeah, it wasn't until that, until I really kind of got the grip of what it's all about and how it

A big part of it was secrets.

Yeah.

You know, institutionally held secrets, they glue you. Oh, I want to know the secret. If

I

stick around, I'll find out the secret. Because we were all looking for, you know, we're all looking for a secret. Like the knowing. The knowing. Yes. And keeping that stuff secret, purposefully secret, and we were told that some of this higher-level stuff Yeah. Could conceivably kill you if you're not ready. I'm not kidding.

I'm not kidding either.

It was— those words were used. If you're not ready for these higher-level spiritual things, it will destroy you, drive you mad.

When I bought my first house in '96, my next-door neighbor was a Scientologist. And there was a piece of land— we were just talking in front of the house, and there was a piece of land next to his house that he was going to buy, but he had to put it off. because his wife was going clear. And I go, what does that mean? He goes, well, it's this ceremony that she undergoes, and afterwards she will no longer be affected by outside influences. I was like, whoa, how are they gonna do that? And he explained to me. I go, well, why do you have to put off the sale? He goes, because it costs $50,000.

They send her to Flag in Florida.

Is that what it is?

Yeah. Yeah, there's a— there's this own thing, and I guess in Clearwater, Incredibly expensive.

Go clear in Clearwater?

Incredibly expensive.

$50 grand. This guy was a construction guy. He had a construction business.

He's probably a million dollars now.

Ooh, yeah, this is '96.

I don't know, but, um, and there was a very purposeful thing. Putting a high price tag on it made it important. Ah, smart.

Yeah, it's

smart. It's, you know, it's Marketing 101. If you give it away, it doesn't have as much value as if you say it's worth $50,000.

I think Paul Haggis was the one in the documentary who was discussing when he first got a hold of, like, one of the ancient stories that is, like, super secret, and he read it, he was like, what the fuck am I reading?

Right.

'Cause it was just kooky L. Ron Hubbard.

It was science fiction stuff. Oh. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, but, you know, I mean—

Hey, whatever floats your boat.

One of the gifts of this, of writing a memoir, was I found my way to be able to forgive myself, you know? Rather than be embarrassed— Right. I would never tell people that I spent 10 years in a cult. It's humiliating. What a dope, right? I would, you know, I was so frightened of being wrong, right? And in writing this thing, I was wrong. It's okay. It's okay. I was wrong. I was young. I was frightened. I made some bad choices. I got through it. I was blessed to have some angels come along the way to help me through it. A lot of that stuff, but I got through it and I don't have to be humiliated by being a foolish young man anymore, you know.

Well, that's part of the maturity of age. You realize being a foolish young man is almost inevitable. There's no getting around it. Agreed. We're all foolish.

Agreed. And that's, you know, I was watching an interview you did the other day because I wanted to learn about what I was sitting down with Tim Robbins, and he said something that struck me as worth repeating, which is a remarkable insight, I thought, and it was a remarkable insight for me. It came very late in life, but it was simply the power of saying, I don't know. What a relief.

Yeah.

To not pretend I know. What a relief to not, you know, to not act as if I Right. I have a handle on this. Right. I don't. And what's great is when you're sitting in a room full of people making a TV comedy, a sitcom, and they all look at you, you know, because the second act doesn't work, and everybody looks at you, and it's a great feeling to go, I don't know. It stinks. Anybody? Anybody? You know, I'm open to anybody having a solution to this shitty second act. But I absolutely don't know, and I'm okay with that. In the past, I would have gone on some long diatribe trying to convince everybody I knew what I was doing. It's exhausting.

Yeah.

I don't, you know? I don't. I'm doing the best I can. And when I don't know, it's freedom to say, I don't know. It's freedom. Oh, your shoulders go down. You exhale. And you seek to collaborate.

So many people need to learn that lesson because it's a burden that you don't have to carry. You're carrying around an unnecessary burden that's propped up by your own ego, and it fucks with your consciousness.

I think it's how we're raised too. You know, I don't think, you know, we're not taught as children to admit to ignorance.

Right.

You know, it's just, it's not how we're raised. It's not, it's, you know, man, right, does the right thing. He knows what to do. He's, he's the leader. He's, he's John Wayne in my generation. You know, I was more Steve McQueen, but okay, a little later. Yeah. But you're certainly not taught to say, to have humility and say, I don't know. And humility has a bad taint to it because it smells of weakness, but it's not. It's the opposite of weakness.

Right.

Oh my God, you know, to be able to say, I don't know, help me, is actually an incredible strength.

And it's much more admirable. It's for people on the outside watching, they recognize it as being true. That's a— this is a—

yeah,

authentic moment rather than someone bullshitting you. Well, you know they're bullshitting you, and they know that you know, and everybody just goes through this stupid fucking dance.

One of the questions I get asked all the time now that I'm in the twilight of my career is, what's the secret sauce? You know, what's— what's, you know, what, if anything, carries through all the different TV shows and whatnot? And the word that comes to mind is collaboration. I didn't do anything alone, you know? You know, you come out of the comedy world, you know that writing comedy with others is really a gas, and it's far more effective.

100%.

I learned so much by being in a room for 25 years With great writers. And one of the things I talk about in the book, which is really meaningful to me, was when I got the chance to do The Kominsky Method with Michael Douglas, I decided I wanted to write it alone to see if I still could write alone because I'd been in a room with people yelling at each other for years. No, this is funny. This is funny. No, do it this way. And it would get volatile, you know. Right. You fucking nuts? What are you, stupid? It got mean, right? But when I sat down and wrote those scripts by myself, I realized all those guys were in the room with me. They're in my head, you know? Really? You think that's funny? It's, you know, it's a fucking pun, you moron. You know, that guy's— that guy's in my head. He was part of me now. And I wasn't— I was writing alone, but I wasn't alone. All those guys. And, you know, when you watch a great stand-up, it gets in your head. You don't copy that guy, but his insight can change the way you perceive things.

100%.

Yeah.

Yeah. Stanhope always says that he writes in— he thinks about himself as a defense attorney defending the bit. as he's writing it.

Who is this?

Doug Stanhope. Hilarious. Great stand-up. Hilarious guy. But he looks at it like he's— like that bit is being tried. How does he defend this bit? And he makes sure that he lays it out in that way.

That's great.

Yeah.

That's great.

But it's the same thing, like having someone in your head that's like a critic that's gonna look at it and go, hey, what the fuck is this part? You know, and you're like, hey, motherfucker, the scene isn't—

that's not how you end the scene.

All right, let's fucking work together here and fix it.

Yeah. You know? And what a gift, you know? And so, you know, again, going back to that word, humility is a strength. I succeeded because I counted on other people.

100%. There's no way— if you've been on a set of a sitcom in particular, there's no way to do it on your own. It's like every— you need to have a lot of brilliant people working together for it to work out well.

Have you interviewed this guy Taylor Sheridan?

Yeah, he's a good friend of mine. Wow. Yeah.

Okay, that might be the anomaly, because, you know, I love that stuff. I love all that stuff. I watch everything. You know, I'm just—

He's a freak. He just churns them out.

I feel so fucking lazy when I watch this. Me too. It's such a— just a Just— I'm just— Driftwood. He wrote it and directed it, and then he had time to write that great feature, and holy shit.

Yeah, he turns them out.

I just— and it's good. Yeah. It's one thing to turn it out, and it's one thing to turn out quality.

You seen Hell in High Country? Yes. Hell in High Water, rather. Is that what it is? Yes. Hell in High Water? Yeah, that's a fucking great movie.

And, um, I just, um— the Sicario stuff.

Yes.

And then 1883 and 1923 with Helen Mirren. And Harrison Ford—

wow. He creates banger after banger. Lioness. I haven't watched Lioness, but everybody tells me that's incredible.

It's fantastic.

Landman.

Landman's incredible. You know, Billy Joe Thornton.

Billy Bob.

Billy Bob.

Yeah.

Unbelievable. Great stuff.

Yeah, man. It's like— it was funny. The pitch for that show was he was gonna do Bad Santa but on an oil rig. And he's like, fuck yeah, I'm in. Bagged Santa as an oil man.

I got to work with him once, Billy Bob. His people, his representatives called me and said, Billy Bob wants to be on The Big Bang Theory. I'm sorry, what? This is an Oscar-winning, you know, Sling Blade guy who wants to be on The Big Bang Theory. I said, I'm sorry? You're gonna have to give me more. He goes, his mother loves the show, and as a gift to his mother, he wants to be on the show.

Oh, wow.

And we did it.

That's awesome.

And we loved it. We had a great time.

That's so cool.

He played a 50-year-old version of them who lived in his mother's basement.

After all these years and all these shows, what keeps you doing it now? Like, what do you enjoy? about the process now?

I'm a laugh whore. Making people laugh is fun, you know? And sitting in the writers' room is fun. Sometimes you want to tear your hair out because it's hard. But every once in a while, you know, you hit something and you go, oh, this is good. This is really good. And what the fuck else would I do?

Well, you could kind of do whatever you want. That's why I'm asking you.

Okay, so I'm asking you. I can do whatever I want. What am I doing? I can travel. That's a couple of weeks. Now what?

Right.

Okay. I'm going to garden? No, I don't see me in the tulips. Keep going. What am I doing? I get a chance to make people laugh. That's not a bad way to spend the day, you know? So—

No, it's an awesome way to spend the day, but some people, the stress of continuing to create and continuing to produce things, like, it eventually gets to them where they just like, I want off the ride.

What I've done, and you really hit on something there, is the stress of it at a certain point is intolerable. It's just intolerable. I just— I find myself becoming the short-tempered curmudgeon.

Right.

The old guy who has no patience. I don't want to be that guy. So I'm— I've been gradually pulling myself back into more of a consultant role where I'm not— if I'm on the stage at a rehearsal, And the actors play out a scene, and the scene ends. Everybody looks and says— looks at me and goes, is it okay? So my very presence suffocates the process. I am the plastic bag from the dry cleaners, right? I kill small children. So I have this extraordinary writing staff, wonderful cast and crew, and sometimes my presence can be— I don't want to say destructive, but it doesn't encourage people to step up and go, what about? How about if? Right. I think this joke doesn't work. Can we beat it? You know, it doesn't invite collaboration And the sad truth is, they think I know. I don't know. I'm guessing. We're all, you know, in the comedy business, it's a game of guessing. I think this is funny. I guessed wrong, right? When it dies. Let's fix it. No harm, no foul. I'm not a horrible person because it died. I'm just— it just died.

They just feel less likely to take chances when you're around?

They're nervous? I think I suck up a lot of oxygen. Yeah. You know, at this time in my career.

Makes sense.

You know, I remember one time Norman Lear came to the set because he was going to go back into— he made a version of One Day at a Time, and he was executive producing a remake of one of his shows from the '70s. And he asked, can I come and watch you guys work to see how it's being done now? This is 35, 40 years after his day. Of course, you know, geez, Norman Lear's gonna come watch us work, which I was a nervous wreck after every joke. I'm looking, is Norman laughing? Is Norman laughing? But I asked him— I remember this really vivid moment when I said, are you gonna write the pilot for this new sitcom you're gonna make? And he went, are you crazy? Now, if I give— if I write the pilot, nobody's going to give me notes. Nobody's going to give me any constructive feedback. I'm all by myself. I'm not going to write it. If it says written by Norman Lear, who's going to do the punch-up?

Right.

Right? Now, I'm not saying I'm Norman Lear. He reinvented television. I carried on. You know, I've been keeping it going, but he really changed the game. So I don't want to— It's the same effect. It's the same effect. In my career, I've noticed I have a— the word stultifying comes to mind— effect on the process. And the people I love working with could give a shit about my opinion, and I love that because then there's back and forth. Then there's arguments. There's, you know, there's collaboration.

Yeah, and it has to happen that way to do it right. That's fun. It's also great that you recognize That your presence can make them nervous and fuck it up.

Yeah. And you want to go, no, no, you don't understand. I actually don't know what I'm doing. Right. I'm just guessing. I'm guessing based on a lot of experience, but I'm still guessing. And—

That's just your reputation precedes you. You've had too many hits. You know?

It's a beautiful problem. Yeah.

It's the best problem. It's a glorious problem. It's certainly better than the opposite.

Probably. When I started The Big Bang Theory, I could barely do one show. Two and a Half Men, it was 60 hours a week, easy. And then I started The Big Bang Theory. I called Norman's office, cold call, said, I'm Chuck Lorre. I've got a show on CBS. I'm about to have a second show. At one point, he had 7 shows on television.

Simultaneously?

Simultaneously. I said, would he be available to talk to me, maybe give me some tips? And he very graciously invited me over to his office. And I sat down and I said, I'm about to start production on a second show. I can barely do the one, and now I'm going to do two. What can you tell me? And he said, You're not going to like the answer. And it boiled down to— he said, you go where the fire's burning the brightest and you try and put it out. That was his management technique. That was it.

The fire of chaos or the fire of creativity?

He had 7 shows in production. Either the script didn't work, they miscast a role. The bad fire. Put out the fire. The director wasn't working. the second act didn't work. You know, some of them are small, some of them are huge problems.

Right.

You know, so-and-so's, you know, ill. Should we shut down? You know, do we wait a week? Do we push a week? What if we miss an air date? Oh my God, what if you miss an air date? The problems could be big or small, but his solution was gauging his response basically You know, nothing, nothing, nothing. Oh, that's a crisis. I'll go there.

How did that guy have time for anything in life?

I don't know. He's a good man, though. He was really— he was a generous and good man. I was very— it was a real privilege to spend a little bit of time.

That's amazing. Yeah. Was there any time, ever any time when you were doing both shows simultaneously where you went, I don't think I should have done this? This is too much?

Always. The entire time? Always. But there was a moment around the 3rd season of Two and a Half Men, and I know I wrote about this, where I had a weird epiphany. I was sitting in a room full of comedy writers, great writers, superstar comedy writers, and we were arguing about something. I don't remember what it was, some scene in an episode that we were working on. And it dawned on me that I could trust myself. And it was a really striking experience. Everybody was yelling and complaining and, no, not this, do that, do this. And I just thought, I think I know how to do this scene. And everybody's going, no, blah, blah, blah. And I went, no, I think I know how to do this scene, and we're going to do it. not angrily defending it, just— I felt calm, you know? I felt this calmness going, I think this can work. Let's do this. And I also— there was a moment in that calmness where I went, if I'm wrong, we'll fix it. Nobody's going to die. You know, we're not going to get drummed out of show business. Right. It's a joke in a scene.

Right.

And I realized that I could be wrong and survive.

Well, that's the benefit of being very successful, too.

And that's also— but it also goes back to the I don't know thing. I don't have to know. But we did it, and it was a turning point for me, you know, where I loved working in a room full of writers, but I wasn't bound by consensus anymore. I was able to To have— trust intuition, which is a weird thing. It's not thinking. You know this.

Right.

Comedy, you just— you have this feeling. It's inchoate. It's not something you could express in words. You just know, I think this is gonna work.

And that feeling grows with the episodes you've done. That feeling grows.

Yes. And you also know when you're bullshitting yourself. Right. This is lazy. We can do better. Right. I know, yeah, this will work, but it's not great. It's okay. And okay, why are we doing this if it's just okay? Let's at least try for great. If we fail, we tried for great. But if you fail trying to do okay, you know, go home. Go home. You're done. So, you know, that's about Shoot for the moon, settle for a low orbit.

That's a great message. I think it's a good way to wrap this up. Um, thank you. I really appreciate it. It was fun.

I'm stunned. I thought for sure I'd— maybe I could talk to you for 20 minutes and I'm gonna go running.

We did 2 hours.

Screaming out of the room going, this—

I know you were saying that at the beginning. You're gonna be fine.

Well, you're a delight to talk to.

And you are too.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

I get it. I get it. You have, as I'm sure you well know, you know, you have an aura about you, a myth, a mythos. Hmm.

What's the myth?

You're powerful. You're a powerful man. And what you've achieved is remarkable.

Oh, thank you.

You know, as we say in the comic book world, use your powers for good.

It's all an illusion. It's just me talking for years, but I appreciate it.

The 10,000 hours are clear.

Well, thank you very much. You're awesome. Your book's great, and this was a lot of fun. Thank you very much. All right, bye everybody.