Transcript of #611 - Louis C.K.

Today's guest is one of the greats. There's nobody like him. He's a comedian. He's a filmmaker, and now he's a novelist. This is his new book, Ingram, and I've read it, and it's great. It's like this huck fin, like an emotional huck fin. You'll love it. I guarantee that. I'm grateful to spend time with him today. He's one of my dear friends, and I think he has a lot to offer the world, so I feel lucky to ride on this planet at the same time as him. Today's guest is Mr. Louis CK.

I will find a song Yeah, man, I'm excited to see you guys perform tonight. The Ryman's a beautiful place. Yeah.

Do you feel uncomfortable ever saying certain things in such a beautiful venue? And not you, particularly, but also definitely you.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. The Ryman feels like... I mean, Harry Houdini was there, and so was Martin Luther King, and so was Johnny Cash and Elvis. A pretty good balance of perverts and- Wizards. Perverts and I think. I feel okay about talking about bad stuff that you shouldn't talk about. There's places like a symphony space when you do one of those where it's really hallowed and it's like, you know. It should be a guy in a tuxedo playing a cello.

Yeah, there should be a maitre d'y of instruments or whatever that guy's called. What's it?

The maitre d'y of instruments. Like a conductor?

The Leader? The Leader, yeah.

Yeah. When you have those guys, and then I'm on there, and I'm talking about the hair on the tip of my cock. Yeah. But then again, I sold the tickets. It's just a bunch of seats.

But it is, though, you get into something, you're like, Oh, this isn't it. Or I had to do a church once. This man invited me, and I don't want to say he was a pervert or whatever. I don't want to say he was He seemed like somebody was willing to touch somebody that was probably young.

He's willing to touch somebody who's maybe probably young? Yeah. That's borderline.

Okay.

He's willing.

Right. He was willing to. I'm not going to say he was.

Right. If somebody was like, Hey, this kid's dick is bleeding. We all feel weird about applying pressure. He'd be like, I'm willing.

Yeah. Right?

Yeah.

Yeah, that guy, like an EMT for small cocks.

Shot his hand up a little too quick on that question. I mean, I just would. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. Like, had a couple of small tourniquets in his pocket. Right.

He's equipped.

But yeah, so that guy invited me to do a show, and it was in like, Laughland, Nevada, or something out in the middle of the desert. It was at a church, and he was a church man. He was like a or a leader of a church. We get there and I was like, Oh, man, this guy had only seen one of my bits, and it was just more of a safe bed. It just had nothing edgy in it. I got into this stuff and you could see a man get up with his family and just I mean, he was leaving the show. He was leaving the church, though, too. You could see.

Oh, no.

I felt horrible. I kept looking at him in the back and he's trying to be supportive. I was like, Don't support me. I was like, This shouldn't be happening.

You felt It felt that way? I did. You shouldn't have been doing it.

Yeah, but I couldn't just... All I had was my material. I could do some roofing, but it's also in a church. The lights were all on. But yeah, some venues, it's just a little...

Yeah, it's funny. I used to be more defiant. I used to feel more like, Hey, man, This is what I... Fuck you. But I feel less that way. I'm not going to change what I do, but I don't want to upset anybody. I'm not trying to.

But I'm not as like, We'll show them.

I I was talking about something on stage recently, and somebody in the balcony yelled, I got angry. And I said, What's wrong? And this person, I don't remember what the bit was, but they were like, That's not cool, man. And I said, Are you offended by what I said? He said, Yeah. And I just said, I'm really sorry. I had never done that before. I was just like, I'm really sorry. Anyway, I'm going to keep doing it. Yeah, we got to keep going. Yeah, you got to keep going. I did a club in Florida down in Key West. Oh, yeah. And it's a good... I love the guy who runs it, this guy Tom, and it's a fun club. But a lot of the crowd is people that are on a cruise, and they jump off, and they had no context for what I was getting pure silence on some stuff. And at some point I just said, Listen, I just want you to know I'm not trying to upset you. Oh, yeah. I'm just want you to know that I don't have another way to go. This isn't me antagonizing you. This is just you and I are very different.

And if you could try to open your heart a little bit, I'm opening up to you, but I can't invent jokes for you right now. And they are like, okay, I could see these old people in pink and coral blue shirts going, All right, we'll try a little harder. Because at first they just thought, Well, he's just... Sometimes if somebody's upsetting you, you think they want to. But sometimes it's just that they're being what they are. If you can know that, I think it helps.

Even as you're saying that, it makes me think. Even when I was a kid, if my mom would have every now and then, I know, bring back things to childhood all the time. But it's like, or if a parent would every now and be like, Hey, I know this is not good.

I know this sucks for you.

Right. I know this. Everything we're doing here is really, it's a Barnum and Bailey. It's a real shit circus.

I've tried to say that to my-But that's all we got. Right. I used to think that about my kids when I would say know about something. Because when I was a kid, no was mean. It was always like, no. And like, no, because I said so. Stuff like that. And no, because you don't deserve it or whatever. And I don't think no has to be a bad thing. I think the life is full of yes and no, right? And the first few years of a kid's life are just yes. You're just trying to keep them alive and just let them know they're loved. And then you have to start going, not that, though. And it's a tragic for them. The person I love is saying no. Why would they do that? And because you feel guilty about saying no to your kid, you put a little spice on it. But you can be nice about it as long as you're firm. You know what I mean? You don't roll over because you just go, No, I'm sorry, honey. Yeah, I know how much that sucks, but it's not changing. You can't do it. And think of something else, but it ain't...

That's a wall. That's a brick wall. And you'll be okay. Also, let them know you'll be okay. And And then they'll know that no is just a turn. It's not a wall. It's a curve. That's all. Go look for something else.

Yeah. And that's a great way to think about it, too, because then it keeps you in a space of like, well, what else could I... What's possible? How else would I figure this out? It almost puts a little challenge into the child.

That's it. And also, when my kids would complain about... If they just harangued and said, Come on, I just... No, I'm not even going to discuss it. But if they're like, Wait, and they reason and they try to lawyer through it, I go, I'm here, I'm listening. That I'll listen to. That's a good skill for them to build.

Yeah, I remember at night, if we got suspended from watching television or something by mom, we could go down and do a performance, right? Yeah. We didn't have a lot of... We had a little bit of face paint. I don't want to say it was like it would seem racial, but some of the shit probably... We didn't have a lot of colors.

Okay. What colors did you have?

We didn't have- Like black, red, and yellow? We had some.

Yeah.

No, we just didn't have a lot of colors, right? We didn't, and we loved a lot of black stuff. So I think we probably did In the Heat of the Night or something. We would do scenes from that.

That's happy, yeah. They call me Mr. Thibs. Yeah. Why not?

In the Heat of the Night. God, dude, we love that show. I love Carroll O'Connor. God, he was so multifaceted.

Well, did you ever see the movie? The movie's amazing.

In the Year of Yeah, I have. With Sidney Poitier?

Yeah, and Rod Steiger.

Oh, is that the other guy in it? A Raising in the Sun, man. Sidney Poitier was something great, huh?

Yeah, he was. What do you call it also? To serve with love.

I haven't seen that.

Yeah, he plays a British teacher teaching... He's a well-educated Black teacher teaching Cockney white kids how to be gentlemen and ladies.

Oh, that sounds good.

It's beautiful.

Oh, I've seen scenes from this, though, just online and stuff. But if we went down and performed, and we would also had, I think we had a kite that we would do this Japanese dragon thing. We had a couple of motifs that we would use to win back the ability to do something new. But that was a way of us at least show up and show me something, right? Don't just sit there and wine.

Put on a kabuki and have an allegorical play that says, Let us eat the Captain Crunch for dinner. Yes.

Let us have this chance. That's all we wanted.

Sometimes it would be nice. Sometimes you had to sing Mammy to get it. You had to…

Swing low. It got… I mean, there were times…

I wanted to emulate Black people when I was a kid. When I was a kid, it was… All my heroes were Black. Muhammad Ali was the greatest thing in the world when I was a kid. Bruce Lee. Everybody who I admired, Bruce Lee was Black, right?

Bruce Lee? No. Bruce Lee was the Asian… But, dude, Black guys were like, Yeah, that's a real.

Yeah. That's a real one. Reggie Jackson. I mean, I grew up different generation than you.

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

Yeah.

Yeah. There was something about being Black that just seemed-I went to a-Fun and risque at the same time.

Yeah. At my school, I went to public school in Newton, Mass, and there was a program called Metco, where kids from inner city, Boston, were brought in busses to our schools. So there was a contingency of kids that were not only Black, but living in a very different place. So they would sit at their be tables at the cafeteria of just Black kids, and I would just go sit with them. I just wanted to be part of that. I would sit with them and they'd go, All right. Hey, fellows. I felt like I just was reaching for that.

But you think it was because... Because I definitely noticed that, too. I like being around Black kids. It was fun. It was interesting. You didn't know what was going to happen. There was an element of crossing in the tracks a bit.

Yeah, because where I grew up in Newton, I mean, I lived in Mexico when I was younger, but I mostly grew up in Newton. And it was a suburb that was already split because there was a working class side and a rich people's side. And I grew up right on the, literally on the tracks. The train tracks, the Mass Turnpike, was a block behind my house, like one block. I heard, I fell asleep to the sound of traffic. And so we were right on the line, my family. We had a little house, a little half a house that we rented. But that was all white, though. Everybody was white. In Newton. Later, I drove a cab in Newton in my hometown, and found out that there was a little enclave of Black people that lived in one little, like one street in Newton. But in Boston itself, too, the main city was very segregated. So there was this one kid in our... One medco kid, his name was David, and his family's house burnt down in Boston. And my friend's dad had half a house that he rented out, and he donated it to their family so they could have a place to live while they were rebuilding.

Wow. So this black family moved into our neighborhood. The Russians, and they were nice people. I didn't think of it. I knew David. He was okay kid. He was a dick, but let anybody be a dick. But there was this one-But he was a black dick.

He was a black A black day.

He was a black day, and he had one.

But- But no, no, no.

At the time, I wasn't aware of that. But there was a kid in our school who was a really vicious bully, and he had a gang. One day, David went to the park, Cabot Park, and Michael was the bully. I'm using real names. I don't know. Maybe you should believe them.

If he did it, he did it.

But Michael- Michael. I'll call him out. His gang And they took David and they said, We're going to show you this swing is your swing. And it was paint. They painted a swing black, and they painted a bench black, and they painted one of everything in the park. And they said, That's the Russell swing. That's the Russell bench. And I heard that story, and I found it hard to believe, but I went to the park and there was a black bench, and it was black as long as the rain, until the rain washed off the paint and the park painted it green over. That's what it was like. This was like a liberal suburb.

Do you think a lot of that was actual true racism, or do you think some of it was just like, I know you're not playing as a racist, but I think sometimes people, if that's what's going on, people will continue it.

Yeah, I think so. But I think if you actually go get a bucket of paint, if you actually go put your money down as a kid and you paint a bench black, I think that's pretty racist. I think it's pretty hard core racist. Yeah, it was nasty. I mean, he was mean to everybody. He found a way to hurt. He was a sadistic person. Yeah, scared the shit out of me. He never hurt me because I was a little bigger, but I never fought, really. But yeah, that was weird. It was racism in Newton. It was weird because it was like-Oh, yeah.

I've been a boss in this still.

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

Yeah. I mean, it's just funny in the South, people will be like, It's so racist. A lot of times people have this view. But also you have a relationship. There's a lot of connectivity, I feel like. So I don't know. I remember one time me and my buddy Devon, we went fishing, and there was these kids on these railroad tracks up above us, up above the river. And they started throwing rocks at us and calling us the N-word and stuff.

White kids? Yeah. Calling you guys that? Yeah.

I wasn't Black.

At the time?

Yeah, I wanted to be part of it.

It wasn't one of the Black periods of your life?

Yeah, I was like, But I still was like, You don't know us, motherfucker. I was yelling shit back. Even Devon's looking at me like, Dude, what the fuck is this? They'll try to steal my thunder here. It was just like, I don't know. All that stuff was just like, I don't know.

I do think kids Just throw everything around. Kids just say stuff. Oh, for sure. Because they want to try it on.

Yeah. I don't trust people that will say... I think if somebody won't say... Some people won't say f, right? Or they won't say the F word about gay folks. And you know what it is. Gay Fs.

Huh? Gay Fs.

Gay Fs, yeah.

Not gay folks. You mean the folks is the F word, right?

No, I'm saying. Some people won't say, and I'll say it really fast because some people don't like hearing it, f.

That got right by the people that they were doing something else.

Well, it's like you could have looked away. You could have been driving and looking out of the street before you know what it's going. But some people will say the N-word but won't say that word. That's what I don't get. It's like, how do you even get?

That you won't say the N-word, but you will say the F-word or that you won't say it. Which way?

Some people won't They'll say the F word, but they'll say the N word.

Really? Who's that? What group is that?

That, to me is racist. That's racist. It's like-Yeah.

If you have a general sensitivity about like, why just don't want it? Some of these words have gotten too hard to use. I used to say all of them. But I don't now because it just has a different effect.

Yeah. Like you're saying earlier, we get older, something just it lands different.

It lands different depending on how things are. Language is a living thing. And the way people communicate is always changing, and the sounds you make are affected by the other sounds in the air. So you don't live in a vacuum. And it doesn't mean... That's not a moral thing to me. That's just, do you want to be understood? What do you want to convey? What feeling are you trying to put out there? Sometimes the N word can be said with a lot of love. It can also be said with humor or just experimental confusion. But at a time where there's certain things that got tightened up, it doesn't have that effect anymore. So make an adjustment.

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

That's right. I mean, the word colored was no way. When I was growing up, colored was like the... That's... But now they say it. But now it's people of color. Things move around. When you start censoring, you freeze yourself, and you're no longer hearing what's going on out there. You know what I mean? That's why you got to have the flow. You got to just trust people to go like, okay, let's put N-word on the shelf for a while. And Kant is back. Colored is respectable now. It moves around. It's fascinating language. It's the most amazing thing about what we do. Yeah.

You use it so well, man. You use it so well. It is interesting. I will try to find a word. It's like, sometimes I'll say something and I'll be like, No, that's not it. I need the exact word. And if I can get the exact word, it can help me unlock a feeling. For sure. It can help me be extremely specific about what I'm trying to say.

Where do you look for your words?

I It's what I look like in my feelings a lot of times. Yeah, I look in my feelings.

You got a dictionary in your heart.

Yeah, it's like, that's not the word. Sometimes you get it, and sometimes you don't get it.

I bought a big dictionary recently because I like to have a dictionary with me when I'm writing fiction. I wrote this book, and then I started writing this other one, and I write it with a typewriter. It's very old fashioned. Oh, yeah. I I wanted to get a dictionary that had a lot of depth to it, because when I'm looking for a word, I like looking at the reference, and some dictionaries have usage of the word. They give you like... So there's a guy named Samuel Johnson back in England in the early 1700s, and he was the first person to write a dictionary for English. He just wrote one. He was like, somebody should have it. There was none. There was lists of words and catalogs, but he came up with the idea, I'm going to sit down and write a dictionary of the whole English language with every word describing the word and giving examples in poetry and literature. And he just sat down and he did it. And it's like this It's huge. It's two volumes, and it sits on my desk on each side of me. And I flip through these big pages, and I read what Samuel Johnson himself, how he described each word.

Was it hard to find those?

I got one on eBay. The thing that's What's crazy is I want to get an original because you can get first editions of that. Yeah, like your guys pulling up there. That's the birth of the English language. You can actually touch it with your hands. You can actually own that. The first person to ever fucking do this.

So that's the first dictionary ever?

First dictionary, and I'm just talking out of my ass. I'm not educated, but this is what I understand to be true.

Okay. A Dictionary of the English language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, was published on April 1775. It is among the most influential the dictionaries in the history of the English language. There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period.

Yeah, there was nothing around. It's horrible. And I learned all this stuff about language from it. Like the letter I and the letter J. Were back then, were the same letter. So I and... When you look in his dictionary, the letter I is defined, and it says I when it's used as a constant, it sounds like E or I, but when it's used as... I mean, as a vowel, but when it's used as a constant, it sounds like J. And that originally J was just an I with a little tail, just so you know that that's hard I, that's J.

This is, yeah.

Yeah. And so when you look in the I section of his dictionary, it alternates I and J. It alternates. Some words start with I, some start with J, but they're all in the same section.

Wow.

It's the same with U and V. U and V were just one word, but they had these two different...

It makes total sense.

But when you get to know this stuff about language, it gives you more... You can actually have more feelings if you have more words. But I like your retro approach, which is you're looking for the words in your feelings. It's good.

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This is a hard because that's it. No, you brought me Ingram. I brought you a hard cover of Ingram. Let's go. It's an inscription, but don't read it out loud.

Okay, I'm going to say. Okay. I'm going to say that. Dude, thank you so much, man. Yeah, I read this. You sent me, and I still have it inside. I have you sent me like, it was in this green folder that was really cool, and it reminded me of like, something that meant something like 25 years ago or 20 years ago, you get a script and it would be in something. It would be in something. It'd be like in this like green folder. It was professional.

Binder, yeah.

Yes, it was a binder. And You gave it to me like that, and you let me read this whole book, dude.

Well, you read a really early version.

Yeah, and it took me two months to read it because I was like, I don't know what was going on. I was probably, who knows? Taking breaks to touch my body, probably. But it was awesome. Every time I came back to it, dude, it was just fascinating. Thanks, man. It's a book about a boy who's neglected, and then he has to take on the world himself. Is that right?

I would say, yeah. It's about a boy who grows up on... That's what it looks like, on a farm, just a shit farm. Yeah.

He lives in a cage, or in a...

Well, he just lives outdoors. His parents don't let him sleep in the house. Got it. He sleeps in the shed, and he just sits on the porch steps where the animals are. It's one of these farms. His father's got one pig. He's just trying to get a little extra. Yeah. His parents are very overwhelmed, and And his father one day tells us... The bank comes to over take the house. They give him a few days. So the father tells the mother to slaughter all the meat, and he goes on the horse and says, I'm going to sell this horse, and I'll come back. And he just never comes back. So the kid's left with his mother who's just so weak, and she just tells him, You got to go. And he's like 10. And she tells him, I can't. Your luck's worse here than it would be out there. Wow. And she's just too hollowed out to overcome what's going on with her.

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

Get him out there and let him learn how to start taking care of himself. So all she tells him is, Stay alive any way you can. That's all the advice he's given. And he just hits the road. And I started writing it, and I didn't know... It's the first novel I ever wrote. I wanted to write novels when I was a kid. I was the first thing I really wanted to be. And then I just took so many drugs that I feel like I burnt my brain out, and it's only now really recovering. Is that true?

You're saying that?

I feel that way a little bit. I used to feel that way.

Were you using opioids or whatever?

When I was a kid, I was doing a lot of smoking a shit ton of pot. Oh, yeah. And we took a lot of acid and mescline and stuff like that, too. I don't think that hurts you. Not at all. But it does take out the linear of your thinking a little bit.

But So your life got busy, too, then.

Yeah. And then I became a comedian, which I always thought was like, just it's a free form scattershot verbal art. So I always felt like it was what I could handle. But I wanted to be a writer. And then I wrote television. But writing TV and movies is more like a blueprint. It's technical writing. Here's what needs to happen when we shoot this. But actually writing something that's meant to be read is what I really wanted it to do. And God, so cool. Yeah. I started writing short stories a few years ago, and I got really back into it. And when Ingram came into my head, I just had this ritual of sitting down every day and asking him, What happened to you? It was just a story that just kept coming.

Asking the child, the character?

Yeah, what happened. I felt like I was taking care of him by taking an honest account, trying to just be honest and not trying to achieve anything in writing it or trying to, you know what I mean, or be impressive. I just wanted to hear the voice and see what happened. And I worried about him every day because it's a hard life that he lives. But I learned from him because he kept just being curious and reporting when it stinks, but not complaining.

Yeah. I mean, there's times he takes on some abuse a couple of times, and I was like, God, it's like you... Yeah. I mean, there's parts, especially Especially towards the later parts of the book, so harrowing. Some of you are like, God, why doesn't he know better?

Yeah, he's just simple. I mean, he's not simple, mentally challenged. He just hasn't He doesn't know.

Dennis Rodman or whatever. Or who else I'm going to say? That's not fair. Or no, somebody else.

Dennis Rodman is anything but simple. You're right.

That's a great-Complex dude. Yeah, he's a fucking Rubik's Cube of a man.

All the stickers are different. There's not even in one color is the same. Yeah, dude. Yeah. Yeah.

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

Yeah, I know. Forget it.

Yeah, that was a bad choice. But yeah, dude, there was times you're like, oh. You feel for him that much. And you did such a great job of making me feel for him.

Oh, thanks.

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

Well, I guess, I don't know, for boys, it's this thing of getting thrown out into the world a little bit. I was alone a lot as a kid and out in the street just trying to figure out what life is. And you just become... A boy is a microcosm of a human ape turning into a human being. You know what I mean? Like, adapting. That's a good point.

Evolution is right there.

Yeah, evolution from the first day of life, especially if you're left alone. If you spend a lot time alone as a boy, you just catch as catch can, and then you go, Oh, I guess that's what this is like. Right. Some things you get strong at and some you don't.

Some things you learn from the worst influences, too. It just happens to be the influence that that's passing through town. That's right. Or that stopped and rolled its window down. It's crazy the way you can get influence. That's what happens to him in some ways, huh? Yeah.

There's this one part where he's been working on a farm, just pulling up corn, and he makes money in dimes. I know. Just because it's the first currency that he learned to respect was a 10 cent dime. So he makes them pay him in dimes, and he hides them under a tree. And when he decides to leave the farm, he digs them up, and he falls asleep in his cabin. And he wakes up and there's this guy there about to steal his money. And Ingram, at this point, has a little knife, and he's thinking he's going to have to defend himself. He's going to have to stick this guy. But he's trying to figure out because he's never been taught, is it okay to actually harm somebody for money? To defend yourself is one thing, but to defend this thing. Yeah. And then it occurs to him that the guy might be a little scared, even though he's bigger than him, even if it's a kid. It's not easy to beat the shit out of a kid. It's no small thing.

Yeah, they're resilient. Kids survive all kinds of stuff.

You're going to go through something. So Ingram says to the guy, Why don't we split it? And the guy goes, I don't have to split it with you. I can just take it. He goes, Yeah, you can, but it's going to be trouble. I'm going to give you a hard time. I'll split it with you now. And it's my money, but I'll give you half of it if we could just split it. And then they look at it and neither of them know how to count. So they got that problem. But I didn't know where it was going. I got to this moment in it where they're in this standoff, and I was like, What's his solution? But by following his logic and in the way he looked at life without having been taught, he found solutions that just came to me naturally that I wouldn't have found in life. You know what I mean? You just get taught things It's like, you got to defend. Anybody fucks with you, you have to hurt them. You do.

Let's split the difference.

Yeah, split them. I'll take half. I'll take half. I'll take half, and nobody has to throw a punch.

I stay alive. And also, I don't have to feel the pain of if I stabbed you, not if I shouldn't have. That's right. Which can be just as harrowing.

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

Yeah. Oh, dude, there's a lot of great parts. Man, honestly, bro, it's awesome. It was so much fun to read. It reminded me of I mean, this sounds crazy, but it reminded me of a real book.

Yeah, well, I feel the same way. To me, it still doesn't add up to me or makes sense that I wrote a book. I grew up in a world of books. You look at a book, you're like, Well, nobody, that's somebody else. Somebody else can do that, not me. And I've tried. I've written short stories and things that have sputtered out. When I got to The End, like when the publishers, I got a publisher, this place, Ben Bella.

Simon & Schuster, is that you're with?

Yeah, Simon & Schuster is distributing it. But the publisher is a company called Ben Bella out of Texas. Really nice people. And when I started working with them and they were going through the book and the editorial part, they said it was curious that I say The End because it's like a grim's fairytale. Nobody does that anymore. But I asked to keep it because to me, it was crazy that I got there. I couldn't believe I got to The End. And I was just like, the day I finished this, I was like, I wrote a fucking novel. If I wasn't me with a little bit of sense that I could probably sell something, I don't know that it gets out. I have no idea. And everybody that's right, I haven't had anybody read it that hates me, so I don't know if it's good. But I don't know. Folks can buy it.

It was great. I know it comes for... You can pre-order it now. September 20th, 20th?

Not November. It's coming out mid-November. But you can pre-order. It's good if people pre-order it because then they'll print more.

Put the ranks up, yeah. Get it up there. Look, I'm not are you joking, guys. I like to read. Especially for a young man, if you've had neglect in your life or you wonder how a child would start to absorb the world with not even being taught how to be much of a sponge in a way, I mean, it's just fascinating. I was just right there in it. I was right there in it with him. It takes place in Texas, right? Oklahoma, Texas or something?

Yeah, Texas.

Yeah, he's just walking along the highway and these things are of cars or things he's never even seen. He's never seen any of it.

It's all fucking great. Yeah, he calls the pavement hard black dirt because he doesn't really know what... Because he grew up barefoot in the dirt.

It amazed me. I was like, oh, shit. Somebody can do this, I think. I think that was probably Because you and I know each other, and I knew that I know your comp, and I know that. And then I've gotten to know you some as a person. But then to see that somebody can make this, and it's a real fucking book. I have a lot of friends that have made some okay books. You know what I'm saying? I'll buy them. I'm not reading them. But this, I was like, man.

Well, I love doing it. I wrote another one. I just finished the second one. And if I can make that what I do, I'm going to make that what I do. I see in the... When you get a vision of what you want your future to be, you might get 40% of it, and that's okay with me. But what I like is the idea of having a nice cruising altitude stand-up comedy performing and writing novels because I really love doing it. And now that I wrote one, and the second one was a lot... It took me much longer. I spent a year and two months on the second one because this one, I wanted to finish so that I wouldn't not finish it. But now that I know I can finish one, I feel like I got a flow. It's really fun to do. Yeah.

And do you think it's the most... Because all I wanted to be, I think when I was a kid, was a writer, probably. I love to read John Irving. I love once I got into his stuff. It was so exciting, all the different possibilities and the ways that... Who was that Irish lady?

Flannery O'Connor. Yeah. Fuck. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. God, I thought... What an imagination.

Yeah, I was like, I could be a murderer.

She has this story about a cranky woman who lives alone on a farm. She runs a farm, and she's just tough. The guy next door who's Black, I mean, the N-word, talk about the N-word, Flannery O'Connor, it's like fucking polka dots on wallpaper. It's everywhere.

It's just everywhere. If you like some soft use of it.

Yeah. But so in this story, the guy next door has a bull that keeps getting loose and coming over to her property, and she hates it. And it's just this, you're in this woman's crankiness. And it's really something to be like, instead of this thing where we watch Karen's on YouTube and say that's somebody else, she takes you inside the mind of a very bitter and cranky person who just doesn't like the world she's in. And in the end of the story, it's a short story, the bull gores her to death. The bull gets his fucking horns in her stomach and rips her to pieces. Oh, yeah. Flannery O'Connor- Which on some black neighbor, males will get it if you leave your wife around. Yeah. She dies, and the book stays in her head while she's dying. So you see the lights get brighter and you see some... I don't remember. I read this for a long time ago.

It stuck with- Greenleaf, it says.

I don't know if That's the one. But does she die with a bull at the end?

One day, Ms. May is upset to find a stray bull on her property. She's worried that the bull will breed with her milk cows.

That's it, right.

She blames Mr. Greenleaf. Yeah. Who appears reluctant to confront the bull.

Yeah, there it is. But before she dies, Ms. May has a moment of spiritual clarity. The story notes that she has the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored, but who finds the light unbearable. I mean, what the fuck? This is the thing. Flannery O'Connor was just a regular person in America, and it One of the reasons that I wrote Ingram is because I live in a world, New York City, modern culture. But this America has always had this voice, people like Flannery O'Connor, Mark Twain, or Harper Lee, who were born in little places, quiet little places. People like you, you have this a voice, where it's not through through Harvard education and reading. It's just that the American voice is very eloquent, simple and eloquent. With that sentence I just wrote of hers, that's not a collegiate sentence. No. That's like someone who lived in an old house and walked really far to the grocery store and had thoughts like that. That's what you grew up in, some parish. People from where I'm from, the word parish just sounds so exotic. It's just a different... You grew up in America, and it made you an eloquent person, like Abraham Lincoln.

A lot of years of Abraham Lincoln's life, he lived in a lean to with an open that he would lay with his family, and there was no wall, and he'd see a jaguar come up and the family just laid there. Really? Yeah. And then he ended up saying some of the most beautiful things ever said just by opening his mouth.

Right.

I just think that America has that language in it. And I started to hear this kid, and I thought, I wonder if I could make a connection with somebody who sounds like that. And that's a humble... I don't know that I did it, but that's what I was trying to touch.

When you're listening to Ingram, help him guide you to write the book.

Yeah. Something like that.

No. And look, man, you just have such a... I mean, you're so good at... You're like the guy who's like, Say your feelings and everything was like a cave or whatever, and everybody's at the top and they're like, We can't go in there. There's one brave Mexican guy He was selling fucking snow cones or something, but not a lot.

At the mouth of the cave?

At the mouth, yeah, but it's close. It's no abierto.

No abierto. Yeah.

He says that.

Yeah, no abierto. But you want a snow cone?

That's it, right? He's over, look.

But then you walk up and you have your fucking spelunking gear and shit. You're like, Who the fuck is this psychopath?

But you're like, I'll be back. And people are like, What? You can't go in there. Look at all the signs. There's like a million signs. You're like, No, I've been in here. I spent a lot of time in here. I left something down there. I left a favorite pack of bubble gum down there.

That's right.

Yeah, it feels like that. You were just so good at going in there and just being in there, man. But also getting in there and getting in there and seeing what the stalagmites are that are hangups in our time or in our feelings, in our existence, in what it means to evolve personally. Man, you're just such an archeologist Just of, I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's emotions or feelings or just of existing.

Well, that's what I love to try to do. What you're describing is what I try to do. I've never heard it that way, but that's what it does feel like is bringing people to these places and going, it's okay. You can look at this without letting it hurt you, or you can let it hurt, and you're going to be okay on the other side. It's okay. And having that. And because I've been doing stand-up for 40 years now, I'm very beyond taking it personally. So if I say something to a crowd and I feel them resist, I don't go like, Oh, they don't like me now. That's one of the problems of being a stand-up is you're so exposed personally. So if they don't like something, you feel like you take it on. But I'm okay with any outcome. They're all okay. So if I say something and people just go, What? I go, Cool. Now we're here. Now we're here that you're weirded out. There's a bunch of places we can go from here because I see it all as okay. I think I see every feeling is worth having, especially if you don't...

I came up with this new idea in my life recently, which is that your feelings are like fire, and you warm yourself by them. You sit by the fire of the feeling. You don't get in it and let it burn you, but you also don't go away because it's hot. You don't go away from it, and then you're cold out there, and there's no light. Just sit and just let it, you know what I mean? So I'm trying to get better at that. I think a lot of early in life, I was more brutal about like, Yeah, look at this shit. This is fucked up. Look at this shit. And that's just messy. But I'm trying to get a little more refined at taking people to hard things to talk about and going like, Let's just sit next to this for a second. And how does it feel to be next to this? What are we doing here? Get used to it. Yeah, because every experience in life, certainly feelings, I think feeling is living. I used to think thinking was more or learning, but I think feeling when people really feel, they're right on.

You know what I mean? Feelings are never wrong.

Yeah, they're pretty pure, huh? They are. Even if you may not agree with somebody's feeling or something, it's interesting to see why they have it if you believe that it's pure from them. Well, it also goes back to that lady's quote, to Flannery O'Connor's quote. I mean, that's more about feeling in there.

Yeah, I finally saw the world, and it was unbearable. It is, especially when you first really see it. But if you're willing to... Like Chris Rock, he's He's a good friend, and he's sometimes a mentor. He says great things.

Oh, he's the best comedian. He's always been my favorite.

Every time I've gone to him in a tough moment, he's never let me out of it. I called him once I was doing a pilot for this show, Lucky Louis, that's a sitcom. And after that, we did two shows. We did two performances of the pilot. And after the first one, it was like, I'm terrible. And I called him up and I said, I'm really scared. I think I might just be a bad actor. And he said, Yeah, wow. Yeah, that's scary. Shit. He wasn't like, You're great, man. He was like, Yeah, well, you better study your lines because maybe you are. And I was like, Oh, okay. And at the same time, I shot a special once. I did two shows. And after the first show, I called him and said, I just killed. And he said, You did nothing. Go do it again. You did nothing. He's a guy that makes you really look at it.

Wow, that's cool. That's cool to be that friend. It's cool to be that challenger, too. To challenge people.

Well, just to be real. I think...

It's so true, huh?

In Rocky, one of the great things What I love about Rocky is that it's a sports movie where the guy loses. I don't think most people even realize that Rocky loses the fight at the end. But the big moment in Rocky is when he's talking to Adrian the night before the fight. He goes to the ring and he sees the spectacle. And he's been training, and they play the music, and he went like this. But then the night before the fight, he goes back home to Adrian, and he says, I can't beat him. It's just a fact I can't beat him. He's just in another class. I'm not even close to him. I will not win. And instead of saying, You can do it, Rock, she goes, What are we going to do? She just lets that be real, and she goes, What are you going to do? And then he decides, I'm going to pick my own victory. I can't beat him, but I bet I could stand there while he beats me. I bet I can get through the fight to the end. What a great goal. And that's what he does. And at the end of the fight, Apollo Creed wins, and Rocky doesn't give a shit because he got what he wanted.

Yeah, I think if somebody's honest with you, if there's a real piece of honesty there, then you can navigate from that place. That's right. Which is pretty real as opposed to things that are so placated. And then you're in this fictional space. Like, yeah, I'm not going to win. But now you're like, okay, how can I win? How How do I find a way to do this, to navigate this?

Yeah, or what do I do about that? I'm not going to. What else is there? It's not the end of the world because both things like saying you can do this. This fantasy, it's nowhere. It doesn't take you anywhere. But in the same with doom, I can't do anything. I got nothing. Now, where are you? This is reality. And usually it's your feelings that will navigate you to where is like Rocky did. I can't win. There it is. But what do I... And then he goes inside his heart and goes, I don't have to win. I just don't want to quit. I just want to do that one thing of staying there. Because I've had a hard life, because I've never gotten anything I wanted, that I know I can do. That means I can get the shit beat out of me on national TV, but I could do it for 12 rounds. Most people can only do it for eight. Yeah. That's fucking good.

And it goes back to finding that thing, finding the word, finding what is the thing that you really need, right? Yeah, the word. Maybe he would have liked to have one for sure. But what does he really want? What's the real victory for him?

That's right. Yeah. What is victory? What is it to be victorious? What is it to be-Right.

Somebody might be working their butt off to make money, but it's like, do you really want money? That may be it, but is that just a blah? Sometimes we get caught in with this general goal of society, or we all get herded into what the goal is supposed to be without looking at what exactly it is that we want.

Yeah, which makes sense because people coalesce so that they can survive. So human beings are shitty animals. They're like really a human being out in the wilderness. It's done. It's not worth much, but you group together and you're good. So it's all the things that are hard about life are because of what we're good at. People fight and attack each other, but they're trying to, in a way, get closer together. You know what I mean? In other words, when people say you shouldn't be doing that because that's not what everybody else is doing, their heart's in the right place because we all want to The weird thing is that now a lot, you get rejected for coming together. It's the opposite. It's a weird time right now. It's like a car battery can have a polarity reversal where it gets confused, and suddenly, north is south, south is north. We've done something weird where the accepted thing is to be separate. The accepted thing is to be enemies of each other. You know what I mean? If you move towards the middle of any issue, people start getting nervous because they want you to... The safe place is these extremes.

Oh, yeah. I noticed that. But that's not what we're good at. That's not what got us through the Ice Age. And that's not what it got us out of the food chain. What got us out of the food chain was just put aside your shit and try to see other people as important to you so that you work together. But now it's scary to say, I don't know, I'm like this guy, even though he's not like me. You know what I mean? You can get ostracized for being for love. It's a weird It's a weird time. I have to believe- Yeah, for being accepting.

You can get ostracized for being accepting.

Yes, that's right. There is a sign at one of the theaters I did this week. It says, Hatred will not be allowed here. Our policy towards hatred is zero tolerance. But that's a weird- Right.

We hate hatred.

Zero tolerance is something that's hate, isn't it? Zero tolerance and hatred are opposites. So hatred and zero tolerance are equal. They're the same. No hatred of any kind, it said. I'm like, What about I hate my dad a little bit?

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

I don't know. I think Yeah, that's like... But it's not human nature. I have a faith in the way things are going to go, and also I see it. Whenever people complain about everybody always says this, right? You hear that a lot? Just that general term? You can't say this without saying that. Everybody does this. The group that behaves that way is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, because if you really go out on the street, if you look at people in the eyes and you see people every day, most people are just really eager to find each other again and reaching out to people as unlike them as they can find and wanting to find love and common ground. That's how human beings behave. Sometimes there's a confusion that scatters them, but it doesn't last. I don't think it can. I mean, if it does, then everybody will...

That's what will happen.

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

The test we didn't pass.

Yeah, it may come, or it might not.

What if it comes then? Some of us can do it.

Some of us can. Nothing, you can't.

We have to have a meeting, though. If things get really bad, we all have to meet somewhere.

Where would we meet?

I don't know. Maybe Denver or something.

Yeah.

Some place where the air is clean, the water is clean still. You have a surviving chance. Altitude cures some diseases. Some stuff, you don't even get it altitude. Really? Yeah. Or the Amish. The Amish have one-tenth of the attention deficit disorder.

Really?

That regular.

They have AIDS a lot, though, I heard. Yeah, Amish AIDS is like... It's...

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Com/theo. I think, ideally, that all of us would like to turn our passions into a paycheck. I've always admired anyone who took what they cared about and built something from it. I enjoyed podcasting, but as that evolved, other things came along with it, including a merch shop where you can go get you a little item, get you a little baby tea or something. But that was a whole new undertaking. Shopify is the reason I was able to make that happen. Shopify is the best place to start and grow a business and dip your toe in the entrepreneurship waters. Whether it's a side hustle or a full storefront, if you're selling locally or worldwide, Shopify takes the guesswork out. Now with the AI tools, Shopify Magic and Sidekick, it feels like you have a business partner who always has your back, helping with reports, content ideas, editing images, and more. So if you're ready to build your own empire, whether it's merch, a new product or the next best idea. Get on Shopify. Com/thio and make it happen. That's Shopify. Com/theo. This episode is sponsored by Betterhelp. Sometimes Sometimes you go to different people for assistance.

You might go to your barista and ask them something. Ask them about your 401k or ask them about a divorce or something. Or you might be at a bus stop and just be badgering somebody with questions, and they can't help you. It's because they're not a therapist. Betterhelp offers therapy. That's it. Betterhelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US Yes. Betterhelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, Betterhelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Find the one with Betterhelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp. Com/theo. That's betterhelp. Com/thheo. In the Amish, I don't know how... I don't know if it was maybe 20 years ago, somebody started recording just on people's genealogy, right? Like a book? Yeah. And that's their dictionary that they'll keep it to their Google, where they'll go and look and be like, Oh, who is that? I've heard of them, and how do I know them? They have this. It's a recurring book that a lot of different families and districts, that's what they live in, called.

A lot of times it's associated with their church. They'll have one. It's their Google. It's like, Oh, go and see who they are. You can see how much land they have or animals. You can see all kinds of things about a certain family, what the children's names are and stuff. They have their own book. That's a form of Google right there.

Descendants of Abe Troyer and Lucinda Somers. That's the book?

It's basically something like that because they started off from just a couple of folks.

It's all records of stuff is fascinating. The people used to have to just write everything down, forget. I was at the New York Public Library library once, and at the New York Public Library, the big one with lions in front, they have every book there, ever. And some of them, you can look at anything you want. Some of them you got to put gloves on because they're very old. And I was looking for something about Gloucester Mass, and it says, I don't want to describe what I was looking for because it's just boring. But I found this book that was the shipping logs for Gloucester back in the 1700s, and I read it and it's like an old writing. It just said, In this winter, 16 ships were lost. There were 34 new widows and 54 orphans and stuff like that. Just record keeping, but that would make you cry. You know what I mean?

Yeah, dude. Things were so severe back then. We're fucking f. I'm not, but a lot of us are. But when it comes to our feelings, we don't... I don't know. We're softer now. Yeah, it used to be like...

Or we're harder. I think people aren't feeling as much. They're avoiding their feelings. I think people are scared of their feelings, but your feelings are native. There's no feeling that's going to kill you. It's just not. Avoiding a feeling will kill you. But we do a lot in addiction and stuff like that to stay away from feeling something.

Oh, yeah. I mean, even you were talking earlier about a feeling is a warm place. Sometimes you want to get right by it. I was thinking the other day, and I've thought about this before, but I was rekindling the thought that, yeah, sometimes I don't want to change certain behaviors just because I don't want to... Part of you wants to have an excuse because It gives you an excuse not to... So that other things don't happen. There'll be times where I didn't want to quit smoking because I was like, If I quit smoking, then I'll have to find something else positive to do. I won't have the excuse that, Oh, I can't do that because I'm smoking, or I don't want to feel that because I'm smoking. Because I would go to smoking a lot of times if I had an intense feeling or if I felt rejected, or it became this a bit of a shower curtain to shield me from real moments.

Yeah. Well, when your life becomes a series of shit you do, I smoke, I eat barbecue, I drink at night, I watch this. Then you can avoid a day of just being on Earth under the fucking swirling sky is fucking intense. If you're really paying attention, if you really wake up to the present moment, it's fucking terrifying. It's constantly moving. Nothing's promised. Everything that you've accomplished is gone, and you're just in this... And so if you could just set out a bunch of stupid tasks and habits and whatever, all ladies night, whatever it is. Bowling. Bowling and going to see that. And now they've turned, there's this screen on your phone where you don't need to even choose what that is. You just let this feed just keep you glazed over. Just serving cunt. Serving cunt all night long. That's crazy. And nobody's even sleeping anymore. You just go to this thing and you're not feeling nothing. These are fake feelings. These are fake feelings in a safe environment. Can't believe she did that. I can't believe he said... What a piece of shit. Why are they getting on his case? All these just dumb things and just keeping it going.

It used to be that they used to call a thing click bait, where they make something so juicy that people would click on it. But nobody's clicking much anymore. It's just going by. It's just that feed. So they're just going like this, and that's living now. The thing I don't understand is who's benefiting, because if everybody's doing this, I don't know, eight different people are getting incredibly rich. Oh, yeah.

And the rest of us are really going to turn in.

And the phone is burning a circuit somewhere. When your phone is doing that scroll, there's a physical thing. There's like a little light that's burning somewhere, like in North Carolina. Really? It's a data farm. Yeah, this isn't like... It's not in the phone, it's not really doing the work. There's something else that's making that. There's a processor that's doing that and put it on the cloud and bringing it to your phone. But there's smoke going in the air, hot smoke, every time you just go like this. And everybody's doing this all the time.

In the middle of the night, I'll wake up, literally. It's almost like I have to do it for a minute so I can go back to sleep. I'm not even joking. I'll wake up, I'll see four things. I'll be like, okay. Yeah, Racism, murder.

Yeah, just as a blanket, murder, like a little. It'll get you back to sleep.

Yeah, someone's dead. Okay, good. Oh, good. A little bit of racism.

Yeah.

Finally, I was going to get a sip of water, but that'll do it.

No, It's very bad for you, and it's such a lucrative addiction. And people are convinced that that's where they're going to go to convince people of what's right and wrong. And that's where you sell stuff. So everyone just gave into it. And it's like if we were all doing heroin, but somebody somehow stopped calling it heroin. And the machines that make that run those processes are going to get hotter and hotter and AI and all that stuff.

Oh, the data centers are getting crazy, man.

Yeah, it's going to be nuts. I was reading an article about in Virginia, they want to use farmland a lot for the solar panel because the companies that do data don't like... They have a style, so they don't want to burn coal. They don't want to burn oil.

Because it does. Yeah, that seems bad. It seems not cool.

Yeah. So nuclear, no problem. All of a sudden, that's no longer a problem. And solar, right? But solar is heavy. So it takes a lot of those things which are made in China, and they pollute a lot just to make them. The panels? The panels. But anyway, in Virginia, there is this county where they're trying to get these panels because they're putting them on the farmland. In other words, there used to be farmfields where the sun, the natural sun, would touch the soil and make green to eat and to make oxygen. It's like the most perfect thing. And they're putting these fucking black panels over the flowers to catch the sun and use it instead for So you and I can do a scroll.

And a lot of the data centers, they're using up a lot of the water. They're using up a lot of power in places. They're monopoly, and they're building them everywhere.

Everywhere.

And it's happening fast. And we started to look at... We were talking with that Sam Altman guy. He's a ChatGPT. He's started that. And I was saying, well, do you feel like the Earth could look like... Bring up that picture that we had... It was like the whole Earth is covered in panels, and it's what we see when we watch Star Trek.

Yes, or Doctor Who. I don't know if you ever watch that show, but if you look at water towers, it used to be you going to an old town in the middle of Kansas or something, and folks are still wearing cowboy hats. They're still driving old GMC trucks with fated side panels. Going into a place like that is very beautiful. When you look at the water towers now, these fated, beautiful big tanks in the sky, they're crusted over with these cell phone things. You could probably find an image like that.

Oh, they attached them all to them now?

Yeah, they're all over. And it's like they're completely covered in them now. And it's very ugly. And it feels like a mold. If you look at it, it feels like there's just this weird... And so when you look at the combination of that with people on the streets staring into a rectangle of black of nothing. You know what I mean? A black rectangle. And everyone's just going like this, and there's these crusty things. It makes it feel like a creature in a way. But it's not. I don't think I don't have some idea that it's from the outside. It's like something inside of us wanted so badly to not feel or something. It started little like this feels good. With looking at our screens and stuff? Yeah, or television first. I mean, it started with theater maybe.

Oh, dioramas, I remember.

Remember that? Sure. Yeah, or stereo photos. People used to hold up a thing you could see.

Fucking peep in time and it was good.

Yeah, and like a girl with little titties and have heavy hips and you put a nickel in. That's where it started. Yeah, porn is the whole thing. But that thing became, let's all go to a movie theater and everybody would go sit in a theater together or vaudville and then TV, then we went home by ourselves to do it. And it got, you know what I mean? More and more.

We definitely got really used to it.

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

Oh, yeah. I mean, you're sitting there and you start to notice when you're looking at your screen and then when you'll come out of it. And you're saying it's like a mole, like a crab, like a shell, and they start to get other barnacles and things on? Yeah, it's barnacles. It starts to... Oh, for sure.

It's barnacles of avoidance, of love avoidance. You know what I mean? Maybe it's because we... Did you see the eclipse that happened back in a couple of years ago or April? I did, man.

When was that? I heard one of the most racist things while I was watching it, too. I hate to even bring that up.

What did you hear?

I was standing next to a guy, and I'm assuming the guy was racist just because of what he said. He was talking to one of his buddies, and the eclipse was happening, and he goes, Oh, look at that. Even the sun wants to be you. And he said the N word.

Oh, my God. I was like, oh. On its face, you could take that as being loving Black people. Yeah. Even the sun. If you say it like this, Brother, But even the son wants to be a black man. Yeah. You could take it like that. You could convert what the guy said and make it that now.

That's a great point, actually. You know what?

There was a beautiful- That is actually most racism, I think, is envious. Oh, for sure. Everybody wants to be one of those guys, man. Even the sun. Some racism gets beautiful because that's beautiful. That's poetic. Even the sun wants to be a black man. What's hurting them is not that black people are bad. It's that everybody wants to be one, damn it.

That's the- Even the sun.

Somebody gets so racist that they become... I remember when Obama was running for President and there was Sarah Palin's rallies, some people would yell out racist shit. Every time she mentioned his name, they'd go, All right, here we go. So she said his name and this woman with a real town, a real old movies with pitchforks and torches. Some lady yelled out about Obama, You need gloves to touch them. I was like, Wooo. But I I thought there's a few ways to look at that.

Oh, it's priceless.

Yes. Also, some part of her is going, I want to touch him. Why can't I touch him? But I need gloves because he's precious. Or you need gloves to touch him. There's a lot in that. What do you want to touch him for? Man, you need gloves to touch him. You need gloves to touch him. Well, you could also just leave him alone. But something in you really wants to touch him, but you're scared to. It's a complex thing.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. The truth of that, dude. I remember the first time a black man touched my hand one time, and it was different.

Sure. How old were you?

I was probably 10 or something, 9.

Why did he touch your hand?

Well, I went over to my buddy's house, and they were swimming just in this little round little... I don't know if it was a pool or just... It had tetanus in it or whatever. It was like a... Something for animals. They put water in it. So we're just playing in there and swimming in there, whatever. And this guy, this black man, had come, and he was tickling us and stuff sometimes. I think he was being okay. I don't know if he was, but anyway, I don't know. But then he lifted me up out of that thing, too. And I just remember, also, he touched my hand, and I just was like, Oh, that's interesting. This was interesting. Dude, I remember I I walked into a black doctor. This is in Nashville. This is two years ago. I'd never walked into a room in my life with a Black doctor. I was like, whoa. And I wasn't like...

I It's new. It's something that's new.

Yeah. I was like, you guys, everybody looks at the same books or charts. I just didn't know. It's almost like when you're at Foot Locker and there's a white woman working in there. You know what I'm saying?

You're like, This is interesting.

Yeah, I'm here for it.

Last time I was in a Foot Locker, I bought these in a Foot Locker, oatmeal-colored New Balance. I got them in a Foot Locker in Salt Lake City. Oh, Yeah. And a young guy... I mean, I am really an old man when I'm in a retail situation. I'm just older. And this young guy helped me, and he took me through a few different ideas, and he let me try some different things. He took the stuffing out of the sneakers for me. I like that. Set me up. Yeah. And then I tried them on. He was patient while I walked around feeling like, What's this like? It was like my mom shoe shopping with me. Oh, yeah. And he was maybe 19, and I could tell he was fidgeting. This guy's making me do a lot. But I bought the sneakers, and I did something that I think my dad used to do and that I used to do when I was I don't know when, but I shook his hand at the end. Just changed the money, and I said, thanks very much. And I shook his hand, and he was like, what the fuck is this?

He didn't know what that was. But that used to be. It's like, it's the proprietor. It's like you're going to the haberdashery and you think-Good work. Yeah. Thanks for your help today. Appreciate that. He was just like, what's being done with my arm?

It is crazy, though, that there will be a time soon, Louis, where people are like, so we used to take a hand that you didn't know and move it up and down. Yeah, you used to pump it. For two seconds?

Yeah. Some people dap.

Dap is okay. The handshake was for real. But then now people are nervous, too. I think when they're around other people, people have wet hands, and that is scaring a lot of people.

Well, when you shake hands, you really connect because every finger has a different intention in the thumb, and you grip someone with the perfect balance of, I don't want to hurt you, but I don't want to make you feel like you're here with me. You know what I mean? Yeah. Then we're going to... I don't know what the shake is about, though.

Yeah, bring that up. Why did the hands shake after they touched? I could see them touching.

Whenever they try to make movies about middle ages or the places of Lord of the Rings or the future, they always reinvent. They do the clasp of the... You do this thing. But a handshake is A globally widespread brief greeting or parting tradition in which two people grasp one... One, you do it.

Two people grasp one of each other's hands, and it is often accompanied by a brief up and down movement of the grasped hands. Customs surrounding handshakes are specific to cultures. The handshake may have originated in prehistory as a demonstration of peaceful intent since it shows that the hand holds no weapon. I like that. Another possibility is it originated as a symbolic gesture of mutual no commitment to an oath or promise. One of the earliest known depictions of a handshake is an ancient Assyrian relief of the ninth century BC depicting the Assyrian king Shalman Nasser III, clasping the hand of the Babylonian king Marduk Zaker Shemee.

There's a picture of that down there, right? Yeah, two guys, two kings that were probably just fighting.

And they said, Hey, let's settle it.

I can't hurt you for this one second. Right. No swords. Yeah, because I'm using my fighting hand. It's going to be a punch with the left. It's going to be weird.

That's a good point because they both have a staff in one hand that shows that they've been walking. The other hand would grab the sword. Yeah, that's your sword hand. Yeah, brother.

That's cool. You can get close to me. It's all right. You've got my hand. I've got yours. Right.

Or even Steven, brother.

But that gives me back to that fucking eclipse, that racist eclipse. Because I saw I love the Eclipse in Vermont.

Up in Stowe, Vermont, or where were you?

In the center of Lake Champlain. At the time, I was dating a woman who was very wonderful. We were together for about a year. We're not together now.

She sounded hot.

She was great. We wanted to see the Eclipse totality. There's certain places where there's a line across America, this diagonal line, and only if you stood in that line, could you actually see the sun totally.

Oh, okay. It's a real hot bed for Eclipse?

Yes, it's where you see the moon totally cover the sun and you go into total darkness. It's called totality. Any other place, it's a little off and it's still basically daylight. Got it. We decided to go, and I looked on that line, and The place that was best for where we were in New York was an island in the middle of Lake Champlain. She's like, I have a cousin who lives on that island. It's like North Hero Island, I think it's called. We went there, and it was like a thing to get. We got there an hour before the eclipse started, and we're seeing people scurrying to where they're going to watch the eclipse. It was like the world was coming to an end. Folks were getting coolers with stuff, and folks were everyone. The closer we got, the more quiet the streets got. Now people were just sitting in lawn chairs all over Vermont, just like this, getting ready, and they all had these glasses on. We're the only car. It was like an end of the world movie. Hell, yeah. We get there, and her cousins are all carrying big baggies of cigarettes because they buy their cigarettes at an Indian reservation where they don't sell them in boxes.

They get a deal on them?

Yeah, they get a big... Oh, God. They just walk around with a bag and just take it smoking. These were great people. We were like right in the right place. It's just a dead-end road on an island in a Vermont. We went out into the middle, me and this woman, we went out into the middle of this field. We could hear. As the thing started and everything started going not black, but brown, there was this brown. The sun disappeared behind the moon, and every bird fucking lost its mind. Every bird was like, What the fuck? You could hear every bird in its own language saying, Bitch, this is fucked up. Shit. Just screaming. Then people going, and then everything was dark and cold, really cold. It was an incredibly moving thing. And I thought, and then I heard people, there was fireworks going off. And the feeling I had was, the immediate thought I had was, this is what the end of the world is going to feel like. The end of the world is going to be beautiful because it's going to bring everybody together because you can finally just forget it all. You can finally just go, it's you and me, brother.

Yeah, make a sandwich.

This is it. I got nothing against you. Like boxers at the end of it. Just seconds ago, I was, and now I'm just I just love you so much that nothing that has ever happened is going to matter at all.

Like Wardingadi, man.

Yes, Wardingadi. At the end, just going like, Man, I loved struggling with you. I got to know you so well in fighting with you. I saw your wounds. I saw how you hurt me. And oh, my God. And it's going to be this ultimate, especially if we end it. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. We're just going to be like, Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. Oh, thank Thank God, finally, I got in close enough, and we're together now, and there's nothing. All that's left is this one second. Because I don't think that time is... My sister asked me once, Are you afraid when you die, it's not going to feel like it was long enough? Are you afraid when you die, you're going to feel like that wasn't enough life?

Yes. Are you? I think so.

I'm not anymore. Because when I get a full moment of living, when I feel open, bore, fucking, aperture, 0. 08, that feels so good. I feel like that's it. I got it. Do you know what I mean?

When you get a real moment of existing.

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

Right. It can be, and those moments can happen in all types of ways.

All types of ways. Sometimes it's just...

Hugging a kid, sometimes it's seeing a parent wipe a kid's cheek or something.

Sometimes it's standing on a subway platform and seeing somebody's phone is next to the track and going like, No. I see life now.

There's so much in that one thing. That's so shitty. Sometimes it's reading that sentence in that Flannery or Conner.

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

Oh, yeah.

Just seeing somebody in their dumb little thing.

Seeing one shoe on the fucking interstate.

Yeah, just one. Fuck.

That's not me.

Then driving by the next day and it's not there anymore. Oh, yeah.

You got it on, and then you're like, Oh, yeah, it's just getting good. Oh, but yeah, some people used to think the Eclipse was just a time when you could use racial slurs, and it didn't get it. That's right.

It didn't. But somebody heard it. Yeah, but still. Now a lot of people heard it.

Oh, yeah. But there is a little moment you're like, Yeah, that's life.

Yeah, so I don't know. I think it's enough. I'd really be ambitious to live more. I love it. I'm getting to really love living a lot. Really? Yeah.

Do you remember when we went to Chris Rock's birthday together? You took me there.

It was an incredible night.

Dude, that was First, we went for Italian food.

That night had no right to be that great. Oh, we were. All we did was go to an Italian restaurant and go to a birthday party.

Can we say that it went to his birthday party or not? It's okay.

It wasn't private. It was a big party. Madonna was there. Yeah, she's little. I think we can say that we were there.

We felt like misfits, remember?

Yeah. Because it was super famous people. And yet the center of attention, Chris is my best friend. But it was like, this is not. I don't belong here.

And I didn't belong there, neither one. So we were just like a pair.

I was like, I was an outcast, and you were a not led in of the same party.

So we just had each other, dude. There was so much fun.

And we were just standing in the corner just going, this is so fucking weird, and looking at all the famous people there. And then Chris went up and he said he took microphone and he said, I feel like my life must have been good because all these people are here, and especially the comedians who came to see me. And he said, Theo, Von, and Louis. Louis brought Theo here. It was like the first thing out of his mouth was that I brought you there and how much that meant to him. And he said it like three or four times.

It was interesting. I couldn't believe he said that.

It ended up meaning more to him than all these other big shots. It was like, really... And I hope that's okay for me to share.

No, I think it is. I think it just showed that he was happy that you were there. And that you were there. Oh, I couldn't believe that he said my name, but it was also just that... Yeah, it was just so funny that we were there, we felt uncomfortable, and that he made it so we didn't feel uncomfortable.

That's right.

That's what I mean. Yeah.

But, Theo, you're like a bridge as a person. That's the way I think about you. Yeah? Yeah, because when I first saw you, it's because you invited me to be on here. Three years ago, something like that?

Yeah, 2002. 2022? Three or four years ago.

Somebody said this guy wants you on a podcast. I hadn't done any interviews for a long time, and then I was just coming out to do interviews for the first time. I was pushing a special, whatever I was doing. I saw a little clip of you, and I was like... I'm as big as it as anybody. Oh, yeah. So I was like, mullet, red state. I don't know. Fucking Southern.

Oh, yeah. Jim Crow.

Mud flap. Fucking, yeah. And without contempt, because I love every American. So I was just like, but you reached out with like, we'd really like to have him on. And I was like, well, let's meet somebody new. Meet somebody new. And then I went and listened to your standup, and I just couldn't believe how funny it was to me and how inventive and how beautiful, just really eloquent and funny. Fucking shit had me laughing so hard. And then we sat down and talked, and I never met anybody like you. I never met anybody that had such open sensitivity and such honesty. And you're ambidextrous. You run all over the... You can be loved by anybody who's willing. And I've gotten to know you. You're beautiful. I love you, man. You're a great guy. And you're an example of when somebody brings people together, folks get a little scared of them. There's nothing. You're just willing. You know what I mean? You listen to anybody. It's the way I feel. But you're a really important guy in the world to me. Thanks, dude. I think.

Yeah. Well, thank you, dude. That's nice of you. Yeah, I couldn't believe that. Yeah, I just appreciate you bringing me over there. It's been fun to become friends and be able to talk to... It's like, yeah, I don't know, you're able just to think without a lot of judgment of yourself. And I think that it gives us so much information. Not a lot of people are like, I don't even know if it's bravery if you're just missing a governor inside of yourself. That needs to be there.

Well, we have something in common, you and me, because we're born in very different parts of the world, different lives. But we both are broken the same way. We both have the same problem. Oh, yeah. And when you have that, that's like a language barrier crosser. Do you know what I mean? It really is. You just go like, oh, I get you. I've seen this, man. I've seen it. Believe I own the same mirror. You go, You really? You see it? Oh, yeah, I know. I fucking see it, man. And you've helped me a lot. You've been very me and helped me a lot in ways I needed. And you're younger than me, but you've given me guidance and helped me. But that's the thing that makes people the closest is that is there common, like you were fucked up the same way? Oh, yeah.

You're fucked up, I'm fucked up. Yeah.

Thank God. Thank God you're fucked up.

Oh, yeah.

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

Dude, yeah, I think there was one time you said, oh, because you'd been through a lot of stuff in your career, you'd had like, this is when things had gotten crazy in your career with accusations and all types of stuff and accurate accusations.

Accurate accusations.

And whatever they were. But you said, Man, I feel so free. And there was something about that to me. I think about that once a week because I think about just the little pieces of ourselves that we try to manage and operate, and we don't even know what they are, and we don't even know why they're in pieces. It's like trying to put some glass together so you can get a clear reflection of yourself. And it's just like, fuck, how did this? I didn't even break this. And I'm just so tired of cutting my fucking fingers trying to get a look at myself. You're I'm going to piece together that broken mirror and cutting your fingers.

That's beautiful. It's true. And when life fucks it up for you, when it gets torn up, it's a relief. That's why I felt free. Because I had tried to manage these problems I had inside of me for so many years, and I tried to feel like I was a normal person or that I was what I thought of as a good person, but I was doing shit in the background of my life that I was ashamed claimed of. I was hurting other people and trying to tell myself I wasn't. And those things on the edge, like using another person, but you got their permission first. You're still using another person. You're not being with them. You're using them. That took me a long time to learn about that stuff. But when you're doing that stuff and creating more and more problems, they just keep getting bigger and bigger. And then the worst thing is if you're having a good life that's successful because you're feeling this incredible rift between the way you're representing yourself and who you really are. And it's getting really... And I used to try, I think, some of the early versions of talking on stage, really, honestly, were me trying to get out and say, I'm corrupt.

I want everybody to know it.

But I'm a corrupt file.

Yeah. And a corrupt file, yeah. But all of that is like, you can't manage it. And so when you're in front of the world and that's going on inside of you, it's just like, it's real hell. And so when it And also when you are successful because we live in America and you're taught it's a working community. You got to succeed. So when you're succeeding, you believe it's a perfect good. Everything you're getting is important, right? You're getting stature, you're getting work, you're getting money, importance. People are saying good things about you. These things, you just believe that after a while, you need those things. Anyway, when life comes along and just fucking, by the grace of my own fucking mistakes, my own fuck-ups, they all came back and took everything away from me. And it was the most thing I was most afraid of in the whole world. And it happened, the scariest possible thing, and it happened. Now people know about me. They know. They deeply know, and not perfectly either. You know what I mean? Because it's fantastical Fame World. So they hear their own version, and they're going like, wait, no, it's not quite like that.

It's the worst thing that could happen happens. Yeah. And you lose everything you were working for. And the people you hurt, everybody knows about it now. And also people who love you are hurt by it. I hurt a lot of people who love me by mismanaging that and willfully becoming big enough as a famous person that the downfall hurt a lot of people, people I love. So It was unbearable. Fuck.

You remember you saying on stage one time, and I'll let you finish your thought. Am I messing up by interrupting you?

Go ahead, go.

I remember you saying one time I was trying to find a flight to somewhere, but every flight was landed on Earth. It was all places to other places on Earth, and it was so unmanageable.

Yeah, there was no... I didn't feel safe anywhere in the world. I was full of a lot of self-pity. I was full of a lot of anger, too. And also, I just didn't feel safe in the world. I also didn't feel safe inside my own head anymore.

And it was like, fuck, that's craziest.

That's the hardest thing. You can handle anything except for the inside of your own head when that gets... Because I live in a world where, like I said before, people coalesce, they come together, and that's our strength. So when you get dejected, love for yourself becomes antisocial. Do you know what I mean? Like sitting there going like, I'm a good person. And most people's mistakes, when people get fucked up the way that I had, it's because of a slow self-esteem problem to begin with. So you just can't...

It's just can't... Yeah, it's like...

Yeah, you're just sitting there and you're trying to feel something good about yourself. It's difficult. And so it was just very overwhelming. But the losses that I... I had spent I don't know. I wasn't like an overnight success. I was in my 40s when I got really famous, and I built to it very gradually. I worked really hard. I learned a lot. I got it my own TV show because I'd learned how to make a TV show from the ground up. I was a cameraman at a local access cable station, and then now I was a director and star. And I'd met so many people and had so many affiliations and a tapestry of a life, a career. And I remember thinking of it like all tentacles coming off the back of my head connecting me with the world. And when this thing happened, it was like someone twisted all of them into a braid and put their foot on the back of my head and just pulled out all the wires. And all of a sudden, I had no... Nobody likes me. I can't talk to nobody. Everybody's afraid of me. And I was just spinning It was really wild.

But now I look at that thing as a beautiful thing. I look at that as God's hands or whatever you want to call it. That was just a good, caring thing that said, Dude, you need to stop.

You need to be detached.

You need to stop. You need out of all this. And that, for me, was great. Not for other people in my life. Some people, it was hard for them.

Oh, yeah, I can certainly Can you imagine that? Yeah, I think it's scary. I think having a different... I've had a lot of the same issues in my life with just affection and those sorts of things and trying to never having any coaching on that and just having severe... And then you start to figure it out all yourself and you make this crazy tetris of what it's all supposed to be and how love is. And then it's also like, I'd be a... But my low self-worth, I was always trying to fill it with things that weren't... Just impossibility. Then for me, I got in to watching porn, and that became this crazy space. It was this like-Never-ending thing. I missed my 20s because I was watching-It's the same.

I was a young kid, really obsessed with stuff that put me in a dark room when I should have been out in the sunlight. It twisted around my... It was That was all up behind this thing of just wanting someone lovely and female to look at me and tell me I'm okay and tell me that I'm acceptable and even more so and lovable. And I had such a strange twisted trip to that moment. I never really quite learned it. And that's my shit. But those things when you're a kid, they're pain. And then when you get to be a grown up with a life and you have an effect on other people, it starts becoming a problem other people. But I think that if I hadn't lost all of that, it just would have gotten worse because that's why I felt free when I said that to you, because I could see the real shape of the world. And I could see that nothing I had, that you can't take anything away from me that's really mine. And that I realized I didn't have much that was worth having. I had my family, and that's private.

That's a different thing for me. But I realized I need to start making a real treasure chest that has shit in it.

That's valuable. That's valuable.

I need to stop thinking about why did these people turn their backs on me and ask myself, Yeah, why did they? Were you a good friend to them? Who are you useful to in this world? That's where I started, was when I wanted to try to reach out and feel less isolated, was who can I be of use to? And I started to try to... But what was easy to let go of was like, Fame, money, and connection, and red carpets. That was easy. I don't want that back. Yeah.

Oh, it seems like a fucking nightmare.

It's shit. It's nothing. Work is different, and what we do is public. So it's like the hard thing was like, I wish I was a carpenter. I could just start making chairs again. I love stand-up comedy. I love it. It's my life. I love it so much, and it's given me so much. And the other thing that happened, too, was that when a hard thing that happens to you that feels like an all-encompassing thing, when you live with it every day, you go to sleep going, I can't do this. I went to sleep many nights going, my days are numbered. I just can't handle this. This is more than I can handle. But then I wake up the next day and I go, All right, I'm still here. It's still here. It's like a sirens blaring, and it's not stopping. And at some point, you just got to make coffee and talk a little louder or whatever. It was like, All right, this is life now. I started to have to look at it and go like, well, everybody doesn't hate me. It's just not true. No. There's people that love me and they're reaching out to me, and I should take their hand.

I shouldn't just sit there and be a little victim. And so after what felt like a terribly long time of just feeling hated by everybody, I started to see people coming up in the street and I'm saying, Where are you? We want to see you. And I thought, I want to start working again. To me, work was the thing. I love it. I know I have value there. So I started working again. And then it was really hard because I lost a lot of friends for starting again. That's crazy to me. Well, everyone was... I used to react to all of this with a lot of anger and confusion, but I started to do psychedelic drug therapy and see that everyone was acting in their own needs, and everyone is doing what they need to do. Life is really hard for everybody. It's really hard. These times have been really hard for everybody. The thing that ripped my life in half had been ripping lives all over the world, and everybody was dealing, and some people were so scared that what happened to me would happen to them. And there's a lot of stuff going on, so I had to see that.

Right. But I also saw that a lot of people that now knew about me were like, What do you got? And I thought, I'm willing, and I was getting shit for trying again. But I'm like, That's okay. It's okay. My rule with that whole thing now is I don't take part in it, and I don't interfere with it. There's a thing about me, I became a symbol for something, which is on me because I made a trillion carbon copies of myself and threw them out of a helicopter and said, think whatever you want about me. So when people started to think bad things about me, that's how they use this image. I can't go around the world and fix that. I can't make people that are mad at me, not mad at me anymore. I can't confront this thing on a global level because I'm not a globe. I'm one guy. And trying to live that way was what got me in trouble in the first place. And the damage is done, and I can't fix that. But what I can do is be a good man to my friends on a one-to-one. I can shake one hand at a time.

I can be a good father, and I can take care of myself. I can constantly try to revise what I think is right and wrong, not depend on it, but just keep asking myself because I thought I was a good guy in a lot of moments where I wasn't. And I have to go back and go, That wasn't okay. And to try to make amends when I get an opportunity. And it was really confusing to do all that. And then you can cut it out if you don't want it set on the air, but you told me about this program. You told me about SLA and about a twelve-step approach to what I was suffering from.

I was so amazed that you didn't have some of the familiarity with it.

I never heard of it, and I didn't think it was for me at all. You told me about it, and I was like, Yeah, that's not for me.

You become such a role model to me through that program, man. You've become somebody that when you talk, I listen. When you want to know how I feel, I know you mean it. When you... Yeah, man, you've become just a real role model to me. You've become somebody that I aspire to be able to get through some of the problems that I have. Because I've seen you get through them, man.

Well, look at that, Theo, because you brought me into this shit. It's crazy. If you reach out to somebody that's on the outside and take their hand and pull them in, they can end up teaching you something. It's the same for me because I loved having you as... I wouldn't have gone into it if I didn't know somebody. And then, by the way, you took me behind this curtain. I was like, I know a bunch of these guys. I had no idea. But I remember, to get a specific for a second, there was one point in my life when I got into this program where I was in what we call withdrawal. So I was like, this crazy idea to me, don't have sexual release for several months in a What? I mean, since I first fucking came clear, liquid, I've done it every day. And then what that did to the relationships of my life and my inability to feel real feelings. And then the reckless behavior and the things I did with other people that came out. But there was a point where I was like, okay, so just don't, don't at all.

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

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

Yeah, because I would call you.

This dude's going deep.

Yeah, and you're like, how long has it been? And I'd say, two months since I jerkt off. And you would go, what's it like out there, man? And when you said that, I think about that all the time. What's it like out there, man? It was like, I'm an astronaut who cut from the cord and I'm just out. And that's what it starts to feel like. I got out of the gravitational pull. I got out of the cycle. Because every time you want something and you get it, you just go back to square one. You keep going back to just nothing.

Oh, that's my cycle. It's just been like, for years, I was texting women, right? Let's meet up sometime. And we would never meet up, right? And it got to a certain point in certain years, I didn't even know if we knew who each other were anymore. But we would both. I meet almost every day. Shall we meet up this week? I mean, for years, but just little moments of trying to get approval, right? Yes. And then going back to like... The group isn't like, everybody's not like... Maybe people have some perverse and stuff, but a lot of it's just like, pornography, intimacy disorders, inability to connect.

It's not like-Well, it's huge. When you do the steps, you learn how you got to where you are, and you learn what in your history made you this way. Yeah. And you get some guidelines for trying to undo it. And the thing about going through withdrawal is that by not pressing the reset button, you go to a new place every day. Every day, you don't do it. You're in a new place. You feel new feelings. And I started realizing that my feelings, my actual emotions, were coming online for the first time, really in my life. And I saw everything really differently. And I saw that everything that had happened with me was because of me. And by the way, that's great news because that means you could do something about it. And that everyone else is doing what they have to do. And so I had to start being a man about it. And I can't prove that to the world. I can't do a big gesture I can just do it in my private life. I can talk to you about it. People can see this, whatever. I have mixed feelings about it. It scares the shit out of me to talk about it.

And that had its own thing. I kept thinking, I have to fix this. I have to fix this reputation I have to go back to where people have at least a neutral feeling about me. And I realized, I just can't. I just can't. And also for some people, the people I probably would want to know, it's happened naturally. Right.

And dude, I was shocked whenever we would hang out that you thought, so many people thought that you were like such a pariah or something. I was like, dude, Louis, people care, but they don't care that way.

You know what I'm saying? No, I'm the last one who gives a shit. Right.

And not even in a bad way, but you weren't even seem like that bad of a guy. You know what I'm saying?

Well, I don't know. For some people, I am.

No, that's a good point.

Sorry. But no, it's okay. For some people, there's-Yeah, you're a boogie man. And that's the way that is. And it's like if I did a movie for Marvel and now I'm on a McDonald's cup you can still get, and I can't really change that. I made the movie. I did that. And maybe it's good for those people in some way. I don't know. And I don't like the way it affects people in my life and my family. I know that. That's hard. That's what I still carry, and I can't... But I'm responsible for it. That's the thing. And what it helps me, my past and the way it's still present in the air around me, helps me because my life was completely unmanageable, and I had no power to change it. And now I've changed it hugely. My life is so different now. I have real love in my life, but I need to remember where I was. And I also need to what is important. I'm writing novels because I don't jerk off every 15 minutes. It's really all it is. I don't look at the phone because for a long time, the phone was a gun pointing directly at my face.

So I completely extricated myself from social media and from scrolling. I haven't scrolled in. I mean, it's a guilty pleasure about once every month I'll go and look. But But the chronic-looking, it would have killed me to keep looking at it. I'm so lucky what happened to me because of what I was ejected out of. And also the culture, since this happened with me in 2017, the world has gone completely insane. I've just been watching. I haven't had to comment about it. I haven't had to pick aside. I've just been sitting back going like, Wow, you guys are... I mean, I'm on the bottom of the sea, but I look up and I see... There's still a full on fucking battleship royal up there. And once in a while, I see a body, like a blue body, float down and I'm like, Hey, man, I remember you. And he's like, Hey. And we're all collecting, and there's more people down here now than there was up there. It's quiet down here. There's fish and stuff. Yeah, it's all right.

Yeah, dude, it is like, I don't know, having a support group and being able to go to meetings and share what's going on, listen to somebody else say something that just unlock something in you that you never could have unlocked. Fuck.

It's huge. It's beautiful.

Yeah, it's unbelievable. It's like you could spend the rest of your life trying to figure that out, and then suddenly somebody just helped you get to a new place.

One thing I love about meetings is there's the structure to these meetings, like in any other twelve-step program where you get three minutes to share. And the regimen of that, it's Perfect. It's like the way baseball is perfect. Like someone figured out just the right amount of feet to make the... That the throw to first is always close. Yeah. Twelve-step meetings have this perfect, this three minutes, and there's a spiritual time keeper, a guy who just says when you're one minute away from finishing, it says one minute, and you acknowledge it, Thank you, one minute, right? There's that thing. But in two minutes, you can get really lost in what a guy is saying. And you get to have this moment where a guy is going like, I keep lighter fluid under my pillow because of the days that my father used to come to my room and I'd want to burn him alive. Thank you, one minute. And I'm like, These little interruptions because it reminds you, yeah, you're in your shit, but wrap it up. There's other guys waiting to talk and the world's going around. That was a long time ago, man.

Get over it on some level. I'm glad you're sharing it, but you only got three minutes. Yeah, dude.

It's Monday, brother.

Yeah, it's Monday.

That sounds like a fucking Thursday share.

Yeah, I need to check in some shit about what I did today.

Oh, dude. Yeah. Even things like, I was looking at pornography the other day, just being able to text somebody and say that to them. And then just like, How many times do I want to go back to this feeling of after I look at pornography, I just feel empty. Or I just don't feel like myself the next day. That's been the biggest thing that helped change it for me is noticing that the next day, I don't feel like myself. I feel like I'm a little scattered. I feel like I still need to recover from something. I still need to put my aura back together a little bit.

Yeah, because you ran away into penography. So when you feel, it's like you froze yourself. And the next day, you start to thaw, and that's uncomfortable. It's like feeling your leg coming back after falling asleep. It tingles, and it's a bad feeling. You want to be in one of the other. So it's hard. The hard thing about being in recovery from addiction, something like what we have is that you can look at something like pornography, but you're aware now. So you know. You know there's a cost to it. Yeah, you know there's a cost. But thank God, because you get so much of life back. And being able to tell another guy, I'm doing this, because there's a lot of shame involved with sex and love addiction, all this thing. When you tell somebody, I'm an alcoholic, people have a lot of sympathy for that. Yeah. This one's a little tougher. So you really need the group because these are a bunch of guys who get it. And so when you tell them, I'm struggling not to do this, the genius of that is just that someone else knows it now. That's all. It's too much for you to carry.

At some point for anybody who's an addict or not, life got to be too much to handle. It just was overwhelming. So you found a way to shift away from it. And thank God you did. Thank God I had that when I was a kid. I don't think I could have handled life without this thing that was right there to soothe me.

Yeah, if I didn't have that thing, I mean, I found pornography, and then when I would get home, I would go, I would look at pornography and stuff like that because it was a way to make myself feel good. It was like I felt so horrible. I didn't even know I felt so horrible about myself. I just felt like a fucking cavern. I didn't even want to impose myself on people because I didn't... I don't know. Nobody had time for me, right? And so it made me think that I wasn't worth people's time. I always just felt like I just couldn't say what I needed to say. I just didn't want to waste your time. I didn't want to waste your time. I remember that feeling. Because you would see that I was a waste. If I could justHow old were you? Probably 10, 11.

I mean, imagine a 10-year-old kid. Look at a 10-year-old kid's face and imagine that he feels like a cavern inside. That's a hard thing to carry. And so you take on this thing that helps you just simplify life. I do this. I search, I push, I get to ecstasy. I'm calm.

It's homeostasis. It regulates me.

It's just regulating. If you're exposed to sex early in life, which I was in a way that was, you get, that's it, that's it, that's what you got. And then later in life, when your feelings are supposed to be developing, they're still under this muffled thing. So they're not developing properly, and you're ashamed of what you're doing. But The thing about a fellowship, it's just so simple. It's not God. It's not something that's better than you. It's a bunch of guys who just have the same problem, and you're able to just go, I'm having this problem. They go, Yeah, I get it. They don't give you a solution. They just go, I know it, too, now. And you go, Now I got two souls to carry this problem, and I'm there for him when he needs that. Yeah. That's not a secret. That just makes it a tiny bit easier so that you can go to the alternative, which is, why do I do this thing? It's because I feel like a cavern. And the detaching from the behavior and stopping the thing I couldn't stop doing gave me the opportunity to go, what's in that cave?

What's in that? Is there something in that that's worth This while, how bad is it? What's wrong with the cave? Is it that I'm alone in there? Am I alone in there? It gave me the courage to sit in the cave alone and take a look around and go like, with a little flashlight. Man, there's like crystals on the roof. It's fucking cool in here. How did I get in here? There's a little door. Where does that go? And starting to really be okay with, I'm just here. I'm in here. And then a feeling comes, the things I used to run from, like deep sadness, I miss my mom, something like that. I don't just have it. I just want to have it now. I just want to have it. And I've got a new habit, which is that when I get that, huh? That used to lead to an addictive moment. When I get that, I know that if I pull away from it, it gets worse. It actually only hurts if I pull away. But if I get up to it and I go, what do you got? And I see colors and I see beautiful things.

And that's the potential is to welcome every feeling. And then you don't want out. And I love I live my life so much now that the last thing I want to do is gray it out with a chronic sexual half-release fake thing, watching a sad person on a video in a weirdly lit room and I'm in it, I just don't.

Come on, buddy. I don't even know who I'm cheering for when I was in pornography. That's crazy.

Which team are you on?

You're like, tie. Let's just have a tie. But, oh, dude, yeah, it's like, oh, that's sedative. It's just a full body sedative. But, yeah, I would... Yeah, I didn't have... It marred really my ability to make a lot of connections because I'll even notice still in my life, and I still need to go through my steps again. I need to check in with my sponsor today. But if I'm face to face with a woman and they say something nice about me, I can't stay there for a second.

Really?

I cannot. Even a woman looking at me, I just have to.

What happens? What makes you run away from it?

Inside of me, it feels fucking like it almost feels like a dirty electricity comes inside of me or just shows up at the front of me.

It's a power. It's a weird electronic. It really is like touching a third rail. Yeah. Love and sex are both extremely powerful, and they ain't all good. It's what I learned after months of not jerking off. And then I decided, I talked to my sponsors like, It's time to try.

Oh, yeah, I remember that big weekend. We were all excited. I think I bought one of those Amish fireplaces. I just feel some of the distance out there. But weren't you out of town? Weren't you? Yeah, somebody. You had to be in the-You were up in New York somewhere, weren't you?

You had to be in the totality of my first jerk off. You had to be in that one stripe. That's right, in the island. I was out in Shelter Island, and I said, Okay, you're going to visit this. You're not doing this for pleasure. You're doing this to visit. You're going to go to the country you left. I did it, and it was like an electrical shock. It wasn't this pure pleasure. I realized that's what it's always been like. But I've been putting wet towels and asbestos and shit over my whole in my life so that I could barely feel it. So I had to really, really rub hard and with the most penetrating, fucked up thoughts in order to find it. And I've been doing it since I was a kid, and I'm like, I can't believe I felt that as a kid, as a child. Wow. That's crazy because I really felt it's raw strength again. And I said, my little conversation I have in my head with this presence I call Wally, it's just my own thing. And I said, after I did it, after I came, I said, That's no joke.

And Wally said, No, it's not. And I said, I think I need some rules. I should not go there alone very often, and I should never go there with somebody who I don't trust. And while he said, That sounds smart, kid. And that's what I've been living by. I've been respecting sex as a very hot fire that's beyond electricity. Your feelings are fires that you can sit by and warm yourself. But sex is electricity that you have to deal with real discipline and thoughtfulness. And so is love, because that's a two-way thing. You got somebody else involved. And the other thing that the steps did was looking at my life, really looking at it. And I was writing down my history of my sex life. It was the first assignment I was given. And I got to like, I've blown up my life twice, really. And the first time I blew up my life, I looked at that moment, I was writing it, and I yelled onto the paper. I said, Stop, to myself. You got to stop. And I felt this huge remorse because I realized I can't hear it. He can't hear it.

That happened. I can't change it. But then I heard a voice say, Please stop. And I realized it's my future self whose life kept getting wrecked. And he said, Please stop. And I'm like, I can hear him. I can fucking hear that guy. And I can actually... I'm in this moment. But I thought, Yeah, but I can't. I'm not strong enough. And I asked the universe to... I just said, somebody fucking help me because I want to live. I want to really live my life. And that was a big moment for me. That's powerful. I can hear that guy now saying, thank you, dude. And please keep it going because you could still fuck it off. You have to keep going in this better direction. That's all just from this stupid twelve-step thing that you get. It's like a DMV fill out thing. Anybody can do it. When you go to these SLA meetings, they're on Zoom and stuff. There's like a hundred dudes on every meeting. And a lot of it is young guys in their 20s, some are 19, who are addicted to porn because they were born into a world where they're being encouraged to go to their phone for love and acceptance and power and money.

And that's where they find sex. And it's all addictive. They've turned every human endeavor into an addictive act. And these kids are so overwhelmed by it. Everything, the most important ones.

Well, one of the things that I've learned are, I mean, the crazy part is, so say I'm sitting there, I'm jerking off, and then there's some... Just because I'm jerking off on my phone, some county out in Iowa, they're losing water because they're having to run a data center. That's right. That's flaring up a little icon. That's right. Now some kid can't even take a hot shower because some other- Because you just need a little- 40-year-old kid won't stop jerking off somewhere in the distance. It's unbelievable. Here's one of the crazy things. We had a lady that came on who told us about Pornhub in a lot of these sites. A A lot of the content on there isn't even consensual. Right, of course. Now you start to realize, Oh, I'm jerking off to crime. I'm jerking off to possible sexual crime. They found 70% of it was non-consensual. This lady, Laila, Ella McElwade is her name. She came on. It was fascinating to learn about it.

Yeah, and if you're jerking off to anything on that site, you're supporting that. Even if the thing you're watching is consensual, it's all the money is going into the same pot. It's financing this shit that's not consensual.

And then also one great thing about being in the program, and I've never really talked about it this... I've talked about it with one other comedian on here, actually, is that we have a buddy in the program named Steve, and he's awesome, and he runs a program called Valor, and this isn't really an advertisement for it, but we do free ads for the Valor on the podcast, and it's a lot of young dudes in there. And I'm in some of the meetings, and it's a lot dudes in there who are just getting help.

Yeah, because it's really hard to unlearnt this shit, and it gets dangerous because it does make you an unthoughtful person. That's the way I got in the trouble that I got into, because I wasn't stopping and thinking. I was so blinded by what I wanted that I didn't... And I would just get this basic feeling of like, this is okay. I would tell myself that, but I wasn't stopping and thinking. And I just have so many... If you have a power boat and you're pulling water skiers or people on a tube, that boat has an elaborate system of ignition. You know what I mean? So that you don't chew somebody up with the propeller. So when someone's in the water, you turn the ignition off. And when you turn the ignition on, it beepes really loud before you start the motor. And that's before you go in gear. You have all these movements before you're harming. And that gives everyone a chance. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So I got all these beepes and triggers in my life now. Like, Especially if I'm looking at a moment of ecstasy, if I'm looking at something that's going to make me feel euphoric, I go, you might be being selfish right now.

That's an automatic thought to me now. Is someone paying for this? Is someone looking like they're okay when they're not? Is somebody saying yes when it was tough for them to get there? Can you just wait a second? Can you cool off? Can you take a breath? Because you might be going too fast. You might be so desperate to get moment that's going to give you that assuagement, that I'm okay feeling, that you're not in it. You're not in the room with somebody. You're not in the room with yourself, even. You're hurting yourself. You're using yourself, too. Oh, yeah. That's new for me. That's new, and it's become an installed part of me. I just move slower. And life has a speed. And if you can get on the same track with it, you're okay. The thing I get from... Every Every morning, I look at the sky. I just look at the sky and the world and nature. And there's a message I keep getting, which is that you're meant to be here. You're designed to be here. You don't even have to look at it as some conscious being made you. It's just that you're of this Earth at this time.

So chances are you match if you're willing to be in it, as long as you're willing to be in reality, the way things really are, accepting what's not there. And because we're human, going for it a little, trying a little, trying to make things happen. I think that the universe, when we fuck around to find out, goes like, nice. I like this motherfucker. Yeah. And so there's a little, there's an edge there that you want to be at where you're just like, I'm here, which means I belong here, and everything that happens will basically be okay with me if I really take it in as reality. And I don't try to just think my way out of it. But I'm a clever little fucking monkey, and I want to try some shit, too. And it means I'll fall. Try to try only as high as the fall won't break you. When you get up really, really crazy high in life. You're too high. You're Madison Square Garden and all this crazy shit that I was doing. It's like the fall will kill you.

Because it's not a human height.

It's not human. And there's no oxygen up there, and there's no drag on your wings. And it's lonely. And it's not affected by your feelings anymore. It's just this other thing. But when I went back to work and I was like, I'm doing clubs again, how's that going to feel? I'm sitting in the funny bone and St. Louis, and the machine that sends Coke to the bar is next to my head, and I'm sitting there, and there's the smell of chicken wings and pizza, and I'm doing retail comedy. I was happy as fuck. I was so happy to be telling the jokes to people whose faces I could see and whose admission price is... They're giving that to me as a gift, and they're going home happy. And I got back to that level of comedy, and it was really beautiful. That's where I live now. I do the theaters because I'm still a fucking pig. I still like it.

Some of them are nice, too.

Some of them are nice. The Ryman in Nashville. Oh, yeah.

Beautiful. I'm excited to come over there. Well, dude, I just I came over to your place and you were making art and you were sculpting and sending me stuff. Then you sat me down one time with a friend when I was over there and she had made something and you were reviewing it, or she was reviewing a project you had made. It was some type of a cartoon, I believe. It was a silent film, maybe.

It's a movie that I was starting to make, and we were making an animatic with charcoal.

It was just fascinating. I'm like, Oh, this dude is a fucking artist, man. That's when I realized, Oh, this guy really He likes being an artist.

It just feels good. It's just fun. If you can share this stuff, it's great.

Yeah, it was great. Then you said this, and I was like, Wow, this dude's really in his spot. But yeah, I agree, man. Having that need for attention from women or watching pornography or watching porno and stuff, it's taking a lot of moments in my life. One time, I was on a vacation with With my girlfriend. Instead of spending time, I was texting some other woman or I was watching porno. It took us out of this great weekend we were supposed to. It's like, I can never get that right in a way.

But it's understandable because you have that feeling that if you're with somebody, you're too much for them, you're scared to be alone with her. You're scared. I probably was. You're finding a way to not be in the room.

Yeah, and it's just that It's an old pattern, though, that if I don't try and get it under control, if I don't try to do better. I think even this year has been tough for me. It's just like, yeah, I just feel like work has gotten busy, and it just makes me scared a little bit. It's Then popularity makes you scared, and that's scary. It should be scary. Then, you're just looking at yourself, and you're just like, what am I even... You're like, I can't even feel like I can't even... The controls feel far from my hands sometimes. Not like doing crazy stuff or anything, but just like, I just, I don't know.

No, it is scary, and it should be. That's the thing is, it's like another electricity. You got to respect it. It's not a small thing being famous, and it can go bad. And it's your fault because you got into it. But I don't know, it's also a human thing to want to share your work and want to be out there. But when it goes bad, you get in this predicament of like, I want to go to each person's house and tell them what really happened and the little things that aren't in the way that's... And that's just never going to happen. And at this point, to me, I just want to live and I want us... I haven't talked about this the way I'm talking about it to I do.

We could take it out if you want.

It's scary. We'll talk about it after. Okay. But there's so many times where I just want to come out and tell people, I'm fucking sorry. I'm really sorry. I hurt people. I feel I've felt like in the way that it was so hard to take all of that at once, that much anger at once. It's like, I just don't have a sorry that covers it. And I don't have only one feeling. Sorry is not the only feeling I have. And so I don't want to say something, and I'm scared of the way that anything I say can be used by other people. There's all fears that come up, and I'm very raw in that space. But that's all because I made this I'm making these choices to stay in this, and it's because I love the work and I want to share it. So I guess I really wish there was... I could have a simple watershed where I can say just yes to everything that happened, and I'm sorry. I really am. And I'm just trying to do better, and I don't think I can prove that to everybody because it's a private thing.

It's a one-to-one man thing. It's not a famous guy act. But I got work that I want to share with people. I have work that I think is worthy. And there, if you don't like it, you don't like it. That's always okay with me. When I'm on stage and I'm talking and people aren't accepting it, that's okay. That's fine.

That's fair.

Fair enough, man. And nobody owes me nothing. I'm trying. We'll see what happens.

Dude, I'm in a weird way. I know this sounds maybe crazy to say. It's almost like, well, I think so many of us probably needed. We needed I wanted a guy like you to have some of this same problem because you have such an ability to look at things and examine them. It's like we needed an astronaut. I know it sounds crazy, but it's like we needed a Neil Armstrong like you to walk Can you look out there and report what you're feeling under your feet because it's like so many people are struggling and you say things, dude, that like, I mean, the rest of us just cannot put it in words. And it's just such a gift that you have.

It's been a little bit painful because-I know it Well, because I felt that when it happened like, hey, this is an opportunity. I can tell people what this is like, and I can come back with something great to say. But I just couldn't. I just couldn't do it. I was too scared, and I was to fighting for my life and also worried about other people in my life. Everything I say affects people that love me. I know that. And people that I'm related to, and I can't just decide what's going to fix it. And also, I'm completely confused by it. I still live with this thing every day. It's still part of my everyday life. It still imposes limits on me every day. And I still don't know what to do about it. I really don't. It's really confusing. But so I wish I could feel... I'm like a shitty astronaut. I'm like an astronaut who's not... They sent the... I'm what's his name? Don Natz. In that whatever. I think he did an astronaut one, right? If he did, he should have. I think, yeah, there it is. Yeah, the reluctant astronaut. That's me.

Yeah, it's no good. I'm Gus Grisham. I blew the hatch. I just was It was just too weak, man. I flared through it. I said some things out of confused anger because I am who I am on stage. I'm pretty raw up there. I'm not vetting what I say. I'm not careful about it.

You may be the reluctant astronaut, but I think it's what we all are. It's like we all just want to try and figure out whatever the truest stuff that's going on inside of us.

That's right.

And that's the part that I think you report back. I'm just saying-Well, you will never choose the hard road for yourself.

Never. And the choices you make in life are a combination of fear. You do things because of what you're afraid of, to avoid things you're afraid of, most things in You work for financial success because you're afraid of being poor more than anything else. And you work towards acceptance because you're afraid of being alone.

Yeah. Sometimes you look at pornography, you do stuff like that because you're afraid of going in and sitting, talking with your spouse or your girlfriend. Just talking about things that are scary to you.

Yeah, that's right. So that's how a person, and it's understandable. It's like people just do their best. A hundred %. But when life throws a bomb in the middle of your life, and and you survive it, you are given this beautiful opportunity to see everything from another angle and go like, what is even breathing? Why do I put a sock on? What am I doing here? And it takes everything away, and it goes start again. And you look back at your life and you go, That was a fucking mess. And you're met with real remorse about your mistakes. You don't have time to regret when you're living life. But when it's cut off and you just go, wow, that was fucked up. And I can't even fully fix it for some people. I just can't. What do I do now? Put a sock on. Maybe another sock, maybe on the same foot, maybe two socks on one foot. What's wrong with that? And I got my sense of humor back that way. So it's just like, this is all pretty silly. It's all pretty fucking silly in a sense. Don't you dare take seriously is one of my big things.

Even as a comedian, you think, I'm a great comedian. Yeah, lighten up, buddy. You know what I mean? And the shows I've been doing on the road now are just, I call the show ridiculous because it's back to I just want to surprise people with what I'm saying. I just want to be a bit of an asshole for an hour. It's just fun. But also just seeing that... I don't think I would have seen these things if life It didn't force me to. So it's good. It's good. Right now, for me, life is just so fucking good, way better than it was before.

Would it be able to live in such fucking... I mean, just to be able to really face some real challenges in your life. That's pretty fucking crazy.

I mean, you walk away going like, I can do that.

Yeah.

And what happened that was terrible was okay. And it wasn't all terrible. Some of it was so beautiful because when you're exposed to the hardest part of life, you're also exposed to the most wonderful. I was looking the other day, I don't know why this is, but the word compass and the word compassion, they share the first seven letters. I don't know why that is, but you get some direction out of life. But you only find real compassion by seeing real pain. And you go, oh, wow, life is really tough. And then That's all you need. All you need is to understand how much life can hurt because it's... Well, I don't know, spitting out with what I'm saying. It's okay. Yeah, life is better now. And also what's happened to me can be an example for other people in fellowship. When I go to a meeting in person and there's a guy who's really hurting his I was fucked up, and I approach him and I go, Hey, you should... And he's not sure about being in this program. And he goes, Oh, I ruined my life. And I go, Do you know who I am?

And he goes, Yeah. And I go, I'm doing pretty good, buddy. And the fact that my wreckage can be a mountain for folks to lean on, take a little load off, that's a beautiful gift.

Yeah. Well, it's been awesome, man. It's so funny. I never really got to as a comedian, I got to know you on stage, but I've gotten to know you, I feel like as a man.

Yeah, you're my brother.

Yeah. I got to know you just by being kind and being cool. And yeah, man, I hope one day I have a cool kid like you, man, that's creative and fun and brave and fucking weird and not afraid to hide somewhere and fucking jerk off a little, but also be fucking cool.

Yeah. Open up. Stay open. Yeah.

I hope that one day I have a cool kid like you. I just feel really proud. I just feel like, yeah, thank you for being a role model to me, man. Same, Theo. You do a good job of that, and I think you should know that. Thanks, bro. That you do a really good job of that of being important to people, Louis, and it's definitely been that for me. So thank you. Thanks, bro. Yeah. I think you're a brave dude. Yeah, man, I'm excited to see you guys tonight. Let's get the fuck out of your shit. It's getting fucking gay, dude.

But this book is great. You got cum coming out of your eyes. There's jizz coming out because it's backing up. That's where the gage is comes out of the eyes.

Oh, God.

Yeah, it's true. That's true.

Oh, I know it is. Oh, I did a four-part series on it online. Ingram is great. It's a new Tom Sawyer, but it's just good. It's written well. It's not like, Oh, this is a big name writing a book, and that's why it's going to be good. This book is good if anybody wrote it. It's magnificent. I'm so glad that you finally get to a place in your life where you feel you have the time and the ability to make such magic like this, man. Thanks, bro. It's really cool. Thank you. All right, Louis CK, thank you so much, bro.

Thank you, Theo.

Yup.

Now, I'm just floating on the breeze, and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be cornerstone. Oh, but when I reach that ground, this peace of mind I found I can feel it in my bones. But it's going to take.