#2564 - Chuck Lorre

Chuck Lorre is a writer, producer, and director behind numerous hit television series, including "The Big Bang Theory," "Two and a Half Men," "Young Sheldon," and "Stuart Fails to Save the Universe." He is an inductee of the Television Academy Hall of Fame, has a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and has received multiple Golden Globe Awards, the PGA Lifetime Achievement Award in Television, several BMI Television Music Awards, and the Critics' Choice Award for Creative Achievement, among others. His new book, "Sitcom: A Memoir," is available now.https://www.harpercollins.com/products/sitcom-chuck-lorrehttps://www.imdb.com/name/nm0521143/https://chucklorre.com Perplexity: Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan. PRE: Watch Chris Pratt in The Terminal List Season 2, October 21 on Prime. Pre-order and get campaign early access! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Speaker 02

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

• 0:16Speaker 03

  It was at the Singer Bowl in 1969. Jimi Hendrix was the headliner, the experience right off to Monterey. And Janis Joplin in the holding company, big brother in the holding company was the warm-up act.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Wow. What was that like?

• 0:35Speaker 03

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

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 0:47Speaker 03

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

• 0:59Speaker 02

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

• 1:28Speaker 03

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

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Don't smash the guitar. No one was smashing guitars back then.

• 1:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it was, it was an expensive way to end a show, but that's what was happening.

• 1:54Speaker 02

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

• 1:58Speaker 03

  It was amazing.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  A rebellion thing.

• 2:00Speaker 03

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

• 2:03Speaker 02

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

• 2:24Speaker 03

  It was a response to the 50s.

• 2:25Speaker 02

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

• 2:32Speaker 03

  And the birth control pill.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:34Speaker 03

  That changed everything.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, very good point. Very good point, yeah. Gave women freedom.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  And as well, it did the same for men.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, everybody could just do whatever the fuck they wanted. And, and they're doing drugs at the same time. It's everything just, boom, just all came together. Your story is awesome. The book is great.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  It really is, it's very compelling. You know, one of the things that bums me out the most about the, the internet and streaming is that we've lost the multi-cam sitcoms. It's a very weird thing. Like, first, the first thing that killed it, I think, was reality shows, right? That, that sort of took a lot of the wind out of its sails. But a few remained. And during COVID, me and my family watched Big Bang Theory. I'd never watched it. Watched it from episode one, we, we just binged it all the way to the end. I fucking loved it. I felt like, when I was like a comic in the clubs in, in LA, you never heard about Big Bang Theory.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  It didn't get, it was like there was other shows that people wanted to, you were cool if you liked. And the Big Bang Theory was like, you know, family sitcom, you know, just like real clean and, it's a really well-written show. It's very funny. It's a really good show, man.

• 3:56Speaker 03

  Thank you. We worked hard.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  I bet you did.

• 4:00Speaker 03

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

• 4:07Speaker 02

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

• 4:13Speaker 03

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

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  That I got.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 03

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

• 4:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  That I understood, yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Your story is awesome, dude. It really is. It's, it's, it's very, it's such an American story. You know, because it's you trying to figure out how to make it in show business, and trying to be a musician, and all these different things that happened to you, and the whole Scientology thing, and then eventually, you know, starting to write on big sitcoms and the Roseanne story, and it's fucking great, man. Because it's like, it's such a huge part of television history, what you've experienced. You really have. It's like, if you think about television history in America, a big part of it is defined by sitcoms. You know, because sitcoms, like, whether it's All in the Family, or Seinfeld, or Friends,

• 5:27Speaker 02

  there's something about those sitcoms that like, cement us in this place of comfort and happiness and like, laughter. Like, those are, almost like our extra family, is these people on TV that we've become attached to, watching every Thursday.

• 5:43Speaker 03

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

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:49Speaker 03

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

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:08Speaker 03

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

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Perfect casting.

• 6:30Speaker 02

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

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Tom, uh, Tim, uh...

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Tim Allen, Brett Butler, there was all those people where like...

• 6:51Speaker 03

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

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was all, you wanted the network to develop a show around you, and all these people were scrambling for that.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  And that, for the most part, doesn't exist anymore.

• 7:03Speaker 03

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

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Netflix, you can do it.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, they have the freedom to...

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Like, Young Sheldon worked on Netflix, that was great.

• 7:21Speaker 03

  The amazing thing about Young Sheldon on Netflix was, a whole generation of kids watched that show and had never seen The Big Bang Theory.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  And what's wonderful, too, is when you get to talk to them, they don't know what CBS is.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  How weird.

• 7:40Speaker 03

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

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Right. No, it definitely was. We binged that, too, after we binged Big Bang Theory. We binged Young Sheldon, which is a great show, too.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  But different, right? Single camera.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  Entirely different vibe.

• 8:01Speaker 02

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

• 8:12Speaker 03

  It is a play.

• 8:13Speaker 02

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• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:31Speaker 03

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

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:34Speaker 03

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

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:37Speaker 03

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

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:47Speaker 03

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

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  You know, and then television happened.

• 10:59Speaker 02

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

• 11:03Speaker 03

  Oh, I don't think so.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  There had to be something probably before that.

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Well, it was always, you know, Lucy, but I think even before that, there was Phil Silvers and, and George Burns and...

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know, I don't know the deep history of it, but it all came out of vaudeville and, and theater, yeah. One of the more interesting things about...

• 11:29Speaker 03

  This taste for the laugh track. We've never used a laugh track, never. Been for forty years been accused of it, but never used it. And I remember one time I had a reporter on the set of The Big Bang Theory, who went and sat in the audience and watched us tape a show in front of a live studio audience. Took three, three and a half hours. And then he writes an article complaining about the laugh track. You know, it's sort of like, okay, there's no getting away from this. He sat in the stands with two hundred people laughing, and he wrote about the annoying laugh track.

• 12:13Speaker 02

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

• 12:20Speaker 03

  It diminishes the show.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  They want to diminish it.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  They want to diminish it.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  I think I made that pretty clear in the book.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  That the word sitcom. It made sense when you married a fucking witch, you know, or you came back from outer space with a genie.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  And you don't want to get laid, you know. But it makes no sense when it's a family show like Archie, you know, All in the Family, that's about a family. What's the situation? He's a bigot? He's, you know, he's racially insensitive? That's not a situation, that's life, you know.

• 12:58Speaker 02

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

• 13:08Speaker 03

  I'd say I wrote a TV comedy.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 03

  Because I'm embarrassed.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Isn't that interesting? Like, sitcoms were dismissed.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  I was very insecure, and, and I, the word hurt me. It physically hurt me.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, because it's.

• 13:22Speaker 02

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

• 13:26Speaker 03

  No, of course not.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Not even close.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  Not even close. So much harder, though, in so many ways, to make two hundred people laugh every week for twenty-two weeks.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  It's almost impossible. It's very difficult to pull off.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  It's ridiculous.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  And if you watch the writers scramble, and, you know, every week you have to have some new scenario, and you've got five cast members, you have to juggle around at the scenes and.

• 13:47Speaker 03

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

• 14:01Speaker 02

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

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Early on.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Horrible, early on, early on. Before the show gets successful.

• 14:09Speaker 03

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

• 14:24Speaker 02

  This, the sitcom on Netflix that you were talking about, is this going to be multi-cam or single cam?

• 14:29Speaker 03

  It's multi-cam.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  It is multi-cam. Oh, that's awesome.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  We just finished our second season.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  I didn't know.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:35Speaker 02

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

• 14:44Speaker 03

  There were forty or fifty a week.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Now there's maybe three. Seriously, maybe three. And in front of an audience, maybe two.

• 14:53Speaker 02

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

• 15:05Speaker 03

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

• 15:07Speaker 02

  It's the greatest timing of all time.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  You know, and, I mean, I just don't understand why they can't come back. It's such a good art form. It's so fun to watch.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  When it's done really, really well.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:19Speaker 03

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

• 15:34Speaker 02

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

• 16:11Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't understand it either. Taste changed, the culture changes?

• 16:15Speaker 02

  Do you think that's what it is, though? I don't think that's what it is. I don't think they've changed that much.

• 16:20Speaker 03

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

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Really?

• 16:30Speaker 03

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

• 17:10Speaker 02

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

• 17:12Speaker 03

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

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:20Speaker 03

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

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 17:24Speaker 03

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

• 17:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 03

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

• 17:45Speaker 02

  You know where that happens the most is Los Angeles.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 02

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

• 18:02Speaker 03

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

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Los Angeles is an insanely self-important place.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Where people are constantly judging each other's social status. And they would love to be able to dismiss you. And they love to look forward to the opportunity to dismiss you. Not everybody, not everybody, a lot of cool people there.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  But there's a, there's a percentage of people that come there with a hole in their soul that they're trying to fill that will never get filled. And so they always have this weird way of interacting with people. It's this constant dick-measuring contest, and it's exhausting.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  So where would I go?

• 18:36Speaker 02

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

• 19:19Speaker 02

  And they are a mess, and they're exhausting. And those are the people that cross their arms. And that's why you think people don't want to laugh, because they do everywhere else.

• 19:27Speaker 03

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

• 19:40Speaker 02

  You're in a bubble.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  I live in a bubble.

• 19:42Speaker 02

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

• 19:44Speaker 03

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

• 20:00Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  They're the Beatles down there. It's remarkable, you know. Maybe not so much in Brentwood.

• 20:10Speaker 02

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

• 20:28Speaker 03

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

• 20:34Speaker 02

  It is hard, but it's-

• 20:35Speaker 03

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

• 20:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:37Speaker 03

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

• 20:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:48Speaker 03

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

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  I mean, it's crickets.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not good.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  But it's an extraordinary teaching device, because you learn some humility. "Oh, I'm not as smart as I thought I was. That joke died. I thought it was great."

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  It died. "Oh, we gotta fix it." You know, and that's how I spent the last many decades, you know, rushing around, trying to fix it.

• 21:25Speaker 02

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• 22:10Speaker 02

  It's also often a wild thunderstorm of creative people getting together, working on something, trying to figure it out. Everyone throwing ideas at things. It's really exciting in that regard. Like, every week, you're creating this thing, and you're putting it on its feet throughout the week. You get a table read, you sit down, everybody fake laughs, you have to figure out what's real.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  What's real?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  You put it together.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  When I was on Roseanne, it was huge. Every week, maybe 40 million people were watching, in real time. No DVRs yet, basically just the start of the VCR stuff. And, you know, great writing staff. I was really blessed to be part of that staff, but we learned very quickly. John Goodman would walk into the kitchen and say, "Rosie, I'm home." The audience would go berserk. And we'd be going, "Yeah, I wrote that line." They were just glad to see him.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  They were so excited to see him, that the response was not genuine. It wasn't a comedy, there was no comedy in "Honey, I'm Home."

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  But they were so thrilled to be in the same space as John Goodman, who they loved-

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  -as Dan Connors. And, you know, you have to start learning that those are not the laughs that you hang your hat on. Those are the laughs because the show's become part of people's lives. You know, it's become visceral.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  People respond to the Big Bang characters. I tell this story in the book. At Comic-Con, early on, thousands of people were camping out at night to come in and see the panel at Comic-Con for The Big Bang Theory. And I was sitting next to Jim Parsons at an autograph line, you know, where people come up with a cast picture and they sign it. And this girl comes up to Jim, and her hands are shaking, and she hands him the picture to sign, and she's crying out of joy to see Jim Parsons, to be this far away from Jim Parsons.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  And I remember thinking, "I've been doing this a while. People are always happy to see John Cryer and Charlie. Nobody ever cried." Nobody ever cried when they saw Roseanne, you know, or anybody like that. But she was crying out of sheer joy to see these guys. And that's when I went, "Something's happening here that we didn't plan, that we couldn't have planned, that these characters have hit a nerve."

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Well, I think it is the misfits thing, you know?

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  I think that's a giant part of it.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  And they become a surrogate family. They support one another.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  They're losers in a life raft.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  You know what I mean?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  And they hold each other up.

• 25:00Speaker 02

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

• 25:24Speaker 03

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

• 25:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Here's this cuckoo.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  Cuckoo's nest. You know, this odd child-

• 25:38Speaker 02

  With normal parents.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  With normal parents. Dad's a football coach, his mom's deeply religious, he's got a twin sister who's just a twin, just a kid.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  And an older brother's kind of a knucklehead, you know? Means well, but, you know, it's how they have to accommodate this remarkable human being. It really became, watching them, how much love and protectiveness went towards this little boy.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Who was oblivious-

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  -at how caustic he was. He was really an asshole. You know what I mean? And so was the grown Sheldon. He was really a dick. He treated his friends horribly. And it was one of the magic tricks of Young Sheldon, was an eight-year-old being a dick is not acceptable, right? You know, 25, 30-year-old Jim Parsons, you can be caustic, but when it's coming out of a child's mouth, not so pleasant. So it really shifted to becoming how his parents, and his brother and sister, and eventually and his grandmother, took care of him. They excused him for being the way he was, and allowed him to be that way. That's a love story.

• 26:55Speaker 02

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

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  But it's great.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  When you talk about the Roseanne days, those are some of my favorite days, because, you know, I'm friends with Roseanne, and I know how crazy she is.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  No, you don't.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  And she talks about, well, I bet you know better than I do, but she talks about how crazy she was during those days.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  That's nice to hear.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  That's nice to hear.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  She's like, "I was a tyrant."

• 27:37Speaker 03

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

• 27:40Speaker 02

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

• 27:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:46Speaker 02

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

• 28:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  -timing. She was just so, so didn't give a fuck. She was so different than any woman comic before her.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  Absolutely. No, she was groundbreaking.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  That initial act that she and her sister, I don't know if she talked about her sister much, but they wrote that act, and it was like nothing that we'd ever seen before. It was entirely original.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, entirely original, and-

• 28:53Speaker 03

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

• 29:05Speaker 02

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

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Easy for you to laugh.

• 29:23Speaker 02

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

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 29:37Speaker 03

  The no-show gigs, yeah.

• 29:38Speaker 02

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

• 29:44Speaker 03

  It was a lot of money.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  A lot of money.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  A lot of money.

• 29:47Speaker 02

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

• 29:50Speaker 03

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

• 30:03Speaker 02

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

• 30:20Speaker 03

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

• 30:29Speaker 02

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

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:33Speaker 02

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

• 30:42Speaker 03

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

• 31:03Speaker 02

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

• 31:35Speaker 03

  It makes me think of, it was my great good fortune to get to know Bob Newhart.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  And to, and to call him a friend, and he did a bunch of Big Bang episodes. And he taught me something I, I've never forgotten. He goes, "I'm not the funny guy on the show. I react to the funny guys." You know? Larry Darrell and Darrell and Tom Poston, those the crazy characters would come in, in the show, when he was a psychiatrist, even that one. Crazy people would come in, and the comedy was in Bob reacting. A raised eyebrow would get an enormous laugh because he, he becomes the audience reacting to the crazy people. And he, I was begging him for years to come and do any show I'd worked on, because

• 32:25Speaker 03

  I was such a fan. And I remember, he finally, he watched The Big Bang Theory, and he said, "All right, I'll, I'll do this one. But I have three demands. Go." He goes, "It has to be in front of an audience. I don't do anything..." I said, "That's all we do. We only work in front of an audience. Done. Number two, I wanted, I want my character to have an arc. I want it to be over a few episodes. Done. Number three, I want to win an Emmy."

• 33:00Speaker 03

  He'd never won an Emmy for his shows.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Isn't that nuts?

• 33:03Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 33:03Speaker 03

  And he did, on The Big Bang Theory. He won an Emmy for Best Supporting Actor, or Best Guest Actor in a, in a comedy. And it was one of the genuine joys of my life, was, I got him the Emmy.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  I mean, he got, he got the Emmy, but we, we delivered on all three.

• 33:19Speaker 02

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

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Isn't that crazy?

• 33:22Speaker 02

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

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Oh, that's cold.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  In that moment, first of all, we were so, we were all so, so broken. We were so sad. It was so, not, not that he didn't win the Emmy, just that he had just recently been murdered. It was just, it was still, it was so hard to believe and so painful, that Dave just came in with the banger. Dave Foley was like, one of the secret producers of news radio. The news radio, the, Paul Sims was so brilliant, that when he created the show, he allowed all these creative people to come up with alternative lines. And Dave was from Kids in the Hall, so he was just a fantastic writer on top of being very funny. And so he would come up with better lines all the time, and Paul would always, always

• 34:26Speaker 02

  use them. It was just, there was no ego there. It was such a great place to be. And so when, when Phil got killed, it was like, we were just broken. We were just like, "What?" And so for Dave to say that at the Emmys, it was like, I'm like, "Okay, no one's topping this. I'll never come back to the Emmys again. Get out of here."

• 34:44Speaker 03

  No, that's a high note. You could come up with that line.

• 34:47Speaker 02

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

• 34:50Speaker 03

  He did, on The Big Bang Theory.

• 34:52Speaker 02

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

• 35:05Speaker 03

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

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  And I'd just sit there in the dark, and just take it in, you know? "Shit, this is where they make this show."

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 35:42Speaker 03

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

• 35:58Speaker 02

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

• 36:34Speaker 03

  We did six, seven years in the clear before it all went to hell.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  We had like, 150-some-odd, 60 episodes before it started to go down.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  And did, was he heavy-using during those times?

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Not to my knowledge.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Oh, so it-

• 36:49Speaker 03

  If he was, he was managing it and keeping it to himself. But as far as I was concerned, we had a great partnership. We were having a lot of fun. The show was insanely, you know, successful. It was, you know, we had, we had something in common, you know? We were all on the same kind of, I thought we were all on the same road, you know, keeping it clean.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Staying sober and stuff. And the show was killing it. It was just, and it actually, the success of that show is what granted me the freedom to go, you know, and go and do a couple of tries to get The Big Bang Theory right. I mean, we failed at first, you know, we made a lot of mistakes. But Two and a Half Men was so successful, CBS granted me unbelievable leeway to, to make, make decisions, do shit over again. Like, the pilot, nobody gets a do-over. We got a do-over on the Big Bang pilot.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 37:53Speaker 03

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

• 37:56Speaker 02

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• 39:55Speaker 03

  Boy, did it work out, yeah.

• 39:56Speaker 02

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

• 40:01Speaker 03

  As far as I know, he was.

• 40:03Speaker 02

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

• 40:06Speaker 03

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

• 40:08Speaker 02

  So, he says he was sober for the beginning, and then at one, and then eventually he just-

• 40:13Speaker 03

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

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Did you notice, like, a change?

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Well, in the eighth season, it was clearly we were in trouble. It was, it was, you know, when his manager calls me and says, "Charlie can't come to run-through today, rehearsal," his bic lighter blew up and he has no eyebrows.

• 40:36Speaker 03

  Now, I'm somewhat naive to some of this stuff, but I know Bic lighters. They don't blow up.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Wow. Maybe they do when you're cooking coke with them. Maybe that's what happened.

• 40:47Speaker 03

  But there was a lot of, the behavior became more and more erratic. A lot of more, a lot of missed stuff.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  And, you know, and the sad truth about, about my part of it was I, I was determined to stay in denial. I just didn't want to know. I wanted to believe it was all okay. I was absolutely, you know, forcefully, you know, oblivious. I just wanted to believe it was all gonna be okay.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  Just because the show was doing so well?

• 41:18Speaker 03

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

• 42:01Speaker 02

  You're gonna lose a bunch, for sure.

• 42:02Speaker 03

  You're gonna lose a bunch. You know, I, just my own experience, I loved Cheers. I was devoted to Cheers. There was a couple of years there where, you know, you had to get through Cliff going home to his mother.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  I wanted to be in the bar with, you know, Woody and Sam, and he would tolerate, you know, some of the dips, but then they'd come roaring back with great writing and, you know, stuff. But more often than not, if a show fails on a few, a few occasions, even a show you love, there's a likelihood you may move on.

• 42:35Speaker 02

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

• 42:49Speaker 03

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

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:53Speaker 03

  You know?

• 42:55Speaker 03

  And, and it, you know, it's really obvious when you think you can spin something off. Do you remember Archie's place?

• 43:04Speaker 02

  No, I don't.

• 43:05Speaker 03

  And they tried to spin off Archie Bunker.

• 43:07Speaker 02

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

• 43:10Speaker 03

  I think he ran a bar.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 43:12Speaker 03

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

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  And, you know, and Edith and...

• 43:19Speaker 02

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

• 43:24Speaker 03

  The miraculous chemistry of All in the Family was gone.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  It was gone. And same thing happened, you know, with Joey off of Friends. The miraculous chemistry of that cast, you just can't just, you know? I think I learned a lesson watching those things, going, don't, don't think this thing travels.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  You know?

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:49Speaker 03

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

• 43:59Speaker 02

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

• 44:06Speaker 03

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

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  You never see him.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  His, him telling the story of being a child in East Texas, that was the only link.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 02

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

• 44:27Speaker 03

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

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, but it worked.

• 44:31Speaker 03

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

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's things about certain sitcoms, like Seinfeld's a great example, where those people just work together so well.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  You couldn't imagine a new person being put in the mix, or someone going away, like, what? You would ruin the whole thing.

• 44:51Speaker 03

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

• 44:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 03

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

• 45:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:04Speaker 03

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

• 45:11Speaker 02

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

• 45:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then Botchko shows at 10. The Botchko shows were impeccable.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 45:25Speaker 03

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

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:29Speaker 03

  You know, NYPD Blue.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  It was an incredible run of sophisticated cop shows.

• 45:38Speaker 02

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

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Again, they were character shows. I mean, Botchko understood that as well, that, you know, the, it wasn't the crime of the week, which is the, you know, solving the crime is more the, the Dick Wolf approach to dramas.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Botchko was, was about the characters, about the cops, about their, their, their heartaches and, you know, the torments of being a cop in Los Angeles and...

• 46:13Speaker 02

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

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Every day.

• 46:17Speaker 02

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

• 46:33Speaker 02

  How's there so many armed robberies when you're around? But if you're a cop, it makes sense to write it in like that.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  There was, I can't remember the name of the guy. He was a New York City cop who wrote a whole bunch of books that I think were a big factor in, in the Botchko lore. I can't remember his name. He, he wrote, gosh damn it, I can't remember his name.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  I'll remember it tonight when we're done.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  But he wrote, he wrote about cops as people, you know? People in untenable work.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  Work was, you know, this incredibly destructive work environment, and it starts with an M.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, cop genres, sitcoms, it's, it's just, to me, it's, the cop genres are still around, whereas the sitcoms have, I mean, what have they been reduced by 80%?

• 47:31Speaker 03

  More.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  90?

• 47:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, again, back, back when I got started, there were four sitcoms on every network, five nights a week, or four nights a week. So what is that? That's, you know, 16 a night?

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  And then the hour dramas were at 10 o'clock, every night, for years, for years.

• 47:52Speaker 02

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

• 48:05Speaker 03

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

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:24Speaker 03

  I had maybe seven, eight years before, they said, here, your show.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  And I wasn't ready. I still was overwhelmed.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Merle Miller?

• 48:36Speaker 03

  No.

• 48:37Speaker 02

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

• 48:44Speaker 03

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

• 48:53Speaker 02

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

• 49:02Speaker 03

  The owners of the Roseanne Show had an idea for a show that was strangely like Roseanne.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  You know, this heavyset unhappy housewife with a domineering husband and problems with her kids. And they went to my then boss, Bob Meyer, and asked him if he wanted to develop that into a series. And Bob, quite rightly saw that they were just trying to, you know, rip off Roseanne and do it again, have another hit show with an unhappy housewife. And he very wisely, or whatever, said, no, I don't think so. I don't like this idea. So they went, all right. They came to me. And I thought, this is a ripoff of Roseanne. I'm in.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Because what I was thinking is, these two people owned The Cosby Show and Roseanne. They were gigantic eight million pound gorillas in television back then. I want to work for them. Somehow, I'm not saying no, even though I see it for what it is. And I worked my ass off on it. This lovely lady, a British actress named Miriam Margulies, Margulies, Marlies. And she was a terrific actress. And she tried so hard. She tried so hard to be an unhappy

• 50:32Speaker 03

  American Staten Island housewife. And the show, you know, to credit how powerful Marcie Garcia and Tom Warner were, the network couldn't bring themselves to say pass. They couldn't say pass. And they ordered six episodes. And they put it on the coveted time slot of eight o'clock Saturday nights.

• 50:55Speaker 02

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

• 50:59Speaker 03

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

• 51:02Speaker 02

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

• 51:09Speaker 03

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

• 51:13Speaker 02

  How far you gotta go back?

• 51:15Speaker 03

  Back into the 60s.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Really?

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Saturday night was a big night?

• 51:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  And it went away.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  Was that because television was fairly new? It was like a crazy thing?

• 51:23Speaker 03

  People stayed home.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Stay home and watch TV?

• 51:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 51:27Speaker 03

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

• 52:00Speaker 02

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

• 52:05Speaker 03

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

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:18Speaker 03

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

• 52:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:29Speaker 03

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

• 52:49Speaker 02

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

• 52:52Speaker 03

  And then he said, "Noble failure. Let's try again." And I was like, "I get another, I get a do-over? I get to try again? Great." You know, because when you're indoors, they bring you lunch. You know, they feed you, you know? You have a parking spot.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  It's pretty cool.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  It's pretty cool.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  And that's, that led to them saying, "We want to do a show about a single mom." And I was like, "Wait a minute. I wanted the Franny's turn, the character, the thing that just failed. I wanted her to leave her husband and try and be, you know, single and live with her daughter." And you said, "No, she has to be married because Cosby's married, Roseanne's married." They wanted another married show. But what it turned out was ABC was looking for a single mom show. So now they wanted a single mom show. And I said, "Where do I come in to, what sensibility can I bring to a single mom show?"

• 53:51Speaker 03

  And to their credit, they sent me to Elgin, Illinois, to spend a few days. The Chamber of Commerce took me to a women's shelter, YWCA hospitals where women were either on welfare, working two jobs, you know, killing themselves to support themselves while raising children. And I got this walkthrough. What I, I went, "Oh, this is, this is great tragedy. These women are, they're heroes." I mean, at the time, the single mom was Murphy Brown.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  Murphy Brown had endless nannies.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:39Speaker 03

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

• 55:22Speaker 03

  said, "Okay, and we found the perfect actress to play that part." And that's how I met Brett Butler. Sure, you laugh.

• 55:32Speaker 02

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

• 55:39Speaker 03

  She was very unhappy.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Out of the gate, day one.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Seems crazy.

• 55:44Speaker 03

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

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Oh, she was hilarious.

• 56:04Speaker 03

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

• 56:17Speaker 02

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

• 56:30Speaker 03

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

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:37Speaker 03

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

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:53Speaker 03

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

• 57:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  When I was a boy, you know? If you make something of yourself, you'll feel, you'll be good. People, people will like you and admire you and you'll, you know, you'll be a man of substance. Yiddish was a mensch, right? And, and then you learn that horrible truth. Only can happen with success, which is, "Oh, shit. I'm still the miserable fuck." Now what? Now what?

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  If that's not going to solve that, that hole inside.

• 57:34Speaker 02

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

• 57:36Speaker 03

  That's where the drugs come in.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  With rock stars.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  Rock stars and gambling and

• 57:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 03

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

• 57:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:54Speaker 03

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

• 58:04Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Call of Duty. Modern Warfare 4 is coming and they're going all in on this one. The kind of missions that make you go, "Dude, did they really just do that?" Set during a full-scale North Korean invasion of South Korea, expect a real boots-on-the-ground experience as young South Korean recruits fighting to protect their homeland and North Korean forces, hunting traitors, interrogating civilians, and more. Modern Warfare 4 launches October 23rd. Preorder digitally for early access to the campaign or pick up your physical disc on day one. Visit callofduty.com for more. Rated M for mature.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  It has to be an inside job to get well from that stuff.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  It's also for, for people's perspective, if you're talking about, what was Brett, Grace Under Fire was 93?

• 58:59Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  In 1993, there was only four channels, okay? And then cable. And nobody was watching cable, not like that, not like sitcoms.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 59:08Speaker 02

  And there was maybe 100 famous people on earth. There was, nobody was famous back then. There's way more famous people. So if you're a damaged person and then all of a sudden, you're one of the most recognizable people in the world, who Brett Butler was when that show was number two.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  I mean, that was a huge show. She was on every magazine. You saw her everywhere.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Like, that kind of pressure and that kind of, for a person who's already, like, struggling to keep it together, that can be devastating.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. I often threatened to write a screenplay, the perfect murder, the perfect murder of an actress who is malicious and destructive is to make her famous.

• 59:47Speaker 03

  It'll ruin her. So, I've yet to write that story yet.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  But you wanna do something harmful to somebody who's, you know, damaged in that way, make them famous. It'll absolutely destroy them.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  Isn't that nuts?

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

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

• 1:00:13Speaker 03

  I've heard those stories as well. I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

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

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  They were rooting for her.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:25Speaker 03

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

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

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

• 1:00:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  And she worked in an oil refinery.

• 1:00:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  On the show.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  Making an audience laugh temporarily fills the hole.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Temporarily.

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

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

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's the problem.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  Okay, what are we gonna do about this?

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

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

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  It was the shortest concert I've ever been to. Literally, it was an outdoor, it was a Singer Bowl, it was an outdoor kind of arena. And cops came in on horses, hitting people over the head with sticks, right?

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Because he pulled his dick out.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  And to stop the show. He'd already, I think it was after he did it in Miami, and he got arrested in Miami.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  That was his move. It was like Burt Kreischer taking his shirt off.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  I was sixteen years old or something like that, and I'm standing there with my friends, smoking a joint going, "This is terrific. This is fantastic." We were watching these horses go by. This is fantastic. We were, we thought, well, yeah, okay, it would've been nice to maybe hear a second song. They opened with "Light My Fire", never finished it.

• 1:02:29Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  End of show.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Oh my god. That's crazy.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

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

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  Who'd you say he was performing with again?

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Uh, the warm-up act was The Who.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  It was, you know, before Tommy, they were a warm-up act there.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:02:48Speaker 03

  Great, like, My Generation, I Can See For Miles, it had great stuff.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 03

  Before Tommy. Once Tommy hit, they were, they never wore a warm-up act again. But this was just prior to Tommy.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  But if Hendrix was dead, then he would get royalties from all those songs forever.

• 1:03:49Speaker 03

  He would, he probably contractually would've had them anyway. I mean, most managers, those, back in those days, it was all so corrupt. It was really predatory and corrupt. He would've had a piece of his publishing no matter what.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  Live or dead, you know? Listen, I-

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  But he wouldn't have anything for him in the future.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  The idea of asphyxiating on his own vomit is heartbreaking into, you know, a generational superstar. I mean, there's, he had a big impact on me.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Oh my god. He was like, unlike anyone before him. His sound was so completely unique that, I mean, Eric Clapton famously said, like, he felt he wanted to quit playing guitar when he saw him. It was just like, and Eric Clapton was insanely good.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  For a guy like Eric Clapton, you know, listen, go listen to the Derek and the Dominos, Layla.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Layla.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ, he was good. Oh my god.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  Passing, how remarkable was that? That back and forth with him and Dwayne?

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  On Layla and Have You Ever Loved A Woman? My god.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Eric Clapton and cocaine, just that. Oh my god. That, yeah, but that, uh, that story is just, the story of his death is like, oh, it's really, it's a weird one. Whereas, some of them do seem like normal drug overdoses, but the Hendrix one, there's a lot of weird stuff to that one. Where it does seem like it's possible that he was murdered, unfortunately. But, oh, there's just a huge number of those guys died so young. And it's because of what you're, what you're talking about. That whatever fucked up thing that makes them so brilliant at performing. And it's like, almost an attempt, the more brilliant you get, it's, the more you can fill that hole temporarily, the more love you get in these big bursts. And then the crowd goes away, and then you're by yourself, and it's just back to the darkness.

• 1:05:35Speaker 02

  And then the drugs, and then the alcohol, and then the chaos, and then fall, ripping your life apart. And then there's another show, and there's another burst. And you're feeling good when you're on stage, then you get offstage, it's the same fucking thing, and it never heals.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

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

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

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

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  Because, because it's part of, it's part of my life.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  Right, but why would you regret saying that?

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  Because it might seem like-

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Cliche.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Flaky and hairy-fairy and, and, you know, woo-woo, new age bullshit.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  But I don't know any other way. I just don't, and I do know that, um, in my own life, seeking a spiritual solution, not finding it, but the act of seeking it, is, there's some salvation in that, you know?

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  No, I think there is as well. I don't think there's anything silly about it. And I think the problem is, the term has been co-opted. The term spirituality has been co-opted by people that you do consider to be flaky. That's the problem, you know?

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  It's like, is it possible that you could preach the word of Jesus in front of a sold-out stadium? And really be sincere? Yeah, sure, it's possible.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  But how many people are, who are preaching in front of sold-out stadiums and giant arenas? How many of those are actually sincere? Well, it's a small percentage. It's not the same thing, you know? It doesn't mean it's not possible.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  No, it just has a bad name.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:15Speaker 02

  And help them, and get them jobs, and give them, teach them skills, and help them get clean. It's like-

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  I know people like that too.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  They're real.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

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

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  I wanna be like that guy.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  They exist.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

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

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

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

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  I wanted, give me.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

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

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  Which is real.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

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

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well-

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  It's a work in progress, basically.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  That's insane.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  It's insane.

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  It's insane. It denies the fact that we change.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  We do change.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

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

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

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

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  It's wild.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  And, uh, yeah, there's a therapeutic, kind of cathartic quality to doing something like this, to try and write about your life. And I, I'm an absolute laugh horse, so I wanted to make it as funny as I could, because otherwise it's just boring. Who gives a shit about your life, Chuck? But if I can make you laugh, then maybe it's worth reading. But, um-

• 1:10:34Speaker 03

  Beginning with my childhood, you know, when I was a kid working for my dad, you know, those things. That's me, but if I were to be held to what I said in 1969, it wouldn't go well for me.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  For anybody?

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's great that you're reading the audiobook, too.

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

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

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  Brian Cox would be great.

• 1:11:05Speaker 03

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

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

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

• 1:11:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:11:43Speaker 02

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

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  Paul Haggas.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

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

• 1:12:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

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

• 1:12:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Speaker 03

  You know, Peyton Manning says, buy this, buy Geico. Peyton must know, he's a quarterback.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

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

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:43Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  I didn't understand that that was Scientology.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Kind of a psychotherapy.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

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

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

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

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  It wasn't that far off the charts.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  He was a science fiction, but he was a science fiction writer.

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  Absolutely, right up there.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  He did, he wrote the most.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  More than Stephen King.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:20Speaker 03

  It was pretty shitty.

• 1:14:21Speaker 02

  It was the worst.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  But funny in that regard, like, that Battlefield Earth movie is fucking fantastic, just because it's so goofy. Have you seen it?

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  I have, it's terrible.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  It's amazingly bad.

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

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

• 1:14:38Speaker 03

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

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

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

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  How did you get introduced to it?

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

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• 1:16:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  So, I'm in, there's pretty girls here.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Oh, they're very smart, how they work you in.

• 1:17:36Speaker 03

  Very smart about that.

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  And I bought a thing called a communications course, which promised to improve my ability to communicate. What could go wrong with that?

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  What could go wrong with that?

• 1:17:48Speaker 03

  Obviously, I'm a musician, and I'm trying to, you know, become a songwriter, that's a communication issue. You know, anything in the arts is communicating. I could get better at that.

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  Perfect.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  Why wouldn't I do that? And, and what he was doing, he had these drills called training routines, and the first one, TR0, was you would sit, like we're sitting right now, in front of each other, and just be in front of each other. No twitching, no laughing, no giggling, no getting creepy, no getting lost in thought, just sit there. What I didn't know, I got really good at it, too. What I didn't know was, it's just meditation. It was just meditation, it was just learning to be still, which is meditation, just learning to be still and not being tossed around by every fucking thought that comes screaming

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  through your head like, you know, a tree full of rabid monkeys. And that first time I did it, opposite a pretty girl. It was a woman who was running the classroom, the communications course. I said, I have this feeling like I'm up in the corner of the ceiling, looking down at me. And she yelled out, Chuck has gone exterior.

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  I didn't know what that meant. But it was an extraordinary experience. I, I, I have a very vivid memory of being up near the ceiling, looking down on me, sitting in front of this, this woman, doing training routine zero.

• 1:19:35Speaker 02

  So it worked?

• 1:19:36Speaker 03

  It worked. I had, I popped out of my head and I had an out of body experience. I didn't know what was happening. I didn't understand what exterior, I know what the word meant, but I didn't know, understand this as, as, but it felt good. The only other time that happened to me, having that experience, was when I flipped my car over at seventy miles an hour in Iowa. And I remember seeing the accident from up in the sky, looking down at it.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  That was more like a near death experience.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  That was a near death experience. But it was also a very calm. Huh.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  As the car is flipping over down in this embankment. And, uh, and so the experience, that's, that's a powerful experience. And I wanted to pursue it. I wanted more of that.

• 1:20:25Speaker 02

  Well, that makes sense. I mean, if, what's interesting is if you get a kid, a young guy, or a young woman, in a very suggestible state.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

  And in this heightened moment where they really believe there's some real significance to them sitting there and doing this exercise, and that something big is gonna happen. Your brain can trigger endogenous states that, that actually are real. So it's like, what they're saying is kind of true, even though it's kooky, like a lot of it is very kooky. Like, some of these methods of just doing that kind of stuff, it can have powerful, transcendent results.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  Nobody told me this was gonna happen. It just happened.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

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

• 1:21:24Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  On occasion.

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  Did, did you ever try to recreate it with the same woman?

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  Maybe it's her. Maybe that's it. Maybe it's like being there with a beautiful girl. And her looking into your eyes, you looking at hers, maybe that triggers the thing.

• 1:21:45Speaker 03

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

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  No?

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  It was just, you were in that suggestible moment?

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

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

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  There's a documentary called Holy Hell, and it's about this cult leader that used to live in Austin for a while. And, um, one of the weird things this guy did, he was a yoga teacher, and also he was a hypnotist and a gay porn star. So it, the documentary's crazy. But in one of the things that he would do with this cult, is he would do a thing called the knowing. And they had to be ready for it. He had to decide they were ready for it, and they'd have the ceremony. And when they had the ceremony, he would touch their, their head. He would put his hands on their head, and they would experience this unbelievable, like, psychedelic moment, where they contacted God, and they all talked about it. Like, cause the anticipation of this moment was so heightened, and they're, they were so suggestible.

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  And he was, you know, an actual professional hypnotist. And when he would put his hands on them, whatever it was inside their brain, it would just release. And even after they talked about him being a fraud, if they all left the, the cult, and they said all these terrible things that he did, they still said that moment was the most powerful moment of their life.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  Hypnotism is a powerful mechanism.

• 1:23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:10Speaker 03

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

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

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

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  Like, even though he's taking everybody's money and fucking everybody, and it's always the same story, he did make them see God. That's what's weird about it. And so many people are, are looking for something to take them out of their state, the state they're in now. And if it's Scientology, if it's being a Mormon, if it's Catholicism, whatever it is, like, people are trying to find something that gets them. Jack Daniels, cocaine, ecstasy.

• 1:23:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  But for you, uh, so I, um, I never actually went to a Scientology meeting or anything like that. I just got the book, but they never stopped emailing me, or mailing me, rather. Every day, I had, had one of those UPS boxes, and every day, it would be some new invitation to some Scientology event.

• 1:24:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, you got on the mailing list.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  I didn't realize that it was even Scientology when I bought the book.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  I thought it was just, oh, Ron Hubbard's gonna teach me how to kick ass.

• 1:24:16Speaker 03

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

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

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

• 1:24:29Speaker 03

  My entire community of friends, everybody was in, was in.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:24:35Speaker 03

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

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  You were supposed to be, you know, you, you, the promise was you were gonna rise up above all these human.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:26Speaker 03

  Menusia, you know, dilemmas and problems and whatnot, and you were gonna have this remarkable insight into the world, and you have power. Power, being very powerful, uh, power being powerful, being a real hook. Cause if you're a young scared guy like I was, power was missing.

• 1:25:48Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  There was no power. I was just scrambling to try and get my foot in any door that would open. And so here these people come in, promise you, the one thing you don't have as a young, stupid man, is power. And it was an easy sell. And I, you know, and I, uh, it took, uh, it took me ten years to realize, wait, this isn't working.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  Took ten years?

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

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

• 1:26:39Speaker 02

  Did they fuck with you at all?

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  No, cause I had no money.

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:26:42Speaker 03

  Nobody chases you if you have money.

• 1:26:43Speaker 02

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

• 1:26:46Speaker 03

  Goodbye.

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

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

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

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

• 1:27:28Speaker 03

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

• 1:28:12Speaker 03

  The dark hole in the soul, that we were talking about.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:28:17Speaker 03

  You know? Which, uh, which, you know, led to the other change in my life, which is, was it twenty-seven and a half years ago, I stopped drinking. So, um, and that's been a massive change, you know? Cause again, you know, I keep saying over and again, I'm not sure I'm saying it clearly. The one thing that is clear is the outside, the outside stuff, whether they be experiences or stuff, or relationships, or in my case, marriages. It doesn't, it's a Band-Aid. Doesn't, it doesn't heal the wound. The wound has to be dealt with in, in some other way that's personal.

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  The spiritual path of your own, you know, your choice. You call it, doesn't matter. If it's Christ, if it's Yahweh, if it's the Quran, if it's Latter Day Saints, or if it's Eckhart Tolle, it doesn't matter. Pick one. Pick one. That's your best shot out of that darkness, as far as I can tell.

• 1:29:28Speaker 02

  I think you're probably very accurate. I think you could probably do it on your own, but I don't know very many people who have.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  It's really hard.

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  It's hard.

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  We're community animals. You know, I think we thrive in groups. I think that's how we're wired. I think the worst thing that could have happened a million years ago in a tribe was to be thrown out of the tribe. You're gonna die. You get kicked out of the tribe because of misbehavior. I don't know what misbehavior is in the place the scene era in Neanderthals, but if you got kicked out, you're dead.

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

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

• 1:30:13Speaker 03

  That's probably very true.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  And you probably were gonna get kicked out of the tribe.

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  Kicking out was a sentence of death. And so we're desperately in need of one another. And that's not good, bad, or indifferent. It's just the way we are.

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  Which is what makes people so prone to ideologies, to religious cults, to all sorts of different things.

• 1:30:31Speaker 03

  We wanna be part of a group.

• 1:30:32Speaker 02

  Wanna be part of a group.

• 1:30:33Speaker 03

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

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  And people will do wrong things to defend the group.

• 1:30:44Speaker 03

  We fight to the death. We go to war over these groups.

• 1:30:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  And doesn't hurt others.

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  And doesn't hurt others.

• 1:31:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it. It's not really complicated. You know, but we don't live in a culture that pursues that. We live in a culture of consumption.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

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

• 1:31:46Speaker 03

  I was raised in a Jewish household.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  No one ever talked, ever. No rabbis, my parents, ever discussed having a connection with God, pursuing God, seeking God.

• 1:32:05Speaker 03

  What's my reason for being here? Why am I alive? How did this happen? It was never discussed. It was just do this and shut up. Right? Hear the rules, do the rules, and move it on. And that was how they were raised too. So, you know, it's not like, there's no malice. It was just, hear the rules of our tribe, do the rules. And at no point was there a connection made with, this could be the most important thing in your life. This could actually solve the whole dilemma of being a human being. It had nothing to do with that. It was a rules-based religion.

• 1:32:48Speaker 03

  It honored some wonderful things like education, and there was a great deal of goodness to it, societal goodness, you know? I think I mentioned in my book that my father was one of 11 Republicans in the country.

• 1:33:10Speaker 02

  11 Jewish Republicans.

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  11 Jewish Republicans in the country. I left out the key word. Because, you know, he believed in his heart, each man for himself, you know? Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and stuff. And he believed that dearly. But

• 1:33:31Speaker 03

  I lost my train of thought.

• 1:33:32Speaker 02

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

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  Let's not talk about that.

• 1:33:51Speaker 02

  Okay. But I just wanted to know, like, what?

• 1:33:54Speaker 03

  Let's focus on the word anonymous.

• 1:33:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  Okay, just, I got sober.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

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

• 1:34:06Speaker 03

  It was inevitable.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  It was a part of it.

• 1:34:08Speaker 03

  It's inevitable. You know, the most extraordinary thing, it's hard to do this and retain anything like anonymity, but

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  there is the encouragement to pursue a God of your understanding, not someone else's.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  Yours.

• 1:34:35Speaker 03

  That was remarkable. That's a remarkable insight for me. Really, I get to choose. Huh.

• 1:34:44Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:34:46Speaker 03

  Wow, this is not a ritualistic, here, do this, do that, you know? It's not about, don't eat fish on Friday or pork ever. It's about finding something greater than yourself.

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  It's not that hard to do, given of your understanding. That could be the ocean.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  It could be whatever you choose it to be. It could be a fucking doorknob. But it's

• 1:35:21Speaker 03

  it's critical. It's critical.

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  What was the path? Like, so you go from becoming sober and this idea of worshiping something? Or looking at some? Okay, what's the word?

• 1:35:37Speaker 03

  The word worship is

• 1:35:38Speaker 02

  Respecting something as a higher power?

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  The word worship is, I don't understand that word. No, it's just recognizing. It's just recognizing that there's something else going on here, and it ain't me. That's it. There's no worship involved. There's no genuflecting or, you know?

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  There's service. It's how can I be better in this world? There is that. There is that, you know? And for somebody like me, who was gimme all the time, was always gimme, gimme, I need, I need more. More is not enough. Right? I need more. And when that ceases to work, when you finally wake up and going, there is no more. More is never enough. When you finally

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  give in to the reality is that that will never do the job, I will always be empty, if that's the way I'm trying to go about it, then there's a possibility that's the bottom. And the bottom is where you decide to stop digging. And the bottom is where you go, okay, let's try something else.

• 1:36:56Speaker 02

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• 1:38:33Speaker 03

  Not really. It's not what I recognize.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

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

• 1:38:41Speaker 03

  It's being subservient. You know, the punishing, you know, all-powerful, you know, thing that's gonna, you know, punish and whatever. The Old Testament stuff.

• 1:38:54Speaker 02

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

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I just, for me...

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

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

• 1:39:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:39:22Speaker 03

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

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

  And was this an arc for you? Or was this a quick realization upon getting sober?

• 1:39:53Speaker 03

  Oh, slow.

• 1:39:54Speaker 02

  Was a slow

• 1:39:55Speaker 03

  Slow bribe.

• 1:39:56Speaker 02

  process to get to where you are now?

• 1:39:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, slow, slow.

• 1:39:59Speaker 02

  And do you define it like what you're serving? Or what you worship? Not bad words, sorry. What you appreciate about the higher power? Or you don't have to define it?

• 1:40:11Speaker 03

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

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:40:14Speaker 03

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

• 1:40:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:40:43Speaker 03

  It's moving, whatever it is.

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  Whatever greater power it is.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

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

• 1:40:53Speaker 02

  I think that's a better way to describe it.

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

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

• 1:41:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

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

• 1:41:25Speaker 02

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

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  We see a man in the fucking moon.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47Speaker 03

  We anthropomorphize everything. We see our images everywhere we look.

• 1:41:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

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

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

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

• 1:42:18Speaker 03

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

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:24Speaker 03

  What the fuck?

• 1:42:25Speaker 02

  Who's making the lightning?

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  What's happening here?

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  The gods are fighting.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

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

• 1:42:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

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

• 1:42:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:42:48Speaker 03

  And we congregate around them and we were able to mobilize millions and millions of people around a fiction.

• 1:42:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Speaker 03

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

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:43:05Speaker 03

  Monkeys don't have a monkey god.

• 1:43:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

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

• 1:43:33Speaker 02

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

• 1:43:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely. This order is

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Too scary.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  Too scary.

• 1:43:48Speaker 02

  Too scary, too crazy.

• 1:43:49Speaker 03

  It's fucking, look at this, you know?

• 1:43:51Speaker 02

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

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

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

• 1:44:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:44:16Speaker 03

  with the Communist Party.

• 1:44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  Right? With a fascist dictator.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:21Speaker 03

  You know? It's same idea.

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  Organize around me.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:44:26Speaker 03

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

• 1:44:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:44:35Speaker 03

  It freaks them out because it's like a tent pole, the tent pole moves, the tent comes down and everything, you know? If you believe that this is the truth and someone says, no, it's not, it's bullshit, everything else you believe is in fair play. Everything.

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:44:57Speaker 03

  Right? The tent collapses, so people will fight to the death to keep the tent pole up. Doesn't matter if it's true or not, it's the tent pole.

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

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

• 1:45:24Speaker 03

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

• 1:45:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:45:37Speaker 03

  Show me.

• 1:45:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:39Speaker 03

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

• 1:45:48Speaker 02

  Like most people.

• 1:45:49Speaker 03

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

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

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

• 1:46:09Speaker 03

  Back in the day.

• 1:46:10Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, that was the big one. I was like, I felt like they knew something I didn't know. Like whatever they're on, and I didn't really know the whole story. I didn't really know the whole story until much, much, much later. I had heard versions of what they believe and it wasn't until going clear, Lawrence Reitberg book.

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  Great book.

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  Great book.

• 1:46:32Speaker 03

  Great book.

• 1:46:33Speaker 02

  I was like, holy shit.

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Wasn't until that, until I really kind of got the grip of what it's all about and how it

• 1:46:42Speaker 03

  Big part of it was secrets.

• 1:46:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:44Speaker 03

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

• 1:46:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  If I stick around, I'll find out the secret. Because we're all looking for, you know, we're all looking for a secret.

• 1:46:57Speaker 02

  Like the knowing.

• 1:46:58Speaker 03

  The knowing.

• 1:46:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:00Speaker 03

  Yes. And keeping that stuff secret, purposefully secret, and we were told that some of this higher level stuff could conceivably kill you if you're not ready. I'm not kidding.

• 1:47:11Speaker 02

  I'm not kidding either.

• 1:47:12Speaker 03

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

• 1:47:21Speaker 02

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

• 1:47:55Speaker 03

  They sent her to Flag in Florida.

• 1:47:57Speaker 02

  Is that what it is?

• 1:47:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. There's this own thing, and I guess in Clearwater, it's incredibly expensive.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Go clear in Clearwater?

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  Incredibly expensive.

• 1:48:06Speaker 02

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

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

  It's probably a million dollars now.

• 1:48:12Speaker 02

  Ooh. Yeah, it was 96.

• 1:48:15Speaker 03

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

• 1:48:22Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 1:48:23Speaker 03

  It's smart.

• 1:48:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48:25Speaker 03

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

• 1:48:33Speaker 02

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

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:48:46Speaker 02

  Because it was just kooky L. Ron Hubbard.

• 1:48:51Speaker 03

  It was science fiction stuff.

• 1:48:52Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:48:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:54Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:48:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, you know, I mean

• 1:48:57Speaker 02

  Hey, whatever floats your boat.

• 1:48:59Speaker 03

  One of the gifts of this, of writing a memoir was I found my way to be able to forgive myself. You know? Rather than be embarrassed, I would never tell people that I spent 10 years in a cult. It's humiliating. What a dope, right? I would, you know, I was so frightened of being wrong, right? And in writing this thing, I was wrong. It's okay. It's okay, I was wrong. I was young, I was frightened, I made some bad choices. I got, I got through it.

• 1:49:40Speaker 03

  I was blessed to have some angels come along, along the way to help me through it, a lot of that stuff, but I got through it and I don't have to be humiliated by being a foolish young man anymore, you know?

• 1:49:55Speaker 02

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

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  Agreed.

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  We're all foolish.

• 1:50:06Speaker 03

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

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:36Speaker 03

  To not pretend I know.

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  What a relief to not, you know, to not act as if I, I have a handle on this.

• 1:50:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:50:45Speaker 03

  I don't. And what's great is when you're sitting in a room full of people and making a TV comedy, a sitcom, and they all look at you, you know, because the second act doesn't work, and everybody looks at you, and it's a great feeling to go, I don't know. It stinks. Anybody, anybody, you know, I'm, I'm open to anybody having a solution to this shitty second act, but I actually don't know, and I'm okay with that. In the past, I would've

• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  gone on some long diatribe trying to convince everybody I knew what I was doing. It's exhausting.

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  I don't, you know, I don't. I'm doing the best I can. And when I don't know,

• 1:51:30Speaker 03

  it's freedom to say, I don't know. It's freedom. Oh, your shoulders go down, you exhale, and you seek to collaborate.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

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

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  I think it's how we're raised, too.

• 1:51:55Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:55Speaker 03

  You know, I don't think, you know, we're not taught as children to admit to ignorance.

• 1:52:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:04Speaker 03

  You know, it's just, it's not how we're raised. It's not, it's, you know, man.

• 1:52:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:11Speaker 03

  Does the right thing. He knows what to do. He's, he's a leader. He's, he's John Wayne in my generation, you know, I was more Steve McQueen, but okay, a little later.

• 1:52:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:22Speaker 03

  But you're certainly not taught to say, to have humility and say, I don't know. And humility has a bad taint to it, because it, it, it smells of weakness, but it's not. It's the opposite of weakness.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:38Speaker 03

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

• 1:52:47Speaker 02

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

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56Speaker 02

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

• 1:53:06Speaker 03

  One of the questions I get asked all the time, now that I'm in the twilight of my career, is what's the secret sauce, you know? What's, what's, you know, what, if anything carries through all the different TV shows and whatnot. And the word that comes to mind is collaboration. I, I didn't do anything alone, you know?

• 1:53:28Speaker 03

  I, you know, you come out of the comedy world, you know that writing comedy with others is really a gas, and it's far more effective.

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 1:53:41Speaker 03

  I learned so much by being in a room for 25 years with great writers. And one of the things I talk about in the book, which is really meaningful to me, was when I got the chance to do the Kaminsky method with Michael Douglas, I decided I wanted to write it alone, to see if I still could write alone, because I'd been in a room with people yelling at each other for years. No, this is funny, this is funny. No, do it this way. And it would get volatile, you know, comedy writers.

• 1:54:11Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:54:12Speaker 03

  You fucking nuts? What are you, stupid? It got mean, right? But when I sat down and wrote those scripts by myself, I realized all those guys were in the room with me. They're in my head, you know? Really? You think that's funny?

• 1:54:29Speaker 03

  It's, you know, it's a fucking pun, you moron.

• 1:54:33Speaker 03

  That guy's, that guy's in my head. He was part of me now. And I wasn't, I was writing alone, but I wasn't alone. All those guys. And, you know, when, when you watch a great stand-up, it gets in your head. You don't copy

• 1:54:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:48Speaker 03

  That guy, but his insight can change the way you perceive things.

• 1:54:55Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 1:54:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

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• 1:56:57Speaker 02

  Stan Hope always says that he writes, and he thinks about himself as a defense attorney, defending the bit as he's writing it.

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  Who is this?

• 1:57:07Speaker 02

  Doug Stanhope.

• 1:57:08Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:57:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 1:57:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:23Speaker 03

  That's great.

• 1:57:23Speaker 02

  But it's the same thing, like having someone in your head that's a critic, that's gonna look at it and go, hey, what the fuck is this part?

• 1:57:29Speaker 03

  You know, and you're like, hey, hey, hey.

• 1:57:30Speaker 02

  The scene isn't, that's not, are you in the scene? All right, let's fucking work together here and fix it.

• 1:57:35Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:57:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:36Speaker 03

  You know, and, and what a gift, you know, and so, you know,

• 1:57:44Speaker 03

  again, going back to that word, humility is a strength. I, I, I succeeded because I counted on other people.

• 1:57:55Speaker 02

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

• 1:58:05Speaker 03

  Have you interviewed this guy, Taylor Sheridan?

• 1:58:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a good friend of mine.

• 1:58:09Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:10Speaker 03

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

• 1:58:21Speaker 02

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

• 1:58:23Speaker 03

  I feel so fucking lazy when I watch this.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  Me too.

• 1:58:27Speaker 03

  I'm such a, just, just, I'm Driftwood. He wrote it and directed it, and then he had time to write that great feature, and holy shit.

• 1:58:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, he turns them out.

• 1:58:38Speaker 03

  I just, and it's good.

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:40Speaker 03

  It's one thing to turn it out, and it's one thing to turn out quality.

• 1:58:44Speaker 02

  You seen Hell in High Country?

• 1:58:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:58:46Speaker 02

  Hell in High Water, right? Is that what it is?

• 1:58:48Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 1:58:48Speaker 02

  Hell in High Water? Yeah, that's a fucking great movie.

• 1:58:50Speaker 03

  And I just, the Sicario stuff.

• 1:58:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:58:55Speaker 03

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

• 1:59:02Speaker 02

  No, he's, he creates banger after banger.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't, I don't

• 1:59:05Speaker 02

  Lioness, I haven't watched Lioness, but everybody tells me that's incredible.

• 1:59:08Speaker 03

  It's fantastic.

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  Landman.

• 1:59:10Speaker 03

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

• 1:59:15Speaker 02

  Billy Bob.

• 1:59:16Speaker 03

  Billy Bob.

• 1:59:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:17Speaker 03

  Unbelievable. Great stuff.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

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

• 1:59:30Speaker 02

  Bad Santa as an oil man.

• 1:59:32Speaker 03

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

• 1:59:59Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 2:00:01Speaker 03

  And we did it.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  That's awesome.

• 2:00:02Speaker 03

  And we loved it. We had a great time.

• 2:00:05Speaker 02

  That's so cool.

• 2:00:05Speaker 03

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

• 2:00:12Speaker 02

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

• 2:00:20Speaker 03

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

• 2:00:42Speaker 03

  What the fuck else would I do?

• 2:00:45Speaker 02

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

• 2:00:47Speaker 03

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

• 2:00:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:00:56Speaker 03

  Okay? I'm gonna garden? No, I don't see me in the tulips. Keep going. What am I doing?

• 2:01:09Speaker 03

  I get a chance to make people laugh.

• 2:01:13Speaker 03

  That's not a bad way to spend the day.

• 2:01:17Speaker 02

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

• 2:01:30Speaker 03

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

• 2:01:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:01:45Speaker 03

  The old guy who has no patience. I don't want to be that guy. So I've been gradually pulling myself back into more of a consultant role, where I'm not...

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  If I'm on the stage at a rehearsal, and the actors play out a scene,

• 2:02:08Speaker 03

  and the scene ends, everybody looks and says... Looks at me and goes,

• 2:02:15Speaker 03

  "Is it okay?" So my very presence suffocates the process. I am the plastic bag from the dry cleaners. I kill small children. So I have this extraordinary writing staff, wonderful cast and crew, and sometimes my presence can be...

• 2:02:42Speaker 03

  I don't want to say destructive, but it doesn't encourage people to step up and go, "What about? How about if?"

• 2:02:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  "I think this joke doesn't work. Can we beat it?" You know? It doesn't invite collaboration. And the sad truth is, they think I know. "I don't know. I'm guessing." You know, in the comedy business, it's a game of guessing. "I think this is funny." "Uh, I guessed wrong." Right? When it dies.

• 2:03:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:03:13Speaker 03

  "All right, let's fix it. No harm, no foul." "I'm not a horrible person because it died. It just died."

• 2:03:19Speaker 02

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

• 2:03:22Speaker 03

  I think I suck up a lot of oxygen now at this time in my career.

• 2:03:25Speaker 02

  Makes sense.

• 2:03:26Speaker 03

  You know? I remember one time Norman Lear came to the set because he was gonna go back into... He made a version of One Day at a Time. And he was executive producing a remake of one of his shows from the 70s. And he asked, "Can I come and watch you guys work to see how it's being done now?" This is 35, 40 years after his day. "Of course. You know, jeez, Norman Lear's gonna come watch his work." Which I was a nervous wreck after every joke. I'm looking, "Is Norman laughing? Is Norman laughing?" But I asked him...

• 2:04:07Speaker 03

  I remember this really vivid moment when I said, "Are you gonna write the pilot for this new sitcom you're gonna make?" And he went, "Are you crazy?

• 2:04:17Speaker 03

  If I write the pilot, nobody's gonna give me notes. Nobody's gonna give me any constructive feedback. I'm all by myself. I'm not gonna write it. If it says 'written by Norman Lear,' who's gonna do the punch?

• 2:04:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:04:29Speaker 03

  Right? Now, I'm not saying I'm Norman Lear. He reinvented television. I carried on. You know, I've been keeping it going, but he really changed the game.

• 2:04:38Speaker 02

  But it's the same effect.

• 2:04:39Speaker 03

  It's the same effect. At a certain point in my career, I've noticed I have a... The word "stultifying" comes to mind, "effect on the process." And the people I love working with could give a shit about my opinion, and I love that. Because then there's back and forth. Then there's arguments. There's, you know, there's collaboration.

• 2:05:04Speaker 02

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

• 2:05:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you want to go, "No, no, you don't understand. I actually don't know what I'm doing.

• 2:05:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:05:18Speaker 03

  I'm just guessing. I'm guessing based on a lot of experience, but I'm still guessing."

• 2:05:25Speaker 02

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

• 2:05:30Speaker 03

  It's a beautiful problem.

• 2:05:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the best problem. Certainly better than the opposite problem.

• 2:05:36Speaker 03

  When I started The Big Bang Theory,

• 2:05:40Speaker 03

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

• 2:06:02Speaker 02

  Simultaneously?

• 2:06:03Speaker 03

  Simultaneously. I said, "Would he be available to talk to me? Maybe give me some tips?" And he very graciously invited me over to his office. And I sat down, and I said, "I'm about to start production on a second show. I can barely do the one, and now I'm gonna do two. What can you tell me?" And he said, "You're not gonna like the answer."

• 2:06:33Speaker 03

  And it boiled down to, he said,

• 2:06:37Speaker 03

  "You go where the fire's burning the brightest, and you try and put it out."

• 2:06:43Speaker 03

  That was his management technique. That was it.

• 2:06:47Speaker 02

  The fire of chaos or the fire of creativity?

• 2:06:51Speaker 03

  He had seven shows in production. Either the script didn't work, they miscast a role...

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  The bad fire, put out a fire.

• 2:06:56Speaker 03

  The director wasn't working. The second act didn't work. The, you know, some of them are small, some of them are huge problems.

• 2:07:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:07:06Speaker 03

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

• 2:07:30Speaker 02

  How did that guy have time for anything in life?

• 2:07:33Speaker 03

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

• 2:07:41Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 2:07:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:43Speaker 02

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

• 2:07:52Speaker 03

  Always.

• 2:07:55Speaker 02

  The entire time?

• 2:07:56Speaker 03

  Always. But there was a moment around the third season of Two and a Half Men, and I know I wrote about this, where I had a weird epiphany. I was sitting in a room full of comedy writers, great writers, superstar comedy writers. And we were arguing about something. I don't remember what it was. Some scene in an episode that we were working on. And it dawned on me that I could trust myself.

• 2:08:26Speaker 03

  And it was a really striking experience. Everybody was yelling and complaining and "No about this, do that, do this." And I just thought, "I think I know how to do this scene." And everybody's going, "No, blah, blah, blah." I went, "No, I think I know how to do this scene, and we're gonna do it." Not angrily defending it, just, I felt calm. You know? I felt this calmness going, "I think this can work. Let's do this." And I also, there was a moment in that calmness where I went, "If I'm wrong, we'll fix it. Nobody's gonna die. You know, we're not gonna get drummed out of show business. It's a joke and a scene."

• 2:09:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:09:04Speaker 03

  And I realized that I could be wrong and survive being wrong.

• 2:09:09Speaker 02

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

• 2:09:11Speaker 03

  And that's also, but it also goes back to the "I don't know" thing. I don't have to know. But we did it, and...

• 2:09:22Speaker 03

  And it was a turning point for me, you know, where I loved working in a room full of writers, but I wasn't bound by consensus anymore. I was able to trust intuition, which is a weird thing. It's not thinking. You know this.

• 2:09:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:09:41Speaker 03

  In comedy, you just, you have this feeling. It's in coed. It's not something you could express in words. You just know, "I think this is gonna work."

• 2:09:51Speaker 02

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

• 2:09:54Speaker 03

  Yes, and you also know when you're bullshitting yourself. "This is lazy. We can do better. I know, I know, yeah, this'll work, but it's not great. It's okay." And okay, why are we doing this if it's just okay? Let's at least try for great.

• 2:10:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:10:12Speaker 03

  If we fail, we tried for great. But if you fail trying to do okay, you know, go home. Go home. You're done. So, you know, that's about...

• 2:10:27Speaker 03

  Shoot for the moon. Settle for low orbit.

• 2:10:31Speaker 02

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

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

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

• 2:10:41Speaker 02

  We did two hours.

• 2:10:42Speaker 03

  Screaming out of the room, going this...

• 2:10:44Speaker 02

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

• 2:10:47Speaker 03

  Well, you're a delight to talk to.

• 2:10:48Speaker 02

  And you are, too.

• 2:10:49Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 2:10:50Speaker 02

  Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

• 2:10:51Speaker 03

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

• 2:11:04Speaker 02

  Hmm. What's the myth?

• 2:11:07Speaker 03

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

• 2:11:16Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:11:17Speaker 03

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

• 2:11:20Speaker 02

  It's all an illusion. It's just me talking for years.

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  But I appreciate it.

• 2:11:27Speaker 03

  The 10,000 hours are clear.

• 2:11:31Speaker 02

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